Encyclopedia
A
sound film is a
motion picture with synchronized sound , as opposed to a
silent film. The first known public screening of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but it would be decades before reliable synchronization was achieved in a commercially practical way. The first commercial exhibition of movies with fully synchronized sound took place in the United States in April 1923. In the early years after the introduction of sound, such films that incorporated live-recorded dialogue and singing were known as "talking pictures," or "
talkies." The first
feature-length movie originally conceived and shot as a talkie was
The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927.
History
Early steps
The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888,
Thomas Edison met with
Eadweard Muybridge, who proposed a scheme for sound film, well before motion pictures had been introduced to the general public. Muybridge suggested combining Edison's recorded-sound technology with his own zoopraxiscope as an image-casting accompaniment. No agreement was reached, but later that year, Edison commissioned the development of the
kinetoscope, essentially a "peep-show" device, as a visual complement to his
cylinder phonograph; the two were brought together as the
Kinetophone in 1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded by successes in film projection. In 1899, a projected sound-film system known as Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, based primarily on the work of Swiss-born inventor François Dussaud, was exhibited in Paris; similar to the Kinetophone, the system required individual use of earphones. An improved cylinder-based system, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet excerpts to be presented at the Paris Exposition in 1900. These appear to be the first publicly exhibited films with projection of both image and recorded sound.
Three major problems persisted however, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for a generation:
- Synchronization – The pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in synchronization.
- Playback volume – While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of electric amplification could not project to satisfactorily fill large spaces.
- Recording fidelity – The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the cumbersome recording devices , obviously imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound.
Cinematic innovators attempted to cope with the fundamental synchronization problem in a variety of ways; an increasing number of motion picture systems relied on
gramophone records—known as sound-on-disc technology; the records themselves were often referred to as "Berliner discs," not because of any direct geographical connection, but after one of the primary inventors in the field, German-American Emile Berliner.
Léon Gaumont had demonstrated a system involving mechanical synchronization between a film projector and turntable at the 1900 Paris Exposition. In 1902, his Chronophone, involving an electrical connection Gaumont had recently patented, was demonstrated to the French Photographic Society. Four years later, he introduced the Elgéphone, a compressed-air amplification system based on the Auxetophone, developed by British inventors Horace Short and Charles Parsons. Despite
high expectations, Gaumont's sound innovations had only limited commercial success—though improvements, they still did not satisfactorily address the three basic issues with sound film and were expensive as well. For some years, American inventor E. E. Norton's Cameraphone was the primary competitor to the Gaumont system ; it ultimately failed for many of the same reasons that held back the Chronophone. By the end of 1910, the groundswell in sound motion pictures had subsided.
Innovations continued on other fronts, as well. In August 1906, French-born, London-based Eugene Lauste—who had worked at Edison's lab between 1887 and 1892—applied for the first patent for
sound-on-film technology, involving the encoding of sound and its inscription directly onto image-bearing celluloid; in 1910, the patent was awarded. Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which came to an effective dead end. In 1913, Edison introduced a new cylinder-based synch-sound apparatus known, just like his 1895 system, as the Kinetophone; instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto a screen. The phonograph was connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization. Conditions, however, were rarely ideal, and the new, improved Kinetophone was retired after a year.
Other sound films, based on a variety of systems, were made before the 1920s, mostly of performers lip-synching to previously made audio recordings. The technology was far from adequate to big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major
Hollywood film studios saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures. Thus such films were relegated, along with color movies, to the status of novelty.
Crucial innovations
A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by the late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback:
Advanced sound-on-film – In 1919, American inventor
Lee De Forest was awarded several patents that would lead to the first sound-on-film technology with commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded and printed on to the side of the strip of motion picture film, making it almost impossible for the sound and picture to go out of synchronization. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of equipment and patents licensed from another American inventor, Theodore Case, also working in the field. On April 15, 1923, at New York City's Rivoli Theater, came the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film, the future standard: a set of shorts under the banner of De Forest Phonofilms, accompanying a silent feature. That June, De Forest entered into an extended legal battle with an employee, Freeman Harrison Owens, for title to one of the crucial Phonofilm patents; though De Forest ultimately won the case in the courts, Owens is today recognized as a central innovator in the field. The following year, De Forest's studio released the first commercial dramatic film shot as a talking picture—the two-reeler
Love's Old Sweet Song, directed by J. Searle Dawley and featuring Una Merkel. Phonofilms' stock in trade, however, was not original dramas but celebrity documentaries and popular-music and comedy performances: President
Calvin Coolidge and many of the top
vaudeville acts of the day appeared in the dozens of short Phonofilms released through 1927.
