Quotes from Peter Wollen

The same theme can be found in Carol Reed's pioneering The Stars Look Down, in which three classic avenue of escape from the working class are posited: crime, football and education.

National culture and national self-expression tend to be self-serving and mythologising (all the more acutely so, perhaps, if foreigners proof even better at mythologising than the locals and drive the locals on to ever-greater feats of self-deception). National culture, by definition, is mythologising, self-serving and at the same time, self-mutilating, designed as it is to focus a group identity by creating shibboleths and stereotypes.

Freed was reportedly asked why he had not shot in Scotland, where the story is set, and said he'd been there and decided against it, because Scotland did not look Scottish enough and anyway, it was too rainy. The Scotland he and Minnelli wanted was a fairy-tale Scotland, distilled from centuries of mythic representation.

The aesthetic discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber.

Photography is motionless and frozen, it has the cryogenic power to preserve objects through time without decay.