F.W. Murnau

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture...we are scientists engaged in the creation of memory... but our memory will neither blur nor fade.”

Evelyn Lambart

“The way I was brought up was to think of yourself as a person who had an obligation to use your talents in any way you could. Whether you were a woman or not didn't make any difference.”

Mikhail Kalatozov

"We saw the film (I am Cuba) as a kind of poem, as a poetic narrative.” —Sergei Urusevsky, cinematographer

Alex & Niko

“It is not enough to use cinema only to tell stories. It is necessary to bring poetic meaning to a film, to provoke deep feeling in the audience: otherwise it becomes simply a recycling of classic cinematographic codes.”

René Laloux

“What suggests, is superior to what shows. Movies today show more and more. It’s paranoid dictator cinema.”

José Antonio Sistiaga

Andrzej Żuławski

“To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.”

Salvador Dalí

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

Maya Deren

“The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.”

Philippe Grandrieux

“I never watched any rushes. Because I frame the shots and operate the camera, the images are directly inscribed on my retina.”

Cao Guimarães

“Art, as a language, and in contrast to what we want from languages, cannot have a final state. Art connects with universals and not simply the particularity of a certain people or culture.”

Jordan Belson

“The distinction between an external scene perceived in the usual way and the scene perceived with the inner eye is very slight to me.”

Norman McLaren

“For myself, indeed, with an abstract film, the most pleasing forms are those which come closest to music. There must be visual equivalence.”

Francis Ford Coppola

“I'm in a unique situation. I'm like now an elderly retired guy who made a lot of money, and now I can just, instead of playing golf, I can make art films.”

Werner Herzog

“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

Béla Tarr

“I think censorship is always there. Then it was the censorship of the state and now it's the censorship of the market.”

Chantal Akerman

“When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films.”

Raúl Ruiz

“If you can make it complicated, why make it simple?”

Carl Theodor Dreyer

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

Buster Keaton

“I don't act anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.”