II.
FILM DIRECTOR AND FILM MATERIAL
Part I THE PECULIARITIES
OF FILM MATERIAL
THE FILM AND THE THEATRE
In the earliest years of its existence the film was
no more than an interesting invention that made it possible to record
movements, a faculty denied to simple photography. On the film, the appearances
of all possible movements could be seized and fixed. The first films consisted
of primitive attempts to fix upon the celluloid, as a novelty, the movements of
a train, crowds passing by upon the street, a landscape seen from a
railwaycarriage window, and so forth. Thus, in the beginning, the film was,
from its nature, only “living photography.” The first attempts to relate
cinematography to the world of art were naturally bound up with the Theatre.
Similarly only as a novelty, like the shots of the railway-engine and the
moving sea, primitive scenes of comic or dramatic character, played by actors,
began to be recorded. The film public appeared. There grew up a whole series of
relatively small, specialised theatres in which these primitive films were
shown.
The film now began to assume all the characteristics
of an industry (and indeed a very profitable one). The great significance was
realised of the fact that from a single negative can be printed many positives,
and that by this means a reel of film can be multiplied like a book, and spread
broadcast in many copies. (28) Great possibilities began to open themselves
out. No longer was the film regarded as a mere novelty. The first experiments
in recording serious and significant material appeared. The relationship with
the Theatre could not, however, yet be dissolved, and it is easy to understand
how, once again, the first steps of the film producer consisted in attempts to
carry plays over on to celluloid. It seemed at that time to be especially
interesting to endow the theatrical performance — the work of the actor, whose
art had hitherto been but transitory, and real only in the moment of perception
by the spectator—with the quality of duration.
The film remained, as before, but living photography.
Art did not enter into the work of him who made it. He only photographed the
“art of the actor.” Of a peculiar method for the film actor, of peculiar and
special properties of the film or of technique in shooting the picture for the
director, there could as yet be no suspicion. How, then, did the film director
of that time work? At his disposal was a scenario, exactly resembling the play
written for the Theatre by the playwright; only the words of the characters were
missing, and these, as far as possible, were replaced by dumb show, and
sometimes by long-winded titles. The director played the scene through in its
exact theatrical sequence; he recorded the walkings to and fro, the entrances
and exits of the actors. He took the scene thus playedthrough as a whole, while
the cameraman, always turning, fixed it as a whole upon the celluloid. The
process of shooting could not be conceived of otherwise, for as director’s
material served these same real persons—actors—with whom one worked also in the
Theatre; the camera served only for the simple fixation of scenes already
completely arranged and definitely planned. The pieces of film shot were stuck
together in simple temporal sequence of the developing action, just as the act
of a play is formed from scenes, and then were presented to the public as a
picture. To sum up in short, the work of the film director differed in no wise
from that of the theatrical producer.
A play, exactly recorded upon celluloid and projected
upon a screen, with the actors deprived of their words—that was the film of
those early days.
THE METHODS OF THE FILM
The Americans
were the first to discover in the filmplay the presence of peculiar
possibilities of its own. It was perceived that the film can not only make a
simple record of the events passing before the lens, but that it is in a
position to reproduce them upon the screen by special methods, proper only to
itself.
Let us take as example a demonstration that files by
upon the street. Let us picture to ourselves an observer of that demonstration.
In order to receive a clear and definite impression of the demonstration, 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
dimensions; next he must come down and look out through the first-floor window
at the inscriptions on the banners carried by the demonstrators; finally, he
must mingle with the crowd, to gain an idea of the outward appearance of the
participants.
Three times the observer has altered his viewpoint,
gazing now from nearer, now from farther away, with the purpose of acquiring as
complete and exhaustive as possible a picture of the phenomenon under review.
The Americans were the first to seek to replace an active observer of this kind
by means of the camera. They showed
in their work that it was not only possible to record the scene shot, but that
by manoeuvring with the camera itself—in such a way that its position in
relation to the object shot varied several times—it was made possible to
reproduce the same scene in far clearer and more expressive form than with the
lens playing the part of a theatre spectator sitting fast in his stall. The
camera, until now a motionless spectator, at last received, as it were, a
charge of life. It acquired the
faculty of movement on its own, and transformed itself from a spectator to an active observer. Henceforward the camera,
controlled by the director, could not merely enable the spectator to see the
object shot, but could induce him to apprehend it.
It was at this moment that the concepts close-up, mid-shot, and long-shot
first appeared in cinematography, concepts that later played an enormous part
in the creative craft of editing, the basis of the work of film direction. Now,
for the first time, became apparent the difference between the theatrical
producer and his colleague of the film. In the beginning the material with
which both theatrical producer and film director worked was identical. The same actors playing
through in their same sequence the same scenes, which were but shorter, and, at
the most, unaccompanied by words. The technique of acting for the films
differed in no respect from that of stage-acting. The only problem was the
replacement, as comprehensibly as possible, of words by gestures. That was the
time when the film was rightly named “a substitute for the stage.”
FILM AND REALITY
But, with the grasping of the concept editing, the position became basically
altered. The real material of film-art proved to be not those actual scenes on
which the lens of the camera is directed. The theatrical producer has always to
do only with real processes—they are his material. His finally composed and
created work—the scene produced and played upon the stage—is equally a real and
actual process, that takes place in obedience to the laws of real space
and real time. When a stage-actor finds himself at one end of the stage, he
cannot cross to the other without taking a certain necessary number of paces.
And crossings and intervals of this kind are a thing indispensable, conditioned
by the laws of real space and real time, with which the theatrical producer has
always to reckon, and which he is never in a position to overstep. In fact, in
work with real processes, a whole series of intervals
linking the separate significant points of action are unavoidable.
If, on the other hand, we consider the work of the
film director, then it appears that the active raw material is no other than
those pieces of celluloid on which,
from various viewpoints, the separate movements of the action have been shot.
From nothing but these pieces is created those appearances upon the screen that
form the filmic representation of the action shot. And thus the material of the
film director consists not of real processes happening in real space and real
time, but of those pieces of celluloid on which these processes have been
recorded. This celluloid is entirely subject to the will of the director who
edits it. He can, in the composition of the filmic form of any given
appearance, eliminate all points of interval, and thus concentrate the action
in time to the highest degree he may require.
This method of temporal
concentration, the concentration of
action by the elimination of unnecessary points of interval, occurs also, in a
more simplified form, in the Theatre. It finds its expression in the
construction of a play from acts. The element of play-construction by which
several years are made to pass between the first and second act is, properly,
an analogous temporal concentration of the action. In the film this method is
not only pursued to a maximum, it forms the actual basis of filmic
representation. Though it is possible for the theatrical producer temporally to
approach two neighbouring acts, he is, none the less, unable to do the same
with separate incidents in a single scene. (29)
The film director, on the contrary, can concentrate
in time not only separate incidents, but even the movements of a single person.
This process, that has often been termed a “film trick” is, in fact, nothing
other than the characteristic method of filmic representation.
In order to show on the screen the fall of a man from
a window five stories high, the shots can be taken in the following way:
First the man is shot falling from the window into a
net, in such a way that the net is not visible on the screen (30); then the
same man is shot falling from a slight height to the ground. Joined together,
the two shots give in projection the desired impression. The catastrophic fall
never occurs in reality, it occurs only on the screen, and is the resultant of
two pieces of celluloid joined together. From the event of a real, actual fall
of a person from an appalling height, two points only are selected: the
beginning of the fall and its end. The intervening passage through the air is
eliminated. It is not correct to call the process a trick; it is a method of
filmic representation exactly corresponding to the elimination of the five
years that divide a first act from a second upon the stage.
From the example of the observer watching the
demonstration pass by on the street, we learned that the process of
film-shooting may be not only a simple fixation
of the event taking place before the lens, but also a peculiar form of
representation of this event. Between the natural event and its appearance upon
the screen there is a marked difference. It is exactly this difference that makes the film
an art. Guided by the director, the camera assumes the task of
removing every superfluity and directing the attention of the spectator in such
a way that he shall see only that which is significant and characteristic. When
the demonstration was shot, the camera, after having viewed the crowd from
above in the long-shot, forced its way into the press and picked out the most
characteristic details. These details were not the result of chance, they were
selected, and, moreover, selected in such a way that from their sum, as from a
sum of separate elements, the image of the whole action could be assembled. Let
us suppose, for instance, that the demonstration to be recorded is
characterised by its component detail: first Red soldiers, then workmen, and
finally Pioneers. (31) Suppose the film technician try to show the spectator
the detail composition of this demonstration by simply setting the camera at a
fixed point and letting the crowd go by unbroken before the lens, then he will
force the spectator to spend exactly as much time in watching the
representation as he would have needed to let the crowd itself go by. By taking
the procession in this way he would force the spectator to apprehend the mass
of detail as it streamed past. But, by the use of that method peculiar to
films, three short pieces can be taken separately: the Red soldiers, the
workmen, and the Pioneers. The combination of these separate pieces with the
general view of the crowd provides an image of the demonstration from which no
element is lacking. The spectator is enabled to appreciate both its composition
and its dimension, only the time in which he effects that appreciation is
altered.
FILMIC SPACE AND TIME
Created by the camera, obedient to the will of the
director—after the cutting and joining of the separate pieces of
celluloid—there arises a new filmic
time; not that real time embraced by the phenomenon as it takes place before
the camera, but a new filmic time,
conditioned only by the speed of perception and controlled by the number and
duration of the separate elements selected for filmic representation of the
action.
Every action takes place not only in time, but also
in space. Filmic time is distinguished from actual in that it is dependent only
on the lengths of the separate pieces of celluloid joined together by the
director. Like time, so also is filmic space bound up with the chief process of
film-making, editing. By the junction of the separate pieces the director
builds a filmic space entirely his own. He unites and compresses separate
elements, that have perhaps been recorded by him at differing points of real,
actual space, into one filmic space.
By virtue of the possibility of eliminating points of passage and interval,
which we have already analysed and which obtains in all film-work, filmic space
appears as a synthesis of real elements picked out by the camera.
Remember the example of the man falling from the
fifth floor. That which is in reality but a tenfoot fall into a net and a
six-foot further leap from a bench appears upon the screen as a fall from a
hundred feet high.
L. V. Kuleshov assembled in the year 1920 the
following scenes as an experiment:
1.
A young man walks from left to right.
2.
A woman walks from right to left.
3.
They meet and shake hands. The young man points.
4.
A large white building is shown, with a broad
flight of steps.
5.
The two ascend the steps.
The pieces, separately shot, were assembled in the
order given and projected upon the screen. The spectator was presented with the
pieces thus joined as one clear, uninterrupted action: a meeting of two young
people, an invitation to a nearby house, and an entry into it. Every single
piece, however, had been shot in a different place; for example, the young man
near the G.U.M. building, the woman near Gogol’s monument, the handshake near
the Bolshoi Teatr, the white house came out of an American picture (it was, in
fact, the White House), and the ascent of the steps was made at St. Saviour’s
Cathedral. What happened as a result? Though the shooting had been done in
varied locations, the spectator perceived the scene as a whole. The parts of
real space picked out by the camera appeared concentrated, as it were, upon the
screen. There resulted what Kuleshov termed “creative geography.” By the
process of junction of pieces of celluloid appeared a new, filmic space without
existence in reality. Buildings separated by a distance of thousands of miles
were concentrated to a space that could be covered by a few paces of the
actors.
THE MATERIAL OF FILMS
We have now established the chief points in the
difference between the work of the film director and that of the theatrical
producer. This difference lies in the distinction of material. The theatrical
producer works with real actuality, which, though he may always remould, yet
forces him to remain bound by the laws of real space and real time. The film
director, on the other hand, has as his material the finished, recorded
celluloid. This material from which his final work is composed consists not of
living men or real landscapes, not of real, actual stage-sets, but only of
their images, recorded on separate strips that can be shortened, altered, and
asembled according to his will. The elements of reality are fixed on these
pieces; by combining them in his selected sequence, shortening and lengthening
them according to his desire, the director builds up his own “filmic” time and
“filmic” space. He does not adapt reality, but uses it for the creation of a
new reality, and the most characteristic and important aspect of this process
is that, in it, laws of space and time invariable and inescapable in work with
actuality become tractable and obedient. The film assembles the elements of
reality to build from them a new reality proper only to itself; and the laws of
space and time, that, in work with living men, with sets and the footage of the
stage, are fixed and fast, are, in the film, entirely altered. Filmic space and
filmic time, the creation of the technician, are entirely subject to the
director. The basic method of filmic representation, this construction of the
unity of a film from separate pieces or elements, the superfluous among which
can be eliminated and only the characteristic and significant retained, offers
exceptional possibilities.
[page86] Everyone knows that the nearer we approach a
regarded object, the less material appears simultaneously in our view-field;
the more clearly our investigating glance examines an object, the more details
we perceive and the more limited and sectional becomes our view. We no longer
perceive the object as a whole, but pick out the details with our glance in
order, thus receiving by association an impression of the whole that is far
more vivid, deeper, and sharper than if we had gazed at the object from a
distance and perceived the whole in a general view, inevitably missing detail
in so doing. When we wish to apprehend anything, we always begin with the
general outlines, and then, by intensifying our examination to the highest
degree, enrich the apprehension by an ever-increasing number of details. The
particular, the detail, will always be a synonym of intensification. It is upon
this that the strength of the film depends, that its characteristic speciality
is the possibility of giving a clear, especially vivid representation of
detail. The power of filmic representation lies in the fact that, by means of the
camera, it continually strives to penetrate as deeply as possible, to the
mid-point of every image. The camera, as it were, forces itself, ever striving,
into the profoundest deeps of life; it strives thither to penetrate, whither
the average spectator never reaches as he glances casually around him. The
camera goes deeper; anything it can see it approaches, and thereafter
eternalises upon the celluloid. When we approach a given, real image, we must
spend a definite effort and time upon it, in advancing from the general to the
particular, in intensifying our attention to that point at which we begin to
remark and apprehend details. By the process of editing the film removes,
eliminates, this effort. The film spectator is an ideal, perspicuous observer.
And it is the director who makes him so. In the discovered, deeply embedded
detail there lies an element of perception, the creative element that
characterises as art the work of man, the sole element that gives the event
shown its final worth.
To show something as everyone sees it is to have
accomplished nothing. Not that material that is embraced in a first, casual,
merely general and superficial glance is required, but that which discloses
itself to an intent and searching glance, that can and will see deeper. This is
the reason why the greatest artists, those technicians who feel the film most
acutely, deepen their work with details. To do this they discard the general
aspect of the image, and the points of interval that are the inevitable
concomitant of every natural event. The theatrical producer, in working with
his material, is not in a position to remove from the view of the spectator
that background, that mass of general and inevitable outline, that surrounds
the characteristic and particular details. He can only underline the most
essential, leaving the spectator himself to concentrate upon what he
underlines. The film technician, equipped with his camera, is infinitely more
powerful. The attention of the spectator is entirely in his hands. The lens of
the camera is the eye of the spectator. He sees and remarks only that which the
director desires to show him, or, more correctly put, that which the director
himself sees in the action concerned.
ANALYSIS
In the disappearance of the general, obvious outline
and the appearance on the screen of some deeply hidden detail, filmic
representation attains the highest point of its power of external expression.
The film, by showing him the detail without its background, releases the
spectator from the unnecessary task of eliminating superfluities from his
view-field. By eliminating distraction it spares the spectator’s energy, and
reaches thereby the clearest and most marked effect. As example we shall take
some instances from well-known films in which notable directors have attained
great strength of expression.
As example, the trial scene in Griffith’s
Intolerance. Here there is a scene in which a woman hears the death sentence
passed on her husband, who is innocent of the crime. The director shows the
face of the woman: an anxious, trembling smile through tears. Suddenly the
spectator sees for an instant her hands, only her hands, the fingers
convulsively gripping the skin. This is one of the most powerful moments in the
film. Not for a minute did we see the whole figure, but only the face, and the
hands. And it is perhaps by virtue of this fact that the director understood
how to choose and to show, from the mass of real material available, only these
two characteristic details, that he attained the wonderful power of impression
notable in this scene. Here once more we encounter the process, mentioned
above, of clear selection, the possibility of the elimination of those
insignificances that fulfil only a transition function and are always
inseparable from reality, and of the retention only of climactic and dramatic
points. Exactly upon this possibility depends the essence of the significance
of editing, the basic process of filmic creation. Confusion by linkage and
wastage by intervals are inevitable attributes of reality. When a spectator is
dealing with actuality he can overcome them only by a given effort of
attention. He rests his glance on a face, then lets it glide down the body
until finally it rests attentively on the hands—this is what a spectator has to
do when looking at a real woman in real surroundings.
The film spares this work of stopping and
downward-gliding. Thus the spectator spends no superfluous energy. By
elimination of the points of interval the director endows the spectator with
the energy preserved, he charges him, and thus the appearance assembled from a
series of significant details is stronger in force of expression from the
screen than is the appearance in actuality.
We now perceive that the work of the film director
has a double character. For the construction of filmic form he requires proper
material; if he wishes to work filmically, he cannot and must not record
reality as it presents itself to the actual, average onlooker. To create a
filmic form, he must select those elements from which this form will later be
assembled. To assemble these elements, he must first find them. And now we hit
on the necessity for a special process of analysis of every real event that the
director wishes to use in a shot. For every event a process has to be carried
out comparable to the process in mathematics termed “differentiation”— that is
to say, dissection into parts or elements. Here the technique of observation
links up with the creative process of the selection of the characteristic
elements necessary for the future finished work. In order to represent the
woman in the court scene, Griffith probably imagined, he may even have actually
seen, dozens of despairing women, and perceived not only their heads and hands,
but he selected from the whole images only the smile through tears and the
convulsive hands, creating from them an unforgettable filmic picture.
Another example. In that filmically outstanding work,
The Battleship “Potemkin” (32) Eisenstein shot the massacre of the mob on the
great flight of steps in Odessa. (33) The running of the mob down the steps is
rendered rather sparingly and is not especially expressive, but the
perambulator with the baby, which, loosed from the grip of the shot mother,
rolls down the steps, is poignant in its tragic intensity and strikes with the
force of a blow. This perambulator is a detail, just like the boy with the
broken skull in the same film. Analytically dissected, the mass of people
offered a wide field for the creative work of the director, and the details correctly
discovered in editing resulted in episodes remarkable in their expressive
power.
Another example, simpler, but quite characteristic
for film-work: how should one show a motor-car accident?—a man being run over.
The real material is thoroughly abundant and complex.
There is the street, the motor-car, the man crossing the street, the car
running him down, the startled chauffeur, the brakes, the man under the wheels,
the car carried forward by its impetus, and, finally, the corpse. In actuality
everything occurs in unbroken sequence. How was this material worked out by an
American director in the film Daddy? The separate pieces were assembled on the
screen in the following sequence:
1.
The street with cars in movement: a pedestrian
crosses the street with his back to the camera; a passing motor-car hides him
from view.
2.
Very short flash: the face of the startled
chauffeur as he steps on the brake.
3.
Equally short flash: the face of the victim, his
mouth open in a scream.
4.
Taken from above, from the chauffeur’s seat:
legs, glimpsed near the revolving wheels.
5.
The sliding, braked wheels of the car.
6.
The corpse by the stationary car.
The separate pieces are cut together in short, very
sharp rhythm. In order to represent the accident on the screen, the director
dissected analytically the whole abundant scene, unbroken in actual
development, into component parts, into elements, and selected from
them—sparingly—only the six essential. And these not only prove sufficient, but
render exhaustively the whole poignancy of the event represented.
In the work of the mathematician there follows after
dissection into elements, after “differentiation,” a combination of the
discovered separate elements to a whole—the so-called “integration.”
In the work of the film director the process of
analysis, the dissection into elements, forms equally only a point of
departure, which has to be followed by the assemblage of the whole from the
discovered parts. The finding of the elements, the details of the action,
implies only the completion of a preparatory task. It must be remembered that
from these parts the complete work is finally to emerge, for, as said above,
the real motor-car accident might be dissected by the onlooker into dozens,
perhaps indeed hundreds, of separate incidents. The director, however, chooses
only six of them. He makes a selection, and this selection is naturally
conditioned in advance by that filmic image of the accident—happening not in
reality but on the screen—which, of course, exists in the head of the director
long before its actual appearance on the screen.
EDITING: THE LOGIC OF
FILMIC ANALYSIS
The work of the director is characterised by thinking
in filmic pictures; by imagining events in that form in which, composed of
pieces joined together in a certain sequence, they will appear upon the screen;
by considering real incidents only as material from which to select separate
characteristic elements; and by building a new filmic reality out of them. Even
when he has to do with real objects in real surroundings he thinks only of
their appearances upon the screen. He never considers a real object in the
sense of its actual, proper nature, but considers in it only those properties
that can be carried over on to celluloid. The film director looks only
conditionally upon his material, and this conditionally is extraordinarily
specific; it arises from a whole series of properties peculiar only to the
film. Even while being shot, a film must be thought of already as an editable
sequence ofseparate pieces of celluloid. The filmic form is never identical
with the real appearance, but only similar to it. When the director establishes
the content and sequence of the separate elements that he is to combine later
to filmic form, he must calculate exactly not only the content, but the length
of each piece, or, in other words, he must regard it as an element of filmic
space and filmic time. Let us suppose that before us lie, haphazard on the
table, those separate pieces of material that were shot to represent that scene
of the motor-car accident described above. The essential thing is to unite
these pieces and to join them into one long strip of film. Naturally we can
join them in any desired order. Let us imagine an intentionally absurd
order—for example, the following:
Beginning with the shot of the motor-car, we cut into
the middle of it the legs of the man run over, then the man crossing the
street, and finally the face of the chauffeur. The result is a senseless medley
of pieces that produces in the spectator an impression of chaos. And rational
order will only be brought into the alternation of pieces when they are at
least conditioned by that sequence with which a chance observer would have been
able to let his glance and attention wander from object to object; only then
will relation appear between the pieces, and their combination, having received
organic unity, be effective on the screen. But it is not sufficient that the
pieces be united in definite order. Every event takes place not only in space,
but in time, and, just as filmic space is created, as we saw, by the junction
in sequence of selected pieces, so must also be created, moulded from the
elements of real time, a new filmic time. Let us suppose that, at the junction
of the pieces shot to represent the accident, no thought has been given to
their proportionate lengths; in result the editing is as follows:
1.
Someone crosses the street.
2.
Long: the face of the chauffeur at his brake.
3.
Equally long: the screaming, wide-open mouth of
the victim.
4.
The braked wheel and all the other pieces shown
similarly in very long strips.
A reel of film cut in this way would, even in correct
spacial sequence, appear absurd to the spectator. The car would appear to
travel slowly. The inherently short process of running-over would be
disproportionately and incomprehensibly drawn out. The event would disappear
from the screen, leaving only the projection of some chance material. Only when
the right length has been found for every piece, building a rapid, almost
convulsive rhythm of picture alternation, analogous to the panic glance, thrown
this way and that, of an observer mastered by horror, only then will the screen
breathe a life of its own imparted to it by the director. And this is because
the appearance created by the director is enclosed, not only in filmic space,
but also in filmic time, integrated from elements of real time picked from
actuality by the camera. Editing is the language of the film director. Just as
in living speech, so, one may say, in editing: there is a word—the piece of exposed
film, the image; a phrase—the combination of these pieces. Only by his editing
methods can one judge a director’s individuality. Just as each writer has his
own individual style, so each film director has his own individual method of
representation. The editing junction of the pieces in creatively discovered
sequence is already a final and completing process whose result is the
attainment of a final creation, the finished film. And it is with this process
in mind that the director must attend also to the formation of these most
elementary of pieces (corresponding to the words in speech), from which later
the edited phrases—the incidents and sequences—will be formed.
THE NECESSITY TO
INTERFERE WITH MOVEMENT
The organising work of the director is not limited to
editing. Quite a number of film technicians maintain that editing should be the
only organising medium of the film. They hold that the pieces can be shot
anyhow and anywhere, the images must only be interesting; afterwards, by simply
joining them according to their form and kind, a way will be found to assemble
them to a film. (34) If any unifying idea be taken as basis of the editing, the
material will no doubt be organised to a certain degree. A whole series of
shots taken at hazard in Moscow can be joined to a whole, and all the separate
shots will be united by their place of taking—the town of Moscow. The spacial
grasp of the camera can be narrowed to any desired degree; a series of figures
and happenings can be taken on the market-place and then finally in a room
where a meeting is being held, and in all these shots there will undoubtedly be
an organising embryo, but the question is how deeply it will be developed. Such
a collection of shots can be compared to a newspaper, in which the enormous abundance
of news is divided into sections and columns. The collection of news of all the
happenings in the world, given in the newspaper, is organised and systematised.
But this same news, used in an article or a book, is organised in an even
higher degree. In the process of creating a film, the work of organisation can
and must extend more widely and deeply than the mere establishment of a hard
and fast editing scheme of representation. The separate pieces must be brought
into organic relation with each other, and for this purpose their content must
be considered in the shooting as a deepening, as an advancement, of the whole
editing construction into the inner depth of each separate element of this
construction.
In considering certain of our examples, we have had
to deal with events and appearances that take place before the camera
independent of the will of the director. The shooting of the demonstration was,
after all, only a selection of scenes of real actuality, not created by the
director, but picked out by him from the hurly-burly flow of life. But, in
order to produce an edited representation of a given action, in order to take
some piece of reality not specially arranged by him in editable form, the
director must none the less, in one way or another, subordinate this action to
his will. Even in the shooting of this demonstration we had, if we wished to
render as vivid as possible a scenic representation of it, to insinuate
ourselves with the camera into the crowd itself and to get specially selected, typical
persons to walk past the lens just for the purpose of being taken, thus
arbitrarily interfering with the natural course of events in order to make them
serve for subsequent filmic representation. (35)
If we use a more complex example we shall see even
more clearly that in order to shoot and filmically represent any given action
we must subject it to our control—that is, it must be possible for us to bring
it to a standstill, to repeat it several times, each time shooting a new
detail, and so forth. Suppose we wish editably to shoot the take-off of an
aeroplane. For its filmic representation we select the following elements:
1.
The pilot seats himself at the controls.
2.
The hand of the pilot makes contact.
3.
The mechanic swings the propeller.
4.
The aeroplane rolls towards the camera.
5.
The take-off itself shot from another position
so that the aeroplane travels away from the camera as it leaves the ground.
In order to shoot in editable form so simple an
action as a take-off, we must either stop after the first movement of the
aeroplane, and, having quickly changed the position of the camera, placing it
at the tail-end of the machine, take the continuation of the movement, or we
must unavoidably repeat the movement of the aeroplane twice; once let it travel
towards the camera, and, the second time, changing the set-up, away from the
camera.
In both cases we must, in order to obtain the filmic
representation desired, interrupt the natural course of the action, either by
stopping or by repetition. Almost invariably, in shooting a dynamically
continuous action, we must, if we wish to obtain from it the necessary details,
either stop it by interruption or repeat it several times. In such a way we
must always make our action dependent on the will of the director, even in the
shooting of the simplest events that have nothing to do with “artistic”
direction. If we chose not to interfere with the natural unfolding of the real
event, then we should be knowingly making the film impossible. We should have
left nothing but a slavish fixation of the event, excluding all possibility of
using such advantages of filmic representation as the particularisation of
details and the elimination of superfluous transitory points.
ORGANISATION OF THE
MATERIAL TO BE SHOT
We now turn to a new side of directorial work —
namely, the methods of organisation of the material to be shot. Suppose the
director to be concerned only in making an industrial film (the work of a
factory, large workshop, or institution), a subject which would appear to consist
only in the fixation of a number of processes not requiring his interference as
director, even so his work consists of something more than the simple setting
up of the camera and shooting the machines and people at work from various
angles. In order to finish up with a really filmically clear, editable
representation, the director is, with each separate process he shoots,
inevitably compelled to interrupt and interfere, guided by a clear perception
of that editing sequence in which he will later project the pieces on the
screen. The director must introduce into his work the element of direction, the
element of a special organisation of every action shot, the goal of which
organisation is the clearest and most exact possible recording of
characteristic details.
But when we go on to the shooting of so-called
“dramatic” subjects, then naturally the element of direction, the element of
organisation of the material to be shot, becomes yet more important and
indispensable. In order to shoot all the essentials of the filmic
representation of the motor-car accident, the director had many times to alter
the position of his camera; he had to make the motor-car, the chauffeur, and
the victim carry out their separate and essential movements many times. In the
direction of a dramatic film very often an event shown on the screen never had
existence as a whole in reality. It has been present only in the head, in the
imagination of the director, as he sought the necessary elements for the later
filmic form.
Here we come to the consideration of that which must
be shot in the limits of one uninterrupted piece of celluloid, in the limits of
one “shot,”as the technical term has it. Work in the limits of one shot is
naturally dependent on real space and real time; it is work with single
elements of filmic space and filmic time; and is naturally directly conditioned
by the cutting later to be carried out. In order to arouse in the spectator the
necessary excited impression, the director, in editing the motor-car accident,
built up a disturbed rhythm, effected by the exceptionally short lengths of
each single piece. But remember, the desired material cannot be got by merely
cutting or abruptly shortening the pieces of celluloid; the necessary length
into which the content of each piece had to fit must have been borne in mind
when it was shot. Let us suppose that it is our task to shoot and edit a
disturbed, excited scene, that accordingly makes necessary quick change of the
short pieces. In shooting, however, the scenes and parts of scenes are acted
before the lens very slowly and lethargically. Then, in selecting the pieces
and trying to edit them, we shall be faced by an insuperable obstacle. Short
pieces must be used, but the action that takes place in the limits of each
separate piece proves to be so slow that, to reach the necessary shortness of
each piece, we must cut, remove part of the action; while, if we preserve the
shots entire, the pieces prove too long.
ARRANGING SET-UPS
Let us imagine that the camera, embracing in its view-field
a wide area, for example two persons talking to one another, suddenly
approaches one of the characters and shows some detail important to the
development of the action and, at the given moment, particularly
characteristic. Then the camera withdraws once more and the spectator sees the
further development of the scene in long-shot as previously, both persons of
the action being found again in the field of view. It must be emphasised that
the spectator only derives an impression of unbroken development of the action
when the transition from long-shot to close-up (and reverse) is associated with
a movement common to the two pieces. For example, if as detail concerned is
selected a hand drawing a revolver from a pocket during the conversation, the scene
must infallibly be shot as follows: the first long-shot ends with a movement of
the hand of the actor reaching for his pocket; in the following close-up,
showing the hand alone, the movement begun is completed and the hand gets out
the revolver; then back to the long-shot, in which the hand with the revolver,
continuing the movement from the pocket begun at the end of the close-up, aims
the weapon at its adversary. Such linkage by movement is the essential
desideratum in that form of editing construction in which the object taken is
not removed from the view-field at a change of set-up. Now, all three pieces
are shot separately (technically, more correctly, the whole of the long-shot is
taken uninterruptedly, from the hand-movement to the threat to the adversary;
the close-up is taken separately). It is naturally obvious that the close-up of
the hand of the actor, cut into the long-shot of the handmovement, will only be
in the right place and only blend to a unity if the movements of the actor’s
hand at both moments of actual recording are in exact external correspondence.
(36)
The example given of the hand is extremely
elementary. The hand-movement is not complicated and exact repetition not hard
to achieve. But the use of several set-ups in representing an actor’s work
occurs very frequently in films. The movements of the actors may be very
complicated. And in order to repeat in the close-up the movements made in
long-shot, to conform to the requirements of great spacial and temporal
exactness, both director and actor must be technically highly practised. Yet
another property of films conditions exactness of spacial directorial
construction. In the preparation of the material to be shot, in the
construction of the work before the camera, in the choice and fixation of one
or other movement form—or, in other words, in the organisation of these
tasks—not only are bounds set to the director by the considerations of his
editing plan, but he is limited also by the specific view-field of the camera
itself, which forces all the material shot into the well-known rectangular
contour of the cinematograph screen. During his work the film director does not
see what takes place in front of him with the eye of a normal spectator—he
looks at it with the eye of the lens. (37) The normal human gaze, widely
embracing the area in front of him, does not exist for the director. He sees
and constructs only in that conditioned section of space that the camera can
take in; and yet more—this space is, as it were, delimited by fast, fixed
boundaries, and the very definite expression of these boundaries themselves
inevitably conditions an inflexibility of composition in the spacial
construction. It is obvious that an actor taken with a fairly close
approximation of the camera will, in making a movement too wide in relation to
the space he occupies, simply disappear from the view-field of the camera. If,
for example, the actor sit with bended head, and must raise his head, at a
given approximation of the camera, an error on his part of only an inch or two
may leave only his chin visible to the spectator, the rest of him being outside
the limits of the screen, or, technically, “cut off.” This elementary example
broadly emphasises once again the necessity of an exact spacial calculation of
every movement the director shoots. Naturally this necessity applies not only
to close-ups. It may be a gross mistake to take instead of the whole of
somebody, only two-thirds of him. To distribute the material shot and its
movements in the rectangle of the picture in such a way that everything is
clearly and sharply apprehensible, to construct every composition in such a way
that the right-angled boundaries of the screen do not disturb the composition
found, but perfectly contain it—that is the achievement towards which film
directors strive.
THE ORGANISATION OF
CHANGE MATERIAL
Anyone who knows anything of painting knows how the
shape of the canvas on which the picture is painted conditions the composition
of the design. The forms presented upon the canvas must be organically enclosed
in the boundaries of its space. The same is true of the work of the film
director. No movement, no construction is thinkable for him outside that piece
of space, limited by a rectangular contour and technically termed the “picture.”
(38) It is true that not always does a film director happen to deal with
subordination as direct as that of actors receiving orders easily obeyed. He
often encounters happenings and processes that cannot be directly subordinated
to his will. For the director strives ever to seize and use everything that the
world around can offer him. And far from everything in this world obeys the
shouting of a director. For instance, the shooting of a sea, a waterfall, a
storm, an avalanche: all this is often brought into a film, and, forming a
firmly integral part of the subject, must consequently be organised exactly as
any other material prepared for editing. Here the director is completely
submerged in a mass of chance happenings. Nothing is directly obedient to his
will. The movements before the camera develop in accordance with their own
laws. But the material required by the director —that is, out of which the film
can be made—must none the less be organised. If the director finds himself
confronted with a phenomenon that is chance in this sense, he cannot and must
not give in to it, for otherwise his work will change itself to a simple,
unregulated record. He must employ the adventitious phenomenon, and he does so
by constantly inventing a series of special methods. Here comes to his help
that possibility of disregarding the natural development of the action in real
time, of which I have already spoken above. The director, alertly watching with
his camera, finds it possible to pick out the material required and to unite
the separate shots on the screen, even though they may in reality be separated
from one another by wide temporal intervals. Suppose he require for a film a
small stream, the bursting of a dam, and the flood consequent on the
catastrophe, he can shoot the stream and the dam in autumn, the river when in
spate in spring, and secure the required impression by combination of the two
sections. Suppose the action take place on the shores of a sea with a
continuous and tempestuous breaking of the surf, the director can only take his
shots when the waves are high after a storm. But the shots, though spread out
over several months, will represent on the screen perhaps only a day or an
hour. Thus the director utilises the (natural) repetition of a chance happening
for the required filmic representation.
The recording of the animals that so often appear in
films affords a further instance of the use of special methods in organising
the adventitious. It is said that an American director spent sixty working
hours and the corresponding amount of celluloid in order to get on the screen
the exact spring that he needed of a kitten on a mouse. In another film a
sea-lion had to be recorded. (39) The timorous animal swam rapidly and
irregularly around its pond. Of course, the simple method would have been to
take in the whole pond, setting up the camera the required distance away, and
enabling the spectator to follow the movements of the sea-lion just as a given
observer standing on the bank would have followed them. The camera could not,
and had not, to watch thus; it had before it a number of separate problems. The
camera had to observe how the beast glided swiftly and dexterously over the
surface of the water, and it had to observe it from the best viewpoint. The
sea-lion had also to be seen from closer, making close-ups necessary. The
editing-plan, that preceded the taking of the shots, was as follows:
1.
The sea-lion swims in the pond towards the
bank—taken slightly from above, the better to follow the movements of the beast
in the water.
2.
The sea-lion springs out on to the bank, and
then plunges back into the water.
3.
It swims back to its den.
Three times had the viewpoint of the camera to be
altered. Once the photographing had to be from above, then the camera had to be
placed so that the beast, springing on to the bank, would happen to be very
near it, and the third time the sea-lion had to be taken swimming away from the
camera, so as to show the speed of its movement. At the same time, the whole
material had to be shown in connected form, so that, on the screen, in the
apprehension of the spectator, the three separate shots of sea-lion should
blend to the impression of one continuous movement of the animal, despite the
fact that they were taken from different points. One cannot command a beast to
swim in a desired direction or to approach a camera; but at the same time its
movement was exactly prescribed in the editing-plan, with which the
construction of the whole picture was bound up. When the sea-lion was being
taken from above, it swam—tempted by the throwing of a fish—several times
across the pond until it came by chance into the view-field of the camera in
the way the director required. For the close-up, the bait was thrown again and
again until the sea-lion leaped on to the right place on the bank and made the
necessary turn. Out of thirty takes made, three were chosen, and these gave on
the screen the desired image of continuous movement. This movement was not
organised by direct prescription of the work required, but attained by
approximate control of adventitious elements and subsequent strict selection of
the material gathered. The chance is synonymous of real, unfalsified, unacted
life. In fifty per cent of his work the director encounters it. Organisation
and exact arrangement— this is the basic slogan of film work, and it is chiefly
accomplished by the editing. The editing-plan can exist before the moment of
shooting, and then the will of the director transforms and subdues reality in
order to assemble the work out of it. The editingplan can appear during the
process of shooting, if the director, come upon unforeseen material, use it
simultaneously orientating his work according to that feasible future form that
will compose, from the pieces shot, a united filmic image.
So, for example, in The Battleship “Potemkin” the
brilliant shots taken in the mist by the cameraman Tisse are cut beautifully
into the film with striking effect and organically weld themselves to its
whole, though nobody had foreseen the mist. Indeed, it was the more impossible
to foresee the mist because mists had hitherto been regarded as a hindrance in
film-work.
But, in either case, the shooting must be related
organically to the editing-plan, and consequently the paramount requirement of
an exact spacial and temporal calculation of the content of each piece remains
in force.
FILMIC FORM
When, instead of making a simple fixation of some
action that takes place in reality, we wish to render it in its filmic
form—that is to say, exchange its actual, uninterrupted flow for an integration
of creatively selected elements—then we must bear invariably in mind those laws
that relate the spectator to the director who edits the shots. When we
discussed a haphazard, chaotic ordination of shots, we laid it down that this
would appear as a meaningless disorder to the spectator. To impress the
spectator is correctly to discover the order and rhythm of the combination.
How does one hit upon such an ordination? Certainly,
generally speaking, this, like any other creative artistic process, must be
left ultimately to the artist’s intuition. None the less, at least the paths
that approximately determine the direction of this work should be indicated. We
have already made comparison above between the lens and the eye of an observer.
This comparison can be carried very far. The director, as he determines the
position of the camera in shooting and prescribes the length of each separate
shot, can, in fact, be compared to an observer who turns his glance from one
element of the action to another, so long as this observer is not apathetic in
respect to his emotional state. The more deeply he is excited by the scene
before him, the more rapidly and suddenly (staccato) his attention springs from
one point to another. (The example of the motor-car accident.) The more
disinterestedly and phlegmatically he observes the action, the calmer and
slower will be the changes of his points of attention, and consequently the
changes of set-up of the camera. The emotion can unquestionably be communicated
by the specific rhythm of the editing. Griffith, the American, richly uses this
method in the greater part of his films. Here belongs also that characteristic
directorial method of forcing the spectator to insinuate himself into the skin
of the actor, and letting him see with the latter’s eyes. Very often after the
face of the hero looking at something, the object looked at is shown from his
viewpoint. The greater part of the methods of editing a film yet known to us
can be linked to this regarding of the camera as observer. The considerations
that determine changes of glance coincide almost exactly with those that govern
correct editing construction.
But it cannot be claimed that this comparison is
exhaustive. The construction of filmic form in editing can be carried out in
several ways. For, finally, it is the editing itself that contains the
culmination of the creative work of the film director. Indeed, it is in the
direct discovery of methods for use in the editing of the material filmed that
the film will gain for itself a worthy place among the other great arts.
Film-art is yet inks period of birth. Such methods as approximation,
comparison, pattern, and so forth, that have already been long an organic
preparatory part of the existing arts, are only now being tested fumblingly in
the film. I cannot here refrain from the opportunity of instancing a brilliant
example of an unquestionably new editing method that Eisenstein used in The
Battleship “Potemkin”
The fourth reel ends with the firing of a gun, on
board the rebel battleship, at the Odessa Theatre. This seemingly simple
incident is handled in an extraordinarily interesting way by Eisenstein. The
editing is as follows:
1.
Title: “And the rebel battleship answered the
brutality of the tyrant with a shell upon the town.”
2.
A slowly and deliberately turning gun-turret is
shown.
3.
Title: “Objective—the Odessa Theatre”
4.
Marble group at the top of the theatre building.
5.
Title: “On the General’s Headquarters”
6.
Shot from the gun.
7.
In two very short shots the marble figure of
Cupid is shown above the gates of a building.
8.
A mighty explosion; the gates totter.
9.
Three short shots, a stone lion sleeping, a
stone lion with open eyes, and a rampant stone lion.
10.
A new explosion, shattering the gates.
This is an editing construction that is reproduced in
words only with difficulty, but that is almost shatteringly effective on the
screen. The director has here employed a daring form of editing. In his film a
stone lion rises to its feet and roars. This image has hitherto been thinkable
only in literature, and its appearance on the screen is an undoubted and
thoroughly promising innovation. It is interesting to observe that in this
short length of film all the characteristic elements peculiar and specific to
filmic representation are united. The battleship was taken in Odessa, the
various stone lions in the Crimea, (40) and the gates, I believe, in Moscow.
The elements are picked out and welded into one united filmic space. From
different, immovable stone lions has arisen in the film the non-existent
movement of a filmic lion springing to its feet. Simultaneously with this
movement has appeared a time non-existent in reality, inseparably bound up with
each movement. The rebel battleship is concentrated to a single gunmuzzle, and
the General’s headquarters stare at the spectator in the shape of a single
marble group on the summit of their roof. The struggle between the enemies not
only loses nothing thereby, but gains in clearness and sharpness. Naturally
this example of the lions instanced here cannot be brought into relation with
the use of the camera as observer. It is an exceptional example, offering
undoubted possibilities in the future for the creative work of the film
director. Here the film passes from naturalism, which in a certain degree was
proper to it, to free, symbolic representation, independent of the requirements
of elementary probability.
THE TECHNIQUE OF
DIRECTORIAL WORK
We have already laid down, as the characteristic
property of filmic representation, the striving of the camera to penetrate as
deeply as possible into the details of the event being represented, to approach
as nearly as possible to the object under observation, and to pick out only
that which can be seen with a glance, intensified to eliminate the general and
superficial. Equally characteristic is its externally exhaustive embrace of the
events it handles. One might say that the film, as it were, strives to force
the spectator to transcend the limits of normal human apprehension. On the one
hand, it allows this apprehension to be sharpened by incredible attentiveness
of observation, in concentrating entirely on the smallest details. At the same
time, it allows events in Moscow and nearly related events in America to be
embraced in a nearly simultaneous comprehension. Concentration on details and
wide embrace of the whole include an extraordinary mass of material. Thus the
director is faced with the task of organising and carefully working out a great
number of separate tasks, according to a definite plan previously devised by
him. As instance: in every, even in an average, film the number of persons in
the action is seldom less than several dozen, and each of these persons —even
those shown only shortly—is organically related to the film as a whole: the
performance of each of these persons must be carefully ordered and thought out,
exactly as carefully as any shot from the part of a principal. A film is only
really significant when every one of its elements is firmly welded to a whole.
And this will only be the case when every element of the task is carefully
mastered. When one calculates that in a film of about 4,000 feet there are
about five hundred pieces, then one perceives that there are five hundred
separate but interlocked groups of problems to be solved, carefully and
attentively, by the director. When one considers yet again that work on a film
is always and inevitably limited by a given maximal time duration, then one
sees that the director is so overloaded with work that successful carrying
through of the film with direction from one man alone is almost impossible. It
is therefore quite easily comprehensible that all notable directors seek to
have their work carried out in a departmentalised manner. The whole work of
producing a film disintegrates into a series of separate and, at the same time,
firmly interrelated sections. Even if one only enumerates the basic stages
superficially, one gets, none the less, a very impressive list. As follows:
1.
The scenario, and its contained treatment.
2.
The preparation of the shooting-script,
determination of the editing construction.
3.
The selection of actors.
4.
The building of sets and the selection of
exteriors.
5.
The direction and taking of the separate
elements into which incidents are divided for editing, the shooting-script
script-scenes.
6.
Laboratory work on the material shot.
7.
The editing (the cutting).
The director, as the single organising control that
guides the assembling of the film from beginning to end, must naturally make
his influence felt in each of these separate sections. If a hiatus, a mishap,
creep into the work of but one of the stages listed, the whole film—the result
of the director’s collective creation—will inevitably suffer, equally whether
it be a matter of a badly chosen actor, of an uneven piece of continuity in the
treatment, or of a badly developed piece of negative. Thus it is obvious that
the director must be the central organiser of a group of colleagues whose
efforts are directed upon the goal mapped out by him.
Collective work on a film is not just a concession to
current practice, but a necessity that follows from the characteristic basic
peculiarities of films. The American director is surrounded during his
directorial work by a whole staff of colleagues, each of whom fulfils a sharply
defined and delimited function. A series of assistants, each provided by the
director with a task in which the latter’s idea is clearly defined, works
simultaneously on the many incidents and parts of incidents. After having been
checked and confirmed by the director, these incidents are shot and added to
the mass of material being prepared for the assembling of the film. The
resolution of certain problems—such, for instance, as the organised shooting of
crowd-scenes including sometimes as many as a thousand persons—shows quite
clearly that the director’s work cannot attain a proper result unless he has a
sufficiently extensive staff of colleagues at his disposal. In fine, a director
working with a thousand extras exactly resembles a commander-in-chief. He gives
battle to the indifference of the spectator; it is his task to conquer it by
means of an expressive construction of the movement of the masses he guides;
and, like a commander-in-chief, he must have a sufficient number of officers at
his disposal to be able to sway the crowd according to his will. We have said
already that, in order to attain a unified creation, a complete film, the
director must lead constant through all the numerous stages of the work a
unifying, organising line created by him. We shall now examine these stages one
by one, in order to be able to represent to ourselves yet more clearly the
nature of the work of film direction.
Part II THE DIRECTOR AND
THE SCENARIO
THE DIRECTOR AND THE
SCENARIST
In production, affairs usually take the following
course: a scenario is received, handed over to the director, and he submits it
to a so-called directorial treatment—that is to say, he works over the entire
material submitted him by the scenarist according to his own individuality; he
expresses the thoughts offered him in his own filmic speech —in the language of
separate images, separate elements, shots, that follow one another in a certain
sequence he establishes.
