I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to try to use the same aesthetics as painting which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing, and most important, insisted on attention to metaphor. Since film is not painting–and not simply because one moves and the other doesn't–I wanted to explore their connections and differences–stretching the formal interests to questions of editing, pacing, studying the formal properties of time intervals, repetitions, variations on a theme, and so on.
-- Peter Greenaway, quoted in Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi
It is one of the most important formal qualities of film that every object that is reproduced appears simultaneously in two entirely different frames of reference, namely the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, and that as one identical object it fulfills two different functions in the two contexts.
-- Rudolf Arnheim Film as Art
