Theory of the film : (character and growth of a new art) (1952)

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MORE ABOUT IDENTIFICATION 91 'deja vu ' This identification of the picture and the spectator (for the picture incorporates the point of view of those with whose eyes it is seen) makes it possible for the film to recall to mind, by the repetition of certain set-ups, the persons who at one time or another had seen that certain picture in the film. A face or a landscape must reappear in the memory as it was seen in reality, else it would not again conjure up the same mood. On the other hand a repetition of the set-up can stimulate the memory of some past experience and produce the well-known psychological effect of 'having seen it before'. In the film Narcosis which Alfred Abel and I made in Berlin a long time ago, the hero, after many years, meets again a girl he had forgotten and who has changed so much that he does not recognize her. The girl does not tell him who she is but arranges a scene identical with the one in which her fate was decided. She sits in the same chair, in front of the same fire, her face lit up by the flames in the same way. She makes the man take the same chair out of which he looked at her in the old days. She reconstructs the same set-up in which the man got his first impression of her. The film repeats the old picture and the spectator has no doubt that the scene will recall the old experience to the hero. MORE ABOUT IDENTIFICATION The physiognomy of every object in a film picture is a composite of two physiognomies — one is that of the object, its very own, which is quite independent of the spectator — and another physiognomy, determined by the viewpoint of the spectator and the perspective of the picture. In the shot the two merge into so close a unity that only a very practised eye is capable of distinguishing these two components in the picture itself. The cameraman may pursue several aims in choosing his angle. He may wish to stress the real objective face of the object shown; in that case he will search for the outlines which express this character of the object most adequately — or he may be more concerned with showing the state of mind of the