Introduction
Histories of cinema generally indicate that the years 1927-28 were the moment of the advent of talking cinema. In fact these years correspond to the appearance of a quite specific technological innovation: the optical track which made it possible to synchronize sounds with a film’s moving images. Yet the full range of the work that went into the transmission and technical reproducibility of sound, work whose origins go back to the eighteenth century, regularly passes unnoticed. This parcours will adopt an archaeological approach in order to highlight the importance of this work in the emergence of sound systems in the cinema, while at the same time avoiding any linear chronology connected to what Michel Foucault describes as the deceptive ideal of “uninterrupted progress.”[1] Our task here, therefore, will be to ask ourselves what role scientific experimentation played in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and what were this experimentation’s technological lineages. What technical innovations were abandoned and which others finally incorporated into sound systems? Which artistic practices shared by theatre and cinema gave rise to the emergence of a new model? At what moment did this model break off from the previous model?
In order to understand the importance of this change, whereby recorded sounds were heard without the intermediary of a cylinder or disc, this parcours will examine above all else the emergence of a device which contributed to the establishment of a new era in our media culture[2] : the phonograph. We will see that once the possibility of capturing, preserving and reproducing the human voice live had materialized, there were immediate attempts at collective experiences in the form of phonographic listening. Subsequent experiments were attempts to go beyond the “impossible synchronism” of sound and image. Among these, Edison’s Kinetoscope Parlor merits note for setting in motion a wave of experiments which were fundamental to the advent of the film industry. The case study devoted to Auguste Baron, who made films with sound on phonograph discs, illustrates the path of synchronous recording by means of microphone and telephone. Another fundamental stage is represented by the Gaumont company’s phono-scenes, like those produced by Mendel, Pathé and others, which also constitute cultural practices. These phono-scenes attempted a complex combination of two devices, the phonograph and the kinematograph, in a constant spirit of experimentation which nevertheless was hampered by numerous technical and mechanical difficulties. Only the creation of a system which made possible the simultaneous recording of sound and image on a single support would make it possible to resolve definitively these many sticking points. In the end, it was this long, tortuous path, riddled with discoveries as much the product of chance as anything else, which led to the encounter between images and sounds.
