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72 THEFACEOFMAN
natural form of art — rather as though a painter were to prefer painting pictures without colours.
This problem cannot on any account be solved by making the characters speak little or not at all. The silence of pantomime characters is an inherent quality of this art form. But in the film it is a quality, a characteristic of the personages, not of the art form. If a human being is silent, although he or she might speak (either audibly as in the talkie or only visibly, as in the silent film) then we attribute this silence to his or her character or to the dramatic situation. We cannot use this powerful means of characterization just for the purpose of avoiding dialogue; the result would be that all the characters in our films would be grotesquely surly and taciturn for no apparent reason.
TEMPO OF MIMICRY
The mute soliloquies of physiognomy, the wordless lyrics of facial expression can convey many things for the registering of which other arts possess no instruments. Not only can facial expression itself tell us things for which we have no words — the rhythm and tempo of changes in facial expression can also indicate the oscillation of moods which cannot be put into words. A single twitch of a facial muscle may express a passion for the expression of which a long sentence would be needed. By the time the character would get to the end of such a sentence, his mood may have changed more than once and the words would perhaps no longer be true when he spoke them. The most rapid tempo of speech lags behind the flow and throb of emotions; but facial expression can always keep up with them, providing a faithful and intelligible expression for them all.
There is another Griffith film in which the heroine, (Lilian Gish) is a naive, trustful girl who is seduced by an unscrupulous cynic. The seducer tells her with a sneer that he has deceived her. Lilian Gish, the loving, trusting girl cannot believe her ears, or rather she is incapable of realizing all at once that her life is in ruins. She knows that what the man says is true, but would nevertheless like to believe that he is