“Mr. Fellini says that his wife sometime resists his view of her talents, which he summarizes as ‘a mingling of youngish and clownish.’ But make no mistake: in suggesting that his wife is a clown, Mr. Fellini means no insult. ‘The clown is the aristocracy of acting,’ he says. ‘To be a clown means to have the possibility of making people cry and laugh.’”


“Why do I so frequently include a levitation scene, a body rising up? Simply because the scene has a great power. This way things can be created that are more cinematic, more photogenic. When I imagine a person suspended in mid-air, it pleases me.. I find myself filled with emotion. If some fool asks me why in my last film people float up in the air, I would say: “It’s magic”. If the same question came from someone with a more acute intelligence & poetic sensibility, I would respond that for these characters love was not the same thing as it was for the author of Betty Blue.

For me love is the supreme manifestation of mutual understanding, and this cannot be represented by the sexual act. Everybody says that if there is no ‘love’ in a film, it is because of censorship. In reality it is not ‘love’ that’s shown on screen but the sexual act. The sexual act is for everyone, for every couple, something unique. When it is put into films, it’s the opposite.”

-Andrei Tarkovsky

“It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses…It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good; any more than they can learn how to be faithful wives by following the ‘positive’ example of Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina. Art can only give food—a jolt—the occasion—for psychical experience.”

-Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema