White Sheik, The (1952) - Federico Fellini

Criterion collection essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Sex is comedy (2002) - Catherine Breillat

Film quote:

Words are the best chastity belt there is.

Breillat quotes:

"The problem is that censors create the concept of obscenity. By supposedly trying to protect us they form an absurd concept of what is obscene."

"It's not just freedom to do a particular act. It's not consumerism. If you think of an orgy or falling in love, everyone would rather fall in love because it's really transcendental. The problem is that all governments and all religions have always been determined to make sex something dirty. Religion is afraid of the power of sex - because a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed."

A zed and two naughts (1985) - Peter Greenaway

Oliver Deuce: There are supposed to be 130,000 bicoses [Bicosis populi - apparently, species of bacteria] in each lick of a human tongue; 250,000 in a french kiss. First exchanged at the very beginning of creation when Adam kissed Eve.
Oswald Deuce: Suppose Eve kissed Adam.

Oliver Deuce: Unlikely. She used her first 100,000 on the apple.

Agnus dei (1970) - Miklós Jancsó

Kinoeye article on Jancso by Andrew James Horton

Jancso interview (in French)

Goldenballs (1993) - Bigas Luna

A forgettable film, supposedly a critique of Spanish machismo, that seems like a soft pornographic advertisement of it.

Sunset Blvd. (1950) - Billy Wilder

Joe Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Norma Desmond: We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!

Norma Desmond: There once was a time in this business when I had the eyes of the whole world! But that wasn't good enough for them, oh no! They had to have the ears of the whole world too. So they opened their big mouths and out came talk. Talk! TALK!

Norma Desmond: You are... writing words, words, more words! Well, you'll make a rope of words and strangle this business! But there'll be a microphone there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongues!

Betty Schaefer: Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Gillis, but I just didn't think it was any good. I found it flat and trite.
Joe Gillis: Exactly what kind of material do you recommend? James Joyce? Dostoyevsky?
Betty Schaefer: I just think that pictures should say a little something.
Joe Gillis: Oh, one of the message kids. Just a story won't do. You'd have turned down Gone With the Wind.
Sheldrake: No, that was me. I said, "Who wants to see a Civil War picture?"

Joe Gillis: There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five.

Betty Schaefer: Don't you sometimes hate yourself?
Joe Gillis: Constantly.

8 1/2 (1963) - Federico Fellini

Quotes from the film:

Writer: It's better to destroy than create what's unnecessary.

Claudia: I don't understand. He meets a girl that can give him a new life and he pushes her away?
Guido: Because he no longer believes in it.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.
Guido: Because it isn't true that a woman can change a man.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.
Guido: And above all because I don't feel like telling another pile of lies.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.

Guido: I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves. Instead, I'm the one without the courage to bury anything at all. When did I go wrong? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same.


Fellini Quotes:

“I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.”

“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the 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.”

“A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.”

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography”

“Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.”

“Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can't teach old fleas new dogs.”

“What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one.... It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one—which is really the realm of the artist.”

“It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.”

“Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.”

“The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world. ”

Some links:

Fellini on 8 1/2 (Criterion Collection essay)
An excerpt from I, Fellini (From the Criterion Collection, again)

Day for night (1973) - François Truffaut

Ferrand (director): The Godfather is showing all over Nice, and it's killing the other movies.

Joelle (director's assistant) : I might quit a guy for a movie, but I'd never quit a movie for a guy!

Ferrand : Tell him I speak English, but I don't understand it.

Ferrand : Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.

Ferrand: Listen, it's very simple. We'll stop and begin shooting again when you find me a cat who knows how to act!

[repeated line]
Alphonse (actor) : Are women magic?

By the pricking of my thumbs (2005) - Pascal Thomas

Le curé: I also happen to say things I don't understand.
Prudence Beresford: Nothing alarming in your case: you're a priest.

Hanele (1999) - Karel Kachyna

Labour equals freedom (2004) - Damjan Kozole

A film that retains its optimism and humour despite dreary economic conditions in a globalized Europe, and that without getting syrupy sweet.

As it is in heaven (2004) - Kay Pollak

A forgettable, syrupy film.

Shop of dreams (2005) - Peeter Urbla

Persona non grata (2005) - Krzysztof Zanussi

A brilliant late Zanussi.

Salaam Cinema (1995) - Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Iberia (2005) - Carlos Saura

Small Secrets (2006) - Pol Cruchten

Mother of mine (2005) - Klaus Härö

Do not disturb (1999) - Dick Maas

Stupid American crap disguised as a European film. The worst American prejudices about Europe as a den of vice put together on film.

Rain falls on our souls (2002) - Vlado Balco

Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The (2005) - Cristi Puiu

Four Minutes (2006) - Chris Kraus