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162 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
Palestine during the 'thirties. His model, he told me in Paris, was a young man with a nondescript face who posed on the roof of a house. Lerski took over a hundred pictures of that face from a very short distance, each time subtly changing the lights with the aid of screens. Big close-ups, these pictures detailed the texture of the skin so that cheeks and brows turned into a maze of inscrutable runes reminiscent of soil formations, as they appear from an airplane. The result was amazing. None of the photographs recalled the model; and all of them differed from each other. Out of the original face there arose, evoked by the varying lights, a hundred different faces, among them those of a hero, a prophet, a peasant, a dying soldier, an old woman, a monk. Did these portraits, if portraits they were, anticipate the metamorphoses which the young man would undergo in the future? Or were they just plays of light whimsically projecting on his face dreams and experiences forever alien to him? Proust would have delighted in Lerski's experiment with its unfathomable implications.)
Variations of camera angles are of similar consequence. In their screen apotheoses of the Russian Revolution, Eisenstein and Pudovkin availed themselves of unusual angles to magnify the class struggle and enforce audience participation with the workers. Some Czarist henchman or member of the bourgeoisie was focused upon from a point near to his feet so that he seemed to rise to towering heights— a foreshortening suggesting his arrogance and ruthlessness. [Illus. 32] (In other contexts, the same procedure might suggest the hero.)
Sometimes music is called in to confer upon the synchronized shots and scenes a significance we would otherwise not attribute to them. In Victory in the West, for instance, musical themes with stereotyped meanings rekindle weary soldier faces, transform an English tank into a toy, and conversely, assign to a few moving Nazi tanks the major task of intimating the irresistible advance of the German army.18 In his nature films Disney goes the limit in exploiting this procedure which uses, or misuses, the plain emotional appeals of certain tunes as leading stimuli.*
Yet were a documentary maker to refrain from coloring the images themselves and instead attempt to give an unbiased account of reallife facts— think of the English documentary Housing Problems which is a model case of objective reporting19— he still would be able to convey his propaganda messages through sheer editing. Kuleshov's famous experiment once and for all demonstrates this possibility.** A classic example is the leftist newsreel which scandalized Berlin in 1928. Issued by an association of red-tinged German intellectuals, it was composed exclusively
*Seep. 141. **Seep. 69.