Sound Film Research Articles

Feeling and Filmmaking: The Design and Affect of Film Sound

Discussion of cinematic affect most typically attends to response, the impact of the film as we experience it. In this vein, various writers have drawn attention to the physicality of hearing (Sobc...

O american dream e a cultura das aparências em Little Caesar, de Meryvn Leroy

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2017v70n1p233Considerado o precursor dos filmes sonoros de gângster do chamado período “clássico” desse gênero, Little Caesar, dirigido por Mervyn LeRoy em 1931, narra o percurso do protagonista Rico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson) da sua ascensão à liderança da gangue à sua queda no final do filme. Little Caesar, além de estabelecer os parâmetros seguidos pelas narrativas dos filmes de gângster a partir dos anos 1930, também contribuiu para que o gângster se tornasse um ícone da cultura norte-americana graças à disseminação de sua figura por meio da indústria cultural, principalmente no cinema. Nosso objetivo com o presente trabalho é, por meio da análise de algumas cenas do filme, verificar de que maneira se configuram a cultura das aparências e a ideologia do American Dream ao longo da narrativa.

“Springing from a sense of wonder”: classroom film and cultural learning in the 1930s

This article makes an “exercise in the archaeology of education” and focuses on the City of Birmingham (UK) in the year 1935 where the Education Committee allowed an experiment on the use of classroom film in senior elementary schools. Arrangements were made to provide projectors, films, operators, and screens for a series of exhibits at 80 schools. The aim of the experiment was to test the value of cinema for class teaching purposes. This article argues that this experiment with sound film could equally be considered an experiment in cultural learning. The first section describes the experiment and the local context in which it took place. The second section broadens the perspective by providing context beyond the local level that puts the experiment in time and place. The third and final section picks up on some of the findings of the first two sections and considers contemporary sources, mainly articles published in the British Film Institute’s film magazine Sight and Sound, as well as recent scholarship on both educational and documentary film in order to discuss the notions of “background” and “excursive” film and to show that the experiment was a genuine adventure in cultural learning.

Interaction of sound and picturein modern cinema space

Interaction of sound and picturein modern cinema space

J. Romains’ and M. Tourneur’s Creative Transposition of Volpone

We are well aware that, no matter how valuable a text may be, its afterlife in other cultural and linguistic contexts is heavily dependent on the translator’s ability to meet the needs and expectations of its target audience. This is precisely what French screenwriter Jules Romains and film director Maurice Tourneur did when adapting Jonson’s Volpone [1940] for the new medium at the advent of sound films. It is the aim of this article to cast light on their creative transposition of Ben Jonson’s theatrical masterpiece. Keywords: Romains; Tourneur; Volpone; creative transposition

Dimitri Kirsanoff: The Elusive Estonian

AbstractThis article investigates the contradictory information about the Estonian identity of the filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff (1899–1957) and examines the archival material that provides final confirmation of his birth and childhood in Tartu. In addition, Kirsanoff’s substantial contribution to silent cinema and his significance in the context of French avant-garde impressionism are discussed. Kirsanoff’s most acclaimed filmMénilmontant(France, 1926) was released 90 years ago. It is still frequently screened all over the world, due to its experimental montage techniques, the early use of handheld cameras, its innovative use of actual locations and the actors’ performances that still resonate with contemporary audiences.Ménilmontantis also influential because of its elliptical narrative style. However, with the advent of sound film, Kirsanoff’s career declined because the reorganisation of the film industry limited the creative freedom he enjoyed in the 1920s. This article attempts to contribute to a wider acknowledgement of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Estonian origins, his films and his important place in the world cinema.

영화 사운드 시간성과 시간성 표현의 물리적 속성

시옹(Chion), 알트만(Altman), 푸도프킨(Pudovkin)과 등과 같은 영화이론가들에 의해 이론화되어온 영화에서의 사운드 개념은 사운드가 종속적인 객체로서만 위치하기보다는 독립적인 역할과 보완적인 역할을 할 수 있다는 것이다. 본고는 영화의 가시화 영역인 온 스크린영역과 순간적으로 이동되는 비화면 영역이라는 비가시 경로 그리고 인식된 현실로 갈 수 있는 어쿠스마틱 영역인 오프 스크린 영역에 시옹의 시간성을 적용해, 인간의 상상으로 재구성하는 사운드 디자인에 대한 형태 분석을 진행하였다. 영화의 청각표현에 해당하는 대사는 인식 층위의 최우선 순위에 해당하는데 그 이유는 무엇이며, 그러한 사운드 형태의 물리적 속성 값은 존재하는가라는 궁금증으로 시작해 시간의 연속선상에 있는 앰비언스, 룸 톤, 잡음을 비롯해 싱크레즈를 나타내는 사운드 효과 그리고 온 스크린을 통해 보이는 사운드의 거리감과 공간감, 마스터링을 통한 음의 균형 값들을 영화 속 사운드 구성요소로 분류해보았다. 이러한 영화 사운드 형태는 각각 인식된 현실이라는 선택적 조정을 통해 들려지는데, 이와 같이 사운드의 시간성과 그를 구성하는 요소들은 내러티브의 이해와 몰입이라는 제 기능을 수행하기 위해 사운드 형태별 물리적 음량 값을 가지게 된다. 이에, 사운드 시간성 요소의 기능을 수행하기 위한 물리적 음량 값 모델을 도출하기 위해, 상업영화 <이끼>, <인셉션> 사운드 디자인의 구성요소별 사례를 분석하였다.

Tragicomedy, Melodrama, and Genre in Early Sound Films: The Case of Two “Sad Clown” Musicals

This interdisciplinary study applies the theatrical theories of stage genres to examples of the early sound cinema, the 1930 Hollywood musicals Puttin’ on the Ritz (starring Harry Richman, and with songs by Irving Berlin) and Free and Easy (starring Buster Keaton). The discussion focuses on the phenomenon of the sad clown as a symbol of tragicomedy. Springing from Rick Altman’s delineation of the “sad clown” sub-subgenre of the show musical subgenre, outlined in The American Film Musical, this article shows that, in these seminal movie musicals, naïve melodrama and “gag” comedy coexist with the tonalities, structures, philosophy, and images of the sophisticated genre of tragicomedy, including by incorporating the grotesque into the mise en scene of their musical production numbers.

The Hallucinatory (Cultural) Logic of Hitchcock's Vertigo

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) inspired so much study by 2012 that the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound critics’ poll hoisted it above Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941)—also scored by B...

Feature article: Baby factory: Romance and reproduction in Norway’s first sound film

Abstract This article considers expressions of ambivalence at the intersections of gender, industry and urbanity in Norway’s first sound film, Den store barnedåpen (The Great Christening) (Ibsen, 1931). Despite its status as a city film, The Great Christening conveys a subtly anti-industrial message, suggesting that true happiness is to be found at a short but significant distance from the factory. Previous scholarship on gender has considered the innovative depiction of Ibsen’s male protagonist Harald and his soft or domestic masculinity. This article uses close reading and historical research on the family in inter-war Norway to reconsider such characterization, as well as the distinct position of the biological mother in the film. The Great Christening expresses great confidence in Norwegian kinship, fertility and urban possibilities. At the same time, it separates romance and reproduction, keeping its male hero at a distance from the anxious association of working-class mothers and mechanization.

Meaning and interpretation of music in cinema

Preface and Acknowledgments Part 1: Meaning and Interpretation 1. Music in the Vococentric Cinema 2. Tools for Analysis and Interpretation Part 2: Music in the Mix: Casablanca by David Neumeyer and James Buhler 3. Acoustic Stylization: The Film's Sound World 4. Music and Utopia: A Reading of the Reunion Scene 5. The Reunion Scene's Contexts Part 3: Topics and Tropes: Two Preludes by Bach 6. Performers Onscreen 7. Underscore: Four Studies of the Prelude in C Major Notes Bibliography Index

Black Voices, White Women's Tears, and the Civil War in Classical Hollywood Movies

Two musical trends of the 1930s—the development of a practice for scoring sound films, and the increasing concertization of the spiritual in both solo and choral form—help shape the soundscape of films based in the South and/or on Civil War themes in early sound-era Hollywood. The tremendous success of the Broadway musical Show Boat (1927), which was made into films twice within seven years (1929, 1936), provided a model of chorus and solo singing, and films like the 1929 Mary Pickford vehicle Coquette and the 1930 musical Dixiana blend this theatrical practice with a nuanced syntax that logically carries the voices from outdoors to indoors to the interior life of a character, usually a white woman. Director D. W. Griffith expands this use of diegetic singing in ways that will later be the province of nondiegetic underscore in his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930). Shirley Temple's Civil War–set films (The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel [both 1935] and Dimples [1936]) strongly replicate the use of the voices of enslaved characters—most of whom are onscreen only to provide justification for the source of the music—to mourn for white women. Jezebel, the 1938 antebellum melodrama, expands musicodramatic syntax that had been developed in single scenes or sequences over the entire second act and a white woman's fall and attempted redemption. Gone with the Wind (1939) both plays on convention and offers a moment of transgression for Prissy, who takes her voice for her own pleasure in defiance of Scarlett O'Hara. The detachment of the spiritual from the everyday experience of African Americans led to a recognition of the artistry of the music and the singers on the concert stage. In film, however, the bodies of black singers are marginalized and set in service of white characters and white audiences.

