Don’t get the idea that the private affairs of your contemporaries are any special concern of mine, nor that I enjoy gossiping about other people’s doings. What I should like, however, is to be able to extend my friendship or my love to people I do not know, will never know, do not wish to know. Their name, age, tastes don’t matter to me. Try to understand me. For me, they cannot just be human creatures like others.
There is the photograph between us. […]The day photography was born humanity won a precious victory over time, its most redoubtable enemy.
Carlo Rim, On the Snapshot (1930). Quoted in The Cinematic from MIT Press.
Month: April 2008
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Dont Get the Idea That the Private Affairs of
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It Was As if This Word Signifying an Abrupt
It was as if this word, signifying an abrupt change in space and time, also initiated another kind of vision that would be necessary to see, to read what was to follow. One needed to follow these images not merely chronologically, but associatively. SUDDENLY, one’s whole notion of spatial and temporal continuity was shattered. Eisenstein’s purposeful combination of events that were happening successively and simultaneously forces the spectator to construct another time frame: one which is bound by the limits of the film and not by the always doomed attempt to mimic real life. Michael Tarantino, A Few Brief Moments of Cinematic Time (1999). Quoted in The Cinematic, from MIT Press.