The big question is whether there is an unbridgeable division, even opposition, between the two arts. Is there something genuinely “theatrical,” different in kind from what is genuinely “cinematic”?

Almost all opinion holds that there is. A commonplace of discussion has it that film and theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standards of judgment and canons of form. Thus Erwin Panofsky argues, in his celebrated essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (1934, rewritten in 1946), that one of the criteria for evaluating a movie is its freedom from the impurities of theatricality. To talk about film, one must first define “the basic nature of the medium.” Those who think prescriptively about the nature of live drama, less confident in the future of their art than the cinéphiles in theirs, rarely take a comparably exclusivist line.

It is imperative that we quickly find some way for the level of world understanding to rise to a new human scale. This scale is the world. The risks are the life or death of this world. Man is running the machines of his own invention, while the machine that is man runs the risk of running wild.

The film experience is not necessarily a single rectangle of light and shadow that flickers at one end of a darkened room. Call this “movies” or “cinema”—that archetypal dream world in which the spectator, seated in a near-foetal position, attempts to ignore the physical space, the other spectators, the projector's shifting beam, to concentrate on the images and the sounds that accompany them. Of course, the movies are a film experience—and a theatre experience—but the use of motion pictures is not so limited, and theatre is just beginning to realize the possibilities inherent in film.

For many years, motion pictures have been used as elements in staged drama—epic and “total” theatre, the “living newspaper,” etc. In 1941, Robert Edmund Jones foresaw “in the simultaneous use of the living actor and the talking picture…a wholly new theatrical art, whose possibilities are as infinite as those of speech itself.”

Artistic creation always manifested itself to me as hunger. I acknowledged it with a certain satisfaction, but during my conscious life I never asked myself what caused this craving. In the last few years the hunger has diminished and been transformed into something else; now I am anxious to find out what the reasons for it were. I have an early childhood memory of my desire to show off achievements: proficiency in drawing, playing ball, the first swimstrokes. I had a strong need to draw the grownups' attention to these signs of my presence in the external world. I never felt that people took enough interest in me. When reality was no longer sufficient, I started to invent things; I entertained my friends with tremendous stories of my secret exploits. They were embarrassing lies, which failed hopelessly when confronted with the level-headed scepticism of the world around me.