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 »
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed o...n film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No sacrifice was too great to get the film right, to get it accurate, true, and perfect. We weren't important in our minds; only t...he picture was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Popular cinema cooperates with desire for reverie rather than opposing it. This is why mass-audience movies are so conscious of ge...nre formulas. A formula--the formula for romance, for example, or thrillers or westerns--is something predictable. If it is made sufficiently obvious through advance advertising and the use of identifying motifs in the introductory scenes of the movie itself, the audience can settle immediately into its reverie, secure in the knowledge that there will be no surprises. Nothing will happen that will require conscious mental effort. The art film, it should be admitted, attempts to move in just the opposite direction--to awaken and shock and engage the audience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consider the relationship of Hollywood and Broadway. In the twenties, the two were sharply differentiated, movies being produced f...or the masses of the hinterland, theatre for an upper-class New York audience. The theatre was High Culture, mostly of the Academic variety (Theatre Guild) but with some spark of Avant-garde fire (the "little" or "experimental" theatre movement). The movies were definitely Mass Culture, mostly very bad but with some leaven of Avant-gardism (Griffiths, Stroheim) and Folk Art (Chaplin and other comedians). With the sound film, Broadway and Hollywood drew closer together. Plays are now produced mainly to sell the movie rights, with many being directly financed by the film companies. The merger has standardized the theatre to such an extent that even the early Theatre Guild seems vital in retrospect, while hardly a trace of the "experimental" theatre is left. And what have the movies gained? They are more sophisticated, the acting is subtler, the sets in better taste. But they too have become standardized: they are never as awful as they often were in the old days, but they are never as good either. They are better entertainment and worse art.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 »
Since film is first visual, and then perhaps laden with intellectual content, the art form it most nearly seems to resemble is pai...nting. But since movies are moving pictures, perhaps sculpture is a better analogy or, since objects are perceived as moving in three dimensions, maybe architecture is better still.... If movies end as architectural objects in motion, they begin as construction projects. Making a movie is more like constructing a building on a vacant lot than like writing a book. The literary property is the lot. The movie is the building. The screenwriter is the architect, the director is the contractor, and the producer is theoretically the owner. The major studio (if one is involved) can represent the lending institution, the equity partner, and/or the leasing agent for the finished building. The artist, if we need to believe one is involved, is likely to be the lawyer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In movies about women, all important historical and natural events are translated into the terms of a woman's daily life. World Wa...r I is not about the Allies versus the Kaiser. It's about how unmarried women become pregnant when they have sex. The Depression is not about an economic collapse. It's about runs in stockings, no money for carfare, and being forced out into the streets. Natural disasters like earthquakes and cholera epidemics are defined by miscarriages and dying children. Everything is couched in terms of what are presumed to be the major events of a woman's life: men, marriage, motherhood, and all the usual "feminine" things. At the same time that big events are made small, personal, small events are made huge.... Thus, the woman's film is a genre that generously empowers a sex that society has relegated to secondary status.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The woman's world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what ...the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the movie woman's world is designed to remind us that a woman may live in a mansion, an apartment, or a yurt, but it's all the... same thing because what she really lives in is the body of a woman, and that body is allowed to occupy space only according to the dictates of polite society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »