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176 III. COMPOSITION
everything passes as in a novel; one would like to jump the description. If the film is designed to teach us a moral truth, it becomes as bad as a didactic poem." Maurois goes on to suggest that, to maintain the "poetic" element in a feature film its action proper should be preceded by pictures creating atmosphere after the manner of Balzac and also of Chaplin in his A Woman of Paris. For the rest, Maurois envisages as an alternative a more radical solution of the conflict— the cinema pur which "would be composed of pictures arranged according to a rhythm, without any intrigue."1 Small wonder, incidentally, that he conceives of the possibility of "pure cinema"; the French avant-garde film had its heyday in 1927 when he published these remarks.
Second, twenty years later Lucien Seve developed a theory which centers on the very same theme. With Seve the discrepancy between "poetry" and "intrigue" hinted at by Maurois turns into a conflict between the properties of the "shot" [plan] and those of the "sequence." "The cinema is ambiguous," says he. "It is based on the shot— which tends to isolate itself and attract an attention of the inquiring variety*— as well as on the sequence which creates a definite unity of meaning between the shots and arouses in the spectator an intense desire for continuation. From the spectator's point of view one might call this the law of double interest; he usually finds the film too long and the shots too short because he has, spontaneously, the two contrary tendencies to retain the shot in order to exhaust its riches and to relinquish it as soon as he has decoded it sufficiently to satisfy his curiosity and his taste for drama." (It need hardly be pointed out that this terminology is misleading. What Seve calls a "shot" may well amount to a "montage" of shots, as, for instance, in the classic Eisenstein films; and what he calls a "sequence" is plainly an episode in some feature film edited in such a way that its over-all meaning obscures the multiple meanings of the shots or shot units comprising it.)
Seve then proceeds to illustrate his thesis that concern with the sequence weakens the power of the shot; that a screen aspiring to storytelling automatically forfeits the chance of conveying specifically cinematic messages: "I follow an American gangster film, and the screen tells me that the bank employee gets in his car to return home in a hurry. From the moment at which I see him pull up before his house I know in advance that I may as well pay less attention: he'll pass the lobby, walk upstairs, get out his key, switch on the indirect light. At this moment I shall again watch closely, for he might find someone sitting in his armchair. . . . While a gesture of Chaplin calls for my extreme attention because it may any time stray in an unexpected direction, here I know
* Cf. reference to Seve, p. 165.