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sound effects are too complex and depend for their effect too closely on the precise quality of the sounds themselves. For another, the emotional effect of sounds on the spectator is less direct than that of images and is therefore less readily described. As Ken Cameron has pointed out, " the effect [of sound] on the emotions depends more upon the association of ideas than upon ... the sound itself. For example, the sound of an anti-aircraft gun and shells in the sky may be just what they represent and nothing more to an audience in Chicago. To an audience which has lived in London throughout the war they will conjure up ideas which are anything but commonplace."1 The reader must therefore go to see (and hear) Listen to Britain if he is to get a clear idea of the way Jennings creates his effects.
To achieve the desired tempo and rhythm of presentation, the fiction-film director directs his scenes at the varying speeds appropriate, and subsequently sees to it that the rhythm of his direction is reinforced in the editing. In a documentary, individual shots — often of inanimate objects — tend to have no inherent rhythm of their own which the editor can work to. The shots are given a rhythmic value only when they come to be edited. (We have already seen in the excerpt from Merchant Seamen how a shot of the calm ocean can be effortlessly placed in a sequence of great speed and excitement.) Sound — actual or commentative — can play a most important role in this process of controlling the pace and rhythm of the originally inert shots. Here is a well-known example in which commentative sounds only are used.
NIGHT MAIL2 Extract from Reel 3
An imaginative documentary showing how night mail trains convey mail from London to the north of Scotland.
The extract is from a sequence showing the train's journey through Scotland. Two slow panning shots of the mountain scenery through which the train is travelling just before daybreak, precede.
Ft. fr. Mountain scenery. Nearer dawn. Wind. 24
Camera pans slowly to reveal a Commentator (Voice A)j
train coming up through the This is the night mail crossing
valley. the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
1 Ibid., p. 8.
1 Directors : Basil Wright, Harry Watt. Editor : R. Q. McNaughton. Sound Direction : Cavalcanti, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten. G.P.O. Film Unit, 1935.
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