Jane Campion’s 1993 The Piano

Jane Campion’s 1993 The Piano opens with its nineteenth-century heroine Ada McGrath’s voiceover: “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice; it is my mind’s voice.” This is the first indication of the inventive uses to which the film will put sound — for Ada is mute, and we will not hear her “mind’s voice” again until the film’s final moments. She is about to emigrate from Scotland to New Zealand to marry a man whom she has never met, and the grand piano that she takes with her becomes her primary means of expression. And even when Ada is forced to leave the piano on the beach where she lands, as it is too large to transport, the film’s soundtrack acts as a link between her and the piano. Later the piano becomes an instrument of exchange and erotic expression, when she must barter for its return from the man who buys it from her husband. The Piano recognizes from the start that film sound does not simply play a supporting role, nor is it restricted to human speech. Rather, film sound — as dialogue, music, or sound effects — can create a drama as complex as mise-en-scène, cinematography, or editing.

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he cinema is an audiovisual medium, one among many that saturate our contemporary media experience. Many of the visual technologies we encounter in daily life are also sound technologies: you choose your

smartphone’s ringtone, battle villains to the soundtrack of your favorite video game, or notice that your television’s volume soars when a commercial interrupts a program. These devices use sound to encourage and guide interaction, to complement visual information, and to give rhythm and dimension to the experience. The cinema works similarly, using complex combinations of voice, music, and sound effects. Too often given secondary status, sound engages viewers perceptually, provides key spatial and story information, and affords an aesthetic experience of its own. This chapter explores how speech, music, and sound effects are used in cinema and how they are perceived by a film’s audience.

KEY OBJECTIVES

▪ Explain the various ways sound is important to the film experience. ▪ Describe how the use and understanding of sound reflect different historical and cultural influences. ▪ Explain how sounds convey meaning in relationship to images. ▪ Summarize how sounds are recorded, combined, and reproduced. ▪ List the various functions of voice in film. ▪ Describe the principles and practices that govern the use of music. ▪ Outline the principles and practices that govern the use of sound effects. ▪ Analyze the cultural, historical, and aesthetic values that determine traditional relationships between

sounds and images.

Sound is a sensual experience that in some cases makes an even deeper impression than a film’s visuals. Viewers might cover their eyes during the infamous shower scene in Psycho (1960), but to lessen the scene’s horror, they would have to escape from the shrieking violins that punctuate each thrust of the knife. To perceive an image, we must face forward with our eyes open, but sound can come from any direction. Listening to movies, just as much as watching them, defines the filmgoing experience, and with the advent of advanced technologies, sound has helped to make that experience even more immersive.

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A Short History of Film Sound Topsy-Turvy (1999) tells the story of the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan, the late-nineteenth-century British lyricist-composer duo, as they brainstorm, quarrel, and finally witness the first production of their operetta The Mikado [Figure 5.1]. The behind-the-scenes story culminates in a performance of the operetta that brings together sound and image for the theater audience within the film and extends this experience to the film’s viewers. As this film dramatizes, many of the traditions and technologies that became synthesized in the institution of the cinema combined sound, especially music, and visual spectacle in public performances.

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5.1 Topsy-Turvy (1999). A film version of a filmic precedent: the making of the nineteenth-century operetta The Mikado.

Theatrical and Technological Prehistories of Film Sound It is difficult to think of a theatrical tradition that does not have its own distinctive musical conventions. The practice of combining music with forms of visual spectacle in the Western tradition goes back at least as far as the use of choral odes in classical Greek theater. Perhaps most relevant to the use of sound in early cinema is the tradition of melodrama. Popularized in eighteenth-century France, melodrama, literally meaning “music drama,” originally designated a theatrical genre that combined spoken text with music. In England, during a time when laws restricted “legitimate” theater to particular venues, melodrama permitted the mounting of popular theatrical spectacles. Stage melodrama became increasingly more spectacular throughout the nineteenth century and eventually came to dominate the American stage, where melodrama had an incalculable influence on cinematic conventions. Not only was the aural component of the form very important, but the up-and-down rhythms of melodrama’s sensational plots also drew on the strongly felt but inexpressible emotions that music so powerfully conveys. All of these qualities were adopted by film melodramas like D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), an adaptation of a nineteenth-century play.

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Technological breakthroughs that led to such inventions as the phonograph were also important precursors of film sound. As far back as the end of the eighteenth century, inventors were engaged in the problems of sound reproduction. Thomas Edison’s phonograph, introduced in 1877, had an irreversible impact on the public and on late-nineteenth-century science.

1895–1920s: The Sounds of Silent Cinema The eventual union of film and sound haunted the medium from its inception. Edison was a primary figure in the invention of the motion-picture apparatus, and one of the first films made by his studios in 1895 is a sound experiment in which Edison’s chief inventor, W. L. K. Dickson, plays a violin into a megaphone as two other employees dance [Figure 5.2]. Sound cylinders provided a way of synchronizing image and sound very early in film history, and inventors continued to experiment with means of providing simultaneous picture and sound throughout the silent film era.

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5.2 Edison Studios’ Sound Experiment (1895). A rare film fragment with synchronized sound from the dawn of cinema. Courtesy Edison Historic Site, NPS

But before the successful development and widespread showing of films with synchronized sound, loudspeakers lured customers into film exhibitions that were accompanied by lecturers, pianos, organs, small ensembles, or, later, full orchestras [Figure 5.3]. The so-called silent cinema was often loud and noisy. In nickelodeons and other movie venues, audiences themselves customarily made noise, joining in sing-alongs between films [Figures 5.4a and 5.4b] and talking back to the screen. Often sound effects were supplied by someone standing behind the screen or by specially designed machines. Occasionally actors even provided dialogue to go along with the picture.

