THE NOISE OF THE PROJECTOR

Despite the nickname that the cinematograph was lovingly accorded in Russia, the cultural image of the ‘Velikii Nemoi’ [The Great Silent One] was acoustical as well as optical. Together with other members of the noisy family of machines the cinematograph burst into the quiet world of nineteenth-century culture and was noisily greeted by Futurist artists and poets. In the Futurists’ disorderly version of the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] idea, the main art was to be ‘the art of noise’,56 _{and cinema too was co-opted into the new}

aesthetic category. Vadim Shershenevich wrote: ‘I sink into the noise of the city, into the jingling and tinkling sounds of the cinematograph.’57 _{David Burlyuk proclaimed:}

The cinematograph occupies a commanding position in contemporary life. Its eternal symbol, Movement, is from now on engraved upon its brow; the cinematograph was the first and only art form capable of keeping abreast of the age and of resonating in unison with the dawn of the coming twentieth century, with its roaring of motor cars and its wailing of sirens.58

The acoustic core of cinema performance was composed of four elements: musical accompaniment; sound effects; ‘live accompaniment’; and, not least, the characteristic sound of the projector itself.

Depending upon the year of manufacture and the type, film projectors covered all ranges of tone, from forte to pianissimo. Before 1908, when ether— oxygen burners predominated, the noise came mainly from the moving parts of the apparatus, while the light source gave out only a faint crackling sound, which Alexander Blok affectionately likened to a ‘tender purring’.59 _{In 1908 safety regulations were introduced}

that insisted that fixed film projectors had to be operated by electricity. The danger of projectors catching fire was to some extent reduced, but the new regulations brought another problem: since their Drummond lamps needed a very high voltage, projectors could not be run off the city grid and had to be provided with their own dynamos, which were appallingly noisy. The journal Cine-Phono complained:

All the machines used in cinema theatres—dynamos, transformers, motor generators, and especially machines for supplying the house lighting—can produce varying degrees of noise, …for example, if a commutator is in any way damaged or out of alignment, or not properly polished, the carbon brushes can make a whistling sound; if an alternating current motor in a generator is overloaded it can produce a magnetic ‘howl’, etc., etc.60

The Riga city architect’s departmental files on the opening of cinema theatres contain complaints made to the building inspector’s office by people who had the misfortune to live in premises adjacent to cinemas. This is a typical document (the first of its kind), drawn up only a month after the new regulations came into force. It is the record of an investigation dated 30 January 1909:

As a result of a complaint from a Mr Silling, the owner of no. 5 Bocharnoy Street, about the noise made by the electric motor of the Synchrophone cinema theatre in the former Elephant warehouse at no. 10 Theatre Street, which backs on to his premises, I carried out a survey at no. 5 Bocharnoy Street. My findings were as follows: on both the lower and the upper floors one could clearly hear an extremely irritating noise coming from the electric motor located in the corner of the rear wall of the Elephant warehouse. There is also a crack in the wall more than three feet long.61

Luckily for the audience, these fire regulations also required that the auditorium be separated from the projection room by a metal partition, which also functioned as a sound insulating system, so that the audience was far less annoyed by the noise than those outside. However, whether piano or even pianissimo, the reception of the film was always accompanied by the background noise of the projector.

People who wrote about cinema did their best to find words and metaphors to describe such sounds: ‘Somewhere, to everybody’s alarm, something crackled and spluttered and figures suddenly appeared on the screen.’62 _{‘Zzzzzz…buzzed the lamp.’}63 _{‘And the cinematograph went on hissing and hissing, with a dry}

monotonous crackle.’64 _{‘Behind us something was sizzling as if they were frying a wild boar.’}65 _{‘We heard}

the monotonous chattering of some kind of strange apparatus; it reminded us of the distant sound of a sewing machine.’66 _{‘The “chattering” of machine guns in war stories reminded the reader of the staccato}

not link the sound of the projector to other aspects of film reception. One such comment referred to non- filmic sound as a substitute for filmic speech. Yuri Tynyanov was convinced that the accompanist’s music

gives the actors’ speech the final element it lacks—sound… Music gives richness and a subtlety of sound impossible to find in human speech. It helps to reduce the character’s speech to a pithy, intense minimum.68

In other words, music offered sound to offset speech. As we have already suggested, the absence of music activated diegetic (narrative) sound expectations. There was always a risk that without music actors would be ‘dubbed’ by the projector. The writer Venyamin Kaverin, recalling the first time he saw a film, recorded exactly this effect:

It was curious to hear the deserted countess crying to her lover: ‘trata-ta-ta’. He tries miserably to excuse himself: ‘trata-ta-ta’. Then she loses her temper: ‘trata-ta-ta’. He falls sobbing at her feet: ‘trata-ta-ta’.69

The other aspect of the projection sound is related to an issue that I am going to return to later in the book.70

Early spectators were subject to the effect of proprioceptive instability, caused by the excess of movement within the frame, which increased to the point of dizziness if the camera happened to be mounted on a moving train or boat, etc. In such cases, a spectator would experience the feeling that it was the auditorium that was moving and that he was being caught up and born away. The illusion was all the more complete when the projector sounded like a moving vehicle. Alexander Khanzhonkov likened the noise of the British- made Urban projector to that of a ‘creaky farm cart’.71 _{Feofan Shipulinsky referred to a sledge gliding over}

snow—the comparison is crowned with a famous ‘panoramic’ stanza from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin:

The whirring [zhuzhzhanie] of the film as it runs through the machine is like the noise made by the runners of a troika as it rushes over uneven snow bearing the poet of our imagination who watches

‘Everything flying past: old peasant women and huts, Streetlamps, gardens and kids,

Palaces, sledges and shops, Bukharans, hovels and barns, Balconies, boulevards, chemists, Peasants, Cossacks and towers, Flocks of jackdaws on crosses, And merchants, and lions on gates.’72

One can point to a case when the association between watching a film and going for a drive worked in reciprocal fashion. It concerned Franz Kafka and cinema. In 1911 in Prague Kafka saw a Danish film, Den hvide Slavehandels sidste Offer (August Blom, 1911), distributed there as Die Weisse Sklavin II [The White Slave Girl II]—its distribution title in England was In the Hands of Imposters II. The film was on the underground prostitution industry.73 _{It made a deep impression on Kafka, and is mentioned more than once}

in his letters and diaries. One such entry is in connection with an ordinary car ride: ‘The tyres swished on the wet asphalt like a projector in the cinema. Again the White Slave Girl’.74 _{This episode should be}

regarded both as a fact of film reception and as a fact belonging to the reception of automobile travel in Austro- Hungarian culture before the First World War.

To sum up, the sound of the silent cinema was a distinct voice in the cacophonous chorus of modernity itself. This is how Luigi Pirandello described this voice in his 1915 novel Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator:

Do you hear it? A hornet that is always buzzing, forbidding, grim, surly, diffused, and never stops. What is it? The hum of the telegraph poles? The endless scream of the trolley wheels along the overhead wire of the electric trams? The urgent throb of all those countless machines, near and far? That of the engine of the motor-car? Of the cinematograph?

The beating of the heart is not felt, nor do we feel the pulsing of our arteries. The worse for us if we did! But this buzzing, this perpetual tickling we do notice, and I say that all this furious haste is not natural, all this flickering and vanishing of images; but that there lies beneath it a machine which seems to pursue it, frantically screaming.

Will it break down?75