Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 3, March 2002
Sean Cubitt
Good Vibrations
James Lastra _Sound Technology and the American
Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity_ New York: Columbia University Press,
2000 ISBN 0-231-11516-4 Hbk; 0-231-11517-2
Pbk 270 pp. Lastra's title is to be taken
literally. This is about the technology of sound,
specifically as it relates to the cinema, specifically in
the USA. The book establishes early on a conception of
modernity which it sees as underinflected by the history of
sound, while sonic history is accused of ignoring the
problematic of modernity. The issue of representation is
discussed in terms of how technologies reproduce sound, but
also in light of the expectations we bring to sound
recording. And perception serves here in the double sense of
the auditory sense, and the social reception of sound cinema
and its associated technologies. Those who bristle in
expectation of a periodisation squabble can rest assured:
Lastra's patch of modernity arises with Edison and goes no
further than the studio era (though its implications are
highly relevant for the digital reconstruction of film
technology). After the obligatory sideswipe at
apparatus theory, the book lays out its central premise as a
quadripartite conceptual scheme. The device is Lastra's term
for the technological machinery employed in sound recording.
'Practice' denotes the employment of devices by
professionals (and in some cases by amateurs), the skills
and techniques developed, the habits and the innovations. A
third aspect is the institution -- the R and D lab, the
nickelodeon, the studio -- in which the constraints of
economics and administration impinge on design and
technique, and finally the discourse concerns the languages
deployed by engineers, recordists and managers as well as
critics and scholars around the complex of technology. All
four aspects range around the technology and constitute it
as a meaningful phenomenon. Deleuze and Guattari's _What is
Philosophy?_ notoriously recommends proliferating concepts
-- Lastra doesn't so much multiply concepts as refine
distinctions, in the process honing the vocabulary into a
finer instrument. Again, parallel to but unlike Deleuze and
Guattari, he derives his concepts less from the internal
workings of an 'empiricist' scheme than from the materialist
analysis that grounds his approach and distinguishes it from
apparatus theory's idealism. In the first chapter, detailing
the development of sound recording in the 19th century, the
author advances a distinction between simulation and
inscription models, the former associated with devices based
in emulations of the human sensorium like Bell's lugubrious
telephone employing a human ear, the latter with, for
example, Chladni's vibrating plates. Refining this
distinction, he sees the same formation reorganised in the
debates between those who read recording as a transition
from original to copy and those understanding it as a
movement from event to structure. The former, which embraces
almost all classical and semiotic film theory, presumes the
self-presence of an auditory phenomenon to be recorded. The
latter insists on the uniqueness of every auditory event and
thus the structured nature of every act of recording (and
indeed playback). This distinction then informs a more
global definitional binary distinguishing reproduction and
representation, with the former describing the discourse of
the copy, the latter of construction, the whole built on a
meticulous reading of technological history, contemporary
engineering reports and critical reviews, and close
attention to film and exhibition practice. The result of this kind of
meticulously theorised in-depth scholarship is to amend and
update some of the canonical texts of revisionist film
history and the (post)theoretical film studies now ascendant
in the North American academy. Clearly indebted to Bordwell,
Staiger and Thompson's _Classical Hollywood Cinema_, Lastra
nonetheless gently but firmly points out that there are
assumptions there concerning the stability and the
ultimately teleological emergence of classicism which cannot
be sustained. In this his background -- as one of the first
generation of mature scholars to emerge from the Iowa school
of Rick Altman and Dudley Andrew -- shows its virtues. The
nice distinction reigns: intelligibility confronts fidelity
as the ground of what proponents of each regarded as
'realism'. Over the book arches the technological
construction of devices according to two competing
paradigms. For one, the device is a simulation of the human
sensorium, imitating contemporary understandings of its
physiology in mechanical devices -- such is the history of
Bell's experiments with animal ears in his earliest
telephones. On the other hand, there is the conception of
devices as in some form literal transcriptions of physical
qualities of the world -- photography not as emulation of
the eye but as the recording of light; phonography not as an
imitation of hearing but as the self-writing of vibrating
air. In his conclusion, Lastra points towards the continuing
problematic relation between the two fields, instancing
discussions of editing in both 3D film and 3D animation,
where foreground objects have a habit of leaping into frame
on simple match cuts (whence the oft-observed reluctance of
early 3D digital animators to cut, preferring instead long
'steadicam' type moves of the virtual lens). In the process of his historical
researches, Lastra uncovers some gems of contemporary
observation, for example the startled discovery of one H. B.
Marvin in 1928 that synchronism was at least as important as
fidelity, a remark premised on the transfer of stage sound
effects (coconut hooves, thunder sheets) to cinematic sound.
Following this thread, Lastra insists that no sound is
'pro-phonographic', but is constructed in order to be
represented (164). Not only does this clarify the issues at
stake in the mistaken relationship between perception and
representation: it illuminates why sound scholarship is so
important to the construction of film-philosophy. The
concept of representation, which at times seems to have
outlived its usefulness, becomes a significant tool in the
analysis of the discursive and institutional reception of
technological innovation and standardisation. Lastra will
not however relinquish the referential role of
representation: 'The recognition of absence by which we
classify representations *as* representations, recordings
*as* recordings, is a positive condition of possibility
rather than a fault'; and: 'Representational reference is
finally, as it is in the writing of history, a question of
right and law, a question of morality and politics, and a
question of social ethics' (152). In other words, Lastra is
in pursuit of an aesthetic, and is prepared to trace it to
the materials of which it is constituted, rather than
belabour an idealist vision of what constitutes the human as
a prior condition to which the aesthetic must conform. The
model of scholarship is eminently admirable, as the book is
immensely enjoyable. There is a problem, however. The
author's 'two basic claims' concern the relation between
sound and modernity: 'aurality has been the unthought in
accounts of modernity' and, as a consequence, 'modernity has
been underexamined in accounts of recorded sound' (4).
Lastra admits exceptions, notably Thomas Levin's excavations
of Adorno's work on radio and phonography. [1]
Oddly, that same issue of _October_ in which Levin's
translations and commentary appeared also carried Douglas
Kahn's 'Track Organology', an article that might have
pointed our author towards both Kahn's _Wireless
Imagination_ anthology (1992) and his towering history of
sonic modernism, _Noise Water Meat_ (1999). [2] Fair
enough, the relation between cinema and radio is fraught
matter for another monograph, and it is thus legitimate to
leave aside substantial scholarship on modernity and sound
in the US from the wireless perspective, [3] while
other analysts from Allen S. Weiss to Georgina Born could be
discounted geographically. [4] More peculiar is the
elision of those -- admittedly few -- philosophers to have
addressed the issue of sound and modernity, notably Andrew
Bowie's flawed but fascinating account of the deafness of
the philosophical discourses at the roots of modernity, and
David Levin's 1993 anthology. [5] More curious still
-- and significant to at least one participant in this
_Film-Philosophy_ salon -- is the omission of the
multi-volume work on audiomodernity by Michael Chanan,
especially the second volume dedicated to the interaction of
the phonogram and modern society. [6] The US
academic presses' house style of substantive footnotes,
always an irritant, makes it hard to double check the
references, but I missed evocation of Douglas Gomery's
pioneering work on the emergence of sound in Hollywood. The
scholarship is so refined it seems unlikely that Lastra has
omitted to read these sources, but the reasons for their
omission or minimising might perhaps be more explicit. In
the meantime, there is clearly work for further scholarship
in the relations between Hollywood and the radio business,
counting backward from Orson Welles's soundtrack into the
popular radio of the 1930s. University of Waikato Hamilton, New Zealand Footnotes 1. See Thomas Y. Levin, 'For the
Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of its Technolgical
Reproducibility', _October_, no. 55, 1991; and Levin's
translations of three of Theodor Adorno's articles in the
same issue: 'The Curves of the Needle', 'The Form of the
Phonograph Record', and 'Opera and the Long-Playing
Record'. 2. See Douglas Kahn, 'Track
Organology', _October_, no. 55, 1990; Kahn and Gregory
Whitehead, eds, _Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the
Avant-Garde_ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); and Kahn,
_Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts_
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 3. See Eric Barnouw, _A Tower in
Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States:
Volume 1 -- to 1933_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
1966); Susan J. Douglas, _Inventing American Broadcasting
1899-1922_ (Baltimore, Mass.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987); and Michelle Hilmes, _Radio Voices: American
Broadcasting, 1922-1952_ (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997). 4. See Allen S. Weiss, _Phantasmatic
Radio_ (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and
Georgina Born, _Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the
Institutionalization of the Avant-Garde_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995). 5. See Andrew Bowie, _Aesthetics and
Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche_ (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1990); and David Michael Levin,
ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993). 6. See Michael Chanan's three books:
_Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from
Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism_ (London: Verso, 1994);
_Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its
Effects on Music_ (London: Verso, 1995); and, _From Handel
to Hendrix: The Composer in the Public Sphere_ (London:
Verso, 1999). Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_
2002 Sean Cubitt, 'Good Vibrations',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 3, March 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n3cubitt>.
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