Sounding funny: sound and comedy cinema

Sounding funny: sound and comedy cinema

The film reviewing of Kenneth Slessor: a cine-aesthetics of the sound cinema

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the film reviews of Kenneth Slessor, an Australian poet, journalist and war correspondent best known for his contributions to Australian poetry between the two world wars. His film reviews of early Hollywood, British, and Australian sound cinema were an important part of his journalism at Smith’s Weekly from 1931 to 1940. Mostly overlooked until recently these reviews reveal a sophisticated approach towards the new (sound) cinema. The criteria he advanced for evaluating film and the range of qualities he discerned, criticised and celebrated in films were based on appreciating film as a unique artform with its own formal repertoire and modes of production. While such standpoints are now familiar in film reviewing, at the time he was writing such standpoints were just coming into being. Close attention to Slessor’s film reviewing discloses a fecund critical imagination attuned to cinema’s range. He deserves wider recognition as a distinctive voice on the cinema in general and Australian cinema in particular.

Film criticism as a political weapon: theory, ideology and film activism in Nuestro Cinema (1932–1935)

This article focuses on the Spanish communist film journal Nuestro Cinema (1932–1935). It analyses its textual production as well as its role within a broader network of film activism that included left-wing film distribution, the founding of film clubs and the promotion of amateur cinema. The essay looks at its position as a product of the ideological radicalization that characterized the evolution of the European film avant-garde from the late 1920s onwards. Concerning the Spanish context, in many ways a later chapter of this international development, Nuestro Cinema is not only a good example of the impact the introduction of sound film and Soviet production’s shift towards socialist realist principles around 1929/1930 had on avant-garde circles, but also a reflection of the political openness under a new political regime (Second Republic, 1931–1936). Directed from Paris by the communist film critic Juan Piqueras, Nuestro Cinema’s astonishingly homogeneous textual production understood cinema as an ideological weapon in the political culturization of proletarian masses. At the same time, the theoretical-historical approach evident in many of its contents as well as its international focus impeded its proper reception and the implementation of its film cultural goals.

Aesthetical Utilization of Sound in film of Alfred Hitchcock

Aesthetical Utilization of Sound in film of Alfred Hitchcock

Robert J. Flaherty and Seáinín Tom Ó Dioráin: Lights, Camera, and (Not Too Much) Action

Famed director Robert Flaherty’s first direct sound film, Oidhche Sheanchais, was recently discovered at Harvard University. This article discusses the impact that the discovery will have on our understanding of this short film, especially as concerns film studies and folklore. It notes several misunderstandings reported in the literature over the years that have now been set right with the finding of the film. The article points to resources held in archives in Ireland and the United States that can additionally address questions related to this film. While a noteworthy contribution to the filmography of Robert Flaherty, the short ‘talkie’ must be approached with caution by folklorists due to the coaching of actors and cinematographic editing.

Why use Linear Workflows with Non-linear Tools?

Although the technologies used to make films have changed completely during the 90-year life of sound film, the filmmaking workflow has remained strangely unaffected. We still make films as if they are shot on film that has to be developed and printed by a lab, mechanically cut and spliced by a film editor and sound edited on mag tape. The transition to digital cameras and sound recorders and digital non-linear editing machines and audio workstations, has had very little impact on the working practices of the film industry. This article proposes to change that. The transition in to a non-linear workflow would enable everyone involved in film post-production to collaborate in a more dynamic and creative way. By allowing more time for the sound editor and picture editor to experiment with sound in the editing process, more informed choices can be made in this critical phase. It would also enable the sound editors to have creative collaborations not only with the editor and the director, but also with the composer.

