Cinema's Conversion to Sound

The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinemas diversity of film styles and practices. Cinemas Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sounds impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies traditional exclusive concern with the film image, the book investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to sound cinema. Extending beyond recent Hollywood cinema, Charles OBrien undertakes a geo-historical inquiry into sound technologys diffusion across national borders. Through an analysis that juxtaposes French and American filmmaking, he reveals the aesthetic consequences of fundamental national differences in how sound technologies were understood. Whereas the emphasis in 1930s Hollywood was on sounds intelligibility within a films story-world, the stress in French filmmaking was on sounds fidelity as reproduction of the event staged for recording.