The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing                  process that significantly reduced the cinema's diversity of film styles and                  practices. Cinema's Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of                  synchronous sound's 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 O'Brien undertakes a geo-historical inquiry into sound                  technology's 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 sound's intelligibility within a film's story-world, the                  stress in French filmmaking was on sound's fidelity as reproduction of the event                  staged for recording.

Cinema's Conversion To Sound: Technology And Film Style In France And The U.S. PDF

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