Films

"Within Latin America, there is an important and hidden level of semi-professional, almost artisanal, production of feature films,especially in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Like “Nollywood”, these films which are not released in theatres but rather circulated via street vendors or streaming on-line (mainly YouTube) are viewed by large audiences,with some titles becoming popular “hits”."

"The cinema market in Latin America has faced drastic changes over the last few decades. Up until 40 years ago, national private companies dominated the Latin American film markets, especially exhibition. Through globalization, film distribution and exhibition are now mainly controlled by Hollywood studios and the multinational companies associated with them (Guback 1969, Getino, 1984-1987,Rey, 2005). In Latin America, there are fewer numbers of movie goers: the frequency of attendance in the region is on average 0.8 movies per year per person, except in Mexico (1.7), a country that has the fifth largest exhibition market of the world. Nevertheless, box office showed an increase of 127% during the 2000s, due mainly to the constant increase in cinema ticket price: prices doubled during the last decade (due primarily to the cost of 3D screening which typically is at a premium price)."

"The number of screens in Latin America grew on average by 65% in the 2000s. This percentage was led by Mexico and to a lesser extent;Brazil and Colombia (see Figure 11). This growth took place in a context of high geographic and class concentration, in addition to the high cost of tickets –in Latin America just one family outing to the family represented the equivalent of 10% of average local monthly income. Nevertheless, Latin America still remains “under screened”, including the giant Brazil, which has only around 2,500 screens fora population of almost 200 million inhabitants,representing only 1.1screens per 100,000 inhabitants. Regardless of whether one country has more or fewer screens, the geographic concentration of the screens is extremely important in all Latin American countries. In Mexico, only 7% of cities had a screen, and in Brazil, the second largest Latin American exhibition market, only 10% of cities had a theater (González, 2011). These patterns are especially acute in digital cinema through its flagship: 3D (the vast majority of Latin American digital screens are 3D). In 2007, 19 screens were digitized in Latin America. Since 2008, especially 2009, many digital screens opened in the entire region. Nevertheless, the rate of digitization in the region remains one of the lowest in the world (22% in 2011) (see Figure 12)."

"This analysis has highlighted some unique trends in the global cinema sector. First, there is a tendency for the “global film industry” (dominated by Hollywood productions) to produce sequels, prequels and adaptations (non-original ideas) that are targeted to mass media, children and youth, resulting in a concentration of world production. Second, film production is highly concentrated with 7% of the countries with regular film production making 55% of all feature films globally. India itself produced 20% of all films worldwide. Blockbusters outside of the USA have mainly been USA-produced comedies, breaking records all over the world. National productions or coproductions that are not distributed by Hollywood major studios have had almost no circulation beyond national borders. In the period 2005-2011, world admissions dropped by 12.8%, while box office revenues rose by 27.8% (average ticket price increased by 46%, especially since the 3D boom). Market concentration is still very high; Top 10 countries represented around 75% of world box office and 85% of world admissions. The concentration for admissions slowly increased from 85% to 90% between 2005 and 2011. Similar to patterns in the world macro-economy, the BRIC group (Brazil,the Russian Federation, India and China) is increasing its market share of the world film market (both production and admissions). China is the main star of this story: based on conservative estimates, by early 2020 the Asiatic giant will surpass USA as the main film market in the world. Other regions, like Latin America , have improved their film market indicators, but they are still low (except for Brazil and Mexico) in comparison to other regions. There are many individual countries that had impressive box office growth (21 countries with increases from 102% to 556%), in comparison with admissions rises (10 countries increasing from 100% to 156%). In other words, the world film screen market is losing spectators but increasing revenues–mainly due to increased ticket prices. In the context of many large countries,such as China, the Russian Federation and India,“lacking cinema screens, the development of their cinema infrastructure could give a push to the world film market”(Miller, 2008)."

"World film production continued to grow from 2005 to 2011,with a 39% increase. During this period, about 100 countries produced professional feature films for theatrical release, with an average of 5,987 feature films being produced per year, as shown in Table 3. The figures also show that there has been stagnation in the world film production since 2008, with total film production remaining at around 6,500 releases per year over the last four years for which data are available."

"Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, "objective" form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein."

"The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation."

"The identity-obsessed left has consistently sneered at those who want accuracy in casting decisions, pretending all criticism of politically motivated choices is based on bigotry or sexual frustration."

"But films . . . it’s funny. People buy a ticket. That ticket is their transport to a fantasy which you create for them. Fantasyland, that’s all, and you make their fantasies live. Fantasies of love or hatred or whatever it is. People want their fantasies over and over. People who masturbate usually masturbate with, at the most, four or five fantasies. By and large. Most people like the same food and they like the same kind of music, they like the same kind of sexual fantasy for a period of time, then maybe it changes. As it is in children. Who is it? Bruce Lee. That’s the hero. Then you grow up and grow out of your Bruce Lee period, or your Picasso Blue Period, and go into another period. “But with kids, because they outpower us, because they have no representation, because they are so dependent, all they think about is power. Dinosaurs or the Million Dollar Man, because they feel so helpless, because they have no way out of it, except fantasy. Because they are only that tall. “And that’s all films are. Just an extension of childhood, where everybody wants to be freer, everybody wants to be powerful, everybody wants to be so overwhelmingly attractive that there’s just no doing anything about it. Or everybody wants to have comradeship and to be understood."

"At the outbreak of war in 1939, the power of the feature film, as a means of communication and persuasion rather than just a vehicle for entertainment, was already well established. One of the earliest programmes of study into the effects of the moving image upon the mind had been carried out by the Payne Fund between 1929 and 1932. The experiments that it carried out concentrated on such issues as the extent to which children learnt from film and how well they retained what they learnt; the possibility that exposure to film affected attitudes; and how moral standards might be affected by what was viewed. The findings of these studies showed that the human mind could be shaped and moulded by persons in positions of influence; and, in this context, the film maker was in an almost unique position of influence."

"The Government controlled the film stock supply at this time and all film scripts for films to be made in the UK had to be submitted to the Ministry of Information. If a film was not approved then no film stock would be supplied. In 1939 the BBFC still operated under the broad guiding principles of former President TP O’Connor’s list of ‘grounds for deletion’ which were first published in 1916. These essentially barred: * References to controversial politics * Relations of capital and labour * Scenes tending to disparage public characters and institutions * Realistic horrors of warfare * Scenes and incidents calculated to afford information to the enemy * Incidents having a tendency to disparage our Allies * Scenes holding up the King’s uniform to contempt or ridicule * The exploitation of tragic incidents of the war The aim of all these constraints was to try and ensure that the kinds of films that came out during this period dealt with war in ways that were unlikely to be particularly upsetting or challenging for audiences."

"While people are always quick to take up the cudgels against censorship of the press, or radio, any crackpot can advocate new forms of censorship for the movies, and not a voice is lifted in protest. There's something illogical about this indifference to censorship of the movies. After all, it's just as much a medium of public expression as are the radio and newspapers."

"I have never heard of any youngster going wrong, turning to crime, because of the movies. It simply isn't possible. Our relation to crime is, in a sense, the same as the prison warden's. We don't create it. We deal with it after it has happened, and we always make the criminal look bad."

"Sometimes watching a movie is a bit like getting raped."

"In all, markets outside the United States accounted for roughly $25 billion of $35.9 billion in worldwide box-office sales last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Precisely what share of international sales was captured by American-based companies is unclear, but they remained dominant. Still, Jonathan Wolf, the American Film Market’s managing director, has been watching what he calls “a global shift away from U. S. product over the last 25 years.” Government subsidies for local film have changed tastes in some regions of the world. That shift, and a new generation of television-trained international filmmakers, Mr. Wolf said, have slowly undermined American-based film in ways that will again be apparent at this year’s market. Over a decade, he noted, English-language film exporters have dropped to about 63 percent from 73 percent among those at his event, while United States-based exporters now account for roughly 47 percent of the American Film Market’s pool, down from 53 percent 10 years earlier."

"According to Rentrak, American studio titles accounted for 39 percent of Chinese ticket sales in 2013, down from 44 percent a year earlier. Speaking in October, Rob Cain, a producer and consultant with considerable experience in China, said the American share was back to almost 44 percent. Of nine films to take in more than $100 million at the Chinese box office at that point, five were Chinese films. But an expected strong performance by Paramount’s “Interstellar” will probably keep the American share relatively high through the year’s end, Mr. Cain said. China, aside from a deeply rooted, action-oriented Hong Kong movie culture, has yet to become a powerful exporter of film. To date, it has been more like India, a prolific producer whose wares are mostly viewed within its borders, and among a vibrant diaspora around the world."

