The technique of film editing (1958)

with each other, all dictating business letters. These are so timed that when the boy gets to the foot of the tree he is just about to climb and raises his hands in prayer to the god of the tree, the three voices repeat, one after the other, " Yours faithfully ..." The boy starts to climb the tree and now the sound is the music which, in Reel 2, was used with the villagers praying to the priest. This is drowned almost at once . . . This short excerpt, incomplete and approximately described though it is, should be sufficient to give an impression of the technique employed. The juxtaposition of sound and picture is such that the two unrelated factors produce an entirely new quality which neither has on its own. There is in many instances no physical connection between them but the simultaneous impact of soundtrack and images — the boy praying and the business man dictating " Yours faithfully," for example — produces overtones of meaning which, if perhaps not fully comprehended, are nevertheless felt by the spectator. There is no simple continuity of action in the editing (much less in the sound) : the effect of continuity is achieved through a continuous flow of ideas and emotion. Although Song of Ceylon itself has an emotional quality rare in any film, it is as well to consider how far its method is universally applicable. The objections to Eisenstein's films can be equally raised here. Much of the meaning of Song of Ceylon remains elusive on first viewing — a fact which is as much due to the complexity of the theme as to the director's way of expressing it. Certainly, it requires a trained sensibility on the part of the spectator if it is to be fully grasped. While this is in no way an adverse criticism of its montage methods, it makes it unlikely that they will be extensively emulated by many other film-makers : minority films of this kind have, unfortunately, come to be a rare luxury. But a further, more important question suggests itself in connection with Wright's use of a sound track which operates independently of the picture. How widely is the method applicable ? The theme of Song of Ceylon is the essential duality of life in Ceylon : on the one side the Western influence ; on the other, the traditional behaviour and life of the Sinhalese. The theme itself is, in this sense, peculiarly well suited to the treatment. Wright uses — not altogether consistently — the sound > and picture to evoke respectively the two different aspects of life in Ceylon. Throughout Reel 3 we are shown in the picture the routine of native life in Ceylon and in the sound-track the sounds associated with the Europeans who control it — as if unseen forces were guiding the natives' lives. It is only by making the rhythm of the sound-track conform to the rhythm of the images that a kind 158