Occupations

"Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures."

"I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in."

"When you start out as a filmmaker, you do parodies, because you can’t really compete on a studio level. That's part of the reason I wanted to produce this film – Traveller."

"If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is."

"Film is incredibly democratic and accessible, it’s probably the best option if you actually want to change the world, not just re-decorate it."

"I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can't take it, because I'm pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said "What did you expect? All major directors are "sexist", a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality! My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this "soul-robbery". Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that."

"Today, there's a general numbing of the audience. There's too much murder and killing. You make people insensitive by showing it all the time. The body count in pictures is huge. It numbs the audience into thinking it's not so terrible. Back in the '70s, I asked Orson Welles what he thought was happening to pictures, and he said, "We're brutalizing the audience. We're going to end up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum." The respect for human life seems to be eroding."

"I think it’s important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you’ve got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances."

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. A comedy is life with the dull bits cut out and the wit and humour maximised."

"In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life."

"A story [in a film] should have a beginning, a middle and an end… but not necessarily in that order."

"We are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship... Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. … How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?"

"What you have really got to learn is focus on learning as much about life and about various aspects of it first Then learn the techniques of making a movie, because that stuff you can pick up pretty quickly. But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences – is very, very important to actually being able to make movies."

"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."

"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water."

"One would think that making a film is an ; you're building this—it's not, it's . The best metaphor I know of is we make in [] and it takes forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. And that's what the process is."

"Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee."

"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach."

"Huston's skill as a director was always that the emotions in his films, whether love, fear, hatred, determination, holiness, greed or desperation, seemed genuinely felt, and he extracted some extraordinarily deep performances from actors not previously noted for extreme mobility."

"There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness."

"We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies"

"In France I am an autier In England, I’m a horror movie director. In Germany, I’m a filmmaker. In the US, I’m a bum."

"All I Need to Make a Comedy is a Park, a Policeman and a Pretty Girl."

"First cuts are a bitch for a director, because it’s been so many months and you put your trust in your editor and you’re going to see your film assembled for the first time. You look at it and go, This is terrible. I hate it."

"It has been my belief that political awareness can be raised as much by entertainment as by rhetoric. There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive – in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen. Obviously, a single piece of work can’t change the world, but what you try to do is add your voice to the chorus.”"

"Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest."

"The foreign directors are always fumbling about in obscurity, and the critics are always writing about the juxtaposition of black and white and the existential dilemma and all that shit, to disguise the fact that they don't understand the first damn thing about it either."

"Hypnotic behaviour is meaningful, goal-directed striving, its most general goal being to behave like a hypnotised person as this is continuously defined by the operator and understood by the client."

"I've recommended hypnotherapy to help ease chronic pain, lessen the side effects of chemotherapy, alleviate symptoms of autoimmune disease, and counteract anxiety and sleep disorders. Hypnotherapy can also be used to improve performance skills, as a form of analgesia or sedation for medical and dental procedures--even to stop hemorrhaging in accident victims. In general, I believe that no condition is out of bounds for trying hypnotherapy on."

"Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not able to do (...) Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?"

"New York Time, in The Possibilities in Hypnosis, Where the Patient Has the Power (3 November 3, 2008)"

"I tried acupuncture, the patch, and hypnosis, but found that I needed to do it alone - when the time was right for me."

"Hypnosis seems helpful in treating addictions, and the depression and anxiety associated with them…"

"As far as hypnosis is concerned, I had a very serious problem when I was in my twenties. I encountered a man who later became the president of the [[W:American Society of Clinical Hypnosis|American Society of Medical Hypnosis. He couldn't hypnotize me."

"All kinds of nice inspiring symbolical interpretations of the ritual are generally given for the benefit of people who seem to want them, but it is here evident that the candidate, unknown to himself or herself, has acted throughout the ceremony of initiation under the stress of hypnotism. No longer a free agent, the initiate takes the oath under hypnotic force which, has also been used to instil into him the feeling of fear. Fear guards the secret of initiation, fear born under the power of hypnotism to serve henceforth as the controlling agent of the initiators over the initiated. The Right Worshipful Master must be a genuine occultist, as it is up to him to charge (hypnotise) the candidate."

