How can anyone be interested in war?--that glorious pursuit of annihilation with its ceremonious bellowings and trumpetings over t...he mangling of human bones and muscles and organs and eyes, its inconceivable agonies which could have been prevented by a few well- chosen, reasonable words. How, why, did this unnecessary business begin? Why does anyone want to read about it--this redundant human madness which men accept as inevitable?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some of the things ... sound like things our grandmothers would have told us: "Men will be boys. We let them play their little gam...es with each other. We know it isn't about the important things, but they think so. So we let them. We take care of them so that they can go on playing...." What grandma did not tell us is that men are capable of something altogether different.... But even though men are untapped wells of potential, they will not move forward if women continue to subsidize the status quo.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 »
He said "Next time can I bring my friend?" And I thought "Does he mean friend?"... And I thought "Yes he does mean friend." Which was quite bold in those days. It was the Dark Ages. Men and men. And they could still put you in prison for it. And did, dear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What then is the difference between film and theatre? Or should one not rather ask: what are the differences? Let us be content wi...th the reply that the screen has two dimensions and the stage three, that the screen presents photographs and the stage living actors. All the subtler differences stem from these. The camera can show us all sorts of things--from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies--which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera len...s and the eye both register images--because of their sensitivity to light--at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is something to be said for losing one's possessions, after nothing can be done about it. I had loved my Nanking home and th...e little treasures it had contained, the lovely garden I had made, my life with friends and students. Well, that was over. I had nothing at all now except the old clothes I stood in. I should have felt sad, and I was quite shocked to realize that I did not feel sad at all. On the contrary, I had a lively sense of adventure merely at being alive and free, even of possessions. No one expected anything of me. I had no obligations, no duties, no tasks. I was nothing but a refugee, someone totally different from the busy young woman I had been.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But who, alas! can love, and then be wise? Not that remorse did not oppose temptation;... A little still she strove, and much repented, And whispering 'I will ne'er consent'Mconsented.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's true we Americans don't know very much about you Japanese and never did. And now I realize you know even less about us. You c...an kill us, all of us or part of us, but if you think that's going to put the fear of God into the United States of America and stop them from sending other flyers to bomb you, you're wrong--dead wrong. They'll come by night, and they'll come by day--thousands of them. They'll blacken your skies and burn your cities to the ground and make you get down on your knees and beg for mercy. You wanted it. You asked for it. You started it. And now you're going to get it. And it won't be finished until your dirty little empire is wiped off the face of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »