Welles the Optimist

(from The Poetics of Cinema)

Orson Welles used to ask, "Why work so hard, if only to fabricate others' dreams?" He was an optimist and believed that the industry could dream.  Accepting his postulate would mean confusing dreams with calculated, profit-hungry mythomania. Let's be much more optimistic: even if the industry perfects itself (in its tendencies toward control), it will never be able to take over the space of uncertainty and polysemia that is essential to images - the possibility of transmitting a private world in a present time that is host to multiple pasts and futures.