Quotable von Trier

In a cinema, preferably a good one, a great deal of trickery is used to enable the audience to watch or experience the film. One of them is turning off the lights. Otherwise you wouldn't see anything. Noise is kept out. So you're in this dark room, looking at the screen, where nothing much happens except some shadows moving about. But people really want to believe. Not just in God, they also want -- the mind wants to turn the shadows into actions, reality and people. It's all trickery because they are just images with a lot of darkness in between. What happens in a cinema is a kind of hypnosis.

- Lars Trier a/k/a Lars von Trier, Danish filmmaker & provocateur