"Hypnosis can be very helpful in allowing you to focus on what you want to focus on."

"This study [with a PET (for positron emission Tomography) scanner to monitor activity in the brain's visual areas] lends considerable weight to the idea that hypnosis is a real neurological phenomenon," said. But our goal is not just to verify a hypothesis. With hypnosis, we can help people modulate perceptions in ways that are therapeutically helpful."

"They are not just suffering in silence ¬ they are able to change their perception of pain."

"The major goal of the Cold War mind control programs was to create dissociative symptoms and disorders, including full multiple personality disorder. The Manchurian Candidate is fact, not fiction, and was created by the CIA in the 1950’s under BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE mind control programs. Experiments with LSD, sensory deprivation, electro-convulsive treatment, brain electrode implants and hypnosis were designed to create amnesia, depersonalization, changes in identity and altered states of consciousness."

"If clinical multiple personality is buried and forgotten, then the Manchurian Candidate Programs will be safe from public scrutiny."

"Denial of the reality of multiple personality by these doctors in the mind control network, who are also on the FMSF [False Memory Syndrome Foundation] Scientific and Professional Advisory Board, could be disinformation. The disinformation could be amplified by attacks on specialists in multiple personality as CIA conspiracy lunatics."

"Hypnosis puts a person in a trance-like state so that they are more receptive to new suggestion, and better able to control what is happening to the body or see a problem from a new point of view."

"Hypnosis is the most effective way of giving up smoking, according to the largest ever scientific comparison of ways of breaking the habit."

"The phenomena of Mesmerism could be salvaged by physicians adopting a more rational and scientific approach, while avoiding the worst excesses of its metaphysical speculations. Moreover, in a discussion of similar ideas propounded by the philosopher Francis Bacon, he specifically recommends that physicians, like Braid, should develop a ‘doctrine of the bond between mind and body’ (i.e., Braid’s “psycho-physiology”). Moreover, Stewart urges enquiry into ‘the effect of fixing and concentrating the attention, in giving to ideal [i.e., imaginary] objects the power of realities over the belief."

"...using hypnosis, scientists have temporarily created hallucinations, compulsions, certain types of memory loss, false memories, and delusions in the laboratory so that these phenomena can be studied in a controlled environment.[ "The Truth and the Hype of Hypnosis". Scientific American: July 2001"

"I have long recognised as a fact that judgements really grounded on a long succession of small experiences mostly forgotten, or perhaps never brought out into very distinct consciousness, often grow into the likeness of intuitive perceptions.... When states of Mind in no respect innate or instinctive have been frequently repeated, the Mind acquires, as is proved by the power of Habit, a greatly increased facility of passing into those states and this increased facility must be owing to some change of a physical character, in the organic action of the Brain."

"Hypnosis can help. A growing body of research supports the ancient practice as an effective tool in the treatment of a variety of problems, from anxiety to chronic pain."

"Influence of the hypnotist upon the hypnotised, and that the hypnotised person simply reacts upon himself by reason of latent capacities in him which are artificially developed. Braid demonstrated that hypnotism, acting upon a human subject as upon a fallow field, merely set in motion a string of silent faculties which only needed its assistance to reach their development."

"Modern Hypnotism owes it name and its appearance in the realm of science to the investigations made by Braid. He is its true creator; he made it what it is; and above all, he gave emphasis to the experimental truth by means of which he proved that, when hypnotic phenomena are called into play, they are wholly independent of any supposed influence."

"In the late nineteenth century, scientists, psychiatrists, and medical practitioners began employing a new experimental technique for the study of neuroses: hypnotism. Though the efforts of the famous France|French neurologist [[w:Jean-Martin CharcotJean-Martin Charcot to transform hypnosis into a laboratory science failed, his Viennese translator and disciple Sigmund Freud took up the challenge and invented psychoanalysis. Previous scholarship has viewed hypnosis and psychoanalysis in sharp opposition or claimed that both were ultimately grounded in the phenomenon of suggestion and thus equally flawed. In this groundbreaking study, the relationship between hypnosis and psychoanalysis, revealed that the emergence of the familiar Freudian psychoanalytic setting cannot be understood without a detailed analysis of the sites, material and social practices, and controversies within the checkered scientific and medical landscape of hypnotism."