Sound Film Research Articles

Introduction

Film Jon Gartenberg Sonbert’s writings on cinema were prolific and far-ranging, and a number of his most significant texts are reproduced herein. He wrote on Hollywood cinema, foreign films and experimental works, and on the representation of homosexuality in cinema. His most significant discourses were about his theory of montage. Sonbert’s primary text on montage theory, “Film Syntax,” is reproduced herein.1 My hope is that the reproduction of this text, together with Sonbert’s other writings on film contained in the ensuing pages, will help reposition this artist as a major theoretician of montage, alongside Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Slavko Vorkapich, and others filmmakers. For this reason, we have also reproduced Sonbert’s shot lists from Rude Awakening,2 as well as several texts related to the evolution toward his making of Carriage Trade.3 The most illuminating document about Sonbert’s early career are his notes on “Lecture Topics”4 comprising all his sound films made between 1966 and 1968. This single piece of paper, heretofore previously unpublished, provides detailed information about each film—the months in which they were shot, screen format (single or twin screen), and accompanying sound (on film or on audiotape). Handwritten notes on this document are mine. Alongside it, we have reprinted his filmography that was published in Film Culture in 1983. As a professional archivist, I find two critically important points to note. First, the films Truth Serum (US, 1967) and Holiday (US, 1968) are listed in Film Culture as silent, when, in fact, they were originally shown as sound films. When we preserved the films in Warren Sonbert’s estate, the sound tracks for both films [End Page 155] were missing (evidently, they were missing when the filmography was prepared for publication). It is critical, in my mind, to underscore that all of Sonbert’s films made between 1966 and 1968 were sound works; this is better understood by looking at his overall creative career, including his relationship to music, as discussed in the prior section of this dossier. I discovered, in doing research in Sonbert’s papers, that he actually made another film in this period, that was shown publicly at the Jewish Museum on February 11, 1969. In his program notes for this series, P. Adams Sitney wrote: tuxedo theatre is Sonbert’s newest and best work. He has abandoned all the scores of rock music that accompanied all the earlier films; and he has clearly placed the perspective in the first person singular. The film is edited, obviously so. Yet it preserves in tone and development the sense of a diary. The montage creates parallels and illusions (such as the television butterfly cut into the line of sight of the young man looking up in the park) and above all, radical displacements. For instance, the film-maker approaches an airplane, up the gangplank, there’s a take off (logically of a different craft), a shot from inside the flying wing, a landing, and we are in a southern climate, perhaps California. Then suddenly after a few shots we are in a Moorish market, or overlooking a skyline of minarets. So the Tuxedo Theatre evolves a juxtaposition of traditional cinematic logic and ellipses.5 The only extant copy of this film was recovered in the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, and preserved at Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences alongside Sonbert’s other films. It is a highly significant work, because it most clearly represents the filmmaker’s first movement away from a loosely structured narrative style toward a more radical montage practice. In his preceding films, Sonbert tracked, in relatively long takes, his youthful protagonists moving around New York City. In Tuxedo Theatre, Sonbert began to incorporate footage from his travels abroad. He also employed shots of shorter duration and devised an editing strategy that cut across such dimensions as form, color, texture, and movement. Through this process, Sonbert found the beginning of a montage theory that (in his later, more mature montage works) united, in temporally simultaneous fashion, the rich panoply of human activity on a global basis. The lesson in this is that no document must be left unexamined in the...

