Cinema's Conversion to Sound Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. [Paperback]

The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinemas diversity of film styles and practices. Cinemas Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sounds impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies traditional exclusive concern with the film image, the book investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to sound cinema. Extending beyond recent Hollywood cinema, Charles OBrien undertakes a geo-historical inquiry into sound technologys diffusion across national borders. Through an analysis that juxtaposes French and American filmmaking, he reveals the aesthetic consequences of fundamental national differences in how sound technologies were understood. Whereas the emphasis in 1930s Hollywood was on sounds intelligibility within a films story-world, the stress in French filmmaking was on sounds fidelity as reproduction of the event staged for recording.

Charles OBrien is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is co-translator (with Nell Andrew) of Francesco Casettis Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (IUP, 1998).

Introduction: National Cinema after Recorded Sound
1. Sound's Impact on Film Style: The Case for Homogenization
2. Film History after Recorded Sound: From Crisis to Continuity
3. The Talkies in France: Imported Films as Exemplars
4. Sound-Era Film Editing: International Norms, Local Commitments
5. Shooting and Recording in Paris and Hollywood
6. Hollywood Indigenized: Path?-Natan and National Popular Cinema
Conclusion: Sound and National Film StylePast and Present
Notes
Filmography: French Films, 19301933
Index