The darkened theatre; a soft, comfortable seat; controlled temperature and humidity; and thousands of shadowy images moving across... the screen--these strongly suggest the dream world each of us occupies while sleeping. It is possible to think of cinema as the deliberate manufacture of dreams. Psychological experiments reveal that individuals deprived of dreams--allowed to sleep but awakened when they begin to dream--move into a psychotic state. Clearly, dreaming is a biological and cultural necessity. In some way, our human psychobiological equipment is purged and regenerated while we sleep. Sanity is maintained, it seems, by the curious, illogical flow of images we call dreams. But why do we require dreams during the waking state?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now the hand-painted image of a person is costly because the time of a well-trained artist is required to make it. The time spent ...by the painter is time spent seeing as well as making. Literally thousands of separate perceptions must be consolidated into a single image by the portrait painter. Even where the style is naturalistic and the technique meticulous, the necessary process of amalgamation entails synthesis, generalization, exag geration, and simplification. Hence, much as we admire the painter's craft, we know that it changes optical data. The invention and perfection of photography has taught us to see how painters change what they see. Oddly enough, we are less conscious of the fact that the camera also changes reality. Beyond that, most of us do not realize how much the photographer manipulates what the camera sees because we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe in the photographer's--as opposed to the painter's--mode of representing reality. For practical purposes this means that we regard photographic imagery as truthful while painterly imagery is viewed, at best, as poetic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »