Cinema pictures with synchronized sound. In 1926, 16-in gramophone discs running at 33 rpm (revolutions per minute) were linked to the film projector, but this was quickly replaced by integral sound-on-film systems. A photographic sound record is printed by the side of the picture as a continuous track in which sound modulations are represented by variations of either its density or its width. During projection the track passes a narrow illuminated slit, varying the transmitted light received by a photocell to produce electrical signals which are amplified to loudspeakers behind the screen. To record high frequencies it was necessary to increase the filming rate from 16 to 24 frames a second, and for projection up to 48 frames a second. By 1930, sound film had become universal in cinemas, although the variable density system of modulation gradually disappeared. Improvements in the quality of photographic sound recording and reproduction have continued, with noise reduction, extended frequency range, and stereophonic presentation, and the use of digital sound representation is envisaged.
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound (that is, sound technologically coupled to image), as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but it would be decades before reliable synchronization was achieved in a commercially practical way. The first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized sound took place in the United States in April 1923. In the early years after the introduction of sound, films incorporating synchronized dialogue were known as "talking pictures," or "talkies." The first feature-length movie originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927.
By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In Japan, where the popular film tradition integrated silent movie and live vocal performance, talking pictures were slow to take root. In India, sound was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the nation's film industry—the most productive such industry in the world since the early 1960s.
History
Early steps
The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before the first commercial motion picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine the zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology. The two devices were brought together as the Kinetophone in 1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded by successes in film projection. An improved cylinder-based system, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet excerpts to be presented at the Paris Exposition in 1900. These appear to be the first publicly exhibited films with projection of both image and recorded sound.
Three major problems persisted, however, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for a generation:
Synchronization – The pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in synchronization. Playback volume – While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of electric amplification could not project to satisfactorily fill large spaces. Recording fidelity – The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the cumbersome recording devices (acoustical horns, for the most part), obviously imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound. Léon Gaumont had demonstrated a system involving mechanical synchronization between a film projector and turntable at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Despite high expectations, Gaumont's sound innovations had only limited commercial success—though improvements, they still did not satisfactorily address the three basic issues with sound film and were expensive as well. By the end of 1910, the groundswell in sound motion pictures had subsided. In 1907, French-born, London-based Eugene Lauste—who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and 1892—was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the encoding of sound and its inscription directly onto image-bearing celluloid. Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which came to an effective dead end. instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto a screen. The phonograph was connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization.Other sound films, based on a variety of systems, were made before the 1920s, mostly of performers lip-synching to previously made audio recordings. The technology was far from adequate to big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major Hollywood film studios saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures. Thus such films were relegated, along with color movies, to the status of novelty.
Crucial innovations
A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by the late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback:
Advanced sound-on-film – In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was awarded several patents that would lead to the first sound-on-film technology with commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded and printed on to the side of the strip of motion picture film, making it almost impossible for the sound and picture to go out of synchronization. On April 15, 1923, at New York City's Rivoli Theater, came the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film, the future standard: a set of shorts under the banner of De Forest Phonofilms, accompanying a silent feature. The following year, De Forest's studio released the first commercial dramatic film shot as a talking picture—the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song, directed by J. in the UK it was employed a few years longer for both shorts and features by British Sound Film Productions, a subsidiary of British Talking Pictures, which purchased the primary Phonofilm assets.
In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. The same year that De Forest received his first patents in the field, three German inventors patented the Tri-Ergon sound system. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, patented a system in which sound was recorded on a separate filmstrip running parallel with the image reel. The following July, Case joined with Fox Film, Hollywood's third largest studio, to found the Fox-Case Corporation. In 1927, as well, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film.
Advanced sound-on-disc – Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology, a number of companies were making progress with systems in which movie sound was recorded onto phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified film projector, allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add synchronized sound sequences to D. Griffith's failed silent film Dream Street. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened incorporating them. On May 1, 1921, Dream Street was rereleased, with love song added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal sequence.
In 1925, the then-midsized Hollywood studio Warner Bros. the first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical score and sound effects, but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying Don Juan, however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, all with live-recorded sound. These were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio. in October 1926, the first feature film with synchronized playback throughout to show to a broad audience.
Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of fundamental technical advantages:
Synchronization: no interlock system was completely reliable, and sound could fall out of synch due to disc skipping or minute changes in film speed, requiring constant supervision and frequent manual adjustment Editing: discs could not be directly edited, severely limiting the ability to make alterations in their accompanying films after the original release cut Distribution: phonograph discs added extra expense and complication to film distribution Wear and tear: the physical process of playing the discs degraded them, requiring their replacement after approximately twenty screeningsNonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had the edge over sound-on-film in two substantial ways:
Production and capital cost: it was generally less expensive to record sound onto disc than onto film and the central exhibition systems—turntable/interlock/projector—were cheaper to manufacture than the complex image-and-audio-pattern-reading projectors required by sound-on-film Audio quality: gramophone discs, Vitaphone's in particular, had superior dynamic range to most sound-on-film processes of the day, at least during the first few playings—while sound-on-film tended to have better frequency response, this was outweighed by greater distortion and noiseAs sound-on-film technology improved, both of these disadvantages were overcome.
The third crucial set of innovations marked a major step forward in both the live recording of sound and its effective playback:
Fidelity electronic recording and amplification – Beginning in 1922, the research branch of AT&T's Western Electric manufacturing division began working intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for the redubbed Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of Don Juan and its accompanying shorts over the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for Warners films was markedly superior to those made for the company's sound-on-film competitors. Meanwhile, Bell Labs—the new name for the AT&T research operation—was working at a furious pace on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow recordings to be played back over loudspeakers at theater-filling volume.
Late in the year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. Superior recording and amplification technology was now available to two Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction. The new year would finally see the emergence of sound cinema as a significant commercial medium.
Triumph of the "talkies"
In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five leading Hollywood movie companies—the so-called Big Two, Paramount and MGM, as well as First National (in the industry's next rank, along with Fox), mid-sized Universal, and Cecil B. DeMille's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC)—to collectively select just one provider for sound conversion; As Fox and Warners pressed forward with sound cinema in different directions, both technologically and commercially—Fox with newsreels and then scored dramas, Warners with talking features—so did ERPI, which sought to corner the market by signing up the five allied majors.
The big sound film sensations of the year all took advantage of pre-existing celebrity. On May 20, 1927, at New York's Roxy Theater, Fox Movietone presented a sound film of the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh's celebrated flight to Paris, recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox sound newsreel depicting his return welcomes in New York and Washington, D.C., was shown. These were the two most acclaimed sound motion pictures to date. As with Don Juan, the film's soundtrack was comprised of a musical score and sound effects (including, in a couple crowd scenes, "wild", nonspecific vocals). It was a smash box office success for the mid-level studio, earning a total of $2.625 million in the U.S. and abroad, almost a million dollars more than the previous record for a Warners film. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying, like Sunrise and Don Juan, on a score and effects. When the movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; Though the success of The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as one of America's biggest music stars, and its limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film (let alone the "first"), the movie's handsome profits were proof enough to the industry that the technology was worth investing in.
The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts before The Jazz Singer, and the film's success did not change things overnight. Not till May 1928 did the four hesitant majors (PDC had dropped out of the alliance)—along with United Artists and others—sign with ERPI for conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. released even a part-talking feature until the small Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) premiered Perfect Crime on June 17, 1928, eight months after The Jazz Singer. Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the rule.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. The film cost Warner Bros. In September, the studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture, The Singing Fool, which more than doubled The Jazz Singer's earnings record for a Warners movie. September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry's Dinner Time, among the first animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. After seeing it, Walt Disney decided to make one of his Mickey Mouse shorts, Steamboat Willie, with sound as well.
Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to the popularity of its sound films, the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer's debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight studios that would be known as "majors" during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first part-talking feature, Lone Wolf's Daughter. Most American movie theaters, especially outside of urban areas, were still not equipped for sound and the studios were not entirely convinced of the talkies' universal appeal—through mid-1930, the majority of Hollywood movies were produced in dual versions, silent as well as talking. Though few in the industry predicted it, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United States would soon be little more than a memory. The final mainstream purely silent feature put out by a major Hollywood studio was the Hoot Gibson oater Points West, released by Universal Pictures in August 1929. One month earlier, the first all-color, all-talking feature had gone into general release: Warner Bros.' On with the Show!
The transition: Europe
The Jazz Singer had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theatre in London on September 27, 1928. According to film historian Rachael Low, "Many in the industry realized at once that a change to sound production was inevitable." On January 16, 1929, the first European feature film with a synchronized vocal performance and recorded score premiered: the German production Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame). A dialogueless film that contains only a few minutes of singing by star Richard Tauber, it may be thought of as the Old World's combination Dream Street and Don Juan. With an eye toward commanding the emerging European market for sound film, Tobis entered into a compact with its chief competitor, Klangfilm, a subsidiary of Allgemeine Elektrizitãts Gesellschaft (AEG).
Over the course of 1929, most of the major European filmmaking countries began joining Hollywood in the changeover to sound. One of Europe's first two feature-length dramatic talkies was created in still a different sort of twist on multinational moviemaking: The Crimson Circle was a coproduction between director Friedrich Zelnik's Efzet-Film company and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released as the silent Der Rote Kreis in Germany, where it was shot; It was given a British trade screening in March 1929, as was a part-talking film made entirely in the UK: The Clue of the New Pin, a British Lion production using the sound-on-disc British Photophone system. In May, Black Waters, a British and Dominions Film Corporation promoted as the first UK all-talker, received its initial trade screening; Originally shot as a silent, Blackmail was restaged to include dialogue sequences, along with a score and sound effects, before its premiere. critical response was also positive—notorious curmudgeon Hugh Castle, for example, called it "perhaps the most intelligent mixture of sound and silence we have yet seen."
On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with a talkie: G’schichten aus der Steiermark (Stories from Styria), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film production. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French feature. a Pathé-Natan film, it is generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot, like Blackmail, at the Elstree studio, just outside of London. It was not "Germany's First Talking Film", as the marketing had it, but it was the first to be released in the United States.
In 1930, the first Polish talkies premiered, using sound-on-disc systems: Moralność pani Dulskiej (The Morality of Mrs. Dulska) in March and the all-talking Niebezpieczny romans (Dangerous Love Affair) in October. In Italy, whose once vibrant film industry had become moribund by the late 1920s, the first talkie, La Canzone dell'amore (The Song of Love), also came out in October; The Soviet Union's robust film industry came out with its first sound features in 1931: Dziga Vertov's nonfiction Entuziazm, with an experimental, dialogueless soundtrack, was released in the spring.
Throughout much of Europe, conversion of exhibition venues lagged well behind production capacity, requiring talkies to be produced in parallel silent versions or simply shown without sound in many places. While the pace of conversion was relatively swift in Britain—with over 60 percent of theaters equipped for sound by the end of 1930, similar to the U.S. figure—in France, by contrast, more than half of theaters nationwide were still projecting in silence by late 1932. Crisp, "Anxiety about resuscitating the flow of silent films was frequently expressed in the [French] industrial press, and a large section of the industry still saw the silent as a viable artistic and commercial prospect till about 1935." as of spring 1933, fewer than one out of every hundred film projectors in the country was as yet equipped for sound.
The transition: Asia
During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with the United States. Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West. It appears that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai (Dawn), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system. Two of the country's leading directors, Ozu Yasujiro and Naruse Mikio, did not make their first sound films until 1935.
The enduring popularity of the silent medium in Japanese cinema owed in great part to the tradition of the benshi, a live narrator who performed as accompaniment to a film screening. As director Kurosawa Akira later described, the benshi "not only recounted the plot of the films, they enhanced the emotional content by performing the voices and sound effects and providing evocative descriptions of events and images on the screen.... Film historian Mariann Lewinsky argues,
The end of silent film in the West and in Japan was imposed by the industry and the market, not by any inner need or natural evolution.... Sound films were not better, just more economical.
By the same token, the viability of the benshi system facilitated a gradual transition to sound—allowing the studios to spread out the capital costs of conversion and their directors and technical crews time to become familiar with the new technology.
The Mandarin-language Genu hong mudan (Singsong Girl Red Peony), starring Butterfly Wu, premiered as China's first feature talkie in 1930. By February of that year, production was apparently completed on a sound version of The Devil's Playground, arguably quaIifying it as the first Australian talking motion picture; however, the May press screening of Commonwealth Film Contest prizewinner Fellers is the first verifiable public exhibition of an Australian talkie. Nineteen-thirty-one also saw the first Bengali-language film, Jamai Sasthi, and the first movie fully spoken in Telugu, Bhakta Prahlada. the first Gujarati-language film, Narsimha Mehta, and all-Tamil talkie, Kalava, debuted as well. Also in 1933, the first Cantonese-language films were produced in Hong Kong—Sha zai dongfang (The Idiot's Wedding Night) and Liang xing (Conscience); within two years, the local film industry had fully converted to sound. Korea, where byeonsa held a role and status similar to that of the Japanese benshi, in 1935 became the last country with a significant film industry to produce its first talking picture: Chunhyang-Jeon is based on a seventeenth-century folktale of which as many as fourteen film versions have been made to date.
Consequences
Technology
In the short term, the introduction of live sound recording caused major difficulties in production. had taken control of thanks to its profitable adventure into sound), gives a behind-the-scenes look at some of the techniques involved in shooting early talkies. Several of the fundamental problems caused by the transition to sound were soon solved with new camera casings, known as "blimps", designed to suppress noise and boom microphones that could be held just out of frame and moved with the actors. As David Bordwell describes, technological improvements continued at a swift pace: "Between 1932 and 1935, [ERPI and RCA] created directional microphones, increased the frequency range of film recording, reduced ground noise...and extended the volume range." Another basic problem—famously spoofed in the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain—was that some silent-era actors simply did not have attractive voices;
With Hollywood's wholesale adoption of the talkies, the competition between the two fundamental approaches to sound-film production was soon resolved. Vitaphone's dominating presence in sound-equipped theaters, however, meant that for years to come all of the Hollywood studios pressed and distributed sound-on-disc versions of their films alongside the sound-on-film prints. With RCA taking the lead, the two parent companies made their projection equipment compatible, meaning films shot with one system could be screened in theaters equipped for the other. As a contemporary report describes:
Tobis-Klangfilm has the exclusive rights to provide equipment for: Germany, Danzig, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, the Dutch Indies, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Finland.
The agreement did not resolve all the patent disputes, and further negotiations were undertaken and concords signed over the course of the 1930s.
Labor
While the introduction of sound led to a boom in the motion picture industry, it had an adverse effect on the employability of a host of Hollywood actors of the time. Not only was silent film out-moded as a medium, audiences seemed to perceive many stars associated with it as old-fashioned, even those who had the talent to succeed in the sound era. Buster Keaton was eager to explore the new medium, but when his studio, MGM, made the changeover to sound, he was quickly stripped of creative control.
Several of the new medium's biggest attractions came from vaudeville and the musical theater, where performers such as Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Jeanette MacDonald, and the Marx Brothers were accustomed to the demands of both dialogue and song. A few actors were major stars during both the silent and the sound eras: Richard Barthelmess, Clive Brook, Bebe Daniels, Norma Shearer, the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and the incomparable Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) employed sound almost exclusively for music and effects. Greta Garbo was the one non–native English speaker to achieve Hollywood stardom on either side of the great sound divide.
As talking pictures emerged, with their prerecorded musical tracks, an increasing number of moviehouse orchestra musicians found themselves out of work. More than just their position as film accompanists was usurped; One 1929 ad that appeared in the Pittsburgh Press features an image of a can labeled "Canned Music / Big Noise Brand / Guaranteed to Produce No Intellectual or Emotional Reaction Whatever" and reads in part:
Canned Music on Trial
This is the case of Art vs.
Commerce
In September 1926, Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros., was quoted to the effect that talking pictures would never be viable: "They fail to take into account the international language of the silent pictures, and the unconscious share of each onlooker in creating the play, the action, the plot, and the imagined dialogue for himself." Sound film, in fact, was a clear boon to all the major players in the industry.
Even as the Wall Street crash of October 1929 helped plunge the United States and ultimately the global economy into depression, the popularity of the talkies seemed to keep Hollywood immune. Reality finally struck later in 1930, but sound had clearly secured Hollywood's position as one of the most important industrial fields, both commercially and culturally, in the United States. The American movie industry—already the world's most powerful—set an export record in 1929 that, by the applied measure of total feet of exposed film, was 27 percent higher than the year before. Concerns that language differences would hamper U.S. film exports turned out to be largely unfounded. In fact, the expense of sound conversion was a major obstacle to many overseas producers, relatively undercapitalized by Hollywood standards. Despite trade restrictions imposed in most foreign markets, by 1937, American films commanded about 70 percent of screen time around the globe.
Just as the leading Hollywood studios gained from sound in relation to their foreign competitors, they did the same at home. Jewell describes, "The sound revolution crushed many small film companies and producers who were unable to meet the financial demands of sound conversion." The combination of sound and the Great Depression led to a wholesale shakeout in the business, resulting in the hierarchy of the Big Five integrated companies (MGM, Paramount, Fox, Warners, RKO) and the three smaller studios also called "majors" (Columbia, Universal, United Artists) that would predominate through the 1950s. Historian Thomas Schatz describes the ancillary effects:
[B]ecause the studios were forced to streamline operations and rely on their own resources, their individual house styles and corporate personalities came into much sharper focus. Thus the watershed period from the coming of sound into the early Depression saw the studio system finally coalesce, with the individual studios coming to terms with their own identities and their respective positions within the industry.
The other country in which sound cinema had an immediate major commercial impact was India. From its earliest days, Indian sound cinema has been defined by the musical—Alam Ara featured seven songs; While the European film industries fought an endless battle against the popularity and economic muscle of Hollywood, ten years after the debut of Alam Ara, over 90 percent of the films showing on Indian screens were made within the country. Most of India's early talkies were shot in Bombay, which remains the leading production center, but sound filmmaking soon spread across the multilingual nation. Once the first talkie features appeared, the conversion to full sound production happened as rapidly in India as it did in the United States. Already by 1932, the majority of feature productions were in sound; two years later, 164 of the 172 Indian feature films were talking pictures.
Aesthetic quality
In the first, 1930 edition of his global survey The Film Till Now, cinema pundit Paul Rotha declared, "A film in which the speech and sound effects are perfectly synchronised and coincide with their visual image on the screen is absolutely contrary to the aims of cinema. It is a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the real use of the film and cannot be accepted as coming within the true boundaries of the cinema." Alfred Hitchcock, though he directed the first commercially successful talkie produced in Europe, held that "the silent pictures were the purest form of cinema" and scoffed at many early sound films as delivering little beside "photographs of people talking."
Most latter-day film historians and aficionados agree that silent film had reached an aesthetic peak by the late 1920s and that the early years of sound cinema delivered little that was comparable to the best of the silents. For instance, despite fading into relative obscurity once its era had passed, silent cinema is represented by eleven films in Time Out's Centenary of Cinema Top One Hundred poll, held in 1995. The earliest sound film to place is the French L'Atalante (1934), directed by Jean Vigo; the earliest Hollywood film to qualify is Bringing Up Baby (1938), directed by Howard Hawks. The first year in which sound film production predominated over silent film—not only in the United States, but also in the West considered as a whole—was 1929;
Sound's short-term effect on cinematic art may be gauged in more detail by considering those movies from the transition period—the last years of commercial silent film production and the first years of talking pictures—in the West that are widely cited as masterpieces, as recorded in recent major media polls of all-time best international movies (though some listed as silent films, like Sunrise and City Lights, premiered with recorded scores and sound effects, they are now customarily referred to by historians and industry professionals as "silents"—spoken dialogue regarded as the crucial distinguishing factor between silent and sound dramatic cinema). From the six-year period 1927–32, eleven silent films are broadly recognized as masterpieces and only one talkie (TO= Time Out; Sound):
Silent films
1927: The General (U.S.; TO 95, VV 01, S&S 02) 1932: negligible silent film productionTalkies
1927: negligible talkie production 1928: none 1929: none 1930: none 1931: M (Germany; VV 01, S&S 02) 1932: noneThe first sound feature film to receive near-universal critical approbation was Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel); The other internationally acclaimed sound drama of the year was Westfront 1918, directed by G. The earliest sound movie now acknowledged by most film historians as a masterpiece is Nero-Film's M, directed by Fritz Lang, which premiered May 11, 1931.
Cinematic form
In 1927, critic Viktor Shklovsky, one of the leaders of the Russian formalist movement, made a blunt proclamation of principle: "Talking film is as little needed as a singing book." While some regarded sound as irreconcilable with film art, others saw it as opening a new field of creative opportunity. The following year, a group of Soviet filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein, proclaimed that the use of image and sound in juxtaposition, the so-called contrapuntal method, would raise the cinema to "unprecedented power and cultural height.
