Ingmar Bergman Quotes

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

I love films, I love the way they make me feel.

I know when I go to a movie I want to experience something, whether to laugh, to cry, to feel bad.

I love being manipulated by what I see. I love weepies and romantic comedies where you're reaching for the Kleenex at the right moment.

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.

A film should be an experience. You should feel something. It should motivate you to feel something.

It was one of the marvellous feelings of the film, having the music going in your head while doing scenes.

From an early age, I learned to invest myself emotionally in what unfolded before me on screen.

The stage is suspension of disbelief. Film is a literal medium.

One must go for a film with an open mind; a film best impacts you when your mind is a blank page to the film.

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

Film is so immersive.

When you go to the theater, you are slipping out of your life into someone else's imaginary world.

I believe that one of the secret engines that allows cinema to work, and have the marvelous power over us that it does, is the fact that for thousands of years we have spent eight hours every night in a 'cinematic' dream-state, and so are familiar with this version of reality.

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

When you're watching Psycho, there' s that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.

I always loved watching movies because I loved what certain moments inside of films did to me.

We all need illusions. That's why we love movies.

Magic in cinema is a bit like ventriloquism on the radio.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

As a viewer, I love watching movies. There has to be an emotional connection.

When I watch a film I get swept away. I don't really watch the camera.

I think a movie is a media that is evoking feelings.

If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.