Sound Cinema

Sound cinema

Early Attempts at Sound

In 1893, Edison combined phonograph & kinetoscope to create the kinetophone. Edison’s assistant, William K.L. Dickson, actually created a short film using this device as early as 1894, now referred to as “Dickson Experimental Sound Film”.

Previously to the sound cinema the sound existed in the cinema. The brothers Lumiére, in 1897, hired a group to play during the presentation of a film at their local Paris.

In 1921, was introduce the Photokinema this system was among the first to synchronize sound and film, used a process called sound-on-disc, refers to a process whereby a phonograph or other disc is used to record or playback sound in sync with a motion picture.

In 1920, Lee Dee Forest created a system that allows sound to be recorded on the same film as the image, becoming one of the first devices in the film sound process.bCreated and patented by the American Lee de Forest in 1920, after taking the idea of German inventors Josef Engi, Hans Vogt and Joseph Massole

first sound film

The premiere of The Jazz Singer marked a before and after in the history of cinema. It was quite a revolution that in addition to music and effects, it also had spoken dialogues.

After the success of this film, numerous sound films were shot and silent films were made with sound. Seeing the success of these productions, the rest of the producers did not want to be left behind and resorted to various sound patents and what became known as the patent war emerged.

Hollywood, seeing the patent war on sound, forced the studios to adopt a standard sound system to avoid chaos in the industry. Finally, the studies decided that the most appropriate was the optical sound, because it was printed in the same film.

Optical sound refers to a film sound recording process in which sound is recorded directly onto the film. Today optical sound can be both analog and digital, and is also often accompanied by a magnetically recorded track.

Once the sound system was standardized, several determining factors arose:

economic determinants

The first of them was economic. It was necessary to condition the studios acoustically, hire sound experts, sound engineers, new material. To obtain financing, they resorted to the North American banks that were immersed in the stock market crash of 1929. But far from being an impediment, it became an opportunity, since the banks saw the cinema as a good means to make their investments profitable.

marketing issues

Due to the large investment, Hollywood studios try to market their films all over the world, but with sound, a problem arises: the language barrier. In the silent film era, there was no problem with the language, since the intertitles were scarce and in this case, they are translated without problem.

To solve it, several systems were tried. First, subtitles were used, but it was a complete commercial failure (illiteracy, lack of habit of reading so much text on the screen) with which films began to be produced in various versions (languages) in order to market each one in its corresponding country. , that is, they shot several films in different languages.

Labor and industry specialization

One of the most important milestones in the history of talkies was the specialization of each of the jobs within the industry. A specialization of each job was created: sound equipment, photography, art direction, production, scriptwriting team... Hollywood creates a way to release films, they produce chains of work. Therefore, the talkies reinvented recording studios and equipment.

Changes in acting

One of the most drastic changes with the advent of talkies was in regards to acting. Silent film actors had to do something new for them: speak. In fact, many of them disappeared from the film industry because their voice did not correspond to what the public expected of them.

Consequently, the actors and actresses had to learn to vocalize correctly and to interpret taking into account the locations of the microphones. As a curiosity, there was an actor who was initially reluctant to record his voice: Charles Chaplin.

cosmetic changes

These changes have to do with the adaptation of the filming crews and the way of shooting with sound. In the first sound films, the recording of live sound on set was quite bad, it did not have much sensitivity and the microphones also picked up all the ambient sound. For this reason, the first shoots were very static (to minimize camera movements, technicians or actors).

The end