an was one of the most skillful film editors in the British film industry. His opportunity to direct came in 1942 when Noel Coward approached him with the offer to co-direct a screenplay he had written called In Which We Serve (Castelli and Cleeland, 1980: 1-3).
David Lean's films show a director in control of his material, and all elements of the filmmaking process are brought to bear in service of the ultimate goal of communicating images. Different devices may be used in different films, but all are coordinated in order to assure that they contribute to the final result. Several of these devices will be analyzed as they are reflected in four films: Brief Encounter (1946), Great Expectations (1947), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Dr. Zhivago (1965). These films are representative of Lean's development as an artist and of his art.
Literary Exposition/Voice-Over Sound: Lean's films have a strong literary content, a reflection of the origin of most of them. The four films under discussion are all adaptations of previous material--Brief Encounter was a play by Noel Coward called Still Life, and the other three were novels. The voice-over in Brief Encounter comes from the character of Laura, and most of the film is told in terms of her memory, as narrated by her voice. This gives the film a literary texture beyond what the original play could have had. It was a one-act much shorter than the film, while the film has attained a novelistic quality through the use of this single voice (Anderegg, 1984: 26). The use of the single voice has several important effects. The voice organizes the material and gives the viewer a strong central character with whom to identify. Anderegg states: "There is a distance between the story and its presentation that allows us to view the narrative as pervasively subjective" (26). By this he means that the material is shaped by Laura's memory and thus by her personality and subjectiv...