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

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188 TRICKS, COMPOSITE S , CARTOONS formal law and logic of that formal world. In this lies its comic effect. That is why films like the Russian Gulliver-film in which live human figures were combined with puppets, are rather problematic. This film, produced by A. Ptushko, is an allegory, just as Swift's immortal story is an allegory. In art and literature the allegory looks back on a millenary tradition and from JEsop to La Fontaine and Swift it has formed part of the classic gold fund of world literature. But these fables depict human characters and human psychology disguised under the masks of animals or what not. Although the characters are called a raven, a fox, a tortoise or a hare in the written story, this does not evoke visual conceptions in the first place and therefore the contradictions between the animals and their human psychology are not inacceptable. If these same animals were visible as the realistic pictures of real live animals, then the complete incongruity between such beings, existing in their own right, and the things they are made to say and do in the story would be painfully evident. If on the other hand they were to be presented in a less realistic form, as mere indicative illustrations, then they would be turned into symbols, emblems standing for something else than they are, empty hieroglyphs. An allegory can become sensory art (and all art is sensory) only to the degree in which it can approximate the naive realism of the folk-tale. Characters in a true fairy-tale live a real life, only they live it according to the laws sui generis of the fairy-tale world and not according to the laws of our earthly nature. An allegory on the contrary is not realistic in any way at all. It may express a truth, but not depict a reality; neither a natural reality, nor a fairy-tale reality, nor any reality at all. It is for this reason that allegories appear bloodless, empty stereotypes which not even the profoundest truths can endow with life. This applies especially to the allegory in the sensory arts.