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

Record Details:

Title:
Film technique and film acting : the cinema writings of V. I. Pudovkin
Date:
1954
Publisher:
London : Vision Press Limited
Volume:
Film technique and film acting : the cinema writings of V. I. Pudovkin
Leaf #:
00020
Language:
English
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
March 21, 2024
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xiv PUDOVKIN it is fixed in position, in the arranged artistic form. To the film director each shot of the finished film subserves the same purpose as the word to the poet. Hesitating, selecting, rejecting, and taking up again, he stands before the separate takes, and only by conscious artistic composition at this stage are gradually pieced together the " phrases of editing," the incidents and sequences, from which emerges, step by step, the finished creation, the film. The expression that the film is " shot " is entirely false, and should disappear from the language. The film is not shot, but built, built up from the separate strips of celluloid that are its raw material. If a writer requires a word — for example, beech — the single word is only the raw skeleton of a meaning, so to speak, a concept without essence or precision. Only in conjunction with other words, set in the frame of a complex form, does art endow it with life and reality. I open at hazard a book that lies before me and read " the tender green of a young beech " — not very remarkable prose, certainly, but an example that shows fully and clearly the difference between a single word and a word structure, in which the beech is not merely a bare suggestion, but has become part of a definite, literary form. The dead word has been waked to life through art. I claim that every object, taken from a given viewpoint and shown on the screen to spectators, is a dead object, even though it has moved before the camera. The proper movement of an object before