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Cinema history3 min read

LESSON 133

Cinema technology 2: sound arrives

The talkies change everything, 1900 to 1930.

IN THIS LESSON

  1. A long road to sync
  2. Vitaphone and The Jazz Singer
  3. What sound changed
  4. The wider effect
  5. Practice: hearing the change

A long road to sync

Sound and film were joined in public as early as 1900, at a show in Paris, but making it work commercially took decades. Early sound-on-disc systems struggled to keep synchronisation and could not amplify well. Eugene Lauste received the first patent for sound-on-film, recording sound as a light pattern on the film itself, in 1907. Lee de Forest showed his Phonofilm sound-on-film system in New York in April 1923. Before then, silent films were usually accompanied live by a piano or an organ in the cinema.

Vitaphone and The Jazz Singer

Warner Bros. used the Vitaphone system for feature films and nearly 1,000 shorts from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone put the sound on separate discs, 16 inches across and played at 33 and a third revolutions per minute, a speed first used for it, on a turntable linked to the projector motor. The Jazz Singer, which premiered on 6 October 1927, was the first feature with synchronised singing and speech in several sequences, and its success marked the start of the end of the silent era.

What sound changed

Sound forced the speed of film to be fixed. Silent films had run anywhere from 16 to 26 frames a second, often varied by hand, but the ear notices changes of pitch at once. Studios chose 24 frames a second, and between 1927 and 1930 it became the standard for 35 mm sound film. The soundtrack also took space on the film, which led to the Academy ratio. Microphones were heavy and fixed at first, until directors started hanging them on poles, the origin of the boom. Sound-on-film soon replaced discs as the standard.

The wider effect

Within a few years of 1930 talkies had spread around the world. In the United States they strengthened Hollywood's place as a centre of cultural and commercial influence. In Europe many film-makers and critics feared dialogue would spoil the visual art of silent cinema, and in Japan, where live narrators accompanied films, talkies took longer to catch on. Sound also created whole new crafts on set and in post-production, from boom operators to mixers. The arrival of sound also pushed studios to build quiet stages.

Practice: hearing the change

This is working practice. Watch a short scene from a late silent film with music only, then a scene from an early talkie. Note how much the camera moves in each, and how the actors are placed. Then film a short scene twice: once silent with title cards, once with dialogue, and compare which details each version needs. A silent version must show everything in pictures, while a sound version can let a line of dialogue do the work. Ask which one forces you to think harder about the image, and keep that habit when you work with sound.

Try it today

  1. 01Watch a scene from a late-1920s silent film.
  2. 02Watch a scene from The Jazz Singer or another early talkie.
  3. 03Compare how the camera and actors move in each.
  4. 04Film a 30-second scene as a silent with one title card.
  5. 05Film it again with dialogue and compare.