How To Enjoy Writing : A Book of Aid and Comfort by Janet & Isaac Asimov

Author:Janet & Isaac Asimov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York, N.Y. : Walker
Published: 1987-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Suppose you darken the picture and allow the sound to remain. Won’t you still get a pretty good notion of what’s going on? There may be spots rich in action and poor in sound that may leave you frustrated by dark silence, but if it were anticipated that you would not see the image, a few lines could be added and you would miss nothing.

Indeed, radio got by on sound alone. It used speech and “sound effects.” This meant that there were occasional moments when the dialogue was artificial to make up for the lack of image: “There comes Harry now. Oh, he doesn’t see the banana. Oh, he’s stepping on the banana. There he goes.” By and large, though, you could get along. I doubt that anyone listening to radio seriously missed the absence of image.

Back to the TV tube, however. Now turn off the sound and allow the vision to remain untouched—in perfect focus and full color. What do you get out of it? Very little. Not all the play of emotion on the face, not all the impassioned gestures, not all the tricks of the camera as it focuses here and there are going to give you more than the haziest notion of what is going on.

Corresponding to radio, which is only speech and miscellaneous sound, there were the silent movies, which were only images. In the absence of sound and speech, the actors in the silent films had to “emote.” Oh, the flashing eyes; oh, the hands at the throat, in the air, raised to heaven; oh, the fingers pointing trustingly to heaven, firmly to the floor, angrily to the door; oh, the camera moving in to show the banana skin on the floor, the ace in the sleeve, the fly on the nose. And despite every extreme of inventiveness of visualization in its most exaggerated form, what did we have every fifteen seconds? An utter halt to the action while words flashed on the screen.

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