Advent of
Sound Cinema
Sound Cinema
This is the French word for voiceless cinema
Cinema muet
This famous painter collaborated briefly on the film L'Age d'or from 1930
Salvador Dali
The onset of sound cinema more or less killed this genre of film
Modernist cinema or modernist avant-garde
Jean Renoir used this to almost completely mask spoken dialogue in his film, Sous le Toits de Paris (1930)
Music
This was the first real “talkie” in France (hint, we saw it in class)
Les Trois Masques, 1929, Andre Hagon
The sound films from Gaumont were screened at this cinema in Paris
Gaumont’s Palace
This American studio was the only to invest in the very trepid industry of the talkies, and could be called a winner of early sound cinema
Warner Bros
Edison’s 1st sound film efforts had these two main issues
Imperfect sound and image synchronization, and frequent breakdowns
He was the inventor of a viable technology to reproduce recorded sound for films
Lee Dee Forest
After America, this country served as a sort of testing ground for the talkies
England
The first attempt, of many, at marketing synchronized sound film took place at this event
Paris World's Fair of 1900
This French powerhouse director suffered a loss with his first attempt at a talkie, becoming a loser of early sound cinema
Abel Gance
These were the two main reasons that France was slow to enter the sound cinema scene
Their lack of technology/no sound studios, and patents controlled by other countries
This innovative actor was the first star of a talkies film, adding a few lines of impromptu dialogue in The Jazz Singer (1927)
Al Jolson
The technology of sound films reduced this quality in filmmaking
Complexity
This editing style became dominant following the advent of sound films
Découpage Classique / Analytic
These 2 French studios tried to market their own sound cinema with little success
Pathe Frere and Gaumont Studios
By the time Gance’s film La Fin du Monde debuted, French audiences had shifted their genre preference to this type of film
Intimate personal dramas set in more plausible, functional worlds (hint: remember cinema was an escape from real life, but still had to have some believability)
This director and brother of Rene Clair tried his hand at a partial talkie called Le Requin
Henri Chomette
The first sound films used this type of technology before the electrical amplification of recorded sound came about
Compressed air that amplified sound signals
The transition to sound caused French films to fall into one of these two categories in terms of film length
Short Subjects & Feature Films
This French director learned from the mistakes of Abel Gance and successfully debuted his own sound film
Jean Grimillon
The 3 main problems that contributed to the failure of Gance’s La Fin due Monde were
Unofficial abridgement or shortening of the film, (accents/dialogues/voices) of the actors were unintelligible to the audience, and the shift of the French audience’s preference of genre
Pierre Braunberger told Jean Renoir that he had to first do this before he was allowed to make La Chienne (1931) with almost complete freedom
Prove himself by filming a Feydeau farce.
Two terms for the apparatus with brief commercial success that was the first to market sound films at the Paris World Fair of 1900
Phonorama or Phono-Cinema Theatre