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220 III. COMPOSITION
from an inalterable, rather remote distance. This is what the young Eiscnstein experienced when, as a theater director, he felt increasingly urged to stage the kind of reality germane to the cinema. He removed a wrestling match from the stage to the middle of the auditorium so as to transform it into a real-life event; he even tried— an impossible artifice— to isolate hands, pillars, legs, house facades in an effort to create the illusion of closeups. But it just did not work. So he left the stage for the screen, while at the same time turning his back on the story as such which, he then believed, was bound to feature individual destinies. His goal, a cinematic one, was the depiction of collective action, with the masses as the true hero.7
Complex units interfere with cinematic narration. Hence the jerkiness of films advancing a theatrical intrigue. It is as if they jumped from unit to unit, leaving unexplored the gaps in-between— whereby it does not in the least matter whether the films are silent or follow the lead of dialogue. And each jump affects the spectator as an arbitrary change of direction, because the units which mark the joints of the intrigue are by far not the last elements at which cinematic analysis may arrive. In the play Romeo and Juliet the Friar's failure to pass on Juliet's letter in time is acceptable because it suggests the workings of Fate. But in Romeo and Juliet, the Castellani film, the same event does not stand for anything; rather, it appears as an outside intervention unmotivated by what goes before, a story twist which for no reason at all abruptly alters the course of action. The whole affair with the letter belongs at best to an ideological continuum, not the material one to which film aspires. It is a sham entity which would have to be broken down into its psychophysical components to become part of camera-reality. This does not imply, of course, that the cinema can afford completely to ignore units which, so to speak, are given only in long shots. These units, which resemble intricately structured molecules, transmit common thoughts, emotions, visions. If the film narrative did not occasionallv avail itself of them as points of arrival or departure, the spectator would be at a loss how to assimilate the successsion of camera revelations.
Detachable patterns of meanings
In progressing from complex unit to complex unit, the theatrical story evolves distinct patterns of meanings. From the angle of film these patterns give the impression of being prearranged because they assert themselves independently of the flow of visuals; instead of seeming to grow out of it, it is they which determine the direction of that flow, if flow it still