CUTs Chapter 1.01: "Sound On"
An Introduction to Variation in the Transition-to-Sound Era
Unless specified, all highlights and italics, including those in quotes, in this text are my own. They are meant to place emphasis on specific points that I believe are crucial.
Multiple film scholars position textual variation as a key characteristic that distin-guishes early and silent pictures from the talkie film, which became the dominant product of the US film industry following its 1926-1931 transition to synchronized sound. Such views place the post-transition or sound film period in opposition to the pre-transition period, as though the technological change caused a shift in the industry from textual variation to reproduction.
Williams argues that the new technology eliminates differences that commonly existed between copies of the same film during the earlier periods. He emphasizes how a silent work “could exist in several different versions: black and white, or colored by one of several methods… accompanied by a large orchestra… or by a single drunk pianist.”1 In the same vein, Vasey describes how silent movies were “inherently unstable” as texts and “never so precisely fixed as their talkie descendants.”2 Bordwell asserts that talkies “created a concrete and inflexible tempo for the Hollywood film,” differentiating it from the silent picture, which had “a malleable, plastic duration.”3
Discourses surrounding standardization similarly assume this distinction. Hannah Lewis, for instance, points to how musicians of small theaters sometimes took delibe-rate liberties with a silent picture score that could “result in mocking or changing the meaning of a film.” Removing such potential appropriations by standardizing the music accompaniment was, according to her, one of the motivations for the industry’s eventual conversion to synch sound.4 Neale also links the absence of variation to the standardization of the aural accompaniment via synch sound technologies.5
Associating the pre-transition period with variation and conversely the transition period with standardization and pure reproduction suggests that the synchronized playback and re-cording technologies enabled a text to remain consistent all throughout production, distribution, and exhibition. However, this reading of history does not hold up when one considers how American film producers and distributors created different versions of the same picture during the transition years.
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The Harold Lloyd comedy Welcome Danger (1929) is exemplary in this regard, having circulated domestically in a silent version alongside “the all-talking version (“suitable only for English-speaking countries”), and, for foreign markets, the silent version fitted with a music-and-effects track…”6
Defining such a picture specifically as a ‘talkie film,’ or a ‘silent film’ neglects the cumulative history of its multiple variants, along with the textual differences between them. Such differences are important to recognize, for they point to how the industry itself has shifted from a silent mode of production to a talkie mode of production.*
*The film was reportedly shot in a silent version directed by Malcolm St. Clair. Lloyd subsequently hired Clyde Bruckman to revise it into a sound picture. His approach was to “scrap half and dub the rest.“ Read more about it here.
Complicating the issue, however, is the fact historical accounts of the transition era tend to confuse and conflate silent versions with sound versions, in turn obfuscating the distinction between silent and sound films. Describing the industry in 1929, Harold Franklin notes that “practically every producer here is making a silent version of the dialogue picture for the foreign market….”7 But he later adds that these versions “will include musical accompaniment and sound effects…” until “foreign producers become familiar with the use of sound recording equipment.8
The author refers to “silent” versions as having synchronized sound effects and music, while distinguishing them from “sound versions” on the basis that the latter possess audible dialogue. By this logic, it would seem that synchronized effects or music don’t qualify as acoustical elements that can distinguish a silent and sound version, while dialogue does. This ties into Mary Ann Doane’s observation that the silent film “is certainly understood, at least retrospectively and even (it is arguable) in its time, as incomplete, as lacking speech.”9
Such comprehension of the term is also evident in Nornes’ study of how the transition led to new translation practices after rendering the silent era translation largely obsolete.10 From this, one can infer that within contemporary academic discourses, a sound version/film is specifically distinguished from a silent version/film and so defined by the presence of audible dialogue.
But this neglects how fluid terms like “silent film” and “sound film” have been throughout film history. As Crafton correctly points out, “sound film” in 1926 signified a picture that had music, rather than speech.11 This is attributable to the fact that feature films with soundtracks containing audible dialogue did not arrive until the premiere of The Jazz Singer in 1927. For purposes of clarity then, it is necessary to adopt specific terms and categories when discussing this subject.
Within the context of this chapter, the term “silent version” refers to a non-synchronized version of a feature film that has live musical or sound accompaniment. A “synch version,” meanwhile, designates a synchronized version intended for wired theaters that have recorded sound effects and/or music scores, but no dialogue or voiceover. By contrast, “talkie version” means a synchronized version that has recorded dialogue or voiceover, either in part or in full, in addition to effects or music. All synch and talkie versions qualify as “sound versions.”
By extension then, a “silent film” is one that has only ever circulated in silent version, while a “sound film” is conversely one that has never circulated in silent version. This will distinguish them from the multi-version silent/sound pictures that appeared during the transition years. Such distinctions are crucial to consider, because silent, synch, and talkie versions all possessed overlaps and differences in terms of the text, as well as production and distribution.
Though this chapter will consider how sound film translation practices resulted in the preparation of alternate versions for foreign markets that could distinguished from the domestic ones by their shooting and editing, it will mostly refrain from examining versions translated into foreign languages. For one thing, translation already has an extensive amount of academic coverage by scholars such as Nornes, Jarvinen, and Segrave, and it would be both redundant and outside the scope of this chapter to extensively delve into this subject.
This goes in hand with the fact that the domestic circulation of silent, synch, and talkie versions seldom factors into historical accounts of the transition period, creating the impression that a picture circulated in the US exclusively as either a silent film or sound film, rather than a multi-version picture. Even when coverage of such versions in the domestic market exists, it tends to be rather short and the existence of these versions is not said to have much significance.
In The Coming of Sound, for instance, Gomery very briefly mentions studios, such as RKO, releasing silent and sound versions domestically during 1928-1929.12 But he provides a far more extensive look at subtitled, dubbed, and other translated versions in his chapter on the international diffusion of sound technology.13 Thus, even if a film could be said to exist in multiple versions during and after the transition, it is due to the commercial demands of international distribution and so does not contradict the notion that the American film has become standardized and stabilized.
Arguably, the most extensive account of multiple transition-to-sound versions can be found in Donald Crafton’s The Talkies, the fourth volume of the History of the American Cinema series. The author aptly links the production of silent and sound versions of the same picture to distribution processes, showing how the gradual wiring of theaters for sound necessitated studios to “supply two sets of prints to silent and sound-equipped cinemas.”14 Unfortunately, Crafton primarily focuses on the economic impact of transition-to-sound versions, positioning variation alongside remaking as one of Hollywood’s “defensive strategies.”15
Per this schema, all silent and sound versions are essentially identical copies from a commercial standpoint, and the differences between them are therefore negligible. This upholds the dominant historical narrative, according to which the transition shifted the American film industry from variation to reproduction, and Hollywood producers sought to bring stability to the film text from the earliest days of cinema.
Rejecting this position, the first chapter aims to illustrate that textual variation has always been intrinsic to the American film industry, and so constitutes a point of continuity, rather than difference, between the pre-transition and transition periods. Its primary argument is that producers and distributors have been central to the circulation of the same picture in multiple versions before, during, and after the advent of synch sound.* To this end, it will provide evidence against the traditional perspective that instances of textual instability were attributable almost entirely to film exhibitors, such as projectionists, musicians, and theater managers.
*The term “producer” in this case refers to producers, writers, directors, editors, etc., and other individuals who participate in the production of the film.
This article is the second entry in an ongoing series called Cinema’s Unstable Texts (CUTs). If you like it, then please, by all means, share it!
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Alan Williams, “Historical and Theoretical Issues in the coming of recorded sound to the Cinema,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 128.
Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 64.
David Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 306.
Hannah Lewis, "The Realm of Serious Art": Henry Hadley's Involvement in Early Sound Film," Journal Of The Society For American Music 8, no. 3 (n.d.), 293.
Stephen Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 91-93.
Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 333.
Harold B. Franklin, Sound Motion Pictures, From the Laboratory to Their Presentation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co, 1929), 326.
Ibid., 334-335.
Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, eds. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 162.
Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 123-127.
Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1997), 88.
Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound: A History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 88-89.
Ibid., 105-114.
Donald Crafton, The Talkies, 165.
Ibid., 168-171.