Cinema's Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. (review)

The connection between film style and technology has received more and more attention in recent film historiography, as has the comparison between the development of film in different countries.¹ The first part of Charles O'Brien's book is an extensive synthesis of recent research on the transition to sound in Hollywood and Europe, supplemented by a huge number of primary sources, such as French film periodicals from the period. The second part is a very interesting, more original work which makes a more complete comparison between the two most famous film industries from the period (1929–1939). O'Brien insists on the differences in the use of sound in the French and American film industries. He stresses the importance of "son direct" (direct sound) in France since 1930, which has become standard although the technologies have since changed. He also emphasizes the diversity of styles over the uniformization which has traditionally been supposed to have accompanied the transition to sound. Although there was a technological standardization, the techniques were used differently according to the country. The author uses very precisely some film frames to illustrate his point. These pictures are taken out of popular French films rather than auteur films, an effective way of showing the evolution of an industry that exclusively produced for its own market.

However, some of O'Brien's affirmations can be contested. Some sound films were made by old silent veterans, but not that many, and he over-emphasizes their influence on the style of 1930–1933.² Half of the sound films produced in France between 1929 and 1933 were adaptations of popular plays, as O'Brien states, but plays themselves were also adapted in great number during the 1920s. It is also true that songs were very important for French audiences: "Exiting the movie theater, people were humming the tunes they just heard" (35, quoting René Clair's words). But the success of the American film musical shows it wasn't an exclusively French phenomenon (as can also be seen in Germany and Italy for example). The actors could address the audience directly, but no more than in the American musicals and comedies before 1934, as in, for instance, Lubitsch's One Hour with You.

From chapter 4 up to the end of his book, Charles O'Brien uses more personal methods to demonstrate his thesis and it works very well. Using the Barry Salt system of counting the Average Shot Length (ASL), he stresses the high differences between American and French editing techniques. The only problem can be the exact nature of the film copies used, for if some frames are missing, or if the restoration transformed the film, it becomes very difficult to evaluate the ASL. But the high number of films used permit O'Brien to make a good evaluation of the French and US "montage." The point is very persuasive when the author shows how the multitrack sound system came only at the beginning of the 1940s in France and the consequences of this on French editing, although it is not very clear if this material was available in France or not—the comparison is contradictory and confusing (102–22). He explains very clearly, however, how the fidelity to the place of recording (many times on location) and the timbre of the actor in France were more important than the intelligibility of the dialogues and the narration, as was the case in the USA. Rerecording and postsynchronizing were specific to Hollywood. In France, even if a lot of material was imported from the USA (like the unidirectionnal microphones), it was not used the same way. The actual sound of the set was preferred in France by the large majority of directors. Multi-camera shooting and multi-microphones recording can be explained, according to the author, by the importance of the recreation of a live...