The Kingdom of Shadows

[ish mailian]

forget to post the link, but here it is:
http://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Sight_and_Sound_(1937)_-_My_Own_Methods


On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 2:40 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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