Aging & Wisdom Quote by Catherine Deneuve

Deneuve’s complaint lands like a velvet slap: cinema has learned new tricks, and in mastering them it may have forgotten why anyone cared in the first place. She acknowledges the dazzle of contemporary filmmaking - “extraordinary techniques,” “impressive special effects” - but the praise is deliberately generic, almost like reading off a brochure. That’s the point. Technical prowess, in her framing, has become the default setting, no longer a marker of ambition but a baseline expectation.

The real charge is in “sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things.” Not “lost,” but “taken out” - a phrasing that implies intention, extraction, a system at work. She’s not nostalgic for grainy cameras; she’s skeptical of an industry that optimizes stories the way it optimizes workflows: smoothing edges, sanding down ambiguity, treating emotion as a deliverable rather than a risk.

Coming from Deneuve, the subtext carries the authority of a career built on directors who trusted stillness, suggestion, and adult contradiction. Her era prized the face as a landscape and silence as dialogue. In today’s attention economy, where spectacle can function as both marketing and anesthesia, “soul” becomes shorthand for what can’t be pre-visualized: moral complexity, erotic tension, the peculiar dread of real life, the sense that a scene might fail unless everyone is fully alive inside it.

It’s also a warning about power. When cinema’s most bankable language is effects, the people who control effects - studios, franchises, algorithms of audience testing - start controlling meaning. Deneuve’s line is less anti-technology than pro-human: an insistence that the camera should still chase something messier than perfection.