In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
-Alfred Hitchcock
From The creativity workshop
''The theatre of the mind is the brightest, most theatrical space in all of creation."
The theatre of the mind defies the narrow stage definition of time–time man made gives way to time star made and rock made; rain made and earthquake made.
This is a theatre you can dwell in–as actor and audience, both actor and audience–for the rest of your life and for the time before and after your living, before fame money power ambitions and other theatrical delusions came to play upon your mind, to cut it up into apartment complexes, factories, and statement.
The theatre of the mind is collective and individual, invisible and all envisioning, narcissistic and universal, beautiful and ugly and brutal and tender; it is the only theatrical hope/experience that keeps us going back and back, performance after putrid performance;
Here, plot is a trap, character a land mine–you enter one broken being after another, survive one explosion after another; the fragment of you, the audience, that is left is the play to be performed live at that moment in your head in dialogue with the life on stage that night so that each night of theatre of the mind is a thousand nights of theatre, a thousand different plays being performed on stage in the dark cave behind the curtain of audience eyes all at once, each play a different one–the broken bits of humanity that speak therefore to journey like the constellations in the sky. And yet, for the theatre of the mind to thrive we need the living stage to serve as the catalyst and clearing house between minds, engendering a vital, imaginative, ethical community of minds with common foes and goals and most of all a common language, a vocabulary of discourse that does not reduce but expand ad infinitum our possibilities as human beings.
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