1) The document discusses how differences in early sound technologies between France and the US helped shape their distinct national film styles.
2) It explains that while both emphasized synchronizing sound and image, the US focused on intelligible dialogue while France emphasized reproducing live performances.
3) This led France to prefer direct sound recording while the US abandoned it by 1932 in favor of assembling scenes from separate audio and visual elements.
1) The document discusses how differences in early sound technologies between France and the US helped shape their distinct national film styles.
2) It explains that while both emphasized synchronizing sound and image, the US focused on intelligible dialogue while France emphasized reproducing live performances.
3) This led France to prefer direct sound recording while the US abandoned it by 1932 in favor of assembling scenes from separate audio and visual elements.
Original Description:
Cinema's Conversion to Sound
Technology and Film Style in France and the US
Charles O'Brien
1) The document discusses how differences in early sound technologies between France and the US helped shape their distinct national film styles.
2) It explains that while both emphasized synchronizing sound and image, the US focused on intelligible dialogue while France emphasized reproducing live performances.
3) This led France to prefer direct sound recording while the US abandoned it by 1932 in favor of assembling scenes from separate audio and visual elements.
1) The document discusses how differences in early sound technologies between France and the US helped shape their distinct national film styles.
2) It explains that while both emphasized synchronizing sound and image, the US focused on intelligible dialogue while France emphasized reproducing live performances.
3) This led France to prefer direct sound recording while the US abandoned it by 1932 in favor of assembling scenes from separate audio and visual elements.
The passage discusses how differences in early sound technologies between France and the US helped shape their distinct national film styles. France preferred direct sound recording of performances, while the US moved towards assembling scenes from separate audio and video recordings.
France often used multiple microphones placed around the set to capture ambient sound, while the US standardized the single-directional microphone method to focus on dialogue intelligibility. This facilitated dubbing films for international release.
The single-microphone method in Hollywood isolated dialogue onto a separate track for post-production mixing and ensured a coherent story world. In France, multiple microphones were used to capture the spatial characteristics of the recording environment.
Ci nema' s Conversi on to Sound
Technology and Film Style in France and the US
Charles O' Brien /n these excerpts from his book O'Brien gives a detoiled occount of how dtfferences beLween eorly sound technologues helped shope the noilonol film styles of the US ond Fronce. lntroduction: National Cinema after Recorded Sound The conversion to sound cinema is commonly characterised as a homogenising process that quickly and significantly reduced the cinema' s diversiry of film styles and practices. The analysis in this book offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sound' s impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies' traditional, exclusive concern with the film image, the investigation here centres on national differences in sound- image recording practices. Through an analysis.iuxtaposing French and American filmmaking, the following investigation reveals the aesthetic consequences of fundamental national differences in how sound technologies were understood and used - differences that endure today, distinguishing French and American films from each other, and also setting apart French and American films from the films of India, ltaly, and other countries. Such differences can be located in basic aesthetic and technical norms. The American and French cinemas, in contrast to numerous other national cinemas, place a strong emphasis on a tight synchronisation of the actors' voices with their images. At the same time, the American and French cinemas also differ from each other in important respects. Most fundamentally, whereas the emphasis in 1930s Hollywood was on sound' s intelligibility within a film' s story-world, French filmmaking implies an alternative model, whereby sound serves to reproduce a performance staged for recording. This difference found its fundamental technical manifestation in the French preference for son direct - the recording of sound simultaneously with the image. In the United States, simultaneous sound-image recording, except for dialogue, was largely abandoned by 1932. Instead of the recording of actors' performances, sound-film work in 1930s Hollywood was under- stood in terms of a process of assembly, whereby scenes were constructed from separate bits and pieces - shot by shot, track by track. In France, sound cinema developed differently, according to a recording-based conception, whereby scenes were understood as the reproduction of actors' and singers' performances. Symptomatic of the national difference was the French cinema's divergence technically from the American cinema, with the standardisation of 're-recording' and other multi-track techniques occurring in France only in the 1940s, during the German occupation - a decade later than in Hollywood. Moreover, even then, direct sound remained unusually common in French filmmaking. Foundational for the subsequent history of sound-film practices were developments during the 1950s and 1960s, when, with the film-industrial adaptation of magnetic sound, direct- sound methods came to define the work of certain of the most important alternative filmmakers of the time. From Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet to Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Jean Eustache, filmmakers in France during the 1950s and 1960s, while wod<ing with new portable technologies, experimented with direct-sound techniques familiar to the national cinema of the 1930s, In the decades since, direct sound has endured in French filmmaking to the point of defining the national film style. According to Larousse' s Dicuonnoire du cin5mo (1986), "The French cinema, if it often resorts to a partial Postsynchronisation for practical reasons, retains a preference in principle for direct sound." As during the 1930s, direct sound is believed to enable superior performances from actors. Chion observes, regarding French film practice in the 1990s: "Most French directors persist, as much as possible, in preferring direct sound, which they regard as more authentic and honest with regard to actors' performances. Thus, they post-synchronise only scenes that seem inaudible, or whose conditions of shooting prohibited the possibility of an acceptable direct recording." The analysis in this book explores direct sound in France as the fundamental national film technique - the filmmaking method that has distinguished the French cinema stylistically from other national cinemas, beginning during the conversion years and continuing, in one form or another, up through the present. In the remaining pages of this introduction, the book's investigation into sound' s significance for the history of national film style is outlined in three stages. Firsl key issues are raised concerning the effects of sound-era technological change on film style, with a focus on the familiar notion that film style became homogenised worldwide during the | 930s. Second, I explain briefly how research for the book evolved, and how the focus on sound-film technology and style required reconceptualisation of French cinema history through (l) an examination of mainstream film-industry Practice, and (2) an explicitly comparative study of the French cinema relative to the American cinema. Finally, a chapter-by-chapter breakdown presents the ideas and arguments of each chapter corresponding to issues in this introduction. SoundTechnology' s lmpact on Film Art With synch-sound films offering a moviegoing experience notably different from that of "silent" films, the impact of synchronous sound's introduction to cinema was sufficiently powerful to draw strong responses from critics, both for and against. Regardless of these various judgments, there was no question concerning the radical nature of the change wrought by synchronous sound on films as art and entertainment. Synchronous sound was not simply an extra feature that supplemented the film image; it wholly transformed the phenomenology of film. Although attemPts to link motion pictures and phonographs dated from the late I 9th century the new sound films, with their powerful electronic amplification and, in the case of films with optical soundtrack, their lock-t'lght synchronisation, impressed viewers as absolutely novel. Essential in this regard was the strong sense of the clariry and immediacy of actors' performances enabled by electronic sound recording and THE SCHOOL OF SOUND reproduction, with its vastly expanded frequency range. ln the United States, the film industryt conversion had been motivated by the goal of producing sound films as low-cost substitutes for live musical, stage, and radio acts. A salient feature of these films was their simulation of the experience of the popular stage, the concert hall, and the radio broadcast. Many of the first sound films looked like recordings of stage and radio routines, and film critics were often disparaging. In contrast to the "poetic" transcendence of the everyday associated with auteur films of the silent era, synchronous sound seemed limited to the brute reproduction of pedormances originating in other media. Prominent commentators, including Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Erich von Stroheim, Ren6 Clair, Fernand Leger, and Luigi Pirandello, spoke for many in the artjstic community in characterising sound cinema as a recording medium rather than an art form." The sound cinema' s capacity for recording was indeed impressive. Like the first motion pictures of the 1890s, the sound films of the late 1920s offered a unique perceptual experience, manifest in a fascinating enlargement of aspects of everyday phenomenal life that ordinarily went unnoticed. Foremost here were the revelatory effects of electronic sound technology on the human voice . In France, critics coined the term "phonogdnie" to refer to aspects of an actor's voice that became evident only when electronically recorded and reproduced. As one critic observed, ' A recorded voice is no longer an ordinary human voice but an articulated sound, endowed with powers, properties, and faculties of expression that we had not known, while also deprived of certain of its former qualities." In light of its singular capacity to reveal the fullness of phenomenal experience, to suggest a co-presence between viewer and actori sound cinema was frequently discussed in connection with developments pending in film colour, 3-D, and television - all heralded as contributions to humankindt ever-growing mimetic capabilicy. But just as the association with "realism" ensured sound cinema' s status as a technological achievement, it served to exclude it from the realm of arc. Rather than transforming reality into art, sound films made ordinary reality salient in unexpected ways. lf sound films displayed artistry it was in the recording of stage derived art, rather than in creating art unique to cinema. Thus, as the cinema' s conversion unfolded, silent films began to appear in a new context. Now juxtaposed against the new, astonishingly realistic sound films, silent films began to acquire the historicity associated with wodcs of art. By the mid- 1930s, film archives and cinemathdques, devoted to film preservation and restoration, were founded in Europe and in the United States, thus laying foundations for subsequent film historiography. The emergent sound cinema cast retrospective light on the cinema' s past, to the point that the distinction between silent and sound film as understood today must be seen as a product of the changes wrought by the film industry's conversion. An indication of sound technology' s challenge to the idea of film as art can be found in a basic continuity in historical writings on the early sound period. The essential concern of much of this writing has been filmmakers' attempts to overcome the aesthetic limitations imposed by new technologies. For instance, to cite one prominent tendency, film-history surveys, since the 1930s, have emphasized the success of gifted directors - such as Rouben Mamoulian, Fritz Lang, Ren6 Clair, King Vidor', and Ernst Lubitsch - in harnessing sound technologies artistically. ln these accounts, the heroic protagonists are exceptional arcists who enabled the triumph of film art over advanced technology's resistance to aesthetic purposes. In recent decades, an alternative, academic historiography of film has situated the heroic achievements of extraordinary directors within the effects of broad, long-term industrial trends on film practice. Thus, in contemporary scholarly studies of sound conversion, the focus is on a relatively impersonal techno-industrial process, whereby synchronous sound is redefined; from its initial status as a wondrous technical novelty, synchronous sound has come to function as another narrative film technigue - comparable to mainstream approaches to editing, cinematography and mise-en-scene. ln any case, whether examined in terms of the achievements of exceptional aftists or as an anonymous film- industrial process, conversion is widely seen as a development whereby sound technology was eventually brought into the fold of an aesthetic project unique to cinema. The histories of earlier technologies of representation can likewise be understood in terms of the technologies' assimilation to artistic purpose, as has been the case with photography, the phonograph, and motion pictures of the 1890s - all of which contributed to as well as transformed the domain of art in ways that the technologies' inventors, as well as earlier user groups, could not have imagined. lf the case of sound cinema seems unique, it is perhaps in the rapid, unidirectional nature of conversion and the uniformity of its impact worldwide. Rather than opening up aesthetic possibilities - as new technologies are sometimes credited with doing (eg magnetic-tape recorders circa 1960) - synchronous sound, a big-business monopoly, seemed to close them down, raising costs, mechanising the studios and laboratories, and ultimately rendering the cinema less rather than more varied stylistically. Moreovel the reduction in diversity appears to have occurred globally. By the mid-1930s, the majority of the world' s films, regardless of where they had been made, came to exhibit the same basic conventions of film narration and style - the same sort of character-driven plots; linear, cause-and-effect successions of scenes; and continuity editing. Even the Soviet Union, famous during the 1920s for the radical montage experiments of Sergei Eisenstein, V. L Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, and other filmmaker- theorists, began producing conventional, character-centred narrative films by the mid- 1930s. The French cinema provides a particularly dramatic case in this regard, given the impressive field of styles that defined French filmmaking in the years prior to conversion. Paris, where the French film industry was based, functioned during the 1920s as one of the world's major film capitals. France was a favored destination for 6migr6 artists and was unusually receptive to the notion of film as art, with an abundance of cin6-clubs, film journals, and arthouse theatres. Moreover, in contrast to the situation in the United States, where a single, "classical" film style reigned as the industrywide norm (with established exceptions, such as slapstick comedy), the French film industry with its fragmented production sectoq produced films exemplifing a more profound stylistic diversity. Whereas institutionally integrated Hollywood was known for its capacity to assimilate international aesthetic and technical influences into a single trademark style, the French cinemas sprawling variety of small producers opened out onto a field of multiple styles, some jostling in self-conscious rivalry with others. These styles encompassed the impressionism and cin6grophie identified with directors such as Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, and Marcel l- Herbier: who pioneered modernist forms of cinematographic "writing"; an indigenous European classicism, familiar, for instance, in the serials dlrected by Louis Feuillade, defined by long takes and a deep-staged mise-en-scdne; local, piecemeal adaptations of Hollywood's editing-based narrative style; and various fringe movemens, ranging from the aostract, music_ based clndmo pur of Henri Chomette, with its uncompromising formalism, to the countercultural surrealism of Luis Bufiuel and its ironic subversion of narrative-film grammar. Compared to this extraordinary range of options, the new sound cinema looked monotonously uniform, as if to confirm that the new technologies permitted only one way of making a film. In France, the effects of the aftistic constraints were dramadc. As film historian Colin Criso puts it, the French cinema of the sound era, with its proliferation of stage-derived scripts and performances, seemed to rest on a rejection of "nine-tenths of the aesthetic possibilities open (to French filmmakers) and regularly practiced in the 1920s.,' Proponents of modernist and avant_garde filmmaking disparaged the evident theatricality of the sound cinema! stage_based scripts, studio seG, long takes, and distant camera positions. Also subject to criticism was the patently theatrical acting, evident, for instance, when actors pedormed as if framed by a stage proscenium, facing an auditorium of fans. Given the many films baseo on stage sources, sound cinema was commonly characterised as a return to the "famous-actors-in-famous-plays,' narrative cinema that modernist and avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s struggled to supercede. No longer the most sophisticated of the arts, French cinema in the sound era looked like a throwback to the filmed theatre of the years prior to World War l, as if the notion of film as a recorded performance had suddenly returned to prominence in France, to permeate the national film industry,s output. Moreove6 the change appeared permanent, as a .,filmed theatre,, approach to sound cinema persisted in the French film industry through the 1930s, nearly a decade later than in Hollywood. As late as 1936, French film actors were said to engage in a theatrical playing style, adopting the theatrical convention of I' oport4, (,,the aside") when "the protagonist suddenly testifies to the public, wink an eye in its direction, or tosses off a phrase as if to confide in it." From the standpoint of the avant_gardist film culture, the new sound cinema, with its many momenG of stage_inspired direct address, exhibited a virtually pre_cinematic characrer. Sound-era commercial pressures were clearly unfavourab le to the cinemas modernist and avant_garde movemenB _ and to independent film production as a whole. For film historian Jean Mitry conversion-era cinema was essentially an industrial rather than an aesthetic phenomenon, and thus, in contrast to the cinema of the 1920s, conversion-era cinema invited analysis in terms of large production companies rather than individuar auteur directors. Beyond the pervasive commercialism of sound_era film culture. the formal properries of the synch-sound image inhibited the development of idiosyncratic, personal styles _ as filmmakers and theorists of the time were well aware. When sound and image were recorded at the same time - as in the highly popular talkies and f/ms porlants ("talking films,') _ certain cinematographic and editing effects familiar to silent-era cinema became difficult or impossible to duplicate. Multiple superimpositions, lens_filtered images, colour tinting and toning, and other cinematographic technigues with tendencies toward two-dimensionality, which had been a hallmark of silent-era cinema, proved incompatible with the phenomenology of the synch-sound film. lnevitably three_ dimensional and relentlessly linear in temporality, synch_sound images entailed a straightforward, naturalistic narration and visual style. As one critic wrote, "The silent film, despice the excess of intertitles, had a power of suggestion, leaving the viewer open ro the realm of dreams. The talking film offers a concrete world (/e fllm porlont precise)." The impact on editing was devastating; in many cases, shots in synch_sound films no longer connected according to established silent_era precedents. Many prominent montage innovations of the 1920s remained feasible in sound film_ making only when the image was post_synchronised. For Abel Gance, Ren6 Clair: Marcel l_Herbier, and other film modernists, the mainstream film-industry approach to synch sound, with its emphasis on direct-recorded speech, counted as a repudiation of the figurative and "poetic" art-house films of the late silent era; hence, the familiar notion that sound cinema,s technical advance had created an aesthetic backslide. Characterisations of the early sound cinema as aesthetically regressive typically approach the period solely from the perspective of the I 920s art cinema. Expanding the context for studying sound film to include not only the silent-era auteur cinema but also cognate media, such as the popular stage, radiq and the phonograph, illuminates the films of the early sound years differently. Cinema during conversion incorporated conventions borrowed from the new electronic media of radio and the electric gr:lmopnone, a! a time when these conventions had just taken form. Thus even in its most commercial aspects, conversion-era cinema was itself highly experimental, and once sound's effects on the image are accounted fo6 can be seen to have exhibited a nearly bewildering diversity stylistically. lt wasn't until the mid- 1930s that sound_film conventions became stabilised, and a single form of classicism began to define film practice worldwide; even then, sound_film practices seen today as alternatives to the mainstream survived throughout the 1930s and into later decades. The aim of this book is to analyse the founding moment in this ongoing history of aesthetic and technical diversity, and also to create a conceptual framework _ via demonstrations of certain research methods and historiographical rules of thumb - that might assist the work of scholars concerned with national cinemas during the sound era, and with questions concerning technology' s impact on cinema generally. ... Shooting and Recording in paris and Hollywood The French cinema' s stylistic distinctiveness relative to the Hollywood cinema is especially evident with respect to practices of shooting and film-sound recording. This distinction can be seen in comparing the fate of the phonographic imperative in the French and American film industries. According to the phonographic imperative, or fidelicy principle, a recording should faithfully reproduce a sound as a witness to the performance can be presumed to have heard it. Foundational for key sound technologies of the late | 9th century, such as Edison' s phonograph ( I g7g) and Berliner' s gramophone (1887), the fidelity principle informed Hollpvood's sound-film practice beginning in l926,with the first Vitaphone and Fox-Movietone productions. By I93 1, howeven following a sustained trial-and-error effort to utilise sound technology in line with Hollywood's silent_era aesthetic and technical norms, the relevance of music-industry standards faded, and the emphasis throughout Hollywood' s studio system shifted away from sound's fidelity to performance and toward its story_ world intelligibility. Thus, in recent scholarship, the US sound conversion has been analysed as an industrywide change from one basic conception of sound-film recording to another. ln France, fidelity-based techniques had a similar overall history but with a different chronology and a more protracted. less linear pattern of change. Fidelity-oriented filmmaking was introduced into the French film industry in 1930, at the beginning of industrial sound-film production in paris, just as it was being phased out in Hollywood. Moreover, fidelity techniques remained THE SCHOOL OF SOUND central to French fllmmaking throughout the 1930s, nearly a full decade later than in Hollywood. lt wasn' t until the | 940s, with the standardisation of the multi-track "psychological realism" of quality cinema, that intelligibility considerations displaced the fidelity norm in France; and even then, the displacement was partial, with fidelity techniques remaining prevalent in French filmmaking. Referring to the French cinema's enduring preference for direct sound, sound engineer Willem Sivel, writing in 1948, claimed that French and American practices continued to exhibit alternative understandings of "a satisfactory use of sound." Hollywood' s Emphasis on Sound' s lntelligibility A notable feature of Hollywood's adaptation of sound technology to classical story-construction norms is how quickly and uniformly it occurred. By early I 93 l, less than five years after the release of the first Vitaphone and Fox-Movietone films, the Hollywood community had substantially revised its approach to film sound. ln a detailed study of Hollywood' s year-by-year output during this time, Donald Crafton identifies the film season of 1930-193 I as the decisive turning point - the year when a new, post-conversion sound style coalesced. Instead of "overt theatrical presentations" d lo the 1926 Vitaphone shorts featuring artists from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to guitarist Roy Smeck ("Wizard of the Strings") or revue musicals such as Poromount on Parode (dir. Charl es de Rochef ort , 1929-1930), t he f i l ms of 1930-193 I exemplified the narrative-defined style familiar to American feature films since the late l9l0s. Variety-show successions of stand- alone songs, dances, and skits gave way to the "integrated musical," with its seamless transitions between "real-wodd" narrative and utopian song-and-dance. By 1933 Hollywood films were routinely accompanied by orchestral scores, written by film-industry composers. Sound-film technique no longer served to foreground self-contained "acts" or performance events but instead to contribute to Hollywood' s established storytelling project. The new, narrative-defined soundtrack with its intermittent orchestral accompaniment, did not evolve naturally from conversion-era precedent but instead was the product of a coordinated effort of technical research and experimentation. In a cooperative proiect sponsored by the major