Huxley’s Feelies: The Cinema of Sensation in Brave New World

Abstract

have just been, for first time, to see and hear picture talk, Aldous Huxley writes in 1929 essay called Silence Is Golden (Essays 2: 19). A little late in day, he imagines his up-to-date reader remarking patronizing and contemptuous smile. After all, film that introduces Huxley to world of sound cinema, Jazz Singer, had been released two years earlier. gigantically enlarged (21) images on screen spouting noise send Huxley into paroxysms of scorn and fury; he is especially horrified by scene in which Al Jolson sings Mammy in blackface: My flesh crept as loud-speaker poured out those sodden words, that greasy, sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being member of species to which such things are addressed. (23) While only half feigning his reactionary pose, Huxley condemns talkies as the latest and most frightful creation-saving device for production of standardized amusement (20). Huxley's violent response to Jazz Singer is window onto key moment in history of cinema, when articles such as Silence Is Golden, Why 'Talkies' Are Unsound (Betts), Ordeal by 'Talkie' (Betts), and The Movies Commit Suicide (Seldes) contended with equally impassioned defenses of sound film. (1) crisis occasioned by coming of sound now appears as an overblown objection to transition that in hindsight seems inevitable. But just as itself was often perceived as revolutionary--George Bernard Shaw remarked in 1914 that The is going to form mind of England.... is much more momentous invention than printing press (9) (2)--the coming of sound was greeted by many as watershed moment. Beyond changes in industry (the retirement of actors who had unpleasant voices, for example), talkies raised more philosophical questions about social, moral, and even physical effects of moving and talking images. Cinema history would not be accurately represented by chronicle of technical development from, say, Muybridge to present. Such history would miss crucial component of story of cinema: spectatorship. Accounts from period such as Huxley's and Iris Barry's Let's Go to Pictures emphasize not just what happens on screen but how audience responds. Those responses are strikingly different from how we now think of spectatorship, and this is particularly true of reception of talkies. Recently critics such as Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Jonathan Crary, and Ben Singer, following early lead of Walter Benjamin (3) and Siegfried Kracauer, have moved away from psychoanalytic approach that dominated film criticism in 1980s to more historical and sociological model that addresses how visual modernity in general and spectatorship in particular are bodily, visceral experiences. Cinema is not merely screen for psychic identifications but is experienced by an embodied, somatically affected spectator. While story of Lumiere's train sending confused audiences screaming from screen in 1895 has been debunked, (4) writing from time of Silence Is Golden demonstrates Kracauer's assertion that film was thought of as influencing the spectator's senses, engaging him physiologically before he is in position to respond intellectually (Theory 158). Gunning's description of earliest filmmaking as cinema of attractions (121) striving more for spectacle than telling story and Singer's examination of early blood and thunder melodramas, among other work, suggest that modern technologies of vision were experienced as mobilizing body and actively producing what Hansen calls a new sensorium (70). Different stages of cinematic development produced different modes of spectatorship and perception, and this was especially true of transition to sound. …