An Infernal Machine

[dreamer_easy]

From Christopher Isherwood's adventure in filmmaking, Prater Violet:

"'Do you know what the film is?' Bergmann cupped his hands, lovingly, as if around an exquisite flower. 'The film is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion it revolves with an enormous dynamism. It cannot pause. It cannot apologize. It cannot retract anything. It cannot wait for you to understand it. It cannot explain itself. It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion.'"

At first, I thought director Friedrich Bergmann was talking about the process of film-making; but a couple of pages later, Isherwood paraphrases this speech when talking about how, unlike a story in a book where you can stop and re-read and so forth, the story in a film proceeds relentlessly. What a huge change the pause button has made to that!

Comments

re:Prater Violet

[ext-1767238.livejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

I recently saw the film whose making inspired this novel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qnId3dI56Y

David Cairns wrote about it here

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-suffer-the-little-children

It's rather beautiful. Friedrich Bergmann/Berthold Viertel is very underrated director.