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 »
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent w...ith the prosaic quality of modern life--a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Then he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that ne glect to give the base year from which the growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living--with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people's confidence.... By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wit is often concise and sparkling, compressed into an original pun or metaphor. Brevity is said to be its soul. Humor can be more... leisurely, diffused through a whole story or picture which undertakes to show some of the comic aspects of life. What it devalues may be human nature in general, by showing that certain faults or weaknesses are universal. As such it is kinder and more philosophic than wit which focuses on a certain individual, class, or social group.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 »
Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or some northerly harbor of Labrador,... before he became a schoolteacher a great-uncle painted a big picture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wish I could take back some of the things I said and some of the things I did. But in the bigger picture, I don't feel that it w...as violent and terrible. I feel like it was primarily--obviously not completely--moral, based on a vision that the government should be better, and that people could be better, and that democracy should be real.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My consciousness-raising group is still going on. Every Monday night it meets, somewhere in Greenwich Village, and it drinks a lot... of red wine and eats a lot of cheese. A friend of mine who is in it tells me that at the last meeting, each of the women took her turn to explain, in considerable detail, what she was planning to stuff her Thanksgiving turkey with. I no longer go to the group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to mo...ve. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of di...ssent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Colonel "Bat" Guano: Okay, I'm going to get your money for you. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that ph...one, you know what's going to happen to you? Group Captain Lionel Mandrake: What? Colonel "Bat" Guano: You're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »