Synchronized sound movies were invented in just a few countries, but they soon became an international phenomenon. Three other countries produced important sound films in the early years. At the same time, language barriers were surmounted—through dubbing, subtitles, and so on—so that dialogue films could circulate around the world.
During the silent era, Leon Gaumont had persistently tried to devise a French sound system. In October 1928, Gaumont presented a program of sound shorts and a feature with postdubbed songs. Like the Warner brothers, he wanted to replace the live music and other entertainment that typically accompanied silent films. The early sound market in France, however, was dominated by American and German systems. Also in October, Paramount wired its first-run Paris theater and showed a short film starring the French music-hall star Maurice Chevalier. Other successful screenings, such as The Jazz Singer in January 1929, led to a race by French producers to make sound features. Since French studios were still being wired, the earliest, largely undistinguished, films were produced in London (including the first French sound feature, Les Trois masques (“The Three Masks,” 1929) and in Berlin (e. g., UAmour chante, “Singing Love,” 1930).
Since France was an important market, German interests sought to capture part of the production sector.
In early 1929, Tobis-Klangfilm set up a subsidiary, the Societe Franc;:aise des Films Sonores Tobis, in Paris. Tobis produced many major French films, including the highly influential first three sound features of Rene Clair, which we shall discuss shortly.
Uncertainty concerning sound led to a dip in French production. By 1930, however, most of the main studio buildings were wired, using either American or German systems or one of several minor French brands. Wiring went on until 1934, since many theaters were small and independently owned.
Despite the weakness of the French film industry during this period, several filmmakers experimented with the new technique. La Petite Lise (“Little Lise,” 1930, Jean Gremillon) tells a simple, melodramatic story of Berthier, a convicted murderer released after a long term in a South American prison; he returns to Paris to find his fragile daughter, Lise, who has secretly become a prostitute. Gremillon shot some scenes in the studio with synchronized dialogue, but he achieved variety by filming others silent, adding sound later. For example, in the opening scene at the prison in Cayenne, he cut freely among several striking exterior compositions of officers calling the roll (9.33). The film also makes powerful use of offscreen sound (9.34). Much of the dreary atmosphere of Lise’s hotel room is conveyed by a sonic motif of trains passing.
Other scenes avoid simple synchronization of sound and image. In a transition from Lise’s room to a factory where Berthier seeks work, the sound of a buzz saw in the factory begins before the cut to the new location, creating an early example of a sound bridge. Later in the film, sound creates a flashback. As Berthier contemplates confessing to the killing, there is a cut from him to the prison in Cayenne and then back to him. Only then, as we see his thoughtful face again, do we hear his memory: the warden’s telling him he is to be freed, a line spoken in the film’s first scene.
9.35, 9.36 Rene Clair uses tracking shots to compare work in a prison and in a factory in A nous, la liberte!
9.37 In A nous, la liberte! a “singing” flower’s shape recalls the horns of the gramophones manufactured in Emile’s factory.
Rene Clair became the most widely known of early French sound directors, as Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930), Le Million (1930), and A nous, La liberte! (“For Us, Liberty,” 1931) found an international audience. His imaginative use of camera movements, stretches of silence, and sonic puns helped quiet the fears of critics who believed that sound would result in static dialogue pictures. We shall see his influence cropping up in national cinemas from Hollywood to China.
A nous, la liberte! involves two escapees from prison. Emile becomes a rich but miserable gramophone manufacturer, while Louis remains a happy, Chap-linesque hobo. The opening uses several lengthy tracking shots to show the prisoners working on an assembly line making toy horses (9.35). These shots establish camera movements and industrial tedium as important motifs. Later, the workers in Emile’s factory are shown in similar shots of boring assembly lines (9.36).
Although A nous, la liberte! uses dialogue, it also employs music extensively—something many filmmakers favored in the early sound period. Clair also liked to surprise his audience by using the “wrong” sound for an object. In one scene, Louis lounges in a field overlooking the factory. We hear music and singing—the sounds of nature itself, which Louis “conducts.” A close shot of a flower trembling in the wind is accompanied by a soprano voice so that it seems to be singing (9.37).
Clair, Gremillon, and other early sound directors like Jean Renoir laid the foundations for important French trends during the 1930s (Chapter 13).
In the mid-1920s, British film theaters began imitating American practice by adding vaudeville acts and prologues to their programs. The 1928 premiere of Vita-phone shorts aroused some interest, but there was no rush to convert to sound. Even The Jazz Singer, in September, failed to create a stir. Jolson’s next film, The Singing Fool, however, opened to enormous acclaim in early 1929, and the push to wire theaters and studios began.
Western Electric’s and RCA’s were the principal systems on the market. Under the terms of the 1930 Paris agreement, 25 percent of the British market was reserved for Tobis-Klangfilm equipment, while 75 percent belonged to the American firms. But Tobis encountered technical difficulties as a result of having allied itself with the small British Phototone, and it could not exploit its share of the market. Several British companies offered cheaper sound outfits, but these provided poor reproduction. British Thomson-Houston (a subsidiary of General Electric) introduced reliable equipment in 1930, but it ran third behind the two American firms in the number of theaters wired. By 1933, all but the smallest British cinemas could reproduce sound.
The production companies, the weakest segment of the industry, had more trouble coping with the expense of converting to sound. The flow of investments into the British film industry after the 1927 Quota Act (p. 240) had slowed. By 1929, most of the new “quota” companies were in trouble, and their problems were compounded by the fact that their recent silent films were of little value in the big first-run cinemas. The main exception to this pattern was British International Pictures (BIP), which had been founded in 1927 by John Maxwell. Maxwell quickly wired his Elstree studio facility with RCA equipment. Rather than aiming for the largely closed American market, as other companies did, he concentrated on Europe and the British Commonwealth countries. His first production, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, was released in both sound and silent versions and was a big hit in 1929. BIP went on to make inexpensive sound films aimed at the British market, and the company remained profitable.
Blackmail was one of the most imaginative early sound films. Refusing to surrender the camera movement and rapid editing of the silent era, Hitchcock avoided multiple-camera shooting, finding a variety of other ways to work sound into his scenes. The opening sequence is a fast-cut episode in which the heroine’s policeman boyfriend helps apprehend a criminal; the many shots of the police van speeding through the streets and the criminal trying to trick his pursuers were all shot silent, with only music added. Later, in the jail, the camera tracks forward behind the two police officers in another scene shot silent and postdubbed (9.38).
Such devices functioned mainly to circumvent the problems of early sound, but Hitchcock also uses sound to enhance the style of Blackmail. For example, in one scene the heroine sees a homeless man lying with outstretched hand, in a posture that reminds her of the body of the would-be rapist she has recently stabbed to death. A scream begins on the sound track, and a cut takes us immediately to the dead man’s apartment, where his landlady is screaming upon discovering the body (9.39, 9.40). In another scene, Hitchcock holds the shot on the heroine’s distraught face as a gossipy neighbor babbles on about the killing. We hear the neighbor’s speech subjectively, as the heroine does, with all the words becoming inaudible except the repeated “knife. . . knife. . . knifed’ Hitchcock would continue such deft manipulations of sound throughout his career.
Synchronized sound also provided the basis for a series of prestigious literary and historical films that
9.38 By filming the policemen from the back in Blackmail, Hitchcock could add their dialogue to silent footage without having to synchronize the sound with their lip movements.
British producers hoped would gain entry into the lucrative American market.
Musical accompaniment ga ve most national cinemas “sound” films in the silent era, but Japan’s industry was one of the few to have “talkies.” The katsuben, or ben-shi, performer was a mainstay of exhibition, sitting in the theater near the screen, explaining the action and vocally portraying the characters. Not surprisingly, the Japanese cinema was one of the last major film industries to convert to synchronized sound movies, and the process involved a protracted struggle.
Although Japanese inventors had tinkered with sound systems in the mid-1920s, the big firms displayed no interest until Fox exhibited Movietone films in the spring of 1929. Major urban theaters, particularly those co-owned by Hollywood companies, were quickly wired. By the end of 1930, most imported films were talkies.
Japanese production proceeded more cautiously. Financial problems of the Depression made the two major companies, Nikkatsu and Shochiku, reluctant to pay the high royalty fees demanded by U. S. equipment suppliers. Japanese studios also feared that giving the Americans control of sound would lead to foreign domination of the market, so the studios devised their own sound
9.39, 9.40 A cut from one woman’s back to another makes it unclear whether one or both are the source of a scream that acts as an imaginative sonic transition in Blackmail.
Technology. Nikkatsu’s sound-on-disc system was tried on a few films, but it proved a failure. Shochiku’s Tsuchihashi system, modeled on RCA’s Photophone, was launched with Heinosuke Gosho’s Madam and Wife (aka The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine), which premiered in August 1931.
Madam and Wife is a domestic comedy that carefully integrates dialogue, music, and sound effects. A writer forever looking for excuses not to work is distracted by his neighbor’s jazz band and the man’s smoking, drinking modern wife. Gosho makes clever use of offscreen sounds (even mice), of subjective sound (the jazz dims when the writer puts cotton in his ears), and of thematic contrasts (the neighbor’s wife is associated with jazz, while the writer’s wife hums a traditional Japanese tune). The film also exploits the audience’s fascination with American talkies. Invited next door, the writer staggers back home drunk and singing, “That’s the Broadway melody!” His family is last seen walking home to the strains of “My Blue Heaven.” Gosho shot the lip-synchronized scenes in multiple-camera fashion, but other passages were filmed and cut quite fluidly.
The popularity of Madam and Wife helped convince the film industry to convert to talkies. In 1933, Nikkatsu allied itself with Western Electric, while Shochiku stuck with its Tsuchihashi system. Smaller firms used sound technology to break into the market: most notable were PCL (Photo-Chemical Laboratories) and JO, both of which began talkie production in 1932. On the whole, however, sound production proceeded more slowly in Japan than in any other major filmmaking nation. Sound films did not account for over half the feature output until 1935, and many of these had only music tracks. As late as 1936, one-quarter of Japanese films were still silent.
The delay was due to several factors. Many small firms could not sustain the costs of sound production, many rural theaters remained unwired for years, and, as in other countries, labor resisted the introduction of sound. In 1929, the powerfully unionized benshi went on strike at the theater premiering the Fox Movietone process. Producers and exhibitors sought to get rid of the benshi. When, in 1932, Shochiku fired ten benshi from major Tokyo theaters, they struck and won reinstatement. Three years of battles followed, during which sound pictures became dominant.
In 1935, when a violent benshi strike against Shochiku was settled by police intervention, the struggle ended. Many benshi took up storytelling in variety halls or in street performances. Still, even at the end of the 1930s, one might be found accompanying a silent movie in a remote rural theater or in a neighborhood screening in Hawaii. For such remote locations, the Japanese industry was still making a few silent films.
Wiring the World’s Theaters for Sound
Sound spread through the world’s film theaters at an uneven pace. Some small countries, especially in eastern Europe and the Third World, produced no films, but their few theaters were wired relatively quickly. This was the case in Albania, for example, where there were a mere fourteen theaters—all showing sound films—in 1937. Venezuela had around a hundred theaters, as well as occasional open-air shows in bullrings and similar venues; even for these casual screenings, portable sound equipment was brought in.
Interestingly, silent screenings lingered on longer in some middle-size markets with small production sectors. In 1937, about 800 of Belgium’s nearly 1,000 theaters had been equipped for sound. Only 100 more were still considered real possibilities for wiring. Belgium produced a small number of sound films, six in 1937. In Portugal, 185 of the country’s 210 theaters were wired; it had one sound studio that made four features and about a hundred shorts in the first nine months of 1937. Brazil had 1,246 theaters, 1,084 of which had sound capability; in 1937 it produced just four sound features.
Ultimately many of those theaters that had not bought sound systems by the mid-1930s went out of business. They had survived primarily by showing old silent films or silent versions of sound films, but these became increasingly hard to get. By the mid-1930s sound films dominated international exhibition, as well as production in those countries that could afford it.
Sound filming created a problem for all producing countries: the language barrier threatened to limit export possibilities. Silent films could be translated through the simple substitution of intertitles, but talkies were another matter.
The earliest screenings of sound films explored several solutions to the problem. Sometimes films were shown abroad with no translation at all. Since sound was still a novelty, this occasionally worked, as when the German version of The Blue Angel met success in Paris. During the early sound era, Hollywood made several big revue musicals, such as King of Jazz (1929), that consisted of strings of musical numbers that could be enjoyed without a knowledge of English.
Because postproduction mixing of sound was impossible in the early years, dubbing a new sound track in a foreign language was clumsy and expensive. It involved, for example, rerecording all the music at the same time that the dialogue was put in, making lip synchronization difficult. Some dubbed films were successful in 1929, but others failed because the voices matched badly with the lip movements. Firms also added subtitles to some films, but these were often rejected as distracting. Other solutions, like eliminating the dialogue and substituting intertitles or even editing in narrators explaining the action in a different language, proved wholly unacceptable.
By 1929, many producers decided that the only way to preserve foreign markets was to reshoot additional versions of each film, with the actors speaking different languages in each. Advertised as the world’s first “multilingual” film, the British production Atlantic was released in German and English (1929, E. A. Dupont). Similarly, the first German talkie, Das Land ohne Frauen, also appeared in an English version, The Land without
Women. In 1929, MGM set up an elaborate program of multilingual production, importing actors and directors to make French, German, and Spanish versions of its pictures. Paramount attempted to economize by producing its multilinguals in France, purchasing its Joinville studio, near Paris, in 1929. The Joinville facilities were equipped like a big Hollywood studio, and there Paramount turned out dozens of films in as many as fourteen languages. Germany’s Tobis-Klangfilm also made many multilinguals.
The assumption was that multilinguals would be relatively cheap to make, since the same scripts, sets, and lighting plans could be used. As each scene was finished, a new team of actors would move in, and the same scene would be done again. The cast and crew were usually changed for each version, though in some cases directors and stars who could speak two or more languages would work on more than one version. Occasionally stars learned their lines phonetically, as when Laurel and Hardy were called upon to make Spanish versions of their films.
After about two years, it became apparent that multilinguals would not solve the language problem. Multilingual production’s main drawback was that it required so many people to be at the studio at the same time, most just waiting their turn to work. The market for each version was too small to warrant the additional expense, and audiences did not welcome minor actors in roles made famous by stars like Gary Cooper and Norma Shearer.
By 1931, the technique of mixing separate sound tracks after shooting had been refined. The original music and sound effects could be combined with new voices, and methods of synchronizing voice and lip movements had improved. Moreover, subtitles were accepted more widely. By 1932, dubbing and subtitles enabled talkies to cross the language barrier, and they have remained in use ever since.
Despite its technical problems, sound boosted film production in several countries, since audiences wanted to hear native performers speaking their own languages. France, for example, gained a bigger share of its own exhibition market than it had enjoyed during the 1920s. Many small countries in eastern Europe and Latin America began producing more films. Most spectacularly, Indian production, which had been limited in the silent era, developed during the 1930s into one of the world’s major studio systems. We shall examine some of these results of the coming of sound in Chapter 11.
World History
