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PRINCIPLESOF
NEW WORLD CINEMA
O
FEBRUARY 1930
20c
c/ora #/zrf 9fiontage 9iumher
-
ANNOUNCEMENT
Experimental Cinema, published by the Cinema Crafters of
America, is the only magazine in the United States devoted to
the principles of the art of the motion picture. It believes there
is profound need at this time for a central organ to consolidate
and orient those individuals and groups scattered throughout
America, Europe and U. S. S. R. that are working to liberate the
cinema from its stereotyped symbolism. It believes the time
has come for wide critical and creative support of these isolated
movements not only from the point of view of the spectator
but also from the point of view of the creator, and it is the in-
tention to experiment with new forms and to introduce to the
spectator and creator the leading ideas and principles of the new
film world. Experimental Cinema will be a forum where the
work of directors and creators such as S. Eisenstein, W. Pudow-
kin, Dovzhenko, C. Dreyer, Konzinstoff, Trauberg, E. Pom-
mer, J. Feyder, B. Rahn, A. Cavalcanti, Mann Ray, M. Allegret,
E. Deslaw, Pabst, J. Epstein, Rene Claire, A. Room, Lubitsch,
Griffith, St-oheim, Vidor, Seastrom, Chaplin, Flaherty, von
Sternberg and others will be discussed. There will also be
criticism, analysis, and scenarios by internationally known men
such as A. Bakshy, L. Moussinac, R. Aron, H. Potamkin,
Seymour Stern, J. Lenauer, L. Bunuel, R. Desnos, R. Aldrich.
Syd S. Salt, and others. Experimental Cinema as the advance
guard of a new motion picture art believes it will be the nucleus
of a profound and vital force toward the creation of a world-
wide cinema ideology. It appeals to you to support this unique
experiment.
SUBSCRIPTION
- - $2.00 A YEAR
NAME
ADDRESS
CITY STATE
EXPERIMENTAL
CINEMA
919 LOCUST STREET. PHILADELPHIA, PA., U. S. /,
r
THE NEW CINEMA
IT
is one of the strange paradoxes of our time
that the nineteenth century while trying in
various ways to eliminate the mysterious and
along with it mystery itself from the universe, at
its close bequeathed to the twentieth, what is per-
haps one of the greatest single forces that history
will record, for imbuing immense masses of people
with that concentrated mystic fervour which the
church was once able to inspire in its devotees

the cinema, silent conqueror of space, time and

causality. In a remarkable communication con-
cerning the machine in modern civilization written
by Elva de Pue and published as an appendix by
Waldo Frank in "The Rediscovery of America",
Miss Elva de Pue writes that "the movie alone
which tells one people in a universal language about
the life of other peoples, however banal its initial
stammering language, must in the end draw them
closer together than even the mystery which they
gathered of yore in magnificent cathedrals which
pointed them away from the earth and its values,
the earth which they were forced temporarily to
deny. In a world filled with the stench of gang-
rened wounds; in a world filled with the stench of
sewage gathering in moats; in a world filled with
plague, that plague which eventually was a factor
in the loss of belief in a merciful God : no incense
could disguise those stenches. No great bells and no
calm glory of intoning could drown the cries of
brutalized underlings tortured by their masters, lay
and clerical. In that dark world the dependence
upon another life was necessary as a compensation.
as salvation from despair." Today, particularly in
America, at a time when there is everywhere desire
to escape the perils and the problems of a mechanic-
al age, at a time when it has become almost fashion-
able to fall back into traditional positions, beaten
paths off the main road, without even attempt at
analysis or positive statement of the problems of
mechanism as to their social, political or psycholog-
ical elements, and in this sense, the humanism of
those who look back to New England for author-
ity, is as far away from the actual problems of the
American scene as the humanitarianism of those
who look forward to U. S. S. R- for a point of
reference. At a time like this, there is exigent
need of a force powerful enough to assist in the
I presentation of these problems, socially, politically,
psychologically, and if possible to transform them
to meet the realities of the time, realities deeply
implanted by the revelations of modern science.
That force itself can be nothing other than a
mechanism, a machine. Anything other than the
machine is impotent in the face of so much mach-
inery to orient. Such a force is the motion picture
machine which throws its light from one end of
the world to the other and back in an instant,
"that tells one people in a universal language about
the life of other peoples however banal its initial
stammering language" may be. The motion pic-
ture camera which in the control of man is
the cinema with a subject matter as wide as the
universe and an understanding as great as nature,
and in the control of men of "genius the cinema
of Greed, Gold Rush, Theresa Raquin, Potemkin.
End of St. Petersburg, New Babylon, Passion of
Joan, Arsenal and ihe boundless potentialities of
the new cinema of the future with its explorations
into the legends and myths of the new age of the
machine. This is the devotional cinema that is tra-
versing with the speed of light and opening up to
the masses, the mysteries of the new universe of
modern physics, bounded yet limitless, almost in
answer to the prayer for an interpretation of man's
changing relationship with man and his ultimate
position in the universe that will be something
more than "isms" at the end of words or stultifying
mechanical noise. The New Cinema profound
creator of free will and knowledge absolute

with the power of transmuting water into wine and
thence to bread and back again to water should
it choose to do so. wherein the fabled mountain
to extend a metaphor, not only goes to Mahomet
but to heaven as well to bring back the ghosts of all
those slain in the name of Mohammedism; wherein
Narcissus slips into the pool and finds himself be-
ing unreeled in the form of a flower that blooms
to a fountain sprouting blood in streams as high
as Betelgeuse
with no return to earth, defying
gravities. In Cinema Faust has reappeared on
the thirteenth stroke of the clock, in new guise,
to perpetuate the eternal alchemy that cannot be
denied to spirit; the faustian soul has drunk deep
of the new elixir and is appeased in cinema; for
here is a new world of miracle wherein all is solv-
ed and sufficient: wherein every wish is granted;
every hope fulfilled: wherein to conceive is to ex-
ecute and execution
revelation.
'
One receives in
the words of a modern french cinematographer
and poet: "A trolley car on the chest. An auto in
the back. A trapdoor under foot. One has a
tunnel in his eyes and rises to the fifteenth floor
drawn by the hair. All this while smoking a
pipe with the hands at the faucet ... A storm tears
out your tonsils, a cry passes thru you like the
shadow of an iceberg" (Cendrars) . Time is no
more; the temporal becomes transformed into a
timeless, ageless world; an incident occurs and
later reoccurs. at the same place and at the same
moment in relation to past or future incidents.
A smokestack falls and in an i
-
, it is resurrected
to its former position. Two irains meet on one
track and fly over each other with the grace of
gods. Man has conquered the air without wing,
in cinema; and the atom has finally given up its
precious secret: of myths like these is born a great
ideal. This is the subject of cinema, as all things
are the subject of cinema; there is nothing it can-
not transfix into a moment of beauty that no other
agency can match so marvelously well; there is no
Vol. I No. I Copyrighted 1930 by Cinema Crafters
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
message it cannot immortalize in memorable mov-
ing pictures: it has in its sixth sense the power to
penetrate so deeply into the mystery of reality be-
cause of the instantaneity of vision the camera
gives, that all other media become pallid along side
it. In Cinema, emotion, is caught and fixed at the
very moment it is felt, in all its purity. Things
are conceived as they are perceived; to think is to
act. In that lies the omnipotence of the medium.
This is the new cinema. And because it contains
in its heart the very essence of the modern spirit
which in its deepest implications is as catholic and
as elastic as life itself
a spirit that Montaigne
a true humanist if ever there were one, would have
understood were it revealed to him in the cinema
only

it is vitally necessary to those of us today

who cannot accept local or aloof positions at a
time when man has it in his power to unite with
man from one end of the world to the other for
the first time in history. When painters, writers,
philosophers, laymen in tune with this Catholicism
come to realize the potentiality of the cinema as
powerful stimulus to creative activity much in the
same light as the authority of the church of the
thirteenth century served as bulwark for work in
philosophy, stained glass cutting, woodcarving etc.,
then the renaissance we have been awaiting so im-
patiently will have come indeed.
David Piatt.
Dynamic Composition
By ALEXANDER BAKSHY
IN
so far as visual images constitute the basic
material of the motion picture the problem of
cinematic composition is nothing else than the
organization of these images in a sequential order.
It is clear that there is more than one way of
carrying out such an organization. The sim-
plest and most obvious way is that of arranging
the images in an order in which their content mat-
ter is used as so many connected links in the chain
of representations which forms the narrative- In
this case the actual form of images plays but a
subordinate part, being at best, as in close-up,
for instance, only the function of their represent-
ational content.
The motion picture as an art of story-telling
has been principally concerned with supplying
the spectator with such visual information as would
ensure the desired intellectual and emotional re-
action. At first, when the plots were simple ana
the technique still elementary, a straightforward
stringing together of a series of scenes was all that
was considered necessary for unfolding the story.
Later, the more complicated stories and the greater
detalization of images helped to bring into use the
flashback and the parallel action, the two devices
of cutting which introduced the method of inter-
mittent composition. In this way the content
matter of images became for the first time a formal
element of cinematic composition. This formal
character of the treatment of images, be it noted,
had nothing to do with their visual form; it was
merely a means of organizing their content

a
means which unquestionably has its origin in the
peculiar mechanical structure of the motion pic-
ture, but which also has its analogues in other non-
visual arts, as for example, in fiction and poetry.
During the last few years some very interesting
attempts have been made in various countries, and
particularly in Russia, to develop other methods of
formal composition on the basis of image-content.
The problem has been attacked from two different
sides. On the one hand, experiments have been
tried to establish a primary cinematic unit in the
form of a group of images constructed somewhat
on the lines of a grammatical sentence- Examples
of this method are found in Eisenstein's "Ten
Days that Shook the World" in which the use
of symbols in the construction of various "figures
of speech" deserves special notice. On the other
hand, attempts have been made to base the com-
position of the film as a whole on such methods
of formalised treatment of the image content as
the arrangement of "rhymed" sequences with cer-
tain images recurring at definite intervals, or of
whole cycles of sequences on the lines of a repeat-
ing pattern somewhat after the manner of certain
verse forms. Dziga Vertov is considered in Rus-
sia as the head of this school of cinematic com-
position.
Side by side with the line of development just
described which is based on the assumption that
the form of cinematic composition is the function
of the sum total of its image content, the history
of the motion picture reveals another line of dev-
elopment which sometimes crosses the former and
sometimes follows an independent course, and
which proceeds from the assumption that the con-
tent matter of a film is the function of its organized
visual form.
Ever since the first motion pictures were made it
has been universally recognized that the cinematic
visual image has one fundamental characteristic
which distinguishes it from the visual images in
other arts. This characteristic is movement. Al-
though the term, particularly in its solemn guise
of "dynamic quality", has acquired a sort of mys-
tic halo, it is well to remember that it is essentially
pragmatic in its origin and represents strictly defin-
able properties of the motion picture mechanism.
The men who made movies when the art was
still new and unexplored, were not theorists. All
they were concerned with was to give their pic-
tures the semblance of life, and it took them but
a short time to discover that a motionless object
on the screen was as good as dead. Hence the
orgy of recorded motion which distinguished the
early movies.
It was at a comparatively early stage, too, that
the necessity of movement not only in the charac-
ters and objects, but in whole scenes in relation
to one another, was realised. Two reasons dictat-
ed this necessity. In the first place, there was the
concentrated technique of cutting arising from the
fragmentary nature of the film record, which had
the effect not only of speeding up movement but
also of compressing time. In certain situations this
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
latter effect was found to conflict rather too harsh-
ly with the sequence of events in real time. For
instance, a scene showing a man in front of a street
door, followed immediately by a scene showing
the same man inside the house, is likely to produce
the impression of something unreal. An interval
of time is clearly demanded between the two
scenes, and this is supplied by an interpolated third
scene which may be a close up of the man, or the
view of the room he is about to enter, or some
other related Jubject. The method of parallel ac-
tion is but an extended application of the same
principle and achieves a similar effect of expanded
time which sometimes, as in the climaxes of Grif-
fith's pictures, is deliberately prolonged beyond
even the realistic implications of the subject for a
specific emotional effect.
The other and perhaps even more important
reason for changing scenes and thus introducing
a greater mobility of visual images, is found in the
very character of realistic acting when it is used
on the screen. In real life or on the stage speech
itself constitutes action. A conversation between
two persons may contain a series of events pregnant
with dramatic significance, although the person
speaking may engage in very little physical move-
ment. On the screen the situation is different.
Deprived of his words, even when these are present
in the form of subtitles, the screen actor can ex-
press himself only by means of gesture and move-
ment. Bu" ",he naturalistic convention of acting
excludes all but a few of these forms of expression.
The inevitable result is that while the stage actor
who uses speech can sustain a situation without a
change in the setting for the length of a whole
act, the screen actor finds his resources of expres-
sion exhausted within as short a time as a minute.
It was to relieve the screen actor of this predica-
ment and a. rhc same time to give greater emphasis
and variety to the means of expression, that long
situations were reduced to a series of fragmentary
scenes with long and medium shots, close-ups and
"angles" thrown in for the sake of variety and
emphasis. It is instructive to note that with the
advent of talkies long scenes depending entirely
on the dialogue and showing very little movement
made their appearance on the screen. The fact
that the latest talkies indicate a return to the tech-
nique of the silent picture with its short and
fragmentary scenes, only goes to prove that the
handling of dialogue on the screen is still far from
being efficient and that the old "dynamic" form
of composition wields a superior power of emo-
tional appeal.
If the movement involved in the change from
one scene to another brought to the fore the im-
mediate significance of the form of the visual im-
age, the movement resulting from a series of such
changes organized in a manner conforming to a
certain rhythmic scheme, placed the visual form in
the position of the dominant factor in the building
of cinematic composition. At this instance it is un-
necessary to go into a description of the various
methods of rhythmic organization of images be-
yond pointing to the work of Abel Gance, Leger
and Murphy, Murnau, Eisenstein and Dovzhenko.
The important fact to be borne in mind is that
cinematic rhythm is a form of visual composition
which is itself charged with powerful emotional
appeal and at the same time, while remaining in-
dependent of the image content, conveys and shapes
the latter's appeal as well.
The effect of rhythm is to organize sequences of
visible beats and accents. It establishes a visual
continuity of intermittent images as a function of
time. It leaves untouched, however, the problem
of spacial continuity, of the spacial relationship
of images to one another as elements of the visual
cinematic composition. No pictures known to
the writer have so far suggested a satisfactory solu-
tion of this problem. And yet so long as this
problem remains unsolved the motion picture as
a medium of dynamic visual art will never reach
its complete maturity. I The continuity of visual
form implies a dynamic composition of which the
only existing illustration in other visual arts is
found in the moving composition of ballet. Just
ns in the latter, the cinematic visual form has to
be built in time, and its elements of composition
should be not static images but lines of forces or
movements in definite directions. It goes without
saying that movement in this sense includes not
only moving objects, nor movement of images in
time only, but also their movement in space over
the entire surface of the screen. The technical
obstacles which still stand in the way of such
dynamic composition are likely to be removed in
the near future by the various announced devices
for enlarged projection. In them therefore lies
the promise of the mature cinema whose intel-
lectual and emotional appeal will be the function
of its dynamic composition.
Film Problems of Soviet Russia
by HARRY ALAN POTAMKIN
BRYHER,
assistant editor of Close Up, has just
published (under the imprint of Pool, Territ-
et, Switzerland) a book entitled, "Film Pro-
blems of Soviet Russia." The title is misleading,
for the book is in reality a compendium of synop-
sis of Soviet Films, with some critical commentary,
and data anent directorial personalities, concluding
with a chapter, from whose heading the book
takes its name, on the British embargo of Russian
motion pictures- The sole "problem" of the Rus-
sian film considered here is the non-cinematic pro-
blem of the British antagonism. Bryher's book is
a plea for the recognition of the Russian cinema
by England. She stresses not only the artistic
merit of the Soviet kino, but urges that vital cinema
upon the British intelligence as quite in accord
ideologically with the social sentiments of the free
Briton. This would seem to characterize Rus-
sian ideology as reformative in its outlook, a quite
acceptable middleman's social philosophy. This
sums up the Russian social attack as entirely
harmless. If that were so, the Russian film, in-
formed by this assertive ideology, would lack the
essential vigor which is its physical health. But
EXPERIMENTAL
CINEMA
the Russian idea is dangerous, decidedly danger-
ous, to the prevailing acceptations. The danger-
ous idea creates the dangerous, or heroic, structure
ultimately.
The heroic structure, is not achieved spontan-
eously from the dangerous or heroic idea. Form
is attained only by penetration and perseverance
and discipline. By all thre and not by any of
these alone. The last two may create a style, per-
severance a manner, the three together form. Form
is the conception constantly informing the struc-
ture. To understand the problems of form in the
cinema of the USSR, we must consider the com-
ponents of the Russian social attitude.
The Russian social idea is composed of the fol-
lowing: the social-revolution, the criticism of the
bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the
ultimate of collectivism, the re-education of the
mass and the individual in the mass, the conquest
of the egocentric mind. Each of these is identi-
fied with the other. The Russian film, confront-
ing these social intentions, must solve its pro-
blems, its construction, with these as insistences
and total experience or final "message." That
the Soviet kino has been preoccupied with the in-
tegral national idea of collectivism is more than
evident. The preoccupation has been called too
facilely "propaganda," with its' negative connota-
tion of counter-art. But propaganda, when pro-
foundly conceived and realized structurally in the
form, is art. The Russian cinema, and the Swed-
ish before it, have alone approximated form.
That the approximations have not as yet been
extended into a completed structure is due to a
number of disturbances, vacillations in the inclus-
ive idea, which induce vacillations in structure.
These vacillations are: the concern with the ego-
centric and the deflection from the relevant me-
thod. The latter refers to the failure to discover
the correct conversion of a profound and inferen-
tial social material into motographic treatment.
Or to put it more simply: the Russians persist,
generally, in a method ill-suited to their material.
The method is the American muscular movie,
which served as initial instruction to the Soviet
Cinema and which has persisted, in the work of
Pudowkin especially, as the Russian medium, per-
fected beyond naive American uses. However,
the Russians have recognized that this technique
can go no further and, as Eisenstein has said, can-
not satisfy the reflective processes. We begin to
see the new and intrinsically Russian film in Dov-
zhenko's Arsenal- In this film the early Russian
juxtaposition of the individual and his analogy
(the simile) become, at least in intention, a struc-
ture of integrated symbolism with a new non-ver-
bal continuity or logic. The symbol in the real-
istic structurea simplism intended ultimately as
a kino language is substituted correctly by a
structure incorporating the symbolic conversion of
the realistic detail, such as the human personality.
So is one problem of the Soviet cinema being met.
A vexing problem is that of the individual in the
film, to what extent shall he be expressed? Rus-
sia is troubled by this matter, as the criticism
dealt Protozanoff's The Man from the Restau-
rant testifies. Eisenstein, interviewed in France,
has remarked with severity upon what he terms
the retrogression in the Russian film, the back-
step to the single personage. He adds, however,
that this is only a momentary withdrawal for an
accumulation of strength toward a further ad-
vance. To Eisenstein. the constructor of mass-
film edifices, the intellectualist and classicist of
the Russian film, complete objectivity is pos-
sible. He does not penetrate the individual and
there is a question in my mind whether he has
penetrated the social inference contained in the
mass-expression. I await his rendering of the
reflective- But to the other film makers of Rus-
sia, the individual is an experience. The prob-
lem becomes more simplified when we ask: how
can the individual as an experience become the
social idea as an experience? The answer is
contained in a number of films: from Pudowkin
to Dovzhenko. In these the treatment is not con-
cerned with the narrative of the individual caught
pathetically in the social morass, or fate

- the
German and American evasion of the social criti-
cism contained in the plight of the individual (see
The Last Laugh and The Crowd). The in-
dividual in The End of St. Petersburg and Arsenal,
in Storm over Asia and In Old Siberia, is the con-
centration of the social force. For a moment one
expected such concentration in The Man from the
Restaurant, when the walk-out occurs, but the
film disintegrates into a palpably American story
of the rich villain and the young hero and pure
heroine.
A third problem arises from the educational
purpose of cinema production in Russia. How
can this purpose be rendered cinematically? Ei-
senstein approaches this problem from the object-
ivity of the newsreel. A very delicate operation
is involved, to subtilize the didactic. Nothing is
impossible in the film, everything is its material.
The problem is an intellectual one. That is where
intellectuality enters the cinema.
A lesser problem, but an important one, is the
criticism of the bourgeosie. Up to the present that
criticism has been' mostly a too Dickensian
caricature of certain gross types, not a revelation
of basic errors which are expressed in vicious ten-
dencies. In other words, types have been ridiculed,
but the bourgeois ideology has not yet been
criticised. An attempt at organizing a critique
condemnation is the sequence of two conducts,
such as, men dying in battle, the exploiter indulg-
ing his appetite. This is, of course, elementary,
but it is necessarily so- The first criticism had tc
be visceral. The criticism of the fundamentals is
a development.
(To be continued
)
Experimental Cinema is published monthly by the
Cinema Crafters of America at 1629 Chestnut St.,
Philadelphia. Penna., U. S. A.
All manuscripts and subscriptions should be mailed to
the above address.
Price $2.00 a year: 20c per copy.
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
Film Direction and Film Manuscript
By WSEVOLOD L. PUDOWKIN
Translation by Christel Gang made from the German of Georg and Nadja Friedland, Edition
Verlag der Licht Bild Buhne. Copyright 1930 by Seymour Stern.
INTRODUCTION
THE
foundation of film-art is montage.
With this password advanced the young cin-
ematography of Soviet Russia. And to this
day, it has lost nothing of its (original) sign-
ificance and effect.
It must be stated, that the concept "Montage"
is not aiways correctly comprehended or judicious-
ly interpreted. Among many people, the naive
conception prevails that by montage is to be un-
derstood a simple pasting-together of the film-
strips in their temporal sequence. Others again
recognize only two kinds of montage: a quick and
a slow. But they forget
or they do not know
in the first place that the moment of rhythm
that is the law, which determines the variation of
short and long film-pieces, is far from exhausting
all posibilities of montage.
Allow me, by the way of elucidation, to draw
upon another art-form, literature, in order to bring
the significance of montage and its future pos-
sibilities more clearly into focus. For the poet
or the writer, the single word represents the raw-
material- It can have the most varied meanings,
which first become defined through the word's
position in the sentence. If, however, the word
is dependent upon the potentialities of the com-
position, its strength and effect will be variable
until it is a part of the fully realized art-form.
For the film-director, each scene of the finished
film signifies the same as the word for the poet.
Hesitating, selecting, discarding, cross-checking,
he stands before the film-pictures and only through
the conscious, artistic composition are the "mon-
tage-sentences'' created, out of which, step by
step, emerges the definite art-work, the film.
The expression, that a film is "turned"*, is
entirely false and must be banished from film-
language. A film is not "turned"
it is
built out of the individual little picture-scenes,
which represent the raw-material of the film.
When a writer uses a word, for example, birch, it
registers, so to speak, the protocol of a definite
object, but it is void of soulful substance. Only
in relationship with other words, only within the
frame of a more complicated form, does it receive
life and reality in art. I open a book, that lies
before me, and read: "The tender green of the
birch-tree" certainly no first-rate composition,
but it reveals distinctly and exhaustively the dif-
ference between the single word and a word-struc-
ture, in which the word "birch" has no longer a
protocol-designation, but has assumed literary
form. The dead word has been stimulated into
life through art.
1 maintain that every object which has been
photographed from a definite viewpoint and is
shown upon the screen to the spectator, is a dead
object, even if it has moved before the camera.
The independent movement of an object before
the camera is still no movement on the screen ;it
is no more than the raw-material for the future
montage-structure of the movement, which re-
presents a composition of a number of different
film-pictures. Only when the object is composed
out of a multiplicity of individual pictures when it
emerges as the synthesis of different individual
picture forms, does it possess filmic life. Exact-
ly as the word birch, it transforms itself through
this process from a kind of protocol (recording)
,
photographic copy of nature, into filmic form-
Every object must be so brought upon the screen
through montage, that it receives not photographic,
but cinematographic, reality.
We see that the significance of montage and its
sphere of work for the director is far from being
exhausted by a succession of contents or by the pre-
sentation of a time-rhythm. Montage is that
primary, creative moment through which, out of
a soulless photography, (the individual film-pic-
tures) the living, cinematographic form is created.
It is characteristic that in the presentation of a
filmic form very different types of material may
be used, which, in reality, have reference to entire-
ly different appearances. Allow me to cite, as il-
lustration, an example from my last film, The End
of St. Petersburg.
At the beginning of the reel, which is devoted
to the war, I wished to show a tremendous dyna-
mite-explosion. In order to endow this explosion
with the completest authenticity (of effect) , I had
a great mass of dynamite buried in the earth, and
photographed the blast. The explosion was truly
extraordinary

only not in the film. On the
screen it was a tedious, lifeless affair.
Later, after long searching and testing, I mount-
ed the explosion according to the effect I desired,
without, however, using one single piece of the
material first photographed. I photographed a
flammen-werter, which threw out a thick column
of smoke. In order to give the effect of the con-
cussion, I mounted short shots of a magnesium-
flame, in rhythmical change of light and dark.
In between, I placed a "stock" shot of a river,
which seemed to me suitable here because of its
particular light-effects- Thus, finally, there came
into manifestation the effect I had desired. The
bomb-explosion was now on the screen: what it
corresponded to in actuality might have been any-
^^^H
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
thing at all, except a real explosion.
Wtih this example I will say that montage is
the creator of filmic reality, and that nature re-
presents only the raw material for its work. That
is decisive for the relationship of film and actual-
This thought leads inevitably to consideration
of the actor. The individual who is photograph-
ed is only the raw material for the future com-
position of his form in the film, effected through
montage. When in my film, "The End of St.
Petersburg, the task confronted me to depict an in-
dustrial magnate, I sought to solve the problem
by mounting (associating) his figure with the
rider-statue of Peter the First. I maintain, that
the form so composed with an entirely different
reality, takes the place of the mimic of the player,
which usually smacks of the theatre.
In my earlier film.. Mother, I wanted to affect
the spectator not through the psychological repre-
sentation of the player, but through the medium
of the depiction through montage. The son is
sitting in his prison-cell. Suddenly a scrap of
paper is slipped into his hand, (containing infor-
mation) that he is to be set free the next day. It
was now a question of how to portray his joy
filmically. Merely to photograph the joyously
excited face would be ineffectual- So I showed the
play of the hands and a huge close-up of the lower
half of the face, of the laughing mouth. These
shots I mounted together wiith entirely different
material. For instance, with shots of a turbulent-
ly flowing spring stream, with the play of sun-
beams, which blended with the water, of birds,
that played in village ponds, and finally with a
laughing child. Thus, the expression of the "joy
of the prisoner" seemed to me to have been formed.
I do not know how the spectators have taken to
my experiment: I myself am profoundly convinced
of its effect.
Cinematography strides forward at a rapid
tempo. Its possibilities are inexhaustible. We
must not forget, that it is only now coming into
its own as a true art, since it has only now been
freed from the dictatorship of alien art-forms, for
example, the theatre. Now it stands on the feet
of its own methods.
The will, to suggest thoughts and emotions
from the screen to the public through montage,
is of emphatic significance, as it dispenses with
theatrical (sentimental, maudlin) titles. I am
firmly convinced that this is the path along which
this great international art of the film will con-
tinue to progress.
Berlin, June, 1928 \V. Pudowkin
FORWARD
The manuscripts that are submitted to pro-
duction-companies have usually a very hetero-
geneous character. Almost all of them represent
the primitive rendition of some fictional content,
with which the authors have obviously troubled
themselves only in order to relate some action, and
utilizing for the most part, literary methods and
not stopping to consider whether the material sub-
mitted by them will be interesting in cinemato-
graphic treatment- This question, however, is
/
very important. Every art possesses its own type
of material-formation. That naturally applies
also to the film. To work on a manuscript with-
out knowing the working-methods of the director,
without knowing the methods of shooting and
cutting the film, is just as senseless as to give a
Frenchman a German verse in literal translation.
In order to convey the correct impression to the
Frenchman, one must re-form the verse with due
recognition of the peculiarities of the French poetic
metre. In order to create a manuscript suitable
for filming, one must know the methods through
which the spectator can be influenced from the
screen.
Sometimes, however, the view is advocated that
the author has only to give the general, primitive
outline of the action. The entire filmic adapta-
tion (according to this view) is the concern of the
director. But this view is entirely false. One
must always bear in mind, that in no art can the
creative process (formation) be divided into isola-
ted stages, independent of one another. If one
reflects on the theme, the final form of the film
will certainly appear only in unclear outlines. But
the manuscript-writer must have an image-con-
ception (Vorstellung) of this form; he must create
material sufficiently suitable to provide the direct-
or with the possibility of creating a production of
filmically powerful effect. Usually, the result is
entirely otherwise. There generally emerge out
of the first scenario-attempts of the author a great
deal of uninteresting, verbal, insurmountable hind-
rances that present obstacles in the path of filmic
adaptation-
It is the task of this study to offer an elementary
knowledge of the fundamental methods of work
on the manuscript. A manuscript can be built
as drama, and then it will be subjected to the laws
which regulated the construction of a drama. In
other cases, it can approximate the novel, and ac-
cordingly it will be defined by other construction-
principles. But in the present work these ques-
tions can be only hastily touched upon, and readers
who are particularly interested in them, must have
recourse to special works.
PART I
THE MANUSCRIPT
What Is Meant by the Continuity?
It is generally known, that the finished film
consists of a whole series of more or less short
scenes, which succeed one another in a definite se-
quence-series- In the development of the action the
spectator is transported to one or the other place,
or, even more than that: he is shown a scene, a sit-
uation or a player not as totality-appearance,

but
the camera selects single parts of the scene or of the
human body. This style of the building-up of
a picture, which divides the material into elements
and then builds out of them a filmic whole, is call-
ed the cutting of the film or the "Montage". More
will be said about that in the second part of this
work. For the present, it is only necessary to al-
lude in passing to this essential form of film-work.
In filming the manuscript, the director is not in
position to take the shots according to sequence,'
that is, to begin with the first scenes and to follow
the shots through to the end in logical order. The
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
reason is very simple. If a decoration (set) is
built, it almost always develops that the scenes
playing within this decorative frame are scattered
throughout the manuscript. If the idea should
occur to the director to proceed after the shot of
this scene to the following scene in the manuscript,
which takes place in an entirely different location,
it would be necessary from the start to build an
extra-ordinary series of settings, which would con-
sume an inconceivable amount of space and an
equally inconceivable amount of material. Final-
ly, a whole mass of sets would stand there, but it
would not be possible to have one or the other
pulled down-
To work in that fashion is naturally impossible.
Neither the director nor the player, therefore, has
the possibility to work in continuity-form.
Through the loss of this possibility, at the same
time, the unity, the style of the work and, with
that, its effect, are imperilled. In order, therefore,
to assure this structural (spiritual) unity, a method
must be found, which, despite the fragmentization
of the individual shots, will warrant a unified
form of the whole. Above all, it is necessary to
work out the manuscript in advance in the min-
utest detail, and the director will only then achieve
positive results if he forms each single detail film-
ically, the final goal always before his eyes. In
this preparatory work the style must be created,
which conditions the value of the art-work. All
individual, separate placements of the (camera)

apparatusfar, near, close up, above-angle, etc.

all technical properties, which connect a shot
with the preceding and the succeeding shots, every-
thing that constitutes the inner contents of a scene,
must be precisely established, otherwise in the film-
ing of a scene picked out of the middle of the man-
uscript, irremediable mistakes will occur. Thus,
the continuity, that is, the finished shooting-form
of the manuscript, represents a new and final-de-
finitive establishment of every single detail, with
provisions for all technical methods that are re-
quisite for the shooting of the scenes.*
To require of the authors, that they write their
work in such form, (virtually) means to make di-
rectors out of them. But this work must be ac-
complished even if the authors do not furnish a fin-
ished shooting- "Stahlmanuscript"*, in which case
they must provide the director with a series of es-
sential stimulative items. The more technically
detailed the continuity is worked out, the more
possibilities will be at hand to realize on the screen
the visual appearances which the author has pre-
sented.
The second chapter of Part I of Pudowkin's
book will appear in the next number of EX-
PERIMENTAL CINEMA, and further transla-
tion of the entire book will appear serially there-
after.
*I. c, "cranked" or revolved.
"*This sentence defines what is meant by a "Stahlmanuscript"
(steel-manuuTipt) . C. G.
Analytical Treatise on the Dreyer Film,
"The Passion of Joan of Arc" with Ap-
pendix of a Constructive Critique.
(Translated from the German Original by
Christel Gang of Universal Pictures Studio)
.
by WERNER KLINGLER
MORE
correctly stated, the film should be
inasmuch as the montage-form and the
called "The Trial Day of Joan of Arc",
technique, which director Dreyer employs here,
grow out of the embodied material and subject:
the conflict between the clergy and the primitive,
but faith-exalted, individuality, Joan.
Apart from its political significance, the col-
lective belief-form of the church is shaken, by this
simple ecstatic girl, to its foundations.
As with Bernard Shaw, it became an absolute
necessity that Joan should suffer death. To ex-
press it in terms of Dostoievsky (Grand Inquisi-
tor*), the returning savior would be once more
nailed to the cross.
Viewing it in such a light, Dreyer selected the
rhythmical, raw structure. He had to develop
the film in such a way that Joan represented the
combatible almost static center-point of the im-
age-whole, and the judging council around her
had to stand out in sharp, active contrast. Slow-
ly, but surely, the circle narrows closer and closer
upon her, straining towards a verdict-
Therefore, the deeming monotony of the film-
rhythm up to the torture-scene has been con-
sciously planned, for the exhaustive legal quibbling,
the length and the monotonous form of conduct-
ing such a trial can in itself forcibly lead to the
desired testimony. This torturous procedure on
trial is not only medieval, but is still in our mod-
ern era applied successfully by the police.
A great deal of comment was made against the
close-up treatment of this film, without anyone's
really offering a convincing argument.
This close-up technique evolved, and it was
postulated for this film, as already mentioned, out
of the material that had to be embodied, and it
is this particular film's own style inasmuch as the
theme is not conveyed by abstract pantomimic ac-
tion, but rather by a more spiritual one.
PRINCIPLE:
The impression produced through such a
type of picture-and-montage form depends
upon <\he association of expression from
close-up to close-up, plus dynamic rhythm.
To determine more clearly the necessity of the
close-ups here, I should like to state that the psy-
chological characters in their strong divergence had
to be absolutely kept apart from one another, as
every psychological type in this film represents
a world in itself. Understood in a purely optical
way, these types had also to be separate and dis-
*In The Brothers Karumazoff.
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
tinct (particularly Joan) and a reciprocal mental,
as well as physical, contact takes place across the
frame of each scene and across the intercut of the
scenes of the picture.
A typical example of this conflict-contact of
types is the scoffing-scene: An English soldier
tickles Joan with a long straw. If Dreyer had
taken the two, that is, the soldier and Joan, and
placed them into the same frame, Joan would have
lost (suffered) (for the spectator) in formal sign-
ificance. The director therefore keeps the two
strictly separate, and goes so far that he does not
even show us the soldier's hand, but only the
moving long straw as it tickles Joan's face.
By this cut, all physical elements (of the
soldier) have been eliminated from the shot of
Joan, and only the base conduct on the one side,
and the emotional reaction of Joan, on the other
side, dominate the scene. That is, absolute
concentration on the head of Joan. Then, when
Dreyer cuts back to the soldier, the latter strikes
us as doubly raw in his coarseness.
Elucidation of the picture-composition: MED.
CLOSE SHOT: The soldier's body is turned
towards the camera. His head and glance are
turned towards the right frame. His extended
arm and hand with the long straw begin moving
towards the lower right corner of the frame. Ful-
ly aware of his power, the soldier grins sadistical-
ly.
In contrast: CLOSE UP of JOAN. Mov-
ing from out of the lower left corner, the long
straw appears upon her face, without the soldier's
hand.
Through this compositional structure, Joan is
reflected in the glory of martyrdom, similar to
that of Christ in the Scoffing-scene.
Dreyer no doubt was fully aware of this and
deliberately chose the Christ-motif, but, as the
symbolical parallelism did not lie so close at hand,
it had to be first creatively "discovered" as "plas-
tic material."
Once more to emphasize the necessity of the
close-up in this film, I should like to mention
that the close-up is used to express emotion. The
most sensitive mimical values are given their full
worth. Thoughts, even the most hidden psy-
chological functions, which speech and a the-
atrical performance have never been, and never
will be, able to convey, become revealed to the
audience.
If I wished to classify Dreyer's special film-
style, I would use the formula:
PSYCHOLOGY TRANSFORMED
RHYTHMICALLY INTO PICTURES.
It is self-evident, that this particular psycholo-
gical note in a film presupposes, first, excep-
tionally trained acting material, and secondly,
an intellectual, spectator, as only in such a
spectator, who possesses a wealth of association-
conceptions, can this filmic quality and potency
evoke its fullest response.
Certain it is, that such a film is not for the
masses, because for the unschooled, primitive spec-
tator the significance lies in action, in rhythmic
and atmospheric presentation. Thus, the torture-
scenes and the burning at the stake in Joan will
make the fastest and strongest impression. The
inspired, superb performance of Mile. Falconetti
is universally acknowledged.
Before the first significant rhythmical highspot,
the torture scene, the curve of action leaps several
times abruptly, upward and downward. The
change in the curve of action occurs in those mo-
ments in which Joan becomes increasingly help-
less in the face of the questions directed at her by
her judges, who press proportionately closer.
In such scenes Dreyer diminishes the camera-
distance from his object, while through quickened
action and a lightning-like change of pictures, the
broad rhythmic structure becomes interrupted.
Beast-like, the heads of the priests from out of
the depth of the picture, drive into the foreground.
A brilliant example of this montage-treatment
is the following scene:
CLOSE UP: The head of Joan, front view.
To her right -
-
The head of a priest in profile.
The priest scolds at Joan.
SINGLE
FLASHES ; Head of JoanHead of priest
closer
lower face, priest
closer
"
Mouth of priest, very
large-
Upon her cheek the spit of the priest. Joan in
such scenes actually steps out of her static reserve
and moves with purely pantomimic gesture and
emotion within the frame of the picture.
As already mentioned, with the scene of torture
starts an important acceleration in the rhythmical
structure.
Without appealing to the lower instincts of the
spectator, this scene carries an immense, impressive
power- .The spectator receives, so to speak, "an
aesthetic emotional shock."

He is swept away by
the rhythmic action and he experiences the swoon-
ing of Joan.
Just as the complete scenic architecture has been
maintained throughout in white, so also has the
torture chamber been kept in white. Any kind
of medieval, mystically shrouded atmosphere has
been carefully avoided.
Through a compelling door, Joan steps into
this glaring white, cruel reality.
For the psychology of the inquisitors Dreyer
finds the most eloquent plastic material. To be
sure and not to miss anything of the approaching
spectacle, a priest, amidst the repressed excitement,
gets a chair from the farthest corner of the room.
Holding it high, he swings it across the heads of
the others and places it in the front row.
The age of torture becomes completely revealed
in its blunderings and its perversity, and stands
clearly condemned.
(The camera follows the chair as it is being
carried through the room)
.
A flash-shot displays the torture chamber in
its totality- Fantastic machines and large wheels
(black against the white background) create a
foreboding of something dreadful. As quickly as
,
L
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
this static scene is withdrawn from the eye, nev-
ertheless as forcefully the impression is held. The
future proceeding in all its horror is foretold.
Immovable in the foreground stands the attendant
of the torture instruments. Significant in his in-
significant corporality.
In close range, one beholds how a certain fluid
is poured through a funnel. An array of funnels
is shown graduating in size. Next, an array of
saws, in the same order. The arrangement in its
gradation indicates the degrees of torture (mon-
tage-type of association)
.
At the sight of these instruments Joan impresses
upon her judges that "even if she should confess
under torture, she would later recall everything."
And now the attendant turns one of the big
wheels of a kind of revolving machine.
From a new angle one sees the broad side of
the large wheel, spiked with hundreds of nails,
turning from the upper side of the picture towards
the lower.
By way of a masterful montage-construction
Dreyer pulls the emotional-condition of the spec-
tator into a mad whirl. He cuts continuously
back and forth, from the revolving wheel to Joan;
in each montage-picture the large wheel turns
faster and faster, simultaneously drawing closer
and closer into the frame, until finally, covering
the whole screen, it reaches the point of culmina-
tion when Joan faints away.
And here the filmic rhythm falls back into a
broader line.
In the bleeding scene that follows I would like
to point out an important moment.
With one hand the surgeon stretches the skin
of Joan's arm. The other, holding a knife, he
raises to cut.
The blade-point of the knife is set tight against
the skin, so that the spectator expects to see a cut
and the blood oozing,
but

- the hand holding
the knife stops short, in order to make im-
mediately another attempt.
At this instant, Dreyer cuts into a new scene,
i. e., to a priest, followed by the camera which
moves from right to left as he passes along a hall-
way.
It is seldom that Dreyer chooses from a tradi-
tionally-optical horizontal angle.
The possibilities of a photographic apparatus
were applied by him to their fullest creative extent.
Our eyes which are governed by certain laws of as-
sociation, are being educated here to an entirely
new sight, and actually the vision gains signifi-
cance, plasticity and depth.
One is astonished at the variety and power of
these new, optically created forms.
For example, the first exterior shot is taken
slantwise, downward at a stone-paved surface.
In the foreground only legs, walking, are seen.
In the background, in perspective shortening, the
people become visible, into full view.
The atmospheric weight of this scene lies in the
legs on the ground, on their way to the cemetery.
The polaric dramatic tension of the scene at the
cemetery is held by the executive priest and Joan.
Slantwise, looking upwards, the priest is caught
standing behind a high desk in such a way, that
the edges of his desk where they run together form
a triangle, facing the camera.
Figuratively speaking, Dreyer also, carries the
action to extremes.
Quickly, facing the camera, the priest directs
his questions at Joan and places her at the choice
between life ^nd death.
He points to a grave that is being dug. She
glances over, and beholds a row of flowers, as they
are blown by the wind. {Moving shot to the
flowers in opposition to the static shot of the
grave)
.
With this comparative reflection (contrast-
montage) Joan decides to save her life by abdica-
tion, and becoming for the first time, unfaithful
to herself, she signs the document.
The crowd, having gathered around this scene,
rushes back to the county-fair.
Taken back to her cell, Joan has to submit to
the cutting of her hair-
Parallel with this action one sees again the
county fair, the masses in their yearning curiosity
for change, for a spectacle. Already they have
forgotten Joan.
And now, in the cell upon the floor, Joan's
hair is being swept up by a servant, with the hair
also her selfwoven crown of cord.
Her kingdom being swept away thus, before
her eyes, suddenly she realizes what she has done,
and she screams for revocation.
Resultant verdict: Death at the Stake.
From now on, the rhythmic structure of its
line of motion mounts in steep ascendency towards
the highpoinc, towards the solution, towards the
end.
All of a sudden Dreyer's camera becomes extra-
ordinarily mobile. The following scenic construc-
tion is drawn into the rhythm of the flames.
After the preparation for the burning has
been completed, (such as carrying of stones, wood,
raising of pole, nailing of the parchment with
the accusation to the pole) , and after the crowd
has deserted the county-fair and comes rushing
once more towards the stake, Dreyer divides, with
Joan's walk to the square of execution, to the wood
pile and stake, the scenic structure into different
actions and movements, each of which falls into
a shorter and quicker tempo the faster the burning
process advances.
The 5 elements of motion, above mentioned,
are mounted within each other.
(
1
) Doves
(2) Fire
(3)
Priest
(4)
Crowd
(5) Joan as the centre.
(1)

In the plastic material of the DOVES,
Dreyer finds for Joan a continuous psychological
process, a most expressive and moving symbol.
As Joan walks to the place of execution, a
... frightened flock of doves soars upward-
Thereupon, after some other scenes mounted in
between, the doves light on the highest cross
of the church tower.
Further scenes of the process of burning are
mounted in between.
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
In formation a flock of doves flies up into the
sky.
Further scenes of the burning-process in be-
tween.
The formation of doves flies higher.
Further scenes of the burning-process in be-
tween.
The doves fly still higher.
Further scenes of the burning-process in be-
tween.
The doves are high, at a vast expanse from the
earth; they are visible merely as little specks.
The "pure soul" is carried by the doves (de-
liverance) into infinity. Simultaneously they re-
present for Joan a medium of overcoming the
agony. From the cross and the doves she receives
the capacity of overcoming.
(2)

The FIRE, the process of burning, re-
presents the rhythmical counterpoint.
The higher the doves soar, the faster the flames
devour, and the whole procedure is enveloped in an
earthiness.
Later on, wnen Joan has disappeared from the
stake, when the parchment, as if in anguish, has
burned, its ashes blown to the winds, and when
only the bare pole with the nail remains in sight,
then all human arrogance of judgment stands
stripped to its basest nakedness.
The camera shows the burning stake from all
angles. In constant repetitive back-and-forth
movements it catches the flames.
(3)
and
(4)
_
PRIESTS and CROWD plus FIRE
(2)
form together a rhythmic collective.
Again and again the priest is shown. The
tall cross held by him towards Joan, becomes like
Joan, smoke-enveloped, and is smoked out.
With frantic entreaty he screams his prayers
to drive out the devil that is not there.
The action here starts its development moving
into a regulated function of antithesis, (Heracl-
itus) , as the crowd is itself, with the beginning of
the insurrection, goaded by the devil.
The brutal mass, the people, are caught here
specifically, in that Dreyer continuously cuts in
with varied types in their reaction to Joan.
Camera movements to right, to left, upwards
and downwards.
(5)

To all this, JOAN remains the center.
Everything reacts towards her- Optically to her
head.
Stirring, how she lifts her own shackles ! The
camera follows the movement exactly as she as-
cends the stake.
Joan then becomes the personification of the
"God forgive them, for they know not what they
do."
Up to the start of the fire, she feels the sedative
of a drink, which a peasant woman had extended
to her on her way to the stake.
Her trembling nostrils betray the first sign that
the stake is burning. Then the fire itself be-
comes evident.
Her last words are:
"OUR FATHER"
(The length of this title is held at such a short
tempo that it appears as if these words had escaped
her mouth with her last breath)
.
With her last words, a spark of intuitive realiza-
tion strikes the mass of people. One of them turns
around and screams:
"YOU HAVE KILLED A SAINT
!"
And with that, the devil whom they wanted to
drive out from her, turns into them, and destruc-
tion revolt, chaos follow. The eternal struggle
over belief, over the Deity.
Dreyer shows the course of the struggle in an
optical distortion. The eye is forced to follow
the discordant change of black and white. The
thought-response of the spectator becomes difficult.
The scenic confusion also bewilders the spectator.
Demonstrated graphically, the sequence at the
stake represents upon the screen 5 major points of
motion-
The pole with Joan as middle-point
(5)
creates
a vertical, which moves from the screen-center,
Joan's head, partly upward, into the irrational, the
doves (1), and partly downward, towards the
burning pile (2)
.
The mad-house, the world, the county-fair
(4)
and the church
(3) move in the rhythm of the
blazing flame
(2)
rotating faster and faster around
the pole where Joan is bound.
This film is no doubt the most completely at-
tainable form of the "silent era.''
A masterpiece, such as The Passion of Joan of
Arc, has a right to be called a classic, for it pos-
sesses lasting merit.
As the "film" represents in itself a collective art-
form, and depends entirely upon technique, the
"talkies" today present the antithesis.
With relentless logical necessity, however, we
are stepping out of the present-day forms and
dilemma of styles into the purest and most complete
film-form, the filmic synthesis.
With the harmony of light (picture) and tone-
value (music) we come to the
SYMPHONIC SOUND-FILM
APPENDIX
Constructive critical comment on the collective
montage of Joan of Arc.
In the first part of the film, in order to break down some-
what, the justified monotony, the distances of close-ups from
Joan to the priests should have been from the very beginning
increasingly widened.
Then, with the idea of advancing towards a circularly
diminishing enclosure, the possibility lies open to
lessen by degrees the distances, i. e., in gradually drawing the
priests closer and closer to the camera.
Simultaneously with the advance of the circle, straining to
close in on Joan, more and more the priests- should have been
shown collectively, in order to emphasize in contrast their
basically psychological difference.
The screen-surface thus, first, through the constant dos-
ing-in of the camera upon the single heads, would become
gradually filled, and secondly, at the same time, by the in-
creasing number of heads at the final encircling of Joan, the
surface would become completely covered, so that no open
space would be left.
This type of montage would permit a greater play of ten-
sion, and upon this path of the purely "optical" (not
rhythmical) the monotony of the rhythm would become re-
leased.
Constructive critical comment on the Individual Montage.
MEDIUM SHOT: Pantomimically a priest, with his
lifted forefinger, gives significance to the words:
TITLE: "We, the church, gather the sheep that have
lost their way."
CLOSE-UP of the hand with the pointed index-finger
should have been cut in at this point, to symbolize the col-
lective church-idea.
10
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
THE MODERN SPIRIT IN FILMS
Motion : The Medium of the Movie
By BARNET G. BRAVER-MANN
THE
limitations of an art give to it individual
character. In the limitations of the medium,
the artist finds a means of stimulating rather
than of restricting his expression. With every med-
ium for art expression the mechanics through which
form is realized are inherent in the nature of the
medium itself. The dramatist thinks in terms
of speech, the sculptor in .erms of day
and marble; the composer and musician in
terms of sound; the writer in terms of words; the
maker of. motion pictures in terms of motion and
light. To express an idea belonging to a particular
medium through the mechanics of another medium
results in the negation of both forms. To apply,
let us say, sound, speech, color and text or words
to the medium of filmic motion subjects the me-
chanics of these various media to an arbitrary, false
technic which emphasizes its limitations as weak-
nesses rather than as potentialities. A relation
between the thought to be conveyed and the means
used to express it does not exist. The result is a
hybrid form.
For the most part producers in American studios
have been content to adapt the mechanics of other
arts to the films rather than to develop to the ut-
most the poss bilities of filmic motion as a medium.
Thus, they have borrowed from the stage, from
literature, from music, from painting. By bor-
rowing from other art forms the picture makers
have hindered the logical development of the movie,
insofar as they have consciously or unconsciously
repressed the creative impulse in the industry to-
wards the development of the motion picture as an
art. When the medium is impeccably handled,
whether in painting, music, the theatre or the cin-
ema, there is no separation between the idea ex-
pressed and the medium through which it is ex-
pressed. In view of the misunderstanding that
has been caused by novelties such as the talking
and sound films, it behooves all of us who are in
any way identified with or interested in the mo-
tion picture to ask ourselves critically, "What is
filmic motion as a medium?"
Ever since the producers deserted the early man-
ifestations of motion in slapstick and old-fashioned
melodramatic action in the movie for the dubious
practice of adapting the mechanics of other media
to that of the motion picture, the American silent
film has remained, artistically speaking, in a rut.
To be sure, the picture makers naively hoped to
improve the films by reason of these literary, the-
atrical and statically pictorial embellishments, but
they succeeded merely in increasing the difficulties
of production. Unhappily, they failed to re-
cognize the most significant element in the films:
The mounting of filmic motionwithout which
there could be no motion pictures ... no images,
patterns, masses or lines in motion.
Since motion breaks down the static scene, the
static visual composition, it has no connection with
the laws of design and movement as applied to
painting and pictorial composition. However
much painting may suggest movement of pattern
and line, mass and volume, it is static whereas
the movie gives continuous mobility to these
elements.
Since filmic motion conveys thoughts by means
of a succession of flowing images, it has no connec-
tion with the medium of words.
* * *
Since the images in motion are silent, then mo-
tion as a medium has no connection with nor re-
lation to music and the mechanical devices for the
reproduction of sound. \ Objects and images in
motion can graphically suggest sound in the mind
of the spectator as has been proved by every mo-
tion picture true to the medium, from Mack Sen-
nett's slapstick comedies to the more sophisticated
films like Potemkin, The End of St. Petersburg,
The Crowd and The Last Laugh.
The medium of motion has nothing in common
with the medium of speech nor with the conven-
tional movements of the stage in the expression
of human emotion.
Since motion is the only medium which tells a
story or conveys thought and feeling by means of
flowing images, the conjunction of pieces in a film
strip, the organization of sequences, and the varia-
tion of their tempo, it is self-sufficient like any in-
dependent art form.
A decade and a half ago the motion picture
seemed to be on the right track. At that time the
movie dealt in motion
in the medium true to
itself. It gave small heed to the stage, particularly
to a stage out of tempo with its age; it gave no
heed to literature, nor to any of the other in-
dependent art media.
# % ^
Producers with aspirations, box-office and other-
wise, sought to improve the screen by imitating
the narrative manner of the stage play. This
imitation of theatre transferred the slow tempo
of the stage to the movie and interrupted the
logical flow of images inherent in the nature of
the medium of motion. On the screen, space is
complementary to motion. Space implies depth
and is necessay for the movement of objects and
bodies in any given direction, thereby imparting to
the motion picture a scope of visual appeal that
cannot be achieved by the necessarily slower tempo
and restricted movement of the stage or of the talk-
ing film. The slow tempo of dialogue films and
of the stage production is due to the slow move-
ment of objects, to static patterns, and to limited
command of depth, pace and space for the exten-
sion of movement. Whenever a film, as frequent-
11
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
ly happens in the case of the dialogue films, slows
down to a degree which makes it possible for the
eye deliberately to take in an object or image on
the screen, and when the mind is conscious of the
passage of time in the act of optical scrunity, then
the film is too nearly static to be a motion picture.
Motion does not permit the eye to focus on an
image for a long period of time. That is what
precisely happens on the stage or in the talking
film. This absence of motion limits the degree
of emotional and visual appeal, for it is the never
ending patterns in motion moving through space
on different planes, and, building up to, a totaluy
concept that heighten the dynamics of the silent
screen.
%
^c
^
Farsighted. prophetic directors and technicians
of the theatre, like Adolphe Appia, Oskar Strnad
and Adolph Linnebach, have tried to adjust the
mechanics of the theatre to the tempo of our times
by seeking to solve the limitations of space on the
conventional stage (which producers of dialogue
films have brought to the screen) only to realize
that no theatre stage can ever be spacious enough
for the depth and varies of motion necessitated
by the motion picture. Several years ago, Linne-
bach at the Printz Regenten Theatre in Munich
predicted that the technique of stage production
would have to adapt a quicker tempo by a rapid
shifting of scenes similar to, but not like, that of
the movie. Thus, while the best technicians in
the modern European theatre seek to overcome the
spatial limitations of the stage, American producers
of dialogue films have brought to the screen the
limitations of the conventional speaking stage.
When Griffith achieved his phenomenal suc-
cess with The Birth of a Nation, producers seemed
as blind then to the reason for the success of this
film as they are to-day to the dynamics of the
movie. If they had been sensitive of the drama of
motion as it is revealed in this Griffith epic, and
which method of mounting Griffith himself has
abandoned, they would have seen that it was the
way in which the director had organized the se-
quences of patterns, the short scenes and quick cuts
and particularly the fragments of objects and
images in motion, which imparted such dynamic
power to The Birth of a Nation. Producers did
not observe that the motion of the patterns and
images, their building up to an idea or concept,
rather than Mae Marsh and the Gishes, served to
develop the emotional appeal

that the same mo-

tion, if enacted by other players, would have been
just as effective. People who were spectators of
The Birth of a Nation, remember the motion, but
have forgotten the players. However, for purely
box-office reasons Mae Marsh, the Gishes and other
players were made stars by the producers. The
fact is, that if Griffith had mounted The Birth of
a Nation in the later narrative manner of most
conventional films, neither that picture nor the
players in it would have created a lasting impres-
sion.
The development of stars brought about the
exploitation of personalities and the exploita-
tion of personalities arrested the development of
films true to their medium Motion. Scenarios
and photoplays were adjusted to the star, with
the result that requirements of the medium re-
ceived secondary attention. The medium was de-
based to enhance the player, instead of the player
being fitted to the medium and the creative de-
mands of mounting. Thus has motion as a me-
dium suffered neglect-
That Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks
have held their own in American pictures longer
than other players is due chiefly to the fact that
they have been truer to the nature of the medium
and pursued their own course independent of pro-
ducers who never understood motion as an art. In-
tellectually and artistically blind to the magic of
motion, most producers and directors have utilized
the close-up with abandon
the producer be-
cause the high salaries paid the stars warranted
much exhibition of their faces; the director because
it was an escape from the difficulties of thinking
in terms of motion, and building up an idea
through the composite effect of non-narrative
images. With most stars as indifferent to the
medium as the producers, of course they agreed
to the non-cinematic use of the close-up, and as
is known in the industry, many stars insisted that
contracts specify a certain number of close-ups in
each picture.
% ^ *
The more close-ups there were without drama-
tic reason the greater was the neglect of motion.
For years, the film has been kept from function-
ing in accordance with its own inherent nature un-
til audiences tired of the lazy, narrative technic and
its sentimental absurdities. They began to find
more drama in motion by driving cars, dancing,
watching ball games, attending prize fights, foot-
ball games, horse races, aeroplane meets, than in
observing the picturization of stage scenes in front
of stage sets and reading the explanatory titles
that the movies have offered. When people dis-
covered they could get the drama of motion else-
where than in .'he movie house, the film merchant
thought that the public had wearied of motion
pictures. The truth is that comparatively few
pictures have been made which were mounted in
harmony wit.i the medium of motion. The pub-
lic never tired of motion pictures because there
never has been an over-supply of such films. Ra-
ther they had grown weary of pictures not true
to the medium and of photographed "kitsch" de-
termined by the sanctified tabooes of Will H.
Hays.
Instead of realizing the situation, correcting it
by adjusting production to the demands of the
medium, or better yet, by developing directors
from the ranks of artists who think naturally in
terms of images and patterns, and by encouraging
writers to plan scenarios in terms of motion and
life, the producers continued to go from bad to
worse and in their last extremity adopted the
dialogue film.
To attribute the spiritless quality of many mo-
tion pictures to the mechanical characteristics of
12
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EXPERIMENTAL
CINEMA
the camera and the projector is an empty excuse
for the inability to create significant, powerful
patterns and images in the medium. Especially
is this true when we note that the camera can be
used to create and distort forms as well as to take
them realistically, and that the projector can
heighten moments of drama by increasing the
tempo of the images as well as the dimensions of
the screen- But these, although important factors,
including three dimensional effects, reflecting sur-
faces, the elastic screen, flexible lens and other de,-
vices, are incidental to the one basic principle of
the motion picture: Motion. To brand the me-
chanics of the motion picture as limitations in the
way of its remaining a creative art is on a par with
decrying the piano because its limitations are cop-
per wire and ivory keys; or painting because its
tools are oil, turpentine, color, canvas and brushes
of pig bristle.
The application of thought and feeling to the
mechanics of an art medium determines the quality
and degree of artistry in the finished product

whether a sonata, a portrait, or a motion picture-
Among the followers of every art there are hacks,
inevitably; and in the cinema it is the hacks among
directors and producers who are most vociferous
about the mixture of speech, sound and color with
motion. They are vocifereous because they have
shown themselves unable to cope with the magic
of motion and have produced shadows of animat-
ed puppets instead of- real motion pictures. Shall
we confuse the limitations of the motion picture
with the incapacity of directors and producers?
It is as if a pianist blamed the wires and ivory keys
of the instrument for his inability to play like a
Paderewskl.
^ ^ ^
Since the principles of each art medium are the
same as regards structure, flow, rhythm and im-
agery, they function in such a way as to give purity
to each medium. The more completely anything
creative is done in its own medium, the less satis-
factory it will be in any other medium. There
is no order in an art form made to absorb the me-
chanics of other art forms. The motion picture is
the only art medium which gives expression to
emotion and ideas through images in motion, light
and space, thereby reflecting the dynamics of our
period. That these images ordinarily appear on
a film as the result of having been recorded by a
camera and transferred to the screen by means of
a projector, is wholly secondary to motion. The
makers of motion pictures will find they must re-
turn to these first principles:
1
The medium of cinematic art is motion.
2
Motion as an art medium is self-sufficient
and has no affinity to such media as
words (away with explanatory sub-
titles) , music (sound) , speech (spoken
titles ) , or painting (color and static de-
sign) .
3
Motion applied to a succession of images
can transmit thought, stimulate emotion,
indicate time, place, character, sound,
speech, atmosphere, physical sensation and
state of mind.
4
Motion, when utilized as an art medium
by artists, has proved the motion picture
a major art form, logically independent,
inevitab*/ self-sufficient and utterly free
of intrusion by the mechanics of any
other medium.
Chaplin has done it. Fairbanks at times has
done it. Murnau. Pabst, Dupont and others have
done it. And the Russians, Eisenstein, Dovshen-
ko and Pudowkin, with the application of their
principles of montage, are carrying the art of mo-
tion further than anybody to-day. The motion
picture

the picture based on motion and the
calculated mounting of images that command
spectator attention
has never failed to be im-
pressive, even when built upon themes of simple
content- The medium of motion as rhythmical-
ly applied to patterns, images and themes, demands
the control by artists. The necessity of the mo-
tion picture is obedience to the characteristics of
its medium,
a medium which only artists in
imagery can use with creative, stimulating effect
for the enrichment of the screen and Man's im-
agination.
THE NEW CINEMA
A Preface to Film Form
The Cinema, a medium capable of aesthetic
expression, sensitive and profound as any of the
arts, is deliberately going to waste through the
trickeries, fictions, criticism and conventions, in the
jargon and definitions of the other art media.
Very little that is original in the cinema's exclusive
mode of truth or beauty has as yet been unreeled:
and by truth or beauty in the cinema sense, I mean
immeasurably more than the composition (or tone)
of a pictorialism, or the pulchritude of a mari-
onette.
In America the cinema has become a parasitic
medium conditioned for sex nomads and day-
dreamers. Its plastics are projected upon the most
melodramatic aspects of behavior; a fetish is made
of the cinema's fact recording powers, and its cel-
luloid marionettes arc deified. Sociologically the
American film is superficial; its environments are
entombed in sentimental implications, and the con-
ventions of its relations (psychological as well as
cineplastic) are an imposition.
The men who direct these films have been re-
cruited from their associations wtih the other arts;
theatre, literature, painting. These novices to the
film medium, instead of defining its hard differ-
ences and unique capabilities, instead of allowing
the plasticities of its instruments to limit and gov-
ern their visions, project their celluloid results in
concocted plastics (funded from their previous
aesthetic pilferings) and moral recipes suited to
the evanescent demand of the many. To their
(directors) abusive treatment of the medium's
properties for expression can be blamed the cinema's
stunted aesthetic growth, its 'particular' lethargy.
13
EXPERIMENTAL
CINEMA
7
It was not until the projection of the Soviet
film "Potemkin" that the cinema became aware
of its individaality. "Potemkin" was the first
film to break away from the multitude of static
reproductions of lighted scenes, of idiotic facial
distortions, of declamatory emotions, and of un-
related and over-emphasized projections. Eisen-
stein, the film's director, replaced the usual nebul-
ous movie manikins, with characters from real
life; ludicrous sets, with direct setting; arty photo-
graphic effects, with a cinematic flexibility of cam-
era organization. Eisenstein achieved his results
not by any emphasis of actor or acting, plot or
setting, but by an arithmetical relationship of the
projection of images in time, movement and image
content; each projection of image in movement
and time paralleled and reverted and carried the
component projections in a rhythmic, and psy-
chological relation to one another, and at the same
time unreeled F.isenstein's 'theme' in cadences strict-
ly cineplastic. As a result the spectators reactions
arose from this organized relation of the cinematic
(thence structural) elements in the film, move-
ment, image and time, in preference to the usual
relations such as acting, decor, dynamite plot, or
pictorialism, but which would not have as valid
an aesthetic cinema significance.
Omitting the few abstract films for the moment,
"Potemkin" was the beginning of aesthetic form in
the cinema insofar as it was the first instance of
a film which expressed the esesntial idea (theme)
in terms of cinema and came into existence only
and entirely through the particular of its medium

the film.
The cinema's particular means, the language
that distinguishes the cinema from other media of
expression is inherent and intrinsic to the motion
picture camera and projector. Its vocabulary is
generally known (fades, dissolves, pams, tilts,
lense changes, masks, iris, slow motion, cuts, etc.
etc.). Each of these cinematic factors contain
values for psychological and cineplastic progression
in a film, and unite to project a whole which con-
sists of and exists by them all. They are the struc-
tural units for film form, cineplastic form, and
unless they are used for purposes other than a mere
reproduction of people or things, nothing of
aesthetic value will unreel. The arrangement and
content of as well as in the cinematic units, is part
of the cineplastic idea. In proportion as these
cinematic units embody the essence of a thing or
situation, and the director's knowledge of sym-
metry composition, synthesis, in the cineplastic
sense of those terms; the film will be good. Cin-
eplastic form then is produced by the arrangements
and co-ordination of the differentiation of the cin-
ematic units, and not of the cinema contents, such
as acting, setting, or pictorialisms.
The arrangements or the relations of the con-
tent factors before "shot" is not necessarily a sign
of cineplastic value. A director must be able to
understand the mutual dependence of the successive
content factors and to co-ordinate them with cin-
ematic units into a unified whole. The first re-
lationship is established by MOVEMENT (mo-
bile camera, pams, tilts, lense changes, cuts, dis-
solves, tempo, camera changes),
TIME (speed,
interval and duration of objects, cinematic units
and movements)
. The second coherence is
dependent upon IMAGERY (subject matter in its
highest organization, cinematically,
psychological-
ly, compositionally)
. A cineplastic ensemble is
established by the introduction of organization,
rhythm, design. The laws of such cineplastic ar-
rangements are identical with the laws which gov-
ern all psychological and physiological activities.
An analogy can be made with the painter who
from his element of color, produces line, light,
space, solidity, and other color. He makes a pat-
tern of each of these factors and relates each to the
other in a complete design; lines are related to other
lines, light to other light, space to space, solids to
solids, (all by the intermediary of color) and from
the interrelations the painter achieves a quality
known as form; plastic form. This plastic form
is rated in proportion as the integration between
subforms and content is complete, original, a per-
sonal unification to express universal values.
In a similar manner the film director proceeds,
relating Time to Time (speed, interval and dura-
tion of objects, movements and cinematic units)
Movement to Movement (mobile camera, pams,
tilts, lense changes, cuts, dissolves, tempo, camera
changes) and Image to Image (subject matter in
its highest organization, cinematically, psychol-
ogically and compositionally) ; a certain number
and kinds of cinematic units arranged and ordered
at specific Time and projecting specific Images
produce a cineplastic movement. A periodic varia-
tion or accent of a number of such cineplastic move-
ments interrelated, produce a cineplastic rhythms
other rhythms different with regard to specific im-
ages or combinations of movements or time values,
but related in general psychological order, further
diversify and amplify the cineplastic structure.
Censorship note: An alteration of any unit in
such an ensemble would destroy the existing rela-
tions and ruin that particular psychological and
cineplastic unity. It is this combination of all
forms that constitutes value, aesthetically im-
portant in proportion as the synthesis is complete;
and despite the so-called limitations of the
'mechanical medium' there does exist the greatest
latitude for a director to integrate his content (sub-
ject matter, theme) into cineplastic forms (organi-
zation of movement, time, imagery) in which the
only limitations are his experience and imagina-
tion.
Leivts Jacobs
EDITORS David Piatt-Lewis Jacobs
NEW YORK CORRSPI" H. A. Potamktn
HOLLYWOOD CORRSPT Seymour Stern
PARIS CORRSPT Jean Lenauer
CONTRIBUTORS Alexander Bakshu. Leon Mous-
sinac, Alberto Cavalcanti, Edward Weston. Christel
Gang. Werner Klingler, Robert Aron. Richard Aid-
rich. R. G. Braver-Mann, H. H. Horivitz, Jo Gercon.
BUSINESS MANAGER Jacques Bright
14
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
Principles of the New World-Cinema
"Man is moved by his images,
and only values experienced as
an image are cogent to move
him."
Waldo Frank.
By SEYMOUR STERN
Being a Continuation of the Aesthetic and Struc-
tural Principles of Soviet Cinematography, Includ-
ing New Forms of Film-Montage.
I Form and Purpose
THE
present is a period of emergence for the
world-cinema. Everywhere, except chiefly
in Hollywood and in England, the old struc-
tural forms are disappearing, and new ones, in-
digenous to film-art and no longer to literature
and the other arts, are emerging. To use a some-
what different figure, the world cinema-ball,
traveling through a new, self-created space-time,
has experienced a sudden great burst of momentum
imparted through the shock of Soviet impetus.
The two Anglo-Saxon countries, true to the char-
acter of the present Anglo-Saxon decadence, that is
boring like a deadly cancer through the Western
world, have been cinematically unaffected by the
film-technical revolution that started (pre-eminent-
ly) with Potemkin. But except for these back-
sliding nations, throughout the world the film may
be noted as vastly (though of course not totally)
freed from the lunacy of the Hollywood tradition-
In particular, the year now closing has been
significant for the fresh and startling acomplish-
ments of Bolshevist cinematography. The Soviet
film-artists have in this year not only surpassed
their previous efforts, but established, in every point
of formal structure and every concept of film
r
methodology, complete emancipation from the tyr-
anny of the former world-conquering Hollywood
film-methods. In every sphere, thanks to Soviet
attainments, we can at last record the disestablish-
ment of that false, commercially inspired American
technique which, for fifteen years, has dominated
and retarded the entire conception and technique
of film-construction throughout the world. Art-
istically and technically, thus far, Moscow has
vanquished Hollywood. Not only in the domain
of "realism" have the Soviet cinematographers
demonstrated the American "school' to be com-
posed of frauds and liars, but in every department
of cinematic construction, in direction, photo-
graphy, cutting, thematic structure and all sub-
sidiary departments. In fact, it is a vital feature
of Soviet film-triumph that the "department"
(.that is, the departmentalization of creative activ-
ity) no longer exists: Although recognizing the
film as a collective art-form, the Russians, by grace
of that inborn artistic character which makes the
Slav at once superior to the Anglo-Saxon, has
solved the problem of the creative dominance of
the film by one master, by one master's vision and
organic genius. (This, it is almost unnecessary
to add, holds every bit as true of collaborative di-
rection as of direction by one man. A powerful
religious social understanding welds into a single
dominant mind, such as Pudowkin's, into the fi'<n-
structure) . Bolshevist cinematography has in this
year enormously freed the world-screen from the
commercial enslavement of Hollywood. More
than that. It has outdone the splendid achieve-
ments of its own first period.
Taking a perspective-view of the period of Soviet
cinematography now closing, Eisenstein observes:
"I believe that only now can we begin to hazard
a guess concerning the ways by which will be
formed a genuine Soviet cinematography, i. e. a
cinematography which not only in respect of its
class attributes will be opposed to bourgeois ci-
nematography, but which will also be categorically
excellent in respect of its own methods*. Ten
Days That Shook the World, although in certain
ways, which I shall discuss, consummating this
period of the Soviet screen, in certain other ways
bears the germ
-
and even the first fruit! of
this self-transcendence- As perhaps the most
dynamic application known to date of a highly
advanced montage-form, it challenges the film-
students of the world to burrow deep into the
problems of the ideological, film-culture that the
Bolshevist cinematographers have developed. And
in this connection, probably nothing represents
a- more explosive liberation from the fettering no-
tions of the Hollywood producers than the Arsenal
of the Ukrainian director, Dovjenko.
By way of introducing the more advanced pro-
blems of film-montage to American and English
readers, I consider it necessary to present a few
of the outstanding elementary principles of film-
construction formulated by W. L. Pudowkin in
his manual entitled Film Regie Und Film Manu-
skript Film Direction and Film Manuscript.
This manual, which was translated for me by Miss
Christel Gang of Universal Studios, Universal
City, California*, is indispensable to film stu-
dents as the primer in the approach to cinematic
technique and philosophy.
Montage, emphasizes Pudowkin, does not mean
merely what its literal translation implies: "mount-
ing". Neither does it mean simply "cutting".
The notion that montage is merely "a pasting to-
*From an article by Eisenstein, The New Language of Cin-
ematography, published in Close Up, May, 1929.
*The kindness and efforts of Christel Gang, exercised through
ier sensitive and meticulous translations of technical litera-
ture from German into English, have made it possible for
film-students in Hollywood and along the West Coast to
become acquainted with a great deal of material that would
otherwise still be inaccessible to them. Her translation of
Pudowkin's book was made privately, for purpose of im-
mediate reference, but arrangements are now being completed
to publish it for the American market. Wherever material
translated from the German appears in this paper, the trans-
lation, unless otherwise indicated, is Miss Gang's.
15
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
gether of the film-strips in their temporal succes-
sion," writes Pudowkin, "is naive." Many
times in this book Pudowkin offers definitive
guiding notes on the particular powers, functions,
and peculiarities of montage-construction. These
laws and general principles, which constitute the
basis of Russian film-ideology, form the very crux
and essence of the correct construction of films;
they also give us a vision of the present emergence
of the screen into an art of colossal power.
Page 59

"Basically taken, montage is a force-

ful steering of the thoughts of the
spectator- If the montage is a sim-
ple, unguided binding of the different
pieces, it tells the spectator nothing."
12

"Montage is the creator of film- re-

ality, and nature represents only the
raw-material of the work that makes
film-reality. This is the most de-
cisive point in the relationship be-
tween film and actuality."
(Italics mine)
.
54

"The picture is built out of the

totality of small pieces."
"THE BUILDING UP OF A
SCENE OUT OF PIECES, OF AN
EPISODE OUT OF SCENES, OF
A SEQUENCE OUT OF EPI-
SODES, OF THE PICTURE OUT
OF SEQUENCES, IS CALLED
MONTAGE.
55

-"There is no breaking-down, or in-

terruption, but only a systematic,
lawful building up."
(This has reference to the close-up,
which, Pudowkin states, when cor-
rectly employed as part of the mon-
tage-structure, is never felt as an in-
terruption of the action, but- on the
contrary, as a highly geared building-
up of the action and the line of move-
ment) .
101
"The emotion can doubtless be con-
veyed through the specific rhythm of
the montage."
(He cites Griffith as the only Amer-
ican director to have accomplished
this to any appreciable extent)
.
"The necessity, which guides the
changing glance of the eye, coincides
exactly with those laws which regu-
late the correct building-up of the
montage."
(This forms the optical, and there-
fore purely descriptive, basis of mon-
tage) .
102
"MONTAGE is the HIGH POINT
OF the CREATIVE WORK of the
DIRECTOR."
115

"The director organizes every single

scene; he analyzes it through reduc-
tion (solution-analysis) into its ele-
ments, and at the same time, he al-
ready visualizes the union of these
elements in montage."
"Change of placement" montage is one of the
cardinal points in the construction of the Russian
film-dynamic. It is a two-fold means of camera
utilization and optical attack. The conventional,
well-known form is simply the shift of camera in
plane, angle or general line of vision, taking the
same action. It requires the photographing of two
or more "shots". But there is another, more
radical, form of placement-change montage, which
the Russians have brought to a high degree of
powerful effect. At the highest tension-points
(study the film-strip of Potemkin, Mother, Ten
Days, etc.), they "break" the individual image-
element into a number of separate placements (but
not into separate "shots"), which evidently, to
judge from sections of the film-strip I have seen,
is accomplished not by cutting (the "shot" is a
constant: it is always the same "shot") but prob-
ably by a stop-watch camera- The important
consideration for this type of construction (which
is really an analysis of the single scene, within it-
self !) is that the "shot" is constantly itself, that
is, the same "s:iot", and that it runs continuously
on the strip without a patch (until, of course,
the next scene begins) . The effect is that of an
analytical totality and very strong. I shall deal
more thoroughly with the structural precepts of
the film-dynamic in my remarks on analytical
montage.
I rehearse these points only because I realize
how impoverished is the film-ideology of radical
American cinematography, and because I am con-
cerned to provide in a short space an adequate in-
troduction to the elementary precepts of montage-
construction before proceeding to the principles of
the new cinematography.
In an article, I expressed the view that "this
book is to film-technique what Aristotle is to logic
and Euclid to geometry the first clear word and
the first systematic document that is likely to be
studied generations after its appearance." This
opinion has been richly substantiated by the sub-
sequent emergent development of Bolshevist cine-
matography from the elementary principles here
defined into a domain of abstract* cinematography
which will ultimately lead the film to the very
door of mind and fourth-dimensional representa-
tion. "To say the truth," writes Pudowkin, "I
fear my book has grown old. Incessant experi-
mental cinematographic work, which progresses in
U. S. S. R., has led us to new principles of mont-
age, or, more correctly put, to a new development
of old principles.**
Perhaps this is true. But no beginning is com-
plete without a perusal of at least the optical found-
ations of montage which his book presents.
*Not to be confused with the "abstract" cinematography of
the French cinema,
that is, with technical laboratory ex-
ercises, however important from certain points of view, such
as Rien Que Les Hemes, Ballet Mechanique, A Quoi Revent
Les Jeunes Films, etc. The abstract film, according to my
ideology, belongs outside the working-sphere proper of mass-
cinematography and can be of value only to limited groups
of students who need cinematic "piano practice".
**Fri$m a letter to me.
16
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
The foundations of the new cinema that leads
to mind carry us to the consideration of radical
principles of vision (image-bases and fundaments)
,
organization and construction. The deepening
connection between film-theory and film-practice
not only justifies, but actually necessitates, such
ideological structure and terminology as I have here
built for the advancement of cinema throughout
the world.
We may see from the foregoing interesting and
significant observations that the making of a film,
after the basic underlying theme** has been decid-
ed upon, is not a matter of romantic intuition, of
helter-skelter shooting of haphazard putting-to-
gether, or of cutting according to impulse, but is
rather a matter of working out the mathematics
of filmic form based on the calculation of the
neural and psychological perception-reactions of the
audience to optical sequences which are mounted
in the order of an ever-heightening tension. The
whole is an entity evolved out of the montage
of its parts; therefore the "vision of the whole"
must be always in mind.
Definition:
MONTAGE. TAKEN IN ITS BROAD-
EST PHILOSOPHICAL SENSE, IS
THE CONCEPTUAL AND STRUC-
TURAL ORGANIZATION OF THE
THE MOVEMENT-FORMS OF THE
FILM. TOGETHER WITH THE VI-
SUAL CONSTRUCTION OF THESE
FORMS. TOWARDS THE END OF A
PERFECT REALIZATION OF DY-
NAMIC HARMONY AND THE CREA-
TION OF A DOMINATING
RHYTHM.
And with less stress on the structural, and more
on the metaphysical side:
MONTAGE IS THE FULFILLMENT
OF THE IMAGE-IDEA THROUGH
THE FILM IN DYNAMIC AND VI-
SUAL FORM.
To abide by so important a philosophical eva-
luation of the essence of cinematography, requires,
as may be instantly realized,
(1 ) a mind sensitive-
ly attuned to the tone of the image-music which,
pictorially. expresses the image-reality of cinema,
and (2) a methodology of practical film-con-
struction that follows the path already so bril-
liantly blazed by the Bolshevist producers. Per-
haps no one has more finely sensed or more suc-
cintly expressed the immense implications of the
above point of view, in its relation to the new
methodology of film-construction, than my friend
and confrere, H. A. Potamkin. In the first of a
series of important essays on the Phases of Cinema
Unity*,, he wrote as follows:
**By theme "I understand, and mean, the same thing that
Pudowkin, Potamkin, Bakshy and others of this persuasion
.mean: i. e.. not 'story' (especially as 'story' is understood
and obeyed in the putrid, damaging, un-filmic tradition of
Hollywood), but intrinsic subject-matter
fundamental,
underlying, intellectual content
in a word, what I later in
this essay name "the essential, radical, underlying image-'
idea."
*Close Up, May, 19 29.
"The entire film must be proconceived in
anticipation of each detail I A curve or
an angle, a close up or a fade-out, must
not be recognized as an isolated detail, but
as an inevitable part of an inevitable pat-
tern. The whole disciplines the detail,
the detail disciplines the whole. There is
a more demanding logic than the logic of
the psychology of a character at any mo-
ment or the logic of the dramatic moment.
There is the rythmic structure of the unit
determining the moment. No such thing
as a "shot" exists in the aesthetic sense of
the cinema, whatever one may call the im-
mediate taking of a scene. Films are
rythms that commence and proceed, in
which

ideally
every moment, every
point, refers back to all that has preceded
and forward to all that follows. A stress
or a deformation, an image or an absence
of image, has validity only if it is justi-
fied by the pattern up to point, and if it
leads again to the pattern from that point."
Words freighted with the Mosaic thunder of
law ! Words rich in explicit injunctions of unity,
universe-logic, universe-necessity, universe-majesty,
that few will apprehend and fewer find possible
of attainment .... Out of such words will emerge
the images that will conquer man ....
This definition of montage, and the appended
comments, may be accepted as the axiomatic be-
ginning-point in the entire ideological system of
cinematography. They may be taken as the syn-
thetically defined basis upon which rest all super-
structural aesthetic and metaphysical considera-
tions in the art of filming.
The sphere of cinematographic work, so defined,
may seem to circumscribe the field of practice to
the exclusion of the so-called intuitive artist. This
is precisely a state of affairs Eisenstein has willed
and has striven to inaugurate. He has violently ban-
ished intuition from the creative realm and ab-
solutely denied it a single claim to existence in
cinematography. His well-known statement, "I
am an engineer by training, strictly utilitarian,"
etc. . . . My slogan is, "Down with intuitive crea-
tion
!"
is expressive of the general tendency of
Bolshevist ..'inematography. Pudowkin does not
share this view. If they can achieve this long-
sought goal, if they can rid creative cinematography
of the handicap of intuitive "inspiration" and thus
remove the film-structure from the constant danger
of the creening-in of intellectually foreign elements,
they will have accomplished another great thing.
I cannot enter further into this phase of the mat-
ter. It would take me too far into the vital mat-
ter of the relation of the unconscious mind to the
objective in age-reality of the film, a subject I shall
treat separately. Let it suffice here to conclude that
the creator of the film-reality, in order to fulfill
these principles, must have a profound working-
knowledge of the mathematics of film-form. By
the mathematics of film-form, I mean, specifically,
the analytical and synthetic treatment of the pic-
ture in its sequences and individual parts.
In Eisenstein we find a master of the mathema-
17
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
tics of film-form, and the first to master it by an
intensively intellectual, non-intuitive method.
While it has been said that Pudowkin is "tradition-
less", (in a sense that is outside the scope of my es-
say), it is really Eisenstein, who, in this direction
at least is traditionless- Pudowkin, while he is far
above the rank and wildly unconceptual intuition-
ism that furnishes the American, English and Ger-
man producers their sole means of ('technique",
leans towards Griffuh in certain intuitional phases
of image-construction*. But in Eisenstein, we find
the completest and most radical departure from
anything resembling these methods. The insist-
ent, religious reliance of Eisenstein on the general
principles of modern science and mathematics for
every structural point, for every characterization,
for every movement.

in a word, for everything

in the nature of cinematic effect and montage-ex
pression, is one of the wonders of the' film-culture
of U. S. S. R. This tendency may explain the
accusation of a certain hardness and dis-individu-
alized impersonality in his works, but according
to my viewpoint all such charges are untrue, or,
at best, superficial and therefore inaccurate. Eisen-
stein chooses to project the tragedy of the mass,
rather than that of the individual, in whom, as a
result of a religious belief in a strict Marxian
materialism, he does not believe. But the emo-
tional force is there as much as in Pudowkin. The
irony is equally savage, the bitterness equally
vitriolic, the hatred of the Western bourgeois world
equally fierce, the will to expose the lying decadent
peoples of the West, is equally developed and ex-
pressive. All the elements are there, and all of
them are satisfying. The result of Eisenstein's
ideology is the "explosive montage", of which Ten
Days That Shook the World is the readiest and
most significant example. Potemkin, which pro-
ceeded along an image-graph of more compactly
woven texture, contains the rudiments of Eisen-
stein's montage in the October film- Ten Days,
experimentally however unfulfilled in the abstract
domain, is, by the least appraisal, a world-revela-
tion in the montage of "movement-explosions"
scientifically established.
My digression on the directorial beliefs and in-
tentions that are making for the re-formation of
the new world-cinema would be incomplete in this
phase if I neglected to mention perhaps the most
interesting particular of all, the method of the
world-famed Bolshevist director, Alexander Room.
Room has himself stated his general method and
intention.
"I want my camera to be like Roentgen,
whose rays pierce through to the. innermost
of our being. I want to project on the
screen the very foundation of man in or-
der that the analysis of determinate sensa-
tions, of acts and thoughts, arc translated
into luminous images. The academic pro-
fessor Bescherew, who died recently, taught
*It is interesting to note that Pudowkin's films, which are
emotionally more violent than Eisenstein's. are the more
popular. They concentrate more on the individual, and hence
are more sympathetic.
me long ago the science of human reflexes.
"I devoted several years to the study of de-
terminism, of psychic states, of the theory
of repression, of Freud in particular and
of diverse manifestations of fear, anguish,
sorrow and love. All that I learnt has
actually been of great service to me in the
preparation of my actors."
Could there be a clearer picture of the intent,
seriousness and purposiveness of Soviet film-meth-
ods? With this I am content to conclude my re-
marks as to the factors of intuition and intellect
in relation to the preparation of the montage.
Analysis of montage-construction leads to a di-
vision of the entire sphere. I establish it as a mat-
ter of categorical expediency to attack all problems
of montage-construction on either of two paths of
construction: Labor on the film is labor on either
the MONTAGE OF VISUAL ELEMENTS or
on the MONTAGE OF DYNAMIC ELE-
MENTS. Briefly, the basic working-categories of
montage arc dynamic montage and visual montage.
There are no other divisions. There is no simpler
way of handling the situation of film-construction.
Under the montage of visual elements may be
grouped the following items of artistic labor:
Photography
Lighting
Set construction
(Scenic architecture)
Composition
Tonalization
Printing (laboratory)
Cleansing and preservation of the celluloid
strip.
Under the montage of dynamic elements may be
grouped the following items:
Movement (tempo, rhythm, motion-anal-
ysis, etc.)
Continuity (and cutting)
Camera operation.
Under this may also be classified all other forms
and functions of movement on the screen.
The total montage-organization of the film is
the result of the harmonization of visual montage
with dynan./c montage. To "mount" a film
means, in its entire sense, to mount visual film-
elements in unity (co-ordination) with dynamic
film-elements. A film may have a good (dynamic)
montage. It may be. in continuity, cutting and in
individual movement-forms, a fine piece of work.
But the final montage-result will be spoiled or de-
stroyed if the visual elements (the lighting, photo-
graphy, printing, etc. ) are not in harmony with
the pattern of the whole. But this condition of
"harmony" (or unity) is not attained according
to the methods of the present Hollywood photo-
graphers who imagine they have only to flood
every scene with light and have crystal-clear print-
ing in order to make their films photographically
(optically) "appealing". On the contrary, the
scheme for the working-out of the visual montage
must be carefully planned in joint consultation of
'director and photographer. The exact degree of
tonalization, the general distribution of light and
shade throughout the film, (each scene envisioned
18
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
print
ikally
. the
ion
01
sioncd
in relation to the whole vision) , and the particular
quality of this light and shade for the particular
film at hand, are montage-matters of as vital con-
cern to artistic cinematography as the problems of
continuity and movement-montage. It is a mont-
age of cinematic chiaroscuro that, in particular,
is required.
The montage of a film, therefore, is not only a
montage of movement (dynamics) : it is also, and
equally, a montage of optical and visual effects
(visuals) . The Russian photographers have best
understood these laws. To realize how much they
have understood them, witness the astonishing
work of such photographers as Tisse, Feldman,
Golownia and Demutzki.
The chief domain, however, of a film-ideology
concerned with the fulfillment of form, is move-
ment. The present period of world-cinemato-
graphy, which has yielded so much of significance
in Soviet production, marks the complete and al-
most universal establishment and recognition of
the nature of cinematography as plastic form,

as movement, (A recognition that comes almost
too late) . To us today the axiom of movement
seems a priori understood- Such an attitude, how-
ever, is still actually without justification. We are
in danger of forgetting that for fifteen years, most
of the world has persistently failed (or refused)
to think of cinema in its native terms and that
this error of judgment (which, more than any-
thing, caused the premature corruption of the pro-
duction-mind and hence of the art) , has been hon-
ored with perpetuation by the long-dreamed of
triumph of the talking-film in the most conven-
tional theatrical tradition. But among the world-
minority who have best understood the film, the
condition of movement and all its implications
are acknowledged. The whole weight and test-
imony of the radical critical tradition of the past
fifteen years apotheosizes this concept into the holi-
est law of the film. The father of film-aesthetics,
fifteen years after having expressed the first princi-
ple of cinematography, again develops a statement
on movement as an article of undying cinematic
faith:
"The only real thing in the motion picture
is movement ... It is the failure to appraise
at its true value the part played in the mo-
tion picture by movement that has been
responsible for the obsession with realistic
effects which have dominated the greater
number of film-directors since the early
days of film-art.
"Assuredly, the material of the motion pic-
ture must be organized, but its organiza-
tion should be of the nature of a dynamic
pattern, in which each separate pictorial
subject is balanced in relation to all other
subjects while the component parts of each
remain fluid in relation to one another.
To enter as an element into a mobile form,
the static picture has first of all to break
down its equilibrium. It ceases therefore
to be a "picture", and, with this, has no
further use for the principles of design and
composition as these are employed in the
easel painting."* (Italics are mine).
Death to every form that violates this law, the
life-law of cinematography
!
Death to the talking-film if its formal structure
intrinsically threatens the film's chief means of il-
lusion-power, which alone creates the new reality !
Death to any and every new form, invention or
synchronization that destroys, or renders impos-
sible, the montage-dynamics of cinematography! .
The past year has yielded a more analytical and
more conclusive statement on movement than any
within my knowledge, by one who is perhaps Mr.
Bakshy's most worshipful disciple
Potamkin-
I offer it for consideration as the final essential
preliminary to the study of my categories of dy-
namic montage:
"Movement is not succession of motions. In
cinema movement, no motion may actually
take place, but an interval may occur, an
interval of time, between two images and
that is movement. In other words, move-
ments are two: the actual movement of a
body, and the constructed movement at-
tained through time and space-successions
(in montage)
.
"The movement of a film is not cinematic
unless it is plastic . .
."
"Dynamics is just another name for the
climacteric construction and organization of
these various elements. It refers to the ac-
cumulative forward march of the film."
(Italics mine)
.
To use a filmic metaphor, the Bakshy-Potam-
kin statements on movement are one and the same
scene photographed from different angles and join-
ed in montage. If the Potamkin statement is a
far-flung extension of the father's original, bear-
ing cinema closer to the distant horizon at a furi-
ous rate of speed, the father's words, that
"
(film)
organization should be of the nature of a dynamic
pattern (etc.)", are holy law, to be defied only at
the peril of demolishing the film entirely.
We are only now at the point of determining
just what are the forms by and through which the
movements of the film (i. e., the movements of
its physical action, the movement of the film in
continuity-progression, the movements of its in-
dividual, fragmented parts which constitute an in-
tegration of its single major movements, etc.) may
be mounted in order
(
1
) to describe events and
(2)
to express image-ideas. The Bolshevist cin-
ematographers have suggested some of these mont-
age-forms. It is my purpose to submit and to dis-
cuss new categories in the light of the present
world-advancement of expressive cinematography.
*From The Road to Art in the Motion Picture by Alexander
Bakshy, published in The Theatre Arts Monthly of June,
1927, an essay for every film-student in the world. The
appearance of this man twenty years ago as the first and
classical film-aesthetician is an early, infallible indication of
the priority of the Russians to mastery of the film.
19
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
The six categories which I propose are:
(1)
SYNTHETIC MONTAGE*
Ideational
(Individually, Sequentially, Episodically,
Organically, Compositionally)
.
(2)
Montage of Static Group Combinations
(3)
Montage of the Transition from the Static
to the Dynamic (and reverse)
(4)
Montage of the Continuance and the Di-
rection of Movement, which includes the
dynamics of the moving camera.
(5)
Montage of Objectification
(6)
MONTAGE OF THE MOVEMENT-
FORMS OF THE FILM.
The progress of contemporary cinematography
is towards a greater and greater, and deeper and
deeper expressiveness. In its march towards mind,
the film has increasing recourse to image-symbols,
which are drawn from the deep well of the psy-
chologic image-experience of the race of man. In
grinding harder its scientifically found material,
and in digging deeper into the experiential con-
sciousness (the unconscious mind) of man, the
film seeks to find those images, those symbols,
those visual forms which may be useful in the task
of re-conduioning the mind and soul of man. For
this task, the cinematographers of our day (main-
ly, if not only, the Bolshevists) , have recruited
for their fighting image-forces the vast army of
data and truths established by modern science.
Pavlov, Freud, Adler, Jung, Bescherew, all schools
and prominent "free lances" in the field of psy-
chologic research, not to mention in the spheres of
Psychopathology clinical psychiatry, chemistry,
physics, mathematics, anthropology, ethnology,
ethnography, etc., have been drafted for this stup-
endous educational war against superstition, reli-
gious dogma, patriotic "idealism"', nationalistic
war propaganda (the concomitant of patriotism)
and against the money-cults of the West. In a word
contemporary cinematography resorts to the great
reserve of modern education in order to combat
the socially retrogressive factors which, throughout
the world, are preparing the world for another
catastrophe.
In thus seeking to establish a language that will
be felt, understood and accepted by the simple,
elemental image-mind of man, cinematography is
perforce traveling in the direction of a profounder,
yet (for that very reason) more simply and intell-
igible abstract image-form. The words of Pud-
owkin are here to remind us again of this vitally
significant trend:
"Now, our work is directed to the develop-
ment of methods of "expressive montage."
When this essay was first written, last April, it was sum-
mitted for critical examination, in criticizing it, David
Piatt suggested that Naive or Detailed Synthetic Montage
(a purely descriptive concept which originally formed the
second division of the category of synthetic montage), "be
subsumed under Analytical Montage (the decorative as op-
posed to the structural)." Among numerous other modi-
fications, this suggestion has been followed.
This (new montage-form) means that the
joining of the (film) -pieces will express
and give the spectator the abstract "concep-
tion" or immediate emotional state. This
principle also extends to the joining of
sound and visual pictures (sound pic-
tures)
."
The category of synthetic montage may, in cer-
tain notable aspects, be considered as identical with
the expressive montage-ideology of U. S- S. R.
Under it, therefore, I group four other montage-
forms, as being, although individually independent,
collectively variations of the many methods of
creating a synthetic montage. But, while all these
forms may be utilized to attain a significant ex-
pressive montage, synthetic montage, on the other
hand, implies also something distinct and specific
in the language of cinematography.
Synthetic montage is expressive montage. But,
deeper, synthetic montage is also the root and basis
of new structural elements that function as means
towards the creation of a philosophical synthetic
imagery.
THE SYNTHETIC MONTAGE unites
a number of single images in immediate
sequence, in order to form the effect of a
single "action" (image) and to build that
action up in its individual parts, if the ac-
tion (image) truly represents the synthesis
of an image-, dea.
Differently expressed, the synthetic mon-
tage gives the parts or fragments of an im-
age-idea in immediate sequence in order to
form the effect of an image-whole and thus
to express its essence.
The synthetic montage, broadly under-
stood, is the montage of the image-idea of
the sequence, of the episode or, as in the case
of its broadest philosophical application,
of the entire image-structure.
This type of montage has already been confused
with its hypothetical antithesis, the analytical
montage. In my original essay on this subject, I
maintained "naive or detailed"" synthetic mon-
tage to be a variation of the entire category of
synthetic montage. The above definition then
stated that, "synthetic montage gives the frag-
ments or parts of a scene, etc." But the term
"scene" had to be changed in accordance with my
acceptance of David Piatt's suggestion (referred
to) , and also if a mere descriptive synthesis of
fragments (details) were not to be confounded
with the purely abstract or expressive character of
my concept of synthesis. The entire trend and
striving of the Soviet screen, as a matter of fact,
has been a herculean intellectual effort to get away
from purely descriptive, literal synthesis (naive or
detailed synthesis) . Manifestly, this type of
"synthesis" belonged under a different category,
and this category, as Piatt has said, is analytical
montage.
Another remark I find n is necessary to make is
that the necessity of synthetic imagery "in im-
mediate sequence" is determined by reference to the
structural basis of the film, the limitation of im-
mediacy vanishing, and the nature of "sequence"
20
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
undergoing relative changes, according to whether
the film is pronouncedly contrapuntal or not. The
more contrapuntal in structure the visual-motor
graph of the film is conceived, (this means also,
the more violently it breaks with the stupid Hol-
lywood tradition of "story-structure"), the less
"immediate'' is the progression in which the part-
icular image-fragments forming a synthetic image-
idea occur in the "sequence" that they create.
There can be true understanding of the two
montage-forms, synthetic and analytical, only by
studying the distinctions between them and as-
signing to each its proper useful function in the
construction of the film. These distinctions are
not arbitrary, but are based on analysis of the
actual structure of film-works- It is more than
expediency: it is a real aesthetic determinant that
requires sharp lines to be drawn here for the guid-
ance and empowerment of the film-workers.
The synthetic and analytical montage-forms are
two distinct kinds.
An analytical montage is any montage which
analyzes the continuum of a single action and
builds it up by dividing it into its salient progres-
sive points of movement.
Though it breaks up, it builds up. Its break-
ing-up is its building-up.
The analysis may or may not include inter-
mediate seems. If no other scenes cue in between
the analytical points of the action analyzed, it is
a simple, straight analytical montage.
But if there are scenes between the points of the
analysis of the single action, the object committing
(or the pe/son performing) this action on the
screen is called, for reference and technical analysis,
the "point of analysis". The basic object of
analysis (that is. the particular "image-action"
analyzed) is the structural point of analysis, and
the parts (pieces of image-fragments) of the analy-
sis made of this initial object, arc the functional
points of analysis. (This terminology, of course,
is strictly utilitarian, based on method and the
stipulations of technical analysis)
.
Here we may avail ourselves of a useful analogy.
We may at this point remark the interesting and
useful parallelism between this analysis-division of
a scene made in order to build up film-reality, and
the idea of Aristotle, in that part of his Metaphys-
ics which treats of the divisibility of motion,
a suggestive analogy that will, in course of time,
carry cinematography
into more universal territory.
Motion, according to the Greek philosopher, is
divisible in two respects:
(a) in respect of the time it occupies
(b) in respect of the separate
movements
of
the moving body.
If we apply this primitive division of motion
to the material which at the present time is the
major film-stuff to be dealt with, and consider the
relationship
between the laws
respectively
govern-
ing each, we see that the motion of every
montage-
scene has two points of structure
from
which to
be analyzed. temporal and spatial.
A scene
may be analyzed according to the tempo of
(a) the action, or
(b) the time-cutting, or
21
(c) according to the points plane-space of
the movement.
a and b are temporal divisions, c is spatial.
It must be borne in mind that I am not trying
to construct a parallelistic metaphysic with Aris-
totle as its starting-point. Such adherence to the
cine-metaphysics of Aristotle's* universe (governed
as it is by a motionless God, the product of the
unfulfilled psycho-graphic experience of the Hel-
lenes), would be unjustified if only out of con-
sideration of the wealth of analogical instruction
that a Bergson's motion-deified universe yields. I
am merely attempting to suggest the way towards
a true formulation of analytical montage-methods,
and towards film-methodology in general. It will
be recognized that between the divisibility Aris-
totle found in the motion of the world-stuff and
the divisibility of the motion of film-reality, as
stipulated, there exists only a temporary analogy
of identity, and the time is not far distant when
the analogy between these two divisibilities will
no longer suffice as suggestions of method, for the
emergence of cinematography into spheres of
hitherto unknown reality will extend the field,
and create new possibilities, for complicated space
and motion analyses. But now, although the
mathematical philosophers of the present time have
gone immeasurably beyond this, cinematography
develops aesthetically, despite the colossal Bolshe-
vist achievement, with a wearying slowness, due
chiefly to the international effect of the damaging,
retrogressive Hollywood influence. Without
ignoring the world-significance of Griffith's early
work, and particularly of the structural lessons of
Intolerance, the film-revolutionary movement is
confronted with the enormous task of combatting
and vitiating this influence in every sphere of
cinematographic work
On the foregoing basis, an example of a simple
analytical montage is the following:
(From Polemkin)
A sailor angrily smashes a plate which bears
the words "Give Us Our Daily Bread".
In this action he is photographed in three
or four quick, successive flash-cuts, each of
which shows us his hand as he raises it
above his head, in the 3 or 4 points in the
progression of its movement:
(1)
plate upraised above his head.
Flash-shot.
(2)
plate descending, face wrathful.
Flash-shot.
(3) plate as it crashes on the table,
sailor's face tense with anger.
Flash-shot.
This is a remarkable study of the description
of the sailor's emotion in its swiftly
mounting
stages. The smashing of the plate bearing the
traditional religious slogan, has behind it many
scenes of an opposite state of affairs, and a great
many social overtones- The sailor's sudden,
frenzied desire to smash, is expressed in a power-
ful movement-analysis:
the analytical montage of
the entire action.
An example of an analytical
montage which in-
cludes several different scenes is the following:
(From Potemkin) :
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
In the episode of the massacre on the Odessa
steps, there is a sequence which shows the
death of a young mother. She is first
seen in a medium shot, standing against
her baby carriage, trying to shield it from
the downcoming Cossacks. But their guns
find her, and a bullet pierces her stomach.
The close-ups of her hands clutching at the
abdomen, of her face rolling in agony, of
her tottering form, of her sudden fall and
death, and, finally, as a consequence of the
fall the accidental releasing of the brake on
the baby-carriage, which starts bouncing
down the steps, are separated in the mon-
tage-continuity of this sequence by long
shots of the Cossacks and by close-ups of
groups and faces in the fleeing masses.
The girl is the structural point of analysis.
The intercut images of the mass are the
functional points of the entire image-
analysis. The girl's death-movement is
not mounted as a constant, unvaried unit,
but each cut back to the girl's sinking body
shows another section of the body.
This is also an example of the division of move
ment according to time-cutting: an analytical
montage in which each cut back to the girl reveals
her nearer to her death, nearer to sinking com-
pletely on the stone steps. The last cut, follow-
ing flash long-shots of the Cossacks, shows her
just as she has fallen to the ground.
Another example of an analytical montage in
which the points of analysis are intercut by other
scenes, and where the time-cutting of a single
movement is forceful, is the following:*
(From Potemkin) :
THE SCENE IS:
The Marine Guard is called out on deck.
The marines line up in two rows, one behind
the other.
THE ANALYTICAL TIME-CUTTING
GOES:
1.
A marine at the end of the second line,
near the lens, is sad and pensive.
A.The marines are at ease while the sail-
cloth is thrown over the group of their
comrades to be shot.
2 The sad marine steals a slow glance over
his shoulder.
B.The sailcloth is thrown an,d settles down
over the heads of the unfortunate men.
3.
The sad marine gazes down by his side
thinking.
C.Two or three "shots" of "business"
elsewhere on deck. The tempo of the
film at this point is decelerated. There
is hardly any movement. The tension,
the expectancy, mounts high.
*In a sense it is not fair to offer this sequence as an isolated
instance of analytical montage, just for the reason that it is
isolated and not considered as a factor in the total image-
structure of the massacre-episode. But for purposes of il-
lustration of my percept, it is perhaps the best single example
that I know or remember of a powerful time-cutting ana-
lysis. Isolated in this manner, it exemplifies a principle.
But actually, it derives its technical and aesthetic value from
its position in the organization of the entire episode.
22
4. The sad marine with his nose pressed
against the barrel of his gun. In the
time-elapse between this cut and cut no.
3, the sad marine has turned his head for-
ward again and raised it.
D.More "business" on deck.
5. The sad marine with his head bent low,
his eyes cast down, before him-
Here we see how a movement is marked off and
rendered meaningful by the time-cutting. While
the foregoing is not a precise duplicate of the actual
continuity at this point (the letter-cuts for the
most part consisting of several individual "shots"
of the intermediary action) , it none the less ex-
emplifies the principle of the time-cutting analyt-
ical montage as Eisenstein uses it. Each time we
see the marine, he has performed a certain part of
the turning of his head in its course from side to
front- The letter-cuts alternate whh the number-
cuts as the tension of the entire sequence mounts
to a point of exciting stillness and momentary,
foreboding cessation. When the previous hurried
movement-rhythm stops, the movement-sensation
(Gemutsbeivegung) experiences an instantaneous
concentration, which "reflexes" in the spectator
(the law of reaction-contrast), and the tension-
point of stillness fat this famous tension-point
in Potemkin the action is suddenly abandoned and
there flash before the spectator's eyes, "still" shots
of a bugle against a sailor's hip, the flag of the
Prince Potemkin, the prow of the ship, the flap-
ping of the sailcloth above the heads of the doomed
and various other important elements that mount
the image-structure here into a profoundly signi-
ficant and ominous pause)
the tension-point of
stillness (
1
) checks the preceding rush of move-
ment, and
(2)
prepares both the image-structure
and the spectator for the outburst of fury that
descends at the crucial moment, in which all cur-
rents of movement are mixed together and the
rhythm-line steps out of any previously sustained
pattern whatsoever .... Thus this turning-around
of the marine's head (together with the above-
mentioned scenes that follow) is not only a true
analytical montage, but also an imagistic emphasis
on the total structural suspense at this point.
These thoughts give us a concise idea of what
is meant by analytical montage. The analysis and
differentiation of movement-forms is one of the
most important instruments at the command of
cinematography for the manipulation of optical
and emotional attention. We now see that, no
matter into how many points of analysis the con-
tinuum of a movement may be divided, the mon-
tage of analysis only superficially implies the pure-
ly descriptive mounting of different pieces in suc-
cession. The montage of analysis is the point at
which begins the study of the mathematics of film-
technical analysis.
This establishes the fundamental distinction
between the analytical and the synthetic montage.
The synthetic montage, as already mentioned by
way of revision, is concerned not with a mere unit-
ing of detail-pieces in succession, nor with the
analysis of movement, but with the synthesizing
of all images which collectively form a single
image-unit expressing the essential, underlying,
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
radical, abstract, meaning-full image-idea.
The connection between synthetic montage and
film-symbolism is immediate, direct, axiomatic.
To resort to this figure: Synthesis is a fruit whose
core is a symbol. This symbol stands in inter-
mediary relation between the fruit itself (the
structure) and the forming principle which makes
the fruit itself. What, after all, is synthesis but
construction in montage to make immediately ap-
prehensible to mind the radical, abstract image-idea,
which is the genetic conception of the film-work?
But if the mechanics of the medium changes, if a
Bakshy magnified screen comes into utilization,
if a highly complex art of orchestral counterpoint
emerges out of the progressive studios of U. S. S.
R., will, then, synthesis still be possible of attain-
ment? The answer is: Obviously, it will be
more possible of attainment than ever before, nor
will its intellectual root-character change. (Radi-
cal abstract ideas are constant, however much
mechanical instrumentation may change or in-
dustrial production multiply) . Only the mon-
tage-form, and not the radical aesthetic conception,
will have to be transposed into a new formal struc-
ture. Method will change: but synthesis, which
is more than method, though less than end,
synthesis, the construction-force that makes the
abstract image-idea apprehensible to mind

- will
not suffer as an aesthetic concept.
\
Whatever the
method, whatever the mechanics, synthesis will
still be the intermediary "station" between the
abstract image-idea and the spectator (the receiving
brain) . In order to keep this clear, and in order
to anticipate, and thus to guard against, possible
confusion should the mechanism undergo further
change (as undoubtedly it will), and to assure
this sphere of cinematography a certain degree
of safety from the inevitable frauds and charlatans
who will corrupt these doctrines, I will postulate
here a number of fundamental (radical) princi-
ples of the image-idea, which are valid for the film
in any sphere whatsoever as regards its imellectual
motivation and meaning.
PRINCIPLES OF THE IMAGE-IDEA
1.
The image-idea is the intellectual and
metaphysical essence of the image-
whole.
2.
The image-idea underlies the image-
structure and governs it.
(This law is completely Spinozaic in
its implications)
3.
The image-idea radically determines the
image-structure (sequentially and or-
ganically) , and definitively necessitates
the image-montage (visual and dy-
namic) .
4.
The image-idea is the abstract, syn-
thetic expression of the secondary raw-
material (as distinguished from the
raw-material, out of which the second-
ary is selected, photographed and creat-
*I use the term "primary raw material" to mean the same as
the term "raw material" in Pudowkin's book. That is, the
jictuality-stuff that the director selects and the camera photo-
graphs.
ed*. This secondary raw-material
signifies all the images of the film as
they are mobilized in the brain of the
creator to form the new image-struc-
ture. The new image-structure (as
distinguished from- the "raw" image-
structure of the creator's brain, to
which, no matter how ultimately it
may be developed, photography and the
laboratory invariably add some new
element of tone or composition), sign-
ifies the cinematic reality, compounded
out of the primary raw-material (ac-
tuality) and the secondary raw-material
(of the brain of the creator) . Of
this cinematic reality, the image-idea
forms the tertiary cinematic material,
but this tertiary material is not a "raw"
material (as are the primary and sec-
ondary raw materials, which, unlike
the tertiary, are either incompletely
formed or not formed at all) , since no-
thing in the film can be metaphysically
deeper or more radical than the funda-
mental image-idea.
5. The image-idea is explicit in the entire
structure of the film. It is implicit in
all the film's sequential (and episodic)
phases, and in all its individual man-
ifestations. It is violently and pro-
nouncedly explicit in its purely sym-
bolical manifestations. It is implicit
in all manifestations of minor or indi-
rect image-symbolism, and in images
of referential or inferential value, per-
tinent to other elements in the film-
structure (of deeper value) or to other
elements not directly expressed in the
film.
6. The image-idea may never be expressed
in the image-structure by a word, un-
less that word be of imagistic value,
containing within itself the rudiments
of an image or an image-composition,
as in the cases of Hebrew, or of Japan-
ese or Chinese script. Only such
image-words possess the potentiality of
becoming a part of the image-structure,
that forms the image-whole and of
these, the one bearing the greatest po-
tentialities and the most radical sign-
ificance, is the Hebrew.
7. The image-idea is the sole intellectual,
aesthetic determinant of the unity and
solidarity of the image-structure. It is the
dominating cause of its montage (visual
and dynamic, sequential, episodic and
organic)
.
8.
The image-idea expresses the philo-
sophy of the theme.
9.
The image-idea is the jealous God of
the cinematic intellect. All deviations
from its true and logical transmutation
into the projected film-stuff, and all
extraneous elements that are permitted
to enter (or that perversely creep into)
23
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
the final filmic expression of its meta-
physical essence, will cause havoc with
this expression and fail to communicate
its essence to the spectator. Hence, the
supreme importance of perfecting the
mechanical aspects of the medium and
of deciding upon the legitimacy of
various current forms of cinema. (For
instance. I exclude the speech-film from
my aesthetic of cinematography. Ac-
cording to the viewpoint of my doc-
trine, color is an abhorrence, a
cheap, commercial corruption of the
purity and integrity of the film's
simple, elemental black-and-white. I
have always fought against it, using
the Ladd-Franklin optical experiments
as a basis of my arguments concerning
optical attack and visual appeal).
I hold these principles to be inviolate law of
cinema, the mass-art.
It is, of course, not for many film-works that
any of these principles hold good, and for still
fewer films that all of them hold good. These
constitute a body of ideal doctrine. More than
that. I recognize that not even every artistic film
can have a radical, philosophical image-idea !
But I also hold that to ignore these principles
as a matter of course must, and will, result ul-
timately in the stagnation and fatal decadence of
cinematography as an expressive medium and as
an instrument of capturing the mass-mind. The
full realization of these principles will no doubt
be rare in the history of cinematography. So far,
such realization has never been attained, but the
cinematographers of U- S. S. R., particularly these
world-creators
Eisenstein, Pudowkin, Alex-
androff, Room, Dovzhenko, Konzintsoff and
Trauberg masters of montage, have come re-
markably close to such realization. In U. S. S.
R., I believe, it has not been lack of genius, but lack
of mechanical resources, that has made perfection
impossible. And then, ultimate and absolute per-
fection will ever remain an elusive goal, because
the mechanization of the medium (despite the
greed-inspired efforts of the Americans) , is, and
will long be, in an inadequate stage of accom-
plishment. It pleases and excites me to anticipate,
however, that the realization of these principles
will approximate the highest degree of attainment
in Eisenstein 's film-interpretation of Marx's
CAPITAL. Here, the image-idea is already
powerfully suggested in the very title !
As a rule, it may be said, any sequence, into which scenes
unrelated in physical content are structurally incorporated
in order to form the abstract, expressive idea (significance)
of the sequence, is an instance of ideational synthetic mon-
tage. Eisenstein in a crude way was successful in a pre-
cocious experiment with this form in the sequence of Ten
Days That Shook the World, where the figure of Kerensky
mounting the stairs, the bust of Napoleon and the peacock
spreading its tail, alternate in a time-cutting synthesis of
astonishing power and emotional effect. Again, in the same
work, there is the episode of the rising bridge, the massacres
in the streets, the advancing riflemen and the hanging of the
horse from the drawbridge,
a synthesis of scenes the in-
conceivable force of which is outmatched only by the stark
and terrible idea that unites them and gives them their vital
meaning. In every case, the quality of symbolism is in-
escapable.*
24
It is here, in this domain. (Ideational synthetic montage),
that the real conditioning-process of cinematography must
operate. Cinema, to an extent never imposed upon any pre-
vious art-form, is confronted by the task of a stupendous
revolutionary mass-conditioning. In the work of dises-
tablishing the slave-values of Western civilization (values of
ethic, aaesthetic. human behaviour, human "ideals", etc.).
it has to draw its fighting-forces and ammunition from the
arsenal of Western scientific research. It must utilize the
despised and relatively neglected science-achievement of the
West (which hitherto has been used purely for money-pur-
poses or for the advancement of the war-makers) , in order
to attack and dethrone the slavery-dogmas of the West . . .
Western knowledge to smash Western slavery ! And this,
too, in application to every society infested with these slavery-
principles. In the new methodology of human behavior for
which many great isolated spirits of the West have sought
(Waldo Frank among them), cinema, by the aid of the in-
genious utilization of the ideational synthetic montage, to
create radical revolutionary image-ideas philosophycally found-
ed, has the dominant place, the most important function.
No other art has this responsibility. No other art bears
the burden to this extent .... To establish the radical im-
age in the mass-consciousness, and to impress the image con-
stantly once it is implanted, in order to give root to a new.
great, beautiful human society this is the task of the new
world-cinema.
Ideational synthetic montage is the least developed, most
difficult and altogether the most significant of all montage-
concepts. The problems of cine-metaphysics, the problems
of expressive montage-construction, and the problems of
ideational synthetic montage . . . these are enduringly inter-
connected. Ideational synthetic Montage opens the door to
the contrapuntal method cinematography. "Synthesis sug-
gests to me the power of reconciling opposites in space-time."
David Piatt) . Not only are counterpoint and synthesis
mutually aidful in the montage of cinematic effects; not
only do counterpoint and synthesis bestow boundless power
and possibility on the explosion-montage which Eisenstein
has developed (his mightiest contribution to cinema!): but,
the conjunction of these radical intellectual image -necessities
emancipates, present-day cinematography from the embar-
rassment of a temporary standstill in its reliance on montage-
effects that have been created as a result of limitations
(of the medium), rather than through positive, radical
creation. As a forceful, participant aid to synthesis, sound
too must be admitted into the army of force utilized by the
contrapuntal method. Sound-image counterpoint will be

is already, thanks to the Moscow creators, the most power-

ful coalition of conditioning-forces of the present world-
cinema.**
Counterpoint and synthesis (montage- put into the hands
of the world cinema-creators the power to express the deep-
est radical image-ideas of human existence in fact, to ex-
press the radical, dominant image idea, basically underlying
Creation,
the image-idea of the One.
The second part of Principles of the New World-
Cinema, which treats of the Problems of Method.
will appear in the March issue of Experimental
Cinema.
*It is remarkable how the critics and public of the bourgeois
world can glibly and happily ignore the intense, bitter social
significance of this vivid symbol. How even the "best-
establishe" of the various emeritus-critics, so-called, can refuse
to see in the hanging horse the symbol of the martyrdom of
the Russian masses, murdered by a labor-exploiting govern-
ment. Perhaps an explanatory title at this point, calling
attention to the situation. might have penetrated to the
bourgeois critical "brain!"
**The Bolshevist creators from the beginning pronounced
"the new orchestral counterpoint of sight-images and sound-
images", "a new and enormously effective means for ex
pressing and solving the complex problems with which we
have been troubled owing to the impossibility of solving them
by the aid of cinematography operating with visual images
alone." (Quoted from the Manifesto on the Sound Film
issued by Eisenstein, Pudowkin and Alexandroff in the Fall
of 1928). This statement must not be accepted in con-
nection with the destructive and confounding use of sound
practised in the Hollywood studios.
i:
FILMS
EDUCATIONAL
INDUSTRIAL
MEDICAL
A COMPLETE STUDIO AND LABORATORY FOR
CREATING, DEVELOPING, AND PRINTING SOUND OR
SILENT PRODUCTIONS 16 mm. OR 35 mm.
NEWS REEL
LABORATORY
1707 SANSOM STREET
Philadelphia, Penna.
t
U. S, A,
I
-r
Film Direction and Film Man-
uscript, Part 2 Translated
by Christel Gang.
Principles of New World
Cinema
Part 2.
The Modern Spirit in films
Part 2.
In Eisenstein's Domain Dr.
Erwin Honig, translated by
From G. Melies to S. M.
Eisenstein.
NEXT MONTH
W. L. PUDOWKIN
SEYMOUR STERN
B. BRAVER -MANN
CHRISTEL 6AN6
M U SSIN AC
Paris and the Talkies. I
T II All Til
L E N A U E R
A. BAKSHY
H. A. POTAMKIN
R. ALDRICH
A.CAVALCANTI

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DAVID PLATT C I N E M
LEWIS JACOBS
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CO N TE N TS
Focus and Mechanism
David Piatt
In Eisenstein's Domain
Tr. by Christel Gang
The Evolution of Cinematography in France A. Cavalcanti
Film Direction & Film Manuscript W. L. Pudowkin
Hollywood Bulletin Seymour Stern
Decomposition Lewis Jacobs
Populism and Dialectics H. A. Potamkin
The Theatre and the Motion Picture B. G. Braver-Mann
From G. Melies to S. M. Eisenstein Leon Mousstnac
Paris Letter Jean Lenauer
Proposed Continuity for the ending of
"All Quiet on the Western Front" Werner Klingler
jrznrz^
^zi-i,-f,;.;;-,.; tMV'iAi zzzzz:
CONTRIBUTORS
B. G.
BRAVER-MANN
has worked with Prof. Oskar Strnad, Max Reinhardt's chief
designer and one of Europe's leading film technicians; has writ-
ten articles for The Billboard. Film Spectator and other jour-
nals. The Literary Digest has referred to him as a chal-
lenging csthetician of the motion picture."
ALBERTO CAVALCANTI
is a film director now in France; among his films are: En Rade.
Rien Que Les Heures. La P'Tite Lily.
CHRISTEL GANG
is a professional German translator at present employed in that
capacity by Universal Pictures Corporation. Universal City. Cal.
She has recently completed the first translation of Pudowkin's
bock done in America.
LEWIS JACOBS
is a painter and designer who has been making industrial and ex-
perimental films for the, past few /ears.
WERNER KLINGLER
formerly connected with Murnau
;
s now "free-lancing" in Hol-
lywood pictures. He has an important role as a revolting Ger-
man soldier in "Journey's End" and he plays the second lead in
All Quiet on the Western Front."
JEAN LENAUER
is a newspaper film critic in Paris and French correspondent for
several European film journals.
LEON MOUSSINAC
is a French critic who has written several important books on
the cinema, the latest of which is "Panoramique Du Cinema",
recently published in France. This is his first appearance in an
American film mag-azine.
DAVID PLATT
is a writer and film critic who has in preparation a book on the
Cinema and the New Naturalism".
H. A. POTAMKIN
Formerly an editor of The Guardian; has contributed poetry,
short-stories, essays on literature, art. education and cineria to
periodicals here and abroad. Work on cinema has appealed in
New Republic, Movie Makers. The Billboard. Musical Quar-
terly, Theatre Guild Magazine, The New Masses. Cinerrw. etc.
W. L. PUDOWKIN
is the well known Soviet Director of "End of St. Petersburg,"
"Storm over Asia", and "Mother". His Book "Film Direction
and Film Manuscript", now appearing in "Experimental Cin-
ema", is one of the few important contributions to film prac-
tice.
SEYMOUR STERN
has written extensively on technical and aesthetic film -problems
for several years. He is at present studying the new mechanism
of the American film studios, in relation to the problems of the
new world-cinematography.
Experimental Cinema is published bv the Cinema Crafters of America at 1629 Chestnut Street. Philadelphia. Penna. Contri-
butions should be addressed to the Editors who will not assume responsibility for their safe return unless solicited. Subscrip-
tion price is S2.00 a -year; $2.50 foreign.
VOL. 1. No. 2. Copyr-gh'ed 1010 by Lewis Jacobs 20 CENTS
r^s?r
ni e
1
PHOTO
BY
BRETT
WESTON
FOCUS AND MECHANISM
j
T cannot be denied that the feeble rationalism
of the great body of modern thought carried
over from a long disintegrated theology has
failed dismally to penetrate and humanize the
forces of the naturalistic world surrounding us
today (as reflected in radio, television, cinema,
the machine in general) forces which are as in-
escapable as they ire directionless. For the first
time in centuries man is without a humanistic
system or theory of the universe potent enough
to meet, cooperate with and give meaning and
reality to the new naturalistic synthesis disclosed
and still being disclosed by modern science. Where-
as in the middle ages, there was at one time power-
ful reciprocal relationship between the social,
political and philosophical forces on one side and
the natural or theologic powers on the other,

no such harmony exists for us today. Twentieth
century man is without a symbology as inclusive
i
Is
EXPERIMEN fAL CINEMA
I
as that of the Mahabharata or the Divine Comedy
which would support him in a union with nature
and the mechanization of nature, the machine and
thereby lend profound purpose to all phenomena
within its scope. An ideology in which the machine
would be incorporated integrally and vitally in
the modern scheme both as affecting the act or
behavior as well as the thought of man within it.
It cannot be stated too often that this lack of a
humanistic orientation of the modern world is
responsible for a good deal of the unrest and
weariness of our time. Indeed, social, political
and humane development are so far in the arrears
of scientific progress that it becomes more and
more doubtful whether the balance will ever be
fully adjusted one with the other, at least by ra-
tionalism. And to suggest a solution to the dif-
ficulty, by deliberate evasion of these new natural
phenomena (radio, television, cinema, the ma-
chine) and by concentration on the traditional in-
ner forces of man that have so long in the past
contributed to his happiness and welfare in a less
mechanical age, is the typical escape of the spirit-
ually retrogressive. As though happiness is some-
thing that can be achieved by withdrawing so
naively
and yet so desperately from pain; or
chaos something that can be resolved to order in an
ivory tower; as though humanistic forces them-
selves are not determined largely by the naturalistic.
The very concept of good and evil itself must ul-
timately conform to a naturalistic ethos, whether
it is the theologic synthesis of the 13th century
or the scientific equivalent of the 20th. This
type of rationalism however defeats itself as will
be seen in a crisis, when it will always be found
in the ranks of the most conservative or reac-
tionary elements- Also to offer a solution to
the question, in blind acceptance of mechanical
science and technological progress, is to fall practi-
cally into the same errora point of view that fails
to take into consideration the irrationality
the
creative irrationalism of nature since the days of
Spencerian science. If it has be proven that even na-
ture herself is irrationa' and imaginative in her be-
behavior (as is now revealed) how on earth is it
possible to erect systematic or rationalistic states,
societies or philosophies, etc., without allowing for
that element of mystery. Thus the so-called hu-
manist and the modernist arrive at the same point
without having touched the heart of the subject.
Neither of these views has been able to explain or
visualize the philosophical or social-political impli-
cations of the relation of man to a world wherein
it is possible or soon will be possible for him to see
an event in any part of the globe the moment it oc-
curs.
"The world for man today", wrote Jean
Epstein, brilliant French cinematographs in
"Broom", several years ago, "is like descriptive
geometry
with its infinite planes of projection.
Everything
possesses hundreds of apparent dia-
meters which never superimpose exactly. A voice
heard naturally, then heard springing from the
black
graphite of the telephone, then finally re
sounding when the sapphire delivers it from the
disc is no longer, whatever one may say, the simple
voice, the same voice". It is this new space-time
spirit that is awaiting a human synthesis. "An
historical reconstruction on the screen strikes out
for a few half hours, twenty centuries of time.
The instantaneous photograph has discovered
gestures which the eye now delivers and the hand
reproduces. We notice how suddenly a face on
the screen shows itself to be different. A wrinkle
appears that we failed to notice for twenty years;
but from now on we shall have learned to see it."
And if "the speed realized by man has given a new
character to civilized life", it will appear, it must
appear in the creative forms of today. So as it
becomes more and more impossible to eliminate
or deflect the main currents of our time as they
are manifested in radio, television, aeronautics,
cinema, relativity, etc., it becomes more and more
urgent that these factors if they are eventually
to react to cur benefit and not to our havoc be
controlled by an ideology nourished by and
through free creative contact with these realities.
And the first premise of this vision will reject the
false dualism of matter and spirit that has infect-
ed our age so long for a spiritual monism more
in consonance with the temper of the time
a
monism that will suggest there is more of the be-
ginnings, the foundations, of the new spirit in
creative work outside the art world, than those
within it

that the positive values of Machinery,

Bridges, Automobiles, Zeppelins, Dynamos, the
Cinema celebrating the union of art and science
are of more importance for our ideology :han
the literature, painting or music of the day des-
perately struggling in a cul de sac and most of
which exalts negative values entirely outside
modern life. It will suggest that the Cinema,
the absolute focus of the new spirit

is great
enough in possibilities to not only contain but to
give direction and purpose to poetry, music, paint-
ing, sculpture, etc. in the throes of a futile roman-
ticism, and that it is the only major force of the
day that in any way incorporates the vision of
the new universe and the only medium in control
of the artist today that can possibly unite with
him in attempting a modern humanistic synthesis
of the world powerful enough to give meaning
and reality to the new naturalistic synthesis of
science.
David Piatt
In 1900 a Swede found a block of magnetic steel which
retained the invisible vibrations of sound and retranslated
them for the human ear. The steel, when demagnetized, be-
came deaf and dumb. If matter hears and speaks, do not
objects see? Do not lines adjust themselves to one another?
A process not yet accessible to the human consciousness.
Similarly, do not the vibrations of the cinema have speech,
thought, will? Scientific investigators may track down
the evidence of this life: hierog-lyphists may interprcc its
system of logic; but is not the imagination, to b: per-
mitted its faith in an arrangement of living lines which,
going beyond pretext and scenery, play the leading role?
The art of the cinema offers us a new expression of thought.
Etienne de Beau nont
.
h
m SENSTEIN'S DOMAIN
By Dr. ERWIN HONIG (Berlin)
{Translated by Christel Gang from the Original Article Published in Internationale Filmschau)
S. M. Eisenstein, the creator of the POTEMKIN
film, which, even if only externally, neverthless
enriched last year's world-production, was recently
in Berlin to arrange the final preparations for the
initial showing of the new film, THE GENERAL
Line*. He expects to leave soon for America, in
ot;der, as he humbly expresses himself, to learn-
horn to make camera angles.
The intellectual and spiritual development of
Eisenstein is today one of the most important
factors for the advance of the cinema. Whoever
has had the opportunity to watch him at his
work in the Leningrad Winter Palace, in the ar-
ranging of scenes for the Russian October-Revolu-
tion, then in the cutting of The General Line in
his Moscow studio, and now in Berlin in the en-
forcement of the newly established problems of
the tone-film, is perpetually astonished at the
stormy intellectual tempo of this man. The tone-
film? It is no longer a dreamed- of goal, or rest-
ing-place,
it is an inwardly conquered affair.
This director, to whom the intellectual is all-im-
portant, cannot be tempted with the promise of the
American dollar. He will return to Soviet Rus-
sia, as only in that country will it be possible for
him to realize his ideas.
This was an established decision already on
those chatty winter evenings in Eisenstein's Mos-
cow home (prominent travelers through So-
viet Russia, such as Theodore Dreiser and Stefan
Zweig, have sung praise of these quar-
ters) . America will bring much to him in the
nature of mechanical technicalities, but whatever
may be the film which Eisenstein will direct in
America, hh main thought belongs even now to
that gigantic task which he has undertaken, the
picturization of Karl Marx's "CAPITAL".
Montage is the pass-word to his plans. The
idea is to treat the philosophical foundation of
socialism by way of montage from image to im-
age, and by means of image combined with sound,
to present it in so clear a form that the Russian
worker and peasant can understand it. The well-
founded montage of the Russian Revolutionary
films can today be duplicated by almost any young
man of the Moscow Cinema University (Mos-
kauer Kino-Technikum) . But one of them
should try to present cinematically "The Economy
cf Antitheses'" . . .Whoever would dare to do
that must possess a profound education and a per-
petual "borin t" desire for research. Tendencies
towards this ntellectua! montage can already be
observed in rVe earlier films of Eisenstein; atten-
tion may be called to the idea of "War in the Name
of the Lord", as it was shown in the film Ten
Days That Shook the World (October).
The strongest elements of montage the Russian
director has discovered in Japanese art. The
ancient Japanese theatre "Kabuki" imparted to the
intellectual life of Moscow last year a special im-
petus (impulse) . No one rushed with greater
intensity upon this stimulant than Eisenstein. The
joint application of picture, movement and sound
has existed since medieval times in the strictest
tradition of this theatre. It is an established mon-
tage*. And deeper still lead Eisenstein's studies
,
into the origin of the Japanese script, as a mon--,
tage composed of drawings and brush-strokes
with symbolic expression.
But whoever wants to see the man at his
work, must follow him from his studio into his
practical teacher-capacity. In Moscow there is the
State cinema-university (of Soviet Russia) , where
Eisenstein functions as one of the most important
teachers in the training of young directors. To
add spice to the work it happens that this university
is established in the former restaurant "Jar",
where in the old days Rasputin, during his Mos-
cow sojourn, held his parties and love affairs. To-
day, those private chambers, instead cf being lux-
uriously furnished, are decorated with a small,
simple picture, the head of Lenin, and underneath
are printed his words: "The Film i. one of the
most important means of the State". Only m
the light of the State policies of the Soviet system
does their treatment of cinema art become clarified.
Of greater importance here than the commercial
success of the film is the fact that young directors
and actors of the Asiatic nations are being instruc-
ed. Here a nucleus is being formed to bring about
the autonomous, national film for every foik-
people. The most vital, agitative thoughts are to
be instilled into the people in such a way that
th,ey will not be aware of its external source, and
the best means to use for a people that is not
trained in reading or in writing, is the film, the
montage. It is a terrible means of power that
is being fostered here.
The cinema university has divisions for al!
branches, for photography, developing, acting and
for directing. A remarkable feature of Eisen-
stein's ideas is a shooting-room partitioned accord-
ing to a coordination-system. Every object re-'
ceives its definite geometrical posicion. Every
dramatic action is divided into its nathematica!
,
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
componencs. The scientific law of film-shooting
is being outlined here.
But the heart of this domain is the technical
school for young directors. Eisenstein conducts
this himself. Tonight there will be exercises on
Zola's works. The foundation of naturalism, a
scene "Death in a Bakery", written by Zola with
minutest observations, is being read and is to be
worked out for the following day in scenario form.
Another student

we are in a poor country, so
one Zola novel is divided among three students
reads the famous part about the flagrant
flowers in the garden of the priest Mouret.
When the Zola course is finished, they move
on the impression, then to expressionism, and to
their mutual friend, the young Russian poet,
Babel. Description of an evening's fantastic il-
lumination at Babel's house. After expressionism
comes the chamber-artist, the psychological
miniature-painter, Stefan Zweig, and one of the
most popularly read authors in Soviet Russia.
And, as a final course, the. Ulysses of James Joyce.
The intense enthusiasm of these young people,
who are gathered here around an ideal task under
the most unfavorable living and working condi-
tions, is one of the strongest positive forces Soviet
Russia has to offer today. It is one of the signs
demonstrating that even in the face of the dire need
of living quarters and the trying economic situa-
tion, spiritual-intellectual power can prevail. But
it is also a warning to the rulers of State every-
where, to grant such spiritual-intellectual elements
their necessary freedom.
Literally, in the German, "it is an anticipatory montage"
(i.e., anticipatory of modern film-montage) . Trans, note.
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ivoluiion of Cinematography in France
by ALBERTO CAVALCANTI
Translated by Richard Aldrich
T the International Congress of Independent
Cinematography, at Sarrez, my remarks on
the growth of cinematography from the
dramatic point of view were to indicate the solu-
tion of some questions with which my comrades
and myself were occupied, questions that were the
purpose of the meeting.
The silent cinema is dead. Its decline provok-
ed a crisis so violent that we have neither compo-
sure, not recoil. Toward the establishment of
an historical view of this silent phase, however,
an examination of the material already allows
formulation of a certain amount of certitude, and
an analysis of the aesthetique.
A composite reel made up of a resume of cin-
ematic work in France since 1893 and selections
from French films were projected to illustrate the
talk at Sarrez.
The first film I think was a release from the
Lumiere flat in Lyons in 1894. This film was
more self-sufficient than evocative; it was fol-
lowed by a short period of enthusiasm. It con-
cerned the arrival of people by train, and a boat
moving around a dock. It carried sufficient novel-
ty and movement to retain attention. Cinematic
art began with L'Arrosseur Arrose in 1900. Was
the cinema aware of its possibilities? Was it go-
ing to interpret human emotion, the comic, life
itself? Also instead of catching its true voice in
4i
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
the beginning indicated so clearly in this film, the
year lost itself in encumbrances with theatrical
tradition. Armand Callier, has shown us at the
Studio des Ursulines several very beautiful ex-
amples of theatre-film. How is one to forget
Mimosa la derniere gcisetle, with Leonace Perret,
and above all, Werther with Andre Brule? The
year recalls also L'Assassinat Du Due de Guise,
one of the first of the "historic reconstruction" class
of film that unhappily remains much in vogue
among French directors. This did not at all im-
pede development, for the cinema recovered itself,
first with Melies who was -the author of one of
the first phantasy films.
The cue was not found alone in phantasy
films, however; Fevillade turned out a little later
the first comedies (the series of the Belee, for
example) played out of doors, which one has not
seen again and which in spite of their twenty
years seem scarcely obsolete.
The period had not completely passed away
when Louis Delluc began to work. He died
young, before he had arrived at a fruition of his
work. He was a theorist of the first order. Even
though they are incomplete, his works for the
most part are beautiful specimens and they mark
distinctly a new transition.
The cinema reacts definitely against the double
influence of the theatre and of letters in the growth
of the episodic, the cultural and the comic film.
A curious lacuna particularly in French produc-
tion is the long disappearance of the comic film
so abundantly and astonishingly developed in
America. Only the films of Max Linder are ex-
cepted.
Forthwith in the appearance of masterpieces
such as Judex, or in America', The Mysteries of
New York, the intrusion of decor in its turn
shackled the growth of the cinema from the drama-
tic point of view. How can we forget apart-
ments grander than the cathedrals and intimate
affairs where one saw scores of figures?
By the side of this ostentation which tended to
bring to cinema sumptuous spectacles of the bad
music hall, dramatic documents took on in their
disturbing simplicity all the power of photographic
veracity. One will never say too much of what a
valuable lesson these actualities have been, one in-
dispensible in the evolution of cinematography.
How could one forget the straining vision of an
automobile race accident in the United States? You
saw the torn form thrown into the air and fall
to the ground. In another you saw a ship that
starts to flounder careen on the waves; the sailors
let her glide and escape the wreck by swimming
in the fatal turmoil of the engulfment.
These cruder devices were used for a long time.
The technique achieved adequacy for the time; ob-
jectives of great works were seen. The pan-
chromatic film was evolved. Then a dimunition
of scale cinematography reached a point that would
have seemed formerly quite improbable. This has
brought forth a precision that seems absolute and
consonant to the rhythm of the images. One
such a reduction of scale was a study of a vivid
struggle between a mongoose and a cobra; an ex-
treme dimunition was that of a soap bubble which
burst; another of. a revolver bullet penetrating a
plank, and another of the flight of a dragon-fly

these mysteries gave up their secrets in the excellent

photography of these rhythms, movements and
solutions-
Today most improvement in the domain of
speed hardly seem to astonish us. The achieve-
ment that will again appease us will perhaps arise
in the growth of greater unification of cinematic
elements.
How much on the side of semblance of the
marvelous should one try to attain in a film, The
problem calls for realization that is profound. To
have reverence for life, to guard its wild freedom,
to interpret it in an act of true reconstruction

>
this is something to look forward to in the cin-, ;
ema.
It is not always possible to renew data suf-
ficiently to have actuality, nor to accept the rhythm
revealed in the first unification of the picture. One
secures an alien rhythm of the flow of images
themselves. This is called montage. It is brought
out by means of adjusting simple interior rhythms,
and powerfully it accents dramatic action. Among
the first beautiful examples of concordant rhythms
one may name the mounting of the machine in
La Rove (Gance) and the summons to battle in
Le Jover d'Echecs (Bernard)
.
Reacting in its turn against certain bad usages
of montage the travel films, often of great drama-
tic power, cooperate by their naturalism to rees-
tablish the film in a form that is better balanced-
La Croissiere Note (Poerier, Le Voyage d'Andre
Gide au Congo (Allegret) in France, and Grass,
Chang, Moana and others have had a direct in-
fluence on film direction.
In the future the cinema finds in pure photo-
graphy the material of its unique kind of drama.
It exists by itself. It is neither a question of the-
atre nor of literature. Dramatic structure of the
film, it seems to us, has arrived at a degree of purity
and perfection that is difficult to surpass when the
sound element comes into consideration. We
thought the formula already found for cinema-
tography was definitive, but instead of proceeding
on a new stage of present growth as one expected,
the introduction of sound has produced on the
contrary a regressive phenomenon- They do not
show us the equal of Train de la Ciotat and of
Canot Contournant la Jettec etc. The opera
singers and players of the saxaphone whom one
likes well enough on discs are works of filmed
theatre, and we cannot believe such violations will
endure. Rather we are seeking to realize in the
new form of cinematography the visual and
auditory elements that will make up the develop-
ed sound film. With sound film a new era is
upon us, and cinematography should begin to
evolve the destiny that the addition of tone now
lays upon the silent drama.
it
Film Direction and Film Manuscript
by W. L. PUDOWKIN
Translated by Christel Gang from the German of Georg and Nadja Friedland.
Edition Verlag der Licht Bild Buehne Revision according to Russian Original
Translation Copyright by Seymour Stern, 1930
Chapter II

THE BUILDING UP OF THE MANUSCRIPT
IF
we try to divide the work of the manuscript
into stages, so that we advance from the general
to the particular, we get. roughly, the follow-
ing scheme:
1. The stuff (subject matter)
2. The script (action)
3. The cinematographic treatment of the action
Naturally, such a scheme can be drafted only
if the final manuscript has been thoughtfully es-
tablished. As I have already remarked, however.
the creative process can advance in a different
order: individual scenes can emerge (i. e., "come
up") during the working-process and can then
for the first time be incorporated in the manu-
script. It is certain, however, that the final valid
form of the work will consist of all three above
moments in their sequence. One should always
keep in mind that the film, owing to the peculiarity
of its construction, (the quick change of consecu-
tive pieces) requires of the spectator an extra-
ordinary strain of attention. The director, and
consequently also the author, lead the spectator
despotically in their path- The spectator sees on-
ly that which the director shows him. To re-
flect, doubt and to pause for criticism, there is
neither space nor time, and therefore the minutest
error or slip in the clarity and definiteness of the
construction will be interpreted as a disturbing
confusion or simply as a meaningless vacuum. One
must therefore, before all else, be cautious to ob-
tain the greatest simplicity and clarity in the solu-
tion of every single task. For convenient elucida-
tion, we will examine the points of the above-
mentioned scheme separately.
THE STUFF (Subject-Matter)
The word stuff (or subject-matter) is an inar-
tistic concept. Every human thought can be ul-
timately utilized as "stuff" ; only whether it is ef-
fective and purposeful, can be discussed. For a long
while the tendency prevailed (and partly exists to
this day) to choose such subjects as embrace mat-
erial that stretches out extensively over time and
space. As an example, take the American film
"Hate", whose stuff may be described as follows:
"In 3ll times and among all peoples, from the earl-
iest days unto the present, there has been hate a-
mong men, and only where there is hate, follows
murder." That is a stuff of enormous dimen-
sions and already the fact that it is extended to
"all times and peoples", necessitates an incalcuable
wealth of material. The result is exceptionally
characteristic. First of all, the film-material
could hardly be squeezed into twelve reels and the
action developed so awkwardly
(
that the effect,
due to the unbroken boresomeness, was very ques-
tionable. In the second place, the excess of stuff
forced the director to work out the theme very
generally, without going into particulars; the con-
sequence was a stark discrepancy between the depth
of the motive and the superficiality of the treat-
ment. Only the part which takes place in the pre-
sent time, where the action is more concentrated,
had a strong effect. Particularly, owing to the
wealth of subject-material, the forced superficial-
ities were conspicuous. And film-art, young to
this day, has other such presuppositions, which do
not permit her to tackle so wide a field.
It is noteworthy, that good films are disting-
uished mainly by a relatively simple theme and by
uncomplicated action. Bela Belazs, in his "Film-
Culture," "hits the nail on the head" when he says
that the failure of many filmings of literary works
is to be traced to the fact that the author attempted
to force too much stuff into the narrow scope of
the film.
The film is above all limited by the determ-
ined length of the film-strip. A film over 2300
meters quickly tires. There exists, however, the
possibility to show a film in several parts, but this
method is suitable only for films of a special kind.
Adventure films, whose content consists chiefly in
a series of interesting incidents in the fate of the
hero, which really have little intrinsic inter-con-
nection and have mostly a self-sustaining interest
(acrobatic and directorial tricks) , can naturally be
presented to the spectator in serial form. The spec-
tator, without losing the impression, can see the
second part without knowledge of the first, whose
content he learns from the opening title. The con-
nection between the parts is effected through a
simple play on the curiosity of the spectator: for
example, if the hero at the end of the first part
falls into some kind of difficult situation, which
is unravelled only at the beginning of the second

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
part. The film with deeper content, however,
whose worth lies always in its total impression,
cannot be divided in such a way into two parts.
The influence of the circumscribed space of the
film is still further magnified through the fact that
the film-artist, for the clear presentation of a
thought, needs considerably more place than, say,
the poet.
Often a word contains a whole complex of dif-
ficult thoughts. Visible apearances, however,
which are capable of presenting such a thought
symbolically, occur very seldom, and the film-
creator is thus forced to mount scenically (inzenie-
ren) an extensive image-presentation, if he does not
want to renounce the effect.
I repeat, that this contention regarding the
limitation of theme is perhaps only a passing one,
but at the present time it is necessary to insist on
it rigidly.
THEME and CLARITY
On this account a stipulation, that is rooted in
the peculiar quality of the film itself, will prob-
ably always have to be laid down: the striving
towards clarity. I have already mentioned above
the necessity of absolute clarity in the discussion
of the. individual tasks in the film. This is valid
in a comprehensive sense also for the work on the
subject-matter. If the basic thought, which is to
serve as the spine of the manuscript, is indefinite
and vague, the manuscript from the beginning is
condemned to failure. Assuming the most care-
ful planning in laying down the foundations of
the film in the manuscript, it is very well possible
to disentangle hazy suggestions and cloggings- I
should like to make mention of the following ex-
ample from experience: A manuscript writer pre-
sented us with an already finished manuscript on
the life of a factory-worker of the period before
the Russian Revolution. The manuscript is
based on a definite personality, a worker. In the
development of the action the worker comes into
contact with a group of persons, friends and
enemies. The enemies do him ill. The friends
help him. At the beginning of the film the hero
is portrayed as a crude, raw type of human being;
at the end he becomes and honest, revolutionary
worker. The manuscript is very naturalistically
written and yields undoubtedly interesting, living
material, which testifies to the gift of observation
and the knowledge of the author. In spite of that,
it is unusuable.
A series of incidents from life, a series of ac-
cidental meetings and conflicts which bear no other
connection than a correctly timed, sequential order,
finally represent nothing else than an accumula-
tion of episodes. The theme as a fundamental
idea, which gives expression to the meaning of
these events as they are shown, is missing; con-
sequently the single figures in a deeper sense are
impersonal, the actions of the hero just as chaotic
and accidental as the meeting of passers-by on the
street, as* they rush past a show-window.
The writer was sensible, and on the basis of
our objections, undertook to re-construct the
manuscript. He brought the hero into a new line
of development by placing him in lasting relation-
ship to the clearly formulated theme- The basic
thought was conceived in a distinct, comprehen-
sive formula: that is, it is not sufficient, to be sole-
ly a revolutionary inclined human being; in order
to serve the cause, one must possess also a correctly
organized consciousness of actuality. In short,
the brawling, quarrelsome worker, thirsting for
action, became an anarchist. His enemies accord-
ingly stood in a definite, clear front. The impact
of the hero with them and his future friends re-
ceived definite meaning and clear significance, a
whole series of superfluous burdens were dispensed
with and the confused, intricate, manuscript was
transformed into a lucid, convincing structure. One
may define the above rendered thought of this sto-
ry already as the theme, the clear formulation
i
of
which unconditionally regulates the whole work
and which alone can yield a clear impressive crea-
tion. As a rule, it should be noted: Formulate the
theme clearly and exactly, otherwise the work'will
lose is deeper significance and its unity which
every work of art must have. All further restric-
tions which influence the choice of the theme arc
connected with the working out of the action. As'
I mentioned before, the creative process never oc-
curs in scheduled succession: if one takes up a
theme, one must almost instantaneously think the.
formation of the script.
THE FORMATION OF THE SCRIPT
Already in the initial stage of his work the au-
thor possesses a certain material which is later em-
bodied in the frame of the work. This material
is obtained through experience, observation, and
through imagination. When the basic thought of
the theme, which determines the selection of
material, is established, the author must next at-
tack the problem of organization. First, the
persons acting in the picture are introduced, their
relationships to one another arc established, their
significance in the development of the action is de-
fined and, finally, certain proportions of the divi-
sion of the total material throughout; the manu-
script are drafted-
In that moment when the treatment of the ac-
tion begins, the author makes his first contacts
with the conditions of artistic labor. Just as the
pure (raw) stuff* can be considered as an ab-
solutely inartistic thing**, so, in the same way,
the work on the action is conditioned through a
whole series of regulations which are peculiar to
art.
Let us begin with the most general: If the
writer thinks through the whole planned out work.
he will always construct a series of certain "prop"
points which are fundamental for the formation
of the stuff and which extend over the total length
of the theme. These prop-points throw the
general outline into bold relief. To this belong
the characterization of individuals, the particularity
*Stuff
meaning absolutely raw. unformed material.
**In the Geiman the word is "moment", tha is, instance or
state of condition.
I
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
of events which react upon these figures, often also
certain details which determine the meaning and
force of the upward-and-downward movement.
To think unsystematically about the subject is
senseless. .(ATTENTION HOLLYWOOD!
Trans. Note) One may not simply say that at the
start the hero is an anarchist and then, after a series
of mishaps, he becomes a conscious communist.
Such a scheme does not release the theme and does
not bring us to the decisive transformation.
One must perceive not only what happens but
also how it happens. In the work on the script
the form must be already fulfilled. To propose
a revolution in the world-philosophy of the hero
by no means signifies a high-point in the manu-
script- Before a certain concrete form is found,
of which the intended effect, according to the
author's meaning, may influence the spectator
from the screen, the bare thought of the revolution
has no artistic worth and cannot serve as a prop-
point in the building-up of the script. These
prop-points, hoicever, are necessary: they establish
the solid skeleton of the script and clear away the
dead places, which always crop up, if such an im-
portant moment in the development of the manu-
script is thought through carelessly and unsys-
tematically. The neglect of this moment can have
irremediable consequences: particularly, it is easy
for elements to creep in which combat the final
plastic treatment and thus destroy the whole struc-
ture.
The writer can represent his high-points through
detailed description: the dramatist through dia-
logue. The manuscript-writer, however, must
think in terms of plastic (external) means; he
must discipline his power of imagination to that
degree where he is able co present every thought in
the form of a sequence of images on the screen.
Mor than that: he mils': learn to govern these im-
ages and, out of the mass of image-forms that flow
to him, to select the clearest and most expressive.
He must learn to master them as the writer masters
the word and the dramatist the dialogue. The
clearness and definiteness of the treatment depends
conclusively on the clear formulation of the theme.
Let us take, as an example, a real naive Amer-
ican film of little worth, which runs under the
title "Immer fremd" (Lit. "Always strange").
Apart from the modesty of its content, it presents
an excellent example of a clearly defined theme
and of a simply and definitely worked out script
(action)- The theme is formulated somewhat
as follows:
"Human beings of different classes of society
will never be happy if they marry."
The building up of the action is as follows: A
chauffeur turns down the love of a laundress, be-
cause he has fallen in love with the daughter of a
capitalist whom he has to drive around daily in
the auto. The son of another wealthy man, who
accidentally sees in his home the young laundress,
falls in love with her. The couples marry. The
small quarters of the chauffeur appear to the daugh-
ter of the capitalist like a dog's kennel. The na-
tural desire of the chauffeur, to find, after a tiring
day's work, a home-cooked meal ready for him,
meets with an insurmountable obstacle
his wife
has not the slightest idea of how to go about mak-
ing a fire. The fire is too hot, the dishes dirty her
hands and the half-finished meal falls to the floor.
When friends of the chauffeur visit him to spend
a gay evening, they behave, according to the spoil-
ed lady's opinion, so raw, that she finally rushes
out of the room in an hysterical crying-fit.
But the laundress in the house of the wealthy
man fares no better. Surrounded by servants she
falls from one embarrassement into another. Her
maid, who helps her dress and undress, gives her
one surprise after another. In fancy dress she feels
ridiculous- Among the guests at dinner she makes
one faux pas after another, so that she becomes
the target of ridicule, to the worry of the spouse
and his relatives.
By accident the chauffeur and the former laun-
dress meet. It turns out that under the influence
of their common disappointments, the former af-
fection is re-awakened. Both couples separate and
find each other in a newer, happier union. The
laundress manages the kitchen in perfect order, and
the new wife of the capitalist wears the dress in
perfect style and dances a wonderful Charleston.
The manuscript is just as primitive as the theme,
but nevertheless one can designate the film as ex-
ceptional in the clearly planned construction.
Every detail is in place and in immediate connec-
tion with the underlying thought: At the same
time one feels even in the superficial content-sketch
distinctly visible the clear, plastically worked out
picture-sequence. The kitchen, the guests of the
chauffeur, the elegant dress, the invited dinner
guests, and again the kitchen and the dress in an-
other form. Every essential moment in the
development of the manuscript is defined through
distinct plastic material. As a counter example, I
shall reproduce an excerpt from one of the many
daily submitted manuscripts:
"A family has fallen into dire poverty. Neither
the father nor the daughter can find work. Every-
where they are turned down- Often a friend calls
on them and tries with consoling words to cheer
up the despairful daughter, etc."
This is a typical example of filmic colorlcssncss
and helplessness in the presentation. One finds
here nothing except meetings and conversations.
Such expressions as "often a friend calls on them".
to cheer up with consoling words", everywhere
turned down", etc. show the complete failure to
connect the work on the script with the filmic
form which the manuscript should finally assume.
Such suggestions can at best serve as stuff for titles,
but not for film-shots, for the word "often" un-
mistakably means" several times", and to show the
friend entering the room four or five times would
even seem absurd to the writer of this manuscript.
ffi
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA

The same is to be said about the notation "every-

where they were turned down."
It is also important that one should not draft
in the general preparatory treatment of the manu-
script that which is unfilmable and inessential, but
only that which one can positively accept as the
plastic, expressive "high" points of the film. As
prop-points in the above example could be design-,
ated the character of a scene, expressing dire pover-
ty, or a deed, (not words) , which characterizes
the relationship of the . daughter to the friend.
One could reply that the work on the plastic form
belongs already to the subsequent stages and can
be left up to the director. Against this, I stress
the point once more, that one must always keep
in mind the plastic form as the goal. Already at
the start of the work, one must know exactly
where one wishes to go, if one desires to avoid
serious difficulties later. . For example, I would
draw attention to the above-mentioned entirely
unnecessary and unplastic word "often".
We have, however, established, the necessity
for the author to orient himself towards the plastic
material, which is finally decisive for the form of
his presentation.
CONCENTRATION OF THE STUFF
We now turn to the general questions, in par-
ticular to the problem of the concentration of the
stuff. There is a whole series of rules, which
regulate the construction of the narrative, the novel
and the drama. They all correspond closely with
the work on the manuscript, but to discuss them
in detail would far overstep the boundaries of this
book. Out of the group of problems dealing with
general construction, only one question shall be
mentioned here. The author must at all times
during the work on the script take into consider-
ation the different degrees of tension in the action.
This tension must finally cause a reaction in the
spectator in that it forces him to follow the pic-
ture with lesser and greater excitement. This ex-
citement depends not alone on the dramatic situa-
tion, but it can also be evoked through purely ex-
ternal methods. The linking up of the dynamic
moment, in the action, the introduction of scenes,
which render conspicuous the intensification of the
energy of the actors: all this effects the increase of
excitement in the spectator and one must learn so
to form the manuscript that the progressive action
captures comulatively the interest of the spectator,
so hat the strongest emotional factor is ungeared
through the climax. A great mass of manuscripts
suffer from the poor manipulation of the attention
factor. As an example, one may cite the Russian
film The Adventure of Mr. West. The first three
reels are looked upon with constantly mounting
interest. The cowboy, who has arrived in Mos-
cow with the American visitor, Mr. West, falls
into a series of difficult situations and gets out
of them with a cleverness that constantly builds
up the interer . of the audience. The first reels,
thoroughly dynamic, ate "easy to look upon" and perfect "exDose" for the director who in rcfec-
10
hold the spectator in constantly mounting excite-
ment. But after the end of the third reel, when the
adventures of the cowboy come to an end through
an unexpected finale, there is a natural reaction in
the spectator, and the continuation, despite the
excellent direction, is seen with far less interest.
And the last reel, the weakest of the whole film,
(a journey through the streets of Moscow and
through some sort of dreary factories) , finally
eradicates the impression and leaves the spectator
unsatisfied.
As an interesting example of the opposite correct
manipulation of the mounting of the tension-
moment in the action may be cited the films of the
well-known American director, Griffith." He
even created a type of film-climax designated with
his name, which is being used by m:\ny of his fol-
lowers to this day. Let us take, for instance, the
aforementioned film, Hate. The young worker,
"'
having been dismissed on acount of his participa-
tion in a strike, comes to New York and then falk;
in with a gang of thieves. But after he meets the
beloved girl, he decides to seek an honest occupa-
tion. However the dark elements will not leave
him in peace- Finally, they involve him in a mur-
der case and the worker is thrown into jail. The
evidence is so unquestionable, that the jury con-
demns him to death. In the end, the young girl,
who meanwhile has become his wife, unexpected-
ly discovers the murderer. Her husband is already-
prepared for execution; only the governor has the
power to revoke the sentence, and he has just left
the city in an express train. Then begins a wild
chase to save the hero's life. The woman races
in a speedster, whose driver has been given to un-
derstand that upon his speed depends a human life,
towards the train. In the cell the man confesses
before his death.
The auto has almost reached
the express. The preparations for the execution
near the end- In the very last moment, when the
noose is supposed to slip around the neck of the
hero, comes the pardon, which was obtained by the
wife with the last degree of energy and exertion.
The quick change of these shots (montage-im-
ages) , the vividly contrasted change of the racing
machine with the methodical preparations for the
execution of an innocent human being, the con-
stantly mounting unrest of the spectator, "will
she get there or not?", all this forces a heighten-
ing of excitement, which through its solution in the
finale, ends the film happily.
The method of Griffith combines inner dramatic
fullness of action with masterly exploitation of
external effects. His films can be used as mas-
ter examples of correctly built-up intensification.
A thoroughly worked out script, in which al!
lines of action are clearly laid down, in which the
essential situations of the actors are designated, in
which finally, the action is skilful.y intensified
and mounted in such a way, that solution, satisfac-
tion and climax fall together: such . script is the
i
fa
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
tion upon the "plastic material", upon the "image
reaction" (optical effect) . transforms it into con-
tinuity.
THE SCENARIO
The next stage in the work of the author is al-
ready the particularized cinematographic treatment
of the subject. Up to now, the subject has re-
ceived no essential cinematographic designation: it
has had so to say, only an adaptation for the film
based on principles. Now the phase of the
plastically animated treatment of the picture comes
to the fore. The manuscript must be divided in-
to parts, the parts into episodes, these into scenes,
the scenes into single placements, which correspond
to the pieces, out of which finally the film-strip
is pasted together. The reels (Akte) must not
be allowed to exceed a certain length and the manu-
script-writer must learn to feel them. The aver-
age length of a reel consists of from 300 to 400
meter. In order to feci this length correctly, one
must take the following into consideration- The
projection-machine runs, at average speed, one
metre in 3 seconds. Consequently, the entire
reel runs within 20 minutes. If one tries to
visualize the corresponding scenes, belonging to
each single reel as they run on the screen, and takes
into consideration the cime which they require in
running, one can then calculate the amount of
scenes it takes to provide the contents of one reel.
A manuscript thoroughly worked out in scenes
has the following appearance:
1. Scene
On a country road a peasant wagon drags slow-
ly along, sinking in the mud. Sad and unwilling
the driver urges the tired horse on. In the corner
of the wagon cowers a figure and huddles itself
up in an old soldier's cloak, in order to get protec-
tion from the sharp wind. An approaching
wanderer stops curiously, the driver addresses him:
Title:
>
"Is it still far to Nabin?"
The wanderer points with his hand. The
wagon continues on its way, while the wanderer
gazes after it.
^
2. Scene
Peasant hut. On the bench in the corner lies
an old, white-haired man, covered with rags; he
breathes heavily. A little old mother busies her-
self around the stove and angrily clatters about
with pots and pans. The sick man turns around
with difficulty and says to her:
Title:
"It seems to mc that somebody is knocking?"
The old woman steps to the window and looks
cut.
Title:
"No, old man. You are mistaken; it is only
the wind, rattling the door."
A manuscript worked out in such a form, that
is already divided into single scenes and titles, re-
presents the first phase of filmic treatment. But
it is still far from the final form of the finished
continuity which alone can serve as the funda-
mental structure for the shooting. One should
consider the fact that a whole series of character-
istic details arc presented here in narrative form,
as for instance, "sinking in the mud", "the sad
driver' , "huddled in a soldier's cloak", "sharp
wind", etc. All these descriptive particulars would
not be impressed upon the spectator, if they were
used merely as "properties" (Requisiten) and if
the scene as a whole, were photographed just as it
is described. In order to bring these particulars into
effective development, the film has its own peculiar
and effective method, thanks to which, one can
draw the spectator's attention to each single detail.
Through this method, one does not just casually
become aware of "bad weather two people in a
wagon", but each of the details is effectively re-
presented. This method is called Montage.*
Some manuscript writers use a somewhat similar
means, in that they often bring into the descrip-
tion of the scene, a so-called close atmospheric shot.
for example, "Village street", "Festival Day", "a
peasant family centered around a lively gesticulat-
ing communist, new groups step up to them, they
raise their voices loudly in protest, etc". Such
insertions arc better omitted as they have nothing
in common with Montage. The terms "inser-
tion" (Einfuegung) and "interruption" (Unter-
brechung) are absurd concepts, which are merely
left-overs of the old misunderstanding of kino-
technical methods. All details, which belong to
scenes of the aforementioned kind, should not be
inserted into the scene, but the scene must be built
up out of them. We shall go over to montage,
as the fundamental method of effectively influenc-
ing the spectator from the screen, when we have
given the necessary explanations regarding the
fundamental types and the choice of the plastic
material.
IWWM^i W|ti mi w ,
*This refers only to the montage (or building-up) o the
details of atmosphere, as described in the scenes on the pre-
ceding page.
Trans. Note
Part II of Pudowkin's book will appear in the
next number of EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
The following books have been received and
will be reviewed in the next issue of "Experimental
cinema":
"An Hour with the Movies and Talkie.
1
.

G. Seldes
Lippincott, Phila., Pa.
"The Crisis in the Film
J. G. Fletcher

-
Univ. of Washington Chap Books.
"Exposition of Decorative & Modern Industrial
Art''
Larousse, Paris.
"American Annual of Photography", 1930

American Photographic Publ., Boston.
"Films of Today and Tomorrow"
Richter, Berlin.
Hans
11
K
.A V < A. *>
V V
i
'OR nine months, ever since the Hollywood Film-

' arte Theatre at 1228 North Vine Street re-open-

ed its doors with the Dreyer film., Passion of
Joan of Arc, the American film-capital has had an
unusual opportunity to take a course in cinema art.
Outstanding pictures from practically every country
have been shown here The nation best represented
was, of course. Soviet Russia. What would a film-art
theatre be without Russian films? ....
The following is a list of the Russian films shown
in Hollywood since September, 1929, in chrono-
logical order:
POTEMKIN
THE VILLAGE OF SIN
TWO DAYS
HER WAY OF LOVE (Das Weib des Gacdisten)
TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD
IN OLD SIBERIA (Zuchthaus Nach Sibirien)
ARSENAL
FLAMES ON THE VOLGA (Revolt in Kazan)
THE YELLOW PASS
THE NEW BABYLON {Kampf Urn Paris)
In some cases the prints were inexcusably bad.
Ten Days That Shook The World looked like the
victim of a Ku Klux Klan or an American Legion
mauling. At least one-third of the scenes were out
of place or upside down and had to be correctly re-
patched; titles were run two, three or four together,
with the intercut scenes hundreds of feet further ahead
in the material: and the general condition of the
print was scratchy and dirty defects due to the
cheapness of the laboratory work and to the care-
lessness of handling. Such customary defiling of
Russian film-prints that find their way to Amer-
ica and other foreign countries naturally weakens
the tonal impression of the photography very
important to the general effect in Russian films

and causes the "victimized" film to appear jumpy
and old. or badly mounted. Despite censorship,
Arsenal probably suffered less in these respects than
any of the other Soviet productions brought to
Hollywood.
How do the American movie people react to
the cinema masterpieces of Soviet Russia. How
do famous direc: ors, who get thousands of dol-
lars a week, react to the directing of Eiscnstein
Dovzhenko
Raismann Trauberg

Preobrajonskaja whose collective salary per

month in the Soviet Union amounts to less than
the weekly check of a single big American 'star'"
And the "stars" those magnificently tailored
religious ido's of the American public what
do the "stars" think of the acting in the Soviet
films, of the dynamic close-ups of working-men
peasant women, revolutionaircs. etc? How does
Miss Dolores Gorgeous, who teaches millions
of
young girls the magic by- words: "Oh, don't you
understand?" and "I love you, Pierre. I love you"
how does Gorgeous feel when she sees Emma
Zessarskaja tell a husky Russian peasant to go to
hell, that the old order is over and the new re-
gime of Communism is at hand? What does the
little grey haired actress. who plays "mother
roles" in sixty-four out of sixty-five Hollywood
"tearjerkers", think of the real mothers in Po-
temkin, Arsenal, New Babylon, etc., not waving
flags, but killing officers in defense of their young.
not gushing songs about "clouds-with-silver-lin-
ings", but risking their lives behind barricades to
help their husbands and sons against the imperia-
list rulers of the world- . . . Hollywood's "cutters"
what do they say when they witness triumphs
of montage-cutting in the Tartar's dance of "Ten
Days, in the massacre of Potemkin or in the revo-
lutionary episodes of Arsenal? And the camera-
men,
-
how enthusiastic are they when they ob
serve the photography of Russian cameramen

of Tisse Golownia, Feldmann, Demutzki, etc?
It is of course impossible to make a report that
will cover every individual reaction. Even the
best general statement necessarily neglects to in-
clude a great many "buts", "ifs ", and "perhapscs"
These statements are based, sometimes verbatim,
on the verbally expressed reactions of American
movie-people. v
Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World
were by far the biggest "box-office" attractions at
the Filmartc. Particularly. Ten Days. There
was widespread amazement throughout the Amer-
ican film-industry at the night photography of
this film, especially the night photography of the
perspective mass-shots during the storming of the
Winter Palace-
The mass-scenes, both of Potemkin and Ten
Days, came in for a due share of astonishment zno
disbelief. Directors, assistant-directors, tech-
nicians, etc., who were questioned, were emphatic
in their conviction that these scenes (specifically.
the Bolshevist demonstration and' machine-gun
episode on Sadovaja street, in Ten Days) , were
not produced but were taken from news-reels.
They chose to ignore the fact that at the time oi'
these events, there was no filming at all in Russia
and hardly any equipment, and that whatever
equipment there was, had been sabotaged by the
fleeing bourgeois owners of the few small pre-
Revolutionary studios. Similarly, they believed
that the character of Lenin was not played but real
news-reel shots of Lenin underground and so
on . . .
12
"U i^T3
A great amount of curiosity was aroused by the
hanging horse in Ten Days. Directors speculated
with one another whether the horse was real or
dummy. If. dummy not bad. If real
-
those bestial Bolsheviks! ....
There was also speculation, ridicule and
general wise-cracking about the symbolism. The
Hollywood movie-people wanted to know :
"What's the idea of all the statues?" This reac-
tion was noted in respect to practically all the
Soviet films shown here.
Directors, cutters, picture-people variously em-
ployed (scenarists, continuity-writers, etc.), whose
views were sought in course of conversation and
discussion, also severly criticized the cutting. They
wanted to know why Eisenstein cut back and forth
so much and so fast. Soviet films have become
known here as the pictures with "choppy cutting".
Explanations of the montage-technique are invari-
ably met with complaints about the alleged
"strain" on the eyesight which this necessitates.
One Hollywood movie-man, who relieved himself
of a heated denunciation of all Russian films, re-
gards the "choppy cutting" of these films as an
indication of the "backwardness" of their tech-
nique and as evidence that the Soviet film-industry
must have reached the stage "where the American
movies were fifteen years ago" when eye-strain was
the price paid for looking at the "flickers".
Minor reverberations of these general critical re-
actions resounded to the less famous Russian films.
For example, much noise was made over the "cruel-
ty" of killing the puppy in Stabavoj's Two Days.
Here was the proof, right by the "Reds" them-
selves,, God-sent to the righteous, upstanding pro-
ducers of anti-Soviet propaganda pictures, which
depict the Hollywood "conception" of the Russian
"revolution", that the Bo'sheviks, after all, like the
Huns during the war, are fiends who bayonet
babies for Sunday pleasure and chew up young
girls for evening meals! Although all the Amer-
ican movie-people interviewed were not absolutely
positive that they could duplicate some of the
fecenes in Ten Days That Shook the World or
Potemkin. most of them sincerely insisted that they
could make much better films than Two Days, In
Old Siberia, Her Way of Love, etc (on some other
revolution) "if they weren't 'in it' for the money."
A few individuals connected with the American
movie-world, also "in it for the money", were a
bit more willing to credit Eisenstein and the other
Soviet directors with some ability and intelligence.
They admired, according to their fancy, the photo-
graphy here, or a mass-scene there, or the dance of
the Tartars in Ten Days, or the wheat field scenes
in The Village of Sin or the tornado in Her Way
of Love ....
The reactions of the Hollywood lay public are
more difficult to get at.
The average audience in attendance at Filmarte
showings is a stormy combination of Los Angeles
radicals with "White Russian" emigres
ex-
counts, ex-dukes, ex-chamber-maids of the Czar
and all the flotsam and jetsam of the late Czar's
regime, who have found welcome, shelter and
warm beds among the "Aristocracy" of America's
movie colony. In between these two antagonistic
elements, are all shades 3nd species of individuals
of the much-advertised "great American masses".
Nevertheless, practically all intelligent and
serious-minded individuals within a fifty-mile
radius of Hollywood have generously patronized
the Filmarte Theatre, even when it was forced to
run films less meritorious than the Russian.
In contrast to this popular support, the studios
yielded only a very small percentage of their total
population. With the exception of one or two
studios, that permitted placards to be posted, no
interest was shown. One company requested cer-
tain of its directors and cameramen to see Ten
Days That Shook the World "to learn the real
way how to film a revolution"! Another com-
pany asked a private showing of Potemkin for its
technical staff. A third requested certain depart-
ments to see In Old Siberia .... Outside of this
purely momentary attention, dictated by a specific
temporary necessity, the Hollywood studios ex-
hibited no more than passing curiosity, and ab-
solutely no genuine interest, in the Soviet films.
When the wheat field shots of The Village of
Sin appeared, the audience at every performance of
the film, literally moved by the beauty of the
landscape and photography, applauded.
Ta'o Days was enthusiastically applauded at
the end of every showing, throughout its run.
Ten Days That Shook the World was applaud-
ed thunderously throughout the film and at its
conclusion. Not only the Communists, but the
intelligent bourgeois public, hailed it as a master-
piece of directorial genius and motion picture art.
The tornado scenes in Her Way of Love, unique
in the films, were acclaimed by the general public
every night-
Potemkin. In Old Siberia, The Yellow Pass

all met with the same enthusiastic reception on the
part of the general public.
13
h
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
The manifest conclusion to be drawn from
these facts is that the appreciation of artistic films
is on a much higher level among intelligent Amer-
ican groups than "appreciation" among technically
experience people connected with the American
movie-industry. In every instance, the latter ex-
hibited a state of mind absolutely ignorant and
offensive as contrasted with the open-minded re-
ceptions given the Russian films by Hollywood
laymen.
Hollywood, however, is a zoo of many strange
animals. The films of the Soviet Union did not
always find the path so rosy . . .
That old stand-by, the militant patriot, and
his twin, the well-to-do jingoist, condescended to
visit an art-theatre, and when they got there, they
were shocked to find themselves so cleverly por-
trayed by Messrs. Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Trau-
berg, Ozep, Raismann, Poznansky, etc., that it
was just too hot for comfort.
After all, it was alright for Sergy Eisenstein to
use a peacock as a symbol to describe
that is,
to "express" dictators of the engineer and sav-
iour variety; and it was also alright for Dovzhen-
ko's soldier-rebel to face an august military board
and calmly announce that he had decided to de-
mobilize himself regardless of their need of being
"defended"- True, America must be kept "pure"
of that sort of thing. But it had all happened in
Soviet Russia, and any breach of military, patriotic
or parlor etiquette could be expected there . . . Be-
sides, Ten Days That Shook the World was a
famous film, Eisenstein was a famous director and
a great many people seemed to enjoy the spectacle
of the Bolshevist Revolution too much for isolated
protests to be effective. Arsenal, on the other
hand, although it gave birth to the suspicion in
some patriotic genius's head that the manager of
the Filmarte Theatre was trying to build up a
"little Soviet", was altogether too abstruse to be
understood. After the first two days, when it ran
to the tune of the ridicule and wise-cracking of a
few mentally empty movie-directors, it played to
an empty house . . . But The New Babylon was
different.
The New Babylon got too close to home to be
seen without squirming. Moscow is Moscow, but
Paris is almost as much America as it is Paris

that is, politically speaking . . .One is Russia,

"Dark Russia", but the other is the Western world.
And a good American patriot should not without
blushing behold the sight of French patriots be-
ing- mado-asses-of by being-shown-singing La
Marseillaise while Communards starve

especial-
ly when these patriots are "respectable people"
with lots of money. It all gets too close to home:
the faces begin to look too familiar. They no
longer have that distictively Slavic expression . . .
So the American patriots "blushed" ....
There were no less than seven complaints, sev-
eral of them distinguished for their moneyed vi-
ciousness. These came from members of a certain
notorious patriotic society known for its kindly
habit of blowing up the homes of starving foreign
workers. These particular important individuals
were overheard to threaten the Filmarte with "in-
vestigation". Their country's saviours pronounc-
ed The A etc' Babylon corruptive, subversive and
dangerous. Perhaps they would call attention to
the case at headquarters . . .
This encounter between the Filmarte Theatre
and the saviours of the fatherland was merely the
direct, open manifestation of an attitude which
had been growing for months and to which less
vociferous, but not less definite, expression had
already been given. It is not the first time a pure-
ly cultural movement has had to meet insult,
abuse and even active insanity on the part of mili-
tant patriots, who see red in everything except iff
their own eye-balls. But in the long run, such
manifestations of bigotry and bought love do nor
avail. In the present case, the overwhelming
majority of people who attend such theatres as the
Filmarte are happy to be able to witness creative
masterpieces like the Russian films. The attend-
ance every time one is shown is the living proof of
the popular sentiment out here.
To be complete, this report has only to mention
that the reception of the Soviet films by profes-
sional critics on Los Angles newspapers and mag-
azines was in almost every case enthusiastic and in-
telligent. Rob Wagner in Script, Arthur Millet
in the Los Angeles Times, Frank Daugherty in the
Film Spectator and a number of reporters on
various papers found these films to be the realiza-
tion of the oldest hopes for motion picture art.
Their publicity partly compensated for fhe Amer-
ican industry's indifference and hostility.
This is the story of what happened when the
Soviet film-masterpieces came to Hollywood, the
"Capital" of the American film-industry and sup-
posedly of the entire film-world. From the time
that Potemkin created excitement because of its
unfaked realism, to the time that Arsenal was
laughed at and dismissed as something mad and
The New Babylon was jeered at by the dollar
patriots

not one important personage of the
most expensive film-industry in the world came
out with a public statement encouraging people
to see these works or advising the industry to
learn something from them about cinema tech-
nique.
Of course, the American film-producers can
learn nothing about motion pictures. They know
it all. By their own admission they make the
"biggest and best" films in the world . . .
Hollywood, Cal. S. S.
14
J.
DECOMPOSE
yR NTIL we learn to differentiate the senti-
y
mental and narrative values from the filmic
or cineplastic qualities in a film, the latter
and greater problem will be neglected.
Each of the arts has its individual medium and
the forms and values which it can effect depend
upon the medium employed. The director who
tries to blend in the film the effects appropriate
to other media, injures the aesthetic ensemble of
his own medium- Consequently a director's
value is dependent upon his ability to project his
celluloid results only in filmic terms, and without
the intervention of any agency (moral, literary
or pictorial) other than the specific cinematic
means.
In contrast, we find the entire cinema scene
dominated by cither the principles of acting, plot,
dancing, sound, color: or such mawkish items as
dramatic scqences, divisions of climaxes, rise and
fall of suspense, the psychology of spectator re-
actions: tricks and formulas, and in no sense
contributing to the cinema that unique quality
which distinguishes the film from other media
of expression; and even at best a detriment to
true film creation.
The representation of the cinematic world is
achieved through the modifications of a surface
(screen) by means of the properties of the motion
picture camera and projector, (cinematic means)
.
It is the manipulation of these cinematic units
(the details that constitute the notation of the
cinema) that objects (subject matter) are given a
filmic recognition, filmic association and filmic
unity, entirely different from the recognitions,
associations, and unit
;
es that they had before. The
business of the director is to integrate the subject
matter and medium in a filmic synthesis, extract-
ing the essence of an object or situation and pro-
jecting it .anew and enriched because of that par-
ticular filmic unification.
This is the process of
composition and is the arrangement and unifica-
tion of subject matter and cinematic notation and
not a mere literal reproduction of objects or in-
dividuals.
Behind every film is the idea. This idea is
twofold, subject matter or theme, (this can be
anything, document, nature, abstractions) and the
cinematic process. As a result of the modification
of subject matter under the stress of the cinematic
notation (long shot, close up, etc., position on the
screen and in the film as a whole, angle, tempo,
duration, action, tone, etc. etc.) a quality or form
embracing the essence of both subject matter and
notation,
_
is projected- This quality, called
Imagery, is one of three structural elements in the
cineplastic progression of a film. This element
of Imagery exhibits itself as the greatest composi-
tional state (filmic and psychological) of the
funded cinematic details (matter and notation)
.
Because- of the repetitions in time-space projection
of shots, (the nature of the film medium) this
quality of Imagery creates a condition or order
called Movement. This simply means that our
senses connect two or more shots and attribute
a dimension to the spaces between. We imagine
a line leading from one shot to the other. These
spaces between are filled in with all degrees of
durations, intervals and stress. When these
spaces are ordered, that is, paralleled and organized
in time-space sequences they create the second of
the cineplastic homogenities called Movement.
This quality Movement is conditioned by the
momentum of the element Imagery and governed
or controlled by the third cineplastic quality,
Time Time exhibits itself as the tempo, dura-
tion, interval and stress of Images, of cinematic
notation and as the governing factor of Movement
and its rhythms.
These cineplastic qualities, Imagery, Movement
and Time are the structural means for filmic form.
Question as to which of these elements contribute
the most to the film, is for the moment unim-
portant. Movement is the very spirit of object
or situation- Time is the core of Movement and
Imagery is the body and essence of the film med-
ium. Each unreels to project a living whole ex-
actly as the various parts of a body are all seen to-
gether and make up the body which consists of
and lives because of them all. These qualities
have an independent appeal of their own (regard-
less of subject matter) and form in the cinema
can only be created by the arrangements and uni-
fications of the differentiation of Imagery, Move-
ment, Time.
There is no limit to the multiplicity of integra-
tions of Imagery Movement and Time, bur their
methods of compositional procedure are displayed
in the following two types:
First, as an unreeling of single images, one fol-
lowing another in a simple linear projection with
the proportion and the content of the subject mat-
ter acting as the dominating idea; and the only
distortions (if any) in the relation of the psy-
chology of the subject matter itself. This is an
*
illustrative type of film. Actions, scenes, char-
acters, atmospheres, ideas, are evoked and the film
is circumscribed by the logic of documentation.
A two dimensional type of composition and at its
most fluent will never exceed pattern in painting,
melody in music, or narration in literature. Near-
ly ail films to-date are of this order.
More complex, and as yet unknown to the com-
mercial cinema is this second type of film com-
positon. Such a film is projected as a rhythmic
order with the intensifications not only of subject
matter, but of imagery (which is its greatest com-
positional state) and Movement and Time. As a
15
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
result of a structural integration among these cine
plastic elements there unreels a filmic order of contin-
uous movement whose beginning and end are syn-
chronous. A cineplastic ensemble is projected where-
in the qualities Imagery Movement and Time serve
as the generating motif for succeeding sequences of
Imagery. Movement and Time, and which in integ-
ration evolve toward a summit and conclusion. Each
new rhythm of Imagery, Movement and Time grow
naturally out of the initial ones and the composition-
al steps are wholly dictated by the logic of Cinema
aesthetics. Such a film contains no climaxes, only
a completion^ and its formal order is never dictated by
the values of the subject matter, (social, political,
religious etc.). The director communicates with the
spectator without the intervention of any other agen-
cies than the specific cineplastic elements
Imagery,
Movement and Time.
True cinema style implies the ease with which the
director employs the structural terms- His method
of film articulation will vary with every shade and
thought projected in accordance with the needs of
filmic form, cineplastic form.
Cineplastic form is the organization by which the
details that constitute Imagery, Movement and Time
(subject matter and cinematic notation) are brought
into filmic relations, fused and integrated so that
they unite to produce a single cineplastic effect. The
more complete unification there is, the richer the
form, and hence the better the film.
To recapitulate: The idea, theme etc. must be
expressed solely in terms of Imagery, Movement and
Time. The director should not project any of the
structural terms to such an extent that they distract
from the perception of the film as a whole. No
isolated effects, either of photography, decor, acting,
cinematic angle, tone, movement etc. or overaccentua-
tion of psychological values should absorb the at-
tention of the spectator; but combine to create a
filmic whole which consists of and lives because of
that particular integration of Imagery, Movement and
Time.
Lewis Jacobs
*>i*ii
"\
'<
*Jr<M
,,'
'r'A
K*S
--.-
ssa
i
i
-
Strip from Pudoivhin's film "Mother", mounte<' psycho-
logically to convey a filmic idea.
P PUUSM AND DIALEC
by H. A. POTAMKIN
(Continuation of "Film Problems of Soviet Russia")
The major problem confronting the film-maker
of the USSR is the thorough treatment of the
social theme. By thorough treatment is meant
non-sentimental or critical treatment. It is the
social idea as against populism. The latter is the
concern with the popular expression as a fact in
itself, uncritically. We have known it in politics
here; we have known it in the "highbrow" infla-
tion of the popular idiom: "jazz", "slang",
"movie", etc. In Russia it evinces itself in pro-
fessional peasant-poetry exaggerating the peasant
as an ideal, an inimical propounding in the pro-
letarian dictatorship. The critical expression of
society in the USSR is articulated in the Marx-
ian dialectics, and its conversion into the form of
the cinema is a structural problem. The solution
of this problem determines the degree of achieve-
ment in the single instance of a film, as well as
in the entire Soviet kino.
Dialectics as drama is conflict and that is
its structure in the film. There is the THESIS
the status quo. The ANTITHESIS a serts it-
16
h
wm
^^^
TH
4-
\!i
THEATRE AND MOTION PICTURE
by BARNET G- BRAVER-MANN
"
FILM:
^HE stage and the motion picture make use of
1 the dramatic types: melodrama, farce, comedy,
tragedy and burlesque in the delineation of
character and scenes, and there any likeness be-
tween the two forms begins and ends. The med-
ia of film and stage are wholly unlike in the
mounting of the completed production. Each
form has its own advantages, laws and character-
istics, and in our time practitioners in cinema and
the theatre have demonstrated their incapacity to
utilize fully those advantages and laws. The
theatre, for instance, has neglected to enter into the
tempo of our time by adhering to the picture-
frame, peepshow stage, with its spatial confines for
the player and for the movement of the play, in-
stead of devising and constructing stages that
would free the drama and the player from the li-
mitations of back wall and border lights.
Since the bourgeois theatre is one of the most
conservative of institutions, it may take many
years before its leaders realize the effect of its de-
bilitating mechanics and ideology upon both the
stage and the motion picture. The theatre might
overcome the lethargic pace on its boards by re-
turning to the Greek practice of continuous action,
as has been demonstrated recently in The Trial
of Mary Dugan. This method preserves not only
continuity of action, but keeps the situations intact
instead of splitting them into three and four acts,
and utilizes movement in a manner that' is lacking
in the conventional modern play, with its time
lapses suggested by the falling curtain before an
intermission. Why should the spectator attend a
play with intermissions, time lapses and interrup-
tions when the ->ame play can be read at home
without breaks in the continuity? It would seem
that the theatre could return in many instances to
the classic forms with profit. For one thing, the
stage has obviously distinctive features foreign to
the technique of the motion picture, - -
such as the
actual presence of the actor, the sound of actual
living speech, rich color gradations in objects, tex-
tures and lighting - -
all mingled in a kind of in-
timacy between audience and actor that is not pos-
sibie in cinema. Esthetically, there is no more
rivalry between the visual power of the best films
and the connotative speech in the best plays than
there is between an image on the screen and an ac-
tor on the stage. Each form has its own place.
To say that the screen is an alternative artistically
preferable to the theatre is to submit a comparison
determined by personal taste rather than by fact.
Nevertheless, the stage and cinema, each in its own
way/makes us feel things differently and by dif-
ferent means- Where the stage offers a combined
emotional and intellectual appeal through the liv-
ing actor and human voice, the motion picture pro-
duces the same effect with its flowing dynamic im-
ages and patterns. The images are shadow and
light in motion; they must be dramatically and vis-
ually significant. This dramatic and visual sig-
nificance is made apparent according to the manner
in which the scenes are planned in the script, then
played, photographed, directed and their images
mounted. The cutting determines length, tempo
and quality of imagery in the mounting, and after
that is done, pace is regulated by the projector.
Obviously the stage does none of these things be-
cause the stage is not cinema.
The cinema gives us visual intimacy of objects
and forms - -
such as closeups of anything from a
a pair of eyes to a mass scene containing thousands
of images. The appeal of the film is first visual,
chen emotional, and lastly intellectual. The cin-
ema overcomes space and depth, save in those films
wherein the film merchants have sought deliberate-
ly to imitate the stage. On the screen a figure
may become the size of a tennis ball like the man
in the arena of Victor Seastrom's film version of
He Who Gets Slapped and be magnified to strik-
ing proportions that make the nose and eyes fill
the screen. It frees us from the physical limita-
tions of time by flashing back into past centuries
and cutting forward into the future. It frees us
of actuality through such devices as dissolves, fade-
ins, fade-outs and double-exposures which lend
themselves to moods of fantasy, to liberties with
:he actual a^d temporal.
The theatre is bound by the actualities of space
and time. Occasionally, a playwright for example
Molnar, in The Red Mill, specifies a rapid change
of scene with sliding sectional walls, that face the
audience, each section covering a scene in process
of arrangement- But The Red Mill is not pure
theatre since its technique infringes so heavily upon
the movie scene that its effect is wearisome. The
theatre play must function on a basis of chrono-
logical progression; it cannot cut back into time.
In a few plays the movie type of progression has
been tried, notably in Dear Brutus, Marco's Mil-
lions, and The Beggar on Horseback, but the suc-
cess of such plays has not been attained as a con-
jequence of the treatment of time, but rather be-
cause of other elements of appeal which neutral-
ized the effect of an undramatic handling of time.
Events that happen on the stage must follow one
another consecutively. The last act in a drama
ran not tell us what has happened during the first
IS
h
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
act and the third act cannot cut back to the first
or second act, nor can the first act alternate with
the last act. Least of all, can the stage build up
an idea by means of a synthesis of scenes unrelated
to each other in physical content, as appears so
often in Russian films; in some German and
Swedish films.
The theatre mounts productions with scenes
on the stage. The screen, flat and two dimen-
sional, flashes shadow-images that are fragmentary
reproductions of scenes and objects. The player
and the fragments of him on the screen form
images . . . visual fragments that show the most
delicate motion of the lips, an eye, and contribute
to the completion of the idea. An image natural-
ly does not fill physical space as does the actor
on the stage- Yet, the images make us conscious
of their meaning by their movement on the screen.
The theatre offers us physical actuality because
unlike the film, it is not a pattern in flowing
images, a difference which brings the film closer
to emotional experience. The film is not con-
cerned with physical actuality but with physical
illusion, which directs its appeal to the emotions
through the eye before the observer has time to
rationalize his emotional reaction.
On the stage, the resonant voice issues from a
living body. Living voices are foreign to shadow-
images. Absence of voice puts the image into the
category of illusion, although the motion and in-
terlacing of images and patterns may suggest real-
ity. Motions of the fingers, of the hands, of the
head may build inner states and all the moods
that can be expressed by speech and voice. In the
theatre, there is rapport between the emotions of
the audience and the emotions of the players; but
the images of the screen may stir our emotions
just as deeply without this personal relationship.
Conversation on the str.ge directs our minds to
past events, which are pictured by the cut-back in
the film. Thus images on the screen function
similarly to words and speech on the stage. Be-
cause tradition has controlled the architectural
form of our playhouses, spectators in different
sections of the theatre have different lines of vi-
sion those in the front row orchestra, center,
look up at the actors; those in rear orchestra see
them directly in a straight line; those in either the
balcony or gallery look down upon the actors:
and those on either side of the house have sharply
angular lines of vision. However definitely the
stage director may arrange a setting or the action
of a scene, the audience gets the effect from dif-
ferent angles. The motion picture presents
scenes, the dimensions of whose patterns appear
the same to every spectator in the cinema house-
On- the stage even the most imaginative effects
are bound by actuality. Gauze and color light-
ing are combined to suggest both mood and actu-
ality. The motion picture, as in Rex Ingram's
The Four Horsemen to mention only one example.
can ignore actuafity and with devices peculiar to
cinema, depict images, such as horses, chariots and
symbolic figures dashing across the sky and then
advancing towards the spectator.
The stage cannot use inanimate objects to sug-
gest mood, thoughts, character, environment, or
foreshadowing of events, as is possible in the mo-
tion picture. Murnau does it in Sunrise with the
floating bullrushes: Eisenstein gives a most elabo-
rate and concrete example of the possibilities of
meaning in inanimate objects in Ten Days That
Shook The World. The dramatic aspects of the
drawbridge in Ten Days make of that mechanism
a living thing; Kerensky pictured dreaming of
Napoleonic power as he plays with a toy crown
and places it on quarter-shaped crystal perfume
bottles, repetition of the theatrically despotic as-
sumed pose by Kerensky; the swinging gun in
Potemkin; the legs of a carcass of meat in the cel-
lar, suggestive of the petty burgeois butcher's lust
in Stroheim's Wedding March illustrate the sym-
bolic u>e of the inanimate object in cinema.
The stage makes no pretense of showing per-
spective in unlimited space. The motion picture
is limited in this respect only by the horizon line
where situation may be built by the director: dark,
sharp-edged masses in the foreground lend to the
illusion of distance on the horizon.
Pantomine on the stage is limited usually in
that its action suggests movement but not sound.
On the motion picture screen the motion of the
players and objects can suggest any kind of sound,
from human speech to the whirr of machinery.
Alternating scenes are a rarity on the stage. In the
motion picture, they are essential to show the ac-
tual relation of one situation to another, of one
mood to another- On the stage all the action
takes place within the limits of set scenes. De-
spite the efforts of Eugene O'Neill to handle the
setting psychologically as a "stage picture" it is al-
ways fairly defined over a period of time, no mat-
ter how cleverly Robert Edmund Jones may suc-
ceed in disguising the actualities of wood, canvass
and paint. Here is one of the major limitations
of the drama .... it must conform to the condi-
tions of the theatre. It is possible we shall never
see some plays satisfactorily presented until we
have greater architectural variety in our playhouses.
The necessity for such variety has been proved by
the spatial demands of plays like The Hairy Ape.
The Beggar on Horseback, Lazarus Laughed and
Processional.
In the motion picture, action may occur any-
where

on the street, on a mountain top, in the

air, below the sea, on the walls of buildings.

