"Cinema at its source": Synchronizing race and sound in the early talkies

Camera Obscura

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 31-71

  Maurice, Alice ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950325964     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-17-1_49-31     Document Type: Review

References (63)

1. Robert Benchley, "'Hearts in Dixie' (The First Real Talking Picture)," Opportunity 7 (1929): 122.
2. This and subsequent definitions are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
3. There has in the past several years been a concerted effort on the part of film scholars to redress the neglect of sound in the analysis of films and to be more attentive to the material conditions of silent cinema by exploring the way music, lectures, crowd noise, and other sounds formed part of the moviegoing experience. Critics including André Gaudreault, Noël Burch, and Rick Altman have pointed out the way sound and image worked (and did not work) together in the early days of cinema, with Burch even noting the primacy of sound and the status of the image as an "appendage" to the phonograph in the years before the motion picture. See Norman King, "The Sound of Silents," in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 31-43.
4. See Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
5. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
6. I discuss the formal and narrative implications of the link between race and motion in an earlier essay, "The Essence of Motion: Figure, Frame, and the Racial Body in Early Silent Cinema," Moving Image 1.2 (forthcoming).
7. "King Vidor Gambling on 'Hallelujah!'" Motion Picture News, February 1929, 547.
8. King Vidor, A Tree Is a Tree (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 175.
9. "The Birth of a New Art," Independent, 6 April 1914, 8.
10. Tom Gunning and Gaudreault coined the phrase "cinema of attractions" to describe the early cinema's penchant for a mode of entertainment that was neither the "actuality film" (à la the Lumière brothers) nor narrative. These shorts featured performances, re-creations, and displays of various kinds, many culled from vaudeville and burlesque stage. See Gunning's "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant Garde," in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56-63.
11. Fatimah Tobing Rony notes in The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1996) that these spectacles differed little from the ethnographic and "scientific" films of the early silent era.
12. Floyd C. Covington, "The Negro invades Hollywood," Opportunity 7 (1929): 131.
13. Vidor, A Tree Is a Tree, 181.
14. "Silent Pictures Will Be an Antique in 30 Years, Says D. W. Griffith," Exhibitors' Herald-World, 19 January 1929, 5.
15. Oswell Blakeston, "Black Fanfare," Close Up 2 (1929): 124.
16. Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 219-20.
17. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 90.
18. Michael Rogin, "Two Declarations of Independence," Representations 55 (1996): 21-22.
19. "Minstrel Show Next Vogue," Motion Picture News, March 1929, 618.
20. The New York Times Film Reviews, project manager Abraham Abramson, vol. 1. (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1970), 35.
21. New York Times Film Reviews, 54.
22. For an account of blackface minstrelsy's status as both "counterfeit" and "currency," see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
23. Rogin, "Two Declarations of Independence," 13.
24. In What Happened in the Tunnel (Edison, US, 1903), a white woman and her black servant play a trick on a white masher who is harassing the white woman.
25. The strategy he identifies is given a whole new meaning in the numerous films that turn on racial disguise. See Gunning's essay in Silent film, ed. Richard Abel, 75-78.
26. Rick Altman, "Moving Lips: Cinema As Ventriloquism," Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 68.
27. "How Talkies Are Made," Photoplay, January 1930, 31.
28. This "quieter" acting style did not entirely replace what Roberta Pearson calls the "histrionic code." Pearson traces the inaccurate progress narrative often told about acting styles in the silent cinema; she also notes the association between class and acting style, particularly in D. W. Griffith's Biograph films. While the broad gestures and pantomime did decrease in the later years of silent film, they were still used, especially when actors were playing lower-class or ethnic roles. See Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
29. Michael Chion, The Voice in the Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 8.
30. Clyde Taylor, "The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema," in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of US Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1996), 13.
31. The Jazz Singer, film historians have (implicitly and explicitly) argued for the separation of aesthetic and ideological concerns.
32. Robert Herring, "Black Shadows," Close Up 2 (1929): 99.
33. Kenneth MacPherson, "As Is," Close Up 2 (1929): 87-88.
34. MacPherson edited the avant-garde film journal Close Up along with the novelist Bryher and the poet HD. The editors saw the coming of sound as the death of the cinema as an art form, but the "Negro in Film" issue they published in 1929 celebrated what they saw as sound cinema's only hope. I will discuss the journal's fetishization of race (and its anticipation of Hallelujah!) later in the essay. For a general introduction to Close Up, see James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus, eds., Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998).
35. Benchley, "Hearts in Dixie," 122.
36. See Metz, "Aural Objects," Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 24-32.
37. Elmer Carter, "Of Negro Motion Pictures," Close Up 2 (1929): 119.
38. See Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 273. In other words, the fetish includes within it both the reminder and the denial of the lack. In this case, the lack refers to the shortcomings of the apparatus, and more basically to the fact that the apparatus is standing in for the real thing - the absent objects reproduced on film.
39. Kaja Silverman, "Suture," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 229.
40. Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was published originally in Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18.
41. This is part of a more general critique of psychoanalysis as an ahistorical approach that leaves out race as a primary category of analysis in favor of gender and sexuality. There has lately been an effort to open a dialogue between theories of race and psychoanalysis, especially by feminist theorists. See Elizabeth Able, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, eds., Female Subjects in Black and White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
42. Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxiety: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997);
43. Christopher Lane, ed., The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
44. Lola Young, Fear of the Dark: "Race," Gender, and Sexuality in Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1996).
45. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales (New York: Routledge, 1991), 216.
46. Young, Fear of the Dark, 16-17.
47. See bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992).
48. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 46.
49. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 43. We can perhaps speak more precisely here about the performance of Fetchit's race since his entire persona, in films and publicity was a caricature of black stereotypes. As Cripps points out, Fetchit's accommodation of racist stereotypes was a large reason for the longevity of his career, as whites could accept him more easily than other black performers.
50. Most studios continued to make silent movies after the birth of synchronized sound just in case the public taste tired of the novelty of talking pictures. This prolonged (and costly) uncertainty led to questionable strategies like the one offered to studios and exhibitors in a Motion Picture News headline from 23 February 1929: "Studio Executive Cautions, Provide for Quick Switch Back to Silent Pictures" (545).
51. MacPherson, "As Is," 90.
52. See Dismond, "The Negro Actor and the American Movies," Close Up 2 (1929): 96.
53. Quoted in Covington, "The Negro Invades Hollywood," 113.
54. Photoplay, 31 May 1929.
55. Herbert Howe, "Stepin's High-Colored Past," Photoplay, 31 May 1929, 123-25.
56. "How Talkies Are Made," 32.
57. Herring, "Black Shadows," 98.
58. Harry A. Potamkin, "The Aframerican Cinema," Close Up 2 (1929): 109.
59. "King Vidor Gambling," 545.
60. Dismond, "The Negro Actor," 95.
61. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 87.
62. Herring, "Black Shadows," 104.
63. Rony, The Third Eye, 54.