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.
EXPERIMENT FOR AMATEURS
FILMS TO MUSIC
G. R. CLARK
Towards the close of the silent era, directors were beginning to put considerable store upon the accompaniments to their films. They were no longer content with the patchwork arrangements that local bandsmen turned out from the theatre repertoire, and were coming to realise the importance of a complete score written specially for the picture. A number of commissions went out to accredited composers and Edmund Meisel responded with excellent scores for Potemkin, October and The Blue Express. In Britain, no lesser man than Goossens was responsible for the music for The Constant JVympk, while Reisenfeld in America was giving his attention to spectacles like Ben Hur. For the first time an intelligent liaison was being created between picture and sound.
With the coming of talking machinery however, directors discarded music and pinned their faith in the spoken word, vaguely believing that speech was a better means of holding attention than the musical scale. But with the inevitable exhaustion accruing from incessant speech, the pendulum is to-day swinging back again and there are signs of returning sanity. Quite recently we have had the commendable efforts of Dr. Becce in the Riefenstahl pictures and in the exciting Ufa short, Steel. White Smoke is particularly interesting for the telling use of leit-motif. The score is built round a short phrase — the love theme — played at the outset by horns. This is developed as the film progresses together with secondary subjects. Towards the end the orchestral texture becomes more and more involved, coincident with the image, and in the final working out, when the orchestra bursts into a joyful dance measure, an added intensity is given to the visual climax.
It may be argued that this is not a very original use of sound, nor that it breaks any new ice so far as sound and picture is concerned. Nevertheless it is important in that it endeavours to effect a definite unity between the visual and the aural. It tries to link a sequence of events together, not by their associable sounds, but by a musical substance possessing an individual quality apart from the picture. It gives a double image and an added point to the argument of the picture, though it is worked out according to its particular canons. It is possible to visualise a future cinema in which the
260