Lea Jacobs, Film Rhythm After Sound: Technology, Music and Performance

Abstract

The technological challenges and theoretical debates that accompanied the transition to sound cinema are well documented. Scholars such as Rick Altman, Donald Crafton and James Lastra, among others, have illuminated the ways in which filmmakers, studios and critics alike negotiated the integration of synchronized sound and moving image-making technologies in the late 1920s and early 1930s.1 Lea Jacobs herself has previously detailed the development of sound re-recording technologies in the transitional period. In Film Rhythm After Sound: Technology, Music and Performance, Jacobs usefully extends and reframes our understanding of the history of film sound, examining the critical yet understudied rhythmic and temporal dimensions of early sound cinema. As her study compellingly illustrates, ‘the problem of pacing, was and remains a critical one for those dealing with classical film narrative, and it became particularly pressing in Hollywood at the moment of the transition to sound’ (p. 24). Jacobs neatly illustrates at the outset of her study the issues that early sound film posed for the rhythm and pacing of narrative film. A comparative analysis of the dramatically different music-and-effects and sync-sound versions Frank Borgaze’s Song O’ My Heart (1930) concisely encapsulates the aesthetic and dramatic restrictions that early sound filmmakers faced and that critics lamented. Although she acknowledges that innovations such as the camera blimp, directional microphones and re-recording helped to mitigate some of the more pronounced issues with pacing and flow highlighted in the Borgaze example, Jacobs convincingly contends ‘there was no one technological “fix” for the problem of rhythmic organization in the early sound film’ (p. 20). Rather, as her study demonstrates, ‘filmmakers working in diverse institutional contexts, and with different technological resources’ developed a variety of aesthetic strategies for controlling the rhythmic flow and tempo of the new medium of sound film (p. 20).