But are we making things for the people of our epoch or repeating what has been done before? And finally, is the question itself important? We must ask ourselves that. The most important thing is always to doubt the importance of the question.
In attempting to make our study of literature scientific and analytical we have merely made it dull. A Shakespearean play is no cadaver, useful for an autopsy. It is a living, vibrant entity that has the power of grasping us by the hand and leading us up onto a peak in Darien. “But I can’t understand Shakespeare” says the high-school boy. “It takes a gray-bearded professor to know what he is talking about.” You are wrong, Johnny. It’s the gray beard that you can’t understand. He has asked you to read Shakespeare with a pair of glasses smoked to a dull and dingy gray. Take them off. It was written for you, for the groundlings, for the unscholarly Globe patrons who walked in from the cockfight on the street. Only those folks whose blood courses hot through their veins can understand these tingling lines. Shakespeare said everything—brain to belly, every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. Chaucer spun husky, lusty yarns that are today as vivid and as vital and as rousing as a date in a parked coupe. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron sang songs to set your senses a tingle. They spoke for you-not for the pedagogues. They spoke with the tongues of men and of angels, and not to know the cadence of their voices, not to have great snatches of their immortal lines ringing in your ears as you view life’s kaleidoscope is to miss one of life’s major thrills.
For my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect: it’s THE aspect. The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics. It isn’t an art, or at best it’s an art only one minute a day. That minute is terribly crucial, but it occurs very rarely. The only time one is able to exercise control over the film is in the editing. The images by themselves are not sufficient. They’re very important, but they’re only images. What’s essential is the duration of each image and that which follows each image: the whole eloquence of cinema is that it’s achieved in the editing room.
jstn:
Orson Welles talking about the time Winston Churchill showed up at a performance where he’s playing Othello.
I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.
My parents and sister are leaving for Florida tomorrow. They will be visiting Walt Disney World during their time there. Thus, I am begininng what will be a series of posts with links to various related Wikipedia articles. I browse Wikipedia regularly and always find myself reading several related articles. I plan on presenting some of those articles here.
Begin with Orson Welles, then go to Citizen Kane’s studio RKO Pictures. After that, read Alice in Wonderland (1951 film) which was premiered by RKO in London, England. It would then be appropriate to read the Walt Disney article, quickly followed by Walt Disney World and Incidents at Disney parks.
It is important to recall that art surpasses reality.
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
