Spectator Quotes

One looks at films differently when one is a director or a critic. For example, though I have always loved Citizen Kane (1941), I loved it in different ways at different stages of my career. When I saw it as a critic, I particularly admired the way the story is told: the fact that one is rarely permitted to see the person who interviews all the characters, the fact that chronology is not respected, things like that. As a director I cared more about technique: all the scenes are shot in a single take and do not use reverse cutting; in most scenes you hear the soundtrack before you see the corresponding images - that reflects Orson Welles` radio training, etc. Behaving like the ordinary spectator, one uses a film as if it were a drug; he is dazed by the motion and doesn`t try to analyze. A critic, on the other hand, is forced to write summaries of films in 15 lines. That forces one to apprehend the structure of a film and to rationalize his liking for it.

(On Andrei Tarkovsky): When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn`t explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure- The Serpent`s Egg (1977), Beröringen (1971), Ansikte mot ansikte (1976) and so on.

A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you`re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you`re wasting your life.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

Don`t be a spectator, don`t let life pass you by.

There`s something that happens in that delivery room, when a woman becomes ten times more a woman, and a guy becomes six times less a man. You feel really dopey and useless and like a spectator. I did, anyway.

The American method of making films left the audience with emotions and nothing else; I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling.

Body language in the cinema is thus very particular. The screen can transmit an image very different of the body. In life, we see each other by facing each other. In the cinema, one is astonished to discover oneself from another angle. But at the same time there is no obligation to look. Serge Daney used to say that the work of actors is the make movies, and the work of the spectator is to look at them.

About her performance as Euripides`s Medea on stage: If one does theatre, it`s to show human beings. They`re not gods. In Euripides, that`s clear. He was an avant-garde writer. Medea is a little like a Hitchcock film. The gods have decided what everybody knows, that`s to say, her children are going to be killed. The spectator`s attention works just the same way as in Hitchcock. The suspense consists in learning how she`s going to kill her children. But it`s Medea who decides herself to kill the children and she isn`t directed by the gods. So there`s every reason to make her a human figure.

It`s a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing.

What an awesome team, ... Our team`s running so great. I am deep in the Funny Car battle, and I`m just a spectator over there. It`s just fun to watch. It`s so much fun to be a part of it.

Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator`s memory.

The American people are sheep. They`re comfortable, rich, working. It`s like the Romans, they`re happy with bread and their spectator sports. The Super Bowl means more to them than any right.

I`m exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.

When a spectator comes to watch, they leave energized, in a better mood. And it`s not by accident the Russian circus has always been the best. Russians are themselves brave and merry people.

I try to equate it to motocross because the jumps, the terrain features, are really pretty similar. It`s very spectator friendly, especially for Americans.

Going to the bathroom is not a spectator sport.

It`s a cut throat world out there (on the course). It is hard enough on your own but then you`ve got three guys riding next to you. It is a great spectator sport.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

To become a spectator of one`s own life is to escape the suffering of life.