The cinema as a graphic art : on a theory of representation in the cinema (1959)

THE CINEMA AS A GRAPHIC ART as a brilliant achievement of Soviet camera art. " If all films were taken as ' Storm over Mexico ' has been," he said, " I see no necessity for stereoscopic photography" (Figs. 113-115). In Tisse's work the positive influence of the Soviet news-reel is clearly discernible. A second line of development has its beginning in the creative strivings of the young camera-men who were given theoretical training in the Moscow Institute of Cinematography and entered production in the years 1924-25. Educated in the new conditions, these young men were largely free from the traditions of the pre-revolutionary Russian cinema. From the earliest days of their work they were interested in the creative expressive possibilities of the technique of camera-man's work, and tried to find independent methods of representation emancipated from the compositional canons of the pre-revolutionary Russian cinema. Possessing adequate theoretical preparation, but deprived of practical experience, these young men were to overcome the influence of the representatives of the old camera-men's school, and at the same time were to borrow their technical culture. In this struggle for functional creation, for the right to participate actively from beginning to end in the creation of the story-film, a considerable part was played by Anatoli Golovnya, one of the most outstanding camera-men in Soviet cinematography. Golovnya's creative individuality was developed in close collective collaboration with V. I. Pudovkin, jointly with whom Golovnya made such works as " Mother " (Fig. 116), " The End of St. Petersburg ", " Storm over Asia ", and " The Deserter ". It is interesting to note that, as in Tisse's case, so in Golovnya's earliest work his main creative activities took the form of investigations into the con structive form of the shot, into finding the forms of linear composition. In the films " Mother " and " The End of St. Petersburg " this tendency to find expressive foreshortening, to find a viewpoint for the object compelling the spectator to see it anew, to perceive it anew, is clearly evident. The shot of the policeman in " Mother " became a ' classic ' example of one of the possible expressions of monumentalism by means of foreshortening construction. In " The End of St Petersburg " the foreshortenings of the Alexander III monument evoke an ironical attitude towards it. The element of caricature is manifested by the viewpoint, emphasised by the foreshortening, and accented by the limits of the image cut out by the frame. In the Stock Exchange scenes Golovnya shifts the frame limits in relation to the horizontal, and so achieves a stronger feeling of dynamism, based not only on the directly representational movement, but also on the dynamic quality of the compositional forms. The audacious turning round of the crowd the methods of optical deformation, the sharp working up of the texture, all to a large extent broke with and discredited the old conceptions of ' artiness ' in the camera-man's art, and at the same time expressively revealed the idea of the shot, created a new ' view of the object ', and manifested the camera-man's creative attitude towards it. While in Golovnya's earliest work the search for the linear-dimensional form of the shot thrust work with lighting into the background, in " Storm over Asia " the problem of lighting occupied the chief place. His work in this film was mainly directed towards manifesting the texture of the object filmed, and towards special lighting effects, in the creation of which his pictorial experience played no small part. In the attempt to convey local colour he arrived at an understanding of the bases of realistic treatment, as is specially manifested in the representational 196