“I think that a film should have a good story, a clear story, and it should have, if possible, something which is probably the most difficult thing – it should have a little bit of magic. Magic being untouchable and very difficult to cast, you can’t deal with it at all. You can only try to prepare some nests, hoping that a little bit of magic will slide into them.” –Emeric Pressburger Continue reading Born On This Day – December 5, 1902
“Of course, all films are surrealist. They are because they are making something that looks like a real world but isn’t.” “Seventy years ago there were men like D.W. Griffith and seventy years later – now – there are not many men like Martin Scorsese. But so long as there is one there will be others, and the art of the cinema will survive.” –Michael Powell “One, we owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss. Two, every single foot in our … Continue reading Born On This Day – September 30
“The great innovators have always been fearless . . . I have fallen off haystacks, out of trees, over cliffs. I have been nearly drowned, shot and hanged. I have been in countless car crashes without getting a scratch. I have been alone in an office with Louis B. Mayer.” –Michael Powell Continue reading In Their Words – Saturday, April 27, 2013
The study of cinema is the study of directors, or more accurately, the study of auteurs. Single visions brought to life via a committee. Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Ford, all of these names immediately pop into our minds when we think of directors. Their films are connected through common motifs, iconic imagery, recurring themes, and most importantly, a singular vision captured. One man helming the show. The problems with this idea is simple, cinema is quite possibly the most collaborative form of artistic expression. Both a blend of consumer oriented marketing and genuine emotional pathos, it takes a village of hundreds, sometimes … Continue reading The Archers
“I make films for myself. What I express I hope most people will understand. For the rest, well, that’s their problem.” –Michael Powell Continue reading In Their Words – Tuesday, February 19, 2013
“Our business was not realism but surrealism. We were storytellers, fantasists. This is why we could never get on with the documentary film movement. Documentary films started with poetry and finished as prose. We storytellers started with naturalism and finished with fantasy.” –Michael Powell Continue reading In Their Words – Saturday, January 26, 2013
“ I’ve always been a very serious-minded person, but people don’t know it, really, they’re always puzzled by my films, that there’s usually something going on in the film besides what you’re looking at, which is of course, the contact with the director, an audience has a contact with the story on the screen and also with the director who is telling the story. This is why a director in making a film is such a strange thing—there are some directors who are just card indexes, machines, just put the thing very well on the screen and that’s it. But there are … Continue reading In Their Words – Sunday, November 18, 2012
“Since H.G. Wells, Arthur Clarke and Ray Bradbury, they have all tried to think up frightening machines but it’s very difficult to achieve. I don’t think there is anything more frightening than a camera, a camera which is filming and which is watching you.” -Michael Powell Continue reading In Their Words – Wednesday, October 31, 2012
“I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from this time on, my memories almost coincide with the history of cinema. I am not a film director with a personal style, I am the cinema. I grew up with and through the cinema; if I interest myself in pictures, books, or music, it is again thanks to the cinema.” -Michael Powell Continue reading In Their Words – Sunday, October 14, 2012
