Urban Noise and Anti-Noise in Silent Cinema

The Crowd uses “sound-suspense images”—a technique unique to the late silent period—to critically represent the urban noisescape. This essay details the technological, ideological, and aesthetic developments that made these images possible, and it considers the codification of Hollywood sound practices that soon made them obsolete. The Roar of The Crowd: Urban Noise and Anti-Noise in Silent Cinema DENNIS HANLON s Jonathan Sterne notes in his history of recorded sound, “In modern life sound A becomes a problem: an object to be contemplated” (9). Once an undifferentiated aspect of the human environment, man-made sound, with increasing industrialization and urbanization, increased exponentially, detaching itself from the general ambience and becoming something to be noticed, inveighed against, and, ultimately, regulated. This essay examines how one film in particular, King Vidor’s The Crowd, released in 1928, contemplates this problem with extraordinary creativity, seizing the opportunity presented by a particular constellation of technological, ideological, and stylistic norms unique to late silent cinema to critically represent the modern urban noisescape. Vidor, whose career spanned more than forty years, is generally considered one of the most innovative Hollywood directors of the silent and early sound periods. Among his better-known films are the anti-war melodrama The Big Parade; Hallelujah!, a musical with an all-black cast; and The Fountainhead, an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Mosaic 42/2 0027-1276-07/073016$02.00©Mosaic 74 Mosaic 42/2 (June 2009) novel. Vidor was nominated for Best Director at the first Academy Awards for his work on The Crowd, which has long been considered one of the masterpieces of American silent cinema. It is a film that rivals those of German directors Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau in scale and ambition. Vidor’s use of street photography, expressionistic sets, and, above all, a more naturalistic acting style were all highly influential. The Crowd is a portrait of an “average” working-class couple, John and Mary, and their struggles to maintain a dignified existence against the anonymous and alienating forces of urban mass society. Among the many adversities they face, one in particular, the intrusiveness and destructiveness of urban noise, is my sole concern here. The scenes in Vidor’s film that are analyzed below reflect many of the key concerns and strategies of the anti- noise movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the goals of which were to publicize problems associated with urban noise and to lobby for legisla- tive remedies. The American silent cinema’s engagement with anti-noise movements dates back to at least 1909 and D.W. Griffith’s Schneider’s Anti-Noise Crusade. What sets The Crowd apart is the way in which Vidor used then-current cinematic techniques, in particular editing, to create a critical picture of urban noise and its effects, something that would paradoxically become nearly impossible two or three years later, with the codification of Hollywood sound practices. This becomes apparent with the compari- son of The Crowd to Vidor’s next urban film, Street Scene, from 1931. The late silent period (from roughly 1925 to 1928) was that unique moment when filmmakers like Vidor could create critical visual representations of urban noise using what, for lack of a standard term, I will call sound images, motion picture images of an object making sound or the effect of sound. Bracketing this narrow window of opportunity are series of technological, ideological, and aesthetic developments. Preceding The Crowd were changes in theatre design and exhibition practices, along with the progressive articulation of a highly developed visual narrative style, all of which made possible Vidor’s sophisticated use of sound images in this film. Subsequent to this brief period, the widespread introduction of synchronized sound and the ideology and aesthetics of sound recording swiftly led to a rigid hierarchy of sounds that privileged the voice and limited any sound inessential to the narrative, especially those sounds considered background noise (Crafton 355). By comparing The Crowd with Schneider’s Anti-Noise Crusade and Street Scene, in the context of contemporary debates about the deleterious effects of urban noise and, in the case of the latter film, the proper use of sound recording technologies in film, I argue that The Crowd represents a high point in the American cinema’s engagement with the modern noisescape and that, more significantly, this high point could only have existed in the period immediately prior to the coming of the “talkies.” Dennis Hanlon 75 hile complaints about noise have no doubt existed for as long as humans have W lived in relative proximity to each other, “the urban inhabitants of early-twentieth-century America perceived that they lived in an era unprecedentedly loud” (Thompson 6). The American modernist composer Charles Ives, who in 1906 included representations of street noise in his