MUTE AND SOUND

پنجشنبه 24 بهمن 1398
17:48
masoumi5631

Mute and loud

The myth of the silent

In 1975 François Truffaut titled Le grand secret the section of Les films de ma vie "dedicated to directors who started their career with silent cinema and continued it with sound" (trad. It. 1978, p. 33) . Although the author does not bother to reveal to the reader the exact nature of this secret, simply stating that the filmmakers in question "have something more", his assumption recalls a widespread idea in the early years of sound among detractors of the new invention and made its own by a substantial part of subsequent criticism and historiography: that according to which, for cinema, the acquisition of sound technology on an aesthetic level would have represented a loss, an impoverishment. The nostalgic myth of silent cinema, lived as a sort of state of Edenic perfection of the seventh art abruptly erased from the original sin of sound, it also explicitly resurfaces in recent studies. This is the case, for example, of the essay by N. Burch dedicated to the "origins of the cinematographic language", in which the author writes: "With the advent of synchronized sound, cinema, in its cultural dimension, gained new means of expression; in its social dimension, new means of control or mobilization. But there was also something that was lost. The economic interests that led to the sudden irruption of the sound brutally interrupted, in fact, a 'silent language' in the propulsive phase [ ...]. Cinema also lost something because the logocentrism of the early 1930s confused and deeply demoralized a based on a Manichean contrast between art and industry - or between style and technique - which is completely inadequate for the study of a phenomenon such as the transition from silent to sound. While it is necessary to strongly reject the anachronistic and false prejudice of an alleged superiority of the silent over the sound, justified in the past by a lack of knowledge of cinema before the thirties. If, until the 1960s, professionals had access to an extremely restricted and selected corpus of undisputed masterpieces (the classics of German Expressionism, the Soviet school, the Hollywood slapstick comedy or the French avant-garde), the

Mute / sound / speech

A strong terminological uncertainty emerges from the comparison between the different languages ​​in the naming of the two objects that in Italian it is customary to designate through the adjectives mute and sonorous. If the Anglo-Saxons, by adopting the opposition silent / sound (silent / sound), discriminate the presence or absence of sound in general, the French-speakers instead favor the word among the other components of the soundtrack, contrasting the silent film with the spoken film (muet / parlant). Less consistently, the other main European languages ​​opt for an undue synthesis between the two dichotomies, combining two terms - silent and sonorous - in the same oppositional pair which, from the semantic point of view, are not strictly speaking opposites (unless you want to to interpret the adjective mute in a broad sense as void of sound, and therefore silent): this is the case of Italian, but also of Spanish (mudo / sonoro), German (Stummfilm / Tonfilm) and Russian (nemoj fil′m / zvukovoj fil′m). Opposing silence to the sound, the couple proposed by the Anglo-Saxon lexicon immediately raises its side to a sensible objection: from the earliest times the cinema screenings were almost always accompanied by acoustic events produced live (music, words, noises), so that the notion of a silent show seems to be reduced to a pure abstraction, which finds almost no confirmation in the concrete experience of the public. By contrasting the synchronous dialogue with its absence, the couple used by the French instead emphasizes an irrefutable historical datum, namely the absolute primacy in the hierarchy of acoustic elements conquered since the early years by the verbal element. However, it too does not satisfy for its excessive verbocentrism, which reduces the whole novelty of the sound revolution to the introduction of dialogue, neglecting the decisive contribution in many cases of non-verbal sound. Moreover, director René Clair was fully aware of this, and in a 1929 article he wrote: "The sounding hopes of the partisans of speechless cinema concentrate on the sound film. They hope to ward off through it the danger represented by the advent of talkies. They want to believe that these noises and sounds that accompany the animated image will sufficiently distract the crowd from demanding dialogue, offering them a

Thus, if the silent / sound opposition establishes a watershed between two epochs in the history of the seventh art, at the same time marking the advent of a new type of cinema, the sound / spoken pair, although today fallen into disuse, underlines to its the existence within it of two different theoretical-practical orientations - or, if you wish, of two different aesthetics - present since the time of its appearance: on the one hand a majority 'current', best represented by the classic cinema of the thirties-forties, which chooses to subordinate any other sound to the needs of the verb, making it the structural center of gravity of the visual and sound staging, on the other a minority trend, but not for this negligible (think of a film like 2001: a space odyssey, 1968, 2001: a space odyssey,by Stanley Kubrick), which tends to resize the word and to accord equal dignity to the non-verbal components of the soundtrack, inspired by a more authentically audiovisual cinema model.

A problematic discriminant

The silent / sonorous opposition introduces a completely specific fracture in the short history of the seventh art, tracing a distinction between two epochs that has no equivalent in the evolutionary path of the previous arts and that sometimes interferes in an embarrassing way with the traditional periodization criteria commonly adopted by historians. It emphasizes, above all, the peculiar and decisive role played in the evolution of cinema by technological innovation: in modern architecture itself, the art that is closest to it in this respect, the advent of new technologies and new materials has not split two distinct classes of objects in our perception, as silent films and sound films are also for the more uneducated spectator.

The same can be said in the cinematographic field about any other technological innovation before or after the advent of sound, including the affirmation of color: although in the public perception the notion of black and white film, in a similar way to that of silent film, defines a specific object formally different from the film tout court (sound and color) and proper to an earlier stage, which has become obsolete, of the evolution of cinema, the slow and gradual character of the transition between the two systems does not allow a periodization of the history of the seventh art on chromatic bases. However, what distinguishes the advent of sound from any other technological transformation introduced in cinema is not only the rapid and definitive character of its affirmation, with the limited and datable historical caesura that this change entails, but also (and above all) the peculiar nature of this innovation. In fact, the specific feature of the opposition between mute and sound is that of operating on both the synchronic and the diachronic levels, dividing the history of cinema into two epochs while isolating two different 'semiotic objects'. Where the invention of panchromatic film, Technicolor, 3D cinema or Cinemascope (like Dolby for sound) is limited to enhancing the expressive and mimetic abilities of the cinematographic image, the advent of sound introduces into the cinema a new component, modifying the perceptual definition of the medium - which has become an audiovisual visual - and consequently its semiotic status,

It is therefore not surprising that such an unprecedented phenomenon was bizarre and scandalous for the pioneers of cinema theory, who tried to adapt the principles of traditional aesthetics to the needs of the new medium of expression. For example. already in 1916 Hugo Münsterberg, criticizing the first attempts to synchronize the projector with the phonograph, maintains that the presence of speech "annoys as much as the color in the drapery of a marble statue", while he says about the use of noisers during the projections of silent films: "We could, in the same way, to improve the painting of a rose garden, sprinkle it with rose perfume, so that whoever looks at it can also smell it" (trad. it. 1980, pp. 110-12) . Concept also confirmed by Rudolf Arnheim, who still in 1933, introduction of sound as an improvement or a completion of the silent film. This is just as absurd as arguing that the invention of three-dimensional oil painting would represent progress on the principles of painting known so far "(in Arnheim 1957; trad. It. 1960, 1983², p. 96). introduction of sound as an improvement or a completion of the silent film. This is just as absurd as arguing that the invention of three-dimensional oil painting would represent progress on the principles of painting known so far "(in Arnheim 1957; trad. It. 1960, 1983², p. 96).

The sound in the historiographic reflection

What has been the approach of reflection on cinema towards the transition from silent to sound? By schematising a lot, it can be said that the debate of the time was inclined to emphasize the differences existing between the two means of expression, whereas the most recent studies instead tend to underline their elements of continuity, with the effect of reducing at least in part the 'revolutionary' scope of the introduction of sound. Thus, if at the end of the 1920s the French critic Alexandre Arnoux wondered if the 'wild invention' would have provoked a second birth of cinema or the definitive death of the seventh art, even the less numerous apologists of sound described his advent as a rupture clear and radical with the previous tradition. Over time, however, the protagonists of the debate gradually tended to attenuate the idea of ​​a radical estrangement between the two periods, reading the introduction of the acoustic element in the context of a general evolutionary process of the cinematographic language. Thus, if still in 1949 Béla Balázs stated that the sound film does not constitute "an organic evolution of the silent film", but rather a new art form "that has different laws and obtains different effects" (trad. It. 1952, p. 259), about ten years earlier Sergej M. Ejzenštejn, in Montaž '37, had developed an ambitious diachronic model that accounted for the development of the seventh art from its initial stage (the cinema 'of shooting from a single point') to the final one, represented by the sound film, passing through the editing cinema of the 1920s (or 'successive shooting points'). As part of this process, the acquisition of the acoustic component is a necessary step in the evolution of cinema, described through the three-stage model (thesis / antithesis / synthesis) of the Hegelian dialectic. Here then that, according to the Soviet director, while the discovery of the montage had led to the fragmentation of the single plane of the Lumière views in a succession of shots, the introduction of sound - interpreted at the time by many as a regression to primitive static - realized in reality, at the same time, the overcoming and synthesis of the two previous phases in a new dynamic unit, based on the 'vertical' relationship between the soundtrack and the visual column. of the points of recovery that follow '). As part of this process, the acquisition of the acoustic component is a necessary step in the evolution of cinema, described through the three-stage model (thesis / antithesis / synthesis) of the Hegelian dialectic. Here then that, according to the Soviet director, while the discovery of the montage had led to the fragmentation of the single plane of the Lumière views in a succession of shots, the introduction of sound - interpreted at the time by many as a regression to primitive static - realized in reality, at the same time, the overcoming and synthesis of the two previous phases in a new dynamic unit, based on the 'vertical' relationship between the soundtrack and the visual column. of the points of recovery that follow '). As part of this process, the acquisition of the acoustic component is a necessary step in the evolution of cinema, described through the three-stage model (thesis / antithesis / synthesis) of the Hegelian dialectic. Here then that, according to the Soviet director, while the discovery of the montage had led to the fragmentation of the single plane of the Lumière views in a succession of shots, the introduction of sound - interpreted at the time by many as a regression to primitive static - realized in reality, at the same time, the overcoming and synthesis of the two previous phases in a new dynamic unit, based on the 'vertical' relationship between the soundtrack and the visual column. acquisition of the acoustic component is a necessary step in the evolution of cinema, described through the three-stage model (thesis / antithesis / synthesis) of the Hegelian dialectic. Here then that, according to the Soviet director, while the discovery of the montage had led to the fragmentation of the single plane of the Lumière views in a succession of shots, the introduction of sound - interpreted at the time by many as a regression to primitive static - realized in reality, at the same time, the overcoming and synthesis of the two previous phases in a new dynamic unit, based on the 'vertical' relationship between the soundtrack and the visual column. acquisition of the acoustic component is a necessary step in the evolution of cinema, described through the three-stage model (thesis / antithesis / synthesis) of the Hegelian dialectic. Here then that, according to the Soviet director, while the discovery of the montage had led to the fragmentation of the single plane of the Lumière views in a succession of shots, the introduction of sound - interpreted at the time by many as a regression to primitive static - realized in reality, at the same time, the overcoming and synthesis of the two previous phases in a new dynamic unit, based on the 'vertical' relationship between the soundtrack and the visual column. described through the three-stage model (thesis / antithesis / synthesis) of the Hegelian dialectic. Here then that, according to the Soviet director, while the discovery of the montage had led to the fragmentation of the single plane of the Lumière views in a succession of shots, the introduction of sound - interpreted at the time by many as a regression to primitive static - realized in reality, at the same time, the overcoming and synthesis of the two previous phases in a new dynamic unit, based on the 'vertical' relationship between the soundtrack and the visual column. described through the three-stage model (thesis / antithesis / synthesis) of the Hegelian dialectic. Here then that, according to the Soviet director, while the discovery of the montage had led to the fragmentation of the single plane of the Lumière views in a succession of shots, the introduction of sound - interpreted at the time by many as a regression to primitive static - realized in reality, at the same time, the overcoming and synthesis of the two previous phases in a new dynamic unit, based on the 'vertical' relationship between the soundtrack and the visual column.

But it was above all the French critic André Bazinche after the Second World War, identifying the inspiring principle of the invention of cinema with the myth of integral realism, he described the advent of sound not as an involutionary process, but as an enrichment in accordance with the nature of the medium . Bazin's reflection certainly had the merit of clearing the field of the theoretical debate from any residual prejudice about an alleged superiority of the silent film. His gesture, fully redeeming the sound film, however, paradoxically ended up denying every specific trait and every radical novelty. Thus, in one of his most famous writings, the French critic wonders "if the technical revolution introduced by the sound track corresponds exactly to an aesthetic revolution", to conclude that "

From the fifties onwards, in the studies on cinema, the idea of ​​substantial continuity took the place of that of a radical discontinuity. Thus, for example, instead of the mute / sound discriminant, historiography now prefers to appeal to the primitive / classical opposition. Sometimes quite explicitly, as in D. Bordwell's work on the Hollywood style, sometimes in a more implicit way, as in N. Burch's work on early cinema, classicism is presented as a homogeneous continuum that includes the last fifteen years of the silent and the first thirty years of sound, building a solid bridge - to quote Bazin again - "above the fissure of the thirties". Continuity or change then? Evidently the question does not allow a clear answer in one sense or the other. L' the advent of sound cinema did not involve, as some feared, a total reset of the technical-stylistic codes developed during the silent era. In most cases the films continued to be made by directors, operators and editors who were 'literate' in the 1920s, who adapted their skills to meet new sound needs. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that sound technology has transformed the language of cinema more profoundly than Bordwell says: the contribution of the word, in addition to revolutionizing the acting style of the actor, has increased the narrative resources of cinema; the synchronous sound has imposed its own times and rhythms, modifying the visual staging; music, no longer subject to the precariousness of live performance, has become a stable component of the film; the noises further strengthened the illusion of reality created by the moving images. The entire creative process, from the script to the editing, has undergone profound changes.

Recording of sound on a medium

The historiographic cliché that cinema would always have been sound is likely to be misleading insofar as it does not take into account the capital innovation introduced by the Hollywood industry in the late 1920s: the fixation of cinematographic sound on a recording medium synchronized with the visual column , a technological transformation destined to modify the same mediological definition of cinema. Although in the silent period the film show normally provided for the presence of a sound integration performed in the room, provided primarily by the music, but sometimes also by noises or by a verbal comment, it is difficult to maintain that these elements were permanently part of the film intended as a work or as a text. First in silent cinema the image and sound participated in two profoundly different forms of textuality. Contrary to the visual column, a closed form fixed once and for all, the sound accompaniment was instead subject to the variable conditions of the live performance and dragged part of the show on the terrain of the performing arts. Secondly, this accompaniment maintained an extremely precarious relationship with the images that it commented: the music itself, an almost mandatory presence since the time of the Lumière brothers, could in principle change every time depending on the musician's decisions or the economic availability of the operator (and this even when the film had an 'official' score). Although so important in promoting the enjoyment of silent films, underlining the rhythm of editing, by intensifying the emotional content of the images and keeping the audience's attention alive, live accompaniment was not a full part of the cinematographic work. Simplifying a lot, it is possible to define the silent film as a visual text that provided, at the moment of its presentation to the public, a sound integration.Only the use by the cinema of recording technologies put an end to the gap existing in the period of the silent between text film and film show. The sound - first recorded on phonograph discs (as foreseen by the Vitaphone system, adopted in 1926 by Warner Bros.), then impressed directly on the film according to the 'optical' method, which would have imposed itself universally in the 1930s - was subtracted from the variable conditions of the live performance to share the same reproductive status as the visual column. Permanently and permanently synchronized with the images, the soundtrack finally became a full component of the work. When it is said that the cinematographic show was from the beginning audiovisual, it must therefore be specified that the filmic text became so only in the late 1920s. Historiography has so far not insisted sufficiently on the importance of this double gesture of inclusion and exclusion - of appropriation of the sound component and definitive expulsion from the hall of any residual presence of performative activities - through which the new cinema of the thirties definitively repudiated the spectacular, mainly popular, practices with which he had had intense trade in his previous phase. Moreover, the fixation of the sound on a recording medium completes a broader process that began much earlier and tended towards a progressive standardization of the cinema show.

The advent of the sound must therefore be interpreted first of all as the arrival point of a more general process tending to smooth the gap between text and spectacle provided by the silent system in favor of textual closure, stripping the body of the film of all elements that are not technically reproduced or attached to it: the artisan coloring of the film, the verbal comment by the barker, the musical accompaniment performed in the auditorium, the use of noisers borrowed from the theater, the presentations and live monologues that still in the 1920s preceded the screenings in first-run theaters and which would have been replaced by equally filmed material: trailers, news, shorts, cartoons.

Music, noise, word

The recording and synchronization of the live musical accompaniment of the 'silent' projections certainly did not in itself constitute a radical innovation. Indeed, it is fair to say that the massive use of the orchestra by sound cinema was a legacy of the silent period: if it had not had thirty years of intense union with scores, cue sheets and room musicians, perhaps the new cinematographic means would have reserved to music the marginal role it occupied in other forms of contemporary entertainment, such as the word theater focused on acting and text. Subjected by the introduction of dialogue to the tyranny of real time, the sound film, as M. Chion observes, "

With the advent of sound, the presence and role of music seemed to undergo a reduction and strengthening at the same time. A reduction because the continuous accompaniment of the silent screenings - re-proposed in recorded form in Alan Crosland's Don Juan (1926; Don Giovanni and Lucrezia Borgia) and in the other post-synchronized films distributed in the following years - aimed at disappearing almost entirely in the first talkies , to then be reintroduced in the 1930s with the discontinuous presence of the classic sound, where music normally intervenes only on some sequences, while in others it is forced to remain silent to give space to speech or noises. A reinforcement because the sound reproduced, in addition to ensuring a more exact synchronism between images and music and therefore a greater adherence of the score to the action, it bound its fate inextricably to that of the film. It should therefore come as no surprise that sound cinema has encouraged much more than silent films profitable collaborations between talented filmmakers and composers (think of the union Ejzenštejn-Prokof′ev, Hitchcock-Herrmann, Antonioni-Fusco, Fellini-Rota, Leone-Morricone or Burton-Elfman), contributing to an overall improvement in the quality and effectiveness of the scores. In fact, despite its continuous presence, which totally suppressed the silence, the accompanying music for silent films - as Chion explains - was actually organized in an episodic or 'sequential' way. In other words, it consisted in a compilation of autonomous pieces (no matter if original or pre-existing) intended to comment on the sequences of the film, one after the other. On the contrary, in sound cinema the scores, although discontinuous, began to obey more complex compositional rules, which contemplate repetitions and variations of recurring themes: think of the Wagnerian technique of the leitmotiv, introduced in film music in the 1930s by Max Steiner and by other Hollywood musicians (seesoundtrack , composer , music ).

