We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
objects. They attract attention, disturb the natural character of the material being shot and upset the intimacy which the documentalist tries to create between himself and his subject."1 Thus the temptation to make do with a straightforward track of actual sounds in many cases did not even arise.
A more important reason for the wide experimenting with commentative sound lies in the nature of documentary film-making itself. The visual continuity of documentaries is often necessarily rather fragmentary because physically unconnected images are being edited into a continuous sequence. In cases of this sort the use of actual sound not only presents insuperable technical difficulties, but also serves no useful purpose.
Sequences employing simpler visual continuities, on the other hand, can often be made to gain immensely from actual sounds. In a film dealing with human situations and designed to evoke an emotional response from the spectator, the creation of mood remains one of the main problems. The counterpart of this difficulty in a story-film lies to a considerable extent in the director's ability to guide his actors in speech and gestures : this, of course, is an entirely different problem. The documentary director does not normally work through dramatised incidents and must therefore convey mood in other ways. It is here that actual sounds can be of the greatest value. Synchronous and non-synchronous sounds can come into play.
The skill in fitting effects to a picture is partly, of course, finding a soundtrack which effectively matches the picture or action appearing on the screen and arranging it so that the two appear synchronous. But a more interesting sidelight on this process is achieving an effect by laying, not the sound represented by what is seen on the screen, but by what may be happening just round the corner — out of range of the camera. For instance, to cover an empty street in the early morning in Manchester we might use the characteristic sound of hooves of dray horses clip-clopping along the cobbled street. It is quite extraordinary how a very dull shot on the screen is somehow brought to life by this sort of technique.2
In making Listen to Britain, Humphrey Jennings set himself the task of re-creating the atmosphere of war-time London, primarily through the characteristic sounds associated with the time. That he succeeded most brilliantly in doing so is testimony not only to his skill, but also evidence of the great emotional power of actual sounds. A detailed analysis of the sound-track of Listen to Britain would be almost impossible. For one thing, the
1 Documentary Film by Paul Rotha. Faber, 1936, p. 208.
2 Sound and the Documentary Film by Ken Cameron. Pitman, 1947, p. 8.
165