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THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PHYSICAL EXISTENCE 51
simultaneously with one of its main subjects. Hence the attraction which masses exerted on still and motion picture cameras from the outset.22 It is certainly more than sheer coincidence that the very first Lumiere films featured a crowd of workers and the confusion of arrival and departure at a railway station. Early Italian films elaborated upon the theme;23 and D. W. Griffith, inspired by them, showed how masses can be represented cinematically. The Russians absorbed his lesson, applying it in ways of their own.
The fact that big objects are as inaccessible to the stage as small ones suffices to range them among the cinematic subjects. Any such object— say, a wide landscape— may be recorded by a long distance shot; but, despite their significance in Griffith films, shots of this type are seldom enough to establish a large phenomenon to the full.24 There is something to reveal about it which is not given away in the total picture of it. The big differs from the small in that it can be exhausted only by a combination of pictures taken from different distances. Faced with the task of capturing the substance of a large-scale landscape, film ought to proceed like a tourist who, in strolling through that landscape, lets his eyes wander about so that his ultimate image of it will be composed of sundry details and vistas.25 Consider a street demonstration. "In order to receive a clear and definite impression of the demonstration," says Pudovkin, "the observer must perform certain actions. First he must climb upon the roof of a house to get a view from above of the procession as a whole and measure its dimension; next he must come down and look out through the first-floor window at the inscriptions carried by the demonstrators; finally, he must mingle with the crowd to gain an idea of the outward appearance of the participants."26
All these obligations may be taken care of by a single traveling shot which successively shows the ensemble and diverse elements of it. But the most primitive, most common procedure is a juxtaposition of long shots and close shots. Whether such a combination of pictures begins with a long shot or a close shot is as immaterial as is the number of shots used in the process. What does matter is that the alternating shots launch the spectator on a movement enabling him really to grasp the street demonstration or whatever tends to overwhelm him through its oversized proportions. Even though this editing unit assumes a particularly incisive function when applied to big objects, it is also needed for penetrations of normal-sized phenomena— descriptions, that is, which do not confine themselves to duplicating conventional reality. Griffith closes in on Annie's face only after having presented her whole figure, and it is in effect the combination of these two or more shots out of which her image arises.