Conference Report

Abstract

Frigid temperatures and Halloween festivities did not deter nearly 300 scholars from attending the ninth 'Film & History' conference, held at the Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor's Club. Sponsored by Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal and organised around the theme 'Golden Ages: Styles & Personalities, Genres & Histories', the conference consisted of eighty-five panels of papers in addition to a workshop on publishing scholarship, information sessions by associates of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and the Media History Digital Library, and a keynote address by illustrious professor Tom Gunning.Papers were organised into topical areas, such as 'Women in the Film Industry', 'Auteurs and Authorship', 'Black Hollywood', and, the focus of this report, 'Sound Is Golden: Case Studies of Industry Practices'. Co-convened and chaired by doctoral candidates Eric Dienstfrey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Katherine Quanz (Wilfrid Laurier University, CA), the 'Sound Is Golden' area consisted of twelve presentations, spread across four panels, which addressed the influence of economic and institutional mechanisms on the nature and function of film sound in a range of genres, modes of production, and historical periods, though emphasis was given to practices of classical Hollywood sound. In addition, it seemed to me that one upshot of the area's focus on a particular element of film style-rather than, say, filmic representations of identity politics- was that the constituent papers tended to privilege close, formal analysis over cultural or ideological readings. This is not to say that the area lacked breadth, and I hope to give a sense of the diversity of papers by summarizing each one rather than elaborating on a select few.The first panel aimed to challenge conventional histories of film sound. In 'The Golden Age of Sound Effects?', Dong Liang (University of Chicago) discussed film sound in the nickelodeon period, when the increasing differentiation of sound effects and music as forms of accompaniment to silent cinema owed to at least two factors: changes in the hierarchy of exhibition labour practices and changes in aesthetic norms, such that sound effects were no longer used for achieving fidelity but rather to convey narrative intelligibility. Next, equipped with his violin and his new book After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934 (Columbia University Press, 2014), Michael Slowik (San Diego State University) challenged the gilded status accorded to Max Steiner's score of King Kong (1933), long considered a pioneer work for its use of music as a narrational force that cues plot events and articulates character emotions. Slowik argued that this 'assertive score' was anticipated by Hollywood's earliest musicals, exemplified by Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929), whose indebtedness to musical theatre's presentational aesthetic accounts for the nondiegetic music's capacity to serve explicitly commentative purposes.In 'The Night They Invented the Golden Age: Revising the Historiography of the Hollywood Musical', Amanda McQueen (University of Wisconsin-Madison) ably interrogated the established rise-and-fall story of the film musical's history, the apex of which is usually considered to be the musicals of the 1940s and 50s. McQueen's deft analysis revealed how studio executives retroactively generated a Golden Age by providing audiences in the 1960s and 70s with a curated canon of studio-era musicals through several means, including the release of compilation soundtrack albums and films as well as topical film festivals and retrospectives. The animated discussion instigated by McQueen's paper in the panel's Q&A session testified to the present-day entrenchment of the musical's standard story, incomplete though it may be.A second panel presented case studies on economic factors that shape film sound. In 'Paying the Piper at Paramount: How Mitchell Leisen Squeezed His Music Budget on Midnight (1939)', Jeff Smith (University of Wisconsin-Madison) asked how budget constraints influenced the score for a high-budget production whose music expenditures occupied just over 1 percent of the film's total production cost. …