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5.3 Wurlitzer organ. The pianos, organs, and orchestras of silent film were often as much of an attraction as the movie itself. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS, ALA,37-BIRM,37 — 120 (CT)

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(a)

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(b)

5.4a and 5.4b Early nickelodeon slides. From 1905 to 1915, films were interspersed with sing-alongs, and slides like these provided the lyrics for an interactive experience. 5.4a: from the collection of Joseph Yranski/5.4b: from Mar nan Collection/Minneapolis, Minnesota

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Music halls in Great Britain and vaudeville theaters in the United States lent early cinema popular talents, proven material, and formats such as the revue, delivering audiences with specific expectations of sound and spectacle to the new medium. Because of the preexisting popularity of minstrel shows and vaudeville, African American and Jewish voices were heard in cinema when they might otherwise have been excluded from entertainment directed at mass audiences. For his sound film debut at MGM, director King Vidor chose to make Hallelujah! (1929), a musical with an all-black cast, capitalizing on the cultural association of African Americans with the expressive use of song [Figure 5.5]. Not only musical talent but also stage performers with training and experience were now in demand in Hollywood, and they soon displaced many of the silent screen’s most beloved stars.

5.5 Hallelujah! (1929). With the coming of sound, musicals abounded, from backstage musicals to King Vidor’s film, shot on location with an all-black cast.

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1927–1930: Transition to Synchronized Sound No event in the history of Hollywood film was as cataclysmic as the rapid incorporation of synchronized sound in the period 1927–1930. Many dynamics were at work in the introduction of sound, including the relationship of cinema to radio, theater, and vaudeville, the economic position of the industry as the United States headed into the Great Depression, and the popularity of certain film genres and stars. Yet exhibitors needed to be convinced to adopt the relatively untested new technology. The expense of converting a sufficient number of theaters to make the production of sound films feasible was considerable, and the studios had to be willing to make the investment.

From 1926 to 1927, two studios actively pursued competing sound technologies. Warner Bros. aggressively invested in sound and, in 1926, premiered its Vitaphone sound-on-disk system with a program of shorts, a recorded speech by Hollywood censor Will H. Hays, and the first feature film with a recorded score, Don Juan. Fox developed its Movietone sound system, which recorded sound optically on film, and in 1928 introduced its popular Movietone newsreels, which depicted everything from ordinary street scenes to exciting news (aviator Charles Lindbergh’s takeoff for Paris was the first use of sound for a news item) and were soon playing in Fox’s many theaters nationwide [Figure 5.6]. The new technology became impossible to ignore when it branched out from musical accompaniment and sound effects to include synchronous dialogue. Public response was enthusiastic.

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5.6 Program for Fox Movietone News. Fox Studios developed a system to record sound optically on the film itself and then produced newsreels to show it off in its vast theater holdings. The newsreels ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Courtesy Photofest

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Talking pictures, or “talkies,” were an instant phenomenon. The Jazz Singer, Warner Bros.’ second feature film with recorded sound, released in October 1927, is credited with convincing exhibitors, critics, studios, and the public that there was no turning back. Starring vaudevillian Al Jolson, the country’s most popular entertainer of the time, who frequently performed in blackface, the film tells a story, similar to Jolson’s own, of a singer who must turn his back on his Jewish roots and the legacy of his father, a cantor in a synagogue, in order to fulfill his show-business dreams. He introduces dialogue to the movies with a famous promise that came true soon thereafter: “You ain’t heard nothing yet!” [Figure 5.7]. In the wake of The Jazz Singer’s phenomenal success, the studios came together and signed with Western Electric (a subsidiary of AT&T) to adopt a sound- on-film system in place of the less flexible Vitaphone sound-on-disk process. The studios also invested in the conversion of their major theaters and in the acquisition of new chains to show sound films.

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5.7 The Jazz Singer (1927). Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone sound-on-disk system became a sensation because of AI Jolson’s singing and spontaneous dialogue.

1930s–1940s: Challenges and Innovations in Cinema Sound The transition to sound was not entirely smooth. The troubles with exhibition technology were more than matched by the difficulties posed by cumbersome sound recording technology. Despite such problems, the transition was extremely rapid: by 1930, silent films were no longer being produced by the major studios; only a few independent filmmakers, such as Charlie Chaplin, whose art grew from the silent medium, held out.

The ability of early films to cross national borders and be understood regardless of the local language, a much-celebrated property of the early medium, was also changed irrevocably by the addition of spoken dialogue in a specific language. Film industries outside the United States acquired national specificity, and Hollywood set up European production facilities. Exports were affected by conversion-standard problems and patents disputes. For a time, films were made simultaneously in different languages. Marlene Dietrich became an international star in The Blue Angel (1930), produced in Germany in French, English, and German versions.

By this period, the Radio Corporation of America had entered the motion-picture production business, joining with the Keith-Orpheum chain of vaudeville theaters. The new studio, RKO, quickly became one of five

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studios known as the “majors” that would dominate sound-era cinema, and RKO’s King Kong (1933) and Citizen Kane (1941) both contributed significantly to sound techniques.

1950s–Present: From Stereophonic to Digital Sound The establishment of representational norms in sound recording and mixing practices proceeded rapidly after the introduction of sound. How movies sound — the crispness of voices, the lush quality of orchestral background music, the use of sound effects in conjunction with what is onscreen — supports ideas about the complementary relationship of sound and image, listening and viewing, and the value of realism. Further technological innovations in the 1950s (stereophonic sound), the 1970s (Dolby and surround sound), and the 1990s (digital sound) brought the aural experience of Hollywood cinema to the fore but did little to challenge these ideas. More than simple technological “improvements,” these changes corresponded with historical shifts in film’s social role, as television, home video, and computer games became competitive entertainments.