CAN MOVIES BE "PROFOUND " ?
have forgotten the prayer."
rrYou
don't have to pray," the hermit
replied, and sent him away. Striding over the waters, the old man
hurried after
his
boat.
Here depth
is
expressed without psychological complexity. Another
such surface symbol occurs in the story of the conversion of the
Indian saint, Rama Krishna. One day when he was still hardly more
than a boy, he saw a flock of white cranes flying over the fields of his
native village, high in the air, close to the blue heavens. He was so
affected by the sight that he fell into a dead faint. When he recovered
his senses, he was a changed man, awakened and converted.
Such depths are not closed to the film. The
gulls
and sailboats
that swarm around the mutinous cruiser in
Potemkin
have no less
symbolic power than the cranes in the story of Rama Krishna.
As
these little sailing craft, bringing gifts of bread and cigarettes to the
rebels in their helples,s ship, glide weightless over the wide dark waters
with billowing sails, white and innocent as the sea-gulls and the
woolly sheep
in
the sky, are they not a symbol and a promise of human
brotherhood?
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