I

		trolling the pain prompted by his mother's absence by throwing away a wooden reel (saying in German "fort" or "gone") then retrieving it using the string attached to it (now stating "da" or ''here"). Through the game then, the boy was able to symbolically bring back his mother and thus alleviate his fears. 9 All in all, it is possible to say that with Griffith and the American cinema in general, the job of editing became one of "collecting" (to use Deleuze's word) the miscellaneous threads originally dispersed by the narrative, gathering them progressively around a core element.10 There is therefore a centripetal impulse at work in this kind of editing, one that is essentially in tune with the Western notion of individualism.

		III

		This way of relating shots is not, however, the only way to think about the relations between two images. The Russians in the twenties based their films on an altogether different model indeed. In their way of thinking, partly based on the Constructivist program, which emphasized demystifying the technical craftsmanship of the work of art (e.g., easel painting) for the benefit of a proletarian audience, it became ideologically important to bring attention to the connection between the shots as opposed to simply glossing over their treatment as was done in the American continuity editing system. All the great Russian director-theorists shared this basic understanding. What kept them apart though, as well as endlessly bickering with one another, was the size of the gap between the two shots.

		To initiate the debate let us recall the Kuleshov effect. Named after the director-theorist-teacher Lev Kuleshov, this editing demonstration has doubtlessly become, as Dana Polan puts it, "the film theorist's equivalent of a palimpsest, an ink-blot test out of which one can read almost any aesthetic position."11 True enough, but that is precisely its strength insofar as the visual assembly opens up, not a single operation, but a whole range of reflections about editing. It can thus be appreciated as the founding metaphor not only for American editing but also for all the variations of Soviet montage that would emerge in the twenties. It is also not important in our present context to ascertain whether Kuleshov executed the experiment alone or with the help of Pudovkin.12 Likewise we need not worry about the exact visual contents in the piece for they no longer exist and each historian recalls the tale somewhat differently.