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“Film Rhythm after Sound is the most convincing demonstration I’ve seen of how much Ezra Pound’s description of poetry ('form cut in time') applies to narrative cinema. Everyone knows that dramatic motion pictures rely on rhythm and pacing to hold our interest and stimulate emotion, but until this book we have had almost no tools to analyze rhythm across the many forms it takes in feature films. This book is a major achievement.”—James Naremore, author of An Invention without a Future: Essays on Cinema
“This brilliant investigation of experiments with rhythmic form in early sound cinema fills a major gap in our understanding of film aesthetics. Against the backdrop of a revisionist assessment of Eisenstein’s concept of rhythmic montage, Lea Jacobs explores the collaborative efforts of Hollywood directors, performers, screenwriters, composers, and editors in the 1930s to incorporate spoken dialogue and music into the formal design of synchronized sound films. In the process she invents nothing less than a new type of audiovisual analysis, one attentive to cinematic rhythm as a complex formal matter, irreducible to a single compositional principle or stylistic element and operating on multiple temporal scales. No existing study brings together an examination of acting, dialogue, music, and visual style in cinema in precisely this way. Film Rhythm after Sound will be of keen interest not only to film historians and analysts but also to scholars engaged with aesthetic issues across the performing arts.”—Charles Wolfe, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
List of contents
List of Online Film Clips
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Film Rhythm and the Problem of Sound
2. A Lesson with Eisenstein: Rhythm and Pacing in Ivan the Terrible, Part I
3. Mickey Mousing Reconsidered
4. Lubitsch and Mamoulian
5. Dialogue Timing and Performance in Hawks
6. Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
About the author
Lea Jacobs is Professor of Film at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s.
Summary
The seemingly effortless integration of sound, movement, and editing in films of the late 1930s stands in vivid contrast to the awkwardness of the first talkies. This book analyzes this evolution via close examination of important prototypes of early sound filmmaking, as well as contemporary discussions of rhythm, tempo, and pacing.
Additional text
"Not just a significant contribution to the history of classical Hollywood cinema, but a broader reminder of what Michel Chion calls the “transsensoriality” of the film experience. As such, it is recommended to anyone who is interested in breaking down the wall that has often been erected between sound and image in the study of cinematic style."
