Pudovkin's Mechanics of the brain - continued...

Following this, Vsevolod Pudovkin explains his camera technique in the "Mechanics of the brain" as the result of dealing with Pavlov's reflexology: "I became aware of the fact that the photographical exactness in fixing a movement allows one to catch this much more accurately than with a simple observation of the eye. I proposed [...] to fix the narrowing of the pupil with the camera as a precise unconditioned reflex of the eye [...]". The proposal was accepted by Pudovkins scientific consultants at the laboratory. The result was a camera-optic, which constantly opens and closes its aperture as a simulation of the human pupil, at one time narrow and focussed, and at another wide and giving a blurred image. But Pudovkin's idea was not only to imitate the functioning of the human eye and to transport physiological knowledge ingeniously with his medium film. In his first press talk on the "Mechanics of the brain" he promised "to develop the «doctrine of the reflexes' by film, [...], to record moments of scientifically valuable experiments, which can only be fixed with the help of the objective of a film-camera". The functions Pudovkin postulated for his apparatus go far beyond the problem of documentation. He considered film technique not only to be a condition for mediating experimental knowledge, but as a procedure amenable to the scientific goal of investigating experimentally gained knowledge.

The operation of narrow and wide lenses through the whole film is not at all coherent, which means it is not exclusively dependent upon the specific physical conditions of the perceptual space. Instead the camera objective is used as a formal vehicle which arranges the "Mechanics of the brain" into four scenes: Nature, laboratory, hospital and filmstudio, each corresponding to the places where Pudovkin was shooting.
The movie starts - in nature - with everyday leisure activities of the soviet citizen: swinging, swimming, horseback riding. Shots of zoo animals lead over to Pavlov's laboratory and to central experiments in the history of physiology - with frogs, dogs and monkeys. The third part of the "Mechanics of the brain" returns from the animal kingdom to the human world, to the hospital: the birth of a new human being is shown and the demonstration of all of his natural reflexes finally merges into the exemplary conditioned soviet child, whose skills and inspiration grow constantly from his first to his twelfth year. But there is one striking difference: this ideal child grows neither in the physiological laboratory nor in social reality, but in the film studio of the producer.