Film Culture (1956)

tary shots assume the character of ‘‘adjustments”’ to the medium. Compare the final episode of Pazsan with its Roman episode: the first is in character because it is, so to speak, soaked in the terrible reality of guerilla warfare, while the second fails sufficiently to integrate into the narrative the general situation from which it is drawn. This is its real shortcoming, not the fact that it is a contrived story—a quality which need not impinge on its episodic character. True, Rossellini tries to compensate for the lack of porosity of the Roman story by concluding it with a scene in which the lover is seen waiting in the rain for a bus to take him back to the war, while the paper with the girl’s address—a last reminder of the romance— floats, and dissolves, in a puddle. But this ending is not enough to make the Roman story appear as a genuine episode. The danger of selfcontainment is also illustrated by such “semidocumentaries” as The Men and The Search. As compared with, say, Open City—a very porous episodic film with some sequences which almost look like found stories —, these films reveal their true nature: They are essentially regular feature films in a more or less theatrical vein, the implication being that the documentary material used in them for references to the “world about us’’ never assumes any vital function; rather, it merely setves to increase interest in the story itself and enhance its suspense. d) A framing device 1) Evidence that the episodic is felt to be in keeping with the cinematic approach may be found in occasional attempts to pass off even an avowedly theatrical film as an episode. The device is simple: the whole story is framed by scenes which try to transform it into a real-life incident. Thus The Ideal Husband opens with a scene in Hyde Park in which the film’s main characters just help define the general atmosphere of high life and elegance without however distinguishing themselves as the future protagonists. Then the Wilde comedy, a pure drawing room affair, takes its course. The film concludes with the Hyde Park re-emerging so as to give the impression that the comedy itself was nothing but a sample of goingson in the smart set. Similarly, the opening scenes of Olivier’s Henry V represent the London Globe Theatre, with the audience waiting for the curtain to rise; and the concluding shots again show the Dr. Siegfried Kracauer theatre after the performance is over. In this play Olivier, prompted by his film sense, attempted to make the play appear as a theatrical spectacle which took place on such and such a day in 16-century London. It is as if he expected these framing scenes with their semblance of camera-reality to offset the uncinematic effect of the play's prearranged meanings. (See Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Picture.’’) 2) A striking counter-example is the Italian film Side Street Story which features a group of people in a small and crowded Naples street, casually relating their destinies before, during and after the war. Episode follows episode; and no one would believe this fair semi-documentary with its loosely composed story to be adapted from a stage play were it not for the theatrical character of the framing scenes. At the beginning and end the two protagonists meet each other and _philosophize about the state of the world which in their opinion remains much the same despite war and revolution. Their discussion points up the moral of the film, thus imposing meanings on it which threaten to curtail the inherent multiple meanings of the pictures themselves. Without the framing scenes the film might easily have implied that moral and yet remained an essentially cinematic communication. No sooner are they grafted upon it than it is retransformed into a “whole with a purpose.” No passage from this article may be quoted in print without the author's permission.