Criticism
Aljean Harmetz states that, "Curtiz's vision of any movie... was almost totally a visual one", and quotes him as saying, "Who cares about character? I make it go so fast nobody notices".
Sidney Rosenzweig argues that Curtiz did have his own distinctive style, which was in place by the time of his move to America: "high crane shots to establish a story's environment; unusual camera angles and complex compositions in which characters are often framed by physical objects; much camera movement; subjective shots, in which the camera becomes the character's eye; and high contrast lighting with pools of shadows". This style was not purely visual, but had the effect of highlighting the character's relationship to his environment; often this environment was identified with the fate in which the character was trapped. This entrapment then forces the "morally divided" protagonist to make a moral choice. While Rosenzweig accepts that almost every film involves such moral dilemmas to some extent, it is Curtiz's directorial decisions which place the element center stage in his films, albeit at an emotional rather than an intellectual level.
Read more about this topic: Michael Curtiz
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)