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118 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
Type III: Parallelism To begin with actual sound (Ilia), think of the numerous films in which one of the actors mentions the war; no sooner does he mention it than the image of him gives way to a battlefield scene, an airtight, or the like— some short cut-in plainly designed to lend color to his portentous reference. Or another instance: often a film director sees fit to insert shots of the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben at the very moment the speaker on the screen, perhaps a traveler back home from abroad, pronounces the magic words Paris or London. With some benevolence one might interpret these inserts as an attempt, on the part of the film director, to make up for the ascendancy of speech, as a tribute he is paying to the medium's affinity for visual communications. Yet these efforts are wasted, for the asynchronous images of the battlefield and the Eiffel Tower just duplicate the verbal statements with which they are juxtaposed. Even worse, in unnecessarily illustrating the juxtaposed words they narrow down their possible meanings. In combination with the shot of the Eiffel Tower the word Paris no longer invites us to indulge in enchanting memories but, due to the presence of that shot, calls forth stereotyped notions which now hem in our imagination. Nor are we free to perceive the Eiffel Tower picture for its own sake; within the given context it is nothing but a token, a sign.
Considering the frequency of such pictorial adornments, Fellini's reserve in his La Strada is all the more remarkable. The roving circus people are seen camping on the dreary outskirts of a city and one of them says something to the effect that they have now reached Rome. At this point a shot of a Roman landmark would have not merely paralleled the place-name but assumed the legitimate function of rendering visible the larger environment. Nothing of the kind happens, however; we just hear the word Rome and that is that. It is as if Fellini, wary of pictorial diversions, has found this value-laden word sufficiently suggestive to drive home to us, by way of contrast, the itinerants' pitiful existence and indifference.
Commentative sound (Illb)— the speaker not belonging to the world presented— lends itself to two kinds of parallelism, both common in American documentaries. First, the imagery amounts to a halfway comprehensible continuity: then the commentator, as if jealous of the pictures' ability to make themselves understood without his assistance, may nevertheless overwhelm them with explanations and elaborations. Newsreel and sport film commentators are prone to drowning even self-evident visual contexts in a veritable deluge of words. Pare Lorentz's The River, which tells the story of the Mississippi basin from the disastrous exploitation of its soil in the past to the successful rehabilitation efforts of the Tennessee Valley