Behold the Newest Technological Sensation! With Music! : The Use of Music in the Silent Cinema

• Cinema was not conceived as a form of visual narrative, and certainly not as a form of art. The moving-image technique was introduced, in the Positivist milieu of the late nineteenth century, as the latest technological marvel, to be used, in the noblest cases, as an instrument for scientific inquiry – for example, to capture and analyse motion, as in Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographic rifle. Or, in more commercial usages, as an attraction at fun-fairs and world expositions – ‘Behold the latest marvel! Animated photographs!’ While the animation of images had a long tradition – for example, the seventeenth-century Magic Lantern shows – the inception of cinema was precisely made possible by recent technological advances: the faster photographic emulsions, the flexible celluloid support, and the feeding mechanism of the industrial sewing machines. While, contrary to the common narrative, it is not sure that some musical accompaniment was regularly present during the first film projections, certainly music came soon to play an increasingly central role in the development and diffusion of film shows. The chapter surveys the changes in musical practices from the early cinema of the 1890s to the standardisation of the classical narrative cinema of the 1920s – a ‘Cinema of Attractions’ that gradually turned into a ‘Cinema of Narrative Integration’ – discussing the principal functions that music fulfilled, its typical forms, its accompaniment strategies, and also some early technical attempts at making synchronisation easier and closer. While the first applications of music typically had a practical rationale – for example, drowning the fastidious sound of the projectors – and music (any music) would be simply used to provide some silence-filler, gradually film-makers realised music’s powerful potential as a narrative tool, and more dramaturgically careful uses of music were implemented, increasingly putting music under the control of the film-makers, to the point that eventually even the performer’s human variable was mechanised, with the adoption of synchronised on-film sound that crystallised the musical performance and made it interlocked with the film-strip and repeatable ad infinitum.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Filmvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Studies on Film (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Musikvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Musicology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

film music; silent cinema; film history; film technique; media theory

Film Studies

Filmvetenskap

Musikvetenskap

Musicology

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