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222 DIALOGUE
form of a caption! Then we see the same man again talking soundlessly! Absurd!
Well, let us admit this was a very naive and primitive method, by which we attempted to remedy the imperfections of our technique. Nevertheless, we gave it the status of an aesthetic principle. This was a necessary and extremely fruitful thesis. After all, the silence of the pictures could not be changed — we got it as the material with which we had to work whether we liked it or not, and every artistic possibility of it had to be exploited to the full.
In the beginning everyone saw only a disturbing element in speech and the best directors exerted their imagination and skill to the utmost to avoid having to make their characters speak. At all cost they wanted to get round using the new technique. If anything could condemn the present state of the sound film, it is certainly the fact that this situation has changed little to this day and dialogue is still regarded as a necessary evil. In other words the sound film is an art which regards its essential means of expression as a nuisance. It is much as if a painter began to paint with the intention of doing without colours as much as possible.
Stroheim got round the problem in his first sound film by using a ventriloquist character. Even Rene Clair in his Sous les Toits de Paris made his characters talk behind a window or in such noise that one could only see the movement of their mouths but not understand what they were saying.
This resistance to dialogue, this refusal to accept the historical fact of the talkie, this infertile, conservative attitude was nevertheless more artistic and productive than the decadence of the last decade of the sound film, when it resigned itself to the American conception of the pure talkie and thereby sank back to the stage of photographed theatre which had once already been left behind by the silent film. Those who still sought to rescue what they could out of this debacle were trying to save the pictorial culture evolved through the silent film, a culture which the spoken word nullified. But the newer American film industry and film business harbours no such artistic anxieties. They have by now quite forgotten the great art which had its cradle in Hollywood and is now dead. They