Book Reviews

Katherine Spring Saying It with Songs: Popular Music & The Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema New York: Oxford University Press, 2014: 229pp.Whether in pursuit of employment or stardom, myriad people have, at one time or another, fallen prey to the bewitching glamour of Hollywood. In the late 1920s, it was the turn of songwriters, who migrated in their dozens from east to west to reap the benefits of the sound-film boom. Technological advances had at last made synchronised sound commercially viable and movie magnates were eager to embrace it. By December 1930, the vast majority of these hopeful musicians would find themselves without a contract. But in the interim, their productivity had helped to transform the relationship between popular music and film: a little more than four years previously, feature-length synchronised sound film had been a pipe dream; at the start of the new decade, more than half of the sound films produced by leading companies contained a popular song.Despite the astonishing proliferation of popular music on early sound film, the medium's seminal half-decade has attracted only modest scholarly attention. In part, this may simply reflect the fact that popular-music studies remains a relatively young discipline, with much unchartered terrain still to be explored. Katherine Spring's new book, on the other hand, suggests that this has been a more calculated oversight. The 'sheer quantity of songs [...] in early sound films', she argues, has made scholars uncomfortable, because it points to music's appropriation by an industry more concerned with maximising profits than with producing works of art (3). The value of this as a claim about contemporary attitudes is questionable: the extent to which popular-music studies perpetuates traditional aesthetic hierarchies remains open for debate. As an observation about historical attitudes towards sound film, however, it is astute. Hollywood's earliest interactions with the popular music industry were driven by the former's desire to capitalise on the latter's lucrative business. But with the novelty of popular song on the big screen quickly wearing thin, early attempts to incorporate such music were increasingly seen to undermine the narrative conventions established by silent cinema.How this tension between 'commerce and story-telling' came about, and subsequently played out, forms the crux of Spring's rich account (1). Her particular concern is 'non-musical' films, such as Westerns, comedies and crime - - a focus that offers a refreshing change from the more common subject of how Broadway adaptations paved way for the film musical. As Spring is careful to note, however, during the period in question the distinction between musical and non-musical film was less rigid than it subsequently became. In part because of the dominating influence of Broadway, and perhaps also because of the novelty factor, non-musical genres frequently featured popular song in both diegetic and non-diegetic capacities. But even as these instances tapped into the representational conventions established by Broadway, incorporating popular song into non-musical films also posed a distinct set of challenges, not least that the appeal of these films to alternative generic conventions (such as those of romantic comedy or detective drama) heightened the disruptive potential of popular song.The first part of the book explores Hollywood's relationship with Tin Pan Alley. The opening chapter sets the scene with a broad overview of how America's Manhattan-based popular music industry functioned in the 1920s. In particular, Spring explores how popular song was promoted through a network of radio broadcasters, music publishers, Broadway producers, song-writers, and performers - a complex of media outlets that created and sustained a market for popular music. The second chapter goes on to describe how, when Hollywood began its conversion to sound, its major players bought into this network. …

An Olfactory Cinema: Smelling Perfume

Abstract While technological improvements from the era of silent movies to that of sound cinema have altered and continued to affect audience’s cinematic experiences, the question is not so much how technology has increased possibility of a sensory response to cinema, rather, it is one that exposes how such technological changes only underscore the participation of our senses and the body in one’s experience of watching film, highlighting the inherently sensorial nature of the cinematic experience. This paper aims to address the above question through an olfactory cinema, by close analysis of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) by Tom Tykwer. What is an olfactory cinema, and how can such an approach better our understanding of sensorial aspects found within a cinema that ostensibly favours audio-visual senses? What can we benefit from an olfactory cinema? Perhaps, it is through an olfactory cinema that one may begin to embrace the sensual quality of cinema that has been overshadowed by the naturalized ways of experiencing films solely with our eyes and ears, so much so that we desensitize ourselves to the role our senses play in cinematic experiences altogether

Excessive Americanisms: Hollywood in the British Empire, 1918–1930

This article analyses debates about American movies in the British Empire during the inter-war era. These had a different tone than similar public discussions within Britain, where critics emphasised the dangers cinema posed to ‘white prestige’ and public order. In the colonies, movies were widely perceived to pose a threat to the cultural bonds that linked the periphery to the metropole. As the post-war empire struggled to redefine the relationship between ruler and ruled, critics of Hollywood – many of them British expatriates – feared American movies would attenuate their connection to the mother country. Movies popularized American history, American institutions and American slang among imperial subjects, thereby diminishing their enthusiasm for the British alternative. The advent of sound films after 1928 injected a further sense of urgency into this debate. The colonial reaction to Hollywood reveals the particularly fragile state of imperial identity formation during the inter-war era.

Approaching the (Trans)National in Criticism of Early Latin American Sound Film

I n the July 1931 issue of Mensajero Paramount (Paramount Messenger), an in-house publication dedicated to the interests of Spanishspeaking film exhibitors, an editorial note remarks that “Spanishspeaking audiences now have a spectacle in which they not only find their language, but something as essential in order for one to be able to speak properly of a Latin American and Spanish cinema: the spirit, the feeling, the Latin American and Spanish psychology.” Paradoxically, the mouthpiece of a major studio contends it is able to fulfill its Spanish-speaking markets’ desires for talkies that both literally and figuratively speak to and for local spectators. Though Hollywood would continue to dominate these markets, creative entrepreneurs in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico began building film industries in the 1930s in the shadow of the giant to the north. The contradictions of this note in Mensajero Paramount, as well as the rise of these domestic film industries, express tensions between two fundamental concepts marking criticism of the early sound period in Latin America historically and through to today: national cinema(s) and transnationalism. In this commentary, I trace the ways in which recent critical studies approximate national and transnational features of Latin American cinema(s) of the early sound period (1931–1943). In so doing, I also

Occult aesthetics: synchronization in sound film

Moments of precise synchronization in films are the key moments for pulling together physically unconnected image and sound tracks into an illusory whole - both in experiential as well as industrial terms As such, it is surprising that there has been no sustained consideration of the phenomenon of synchronization. The ‘lock’ of audio and visual exerts a synergetic, what might be described as an occult effect: a secret and esoteric effect that can dissipate in the face of an awareness of its existence. The starting point for this investigation is the observation that film tends routinely to move between moments of synchrony between sound and image and points where there is no apparent synchronization. Approaching audio-visual culture from this, more abstract, perspective illuminates it in a form that removes the overfamiliar aspects that have militated against sustained and detailed theorization of sound in films, and the notion of ‘sound films’ more generally

“The Realm of Serious Art”: Henry Hadley's Involvement in Early Sound Film

AbstractComposer-conductor Henry Kimball Hadley (1871–1937) is widely viewed as a conservative musical figure, one who resisted radical changes as American musical modernism began to flourish. His compositional style remained firmly rooted in late-Romantic European idioms; and although Hadley advocated for American composition through programming choices as a conductor, he mostly ignored the music of younger, adventurous composers. In one respect, however, Hadley was part of the cutting edge of musical production: that of musical dissemination through new media. This essay explores Hadley's work conducting and composing film music during the transition from silent to synchronized sound film, specifically his involvement with Warner Bros. and their new sound synchronization technology, Vitaphone, in 1926–27. Drawing on archival evidence, I examine Hadley's approach to film composition for the 1927 film When a Man Loves. I argue that Hadley's high-art associations conferred legitimacy upon the new technology, and in his involvement with Vitaphone he aimed to establish sound film composition as a viable outlet for serious composers. Hadley's example prompts us to reconsider the parameters through which we distinguish experimental and conservative musical practices, reconfiguring the definitions to include not just musical proclivities but also the contexts and modes through which they circulate.

Escutas da imagem: as resultantes do som nos componentes semióticos da linguagem visual

This study analyzes the communicational and aesthetic effects produced in the relationship between the image and sound elements of the films Rosso come ilcielo by Cristiano Bortone, and A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick. The theoretical framework comes from thesound and listening modes included in Theory of Film Sound Production proposed by Michel Chion and they are related to semiotic bases of C.S. Peirce. Also used is Hans Belting’s concept of endogenous images, the contributions of Vilem Flusser about the construction of mental images, and concepts of aesthetic categories treated by Umberto Eco and Sanches Vazquez. Analyzing some sequences according to the wiretaps reduced, causal, and semantics, we can say that the sound adds important elements to the scene that contribute to the final result, of communicational or aesthetic value. It is concluded, in Rosso come ilcielo, the sonorous code effectively contributes to the enhancement of synesthetic relations of the film, besides acting as an element that generates sense in the narrative as it is put as the main element in building of the mental imagery at times that the plot deals with the impairment of the sense of sight. In A Clockwork Orange, it is concluded that the sonorous component is responsible for generating of the ambiguity present in most of the film, especially in times of application of civil and system violence. It can be said that in this film, music selection was instrumental in adding to the scene elements in contrast to the imagery, thus producing a sense of the grotesque, enhanced by the mixture of pleasure and horror and sometimes by the presence of the comic.

Literature in the first media age: Britain between the wars

The period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature, David Trotter argues, stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to portray communication by telephone, television, radio, and sound cinema--and to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they filled up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life.New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, Trotter observes, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars. In defining what they achieved, this book creates a new literary canon of works distinguished formally and thematically by their alertness to the implications of new media and new materials.

W.E.B. Du Bois and Filipino/a American exposure programs to the Philippines: race class analysis in an epoch of ‘global apartheid’

The article highlights the ongoing relevance of W.E.B. Du Bois for the global analysis of race and class. Engaging scholarly debates that have ensued within the educational subfields of critical race theory (CRT) and (revolutionary) critical pedagogy, the article explores how a deeper engagement with Du Bois’s ideas contributes theoretically and methodologically to these two subfields. Of particular focus is Du Bois’s conceptualization of a ‘guiding hundredth,’ which he forwarded as a corrective to his ideas of a ‘talented tenth.’ The article also offers a case study analysis of the film Sounds of a New Hope, which documents a hip hop exposure program to the Philippines. The case study draws upon Du Bois’s ‘guiding hundredth’ for a twenty-first century context as a Filipino American cultural worker utilizes hip hop to articulate, analyze, and alter the lived experiences for Filipino/a Americans in a global diaspora.

Cinema and Music (1937) by Ignacio Isaza Martínez

IntroductionIgnacio Isaza Martinez (b. Medellin, 20 June 1907: d. 28 July 1997) was a mining engineer with broad interests in the arts, mainly music and literature. He is mostly known in Colombia for being one of the co-founders of the Sociedad Amigos del Arte de Medellin (Society Friends of the Arts of Medellin).2 The article proposed here in English translation was published in the cultural magazine Pan, created in 1935 by a group of intellectuals from the town of Popayan, in the south of Colombia, that went under the name of Nabisco (Alunno 2014). In this one-off reflection on film music, Isaza Martinez offered an unusually informed insight from a region of the world that was far removed from the main centres of debates about cinema. Colombia did not (and still does not) have a grounded cinema industry. Film production was limited to extemporary and frequently ill-fated ventures with no hope of establishing the country's cinematographic future. Furthermore, the movie that is traditionally considered to be the first sound film produced in Colombia - the documentary Olaya Herrera y Eduardo Santos - was released only in 1937. Sound cinema, particularly of North American, Mexican, and Argentinean production, was already circulating in the country in the late 1920s, but the first sound system of Colombian creation took much longer to find a definite way to the screen (Martinez Pardo 1978: 153-55). Carlos Schroeder, a Colombian of German descent, presented his cronofotofono ('chronophotophone') for the first time on 8 November 1929. However, despite the success of the premiere, very few short films were made for the new device before the above-mentioned Olaya Herrera y Eduardo Santos (ibid.: 73-78).In the same year this documentary was released Isaza Martinez theorised on aspects of film music that were still in the back of the mind of many film critics in Europe and North America. For both these reasons we think it is worth bringing the reader's attention to this curious, isolated piece of writing from an intellectual who is remembered by his widow as 'a responsible, honest, accomplished, joyful, and supremely cultivated person' (Perez Salazar 2013: 70: author's translation).The editor of Pan introduced the original article thus: 'The cinephile engineer, a passionate expert with a profound knowledge of the subject, promises to continue analysing in these pages the relationship of the Art of Cinema with other aspects of modern life ... and provides the Editor with some illustrations from his collection ... Hopefully.'Cinema and MusicOne notices something peculiar when he decides to study the development of the phonograph and the cinema. When Edison was working on his wonderful invention,3 back in 1887: he realised that the sound would be considerably more interesting if complemented by a series of images. With this idea in mind he built the Kinetoscope, but the result was so unsuccessful that he had to abandon it shortly afterwards. Then recording technique and sound reproduction achieved the perfection they currently possess, without anyone remembering Edison's main concern. However, some years later, the situation was reversed. At its height, the realisation came that the images of silent cinema were more interesting if accompanied by a series of sounds.There was, in fact, a cyclical tendency of sound towards sight and of sight towards sound as a product of a somewhat intimate union of optical and aural worlds. The same forces that engendered the theatre, the opera, and the Russian ballet engendered also the present cinema, which is, after all, nothing but the outcome of natural and persistent circumstances.Establishing whether or not sound cinema is a new art form, substantially different from silent cinema, goes beyond our scope and there are many valuable opinions supporting both sides of the argument. Perhaps things would be more straightforward if one isolated sound cinema from talking cinema, for it is obvious that, by employing the voice in a systematic manner, cinema lost some of its most relevant artistic qualities. …

Audio-visual moiré patterns: Phasing in Guy Sherwin’s Optical Sound films

Abstract British experimental film-maker Guy Sherwin’s Optical Sound films from the 1970s explore the corporeal correspondence between sound and image through a transposition of the optical soundtrack into the visual images presented on-screen. These films are fundamentally a series of experiments investigating not only the relationship between sound and image, but also the essence and materiality of film itself. Sherwin asserts that his Optical Sound films have three discernible influences on them: the rigorous structuralism of the London Filmmaker’s Co-operative of the 1970s, the idea of aural/visual equivalence and Steve Reich’s contemporaneous musical experiments with sound phasing. Bearing this assertion in mind, this article intends to explore how Sherwin’s films, such as Phase Loop (Sherwin, 1971, 2007), subvert conventional notions of sound and synchronization in the film form from the vantage point of structural/materialist film theory. Further to this, it will also consider the influence of Reich’s use of phasing, looping and his stress on the importance of process in the structuring of material in order to assess the effects of perceptual shifts as extended to the audio-visual experience by Sherwin.

Sound Synthesis, Representation and Narrative Cinema in the Transition to Sound (1926-1935)

Since the beginnings of western media culture, sound synthesis has played a major role in articulating cultural notions of the fantastic and the uncanny. As a counterpart to sound reproduction, sound synthesis operated in the interstices of the original/copy correspondence and prefigured the construction of a virtual reality through the generation of novel sounds apparently lacking any equivalent with the acoustic world. Experiments on synthetic sound crucially intersected cinema’s transition to synchronous sound in the late 1920s, thus configuring a particularly fertile scenario for the redefinition of narrative paradigms and the establishment of conventions for sound film production. Sound synthesis can thus be viewed as a structuring device of such film genres as horror and science fiction, whose codification depended on the constitution of synchronized sound film. More broadly, sound synthesis challenged the basic implications of realism based on the rendering of speech and the construction of cinematic soundscapes.

Throwing the Voice: Rationalist Mystification in Ventriloquist Films

:This essay analyzes six ventriloquist films—films that feature a ventriloquist character. Although ventriloquist films span many decades and genres, they consistently engage in rationalist mystification—the process of laying bare the techniques of ventriloquism while simultaneously remystifying the feat by exaggerating the abilities of ventriloquists. Ventriloquist films' consistent rationalist mystification approach reveals cinema's continued concern with tricks and illusions, staples of early cinema. Moreover, ventriloquist films reflect a decided uneasiness about alluding too strongly to sound cinema's bifurcation of image and sound, a concern dating back to the earliest years of sound cinema.

Immigrant Cosmopolitanism: The Political Culture of Argentine Early Sound Cinema of the 1930s

This article examines the social and urban history of early sound cinema in Argentina in the 1930s. It critically analyzes film culture and its relationship to the shaping of an early conceptual construction of an Argentine cinema of resistance. The authors document the ways that protagonists of national film within the industry crafted a film culture against the pressures of nationalist reformers. As nationalists on the right hoped to use cinema as a tool of national identity construction and moral education, this early sound cinema culture constructed narratives of industrial professionalization, cosmopolitan audiences, and political critique. This article argues that film politics of this period extended beyond the big screen to intersect with local and national politics of the urban and primarily immigrant working class. Situating this class within the landscape of urban life, this cinema forged a critical bridge between immigrant communities and the city that constituted a form of cultural resistance to fascist tendencies within the state. Early sound cinema asserted a notion of ‘immigrant cosmopolitanism’ onto the political landscape of urban life in Buenos Aires.

Tod Browning's Expressionist Bodies

Tod Browning had a difficult transition into sound cinema, which hurt his subsequent reputation as a director. His early sound films, from The Thirteenth Chair (1929) through Freaks 1 (1932) often ...

“My Wife”: The Tape Recorder and Warhol’s Queer Ways of Listening

“My Wife”:The Tape Recorder and Warhol’s Queer Ways of Listening Gustavus Stadler (bio) Introduction: “Human Sound” In a droll anecdote early in his 1980 memoir POPism: The Warhol Sixties, Andy Warhol describes his transition from silent to sound filmmaking in late 1964: “Now that we had the technology to have sound in our movies,” he writes, “I realized that we were going to be needing a lot of dialogue.” Subsequently, he claims to have enlisted poet and playwright Ronald Tavel as his screenwriter after attending a public reading at Café Le Metro in downtown Manhattan. The memoir describes Warhol’s delight upon seeing “the sheer amount of stuff [Tavel had] evidently written. While he was reading, I was thinking how wonderful it was to find someone so prolific just at the point when we were going to need ‘sounds’ for our sound movies.”1 Warhol’s remark here is telling in its focus on “sounds” rather than dialogue, as well as in its wry characterization of sound as quantifiable in a manner analogous to the pile of manuscripts at Tavel’s side. In an interview in which he, too, recounts this meeting, Tavel claims to have known immediately that “[Warhol] was interested in my voice, not my words,” and that “it was human sound itself he wanted rather than any particular words.”2 The accounts of this encounter reflect the broadening engagement with sound and its reproduction evident in Warhol’s work and life during the vital 1963–67 period.3 During this time, he announced his retirement from painting, and in POPism he describes this move as meant in part to free more time for listening: “Art just wasn’t fun for me anymore; it was people who were fascinating and I wanted to spend all my time around them, listening to them, and making movies of them” (142). Elsewhere in the memoir, Warhol recalls the mid-1960s Factory studio as drenched in recorded music, an aural environment constituted by odd overlays of musical genres, such as opera records playing on one phonograph while [End Page 425] the latest hit single played on another; audio recordings of the daily life at the Factory, of which Warhol made thousands of hours, confirm this account. During these years, the artist not only kept an ear open to trends in contemporary pop music but also courted relationships with many of the era’s most eminent pop musicians, including Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, and Bob Dylan. In 1963, Warhol himself was a backup singer in a brief-lived rock group made up of artists, including Claes and Patti Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Lucas Samaras, and Walter de Maria, as well as minimalist composer La Monte Young.4 He began producing sound films with Tavel’s assistance, beginning with Harlot, in December 1964. A year later, the artist began his collaboration with the Velvet Underground, an experimental rock group. Warhol introduced the band to another musical protégé, the German model and singer Nico, with whom the Velvets agreed, ambivalently, to collaborate. Warhol subsequently acted as producer for the LP The Velvet Underground & Nico (recorded 1966, released 1967), with its famous, Warhol-designed banana cover. The recording is now widely considered one of the most influential albums in the history of rock music. This same period also saw the artist’s “authorship” of a book eventually published by Grove Press in 1968 as a: a novel. A 450-page tome, this literary experiment was the muddled, imprecise, oddly formatted, reader-unfriendly transcription of eighteen hours of audiotape recordings Warhol had made, mostly in July 1965, while following extravagantly queer Factory denizen Robert Olivo—better known to the Warhol circle (and viewers of the film Chelsea Girls [dir. Warhol, 1966]) as Ondine—on his amphetamine-suffused wanderings from the Factory to various points around Manhattan. Enabling this endeavor, and—I want to suggest—providing an important model of listening for the others, was Warhol’s procurement, sometime in 1964, of the first mass-marketed portable cassette recorder, the Norelco Carry-Corder, a device to which he felt so closely devoted that he began referring to it as his “wife.”5 The diversity...

A conversão para o cinema sonoro no Brasil e o mercado exibidor na década de 1930

This article analyses the adaptation of Brazilian movie theaters to sound film projection with special attention to the local particularities and its economic and technologic dimensions. It is described how this process took place nationwide, identifying three different phases: the arrival of the talkies in the main Brazilian cities (1929-1930); the slow expansion of sound projection in the secondary circuit (1931-1933); and the difficulties of technology standardization (1934-1935).

Soviet Film Expeditions of the 1930's through the Eyes of Greater Tokyo Inhabitants

The early 1930's were a turning point in the history of Japan and its cinema. The transition to the sound film, the rapid development of documentary genre and use of it for propaganda purposes took place in the context of the filmmakers' interest to the experience of Soviet cinema, its highly expressive editing, documentary style and ideological partiality. The sound documentary «Greater Tokyo» (1932) by V. Shneiderov was created in these years. The film has been forgotten for a long time due to various reasons. The author tries to return the film into the historical context of the early 1930's and analyze the perception of Soviet documentaries in the pre-war Japan.

Panorámica de la investigación en traducción para el doblaje

Dubbing, together with subtitling, is one of the most widespread types of audiovisual translation. Its origins can be traced back to the late twenties, with the need to transfer the new sound films to other languages and cultures. This article places dubbing in the world of audiovisual translation, reviews the origins of research on dubbing, and offers an overview of the first theoretical and professional approaches to this audiovisual translation mode. The paper then sets out to compare research approaches centred on the problems posed by the source text to descriptive approaches focused on the target text. It concludes by showing research avenues which are still unexplored and call for urgent attention among the academic community. Each section explores basic concepts which have proved to be useful to audiovisual translation theory, such as the notion of translation constraints, dubbese and dubbing norms. The article also presents new genres and new combinations of audiovisual translation modes that are progressively changing the dubbing industry.