Sadao Yamanaka – Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937)

Judging solely on our three-film sample of Sadao Yamanaka’s work, Humanity and Paper Balloons, the last film he directed before passing away, is undoubtedly his masterpiece. Simple in its presentation at first but with an intricate and complex narration, the film shows Yamanaka as a true master of his craft, an irreverent storyteller who was not afraid to take an unpopular political stance. A lot of the actors cast in the movie hailed from the far-left theater group Zenshin-za and we know now that Yamanaka’s flirtations with communist groups and left-wing thinking ultimately caused his draft to the front that resulted in his premature death. The portrayal of samurais in Humanity and Paper Balloons is unglamorous and free from any self-aggrandizing nationalistic revisionism. Political authorities are represented as corrupt and insensitive towards the needs of the poorer population, whereas community and empathy are presented as keys to happiness – a viewpoint not necessarily shared by the militaristic Showa government at the time of the film’s release.

The film is bookended by two suicides. We open with the suicide of an impoverished ronin who had to sell his sword and swap it for a bamboo sword. There is quite an uproar over his death in the small community we are introduced to over the course of the film but the hara-kiri is not subject to a grand remembrance in honor of the respected samurai. Rather, it is an opportunity to pocket five bottles of sake from the landlord and come together to dance and drink. The other ronin significant to the story is Matajuro Unno who’s father recently died and who relies on his wife to provide for the family by selling paper balloons. He approaches Mori, a local political figure and “urban” samurai with ties to the yakuza who knew his father, in the hopes that he would point him towards gainful employment. But Mori doesn’t want to be reminded of his ties to Matajuro’s father.

As payback, the ronin helps hiding Okoma, a young woman who is to be married to the higher samurai class and who is abducted by Shinya, a barber and gambler who organizes unauthorized gambling games in his own home, attracting the wrath of the yakuza. Shinya and Matajuro’s kidnapping scheme finally backfires and the ronin’s wife kills him in his sleep and subsequently commits suicide. End of film.

Far from heartwarming Heimatfilm tropes and a vision of the ronin as an honorable and wise warrior, Yamanaka presents feudal Japan as an unjust class society, weighed down by punishing social conventions and unfair social conditions. Class relations are the main motive here, as we jump back and forth between the poor community of peasants, merchants and down-on-their-luck samurais, and the removed class of arrogant gangsters, political rascals and merciless upper-echelon samurais. There is a heartfelt black-and-white representation of both stratums of society and Yamanaka is never ambiguous about which side he’s on. The poor, as carefree and optimistic as some of them might be, never catch a break, while the rich always maintain the upper-hand.

There is a subtle gender commentary to be found as well. All of our main protagonists are male. Women are either pawns in a larger game played by the men, like Okoma, or wives who look upon their husband’s actions with disdain but with little power to change them. After it is revealed that Matajuro was involved in Shinya’s kidnapping scheme we get a brief scene in which various women chat with each other about how all men are scoundrels since even the samurai, who should be a respectable role model, participated in such an ill-conceived venture. Matajuro’s wife overhears them talking like that – and ultimately chooses death as her and her husband’s only way out. The message here is twofold: not only are the men’s actions irresponsible and oftentimes plain dumb, but women, just like the poor on the larger scale of society, have to suffer the consequences of actions they are not responsible for. More than an advocate for the “lower” classes of society, Yamanaka, it seems, was a feminist.

The story, though virtually void of plot, is fascinatingly constructed. A little confusing at the beginning because we are introduces to a wide array of characters and conflicts, the script builds and builds by mostly just observing the characters and their day-to-day transactions and sponging details. Relationships are forged slowly until the characters abruptly, it seems, face compelling moral conundrums that finally grab us emotionally. By the end of Humanity and Paper Balloons, we are totally immersed in this world Yamanaka delineated very clearly and aggregated with intricate detail. The film never keeps us at arm’s length rather inviting us to visit it again and again, as one single viewing doesn’t do the film justice, doesn’t allow us to fully register all the themes, character details and visual motives.

Humanity and Paper Balloons was certainly a singular viewing experience for me personally. I have read elsewhere that the film is bleak and pessimistic and there is certainly something to that. But I was struck by the poetic nature of the movie, by the deliberate pace that allows us to reflect as we are presented with an array of ideas and themes, by its intimacy and the almost introspective atmosphere. Where The Pot Worth a Million Ryo and Koshiyama Soshun where carried along mostly by plot intricacies, Humanity and Paper Balloons sets out to portray exactly that: humanity. In his excellent essay on Sadao Yamanaka, Chris Fujiwara explains: “In the title of Yamanaka’s final film, the word that is translated as “humanity,” ninjo, means not the human race (for which the language has another word, jinrui) but human feeling. In the title of the film, it indicates no precise direction for the plot but opens up the chaotic and unpredictable space of impulses.” It is this more observational narrative method that elevates Yamanaka's work from superior genre fare to full-blown cinema mastery for me.

Sadao Yamanaka – Kochiyama Soshun (1936)

Sadao Yamanaka once said, "I do the reverse of what Pudovkin taught." Regular readers of this blog, if such exist, will recall that I discussed Pudovkin's editing technique a few weeks back. The soviet director regarded editing as "the foundation of film art." In this context, content is defined by how the shots are arranged in relation to each other. For Yamanaka, as was the case for a lot of Japanese directors in the 1930's, the shots themselves created meaning. Editing equated assembling the final product. Little esthetic work was done in the editing room. This was one of the reasons why Japanese directors were able to churn out staggering amounts of films. Post-production time was cut down by carefully planning out shots and sequences beforehand. There was a specific reason for each new shot. But mostly, careful blocking and shot compositions enabled the directors to let scenes play out in a small number of takes.

In Kochiyama Soshun, Yamanaka's second surviving film, there is one scene in which two characters bid on a small knife at an auction. They are both filmed in a medium shot showing only the two. We don't see or hear anyone else attending the auction. Yamanaka's confidence as a visual artist and the performances of both actors enable the director to hold the shot until the scene's resolution.

Kochiyama Soshun, even more than The Pot Worth A Million Ryo, is an extraordinary stylistic achievement. We miss all the flamboyance of a Mizoguchi or Kurosawa, but it's in his restraint, much like his colleague and friend Yasujiro Ozu, that Yamanaka shines bright. He predominantly uses wide angle shots employing all the depth of field. The narrow alleyways and claustrophobic interiors where the action takes place provide the perfect setting for this. Yamanaka activates the space on a vertical line. Characters frequently enter a scene from the background and make their way to the center of the frame where the action takes place and is captured in long shots. There are no reverse-angle shots in conversation that I could recall.

There is a tranquil rhythm that carries us along, a smoothness of the plot that is enhanced by the seamless succession of shots. Yamanaka also uses a lot of repetition to underline how the characters change and how they are trapped at the same time. When the plot calls for it, Yamanaka ups the ante without losing his clarity of vision. The climax of the movie involves an escape from ruthless henchmen. Characters chase each other through narrow streets and back alleys, and Yamanaka increases the suspense by accelerating the pace of the editing. The last shot of a monk trying to hold back a horde of sword swinging badasses while a stream of water erupts in the foreground of the frame is among the most poetic and most violent of the film.

Based on a famous Kabuki play by Kawatake Mokuami, Kochiyama Soshun is a genre film unlike you have ever seen one. Naojiro, a young knucklehead, steals a small but invaluable knife from a samurai and with that offsets a chain of events that eventually leads to his sister having to sell herself into prostitution, the samurai almost having to commit harakiri, his girlfriend jumping to her death and a lot of people getting killed in the climatic battle. Like in The Pot Worth A Million Ryo, an object is at the center of the narrative and structures the multiple plotlines that intertwine and add to a narrative web that gains in complexity with each new scene.

And again, the fabric of reality is put into question. Reality, which is pieced together through knowledge, is constantly negotiated between the characters as they exchange knowledge and broaden or narrow down their intellectual spectrum. When the samurai contemplates the possibility of committing harakiri if his master ever finds out that the small knife was stolen from him, the two men who bought that knife at the auction quarrel over its worth: "who could pay 10 ryos for such a trivial small knife?" asks one. "It's such a waste of money!" By showing us these two extremes, Yamanaka emphasizes once more the complexity of life. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Yamanaka also seems interested in the malleability of reality. Time and time again, characters speak about the same things without realizing it and misunderstand each other or getting to the wrong conclusions. If the same thing can have different meanings for different persons, how can one perspective be superior to another? At one point, the samurai, contemplating his supposed harakiri, reveals that he is 53 years old. His counterpart nonchalantly tells him: "with 50, a man has already lived his life." Such is the beauty of Yamanaka's work. In one amusing one-liner he expresses several complex ideas.

Whoever said that thoughtful films can't be entertaining?

Sadao Yamanaka – The Pot Worth A Million Ryo (1935)

As mentioned in my last post, the tragedy of Sadao Yamanaka’s fate has often been deplored by cinephiles interested in early Japanese cinema. Drafted to the front in 1938 at the age of 28 as punishment for his political activism, the director, hailed as one of the most promising cinematic talents by his contemporaries, died from a disease contracted on the battle field, leaving behind 12 finished films of which only three have survived today. All three films, The Pot Worth A Million Ryo, Koshiyama Soshun and Humanity And Paper Balloons are generally hailed as masterpieces, and rumors float around that his other films, which we will most likely never see, were even better.

No one can really say if there is any veracity to this claim, but we can appreciate the fact that Yamanaka, along with a small group of other directors and screenwriters such as Hiroshi Inagaki, revitalized the Japanese period film in the 1930’s by updating it in terms of dialogue and themes, but also by ablating some of its gravitas and imbuing it with a healthy dose of humor and adding romantic subplots, which was often criticized as "too American". For our contemporary tastes, however, Yamanaka’s films stand as oddities as well as strokes of genius, a singular and peculiar auteur vision that leaves us wanting for more.

The Pot Worth A Million Ryo, the earliest of Yamanaka’s surviving films, is part caper movie, part comedy, part drama, part jidaigeki. The story concerns, as you might have guessed, a pot that ostensibly is worth a million ryo, although its value is never explained or questioned. Believing it to be worthless, a powerful Lord offered it to his brother Genzaburo as a wedding present. Genzaburo, insulted by the present (the pot does not look particularly valuable), sells it to ragpickers who themselves give it to a little boy who uses it as a container for his goldfish. When the boy's father, a rice merchant, is murdered, Tangekazen, the one-eyed ronin, takes him under his wing, much to his lover Okami's chagrin. One by one, the characters discover the pot’s worth and set out to find it. Genzaburo seems to be the most intent on locating the pot, but he only uses it as an excuse to spend his time outside of the house and far away from his wife, flirting and hanging around a tea house which is run by Okami. When he finally realizes that Tangekazen and the boy have the pot, he doesn’t hand it over to his wife but let’s them keep it so that he can still spend his time at the tea house, pretending to be on the hunt for it.

Such a set-up leaves a lot of room for interpretation and analysis, of course. We can find themes of class distinction, male-female relationships, fate, the deep irony of life – the list goes on. One idea central to the film is that what we want most is oftentimes right in front us, but we ignore it. Obviously, the invaluable pot is the prime example of this leitmotiv. Another one is Tangekazen’s inability to tell the boy that his father was murdered. Not only is the truth right in front of the boy without him being able to grasp it, but the ronin tries to establish an honest relationship with the boy, an undertaking tainted by the heavy secret.

In fact, most if not all characters have something to hide: the vassal of the Emperor who tries to get back the pot from Genzaburo first for free and then for a small amount of money; the rice vendor who tells everyone he has a big shop when in reality he lives in poverty; Genzaburo who pretends to search for the pot when in reality he spends his days flirting with Okami’s assistant. There is a clear divide between what the characters make reality out to be, and what reality really is. Stylistically, Yamanaka expresses this with the transition-by-negation. When Tangekazen first brings the boy home, Okami refuses to feed him. The next shot shows the boy eating. Later, she refuses to buy him bamboo sticks. The next shot shows the boy walking on bamboo sticks. Instances like that can be found throughout the movie.

More than humorous transitions, these vignettes form meaning.  The characters are constantly struggling to come to terms with the reality around them. Genzaburo makes himself out to be a better archer than he really is. Tangekazen exhibits a tuff shell but has a soft heart. The boy has to accept the sudden change of his living environment, and then runs away when Okami and the ronin fight about him. Consequently, the characters discover most truths by proxy. Everyone is told about the pot's worth. They don't discover it themselves. Genzaburo's wife discovers his mischief only after one of her employees point out where he is. Genzaburo shoots an exaggerated amount of arrows at a target but it is Okami's employee who has to reveal to him how many hit the spot: a single one.

In my mind, The Pot Worth A Million Ryo is more concerned with the way we try to make sense of our environment than an oblique meditation on class relations or the irony of life. As humans, we can only grasp but one tiny portion of what life entails. We have to rely on third parties, institutions and art to make sense of it all. One joke, told by the boy, expresses this perfectly: "why do humans have two eyes? Because otherwise the second eyeglass lens would be a waste." We all make sense of our world differently. And sometimes, the most obvious is right in front us without us realizing it.

Yasujiro Shimazu – The Trio's Engagement (1937)

In my last post I lamented the fact that so few of Shimazu's films have survived the trials of time and that even fewer are available to the English speaking public. Not only is our possible fandom squelched from the get go, but for people interested in studying the director's work in-depth it is very frustrating to have only such a small sample size at their disposal.

It is especially frustrating in this instance because The Trio's Engagement is so fundamentally different from Our Neighbor, Miss Yae and my reaction to it was so dissimilar from my first Shimazu experience that I am aching to see more in order to better assess his body of work. But as it is, I am stuck with two very different viewing experiences. Not to say that The Trio's Engagement is horrible. On the contrary, the plot is quite amusing. Three young men find work at a textile company at the same time. One is from the suburbs, one from the countryside, one from the city. All three fall for their boss' daughter and court her. In the end, their supervisor hands them an invitation to the boss' daughter's wedding to a baron.

This admittedly contrived story gives Shimazu the possibility to explore how the men's different social origins define their work ethic and, more importantly, their flirting prowess. The film is light-hearted at it's core and at times outright farcical. For it to be such an obvious construct to explore social differences, The Trio's Engagement is utterly uninterested in going deep into the issue, preferring to be straight up entertaining without indulging in some darker beats, as we have grown accustomed from the Japanese social realist dramas of the time.

This is not a complaint. My complaint lies in the fact that Our Neighbor, Miss Yae impressed me so much more upon my first viewing. I totally got what Shimazu was going for in The Trio's Engagement, but I found myself a lot less engaged in the proceedings than with the other film. Not only was I less interested in the story, but stylistically, Miss Yae wowed me more. The seamless storytelling paired with impeccable directing and editing were the clear imprint of a master filmmaker. But The Trio's Engagement has a lot less to offer visually, rendering it almost interchangeable with any other fare from that period.

And herein lies the problem. By all accounts, Shimazu was indeed a master of the medium. But in viewing only two of his films, I couldn't confirm or deny it. One film is a masterpiece, the other one more average if still enjoyable. Which level of quality is the norm here? Where is Shimazu's handwriting? It's impossible for me to say. It is even more frustrating than in, say, Sadao Yamanaka's case who was considered the best Japanese director of the 1930's. Only three of his films have survived and they are all incredible masterpieces. We know that we miss out on a lot of quality and it's a tragedy that Yamanaka's body of work has mostly vanished. But with Shimazu, I can't even assess what the threshold is. And, to me, that's even worse.

Yasujiro Shimazu - Our Neighbor, Miss Yae (1934)

As we all know, history is written by the winners. When we think of early Japanese cinema, we rightfully think of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and, to a lesser extent, Kurosawa. While a lot of Ozu’s and Mizoguchi’s early films are lost, they produced an impressive body of work after the war which enabled them to profit from the industry’s postwar growth and its discovery by westeners. This is not the case for Yasujiro Shimazu who died in 1945. Considered the first real master of the shomin-geki genre, Shimazu directed well over 100 silent films, which are lost for the most part. And of the films that survived, only a tiny fraction is available with English subtitles.

One can’t help but wonder what this “loser” of history has in fact contributed to Japan’s early cinematic landscape as we perceive it today. Shimazu’s films have a reputation to have been starting blocks for many Japanese film stars and it seems like the director was mainly interested in “slice-of-life” narration and outsider characters (his debut First Steps Ashore involves seamen and prostitutes - no pun intended). Stylistically, it seems like he was a major player in implementing the use of the long lens and, it might be argued, the seamless tracking shot. But one can’t know for sure as our sampling size is simply too small to tell.

Which is frustrating. Just as I am terribly curious what an Ozu period film might look like (the lost The Sword of Penitence), delving deeper into Shimazu’s filmography would surely prove to be fascinating and maybe shed a new light on pre-war Japanese cinema and beyond. I was able to source and see two Shimazu films and am very impressed. History might be written by winners, but exploring the niches is very rewarding.

Our Neighbor, Miss Yae opens with a masterful lateral tracking shot establishing the suburban lower middle-class setting of the film. The shot ends on a pair of brothers playing catch in the back yard. We get a meticulously mounted and edited sequence in which the brothers throw around the baseball, which culminates in the ball flying over to the neighbor's property and smashing one of their windows. I was struck by the amount of coverage Shimazu gets. The editing is less rigorous than Ozu's, but more systematic than Shimizu's. The shots follow each other very deliberately. There are, however, a lot of shots that are never repeated and simply stand as stylistic flourishes. There are also quite a few cut-aways that Ozu would later use systematically but are employed more casually, it seems, by Shimazu.

This opening sequence not only immediately establishes Shimazu as a very considered filmmaker but it also introduces one of the major themes of the movie: characters interactions depend on damage, spoilage, harm. Shortly after the baseball sequence, one of the brothers responsible for the breakage, Keitaro, goes over to the neighbor's house because he locked himself out.  He is given something to eat and spills it on the pillow he is sitting on. At that moment, the neighbor's girl Yea-chan comes home with a friend, and Keitaro tries to hide his mischief. When she wants to offer the pillow to her friend, Keitaro has to admit to his clumsiness and the two girls make fun of him. Next, Yea-chan notices that Keitaro's socks have holes in them. She offers to mend them, but the student is clearly embarrassed. When he finally agrees and takes off his socks, Yea-chan comments on how dirty his feet are. Also, his socks stinks. That's why he didn't want to give them to Yea-chan in the first place.

The effect of this focus on imperfections is that the film feels very lived in. The relations between the characters are instantly believable because Shimazu shows them interacting in everyday situations that root the narrative in a very distinct sense of veracity. Everything in this movie rings true. This is especially valid for Keitaro and Yea-chan's timid courtship. Shimazu doesn't make a big fuss out of it and the two never really get to take their relationship to the next level but it is a delight to observe the two flirting gleefully and having a good time. There is an emotional honesty on display here that is rarely found when it comes to love and relationships in films.

Drama arises when Yea-chan's sister Kyouko comes home because she wants to divorce her husband who has been unfaithful. She and Keitaro are attracted to each other which, in turn, attracts Yea-chan's jealousy. But even here, where Shimazu would have had more than enough material to cook up simple minded melodrama, the director mostly exhibits restraint in the tear-jerker department and contents himself with showing how the character's actions change subtly from the point of Kyouko's appearance.

Yea-chan's father, for example, drinking buddy with Keitaro's father, grows increasingly frustrated and unhappy. In the end, the family moves to Korea. There is also a wonderful sequence in which Yea-chan and Kyouko go out on a double date with Keitaro and his brother, which, you guessed it, entails quite some instances of breakage, skin burns and other missteps that fuel the character interactions. Strictly speaking the night out sequence doesn't add a lot to the already meager plot, but it brings emotional heft to the table and what the actors do with simple looks, and what Shimazu accomplishes with shot composition to underline the characters' standing in relation to each other is remarkable.

A lot more could be said about Our Neighbor, Miss Yae. For instance, I haven't even delved into the film's thematic richness. But I found myself so thoroughly absorbed by the film's deliberate pacing and emotional honesty that I don't even want to get any more academic in discussing it. Our Neighbor, Miss Yae is a delightful and very entertaining film that proves that history's losers have plenty to say and that we would fare well to listen to them more often.

