Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture
256
Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture
256Hardcover(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520299474 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 03/05/2019 |
| Series: | California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media , #1 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Songs of the Sonic Body
Noise and the Sounds of Early Motion Picture Audiences
We may wish we could hear the sounds of an early cinema auditorium. Few, however, would ever have thought to record the sounds of a motion picture's accompaniment, much less those of the motion picture house. The sounds of the audience have never been deemed to have any such significance. But the historian who devotedly wishes for what few have wished for is in luck: what exists are accounts of these sounds. These accounts emerged in the motion picture trade press, to describe and then, later, police noisy behaviors within the nickelodeon. Through them, the soundscape of the early cinema era comes to life. We can form the soundscape that we lack in audio recordings through words. Drawing together specific examples from Moving Picture World from 1908 to 1912, we may draw a scene in this way.
The slim teenaged girl moves quietly through the crowded room to reach the old piano that graces the front of the house. She tucks her hair behind her ear, and for a moment she just listens. Her surroundings are overwhelming: the room is hot and overcrowded. Most of all, it is noisy. Everyone has gathered here for the moving picture show. As they wait for the show, they fill the room to the brim with conversation, laughter, and, tonight, the sounds of flirtation. Several girls she knows giggle loudly, performatively, so that people notice, as boys she does not know whisper in their ears. She could be out there among them, but tonight she is working. She sits on the stool and glances over her shoulder. Her boyfriend is there, smiling broadly in the front row. He calls out to her by name; she smiles and gestures quietly but does not respond out loud. It is showtime. The sounds of the environment swirl all about the girl pianist: a tornado that fills her mind and distracts her. She can almost feel the sounds, they are so pervasive. She listens for a moment, with her eyes closed. She attempts to block the sounds out, focusing in on the task at hand. She readies her fingers to play and strikes the keys. The sound of the audience continues around her, and it does not stop for the entire show.
The sounds of the socially engaged cinema audience were part of the soundscape of the movie house from its inception in the United States. This chapter argues that a social conflict over the body played out in the sounds made by spectators in moving picture venues from 1895 through the first decade of the 1900s. The cinema house became a site of a debate over noise, class, gender, and the body. The cinema house, as a result of the presence of what I call the "sonic body"— a body that makes itself heard and felt within social space — had a complex and indeed even corporeal soundscape, full of the sounds of spectators going about their social, embodied, and even sexual business during film screenings. These sounds died down rather quickly in the early 1910s. Media historians have accounted for this mostly by citing the changing class structure of the audience. While this is accurate, the work already done underemphasizes the strong connections between noise and class that were at work in the debate. I will take quite a different tack here, arguing that the change in the cinema soundscape was equally, if not more, linked to a changing understanding of how the body should be heard within public space — and especially the space of entertainments. The quieting that we experienced in film culture in the 1910s was not unique to film culture. Appealing to a broader explanation that goes beyond class in cinema as its primary indicator, I arrive at a solution that is connected to a broader aural culture that was manifesting these problems at the same time as, and just before, cinema's great "turn to silence."
By 1912, a shift had definitely occurred. Certain classed and gendered associations with noise had to be excised from the soundscape of the cinema theater. For this change to be enacted, the sounds of certain classes and genders needed to be quieted within the soundscape. These sounds stopped nearly altogether in cinemas in white, middle-class American communities. And with the rise of white, middle-class mores in viewing etiquette, silence began to reign over the picture houses. Understanding why the quieting occurred reveals certain tensions within film culture. It indicates where sounds that were deemed noises began to challenge boundaries, and it reveals cinema culture's relationship to the power dynamics of the culture that gave birth to them. Listening to these sounds, we can see what social distinctions this new aural etiquette of the cinema house sought to reinforce, and what ties it had to a greater aural etiquette that governed the culture at the time.
Several moral panics marked early motion picture culture. One centered on sexuality and the body. It resulted in some notable policing of the nickelodeon environment in which people experienced motion pictures. Another centered on audience noise and its associations with a lower economic class of spectator. It resulted in the imposition of a new form of projection and musical accompaniment, which led to greater audience concentration on the film. We will cover both developments briefly at the top of this chapter in order to ground our sound analysis that follows. Aural culture is rarely discussed as an aspect of these moral panics expressed in the varied sounds of moviegoing: the way cinema's sound culture combined concerns about class and sexuality. It was a problem of aural culture, and it was dealt with via aural culture through the cultivation of a sonic etiquette. This soundscape, I argue here, manifested many of the same cultural anxieties regarding gender and sexuality that we are more familiar with in a more conventional film historical context.
With regard to the moral panic centered on the body and sexuality, many film historians have written about the anxiety produced by the presence of spectators' bodies in the dark. This might be expressed in an anxiety over crime, but more often it was expressed in the form of a need to police sexual behaviors at the cinema house, and particularly the desire to protect women moviegoers from sexual threat. The concerns among early twentieth-century reformers that movie theaters were becoming recruiting grounds for "white slavers" provide a clear example of this impulse, as does the discourse on "mashers" who accosted women in the theater. Further, as Jan Olsson has shown, debates over the threats that cinema houses posed to public health and sexual safety focused specifically on the bodies of female spectators. According to cinema reformer Anna S. Richardson, "The principal objection to the dark theater lies in the opportunity afforded for improper acts, verging on immoral, or at least tending in that direction." Film scenario writer W.H. Kitchell similarly asserted, "There is no excuse for a dark house where unimaginable evils may flourish." In response, the Motion Picture Patents Company proposed brighter lighting — what they called "daylight projection" — to "offset illicit activities." Daylight projection made a visual "cleanup" of the movie house possible. Different measures would be necessary for an aural cleanup.
The second moral panic was associated with noise and economic class among cinema audiences. Early cinema audiences were varied in their class identifications, as I will detail later in the chapter, and all classes of audiences tended toward noise. However, cinema's modes of audience address were certainly associated with entertainments of the lower class, and these modes of address encouraged rowdy and raucous audience response. Rick Altman has detailed the "gentrification" of early cinema auditoriums' soundscapes, stating that the standardization of musical accompaniment did a great deal to enforce newly established norms of audience's aesthetic absorption. This was, as he states, in keeping with a growing early 1910s middle-class ideal of absorption in narrative. Altman compares early cinema's soundscape to that of "beer gardens, minstrel shows, Chautauquas, amusement parks, Wild West shows, burlesque, vaudeville, and melodrama," where spectators "were expected to laugh, to sing, to speak." This culture, he argues, was reformed in the early years of the 1910s, when movie houses stopped providing occasions that overtly invited audience participation — for example, banishing "illustrated songs," songs played to accompany slides that represented the actions in the songs and displayed printed lyrics whose choruses the spectators were encouraged to sing. Referring to the early cinema soundscape as "carnivalesque," Altman states that "reformers — of morals and music alike — at first offered simplification as a solution: limit the soundscape to a single sound source, standardize sound practices, gentrify sound choices." "Well-chosen music," they concluded, "would have a desirable silencing effect on the audience." Altman, like many film historians, focuses on the changing nature of cinema audiences with regard to class. Standardization came along with legitimation, and "In a sense, it was the campaign to standardize sound in the early 1910s that first turned cinema into an audiovisual medium, long before Hollywood's conversion to synchronized recorded sound." However, visual tactics of reform and narrative/exhibition tactics of control are just one part of the story.
So while conflicts raged about the necessity of lighting film theaters to keep "mashers" from soliciting women, and while cinema was gentrifying, the two matters of sex and class came together through sound in a way that has never been explored in film studies. The sounds of the cinema house's depravity were dealt with by the trade press. However, these sounds — and the cultural connections that they suggested and held — have mostly faded from memory. In part, this is because they did not last for very long in their original and intense form.
This chapter argues for a new, and significantly more socially and corporally grounded, explanation of what is generally called the "turn to silence" in American white, middle-class cinema audiences in the early 1910s. It is grounded in the body, which the extant literature by cinema historians tends to neglect in favor of the film text and exhibition practices. Film historians are familiar with the turn to silence and have accounted for it in various ways; however, an explanation that links cultural attitudes toward the body with film's aural culture has yet to be made. The complex cultural beliefs the middle class held regarding sound and the body in the 1910s have never been considered a subject in a study of cinema. Stemming from beliefs from turn-of-the-century aural culture regarding the body's associations with class and gender, the new aural etiquette of the cinema house was tied to the culture's symbolic associations with sound. The elaborations of social power that encourage the production of some sounds and discourage others can be heard within the sounds of cinema culture. This showcases what Steve Goodman has called the play of social power as it occurs in sound, or "audiosocial power in the politics of silence and the politics of noise." In returning to these lost sounds, then, I aim to articulate a vital connection between cinema culture's attitude toward spectator sound and the late nineteenth-century middle class's attitude toward the corporal body's sonic behavior in public. In establishing this connection, I show how the soundscape of the cinema house makes audible certain significant broader social tensions regarding class and gender that were present in its historical moment.
Here, specifically, I argue that the aural etiquette of the entertainment culture of the time reflects the sonic concerns of its moment by manifesting a marked tendency toward disciplined silence on the part of the spectator. Drawing upon cultural historical sources that I mine for the sounds of spectators' bodies in the cinema house, I draw together a "constellation of silence" that I identify forming in American culture. Then I place cinema culture's own aural changes within this context. The constellation of silence was composed of a network of relations in mid-nineteenth-century American culture that encouraged means of achieving personal silence in middle-class subjects. Multiple areas of middle-class public culture taught this lesson of personal silence. Cinema was one of a genealogy of entertainments that, as a result of this cultural change, went through a similar transformation. Before audience silence in cinema came audience silence in theater, opera, and symphonic performance contexts. In each case, advisers crafted a sonic etiquette that middle-class subjects were expected to learn and to which they were intended to adapt. This etiquette involved maintaining personal silence in public. It also placed a great deal of emphasis on physical self-control. Etiquette manuals hit a height in popularity during this period, and I argue that they (or texts that we can see as such) were integral to popularizing the etiquette that created silence within the culture in general but within cinema houses specifically.
