In a play ... a psychological loop is established between performers and audience. Nothing like this can occur in a movie theater.... The images on the screen are patterns of light, not living actors. They are not affected by applause or hissing. They will be the same in a packed house or an empty one. And they will be the same every time the movie is shown. This affects the audience. Occasionally, movie audiences applaud or hiss or walk out, but for the most part they are passive. No social bond between the audience and the actors can exist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hebrew culture is based on a single book, the Word of God. Greek culture, by contrast, is based on a thousand books, all of them b...y human authors. The god of the Hebrews sternly rejected graven idols. Consequently, the Hebrew tradition is iconoclastic--it scorns all attempts to materialize the divine. The Greek gods, conversely, admired the material world. Their admiration, as a matter of fact, often seems to be tinged with envy, as though they considered the material world better than the celestial. They wanted to be materialized. They approved of statues, and the statues they inspired were so beautiful that they eventually set standards for human beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Popular cinema cooperates with desire for reverie rather than opposing it. This is why mass-audience movies are so conscious of ge...nre formulas. A formula--the formula for romance, for example, or thrillers or westerns--is something predictable. If it is made sufficiently obvious through advance advertising and the use of identifying motifs in the introductory scenes of the movie itself, the audience can settle immediately into its reverie, secure in the knowledge that there will be no surprises. Nothing will happen that will require conscious mental effort. The art film, it should be admitted, attempts to move in just the opposite direction--to awaken and shock and engage the audience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »