A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Movies (29 quotes)
At the very beginning, in 1450, the printed word already had all the essential characteristics of modern movies. The movie today is at once the fulfillment and a kind of reversal of the nature of print invented five hundred years ago.
“The Electronic Revolution in North America” (1959), p 7
Year: 1959
At present a new discovery, a new machine is at work to turn the attention of men back to a visual culture and to give them new faces. This machine is the cinematographic camera.
“Culture without Literacy”, in Explorations #1, December (1953), p 122 reprinted in Essential McLuhan, (1995), p 307, additional reprint in Media Research Technology, Art and Communication (1997), p 132. and McLuhan Unbound #6, (2017)
Year: 1953
Even movie people don't have to study their medium that closely. Because in most movies they are very, very vague about the sort of effect they want. Big boys like Bergman are artists who understand effects. They don't just make pictures. They know the effect they want before they start. Advertising men know the effect they want before they start-they want sales. That's why the art of advertising is the greatest art form in the world. The advertisement, because of its concern for effect and its understanding of the media for the getting of that effect, is the greatest art form there is. Years from now the advertising of our century will be studied by all the great art experts. They will be saying, "Oh boy, that artist was totally unknown, anonymous and ignored all his life. He was one of the greatest guys who ever lived."
“CONVERSATION WITH MARSHALL MCLUHAN”, Howard Polskin Interview in Videography ,October (1977), p 61
Year: 1977
Chapter:
Advertising
…the art of the movie is not to be judged by the invention and arrangement of images but by the effect which those images have on the mind or guts of a spectator.
“The Psychopathology of Time & “Life,” (1949) in The Scene Before You (1955), p 149
Year: 1949
The camera rolls up the carpet of existence. On the other hand, the projector reconstructs the dissected scene and unrolls the daylight world as a magic carpet, a dream-world. The camera records the day-world; the projector evokes the night-world. ... Plato and Hollywood join hands in a metaphoric dance on the sands of California.
“Notes on the Media as Art Forms,” In Explorations 2 (1954)
Year: 1954
I can only regard the movie as the mechanization and distortion of this cognitive miracle by which we recreate the exterior world. But whereas cognition provides that dance of the intellect which is the analogical sense of Being, the mechanical medium has tended to provide merely a dream world which is a substitute for reality rather than a means of proving reality.
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954), p 60 , reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 165 .
Year: 1954
The basic fact to keep in mind about the movie camera and projector is their resemblance to the process of human cognition… The camera rolls up the external world on a spool… The camera records and analyzes the daylight world with more than human intensity because of the forty-five degree angle of the camera eye. The projector reveals their daylight world on a dark screen where it becomes a dream world.
“Sight, Sound, and the Fury,” in The Commonweal, 1954, p 493
Year: 1954
Drawn to McLuhan #13
The movie industry is thus an inseparable portion of the advertising industry in providing the necessary drama of consumption, in which the ads merely provide the news.
“The Subliminal Projection Project” (1957), p 196
Year: 1957
[T]he movie is in a sense the final stage of the Gutenberg revolution; for the movie is a mechanical not an electronic form.
Media Alchemy in Art and Society, 1958, p 67
Year: 1958
The movie is a mechanical way of rolling up the world in a sequence of small still shots, not unlike the way in which print captures the movement of an author’s mind in a sequence of black and white still shots. Played back, these still shots recreate or reconstruct an earlier action. The movie has built-in perspective and is superb in details to fill the pictorial space of its perspective.
"New Media and the New Education in Christianity and Culture (1960)
Year: 1960
Yeats saw the movie as a world of Platonic ideals with the film projector playing “a spume upon a ghostly paradigm of things.” This was the world that haunted Don Quixote, who found it through the folio door of the newly printed romances.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge, p 286
Year: 1964
It was Rene Clair who pointed out that if two or three people were together on a stage, the dramatist must ceaselessly motivate or explain their being there at all. But the film audience, like the book reader, accepts mere sequence as rational. Whatever the camera turns to, the audience accepts.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 286
Year: 1964
Movies as a nonverbal form of experience are like photography, a form of statement without syntax.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 285
Year: 1964
In David Copperfield, [Dickens] experimented with the eyes of a child as if they were a camera turned on the adult world. D.W. Griffiths recognized this and habitually carried a volume of Dickens with him on location. He would sit down and open his Dickens in the midst of shooting a film in order to discover new ways of solving his problems.
“New Media and the Arts”, 1964, p 240
Year: 1964
The stream of consciousness is really managed by the transfer of film technique to the printed page, where, in a deep sense it really originated; for as we have seen, the Gutenberg technology of movable types is quite indispensable to any industrial or film process.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 295
Year: 1964
Movies in America have not developed advertising intervals simply because the movie itself is the greatest of all forms of advertisement for consumer goods.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 207
Year: 1964
Yet film and the stream of consciousness alike seemed to provide a deeply desired release from the mechanical world of increasing standardization and uniformity.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 295
Year: 1964
At the present time, film is still in its manuscript phase, as it were; shortly it will, under TV pressure, go into its portable, accessible, printed-book phase. Soon everyone will be able to… [buy and rent films in cartridges].
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 291
Year: 1964
[The movie medium] is a monster ad for consumer goods.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 294
Year: 1964
[Of cinema verite] If there's no story-line, the viewer has to create something all the time, like a detective story, by pulling out the connections between the events: the reader has to make the story.
Q and A with M. McLuhan, Take One, Nov-Dec., 1966, p 7
Year: 1966
You see, the camera extends your feet and your eyes; a movie camera carries your eyes out on your feet into the world -- it's mobile. And TV doesn't do that... it extends your eyes and your hands.
Q and A with M. McLuhan, Take One, Nov-Dec., 1966, p 9
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Environment
I want to point out, one of the strange things about the movie when it was new, at the beginning of the century, it seemed hilarious, it seems comic, simply because it was so perfect, a repeat of ordinary experience ordinary living… the movie in its early phase, was a parody of life, an imitation of life in a comic sense, because it just went along para hodos against or along beside the track of real life. The picture track, the movie picture track and the track of real life, were almost interchangeable and this creates a very comic effect. Realism, when new, is comic. Hilarious. Go back to the days of Sam Pepys and Daniel Defoe and you'll see what I mean. But with the coming of realism, prose realism, it was a new mythic form that created a very comic and satirical world. This was the great age of satire, realistic forms created a comic and satiric effect in the case of Pepys’ diary and in the case of Defoe, Robinson Crusoe sort of thing. One of the reviewers of Robinson Crusoe said “Mr. Defoe has represented the British Isles as totally depopulated”. This I found very valuable and comical sidelight, on the effect of realism on people for whom realism was new.
Recorded lecture, “Joyce and Film,” Fordham, 1967 (Youtube); transcript: 31:24
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Replay
Motion pictures are a blend of Euclidean and acoustic thinking, the mechanical and the electrical…”
“Conversation with Bruce Powers”, The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 134
Year: 1989
Why should the European and the Russian and the Japanese have regarded the film as an art form from the first? Why should the English-speaking world have such difficulty in seeing popular forms of entertainment as art forms whether the movie, the comic strip, or the common advertisement?
McLuhan Hot and Cool (1967), p 157
Year: 1967
Chaplin chose only a small group of items: the costume of the middle-class nobody, the hidden gestures of the music-hall entertainer, the romantic outlook of Cyrano, the unlovable lover, and the foot positions of classical ballet.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 203
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Body Language
I think TV tends to be more social and less isolating than the movie, the movie tends to the world of the private dream.
Said on Dick Cavett Show, 1970; transcript: 8:11
Year: 1970
In short, True Grit is a capsule summary of both the Western hero as entrepreneur and the eastern lawyer as the creator of corporate safety. It is characteristic of all social processes that they become manifest and conspicuous at the moment of their demise.
“The Popular Hero and Anti-Hero” (1971), p 135
Year: 1971
…even a big-time movie, I’ll say a picture like “Grand Hotel” with Greta Garbo and John Barrymore, which I saw, you go to now to laugh at; you don’t go to admire. This is cool. Those pictures when they were made, were hot. Now they are cool right off. To being them back on TV is to cool them even more. They look even more foolish.
“Jean Pare interview”, in Forces magazine a Hydro Quebec publication, No.22, (1973), p 15
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Hot & Cool
MCLUHAN: The movie theatre is the massage. Being inside is getting their full treatment. MISS FISHER: There seemed to be an indication that there is something coming out differently. MCLUHAN: When you get massaged you do come out quite different.
The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, 1967, full transcript of a seminar at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967, edited by William Buxton, U. of Alberta Press, 2026, pages 70-71
Year: 1967
Chapters:
Environment | Medium is the Message