High Fidelity: France's Conversion Era and the Limits of the Classical Style

Abstract

High Fidelity: France's Conversion Era and Limits of Classical Style Cinema's Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and U.S., by Charles O'Brien, Indiana University Press, 2005. Charles O'Brien's scrupulously researched and discriminating volume, Cinema's Conversion to Sound, makes a fine companion piece to Colin Crisp's seminal The Classic French Cinema, 1930-1960. According to Crisp, economic factors attached to use of sound technology were central in determining fate of film aesthetics in early 1930s. While forays into experimental feature filmmaking did not cease outright, the introduction of sound [. . .] saw an aesthetic revolution of a fundamentally conservative nature take place in French cinema.1 O'Brien's revisionist study of five-year French conversion era (1929-1934), however, contends that story of impact of sound conversion cannot be limited to an appeal to technological or economic determinants. Cultural factors-the uniquely French interpretation of possibilities of sound film-must be accounted for as well. In order to accentuate particularities of French approach to sound conversion, O'Brien, associate professor at Carleton University, Ottawa, undertakes a comparative study, setting French conversion era up alongside that of Hollywood, which began three years earlier (1926-1931). Reflecting on methodological limitations of previous historical accounts, he carves out a daring thesis: while technology and technique during conversion era appear to have undergone transnational standardization, in fact conversion led to a mobilization of differences in national film styles. By placing conditions and effects of die transition to sound in American setting side-by-side with those in France, author draws out salient differences between their respective products. But linchpin in O'Brien's argument is not simply notion that an empirical investigation of American and French films of period reveals stark differences in look of these two cinemas; crucial differences would in fact remain largely concealed by such an approach. Rather, O'Brien is interested in causes of differences, in practice-defining goals that shape American and French methods, for this is truly where divergence lies. Although French and Americans had access to same technologies and techniques in their respective transition eras, deeprooted cultural differences and divergent craft and institutional traditions caused a rift along national boundaries. In this potentially groundbreaking account, O'Brien isolates a principal flaw that pervades film stylistics-a flaw that has masked true nature of France's conversion era: tendency to reduce film style to visual style. In this way, one of reasons Standard Story of conversion era is deficient is because it focuses on changes in film image alone to absolute neglect of sound and its unique interaction with image track in different national cinemas. While both French and American filmmakers and audiences developed a taste for tight synchronization of sound and image, a closer investigation of sound practice in conversion era discloses that in Hollywood, sound was designed to facilitate story-world intelligibility; in France, however, main concern was preservation of original performances that became meat of what has pejoratively been labeled filmed theater or cinema de sam 'di soir product of era. O'Brien dubs this impulse of preservation fidelity. This intelligibility versus fidelity paradigm allows author to paint in broad strokes-thai is, to forge even in a small study with an ostensibly narrow focus a set of generalizations about long-range undercurrents. …