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124 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
voice an aside— some slant on the pictures he watches. Far from disrupting the pictorial continuity, his casual remarks open up avenues of thought which, for being unsuspected, may well increase our sensitivity to the multiple meanings of the imagery.
SOUND PROPER
About the nature of sounds
Sounds— this term meaning exclusively noises here— can be arranged along a continuum which extends from unidentifiable to recognizable noises. As for the former, think of certain noises in the night: they are, so to speak, anonymous; you have no idea where they come from.32 At the opposite pole are sounds whose source is known to us, whether we see it or not. In everyday life, when we hear barking, we immediately realize that a dog must be around; and as a rule we do not go wrong in associating church bells with the sound of chimes.
Those puzzling noises which the night is apt to produce attune the listener primarily to his physical environment because of their origin in some ungiven region of it. But what about the many identifiable noises at the other end of the continuum? Take again chimes: no sooner does one hear them than he tends to visualize, however vaguely, the church or the clock tower from which they issue; and from there his mind may leisurely drift on until it happens upon the memory of a village square filled with churchgoers who stream to the service in their Sunday best. Generally speaking, any familiar noise calls forth inner images of its source as well as images of activities, modes of behavior, etc., which are either customarily connected with that noise or at least related to it in the listener's recollection. In other words, localizable sounds do not as a rule touch off conceptual reasoning, language-bound thought; rather, they share with unidentifiable noises the quality of bringing the material aspects of reality into focus. This comes out very clearly in scenes where they are combined with speech. It could be shown above that in the great dialogue scene of Orson Welles's Othello the intermittent footfalls of Iago and the Moor, far from increasing the impact of the dialogue, help shift audience attention to the protagonists' bodily presence.
In sum, as Cavalcanti once put it, "noise seems to by-pass the intelligence and speak to something very deep and inborn."33 This explains why, in the era of transition to sound, those addicted to the silent staked their last hopes on films that would feature noises rather than words.34 So Eisenstein in a 1930 talk at the Sorbonne: "I think the '100% all-talking film' is