My philosophy is that to be a director you cannot be subject to anyone, even the head of the studio. I threatened to quit each tim...e I didn't get my way, but no one ever let me walk out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater. Every technique learned by the ac...tor, every curtain, every flat on the stage, every careful analysis by the director, every coordinated scene, is for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, our evaluators, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and t...hat the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering--that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artis...tic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, ...however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence. The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc.... Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows o...ne big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classifica tion, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our art is the finest, the noblest, the most suggestive, for it is the synthesis of all the arts. Sculpture, painting, literature,... elocution, architecture, and music are its natural tools. But while it needs all of those artistic manifestations in order to be its whole self, it asks of its priest or priestess one indispensable virtue: "faith."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits... depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a ...monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »