Film technique and film acting : the cinema writings of V. I. Pudovkin (1954)

vi FILM TECHNIQUE AND FILM ACTING Asia (1928), were the two pictures which made Pudovkin's reputation in the United States. Mother was not shown in this country until years later, and then only to limited audiences. The End of St. Petersburg was so popular that it had the distinction of being the first Soviet film to appear in Broadway's largest movie theatre, the Roxy. It played there for a number of weeks after an initial two-a-day run at Hammerstein's legitimate theatre — an uncommon event for that day. The End of St. Petersburg dramatized through the eyes of a peasant the social upheaval in St. Petersburg, with a sweep and richness of detail comparable to the best efforts of Griffith and Eisenstein. Its warm human feeling for character, its atmosphere of the Russian countryside, its innumerable satirical touches and its portrait of a bewildered peasant who finally emerges from perplexity to an understanding of his country's upset, were rendered in a quick, staccato style that emphasized the intensity of the period and carried the spectator away by the sheer force and dynamic quality of its filmic construction. Some of the film's sequences were considered so extraordinary cinematically that they have since become celebrated in film history. In the stock exchange sequence for instance, Pudovkin portrayed in extreme close shots the hysteria of the Czarist war profiteers, then cross cut these images to another kind of hysteria — soldiers in battle being mowed down by bursting shells, freezing in dug-outs, killing and being killed. He forced the spectator to draw his own conclusions