Skip to main content

Daily Inspiration Quote by James Broughton

"I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made"

About this Quote

Broughton is insisting on cinema as an authored object, not an industrial product - a stance that reads almost defiant in a medium built on crews, budgets, and commerce. Calling his films "poems" isn’t just a bid for prestige; it’s a claim about how meaning gets made. Poems are dense, rhythmic, associative. They don’t argue so much as they arrange sensations until a worldview snaps into focus. He’s telling you to watch for cadence, metaphor, private symbols, the way an image can function like a line break.

The phrasing "as personal as my writing" smuggles in a hierarchy: film, for him, should be as intimate as the solitary act of writing, not diluted by committee thinking. It’s also a quiet corrective to the idea that directors are primarily managers. Broughton positions himself as a maker with a singular voice, closer to a diarist than a ringmaster.

"Hand-made" is the sharpest word in the sentence. It rejects slickness and scale in favor of touch: visible seams, playful artifice, the sense that someone chose every gesture and cut. In the context of mid-century avant-garde and poetic cinema, it aligns him with the DIY ethos of experimental film - where limited resources became an aesthetic, and imperfection signaled authenticity rather than failure.

The subtext is a demand for a different kind of audience contract. Don’t come looking for plot efficiency or mass appeal. Come the way you come to a poem: ready to meet a person, not a product.

Quote Details

TopicMovie
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Broughton, James. (2026, January 17). I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-consider-my-films-to-be-poems-that-are-all-as-74683/

Chicago Style
Broughton, James. "I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-consider-my-films-to-be-poems-that-are-all-as-74683/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-consider-my-films-to-be-poems-that-are-all-as-74683/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by James Add to List
James Broughton: Films as Poems, Hand-made Lyric Cinema
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

USA Flag

James Broughton (November 10, 1913 - May 17, 1999) was a Director from USA.

33 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes