“Living very well”: Emotional scenario by A.G. Rzheshevskii as directed by V.I. Pudovkin

Abstract

The complexity of staging the emotional scenario, coinciding in its appearance with the crisis of montage in silent cinema, inclines fi directors to creative experiments. The fi “The Simple Case” was based on Rzheshevskii’s script and went down in history as a creative failure of Pudovkin and his plan was left largely unrealized for diff reasons. The refl on principles of the emotional scenario took place during Pudovkin’s work on that fi and it is being studied in the article following the text of the surviving shooting script. The author considers that Pudovkin’s approaches were aimed at the plot episodization which helped to increase the signifi of the particular character. Working on the “symbolic prologue” of the shooting script Pudovkin was looking for new ways to represent the man on the screen, involving synthetic principle of depicting. The character becomes not a derivative of the plot structure but a form of the reality presence, created through the diff emotional stimuli: visual, colorful, vocal, musical. The article considers his work in relation to the ideas about synthetic artwork, which became relevant in the 1930s as a potential alternative to analytical experiments of avant-garde and to the doctrine of socialist realism.