Cinema's Conversion to Sound Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CINEMA'S CONVERSION TO SOUND TECHNOLOGY AND FILM STYLE IN FRANCE AND THE U.S. Charles O'Brien Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, 200 pp. Cinema's Conversion to Sound fills significant gap in film studies scholarship. Someone interested in the development of sound in American films can be directed to numerous books, as well as the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and the resources held by the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but previously it was not clear where to direct someone interested in the development of sound in French cinema. Charles O'Brien has provided an excellent history of early sound in French cinema, and convincingly argues for its unique place in the international spectrum of early sound films. The full title of this book indicates that it is about sound technology in both France and the United States. However, the focus of the work is on French cinema. O'Brien describes it as a study situating French practices relative to contemporaneous practices in the United States and Germany, but while readers will gain better understanding of the development of early sound film outside France, this is not the best resource on this history for either the U.S. or Germany. It is, however, definitely the book to read for the history of the development of sound film in France. It is admirable that O'Brien distances his work from traditional approaches that exclusively view national cinemas in terms of works produced by small number of high-profile directors. Rather than just look at auteur films, he places equal emphasis on mainstream popular cinema. By doing so, he is led to the central insights of his book, and he is able to introduce the reader to elements that are generally overlooked in the standard works on French cinema. Masterpieces are certainly of great interest, but comprehensive historical work requires including the popular cinema, B films, and serials. O'Brien's study is model of thoroughness. Cinema's Conversion to Sound is organized with an awareness of contemporary reading habits. The Introduction has summary of each chapter; at the start of each chapter the author tells the reader what he will be discussing, and at the end of the chapter there is reminder about what has just been done. While one might think the reader should be perceptive enough to read book chapter by chapter and understand the points without this much assistance, this can be taken as reasonable approach by an author who has come to understand how most books are actually read. Readers normally look to the summary to find way of not actually having to read the book or to be directed to the parts which hold the most interest. Thus, when readers actually get to the chapter, then often read so quickly that they need to have reminders of the chapter's main points. I see these summaries not as repetition, but as O'Brien's serious effort to have his points understood. It is realistic strategy. What are the points in the book? The central one has to do with the use of direct sound in French cinema. Early Hollywood sound films used direct sound at first, but very quickly incorporated mixing boards to add and manipulate sound, effects, and music after shooting. As O'Brien watched early French sound films aimed at popular audiences, he observed that using long takes with direct sound was the standard method. A casual viewer seeing one of these French films from the early 1930s might think that it had the appearance of Hollywood sound films from perhaps 1928 and thus that French cinema was just slow in coming up to the sound sophistication level found in Hollywood. O'Brien looked at enough of these French films and read enough of the original technical and critical literature to understand this direct-sound/long-take method differently. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".