Sounds Like a Movie

Andra McCartney

James Lastra. Sound Technology and the American Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. 288 pages. $49.50 (cloth); $18.50 (paper).

James Lastra’s Sound Technology and the American Cinema is a welcome addition to scholarly writing about film sound. Subtitled "Perception, Representation, Modernity," the book investigates film sound in relation to the two tropes of inscription and simulation. Lastra discusses the complex epistemological issues raised by new media, in which ideas about inscription were changed by the possibility of autonomous mechanical processes, and ideas about perception were altered by what Lastra terms the "inhuman" capacities of machines.

In the first chapter, Lastra undertakes an analysis of the writings of such nineteenth-century sound experimenters as Thomas Edison. He describes the public reception of mechanical sound technologies such as the phonautographe, Euphonia, and Kempelen’s speaking machines, and discusses popular scientific texts about acoustics published at that time. Unfortunately, Lastra does not undertake an analysis of the power relations embedded in the epistemological issues surrounding the introduction of such sound technologies. For instance, Lastra describes the writing of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who reflected on the meanings of Edison’s work. This author describes an imagined scenario where Edison’s invention of a sonic automaton is intended as a romantic substitute for a woman with a beautiful voice but vulgar soul (18). Lastra decries the virulent misogyny of this story, but does not follow it up theoretically. Similarly the Euphonia, an early vocal technology shown in an illustration (25), like Kempelen’s chess machine, looks like a Turk, and could be made to speak in many different languages. Lastra does not follow up questions of orientalism, gender, and racism. He does not address the questions of who is being represented, and by whom. Who speaks, and whose voice is controlled by another? Who are technologies meant to replace?

In the next chapter, Lastra discusses performance and inscription. As in the first chapter, his close analysis of contemporary texts lends depth and complexity to the theoretical issues that he follows. Most interesting in this respect is a discussion of Edison’s recording practices (86ff). Edison preferred to work with less distinguished singers who were willing to follow his performance suggestions, based on his ideas of phonographic standards, fitting with an aesthetics grounded more in mechanics than in music. It was at this point in the book that I wondered why performance had not been given the status of third important term, along with inscription and simulation. As an embodied representation, performance takes an intermediary place between the other two, complicating their dualism, and is, in my opinion, equally important to consider in relation to the development and adoption of sound technologies. In the body of the book, the question of performance is raised repeatedly. Yet it is not considered in any depth in the theoretical discussions of either introduction or conclusion.

In chapter 3, the issue of performance raises some interesting questions. Lastra describes sound practices before the talkies, including the illustrated song, the slide lecture, the song film, and sound accompaniment of silent films. Here he relates that, "performative sound implicitly threatened the dominance of the image" (106). Sound accompaniments were changed to suit the ethnicities and class backgrounds of particular audiences, and could also be used to critique the films through the practice of "funning." Lastra describes how the advent of talkies moved sound control back into the hands of filmmakers, and into the service of the image.

In chapter 4, Lastra discusses sound theory in relation to the American cinema, referring to the work of Metz, Altman, Levin, Adorno, and others. He focuses particularly on the idea of the sound "original" in relation to the copy, as well as in relation to recording and representation. A fascinating complication of this theory is presented in Lastra’s discussion of film sound practice and the theoretical writings of film sound engineers (137ff) during the period of the early talkies (1926-1934). Here, he organizes his discussion around the models of phonographic fidelity and telephonic intelligibility.

Chapter 5 focuses on sound aesthetics in relation to technological change and labor relations. In this chapter, Lastra engages in a political analysis of workplace conditions. Once again referring to the writings of sound engineers, he links aesthetic decisions to professional negotiations. He discusses the increasing focus on isolating dialogue in film sound, and how this increased isolation is reconciled by sound engineers with an emphasis on sonic fidelity, inherited from phonography. Lastra documents how ideas about fidelity changed as this sound practice developed. However, in his desire to illustrate a tension between fidelity and narrative inscription, I think that Lastra here does not do justice to the full range of approaches to sound technologies. For instance, in his discussion of the Vitaphone short, a phonograph-based, early sound film form, he writes, "Like the phonograph and radio industries from which it emerged, the Vitaphone short was institutionally and economically bound to an aesthetic that privileged an absolutely faithful rendering of a sonic performance conceived of as wholly prior to the intervention of the representational device" (196). Lastra continues with a discussion of this idea that focuses only on the phonograph. I would dispute his claim that early radio was tied to a fidelity aesthetic, arguing that as a broadcast technology, it was linked quite strongly to an aesthetic of transmission. While phonographic recordings sometimes formed the content of early radio, the live voice of a studio host was also important, as was a relationship to a specific listening community defined by transmitter strength and time of broadcast. The liveness of radio broadcast means that not all sonic performances on radio can be conceived as faithful to a prior performance.

I recommend Lastra’s book as an interesting scholarly account of the rise of early film sound technologies. While I wish that he had taken the concept of performativity further in his theoretical discussion, I find his approach to the history of film sound fascinating in its discussion of how sound practice, particularly in the accounts of film sound engineers, complicates and grounds sound theory.