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220 SOUND
tically synchronous. The sounds exist in the same rooms, but not in the same shot. Such a split may also have its contrapuntal effects. The spectator's attention is riveted on a silent face and he sees quite different things with his eye than those about which he hears from a space outside the film frame. This again can give counterpointed effects impossible on the stage and equally impossible in the silent film.
In his first sound film (in which he did not speak), Charlie Chaplin showed us a fine example of such an asynchronous effect. His beloved is singing in a hall and does not please the audience. The crowd in the vast hall is wrapped in icy silence. Only the clapping of one isolated pair of hands is heard. The camera pans, searching the crowd for the lone applauder. It searches for a long time among cruelly indifferent faces. But the applause grows louder. The camera is drawing closer. Finally it lights on Charlie, clapping away alone in a corner of the hall, fighting single-handed against the indifference of the crowd and against fate.
In Party Crowd, a film made by Pyriev, the Soviet director, there is another fine instance of such an effect. The heroine is expelled from the party by a show of hands at a committee meeting. We see her alone in close-up. We cannot see the hands raised in the vote and so we cannot at the first glance ascertain whether the majority is for her or against her. But we can hear the tellers count : 'One, two, three . . .' The heroine bows her head more and more. Tour, five, six . . .' the figures crash down on the bowed head like hammer-blows. But we cannot see the final result, which we would of course have seen at a glance if the shot had been a longer one instead of a close-up. Only hearing the count permits us still to go on hoping, and because we can't see the teller, his voice is magnified to the dimensions of an impersonal, inexorable destiny.