studios, filmmakers and technicians collaborated with technical-support companies to adapt sound technology in conformity to Hollywood' s established approach to film narration. The challenge entailed the unexpected, counter- intuitive revision of established, sound-related assumptions deriving from the music industry and other sound-technological domains, such as those relating to the telephone and other electronic communications. Film personnel confronted awkward problems deriving from the history of the sound technologies, which had been developed entirely outside the film industry in the context of projects whose aim, in one regard or another, was to accurately reproduce an original sound signal. The history of such projects traced back to sound recording's beginnings in the mechanical telegraph of the late lSth century and to more recent phenomena such as the wireless telegraph, long{istance telephone service, public address technology, and military and transport communications such as ship-to-shore radio - endeavours all informed by the goal of the accurate reproduction of a signal. The objectives informing the development of these communications technologies were far from congruent with the project of fiction filmmaking, whose basic technical goal was not to reproduce an original signal but to create the illusion of a coherent fictional wodd. In this contexg considerations of fidelity were largely beside the point. As had been evident throughout the history of narrative cinema, a filmi impression of story-wodd wholeness did not require the reproduction of an extra-filmic reality. ln fact, more often than not, a film's diegetic world amounted to a construction whose impression of coherence rested on technical ruses of one sort or another, from the virtual geography of the eyeline match to showstopping trucdges ("tricks") and special effects, as well as tried and true costcutting methods such astrompe lbeil scenery and day-for-night shooting. In fact, representational accuracy, in some cases, could prove problematic. With respect to sound, for instance, attempts to capture reality sometimes under- mined the story-world illusion, as when the physical presence of the actors, the recording environment, and/or the recording technology itself became overly emphatic. Recall that the evident "liveness" of Al Jofson's direct-recorded performances in lhe lozz Singer allowed critics to claim that Jolson had "played himself " rather than incarnate a fictional character. Essential to Hollywood' s abandonment of the fidelity emphasis were technological developments that freed filmmakers from the need to record sound and image simultaneously. As sound production split off from image production, synchronisation's extraordinary capacity to suggest a causal link between what is seen and what is heard became subject to the filmmakers' control. When isolated onto separate tracks, a sound's phenomenal characteristics were no longer limited to what had happened on the set, at the instant of recording, but could be manipulated after the fact in diverse ways. These manipulations ranged from "filtering" (the use of electronics to cut out the high and,/or low end of the frequency spectrum) to altering the speed of the recording, and included the addition of artificial reverberation, whereby the ratio of direct to reflected sound was augmented through electro-acoustic means. During the 1930s, electronically "weaked" sounds, d /o the post- synchronised honk of Harpo Marx' s horn, became increasingly common on Hollywood soundtracks. Such sounds contributed powerfully to the Hollywood cinemal trademark sense of linearity by simplifying a shot' s effect or meaning, pulling the viewer' s attention toward a single aspect or feature of the image. Most fundamentally, the isolation of sounds onto separate tracks made it possible, simply through volume control, to make sounds seem close or distant, and thus to generate a sense of story-world three-dimensionality. More than simply a modification of existing practice, the shaping of film sound in foreground-background terms signaled a basic shift in aesthetic priorities, whereby the construction of a story-world took absolute precedence, regardless of whether the result accurately reproduced a real-world original. Adopted quickly throughout the studio system, multi-track methods quickly came to define Hollywood' s approach to film sound. By the summer of 1932, even minor studios such as Universal had institutionalised them. In 1933, at Warner Bros - a famously cost- conscious studio - "as many as sixteen separate sound track, each one carefully controlled as to level, perspective and quality, [were used] to make a pleasing composite soundtrack" Since the 1930s and up through the present, a layered, multi-track approach to film sound has defined the Hollpvood cinema relative to other national cinemas. The French Cinema' s Fidelity-based Alternative It is with regard to practices of sound-film recording that the French film industry's divergence from the American film industry is especially evident. Throughout the 1930s, direct sound (son direct), the simultaneous recording of sound and image, was described in the French film trade press as inherently superior to I sound that had been recorded separately and then added to the soundtrack during post-production. By and large, significant movement away from direct recording occurred in France only in l93B and 1939, when techniques of post-synchronisation began to be used in the French studios not only for dubbing but also for purposes of ordinary scene construction. In short, throughout the sound cinema' s first decade, French recording pructice could be said to have rested on the inverse of what Rick Altman has identified as the fundamental principle guiding the evolution of Hollpvood' s sound style: whereas technicians in 1930s Hollpvood developed a battery of methods for separating sound production from image production, filmmakers in France privileged the "naturalism" that came from simultaneous sound-image recording. Indicative of the French cinema' s naturalist priority is the extent to which fidelity-oriented methods were undertaken regardless of the technical problems. Examples include the numerous moving-camera shots in French films during which actors speak. With sound and camera personnel required to choreograph their movements so as to keep microphones, cords, and shadows outside the camera' s visual field, such shots imposed a formidable physical challenge for production crews. For tracking shots made in the studios, microphones were often "planted" on the set rather than susoended from a mobile boom. Technicians ensured that the final track would reproduce only or primarily sounds whose sources appeared within