Moving Images, Understanding Media

62 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding Media

through provocative cutting that strived for dynamic rhythms, striking

juxtapositions of shots, and forceful imagery that ranged from the poetic to

a rapid collision of visual cues. In particular, these fi lmmakers focused on

the aspects of motion pictures that were unique to the cinema and worked

on the development of means of expression—a language, in essence—that

was particular to fi lmmaking. A vital passion for the expressive powers of

the cinema is seen in the works and writing of such fi lmmakers as Eisenstein,

Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Vertov in the Soviet Union, and Delluc, Vigo,

and Gance in France.

Th rough editing, fi lmmakers were expanding the range of possibilities for

movies to tell stories and express visual ideas and imagery in ways distinctly

suited to motion pictures. Th e sense of discovery, invention, and teamwork

is refl ected in comments by many fi lmmakers of this period. Talking about

her work with editor and director Dorothy Arzner, screenwriter and actress

Bebe Daniels commented that assisting in the editing process “taught me

more about writing for motion pictures than anything in the world could

have taught me.” Dorothy Arzner, who worked as an editor in the 1920s

before moving on to become a director, explained:

I cut something like thirty-two pictures in one year at Realart...

I also supervised the negative cutting and trained the girls who cut

negative and spliced fi lm by hand. I set up the fi lm fi ling system and

supervised the art work on the titles. I worked most of the day and

night and loved it.

Figure 2-26 Director

Dorothy Arzner leaning

on a tripod as she holds

a combination viewfi nder

and megaphone while

cinematographer Alfred

Gilks stands behind the

camera for Get Your Man

from 1927. (Courtesy Hulton

Archive/Getty Images)

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