Silent movies to sound movies is definitely a topic that can’t be finished. Half a century ago singin’ in the rain was talking about it, and half a century later the artist is still talking about it. It’s not too much to say that this is an important turn in the history of cinema. singin’ in the rain uses a lot of wit to talk about the changes of that era.The first thing that came to my mind was the change in editing. Silent films are not constrained by the sound of reading lines, so there is a lot of freedom to edit the film. Griffith developed classical editing and thematic montage in the silent film period. But the early stage of the emergence of sound films was to take simultaneous recording of sound and shadow, which was a challenge for editing, to edit the footage while maintaining the continuity of sound was a difficult problem to solve. So, most of the skilled editors put away their sharp edges, and the most common “paragraph shot” at the beginning of the film was regained. The so-called “paragraph shot”, can be understood as a long shot without cutting. Mr. Simpson, the boss of the studio, showed an experimental sound film at the party, which was uncut from beginning to end, and even the camera position and camera position did not change the paragraph shot.
The second is the change of scene scheduling. Scene scheduling has a wide connotation, mainly refers to how the film director selects the frame, design the composition, allocate the area space within the scene, determine the distance between the camera and the subject, etc. Singin’ in the rain shows the change of the actors’ position and performance. We see the actors in front of the screen, but do not think that the performance is random. Each step of the route, each stand, is the director, cinematographer and lighting engineer together to discuss out. At the beginning of the birth of sound film, nowadays the kind of hairball radio has not yet appeared, the microphone can only be hidden in the set. And the microphone radio effect is not ideal, far away from the actors often can not record the sound.
So the director had to be held back by the recording factor when scheduling scenes. Actors also because of this technical flaw, have to adjust their own performance style, say dialogue as much as possible to the microphone. Otherwise, it will be like the movie lemon, but also maintain the exaggerated performance style of the silent film period, head left and right swing, the voice is not into the microphone, the director dare not speak.The third is the alternation of old and new stars. another film of The Artist is called “Starlight Dreamer”. I think the description of the silent film to sound film period of Hollywood is really more than apt. Fame is a dream of glamour. In this era of technological innovation, it is not a legend that silent film stars fall overnight and unknown stars rise instantly.
As mentioned earlier, sound and silent films require different acting styles from actors. Silent films have no dialogue, and the message of the dialogue largely depends on the exaggerated body language and facial expressions of the actors to convey. But the movie has sound, the complex plot only needs two or three lines of dialogue can be explained clearly, the former set of performance methods but seems pompous artifice. Many superstars of the silent film era were unable to change their own way of acting and let their interpretation career to the end of the road.Singin’ in the rain is a scene in which the male and female leads of the dueling knights are trained by a language master. The actor has to learn how to spit out words in a rounded and clear manner. While speaking intonation and technique can be practiced later in life, the voice is innate. Some actors’ voices are too unpleasant or do not match their personal temperament, which limits the expansion of their acting career. On the contrary, a group of young actors with pleasant voices can easily rise to the top. In addition, soon after the emergence of sound films, the film ushered in the heyday of song and dance films, the voice of the actors more demanding. As can sing and dance Casey generation singing generation out of the head, while the red hot Li Meng but because of their flat voice ruined the acting career.Fourth is the improvement of the script. Remember geane kelly in the play within the play said: “I love you. I love you. I love you.” when the movie theater audience said: “write such bad dialogue people are paid to take?” The role of dialogue was minimized during the silent film period, with at most two or three short sentences written on the occasional title card. So, no one ever thought to work out the dialogue, and the lines were as crude and monotonous as could be imagined. But sound movies don’t allow writers to fool around like this, so they start to dig in and write golden lines. By the time the play-within-a-play “Knight of the Dance” was released, the boring dialogue had been transformed into rhyming lyrics.In the process of film development, the integration of each new technology requires a certain amount of time and a variety of constant practice and experimentation by filmmakers. Just as when sound films were born, directors were not yet very skilled in the use of sound. The success of those initial sound films was likely due to the audience’s novelty of synchronizing sound and film.
When they marveled at how synchronized the action of opening the door and the sound of the lock could be, they were not so much enjoying the art of film as they were observing the new technology of sound recording. Just as Avatar’s plot was so bad that it did not prevent it from becoming a significant film, because it opened the era of 3D, it inspired later directors from the technical aspects of the film can also be so shot.The charm of the film is that its artistic sublimation is the result of the friction with each new technology. The birth of new technology triggers people to think about the way of making movies and evolves new film theories, and then in the practice of filmmakers and critics over and over again, the best way to integrate art and technology is found, and the history of cinema takes a big step forward.