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KE E PING SIL E NT NO SOLU TION 71
ments repeated over and over again. The latter would show only hypocrisy. The former show a fierce passion as well. The loquacity itself is characteristic, but it would have been both tiring and boring to listen to it all. In a sound film the stream of words could never have rushed on with such rapidity — the words would have been unintelligible at such a pace. The motions of speech were here far more expressive and convincing than any spoken words could have been; hence they could be shown only in a silent film.
DUMB SHOW
The characters in the silent film spoke, but their speech was only visible, not audible. Only the pantomime has genuinely mute characters and hence this is a basically different form of art. Pantomime is mute not only to the ear but to the eye. For the pantomime is not only a silent art, it is the art of being silent, expressing what rises from the depths of silence. The gestures and mimicry of pantomime are not an accompaniment to words which have been spoken and which we cannot hear, but the expression, by means of gestures, of the profound experience of music, the music that lives in the depths of silence. It is interesting to observe that in a film in which we see onlookers watching dancers dancing, the motionless public appears more realistic to us than the dancers who are in rapid movement. The reason for this is that the immobility of the audience is the familiar everyday behaviour of all onlookers, while the movements of the dancers express a distant, exotic experience outside our workaday usage.
KEEPING SILENT NO SOLUTION
I must anticipate a little here, as the problem of silence will arise again later. The unsolved inner contradictions of the sound film are manifested among other things in the fact that nearly every director prefers to avoid much speaking and wants scripts in which there is as little dialogue as possible. This in itself discredits the talkie and shows that it is an un