shift. destiny.

“Life is a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too, you know. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody born here lately who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life. So why do you hide it? Truth, honesty, that’s my key [to] filmmaking.”
-André de Toth, quoted in A Personal Journey through American Movies with Martin Scorsese (1995


Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939, dir. William Dieterle) (via) “When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.”


“To be good is to be forgotten. I’m going to be so bad I’ll always be remembered.”
-Theda Bara, quoted in “The Confessions of Theda Bara”, Photoplay Magazine (1920)

“I met the French filmmaker Louis Malle through Juliette Greco. He told me he had always loved my music and that he wanted me to write the musical score for his new film, Elevator to the Gallows. I agreed to do it and it was a great learning experience, because I had never written a music score for a film before.
I would look at the rushes of the film and get musical ideas to write down. Since it was about a murder and was supposed to be a suspense movie, I used this old, very gloomy, dark building where I had the musicians play. I thought it would give the music atmosphere, and it did. Everyone loved what I did with the music on that film.”
-Miles Davis, excerpted from Miles, the autobiography

“Film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words. I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension. In two hours and twenty minutes of film there are only forty minutes of dialogue.
I think one of the areas where 2001 succeeds is in stimulating thoughts about man’s destiny and role in the universe in the minds of people who in the normal course of their lives would never have considered such matters. Here again, you’ve got the resemblance to music; an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects. The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication.
The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It’s time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play.”
-Kubrick, quoted in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (1970)