“The photoplay can speak the language of the man who has a mind World's Fair size.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“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)
“A new esthetic cocoon is broken; where will the butterfly's wings carry him?”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“As soon as it is grasped that the film play is not simply a mechanical reproduction of another art but is an art of a special kind, it follows that talents of a special kind must be devoted to it and that nobody ought to feel it beneath his artistic dignity to write scenarios in the service of this new art.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Languages when they evolve produce stylists, and we will some day distinguish the different photoplay masters as we now delight in the separate tang of O. Henry and Mark Twain and Howells.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“Nobody can foresee the ways which the new art of the photoplay will open, but everybody ought to recognize even today that it is worth while to help this advance and to make the art of the film a medium for an original creative expression of our time and to mold by it the esthetic instincts of the millions.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play; and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“May it not be, on the contrary, that it does not imitate or replace anything, but is in itself an art as different from that of the theater as the painter's art is different from that of the sculptor?”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry.”
— Aristotle, Poetics (trans. S. H. Butcher)
“We recognized that art is a way to overcome nature and to create out of the chaotic material of the world something entirely new, entirely unreal, which embodies perfect unity and harmony.”
— 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)
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