Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound

Charles O’Brien

Description

How did the introduction of recorded music affect the production, viewing experience, and global export of movies? In Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound, Charles O'Brien examines American and European musical films created circa 1930, when the world's sound-equipped theaters screened movies featuring recorded songs and filmmakers in the United States and Europe struggled to meet the artistic and technical challenges of sound production and distribution. The presence of singers in films exerted special pressures on film technique, lending a distinct look and sound to the films' musical sequences. Rather than advancing a film's plot, songs in these films were staged, filmed, and cut to facilitate the singer's engagement with her or his public. Through an examination of the export market for sound films in the early 1930s, when German and American companies used musical films as a vehicle for competing to control the world film trade, this book delineates a new transnational context for understanding the Hollywood musical. Combining archival research with the cinemetric analysis of hundreds of American, German, French, and British films made between 1927 and 1934, O'Brien provides the historical context necessary for making sense of the aesthetic impact of changes in film technology from the past to the present.

Introduction

Part I: Movies and Songs in Transition
Chapter 1: Songs in Cinema in 1930
Chapter 2: Electric Sound as New Medium
Chapter 3: Voices and Bodies, Direct and Dubbed

Part II: Transnational Trends
Chapter 4: Film Editing after Electric Sound
Chapter 5: Export Cinema and Modular Aesthetics

Part III: Hollywood and Film Europe
Chapter 6: American Films and Songs, at Home and Abroad
Chapter 7: Musical Films Made in Germany

Epilogue: Songs in Cinema, from Electric to Digital

Sujets

• MUSIC
• Años 1930
• Película fotográfica
• MusicAL
• Multiple signal classification
• Sound-on-film
• Cinema of the United States
• Film score
• Editing
• 1930s
• Statistics
• Performing arts
• Cinema of France
• History of film
• Cinema of Germany
• Cinema
• Exhibition
• Songs
• Style
• Film
• Hollywood

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 08 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253040411
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

