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We can find many movie quote top tens. But this is my Top Ten quotes about the movies.
1. Director Jean-Luc Godard recalls: I knew nothing of life except from the Cinema.
2. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre describes the cinema as: ...the frenzy on the wall...
3. Film critic Roger Ebert makes a very strong argument for the study of film: I believe that movies can be noble and good for the soul. They are empathy machines, allowing us for an hour or two to understand a little of what it would be like to be somebody else. To be a different race or gender or religion, or live at another time or under other politics. They help make us citizens of mankind. Of course most movies are shallow or silly, but sometimes there are movies that shake us up and make us deeper and better.
4. Film historian David Thompson gives some idea of the universal appeal of film: A movie is a kind of séance, or a drug, where we are offered the chance to partake in the lifelike. No, it’s not life: We will never meet Joan Crawford or Clark Gable. Yet we are with them. It is surreptitious; it is illicit, if you like, in the sense of being unearned or undeserved. It is vicarious, it is fantastic, and this may be very dangerous. But it is heady beyond belief or compare. And it changed the world. Not even heroin or the supernatural went so far.
5. The empowering experience of collectively viewing flickering shadows on the silver screen at the theater is contrasted with television by actor Richard Dreyfuss: Film has a power over us. When we sit in a darkened room and symbolically hold hands with one another and say, “Give me this experience”—we are investing religiosity to that experience…we will be swept up with it….But if it’s on TV, who cares? Because TV has no impact, it is simply part of the furniture sitting next to the potted palm or the refrigerator. It has no impact on the primal level.
6. What art historian Irwin Panofsky observed in 1934 is still true over seventy years later: Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60% of the population of the earth.
7. Educator and Producer of Chariots of Fire, David Putnam on the influence of film: Movies are powerful. Good or bad, they tinker around inside your brain. They steal up on you in the darkness of the cinema to inform or conform social attitudes. They can help to create a healthy, informed, concerned, and inquisitive society or, alternatively, a negative, apathetic, ignorant one---merely a short step away from nihilism…..
8. Director Alfred Hitchcock’s film theory: I don’t want to film a “slice of life” because people can get that at home, in the street, or even in front of the movie theater. They don’t have to pay money to see a slice of life. And I avoid out-and –out fantasy because people should be able to identify with the characters. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
9. Film Scholar Ernest Lindgrin describes the versatility of the medium: It is impossible to conceive of anything which the eye might behold or the ear hear, in actuality or imagination, which could not be represented in the medium of film. From the poles to the equator, From the Grand Canyon to the minutest flaw in the piece of steel, from the whistling flight of a bullet to the slow growth of a flower, from the flicker of thought across an almost impassive face to the frenzied ravings of a madman, there is no degree of magnitude or speed of movement within the apprehension of man which is not in reach of the film.
10. A. O. Scott, film critic of The New York Times, writes of the strange attractions and irony of going to the movies: The essential paradox…is that it is at once collective and radically solitary, an amalgam of the cohesive social ritual of theatergoing and the individualist reverie of novel reading. The movies offer visions of a better world even as they are symptoms of everything wrong with this one. As such, moviegoing is perhaps still…the exemplary modern cultural activity. It splices together individualism and mass culture—the insistence on the particularity of identity and the standardization of experience, the line at the box office and the solitary dreaming in the dark—like serendipitous art-house double feature programmed by a deity with perverse tastes and an odd sense of humor.
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