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THE FILM SHOT AND THE WORD 229
crepancy of temperament between word and gesture. This is a consoling thought because it proves that the sound-film culture of the public has developed greatly since the dubbing days, even though this development made dubbing impossible.
AESTHETIC LAW OF IMPERMEABILITY
We know that the Shakespearian stage had no scenery. No visual impression distracted the attention of the audience from the words of the play. Shakespeare's colourful language filled the stage with a rich baroque imagery. But aesthetics have a law which is related per analogiam to the law of impermeability known to physics. According to this the sound film is so full of visual images that there is little room in it for words. This is the exact opposite of the position on the Shakespearian stage. The sound film consists of a series of pictures and the words sound within the picture — they are just as much an element of the picture as any line or shadow. They will always only complete or stress the impression made by the picture. For this reason the words must not become too prominent in it. The sound film demands a style of weightless words.
THE FILM SHOT AND THE WORD
It is an artistic postulate that each shot should be a properly composed picture. The words must not be allowed to burst the bounds of this composition. Words can assist the film's visual pictoriality by permitting the leaving-out of many transition shots which would be needed only to make what is happening easier to understand, which can be adequately narrated in words, and which it would not be worth while to show pictorially. The talkie can even give optical emphasis to words, can underscore them visually, for instance by making the character say the crucial sentence in a close-up and thereby lifting it out above the rest. Another device is to have it said in a suddenly enlarged shot taken by the camera moving quickly closer to the speaker. Camera technique thus makes it possible to emphasize a word or a phrase without the speaker actually having to do so. On the stage, only the actor can put