In short, if a film be compared with the scenario
lying basic to it, it is possible to distinguish the theme, the subject
treatment of the theme, and, finally, that imaginary filmic formation of the
treatment that is worked out by the director in the process of production.
Needless to say, these three stages of work must be directly and organically
interdependent. None the less, it is evident that the work of the scenarist
extends only up to a certain point, after which the share of the director
begins. There is no art-form in which a sharp division between two stages ofwork
is thinkable. One cannot continue a work from some point in its course, and not
have been linked with it from its beginning. Therefore, as a result of the
necessity for unification of two stages, the preliminary work of the scenarist
and the subsequent directorial work, the following is inevitable: either the
director must be directly associated with the work of the scenarist from the
beginning, or, if this be impossible for some reason or other, he must
inevitably go through the scenario, removing anything foreign to him, maybe
altering separate parts and sequences, maybe the entire subject-construction.
The director is ever faced with the task of creating the film from a series of
plastically expressive images. In the ability to find such plastic images, in
the faculty of creating from separate shots, by editing, clear, expressive
“phrases,”and connecting these phrases into vividly impressive periods, and
from these periods constructing a film—in this consists the art of the
director. Not always can the scenarist, especially when he has not a clearly
filmically thinking brain and is thus in some degree himself a director,
provide in ready form the plastic material required by the director. Usually it
is otherwise, the scenarist gives the director the idea, as such—the detached
content of the image, and not its concrete form. But in a collaboration of this
kind the welding together of the two colleagues, the scenarist and the
director, is certainly of tremendous importance. It is easy to put forward
ideas that will wake no echo in the director and must remain a pure abstraction
without concrete form. Even the theme itself of the scenario—in other words,
its basis —must inevitably be selected and established in contact with the
director. The theme conditions the action, colours it, and thus, of course,
inevitably colours that plastic content the expression of which is the chief
substance of the director’s task. Only if the theme be organically comprehended
by the director will he be able to subdue it to the unifying outline of the
form he is creating.
Pursuing further, we come to the action. The action
outlines a number of situations for the characters, their relations to one
another, and, not least, their encounters. It prescribes in its development a
whole number of events that already have, in some sort, feelable form. The
action cannot be thought of without already some plastically expressive form.
In most cases it is difficult for a scenarist, having graduated from the
literary field, to steer his course by the conditions of externally expressive
form. Already in planning the action the basic incidents that are to determine
its shape must infallibly be mapped out. Here comes yet more clearly to light
the inevitable dependence on the later directorial work. Even such a thing as
the characteristics of a person of the action will be meaningless if not shown
in a series of plastically effective movements or situations.
THE ENVIRONMENT OF THE
FILM
To continue. All the action of any scenario is
immersed in some environment that provides, as it were, the general colour of
the film. This environment may, for example, be a special mode of life. By more
detailed examination, one may even regard as the environment some separate
peculiarity, some special essential trait of the given mode of life selected.
This environment, this colour, cannot, and must not, be rendered by one
explanatory scene or a title; it must constantly pervade the whole film, or its
appropriate part, from beginning to end. As I have said, the action must be
immersed in this background. A whole series of the best films of recent times
has shown that this emphasis by means of an environment in which the action is
immersed is quite easily effected in cinematography. The film Tol’able David
shows us this vividly. It is also interesting that the effecting of the unity
of this colour of a film is based upon the scarcely communicable ability to
saturate the film with numerous fine and correctly observed details. Naturally
it is not possible to require of the scenarist that he shall discover all these
details and fix them in writing. The best that he can do is to find their
necessary abstract formulation, and it is the affair of the director to absorb
this formulation and give it the necessary plastic shape. Remarks by the
scenarist such as, perhaps, “There was an insufferable smell in the room” or
“Many factory-sirens vibrated and sang through the heavy, oil-permeated
atmosphere” are not in any sense forbidden. They indicate correctly the
relation between the ideas of the scenarist and the future plastic shaping by
the director. It may already now be said with a fair degree of certainty that
the most immediate task next awaiting the director is that very solution by
filmic methods of the descriptive problems mentioned. The first experiments
were carried out by the Americans in showing a landscape of symbolic character
at the beginning of a film. Tol’able David began with the picture of a village
taken through a cherry-tree in flower. The foaming, tempestuous sea symbolised
the leit-motif of the film The Remnants
of a Wreck.
A wonderful example, affording unquestionably an
achievement of this kind, are the pictures of the misty dawn rising over the
corpse of the murdered sailor in The
Battleship “Potemkin.” The solution of these problems—the depiction of the
environment — is an undoubted and important part of the work on the scenario.
And this work naturally cannot be carried out without direct participation by
the director. Even a simple landscape—a piece ofnature so often encountered in
films—must, by some inner guiding line, be bound up with the developing action.
I repeat that the film is exceptionally economical
and precise in its work. There is, and must be, in it no superfluous element.
There is no such thing as a neutral background, and every factor must be
collected and directed upon the single aim of solving the given problems. For
every action, in so far as it takes place in the real world, is always involved
in general conditions—that is, the nature of the environment.
The action of the scenes may take place by day or by
night. Film directors have long been familiar with this point, and the effort
to render night effects is to this day an interesting problem for film
directors. One can go further. The American, Griffith, succeeded in the film
America in obtaining, with marvellous tenderness and justness, graduations of
twilight and morning. The director has a mass of material at his disposal for
this kind of work. The film is interesting, as said before, not only in that it
is able to concentrate on details, but also in its ability to weld to a unity
numerous materials, deriving from widely embraced sources.
As example, this same morning light: To gain this
effect, the director can use not only the growing light of sunrise, but also
numerous correctly selected, characteristic processes that infallibly relate
themselves with approaching dawn in the apprehension of the spectator. The
light of lamp-posts growing paler against the lightening sky, the silhouettes
of scarcely visible buildings, the tops of trees tenderly touched with the
light of the not yet ascended sun, awakening birds, crowing cocks, the early
morning mist, the dew—all this can be employed by the director, shot, and in
editing built to a harmonious whole.
In one film an interesting method was used of
representing the filmic image of a dawn. In order to embrace in the editing
construction the feeling of growing and ever wider expanding light, the
separate shots follow one another in such wise that at the beginning, when it
is still dark, only details can be seen upon the screen. The camera took only
closeups, as if, like the eye of man in the surrounding dark, it saw only what
was near to it. With the increase of the light the camera became ever more and
more distant from the object shot. Simultaneously with the broadening of the
light, broader and broader became the view-field embraced by the lens. From the
close-ups in darkness the director changed to ever more distant long-shots, as
if he sought directly to render the increasing light, pervading everything
widely and more widely. It is notable that here is employed a pure technical
possibility, peculiar only to the film, of communicating a very subtle feeling.
It is clear that work on the solution of problems of
this kind is bound up so closely with the knowledge of film technique, so
organically with the pure directorial work of analysis, selection of the
material, and its unification in creative editing, that such problems cannot,
independently of the director, be resolved for him by the scenarist alone. At
the same time, it is, as already mentioned, absolutely essential to give the
expression of this environment in which the action of every film is immersed,
and accordingly, in the creation of the scenario, it is indispensable for the
director to collaborate in the work.
THE CHARACTERS IN THE
ENVIRONMENT
I should like to note that in the work of one of the
strongest directors of the present day, David Griffith, in almost every one of
his films, and indeed especially in those in which he has reached the maximum
expression and power, it is almost invariably the case that the action of the
scenario develops among characters blended directly with that which takes place
in the surrounding world.
The stormy finale of the Griffith film is so
constructed as to strengthen for the spectator the conflict and the struggle of
the heroes to an unimagined degree, thanks to the fact that the director
introduces into the action, gale, storm, breaking ice, rivers in spate, a
gigantic roaring waterfall. When Lilian Gish, in Way Down East, runs broken
from the house, her happiness in ruins, and the faithful Barthelmess rushes
after her to bring her back to life, the whole pursuit of love behind despair,
developing in the furious tempo of the action, takes place in a fearful
snowstorm; and at the final climax, Griffith forces the spectator himself to
feel despair, when a rotating block of ice, on it cowering the figure of a
woman, approaches the precipice of a gigantic waterfall, itself conveying the
impression of inescapable and hopeless ruin.
First the snowstorm, then the foaming, swirling river
in thaw, packed with ice-blocks that rage yet wilder than the storm, and
finally the mighty waterfall, conveying the impression of death itself. In this
sequence of events is repeated, on large scale as it were, the same line of
that increasing despair — despair striving to make an end, for death, that has
irresistibly gripped the chief character. This harmony— the storm in the human
heart and the storm in the frenzy of nature—is one of the most powerful
achievements ofthe American genius. (41) This example shows particularly
clearly how far-reaching and deep must be that connection, between the content
of the scenario and the director’s general treatment, that adds strength and
unity to his work. The director not only transfers the separate scenes
suggested by the scenarist each into movement and form, he has also to absorb
the scenario in its entirety, from the theme to the final form of the action,
and perceive and feel each scene as an irremovable, component part of the
unified structure. And this can only be the case if he be organically involved
in the work on the scenario from beginning to end.
When the work on the general construction has been
finished, the theme moulded to a subject, the separate scenes in which the
action is realised laid down, then only do we come to the period of the hardest
work on the treatment of the scenario, that stage of work when, already concrete
and perceptible, that filmic form of the picture that will result can be
foreseen; do we come to the period of the planning out of the editing scheme
for the shots, of the discovery of those component parts from which the
separate images will later be assembled.
To bring a waterfall into the action does not
necessarily mean to create it on the screen. Let us remember what we said
regarding the creation of a filmic image that becomes vivid and effective only
when the necessary details are correctly found. We come to the stage of
utilising the pieces of real space and real time for the future creation of
filmic space and filmic time. If it may be said at the beginning of the process
that the scenarist guides the work — and that the director has only to pay attention
so as properly to apprehend it organically, and so as, not only to keep contact
with it at every given moment, but to be constantly welded to it—now comes a
change. The guide of the work is now the director, equipped with that knowledge
of technique and that specific talent that enables him to find the correct and
vivid images expressing the quintessential element of each given idea. The
director organises each separate incident, analysing it, disintegrating it into
elements, and simultaneously thinking of the connection of these elements in
editing. It is here of special interest to note that the scenarist at this
later stage, just as the director in the early stages, must not be divorced
from the work. His task it is to supervise the resolution to editable shape of
every separate problem, thinking at every instant of the basic theme—sometimes
completely abstract, yet current in every separate problem.
Only by means of a close collaboration can a correct
and valuable result be attained. Naturally one might postulate as the ideal
arrangement the incarnation of scenarist and director in one person. But I have
already spoken of the unusual scope and complexity of film creation, that
prevents any possibility of its mastery by one person. Collectivism is indispensable
in the film, but the collaborators must be blended with one another to an
exceptionally close degree.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE
RHYTHM OF THE FILM
The editing treatment of the scenario consists not
only in the determination of the separate incidents, scenes, objects that are
to be shot, but also in the arrangement of the sequence in which they are to be
shown. I have already said that in the determination of this sequence one must
not only have in mind the plastic content, but also the length of each separate
piece of celluloid—that is to say, the rhythm with which the pieces are to be
joined must be considered. This rhythm is the means of emotionally influencing
the spectator. By this rhythm the director is equally in the position to excite
or to calm the spectator. An error of rhythm can reduce the impression of the
whole scene shown to zero, but equally can rhythm, fortunately found, raise the
impression of a scene to an infinite degree, though it may contain in its
separate, imagined, visual material nothing especial. (42) The rhythmic
treatment of the film-scenario is not limited to the treatment of the separate
incidents, to the finding of the necessary images comprising them. One must
remember that the film is divided into separate shots, that these are joined
together to form incidents, the incidents to sequences, these last to reels,
and the reels together form the whole film. Wherever there is division,
wherever there is an element of succession of pieces, be they separate pieces
of celluloid or separate parts of the action—there everywhere the rhythmic
element must be considered, not indeed because”rhythm”is a modern catchword,
but because rhythm, guided by the will of the director, can and must be a
powerful and secure instrument of effect. Remember, for instance, how
exhausting, and how extinguishing in its effect, was the badly created,
constantly confused rhythm of that big film, The Ray of Death; and, on the other hand, how clever was the
distribution of material in Tol’able David, in which the alternation of quiet
and tense sections kept the spectator fresh and enabled him to appreciate the
violent finale. The editable preparation of the scenario—in which not only the
exact plastic content of each separate little piece is taken into consideration,
but also the position in rhythmic sequence of its length when the pieces are
joined to incidents, the incidents to sequences and so forth—the establishment
of this position, which is already completely decisive for the final form that
the film projected on the screen will take, is the last stage of the work of
the director on the scenario. Now is the moment come at which new members of
the collective team enter the work of creating the film—in fact, those who are
concerned with real men and objects, with the movements and backgrounds in
which they are locked. The director now has to prepare the material in order to
record it on the film.
