Because most people think of silent cinema as having been exactly that-silent -no one has fully examined how sound was used to accompany films. Silent Film Sound reconsiders all aspects of sound practices during the entire silent film period.
Based on extensive original research and accompanied by outstanding illustrations, Silent Film Sound challenges the basic assumptions of earlier histories of this period in film and reveals the complexity and swiftly changing nature of American silent cinema. Contrary to received opinion, silent films were not always accompanied, nor were accompaniments uniform.
Beginning with sound practices before cinema´s first decade and continuing through to the more familiar sound practices of the 1920s, Rick Altman discusses the variety of sound strategies and how early cinema exhibitors used these strategies to differentiate their products. During the nickelodeon period prior to 1910, this variety reached its zenith, with theaters often deploying half a dozen competing sound strategies -from carnival-like music in the street, automatic pianos at the rear of the theater, and small orchestras in the pit to lecturers, synchronized sound systems, and voices behind the
screen. When music was used to accompany a film during this period, it did not regularly support the story and its emotions, a now-standard practice familiar to today´s moviegoers.
In the 1910s, cinema sound acquiesced to the demands of captains of the burgeoning cinema industry, who successfully argued that accompaniment should enhance the film´s narrative and emotional content, rather than score points by burlesquing or "kidding" the film. From that moment on, film music would become an integral part of the film, rather than its adversary, and a new style of cinema sound would favor accompaniment that worked in concert with cinema storytelling.