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2036-461X
21135
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Giusy Pisano, Une Archéologie du cinéma sonere (Paris: CNRS, 2004)
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Selected by
2005-10-01
2023-09-21
2005-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Rick Altman
2005/10/01
2036-461X
7
en
Giusy Pisano, Une Archéologie du cinéma sonere (Paris: CNRS, 2004)
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/21135/18763
5
                                                                             SELECEO BY


SELECTED BY: RICK ALTMAN                     reflections and esperiments on sound
                                             regularly takes her far afield. The clarity
Giusy Pisano, Une Archéologic du ciné.       of her summarics of important develop
ma sonore (Paris: CNRS, 2004)                ments is most wclcome.
                                              Once Pisano reaches the mid so centu
  One of the oldest human dreams is the      ry, her carlier broad coverage joins the
desire to store and reproduce sound in the   more familiar history of phonography.
same way that images can be replicated.      The usual suspects thus make their
Unless sound can be reproduced, it can't     appearance here: Leon Scott de Martin-
be properly studied, stored, or sold, and    ville, Helmholtz, Marcy. Mugbridge,
thus must remain unavailable for scien-      Alexander Graham Bell, Edison, Berliner.
tific and commercial exploitation. The       In a final section, Pisano provides in-
history of attempts to domesticate sound     depth coverage of the many late 19 cen-
is thus rich and fascinating, as Giusy       tury attempts to synchronize sound and
Pisano demonstrates in her archaeology       image.
of sound cinema. This is not a history of      Based on substantial new research into
cinema sound like Harry Geduld's The         a wide range of documents and materials
Birth of the Talkies: From Edison to lol-    (patents, laboratory instruments, projec
son. Where Geduld concentrates on those      tion systems, contemporary claims and
who applied existing ideas about sound  reviews, catalogues, technical docu
to cinema (De Forrest, Case, Sponable), ments), Pisano's work adds substantially
stressing Phonofilm, Vitaphone, and          to previous work in this domain. Her abil.
other 19205 sound systems, Pisano offers    ity to handle technical writing in several
a complete overview of the ways in which languages gives her work a breadth not
the Western world learned to document       seen elsewhere. Whether she is dealing
and reproduce sound events.                 with myth, magic, or science. Pisano does
  The book's first section explores the a first-rate job of explaining not only the
sound-oriented myths and dreams of details of cach theory, but also their gen
antiquity (the statue of Memnon) and the    eral import and relation to other theories.
Renaissance (Rabelais' paroles gelées), the The   book also benefits substantially from
                                            several dozen well chosen illustrations.
magical approach of early moderns
(Athanasius Kircher, Giambattista Della
Porta, Etienne-Gaspard Robertson), and
the 18th century's increasingly experi- SELECTED BY: THOMAS ELSAESSER
mental science of sounds, with its empha-
sis on the production of automatons          Kirsten Baumann, Rolf Sachsse (eds.).
capable of reproducing the mechanisms        Moderne grüße/Modern Grectings.
of the human body. Moving into the 19th      Fotografierte Architektur auf Insicht.
century, Pisano concentrates on the all      skarten 1919-1939/Photographed Archi-
too neglected figure of Thomas Young,        lecture on Picture Postcards 1919-3939
one of the first to devise an adequate       (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers.
method for transcribing movement,             2004)
eventually successfully applied to tran-
scription of the vibrations produced by        One of the most famous examples of
sound. Though Pisano makes it clear that     international modernism in architecture
her principal domain is France in the 19th   is the Weissenhofsiedlung near Stuttgart,
century, the international nature of         a housing complex designed in 1927 by
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