Film

"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."

"A motion picture must be true to life. If a picture portrays a false emotion it trains people seeing it to react abnormally."

"Sound and talking undoubtedly increase the entertainment value of a picture. There is a distinct conflict, however, between a pictorial and sound elements, which cannot be entirely avoided until third dimensional pictures are made."

"Not even the church is so powerfully equipped to serve the public psychologically as is the motion picture company."

"If I write a crappy comic book, it doesn't cost the budget of an emergent Third World nation. When you've got these kinds of sums involved in creating another two hours of entertainment for Western teenagers, I feel it crosses the line from being merely distasteful to being wrong. To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate — unlike most films."

"Hollywood, television and film is not my prime area of interest. Because I would never have any control, working in those areas. It’s nice to get the money from a Hollywood project, but whatever they do with it, it would be their piece of work, and not mine."

"Photography because of its causal relationship to the world seems to give us the truth or something close to the truth. I am skeptical about this for many reasons. But even if photography doesn't give us truth on a silver-platter, it can make it harder for us to deny reality. It puts a leash on fantasy, confabulation and self-deception. It provides constraints, borders. It circumscribes our ability to lie — to ourselves and to others."

"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."

"Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum."

"It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten."

"The talkies are the only art that would attract Leonardo da Vinci were he alive to-day. It is the only art that excites a scientist's curiosity, the only art that challenges the engineer, the only art that offers the great artist a medium capable of expressing every human thought and emotion, as well as the pure aesthetic effects of color and music. It is a baby giant, as clumsy as all babies are. Its noises are, we grieve to admit, often as inartistic as the squalling of a baby. But squalling babies have a way of growing up into soft-voices women and great singers. This is why we, the authors, have gladly played the role of nursemaids. We don't know what the baby will be doing and saying when it grows up. But we are sure it will make its mark in the world."

"The literary story is hard enough, heaven knows. It calls for a thorough understanding of the kinds of people you set out to depict. It cannot be of high quality unless the author can plot well. And, of course, it must be cast in distinctive style. The picture of the silent screen does not demand literary abilities, but it does require insight into character as well as drama; furthermore, it is founded upon a high order of visual imagination. The stage play, in a certain sense, calls for all the chief abilities of literary stories and silent pictures; and, in addition, it must be managed with dialogue, which is some thing very different from literary language. But the sound picture goes beyond all of these other art forms. To invent a good one, you must grasp character, drama, settings, and dialogue. But you must go beyond these. You need a fanciful ear. The backgrounds of your story now cry out. The tale is filled with noises. And every least sound adds a unique quality to the total effect."

"People go to moving pictures to be made to weep or laugh, to be happy or unhappy as they watch what hap pens to the screen characters before them. They become completely absorbed in the screen action. They follow the story, willy-nilly. And in so doing, they are forced to feel the emotion/ aroused by the dramatic situations.Pictures makes millions of people, day after day, feel glad or sad, courageous or fearful, righteous or angry. He, can do this, that is to say, within limits, and these limits largely depend upon the story of the picture. If the producer has a powerful enough story, these millions for get themselves and their little joys and woes and escape into the scenes on the screen before them. Small wonder then, that, with such stupendous power over the thinking and feeling of myriads of men, women, and children, the moving picture producer is willing, even eager, to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars — or even a cool mil lion or so — to secure and produce a picture for this world of movie-goers. But the story selected must itself have power enough to arouse the emotions of an audience. Excellent photography and good acting can help to carry successfully any story, but they can never put emotional meaning into a story that is built without emotional appeal."

"The task of depicting character in the sound picture is, in one sense, far easier than in the silent picture. The latter, being essentially pantomime clarified with titles, is cruelly restricted as a medium of depicting human nature. Few of us express ourselves in postures and gestures. Our natural manner finds itself freer and surer in spoken words and, most of all, in decisive acts involving such forms of language as promises, commands, prohibitions, and so on, all of which readily lends itself to reproduction in talk and scene combined. To this extent, character drawing in sound pictures seems to offer pretty much the same opportunities and difficulties as in the drama of the Broadway stage. But a closer study brings out the somewhat startling fact that a sound picture, skillfully handled, can reveal more of a personality than any other device of art or science. The actor on the stage can talk, gesticulate, and move to and fro; but there his powers end. The actor of the talking screen can do all of these things and then carry on his subjective life in the presence of the spectators. We can show pictorially his memories, his fears, his hopes, and his cunning schemes. We can reveal his clenched fist in a close-up. We can show the beads of perspiration on his brow, as he trembles with suppressed rage."

"I'm fascinated by the movies simply because it is an enormous machine for making money and no matter how badly they run it, it still makes money. It's the perfect industry to put your nephew in and your idiot cousin, because they'll be geniuses."

