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"Excuse me, but haven't they yet discovered a way of making the camera go by itself?"

I can still see that gentleman's face; delicate, pale, with thin, fair hair; keen, blue eyes; a pointed, yellowish beard, behind which there lurked a faint smile, that tried to appear timid and polite, but was …

I study people in their most ordinary occupations, to see if I can succeed in discovering in others what I feel that I myself lack in everything that I do: the certainty that they understand what they are doing.

At first sight it does indeed seem as though many of them had this certainty, from t…

[...] Pirandello's comments on film in Shoot! played an important role in Walter Benjamin's influential discussion of cinema in "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility," published in 1936, with Benjamin emphasizing that the passing time and even the transition to sound film h…

The operation of the camera supplied Pirandello with an image for a new detachment from life as it unfolds before one. Gubbio watches, observes, records, but remains unmoved by the dramas enacted before him. This professional attitude becomes a model for his behavior in all situations, extending to…

CALCIUM CALCULATES. HIS chalkboard filled with mathematical scribbles and chemical equations, he ponders. He paces. He stares out a still-standing window frame at his ruined town. He plays his burnt violin. Unearthly music. Modern Phrygian mode, I’m guessing. He goes back to the board. He practices…