We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
DIALOGUE 223
blithely make their characters talk in close-ups from start to finish. It is cheaper and quicker that way. It is photographed theatre again as it was at the very beginning.
But now we have come to the threshold of the second period of film art, when Europe will rediscover the film, the sound film, the talkie, the colour film and stereoscopic film, which nevertheless will not be a copy of the theatre but an autonomous new art using every one of its media of expression in a way differing from the methods of the theatrical stage. This art will not regard the dialogue as a nuisance but use it according to its own new and autonomous methods.
In my Der sichtbare Mensch I outlined the aesthetics of silence in film art. This was no error on my part, for the sound film was no organic continuation of the silent film, but a different form of art. In the silent film of the silent days, silence was in fact an essential element.
It is nevertheless true that the silent film would never have emerged in the form in which it did emerge, had the sound camera been developed at the same time as the ordinary cinematographic camera. Every phenomenon of history has its reason, but not every phenomenon is necessary for all that. The essential difference between visual culture and the intellectual culture of words, of which I wrote in Der sichtbare Mensch, does in fact exist, but that does not mean that it must continue to exist for ever as a gulf that cannot be bridged.
It is true also that the talkie has thrown a developed pictorial, visual culture back to a primitive stage. But it would be dogmatic and pedantic to magnify a technical crisis into an impassable essential gulf between pictorial and verbal presentation.
In the silent film, too, there was in fact a contradiction between the picture and the written word, because the picture, the visual scene had to be interrupted in order to let the public read the captions. Picture and writing, two basically different dimensions of the mind had thus constantly to alternate with each other. The rhythm of the cutting was constantly held up. Looking at it to-day this appears an intolerable crudity.
In the sound film the sequence of the pictures is never interrupted in this way. The visual montage is never stopped by a