Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant the room we are sitting in is completely altered; everything in it has taken on another look; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed and the objects are as we conceive them. That is the effect I want to get in my film.
Interpretation
Our perception alters reality, transforming how we perceive our surroundings.
In this quote, Carl Theodor Dreyer illustrates the profound impact that knowledge and perception have on our experience of reality. The idea that merely being informed of a hidden corpse can change our perception of an ordinary room highlights how our minds shape the significance of objects and environments around us, which is a vital principle in filmmaking and storytelling.
In practice
A filmmaker might reference this quote when discussing the importance of atmosphere in creating tension.
Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.
Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.
I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.
Everything of mine is permeated with my love of ideas-both big and small. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it grabs me and holds me, facinates me. And then I'll run out and something about it... I write for fun.
He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity.
I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?
We understand … that what constitutes the dignity of a craft is that it creates a fellowship, that it binds men together and fashions for them a common language.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.