No man worth his salt, no man of spirit and spine, no man for whom I could have any respect, could rejoice in the identification o...f Tallulah's husband. It's tough enough to be bogged down in a legend. It would be even tougher to marry one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The advantage man enjoys, which makes itself felt from his childhood, is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter... to his destiny as a male. Through his identification of phallus and transcendence, it turns out that his social and spiritual successes endow him with a virile prestige. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of woman that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a sovereign subject. It is this conflict that especially marks the situation of the emancipated woman. She refuses to confine herself to her role as female, because she will not accept mutilation; but it would also be a mutilation to repudiate her sex. Man is a human being with sexuality; woman is a complete individual, equal to the male, only if she too is a human being with sexuality. To renounce her femininity is to renounce a part of her humanity.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 »
When we lose love, we lose also our identification with the universe and with eternal values--an identification which alone makes ...it possible for us to lay our lives on the altar for what we believe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Introspection is self-improvement and therefore introspection is self-centeredness. Awareness is not self-improvement. On the cont...rary, it is the ending of the self, of the "I," with all its peculiar idiosyncrasies, memories, demands, and pursuits. In introspection there is identification and condemnation. In awareness there is no condemnation or identification; therefore, there is no self-improvement. There is a vast difference between the two.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The majority of Black Americans are unaware of the complexity of the meaning of Israel to American Jews. But, ironically, Afro-Zio...nists have as an intense an emotional identification with Africa and with the Third World as American Jews have with Israel. Doubly ironic, this same intensity of identification with a "Motherland" seems rooted in the mythologies common to both groups. In this special sense--in the spiritual sense implied by "Zion" and "Diaspora" and "Promised Land"MBlack Americans are America's Jews. But given the isolation of Black Americans from any meaningful association with Africa, extensions of the mythology would be futile. We have no distant homeland preparing an ingathering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the theater the audience is generally riveted to a single angle of observation. The movie director, though, can rapidly shift f...rom objective to subjective--and to any number of subjective points of view--and in so doing seem to pull the audience directly inside the frame of his picture, giving the spectator the sense of experiencing an action from the viewpoint of a participant. Identification of the viewer with the film character, then, can be much more intimate than the analogous situation in the theater.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 »
The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a... repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »