But it is precisely from the dialectical synthesis of contrary values, namely artistic

order and the amorphous disorder of reality, that it derives its originality. There is
not one image that is not charged with meaning, that does not drive home into
the mind the sharp end of an unforgettable moral truth, and not one that to this
end is false to the ontological ambiguity of reality. Not one gesture, not one
incident, not a single object in the film is given a prior significance derived from
the ideology of the director.
-Andr Bazin on The Bicycle Thief

Do you tell them [the actors] the message of the film?

No, good heavens, no. No, no, no, no, no. In a way I don't know anything about
message or symbols or things like that. I am always very surprised when people
ask me about a message. I have just wanted to get in touch with other human
beings, when I make a picture, and tell them a story or just to be together with
them or to touch them and to help them to feel things. Sometimes when I had a
message, everything goes wrong.
-Ignmar Bergman

The perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the
most precarious of all. Changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the
perfect page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are
so easily worn away. On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can
traverse the fire of typographical errors, approximate translations, and
inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process. One
cannot with impunity alter any line fabricated by Gngora (according to those
who restore his texts), but Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his
translators and survives each and every careless version.
-Jorge Luis Borges

This film is so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is

doubtless objectionable.
-British Board of Film Censors on Le Coquille et le Clergyman

All my life Ive been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not
another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the
blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our
destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might
be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence.
-Luis Buuel

Nothing in [Un Chien Andalou], symbolizes anything. The only method of

investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis.
-Luis Buuel

You have to fight sophistication...its a trap, a kind of death.

-John Cassavetes

But if there is the slightest distraction, if I fail just a little bit, above all if I
interpret too much one day, if today I am carried away by a theory which runs
counter to that of yesterday, if I think while I paint, if I meddle, whoosh!
everything goes to pieces.
Interpretation is worthless?
The artist is no more than a receptacle for sensations, a brain, a recording
apparatus. But if it interferes, if it dares, feeble apparatus that it is, to
deliberately intervene in what it should be translating, its own pettiness gets into
the picture. The work becomes inferior.
Do you mean that we should slavishly follow nature?
That's not what I meant. Art is a harmony parallel to nature. What can we say to
the fools who tell us: the painter is always inferior to nature? He is parallel to her.
Provided, of course, he does not intervene deliberately. His only aspiration must
be silence.
-Paul Czanne

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be
understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the
creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
-Charlie Chaplin

Why should poetry have to make sense?

-Charlie Chaplin

This is why [The Blood of A Poet] is confessional, and as obscure as possible - in

the sense that spectators use the word "obscure." Even if I wanted to tell you
what happens in the film I would not be able to.
-Jean Cocteau

As I said earlier, one can't tell the story of film like this. I could give you my own
interpretation [of The Blood of A Poet]. I could say; the solitude of the poet is so

great, he lives out his own creations, so vividly that the mouth of one of his
creations is imprinted on his hand like a wound; that he loves this mouth, that he
loves himself, in other words; that he wakes up in the morning with this mouth
against him like a chance acquaintance; that he tries to get rid of it; that he gets
rid of it on a dead statue; that this statue comes to life; that it takes its revenge;
that it sends him off into terrible adventures. I could tell you that the snowball
fight represents the poet's childhood, and that when he plays the card game with
his Glory, with his Destiny, he cheats by drawing from his childhood instead of
from within himself. I could tell you that afterwords, when he has tried to create a
terrestrial glory for himself, he falls into that "mortal tedium of imortality" that
one always dreams of when in front of famous tombs. I'd be right to tell you all of
that, but I would also be wrong, for it would be a text written after the images[...]
When I was working, let me say again, I wasn't thinking of anything, and this is
why one must let the film act like Auric's accompanying music. Music gives
nameless nourishment to our emotions and memories, and if each of you find
your own personal meaning in this film, then I will have achieved my ambition.
-Jean Cocteau

We are only a step away from having to explain what music means: as in the
Pastoral Symphony, where the auditorium is delighted when it can recognize the
cuckoo and the peasant dances.
-Jean Cocteau

Everything that can be explained or demonstrated is vulgar.

-Jean Cocteau

All thought paralyzes action. And a film is a succession of acts. Thought weighs it
down and embellishes it in an unbearable and pretentious manner. Poetry is the
opposite of "poetic." As soon as someone aspires to being a poet, that person
ceases to be one and the poetry makes its escape. This is when people recognize
its rear view, and congratulate themselves for being subtle enough to understand
it.
-Jean Cocteau

Otherwise, it is probable that the plot of [The Testament of Orpheus] is made up

of signs and meanings. However, I know nothing of this and can only accept it in
the shape of a machine for manufacturing meanings. I should add that the signs
and meanings that the audience will discover in it must doubtless have a basis in
which the deeper self that transcends my superficial self comes to the fore.
-Jean Cocteau

I find it hard to say any more. It is not that I am cultivating secrecy, which I find
pretentious and ridiculous, but because I think that a cinematographic work can
no more be described than a painting. Its "matter" and "manner" are what
counts, not the things represented in it.
-Jean Cocteau

A thesis forces us to "buckle the wheel," to twist it so that it will obediently follow
an artificial line.
-Jean Cocteau

When a Frenchman no longer understands he never asks himself if it is necessary

to understandhe either gets angry or he takes refuge in symbols. I dont
understand, therefore it must be a symbol, is a typically French way of thinking.
Either what Im seeing doesnt mean anything, or else it means something
different from what I am seeing, and that something different may be hiding a
symbolic meaning.
-Jean Cocteau

You try too hard to understand. Its a great fault.

-Jean Cocteau, Orpheus

For Bresson, then, it's very clear. There's no psychology. He tells us that there's
no psychology in film. There are sounds. There are images. Psychology comes
afterwards, with us, with the construction of the film. It's the construction that is
psychological, not the things in the film.
-Pedro Costa

I don't care so much for metaphors metaphor is a bad thing in a film.

-Pedro Costa

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.
-Federico Fellini

Director David Fincher recently complained at a special screening of his latest

film, Gone Girl, in New York, about audiences giving too much significance to the
appearance of the board game Mastermind. I think it was the only game we
could legally clear Part of the curse of working in cinema is that nothing is
treated as accidental or off-handed. When you cut to something, it gets this weird
importance, so you have to be careful.

-David Fincher

I ask about the significance of the llama and the donkey in Film Socialisme, which
have prompted much chin-stroking among critics. "The truth is that they were in
the field next to the petrol station in Switzerland where we shot the sequence.
Voil. No mystery. I use what I find." He says people often find meaning in his
films that are not there.
-Jean-Luc Godard

There are pictures in Histoire(s) du cinma of the shot in La Belle et la bte when
Josette Day approaches down the long corridor; Cocteau didn't make a tracking
shot, he put her on a small dolly and advanced her toward the camera. In effect it
is the same, but the meaning is not the same. [In the shot in Hlas pour moi] you
have the meaning: she's coming into focus. It's like somebody submerged coming
to the surface, because after all, the screen is a surface. I have to make the
audience think of that. It's like musicnot to be definite; don't pretend to mean
this or that. American people like to say, What do you mean exactly? I would
answer: I mean, but not exactly.
-Jean-Luc Godard

In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must

understand and get everything right away. But this is not possible. When you
eat a potato, you dont understand each atom of the potato!
-Jean-Luc Godard

At the cinema we do not think, we are thought.

-Jean-Luc Godard

The important thing is not the message but the vision.

-Jean-Luc Godard paraphrasing Claude Chabrol

I think the best way to look at these programs is to enter into the image without a
single name or reference in your head. The less you know, the better.
-Jean-Luc Godard on Histoire(s) du Cinma

But aside from the fact that most of our best contemporary novelists have gone
to school with the avant-garde, it is significant that Gide's most ambitious book is
a novel about the writing of a novel, and that Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
seem to be, above all, as one French critic says, the reduction of experience to

expression for the sake of expression, the expression mattering more than what
is being expressed.
-Clement Greenberg Avant-Garde and Kitsch

Wollen's next point is that although signs are often used to communicate
messages, they are not always used in that way and are not used that way in
films. A scientist working out the implications of a theory, a mathematician doing
a calculation, and a traveler planning an itinerary are all using signs, but not to
communicate with anyone. They are, as it were, seeing the implications of certain
signs. Similarly, a poet, an artist, and a film director are using signs but not to
communicate any sort of message. To suppose that they are is simply to make a
mistake about what they are doing. They, like the mathematician, scientist, and
traveller, are using signs for a different purpose. Like them, they are constructing
signs in order to see what the implications of those signs are.
-Gilbert Harman Semiotics and the Cinema: Metz and Wollen

Frank Capra, until he went into the army, was one of the greatest directors we
ever had. Made great entertainment. After that he couldn't make anything. He
started to analyze his pictures, and put messages in them. He put messages into
his other pictures, but he didn't think about it. He did it naturally. When he got to
thinking about his messages, oh brother, he turned into really ... ah, no good
-Howard Hawks

"Content" is not content; "the meaning" is not a concrete certitude cunningly

buried so that one may have the pleasure of a civilized, mental version of hideand-seek, stripmining through "the story" to get to "the themes." "The meaning"
is only one more piece of material, as deformable by the operation of the artistic
sensibility as the sea is by the pull of the moon's gravity. Content is what
happens, from moment to moment, and then in the suspended moment that is
one's life within the aesthetic life-system the artist has created. And content is at
the beck of style.
-Richard Jameson Style vs. 'Style': The Good, The Bad, and The Whatever

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.
-Stanley Kubrick

I don't think that writers or painters or film makers function because they have
something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And
they like the art form: they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and
photographic images and working with actors. I dont think that any genuine artist

has ever been orientated by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he
was.
-Stanley Kubrick

Well, if I could have answered that, it wouldnt have been necessary for me to
film the scene, would it?
-Akira Kurosawa when asked what a scene in one of his movies meant

The Lady in the Radiator wasnt in the original script for Eraserhead. I was sitting
in the food room one day, and I drew a picture of the Lady in the Radiator, but I
didnt know where it came from. But it was meaningful to me when I saw it finally
drawn. And then I saw the radiator in my head. And it was an instrument for
producing warmth in a room; it made me sort of happylike me as Henry, say. I
saw this opening to another place. So I ran into the set and looked at the radiator
more closely. You know, there are many different types of radiators, but Id never
seen another radiator like this. It had a little kind of chamber, like a stage in it.
Im not kidding you. It was right there, and it just changed everything. So then I
had to build the doors and the stage, and do the whole thing. One thing led to
another, and suddenly there she was.
-David Lynch

We should be careful not to depart, too brusquely, for the higher order
abstractions that we regularly translate the evidence of our senses into:
meanings, symbols, metaphors, allegories, directorial intentions, world views.
-Adrian Martin

We might think of Godards didactic strokes as a preliminary test, and those who
pass it understand that the best way to appreciate his films is in a state of
liberation from familiar modes and pressures of narrative, interpretation,
appreciation.
-Michelle Orange

Do you suppose movie audiences will ever learn to take works as experiences
instead of merely as expression, what does it mean? etc.?
-Sidney Peterson

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning.
When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
-Pablo Picasso

There is in [Lumiere's] films a recreation of the atmosphere of the period that is

exactly what we love today in Godard. When we look at the very first films,
they're almost all extraordinary. You feel like using the word "genius." But these
cameramen weren't geniusesthey were helped by the fact that technique was
still difficult. I find more fantasy in certain Lumiere films than in paintings that
aspire to fantasy. It's the creation of a world that exists in reality, but also of a
world that exists in the imaginations of Theodore Rousseau or the Lumiere
cameramen. The angle chosen by the cameraman a humble servant of reality
is the work of his unconscious talent. Many great works of art are the result of
the unconscious. I would even say that when a film we've made works, it's in
spite of us.
-Jean Renoir

One way of removing the threat and challenge of art is reducing it to a form of
problem-solving that believes in single, Eureka-style solutions. If works of art are
perceived as safes to be cracked or as locks that open only to skeleton keys, their
expressive powers are virtually limited to banal pronouncements of overt or
covert meanings - the notion that art is supposed to say something as opposed
to do something.
-Jonathan Rosenbaum

From interviews, it appears that Resnais and Robbe-Grillet consciously

designed Last Year at Marienbad to accommodate a multiplicity of equally
plausible interpretations. But the temptation to interpret Marienbadshould be
resisted. What matters inMarienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous
immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain
problems of cinematic form.
Again, Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down the empty
night street in The Silence as a phallic symbol. But if he did, it was a foolish
thought. ("Never trust the teller, trust the tale," said Lawrence.) Taken as a brute
object, as an immediate sensory equivalent for the mysterious abrupt armored
happenings going on inside the hotel, that sequence with the tank is the most
striking moment in the film.
Those who reach for a Freudian interpretation of the tank are only expressing
their lack of response to what is there on the screen. It is always the case that
interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious)
with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.
Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed
of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for
arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
-Susan Sontag

Antonioni enraged many people by saying he didn't know himself what happened
to the missing girl inL'Avventura-whether she had, for instance, committed
suicide or run away. But this attitude should be taken with the utmost
seriousness. When the artist declares that he "knows" no more than the audience
does, he is saying that all the meaning resides in the work itself, that there is
nothing "behind" it. Such works seem to lack sense or meaning only to the extent
that entrenched critical attitudes have established as a dictum for the narrative
arts (cinema as well as prose literature) that meaning resides solely in this
surplus of "reference" outside the work-to the "real world" or the artist's
"intention." But this is, at best, an arbitrary ruling. The meaning of a narration is
not identical with a paraphrase of the values associated by an ideal audience
with the "real-life" equivalents or sources of the plot elements, or with the
attitudes projected by the artist towards these elements. Neither is meaning
(whether in film, fiction, or theatre) a function of a determinate plot. Other kinds
of narration are possible besides those based on a story, in which the
fundamental problem is the treatment of the plot line and the construction of
characters.
-Susan Sontag

We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by
descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress:
metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite
meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image
possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image
as opposed to a symbol is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the
infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the
formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a
monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.
-Andrei Tarkovsky

An image cannot be a symbol in my opinion. Whenever an image is turned into a

symbol, the thought becomes walled in so to speak, it can be fully deciphered.
That's not what image is. A symbol is not yet an image. Although image cannot
be explained, it expresses truth to the end... Its meaning remains unknown. I was
asked once what the bird on boy's head in The Mirror meant. But any time I
attempt to explain, I notice everything loses its meaning, it acquires a completely
different sense than intended, moves away from its rightful place. I could only
say a bird would not come to an evil man but that's not good enough. A true
image is an abstraction, it cannot be explained, it only transmits truth and one
can only comprehend it in one's own heart. Because of that it's impossible to
analyse a work of art by utilising its intellectual significance.
-Andrei Tarkovsky

I am an enemy of symbols. Symbol is too narrow a concept for me in the sense

that symbols exist in order to be deciphered. An artistic image on the other hand
is not to be deciphered, it is an equivalent of the world around us. Rain in Solaris

is not a symbol, it is only rain which at certain moment has particular significance
to the hero. But it does not symbolise anything. It only expresses. This rain is an
artistic image. Symbol for me is something too complicated.
-Andrei Tarkovsky

I am constantly being asked what this or that means in my films. It's unbearable!
An artist does not have to be accountable for his intentions. I did not do any deep
thinking about my work. I don't know what my symbols mean. I only desire to
induce feelings, any feelings, in viewers. People always try to find "hidden"
meanings in my films. But wouldn't it be strange to make a film while striving to
hide one's thoughts? My images do not signify anything beyond what they are...
We do not know ourselves that well: sometimes we express forces which cannot
be grasped by any ordinary measure.
-Andrei Tarkovsky

Mysterious elements in my films? I think people somehow got the idea that
everything on screen should be immediately understandable. In my opinion
events of our everyday lives are much more mysterious than those we can
witness on screen. If we attempted to recall all events, step by step, that took
place during just one day of our life and then showed them on screen, the result
would be hundred times more mysterious than my film [Stalker]. Audiences got
used to simplistic drama. Whenever a moment of realism appears on screen, a
moment of truth, it is immediately followed by voices declaring it "confusing."
Many think of Stalker as a science fiction film. But this film is not based on
fantasy, it is realism on film. Try to accept its content as a record of one day in
lives of three people, try to see it on this level and you'll find nothing complex,
mysterious, or symbolic in it.
-Andrei Tarkovsky

I never create allegories. I create my own world. That world does not signify
anything unusual. It just exists, it has no other meaning. I think symbol and
allegory rob the artist. Creator brings up images which express, reveal life the
way it is. They are not Aesop's fables. This manner of working would be too
primitive not only for the contemporary art but for art of any era. Artistic image
possesses an infinity of meanings just like life carries an infinity of meanings. An
image changed into a symbol cannot be analysed. When I create my images I use
no symbolism of any kind. I want to create an image, not a symbol. That's why I
don't believe in interpretations of supposed meanings of my pictures. I'm not
interested in narrow political or social issues. I want to create images that would
touch the viewer's soul to some degree.
-Andrei Tarkovsky

It makes no difference to me how the public receives and interprets my films. I

make films in such a way as to create certain spiritual state in the viewer. As a

result he cannot remain unchanged after watching the film. But what the viewer
thinks about my film's style is unimportant to me. Viewers search for meanings
as if this was some sort of a charade. I know of no work of art whose meaning
would be clear to the degree demanded by some. When they listen to music,
read a novel or watch a play they frequently encounter fragments they don't
understand. It's a normal state of the relationship toward a work of art. But when
they go to the cinema they demand complete clarity, total understanding. I am
against discrimination in art. Clarity is not most important. The world created by
an artist is as complex as the world that surrounds him.
-Andrei Tarkovsky

So when critics describe your work as metaphysical, does that appeal to you?
No, no, no. I never think about theoretical things when we are working... You
know how it happens, when we started we had a big social responsibility which I
think still exists now. And back then I thought Okay, we have some social
problems in this political system maybe well just deal with the social question.
And afterwards when we made a second movie and a third we knew better that
there are not only social problems. We have some ontological problems and now I
think a whole pile of shit is coming from the cosmos. And theres the reason. You
know how we open out step by step, film by film. Its very difficult to speak about
the metaphysical and that. No. Its just always listening to life. And we are
thinking about what is happening around us. ... you know when we are working
we dont talk about any theoretical things. We only ever have practical problems.
And its the same with the writer. Mostly we just talk about life. How its going on
the street. We never talk about theoretical things. We never talk about Chaos or
existential things. We just talk about someone coming into the room and he
wants something and the other guy who is sitting there doesnt want these
things. Thats all.
-Bla Tarr