III. TYPES INSTEAD OF
ACTORS (52)
(address delivered to the film society)
First of all allow me, in the name of Russian
film-workers, to greet in your person that organisation [the Film Society]
which was the first to undertake the task of acquainting the English public
with our films.
I ask you to forgive my bad English. Unfortunately my
knowledge of it is so limited that I cannot speak, but must read my notes, and
even then not very well. I shall endeavour to acquaint you in this short speech
with some of the principles which form the basis of our work. When I say “our”
I mean, in fact, the directors of the so-called left wing. [See note to
section: Translator’s Preface.]
I began my work in the films quite accidentally. Up
to 1920 I was a chemical engineer, and, to tell you the truth, looked at films
with contempt, though I was very fond of art in other forms. I, like many
others, could not agree that films were an art. I looked upon them as an
inferior substitute for the stage, that is all.
Such an attitude is not to be wondered at,
considering how rubbishy the films shown at the time were. There are many such
films even now; in Germany nowadays they are called Kitsch. Primitive subjects
calculated to appeal to the average bad taste—a cheap showman’s booth
entertainment that at first gives a good return to the owner, but in the long
run demoralises the public.
The methods applied to the preparation of such films
have nothing in common with art. The producers of such films have only one
thing in mind, and that is to photograph as many lovely girls’ faces from as
many angles as possible, and to provide the hero with as many victories in
fights as possible, and to wind up with an effective kiss as finale. There was
nothing extraordinary in the fact that such films could not attract any serious
attention.
But a chance meeting with a young painter and
theoretician of the film—Kuleshov—gave an opportunity to learn his ideas,
making me change my views completely. It was from him that I first learned of
the meaning of the word”montage”a word which played such an important part in
the development of our film-art.
From our contemporary point of view, Kuleshov’s ideas
were extremely simple. All he said was this: “In every art there must be
firstly a material, and secondly a method of composing this material specially
adapted to this art.” The musician has sounds as material and composes them in
time. The painter’s materials are colour, and he combines them in space on the
surface of the canvas. What then, is the material which the film director
possesses, and what are the methods of composition of his material?
Kuleshov maintained that the material in filmwork
consists of pieces of film, and that the composition method is their joining
together in a particular, creatively discovered order. He maintained that
film-art does not begin when the artists act and the various scenes are
shot—this is only the preparation of the material. Film-art begins from the
moment when the director begins to combine and join together the various pieces
of film. By joining them in various combinations, in different orders, he
obtains differing results.
Suppose, for example, we have three such pieces: on
one is somebody’s smiling face, on another is a frightened face, and on the
third is a revolver pointing at somebody.
Let us combine these pieces in two different orders.
Let us suppose that in the first instance we show, first the smiling face, then
the revolver, then the frightened face; and that the second time we show the
frightened face first, then the revolver, then the smiling face. In the first
instance the impression we get is that the owner of the face is a coward; in
the second that he is brave. This is certainly a crude example, but from
contemporary films we can see more subtly that it is only by an able and
inspired combination of pieces of the shot film that the strongest impression
can be effected in the audience.
Kuleshov and I made an interesting experiment. We
took from some film or other several close-ups of the well-known Russian actor
Mosjukhin. We chose close-ups which were static and which did not express any
feeling at all—quiet close-ups. We joined these close-ups, which were all
similar, with other bits of film in three different combinations. In the first
combination the close-up of Mosjukhin was immediately followed by a shot of a
plate of soup standing on a table. It was obvious and certain that Mosjukhin
was looking at this soup. In the second combination the face of Mosjukhin was
joined to shots showing a coffin in which lay a dead woman. In the third the
close-up was followed by a shot of a little girl playing with a funny toy bear.
When we showed the three combinations to an audience which had not been let
into the secret the result was terrific. The public raved about the acting of
the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the
forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked
on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed
the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the
same.
But the combination of various pieces in one or
another order is not sufficient. It is necessary to be able to control and
manipulate the length of these pieces, because the combination of pieces of
varying length is effective in the same way as the combination of sounds of
various length in music, by creating the rhythm of the film and by means of
their varying effect on the audience. Quick, short pieces rouse excitement,
while long pieces have a soothing effect.
To be able to find the requisite order of shots or
pieces, and the rhythm necessary for their combination— that is the chief task
of the director’s art. This art we call montage—or
constructive editing. It is only with the help of montage that I am able to solve problems of such complexity as the
work on the artists’ acting.
The thing is, that I consider that the main danger
for an actor who is working on the films is so-called “stagey acting.” I want
to work only with real material—this is my principle. I maintain that to show,
alongside real water and real trees and grass, a property beard pasted on the
actor’s face, wrinkles traced by means of paint, or stagey acting is
impossible. It is opposed to the most elementary ideas of style.
But what should one do? It is very difficult to work
with stage actors. People so exceptionally talented that they can live, and not
act, are very seldom met with, while if you ask an ordinary actor merely to sit
quietly and not to act, he will act for your benefit the type of a non-acting
actor.
I have tried to work with people who had never seen
either a play or a film, and I succeeded, with the help of montage, in achieving some result. It is true that in this method
one must be very cunning; it is necessary to invent thousands of tricks to
create the mood required in the person and to catch the right moment to
photograph him.
For example, in the film The Heir to Jenghiz
Khan, I wanted to have a crowd of
Mongols looking with rapture on a precious fox-fur. I engaged a Chinese
conjuror and photographed the faces of the Mongols watching him. When I joined
this piece to a piece of the shot of fur held in the hands of the seller I got
the result required. Once I spent endless time and effort trying to obtain from
an actor a good-natured smile—it did not succeed because the actor kept on
“acting.” When I did catch a moment, and photographed his face smiling at a
joke I made, he had been firmly convinced that the shooting was over.
I am continuously working on the perfection of this
method, and I believe in its future. Of course, one can photograph in this way
only short bits of separate actors, and it is the art of the director, with the
help of montage, to make out of the
short bits a whole, a living figure.
Not for a moment do I regret that I took this line. I
more and more often work with casual actors, and I am satisfied by the results.
In my last film I met the Mongols, absolutely uncultured people who did not
even understand my language, and, despite this, the Mongols in that film can
easily compete, as far as acting honours are concerned, with the best actors.
In conclusion I would like to tell you of my views on
a very tricky question which I have met recently. I mean sound films.
I think that their future is enormous, but when I use
the expression “sound film” I do not in any way mean dialogue films, in which
the speech and various sound effects are perfectly synchronised with their
corresponding visual images on the screen. Such films are nothing but a
photographic variety of stage plays. They are, of course, new and interesting,
and will undoubtedly at first attract the curiosity of the public, but not for
long.
The real future belongs to sound films of another
kind. I visualise a film in which sounds and human speech are wedded to the
visual images on the screen in the same way as that in which two or more
melodies can be combined by an orchestra. The sound will correspond to the film
in the same way as the orchestra corresponds to the film to-day.
The only difference from the method of to-day is that
the director will have the control of the sound in his own hands, and not in
the hands of the conductor of the orchestra, and that the wealth of those
sounds will be overwhelming. All the sounds of the whole world, beginning with
the whisper of a man or the cry of a child and rising to the roar of an
explosion. The expressionism of a film can reach unthought-of heights.
It can combine the fury of a man with the roar of a
lion. The language of the cinema will achieve the power of the language of
literature.
But one must never show on the screen a man and
reproduce his word exactly synchronised with the movements of his lips. This is
cheap imitation, an ingenious trick that is useless to anyone.
One of the Berlin Pressmen asked me: “Do you not
think that it would be good to hear, for instance, in the film Mother, the weeping mother when she
watches over the body of her dead husband?” I answered: “If this were possible
I would do it thus: The mother is sitting near the body and the audience hears
clearly the sound of the water dripping in the wash-basin; then comes the shot
of the silent head of the dead man with the burning candle; and here one hears
a subdued weeping.”
That is how I imagine to myself a film that sounds,
and I must point out that such a film will remain international. Words and
sounds heard, but not seen on the screen, could be rendered in any language,
and changed with the film for every country.
Allow me to conclude this note by thanking you for
the patience and attention with which you have listened through my address.
(Delivered, in the present translation by I. M. and
S. S. N., to the Film Society, in Stewart’s Cafe, Regent Street, February 3,
1929. Published, slightly amended, by the Cinema, February 6, 1929)
IV. CLOSE-UPS IN TIME
(53)
(address for the workers’ film federation)
During the summer of the year 1930 I attended a
meeting in the Palace of Labour at Moscow. Work was ended. Outside in the
street it was raining hard, and we had to wait for it to stop. The globules of
water rebounded slightly from the sill; now they were large, now smaller until
they vanished in the air. They moved, rising and falling in curves of various
form, in a complex yet definite rhythm. Sometimes several streams, probably
influenced by the wind, united into one. The water would strike upon the stone,
scattering into a transparent, shivering fan, then fall, and anew the round and
glistening globules would leap over the edge, mingling with the tiny raindrops
descending through the air.
What a rain! I was but watching it, yet I felt to the
full its freshness, its moisture, its generous plenty. I felt drenched in it.
It poured down on my head and over my shoulders. Most certainly the earth,
soaked brimful, must long have ceased to drink it up. The shower, as commonly
occurs in summer, ended almost abruptly, scattering its last drops beneath the
already brightening sun.
I left the building and, passing through the garden,
paused to watch a man working with a scythe. He was bared to the waist. The
muscles of his back contracted and expanded with the even sweep of the scythe.
Its damp blade, flying upwards, caught the sunlight and burst for a moment into
a sharp, blinding flame. I stepped near. The scythe buried itself in the wet,
rank grass, which, as it was cut away beneath, slowly gave down on to the
ground in a supple movement impossible to describe. Gleaming in the slanting
sunrays, the raindrops trembled on the tips of the pointed, drooping
grassblades, tumbled, and fell. The man mowed; I stood and gazed. And once more
I found myself gripped by an unaccustomed feeling of excitement at the grandeur
of the spectacle. Never had I seen wet grass like this! Never had I seen how
the raindrops tumble down the grooves of its narrow blades! For the first time
I wa§ seeing how its stalks fall as they yield to the sweep of the scythe!
And, as always, according to my invariable custom
(doubtless one familiar to all film directors), I tried to imagine to myself
all this represented on the screen. I recalled the reaping scenes recorded and
included scores of times in an abundance of pictures, and felt sharply the
poverty of these lifeless photographs in comparison with the marvellous and
pregnant richness I had seen. One has only to picture to oneself the flat, grey
manikin waving a long pole, invariably in slightly speeded tempo, to picture
the grass shot from above and looking like dry, tangled matting, for it to be
clear in what measure all this is poor and primitive. I recall even
Eisenstein’s technically magnificent General
Line, where, worked out in a complex
editing construction, is shown a reaping competition. Nothing of it remains in
my memory, save men rapidly waving poorly distinguishable scythes. The question
was how to capture, how to reproduce to others this full and profound sensation
of the actual processes that twice this day had made me marvel. I tortured
myself on my homeward way> flinging myself in my thoughts from side to side,
seizing and rejecting, testing and being disappointed. And suddenly, at last, I
had it!
When the director shoots a scene, he changes the
position of the camera, now approaching it to the actor, now taking it farther
away from him, according to the subject of his concentration of the spectator’s
attention—either some general movement or else some particularity, perhaps the
features of an individual. This is the way he controls the spacial construction
of the scene. Why should he not do precisely the same with the temporal? Why
should not a given detail be momentarily emphasised by retarding it on the
screen, and rendering it by this means particularly outstanding and
unprecedently clear? Was not the rain beating on the stone of the window-sill,
the grass falling to the ground, retarded, in relation to me, by my sharpened
attention? Was it not thanks to this sharpened attention that I perceived ever
so much more than I had ever seen before?
I tried in my mind’s eye to shoot and construct the
mowing of the grass approximately as follows:
1.
A man stands bared to the waist. In his hands is
a scythe. Pause. He swings the scythe. (The whole movement goes in normal
speed, i.e., has been recorded at normal speed.)
2.
The sweep of the scythe continues. The man’s
back and shoulders. Slowly the muscles play and grow tense. (Recorded very fast
with a”slow-motion”apparatus, so that the movement on the screen comes out
unusually slow.)
3.
The blade of the scythe slowly turning at the
culmination of its sweep. A gleam of the sun flares up and dies out. (Shot in”slow
motion.”)
4.
The blade flies downward. (Normal speed.)
5.
The whole figure of the man brings back the
scythe over the grass at normal speed. A sweep —back. A sweep—back. A sweep. .
. . And at the moment when the blade of the scythe touches the grass —
6.
—slowly (in”slow motion”) the cut grass sways,
topples, bending and scattering glittering drops.
7.
Slowly the muscles of the back relax and the
shoulders withdraw.
8.
Again the grass slowly topples, lies flat.
9.
The scythe-blade swiftly lifting from the earth.
10.
Similarly swift, the man sweeping with the
scythe. He mows, he sweeps.
11.
At normal speed, a number of men mowing,
sweeping their scythes in unison.
12.
Slowly raising his scythe a man moves off
through the dusk.
This is a very approximate sketch. After the actual
shooting, I edited it differently—more complexly, using shots taken at very
various speeds. Within each separate set-up were new, more finely graduated
speeds. When I saw the result upon the screen I realised that the idea was
sound. The new rhythm, independent of the real, deriving from the combination
of shots at a variety of speeds, yielded a deepened, one might say remarkably
enriched, sense of the process portrayed upon the screen.
