Daily Inspiration Quote by Bruce Beresford

Beresford’s line isn’t nostalgia for silent cinema so much as a brisk demystification of it. He sketches early film grammar as theater with a lens: the camera “put down” like a piece of furniture, actors dutifully filing past it, the scene beginning and ending with entrances and exits. The plainness of the description is the point. It quietly punctures the romantic idea that silent movies were inherently more “pure” or “artful,” reminding you that a lot of it was logistical habit and inherited stage convention.

The kicker is his casual treatment of “cutting” as a rarity. Editing is where cinema declares independence from theater: time can be compressed, space can be re-mapped, attention can be steered. By framing cutting as “quite infrequent,” Beresford points to an era before that power was widely understood or widely trusted. The subtext is about craft evolution: what we now experience as invisible, essential grammar (coverage, continuity, montage, reaction shots) had to be invented against an instinct to simply record performance.

There’s also a director’s edge in the phrasing. “Everybody walked” makes actors sound like traffic, emphasizing blocking over psychology. It’s Beresford defending modern direction - not as flashy technique for its own sake, but as a hard-won language that lets film do what theater can’t. The intent is less to dunk on the past than to underline how radical the cut really was: the moment movies stopped documenting and started thinking.