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It is with the symbolic meaning of an action, rather than with its actuality in life, that the film is concerned.
If it be granted that a director must employ a professional actor to reproduce gesture, facial expression, and movement when they are important to the meaning of the individual image, let us pass to Rotha's second objection. In making a distinction between the realities of stage and screen he quotes Pudovkin: "The film assembles the elements of reality to build from them a new reality proper to itself; and the laws of time and space that, in the sets and footage of the stage are fixed and fast, are in the film entirely altered." On the stage, that is, an event seems to occur in the same length of time it would occupy in life. The camera, however, only records the significant parts of the event, and so the filmic time is shorter than the real time of the event — or, if cross-reference or repetition for emphasis is necessary, it is longer. The introduction of the theatrical device of acting, says Rotha, brings real time into the film, and so destroys filmic reality. In saying this, he is assuming that if acting is employed the screen time of a particular image will be prolonged so that the acting of an incident may have its full effect. That is an underestimation of acting, which can be instantaneous or prolonged, depending upon the particular effect toward which it is directed. Acting does not vitiate montage. It is only where there is no creative editing that acting, deprived of the meaningful interrelation of images, must compensate for the deficiency by literal representation of the relationships which it is the function of montage to indicate. Rotha's criticism springs from his mistaken belief that all acting must be like that of the stage, where it carries the entire burden of visual representation. Cinematic acting is relieved of that burden, and can concentrate upon contributing to the effect of a particular image, which effect montage relates to the images that come before and after.
Indeed, I have yet to see a film in which untrained type actors have been used with any success in the portrayal of character. Storm Over Asia and Tabu have been upheld as examples of the triumph of montage, but I scarcely think anyone will contend that the characters in these otherwise excellent films were well set forth. To me they seemed bare of all personality, stripped down to the essential characteristics which all human beings possess in common. Pudovkin's Mother, an attempted study of a particular human relationship, created two formless, contradictory personalities whom it is difficult to remember a few months after seeing the film. Pudovkin apparently tried to make up for the deficiencies of his actors by expressing their characters through inanimate objects as much as possible. If it were feasible to build a personality by photographing symbolically all those objects which are intimately and
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