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COPYRIGHT 2002 Duke University Press
One of MGM's publicity photos for King Vidor's Hallelujah! (US, 1929) features two of its stars, Victoria Spivey and Daniel Haynes, looking at a piece of the movie's soundtrack. Entitled "Pictures of Their Voices," the studio's caption reads: "Victoria Spivey and Daniel Haynes look at a sound track of their voices in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 'Hallelujah!'" The photo economically figures the discursive link created--by studios, critics, and the popular press--between African American performers and sound technology. The picture sums up a common strategy of the early sound era: selling the sound cinema via black performers and selling black performers (primarily to white audiences) via the sound cinema. The year 1929 saw the release of Hollywood's first feature-length films with all-black casts. The Fox studio was first with Paul Sloane's Hearts in Dixie (featuring Stepin Fetchit), and MGM followed with Hallelujah!, acclaimed director King Vidor's first sound film. Both were musicals, and both capitalized on the combined "novelty" of an "all talkie" and "all Negro" spectacle. While African American performers had a long history in the silent cinema, their opportunities in Hollywood multiplied during the first years of sound. Short and feature-length musicals featuring black casts became crucial to the way the new medium was publicized and received.
Robert Benchley articulates the link between race and the new cinema in his ecstatic 1929 review of Hearts in Dixie: "With the opening of 'Hearts in Dixie' ... the future of the talking-movie has taken on a rosier hue. Voices can be found which will register perfectly. Personalities can be found which are ideal for this medium. It may be that the talking-movies must be participated in exclusively by Negroes, but, if so, then so be it. In the Negro the sound-picture has found its ideal protagonist." (1) Benchley, the regular movie critic for The New Yorker, published this review in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, and some African American writers drew the same connection between "black voices" and the new cinema in order to take advantage of and extend the growing opportunities for black performers in Hollywood. But this sort of fetishization of the "black voice" reveals the way in which the discourses of race and sound were intertwined during the transition to the talkie. The two discourses supported each other not because of the alleged suitability of "black voices" to sound recording, but because of what they already had in common: a dependence on popular expectations regarding authenticity, the alignment of internal and external characteristics, and the evidence of the senses.
Critics like Benchley turned to "the Negro" for a remedy to the often clunky and disappointing marriage of sight and sound in the early talkies. The suggestion that "black voices" could cure the new cinema's technical difficulties highlighted a kind of synesthesia already at work in the representation and perception of race. I am using the term synesthesia--defined as the "production, from a sense-impression of one kind, of an associated mental image of a sense-impression of another kind" (2)--because it explains one of the primary (if implicit) mechanisms through which the discursive links between sound technology and race were created. Most dictionary definitions feature examples similar to the one offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: "When the hearing of an external sound carries with it, by some arbitrary association of ideas, the seeing of some form or colour." The presumed perceptual link between color and sound offers the exemplary instance of synesthesia--a sensory wire-crossing helped along by imagination and the "arbitrary association of ideas." Synesthesia also functions as a literary device: "The use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are used to describe sense-impressions of other kinds." The persistent link between color and sound in both registers--the psychological/perceptual and the rhetorical--produced an effective and insidious strategy for promoting the "all-black cast" talkies. On a more general level, synesthesia suggests a model for thinking about the birth of sound as a union of disparate elements--a challenge for the ear and eye at a moment when the terms of cinematic signification were themselves changing.
The photo of Spivey and Haynes that opens this article depicts a curiosity that audiences might have shared with the notion of looking for voices; the two actors essentially perform a desire to see something unseeable, something formerly intangible now newly materialized on a piece of film. One thing white producers and moviegoers were looking for in these new cinema voices was race. The very term black voices would of course make no sense in the absence of race; even if sounds can be said to evoke the visualization of color, the black of black voices signifies much more than color. And in the case of black voices, the action is reciprocal: color/race promises a particular kind of sound, and that sound, once heard, is supposed to refer back to the color/ race that produced it. Benchley declares that "there is a quality in the Negro voice" that makes it the "ideal medium for talking pictures"; this quality, at once elusive and definitive, can only be explained through an appeal to race. The rhetoric around the "black voice" suggests that racial identity must be seen and heard, or, more precisely, that racial identity lies somewhere in the synchronization of sound and image. Claims that African American performers' voices could be reproduced more faithfully than others essentially promised that these voices would be "in sync" with their bodies--and with audience expectations about what should emanate from those bodies. In other words, the sound would be synchronized not merely with the image on screen but with the image or stereotype of the "Negro" long produced and exploited by Hollywood. The cinema always included sound--music, lectures, and other sorts of external sound accompanied the silent cinema--but the "talkies" synchronized sound and image, and African American performers defined and supplemented that synchronization. (3)
The focus on the racialized body--including the fetishization of body parts and bodily properties (especially the "Negro voice")--signaled the cinema's need to remake itself. As in the earliest days of the cinema, race functioned to show off and shore up the apparatus at a time of technological vulnerability. (4) If we turn to Hallelujah! in this context, we can see the ways in which the powers of cinematic expression were at stake. In the publicity surrounding the black-cast talkies, an overembodiment of African American performers propped up the new apparatus. The photo of Spivey and Haynes holding the Hallelujah! soundtrack suggests the physical link created between African American performers and the sound cinema, but that connection was not confined to publicity materials. Like many directors of the silent film era, Vidor was not thrilled by the idea of sound cinema, but he saw in it an opportunity to make "a dramatic story of negro life." (5) He felt the studio would see the appropriateness of Negro spirituals for talking pictures, but his primary interest lay in portraying the "sincerity and fervor of [African American] religious expression ... [and] the honest simplicity of their sexual drives." (6) The film expresses these "truths" not through words, but through music and movement. The last section of this essay will look closely at the ways in which the film's expressionistic visual style fuses the racialized body and the cinematic sign in order to produce a more perfect synchronization. The characters' bodies are by turns monumentalized and fragmented by the camera until they finally become the distorted shadows that dance across the screen in the film's most visually stunning and self-reflexive moments. Once again, black bodies meld into the apparatus, figuring a pure and legible motion, and sound is no longer a clunky intrusion: race synchronizes image, sound, and meaning.
Race, Sense, and Memory
The use of racialized bodies (both African Americans and whites in blackface) to demonstrate the prowess of the apparatus was nothing new. It was a common and effective strategy from the very beginning of motion-picture exhibition. In his advertisements to exhibitors, Edison sold his race subjects by boasting about the ability of the camera to record the sharp contrasts between black and white. Short subjects such as A Morning Bath (1896)--which featured an African American mother washing her baby in white soap suds--simultaneously showed off the apparatus and provided a racist gag based on the supposed humor of the color contrast. One might expect that the black-and-white cinema would seize upon the visual "opportunities" of black and white, but the alignment of race with the apparatus in the era of sound suggests that something more was at stake than visual contrast.
Early silent cinema was defined by its ability to record motion, and motion guaranteed audiences what The Independent in 1914 called the "essence of reality." (7) To find that essence, the stationary camera of early cinema looked not just to any moving bodies but to those that could provide strange and interesting movement--those that expressed motion as their very essence. Black, "lower-class," and ethnic subjects provided the early cinema with both real-life and burlesque display. (8) In other words, these bodies were perceived as the perfect medium for moving pictures. And in 1929, when the sound recording apparatus was as new and technically limited as the stationary camera of early cinema, "black voices" provided the perfect medium for the talking picture. A spate of all-black features and short subjects was hurried into production, and the demand for African American actors reached unprecedented levels. In 1927, 3,754 African Americans found placement as extras in Hollywood movies; the numbers for 1928 jumped to 10,916, paying a total of $30,036 in wages. More importantly, black actors were beginning to receive star treatment--high salaries and studio contracts. Opportunity reported that the first two all-black-cast Hollywood films--Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah!--set records for the highest salaries paid to black actors in Hollywood. (9)
In his memoirs, King Vidor remembers his disgust with the new sound cinema and its limitations; the camera sacrificed its "legs" in order to accommodate dialogue. Vidor recalls that the sound equipment brought back the "nailed-down tripod of the early days." (10) The change did not go unnoticed by audiences. In May 1929, the popular fan magazine Photoplay poked fun at the boredom of the new dialogue-driven movies: the issue featured Rube Goldberg's "No-Snooze-at-Talkies-Device" and a satire titled "The Great Talkie Sleep Test" on facing pages. Moviegoers were apparently complaining that the new features were slow, and D. W. Griffith agreed: "People say the dialogue is too slow. They are right.... We must preserve all the speed, action, swirl, life, and tempo of the motion picture today." (11) Once again, motion becomes the raison d'etre of cinema, the only way to keep the talking picture alive. It is not surprising, then, that the cinema must again turn to black subjects. With Hallelujah!, Vidor felt certain he could provide the cinema with the "fervor of [African American] religious expression" (12)--or what one critic called the "intoxicating ... dervish dance" of "Negro spiritual life." (13)
The desire for spectacle in an age of technical limitations produced a strange mixture of old and new. To accommodate the stationary camera, many of the early talkie shorts featuring black performers were shot in theaters such as the Manhattan Opera House "where the acoustics were good and the stiff musical vignettes demanded by the bulkiness and immobility of the cameras seemed plausible." (14) The talkies ushered in a new era by harkening back to pre-cinema entertainment: vaudeville and minstrel shows. As Michael Rogin points nut in his study of blackface performance, "The first talking picture [The Jazz Singer] went backward in order to go forward and enter the era of sound." (15) Rogin argues that The Jazz Singer (dir. Alan Crosland, US, 1927) and other Al Jolson blackface vehicles offered stories of Americanization in which immigrants could celebrate their upward mobility by putting on (and taking off) the mask of the ethnic group whose racial identity was more fixed and oppressive: African Americans. (16) These sagas of Americanization offered the familiarity and comfort of vaudeville routines in times of technological and social change. This transitional moment in cinema, however, reveals more than a thematic concern with racial identity. The cinema's signifying powers--its language, narrative codes, and modes of address--are bound up with the representation of race. And while the resurgence of blackface brought back memories, it had a way of erasing them as well.
The return to vaudeville and burlesque activated some audience nostalgia and even some ridicule--one of the trade journals mockingly noted the sudden spate of movies "glorifying burnt cork" produced on the heels of The Jazz Singer. (17) But many writers marveled at both blackface and African American performers in a way that obscured the racial history of silent pictures--the formative role that racist gags played in the medium's early days. Most writers marveled at (if they were white) and applauded (if they were black) the new opportunities for black performers in the sound...
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