Babies are necessary to grown-ups. A new baby is like the beginning of all things--wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities. In a wo...rld that is cutting down its trees to build highways, losing its earth to concrete ... babies are almost the only remaining link with nature, with the natural world of living things from which we spring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The function of the hero in art is to inspire the reader or spectator to continue in the same spirit from where he, the hero, leav...es off. He must release the spectator's potentiality, for potentiality is the historic force behind nobility. And to do this the hero must be typical of the characters and class who at that time only need to be made aware of their heroic potentiality in order to be able to make their society juster and nobler. Bourgeois culture is no longer capable of producing heroes. On the highbrow level it only produces characters who are embodied consolations for defeat, and on the lowbrow level it produces idols--stars, TV "personalities," pin-ups. The function of the idol is the exact opposite to that of the hero. The idol is self-sufficient; the hero never is. The idol is so superficially desirable, spectacular, witty, happy that he or she merely supplies a context for fantasy and therefore, instead of inspiring, lulls. The idol is based on the appearance of perfection; but never on the striving towards it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christina Bailey: I was just thinking how much you can tell about a person from such simple things. Your car, for instance. M...ike Hammer: Now what kind of message does it send you? Christina: You have only one real, lasting love. Mike: Now who could that be? Christina: You. You're one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. I'll bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The radio ... goes on early in the morning and is listened to at all hours of the day, until nine, ten and often eleven o'clock in... the evening. This is certainly a sign that the grown-ups have infinite patience, but it also means that the power of absorption of their brains is pretty limited, with exceptions, of course--I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. One or two news bulletins would be ample per day! But the old geese, well--I've said my piece!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An editor once said to me, "If I didn't know that you, a woman, had written these poems, I would like your work." And once an edit...or wrote me, "Your poems are dynamic, colorful, exciting, but too strong for a woman."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am parshial to ladies if they are nice[.] I suppose it is my nature. I am not quite a gentleman but you would hardly notice it.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 »
What then is the difference between film and theatre? Or should one not rather ask: what are the differences? Let us be content wi...th the reply that the screen has two dimensions and the stage three, that the screen presents photographs and the stage living actors. All the subtler differences stem from these. The camera can show us all sorts of things--from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies--which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance.... When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures--finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding--we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season's fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell's own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »