The Academy Technical Bureau, Cooperative Research, and the Building of the Studio System

At the end of the 1920s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) harnessed its role in the transition to sound to shift leadership of technical research to Hollywood. At the same time that it began the Sound School, the Academy established a Producers-Technicians Committee designed to pool knowledge of universal production practices. This chapter argues that AMPAS was able to establish itself as the authority over everyday technology in Hollywood through this committee and by absorbing the AMPP’s Technical Bureau. Through their collective scientific activities, the studios were able to take advantage of the knowledge and skills of their workers to solidify Hollywood’s dominance over the motion picture industry. At the same time, several new journals and publications for the dissemination of technical knowledge were established, including the International Photographer, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, and the Academy Technical Digest, determining who disseminated knowledge, generated definitions, and created standards. The institutional structure established by the start of 1930 would remain stable throughout the golden age of Hollywood, making AMPAS both the clearinghouse and the gatekeeper that determined what the basic standards for technology would be and who would have access to this knowledge.

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie

During the transition to sound, the trade and news press noted frequent complaints against recorded sound, both from those inside the industry who were suspicious of the new technology disrupting their work habits and from the public, which was curious but uncertain about the conventions of sound film. These complaints ranged from dialogue that was too loud and too deliberate, to technical difficulties with reproducing sibilants, to overly intrusive and distracting sound effects. But special ire was reserved for recorded synchronized scores, although the ability to provide such music remained one of the chief early selling points of the technology. This chapter examines some of these early reactions to sound film and looks at strategies that filmmakers developed to convince filmgoers that recorded sound could be cinematic.

Weavers of Film

This article uses AT&T’s 1910s–30s “Weavers of Speech” campaign to read on-screen telegraph and telephone operators as vernacular translators of cinematic syntax and hypervisible avatars for the invisible cutter girls who “knitted the pieces of film together” on studio lots. While operators largely played peripheral roles in classical films, two transitional periods saw them rise to the surface of story en masse, as if temporarily hired to sew over a rupture. A comparative analysis of telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of crosscutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound suggests women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and auteur models that dominate theories of film editing. More broadly, the article suggests that the culturally conspicuous feminization of low-level information labor offers feminist film historians a crucial “mediatrix” for uncovering woman workers hidden in the cut of film.

5. The secret afterlife of silent film

The year 1929 is often seen as marking the end of silent film. “The secret afterlife of silent film” questions this date, demonstrating how that year only signaled the end of production in major studios in the United States. Once the technology for synchronization and amplification became available, the transition to sound in the motion picture industry was smoother than is often depicted. Silent film production continued in pockets around the globe until nearly the middle of the century, as did silent film exhibition. Elements of silent film persist even in the early twenty-first century, from avant-garde to animated films. Silent film is still beloved by critics and cinephiles, and the innovations of the silent period arguably contribute to the ongoing appeal of cinema itself.

‘Dead as the wooden battleship’: The Fate of Silent British Features in the Transition to Sound

Dead as the wooden battleship, dead as the magic lantern: such were the similes used in 1929 by some in the British film industry to describe the fate of silent cinema in the new talkie era. Other voices predicted a lingering half-life. Either way, most film companies faced a common problem: what to do in 1929 with their stock of silent films which were completed but unreleased. Foregrounding the activities of British International Pictures, Gainsborough Pictures and the distributors Equity British, this article explores the aesthetic, practical and technical problems in exhibiting and sonically titivating silent product as the industry adjusted to sound technology. Topics include the problems generated by the Cinematograph Films Act 1927; the damage caused by awkwardly dubbed voices; the perils of management divisions; the re-release of older silent films; audience and critical dissatisfaction; and the output of young film-makers such as John F. Argyle, who made his last silent feature, The Final Reckoning, in September 1931. British silent cinema's death, it turns out, was neither quick nor painless.