Hollywood, fighting to make a difference between reality and fiction

From The New Yorker : fact : content
“I think people can differentiate between a television show and reality.” [says 24 TV show screenwriter]
This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.” [...]

a dreary world

From The Show Off (1926)
Youth, and Louise Brooks’ hard glaze, give this close-up its power.

You talking to me ?

Any idea as to what those two birds are saying to each other ?

Chaplin defeats the Kaiser !

A Night in Casablanca (1947)

Gary Giddins was right (Comedy, Film, Music and Books) when he described the Marx brothers as
grown-ups pretending to be children pretending to be grown-ups
The exhilaration of watching their crazed zaniness in action comes not just from the slapstick and the fun of well-timed gags, but also from the innate optimism. Nothing is impossible, and everything [...]

a silent film as a musical ?

Music, costumes, scenery, dancing, all meshed into a gloriously dreamy whole: this was already a possibility back in 1922.
Another of those pleasing Music Films is at the Rialto, also. It is called “Arabian Duet,” and was produced under the direction of J. F. Leventhal, with a setting by Claude Millard and choreography by Ted Shawn. [...]

it’s the drama, stupid, now as then

We have found out it isn’t necessary for a photodrama to have only one dramatic scene, but each scene must be a drama in itself. The whole picture must be made up of a series of small dramas. This makes the completed drama a mosaic of little ones. Scenes that have no dramatic value in [...]

Rhetorical punctuation and noir films

Detour (1945)
A gripping noir film, talkative at times and a bit unconvincing in the depiction of Roberts’ emprisonment by Vera, but gripping nonetheless. Noir films replace love or power as the driving forces of tragedy, and replace it with the more democratic force of money. Instead of kings, bums and outcasts. Instead of Fate, greenbacks. [...]

putting words on the image

From Harold Lloyd’s Just Neighbors.
The only instance I’ve seen so far of anything at all written on a moving image in silent films is to indicate any noise, sound, usually of non-human origin,, and usually for comic purposes.
For instance in this sequence (where Bebe Daniels is, incidentally, doing a lot of looking at the director [...]

detour (1945)

Identify this road :