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 »
The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it... to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gaze implies a concentration of the spectator's activity into that of looking, the glance implies that no extraordinary effort... is being invested in the activity of looking. The very terms we habitually use to designate the person who watches TV or the cinema screen tend to indicate this difference. The cinema-looker is a spectator: caught by the projection yet separate from its illusion. The TV looker is a viewer, casting a lazy eye over proceedings, keeping an eye on events, or, as the slightly archaic designation had it, "looking in."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those ...of the film.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no one kind of thing that we 'perceive' but many different kinds, the number being reducible if at all by scientific inve...stigation and not by philosophy: pens are in many ways though not in all ways unlike rainbows, which are in many ways though not in all ways unlike after-images, which in turn are in many ways but not in all ways unlike pictures on the cinema-screen--and so on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our lif...e story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One should speak of television's cold light, and why it is inoffensive to the imagination (including the imagination of children).... It is innocuous because it no longer conveys an imaginary, for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. Here it contrasts with the cinema which (though increasingly contaminated by television) is still endowed with an intense imaginary--because it is an image. This is not simply to speak of film as a mere screen or visual form, but as a myth, something that still resembles a double, a mirror, a fantasy, a dream, etc. None of this is in the TV image. It doesn't suggest anything, it mesmerizes.... It is only a screen or, better, it is a miniaturized terminal that immediately appears in your head (you are the screen and the television is watching you), transistorizes all your neurons and passes for a magnetic tape--a tape, not an image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its... own special columns in the newspapers--and in people's minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the seas...on they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or ...the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »