Sound film

Photogram The Dickson Experimental Sound FilmThe first sound film.

The sound cinema is one in which the film incorporates sound that is synchronized (that is, technologically coupled) with the image. The first public display known as a sound film was shown in Paris in 1900, decades before reliable synchronization between sound and image became commercially practical. The first commercial projection of fully synchronized sound films occurred in New York City in April 1927 (The Jazz Singer). In the early years after the introduction of sound, films that incorporated synchronized dialogue were known as "talk films".

In the 1940s, talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States they helped secure Hollywood's position as one of the most powerful cultural/commercial systems in the world. In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere) the new development was treated with suspicion by many film directors and critics who worried that a focus on dialogue would upset the main aesthetic virtue of silent films. In Japan, where due to its cultural tradition silent films were integrated with live vocal performances, talkies took root very slowly. In India, sound was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the country's film industry, the most productive in the world since the early 1960s.

History

First Steps

The idea of combining moving images with recorded sound is almost as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, a few days after photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture not far from Thomas Edison's laboratory, the two inventors met in private. Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before the first showing of a commercial film, he proposed a scheme for talkies that would combine his zoopraxiscope image projector with Edison's recorded sound technology. No agreement was reached. Agreement, but for a year Edison was tasked with developing the kinetoscope, essentially a "quick view" system, as a visual adjunct to his phonograph cylinder. The two devices were merged into the kinetophone in 1895, but individual viewing of moving pictures in a cabinet soon fell out of fashion due to the successes in film projection. In 1899 a projected film sound system appeared, known as the Cinemacrophonograph. or Fonorama, based mainly on the work that the Swiss inventor François Dussaud exhibited in Paris; similar to the kinetophone, the system required the individual use of headphones. An improved system based on the cylinder, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of extracts from theater, opera to be presented and ballet at the Paris Exposition of 1900. These appear to be the first publicly shown films with projection of both image and recorded sound.

However, two major problems persisted leading moving images and recorded sound to go their separate ways for a generation:

1. Synchronization: The images and sound were recorded and reproduced in separate appliances, in which it was difficult to start their operation and maintain their synchronization. Although the motion picture projectors soon allowed the cinema to show itself to larger audiences, audio technology, before the development of the electric amplification, could not stand out to satisfactorily fill large spaces.
2. Fidelity of recording: The first sound cinema systems produced very low-quality sound, unless the interpreters were placed directly in front of the voluminous recording devices (Trumpet loudspeakers, usually), imposing serious limits on the type of films that could be created with sound recorded directly.

Innovative filmmakers attempted to wrestle with the fundamental problem of timing in different ways; a growing number of moving image systems depended on gramophone records, a technology known as sound on record; the recordings were often called "Berliner records" (Berliner Discs), in honor of one of the leading inventors in the field, the German-American Emile Berliner. Léon Gaumont demonstrated a system involving mechanical synchronization between a movie projector and a record player at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris. In 1902 his Chronophone, involving an electrical connection Gaumont had recently patented, was shown at the Society French photography. Four years later, he introduced the Elgéphone, a compressed-air amplification system based on the Auxetophone, developed by British inventors Horace Short and Charles Parsons and marketed by the American company Victor Talking Machine. Despite high expectations, Gaumont's sound innovations met with only limited commercial success; although improvements were made, they still did not satisfactorily solve the basic problems with sound in the cinema and were also expensive. For some years, American inventor E. E. Norton's Cameraphone was the main competitor to Gaumont's system (some sources differ on whether the Cameraphone was disk- or cylinder-based); in the end it failed for many of the same reasons that occurred with the Chronophone. By the late 1910s, the movement in talkies had come to a halt.

Innovations continued on other fronts. In 1907, Frenchman Eugene Lauste—who had worked in Thomas Edison's laboratory between 1886 and 1892—was granted the first patent for optical sound technology, involving the transformation of sound into light waves that were directly photographically recorded. on celluloid. As historian Scott Eyman described,

"It was a double system, that is, the sound was in a different part of the celluloid that the image... In essence, the sound was captured with a microphone and translated into light waves through a light valve, a thin sensitive metal tape on a tiny slit. The sound that came to this tape would become light by the vibration of the diaphragm, focusing the resulting light waves through the cleft, where it would be photographed in a part of the celluloid, on a tape of a tenth of an inch wide".

Although optical sound would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized talkies, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which effectively reached a dead end. In 1913, Edison introduced a new cylinder-based synchronized sound apparatus as his 1895 system called the Kinetophone; instead of showing the films individually in the kinetoscope room, they were now projected on a screen. The turntable was connected by a complicated series of pulleys to the movie projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—synchronization. Conditions, however, were rarely ideal, and the new and improved Kinetophone was withdrawn after just over a year.

Other sound films, based on a variety of systems, were made before the 1920s, usually with performers lip-synching to previously made audio recordings. The technology was much better suited for commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major Hollywood movie studios saw little benefit in producing talkies. Thus these films were relegated, along with color films, to the background.

Crucial Innovations

A number of technological developments contributed to making sound film commercially viable in the late 1920s. Two involved opposing approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback:

Advanced optical sound

In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was granted several patents that would lead to the first commercially applicable optical sound technology. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded on one side of the film tape to create a composite or "married" copy. If correct synchronization of sound and image was achieved on the recording, playback could be absolutely trusted. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of material and patents licensed by another American inventor in the field, Theodore Case. Among the many footage De Forest made while testing and perfecting his system, it has been found in the Library from the United States Congress a sound tape featuring Concha Piquer. At the University of Illinois, Polish-born research engineer Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was working independently on a similar process. On June 9, 1922, he gave the first demonstration of optical sound film to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.As with Lauste, Tykociner's system never had commercial advantages; however, De Forest's would soon do so.

On April 15, 1923, the first commercial film with optical sound was shown at the Rivoli Theater in New York City, The Future Standard: A Series of Shorts under the banner of De Forest Phonofilms, accompanying a motion picture muta. In June of that year, De Forest entered into a legal battle with an employee, Freeman Harrison Owens, over the right to one of Phonofilm's crucial patents. Although De Forest ultimately won the case in court, Owens is today recognized as a core innovator in the field. That same year, Lee DeForest also presented the film "Concha Piquer", with the Spanish singer of the same name reciting and singing in Spanish and Portuguese. The following year, De Forest's studio released the first commercial film sound drama, the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song, directed by J. Searle Dawley starring Una Merkel. Phonofilms' specialty, however, was not original dramas but documentaries. of celebrities, popular music acts and comedy performances. President Calvin Coolidge, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, and vaudeville stars such as Phil Baker, Ben Bernie, Eddie Cantor, and Oscar Levant appeared in the firm's films. Hollywood remained leery, even fearful, of the new technology. As Photoplay editor James Quirk put it in March 1924, "Sound pictures are perfected," says Dr. Lee De Forest. "So is castor oil." De Forests process continued to be used in 1927 in the United States in dozens of short Phonofilms; in the UK it was used for a few more years for both short and feature films by British Sound Film Productions, a subsidiary of British Talking Pictures, which bought the main assets of Phonofilm. In the late 1930s, the Phonofilm business would be wound up.

In Europe, others were also working on the development of optical sound. The same year that De Forest received the first patents from him in the field, three German inventors patented the Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, they presented a public screening of optical sound productions including a dramatic sound film, Der Brandstifter (The Arsonist) before an invited audience at the Alhambra Kino of Berlin. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, patented a system whereby sound was recorded on separate slides running in parallel with the imaging coil. Gaumont would license and briefly put the technology into commercial use under the Cinéphone name. It was a national competition, however, which would lead to the eclipse of Phonofilms. By September 1925, the work agreement between De Forest and Case had fallen through. The following July, Case joined with Fox Film, the third largest studio in Hollywood, to found the Fox-Case Corporation. The system developed by Case and his assistant Earl Sponable, under the name Movietone, became the first viable optical sound technology controlled by a Hollywood movie studio. The following year, Fox purchased the North American rights to the Tri-Ergon system, although the company found it inferior to Movietone and virtually impossible to integrate the two different systems to take advantage of them. In 1927, too, Fox retained Freeman's services. Owens, who had a particular skill at building synchronized sound film cameras.

Advanced sound-on-disc

In parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology, a number of companies were making progress with systems where the sound of the film was recorded on phonograph records. In the sound-on-disc technology of the era, a phonograph turntable was connected by mechanical interlock to a specially modified movie projector, allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was used to add synchronized sound sequences to D. W. Griffith's unsuccessful silent film Dream Street. A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves, was recorded, as was a spoken introduction and a crowd sound effect sequence. The dialogue scenes were also apparently recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film incorporating them was never released publicly. On May 1, 1921, Dream Street was re-released, with the love song added, at the Town Hall Theater in New York City, qualifying, by chance, as the first feature film with a sequence. live recorded vocal. However, because the sound quality was poor and no other theater had the technology to show it with sound, it did not have much traction. On May 29, "Dream Street" premiered at the Shubert Crescent Theater in Brooklyn along with a program of short films made at Photokinema. However, it was not commercially successful and the exhibition was cancelled.

In 1925, Warner Bros., then a small Hollywood studio, began experimenting with sound-on-disc systems at Vitagraph Studios in New York, which it had recently purchased. The Warner Bros. technology, called the Vitaphone, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the release of the nearly three-hour film Don Juan; the first feature film to employ a synchronized sound system of any kind throughout the film, its soundtrack contained music and sound effects, but no recorded dialogue. In other words, it had been intended and shot as a silent film. Accompanying Don Juan, however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, all with sound recorded live. These were the first true talkies released by a Hollywood studio. Don Juan would not be released in general until February of the following year, making the technically similar The Better ' Ole, released by Warner Bros. in October 1926, the first feature film with synchronized sound throughout the film to be shown to a wide audience. The brothers Elisa Cansino and Eduardo Cansino, who formed the dance couple known as Dancing Cansinos, were the protagonists of what is considered the first sound short in history, La Fiesta.

Sound-on-film

This system would ultimately succeed, over the sound-on-disc method, for a number of fundamental technical advantages:

• Synchronization: no intertwined system was completely reliable, and the sound could be disincronized due to disk jumps or minute changes in film speed, requiring constant monitoring and frequent manual adjustment.
• Editing: discs could not be edited directly, severely limiting the ability to make alterations in their accompanying films after the original edition.
• Distribution: Fonographic records added expenses and extra complication to the distribution of films.
• Use and wear: the physical process of reproducing the discs degraded them, requiring their replacement after approximately twenty projections.

In the early years, however, sound-on-disc had advantages over sound-on-film in two considerable ways:

• Cost of production and capital: it was generally less expensive to record sound on a disc than on the celluloid and the main display systems—tocadiscos/interlaced/projector—were cheaper to make than the projector complexes that read the image and sound patterns required by the image and sound patterns. sound-on-film.
• Audio quality: the gramophone discs, the Vitaphones in particular, had a dynamic range superior to that of most processes sound-on-film of time, at least during the first reproductions, while the sound-on-film I tended to have a better response in frequency, this was overcome by greater distortion and noise.

As sound-on-film technology improved, these two disadvantages were overcome.

The third set of crucial innovations marked a major step forward in both live recording of sound and its efficient reproduction:

Fidelity electronic recording and amplification

Beginning in 1922, the research arm of AT&T's Western Electric manufacturing division began intensive work on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on -film. In 1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved electronic audio system, including sensitive condenser microphones and rubber line recorders. In that month of May, the company authorized the businessman Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for commercial films; he founded Vitagraph, which Warner Bros. acquired a stake in just a month later. In April 1926, the Warner brothers signed a contract with AT&T for the exclusive use of their sound technology for motion pictures for the renamed Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of Don Juan and its accompanying shorts. during the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for the Warners' films was considerably higher than those made by the company's sound-on-film competitors. Meanwhile, Bell Labs—the new name for AT&T's research operations—was working furiously on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow recordings to be played over loudspeakers at theater-filling volumes. The new moving coil speaker system was installed at the Warner's Theater in New York in late July and its filing patent, for what Western Electric called receiver number 555, was filed on August 4, just two days before of the premiere of Don Juan.

Later that same year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to manage the rights to the company's audio technology. Vitaphone continued to have legal exclusivity, but having defaulted on its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in the hands of ERPI. On December 31, 1926, the Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the Western Electric system in exchange for a portion of the proceeds that would go directly to ERPI. The patents of the three businesses were cross-licensed. Superior amplification and recording technology was now available to two Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction. The new year would finally see the emergence of talkies as a significant commercial medium.

Triumph of talkies

In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five major Hollywood production companies—the so-called Big Two, Paramount and MGM, as well as First National (once ranking in the industry with Fox, but now in decline)., midsize Universal, and Cecil B. DeMille's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC)—to collectively select only one provider for sound conversion. The group of five then settled back and waited to see what kind of results the forerunners proposed. In May, Warner Bros. resold its exclusivity rights to ERPI (along with the Fox-Case sublicense) and entered into a new Fox-like royalty agreement for use of Western Electric's technology. As Fox and the Warners pushed talkies in different directions, both technologically and commercially—Fox with newsreels and later musical dramas, the Warners with talkies—so did ERPI, which sought to capture the market by signing with five major allies.

All the talkies of the year 1927 took advantage of pre-existing celebrities. On May 20, 1927, at the Roxy Theater in New York, Fox Movietone presented a sound film of the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh's celebrated flight to Paris, recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox newsreel is shown introducing their welcome back to New York and Washington, D.C. These were the two most acclaimed talkies to date. Also in May, Fox released the first fictional Hollywood feature film with dialogue. synchronized: the short They're Coming to Get Me, starring comedian Chic Sale. After re-releases of a few silent film hits, such as Seventh Heaven, set to recorded music, Fox released its first Movietone original feature on September 23: Breaking Dawn, by acclaimed German director F. W. Murnau. As with Don Juan, the film's soundtrack was composed of music and sound effects (including, in a couple of crowded scenes, non-specific conversations). Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.'s The Jazz Singer was released. It was a huge box office success for the mid-sized studio, earning a total of $2.6 million at the United States and abroad, nearly $1 million more than the previous record for a Warner film. Produced on the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live audio, depending, as Amanecer and Don Juan, in their music and sound effects. When the film's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film switches to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two improvised speech scenes—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange of opinions between him and his mother. Although the success of The Jazz Singer was due in large part to Jolson, already established as one of America's biggest musical stars, and his limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified as groundbreaking, sound film (but like the 'first'), the sizable profits were proof enough to the industry that the technology was worth investing in.

The development of commercial talkies had gone in gusts before The Jazz Singer, and the film's success didn't change things overnight. It was not until May 1928 that the four main holdouts (PDC had left the alliance)—along with United Artists and others—signed with ERPI for the conversion of production facilities and theaters for talkies. Initially, all theaters wired by ERPI were made Vitaphone compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well. Even with access to both technologies, however, most Hollywood companies continued to be slow to produce talkies of their own. No studio other than Warner Bros. released a film with sound parts until the small Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) released Perfect Crime on June 17, 1928, eight months after The Jazz Singer. FBO had fallen under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor, General Electric's RCA division, which was looking to commercialize its new sound-on-film system, Photophone. Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on the celluloid that would eventually become Rule-. (In both systems, a specially designed lamp, the exposure of which to the celluloid is determined by the audio input, is used to record sound photographically as a series of tiny lines. In a variable-density process, the lines are of variable darkness; in a variable area process, the lines are of variable width). By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of a major new Hollywood studio, RKO Pictures.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had released three more talkies in the spring, all profitable, but not on the level of The Jazz Singer: The Tenderloin came out in March >; it was named by the Warners as the first film in which the characters spoke their parts, even though only 15 of its 88 minutes had dialogue. It was followed in April by Glorious Betsy and The Lion and the Mouse (31 minutes of dialogue) in May. On July 6, 1928, the first fully speaking film, Lights of New York. The film cost Warner Bros. just $23,000 to produce, but earned $1.2 million, a record rate of return of over 5,000%. In September, the studio released another speaking film with Al Jolson, The Singing Fool, which more than doubled The Jazz Singer's profit record for a movie. The Warners. This second screen hit for Jolson demonstrated a film musical's ability to transform a song into a national hit: the following summer, Jolson's number "Sonny Boy" it had recorded sales of 2 million records and 1.25 million scores. In September 1928 Paul Terry's Dinner Time was released, one of the first cartoons produced with synchronized sound. After seeing this, Walt Disney decided to make one of his Mickey Mouse shorts, Steamboat Willie, also with sound.

Throughout 1928, as Warner Bros. began to reap huge profits from the popularity of its talkies, the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. Paramount, the industry leader, released its first talking picture in late September, Beggars of Life; though it had only a few lines of dialogue, it demonstrated the studio's appreciation of the power of the new medium. Interference, Paramount's first all-talking film, debuted in November. Expectations changed rapidly, and "fashion" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929. In February 1929, sixteen months after the debut of The Jazz Singer, Columbia Pictures was the last of eight studios that would become known as "big" during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first talking picture, Lone Wolf's Daughter. Most American movie theaters, especially outside urban areas, were not yet equipped to sound and studios were not fully convinced of the universal interest in talkies—by the mid-1930s, most Hollywood films were being produced in dual versions, both silent and sound. Although few in the industry predicted it, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United States would soon be more than a memory. The last mostly silent film to be put out by one of Hollywood's major studios was Hoot Gibson's western Points West, released by Universal Pictures in August 1929. A month earlier, the first film entirely in color and fully spoken word had been released publicly: On with the Show! from Warner Bros.

Transition: Europe

The Jazz Singer had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theater in London on 27 September 1928. According to film historian Rachael Low, "Many in the industry were they realized at once that the switch to sound production was inevitable." On January 16, 1929, the first European film with a synchronized vocal performance and recorded music was released: the German production Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (I kiss your hand, Madame). A film with no dialogue containing only a few minutes of singing by star Richard Tauber, it can be thought of as combining Old Man World of Dream Street and Don Juan. The film was made on sound-on-film controlled by the German-Dutch firm Tobis, corporate heirs to the Tri-Ergon business. With an eye toward dominating the emerging European talkies market, Tobis entered into a pact with its main competitor, Klangfilm, a subsidiary of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (AEG). In early 1929, the two businesses began marketing their recording and playback technologies together. As ERPI began wiring theaters around Europe, Tobis-Klangfilm claimed that Western Electric's system infringed Tri-Ergon's patents, stalling the introduction of American technology in many places. Just as RCA had entered the movie business to maximize the value of its recording system, Tobis also established its own production houses, run by Germany's Tobis Filmkunst.

Throughout 1929, most of the major European film-making countries began to join Hollywood in converting to sound. Many of the fashionable European talkies were shot abroad in studios leased from production companies while their own were being converted or while they were deliberately marketing markets that spoke different languages. One of Europe's first dramatic talkies was created in a different kind of multinational film-making setting: The Crimson Circle was a co-production between director Friedrich Zelnik's Efzet-Film company and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released as the silent film Der Rote Kreis in Germany, where it was shot; The English dialogue was apparently dubbed much later using De Forest's Phonofilm process controlled by BSFP's parent company. It was given a British commercial release in March 1929, as it was a talking picture made entirely in the UK: The Clue of the New Pin, a British Lion production using the Photophone system British sound-on-disc. In May, Black Waters, a British and Dominions Film Corporation production was released commercially and was billed as the UK's first fully talking film; it had been shot entirely in Hollywood on a Western Electric sound-on-film system. None of these films made much of an impact. The first successful European talkie drama film was the all-British Blackmail. Directed by twenty-nine-year-old Alfred Hitchcock, the film made its London debut on June 21, 1929. Originally shot as a silent film, Blackmail was partially reshot to include dialogue sequences, along with music. and sound effects, before its premiere. A British International Pictures (BIP) production, it was recorded at RCA Photophone with General Electric having bought a part of AEG to gain access to the Tobis-Klangfilm markets. Blackmail was a considerable success; Critical reaction was also positive—the notorious curmudgeon Hugh Castle, for example, said of it that it is "perhaps the cleverest mix of sound and silence weve ever seen."

On August 23, the Austrian film industry released a sound film: Geschichten aus der Steiermark (Stories from Styria), an Eagle Film-Ottoton Film production. On September 30, the first dramatic talkie film made entirely in German, Das Land ohne Frauen (The Land Without Women), was released. A Tobis Filmkunst production, a quarter of the film contained dialogue, which was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response was below expectations. Sweden's first talkie film, Konstgjorda Svensson (Artificial Svensson), was released on 14 October. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film released Le Collier de la reine (The Queen's Necklace), shot in the Epinay studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given Tobis-recorded music and a single spoken sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French film. On October 31, Les Trois masques (The Three Masks) debuted; a Pathé-Natan film, it is generally considered to be one of the first French talkies, although it was shot, like Blackmail, at the Elstree studio, just outside London. The production company contracted to RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest facility with the system. Braunberger-Richebé's talkie La Route est belle (The route is beautiful), also shot on location in Elstree, followed a few weeks later. If Paris were fully equipped for sound—a process that spread well into the 1930s—a number of other early French talkies were being shot in Germany. The first German all-speaker film, Atlantik ( Atlantic), premiered in Berlin on October 28. Although it was another film made in Elstree, it was somewhat less German at heart than French Les Trois masques and La Route est belle; a BIP production with a British set designer and a German director, it was also shot in English as Atlantic. The all-German production Dich hab ich geliebt (Because I loved you ) by Aafa-Film opened three and a half weeks later. It was not "Germany's first talking film", as the marketing claimed, but it was the first to be released in the United States.

The first sound film in Spain was released on January 7, 1930, Football, love and bullfighting, directed by Florián Rey and followed 4 days later by The mystery of the Puerta del Sol, directed by Francisco Elías Riquelme, whose shooting began between October and November 1929. In 1930, the first Polish spoken films were released, using sound-on-disc systems: Moralność pani Dulskiej (The Morality of Mrs. Dulska) in March and the fully spoken film Niebezpieczny romans (Dangerous Amorous Adventures) in October. In Italy, whose industry had been vibrant had become moribund in the late 1920s, the first talking picture, La Canzone dell'amore (The Song of Love), also came out in October; within two years, Italian cinema would be enjoying a resurgence. The first Czech-language film also debuted in 1930, Tonka Sibenice. Several European countries with lesser positions in the field also produced their first film spoken word—Belgium (in French), Denmark, Greece, and Romania. The Soviet Union's robust film industry released its first talkies in 1931: Dziga Vertov's nonfiction film Entuziazm, featuring a experimental soundtrack and no dialogue, it was released in the spring. In the fall, Nikolai Ekk's drama Putyovka v zhizn was released as the country's first talkie.

In most of Europe, the conversion of exhibition venues lagged well behind production capacity, requiring talkies to be produced in parallel with silent versions or simply shown without sound in many venues. While the pace of conversion was relatively fast in Britain—with more than 60% of cinemas equipped for sound by the late 1930s, similar to the figure in the United States—in France, by contrast, more than half of the cinemas nationwide were still showing silent films by the end of 1932. According to scholar Colin G. Crisp, "The concern to revive the flow of silent films was frequently expressed in the [French] industrial press, and a large part of the industry he continued to view silent films as a viable artistic and commercial prospect until around 1935." The situation was particularly dire in the Soviet Union; by the spring of 1933, fewer than one in a hundred movie projectors in the country were equipped for sound.

The transition to talkies in Asia

During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the two largest film producers in the world, along with the United States. Although the country's film industry was among the first to produce both talkies and talkies, full conversion to sound progressed much more slowly than in the West. It appears that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai, was made in 1926 on De Forest's Phonofilm system. Using Minatoki's sound-on-disc system, the major Nikkatsu studio produced a couple of films spoken in 1929: Taii no musume and Furusato, the latter directed by Mizoguchi Kenji. Rival studio Shochiku began the successful production of sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called Tsuchibashi. Two years later, however, more than 80% of films made in the country were still silent. Two of the country's leading directors, Ozu Yasujiro and Naruse Mikio, did not make their first talkies until 1935. By 1938, more than a third of the films produced in Japan were shot without dialogue.

The enduring popularity of the half-silent in Japanese cinema was due in large part to the tradition of the benshi, a live narrator who performed as an accompaniment to the screening of the film. As director Kurosawa Akira later described, the benshi "not only told the plot of the films, but also heightened the emotional content by performing voices and sound effects and providing evocative descriptions of events and images on the screen. The most popular storytellers were stars in their own right, solely responsible for sponsorship of a particular cinema." Film historian Mariann Lewinsky expounds,

The end of silent cinema in the West and Japan was imposed by industry and market, not by any internal need or natural evolution... Mute cinema was a completely mature and extremely pleasant way. He lacked nothing, at least in Japan, where there was always the human voice making dialogues and narration. Sound films were not better, only cheaper. As the owner of the cinema you no longer had to pay a salary to the musicians and the benshi. And a good benshi was a star demanding a star payment.

Similarly, the viability of the benshi system facilitated a gradual transition to sound—allowing studios to spread the capital costs of conversion and the time of their directors and crew to familiarize themselves with the new technology.

The Mandarin-language film Genu hong mudan, starring Butterfly Wu, was released in 1930 as China's first sound film. In February of that same year, production was apparently completed with a sound version of The Devil's Playground, arguably qualifying it as Australia's first talking picture; however, the May press screening of the Commonwealth Film Contest Fellers prize winner is the first verifiable public showing of an Australian talking picture. In September 1930, a song performed by the Indian star Sulochana, taken from the silent film Madhuri (1928), was released as a short with synchronized sound, turning it into a mini Asian Dream Street. The following year, Ardeshir Irani He directed India's first talkie film, the Hindi-Urdu Alam Ara, and produced Kalidas, mainly in Tamil with some Telugu. The year 1931 also saw the first Bengali-language film, Jamai Sasthi, and the first fully Telugu film, Bhakta Prahlada. In 1932, Ayodhyecha Raja became the first film to be released in the Marathi language (although Sant Tukaram was the first to go through the official censorship process); the first Gujarati-language film, Narsimha Mehta, and the fully Tamil-language film, Kalava, also debuted. The following year, Iranian Ardeshir produced the first Persian-language talkie film, Dukhtar-e-loor. Also in 1933, the first Cantonese-language films were produced in Hong Kong—Sha zai dongfang and Liang xing; within two years, the local film industry had gone completely sound. In Korea, where the byeonsa had a role and status similar to that of the Japanese benshi, in 1935 he became the last country with a significant film industry to produce its first talking picture: Chunhyang-Jeon. This is based on a 17th century folk tale of which up to fourteen film versions have been made to this day.

The transition to talkies in Latin America

In 1929, the Cuban actor and director René Cardona filmed in the United States the first talkies or spoken films, entirely in Spanish, Sombras Habaneras (1929), with actors from various Spanish-speaking countries. In the period from 1929 to 1931, several talkies in Spanish were filmed in the United States, standing out, among them, the films Dios Y Ley (1929) acted by Carmen Guerrero filmed on location in Tehuantepec (Mexico) and the beaches of Malibu, California, United States by actor and director Guillermo Calles or Guillermo "Indio" Calles, Gypsies (1929) short film in a Mexican-American co-production starring Emilio Fernández, Sombras de Gloria (1929) produced and starring Jose Bohr, the actress and soprano Cuban Carolina Segrera stars in the short sound film in Spanish The Cuban Nightingale (1929) and later, Charros, gauchos y manolas (1930) is filmed, by the Catalan conductor Xavier Cugat with the performances of the Mexican actress Delia Magaña and the Argentine actor Paul Ellis. Thus is life (1930) (in Spanish America "Así es la Vida") with actress Delia Magaña, The Cat Creeps ("La Will of the Dead", in Latin America) (1930) and Dracula (1931) with the Mexican actress Lupita Tovar and the films Diplomatic Don Juan (1931) and The trial of Mary Dugan(1931), with the Mexican actress Celia Montalván. The actor and singer Carlos Gardel would act in films filmed in Joinville-le-Pont, France with the American company Paramount: The lights of Buenos Aires (1931), Wait for me (1932), the short film La casa es seria (1932), Melodía de arrabal (1932) and the films made with said artist on Long Island New York: Cuesta below (1934), Tango on Broadway (1934), The day you love me (1935) and Tango bar (1935) and Star Hunters (1934) made in Hollywood, California. The Cuban conductor Don Azpiazu scored the film Wait for me (1932) starring Gardel. Later he filmed in New York, alongside the Cuban singer Antonio Machín, the sound shorts Don Azpiazu and his Cuban ensemble (1933) and Don Azpiazu the Rhumba (1933), in the Movietone system

Sound films in Argentina

Since 1907 there were attempts to make sound films in Argentina. That year, Eugenio Py together with Enrique Lepage, carried out experiments using cylinder phonographs as a sound source. Although it would not be until the first showing of a sound film in Buenos Aires —also being the first projection of this type in South America— in mid-1929, when Argentine filmmakers saw the potential of sound films to the detriment of the then predominant silent cinema, both making new films, or with the sound reinforcement of films already exhibited. The first South American sound film was the short film Mosaico Criollo (1929), made by the director Roberto Guidi who used the Vitaphone system, being a minor success, but which attracted a lot of attention from the public, later it was filmed the short film El adiós del unitario, by the Argentine director Edmo Cominetti played by the actress Nedda Francy and premiered in 1931. The first sound film Muñequitas Porteñas (1931) was also filmed in Argentina.) a melodrama filmed using the Vitaphone system, and directed by José Agustín “El Negro” Ferreyra, Ferreyra had already given musical accompaniment to the films La canción del gaucho (1930) and El cantar de my city (1930). The first series of 10 short films with optical sound (Añoranzas, Canchero, El cartero (with Arturo de Nava), Enfundá la mandolina , Hand in Hand (with Celedonio Flores), Padrino pelao, Autumn Roses (with Francisco Canaro), I'm afraid, Viejo tuxedo and Yira… yira (with its creator, Enrique Santos Discépolo) with performances by Carlos Gardel that were filmed between October 23 and on November 3, 1930 by the Argentine director Eduardo Morera under the Phonofilm optical system and premiered on May 3, 1931 at the Astral cinema, located at Corrientes 1641 in Buenos Aires, under the category of "Musical variety" and the first Latin American animated film with sound (Peludópolis, made in 1931 by Quirino Cristiani). By 1933, the Argentine industry abandoned silent cinema, after the foundation of the Argentina Sono Film and Lumiton studios and the great success of the first national feature films that incorporated optical sound: ¡Tango! (1933) and The three berets (1933).

Sound films in Mexico

Between 1927 and 1929, in Los Angeles, California, director Joselito Rodríguez developed his own optical sound equipment. On September 15, 1929, he premiered his short film with optical sound Himno Nacional de México at the Electric cinema in the city of Los Angeles, then filmed Sangre Mexicana (1929) with dialogues of the actress Celia Montalván using the RCA Photophone optical system and released in theaters in May 1931. Subsequently, Joselito Rodríguez films Fletonatiuh, Santos y Lee I and II (1930), The famous Banda de Música de la Policía de México (1930) and provides sound through its optical system for the American series The Indians are Coming (1930; R: Henry MacRae; produced by Adventure and distributed by Universal Pictures). The sound film El águila y el nopal (1929) by director Miguel Contreras Torres is filmed in Mexico, while the founder of the Fascist Party of Mexico, the politician Gustavo Sáenz from Sicily films in December 1928, the film Rosario's Wedding (1929) first released silently in February 1929 and re-released with sound on April 27, 1929 at the Teatro Iris accompanied by phonographic records with the performances of the Cuban actor and singer Juan José Martínez Married and actress Consuelo Frank. Silent film director José Manuel Ramos films his first sound short film Cautiva (1929). On the night of April 26, 1929 at the Imperial Theater in Mexico City, Columbia Pictures premiered Submarine / Submarino de F. Capra (1928), the first synchronized film with incidental noises known in the country. Almost a month later, on May 23, 1929, with The Singing Fool / La última canción de L. Bacon (1929), Warner unveiled the vitaphone at the Cine Olimpia Distrito Federal. Later, Miguel Contreras Torres would film Protest and inauguration of the president, engineer Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1930) in February, in Mexico City and Soñadores de gloria (1930), in the United States, With the actresses Medea de Novara and Emma Roldán, the director Salvador Pruneda films Abismos ò Náufragos de la Vida (1930). Carlos or Charles Amador directs the short film El Inocente (1929) and the feature film Terrible Nightmare (1930). The film The Children of Fate (1930) acted by Juan José Martínez Casado and directed by Luis Lezama. Director Gabriel Soria films the series of 5 sound short films Excelsior Magazine (1930) and months later, the first fully spoken Mexican film is filmed, Stronger Than Duty(1930) by Rafael J. Sevilla. In 1931 the director Alberto Méndez Bernal films Contraband with the performances of the Spanish actor Ramón Pereda and Virginia Zuri. However, the poor preparation of the projectionists with the adequate synchronization of dialogues and songs with the images on the Vitaphone sound system meant that almost all of them were a resounding failure in their public exhibition.

The first successful Mexican sound film was Santa(1931) (Theatrically released in March 1932) which used the RCA Photophone optical system process performed by Lupita Tovar. During this time, Mexican cinema was consolidated with films such as Una vida por otra (1932), El compadre Mendoza (1933), El presionero 13 (1933) with the actor Alfredo del Diestro, La calandria(1933), El fantasma del convento(1934), Vámonos con Pancho Villa (1935) and Women rule (1937), directed by Fernando de Fuentes; An impertinent spectator (1932), Mano a mano (1932), La Mujer del Puerto(1934), Jealousy (1935), Así es mi Tierra(1937) and Águila o Sol(1937)--the last two with Mario Moreno "Cantinflas", all of them directed by Arcady Boytler and Blood Rules (1933), Who Killed Eva?(1934), Love Dream(1935) Luponini of Chicago (also known as The Great Luponini, Luponini or The Bloody Hands)(1935) and Marihuana (1936) which addresses the issue of drug trafficking and addictions, directed with the Chilean singer and actor José Bohr. Spanish director Juan Orol films Dear Mother(1935),Soulless Women, Supreme Vengeance? (1935),You will honor your parents (1936), The Calvary of a Wife (1936) and Eternal Martyr (1937) with a resounding box office success.

The ranch comedy

It is a genre of early birth derived from the sound of the films. In 1936, Fernando de Fuentes directed Allá en el Rancho Grande, which achieved unprecedented commercial success in Mexican cinema. It lays the foundations for the development of the Mexican archetypes that would later turn the genre into one of the most popular at the national level. The most important characteristic of ranchera comedies is that, thanks to the cinematographic sound system, several musical numbers could be included, songs performed by the protagonists and inserted into the plot in a different way from that used in Hollywood musical cinema, more accustomed to the great musical numbers with majestic choreography.

Sound films in the rest of America

Due to the lack of film tradition, the rest of Latin America had to adopt sound late.

Chile was the third country in Latin America to have talkies with the first showing in April 1930 at the Victoria Theater in Santiago. The films La calle del ensueño (1929) were filmed shortly after., performed by the Mexican actress Amparito Arozamena and premiered in 1930 with sound effects and music, and North and South (1933), fully spoken and premiered in 1934, both by Jorge Délano. During this period, Venezuela also produced its first sound films: La Venus de Nacár (1931) directed by Efraín Gómez and premiered in 1932 at the Teatro Maracay and Taboga (1938), this the latter being the first Venezuelan film with optical sound. The first film in Colombia made with optical sound Pereira is the one who invites to her great carnival (1936) produced by the Casa Filmadora Venus in the city of Medellìn and The First Trials of the National Talking Cinema (1937) with the Chrono Photophone optical sound system, imported by the Acevedo Brothers, both films, only with a marginal and experimental character. The first Bolivian sound film was Hacia la gloria (1932) released in 1933, with sound with the Vitaphone system, produced by Mario Camacho, José Jiménez and Raúl Durán and directed by the writer, painter and landscape artist Arturo Borda Sound films would follow, such as The Chaco Campaign (1933) and Historia de la decadencia aymará (1933). In Ecuador, the company Sono Filmes produces the film Guayaquil de mis amores (1930), directed by Francisco Diumenjo. Later, La divina canción(1931) and Incendio(1931) made by the Chilean director Alberto Santana, which include songs and incidental sounds. But the film They met in Guayaquil (1949) is the first to be considered sound in Ecuador, also filmed by Alberto Santana. The first Peruvian sound film was Resaca (1934) also directed by Alberto Santana, set in the world of boxing. Prior to this, the documentary The patriotic manifestation of May 28, 1933 (1933), and the short period of production boom of the so-called Creole cinema began. The first sound documentary feature film in Paraguay, titled In the Chaco's Hell (1932), implemented a band of sound effects and environmental noises, directed by the Argentine photographer Roque Funes. In 1937, the first Paraguayan plot film, Promised Land, was filmed as a Paraguayan-Argentine co-production, in 35 millimeters, with sound, directed by the German James Bauer, with a script and music by the Paraguayan composer Remberto Giménez. In Uruguay, the film The Little Hero of Arroyo de Oro (1929) was made silent and would later be given sound in 1933 for its revival with some dialogues and the first Uruguayan sound film, fully spoken, which was Two Destinies (1935) released in theaters in 1936, followed by Vocation?(1938), I'm Happy Single (1938) directed by Juan Carlos Patrón, and Radio Candelario (1939) directed by the Spanish writer Rafael Abellá. The Cuban film La Virgen de la Caridad (1930) starring Miguel Santos and directed by Ramón Peón incorporated some incidental sounds, Maracas y bongó (1932) is a short film that incorporates sound Optical co-produced by filmmakers Max Tosquella and Arturo “Musie” del Barrio. In 1937 the first Cuban sound film was filmed, La serpiente roja, by the Spanish director Juan Orol produced by Ernesto Caparrós with the actors Pituka de Foronda and Aníbal de Mar. In 1938, the sound film Siboney, also directed by Orol, with the Puerto Rican actress and singer María Antonieta Pons, although it would not be released until 1942. In 1938 El Romance del Palmar (1938) directed by Ramón Peón with the performance of the singer Rita Montaner and Ahora Seremos Felices with the actresses Pituka de Foronda, Mapy Cortés and the actors Gustavo Rojo and Rubén Rojo. In 1939 A Dangerous Adventure (originally Una Aventura Peligrosa) was filmed, also directed by Ramón Peón and starring Rosita Fornés and Aníbal de Mar. The Brazilian film Acabaram-se os Otários released in theaters on September 2, 1929, is the first attempt to incorporate some songs with the Vitaphone record system as in Limite(1930) premiered in 1931, by Mario Peixoto, which was not well received by the public; but, eventually, it was seen as a masterpiece, along with Ganga Bruta (1933) by Humberto Mauro filmed between 1931 and 1932 and which after 1932 managed to incorporate sound effects as background music and some brief dialogues in the Movietone optical system and which is rejected by the most conservative groups in Brazilian society. With the tapes A Voz do Carnaval (1933) by Adhemar Gonzaga and Humbertor Mauro.Hello! Hello! Brazil (1935) and Hello! Hello! Carnival (1936) by filmmaker Luiz de Barros and the carnival film Tereré Não Resolve (1938) and Banana da Terra (1939) directed by Ruy Costa films in which the actress Carmen Miranda acted. This is how sound is fully incorporated into Brazilian cinema. In Honduras, the filmmaker José Bohr films the film with optical sound Honduras (1937) and sound documentaries are filmed throughout the 40`s but it is until the filming of My friend Ángel (1962) which made the film industry official in that Nation. In the Dominican Republic since 1930, sound effects have been incorporated into documentaries dedicated to the dictator Trujillo. But it is in 1963 when the playwright Franklin Domínguez shoots his feature film La silla , in which he denounces the horrors of the Trujillo regime and creates an unofficial filmography. The first sound film filmed in Canada is The Crimson Paradise(1933) Directed by Robert F. Hill with the performances of Nick Stuart and released in the United States of America under the title of Fighting Playboy (1933).

Sound films in Spain and Portugal

It is said that the first sound film in Spanish was made in the United States of America, four years before “The Jazz Singer” (1927) (El Cantante de Jazz), which is considered the first sound film of the history of cinema. Indeed, a tape has been found in the Library of Congress of the United States that shows that in 1923 a series of short films were filmed that were presented on April 15 at the Rivoli Theater in New York City. In it, there is an eleven-minute film directed by the American Lee DeForest and starring the Spanish actress and singer, Conchita Piquer. In the film, the cupletista sings an Andalusian Copla and an Aragonese Jota in Spanish and a Fado in Portuguese, which also makes it the first film in the Portuguese language with sound.

Between October and November 1929, the first feature film in the history of Spanish talkies was shot. It is Football, Love and Bullfighting, a film directed by Florián Rey. On January 7, 1930, it premiered in Madrid at the Teatro de la Zarzuela. This film was very successful and received numerous applause at the end of the screening. The film was screened in other cities such as Barcelona, Zaragoza and Logroño.

On the other hand, the same year another sound film was released in Spain whose filming was done on approximately the same dates. This is The Mystery of Puerta del Sol, a film directed by Francisco Elías. This film was born as a result of the meeting between the director and Lee DeForest. Elías, upon returning to Spain, decided to produce a sound film. The film is about two litonists who find out about the upcoming filming in Madrid, their city, of a Hollywood movie. They decide to attract attention by committing a murder. This comedy premiered on January 11, 1930 at the Coliseo Castilla de Burgos since neither in Madrid nor in Barcelona was it accepted to screen it. This movie, unlike the previous one, was a complete failure. The projection rooms were not prepared for Phonofilm and the producer lost a huge sum of money, which made him leave the world of cinema forever.

After that, the film was forgotten until in 1981, the granddaughter of the film's producer, Feliciando Vitores, released the film during a conservation meeting at the Ateneo de Madrid. Ramón Rubio, present at the meeting, explains:

“When he told me it was “The mystery of the Gate of the Sun” I began to call it insistently. I proposed to him to make a notary document so that at least we would keep the film even if it remained his property. But his father had not left a good memory of his walks for the cinema. I was told she was kept in a storage room in a village of Burgos. And that every year I went through there and the movie was fine.

In 1995, he finally agreed to sell it and restoration was undertaken. Phonofilm was a complex system that restorers were not used to, so it had to be taken frame by frame in order to improve the sound. Backup copies were made and the sound was separated from the images. The Spanish Film Library released a commemorative DVD.

The loss of the Fútbol, amor y toros tape has caused the film to disappear both physically and from memory. The big difference between this and The mystery of Puerta del Sol is its resistance over the years. Since one, despite its failure, has survived over the years while the other, which was much more successful, completely disappeared and no copy has been found to this day. The only thing that remains of this film are the reviews and advertisements that appeared in newspapers. Therefore, The Mystery of Puerta del Sol and Football, Love and Bulls, Released four days apart, these are the two films that marked the beginning of talkies in Spain.

The Spanish Industrial Film Company S.A. (better known by its acronym CIFESA) was founded in Valencia during the Second Spanish Republic, on March 15, 1932, as an independent production company that made films according to popular tastes. Although the creation is attributed to the Casanova family, who would later take over the company, it was the Trènors who founded it. In 1933, when the company already belonged to the Casanova family, it obtained exclusivity to distribute Columbia Pictures films in Spain. In 1933, a total of 17 films had been shot in Spain (4 in 1931, 6 in 1932 and 7 in 1933), and in 1934, 21, including the documentary Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan (1933) by director Luis Buñuel and the first success of Spanish talkies La hermana San Sulpicio (1934) by Florián Rey.

In the 1930s, talkies arrived in Portugal, and in 1931 "Invicta Filmes" disappeared, along with the lesser-known production companies "Caldevilla Films" and "Fortuna Film"2. At the beginning of the decade, Portuguese actors and technicians traveled to Paris to shoot versions of the greatest American hits. The quality was inferior to that of the originals, but the economic returns were significant, since the versions were also screened in Brazil, where Portuguese cinema enjoyed great popular acceptance. The film A Severa (1931), is the first film shot in Portugal that was later sound-tracked in France and directed by Leitão de Barros. In 1932, the Tobis Portuguesa studios were installed, assembled with material from the Tobis Klang Film company from Germany. It was there that the first entirely Portuguese sound film was shot: The Song of Lisbon (1932). Its director, a renowned architect, conquered by the art of celluloid: José Cottinelli Telmo (1897-1948). For its part, the New State sees in history and ancestral Portuguese customs a source of inspiration to build its political regime, favoring unoriginal cinema, weighed down by an artificial costumbrismo whose protagonists are historical or folkloric heroes. And those will continue to be the contents during these decades and the next, where talkies would do nothing but continue and establish this cinematographic construction based on rurality, tradition and history as essential features of nationality. Between the years 1932 and 1939, only thirteen feature films were filmed in Portugal, not even an average of two per year.

Consequences

Technology

In the short term, the introduction of live sound recording caused significant production difficulties. The cameras were noisy, so a soundproof room was used in many early talkies to isolate the noisy crew from the actors, at the expense of drastically reducing the camera's freedom of movement. For a time, shooting with multiple cameras was used to compensate for the loss of mobility and innovative studio technicians were often able to find ways to free up the camera for particular shoots. The need to be within range of the fixed microphones meant that the actors often had to limit their movements in unnatural ways as well. Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), from First National Pictures (which Warner Bros. had bought thanks to its profitable sound venture), offers a behind-the-scenes look at some of the techniques being used in the filming of the first talking pictures. Several of the fundamental problems caused by the transition to sound were soon fixed with new camera housings designed to drown out noise and boom mics that could be held out of frame and moved with the actors. As David Bordwell describes, technological improvements continued apace: "Between 1932 and 1935, [Western Electric and RCA] created directional microphones, increased the frequency range of recordings, reduced ground noise...and expanded the volume range. These technical advances often meant new aesthetic opportunities: "Increasing the fidelity of the recordings... enhanced the spectacular possibilities of vocal timbre, pitch, and volume." Another basic problem—famously parodied in the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain—was that some silent-era actors just didn't have attractive voices; although this issue was frequently exaggerated, there were concerns regarding the overall vocal quality and the casting of performers for their dramatic abilities in roles that also required singing talent. By 1935, the re-recording of the dialogues by the original actors or by different actors in post-production had become a common practice. The ultraviolet recording system introduced by RCA in 1936 improved the reproduction of whistles and high notes.

With Hollywood's wide-scale adoption of talkies, the competition between the two fundamental approaches to sound film production was soon resolved. Throughout 1930-31, the only major studios using sound-on-disc, Warner Bros. and First National, switched to sound-on-film recording. >. The Vitaphone's dominant presence in sound-equipped theaters, however, meant that for the next several years every Hollywood studio created and distributed sound-on-disc versions of its films alongside sound-on-film copies. Fox Movietone soon followed the Vitaphone into obsolete as a recording and playback method, leaving two major American systems: RCA's variable-area Photophone and Western Electrics' own variable-density process, a substantial improvement over the cross-licensed Movietone. With RCA taking the reins, the two parent companies made their projection equipment compatible so that films shot on one system could be released in theaters equipped with the other. This left one big question—the Tobis-Klangfilm challenge. In May 1930, Western Electric won an Austrian lawsuit that voided the protection of certain Tri-Ergon patents, helping to bring Tobis-Klangfilm to the negotiating table. An agreement on patent cross-licensing was reached the following month, complete reproduction compatibility, and the division of the world in three zones for the provision of material. As a contemporary report describes:

Tobis-Klangfilm has exclusive rights to provide material in: Germany, Danzig, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Finland. Americans have exclusive rights for the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and Russia. All other countries, including Italy, France and England, are open to both parties.

The agreement did not resolve all patent disputes and subsequent negotiations and concords were taken over and signed throughout the 1930s. Also during these years, US studios began to abandon the Western Electric system for the Photophone approach of RCA's variable area—by late 1936, only Paramount, MGM, and United Artists continued to have contracts with ERPI.

Work

While the introduction of sound led to a boom in the movie industry, it had an adverse effect on the employment of a large number of Hollywood actors. Suddenly those with no theater experience were considered suspects by the studios; those whose accents were heavily pronounced or otherwise discordant voices that had previously been hidden were particularly vulnerable. The career of the major silent film star Norma Talmadge effectively came to an end in this way. The famous Swiss actor Emil Jannings returned to Europe. John Gilbert's voice was good, but the audience found it hardly fitting his hero profile, and his star went dark as well. Clara Bow's voice was sometimes blamed for the demise of her brilliant career, but the truth was that she was too difficult to bear. Not only had silent films gone out of style as a medium, audiences seemed to perceive many stars associated with them. with him as old-fashioned, even those that had the talent to succeed in the sound age. Lillian Gish left, backstage, and other major figures soon left acting altogether: Colleen Moore, Gloria Swanson, and Hollywood's most famous acting couple, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Buster Keaton was eager to explore the new medium, but when his studio, MGM, converted to sound, he was quickly stripped of creative control. Although some of Keaton's early talkies made impressive profits, they were artistically sad.

Several of the biggest attractions of the new medium came from vaudeville and musical theater, where performers like Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Jeanette MacDonald, and the Marx Brothers were accustomed to the demands of both dialogue and song. James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who had teamed on Broadway, were brought together by Warner Bros. in 1930. A few actors were big stars during both the silent and sound film eras: Richard Barthelmess, Clive Brook, Bebe Daniels, Norma Shearer, the comedy duo of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and the incomparable Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) used almost sound. exclusively for music and effects. Janet Gaynor became a superstar with Seventh Heaven and Breaking Dawn with synchronized sound but no dialogue, as Joan Crawford did with the technologically similar Modern Virgins (1928). Greta Garbo was a non-native English speaker who rose to Hollywood stardom in both silent and talkies.

As talkies, with their pre-recorded music tracks, emerged, an increasing number of movie band musicians found themselves out of work. They were usurped by more than just their position as musical accompanists in movies; according to historian Preston J. Hubbard, "During the 1920s live musical performances in first-class theaters became a tremendously important aspect of American cinema." With the advent of talkies, these performances—usually performed as preludes—were also largely removed. The American Federation of Musicians withdrew newspaper ads protesting the replacement of live musicians with mechanical reproducing devices. A 1929 ad that appeared in the Pittsburgh Press features an image of a can labeled "Canned Music / Makes Much Ado / Guaranteed to Produce No Intellectual or Emotional Reaction" and shows in part:

Enlarged Music in Judgment
This is the case of Art vs. Mechanical music in cinemas. The defendant is accused in front of the American people of attempting corruption of musical appreciation and discouragement of musical education. Cinemas in many cities are offering synchronized mechanical music as a substitute for real music. If the audience who goes to the cinema accepts this enviction of their entertainment program a regrettable decline in the art of music is inevitable. Musical authorities know that the soul of art is lost in machining. It cannot be otherwise because the quality of music is dependent on the mood of the artist, in human contact, without which the essence of intellectual stimulation and emotional ecstasy is lost.

Trade

In September 1926, Jack Warner, owner of Warner Bros., asserted that talking pictures would never be viable: "They fail to take into account the international language of silent pictures, and the unconscious participation of each viewer in creating the play, the action, the plot, and the dialogue imagined by himself." Much to the benefit of his company, he would be proven wrong—between fiscal years 1927-28 and 1928-29, Warner profits increased suddenly from $2 million to $14 million. Talkies, in fact, were a clear boon to all the major studios in the industry. During the same twelve-month period, Paramount's profits increased by $7 million, Fox's by $3.5 million, and Loew/MGM's by $3 million. RKO, which did not exist in September of 1928 and whose parent production company, FBO, was among Hollywood's minor studios, by late 1929 it had established itself as one of America's leading entertainment companies.

Even as the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 caused the United States to crash and ultimately plunged the world economy into a depression, the popularity of talkies seemed to keep Hollywood immune. The 1929-30 exhibition season was even better than the previous one for the film industry, with ticket sales and global profits reaching new highs. Reality finally struck later in 1930, but sound had clearly secured Hollywood's position as one of the most important industrial fields in the United States, both commercially and culturally. In 1929, movie box office receipts made up 16.6% of total American spending on entertainment; by 1931, the figure had reached 21.8%. The movie business would pull in similar numbers for the next 15 years. Hollywood also dominated the big stage. The American film industry—already the most powerful in the world—set an export record in 1929 that, by the applied measure of total feet of celluloid exposed, was 27% higher than the previous year. Concerns that differences language restrictions would hinder American film exports turned out to be largely unfounded. In fact, the expense of sound conversion was one of the biggest hurdles for many overseas producers, relatively undercapitalized by Hollywood standards. The production of multiple versions of the export-linked talkies in different languages, a common approach at first, largely finished by mid-1931, was replaced by later dubbing and subtitling. Despite trade restrictions imposed on most foreign markets, by 1937, American films commanded 70% of screen time around the world.

Just as the major Hollywood studios gained in sound relative to their foreign competitors, so did they at home. As historian Richard B. Jewell describes, "The sound revolution crushed many small film companies and producers who were unable to meet the financial demands of conversion to sound." The combination of sound and the Great Depression led to a large-scale restructuring in the business, resulting in the hierarchy of the integrated Big Five companies (MGM, Paramount, Fox, Warners, RKO) and the three minor studios (Columbia, Universal, United Artists) that would dominate throughout the 1950s Historian Thomas Schatz describes the complementary effects:

[C]omo studies were forced to make operations more efficient and depend on their own resources, their individual styles of the house and corporate personalities will become the center of attention. Thus the period that marked a milestone from the arrival of sound to the beginning of the Depression saw that the system of studies finally worked, with individual studies conforming to their own identities and their respective positions within the industry.

The other country where talkies had a considerable immediate commercial impact was India. As one distributor of the period put it: "With the advent of talkies, Indian cinema itself entered into a definitive and distinctive piece of creation. This was achieved with music." From its earliest days, Indian talkies have been defined by the musical—Alam Ara featured seven songs; a year later, Indrasabha would present seventy. While the European film industry fought an endless battle against the economic muscle and popularity of Hollywood, ten years after the debut of Alam Ara, more than 90% of the films shown on Indian screens were made within the country. Most of India's early talkies were shot in Bombay, which remains the main center of production, but talkies soon spread from one end of the multilingual country to the other. Just a few weeks after the March 1931 release of Alam Ara, Calcutta-based Madan Pictures released both the Hindi version Shirin Farhad and the Bengali version Jamai Sasthi. The Hindustani film Heer Ranjha was produced in Lahore, Punjab, the following year. In 1934, Sathi Sulochana, the first Kannada language film to be released, was shot in Kohalpur, Maharashtra; Srinivasa Kalyanam became the first Tamil talkie film actually shot in Tamil Nadu. Once the first talkies appeared, the conversion to fully sound production happened as quickly in India as it did in the United States. Already by 1932, most film productions were with sound; two years later, 164 out of 172 Indian films were talkies. From 1934 to the present day, with the sole exception of 1952, India has been among the top three film-producing countries in the world every year.

