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CONTENTS

* 1 History
* 1.1 Early steps
* 1.2 Crucial innovations
* 1.3 Triumph of the "talkies"
* 1.4 The transition: Europe
* 1.5 The transition: Asia
* 2 Consequences
* 2.1 Technology
* 2.2 Labor
* 2.3 Commerce
* 2.4 Aesthetic quality
* 2.5 Cinematic form
* 3 See also
* 4 Notes
* 5 Sources
* 6 External links
* 6.1 Historical writings
* 6.2 Historical recordings

in: History of film, Film and video technology, Film sound production, Pages
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TALKIES

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A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound
technologically coupled to image, as opposed too a silent film. The first known
public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but
decades would pass before reliable synchronization was made commercially
practical. The first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized
sound took place in New York City in April 1923. In the early years after the
introduction of sound, films incorporating synchronized dialogue were known as
"talking pictures," or "talkies." The first feature-length movie originally
presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927.

By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States,
they helped secure Hollywood's position as one of the world's most powerful
cultural/commercial systems. In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere) the
new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who
worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of
soundless cinema. In Japan, where the popular film tradition integrated silent
movie and live vocal performance, talking pictures were slow to take root. In
India, sound was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of
the nation's film industry—the most productive such industry in the world since
the early 1960s.

CONTENTS

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HISTORY[]

EARLY STEPS[]

Template:Details

File:DicksonExpSoundFilm.jpg

Image from the Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894 or 1895), produced by
W.K.L. Dickson as a test of the early version of the Edison Kinetophone,
combining the Kinetoscope and phonograph.

The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as
the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, a couple of days after
photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture not far from the
laboratory of Thomas Edison, the two inventors privately met. Muybridge later
claimed that on this occasion, six years before the first commercial motion
picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine his
image-casting zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology.[1] No
agreement was reached, but within a year Edison commissioned the development of
the Kinetoscope, essentially a "peep-show" system, as a visual complement to his
cylinder phonograph. The two devices were brought together as the Kinetophone in
1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded
by successes in film projection.[2] In 1899, a projected sound-film system known
as Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, based primarily on the work of Swiss-born
inventor François Dussaud, was exhibited in Paris; similar to the Kinetophone,
the system required individual use of earphones.[3] An improved cylinder-based
system, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and
Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet
excerpts to be presented at the Paris Exposition in 1900. These appear to be the
first publicly exhibited films with projection of both image and recorded sound.

Three major problems persisted, leading to motion pictures and sound recording
largely taking separate paths for a generation:

1. Synchronization – The pictures and sound were recorded and played back by
separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in
synchronization.[4]
2. Playback volume – While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be
shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of
electric amplification could not project to satisfactorily fill large
spaces.
3. Recording fidelity – The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very
low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the
cumbersome recording devices (acoustical horns, for the most part), imposing
severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded
sound.

File:Expo1900SoundFilm.jpg

Poster featuring Sarah Bernhardt and giving the names of eighteen other "famous
artists" shown in "living visions" at the 1900 Paris Exposition using the
Gratioulet-Lioret system.

Cinematic innovators attempted to cope with the fundamental synchronization
problem in a variety of ways; an increasing number of motion picture systems
relied on gramophone records—known as sound-on-disc technology; the records
themselves were often referred to as "Berliner discs", not because of any direct
geographical connection, but after one of the primary inventors in the field,
German-American Emile Berliner. Léon Gaumont had demonstrated a system involving
mechanical synchronization between a film projector and turntable at the 1900
Paris Exposition. In 1902, his Chronophone, involving an electrical connection
Gaumont had recently patented, was demonstrated to the French Photographic
Society. Four years later, he introduced the Elgéphone, a compressed-air
amplification system based on the Auxetophone, developed by British inventors
Horace Short and Charles Parsons.[5] Despite high expectations, Gaumont's sound
innovations had only limited commercial success—though improvements, they still
did not satisfactorily address the three basic issues with sound film and were
expensive as well. For some years, American inventor E. E. Norton's Cameraphone
was the primary competitor to the Gaumont system (sources differ on whether the
Cameraphone was disc- or cylinder-based); it ultimately failed for many of the
same reasons that held back the Chronophone. By the end of 1910, the groundswell
in sound motion pictures had subsided.[6]

Innovations continued on other fronts, as well. In 1907, French-born,
London-based Eugene Lauste—who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and
1892—was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the
transformation of sound into light waves that are photographically recorded
direct onto celluloid. As described by historian Scott Eyman,

> [I]t was a double system, that is, the sound was on a different piece of film
> from the picture.... In essence, the sound was captured by a microphone and
> translated into light waves via a light valve, a thin ribbon of sensitive
> metal over a tiny slit. The sound reaching this ribbon would be converted into
> light by the shivering of the diaphragm, focusing the resulting light waves
> through the slit, where it would be photographed on the side of the film, on a
> strip about a tenth of an inch wide.[7]

Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for
synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations,
which came to an effective dead end. In 1913, Edison introduced a new
cylinder-based synch-sound apparatus known, just like his 1895 system, as the
Kinetophone; instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the
kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto a screen. The phonograph was
connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector,
allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization. Conditions, however, were
rarely ideal, and the new, improved Kinetophone was retired after little more
than a year.[8] In 1914, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt was granted German
patent 309,536 for his sound-on-film work; that same year, he apparently
demonstrated a film made with the process to an audience of scientists in
Berlin.[9]

Other sound films, based on a variety of systems, were made before the 1920s,
mostly of performers lip-synching to previously made audio recordings. The
technology was far from adequate to big-league commercial purposes, and for many
years the heads of the major Hollywood film studios saw little benefit in
producing sound motion pictures. Thus such films were relegated, along with
color movies, to the status of novelty.

CRUCIAL INNOVATIONS[]

A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema
commercially viable by the late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to
synchronized sound reproduction, or playback:

File:DeForestScreenShot.jpg

Title card from an unidentified De Forest Phonofilms talkie.

Advanced sound-on-film – In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was awarded
several patents that would lead to the first sound-on-film technology with
commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was
photographically recorded on to the side of the strip of motion picture film to
create a composite, or "married," print. If proper synchronization of sound and
picture was achieved in recording, it could be absolutely counted on in
playback. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of
equipment and patents licensed from another American inventor in the field,
Theodore Case.[10]

At the University of Illinois, Polish-born research engineer Joseph
Tykociński-Tykociner was working independently on a similar process. On June 9,
1922, he gave the first reported U.S. demonstration of a sound-on-film motion
picture to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.[11] As
with Lauste and Tigerstedt, Tykociner's system would never be taken advantage of
commercially; De Forest's, however, soon would.

On April 15, 1923, at New York City's Rivoli Theater, came the first commercial
screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film, the future standard: a set of
shorts under the banner of De Forest Phonofilms, accompanying a silent
feature.[12] That June, De Forest entered into an extended legal battle with an
employee, Freeman Harrison Owens, for title to one of the crucial Phonofilm
patents. Although De Forest ultimately won the case in the courts, Owens is
today recognized as a central innovator in the field. The following year, De
Forest's studio released the first commercial dramatic film shot as a talking
picture—the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song, directed by J. Searle Dawley and
featuring Una Merkel.[13]

Phonofilms' stock in trade, however, was not original dramas but celebrity
documentaries, popular music acts, and comedy performances. President Calvin
Coolidge, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, and vaudeville stars such as Phil Baker,
Ben Bernie, Eddie Cantor, and Oscar Levant appeared in the firm's pictures.
Hollywood remained suspicious, even fearful, of the new technology. As Photoplay
editor James Quirk put it in March 1924, "Talking pictures are perfected, says
Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil."[14] De Forest's process continued to be
used through 1927 in the United States for dozens of short Phonofilms; in the UK
it was employed a few years longer for both shorts and features by British Sound
Film Productions, a subsidiary of British Talking Pictures, which purchased the
primary Phonofilm assets. By the end of 1930, the Phonofilm business would be
liquidated.[15]

In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. In
1919, the same year that DeForest received his first patents in the field, three
German inventors patented the Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, the
Tri-Ergon group gave a public screening of sound-on-film productions—including a
dramatic talkie, Der Brandstifter (The Arsonist)—before an invited audience at
the Alhambra Kino in Berlin. By the end of the decade, Tri-Ergon would be the
dominant European sound system. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and
Arnold Poulsen, patented a system in which sound was recorded on a separate
filmstrip running parallel with the image reel. Gaumont would license and
briefly put the technology to commercial use under the name Cinéphone.[16]

It was domestic competition and copyright infringement, however, that would lead
to Phonofilms' eclipse. After three years of successful screenings of more than
1000 films, De Forest achieved his aim off attracting the interest of the film
industry. William Fox, owner of Hollywood's third largest studio, became
determined to adopt the new technology, but was unwilling to pay the due license
fees for De Forest's system. An opportunity to circumvent Phonofilm appeared
when the partnership of De Forest and Theodore Case fell apart in September
1925. Fox Film invited Case to found the Fox-Case Corporation in July 1927. In
the same year, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular
expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film.[17] The system developed
by Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, was given the name Movietone. It would
take years of litigation for a Federal Court finally recognize in 1935 the
patent infringements, but the opportunity was lost and, De Forest, financially
runied.

Movietone became the first viable sound-on-film technology controlled by a
Hollywood movie studio. In 1927 Fox purchased the North American rights to the
Tri-Ergon system for US$ 50.000, though the company found it inferior to
Movietone and virtually impossible to integrate the two different systems to
advantage.[18]

Advanced sound-on-disc – Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology,
a number of companies were making progress with systems in which movie sound was
recorded onto phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a
phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially
modified film projector, allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema
sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add
synchronized sound sequences to D. W. Griffith's failed silent film Dream
Street. A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves, was recorded, as was a
sequence of live vocal effects. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded,
but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened
incorporating them. On May 1, 1921, Dream Street was rereleased, with love song
added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however
haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal
sequence.[19] There would be no others for more than six years.

File:DonJuanPoster2.jpg

Poster for Warner Bros.' Don Juan (1926), the first major motion picture to
premiere with a full-length synchronized soundtrack. Audio recording engineer
George Groves, the first in Hollywood to hold the job, would supervise sound on
Woodstock, 44 years later.

In 1925, Warner Bros., then a small Hollywood studio with big ambitions, began
experimenting with sound-on-disc systems at New York's Vitagraph Studios, which
it had recently purchased. The Warner Bros. technology, named Vitaphone, was
publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of the nearly
three-hour-long Don Juan; the first feature-length movie to employ a
synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a
musical score and sound effects, but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had
been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying Don Juan, however, were
eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute
filmed introduction by Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Association
of America, all with live-recorded sound. These were the first true sound films
exhibited by a Hollywood studio.[20] Don Juan would not go into general release
until February of the following year, making the technically similar The Better
'Ole, put out by Warner Bros. in October 1926, the first feature film with
synchronized playback throughout to show to a broad audience.

Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of
fundamental technical advantages:

* Synchronization: no interlock system was completely reliable, and sound could
fall out of synch due to disc skipping or minute changes in film speed,
requiring constant supervision and frequent manual adjustment
* Editing: discs could not be directly edited, severely limiting the ability to
make alterations in their accompanying films after the original release cut
* Distribution: phonograph discs added extra expense and complication to film
distribution
* Wear and tear: the physical process of playing the discs degraded them,
requiring their replacement after approximately twenty screenings

Nonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had the edge over sound-on-film
in two substantial ways:

* Production and capital cost: it was generally less expensive to record sound
onto disc than onto film and the central exhibition
systems—turntable/interlock/projector—were cheaper to manufacture than the
complex image-and-audio-pattern-reading projectors required by sound-on-film
* Audio quality: phonograph discs, Vitaphone's in particular, had superior
dynamic range to most sound-on-film processes of the day, at least during the
first few playings—while sound-on-film tended to have better frequency
response, this was outweighed by greater distortion and noise

As sound-on-film technology improved, both of these disadvantages were overcome.

The third crucial set of innovations marked a major step forward in both the
live recording of sound and its effective playback:

File:VitaphoneDemo.jpg

Western Electric engineer E. B. Craft, at left, demonstrating the Vitaphone
projection system. A Vitaphone disc had a running time of about 11 minutes,
enough to match that of a 1,000-foot reel of 35mm film.

Fidelity electronic recording and amplification – Beginning in 1922, the
research branch of AT&T's Western Electric manufacturing division began working
intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film. In
1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved system of electronic
audio, including sensitive condenser microphones and rubber-line recorders. That
May, the company licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for
commercial motion pictures; he founded Vitagraph, which Warner Bros. acquired a
half interest in just one month later. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract
with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for the redubbed
Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of Don Juan and its accompanying
shorts over the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive
access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for Warners films was
markedly superior to those made for the company's sound-on-film competitors.
Meanwhile, Bell Labs—the new name for the AT&T research operation—was working at
a furious pace on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow
recordings to be played back over loudspeakers at theater-filling volume. The
new moving-coil speaker system was installed in New York's Warners Theatre at
the end of July and its patent submission, for what Western Electric called the
No. 555 Receiver, was filed on August 4, just two days before the premiere of
Don Juan.[21]

Late in the year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical
Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to handle rights to the company's film-related
audio technology. Vitaphone still had legal exclusivity, but having lapsed in
its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in ERPI's hands. On
December 31, 1926, Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the
Western Electric system in exchange for a share of revenues that would go
directly to ERPI.[22] The patents of all three concerns were cross-licensed.
Superior recording and amplification technology was now available to two
Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction.
The new year would finally see the emergence of sound cinema as a significant
commercial medium.

TRIUMPH OF THE "TALKIES"[]

In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five leading Hollywood movie
companies: the so-called Big Two—Paramount and MGM—a pair of studios in the next
rank—Universal and the fading First National—and Cecil B. DeMille's small but
prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). The five studios agreed to
collectively select just one provider for sound conversion. The alliance then
sat back and waited to see what sort of results the forerunners came up with. In
May, Warner Bros. sold back its exclusivity rights to ERPI (along with the
Fox-Case sublicense) and signed a new royalty contract similar to Fox's for use
of Western Electric technology. As Fox and Warners pressed forward with sound
cinema in different directions, both technologically and commercially—Fox with
newsreels and then scored dramas, Warners with talking features—so did ERPI,
which sought to corner the market by signing up the five allied studios.

File:JazzSingerAndFox.jpg

Poster from a fully equipped theater in Tacoma, Washington, showing The Jazz
Singer, on Vitaphone, and a Fox newsreel, on Movietone, together on the same
bill.

The big sound film sensations of the year all took advantage of pre-existing
celebrity. On May 20, 1927, at New York's Roxy Theater, Fox Movietone presented
a sound film of the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh's celebrated flight to Paris,
recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox sound newsreel depicting his return
welcomes in New York and Washington, D.C., was shown. These were the two most
acclaimed sound motion pictures to date.[23] In May, as well, Fox had released
the first Hollywood fiction film with synchronized dialogue: the short They're
Coming to Get Me, starring comedian Chic Sale.[24] After rereleasing a few
silent feature hits, such as Seventh Heaven, with recorded music, Fox came out
with its first original Movietone feature on September 23: Sunrise, by acclaimed
German director F. W. Murnau. As with Don Juan, the film's soundtrack was
comprised of a musical score and sound effects (including, in a couple of crowd
scenes, "wild", nonspecific vocals). Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.' The
Jazz Singer premiered. It was a smash box office success for the mid-level
studio, earning a total of $2.625 million in the U.S. and abroad, almost a
million dollars more than the previous record for a Warners film.[25] Produced
with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded
audio, relying, like Sunrise and Don Juan, on a score and effects. When the
movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on
the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed
speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a
cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. Though the
success of The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as one
of America's biggest music stars, and its limited use of synchronized sound
hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film (let alone the "first"), the
movie's handsome profits were proof enough to the industry that the technology
was worth investing in.

The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts
before The Jazz Singer, and the film's success did not change things overnight.
Not till May 1928 did the group of four big studios (PDC had dropped out of the
alliance), along with United Artists and others, sign with ERPI for conversion
of production facilities and theaters for sound film. Initially, all ERPI-wired
theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone
reels as well.[26] Even with access to both technologies, however, most of the
Hollywood companies remained slow to produce talking features of their own. No
studio beside Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until the
low-budget-oriented Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) premiered The Perfect
Crime on June 17, 1928, eight months after The Jazz Singer.[27] FBO had come
under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor, General Electric's
RCA division, which was looking to market its new sound-on-film system,
Photophone. Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were
variable-density systems, Photophone was a variable-area system—a refinement in
the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the
rule. (In both sorts of system, a specially designed lamp, whose exposure to the
film is determined by the audio input, is used to record sound photographically
as a series of minuscule lines. In a variable-density process, the lines are of
varying darkness; in a variable-area process, the lines are of varying width.)
By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's
newest major studio, RKO Pictures.

File:BarkerMackaillSills.jpg

Dorothy Mackaill and Milton Sills in The Barker, First National's inaugural
talkie. The film was released in December 1928, two months after Warner Bros.
acquired a controlling interest in the studio.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had released three more talkies in the spring, all
profitable, if not at the level of the The Jazz Singer: In March, The Tenderloin
appeared; it was billed by Warners as the first feature in which characters
spoke their parts, though only 15 of its 88 minutes had dialogue. Glorious Betsy
followed in April, and The Lion and the Mouse (31 minutes of dialogue) in
May.[28] On July 6, 1928, the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York,
premiered. The film cost Warner Bros. only $23,000 to produce, but grossed
$1.252 million, a record rate of return surpassing 5,000%. In September, the
studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture, The Singing Fool, which
more than doubled The Jazz Singer's earnings record for a Warners movie.[29]
This second Jolson screen smash demonstrated the movie musical's ability to turn
a song into a national hit: by the following summer, the Jolson number "Sonny
Boy" had racked up 2 million record and 1.25 million sheet music sales.[30]
September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry's Dinner Time, among the first
animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. After seeing it, Walt Disney
decided to make one of his Mickey Mouse shorts, Steamboat Willie, with sound as
well.

Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to
the popularity of its sound films, the other studios quickened the pace of their
conversion to the new technology. Paramount, the industry leader, put out its
first talkie in late September, Beggars of Life; though it had just a few lines
of dialogue, it demonstrated the studio's recognition of the new medium's power.
Interference, Paramount's first all-talker, debuted in November. The process
known as "goat glanding" briefly became widespread: soundtracks, sometimes
including a smatter of post-dubbed dialogue or song, were added to movies that
had been shot, and in some cases released, as silents.[31] A few minutes of
singing could qualify such a newly endowed film as a "musical." (Griffith's
Dream Street had essentially been a "goat gland.") Expectations swiftly changed,
and the sound "fad" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929. In February 1929,
sixteen months after The Jazz Singer's debut, Columbia Pictures became the last
of the eight studios that would be known as "majors" during Hollywood's Golden
Age to release its first part-talking feature, Lone Wolf's Daughter.[32] Most
American movie theaters, especially outside of urban areas, were still not
equipped for sound and the studios were not entirely convinced of the talkies'
universal appeal—through mid-1930, the majority of Hollywood movies were
produced in dual versions, silent as well as talking.[33] Though few in the
industry predicted it, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United
States would soon be little more than a memory. The final mainstream purely
silent feature put out by a major Hollywood studio was the Hoot Gibson oater
Points West, released by Universal Pictures in August 1929.[34] One month
earlier, the first all-color, all-talking feature had gone into general release:
Warner Bros.' On with the Show!

THE TRANSITION: EUROPE[]

File:DietrichIKIHM.jpg

Perhaps Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (1929) would be better remembered today if
costar Marlene Dietrich, instead of kissing their hands, had been invited to
sing.

The Jazz Singer had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theatre in
London on September 27, 1928.[35] According to film historian Rachael Low, "Many
in the industry realized at once that a change to sound production was
inevitable."[36] On January 16, 1929, the first European feature film with a
synchronized vocal performance and recorded score premiered: the German
production Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame).[37] A
dialogueless film that contains only a few minutes of singing by star Richard
Tauber, it may be thought of as the Old World's combination Dream Street and Don
Juan. The movie was made with the sound-on-film system controlled by the
German-Dutch firm Tobis, corporate heirs to the Tri-Ergon concern. With an eye
toward commanding the emerging European market for sound film, Tobis entered
into a compact with its chief competitor, Klangfilm, a subsidiary of Allgemeine
Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (AEG). Early in 1929, the two businesses began
comarketing their recording and playback technologies. As ERPI began to wire
theaters around Europe, Tobis-Klangfilm claimed that the Western Electric system
infringed on the Tri-Ergon patents, stalling the introduction of American
technology in many places. Just as RCA had entered the movie business to
maximize the value of its recording system, Tobis also established its own
production houses, led by Germany's Tobis Filmkunst.

File:BlackmailStill.jpg

The Prague-raised star of Blackmail (1929), Anny Ondra, was an industry
favorite, but her thick accent became an issue when the film was reshot with
sound. Without post-dubbing capacity, her dialogue was simultaneously uttered
and recorded offscreen by actress Joan Barry. Ondra's British film career was
over.

Over the course of 1929, most of the major European filmmaking countries began
joining Hollywood in the changeover to sound. Many of the trend-setting European
talkies were shot abroad as production companies leased studios while their own
were being converted or as they deliberately targeted markets speaking different
languages. One of Europe's first two feature-length dramatic talkies was created
in still a different sort of twist on multinational moviemaking: The Crimson
Circle was a coproduction between director Friedrich Zelnik's Efzet-Film company
and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released
as the silent Der Rote Kreis in Germany, where it was shot; English dialogue was
apparently dubbed in much later using the De Forest Phonofilm process controlled
by BSFP's corporate parent. It was given a British trade screening in March
1929, as was a part-talking film made entirely in the UK: The Clue of the New
Pin, a British Lion production using the sound-on-disc British Photophone
system. In May, Black Waters, a British and Dominions Film Corporation promoted
as the first UK all-talker, received its initial trade screening; it had been
shot completely in Hollywood with a Western Electric sound-on-film system. None
of these pictures made much impact.[38] The first successful European dramatic
talkie was the all-British Blackmail. Directed by twenty-nine-year-old Alfred
Hitchcock, the movie had its London debut June 21, 1929. Originally shot as a
silent, Blackmail was restaged to include dialogue sequences, along with a score
and sound effects, before its premiere. A British International Pictures (BIP)
production, it was recorded on RCA Photophone, General Electric having bought a
share of AEG in order to gain access to the Tobis-Klangfilm markets. Blackmail
was a substantial hit; critical response was also positive—notorious curmudgeon
Hugh Castle, for example, called it "perhaps the most intelligent mixture of
sound and silence we have yet seen."[39]

On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with a talkie:
G’schichten aus der Steiermark (Stories from Styria), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film
production.[40] On September 30, the first entirely German-made feature-length
dramatic talkie, Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women), premiered. A Tobis
Filmkunst production, about one-quarter of the movie contained dialogue, which
was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response was
underwhelming.[41] Sweden's first talkie, Konstgjorda Svensson (Artificial
Svensson), premiered on October 14. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film came
out with Le Collier de la reine (The Queen's Necklace), shot at the Epinay
studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded
score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French
feature. On October 31, Les Trois masques debuted; a Pathé-Natan film, it is
generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot,
like Blackmail, at the Elstree studio, just outside of London. The production
company had contracted with RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest
facility with the system. The Braunberger-Richebé talkie La Route est belle,
also shot at Elstree, followed a few weeks later.[42] Before the Paris studios
were fully sound-equipped—a process that stretched well into 1930—a number of
other early French talkies were shot in Germany.[43] The first all-talking
German feature, Atlantik, had premiered in Berlin on October 28. Yet another
Elstree-made movie, it was rather less German at heart than Les Trois masques
and La Route est belle were French; a BIP production with a British scenarist
and German director, it was also shot in English as Atlantic.[44] The entirely
German Aafa-Film production Dich hab ich geliebt (Because I Loved You) opened
three-and-a-half weeks later. It was not "Germany's First Talking Film", as the
marketing had it, but it was the first to be released in the United States.[45]

File:Putevka v zhisn poster.jpg

The first Soviet talkie, Putyovka v zhizn (The Road to Life; 1931), concerns the
issue of homeless youth. As Marcel Carné put it, "in the unforgettable images of
this spare and pure story we can discern the effort of an entire nation."[46]

In 1930, the first Polish talkies premiered, using sound-on-disc systems:
Moralność pani Dulskiej (The Morality of Mrs. Dulska) in March and the
all-talking Niebezpieczny romans (Dangerous Love Affair) in October.[47] In
Italy, whose once vibrant film industry had become moribund by the late 1920s,
the first talkie, La Canzone dell'amore (The Song of Love), also came out in
October; within two years, Italian cinema would be enjoying a revival.[48] The
first movie spoken in Czech debuted in 1930 as well, Tonka Šibenice (Gallows
Toni).[49] Several European nations with minor positions in the field also
produced their first talking pictures—Belgium (in French), Denmark, Greece, and
Romania.[50] The Soviet Union's robust film industry came out with its first
sound features in 1931: Dziga Vertov's nonfiction Entuziazm, with an
experimental, dialogueless soundtrack, was released in the spring.[51] In the
fall, the Nikolai Ekk drama Putyovka v zhizn (The Road to Life), premiered as
the state's first talking picture.

Throughout much of Europe, conversion of exhibition venues lagged well behind
production capacity, requiring talkies to be produced in parallel silent
versions or simply shown without sound in many places. While the pace of
conversion was relatively swift in Britain—with over 60 percent of theaters
equipped for sound by the end of 1930, similar to the U.S. figure—in France, by
contrast, more than half of theaters nationwide were still projecting in silence
by late 1932.[52] According to scholar Colin G. Crisp, "Anxiety about
resuscitating the flow of silent films was frequently expressed in the [French]
industrial press, and a large section of the industry still saw the silent as a
viable artistic and commercial prospect till about 1935."[53] The situation was
particularly acute in the Soviet Union; as of spring 1933, fewer than one out of
every hundred film projectors in the country was as yet equipped for sound.[54]

THE TRANSITION: ASIA[]

File:MadamuTonyobo.jpg

Director Gosho Heinosuke's Madamu to nyobo (The Neighbor's Wife and Mine; 1931),
a production of the Shochiku studio, was the first major commercial and critical
success of Japanese sound cinema.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers
of motion pictures, along with the United States. Though the country's film
industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the
full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West. It appears
that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai (Dawn), was made in 1926 with the De
Forest Phonofilm system.[55] Using the sound-on-disc Minatoki system, the
leading Nikkatsu studio produced a pair of talkies in 1929: Taii no musume (The
Captain's Daughter) and Furusato (Hometown), the latter directed by Mizoguchi
Kenji. The rival Shochiku studio began the successful production of
sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called
Tsuchibashi.[56] Two years later, however, more than 80 percent of movies made
in the country were still silents. Two of the country's leading directors, Ozu
Yasujiro and Naruse Mikio, did not make their first sound films until 1935. As
late as 1938, over a third of all movies produced in Japan were shot without
dialogue.[57]

The enduring popularity of the silent medium in Japanese cinema owed in great
part to the tradition of the benshi, a live narrator who performed as
accompaniment to a film screening. As director Kurosawa Akira later described,
the benshi "not only recounted the plot of the films, they enhanced the
emotional content by performing the voices and sound effects and providing
evocative descriptions of events and images on the screen.... The most popular
narrators were stars in their own right, solely responsible for the patronage of
a particular theatre."[58] Film historian Mariann Lewinsky argues,

> The end of silent film in the West and in Japan was imposed by the industry
> and the market, not by any inner need or natural evolution.... Silent cinema
> was a highly pleasurable and fully mature form. It didn't lack anything, least
> in Japan, where there was always the human voice doing the dialogues and the
> commentary. Sound films were not better, just more economical. As a cinema
> owner you didn't have to pay the wages of musicians and benshi any more. And a
> good benshi was a star demanding star payment.[59]

By the same token, the viability of the benshi system facilitated a gradual
transition to sound—allowing the studios to spread out the capital costs of
conversion and their directors and technical crews time to become familiar with
the new technology.[60]

File:AlamAra.jpg

Alam Ara premiered March 14, 1931, in Bombay. The first Indian talkie was so
popular that "police aid had to be summoned to control the crowds."[61] It was
shot with the Tanar single-system camera, which recorded sound directly onto the
film.

The Mandarin-language Gēnǚ hóng mǔdān (Template:Linktext, Singsong Girl Red
Peony), starring Butterfly Wu, premiered as China's first feature talkie in
1930. By February of that year, production was apparently completed on a sound
version of The Devil's Playground, arguably qualifying it as the first
Australian talking motion picture; however, the May press screening of
Commonwealth Film Contest prizewinner Fellers is the first verifiable public
exhibition of an Australian talkie.[62] In September 1930, a song performed by
Indian star Sulochana, excerpted from the silent feature Madhuri (1928), was
released as a synchronized-sound short, making it that nation's mini–Dream
Street.[63] The following year, Ardeshir Irani directed the first Indian talking
feature, the Hindi-Urdu Alam Ara, and produced Kalidas, primarily in Tamil with
some Telugu. Nineteen-thirty-one also saw the first Bengali-language film, Jamai
Sasthi, and the first movie fully spoken in Telugu, Bhakta Prahlada.[64] In
1932, Ayodhyecha Raja became the first movie in which Marathi was spoken to be
released (though Sant Tukaram was the first to go through the official
censorship process); the first Gujarati-language film, Narsimha Mehta, and
all-Tamil talkie, Kalava, debuted as well. The next year, Ardeshir Irani
produced the first Persian-language talkie, Dukhtar-e-loor.[65] Also in 1933,
the first Cantonese-language films were produced in Hong Kong—Sha zai dongfang
(The Idiot's Wedding Night) and Liang xing (Conscience); within two years, the
local film industry had fully converted to sound.[66] Korea, where byeonsa held
a role and status similar to that of the Japanese benshi, in 1935 became the
last country with a significant film industry to produce its first talking
picture: Chunhyangjeon (Template:Lang/Template:Lang) is based on the
seventeenth-century pansori folktale "Chunhyangga," of which as many as fourteen
film versions have been made to date.[67]

CONSEQUENCES[]

TECHNOLOGY[]

File:ShowgirlHollywood.jpg

Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), one of the first sound films about sound
filmmaking, depicts microphones dangling from the rafters and multiple cameras
shooting simultaneously from out of soundproofed booths. The poster shows a
camera unboothed and unblimped, as it might be when shooting a musical number
with a prerecorded soundtrack.

In the short term, the introduction of live sound recording caused major
difficulties in production. Cameras were noisy, so a soundproofed cabinet was
used in many of the earliest talkies to isolate the loud equipment from the
actors, at the expense of a drastic reduction in the ability to move the camera.
For a time, multiple-camera shooting was used to compensate for the loss of
mobility and innovative studio technicians could often find ways to liberate the
camera for particular shots. The necessity of staying within range of still
microphones meant that actors also often had to limit their movements
unnaturally. Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), from First National Pictures (which
Warner Bros. had taken control of thanks to its profitable adventure into
sound), gives a behind-the-scenes look at some of the techniques involved in
shooting early talkies. Several of the fundamental problems caused by the
transition to sound were soon solved with new camera casings, known as "blimps,"
designed to suppress noise and boom microphones that could be held just out of
frame and moved with the actors. In 1931, a major improvement in playback
fidelity was introduced: three-way speaker systems in which sound was separated
into low, medium, and high frequencies and sent respectively to a large bass
"woofer," a midrange driver, and a treble "tweeter."[68]

As David Bordwell describes, technological improvements continued at a swift
pace: "Between 1932 and 1935, [Western Electric and RCA] created directional
microphones, increased the frequency range of film recording, reduced ground
noise...and extended the volume range." These technical advances often meant new
aesthetic opportunities: "Increasing the fidelity of recording...heightened the
dramatic possibilities of vocal timbre, pitch, and loudness."[69] Another basic
problem—famously spoofed in the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain—was that some
silent-era actors simply did not have attractive voices; though this issue was
frequently overstated, there were related concerns about general vocal quality
and the casting of performers for their dramatic skills in roles also requiring
singing talent beyond their own. By 1935, rerecording of vocals by the original
or different actors in postproduction, a process known as "looping," had become
practical. The ultraviolet recording system introduced by RCA in 1936 improved
the reproduction of sibilants and high notes.[70]

With Hollywood's wholesale adoption of the talkies, the competition between the
two fundamental approaches to sound-film production was soon resolved. Over the
course of 1930–31, the only major players using sound-on-disc, Warner Bros. and
First National, changed over to sound-on-film recording. Vitaphone's dominating
presence in sound-equipped theaters, however, meant that for years to come all
of the Hollywood studios pressed and distributed sound-on-disc versions of their
films alongside the sound-on-film prints. Fox Movietone soon followed Vitaphone
into disuse as a recording and reproduction method, leaving two major American
systems: the variable-area RCA Photophone and Western Electric's own
variable-density process, a substantial improvement on the cross-licensed
Movietone.[71] Under RCA's instigation, the two parent companies made their
projection equipment compatible, meaning films shot with one system could be
screened in theaters equipped for the other.[72] This left one big issue—the
Tobis-Klangfilm challenge. In May 1930, Western Electric won an Austrian lawsuit
that voided protection for certain Tri-Ergon patents, helping bring
Tobis-Klangfilm to the negotiating table.[73] The following month an accord was
reached on patent cross-licensing, full playback compatibility, and the division
of the world into three parts for the provision of equipment. As a contemporary
report describes: bitch please

> Tobis-Klangfilm has the exclusive rights to provide equipment for: Germany,
> Danzig, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, the Dutch
> Indies, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Finland.
> The Americans have the exclusive rights for the United States, Canada,
> Australia, New Zealand, India, and Russia. All other countries, among them
> Italy, France, and England, are open to both parties.[74]

The agreement did not resolve all the patent disputes, and further negotiations
were undertaken and concords signed over the course of the 1930s. During these
years, as well, the American studios began abandoning the Western Electric
system for RCA Photophone's variable-area approach—by the end of 1936, only
Paramount, MGM, and United Artists still had contracts with ERPI.[75]

LABOR[]

File:PhotoplayDec.jpg

The unkind cover of Photoplay, December 1929, featuring Norma Talmadge. As film
historian David Thomson puts it, "sound proved the incongruity of [her] salon
prettiness and tenement voice."[76]

While the introduction of sound led to a boom in the motion picture industry, it
had an adverse effect on the employability of a host of Hollywood actors of the
time. Suddenly those without stage experience were regarded as suspect by the
studios; as suggested above, those whose heavy accents or otherwise discordant
voices had previously been concealed were particularly at risk. The career of
major silent star Norma Talmadge effectively came to an end in this way. The
celebrated Swiss actor Emil Jannings returned to Europe. John Gilbert's voice
was fine, but audiences found it an awkward match with his swashbuckling
persona, and his star faded as well. Clara Bow's speaking voice was sometimes
blamed for the demise of her brilliant career, but the truth is that she was too
hot to handle.[77] Audiences now seemed to perceive certain silent-era stars as
old-fashioned, even those who had the talent to succeed in the sound era. And,
as actress Louise Brooks suggested, there were other issues:

> Studio heads, now forced into unprecedented decisions, decided to begin with
> the actors, the least palatable, the most vulnerable part of movie production.
> It was such a splendid opportunity, anyhow, for breaking contracts, cutting
> salaries, and taming the stars.... Me, they gave the salary treatment. I could
> stay on without the raise my contract called for, or quit, [Paramount studio
> chief B. P.] Schulberg said, using the questionable dodge of whether I'd be
> good for the talkies. Questionable, I say, because I spoke decent English in a
> decent voice and came from the theater. So without hesitation I quit.[78]

Lillian Gish departed, back to the stage, and other leading figures soon left
acting entirely: Colleen Moore, Gloria Swanson, and Hollywood's most famous
performing couple, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Buster Keaton was eager
to explore the new medium, but when his studio, MGM, made the changeover to
sound, he was quickly stripped of creative control. Though a number of Keaton's
early talkies made impressive profits, they were artistically dismal.[79]

Several of the new medium's biggest attractions came from vaudeville and the
musical theater, where performers such as Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Jeanette
MacDonald, and the Marx Brothers were accustomed to the demands of both dialogue
and song. James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who had teamed on Broadway, were
brought west together by Warner Bros. in 1930. A few actors were major stars
during both the silent and the sound eras: Richard Barthelmess, Clive Brook,
Bebe Daniels, Norma Shearer, the comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy,
and the incomparable Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights (1931) and Modern Times
(1936) employed sound almost exclusively for music and effects. Janet Gaynor
became a top star with the synch-sound but dialogueless Seventh Heaven and
Sunrise, as did Joan Crawford with the technologically similar Our Dancing
Daughters (1928). Greta Garbo was the one non–native English speaker to achieve
Hollywood stardom on either side of the great sound divide.

As talking pictures emerged, with their prerecorded musical tracks, an
increasing number of moviehouse orchestra musicians found themselves out of
work.[80] More than just their position as film accompanists was usurped;
according to historian Preston J. Hubbard, "During the 1920s live musical
performances at first-run theaters became an exceedingly important aspect of the
American cinema."[81] With the coming of the talkies, those featured
performances—usually staged as preludes—were largely eliminated as well. The
American Federation of Musicians took out newspaper advertisements protesting
the replacement of live musicians with mechanical playing devices. One 1929 ad
that appeared in the Pittsburgh Press features an image of a can labeled "Canned
Music / Big Noise Brand / Guaranteed to Produce No Intellectual or Emotional
Reaction Whatever" and reads in part:

> Canned Music on Trial
> This is the case of Art vs. Mechanical Music in theatres. The defendant stands
> accused in front of the American people of attempted corruption of musical
> appreciation and discouragement of musical education. Theatres in many cities
> are offering synchronised mechanical music as a substitute for Real Music. If
> the theatre-going public accepts this vitiation of its entertainment program a
> deplorable decline in the Art of Music is inevitable. Musical authorities know
> that the soul of the Art is lost in mechanisation. It cannot be otherwise
> because the quality of music is dependent on the mood of the artist, upon the
> human contact, without which the essence of intellectual stimulation and
> emotional rapture is lost.[82]

By the following year, a reported 22,000 U.S. moviehouse musicians had lost
their jobs.[83]

COMMERCE[]

File:BroadwayMelodyPoster.jpg

Premiering February 1, 1929, MGM's The Broadway Melody was the first smash-hit
talkie from a studio other than Warner Bros. and the first sound film to win the
Academy Award for Best Picture.

In September 1926, Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros., was quoted to the effect
that talking pictures would never be viable: "They fail to take into account the
international language of the silent pictures, and the unconscious share of each
onlooker in creating the play, the action, the plot, and the imagined dialogue
for himself."[84] Much to his company's benefit, he would be proven very
wrong—between the 1927–28 and 1928–29 fiscal years, Warners' profits surged from
$2 million to $14 million. Sound film, in fact, was a clear boon to all the
major players in the industry. During that same twelve-month span, Paramount's
profits rose by $7 million, Fox's by $3.5 million, and Loew's/MGM's by $3
million.[85] RKO, which hadn't even existed in September 1928 and whose parent
production company, FBO, was in the Hollywood minor leagues, by the end of 1929
was established as one of America's leading entertainment businesses.

Even as the Wall Street crash of October 1929 helped plunge the United States
and ultimately the global economy into depression, the popularity of the talkies
at first seemed to keep Hollywood immune. The 1929–30 exhibition season was even
better for the motion picture industry than the previous, with ticket sales and
overall profits hitting new highs. Reality finally struck later in 1930, but
sound had clearly secured Hollywood's position as one of the most important
industrial fields, both commercially and culturally, in the United States. In
1929, film box-office receipts comprised 16.6 percent of total spending by
Americans on recreation; by 1931, the figure had reached 21.8 percent. The
motion picture business would command similar figures for the next decade and a
half.[86] Hollywood ruled on the larger stage, as well. The American movie
industry—already the world's most powerful—set an export record in 1929 that, by
the applied measure of total feet of exposed film, was 27 percent higher than
the year before.[87] Concerns that language differences would hamper U.S. film
exports turned out to be largely unfounded. In fact, the expense of sound
conversion was a major obstacle to many overseas producers, relatively
undercapitalized by Hollywood standards. The production of multiple versions of
export-bound talkies in different languages, a common approach at first, largely
ceased by mid-1931, replaced by post-dubbing and subtitling. Despite trade
restrictions imposed in most foreign markets, by 1937, American films commanded
about 70 percent of screen time around the globe.[88]

Just as the leading Hollywood studios gained from sound in relation to their
foreign competitors, they did the same at home. As historian Richard B. Jewell
describes, "The sound revolution crushed many small film companies and producers
who were unable to meet the financial demands of sound conversion."[89] The
combination of sound and the Great Depression led to a wholesale shakeout in the
business, resulting in the hierarchy of the Big Five integrated companies (MGM,
Paramount, Fox, Warners, RKO) and the three smaller studios also called "majors"
(Columbia, Universal, United Artists) that would predominate through the 1950s.
Historian Thomas Schatz describes the ancillary effects:

> [B]ecause the studios were forced to streamline operations and rely on their
> own resources, their individual house styles and corporate personalities came
> into much sharper focus. Thus the watershed period from the coming of sound
> into the early Depression saw the studio system finally coalesce, with the
> individual studios coming to terms with their own identities and their
> respective positions within the industry.[90]

The other country in which sound cinema had an immediate major commercial impact
was India. As one distributor of the period said, "With the coming of the
talkies, the Indian motion picture came into its own as a definite and
distinctive piece of creation. This was achieved by music."[91] From its
earliest days, Indian sound cinema has been defined by the musical—Alam Ara
featured seven songs; a year later, Indrasabha would feature seventy. While the
European film industries fought an endless battle against the popularity and
economic muscle of Hollywood, ten years after the debut of Alam Ara, over 90
percent of the films showing on Indian screens were made within the country.[92]
Most of India's early talkies were shot in Bombay, which remains the leading
production center, but sound filmmaking soon spread across the multilingual
nation. Within just a few weeks of Alam Ara's March 1931 premiere, the
Calcutta-based Madan Pictures had released both the Hindi Shirin Farhad and the
Bengali Jamai Sasthi.[93] The Hindustani Heer Ranjha was produced in Lahore,
Punjab, the following year. In 1934, Sati Sulochana, the first Kannada talking
picture to be released, was shot in Kolhapur, Maharashtra; Srinivasa Kalyanam
became the first Tamil talkie actually shot in Tamil Nadu.[94] Once the first
talkie features appeared, the conversion to full sound production happened as
rapidly in India as it did in the United States. Already by 1932, the majority
of feature productions were in sound; two years later, 164 of the 172 Indian
feature films were talking pictures.[95] From 1934 through the present, with the
sole exception of 1952, India has been among the top three movie-producing
countries in the world every single year.

AESTHETIC QUALITY[]

File:LAtalantePoster.jpg

The earliest sound film to make most latter-day shortlists for "greatest movie
ever made," L'Atalante (1934) placed tenth in Time Out's centenary poll of film
industry professionals and critics.

In the first, 1930 edition of his global survey The Film Till Now, cinema pundit
Paul Rotha declared, "A film in which the speech and sound effects are perfectly
synchronised and coincide with their visual image on the screen is absolutely
contrary to the aims of cinema. It is a degenerate and misguided attempt to
destroy the real use of the film and cannot be accepted as coming within the
true boundaries of the cinema."[96] Such opinions were not rare among those who
cared about cinema as an art form; Alfred Hitchcock, though he directed the
first commercially successful talkie produced in Europe, held that "the silent
pictures were the purest form of cinema" and scoffed at many early sound films
as delivering little beside "photographs of people talking."[97]

Most latter-day film historians and aficionados agree that silent film had
reached an aesthetic peak by the late 1920s and that the early years of sound
cinema delivered little that was comparable to the best of the silents. For
instance, despite fading into relative obscurity once its era had passed, silent
cinema is represented by eleven films in Time Out's Centenary of Cinema Top One
Hundred poll, held in 1995. The earliest sound film to place is the French
L'Atalante (1934), directed by Jean Vigo; the earliest Hollywood sound film to
qualify is Bringing Up Baby (1938), directed by Howard Hawks. The first year in
which sound film production predominated over silent film—not only in the United
States, but also in the West considered as a whole—was 1929; yet the years 1929
through 1931 (for that matter, 1929 through 1933) are represented by three
dialogueless pictures (Pandora's Box [1929; often misdated 1928], Zemlya [1930],
City Lights [1931]) and zero talkies in the Time Out poll.

Sound's short-term effect on cinematic art may be gauged in more detail by
considering those movies from the transition period—the last years of commercial
silent film production and the first years of talking pictures—in the West that
are widely cited as masterpieces, as recorded in recent major media polls of
all-time best international movies (though some listed as silent films, like
Sunrise and City Lights, premiered with recorded scores and sound effects, they
are now customarily referred to by historians and industry professionals as
"silents"—spoken dialogue regarded as the crucial distinguishing factor between
silent and sound dramatic cinema). From the six-year period 1927–32, eleven
silent films are broadly recognized as masterpieces and only one talkie (TO=
Time Out; VV=Village Voice; S&S=Sight & Sound):[98]

Silent films

* 1927: The General (U.S.; VV 01, S&S 02), Metropolis (Germany; VV 01, S&S 02),
Napoléon (France; TO 95), October (USSR; VV 01); Sunrise (U.S.; TO 95, VV 01,
S&S 02)
* 1928: The Passion of Joan of Arc (France; TO 95, VV 01, S&S 02), Steamboat
Bill Jr. (U.S.; VV 01)
* 1929: Man with a Movie Camera (USSR; VV 01, S&S 02), Pandora's Box (Germany;
TO 95)
* 1930: Zemlya (USSR; TO 95)
* 1931: City Lights (U.S.; TO 95, VV 01, S&S 02)
* 1932: negligible silent film production

File:LangM.jpg

Peter Lorre in M (1931). "Many early talkies felt they had to talk all the
time", writes Roger Ebert, "but [director Fritz] Lang allows his camera to prowl
through the streets and dives, providing a rat's-eye view."[99]

Talkies

* 1927: negligible talkie production
* 1928: none
* 1929: none
* 1930: none
* 1931: M (Germany; VV 01, S&S 02)
* 1932: none

The first sound feature film to receive near-universal critical approbation was
Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel); premiering on April 1, 1930, it was directed
by Josef von Sternberg in both German and English versions for Berlin's UFA
studio. The first American talkie to be widely honored was All Quiet on the
Western Front, directed by Lewis Milestone, which premiered April 21. The other
internationally acclaimed sound drama of the year was Westfront 1918, directed
by G. W. Pabst for Nero-Film of Berlin. Cultural historians consider the French
L'Âge d'or, directed by Luis Buñuel, which appeared in October 1930, to be of
great aesthetic import, though more as a signal expression of the surrealist
movement than as cinema per se. The earliest sound movie now acknowledged by
most film historians as a masterpiece is Nero-Film's M, directed by Fritz Lang,
which premiered May 11, 1931.

CINEMATIC FORM[]

File:MDWimage.jpg

Image of sumo wrestlers from Melodie der Welt (1929), "one of the initial
successes of a new art form," in André Bazin's description. "It flung the whole
earth onto the screen in a jigsaw of visual images and sounds."[100]

"Talking film is as little needed as a singing book."[101] Such was the blunt
proclamation of critic Viktor Shklovsky, one of the leaders of the Russian
formalist movement, in 1927. While some regarded sound as irreconcilable with
film art, others saw it as opening a new field of creative opportunity. The
following year, a group of Soviet filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein,
proclaimed that the use of image and sound in juxtaposition, the so-called
contrapuntal method, would raise the cinema to "unprecedented power and cultural
height. Such a method for constructing the sound-film will not confine it to a
national market, as must happen with the photographing of plays, but will give a
greater possibility than ever before for the circulation throughout the world of
a filmically expressed idea."[102]

On March 12, 1929, the first feature-length talking picture made in Germany had
its premiere. The inaugural Tobis Filmkunst production, it was not a drama, but
a documentary sponsored by a shipping line: Melodie der Welt (Melody of the
World), directed by Walter Ruttmann.[103] This was also perhaps the first
feature film anywhere to significantly explore the artistic possibilities of
joining the motion picture with recorded sound. As described by scholar William
Moritz, the movie is "intricate, dynamic, fast-paced...juxtapos[ing] similar
cultural habits from countries around the world, with a superb orchestral
score...and many synchronized sound effects."[104] Composer Lou Lichtveld was
among a number of contemporary artists struck by the film: "Melodie der Welt
became the first important sound documentary, the first in which musical and
unmusical sounds were composed into a single unit and in which image and sound
are controlled by one and the same impulse."[105] Melodie der Welt was a direct
influence on the industrial film Philips Radio (1931), directed by Dutch
avant-garde filmmaker Joris Ivens and scored by Lichtveld, who described its
audiovisual aims:

> [T]o render the half-musical impressions of factory sounds in a complex audio
> world that moved from absolute music to the purely documentary noises of
> nature. In this film every intermediate stage can be found: such as the
> movement of the machine interpreted by the music, the noises of the machine
> dominating the musical background, the music itself is the documentary, and
> those scenes where the pure sound of the machine goes solo.[106]

Many similar experiments were pursued by Dziga Vertov in his 1931 Entuziazm and
by Chaplin in Modern Times, a half-decade later.

A few innovative commercial directors immediately saw the ways in which sound
could be employed as an integral part of cinematic storytelling, beyond the
obvious function of recording speech. In Blackmail, Hitchcock manipulated the
reproduction of a character's monologue so the word "knife" would leap out from
a blurry stream of sound, reflecting the subjective impression of the
protagonist, who is desperate to conceal her involvement in a fatal
stabbing.[107] In his first film, the Paramount Applause (1929), Rouben
Mamoulian created the illusion of acoustic depth by varying the volume of
ambient sound in proportion to the distance of shots. At a certain point,
Mamoulian wanted the audience to hear one character singing at the same time as
another prays; according to the director, "They said we couldn't record the two
things—the song and the prayer—on one mike and one channel. So I said to the
sound man, 'Why not use two mikes and two channels and combine the two tracks in
printing?'"[108] Such methods would eventually become standard procedure in
popular filmmaking.

File:LeMillionPoster.jpg

Writing soon after the 1931 release of Le Million, critic James Agate called it
"one of the two best films I have ever seen. What the other one is I have no
notion."[109]

One of the first commercial films to take full advantage of the new
opportunities provided by recorded sound was Le Million, directed by René Clair
and produced by Tobis's French division. Premiering in Paris in April 1931 and
New York a month later, the picture was both a critical and popular success. A
musical comedy with a barebones plot, it is memorable for its formal
accomplishments, in particular, its emphatically artificial treatment of sound.
As described by scholar Donald Crafton,

> Le Million never lets us forget that the acoustic component is as much a
> construction as the whitewashed sets. [It] replaced dialogue with actors
> singing and talking in rhyming couplets. Clair created teasing confusions
> between on- and off-screen sound. He also experimented with asynchronous audio
> tricks, as in the famous scene in which a chase after a coat is synched to the
> cheers of an invisible football (or rugby) crowd.[110]

These and similar techniques became part of the vocabulary of the sound comedy
film, though as special effects and "color", not as the basis for the kind of
comprehensive, non-naturalistic design achieved by Clair. Outside of the comedic
field, the sort of bold play with sound exemplified by Melodie der Welt and Le
Million would be pursued very rarely in commercial production. Hollywood, in
particular, incorporated sound into a reliable system of genre-based
moviemaking, in which the formal possibilities of the new medium were
subordinated to the traditional goals of star affirmation and straightforward
storytelling. As accurately predicted in 1928 by Frank Woods, secretary of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, "The talking pictures of the future
will follow the general line of treatment heretofore developed by the silent
drama.... The talking scenes will require different handling, but the general
construction of the story will be much the same."[111]

SEE ALSO[]

* History of film
* Sound stage
* Film soundtrack
* Category:Film sound production for articles concerning the development of
cinematic sound recording

NOTES[]

1. ↑ Robinson (1997), p. 23.
2. ↑ Robertson (2001) claims that German inventor and filmmaker Oskar Messter
began projecting sound motion pictures at 21 Unter den Linden in September
1896 (p. 168), but this seems to be an error. Koerber (1996) notes that
after Messter acquired the Cinema Unter den Linden (located in the back
room of a restaurant), it reopened under his management on September 21,
1896 (p. 53), but no source beside Robertson describes Messter as
screening sound films before 1903.
3. ↑ Altman (2005), p. 158; Cosandey (1996).
4. ↑ Sound engineer Mark Ulano, in "The Movies Are Born a Child of the
Phonograph" (part 2 of his essay "Moving Pictures That Talk"), describes
the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre version of synchronized sound cinema:

> This system used an operator adjusted non-linkage form of primitive
> synchronization. The scenes to be shown were first filmed, and then the
> performers recorded their dialogue or songs on the Lioretograph (usually
> a Le Eclat concert cylinder format phonograph) trying to match tempo
> with the projected filmed performance. In showing the films,
> synchronization of sorts was achieved by adjusting the hand cranked film
> projector's speed to match the phonograph. the projectionist was
> equipped with a telephone through which he listened to the phonograph
> which was located in the orchestra pit.

5. ↑ If there was a drawback to the Elgéphone, it was apparently not a lack
of volume. Dan Gilmore describes its predecessor technology in his 2004
essay "What's Louder than Loud? The Auxetophone": "Was the Auxetophone
loud? It was painfully loud." For a more detailed report of
Auxetophone-induced discomfort, see The Auxetophone and Other
Compressed-Air Gramophones.
6. ↑ Altman (2005), p. 158–165.
7. ↑ Eyman (1997), pp. 30–31.
8. ↑ Gomery (1985), pp. 54–55.
9. ↑ Erik Magnus Cambell [sic] Tigerstedt entry in Föreningen Svenskt
Filmljud; A Country That Innovates essay by Kari Sipilä, part of the
Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland's Virtual Finland website. See
also A. M. Pertti Kuusela, E.M.C Tigerstedt "Suomen Edison"
(Insinööritieto Oy: 1981).
10. ↑ Sponable (1947), part 2.
11. ↑ Crafton (1997), pp. 51–52; Moone (2004); Łotysz (2006). Note that
Crafton and Łotysz describe the demonstration as taking place at an AIEE
conference. Moone, writing for the journal of the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, says
the audience was "members of the Urbana chapter of the American Institute
of Electrical Engineers."
12. ↑ The information on the April 1923 Phonofilms screening contained in the
main text is per the majority of available sources. A minority of sources
claim, variously, that (a) the date was April 1, (b) the venue was the
Rialto Theater, and/or (c) the feature, Bella Donna, had sound. The best
piece of evidence in support of the majority description is the
contemporary New York Times review of Bella Donna, which appeared on April
16 and which makes no reference to the film having any recorded sound at
all.
13. ↑ A few sources indicate that the film was released in 1923, but the two
most recent authoritative histories that discuss the film—Crafton (1997),
p. 66; Hijiya (1992), p. 103—both give 1924. It is generally accepted that
De Forest recorded a synchronized musical score for director Fritz Lang's
Siegfried (1924) when it arrived in the United States the year after its
German debut—which would make it the first feature film with synchronized
sound throughout—but seemingly no two sources agree on when the recording
took place or if the film was ever actually presented with synch-sound.
The August 24, 1925, New York Times review of Siegfried, following its
apparent American premiere at New York City's Century Theater the night
before, describes a live orchestra performing the score. The De Forest
recording was likely made then.
14. ↑ Quoted in Lasky (1989), p. 20.
15. ↑ Low (1997a), p. 203; Low (1997b), p. 183.
16. ↑ Crisp (1997), pp. 97–98; Crafton (1997), pp. 419–420.
17. ↑ See Freeman Harrison Owens (1890–1979) entry in the Encyclopedia of
Arkansas History and Culture. A number of sources erroneously state that
Owens's and/or the Tri-Ergon patents were essential to the creation of the
Fox-Case Movietone system.
18. ↑ Sponable (1947), part 4.
19. ↑ Bradley (1996), p. 4; Gomery (2005), p. 29. Crafton (1997) misleadingly
implies that Griffith's film had not previously been exhibited
commercially before its sound-enhanced premiere. He also misidentifies
Ralph Graves as Richard Grace (p. 58).
20. ↑ File:HisPastimes.jpg

Roy Smeck performing on the ukelele in the Vitaphone sound short His
Pastimes (1926).

