The Quotable Viktor Shklovsky

From Literature and Cinematography, originally written in 1923:

The poetics of the motion picture is a poetics of pure plot.

Blessed are the lowly ones in the history of art, for theirs is the kingdom of the future.

To my horror, I have discovered abroad that in America the film industry is the third-largest industry, exceeded only by metallurgy and textiles.

An image is like a parallelism with its first part suppressed. . . . A riddle is a parallelism with the first part of the parallel omitted and with the possibility of several substitutions.

The film script has turned both toward popular comedy, with its stock characters, and toward the adventure novel, with its highly developed use of "delaying elements," with its wide range of casualties, drownings, desert islands, and other tricks, which resemble, above all, the devices of the Greek adventure novel.

Thus in Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina the Karenin-Vronsky group is opposed to the Kitty-Levin group. All of the above gave Tolstoy the right to declare that "he had no use for the clever darlings who fished individual thoughts out of the work" and that "if I wanted to say in a word everything that the novel wanted to express, then I would have had to write the same novel I wrote in the first place; and if the critics now understand it already, and if they can express in a topical satire the same thing I wanted to say in my novel, then I congratulate them and boldly assert that they are capable of creating things that are greater than those I myself can create."

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