MOVIES, SONGS, AND ELECTRIC SOUND
MOVIES, SONGS, AND ELECTRIC SOUND
Transatlantic Trends
Charles O Brien
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Charles O Brien
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-253-04039-8 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04040-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04042-8 (web PDF)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
This book is dedicated to
the memory of Samnang Thary O Brien
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Movies and Songs in Transition
2 Electric Sound as New Medium
3 Voices and Bodies, Direct and Dubbed
4 Film Editing after Electric Sound
5 American Film Songs, Inside the Films and Out
6 Musical Films Made in Germany
Conclusion: Songs in Cinema, from Electric to Digital
Appendix A: Methods of Measurement
Appendix B: Samples and Tests
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
F INISHING THIS BOOK TOOK A LONG TIME, WHICH means that there are a lot of people to thank and the risk that an important name will be left out. I ll begin at the beginning with Hans-Michael Bock, Francesco Pitassio, Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Vichi, and others behind the Gradisca Spring School from 2003 through 2005, when the school s focus was on the multiple-version films of the early 1930s. The viewing of archival prints of rare films, along with participation in workshops and conversations with Horst Claus, Nata a urovi ov , Joseph Garncarz, Malte Hagener, Anne J ckel, Ivan Klime , Anna Sofia Rossholm, Petr Szczepanik, Chris Wahl, and others, led me to want to write a book on the period s musical films. Special thanks to Hans-Michael for encouraging my work on German cinema by inviting me to Hamburg to give a talk at the CineGraph conference in 2005.
An initial draft of this book was completed while I was senior fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC (2006-7). What a great place. Thanks to directors Elisabeth Cropper, Peter Lukehart, and Therese O Malley, along with that year s community of fellows, for providing a stimulating and collegial research environment.
Crucial support for the project came from Canada s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which helped fund archival research conducted in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and London at the following libraries and archives: the Library of Congress, the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California s School of Cinematic Arts, the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin, the Deutsche Kinemathek, the Biblioth que nationale de France, the Biblioth que du film in Paris, the British Film Institute, and the British Library. Special gratitude to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and the Deutsche Kinemathek for permission to use photos from their fabulous collections.
Research related to this book was presented at conferences sponsored by the following scholarly societies: the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2008, 2014, 2015), the Society for Cognitive Studies in the Moving Image (2009, 2010, 2011), Studies in French Cinema (2008, 2009), and the Film Studies Association of Canada (2009). Further venues for the presentation of book-related research included the Splendid Innovations screen translation conference organized in London by Jean-Fran ois Cornu and Carol O Sullivan (2015), the Hollywood s Musical Contemporaries and Competitors conference organized by Jeremy Barham at the University of Surrey (2014), the GRAFICS Workshop on Montage sponsored by Andr Gaudreault and his team at the Universit de Montr al (2014, 2016), and the conference on French and British cinema relations organized by Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley at the University of Southampton (2007).
Participation in 2012 in the stellar one-week German Film Institute at the University of Michigan, which included round-the-clock screenings of rare films, proved extremely helpful. Thanks to the GFI s organizers, Anton Kaes, Johannes von Moltke, and Eric Rentschler, and to the other participants for welcoming someone who came to German film scholarship late in the day.
This book s ideas were developed through my work as a teacher and graduate supervisor in the Film Studies program at Carleton University. Thanks to my students over the years for providing an audience for my ideas and to my faculty colleagues, especially Carol Payne, Aboubakar Sanogo, and Michael Windover, who read drafts in our faculty writers group. Assisting with the book s statistical analysis were two students in the Film Studies master s program, Kira Vorobiyova and especially Mohsen Nasrin, a creative practitioner of cinemetrics in his own right. Nancy Duff and Jack Coghill performed life-saving work in redoing the book s DVD frames for me while I was living in Florence, Italy, where the Kuntshistorisches Institut and the Biblioteca Palagio di Parte Guelfa provided congenial spaces for daily work sessions.
Thanks also to Yuri Tsivian for encouraging my use of statistical methods and providing a major resource through his creation and maintenance of the Cinemetrics website; to the late and beloved Gunars Civjans for his creation of the cinemetrics tools that enabled the research for this book; and to Rick Altman, whose course on the American film musical at the University of Iowa many years ago sparked my interest in songs in films. I am also pleased to express gratitude to Petr Szczepanik for inviting me in 2012 to Masaryk University in the Czech Republic to teach a one-week course on songs in cinema, and to Geoff Brown, Colin Crisp, and Malte Hagener for sending me copies of their writings, including unpublished work. Art critic Anja Caspary provided valuable assistance with the German-language texts. Janice Frisch and Kate Schramm at Indiana University Press guided me through the editorial process, and Leigh McLennon contributed astute copyediting.
Countless people have helped me along the way in the work on this book. I apologize to those whose names I missed. Also, any errors or deficiencies in the book are, of course, solely the author s responsibility.
As always, the deepest thanks go to Randi Klebanoff and our daughter, Madeleine, who inspire me more than words can say.
MOVIES, SONGS, AND ELECTRIC SOUND
INTRODUCTION
T HIS BOOK EXAMINES A MERICAN AND E UROPEAN MUSICAL FILMS produced circa 1930, when the world s sound-equipped theaters screened movies featuring recorded songs, and filmmakers in the United States and Europe struggled to meet the artistic and technical challenges of sound production and distribution. The challenges were unusually disruptive. New-media upheavals on a global scale have a long history, beginning with the printing press in the fifteenth century and continuing up through the current digital revolution. 1 A peculiarity of electric sound s introduction into cinema was the sense of aesthetic catastrophe. The telegraph did not eliminate an established art, nor did the telephone, phonograph, wireless, or motion picture. Digital technologies are transforming cinema, but in ways that leave the theater experience largely unchanged. The challenge to cinema s identity posed by recorded sound was more radical. Electric sound s introduction into cinema, in the view of many observers, had brought about an artistic retreat. Devotees of the seventh art railed against the talkies. With the sudden presence of tenors, clowns, masters of ceremonies, and band leaders, wrote critic Nino Frank, the popular-theater traditions banished from cinema in the 1920s had returned with a vengeance, bringing artistic innovation to a halt. 2 Critic Leo Hirsch proclaimed, Today one cannot deny that the sound film has ceased all experiments in abstract, mathematical, and expressionist cinema, and that there is no longer an avant garde, that one no longer sees new comic forms, and that the pictorial has disappeared from cinema. 3
The period s musical films, with their stage-derived song-and-dance sequences, took much of the blame. With stars, formats, and techniques culled from multiple extracinematic media, new and old, the song-heavy films of the late 1920s and early 30s responded to pressures that seemed commercial in nature rather than aesthetic. Thick with what critic Daniel Albright called intermedial dissonance, musical films fell short of coalescing into an artistic whole, a unified form. 4 For many observers, the hard-won artistic gains of the past quarter century were being undone by the new singing and talking films, which, declared film historian L on Moussinac, had reduced the cinema to its state in 1905. 5
The presence of singers in films exerted special pressures on film technique. Musical films were sold in connection with star vocalists whose profiles in multiple media made them always bigger than the films in which they appeared. Song sequences seemed designed less to push forward the film s plot than to facilitate the singer s engagement with her or his public. They thus tend to stand apart fr