Charles O’Brien,
Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S.
Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 253 34463 8 (hb) US$45.00
ISBN: 0 253 21720 2 (pb) US$19.95
168pp
(Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press)
This ambitious book aims, by focussing on the years 1930-34, to identify certain characteristics of the French cinema which were established when the cinema was converting to sound and which continue to distinguish it from other national cinemas, notably Hollywood.
O’Brien’s book is unusual in that it makes techniques of sound recording themselves central to the definition of French cinema. In particular he notes the long-standing national preference for direct sound recording onto a single sound-track, as opposed to re-recording with multiple sound-tracks which are then edited together. This preference for direct sound is seen as having led inevitably to the development of a number of other technical and stylistic factors.
These include:
* the favoring of actors, and the integrity and continuity of their performance; whence
* the use of multiple cameras to record a single continuous performance rather than using a single camera to record fragments that are later edited into an ideal performance;
* a disregard of Hollywood spatial conventions when cutting between these multiple cameras;
* the focus on a national market rather than dubbing that performance into other languages; and
* a preference for making decisions during shooting, thus leaving room for spontaneity and improvisation rather than dictating all details of the final film in the scenario.
Actually, his account of these distinctive national characteristics makes a reverence for actors and their performance seem more fundamental than the direct recording of sound (and the economics of production might be an even more promising starting point), but he makes a good case for their cumulative effect being an emphasis on fidelity to the pro-filmic reality rather than, as is the case of Hollywood, the immediate comprehensibility of the constructed diegesis and narrative. And by contrasting these French and American instances at a time when the technology being used was the same in both countries, O’Brien aims to demonstrate that similar technology will be used in different ways in different national cultural environments. In claiming this he is taking a strong stand against technological determinacy.
On the whole his argument is well-founded and largely justified, in my view, though it is not always well-structured. The sequencing of chapters is not governed by any clear necessity, and there is a lot of circularity and repetition as the main points are re-stated time and again. If I have worries about the details of his argument it is with chapters 3 and 6. The latter is a case study of Pathé-Natan films from the conversion years, which adds nothing of interest to the preceding chapters. It consists largely of an industrial history which sits a little incongruously beside the earlier material, and reads as if it had been written earlier and for a different purpose, now awkwardly integrated into (or tacked onto) the present work.
In the course of the chapter O’Brien claims that “‘Pathé-Natan films were routinely ranked among the most popular releases by French exhibitors,”‘ constituting a “‘popular national alternative to Hollywood.”‘ I can find only 3 of the 18 films he lists as coming from the Pathé-Natan studio in those years amongst the top 10 of their year of release (ie amongst the top 50 of 1930-35). Many of them would have failed to make a profit, even in those heady years. (Some he doesn’t mention, such as Théodore et Cie (France, 1933) and Charlemagne(France, 1933) might have helped his case, though others again would have undermined it). Of course all questions of box office in these years are contentious, but he clearly knows of the efforts I have made to clarify them. I would make an analogous criticism of his claim that Renoir was during this period becoming known for his “‘sensitivity to popular taste”‘ – an odd claim at a time when he frittered away his inheritance on five films, four of which either crashed or were at best very modest earners.
The other chapter that I find a little dubious consists of a series of distinctions between categories of early sound film. Here there is a discussion of the different sound formats that arose in the conversion years, and I think O’Brien over-simplifies the situation: he sees two primary types, films sonores which were shot silent and had a sound-track added later, and films parlants where the performance was directly recorded. But there were several other categories of film around at the time which were partially one or the other or partially both.
Further on in the chapter, the argument depends on a contrast between The Jazz Singer (USA, 1927) and Le Chemin du paradis as exemplars of two distinct strands of ‘foreign’ sound film, US and German respectively, only the former of which was to ‘take’ in France in the long term; but the contrast is not convincing and the characterisation of the two strands not as clear as it should be. My worry here is that O’Brien tries to map one on another several oppositions which never exactly correlate – sonorised and talking pictures, post-synched and directly recorded, modernist and realist, ‘cinematic’ and ‘theatrical’, German and American. He would have done film history a greater service, I think, if he had attempted to disentangle these oppositions.
In general, in his desire to draw categorical distinctions between German and American practices, and thence between two schools of French cinema, I think O’Brien pushes the supposed oppositions too far. At one extreme there were indeed many French directors who manipulated and bullied actors, relying on the editing stage to construct a pre-conceived performance from the filmed fragments, and who therefore insisted on a rigorous observance of the découpage, just as at the other there were many who favoured improvisation. Example of both extremes and all intermediary positions could be cited. In fact as he notes at one point a better distinction to draw is between the relatively uniform Hollywood practices and the extreme diversity of the French practices, permitted by the fragmentary industrial structure of the producer-package system.
When discussing individual films (and regrettably he discusses very few in any detail) there is a curious lack of passion and of detail in the description of some of the most extraordinary experiments in sound film ever made. It is hard to understand how anyone who has analysed Le Chemin du paradis (France, 1930), La Petite Lise (France, 1930) and Prix de beauté (France, 1930) could describe them in the terms he does here. In addition, this chapter contains some explicit or implicit contradictions. At one moment O’Brien characterises direct recording and its associated techniques as more efficient and economical, allowing briefer studio rental, while elsewhere he describes the chaos and delays that resulted from under-rehearsed roles and unplanned technical decisions. Again, at one moment he talks of the lowly status and anonymity of sound technicians, but he must surely be aware of the terror in which many directors held them, and the dictatorial power they wielded.
One final protest: O’Brien makes much of the continuity of film-style in France, contrasting it with the disjunction between silent and sound periods which prevailed elsewhere and which is widely seen as having been universal. But (as he well knows) the continuity he mentions is between the stagy performances of 1900-1915 French cinema and the filmed theatre of 1930-1935 French cinema. Nothing could be less continuous with these than the avant-garde explorations that separated the two periods. There was probably more disjunction in France than in any other film-making country. The continuity he claims is in fact with those extra-cinematic media such as boulevard comedy, operetta and music-hall from which the 1930s French cinema borrowed so many of its actors and scenarios (because transferring them to the screen was the cheapest and quickest way to provide the sound cinema programmes that were so urgently needed).
But if I have these and other reservations about O’Brien’s thesis I would like nevertheless to emphasise the importance of his novel proposal about the primacy of sound practices in the development of a typically French film style. This is a proposition that upends much earlier thinking, and which must be taken seriously in any future debate on this topic.
Colin Crisp
Australia.
Created on: Thursday, 2 March 2006 | Last Updated: 2-Mar-06