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confined to writing into the script the necessary technical notes and to planning the changes of camera angles. They are no longer Carne's films with dialogue by Prevert, but Prevert's films, directed by Carne. It is another world.
Where Carne makes a point visually, Prevert makes his point with words. He allows the visuals the sole purpose of showing, presenting and placing the characters in situations cleverly contrived, but controlled by his text. Hence the visuals emptily serve only to identify outwardly characters of whom we know nothing except from what they say ; the visuals serve only to illustrate a story whose development is never indicated except in words. The text becomes the pivot, the life, the structure of the film, and the visuals serve as the reinforcing support by showing the shapes which the words represent.1
Mitry's account suggests a reason for the extraordinary visual emptiness of Carne's post-war films. It is not that the images are dull — they are, if anything (in Les Visiteurs du Soir, particularly), too striking : but they serve to illustrate rather than to tell the story.
It may be objected that dialogue-bound scripts are not necessarily written by all writers, but only by bad ones. Experience shows, however, that where the writer is given ultimate control, where the director is made to shoot to a tight script which he is not allowed to modify, films tend to become static and wordy. Often, this is a matter of deliberate choice. The normal Hollywood practice of making the writer and producer the controlling members of the unit is, no doubt, made possible by the comparatively great skill of the writers. But it is also a symptom of the Hollywood system of film-making in a much wider sense.
Behind a great proportion of films made in Hollywood is the simple intention to exploit the box-office appeal of the studio's contracted stars. Films are written, directed (and edited) around the particular talents of the leading players. Scripts are written primarily in terms of dialogue which can most economically bring out the special box-office attractions of the actors involved, and the visuals are designed to flatter the stars' appearance. The effect on editing is equally strong : it becomes not so much a matter of working to the specific dramatic needs of the story, as of presenting the leading players in the most favourable light. The most obvious effect of this is the superabundance of dramatically meaningless close-ups which so often ruins a film's pace and movement.
As anyone who goes to the cinema at all regularly can testify, the outcome of this star-centred system of film-making is a consistent level of dramatic mediocrity.
1 Sight and Sound, March, 1950. Translated by Thorold Dickinson. The Filmwright and his Audience.
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