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THE DEPUTY OF THE BALTIC FLEET 67
to his birthday party has come. He is left alone at an empty table laid for many guests. The table is a depressing sight and the professor's wife weeps. Suddenly the old man turns away and goes to his laboratory. There he looks, not at the empty festive table, but at a bench laden with retorts, test-tubes and other apparatus, cheerfully glittering tools of his life's work, his ever-faithful loyal friends. This alone would make a fine close-up. But the expression coming to the professor's face is an even finer one. Here is sorrowful defiance, a proud faith in spite of everything, a great mute vow of fidelity to the revolution, all in an unspoken soliloquy. Russian audiences broke into spontaneous applause when they saw this scene.
Not only psychological subtleties or moving emotions can be shown in such close-ups, but greater things too, all the pathos of human greatness. The simple, immediately convincing expression on a human face avoids the danger of overornate phrases, or rhetoric. (Of course only if the expression is convincing. The play of features can also have an insincere rhetoric of its own.) I remember Shchukin playing Lenin in the film Lenin in October, notably in the scene where he is talking to a little child. The warmth of a paternal tenderness is still on his face when the news is brought of the assassination of his close friend and comrade Uritski. He does not utter a word, only turns his face away. He remains silent for a long time, but his face is all the more eloquent in a microphysiognomic close-up. The expression of love and tenderness does not fade off his face, but is slowly overlaid by another emotion : pain. Then comes the third layer : we see anger hardening into inexorable, fear-inspiring hatred. These four emotions are all seen together and simultaneously on Shchukin's face like a chord of four notes.
The director let this scene follow immediately on the scene with the child, because he wanted to show in this synthesis of emotions the true soul of the great revolutionary. He wanted to show what was most important: that hardness was only the reverse side of tenderness, that the revolutionary could hate so fiercely only because he could love so tenderly.