Sound Film Research Articles

‘Martenaut Waves’ in the Music of the French Avant-Garde Cinematographer of the First Half of the 20th Century (on the example of the creativity of A. Honegger)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the figurative, semantic and symbolic specificity of the interpretation of the timbre of "Martenaut waves" in the music of the French avant-garde cinematography of the first half of the 20th century, including in the work of A. Honegger. Research methodology. Cultural-historical, interdisciplinary historical-cultural, as well as analytical-musicological methods were essential for this work. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it introduces for the first time into the circulation of art historians the materials related to the film music of A. Honegger and its timbral specificity, marked by an appeal to the semantic and expressive features of the "Martenaut waves". Conclusions. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as a result of rapid scientific and technical progress, cinematography came to the forefront of world art. The unity of cinematography as a synthetic art and music is strengthened by the emergence of sound cinema in 1926-1927, in which music is recorded on the same film as the image. The use of electric musical instruments, including "Martenaut waves", becomes organic in this process. Thanks to their unusual timbre, they acquired the meaningful status of the embodiment of "the materialisation of the intangible." The world of hallucinations and dreams, mystical spiritual revelations and unusual natural phenomena – such was the range of images that were conveyed with the help of this instrument in French film music of the 1930s and 1940s. A. Honegger worked most fruitfully in this field during the mentioned period, whose creative output includes more than forty soundtracks, including those using "Martenaut waves". One of the first films in which the expressive timbre of this instrument is used was the science fiction film "The End of the World" (1931) directed by A. Gans, as well as the animated film "Idea" (1934) directed by B. Bartosh and artist F. Mazerel. In the musical accompaniment of these films, the timbre of the "Martenaut waves" occupies almost the most important place, revealing the connection of the instrument with the sphere of the Sacred and the Cosmic and the spiritual and stylistic searches of European modern culture.

The Body of the Voice: Orality as Sound and Performative Expression in Non-Fiction Film

The Body of the Voice: Orality as Sound and Performative Expression in Non-Fiction Film

About Oleksandr Dovzhenko and His Stay in France

The subject of the analysis of this article is the foreign trip and stay in France of Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Yuliia Solntseva in the summer of 1930 and the probable stay of Dovzhenko himself in Paris in 1932. The analysis is written on the basis of articles and reviews, most of which have appeared in the French film press in 1930–1931. The article is aimed at the describing a little-known information about Dovzhenko’s stay in France. The author also is trying to and to submit his exclusive assumptions about his probable second visit to the City of Light in 1932. During his visit Dovzhenko has been accompanied by Parisians Yevhen Deslav and Leonid Mohylevskyi, as well as the artist Mykola Hlushchenko. The description contains a number of events – visits to film studios for the study of sound film technologies, proposals for the production of a French-Ukrainian film, screenings of his films in his presence in the Studio 28 cinema, meetings in the Montparnasse district with leading French filmmakers and with Ukrainian artists of the so-called Paris School, contacts with the former colleagues of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, a probable trip to Amsterdam planned with Deslav. The article contains two hitherto unheard-of reports about Dovzhenko’s second trip to France. The first is based on Yevhen Deslav’s annotation: “I’ve met Dovzhenko in Paris somewhere in 1932 (sic), where he comes to study sound cinema”. The second is the photo of Dovzhenko, posing in the photo salon to the French photographer and film director Elie Lothar. This is the fact, strengthening the hypothesis of the master’s repeated presence in Paris in 1932.

A linguist among cineastes: Roman Jakobson on the moving image

ABSTRACT The article presents a critical review of the texts on cinema and the moving image written by Roman Jakobson between 1921 and 1980, gathered under the following headings: sound film; Soviet cinema; semiotic approach; metonymy/metaphor; synchrony/diachrony; film criticism and film comparisons. It is concluded that for Jakobson the cinema, as a semiotic system, establishes a link between linguistics and poetics.

Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic analysis of human values in the film sound of freedom

This research focuses on semiotic analysis of the film Sound of Freedom. This semiotic analysis aims to determine the interpretation and meaning related to the life values of the film. In this research the author uses elements from Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic analysis method, with the limit of semiotic studies to the semantic level. This research is based on the understanding that film is not only a work of art that aims to entertain but can also be a communication medium that indirectly conveys human values. This film is an adaptation of a true story that tells the story of a United States government agent, Timothy Ballard (Jim Caviezel), who uncovers a child trafficking network in Colombia. The research method used by researchers is a qualitative research method using data originating from the results of document analysis and observations of texts. Technical data analysis was carried out using Charles Sander Peirce's semiotic theory. Researchers took Peirce's formula regarding objects which are classified into three, in the form of icons, indexes and symbols which are applied to each scene of the film Sound of Freedom. The results of this research show the human values contained in the film Sound of Freedom semantically. The results of this research show that the film Sound of Freedom contains human values. These human values include Respect for Human Dignity, solidarity, and sucriface for humanity.

Professional and novice audio describers: quality assessments and audio interactions

Empowering novice describers can reduce costs and expand access to high-quality audio descriptions (ADs). This study explored differences between novice and professional practices by analysing their ADs for a 3:42-minute scene from a Japanese fictional film. A film producer rated both the overall quality and volume quality of ADs. The perceived AD volume quality reflects the comprehensive volume experience within ADs beyond loudness. The assessment revealed that ADs created by ten novices using speech synthesis reached approximately 60% of both the overall quality and volume quality of published ADs with human voice. Kernel density estimation showed significantly lower mean loudness in published ADs than in novice ADs. Additionally, a significant negative correlation existed between perceived AD volume quality and mean film loudness during AD presentation across all AD sets. However, published ADs had longer durations compared to novice ADs. Contrasting cueing strategies were observed. Published ADs relied on film sounds, whereas novice ADs leaned on visual cues. Consequently, we developed a professional technique: carefully curating the film information to be heard and balancing AD placement to ensure the audio experience of both ADs and film sound without abrupt AD loudness increases. This sonic approach empowers novices to craft impactful ADs.

Exploring User-Centered Evaluation in a Tertiary-Level, Audio-Describer Training Program

Introduction: Audio description (AD) should satisfy the needs of people who are visually impaired; however, quality assessment in university training programs has rarely been based on feedback provided by AD users. Aiming to help students truly understand the needs of people who are visually impaired and their criteria for AD, this study adopted user-centered evaluation in an AD training program offered by a university in Hong Kong. Method: Three evaluators with visual impairment, representing the views of AD users, were invited to evaluate 29 students’ film clips that included AD and discuss their evaluation criteria. Eleven students participated in focus-group interviews and were asked to comment on AD products and discuss their own evaluation criteria. The evaluation criteria of the two groups were compared qualitatively and quantitatively with the aid of the software NVivo. Results: The results showed discrepancies between the users’ and the trainees’ criteria as well as differences in their focuses when evaluating the AD products. The users’ criteria were more numerous; however, certain criteria were perceived exclusively by the trainees. Discussion: Without sufficient knowledge of users’ needs, AD trainees are inclined to provide redundant information (e.g., easily identifiable film sounds and speaker information) while neglecting some aspects of AD (e.g., the prudent use of pronouns and literary expressions), which are deemed important by the users. Implications for Practitioners: The results prompted AD instructors to integrate user feedback into AD training to improve students’ understanding of how to produce AD that better meets its users’ needs.

Working in the dream factory: gendering women's film labour under Fascism

AbstractThis article draws on a broad range of under-explored historical sources to document the career trajectories of the women who worked in the Italian film industry between 1930 and 1944. Challenging established histories that normalise male dominance in Italian cinema during and after Mussolini's regime, the article sheds light on women's overlooked contribution to Italy's sound film industry and explores the multilayered, shifting dimension of their precarious and gendered labour. Engaging with key questions raised by historians of Italian Fascism and by feminist research in film and media history, the article delineates intersectional barriers to film employment faced by women in the years of the dictatorship and points to their historical legacy.

Джаз в советском кино. Опыт ретроспективного анализа

The article is devoted to representation of domestic jazz in the Soviet feature silent and sound cinema in the period from 1926 to 1990. The author notes that jazz was becoming part of the plot of documentaries and feature films since its emergence in the USSR, but the accents in its image changed, and the genre nature of the movies evolved. There was a traceable shift from musical comedy to satirical pamphlet, from lyrical comedy to melodrama. Based on several dozens of examples of films where jazz sounds, the article shows the relationship between the ideological course of the Soviet state, the perception of the jazz performance specifics at different historical milestones, and the nature of its reflection on the screen. Thus, in the 1930s, jazz was synonymous with popular music and had a clear shade of humour and entertainment; in the late 1940s, it symbolized the ideological opponents of the country; and after the Khrushchev Thaw, it was considered an art, a kind of intellectual activity. In addition to the periodization of jazz cinema, the article provides a typology of films about jazz. The author presents a classification based on a set of qualities, such as maximum or minimum correlation of the plot of the film with jazz, participation of jazz musicians in it, and presence of a jazz soundtrack.

A Functional Study of Film Sound Design in Science Fiction Films

As a form of art combining audio and visual, movie sound effect is an important element in building the story world of the movie. When sound films first appeared, they were recognized and welcomed by the public, and it is extremely important to use sound effects in narrative films so that the audience can have a better connection with the fictional world. As one of the popular cinema genres, science fiction movies were loved by the audience when they first appeared, attracting the audience's attention with brilliant special effects, but the role played by sound effects in them should not be neglected. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of sound effects in science fiction films, and will use Avatar, Inception, The Prestige and Gravity, the four films, respectively, to explain the three functions that sound effects have. They are to enhance the realism of the movie, to help complete the temporal construction of the movie and to express the inner world of the characters.

A study on Bernard Herrmann’s science fiction film music

The early sound film and “classical-style” Hollywood film periods were important representatives in the history of Hollywood films, producing many classic films as well as many famous film music composers. Among them, Bernard Herrmann was a unique and distinctive representative with his own personal compositional style, and was also the representative composer for thriller, horror, mystery and science fiction films during this period. When analyzing film music, especially Bernard Herrmann’s works, using tonal music analysis, many harmonic progressions cannot be accurately expressed. Harmonic function analysis emphasizes the principles of tonality, while neo-Riemannian theory breaks away from the framework of tonality and harmonic functions, emphasizing the spatial progression between chords. For Bernard Herrmann’s music, using neo-Riemannian theory can reasonably analyze the characteristics and patterns of musical progression, and explain many chord progressions that harmonic functions cannot. One of the films that can be given as an example of this situation is The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The Day the Earth Stood Still is a Hollywood science fiction film made in 1951. This work played an important role in the development of later science fiction films. Bernard Herrmann chose to abandon the traditional orchestral instrumentation and used a specific instrumental ensemble to form Herrmann’s unique science fiction film music space. Transformational analysis shows that the music uses modes, hexatonic scales and octatonic scales to form melodies and harmonies with ambiguous characteristics, and the use of these modes and scales also provides important color elements for film music of specific styles. Neo-Riemannian theory has been around for less than 50 years. As an emerging music theory system, it is not yet mature and complete, and is still expanding and improving. However, as an analysis tool for nonfunctional tonal film music, it can provide a brand new perspective. This researcher also believes that neo-Riemannian theory can provide theoretical basis for analyzing various styles of film music as an analytical tool.

Sonic Alchemist: AI’s Role in Amplifying Creativity in Film Sound

Defying mainstream views of AI as tools that mimic or replace human input, this paper presents Sonic Alchemist: an avant-garde AI software taking a fresh approach to sound design. Built on the Beginner’s Mind principles, it empowers users to defy familiar paths and habits, fostering collaboration between human and machine. Unique features like automatic sound effects matching and a weight-based sound selection system further enhance this partnership. User feedback and case studies highlight Sonic Alchemist’s capacity to evoke new insights and unexpected solutions, reinforcing its role as a creative ally. Analysis of industry reception and user responses during testing underscores its potential to transform sound design in visual media. This study underlines the enduring significance of human originality, even in the AI era, portraying Sonic Alchemist as an inspiration tool and a champion of human creativity. It asserts that the willingness to unlearn and rediscover is key in creative innovation, even when assisted by advanced AI tools.

Revoicing the Forbidden: The Yishuv, Yiddish Films, and Hebrew Dubbing

Abstract: This essay focuses on the compulsory Hebrew-language dubbing of Yiddish sound films during 1930s and 1940s in Mandatory Palestine (1920–1948). The term “dub” is a shortened version of the word “double” and denotes the practice of supplanting a film’s original language with another, mostly (though not exclusively) for translation purposes. Hebrew dubbing was a practical compromise that made it possible for Yiddish films to be screened in Palestine, albeit not in their original tongue. This was an arrangement that bridged the gap between the rigid ideological language restrictions commanded by the Hebraist leadership of the Yishuv, and the general population’s desire to enjoy films that represented a culture beloved by many. The topic of enforced dubbing, standing at the intersection of national language policy and popular entertainment, showcases the tension between the ideal of total Hebraization and the consumption of foreign-language cultural products.

The Silent Enemy (1930) and n’Daki Menan: Reclaiming Mise-en-Scène as Authorial Expression

Paramount Pictures’ The Silent Enemy, released in 1930, is a fascinating cultural artifact made and released during the transition from silent to sound film. One of the last silent feature films made by the studio, this critically acclaimed film took three years to make and was shot in large part on location on n’Daki Menan, the traditional territory of the Teme Augama Anishnabai in northern Ontario. Like other silent films made in Indigenous communities during this period such as Curtis’ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and Myles’ The Daughter of Dawn (1920), The Silent Enemy employed local Indigenous actors and drew on their knowledge and traditions to construct its vision of pre-contact Anishinaabe life. While the exact location and community are never mentioned in The Silent Enemy itself, local Anishinaabe people were hired to act in the film and make the costumes and sets according to pre-contact standards, all elements of the film form that added greatly to the production’s claims of authenticity. This cultural labour went uncredited and unacknowledged. While the film recycles the prominent ethnographic narrative of the dying “Indian” culture, it does feature ironic moments of Indigenous survivance, such as an introductory sequence with Chief Yellow Robe shot in synchronized sound, naturalistic performances, material culture designed by locals that continue to captivate community members, and over-the-top colonial takes on pre-contact life. Until now, most readings of this silent feature focused on the celebrity image of Chief Long Lance and his “outing” as an African American and its use of Native American actors in leading roles, but for far too long, the story of its long-lasting influence as both a personal and a public historical artifact for the Teme Augama Anishnabai has not been told. The authors’ method for telling this story will alternate between oral storytelling and scholarly analysis of the film’s formal and thematic elements. The authors hope that by drawing on oral and traditional storytelling approaches, Indigenous ways of knowing will be foregrounded.

Campbeltown Speaks: Small-Town Cinema and the Coming of Sound

The popularity of cinema from its earliest days in small-town settings emphasises the importance of local circumstances in explaining the medium’s success. This article employs surviving business records relating to the Picture House in the Scottish burgh of Campbeltown to explore aspects of cinema-going peculiar to that corner of rural Argyllshire, including a propensity, hitherto unidentified among Scottish audiences, to support the productions of the British film industry. Beyond this, the Picture House has a broader significance. As a monopoly provider of commercial entertainment to an enclosed market, it offers telling insights into a key point of transition for cinema, that from silent to sound film. Placed in the context of national trends, documented by data relating to the taxation of entertainments, Campbeltown provides compelling evidence that the advent of the talkies marked a fundamental discontinuity in the history of the medium at all levels, from the local to the national.

The Tradition of Literary Classics and Twentieth Century Cinema: Dickens and Chaplin

The article deals with the dialogue between literature and cinema, namely the phenomenon of mutual reflection of the holistic artistic worlds of Chaplin and Dickens. Significant similarity of the facts of biography, artistic method, problems, the general direction of the evolution, certain images and techniques, the nature of the representation of the author’s origin allow us to view the work of film director as a kind of reincarnation of the writer. The aim of the article — to demonstrate the proximity of the artistic worlds of Dickens and Chaplin in their main qualitative characteristics — in the transformation of Dickensian literary images in Chaplin’s cinematic. This transformation is explored through the example of the pairs of analogues: Oliver Twist (1838) — The Kid (1921), Hard Times (1854) — New Times (1936), Cold House (1852) — Monsieur Verdoux (1947).Both writer and director, who received worldwide fame during his lifetime, in his later works are deeply immersed in the awareness of the causes of world evil, hence the new and in the strategy of communication with the reader, and in the nature of the narrative.In the later novels of Dickens (“Bleak House”, “Hard Times”, “Little Dorrit”, “Great Expectations”) the image of the hero loses its single identity, opening the way to the duplicity as an expression of the deformation of the human personality. The detective element strengthens as a quest to understand the mystery and origins of social evil. Chaplin’s films from the 1940s onwards are marked by an increasingly grim social diagnosis of modernity as the usual contours of good and evil become blurred. The image of the little vagabond is gone from Chaplin’s sound films: The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Limelight (1952), The King in New York (1957). While clowning did not disappear, it was relegated to the periphery and ceased to be the principal means of grasping reality.A comparative analysis of the work of the two geniuses leads to the conclusion that their art, humanistic in its orientation, contains an enormous charge of love for people all over the world, beyond national, religious and other boundaries.

“Screen on the Chum”: Social Reconstruction and Mobile Film Propaganda in the North of the Ob region in the 1930s

Drawing on the example of agitation and propaganda campaigns carried out in the north of the Ob region in the 1930s among the indigenous population, a specific tool of the Soviet ideological indoctrination of the Great Break period — a mobile cinema (installations designed to screen silent and sound films to a small audience in open areas and in premises not equipped with stationary film projectors) — has been comprehensively studied. The mobile cinema is considered as one of the varieties of cultural management technologies that are equally characteristic of all states and empires of the modern era, including the USSR, where, due to the existence of state ideology and low literacy of the population, it was even more important than other cultural technologies. The management supported and strengthened the centralized power, serving as a complement to force and coercion. Based on the materials of the State Archive of the Socio-Political History of the Tyumen Region, it has been es-tablished that the first mobile cinema in the north of the Ob region was created under the auspices of the Commit-tee of the North under the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the USSR, but it reached its fullest flou-rishing in the area during the period when the region came under the jurisdiction of the Chief Directorate of the Northern Sea Route (1935–1938). The repertoire of a mobile cinema was compiled centrally, and it included popular science and feature films, united by a common goal, which was the ideological indoctrination of the audi-ence. For representatives of the indigenous peoples of the North, movie screening itself was the most important experience of joining a new life, akin to the rite of initiation. Indigenous peoples were most interested in movies that narrated about their own daily life: hunting, fishing, travelling. Mobile cinemas were moved around the north by sled and specially equipped boats. The work of a mobile cinema in the north of the Ob region was associated with constant overcoming of a number of problems: the shortage of films, frequent breakdowns of movie cameras, and the lack of qualified projectionists. Nevertheless, mobile cinemas made significant contribution to the mo-dernization of everyday life and worldview of the indigenous peoples of the Ob North.

Scoring the Hollywood Actor in the 1950s Gregory Camp

The 1950s were a pivotal decade in the history of Hollywood music. The great movie studios had dominated the early days of sound film production and distribution but were battered in 1948 by the Supreme Court’s antitrust Paramount Case, which forced them to divest from the theatres they had previously controlled and through which they had exerted an effective monopoly on the distribution of their product. As a result of the ruling, studio profits cratered over the next decade, leading to a crisis within the film industry. This crisis was compounded by the traumatic experience of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which devastated Hollywood in the late 1940s and early 1950s as writers, directors, actors, and composers were forced to testify and inform on one another regarding any political activity deemed to be subversive. But the worst shock to Hollywood’s old order came from the advent of television. As the baby boom generation emerged in the wake of Second World War, TV presented a stay-at-home alternative that caused attendance at cinemas to drop precipitously. To lure viewers back to the cinema, Hollywood rolled out a succession of enticing attractions in the 1950s: spectacular new Widescreen formats such as Cinemascope or Cinerama that provided opportunities for sweeping vistas in historical epics like Ben Hur and thrilling genres such as science fiction and horror, which presented astonishing monsters and flying saucers. At the same time, a relaxing of the strict censorship code that Hollywood, fearing boycotts from the religious right, had imposed on itself since the early 1930s, led to increasingly frank depictions of sex and violence on the screen that reached a culmination with Hitchcock’s boundary-pushing Psycho in 1960. All of this provided new opportunities for musical expression: science fiction and horror films, with their emphasis on the strange and unfamiliar, inspired composers to experiment with modernist techniques such as atonality and electronic music, while movies dealing with contemporary topics such as addiction and teenage crime invited the dangerous and thrilling sounds of jazz and rock’n’roll into the heretofore rather sheltered late-Romantic musical universe of Hollywood film. A new generation of American composers, including Alex North, Leonard Rosenman, Elmer Bernstein, and Henry Mancini, entered the film-scoring scene during this period and proceeded to expand the stylistic palette available to film composers with elements of jazz and modernism. It is not surprising, then, that the 1950s has provided a particularly rich terrain for film-music scholars. An important early contribution to the analysis of pivotal scores by North and Rosenman, among others, was George Burt’s monograph The Art of Film Music (Boston, 1994). In recent years, a number of books, chapters, and articles have explored this turbulent and fascinating decade, including ‘Scoring East of Eden: The Division of the “One”: Leonard Rosenman and the Score for East of Eden’, in Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (eds.), Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview (New York, 2009); Stanley C. Pelkey II and Anthony Bushard (eds.), Anxiety Muted: American Film Music in a Suburban Age (New York, 2015); and James Wierzbicki, Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties (Chicago and Springfield, IL, 2016).

Absurd justice: documenting the show trial in Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial (2018)

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the material history and conceptual origins of Sergei Loznitsa’s The Trial (2018), an archival documentary that re-edits restored footage and deleted scenes from Iakov Posel’skii’s 1931 propaganda documentary 13 Days, one of the Soviet Union’s earliest sound films. Shelved in state archives soon after its release, Posel’skii’s documentary chronicles the infamous Industrial Party Trial, in which a cabal of scientists and engineers were accused of undermining Soviet industry. To tell this story, The Trial relies on a lack of commentary supplemented by novel sound editing techniques including the addition of seemingly indexical sounds. This article investigates such devices as an attempt to immerse the viewer in a moment in time, thus creating a realistic experience of a historical event. In doing so, it provides insight into the cinematic techniques Loznitsa uses to repurpose archival materials, and touches on the role of the audience in Loznitsa’s film.

SCHOOL LIBRARY SERVICES AT UPT SMA NEGERI 5 ENREKANG DURING THE PANDEMIC PERIOD

The purpose of this study was to determine library services in this case circulation services, reference services, on-site reading services and ICT-based services as well as supporting and inhibiting factors in school library services. This research approach is qualitative with a type of description. Data collection techniques were carried out by interview, observation and documentations. Data analysis techniques using data reduction, data presentation and drawing conclusions. Checking the validity of the data is done by trianggulation technique. The reserch results showed that : 1) the circulation service has a collection of 19,839 books, but does not yet have a non-book collection such as tape recorders, sound slides, video cassettes, sound films and many more. The system used in this library is an open service system. 2) The reference service has 587 collections consisting of dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps and others. In this service, users can obtain information and assistance regarding the existence of the collection needed. 3) on-site reading services, in this service the library provides 6 reading tebles placed in several corners of the room so that students get good lighting and air circulation. Howefer, this service is currently unvailable because students rarely use it. 4) ICT-based services, in the SMA Negeri 5 Enrekang library this service is not yet available because officers are still in the stage of entering library materials into the library application. While the supporting factors for library services are the personnel or the staff themselves, staff commitment and adequate books. While the inhibiting factors are the library collections which are still in hard copy form, lack of student interest and limited staff/librarians.