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Film Technique and Film Acting: The Cinema Writings of V.I. Pudovkin
This vintage book contains two pioneering volumes on the subject of film making by V.I. Pudovkin. Considered two of the most valuable manuals of the practice and theory of film making ever written, these texts will prove invaluable for the student or film enthusiast, and are not to be missed by discerning collectors of such literature. The chapters of this volume 'The Film Scenario and Its Theory', 'Film Director and Film Material', 'Types Instead of Actors', 'Close-Ups in Time', 'Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film', 'Rhythmic Problems in my First Sound Film', 'Notes and Appendices', 'Film Acting', et cetera. Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin (1893 – 1953) was a Russian film director, screenwriter, and actor, famous for developing influential theories of montage. This volume is being republished now complete with a new prefatory biography of the author.
399 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1960
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756 people want to read
About the author
Vsevolod Pudovkin
22 books10 followersVsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin (Всеволод Илларионович Пудовкин) was a film director, screenwriter, and actor, who is known for his theories about film montage.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 19, 2018
Throughout the decades of filmmaking, this novel remains relevant. Despite being published in 1949,and though the technologies and some fundamental practices have since been developed it captures the soul of film as an art and medium. Though it is important to study from contemporary examples, it is also important to draw back to the techniques that were developed by the Soviets nearing a century ago, being that this was written by a Soviet filmmaker, and translated into English. Essentially, it is a foundation to cinematic language. It has a broad vocabulary, though everything is thoroughly explained and elaborated upon. It was incredibly thought provoking. I found myself making notes, marking up all the pages in black ink. The elements were explained in such a way that allowed the reader to come to their own conclusions, while still providing a well defined framework of ideas.
There’s definitely a curve in reading this book. The first chapter is rather difficult to get through, especially if one isn’t accustomed to reading something so dry, but as one pursues the work, the stiff demeanor becomes necessary for the purposes of the book. The goal is for the reader to come out a better filmmaker, and it achieves this.
I also loved how it drew from real examples and explains the “why” to each technique. If there was something that felt unclear, the example would really draw it out. Although I had never heard of any of the films that were used in the examples, they were still very helpful. When the importance of the editing process was described, Pudovkin explained his experience with creating an explosion for one of his films. Though a lot of money was spent on creating real explosions, they ended up using a flamethrower to simulate the visual. This simple example highlighted the topic, was engaging, and thought provoking.
I really applaud the book’s ability to deconstruct the film process. While one is watching a film, it’s generally more of an experience, but once you go beyond the story, the visual, and the secondary experience, you can begin to understand film and become a better filmmaker. It also addresses the fact that every film advances filmmaking. For any given film, constricted by the budget, there may be new technologies created to solve a contextual issue, that then goes forth to advance the entire industry, art, and medium.
Reading this book will only make one a better filmmaker, or at least a more informed and thoughtful consumer, so I’d recommend this book to anyone who would like to achieve this. If you enjoyed Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema?, The Film Sense, or Einstein’s Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, you would enjoy this novel. In addition, if you are a fan of any of Stanley Kubrick's films including The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and many others, you would have a lot to gain from reading this book. It was cherished by Kubrick throughout all of his years of filmmaking. He owned multiple copies, because he made so many annotations. It’s truly a wonderful book, and many beautiful films of the world have stemmed from it.
July 6, 2020
Note-form epiphanies from the modernist text:
- The role of the scenarist to select the most clear and vivid form of plastic expression out of many possibilities.
- The importance of the depth of the motif instrumental in the film impression as a whole.
- Identifying key-stones in a sequence (plastic material).
- Formulating theme with vivid aesthetics such as adding agency to a prop.
- Intensity of climax as the culmination of constructive editing (rhythmic significance).
- Semiotic subtext of a title acts as plastic material.
- Lens of the camera replaces the eye of the spectator and editing acts as a guidance of thoughts.
- Relational editing - contrast, parallelism, symbolism, simultaneity, leit-motif (reiteration of theme).
- Film goes beyond being a substitute of the stage thanks to editing, mise-en-scene and cinematography - manipulation of temporal and spatial dynamics is a key variable.
- The creative geography through illusions of continuity (Kuleshov effect) - real/actual/filmic.
- Goal of filmmaking - vivid, deeper, sharper elucidations.
- The semantic logic of the sequence of film events (pre-, production, post-) - what correlations and organisation should the director form?
- The importance of maintaining a consistent aesthetic throughout a film aids the coherence of character and narrative arcs - it gives the film "plastic shape".
- Film is the energy between the storm of the human heart and the storm in the frenzy of nature
- Micro/macro rhythm in a film can be divided by action, incidents, scenes, sequences, acts, arcs.
- The selection of rhythmic elements in a sequence must consider succession of whole narrative.
- The conditionality of film - make-up can create filmic representation beyond the real - actors create vividly expressive externalities conforming to the requirements made by the scenario.
- The work of a person being photographed must be strictly subject to a whole series of conditions by the film.
- The organic connection between disintegrated parts of acting and filmic representation must take place in the co-ordination of shots to create coherent arcs.
- The actor's details - fingers, eyebrows, eyelashes - everything must be calculated by the director but without being mechanical or dictatorial in instruction.
- The ensemble - the relationship between the work of separate characters.
- The gesture-movement of the actor - plastic material for semantic development.
- The performance of an actor linked with an object - powerful method of film construction.
- Dialogue - axioms as a leit-motif.
- Enclosing of the rectangular space of the screen - creative limitation.
- Film lighting does not simply serve to develop the forms but to make them visible - composition of light can eliminate and emphasise - it is an expressive art.
- Composition of camera movement - expressive framing, 45 degrees (view-angle of the lens) - real space and optical space apprehended - narrowing of the view-field as creative limitation.
- Limited depth-of-field - Battleship Potemkin manipulated this masterfully.
- The viewpoint of the camera is scarcely ever the exact viewpoint of the ordinary spectator.
- One must be careful to make sure the background does not steal attention from the actor's performance, unless for the purpose of the film's plastic material.
- Striving for exactitude must govern the director and cameraman not only in scene-construction, but in selection of location parts where space on screen is to be constructed - editing (assemblage) creates an additional variable in the film's spatial and temporal composition - light is that which finally creates the form transferred to the screen - final piece: film-art.
- Montage - constructive editing - requisite order of shots and rhythmic construction condensing multiple images for plastic material - frequent changes of shot achieves a richness of visual form.
- When the grammar of film language is vividly expressed, it achieves the power of the language of literature.
- Asynchronism as a principle - experimental sound for semantic effect - subverting naturalism in favour of abstract expressionism.
- Griffiths' use of close-up - plastic material for dramatic punctuation within rhythmical composition.
- Diegetic sounds - heavy hammers, natural sounds, pneumatic drills, fixing a rivet, sirens, crashing crescendo of falling chains - like notes of music - all create a vivid portrait of a dock-side.
- Dziga Vertov - "Kino-eye" - director should stage nothing - accumulate material - director's 'interference' is the choosing and eliminating of details - art of documentary.
- Wrestling with how to transcend theatricality in cinema - artist, work, spectator role.
- On stage and screen - the aim and object of the technique of the actor is his struggle for unity, for an organic wholeness in the lifelike image s/he creates.
- The discontinuity of the actor's work must never be ignored, but always treated as a difficulty to be overcome.
- Stanislavski: the hack actor disregards the living of the role and endeavours to work out once and for all a ready-made form of expression of feeling, a stage interpretation for every possible role and possible tendency in art. The actor must 'live the role' to actualise 'method' - mastering verisimilitude.
- That which on the stage can only be narrated, on the screen can be directly represented.
- Cinema can transcend literature in its exceptional power of impression.
- The contradiction between the personality of the actor and their striving in the process of acting to become a linked part of the whole circumstances of a realistic film, is a contradiction general to all arts.
- Round-table conferences between cast and crew as pivotal.
- The editing of separate camera angles in the cinema is the more vivid and expressive equivalent of the technique that obliges a stage actor who has inwardly absorbed his acting image to 'theatricalise' its outer form.
- The possibility for the director to make the actor believe in him not merely as a theoretician, as a thinker and mentor, but also as a directly affected, either admiring or disappointed spectator.
- Editing should be precious to the actor, as shaping their performance (dramatis personae) into the ensemble, and they should be eager/anxious for its success and the final linkage of every element of their work coherently and seamlessly (rhythmic and thematic construction) into the whole.
- Cinematisation of performance - Intonation/elocution/make-up/gesture, dual rhythm of sound/image, realism, dialogue, dis/continuity, contradictions of performance/personality, theatricality, naturalism, method, creative collective.
- The role of the scenarist to select the most clear and vivid form of plastic expression out of many possibilities.
- The importance of the depth of the motif instrumental in the film impression as a whole.
- Identifying key-stones in a sequence (plastic material).
- Formulating theme with vivid aesthetics such as adding agency to a prop.
- Intensity of climax as the culmination of constructive editing (rhythmic significance).
- Semiotic subtext of a title acts as plastic material.
- Lens of the camera replaces the eye of the spectator and editing acts as a guidance of thoughts.
- Relational editing - contrast, parallelism, symbolism, simultaneity, leit-motif (reiteration of theme).
- Film goes beyond being a substitute of the stage thanks to editing, mise-en-scene and cinematography - manipulation of temporal and spatial dynamics is a key variable.
- The creative geography through illusions of continuity (Kuleshov effect) - real/actual/filmic.
- Goal of filmmaking - vivid, deeper, sharper elucidations.
- The semantic logic of the sequence of film events (pre-, production, post-) - what correlations and organisation should the director form?
- The importance of maintaining a consistent aesthetic throughout a film aids the coherence of character and narrative arcs - it gives the film "plastic shape".
- Film is the energy between the storm of the human heart and the storm in the frenzy of nature
- Micro/macro rhythm in a film can be divided by action, incidents, scenes, sequences, acts, arcs.
- The selection of rhythmic elements in a sequence must consider succession of whole narrative.
- The conditionality of film - make-up can create filmic representation beyond the real - actors create vividly expressive externalities conforming to the requirements made by the scenario.
- The work of a person being photographed must be strictly subject to a whole series of conditions by the film.
- The organic connection between disintegrated parts of acting and filmic representation must take place in the co-ordination of shots to create coherent arcs.
- The actor's details - fingers, eyebrows, eyelashes - everything must be calculated by the director but without being mechanical or dictatorial in instruction.
- The ensemble - the relationship between the work of separate characters.
- The gesture-movement of the actor - plastic material for semantic development.
- The performance of an actor linked with an object - powerful method of film construction.
- Dialogue - axioms as a leit-motif.
- Enclosing of the rectangular space of the screen - creative limitation.
- Film lighting does not simply serve to develop the forms but to make them visible - composition of light can eliminate and emphasise - it is an expressive art.
- Composition of camera movement - expressive framing, 45 degrees (view-angle of the lens) - real space and optical space apprehended - narrowing of the view-field as creative limitation.
- Limited depth-of-field - Battleship Potemkin manipulated this masterfully.
- The viewpoint of the camera is scarcely ever the exact viewpoint of the ordinary spectator.
- One must be careful to make sure the background does not steal attention from the actor's performance, unless for the purpose of the film's plastic material.
- Striving for exactitude must govern the director and cameraman not only in scene-construction, but in selection of location parts where space on screen is to be constructed - editing (assemblage) creates an additional variable in the film's spatial and temporal composition - light is that which finally creates the form transferred to the screen - final piece: film-art.
- Montage - constructive editing - requisite order of shots and rhythmic construction condensing multiple images for plastic material - frequent changes of shot achieves a richness of visual form.
- When the grammar of film language is vividly expressed, it achieves the power of the language of literature.
- Asynchronism as a principle - experimental sound for semantic effect - subverting naturalism in favour of abstract expressionism.
- Griffiths' use of close-up - plastic material for dramatic punctuation within rhythmical composition.
- Diegetic sounds - heavy hammers, natural sounds, pneumatic drills, fixing a rivet, sirens, crashing crescendo of falling chains - like notes of music - all create a vivid portrait of a dock-side.
- Dziga Vertov - "Kino-eye" - director should stage nothing - accumulate material - director's 'interference' is the choosing and eliminating of details - art of documentary.
- Wrestling with how to transcend theatricality in cinema - artist, work, spectator role.
- On stage and screen - the aim and object of the technique of the actor is his struggle for unity, for an organic wholeness in the lifelike image s/he creates.
- The discontinuity of the actor's work must never be ignored, but always treated as a difficulty to be overcome.
- Stanislavski: the hack actor disregards the living of the role and endeavours to work out once and for all a ready-made form of expression of feeling, a stage interpretation for every possible role and possible tendency in art. The actor must 'live the role' to actualise 'method' - mastering verisimilitude.
- That which on the stage can only be narrated, on the screen can be directly represented.
- Cinema can transcend literature in its exceptional power of impression.
- The contradiction between the personality of the actor and their striving in the process of acting to become a linked part of the whole circumstances of a realistic film, is a contradiction general to all arts.
- Round-table conferences between cast and crew as pivotal.
- The editing of separate camera angles in the cinema is the more vivid and expressive equivalent of the technique that obliges a stage actor who has inwardly absorbed his acting image to 'theatricalise' its outer form.
- The possibility for the director to make the actor believe in him not merely as a theoretician, as a thinker and mentor, but also as a directly affected, either admiring or disappointed spectator.
- Editing should be precious to the actor, as shaping their performance (dramatis personae) into the ensemble, and they should be eager/anxious for its success and the final linkage of every element of their work coherently and seamlessly (rhythmic and thematic construction) into the whole.
- Cinematisation of performance - Intonation/elocution/make-up/gesture, dual rhythm of sound/image, realism, dialogue, dis/continuity, contradictions of performance/personality, theatricality, naturalism, method, creative collective.
December 14, 2025
Incredibly, this is still relevant despite a century of developments in the medium.
I'd say Film Technique is more essential than Film Acting, though the latter is still very much accurate, and surprisingly espoused a progressive idea of performance that cinema wouldn't catch up to for at least two decades after he wrote it. I like that his emphasis is on the lived inner reality, and that he draws from Stanislavski extensively, even suggesting that the latter's ideas were best suited to the cinema rather than the theatre (a prophecy that has proved true in retrospect).
I think the idea of having an actors' script as distinct from the film's script is a little used, but very fruitful idea in that it allows the actor to fully live the scene from which you take the relevant parts for your film. In some ways, directors do this when they ask the actors to improvise their way into the lines, but it's worth considering when you're trying to get a specific slice of an emotionally complex moment.
I love what he says about film needing to dramatize "plastic (externally expressive images)" as opposed to literature, and that most screenwriters mistakenly think in terms of words, not shots. "Meetings" and "talkings," which, while problematic for the silent film are still an issue with sound, as most of our cinema has devolved into actors talking rather than doing.
Pudovkin's emphasis remains one of the most important any book on cinema can make, and one that gets lost all too often, with things only having gotten worse in the hundred years since he wrote this book and our complacent reliance on "words, not shots." What we need is an enormous reservoir of examples to draw from to drill this into filmmakers' brains: the novel and the play are the mediums for language, cinema is a different medium with its own unique strengths.