The chance spectators, who were ignorant of the
nature of the method employed, confessed to having experienced an almost
physical sense of moisture, weight, and force. I tried to shoot and edit the
rain in the same way. I took long shots and close-ups at different speeds,
using “slow motion.” The slow striking of the first heavy drops against dry
dust. They fall, scattering into separate dark globules. The falling of rain on
a surface of water: the swift impact, a transparent column leaps up, slowly
subsides, and passes away in equally slow circles. An increase of speed proceeds
parallel with the strengthening of the rain and the widening of the set-up. The
huge, wide expanse ofa steadily pouring network of heavy rain, and then,
suddenly, the sharp introduction of a close-up of a single stream smashing
against a stone balustrade. As the glittering drops leap up—their movements are
exceptionally slow—can be seen all the complex, wondrous play of their
intersecting paths through the air. Once more the movement speeds, but already
the rain is lessening. Closing, come shots of wet grass beneath the sun. The
wind waves it, it slowly sways, the raindrops slide away, and fall. This
movement, taken with the highest speed of the “slow-motion” camera, showed me
for the first time that it is possible to record and reproduce the movement of
grass before the wind. In earlier pictures I had seen nothing but a dry,
hysterically trembling tangle. I am deeply convinced both of the need for and
the sense of practicability achieved by this new method.
It is of the highest importance to appreciate, in all
its profundity, the essence of this work in “slow-motion,”and to exploit it not
as a trick, but as a means of consciously, at required points, retarding or
accelerating movement to a precise
degree. It is necessary to be able to
exploit every possible speed of the camera, from the very highest, yielding on
the screen exceptional slowness of movement, to the very least, resulting on
the screen in an incredible swiftness. Sometimes a very slight retardation just
of the plain and simple walk of a human being endows it with a weight and
significance that could never be rendered by acting. I tried to render a shell
explosion by an editing construction of shots at various speeds: Slow at the
beginning; then very rapid flight; slightly retarded development; the ground
slowly sinks away, and then suddenly fragments of earth start flying very
rapidly straight at the spectator; for a fraction of a second an instantaneous
change and they are flying slowly, crushingly and terribly, then an equally
sudden change and once more they are flying fast. It came out excellently!
Cinematography with the “slow-motion” camera has long
been practised. The disconcerting strangeness of retarded movement on the
screen, the possibility of perceiving forms that ordinarily are imperceptible
and invisible, yet none the less existent in actuality, exerts so powerful an
impression on the spectator that it is already no uncommon thing for directors
to insert shots taken in “slow-motion” into their pictures. (It is to the point
here to note that the charm of a cleverly “captured” movement in a drawing
often depends on the same “slow-motion” effect, only here the role of the
“slow-motion”camera is played by the artist’s eye.)
But all the directors who have exploited retardation
of movement have failed to do the one thing that, in my view, is the most
important. They have failed to incorporate the retarded movement in the editing
construction as a whole—in the general rhythmical flow of the film. Suppose
they have been using “slow-motion” to shoot a horse jumping, then they have
shot it as a whole, and as a whole inserted it in the picture, almost as a
separate “dragged in” sequence. I have heard that Jean Epstein shot a whole
film in “slow-motion” (I think it was The
Fall of the House of Usher, from E. A. Poe’s story), using the effect of
retarded motion to give a mystical tinge to every scene.
This is not at all what I mean. I refer to the
incorporation of various degrees of retarded speed of movement integrally in
the construction of a given editing phrase. A short-length shot in
“slow-motion”can be placed between two longer normalspeeded shots,
concentrating the attention of the spectator at the desired point for a moment.
“Slow-motion” in editing is not a distortion
of an actual process. It is a portrayal more profound and precise, a conscious guidance of the attention of the spectator.
This is the eternal characteristic of cinematography.
I tried to construct the blow of a fist on a table as follows: The fist rushes
swiftly down on to the table, and the moment it touches it the subsequent shots
show a glass, stood nearby, slowly jumping, rocking, and falling. By this
conjunction of rapid and slow shots was produced an almost audible,
exceptionally sharply sensed impression of a violent blow. The full processes
shown upon the screen by the editing together of shots recorded at various
speeds seem endowed with a rhythm peculiar to themselves, a sort of breath of
life of their own. They are alive, for they have received the vital spark of an
appraising, selecting, and all-comprehending concept. They do not slip by like
landscape past the window of a railway carriage beneath the indifferent glance
of a passenger familiar with the route. They unfold and grow, like the
narrative of a gifted observer, who has perceived the thing or process more
clearly than anyone else has ever done before.
I am convinced that this method can be extended to
work in shooting a man—his expression, his gestures. I already know by
experience what precious material is afforded by a man’s smile shot
in”slow-motion.”I have extracted from such shots some remarkable pauses,
wherein the eyes alone are engaged in a smile that the lips have not yet begun
to share. A tremendous future stretches before the”close-up of time. 55 Particularly
in sound film, where the rhythm is given point and complexity by its
conjunction with sound, particularly here is it important.
(Written but not delivered as an address for the
Workers’ Film Federation Summer School, 1931, and published, in the present
translation by I. M. and H. C. Stevens, in The Observer, Jan. 31, 1932, by
courtesy of whose editor it is now reprinted.)
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