Cinematic Realism and the Phonographic Analogy

Abstract

It stands to reason that the greatest part of commentary on the subject of sound and film has concerned itself with the only slightly narrower subject of sound in film-or, simply, sound film. Still, a number of worthwhile areas of investigation lie in the periphery of the sound and film discourse (the use of live narrators in early film exhibition, for example, or the occurrence of audience vocality in certain screening contexts), and others will presumably come to light. Among these projects is the present essay, a comparative theorized history of narrative cinema and recorded sound, the latter in its guise as home entertainment. The emphasis will be on the subject of realism, and I proceed from the hypothesis that the realism of these media may be traced not only (or even chiefly) to the immanent properties of their finished artifacts, but at least equally to a commercially generated realist longing constantly reinscribed in their reception. My interest is in the relation between that process, by which a predisposition to realism is created, and the credentials which the two media at hand may meaningfully claim as instruments of realism. Within certain limits, in other words, I shall examine the institutional behavior of each in the context of its technological properties. The inquiry will thus have both synchronic and diachronic aspects, using the strategy of comparison between cinema and phonograph in the hope of contributing to a general understanding of the realist imperative which seems to govern the receptions of these and other media. By popular reception I mean the epistemological tenor of the discourses of journalistic criticism, promotional material, and the massive, all-important network of public and private oral communication. These three modes of discourse are, respectively, difficult, difficult, and impossible to empiricize meaningfully, even in a much larger context whose primary object is their detailed study; yet their roles demand consideration in any functional account of the tenacious realist mechanisms of which they are parts. In the interest of historiographical clarity I wish to be explicit about the macroscopic scale of parts of my argument. Even where the almost infinite historical record is engaged closely, the act is one of selection and storytelling. Readers who respond skeptically to the observations made at this level are of course at liberty to evaluate the attendant theoretical elaborations accordingly. The fullest name I might give to the filmic object of my attention would be continuity realist narrative, a term chosen only in part for its resonance with such terms as classical or dominant. Certainly the American orientation of

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