Institute History
Description
His first film, I Shot Jesse James, was constructed almost entirely in close-ups of an oppressive intensity the cinema had not experienced since Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Fuller’s script was so compressed that there was no room for even one establishing shot, atmosphere shot, or one dramatically irrelevant scene in which the characters could suggest an everyday existence. the excitement Fuller arouses in critics sensitive to visual forms is equaled by the horror he arouses in critics of the left for the lack of social perspective in his films. It is the artistic force with which his ideas are expressed that makes his career so fascinating to critics who can rise over their political prejudices . . . Fuller belongs to the cinema, and not to literature and sociology.