Sound+Begins

= __Introduction__ =

===A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades would pass before sound motion pictures were made commercially practical. Reliable synchronization was difficult to achieve with the early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate. Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures using the technology, which took place in 1923.===

===The primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid- to late 1920s. At first, the sound films incorporating synchronized dialogue—known as "talking pictures", or "talkies"—were exclusively shorts; the earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures.===

===By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States, they helped secure Hollywood's position as one of the world's most powerful cultural/commercial systems. In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere), the new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of soundless cinema. In Japan, where the popular film tradition integrated silent movie and live vocal performance, talking pictures were slow to take root. In India, sound was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the nation's film industry—the most productive such industry in the world since the early 1960s.===

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_film

=__Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut Discuss the impact of sound on Cinema__= ===Hitchcock: Well, the silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking and the noises. But this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. In other words, since all that was missing was simply natural sound, there was no need to go to the other extreme and completely abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way they did when sound came in.===

===Truffaut: I agree. In the final era of silent movies, the great film-makers--in fact, almost the whole of production--had reached something near perfection. The introduction of sound, in a way, jeopardized that perfection. I mean that this was precisely the time when the high screen standards of so many brilliant directors showed up the woeful inadequacy of the others, and the lesser talents were gradually being eliminated from the field. In this sense one might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound.===

===Hitchcock: I agree absolutely. In my opinion, that's true even today. In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between. It seems unfortunate that with the arrival of sound the motion picture, overnight, assumed a theatrical form. The mobility of the camera doesn't alter this fact. Even though the camera may move along the sidewalk, it's still theater. One result of this is the loss of cinematic style, and another is the loss of fantasy. In writing a screenplay, it is essential to separate clearly the dialogue from the visual elements and, whenever possible, to rely more on the visual than on the dialogue. Whichever way you choose to stage the action, your main concern is to hold the audience's full attention. Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.===

=Hitchcock's conclusions:= =Questions:=
 * Much cinema today are "photographs of people talking" (and moving the camera along the sidewalk isn't enough to alter this)
 * It is essential to rely on the visual more than dialogue
 * As young and contemporary members of the cinema audience, to what extent do you agree with Hitchcock?
 * Do you think that Hitchock would think differently today? (the interviews were done in 1962) Why?

__Reading Resource to get you thinking__:
==In 1929 filmmaker René Clair discusses the potential impact of sound on the art of film. Note that there is a distinction made between the "sound film" and "talkies". Does this distinction mean aything to us today? : [|The Art of Sound] ==


 * Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film **by Russian filmmaker V. I. Pudovkin

= Key Terms to know = Dialogue, Sound Effects, Foley Artist, synchronous sound, asynchronous sound, [|diegetic sound, nondiegetic sound], motif

=__** Extension Resource: **__=

__**The Movies Learned to Talk**__
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===Listen to the original raw audio from a 1962 interview that ended up as the source material for Truffaut’s book [|Hitchcock] (a wonderful resource for the serious film student there is 12 hours of this stuff): [|The Interviews]===