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250 THE SCRIPT
Beethoven sonata 'unfinished' or a 'sketch' because of this. We even have film scripts now which are intended for reading and could not be shot — just as there are 'book' plays which could never be staged. Nevertheless such scripts are not novels or short stories or stage plays — they are film scripts. They belong to a new literary form.
The basic fact which underlies every form of film and determines the laws governing the script is that the film is an audible spectacle, a motion picture, i.e. an action played out in the present, before our eyes.
One of the things that follows from this basic fact is that the script, like the drama, can present only 'real time'. The author cannot speak for himself in the script, just as he cannot in the drama. The author cannot say 'meanwhile time passed . . .', he cannot say '. . . After many years . . .' or '. . . after this . . .'.The script cannot refer to the past, cannot tell us about something that happened long ago or in some other place, it cannot summarize events, as the epic forms can. The script can only present what can be enacted before our eyes, in the present, in a space and time accessible to our senses; in this it is similar to the drama.
How, then, does the script differ from the drama?
In the film, as on the stage, the action is visible and audible, but on the stage it is enacted in real space (the space of the stage) by live human beings (the actors). The film on the other hand shows only pictures, images of that space and of those human beings. The film does not present some action played out in the imagination of a poet, but an actual event enacted in real space by real human beings in nature or in a studio, but presents only a picture, a photograph of these events. Thus it is neither a figment of the brain nor immediate reality.
The upshot of this is that the script as a literary form can contain only what is visible and audible on the screen. This appears to be a truism if we do not examine the bounds set by this rule. But it is on this that everything turns.
In one of the finest Soviet films, Chapayev, the political commissar attached to Chapayev's partisan troop arrests one of the partisan leaders for stealing a pig. But why lock him up on the farm where they are staying? There is only a dilapi