Close Up (Jul-Dec 1928)

CLOSE UP the elephants in Chang to the war scenes in The End of St. Petersburg^ have been essentially visual rather than audible. To quote from an article of mine in The New York Herald Tribune : If the cinema is going in for talk, it must inevitably take its accent from the use of stories with essentially visual power, utterly fresh from the contamination of a completely different medium and place it on the employment of scenes that talk. Fewer and longer scenes and less freedom of pictorial sweep are bound to result from this amalgamation, with the result that the screen will use its potential identity as a separate art, with its own code of esthetics, and become an unattractive hybrid that compromises so completely between the pictorial and the conversational that it merely results in a lack of dramatic force.'' In addition to this, we reactionaries have loudly proclaimed that the use of words in photoplays threatened the vaunted power of American films in foreign lands ; that the pantomimic merit of some of the greatest players, from Jannings and Chaplin to Janet Gaynor, might be gravely threatened through the stressing of vocal values, where these stars might be less expert than, say, Milton Sills or Madge Bellamy ; that the talking device, though suited to news reels and short subjects, was only a handicap in full length photoplays. To the end we have cried out that talking films were but a lazy director's way of telling a story he was not shrewd enough to present through dynamic pantomime. It is only fair to add that so far all our claims have shown themselves completely justified. True enough, the apologists for the talking films have defended their medium by reminding its foes that the efforts so far seen are but pioneer ones, 16