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Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."
[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]
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Jim Jarmusch
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Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.
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Arundhati Roy
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For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
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Virginia Woolf (Selected Essays)
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Ever director has at least 10 bad films in them.
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Robert Rodríguez (Rebel Without a Crew: Or, How a 23-year-old Film Maker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player)
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A sex worker deserves a billion times more respect, than the mystical fraudsters of the society, such as astrologers, psychics and tarot card readers.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Use filmmaking for a greater purpose, than to just entertain some drowsy minds. Wake the whole world up with your movies. It has been sleeping for long. Its eternal sleep has become its darkest nemesis. Now is the time to wake it up.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.
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Jean Renoir
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I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.
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Olaf Stapledon (Star Maker)
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Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.
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Julian Barnes (Explaining the Explicit)
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A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Here’s what I like about God: Trees are crooked, mountains are lumpy, a lot of his creatures are funny-looking, and he made it all anyway. He didn’t let the aardvark convince him he had no business designing creatures. He didn’t make a puffer fish and get discouraged. No, the maker made things—and still does. European film directors often enjoy creative careers, during which their films mature from the manifestos of angry young men to the rueful wisdom of great works by creative masters. Is an afternoon siesta the secret? Is their vita just a little more dolce? We’ve taken espresso to our American hearts, but we haven’t quite taken to the “break” in our coffee breaks. Worried about playing the fool, we forget how to simply play. We try to make our creativity linear and goal oriented. We want our “work” to lead somewhere. We forget that diversions do more than merely divert us.
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Julia Cameron (Walking in This World (Artist's Way))
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[C]ourageous film-makers, who take no account of success, prove that cinematography is a medium for realism and lyricism, and that everything depends on the angle from which one observes the spectacle of life ― the angle from which they constrain us to share a singular vision of things and emphasize the everyday miracle that lies within them.
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Jean Cocteau (The Art of Cinema)
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Undoubtedly the novel has means of its own—language not the image is its material, its intimate effect on the isolated reader is not the same as that of a film on the crowd in a darkened cinema—but precisely for these reasons the differences in aesthetic structure make the search for equivalents an even more delicate matter, and thus they require all the more power of invention and imagination from the film-maker who is truly attempting a resemblance. One
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André Bazin (What is Cinema?: Volume 1)
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When people read, they hear voices and see images in their head. This production is total synesthesia and something close to madness. A great book is an hallucinated IMAX film for one. The author had a feeling, which he turned into words, and the reader gets a feeling from those words—maybe it’s the same feeling; maybe it’s not. As Peter Mendelsund wrote in What We See When We Read, a book is a coproduction. A reader both performs the book and attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra, and audience. A book, whether nonfiction of fiction, is an “invitation to daydream.
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Derek Thompson (Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction)
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Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.
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Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
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The extraordinary thing is this: that the moment you make a story or create an image that finds favour with an audience, you’ve effectively lost it. It toddles off, the little bastard; it becomes the property of the fans. It’s they who create around it their own mythologies; who make sequels and prequels in their imagination; who point out the inconsistencies in your plotting. I can envisage no greater compliment. What more could a writer or a film maker ever ask, than that their fiction be embraced and become part of the dream-lives of people who it’s likely he’ll never meet?
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Clive Barker (Clive Barker's Hellraiser Vol. 1)
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The lemmings in question were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, where much of the lemming footage was shot. And the lemmings did not hurl themselves bodily out into space. Instead the film makers dumped the lemmings over the cliff from a truck. And filmed them as they fell. And eventually drowned. "Gunter, give them a shove.
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John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet)
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The problem for US officials is the same problem that filters through all the other sections of our societies. It goes something like this. Since we know – thanks to Salman Rushdie, who was forced into hiding for his life because of his novel about Islam, The Satanic Verses, Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker who was murdered after making a critical film about Islam, and others – that there is a potentially high price to pay for criticising Islam, what reaction are we able to make in response to the religion? If we cannot criticise it at all, ever, for fear of being ‘phobic’ at best and beheaded at worst, we have to find some other attitude towards it.
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Douglas Murray (Islamophilia)
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Whatever genre you deem suitable for your taste – romance, comedy, action, mystery, sci-fi or anything else, make sure it has the plain everyday human kindness.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Filmmaking has the power to fortify the feeble, unify the divided, raise the abandoned and inspire the ignorant.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Take the clapper and become the alarm that the world so desperately needs.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Use filmmaking to eliminate racism – use to it terminate misogyny – use it to destroy homophobia and all other primitiveness.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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The list of names on the windows are taught to cast members as the credits to the beginning or end of a movie, just like showing the actors and film makers who created the film you had just seen. Susan told us that if you’re walking toward the castle, the names on the windows represent the opening credits to your day, and walking away from the castle represented the closing credits.
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Samantha Diener Drucker (Samantha Earns Her Ears: My Secret Walt Disney World Cast Member Diary (Earning Your Ears Book 10))
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In all sorts of markets—music, film, art, and politics—the future of popularity will be harder to predict as the broadcast power of radio and television democratizes and the channels of exposure grow.... The gatekeepers had their day. Now there are simply too many gates to keep.
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Derek Thompson (Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction)
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The image - its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism - has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist
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André Bazin (What is Cinema? Volume I)
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Socially, too, we have seen a defiant Promethianism that is basically innocuous: the confident power that can catapult man to the moon and free him somewhat of his complete dependence and confinement on earth-at least in his imagination. The ugly side of this Promethianism is that it, too, is thoughtless, an empty-headed immersion in the delights of technics with not thought to goals or meaning; so man performs on the moon by hitting golf balls that do not swerve in the lack of atmosphere. The technical triumph of a versatile ape, as the makers of the film 2001 so chillingly conveyed to us. On more ominous levels, as we shall develop later on, modern man's defiance of accident, evil, and death takes the form of sky-rocketing production of consumer and military goods. Carried to its demonic extreme this defiance gave us Hitler and Vietnam: a rage against our impotence, a defiance of our animal condition, our pathetic creature limitations. If we don't have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods.
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Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
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At one A.M. we are learning over a bar, Jim and I, and I am stressing the primary importance of the wish. Not knowing what we want, not wishing for it , keeps us navigating along peripheries and tributaries formed and shaped by external influences. I said: "Forget about the probable and improbable. Just a few hours ago I met Shirley Clark. She had no money at all but wanted to go to India. She is a film maker. The wish was the orientation. When an offer came to make a film about French children for UNESCO, she accepted, and it led to her being asked to make film on an Indian dancer. Her wish, for years, was the beacon. The probable and improbable are only negative concepts we have to transcend, not accept.
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Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955)
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Jerome doesn't have a clue. He in fact avoids the poets, with their petty feuds and righteous poverty. Endlessly competitive and introspective, they live in dumpy slum apartments and would knife each other for $5. Jerome prefers the painters and the film-makers who live in Soho and Tribeca. There's money there, at least the things they fight about are real.
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Chris Kraus (Torpor)
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They've forgotten about beds, and I understand, because once you set sail on a movie, you are out of touch with ordinary land. Movie-makers between movies seem like you and me; they go to parties, they shop, they swim. But they're just treading water, waiting for another injection, another ship to come take them away in film. And money has nothing to do with it.
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Eve Babitz (Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.)
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Imaginary Lives Imaginary Lives is a thought experiment I have adapted from two important career-change thinkers, Julia Cameron and John Williams, which aims to take your ideas a stage closer towards specific job options.55 It’s simple but potentially powerful. • Imagine five parallel universes, in each of which you could have a whole year off to pursue absolutely any career you desired. Now think of five different jobs you might want to try out in each of these universes. Be bold in your thinking, have fun with your ideas and your multiple selves. Your five choices might be food photographer, member of parliament, tai chi instructor, social entrepreneur running a youth education project, and wide-achieving Renaissance generalist. One person I know who did this activity – a documentary film maker who was having doubts about her career – listed massage therapist, sculptor, cellist, screen-play writer, and owner of her own bar on a tiny, old-fashioned Canarian island. Now come back down to earth and look hard at your five choices. Write down what it is about them that attracts you. Then look at them again, and think about this question: • How does each career measure up against the two motivations in the previous activity that you chose to prioritize in the future? If you decided, for instance, that you want a combination of making a difference and high status, check whether your five imaginary careers might provide them. The point is to help you think more deeply about exactly what you are looking for in a career, the kind of experiences that you truly desire.
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Roman Krznaric (How to Find Fulfilling Work (The School of Life))
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those who gave me the most pleasure. You know why? Because you’re an idiot, and even to fuck well it takes a little intelligence. For example you don’t know how to give a blow job, you’re hopeless, and it’s pointless to explain it to you, you can’t do it, it’s too obvious that it disgusts you. And he went on like that for a while, making speeches that became increasingly crude; with him vulgarity was normal. Then he wanted to explain clearly how things stood: he was marrying her because of the respect he felt for her father, a skilled pastry maker he was fond of; he was marrying her because one had to have a wife and even children and even an official house. But there should be no mistake: she was nothing to him, he hadn’t put her on a pedestal, she wasn’t the one he loved best, so she had better not be a pain in the ass, believing she had some rights. Brutal words. At a certain point Michele himself must have realized it, and he became gripped by a kind of melancholy. He had murmured that women for him were all games with a few holes for playing in. All. All except one. Lina was the only woman in the world he loved—love, yes, as in the films—and respected. He told me, Gigliola sobbed, that she would have known how to furnish this house. He told me that giving her money to spend, yes, that would be a pleasure. He told me that with her he could have become truly important, in Naples. He said to me: You remember what she did with the wedding photo, you remember how she fixed up the shop? And you, and Pinuccia, and all the others, what the fuck are you, what the fuck do you know how to do? He had said those things to her and not only those. He had told her that he thought about Lila night and day, but not with normal desire, his desire for her didn’t resemble what he knew. In reality he didn’t want her. That is, he didn’t want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn’t want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last. He wanted her not to screw her—that word applied to Lila disturbed him. He wanted to kiss her and caress her. He wanted to be caressed, helped, guided, commanded. He wanted to see how she changed with the passage of time, how she aged. He wanted to talk with her and be helped to talk. You understand? He spoke of her in way that to me, to me—when we are about to get married—he has never spoken.
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Elena Ferrante (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay)
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I will always say that if I’m grateful to anybody, it’s Adi, because he saw something in me that I myself didn’t see. Neither did my parents. I didn’t know I had it in me. Adi was the one who told me I was a film-maker, and why I was not doing anything about it. I swear on my life, my career, on everything, it had not crossed my mind. I never thought that I would be a film-maker, never. I had thought of fashion designing, and therefore costume designing was in my head somewhere.
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Karan Johar (Unsuitable Boy)
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There is a real danger in believing it when people use the word “genius”—and it’s even more dangerous when we let hubris tell ourselves we are one. The same goes for any label that comes along with a career: are we suddenly a “film-maker,” “writer,” “investor,” “entrepreneur,” or “executive” because we’ve accomplished one thing? These labels put you at odds not just with reality, but with the real strategy that made you successful in the first place. From that place, we might think that success in the future is just the natural next part of the story—when really it’s rooted in work, creativity, persistence, and luck.
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Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent)
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IN HIS PRESENCE, I FEEL OUR AXIS RECALIBRATING. Where North was once —and for eons — the assigned pull of the Earth, in Sunny’s universe, all magnets drive us South. Or West. Or deep into the core because that’s more interesting to him. He’s a world-creator; he doesn’t walk from A to B the way most humans do, seeing what’s provided then dealing with, lamenting or pondering it. He creates what he wants and when you walk a path with him, you get shaped and reinvented, too. Not against your will, but more in tune with aspects of it, unfolding into the potential of a secret craving, fully funded.
~Amie, getting to know Sunny in The LOOK
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Laurie Perez (The Look of Amie Martine)
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Jerry thought of Dean as a brother, but in time, tempers and egos flared in the partnership, leading to their headline-making breakup in 1956, exactly ten years after they had joined forces. People worried what would become of Dean Martin, but Jerry Lewis flourished in his first solo films: The Delicate Delinquent, The Sad Sack, Rock-a-Bye Baby, and Don't Give Up the Ship. His directors include such comedy pros as Taurog and Frank Tashlin. Eventually, Lewis decided that he wanted to write and direct his own films. As a steady and stellar money-maker for Paramount, no one at the studio was prepared to stand in his way. His first effort was his most daring: The Bellboy,
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Leonard Maltin (Great Movie Comedians: From Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen (The Leonard Maltin Collection))
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I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars. If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man’s blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a universal movement!
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Olaf Stapledon (Star Maker)
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The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery – useless high-tech – reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and, consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as impotent voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in this, nothing of a theatre of cruelty, but merely a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels towards itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art' with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves.
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Jean Baudrillard (Fragments)
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To understand Bashō’s place in Japanese poetry, it’s useful to have some sense of the literary culture he entered. The practice of the fine arts had been central to Japanese life from at least the seventh century, and virtually all educated people painted, played musical instruments, and wrote poems. In 17th century Japan, linked-verse writing was as widespread and popular as card games or Scrabble in mid-20th-century America. A certain amount of rice wine was often involved, and so another useful comparison might be made to playing pool or darts at a local bar. The closest analogy, though, can be found in certain areas of online life today. As with Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, or Worlds of War and Second Life today, linked verse brought its practitioners into an interactive community that was continually and rapidly evolving. Hovering somewhere between art-form and competition, renga writing provided both a party and a playing field in which intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity might be put to the test. Add to this mix some of street rap’s boundary-pushing language, and, finally, the video images of You-Tube. Now imagine the possibility that a “high art” form of very brief films might emerge from You-Tube, primarily out of one extraordinarily talented young film-maker’s creations and influence. In the realm of 17th-century Japanese haiku, that person was Basho.
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Jane Hirshfield (The Heart of Haiku)
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It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.
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Mike Nichols
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Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, says he thinks to make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others. To him, the Braintrust provides that pivot, and it is necessarily painful. “Part of the suffering involves giving up control,” he says. “I can think it’s the funniest joke in the world, but if nobody in that room laughs, I have to take it out. It hurts that they can see something you can’t.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
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Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, says he thinks to make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
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A movie is not a movie, it is a potential nuclear furnace of inspiration, courage and conscience.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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It is fun to be around really, really creative makers in the second half of the chessboard, to see what they can do, as individuals, with all of the empowering tools that have been enabled by the supernova. I met Tom Wujec in San Francisco at an event at the Exploratorium. We thought we had a lot in common and agreed to follow up on a Skype call. Wujec is a fellow at Autodesk and a global leader in 3-D design, engineering, and entertainment software. While his title sounds like a guy designing hubcaps for an auto parts company, the truth is that Autodesk is another of those really important companies few people know about—it builds the software that architects, auto and game designers, and film studios use to imagine and design buildings, cars, and movies on their computers. It is the Microsoft of design. Autodesk offers roughly 180 software tools used by some twenty million professional designers as well as more than two hundred million amateur designers, and each year those tools reduce more and more complexity to one touch. Wujec is an expert in business visualization—using design thinking to help groups solve wicked problems. When we first talked on the phone, he illustrated our conversation real-time on a shared digital whiteboard. I was awed. During our conversation, Wujec told me his favorite story of just how much the power of technology has transformed his work as a designer-maker.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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That's one reason wildlife films matter: they're a set of permanent memories we can all share, making real those things we have not seen for ourselves, such as the plight of the albatrosses. In time perhaps this will make us wiser about protecting what we still have, by making it harder for anyone to say, 'I didn't know.
