Godard: Don’t you think that cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world?
Truffaut: Definitely. I have always preferred the reflection of the life to life itself.
check me out.
“When you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie. But as you grow more experienced, the odds change. Unless you’re feebleminded, the odds get worse and worse. We don’t go on reading the same kind of manufactured novels – pulp Westerns or detective thrillers, say – all of our lives, and we don’t want to go on and on looking at movies about cute heists by comically assorted gangs. The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new. And despite all the chatter about the media and how smart the young are, they’re incredibly naïve about mass culture – perhaps more naïve than earlier generations (though I don’t know why). Maybe watching all that television hasn’t done so much for them as they seem to think; and when I read a young intellectual’ s appreciation of `Rachel, Rachel` and come to `the mother’s passion for chocolate bars is a superb symbol for the second coming of childhood`, I know the writer is still in his first childhood, and I wonder if he’s going to come out of it."
Trash, Art, and the Movies, by Pauline Kael.
Another worth reading: A Century of Cinema by Susan Sontag.
