98 In the 1920s, cinema was embraced by avant-garde filmmakers and artists who experimented with the medium in radical ways, often writing film theory and criticism in tandem with their filmmaking. They belonged to movements like Dada, surrealism, and constructivism, and made some of the most enduring and fascinating films in the history of cinema. The surrealist movement placed the unconscious, dreams, delirium, and hallucination at the centre of its poetics. THE EVOLUTION OF THE AUDIO-VISUAL LANGUAGE The audio-visual language has developed very rapidly. In its early days, the language of film and television was unrefined, but then borrowed grammars and narrative techniques from other languages, primarily photography and theatre. The transition to sound and close-ups The transition to sound brought about a definitive evolution, changing the world of broadcasting forever. Another massive change was brought about by the use of close-ups which, at the very beginning, were not used because the audience would have thought of a severed head and been frightened. The language of film In early films, the camera recorded life as it passed in front of it, as it occurred in photos. Then the camera began to move into the scene, but it was not until the mid1920s and the European avant-gardes who brought editing to a high degree of refinement that the language of film reached full maturity. The films belonging to this innovative phase aimed at experimenting and shocking mainstream audience. A very famous example which entered the history of cinema is Un Chien Andalou, the most significant film of surrealist cinema . The inspiration for it began with two artists, Luis 226 BiG and smaLL scrEEn Bu uel and Salvador Dal , who began working on a screenplay from some of their past dreams. The story concept The story concept is an essential feature of the audio-visual language. Every age has its story concepts because the core of every narrative is closely related to the nature of the society that generates it. The historical phase that a particular audience is going through can form the basis of both commercial and auteur films. There are two types of concepts; low concepts don t have built-in conflicts and antagonists, nor do they appear to be particularly unique or compelling. Some examples are: two teenagers falling in love; a widow struggling with grief; a detective solving a crime; high concepts often wrestle with what-if questions and tend to contain built-in appeal, conveying a fresh or original idea, or a new twist on an old idea. Many high concepts focus on primal emotions and situations such as survival, the conflict and genre are often self-evident, and they tend to be visual and stimulate people s imagination. Some examples are: what if scientists built dinosaurs from preserved DNA?, a lonely orphan is invited to a secret school for young wizards, what happens when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence? built-in appeal: fascino incorporato in tutto il film built-in conflict: tensione all interno della narrazione grief: dolore, lutto to severe: tagliare