seamless web of superstition.

     Like the oral Russian, the African will not accept sight and 
sound together. The talkies were the doom of Russian film-
making because, like any backward or oral culture, Russians 
have an irresistible need for participation that is defeated by 
the addition of sound to the visual image. Both Pudovkin and 
Eisenstein denounced the sound film but considered that if 
sound were used symbolically and contrapuntally, rather than 
realistically, there would result less harm to the visual image. 
The African insistence on group participation and on chanting 
and shouting during films is wholly frustrated by sound track. 
Our own talkies were a further completion of the visual package 
as a mere consumer commodity. For with silent film we 
automatically provide sound for ourselves by way of “closure” 
or completion. And when it is filled in for us there is very much