X

speech and move the camera to a new position? As a consequence of the general confusion surrounding the introduction of sound, writers were forced to leave out of their screenplays what Ince had made them add: the very detailed breakdown of scenes into shots. Jean-Paul Torok is thus absolutely right when he designates the changeover as most important for the practice of cinema. 12 From this point on, film continuity was redefined away from the shot, toward the nonstop rush of the dialogue, with only minimal description of actions and very few if any camera directions: "instead of a flurry of fragmented images, one broad all-encompassing view of the setting."13 Meaning therefore was no longer conveyed by the image and the linking of images through editing but by dialogue-driven scenes. By the early thirties, a film script consisted essentially of a series of scenes involving people talking to one another. Today the professionals who read scripts for a living scan the dialogue lines with but a wink toward the rest of the information.
IV
Whereas Ince's system located the essence of the movies inside the screenplay, the new format, superficially at least, split it between two distinct moments, two discrete labors, the writing and its execution. Once again, superficially, it was up to the director to decide how to stage the action and where to place the camera. Yet, even though screenplays were no longer the exact blueprints of films, deep down, nothing much had changed. It was still essentially a cinema dominated by the story. The visualization process remained entirely subservient to the drama described by the script. The core of Ince's contribution which, as Stempel puts it, was to "catch the audience up in a story and propel the viewer through it," had not been overturned.14 Neither mode of writing concerned itself in the least with the specificity of the visuals: the particular way in which light, composition, staging, motion, even the grain of the film can speak to us each in its own way. For the most part then, the directors' work remained interchangeable, very much like a nonessential, transparent veneer on top of the story material. To borrow the words of Fran ois Truffaut, a comfortable, predictable, unimaginative "tradition of quality" resulted from this state of affairs.15
To counter the drabness of such cinema, critical attention was given in the fifties to little details through which a director could give vibrancy

 



Film Production Theory2000
Film Production Theory2000
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 126

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