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DIALOGUE AND SOUND 117
pictorial communications brings cinematic methods within the accomplished film director's reach. But what methods of synchronization are actually at his disposal? Evidently the four types represented in our table. The task is now to ascertain the uses he must or may make of them in either of the two possible total situations. Let us again take a look at that table, this time with a view to inquiring into what happens to the four types of synchronization (1) when word meanings carry the day, and (2) when the pictures retain full significance.
THE DOMINANCE OF SPEECH ENTAILING PROBLEMATIC USES
Synchronism
Type I: Parallelism This commonplace manner of synchronization— the sight of a speaker adding nothing to what he is saying— has already been discussed above (example 5). In any such case the pictures are degraded to pointless illustrations. Moreover, absorbed as we are in the speaker's communication, we will not even care to watch them closely. Visible material reality, the camera's major concern, thus evaporates before the spectator's unseeing eyes.
Type II: Sham counterpoint Scenes with the emphasis on speech occasionally include a shot of the speaker which seems intended to add something of its own to the synchronized words; perhaps the film maker has inserted a close-up of the speaker's face for the purpose of tacitly qualifying through it the manifest content of his utterances. However, since, according to premise, these utterances themselves are all that matters at the moment, we will naturally try to take them in as best we can, and therefore we will hardly be able simultaneously to grasp such implications of the face as point in another direction. More likely than not we will not notice the speaker's face at all. Or if we do notice it, we will at most be surprised at the way he looks without giving further thought to it. In this case, it is true, parallelism yields to an attempt at counterpoint, but the attempt is abortive because the undiminished impact of the words emasculates the accompanying images, blurring their divergent meanings.
Asynchronism
Notwithstanding the wide response which the Russian directors' preference for asynchronous sound has found in the literature on film, there is actually not the slightest difference between asynchronism and parallelism with respect to their cinematic potentialities. It will presently be seen that the former may be as "bad" as the latter (or of course, the latter as "good" as the former).