CISA– Introduction, writing, researching

I think my major interest in writing this CISA essay is to investigate what is the difference between “films” and “speechless films”. Most of the time I am more engaging in the film chapters that do not have dialogues. And it enables me to think much deeply on what is happening. It might also be the reason I am interested in dance films. (a combination of body movements and music)

[A very ancient mime is said to have been symbolic of the conquest of China by Wou Wang,  while others focus on the harvest, war, peace, and nature. (Broadbent, 2004) Another modern and most frequent example of traditional Chinese mime is called Crested Ibis (Chinese characters), which is a dance drama produced by Shanghai Dance Theatre. With the help of Sino-Japanese efforts, directed by Ma Xuefeng, it explores the fate of crested ibises, beautiful and rare creatures that symbolize happiness and blessings in ancient China. Regarding modernization and urbanization, the birds gradually faded away who were being endangered. As one of the representative art forms, Crested Ibis relies on the performers’ abilities and acquired skills to make use of their movements to convey expressions, intentions, and emotions which shared the idea from Laban in 1980. Specifically, when analyzing its contemporary sound design, it relates to mainly two parts respond body and shape. It is relatively easy for people to understand and familiar to most dance movement therapists (Dayanim et al., 2006; White, 2009).]

Some references on my topic:

In addition, sound gives a new value to silence. A quiet passage in a film can create almost unbearable tension, forcing the viewer to concentrate on the screen and to wait in anticipation for whatever sound will emerge. Just as color film turns black and white into grades of color, so the use of sound in film will include all the possibilities of silence.

David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson. (1979). Film Art: An Introduction. pp.265

Sound temporalizes images in three ways.
The first is temporal animation of the image. To varying degrees, sound renders the perception of time in the image as exact, detailed, immediate, concrete—or vague, fluctuating, broad.
Second, sound endows shots with temporal linearization. In the silent cinema, shots do not always indicate temporal succession, wherein what happens in shot B would necessarily follow what is shown in shot A. But synchronous sound does impose a sense of succession.
Third, sound vectorizes or dramatizes shots, orienting them toward a future, a goal, and creation of a feeling of imminence and expectation. The shot is going somewhere and it is oriented in time. We can see this effect at work clearly in the prologue of Persona—in its first shot, for example.

The silent cinema adopted the traditional methods of punctuating scenes and dialogues (for the cinema did, after all, have dialogues). And it also naturally borrowed narrative techniques from opera, which used a great many punctuative musical effects by drawing on all the resources of the orchestra.
The silent cinema had multiple modes of punctuation: gestural, visual, and rhythmical. Intertitles functioned as a new and specific kind of punctuation as well. Beyond the printed text, the graphics of intertitles, the possibility of repeating them, and their interaction with the shots constituted so many means of inflecting the film.
So synchronous sound brought to the cinema not the principle of punctuation but increasingly subtle means of punctuating scenes without putting a strain on the acting or the editing. The barking of a dog offscreen, a grandfather clock ringing on the set, or a nearby piano are unobtrusive ways to emphasize a word, scan a dialogue, close a scene.
Punctuative use of sound depends on the initiative of the editor or the sound editor. They make decisions on the placement of sound punctuation based on the shot’s rhythm, the acting, and the general feel of the scene, working with the sounds imposed on them or chosen by them. (In rare cases, the director makes such decisions him or herself, and some sound punctuation is already determined at the screenwriting stage.)
Naturally, music can play a major punctuative role. It certain- ly did in the silent era, but in a less precise, more approximate way, owing to the much looser methods of synchronizing music with image. And so it is not very surprising if certain early sound films dared to employ music in an unabashedly punctuative manner. John Ford’s The Informer, with its score by Max Steiner, provides a good example.

The orchestra’s punctuation of gestures and dialogue aims to undermine their purely realist and concrete aspects in favor of making them into signifying elements in an overall mise-en-scene.

Michel Chion. (1994). Audio-vision: Sound on screen (C. Gorbman, Trans.). Columbia University Press.