Robert Bresson Quotes

You have to make an audience experience with the ears as well as their eyes.

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

Sight is a slick and overbearing autocrat, trumpeting its prodigal knowledge and perceptions so forcefully that it drowns out the other, subtler senses.

What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear.

I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.

I don't know what silence sounds like anymore.

I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.

I want my films to be very tactile, visually and sonically.

Everyone makes sexy sounds; relatively few, sexy sights.

Colour is the touch of the eye, Music to the deaf, A word out of darkness.

...If there's a noise in the woods, and there's nobody around to hear it, is it really a noise?" "Of course it is," she replied calmly. "How did you reach that conclusion?" Beldin demanded. "Because there's no such thing as an empty place, uncle. There are always creatures around --wild animals, mice, insects, birds --and they can all hear." "But what if there weren't? What if the woods are truly empty?" "Why waste your time talking about an impossibility?

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.

Now the dark air is like fire on my skin, And even the moonlight is blinding

It seems that most the world is driven by the eye, right? They design cities to look great but they always sound horrible ... They design telephones to look great, but they sound horrible. I think it was about time that the other senses were celebrated.

Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.

Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity.

If everything is amplified, we hear nothing.

These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

A person does not hear sound only through the ears; he hears sound through every pore of his body. It permeates the entire being.

A few times in my life I've had moments of clarity where the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think.

The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.

I was interested in how we engage the world. How do we use our skin as our eyes? If you read a cityscape or a landscape with just your mind, and not your body, it becomes like a picture or representation, not something you really engage with.

At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.