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

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126 EDITING rollers of the rotary. Here the montage has created a metaphor. When the battle-cruiser Potemkin steams into its last fight, what we see is not a great ship ploughing up the water into foam — we see what is happening inside it, in its heart. We see big close-ups of the engines, their wheels and cranks crosscut with big close-ups of the sailors' faces. Such repeated juxtaposition compels comparison. A visual parallel inevitably conjures up a parallel in the mind. The angry, resolute faces of the sailors transfer their own expression to the wheels and cranks. Yes, they are fighting side by side in a common struggle. An almost human consciousness seems expressed in the physiognomy of the throbbing, quivering machines as they revolve at full-speed and the panting of the valves, the whirling of the flywheels seem the determined gestures of 'Comrade Machine'. POETIC MONTAGE Very deep subconscious idea-associations can emerge or be touched off by such editing. Sometimes the picture of a landscape is enough to conjure up the memory of a face or to characterize a situation. Such effects are certainly not 'literary', for no words can convey this non-rational correlation of shapes and images which takes place in our subconscious mind. In Pudovkin's film Mother the first revolutionary demonstration of workers passes along the streets in spring, accompanied by a parallel sequence of melting snow-water which is first only a trickle, then a rivulet, a torrent, a raging flood. The streaming of the waters is time and again cut into the pictures of the demonstration and the parallel pictures are inevitably related to each other by the spectator. The spring waters glitter in the sun like a bright hope and the same hope shines in the workers' eyes. The faces of the workers, radiant with faith and expectation, are reflected in the sunlit puddles. Such a correlation of pictures is an inevitable, automatic process. Just as the contact of electrically charged objects evokes a spark, so the contact between pictures in a film evokes a mutually interpreting associative process, whether the director wishes this or not. This is an inherent power which the