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The Social Imaginary of Telephony: Fictional Dispositives in Albert Robida’s Le Vingtième Siècle and the Archeology of “Talking Cinema”
- Edited by Maria Tortajada, François Albera
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- Book:
- Cine-Dispositives
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 10 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 08 January 2015, pp 217-248
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Summary
What I propose to do here, within a perspective involving both epistemology and the archaeology of media, is to approach “talking cinema” through the examination of discourses produced in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, that is, almost fifty years prior to the generalization of talkies and the institutionalization of practices related to sound in the domain of cinema. Beyond this specific medium, I will examine the series of machines of audiovisual representation, one of whose many actualizations was “talking cinema” (which is why quotation marks are fitting here, with regard to “cinema” as well as “talking”). Among the many inventions from which various experimentations with “talking cinema” may be said to derive, I will emphasize the technique of telephony. Indeed, its study presents the advantage of encompassing a number of auditive or audiovisual dispositives that are often much more difficult to reduce to their place in the genealogy of (institutionalized) cinema than viewing dispositives. On a methodological level, de-centering the point of view is precisely what appears productive to me, as the discussion of the place given to the voice within various audio(visual) dispositives constitutes the theoretical horizon of my observations.
It seems rather improbable that the telephone, considered today as belonging in the sphere of telecommunications, and whose invention is usually credited to Alexander Graham Bell (who registered a patent for it in February 18764), would cross paths with the series of moving images, even when these come with recorded sounds. Some differences touching on the relations established between representation and addressee of the vocal (or audiovisual) message would at the very least cast doubts on the possibility. These differences may be spelled out thanks to the following, necessarily basic classification, whose oppositional pairs should not be seen as hermetically separate, at least if the hybridity of phenomena tied to the emergence and constitution of the media in question is to be taken into account:
When considering these different features and the traditional and monolithic conception of the two media they assume, the unidirectional communication with a collective audience (projection) implied in the film show proves very different from the dominant use of the telephone, which consists in an interactive communication carried out by a user in a private space.
The Lecturer, the Image, the Machine and the Audio-Spectator: The Voice as a Component Part of Audiovisual Dispositives
- Edited by François Albera, Maria Tortajada
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- Book:
- Cinema Beyond Film
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 22 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2012, pp 215-232
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Summary
When one examines the various uses that were made of sound before talking films became the general rule and that have been recently brought to light by research into the archaeology and history of the cinema by scholars such as Jacques Perriault, Giusy Pisano or Rick Altman, one is struck by the fact that the co-presence of a voice and a visual representation makes up one of the major hallmarks of ‘cinema’, whether one extends one’s epistemological viewpoint to cover earlier spectacles, the technologies then available, or the tangle of cultural sequences to which cinema – in its various disguises – belonged. The interest that early cinema historians such as Germain Lacasse have shown over the last decade for the figure of the lecturer (known in francophone historiography as the bonimenteur – the smooth talker or ‘barker’) is the sign of a new way of conceiving of this period and a desire to rehabilitate not just the vocal element, but also more generally the oral dimension of what were essentially ephemeral ‘events’ – cinematographic projections.
In this article, my aim is to put forward a conceptual framework that can be used when studying the ways in which the voice of a speaker – whether live or recorded – is integrated into (pre-)cinematographic spectacles. There are many differences between the two types of voice production, but they both raise the question of the place and function given to a specifically human characteristic within a dispositive that for the greater part is governed by technological parameters.
To study the discursive networks that are associated with historical objects such as lecturers, machines for audiovisual representation or the means of (tele-) communication – whether real or imagined by scientists or novelists – one may use a theoretical framework that is gradually (and reciprocally) built up on the basis of the discoveries of new practices or inventions and that is used to organise the information that is gleaned from work on the various sources. In my view, the notion of dispositive is a productive one, as it allows one to link the study of voice production with that of other parts of the spectacle, and thus to reach a better understanding of what is specific in the role that falls to the voice.
On the Singular Status of the Human Voice: Tomorrow’s Eve and the Cultural Series of Talking Machines
- Edited by François Albera, Maria Tortajada
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- Book:
- Cinema Beyond Film
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 22 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2012, pp 233-252
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Summary
The cinema was far from being the first ‘talking machine’ used for putting on shows. The talking component is part and parcel of a long line of technical inventions and discourses about the audiovisual representation of man. The term itself underlines the preponderant role given to the word – the true ‘subject’ of talkies being located in the talking Subject her/himself, as Jean-Louis Comolli has noted. The talking element has fostered an anthropomorphic mimetism, which is comparable in its principles to the mimetism underlying both the manufacturing of automata with human faces and some of the ways phonographic techniques are used. Rick Altman has written about the phase in which talking was generalised: ‘nearly every important technological innovation can be traced to the desire to produce persuasive illusion of real people speaking real words’. James Lastra has noted that when analysing the writings of Hollywood technicians at that time, ‘all sounds were ultimately recognized to be functionally subordinate to the voice’. Even if in science, as Jonathan Sterne underlines, a movement of subordination of the voice to the more general category of ‘sounds’ can be observed from the 19th century onwards, the primacy of the talking element has been perpetuated in audiovisual representations, implying all the phases of sound manufacturing in the cinema, from their recording to their projection in halls. It is against this background that I shall address the conditions that have contributed to the emergence of a conception of the relations between sound and visual representations, where the dominant parameter is voice-lip synchronism. When one examines the possible combinations (exemplified in the ‘installations’ of contemporary artists), it becomes clear that institutionalised talking cinema can profit from being set within a wider technological spectrum belonging to the cultural series of talking machines. From a methodological point of view, this conception allows us to free historical study from the requirements of periodisation, for if one series may be derived from another series, it may also echo it at a distance or develop in parallel to neighbouring series. Reciprocal influence may occur as a result of a spatial contiguity (when, for example, two techniques are presented at the same exhibition) that is itself subject to considerable diachronic variations and various contingencies, as it results from practices that have not been laid down and fixed.