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FILMS OF THE QUARTER
DEVELOPING SOUND
FORSYTH HARDY
A new consciousness of sound as a means of enriching the expressiveness of the film is the most interesting development of a quarter singularly unproductive of notable pictures. Ever since Jolson broke the sacred silence, of course, there has been a realization, in theory, that sound ought to have more than a merely naturalistic purpose in cinema; and a few experimentalists have made fleeting attempts to do unconventional things with the sound-strip. There is no need to detail again the experiments of Clair, Hitchcock, Lubitsch and the others. Their isolated outbursts of imaginative experimentation with sound have already been analysed with so much reverence that they are almost elevated into a doctrine, instead of being accepted as haphazard gropings towards the light. The limit in the expressive use of sound was not reached with Clair's cine-opera or the soliloquy before the shaving mirror in Murder. These and such other celebrated experiments as the choral accompaniment to the unemployment sequence in Three Cornered Moon and the police-car call prologue to Beast of the City ought to have been regarded as minor discoveries in an unknown land. But instead of being the starting points for further exploration, they have been too often estimated as final achievements — devices to be copied perhaps, but not ideas to be understood and developed. Thus there has been no general march forward : the pioneers have faltered and for the most part fallen back. The result is that we are not now much nearer to a fully expressive use of sound than we were in the days of The Great Gabbo. We have made sound more distinct, but not more dramatic.
There has been some evidence this quarter however, of a change in attitude. Grierson and Cavalcanti at the G.P.O. have been making a series of experiments in the art and practice of sound-which are in advance of anything yet attempted and which have a real significance for the development of film. The tentative departures from convention in 6.30 Collection and Cable Ship, which Grierson has already described in these pages, have been followed by more exciting developments in Granton Trawler and Weather Forecast, while Pett and Pott represents a complete departure from the traditional form of the talking picture and the emergence of a sound film with an aural expressiveness related to, but not merely dependant on, the
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