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112 CHANGING SET-UP
Pointed, thorny outlines of reed and bush pierce the air in the distance of the other bank. Suddenly the reeds and bushes seem to grow denser. New pointed, thorny silhouettes emerge from the ground in terrifying numbers. They cluster together and move away and we realize that what we saw were the straightened scythes of the insurgent peasant army. We see that they have 'grown out of the earth' like the reeds and the bushes. It is the set-up which made us see them in this way. Such a metaphor, written, would have been trivial — seen, it is of elemental power.
In an American film two policemen drag a poor girl before the judge. The angle shows the policemen as two mighty terrifying, gigantic colossi who fill up the whole frame. Between the two is a narrow slit, in which we see the thin, fragile little figure of the girl. This one picture alone foreshadowed the sentence and the whole fate of the girl.
The hidden pattern of angles, the physiognomy of set-ups touch off the association of our ideas and conjure up thoughts, moods and emotions, as metaphors do in poetry.
In the immortal scene in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin where dead and wounded are lying on the great flight of steps, the set-up shows bloodstained and tearstained human faces. Then it shows the Cossacks who fire on the crowd. But it shows only their boots. Not men, mere boots trample down those human faces. The boots have such oafish, stupid, base physiognomies that the spectator clenches his fists in anger. Such is the effect of picture-metaphors.
Such picture-metaphors often have a satirical edge, as for instance in one of Pudovkin's films, where the council of war held by the bourgeois generals was shot at an angle which put the heads of the generals out of the picture and all one could see was a row of headless, much-bemedalled chests in military tunics.
Another fine metaphor of this kind occurs in Eisenstein's October which shows St Petersburg in the first days of the revolution. The Winter Palace is being besieged. But we see few battle scenes. We see the first shot fired by the battleship Aurora and immediately afterwards we see the magnificent chandelier of the throne-room quiver. The set-up shows the