Sunshine & Lollipops (Filmic Cuts Book 1)

Scott called the film "predictable", but said "You might, nonetheless, want to see this movie, even—or maybe especially—if you have seen Billy Elliot or Bend It Like Beckham. It also is ridiculously, utterly entertaining. Drew Barrymore's smashing directorial debut harkens back to an era in which Hollywood studio pictures could still move and enthrall the audience while plying in hoary cliches. Whip It was not financially successful. The film has a song playlist, with a wide range of styles and genres.

According to Allmusic , "The disc is a blend of familiar old standbys including a glittering remix of the Chordettes' "Lollipop" and indie acts among them Barrymore's ex-boyfriend Fabrizio Moretti 's band Little Joy , achieving the kind of safely edgy balance that embodies the Fox Searchlight aesthetic that is, it's quirky enough to appeal to the cool kids, but never strays too far from the mainstream.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Whip It Theatrical release poster. Retrieved January 12, Retrieved 3 July Retrieved 9 March The New York Times. The Grand Rapids Press. Archived from the original on Retrieved 6 February Retrieved February 6, Retrieved April 10, Retrieved October 11, Retrieved June 30, From the scene in the present, Griffith simply mixed to the earlier scene and then mixed back again. The continuity of dramatic ideas was sufficiently forceful for the scene to be completely lucid. The revolution in film craftsmanship which followed Griffith's many innovations was felt in various ways in the routine of pro- duction.

Armed with his new editing methods, Griffith was no longer obliged to stage scenes in their entirety. Where Porter might have staged an elaborate chase sequence and photographed it as it might be seen by a spectator present on the spot, Griffith took separate shots of the pursuer and the pursued. It was only when the scenes came to be edited that they conveyed the desired picture of a chase. Scenes which could previously only be recorded with great difficulty, could now be assembled from easily staged shots: The massacres of the Babylonians in Intolerance are presented with conviction by being reconstructed from shots of manageable length.

A continuity consisting of one shot of a Persian releasing an arrow, followed by a second shot of a Baby- lonian, struck and falling to the ground, gives an entirely convincing picture of a scene which would have been difficult to handle in a single shot. If Griffith's methods made the staging of spectacle scenes easier, they made the actor's task in films considerably more difficult.

Acting in close shot demanded greater control and subtlety of expression than had hitherto been necessary. Whereas in Porter's time it had been necessary to over-act to convey an effect at all, the camera's proximity imposed on the actor the new discipline of restraint. The suspense leading up to the murder of Lincoln achieved by devices like the quick cut-away to shot 37 is conveyed not primarily by the actors but by the manner in which the events are arranged.

The director controls the order and manner in which the spectator sees consecutive shots and can therefore highlight or flatten a scene as he chooses. If he cuts to a close shot, the very appearance of the larger image implies to the spectator that a moment of greater dramatic intensity has arrived. The effect of an actor's performance in a shot is thus conditioned by the way the director decides to place the camera and by the context in which he chooses to show it. The control of the element of timing is equally transferred from the actor to the director in Griffith's films.

Griffith's splitting up of scenes into small components raises a new question for the editor.

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How long should each shot be left on the screen? An examination of the excerpt from The Birth of a Nation reveals how the timing of shots can be made to play a significant part in controlling the impact of a scene. The pace of cutting is increased towards the climax to give an impression of mounting tension.

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Griffith's famous chase sequences — the technique of cross-cutting in the final chase of an action picture was, for a long time, known in the industry as the " Griffith last minute rescue " — all gained a great deal of their effectiveness from the tempo at which they were edited. The cutting rate was invariably increased towards the climax, giving the impression that the excitement was steadily mounting. Rhythmic effects of this kind are, unfortunately, extremely difficult to analyse without direct reference to the film itself and we shall have to content ourselves, at this stage, with drawing attention to Griffith's awareness of their importance.

Since a consideration of the control of tempo and rhythm in Griffith's films would cover points we shall consider later, more detailed discussion is held over to Chapter Griffith's genius was essentially the genius of a story- teller ; his great achievement lay in his discovery and application of editing methods which enabled him to enrich and strengthen the narrative power of the film medium.

The Russian director 26 Sergei Eisenstein, in his essay, Dickens, Griffith, and the Film To-day, 1 describes the manner in which Griffith translated the literary devices and conventions of the novelist particularly of Dickens into their film equivalents. Eisenstein points out that devices such as cross-cutting, close shots, flash-backs, even dis- solves, have literary parallels and that all Griffith did was to find them. Having analysed the origin of Griffith's methods, Eisenstein goes on to explain their influence on the young Russian directors. Deeply impressed by Griffith's pioneer work, they nevertheless felt it was lacking in one important respect.

To the parallelism of alternating close-ups of America [i. In the theory of literature a trope is defined thus: Griffith's cinema does not know this type of montage construction. His close-ups create atmosphere, outline traits of characters, alternate in dialogues of leading characters, and close-ups of the chaser and the chased speed up the tempo of the chase. But Griffith at all times remains on a level of repre- sentation and objectivity and nowhere does he try through the juxtaposition of shots to shape import and image.

They planned, by means of new editing methods, not only to tell stories but to interpret and draw intellectual conclusions from them. Griffith had attempted just this in Intolerance. By telling four stories, each illustrating his title theme, and presenting them in parallel, he meant to express his central idea. Eisenstein conceded that the four stories of Intolerance were well told but maintained that the central idea failed to get across: This failure, Eisenstein argued, arose from Griffith's misunderstanding of the nature of editing.

Out of this [misunderstanding] came his unsuccessful use of the repeated refrain shot: Lillian Gish rocking a cradle. Griffith had been inspired to translate these lines of Walt Whitman: And this he understood to be the task of the young Russian directors. To understand the unique contribution to the cinema made by the early Russian film-makers, it is necessary to know a little of the state of the Soviet film industry in the silent period. Eisenstein has described how he and his colleagues, starting their work in the cinema, found themselves in an industry almost completely devoid of native traditions.

Such films as had been made in Russia before the revolution were mainly undistinguished commercial quickies whose artificiality was alien to the young revolutionary directors who saw themselves as propagandists and teachers rather than as conventional entertainers.

As such, their task was twofold: These circumstances produced two noteworthy results. First, the young directors set about finding new ways by which to express ideas in the film medium so that they could communicate these in their political cause. Second, they went about developing a theory of film-making which Griffith, busy and essentially instinctive worker that he was, had never attempted to do. The theoretical writing of the Russian directors falls into two separate schools. On the one hand, are the views of Pudovkin and Kuleshov, most succinctly laid down in Pudovkin's book, Film Technique ; on the other, the more erratic, less systematically presented writing of Eisenstein.

Pudovkin's contribution to film theory is to a large extent a rationalisation of Griffith's work. Where Griffith was content to solve his problems as they arose, Pudovkin formulated a theory of editing which could be used as a general guiding system. He started from first principles. If we consider the work of the film director, then it appears that the active raw material is no other than those pieces of celluloid on which, from various viewpoints, the separate movements of the action have been shot.

From nothing but these pieces is created those appearances upon the screen that form the filmic representation of the action shot. And thus the material 1 Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein. This celluloid is entirely subject to the will of the director who edits it. He can, in the composition of the filmic form of any given appearance, eliminate all points of interval, and thus concentrate the action in time to the highest degree he may require. In order to show on the screen the fall of a man from a window five storeys high, the shots can be taken in the following way: First, the man is shot falling from the window into a net, in such a way that the net is not visible on the screen ; then the same man is shot falling from a slight height to the ground.

Joined together, the two shots give in projection the desired impression. The catastrophic fall never occurs in reality, it occurs only on the screen, and is the resultant of two pieces of celluloid joined together. From the event of a real, actual fall of a person from an appalling height, two points only are selected: The intervening passage through the air is eliminated.

It is not proper to call the process a trick ; it is a method of filmic representation exactly corresponding to the elimination of the five years that divide a first act from a second upon a stage. From here onward, however, Pudovkin's theory begins to diverge from Griffith's work. Where Griffith staged scenes in long shot and used inserted close shots of details to heighten the drama, Pudovkin held that a more impressive continuity could be obtained by con- structing a sequence purely from these significant details.

This change of attitude, as will be seen from one of Pudovkin's examples, is more than a matter of differently explaining a given method, for it affects the director's approach to his subject from the moment the script is conceived. A peasant waggon, sinking in the mud, slowly trails along a country road. Sadly and reluctantly the hooded driver urges on his tired horse.

A figure cowers into the corner of the waggon, trying to wrap itself in an old soldier's cloak for protection against the penetrating wind. A passer-by, coming towards the waggon, pauses, standing inquisitively. The driver turns to him. Is it far to Nakhabin? The pedestrian answers, pointing with his hand. The waggon sets onward, while the passer-by stares after it and then continues on his way. A scenario written in this way, already divided into separate scenes and with titles, forms the first phase of filmic overhaul. Note that there is 1 Film Technique by V. The film possesses essentially specific and highly effective methods by means of which the spectator can be made to notice each separate detail mud, wind, behaviour of driver, behaviour of fare , showing them one by one, just as we should describe them in separate sequence in literary work, and not just simply to note " bad weather," " two men in a waggon.

He is scornful of directors who tell their stories in long-lasting shots of an actor playing a scene, and merely punctuate them by occasional close shots of details. Such interpolated close-ups had better be omitted — they have nothing to do with creative editing. Terms such as interpolation and cut-in are absurd expressions, the remnants of an old misunderstanding of the technical methods of the film. The details organically belonging to scenes. Kuleshov's experiments had revealed to him that the process of editing is more than a method for telling a continuous story.

He found that by suitable juxtaposition, shots could be given meanings which they had hitherto not possessed. If, Pudovkin argued, one were to join a shot of a smiling actor to a close shot of a revolver, and follow this by another shot of the actor, now terrified, the total impression of the sequence would be to suggest that the actor was behaving in a cowardly manner. If, on the other hand, the two shots of the actor were reversed, the audience would see the actor's behaviour as heroic.

Thus, although the same shots would have been used in the two cases, a different emotional effect would be achieved by simply reversing their order. In another experiment, Pudovkin and Kuleshov took close-ups of the actor Mosjukhin and used them to edit three experimental sequences. In the first, they joined the shots of the actor — whose expression in them was neutral — to shots of a plate of soup standing on a table ; in the second, to a shot of a coffin in which lay a dead woman ; in the third, to a shot of a little girl playing with a toy.

The public raved about the acting of the artist. They pointed out the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same. From our contemporary point of view, Kuleshov's ideas were extremely simple.

All he said was this: The painter's materials are colour, and he combines them in space on the surface of the canvas. Kuleshov maintained that the material in filmwork consists of pieces of film, and that the composition method is their joining together in a particular, creatively discovered order.

He maintained that film art does not begin when the artists act and the various scenes are shot — this is only the preparation of the material. Film art begins from the moment when the director begins to combine and join together the various pieces of film. By joining them in various combinations in different orders, he obtains differing results. Com- paring his silent films with those of Griffith, one finds the very differences which Pudovkin's theoretical writings might have led one to expect.

Where the narrative of Griffith's films reaches the spectator through the behaviour and movement of the actors, Pudovkin builds his scenes from carefully planned series of details and achieves his effects by their juxtapositions. As a result his narrative passages are more concentrated in their effect but less personal in their appeal.

This difference in editing style and therefore of emotional effect is, of course, primarily a reflection of the two directors' differing dramatic intentions. While Griffith is usually most concerned with human conflicts, Pudovkin is often more interested in the sidelights and overtones of the story than in the conflicts themselves. Pudovkin's plots are always, in sheer quantity of incident, simpler than Griffith's and he allots a greater proportion of screen time to exploring their implications and significance.

In The End of St. Petersburg Pudovkin has a sequence of the 1 Film Technique by V. To strengthen the impact of this, he cross-cuts the shots of the trenches with a sequence showing the city-dwelling financiers crazily rushing to the stock exchange to cash in on the rising market prices. One feels that Pudovkin's aim in editing his scene in this way was not so much to score a political point as to strengthen the emotional effect of the trench scenes. These, indeed, depend for their effect almost entirely upon the juxtaposition of the two actions, for the soldiers at the front are shown almost exclusively in long shot and none of them is individually identified.

Another equally characteristic Pudovkin continuity occurs in Mother when the son is just about to be released from prison. Pudovkin has described its making as follows: Mother, I tried to affect the spectators not by the psychological performance of an actor, but by plastic synthesis through editing.

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The son sits in prison. Suddenly, passed in to him surreptitiously, he receives a note that next day he is to be set free. The problem was the expression, filmically, of his joy.

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The photographing of a face lighting up with joy would have been flat and void of effect. I show, therefore, the nervous play of his hands and a big close-up of the lower half of his face, the corners of the smile. These shots I cut in with other and varied material — shots of a brook, swollen with the rapid flow of spring, of the play of sunlight broken on the water, birds splashing in the village pond, and finally, a laughing child. By the junction of these components our expression of prisoner's joy takes shape.

He points out, among other things, that Pudovkin's description of the sequence is incomplete and hardly does justice to it. From our point of view, however, the director's account is sufficiently full to make its main point: Pudovkin's films abound in passages of this kind, where the relationship between shots is purely one of idea or emotion although, as Lindgren has pointed out in this case, Pudovkin makes the images of the stream, birds, etc. In this sense, his films already contain hints of the sort of continuities employed by Eisenstein which, as we shall see, are even further removed from Griffith's straightforward narratives.

In Eisenstein's silent films, particularly in October and Old and New, the balance between plot and comment is, as it were, tipped the other way. To Eisenstein — and we are here speaking of his silent films only — the story merely provides a convenient structure upon which to build an exposition of ideas ; to him, it is the conclusions and abstractions which can be drawn from the actual events which are of first interest. Eisenstein's methods of what he himself has called intellectual montage are fully described in his own theoretical writings.

These, in translation, are often extremely obscure and, since they depend on a series of definitions peculiar to the writer's method, difficult to summarise. Let us therefore, before passing on to the theory, look at a passage of intellectual cinema from one of Eisenstein's silent films and attempt to analyse the difference between his and his predecessors' editing techniques.

In doing so, we shall keep faith with Eisenstein's theoretical approach, which was always a direct rationalisation of his practical work. Kerensky, head of the provisional government, attended by two lieutenants, is slowly walking down the vast palatial corridor. He moves up the stairs: Commander-in-Chief, Minister of War and Marine, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. A garland in the hands of one of the palace statues. The whole statue, holding the garland. Garland, as in Hope of his Country and the Revolution.

The angle of the camera makes it appear as if the statue were just about to deposit the garland on Kerensky's head. Kerensky's face, still and intense. Garland in the statue's hands. Kerensky, as in His expression relaxes into a smile. Kerensky, despite attempts at dignity, looks small beside this imposing figure. He is introduced to a whole line of footmen and shakes hands with each one.

We see the Czar's coat-of-arms on the doors. Kerensky waits helplessly for the doors to open. Kerensky's boots, then his gloved hands, seen in close-up, moving in impatient gestures. B 33 The two Lieutenants are ill at ease. We cut to the head of an ornamental toy peacock ; it wags its head, then proudly spreads its tail into a fan ; it starts revolving, performing a sort of dance, its wings shining.

The huge doors open. Kerensky walks through the doors and farther doors ahead of him are opened one by one. The action of opening the doors is repeated several times without matching the movements on the cuts. The peacock's head comes to rest and stares, as if in admiration, after Kerensky 's receding figure.



Close shots of rows of crockery, the Czarist initial A on everything including the imperial chamber pots. In the apartments of the Czarina — Alexandra Fedorovna: Kerensky lying on the bed shown in three consecutive shots from different angles. More ornamental tassels, etc. Kerensky, standing by the desk in the Czar's library, a very small figure in these grand surroundings.

Three more shots of Kerensky from progressively farther away and emphasising Kerensky's smallness in this huge palatial room. Kerensky picks up a piece of paper from the desk. The Decree Restoring the Death Penalty. Kerensky sitting at the desk, thinking. He leans over the desk and signs.

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A servant and one of the Lieutenants are watching. Kerensky, looking down, arms folded. Statuette of Napoleon in the same attitude. The servant and Lieutenant salute. A row of tall, palace wine glasses. Another row of glasses. A row of tin soldiers, similarly disposed about the screen. Kerensky, sitting at a table. In front of him stand four separate quarters of a four-way decanter.

They are standing side by side on the table ; Kerensky stares down at them. Kerensky's hands manipulating the four decanter bottles into position. He stares at the bottles. Kerensky's hand as it opens a drawer in the table and withdraws the fitting cap of the decanter — shaped like a crown — from the drawer. Kerensky; he raises the crown before his eyes.

Kerensky ; he places the crown on top of the bottles. The crown, now fitting over the decanter. The Revolution in Danger. Kerensky, settling down to admire the crown on the top of the decanter. All Hands to the Defence of Petrograd. Men Bolsheviks holding rifles and banners, rush past the camera. For God and Country. Country Close shots of medals, ornate uniforms, officers' lapels, etc.

The statue itself was torn down by workers in the first reel. Fragments of the torso of the statue, lying on the ground, swing back into position on top of the pedestal. They appear to be smiling. Finally, the sceptre and then the head of the statue wobbles and settles back into position. Church spire, upside down. Head of Czar's statue, proudly back in position.

A priest, holding a cross. A statue of Napoleon, astride a horse, his arm stretched forward. A similar shot of Kornilov as he raises his arm. Kerensky, still in the palace, staring at the crown at the top of the decanter, arms folded. Several more images of the statue of Napoleon. A head of Napoleon facing left. A head of Napoleon facing right. The two heads on screen together, facing each other. Two grotesque figures — seen earlier — facing each other. More shots of Napoleon and another sequence of religious effigies.

Eisenstein's aim in making October was not so much to recount an historical episode as to explain the significance and ideological background of the political conflict. The film's appeal, therefore, comes from the manner in which Eisenstein has exposed certain ideas rather than from its excitement as a dramatic story.

Indeed, as a piece of narrative, the passage we have quoted is extremely unsatisfactory. The incidents are loosely constructed and do not follow each other with the dramatic inevitability which a well-told story demands: The time relationship between consecutive shots and scenes is left undefined and no sense of continuous development emerges: No attempt is made to explain or to conceal the time lapse between the shots, as could easily have been done with a dissolve.

The reel abounds in similar examples, showing Eisenstein's lack of interest in the simple mechanics of story-telling and his ruthless suppression of any footage not directly relevant to his thesis. This contempt for the simplest requirement of a story-film — the ability to create the illusion of events unfolding in logical sequence — is manifested in Eisenstein's films in another way.

Just as in the cut from to he jumps forward through time, so on other occasions he may play a scene for longer than its natural duration. In the well-known sequence of the raising of the bridges in October, Eisenstein photographed the action from two viewpoints: Then, in editing the material, he used both these series of shots and thereby considerably extended the screen time of the actual event. Clearly, this creates a laboured effect: A similar instance occurs in the reel we have quoted.

When Kerensky is about to enter the Czar's private quarters, the incident is stressed by repeating the shot of the opening doors without matching the cuts, i. The whole question of matching cuts is discussed in greater detail in Chapter Eisenstein's aim in thus breaking away from the narrative editing methods of his predecessors was to extend the power of the film medium beyond simple story-telling. Eisenstein describes his intentions at the opening of reel 3 shots as follows: Kerensky's rise to power and dictatorship after the July uprising of A comic effect was gained by sub-titles indicating regular ascending ranks "Dictator," " Generalissimo," " Minister of Navy and of Army," etc.

Here a conflict between the flummery of the ascending ranks and the hero's trotting up the same 1 Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein. Kerensky's essential nonentity is shown satirically. We have the counterpoint of a literally expressed conventional idea with the pictured action of a particular person who is unequal to his swiftly increasing duties. The incongruence of these two factors results in the spectator's purely intellectual decision at the expense of this particular person.

The whole passage is typical of Eisenstein's method: The next incident is relatively simple: After this, in , Eisenstein resumes his oblique approach: Then, after a brief glimpse of the revolutionary fighters, Eisenstein returns to the attack, this time exposing Kerensky's petty enjoyment of the Czarist palace, seen side by side with his inability to assume the responsibilities of a ruler.

There now follows a satirical rendering of Kerensky's dreams of power. The image of Kerensky is compared with a shot of a bust of Napoleon, but the row of wine glasses, followed by the similar row of tin soldiers, promptly throws scorn on the empty pretence: The image of the crown-shaped decanter stopper becomes a symbol of Kerensky's ambition and this is inter-cut with the shot of the factory whistle — the symbol of the power of the revolutionaries.

The conflict, it will be noted, is not established in terms of armies or political statements but by symbols of the two opposing ideologies. The potential drama of the situation is rendered as a clash of ideas. Up to this point, though the continuity has abounded in side- allusions, all the images which have been used for symbolic effect were taken from Kerensky's actual surroundings.

From here onward Eisenstein chooses his images at random, without reference 1 Ibid. Having established that Kornilov represents the military danger, he proceeds to discredit the regime which, under the banner " For God and Country," is about to attack the Bolsheviks see A number of religious images, from a magnificent Baroque Christ to an Eskimo idol, were cut together. The conflict in this case was between the concept and the symbolisation of God. While idea and image appear to accord completely in the first statue shown, the two elements move further from each other with each successive image.

Maintaining the denotation of " God," the images increasingly disagree with our conception of God, inevitably leading to individual conclusions about the true nature of all deities. In this case, too, a chain of images attempted to achieve a purely intellectual resolution, resulting from a conflict between a preconception and a gradual discrediting of it in purposeful steps. Each cut carries forward an idea instead of continuing the action of the previous shot: The same method is maintained in the next few shots when the idea of " Country " is rendered in terms of the outdated military paraphernalia and, later, as the battered statue of the Czar reassembling itself.

The separate threads of the argument are then tied together in and the two figures of Kornilov and Kerensky are reduced to insignificance by satirically identifying them with " two Bonapartes. Here one of Kornilov's tanks climbs up and crushes a plaster-of-Paris Napoleon standing on Kerensky's desk in the Winter Palace, a juxtaposition of purely symbolic significance. Eisenstein emphati- cally opposed this view. He believed that to build up an impression by simply adding together a series of details was only the most elementary application of film editing.

Instead of linking shots in smooth sequence, Eisenstein held that a proper film continuity should proceed by a series of shocks ; that each cut should give rise to a conflict between the two shots being spliced and thereby create a fresh impression in the spectator's mind. He stated the principle of intellectual montage most succinctly by comparing it with the workings of hieroglyphs. But this is — montage! It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content — into intellectual contexts and series.

Eisenstein believed that the director's function was to evolve series of shot conflicts of this sort and to express his ideas through the new meanings which arose from them. He held that the ideal film continuity was one in which every cut produced this momen- tary shock. There is nowhere in his films any attempt at smooth 1 Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein classified the various kinds of conflict possible between adjacent images in terms of contrasting composition, scale, depth of field, photographic key and so on.

Any feature of the picture could be abruptly varied in adjacent shots in order to give rise to the desired conflict. Here, for instance, is his description of one of the juxtapositions from the anti-religious passage we have quoted in which the contrasting shapes of the objects photographed produce the momentary shock. In illustrating the monarchist putsch attempted by General Kornilov, it occurred to me that his militarist tendency could be shown in a montage that would employ religious details for its material.

For Kornilov had revealed his intention in the guise of a peculiar Crusade of Moslems! So we intercut shots of a Baroque Christ apparently exploding in the radiant beams of his halo with shots of an egg-shaped mask of Uzume, Goddess of Mirth, completely self-contained. The temporal conflict between the closed egg-form and the graphic star-form produced the effect of an instantaneous burst — of a bomb, or shrapnel. The conflicting compositions of the two images create, according to Eisenstein's analysis, " the effect of instantaneous burst — of a bomb, or shrapnel," and therefore indirectly throw light on Kornilov's militarism.

It is pertinent to ask whether the intended effect does, in practice, reach the audience. The " burst," as seen by the spectator, is a purely pictorial one and it is difficult to see why he should associate it with Kornilov's " military tendency. This is perhaps an extreme example of the obscurities which occur fairly frequently in Eisenstein's films. In most instances, the difficulty is not so much that the passages of intellectual cinema are incomprehensible, as that many of the references escape the spectator on first viewing, and demand from him an amount of study and analysis that few are in the position to devote to a film.

Whether this obscurity is inherent in Eisenstein's method, it is difficult to say. He only worked with the genre consistently in two films and the whole system of intellectual cinema may perhaps be said never to have got beyond the experimental stage. Dobson, , P- Men like Porter, Griffith and Eisenstein, together with many lesser innovators, evolved editing techniques which gradually transformed cinematography from a simple means of recording actuality to a highly sensitive aesthetic medium.

The history of silent film-making is the history of the struggle to widen the cinema's visual appeal through more and more elaborate editing. The desire to tackle increasingly complex intellectual and emotional themes forced directors to experiment with fresh, more evocative patterns of visual continuity, and produced by the end of the silent period a fairly comprehensive " grammar " of film construction. The introduction of sound brought with it a temporary reversal of this process. All the dramatic effects were, for a time, derived from the sound-track.

While film theorists claimed on the one hand that dialogue could only lessen a film's total appeal, 1 and on the other, that sound must be used in counterpoint, not in synchronisa- tion with the picture, 2 commercial film-makers eagerly went about making the highly successful hundred per cent talkies. Looking back, it is easy to say that these films showed a retro- gressive development, but that is to ignore the background against which they were made. The majority of silent films made in the twenties in this country and in U. Alexandrov, first published in Moscow in For the definition, see p.

In retrospect, it seems unreasonable to condemn the directors of the numerous hundred per cent talkies for misusing their new toy: Yet the hundred per cent talkies — that is to say musicals and stage adaptations which relied solely on the appeal of spoken dialogue and songs, and made the picture into a static, unimportant background for the sounds — proved, after the novelty had worn off, dull and unimaginative. Part of the trouble was undoubtedly that in the early days of sound recording the microphone had to be kept static on the set: More important, the makers of the hundred per cent talkies failed to realise that conveying events through an unceasing and unselec- tive flow of actual sound does not correspond to the mode in which real life is normally experienced.

Just as we did not dwell at any length on the earliest years of the silent cinema, so there is no need here to give detailed con- sideration to the first days of the talkies: Instead, we must attempt to use the experience of the last twenty years of sound film-making to establish a consistent theory about how actual sound can or cannot be used to strengthen a film's total appeal. In discussing the use of sound in the early talkies, Lindgren has said: A silent film can show a dog barking ; to add the sound of his bark is certainly a gain in realism, but it tells us nothing more than we knew before, it adds nothing to the expressive qualities of the image ; it is still merely a dog barking.

Even dialogue was often used to say in words what the films were able to express as well by images alone. The picture of the angry father pointing his erring son to the door is made no more significant if we add the words: As a general indictment against the use of actual sound itself, they seem unnecessarily emphatic. Although it is true that both the silent and sound versions of the father evicting his son convey the same facts, to argue from this that one is more or less impressive than the other is to make a meaningless comparison.

Assuming the father is given a less outrageous line than Lindgren gives him, the fact that we hear him say something means that the scene becomes more realistic. More About the Authors. Oli Jacobs is a man. A man with a beard. He isn't that interesting, but his books are.

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