Sound Technology and the American Cinema (review)

Sound Technology and the American Cinema. James Lastra. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Pp. 270. $49.50 (cloth); $18.50 (paper).

Numerous scholars have dealt with sound and film, but few have sought to understand its operations of sound, voice, and listening by venturing very far outside the world of film itself. Given the fact that scholarly discussions of the cultural status of sound have been few and far between, this has been perfectly understandable. In fact when it comes to substantive treatments of "sound," film studies has been practically the only show in town. And why not? Film offers a number of advantages over other auditory forms and experiences. Unlike the blinded sound of radio (Rudolf Arnheim's term) film sound is embedded among many other markers of phenomenal reality, forming a rich, discursively productive site. Cinema, moreover, comprises its own documentary record, surrounded as it is by an industry replete with trade papers and popular press, the accounts of directors, stars and also-rans, technicians, and the like. Other forms of sound, conversely, are left undocumented or housed in uncommon archives. Radio, a massive social and cultural force, has a formidable industry but, as a document, dissipates into the very airwaves. Libraries, the most common archives, are filled with debased forms of recording--writing or musical notation. Written language does not lend itself to invoking auditive events or experiences; and musical notation is inept when it comes to as basic an attribute as timbre, not to mention the more mimetic registers. Finally, the early proximity of film studies to literature departments meant that studies of film sound were informed by the latest theories, as opposed to departments of musicology where "theory" is, let's say, very differently understood.

Much has changed over the last decade as scholars across a range of disciplines have offered substantial contributions to what is beginning to be called the study of auditory culture. Working in isolation from one another, often without previous works to refer to, they have been particularly resourceful in gleaning every little whisper and squeak from an excess of mute, original sources. In the last two years alone over a dozen titles and dissertations have been published or are shortly forthcoming. The auditory turn is in full swing. James Lastra's Sound Technology and the American Cinema is situated between the tradition of scholarship on film sound and the more recent impulse toward the auditory. By going back to mostly nineteenth-century discourses of photography, phonography, and film, he aims to develop a theory of audio-visual recording media applicable to sound in classical American cinema, and in the process to complicate ideas about modernity and representation. This is a perfectly valid ambition. Because the study of sound film developed at a remove from other discourses on sound, a major rethinking is certainly due, and because of the visualist presumptions underscoring theories of modernity and representation, questions of the auditory have the potential to reconfigure time-honored accounts and ask formerly unconsidered sets of questions.

Lastra's book promises such a rethink. He is very well schooled in the discourses and practices of technology in the American sound film. His book is therefore especially impressive in its detailing of the immediate prefiguration of sound film and the various negotiations that produced what we recognize, quite arbitrarily, as the way it should have always been. Sound Technology and the American Cinema thus complements the work of Rick Altman and Alan Williams among others. The problem is that as the book departs from its analysis of film sound, its argument becomes less certain. Lastra is confident and compelling while discussing cinema and sound cinema, to a lesser extent photography, in large part because the groundwork has already been laid. Yet relatively little scholarship exists on phonography, visible and graphic sound, automata, vocal simulation, and the relevant discourses in the nineteenth century and before. To do justice to this area now requires original research, quite a bit of it, and...