O "maldito" Vigo e o nascente cinema sonoro (original) (raw)
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Sound Synthesis, Representation and Narrative Cinema in the Transition to Sound (1926-1935)
Cinémas, 2013
Abstract Since the beginnings of western media culture, sound synthesis has played a major role in articulating cultural notions of the fantastic and the uncanny. As a counterpart to sound reproduction, sound synthesis operated in the interstices of the original/copy correspondence and prefigured the construction of a virtual reality through the generation of novel sounds apparently lacking any equivalent with the acoustic world. Experiments on synthetic sound crucially intersected cinema’s transition to synchronous sound in the late 1920s, thus configuring a particularly fertile scenario for the redefinition of narrative paradigms and the establishment of conventions for sound film production. Sound synthesis can thus be viewed as a structuring device of such film genres as horror and science fiction, whose codification depended on the constitution of synchronized sound film. More broadly, sound synthesis challenged the basic implications of realism based on the rendering of speech and the construction of cinematic soundscapes. Résumé Synthèse sonore, représentation et narration à l’époque de la transition vers le cinéma sonore (1926-1935) Depuis les débuts de la culture médiatique occidentale, la synthèse sonore a largement contribué à façonner notre conception culturelle du fantastique et de l’étrange. Contrepartie de la reproduction sonore, la synthèse sonore venait brouiller la distinction entre copie et original tout en préfigurant la réalité virtuelle grâce à sa capacité de créer des sons inédits, sans équivalent dans le monde acoustique. À la fin des années 1920, la recherche sur le son synthétique entre dans une période cruciale, alors que s’opère la transition du cinéma vers le son synchrone et que le contexte s’avère particulièrement propice à une redéfinition des paradigmes narratifs en place et à l’élaboration de standards pour la production de films sonores. La synthèse sonore apparaît dès lors comme un principe structurant au sein de genres tels que l’horreur et la science-fiction, dont la codification reposait largement sur l’usage d’une trame sonore synchronisée. Plus largement, la synthèse sonore questionne les implications fondamentales d’un réalisme qui serait fondé sur la transmission de la parole et la construction de paysages sonores.
The arrival of the first film sound systems in Spain (1895 - 1929)
López Gómez, Lidia (2108) The arrival of the first film sound systems in Spain (1895-1929). Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT), Issue 1, p.27-41, 2018
The arrival of the first film sound systems in Spain (1895-1929) PALABRAS CLAVE: CinE mudo | Sonido | RECEPCión | KinEtófono | ChRonoPhonE | PhonofiLm KEY WoRdS: SiLEnt fiLm | Sound | RECEPtion | KinEtoPhonE | ChRonoPhonE | PhonofiLm ABStRACt
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.
The Forms of the Game in Silent Films, the Discovery of Sound Technology
2019
The soundless films of the first generation of world'S cinematography, which left an indelible mark and survived to this day, precisely because it was an undisputed artistic value. The universal themes selected and handled by Artists of that time will find a special focus on my work, the playfulness of the act of that time, the possibilities of recording in the celluloid and the appearance of obstacles with the mechanical projectors. The discovery of that period, that is recording the tone, the difficulties, the problems and the main challenges in acting in front of the film camera, such an invention would certainly give another direction to the artistic film, contribute to its development but at the same time exhibited barricades of banal nature, in the simple sense would turn the role-play to the zero point, precisely in the moments of its advancement towards the extreme naturalness, would bump into the theater actors with those of the sketches or the noiseless films that had ...
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.
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.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Semiotics in Memory of Raymond Monelle, 2013
"We define ‘electroacoustic’ a sound or set of sounds resulting from processes of electronic synthesis and/or manipulation. At the turn of 20th century such technological processes matched with certain ‘tropes’ of western culture such as vibration, inscription and transmission that were subsequently developed in sonic arts. These tropes find a privileged field of application in the domain of audiovisual media, to the extent that some scholars place them at the origin of the theoretical and technical debate concerning the birth of American talkies. It is indeed the fictional cinema that since its beginnings contributed, through the means of electroacoustic sound, to the development of those tropes towards narrative configurations such as automation and perceptual alteration and eventually to the profound characterization of genres like science fiction and horror-thriller. In an ideal itinerary leading from Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), the topical connotation of electroacoustic sound become well established in the American cinema. I argue that Italian auteur cinema of the 1960s rearticulated such topoi under new perspectives and through an approach to electroacoustic sound strongly mediated by the reception of contemporary avant-garde music. Drawing on two case studies––The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) and The Seed of Man (Marco Ferreri, 1969)––this paper analyzes how Italian auteur films used electroacoustic sound and music (in these cases pre-existent compositions) to give expression to the alienated condition of a generation facing dramatic disillusion after the post-war ‘economic miracle’. In such contexts, electronics are used not merely to produce uncanny effects but as processes of musical construction that challenge artistic creativity and expression, eventually representing tools of hermeneutical interpretations of the films themselves."
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.