"There is only one thing that can kill the movies, and that is education."

"We know the power of short movies. When they are well done, [they are] greater and more incisive than full-length films. Professionally done trailers are sometimes better than the full movies they announce, being a form of visual art in themselves or even containing self-sufficient micro-stories."

"Until about the mid-1930s, law in film was an authoritative and neutral process—a formal and almost religious space—in which truth could be revealed or justice done through heavy-handed elites. Starting from the late-1930s until the post-WWII period—the "film noir" period—film depicted an underside of law, corruption, and unreasonable attachment to formality at the expense of justice. There are a lot of films from this time that depict legal heroes that flout the law to make sure the truth comes out and that depict mobs taking over both the legal process and civil society. In the mid-1950s onward, classical Hollywood cinema took over with its brighter depiction of the promise of law to help the everyday person. It is an evolution that sounds in grassroots democracy, the value of juries, and the promise of individuals to make a difference working within the system. From the late-1980s, many law films were ahead of their time in terms of civil rights, depicting African American judges, female litigators, and a legal system that is open and sufficiently self-reflective to incorporate criticism into its pursuit of justice. You might think of Philadelphia, with Tom Hanks and Denzel Wasghinton, as one of these films, or A Few Good Men, with Demi Moore as Lt. Cmdr. Joanne Galloway and J.A. Preston as Judge Julius Alexander Randolf. TV has followed a similar arc, but with more police serials than courtroom dramas. As you can see from these periods, the themes of film track and help constitute U.S. socio-political culture."

"Across all the countries examined, females were underrepresented in the film workforce compared to their actual percentages globally. Discrepancy scores were calculated to determine the degree to which on-screen depictions of occupations differ from real-world values (see Table 6). The scores were grouped into three categories based on the size of the discrepancy: small (5-9.9), moderate (10-19.9), and large (20+). India was the only country in which female film jobs revealed a small difference from the real world. Five countries (Japan, Brazil, U.K., China, Korea) showed moderate differences between movie and actual workforce percentages and five countries (France, Russia, U.S., Australia, Germany) showed large differences. Once again, women are underrepresented on screen. This time they comprise less than a quarter of the workforce in international films, which is well below their share in the real world of work. Given that movies can set an agenda for the next generation entering the workforce, the lack of females in the labor market is a concern. Perhaps even more troubling is the types of occupations women are shown possessing, the topic of the next section."

"Well, Jack Warner may have been celebrated for calling writers "Schmucks with Underwoods," but 20 years earlier, Irving Thalberg … said that "The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing that.""

"From the 1960s, cinema was one of the most important aspects of the alliances between Cuba, the USSR and African liberation movements. Filmmaking - both documentary and fiction - in support of rebellious causes were emerging across the world, from Palestine to Latin America, and young members of guerrilla movements such as the PAIGC's Flora Gomes and Sana Na N'hada were sent to Cuba to learn the language and techniques of Third Cinema, the values of revolution and social justice of which echoed the early, utopian ideals of African anti-colonial struggles."

"Watching violence in movies or in TV programs stimulates the spectators to imitate what they see much more than if seen live or on TV news. In movies, violence is filmed with perfect illumination, spectacular scenery, and in slow motion, making it even romantic. However, in the news, the public has a much better perception of how horrible violence can be, and it is used with objectives that do not exist in the movies."

"I honestly don't understand the big fuss made over nudity and sex in films. It's silly. On TV, the children can watch people murdering each other, which is a very unnatural thing, but they can't watch two people in the very natural process of making love. Now, really, that doesn't make any sense, does it?"

"A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking - it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it."

"To make a film is to improve on life, to arrange it to suit oneself, to prolong the games of childhood, to construct something which is at once a new toy and a vase in which one can arrange in a permanent way the ideas one feels in the morning."

"I make films that I would like to have seen when I was a young man."

"Data from 93 countries and territories cover film production, exhibition and distribution for countries at various levels of economic development for the 2015 reference year.New data show the growing importance of developing countries in the cinema industry. In 2015, developing countries, accounted for 59% of global movie production (see the figure). Booming cinema industries in India and Nigeria, known as Bollywood and Nollywood, are driving growth. In India, for example, film production has nearly doubled since 2005 when just over 1,000 films were produced. With the introduction of digital technology, production started to ramp up in 2012, and in 2015 India reported that 1,907 feature films had been produced."

"But you just don't know where any film is going to go, or how it's going to end up. Films so often don't get the love and attention needed to get to the right festival, or find the right distributor, or get seen by the world."

