The art of sound pictures (1930)

YOUR STORY lOI screen can do all of these things and then carry on his subjective life in the presence of the spectators. We can show pictorially his memories, his fears, his hopes, and his cunning schemes. We can reveal his clenched fist in a close-up. We can show the beads of perspiration on his brow, as he trembles with suppressed rage. And, perhaps before this book has been printed a year, some ingenious director will have hit upon tricks now beyond all imagining, tricks which will make the dual speech, invented by Eugene O’Neill in Strange Interlude, seem very, very simple. Perhaps the soundest general advice to give the writer of stories for sound pictures is this: Employ any device whatsoever that helps you to depict a character quickly and vividly. Your one serious limitation is the time required for presentation. It will seldom injure your cause if you portray characters through the medium of strange and difficult devices. A director with intelligence and imagination (and such there truly are!) will be intrigued by these, even though he realizes that he cannot use them on the screen. Then, too, he will endeavor to find more practicable ways and means. The next general advice is that, whenever possible, a character should be depicted in some emotional moment, inasmuch as the strongest human impulses come to the surface then under conditions that almost any ordinary person readily understands. Furthermore, it is the spectacle of such an emotional moment that arouses the spectator most intensely and lifts him out of himself {either pleasantly or unpleasantly). A little later we shall discuss, at great length, the