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 »
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 »
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 »
The fact remains that, when living person is set before living person--actor before spectator--a certain deliberate conventionaliz...ing is demanded of the former if the aesthetic impression is not to be lost, whereas in the film, in which immediately a measure of distance is imposed between image and spectator, greater approaches to real forms may be permitted, even though these have to exist alongside impossibilities and fantastic symbols far removed from the world around us. This is the paradox of cinematic art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No sacrifice was too great to get the film right, to get it accurate, true, and perfect. We weren't important in our minds; only t...he picture was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because film operates in real time, it is more limited. Novels end only when they feel like it. Film is, in general, restricted to... what Shakespeare called "the short two hours' traffic of our stage." Popular novels have been a vast reservoir of material for commercial films over the years.... But commercial film still can't reproduce the range of the novel in time. An average screenplay, for example, is 125 to 150 pages in length; the average novel twice that. Almost invariably, details of incident are lost in the translation from book to film.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Othello or Nora are definite, substantial figures created by the playwright. They can be played well or badly, and they can be "in...terpreted" in one way or another; but they most definitely exist, no matter who plays them or even whether they are played at all. The character in a film, however, lives and dies with the actor. It is not the entity "Othello" interpreted by Robeson or the entity "Nora" interpreted by Duse, it is the entity "Great Garbo" incarnate in a figure called Anna Christie or the entity "Robert Montgomery" incarnate in a murderer who, for all we know or care to know, may forever remain anonymous but will never cease to haunt our memories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in ou...r imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence. Ever since childhood, music has been my great source of recreation and stimulation, and I often experience a film or play musically.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficul...t to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »