May 14th, 2012
Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they’re not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow. The building is a thin-walled set, the sunlight is a Xenon, and the traffic noise is supplied by the sound designers. It’s all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving. This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion.
~ James Cameron in 2008
105 notes·
auteur cinema
January 19th, 2012
My film is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
~ Robert Bresson Notes sur le Cinématographe
120 notes·
director cinema process
January 19th, 2012
Cinematograph is a writing with images in movement and with sounds.
~ Robert Bresson Notes sur le Cinématographe
54 notes·
director cinema
January 19th, 2012
Two kinds of films: those that employ the means of theatre (actors, staging, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce, and those that employ the means of the cinematograph and use the camera in order to create.
~ Robert Bresson Notes sur le Cinématographe
52 notes·
director cinema
December 30th, 2011
Roger Ebert: I'll tell you why movie revenue is dropping...

Diversity:

1. Obviously, the absence of a must-see mass-market movie. […]

2. Ticket prices are too high. […]

3. The theater experience. […]

4. Refreshment prices. […]

5. Competition from other forms of delivery. […]

6. Lack of choice. Box-office tracking shows that the bright spot in 2011 was the performance of indie, foreign or documentary films [this has arguably been the case since 1989 with Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape]. On many weekends, one or more of those titles captures first-place in per-screen average receipts. Yet most moviegoers outside large urban centers can’t find those titles in their local gigantiplex. Instead, all the shopping center compounds seem to be showing the same few overhyped disappointments. Those films open with big ad campaigns, play a couple of weeks, and disappear.

 The myth that small-town moviegoers don’t like “art movies” is undercut by Netflix’s viewing results; the third most popular movie on Dec. 28 on Netflix was “Certified Copy,” by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. You’ve heard of [him]? In fourth place—French director Alain Corneau’s “Love Crime.” In fifth, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo“—but the subtitled Swedish version.

The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It’s the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can’t depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.

~ Roger Ebert

(Source: news.ycombinator.com)

Reblogged from kateoplis
515 notes·
cinema business
November 17th, 2011

I know my gaze was discontinuous, broken, composed of hundreds of frozen gazes, with tiny intervals between each as long as the gaze itself. What interrupted the gaze- the black intervals between frame, as it were…

Perhaps my look went on and off because it was changing, and the only way I could convey the illusion of a smooth transition from one stage of my gaze to another was precisely by slicing into the gaze, whereas it had remained a continuous there would have been a blur.
~ Susan Sontag.  Jessie Thatcher thought of this quote in response to Tony Conrad’s work, The Flicker.  Film is life at 24 fps.  The Flicker is that illusion in its most basic form.
13 notes·
cinema Experimental
July 26th, 2011
Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life’s experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer “to” anyone or anything, but prayer “about” everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.
Roger Ebert

(Source: ordinaryasafairy)

Reblogged from ordinary as a fairy
90 notes·
cinema
July 26th, 2011

Feeling vs. Understanding

Robert Bresson

(Source: a-bittersweet-life)

Reblogged from A BitterSweet Life
56 notes·
cinema directors
May 14th, 2011

Themes

Themes echo throughout powerful films.  They are immediately established and then revisited again and again throughout the feature, each time in a new context.  It keeps the film fresh and perpetually moving forward.  There are other ways to address this beyond plot.  Walter Benjamin inadvertently teaches us how to use light and sound to accomplish the same goal:

The deja vu effect has often been described.  But I wonder whether the term is actually well chosen, and whether the appropriate metaphor to the process would not be far better taken from the realm of acoustics.  One ought to speak of events that reach us like an echo awakened by a call, a sound that seems to have been heard somewhere in the darkness of a past life.

~ü

4 notes·
cinema echo light listen sound
Loading tweets...

@dschmudde

Techniques for directing film. More than the script, bigger than the screen - the tangible and mystical characteristics of truly great filmmaking.