Sound Motion Pictures Research Articles

“WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WAY I TALK?” THE EFFECT OF SOUND MOTION PICTURES ON ACTOR CAREERS

The development of sound motion pictures in the late 1920s provides one of history's most evocative examples of the effect of technological innovation on employment. I begin by exploring the transition to sound, which lasted several years. I then analyze transition's effect on actor employment, and find it to be associated with a substantial increase in career terminations, not only among major stars (which film scholars emphasize), but also among more minor actors. Furthermore, I find that sound raised hazard rates generally. Finally, I calculate that the number of actors employed in movies increased substantially in the sound era.

'What's Wrong with the Way I Talk?' The Effect of Sound Motion Pictures on Actor Careers

The development of sound motion pictures in the late 1920s provides one of history’s most evocative examples of how new technology can affect employment – film historians have long believed that the transition to sound cut short the careers of a number of silent film stars. But whether this was due to the transition itself (actor careers are unpredictable at the best of times), and if so, whether more than a small number of famous stars were affected, has not been explored systematically. In this paper, I analyze a data set of nearly 10,000 actors who played in motion pictures from 1920 through 1940, inclusive. I find that the transition period is associated with a substantial increase in career terminations, not only among major stars, but also among more minor actors. However, I also find that sound films raised hazard rates generally, so that whereas the silent era is associated with a hazard rate that is 30-to-50 percent lower than that of the transition period, the sound era it is associated with only a 10 percent lower hazard rate. This means that some of the increase in career terminations attributed to the transition process may in fact simply reflect the higher rate of exit that became the norm during the first decade of sound motion pictures.

Swedish Inventor Sven Berglund's Little-Known Achievements in the Development of Motion Picture Optical Sound Recording

Swedish Inventor Sven Berglund's Little-Known Achievements in the Development of Motion Picture Optical Sound Recording Robert J. Heiber (bio) On June 26, 2009, archivists at the Deutsches Film Museum (DFM) in Frankfurt found a lonely reel of cellulose nitrate base optical sound film. Labeled "Berglund VI Tonaufnahmen 1922," the 750-foot reel of 35mm nitrate film was in a can of film from the Filzinger Archive. The seemingly insignificant find turned out to be a rare artifact of Swedish inventor Sven Berglund and his colleague Wolfgang Filzinger from the early years of sound motion picture experimentation. Though Berglund is not a familiar name to most researchers and archivists, the documentation of his accomplishments confirms that synchronized sound motion picture production and exhibition was feasible in 1921. The recovery of this reel, which was lent by the DFM to the Swedish Film Institute, provided tangible evidence for the effectiveness of Berglund's optical sound recorder. At the beginning of the 1920s, technology was rapidly evolving in the motion picture industry. Though sound for motion pictures was scorned by a good portion of the production and exhibition community, a small but dedicated group of technologists persevered and forever changed an art form and commercial product. The key contributors in the history of motion picture sound—Lee de Forest, Theodore Case, E. I. Sponable, E. C. Wente, (Axel) Peterson and (Arnold) Poulsen, Eugene Lauste, and the team at Tri-Ergon—are well known to scholars, archivists, and researchers. However, Sven Berglund, a Swedish engineer, is not a name that many would immediately associate with the development of optical sound technology. Berglund was born on July 20, 1881, in Stockholm. His father, Archadius, was a military engineer who edited the second edition of The Book of Inventions (1898-1907), a worldwide compendium of registered current inventions. Berglund followed his father's scientific path by attending the Technical University of Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1901. Working in the photographic industry in Berlin after graduation, Berglund experimented with optically recording acoustical sound waves onto photographic plates. 1 By 1911, Berglund had perfected a system to record optical sound onto a continuous piece of nonperfed 35mm film. His original invention can be found in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. Working with Goerzen Optical Co., a German manufacturer of motion picture cameras and lenses, he attracted investors interested in developing a system for synchronizing sound for motion pictures. The venture, called Fotoaerofon, was one of a number of companies Berglund would form to raise capital for his motion picture sound system. During the early years of motion picture development, patents and licenses controlled the manufacturing of cameras and projectors, creating profitable monopolies for their owners. Technical innovators also understood that bringing a viable sound system to motion pictures would be another opportunity to cash in on the fledgling industry. Thus Berglund once said that "an inventor devotes at least as much time to raise money for his research, as he spends on the research work." 2 World War I interrupted Berglund's work in [End Page 76] Germany, and he returned home to Stockholm. When it was evident that the war would rage on for years, Berglund made a daring trip back to Goerzen in Berlin to pack up his equipment and ship it to Sweden to continue his research. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sven Berglund in his laboratory at Lidingö. Originally published in the magazine The Film (1919). The cornerstone of Berglund's acoustical optical recording system was the ability to have sound waves modulate light so that the sound energy could be recorded photographically on black-and-white film. This is essentially the same technology that is used for motion picture optical sound tracks today. Converting sound waves to modulating light was not his original idea—Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter pioneered this work in the 1880s with their invention of the photophone; however, by harnessing this phenomenon, Berglund could record sounds farther away from the recording funnel. This advantage is gained by the fact that light has no mass. Berglund's system therefore required much less acoustical energy than the traditional stylus-cutting method employed on...

From the Midway to the Hall of State at Fair Park: Two Competing Views of Women at the Dallas Celebration of 1936

From the Midway to the Hall of State at Fair Park:Two Competing Views of Women at the Dallas Celebration of 1936 Light Townsend Cummins (bio) This essay will examine two conflicting and mutually exclusive roles that women played in the Central Centennial Celebration held at Fair Park in Dallas during the summer and fall of 1936.1 On one hand, the predominantly male planners of the fair exploited female beauty as a selling point for the exposition. On the other hand, women also played significant and more enduring roles in planning and implementing the Dallas exposition. This was most especially the case for women who advanced the cause of art at the exposition. Exposition planners exploited female beauty by means of publicity, advertising copy, and the creation of public attractions at Fair Park designed to increase attendance by objectifying beautiful women as drawing cards. In so doing, the celebration glorified women as purveyors of sex appeal and created an atmosphere at the centennial exposition that presented them to the public as embodiments of largely male-defined characterizations of femininity. New technical advances by the 1930s in the practices of photojournalism, including more portable cameras and the cost-effective printing of photographic images, along with the widespread [End Page 225] coverage of the Dallas exposition by radio broadcasting, sound motion pictures, and other mass circulation media helped to make the objectification of women more explicit than it had previously been in the realm of Texas public relations. This portrayal reinforced the prevailing notions of female beauty of the era. The impact of women at the Central Centennial Celebration was felt in ways other than through the exploitation of female beauty, too. Female artists, many of them highly educated women of social standing and civic accomplishment, existed apart from the beauty culture objectification of the exposition's public relations and, in retrospect, were a historical contradiction to it. In the larger arena of Texas history, this was consistent with the role that women played in the development of the visual arts in Texas. Female artists in the state during the 1930s used their art and their standing in the state's artistic community as a means to empower themselves socially, politically, and civically, thus advancing all women in the process. They certainly did so at Dallas's Fair Park during the Texas Centennial of 1936 as the exposition served as one of many venues during the 1930s for this evolving process of female empowerment undertaken by women artists during that decade. The centennial at Dallas in 1936 thus presents to the historian a stark example of two mutually exclusive, if not conflicting, roles that women played in the Fair Park exhibition and, by extrapolation, in Texas society at large. Beyond manifesting two different and self-contradictory viewpoints about women, on a larger canvass the Texas Centennial of 1936 marked a significant, generally positive moment in the economic and cultural development of the state. As historian Patrick Cox has noted, its "multiple events embodied a new 'Texan' image and myth that combined factual and fictional material."2 These activities would prove to be especially significant for Dallas because a combination of state and federal funds was allocated to revamp Fair Park into an Art Deco architectural monument for a grand celebration that would be the statewide centerpiece of the centennial. Officially known as the Central Centennial Exposition, this exposition ran from June to November 1936 at Fair Park, east of downtown, constituting one of the major statewide centerpieces of that year's events. Retailer Stanley Marcus, who personally played a role in supporting the exposition, later remarked that the Dallas exposition became a turning point not only in the history of the city, but the entire state. Recalling the tens of thousands of visitors who came to Dallas from the rest of the nation and abroad, Marcus observed: "They came, they looked, they liked it." He further remembered: "They returned to New York and to Chicago and to New Jersey with a clear understanding of where Texas was located and what [End Page 226] it was all about."3 The dozens of books and articles written in the intervening three quarters of...

Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (review)

Reviewed by: Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media David L. Morton (bio) Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media. By Stephen J. Wurtzler. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+393. $34.50. The use of "electrical acoustics" (i.e., electronically amplified audio) links the histories of the phonograph, radio broadcasting, and motion pictures from the latter half of the 1920s, argues film and media studies scholar Stephen J. Wurtzler. Near the beginning of that period, record manufacturers stopped using "acoustic" recording in favor of recording technology that used microphones and electronic amplifiers. Motion picture studios used electronics to introduce the "talkies" at about the same time, and radio broadcasting of voice and music was established, again using electronics. Wurtzler examines the use of electrical acoustics across these industries, hoping to find new insights into cultural, economic, and technological history. All these industries experienced vertical integration that accompanied, or was in some way enabled by, the adoption of the new electronic technologies. Wurtzler explores the common ways that these industries incorporated electronics into their business strategies and promoted technological change to consumers and audiences. Then, turning to the way that phonograph records, radio shows, and motion pictures were made, he shows that electrical acoustics was increasingly used to manipulate or construct the listening experience, not simply to capture an authentic event. At the same time, the skill required to use reproducing machines (radios, phonographs, or projectors) was reduced and made a more passive or less obviously "technical" experience. Especially in motion pictures and radio, the use of electronics somehow enabled commercial and political messages to creep in. Advertisements and political content were inserted into presentations, the former resembling an early form of "product placement." Electronically enhanced media thus blurred lines between previously distinct realms of culture. Further, while these media appeared to link people across time and space into common political or cultural communities, that appearance was deceptive. Throughout the book, Wurtzler strives to look carefully at the hardware of sound recording, transmission, and reproduction, in addition to mediated messages or aural content, audiences, and sponsoring industries. Given the number of works on segments of the history of audio technology, a cross-media and cross-corporation history has long been needed. This is particularly true in the history of sound motion pictures, where the scholarship has not had much overlap with studies of other forms of sound recording or radio. It would be very useful to have a synthesis of that scholarship that treats the subject comprehensively and presents it coherently to a wider academic audience. It would be even more useful if significant new archival research could inform and enhance such a synthesis. [End Page 505] Electric Sounds is probably not that book. It will not readily serve those outside Wurtzler's own specialty, because he employs a vocabulary that detracts incalculably from the book's readability. There are also significant problems with his arguments, evidence, and conclusions. The book focuses exclusively on mass media, to its detriment. It might seem reasonable to forego a discussion of the telephone in this study, because it was not a "mass" media in the usual sense. Yet Wurtzler repeatedly mentions, in isolation, the contributions of AT&T and its subsidiaries. He fails to make anything of the overwhelming presence of the U.S. telephone conglomerate in inventing, manufacturing, providing services for, or promoting the technological artifacts that are at the center of his argument. In a work focusing on "hardware" and seeking links across media and corporations, this is an inexplicable omission. Also troubling is Wurtzler's failure to make more than passing reference to governmental regulation and economic intervention. Other historians have established that government-led investigations, legal proceedings, and eventual regulation of the mass media are central explanatory factors in their technological histories. Here, again, is another cross-media linkage ignored. The major omissions and artificial constraints placed on this work are perhaps the reasons why Wurtzler fails to reach novel conclusions. In a chapter titled "Conclusions/Reverberations" he explains, weakly, that he "stubbornly resists imposing closure" (p. 280) on his subject. Instead, after briefly summarizing his chapters he diverges...

Language learning

Language learning

Indexical Relations and Sound Motion Pictures in L2 Curricula: The Dynamic Role of the Teacher

Well-chosen sound motion pictures (SMPs) can be excellent language teaching tools for presenting facts and providing comprehensible input in the target language. They give access to content and authentic surface forms in the target language as well as to the associations between them. SMPs also allow repeated exposures, but they are rarely exploited fully. Here we argue that indexical relations of three kinds are critical to language acquisition and to the use of SMPs: (1) objective indexes emanating from material bodily objects to observers, (2) subjective indexes projected from observers onto bodily objects, and (3) symbolic indexes marking linguistic associations between the surface forms of the target language and their referents as well as relations between all of these. The teacher plays an essential role in helping the language learner to discover, establish, and develop the crucial indexical relations owing to the dynamic nature of these relations.

Indexical Relations and Sound Motion Pictures in L2 Curricula: The Dynamic Role of the Teacher

Well-chosen sound motion pictures (SMPs) can be excellent language teaching tools for presenting facts and providing comprehensible input in the target language. They give access to content and authentic surface forms in the target language as well as to the associations between them. SMPs also allow repeated exposures, but they are rarely exploited fully. Here we argue that indexical relations of three kinds are critical to language acquisition and to the use of SMPs: (1) objective indexes emanating from material bodily objects to observers, (2) subjective indexes projected from observers onto bodily objects, and (3) symbolic indexes marking linguistic associations between the surface forms of the target language and their referents as well as relations between all of these. The teacher plays an essential role in helping the language learner to discover, establish, and develop the crucial indexical relations owing to the dynamic nature of these relations.

Dead Rooms and Live Wires: Harvard, Hollywood, and the Deconstruction of Architectural Acoustics, 1900-1930

In 1900 Wallace Sabine, a physicist at Harvard University, published a mathematical formula for calculating the reverberation time in a room, a measure of how quickly or slowly sound energy dies away in an enclosed space. In 1930 Carl Eyring, a physicist working in the Sound Motion Picture Studio at Bell Telephone Laboratories, revised Sabine's equation. This essay examines material changes in the practice of architectural acoustics in order to explain how and why Eyring was motivated to reformulate the Sabine equation. Sabine's equation was the product of experimentation in highly reverberant rooms. Eyring worked in a world increasingly constructed of sound-absorbing building materials--a world of acoustically dead rooms in which Sabine's original assumptions were no longer valid. Further, Eyring's world was filled with electroacoustic devices that had not existed in 1900. Live wires powered new tools for producing, measuring, and controlling sound, and the new electroacoustic technologies additional...

Silent poetry: deafness, sign, and visual culture in modern France

This text explores the dynamic interaction between art and the sign language of the deaf in France from the philosophes to the introduction of the sound motion picture. It shows how the French Revolution transformed the ancien regime metaphor of painting as poetry into a 19th-century school of over 100 deaf artists. Painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists all emanated from the Institute for the Deaf in Paris, playing a central role in the vibrant deaf culture of the period. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and race science, however, the deaf found themselves categorized as savages, excluded and ignored by the hearing. This book is concerned with the process and history of that marginalization, the constitution of a centre from which the abnormal could be excluded, and the vital role of visual culture within this discourse. Based on archival and pictorial research, the text's intertextual analysis of what it terms the silent screen of deafness produces an alternative history of 19th-century art that challenges canonical views of the history of art, the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and the functions, status, and meanings of visual culture itself. Fusing methodologies from cultural studies, poststructuralism and art history, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of art history, cultural and deaf studies, and the history of medicine, and should also interest a general audience concerned with the relationship of the deaf and the larger society.

What makes the picture talk: AT&T and the development of sound motion picture technology

The development of technological system that brought sound to motion pictures in the 1920s at AT&T's Bell Laboratories and its predecessor, the Western Electric Engineering Department, is described. The telephone company had set out to perfect the national telephone network. Among the technologies developed in this effort were amplifiers, loud speaking telephones (i.e. loudspeakers), condenser microphones, and electrical sound recording and reproduction. In 1922, all the pieces necessary for the addition of sound to movies were in place except for a means to synchronize sound and picture, a task then given to a team of engineers. By 1924, AT&T has produced a complete working system. Western Electric established a subsidiary in 1927 to work with the motion picture industry to develop commercial sound film production, and with the theater owners to equip thousands of theaters to show sound films.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Leonard Leff Responds to Robin Bates

Irrespective of 'meaning,' [final] shot of sled gives many viewers a rush, I wrote in Reading (Film Quarterly, Fall 1985); does something to them. Those who study Citizen Kane must have been as delighted as I to learn what near-end of this picture did to college freshman Scott Bates in 1941: It was flaming consummation of sex and politics that had been looking for in movie theatres all our young lives. Robin Bates aptly concludes-and I agree-that studying audience responses like this reveals the multidimensionality of But whether a search for 'the real meaning' of Kane brings therapeutic force to revelation of Rosebud seems problematic. The question hinges upon audience. In Reading I stipulate a composite we modelled after Riffaterre's reader of 'Les Chats,' an 'we' alert to what one of cinema's most stimulating works does. Bates frequently employs term audience in his well-argued essay, and although he never defines it, he leaves little doubt that he also intends an informed viewer. Yet he hedges on just what an viewer knows and how an viewer responds. Also, I believe, he does not acknowledge multidimensionality of viewers. Bates, for instance, locates meaning of newsreel far... from real meaning of dream (18). Though a discussion of humor and satire as modes of discourse enters neither Bates's nor my own articles, it seems impossible to discuss newsreel sequence without reference to Welles's wit. The images of tremendous potency assembled by News on March reporter are not only phallic but funny; they at once imitate and deride montage a la Vorkapich. Citizen Kane, as academics occasionally forget, has a sophomoric exuberance. For example, shrewd Welles stages Thatcher's congressional appearance during News on March sequence, giving us sound motion picture footage from silent era; gulf between sense of title preceding Kane's funeral (Thompson calls it big and strange) and footage that contradicts it adds yet another grim joke. Puns litter film. Mudslinging (literally) brings Kane and Susan together. She invites him to her room, where he gets in hot water; later, he threatens to send his political enemy to Gettys, Sing Sing, but ultimately he makes Susan sing sing. A viewer as sharp as Bates-but as conversant with movie history as with Victorian pornography-would not have missed these points. (Their discussion would also have relieved some of heaviosity, vulvas as Lacanian lacks.)

Cinematography — Sound Motion-Picture Camera Cartridge, 8 mm Type S Model II – Slots and Projection for Film Speed, Cartridge Hole and Projection for Film Identification and Colour-Balancing Filter – Dimensions and Positions

Cinematography — Sound Motion-Picture Camera Cartridge, 8 mm Type S Model II – Slots and Projection for Film Speed, Cartridge Hole and Projection for Film Identification and Colour-Balancing Filter – Dimensions and Positions

Cinematography — Sound Motion-Picture Camera Cartridge, 8 mm Type S Model II — Camera Run Length and End Notches in Film — Dimensions and Specifications

Cinematography — Sound Motion-Picture Camera Cartridge, 8 mm Type S Model II — Camera Run Length and End Notches in Film — Dimensions and Specifications

Researching and Restoring Pioneer Talking Pictures: The 70th Anniversary of the Theatrical Release of Kinetophone

This article attempts to clarify some of the obscure beginnings of sound motion pictures, utilizing new information recently uncovered about Edison's work in this medium. Two technical perspectives are pursued. One describes Kinetophone, and the other explains the use of modern audio, film, and video technologies to generate picture and sound with qualities much better than are presumed possible for productions of this vintage.

The Blattnerphone: An Early Attempt to Introduce Magnetic Recording into the Film Industry

Conventional wisdom assumes that magnetic recording, today an integral aspect of both film and broadcast technology, is a post-World War II phenomenon arising solely out of German wartime technical progress appropriated by the victorious Allies.' This assumption obscures the actual origin of magnetic recording within both film and broadcast history: within the economic and technological turmoil caused by the motion picture industry's full-scale adoption of sound between 1927 and 1930, the communications and broadcasting industries discovered the viability of magnetic recording as an efficacious alternative to photographic and mechanographic sound recording processes. Although magnetic recording in conjunction with sound motion pictures had been proposed at least as early as 1913, the first concrete attempt to implement magnetic recording in film production occurred in 1929 when a relatively obscure German producer working in England proposed magnetic recording as an alternative to the cumbersome disc and costly photographic sound recording and reproduction methods then revolutionizing film production and exhibition. Ludwig Blattner's attempt to interest the film industry in magnetic recording failed, but his efforts, with those of his partner Curt Stille, represent an important initial step in the innovation of a nascent technology, a step which directly led to the intense technical research and development which would, by the eve of World War II, provide the bases for today's ubiquitous magnetic recorders and media. Early Attempts to Implement Magnetic Recording in Sound Films. As early as 1878 Thomas Edison had considered the properties of magnetism to provide the sound record for his original tin-foil gramophone; by 1881 Alexander Graham Bell's associate Charles Sumner Tainter, working under contract from the Edison interests to develop an efficient recording medium for Edison's later gramophones, also considered experimentally the use of magnetism.2 The proposal historians generally cite as heralding the birth of magnetic recording appeared in an American technical journal in 1888 when a Cincinnati metallurgist, Oberlin Smith, suggested the recording of sound through purely electrical means (as opposed to the

Attention to stimulus presentation mode as a function of sex.

This study investigated sex differences in attention to verbal stimuli presented in auditory and visual modes. Ss were 996 male and female students, ages 7 through 17, who observed different forms of a sound motion picture film. One control film contained auditory verbal stimuli only, the other control film contained visual verbal stimuli only, and the experimental film contained simultaneous, conflicting auditory and visual verbal stimuli. Attending behavior was quantified as the number of stimulus specific answers on a paper-and-pencil test administered after presentation of the film. Prior results had indicated that experimental Ss under the age of 12 attended auditory stimuli significantly more often, and those over the age of 13 attended visual stimuli significantly more often. The present experiment concerned sex differences in attending behavior during the crossover period: it was found that females switched their preference for auditory stimuli to visual stimuli earlier (age 11.5) than males (age 13.5). The significant differences between sexes (p less than .05) were attributed to differential conditioning of attitudes, reinforcements, and discriminations regarding the stimulus presentation mode, as well as biological factors.

Approaches to digital surgery: a new 16-mm. color sound motion picture film from APA.

Approaches to digital surgery: a new 16-mm. color sound motion picture film from APA.

The Adriani Lazzi of the Commedia Dell'Arte

It would be difficult to think of an historical acting style that affected twentieth-century performance more than the Italian sixteenth-century commedia dell'arte. For avant-garde directors in the 1910's—people like Meyerhold, Evreinov, Reinhardt, Copeau—the commedia, with its reliance on stereotyped characters, masks, broad gestures, and improvised comedy, represented the very theatricality of the theatre. Performing across Europe and elsewhere from 1550 to 1750, often without dramatic texts as such and outside proscenium stages, commedia troupes developed large audiences of all classes, another feature that made their work so attractive to avant-garde directors. Even the most popular entertainments of the first part of the twentieth century—silent and sound motion picture comedy as well as radio comedy—seem closely related to the commedia. Indeed, it is hard to conjure images of the commedia without seeing Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Bert Lahr, the Marx Brothers, or Laurel and Hardy.

A Computer-Controlled Super-8 Projector

Research conducted within Project C-BE (Computer-Based Science and Engineering Education) and other research has identified the need for random access computer-controlled motion-picture output at interactive computer terminals. The Kodak Supermatic 60 Super 8 magnetic sound motion picture projector was chosen for modification because it featured through-the-gate rewinding, auto-threading from cassettes, high reliability, and electrical controls. Mechanical modifications, included within the standard housing, involved adding four units (a fast-forward clutch with an actuator solenoid, a feed reel brake, a separate rewind clutch solenoid, and photodiodes in the film path to provide sprocket-hole motion signals). The projector is controlled by an electronic interface and control unit which receives its commands from the time-shared computer. The interface unit scans ASCII characters received from the computer and responds to control commands by performing the necessary operations without operator intervention. Search speed, forward and reverse, is about 450 frames/s and search accuracy is within four frames or better. Although the system is being used to teach observation skills in the area of child development, numerous other possible applications are envisioned. To the authors' knowledge, this is the only low-cost device to provide random access sound motion-picture output at a computer terminal.