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THEME WITH VARIATIONS 95
the giant machines. She rushes across the site in despair, surrounded by the murderous devices that killed her boy. The set-up is different and how different are their faces ! They are no longer sensible mechanisms serving a reasonable purpose, but fierce and incalculable antediluvian monsters which lash out with their heavy arms at the puny men who stray within their reach. The terrifying wild beasts of a primeval jungle, they are now the deadly enemies of man. Nevertheless Dovzhenko still shows us the same building site — only the different set-up makes it reflect the terrors of an unhappy bereaved mother.
There is a fourth variation to the theme. The mother has rushed into the building office with her complaint and her accusations. She bursts into the room of the chief engineer, who is just reporting the accident to the authorities. The woman waits and hears what is being said. Her son, a member of the Komsomol, volunteered for a dangerous bit of rescue work in the interests of the project and of the country. The woman does not wait to hear the end of the telephone conversation. She has heard enough. Her son was a hero. She walks out of the office and goes back to her work along the same road she came. She sees the same giant dredgers and derricks as before. But she sees them with a different eye. She holds her head erect and there is pride in every feature. The same machines now seem sublime steel columns of some gigantic temple. She walks amid grandeur and beauty and we hear the strains of a great psalm, a swelling hymn of fruitful labour and it is as though the pictures themselves were singing.
These variations of the same picture were not projections of the author's subjective moods, but objective presentations of the subjective emotions of the characters. After all, we show dream pictures in the films. Dream pictures are so subjective that they are not images of some outside reality; they are born from the inner images of the memory. Nevertheless dreaming is a natural, existing objective phenomenon, the specific material of film art.