“There was only one Saul Bass. He was a gentleman, a brilliant raconteur, a marvelous collaborator and, as I’ve said before, a truly great artist. And – let’s be honest – a giant.”
— Martin Scorsese

“Saul Bass wasn’t just an artist who contributed to the first several minutes of some of the greatest movies in history; in my opinion his body of work qualifies him as one of the best film makers of this, or any other time.”
— Steven Spielberg

“Bass fashioned title sequences into an art, creating in some cases, like Vertigo, a mini-film within a film. His graphic compositions in movement function as a prologue to the movie – setting the tone, providing the mood and foreshadowing the action.”
— Martin Scorsese

One of the boys I dated, and they were boys, suggested that we go to Paris and I said I’d always wanted to see Paris. As if I’d never been!

Opening sequence in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de Nervios, 1988. (Director: Pedro Almodóvar, Sequence by Juan Gatti)

“For me, film-making combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AKIRA KUROSAWA | (March 23, 1910 – September 6, 1998)

The Douglas Sirk Color Melodrama
Sirk’s melodramas of the 1950s, while highly commercially successful, were generally very poorly received by reviewers. His films were considered unimportant because they revolve around female emotions and domestic issues, seen as banal at the time because of their focus on larger-than-life feelings, and unrealistic because of their conspicuous style. Attitudes toward Sirk’s films changed drastically in the 1960s and 1970s as his work was re-examined by French, American, and British critics. From around 1970 there was a considerable interest among academic film scholars for Sirk’s work - especially his American melodramas. Often centering on the formerly criticized style, his films were now seen as masterpieces of irony. The plots of the films were no longer taken at face value, and the analyses instead found that the films really criticized American society underneath the banal surface plot. The criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s was dominated by an ideological take on Sirk’s work, gradually changing from being Marxist-inspired in the early 1970s to being focused on gender and sexuality in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.

I wanted to see him so bad that I didn’t even dare imagine him anymore.

Everything inspires me! Life, people, everyday life, the street, nature, trees, art, long walk, and most of all poetry. I’m not sure I’d say it inspires me, but I think I have a gift, a present from nature, to love life above.

Happy 86th Birthday Emmanuelle Riva! | 24 February, 1927