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John Aitchison (The Shark and the Albatross: Adventures of a wildlife film-maker)
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I sometimes wonder whether any of the animals I film will become extinct, leaving these images as part of the record of their time on Earth. I have filmed rarer birds than these Adelies, but when I look at the young penguins, preening and pottering about my feet, I can't help thinking it would have been like this to sit beside a group of dodos. Adelies could move further south to find more ice but eventually the Antarctic continent will block their way and that will be the beginning of the end, because penguins must always have access to the sea. Their species may become one of the earliest casualties of climate change.
More young birds are coming down to the shore and as they pass I speak to each of them: 'Good luck. Good luck. Good luck.
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John Aitchison (The Shark and the Albatross: Adventures of a wildlife film-maker)
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The art of filmmaking is the most influential form of art that has ever existed throughout the history of human artistic endeavors.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Make movies my friend – make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Filmmaking is not the work of the weak-minded. It may not be rocket science, but it requires ten times more strength of the mind than that.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Without art, a film is pure wastage of time and resources.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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Oscar may be the world’s most glorious way of honoring your work, but the real award for a filmmaker is the contentment which you receive from making your film.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Film Testament)
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During World War II, rationing in Russia had made vinyl prohibitively expensive, and cheap X-ray film became the bootleg music industry’s substitute. After purchasing a used X-ray plate for a ruble or two from a medical facility, music lovers could cut the plate into a disk with scissors or a knife before having it etched with their favorite tunes. Students studying engineering, I was told, particularly excelled in this bootlegging process. But even a thawed Khrushchev regime had its standards to uphold, and in 1959 the government began a crackdown on this illicit music market. One government tactic was to flood record shops with unplayable records, many intended to damage record players. Some of these records included threatening vocals placed in the middle of a recording, which screamed at the unsuspecting listener, “You like rock and roll? Fuck you, anti-Soviet slime!” Eventually the use of bone records declined as replacement technologies, such as magnetic reel-to-reel tape, took over. But until then, bone-record makers were hunted down and sent to the Gulags. Particularly offensive to the Soviet government were bootleggers who reproduced American jazz records, music Stalin had declared a “threat to civilization.” Despite
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Donnie Eichar (Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident)
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I am a Entertainer, i don’t feel anything wrong in any of demanding scene as per the script, I cook to serve to people, Not to eat ourselves!
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Mikki Koomar
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Sarah,’ Hugo smirked, ‘we’re only making movies here, not inciting a Marxist uprising. I mean, there’s only room in history for one film-maker like Tarkovsky, right?
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Winnie M. Li (Complicit)
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Entrepreneurial innovation comes in three flavors: 1) new business models, as with Rent the Runway offering apparel for rent rather than sale; 2) new technologies, as with Solyndra, a failed maker of cylindrical solar panels built with a proprietary thin-film material; and 3) combining existing technologies in new ways, as with Quincy Apparel using a measurement system akin to that used for men’s suiting to offer better-fitting clothing for women.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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This is her tenth pregnancy. Hasn’t she learnt anything? There are reports warning of random population growth. Random – that’s the word I’ve been looking for for ages. We’re living in a random world. We’re multiplying and our children stand naked. Sources of inspiration for film-makers, or for discussion around the table at the G8. We are small people but they can’t live without us. For our sake some buildings have fallen down and some railway stations have been blown up. Iron is liable to rust. For our sake there are plenty of picture messages. We are actors who don’t get paid. Our role is to stand as naked as when our mothers gave birth to us, as when the Earth gave birth to us, as the news bulletins gave birth to us, and the multi-page reports, and the villages that border on settlements, and the keys my grandfather carries. My poor grandfather, he didn’t know that the locks had changed. My grandfather, may the doors that open with digital cards curse you and may the sewage water that runs past your grave curse you. May the sky curse you, and not rain. Never mind, your bones can’t grow from under the soil, so the soil is the reason we don’t grow again.
