Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance

July 23, 2015 @ 1:56 am

Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance

Language: English

Pages: 280

ISBN: 0520279654

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The seemingly effortless integration of sound, movement, and editing in films of the late 1930s stands in vivid contrast to the awkwardness of the first talkies. Film Rhythm after Sound analyzes this evolution via close examination of important prototypes of early sound filmmaking, as well as contemporary discussions of rhythm, tempo, and pacing. Jacobs looks at the rhythmic dimensions of performance and sound in a diverse set of case studies: the Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration Ivan the Terrible, Disney’s Silly Symphonies and early Mickey Mouse cartoons, musicals by Lubitsch and Mamoulian, and the impeccably timed dialogue in Hawks’s films. Jacobs argues that the new range of sound technologies made possible a much tighter synchronization of music, speech, and movement than had been the norm with the live accompaniment of silent films. Filmmakers in the early years of the transition to sound experimented with different technical means of achieving synchronization and employed a variety of formal strategies for creating rhythmically unified scenes and sequences. Music often served as a blueprint for rhythm and pacing, as was the case in mickey mousing, the close integration of music and movement in animation. However, by the mid-1930s, filmmakers had also gained enough control over dialogue recording and editing to utilize dialogue to pace scenes independently of the music track. Jacobs’s highly original study of early sound-film practices provides significant new contributions to the fields of film music and sound studies.

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to me oversimplified once one considers the panoply of options offered by the editing of dialogue, music, and image tracks. Here is a brief résumé of some of the most commonly employed synchronization strategies: 1. Eisenstein can synchronize a single element, for example, speech or gesture, with melodic and/or rhythmic figures. 2. Eisenstein can stagger or layer the sync points, for example, by alternating speech with groups of notes. There is a palpable rhythm to this kind of alternation and,

the passing of silent cinema in terms quite similar to Richardson’s: I am deeply attached to the cinema. For me, its play of black and white, its silence, the rhythmic succession of its images, its power to relegate the word, that ancient symbol of human bondage, to the background, seemed to me the promise of a new and wonderful art. Now a barbaric invention comes to destroy it all.2 1 2 / Chapter 1 Even after the early years of the transition, discussion of the sound cinema continued to

as 1938, Arnheim continued to reject sound cinema, and particularly the introduction of spoken dialogue, as an unfortunate diminution of the medium’s unique aesthetic capacities. These well-known objections to sound were framed theoretically in terms of the problem of language in relation to the image. But in my view they should also be seen as reactions to the phenomenon of the talkies and contextualized in terms of the specific technical problems of rendering speech in synchronization with

places the action metrically off kilter. This helps build to shot 11, a cut-in to a very angry Mickey confronting his pet, figure 60. Playful Pluto, bar 61 beat 2. figure 61. Playful Pluto, bar 62 beat 2. Mickey Mousing Reconsidered / 99 figure 62. Playful Pluto, bar 63 beat 2. at which point the film returns the stress to the downbeat, whole-note, chord. The episode reveals the subtle control over rhythm that the studio had achieved by this date. Music, sound effects, and animation are

the sequence. It strongly anticipates what would become classical background scoring (even though the use of recognizable tunes and the abrupt shifts in pitch and timbre within the cue make the music more obtrusive than would become the norm). The underscoring’s dramatic import is clear: melodic fragments give resonance to phrases such as “Must have lost it when we were dancing,” and the entire speech beginning, “Bertha, you have no idea how beautiful Monte Carlo is.” In addition the modulation

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