| | | | | | escape as well is mirrored in the breaking up of the ice cap. And when Pavel jumps from floe to floe to escape his pursuers and secure his freedom, it is as if the joy of his freedom and the strength of his revolutionary fervor have found a sympathetic echo among the forces of the universe. For Pudovkin then, the goal of the camera is to "penetrate as deeply as possible, to the mid-point of every image. The camera, as it were, forces itself, ever striving, into the profoundest deeps of life. . . ." 20 Accordingly the liberation of a Communist sympathizer reaches all the way to the whole wide world and is enlightened by it. | | | | | | | | | Sometimes, in the Odessa steps sequence of The Battleship Potemkin (1925) for instance, Sergei Eisenstein uses editing in a way that is not that different from Pudovkin's. As the Cossacks shoot at the assembled populace and the crowd scatters in every direction, the single event bursts into a multitude of concurrent mini-events, including the famous sequence where the baby carriage escapes from the hands of the infant's mother and ends up bouncing down the steps unattended. So, in the same way that Pudovkin used cutting to dissect something happening into multiple elements nurturing our understanding of what is going on with shots of body parts, adjacent objects, or pictures of a nature that shows itself in harmony with the main subject Eisenstein takes full advantage of the fusillade's impact to atomize the scene into scores of distinct incidents. With both directors then, even though the cutting opens up the action to far more scrutiny than would normally be the case with American editing (where continuity remains the paramount issue), the "bursts" at this point remain physically contiguous to the original action. The difference between the two directors so far is more a question of tactics than anything else. For Pudovkin, there is an easy glide, a natural slippage from one element of the scene to another. For Eisenstein, the cutting executes little jumps to something or someone not far away from the original action. With both directors, however, the cut takes the story away from any possible involvement with a single individual and his or her predicament. For Eisenstein indeed, it is imperative for the new Soviet art to show individuals only insofar as they appear through the grid of the collective mass.21 Even though such cutting opens up the field, taking all in, it remains nonetheless in the same geographical region as before. The cen- | | | | |
