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Issue 6. Medium Theory

The Silent Movie Revisited

Author: Jan Baetens
Published: February 2003

Abstract (E): review of Abel, Richard and Rick Altman (ed.). The Sounds of Early Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001.

It is now widely accepted that the cinema of the silent era (1895-1927) was not a "silent" but a "deaf" cinema (to quote the formula coined by Michel Chion), just as there is now a very broad consensus on the fact that prenarrative cinema (between 1895 and the early 1910s) was not "primitive" but "early". Thanks to the efforts of DOMITOR, an international group of film scholars and researchers, new visions and now interpretations have recently been shading and modifying these global ideas, which in the 1980s had shattered the monolithic definition of cinema as both essentially talking and narrative.

On the one hand, the "earliness" of the first years of the cinema is now being thought of in terms of "difference". On the other hand, the role of sounds in early cinema is no longer seen as incompatible with some forms and uses of real silence.

The book edited by Richard Abel and Rick Altman offers part of the proceedings of the fifth biannual conference hosted in Washington in 1998 (other essays, specifically devoted to "Global experiments in early synchronous sound", appeared in a special issue of Film History in 1999), and the least one can say is that the present volume is a paramount contribution to the best scholarship in the field, both by the richness of the historical information offered by all authors and by the depth of the theoretical insights elaborated by most of them. In this collection of 25 papers more than two thirds are of incontestable value, which is in unusually high average. Furthermore, the book (very carefully edited and published) foregrounds an exceptional sharing of theoretical and methodological frameworks, which makes it a real book, not just a loose assembling of individual pieces. So great is its cohesion that one often has the impression that it has been written by one single author under many pseudonyms. As a francophone reader, I would express also my gratitude to the fact that the French papers delivered at the conference are here published in a bilingual version, a good example of what a politically correct language policy in international scholarship should be.

But what are the major new ideas and hypotheses put forward in this volume? It is clear that the starting point of the whole conference is double. First, there is the 1996 article by Rick Altman, "The Silence of the Silents", published in Music Quarterly, vol. 80-4. In this landmark essay, Altman has proposed to make room once again for the place and the function of real silence in the early cinema. Of course, Altman does not argue in his article that the silent movie was really silent, but that silence was one of its possible dimensions. Second, there is the use of new historical evidence on the sounds of early cinema. First-hand testimonies are replacing second-hand (hearsay) interpretations. Sound machines used during projection have been rediscovered and their concrete functioning can now be analyzed. And silent movies are now, more than during the first years after their miraculous come-back in the 70s, contextualized within the broader fields of entertainment, business, and culture.

The combination of these two sources (Altman's plea for a the theoretical reconsideration of sound and the increasing knowledge of historical circumstances) enables all contributors of this volume to examine their cases with a clear and coherent theoretical frame and with an acute feeling of the historical embeddedness of the corpus. Rather than stressing here the qualities of all individual contributors (as I have said, they meet almost without any exception the highest standards), I would like to bring together some new ideas running throughout the whole book.

The essential theoretical stance of the book is the emphasis put on the relationship between cinema and modernity. Modernity is considered a paradoxical (and not just dialectical) combination of two basic logics: the logic of dissociation and the logic of re-association. The more modernity tends to split all human actions and faculties (a phenomenon studied by Jonathan Crary in his much celebrated book Techniques of the Observer, MIT, 1990), the more it also launches an antagonistic movement of blending and recombination (sometimes in a nostalgic way, but often also via all types of avant-garde programs). For the cinema, the lessons of this thesis are crucial: it means that the craving for "talking movies", i.e. the marriage of sound and vision, was not the result of some lack that was being felt, but the modern answer to the autonomization of the senses produced by modernity itself.

A second important issue is the emphasis put on national differences in cinema. This collection of essays demonstrates very clearly that those differences whose existence and solidity no one denies, are not a matter of style (or taste, or aesthetics, or whatever), but that they are closely tied up with differences in the historical context in which the national cinemas developed. The role of melodic interludes in early American melodrama (one of the examples here is the famous The Great Train Robbery) cannot be interpreted correctly when one does not know that the Great Panic of 1873 modified dramatically the composition of the companies, which became travelling companies, tending to be "combined" and proposing shows that no longer respected the separation of genres and media.

Third, one should also stress the important contribution of this book to the critical reappraisal of many stereotypes concerning the early years of the cinema, such as the (completely false) idea that silent movies were not scripted or that the actors did not really pronounce their lines as they were supposed to do. There is now a whole lot of evidence that those scripts existed, and that they really were the base of the whole production. Moreover, lip reading experiments have shown that the scripted lines corresponded with what the actors actually pronounced, and there are testimonies that the first spectators noticed when a "silent" actor pronounced, say, "What do we have for dinner tonight" instead of "I really love you, you know".

Fourth, the book also redefines in a very clever sense the meaning of silence in early cinema itself. This meaning does not depend on "technical" parameters, but appears as a thorough example of the social construction of what was less a "thing" than a "practice". Silence, indeed, had to be imposed, for instance by the solemnity of the subject or the attempts made to socially upgrade the movies. As a corollary, the role of silence cannot be understood without analyzing the often very negative reactions produced by... sounds in cinema, which were often seen as vulgar, inaccurate, disturbing, and incompatible with the very fact of looking at images.

Fifth, The Sounds of early cinema helps reconsidering the very often debated issue of the frontiers between the "cinema of attractions" on the one hand and the other competing media and practices on the other hand. One of the most innovative claims of the book is that the antagonism of bourgeois theatre and cinema has to be reanalyzed in the light of the existing antagonism between theatre and petty-bourgeois and popular music hall (one could compare these triangular and rapidly shifting relationships with what we know nowadays about the relationships between photography and painting, which are necessarily misunderstood as long as one does not take into account the role played by another medium, i.e. etching).

Finally, this collection foregrounds also the fascinating concept of "seeing voices", i.e. the set of cognitive mechanisms which make the spectator "hear" something when he is just looking at images. The works by Chion have already demonstrated how much the act of seeing is changed by the fact that we simultaneously hear a sound-track. The proceedings of the DOMITOR conference go much further, since several papers analyze very acutely how the visual representation(s) of sound(s) infer in the mind of the spectator a sound-track of which the richness and complexity are not very different from what is achieved today by high-tech.

In short, The Sounds of early cinema is a wonderful and exciting book. It would be a pity if it was only read by film historians. Scholars in the field of cultural studies and cultural history should read it too, and take it as an example for their own research programs and methods.

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