The art of sound pictures (1930)

200 THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES flights, hitting every third stair on the way, the Gargantuan gasps of husbands surprised by their wives. Then turn to serious character drama and let your ear take in the crunch of hard winter snow, the whine of a blizzard, the futile spinning of the wheels of a motor bus sunk deep in mountains of snow, the breaking up of kindling wood for the church stove, the shattering of ice as a girl breaks through it and nearly drowns, the crunching of a huge tractor over snow, and many other novel and singularly faithful sound reproductions. The scale of emotional values is also affected by the negative phase of sound. The most casual observer of talking pictures must have been increasingly impressed by the new quality of silence. Its use by contrast can achieve almost any desired effect, from the most terrific suspense to a poignant pathos. But silence, like sound, must be built into your story. It must not be used as a convenient relic of the old days of the silent screen. One of the deftest tricks of combining silence with sound, and in making the combination meaningful, is to be seen in Wonder of Women, which, by the way, is a lovely rendition of a Sudermann story, achieving dramatic and pictorial effects far beyond the possibilities of the original drama. The director has ingeniously used silent sequences to present events which happen before the main action starts. The latter he keeps entirely in sound. Few spectators seem to know what has been done; but many of them feel something very significant. What is the significance, though? Simply this: The main action is given as the living present, in which we perceive events about us with all of our senses. But the prior events are given as memories. Not that they are so