HEARING FREEDOM, VISION SLAVERY

The interaction of vision and sound in cinema is also interesting. Almost immediately after the invention of the cinematograph by the Lumiere brothers, it became clear that without sound, moving images could only be viewed for a very limited time. A moving image with no sound is a security camera. Keep track of which work. Let's also remember that if you create complete silence by putting on headphones, for example, a person gets a feeling of anxiety and primal fear. Having discovered these effects in my own experience, almost immediately films began to be accompanied by playing the piano. Or even an entire orchestra.

At the same time, as shown by the experience of director Mamin (one of the authors of this note), accompanying the film with noise is also of interest. The neighing of horses. We bark dogs. The creak of carts and doors. natural sounds. After that, the films of Keaton and Chaplin begin to be perceived differently. Perhaps better than accompanied by a pianist. Or an orchestra.

Why was this technique not used in cinema? For purely technical reasons. While the films were silent, no sounds could be recorded on the film: no squeaks, no neighing, no barking of dogs, no birds singing, no rustling of trees, no howling of a storm, sounds without words that accompanied a person until the 20th century most of his life. . And as soon as sound appeared, it was immediately used to record speech and music. In this way, cinematography slipped through the effect of accompanying silent action with the sounds of nature, living and dead, sounds that a person does not make.

And another interesting effect was discovered by film director Yuri Mamin. For the first decades, films were made and played back by twisting a pen by hand. Therefore, the speed of shooting and the speed of the show were completely determined by the cameraman of the film studio and the projectionists in the cinema halls. So, it has been established purely empirically (according to the director Mamin, who is the largest specialist in dynamically filmed comedies) that if you show the films of Chaplin, Keaton, Max Linder at the speed with which these films were shot, unimaginable boredom arises. The display speed was determined by the display itself. The absence of automatic determination of speed and design of what was shot on the screen gave this freedom. Which, with the advent of movie cameras and movie projectors showing exactly 24 frames per second, has disappeared.

These are the most interesting effects that arise when the master talks about them. As well as people involved in the physiology of perception.

This is a perfect example of how technological progress can turn out to be a regression. Technical improvement can not only add features, but also reduce them. Speeding up and slowing down in silent films was possible without technical tricks, while in sound films, making a record play back several times faster in the same key requires the most sophisticated technological applications that were created only at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Information for thought. As well as changing the understanding of the concept of technological progress. Which is progress in some ways, and regression in some ways. Moreover, this principle seems to be fundamental. In the world of the living, in which organisms are simpler than humans, they can have properties that are not available to homo sapiens. According to Darwin, evolution inevitably not only finds new properties, but also loses the old ones that the ancestors had. Not only primates (for example, the ability to climb trees and jump from branch to branch), but also more distant ones. Fish not out of the water. And unicellular!

The same with technological progress. Which, expanding some possibilities, narrows or cancels others. And this is apparently inevitable. And if so, is the law of nature. And the one that exists outside of a person, and the one that a person creates.