“We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience … in life, too, changes and transitions flash before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.”
Leo Tolstoy discussing cinema with Isaak Teneromo in August 1908, as reported in the New York Times on January 31st 1937.
The article also reports that Tolstoy was planning to write “a play for the screen” likely to have “a terrible and bloody theme.”
I really rather wish Tolstoy had written a horror film - and that he could have lived to see Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari. He would have loved it.
(quote via confusionis - my notes)
(via byronic)