the camera' s view by "opening" or "closing" microphones as the camera moved through the set. In cases when the dialogue' s volume and reverberation varied considerably in the course of a single shot, it proved difficult to edit the shots together. Such "mobile shots" were "the great terror of the studios," according to Fritz Lang, commenting on his work on Liliom, a film he directed in Paris in 1934. Although technical difficulties might be assumed to have limited the incidence of direct-recorded camera movement in French films, the opposite is said to have been the case; according to a | 937 trade-press report, the use of travelling camera shots in which actors spoke while moving had become increasingly prevalent in French filmmaking, despite requiring "acrobatic" efforts from the production crew. The device of the direct-recorded moving camera was pushed to extremes in films such as Llillustre Mourin (The lllustrious Mourin, dir. Andr6 Hugon, 1933), whose tracking shots, recorded outdoors and featuring soliloquy-like monologues, reguired the laying of camera track of up to 375 metres in length. Special difficulties arose from certain forms of location shooting that were unusually common in French sound films. Numerous French films of the 1930s feature scenes filmed in noisy, automobile- dogged public places. A striking example can be found in Le roi du ciroge (dir. Pidre Colombier, 1932), in which a direct-recorded conversation occurs on a Parisian grande boulevard, in the back- seat of a moving car - a convertible with the top down. Similar shots featuring direct-recorded conversations, recorded on streets in moving cars, appear in other films made in France during this time, such as Le sexe foible (TheWeok Sex, dir, Robert Siodmark, 1933). Most remarkable of all, howeveri are the numerous dialogue scenes filmed in interior locations - commonly regarded by sound technicians as the most difficult of recording sites. Besides L'illustre Mauin, examples occur in certain high-reverb interior scenes in Le chien joune (TheYellow Dog dir. Jean Tarride, 193 l). These practices - which were vircually nonexistent in Hollywood filmmaking - endured in French filmmaking through the | 930s and into the next decade. As late as | 939, multFtrack sound in the Hollywood sense remained a relatively new technique in the French film industry where it was practiced only in an od hoc, non- routinised manne[ and in the context of an overall approach to film sound emphasising direct sound. Even after the modernisation of film-industrial practice during the German occupation of France, direct sound remained an important option in French film- making. According to sound technician Willem Sivel, commenting on French cinema in the late 1940s: ' A simple formula expresses the situation: we make our best sound while the cameftI oDerator makes the image." ln short, the sort of fidelity-based approach that had been decidedly marginalised in Hollylvood by 193 | remained central to French filmmaking decades later. Voices in ContextThe Fidelity/lntelligibility Trade-Ofr The basic national preference for direct sound carried crucial implications for French film style, especially with regard to the treatment of actors' voices. lt is often said that Hollywood' s soundtracks accord formal privilege to dialogue over other types of sound, privileging voices on the soundtrack in a manner analogous to the centrality of the human figure in the image. Given the physiology of human audition, a voice-dominated viewing experience may be inevitable, so that, as Michel Chion proposes, "[]n every audio mix, the presence of the human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception." What distinguished Hollpvood films went beyond the anthropocentric stress on human speech to encompass an emphasis on dialogue' s intelligibiliry: "For the Americans, a good sound is essentially the one that procures a clear comprehension of the dialogue," as Sivel had observed. During conversion, the privilege accorded to speech can be characterised as literal, with the general rule being that voices and other sounds be accompanied by the visual depiction of their source. At Paramount' s studio in Paris, for example, cinematographers were instructed to frame actors so that their faces remained visible while speaking: "We are in the business of selling voices and actors," studio head Robert Kane was said to have informed the companyt production personnel. Like the Hollywood cinema, the "actor' s cinema" of 1930s France privileged actors'performances, and voices were obviously crucial in this regard. Indeed, the "filmed theatre" of 1 930s France was known for voluminous talking. Less centred on spectacular chase sequences and action-based physical gags than analogous forms of American film comedy, the comedies and farces of conversion- era France often featured ensemble performances and profuse repartee and banter, as was the case with boulevard comedy in particular, but also with other, "lower" forms, including vaudeville. The French cinema's stage-derived scripts were dense with speech, and actors such as Jules Berry, Sacha Guitry and Raimu, who also performed on radio, were known for their irrepressible volubility. At the same time, given national differences in recording practice, voices in French films may invite a different type of interest from those in Hollywood films. ln contrast to Hollyrvood! telephonic clarity, French films, with their direct-recorded soundtrack, capture the phenomenal characteristics of actors' speech - dimensions of voice quality and timbre - together with the spatial characteristics of the recording environment. While vocal characteristics can be said to define recorded speech in American films as well - and indeed in sound films made virtually anywhere - in French films their salience, the way they compel the viewer's interest, may exceed the role of dialogue as the conduit for a filml plot development, to instead substantiate the materiality of the scene's setting. When Ren6 Clair remarked on his intent in modifing his style for Quotorze yuil/et (dir. Ren6 Clair, 1932) in light of the mainstream French cinema's "filmed theatre," it was exactly this aspect of THE SCHOOL OF SOUND speech, its potential as an index of place or milieu, that he stressed. Noting that euotorze juiltet had more dialogue than his earlier sound films, and that, in certain moments, the dialogue appear to have been improvised (one think, for instance, of the kerbside argument bewveen the taxi drivers), Clair agreed that in the new film "They speak all the time... But ir is the ,sound, of the words and not their meaning that counts here. The words of the rumbling crowd are a soft of accompaniment of the action, in the same manner as the