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Lecture
Six:
The Coming of Sound
When sound was introduced in 1927, the public was generally ecstatic. But many filmmakers and critics initially put up resistance.
General Criticisms Against Sound:
1) For many critics, silent film has been associated with poetry, whereas the talking film has been associated with the “lower” form of rationality.
2) Other critics have feared that if speech were given free rein, film would become indistinguishable from theater.
3) There are current examples of this prejudice against sound (or at least words)even today, such as the prejudice against voice-over narration and the advice given to beginning screenwriters to minimize dialogue as much as possible.
Sound’s Initial Impact on Hollywood:
1) The commercial success of The Jazz Singer transformed Warner Brothers into Hollywood's most prolific film factory.
2) Sound presented a range of technical problems: the non-portability of microphones, the extreme sensitivity to ALL sounds early microphones had, the necessity for technicians to devise synthetic noises to replicate real ones that were either too explosive or somehow sounded false when recorded, the new and challenging demand for editors to match up sound with image.
3) Studios also had to cope with the dilemma of foreign markets.
4) Many stars, whose voice didn’t translate well to screen, saw their careers ruined.
5) The specific kinds of movies that were made began to change: musicals, newspaper films, screwball comedy, and the gangster genre, all of which relied heavily on either dialogue or music or soundtracks.
The Gangster Genre and Sound
The gangster genre is intimately linked with the birth of sound.
When films like The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface were first released, critics noted the dialogue, which seemed to them particularly daring and realistic. In part, this was because the scripts were written by streetwise newspapermen and/or based on true accounts of criminals’ stories, as was the case with Public Enemy.
Characteristics of gangster dialogue:
1) It acquaints audiences with a specialized vocabulary
2) It reflects the values and organization of a counterculture.
3) It is also informal and full of slang, using words and phrases that are marked as “lower-class.”
4) It also tends to reflect a lack of education and linguistic ability.
5) It contains much obscenity
Films from which clips were taken:
- Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952)
- Goodfellas (Martin Scorcese, 1990)
- Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997)