Phono-kinematographic Scenes, Kine-phonographic Scenes and Phono-sceness - Text 8
The repertoire began to diversify. Of course the films were mostly songs, but there were also monologues, dialogues and comic scenes which had known success through the cylinders and discs that the phonograph industry marketed in large numbers.
The Gaumont phono-scenes, like those offered by Mendel, Pathé and others,[5] pertain to cultural practices marked by the advent of the phonograph, from which they could not escape, its consequences having transformed to such an extent the public’s anthropological relations with sound, which had become recorded and reproduced. Through it, two concepts emerged. The first is that of the listening point, whereby the listening depends on a series of physical and mental processes tied to the observer’s body, his or her position and, finally, the circumstances in which he or she finds himself. The second is that of listening, involving the body in the act of listening (proximity with the device). These two principles are specific to phonographic listening, but they were used later with the introduction of electric and then digital systems, albeit on a different scale. Acoustic recording, even as it offered a representation of the sound, retained the illusion of what Noël Burch calls “raw reality”[6] merely by recreating the sound (this term, recreation [restitution], recurs constantly in the French-language literature of the acoustic period). This, then, was a sound which, without being a copy of the real sound, was nevertheless the result of an encounter between the phonograph horn and the “naked,” raw voice of the performer. In this way the performance principle was preserved: the cleanness of the grooves cut into the earliest wax cylinders depended above all on the physical power of the voice and the specific qualities of the musical instruments.
