“The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in… In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.
I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between. In writing a screenplay it is essential to, whenever possible, rely more on the visual than on dialogue… To me, one of the cardinal sins for a scriptwriter, when he runs into some difficulty, is to say ‘We can cover that by a line of dialogue.’ Dialogue should simply be a sound among sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”
—Alfred Hitchcock, excerpted from Francois Truffaut’s & Helen G. Scott’s Hitchcock (1967)
Robert,
I believe paintings and photographs are the purest form of the visual arts. I think books and poetry are the purest form of the written word. Film is the merging of the two.
Television, on the other hand, is the modern, short-attention span version of cinema. You get 20-21 minutes of “action” (in a typical half-hour show) to tell your story and most of it requires no intellectual activity on the viewers’ part.
As an aside, what do you think about Hitchcock’s quote?
The comment by Hitch wasn’t about the visual arts but cinema, which is one of those arts, and purity appears to be a matter of contention, on the level railing at God in the park or street corner for imagined injustice. But if you are looking for ‘purity’ which I am certainly not, the sculptor would seem to be at the head of the class. In literature perhaps a single word repeated might qualify, but I will take a good novel, play or film script anytime.
Pure cinema huh — well we are in show business not the pure game. Slavko Vorkapich once told me that the purest form of cinema would be to set a camera up at the edge of the sea and watch the water flow, in and out. I thought that brilliant and still do, but only as an exercise. The rest is Andy Warhol territory, so if you like that, take my share with you.
I agree. It’s entertainment, and as such, it needs to entertain. Silent films were entertaining when they were the only game in town, but almost never again.