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DIALOGUE AND SOUND 123
drops the word ''knife." At this moment time seems to come to a stop: the word "knife" lingers on, an ever-repeated threat, and so does the face of the girl— a drawn-out interlude filled exclusively with her close-up and the ominous word. Then the spell subsides. The woman resumes her prattle and we realize that she actually never discontinued it.28 In pointing to the impenetrable contexts of physical and psychological influences, both this famous "knife" scene and the Elsie episode confirm the medium's affinity for a causal continuum. They arrest the course of action to probe into the twilight regions from which it arises. Instead of advancing the intrigue, they proceed in the reverse direction— away from its denouement toward its premises and origins. Thus they complement the story proper, offering glimpses of the endless trail it leaves behind.
"Let us imagine a film in which the spoken text would substitute for the written text of the captions, remain the servant of the image, and intervene only as an 'auxiliary' means of expression— a brief, neutral text to which the pursuit of visual expression would in no way be sacrificed. A bit of intelligence and good will would suffice to reach an agreement about this compromise."29
Rene Clair published these lines, which concern commentative sound (IVb) as early as 1929, when he was groping for possibilities of putting speech to good cinematic use. The gist of his proposition is that sparse verbal commentary which confines itself to providing indispensable information does not, or need not, interfere with the pictures on which it bears counterpointwise. Others soon experimented in this direction. In Lang's M the police commissioner talks with his superior over the phone, and while he explains to him the difficulties with which police investigations are faced, one sees cops and plain-clothes men proceeding along the lines of his verbal report.30 Sacha Guitry in his The Story of a Cheat has set a less mechanical, better integrated pattern: the old "cheat" in the role of the narrator cynically reminisces about his youthful exploits; yet instead of covering the ground exhaustively, he just advances a few caption-like hints, leaving it to the visuals to take their cue from them. In consequence, the narrative proper consists of long stretches of largely silent film touched off and framed by his expository words.31
The same type of contrapuntal relation between subdued commentary and a veritable flow of visuals materializes in a limited number of documentaries, mainly from England and Nazi Germany. In these films, which, perhaps, owe something to the English bent for understatement and/or the German sense of polyphonic instrumentation, the narrator does not simply introduce or complement the visuals but comments upon them obliquely. It is as if he himself sat in the audience and occasionally felt prompted to