composition “Central Park in the Dark,” fled New York for suburban Connecticut six years later, declaring the city a “hell hole” because of its din (Thompson 134). Nor were Americans the only ones so affected by the ele- vated volume of urban noise. As the Berlin Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck wrote of his return from Switzerland at the end of World War I: “In January 1917 I returned to Germany, the face of which had meanwhile undergone a fantastic change. I felt as though I had left a smug fat idyll for a street full of electric signs, shouting hawkers, and auto horns” (380). There are two main phases to the anti-noise movements in both Europe and the United States. The first extends from roughly 1906 to 1914, and the second from around 1920 to 1930 (Smilor, “Cacophony” 25). That there are two distinct periods has less to do with the movements accomplishing their aims than with their being interrupted by the social cataclysms of World War I and the Great Depression, events that led to the tabling of any progressive reforms that might have been seen as anti- industrial. While these two distinct periods share many of the same concerns, especially regarding the health effects of noise, they are also distinguished by different approaches to the problem. The first movement characterized the excess of noise in terms of personal responsibility and used laws regulating behaviour to create what Karin Bijstervold terms a “noise etiquette” (51). Frequent targets of these laws were gramophone and pet owners, barkers, newsboys, peddlers, and nickelodeons and stores that used loudspeakers to hail customers in the street. According to historian Raymond W. Smilor, who coined the phrase “noise pollution,” the second movement was more scientific in nature and resulted in the first attempts to survey sound, as well as the first major initiatives to abate the noise produced by machinery, especially that of transport (“Cacophony” 33). The popular press of the early twentieth century was full of references to urban noise as a violent intrusion into the domestic sphere and a violation of the individual “right” to silence. In such a discursive environment, it is not at all surprising that a similar rhetoric found its way into contemporary movie reviews. Mordaunt Hall, chief film reviewer for The New York Times during the twenties and thirties, referred to acoustic events foregrounded in early sound films as “sound intrusions” (Crafton 356). In 1906, Mrs. Julia Barnett Rice of New York, a middle class mother of six, founded the first American anti-noise organization, the Society for the Suppression 76 Mosaic 42/2 (June 2009) of Unnecessary Noise in New York City, and was able to attract the assistance of such public luminaries as Mark Twain to advance her cause (Smilor, “Cacophony” 31). Her first major success was the establishment of quiet zones, first around children’s hos- pitals and then around schools (Thompson 126). If this first period of the anti-noise movement was characterized by an attack on personal behaviour, it also focused its efforts on protecting the defenceless, efforts that had widespread popular support. One scene in The Crowd effectively taps into the vast reservoir of sympathy for sick children as victims of urban noise that resulted from the work of Rice and oth- ers. After being hit by a truck, the couple’s young daughter lies dying in her bed while John leans out the window futilely hushing the street below. An escalating series of sound events—from noisy gum chewing to passing newsboys to police whistles to fire truck sirens—draws the father outside, where he stands amidst the flow of traffic vainly attempting to stop the stream of noise that invades his house and, the film suggests, precipitates his daughter’s death. There is little ambiguity to this image of the noise of the city penetrating the domestic. Noise is pure threat, and the city, through which the masses ebb and flow according to its mechanical rhythms, is coldly indif- ferent to the daughter’s fate. During the second period of the anti-noise movement, the experts took over from the middle-class reformers as leaders of the movement. One particularly impor- tant event was the invention of the audiometer by the Bell Labs in 1925 (Smilor, “Cacophony” 34). This instrument was used to conduct the first surveys of noise in London, New York, and Chicago between 1926 and 1930 (Bijstervold 52). By 1928, the year The Crowd was released, the word decibel was already beginning to appear in common parlance, which suggests that the film’s original audience would have been familiar with attempts to measure and regulate noise (Smilor, “Cacophony” 34). Smilor concludes one of his studies as follows: “The fight against noise that sprang up in the early 1900s attracted widespread popular support because it gave people the opportunity to express their anxiety over machine technology, to test their ability to control their physical surrounding and to lessen their apprehension in coping with a new environment” (“Cacophony” 36).

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