The magic of the voice reaches men's secret feelings. He translates historical philosophy into the language of the people. He has the ability to call up long forgotten history and make those who hear him feel as if they had always known about it.
What is worth staging? This question has bothered me ever since I began to think myself, along with the medium, out of existence. If the cinematic pursuit is one toward the capturing of pure-presence, why ever depict a story? What should be left to exposition and what necessitates its fleshing out and staging? Why didn't the mass populace embrace the Ben Jonsons or George Chapmans of the world in the same way as the William Shakespeares? Assuming the historical-collective prefers to watch, of all possibilities in all the culture of the past, entertaining people doing entertaining things... then, what? And why? Normally, this tendency toward populist dramatic-poetic novelty is observed as a massive short-coming of the given society, or sign of its decadence; however, this argument seems to disregard a sweeping trend across time (seen in the commonality between the handful of artists who, by quality alone, act as representatives of their century), attributing to one's taste what may be of nature.
Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is, that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general; whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.' For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the colouring, or some such other cause.
We connect with the frame through the eyes of the characters. Say, as a filmmaker, you have a piece of blurry footage for whatever reason: if the eyes of the actor are fudged to the extent that the spectator can not lock with its gaze, the image is unsuitable for classical dramatic emotional-transference. Although the direction of the gaze eventually moves around the frame to observe finer details of the composition, it is with the eyes of the characters that the gaze always returns to, and ultimately where the strongest view-point of the work is embedded. We lock on from eye-to-eye; close / medium / wide — we make eye contact. What is going on? I notice two things within myself: through the eyes of this other individual I see myself reflected, conjuring a 1) personal association - automatically feeling-up and relating my own experiences, history, and local consciousness / unconsciousness while being moved by my 2) natural empathy (emotional responses to pain and pleasure). The result of a Cinematic experience seems to be the inner sensation of an emotional-temporal symphony, a sculpted wavey-trace of minutely conducted bursts of adrenaline, affirming rhythmic pulses of positivity and negativity relating to my life and world-view, — this, over the course of two hours. What is remembered are impressionistic strokes of sensation, sketches of minutiae, pictograms, sometimes the idea behind the arrangement, and usually never the dialogue. Hitchcock once noted that the film of the future will be a box the individual spectator can hook themselves up to and injected with chosen emotions as they imagine themselves doing anything as anyone.
What's to be made of this?
but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - the Thoughts.
In the end, each image would have mattered and held its significance.
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