Vampyr (1932, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)

The ballerinas roam the catacombs of the Paris Opera in The Phantom of the Opera (1925, dir. Rupert Julian) (scene here)

via Un Chien Andalou (1929, dir. Luis Buñuel) (online here)

“Amusingly enough, a great many psychiatrists and analysts (i.e., film critics) have had a great deal to say about my movies. I’m grateful for their interest, but I never read their articles, because when all is said and done, psychoanalysis (i.e., film criticism), as a therapy, is strictly an upper-class privilege.

Some analysts - in despair, I suppose - have declared me ‘unanalyzable,’ as if I belonged to some other species or had come from another planet (which is always possible, of course). At my age, I let them say whatever they want. I still have my imagination, and in its impregnable innocence it will keep me going until the end of my days.

All this compulsion to ‘understand’ everything fills me with horror.”

-Luis Buñuel, in his autobiography My Last Sigh

Rita Hayworth & Everett Sloane in The Lady from Shanghai (1947, dir. Orson Welles) (scene here)

“You’d be foolish to fire that gun. With these mirrors, it’s difficult to tell - you are aiming at me, aren’t you? I’m aiming at you, lover. Of course, killing you is killing myself. It’s the same thing. But you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us.”

Rita Hayworth posing for publicity stills for Salome (1953, dir. William Dieterle)

“Why should I mind? I like having my picture taken and being a glamorous person. Sometimes when I find myself getting impatient, I just remember the times I cried my eyes out because nobody wanted to take my picture at the Trocadero.”

“Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.”

-Jean Cocteau

The “living sculpture” of the Beast’s enchanted castle in Beauty and the Beast (1946, dir. Jean Cocteau)

Isadora (1968, dir. Karel Reisz) (via)

Caption on the back of the photo (circa 1923):

The question is: can they make Buster Keaton laugh? Not if he is awake. Buster has never been known to laugh although he has made millions roar. Here are three of Buster Keaton’s scenario staff and his director Eddie Cline trying to “laugh” Keaton into a story.

Keaton once said, “I developed the ‘Stone Face’ thing quite naturally. Even as a small kid, I happened to be the type of comic that couldn’t laugh at his own material. I soon learned at an awful early age that when I laughed the audience didn’t. So, by the time I got into pictures, that was a natural way of working.”

Bette Davis (with cigarette drooping from her mouth, naturally) with her maid Marie on the Warner Brothers lot (1943)

“It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies. No one has ever understood the sweetness of my joy at the end of a good day’s work. I guess I threw everything else down the drain. I will not retire while I’ve still got my legs and my make-up box.”

Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957, dir. Stanley Donen)

“Why, she was pressed, does she think she provoked such strong feelings of empathy from her audiences? After all, she was not a sex symbol (‘I sure wasn’t’), so what was it - her beauty, her vulnerability, her sense of humor, her sensitivity? - that gave her that special aura?

‘It’s impossible for me to know,’ [Audrey Hepburn] said with hesitation, ‘but if you asked me what I would like it to be, though it may sound presumptuous to say so, it’s an experience I’ve had with other performers who somehow make you open up to them. For me, it always has to do with some kind of affection, love, a warmth.’

‘I myself was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it,’ she went on. ‘That’s what I’d like to think maybe has been the appeal. People have recognized something in me they have themselves — the need to receive affection and the need to give it. Does that sound soppy?’”

-excerpted from New York Times interview, April 1991