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NATURE TURNEDTO ART 79
cularly if he had to speak, the bad, amateurish acting often nullified the effect produced by the suitable physiognomy.
NATURE TURNED TO ART
To try to cut raw nature into a film is a dangerous business. The fanatics of 'naturalness' (such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin were at one time), simply brought in extras from the street and expected them to move naturally in the set, because they were not actors. But such strangers could not be natural, precisely because they were not actors and hence the studio was something unnatural to them, making them unnatural themselves. But such adherents of the natural did even more than this: they attempted to cut real, natural facial expressions and gestures caught by the camera in the street, into the artistic sequences of their films. They tried to produce art by means of montage, by piecing together natural snapshots. If they wanted a woman looking in terror into the barrel of a gun directed at her and the acting of an actress was not natural enough for their requirements, they went out and searched for a truer one in the street. A woman screamed in terror because the pram with her baby in it overturned by accident. She was photographed without her knowledge and then this really unselfconscious, naturally terrified face was cut into the picture to face the gun.
I am quoting this instance only as an illustration of the method. This method is always a deception; it is rendered possible only by the fact that our physiognomic culture is not as yet sufficiently sensitive to be able to differentiate between terrors induced by different causes — or different laughters for that matter. The close-up which has made us so sensitive to the naturalness of a facial expression will sooner or later develop our sensitivity further, so that we shall be able to discern in a facial expression its cause as well as its nature. Even now we often meet with the paradoxical situation that in the good acting of a good actor things appear perfectly natural, while the photographed reproduction of actual reality does not seem natural at all, as for instance in snapshots of a running man or horse.