In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. The same year that De Forest received his first patents in the field, three German inventors patented the Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, they gave the first public screening of sound-on-film productions before an invited audience at the Alhambra Kino in Berlin. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, patented a system in which sound was recorded on a seperate filmstrip running parallel with the image reel; Gaumont would license and briefly put the technology to commercial use under the name Cinéphone. It was domestic competition, however, that would lead to Phonofilms' eclipse. By September 1925, De Forest and Case's working arrangement had fallen through. The following July, Case joined with
Fox Pictures, Hollywood's third largest studio, to found the Fox-Case Corporation. The system developed by Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, given the name Movietone, thus became the first viable sound-on-film technology controlled by a Hollywood movie studio. The following year, Fox purchased the North American rights to the Tri-Ergon system, though the company found it inferior to Movietone and virtually impossible to integrate the two different systems to advantage. In 1927, as well, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film.
Advanced sound-on-disc – Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology, a number of companies were making progress with systems in which movie sound was recorded onto phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified film projector, allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add synchronized sound sequences to
D. W. Griffith's failed silent film
Dream Street. A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves, was recorded, as was a sequence of live vocal effects. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened incorporating them. On May 1, 1921,
Dream Street was rereleased, with love song added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal sequence. There would be no others for more than six years.
In 1925, the then-midsized Hollywood studio
Warner Bros. began experimenting with sound-on-disc systems at New York's Vitagraph Studios, which it had recently purchased. The Warner Bros. technology, named Vitaphone, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of the nearly three-hour-long
Don Juan; the first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical score and sound effects, but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying
Don Juan, however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by
Will H. Hays, president of the
Motion Picture Association of America, all with live-recorded sound; these were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio.
Don Juan would not go into general release until the following February, making the technically similar
The Better 'Ole, put out by Warner Bros. in October 1926, the first feature film with synchronized playback throughout to show to a broad audience.
Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of fundamental technical advantages:
- Synchronization: no interlock system was completely reliable, and sound could fall out of synch due to disc skipping or minute changes in film speed, requiring constant supervision and frequent manual adjustment
- Editing: discs could not be directly edited, severely limiting the ability to make alterations in their accompanying films
- Distribution: phonograph discs added extra expense and complication to film distribution
- Wear and tear: the physical process of playing the discs degraded them, requiring their replacement after approximately twenty screenings
Nonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had the edge over sound-on-film in two substantial ways:
- Production and capital cost: it was generally less expensive to record sound onto disc than onto film and the central exhibition systems—turntable/interlock/projector—were cheaper to manufacture than the complex image-and-audio-pattern-reading projectors required by sound-on-film
- Audio quality: gramophone discs, Vitaphone's in particular, had superior dynamic range to most sound-on-film processes of the day, at least during the first few playings—while sound-on-film tended to have better frequency response, this was outweighed by greater distortion and noise
As sound-on-film technology improved, both of these disadvantages were overcome.
The third crucial set of innovations marked a major step forward in both the live recording of sound and its effective playback:
Fidelity electronic recording and amplification – Beginning in 1922, the research branch of
AT&T's
Western Electric manufacturing division began working intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film. In 1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved system of electronic audio, including sensitive
condenser microphones and rubber-line recorders. That May, the company licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for commercial motion pictures; he founded Vitagraph, which Warner Bros. acquired a half interest in just one month later. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for the redubbed Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of
Don Juan and its accompanying shorts over the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for Warners films was markedly superior to those made for the company's sound-on-film competitors. Meanwhile,
Bell Labs—the new name for the AT&T research operation—was working at a furious pace on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow recordings to be played back over loudspeakers at theater-filling volume. The new moving-coil speaker system was installed in New York's Warners Theatre at the end of July and its patent submission, for what Western Electric called the No. 555 Receiver, was filed on August 4, just two days before the premiere of
Don Juan.
Late in the year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. , to handle rights to the company's film-related audio technology. Vitaphone still had legal exclusivity, but having lapsed in its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in ERPI's hands. On December 31, 1926, Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the Western Electric system in exchange for a share of revenues that would go directly to ERPI. The patents of all three concerns were cross-licensed. Superior recording and amplification technology was now available to two Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction. The new year would finally see the emergence of sound cinema as a significant commercial medium.
Triumph of the "talkies"
In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five leading Hollywood movie companies—the so-called Big Two,
Paramount and
MGM, as well as First National , mid-sized Universal, and
Cecil B. DeMille's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation —to collectively select just one provider for sound conversion; then they sat back and waited to see what sort of results the forerunners came up with. In May, Warner Bros. sold back its exclusivity rights to ERPI and signed a new royalty contract similar to Fox's for use of Western Electric technology. As Fox and Warners pressed forward with sound cinema in different directions, both technologically and commercially—Fox with newsreels, Warners with fiction features—so did ERPI, which sought to corner the market by signing up the five allied majors.
The big sound film sensations of the year both took advantage of pre-existing celebrity. On May 20, 1927, at New York's Roxy Theater, Fox Movietone presented a sound film of the takeoff of
Charles Lindbergh's celebrated flight to Paris, recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox sound newsreel depicting his return welcomes in New York and Washington, D.C., was shown. These were the two most acclaimed sound motion pictures to date. Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.'
The Jazz Singer premiered. It was a smash box office success for the mid-level studio, earning a total of $2.625 million in the U.S. and abroad, almost a million dollars more than the previous record for a Warners film. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded sound; the soundtrack relies, much like a silent movie, on a musical score and sound effects. When the movie's star,
Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz , addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. Though the success of
The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as one of America's biggest music stars, and its limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film , the movie's handsome profits were proof enough to the industry that the technology was worth investing in.
The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts before
The Jazz Singer, and the film's success did not change things overnight. Not till May 1928 did the four hesitant majors —along with
United Artists and others—sign with ERPI for conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well. Even with access to both technologies, however, most of the Hollywood companies remained slow to produce talking features of their own. No studio beside Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until the small
Film Booking Offices of America premiered
Perfect Crime on June 17, 1928, eight months after
The Jazz Singer. FBO had come under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor,
General Electric's
RCA division, which was looking to market its new sound-on-film system, Photophone. Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the rule. By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's newest major studio,
RKO Pictures.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had released three more talkies in the spring, all profitable, if not at the level of the
The Jazz Singer: In March,
The Tenderloin appeared; it was billed by Warners as the first feature in which characters spoke their parts, though only 15 of its 88 minutes had dialogue.
Glorious Betsy followed in April, and
The Lion and the Mouse in May. On July 6, 1928, the first all-talking feature,
Lights of New York, premiered. The film cost Warner Bros. only $23,000 to produce, but grossed $1.252 million, a record rate of return surpassing 5,000%. In September, the studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture,
The Singing Fool, which more than doubled The Jazz Singers earnings record for a Warners movie. This second Jolson screen smash demonstrated the movie musical's ability to turn a song into a national hit: by the following summer, the Jolson number "Sonny Boy" had racked up 2 million record and 1.25 million sheet music sales. September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry's
Dinner Time, among the first
animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. After seeing it,
Walt Disney decided to make one of his
Mickey Mouse shorts,
Steamboat Willie , is an animated cartoon [i] featuring Mickey Mouse [i]. ...
, with sound as well.
Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to the popularity of its sound films, the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. Paramount, the industry leader, put out its first talkie in late September,
Beggars of Life; though it had just a few lines of dialogue, it demonstrated the studio's recognition of the new medium's power.
Interference, Paramount's first all-talker, debuted in November. Expectations swiftly changed, and the "fad" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929, leading many movie reviewers to deride silent films as passé. In February 1929, sixteen months after
The Jazz Singers debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight studios that would be known as "majors" during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first part-talking feature, Lone Wolf's Daughter
. Soon, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United States would be little more than a memory. The final silent feature put out by a major Hollywood studio was the Hoot Gibson oater Points West, released by Universal Pictures in August 1929. One month earlier, the first all-color, all-talking feature had gone into general release: Warner Bros.' On with the Show!Consequences
Production
The phenomenon of the "talkies" is viewed as the final industry-wide development resulting in the domination of the Hollywood studio system over the global film business; at the same time, the introduction of synchronized sound caused immense difficulties in production. Cameras were noisy, so a soundproofed camera booth was used in the earliest talkies to isolate the loud equipment from the actors, at the expense of a drastic reduction in the ability to move the camera. The necessity to place microphones just so meant that actors often had to limit their movements unnaturally. In addition, some silent-era actors simply did not have attractive voices. These kinds of problems—famously spoofed in the 1952 film
Singin' in the Rain—were soon solved with camera casings modified to suppress noise, boom microphones that could be held just out of frame and moved with the actors, and post-production sound recording techniques that facilitated, among other things, the dubbing of vocal performances.
Show Girl in Hollywood , from First National Pictures , gives a behind-the-scenes look at some of the techniques involved in shooting early talkies.
Labor
While the introduction of sound led to a boom in the motion picture industry, it had an adverse effect on the employability of a host of Hollywood actors of the time; as suggested above, particularly those whose heavy accents or unpleasant speaking voices had previously been concealed. The careers of major silent stars
Norma Talmadge and
Clara Bow effectively came to an end in this way. The celebrated Swiss actor
Emil Jannings returned to Europe. John Gilbert's voice was fine, but audiences found it an awkward match with his swashbuckling persona, and his star faded as well. Not only was silent film out-moded as a medium, audiences seemed to perceive many stars associated with it as old-fashioned, even those who had the talent to succeed in the sound era.
Lillian Gish departed, back to the stage, and other leading figures soon left acting entirely:
Colleen Moore,
Gloria Swanson, and Hollywood's most famous performing couple,
Douglas Fairbanks and
Mary Pickford. A number of their most successful replacements came from vaudeville and the musical theater, where performers such as Jolson,
Eddie Cantor,
Jeanette MacDonald, and the
Marx Brothers were accustomed to the demands of both dialogue and song.
James Cagney and
Joan Blondell, who had teamed on Broadway, were brought west together by Warner Bros in 1930. A few actors were major stars during both the silent and the sound eras:
Richard Barthelmess, Clive Brook,
Bebe Daniels,
Norma Shearer, the comedy team of
Stan Laurel and
Oliver Hardy, and the incomparable
Charlie Chaplin, whose
City Lights is a 1931 [i] film written by, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin [i] ...
and
Modern Times employed sound almost exclusively for music and effects.
Joan Crawford became a top star with the synch-sound but dialogueless
Our Dancing Daughters .
Greta Garbo was the one non-native-English-speaker to achieve Hollywood stardom on either side of the great sound divide.
As talking pictures emerged, with their prerecorded musical tracks, an increasing number of moviehouse orchestra musicians found themselves out of work. The
American Federation of Musicians took out newspaper advertisements protesting the replacement of live musicians with mechanical playing devices. One 1929 ad that appeared in the
Pittsburgh Press features an image of a can labeled "Canned Music / Big Noise Brand / Guaranteed to Produce No Intellectual or Emotional Reaction Whatever" and reads in part:
Canned Music on Trial
This is the case of Art vs. Mechanical Music in theatres. The defendant stands accused in front of the American people of attempted corruption of musical appreciation and discouragement of musical education. Theatres in many cities are offering synchronised mechanical music as a substitute for Real Music. If the theatre-going public accepts this vitiation of its entertainment program a deplorable decline in the Art of Music is inevitable. Musical authorities know that the soul of the Art is lost in mechanisation. It cannot be otherwise because the quality of music is dependent on the mood of the artist, upon the human contact, without which the essence of intellectual stimulation and emotional rapture is lost.
Commerce
In September 1926,
Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros., was quoted to the effect that talking pictures would never be viable: "They fail to take into account the international language of the silent pictures, and the unconscious share of each onlooker in creating the play, the action, the plot, and the imagined dialogue for himself." Much to his company's benefit, he would be proven very wrong—between the 1927–28 and 1928–1929 fiscal years, Warners' profits surged from $2 million to $14 million. Sound film, in fact, was a clear boon to all the major players in the industry. During that same one-year span, Paramount's profits rose by $7 million, Fox's by $3.5 million, and Loew's/MGM's by $3 million. RKO, which hadn't even existed in September 1928 and whose parent production company, FBO, was in the Hollywood minor leagues, by the end of 1929 was established as one of America's leading entertainment businesses.