If in sound cinema extradiegetic music (external to action) inherits some functions of the live musical accompaniment of silent cinema, on the contrary the possibility of making full use of diegetic musical events (i.e. belonging to the space in which move the characters of the film) is certainly the main innovation introduced in this field since the advent of sound. Already in The jazz singer (1927; The jazz singer) the director Alan Crosland exhibits the perfect lip synchronicity between the voice of the protagonist Al Jolson and the images that resume his singing performances, leaving immediately to understand the unprecedented possibilities of development of the musical genre in its many variations (operetta, musical, concert film, opera film etc. ) and opening the doors of the studios to a new group of actors-singers divided between Hollywood, show business and the record industry. Moreover, it is known that the producers of Warner Bros., unaware of the potential of speech, initially thought of the Vitaphone system as a sort of visual extension of the phonograph, that is, a technology to record and disseminate musical performance. If the narrative model of fiction, enhanced by the introduction of the dialogue, would have had - as is well known - the first shorts made in 1926 by the studio, filming performances by concert performers and singers, revealed a possibility precluded to silent cinema, that is that of reproducing the musical event (it doesn't matter if 'authentic' or simulated) in its full audiovisual dimension.

In 1930 the Hungarian theorist B. Balázs argued that sound cinema would be able to introduce us to the acoustic environment better, in the same way that silent film had deepened and refined our knowledge of the visible. "The sound film - he wrote - will discover the acoustic world that surrounds us. [...] From the roar of the waves to the noise of the factories, to the monotonous melody of the autumn rain on the windows, up to the creaking of the floor of an abandoned room" (trad. it. 1975, p. 141). Apparently some products of those years bode well: if the silent films synchronized afterwards were enriched with sound effects to make up for the absence of the word, the most inventive directors attempted to mitigate the verbiage of the first talkies by enhancing the size of the noise in some passages; and there were even those who, like the director Raoul Walsh for the western In old Arizona (1929; Night of treason), co-directed with Irving Cummings, challenged the difficulties determined at the time by taking in the outdoors in order to obtain a realistic rendering of the ambient sounds. However, Balázs' prophecy would have been unfulfilled for more than two decades. In fact, in classical cinema the sovereignty attributed to the word, together with the tendency of music to cover almost all the non-dialogue passages and the presence of some objective technological limitations, would have ended up relegating the non-verbal and non-musical element to a completely subordinate position and neglected, where stylization and routine would have reigned supreme, discouraging the original research for a long time. If some important but marginal strands are excluded (such as that of animated cinema, characterized by an inexhaustible inventiveness in the use of sound effects), for witnessing an adequate enhancement of the noise it would have been necessary to wait for the two most important innovations in the history of sound cinema after the introduction of the mixing in the early thirties, or the 'revolution' of direct cinema and the adoption of stereophonic sound . If in fact the documentaries of the sixties used the tape recorder for the first time in order to record authentic sound directly,

In many silent classics there is a certain disparity between the high degree of formal elaboration of the visual staging and the ideological, psychological and narrative schematism of the plot, often indebted to the archetypes of popular literature. This is a residue of the popular origins of the cinematographic show which the advent of sound, through the imposition of theater models and the bourgeois novel, would have contributed indirectly to canceling, but also a direct consequence of the nature of the medium; unable to take full advantage of the resources of the word, the silent filmmakers were forced to fall back on narrative forms more congenial to them: from the symbolic-existential parables preferred by German Expressionism to the apologists of political propaganda dear to the Soviet school, from the story based on the pure accumulation of slapstick comedy gags to the rejection of the narrative form theorized and practiced by many avant-garde filmmakers. After all, the ubiquitousdidascalie, splinters of writing embedded in the body of a text that the proponents of pure cinema claimed non-verbal, demonstrated by their very existence the congenital incompleteness of the visual codes of silent cinema, forced - willingly or unwillingly - to lean on a verbal prop. Of all this, moreover, some silent filmmakers were fully aware. The famous poster Buduščee zvukovoj fil′my. Zajavka (The future of sound. Declaration), signed in 1928 by Ejzenštejn, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin and Grigorij V. Aleksandrov, who in other respects prove very critical of the new invention, on this point it could not be more explicit: " From day to day the subjects' themes become more and more complex; and the attempts made to resolve them by purely figurative means either remained unsolved or led to too imaginative symbolism. Sound […] will instead introduce an extremely effective means of solving the complex problems against which realization was hitting due to the impossibility of finding them a solution by means of visual means only "(trad. It. In Ejzenštejn 1986, p. 270) Two years later another veteran of the silent film, the Frenchman Jacques Feyder, went even further, stating that the 'silent' film was an unsuitable medium to fulfill the narrative task that had been assigned to him and capable of staging only elementary events, ennobled by a great deployment of visual devices which in his opinion constituted the only authentic attraction of this form of expression (cf.