Form, Experience, and Desire: Frank Moorhouse’s 1970s Cycles as Experimental Writing

Windows of Historical Contexts | Gallagher Edward J. Gallagher Lehigh University ejgl@lehigh.edu Windows of Historical Contexts Donald R. Stevens, ed. Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies. Scholarly Resources, 1997. (243 pages; $35) Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera Ayala find in the quincentennial 1492 (USA, 1992) is, with little exception, familiarly mainstream. Columbus is the safe and traditional "Renaissance Rambo" who protects the Indians. On the other hand, though, Aguirre (Germany, 1972), in the director's own words, is not about real happenings or people at all, which propels Thomas H. Holloway to print the famous mutinous 1561 letter and propose his own representation of Aguirre as loyal soldier betrayed by "the system." In regard to the relation between fact and fiction, for instance, James Schofield Saeger blisters the depiction of the Guarani war in The Mission (USA, 1986) for displaying an outlived paternalistic perspective in which the Guarani are no more than "cultural ciphers." On the other hand, Robert M. Levine finds that Pixote (Brazil, 1980) tells the truth about abandoned children during Brazil's transition to democracy — so truly, in fact, that the film's title actor, a real slum child, was later killed just like his film character. Some films explain history, and some need history to explain them. Susan E. Ramirez finds that /, the Worst ofAll (Argentina, 1990), for instance, closely follows Octavio Paz's biography of proto-feminist Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. And Barbara A. Tenenbaum finds that the lack of a standard immigration experience and the consequent propensity to embrace the indigenous past explain why Mexicans understand important elements of Like Water for Chocolate (Mexico, 1992) — like the heroine's suicide ("How Mexican an ending!") — that mystify North Americans. Some films reveal a hidden history. Films like Tïie Other Francisco (1975) and The Last Supper (1976), for instance, are the result of concerted efforts after the 1959 revolution to revise Cuban history. The focus here is slave rebellion, which "contains the seeds of Cuban nationalism." John Mraz finds Francisco the more important film because it tells its story in both a Gone with the Wind style and a documentary one, forcing us to reflect on how history is written. Mark D. Szuchman shows that The Official Story (1985) and Miss - article continues on page 88 turies (Camila, The Other Francisco), ana six about the 20th century (Lucia, Gabriela, Like Water for Chocolate, Miss Mary, The Official Story, Pixote). Three films — /, tiie Worst ofAll, Camila, Miss Mary— are by one director, Maria Luisa Bemberg. Historian Stevens provides an introductory essay that plays off D. W. Griffith's blithe prophecy that film would render the reading of history obsolete, and he rehearses the chilly relationship between historian and film, ending up squarely (there are "possibilities and perils" to cinematic history), if melancholily (we "plodding empiricists " still have something to say), in the middle ("Neither book writing nor filmmaking provides a perfect window on the past"). It is not surprising, then, that neither Stevens nor his contributors pursue any grand polemic in the body of the work. There is no big generalization about film and history wrestling for acceptance here and no attempt to sweep together all Latin American cinematic history. What there is, refreshingly, is simply "a series of windows" — case studies of historical contexts for individual films with handy, annotated supplemental resources for further study. The windows yield a variety of perspectives on cinematic history. In regard to portraying historical figures, for instance, on the one hand the image of Columbus that Vol. 30.1 (March, 2000) | 89 Shull I Films of the Fifties Michael S. Shull Frederick Community College/The Washington Center ShullMS@aol.com Films of the Fifties Alan C. Fetrow. Feature Films, 1950-1959: A United States Filmography. McFarland, 1999. (718 pages; $72.50) Feature Films, 1950-1959, a Filmography ofAmerican Movies, is the third such enterprise by Alan G. Fetrow. His first two efforts, also published by McFarland, dealt with Hollywood's Sound Films, 1927-1939 (1992) and Feature Films, 1940-1949 (1994). With regards to Fetrow's earlier books, it is highly recommended by this reviewer that scholars engaged in serious...

THE LITERARY SIN: THE TRANSITION FROM MODERNISM TO SOCIALIST REALISM IN THE SOVIET CINEMA 1920-1930'S

The article problematized the interaction of literature and cinema in the Soviet Union of 1920−1930, dotted outlined the way in which the Soviet cinema came from aggressive rejection of any literary forms to severely restrict cinematic specificity for the sake of literature. In cinema the transition from modernism to socialist realism (from the showing abstract images of the revolution to the story of the particular manifestations of ideology) occurred in two planes. At first, the film loses its cinematic specificity, by simplifying of ways of filming and editing, − this process was made in the formalism’s liquidation. Secondly, during the development of the sound cinema the art world concentrates around speech − this process was related with fixing literature in the center of the cultural and political life of the USSR. Soviet cinema of the 1930s clears cinematic language to turn it into a semantically￾neutral mirror, which must reflect the socialist reality. The aim of the Soviet cinema in the 1930s was the organization of the film around the speech of the characters, broadcasting a party’s position on the backdrop of the clashing ideological manifestations. The material of the research is based on the critical and theoretical notes, party’s decisions, polemical pronouncements, memoirs of the contemporaries and later scholars’ thoughts.