The silence of the cinema spectator arose not just as a response to a shift in film style, or even in film exhibition (as has often been argued), and not simply as a result of the increasing numbers of middle-class patrons within the cinema audience, who tended to be more quiet (as has also been argued), but significantly, as a response by exhibitors to a specific set of aural beliefs, anxieties, and biases that were popular in American culture. Cinema inherited a set of problems with the body as well as sonic biases against its noise from an entertainment culture of the mid-nineteenth century, whose sonic priorities in turn arose from the aural cultural beliefs of the rising American bourgeoisie. Theirs was an aural culture deeply marked by personal silence, restrained public comportment, and the necessity of downplaying the corporal body in public. This stemmed from a pervasive cultural emphasis on aural "respectability." Traits of self-restraint and corporal self-denial — clearly marked in historical accounts — exemplified the middle class's relationship to sounds of the body. To be silent meant to be properly under one's own self-control. This etiquette filtered through entertainment culture and shaped cinema's own aural rituals that governed its form of spectatorship. The aggression toward the sound of the body can be found in multiple locations within this culture, including discussions of public comportment, texts on acceptable and unacceptable forms of aural manners, antinoise campaigns in the United States and Europe and their attendant activities and rhetorics, and instructions by entertainment exhibitors to their spectators. We must acknowledge a relationship between cinema and this constellation of noiselessness that animated public culture of the mid-1800s if we are to properly understand the cultural motivation behind cinema's "turn to silence" in the 1910s.
Now, this movement did not originate in cinema culture. The discourse on the sonic body as a site of disturbance first appeared in the early 1830s in descriptions of public culture's acceptable modes of comportment, and it appeared soon thereafter in discussions of behavior in entertainment spaces. It was everywhere suggested in each of these contexts that this body was something to be controlled and silenced, and across the board certain specific methods were put forward to encourage such silencing in entertainment culture. The sonic body in the entertainment context was quashed by the creation of an etiquette manual–governed public culture overseen by middle-class cultural arbiters. The turn of the century was marked by two trends that affected this situation significantly: first, the rise of etiquette manuals as a genuine force in popular culture, and second, the creation of a noise etiquette that applied to many areas of daily life.
Historians have generally viewed the question of the rise of silent spectatorship and the "turn to silence" through the lens of film culture, rather than attacking the problem through the techniques offered by the study of aural culture. Rather than focusing on how the aural sense is engaged and controlled, they assert that the shift was created via the means by which visuality was manipulated and visual attention was gained, enacted by the film text or the cinema environment. This leads to different answers — and generally, answers that do not focus on audience silence per se but instead treat it as a by-product of visual attentiveness. Researchers ask, "How did audiences change within the early period? How did the modes of presentation alter over time? What effect did the changes in film presentation have on the modes of audience comportment?" They focus on the period between 1906 and 1913 as a transitional moment during which modes of filmic address altered drastically, along with the types of narrative films being made. This process ended with the codification of modes of narration in the early 1910s and the creation of a modern American cinema that was both narrative and immersive for the spectator. These scholars focus on cinema's own development and the manner in which it predisposes certain modes of attention for spectators. Narrative cinema, they explain, demanded greater audience attention. Tom Gunning has influentially described this period ranging from 1907 to 1913 as the end of the "cinema of attractions" and the beginning of "the true narrativization of the cinema," which culminated with the appearance of feature films. He writes that the cinema of attractions is defined by "its direct address of the audience, in which an attraction is offered to the spectator" in a manner that acknowledges his social and physical presence as a spectator in a social scene. Such early cinema offers a series of exciting displays but shows a "lack of concern with creating a self-sufficient world" by developing characterization and unfolding a story. But during this period cinema became narrativized and turned from a mode directly addressing the spectator to a mode inducing the spectator's "diegetic absorption." Miriam Hansen agrees, stating that early filmmaking is marked by a mode of "display, of demonstration, [and] of showmanship" and that as a result "the viewer is solicited in a more direct manner — as a member of an anticipated social audience and a public, rather than as an invisible, private consumer." For both Gunning and Hansen, the shift from audiences' noisy participation to silent spectatorship is rooted in the "transformation of filmic discourse," and the means by which the spectator is addressed by the text should take primacy in its explanation. Hansen asserts that the spectator was "a fundamental category" of the creation of cinema as an art and a social practice. Although the technology that enabled the creation of cinema was created in the 1890s, it was not until a decade of exhibition had passed that the figure of the modern silent spectator appeared. She argues that the end of first-period cinema (in 1913, with a substantial shift occurring around 1908) was evidenced by "the increasing privatization of viewing behavior and the textual homogenization of positions of subjectivity." This resulted in what Mary Ann Doane has called a "despatialization of subjectivity" that helped make the viewer conscious of the diegesis to the detriment of his awareness of and participation in the social space surrounding him.
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