Part III THE DIRECTOR AND
THE ACTOR
TWO KINDS OF PRODUCTION
In accordance with their acting, films can roughly be
divided into two kinds. In the first group are included such productions as are
based on one particular actor—the “star,” as he is called in America. The
scenario is written especially for the actor. The entire work of the director
resolves itself to the presentation to the spectator, once again in new
surroundings and with a new supporting cast, of some well-known and favourite
figure. Thus are produced the films of Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford, and Lloyd.
To the second group belong those films that are underlain by some definite idea
or thought. These scenarios are not written for an actor, but actors must be
found for their realisation when written. Thus works David Griffith. It is not,
therefore, remarkable that in several of his pictures Griffith rejects such
brilliant names as Pickford, Mae Marsh, and others, a whole series of heroes
and heroines whom, having used them for one or two films, he gives up to other
hands. To that extent to which a film is basically inspired by some thought, by
some definite idea—and not merely by the display of clever technique or a
pretty face—the relationship between the actor and the material of the film
receives a special and specific character, proper only to the film.
THE FILM ACTOR AND THE
FILM TYPE
In order to create a required appearance, the stage
actor tries to find and create the necessary make-up, altering his face. If he
has to take the part of a strong man in the play, he binds muscles of wadding
on his arms. Suppose, for example, it were proposed to him to play Samson, he
would not be ashamed of erecting pasteboard pillars on the set, to overthrow
them later with one push of his shoulder. Such deceit in properties, equally
with make-up drawn upon the face, is unthinkable in films. A made-up, property human
being in a real environment, among real trees, near real stones and real water,
under a real sky, is as incongruous and inacceptable as a living horse on a
stage filled with pasteboard. (43) The conditionality of the film is not a
property conditionality: it changes not matter, but only time and space. For
this reason one cannot build up a required type artificially for the screen;
one must discover him. That is why even in those productions the pivot of which
is the inevitable and necessary “star,”none the less the supporting actors for
the second and third parts are always sought by the director from among many.
The work of finding the necessary actors, the selection of persons with vividly
expressive externalities conforming to the requirements made by the scenario is
one of the hardest tasks of the director. It must be remembered that, as I have
already said, one cannot “play a part” on the film; one must possess a sum of
real qualities, externally clearly expressed, in order to attain a given effect
on the spectator. It is therefore easy to understand why, in film production, a
man, passing by chance on the street, who has never had any idea of being an
actor, is often brought in, only because he happens to be a vividly externally
expressive type, and, moreover, the one desired by the director. In order to
make concretely clear this inevitable necessity to use, as acting material,
persons possessing in reality the properties of the image required, I shall
instance at random the following example.
Let us suppose that we require for a production an
old man. In the Theatre the problem would be perfectly simple. A comparatively
young actor could paint wrinkles on his face, and so make on the spectator,
from the stage, the external impression of an old man. In the film this is
unthinkable. Why? Just because a real, living wrinkle is a deepening, a groove
in the face. And when an old man with a real wrinkle turns his head, light
plays on this wrinkle. A real wrinkle is not only a dark stripe, it is a shadow
from the groove, and a different position of the face in relation to light will
always give a different pattern of light and shade. The living wrinkle lives by
means of movement in light. But if we paint a black stripe on a smooth skin,
then on the screen the face in movement will never show the living groove
played on by the light, but only a stripe painted in black paint. It will be
especially incongruous in cases of close approximation of the lens—that is, in
close-ups.
In the Theatre, make-up of this kind is possible
because the light on the stage is conditionally constant and throws no shadows.
By this example it may in some wise be judged to what
degree the actor we seek must resemble his prescribed appearance in the
scenario. It may be said, in fine, that in most cases the film actor plays
himself, and the work of the director consists not in compelling him to create
something that is not in him, but in showing, as expressively and vividly as
possible, what is in him, by using his real characteristics.
PLANNING THE ACTING OF
THE FILM-TYPE
Where the acting material is assembled in this way,
the possibility of using a stock company, as in the Theatre, is naturally
almost excluded. (44) In almost every film the director is compelled to work
with ever new human material, often entirely untrained. But at the same time
the work of the person being photographed must be strictly subjected to a whole
series of conditions dictated by the film. I have already said that each piece
shot must be exactly organised in space and time. The work of the actor being
shot, as much as everything being shot, must be exactly considered. Remember
that we have discussed the process of taking editable shots, whereby the same
movements have to be repeated several times with great exactitude, in order to
make it possible for the director to form into a single whole the incidents
later composed by the junction of separate pieces. In order to work exactly one
must know how, one must learn how, or at least be able to remember by heart.
For the work of the film actor, or, if you prefer it, his acting, is deprived
of that unbroken quality proper to the work of his colleague on the stage. The
film image of the actor is composed from dozens and hundreds of separate,
disintegrated pieces in such a way that sometimes he works at the beginning on
something that will later form a part of the end. The film actor is deprived of
a consciousness of the uninterrupted development of the action, in his work.
The organic connection between the consecutive parts of his work, as result of
which the distinct whole image is created, is not for him. The whole image of
the actor is only to be conceived as a future appearance on the screen,
subsequent to the editing of the director; that which the actor performs in
front of the lens in each given piece is only raw material, and it is necessary
to be endowed with special, specific, filmic powers in order to imagine to
oneself the whole edited image, meticulously composed of separate pieces picked
sometimes from the beginning, sometimes from the middle. It is therefore
understandable why it was first in films that there appeared exact directorial
construction of the actor’s work. (45) In most cases only the director knows
the shooting-script so thoroughly and so well as to be able clearly to imagine
it to himself in that shape in which it will later be transposed upon the
screen, and therefore only he can imagine to himself each given part, each
given image in its editing construction. If an actor, even a very talented one,
allow himself to be inspired by a given separate scene, he will never be able,
of himself, so to limit his work as to be able to give a part of his acting of
exactly that length and that content later required by the editing. This will
only be possible when the actor has entered as deeply and organically into the
work of building the film creation as the director producing it. There are
schools that maintain that the play of the actor must be ordered by the
director down to its least details; down to the finest movements of the
fingers, of the eyebrows, of the eyelashes, everything must be exactly
calculated by the director, instructed by him, and recorded on the film. This
school represents an undoubted exaggeration that results in unnecessary
mechanicalisation; it is, none the less, not to be gainsaid that the free
performance of the actor must be enclosed in a frame-work of the severest
directorial control. It is interesting that even such a director as Griffith —
who is distinguished by a special “psychologicality” that should, strictly
speaking, preclude the possibility of hard and fast construction—none the less
does undoubtedly plastically “create” his actor. Griffith has a peculiar
feminine type of his own, pathetically helpless and heroic at the same time. It
is interesting to follow how, in various of his films, various women express
the same emotional states by the same external means. Remember how Mae Marsh
weeps in the trial in Intolerance,
how the heroine in America sobs over
her dying brother, and how Lilian Gish sobs in the Orphans of the
Storm as she tells of her sister.
There is the same heartrending face, the same streaming tears, and the
helpless, trembling attempt to show a smile behind tears. The similarity of
method of many American actors who have worked under control of one and the
same director shows markedly how far-reaching is the directorial construction
of the actor’s work.
THE “ENSEMBLE”
In the Theatre there exists a concept “ensemble” the concept implying that
general composition which embraces the work of all the actors collaborating in
the play. The ensemble undoubtedly
exists also in the film, and the same may be said about it as has been said
about the edited image of the actor. The fact is that the film actor is
deprived of the possibility of himself directly appreciating this ensemble. Very often an actor, from
beginning to end of his part in front of the camera, does not once see the
performance of the actor opposite him in the film, and is shot separately. None
the less, however, when the film is subsequently joined, the scenes of this
actor will appear directly connected with those of the other, whom he has never
seen. The consciousness of the ensemble,
the relationship between the work of the separate characters, consequently
becomes once again a task of the director. Only he, imagining to himself the
film in its edited form, already projected upon the screen, already joined from
its separately shot pieces—only he can appreciate this ensemble, and direct and construct the actor’s work in conformity
with its requirements. The question of the bounds of the influence the director
should exert on the work of the actors is a question that is still open. Exact
mechanical obedience to a plan provided by the director has undoubtedly no
future. But also a wavering free improvisation by the actor according to
general suggestions from the director—a method hitherto a characteristic of
most Soviet directors—is definitely inadmissible. Only one thing is still
undoubted, that the whole image of the actor will only result when the
separately shot pictures are united one to the other in editing, and the work
of the actor in each separate shot has been firmly and organically linked to
the clear understanding of the future whole. If such an understanding is
present to the actor he can work freely, but, if not, then only the exact
instructions ofthe director, the future creator of the editing, can correctly
construct the acting work.
Special difficulties are encountered by the director
with casually collected human material, but this casual material is, as we have
said, nearly inevitable in every film; and, on the other hand, this material is
of exceptional interest. An average film lasts an hour and a half. In this hour
and a half there pass before the spectator sometimes dozens of faces that he
may remember, surrounding the heroes of the film, and these faces must be
especially carefully selected and shown. Often the entire expression and value
of an incident, though it may centre round the hero, depends from these
characters of second rank who surround him. These characters may be shown to
the spectator for no more than six or seven seconds. Therefore they must
impress him clearly and vividly. Remember the example of the gang of
blackguards in Tol’able David, or of the two old men in The Isle
of Lost Ships. Each face
impresses as firmly and vividly as would a separate, clever characterisation by
a talented writer. To find a person such that the spectator, after seeing him
for six seconds, shall say of him, “That man is a rogue, or good-natured, or a
fool”—this is the task that presents itself to the director in the selection of
his human material.
EXPRESSIVE MOVEMENT
When the persons are selected, when the director
begins to shoot their work, they provide him with a new problem: the actor must
move in front of the camera, and his movements must be expressive. The concept
“an expressive movement” is not so simple as it appears at first sight. First
of all, it is not identical with that everyday movement, that customary
behaviour proper to an average man in his real surroundings. A man not only has
gestures, but words also are at his disposal. Sometimes the word accompanies
the gesture and sometimes, reversed, the gesture aids the word. In the Theatre
both are feasible. That is why an actor with deeply ingrained theatrical
training conforms with difficulty to the standards of the screen. In The Postmaster,
Moskvin—an actor of undoubted exceptionally big filmic possibilities—none the
less tires one unpleasantly with his ever-moving mouth and with petty movements
beating time to the rhythm of the unspoken words. Gesture-movement accompanying
speech is unthinkable on the film. Losing its correspondence with the sounds
that the spectator does not hear, it degenerates to a senseless plastic
muttering. The director in work with an actor must so construct the performance
of the latter that the significant point shall lie always in the movement, and
the word accompany it only when required. In a pathetic scene, when he learns
from the godmother that the hussar officer has eloped with Dunia, Moskvin
speaks a great deal and obviously, while at the same time, automatically and
quite naturally, like a man accustomed to spoken business, he accompanies every
word with one and the same repeated movement of the hand. During the shooting,
when the words were audible, the scene was effective, and even very effective;
but on the screen it resulted as a painful and often ridiculous shuffling about
on one spot. The idea that the film actor should express in gesture that which
the ordinary man says in words is basically false. In creating the picture the
director and actor use only those moments when the word is superfluous, when the
substance of the action develops in silence, when the word may accompany the
gesture, but does not give birth to it. (46)
EXPRESSIVE OBJECTS
That is why the inanimate object has such enormous
importance on the films. An object is already an expressive thing in itself, in
so far as the spectator always associates with it a number of images. A
revolver is a silent threat, a flying racing-car is a pledge of rescue or of
help arriving in time. The performance of an actor linked with an object and
built upon it will always be one of the most powerful methods of filmic
construction. It is, as it were, a filmic monologue without words. An object,
linked to an actor, can bring shades of his state of emotion to external
expression so subtly and deeply as no gesture or mimicry could ever express
them conditionally. In The Battleship
“Potemkin” the battleship itself is an image so powerfully and clearly
shown that the men on board are resolved into it, organically blended with it.
