1 See, for instance, Paul Rotha’s theoretical section in The Film Till Now. Cape, 1929.
2 See A Statement, signed by S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin and G. V. Alexandrov, fi rst published in Moscow in 1928. Film Form. Denis Dobson, 1951 .
would previously have been shot from a large number of set-ups, some of them with a panning or tracking camera, now had to be shot from one fi xed position. More important, the makers of the hundred per cent talkies failed to realise that conveying events through an unceasing and unselective fl ow of actual sound does not correspond to the mode in which real life is normally experienced.
Just as we did not dwell at any length on the earliest years of the silent cinema, so there is no need here to give detailed consideration to the fi rst days of the talkies: both were periods of instability and technical fum-bling which are now of little more than academic interest. Instead, we must attempt to use the experience of the last twenty years of sound fi lm-making to establish a consistent theory about how actual sound can or cannot be used to strengthen a fi lm’s total appeal.
In discussing the use of sound in the early talkies, Lindgren has said:
. . . the compensating gain from synchronism was negligible. A silent fi lm can show a dog barking; to add the sound of his bark is certainly a gain in realism, but it tells us nothing more than we knew before, it adds nothing to the expres-sive qualities of the image; it is still merely a dog barking. Even dialogue was often used to say in words what the fi lms were able to express as well by images alone. The picture of the angry father pointing his erring son to the door is made no more signifi cant if we add the words: “ Get out of here and never darken these doors again. ” The silent image, in such a case, may well be more, rather than less, impressive. 3
These remarks were written as a criticism of the thoughtless use of actual sound with all images, and as such one must agree with them. As a general indictment against the use of actual sound itself, they seem unneces-sarily emphatic.
Although it is true that both the silent and sound versions of the father evicting his son convey the same facts, to argue from this that one is more or less impressive than the other is to make a meaningless comparison.
Assuming the father is given a less outrageous line than Lindgren gives him, the fact that we hear him say something means that the scene becomes more realistic. The silent version, expressed through the father’s mime, may be equally “ impressive, ” but it will be so on a different plane of realism. If a comparison must be made, it will depend on the standard of direction and acting and the context of the scene within the fi lm. The fact that one uses sound and the other does not merely places the two scenes in two different artistic conventions, and there can be no question of relative merits.
The case of the barking dog could be equally misleading. Clearly, the sound of the bark gives us no fresh information, but that is by no means to say that “ it adds nothing to the expressive qualities of the image. ” Depending on the quality of the sound used and the general context of the bark within the rest of the sound-track, it could give the picture a variety of emotional meanings which were not necessarily inherent in the picture alone. (The example quoted from Odd Man Out on p. 219 is a case in point.) In both cases, the sound could not only strengthen the realism of the rendering but also sharpen the dramatic impressiveness.
Besides this, the use of actual sound has brought with it a more fundamental change in fi lm story-telling.
Using sound and dialogue in synchronisation with the picture has enabled directors to practise a much greater economy than was possible in the silent fi lm. The character of a place or a person can be conveyed more directly, because it comes to the spectator in terms more nearly akin to those of everyday life. A line of
3 The Art of the Film by Ernest Lindgren. Allen & Unwin, 1948, p. 99.
dialogue may convey an amount of information which the silent fi lm-maker could only express in a subtitle or through an awkward, visually self-explanatory scene. Inessentials can be conveyed economically through hints on the dialogue or sound-track. The director of a sound fi lm has greater freedom to distribute the dra-matic emphasis as he wishes, because he is not bound to spend time on dradra-matically ineffectual scenes which are nevertheless necessary to the sense of the story. Whereas Griffi th — in Birth of a Nation , for instance — often needed to open his fi lms with long, dramatically rather fl at scenes to set the situation, the director of a sound fi lm can establish the character of the players and the scene in a few well-chosen shots and lines of dialogue.
(This becomes especially apparent in scenes of transition: where the silent fi lm-maker normally used a subtitle and a long establishing scene when he took the story from one place to another, a simple hint in the dialogue can quite effortlessly accomplish a similar transition to-day.)
These , then, are the two main changes that sound has brought with it: a greater economy is story-telling means, which has enabled the narrative of sound fi lms to become more and more complex, and a high stan-dard of realistic presentation which has become the aim of the majority of fi lm-makers of the sound period.
Whereas the tendency in the best silent fi lms was towards perfecting a style which would affect audiences by various indirect suggestions peculiar to the medium — by over-expressive visual compositions, evocative cut-ting effects, symbolic devices and so on — the sound fi lm makes a more direct appeal, expressed more nearly in the terms of ordinary experience.
This fundamental change of approach becomes immediately obvious nowadays when one goes to see a silent fi lm. One is conscious with fi lms like Intolerance , Battleship Potemkin , Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — to take three widely different instances — that the directors have contrived visual effects which are somehow larger than life; they attempt to make an exaggerated appeal to the eyes in order to express themselves comprehensively on a single plane. One is conscious of an artistic convention which, being unable to use the element of sound, needs to enlarge and distort the visual plane of appeal. To react by saying that this very need for highly expressive images made silent fi lms superior to sound, or, conversely, to claim that inability to use sound reduced the silent cinema to a series of inadequate approximations, is to misunderstand the strength of either medium. Silent and sound fi lms operate on two different levels of realistic presentation: there can be no ques-tion of relative merits, only a recogniques-tion of differences.
The interrelation of sound and picture, the relative amount of attention each factor requires or should require from an audience — these are problems which can be discussed only in general terms. Films like Ford’s The Informer , de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves or some of Carn é ’s pre-war fi lms, all display an admirable econ-omy in the use of dialogue which has led to works of great distinction. But this does not in itself justify the conclusion that a sparing use of dialogue is necessarily an essential prerequisite of every good fi lm.
Any theory which rules out fi lms like The Little Foxes , Citizen Kane or the early Marx Brothers comedies must be suspect from the beginning. It is more relevant to stress that although these fi lms use dialogue to a considerable extent, they make their essential impression by the images: The Little Foxes and Citizen Kane are among the most visually interesting fi lms to have come from Hollywood; the visual contribution to his gags of Groucho Marx ’ eyebrows is incalculable, and Harpo never says a word. Making a quantita-tive estimate between the amount of visual and aural appeal can serve no useful purpose. It is not so much the quantitative balance between sound and picture as the insistence on a primarily visual emphasis which needs to be kept in mind.