Reading Practice 25

[1] The early twentieth century brought a multitude of changes to the entertainment business. In the 1920s, innovators advanced the medium of film by playing with new technology and new styles. Color processors were added and multiple projectors were used. The television was invented and screen sizes expanded. Yet, more significant than the transition from black and white to Technicolor or the expansion of size was the addition of sound to film in the 1920s. These early “talking pictures,” or simply “talkies,” would eventually become all the rage and change the direction of cinema forever.

 

[2] Before this change, silent films were not in fact “silent.” A variety of sounds were created to enhance the motion picture experience for the patron. Almost every theater had a piano or an organ which a musician would play to accompany the action on screen. Some theaters employed even more elaborate set-ups. In Japan, for instance, “benshi” provided live narration; the voice actors stood to one side of the screen, sometimes voicing multiple roles alongside the original musical compositions. And in some cases, original music was composed to go along with a particular film. An example of these original musical films can been seen in the 1925 Soviet film “The Battleship Potemkin” screened in Berlin. When it first played outside the USSR in Berlin, Germany, director Sergei Eisenstein teamed up with Austrian composer Edmund Meisel to produce a musical score that matched sound to image.

 

[3] While we now take for granted the use of sound in movies, it was not always seen as an inevitable development. Before World War One, innovators had played with adding sound to recorded movies. As early as 1900, public exhibitions of sound films had taken place. However, the technology available didn’t match filmmakers’ ambitions. Not only were recording and amplification quality poor, but it was difficult to synchronize sound and film reliably. The result – a poor quality recording out of sync with the action on film – made viewers of the 1920s skeptical about the future of sound in films. Many thought that it would soon fade. Still, filmmakers who experimented with sound persisted, and eventually they benefited from a more general scientific and public interest in sound technology.

 

[4] The phone was being developed in this era, and wireless technologies began to surface. In the United States, firms like the American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and General Electric (GE) emerged as industry leaders, as they pursued new forms of sound technology and all potential avenues for commercial exploitation. Commercial radio programming began, spawning an entirely new outlet for entertainment and news. Clearly, the world was enjoying the newfound success in sound technology, and it was only a matter of time before the film industry caught up.

 

[5] Until 1927, only short films were made with sound. In October of that year came Warner Brothers release of The Jazz Singer, the first full-length feature film incorporating sound. Using the most advanced sound-on-disc technology of the time, it was a resounding success. But other major studios were rather slow to join the movement. Warner Bros. released three more successful feature-length talkies in the following year, and it wasn’t until September 1928 that another studio – Paramount – brought out its own sound film: Beggars of Life. Seeing the profits that Warner Bros. was reaping, all of the other major studios followed suit over the next year and a half. In 1929, only two years after The Jazz Singer, the United States released over 300 sound films, including many with music. The trend was so swift that by 1930, virtually all American theaters had been retrofitted for sound.

 

[6] Talkies were not purely an American phenomenon. European filmmakers, following the release of The Jazz Singer in September of 1928, realized the potential and joined the fray. In 1929, most major filmmakers in Europe embraced the new technology, but they had to shoot their films abroad while their domestic studios scrambled to catch up technologically. And it wasn’t only studios that lagged behind the filmmakers; conversion of theaters happened somewhat slowly, which meant that many European filmmakers created two versions of each movie: one with sound, one without. Eventually, Britain matched the pace of conversion in America, with well over half of theaters becoming sound-equipped by the end of 1930. In France, on the other hand, a majority of venues were still fully silent in late 1932.