“I need uncertainty in everything…I always try to keep that feeling of being on the edge. It’s very complicated but it’s because I’m afraid of knowing too well and seeming mechanical. It’s also a way to expose myself, like I was in Les Voleurs, to be in a difficult situation. Since then, I have thought a lot about that, but I cannot completely give up. I have to put myself in a little danger so as not to arrive completely sure. I’m afraid of being too sure, to just deliver.”

-Catherine Deneuve, The Guardian (via)

Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965, dir. Roman Polanski)

Fatty Arbuckle & Mabel Normand in He Did and He Didn’t (1916, dir. Fatty Arbucke) (via A World of Movies: 70 years of Film History)

Fatty Arbuckle & Mabel Normand in He Did and He Didn’t (1916, dir. Fatty Arbucke) (via A World of Movies: 70 years of Film History)

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

“My father took me to see this film in 1950, when I was eight years old. And I’ve never forgotten it. I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain what this film has meant to me over the years. It’s about the joy and exuberance of film-making itself. It’s one of the true miracles of film history.

What keeps nourishing me over the years is the spell the film casts, how it weaves the mystery of the obsession of creativity, of the creative drive. It all comes down to that wonderful exchange early in the film when Anton Walbrook confronts Moira Shearer at a cocktail party. ‘Why do you want to dance?’ he asks, and she answers, ‘Why do you want to live?’ The look on his face is extraordinary.’

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that exchange. It expresses so much about the burning need for art – the mystery of the passion to create. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. You have no choice. You have to live it and it comes with a price. But what a time paying it.”

-Martin Scorsese (2009)

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

“My father took me to see this film in 1950, when I was eight years old. And I’ve never forgotten it. I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain what this film has meant to me over the years. It’s about the joy and exuberance of film-making itself. It’s one of the true miracles of film history.

What keeps nourishing me over the years is the spell that the film casts, how it weaves the mystery of the obsession of creativity, of the creative drive. It all comes down to that wonderful exchange early in the film when Anton Walbrook confronts Moira Shearer at a cocktail party. ‘Why do you want to dance?’ he asks, and she answers, ‘Why do you want to live?’ The look on his face is extraordinary.’

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that exchange. It expresses so much about the burning need for art – the mystery of the passion to create. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. You have no choice. You have to live it and it comes with a price. But what a time paying it.”

-Martin Scorsese (2009)

Ben Chapman relaxes between takes on the set of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, dir. Jack Arnold) (via Hollywood Horror: Gothic to Cosmic)

“The reason they didn’t credit me in the movie, and this is crazy, is the studio wanted to give the impression, the illusion, that it was a real creature. If you see the original Frankenstein, Boris [Karloff] doesn’t get credit. It’s a question mark in the credit. I looked at the studio and asked if they thought the people were that stupid, and they said, ‘You’d be surprised what people believe’”

Edie Sedgwick & Lou Reed in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1966)

Ben Chapman relaxes between takes on the set of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, dir. Jack Arnold) (via Hollywood Horror: Gothic to Cosmic)

“The reason they didn’t credit me in the movie, and this is crazy, is the studio wanted to give the impression, the illusion, that it was a real creature. If you see the original Frankenstein, Boris [Karloff] doesn’t get credit. It’s a question mark in the credit. I looked at the studio and asked if they thought the people were that stupid, and they said, ‘You’d be surprised what people believe’”

1930s vision of a post-apocalyptic subterranean supercity in 2036 via Things To Come (1936, dir. William Cameron Menzies, screenplay by H.G. Wells, who also wrote the book on which the film is based)

“What will the next hundred years bring to mankind?

The world of tomorrow, an underground city with its glass enclosed, compressed air elevators, overhead streets, overhead tracks for cigar-shaped ‘street cars’, apartments in tiers like the homes of the Pueblo Indians, its people getting the news of the day by television, is vividly portrayed in Things to Come, H.G. Wells’ motion picture of the ‘Next War’ and a rebuilt world.”

-excerpted from original press materials for Things to Come

Entire film online at Internet Archive.

Edie Sedgwick & Lou Reed in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1965-66), which were originally conceived as “living portraits” (i.e. portraits done on film rather than on canvas) & featured silent, unbroken 3-4 minute shots of both famous & anonymous visitors to Warhol’s studio sitting nearly motionless.

Sedgwick screen test

Reed screen test

Paul Newman on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969, dir. George Roy Hill ) (photo by Jimmy Mitchell, via 20th Century Fox: Inside the Photo Archive)