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of the players and the scene in a few well-chosen shots and lines of dialogue. (This becomes especially apparent in scenes of transition : where the silent film-maker normally used a subtitle and a long establishing scene when he took the story from one place to another, a simple hint in the dialogue can quite effortlessly accomplish a similar transition to-day.)
These, then, are the two main changes that sound has brought with it : a greater economy is story-telling means, which has enabled the narrative of sound films to become more and more complex ; and a high standard of realistic presentation which has become the aim of the majority of film makers of the sound period. Whereas the tendency in the best silent films was towards perfecting a style which would affect audiences by various indirect suggestions peculiar to the medium — by over-expressive visual compositions, evocative cutting effects, symbolic devices and so on — the sound film makes a more direct appeal, expressed more nearly in the terms of ordinary experience.
This fundamental change of approach becomes immediately obvious nowadays when one goes to see a silent film. One is conscious with films like Intolerance, Battleship Potemkin, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — to take three widely different instances — that the directors have contrived visual effects which are somehow larger than life ; they attempt to make an exaggerated appeal to the eyes in order to express themselves comprehensively on a single plane. One is conscious of an artistic convention which, being unable to use the element of sound, needs to enlarge and distort the visual plane of appeal. To react by saying that this very need for highly expressive images made silent films superior to sound, or, conversely, to claim that inability to use sound reduced the silent cinema to a series of inadequate approximations, is to misunderstand the strength of either medium. Silent and sound films operate on two different levels of realistic presentation : there can be no question of relative merits, only a recognition of differences.
The interrelation of sound and picture, the relative amount of attention each factor requires or should require from an audience — these are problems which can be discussed only in general terms. Films like Ford's The Informer, de Sica's Bicycle Thieves or some of Carne's pre-war films, all display an admirable economy in the use of dialogue which has led to works of great distinction. But this does not in itself justify the conclusion that a sparing use of dialogue is necessarily an essential prerequisite of every good film. Any theory which rules out films like The Little Foxes, Citizen Kane or
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