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.
HISTORY AND FANTASY 89
place, we recognized that, granted the conditions which might make them achievable, they would have assumed just such forms as were cast on the screen. The ghost was thus a 'realistic' one."22 Films in this line, then, adjust the supernatural to the natural instead of alienating the latter. Their spooky ingredients seem well-nigh indistinguishable from those "small moments of material life"23 which Lumiere was the first to capture. Significantly, Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is crowded with quasi-documentary shots which refer to real and unreal happenings alike.
Even though in the long run the spectator will also tire of devices introducing fantasy playfully, he may nevertheless accept them more readily than tricks which establish it as a valid film theme. Presumably the former arouse less inner resistance because of their greater adequacy to the medium.
Device-created dreams in realistic films go beyond stagy ones in that they not only acknowledge the ascendancy of the real world in their capacity of dreams but are actually derived from shots rendering that world. Instead of culminating in nonrealistic imagery, they feature images, however manipulated, of given material phenomena. Most objects and characters in the dreams of The Secrets of a Soul have already appeared in the real-life episodes of this film and do not deny their origin in them. Or take the dying Toulouse-Lautrec's dream-like vision in Moulin Rouge: Chocolat, La Goulue, and the others who now hover, aerial spirits, before his inner eye, radiantly emerging from the dark wall and dancing into nothingness to the muted sounds of Offenbach, are essentially the same figures he so often saw perform when he was still very much alive. To be sure, all these images are processed and/or edited in a manner designed to enhance their dream character, but they practically never transgress camera-reality to such an extent that they would not be identifiable as derived from it. The many ambiguous shots among them which represent "reality of another dimension"— slow-motion pictures, shots from unusual angles, etc.— are as a rule so handled that they recall the natural data from which they are won rather than develop into detached shapes. It is as if the impact of the realistic tendency kept them in the fold.
What holds true of photographic film does of course not apply to animated cartoons. Unlike the former, they are called upon to picture the unreal— that which never happens. In the light of this assumption, Walt Disney's increasing attempts to express fantasy in realistic terms are aesthetically questionable precisely because they comply with the cinematic approach. From his first Mickey Mouse films to Cinderella and