"[A PG-13 rating is the] studio wanting to make money. R-rated movies are excluded because they limit the audience. The capitalist system completely dominates the American film industry. It’s all about the bottom line. Any argument about filmmaking or art is lost. Even the art of meaning is lost. There’s no meaning to American cinema anymore. The only meaning is money. It’s reduced to that, and it’s horrible. Capitalism can also accept there are other values than money, but it looks like studios can only look at movies for pure profit. That’s why the R rating is gone. Then you get more people, but you sacrifice everything that is edgy or sexual. You sacrifice anything that might offend people. Now if you go to a multiplex, everything is PG-13."

"As I now move—graciously, I hope—toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies. Naturally, Sex and Art always took precedence over the cinema. Unfortunately, neither ever proved to be as dependable as the filtering of present light through that moving strip of celluloid which projects past images and voices onto a screen."

"To write a script today means working for a committee of people who know nothing about movies, as opposed, say, to real estate or the higher art of bookkeeping."

"A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins."

"Even more important was American influence in Europe through its music, movies, and fashion. Unlike the Soviet efforts at gaining a cultural influence, there was little that was centrally planned about this. The State Department and the CIA tried to make sure that “healthy” American films and literature were spread abroad, but their successes were limited. Instead, company marketing and consumer responses ruled the roost. The ability of US film studios and record producers to make their output inexpensive and plentiful, while Europe suffered all kinds of shortages, also gave imports an advantage. In 1947, for instance, only forty French films were made, while 340 were imported from the United States. Though the music of Elvis Presley or the movies of Marlon Brando or James Dean were not set up to be propaganda for the American way of life, young Europeans liked them, in part because of their rebelliousness. Wearing T-shirts and blue jeans merged a form of protest against convention with identifying with US movies. In the mid-1950s, American and European teenagers were more united by Brando than by NATO."

"See it Film it Change it"

"The percentage of people who actually go to a movie theater has declined from a high of 65% of the population in 1930 (before television) to about 10% over the last several decades."

"By 1990, movies were either rented or sold at much more reasonable prices directly to consumers (known as sell-through). Video rentals reached a plateau, but video sell-through sales continued to grow. By 1992, the value of video sell-through sales exceeded the domestic theatrical box office for the first time. Home video caused a significant downward shift in the box office; for instance, the domestic box office represented 80% of studio revenues in 1980, but by 1992 it decreased to no more than 25%."

"With the exception of large U.S. companies whose feature films are distributed and seen on the five continents, production from the other four leading countries generally have geographically more restricted circulation. Feature films produced in India, for instance, are popular with the Indian diaspora, as well as Afghanistan, Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan."

"The international co-production of feature films, which involves companies from two or more countries that finance and produce films, can be considered a gateway to diversity of cultural expressions as it enables the exchange of human resources –both technical and artistic–across countries and,undoubtedly,facilitates the circulation of films across two or more film markets. In this regard, for instance, the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-production(CE, 1992) considers international co-production as “an instrument of creation and expression of cultural diversity”. It is worth noting that international co-production is a practice that started in the mid-20th century among companies from countries with major historical, cultural and/or linguistic ties. Furthermore, since the late 20thcentury, governments from wide political spectrums have been encouraging co-productions with other countries through international programmes, such as the Ibermedia Programme introduced in 1996 for the Ibero-American area. In a highly competitive and globalised market, international co-production is a way for film production companies to broaden their markets of operation."

"A key sector for analysing the diversity of the film industry is distribution. Distribution companies are directly linked to the diversity offered to potential spectators, acting in many markets and reaching diverse audiences through cinema complexes. Focusing on the distribution of feature films in theatres, the world’s most successful films were distributed and promoted by companies belonging to the U.S.majors: Buena Vista (an affiliate of the Walt Disney Company), Sony Pictures Releasing, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Warner Brother and Paramount Pictures. These companies have a dominant position in several countries of the world (in Latin America and Western Europe, for instance) and rule the distribution of both Hollywood blockbusters and locally-produced films that are likely to become commercial hits in their respective markets.In addition, often the U.S. majors operate in foreign markets in a coordinated fashion, to the detriment of local productions and independent distributors, as can be seen in Spain (TDC, 2006). This has a negative impact on the diversity of feature films that the markets can offer to local audiences. Thus, many feature films do not access screening slots in the theatres of their country of origin."

"In contrast with the wide-ranging dissemination at the international scale reached by U.S. productions, the distribution of feature films beyond the borders of the countries that produce them is a serious problem in regions such as Europe and Latin America. As mentioned by the European Commission when launching its ‘European Film in the Digital Era’ strategy in 2014, “the number of movies made in Europe went from 1,100 in 2008 to 1,300 in 2012, but for the most part they are only screened in the country of their production and rarely reach distribution across borders”. Therefore, the European Union has a new strategy aimed at the“need to take full advantage of the new distribution methods to drive cultural diversity and competitiveness” (EC, 2014)."