I'd say Film Technique is more essential than Film Acting, though the latter is still very much accurate, and surprisingly espoused a progressive idea of performance that cinema wouldn't catch up to for at least two decades after he wrote it. I like that his emphasis is on the lived inner reality, and that he draws from Stanislavski extensively, even suggesting that the latter's ideas were best suited to the cinema rather than the theatre (a prophecy that has proved true in retrospect).
I think the idea of having an actors' script as distinct from the film's script is a little used, but very fruitful idea in that it allows the actor to fully live the scene from which you take the relevant parts for your film. In some ways, directors do this when they ask the actors to improvise their way into the lines, but it's worth considering when you're trying to get a specific slice of an emotionally complex moment.
I love what he says about film needing to dramatize "plastic (externally expressive images)" as opposed to literature, and that most screenwriters mistakenly think in terms of words, not shots. "Meetings" and "talkings," which, while problematic for the silent film are still an issue with sound, as most of our cinema has devolved into actors talking rather than doing.
Pudovkin's emphasis remains one of the most important any book on cinema can make, and one that gets lost all too often, with things only having gotten worse in the hundred years since he wrote this book and our complacent reliance on "words, not shots." What we need is an enormous reservoir of examples to draw from to drill this into filmmakers' brains: the novel and the play are the mediums for language, cinema is a different medium with its own unique strengths.
February 14, 2025
En la primera parte del libro Pudovkin desglosa varios conceptos como el material plástico, las formas de rodaje, los tipos de montaje, análisis de las películas de Griffith que varios conceptos que a un siglo de distancia lo sorprendente es lo poco que ha mutado la industria, es interesante su contraposición con el montaje de Eisenstein aunque la claridad de su dicotomía radica en ver las películas, desglosa principalmente lo que ahora es conocido por el método de representación institucional, el montaje invisible adoptado por la industria Hollywoodense.
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Sin embargo en la segunda parte es donde se pone más interesante, Pudovkin aborda problemáticas como el filmar la acción completa, la actuación vivencial y la discriminación al actor al no mostrarle la película ni clarificar el montaje, como ex-actor de Meyerhold cuestiona la biomecánica aplicada al cine, defendiendo que es inútil pues pues para pasar por esas imágenes no se.puede llevar al cuerpo a un encadenamiento de acciones mecánico- orgánicas, no da respuestas pero plantea que la solución seguramente está en el método de Stanislavski, es interesante pues parece una biblia aplicada con la cual la industria poco a poca ha caído en picado explotadora.
-
Sin embargo en la segunda parte es donde se pone más interesante, Pudovkin aborda problemáticas como el filmar la acción completa, la actuación vivencial y la discriminación al actor al no mostrarle la película ni clarificar el montaje, como ex-actor de Meyerhold cuestiona la biomecánica aplicada al cine, defendiendo que es inútil pues pues para pasar por esas imágenes no se.puede llevar al cuerpo a un encadenamiento de acciones mecánico- orgánicas, no da respuestas pero plantea que la solución seguramente está en el método de Stanislavski, es interesante pues parece una biblia aplicada con la cual la industria poco a poca ha caído en picado explotadora.
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February 5, 2021Soviet Russian Film Director Vsevolod Pudovkin's "Film Technique and Film Acting" is one of the best books of 20. Century - written by a film director. Pudovkin writes his book with his knowledge, his experiences and his thoughts which were sourced from his work in his films. Pudovkin is writing the main concepts, principles and processes of film-making. Pudovkin describes the relations between "the filmic time" and "the filmic space", Pudovkin explains what are the elements of film-making, and Pudovkin draws the general view of film-making in his age. Pudovkin's "Film Technique and Film Acting" is the book of changes in film-making, Pudovkin writes for his students, Pudovkin's intention with his book is to produce "the knowledge of a new cinema" in the world.
