Certainly what the cinema will become within the next few years will rudely obliterate these hours which we now proclaim to be of such a high order. Yet the future of cinema drama still lies in themes of simple humanity.
Louis Delluc, 1921
The cinema is no more literature than it is painting, sculpture, architecture, or music; it is a profoundly original art which can borrow from the other arts certain elements of its definitive form but whose [governing] laws remain to be precisely discovered.
Leon Moussinac, 1921
We recognize Cinema as the synthesis of all the arts and of the profound impulse underlying them. . . . It will be a lucid and vast expression of our internal life, infinitely more vibrant than all previous forms of expression.
Ricciotto Canudo, 1923
The cinema is poetry’s most powerful medium, the truest medium for the untrue, the unreal, the “surreal” as Apollinaire would have said. This is why some of us have entrusted to it our highest hopes.
Jean Epstein, 1924