77 quotes found
"In 16th-century Italy there lived Lodovico Gonzaga, a 16-year old seminarist who was very fond of playing ball. Once a certain priest passing by wondered if for a future priest the youth was too keen on his pursuit and asked him:"What would you do if you learned that in half an hour the end of the world was coming?" To which Lodovico replied: "I'd play on." According to the Russian thinker Georgy Fedotov, the importance of culture lies in precisely that: we go on playing ball on the verge of Doomsday..."
"Honest women are inconsolable for the mistakes they haven't made."
"You can pretend to be serious but you can't pretend to be witty."
"The little I know, I owe to my ignorance."
"When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy."
"When a man steals your wife there is no better revenge than to let him keep her."
"The hell with it. Who never knew the price of happiness will not be happy."
"So on and on we walked without thinking of rest passing craters, passing fire, under the rocking sky of '41 tottering crazy on its smoking columns."
"Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little, barefoot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!"
"Over Babiy Yar there are no memorials. The steep hillside like a rough inscription. I am frightened. Today I am as old as the Jewish race."
"No Jewish blood runs among my blood, but I am as bitterly and hardly hated by every anti-semite as if I were a Jew. By this I am a Russian."
"No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet."
"И если умирает человек, с ним умирает первый его снег, и первый поцелуй, и первый бой..."
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote."
"I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life"
"In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable."
"[I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck—and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road."
"Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?"
"Time has a way of demonstrating The most stubborn are the most intelligent."
"My dear friend Yevtushenko has, I claim, an ego that can crack crystal at a distance of twenty feet."
"The worldwide sensation created by the appearance in 1961 of a brief poem, "Babi Yar," by Yevgeni Yevtushenko , condemning Nazi and prerevolutionary antisemitism, and the mutilation by Soviet censorship of Babi Yar (1966; Eng. 1967, revised 1970), a documentary novel by Anatoli Kuznetsov about the Nazi massacre of Soviet Jews in a ravine near Kiev, demonstrate that, in contrast to other areas of Soviet life, there was no real thaw in Soviet literature's treatment of Jewish themes."
"Politics had much to do with tastes in poetry. Russian poets, especially if they were politically outspoken, were garnering huge followings among college students in the West. Yevgeny Yevtushenko was having a big year in 1968, both in political controversy at home and in artistic recognition abroad. Born in 1933, he belonged to a new school of Russian lyric poetry. Critics frequently suggested that others from the new school, such as Boris Pasternak’s protégé Andrey Voznesensky, also born in 1933, were better poets. But in the 1960s Yevtushenko was the most famous working Russian poet in the world. In 1962 he published four poems highly critical of the Soviet Union, including “Babi Yar,” about a massacre of Jews unsuccessfully covered up by the Soviets."
"Although the USA eventually overtook the [[w:Soviet_space_programme|Soviet [space] programme]], the early feats were widely remembered. Gagarin had the looks and affability of a film star and toured the world as his country’s semiofficial ambassador. He gave a human face to the communist order. Others did the same. Yevgeni Yevtushenko, an overrated poet but a larger-than-life personality and an advocate of de-Stalinisation, gave public readings in North America and Europe. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the world’s main languages in 1963; its withering critique of the labour-camp system in the 1940s was taken as proof that the USSR was starting to look at its past with honest eyes. Soccer goalkeeper Lev Yashin was widely renowned. Soviet athletics teams had regular success at the Olympic games and brought glamour to the USSR."
"He has a clear style and has had much courage – as in his poem "Babi Yar", a memorial to the Jews murdered by the Nazis. But he is no more than a talented poetaster – which is quite obvious to all but Western journalists – and it would be foolish to consider him as more than a skilful publicist."
"I was overjoyed when I read Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar"; the poem astounded me. It astounded thousands of people…People knew about Babi Yar before Yevtushenko's poem, but they were silent. And when they read the poem, the silence was broken. Art destroys silence."
"We are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human’s abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism. We strive to imagine (and show to the viewer) the reality of the 21st century — the life of future humans developing, solving their difficulties and problems but being already on the new levels of cognition and morality. But the foundation of that future is being laid now. We strive to represent the future people as vivid and free, in the unity of their joys and cares, poetry and prose of their life. We are in no way satisfied with the primitive and unconvincing image of "people of the future", which can be observed in some works of literature and cinema. At the same time, we consider our work to be polemical with the many books and movies produced by the bourgeois world, which tend to see the future in an apocalyptic or technocratic way, affirming a sort of disbelief in the strength and capabilities of a human being."
"An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false."
"For me the most interesting characters are outwardly static, but inwardly charged by an overriding passion."
"I have to say from the outset that not all prose can be transferred to the screen."
"I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms. Certainly I am more at home with them than with traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear rigid logical development of plot. That sort of fussily correct way of linking events usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when the plot is governed by the characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life's complexities."
"Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken the wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for his own sake. What purports to be art begins to looks like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalised action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in an artistic creation the personality does not assert itself it serves another, higher and communal idea. The artist is always the servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by a miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of the self can only be expressed in sacrifice. We are gradually forgetting about this, and at the same time, inevitably, losing all sense of human calling."
"The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible. The absolute is only attainable through faith and in the creative act."
"Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being."
"The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good."
"The meaning of religious truth is hope."
"An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty."
"It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all."
"History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul."
"What is the essence of the director's work? We could define it as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is not a part of it — so the film-maker, from a 'lump of time' made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image."
"Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema."
"Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar."
"The whole concept of the avant-garde in art is meaningless. I can see what it means when applied to sport, for instance. But to apply it to art would be to accept the idea of progress in art; and though progress has an obvious place in technology — more perfect machines, capable of carrying out their functions better and more accurately — how can anyone be more advanced in art? How could Thomas Mann be said to be better than Shakespeare?"
"Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical."
"No one component of a film can have any meaning in isolation: it is the film that is the work of art. And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially or the sake of theoretical discussion."
"The man who has stolen in order never to thieve again remains a thief. Nobody who has ever betrayed his principles can have a pure relationship with life. Therefore when a film-maker says he will produce a pot-boiler in order to give himself the strength and the means to make the film of his dreams — that is so much deception, or worse, self-deception. He will never now make his film."
"[About Mirror] I had the greatest difficulty in explaining to people that there is no hidden, coded meaning in the film, nothing beyond the desire to tell the truth. Often my assurances provoked incredulity and even disappointment. Some people evidently wanted more: they needed arcane symbols, secret meanings. They were not accustomed to the poetics of the cinema image. And I was disappointed in my turn. Such was the reaction of the opposition party in the audience; as for my own colleagues, they launched a bitter attack on me, accusing me of immodesty, of wanting to make a film about myself."
"I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him."
"Objectivity can only be the author's and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel."
"What is Bresson's genre? He doesn't have one. Bresson is Bresson. He is a genre in himself. Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Vigo, Mizoguchi, Bunuel — each is identified with himself. The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin — comedy? No: he is Chaplin, pure and simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated."
"Never try to convey your idea to the audience — it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it."
"Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could listen to them properly, cinema would have no need for music at all."
"If there are some who talk the same language as myself, then why should I neglect their interests for the sake of some other group of people who are alien and remote? They have their own 'gods and idols' and we have nothing in common. ... If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money."
"A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts — for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work."
"A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books."
"Everything is conditioned by necessity of one kind or another; and if it were actually possible to find a person in conditions of total freedom, he would be like some deep water fish that had been dragged up to the surface. It's curious to reflect that Rublyov worked within the strictures of the canon! And the longer I live in the West the more curious and equivocal freedom seems to me. Freedom to take drugs? To kill? To commit suicide?"
"All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love."
"The Stalker seems to be weak, but essentially it is he who is invincible because of his faith and his will to serve others."
"It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas."
"One can only be staggered by the hubris of modern artists if we compare them, say, to the humble builders of Chartres Cathedral whose names are not even known. The artist ought to be distinguished by selfless devotion to duty; but we forgot about that a long time ago."
"Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition — otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence."
"My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware the beauty is summoning him."
"What nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love. It is impotent; for the moment it is nothing."
"It seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroads, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the existence of blind consumer, subject to the implacable march of new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a new way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, to turn to God."
"We know perfectly well that neither love nor peace of mind can be bought with any currency."
"Freedom is inseparable from conscience. And even if it is true that all the ideas developed by the social conciousness are the product of evolution, conscience at least has nothing to do with the historic process. Conscience, both as a sense and as a concept, is a priori immanent in man, and shakes the very foundations of the society that has emerged from our ill-conceived civilisation."
""Man is born unto the trouble as the sparks fly upwards." In other words suffering is germane to our existence; indeed, how without it, should we be able to "fly upwards"."
"Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in the artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?"
"The film needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts"
"I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman."
"Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure..."
"I love and admire the filmmaker Tarkovsky and believe him to be one of the greatest of all time. My admiration for Fellini is limitless. But I also feel that Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that Fellini began to make Fellini films."
"American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema."
"“This is Paul Robeson, the greatest American singer!” declared the famous film director, Eisenstein, introducing Robeson to a reception in his honor, attended by nearly all the celebrities in Moscow’s theatre and art world."
"{{Translated quote"
"Kazakhs, what kind of ingratitude do you call this? Look carefully at what is happening in Ukraine… If you think that you can get away with trying to be so cunning, and imagine that nothing will happen to you, you are mistaken. The world has changed, everything has changed."
"Belarus has become so pitiful that it sent toilet paper to Ukraine. I am not kidding. Humanitarian aid included toilet paper. First, fellow citizens, let's congratulate Belarus, the country has finally found someone poorer than itself. As the saying goes, what you’re rich in, so you use for wiping up. 8 thousand rolls! Even Belarus realized that Ukraine was an asshole!"
"It's a pity we didn't annex you [France] in 1814. Paris would have been ours. We would have held a polite referendum..."