Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.
Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
French photography was basically poetic, and mine was vulgar and brash and violent, except that there's never any violence in the photographs: it's only in the photographic style.
My first film was very static.
Nowadays you don't get to see composition in a movie because nobody ever keeps the camera still long enough to see it. Actors don't have the thrill and the power of working with space.
Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.
Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.
Raft told me how to walk with him in a scene: We'd start off in a long shot normal, and about the time we got together in a close-up, I'd be bending my knees so I'd be shorter.
I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.
Turner - whether on canvas or paper - can create almost measurable distances of space and air - air that you can draw, in which you can work out what the section through it would be. The space he creates is not emptiness; it is filled with 'solid' atmosphere.
The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.
I think you have to control the materials to an extent, but it's important to let the materials have a kind of power for themselves; like the natural power of gravity, if you are painting on a wall, it makes the paint trickle and it drips; there is no reason to fight that.
Contrasting styles is always the most fun to watch.
I've always tried to do camera moves that I felt were immersive. So I think, as a filmmaker, my style of filmmaking is very well-suited to 3-D anyway, so it's not like I'm having to change a huge amount of the way I shoot to work in 3-D.
The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy.
It's all in how you arrange the thing... the careful balance of the design is the motion.
What's genius about 'Gravity' is that you are close upon the actors, but 3D works best when you have foreground, middle ground and background.
I use depth in my visuals even in 2-D, and found that 3-D is actually liberating.
Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.
Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.
What makes a lot of suspenseful films work is very, very particular points of view and very subjective use of the camera.
But I notice that there is a lack of darkness in my movies and I don't know where that comes from.
For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.
By drawing or exposing two or more patterns on the same bit of film I can create harmony and textual effects.
Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay - or, rather, or analysis - to movement.
