The art of sound pictures (1930)

THE NEW ART II So please toil through the technical chapters of this book, however hard some of the pages may be. The beginner is almost certain to assume that the main problem of sound pictures is the adding of talk and music to the old-fashioned silent movie. Why shouldn’t he think so? He finds a highly developed art of the silver screen all ready at hand. He beholds physicists and engineers perfecting mechanical devices which reproduce sounds and synchronize them with screen pictures. How natural, then, to suppose that he must learn how to affix the sounds to the silent sequences! This is precisely what ninety-nine out of every hundred directors and producers believed during the first year of the new invention. And that is one of the chief causes of the wretched quality of the talkies which were then produced. We now realize that sound is not something to he added to the silent motion picture. It is, rather, a basic factor in a wholly new art which also makes use of motion pictures. When you strike down to the heart of the silent picture’s technique, you find that it employs two main factors and two subordinate ones. The main factors are setting and pantomime. The two subordinates are title and musical accompaniment. The title explains facts, while the music reenforces the emotional tone of the dramatic action shoAvn in pantomime. The heart of the whole business, however, is pantomime. And the handling of all the factors depends, first and foremost, upon the conveying of effects through the visible motions of hands and feet, of arms and legs, of faces and bodies. The geniuses of the silent screen have all been people who