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

ON FILM TECHNIQUE xvii a reality quite other than that produced by the posing of an actor, which nearly always smacks of Theatre. In my earlier film, Mother, I tried to affect the spectators, not by the psychological performances of an actor, but by plastic synthesis through editing. The son sits in prison. Suddenly, passed in to him surreptitiously, he receives a note that next day he is to be set free. The problem was the expression, filmically, of his joy. The photographing of a face lighting up with joy would have been flat and void of effect. I show, therefore, the nervous play of his hands and a big close-up of the lower half of his face, the corners of the smile. These shots I cut in with other and varied material — shots of a brook, swollen with the rapid flow of spring, of the play of sunlight broken on the water, birds splashing in the village pond, and finally a laughing child. By the junction of these components our expression of " prisoner's joy " takes shape. I do not know how the spectators reacted to my experiment — I myself have always been deeply convinced of its force. Cinematography advances with rapid stride. Its possibilities are inexhaustible. But it must not be forgotten that its path to a real art will be found only when it has been freed from the dictates of an artform foreign to it — that is, the Theatre. Cinematography stands now upon the threshold of its own methods. The effort to affect from the screen the feelings and ideas of the public by means of editing is of