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Ashraf Fayadh
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Steve came from a very different background to the band. His father Tommy was a fisherman on the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland; when the great American documentary maker Robert Flaherty made his film Man of Aran about life on the islands in the 1930s, Steve’s father was one of the featured characters.
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Nick Mason (Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd)
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At any event, like other French women writers or film-makers of her generation, she was not prepared to accept moral tutelage from the women’s movement, and though she continued to speak publicly as a woman she slowly withdrew her – at best rhetorical – support for the militant feminism of the 1970s, which, she implied, did little more than to remind her of the dogmatic moralising she had experienced when once a member of the Communist Party.
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Leslie Hill (Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires)
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In Italy the chairman of the Film Commission, Admiral Stone, began a meeting by roundly declaring that Italy, as a rural and former Fascist country, did not need a film industry and should not be allowed to have one.[...] Neo-realism signalled an affirmation by Italian film-makers that they could create a cinema whose aesthetic (and political) assumptions were opposed in equal measure to those of Hollywood and of Italy's own cinema in the Fascist period.
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Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945-95 (UCLA Film and Television Archive Studies in History, Criticism, and Theory))
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The number of theatres that regularly played art films (defined as foreign language films and English language films produced abroad without American financing) increased from around one hundred in 1950 to close to 700 by the 1960s. Foreign film distribution in the United States was originally handled by dozens of small independent outfits, but when Brigitte Bardot's And God Created...Woman broke box-office records in 1956, Hollywood took over. In search of foreign pictures with commercial ingredients, the majors absorbed the most talented foreign film-makers with offers of total financing and promises of distribution in the lucrative US market.
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Tino Balio
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Every filmmaker is reflected in their films, every creator in their creations, and that can be a very beautiful journey for the artist and the audience. So can we understand the film and in turn Bollywood more deeply if we understand the maker.
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Oorvazi Irani (Indian Film Culture: Indian Cinema)
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My conclusion at the time was that finalizing the story before production began was still a worthy goal—we just hadn’t achieved it yet. As we continued to make films, however, I came to believe that my goal was not just impractical but naïve. By insisting on the importance of getting our ducks in a row early, we had come perilously close to embracing a fallacy. Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal. I see this over and over again in other companies: A subversion takes place in which streamlining the process or increasing production supplants the ultimate goal, with each person or group thinking they’re doing the right thing—when, in fact, they have strayed off course. When efficiency or consistency of workflow are not balanced by other equally strong countervailing forces, the result is that new ideas—our ugly babies—aren’t afforded the attention and protection they need to shine and mature. They are abandoned or never conceived of in the first place. Emphasis is placed on doing safer projects that mimic proven money-makers just to keep something—anything!—moving through the pipeline (see The Lion King 1½, a direct-to-video effort that came out in 2004, six years after The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride). This kind of thinking yields predictable, unoriginal fare because it prevents the kind of organic ferment that fuels true inspiration. But it does feed the Beast.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: an inspiring look at how creativity can - and should - be harnessed for business success by the founder of Pixar)
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Visual design is always a collaborative process between the director and the cinematographer. According to the best-case scenario, the director and cinematographer challenge each other as equals, and ultimately synthesize their differing approaches into a superior collective decision. But for this to be the case, the director must be as good a shot maker as the DP. If he is the weaker partner, then the look of the finished film will not be his
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Gil Bettman (Directing the Camera: How Professional Directors Use a Moving Camera to Energize Their Films)
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a recent event hosted by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists got together with film makers to discuss what both groups have learned---the scientists through painstaking experiments and analysis, and the film makers by intuition and experience---about the mechanisms of attention and perception.
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Anonymous
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Satu hal yang mesti kalian renungkan baik-baik. Sehebat apa pun seorang movie maker, dia pasti pernah dikritik. Coba kalian pikir, film mana yang lolos kritikan? Sutradara sebesar apa pun pernah mendapat kritikan. Karena itulah, mereka bisa menjadi besar.
