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

That Pudovkin intentionally feedbacks each place of action by the focus of his camera is almost obvious. There was nothing in these one and a half years of shooting to be left to pure chance. The director "has to make accidental material useful [...], then the will of the director transforms reality [...]". An understanding which Pudovkin came up with while filming the see lions in the zoo.

Linking nature to hospital and laboratory to studio is Pudovkin's comment on their status in the process of research and cognition. This becomes easier to understand when considering such basic texts of experimental physiology like Claude Bernard's "Introduction into the study of experimental medicine" and its theoretical pillars - observation, chance, repetition, verification, doubt, idea. Bernard's experimental praxis became familiar to Russian physiology in the 1860s via Ivan Secenov, who studied physiology in French and German Laboratories and whose publication in the West was once even sponsored by Claude Bernard. Sechenov is known as the "Father of Russian Physiology" and the forerunner of Ivan Pavlov. With his dissertation work "Reflexes of the brain" (1863) he drew a crucial thematical line between the french scholar and the "Mechanics of the brain".
In the end, Pudovkin, through the process of using his apparatus on this subject matter, expanded the discussion of experimental physiology on objectivity in nature, hospital, laboratory to the objective possibilities of his camera. He deals with the reality of his medium, the film studio and its technical conditions - camera and montage. It seems that he gave a methodological answer to the main question of the first "Allrussian Conference for Initiatives of Scientific Labor Organization and Management" in 1921: "Which stimuli have to be used, which interests have to be roused in the worker, to get out of him [...] the maximum power in the best working conditions?" Pudovkin's answer would be not to "make him watch the recorded object" but to "force him to understand the viewed".