Cinema's conversion to sound : technology and film style in France and the U.S. / Charles O'Brien.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Brien, Charles, 1955-

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sound motion pictures--History.

Sound motion pictures.

History.

Motion pictures--France--History.

Motion pictures.

Sound--Recording and reproducing.

France.

Motion pictures--United States--History.

United States.

Sound--Recording and reproducing--France--History--20th century.

Sound.

Sound--Recording and reproducing--United States--History--20th century.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xi, 200 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2005]

Summary:

The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinema's diversity of film styles and practices. Cinema's Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sound's impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies' traditional exclusive concern with the film image, Charles O'Brien investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to sound cinema.

Extending beyond recent sound-film scholarship's focus on Hollywood cinema, the project undertakes a geo-historical inquiry into sound technology's diffusion across national borders. Through an analysis that juxtaposes French and American filmmaking, Cinema's Conversion to Sound reveals the aesthetic consequences of fundamental national differences in how sound technologies were understood: whereas the emphasis in 1930s Hollywood was on sound's intelligibility within a film's story-world, the stress in French filmmaking was on sound's fidelity as reproduction of the event staged for recording.

Contents:

Sound's impact on film style : the case for homogenization

Film history after recorded sound : from crisis to continuity

The talkies in France : imported films as exemplars

Sound-era film editing : international norms, local commitments

Shooting and recording in Paris and Hollywood

Hollywood indigenized : pathé-natan and national popular cinema

Conclusion: sound and national film style

past and present.

Notes:

Includes filmography: pages [191]-186.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [165]-190) and index.

ISBN:

0253344638

0253217202

OCLC:

55044631