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decoration and scenery, was the vogue (performed by dramatic artists who represented in the crudest manner the passions of a single social element, i. e. middle-class man living by himself and for himself), it had now to be replaced by social drama, depicting the life and struggles of the collectivity, or of individuals considered not as isolated factors, but in their relation to the community. This entails live action which displays the truth in its completeness to the spectator, himself a member of a new social collectivity.
Considered from the standpoint of form, the most powerful means of this new development of the film — based on the social instinct, on a knowledge of cinematographic technique, and experimental work — consists, on the one hand, in a perfect staging of the film, and on the other, in the performance of the actor, in his mastery of the technique of movement and the effects it produces on the screen. All this was alien to the old methods, theatrical in their essence and reactionary from the social standpoint, which predominated in the cinematograph prior to the revolution.
The necessity that the performance of the artists should create convincing and objective images and the practical representation of such images, compelled actors to conform themselves to the elasticity of living nature, which is the principal resource in scene-setting for imparting life to the drama. This new principle made it possible to get free from the reactionary bonds of the personal psychological drama.
The film should not form an arena for the actor and his histrionics ; the actor must be the arena — the medium — for the film and its message. To put it differently, it is not the personality of the actor that should emerge from the film, but the psychology and class type that he represents.
But theoretic premises and reasoning alone were not enough, and the genius of the individual masters of the cinematograph could not create a new form of art. Examples and illustrations were necessary for any advance to be made. Examples were to be found in the American adventure films and in the Soviet theatres which cultivated this line in a much more aesthetic form (the amateur stage and experimental heroic drama of B. Ferdinandoff).
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