The shooting down of the crowd is answered not by the sailors standing to the
guns, but by the steel battleship itself, breathing from a hundred mouths.
When, at the finale, the battleship rushes under full steam to meet the fleet,
then, in some sort, the steadfastly labouring, steel driving-rods of the engine
incarnate in themselves the hearts of its crew, furiously beating in tenseness
of expectation.
THE DIRECTOR AS CREATOR
OF THE”ENSEMBLE”
For the film director the concept of ensemble is
extraordinarily wide. Material objects enter organically into it as well as
characters, and it is necessary once more to recall that, in the final editing
of the picture, the performance of the actor will stand next to, will have to
be welded to, a whole series of other pieces, which he cannot see, and of which
he can know only indirectly. Only the director knows and gauges them
completely. Therefore the actor is considered by the director, before anything
else, as material requiring his “treatment.” Let us, in fine, also remember
that even each actor separately who is, in real conditions, apprehended as
something whole, as the figure of a human being whose movements are perceived
as the simultaneous connected work of all the members of his body—such a man
often does not exist on the screen. In editing, the director builds sometimes
not only scenes, but also a separate human being. Let us remember how often in
films we see and remember a character despite the fact that we saw only his
head and, separately, his hand.
In his experimental films Lev Kuleshov tried to
record a woman in movement by photographing the hands, feet, eyes, and head of
different women. As consequence of editing resulted the impression of the
movements of one single person.
Naturally this example does not suggest a special means of practical creation
of a man not available in reality, but it emphasises especially vividly the
statement that, even in the limits of his short individual work unconnected
with other actors, the image of the actor derives not from a separate stage of
work, the shooting of a separate piece, but only from that editing construction
that welds such pieces to a filmic whole. Take this as one more confirmation of
the absolute necessity for exactness in working, and one more confirmation of
the axiomatic supremacy of its imagined edited image over each separate element
of the actual work in front of the lens. Also, quite obviously of course, the
axiomatic supremacy of the director, bearer of the image of the general
construction of the film, over the actor who provides material for this
construction.
Part IV THE ACTOR IN THE
FRAME
THE ACTOR AND THE FILMIC
IMAGE
I have already spoken above of the necessity
constantly to bear in mind the rectangular space of the screen that always
encloses every movement shot. The movement of the actor in real
three-dimensional space once again serves the director only as material for the
selection of the elements required for construction of the future appearance,
flat and inserted exactly into the space of the frame. The director never sees
the actor as a real human being; he imagines and sees the future filmic
appearance, and carefully selects the material for it by making the actor move
in various ways and altering the position of the camera relative to him. The
same disintegration as with everything in film. Not for one moment is the
director presented with live men. Before him he has always only a series of
component parts of the future filmic construction. This does not necessitate a
sort of killing and mechanicalisation of the actor. He can be as spontaneous as
he likes, and need not in any way disturb the natural continuity of his
movements, but the director, controlling the camera, will, owing to the nature
of cinematographic representation, himself pick out from the entire work of the
living man the pieces he requires. When Griffith shot the hands of Mae Marsh in
the trial scene, the actress was probably crying when she pinched the skin of
her hands; she lived a full and real experience and was completely in the grip
of the necessary emotion as a whole, but the director, for the film, picked out
only her hands.
THE ACTOR AND LIGHT
There is one more element characteristic for the work
of the director with the actor—that is light, that light without which neither
object nor human being nor anything else has existence on the film. The
director, determining the lighting in the studio, literally creates the future
form upon the screen. For light is the only element that has effect on the
sensitive strips of celluloid, only of light of varying strengths is woven the
image we behold upon the screen. And this light serves not only to develop the
forms—to make them visible. An actor unlit is—nothing. An actor lit only so as
to be visible is a simple, undifferentiated, indefinite object. This same light
can be altered and constructed in such a way as to make it enter as an organic
component into the actor’s work. The composition of the light can eliminate
much, emphasise much, and bring out with such strength the expressive work of
the actor, that it becomes apparent that light is not simply a condition for
the fixation of expressive work by the actor, but in itself represents a part
of this expressive work. Remember the face of the priest in The Battleship “Potemkin” lit from
underneath. (47)
Thus the work of the film actor in creation of his
filmic image is bounded by a technically complex frame of conditions
specifically proper to the film. The exact awareness of these conditions lies
only with the director, and the actor can only enter creatively, sufficiently
widely and deeply, into the work of creating the film when he is a sufficiently
tightly and organically welded member of the team —that is, if his work be
sufficiently deeply embraced in the sphere of the preparatory work of the
director and scenarist. Thus we have arrived, at the end of this chapter, once
more at a conclusion of the necessity for an organic team.
Part V THE DIRECTOR AND
THE CAMERAMAN
THE CAMERAMAN AND THE
CAMERA
When the actors have been chosen, and the scenes
exactly and editably prepared—then begins the shooting. Into the work enters a
new member of the team—a man armed with a camera, who does the actual
shooting—the cameraman. And now the director has a new problem to overcome:
between the collected and prepared material and the future finished work stands
the camera, and the man working it. Everything that has been said about the
composition of movement in the space of the picture, about light bringing out
the picture, about expressive light, must in actuality be brought into
conformity with the technical possibilities of shooting. The camera, which
appears for the first time in shooting, introduces a real conditionality into
film-work. First and foremost: the angle of its vision. Normal human vision can
embrace a little less than 180 degrees of surrounding space—that is to say, man
can perceive almost the half of his horizon. The field of the lens is
considerably less. Its view-angle is equal roughly to 45 degrees and, here
already the director begins to leave behind the normal apprehension of real
space. Already, owing to this peculiarity, the guided lens of the camera does
not embrace the entirety of optical space, but picks out from it only a part,
an element, the so-called picture. With the help of a number of camera
accessories a yet greater narrowing of this view-field can be attained; the
frame itself surrounding the image can be altered, by means of a so-called
“mask.”
Not only does the small view-angle set bounds to the
space in which the action develops both in height and in width, but by a
technical property of the lens the depth of the space picked out is also
limited. An actor shot from very close has not only to fit his movements into
the narrow frame of the picture in order not to overstep its bounds, he must
remember also that he must not recede in depth or approach, for he would then
go out of focus and his image would be unclear. At the same time, the camera,
over and above those limitations that condition the movements of the material
shot, has also a number of accessories which, far from limiting, on the
contrary broaden, the work of the director. Remember, for example, in the
pictures of Griffith, those lyrically tender moments that appear as if taken
through a slight haze. Here we have a method that unquestionably strengthens
the impressions of the scene shot, and it is carried out solely by the
cameraman taking his shot through a light, transparent gauze or with a
specially constructed lens. (48)
Remember the extraordinarily impressive shot in The Battleship “Potemkin” when the stone
steps appear suddenly to rush up to meet the falling wounded. This effect could
not have been attained without a special apparatus that enabled the camera to
be tilted quickly from up downwards during the shot.
In the hands of the cameraman are those actual
technical possibilities with the help of which he can transform the abstract
ideas of the director to concrete. And these possibilities are innumerable.
THE CAMERA AND ITS
VIEWPOINT
When the camera stands ready in position, the
director does not now only orientate himself on the future screen image, as he
did when working on the scenario or selecting and preparing the actor. He does
not now only imagine or visualize it. Looking through the view-finder (a
special appliance attached to the camera), the director sees on smaller scale
the future picture that will later be projected on the screen. The scenario has
been written, its special tasks exactly formulated. The prescription of the
shooting of each scene, determining its plastic and rhythmic content, is ready,
the cast is selected and ready for work, all preparation completed, and now the
material thus prepared has to be fixed upon the celluloid. The camera when
prepared for shooting embodies the viewpoint from which the future spectator
will apprehend the appearance on the screen. This viewpoint may be various.
Each object can be seen, and therefore shot, from a thousand different points,
and the selection of any given point cannot, and must not, be by chance. This selection
is always related to the entire content of the task that the director keeps in
mind in aiming, in one way or another, to affect the spectator.
Let us begin, for argument’s sake, with the simple
showing of a shape. Suppose we wish to shoot a cigarette lying on the edge of a
table. One can so set up the camera that the opening of the cardboard cartouche
of the cigarette exactly faces the lens; and as a result of the shot no
cigarette will appear upon the screen—the spectator will see only the stripe of
the edge of the table, and on it a small round black circle, the opening of the
cartouche circled by its round white frame of cardboard. It follows that in
order to enable the spectator to see the cigarette, it is necessary for the
lens of the camera also to be able to “see” it. It is necessary, in shooting,
to find such a position for the lens in relation to the object as will enable
the whole shape of the latter to be seen with maximum clarity and sharpness.
If a torn cigarette is to be shot, the cameraman must
so position the camera that the lens, and with it the eye of the future
spectator, shall clearly see the tear of the paper, and the tobacco sticking
through it.
The example with the cigarette is very elementary —it
but roughly proves the substantial importance of the selection of a definite
set-up of the camera in relation to the object shot. The problems solved by
this selection, in actual practice, are many sided and provide one of the most
important aspects of the joint work of director and cameraman.
Let us turn to the more complex. The task of the
director may involve not only a simple representation of the shape of the given
object, but of its relative position in this or that part of space. Let us
suppose we have not only to shoot a wall-clock, but also to show that it hangs
very high. Here the task of selecting the picture is complicated by a new
requirement, and the cameraman, in choosing the set-up for the camera, either
goes to a good distance, trying to get a part of the floor in the picture and
thus show the height, or he shoots the clock from near but from below, bringing
out its position by a sharp fore-shortening in perspective. If we take into
consideration the fact that the material employed by the film director may be
exceptionally complex in its form, it becomes clear how enormous a part is
played by the selection of the camera-set-up. To shoot a railway-engine well
implies to be able to select that viewpoint from which its complicated form
will be most exhaustively and vividly apparent. A correctly discovered set-up
determines the expressiveness of the future image.
Everything said so far has related especially to the
shooting of motionless objects that do not change their position in relation to
the camera.
THE SHOOTING OF MOVEMENT
The work becomes yet more complicated when movement
is introduced. An object not only has shape, this shape in the image alters
itself functionally with its movement, and, moreover, its movement itself has a
shape and serves as object of shooting.
The previous desideratum remains in force. The camera
must be so directed that every happening in front of it shall be visible in its
clearest and most distinct form. Why does a shot of an army parade taken from
above produce so vivid an impression? Because it is just from above that, with
the fullest sharpness and clearness, the energetic, rhythmic movement of troops
can best be observed. Why is the impression of a rushing train or a racing car
so effective when the object is shot so that, having appeared in the distance,
it charges straight at the camera, and dashes past near it? Because it is in
the perspective increase of the approaching machine that the speed of the
movement is most distinctly represented. If we are to shoot a car and a
chauffeur sleeping in it, the cameraman will place the camera on the ground
near the car. But if we are to shoot the same car winding through the traffic
of the street, the cameraman will shoot the scene from the third floor in order
the better to pick out the movement in its form and essence. The selection of
the camera set-up can intensify the expression of the image shot in many
directions. The shooting of a railway-engine charging straight at the lens
communicates to an exceptional degree the power of the gigantic machine.
