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160 PROBLEMS OF STYLE IN THE FILM
Viertel and the cameraman was Karl Freund. The ostensible central hero was a ten-mark banknote, which as it passed from hand to hand, was the cause of all the adventures recorded in the film. The other characters changed in every scene. The events were in casual connection with each other but the human characters moved past each other as in a mist, unaware of each other and not even suspecting that their actions decided the fate of the others. The ten-mark banknote was the only thread that held the scenes together.
The scenes of such cross-section films are just as carefully thought out as the scenes of any strictly composed drama and their sequence and linkage is even more intricate, because more subtly constructed, than the most literary of novels. But the series of scenes of such a film have no predetermined direction, no dramatic culmination, no movement towards a definite end. They move tapestry-like in one and the same plane and their number could be increased or decreased at will. Such a composition doubtless has a certain naturalistic semblance of reality through the chance character of everything that happens, but it entirely lacks the convincing power of artistic necessity.
It is characteristic that I got the first inspiration for this 'non-literary' film from a well-known literary classic : Tolstoy's The Forged Coupon', a story in which a coupon passes from hand to hand like my ten-mark note.
It is not surprising that the best 'hero-less' films were made in the Soviet Union soon after the 1917 revolution, when the romantic conception of the spontaneously acting 'mass-soul' was still very much in vogue. Eisenstein's mighty October (or Ten Days That Shook The World) presented the uprising in Leningrad without making a central figure even out of Lenin; only masses were shown facing masses, although of course these masses were masterfully drawn, with individual characters and characteristic physiognomies.
The basic dangers inherent in this type of film are twofold. One is that as the character and specific quality of the masses is manifested not only in their external, visual appearance but even more in their behaviour and action, such films must inevitably also have something happening in them, and these