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

56 PUDOVKIN a thing indispensable, conditioned by the laws of real space and real time, with which the theatrical producer has always to reckon, and which he is never in a position to overstep. In fact, in work with real processes, a whole series of intervals linking the separate significant points of action are unavoidable. If, on the other hand, we consider the work of the film director, then it appears that the active raw material is no other than those pieces of celluloid on which, from various viewpoints, the separate movements of the action have been shot. From nothing but these pieces is created those appearances upon the screen that form the filmic representation of the action shot. And thus the material of the film director consists not of real processes happening in real space and real time, but of those pieces of celluloid on which these processes have been recorded. This celluloid is entirely subject to the will of the director who edits it. He can, in the composition of the filmic form of any given appearance, eliminate all points of interval, and thus concentrate the action in time to the highest degree he may require. This method of temporal concentration, the concentration of action by the elimination of unnecessary points of interval, occurs also, in a more simplified form, in the Theatre. It finds its expression in the construction of a play from acts. The element of play-construction by which several years are made to pass between the first and second act is, properly, an analogous temporal concentration of the action. In the film this method is not only pursued to a