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Image or Word

© Ken Nared

It was only by chance that cinema first developed before technology gave filmmakers the ability to put a sound track and thus dialog on the film strip. This chance bit of luck has affected movies from the first shots of people doing chores until the latest special effects epic. Film basically put is about images and not words, but the line is blurred because we take in a lot of our daily information through our ears. Radio, which coincidentally developed after film, proved that you could tell a story in dialog only but it required that you tell your audience much of what was going on. Granted radio used sound effects to tell when people were getting in and out of cars or shooting a gun but much of the information that a visual medium would impart in a moment to the eye had to be delivered in words.

The first movies with any cohesive story line got around the problem of no sound by using imbedded dialog cards with a couple of sentences on them, but these were totally subservient to the images that were telling the story and in some cases, such as a dialog card reading "What do you mean?" following the shocked look on the face of a character on screen, were totally superfluous. The cards, placed at the discretion of the director, were never a part of the planning of the film, they were always written afterwards and sometimes became a crutch for weak direction or story.

When Al Jolson bust into song in The Jazz Singer in 1927 film changed forever. Although silent films continued to be made into the mid-thirties the ability to put the actors word with the film changed the thinking of filmmakers. Was image enough or was dialog just as important? That discussion still continues today. Movie goers want sharp dialog in their films but when is talk to much? The eye can take in much more information that the ear so what is the proper place of dialog in the film. Should the image serve the dialog or the other way around. The fact the marriage between the two is an uneasy one is a good thing.

Filmmakers constant struggle to balance dialog and image produce some great moments in film. We all remember the great lines from our favorite films, "I'll be back," "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night," "Frankly my dear I don't give a damn." But we also remember the great images, the liquid metal robot in Terminator 2, the light saber battles in Star Wars, the final scene on Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest. The bond between words and pictures is an inseparable one and we can only hope that a just balance continues and that movies never become the domain of just words no mater how clever or funny they may be, because we want to see movies not just hear them.

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