A practical manual of screen playwriting : for theater and television films (1952)

l82 A PRACTICAL MANUAL OF SCREEN PLAYWRITING Building In addition to having a sense of the visual, the screen-play writer must possess a film sense. A creative film sense demands of the writer that he be able to tell his story in strictly visual terms, by writing in little segments of life, so as to present a complete mosaic. The filmic sense. In other words, the screen-play writer can, if he has a filmic sense, give a feeling of life to what are ostensibly dead images on the screen, regardless of the fact that they are apparently in motion. At the same time, he should be able to convey the impression that this life is artistically created and so has an esthetic entity of its own. The Russian director Kuleshov proved that he could photograph a series of entirely disconnected shots and, after assembling them, present a completely different and entirely whole scene. In the order of assembling, he spliced together shots of: 1. A young man walking from left to right 2. A young woman walking from right to left 3. Both meeting and shaking hands, as the man points to something off scene 4. An immense white building fronted with a broad flight of steps 5. The young man and woman ascending the steps Regardless of the fact that each of these shots was photographed in a different place and at different times, when they were assembled the over-all impression was that the action was continuous in time and spatially at the same locale. The Russians have tried many experiments of this sort, building up scenes out of disconnected shots. At one time they assembled shots of the hands, feet, eyes, and heads of a number of different women and, after assembling them, gave the impression that they were all cut-in shots of one woman. At another time, they took some quiet close-ups of an actor and intercut them with three different kinds of cutaway shots: 1 . A shot of a bowl of soup the actor was supposed to be looking down at