music and the noises.,, ln the case of euotorze juillet, made at Tobis Films Sonores, the dialogue's embeddedness was achieved through multi_track methods comparable to those employed contemporaneousty in the film industries of Germany and the United States. For the majority of films made in France, however, diarogue was recorded together with ambient sound, and thus the dialogue,s intelligibility was somedmes compromised, as when .,wild,, ambient sounds recorded by chance _ a creak in the floor; the clink of tableware, or an off-screen car hom _ momentarily masked the actors, speech. An indication of the technical difficulties associared with this direct_ sound approach can be found in .,script repors,,, which describe the sound and image quality of a given day,s rushes; for instance, one such report, prepare d for Feu! (Firel dir. jacgues de Baroncelli, 1937), a "quality" production, lisrs numerous takes whose dialogue by virtue of the direct recording had been obscured Dy concurent ambient sounds, such as the clink of a glass on a tabletop, the slam of a car door, noise from a piece of machinery and so on. In the context of narrative cinema, direct recording,s tendency to emphasise the recording environment,s physical characteristics sometimes posed a problem in itself. Through electronic amplification, the microphones captured not only the actors' voices but also the volume of air in the studio space where the recording had occurred. Instead of ensuring the viewer,s absorption into the film,s story_world, the .,room tone,, of a direct-recorded film can disclose that world,s material conditions, that is, the site of the recording, the bodies of the actors, and the technology itself. Far from enhancing realism, the attempr to meet the imperative of fidelity to an original sound can serye to foreground the scenet arcifice, by revealing the technology,s role in mediating the viewer,s perception of the image. ln Hollywood, technicians' attempts to limit potentially distracting side-effects of this sort involved the use of multi_track techniques that systematically stressed sound,s intelligibility within a film's story-world over its fidelity as the reproduction of a performance. Coinciding with the intelligibility emphasis was an extensive use of prerecorded ambient sound. As Donard crafton observes, Hollywoodi soundtracks, beginning in 1930, featured diverse prerecorded sounds: ambient voices, desert wind, foghorns, creaking doors, footsteps, typewriter keys, gun snots, sirens, and so on. Construcrec so as to minimise Dhenomenal characteristics that might impede the viewer,s comprehension of the story such sounds were intended to refer to their putative source in the film's story_wodd rather than their actual source in the recording studio. As film_sound work in Hollywood became further mechanised and specialised during the 1930s, generic sounds of this sort became increasingly prominent on Hollpvood soundtracks. According to one French observer: by the mid_ | 930s, Hollywood had effectivery rendered ambient sound into a form of music - to the point of altogether replacing actual or simulated noises with the kind of musical sound effects common in sound_eftl caruoons. In contrast, the French cinema was developing a noise_ tolerant, direct-sound alternative. According to one 1934 CINEMA' S CONVERSION TO SOUND account, the same ambient sounds manufactured separately in Hollywood ("noises of clinking glassware and conversations in a caf6, the rumble of distant sounds") were recorded on the set in France, at the same time as the dialogue. This direct_sound approach, and i.' distinctive styristic effects, endured into the rate 1940s, when the refusal on the part of French filmmakers to efface "the thousands of prosaic sonorities of rear rife" could stit be contrasted to "the anonymous charactei the absence of soul of American film sound.' , This doesn' t mean that ambient sounds in French films are necessarily more audible than in Hollpvood films. In fac! in many cases, direct-recorded French firms do not feature the sort of sonic realism that a Hollpvood-acculturated viewer expects. Consider, for instance, the countryside laundry scene in Ionl, in which Toni protects Marie from attack by an invisible and unheard bee; in a contemporaneous American film, a comparable scene would surely have featured a post_synch bee noise. Differences between American and French sound_film practices suggest a trade_off familiar to fidelity_based filmmaking, whereby an increase in spatial fidelity implies a decrease in soeech intelligibility, and vice versa. In other words, the need to ensure the dialogue's clarity required close miking and low reverb, whereas the demand to render accurately the space of the recording environment required distant miking and high reverb. In the case of direct-recorded scenes, the sound crew faced the challenge of somehow "squaring the circle" by reconciling the contradictory demands of voice recording (intelli$bility) with the proper restrtution of the reconding site (fideliry). The challenge was inescapable in the French and American cinemas, which favored a tight, naturalistic synchronisation of actors' voices and lips. One way to characterise the basic national difference is to say that French and American cinemas came down on opposite sides of the intelligibility /fideliq split. ln French films, direct_recorded scenes can be said to be faithful in that they record the actors' performance as it might have been heard by a witness, located on the soundstage during filming. But these direct-recorded scenes may lack intelligibility, as when voices and other sounds overlap, reverberafion causes discrete sounds to mass together perceptually, and the technology,s mediating role is made evident. The situation concerning Hollywood films look something like the opposite. In Hollywood films, sounds were not necessarily faithful: they may have been artificially produced or otherwise electronically .,tricked,,; gunshots might have made by a cane striking a chair,s leather cushion, or the rhythmic clop of horses' hooves produced by the clacking of halved coconut shells. Nonetheless, the scenes are extraordinarily intelligible: all dialogue can be heard, voices overlap only in exceptional cases (eg at a scene' s establishing_shot beginnings and endings), only a single sound important to narrative causality occurs at a dme, and ambient sounds (ultimately) refer to an identifiable source. From the perspective of the American film industry,s storytelling project, the French cinema! fidelity emphasis implied an alternative sound-film aesthetic, founded on opposed principles. How Many Microphones? A fascinating aspect of nationar sound-firm aesthetic and techni- cal differences is how the