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DIALOGUE AND SOUND 105
tation, verbal poetry, threatens to drown the significance of the accompanying pictures, reducing them to shadowy illustrations.9 Erwin Panofsky makes this very point in his trenchant attack on a literary approach to the medium: "I cannot remember a more misleading statement about the movies than Mr. Eric Russell Bentley's in the Spring Number of the Kenyon Review, 1945: The potentialities of the talking screen differ from those of the silent screen in adding the dimension of dialogue— which could be poetry/ I would suggest: The potentialities of the talking screen differ from those of the silent screen in integrating visible movement with dialogue which, therefore, had better not be poetry/ "10
Equilibrium Those aware of the theatrical effects of dialogue film and yet adverse to reducing the role of verbal communications tend to envisage the above-mentioned possibility of an equilibrium between word and image as a workable solution. Allardyce Nicholl considers Max Reinhardt's film A Midsummer Night's Dream a case in point, and defends the latter's equal concern for 'Visual symbols" and "language" on the strength of an interesting argument. Shakespeare's dialogue, says he, addressed itself to an audience which, confronted with a growing language and still unaccustomed to acquiring knowledge through reading, was much more acutely alert to the spoken word than is the modern audience. Our grasp of spoken words is no longer what it was in Shakespeare's times. Reinhardt is therefore justified in trying to enliven the dialogue by supplementing it with an opulent imagery. This imagery, Nicholl reasons, mobilizes our visual imagination, thus benefiting the verbal communications whose stimulating power has long since subsided.11
The fallacy of Nicholl's argument is obvious. In fact, he himself seems to doubt its conclusiveness; before advancing it, he admits that one might as well condemn A Midsummer Night's Dream for assigning to the pictures on the screen a role apt to divert the audience from the appeal of Shakespeare's language. Well, exactly this is bound to happen. Because of their obtrusive presence the luxuriant images summoned by Reinhardt cannot be expected to revitalize the dialogue by stimulating the spectator's allegedly atrophied sensitivity to it; instead of transforming the spectator into a listener, they claim his attention in their own right. So the word meanings are all the more lost on him. The balance to which the film aspires turns out to be unachievable. (For the rest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its stagy settings and lack of camera movement, is nothing but a lifeless accumulation of splendors which cancel one another out.)
Perhaps the most noteworthy attempt at an equilibrium between verbal and pictorial statements is Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, a film which breathes a disquiet that is much to the credit of its director. Olivier wants