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

82 FILM ACTING record can be cut and edited, more — on occasion must be cut and edited.1 Let us consider, for example, the pauses that separate from one another separate significant moments in the speech of one or several actors. Not always can these pauses be recorded in reality. Consider an instance we have already discussed. An orator is addressing a listening crowd. His words are interrupted by general hubbub, applause, individual shouts and yells. In taking such a scene, not even a director most set in stagy treatment of the cinema and most scornful of the paramountcy of editing would be content with only one long shot showing the scene as a whole, and not transfer the camera from the orator to various of the individual listeners reacting to his speech and back again. But with shooting in this way, in separate pieces, the pause that separates a completed sentence, or a part of a sentence left incomplete, on the part of the orator from the shout of listeners or the latter's applause would not be recorded. Inasmuch as the two pieces — orator and listener — have been shot separately, the length of the pause on the screen will depend not on its length in reality, but on the 1 In most sound systems used in the West, a cut sound track results at its point of junction (in spite of sound-masking measures, such as the so-called blupe splice) in a definite if slight * plop.' A great deal of elimination of surplus sound, or combination on a single track of sounds recorded separately, is effected therefore not by cutting, but by what is called * re-recording.' In theory this does not affect Pudovkin's principle of possible pliability here enunciated, but in practice — owing to the fact that a new celluloid track is dearer than a scissors snip — it does affect the extent to which that pliability is in fact utilised. — Tr.