Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus... stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great silent movies revolve around the body and the personality of its owner; the great sound comedies revolve about structure... and style--what happens, how it happens, and the way those happenings are depicted. Film comedy, as well as film art in general, was born from delight in physical movement. The essence of early filmmaking was to take some object (animate or inanimate) and simply watch it move.... The sound comedy is far more literary. Given the opportunity to use the essential tool of literature, words, as an intrinsic part of the film's conception, the filmmaker did not hesitate to do so. In silent films, the use of words in titles was intrusive, a deliberate interruption of the cinematic medium and a substitution of the literary one. We stop looking and start reading. But the sound film provided the means to watch the action and listen to the words at the same time. Whereas the silent performer was a physical being,... the sound performer was both physical and intellectual at once.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Analogies between the stage and the screen assume that they deal with the same material. But they don't. The material of the scree...n is not actual objects but images fixed on the film. And the very fact that they have their being on film endows these images with properties which are never found in actual objects. For instance, on the stage the actor moves in real space and time. He cannot even cross the room without performing a definite number of movements. On the screen an action may be shown only in terminal points with all its intervening moments left out. Similarly, in watching a performance on the stage the spectator is governed by the actual conditions of space and time. Not so in the case of the movie spectator. Thanks to the moving camera he is able to view the scene from all kinds of angles, leaping from a long-distance view to a close-range inspection of every detail. It is obvious that with this extraordinary power of handling space and time--by elimination and emphasis, according to its dramatic needs--the motion picture can never be content with modeling itself after the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more... direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is "Corneillian." From this point of view one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a certain tension which is a definite part of theater. No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even between the worst charity production in the theater and the most brilliant of Olivier's film adaptations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into... the dark rooms of our souls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed o...n film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Film noir] experiences periodic rebirth and rediscovery. Whenever we have any moment of deep societal rift or disruption in Ameri...ca, one of the ways we can express it is through the ideas and behavior in film noir.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »