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

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7o PUDOVKIN properties peculiar only to the film. Even while being shot, a film must be thought of already as an editable sequence of separate pieces of celluloid. The filmic form is never identical with the real appearance, but only similar to it. When the director establishes the content and sequence of the separate elements that he is to combine later to filmic form, he must calculate exactly not only the content, but the length of each piece, or, in other words, he must regard it as an element of filmic space and filmic time. Let us suppose that before us lie, haphazard on the table, those separate pieces of material that were shot to represent that scene of the motor-car accident described above. The essential thing is to unite these pieces and to join them into one long strip of film. Naturally we can join them in any desired order. Let us imagine an intentionally absurd order — for example, the following : Beginning with the shot of the motor-car, we cut into the middle of it the legs of the man run over, then the man crossing the street, and finally the face of the chauffeur. The result is a senseless medley of pieces that produces in the spectator an impression of chaos. And rational order will only be brought into the alternation of pieces when they are at least conditioned by that sequence with which a chance observer would have been able to let his glance and attention wander from object to object ; only then will relation appear between the pieces, and their combination, having received organic unity, be effective on the screen. But it is not sufficient that