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

"I'm going to leave you with this machine, pay attention, she's going to ask you a bunch of questions."

"A message I’ve been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can’t do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now."

"The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized."

"I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images."

"… a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries, … a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence,… which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles."

"I always say a screenplay is the big plain pizza, the one with tomatoes and cheese. And then the director comes and says, “You know, it needs some mushrooms.” And you go, “Put mushrooms on it.” And then the costume designer throws peppers on it, and – and pretty soon, you have a pizza with everything on it. And sometimes it’s the greatest pizza of your life and sometimes you think, “Well, that was a mistake. We should have left it with only the mushrooms.”"

"Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure."

"The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all, that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open, has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?"

"A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together."

"Frivolity, sensuality, indecency, appalling illiteracy and endless platitude are the marks of the degenerate American Theater under Jewish control. [...] it is quite possible that many who read this are not interested in the theater, and are, in fact, convinced. that the theater and cinema are a menace. But, what principally makes these things a menace? This-that the stage and cinema today represent the principal cultural element of 90 percent of the people. What the average young person absorbs as to good form, proper deportment, refinement as contrasted with coarseness, correctness of speech or choice of words, customs and feelings of other nations, fashion of clothes, ideas of religion and law, are derived from what is seen at the cinema and theater. The masses' sole idea of home and life of the rich is derived from the stage and the movies."

"Nooo! Leave that to George Lucas, he' s really mastered the CGI acting. That scares me! I hate it! Everybody is so pleased and excited by it. Animation is animation. Animation is great. But it's when you're now taking what should be films full of people, living thinking, breathing, flawed creatures and you're controlling every moment of that, it's just death to me. It's death to cinema, I can't watch those Star Wars films, they're dead things."

"[Steven Spielberg's films] are comforting, they always give you answers and I don't think they're very clever answers. … The success of most Hollywood films these days is down to fact that they're comforting. They tie things up in nice little bows and give you answers, even if the answers are stupid, you go home and you don't have to think about it. … The great filmmakers make you go home and think about it."

"The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t."

"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."

"A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad."

"Watching movies, but we ain't seeing a thing tonight."

"If you want to be a storyteller, be an author, be a novelist, be a writer, don't be a film director. Cinema is not the greatest medium for telling stories. It is too specific, leaves so little room for the imagination to take wing other than in the strict directions indicated by the director. Read "he entered the room" and imagine a thousand scenarios. See "he entered the room" in cinema-as-we-know-it, and you are going to be limited to one scenario only."

"If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!"

"Film is not the art of scholars, but illiterates."

"As you see [filmmaking] makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone – just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns."

"I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books."

"Some 20 years after Lumière’s film, a Harvard psychologist named Hugo Munsterberg challenged researchers to figure out the depth of, and reason for, cinema’s influence: “For the first time the psychologist can observe the starting of an entirely new esthetic development, a new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a technical age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art destined to overcome outer nature by the free and joyful play of the mind,” Munsterberg wrote in The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, considered by many to be the first important behavioral look at film. But though the research gauntlet had been thrown down, what followed is what one would expect when looking for artistry in a Pauly Shore flick: nothing. Or, at least, very little, says Stuart Fischoff, founder of the Journal of Media Psychology, who in 2003 retired from the psychology department at California State University, Los Angeles. Between 1916, when Munsterberg wrote The Photoplay, and the 1950s, perhaps the most influential psychological research on cinema was L.L. Thurnstone’s 1928 Payne Fund report — a study whose purpose was to indict, not investigate, the role of film on behavior, Fischoff says. In fact, for much of the 20th century, the psychological study of film was considered “lightweight stuff,” says Dolf Zillmann, University of Alabama, one of the field’s pioneers. Film study was approached with a Freudian mindset, and few empirical studies took place. But in the past decade or so, such research has experienced a resurgence — the rare sequel that outperforms the original. “There’s really a new psychology of film in the making,” says Zillmann. Film study from a psychological perspective now takes place in campuses around the country, combining interdisciplinary approaches from several areas, with an increasing focus on the neuroscience of viewer response."

"Let's face it, motion pictures are sausages. But that doesn't mean you can't make artful sausage."

