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MUTEDIALOGUES 73
joking. For it is impossible that he should be so evil. In this helpless, breathless struggle, this alternating between faith and despair, Lilian Gish laughs and weeps by turns perhaps a dozen times, while she stares at her seducer without saying a word. This two-minute dumb-show, which one could see in close-up, was one of the great artistic achievements of 'microphysiognomies'. It would in itself suffice to immortalize the art of the silent film — the silent film which has since died.
It is impossible to express such an oscillation of emotions in their original rhythm by means of the spoken word. Described in a novel it would take pages, the reading of which would require much more time than the described scene itself. Here again we find an emotional reality which can be shown adequately by the film alone. But not only by the silent film. There is no technical obstacle to such scenes in a sound film. But the sound films of to-day seem to have torn the strings from their own instruments. In their primitive banality they do not know and do not wish to know the possibilities of their own medium and squander the rich heritage of the silent film.
MUTE DIALOGUES
In the last years of the silent film the human face had grown more and more visible, that is, more and more expressive. Not only had 'microphysiognomy' developed but together with it the faculty of understanding its meaning. In the last years of the silent film we saw not only masterpieces of silent monologue but of mute dialogue as well. We saw conversations between the facial expressions of two human beings who understood the movements of each others' faces better than each others' words and could perceive shades of meaning too subtle to be conveyed in words.
A necessary result of this was — as I will show in detailed analysis later in connection with the dramaturgy of the film — that the more space and time in the film was taken up by the inner drama revealed in the 'microphysiognomic' close-up, the less was left of the predetermined 8,000 feet of film for all the external happenings. The silent film could thus dive