"You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie"
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Pollack is drawing a line between two kinds of authorship: stewardship versus invention. Onstage, even the boldest director is tethered to a preexisting artifact - a script with a performance history, a canon, an audience primed to compare your choices against other choices. Theatre is a public conversation with the dead. You can cut, update, subvert, but you are still "doing" Hamlet or Streetcar, working inside a frame that announces itself as inherited.
Film, Pollack implies, doesn’t arrive with that built-in scaffolding. The movie is the artifact. Even when it’s adapted, the camera doesn’t merely interpret; it manufactures the text people will actually encounter. The subtext is a quiet defense of the director’s centrality in cinema: in theatre, the playwright’s authority can feel gravitational; in film, the director (and the whole production apparatus) becomes the primary authorial force, because the final object is fixed, repeatable, and widely distributed. A stage production evaporates nightly and lives as reputation. A film hardens into the version.
Context matters: Pollack came up in an era when Hollywood was renegotiating power between studios, stars, and the so-called auteur director. His own work balances prestige craft with mass accessibility, and this distinction flatters the filmmaker’s role as builder, not caretaker. It also hints at cinema’s modern anxiety: because film creates the definitive edition, it bears a heavier responsibility. You don’t just comment on culture; you mint it.
Film, Pollack implies, doesn’t arrive with that built-in scaffolding. The movie is the artifact. Even when it’s adapted, the camera doesn’t merely interpret; it manufactures the text people will actually encounter. The subtext is a quiet defense of the director’s centrality in cinema: in theatre, the playwright’s authority can feel gravitational; in film, the director (and the whole production apparatus) becomes the primary authorial force, because the final object is fixed, repeatable, and widely distributed. A stage production evaporates nightly and lives as reputation. A film hardens into the version.
Context matters: Pollack came up in an era when Hollywood was renegotiating power between studios, stars, and the so-called auteur director. His own work balances prestige craft with mass accessibility, and this distinction flatters the filmmaker’s role as builder, not caretaker. It also hints at cinema’s modern anxiety: because film creates the definitive edition, it bears a heavier responsibility. You don’t just comment on culture; you mint it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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