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.
Interpretation
Fellini highlights cinema as a powerful art form that captures and enriches life through storytelling.
In this quote, Federico Fellini expresses his profound appreciation for cinema as a unique medium for storytelling. He believes that film not only represents life but also enhances and transforms it into an experience that is dynamic and multifaceted. Unlike static forms of art like painting or literature, cinema possesses its own distinct qualities—rhythms and perspectives—that allow for a deeper engagement with storytelling and life's complexities.
In practice
This quote could be used in a film studies class to discuss the significance of cinema as an art form.
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.
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.
Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence.
An artist must believe in himself - Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence - but passionately. Your belief is contagious. Others say - He is vain - but they are affected.
I love getting cheers. I love giving scares. Anything that really works with the audience makes me happy.
It's delightful, it's delicious, it's de-lovely.
I have always wanted my art to service my people - to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life.
In the belly of the furnace of creativity is a sexual fire; the flames twine about each other in fear and delight. The same sort of coiling, at a cooler, slower pace, is what the life of this planet looks like. The enormous spirals of typhoons, the twists and turns of mountain ranges and gorges, the waves and the deep ocean currents - a dragonlike writhing.
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