and may be depicted from many angles. Lastly,
the play written for the stage is arranged to har-
monize with the purposes of dialogue in conjunc-
tion with conventional stage movements. The
stage play is built essentially upon speech: at times
it may achieve even literary form. The photo-
play is built in the language of cinematic images,
and these are described in words that compose the
continuity. It has no affinity with dialogue, al-
though American studio practitioners are inc'ined
19
13
I.
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
to use too many explanatory or conversational
sub-titles, instead of terse phraseology indicative
of a mood, a pause, or a time lapse, bound up with
montage. Even so, the scenarist and director who
know montage seek to avoid the sub-title and to
work wholly with images. Curiously enough,
in the current talking pictures, sub-titles are
spoken
.
The stage director deals with actual situations
carried out by players whose "business" he regu-
lates. He works with actual time, in actual
space, from the start to the finish of a produc-
tion. Actual plastic forms, actual time and
actual space are his materials for building up to
the high point in a drama. But in the cinema,
the director works with filmic time, which is not
subject to causality: By means of what he does
with the piecing together and mounting of the
images on the film strip, the director gives the
screen a time all its own. Filmic time is a reality
produced by the film director, just as he creates
its rhythms which have no relation to the actual
rhythms of the stage. "The film", writes Pu-
dowkin, "is a succession of visual images moving
through their own world, their own time, their
own space". The film therefore, is not con-
cerned with the reproduction of actuality as it
appears on the stage or in life, but with the crea-
tion of reality through the meaning which the
director gives the images by his mounting in the
script, on the set, and in the film strip- His
principle tool for forging reality is that of sug-
gestion the selective visual essence of events,
of time, of space.
The basic element of the theatre scene is scenic
totality. The basic element of the film is the
fragment of the totality, scene, or object. This
distinction so long neglected by Hollywood and
Neubabelsberg, was made clear by Fernand Leger,
the French painter, who first called attention to
this violation of cinematic principles by theatre-
minded film practitioners. The strongest,
clearest, deepest impressions on the mind and the
emotions are inherent in the implication given the
fragment by the directorial will. It can suggest
a world of meaning by an ear, a stairway, a stat-
ue's head, or part of a bottle, all depending upon
the film director's skill in montage. The early
phase of the film merely was confined to specula-
tion about its possibilities as to motion. It was
looked upon as a novelty or stunt discovery. Ex-
periments were limited at first to taking images on
the film strip of ordinary scenes or objects, in city.
on sea, and in country lanes. Later recruits from
the stage began to experiment with the film. Such
scenes as were taken by them were in the stage
manner and were merely photographs of player:;
going through stage business, illustrated by many
long titles that robbed the images of any pos-
sible significance- The director, u
r
v.ally from the
theatre, indicated the two points between the ac-
tion, the entrance and the exit as in the theatre,
taking scenes in their totality, just as they might
have appeared on the stage. This application of
directorial theatre technique to the cinema, plus
the influence of players, who for the most part
were from the stage and the destructive factory
methods of Hollywood, played havoc with the
development of the medium of the motion picture.
Scenes were mounted in progression in the film-
strip the same as in a theatre, instead of being
broken down analytically to build definite visual
ideas.
In The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance were
first revealed the self-contained elements of the mo-
tion picture independent of the stage. Griffith
showed that the cinema could soar beyond the
architectural barriers of the theatre, that greater
emotional significance could be given objects when
they were viewed from every possible angle. In-
stead of using the totality of the theatre scene,
Griffith broke the scene into fragments of vis,ual
suggestion. He made the camera flexible. He
used the visual impression of the moment, of the
fragment, as means with which to interpret deep-
ly and dynamically character and situation. The
fragment, the dominant important visual element
of the film bears no relation to the actuality of .
nature or of the theatre. The theatre imparts''
meaning through the totality of all its forms, the
film transmits meaning through the fragment of
the totality ... .of a crowd, a man, a street, a bil-
liard table, a hand, things seen with the shifting
glance of the eye. In the theatre, the spectator
must organize his attention. In the cinema, the
director must assume the task of organizing the
attention of the spectator in the montage.
In this brief exposition of the difference be-
tween the stage and cinema, we have sought to con-
sidcr the fundamental distinctions between the two
in the matter of medium and of mechanics. With
forms so thoroughly self-contained, wherever
imitation is attempted, the result is never satisfy-
ing. The theatre can no more be cinema than
the cinema can be theatre. Each form has its
own esthetic laws and special methods of produc-
tion; each develops its own practices, and imita-
tion of one by the other reduces such production
to a mechanical process that is neither cinema or
theatre. The motion picture of tomorrow, of
which the triumphant Soviet films are prophetic,
will be guided by image-minded poets, artists and
philosophers., and will convey meaning only
through images freed from the intrusion of the
theatre and all other non-cinematic elements.
\
T
ote
:
Consideration here of the differences
in the technique of the theatre and
of the motion picture excludes the
audible film because the latter is
neither cinema nor theatre
20
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
From GEORGE MELSES to S. M. E1SENSTE1H
by LEON MOUSSINAC
Translated by Vivian Chideckcl
THROUGH
mere coincidence the films of
George Melics, produced from 1902 to 1912,
and the last work* of S. M. Eiscnstein and
Alexandroff. Soviet directors^ were projected in
Paris during the same week. There was thus af-
forded an opportunity to suggest a point not yet
brought out concerning these films representing in
some manner two poles of the silent cinema,
(since it is necessary to contemplate henceforth the
contribution of the "Talkmg" and the "Sonorous"
before color and relief, moreover near at hand).
and expressing the sense and character of the re-
searches of yesterday and today.
George Melics was, by first profession, a prcs-
tigitator. In adopting the camera he remained a
magician. His imagination and technique led him
to play with images, using all the resource of
magic that for the most part he had devised, just
as he had loved to juggle, striving to amuse, in the
dark room of the Dufaycl, children temporarily
abandoned by parents in quest of bargains. But
it happens that these films have kept enough power
and fantasy to interest us today in our turn.
Ridicule and charm go neighboring there with the
movement and ingenuity which, without doubt,
inspired the American Mack Sennett, creator of
flickering comedies, in an epoch when the French
film represented seventy-five percnt of the cinema-
tographic production of the world. The clever-
ness of Melies is extraordinary, though the literary
surrealism attains nothing in Le voyage dans la
(u,ne, Les quatre cents coups du diable and A la
conquete du pole. And without doubt, if Melies
had not taken chances in the drama (Le Juif errent
gives us a foretaste) his films would have been
worth no more than I'Assassinat du due de Guise,
"superproductions" of the same period that certain
houses of the vanguard were pleased to project
these last years for the great amusement of the
public.
George Melies represents exactly the cinema-
tographic pre-war comedy with a spirit in some
way primitive, which makes his work worthy of
the exhibiting which it will gain henceforth. And
one can say that I.es quatre cents coups du diable
is a well executed film in that these diverse parts
exactly answer to their object. To discuss the
quality of the object is another question, but one
cannot fail to acknowledge in this film all its
historic, its creative value. George Melies will
remain the precursor.
Since these heroic times, the photoplay, through
a thousand adventures without glory, and some
flashing manifestations, has in vain sought a
balance. It is that economic necessities keep it in
an exclusive state of dependency, and that by way
of expression it carries to its maximum this contra-
diction of modern societies which opposes art to
industry. The placing to a technical point, of the
synchronization of sound and image has not been
done for disinterested objectives, but only for the
temporary salvage of a capitalist organization which
had come to be saturated with sentimental stupid-
ity, with romantic or polished banality, and the
weak percentage of a public that had through the
world stuck to a taste for adventure and a certain
need of spiritual evasion, without its being a ques-
tion besides, of appreciating here the quality of this
taste nor the degree of this need.
With La Ligne generate one touches to the quick,
finally, gravest problems rising by the very inten-
tion of the photoplay inasmuch as it strives to a
new mode of expression. This film, powerful,
pathetic, of a poetic intensity sometimes over-
whelming, astonishingly creating life, attacks in
front a social problem: the industrialization of the
peasants, the collectivization of the soil of the
USSR, a problem and program the more so
charged with humanity that to their solution, to
their success, is tragically bound, for a time, the
destiny of a revolution theme: the poor village,
and three elements of dramatic progression, name-
ly the female milk skimmer, a reproductive bu'l,
an agricultural tractor. The whole film is at-
tended with freedom, vigorously developed im-
ages radiant with a force of expression, with a
lyricism, a truth, not to be forgotten. Here, as
with George Melies
if one dares this compari-
son the film answers exactly to its object, only
this object is quite on another scale. It is no more
a question of amusing and making one dream like
children, but of exalting life, of carrying away
with itself millions of men, of running routines,
of abolishing prejudices, of gaining the adhesion
of a nation of peasants still uneducated to a social
system which constructs a new order on the ruins
of individual property. Ambition, one sees, is
moving. It remains that the significance, from an
aesthetic point of view, of a film like La Ligne
generate surpasses that of the highest work that
the cinematographic has given us since its origin,
and that the Soviet cinema has offered us with
The Mother, the Armored Cruiser Potemkin and
The End of St. Petersburg. It is a quesion of
nothing less than binding intimately, thanks to
th& photoplay, the world of sensibility and the
world of ideas, sentiment and reason, science ard
21
k
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
art. This intimate connection, Jean Epstein, be-
fore being director, bad already alluded to in his
Lyrosophie. but without any cinematographic
solution, and one would find without doubt in
the philosophy of Maine de Biran, the premises
of such theoretical researches. But S. M. Eisen-
stein, is the first to discover in the photoplay the
practical means of realizing the imposing fusion.
Here is how he recently explained himself in an
article, VAvenir du cinema.*'*
"
. . . Where then is there a difference between the
perfect method of a symphony and the method per-
fected in view of the acquisition of new knowledge?
It is necessary th.:t the new art put an end to the dual-
ism of these two spheres that are sentiment and reason.
It is necessary to render to science its sensuality and
to its intellectual process fire and passion.
"It is necessary to plunge into the fire boil-
ing with practical activity the process of abstract
thought. It is necessary that collected and speculative
formula be attached anew to the richness and opulence
of the living and palpable form. The formal will
must acquire the exactitude of ideologic formulas.
"There is the exigency that we create, there
are the exigencies that we propose to the new epoch of
art. What form of art is their match' Uniquely and
only, the cinematography of the intellect, synthesis of
the film of emotion, of the documentary film and the
absolute film."
S. M. Eisenstein insists:
"
. . . onlv a cinema capable of directly uniting
dialectic conflicts in the growing of ideas possesses the
possibility of penetrating the mind of the great masses
of ideas and new perceptions. Such a cinema, alone.
will dominate by the form, the summits of modern in-
dustrial technique. Finally, alone, such a cinema will
have the right to exist among the miracles of radio,
television and the theory of relativity.
"The old type of original cinema, as the
type of abstract film, will disappear before the new
concrete film of the intellect."
There is the question of the progresses of the
cinema we mean of its destinies
placed with
force at the same hour when it seems that the in-
ternational photoplay has reached an abrupt turn
in its history. It is that it's a matter of saving a
mode of expression of adventures, and that one in
the name of the mind, and not one of the most
powerful industrial and commercial organizations
of the world in the name of money.
From the simple play of images of George Mclies
to the passionate work of Eisenstein one can meas-
ure with emotion a decisive stage entirely marked
by these agitations of the world which will ac-
company for a long time yet, the birth of the
cinema.
"Old and New"
*
-Monde. November 16, 1929.
aris
L I
C'C
INCE the advent of the talkies, or more exactly,
since little more than a year (and before we
question the value of the talkies) we who live
in France and love American films are conscious of
being poor parents of the Cinema. We read reports
of the talking films that we shall never see, and while
you work fervently in America on the construction
of a new cinematographic expression, we aesthetes
and other cumbersome personages discuss the value
or the non-value of the talkies.
But I am forgetting talking films have been
produced in Europe but these are neither of the cin-
ema nor of the theatre, or perhaps more Jghtly they
have taken from these two forms only what it less in-
teresting- In general up to now they have had only
very bad photographic theatre such as the
"3
masques" or that other abominable film of a man
in whom we were wrong to have confidence, name-
ly: E. A. Dupont, and his film "Atlantic".
It is true wc also had Walter Ruttman's "Melody
of the World". Ruttman is a remarkable mind in
the European cinema, and if theory, perhaps, has too
much place in his cinematographic life, you can ex-
pect from him very beautiful films. "Melody bf
the World" is not correctly speaking a talkie. It' is
a document compiled for the most part of extreme
actuality, but of which he has made the setting in a
very obvious way, to which he has known how to
add noises or music which astonishingly reinforce the
significance of the images. Ruttman is a musician
and that is felt. The setting is not only, as in many
Russian films made to dazzle, but a means employed
soberly to lead us to a necessary crescendo, or to the
comprehension of his work, of his thought. He has
not really created a talking film, but he gives us the
assurance that he knows exactly how to make use of
image and sound, in a manner so agreeably intelligent
that we are permitted to expect much from his next
films.
The others still use sound as a toy. We are still
in the heroic epic where we admire the perfect coin-
cidence of the movement of the lips and the sound
that comes forth. I would never have suspected that
Europe was so young, pardon, I mean infantile.
What we admitted to be the vanguard is distinctly
dying in the interval. The talkie had killed it. Wc
knew already some time ago that the vanguard which
promised so much and held nothing was engaged in
a dangerous impasse from which one cculd sec no
issue. But the slowness of mind of certain people
is really terrifying. To use a camera: to seek for
angles; to discover extraordinary planes is not
enough. I claim that any camera enthusiast can ob-
tain today this result: to show a succession of images
interesting in themselves but insignificant. The
talkie today again substantiates one idea: one does
not make a film for images, but because one has some-
thing to express. The talkie has proved to us tlx
impossibility of continuing in the way of the van-
guard of yesterday. A dialogue which says nothing,
which expresses no idea is more blantantly stupid
than a succession of inexpressive images-
Tomorrow's vanguard will no longer busy itself
in telling us anything with common images. It
will, on the contrary, tell us much, it will tell us
important things with the simplicity that sincerity
demands-
Jean Lenaucc
29
v^^---
PROPOSED CONTINUITY FOR THE ENDING OP
"ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT."
by WERNER KLINGLER
(Copyright 1930 by WERNER KLINGLER)
"This proposed ending to "All Quiet On The Western Front" was submitted to ft considered by Univer-
sal Pictures Corp. but was finally not accepted.
PICTURE IDEOLOGICAL SPECIFICATION SOUND
Sound of firing
machine-gun.
After Katzinsky's death
LONGSHOT of Paul from behind,
staggering out into the open field
towards the French lines.
MEDIUM CLOSEUP of a French
machine-gun and crew-
LONGSHOT of Paul, walking to-
wards the camera.
CLOSEL
T
P of the French machine-gun,
firing.
All shots mirror lightninglike the
theme of the book and are balanced
up in such a manner, that in their
retrospective montage of contrast-
ing image-values they lead up to
the apotheosis, passing an impres
sive judgment on the horrors of
war.
MEDIUMSHOT of Paul, as he pauses
hit by a bullet, slowly sinking down.
CLOSE UP of Paul's face falling
from the upper picture frame towards
the lower one.
CLOSEUP of Paul's EYES.
He sees, in a vision of quick-charg-
ing images, becoming more aid
more rapid, the following pictures,
(Montage of cutting.)
The action of Paul's vision occurs
between the first and last part of
his fall to the ground.
*
(In this visionary action there are
shown only shots which have d-
ready occured in the film, except
four semiotic images indicated
an asterik.)
23
;
**
-
K
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
SOUND PICTURE IDEOLOGICAL SPECIFICATION
Machine-gun keeps firing
incessantly, but with in-
tervals between.
FADE IN DOUBLE EXPOSURE
CLOSE UP OF Paul's mother-
Voice of. teacher Kantorek:
'PAUL BAUMER, AND
I WONDER WHAT
YOU ARE GOING TO
DO?"
A part of that sentence has already
been heard in the mother-closeup,
and extends to >
\
i
Voice of Paul:
GO!"
"I'LL
QUICK LAP DISSOLVE TO
CLOSEUP of teacher Kantorek in the
schoolroom.
CUT TO CLOSEUP of the student,
Paul Baumer, in the schoolroom, rising
with reckless enthusiasm.
Double-print: firing
French machine-gun and
voice of Kantorek: "YOU
ARE THE LIFE OF
THE FATHERLAND,
YOU BOYS."
FADE OUT DOUBLE EXPOSURE
of Paul's eyes. Paul's close up remains
in the picture.
CUT TO CLOSEUP DOUBLE EX-
POSURE of Iron Cross* coming to-
wards the camera until it fills out the
whole screen.
QUICK LAP DISSOLVE OUT
FROM IRON CROSS INTO rain of
silvercoins.*
LAP DISSOLVE TO CLOSEUP of
Christ on Cross* in a cemetery, taken
from below.
DIRECT CUT OUT DOUBLE EX-
POSURE of Paul. Christ remains in
the picture.
The coins should be generic, but
not the particular coins of any one
nation. The glittering quality
should be emphasized pTiotograph-
ically.
24
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
SOUND PICTURE IDEOLOGICAL SPECIFICATION
Voice of Kantorek:
."SWEET and FITTING
IT IS TO DIE FOR THE
FATHERLAND." This
sentence spoken by Kan-
torek covers all the scenes
up to Medium closcup of
soldier Behm- The ex-
plosion of the shells and
the yelling of Behm start
in with the last words of
Kantorek.
Voice of Kemmerich: "Mc
TOO!" From far away,
the roar of cannon and the
tatata of machine-guns.
Voice of Albert:
"COUNT ON ME!"
Voice of Kantorek: "ARE
YOU MOTHERS SO
WEAK THAT YOU
CANNOT SEND YOUR
SONS T O DEFEND
THE LAND WHICH
GAVE THEM BIRTH?"
CLOSEUP OF BEHM as a student in
schoolroom, shaking his head denying-
!y-
.
DIRECT CUT OUT DOUBLE EX-
POSURE of Christ. Behm's closcup
remains in the picture. Behm, still
shaking his head ....
CUT TO MEDIUM CLOSEUP of
BEHM AS A SOLDIER. (Night shot).
Behm is hurled down on the battlefield
by an exploding shell. He jumps to
his feet, blinded, and runs in circles, his
hands to his eyes-
CUT TO CLOSEUP OF KEMME-
RICH (as a student) in schoolroom.
CUT TO CLOSEUP OF KEMME-
RICH AS A SOLDIER, dying in hos-
pital-bed.
CUT TO CLOSEUP 01- ALBERT
as a student in schoolroom.
CUT TO CLOSEUP OF ALBERT
AS A SOLDIER, getting wounded
during an infantry attack.
25
r
rB
^^^
EXPERIMENTAL
CINEMA
SOUND
PICTURE
IDEOLOGICAL SPECIFICATION
This sentence spoken by
Kantorek i s sustained
throughout the quick
montage-cuts and vanish-
es only at that shot when
Paul finishes his fall to the
ground.
tatata sound of the firing
machine-gun
now very
loud.
CUT TO CLOSEUP of KANTOREK
in schoolroom.
CUT TO CLOSEUP OF dead French-
man.
CUT TO CLOSEUP OF Paul's
mother.
CUT TO LONG SHOT OF common
grave* with many crosses.
CUT TO A QUICK SERIES OF
BLACK AND WHITE FRAMES
flashed in visual synchronization to
the
OVER THE BLACK AND WHITE
FRAMES FADE IN DOUBLE EX-
POSURE CLOSE UP OF Paul as he
finishes his fall to the ground. (Shot
from above)
QUICK FADEOUT DOUBLE EX-
POSURE OF black and white frames.
PAUL'S CLOSE UP REMAINS.
There is a smile of peace and calm on
his face.
(The arrangement of these last three
shots represents a nctc type of montage-
form.)
20
The volume of Kantorck's voice,
in the beginning very strong, slows
down gradually during these
scenes, and as Paul falls to the
ground, it seems to come from be-
yond.
'
Thus demonstrating
the
spatial and temporal depth of the
vision and the ascendancy
of un-
consciousness.
The diminution of the volume of
Kantorck's voice coincides
with the
shortening of the tempo of the pic-
ture-frames.
^
I
Ml
ffe
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
50UND
PICTURE
IDEOLOGICAL SPECIFICATION
The now highly magni-
fied tatatatatata of the
machine-gun slowly d i :>-
solves
into
the sound of a wireless
telegraph.
--.... - - . . .
Sound of telegraph lingers
on.
'REPOR
'ALL"..
"
QUIET ON
THE WESTERN
FRONT",
SLOW FADE OUT OF Paul's face.
After Paul's face has faded from the
screen, a series of black and white frames
are flashed, visualizing the
--....---
...--... of the telegraph.
FADE IN CLOSEUP OF a hand, hold-
ing the receiver of a German field-phone
to ea^ (Objectification close-up)
CUT TO CLOSEUP OF a Mouth,
forming the words:
CUT TO CLOSEUP OF the mouth-
piece of a phone- Camera traveling fast
towards it, "creeping" into it. When
the mouthpiece occupies the full screen,
FADE OUT of picture
and dark-
ness remains while the las.: words:
are not only heard from the screen,
but at one and the same time from
several loudspeakers, installed in
different places about the theatre
(some above, some on the sides,
some on the floor, lobby)
.
By such an arrangement, the spec-
tators will directly share all ex-
perienced emotions, and the words:
"ALL QUIET ON THE WES-
TERN FRONT" will echo as a
psychological sensation, like a My-
thos, stirring up the unconscious
mind.
Note:
This sound-montage idea may be
used also for any scenes in which
the spectator is made to experience
the physical and psychological sen-
sation of the players. As, for in-
stance, players heavily involved in
battle-scenes (cannon thunder, ex-
plosion of grenades, machine-guns,
etc.), air-battles (roar of motors,
machine-guns, tail-spinning planes,
etc.)*
'All montage-ideas, special sound-effects, etc. of the above continuity arc fully protected by copyright of Werner K! ngler.
27
HB w^m
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,
-
M.:^'
v
1
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i*6Z*
*''
trf*
*.vfes
^*<jrC--
:>'
7
"PASSION OF
JOAN OF ARC"
J
CARL DREY-R
s
,f
THE FILM SPECTATOR
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1629 CHESTNUT STREET PHILADELPHIA. PA., U.'S. A.
XPERIMENTAL
~IO. 3
25c
N MA
From TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD EISENSTEIN
CONTENTS
EISENSTEIN
Lewis Jacobs
THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE S. M. Eisenstein
THE PROBLEM OF THE NEW FILM LANGUAGE V. Turin
STATEMENT Edward Weston
SCENARIO AND DIRECTION V. I. Pudovkin
ONE HOUR WITH G. SELDES David Plati
TURKSIB AND THE SOVIET FACT ]. Lengyel
HOLLYWOOD BULLETIN
ON A THEORY OF "SOURCES" Samuel Brody
VIDOR AND EVASION B. G. Braver-Mann
PRINCIPLES OF NEW WORLD-CINEMA Seymour Stern
POSITION OF THE SOVIET CINEMA Leon Moussinac
SERGEI
M. EISENSTEIN, GREGOR V. ALEXANDROV and
EDUARD TISSE need no introduction in Experimental
Cinema. The list of their films to date is as follows:
WORKERS, STRIKE! . . . Directed by Eisenstein, pho-
tographed by Tisse. Not released in U. S. A.
ARMORED CRUISER PRINCE POTEMKIN . . . Di
rected by Eisenstein, photographed by Tisse. Scenario
by Eisenstein and Alexandrov. Alexandrov played the
part of a Czarist captain on board the "Potemkin."
TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD ... Di-
rected by Eisenstein and Alexandrov. Photographed by
Tisse. Scenario and montage by Eisenstein and Alex-
androv.
OLD AND NEW (THE GENERAL LINE) ... Di-
rected by Eisenstein and Alexandrov. Photographed by
Tisse. Scenario and montage by Eisenstein and Alex-
androv.
ROMANCE SFNTIMENTALE ... A two-reel experi-
ment in sound, made in Paris in the summer of 1930
by Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Tisse.
At present they are making a film in Mexico. (See the "HOL-
LYWOOD BULLETIN" in this issue.) The June, 1930, issue of
Experimental Cinema contained an interesting article on Eisen-
stein's activities as a teacher in the Moscow Cinematographic
University and also on his research into the Japanese "Kabuki"
Theatre, on which The Cinematographic Principle and Japanese
Culture is based.
rSEVOLOD I PUDOVKIN also requires no introductj
'
The list of the films he has made i.i USSR is as folio?)
THE CHESS PLAYER ... a two-reel experimenj
analytical and cross-cutting montage, made five years V
Not released in U. S. A.
MECHANICS OF THE BRAIN ... a laboratory
J
made by Pudovkin in conjunction with Prof. Pavlo'
the Psycho-Neurological Brain Institute in Leningi
Studies in the activities of the "conditioned reflex."
important film-document has had "educational" (but>l
popular) release in this country.
MOTHER ... The powerful film of the 190? stnkesU
revolution based on Gorki's novel of the same n;
Banned in the U. S. A.
THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG . . . Produced.!
Mezhrabpom for the tenth anniversary of the Bolsh
Revolution. Released in U. S. A. very much abrid'
The original was three hours long.
STORM OVER ASIA . . . Pudovkin's masterpiece. 1
ish imperialism in Asia and the Mongolian upri
Partial release in U. S. A.
He has joist completed a film, "LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL."']
Victor Turin is the Soviet director of "TURK-SIB."
All Soviet stills courtesy Amkino Corporation.
Experimental Cinema is edited by David Piatt, Lewis Jacobs.Seymour
Stern. Contributing editors. Richard Aldr.ch,
P Attasheva, Bela Belazs, B. Braver-Mann, Samuel Brody, Chr.stel Gang,
J.
Lengyel, L. Moussinac, Edward Weston
J
Published at 302 East 59th St., New York City. Hollywood office, 1803 Vista del Mar, California. Subscription $2.00
for 12 issues. $2.50 foreign. Single copies 25 cents. Vol. 1,
No. 3.
Copyrighted 1931.
STATEMENT
THIS,
the third issue of EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA, makes its appearance after six months of
ceaseless effort to raise funds for its publication. After half a year of financial and other
difficulties, we are finally enabled to appear with an intensification and a clarification of policy
which will bring EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA into close relationship with the labor move-
ment in America.
The widespread interest that has manifested itself in our two earlier attempts to release the film for
intelligent contact in America, encourages us to hope that with this issue, which makes clear the proletarian
basis of our organ, EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA will succeed in establishing the ideological and organ-
izational foundations of an American working-class cinema. This is particularly desirable at a time when
the current Hollywood movie boasts a banality and a stupidity that seems to wax greater in proportion to
the growth in the unsettlement and distress of American life. Two organizations, independent in operation
but united in purpose, have already been formed for this task, although much remains to be done in each
case to complete the basic direction and activity. These two groups are: THE WORKERS FILM AND
PHOTO LEAGUE OF AMERICA and THE AMERICAN PROLET-KINO. These are the first two film-
producing units of the American working-class.
It is clear to the editors of EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA that Hollywood, while it is an almost inex-
haustible source of stupefying "entertainment," is also at the same time the tool of American im-
perialist political policy, which it serves so faithfully and so supinely through the medium of war films,
anti-USSR films, news reels, etc. The United States with its appalling rate of illiteracy is fertile soil for
so direct an instrument as the film. The talkie, by eliminating the printed caption, has overcome the last
barrier necessary to make the cinema the most simple, the most powerful and the most popular political
weapon in existence today.
American imperialism has not been slow in recognizing this. It is wielding this dangerous sword in a
most conscious way. There is a bill pending in Congress at the present time calling for the transformation
of the movie industry into a public utility under federal control. The United States Government openly
cooperates in the production of films glorifying the achievements of American marines in crushing latin-
american uprisings. The film, "Flight," was an open attack on Sandino and the Nicaraguan struggle for
national freedom from American imperialist domination. Such bluntly jingoistic, flag-waving films as
"Wings," "The Mighty," "Tell It To The Marines," "The Patent Leather Kid," etc., etc., are only a be-
ginning.
Thus, the need to develop active film-machinery in the working-class to counteract this nefarious and
growing activity, maliciously organized to prepare the American masses for martial suicide in the next
war to end warbecomes doubly, immeasurably urgent.
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA in future issues will expose in its pages the growth of practices such as
those stated above, as well as the source of this capitalist propaganda in the film-industry, where a boycott
is now in force on all films and news reels that reveal any evidences of the class struggle.
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA will also endeavor in the future, as an inalienable part of the workers'film-
movement, to cooperate in the production of films of a nature which will serve to give cohesion to the
movement among the masses of movie-goers and which will also serve to counteract amongst these masses
the stupefying opiate of the Hollywood product.
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA, in conclusion will reveal to students of the film, through important
articles, essays, photographs, stills, etc., the means and methods whereby films of the life of the Amer-
ican workers will be adequately produced and presented for working-class audiences.
SUPPORT OF EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA MEANS SUPPORT OF THE FIRST WORKERS'
FILM GROUP IN AMERICA!
Photo by
BRETT
WESTON
EISENSTEIN
IN
America, the film, the one absolute and vital cultural
force of our time, is completely imbedded in the ideas
and doctrines of a reactionary class. The bourgeois cur-
rents behind the puerilities of the film are dead to any
promise of unfoldment within the lens. Only the ethos of
the class-struggle contains any hope for a new transforma-
tion of the film in America.
On the other hand, the development of the cinema in
Russia is organically related to the new social forces
and economic implications of the era. These force:
manifest themselves stirringly in the Soviet film. Directors
there define the revolutionary working class reality and
ideology.
Functioning as one of the leaders of this new spirit is
Eisenstein, director of "Strike", Potemkin", "Ten Days
That Shook The World''', and "Old and New". Eisenstein
in concentrated images expresses cinematically the social
forces released by the proletarian revolution. Impelled by
this upheaval, he has evolved autonomous laws of cinematic
form sharply related to the needs of the Russian masses.
The film has been transformed thru his "tonal" and "over-
tonal" montage from a bourgeois opiate into an intense
experience in which the spectator becomes a participant m
a new and orphic conception.
The creator of cinematic prose-rhythm, Eisenstein, em-
ploys a style which enables him to pack and combine
multiple perceptions, implications and meanings into
each of his images; assigning to each their manifold con-
tent, their angle, their tone, their precise action and move'
ment, their rhythm and exact function so that there will
be no discrepancy between his attitude and the projected
film. Furthermore, he proportions each quality of image:
p
Ai
n
pit
A.
Cii
hie!
its context, its tempo, its duration, its interval and positior
its "overtone" and its plastic and social purpose in th
cinematic plan: Montagethe plastic means toward pre
found effects and the nucleus of every subsequent fill
intelligence.
The images of Eisenstein are never "photographic" an
never merely decorative, but because of their cadre an
rhythmic action, their "collisions and conjunctions," the:
transitions and conflictstheir essential Tightness, they ir
feet and charge the mind and emotions of the spectatc
and instil anticipatory reverberations, both organic an
significant, for their response.
It is from this condition that they function: the fin s
image and its qualities prepares for the second, which meet ;
the expectation roused by the rising modulation and in
pulse, and the third is a challenge and collision,a r<
sponse differing from its cinematic associates in a visu:
way, but yet conforming in an organic precision. A strui
ture is created which introduces a number of impulses an
counterpoints whose reconciliation is the activity of tr
montage groups and their momentum: a structure whic
piles up emotional effect by junction and multiplicatioi
cumulation and conflict. Any effort to cut or substitu
for an image in a sequence, or to speed or slow an imafl
or sequence, or to juxtapose an arrangement, will indica
how organic the whole is and at once injure the esthet
value of the total. Here is a mighty style and a form th.
evolves and corresponds with the complexity and precisic
of the triumphant proletariat, the first to dominate tfl
films' organic problem and the most able to satura;
its structure with the program of the revolutionary soci
substance.
LEWIS JACOB
THE CINEMATOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE
AND
JAPANESE CULTURE
WITH A DIGRESSION ON MONTAGE AND THE SHOT
by S. M. EISENSTEIN
T is a weird and wonderful feat to have written a pamph-
let on something that in reality does not exist.
There is not, for example, any such thing as a cinema
without cinematography.
And yet the author of the pamphlet in which this essay
irst appeared
1
has contrived to write a hook about the
inema of a country that has no cinematography. About
he cinema of a country that has, in its culture, an infinite
lumber of cinematographic traits strewn everywhere with
he sole exception ofits cinema.
This essay is on the cinematographic traits of Japanese
ulture, lying outside the Japanese cinema, and is itself as
part from the pamphlet as these traits are apart from the
apancse cinema.
A cinema is: so many companies, such and such turn-
)vers of capital, such and such stars, such and such films.
Cinematography isfirst and foremost: montage.
The Japanese cinema is excellently equipped with com-
janies, actors, subjects.
But the Japanese cinema is a complete stranger to mon-
age.
And yet the principle of montage can be identified as
he basic element of Japanese representational culture.
Writing.
For writing is primarily representational.
The hieroglyph.
The naturalistic image of an object as portrayed by
he skilful hand of Tzanki 2650 years before our era be-
omes slightly formalised and, with its 539 fellows, forms
ie first 'contingent
1
of hieroglyphs.
Scratched out with an awl on bamboo, the plastic por-
rait of an object still in every respect resembles its orig'
nal.
But then, by the end of the Illrd Century, the brush is
rrvented.
In the 1st Century after that happy event (A. D.)

igper.
And, lastly, in the year 220Indian ink.
A complete upheaval. A revolution in draughtsmanship.
Vnd, after having suffered in the course of history no
jj
ewer than 14 different styles of handwriting, the hier-
glyph crystallises in its present form.
The means of production (brush and Indian ink) have
etermined the form.
The 14 reforms have had their way. As result.
In the fierily cavorting hieroglyph "ma" (a horse) it
: already impossible to recognise the features of the dear
^
ttle horse, pathetically sagging in its hind-quarters, of the
writing style of Tzanki, ,so well-known from ancient
Jhinese sculpture.
vis
q
es
i
w
catii
iStltl
itti
ml
ecis
ite
M
50
But let it rest in the Lord, this dear little horse, to-
gether with the other 607 remaining "sianchin" ciphers

the first depictive category of hieroglyphs.

The real interest begins with the second category of
hieroglypsthe "choy-ee," i.e. 'copulative'.
The point is that the copulation

perhaps we had bet-

ter say, the combinationof two hieroglyphs of the sim-
plest series is to be considered not as their sum but as their
product, i.e., as a unit of another dimension, another pow-
er: each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact,
but their combination corresponds to a concept. By the
combination of two 'depictables'' is achieved the represen-
tation of something graphically undepictable.
For example: the picture for water and the picture of
an eye means

'to weep';
The picture of an ear near a drawing of a door

'to
listen';
a dog and a mouth

'to bark';
a mouth and a child

'to clamour';
a mouth and a bird

'to sing';
a knife and a heart

'sorrow', and so forth.

But this is

pure montage!
Yes. Exactly what we are doing in the cinema, com-
bining the as far as possible mono-significant, individually
neutral (from the content point of view), depictive shots,
into intelligible contexts and series.
A means and method inevitable in any cinematographic
representation. And, in its condensed and purified form
the starting point for the ideological cinema.
For a cinema seeking a maximum laconism for the visual
representation of abstract concepts.
As the pioneer among these paths we hail the method
of the late lamented (long lamented) Tzanki.
We have spoken of laconism. Laconism affords us a
transition to a further point. Japan possesses the most
laconic form of poetry. The "khai-kai" (which appeared
at the beginning of the Xllth Century) and the "tanka".
Both are almost hieroglyphs transposed into phraseology.
Even so much so that half their value is appraised by the
calligraphic quality of their draughtsmanship. Their meth-
od of construction is completely analogous.
This method, which in hieroglyphics provides a means of
laconic determination of an abstract concept, gives rise
when transposed into literary representation to an identi-
cal laconism of pointed imagery.
The method applied with concentration to the ascetic
combination of ciphers strikes from their conflict a dry defi-
niteness of the concepts determined.
The self-same method expanded into the luxury of a
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
group of already formed verbal combinations, swells into
a splendour of image effect.
The concepta bare formula; its adornment, expansion
by additional material, transforms it into an imagea fin-
ished form.
Exactly, though in reverse, as the primitive mode of
thinkingimage thinking, concentrating to a definite de-
gree, became transformed to conceptual thinking.
But let us turn to examples:
The "khai-kai" is a concentrated impressionistic sketch:
"In the hearth
Two shining dots:
A cat is sitting.'''
(Cheo-Dai)
or:
or:
"An ancient monastery,
The cold moon.
A wolf is howling.
"
(Hik-ko)
"All is quiet in the field.
A butterfly is flying.
The butterfly has gone to sleep."
(Go-Sin)
The "tanka" is slightly longer (by a pair of lines).
"A slowly walking
Mountain pheasant; its tail
Trails behind.
Oh, night without end,
Alone can I endure it!"
(Khitomaro)
From our point of viewthese are montage phrases. A
montage plan.
The simple combination of two or three details of a
material scries yielded a perfectly rounded-off representa-
tion of another order

psychological.
And, if the finely ground edges of the intellectual deter-
mination of the concepts formed by combination of hiero-
glyphs are here blurred, yet, in emotionalism, the concepts
have blossomed forth immeasurably.
Of Japanese writing it is uncertain.
Whether its aspects as a character system (the determin-
istic), or as an independent creation of graphics, (the de-
pictive) predominates. . . .
In any case, born of the duomonistic mating of the depict-
ive by method and deterministic by purpose, the method
of hieroglyph continued both its lines. (Continuednot
historicallyconsecutively, but consecutively in principle, in
the minds of those developing the method)
.
Not only did its deterministic lines continue into litera-
ture, in the "tanka," as we have shown.
But exactly the same method (in depictive aspect) oper-
ates also in the most perfect examples of Japanese pictorial
art.
Sharaku. The creator of the finest engravings of the
XVIIIth Century. Of an especially immortal gallery of por-
traits of actors. The Daumier of Japan. The Daumier
whom Balzachimself the Bonaparte of literaturein his
turn named "the Michael-Angelo of caricature."
And, in spite of all this, almost unknown to us.
The characteri; tic features of his work are noted by
Julius Kurth. Discussing the question of the influence of
sculpture on Sharaku, he draws a parallel between a por-
trait of the actor Nakayama Tomisabro and an antique
mask from the semi-religious No theatrethe mask Rozo
(an old bronze).
".
. . there is the same cast of countenance in the mask,
aho created in the days of Sharaku, and in the portrait oi
Tomisabro. The features of the face and the distribution
of the mass are very similar, though the mask represent!
an old man, and the engraving a young woman (Tomisa
bro in a female part). The likeness strikes the eye, and yet
there is nothing in common between the two. But it is jus
here that we discover the most characteristic trait of Shara
ku: whereas the mask is carved from wood in almost cor
rcct anatomical proportions, the proportions of the face
in the engravingare simply impossible. The distance
between the eyes is so enormous as to be a mockery of all
sound sense. The nose in comparison with the eyes is at
least twice as long as any normal nose can afford to be, thj
chin in relation to the mouth is out of all proportion; the
eyebrows, the mouth, in general every detail considered
in relation to the others, is entirely unthinkable. The sand
may be observed in the faces of all the big heads of Shara-
ku. The possibility that the great master did not realia
the erroneous relationship of the sizes is quite out of thf
Question. He rejected naturalism quite consciously, ani
while every detail separately regarded is constructed oi
the principle of the most concentrated naturalism, thei:
combination in the general composition is subordinatec
solely to the problem of content. He took as his norma
proportions the quintessence of psychological expressive
ness. . .
"
(Julius Kurth. "Sharaku", pp. 79,80,81. R. Piper, Munich)
Is this not the same as does the hieroglyph, combinin
the independent 'mouth' and the unrelated 'child' to forr
the content expression 'clamour'?
And is this not exactly what we of the cinema do i
time, just as he in simultaneity, when we cause a moi
strous disproportion of the elements of a normally flowi:
event, dismembering it suddenly into 'gripping hanc
large', 'medium shots of struggle' and 'bulging eyes, fil
ing screen' in making the 'montage' disintegration of a
event into shots? In making an eye twice as large as
man's full height? Bv the combination of these monstroi
incongruities we gather up the disintegrated event on<
more into one whole, but in our aspect. According to oi
treatment in relation to the event.
The disproportionate depiction of an event is organica
ly characteristic in us from our very beginning. A.
Luria, of the Psychological Institute in Moscow, has show
me a drawing by a child on the theme 'lighting a stove
Everything is depicted in passably accurate relationsh,
and with great care. The firewood. The stove. The chir
ney. But in the central space of the room is a huge re
tangle streaked with zigzags. What are these zigzag
They turn out to bethe matches. Taking into accou
the crucial importance of these very matches for the pr
cess depicted, the child allots them a scale according
their due.
The representation of objects in the actual (absoluti
proportions proper to them is, of course, only a tribi
to orthodox formal logic.
A subordination to the conception of an unalterable <
der of things.
Both in painting and in sculpture there is a periodic a: t
unceasing return to periods of establishment of absoli
ism.
An exchange of the expressiveness of archaic disp:
^
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
A Victim of Tsarism
)ortion for the regular 'table of ranks and classes' of an
rfficialdom-created harmony.
Positivistic realism is in no way the correct form of per'
:eption. Purely and simplya function of a certain form
3f social structure.
Following a state monocracy, implanting a state mono-
From POTEMKIN
typic form of thought.
An ideological uniformation, developing figuratively in
the uniformed ranks of the regiments of Guards.
Thus we have seen how the principle of the hieroglyph
-'determination by depiction' split into two.
8 EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
First along the line of its purpose (the principle 'determi-
nation') into the principles of the creation of literary
imagery.
Then along the line of its method of realisation of this
purpose (the principle depiction,) into the striking methods
of expressiveness of Sharaku.
2
And, just as the two outspreading wings of a hyperbola
meet, as we say, at infinity (though no one has
visited so distant a region), so the principle of
hieroglyphics, infinitely splitting into two (in accordance
with the functionalism of ciphers), suddenly from this
dualistic estrangement once more unites, in yet a fourth
spherethe theatre.
Estranged for so long, once againin the cradle period
of the dramathey are present in parallel. In a curious
dualism.
The signification (determination) of the action is effect-
ed by its narration by a man behind the staeethe repre-
sentation (depiction) of the action is effected by a dumb
marionette on the stagethe so-called Dzeiruri.
Together with a specific manner of moving, this archa-
ism migrated also into early Kabuki. It is maintained, as
a part method, in classical repertory even to this day.
(Where certain parts of the action are narrated from be-
hind the stage while the actor acts in dumb-show).
But this too is not the kernel.
Mo:t important is the fact that into the technique of
acting itself the hieroglyphic (montage) method has in-
stilled itself in the most interesting ways.
Ho^.'cver, before we discuss this finally, let us allow
ourselves the luxury of a digression. Let us pause at the
wayside halt of the question of the shot, in order to settle
the question of shot-montage once and for all.
A shot. A single piece of celluloid.
A small rectangular frame with, somehow organised in-
to it, a bit of an event.
'Sticking to each other,' these shots form montage. Of
course, when they stick in appropriate rhythm.
Thus, roughly, teaches the old, old school of cinema-
tography.
"Screw by screw,
Brick by brick. .
."
Kuleshov, for example, even writes with a brick, thus:
".
. . Should there be for expression any fractional idea,
any particle of the action, any link of the whole dramatic
chain, then that idea must be expressed, built-up out of
shot-ciphers, as if out of bricks. . .
(L. Kuleshov, "The Art of the Cinema." Published
by Tea-Kino-Pechat,
p. 100).
"Screw by screw,
Brick by brick. . ./'as the song goes.
3
The shotis an element of montage! Montage is a
'junction of elements'.
A most pernicious method of analysis.
One in which the understanding of a process as a whole
(linkage, shot-montage) is derived merely from the extern-
al characteristics of its flow (a piece is stuck to a piece).
Thus it would be possible, for example,- to arrive at the
well-known conclusion that tramcars exist to be laid across
streets.
An entirely logical deduction, if one orientate oneself
on the external characteristics of those functions they per-
formed, for example, in Russia in the February days of
'17.
But the Materialist Conception of History interprets
it otherwise.
The worst of the matter is that an approach of this,
kind does actually lie like an unclimbable tramcar across
the possibilities of formal development.
Such an approach predestines one not to dialectical de
velopment, but only to gradual evolutionary 'perfecting'
in so far as it gives no bite into the dialectical substance
of events.
In the last resort, such evolutionising leads either
through refinement to decadence or, on the contrary, to
simple withering away from stagnation of the blood.
And, strange as it may seem, a melodious witness tc
both these cases simultaneously is Kuleshov's last film
"The Gay Canary."
The shot is in no wise an element of montage.
The shot is a montage cell.
Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of an
other order, the organism or embryo. So, on the other side
of the dialectical leap from the shot, is montage.
By what then is montage characterised, and consequent
ly its cellthe shot.
By collision. By conflict of two pieces standing in op
position to each other. By conflict. By collision.
In front of me lies a crumpled yellowed sheet of note'
paper.
On it a mysterious note:
"Linkage
P"
and "Shock
E."
This is the material trace of a hot engagement on the
subject of montage between Emyself and PPudovkin
(About a year ago.)
This is the established order. At regular intervals he
;
comes to me late at night and we row, behind closec
doors, on subjects of principle.
Here as before. Hailing from the Kuleshov school h(
r
heatedly defended the conception of the montage as a link
age of pieces. Into a chain. Bricks.
Bricks, by means of their rows narrating a concept.
I confronted him with my point of view of montage a|
collision. A viewpoint that from the collision of two givn
en factors arises a concept.
Linkage is, in my interpretation, only a possible special
case.
You remember what an infinite number of combination!
is known in physics in the matter of the impact (collision
J
into
A
aph
the
muli
by;
or
In
1!
A;
#1
nab
Bu
Co
jmii
Co
C
!
'
Coi
\k
Co
An'
It I
W) o
Clo-
Gra
rob,
Dai
The
Ufa
of balls.
According to whether they be resilient, or non-resilient
or mixed.
Amongst all these combinations there is one in whic}
the impact is so weak that the collision degrades into thj
even movement of both in one direction.
This case would correspond to the point of view of Pi;
dovkin.
Not long ago I had another talk with him. Today
stands in agreement with my present point of view.
True, during the interval he had taken the opportunit
to acquaint himself with the substance of the lectures
j
had read during that period at the Central Cinematograp
College.
itn

-T-bus;-montag'''is conflict.
The basis of every art is always conflict. A peculi
"image' transubstantiation of the dialectic principle.
And the shot represents a montage cell.
So, consequently, it aho must be considered from tr
point of view of conflict.
Intra-piece conflict

potential montage, in the development of its intensit

shattering its quadrilateral cage and exploding its confli
ps'ai
10
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
ur
fa
into montage impulses between the montage pieces.
And if montage must be compared with something, then
a phalanx of montage-pieces, 'shots', should be compared to
the series of explosions of an internal combu:tion engine,
multiplying themselves into montage dynamics and there-
by serving as 'impulses' to drive along a tearing motor-car
or tractor.
Intra-piece conflict. It may be of very various nature:
may even bea conflict in the action depicted itself.
As in "What happened to Mary." In the course of a piece
400 ft. long. Such conflict is clearly not subject to exami-
nation in the light of questions of cinematographic form.
But 'cinematographic' are:
Conflict of graphic directions (either static lines or dy-
namic lines).
Conflict of scales.
Conflict of spaces.
Conflict of masses (spaces filled with various intensities
f light.)
Conflict of depths.
Any of the:e and the following conflicts of such degree
hat they wait only for one push of intensification to fly
nto couples of antagonistic fragments.
Close and long shots (C.U.'s, M.S.'s and L.S.'s, etc.)
Graphically vari-produced pieces. Pieces solved, by
olume with pieces solved by area.
Dark pieces with light pieces, etc.
And, lastly, there are such unexpected conflicts as:
The conflict of an object with its normal dimension, and
e conflict of an event with its normal temporal na-
re.
This may sound extraordinary but both these cases are
imiliar.
The firstan optical distortion of the lens, the second

peeding-up or slow-motion.
The assembling of all properties of cinematography into
e
le formula of conflict, the grouping of all cinematograph'
characteristics into a dialectical series under one single
:adis no empty rhetorical diversion.
We thus seek a unified systematization of the method of
nematographic expressiveness that shall hold good for all
: "
s elements.
The assembling of them to a series of common interpre-
tion will iolve the problem as a whole.
Experience in the various separate departments of the
riema varies in measure beyond compare.
Whereas we know a great deal about montage, in the
Leory of the shot we are still bubbling about between the
ayal Academy, the French Impressionists, and pure geo-
;trisations that begin to set one's teeth on edge.
The regarding of the frame, however, as a particular,
:llular' case of montagethe smashing of the dualism
iot-montage', makes possible the direct application of
in ontage experience to the question of the theory of the
ot.
The same with the question of lighting. The concep-
>n of this as a collision between a current of light and an
stack, like the impact of a gush of water from a fire-
se striking an object, or of the wind Luffeting against
person, muct result in a usage of it comprehensible en-
;ly different from that afforded by playing around with
luzes' and 'spots'.
The one available such interpretative principle is the
nciple of conflict:
The principle of optical counterpoint.
nd, let us not now forget ""hat shortly we shall have
solve another and less simple counterpoint, namely, the
conflict of auditory and visual impulses in the sound cinema.
osra
Mil!
At the moment, however, let us return to one of the
mo.t interesting of optical conflicts:
The conflict between the limits of the frame and the
object shot.
The shooting-angle as the materialisation of conflict
between the organising logic of the director, and the inert
logic of the object, in collision, giving the dialectic of cin-
ema-viewpoint.
In this respect we are still impressionistic and devoid of
principle to a point of sickness.
But, in spite of this fact, a sharp degree of principle is
proper to the technique of this also.
The dry quadrilateral, plunging into the haphazard of
natural diffuseness. . . .
And once more we are back in Japan!
For, thusthe cinematographic is one of the methods of
drawing instruction used in Japanese schools.
What is our method of drawing instruction?
We take an ordinary four-cornered piece of white
paper. . . .
And we cram onto it, in most cases even without using
the corners (the edges are usually grease-stained with long
sweating over it), some tedious caryatid, some vain Corin-
thian capital, or a plaster Dante (not the juggler at the
Moscow Ermitage, but the other oneAligheri, the com-
edy writer.)
The Japanese do the opposite.
Here's a branch of cherry-tree, or a landscape with a
sailing boat.
And the pupil extracts from its whole, by means of a
square, or circle, or a rectangle, a composition unit.
He takes a frame!
And just by these two ways of teaching drawing are
characterised the two basic tendencies struggling in the
cinema of today.
The onethe expiring method of artificial spatial or-
ganisation of the event in front of the lens.
From the 'direction' of a sequence, to the erection of
a Tower of Babel in the literal sense, in front of the lens.
And the othera 'pieking-out' by the camera, organisa-
tion by its means. The hewing of a piece of actuality by
means of the lens.
However, now, at the present moment, when the cen-
tre of attraction is beginning, in the ideological cinema, fin-
ally to be transferred from the material of the cinema as
such into 'deductions and conclusions' formed by the or-
der of its approximation, both schools lose the importance
of their differences and can quietly blend into a synthesis.
Some pages back we lost, like a golosh in a tramcar,
the question of the theatre.
Let us turn back to the question of methods of montage
in the Japanese theatre.
In particular, in acting.
The first and most striking example, of course, is the
purely cinematographic method

'untransitional acting'.
Alongside with mimic-transitions carried to the limit of
refinement, the Japanese actor uses the exactly reverse
method.
At some moment or other of the acting he interrupts it.
The 'Black Ones'
4
obligingly conceal him from the spec-
tator. And lohe is resurrected in a new make-up. A new
wig. Characterising another stage (degree) of his emo-
tional state.
Thus, for example, in the play "Narukami" is solved
the transition of Sadandzi from drunkenness to madness.
10 EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
By a mechanical cut to it. And a change in his collec-
tion (armoury) of coloured streaks. On his face, empha-
sizing those of them whose lot it is to fulfill a task of high-
er intensity than that allotted to those used in the first
irake-up.
This method is organic to the film. The forced introduc-
tion into the film, by the European acting tradition, of
pieces of 'emotional transitions' is yet another influence
forcing the cinema to mark time. Whereas the method of
'cut' acting makes possible the construction of entirely new
methods. The supplantation of one changing actor-face
by a scale of vari-mooded type-faces always affords a much
more acutely expressive result than that enabled by the
surface, too receptive and devoid of organic resistance,
of the face of a professional actor.
The banishing of the intervals between the polar stages
of expression of face in sharp contrast has been used
by
me in our new village picture. By this means is achieved
a greater sharpness in the 'play of doubt' around the sep-
arator. Will the milk thicken or no? Trickery? Wealth?
Here the psychological process of the play of motifs

faith and doubtis disintegrated into the two extreme po-

sitions of joy (confidence) and gloom (disillusionment).
Moreover there is a sharp emphasizing of this by light (in
head. A disintegration into shots. With the shortening
of the separate successive constituents at the approach to-
wards the . . . tragic enddeath.
By shaking himself free from the yoke of simple na-
turalism, the actor is enabled by this method entirely to
grip the spectator by 'rhythms', thus rendering the stage,
which in its general composition is constructed on the most
consecutive and detailed naturalism (flesh and blood, etc.),
not only apprehensible but affective.
Since we now no longer make a distinction in princi-
ple between questions of intra-shot and montage, we may
here cite a third example:
The Japanese makes use in his work of a slow tempo oJ
a degree of slowness unknown to our stage. The famou;
scene of harakin in "The Forty-seven Ronin". Such a de
gree of slowing down of movement is absent from ou
stage. Whereas, in the previous example, we dealt wit!
disintegration of the linkage of movement, here we hav<
disintegration of the process of movement. Slow-motion
I know of only one example of a thorough application o
this same method, as technically employable in the cine
ma, for a compositionally thought-out end. Usually it i
used either for a depiction, as 'The Submarine Kingdoir
("The Thief of Bagdad"), or for a dream ("Zvenigora")
A
Mil
U I
A
I ft
I
a
K<
Ml
THE ODESSA MASSACRE
no wise conforming to actual light conditions). This leads
to a considerable strengthening of the intensity.
Another remarkable characteristic of Kabuki is the
principle of 'disintegrated' acting. Thus, Siozoi, the fe-
male part lead of the "Kabuki" company that played in
Moscow, in depicting a dying girl in "The Sculptor of
Masks", performed his part in pieces of acting entirely de-
tached from one another.
Acting with only the right arm. Acting with one leg.
Acting with the neck and head only. The whole process
of the general death agony was disintegrated into the solo
playing through of each 'part' separately from the others:
the parts of the leg, the parts of the arms, the part of the
From POTEMKIN
Or, more often still, it is just formal spillikens and pi
poseless camera hooliganism ("The Man with the Mc
Camera"). The instance I have in mind is Epstein's
"
Fall of the House of Usher". Normally acted emotii
taken with a speeded-up camera gave an unsual emoticj
pressure by their slowness on the screen (judging from
press reports). If it be borne in mind that the effeel
the acting of an actor on the public is based on its imitat
by the spectator, it will be easy to relate the two ex
pies to one and the same causual explanation. The inte
ty of the reception increases because the imitative pro
goes more easily along a disintegrated motion . . .
Training in how to handle a rifle was hammered
::::ii
li
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA 11
:ven the stiffest automata among 'raw' recruits 'along dis-
ntegration'. . .
The most interesting association of the Japanese thea-
re, however, is, after all, with the sound cinema, which
:an and must learn what is basic for it from the Japanese

he bringing of both visual and auditory impressions to

me common physiological denominator. But I consecrated
i whole article in the "Zhizna Iskusstva" (1928, No. 34).
5
to this point, and I shall not return to it here.
So, it has been possible cursorily to establish the permea-
tion of the mo.t various branches of Japanese culture by the
pure element and basic nerve of cinematographymontage.
And only the Japanese cinema falls into the same error
is the left-drifting
1
"Kabuki".
Instead of learning how to extract the principles and
technique of their remarkable acting from out of the tra-
ditional feudal forms of what they act, the progressive
heatrical leaders of Japan fling themselves into adaptation
jf the spongy shape lessness of our own academic p^ycho-
ogical naturalistic Art Theatre. The results are tearful
lyt
I
nil
a.:
and sad. In the realm of the cinema Japan similarly pur-
sues imitations of the most revolting examples of commer-
cial American and Middle-European market junk.
To understand and apply her cultural peculiarities to the
cinema, this is
1
the task of Japan.
Colleagues of Japan! Are you really going to leave it
to us?
1. This essay was first published as an epilogue to N. Kauf-
man's pamphlet "The Japanese Cinema" (Tea-Kino-Pechat. The
Theatre and Film Press, Moscow, 1929) and entitled "Outside the
Shot." The present text is translated by Ivor Montagu and S. S.
Nalbanov and revised by the author.
2. It has been lctt to Joyce to develop in literature the depictive
line of the Japanese hieroglyph. Every word of Kurth's analysis of
Sharaku may be applied, neatly and easily, to Joyce. S. M. E.
3. The quotation is from "Kerpitchiki," a Russian popular
Ming. I. M.
4. The Black Ones in Kabuki are persons attired completely in
black and thus relatively invisible. Besides functioning as described,
they move furniture and carry out all manner of changes.I. M.
5. Republished in a French translation in "Monde," December,
1928.S. M. E.
The Problem of the New Film Language
by VICTOR TURIN
A
CHARACTERISTIC feature of the filmic language
of the majority of our films is that it is based on the
intellectual sense of the composition. By that we mean that
not only the visual appearance on the screen as such, but
also the idea behind it, affects the spectator.
A few film-people have expressed this fact in paradoxi-
cal form, as follows: The essence of the film lies not in the
images, in the scenes, but between the scenes. Eisenstein
terms this the "fourth dimension" of the film. He means
that one does not just see the art-work, but feels-and-thinks
it,that is, "senses" it. This principle is undoubtedly ap-
plicable to the film that is expressed in poetic film-terms.
Every film-work is actually supposed to consist of a ser-
ies of thought-impulses, and the action to serve only as
opportunity for the visualization of these thoughts.
In contrast to the so-called prosaic film with its dynamic
of action, stands poetic film-language with its dynamic of
thought. Instead of: "I see that he walks," it will become:
"I feel, what the artist thinks."
The thought is realized through the action and com-
prehended in its pure form, without being obscured by
the events.
The thought thus becomes the basic element of the
montage. The visual unity in only an equivalent of the
thought. The basis is therefore not the composition of
the action, but the composition of the thought. The most
effective means for the realization of such a composition
is the "association montage." The development and perfec-
tion of this method will make it possible to construct art-
works along manifold thematic lines of highly varied ma-
terial. To master this method completely, means to have
attained the ideal of art-creation, whose task it is, as the
old Dutch philosopher Hemsterguy put it, "to express the
greatest number of ideas in the shortest time."
There is no doubt that the time-limitations of the film
("the shortest time") and our attempt, to give "the great-
est number of ideas," are in accord with this teaching of
the old Hollander. The nature of the film offers the pos-
sibility to solve this difficulty and for the other arts insolu-
ble, task.
The two elements of this new film-language, association
and brevity, justify the designation of this method as the
Method of '"Associative Laconism."
This conditioned expression (practically speaking, all
expressions of art-theory are conditioned) offers the occa-
sion to analyze the elements of filmic language from a par-
ticularly definite point of view.
Associative laconism affords, in my opinion, the possi-
bility to establish in the work the line of development of
the theme. This method makes it possible to control time
and space more effectively through a successful composi-
tion of the abstract meaning; it facilitates the unification
of highly varied types of visual material into a single, def-
inite thought subordinated to the whole. It reduces the
time of the action to a minimum. Association ultimately
corresponds completely to the principle of the intellectual
film, in which the subject-matter is subordinate to the
intellectual reflex. If one takes into further consideratior.
that poetic language, according to its own peculiar na
ture, is not composed of isolated grand thoughts, but fre
quently consists in intimations and allusions to definite
ideas, then it becomes very clear that just this associative
laconism constitutes its technically adequate means of ex-
pression.
Our films are therefore not constructed on the develop-
ment of the external action, and do not depend on the ex-
ternal dynamic, but are based on the continuation of an in-
tellectual thought-line.
The explanation for this lies in the circumstance that
for us it is not possible to have a previously established
continuity.
The final formation of our films occurs solely in the
montage, in the cutting.
During the cutting, muchvery muchis changed,
this change often even depending on the substitution of
some title for a very important picture. In fact, in such
12
EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
films, the placement of the titles is as important as that of
the images.
It is no accident that mo:t of our best directors (Eisen-
stein, Dovzhenko, etc.) write their own manuscripts. The
language of their manuscripts originates out of their ex-
tensive relationship, as directors, to the material and out of
their extensive knowledge of the film-camera. Even in the
films of Pudovkin the so-called "poetic spots" are incor-
porated by the director himself. It is ako no accident that
these directors have found fewer followers than the direc-
tors of the old theatrical "school," of which the outstand-
ing representatives in Soviet Russia are Protozanov, Ozep
and Room.
There is no doubt, however, that the transformation of
the theme is likewise accompanied by a revision of the
formal-styliitic disposition.
We must not only change the thematic contents of our
works, but we must also seek new means of expression. Such
a necessity impels us to constant change and experimenta-
tion; it permits of no stand-still, and it prevents us from
creating still further art-works according to the old banal
methods.
Our main task was to show the development of our
country from a complete technical backwardness and lack
of culture to our present-day colossal advancement, at the
threshold of which we now stand. Our country is today
seized with the enthusiasm of construction. The building
of the Turkestan-Siberian Railroad is only one manifesta-
tion of this gigantic labor.
Not a single art-work that has its origin in the Soviet
Union today is the metaphysical brain-child of an artist;
but all art-works are based on material of actual occur-
rence, which forms the best foundation for any kind of crea-
tive work. Our central theme is the manifestation of so-
cialism, the daily life of our Union.
All the imagination of our artists, all their inventive gen-
ius, can be applied to the wealth of material of our own
lives. We need not ponder over subject-matter, for it can
be found in every nook and corner of our Union, and we
can therefore concentrate our full creative strength on the
search for new and better means of expression. But these
new methods for the construction of our film-works we
seek only in order to reflect that which happens to us in
reality, in as powerful and vital a way as possible.
We realize that in our work we are still a long way
from perfectionmore, that we stand just at the beginning
of these new paths of the Soviet film.
We are technically still very weak and must daily seeM
and invent new art-means. Our cinema, artistically as well
as technically, is still in its childhood days. Thus, we have
just recently started to familiarize ourselves with the tech
nique of the sound-film; but we know, we are convinced!
that when we have once learned to master these new meth
ods, we shall be able to create art-works which will deepl>
move the proletarian spectators of the entire world.
(Translated from the German by Christel Gang)
The development of art has at all times been closely r&
lated to the ideas and forms of life of the cla.s ruling at a
given time. In all former epochs which, with but few eJ
ceptions, made art the monopoly of the possessing and rul-
ing class, those forms of art were encouraged which served
to satisfy the higher, more refined individual requirements
of the privileged. The satisfaction of the artistic needs o:
the masses was regarded as a subsidiary matter. Art was
doled out to them in bad mass reproductions.
Things are different in the Soviet Union. There the
masses are considered first. Consequently those arts which
in themselves, can benefit the masses, receive special en
couragement. In the present stage of development these
are the cinema and the wireless. They have long been reo
ognized as extremely effective means for influencing the
masses and giving them an artistic educationKURELLA
The Five-Year-Plan and The Cultural Revolution.
AMERICAN
PROLET-KINO
The first workers film-producing organization
in America
PROLETARIAN CAMERAMEN,
TECHNICIANS, SCENARISTS,
ETC.
COMMUNICATE with the Prolet-Kino.
ADDRESS: Lewis Jacobs, 302 East 59th Street,
N. Y. C, N. Y. or Seymour Stern,
1803 Vista del Mar, Hollywood, Cal.
Studio of Sovkino in Construction
--
Moscow
tec
PEPPER
EDWARD WESTON
r DWARD WESTON is an example of how America ignores
*-*
first rate artists. It is more than fifteen years since Weston pro-
duced the first of his enormous volume of photographs, the majority
of which have carried his name and the technique associated with his
method, far around the world. But in the United States he is
still known to an extremely limited number of people, chiefly, we
believe, because the fundamental idea behind his conceptions and
the unsweetened vitality of his results are too bold, and creatively
too profound, for the type of American "mind" that "likes pho-
1
tography." Weston's photography is not what the average Holly-
wood movie-photographer would rate as "good": the quality of
Ins work is a permanent message to future proletarian technicians,
both of the still and of the film camera, against the bourgeois
"technique" of American photography that is even today, in spite
of Soviet camera'accomplishments, a befuddled standard to a great
part of the world. Here, in this man's work, the product of an
honest eye, is no unhealthy artificialism of design, no back-lighting
or cross-lighting, a complete absence of conventional technical
sentimentalism, etc. . .
Edward Weston's work represents the high-point of photography
in the United Statesits healthiest and most vital still-camera ac-
complishment.
STATEMENT
BY
EDWARD WESTON
^
^^0^ ^gf
todaythe tempo of life acceleratedwith airplane and wireless as speed symbols

I
%J iBL
]
I
with senses quickenedminds cross- fertilized by intercommunication and teeming with
"^^
W*^F
^^
fresh impulse.
Today

photographywith capacity to meet new demands, ready to record instantaneouslyshutter

co-ordinating with the vision of interest impulseone's intuitive recognition of life, to record if desiired,
a thousand impressions in a thousand seconds, to stop a bullet's flight, or to slowly, surely, decisively expose
for the very essence of the thing before the lens.
Recording the objective, the physical facts of things, through photography, does not preclude the com-
munication in the finished work, of the primal, subjective motive. AN ABSTRACT IDEA CAN BE
CONVEYED THROUGH EXACT REPRODUCTION: photography can be used as a means.
Authentic photography in no way imitates nor supplants paintings: but has its own approach and tech-
nical tradition. Photography must be,Photographic. Only then has it intrinsic value, only then can its
unique qualities be isolated, become important. Within bounds the medium is adequate, fresh, vital: with-
out, it is imitative and ridiculous!
This is the approach: one must prevision and feel, BEFORE EXPOSURE, the finished printcomplete
in all its values, in every detailwhen focusing upon the camera ground-glass. Then the shutter's release
times for all time this image, this conception, never to be changed by after-thought, by subsequent mani-
pulation. The creative force is released coincident with the shutter's release. There is no substitute for
amazement felt, significance realized, at the TIME of EXPOSURE.
Developing and printing become but a careful carrying on of the original conception, so that the first
print from a negative should be as fine as it will yield.
Life is a coherent whole: rocks, clouds, trees, sh ells, torsos, smokestacks, peppers are interrelated, inter-
dependent parts of the whole. Rhythms from one, be come symbols of all. The creative force in man feels
and records these rhythms, these forms, with the medium most suitable to himthe individuualsensing
the cause, the life within, the quintessence revealed directly without the subterfuge of impressionism, be-
yond the range of human consciousness, apart from the psychologically tangible.
Not the mys'tery of fog nor the vagueness from smoked glasses, but the greater wonder of revealment,
seeing more clearly than the eyes see, so that a tree becomes more than an obvious tree.
Not fanciful interpretation,the noting of super ficial phase or transitory mood: but direct presentation
of THINGS in THEMSELVES.
TECHNICAL REMARKS
These photographs,excepting portraitsare contact prints from direct 8x10 negatives, made with a rectilinear lens
costing #5.00,this mentioned because of previous remarks and questions. The porlraits are enlarged from 3%x4^4
Graflex negatives, the camera usually held in hands.
Edward Weston, Carmel, Cal.
EDWARD
WESTON is an internationally known
photographer who lives and carries on his main
work in Carmel, California. After several years
spent in Mexico, where he contacted his contemporaries
in the field of painting, Orozco and Diego Rivera, Wes-
ton returned to the United States and produced a mass
of photographs which have had revolutionary conse-
quences in expanding the powers and developing the
dynamic of the still-camera. Reproductions of four of
his prints appear in the present issue. Weston's most
noted work is in his groups of peppers, tree-roots and
early industrial subjects.
KELP
- i
16 EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA
SCENARIO and DIRECTION
by V. I. PUDOVKIN
IN
response to a number of inquiries and requests, Ex-
perimental Cinema informs its readers that the Christel
Gang translation of Pudovkin's book, Film Direction and
Film Manuscript, the first half of which was published in
the February and June, 1930, issues respectively, is the
first and only translation of this work published in the
United States. An English translation has been published
in Great Britain, but this is not available on the American
market. With this number, however, Experimental Cinema
discontinues the serialization of Christel Gang's translation
and prints instead a recent manuscript by Pudovkin deal-
ing with present developments in his methodology. As Pu-
dovkin himself makes clear in the course of this essay, the
ideas formulated in his book, which was first published in
the U.S.S.R. four years ago, are now obsolete when con-
sidered in relation to the rapid growth of Soviet film-
technique. Its appearance was "unfortunate," to use Pudov-
kin's own word, in view of the radical advances and
changes that Pudovkin himself has made in his entire
method. There seems, therefore, to the editors of Experi-
mental Cinema, no valid reason for continuing this out-
moded work at the present stage of the evolution of the
Soviet cinema.
THE EDITORS
READING
for the first time a scenario by Alexander
Rjechevsky, I experienced a sensation until then
unknown to me.
While reading it, the scenario created the same emotion
in me as a literary work. I say unknown sensation be-
cause, for reasons unexplained, the authors of scenarios al-
ways use, to express themselves, a style characterized by its
platitude and banality. All scenarists seem to forget that
the word is their only means means of expression; it is by
means of the word that they must convey to the direc-
tor the complex whole of their ideas and sensations which,
on the other hand, the screen must convey to the spec-
tator. The co-operation of the scenarist and director is
very important. Until now this was partially realized by
meetings, discussions, conversations, but as a rule, the au-
thor of a scenario, having sold his work to a firm, was from
then on completely out of touch with actual production
and grew indignant against the director who often distort-
ed his work. The lack of coincidence of scenario and film
can often be ascribed to the incompetence of a director, but
is in most cases due to reciprocal misunderstanding. The
erroneous propaganda which called for the writing of the
scenario as a simple series of frames, has given unsatisfact-
ory results. Four years ago I, unfortunately, took part in
this campaign of "the idea thru the picture". It must
be said that then scenarists were exclusively preoccupied
with montage. The content of the film, its idea, its in-
tentions, were all united in the theme. The director limit-
ed himself to taking care of the simplest descriptive mon-
tages: a departing train, a well mounted fire, were consid-
ered fair results.
Times have changed. The cinema has progressed. The
cinema-creators of today know how to impart to an aud-
ience, by a series of montage, very complicated abstract
notions. The domain of the motion picture is broadening
Its possibilities are increasing: that which some time age
seemed impossible of expression thru the film is today a
tangible and clear reality wherefrom we draw our
productions. It would be astonishing, if, in view of sucr
changes, the scenario writers, so closely linked with the
realization of the film, were not to transform their tech-
nique. Many directors, however, write their own scenar
ios. They jot them down on montage sheets, simple scheme
or technical plan of work for shooting. In such case;
everything must be read between the lines.
1. Paul's face.
2.Fist.
3. Ivan's face.
4.Fist pounding table.
5. Table collapses.
6. Ivan's face, etc.
What about Ivan's face, what is this pounding fist, wha
happens to Ivan? Nothing is indicated . . . Everything
is clear only to the director, who, briefly, telegraphically
determines the nature-of the frames discovered and sho
by himself . . . This telegraphic style has unfortunately
been adopted by the authors of scenarios. To think onh
in pictures,to do the work of the director, in othei
words, often leads the scenarist into blind alleys. He for
gets that in his work, contrary to the purpose of the mon
tage sheets, everything must be contained in the lines
The word is his instrument. He must master it to per
fection; otherwise it is inevitable that his work be inexac
ly and superficially felt by the director.
|
Consequence: the interpretations of the theme are var
iable and the film loses all its value. In Rjechevsky, how, l
ever, we have an interesting example of scenarios pre
foundly elaborated in their content. For instance:
I ver
veil th
Extract from "The 26 Communists of Baku:"
The front.
Against the spectator, completely against hirr :.
the inseparable wall of maddened machine-gun;
crackling.
Covered with blood a soldier of the red arm
meditates at length; at last he finds . . .
He has something to say to the whites . . .
He writes it dow