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 »
The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinerama scre...en tend to narrow it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have crossed the Andes, ascended Tenerife, entered Japan, "done" Niagara and the Thousand Isles, drunk delight of battle with o...ur peers (at shop windows), sat at the councils of the mighty, grown familiar with kings, emperors and queens, prima donnas, pets of the ballet, and "well graced actors." Ghosts have we seen and have not trembled; stood before royalty and have not uncovered; and looked, in short, through a three-inch lens at every single pomp and vanity of this wicked but beautiful world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the motion-picture theater, the screen at rest is a neutral, shadowy blank; at rest, the fish-eye lens of the TV screen mirrors... the room over which it presides. In both, the images are luminous, lighted as though from within, but the motion-picture images hover on or just in front of the surface of the screen. The viewer moves toward inclusion; no need for those movie-palace stunts, those three-dimensional experiments when, bicolored glasses in place, we ducked the baseball flung at us or were frozen in our seats by the locomotive that roared out of the screen and over our heads. The TV image, by contrast, recedes into its box and includes us out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wonder if it's ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens? D'ya suppose it's ethical even if you prove that he... didn't commit a crime? I'm not much on rear window ethics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,... that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dear friend, I will have to sink with hundreds of others... on a dumbwaiter into hell. I will be a light thing. I will enter death like someone's lost optical lens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Carlyle is not a seer, but a brave looker-on and reviewer; not the most free and catholic observer of men and events, for they are... likely to find him preoccupied, but unexpectedly free and catholic when they fall within the focus of his lens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he may ...communicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »