Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.
The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.
Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art’s form.
Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.
Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.
Cinematography is writing with images in motion and with sounds.
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.
Be the first to see what you see as you see it.
Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.
Unbalance so as to re-balance.
It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.
Empty the pond to get the fish.
Let nothing be changed and all be different.
The crude real will not by itself yield truth.
Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.
Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that’s impossible.
In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.
For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.
An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.
Cinema, radio, television, and magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen without hearing.
Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.