French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema by Hannah Lewis (review)

Hannah Lewis’s examination of the first years of sound in France in the 1930s takes its place among a handful of recent works that open comparable avenues of research in film sound and music in the same period but in different regions. Michael Slowik’s After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934 (2014) concentrates on American filmmaking and asks important questions about the assumptions commonly made about well-known American scores of the early sound era and how much they may have relied on silent practices. Slowik’s interest is largely in the realm of the firmly non-diegetic orchestral score, while Katherine Spring’s Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema (2013) focuses on musicals. A welcome expansion into European cinema and beyond has augmented this literature: Lea Jacobs published Film Rhythm After Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance (2014), which adds Russian and other European cinema in a study that brings together analyses of rhythm in its many forms as demonstrated in pictures from the 1930s. A forthcoming title from Jacqueline Avila, Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity During Mexico’s Época de Oro (2019), takes in a broader historical range in addition to the critical transition years.

So French Musical Culture and the Coming of Sound Cinema, published in the same Oxford series as the titles from Avila and Spring, forms part of a vibrant research area specific to the early sound era as it manifested in various localities. Lewis reminds us that in France, much like in Britain and America, there was no single concept of the ‘sound film’, but instead at least two ways of categorising them. Firstly, film sonore, in which all sound, sometimes including dialogue, was recorded and synchronised in post-production; and then film parlant, which contained synchronised dialogue recorded on-set. But like all such typologies, the terms were sometimes used interchangeably or conflated in contemporaneous writing. Lewis effectively communicates that, while sound caused the same critical row over ontology and concepts of ‘progress’, the division between these perceived kinds of sonorised film caused further anguish, and seemed to result in what Lewis identifies as a ‘broader preference for films sonores over films parlants’ (25) since dialogue threatened to engulf film with a largely unwelcome realism.

Further investigation into the nomenclature of various kinds of musical film within the above divisions is undertaken in the third chapter of the study, and it is interesting to compare Lewis’s findings here with the situation in Britain. It seems that in France, filmed operetta and filmed opera were received more generously than in Britain, but the author makes it clear that the way these genres were referred to is crucial, and that it is not as simple as saying that filmed operetta was more popular in France: ‘In France, the lines differentiating the categories of films with popular songs, comédies musicales, and opérettes filmées were not as distinct [as in Hollywood, and I would argue in Britain as well]. But films that featured songs integrated into the narrative (as opposed to backstage musicals) were most often labelled opérettes filmées, regardless of musical style. The word opérette may have also provided just the right amount of cultural cachet’ (pp.76–77). Observations like this and their associated case studies, wherein Lewis makes links between the developing conventions of the film industry and its relationship to music and songs on the one hand, and the broader background of French culture on the other, give this study its real strength.

Initial material covering the attitudes and responses to the coming of sound in France interrogates the re-emergence of the musical analogy among filmmakers’ parlance as a way to conceptualise the multi-faceted craft of the sound film, and isolates specific voices in the debate. Crucially, Lewis reminds us that ‘[a]t times these prescriptions for sound...