Seeing and Hearing Thought

Marcel Carné (still), Le jour se lève, 1939.

For some twenty years, production has been dominated by a misunderstanding whereby a film is held to be a means, not to express thought, but to reproduce speech.1 This mistake derives from another one, still to this day spread by college regents, many of whom claim that there is no thought without words. A share of our thoughts does indeed result in interior monologues which, in moments of confusion, we may go as far as to mutter. Still, beneath this verbal thought, which is all the more coherent logically because it is closer to consciousness and its oral or graphic realization, there exists a more intimate, less conscious, but extremely active mental life in which images play a very important part. The moving memories of a friend, of a day of vacation, of a loss are thus first and foremost a gallery of tableaux vivants, portraits and landscapes, preserved by memory, touched up by oblivion. Only later do words attach to these visual elements, whose affective climate they very imperfectly manage to render. Thought in images is therefore not reserved for dreaming, reverie, or delirium; it is part of the ordinary life of the soul, during the day and at night, and in such a continuous manner that some attention is required to glimpse it and identify it as the foundation of verbal thought.

When silent cinema sought to refine the psychology of the characters in its fictions, it initially used and abused subtitles, then resorted to close-ups, and at last discovered that it was quite naturally capable of representing, through the images of the screen, the images of this profound thought that underpins words. The first flashbacks,2 `or views representing memories, which appeared in a few American films, were characterized by a soft focus which, like italics, indicated that these shots did not belong to the same level of objectivity as the rest of the sequence. At the opera, for instance, Faust sees Marguerite through tulle. In La Roue, Gance, in an analogous search for an inner truth, showed shapes gradually growing darker and then disappearing in the sight of a man becoming blind. With some directors, harmonizing the shooting technique with the state of mind of the character supposedly seeing what the audience saw became a permanent concern. The process was quite legitimate, so legitimate in fact that it became commonplace.

However, the real problem – that of putting on the screen, in their authentic illogicality, associations of thought through visual images – had until then been barely touched upon. Suddenly, under the influence of Surrealism, a few authors were able to direct four or five films in which they claimed to describe a purely mental spectacle and drama. Images no longer had to tell what a hero did or said, but what he thought, everything he thought, respecting the apparent disorder of this psychic activity. Yet the public, saturated with verbal logic, demanded that a drama or a comedy be built in every detail as a succession of theorems, and that the arrest of the assassin or the engagement of the fiancés be deducible point by point, with the rigor of a demonstration. And the screenings of the last Surrealist film were stopped by order of the police headquarters on the pretence of obscenity. In truth, the issue was to put an end to an offence, not so much to morals as to one of its old parents, dating back to Aristotle: formal logic. Shortly before the triumph of the talkie, verbal rationalism thus already scored a first victory and, already, put a ban on the romanticism of purely visual discourse.

For long our ancestors, who invented speaking, remained in awe at the power of the word. It was enough to utter: “Do!” “Give!” “Carry!” for a thing to be done, given, carried. It was magic, undoubtedly. When, around the age of thirty, film found itself cured of its silence, it also started believing in the bewitchment of words and their power to create everything: the setting and the fact and the soul of characters. Why labor so much trying to express a few snatches of visual thought when verbal thought seemed to flow on its own in a dialogue or monologue? And why linger over the uncertain search for a new optical language when the old verbal languages presented the moving image with their safest commodities?

However, we think aloud quite rarely if our thoughts are not meant to be communicated immediately to some interlocutor. And the typical monologue, that of the actor taking the stage alone or speaking in an aside, constitutes a shocking artifice, even in theatrical conventions. Cinematographic dramaturgy, which is not without conventions but still follows psychological reality more closely, soon reckoned that on the screen that kind of monologue amounted to a comic scandal.

Other films featured a more interior form of monologue, closer to truth. Here, it is a doctor doing a morning round in his neighborhood, with commonplace remarks coming to mind: “For God’s sake, why did I tie a knot in my handkerchief? Another kid who doesn’t find life to his taste… in a way, I would tend to agree with him… Ah, there I am, I had to remember little Colter’s birthday… That’s it… buy him a little present… a toy…” Yet these thoughts, if the attitude and the expression of the doctor match them, are not uttered through his mouth. The audience can hear them whispered by the very muted voice of the walker, by a voice barely spoken and which may give the illusion of a voiced-only thought. Elsewhere, the same technique makes the entreaties of a woman heard very softly; her whole face is praying, but her lips are not moving. This is certainly an artifice, but the artifice of a plausible effect. And should not the scene from Jean de la Lune, in which the rumble of a train turns into a rhythm, be taken as the origin of this system, as the ear deciphers a few words ceaselessly on the traveler’s mind?3

This old example from Jean de la Lune shows perhaps the best and the most delicate use of the technique. For here the danger is of wanting to have verbal thought say too much, and on the model of spoken discourse. Though more logical than thought in images, thought organized in words remains even further removed from the order of oral language than oral language is removed from the perfect geometrical rectitude of the written sentence. Always hedging about its goals; directly linked to the fancy of its genitor, visual thought; time and again modified, diverted, enriched by the interferences of its outsides and of coenaesthesia,4 the interior verb follows a much more convoluted, intermittent, disparate progression than, for instance, the thoughts of the doctor mentioned previously might lead one to believe. In Le Jour se lève, the monologue of the murderer combines snippets related to his crime which he mechanically scans in an old newspaper.5 Though uttered in a hushed voice, the monologue represents more truthfully a real arrangement of words coming to mind.

Between the logical order of the speech composed in order to be given or read and the pre-logical relation of a spontaneous series of images, there is an infinity of intermediate forms of thought that are more or less verbalized and rationalized at the same time that they are more or less visualized and sentimentalized. Thought really exists only in this mixed state of images and words, reasoning and emotion. In its chimerical ambition of translating everything through images, silent film had the excuse of not being able to speak, of not being equipped with the instrument necessary in the expression of the spirit of geometry. However, sound film would be unforgivable if it lost its way claiming to convert all the life of the soul into words – if it forgot that it has retained the means to express, through the image, the spirit of subtlety.