Devoted filmophilia does not treat film quotations merely as a post-modernist quip. It allows them to develop into some type of a dynamic film quiz. The hunt for quotations presents the ultimate test of our film erudition. The main prize could be, let’s say, a romantic dinner with Jay and Silent Bob. In a way, the climax was reached with Tarantino whose films are not only different variations of evolution and the history of film forms, but also, a personal journey through the shelves of the author’s private video club in an era when Duchamp’s  “ready made” becomes Warhol’s “already made”. Since his films are nothing but twisted deliriums of references, homage, samples, conceptual quotations and inter-textual games, Mr Q was proclaimed, by some of the critics, as a trendy manipulator of images that had already existed somewhere, no matter how hard he tried to transform them into something new and different.

In order to be successful, a film quotation has to be subtle, cleverly hidden, and discreetly dosed. This is also proved by the additional festival programme dedicated to film quotations. In this way, the first European film of the great Hou Hsiao-Hsien “Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge” cannot be treated as a classical remake. As opposed to the original, his film loses the Lamorisse’s fairy tale atmosphere just by the fact that his balloon is not only a figure, and a flying metaphor par excellence. It also becomes a subject of a student film, reduced to the plainest digital effect. Then the author alights the balloon and makes us stop daydreaming as it was all just a fraud, but not for long because in the sequence of the boy’s entrance into Musee d’Orsay, he makes us start daydreaming again. For this reason, Hou’s personality as an author that we like the most, appears in the character of an old Chinese puppeteer who is visited by the boy’s mother. Thus, he recalls the ghosts of his masterpiece “The Puppeteer”. These (auto) references are even more intriguing and conceptually more complex than the ones in the remakes.

However, Hou’s fascination with quotations does not end here. In the same way, the film posters from the snow covered “Millenium Mambo” reappear in the author’s short film “The Electric Princess Picture House” from the Cannes omnibus  “Chacun Son Cinema.” A motive of Kitan’s segment of the same omnibus, which shows a small, lonely  Japanese cinema in the middle of nowhere will reappear in his latest film “Achilles and the Turtle”, only now as a motive of his painting canvas. The auto-reference and numerous quotations are being considered in an ironical context, while his hero plagiarizes Basquait and Liechenstein. However, the real parody and an explosion of quotations is shown in his film “Glory to the Filmmaker”, after which Ouzo’s fans will not sleep calmly again.

Also, the filmophile nostalgia of Johnnie Toe (Sparrow) which will reach its climax in a rainy, soaked final sequence, does not only recall the ghost of Jacques Demy and his “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg”, but also Ming-Liang’s rainy final “Goodbye Dragon Inn” where the Taipei’s old cinema specialized for old martial arts produced by the mythical company of the Shaw Brothers is forever shut down. Therefore, it is a question of a double homage: a homage to the city and a homage to the cinema/film.
Where the expressionist pathos and monochrome imagination of Maddin’s perhaps most successful film “Brand Upon the Brain!” refers to the aesthetics of silent film, from Feuillade to Frankenstein, and also to Cronemberg’s penetrations (observing the holes in the heads of orphans), the silent relationship of lovers in Reygadas’s “Stellet Licht” is dipped into a visual ecstasy of physical landscape. Nevertheless, even though his film final is reserved for a Dryer quotation, the real miracle happens sometime earlier, when we see Raygadas’s heroine independently driving a combine.