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Silent Film Analysis

1310 Words6 Pages

Silent movies were almost always accompanied by music, from a multipieced pit orchestra to a single piano or even a guitar. This is why silent film audiences seemed perfectly happy with silent movies. There was also technological difficulty of matching sound with visuals so that everyone in the audience could hear. The problems were synchronisation and amplification. A vitaphone was something that produced the first commercially viable sound system. This was then replaced by the now- standard strip of celluloid prepped for sound that runs on the side of the film strip, this makes the two modes remain in sync.

Even after this apparatus was invented, sound still presented quite a few problems. The early sound cameras and equipment were noisy …show more content…

Characteristics that allow film sound to be manipulated are as follows, sensitivity, nonspecificity and ambiguity. We are subjected to sounds all around us every day but the brain tends to filter out those that are not important to us at that moment in time. A microphone is not as selective. The filmmakers eliminate that for us, the viewers. A film sound track is made to not draw attention to itself unless it is a vital part of the plot. A sound track is comprised of three ingredients. The human voice, sound effects and music. These sound elements must be balanced and mixed to produce the desired dramatically creative …show more content…

The first known public exhibition of sound film was in Paris in 1900. Thomas Edison invented the Phonograph/Gramophone in 1877. It could both record sound and play it back. The earliest type of Phonograph recorded on a thin sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a grooved metal cylinder. A stylus connected to a diaphragm indented the foil into the groove as the cylinder rotated. The arrangement explained is known as vertical or ‘’Hill-and-Dale’’ recording. The first synchronisation was a turning recording device marked with a white spot. When the white spot rotated the camera operator had to hand crank the camera to keep it in sync with the recording. For playback the method was then repeated but the projectionist was hand cranking the film projector. Later the 50 Hz or 60 Hz sine wave which was called a pilotone was recorded on a second parallel track of an audio

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Wicked Silence is a short documentary that focuses on the 7600 forced sterilizations that occurred in North Carolina even after World War II, making North Carolina among the worst in state sterilization programs. The film began with a forum for victims and their family members, in which the audience is introduced to the concept of feeblemindedness as the criterion that the Eugenics Board of North Carolina used to target victims for these forced and coerced sterilizations. Social workers would target people and form petitions based on this for the “operation of sterilization or asexualization by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina” (Haq, YouTube, Wicked Silence), most often not obtain consent from the patients, and send the cases to Raleigh

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In his Making America More Musical Through the Phonograph, Mark Katz discussed the significance of the phonograph in transforming America into a more musical nation. Towards the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, classical musical was viewed as a powerful cultural and moral force. However, many Americans still lacked access to this "good music", which was mainly accessible through some wealth and living in the cities. The invention of the phonograph, however, was able to bridge the gap between the poorer, rural territories, and allow music to travel to places that beforehand were out of the question. Through the characteristics of portability, affordability, and repeatability, the phonograph took the center stage

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According to Webster’s dictionary, “Audism is discrimination or prejudice against individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing,” but the idea of audism goes far beyond this definition. Audism also involves the notion that someone feels superior on their ability to hear. Furthermore, they believer that not being able to hear leads to a futile and miserable life. Thus, the belief that a hearing person is superior to a deaf person, and that a deaf person’s life is a miserable one leads to a negative stigma toward those unable to hear.

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The General The General (1926) is a highly acclaimed movie by Buster Keaton, and one Keaton believed to be his best work. While still being a comedy movie, The General differs from Keaton’s other movies in featuring more action. Viewers can recognize the common bubbling character typical of his works, but witness a new smooth efficiency to his character’s stunts distinctive to The General. The storyline of the movie proves to be rather simple, allowing the audience to really appreciate the camera work and the theme. As the movie follows clumsy character Johnny win his sweethearts love and fight the North during the Civil War, audiences witness that anyone can be a hero.

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These sound effects were used to show how the Party kept its influence on its citizens throughout their lives. Because the telescreen was so loud and impossible to shut off, the citizens were reminded of the everlasting presence of the

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Increasingly, people all across the country were sharing the same information and enjoying the same pastime. A new American popular culture was emerging which was the Entertainment in the Roaring 20’s. Film was really booming in the 1920’s. In the early 20’s most films had no analogue or sound except for a piano

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After World War I, people in the 1920s had money to spend, which helped the entertainment industry to rise. Radio introduced music to society as well as the famous singers became easily known with it. Plays and movies also became popular. Movies had no sound at first, until 1927 when the first film with sound came out. Newspapers mainly informed about celebrities and their works.

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This vehicle was surprisingly the first invention designed in order to use on snow allowing it to be a very significant method of transportation for Canadians and not be restricted by snowfall. CITE Lastly another source of entertainment that was well known as the first sound movies also known as talkies in 1927. Movies were limited to only visual sight when first made but in the 1920s the sound movies were far more developed and amazing to witness. “Movies became a part of everybody's lives.” but not only as a source of entertainment but also a distraction that helped many people in the following years of the dirty thirties.

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According to courses.lumenlearning.com, "The increased prosperity of the 1920s increased the Americans' income to spend on entertainment. As the popularity of ''moving pictures'' grew in the early part of the decade, "movie studios" expanded to seat larger audiences and sprang up in major cities. Hollywood became the main global film industry and can be traced back to the early 20th century, when filmmakers began to move to the West Coast of the United States. As stated in Britannica.com, "In 1919, De Forest developed an optical sound-on-film process patented as Phonofilm, and between 1923 and 1927, he made more than 1,000 synchronized sound shorts for release to specially wired theaters. " It also mentions that "One of the first successful subtractive processes was a two-color one introduced by Herbert Kalmus’s Technicolor Corporation in 1922.

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The 1920s was the decade that denoted the start of the cutting edge music time. the music recording industry was simply starting to frame and a horde of new innovations made the way music was made and appropriated. The phonograph was imagined by Thomas Edison in 1877 and it utilized wax chambers to play back chronicles. This creation prompt a recorded music advertise that started to show up in the 1880s. The gramophone was then made in the late 1880s and it utilized level plates to imitate sound, getting to be famous in the mid 1900s and supplanting the phonograph.

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The final film technique Tim Burton uses is sounds he uses. The most popular type of sound techniques is the non-diegetic sounds. In the 1989 Batman film, Tim Burton uses a ton of non-diegetic music. In multiple scenes in the movie, often combat scenes, there is dramatic music playing in the background to enhance the tension in the audience. During the scene in Charlie and the chocolate Factory when Charlie won the last golden ticket and he was running home there was non-diegetic happy and exciting music playing in the background.

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There are several shots during the course of the film where there is sound from the actions being taken rather than just the narrator and the background music. As an example right after the narrator explains about how they get fish. There is a scene where one of the crew clubs one of the fish that landed on the deck and you can hear the thumping

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In 1927, the release of Alan Crosland’s film The Jazz Singer revolutionized the movie industry with the first feature length movie to utilize synchronized sound. Prior to this innovative film the industry was primarily focused on what are now known as “silent films,” which would often be accompanied in the theatre with live music or sometimes even a recorded soundtrack. The accompanying music would set the mood for these dialogue-less films, and in many ways convey more intricate aspects of the story that could not be expressed through the cinematography alone with the technology at the time. With the utilization of synchronized sound in cinema, the industry adapted a new type of film known as “talkies,” which were just as often musical movies

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To help explain this analysis I am using the animated movie Wall-E made in 2008 by Ben Burtt as a case study . Ben Burtt is known as “The Father of Modern Sound” (Ciccarellli, 2009) because of his

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This was then replaced by the now- standard strip of celluloid prepped for sound that runs on the side of the film strip, this makes the two modes remain in sync. Even after this apparatus was invented, sound still presented quite a few problems. The early sound cameras and equipment were noisy and very big in size which meant they were not practical for transportation. They were to be kept in sound proof rooms called “blimps”. It also took a while to figure out that that you could move a microphone around by placing it on a stick.

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