The Cine Technician (1935-1937)

52 The Journal of the Association of Cine-T echnicians Nov'cmber, 1935 helped us to laugh at his fears, but m talkies the noises he made — the grunts and puffings of a man desperately engaged in physical effort, the squeals and groans of a man in the grip of mortal terror — are such as we associate in our subconscious with powerful discomfort. Such sounds were far too powerful in their effect to allow us to draw from the scene a comic impression. Disney and Clair were the pioneers of the solution. Clair when he produced a comic effect by matching a scene of men trying to arrest the hero escaping with the treasure against the sounds of a rugger match ; Disney before him when he showed that, while it is not funny to strike a drum and hear the noise of a drum, or to strike a lion's stomach and hear the noise of striking a lion's stomach, it is funny to strike a lion's stomach and hear the noise of a drum. Nowadays almost no one would make that old mistake of Harold Lloyd's. Almost everyone is sensible enough now to choose his comedy noises quite as arbitrarily for comic effect as he would choose for comic effect the incidents of his script. This is, of course, not because •people read the theoretical writings of myself (et al), but from a gradual unconscious absorption of the results of trial and error. There is one disadvantage, however, of "unconscious absorption." People are apt to fail to recognise analogous cases. And what they would not do in comedy, still persists in straight work. On "39 Steps" for example, when the waterfall scene was first recorded for me, the rush of water was raised and lowered in exact correspondence with the distance of the causal source of noise in the various shots. The odious result sounded like nothing in human experience but the turningon and turning-off of taps. Only concrete experiment persuaded those concerned {a) that a loud waterfall noise was in any case important on the background of hstening pursuers, however distant from the waterfall, to express their confusion and inability to hear the pursued ; (b) that in any case, and even more importantly, a continuous roar was the only sound corresponding in human experience to the sound heard in the presence of a waterfall and therefore would be the only convincing one whatever the image cutting. An error of this kind indicates the importance of theory for every technician, of whatever grade, working on the creative side. 4. Limitation of Universality. I do not mean to discuss here the polyglot difficulty. Neither the financial question whether increased domination of the home market through talkies compensates pecimiarily for diminution of foreign markets through talkies (interesting how the arrival of talkies and this consequence happened to coincide with the Fascist fashion for economic self-sufficiency as a doctrine). Nor the cultural consequence of the loss of interchange among national populations speaking different languages of different samples of their racial types acting similar stories, which freely took place in silent days (this consequence of talkies is perhaps the greatest cultural retrogression in the whole history of human communication ; translation of Hterature, occasional vi.sits of speciality drama groups to capital cities, neither of these ever approached the old silent film as a factor of international communication transcending frontiers and language barriers). T refer precisely to reduction of universality of appeal of a talkie even to its own language audience." This we all fore.saw. It lias been fully realised and, I believe, is the strongest factor holding the talkies below the emotional impression level achieved by silents. It is clear that the more general the communication, the wider the audience to which it will apply. This principle has its particular application in films, where the major part of each spectator's reaction to a film lies in the possibility of his or her identification with at least one of the characters. Each of us identifies ourselves in our unconscious with any personable young man or woman to our taste and vicariously enjoys his or her adventure, success, and final congress with a member of the opposite sex. The field of such types with whom such subconscious identification is possible is tremendously limited by the powerful particiilarisation resulting from speech. This is true both , in respect to actors (it is doubtful whether any talkie stars have quite the fanatic devotion earned by those of silent days : "The World's Sweetheart," Valentino Club, etc.), and to the characters they play. The sense of unreality roused in an English audience by hearing an English crusader at the siege of Acre say : "It's kinda rough on you, lady," would be nearly as strong if he uttered the full-blooded Cockney speech of to-day. Archaic speech would be as a foreign language to us, and to interpret passably to the modern audience such a "costume" p^eriod we have to take refuge in a colourless, unidiomatic, neutral phraseology that was never alive at any time. Not only is a whole abundance of material, technically quite feasible, thus made perilously unconvincing to the talking picture, but where it is used it becomes less convincing in effect. No speaking characters, with the sharp individual reactions their speech-characterised personalities would arouse in us, could attain in a war film the universal force of the three soldiers in "The Big Parade." We know we are not John Gilbert when he speaks, but when he was silent, he or anyone else, we might have suffered in the front line in his skin. Into the field of material unconvincing in speech falls any sort of fantasy (including the daredevilry of an acrobat hero (Fairbanks) or cowboy stuff and including slapstick). Consider in this connection also the enormous power of the musical accompaniment of silent films in suspending unbelief. Music, or any other rhythmic noise, by hypnosis helps to reduce audience resistance to the "truth" of play-acting. (Hence the popularity of train scenes in modern adventure films.) Recall the excitement and rise in tension in the film of "Treasure Island" in the silent (musically-accompanied) sequence where the boy rowed to the ship. Cowboys, or Fairbanks super-acrobatics, were just as incredible and silly in silent films, but the music made us forget it. Cowboy films are good still, for they retain a rhythm in the gallop of hoofs, but the Fairbanks type is dead. It is interesting too, in questionnaires filled in by ordinary film-fans, how many have gone off the wild incidents of Lloyd and other slapstick giants and comment : "ridiculous" "far-fetched," a judgment they would never have arrived at when the conflict with commonsense, instead of being fortified by natural noises, was masked by music. 5. Limitation of Sound. Here is a category we did not foresee, and on which, O technicians, we have experienced our greatest let-down. Listen to this : "the wealth of these sounds will be overwhelming. All the sounds of the whole world, beginning with the whisper of a man or the cry of a child 1