Time & Perspective Quote by Conrad Hall

Cinema’s power is hiding in Hall’s casual math. “Billions” isn’t poetry; it’s a scale model of modern persuasion. By calling film history “short,” he compresses a century into a blink, making the medium feel less like an art form that slowly earned legitimacy and more like a technology that rapidly colonized the imagination. The subtext is a cinematographer’s quiet warning: movies don’t merely entertain; they train the eye, and the eye trains the mind.

Hall isn’t talking about influence as a vague vibe. Coming from the person responsible for how stories look, “seen” is doing double duty. It points to the literal act of viewing, but also to the way movies author our visual vocabulary: what heroism should be lit like, how desire is framed, which faces get softened, which streets get made menacing. Influence happens at the level of technique - the grammar of close-ups, shadows, pacing - before it ever reaches the level of message.

The context matters. Hall’s career runs through the late studio era into New Hollywood and prestige Oscar culture, when cinematography became a brand of seriousness and films increasingly competed with television’s reach. His remark reads like an artist defending the stakes of craft: if billions are absorbing these images, then lighting a face or choosing a lens isn’t “aesthetic.” It’s ethical. Movies are one of the few mass experiences that feel intimate, and Hall is reminding us that intimacy scales.