Words on Pictures

Cinema and the Document "The slow appreciation of the cinema as an art form may be laid at the oversight of dual but compatible functions of all art, of all pictorial productions. While the moving pictures document and record realistically that which we have seen, experienced and heard, nevertheless they are designed and produced under the same basic principles which condition all other types if pictorial composition. Consideration of any film discovers that the amount of story-telling elements and the subjective content is slight when compared to the amount of production craftmanship required to make the finished work. Photography in the moving film form has within its projected image every element of art, merged into a whole by editing, direction and conception of the relations of time sequences of events portrayed, of images moving and the balance of tone, light, sound and shape. And just as other art forms, moving pictures are good sources for facts... All films,

  Words on Pictures: Romana and the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection .  edited by Anthony T. Troncale. New York:  Photo | Verso Publications, LLC , 2020.    ISBN 978-1-7346409-0-8 (hardcover)   Identifiers ISBN    978-1-7346409-1-5 (ebook) An eye for history... [Vaudeville Theater advertising the silent movie Tigris next to the Brill Building at 46 Broadway, Times Square.] c.1913. Yampolsky Collection     Many illustrations found throughout the forthcoming book Words on Pictures are drawn from Romana Javitz's personal collection (cited as the Yampolsky Collection) of prints, photographs and ephemera. Here is an early view of Broadway in Times Square. ca. 1913. Note the Brill Building at right.   ~~~~~ One of the most critical quotes from the 1933 Annual Report to the Director sums up the contributions it provided going into the tumultuous Great Depression. It is only a harbinger to come for future decades of service to its consumers of visual documentati