Activity

I have sometimes found it useful to think of the nature of film by comparing what camera and projection bring to a script with what music brings to a libretto. Whatever the strains of the comparison its point here would be to locate what it is, in any medium that can film, seriously be thought of a…

There is in these closing pages of the play an unfolding of actions amounting to what I should like to call continual poetic justice. The intellectual or spiritual succession of concepts,’ dismantling the doll house, have this quality as certainly as the more obviously Ibsenist gesture in which Nor…

The intimacy of the connection between these excerpts and the themes of the films of remarriage will not, I think, make itself felt unforgettably until one is well into the studies of the individual films; certainly, as I indicated, I did not see the intimacy until I was just about through composin…

What is it about the conversation of just these films that makes it so perfectly satisfy the appetite of talking pictures? Granted the fact, the question can only be answered by consulting the films. Evidently their conversation is the verbal medium in which, for example, questions of human creatio…

[...] Malcolm Cowley, sifting his attentive experience of the period and of its writing, picks out three features for emphasis that our films may be seen to share. The transcendentalist possibility I was noticing seems to be what Cowley calls the period's millennialism, as if under the depression a…