History of Cinema

“Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet? The search for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? All over the world there are, indeed, entertainment firms and organizations which exploit cinema and television and spectacles of many other kinds. Our starting point, however, should not be there, but in the essential principles of cinema, which have to do with the human need to master and know the world. I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: ‘stars’, story-lines and entertainment have nothing to do with it.”

“Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high?" — Martin Scorsese “Among those whom I would call ‘younger generation’ Kubrick appears to me to be a giant." — Orson Welles “It’s so hard to do anything that doesn’t owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies. Inevitably, you’re going to end up doing something that he’s probably already done before. It can all seem like we’re falling behind whatever he came up with." — Paul Thomas Anderson “He copied no one while all of us were scrambling to imitate him." — Steven Spielberg “A Clockwork Orange is my current favourite. I was very predisposed against the film. After seeing it, I realize it is the only movie about what the modern world really means.” — Luis Buñuel “I really love “Eyes Wide Shut". I just wonder if Stanley Kubrick really did finish it the way he wanted to before he died." — David Lynch “Each month Stanley Kubrick isn’t making a film is a loss to everybody.” — Sidney Lumet “It’s the best of the best. No film can hope to top it (Kubrick’s 2001)." — Ridley Scott “Stanley’s good on sound. So are a lot of directors, but Stanley’s good on designing a new harness. Stanley’s good on the colour of the mike. Stanley’s good on the merchant he bought the mike from. Stanley’s good about the merchant’s daughter who needs some dental work.” — Jack Nicholson “I love almost all of Stanley Kubrick, there’s almost no Stanley Kubrick I don’t love. I love Lolita, I love Dr. Strangelove. I love A Clockwork Orange, obviously. I even like a lot of Barry Lyndon (laughs). And early stuff, like The Killing and Paths of Glory. … It’s ridiculous. Look, he made the best comedy ever, he may have made one of the best science fiction movies ever, he made the best horror movie ever. I couldn’t watch the end of The Shining. I went through half The Shining for years before I could finish, because I’m a writer and as soon as he starts writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” I had to turn it off. It’s almost like Picasso in that he mastered so many different genres. … he took his time and patience and he had a crew of like 18 people. They were very handmade movies these were not large behemoths that he did; they were very thoughtful and his editing process was long. He’s kind of without peer really. If I was gonna settle on a director, probably Kubrick." — Gary Ross “From a storytelling point of view, from a directing point of view, there is one thing I associate with what [Kubrick] does, which is calm. There is such an inherent calm and inherent trust of the one powerful image, that he makes me embarrassed with my own work, in terms of how many different shots, how many different sound effects, how many different things we’ll throw at an audience to make an impression. But with Kubrick, there is such a great trust of the one correct image to calmly explain something to the audience. There can be some slowness to the editing. There’s nothing frenetic about it. It’s very simple. There’s a trust in simple storytelling and simple image making that actually takes massive confidence to try and emulate.” — Christopher Nolan “Single greatest American director of his generation." — Oliver Stone “I admire Kubrick greatly. He is often accused of being a prodigious technician and rigid intellectual, which people say makes his films very cold. I don’t agree. I think that “Barry Lyndon" or “A Clockwork Orange" are the most perfect marriages of personality and subject." — Guillermo del Toro