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

20 PUDOVKIN has almost reached the express. The preparations for the execution are nearing their end. At the very last moment, when the noose is being laid round the neck of the hero, comes the pardon, attained by the wife at the price of her last energy and effort. The quick changes of scene, the contrasting alternation of the tearing machines with the methodical preparations for the execution of an innocent man, the everincreasing concern of the spectator — " will they be in time, will they be in time ? " — all these compel an intensification of excitement that, being placed at the end, successfully concludes the picture. In the method of Griffith are combined the inner dramatic content of the action and a masterly employment of external effort (dynamic tension). His films can be used as models of correctly contrasted intensification. A working out of the /action of the scenario in which all the lines of behaviour of the various characters are clearly expressed, in which all the major events in which the characters take part are consecutively described, and in which, last but not least, the tension of the action is correctly considered and constructed in such a way that its gradual intensification rises to a climactic end — this, in fine, is a treatment already of considerable value and useful to the director in representation. Written though it may be in purely literary phraseology, such a treatment will provide the libretto, as it were, of the scenario ; and, in the hands of the specialist director, it will be transformable into a working script the more easily the more that orientation on plastic