Beethoven Film Quotes

He looks away from me, covering his mouth. “What are you laughing at.” He looks down, but waves his hand at me. “You—your—” I refuse to look down at myself. “My what, Snow?” “Your hair.” I refuse to touch my hair. “You look like that guy, with the wig—” He mimes playing the piano. “Duh, duh, duh, duhhh.” “Beethoven?” “I don’t know his name. With the big wig. There was a film about him.” “Mozart. You’re saying I look like Mozart.” “You’ve got to look, Baz, it’s a scream.

There are those who see film and take it seriously as an artistic medium, and others who go to have a good time, to simply be entertained. I have to be careful , because it sounds like I am condemning, or criticizing what people are doing. I have nothing against that, in the same way that some people like rock music or to go dancing, and other people like to go to a Beethoven concert. It's just that I'm more interested in the one than the other.

Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films... all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions... await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place. Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side. He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work. Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved. Exactly a year from now, I vowed, I would sit outside at night wherever I was, somewhere in Europe, or in America, and turn my face to Egypt, as Moslems do when they pray and face Mecca, and remember this very night, and how I had thought these things and made this vow. You're beginning to sound like Elsa and her silly seders, I said to myself, mimicking my father's humour. On my way home I thought of what the others were doing. I wanted to walk in, find the smaller living room still lit, the Beethoven still playing, with Abdou still cleaning the dining room, and, on closing the front door, suddenly hear someone say, "We were just waiting for you, we're thinking of going to the Royal." "But we've already seen that film," I would say. "What difference does it make. We'll see it again." And before we had time to argue, we would all rush downstairs, where my father would be waiting in a car that was no longer really ours, and, feeling the slight chill of a late April night, would huddle together with the windows shut, bicker as usual about who got to sit where, rub our hands, turn the radio to a French broadcast, and then speed to the Corniche, thinking that all this was as it always was, that nothing ever really changed, that the people enjoying their first stroll on the Corniche after fasting, or the woman selling tickets at the Royal, or the man who would watch our car in the side alley outside the theatre, or our neighbours across the hall, or the drizzle that was sure to greet us after the movie at midnight would never, ever know, nor even guess, that this was our last night in Alexandria.

A música afeta as nossas emoções e pode levantar-nos ou baixar-nos o moral. Um bom exemplo disto é a forma como as bandas sonoras dos filmes nos dão pistas sobre como reagirmos à cena que estamos a ver – romance, humor e tensão são ampliados pela música que os acompanha.

Beethoven and Paul McCartney cited dreams as the spark behind some of their musical compositions (including McCartney’s famous “Yesterday”). Some of the most recognizable sequences in film—sections of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Fellini’s 8 ½, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life—are translations of the directors’ dreams. Mary Shelley credited dreams with inspiring Frankenstein; E. B. White with Stuart Little.

In the last decade and a half a revival of plant behavior research had brought countless new realizations to botany, more than forty years after an irresponsible best-selling book nearly snuffed out the field for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, captured the public imagination on a global scale. Written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the book was a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection. In one chapter, Tompkins and Bird suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. In another, a former CIA agent named Cleve Backster hooked up a polygraph test to his houseplant and imagined the plant being set on fire. The polygraph needle went wild, which would mean the plant was experiencing a surge in electrical activity. In humans, a reading like that was believed to denote a surge of stress. The plant, according to Backster, was responding to his malevolent thoughts. The implication was that there existed not only a sort of plant consciousness but also plant mind-reading. The book was an immediate and meteoric success on the popular market, surprising for a book about plant science. Paramount put out a feature film about it. Stevie Wonder wrote the soundtrack. The first pressings of the album version were sent out scented with floral perfume. To its many astonished readers, the book offered a new way to view the plants all around them, which up until then had seemed ornamental, passive, more akin to the world of rocks than animals. It also aligned with the advent of New Age culture, which was ready to inhale stories about how plants were as alive as we are. People began talking to their houseplants, and leaving classical music playing for their ficus when they went out. But it was a beautiful collection of myths.

But then I met Frank Serpico in Bregman’s office. Bregman had set it up. I took one look at Frank and I knew. I said, I can play him. I’ve got to play him. I saw it in his eyes, and I thought, I want to be that. I’m often offered real people, and I turn them down. I didn’t want to be them. Not because they’re bad or good. Just because I didn’t feel any connection to them. I spent more time with Frank that summer before we made the film. He came to visit me at a house I was renting in Montauk. We were sitting on my deck, looking at the waves coming in. Finally I said something to him that he’d probably heard a thousand times before. “Frank, why didn’t you take those payoffs?” I asked him. “Just take that money and give your share away if you didn’t want to keep it?” He said to me, “Al, if I did that”—long pause—“who would I be when I listen to Beethoven?” There was something about that statement that just made me want to play him.