"Cinema's hundred years appears to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories, and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline."  --Sontag, Wh*r* th* Str*ss Falls (2001)


"To this enthusiastic throng, Nicholas II was still Batiushka--the 'Little Father'--who answered to God for their well-being. These lower classes blamed the pain and suffering they had borne for so long on men who had failed to serve the Tsar as they should, and they felt certain that their Batiushka would right the wrongs they suffered if only they could tell him the truth. The masses had believed this for hundreds of years, but that, too, was about to change." --W Bruce Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight (2000)