"The culture is unchallenged as the standard setter, and the child’s sense of right and wrong and his priorities in life are shaped primarily by what he learns from the television, the movie screen and the CD player."

"In the world we live in - and the system we've created for ourselves, in terms of it's a big industry - you cannot lose money. So the point is that you're forced to make a particular kind of movie. And I used to say this all the time, with people, you know, back when Russia was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and they'd say: "Oh, but aren’t you so glad that you're in America?" And I'd say: "Well, I know a lot of Russian filmmakers and they have a lot more freedom than I have. All they have to do is be careful about criticizing the government. Otherwise, they can do anything they want"."

"The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this."

"Dedicated enforcement campaigns have become relatively common sights in developing countries as part of the release strategies for major domestic films, with notable examples including The Irony of Fate 2 (2007), in Russia, Tsotsi (2005) in South Africa, Tropa de Elite 2 (2010) in Brazil and Lagaan (2001), in India. Police mobilization in these situations is generally geared toward the suppression of street piracy during the initial release window for the film, when the majority of profits are made."

"Since 2002, the US movie industry has been a $9-10.5 billion business in domestic box office revenues, with successive record-setting years in 2007, 2008, and 2009. International distribution brought in some 16.6 billion in 2007, $18.1 billion in 2008, and 19.3 billion in 2009 (MPAA 2009). DVD sales are a separate, massive revenue stream: global sales peaked at $23.4 billion in 2007 before dropping to $22.4 billion in 2008 and falling further in 2009. Licensing of movie-related merchandise is a third revenue stream, estimated at roughly $16 billion per year (Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf 2009). This success is not limited to Hollywood. The Indian movie industry - second in global revenues - has also boomed in recent years and registered 13% growth in 2008, with up to $2.2 billion in box office revenues (seefigure 1.4). Revenues in 2009 dropped slightly to $1.86 billion (Kohi-Khandekar 2010)."

"Although US domestic box office revenues have grown 40% since 2000, the real growth markets have been overseas. Bo office revenues have roughly quadrupled in India since 2000 and tripled in Brazil; they have tripled in Russia since 2004. Because this growth took place against low baselines, however, these markets remain very small compared to their US and European counterparts."

"White examines the hold of analogical reasoning on the legal imagination by assessing the way courts responded to innovations in the social world. The two examples that are the subject of this essay are the treatment of radio and motion pictures in the early part of the twentieth century. He looks at how law responded to these innovations and, in particular, how courts responded to challenges to efforts to impose a regulatory regime on them. The drive to regulate emerged from a particular awareness of the media’s mass quality and the immediacy of the effects they created; in addition, it was fueled by the Progressive Era’s tendency to approve regulation by experts as a way of addressing social concerns. Yet these regulations, at least from the perspective of today, raise serious First Amendment issues. White examines cases challenging regulation to show that analogical reasoning was used to construct a legal history in such a way as to justify regulation in spite of the First Amendment. In the case of film, courts constructed such a history by categorizing it as a form of property. Like property, film might be used to do “evil.” Courts then conjured the history of the “police powers” by which states could invoke their powers to protect the morals of the public. In addition, they brought the regulation of film within the history of administrative law and, as a result, focused only on the nature of the legislative delegation involved. Having established framework of analogies, courts then were able to bring to bear the relevant precedents. In their treatment of those cases they tended to anticipate the position of Marshall in “Payne”, insisting on the value of consistency and continuity of law’s doctrinal structure."

"As one industry insider argued, "Saving Private Ryan suffers on [video] cassette. If you see it at home, you are by no means as impressed with it as you were in the movie theater. And Shakespeare in Love is a more intimate picture, it plays well on cassette. It may actually be enhanced by watching it at home."" In response, Dreamworks' marketing chief, Terry Press countered: "That goes to a larger issue. You're a member of the Motion Picture Academy, not the television video academy. These movies are meant to be seen in movie theaters, all of them. They're not meant to be stopped and started and paused when the phone rings or to feed the dog.""

"A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later."

"They’re outraged not because of any personal prejudice. They’re outraged because they hate to see any change made on a series and characters they had gotten familiar with. In Spider-Man, when they got a new actor, that bothered them, even though it was a white actor. I don’t think it had to do with racial prejudice as much as they don’t like things changed."