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This article was downloaded by: [University of Ulster Library]On: 29 October 2014, At: 02:15Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Seeing voices: Oral pragmatics and thesilent cinemaSheila J. Nayar aa Greensboro College , Greensboro, North Carolina, USAPublished online: 04 Aug 2009.
To cite this article: Sheila J. Nayar (2009) Seeing voices: Oral pragmatics and the silent cinema,Early Popular Visual Culture, 7:2, 145-165, DOI: 10.1080/17460650903010691
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Early Popular Visual CultureVol. 7, No. 2, July 2009, 145–165
ISSN 1746-0654 print/ISSN 1746-0662 online© 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/17460650903010691http://www.informaworld.com
Seeing voices:1 Oral pragmatics and the silent cinema
Sheila J. Nayar*
Greensboro College, Greensboro, North Carolina, USATaylor and Francis LtdREPV_A_401241.sgm10.1080/17460650903010691Early Popular Visual Culture1746-0654 (print)/1746-0662 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis72000000July 2009Dr [email protected]
This article suggests that we have perhaps too willingly dichotomized silent andsound cinema. Historically and conceptually cleaving these two forms based onthe presence (or absence) of the voice may have aided in obfuscating othernarrative pressures that traverse, complicate, and in some sense call into questionthe insuperability of the silent–sound barrier. One of these pressures entailsnarrative and performative norms that are fundamentally oral – that is, that arehinged on non-writing-based ways of knowing. By drawing connections betweensilent film and a subset of Hindi sound films (which has elsewhere been shown tobe contoured by orality), this article will force a re-evaluation of the etiologicalroots of some of silent cinema’s traits, such as its propensity for melodrama andspectacularity. Further, it will posit that scholars need to think of early film nomore in terms of image than in terms of an epistemically inflected (as opposed tomerely aurally inflected) centrality of the mouth.
Keywords: cinema of attractions; literacy; melodrama; orality; silent cinema;voice
[S]cholars have for years pursued their arguments in favor of cinema’s visual nature:historically, films existed without sound – cinema is thus essentially a visual art; onto-logically, cinema requires an image but not sound – cinema is thus essentially a visualart. … The history of cinema has been so fully constituted as a visual affair that it is notclear how, at this late date, a different story might be defended.2
Voicing the silence in silent cinema
This article continues an ongoing attempt by film scholars to problematize the silencein silent cinema. In short, it suggests that we have, if not quite wrongly, perhaps toowillingly and liberally, dichotomized silent and sound narrative. Historically andconceptually cleaving these two forms based on the presence (or absence) of the voicemay have aided in obfuscating other narrative pressures that traverse, complicate, andin some sense etiologically call into question the insuperability of the silent–soundbarrier.
That silent cinema may have been functioning in realms other than the ‘quiet’ or‘mute’ is hardly new – or news – to the scholarly debate. One finds producer IrvingThalberg contending decades ago that, given the live sound that accompanied the pre-talkies, ‘There never was a silent film’;3 Jean Painlevé that ‘the cinema has alwaysbeen sound cinema’; and Jean Mitry, somewhat alternatively, that ‘the early cinemawas not mute, but quiet’.4 Michel Chion rhetorically complicates matters when hedraws attention to the characters in the films, whose lips were moving constantly.5
*Email: [email protected]
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This centrality of talking onscreen is taken up as well by Norman King, who declaresthat, by the early 1920s, ‘implicit speech was already an accepted convention inEuropean cinema. … In Germaine Dulac’s La souriante Madame Beudet, for exam-ple, there is a long telephone conversation with frequent close-ups of the principalactress who is clearly speaking her lines.’6 No doubt scenes like these, and the prom-inence given to speech in them, are what led Chion to forge the claim that the silentfilm wasn’t mute, but deaf,7 as well as for Isabelle Raynauld to counter Chion bydeclaring that silent stories were in fact happening in a sound world, not a deaf world.The directors and writers of early cinema, Raynaud contends, ‘used the dramaticpotential of sound to create complex stories’.8 In fact, that is why the majority of cine-matic adaptations could originate from a stage repertoire, she argues, in spite of thepopular perception that the screen is ‘all images’ and the stage ‘all talk’.9 Sound wasnot only innovatively present, but represented: ‘Instead of doing away with soundentirely, the early cinema writers and filmmakers found a chorus of strategies to makesound be heard inside the story and be seen on the screen.’10
So how, then, to re-conceptualize – or, at the least, to renegotiate in an evidentiarymanner – the relationship between pre-sound cinema and the voice? Earlier I mentionedthat part of the problem may stem from our thinking of silent and sound films toodiscretely. What if these two species are in actual fact linked by a broader, more retic-ulate set of characteristics that drive visual storytelling? Consider, for instance, whatDominique Nasta says about pre-1917 American film melodramas: that they weresignificantly ‘closer to the theatrical and operatic models inherited from the nineteenthcentury, where music and sounds were used to serve as a constant emotional back-ground to the action or to herald effective action pauses or extra-filmic interludes’.11
Here, she is deepening tracks first laid by Rick Altman, who puts great emphasis onthe debt early film owed to theatrical adaptations of novels, with their dependence ontypecasting, melodrama, and spectacularity.12 And yet, what are we to make of the factthat the very same can be said about formulaic Hindi sound films from the 1950s tothe 1990s – and, indeed, has been said many times over? In short, these masala (spice-mix) films, which are somewhat notorious for their narrative ‘potpourri of elements –music, romance, action, comedy, and drama’13 – have been described outright as‘restor[ing] melodrama to its Greek tragedy and Italian-opera roots’.14 Likewise, thesefilms, which are often given the sobriquet ‘Bollywood’ (the Hollywood of Bombay),have been critically noted for their propensity for ‘already interpreted speech, whosemeanings are readily visible on the surface’.15 Quite frankly, they display an evengreater affinity for the norms of early cinema than Hollywood classical cinema,notwithstanding Bollywood’s obvious non-derivation from American silent cinema’sinherited theatrical and operatic sources.
Consider further Jean Châteauvert and André Gaudreault’s claim that ‘early cinemacommonly involved a resolutely public space between screen and spectator’, one thatwas made public largely by way of the spectators’ own ‘sound occurrences’ (e.g.applause, singing along).16 But such sounds did not constitute noise, the authors empha-size. Rather, in the regime of the spectacular, they were ‘the sign of an active partici-pation. They belong[ed] in the very definition of the said spectacle, a spectacle that[was] addressed to a group, a collective entity.’17 Contemporary cinema, on the otherhand, as the authors point out vis-à-vis the West, creates a ‘decidedly private space,an intimate space of contemplation in which the screen addresses itself not to the multi-tude, but to a singular, individual, and personal spectator isolated in the intimate obscu-rity of a movie theater’.18 And yet, once again, Bollywood cinema, especially in its
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formulaic heyday, also involves this more ‘public’ theatrical space, one in which ‘theaudience cheers, mouths dialogue, and sings with the songs’.19 In the non-bourgeoiscontext, this certainly complicates – though without invalidating – Châteauvert andGaudreault’s proposition that, in the course of second-period (i.e. post-1908) cinema,‘the shift from a non-structured to a structured sound space had as a consequence …the gradual imposition of silence for a spectator accustomed to the spectacle of movingpictures yet more and more frequently invited to attend a representation of narrativefilms …’20 The reason for this migration, a percipient exposed to Bollywood might bemore inclined to argue, was due less to a narratively driven capitulation to spectatorialsilence than to some alternative raison d’être that might explain the perpetuation ofsuch sound occurrences into and beyond the 1990s.
Perhaps predictably, I would like to offer such an alternative. What was in facttaking place during this shift, I would like to suggest, was a subtle retreat from a moreorally based form of storytelling – that is, from an interpenetrated set of norms histor-ically contoured by orally based thought and by rhetorical strategies common to oralstorytelling. Unwittingly reflected in Châteauvert and Gaudreault’s statement, in otherwords, is a nascent turn that was transpiring toward storytelling norms that emerge asa direct consequence of the written word. In short, in oral cultures, humans arebeholden to transmitting all information by word of mouth; it is only with writing –and, even more so, with print – that knowers are able to become separate from whatthey know.21 As such, chirography is capable of altering what, and even how, humansknow.22 Meaning-making itself becomes transformed (which is not to imply that allindividuals or cultures are inherently versed in, or even desirous of, participating inthe culture of the written word).
But how could this possibly apply to movies? After all, film is a visually, not atextually, based technology and one, some might argue, that even transplanted writtenmodes of story transmission. Certainly, too, it arose several centuries after the printingpress, not to mention several millennia after the written word. Nevertheless, this doesnot preclude the possibility of norms that have been induced by literacy (or, just aspossibly, that are indifferent to literacy) weighing on celluloid storytelling as both agenerative and a spectatorial act. In this sense, while media may be the messages, topluralize Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, they are also, in the realm of narrative,vehicles for distinct discursive structures23 that might be available only to those whohave been ontogenetically equipped. Thus if some viewers (and storytellers) expressa predilection for, or capacity to negotiate, certain norms of storytelling, it may bebecause of those persons’ ability to depart from a decidedly oral, and often existen-tially essential, way of knowing.
My previous study of Hindi popular cinema – whose masala formula was heavilycontoured during a period of national low literacy – led to the excavation of whatI term the oral episteme of visual narrative.24 The interpenetrated network of normsthat comprise this episteme includes not only ‘broad psychodynamic characteristics oforally sustained thought, such as a disposition toward conservation and traditionalism,[but as well] specific devices and motifs common to orally based storytelling, fromthe use of clichés and a heightened portrayal of physical violence to an acceptance of– indeed, preference for – repetition, recycling and formula’25 (see Table 1).26
These reticulate characteristics are of course not exclusive to the Indian context,for we can quickly ascertain their relevance to, say, Hollywood blockbusters andMexican telenovelas. Orality, in other words, is neither pre-modern nor bygone. So,though film historians like Altman, Chion, Raynauld et al. may cautiously limit the
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geographical and/or chronological scope of the texts they study, the oral epistemeforces us to reconsider silent cinema in a more epistemically grounded way – indeed,in a way that is comparatively transgressive with respect to historical time and placeof origin. One way of easing the conceptual process may be to imagine visual story-telling not in terms of picture or sound (let alone picture minus sound, or picture withsound), but as a set of narrative and performative traits that passes through varioustechnical modes. As such, drawing connections between silent cinema and masalafilms may bear as much fruit as confining the discussion to nascent Hollywood, or toEuropean popular theatrical traditions in the aughts.
Of course silent film is not a monolithic species, and this 30-year period of film isrife with its own developments, ruptures, and technical and narrational advancements.For that reason, my concern will rest chiefly with longer narrative films – that is, withones whose stories were given some technical ‘shape through montage, cameraangles, and continuity editing …’27 In other words, these are texts that had alreadyundergone a degree of narrativization, as Richard Abel describes,28 that display anintelligibility of story that does not require an a priori knowledge on the part of thespectator or an exhibitor who is there to provide running commentary. Instead, theypossess what Gunning refers to as ‘a sort of interiorized film lecturer’29 – reflecting,to some degree, those second-period films to which Châteauvert and Gaudreault refer.For, unlike their more primitive, traveling act–style precursors, these post-1908movies display a ‘causal narrative chain whose governing principle of unified actionwould depend on the conventional devices of repetition, delay, surprise, suspense,and, above all, resolution and closure’.30 If the purpose in developing such narrationwas to control an audience’s vision, as Eileen Bowser contends,31 the key for us lies
Table 1. The oral episteme of visual narrative* (based on hit masala films, 1950s–1990s).
Structure and form ● Episodic narrative form, including flashbacks and digressions● Repetition, recycling, formula-privileging● Spectacle (i.e. flat surface – a ‘cinema of attractions’)● Narrative closure (i.e. no ambivalent or open endings)
Visual, verbal, and aural tone ● Agonistically toned (e.g. amplified violence, melodrama)● Outsize characters and settings● Syntagmatic kinesthesia● Frontality● Plenitude, redundancy (e.g. visual, material, and dialogical excess)● Use of rhetorical devices (e.g. clichés, proverbs)● Non-interpretive, unambiguous meaning (e.g. privileging of oaths, anti-symbolic)
Worldview and orientation ● Manichean worldview (i.e. black and white)● Non-psychological orientation (i.e. extrospective)● Non-historical (i.e. synchronic, synthetic, experiential telescoping)● Non-self-conscious (e.g. parody)● Fulfillment of audience expectations● Participatory● No anxiety of influence (i.e. imitative, no concept of plagiarism)● Focus on social suturing, preservation of the status quo● Collective-social orientation (i.e. ‘we’-inflected)
*Nayar 2005, 65.
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in addressing what the audience might have needed epistemically, in order to engagemeaningfully and comfortably with such cinematic tales. Indeed, doing so mightgenerate some worthwhile and novel hypotheses.
As an example, consider Ben Brewster’s gentle counter to Kristin Thompson’sargument regarding the significance that moving to feature-length films had in thedevelopment of the classical narrative cinema. Whereas Thompson argues that longerfilms necessitated more complex narration, Brewster posits that ‘on the contrary,longer films allowed simpler narration’, and that complicated scenarios that involvedmultiple diegeses were in fact largely absent from the end of the teens up until thelikes of Citizen Kane.32 Could orality (and, by extension, literacy) perhaps more gain-fully elucidate the mutual existence and development of more complex and lesscomplex narrative forms? After all, the narration of hit Hindi masala films from thelast few decades is highly episodic in a dramaturgically loose and non-complex way– and here we are speaking of films that are typically three hours in length!
