Mistaken Film Quotes

In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday. She is not beautiful, mocked, cursed or disowned by all. But don’t be mistaken, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind; for there is a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule; cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it is written; Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It is composed; Gershwin, Mozart. It is painted; Cézanne, Vermeer. It is filmed; Antonioni, Vigo. Or it is lived, then it is the art of living; Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes.

IN THE GREAT DICTATOR’S CLOSING SCENES, CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S timid Jewish barber is, through a complicated plot twist, mistaken for the film’s Hitler-like character, also played by Chaplin. Clad in a German military uniform, he finds himself standing before a microphone, expected to address a mammoth party rally. Instead of the rapid-fire invective the crowd anticipates, Chaplin delivers a homily about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of evil. He asks soldiers not to give themselves to “men who despise you, enslave you . . . treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder . . . unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. “Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world,” the humble barber tells the crowd, “millions of despairing men, women, and little children—victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say—do not despair. . . . The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. . . . Liberty will never perish.” Chaplin’s words are sentimental, maudlin, and naïve. I cannot listen to them without wanting to cheer.

The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any unproved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result.

I felt as though the temple curtain had been drawn aside without warning and I, a goggle-eyed stranger somehow mistaken for an initiate, had been ushered into the sanctuary to witness the mystery of mysteries. I saw a phantasmagoria, a living tapestry of forms jeweled in minute detail. They danced together like guests at a rowdy wedding. They changed their shapes. Within themselves they juggled geometrical shards like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. They sent forth extensions of themselves like the flares of suns. Yet all their activity was obviously interrelated; each being's actions were in step with its neighbors'. They were like bees swarming: They obviously recognised each other and were communicating avidly, but it was impossible to know what they were saying. They enacted a pageant whose beauty awed me. As the lights came back on, the auditorium seemed dull and unreal.I'd been watching various kinds of ordinary cells going about their daily business, as seen through a microscope and recorded by the latest time-lapse movie techniques. The filmmaker frankly admitted that neither he nor anyone else knew just what the cells were doing, or how and why they were doing it. We biologists, especially during our formative years in school, spent most of our time dissecting dead animals and studying preparations of dead cells stained to make their structures more easily visible—"painted tombstones," as someone once called them. Of course, we all knew that life was more a process than a structure, but we tended to forget this, because a structure was so much easier to study. This film reminded me how far our static concepts still were from the actual business of living. As I thought how any one of those scintillating cells potentially could become a whole speckled frog or a person, I grew surer than ever that my work so far had disclosed only a few aspects of a process-control system as varied and widespread as life itself, of which we'd been ignorant until then.

When money is the cornerstone of everything, it is the end of genuine art! You have given me this rose and, of course, it is beautiful. But you are mistaken when you say that it is alive! It died as soon as you condemned it to this golden captivity! It was transformed into the mummified corpse of a flower! It is the same with your cinematograph. The theatre is life! And like all life, it is instantaneous and unrepeatable. There will never be another moment exactly the same, it cannot be halted, and that is why it is beautiful. You Fausts, who dream of halting a beautiful moment, fail to grasp that beauty cannot be recorded, it will die immediately. That is what the play we acted today is about! You must understand, Andrei Gordeevich, that eternity and immortality are the enemies of art, I am afraid of them! A play may be good or bad, but it is alive. A film is a fly in amber. Exactly as if it were alive, only it is dead. I shall never, do you hear, never act in front of that box of yours with its big glass eye!’ God, how lovely she was at that moment

While we can certainly be mistaken at times about what is real, there is indeed a reality to know. Mistakes actually prove the point. We would not know there were such things as hallucinations or illusions if we did not have reality with which to compare them.

We went on that programme and we’d done our homework, thinking we were going to get into quite a tough theological argument, but it turned out to be virtually a slinging match. We were very surprised by that. I don’t get angry very often but I got incandescent with rage at their attitude and the smugness of it. And it was really the way they played to the audience that got me. We weren’t defeated in argument at all. John was brilliant. What they were trying to do was to sort of smirk at the audience and belittle what we’d done and that seemed so out of touch and so stupid and so mistaken. I mean, how do they think the film was made? That we go in there one night, write the script and the film’s made the next morning? They don’t realise we’d been working on it for two years, we’d studied, that we had an opinion and we had an attitude, but they wouldn’t let us have that. So it was their condescension that really got me irritated.’ Gilliam remembers having never seen Palin quite so pissed off before.

As soon as camera crews are able to enter the Congo again, and have the guts to film bonobos the way they are, people will understand that everything being said about these apes is no exaggeration. They are not the product of some overactive sexual imagination, or of wishful thinking. That they delight feminists, the gay community, and pacifists should not be held against them. If one of our closest relatives fails to fit the prevailing views about aggressive males and passive females, one possibility to consider is that the prevailing views are mistaken. Either that, or there is something wrong with those males.

We never made much use of being identical, did we JJ? Not when we were young. Once or twice, at school, and on the farm during the war, I’d managed to get out of trouble by sowing doubt. It must have been my brother. Not me. More often, we’d get a beating just the same. For being the same, for not being different, for causing confusion and unease among our peers. There’s a reason horror films are full of twins. Our early lives were not a riot of hilarious mistaken-identity japes.

And there was something prescient about being mistaken for Macaulay Culkin, who was cast in Home Alone by the director Chris Columbus, because it was Chris who would go on to cast me as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films.

His home town as it existed in his memory seemed distant to him, like something that belonged to another person. It was almost as though he'd mistaken a place he'd seen on TV or in a film for a thing of his own, or else that the sights seen by someone in one of the thousand or so different flats on that estate had somehow snuck their way into his mind and still remained there. That was how it seemed from time to time.

Astaire had been told by the studio brass that he could have all the time he needed, so he planned for six weeks of rehearsal on the more difficult numbers (“Night and Day” and “The Table Dance”) that he imported from the stage production. Even though Astaire had played the role of Guy Holden, the man mistaken for Mimi’s (Ginger Rogers) divorce correspondent, on Broadway and in London, he was too much of a perfectionist to assume that he could reprise the dances on film without sufficient rehearsal. In addition, the Cole Porter score that he had sung in the theatre was, with the exception of “Night and Day,” completely scrapped and replaced with songs by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, and Con Conrad and Herb Magidson (after Porter refused producer Pandro Berman’s request to write new ones). Astaire wanted, and was given, the time to master the new material.

Back out in what passed for daylight, he was greeted by ancient, tall tenements staring blankly at each other from either side of the street, making it feel more like a tunnel, making it feel as if night had fallen. If there had been no people around, you might have mistaken it for a film set of a Dickens novel. You might have mistaken it for the past itself.

an iterative process such as Pixar’s corrects for a basic cognitive bias that psychologists call the “illusion of explanatory depth.” Do you know how a bicycle works? Most people are sure they do, yet they are unable to complete a simple line drawing that shows how a bicycle works. Even when much of the bicycle is already drawn for them, they can’t do it. “People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do,” researchers concluded. For planners, the illusion of explanatory depth is obviously dangerous. But researchers also discovered that, unlike many other biases, there is a relatively easy fix: When people try and fail to explain what they mistakenly think they understand, the illusion dissolves. By requiring Pixar film directors to walk through every step from the big to the small and show exactly what they will do, Pixar’s process forces them to explain. Illusions evaporate long before production begins, which is when they would become dangerous and expensive.

What is now Tanzania was once Tanganyika and before that part of British East Africa and prior to that a colony of Germany. During World War I the fighting actually came to the Continent of Africa. Known as the East African Campaign, many of the battles almost went unreported and are little known, however the romance of this war is portrayed by many novels and the well-known movie “African Queen,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. The film is a stretch, but strictly speaking it is based on a true story, however even saying this, neither the original novel nor the movie bears more than a passing resemblance to reality. The four years of warfare mostly fought in Europe, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and affected many millions more. The campaigns, skirmishes and battles in Africa, although relatively small, cost the lives of 14 German soldiers with 34 being wounded whereas the British had a total of about 150 casualties. “In actual fact the four years of warfare from 1914 to 1918, cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and affected many millions more. The campaigns, skirmishes and battles although relatively small, cost the lives of 14 German troops with 34 being wounded whereas the British had a total of about 150 casualties. An example of the type of battles fought in Africa was the Battle of Bukoba. Here the British objective was the destruction of the Bukoba wireless station on the shore of Lake Victoria, it was decided that the raid should take the form of an amphibious assault by the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment and the 25th Frontier Royal Fusiliers who served in the African Theatre of war around Lake Tanganyika, British East African and German East African territory. Upon reaching the objective at Bukoba, the attackers were mistakenly landed in a large swamp and were pinned down by fierce rifle

Third, an iterative process such as Pixar’s corrects for a basic cognitive bias that psychologists call the “illusion of explanatory depth.” Do you know how a bicycle works? Most people are sure they do, yet they are unable to complete a simple line drawing that shows how a bicycle works. Even when much of the bicycle is already drawn for them, they can’t do it. “People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do,” researchers concluded. For planners, the illusion of explanatory depth is obviously dangerous. But researchers also discovered that, unlike many other biases, there is a relatively easy fix: When people try and fail to explain what they mistakenly think they understand, the illusion dissolves. By requiring Pixar film directors to walk through every step from the big to the small and show exactly what they will do, Pixar’s process forces them to explain. Illusions evaporate long before production begins, which is when they would become dangerous and expensive.[24]