In the ancient world and in medieval times, the most popular of all stories were those dealing with The Falls of Princes. With the coming of the very hot print medium, the preference changed to a rising rhythm and to tales of success and sudden elevation in the world. It seemed possible to achieve anything by the new typographic method of minute, uniform segmentation of problems. It was by this method, eventually, that film was made Film was, as a form, the final fulfillment of the great potential of typographic fragmentation. But the electric implosion has now reversed the entire process of expansion by fragmentation. Electricity has brought back the cool, mosaic world of implosion, equilibrium, and stasis. In our electric age, the one-way expansion of the berserk individual on his way to the top now appears as a gruesome image of trampled lives and disrupted harmonies. Such is the subliminal message of the TV mosaic with its total field of simultaneous impulses. Film strip and sequence cannot but bow to this superior power. Our own youngsters have taken the TV message to heart in their beatnik rejection of consumer mores and of the private success story. Since the best way to get to the core of a form is to study its effect in some unfamiliar setting, let us note what President Sukarno of Indonesia announced in 1956 to a large group of Hollywood executives. He said that he regarded them as political radicals and revolutionaries who had greatly hastened political change in the East. What the Orient saw in a Hollywood movie was a world in which all the ordinary people had cars and electric stoves and refrigerators. So the Oriental now regards himself as an ordinary person who has been deprived of the ordinary man's birthright. That is another way of getting a view of the film medium as monster ad for consumer goods. In America this major aspect of film is merely subliminal. Far from regarding our pictures as incentives to mayhem and revolution, we take them as solace and compensation, or as a form of deferred payment by