Overview

Silent cinema was never silent. But from the mid-1920s onwards, the 'sound' part of the cinema experience was transformed by the arrival of films, long and short, with clearly audible talk, music, and sound effects built in. It marked the most fundamental shift in cinema technology since cinema's birth. The first book devoted to Britain's conversion to talkies, and the result of eight years' research, Silent to Sound: British Cinema in Transition takes a lively and comprehensive look at the production side of the British sound revolution, stretching from experimental efforts in the late 19th century, through the sound shorts of the 1920s, to the key year of 1929, the year of Hitchcock's Blackmail (Britain's first home-grown talkie feature), and the industry turmoil that followed. The narrative concludes in 1934, when John Grierson's GPO Film Unit finally acquired sound equipment, prompting a late burst of experimentation just when commercial feature soundtracks had settled down. Films familiar, neglected, and unknown are examined: overripe melodramas (the lost Black Waters), local versions of Hollywood musicals (Harmony Heaven), visually elaborate science-fiction (High Treason), plus newsreels, documentaries, amateur films, and the last phase of British silent production. The impact of sound on studio technique is examined, along with the industry's complex relations with Britain's strong theatre traditions, with Europe, and above all, cinema's superpower, America. It's also never forgotten that the sound transition was shaped not just by technology but by the talents, foibles, and follies of individual people. Film history with a human face.

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"""It is a wonderfully lively and thorough and engaging account of such a crucial period.""—Charles Barr - Film Scholar ""A very fine piece of work, with great in-depth research. Also, it is written in an accessible and entertaining style, not academese! I learned a lot from this.""—Stephen Bottomore - Film Scholar ""You present film history as something exciting ...You leave me dying to read your book""—Kevin Brownlow - Film Scholar"

Author Information

Geoff Brown, Honorary Associate Research Fellow at De Montfort University (Leicester), has written widely on British film history in books and scholarly journals, as well as working for the London Times as film critic and classical music critic. Books with contributions include Enchanted by Cinema, Ealing Revisited, and Directors in British and Irish Cinema. The present book draws on extensive research undertaken for the project 'British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound, 1927–1933', financed by Britain's Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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