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104 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
DIALOGUE
The role oi the spoken word
PROBLEMATIC USES
What caused Eisenstein's gloom when he anticipated that the arrival of sound would generate a flood of "highly cultured dramas"? No doubt he feared lest the spoken word might be used as the carrier of all significant statements and thus become the major means of propelling the action. His fears were all too well-founded. At the beginning of sound the screen went "speech-mad," with many film makers starting from the "absurd assumption that in order to make a sound film it is only necessary to photograph a play."7 And this was more than a passing vogue. The bulk of existing talkies continues to center on dialogue.
Dialogue in the lead The reliance on verbal statements increases, as a matter of course, the medum's affinity for the theater. Dialogue films either reproduce theatrical plays or convey plots in theatrical fashion. This implies that they automatically turn the spotlight on the actor, featuring him as an insoluble entity, and by the same token exile inanimate nature to the background.8 Most important, emphasis on speech not only strengthens this tendency away from camera-life but adds something new and extremely dangerous. It opens up the region of discursive reasoning, enabling the medium to impart the turns and twists of sophisticated thought, all those rational or poetic communications which do not depend upon pictorialization to be grasped and appreciated. What even the most theatrical-minded silent film could not incorporate— pointed controversies, Shavian witticisms, Hamlet's soliloquies— has now been annexed to the screen.
But when this course is followed, it is inevitable that out of the spoken words definite patterns of meanings and images should arise. They are much in the nature of the loving memories which Proust's narrator retains of his grandmother and which prevent him from realizing her crude physique as it appears in a photograph. Evoked through language, these patterns assume a reality of their own, a self-sufficient mental reality which, once established in the film, interferes with the photographic reality to which the camera aspires.* The significance of verbal argumen
* Borderline cases are the comedies by Frank Capra and Preston Stnrges which just manage to counterbalance their sophisticated dialogue by visuals of independent interest — fresh slapstick incidents that complement, and compensate for, the witty repartee.