Listening to Thelonious Monk play I Surrender, Dear, or listening to Cecil Taylor play one of his own compositions, we are concern...ed with the struggle of the performer against the predetermined nature of his medium (the theme, the chord structure, etc.). Like jazz performance, film acting is improvisatory, on an almost metaphysical level. In the drama, the aim of performance is to achieve a kind of psychophysical translucence, whereby the potencies imagined by the author of the drama "shine through" the immitigable fasciculate of presence-on-the-stage. In film, however, the dramatic text is--rightly--only a pre-text for its eruption into the moving figures, the absurd images, who are not really there but whom the film, at the height of its artifice, can convince us do exist in their own lucid fasciculate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern & his undersea folk. At 11, Let's Pretend/& we did/& I, the poet, still do, Than...k God!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 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 »
I devoutly believe it is the writer who has matured the film medium more than anyone else in Hollywood. Even when he knew nothing ...about his work, he brought at least knowledge of life and a more grown-up mind, a maturer feeling about the human being.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 »
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 »
My time has been passed viciously and agreeably; at thirty-one so few years months days hours or minutes remain that "Carpe Diem" ...is not enough. I have been obliged to crop even the seconds--for who can trust to tomorrow?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't know why one can't chase two rabbits at the same time, even in the literal sense of those words. If you have the hounds, g...o ahead and pursue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »