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DIALOGUE AND SOUND 109
word cascades wreak havoc on language, and among the resultant debris Harpo continues to feel at ease.
Shift of emphasis from the meanings of speech to its material qualities Film makers may also turn the spotlight from speech as a means of communication to speech as a manifestation of nature. In Pygmalion, for instance, we are enjoined to focus on Eliza's Cockney idiom rather than the content of what she is saying. This shift of emphasis is cinematic because it alienates the words, thereby exposing their material characteristics.15 Within the world of sound the effect thus produced parallels that of photography in the visible world. Remember the Proust passage in which the narrator looks at his grandmother with the eves of a stranger: estranged from her, he sees her, roughly speaking, as she really is, not as he imagines her to be. Similarly, whenever dialogue is diverted from its conventional purpose of conveying some message or other, we are, like Proust's narrator, confronted with the alienated voices which, now that they have been stripped of all the connotations and meanings normally overlaying their given nature, appear to us for the first time in a relatively pure state. Words presented this way lie in the same dimension as the visible phenomena which the motion picture camera captures. They are sound phenomena which affect the moviegoer through their physical qualities. Consequently, they do not provoke him, as would obtrusive dialogue, to neglect the accompanying visuals but, conversely, stir him to keep close to the latter, which they supplement in a sense.
Examples are not infrequent. To revert to Pygmalion, it is the type of Eliza's speech which counts. Her manner of expressing herself, as recorded by the sound camera, represents a peculiar mode of being which claims our attention for its own sake. The same holds true of those parts of the dialogue in Marty which help characterize the Italian-American environment; the bass voice in the coronation episode of Ivan the Terrible; the echo scene in Buiiuel's Robinson Crusoe; and the lumps of conversation tossed to and fro in Mr. Hulot's Holiday. When in Tati's admirable comedy, one of the most original since the days of silent slapstick, Hulot checks in at the reception desk of the resort hotel, the pipe in his mouth prevents him from pronouncing his name clearly. Upon request, he politely repeats the performance and, this time without pipe, enunciates the two syllables ''Hulot" with so overwhelming a distinctness that, as in the case of his initial mutter, you are again thrust back on the physical side of his speech; the utterance "Hulot" stays with you not as a communication but as a specific configuration of sounds.
'There is something peculiarly delightful," says Ruskin, ". . . in passing through the streets of a foreign city without understanding a word