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

ON FILM TECHNIQUE 13 A writer, when he plans out a future work, establishes always a series of, as it were, key-stones, significant to the elucidation of the theme and spread over the whole of the work in preparation. These key-stones, as it were, mark the general outline ; to them belong the elements characteristic of the various persons, the nature of the events that bring these persons together, often the details conditioning the significance and strength of the elements of crescendo and diminuendo, often even just separate incidents selected for their power and expressiveness. Exactly the same process occurs certainly in the work of the scenarist. To consider the action abstractly is impossible. It is impossible to plan merely that at the beginning the hero is an anarchist and then, after meeting with a series of mishaps in his efforts at revolutionary work, becomes a conscious communist. A scheme of this kind is no advance on the theme and brings us no nearer the essential treatment. Not only what happens must be perceived, but also how it happens ; in the work on the action the form must already be sensible. Imagining a reform in the cosmic philosophy of the hero is still very far from creating a climax in the scenario. Before the discovery of a definite concrete form that, in the scenarist's opinion, will affect the spectator from the screen, the abstract idea of a reform has no creative value and cannot serve as a key-stone in the constitution of the action ; but these key-stones are necessary ; they establish the hard skeleton and remove the danger of those blank gaps that may