You see the entrancing outside world, but it does not reach you. After learning to lip-read, you are still inside the bottle, but the cork has come out and the outside world slowly but surely comes in to you. The last item on the board was an aphorism by the film theorist Michel Chion: The silent film may be called the deaf film, Chion writes, Bereyter wrote (and I transcribed), because these films gave the moviegoer a deaf person’s viewpoint on the action depicted. Listen to her, Bereyter repeats now from the lectern, his body half-turned to the canvas behind him, one hand elegantly indicating the image onscreen. He is exhorting us to listen to the woman seated at the bar. The clip in question keeps repeating, the same four seconds over and over. We have now had the opportunity to witness this woman mouthing her line several dozen times. While James Stewart, seated in the foreground, peers hauntedly off-camera—hoping for a glimpse of Kim Novak—the barfly in the background mutters something to her companion, smiling demurely into her drink, teasing him (or herself?) with a coquettish roll of the eyes. She is a grayhaired woman in a dark blue suit and a matching navy hat. Whatever she is saying, her dialogue remains inaudible. Her glass is empty, perhaps she is assenting to a refill. The fact is, she is not a significant character in this film. Indeed, she is not a character at all, merely an extra, with no speaking role. Though her lips move, all that can be heard on the audio track is a general murmur: the bustle of the other patrons in the bar, the clinking of drinks. Hitchcock planted her in this scene, on that barstool, and no doubt directed her to speak—to mime speech, to suggest a scenery of speech—but he did not position any microphone to preserve her voice. He must have told her, Say anything, anything at all, it doesn’t matter, just so long as we get your mouth moving. And whatever this woman chose to say that day—there on set, in Ernie’s Restaurant, in San Francisco sometime in 1957—it is now swallowed up in the ambient chatter of the scene. It has no bearing on the narrative. It is a pale utterance, a white dialogue. That is Bereyter’s point, when he exhorts us to listen. No matter how hard we listen, nothing will be heard. Earlier this morning, in a methodological preface at the beginning of his lecture, Bereyter explained the entire process of white dialogues to us. First he searches for extras, he said, scouring a film’s backgrounds, crowd sequences, and establishing shots for any signs of speech, any men or women whose mouths are moving. Next he isolates this footage and sends the clip to his collaborator, a lip-reading German professor at his alma mater, who analyzes the designated extras as best she can and returns her results to Bereyter in the form of a transcript. These transcripts—a handout is currently circulating the room—are apparently formatted like screenplays.