The cinema : 1952 (1952)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

Great Expectations DAVID LEAN TALKS TO ROGER MANVELL What we were trying to do in Great Expectations was to create in the film that larger-than-life picture which is really most characteristic of Dickens' kind of writing. The scenes of the boy Pip lying terrified in his bedroom after a night of fear, creeping downstairs at dawn and then stealing the food for the convicts out on the moors was something Dickens wrote as if he were right inside the boy himself. We tried in the film to make the audience share Pip's fear. If we hadn't done this, we should have been faced with quite a different problem — making the audience accept what is really a pretty exaggerated piece of melodrama. They might easily have found the convicts and their fustian dialogue just funny instead of terrifying, if we had not built up the fear in the audience at the same time as we did in the boy — first of all, of course, with the sheer physical shock when Pip suddenly collides with the convict in the churchyard at the beginning of the film and hears the horrifying threats in his throaty voice. From then on we made everything larger than life, as it is in a boy's imagination. We made the audience share Pip's own exaggerated experiences. Dickens describes the voices which Pip imagines accusing him of horrible crimes ; they seem to come from the hare hung head downwards in the back of the larder cupboard and even from the munching cows in the misty fields. They are not, of course, meant to come from them really ; they are in Pip's imagination. Some people got this wrong when they saw the film : the cows stare and chew, but they do not actually speak ! Then later, when Pip meets the convicts and gives them the food, we share his fear of these fearful creatures. They are not like real men, they are figures of terror out of some childish nightmare. In the later scene in the kitchen when Pip is back home surrounded by the grown-ups, we tried to dwarf him as much as