British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound

In recent years the advent of digital, CGI and 3D technologies have been heralded as revolutionising our experience of cinema, but these are nothing compared to the impact of new sound technologies in the late 1920s when silent cinema as an art form was subjugated to the spoken and sung word. In Britain the films produced in this transitional period, with the exception of Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929), produced in both silent and sound versions, have been largely overlooked. Early British sound films have suffered from critical denigration due to their supposedly clumsy attempts to deal with the spoken word. However, their reappraisal is now long overdue, particularly in the wider contexts proposed by this study which will look comprehensively, for the first time, at the ways in which British cinema responded to the coming of sound across all aspects of production, exhibition, distribution and reception - from the frenzied international competition to patent and install new sound equipment in studios and cinemas, to the impact on film stars and the thousands of cinema musicians who played to silent films, to the kinds of films that were produced and the critical and popular responses to them. The economic burden of equipping studios and cinemas for sound required massive domestic and foreign investment and coincided with global recession, the Wall Street Crash and the need for fundamental changes to financial investment in cinema. This project will examine British cinema's response to these conditions alongside the various positive and negative drivers for and against sound cinema; from the increasing influence of popular radio and audiences' desire to hear the sung and spoken word and the various equipment manufacturers competing to dominate global markets, to victims such as the musicians and composers who relied on the cinema for their livelihood, the silent stars whose voices did not respond to the microphone, and the scenarists who wrote intertitles for silent films. In order to carefully periodise this transition, the study will be divided into three key periods corresponding to the project's workplan: 1927-1928 - the period immediately before the arrival of The Jazz Singer in the UK 1929-1930 - the transition between silent and sound when films were made in both formats and the industry experimented with different technologies and methods 1931-1933 - the early sound period when silent cinema technologies and personnel were adapting to the new medium Using this historical framework, the research will investigate and draw together, the following three areas: 1. The British cinema industry and infrastructure in terms of producers, studios and production companies and the changes caused by new sound technologies including the development of studio recording and cinema exhibition technologies, the rush to patent new systems and those who succeeded or failed. The overall effects on businesses and industrial organisations associated with cinema; the winners and losers including impacts on: i. personnel with the rapid need for new skills and the loss of those associated with silent cinema and related changes in the organisation of labour. ii. audiences, cinema-going and the response of press and critics. iii. the source material for new sound cinema. iv. international relations in the spheres of co-production and distribution 2. a critical reappraisal of the films themselves in the light of the above including how film techniques and aesthetics changed and developed over these three periods. 3. historical evidence explaining how 'the talkies' changed British cinema forever and the significance of their legacy.