C H A P T E R 1
THE UNCANNY BODY
OF EARLY SOUND FILM
There are uses of sound that produce a desirable effect;
on the other hand, there are uses that disgust people.
“Facts about Talking Pictures and Instruments—No. 4,”
Harrison’s Reports, 8 September 1928
The coming of sound fueled a number of genre developments in Hollywood
cinema. One obvious example is the ﬁlm musical. Less obvious is
how the horror genre also dramatized and explored potentials that synchronized
sound brought to Hollywood ﬁlms. Where do we situate this
outgrowth of the sound transition in relation to others of the period? We
can start by noting that some genre developments were inspired by impressions,
widespread at the time, that the coming of sound marked a
huge forward leap in cinematic realism.
Signs of this impression appear everywhere in commentaries on the new
ﬁlms. Many noted that human ﬁgures in particular now seemed more excitingly
present than before. Of a 1927 Fox Movietone short featuring
George Bernard Shaw, Photoplay wrote that “it is the ﬁrst time that
Bernard Shaw ever has talked directly and face to face with the American
public. What a voice and what a face! Although over seventy years old,
Shaw is built like an athlete. He moves as gracefully as Jack Dempsey.
And he has so much sex appeal that he leaves the gals limp.”1 Another
commentator, considering sound ﬁlms generally, wrote that “now, when
a great singer opens his mouth in song we feel the thrill of his voice and
his personality.”2 Alexander Bakshy, one of the most perceptive critics writing
about ﬁlm at the time, agreed, noting that “the popularity of the talkies
8
is not wholly a craze for novelty. Their success is much more due to the
warmth and intimacy which has been given the picture by the human voice
and which is so unmistakably missing in the silent picture as this comes
from Hollywood.”3 How this new warmth and intimacy was to ﬁnd immediate
application within the character-centered narrative tradition of
Hollywood cinema was suggested by the exhibitors’ weekly Harrison’s
Reports when it explained the success of The Jazz Singer: “It was the talk
that Al Jolson made here and there, and his singing of his ‘Mammy’ song,
chieﬂy the singing of ‘Mammy.’ It was so successfully done that people
were thrilled. The sight of Mr. Jolson singing to his mother, sitting in the
orchestra, stirred the spectator’s emotions as they were stirred by few pictures;
it brought tears to the eyes of many spectators.”4
If ﬁlmmakers could tug harder at viewers’ heartstrings than before,
they also could aspire to new heights of intellectual achievement. A journalist
writing in 1928 gleefully predicted that now “the sparkling epigram,
the well-turned phrase, even the cadences of Shakespeare will make
their appeal.”5 Bakshy, although also critical of the period’s stage-bound
ﬁlm adaptations of plays, felt that Hollywood deﬁnitely had something
to learn from the theater’s “relatively superior intellectual approach to
the material of life.”6 Striving for these heights more ambitiously than most
other Hollywood ﬁlms of the period was Strange Interlude (Leonard, 1932),
MGM’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play. In the play the characters
speak their thoughts aloud to the audience; in the ﬁlm their thoughts can
be heard on the sound track while the characters’ lips do not move. This
technique, though it may remind viewers today of a television soap opera,
impressed the ﬁlm’s ﬁrst critics. Screenland called the ﬁlm “restrained,
highly intelligent, beautifully directed.”7 Variety called it “a natural for
discourses on academic analyses of the contemporary ‘art of the cinema.’”8
Film Daily called it “a class picture ﬁnding the talking ﬁlm in its
highest form.”9
With sound, then, came new opportunities to arouse the intellect, stir
pathos, and elicit sensations of realism. Hollywood took advantage of
these impressions by adding sounds to the same kinds of ﬁlms that it was
already making and also by developing some new kinds. One existing
ﬁlm type was the topical newsreel. Popular during the period, these shorts
were constructed, as Donald Crafton notes, to maximize impressions of
“being-there-ness.”10 A new ﬁlm type, also popular and also energized
by the perceived realism and immediacy of sound ﬁlm, was the social
problem ﬁlm, especially the cycle of gangster ﬁlms that began with Little
Caesar (LeRoy) in 1930.
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Social problem ﬁlms led a trend that capitalized on impressions of
sound ﬁlms as open windows on the world. Not just the crisp reports
of machine-gun ﬁre or the slangy talk of the street persuaded viewers
that these ﬁlms held a special purchase on the real thing; also validating
the producers’ assertions was the resonance of these ﬁlms with stories
then in the news. A movie could be based on current events, or it
might be built out of their very material. The Motion Picture Herald
noted that I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy, 1932) was “written
by a man who is himself still a fugitive from just such a chain gang
as is here delineated. It is a tremendous selling point. That man wrote
of his experiences and a motion picture has been woven from it.”11 Another
critic jokingly reported that a prop used in Scarface (Hawks, 1932)
was highly authentic: “The corpse ﬂung from a taxi in one scene is no
dummy but a remnant actually procured from some convenient
morgue.”12 The same nouns and adjectives pepper the reviews of these
ﬁlms. The Public Enemy (Wellman, 1931) was “raw and brutal with
that brutality ﬂung to the front,” “a grim and terrible document,” and
a ﬁlm that “will get you, with its stark realism.”13 Also singled out was
the ﬁlms’ stylistic leanness. Of The Public Enemy, one reviewer wrote
that “there’s no lace on this picture” and that “there doesn’t appear to
be a wasted foot of ﬁlm. That means speed.”14 These ﬁlms, then, were
less like paintings or poems than like crime scene photographs or court
transcripts. These were documents struck unfussily on newsprint, the
output of a cinema freshly ventilated by the bracing effects of synchronized
sound. The special capacity of the medium to render in ﬁne detail
the sordid realities of the present day earned the gangster cycle detractors
as well as fans. One of the former complained in a letter to Picture
Play: “I can’t understand why people like these underworld pictures. It
really hurts me to see one of my favorites in gangster ﬁlms, because
movies seem so real to me.”15
Another spur to genre innovation during the period stemmed from a
very different experience of sound ﬁlm, one in which viewers now felt
greatly distanced from the world outside the movie theater. To get a sense
of this other experience of the medium, picture a horizontal scale for
measuring the relative strength or weakness of the perceived realism and
transparency of sound ﬁlm, with perceptions growing stronger as we
move to the right. Now bisect this scale with a vertical line and place the
disembodied, “intellectual” appeal of Strange Interlude’s voice-overs at
the top. The result is a simple grid for imagining some of the evocative
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potentials of sound ﬁlm (Fig. 1). On this grid, the bottom-left quadrant
stakes out a zone of sensation in which the unreal and the bodied nature
of sound ﬁlm come across the most forcefully. This zone contains what
I call the uncanny body modality of early sound ﬁlms. Out of this zone
the classic horror cycle emerged near the close of the sound transition
period. We can gather some initial clues to the existence and source of
this reception phenomenon from critics of the day who voiced their dissatisfaction,
often in vague and grasping terms, with the touted realism
of the ﬁrst sound ﬁlms.
THE SHRINKING OF PERSONALITY
Synchronization of music and movement was perfect.
It left nothing to be desired and created an illusion of
reality—almost.
Ruth Russell, “Voice Is Given to Shadows of Silver Screen,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 September 1926
Within the chorus of praise for the realism of the new ﬁlms were indications
that sound simultaneously was getting in the way of viewers’ sensations
of the ﬁgures speaking and singing on the screen. In 1929
Fitzhugh Green, in his book The Film Finds Its Tongue, recalled a 1926
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Unrealism
The mind
The body
The
uncanny
body
Realism
Figure 1
sound ﬁlm—one in the premiere program of Vitaphone shorts—in which
Will Hays delivered a brief speech. Green wrote that Hays “seemed to
be present, and yet he did not seem to be present.”16 In 1932 technical
sound expert H. G. Knox remembered that “the early sound pictures required
the exercise of considerable imagination to actually feel the actor’s
presence on the screen before you.”17 Of the partly talking ﬁlm Tenderloin
(Curtiz, 1928), Variety wrote that “another angle is whether the
voice on the screen does not suggest something missing, with that missing
element the physical self. This is undeniably felt.”18 And in what was
perhaps the most in-depth articulation of this potentially troubling quality
of the new ﬁlms, Bakshy—who, as I noted, also championed the human
warmth of the ﬁlms—reﬂected on his dissatisfaction with recent ﬁlms
in which such stars as George Arliss and John Barrymore led the casts.
In a piece titled “The Shrinking of Personality,” he wrote:
As I now try to recall my main impressions I am struck by a rather puzzling
fact. None of the popular actors I saw stands out before me as a personality
with whom I had a direct and all but physical contact. I know
that on the stage some of these actors and others of equal gifts were and
are able to escape the shell of the characters they represent and to ﬁll the
entire theater with their own beings, so that one feels as if one almost
touched them. More phantom-like, but no less expansive and penetrating,
were the personalities of the famous stars that radiated from the silent
screen. . . . There can be no question of the success of the producers in establishing
their screen stars not merely as favorites with the public, but as
personalities that somehow . . . transcended their screen characters and
came into a direct contact with the audience. The appeal of Chaplin, Fairbanks,
Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, or Jannings in the old days of silent
ﬁlms had that quality of expansion.
The situation with the talking pictures seems to be paradoxically different.
The personal magnetism of the actor has lost its force. His entire
personality has shrunk to something that is only a little more than the character
he represents. This does not necessarily mean that his personality is
completely submerged in the character. More often than not the reverse
is actually the case, and the same George Arliss, for instance, will be seen
in a number of characters that differ but little from one another. . . . But I
doubt that his failure to loom as large from the speaking screen as he does
from the stage, and as he probably would from the silent screen, is due to
any lack of magnetism in his acting personality. The reason, I am inclined
to think, lies rather in the curious effect that the addition of mechanical speech
has had on the relationship between the screen actor and the audience.19
Bakshy goes on to blame the theatricality of the current cinema, speciﬁcally
its strong reliance on stage techniques and sources, combined with the
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cinema’s capacity to present scenes unfolding in “natural surroundings,”
for this effect of remoteness. While he deﬁnitely has a point, I believe we
can discern a deeper source of the trouble than the decisions of any individual
producers regarding this or that source or setting.A Variety reviewer
of a 1927 program of Vitaphone shorts came much closer to grasping this
deeper cause:
An hour of mechanical sound production, together with its ﬂicker accompaniment,
is a pretty severe experience. There is something of colorless quality
about the mechanical device that wears after so long a stretch, not because
the reproduction is lacking in human quality, for it has extraordinary
exactitude and human shading. It must be that the mere knowledge that
the entertainment is a reproduction has the effect of erecting an altogether
imaginary feeling of mechanical ﬂatness such as one gets from a player
piano.20
The root of the problem was, as this critic intuited, viewers’ renewed
awareness of the mechanical nature of cinema. This awareness stemmed
from two sources: the temporary coarsening of ﬁlm style that accompanied
the transition to sound ﬁlm production, and the initial sensational
novelty appeal of synchronized sound ﬁlms.
THE RETURN OF THE MEDIUM-SENSITIVE VIEWER
It would doubtless seem strange if upon a screen a
portrait (head) of a person were projected, and this
picture slowly became of an animated character,
opened its mouth and began to talk, accompanied by
an ever-changing countenance, including the formation
by the mouth as each peculiar sound is uttered.
Claude Friese-Greene, 188921
During the earliest years of cinema history, viewers were aware of qualities
of ﬁlms that most later viewers would tend not to notice. They were
medium-sensitive viewers. I take this term fromYuri Tsivian’s book Early
Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, in which, following observations
made by Eileen Bowser, Tsivian notes instances in which commentators
during the early cinema period write vividly about such seemingly
mundane events in ﬁlms as a train or other object coming into the
foreground, a bush trembling at a water’s edge, waves breaking on sand
and bursting into rivulets, and the faintest unsteadiness in a card player’s
ﬁngers.22 Viewers then also might notice elements of the cinematic disT
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course that later viewers would ﬁnd unremarkable. These elements could
include a close camera distance, a camera tracking forward or backward,
the edges of the frame, the ﬂatness of the image, and the monochrome
color of the ﬁlm.23 Tsivian’s observation of this phenomenon of early cinema
reception is important for our study of early sound cinema reception
because the coming of sound triggered the ﬁrst major return of
medium sensitivity to ordinary viewing in thirty years.
A number of practical and technical realities of production during the
early sound period imprinted themselves on the ﬁnished ﬁlms in ways
that help to explain why viewers now were suddenly much more aware
of ﬁlms as manufactured objects. The addition of the recorded voice alone
went a long way toward producing this result. Most obviously, there
could be synchronization problems, which continued to occur in soundon-disc
ﬁlm presentations until Warner Bros. phased out the technology
in 1930—and later in theaters that continued to show sound-on-disc
ﬁlms.24 Every synchronization mishap served to remind viewers that the
bodies speaking on the screen constituted whole entities only tenuously,
ones that had been pieced together in a movie studio and that could come
apart quite easily once inside the movie theater. But even perfectly synchronized
voices could heighten medium awareness in several ways.
To begin with, the voices could sound unnatural to viewers’ ears. The
technology was derided as “the cold, rasping Noisytone inventions.”25
Harrison’s Reports reminded its readers: “You are well aware of the fact
that the voice can under no circumstances be made to sound natural
through a megaphone. And the horn is a megaphone.”26 At the end of
1930, Knox recalled “how queer some of the ﬁrst talking pictures
sounded. . . . Actors and actresses often sounded as though they were lisping
and voices were quite unnatural.”27 A history of ﬁlm published in
1931 noted that “by 1927, talkies had lost nearly all of their early squeaks
and squawks and were delivering to audiences reliable reproductions of
music and of the human voice.”28 Whether the problem was solved by
1927 or later depended as much on the acclimation of individual viewers
to sound ﬁlm as it did on the ongoing improvements in the technology
itself. At any rate, locating a precise line of demarcation to characterize
the before-and-after experience of most viewers is less important
than is simply recognizing that, initially, the voice on sound ﬁlm could
strike a viewer as patently unreal.
Also making the speech seem unreal could be the slowness of its delivery.
A reason for the slowness was a set of notions that preoccupied
critics and industry professionals during the transition period concerning
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the so-called quality voice, which, Crafton notes, drew heavily on speech
standards derived from the theater.29 One result was that ﬁlm dialogue
was often articulated noticeably slowly and distinctly. Further, sound technicians
seeking to record maximally intelligible dialogue could insist that
actors enunciate carefully and deliberately. As Alexander Walker writes,
“there was a heavy concentration on picking up ev-ery syl-lab-le, which
led to retarded delivery.”30 Such plodding deliveries could make already
mufﬂed, hollow, and tinny speech sound even more unnatural.
Finally, the speech could seem unreal because viewers could tell that
the sounds were not issuing from the lips moving on the screen. Mordaunt
Hall at the New York Times was conﬁdent that with the arrival of
the Vitaphone, this problem was now in the past: “Hitherto the efforts
to couple pictures and sound have possessed weak points. In the earlier
conceptions the voice appeared either to come from the top or the bottom
of the screen, and although the lips of the character moved to the
utterances it was not he or she who seemed to be doing the talking.”31
But this problem continued to crop up after 1926, in Tenderloin, for example,
of which Variety wrote that “the voice, though issuing from the
picture player, seems a thing apart, albeit synchronizing.”32 French ﬁlm
critic Alexandre Arnoux reported, after watching an early talkie in London,
that “right at the start the general effect is rather disconcerting. Since
the loudspeaker installed behind the screen never changes its locus of
sound propagation, the voice always comes from the same spot no matter
which character is speaking. The synchronization is perfect, of course,
but it confuses and annoys the listener.”33 Rick Altman notes that some
industry professionals believed that positioning several loudspeakers behind
the screen and having an on-site operator fade the sound in four directions,
to keep the voices close to the speaking mouths, was the only
way to solve this problem.34 It turned out that no such measure would
be necessary, because this problem, which was largely a function of the
newness of the technology to those who were supposed to be fooled by
it, eventually solved itself. Once audiences got used to the loudspeakerscreen
conﬁguration, the bodies on the screen merged with the voices.
Until then, even perfectly synchronized and acceptably natural-sounding
speech could strike a viewer as a transparently mechanical contrivance.
Elements other than sound functioned to raise general awareness of
the ﬁlms as ﬁlms. Synchronized speech in the ﬁrst sound features came
in distractingly discrete packages within the ﬁlms. These were talking sequences
abutted, usually at both ends, by silent sequences that had been
scored with music. A transition from one type of sequence to the other
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could register as a sort of awkward mechanical gearshift in a ﬁlm’s mode
of narrative presentation. All at once, dialogue titles gave way to synchronized
speech; ﬁgures emoting and gesturing in the familiar silentﬁlm
acting style became ﬁgures keeping comparatively still so as not to
make distracting sounds that could be picked up by the insufﬁciently discriminating
microphone; the mobile frame of the silent ﬁlm became the
noticeably more restricted camera viewpoint of the early talkie; and ﬂowing
music yielded to a scratchy quiet that engulfed both the ﬁgures and
their speech. Transitions out of as well as into a talking sequence could
deliver a jolt. A reviewer of The Jazz Singer complained about “the abrupt
blankness when the singing or dialogue stopped and the ordinary screening
continued.”35 Another, writing about part-talkies generally, found
that “the abrupt change of tempo when the words stop and the action
resumes is a terriﬁc strain on the credulity of the customers.”36 The edits
that marked these transitions were more obtrusive than the edits in
silent ﬁlms. They could seem like raised seams along which disparate types
of cinematic material came together. This problem, moreover, would persist
after all-talking feature ﬁlm production became the norm, for the
ﬁrst all-talking features also often clearly announced, via a perceptible
change in the quality of the surrounding quiet, when a talk-free stretch
of ﬁlm was ending and a dialogue exchange was about to begin.37
Actors could exacerbate the general medium awareness for reasons
other than their slow talking. Because of the difﬁculties associated with
editing sound ﬁlm, dialogue scenes now were being assembled out of
fewer total shots.38 This meant that actors needed to get their lines and
blocking right for longer stretches, and this imperative, combined with
the higher costs of ﬁlming retakes in the period, increased the likelihood
of a slightly ﬂubbed line here or a missed cue there making it into a
ﬁnished ﬁlm.39 Viewers watching an actor making a mistake had little
choice but to be reminded of the artiﬁciality of the entire package. In all,
the state of narrative absorption that had been (and would soon be again)
intrinsic to the classical Hollywood viewing experience was partially disrupted
as the augmented medium began to exhibit its materiality and the
unsteadied practice to ﬂaunt its techniques.40
Switching focus from the ﬁlms to the viewers brings to light more reasons
why general viewing during the period was shot through with uncommon
medium sensitivity. For one thing, viewers were aware of a connotation
of synchronization that the word no longer carries today. During
the silent era, as James Lastra notes, the word in the context of moviegoing
had referred primarily to live musical accompaniment.41 Synchro-
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nization in this context suggests something extratextual pieced onto the
whole for effect rather than something intrinsic to the proﬁlmic world that
has been drawn out of it and captured on ﬁlm or disc. Synchronized voices
are understood to accompany moving lips rather than to issue from them.
This connotation helps to explain instances in which the word is applied,
during the early sound period, to describe sloppy postdubbing and even
foreign speech that has been dubbed over English-speaking mouths.42
The sense of synchronization as something more provisional than essential
accorded well with a viewer’s impression of synchronized speech
as a marvelous mechanical gimmick. The novelty of the technique guaranteed
that even if there had been no discernable problems with the synchronization,
the quality of the sound, or the disparity between the
locations of the loudspeakers and the speaking mouths, viewers still
would have experienced a heightened awareness of the artiﬁcial nature of
cinema as a direct result of the sound. The editor of Motion Picture News
noted in 1928: “There has not been, until now, any great, basic mechanical
change in the motion picture. I am not speaking now from a
scientiﬁc standpoint, nor am I overlooking the technical advances in picture
making or projection or presentation. I am speaking only from a
public viewpoint.”43
The novelty of sound produced some unforeseen side effects, one of
which appears to have been an increased awareness of the image as a ﬂat
entity. Sound, that is, reasserted the presence of the screen within the space
of exhibition. It was a reassertion because, as Tsivian notes, the screen
during the early cinema period had fascinated viewers.44 Hints of the
screen’s restored visibility include this comment from 1926: “So remarkable
is this synchronizing machine it seemed incredible the ﬁgures
on the screen were only shadows.”45 This writer, in addition to indicating
that the “synchronizing machine” is what is drawing her notice,
conveys an impression of the ﬁgures on the screen as ﬂat shadows. Hall
likewise described a Vitaphone short featuring opera singer Giovanni
Martinelli in which “the singer’s tones appeared to echo in the body of
the theatre as they tore from a shadow on the screen.”46 In 1922 a journalist
covering a Phonoﬁlm demonstration remarked that “each word
was clearly audible as articulated by the moving lips of the moving picture.”47
Here the suggestion clearly is one of lips belonging to a picture
and not to any person. Sensations of the image’s ﬂatness could, moreover,
be heightened by the emerging practice of rendering dialogue comparatively
loud and keeping it at a steady volume in order to make it easily
comprehendible. A commentator wrote in early 1930 that speech so
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foregrounded, “while it may result in technically good recording, will
cause all voices to seem to come from the same plane and thus destroy
the effect of spatial depth, so necessary for dramatic effect.”48
The novelty of sound also could induce viewers to register the unnaturalness
of the sound more acutely. The novelty drew attention to qualities
of ﬁlm speech that soon would become submerged within the total
ﬁlmgoing experience. Initially, viewers were unable to process synchronized
speech as routinely and transparently as they had the silent ﬁlm intertitle.49
They might ﬁnd the speech fascinating not for anything a
speaker was saying but simply because the speaker could be heard saying
anything at all. To viewers used to following a ﬁlm narrative relatively
distraction free, this sort of ravenous interest was something new.
Viewers would soon be gauging, unimpeded, the characters’ emotional
states from the tones of their voices and listening, undistracted, to dialogue
to gain information about what was happening in the stories; at
ﬁrst, however, synchronized speech could harbor fascinations that competed
with these basic functions. A New York Times foreign correspondent
implied in April 1930 that Parisians who could not understand English
were turning out to see Hollywood talkies.50 Clearly the virtues of
synchronized speech as a conveyor and clariﬁer of story information were
not foremost on these viewers’ minds. A critic noted that the ﬁrst alltalking
ﬁlm, Lights of New York (Foy, 1928), “would have been laughed
off the stage had it been presented without beneﬁt of Vitaphone”; he then
added that “novelty, however, has a fascination all its own.”51 Another
commentator recalled in 1931 that “in the early days of talking pictures
both stories and actors were forgotten—every one went to the cinema
for a voice.”52 Such comments suggest that early sound ﬁlm viewers could
be engaged less by the semantic content of a speech utterance than by
the very fact of it. Viewers so engaged would be more inclined to notice
the textural qualities of the speech, which, as I have noted, could seem
to them obtrusively unnatural. Initially, then, synchronized speech carried
a strong potential to impress viewers with its strangeness and its materiality,
two qualities the speech would substantially lose once viewers
grew accustomed to sound ﬁlm and once the quality of the sound itself
had sufﬁciently improved.
The increase in medium awareness meant that general reception during
the period could be less predictable than in the years immediately preceding
and following the transition. During this time of relative instability,
synchronized speech could pin a viewer’s attention on a speaking ﬁgure,
as it did the Photoplay critic’s on Shaw, or it could direct attention to the
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ﬁlm as a visibly and audibly present object within the theater auditorium.
Crafton’s characterization of critical debates surrounding the voice during
the early part of the transition is relevant: “It is as though the ‘quality
voice’ was not part of the actor but part of the medium itself. The actor’s
job was to adjust his or her physiology to that mechanical paragon.”53
Until the voices took up permanent residence within the actors’ bodies,
sound ﬁlm could strike a viewer as a dazzling reproduction of a preexisting
unity or as merely an approximation and reassembly (however
thrilling) of that unity. According to the latter view, cinema was less a window
that had always been transparent—and now had been opened to let
the sounds through—than it was a noisy attraction busily cranking out
sensory delights before a house of astonished patrons.54 This is our starting
point for understanding the “shrinking of personality” and, beyond
that, the uncanny body of early sound ﬁlm.
THE COMPLEXION OF THE THING
In the key-cities, it would have “starved to death.” But
the novelty of having the screen shadows talk naturally
changes the complexion of the thing.
“Motion and Sound,” Harrison’s Reports, 14 July 1928,
referring to Lights of New York
Like the smallest movements that could rivet viewers when pictures ﬁrst
began to move, so the smallest sounds now could startle and excite viewers
as moving pictures ﬁrst began to make sounds. Fitzhugh Green recalled
that Will Hays “advanced to the foreground and there was a little
sound. It penetrated through people’s minds that they had ‘heard’ him
clear his throat.”55 A review of the same program noted that “when Mischa
Elman played there was not only the delicate pizacatti [sic] as the violinist
plucked the strings, but the brush-sound of his bow as it moved
legato over them.” Photoplay wrote that when Shaw walks forward, “you
hear his footsteps—scrunch, scrunch—on the path.” And reportedly Sam
Warner was thunderstruck when he found that he could hear the pianist
in a Vitaphone demonstration ﬁlm unbuttoning his gloves.56
There also were indications that sound resensitized viewers to the visual
image. A sound technician wrote in August 1928 that “a review of
the present talkies suggests an exaggeration of lip gymnastics. This is unnecessary,
because of the intimate detail characteristic of motion picture
photography, as compared to the legitimate stage declamation.”57 But
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were actors now really exercising their lips to a greater degree or were
viewers now just more sensitive to these movements? Another commentator,
without mentioning sound ﬁlm, wrote the same month that “an
actor whose face is slightly disﬁgured or disproportioned, so slightly that
no abnormality is noticed in real life, becomes a marked man in a large,
high-lighted close-up.”58 Another, who did explicitly link sound to his
sense of the current enhanced potential of faces—especially ones viewed
in close-ups—to appear grotesque, explained why acting expressivity
must now be toned down:
How can a dramatic episode be under-acted? This would surely not do for
the legitimate stage, so how could it sufﬁce for the talking picture?
The answer to the question lies in the size of the screen. Even if we sit
in the orchestra stalls of an ordinary theatre we can rarely detect whether
the leading lady has a dimple. On the screen, however, we sometimes get
a close-up of a star, where not only her dimple, if she has one, is visible,
but the very pores of her skin. In fact, there are very few things one could
avoid seeing when the features are magniﬁed to 10 ft.
Add to this huge physiognomy sobs which are only too often stentorian,
and is it a wonder that the exhibition becomes so grotesque that the
audience can remain polite no longer, but burst into laughter? These superclose-ups
should never be used for sound pictures, especially if any strong
emotion is being portrayed.59
This comment, which resembles ones that Tsivian ﬁnds from the early
cinema period—expressions of shock and disgust at the graphic ugliness
and gigantism of close-up faces—suggests that faces in early sound ﬁlms
could appear strangely energized when they were mouthing synchronized
speech.60
Such changes in the appearance of objects in proﬁlmic space could be
compounded by another by-product of medium-sensitive viewing. Audiences
also now—and just as Tsivian ﬁnds them doing during the early
cinema period—were projecting elements of the cinematic discourse onto
the diegetic or story worlds in the ﬁlms.61 We see this happening in mild
form above, where a close camera view yields a “huge physiognomy.”62
Tsivian’s examples of this act of projection in early cinema viewing include
interpreting a shot in which the camera is moving toward a ﬁgure’s
head as one in which the head is moving toward the camera (or growing
larger in size), and perceiving the edges of the frame as bounding a
mysterious, unseen zone with the power to suck objects, persons, and
even physical space into itself.63 Tsivian is careful to stress that, very
quickly, viewers learned to distinguish discursive elements from diegetic
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ones. Still, he maintains, throughout the early cinema period, ﬁlms could
elicit sensations of motion and transformation, even in viewers who knew
better, and these sensations could turn watching the (to our eyes) most
mundane ﬁlm into a strange and even vertiginous experience.64
Sometimes early-ﬁlm viewers projected onto the diegesis elements they
perceived to be missing from the cinematic discourse. And so a crowd
ﬁlmed with a silent camera became a crowd bustling with activity but
making no sounds at all. The central text in Tsivian’s examination of this
viewing tendency is Maxim Gorky’s famous 1895 review of the ﬁrst Lumière
program when it came to Russia. For Gorky, the views these ﬁlms
presented of domestic life and other everyday scenes were far from ordinary.
They provided glimpses into a world that was strangely lacking
in sound and color, a “kingdom of shadows.”65 Gorky knew that photography
was a black-and-white medium and that what the Lumières
were screening was moving photography; still, his senses were aroused
in a manner that deﬁed the simple and known facts of the presentation.
Contemporary discourses on early sound ﬁlms suggest that viewers
were again making the same sorts of projections, although probably to a
lesser degree than viewers during the earlier period had. Hall articulated
his dissatisfaction with the abrupt transitions of part-talking ﬁlms in this
way: “This sudden gift of voice to characters is frequently startling, for
one may see a detective who has been silent suddenly boom forth in a terrifying
fashion and thereafter ﬁguratively have his tongue cut out.”66 Considering
The Jazz Singer, Harrison’s Reports noted that “Mr. Jolson sings
with the Vitaphone several times. In one instance, after the song stops,
one feels as if the characters were deaf and dumb.” For another commentator,
the need for actors to stay close to hidden microphones, keep
still, and enunciate clearly “made the players resemble ﬁgures in a wax
museum.” A journalist covering a 1923 Phonoﬁlm demonstration featuring
a man and woman dancing to musical accompaniment found it
“surprising that, while one could hear the instruments being played for
the dancers, one could not hear the slightest sound of a footfall. Hence it
seemed as if the dancers were performing in rubber shoes.”67
These comments suggest that “absences” in the cinematic discourse
could trigger perceptions of altered presences within the diegetic world.
Among these presences, the most notably altered consistently was the human
ﬁgure, for at least two reasons: the instant centrality of synchronized
speech in the initial responses to sound ﬁlm, and the long-standing centrality
of human ﬁgures in classical Hollywood cinema. What then was
projected onto these ﬁgures?The grayness of the medium, and the imperfect
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sound technology that many believed was never more imperfect than when
it was reproducing the human voice. The result could be a viewing sensation
whose power rivaled the uncanny realism of the ﬁrst sound ﬁlms.
The force of sound’s novelty could impart to the image tremendous
vibrancy, enough to make the singing Martinelli seem, to Hall, “so excellent,
so real, that one felt as though Martinelli would eventually burst
through the screen, as if it were made of paper.”68 But, as I have noted,
Martinelli also seemed to Hall like a mere shadow on that screen. Figures
now could seem anemic compared to the full-blooded characters
and stars in silent ﬁlms, and their voices could sound as attenuated as
their countenances were wan. Something vital had been added along with
the sound, but also something vital had been leached away.69 Figures now
seemed more vivid and animated, and yet, paradoxically, they did not
necessarily seem more alive. In fact, with luminously pale skin and with
voices that could be reedy and hollow sounding, these ﬁgures now could
seem distinctly less alive than before.
This negative potential of sound ﬁlm was intuited by Theodor Adorno
and Hanns Eisler in their 1947 book, Composing for the Films. The authors
wondered why musical accompaniment had so often been considered
indispensable in silent ﬁlm exhibition. They speculated that music
helped to compensate for the lack of sound and color in the image, and
masked its inherent ghostliness—then they added that “the sound pictures
have changed this original function of music less than might be imagined.
For the talking picture, too, is mute. The characters in it are not
speaking people but speaking efﬁgies, endowed with all the features of
the pictorial, the photographic two-dimensionality, the lack of spatial
depth. Their bodiless mouths utter words in a way that must seem disquieting
to anyone uninformed.”70
The authors point to two reasons why ﬁlm speech during the early sound
period could seem to issue from bodiless mouths, “speaking efﬁgies.” First,
at that time every viewer was “uninformed.” Second, nondiegetic music
was not yet a norm of Hollywood sound cinema. There was disagreement
as to how much, if any, nondiegetic music a ﬁlm should contain. Some believed
that music would annoy viewers who were trying to listen to dialogue;
others worried that viewers would be wondering where the music
was coming from.71 Still others feared that viewers would ﬁnd incidental
diegetic noises distracting, as well.72 As a result, dialogue scenes sometimes
played out against inordinately quiet backgrounds. One who complained
wrote in 1932, in the Motion Picture Herald, that “it seems strange that
the power of music to make mobile and to vitalize has not been given more
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recognition in its application to the audible screen.”73 (The previous year
Bakshy had written that most silent ﬁlms, when screened without musical
accompaniment, “appeared emaciated, bloodless, lacking in emotional
appeal and dramatic accent.”)74 Unaccustomed viewers—and talking ﬁlms
with long stretches of virtually no sound except talk: Adorno and Eisler
suggest that this combination could send disquieting sensations rippling
through ﬁlm audiences during the early sound period.
Comments from the period suggest that persons in sound ﬁlms could
indeed look to viewers like ﬂat photographic entities. Luigi Pirandello
wrote in 1929 that “the voice is of a living body which produces it, whereas
on the ﬁlm there are no bodies or actors as on the stage, but merely their
images photographed in motion.”75 A critic commented the previous year
that “the moment a character begins to speak from the screen his bodily
unreality becomes marked—at least until one becomes accustomed to
it.”76 Such feelings of unreality contributed to a general sense that more
sensory information needed to be added to Hollywood ﬁlms. A commentator
in 1930 wrote that “the demand for color photography . . . increased
to an almost unbelievable extent after the advent of sound and is
steadily increasing. No doubt the incongruity of black and white images
speaking lines and singing songs like living beings created a demand for
a greater illusion of reality. This color photography helps to supply.”77 In
1929 Bakshy, after expressing his dissatisfaction with the illusion of reality
on view in current ﬁlms, wondered if “the introduction of stereoscopic
projection coupled with color will solve this problem.”78 Cinema
has long aspired to present an ever fuller sensory experience of the world.
It is an impulse that André Bazin celebrated and one that Noël Burch, less
delighted, has called “Frankensteinian.”79 Evidence suggests that this impulse
grew more desperate when sound was added to the sensory mix.
Especially troubling was that this impulse could become even more
desperate when faces were shown vocalizing in close-ups. Close-ups could
seem to frame, as I have noted, huge physiognomies, marked men, and
disgusting displays of lip gymnastics. Also, faces in close-ups could appear
more lifeless than when viewed from other distances. Sound expert
Joseph P. Maxﬁeld found it “difﬁcult and at times almost impossible to
obtain a good illusion with extreme close-ups, that is, with pictures where
the head and top of the shoulders only ﬁll the whole screen. The reason
for this partial failure is not wholly clear.”80 Another wrote that “in dialog
sequences, quality and volume remain constant while the cutter
jumps from across the room to a big close-up. At such times one becomes
conscious that he is witnessing a talking picture.”81 Spiked increases in
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awareness of the artiﬁciality of a ﬁlm probably provoked more intense
projections of cinematic discourse onto the faces on display. Close-ups,
then, long valued by Hollywood for their capacity to strengthen character
identiﬁcation and glamorize stars, could distort and enervate human
faces with a special power.
Regardless of the shot scale, sound ﬁlm could seem to lack something,
whether it was color (though it had always lacked this) or realism (though
sound should have made ﬁlms seem more real). Human presence in particular
seemed afﬂicted. One option for ﬁguratively describing this impression
was to note a “shrinking of personality.” Another was to invoke
a critical reception trope of the period, one so ubiquitous in the
contemporary discourses that we tend to pay it no mind, which is to call
the ﬁlms and the ﬁgures in them “talking shadows.”82 A third possibility
was to call the ﬁgures ghostly.
Soundless feet could seem to wear rubber shoes or, as for a 1915 viewer
of Edison’s Kinetophone, could effect a more total, ground-up transformation:
“A dog runs about noiselessly like a disembodied ghost, but his
barking is far too loud.” In 1929 a commentator described a ﬁlm with “but
two oral sequences in which the characters roared like monstrous ghosts.”
The same year, Pirandello attributed the inherent absurdity of sound ﬁlm
to the fact that “images do not talk, they can only be seen; if they talk
their living voice is in striking contrast with their quality of ghosts.”83
Also in 1929, Bakshy wrote that “for reasons which it is difﬁcult to discern,
the total effect of the talking picture is generally thin, lacking in
substance. Strange as it may appear, a silent picture seems to be freighted
with sensory appeal. A picture like ‘The Last Laugh’ is a veritable ‘eyefull.’
In the talkies, much as you may be moved by the drama, you feel it is
a drama in a world of ghosts.”84 And in 1990, a respondent to a Maine
survey on cinemagoing recollected a 1928 ﬁlm in which “the star was
Conrad Nagel, and the ‘talking’ was of only partial duration—not for
the whole picture. Spooky—hollow sounding voices—larger than life and
ghostly. But fascinating.”85
These comments suggest that the addition of synchronized sound triggered
perceptions of ghostly ﬁgures in a shadowy world, just as the addition
of movement had when, at the ﬁrst Lumière screenings, the projected
still photograph that opened the show was cranked suddenly to
life.86 Both times, the discursive element that was new raised awareness
of the remaining silences and blank spots in the total sensory package,
and the sensations that could result had the power to inﬁltrate and counteract
impressions of the medium’s advancement toward greater realism.
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Tsivian and also Tom Gunning have described this dynamic of ambivalence
running through the earliest responses to cinema.87 They help us
discern similarities between certain broad-scale patterns of ﬁlm reception
at two points in cinema history. While of course the two periods were really
more different than alike, we can nevertheless say that at both times,
conﬂicting perceptual cues clashed in the minds of viewers who were trying
to make sense of a new representational technology; and at both times,
a possible outcome of their efforts was to ﬁnd the ﬁlmic world altered in
a way that made it appear ghostly. At the dawn of the sound era, the both
immediate and ingrained centrality of the human ﬁgure within the viewing
experience guaranteed that the foremost manifestation in the freshly
resurrected ghost world of the cinema would be an uncanny body.
SHADOWS IN THREE DIMENSIONS
One of the most pleasing numbers on the program
followed. It was not a motion picture at all, but a
shadow-graph dance, performed by real people behind
a screen.When viewed through the teleview the shadows
were not ﬂat, as they would be ordinarily, but rounded,
and separated as ﬁgures from each other. The effect was
decidedly novel and pleasing.
“Vivid Pictures Startle,” review of a demonstration of the
Teleview, a stereoscopic ﬁlm process, New York Times,
28 December 1922
The bloodless faces could appear ghostly. Ghostliness suggests a lack of
physical substance, the semitransparent wispiness of an apparition. Impressions
to this effect probably were helped along by the period’s increased
screen awareness, which would have made the ﬁgures seem as
ﬂat as shadows. Comments from the period, however, also suggest that
synchronized speech could imbue ﬁgures with a physically emergent quality.
Hall, for example, who wrote that it is “better to have words missed
than to have them exploded from the screen in such a frightening fashion
that it virtually killed the action of the story,” also found, as I have
noted, the singing Martinelli himself seeming ready to burst through the
screen.88 The two comments taken together suggest that in a reception
environment in which discursive elements are tending to slip easily onto
diegetic entities, perceptions of synchronized speech exploding from the
screen possibly triggered perceptions of speaking bodies about to do the
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same—this at a time when the ﬂatness of the screen also was asserting
itself with a forcefulness to which viewers were not accustomed. I am
describing a possible tension between the heightened awareness of the
two-dimensionality of the screen image and the potentially frenetic visual
intensity of the vocalizing human ﬁgure.
A theater chain executive wrote in 1930 that “no matter how effective
your silent sequences might have been, they were still shadows, legends,
phantoms. Once they become vocal, however, they become people;
they come right off the screen into the laps of the audiences—whatever
their effect was while mute, it trebles, and trebles again, in voice.”89 In
1932 Knox, describing recent improvements in motion picture sound
technology, wrote that “many persons listening to Wide Range reproduction
have expressed themselves as having the feeling that the actors
are actually present in person. They seem to stand out in bolder relief,
and one is not continually aware that it is only a picture.”90 It seems safe
to assume that if improvements in synchronized sound technology could
endow human ﬁgures with a quality of embodiment, the initial applications
of the technology probably aroused similar sensations—with an
added force deriving from the technology’s newness. If so, the impressions
of bloodlessness may have combined with ones of the vocalizing
ﬁgures as more densely and protrudingly corporeal than the ﬁgures in
silent ﬁlms. This would help to explain why ﬁgures in silent ﬁlms seemed
to Bakshy “more phantom-like, but no less expansive and penetrating,”
than the ones in sound ﬁlms. Possibly, then, viewers experienced a composite
sensation of these ﬁgures. First, as Claudia Gorbman writes, “the
recorded voice ﬂeshed out the human body on the screen.”91 Also, however,
the voice initially drained this body of its color and vitality. Such a
body, at once lifeless and three-dimensional, might have born a resemblance
to a living human corpse.92
A MODALITY
bela lugosi: I just ﬁnished Frankenstein Meets the
Wolf Man for Universal.
fred allen: Another musical, hey?
“Texaco Star Theater” radio program, 25 April 194393
I began this chapter by making some contrasts between horror ﬁlms,
gangster ﬁlms, and the lofty, experimental Strange Interlude. I conclude
it by claiming that with respect to the coming of sound, the closest rel-
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ative of the horror ﬁlm is the musical. Describing their relationship now
will help me reﬁne my characterization of the uncanniness of the sound
transition cinema while also previewing the means by which I will link
that uncanniness to the origins of the horror genre.
Both genres seized on the abrupt tonal shifts that early sound ﬁlmmakers
sometimes effected in their ﬁlms unintentionally. Consider movie
musicals, in which musical numbers stand apart stylistically from the sequences
that precede and follow them. A ﬁlm shifts gears when a number
starts, then shifts them back again after it is over.94 The songs would
threaten to break away from the rest of the ﬁlm if their narrative motivation
(the characters are putting on a show, the characters are falling
in love) and the viewer’s familiarity with the conventions of the genre
were not holding the numbers ﬁrmly in place. This characteristic register
switching has roots in the cinema of the sound transition.
During the transition, as Lastra and Altman note, two models competed
for dominance as ﬁlm practitioners experimented with different
ways to integrate sounds and images.95 One model, the scale-matching
(or invisible auditor) approach, adjusted the sound scales of the individual
shots to correspond to the shots’ image scales. And so close-ups would
be accompanied by “close-up sounds,” while ﬁgures speaking in long
shots would be harder to hear. The other model, the foregrounded-sound
approach (which I have already found contributing to sensations of the
unreality of close-up faces), placed dramatically signiﬁcant speech atop
a hierarchy that overrode the image scales of the individual shots and
organized within itself all sounds according to their narrative relevance
and presumed viewer interest.96 Lastra writes that the scale-matching
model, though it did not prevail, “found validation in an important early
sound ﬁlm form—the Vitaphone short—whose representational needs
meshed seamlessly with the perceptual model of recording.”97 A model
aimed to reproduce the experience of watching a live act from the vantage
point of a theater seat proved ideal for the early Vitaphone shorts,
which, Crafton observes, strongly resemble the numbers in many early
musical feature ﬁlms.98 Through this pair of observations we can sketch
a line of likely inﬂuence and development.
According to this sketch, the scale-matching model, which from the
standpoint of narrative ﬂow, represents the more disruptive of the two,
gets funneled into the numbers in early musical feature ﬁlms. The genre
takes advantage of this model’s assertion of an invisible auditor to position
viewers in front of virtual live musical performances. Musicals latch
onto—and codify—aspects of the more “disturbing” model, the one that
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tended to imbue single shots with too much weight and distinctness with
respect to the other shots in a sequence. These codiﬁed aspects, with the
weight and distinctness transferred from individual shots onto whole,
segmented musical numbers, are in turn passed down through the history
of the genre, which never stops encapsulating musical numbers to
varying degrees.99 Musicals thus carry forward into the sound era vestiges
of the scale-matching model, and a short-lived idiosyncrasy of the
transition furnishes raw material for a durable genre practice. We can
compare this development to the inception of the horror genre as it relates
to the sound transition. The precise nature of the parallel I want to
draw is richly suggested by Katie Trumpener, who considers the ﬁrst feature
ﬁlm that Douglas Sirk directed, when he was still in Germany and
his name was still Detlef Sierck.
The ﬁlm is April, April! (1935), which interests Trumpener because it
manifests the “texture of transient moments” and because it poses what
she refers to as “the problem of the overlap ﬁlm.”100 Already the
prospects for comparing the musical and horror genres seem tantalizing,
even though the transient moment that is Trumpener’s main interest concerns
the overlap between the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise
of fascist Germany. Still, Trumpener also is interested in sound in Sierck’s
ﬁlm, which, she ﬁnds, bears the markings of an early sound ﬁlm. For her,
the ﬁlm’s transitional status (in both senses) is most evident in its two
brief musical sequences, especially where they begin and end:
Sierck audibly and visibly shifts out of one modality (with its own particular
use of space, sound, rhythm, and the bodies, gestures, and language
of the actors) into a different modality, then back again. By now, nothing
could be more familiar than such shifts. Since the early 1930s, indeed, they
have formed part of the generic code of the musical, evolving from the practical
need in early sound ﬁlms to change the miking (and thus the mode of
camera work as well) whenever there was a move from an action sequence
into a singing sequence or vice versa. Ever since, when musical numbers
appear or disappear in a musical, there is often a perceptible shift in the
atmosphere, the emotional “weather” of a movie. The action of the ﬁlm
slows to a dream-like halt—or shifts into a different tempo; and then, suddenly,
the onset of the music lifts the audience out of the inert everyday
world into the more magical world of the song. When the music is rudely
interrupted, or slowly fades away, the audience awakens, as if from a
dream. If the movie itself works on its viewers as a kind of enchanted dream,
a song sequence is a dream within a dream.101
Several points Trumpener makes here are worth underscoring: that aspects
of musical ﬁlms reach back to practical production realities of the
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sound transition; that the grouped, salient, formal characteristics of musical
numbers can usefully be called a modality; that the modal shifts
into and out of these numbers trigger changes in the “emotional ‘weather’”
of a ﬁlm, with the numbers themselves constituting something like selfcontained
weather events traveling across the screen of the viewer’s consciousness;
and that this emotional weather is manifestly dreamlike, even
against the dreamlike background of the ﬁlm itself.102 Each of these
points correlates with an aspect of the uncanny body of early sound
ﬁlms.
The uncanny body was a modality. Its appearance marked a shift in
a viewer’s perception of the space, sounds, rhythms, bodies, acting gestures,
and spoken language in a ﬁlm. And like the numbers in a musical
ﬁlm, this body came and went. It might be called up by a voice suddenly
sounding reedy or booming, a cut to a close view, an audible pop accompanying
a ﬁlm edit, or a combination of these events. Also, this shift,
like the one into a musical number, reorganized a viewer’s experience of
a ﬁlm. It provoked a change in the movie’s “emotional ‘weather,’” effecting
a transition into a more deeply dreamlike state—although in the
case of the uncanny body, this state was closer to a nightmare than to an
enchanting reverie.
The patchy, inconsistent quality of early sound ﬁlms thus becomes important
for understanding the early developments of two genres. In the
case of the musical, the numbers are not distinctive unless comparatively
banal talking sequences precede and follow them. Put another way, there
is no modal shift if the whole ﬁlm is more or less uniformly dreamlike.
Trumpener juxtaposes Sierck’s ﬁlm with ones directed by René Clair in
which “the extremely subtle, balletic passage between spoken and sung
sequences reinforces both the sense of waking dream and the sense of everyday
life itself—street life, domestic routine—as a kind of unselfconscious
but choreographed group dance, enchanting in its quotidian ordinariness.
April, April! handles its transitions far more baldly, pasting its two musical
sequences into the narrative with an audible montage, a visible shift
in register and rhythm.”103 Gradual transitions of the sort Clair orchestrates,
however beautiful, preﬁgure the formal distinctness of the musical
ﬁlm less strongly than do the abrupt starts and stops in Sierck’s ﬁlm.
Similarly, perceptions of the uncanny body were intensiﬁed by perceptions
of the sometimes normal appearance of human ﬁgures in early
sound ﬁlms. That is, the relative instability of ﬁlm style and reception
during the period acted to set the uncanny body off against its surroundings
more crisply. A dismayed fan wrote to Picture Play in 1928:
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With the Vitaphone the smooth effect of varied action must be cut and always
subordinated to the voice, to words, thus striking at the very heart
of all that motion pictures have come to represent.
With the Vitaphone, one has a feeling of discord within, or a sensation
like a tug-of-war. That part of one’s receiving set which the cinema has
developed is led to expect one thing, and before this is completed, the mind
must be focused on the voice. It is a case of oil and water mixing.104
Impressions like this one—of churning internal disarray, fugitive parts
within stormy wholes—enhanced the general “atmospheric conditions”
for the integrations of both songs and living corpses into new Hollywood
genre productions.105
We can think of the uncanny body as a form of reception interference
or static. This shadow of life did not represent—from the standpoint of
an institution dedicated to telling stories about ﬂesh-and-blood living
persons—a welcome side effect of adding synchronized sound to ﬁlms.
But neither were these incidental viewing energies counterproductive from
the standpoint of every Hollywood interest. In the pressbook for The
Bride of Frankenstein (1935), director James Whale made the following
analogy as he reﬂected on the art of frightening audiences through the
power of suggestion: “Lock yourself in a windowless room alone, turn
out the light, and put your radio on in such a way that all you get is
screams and moans and unearthly noises produced by static. Unless you
are the rare exception, you will very hastily switch on the light, fully expecting
to see some terrifying intruder in the empty room with you.”106
Whale, Tod Browning, and others made monsters out of the static of the
sound transition. Browning’s was not the ﬁrst ﬁlm to do this. The next
chapter looks at some other early sound ﬁlms as it examines the mechanism
of this transformation.
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turn to the theatrical model” (Rick Altman, “The Evolution of Sound Technology”
[1980], in Weis and Belton, 51).
16. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003), 75.
17. See, for example, the ﬁrst chapter of Carroll, 1990.
18. Richard Watts Jr., “On the Screen,” rev. of Dracula, New York HeraldTribune,
13 Feb. 1931, 20.
19. Mordaunt Hall, “The Mystery of the Wax Museum,” New York Times,
18 Feb. 1933, 13.
CHAPTER 1. THE UNCANNY BODY
OF EARLY SOUND FILM
1. “George Bernard Shaw—Fox Movietone,” Photoplay, Sept. 1928, 57.
Mordaunt Hall found the ﬁlm conveying “Mr. Shaw’s true personality by an
unimportant little chat” (Mordaunt Hall, “The Reaction of the Public to Motion
Pictures with Sound,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
12, no. 35 [Sept. 1928]: 608). On the slipperiness of the concept of realism in
relation to the early sound period, see Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative
Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 45–49.
2. Hal Hall, “Some Talkie Observations” (interview of William A. Seiter),
American Cinematographer 11, no. 2 (June 1930): 19.
3. Alexander Bakshy, “The Movie Scene: Notes on Sound and Silence,” Theatre
Arts Monthly (Feb. 1929): 102. Bakshy voiced a similar opinion in “The
‘Talkies,’” The Nation, 20 Feb. 1929, 236.
4. “Facts about Talking Pictures and Instruments—No. 4,” Harrison’s Reports,
8 Sept. 1928, 144.
5. “When Movies Talk,” New York Times, 17 May 1928, 24.
6. Alexander Bakshy, “Hollywood Tries ‘Ideas,’” The Nation, 22 June 1932,
708.
7. Delight Evans, “Strange Interlude,” Screenland, Sept. 1932, 60.
8. Abel Green, “Strange Interlude,” Variety, 6 Sept. 1932, 15 (This reviewer
signed his name “Abel.”).
9. “Strange Interlude,” Film Daily, 8 July 1932, 22.
10. Crafton, 100.
11. “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” Motion Picture Herald, 22 Oct.
1932, 31.
12. J. C. M., “The Current Cinema: Silk-Shirt World—The Lockstep with
Music—Robinson Becomes a Type,” The New Yorker, 28 May 1932, 51. Jason
Joy of the Studio Relations Committee worried that Scarface’s Tony Camonte
resembled Al Capone too closely in name and deeds (Joy to E. B. Derr of Caddo,
4 June 1931, quoted in Richard Maltby, “‘Grief in the Limelight’: Al Capone,
Howard Hughes, the Hays Code and the Politics of the Unstable Text,” in Movies
and Politics: The Dynamic Relationship, ed. James Combs [New York: Garland,
1993], 150). On similarities between the backgrounds of the ﬁlms’ stars and those
of the characters they played, see Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public HeN
O T E S T O P A G E S 6 – 1 0 / 1 3 1
roes: Screening the Gangster Film from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), 39–40, 41, 63.
13. Respectively: Sid Silverman, “The Public Enemy,” Variety, 29 April 1931,
12 (This reviewer signed his name “Sid.”); Norbert Lusk, “The Public Enemy,”
Picture Play, Aug. 1931, 56; and “The Public Enemy,” Screenland, June 1931,
84. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was a “starkly realistic expose”; Kameradschaft
(Pabst, 1931) moved “like an epic news reel, and you feel the reality
of every incident”; also, this ﬁlm was “a human document, intense, direct, forceful
in its concentrated action”; All Quiet on theWestern Front (Milestone, 1930)
was a “powerful document against war.” (Respectively: “I Am a Fugitive,” 31;
“Kameradschaft,” Film Daily, 10 Nov. 1932, 6; “Kameradschaft,” Motion Picture
Herald, 10 Dec. 1932, 50; “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Film Daily, 27
April 1930, 12.)
14. Silverman, “The Public Enemy,” 12.
15. Todd Graves, “Fed Up on Gangsters,” Picture Play, Dec. 1931, 73. Munby
notes that this also was a cinema well equipped to address head-on the harsh social
realities of the Depression (Munby, 40).
16. Fitzhugh Green, The Film Finds Its Tongue (New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1929; repr., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), 12.
17. H. G. Knox, “Wide Range Sound: What It Is and What It Means to the
Theatre,” Motion Picture Herald, 27 Aug. 1932, Better Theatres Section, 15.
18. “Tenderloin,” Variety, 21 March 1928, 18.
19. Alexander Bakshy, “The Shrinking of Personality,” The Nation, 27 May
1931, 590.
20. Alfred Rushford Greason, “Vitaphone Reviews,” Variety, 23 March 1927,
15 (This reviewer signed his name “Rush.”).
21. Quoted in “Inventor Describes His Colored Picture Process,” New York
Times, 22 June 1924, sec. 7, p. 2.
22. The train reference is from Maxim Gorky, Review of the Lumière program
at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair (1896), reprinted in Kino: A History of the
Russian and Soviet Film, ed. Jay Leyda (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960),
408. On objects coming into the foreground in early ﬁlms, see Stephen Bottomore,
“The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect,’” Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no. 2 (1999): 177–216. The bush reference
is from Rémy de Gourmont, “Epilogues: Cinematograph” (1907), quoted
in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, vol.
1, 1907–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 47. (For a different
translation of the same passage, see Tsivian, Early Cinema, 109.) The wave
reference is from New York Dramatic Mirror, 2 May 1896, quoted in George C.
Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, CT: New
York Graphic Society, 1966), 16. The ﬁngers reference is from Gorky, 408. On
the medium sensitivity of early cinema viewers, see Tsivian, Early Cinema,
216–17; and Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915, vol. 2
of History of the American Cinema, ed. Charles Harpole (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1994), 92–95.
23. See, in Early Cinema, Tsivian’s chapters “The Reception of the Moving
Image” (135–61) and “The Reception of Narrative Devices” (177–215).
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24. On Warner Bros. ceasing production of sound-on-disc ﬁlms, see Douglas
Gomery, The Coming of Sound: A History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 95,
where he also notes that by 1933, approximately four hundred disc-only theaters
were still in operation in the United States.
25. David Barrist, “The Flop of the Talking Movie,” The Exhibitor (Philadelphia),
quoted in Harrison’s Reports, 24 Sept. 1927, 153.
26. “Facts about Talking Pictures and Instruments—No. 10,” Harrison’s Reports,
22 Dec. 1928, 201.
27. H. G. Knox, “Bewildering Problems of Sound,” NewYorkTimes, 21 Dec.
1930, sec. 8, p. 6. Another commentator called the ﬁrst Vitaphone ﬁlms “a
squeaky, squawky assemblage of crude noises” (Benjamin B. Hampton, A History
of the Movies [New York: Vici Friede Publishers, 1931], 378).
28. Hampton, 385. A critic wrote, in early 1930, that “voices sound far more
human than they did six months ago” (“The Talkies’ Future,” The Nation, 15
Jan. 1930, 61).
29. Crafton, 447–56.
30. Alexander Walker, The Shattered Silents (New York: William Morrow,
1979), 61; also see 69.
31. Mordaunt Hall, “Amazing Invention Coupling Sound with Screen Images
Stirs Audiences,” New York Times, 15 Aug. 1926, sec. 7, p. 2.
32. “Tenderloin,” 18.
33. Quoted in René Clair, CinemaYesterday andToday, trans. Stanley Appelbaum
(New York: Dover, 1972), 128.
34. Rick Altman, “Sound Space,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Altman,
47–48.
35. Myrtle Gebhart, “Voices Are Tested,” Picture Play, July 1928, 104.
36. Chapin Hall, “Talking Films Try Movie Men’s Souls,” New York Times,
8 July 1928, sec. 3, p. 1. Similar complaints about another 1928 ﬁlm are noted
by Crafton (284), who also describes a ﬁlm from the same year in which the “camera
ﬂits giddily through the silent scenes in Coney Island but freezes rock-steady
in the talking ones, causing an abrupt change in visual style” (308). On the jarring
quality of these transitions, also see John Belton, “Awkward Transitions:
Hitchcock’s ‘Blackmail’ and the Dynamics of Early Film Sound,” The Musical
Quarterly 83, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 227–28.
37. This problem is noted in “Hissing and Scratching Ended by New Process,
Asserts Erpi,” Exhibitors Herald-World, 6 Dec. 1930, 17. Examples of such noises
can be heard in Madame X (L. Barrymore, 1929) and Anna Christie (Brown,
1930).
38. These difﬁculties included the impossibility of editing synchronized
sound-on-disc ﬁlm sequences, and the jumps in sound levels and ground noise
that could result from editing sound-on-ﬁlm sequences. Some of these problems
are discussed in J. Garrick Eisenberg, “Mechanics of the Talking Movies,” Projection
Engineering 1, no. 3 (Nov. 1929): 22 and 23. In the case of sound-onﬁlm
editing, the difﬁculties would be substantially alleviated by the introduction
of Western Electric Noiseless Recording in 1930.
39. On the higher costs of production during the period and how the studios
dealt with them, see A. Walker, 93–97, who notes that Paramount’s response to
N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 4 – 1 6 / 1 3 3
the increases included setting the maximum number of takes a director could
order printed to two (93).
40. On how the addition of synchronized sound resulted in a coarsening of
ﬁlm style, see Belton, 228–32.
41. James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception,
Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 111,
and see 92–122 on how the term synchronization has been applied in considerations
of ﬁlm sound-image combinations during the sound and the silent eras.
42. Sloppy postdubbing: “Warming Up,” Harrison’s Reports, 21 July 1928,
114. Dubbed-in foreign speech: Heinrich Fraenkel, “Can Industry Stay International?
The Multilingual Problem and What to Do about It,” Motion Picture
Herald, 31 Jan. 1931, 58.
43. William A. Johnston, “The Public and Sound Pictures,” Journal of the
Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 35 (Sept. 1928): 615. On the novelty
of early ﬁlm sound, see Gorbman, 44–45.
44. Tsivian, Early Cinema, 153–56.
45. Eileen Creelman, N.Y. American, quoted in “Warner Bros. Present Vitaphone”
(advt.), Film Daily, 17 Aug. 1926, 6.
46. Mordaunt Hall, “Vitaphone Stirs as Talking Movie,” New York Times,
7 Aug. 1926, 6. Also suggesting an increase in screen awareness is a review of a
1923 sound ﬁlm demonstration in which “conversation and music accompanying
the pictures were clearly audible, and, being ‘broadcast’ directly from the
ﬁlm, synchronized with the action” (“Talking Movies Shown: Conversation and
Music Accompany Pictures in Cleveland,” New York Times, 12 Dec. 1923, 24).
On the tendency to invoke radio when describing early sound ﬁlms, see Crafton,
40–41.
47. Cyril Brown, “Speech to Movies by the Phonoﬁlm,” New York Times, 17
Aug. 1922, 6.
48. Joe W. Coffman, “Art and Science in Sound Film Production,” Journal
of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 14, no. 2 (Feb. 1930): 176.
49. On how early sound ﬁlm audiences could, by laughing, indicate that they
did not know how to react to a sound ﬁlm, see A. Walker, 48. Viewers would
quickly adjust their faculties to accommodate the sound. As a 1930 article in
Projection Engineering put it: “When the novelty lessens, as a result of familiarity,
the theatre patron has time and opportunity to catch up, and to analyze
his reactions. Given time to reason (after wonder has subsided), the theatre patron
is in the mental state necessary to resume the role of critic” (“The Psychology
of Sounds in Screen Presentations,” Projection Engineering 2, no. 4 [April
1930]: 21).
50. Carlisle MacDonald, “Demand Talkies in Own Language,” New York
Times, 17 April 1930, 9.
51. Quoted in “New York Critics Like the First ‘All-Talkie,’” Film Daily, 15
July 1928, 11.
52. Bernard Brown, Talking Pictures (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons,
1931), 298.
53. Crafton, 490. Elsewhere he describes 1928 ﬁlms that treat synchronized
speech more like a special effect than like an integrated element of the mise-en-
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scène (115), and notes that during the initial phase of critical consideration of
the voice in relation to the image, the voice was regarded as separate from the
actor’s body, something with merely a surplus value (298, 447, 455–56, 460, 478,
and 511). Lastra notes that “synchronization” was regarded as a kind of performance
during both the silent and sound eras (Lastra, SoundTechnology, 120).
54. Tom Gunning has written extensively on this sense of ﬁlms during the
early cinema period. See, for example, his essays “‘Primitive’ Cinema: A FrameUp?
Or the Trick’s on Us,” in Early Cinema: Space—Frame—Narrative, ed.
Thomas Elsaesser with Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990),
95–103; “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,”
in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 118–19 (essay originally published
in Art and Text 34 [Spring 1989]: 31–45); and “‘Animated Pictures’: Tales
of Cinema’s Forgotten Future, after 100 Years of Films,” in Reinventing Film
Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 318.
55. F. Green, 11.
56. Ruth Russell, “Voice Is Given to Shadows of Silver Screen,” Chicago Daily
Tribune, 16 Sept. 1926, 31 (“delicate pizacatti”); “George Bernard Shaw—
Fox Movietone,” 57 (“scrunch, scrunch”); the Warner anecdote is related in
A. Walker, 23.
57. Lewis W. Physioc, “Technique of the Talkies,” American Cinematographer
9, no. 5 (Aug. 1928): 24.
58. James O. Spearing, “Now the Movies Go Back to Their School Days,”
New York Times magazine section, 19 Aug. 1928, 12.
59. B. Brown, 289.
60. See for example Tsivian, Early Cinema, 131, 198.
61. Ibid., 198–99.
62. More evidence of the tendency to interpret a close view of a head as a
view of a big head is this comment: “We hear on all sides discussions which indicate
that the auditors are satisﬁed that synchronism is accomplished; but that
there is a feeling that only at rare times does the sound seem to come from the
proper source. They view a medium close-up that appears to ﬁt the sound, there
is a gasp of delight audible over the entire audience, the illusion is perfect; then
comes a large head, covering the entire screen, the lips move in perfect synchronism
with the sound, but there is a sense of disappointment in the audience”
(Physioc, 25 [my italics]). Another sign is Lee DeForest’s comment that “a giant
face must not speak with an ordinary human voice” (Lee DeForest, “Recent Developments
in ‘The Phonoﬁlm,’” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers
10, no. 27 [Oct. 1926]: 72).
63. On the forward-moving camera, see Tsivian, Early Cinema, 204–7. On
perceptions of the dangerous and mysterious nature of the frame’s edges, see ibid.,
146–47; Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early
Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film before Grifﬁth,
ed. John Fell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983),
363–65; and Gorky, 407, 408.
64. See for example Tsivian, Early Cinema, 155–56, 206.
65. Gorky, 407. One might doubt that many general viewing responses to
N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 9 – 2 1 / 1 3 5
early ﬁlms can be found reﬂected in the densely imaginative prose of this Russian
Symbolist writer. Tsivian in Early Cinema does distinguish critical responses
from ordinary ones, referring to the latter as reactive and the former as reﬂective
(1–3). However, he also argues that Gorky’s review, like other written comments
dating from the period, does reveal universal tendencies in early ﬁlm viewing,
including that of projecting elements of cinematic discourse onto the diegesis
(see, for example, 149). Gunning also believes that Gorky’s response can be so
generalized. (See his “Animated Pictures,” 326.)
66. Hall, “Reaction of the Public,” 605–6.
67. “The Jazz Singer,” Harrison’s Reports, 22 Oct. 1927, 171 (“deaf”); “Sounds
in a Studio,” New York Times, 29 June 1930, sec. 8, p. 3 (“museum”); “Phonoﬁlm
Shown in Rivoli Theatre,” New York Times, 16 April 1923, 20 (“shops”).
68. Hall, “Reaction of the Public,” 607.
69. Of some human ﬁgures in a Lumière ﬁlm, Gorky wrote that “their smiles
are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift
as to be almost imperceptible” (407).
70. Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno, Composing for the Films (Freeport,
NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1947; repr., 1971), 76. On Eisler and Adorno’s
thoughts on the ghostliness of ﬁlm, see Gorbman, 39–41; Michal Grover-Friedlander,
“‘The Phantom of the Opera’: The Lost Voice of Opera in Silent Film,”
Cambridge Opera Journal 11, no. 2 (July 1999): 182–83; and Philip Rosen,
“Adorno and Film Music: Theoretical Notes and Composing for the Films,” Yale
French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 172–74. Roger Manvell and John Huntley note
that music softens the “unnatural and ghostly” quality of silent ﬁlm, in TheTechnique
of Film Music (New York: Communication Arts Books, Hastings House,
1957), 16.
71. The opinion that nondiegetic music distracts viewers is expressed in “Playing
Music While the Characters Talk,” Harrison’s Reports, 30 Nov. 1929, 192.
Concerns that viewers would be wondering about the source of the music are
noted by Frederick Steiner in “The Making of an American Film Composer: A
Study of Alfred Newman’s Music in the First Decade of the Sound Era” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Southern California, 1981), 121–40. A composer who worked
on early sound ﬁlms recalled that when Heaven on Earth (Mack, 1931) “was
shown in the projection room at Universal, . . . at some spots, when someone
said ‘how are you,’ Laemmle [Jr.] said ‘cut the music out under that, one has to
hear the dialogue’” (Bernhard Kaun to William H. Rosar, 21 Feb. 1970, quoted
in Rosar, “Music for the Monsters: Universal Pictures’ Horror Film Scores of the
Thirties,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 40 [Fall 1983]: 397).
72. Hall reports that Jesse Lasky felt this way about incidental noises in relation
to dialogue (“Reaction of the Public,” 609). Others believed that scene
transitions and important movements within the frame demanded quiet to be
easily comprehendible (“The Psychology of Sounds in Screen Presentations,” 21).
73. Joseph O’Sullivan, “Why Not Dramatize Sound?” Motion Picture Herald,
3 Sept. 1932, 17.
74. Alexander Bakshy, “With Beneﬁt of Music,” The Nation, 1April 1931, 359.
75. Luigi Pirandello, “Pirandello Views the ‘Talkies,’” New York Times, 28
July 1929, sec. 5, p. 1.
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76. Gilbert Seldes, “The Movies Commit Suicide,” Harper’s, Nov. 1928, 710,
quoted in Crafton, 534.
77. John Seitz, “Introduction,” Cinematographic Annual 1930 (New York:
Arno Press, 1972), 17, quoted in Crafton, 249. The Motion Picture News editor
wrote in 1928: “I believe that other important physical developments will follow
now that the screen can talk. One is color and another is the third dimension
effect, both designed to lend further realism to the formerly ﬂat and silent
ﬁgures of the screen” (Johnston: 618–19).
78. Alexander Bakshy, “A Year of Talkies,” The Nation, 26 June 1929, 773.
79. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, ed. and
trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1967), 17–22; and Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, ed. and trans. Ben Brewster
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 10.
80. Joseph P. Maxﬁeld, “Some Physical Factors Affecting the Illusion in Sound
Motion Pictures,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 3, no. 1 (July
1931): 79. But as with synchronized sound generally, viewers also could ﬁnd closeups
in sound ﬁlms enhancing sensations of human presence. Such a view is expressed
in Norbert Lusk, “Continuous Dialogue on the Screen,” rev. of Lights
of NewYork, Picture Play, Oct. 1928, 70; and Rob Wagner, “Silence Isn’t Golden
Any More,” Collier’s, 25 Aug. 1928, 12.
81. John L. Cass, “The Illusion of Sound and Picture,” Journal of the Society
of Motion Picture Engineers 14, no. 3 (March 1930): 325. Shots so framed
could seem to leap out of a sequence and disturb a viewer’s sense of a ﬁlm’s
ﬂow. Pirandello castigated ﬁlmmakers for “showing close-ups of the talking images,
with the ﬁne result that the scene, as a whole, is lost; that the quick succession
of talking images tires the eyes; and that the dialogue loses all forcefulness.
Furthermore, there is the realization that the lips of those huge images
in the foreground are moving in vain because the voice does not issue from their
mouths but comes out in a grotesque manner from the machine” (sec. 5, p. 2).
A journalist in 1922 questioned whether close-ups should be used at all in sound
ﬁlms (“Talking Films Soon Will Appear Here,” New York Times, 22 Oct. 1922,
sec. 2, p. 14). And Physioc in 1928 complained that the overuse of close-ups
in silent ﬁlms became, in the sound era, “an even more important matter, due
to the relation between the volume of sound and the size of the picture” (Physioc,
24).
82. In one article, Hall referred to “sound with shadows,” “speaking likeness,”
and to the time when Shaw “sent his shadow and his voice over here”
(Hall, “Reaction of the Public,” 603, 612, and 608 respectively). Another wrote
that “the irrepressible technician has at last succeeded in teaching shadows to
talk” (“Hollywood Speaks,” The Nation, 26 Sept. 1928, 285).
83. 1915 Kinetophone viewer quoted in Tsivian, Early Cinema, 102; Rob
Wagner, “Photo-Static,” Collier’s, 23 Feb. 1929, 26 (“roared like monstrous
ghosts”); Pirandello, sec. 5, p. 1–2 (“images do not talk”).
84. Bakshy, “Year of Talkies,” 773.
85. From an e-mail to the author by Karan Sheldon of Northeast Historic
Film, who quotes an unpublished survey. The respondent’s name is Neil G.
Sawyer. The comment also can be found (slightly misquoted) in Crafton, 6. Also,
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Fitzhugh Green described a “‘hollowness’ of recording” and the sometimes
mufﬂed quality of the voice (F. Green, 169–70).
86. Again Gorky supplies the central text: “It is a world without sound, without
colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the
air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey
eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its
shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre” (407). Others to comment on
the unrealism of ﬁlm include Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism
in the German Cinema and the Inﬂuence of Max Reinhardt (1952; repr.,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 17; Gunning,
“Animated Pictures,” 318; and Parker Tyler, “Supernaturalism in the Movies,”
Theatre Arts, June 1945, 363.
87. See Gunning, “Animated Pictures,” 316–31, especially 326, on how the
addition of movement to still photographs made what was perceived to be still
lacking stand out. Also see Tsivian, Early Cinema, 6–9, 82–83, 111, and Gunning’s
foreword to Tsivian’s book, xxi.
88. The quoted words come from Mordaunt Hall, “The Best Ten Films,” New
York Times, 5 Jan. 1930, sec. 8, p. 6.
89. Harold B. Franklin, “Talking Pictures—The Great Internationalist,”
Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 15, no. 1 (July 1930): 18.
90. Knox, “Wide Range Sound,” 15–16.
91. Gorbman, 41.
92. Tom Gunning uses the same metaphor to rework prior characterizations
he has made of ambivalent responses to ﬁlms during the early cinema period (Tom
Gunning, “The Ghost in the Machine: Animated Pictures at the Haunted Hotel
of Early Cinema,” Living Pictures 1, no. 1 [2001]: 14–16).
93. On the audio CD of Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dracula (Gary D. Rhodes,
2000).
94. On the stylistic particulars of these transitions, see the discussion of “audio
dissolves” and “video dissolves” in Rick Altman, The American Film Musical
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 62–80.
95. Altman, “Sound Space,” 46–64; Lastra, SoundTechnology, 154–79. Also
see Charles O’Brien, Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style
in France and the U.S. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 97–102.
96. Though the foregrounded-sound approach sounds natural to us, it didn’t
necessarily to viewers who were unaccustomed to the convention. Two who found
the effects of the technique unreal were Physioc, 25; and Gordon S. Mitchell,
“The New Motion Picture and the Public,” Exhibitors Herald-World, 22 Nov.
1930, Better Theatres Section, 11 and 40. The scale-matching approach, however,
could be just as bad. MGM chief transmission engineer Wesley Miller endorsed
scale matching not as a solution but as the lesser of two evils: “Any combination
of picture and sound must be so proportioned that the latter sounds
natural coming from the artiﬁcial person on the screen” (Wesley C. Miller, “Sound
Pictures the Successful Production of Illusion,” American Cinematographer, Dec.
1929, 5 and 20 [my italics]). On this comment, see Lastra, 161–62.
97. Lastra, Sound Technology, 194.
98. See, for example, Crafton, 279, 328.
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99. Numbers in Hollywood musicals tend to be separated from what precedes
and follows them unambiguously, but there are exceptions. For an example,
see Altman, American Film Musical, 67–68.
100. Katie Trumpener, “The René Clair Moment and the Overlap Films of
the Early 1930s: Detlef Sierck’s April, April!” Film Criticism 23, no. 2–3 (Winter/Spring
1999): 36 and 35, respectively.
101. Ibid., 39–40.
102. On the dreamlike quality of musicals, see Altman, American Film Musical,
chap. 4, esp. 60–61, 76–77.
103. Trumpener, 40. A U.S. review of À Nous la Liberté (1931) that voices
an observation similar to Trumpener’s is Margaret Marshall, “The Art of René
Clair,” The Nation, 8 June 1932, 660.
104. Patricia Leigh, “What the Fans Think: Talking Down the Talkies,” Picture
Play, Nov. 1928, 12.
105. The perceived tempestuous character of individual ﬁlms was mirrored
in some impressions of the period as a whole. An industry trade journal referred
in 1929 to “this present momentous and unsettled era.” Fitzhugh Green wrote
that “the greatest and the lowliest are still experimenting. For though their talkie
of today is a marvel compared to that of six months ago, they know that the
talkie of tomorrow is going to be just that much different again. There is almost
no talkie made that doesn’t alter their knowledge of the art.” A 1930 book on
sound ﬁlm noted that “great progress has already been achieved in the making
of pictures that have talking sequences even as compared with the crude efforts
of a few months ago!” (Respectively: Haviland Wessells, “Sound—as the Customers
Hear It,” Projection Engineering 1, no. 3 [Nov. 1929]: 12; F. Green, 294;
and Harold B. Franklin, Sound Motion Pictures: From the Laboratory to Their
Presentation [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1930], 12.) Also see “Picture-Making
Changed More in 3 1/2 Yrs. since ‘Jazz Singer’ Than in 20 since
‘Birth of a Nation,’” Variety, 1 April 1931, 12.
106. “Director of ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ Tells All,” Exhibitors’ Campaign
for The Bride of Frankenstein, reproduced in Philip J. Riley, ed., The Bride
of Frankenstein, Universal Filmscripts Series, Classic Horror Films, vol. 2 (Absecon,
NJ: MagicImage Filmbooks, 1989). On the claim of researchers in paranormal
phenomena that by tuning between radio stations so that all one can hear
is static, one may pick up communications from the dead, see Jeffrey Sconce’s
excellent Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 84–91.
CHAPTER 2. LUDICROUS OBJECTS,
TEXTUALIZED RESPONSES
Epigraph: Sound technician Joe Coffman shared Johnston’s wariness of standardization:
“Just now, production is beginning to settle down to routine, and
all experts are breathing easier, feeling safe in the many tricks and expedients
that they have used in producing the relatively satisfactory results now being seN
O T E S T O P A G E S 2 8 – 3 1 / 1 3 9