Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
Interpretation
Dreams and cinema both convey complex ideas and emotions through imagery.
Federico Fellini compares dreams to cinema, highlighting how both mediums can manipulate time and space through vivid visuals. He suggests that just as dreams can convey meaning through imagery and symbolism, so too can films, inviting viewers to interpret deeper underlying themes and emotions present in the visual narrative.
In practice
Using this quote in a film studies class to discuss the symbolism in cinema.
I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.
No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.
A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.
We can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we’re faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off.
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.
Before I compose a piece, I walk round it several times, accompanied by myself.
An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.
Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbor.
I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.
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