The Forms of the Game in Silent Films, the Discovery of Sound Technology (original) (raw)
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The Forms of Acting in Silent Movies, the Discovery of Audio Recording in Movies
2019
Silent movies did not have any talking or music in them but they left indelible traces to this day, primarily because they possessed undisputed artistic values. The themes that were discussed by the artists of the silent movies, are the main focus of my work. The silent movie provided entertainment to people for decades and provided the industry with a springboard to talking pictures, and the movies we know today. The technological developments that lead to the first sound movies, hardships, difficulties and challenges in acting in front of the camera, would certainly give another direction to the artistic film. All these factors had a massive contribution to its development, but at the same time banal obstacles appeared that created a collision between the actors of theater and actors of silent movies.
Crisis and Critique 7.2, 2020
For psychoanalytic theory, the object of the cinema has always been the gaze. The importance of the gaze as the impossible object around which films are constructed is impossible to question. However, this essay contends that we should consider the importance of the voice as a possible object of a particular type of cinema. We should think of these two objects, the voice and the gaze, as having a historical relationship with each other. The contention here is that while the gaze is the object of the sound film, the voice is the object of the silent film. The absence of voices in silent cinema provides the perfect form for depicting the voice as an absent object. Once characters actually begin to speak on the screen, however, their voices obscure the voice as an absent object, and the result is that the gaze becomes the central cinematic object and preoccupation.
In this paper I would like to present some of my preliminary research results concerning the arrival of sound in Czech cinema. My main goal in this project is to analyze the broader cultural and intermedia contexts of this technological change, and to describe it on all levels of the cinematic institution. During the first stage of my research, I performed a discursive analysis of texts surrounding the advent of film sound and its relation to other media. This analysis revealed that the contemporary yet alternative image of cinema's future and of its media identity were multiple, heterogeneous and rather different from the following development of classical, silent, narrative cinema. On the level of critical reception, from a prospective. contemporary point of view, the cinema was often freed from the dominance of fictional narrative forms as well as from the classical cinematic dispositif.r The cinema was then understood as a hybrid mingling theater, radio, gramophone, telephone and even television. It was also frequently reflected as a "new medium": as a scientific tool for analysis of physiological and mimetic processes of live speech, as a suitable instrument for special kinds of archivally preserving "audiovisual autographs" of politicians, scientists, artists etc., and as a new kind of communication technology resembling recent TV-networks, interactive media or as a new kind of "opto-phonetic" poetry based on synesthesia. The reasons for such a utopian imagination can be found above all in the special nature of the Czech film avant-garde movement of the 1920s: it was quite influential, but was purely theoretical, visionary and literary in its concern with the potentialities of the cinema as it remained alienated from actual film practice of the time.
Within the strategies built upon the intentional weakening of the diegetic efficiency a group apart is formed by those films which try to reach this gesture of destruction by resorting to the diegetically weaker, in this sense pre-discursive way of expression of the silent cinema. In this paper the author analyze two films from this perspective: Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992) and Esteban Sapir’s La Antena (2007). The plot of these films coupled with the effect achieved by the mimicry of the silent film challenges interpretation. What are the discursive functions in the contemporary cinema of the silent film-like formal principles and techniques weakening the diegetic effect, such as the absence of the synchronized sound and the use of the intertitles in the film? The hypothesis is, that the turning to the visual style of the silent film is associated with the problematization of the medial relationship between image and text, image and voice respectively, and is manifested both at the level of the fable and in the use of the filmic techniques.
Silva, Manuel Denis, „The Sound of Silent Films“: Interview with Claus Tieber and Anna K. Windisch,
Over the last few years, sound and music practices during the silent film period have received an increasing attention from the academic community, both in film studies and musicology. The emergence of interdisciplinary networks, such as “The Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain” (Brown and Davison 2013) and the “Cabiria Research Project” in Italy (Colturato 2014), have contributed to widen the frame of this field, revealing the importance of national, regional and local specificities in the construction of early cinema as an auditory experience. In the context of the thematic issue on “Music, sound and cinema”, Aniki interviewed Claus Tieber and Anna K. Windisch.
2021
«Nikos Kazantzakis’ Unshot Adaptations of Don Quixote and Decameron: Studies on images and sound during early talking cinema», Classica Cracoviensia, vol. 24 (2021), p. 81-102. This article examines two of Nikos Kazantzakis’ unshot screenplays of the early 1930s: his adaptations of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Boccaccio’s Decameron, kept in typed manuscripts at the Nikos Kazantzakis Museum Foundation in Iraklion, Crete. The article analyses Kazantzakis’ Don Quixote and Decameron in the contexts of early talking cinema and his ideas of the image-language relationship. Written at a time when the artistic value of talking cinema was still debated, Kazantzakis’ adaptations demonstrate that he sought to express ideas with images rather than dialogue (Don Quixote) and use sound as a creative element (Decameron) in ways alluding to Eisenstein’s 1928-1929 writings, with which, as evidence suggests, the Greek author was familiar. Thus, Kazantzakis’ Don Quixote and Decameron show how a technological development in film history – the coming of sound – and the Soviet film theory influenced this author’s adaptation techniques, while also enhancing our understanding of his creative career as well as the worldwide resonance of Cervantes’ and Boccaccio’s literary milestones.
Silent Film Studies: The curious absence of film sound in film theory
2013
There is a hierarchy of sound and image in films but that is not a natural one. There are moments in the history of cinema when a rupture occurs in the process and sound affects us more than visual. The lack of discussion on film sound is alarming with respect to that. This paper interrogates the conditions of such an absence and the complexities of such a denial, which in itself might be an unspeakable rule. In more ways than one, such denials create the absence of a theoretical framework and linguistic tools that would render the articulation of film sound possible. This paper argues that this is not merely a case of negligence or lack of research material, but there is a pattern to such denial.
The New Soundtrack, "The theory of Practice" edited by Philippa Lovatt, Nessa Johnston, , 2017
Most of the recent theoretical contributions in film and media studies claim an adequate consideration of sound reproduction in its material features. With the aim of underlining how two distinct conceptions of materiality (concerning the physical composition of reproduced sound itself on the one hand and a material approach to the media for sound recording and sound reproduction on the other) might be mutually intervolved, the first part of the article will point out some significant intersections between the theoretical accounts on mediated sound offered by Rick Altman, Tom Levin and Wolfgang Ernst. Those notions will be subsequently applied to the historical context of the conversion to sound in Italian cinema: in doing so, we will first outline the way in which film theorists rejected both the sonic and technological ‘materialisation’ of the film-medium and how, by contrast, practitioners dealt with the technological novelties as concrete problems to solve; secondly, by focusing on the film-making practices and the film-editing and projecting techniques we will re-formulate to the notion of noise with the double meaning of ‘obtrusive materiality’ and ‘technological materiality’, depending on the different context. In order to verify how new theoretical accounts can serve as epistemological frameworks for our investigation on historical film practices, the essay will discuss the way in which the materiality of mediated sound (as an aural phenomenon to be recorded and a technological inscription to be reproduced) changed the habits and challenged the skills of the workers involved in a film-making process.