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

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

144 EXPRESSIVE TECHNIQUE OF CAMERA partisans stand and still keep their eyes on it. It holds their eyes and holds their hearts. And when it is so far away that it almost merges with the mist of the horizon, the picture very slowly fades out — and by this optical, technical device it takes over and continues the mood induced by the slow dwindling of the car in the distance. Up to this moment the parting friend had receded in the picture; now the picture itself recedes and fades. The sorrow of parting is here deepened into a premonition of evil, as though not only a good friend but good fortune had gone from Chapayev and his band. As the diaphragm closes, the world grows dark for them and intangibly, but none the less clearly, we feel the shadow of death fall on them. A mere technicality of the camera mechanism here induces a profound emotion such as we sometimes find in the poems of the greatest poets. SECRET OF THE DIAPHRAGM The iris diaphragm can produce other, no less profound psychological effects by other technical tricks. Fade-ins and dissolves also give effects only to be described as poetic. These possibilities have been known and used in practice for a long time. But what is the explanation of these effects? As long as the film only shows objective reality in pictures, the unsophisticated spectator does not perceive the subjective part played in it by the maker of the film, the director. This part may be to a very great extent implicit in his way of showing things, but he does not show himself, just as the author of a stage play does not speak in the first person. But when we see not only actual pictures of objects on the screen, but fades and dissolves, in other words photo-technical effects, we are no longer facing only objective reproductions of things — here the narrator, the author, the film-maker himself is speaking to us. THE CAMERA SHOWS INVISIBLE THINGS The strangeness of all this is that by the fades and dissolves projected on to the screen the camera in fact shows us invi