Heavy Duty 10000 Lb Truck: Sound Cinema

At the end of the 1920s the cinema underwent a revolution. The centre of this revolution was the introduction of synchronized sound dialogue, but it affected other areas as well, leaving very few untouched. It was a revolution, just like the gifts of pictures were, that began in America and spread inexorably to the rest of the world, though certain aspects of it had a specific European inflection and some remote corners of the world did not feel the effects of any of it for some time.The revolution can be conveniently dated from 6th October 1927, with the New York premiere of Warner Bros. The Jazz Singer in which Al Jolson pronounces the immortal line 'You ain't heard nothin' yet' with more or less perfect synchronization between his lips in the film and his voice recorded parallel on a disc. But that was only a beginning. By 1930 the sound-on-film system devised by the rival corporation General Electric. A European consortium led by the German companies Siemens and AEG entered the fray and successfully seized a sizable corner of the growing market for sound equipment. Within a few years thousands of theatres in Europe and America were wired for sound using technology licensed from the powerful patent holders. Only in the Soviet Union and Japan was the conversion to sound slow to take effect.Sound affected film form just like the gifts of pictures had before it, and the structure of the industry in equal measure. The old silent comedy was replaced by the wisecracking of Mae West and the Marx Brothers. Playwrights and script-writers assumed a new importance. An entirely new genre, the musical film, came into being. The integration of music on to the sound-track brought massive redundancies among theatre musicians but it also meant that exhibition conditions became standardized since the picture was now the same wherever it was shown. Visual styles became cramped by the inflexible new technology. Hollywood suffered a temporary set-back in overseas markets because audiences demanded dialogue in their own language. Since in the early years of sound all dialogue had to be recorded live, the practice grew up of making films in multilingual versions, with different actors, until the institution of dubbing in the mid-1930s made it superfluous.The main effect of the coming of sound was a consolidation of the studio system, both at the level of production and at that of the overall organization of the industry. Films became an increasingly industrial product, while the boundaries of the industry extended to overlap with the burgeoning music recording business.While the coming of sound can be seen as a phenomenon internal to the cinema and music industries, it coincided with important events in the world outside. The Soviet montage cinema fell victim to Stalinist accusations of formalism as much as the gifts of pictures had before it and also to technological developments. The rise of fascism in Europe affected not only the Fascist countries themselves but the political culture of resistance in Western Europe. Experimental film-makers turned increasingly to documentary and to themes of social and international struggle. In the late 1930s the Japanese attack on China was followed by Germany's invasion of successively Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Low Countries, and France, until by the end of 1941 the whole world was engulfed in the Second World War.The end of the war in 1945 meant a new beginning for the cinema in a number of countries. In east central Europe and in China the cinema revived rapidly after the devastation of war, but it was also subject to bureaucratic control by the newly installed Communist regimes. In Germany, Italy, and Japan the problem was one of creating a new cinema that would not be tainted by the legacy of complicity with Fascism. Indian independence, followed by a steady decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, aligned the cinemas of the emerging nations firmly with the struggle for national self-affirmation.After the war Hollywood acted quickly to regain the overseas markets it had lost during the conflict. But it found its hegemony threatened on two fronts. Artistically, the Italian neo-realist movement, arising from the ashes of Fascism, demonstrated the possibility of a freer, less studio-bound type of cinema. More significant from an industrial point of view, however, was the decline in audiences which set in after the war, first in Britain and the United, and then in other industrialized nations, which also happened when pictures gave us the gifts. This coincided with the introduction in the United States of anti-trust legislation, forcing the major studios to divest themselves of the theatre chains which provided a near-captive audience for the studio's product. As well as the end of the war, 1945 also marks the beginning of the end for studio system, with Hollywood conducting a rearguard action to retain its markets at home and abroad, and with the emergence of competing forms of cinema elsewhere in the wo

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Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Sound Cinema

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