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198 SOUND
over the stones. Sensitive lyrical poets always could hear these significant sounds of life and describe them in words. It is for the sound film to let them speak to us more directly from the screen.
DISCOVERY OF NOISE
'The sounds of our day-to-day fife we hitherto perceived merely as a confused noise, as a formless mass of din, rather as an unmusical person may listen to a symphony; at best he may be able to distinguish the leading melody, the rest will fuse into a chaotic clamour. The sound film will teach us to analyse even chaotic noise with our ear and read the score of life's symphony. Our ear will hear the different voices in the general babble and distinguish their character as manifestations of individual life. It is an old maxim that art saves us from chaos. The arts differ from each other in the specific kind of chaos which they fight against. The vocation of the sound film is to redeem us from the chaos of shapeless noise by accepting it as expression, as significance, as meaning.'
Twenty years have passed since I wrote down these conditions. The sound film has left them unfulfilled to this day. The arts did not accede to my theoretical wishes. During its evolution the human spirit has had many a fair prospect open up before it, which the great highroad of human culture then bypassed and left behind. No art exploits all its possibilities, and not only aesthetic factors influence the choice of the road that is ultimately followed in preference to many possible others. And I would not have repeated this my old demand if the sound film had since advanced farther along another road. But it has advanced nowhere. What twenty years ago was opportunity and perspective, is still perspective and opportunity today. I quote:
'Only when the sound film will have resolved noise into its elements, segregated individual, intimate voices and made them speak to us separately in vocal, acoustic close-ups; when these isolated detail-sounds will be collated again in purposeful order by sound-montage, will the sound film have become a new art. When the director will be able to lead our ear as he could once already lead our eye in the silent film and by