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130 II. AREAS AND ELEMENTS
addition, as a straight expression of the infant's inmost nature, this terrific cry sheds new light on his outer appearance. The image we watch thus gains in depth. And the spectator will all the more readily respond to it since the cry itself is so upsetting emotionally that it brings his whole being into play.
Asynchronism In 1929, after having taken a look at the first American talkies in London, Rene Clair singled out for praise the following scene of Broadway Melody: we hear the noise of a car door slammed shut, while we see the anguished face of Bessie Love watching from the window an event in the street which we do not see but which the noise enables us to identify as the departure of a car. The beauty of this short scene, says Clair, is that it concentrates on the face of the actress and simultaneously tells a story which the silent cinema would have had to convey through several images. And he concludes: "Sound has replaced the image at an opportune moment. It seems to be in this economy of its means of expression that sound film has a chance of finding its original effects."41 What Clair endorses is asynchronous actual sound issuing from an identifiable source and relating contrapuntally to the synchronized images (type IVa). To generalize and complement his argument, this mode of synchronization is significant cinematically for three reasons:
(1) It permits, if not invites, us to absorb the given visuals.
(2) It enables us to dispose of images with extrinsic functions— the kind of images, that is, which in earlier contexts have been called "explanatory visual inserts/'* The noise of the car door slammed shut thus stands for cumbersome cuts-in which would have just served to keep us posted on the departure of the car. His infatuation with camera-reality notwithstanding, Flaherty, exactly like Clair, welcomed the possibility of superseding such pictures by sounds suggesting them: "Sounds are pictures in themselves; you can use them without the supporting visual image— once the sound has been identified— to recall things without having to show them."42
(3) Finally, sound in the form of asynchronous counterpoint stirs our imagination to explore reality in accordance with the affinities of the medium. One of the routes we then follow leads into the wider material environment, as is illustrated by Clair's own example from Broadway Melody. The noise of the departing car not only benefits our involvement in Bessie Love's face— this is the point made by Clair himself— but draws us away from it to the street in which cars and people are carrying on as usual. Passages in a similar vein are fairly frequent. The wonderful swamp sequence of King Vidor's Hallelujah reverberates with confused sound patterns which impress upon the audience the invisible presence of life in the swamp— an effect resembling, somehow, that of the flow of messages
* See pp. 102-3.