- Narrator: From the start, American films seduced audiences around the world with their visual panache. They drew on America's rambunctious spirit and its notion that there'd always be a new frontier.
- Narrator: The machine age had already brought us the electric light, the automobile, and the drinking straw. Then, inventors in America and Europe came up with the most captivating machine yet: the movie camera. Or, was it a machine at all? The great American director Sam Peckinpah said, "You're not going to tell me the camera is a machine. It is the most marvelous piece of divinity ever created.
- Kevin Brownlow: Well, silent film is very poetic. Half the time they don't need the titles. It's so - so - expressive.
- Narrator: They called themselves cameramen and they were a fraternity of light. Through their eyes the world opened up to us. They brought us closer to the face of drama.
- Leonard Maltin: And then comes sound. And all of that beauty and all of the luster of those late silent films *vanishes*, as if, a meat cleaver has been, you know, whacked down - mercilessly on an art form.
- John Bailey: People refer to Beethoven's 7th Symphony, highly rhythmic, even for Beethoven, highly rhythmic - as the apotheosis of the dance. In a way, you can say that "Citizen Kane" is the apotheosis of cinematography. One of the reasons it's so revered is virtually cinematographers worldwide see in that film this incredible sort of vibrant, exciting use of lighting, camera movement, composition. Here is the essence of it: none of this stands alone. This was the great gift of Toland. And, no matter what he did, it was always deeply imbedded in the sense of character, drama, and narrative.