The eight musical shorts were Caro Nome, An Evening on the Don, La Fiesta,
His Pastimes, The Kreutzer Sonata, Mischa Elman, Overture "Tannhäuser",
and Vesti La Giubba.
21. ↑ Motion Picture Sound 1910–1929 and Sound Recording Research at Bell Labs
detailed chronologies; part of Steven E. Schoenherr's Recording Technology
History resource.
22. ↑ Gomery (2005), pp. 42, 50. See also Motion Picture Sound 1910–1929,
perhaps the best online source for details on these developments, though
here it fails to note that Fox's original deal for the Western Electric
technology involved a sublicensing arrangement.
23. ↑ Gomery (2005), p. 51.
24. ↑ Lasky (1989), pp. 21–22.
25. ↑ Glancy (1995), p. 4 [online]. The previous highest-grossing Warner Bros.
film was Don Juan, which Glancy notes earned $1.693 million, foreign and
domestic. Historian Douglas Crafton (1997) seeks to downplay the "total
domestic gross income" of The Jazz Singer, $1.97 million (p. 528), but
that figure alone would have constituted a record for the studio.
Crafton's claim that The Jazz Singer "was in a distinct second or third
tier of attractions compared to the most popular films of the day and even
other Vitaphone talkies" (p. 529) offers a skewed perspective. While the
movie was no match for the half-dozen biggest hits of the decade, the
available evidence suggests that it was one of the three highest-earning
films released in 1927 and that overall its performance was comparable to
the other two, The King of Kings and Wings. It is undisputed that its
total earnings were more than double those of the next four Vitaphone
talkies; the first three of which, according to Glancy's analysis of
in-house Warner Bros. figures, "earned just under $1,000,000 each", and
the fourth, Lights of New York, a quarter-million more.
26. ↑ Crafton (1997), p. 148.
27. ↑ Crafton (1997), p. 140.
28. ↑ Hirschhorn (1979), pp. 59, 60.
29. ↑ Glancy (1995), pp. 4–5. Schatz (1998) says the production cost of Lights
of New York totaled $75,000 (p. 64). Even if this number is accurate, the
rate of return was still over 1,600%.
30. ↑ Robertson (2001), p. 180.
31. ↑ Crafton (1997) describes the term's derivation: "The skeptical press
disparigingly referred to these [retrofitted films] as 'goat
glands'...from outrageous cures for impotency practiced in the 1920s,
including restorative elixers, tonics, and surgical procedures. It implied
that producers were trying to put some new life into their old films" (pp.
168–169).
32. ↑ The first official releases from RKO (which produced only all-talking
pictures) appeared still later in the year, but after the October 1928
merger that created it, the company put out a number of talkies produced
by its FBO constituent.
33. ↑ Crafton (1997), pp. 169–171, 253–254.
34. ↑ In 1931, two Hollywood studios would release special projects without
spoken dialogue (now customarily classified as "silents"): Charles
Chaplin's City Lights (United Artists) and F. W. Murnau and Robert
Flaherty's Tabu (Paramount). The last totally silent feature produced in
the United States for general distribution was The Poor Millionaire,
released by Biltmore Pictures in April 1930. Four other silent features,
all low-budget Westerns, were also released in 1930 (Robertson [2001], p.
173).
35. ↑ As Thomas J. Saunders (1994) reports, it premiered the same month in
Berlin, but as a silent. "Not until June 1929 did Berlin experience the
sensation of sound as New York had in 1927—a premiere boasting dialogue
and song": The Singing Fool (p. 224). In Paris, The Jazz Singer had its
sound premiere in January 1929 (Crisp [1997], p. 101).
36. ↑ Low (1997a), p. 191.
37. ↑ How the Pictures Learned to Talk: The Emergence of German Sound Film
historical survey; part of the filmportal.de website.
38. ↑ Low (1997a), pp. 178, 203–205; Low (1997b), p. 183; Der Rote Kreis
Deutsches Filminstitut entry; Crafton (1997), pp. 432. Note also that
IMDb.com incorrectly refers to Der Rote Kreis/The Crimson Circle as a
British International Pictures (BIP) coproduction (it also spells Zelnik's
first name "Frederic"). The authentic BIP production Kitty is sometimes
included among the candidates for "first British talkie." In fact, the
film was produced and premiered as a silent for its original 1928 release.
The stars later came to New York to record dialogue, with which the film
was rereleased in June 1929, after much better credentialed candidates.
See sources cited above.
39. ↑ Quoted in Spoto (1984), p. 136.
40. ↑ Wagenleitner (1994), p. 253; Robertson (2001), p. 10.
41. ↑ Jelavich (2006), pp. 215–216; Crafton (1997), p. 595, n. 59.
42. ↑ Crisp (1997), p. 103; Epinay ville du cinéma part of the
Epinay-sur-Seine municipal website; Le Collier de la reine All Movie Guide
description by Hal Erickson; Le cinéma français en 1930 chronology also
covering 1929; part of the Cine-studies website. In his 2002 book Genre,
Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press), Crisp says that Le Collier de la reine was "'merely'
sonorized, not dialogued" (p. 381), but all other available detailed
descriptions (including his own from 1997) mention a dialogue sequence.
Note also that Crisp gives October 31 as the debut date of Les Trois
masques and Cine-studies gives its release ("sortie") date as November 2.
Note finally, where Crisp defines in Genre, Myth, and Convention a
"feature" as being a minimum of sixty minutes long, this article follows
the equally common, and Wikipedia-prevalent, standard of forty minutes or
longer.
43. ↑ Crisp (1997), p. 103.
44. ↑ Chapman (2003), p. 82; Chronomedia: 1929 chronology of media
developments during the year—part of the Terra Media website.
45. ↑ See the January 25, 1930, New York Times review for a description.
46. ↑ Carné (1932), p. 105.
47. ↑ Haltof (2002), p. 24.
48. ↑ See Nichols and Bazzoni (1995), p. 98, for a description of La Canzone
dell'amore and its premiere.
49. ↑ According to Il Cinema Ritrovato, the program for XXI Mostra
Internazionale del Cinema Libero (Bologna; November 22–29, 1992), the film
was shot in Paris. According to the IMDb entry on the film, it was a
Czech-German coproduction. The two claims are not necessarily
contradictory. According to the Czech-Slovak Film Database, it was shot as
a silent film in Germany. Per CSFD, soundtracks for Czech, German, and
French versions were then recorded at the Gaumont studio in the Paris
suburb of Joinville.
50. ↑ File:AcabaramSeOsOtariosAd1.jpg

Poster for Acabaram-se os otários (1929), performed in Portuguese. The
first Brazilian talkie was also the first anywhere in an Iberian language.

See Robertson (2001), pp. 10–14. Robertson claims Switzerland produced its
first talkie in 1930, but it has not been possible to independently
confirm this. The first talkies from Finland, Hungary, Norway, Portugal,
and Turkey appeared in 1931, the first talkies from Ireland
(English-language) and Spain and the first in Slovak in 1932, the first
Dutch talkie in 1933, and the first Bulgarian talkie in 1934. In the
Americas, the first Canadian talkie came out in 1929—North of '49 was a
remake of the previous year's silent His Destiny. The first Brazilian
talkie, Acabaram-se os otários (The End of the Simpletons), also appeared
in 1929. That year, as well, the first Yiddish talkies were produced in
New York: East Side Sadie (originally a silent), followed by Ad Mosay (The
Eternal Prayer) (Crafton [1997], p. 414). Sources differ on whether Más
fuerte que el deber, the first Mexican (and Spanish-language) talkie, came
out in 1930 or 1931. The first Argentine talkie appeared in 1931 and the
first Chilean talkie in 1934. Robertson asserts that the first Cuban
feature talkie was a 1930 production called El Caballero de Max; every
other published source surveyed cites La Serpiente roja (1937).
Nineteen-thirty-one saw the first talkie produced on the African
continent: South Africa's Mocdetjie, in Afrikaans. Egypt's Arabic
Onchoudet el Fouad (1932) and Morocco's French-language Itto (1934)
followed.
51. ↑ Several sources name Zemlya zhazhdet (The Earth Is Thirsty), directed by
Yuli Raizman, as the first Soviet sound feature. Originally produced and
premiered as a silent in 1930, it was rereleased with a non-talking,
music-and-effects soundtrack the following year.
52. ↑ Crisp (1997), p. 101; Crafton (1997), p. 155.
53. ↑ Crisp (1997), p. 101–102.
54. ↑ Kenez (2001), p. 123.
55. ↑ Burch (1979), pp. 145–146. Note that Burch misdates Madamu to nyobo as
1932. He also incorrectly claims that Ozu Yasujiro and Naruse Mikio made
no sound films before 1936. In fact, Ozu's Hakoiri musume (An Innocent
Maid, aka The Young Virgin) and Naruse's Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Wife! Be
Like a Rose!), both acclaimed talking features, were produced and released
in 1935.
56. ↑ Anderson and Richie (1982), p. 77.
57. ↑ Freiberg (1987), p. 76.
58. ↑ Quoted in Freiberg (1987), p. 76.
59. ↑ A Page of Madness (1927) interview with Mariann Lewinsky by Jasper
Sharp, March 7, 2002; part of the Midnight Eye website.
60. ↑ See Freiburg (2000), "The Film Industry."
61. ↑ Quoted in Chatterji (1999), "The History of Sound."
62. ↑ Reade (1981), pp. 79–80.
63. ↑ Chronomedia: 1930; The Early Talkie part of the Film City website.
64. ↑ Pradeep (2006); Narasimham (2006); Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (2002), p.
254; Tamil Cinema History—The Early Days: 1916–1936 part of the IndoLink
Tamil Cinema website.
65. ↑ Chapman (2003), p. 328; Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (2002), p. 255;
Chatterji (1999), "The First Sound Films"; Bhuyan (2006), "Alam Ara:
Platinum Jubilee of Sound in Indian Cinema." In March 1934 came the
release of the first Kannada talking picture, Sathi Sulochana (Guy
[2004]); Bhakta Dhruva (aka Dhruva Kumar) was released soon after, though
it was actually completed first (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen [2002], pp.
258, 260). A few websites refer to the 1932 version of Heer Ranjha as the
first Punjabi talkie; the most reliable sources all agree, however, that
it is performed in Hindustani. The first Punjabi-language film is Pind di
Kuri (aka Sheila; 1935). The first Assamese-language film, Joymati, also
came out in 1935. Many websites echo each other in dating the first Oriya
talkie, Sita Bibaha, as 1934, but the most authoritative and most detailed
sources to definitively date it both give 1936 (Chapman [2003], p. 328;
"Sita Bibaha: The First Oriya Cellulolid Romance" essay by Saswat
Pattanayak—part of the Ornet Archives discussion list). The Rajadhyaksha
and Willemen (2002) entry gives "1934?" (p. 260).
66. ↑ Lai (2000), "The Cantonese Arena."
67. ↑ "Korean Cinema and Hollywood" essay by Oh Sungji; "Formation of Korean
Film Industry Under Japanese Occupation" essay by Noh Kwang-Woo.
68. ↑ Millard (2005), p. 189.
69. ↑ Bordwell (1985), pp. 300–301, 302.
70. ↑ Bordwell and Thompson (1995), p. 124; Bordwell (1985), pp. 301, 302.
Note that Bordwell's assertion in the earlier text, "Until the late 1930s,
the post-dubbing of voices gave poor fidelity, so most dialogue was
recorded direct" (p. 302), refers to a 1932 source. His later (coauthored)
description, which refers to the viability of looping in 1935, appears to
replace the earlier one, as it should: in fact, then and now, "most" movie
dialogue is recorded direct.
71. ↑ See Bernds (1999), part 1.
72. ↑ See Crafton (1997), pp. 142–145.
73. ↑ Crafton (1997), p. 435.
74. ↑ "Outcome of Paris" (1930).
75. ↑ File:USN16mmSoundtrack.jpg

Example of a variable-area sound track—the width of the white area is
proportional to the amplitude of the audio signal at each instant.

Crafton (1997), p. 160.
76. ↑ Thomson (1998), p. 732.
77. ↑ See Crafton (1997), pp. 461, 491, 498–501, 508.
78. ↑ Brooks (1956).
79. ↑ See Dardis (1980), pp. 190–191, for an analysis of the profitability of
Keaton's early sound films.
80. ↑ American Federation of Musicians/History "1927 – With the release of the
first 'talkie,' The Jazz Singer, orchestras in movie theaters were
displaced. The AFM had its first encounter with wholesale unemployment
brought about by technology. Within three years, 22,000 theater jobs for
musicians who accompanied silent movies were lost, while only a few
hundred jobs for musicians performing on soundtracks were created by the
new technology. 1928 – While continuing to protest the loss of jobs due to
the use of 'canned music' with motion pictures, the AFM set minimum wage
scales for Vitaphone, Movietone and phonograph record work. Because
synchronizing music with pictures for the movies was particularly
difficult, the AFM was able to set high prices for this work."
81. ↑ Hubbard (1985), p. 429.
82. ↑ "Canned Music on Trial" part of Duke University's Ad*Access project. The
text of the ad continues:

> Is Music Worth Saving?
> No great volume of evidence is required to answer this question. Music
> is a well-nigh universally beloved art. From the beginning of history,
> men have turned to musical expression to lighten the burdens of life, to
> make them happier. Aborigines, lowest in the scale of savagery, chant
> their song to tribal gods and play upon pipes and shark-skin drums.
> Musical development has kept pace with good taste and ethics throughout
> the ages, and has influenced the gentler nature of man more powerfully
> perhaps than any other factor. Has it remained for the Great Age of
> Science to snub the Art by setting up in its place a pale and feeble
> shadow of itself?
> American Federation of Musicians (Comprising 140,000 musicians in the
> United States and Canada), Joseph N. Weber, President. Broadway, New
> York City.

83. ↑ Oderman (2000), p. 188.
84. ↑ "Talking Movies" (1926).
85. ↑ Gomery (1985), pp. 66–67. Gomery describes the difference in profits
simply between 1928 and 1929, but it seems clear from the figures cited
that he is referring to the fiscal years that ended September 30. The
fiscal year roughly paralleled (but was still almost a month off from) the
traditional Hollywood programming year—the prime exhibition season began
the first week of September with Labor Day and ran through Memorial Day at
the end of May; this was followed by a fourteen-week "open season", when
films with minimal expectations were released and many theaters shut down
for the hot summer months. See Crafton (1997), pp. 183, 268.
86. ↑ Finler (1988), p. 34.
87. ↑ Segrave (1997) gives the figures as 282 million feet in 1929 compared to
222 million feet the year before (p. 79). Incredibly, Crafton (1997)
reports the new mark this way: "Exports in 1929 set a new record:
282,215,480 feet (against the old record of 9,000,000 feet in 1919)" (p.
418). What old record? In 1913, for instance, the U.S. exported 32 million
feet of exposed film (Segrave [1997], p. 65). Note also that Crafton says
of the 1929 exports, "Of course, most of this footage was silent," though
he provides no figures (p. 418). In contrast, if not necessarily
contradiction, Segrave points to the following: "At the very end of 1929
the New York Times reported that most U.S. talkies went abroad as
originally created for domestic screening" (p. 77).
88. ↑ File:AllQuietWesternFrontPosterA.jpg

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on the novel by Erich Maria
Remarque, was the first American sound film to win near-universal critical
praise. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Eckes and Zeiler (2003), p. 102.
89. ↑ Jewell (1982), p. 9.
90. ↑ Schatz (1998), p. 70.
91. ↑ Quoted in Ganti (2004), p. 11.
92. ↑ Ganti (2004), p. 11.
93. ↑ Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (2002), p. 254; Joshi (2003), p. 14.
94. ↑ Guy (2004); Tamil Cinema History—The Early Days: 1916–1936.
95. ↑ Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (2002), pp. 30, 32.
96. ↑ Quoted in Agate (1972), p. 82.
97. ↑ Quoted in Chapman (2003), p. 93.
98. ↑ Time Out Film Guide (2000), pp. x–xi (top 100 poll conducted in 1995);
Village Voice: 100 Best Films of the 20th Century (2001) posted on the
filmsite.org website; Sight and Sound Top Ten Poll 2002 listing all 60
films to receive five or more votes.
99. ↑ Ebert (2002), p. 277.
100. ↑ Bazin (1967), p. 155.
101. ↑ Quoted in Kenez (2001), p. 123.
102. ↑ Eisenstein (1928), p. 259.
103. ↑ There is disagreement on the running time of the film. The Deutsches
Filminstitut's webpage on the film gives 48 minutes; the 35 Millimeter
website's entry gives 40 minutes. According to filmportal.de, it is "some
40 minutes."
104. ↑ Moritz (2003), p. 25.
105. ↑ Quoted in Dibbets (1999), pp. 85–86.
106. ↑ Quoted in Dibbets (1999), p. 85.
107. ↑ See Spoto (1984), pp. 132–133; Truffaut (1984), pp. 63–65.
108. ↑ Milne (1980), p. 659. See also Crafton (1997), pp. 334–338.
109. ↑ Agate (1972), p. 98.
110. ↑ Crafton (1997), p. 377.
111. ↑ Quoted in Bordwell (1985), p. 298. See also Bordwell and Thompson
(1995), p. 125.

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EXTERNAL LINKS[]

* "Documentary and the Coming of Sound" essay on the impact of synch-sound on
nonfiction film by scholar Bill Nichols
* Edison: The Marriage of Sight and Sound brief discussion of Edison's
experiments; part of the Library of Congress/Inventing Entertainment website
* Film Sound History well-organized bibliography of online articles and
resources; part of the FilmSound website
* Hollywood Goes for Sound charts showing transition to sound production by
Hollywood studios, 1928–1929; part of the Terra Media website
* "Hollywood Learns to Sing" essay on early film musicals by John Kenrick
* "Let's Hear It for Sound" essay on the positive effects of sound on cinema
technology by Bob Allen
* "Moving Pictures That Talk" essay by audio engineer and historian Mark Ulano
* 100 Years of Cinema Loudspeakers detailed chronology by John Aldred
* Progressive Silent Film List (PSFL)/Early Sound Films comprehensive and
detailed listing of first generation of sound films from around the world;
part of the Silent Era website
* Recording Technology History extensive chronology of developments, including
subsites, by Steven E. Schoenherr; see, in particular, Motion Picture Sound
* A Selected Bibliography of Sound and Music for Moving Pictures compiled by
Miguel Mera, Royal College of Music, London; part of the School of Sound
website
* The Silent Film Bookshelf links to crucial primary and secondary source
documents, a number of which cover the era of transition to sound
* "The Sound of Sound" essay on theatrical sound reproduction by historian Rick
Altman
* Sound Stage—The History of Motion Picture Sound informative illustrated
survey; part of the American WideScreen Museum website
* The Speed of Sound chapter 1 of book by historian Scott Eyman; excerpt
focuses on developments through the mid-1920s
* Vitaphone Varieties essays by amateur motion picture historian Jeff Cohen on
the system and the films made with it
* "Why The Jazz Singer?" essay speculating on the basic source of the film's
impact by Bob Allen (note that Allen erroneously describes The Jazz Singer as
"one of the big box office hits of all time"—it was not)
* "'You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet, Folks—Listen to This!': The Sound that Shook
Hollywood" article on the transition to sound by historian Guy Flatley; part
of the MovieCrazed website

HISTORICAL WRITINGS[]

* "The Art of Sound" May 1929 essay by filmmaker and critic René Clair
* "Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film" 1934 essay by filmmaker and
theorist V. I. Pudovkin
* "Dialogue and Sound" essay by film historian and critic Siegfried Kracauer;
first published in his book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical
Reality (1960)
* "The Film to Come" essay by producer and composer Guido Bagier; first
published in Film-Kurier, January 7, 1928
* Handbook for Projectionists technical manual covering all major U.S. systems;
issued by RCA Photophone, 1930
* "Historical Development of Sound Films" chronology by sound-film pioneer E.
I. Sponable; first published in Journal of the Society of Motion Picture
Engineers, April/May 1947
* "Madam, Will You Talk?" article on the history of Bell Laboratories' early
research into sound film, by Stanley Watkins, Western Electric engineer;
first published in Bell Laboratories Record, August 1946
* "Merger of the Sound Film Industry—The Founding Agenda of Tobis" corporate
manifesto first published in Film-Kurier, July 20, 1928
* "The Official Communiqué: Foundations of the Sound-Film Accord Sales
Prospects for the German Electronics Industry" article first published in
Film-Kurier, July 23, 1930
* Operating Instructions for Synchronous Reproducing Equipment technical manual
for Western Electric theatrical sound projector system; issued by ERPI,
December 1928
* "Outcome of Paris: Accord Signed/Total Interchangeability—Globe Divided into
Three Patent Zones—Patent Exchange" article first published in Film-Kurier,
July 22, 1930
* "The Singing Fool" review by film theorist and critic Rudolf Arnheim, ca.
1929
* "Sound-Film Confusion" 1929 essay by Rudolf Arnheim
* "Sound Here and There" essay by composer Paul Dessau; first published in Der
Film, August 1, 1929
* "Sound in Films" essay by director Alberto Cavalcanti; first published in
Films, November 1939
* "A Statement" polemic arguing for contrapuntal use of cinematic sound by
Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and G. V. Alexandrov;
first published in Zhizn iskusstva (Life of the Art), August 5, 1928
* "Theory of the Film: Sound" 1945 essay by film theorist and critic Béla
Balázs
* "What Radio Has Meant to Talking Movies" prescient essay by Universal sound
engineer Charles Feldstead; first published in Radio News, April 1931

HISTORICAL RECORDINGS[]

* Ben Bernie and All the Lads excerpts from ca. 1924 Phonofilm sound film; part
of The Red Hot Jazz Archive website
* Dickson Experimental Sound Film discussion by restoration editor Walter Murch
and clips of 1894/95 Edison sound film
* A Few Minutes With Eddie Cantor 1924 Phonofilm sound film; part of
Archive.org
* President Coolidge, Taken on the White House Lawn 1924 Phonofilm sound film;
part of Archive.org
* Sound-on-Film brief discussion accompanied by Quicktime version of 1930s Bell
Labs cartoon describing the process, with available transcript; part of the
IEEE Virtual Museum website
* Voice Trial—Kinetophone Actor Audition by Frank Lenord mp3 audio file of
undated audition
* Voice Trial—Kinetophone Actor Audition by Siegfried Von Schultz mp3 audio
file of undated audition

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