Viktor Shklovsky: Their Moment

"The Basic Laws of the Shot"

The significance of the subject-matter will be discussed here in its narrow sense.  Most of the content of this chapter is devoted to the absence of an underlying shift in film.

In literature there is the word; between word and object lies denomination.  Film starts with photography, where the artistic event is absent.  Although Eisenstein refers to this as a set factory (correlating to things visualized by the artist), as of yet a “literature” in film--that is, a framework of assumptions that predetermine the nature of our perceptions—is missing.

The fact that a given actor -- Jacky Coogan, for example -- can play the same role --a boy lost and found by his parents – over and over again and never actually play any other type of role at all means that any qualitative difference sensed by the audience is not to be found in the role itself.

Here is the question: What is the molecule of film, the molecule of its artistic sensibility, the scaffolding of sensation in film?

Here is the question: What is the molecule of film, the molecule of its artistic sensibility, the scaffolding of sensation in film?

(Viktor Shklovsky, Ikh nastoiashchee, M: 1927. Translated from the Russian by Adam Siegel)