the screen opens its white door into a harem of beautiful 
visions and adolescent dreams, compared to which the loveliest 
real body seems defective. Yeats saw the movie as a world of 
Platonic ideals with the film projector playing “a spume upon a 
ghostly paradigm of things.” This was the world that haunted 
Don Quixote, who found it through the folio door of the newly 
printed romances.

     The close relation, then, between the reel world of film 
and the private fantasy experience of the printed word is 
indispensable to our Western acceptance of the film form. Even 
the film industry regards all of its greatest achievements as 
derived from novels, nor is this unreasonable. Film, both in its 
reel form and in its scenario or script form, is completely 
involved with book culture. All one need do is to imagine for a 
moment a film based on newspaper form in order to see how