Film Rhythm after Sound

“Film Rhythm after Sound is the most convincing demonstration I’ve seen of how much Ezra Pound’s description of poetry ('form cut in time') applies to narrative cinema. Everyone knows that dramatic motion pictures rely on rhythm and pacing to hold our interest and stimulate emotion, but until this book we have had almost no tools to analyze rhythm across the many forms it takes in feature films. This book is a major achievement.”—James Naremore, author of An Invention without a Future: Essays on Cinema

“This brilliant investigation of experiments with rhythmic form in early sound cinema fills a major gap in our understanding of film aesthetics. Against the backdrop of a revisionist assessment of Eisenstein’s concept of rhythmic montage, Lea Jacobs explores the collaborative efforts of Hollywood directors, performers, screenwriters, composers, and editors in the 1930s to incorporate spoken dialogue and music into the formal design of synchronized sound films. In the process she invents nothing less than a new type of audiovisual analysis, one attentive to cinematic rhythm as a complex formal matter, irreducible to a single compositional principle or stylistic element and operating on multiple temporal scales. No existing study brings together an examination of acting, dialogue, music, and visual style in cinema in precisely this way. Film Rhythm after Sound will be of keen interest not only to film historians and analysts but also to scholars engaged with aesthetic issues across the performing arts.”—Charles Wolfe, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara