by Mark Cousins
The otherworldliness of cinema started to decline after 1927 as the next great epoch in film history began. Movies across the world began to speak over the next eight years. At first, sound films were stagy because the equipment was cumbersome and audiences heard starchy conversations, people singing, doors slamming and dogs barking. Films largely moved indoors because filmmakers needed silence to record voices. Then something else happened: filmmakers discovered that sound could make their films more intimate by letting characters voice their thoughts. They used sound as a magnet to draw people into their film, into scenes and into emotional exchanges. Audiences started to feel that they could be with movie stars not only in their fantasies, but also in their ordinary lives
Sound was, “the discovery that halted cinema on its royal road”. Suddenly the image was not primary. However, it would be forty-five years before a mainstream movie would take the effect of sound as a philosophical subject in itself, in Francis Coppola’s The Conversation (USA, 1974), a film about a man’s obsession with what two people say to each other, which leads to his eventual breakdown.
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Gene Hackman as sound recordist Harry Kaul in The Conversation. Director: Francis Ford Coppola. USA, 1974.
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Choreographer Busby Berkeley’s interest in regimented movement and eroticism led him toward semi-abstract imagery such as this one, an overhead shot of twenty-five chorus girls playing violins. Gold Diggers of 1933. Director: Mervyn Leroy. USA, 1933.
JAPANESE CLASSICISM AND HOLLYWOOD ROMANCE (1928 –45)
Cinema enters a golden age
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Cinema started to sing in the years 1928–45. Five times as many people flocked to the movies each week as do now – they became an international obsession. Popular music and the tabloid press fostered escapism too, but cinema had more impact. One writer commented on how the “abundance, energy, transparency, community” of the entertainment films appealed to audiences because it was the opposite of “scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, fragmentation” of their real lives.1 Surely, this is how entertainment works. It finds form for feelings that are missing. It is “what Utopia might feel like rather than how it would be organized.”2
This chapter is about cinema’s attempts to describe this utopian3 feeling. Countries such as Egypt, China, Brazil and Poland start, for the first time, to make significant films and stylistically, filmmakers learnt to use sound creatively. Japanese masters Ozu, Naruse and Mizoguchi, among others, tell stories in a rigorous way which partly qualifies them as film history’s classicists. The biggest formal shift in this period is that, after years of flattening and romanticizing its imagery, Western mainstream cinema begins to explore space in more visual depth. In the last chapter, each stylistic group was discussed separately, but this one navigates the period chronologically, crisscrossing the globe to examine cinematic events and landmarks.
THE CREATIVE USE OF SOUND IN AMERICA AND FRANCE
There had been previous attempts at sound cinema before The Jazz Singer’s release at the end of 1927, but this film was well-funded and widely released.4 It was successful and, as a result, American cinemas, followed by those of other countries, started to install speaker systems behind their screens; ten million more cinema tickets were sold in the US immediately after the introduction of this new technology. Many silent filmmakers, such as Chaplin, thought that the onset of sound destroyed the mystique of film and delayed using it for as long as possible. Some highly developed national film industries, including Japan’s, did not invest in sound technology until the mid- to late 1930s. From the filmmakers’ point of view, shooting sound was a whole new ball game. Real locations were now difficult to use because as soon as the director shouted “Action!”, someone nearby was bound to start digging a road or hammering metal. No one wanted to hear these sounds while the actors were speaking; so directors and producers were forced to return to filming in “black box” studios, which were now called “sound stages”.
The image to the right (82) illustrates how problematic this new system was. The scene is a simple one, a couple talk on a park bench. They are placed on the far right of the frame and in front of them are three large wardrobe-shaped boxes. At the beginning of the sound period, cameras had to be housed in such boxes, or “blimps” as they were called, so that their whirring would not be picked up by the micro-phone. Each container is further muffled by large blankets and, behind the third of these, the “boom operator” stands in a trilby hat. He holds a long pole, a “boom”, at the end of which the microphone records the actors’ dialogue. He moves this left and right according to which actor is speaking and must at all times keep it out of shot. Surprisingly, an orchestra to his left performs as the actors speak. It was not until 1933 that music could be added separately to a film’s soundtrack after the editing had taken place. Until then, astonishingly, it had to be recorded simultaneously. Quite a pressing reason for not filming on real streets.
In the silent period, multi-camera shooting was used only for big action stunts which could not be easily repeated, so why were these three cameras used to cover this intimate park bench conversation? The answer again relates to sound recording problems. If this scene was first filmed in a wide shot followed by close-ups of the man and the woman, it would be very difficult to edit or match the sound from each shot together. The orchestra and dialogue would have to pace each other to precise fractions of a second – if they failed to do this and the editor cut from a wide shot to a close-up, the sound would jar. The solution was to run three cameras, one filming the wide shot (in this case the centre camera) and further cameras photographing the actors’ close-ups (here one on the right and one on the left in front of the boom operator). The actors would then perform the whole scene in a continuous take to ensure that sound on each camera would match seamlessly.
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This photograph, taken during the making of a Warner Bros. film, shows the coordination involved in early sound recording. Three large draped boxes house the cameras (bottom), a man holds a long boom over the actors’ heads (far right) and a small orchestra plays.
Actors’ performances were affected by this new technology. The director could no longer talk to them during a take, as was the norm in silent cinema, and in the first years of sound actors had to talk with unnatural precision to be recorded successfully by the crude sound recording technology. It was not until 1932 in America, and later in other countries, that directional microphones were intro-duced which could record specifics rather than picking up every sound. Notice, finally, that the couple on the bench are illuminated by just two big studio lights, one on each side of the trio of cameras. In late silent films, close-ups were lit separately and with great care to create attractive facial shadows and moody or romantic backgrounds. But here there is no chance of doing this, because the lighting stands for such set-ups would have to be behind or beside the actors, in the place of the bushes. They would then be clearly visible in the wide shot, which is filmed simultaneously with the close-ups.
Creative directors were immediately frustrated by these obstacles to their artistic freedom and the best devised ways of obviating them. The Russian director Rouben Mamoulian went to the West as a student of the great acting guru, Stanislavski. At first Mamoulian directed opera in Paris, London and New York, which quickly confirmed that he had no feel for naturalism. Hired by Paramount on the strength of his inventive theatrical productions, his first film, Applause (USA, 1929) pushed the creative boundaries of sound films. The film’s storyline was not innovative – an ageing stage entertainer sacrifices her career for her daughter – but some key scenes made the industry sit up and pay attention. One example contrasts the convent’s hushed atmosphere, which has housed the daughter, with the hubbub of traffic and street sounds of bustling New York as she visits her mother. Mamoulian used sonic contrast to reflect the feelings of the disorientated daughter. In a later example, there is a more daring technical innovation. A wide shot, which encomp
asses most of the bedroom, shows the mother trying to calm her child’s frayed nerves in a night-time scene. The camera dollies into a two-shot, which frames the mother and child and remains there for a minute of dialogue, before moving into a closer two-shot, followed by two medium close-ups and then into a single close-up of the praying daughter as her mother sings a lullaby. Finally, the camera tracks out again and the father’s shadow falls across the scene.
Mamoulian’s sound crew told him the prayer and the lullaby could not be done simultaneously; we could hear one or the other or a combination of the two, but not both clearly. Mamoulian suggested that they use two microphones, one for each actress, run separate wires from them and then combine them in the printing process. The sound men said this would not work. Mamoulian was furious and stormed off the set. The studio boss, Adolph Zukor, ordered the technicians to try Mamoulian’s way, and it worked. A single scene in Applause proved simultaneous sound possible in cinema. New schema were opened up and directors now had to decide whether they wanted audiences to hear one thing or more and if other sounds should derive from the action within the image or from elsewhere. The idea of background noise, sonic landscape, threatening or warning sounds, were born in this advance.5
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Maurice Chevalier’s actions are perfectly timed to music in Love Me Tonight. Director R. Mamoulin played the recorded score while the shot was being taken. USA, 1932.
Three years later, Mamoulian would direct a musical so explosively innovative that it makes the majority of contemporaneous films look hopelessly dated. Love Me Tonight (USA, 1932) tells the story of a bored princess (Jeanette MacDonald) living in a French chateau, falling in love with a plucky Parisian tailor (Maurice Chevalier). In one scene, Mamoulian cuts from real time to slow motion within a single piece of action, a very rare technique at that time. Little details like this are great fun, but their inventiveness is dwarfed by Mamoulian’s major coup: to have the musical and percussive score recorded before the shoot started. Although it was commonplace in opera to have the entire score written before the staging began, this was unprecedented in cinema. This then allowed Mamoulian to choreograph Chevalier’s movements in time to the music during his first visit to the chateau, which was played during the takes. Though walking, Chevalier seems to dance and dart around the huge rooms (83).
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Jeannette MacDonald bored on her balcony in an innovative early musical Love Me Tonight. Director: Rouben Mamoulian. USA, 1927.
The director not only wanted to create visual rhythm and grace with his new approach to sound, but also biting satire. Not relying on the witty script alone, he at one point adds the yappy sound of dogs on to a shot of old ladies. Mamoulian also links the city and countryside as the tailor in Paris sings, “Isn’t it romantic” and this is overheard by a passer-by who heads out of town, only to have his musical rendition of this successively picked up by others until the stranded princess hears it (84). Sound was unifying a sequence as a metaphor for travel. Love Me Tonight was called Mamoulian’s “first flawless masterpiece”.6
While the saucy romanticism of Love Me Tonight seems to have been influenced by Ernst Lubitsch who had been working in Hollywood for nearly a decade by 1932, it was also indebted to René Clair, who carried his penchant for mockery into sound films like Le Million/The Million (France 1931) and A Nous La Liberté/Freedom is Ours (France, 1931). The Million is the story of a man who wins a million francs on the lottery, but who loses the ticket with which he can claim his winnings. Clair ensured that all the actors sing in the film except the lottery winner, which makes it a clear forerunner of Love Me Tonight’s musicality. In A Nous La Liberté, a close-up shot of a quivering bell-shaped flower is combined with the sound of singing voice, as if the flower is literally in song. Such metaphorical use of sound freed directors from sonic literalness and clearly led to Mamoulian’s yapping dogs.
In the Soviet Union in 1928, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein and his associate Grigori Alexandrov had issued a statement of principle, which was very similar to Clair’s approach, “Only the contrapuntal use of sound will open up new possibilities for the development and perfection of montage … It cannot fail to provide new and enormously powerful means of expressing and resolving the most complex problems.” The Soviets were not technically advanced enough to pursue this potential, but they realized like Mamoulian and Clair that sound could do far more than merely reproduce a conversation or a song.
INDIA’S APPROACH TO SOUND
Indian films in the silent days, as we have seen in Chapter Four, divide into categories similar to the Hollywood genres: historicals, socials, mythologicals and melodramas. In the 1920s social concerns about caste, exploitation and the poverty of burgeoning city life also influenced filmmakers. In 1930, the pacifist protest leader Mahatma Gandhi ended a 300-mile march against the British re-imposition of salt taxes, and an important national debate about the acceptability of British colonial rule was gripping the country. However, seventeen years would pass before the British finally withdrew and, in the meantime, Indian cinema crossed the most important threshold of its history – it, too, wired for sound.
India was producing over 200 films per year by the early 1930s, but until the introduction of sound recording, it was missing one of its cultural heritage’s key elements, song and dance. This was to change in 1931 when a talkie, Alam Ara (Ardeshir Irani, 1931) was filmed. It contained seven songs recorded simultaneously with the photography, in the same way as the park bench conversation which began this chapter. It was a massive commercial success and, astonishing though it seems to Westerners, only two of the many thousands of films made in India between then and the beginning of the 1950s would not have musical interludes. The whole of Indian cinema became one big musical genre. The most popular of these, the so-called “All India” films, were made in the federal language, Hindi, and mostly shot in Bombay (Mumbai).
The live method of shooting musical numbers was so cumbersome that, like Mamoulian, Indian directors and producers looked for ways to liberate their camerawork. A solution was found in the playback system introduced in 1935, wherein a song would be recorded in advance by singers such as Lata Mangeshkar, then played during the actual filming and mimed by the actors. The camera could now dolly and dart, filming could stop and start, various angles could be used and yet the musical recording would remain constant.
The first classic of the playback-influenced Indian cinema would be Devdas (India, 1935), which is still one of the most influential South Asian films. It was directed by Pramathesh Chandra Barua, an aristocratic Assamese who started directing in 1934, aged thirty-one, and who died just sixteen years later. He had studied the films of Lubitsch and Clair and started his own company in 1929. His most resonant work is set in the aristocratic circles familiar to him, but they are viewed with a Lubitsch-esque irony and sometimes are actually bleak. His expressive camera style, yet restrained direction of actors, counterbalanced each other in a way similar to Mizoguchi. “The static stories and mask-like actorial postures are counterpointed by the most mobile subjective camera in the Indian cinema of his time, the visual excess of his sweeping pans announcing the landscapes of later Bengal School painting.”7 The tension between the acting style and the camerawork noted by Rajadhyaksha and Willemen would later be echoed in Japanese cinema.
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One of India’s most celebrated films, Devdas told the story of a younb man driven to alcohol. Cinematographer Bimal Roy shot the lead actor with green filters in order to emphasize his immoral character. Director: P. C. Barua. India, 1935.
Devdas was based on Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s well-known novel about a young man driven to alcohol over his impossible love for a childhood sweetheart (85) and would be much remade in the course of film history, and widely seen around the world by the growing Indian diaspora. The film’s daring cinematographer, Bimal Roy, used green filters to make Devdas seem unsympathetic and morally wrong. He would go on to become a major directo
r, who combined 1930s extravagance with an Italian-inspired neo-realism. Together with Raj Kapoor and Mehboob, Roy combined two filmmaking counter-tendencies in Indian cinema – visual gloss and realism – rarely achieved elsewhere.
JAPAN REMAINS SILENT
At the time of the sound revolution in America, the dazzle of Mamoulian and Clair, the intellectual rigour of Eisenstein and the musical extravagance of Barua, it is surprising that Japan was initially indifferent to the possibilities. It was producing more than 400 films per year and had an industrial film system in the late 1920s and 1930s similar to the US. However, it was director-rather than producer-led and benshis still commentated in cinemas. This apparent refusal to embrace the modern way of making movies was echoed in Japan’s broader political conservatism at the time. Nationalism was becoming more popular and the belief that Asian culture was superior to the Occident held sway. Japan retreated psychologically from the advances of the twentieth century, which resulted in Eastern fascism. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 in an attempt to fend off Western influence in the East and spread its new chauvinistic ideas. Over thirty million lives would be lost in the subsequent years of the Sino–Japanese war.
Although it is a very uncomfortable fact, Japanese cinema soared artistically during this ignoble episode in its history, despite taking a slower route to technological change. Some of its most significant films were produced within this period of political, technical and artistic isolation. The era of aggression in Japan was also a golden age of Japanese film, producing the most balanced and internally directed body of work that the cinema has witnessed to date.