What kept me going through all this, however, were the comments which clearly showed that there were people who minded about my work, and were actually waiting to see my films; only it was apparently in nobody's interests to further my contact with that section of the audience.

To be faithful to life, intrinsically truthful, a work has for me to be at once an exact factual account and a true communication of feelings.

Cinema should be a means of exploring the most complex problems of our time, as vital as those which for centuries have been the subject of literature, music and painting. It is only a question of searching, each time searching out afresh the path, the channel, to be followed by cinema. I am convinced that for any one of us our film-making will turn out to be a fruitless and hopeless affair if we fail to grasp precisely and unequivocally the specific character of cinema, and if we fail to find in ourselves our own key to it.

Working from my own—alas, quite useless—script, I did not feel at all that I was approaching an understanding of what is called cinema. Matters were made worse by the fact that all the time we were filming we were longing to make a full-length work—or, as we wrongly imagined, a 'real' film. In fact, making a short film is almost harder than making a full-length one: it demands an unerring sense of form. But in those days we were exercised above all by ambitious ideas of production and organisation, while the concept of the film as a work of art consistently eluded us. As a result we were incapable of taking advantage of our work on the short film in order to define our own aesthetic aims.

Only after Ivan did I know that I must work in cinema; up till then it had been such a closed world for me that I had no clear idea of the role for which I was being prepared by my teacher, Mikhail Ilych Romm.'6 It was like travelling along parallel lines which never touched or influenced each other. The future did not meet the present. It was not clear to me, at the deepest level, what my function was to be. I still could not see that goal which is reached only through struggle with oneself, and which signifies an attitude voiced, formulated for all time. That goal will remain for ever constant— though the tactics involved in its pursuit may change—for it consti- tutes a person's ethical function.