RICK ALTMAN’S ILLUSTRATIVE TALKIE ON THE PHONOGRAPHIC FILM PHENOMENON – A DELIRIOUS ACCOUNT FROM THE RECEIVING END

Alice Guy Blaché Symposium, 

NYU Cantor Film Center

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Emerging Media: Now and Then 

“What kind of film should phonography show?” – asks film theorist Rick Altman as we are presented in his illustrated ‘talkie’ with an array of bizarre cinematic constellation that have all struggled to articulate themselves into that perfect audio-visual ensemble what we now know as sound cinema.  

I couldn’t help but think that Altman’s “schizophrenic” delivery, shifting in and out of voices, was not only in jovial defiance of the usual academic speak but itself was broadcasting the grain of his sound thesis through the phonographic apparatus growing like an appendage out of that growing body of cinema.  His first image is a bizarre object indeed: a phonographic player stuffed into the already-crammed cabinet of a kinetoscope.  Altman’s leading trope which he repeated like a sing-a-long throughout his spasmodic performance is the tune of ‘new wine skins into old wine skins.’  We are reminded that these rudimentary attempts in which pre-existing moving-picture technologies and emerging audio technologies, in attempting to bring these heterogeneous machines together to produce the phenomenon of ‘pictures with sound’ (and not ‘sound with pictures’), not only look utterly ridiculous but have absolutely nothing to do with the ‘old wine skins’ of musical and vaudeville subject matter (i.e., content) that habitually pours into the ‘new wine skin.’  

Altman strips – at least for the duration of his brief performance – the bizarre assemblage of its content, leaving only the rudimentary form, that is the clunkiness that he preserves of the phenomenon of sound cinema.  “What kind of film should phonography show?” – is not really answered but seductively sustained so that the bizarre bricolage can be shown for what it is, namely a bizarre thing indeed!  Altman preserves a sense of the early reception of the phonographic film phenomenon in false fits-and-starts, possibilities and failures, over- and under-determinations that have yet to really take off!     

 Sandra Gibson