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Evi Sri Rezeki (CineUs)
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... [Y]ou mainly hear from white supremacists, about the "glory" of the white race. They point to the innovations of white people and use that evidence of our "inherent greatness." So first of all, most of the white people who bring this shit up are NOT impressive people. It's not for the most part the scientists, and the engineers, and the artists, and the writers, and the film makers, and people who actually have skill sets who bring up this point. It's the shlubs, and the losers, who are spinning their fucking wheels in the mud, it's the people who have nothing to take pride in so they take pride in the accomplishments of everyone who happens to share their skin color. Pathetic.
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T.J. Kirk
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Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, rather than feeding the general population with garbage.
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Abhijit Naskar
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Si Pong ang isa sa mga nagpaningas, ugat ng apoy kung bakit mas masidhing lumaganap ang FNB sa Cavite. Nagpatuloy ito, naganap at nakapanghikayat ng iba't-ibang indibiduwal, mga musikero, mga makata, mga pintor, mga graffiti artist, mga skater, mga film maker, mga estudyante tropahan, at maging magulang ng mga ito hanggang sa kasalukuyan. Ang FNB ay kadalasan naisasagawa sa mga covered court, nasunog na day care center, mga bangketa, mga eskinita, mga barangay, mga excess lot, o mga butas ma espasyo kung saan mas malapit ito sa komunidad. Nang sa gayon ay mas maibabahagi ang turo at prinsipyo ng nabanggit na payapang protesta. Dahil sa ganitong mga ganap at makataong gawi, unti-unting nawawala ang pagkagulat at panghuhusga sa postura ng mga punk. Nararamdaman ng mga nagboboluntaryo sa FNB ang munting butil ng pag-ibig sa kanilang mga puso sa tuwing magagawa ang pagbabahagi. Gayundin, dahan-dahang tinatalakay sa mga taong dumalo at napadaan kung ano ba talaga ang FNB.
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Jenny Ortuoste (In Certain Seasons: Mothers Write in the Time of COVID)
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In the 1980s, Australia had a few home-grown immunisation sceptics, although the great majority of parents immunised their children. In 1996, a film-maker made a supposedly scientific documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She interviewed people who were both pro- and anti-immunisation in equal numbers, ‘for balance’. She was pregnant with her first child, and concluded the documentary by saying that she had not yet decided whether or not to get her baby immunised. I was one of the doctors interviewed. When the documentary was shown in Australia it generated considerable debate and controversy. Two weeks later I was in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, and gave a presentation to the hospital about immunisation. A number of the audience told me they recognised me from the documentary, which had been shown that week on PNG television. They were puzzled as to why anyone would make such a film. Their wards were filled with children with severe tuberculosis, newborns dying from tetanus, and babies with severe rotavirus gastroenteritis, all preventable by immunisation. On their streets were people crippled forever by poliomyelitis. But Papua New Guinea did not have the money or the public health infrastructure to deliver vaccines effectively to its population. Papua New Guineans knew vaccines could prevent the devastating diseases they saw every day, and could not understand why anyone in Australia would dream of not immunising their child. Immunisation scepticism is very much a first-world problem.
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David Isaacs (Defeating the Ministers of Death: The compelling story of vaccination, one of medicine's greatest triumphs)
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Here are a few examples of compelling vision statements: To offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially conscious businesses. Warby Parker At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better by connecting clients and communities to the resources they need to be successful. Bank of America Becoming the best global entertainment distribution service, licensing entertainment content around the world, creating markets that are accessible to film makers, and helping content creators around the world to find a global audience. Netflix
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Melissa Perri (Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value)
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No artist is ever happy with all the work they produce, so why should their critics be? Let artists be revered for their best works of art—even if it happens but once in a lifetime—and forget about the rest. All too often art is a wondrous accident, and it is folly to seek genius in its maker.
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Anthony Marais
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If a filmmaker has no originality, what's the difference between a filmmaker and a photocopier!
