The Sounds of Early Cinema (review)

The Sounds of Early Cinema. Edited by Richard Abel and Rick Altman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. [xvi, 327 p. ISBN 0-253-33988-X. $49.95. (hdbk.); ISBN 0-253-21479-3. $22.95. (pbk.).] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

The explosion of interest in film music in the last ten years has yielded a wealth of articles and books on a wide variety of topics, yet the larger picture has been occluded. That is, music—which constitutes only a segment of the larger conception of sound in film (albeit a significant one)—has received the lion's share of scholarly notice. Just as attention to less traversed areas of film music has increased recently, more work has appeared of late that focuses on all aspects of sound in cinema.

Only a few anthologies of writings on cinema sound have appeared in the last twenty years, including Cinema/Sound (ed. Rick Altman; Yale French Studies, 60 [New Haven: Yale French Studies, 1980]); Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); as well as occasional articles scattered throughout film and music journals and edited anthologies. A few examples of full-length critical studies exist, such as Elisabeth Weis's The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982). French critic and film-maker Michel Chion spent much of the last twenty years writing about sound in cinema and the intertextuality of music, sound, and image; much of his work has been made available in English within the last ten years, all translated by another film music notable, Claudia Gorbman (Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994]; The Voice in Cinema [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999]). Rick Altman—one of the coeditors of The Sounds of Early Cinema—has led a veritable revolution in the United States with his work on early film sound. Probably most important of his recent work is the article "The Silence of the Silents" (Musical Quarterly 80 [winter 1996]: 648-718), which made permanently explicit the erroneous presupposition that silent films were never silent, but always had some form of music playing at all times.

The Sounds of Early Cinema, coedited by Altman and film scholar Richard Abel, is a collection of the varied program of papers and demonstrations presented at the fifth biannual conference of Dormitor, "an international association of historians and archivists devoted to the study of early cinema (prior to 1915)" (p. xii). This particular conference focused on issues of sound, and took place in Washington, D.C., in June 1998. The editors' comment in the introduction, that "the work collected here hardly can be taken as the culmination of research on sound and early cinema. Rather . . . these essays mark the beginning of serious study" (p. xii-xiii), sets the stage for the variety of topics addressed. Many of the papers presented at Dormitor concerned what, exactly, people might have been seeing and hearing at early-twentieth-century film exhibitions. Since most of these presentations concerned issues seldom, if ever, dealt with before in a scholarly fashion, the papers collected for this book provide an excellent starting point for quite literally dozens of fresh topics of inquiry.

Given the explicit attention to all matters related to early film sound, it is of no surprise that only one of the five broad areas into which the book is divided deals specifically with music in early cinema. The other sections concern issues of spectatorship, and various topics on film exhibition, including contexts for exhibition, and the formulation and production of sound for early exhibitions. What exactly went on as a film was shown to an audience of spectators is broken down into the most minute details, while the very notion of the audience as "spectators" is taken into question. The book's sole appendix reprints the original French texts for six of the contributors' essays. The audience for this book, therefore, would...