The Kingdom of Shadows

[ish mailian]

Now when the camera has immersed the audience so closely in a scene
such as this, it can't instantly become objective again. It must
broaden the movement of the scene without loosening the tension.
Verloc gets up and walks round the table, coming so close to the
camera that you feel, if you are sitting in the audience, almost as
though you must move back to make room for him. Then the camera moves
to Sylvia Sidney again, then returns to the subject — the knife.

So you gradually build up the psychological situation, piece by piece,
using the camera to emphasise first one detail, then another. The
point is to draw the audience right inside the situation instead of
leaving them to watch it from outside, from a distance. And you can do
this only by breaking the action up into details and cutting from one
to the other, so that each detail is forced in turn on the attention
of the audience and reveals its psychological meaning. If you played
the whole scene straight through, and simply made a photographic
record of it with the camera always in one position, you would lose
your power over the audience. They would watch the scene without
becoming really involved in it, and you would have no means of
concentrating their attention on those particular visual details which
make them feel what the characters are feeling.

One way of using the camera to give emphasis is the reaction shot. By
the reaction shot I mean any dose-up which illustrates an event by
showing instantly the reaction to it of a person or a group. The door
opens for someone to come in, and before showing who it is you cut to
the expressions of the persons already in the room. Or, while one
person is talking, you keep your camera on someone else who is
listening. This over-running of one person's image with another
person's voice is a method peculiar to the talkies; it is one of the
devices which help the talkies to tell a story faster than a silent
film could tell it, and faster than it could be told on the stage.

Or, again, you can use the camera to give emphasis whenever the
attention of the audience has to be focused for a moment on a certain
player. There is no need for him to raise his voice or move to the
centre of the stage or do anything dramatic. A close-up will do it all
for him — will give him, so to speak, the stage all to himself.

I must say that in recent years I have come to make much less use of
obvious camera devices. I have become more commercially-minded; afraid
that anything at all subtle may be missed. I have learnt from
experience how easily small touches are overlooked.

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 11:11 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. . . . If you only knew how
> strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without
> colour. Everything there-the earth, the trees, the people, the water
> and the air-is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of sun across the
> grey sky grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are
> ashen grey. It is no life but its shadow, it is not motion but its
> soundless spectre. . . . And all this is in a strange silence where no
> rumble of wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech.
> Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always
> accompanies the movements of people.1
>
> I. THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS
>
> WRITING UNDER THE PSEUDONYM "I. M. PACATUS," Maxim Gorky began his
> review of the Lumière program for the 4 July 1896 edition of
> Nizhegorodski listok with these words.
>
>
> http://0-literature.proquest.com.fama.us.es/searchFulltext.do?id=R01720124&divLevel=0&area=abell&forward=critref_ft
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l