Michel Chion famous quotes

Dolby stereo increases the possibility of emptiness in film sound at the same time that it enlarges the space that can be filled. It's this capacity for emptiness and not just fullness that offers possibilities yet to be explored. Kurosawa has magnificently exploited this dimension in Dreams: sometimes the sonic universe is reduced to a single point-the sound of the rain, an echo that disappears, a simple voice.
-- Michel Chion

#Dream #Rain #Simple

The emotional, physical and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibration. So just as directors and cinematographers (even those who will never make abstract films) have everything to gain by refining their knowledge of visual materials and textures, we can similarly benefit from disciplined attention to the inherent qualities of sounds.
-- Michel Chion

#Emotional #Quality #Directors

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

The environmentalist's dream is an egalitarian society based on: rejection of economic growth, a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.

You have to dream before your dreams can come true.

One day people will touch and talk perhaps easily, and loving be natural as breathing and warm as sunlight, and people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted, unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers, unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea, and work will be simple and swift as a seagull flying, and play will be casual and quiet as a seagull settling, and the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder or care or notice, and people will smile without reason, even in winter, even in the rain.

Hark! the hours are softly calling Bidding Spring arise To listen to the rain-drops falling From the cloudy skies To listen to Earth’s weary voices Louder every day Bidding her no longer linger On her charm’d way But hasten to her task of beauty Scarcely yet begun.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.

A successful film is a good film, and a non-successful film is a bad film. It's as simple as that.

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.