The Deleuzian Century V: Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1928) and Earth (1930)

An explosion on an empty field.

A woman stands immobile in a sparsely furnished room.

A title card: "There was a mother who had three sons."

Another explosion. Two dead soldiers on a rolling train. Empty, desolate trenches.

The same woman, still standing immobile in her comfortless room.

Smoke emerging from the trenches. Obscuring our view.

Another title card: "There was a war."

A woman stands on an empty field, next to a dilapidated hut.

A village street. Three women stand immobile in front of their poor houses. An amputee crosses the screen trailed by a small child.

Another street. A Young woman leans against a house. An old officer walks towards her. Stops. Examines her. Smiles. Touches her breasts. And then walks away.

A third title card: "The mother had three sons no more."

On a vast desolate field, an old woman throws seeds. Alone. And then falls to the ground.

If Alexander Dovzhenko is frequently called the poet among the Soviet formalists, it is precisely because of evocations like the one described above, found at the beginning of Arsenal. In a three minute sequence, the Ukrainian director manages to convey all the hopelessness, the senselessness, the dread, the bleakness, the horror of war without showing us a single gun shot or wound. Fragments are assembled, meaning is created. Dovzhenko is "obsessed with the relation between the parts, the unit and the whole" (Cinema 1, 58), writes Deleuze. Or as the French film critic Barthélemy Amengual puts it, Dovzhenko is capable of expressing himself "outside of time and space" thanks to fragmented montage.

Dovzhenko is out and out dialectician. The parts of his elliptical films are always expressions of the whole. Where the director doesn't create meaning within the scene, we creep towards a slow realization of a central idea, of a bigger meaning. In Zvenigora, a frequently hard to follow allegory, two stories run along each other, sometimes intersecting but remaining separate entities always. One is the story of a "Grandfather" who tries to protect a century old treasure, the other one is a confusing disquisition about war and industrialization. At the end, Dovzhenko joins both narratives in a sublime instance of a "qualitative bound" and we come to realize that what was at stake the whole time was Ukrainian national identity. The propagandist element is well there, except Dovzhenko takes a lot of detours to get there.

As Deleuze remarks, Dovzhenko, far more than Eisenstein, knows how to douse the parts and their unity into a new whole "that gives them incomparable depth and extensiveness within their own boundaries." (58) If Deleuze is interested in how the école soviétique combines the parts to express a new whole, Dovzhenko gives him a run for his money. Story is never narrated, it is constructed with disjointed elements. The whole is slowly assembled, the elements melt into the bigger picture. In short, there is a purpose, even if we don't always know what that purpose is.

Earth, on which the consensus seems to be that it's Dovzhenko's best although I found Arsenal  to be oftentimes more engaging, pushes the "qualitative bound" to its limit, I would dare to say. If Eisenstein concocted his milk separator sequence to turn a narrative page, Dovzhenko builds and builds anticipation but subtracts narration. When the tractor arrives to the village, separating its inhabitants into two fractions (pro or contra modernization) we get a long sequence in which the appearance of the machine produces incredible exhalation among the population and seems to be integral to the village's survival. It is almost a slow build from hope to triumph like in Old And New. But that build-up is never resolved.

Similarily, the film begins with an old man announcing that he is dying. But he still converses a bit with some villagers and eats an apple. We build and build and build towards his death, but once his life really does extinguish, we haven't had a narrative eureka. Dovzhenko just doesn't operate on those terms. The "qualitative bound" occurs once we as an audience make sense of all these elements, once unity emerges and the whole begins to transpire. Montage here is not used so much on a micro scale as with Eisenstein, but applied to the whole film text. The parts always point to the whole. It is Dovzhenko's genius that he approaches montage on his own terms.

The Deleuzian Century IV: Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Storm Over Asia (1928)

We have seen the dialectical spiral, we have seen the section d'or, we have seen the qualitative bound - all expressions of Sergei Eisenstein's masterful command of "dialectic montage" as described by Gilles Deleuze. But, reminds us the french philosopher, "everyone knows that dialectics are characterized by several different laws". (Cinema 1, 57) "If we can talk about an école soviétique, it is not because its auteurs resemble each other, but because they are all different, every one having a different affinity to the dialectic conception they share". (57)

Eisenstein has a didactic approach to historic process and uses "opposition montage" to stage said process without having to rely on individuals too much to advance the narration (with exception, of course, of Ivan The Terrible). Vsevolod Pudovkin, even more of an overt and unambiguous propagandist than Eisenstein, is very much involved in the business of selling us history as approved by the socialist dominions as well, but uses individuals as symbols, although we are still miles away from a Hollywoodesque hero-driven narrative.

We find the qualitative bounds employed by Eisenstein, but in a different context. As history is symbolized by people in Pudovkin's work, the qualitative bounds in his films, argues Deleuze, are mainly changes in conscience. Through carefully edited POV shots, that serve as a sort of puzzle for the characters and the audience alike, Pudovkin builds to a realization, to a change in consciousness that gives the scene a new meaning, a new quality, and that calls for action from the protagonists.

In Mother, for example, we have an early scene in which the titular mother observes her drunk husband glaring at a wall clock. With every POV shot from the mother, intercut with close-ups of her face, we come closer to the realization that the husband is considering how he can sell the clock's parts in order to pay for more booze. As soon as the mother realizes it herself, she jumps to action and tries to prevent him from doing so. Through simple shots of one character observing another, the scene changes its meaning completely. Just as the mechanics of the milk separator in Old And New served as a narrative tool transforming hope into triumph, piecing the elements together in Mother means realizing what the scene really is about.

The End of St. Petersburg, in my mind a superior offering than Mother in many aspects, pushes this concept a little further. Looser and more sweeping in its narrative, the chronicle of St. Petersburg's fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution is not presented solely as a linear advancement of history. Rather, Pudovkin gives us many different pieces to the story, highlighting different social malaises. Piecing them together gives us not only the full story, but a new outlook on things. Just as individual scenes can flip once all the different elements taken together make sense, history can be fully appreciated once the different relevant points of view have been presented. The question becomes, of course, what is perceived as relevant.

The qualitative bounds in The End of St. Petersburg, are there on the micro scale as well, and we get recurring motives that offset changes in consciousness (the clock, the vast open skies that represent hope and death at the same time, the black smoke) but even more so than in Mother, Pudovkin tries to trigger changes in consciousness in the audience and not only the fictional characters on the screen.

In Storm Over Asia, in my opinion the best movie of the three, Pudovkin exhibits his most refined use of montage yet. A sort of Russian Lawrence of Arabia (there is even a desert scene in which a point on the horizon reveals itself to be a rider on a horse as he advances towards the camera, predating about 35 years the similar iconic scene in David Lean's classic) we get a lot of prolonged scenes that show Mongolian customs, Buddhist religious ceremonies, and explosive battle sequences. In order to render them fully, Pudovkin shows us a succession of close-ups that convey the atmosphere of each scene as experienced by the protagonists. He calls on all our senses. We see the faces of the people present, their clothes, sources of noise or music, fire, decors, the list goes on and on.

These signifiers are clearly meant for the audience. Pudovkin doesn't render one protagonist's point of view but gives us a god-like overview slowly revealed through intricate montage. With each new bit of visual information, our understanding of the scene is enhanced, altered, completed. The qualitative bound occurs in the audience's mind when the full extent of a scene is realized. Some associative montage is to be found in Storm Over Asia as well, but these sequences are stylistic flourishes and not a necessity to convey a certain plot point. In that regard, Pudovkin is decidedly uneisensteinian, so to speak.

Both are interested in awakening a certain state of consciousness in the audience. Both use montage to do so. But where Eisenstein combines point A with point B to create a heightened point C, Pudovkin slowly pushes his audience towards the realization of what point A, B and C are in the first place. It is also interesting to consider how chronologic narration is employed to wholly different ends. It's not like Pudovkin is less of a realist than Eisenstein. But where the director of Battleship Potemkin uses linear narration to show progress and consequences, Pudovkin combines disjointed elements to produce new meaning that, in turn, advances the story.