sloth unleashed

Isuzu Yamada in Throne of Blood (1957, dir. Akira Kurosawa)

“Out, damn’d spot! out, I say! What need we fear who knows it when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

(via)

On the Lolita set, Stanley Kubrick cranes his neck behind Sue Lyon’s back to watch James Mason’s performance from the same angle as the camera (1961, via)

“The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book’s psychological content, will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.

…People have asked me how it is possible to make a film out of Lolita when so much of the quality of the book depends on Nabokov’s prose style. But to take the prose style as any more than just a part of a great book is simply misunderstanding just what a great book is. Of course, the quality of the writing is one of the elements that make a novel great. But this quality is a result of the quality of the writer’s obsession with his subject, with a theme and a concept and a view of life and an understanding of character.

Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the beholder in order to convey to him his feelings and emotions and thoughts. These are what have to be dramatised, not the style. The dramatising has to find a style of its own, as it will do if it really grasps the content.”

-excerpted from Kubrick’s essay “Words and Movies” (Sight & Sound, 1960-61)

Gregory Peck & Mary Badham in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, dir. Robert Mulligan)

“I put everything I had into it – all my feelings and everything I’d learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.”

-Peck (1989) (via)

Josette Day in Beauty and the Beast (1946, dir. Jean Cocteau)

Catherine Hessling in publicity still for Nana (1926, dir. Jean Renoir) (via)

“She is a girl descended from four or five generations of drunkards, her blood tainted by an accumulated inheritance of poverty and drink, which in her case had taken the form of a nervous derangement of the sexual instinct. She had grown up in the slums, in the gutters of Paris; and now, tall and beautiful, and as well made as a plant nurtured on a dungheap, she was avenging the paupers and outcasts of whom she was the product.

With her, the rottenness that was allowed to ferment among the lower classes was rising to the surface and rotting the aristocracy. She had become a force of nature, a ferment of destruction, unwittingly corrupting and disorganizing Paris between her snow-white thighs.”

-Emile Zola, Nana (1880)

Robert Blake, John Forsythe, and Scott Wilson in In Cold Blood (1967, dir. Richard Brooks) Photo by Phil Stern.

“Although none of the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.”

-Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)