Boom-de-yada

In lieu of, and foreshadowing, other postly content: for the first three weeks of May, I was interning at the National Film and Sound Archive's library in Canberra. It was neat, and I got to help out with a lot of things that needed doing, and inevitably I handled some interesting books (one told you how to build a phonograph! With fold-out diagrams! *science!glee*). Two quotes caught my eye as I sorted through the boxes, and I wrote them down.

The first is from Louis Delluc in 1919, contemplating the fledgeling film industry:

We are assisting at the birth of an extraordinary art which has already found its feet and is destined for future glories. The only modern art, the offspring of the machine and the human ideal.

And the second is from a radio broadcast by King George V from Sandringham on Christmas Day in 1932:

I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all. To men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them.

I despise the word sensawunda (as word, not emotion) but it's voices from the past like these, pointing to the air-borne words and the Frankenstein miracle dancing across the screen, that bring that spark of magic back to the future world for me.