Geoffrey Nowell-Smith > Quotes

“If there were a cultural issue around which, in 1945 itself, a large measure of agreement existed, it was that the new cinema in Europe should be democratic and the inema should never again be allowed to be used, as it had been in Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent Fascist Italy, as an instrument of totalitarian ideology. Over this question it was the Americans who took the lead. Following the Allied combat troops into Italy and France came the spiritual crusaders of the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), armed not with guns but with movies, mostly documentaries but also a handful of features, designed to re-educate the peoples of formerly Fascist and occupied Europe about the virtues of democracy.”
― Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945-95

“The whole thrust of the modern novel and short story, however, from the late nineteenth century onwards, has been to reject the convention of this form of ordered fiction and to tell stories which, while still crafted as stories, are respectful of the randomness of real life, stories which do not necessarily have clearly demarcated endings, or even beginnings, but just enter into a phase of someone’s life when nothing in particular is happening and leave it at a later point when something has happened which is not an achievement, or a consummation, or a tragedy, or even a step in the re-cementing of a social order.”
― Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s

“...it is one thing for experimentation to take place: it is another for it to acquire critical mass – or, to use a different metaphor, for ripples to become a wave.
...
One sign was the emergence or re-emergence of an international audience that actually sought out artistically challenging films.”
― Geoffrey Nowell-smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s

“[H]e gave himself over to the vie de bohème, to reading books ... [A]nd to ever more assiduous immersion in the cinema.”
― Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s

“In Italy the chairman of the Film Commission, Admiral Stone, began a meeting by roundly declaring that Italy, as a rural and former Fascist country, did not need a film industry and should not be allowed to have one.[...] Neo-realism signalled an affirmation by Italian film-makers that they could create a cinema whose aesthetic (and political) assumptions were opposed in equal measure to those of Hollywood and of Italy's own cinema in the Fascist period.”
― Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945-95