ovo film industries coincidentally used many of rhe same technologies. Beginning in the fall of 1929 and continuing through the I 930s, the principal French studios contracted with American suppliers to purchase blimped Bell and Howell cameras, "noiseless" Western Electric and RCA multi_ track recorders, ribbon microphones, and so on, The reliance on lmported technologies continued in later decades; as late as 1954, half of the fifty sound-recording systems at use in the French film industrT were estimated to have been imported, primarily from the United States. All the same, any notion that the prevalence of imported technologies in French filmmaking entailed sound-era homogenisation is contradicted by substantial style differences between French and American films. lf the same technologies were sometimes employed by the two film industries, the manner in which they were used sometimes differed substantially. With regard to sound technique specifically, an example can be found in French methods regarding a basic issue in sound-film Dractice: the number of microohones used to record a scene. The practice for early sound films, such as the Vitaphone productions of Warner Bros, was to record with multiple microphones, all functioning simultaneously to capture a performance staged for camera and sound. The multiple miking of numerous, simultaneous sound sources exemplified the American film industry' s fideliry emphasis during the sound cinema' s first years. By the late 1920s, however, sound-film technicians in the United States worked to limit the number of microphones during recording sessions so as to reduce the white-noise hiss associated with multiple miking. The key shift occurred in 193 I, with industrywide deployment of the "single-microphone" method, which involved recording voices to the exclusion of other sounds, through use of a single, directional microphone, suspended from a mobile boom, and placed at a close, constant distance from the actors. Although simple in principle, single-microphone recording entailed a radical overhaul of American sound-film practice, which included the development of new technologies and the transfor- mation of soundstage acoustics. The technologies included new directional microphones, such as RCN' s ribbon model (introduced in | 93 l), whose restriction of the aural field to a seventy-degree radius allowed voices to be recorded to the exclusion of ambient sound. During the scene' s recording, this dialogue microphone was the only one needed; music and ambient sounds - footsteps, doors opening and closing, the clop-clop of horses' hooves, telephones ringing, typewriters clacking, and so forth - were now recorded separately, in special studios, and then, via multi-channel technology, mixed into the soundtrack during post-production. Copies of generic sounds of this sort were compiled in studio Iibraries or phontidques, where they could be reused later, as the need arose. Another essential new device was the extendable/ retractable microphone boom, which facilitated the microphone' s placement at a constant distance from a speaking actor, including when the actor traversed the soundstage. ln ensuring dialoguet intelligibility, a lock-tight voice-image match, and great flexibility in creating a coherent, three-dimensional story-worid, the single-microphone method met the need in Hollywood for an approach to dialogue recording compatible with the industry's established narrative-film pfoject. Moreover, in isolating dialogue onto a separate track, the single-microphone approach also facilitated the dubbing of Hollywood films for the world market - a crucial consideration during the early 1930s, when Hollywood struggled, in the face of new, sound-era linguistic barriers, to maintain a foreign market estimated to bring in some 30 to 40 percent of its gross income. The main method for preparing sound films for export to foreign-language markets during 1930-1932, for both American and German producers, was the making of "multiple versions," that is, films featuring the same scenarios and sets but with different teams of actors. But as multi-track sound became standardised throughout the studio system in 193 1, the American film industry ceased producing multiple versions and instead began dubbing films for export By 1932, the injunction to limit on-set recording to a single microphone became a technical norm in Hollywood, and then in other film industries throughout the world - including, ultimately, France. In filmmaking manuals today, the single-microphone method is cited as a slne qua non for high-qualiry film sound. In France during the early 1930s, however, film sound was often recorded in a fundamentally different manner; instead of a single, directional microphone, three to five microphones, positioned to capture both dialogue and ambient sound, were commonly used. As late as December 1938, scenes featuring dialogue continued to be recorded in the French studios with up to eight microphones. In certain cases, up to twelve microphones were employed for a single scene. The microphones often varied in type, and were placed at varying distances from the sound source(s) so as to capture the recording environment's spatial characteristics. For dialogue scenes, additional microphones were suspended from the sound- stage rafters to ensure reliefsonore - the requisite sense of three- dimensionality, which was contingent on an appropriate level of reflected sound- In France, reflected sound was typically a function of what happened on the set during filming, and thus depended on the judicious placement of multiple microphones. Directional microphones were sometimes used, but in a manner that contradicted tie rationale of their use in Hollywood. At Pathe-Natan, for instance, the adoption in 1933 of the latest RCA directional mikes did not entail a coincident switch to the single-microphone method; instead, the new devices were incorporated into Joinville' s existing multiple-microphone, multiple-camera system. Serving established national film-industry purposes, ribbon microphones at Path6-Natan were supplemented with additional, omnidirectional microphones, so as to ensure as full a restitution of the recording environment as possible. Commentators in the French trade press even argued against using a single microphone, on the grounds that the spatial characteristics of single- microphone scenes were insuf{iciently naturalistic. Cnemo's Conversion to Sound:Technology ond Film Sn/]e in Fronce and the U5, Charles O'Brien. Published 2005 lndiana Univemity Press, Bloomington and lndianapolis, USA. A review of Clnema\ Conversion to Sound, byJames Leahy, can be found in The Soundtmck Journal, Volume I - lssue 3, published by Intell{t Ltd THE SCHOOL OF SOUND