“Of all internal functions which create the meaning of the world around us, the most central is the attention. The chaos of the surrounding impressions is organized into a real cosmos of experience by our selection of that which is significant and of consequence.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place.”
— Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher)
“A new esthetic cocoon is broken; where will the butterfly's wings carry him?”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”
— Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher)
“Every single picture of the sixteen thousand which are shown to us in one reel ought to be treated with this respect of the pictorial artist for the unity of the forms.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Pictures of Action Intimacy and Splendor are the foundation colors in the photoplay, as red, blue, and yellow are the basis of the rainbow.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“In dancing, rhythm alone is used without 'harmony'; for even dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement.”
— Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher)
“In those twenty thousand theaters which grew from it all human passions and emotions find their stage, and whatever history reports or science demonstrates or imagination invents comes to life on the screen of the picture palace.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“The people still has to learn the great difference between true enjoyment and fleeting pleasure, between real beauty and the mere tickling of the senses.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Realistic and idealistic, practical and romantic, historical and modern topics are fit material for the art of the photoplay. Its world is as unlimited as that of literature, and the same is true of the style of treatment.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“But if every mechanical inventor on earth voiced his dearest wish and lived to see it worked out, the real drama of prophecy and fulfilment, as written in the imagination of the human race, would remain uncompleted.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“Beautiful architectural undertakings, while appearing to be material, and succeeding by the laws of American enterprise, bring with them the healing hand of beauty. Beauty is not directly pious, but does more civilizing in its proper hour than many sermons or laws.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
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