Sound - Text 1
“This problem with camera noise is perpetual. To guard against it, the camera is muffled in a quilt, which makes it look like a pet poodle wearing its winter jacket. Nevertheless, the noise persists. Bergmann [the director] never fails to react to it. Sometimes he curses, sometimes he sulks. This morning, however, he is in a clowning mood. He goes to the camera and throws his arms around it.”[1] Inspired by the time the writer Christopher Isherwood spent in the London studios of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation in the early 1930s, this excerpt from his novel Prater Violet satirizes the frustrations which the noise made by film cameras caused the pioneers of talking cinema. American Cinematographer, the magazine published by the American Society of Cinematographers, also conveyed the distress caused to its mechanically-inclined membership by the conversion to sound in the early 1930s:
Ever since the success of the first Vitaphone films started the rush towards talking pictures, cinematographers have been learning all sorts of new things about the machinery they work with. One of the first things they learned was that their cameras, which they had always considered remarkably quiet, were far too noisy to suit their new colleague, the exacting ‘Mike.’ In other words, the pleasantly satisfying purr of a smooth-running Bell & Howell or Mitchell recorded even more strongly than the dialogue of the actors.[2]
The problem could not easily be circumvented, as its root lay in the intermittent mechanism – closely related to those of sewing machines, as explained by none other than Louis Lumière[3] – which was the most essential component of all movie cameras. The years that followed the advent of the talkies consequently saw a flurry of exchanges between camera operators, engineers and technicians striving to develop new cameras that were sufficiently quiet while remaining compact enough to produce the tilts, pans and tracking shots moviegoers had come to expect in the late silent era. The changes made to the cameras used for studio work in the early years of talking cinema consequently had three main goals: to stabilize the frame rate in order to make it possible to synchronize cameras with the sound recorder; to reduce the noise they generated; and to bring down their size and weight.
Synchronizing the camera with the sound recorder proved to be the easiest issue to solve. Once a camera had been fitted with an electric motor, its speed was essentially determined by the power source to which it was connected. It was consequently easy to make it run at the same speed as a sound recorder connected to the same power source. This was generally facilitated by the use of a cable connecting the sound recorder to the camera, which let one to the two devices dictate its speed to the other. The addition of these motors and cables did not pose much of a challenge, but did make the cameras more cumbersome and expensive.
Silencing the cameras proved to be more arduous. Engineers and technicians would eventually spend decades working on ways to eliminate, or at least reduce, the extraneous noises produced by cameras. A first solution devised in the early days of the talkies was the constructions of soundproof booths in which the camera and its crew could be installed. Nicknamed “ice boxes” in U.S. studios, these booths had multiple disadvantages. They hampered communication between the camera operator and the rest of the crew, produced subpar images because of the extra layers of glass in the porthole through which the camera was filming, made camera crews miserable through lack of space and ventilation, and made it extremely difficult to produce camera movements. As a result, booths could only be a temporary solution used in studios while camera operators, engineers and technicians were busy finding better ways to silence cameras.