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INHERENT AFFINITIES 63
featured the street as an area dominated by chance in a manner reminiscent of Lumiere's shots of crowded public places. In one of his early films, which bears the suggestive title The Musketeers of Pig Alley, much of the action is laid in dingy houses, a New York East Side street teeming with nondescript passers-by, a low dive, and a small yard between cheap tenement houses where teenagers forever loiter about. [Illus. 17] More important, the action itself, which revolves around a thievery and ends on a pursuit, grows out of these locales. They offer opportunities to the criminal gang to which the thief is committed; and they provide the adventitious encounters and promiscuous gatherings which are an essential element of the intrigue. All this is resumed on a broader scale in the "modern story" of Griffith's Intolerance. There the street takes on an additional function reserved for it: it turns into the scene of bloody clashes between striking workers and soldiers sent out against them. (The sights of the crowds of fleeing workers and the corpses left behind foreshadow the Russian films of the Revolution.)
Yet if the street episodes of the "modern story" involve the depiction of mass violence, they do by no means exhaust themselves in it. Eisenstein praises them for something less glaring— the way in which they impress upon the spectator the fortuitous appearances and occurrences inseparable from the street as such. In 1944, all that he remembered of these episodes was an ephemeral passer-by. After having described him, Eisenstein continues: "As he passes he interrupts the most pathetic moment in the conversation of the suffering boy and girl. I can remember next to nothing of the couple, but this passer-by who is visible in the shot only for a flashing glimpse stands alive before me now— and I haven't seen the film for twenty years! Occasionally," he adds, "these unforgettable figures actually walked into Griffith's films almost directly from the street: a bit-player developed in Griffith's hands to stardom; the passer-by who may never again have been filmed."4
ENDLESSNESS
Like photography, film tends to cover all material phenomena virtually within reach of the camera. To express the same otherwise, it is as if the medium were animated by the chimerical desire to establish the continuum of physical existence.
24 consecutive hours
This desire is drastically illustrated by a film idea of Fernand Leger's. Leger dreamed of a monster film which would have to record painstakingly