Kracauer, S. (1960). Dialogue and sound. Retrieved February 19, 2020, from https://ifsstech.files. ... siegfried_kracauer1.pdf
Added by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard Last edited by: Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard 10/09/2021, 10:23
"The bulk of existing talkies continues to center on dialogue. ... The reliance on verbal statements increases, as a matter of course, the medium's affinity for the theater."
"The puzzling noises which the night is apt to produce attune the listener primarily to his physical environment because of their origin in some ungiven region of it."
"...localizable sounds do not as a rule touch off conceptual reasoning, language-bound thought; rather, they share with unidentifiable noises the quality of bringing the material aspects of reality into focus."
Talking of Eisentein and Clair's attitudes to talkies, the film "connoisseurs' preference for noises [as opposed to speech sounds] ... rested upon the belief that, as material phenomena, they evoke a reality less dangerous to the images on the screen than the kind of reality conveyed by the all-out talkie. Sounds whose material properties are featured belong to the same world as the visuals and, hence, will hardly interfere with the spectator's concern for the latter."
"Sound used contrapuntally must relate to the synchronized images in an understandable way to signify something comprehensible."
Kracauer uses noise to refer to non-speech sounds similar to other earlier critics such as Cavalcanti (Cavalcanti 1939).
