ABSTRACT
Because the cinema is an art form that succeeds so well in exploring the various aspects of the outside world, it has very quickly found its own ways of expressing the inner world as well. But when it comes to analyzing its resources, it seems that film theory has attached more importance to images than sounds, and even less so to voices. Whereas such filmmakers and early cinema theoreticians as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Poudovkine and Grigori Alexandrov have, with the advent of talking movies, 1 theorized the relationships between sounds and images, other artists and thinkers such as Walter Ruttman, Charlie Chaplin, Béla Balázs and Roman Jakobson have been considering sounds – and even dialogues, in Balázs’ case – as raw material per se for making a film. But these contributions, rich though they may be, do not really take into consideration the contents of what is being said along with the moving images, and how it is said – which is quite normal at this early stage of talking pictures. Maybe an ancient state of antagonism with the theater also explains why it was – and to some extent still is – generally considered almost a shame to pay too much attention to such things as dialogues, different tones of voice and kinds of diction, and even actors’ performances. However, a director’s framing choices were considered as really pertaining to the art of filmmaking, along with the kind of directions he gave his actors about the way they moved, stared or talked.
