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with them. As a general indictment against the use of actual sound itself, they seem unnecessarily emphatic.
Although it is true that both the silent and sound versions of the father evicting his son convey the same facts, to argue from this that one is more or less impressive than the other is to make a meaningless comparison. Assuming the father is given a less outrageous line than Lindgren gives him, the fact that we hear him say something means that the scene becomes more realistic. The silent version, expressed through the father's mime, may be equally " impressive," but it will be so on a different plane of realism. If a comparison must be made, it will depend on the standard of direction and acting, and the context of the scene within the film. The fact that one uses sound and the other does not merely places the two scenes in two different artistic conventions, and there can be no question of relative merits.
The case of the barking dog could be equally misleading. Clearly, the sound of the bark gives us no fresh information, but that is by no means to say that " it adds nothing to the expressive qualities of the image." Depending on the quality of the sound used and the general context of the bark within the rest of the soundtrack, it could give the picture a variety of emotional meanings which were not necessarily inherent in the picture alone. (The example quoted from Odd Man Out on p. 261 is a case in point.) In both cases, the sound could not only strengthen the realism of the rendering but also sharpen the dramatic impressiveness.
Besides this, the use of actual sound has brought with it a more fundamental change in film story-telling. Using sound and dialogue in synchronisation with the picture has enabled directors to practise a much greater economy than was possible in the silent film. The character of a place or a person can be conveyed more directly, because it comes to the spectator in terms more nearly akin to those of everyday life. A line of dialogue may convey an amount of information which the silent film-maker could only express in a subtitle or through an awkward, visually self-explanatory scene. Inessentials can be conveyed economically through hints on the dialogue or sound track. The director of a sound film has greater freedom to distribute the dramatic emphasis as he wishes, because he is not bound to spend time on dramatically ineffectual scenes which are nevertheless necessary to the sense of the story. Whereas Griffith — in Birth of a Nation, for instance — often needed to open his films with long, dramatically rather flat scenes to set the situation, the director of a sound film can establish the character
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