March 29, 2017
Surprisingly thorough and relatively current description of all aspects of making a film. (Pudovkin was a contemporary of Eisenstein thought to produce works of a similar quality.) It was apparently the "film school" of its time and was the only book on film creation available for decades. While still interesting, probably current directors will move beyond it very quickly, and it will be of mainly historical interest.
There are so many versions and so many dates that I'm unclear on exactly what was first published where, and on how much of the book is due to Pudovkin, to book editors, or to translators. Despite not being able to pin down a "definitive version" to my satisfaction, it is generally clear the book is pre-WWII and the content is largely due to Pudovkin himself.
Most of what he says is still relevant, the most glaring exception being comments about where and how to break between "reels". With two-projector projection, continuous projection, or digital projection these comments are not just irrelevant but flat wrong. They make sense only in their original context - projection by only one projector, so audiences saw "reel boundaries" as very short breaks, something like the breaks between movements of a symphony. (Some -not all- of Pudovkin's discussions of reel breaks were "updated" by a translator who essentially rewrote whole pages to make them more consistent with the current technology.)
The principal problem Pudovkin wrestles with (and never solves in a fully satisfactory way) is that actors can only really "get into character" if scenes are long and continuous and projected pretty much in the order filmed, _but_ films are created by editing together many many very short segments with no regard at all for the order they were filmed in. Some possible solutions he toys with: having the actors _in_ the editing room actively contributing ideas to the editing, and having the director describe to the actors even before shooting begins roughly what the final editing is going to look like. (I suspect he would be astounded by the reality today, which is that good film actors are _much_much_ better than anything he ever experienced, and are able to create fragments convincingly.)
There are so many versions and so many dates that I'm unclear on exactly what was first published where, and on how much of the book is due to Pudovkin, to book editors, or to translators. Despite not being able to pin down a "definitive version" to my satisfaction, it is generally clear the book is pre-WWII and the content is largely due to Pudovkin himself.
Most of what he says is still relevant, the most glaring exception being comments about where and how to break between "reels". With two-projector projection, continuous projection, or digital projection these comments are not just irrelevant but flat wrong. They make sense only in their original context - projection by only one projector, so audiences saw "reel boundaries" as very short breaks, something like the breaks between movements of a symphony. (Some -not all- of Pudovkin's discussions of reel breaks were "updated" by a translator who essentially rewrote whole pages to make them more consistent with the current technology.)
The principal problem Pudovkin wrestles with (and never solves in a fully satisfactory way) is that actors can only really "get into character" if scenes are long and continuous and projected pretty much in the order filmed, _but_ films are created by editing together many many very short segments with no regard at all for the order they were filmed in. Some possible solutions he toys with: having the actors _in_ the editing room actively contributing ideas to the editing, and having the director describe to the actors even before shooting begins roughly what the final editing is going to look like. (I suspect he would be astounded by the reality today, which is that good film actors are _much_much_ better than anything he ever experienced, and are able to create fragments convincingly.)
March 25, 2015
Probably one of the best books a film student can read, study, and inform his/her process. I was actually awarded a plaque in my honor in this book at the William T. Young Library at the University of Kentucky. Yes, this book is that important and not on many reading lists for students.
June 20, 2015
Muhtemelen şimdiye kadar yazılmış en iyi film tekniği kitabı. 1926'da yazılmış olması, bugün filmlerde gördüğümüz şeylerin %90'ının ta o zamanlar (sessiz sinema döneminde) keşfedildiğini ve 90 yıldır çok az 'yeni' şey yapıldığını da gösteriyor.
July 11, 2020
What drew me first to Pudovkin’s book is the fact that dir. stanley kubrick was frequently seen holding it. Upon reading it, I understood more about the art of cinema some things that are not talked enough. I highly recommend it from film students & cinephiles.
August 4, 2014
Delicious reading for anyone into film studies, wanting to know more about the vision and thought on film from one of the truest montage storytellers.
March 21, 2014
Great book
March 7, 2011
Read at ucla
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews