“The younger generation is just basically film-ignorant. Not just about Bergman, but Antonioni, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Bunuel. Film is not part of their general literacy. They don’t know The Bicycle Thief; they don’t know Grand Illusion. And many, many of them don’t know Citizen Kane. If they do know it, they know it as something they happened to see on television. They don’t have the same general reverence — which I’m not criticizing them for — there’s no reason why they would or should. It’s just a different time. Their icons and heroes lie in a different area.” — Woody Allen speaking to The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday in a 2.4.11 interview about a forthcoming Ingmar Bergman retrospective at the Berlin Film Festival.

“Readers…will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob*s Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the Apu trilogy). The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers, but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay.” — from intro to David Kamp and Lawrence Levi‘s The Film Snob Dictionary (2006).