speaking of the 'invisible' shubhamrc
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Silent Film Studies: the curious absence of film sound
in film theory
Shubham Roy Choudhury
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? said Harry M. Warner of
Warner Brothers in 1927. Fate of film sound seemed to have been sealed with
this very comment. But we all know history is just the opposite. 1927 is
marked as the year when Warner Brothers released their first talkie, The Jazz
Singer (Dir: Alan Crossland), a film that often marks coming of sound in
cinema[1]. Harry Warners words seem like a
foolish prediction, but thats just half the truth. He
also said, The music that's the big plus aboutthis." Warner Brothers were already investing
money in film sound with Vitaphone, Western
Electrics 16 inch disc based recording system.
Vitaphone, however, did not survive and by 1930
Warner Bros shifted to sound on film[2]. The
anecdote at the beginning of this paper points to the fact that often half-
truths achieve such mythical status that it becomes difficult to dismantle
them. Theories developed on the assumption that cinema is primarily a visual
medium are often treated as truisms, without inspecting their inherent bias
towards the visual. It is not an accident that film sound has been ignored for
so long. Rick Altman argues,
In fact, the theoreticians who overlook sound usually do so
quite self-consciously, proposing what they consider strong
arguments in favour of an image-based notion of cinema.[3]
Altman identifies a few fallacies that guide the study of films withoutacknowledging the role of sound. The most important fallacy of these is ahistorical one. The general perception among many directors as well astheorists is that sound is an adage to the silent film. This is a debate that
dates from around 1920s. Works of film historians like Rick Altman, RichardAbel, Charles OBrien, Donald Crafton etc shows us there was never a thingcalled Silent Cinema. In fact, the term was not in use before 1927.[4] The
journey of sound recording and reproduction started much earlier in theforms of the telephone and the music industry. Although Edison could notsuccessfully complete his machine before the Lumiere Brothers, he wasexperimenting with the sound film from the very beginning, as early as 1891.[5] Shows of pictorial slides with music were a regular feature of thevaudeville and music halls before the invention of cinema. Johnson writes,
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As many writers have recognized, the historical fallacy ignores
the prevalence of sound during the so-called silent era. In addition
to the standard accompaniment of live music, there were
experiments with adding sound effects and even live dialogue.
Moreover, the prehistory of the cinema had included attempts to
marry the recording of images with the recording of sounds...After all, the forms of entertainment that influenced the nascent
cinema - theatre, vaudeville and music hall - all relied heavily on
speech, music and sound effects.[6]
This may indicate why Warner thought addition of sound on film will be
an advantage. All over the world film industries adapted to sound within a
surprisingly short period. This is a clear indication that film has always been
an audio-visual medium; it just lacked the technology to record and reproduce
sound with image.[7]So when that promise was fulfilled, makers embraced it
even in its crude form. However, it is not to say that this transition was a
smooth one. On the contrary there were several law suits over patents, strikeson behalf of artists unions, severe resistance from exhibitors and fierce
competition between different formats of sound developed by various
companies including RCA, Western Electric and ERPI. But there was a general
tendency on behalf of the makers to incorporate sound in some form or the
other, there was pressure from the radio and telephone industry and the
transition was rather quick, despite legal and other blockades.[8]
The historical fallacy, however, can be explained by a lack of research
and Hollywoods construction of the grand narrative of a crisis with a happy
ending. It can easily be refuted with the help of new data emerging from
research in the field, but the more complex problem is an ontological one.
This strain of argument comes from the influential film critics like Rudolph
Arnheim and Bela Balasz. Assuming cinema is a single object, unchanged
through the course of history, they have presented their arguments
suggesting cinema is primarily a visual medium and sound acts as a pollutant
to that. The effects of their theories are so far reaching that even the present
day critics often refer back to them to suggest that sound has a marginal role
in film and has little effect on the overall structure of a film. The problem with
such a claim is that it understands cinema as a single, monolithic object and
tries to assert ontology without analysing the structure of actual films and the
system that produces them. The value of image possibly comes from thefaulty assumption about the process that gives birth to the two tracks. Film
image is usually conceived as a single strip, whereas sound is synthesized
from multiple sources. It is often divided in speech, music and effect sound as
the process of creating them are different from one another. It undermines
the facts that,
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a) image is often conjured up from various sources as well (e.g., stock shots,
special effects/CGI, second unit footage, background mattes etc.) and
b) there are enough examples to show the division between speech, music
and effect sound are not limiting, in fact, they often blur such boundaries.
William Johnson points out,
For example, any theory based on the concept of film as a kind of
language invariably assumes that film consists of a single channel,
like a succession of written letters or of spoken sounds, and the
syntagmas and paradigms of that channel are invariably taken to
be visual scenes. [9]
One has to look back at the situation around 1930s to understand how
sound shapes the object we understand as film today. The most notable
change sound immediately brought to film is that it standardised the speed of
the film to 24 frames per second. Early cinematographers often used slowerspeed to help the exposure to get better images. Successful recording and
projection of sound demanded that the speed of the recorder and the
projector must be constant and exact at all places. The arc lights used at the
studios then were noisy and interrupted the sound recording process. Hence
the quite incandescent lighting had to be used, which were in the red end of
the spectrum. This meant the blue sensitive Orthochromatic films had to be
replaced by the costlier red sensitive Panchromatic film. The Panchromatic
film was already in production but the producers were reluctant to use it
because of its cost. When they were forced to use it, the Panchromatic film
gave the cinematographers superior quality and low lighting possibilities. The
Orthochromatic film was developed by human agency in a low lit room using asafe light. But the Panchromatic film was sensitive to the full spectrum of
light. Hence it had to be developed in total darkness, which ruled out the
possibility of human judgement practised for the development of the
Orthochromatic film and made it a more mechanised and a precise scientific
process. One must note at this point how sound influenced and determined
the structure and quality of the visual. [10] To further dismiss the claim of
cinema being ontologically image oriented and an unchanged monolithic
object through history, Rick Altman notes,
During the many periods when cinema was heavily marked by its
relation to the music industry, for example, music accompanied by
a blank screen has been regularly recognised as cinema: the long
overtures to the early Vitaphone sound-on-disk features, the
introduction of a films theme song before the images or its
continuation after the post credits (as in Nashville), and the use of
totally black screen in recent music videos. These examples hardly
prove that cinema is regularly taken as a sound-based medium, but
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they do suggest the historical possibilities of cinema as an audio-
visual medium, in which sound-oriented proclivities regularly
confront image-based tendencies, thus producing a varied history
belying claims of a solely image-oriented ontology.[11] [Emphasis
in original text]
Most film theoreticians suffer from the false idea that film sound is
reproduced as it is, whereas the image goes through multiple stages of
human intervention. Allan Williams points out that recorded sound is not a
reproduction but a representation, much like the image. The apparatus
involved in recording and reproducing sound invariably isolates, intensifies,
analyzes the sonic material for us and in the process modifies it. The listening
is already done by the machine; we can only hearwhat is represented of the
original sound event to us.[12] It is merely an accident that the image track
can be divided into static and legible units. Hence all the literary theories
dealing with similar linguistic units have been used to understand film-texts.
Film theories can and do flourish completely disregarding sound as an integralpart of films, imposing a peculiar silence over study and discussions of film as
an audio-visual medium. This imposed silence over film sound has become
more oppressive in the recent years with the wake of visual studies and
visual theories that encompass elements from cultural studies, art theory
and critical theory, providing the academic terminology a strangely optical
turn. Not only discussions of film sound are pushed to the margins, they are
denied the terminology to articulate in academic language. According to Rick
Altman writings on the sound film becoming a reality dates back to 1910. The
evidence from the century long history of sound studies suggest, it has always
been an emerging field and probably will remain so. Michel Hilmes observes,
Perhaps sound study is doomed to a position on the margins of
various fields of scholarship, whispering unobtrusively in the
background while the main action occurs elsewhere. This would
echo the position that most writers on the topic attribute to sound
itselfconstantly subjugated to the primacy of the visual,
associated with emotion and subjectivity as against the objectivity
and rationality of vision, seen as somehow more natural and less
constructed as a mode of communicationin essence,
fundamentally secondary to our relationship to the world and to
dominant ways of understanding it.[13]
It is disturbing to note, how major film theories are developed on an
incomplete and deliberately partial understanding of the medium. Discussion
of film sound can only be found in sporadic special issues of critical journals
and in the writings of a few mavericks of film studies in the last few decades.
Even then Philip Brophy rightly observes that much of that discussion falls on
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deaf ears, as if reprioritisation of sound is a disability, requiring a special
ramp way to the heads of the serious discussants of cinema.[14]
REFERENCES
[1] The first film to have sound on the Vitaphone system was Warners Don
Juan(Alan Crosland, 6th August, 1926). Jazz Singer released on 6th October,
1927. Don Juan, however had only music and effect sound, not dialogues.
[2] Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinemas Transition to Sound,
1926-1931, History of American Cinema 04 (New York: Charles Schribners
Sons, 1997).
[3] Rick Altman, Introduction: Four and half Film Fallacies, in Sound Theory
Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 35-45.
[4] Steve Neale, Sound and Film Aesthetics, in Cinema and
Technology:Image,Sound,Colour (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1985), 91-106.
[5] Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound, Film and Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), 7881.
[6] William Johnson, The Liberation of Echo: A New Hearing for Film Sound,
Film Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Summer 1985): 2-12; Michel Chion, Prologue:
Raising The Voice, in The Voice in Cinema, ed. Claudia Gorbman and Claudia
Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 11. Chion notes there
are a number of patents and demonstrations of film sound equipment
between 1895 and 1928.
[7] Johnson, The Liberation of Echo: A New Hearing for Film Sound, 23.
There are a variety of experiments with sound in the first 2-3 years. William
Johnson, in fact, claims almost all the uses of sound that can be found in
narrative cinema have been invented by 1931.
[8] Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinemas Transition to Sound, 1926-1931.
[9] William Johnson, Sound and image: A Further Hearing, Film Quarterly
43, no. 1 (Autumn 1989): 24-35.
[10] Bob Allen, Lets Hear It For Sound, Association of Motion Picture Sound,n.d., http://www.amps.net/newsletters/issue15/15_lets_.htm. (accessed on
May 5, 2010)
[11] Altman, Introduction: Four and half Film Fallacies, 38.
[12] Alan Williams, Is Sound Recording Like A Language?, Yale French
Studies 60 (1980): 51-66.
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[13] Michel Hilmes, Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does
It Matter?, American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 249-259.
[14] Philip Brophy, Where Sound Is: Locating The Absent Aural in Film
Theory, in The Sage Handbook of Film Studies, ed. James Donald and Michel
Renov (Los Angeles: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008), 425-435.
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