TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Beginning in the 1930s, films featuring radio studios, live transmission of a crucial event or a variety of broadcasts grew in number. Some musicians took advantage of the cinema to bolster their success on record albums, live tours and the radio. For example, Ray Ventura and his orchestra were featured in Jean Boyer’s We Will All Go to Paris (Nous irons à Paris, 1950), the story of a clandestine radio station. The best pieces by this popular band are performed in front a microphone in each sequence. The film’s success led to a number of popular comedy films with songs from radio: Boyer’s A Hundred Francs a Second (Cent francs par seconde, 1953), Maurice de Canonge’s Boum sur Paris (1954), etc.

In the mid-1970s, when sound media (transistors, hi-fi) had become quite routine, Robert Altman, in Nashville (1975), used the recording studio as a place of action. In the film’s first sequence, detail shots of the recording of a kind of country-flavoured patriotic hymn let us follow the various musicians, with the singer in one sound booth and the choir in another. By counting the VU meters, we can see that the mixing board has sixteen tracks. The film itself, as stated in the credits, was recorded on an eight-track tape recorder. And we see how much Altman enjoys playing with the different audio tracks right from the first images, during which a van broadcasts a political candidate’s speech. We hear passing automobiles and then a snare drum, followed by a pedal-steel guitar and a banjo and finally the voice of the singer accompanied by the choir. The number of tracks takes us through the sonic chaos of the capital of Tennessee, an important site in the history of the recording industry. Even in the large recording studio Altman enjoys showing two sessions taking place at the same time: on the one hand, an exclusively white nationalistic country recording session, and on the other a white gospel singer accompanied by the Jubilee Singers, a black choir founded in 1871 and famous for its a cappella spirituals. In this ensemble film, political differences are thus heard from one studio to the next, behind the glass panes where sound engineers record an extremely diverse range of songs.