On March 12, 1929, the first feature-length talking picture made in Germany had its premiere. This was also perhaps the first feature film anywhere to significantly explore the artistic possibilities of joining the motion picture with recorded sound. As described by scholar William Moritz, the movie is "intricate, dynamic, fast-paced...juxtapos[ing] similar cultural habits from countries around the world, with a superb orchestral score...and many synchronized sound effects." Composer Lou Lichtveld was among a number of contemporary artists struck by the film: "Melodie der Welt became the first important sound documentary, the first in which musical and unmusical sounds were composed into a single unit and in which image and sound are controlled by one and the same impulse." Melodie der Welt was a direct influence on the industrial film Philips Radio (1931), directed by Dutch avant-garde filmmaker Joris Ivens and scored by Lichtveld, who described its audiovisual aims:
[T]o render the half-musical impressions of factory sounds in a complex audio world that moved from absolute music to the purely documentary noises of nature. In this film every intermediate stage can be found: such as the movement of the machine interpreted by the music, the noises of the machine dominating the musical background, the music itself is the documentary, and those scenes where the pure sound of the machine goes solo.
Many similar experiments were pursued by Dziga Vertov in his 1931 Entuziazm and by Chaplin in Modern Times, a half-decade later.
A few innovative commercial directors immediately saw the ways in which sound could be employed as an integral part of cinematic storytelling, beyond the obvious function of recording speech. In Blackmail, Hitchcock manipulated the reproduction of a character's monologue so the word "knife" would leap out from a blurry stream of sound, reflecting the subjective impression of the protagonist, who is desperate to conceal her involvement in a fatal stabbing. In his first film, the Paramount Applause (1929), Rouben Mamoulian created the illusion of acoustic depth by varying the volume of ambient sound in proportion to the distance of shots. So I said to the sound man, 'Why not use two mikes and two channels and combine the two tracks in printing?'" Such methods would eventually become standard procedure in popular filmmaking.
One of the first commercial films to take full advantage of the new opportunities provided by recorded sound was Le Million, directed by René Clair and produced by Tobis's French division. A musical comedy with a barebones plot, it is memorable for its formal accomplishments, in particular, its emphatically artificial treatment of sound. Clair created teasing confusions between on- and off-screen sound.
These and similar techniques became part of the vocabulary of the sound comedy film, though as special effects and "color", not as the basis for the kind of comprehensive, non-naturalistic design achieved by Clair. Outside of the comedic field, the sort of bold play with sound exemplified by Melodie der Welt and Le Million would be pursued very rarely in commercial production. Hollywood, in particular, incorporated sound into a reliable system of genre-based moviemaking, in which the formal possibilities of the new medium were subordinated to the traditional goals of star affirmation and straightforward storytelling. The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, expanded ed. Mr. Bernds Goes to Hollywood: My Early Life and Career in Sound Recording at Columbia With Frank Capra and Others. "The Introduction of Sound", chap. in Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931. Claudia Gorbman, in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939. Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present. "The Culture-specific Use of Sound in Indian Cinema", paper presented at International Symposium on Sound in Cinema, London, April 15–18 (available online). The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931. "A Statement", in his Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1957 [1949]), trans. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926–1930. "The Transition to Sound in Japan", in History on/and/in Film, ed. Film Association of Australia (available online). "Comprehensive Connections: The Film Industry, the Theatre and the State in the Early Japanese Cinema", Screening the Past, no. Film Grosses, 1921–51: The William Schaefer Ledger", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, March (available online). "The Coming of Sound: Technological Change in the American Film Industry", in Technology and Culture—The Film Reader (2005), ed. The Coming of Sound: A History. "First Film to Talk in Kannada", The Hindu, December 31 (available online). "Synchronized Sound and Movie-House Musicians, 1926–29", American Music, vol. Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture. "Oskar Messter, Film Pioneer: Early Cinema Between Science, Spectacle, and Commerce", in A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades, ed. the Consolidation of the Film Industry", Screening the Past, no. Vitaphone Films: A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts. The History of the British Film 1918–1929 (The History of British Film, Volume IV). The History of the British Film 1929–1939: Film Making in 1930s Britain (The History of British Film, Volume VII). History and Heartburn: The Saga of Australian Film, 1896–1978. American Films Abroad: Hollywood's Domination of the World's Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present. "Historical Development of Sound Films", Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, vol. ISBN 0-345-31462-X "Talking Movies: They'll Never Take, Asserts Film Company's Head" (1926), Associated Press, September 3 (available online). ISBN 0-679-75564-0 Time Out Film Guide (2000). ISBN 0-8078-2149-7
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