We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
MISCELLANY
PUDOVKIN ON SOUND
JOHN GRIERSON
Pudovkin sums it up by saying that we Occidentals have failed to use sound dramatically. We have not yet learned to make sound an essential factor in our film construction. Our dialogue is derivative of the stage, our songs of the music hall, our recitals of the lecture room, our natural sound of melodrama; and sound film seldom conveys any fuller sense of the object than mute film did before it. A worse sense if anything, for dialogue has depraved the sense of action. Pudovkin generalises perhaps too readily; forgetting, or not knowing, the split choruses of Lubitsch and Clair, the unemployment sequence of Three-cornered Moon, the gossip sequence of The Night of June 13th, and the other occasional ingenuities of our technique. But on the whole he is right. We do not use sound to develop the art we discovered with silent cinema. We use it so much for its derivative values — in dialogue, in interlude — that it slows our pace, makes image and sequence of image incidental to literary meaning, and diminishes the peculiar power of the screen. Much of Pudovkin' s theory, as set out in the new chapters of
'Film Technique' (London: Newnes, 3s. 6d.), is no more than common sense; and we hardly need a special discourse on asynchronism (not even the longer word explains it) to tell us that the sound should complement the mute and not merely repeat it. The first function of sound, says Pudovkin (or his translators), is to
'augment the potential expressiveness of the film's content." It widens the scope of the film; it allows more things to be said; and more variously; and more shortly. The sound strip and the silent must each follow its own rhythmic course. The synchronous use of sound is only "exceptionally correspondent to natural perception."
In so far as Pudovkin is exclusively interested in story values (he always is in his theory, if not in his films) his examples of asynchronism are curiously shallow. He thinks of a town-bred man in a desert accompanied by city noises ; of a cry for help which silences
106