High Fidelity: France's Conversion Era and the Limits of the Classical Style

Charles O'Brien's scrupulously researched and discriminating volume, Cinema's Conversion to Sound, makes a fine companion piece to Colin Crisp's seminal The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960. According to Crisp, the economic factors attached to the use of sound technology were central in determining the fate of film aesthetics in the early 1930s. While forays into "experimental" feature filmmaking did not cease outright, "the introduction of sound [. . .] saw an aesthetic revolution of a fundamentally conservative nature take place in the French cinema."¹ O'Brien's revisionist study of the five-year French conversion era (1929–1934), however, contends that the story of the impact of sound conversion cannot be limited to an appeal to technological or economic determinants. Cultural factors—the uniquely French interpretation of the possibilities of the sound film—must be accounted for as well.

In order to accentuate the particularities of the French approach to sound conversion, O'Brien, associate professor at Carleton University, Ottawa, undertakes a comparative study, setting the French conversion era up alongside that of Hollywood, which began three years earlier (1926–1931). Reflecting on the methodological limitations of previous historical accounts, he carves out a daring thesis: while technology and technique during the conversion era appear to have undergone transnational standardization, in fact conversion led to a mobilization of differences in national film styles. By placing the conditions and effects of the transition to sound in the American setting side-by-side with those in France, the author draws out the salient differences between their respective products. But the linchpin in O'Brien's argument is not simply the notion that an empirical investigation of American and French films of the period reveals stark differences in the look of these two cinemas; the crucial differences would in fact remain largely concealed by such an approach. Rather, O'Brien is interested in the causes of the differences, in the practice-defining goals that shape the American and French methods, for this is truly where the divergence lies. Although the French and the Americans had access to the same technologies and techniques in their respective transition eras, deep-rooted cultural differences and divergent craft and institutional traditions caused a rift along national boundaries.

In this potentially groundbreaking account, O'Brien isolates a principal flaw that pervades film stylistics—a flaw that has masked the true nature of France's conversion era: the tendency to reduce film style to visual style. In this way, one of the reasons the Standard Story of the conversion era is deficient is because it focuses on changes in the film image alone to the absolute neglect of sound and its unique interaction with the image track in different national cinemas. While both French and American filmmakers and audiences developed a taste for tight synchronization of sound and image, a closer investigation of sound practice in the conversion era discloses that in Hollywood, sound was designed to facilitate story-world "intelligibility;" in France, however, the main concern was the preservation of the original performances that became the "meat" of what has pejoratively been labeled the "filmed theater" or "cinéma de sam'di soir" product of the era. O'Brien dubs this impulse of preservation "fidelity."

This "intelligibility versus fidelity" paradigm allows the author to paint in broad strokes—that is, to forge even in a small study with an ostensibly narrow focus a set of generalizations about long-range undercurrents. As O'Brien acknowledges, Fernand Braudel and the Annales School first pioneered this mode of historiographic study, in which the historian aims to uncover historical constancies imperceptible to those experiencing the events as they unfold. Adopting this approach allows O'Brien to unveil his most compelling, and far-reaching, find. "Still today," he argues, "the notion that the French cinema's conversion amounted to a break from the national cinema's past remains widely accepted among film historians."² In order to deal a...