What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own fiel...d, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and ... to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imp...erative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us consider for a moment the following argument. The child plays in complete--we can well say, in sacred--earnest. But it play...s and knows that it plays. The sportsman, too, plays with all the fervour of a man enraptured, but he still knows that he is playing. The actor on the stage is wholly absorbed in his playing, but is all the time conscious of "the play." The same holds true of the violinist, though he may soar to realms beyond the world. The play-character, therefore may attach to the sublimest forms of action. Can we now extend the line to ritual and say that the priest performing the rites of sacrifice is only playing? At first sight it seems preposterous, for if you grant it for one religion you must grant it for all. Hence our ideas of ritual, magic, liturgy, sacrament, mystery would all fall within the play concept.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, from the very first, the action of the play is absurd, it is because this is the way mad Waltz--before the play starts--imagin...es it is going to be....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unthinking people speak of the motion picture as the medium of "action"; the truth is that the stage is the medium of action while... the screen is the medium of reaction. It is through identification with the person acted upon on the screen, and not with the person acting, that the film builds up its oscillating power with the audience. This is understood instinctively by expert film-makers, but to my knowledge it has never been formulated. At any emotional crisis in a film, when a character is saying something which profoundly affects another, it is to this second character that the camera instinctively roves, perhaps in close-up; and it is then that the hearts of the audience quiver and open in release, or rock with laughter or shrink with pain, leap to the screen and back again in swift-growing vibrations. The great actors of the stage are actors; of the screen, re-actors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In football, on each play eleven men act in unison, and in each action not the individual but the corporate unit acts. When Bart S...tarr completed a pass for the Green Bay Packers, all the Packers could be said to share the deed; one man alone is quite helpless. When Joe Di--aggio stepped to the plate in Yankee Stadium with his unforgettable stance and fluid swing, Di--aggio stood in spotlighted solitude, and none of his teammates could act in his behalf. Football is corporate, baseball an association of individuals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees t...hem as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it--namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it ...is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The stage is three-dimensional, the movie multi-dimensional.... The stage play can create epic, for example, only by borrowing mov...ie methods. The movie, likewise, can debate ideas only by imitating the relative stasis of theater and, in pursuit of ideas or not, it unnaturally limits its prowess by containing action within one room or other closely confined area.... The imperative of movie motion makes any concession to the working principles of theater a retrograde act, for the form of a play must be violated in order to be converted; if this violation is shirked, the movie's integrity will be sacrificed for that of the play. One cannot possibly imagine a fluid movie adapted from a play by Moliere, Chekhov, Sternheim, or Pirandello, unless the original content were disastrously modified. Nor can the social dramas of Ibsen and the discursive comedies of Shaw profit from the movie medium. Their action, in the literal sense, is not going anywhere; their moods and theses can only be dissipated by a compulsively mobile camera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »