The Altering Eye

1For the Eye altering alters all.
William Blake, ”The Mental Traveller”

2The screen’s white eyelid would only need to be able to reflect the light that is its own, and it would blow up the Universe.
Luis Buñuel

3We often went to the movies. The screen lit up and we trembled…But more often than not Madeleine and I were disappointed. The pictures were dated, they flickered. And Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. It made us sad. This wasn’t the film we’d dreamed of. This wasn’t the total film that each of us had carried within himself...the film we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live.
Paul, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin-féminin

4My father said, ”film is the art of seeing.” That’s why I can’t show these films which are mere exploitations of all that can be exploited in human heads and eyes.... I won’t be forced to show films where people stagger out stunned and rigid with stupidity... that kill any joy of life inside them, destroying any feeling for themselves and the world.... The way it is now it is better there’s no cinema than a cinema the way it is now.
A provincial theater owner in Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road