CUTs 1.02: Sound Performance and Silent Versions
Discourses on Exhibition and Variation of Silent Films
Film scholars commonly point out that, contrary to its categorization, the silent film was not necessarily devoid of sound elements, at least not in the course of its presentation to viewers. Nornes speaks of how the early cinema “was anything but silent. At the point of reception, exhibitors were adding live lecturers, music, and even elaborate sound effects.”1
Among other things, musicians regularly accompanied screenings, providing a score for the audience to listen to while viewing the images. Theater lecturers, meanwhile, could verbally explain the plot of a given picture, while behind-the-stage actors would voice the words spoken by the characters onscreen.
Neale cites these elements in addition to projector noise and the audience itself to illustrate that “silent films were, in fact, rarely seen in conditions of silence.”2
Prior to 1926 then, a given picture could and often did circulate with sound accompaniment. However, it did not have the exact same accompaniment from one screening to the next, resulting in multiple versions of the same text distinguished by sound, music, and other acoustical elements.
Exhibition and Instability
Partially, this is attributable to the improvisation that occurred in exhibition. Bowser’s research of Nickelodeon music shows that the distribution system of the American film industry after 1907 made it impractical and virtually impossible for a musician to have any preparation for what he was going to play, leading some film critics to recognize how music could affect one’s perception of a picture.3
Meanwhile, Altman’s study of exhibition lecture practices from 1907-1910 finds that many nickelodeon lecturers invented their own material to foster the narrative links between scenes, characters, and events for spectators, rather than rigidly adhere to an official synopsis or description. Reportedly, there were many instances of lecturers narrating films they hadn't seen or for which they did not yet have a synopsis, while fearing that the audience would notice potential contradictions between image and voice.4 One could characterize such improvisation as being unintentional.
On the other hand, many historical accounts state that musicians improvised the accompaniment even when studio scores were available, meaning improvisation could also be a deliberate act.5 Whether or not sound accompanists improvised intentionally, their actions often serve to support the view that textual variation throughout the early and silent film periods was specifically the result of exhibitor practices. Musser, for instance, uses the presence of dialogue, narration, music, and effects in early cinema, as evidence that variation “was inevitable” because sound accompaniment “remained the responsibility of the exhibitors.”6
This is echoed by James Lastra’s writing that sound during the nickelodeon period (1907-1915) was “an arena wherein individual exhibitors could alter the public’s relation to the film.” This distinguished sound from other elements of a picture, over which producers had largely consolidated control. He cites stories of “overactive drummers” and “effects men” who could “destroy” a film image’s “intended spatial hierarchies” by creating too many sound effects during the showing. Usage of terms such as “alter” and “intended” clearly presumes the existence of a pre-existing producer version of a film that exhibitors had affected in a negative way by virtue of changing sound accompaniment. By this logic, if sound accompaniment had not been the responsibility of exhibitors, then there would be no variation.
Bolstering this view are the discourses surrounding projectionists – exhibitors, whose main responsibility was to manually crank the projector during screenings. Equating films from the first decade of cinema to “semi-complete products that could be finished in exhibition,” Abel lists “variable projection speeds” and re-editing alongside aural accompaniment as actions that promoted “wide textual variance.”
As cameras and projectors were both manual devices at the time and so had no standard speed, projectionists would need to accurately reproduce the speed at which the cameraman had recorded the images to achieve natural motion during presentation. Over-cranking the projector made a film faster, shortening the runtime and rendering on-screen movement faster than normal, while under-cranking would result in slow motion and extended duration.7 Projectionists of silent films were thus comparable to film editors, in that they were able to affect the duration, pace, tempo, etc. of a given picture during the screening.
In fact, a common assertion is that projectionists occasionally re-edited or over-cranked pictures and film programs at the behest of nickelodeon or picture palace managers that hoped to maximize profit by fitting more film screenings into a single day.8 Alongside accompanists’ modulation of sound, projectionists’ manipulation of speed, duration, and related elements clearly contributes to a given picture’s variability. This would seem to confirm that prior to the transition period multiple versions stemmed specifically from exhibitor practices, meaning a silent film remained stable during the production and distribution stages.
Such discourse defines silent film exhibition in opposition to production and distribution, linking the former with textual variation and the latter with pure reproduction. Presumably then, had producers or distributors been in control of sound accompaniment, projection, and other exhibition elements at this time, films would circulate in their intended, identical copies. From all this, it follows that the conversion to synch sound had greatly benefited the cinema, insofar that it brought film texts under producer control. Free from the destabilizing silent exhibition practices, films could now circulate in their intended, qualitatively superior states.
Film Exhibition and Live Performance
Such a narrative is in need of serious revision, for it neither provides an accurate picture of textual variation’s causes before or after the transition-to-sound, nor of the complicated dynamics that existed between producers, distributors, and exhibitors.
We can begin by establishing that the aforementioned discourses tend to overlook the fact that silent film presentations always combined recorded images with live performances. This is crucial, for a given live performance reflects an individual’s in-the-moment decisions that differentiate it from another.
According to Roud, for example, variation is integral to most definitions of folk song “because the songs are passed on informally in live performance... No singer can exactly replicate the performance of the person from whom they learned a song; indeed, no singer can sing the same song exactly the same each time.”9 Similarly, Becker states that because “the work is never a sufficient guide to how it should be performed, every performance varies…” He links this to the notion of authorial intention, arguing that, because a variation is not true to intention, every performance “changes what the original maker intended, and changes the work.”10 All this is applicable to sound accompanists, projectionists, and other silent film exhibitors.
From this perspective, a silent picture consistently circulated in numerous versions not so much because film exhibitors deliberately sought to transform a picture from what its producers had intended, but rather because they were fundamentally incapable of perfectly replicating their performances. From one screening to the next, a lecturer couldn’t provide the exact same commentary even if he read an identical script, nor could a projectionist match the specific rhythms at which the images appeared before an audience. Each and every screening of the same film could have its own particularities in terms of sound accompaniment, duration, and pace among other aspects, resulting in a distinct exhibitor version.
Because film exhibition necessitated live performance, variation in the pre-transition period was inherent to the film text. In other words, it was the rule, rather than the exception. Naturally, producers were well aware of the fact that movies will have been performed and so changed in theaters. As the next issue will show, this awareness could directly influence how a picture’s design at the stage of shooting.
This is the third 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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Nornes, Cinema Babel, 93.
Neale, Cinema and Technology, 91. Some of these practices would gradually lose popularity and be phased out of the film presentation over time. Japanese benshi were reported to be intrinsic to screenings until late into the 1930s. But in the US, lecturer actions were primarily replaced by intertitles during the 1910s.
Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990), 13-15.
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 140-143.
Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital (London: Wallflower, 2005), 104. James Buhler and Hannah Lewis, “Evolving Practices for Film Music and Sound, 1925-1935,” in The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 8-9. Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 67.
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 179.
A hypothetical picture recorded at a consistent 16 frames-per-second (fps) would be 1.5 times faster in pace and shorter in duration when projected at 24. The opposite would be true for a picture recorded consistently at 24 fps when projected at 16.
Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 10; Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915-1928 (New York: Schribner, 1990), 56.
Steve Roud, “Introduction,” in Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North Ameri-ca: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions, ed. David Atkinson and Steve Roud (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 13.
Howard Saul Becker, Art Worlds, 25th Anniversary Edition (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2008), 175.