Silent Cinema Quotes

You can tell how good a filmmaker is if you can turn the sound down but you can still feel the story.

I've never made a film using dialogue or speech.

The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema

I love moments in film where there's no dialogue, and somebody communicates something with a look that kills you. That's why I love going to the cinema.

I'm a big fan of silent cinema and I think that before I got into the canon of European arthouse cinema, the first interesting films I liked as a kid were German expressionist silent films.

I like watching films that can play in any language because they're essentially silent.

When I was a little boy, there was no sound in the movies.

A certain type of critic doesn't really want French movies to be visual. They think movies started from books and they forgot this part of moviemaking, like Chaplin and Buster Keaton, which I didn't forget.

I remember seeing the performance Samantha Morton did in 'Sweet and Low Down' where she didn't speak at all, and I loved it so much because she got to do so much work just by expressing herself in her body and her face. With expressions, it wasn't necessary to speak. I find that appealing.

For me, I loved it. I only want to make silent movies now.

I love silent films. The future is unwritten.

When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me-I still watch silent films. I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don't say, 'I read an old book by Flaubert,' or 'I saw an old play by Moliere.'

I never approved of talkies. Silent movies were well on their way to developing an entirely new art form. It was not just pantomine, but something wonderfully expressive.

I always loved silent movies. I was not a specialist, but I loved them. And when I started directing, I became really fascinated by the format - how it works, the device of the silent movie. It's not the same form of expression as a talkie. The lack of sounds makes you participate in the storytelling.

When you see a silent movie, you understand everything that's going on from the images because the images are so strong.

I love silent cinema but don't hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces.

Garrel has succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen.

It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around.

Something I am wondering: if you cannot hear do you have no sounds in your head? Do you see a silent movie

There will never be talking pictures.

The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion.

In a silent film, the visuals are of utmost importance.

My father is a silent cinema freak, so he took me to 1925 silent films that took forever, like 5-hour movies, but I've seen a lot of that stuff since I was young. And then I saw the film 'Annie,' and I just wanted to be Annie; I just wanted to be that orphan kid and wanted to sing and dance.

Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?

Ever since I made the short film 'Black And White,' which had almost no dialogues, the idea of making a silent feature film fascinated me.