evanevanevan

"For the first Hollywood film Dadaist I have a few suggestions. For instance, I have always thought that the best way to film a famous novel would be to let the audience read it word for word off the screen; at the end of each chapter a list of suitable questions could be asked to see if the audience was getting it. My suggestion for the most worthwhile newsreel would be one that ran for three hours and consisted solely of horse races—the newsreel people could thus see for themselves how alike one horse race is to another and perhaps see so many of them as to get their fill once and for all...

"...My favorite thirty-second movie would open on an idyllic forest glade, with the faithful little boy—played by Roddy McDowall—nuzzling and petting a gentle collie dog, named Lassie; suddenly the dog would turn on Roddy and bite his head off, and the last scene would show Lassie as she was at the start but Roddy would be without a head. And then there would be an Orson Welles movie in which the camera mucked around on a dark stairway for two hours looking for Welles. I'd like to see a movie in which one never saw the faces of the players, and the idea would be that those people in the audience who could identify the actors from their bodies would be given free tickets to next week's show, in which only the legs of the players were shown; whoever could name the actors this time would be given tickets to a final performance where nothing was shown, and those who could name the actors this time would be made lifelong members of those actors' fan clubs."

- Manny Farber, New Republic, April 17, 1944