Kevin Brownlow Quotes

I love silent films. The future is unwritten.

When you speak of silent movies, everyone thinks of Charlie Chaplin first.

Friends told me not to bother with the silents - they're jerky, poorly photographed and ludicrously badly acted. But I was immediately struck by the freshness and vitality of these films.

I like some of the early silent films because I love to watch how actors had to play then. What would interest me today is to do a silent film.

But you know, as you say, the original versions of my films are getting out there, slowly.

I've been campaigning like anything for restoring these changes. For 27 years. I wrote a book about it, well, a portion of the book was devoted to these scenes and why they should have been in the movie.

My father comes from a generation of film that actors my age don't even know about, which is really sad.

You have to go back to the '30s and '40s to see a film that's any good.

Now I'm the go-to-girl for silent films.

The first Westerns I saw as a child were those little 8-mm. home movies put out by Castle Films.

My father, who was a good deal older than my mother, had basically grown up with silent films; sound didn't arrive until he was 30 years old. So he took me to see silent pictures at MoMA when I was 5 or 6 years old.

I love old Hollywood. I love our early film culture.

I do think there's not enough film history being taught and appreciated. Maybe it's being taught, but I've heard from professors that young kids don't want to look at black-and-white movies. And that's 85 years of film history, with masterpiece after masterpiece.

I recently found out that the print of my first film 'Utrada Rathri,' released in 1978, is damaged beyond repair. So the only way to relive earlier films is through books based on the screenplay.

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 can say is usually people are slightly confused. They think that silent movies are old. But, the fact is, they are old because they have been made in the '20s. That's the thing that makes them old. Not the format. The format is just a format. It's not an old format.

The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema

From the age of four or five. I went to see a lot of Westerns then. But it was silent movies and I loved everything that happened then.

The silent film, it was cut at the age of thirty.

I believe that DVD is that which gives some hope to retaining some content in movies that will appeal to an older audience or the more sophisticated audience or the audience that doesn't need or desire to see a movie on a Friday night.

I don't think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I'm always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking - although I want good talking. I'm much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth.

Like I said about Freaked, people tend to find these films, and I think that in the end the cool thing about a movie is that it can be sort of burnt temporarily, but then it's burnt into the fabric of your culture.

The advent of DVD/Blu-ray reissues of classic Hollywood and foreign films has been a boon to film buffs, who can now study their favorites in all their glistening detail and restored palettes.

For my own films, I would like to see 'Bullet in the Head' remastered. The original cut was actually almost three hours.

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.