Quotation by Don Gifford

In the motion-picture theater, the screen at rest is a neutral, shadowy blank; at rest, the fish-eye lens of the TV screen mirrors the room over which it presides. In both, the images are luminous, lighted as though from within, but the motion-picture images hover on or just in front of the surface of the screen. The viewer moves toward inclusion; no need for those movie-palace stunts, those three-dimensional experiments when, bicolored glasses in place, we ducked the baseball flung at us or were frozen in our seats by the locomotive that roared out of the screen and over our heads. The TV image, by contrast, recedes into its box and includes us out.