““What greater contrast of chiaroscuro is there than that between burning screen and darkened audience? Take any photograph of an intent audience, and it is an image from Fuseli: of pale faces staring out of the night. What medium is so dependent on sensation, with the screen so much larger than life and the constant threat that in a fraction of a second the image we are watching can change unimaginably? And what are the abiding themes of cinema but glamour, sexuality, fear, horror, danger, violence, suspense, averted disaster, true love, self-sacrifice, happy endings, and the wholesale realization of those hopes and anxieties that we are too shy to talk about in the daylight? Why is it dark in cinemas? So that the compulsive force of our involvement may be hidden.””
