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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
emptiness and confusion, the fact that its use of disjunct sound was unsuccessful seemed unimportant, but here, at the beginning of tilings, was a warning for all to see that the process of association on which the theory depended could not be strained too far. Pudovkin did strain it too far, and the result was either incomprehension or a completely intellectual effect. It was literally true that Pudovkin's intentions could not be understood by ordinary audiences unless programme notes explained them, and many of his supposedly most brilliant effects impressed the foreign intelligentsia only because they had read about them in advance. The trap into which both Eisen stein and Pudovkin seem to have fallen in their elaboration of the theory of sound is the trap of symbolism — the ' formal-aesthetic ' fault of which their colleagues were soon to accuse them. Actually, Ekk's brief use of disjunct sound in Road to Life was nearer the mark, for he had sought in the scene for some object of occurrence which would express the feeling of the whole, much as Pabst in the silent days summed up a passage by isolating a unit with his camera which would mutely speak his meaning.
The sound-film medium seems to demand such treatment. However defensible in theory, the association of sound and image, or of image and image, cannot become too remote or sophisticated without resulting in a fatal abstraction. The medium does not consist only of composition of material; the material makes demands of its own and refuses wholly to follow the commands of the godlike editor. But all this was not yet apparent.
The case of Pudovkin's flawed masterpiece Deserter (1933) is now well-known. Here, too, his pursuit of sound theories had unequal results, and his choice of subject revealed a conflict and a quandary which was to plague him and his colleagues more and more. Deserter achieved greatness at isolated moments, when the ideas and the material did not bear directly on the problematic nature of the theme. Grierson sums up : ' When you come to consider the continuing theme of the film you will be wise
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