Daily Inspiration Quote by Nicolas Roeg

Roeg’s line lands like a dry little insult aimed at the cultural gatekeepers who decide what counts as “art.” By putting children’s finger-painting on a pedestal while casting movies out, he’s not actually sneering at kids; he’s exposing a snobbery so entrenched it becomes absurd. Finger-painting gets the halo of innocence and authenticity: pure expression, no commerce, no machinery. Film, by contrast, arrives trailing cables, budgets, crews, distributors, advertising. It looks industrial, and for a long time “industrial” was treated as the opposite of “art,” even when the end product was as personal as any canvas.

The subtext is Roeg defending cinema’s right to complexity. His own work (Don’t Look Now, Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth) is proof that film can be as formally daring and psychologically jagged as modernist literature or painting. Yet it was often received through a double standard: if a movie confuses you, it must be a “mess”; if a painting confuses you, it must be “challenging.” That asymmetry isn’t about difficulty, it’s about prestige.

Contextually, Roeg comes from the moment when directors were pushing film language forward while institutions lagged behind. Museums and critics could celebrate brushstrokes while treating montage, sound design, and editing as mere technique. His quip compresses a larger grievance: cinema was expected to entertain first and justify its artistry later. The sting is that the criteria were never neutral; they were classed, conservative, and terrified of mass culture getting too smart.