Effettivamente l'impiego del dialogo sincrono costituisce la conseguenza dell'introduzione del suono di gran lunga più rilevante: lo capivano bene coloro che contrapponevano il film sonoro al film parlato, tollerando la presenza di musica o rumori registrati e condannando invece senza appello il ricorso all'elemento verbale. Esso infatti potenziava enormemente le risorse del linguaggio cinematografico, ma a un prezzo ritenuto troppo alto per l'arte dell'immagine in movimento: quello di rendere la parola l'asse portante della significazione filmica, rinunciando all'ideale di purezza visiva coltivato da alcuni in precedenza. Tuttavia non vi è dubbio che l'avvento del sonoro abbia trasformato il cinema in un'arte narrativa più completa e matura, dando inizio a un processo che si può suddividere schematicamente in due fasi distinte. A uno stadio iniziale, corrispondente al primo decennio del sonoro e caratterizzato da una concezione della messa in scena ancora fortemente dipendente dal modello teatrale, sarebbe infatti seguita una seconda fase inaugurata ufficialmente nel 1941 da Citizen Kane (Quarto potere) di Orson Welles e contraddistinta da un impiego più libero della componente verbale. Dagli anni Quaranta in avanti si sarebbe assistito infatti alla progressiva immissione nel cinema sonoro di modelli romanzeschi, riscontrabile da una parte in una marcata tendenza alla soggettivazione del racconto, che avrebbe impiegato in modo frequente l'espediente della prima persona letteraria, dall'altra nella predilezione per intrecci cronologicamente non lineari, ottenute utilizzando il procedimento del flashback. Opzioni rese entrambe possibili dalla scoperta importantissima dell'artificio della voice over, attraverso cui la parola si sarebbe liberata dai vincoli dello spazio in cui si muovono i personaggi del film per divenire agente autonomo di narrazione.

Time, space, story

An important consequence of the advent of sound consists in stabilizing the speed of recording and reading of moving images. In fact, as has been said, the projectionists could speed up or slow down the scrolling of silent films at will, while sound imposed the fixed speed of 24 frames per second, indispensable for maintaining synchronism with the soundtrack without distorting it grotesquely. This phenomenon has certainly contributed to imposing a new perception of duration, the contribution of the verbal component is much more important. In fact, the discovery of the editing had allowed the silent filmmakers to use a very elliptical style, based on an extremely casual treatment of time, which could be dilated or contracted at will. On the contrary, the presence of dialogue forced the sound filmmakers to respect the duration and natural continuity of the words and phrases pronounced by the characters, using longer shots and depriving the assembly of many of the privileges acquired during the 1920s. Increased in duration and synchronized with the dialogue, the shot effectively threatened to return to being a fully accomplished unity of meaning, as in the 'autarchic' paintings of the early cinema, and the assembly of the material shot risked losing any autonomous power of meaning, reducing itself to the mere succession of these 'blocks' of meaning. During the thirties even the same theorists of sovereign editing, taking note of the new situation, would have ended up adopting an enlarged definition of the procedure, which would no longer be strictly understood as a combination of separate planes, but would have extended its boundaries to include all the visual and sound elements capable of achieving an 'internal' segmentation without the need for resort to changes in framing. Situation very well described by Ejzenštejn when he affirms in his last writings that the 'center of gravity' of the visual montage, constituted in silent cinema by the 'joint' between the individual planes, that is to say by an element external to the image, with the advent of the sonorous has moved inside, in the 'accents' scattered inside the frame, meaning with this expression either a machine movement or a gesture of the actor is - acoustically - a cry, a beat, a noise or the sudden interruption of music (cf. Ejzenštejn 1964; trad. it. 1981, 1992³, p. 362). This is equivalent to saying that the editing cut, deprived of its central role in the construction of meaning, has become one of the possible 'accents' that mark the audiovisual continuum of sound cinema. Following the introduction of sound, however, we witnessed the decline of those editing styles characterized by an excessive fragmentation of space and time or by concatenation criteria other than the narrative one (e.g. the visual similarities used by Ejzenštejn and other filmmakers in the last decade of the silent film). Relieved of the burden of meaning independently to compensate for the absence of the word, editing in classical cinema was brought back to its primary function of articulating space and time, which it was also called upon to carry out trying to make itself noticed as little as possible, according to the aesthetics of transparency prevailing in Hollywood. The relationship between the so-called affirmation has not yet been sufficiently investigatedclassical decoupage and the new conception of space and time introduced in cinema since the advent of sound.

The relationship between the discovery of machine movements and the introduction of sound has also been little studied. And yet, apart from a few exceptions, all from the 1920s - the entfesselte Kamera by Friedrich W. Murnau and other German directors, the stunts by Abel Gance in Napoléon (1927; Napoleon) - it cannot be said that silent cinema has showed a particular interest in the mobility of the camera. Moreover, the preference for a fragmented découpage, composed of short and almost always fixed shots, typical of the peak currents of the last decade of the silent era, inevitably led to neglect the experiments in this field. On the contrary, the filmmakers of the sound, unable to cut freely as they once did the material shot, they found a substitute for editing in camera movements, which made it possible to modify the spatial coordinates of the shot, passing from the long field to the first floor or moving from one detail to another of the scene, without interrupting the continuity of shooting and therefore in an absolute respect for real time. Here then some 'primitive' sound films - such as the very important Applause (1929) by Rouben Mamoulian - surprise for the unexpected presence of sequence plans with long and elaborate machine movements that seem to anticipate the Wellesian and Hitchcockian experiments, announcing a new conception of the staging in which the director's virtuosity no longer manifests itself through the paroxysm of editing, but in the ability - to use Truffaut's words - of " who used to indicate it frequently through the looks of the characters and their entrances or exits beyond the limits of the picture. However with sound, the possibility of using voices or noises emitted from sources not displayed on the screen but given as present in the place of action has contributed to giving a more concrete existence to the off-pitch, significantly dilating the boundaries of the cinema space. The implications of the phenomenon were clear to René Clair, who in a review of Harry Beaumont's musical The Broadway melody (1929) praised in particular a sequence in which the noise off of a car was combined with a close-up of the protagonist at the window that anxiously witnessed the departure of the beloved, noting that at least two shots would have been required to represent the same event in a silent film. And there were even overzealous theorists - director Pudovkin at the head - who believed that sound should be used in cinema according to the dictates of 'asynchronicity' (i.e. programmatically dissociated from the image: seesynchronism and asynchronism). It did not take long to understand, however, that a combination of recognizable ambient sounds superimposed on a close-up allowed the viewer to locate the character even in the absence of a long shot that revealed the space in which it was included. Nor did it take long to exploit the potentially disturbing nature of off-screen voices and noises to intensify suspense in thrillers and horror films. Much before the affirmation of Dolby Stereo, with its numerous speakers located along the walls of the hall, assigned real positions outside the image to the events, the rudimentary and monophonic sound of the early 1930s had already produced in the public the illusion of the concrete presence of a much larger and deeper space than the visual one,


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