Voices of Film Experience (Jay Leyda)

[Johann]

I went to a book sale today at Trinity College and found a massive book to add to my film book collection: Jay Leyda's
Voices of Film Experience (hardcover, 1977) for 2 bucks!

Leyda is famously known as a film scholar, a man who worked with Sergei Eisenstein and was a champion of directors like Melville. The dust jacket says:
Jay Leyda, a veteran of three years in Soviet film schools and studios, is the English translator of three collections of Eisenstein's theoretical writings. He is the author of several books including FILMS BEGAT FILMS , DIANYING, and KINO. He is the Gottesman Professor at New York University.

Just from flipping through some pages I knew I had to have it.
I think it's out of print, and I've never seen it before. It's thick, with about 550 pages, and I'll review it after I've plowed through it.
It's got everythng: quotes from actors, writers, composers, designers, producers, directors- they all talk about films. From Kubrick to Kurosawa to Orson Welles- everybody of import.

It covers "1894 to the present" (1977) and I can't wait to read it.
I'll be sure to post some interesting factoids from it, stuff that I learn. What a find! And it's in excellent shape for over 30 years old.

[Johann]

Stanley Kubrick: (on 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Every separate element and step was recorded on this history- information as to shooting dates, exposure, mechanical processes, special requirements, and the technicians and departments involved. Figuring ten steps for 200 scenes equals 2,000 steps. It took an incredible number of diagrams , flow charts, and other data to keep everything organized. The system worked.

[Johann]

Jean Renoir: (on The Rules of the Game)

I knew what I was doing. My instinct guided me. My awareness of the danger we were in, enabled me to find the right situations, gave me the right words. I think the film is good. But it is not very difficult to work well when your anxiety acts as a compass, pointing you in the right direction....

[Johann]

William Wyler: (on deep focus)

[with deep focus] I can have action and reaction in the same shot, without having to cut back and forth between individual shots of the characters. This makes for smooth continuity, an almost effortless flow of the scene, much more interesting composition in each shot and lets the spectator look from one to the other character at his own will, do his own thing.

[Johann]

Yazujiro Ozu: (on Floating Weeds)

Miyagawa, the cameraman [on Floating Weeds- 1959] took a lot of trouble and tried a lot of different things in this film, so I began to understand what a color picture is. For example, it is necessary to give the right amount of the right kind of lighting to a certain color in order to prevent it from turning out different from what it looks like to our eye. Therefore, when you try to shoot two different colors with the same amount of lighting, one is destroyed. So you must choose which color you want to be faded. This is what I learned for the first time.

[Johann]

Akira Kurosawa: (on Red Beard)

After finishing SANJURO [1962] I started looking around for something else to do, and quite by accident picked up Red Beard by Shugoro Yamamoto [authour of the Sanjuro novel]. At first I thought that this would make a good script for Horikawa, but as I wrote I got so interested that I knew I would have to direct it myself. The script is quite different from the novel. One of the major characters , the young girl, is not even found in the book. While I was writing, I kept remembering Dostoyevsky and I tried to show the same thing that he showed in the character of Nelly in THE INSULTED AND INJURED.

[Johann]

Robert Altman: (on Nashville)

Sound is supposed to be heard, but words are not necessarily supposed to be heard. I am trying to divorce the audience somewhat from literature and from theater. In those areas it's the words that the character uses that is important. I think in film it's what the character does not say, what you don't hear. Now again, in this film [Nashville-1975] we're using the 8-track sound system and in the theatres we're adding 16 tracks. But we're really going after the simplicity of having audiences hear what they would hear. There's no way to do that with one microphone, or with one guy mixing it there on the set, so we're getting it seperated so we can get the quality we got on California Split-1974

[oscar jubis]

I am enjoying and learning from this thread. Thanks J.

[Johann]

I could post the whole book, it's that great.
But we don't want to be sued here, so just a couple snippets will have to do.

If you can find the book, buy it. It's essential reading to me.
I know for a fact you'd love it Oscar.
For film scholarship it can't be beat.

[Chris Knipp]

The book is out of print, but you can find it for sale. Cheapest price is four dollars US though, so you did get a good deal for two dollars Canadian (which isn't much less nowadays, is it).