Even as the
Wall Street crash of October 1929 helped plunge the United States and ultimately the global economy into
depression, the popularity of the talkies seemed to keep Hollywood immune. Nineteen-thirty was an even better year for the motion picture industry than the previous, with ticket sales and overall profits hitting new highs. Reality finally struck in 1931, but sound had clearly confirmed Hollywood as one of the nation's most important industrial fields, both commercially and culturally. The combination of sound and the Great Depression led to a wholesale shakeout in the business, resulting in the hierarchy of the Big Five integrated companies and the three smaller so-called majors that would predominate through the 1950s. Film historian Thomas Schatz describes the ancillary effects:
[B]ecause the studios were forced to streamline operations and rely on their own resources, their individual house styles and corporate personalities came into much sharper focus. Thus the watershed period from the coming of sound into the early Depression saw the studio system finally coalesce, with the individual studios coming to terms with their own identities and their respective positions within the industry.
Aesthetics
In the first, 1930 edition of his global survey
The Film Till Now, cinema pundit Paul Rotha declared, "A film in which the speech and sound effects are perfectly synchronised and coincide with their visual image on the screen is absolutely contrary to the aims of cinema. It is a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the real use of the film and cannot be accepted as coming within the true boundaries of the cinema." Most film historians agree that silent film had reached an aesthetic peak by the late 1920s and that the early years of sound cinema delivered little that was comparable to the best of the silents. For instance, despite fading into relative obscurity once its era had passed, silent cinema is represented by eleven films in
Time Outs Centenary of Cinema Top One Hundred poll, held in 1995. The earliest sound film to place is the French L'Atalante
, directed by Jean Vigo; the earliest Hollywood film to qualify is Bringing Up Baby , directed by
Howard Hawks. The first year in which sound film production predominated over silent film—not only in the United States, but also in the world considered as a whole—was 1929. By mid-1930, commercial silent film had virtually disappeared outside of Japan; yet the years 1929 through 1931 are represented by three silent films and zero sound films in the
Time Out poll.
Sound's short-term effect on cinematic art may be gauged in more detail by considering the widely recognized silent masterpieces of the last years of soundless filmmaking:
- 1927: Metropolis , Napoléon , Sunrise , Wings
- 1928: The Docks of New York , The Passion of Joan of Arc was a silent film [i] released in France [i] in 1928 [i] based on the trial [i]...
, Steamboat Bill Jr. is a feature-length silent comedy film featuring Buster Keaton [i], one of the ma ...
, The Wedding March , The Wind - 1929: The Crowd , Diary of a Lost Girl is a 1929 film directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst [i]. ...
, Man with a Movie Camera, sometimes The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Came...
, Pandora's Box - 1930–31: City Lights , Tabu , Zemlya
These may first be contrasted with the early sound feature films that have been chosen for the United States National Film Registry:
- 1927: The Jazz Singer
- 1928–29: none
- 1930: All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel [i] by Erich Maria Remarque [i], a German [i] vete ...
, Little Caesar is a 1931 [i] crime film [i] made during the Pre-Code [i] era which tells the story of ...
, Morocco - 1931: Dracula is an 1897 [i] novel [i] by Irish [i] author Bram Stoker [i], and the name of its ti ...
, The Forgotten Frontier is a 1931 [i] documentary film [i] about the Frontier Nursing Service [i], nu...
, Frankenstein is a novel [i] by Mary Shelley [i]. ...
, The Public Enemy is a 1931 [i] crime drama made in the Pre-Code [i] era in which heroic brother Mich ...
All have been deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant," but only
All Quiet on the Western Front,
Morocco, and
Frankenstein might possibly be ranked near the great silent films listed above. Expanding the scope of the comparison to take in film culture outside the United States, the French
L'Âge d'or , directed by
Luis Buñuel, is the first sound movie widely regarded as being of great aesthetic import, though more as a signal expression of the
surrealist movement than as cinema per se. The earliest sound movie now acknowledged by most film historians as a masterpiece is the German
M, directed by
Fritz Lang, which premiered May 11, 1931.
See also
- History of film
- Silent film
- Sound stage
- Film soundtrack
for articles concerning the development of cinematic sound recording
Notes
Sources
- Agate, James . Around Cinemas. New York: Arno Press/New York Times. ISBN 0-405-03888-7
- Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson . The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231060548
- Bradley, Edwin M. . The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0786410302
- Cosandey, Roland . "François Dussaud ," in Who's Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, ed. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan. London: BFI Publishing . ISBN 0851705391
- Crafton, Donald . The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0684195852
- Crisp, Colin G. . The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960. Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press/I. B. Tauris. ISBN 0253211158
- Finler, Joel W. . The Hollywood Story. New York: Crown. ISBN 0-517-56576-5
- Glancy, H. Mark . "Warner Bros. Film Grosses, 1921–51: The William Schaefer Ledger," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, March .
- Gomery, Douglas . "The Coming of Sound: Technological Change in the American Film Industry," in Technology and Culture—The Film Reader , ed. Andrew Utterson, pp. 53–67. Oxford and New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0415319846
- Gomery, Douglas . The Coming of Sound: A History. New York and Oxon, UK: Routledge. ISBN 041596900X
- Hijiya, James A. . Lee De Forest and the Fatherhood of Radio. Cranbury, N.J., and London: Associated University Presses. ISBN 0934223238
- Hirschhorn, Clive . The Warner Bros. Story. New York: Crown. ISBN 0-517-53834-2
- Koerber, Martin . "Oskar Messter, Film Pioneer: Early Cinema Between Science, Spectacle, and Commerce," in A Second Life: German Cinema's First Decades, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, pp. 51–61. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 90-5356-172-2
- Liebman, Roy . Vitaphone Films: A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. ISBN 0786412798
- Robertson, Patrick . Film Facts. New York: Billboard Books. ISBN 0823079430
- Schatz, Thomas . The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19596-2
- Sponable, E. I. . "Historical Development of Sound Films," Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, vol. 48, nos. 4–5, April/May .
- "Talking Movies: They'll Never Take, Asserts Film Company's Head" , Associated Press, September 3 .
- Thomson, David . A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3d ed. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0-679-75564-0
External links
- essay on the impact of synch-sound on nonfiction film by scholar Bill Nichols
- brief discussion of Edison's experiments; part of the Library of Congress/Inventing Entertainment website
- well-organized bibliography of online articles and resources; part of the FilmSound website
- essay on the positive effects of sound on cinema technology by Bob Allen
- essay by audio engineer and historian Mark Ulano
- detailed chronology by John Aldred
- comprehensive and detailed listing of first generation of sound films from around the world; part of the Silent Era website
- extensive chronology of developments, including subsites, by Steven E. Schoenherr; see, in particular,
- links to crucial primary and secondary source documents, a number of which cover the era of transition to sound
- essay on theatrical sound reproduction by historian Rick Altman
- informative illustrated survey; part of the American WideScreen Museum website
- essay speculating on the basic source of the film's impact by Bob Allen
- article on the transition to sound by historian Guy Flatley; part of the MovieCrazed website
Historical writings
- 1929 essay by filmmaker and critic René Clair
- 1934 essay by filmmaker and theorist V. I. Pudovkin
- essay by film historian and critic Siegfried Kracauer; first published in his book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
- article on the history of Bell Laboratories' early research into sound film, by Stanley Watkins, Western Electric engineer; first published in Bell Laboratories Record, August 1946
- 1939 essay by director Alberto Cavalcanti
- 1928 polemic in favor of contrapuntal use of film sound by Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and G. V. Alexandrov
- 1945 essay by film theorist and critic Béla Balázs
- prescient essay by Universal sound engineer Charles Feldstead; first published in Radio News, April 1931
Historical recordings
...
and clips of 1894/95 Edison sound film
- brief discussion accompanied by Quicktime version of 1930s Bell Labs cartoon describing the process, with available ; part of the IEEE Virtual Museum website
- mp3 audio file of undated audition
- mp3 audio file of undated audition
