But why? Sandro asked much later, after Roberto had left for his university studies. Because you are going to be an artist, his father said. And it was important to establish that you aren’t suited to anything else. That’s what artists are, his father said, those who are useless for anything else. That might seem like an insult, he said, but it wasn’t, and someday Sandro would understand.
“If one is striving to create a realistic space, the same thing must be done with sound. While I am writing these lines, I can hear church bells ring in the distance; now I perceive the buzzing of the elevator, the distant, very-far-away clang of a streetcar, the clock of city hall, a door slamming. All these sounds would exist, too, if the walls in my room, instead of seeing a man working, were witnessing a moving, dramatic scene as background to which these sounds might even take on symbolic value — is it right then to leave them out?”
Carl Theodor Dreyer