FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

126 Transition and Transformation
I dunno
Buck
What do you mean, you dunno?
Tony
Justa-what I say. I’m going get married but I dunno who I get married wit. I’m gonna
take trip to San Francisco to look for wife – nice – young and fat. 19
A second example occurs when Lena realizes that the seemingly paralysed man
on the stretcher is Tony. She then appears in medium shot, asking: “Who is
he?”, to which Buck responds off screen: “It’s Tony.” The third time is during
the wedding ceremony, as we see Tony on his stretcher and Lena by his side,
and hear the priest, again off screen, say: “in sickness and in health, until death
do us part”. The fourth example, still during the wedding, first shows only Lena
in close-up, as she is sitting next to Tony on his bedside, and he talks off screen
while people are singing “Addio a Napoli” in the background. The couple are
then reunited in the next shot, and thus, this central scene also prefigures their
later, closer relationship:
Tony
Iw’ispra in your ear, Lena. You ain’t mad wit Tony for being so crazy wild in love wit
you, huh? You know you come in da house – lik-a de spring come in de winter. You –
you come in da house lik-a da pink flower on da window sill, when you come –
58812BIG CU Lena. (MUSIC: People still singing; words indistinguishable)
Tony’s voice
– da whole world is just turn like inside de wine cup. You understand, Lena? I can’t
help to talk this way, you dis –
6 121 14 MCU Tony and Lena.
– and I got no English language for tell you. Oh, my Lena is so good. Oh, she’s so
pretty. 20
A second occasion when the transition becomes audible is when off-screen
space is made present through sound effects other than dialogue. This effect
appears a number of times in the film. To mention only one, central example,
the most important from a narrative point of view would then be when Buck
and Lena are involved in an intimate conversation, but are all of a sudden
interrupted by a terrible noise off screen, announcing the injured Tony’s arrival.
If the latter scene could have occurred in any sound film, the inventive use of
off-screen space within dialogues testifies to Sjöström’s first sound film as belonging
to an experimental period, where the conventions of sound cinema had
not yet been fully established. Hence, instead of strictly subordinating sound in
dialogue to the shot-reverse shot pattern of classical cinema, it is here used to