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

Record Details:

Title:
A grammar of the film : an analysis of film technique
Date:
1950
Publisher:
Berkeley : University of California Press
Volume:
A grammar of the film : an analysis of film technique
Leaf #:
000197
Language:
English
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Media History Digital Library
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
March 28, 2024
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Instances 33. We shall now turn to give a single representative illustration of each of the three most important scales distinguished above: subjective — objective, realistic — non-realistic, and parallel — contrastive. Subjectivism in sound has never been used consistently. There was a brief instance of it in M (Fritz Lang, 1931), where a man sitting at a table in a cafe put his fingers in his ears, whereupon the natural sound (here a band) faded away, and swelled out again when he removed them. This was, of course, very ineffective, since the cessation of sound was an inevitable and therefore anticipated consequence of the man’s action. A much better example occurred in Blackmail (Hitchcock, 1929), when a girl, having murdered an artist for the usual reason in a moment of disgust and terror, heard the words ‘Knife, knife, knife . . .’ leaping out of the hubbub of voices, as the crowds she walked through read of the crime. This subjective use of sound has been regrettably neglected, perhaps because of the bane of the ‘highbrow’ which haunts even the most advanced directors. 34. Free transposition (perfect unrealism) of speech and sound must, we have said, be applied with great care; but it need not be excluded altogether. Indeed one of the simplest uses of speech and music, the commentative (defs. B. a. 3 and B. c. 2), falls into this class. The voice which comments on newsreels or on simple lessons in natural history is never 185