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.
FILM WITHOUT A HERO 159
from preconstructed film stories claimed that its object was to get closer to reality. The photographic 'ascertainment' of the immediate reality of life, free of literary influences, seemed more realistic than the feature films with their intricate plots. In other words, one of the directions of the flight from the film story was towards reality.
But at the same time another no less strong trend developed in another direction. Here again there was a desire to escape from the literary, epic or dramatic content of the film but the way it chose was towards the abstract shapes and formal constructions of 'pure visuality', on the model of 'abstract' painting. Thus the film attempted to get away from epic or dramatic content in two opposite directions; on the one hand towards pure reportage and the documentary film, on the other hand towards absolute visuality, the kaleidoscope of optical impressions, the purely formal capers of the 'absolute' film.
FILM WITHOUT A HERO
The first step in all this was the film without a hero. It still had predetermined events, scenes arranged in advance and a certain connection between these. It also still had a story but the story was not bound up with the person of a central character and hence such films lacked the constructed dramatic conflict and plot which arises from the struggle of two or more persons.
The adherents of this trend did not want to string the characteristic events of life on the slender thread of a single human destiny. They wanted to show a broad cross-section of life, not merely the narrow slice of it which can be seen from the viewpoint of one person and compressed into the limits of a single human being's capacity. Life as such, typical life, and not the chance life of any one man, was to be presented. Such a film, it was thought, would not appear to be artificial, a mere invention of some script-writer; it would appear natural and logical. This was the theory.
I was one of the first to make such a film. The title was The Adventures of a Ten-Mark Note. It was produced for the European branch of Fox in Berlin, was directed by Berthold