Mark Moran

Prof. Larry Engel

Film 3001: Midterm – Question 4

March 30, 1999

 

Sound

 

More so than any other technical innovation, including color, widescreen, 3D, and CGI, sound divides the history of cinema.  Virtually all films before 1928 were silent, and nearly every film after has sound.  Sound changed the aesthetic of film more than anything else before or since; it allowed whole new forms of storytelling to be developed and at the same time ended earlier forms.  Gone were the slapstick comedies, the parodies, montage sequences, and the international sharing of every film.  In their place were sophisticated new film genres that involve more complex plots and attracted more theater-oriented actors and audiences.  Films became imbued with rich atmospheric sounds, music, Foley effects, and of course, dialogue.  The interplay of on-screen sound and off-screen sound, diagetic sound and non-diagetic sound, as well as sound that compliments and sound that opposes the images added significant new depth to cinema.  Many welcomed the new possibilities, and others feared or resented them (Engel).  “So great a threat to the cinema as a creative form did sound recording seem at the outset that many directors and theorists of film violently opposed its arrival” (Cook 265).

One group obviously effected by the transition to sound were the actors.  Many foreign actors working in America (e.g. Emil Jannings) were forced to return to their native countries because their English was not too poor or accented.  For the most part, female stars like Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, and Greta Garbo made the transition to sound successfully, but male stars such as Tim McCoy, Ramon Novarro, and John Gilbert faded quickly after 1928.  Sound films required more subtle and natural acting rather than the heavy pantomime that silent actors had used “to overcome the deficiency [or] absence of words and … voice” (Doane 363).  For this reason, sound attracted a new crop of stars such as Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery, and equally importantly, a new crop of writers, trained in Broadway theater: Ben Hecht, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Kaufman, and others (Schatz 102-103).  Meanwhile, masters of the silent-screen like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin failed or refused to have the same influence after sound.  Chaplin, in fact, vehemently opposed the transition to sound and used it only to show contempt, such as in Modern Times (Engel).

Filmmakers like Paul Rotha rejected sound film as “the direct opposition of two separate mediums [sound and image, insisting that] a silent visual film is capable of achieving a more dramatic, lasting, and powerful effect on an audience by its singleness of appeal than a dialogue film” (Cook 265).  The Soviets Eisenstein and Pudovkin, recognized that sound, if used improperly, would be a threat to their beloved montage, which they considered “the principal means of influence … upon which world cinema culture rests” (Eisenstein 360).  “Sound used [to convey dialogue in “filmed-plays”] will destroy the culture of montage because every mere addition of sound to montage fragments increases their inertia as such and their independent significance… Only the contrapuntal use of sound vis-à-vis the visual fragment of montage will open up new possibilities for the development and perfection of montage” (361).  Lamenting that sound technology would not be available in Russia for some time, they thought that sound juxtaposed against image could “provide new and enormously powerful means of expressing and resolving the most complex problems” (361).  Similarly, Vertov, who had made the silent classic Man With A Movie Camera, “welcomed the coming of sound, seeing it as a means of augmenting the kino-eye with the radio-ear” (Cook 135).

Early sound films such as the original Front Page or Frankenstein used sound in a primitive manner, such that all the cuts were jerkily synced to speaker changes.  However, films like Lang’s M andHawks’ Scarface employed sound to create a novel experience.  In Scarface, gunshots and door openings occur off-screen to both add information and create tension.  Furthermore, the dialogue and speaking manner of the characters such as Tony and Poppy provide rich insight into their characters’ personalities.  While the speaking character is still always on screen, the editing is no longer forced to the dialogue.  By the time of Kirosawa’s Seven Samurai, sound in film has reached a whole new level.  The sound of wind and water quickly place us in 16^th century Japan, while the hustling noise of the crowd’s panic makes us immediately aware of the situation’s danger.  Dialogue is no longer tied to the screen, and we can watch the reactions of people overhearing an off-screen conversation.  We are then startled by the screaming of the thief and the crying of the young boy.  And then silence. As in Scarface, one of the most profound effects in sound films is the selective lack of sound, slow-motion shots that are surprising and distinctive because they are eerily silent.

Works Cited

 

Cook, David A.  A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition. 

New York: W.W. Norton & Co.  1996

 

Doane, Mary Ann.  “The Voice In The Cinema.”  Film Theory and Criticism,

Fifth Edition.  Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.  363-375.

 

Eisenstein, Sergei et al.  “Statement On Sound.”  Film Theory and Criticism,

Fifth Edition.  Ed. Leo Braudy.  New York: Oxford UP, 1999.  360-362.

 

Engel, Larry.  Notes from class lectures.  Columbia University, Spring 1999.

 

Schatz, Thomas.  The Genius Of The System.  New York: Henry Holt & Co.  1998.