“The theater has both depth and motion, without any subjective help; the screen has them and yet lacks them. We see things distant and moving, but we furnish to them more than we receive; we create the depth and the continuity through our mental mechanism.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.”
— Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher)
“the photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely, space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“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)
“Whatever in nature or in social life interests the human understanding or human curiosity comes to the mind of the spectator with an incomparable intensity when not a lifeless photograph but a moving picture brings it to the screen.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“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)
“Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Humble Remonstrance (in Memories and Portraits) (1884)
“The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
The Salon library
This is today’s sample of twelve. The whole collection is in the Salon.
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