Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound: Transatlantic Trends

How did the introduction of recorded music affect the production, viewing experience, and global export of movies? In Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound, Charles O'Brien examines American and European musical films created circa 1930, when the world's sound-equipped theaters screened movies featuring recorded songs and filmmakers in the United States and Europe struggled to meet the artistic and technical challenges of sound production and distribution. The presence of singers in films exerted special pressures on film technique, lending a distinct look and sound to the films' musical sequences. Rather than advancing a film's plot, songs in these films were staged, filmed, and cut to facilitate the singer's engagement with her or his public. Through an examination of the export market for sound films in the early 1930s, when German and American companies used musical films as a vehicle for competing to control the world film trade, this book delineates a new transnational context for understanding the Hollywood musical. Combining archival research with the cinemetric analysis of hundreds of American, German, French, and British films made between 1927 and 1934, O'Brien provides the historical context necessary for making sense of the aesthetic impact of changes in film technology from the past to the present.

Humor & Entertainment

O’Brien, Charles

Movies

Indiana University Press

The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinema’s diversity of film styles and practices. Cinema’s Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sound’s impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies’ traditional exclusive concern with the film image, the book investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to sound cinema. Extending beyond recent Hollywood cinema, Charles O’Brien undertakes a geo-historical inquiry into sound technology’s diffusion across national borders. Through an analysis that juxtaposes French and American filmmaking, he reveals the aesthetic consequences of fundamental national differences in how sound technologies were understood. Whereas the emphasis in 1930s Hollywood was on sound’s intelligibility within a film’s story-world, the stress in French filmmaking was on sound’s fidelity as reproduction of the event staged for recording.

Cinema's Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S.

The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinema’s diversity of film styles and practices. Cinema’s Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sound’s impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies’ traditional exclusive concern with the film image, the book investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to sound cinema. Extending beyond recent Hollywood cinema, Charles O’Brien undertakes a geo-historical inquiry into sound technology’s diffusion across national borders. Through an analysis that juxtaposes French and American filmmaking, he reveals the aesthetic consequences of fundamental national differences in how sound technologies were understood. Whereas the emphasis in 1930s Hollywood was on sound’s intelligibility within a film’s story-world, the stress in French filmmaking was on sound’s fidelity as reproduction of the event staged for recording.

Publication of this book, one of six devoted to the buildings of London, marks the completion of the long-awaited revision of the original Pevsner guides and brings the account of the capital’s buildings entirely up to date.
This fascinating volume provides a historical introduction to a uniquely diverse area as well as a detailed gazetteer of individual buildings. Along the Thames, relics of a powerful industrial and maritime past remain, and in the East End, Hawksmoor’s Baroque churches still tower over Georgian houses. The contributions of generations of immigrants are reflected in places of worship and cultural centers, while a century of social housing has produced architecture now of historic interest. Further out, medieval churches and country mansions stand among the suburban streets and proud civic buildings.

London 5: East (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)

Reference

PEVSNER, Nikolaus

Cherry, Bridget

Catalogs & Directories

Yale University Press

Bedfordshire is one of the smallest English counties but encompasses great variety in landscape and architecture. Its major monument is Woburn Abbey, one of the finest Georgian country houses in England, and the influence of the estate is widely felt in the model housing and schools in the county’s villages. Its many other attractions range from the churches of the market towns of Bedford, Leighton Buzzard, and Ampthill to the majestic gardens at Wrest Park. Such variety is also to be found in Huntingdonshire and Peterborough, famous not only for the cathedral and the spires of the stone medieval parish churches scattered across its remote and intimate landscape but also for vast and stately Burghley House and Vanbrugh’s Kimbolton Castle. This a fully revised edition of Pevsner’s original guide of 1968 and contains separate introductions, gazetteers, and photographs for Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough.

Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)

Arts & Photography

Architecture

An enthusiast’s guide to exploring historic houses of England, this informative book also enables readers to discover more about the history of their own houses. Users can learn to interpret domestic architecture, identify period styles, uncover the origins of a building, and understand why rooms are arranged in particular sequences, why window and chimney designs change through history, or why staircases are presented in a certain fashion. Color photography and informative line drawings illustrate the explanations and provide a rich visual history of domestic architecture from the earliest surviving dwellings to the most avant-garde developments.

Houses: An Architectural Guide (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Introductions)

History

Europe

This volume, a companion to Hampshire: Winchester and the North, covers the county’s southern half, from the woodland and heath of the New Forest to the cities along the Solent, and from remote Saxon churches to Modernist seaside villas. The original text has been fully revised to include new research and 130 specially commissioned color photographs. The guide explores major ecclesiastical monuments at Romsey, the Bishop of Winchester’s palace at Bishops Waltham, and the remains of the great post-Dissolution houses at Beaulieu and Titchfield. At Southampton is one of England’s best preserved medieval town walls, while at Portsmouth the structures of the 18th- and 19th-century Royal Navy dockyard are among the most important of their kind. Amid all this beauty are traces of conflict, from the Roman fort at Portchester, to the coastal castles of Henry VIII’s rule, to the relics of the Normandy invasions of 1944.

Hampshire: South (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)

Travel

Bailey, Bruce

Lloyd, David W.

An enthusiast’s guide to exploring historic houses of England, this informative book, now in paperback, also enables readers to discover more about the history of their own houses. Users can learn to interpret domestic architecture, identify period styles, uncover the origins of a building, and understand why rooms are arranged in particular sequences, why window and chimney designs change through history, or why staircases are presented in a certain fashion. Color photography and informative line drawings illustrate the explanations and provide a rich visual history of domestic architecture from the earliest surviving dwellings to the most avant-garde developments.

History & Criticism

A newly expanded volume on England’s preeminent “Home County,” exploring its mix of rural and urban architecture as well as its many major historic buildings\nSurrey, originally published in 1962, was the first Buildings of England volume that Pevsner shared with another author, and Ian Nairn’s brilliant, provocative descriptions have been treasured by many ever since. For centuries Surrey has been the playground for London, and home to thousands of its commuters. Yet much of the county is still deeply wooded or surprisingly bucolic. This fully revised and enhanced edition, the first since 1971, is packed with new information on its major historic buildings – Waverley Abbey, Farnham Castle, Sutton Place and Loseley Park among others – and much-expanded accounts of its Victorian set pieces – Royal Holloway College, Holloway Sanatorium and Charterhouse School – alongside fresh appreciation of the twentieth century, including its principal monument, Guildford’s cathedral. To the fore in Surrey is domestic architecture: medieval farmhouses, seventeenth-century gentry houses in the Artisan Classical style, eighteenth-century country houses, Victorian and Edwardian businessmen’s residences, designed most famously by Norman Shaw, Lutyens and Voysey, and high-class suburban estates. Into this small county is fitted architecture of endless variety, ranging from Georgian designed landscapes to military cemeteries, from seminaries to shooting clubs, and from lime kilns to lunatic asylums.

Surrey (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)

Nairn, Ian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O’Brien, Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by O’Brien, Charles

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by O’Brien, Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound: Transatlantic Trends

Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound: Transatlantic Trends

Cinema's Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S.

Cinema's Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S.

London 5: East (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)

Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)

Houses: An Architectural Guide (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Introductions)

Hampshire: South (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)

Houses: An Architectural Guide (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Introductions)

Surrey (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)