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LITERARY METAPHORS 127
film-maker, if he is an artist, must hold firmly in his grip, direct and shape according to his needs.
ALLEGORIC MONTAGE
In Lupu Pieck's film New Year's Eve, a pioneer film in its time, shots of a stormy sea tossing with varied intensity were cut in between the scenes. By a parallel between the dramatic storms and oceanic storms he wanted to increase the rhythmic and emotional effects of his scenes. Here he made that very mistake of which mention was made in the paragraph relating to allegoric set-up. Eisenstein's Cossack boots and Winter Palace chandelier were not invented merely for the sake of a simile and stuck into the film. They were real elements of the film story and only their specific presentation made them point to something beyond their own selves and thus turned them into symbols. And in Pudovkin's Mother the spring waters really gurgle and splash around the feet of the demonstrating workers, and are given a metaphoric significance only by dint of the montage. But Lupu Pieck's film story has nothing to do with the sea. He cut the shots of a stormy sea into urban scenes merely for the sake of the parallel, the simile; it was not some organic part of the film story that was raised to symbolic significance, but an allegory brought from outside was, as it were, stuck on to the film.
LITERARY METAPHORS
On the other hand it sometimes happens that the director tries to illustrate a literary metaphor simply by means of montage. In one of Eisenstein's films two old-world Russian peasants want to divide up a heritage and they do so by sawing in two the hut which constitutes this heritage. The wife of one of them sadly watches the murderous work of the saw. A big close-up of the saw and the big close-up of the woman's face alternate so rapidly in repeated short shots that finally the spectator feels — because he actually almost sees it — as though the saw was sawing through the woman's heart. It is obvious here that a constructed literary picture has been translated into a visual image.