A grammar of the film : an analysis of film technique (1950)

Film Technique: 1. Analysis which had been described, Legg superimposed various representative parts of the system on a shot of a row of houses. Except as a concession to unimaginative indolence, this was indefensible. Contiguities are most forcible when they are least forced 5 and the sight of a ghostly radio transmitting mast, many hundreds of feet high, standing in a suburban street at a precariously tilted angle, was little short of ludicrous. The process which was thus crudely materialized should have taken place in the spectator’s mind, the successive images of blocks of intricate mechanism and humble suburban houses fusing mentally into a general conception of a very fine and delicate system. The co-presentation of a particular radio mast and a particular street narrowed the scope of an idea which the director was trying to make as wide as the system itself. An unsuccessful short cut was thus taken to the process of implicational montage described in the next chapter. 26. Reduplication is very often met with in early cartoons (e.g. The Skeleton Dance , Disney, 1930). A single series of movements is executed together by a number of precisely similar figures; the effect is then markedly superior to that produced by a single figure, though the reason for this is obscure. It is perhaps recognized in the size of music-hall choruses, which, though partly accounted for by the increased attractiveness of a greater number of legs, may also 172