Applying the oral episteme to silent cinema may also help to more constructivelyillumine class-based tastes – not to mention occasional aversions to particular tastes.Miriam Hansen, for instance, remarks on ‘campaigns by the trade press to eliminatenonfilmic activities like “cheap” vaudeville and sing-alongs’, and says that these‘were unmistakably directed against manifestations of class and ethnicity’.33 Butcould these sorts of activities be less class-based than orality-based (or class-based inso far as socio-economic level is tied to schooling)? Keep in mind that the morepublic and outward orientation that such activities imply is still, to this day, part andparcel of much Bollywood sound cinema spectatorship. In other words, we need totake into account the epistemic locale of many of silent film’s spectators. If in thatera ‘[t]he immigrant’s partiality to the new entertainment was attributed to film’snonverbal mode of signification’,34 as Hansen proposes, I would suggest that thismode (and the immigrant’s partiality to it) was the paradoxical byproduct of storytell-ing norms explicitly tied to the voice. Indeed, in some ways I wish to initiate a newstrand of silent cinema history reconfigured through the voice35 – in so far as thevoice is connected to (or becomes disconnected from) the oral episteme of visualnarrative.
Below I address some of the oral psychodynamic and performative traits of visualnarrative as they apply to or might productively round out our understanding of thesilent cinema. These applications are based not on my own, potentially biased read-ings of the species, but rather on theoretical claims made by scholars with expertise inthe field. My hope is that, in teasing out the oral underpinnings of much early filmnarration, in tandem with comparing that narration to contemporary sound films thatshare a similar epistemic space, I will persuade readers of the utility of reconfiguringhow silence operates in the early cinema. The aim here is not to be theoretically substi-tutive or prescriptive, but to offer an alternative theoretical paradigm, through which,in the words of Rick Altman, it is possible, perhaps even essential, to start defendinga different story.
Cinema of amplification: the oral underpinnings of extremes
Perhaps no silent-film norm deserves more consideration apropos the oral episteme ofvisual narrative than that of the ‘aesthetic of attractions’. Coined by André Gaudreaultand Tom Gunning, the term ‘aesthetic of attractions’ is a modification of Einstein’s‘montage of attractions’, whose roots lie in the fairground aspect that Eisenstein saw
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as stimulating spectatorial interest. What are the themes that are intrinsically ‘attrac-tive’ in early cinema? According to Gunning, they include
a fascination with visual experiences that seem to fold back on the very pleasure of look-ing (colors, forms of motions – the very phenomenon of motion itself in cinema’s earliestprojections); an interest in novelty (ranging from actual current events to physical freaksand oddities); an often sexualized fascination with socially taboo subject matter dealingwith the body (female nudity or revealing clothing, decay, and death); a peculiarlymodern obsession with violent and aggressive sensations (such as speed or the threat ofinjury).36
Principally Gunning is interested in underscoring the species’ proclivity for display inlieu of storytelling; and though he uses the term ‘attractions’ foremost in reference tofirst-period silent film, he himself notes that attractions ‘are not abolished by the clas-sical paradigm, they simply find their place in it’.37 Indeed, the very concept hasdeveloped currency far beyond the confines of silent cinema. Film theorists interestedin South Asia frequently cite attractions as a driving force of Hindi popular cinema.Ravi Vasudevan, for one, describes the dramaturgical system of Bombay’s 1950ssocial films as reflecting a ‘relationship between narrative, performance sequence andaction spectacle [that is] loosely structured in the fashion of a cinema of attraction’.38
And although Ashish Rajadhyaksha does not import the precise term, he remarks onhow the species in the 1980s operates ‘by means of accumulation of stimulus-responsescenes, of loosely strung together bits of business each of which constitutes a bet onbox office returns: fights, cabarets, suggested nudity, a stereotyped “star” identity’.39
Meanwhile, Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel explicitly structure a major portion of theirintroductory chapter to Cinema India around Hindi cinema’s ‘main “attractions”’: its‘sets and costumes, action sequences (“thrills”), presentation of the stars, grandilo-quent dialogues, song and dance sequences, comic interludes and special effects’.40
Clearly an admittedly baggier version of that extroverted, flaunting, kinestheticaesthetic transcends the pre-talkie period. More importantly, attractions can be –indeed, in some sense, must be – folded into an oral episteme of visual narrative. Such‘arousing’ display, after all, whether voyeuristic or vicious, is a sure-fire way to makestory memorable. For this reason, many of the same topoi that Gunning identifies vis-à-vis early cinema can be found permeating Homeric epic, the Mahabharata, andother such oral epical forms. Obviously they do so in non-visual ways – or, rather, inways that are verbally transmissible manifestations of such attractions. Eric Havelock,for example, calls attention to the manner in which Homeric epics ‘glory in conspic-uous consumption’, in part because descriptions of excess ‘reinforce the spell over thememory of the listeners’,41 and Walter Ong emphasizes the extraordinary agonism –both verbal and physical – that permeates encounters between characters in narrativeslike Beowulf and The Mwindo Epic.42 Perhaps, then, cinematic spectacularity oftenfunctions less as a route to scopophilic gratification than as a vehicle for impartinginformation that cannot – in oral cultures, at least – rely on other, more subtle modesof transmission, as these would not ensure that information’s perpetuation.
Hansen goes so far as to suggest that post-1910 cinema ‘translat[ed] the wholeworld into spectacular terms’:
the cinema generated a metadiscourse of consumption (not unlike one of its antecedents,the nineteenth-century world fair), a phantasmagoric environment in which boundariesbetween ‘looking’ and ‘having’ were blurred. This environment beckoned the viewer
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with an abundance of images – and images of abundance – unavailable to the addressee,or available at best in fragmentary substitutes.43
But here, again, we might postulate that the cinema was no less imitating sybaritictrends of consumption than pragmatically anchoring itself to oral norms that under-pinned narrative or experiential retention. After all, this type of ingestible plenitude,this ‘lust of the eye’, as Gunning calls it,44 is, once more, a vital constituent of the oralepisteme. That is because striking images don’t only seize the imagination; they alsoserve ‘as storage and recall devices – the ocular equivalents of verbal formulas’.45
Might the oral episteme of visual narrative even shed etiological light on silentcinema’s idiosyncratic use of color? According to Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk,as much as eighty percent of silent film used some sort of color,46 and the popularityof these colors with the masses, as Gunning further remarks, ‘had to do less with natu-ralism as we would normally understand it, than with extremes of emotion almost, orsensuality – a kind of intensity. Very often what gets coloured, for instance in TheGreat Train Robbery, is not what is most natural, but what is most extreme.’47 I amunder no illusion that the presence of – or subsequent retreat from – color was notconditioned by multiple factors, such as a desire (as in the case of a retreat from it) tosecure class distinctions. But is it not just as plausible that the eventual withdrawalfrom an ‘unnatural’ deployment of color might have stemmed from an increasinglyliterately driven privileging of verisimilitude?48 This is a difficult statement to qualifyin brief; but generally a verisimilar projection of life – with its emphasis on restraintand on putting man ‘wholly into his physical setting’49 – is by necessity impeded inoral communities. The incapacity for knowledge in such communities to be disen-gaged from the voice necessitates narrative expression that is fundamentallyoutwardly oriented: loud, fulsome, flatulent even (see Figure 1). In this way, we needask if one’s noetic capacity to retreat from an oral way of knowing (a privilege, to besure, considering its heavy tethering to formal education) might have played a deci-sive, and even discriminatory, role apropos demarcating class-based tastes. For certainit would explain the tendency for contemporary scholars in the field to refer to suchvisual amplification as ‘sensationalist’, ‘garish’, even ‘kitschy’.50
A similar sort of amplification has been noted of silent-film performance. JonBurrows, for example, pays tribute to the ‘semaphoric largesse’ of character actors insilent British film from 1908 to 1918,51 while Paula Cohen draws attention to a ‘moreold-fashioned “histrionic school”’ of acting in American silent cinema, one that‘favored exaggerated, declamatory gestures – actors beating their breasts to denote griefor clenching their fists high in the air for anger’.52 It might behoove us to re-evaluateterms like ‘old-fashioned’, however, given that, even today, we find in a strain ofmasala films – not to mention Hong Kong films and Egyptian popular cinema – a simi-lar penchant for outsize performance. In other words, a narrative’s predilection foroutward display may be not merely for reasons of sensationalism or because of a senti-mental commitment to established theatrical practices (as high-literates might have it),but for noetically conservative reasons. Melodrama, for instance, when part of an oraleconomy, is in many respects a memorable enactment of verbomotor speech. (It is alsoin some sense the generic byproduct of outsize performance.) After all, the tributes andhostilities of the individual who is faced psychologically outward must also be directedoutward – ‘and chiefly to what he is most intimately aware of in that aurally or vocallyconceived world, that is, to his fellow man’.53 Thus, if films like the early crime serialsor Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery (1914) betray a highly exoteric aspect and a penchant
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for ‘mellerdrammer’,54 I would suggest that they do so in ways not unlike African oralepics, which have ‘little room for the passive, lifeless, and immobile’.55 Perhaps, then,the oral episteme might help to widen the explanatory parameters concerning why, asBurrows asks, certain styles of performance might have been more ‘appealing andcomprehensible’ to certain lower-middle-class and working-class audiences.56
“Mellerdrammer” as a memorable enactment of verbomotor speech. Publicity still for The Perils of Pauline, 1914 (Courtesy Library of Congress)There is a possible oral etiology not only for these films’ affection for aggrandize-ment, but as well for what Ben Singer observes is their spectacular predispositiontoward violence.57 Not coincidentally, violence is prevalent in oral epics like theMahabharata, as well as in that epic’s modern celluloid counterpart, the masala film.Indeed, what Fareed Kazmi says regarding the latter may apply just as well to theaesthetic of attractions; for each ‘privileges the physical over the mental, brawn overbrain, the body over the mind, the non-rational over the rational, the primitive over thecultured’.58 Could this be because, in the oral milieu, knowledge must be situated inthe context of a struggle? As Ong states, ‘When all verbal communication must be bydirect word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonalrelations are kept high – both attractions and, even more, antagonisms.’59
Certainly the oral episteme helps shed a crisper light on why, during the silent-filmperiod, ‘[t]he middle class equated [melodrama’s] aesthetic of calamity and astonish-ment with proletarian vulgarity and degeneracy’.60 One bourgeois woman, forinstance, described the aesthetic in 1916 as ‘this reeking, bloody, villain-pursued-her… sort of stuff’.61 Indeed, Hansen contends that the film industry’s subsequentattempts to achieve a greater ‘realism’ (via pictorial detail, a more restrained style of
Figure 1. ‘Mellerdrammer’ as a memorable enactment of verbomotor speech. Publicity stillfor The Perils of Pauline, 1914 (courtesy Library of Congress).
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acting, and psychologically motivated characters) reflected its bid for a ‘higher-classaudience’.62 I would propose that an ability and eagerness to participate in a greater‘realism’ simultaneously reflected norms facilitated by alphabetic literacy. In short,our long-term immersion in the solitary acts of reading and writing has historicallyfacilitated – and, indeed, bred a particular relish for – restraint, depth psychology, andverisimilitude. To be sure, an externalized intensity of emotive display, and thepresentational frontality that results, is not exclusive to the oral domain.63 But moreoften than not – and certainly in the case of Hindi popular films – it performativelyoperates in, and as part of, a matrix governed by oral principles. Of course, to the moreliterately invested spectator, such ‘loud’ and agonistic narrative language may appeartiresome and trite. Hence one writer’s decrial in a 1919 Photoplay article, perhaps, thatserial melodramas were all ‘[a]ction, action, and yet more action! … Serials are TheModern Dime Novels! They supply the demand that was once filled by those bloodcurdling thrillers… . Melodrama! Of course it’s melodrama.’64
Just as vital as these serials’ foregrounding of action is the way they came narra-tively packaged in a ‘basic, iconographic formula’,65 which housed even smaller icon-ographic packages that helped to orient the spectator. If ‘the fainting heroine was’, asCohen puts it, ‘a standard shorthand for profound emotion’,66 to some degree this mayhave been because of the externalized nature of such emotion. No doubt, as well, itwas because of an existentially vital oral predilection for standardization and, as weshall see later, for redundancy. True, the term ‘shorthand’ often implies a kind ofhackneyed storytelling, a reliance on overused devices and simply coded gestures thatthe high-literate percipient might derisively term cliché. But clichés, being pre-known, are inherently collectively owned – not to mention the most economical meansby which to carry and perpetuate content. Not only would these clichés have aided intranscending divergent linguistic discrepancies and cultural differences betweenmigrant viewing populations; they would have also demanded much less spectatorialforeknowledge in order for the stories to be understood.
A similar tendency toward commonplaces can be identified in orally inflectednarrative with respect to character types. That is, characters, like rhetorical devices,likewise need to be unforgettably inflated and commonly public. This could certainlyhelp explain why silent-film producers found success with familiar, pre-existing char-acters drawn from vaudeville and the comics, as well as with broad-stroked characterswhose familiarity they outright invented (e.g. ‘The Tramp’, ‘Little Willy’, ‘BurglarBill’) or whom they styled as family members (e.g. ‘Foxy Grandpa’, ‘Uncle Josh’,‘Aunt Jane’).67 For this reason, we probably need to revisit the contention that, in thesilent-film scenario, ‘everybody’s ersatz family of stars’ offered merely a ‘rush ofcomfort’ or ‘a hollowed-out substitute for the original’.68 The original, the unrecog-nizable, and the discontinuous are, after all, anathema to the orally inflected narrative,which seeks to preserve, not to interrogate, through story. Indeed, in the case of Hindimasala films, impartial critics have explicitly commented on the collapsed nature ofthe actor–role relationship, with stars less playing characters than ‘sets of expecta-tions, created by the audience’.69
An existentially oral inclination toward collectivity might also account for thepreponderance in silent films of musical and dance interludes, as well as for why ‘welargely fail [today] to appreciate Porter’s “lively quadrille” [in The Great TrainRobbery]’.70 True, the necessity to obscure the dearth of sound via musical accompa-niment might have organically fostered ‘a sense of collective presence’,71 and true,too, that the proclivity for musical interludes could have stemmed from the mimicry
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and expectation of a percipient’s engaging with earlier theatrical models; and one finaltruth is that film-going in the silent era, as Richard Koszarski concludes, may have‘remained essentially a theater experience, not a film experience’.72 But how then dowe explain the preponderance of such interludes in the Bollywood cinema of the1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s – or in Disney films, which may be as linked to an oralway of knowing as they are to elementariness? After all, one does not witness or antic-ipate that same sort of collective impulse when attending a play written by Ibsen orChekhov. Thus, once more, we see the saliency of drawing attention to the linkbetween the oral episteme and the aesthetic of attractions, given that cultures or groupsheavily inflected ontologically by orality ‘find their identities within communal rela-tions’.73 This is nowhere more evident than in the mandatory staging of a closedending in both these species – one where the status quo is ultimately conserved andall unsettling features neutralized. Why would this betray an oral impetus? Becausesuch endings permit the incorporation of the self into the group and, in this way, oper-ate fundamentally as an act of preservation. Attractions are only attractive when theydo not severely jeopardize the body politic.
The centrality of the mouth
Rick Altman has argued that, though cinema’s primary challenge in the silent-filmperiod was the linkage of shots and spaces (via eyeline matches, point-of-view shots,etc.), scholars have underplayed, if not all-out ignored, the importance of sound: ‘Asimportant as the gaze becomes during the late aughts, understanding of this periodrequires equal attention to listening and the use of sound to establish narrative spaceand spatial connections.’74 Besides, if silent cinema rested exclusively with the visual,why was there so much emphasis placed on listening? By 1910, somewhat ironically,a veritable chattiness of characters had developed in the American film; and often thatchattiness, which was frequently presented as an eavesdropped activity, served as anoteworthy vehicle for plot. Not only did these plots ‘turn on moments when listening[was] emphasized, but listening increasingly serve[d] an important role in new meth-ods of constructing narrative space’.75 The major innovation of The Voice of the Violin(1909), for instance – a D.W. Griffith film, in which a music teacher-turned-Marxisthears his own student playing the violin in the very mansion in which he is planting abomb – is ‘its use of hearing to connect space and further the plot’.76 Additionally,more than half the early European screenplays that Isabelle Raynauld submitted toanalysis tell ‘stories that revolve around “sound events” in the diegesis’,77 such ascooks hearing their bosses’ footsteps approaching at the sound of dishes breaking, ormen quaking at the blast of gunshots. One of the most commonly filmed situations isin fact the trial; and, as Raynauld humorously queries, ‘is there anything more talkythan a court trial?’78 Perhaps most striking, she concedes, is how often ‘off-screensounds and conversations are the reason for characters to “move” from one shot orscene to the next’.79 For instance: ‘At the sound of her master’s scream the old servantruns in, followed by the terrorists’; and ‘When [a man] suddenly hears the voice of hisyoung mistress, he runs in the direction of the voice.’80 As earlier mentioned,Raynauld contends that early European cinema represented sound, including not onlythese sorts of faux auditory action-inducers, but more generally characters dialoguingand speaking their lines. The actor of the silent era had to ‘speak his part for the hear-ing world, keep his mouth in motion for the spectators to see, whether they could hearhim or not!’81 Regardless of the lack of sound, spectators clearly wanted to see the
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mouth – and in this way, however ineffectually, to listen. Why otherwise, given thesefilms’ silence, would there be such compunction to represent the vocalizing mouthand the overhearing ear?
In some sense, the reasons may be axiomatic: we communicate largely by way ofspeech, hence the focus on our vehicle of speech. No doubt, too, as Gunning hasproposed, early cinema was paying obeisance to theatrically prescribed laws of dramaand acting.82 But is it also not possible that part of the answer lies in a crude syllogis-tic rebuttal of Paula Cohen’s assertion that ‘[w]ith the coming of sound, it becamepossible to make the voice an adjunct to the face in the representation of character’?83
Literacy, not sound, makes the voice an adjunct. Certainly the voice’s privileged locusin orally inflected sound cinema and its pre-eminence for orally inflected peoples (forwhom lengthy story transmission necessarily occurs by way of the voice) makesspace for an alternative theoretical claim. For, if we think of listening as an extensionof speaking (in the sense that, in an oral community, one can only participate in astory that is being told), then one possibility is that the central feature in early filmwas the voice itself – or its ‘silent’ locus in early film, the mouth. For this reason, Iwould propose that, despite many a silent-film character’s incapacity to hear, a signif-icant concentration was dedicated to the mouth, with the face serving primarily as anadjunct to the voice.84
If we are theoretically amenable to this proposition, we might further extrapolatethat the eventual standardized inclusion of the close-up emerged as much from a spatialconnection to the voice as it did from a spatial connection to the face as the seat ofhuman expression. Similarly, techniques such as cutting may have been no less fueledby speech than they were by sight. Consider, for instance, the shot/reverse shot or thecamera whose positioning moves us progressively closer to a character. Arguably theseare as much voice-stimulated as sight-stimulated, generated by mouthline matches asmuch as by eyeline matches. When we move in tighter – as from a long shot, to amedium shot, to a close-up, say – that closer proximity may be no less initiated by anaural impulse than by a visual impulse. Closer – IS GETTING – LOUDER, in effect.
For this reason, I tend to agree with John Fullerton, who, based on his close readingof early Danish comedies, concludes that three processes of filmic manipulation –namely, reverse-action footage, the jump cut, and the chemical treatment of the filmemulsion – all ‘ar[o]se from a desire to imply or figure sound in the diegesis’.85 ThoughFullerton and I may differ on the etiology of such sound-based cuts,86 he demonstratespersuasively how jump cuts were associated with sound via ‘the use of bodily gestureto represent what, in human interaction, would normally be communicated aurally. Inthis context, verbal response to a given narrative situation (often involving excitement,fear, frustration or anger) [was] figured through gesture.’87 Further, these jump cuts,along with other filmic devices, were frequently triggered by ‘implied sound cues’, justas ‘other forms of “trickality” could, on occasion, figure sound’.88 Heksen og cyklisten(‘The Witch and the Cyclist’, 1909) serves as a compelling example:
After a series of verbal altercations, which become increasingly vehement, [a] witch,shouting at [a] cyclist and raising her right arm, casts a spell, whereupon a jump cut,motivated by her speech and action, effects the transition to [a shot where the] cyclist’sclothes have been transformed.89
‘In this extract,’ as Fullerton subsequently analyzes, ‘jump cuts are used not only toeffect sudden transformations in pro-filmic space … but are motivated by impliedsound cues … as the sound of the witch’s voice is displaced onto bodily gesture.’90
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Dominique Nasta goes so far as to suggest that auditive perception sometimesproves more active in silent film than visual perception, with sounds ‘visualized so asto ensure that they are somehow associated with the act of real hearing or listening’.91
In fact, she wonders if the authors of several French melodramas ‘intend[ed] to rendertheir stories more accessible, more realistic, by overusing sound elements’; either that,or they ‘complicate[d] their legible diegeses with hyperbolic aural figures that wouldattract the viewer’s attention in a different, more challenging way’.92 In films like Lalégende du vieux sonneur (‘The Legend of the Old Bellringer’, 1911), she notes, ‘thehyperbolic nature of the bell-ringer’s various auditive reactions increases the melodra-matic potential of an otherwise simplistic intrigue’.93 I would propose that the hyper-bolic way in which these silent ‘sound effects’ were employed hints again at a possibleconnection to orality. Hyperbole – no doubt axiomatically now – is an essential ingre-dient in orally inflected tales, by virtue of the way it ensures a story’s easy enlistmentto memory. Certainly exaggerated acoustical phenomena – and the melodrama theyinduce – are to be found in many late twentieth-century Bollywood films, where clam-orous sound effects or musical chords often augur the arrival of the human utterance.In fact, quite typically in the masala movie, ‘sound is aggrandized, exaggeratedexpression is favored, and the value of the visual is conditioned less by cinematogra-phy than by a collectively agreed-upon ascendancy of the voice that inhabits it’.94 Nowonder, then, the spectatorial ‘threat’ (as François Jost sees it) of silent films likeL’Assissinat du duc de Guise (‘The Assassination of the Duke of Guise’, 1908),where, in tandem with emerging representations of psychology, silence is givennoticeable presence.95
Even repeated stories, we might postulate, function as modes of extending the roleof the mouth as the vehicle of story. Take, for example, what Shelley Stamp articulatesabout the Perils of Pauline series. True, as a character Pauline may appear antitheticalto the old-style heroine of melodrama, who was generally meek and unadventurousand who, if faced with peril, was destined to succumb.96 Nevertheless, Pauline wasstill, as Stamp notes, embedded in alarmist tales, in ‘formulaic serial plots [that]repeatedly, even obsessively, staged the same cautionary tale in thinly disguised repe-titions from episode to episode, and serial to serial, as plotlines quickly came to resem-ble one another’.97 But from the vantage point of the oral episteme, such repetition isless tolerated than mandatory. When one must transmit everything by word of mouth,there is a pragmatic need to reiterate or echo knowledge in order to ‘store’ it success-fully. The mind must focus on keeping what is already there there still. Such a noeticeconomy naturally forces a disposition toward a conservative or traditional mindset,98
toward one that does not promote speculation or originality (as the literate mindunderstands those terms), but seeks instead to reshuffle the old or already existent inorder to accommodate the novel.99
Epistemic quietude versus technological quietude
Hopefully the reader is by now persuaded that, despite its particular brand of silence,silent film is not inherently detached from the voice – in so far as the voice pertainsto, and is the vehicle for, an epistemically oral way of knowing. By the same token, asound film, despite being lodged in a ‘hearing’ world, may evince a strong reticulatedetachment from the oral, even as voices may diegetically (and logorrheically) over-run it. Such statements of course appear to contradict Chion’s claim that ‘[b]y endow-ing the film with a synchronized “sound track” and bringing the voice to this added
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track, the talkies allowed us not only to hear silence … but also to have truly silent,mute characters. The deaf cinema … wasn’t able to make their silence heard.’100 Butany seeming incongruity between our points of view is only superficial; for, whereasChion is discussing the aural hearing of silence, I am discussing what the isolatedexperience in silence permits, and what even it has the capacity to engender. Thisdistinction discriminates crucially between the silence typically attributed to a filmbereft of a synch soundtrack and the quietude perhaps most readily identified with thefilms of directors like Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson. Based on the oralepisteme, however, we must take heed of where the facility for enduring the presenceof quietude – and, by extension, of quiescence – originates.
Consider, for example, that in Hindi masala films quiescence and quietude arerarely amplified, or ever, quite frankly, even deployed. This is because these twoqualities – in their concerted departure from utterance and, ergo, in their call for aprivate extraction of meaning – can only mark an absence of story, not a compellingroute to a story’s depth. This motif of absence-as-presence, in other words, is inextri-cably linked to a spectator’s ability to segregate him or herself from the humanvoice, an activity which may not be in an oral spectator’s interest or purview. Conse-quently, with respect to silent film, we need to be wary of assigning more or lessexclusively to a capitalistically motivated privatization of the spectatorial process101
what may be in part owed to epistemic shifts in interpretative capacities. (These are,once again, inarguably bound up with economic contingencies, given that such shiftsare largely educationally endowed.) Or, we might phrase it this way: we need to bevigilant about distinguishing the silence in which one watches from the silence forwhich one watches, as it is fundamentally out of this latter type of silence that ironyand symbolism are born. Such tropes, after all, call for hermeneutical activities thattake place primarily alone. Indeed, could this be what has led critics to historicallylaud directors like F.W. Murnau and Carl Dreyer for having brought ‘poetry’ or‘purity’ to the silent screen? Their films serve as illuminating examples, I believe, ofhow literate motivations may sometimes be underpinning nebulously determinedcategories like ‘sophisticated’ or ‘transcendent’. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), forinstance, is frequently touted in academia for the manner in which it renders wordssuperfluous, for its beautiful pacing and atmospheric images (see Figure 2). But suchcharacteristics as are manifest in the film (or as are rooted out of a film, we mightaver) hinge on a literately inflected capacity for interpreting what an atmosphericimage might be meaning, or how a sound might be signifying ‘a character’s thoughtsor subjective perceptions’.102 This latter activity, for instance, shifts the nature of theengagement into the realm of the symbolic – which is in great contradistinction tothe totemic realm salient in orally inflected narratives. Totems, after all, are collec-tively known and shared.
Might the oral episteme of visual narrative also account for why Sunrise – despitethe ‘torrents of praise’ it received from scholars many years later – was, upon its initialrelease, received in manner that was ‘far from universally favourable’?103 In fact, thefilm was described by some as being ‘as cold as the marble that a sculptor uses’ and‘the sort of picture that fools highbrows into hollering Art’.104 Interestingly, ‘cold’ isa word that Indian spectators have assigned in the past to western films.105 Perhaps thereason is that, in the oral world, mental reason is rarely extricated from nature. As Ongpoints out (borrowing from A.R. Luria), an oral culture simply does not engage in‘abstract categorization’ or ‘articulated self-analysis’, as these mandate a ‘demolitionof situational thinking’.106 Abstraction, in this circumstance, signals a divorce from the
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world, not a greater comprehension of it. That some contemporaneous viewers wentso far as to claim that ‘[t]here is not a heart-throb in Sunrise’107 may speak to thecomparatively more literate location of that film’s sublimity.“Purity” as a shift away from the utterance-toward a private extraction of meaning. Still from Sunrise, 1927 (Courtesy British Film Institute)D.W. Griffith even hints unwittingly at this oral-to-literate perspectival shift whenhe explains the creative motivations behind his direction of that landmark of parallelstorytelling, Intolerance (1916):
Figure 2. ‘Purity’ as a shift away from the utterance-toward a private extraction of meaning.Still from Sunrise, 1927 (courtesy British Film Institute).
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I have endeavored to make the incidents which I have shown on the screen of such anature that the audience on viewing the picture conceives and elaborates the story in his[sic] mind. In other words, the greatest value of the picture will be in its suggestive valueto the audience, in the manner in which it will force it to create and work out the ideathat I am trying to get over. I have made little or no attempt to tell a story, but I havemade an attempt to suggest a story …108
Given the patent retreat here from oral norms, it is no wonder that, as Hansen exhorts,‘[w]hether encouraging the viewer’s associational and interpretive competence or para-lyzing the viewer with its infinite regress of self-definition and abstraction, Intolerancerenders spectatorship problematic in a number of ways’.109 In some sense, we mightcontend that what made this movie – and many movies at the time – ‘alternative’ wasits literately inflected impulse to abandon the viewer.
The same claim could be made about Eisenstein’s oeuvre, in spite of Eisenstein’sbelief that his montage of attractions hinged on an unambiguous syntax available tothe masses. For, as David Bordwell describes, Eisenstein ‘takes fairly dead andclichéd metaphors and enlivens them through contextual associations: his filmicfigures go beyond one-for-one comparisons and acquire the penumbra of connota-tion that distinguishes a rich poetic metaphor’.110 But such reconfigurations may beanathema to the orally inflected viewer, who relies on those so-called dead andclichéd metaphors, since they are the best, most efficient means for transportinginformation.
Introduction of orality to the silent-film arena thus reinforces John Orr’s proposi-tion that the division between silent and sound art films has been too quickly drawnand overstated. As Orr notes in Cinema and Modernity, the modernist period of film-making comprising directors like Antonioni and Alain Robbe-Grillet was in actualfact neo-modernist, a return to an ‘earlier moment of high modernism between 1914and 1925’, when directors like Buñuel, Dreyer, Eisenstein, Lang, and Murnau wereworking.111 I would suggest that the qualities which Orr cites as evidence of thisearlier modernism – such as its movement toward a ‘greater physical redemption ofreality, towards establishing, particularly in the cinema of Vigo and Renoir, the lumi-nous validity of the image’112 – were generated by, and demand that they be readthrough, a more literately inflected set of norms.
Similarly, Béla Balázs’ claim that ‘[f]acing an isolated face takes us out ofspace’ or Roland Barthes’ rhetorical tribute to ‘that moment in cinema … when oneliterally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the facerepresented a kind of absolute state of the flesh …’113 may prove, as noetic acquisi-tions and aesthetic interpretations, objectionable to the more orally inflected viewer,for whom ‘getting lost’ may signal a story’s failure rather than its greater artistry.Without any clear and foregrounded activity on the screen, the weight of the story-telling is shifted intellectually onto the shoulders of the spectator, who must askherself, What is this face for? What does this mean? But interpreting an image thatis grayer or a narrative that is more ambiguous; having to confront formalistically‘deformed’ cinematic language that makes an image more semantically dense: allthese grow out of a literate (and highly learned) capacity for engaging with text. Forthis reason, it is imperative that we tease away technological quietude from theconnotatively charged quietude engendered by literacy. A film that is ‘technologi-cally silent’ doesn’t lead sine qua non to the kind of erotic gapes that the ill-definedor even undefined silence in a sound film – or the semantic density in a Sunrise –has the capacity to produce.
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A clarion call apropos silence
According to Paula Cohen, the ‘silent film esthetic’ is still very much alive today:American comedies continue to emphasize physical stunts, ‘with Jim Carrey a post-modern hybrid of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton’, just as action films remaincommitted to long, wordless sequences and video games to a ‘frenetic movement andrepetitive musical accompaniment … reminiscent of the early silent chases’.114
But is it only an ‘esthetic’? Perhaps we should acknowledge instead that theesthetic is in part epistemically motivated – or at least, in the particular cases thatCohen cites, corporately motivated continuities that capitalize on the more ‘natural’accessibility, universality, and recollective durability of orally inflected norms. If thisseems a large claim, it is only because of the startling number of attributes that linkmuch of the silent-film species to the oral episteme of visual narrative. In fact, silentcinema’s draw upon previous genres, such as ‘well-known plays, novels (or, moreoften, their theatrical adaptations), folk- and fairy-tales, comic strips, politicalcartoons, and popular songs’,115 may have been motivated by something much moreexistentially vital than a mere capitulation to nostalgia.116 (That many of these earlierforms, such as the folk tales and fairy tales, had themselves been contoured by oralitywould certainly have made them inherently attractive as material.)
Clearly I have only scratched the surface. But as I acknowledged at the outset, thisarticle is intended more as an incitation to scholars in the discipline. My hope is thatsilent-film specialists will recognize the significance of this episteme to the study ofsilent film and that, with the aim of nuancing our understanding of how film narrativeworks (including a challenge to my own overdetermination of the links, perhaps), theywill continue to probe the species with an eye toward how orality, and our subsequentmove away from it, might have impacted the development and reception of film narra-tive in its silent days. At the least, introduction of orality healthily complicates howwe conceive the silent in silent film. We can certainly talk about more oral silentfilms, just as we can talk about more literate ones, too. In the words of Noël Burch,‘the “language” of cinema is no way natural, a fortiori that it is not eternal, that it hasa history and is a product of History’.117 Thus this article’s plea for the inclusion oforality/literacy amongst those currently recognized photographic, literary, and theatri-cal influences on silent film. Though film may be a medium that is fundamentallyimage-oriented,118 clearly those images, when shaped as narrative, may derive in partfrom norms that register our noetic capacity to separate ourselves (or not) from whatwe know. Thus, the voice, one might argue was sometimes as ‘heard’ in silent film asit is today in the Hollywood blockbuster. Turn off the latter’s audio, or screen a filmthat possesses no soundtrack, and still you may be operating from within a milieupiloted by the voice.
Notes1. I borrow this concept of ‘seeing voices’ from Oliver Sacks, via Isabelle Raynaud (2001).2. Altman 2004, 6.3. Quoted in Altman 2004, 193.4. Quoted in Chion 1999, 6.5. Chion 1999, 8.6. King 1996, 37.7. Chion 1999, 7.8. Raynaud 2001, 69.9. Raynaud 2001, 70.
10. Raynaud 2001, 70.
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11. Nasta 2001, 95.12. Altman 1996a, 145–62.13. Ganti 2004, 139.14. Corliss 2002.15. Prasad 1998, 71.16. Châteauvert and Gaudreault 2001, 183.17. Châteauvert and Gaudreault 2001, 190.18. Châteauvert and Gaudreault 2001, 183.19. Chopra 2002, 183. See, too, Hamid Naficy’s description of Iranian audiences during his
growing-up days. Such audiences interacted orally with the diegesis and, in his words,‘heightened the contentiousness of the viewing experience’ (Naficy 2003, 189–90).
20. Châteauvert and Gaudreault 2001, 187.21. Havelock 1963, 197–214.22. Nayar 2008.23. Foucault 1972, 191–2.24. I borrow the concept of the episteme from Michel Foucault.25. Nayar 2008, 142.26. For a comprehensive account of these norms’ etiology, see Nayar 2001.27. Cohen 2001, 37.28. Abel 1994, 103–4.29. Quoted in Abel 1994, 104.30. Châteauvert and Gaudreault 2001, 103.31. Quoted in Hansen 1991, 79.32. Brewster 2004, 236; emphasis added.33. Hansen 1991, 95.34. Hansen 1991, 77.35. The wording here I borrow partly from Altman who, in his book Silent Film Sound, calls
for the development of ‘a new history of American cinema reconfigured through sound’(Altman 2004, 7).
