Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound: Transatlantic Trends by Charles O’Brien (review)

The historiography of the transition from silent cinema to sound cinema has evolved considerably in the last decade, none more so than for scholars of cinematic sound. A wealth of recent scholarship has illuminated the coming of sound from a range of different national, cultural, and industrial vantage points, bringing the many continuities between silent cinema and sound cinema into focus. As a result, what was once treated as a stark line in the sand–a technological revolution followed by a few years of chaos, as exhibitors fired scores of orchestra players and filmmakers scrambled to learn how to use new sonic resources ‘properly’–is now understood as a complex global process, advancing swiftly in some places and incrementally in others. More than ever before, the decade between 1925 and 1935 appears as a period ripe with aesthetic possibility.

Charles O’Brien’s new monograph joins this growing cohort of studies, with a particular focus on what he terms the ‘musical film’–an umbrella term covering ‘operettas, revue films, musical-stage adaptations, opera-singer vehicles and backstage melodramas’ (p.3). This musically driven cinema, O’Brien notes, was a crucial product for film industries around the world circa 1930, able to transcend the new linguistic barriers to international distribution with greater ease than ‘the talkies’. But incorporating songs and their performance into cinematic narrative was not without its difficulties, posing technical and artistic challenges for personnel on both sides of the camera. O’Brien is interested in how these challenges were solved not only in an American context, but in a European (and especially German) one as well. In fact, what Movies, Songs and Electric Sound: Transatlantic Trends undertakes to uncover is a putative period style, a concept O’Brien borrows from art history: ‘the combination of techniques that films made in one city, country and continent were likely to share with films made in others at roughly the same time, regardless of the locale of production’ (p.9).

Such an expansive concept inevitably demands corroboration with evidence from a large body of films, and O’Brien duly attempts the analysis of close to 500–more on that number shortly–using both historical and statistical methodologies. The historical methods employed are familiar, combining archival evidence with readings of individual films. But O’Brien supplements these with a closer study of the films in question, employing an approach within film studies known as ‘cinemetrics’. Spearheaded by the film scholar Yuri Tsivian, cinemetrics prioritises the analysis of various quantifiable features of film montage, most notably the average shot length (ASL) of an individual film or set of films. Proponents of this approach argue that by comparing the number and length of shots in different films within, say, one director’s oeuvre, meaningful conclusions can be drawn about the editing rhythm characteristic of that director’s style–or regarding drifts in wider editing preferences over time. In the late 1920s, new-fangled singing sequences, like dialogue itself, substantially disrupted editing patterns that had evolved around the demands of silent cinematic montage, and O’Brien argues that his blended methodology, encompassing cinemetric analysis and conventional historical inquiry, can therefore grant special insight into stylistic trends around the coming of sound.

The first half of the book explores different topical angles on the period 1927–1934, starting in Chapter 1 with the place of songs in the early years of sound film. O’Brien then explores the impact of ‘electric sound’, as he calls it, on cinematic exhibition (Chapter 2); and on the voices and bodies of actors in films (Chapter 3). Then, in Chapter 4, he turns to the effects of synchronised sound on editing techniques, through an extended analysis of several Marx Brothers films. This is the topic most germane to cinemetrics, and this chapter trades most explicitly in statistical evidence. It is thus worth briefly summarising the principal findings of O’Brien’s cinemetric analysis–a truly Herculean labour, for, in order to calculate...