In The
Battleship “Potemkin” the muzzles of the guns, looking straight at the
spectator, are exceptionally threatening. In The Virgin of Stamboul the
galloping horses are shot by the cameraman from a road-ditch looking up, so
that the hoofs dash by soaring, as it were, over the heads of the spectator,
and the impression of a mad gallop is increased to a maximum. Here the work of
the cameraman ceases to be a simple fixation of an incident independently of
the director working on it. The quality of the future film depends not only on what is to be shot, but also on how it is to be shot. This how must be planned by the director and
carried out by the cameraman.
THE CAMERA COMPELS THE
SPECTATOR TO SEE AS THE DIRECTOR WISHES
By selection of the camera set-up, director and
cameraman lead the spectator after them. The viewpoint of the camera is
scarcely ever the exact viewpoint of an ordinary spectator. The power of the
film director lies in the fact that he can force the spectator to see an object
not as it is easiest to see it. The
camera, changing its position, as it were, “behaves” in a given mode and
manner. It is, as it were, charged with a conditioned relation to the object
shot: now, urged by heightened interest, it delves into details; now it
contemplates the general whole of the picture. Often it places itself in the
position of the hero and records what he sees; sometimes it even”feels”with the
hero. Thus, in The Leather Pushers, the camera sees with the eyes of a beaten boxer rendered
dizzy by a blow, and shows the revolving, swimming picture of the amphitheatre.
The camera can “feel” also with the spectator. Here
we encounter a very interesting method of film-work. It can be said with
completest safety that man apprehends the world around him in varying ways,
depending on his emotional condition. A number of attempts on the part of the
film director has been directed towards the creation, by means of special
methods of shooting, of a given emotional condition in the spectator, and thus
the strengthening of the impression of the scene. Griffith was the first to
shoot tragic situations as if through a light mist, explaining it by his desire
to force the spectator to see, as it were, through tears.
In the film Strike
there is an interesting sequence: workers out for a walk outside the town. In
front of the strollers is an accordion-player. After the closeup in which the
accordion is seen opening and shutting follows a series of pieces in which the
men strolling are shot from various, often very distant, viewpoints. But the
playing accordion remains held through all the shots, become barely visible,
transparent. The landscapes and the groups walking afar off are visible through
it. Here has been solved a peculiar problem. The director wished, in
representing the picture of the stroll, laying it in the wide background of the
landscape, to preserve simultaneously the characteristic rhythm of music heard
sounding from far away. In this he succeeded. He succeeded thanks to the fact
that the cameraman was able to find a concrete method for the realisation of
the director’s idea. To take this scene the accordion had to be swathed in
black velvet, and it was necessary to calculate exactly the relative exposures
of the shot with the landscape and of the separate shot of the accordion. A
number of calculations had to be made, requiring a special knowledge of the
craft of the cameraman and a technical inventive faculty. Here a complete
blending of the work of director and cameraman was indispensable, and it
conditioned the success of the achievement. The ideas of the director, in his
work in making expressive the film image, only receive concrete embodiment when
technical knowledge and the creative inventive faculty of the cameraman go hand
in hand, or, in other words, when the cameraman is an organic member of the
team and takes part in the creation of the film from beginning to end.
THE SHAPING OF THE
COMPOSITION
The selection of the camera set-up is but a special
case of the work of selecting location. In working on location (and, on the
average, fifty per cent of every production is made on location) (49) the first
task of the cameraman and director is to select that part of space in which the
scene is to develop. Such selection—like everything in film work—must not be by
chance. Nature in the picture must never serve as background to the scene being
taken, but must enter organically into its whole and become a part of its
content. Every background qua background runs counter to the basic laws of
films. If the director require in a scene only the actor and his performance,
then every background, with the exception of a flat surface inconspicuous to
the attention, will steal a part of the spectator’s attention, and thus
substantially nullify the basic method of film effect. (50) If something be
brought into the picture besides the actor, this something must be linked to
the general purpose of the scene. When, in Way
down East, Griffith shows the lad Barthelmess knee-deep in thick grass,
surrounded by trembling white daisies, bowing in the wind, in this picture
nature does not serve as a chance background; it is true that it is done in a
rather sentimental way, but it vividly supplements and strengthens the image
shown. The work on the formation of the”essence”of the picture, the necessity
for an organic dependence between the developing action and the surrounding, is
so indispensable and important, that the finding and determination of the
locations desired for exterior shots is one of the most complex stages in the
preparatory work of the cameraman and director.
One of the first requirements set in the production
work of the film director is exactitude. If, having thought out the filmic
image of a scene, in taking it he desire to get that material out of which he
can create what he has planned, he must inevitably think of each piece he is
taking as an element of the future editing construction; and the more exact is
his work on the components of each element being taken, the more perfectly and
clearly he will reach the possibility of realising his thought. From this
derives the peculiar relation of the film director to the actor, to the
objects, to all the real matter with which he works in the course of his
production. Each separate piece of celluloid used by the director in taking a
required shot must be used in such a way that its length shall exactly conform
to the requirements of that general task which forms the basis of the filmic
treatment of any given scene. In every given piece a movement begins and
proceeds to an exact required point, and the time required for this movement
must be exactly determined by the director. If the movement be accelerated or
slowed down, the piece obtained will either over- or under-step the necessary
length. Such an element of an incident, in departing from the length prescribed
for it, will, in the process of editing, destroy the harmony of the filmic
image planned. Everything chance, unorganised, everything unsubdued to the
editing construction planned by the director in representing to himself the
filmic image of each given incident—all this will lead inevitably to lack of
clarity, to confusion in the final editing formation of the incident. An
incident will awaken an impression from the screen only if it be well edited.
Good editing will be achieved when for it is found the correct rhythm, and this
rhythm is dependent on the relative lengths of the pieces, while the lengths of
the pieces are in organic dependence on the content of each separate one.
Therefore the director must enclose every shot he takes into a harsh, severely
limited, temporal frame.
Let us, for example, suppose that we are editably
taking an incident with an actor. The incident is as follows: The actor sits in
an armchair tensely awaiting his possible arrest. He hears that some one has
approached the door; he watches intensely, sees the handle of the door
beginning to move. The actor slowly takes out his revolver that he had hidden
between the back and the seat of the chair; the door begins to open. He quickly
aims the revolver, but, there enters unexpectedly, instead of the policemen, a
boy carrying some puppies (from the film Beyond
the Law).
The editing is written as follows:
1.
The actor sitting in the armchair alters his
position, as if he had heard a knock.
2.
His tense, watching face.
3.
Taken by itself: the moving door-handle.
4.
Close-up—the hand of the actor, slowly and
fumblingly drawing the revolver.
5.
The slightly opening door.
6.
The actor aims the revolver.
7.
Through the door steps the boy with the puppies.
The elements of the incident, by means of which the
attention of the spectator is turned now to the man, now to the door, now
concentrates upon the moving handle, now upon the hand of the actor or the
revolver, must, finally, blend upon the screen to the single image of an unbrokenly
developing incident. Undoubtedly the director must, for the creation of a sharp
break between the slowly increasing tension and the unexpectedly rapid dénouement, establish a definite,
creatively discovered rhythm of editing. Every element of the incident has to
be taken separately. And everything that the actor performs in the shooting of
each piece must be exactly temporally limited. But it is not sufficient to set
temporal boundaries; within these boundaries the actor must carry out the given
series of movements, must saturate every piece with the given clear and
expressive plastic content. If room for chance were left in the actor’s work,
then not only a pause, a slowing down, but a superfluous movement on the part
of the actor would already shatter those temporal limits that must infallibly
be set by the director. This shattering, as we have already said, would alter
the length of the piece, and thereby destroy the effect of the whole
construction of the incident. We thus perceive that not only must temporal
boundaries be exactly established, but also the movement form they enclose; the
plastic content of the acting work in each separate scene must be performed
exactly, if the director wish to attain a definite result in the creation of
that filmic image of the scene that is to effect an impression on the spectator
from the screen, not now in its real, but in its filmic form. The exactitude of
work in space and in time is an indispensable condition, by fulfilment of which
the film technician can attain a clearly and vividly impressive filmic
representation.
The same striving for exactitude must govern the
director and cameraman not only in scene-construction, but also in selection of
the parts of location from which the space on the screen is to be constructed.
It may appear to suffice that if a river or a wood be required for a shot, a
“pretty” river or wood be found and then the shooting begun. In reality,
however, the director never seeks a river or a wood, he seeks the required
“pictures.” These required pictures, corresponding exactly to the problems of
each scene, may be strewn over dozens of different rivers; they will, however,
be blended to a whole in the film. The director does not shoot nature; he uses
it for his future composition in editing. The problem set by this composition
may be strict to such a degree that director and cameraman often forcibly alter
and reconstruct a part of nature in trying to obtain the form required. The
breaking away of interfering boughs, the felling of a superfluous tree, its
transplantation whithersoever may be necessary, the damming of a river, the
filling of it with blocks of ice—all this is characteristic for the film
technician, always and by all means making use of natural material for the
construction of the filmic image required. The employment of nature as material
reaches its extremest expression in the construction of natural scenes in the
studio, when from real earth, real stones, sand, live trees, and water, are
exactly created in the studio just those forms required by the director.
The selection of the shooting location and the
determination of the camera set-up, as a whole technically termed “selection of
the picture” are always complicated by yet another condition. This condition is
light. We have already spoken of the powerful influence of light. Light it is
that finally creates that form which is transferred to the screen. Only when
the object is lit in the required manner and to the required intensity is it
ready for shooting. The appearance on the celluloid projected upon the screen
is only a combination of light and dark specks. On the screen there is nothing
but light, and it is quite obvious, therefore, that in controlling the light at
the taking we are actually performing the work of making the future image.
Feeling for the quality and intensity of light is inseparably bound up with the
knowledge of that relation between the object and its later appearance upon the
celluloid which belongs exclusively to the technique of the cameraman.
THE LABORATORY
Everything that has been said already about the
necessity for the close relation of all those collaborating in the production
of the film relates also in full to the cameraman. Through the director, the
work of whom on the various processes and happenings of reality he transforms
to filmic material, the cameraman is bound to the other members of the team,
the actor and the scenarist. He, in his turn, serves as the connecting link
between the director and the technicians of the laboratory, the work of which
is the next stage of working out the film material, directly following the
shooting.
Only after the development of the negative and the
printing of the positive does the director at last receive in pure form the
film material from which he can assemble his work. Just as every other stage of
film production, the work of the laboratory also involves more than the simple
execution to pattern of standardised processes (chemical treatments of the
exposed film). Its tasks are very often the continuation of the ideas
originated by the scenarist and pursued by the director and cameraman. The
Griffithian twilight in America could
not have been obtained without a developer of the necessary synthetic
properties and power. Only now, when before us appear all the pieces necessary
for the creation of the film, at last in the shape of images printed on
positive stock, only now ends the organic liaison between all the workers on
the film production, that liaison which is an indispensable condition of the
creation of a”real,”significant, finished work.
The director now begins to join his detached pieces
to a whole. We now leave him engaged on that basic creative process of which we
spoke at the beginning of this essay. (51)
COLLECTIVISM: THE BASIS
OF FILM-WORK
This essay on the film director has covered all the
collaborators in the production of a film. It could not have been otherwise.
The work of filmmaking has all the properties of an industrial undertaking. The
technical manager can achieve nothing without foremen and workmen, and their
collective effort will lead to no good result if every collaborator limit
himself only to a mechanical performance of his narrow function. Team-work is
that which makes every, even the most insignificant, task a part of the living
work and organically connects it to the general task. It is a property of
film-work that the smaller the number of persons direcdy taking part in it, the
more disjointed is their activity and the worse is the finished product of
their work—that is, the film.
(First published as Number Five of a series of
popular scientific film handbooks by Kinopetchat, Moscow and Leningrad, 1926.)
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