We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
164
CLOSE UP
the greater the power that comes into her hands. In fact she bids to become almost an equal with the discoverer of her attractions, and even the most high handed American regisseur is forced to share his laurels with his stars.
This is true to a lesser degree of the European regisseurs, the Langs and the Rene Clair's; to all but the Russian regisseurs to whom the actor is a part, a rather lesser part, of the collective process of picture making.
The Russian film actor's position, even if he would be a star in any other country, is only of the same importance as the camera and the sound operator. If it be reckoned in eclair he is relatively hardlv more than a small part actor in Hollywood. He is, with few exceptions, a vessel into which the regisseur pours his conception and ruthlessly eliminates all but his own. He is an instrument to be played upon by the imagination of the master; to be moulded into a new entity who, unlike the European film star, mav have passed again into obscurity before the film is ever shown. He is not seen in the terms of an investment, only as a means of interpretation, thus there is no one that can be called a star in the Soviet cinema.
Few Russian films have set the actor in a dominant position ; one simply quotes the name of the regisseur and probablv does not remember the actor's name. Mustapha in Ekk's Road to Life was obviouslv a remarkable actor, but to-day not a single regisseur in Moscow needs him for a picture. He will probably find his way into another profession.
Of all the new Russian films, onlv two, Macherat's Jobs and Men and Vstrechny by Ermler and Utkevitch, both films having a more theatre than film qualitv, are pictures in which the actor is a definite personal entitv giving an individual performance and not an effect created almost entirely by the imagination of the regisseur through montage.
Of all the regisseurs who use the actor as interpreter of their meaning, Pudovkin, I think, is the most thorough. He sees qualities in actors which other regisseurs miss; he will see a simple peasant in an actress who is cast bv all other regisseurs for women of the world.
It is commonly believed that he never uses professional actors. That is not so ; for he will use any human being if he finds in them the qualities he wants and that thev are receptive to his meaning. He seldom works with theatre actors, for he finds that their theatre technique interferes, and cannot help imposing itself upon his conception of reality with an exaggeration of emphasis.
When Pudovkin is preparing a picture he has five assistants who search for suitable types of people. Anywhere and everywhere they look for this human material which he will study for weeks before shooting, talking to for hours and trying to understand their psychology.
" You can't work with someone you don't know," he says. He will then shoot them in a hundred different positions for one small episode.
With this human material, Pudovkin becomes a battery of energy, pouring forth his will, meaning and imagination in a molten stream of words .and gestures. He is transformed from a shv and quiet man into a seething