Aesthetic quality

In the 1930 first edition of his global survey The Film Till Now, film expert Paul Rotha declared, "A film in which dialogue and sound effects are perfectly timed and matched." with its visual image on the screen is absolutely contrary to the objectives of cinema. It is a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the real use of cinema and cannot be accepted as being within the true limits of cinema." These views were not uncommon among those who viewed cinema as an art form; Alfred Hitchcock, though he directed the first commercially successful talkie film in Europe, maintained that "silent films were the purest form of cinema" and derided many early talkies as offering little beyond "photographs of people talking."

Most recent film buffs and historians agree that silent films had reached an aesthetic peak by the late 1920s and that the early years of talkies offered little in comparison to the best Silent movies. For example, despite falling into relative oblivion once its era passed, silent films are represented by eleven films in the Time Out' Centenary of Cinema Top One Hundred poll held in 1995. The oldest sound film to appear is the French L'Atalante (1934), directed by Jean Vigo; the oldest Hollywood film to appear is My Girl's Beast (1938), directed by Howard Hawks. The first year in which sound film production predominated over silent film—not only in the United States, but also in the West as a whole—was 1929; although the years from 1929 to 1931 are represented by three films without dialogues (Die Büchse der Pandora [1929], Zemlya [1930], City Lights [1931]) and zero talkies in the Time Out survey.

The short-term effect of sound on cinematic art can be estimated in more detail by considering that films of the transition period—the last years of commercial silent film production and the early years of talkies—in the West these are widely cited as masterpieces, as they appear in recent major media polls of the best international films (although some listed as silent films, such as Breaking Dawn and City Lights, are released with recorded music and sound effects, are now customarily referred to by historians and industry professionals as "silent"—spoken dialogue is considered the crucial distinguishing factor between silent film and sound dramatic film). From the six-year period 1927-32, eleven silent films are widely recognized as masterpieces and only one spoken film (TO= Time Out; VV=Village Voice; S&S=Sight & Sound):

Silent movies

• 1927: The Machinist of the General (USA.; VV 01, SlopS 02), Metropolis (Germany; VV 01, SlopS 02), Naples (France; TO 95), October (Soviet Union; VV 01); Dawn (USA.; TO 95, VV 01, SlopS 02)
• 1928: The passion of Joan of Arc (France; TO 95, VV 01, SlopS 02), The Hero of the River (USA.; VV 01)
• 1929: The camera man (Soviet Union; VV 01, SlopS 02), Die Büchse der Pandora (Germany; TO 95)
• 1930: Zemlya (Soviet Union; TO 95)
• 1931: City lights (USA.; TO 95, VV 01, SlopS 02)

Talking movies

• 1927: The jazz singer (A. Crossland, USA)
• 1928: none
• 1929: Chanting (A. Hitchcock, Great Britain)
• 1930: The blue angel (L. Von Sternberg, Germany)
• 1931: M (Germany; VV 01, SlopS 02)
• 1932: Scarface (H. Hawks, USA)

The first sound film to receive near-universal critical approval was Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel); Premiered on April 1, 1930, it was directed by Josef von Sternberg in both the German and English versions for the UFA studio in Berlin. The first widely respected American talkie film was All Quiet at the Front, directed by Lewis Milestone, which opened on April 21. The other internationally acclaimed sound drama of the year was Four Infantry, directed by G. W. Pabst for Nero-Film in Berlin. Cultural historians consider the French The Golden Age, directed by Luis Buñuel, which appeared in October 1930, one of the most aesthetic imports, although more as a sign of expression of the Surrealist movement than as cinema. per se. The oldest sound film now recognized by most film historians as a masterpiece is Nero-Film's M, directed by Fritz Lang, which was released on May 11, 1931.

Kinematic form

"The talking picture is as unnecessary as a song book." This was the emphatic proclamation in 1927 of the critic Viktor Shklovsky, one of the leaders of the Russian formalist movement. While some considered sound irreconcilable with cinematic art, others saw it as opening up a new field of creative opportunity. The following year, a group of Soviet film directors, including Sergei Eisenstein, proclaimed that the use of image and sound in juxtaposition, the so-called contrapuntal method, would bring cinema to "unprecedented power and a cultural pinnacle.". This method of constructing talkies will not restrict it to a national market, as performance photography must, but it will provide a greater possibility than ever before for the worldwide circulation of an idea expressed filmically."

On March 12, 1929, the first talking picture made in Germany was released. The inaugural production of Tobis Filmkunst, was not a drama but a documentary sponsored by a shipping company: Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World), directed by Walter Ruttmann. it was perhaps the first film to significantly explore the artistic possibilities of marrying moving images with recorded sound. As scholar William Moritz describes, the film is "intricate, dynamic, fast-paced...juxtaposing similar cultural habits from countries around the world, with splendid orchestral music...and many synchronized sound effects". Lou Lichtveld was among a number of contemporary artists impressed by the film: «Melodie der Welt became the first major sound documentary, the first where musical and non-musical sounds were composed into a single unit. and where image and sound are controlled by one and the same impulse.” Melodie der Welt was a direct influence on the industrial film Philips Radio (1931), directed by avant-garde film director Joris Ivens and music composed by Lichtveld, who described his audiovisual goals:

"To present the semi-musical impressions of factory sounds in a complex world of audio that moved between absolute music and purely noises of the nature of the documentary. In this film you can find each intermediate stage: as the movement of the machines played by music, the noises of the machines dominating the background music, the music itself is the documentary, and these scenes were the pure sound of the single of the machines".

Many similar experiments were pursued by Dziga Vertov in his Entuziazm of 1931 and by Chaplin in Modern Times, five years later.

A few innovative commercial directors immediately saw ways in which sound could be used as an integral part of telling a story cinematically, beyond the obvious function of the recorded word. In Blackmail, Hitchcock manipulated the playback of a character's monologue so that the word "knife" it would jump out of a blurry stream of sound, reflecting the subjective impression of the protagonist, who is desperate to hide his involvement in a gruesome stabbing. In his first film, Paramount's Applause (1929), Rouben Mamoulian created the illusion of acoustic depth by varying the volume of ambient sound in proportion to the distance of the shots. At a certain point, Mamoulian wanted the audience to hear one character singing while another was praying at the same time; according to the director, “They said we couldn't record both things – the song and the prayer – on one mic and one channel. So I said to the sound guy, 'Why not use two mics and two channels and combine the two tracks in post-production?'" These methods would eventually become standard procedure in the popular creation of cinema.

One of the first commercial films to take full advantage of the new opportunities provided by recorded sound was Le Million, directed by René Clair and produced by the French division of Tobis. Opening in Paris in April 1931 and New York a month later, the film was both a popular and critical success. A musical comedy with a basic plot, it is memorable for its formal achievements, in particular its downright contrived treatment of sound. As scholar Donald Crafton describes,

"Le Million It does not allow us to forget that the acoustic component is a construction as much as the whiteboard. He replaced the dialogue with actors singing and speaking in rowing couples. Clair created bromist confusions between the sound on screen and off-screen. He also experimented with asynchronous audio clippings, as in the famous scene where a chase to a coat is synchronized with the applause of an invisible crowd on rugby."

These techniques and the like are part of the vocabulary of comedy talkies, though as special effects and 'color', not as the basis for the kind of sprawling, non-naturalistic design achieved by Clair. Outside the realm of comedy, the kind of gritty film with sound exemplified by Melodie der Welt and Le Million would rarely be pursued in commercial production. Hollywood, in particular, incorporated sound into a reliable genre-based system of filmmaking, where the formal possibilities of the new medium were subservient to the traditional goals of star affirmation and simple storytelling. As Frank Woods, Secretary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood, accurately predicted in 1928, "The talking pictures of the future will follow the general line of treatment hitherto developed by silent dramas."..the talking scenes will require different handling, but the overall construction of the story will be much the same."