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 »
Today's parents have little authority over those others with whom they share the task of raising their children. On the contrary, ...most parents deal with those others from a position of inferiority or helplessness. Teacher, doctors, social workers, or television producers possess more status than most parents.... As a result, the parent today is ... a maestro trying to conduct an orchestra of players who have never met and who play from a multitude of different scores, each in a notation the conductor cannot read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the inclusive mesh of the TV image, in particular, that spells for a while at least, the doom of baseball. For baseball is a... game of one-thing-at-a-time, fixed positions and visibly delegated specialist jobs such as belonged to the now passing mechanical age, with its fragmented tasks and its staff and line in management organization. TV, as the very image of the new corporate and participant way of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social interdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball, with its specialist and positional stress. When cultures change, so do games. Baseball, that had become the elegant abstract image of industrial society living by split-second timing, has in the new TV decade lost its psychic and social relevance for our new way of life. The ball game has been dislodged from the social center and been conveyed to the periphery of American life. In contrast, American football is nonpositional, and any or all of the players can switch to any role during play. It is, therefore, a game that at the present is supplanting baseball in general acceptance. It agrees very well with the new needs of decentralized team play in the electric age.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"In the cinema, one extracts the thought from the image," Andre Levinson observed over forty years ago, "in literature, the image ...from the thought." Inasmuch as the image comes first on the screen, the film is a more economical medium than the page. Whereas a film-maker can encompass an entire business office in a single frame, a novelist is limited to the piecemeal notation of each person and object in that office. "On paper all you can do is say something happened, and if you say it well enough the reader believes you," John Huston remarked once. "In pictures, if you do it right, the thing happens, right there on the screen."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinit...esimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »