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THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PHYSICAL EXISTENCE 57
objects, that were our companions in a pupa state. The most familiar, that which continues to condition our involuntary reactions and spontaneous impulses, is thus made to appear as the most alien. If we find these obsolete sights funny, we respond to them also with emotions which range from fright at the sudden emergence of our intimate being to nostalgic melancholy over the inexorable passing of time. Numerous films— among them Clair's The Italian Straw Hat and Les Deux Timides, and many a mystery drama laid in the Victorian era— draw on the incomparable spell of those near and faraway days which mark the border region between the present and the past. Beyond it the realm of history begins.
Phenomena overwhelming consciousness
Elemental catastrophes, the atrocities of war, acts of violence and terror, sexual debauchery, and death are events which tend to overwhelm consciousness. In any case, they call forth excitements and agonies bound to thwart detached observation. No one witnessing such an event, let alone playing an active part in it, should therefore be expected accurately to account for what he has seen.30 Since these manifestations of crude nature, human or otherwise, fall into the area of physical reality, they range all the more among the cinematic subjects. Only the camera is able to represent them without distortion.
Actually the medium has always shown a predilection for events of this type. There is practically no newsreel that would not indulge in the ravages of an inundation, a hurricane, an airplane crash, or whatever catastrophe happens to be at hand. The same applies to feature films. One of the first film strips ever made was The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895); the executioner cuts off her head and then holds it in his uplifted hand so that no spectator can possibly avoid looking at the frightful exhibit. Pornographic motifs also emerged at a very early date. The path of the cinema is beset with films reveling in disasters and nightmarish incidents. Suffice it to pick out, at random, the war horrors in Dovzhenko's Arsenal and Pabst's Westfront 1918; the terrible execution sequence at the end of Thunder over Mexico, a film based on Eisenstein's Mexican material; the earthquake in San Francisco; the torture episode in Rossellini's Open City; the depiction of a Polish Nazi concentration camp in The Last Stop; the scene with the young hoodlums wantonly mistreating a legless cripple in Bunuel's Los Olvidados. [Illus.
Because of its sustained concern with all that is dreadful and off limits, the medium has frequently been accused of a penchant for cheap