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Abhijit Naskar (Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World)
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[from 'Blade Runner 2049' review in 'Cut The Kink'] Here, in a reversal of 'The Force Awakens,' Harrison Ford survives and Gosling, his surrogate son, dies. The last shot of the film shows baby-boomer Ford creepily watching his daughter, a maker of memory implants, through a glass partition. Somehow, this generic version of the female has become the creator and repository of false memories, a scrapbooker of all the unnecessary backstories that have been weighing down screenplays since the original 'Blade Runner' came out. At one point we meet some official Hollywood-movie Tribal Scavengers, followed later by some official Hollywood-movie Meaningless Revolutionaries. Since at least the Matrix movies, such figures have heralded a revolution that never comes, though President Donald Sutherland did get trampled to death by rebels in 'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2.
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A.S. Hamrah (The Earth Dies Streaming)
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They’ve forgotten about beds, and I understand, because once you set sail on a movie, you are out of touch with ordinary land. Movie-makers between movies seem like you and me; they go to parties, they shop, they swim. But they’re just treading water, waiting for another injection, another ship to come take them away in film. And money has nothing to do with it. “Gabrielle
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Eve Babitz (Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.)
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It was a sort of suicide – first as a player, then as a man. The once implacable Fischer had no resistance left. That he should die at 64 – the number of squares on the chessboard – was the ultimate irony, as fitting as it was tragic. What a waste, yet what a life. No wonder it is Fischer’s story that film-makers still want to tell.
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Stephen Moss (The Rookie: An Odyssey through Chess (and Life))
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Hollywood Hotel was the first major network show to broadcast from the West Coast. The film capital was rich in nationally known talent untapped by radio. It had remained untapped because of a telephone company policy that cost the networks up to $1,000 to reverse radio circuits: everything then was geared to broadcast from east to west, and it was sometimes said that a producer could bring a film star east for a five-day train trip for less money than it cost him to air a radio show from California. In 1934 the radio centers were Chicago and New York. This all changed with Hollywood Hotel. Hostess Louella Parsons immediately offset the technical tariff by persuading the elite of the film world to appear on the show without pay. Parsons was then the most feared and powerful newspaper columnist in Hollywood: her column, which appeared across the nation in Hearst newspapers, was widely seen as a maker or breaker of films and careers. She lined up stars who otherwise might be paid $1,000 for a single radio appearance, and scheduled as many as half a dozen each
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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That message got through to Jobs. Jobs had a role in the system—he was a brilliant deal-maker and financier. It was Jobs, for example, who insisted on timing the Pixar IPO with the Toy Story release, and Jobs who negotiated the Pixar deals with Disney. But he was asked to stay out of the early feedback loop on films. The gravity of his presence could crush the delicate candor needed to nurture early-stage, fragile projects. On those occasions he was invited to help near-finished films, Jobs would preface his remarks: “I’m not a filmmaker. You can ignore everything I say.” Jobs had learned to mind the system, not manage the project.
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Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
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Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.
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John Lewis Gaddis (The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past)
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Anos e anos de filmes açúcar, canções pop melosas e livros bobinhos tinham conseguido construir um mundo de ilusões românticas em sua mente.
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Yoav Blum (The Coincidence Makers)
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I think it was something I had to do: become a film-maker. It was my destiny and I would have been very incomplete if I hadn’t done it.
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Eugène Green
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Though most commodity film-makers, with both eyes on the box office, had been abusing music, Ghatak and Guru Dutt showed that it was possible to use music as an integral part of the whole. They demonstrated that cinema was not a medium meant exclusively to reflect reality or to communicate ‘messages’. It was a medium that imposed its own rhythmic patterns of expression.
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Arun Khopkar (Guru Dutt: A Tragedy in Three Acts)
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The transformation of cities A suburban world The emerging world is becoming suburban. Its leaders should welcome that, but avoid the West’s mistakes Dec 6th 2014 | From the print edition IN THE West, suburbs could hardly be less fashionable. Singers and film-makers lampoon them as the haunts of bored teenagers and
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Anonymous