Selected Film Quotations
In addition to our other features, each month a group member identifies a selected quotation for consideration of the group. This quotation can address a variety of film-related topics. This feature began in 2016, and a complete record of selected quotations can be viewed below.
01/16
ACT ONE MISSION QUOTE: “No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.” — Ingmar Bergman, director of The Seventh Seal
02/16
“For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.” — Alfred Hitchcock, director of Rebecca
03/16
“Does art reflect life? In movies, yes. Because more than any other art form, films have been a mirror held up to society’s porous face.” — Marjorie Rosen, author of Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream
04/16
“Cinema is universal, beyond flags and borders and passports.” — Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of Babel
05/16
“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.” — Jean-Luc Godard, director of Breathless
06/16
“Film lovers are sick people.” — François Truffaut, director of The 400 Blows
07/16
“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.” — Jean Cocteau, author of Les Enfants Terribles
08/16
“Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.” — Roger Ebert, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and historian
09/16
“I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.” — Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather
10/16
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” — Alfred Hitchcock, director of Rebecca
11/16
“The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second.” — Jean-Luc Godard, director of Breathless
12/16
“Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too.” — David Lynch, director of Dune and Blue Velvet
01/17
“We love films and storytelling as a people. It's just human compulsion to listen to and tell stories.” — Mychael Danna, composer of The Time Traveler's Wife and Life of Pi
02/17
“Cinema is magic in the service of dreams.” — Djibril Diop Mambéty, director of Contras'city and The Journey of the Hyena
03/17
“Film recognizes neither time nor space, only the limits of man’s imagination.” — Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause and The True Story of Jesse James
04/17
“Like all art forms, film is a media as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; the only difference is that war destroys and film inspires.” — Nicolas Winding Refn, director of Drive and The Neon Demon
05/17
“Human beings share the same common problems. A film can only be understood if it depicts these properly.” — Akira Kurosawa, director of Rashomon and Seven Samurai
06/17
“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” — Frank Capra, director of It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
07/17
“There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.” — Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai
08/17
“Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.” — Tom Hanks, Oscar-winning star of Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994)
09/17
“The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.” — Carl Jung, psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology
10/17
“Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.” — Andrei Tarkovsky, director of Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Solaris (1972)
11/17
“When I was 16, I felt very relieved to discover cinema. It was like an island where I could see life and death from another perspective. Every young person should be interested in that island. It’s a beautiful place.” — Leos Carax, director of Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Holy Motors (2012)
12/17
“Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.” — Frank Capra, director of It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)