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'Cinema uses the language of dreams'

Published: Oct 24, 2014 07:55:00 AM IST
Updated: Oct 25, 2014 07:50:36 AM IST
'Cinema uses the language of dreams'
Image: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur

Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood... The body exists for the sake of the eyes; it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable jewels.
Jim Morrison

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire—it tells you how to desire.
Slavoj Žižek

I remember queuing around the block in Sheffield when I was growing up. At that time, going to the cinema was really something special—there was something about the style of the real thing that is immeasurably nicer than multiplexes.
Michael Palin

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.  
Alfred Hitchcock

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theatre.
Roman Polanski

The cinema is an invention without a future.
Louis Lumière

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
Federico Fellini

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artistes and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.
Martin Scorsese

In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.
John Marmysz

(This story appears in the 31 October, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)

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