Putting it differently, one could say that Bazin favored shooting over writing and editing because it was at that time that the film was most open, aesthetically and dramatically, to the indeterminacy of life. The work of these other moments of production could consist mostly in preparing the way or preserving the encounter with reality taking place during filming. Bazin's interest was also determinedly turned toward film practice, putting its energy on what could be done to reawaken the cinema to its full potential. He reminded us that it was indeed cinematic to discover people and their environment in a single shot, to pay attention to everything at length. And he warned us against too much dependence on film techniques which at times could be destructive of more profound values. One need not play by the rules, Bazin reiterated, for these were always terribly limiting. On the contrary, one should constantly refer back to the larger multifarious territory where choice is inexhaustible. In that he pointed to the single monad rather than the flow from shot to shot, Bazin differentiated himself from other theorists. Whereas the force of the American cinema was essentially centripetal in that it brought everything back to an individual core, and the thrust of Soviet montage centrifugal in its ability to link subjects independently of time and space, Bazin pointed to the here and now, to actual existence and the materiality of things. Editing was the enemy because it performed a cheap trick on the viewer, because the cut favored the flight of an idea over the thing itself. Editing made the world disappear behind the discourse. And this, in turn, not only impoverished cinema but made us poorer as well.
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It is time now to return to the Kuleshov experiment and rethink its coordinates. We have evaluated its potential effects with regard to editing but have not really examined its most disturbing quality. Kuleshov indeed pointed to the connections that show up when we look at discrete shots, but he left aside the question of their origin. To understand what is at stake here it may be useful to go back once more to Ferdinand de Saussure and his seminal ideas on linguistics. Saussure made clear that the rapport between the signifier (the specific group of letters or the sounds we use to describe something) and its signified (what is meant by it in our mind) was totally arbitrary. The fact that the signifier and the signified are not amalgamated implies that each set of letters acquires its meaning only
