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DIALOGUE AND SOUND 115
This bias goes hand in hand with the tendency, equally widespread in theoretical writings, to follow the example of the Russians, who not only championed counterpoint and asynchronism when sound arrived but plainly assumed that both procedures are inseparable from each other. In their joint Statement of 1928 Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov declare: "Only a contrapuntal use of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of montage development and perfection."21 And somewhat later Pudovkin remarks: "It is not generally recognized that the principal elements in sound film are the asynchronous and not the synchronous/'22 He and Eisenstein took it for granted that asynchronism inevitably calls for a contrapuntal handling of sound and, conversely, the latter for asynchronism. Presumably it was their obsession with the montage principle which made them believe in the supreme virtues of this particular combination, blinding them to other, equally rewarding possibilities. The reader need hardly be told that the Russian doctrine entails, or at least encourages, the no less untenable identification of parallelism with "synchronism."23
Even though, thanks to three decades of talkies, modern writers in the field are more discerning than the authors of this oversimplified doctrine,24 they continue in a measure to endorse the latters' insistence on the cinematic merits of asynchronous sound and its contrapuntal use. And Pudovkin's main argument in support of his proposition is still fully upheld. He defends asynchronism— or counterpoint, for that matter —on the ground that it conforms best to real-life conditions, whereas cases of parallelism, says he, materialize much less frequently than we are inclined to think. To prove his thesis he constructs the above-mentioned example of a cry for help from the street which stays with us as we look out of the window, drowning the noises of the moving cars and buses now before our eyes (example 3). And what about our natural behavior as listeners? Pudovkin describes some of the ways in which our eyes happen to wander while we are following a conversation. We may go on watching a man who has just finished talking and now listens to a member of the party; or we may prematurely look at a person all set to answer the actual speaker; or we may satisfy our curiosity about the effects of a speech by scanning, one by one, the faces of the listeners and studying their reactions.25 All three alternatives— it is easy to see that they fall into line with our example 2— are drawn from everyday life; and all of them represent at least borderline cases of asynchronism, with word and image being interrelated in contrapuntal fashion. The gist of Pudovkin's argument is that this type of synchronization is cinematic because it corresponds to our habits of perception and, hence, renders reality as we actually experience it.