TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Cinema regularly uses the latest technologies as driving forces of the action: beginning with the widespread adoption of talking films, technologies associated with sound have frequently served to appeal to viewers’ eyes and ears. In the United States, “electric sound,”^[1] first used in radio in 1922 and then for speeches amplified by microphones and loudspeakers in the mid-1920s and in electric record players marketed beginning in 1925, became widespread with talking cinema between 1926 and 1934.^[2] At the same time, an electronic medium began to develop: television. All these media were used in talking film, because they made it possible both to show the “latest technology” and to enable the public to hear electrically transmitted sound.

In 1936, Mack V. Wright’s The Singing Cowboy, a B-film produced by the small production company Republic Pictures, featured live transmission of songs using a television broadcast system hooked up to a simple antenna. In this “modern western,” Gene Autry plays himself in the role of a singing cowboy promoting a brand of coffee to put together enough money for a paralysed young orphan girl’s operation. The new medium thus made it possible to reach people in their homes, and the advertising broadcast on television sets helped the singer, a recording, radio and film star, quickly obtain money.

In fact the new electric media served to communicate with huge numbers of people. At the beginning of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu, 1939), a reporter seeks an aviator’s reactions after an exploit, wishing to transmit these live on air. Through radio (a transmission truck and a microphone), the whole world hears the young pilot react sharply, because he thinks he is communicating only with the woman he loves. In this way, Renoir plays with the idea of a mass medium transmitting the bitter and private feelings of the pilot, disappointed in not seeing the woman for whom he had carried out a trans-Atlantic flight.