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invention of sound-recording" apparatus has more than doubled that potentiality. For it means the creation, not merely of a realistic adjunct, adding the sensation of hearing to the sensation of sight as a synchronized reproduction of reality ; but actually the creation of another dimension in the art of the cinema. The independence of the sound strip, both in recording and montage, means that sight and sound can be combined in a counterpoint which is entirely independent of realism. Rudolf Arnheim expresses the idea neatly : " The principle of sound film demands that picture and sound shall not do the same work simultaneously but that they shall share the work — the sound to convey one thing and the picture another, and the two jointly to give a complete impression."*
Arnheim, in his interesting chapter on " Asynchronism," discusses some of the possibilities and dangers of this new technical device. A certain welding-together of incongruities only ends, as he points out, in a chaotic pseudo unity. There must be a certain notional or imaginative unity behind every combination — a simple illustration would be the combination of the sound of rhythmic machinery and a marching army ; the machinery might alternate with, or even be superimposed upon, the sound of a marching song. But obviously such combinations are going to call for great aesthetic tact — indeed, for a new type of film artist, as much musician as producer, who builds up symphonies of sight and sound.
In one of those few laboratories of experiment which exist in the world — the G.P.O. Film Unit, which has succeeded to the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit — John Grierson and Alberto Cavalcanti have been carrying out experiments in this direction which are of the greatest interest. They are limited by the kind of film they are required to produce — documentary and propaganda — but even within these limits they have shown how usefully this counterpoint of sight and sound can be developed. Perhaps the most ambitious of these experiments is a comedy, Pett and Pott, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. Here a large variety of asynchronous devices are used to produce special effects. In addition to what might be regarded as the normal device — an accompaniment of music which induces a sympathetic mood, there are suggestions of a more complicated symphonic construction; the interweaving of direct naturalistic sounds with the formal musical rhythm — at one point, for example, the meaningless clatter of a rough-and-tumble fight is reinforced by the strains of a drum-and-fife band, and the fight proceeds to the rhythm of the music. More original is the formalized chorus used, for example, in a scene which depicts a suburban train, full of identical suburbanites reading identical evening papers. They begin to read the headings of the latest suburban sensation — a robbery * Film : London, Faber & Faber, 15s. 18