36. Gunning 2004, 44.37. Gunning 2004, 43.38. Vasudevan 1995, 307.39. Rajadhyaksha 1987, 58.40. Dwyer and Patel 2002, 30.41. Havelock 1987, 98.42. Ong 1982, 44.43. Hansen 1991, 85; emphasis added.44. Gunning 1999, 829.45. Eric Havelock, quoted in Ong 1967, 25.46. Hertogs and de Klerk 1995, 41.47. Gunning 1995, 29–30.48. Enno Patalas claims that, in films like Murnau’s Faust and The Last Laugh, the camera
work became increasingly important, and this weakened the need for tinting. Particularlyhe cites a ‘growing awareness of the photographic nature of cinema and a growing stresson camera movement’ (Patalas 1995, 46). I would add that the increased semantic densitygenerated by these changes, as well as the noetic demands they place on the spectator,underscore these films’ move toward a more literately inflected form of storytelling.
49. This statement was made by Allen Tate. Quoted in Watt 1957, 27.50. Singer points to the films’ sensationalism (2001, 13), Gunning to their being ‘garish’
(1995, 33), and Bordewijk to their kitsch factor, albeit in quotes (1995, 35). Significantly,Bordewijk notes that this kitsch was ‘for the lower classes, who were thrilled to see colourin their lives’, and says, ‘We have transformed their pleasure in kitsch into our pleasurein camp. Our enjoyment of these colours is a kind of meta-enjoyment’ (1995, 35). I wouldsuggest that these references betray a literately inflected drive. After all, this ‘meta’ aspectis anathema to orally inflected cinema. Indeed, it is the descendant of another literatelyinflected trait wholly absent from masala films: irony.
51. Burrows 2003, 37. It is important to mention that Burrows rejects as misleading ‘conceptsof histrionic and verisimilar codes which have commonly been used in recent scholarlystudies to categorise early film acting styles’; instead, he stresses that ‘the flamboyant andextravagant poses of performers … were quite logically harmonised with early theories of
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screen realism and corroborated increasingly sophisticated norms of narrative storytellingand character delineation which were then emerging’ (24).
52. Cohen 2001, 117.53. Ong 1967, 134.54. The term was used – pejoratively, obviously – in a 1916 critique of the serial The Yellow
Menace. See Singer 2001, 203.55. Okpewho 1979, 229.56. Burrows 2003, 112.57. Singer 2001, 96.58. Kazmi 1999, 80–1.59. Ong 1982, 44–5; emphasis added.60. Singer 1996, 166.61. Quoted in Singer 1996, 167.62. Hansen 1991, 69.63. Singer, for instance, contrasts the period’s serial-queen melodramas – which have ‘no
interest in the portraiture of emotional nuance’ – with the type produced by DouglasSirk: ‘If the [Sirkean] family melodrama can be described as a cinema in which, as Sirkput it, “everything happens on the inside” – within a zone that is doubly “inside”,concentrating on the interior spaces of the home and the heart – the serial-queen melo-drama is distinct in its externalization, its insistence that everything happen on theoutside. It virtually eradicates any complexity of emotional entanglement and sentimentin favor of a focus on physical action and violence. It externalizes psychology in theform of fixed, unequivocal dispositions of villainy, virtue, and valor. The serial-queenmelodrama externalizes its focus of diegetic interest as well as character psychology,avoiding the private sphere in favor of an adamantly non-domestic mise en scène ofcriminal dens, submarines, lumber mills …’ (Singer 1996, 169–70). Melodrama, in thecase of Sirk, I would argue, becomes a genre that extrapolates a norm from the oralepisteme of visual narrative and works upon it in decidedly literate ways.
64. Quoted in Singer 1996, 168. This film/dime novel correlation intriguingly points to howwritten narrative, despite requiring a capacity for alphabetic literacy, can still manifest anotable connection to, or contouring by, orality. Also, that serial-writers could author anarrative that was clearly more orally inflected than they were speaks to the complexityand fascinating nuances of applying the oral episteme to the visual medium.
65. Singer 1996, 184.66. Cohen 2001, 123.67. Altman 1996b, 282.68. Altman 1996b, 282.69. Mishra 1992, 141.70. Mayer and Day-Mayer 2001, 221.71. Hansen 1991, 43.72. Quoted in Hansen 1991, 99.73. Tomaselli, Shepperson, and Eke 1995, 26.74. Altman 2004, 214.75. Altman 2004, 214.76. Altman 2004, 214.77. Raynauld 2001, 70.78. Raynauld 2001, 74.79. Raynauld 2001, 74.80. Raynauld 2001, 74.81. Raynauld 2001, 75.82. In Raynauld 2001, 74.83. Cohen 2001, 127.84. The allusion here is in part to Béla Balázs’ adulation of the physiognomy of the face in
silent cinema as a route to deepening our immersion into the human soul or spirit. See hisTheory of the Film.
85. Fullerton 2001, 93; emphasis added.86. Fullerton suggests that ‘sound and the jump cut would have stimulated a multimedial
response in the historical spectator, bringing some of the aural events associated with livecircus performance to the experience of viewing the film’ (2001, 90).
87. Fullerton 2001, 90.
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88. Fullerton 2001, 89.89. Fullerton 2001, 93 and 91.90. Fullerton 2001, 91.91. Nasta 2001, 96.92. Nasta 2001, 97.93. Nasta 2001, 97.94. Nayar 2001, 131.95. Jost 2001, 50.96. Oral inflection certainly does not imply complete inflexibility. Much as with oral epic,
tensions or events generated by the contemporary political or social scene are typicallygrafted on to a core of older themes and formulae (see Hiltebeitel 1999, 26). They can alsobe oriented toward specific audiences, such as – in the case of the Pauline series – women.
97. Stamp 2004, 212.98. Ong 1982, 41.99. Ong 1982, 41.
100. Chion 1999, 95.101. Hansen 1991, 95.102. Chion 1999, 136.103. Butler 1988, 141.104. Quoted in Butler 1988, 142.105. Thomas 1995, 162.106. Ong 1982, 54.107. Quoted in Butler 1988, 142.108. Quoted in Hansen 1991, 137; emphases added.109. Hansen 1991, 140.110. Bordwell 2004, 373.111. Orr 1993, 2. Orr alleges that ‘political repression and exile and the slow take-up of new
technologies in the sound cinema’ were the ‘two things [that] coincided to frustrate thecontinuity of modern film’ (2).
112. Orr 1993, 3.113. Quoted in Cohen 2001, 124.114. Cohen 2001, 173.115. Cohen 2001, 45.116. Cohen 2001, 59.117. Burch 1990, 2.118. Altman 1996b, 37.
Notes on contributorSheila J. Nayar is Associate Professor of English and Communication Studies at GreensboroCollege, in North Carolina, USA. Her articles on orality, literacy, and visual narrative haveappeared in Film Quarterly, New Review of Film and Television Studies, PMLA, and VisualAnthropology. Her book Cinematically speaking: The orality–literacy paradigm for visualnarrative is forthcoming with Hampton Press.
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