TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The earliest microphones recorded all sounds in the same manner, without distinguishing stray sound from essential dialogue. Beginning in 1930, these multi-directional microphones were gradually replaced by somewhat more directional microphones.^[4] Publications by engineers and advertisements in the trade press show the speed with which film production equipment changed. In the course of the year 1929, in the United States, microphones which appeared to have to remain attached to the ceiling came to be moved around. In filmmakers’ memoirs, one reads that the sound engineers on the set prevented movements by the actors, obliging them to remain rooted beneath microphones hanging from the ceiling or well hidden in a flowerpot. This is, in part, a myth. Several similar initiatives in late 1928 and throughout 1929 made it possible to move the microphone. William Wellman recalls announcing to the “soundmen” that he was going to move “that god-damned mike”: “[I] went up and took [the mike] and put it on the end of a broomstick. And I moved it and it worked.”^[5] Elsewhere one reads, with respect to the earliest microphone “booms,” that these were the idea of John Ford, or of the sound engineer Eddie Mannix, or of Gordon Sawyer, or of the film director Dorothy Arzner.^[6] By late 1929, several large studios had “giraffes” with telescopic booms.^[7] Microphones were fairly heavy, and needed a counterweight at the end of the boom. The boom’s tripod on wheels structure made it possible to move the microphone in every direction.^[8]

At the same time as these developments, the perfection of the crane made it possible to move cameras about in every direction. Rouben Mamoulian had a crane built for the wide camera movements in Applause in 1929. These movements using cranes and booms in tandem were in evidence by 1930, in France as well; we can see movements of microphones and more or less soundproofed cameras in film shoots that year. This became widespread only gradually, but it was already possible. The idea that tracking shots no longer existed and that the arrival of sound impeded all movement needs to be discounted. Depending on the studio in question, a film shoot could be very static, but by late 1929 it was truly possible to spin the camera around while at the same time keeping a microphone close to the actors.