Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Beth Hutchison

Critical Essay by Beth Hutchison

SOURCE: Hutchison, Beth. “Gertrude Stein's Film Scenarios.” Film Literature Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1989): 35-8.

In the following essay, Hutchison contrasts the forms and meanings of A Movie and Film.

In “Portraits and Repetition” [1935], Gertrude Stein related the carefully aggregated details characteristic of her word portraits to the raw material of film, the frame: “In a cinema picture no two pictures are exactly alike each one is just that much different than the one before, and so in those early portraits there was … no repetition” (177). Rather than repetition, a film shot consists of a vast number of almost duplicated images which combine in the memory to create the image of one object persisting through time. Such is the effect of Stein's early portraits; a few simple phrases are repeated, with slight changes, to imply the consistency of basic personal attributes. However, the cinema offered “a continuously moving...
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