Film and TV Technician (1957)

October 1957 FILM & TV TECHNICIAN 137 The very lack of words was the most important factor in building up audience participation. The audience had to draw on its imagination to supply the speech and it was much more moved in consequence. " People remember me today from the silent films ", she said, " but they don't remember because it is me. They remember because they had to supply in their own minds, and with their own feelings, the works of the human beings I portrayed." Suicide Turning her mind back to the 'twenties, Miss Gish recalled that D. W. Griffith, after a number of great silent films, made his first talkie in 1921, a picture called Dream Street. Then he discarded talkies. " Talking films are suicide ", he said. " With talkies we can only play to the Englishspeaking world." I think that some such thought is in Lilian Gish's mind now when she speaks of what film, properly used, can do. "As things are we have lost a world audience," she said. " Translations of speech dubbed as captions over vision are not good theatre, not good film and not good art. . . . But pictures Above: " The Red Balloon ". Below: D.W.Griffiths' great spectacular picture " Intolerance ". like La Strada, M. Hulot's Holiday and, I am told, though I have not seen it yet, The Red Balloon, in which words are subordinate to married sound and vision, can go out and speak to the world. Japan has lovely things to send us, too. Why should not every country send out its own particular beauty to the rest of the world, so that we can participate in its poetry of sound and movement." More Difficult Task When Miss Gish speaks of ' songs ' she is not speaking of music in the dictionary sense but what she calls ' the music of understanding '. She is the very first to admit that creating these ' songs ' is a more difficult task than the making of dialogue films because, when the audience has to supply its own thoughts and words and feelings the film maker (Continued on page 138)