Screen Topics

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)

I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere bluer than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. ...I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. ... in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino.
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)

In the motion-picture theater, the screen at rest is a neutral, shadowy blank; at rest, the fish-eye lens of the TV screen mirrors the room over which it presides. In both, the images are luminous, lighted as though from within, but the motion-picture images hover on or just in front of the surface of the screen. The viewer moves toward inclusion; no need for those movie-palace stunts, those three-dimensional experiments when, bicolored glasses in place, we ducked the baseball flung at us or were frozen in our seats by the locomotive that roared out of the screen and over our heads. The TV image, by contrast, recedes into its box and includes us out.
—Don Gifford, U.S. educator, critic. The Farther Shore: A Natural History of Perception, ch. 1, Little Brown (1990)