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ASYNCHRONOUS PICTURE 219
more unnatural that a human being should move across the ground with the speed of a car? As long as what we see remains close to reality, reality appears exaggerated. But if what we see is quite divorced from reality, it becomes fairytale or symbol. If a man has wings to fly with, he can compete even with an aeroplane; we no longer apply 'natural' standards. Asynchronous sound has no need to be natural. Its effect is symbolic and it is linked with the things it accompanies through its significance, in the sphere of the mind, not of reality. This richest and deepest possibility of artistic expression has as yet been used very little in the sound film. And yet its future development lies in this direction. It is this free, counterpointed use of picture and sound that could deliver the sound film from the fetters of primitive naturalism and enable our filmic art to attain once again the subtlety already achieved by the silent film in the past and then lost again through the advent of sound.
In an asynchronous sound film the action can move on two parallel levels at the same time, in the sphere of sound and in the sphere of visual image. For instance : we can see what is ostensibly happening; at the same time we can hear what the persons involved in the action are thinking and feeling within themselves. Or the other way round: a narrator tells us what is happening; we need not even see it. What we do see is a sequence of thoughts, an irrational chain of associations. New art forms, the forms of the film-ballad and of lyrical film-poetry may possibly develop along these lines. We would hear the poem, accompanied by a cascade of pictures, a parallel, as it were, to a musical accompaniment but translated into the visual sphere; illustrations which have motion and which conjure up the mind-pictures of a soul moved by emotion.
ASYNCHRONOUS PICTURE, SYNCHRONOUS
SCENE
If we see a close-up of a listening human face isolated in a shot and hear some other person talking to it, then the shot will be asynchronous, even though the scene may be naturalis