To suggest that nonverbal aspects of film communicate psychological and sociological realities may seem like the most commonplace and self-evident tautology. Even so, the power of images to dominate the narrative and psychological sense of film and indeed to convey more of the narrative truth of a motion picture than its dialogue can be overlooked, particularly if the onscreen talent speaking the dialogue has star power. It seems perfectly natural for a film spectator to wait for every next moment that something comes out of the mouth of (say) Meryl Streep or Michael Caine. The whole matter is complicated for Americans watching foreign films--in constant agitation as they hastily read the subtitles so they can know what is going on. How else than through dialogue, one may rather sensibly ask, is a person to figure out what is going on?
Yet, the mise-en-scFne of a film cannot be divorced from what is going on in the dialogue and indeed is essential to conveying narrative and emotional content. "It is fashionable to say that the camera is impersonal," says Ralph Block, "but those who use the camera know this is untrue." Block continues:
The camera is on the one hand as intimate as the imagination of those who direct it; on the other hand it has a peculiar selective power of its own. . . . Far from being impersonal, the camera may be said to have pronounced prejudices of rhythm (Block, 1966, p. 156).
Decisive and revolutionary as the advent of talkies was, it did not mitigate the need for filmmakers to--at minimum--account for the context in which sound became operative. That does not mean silent film was somehow superior to the talkies: If Norma Desmond's critique of them is not inaccurate--"And no dialogue. We didn't need dialogue. We had faces" (Wilder, 1950)--it does not fully capture the fact that in finer films the visual element enriches narrative and emotion and may be the source of a film's principal thematic content.
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