The art of sound pictures (1930)

130 THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES ceptance. As we can control the feelings of our audience by presenting pleasant or unpleasant situations, so can we control their emotional reactions by presenting the action attitudes (alliance, antagonism, superior, inferior) to which we wish them to respond. That is, the situation in which the villain is beating the girl is undoubtedly unpleasant. But it also is emotional. It makes the audience feel antagonistic toward the villain and wish to become superior to him or to control him. Every one would like to enter into the battle and hit him over the head. Consequently, every one experiences an emotion. To understand the attitudes of alliance and of antagonism, which we wish to compel our audience to take toward the situations and characters in a story, we must JS understand the four elementary emotions which are brought about by different combinations of these attitudes. 'i Compliance This emotion is the result of the combined attitudes of antagonism and inferiority. If an object is stronger than we are, we wish to be controlled by it or give way to it in order to escape pain or suffering. We wish to be rid of it, certainly, but we also wish to move ourselves away from it, rather than to try to remove it by our own energies. In the barred-door situation, a compliant person would see the barrier as antagonistic. But he would feel inferior to it and would go away from it, thus escaping the pain he might feel if he tried to break it down with his body. A simpler illustration of compliance is a situation in which a person stands on a railroad track. He sees a train bearing down upon him. The train is, of course, antagonistic to him and superior in strength. He