Body, Voice and Noise: Acting for Sound Films as Debated in the Interwar Romanian Press

Abstract

Sound cinema arrived on Romanian screens in 1929 to a moderate response. Critics and artists alike pondered over their status as an altered version of silent cinema, filmed theatre or a new art form. All three alternatives were further confronted to the status of the actor, as delineated by theatre, in an attempt to clarify the uncertain future of the film actor who used both his body and voice. This paper conducts a survey of articles on these issues published by Romanian interwar newspapers. Their authors reached various conclusions, from predicting the imminent failure of sound cinema and, thus, the disappearance of the spoken film actor, temporarily subjected to enacting on celluloid a shadow of his defining stage performance, to examining solutions that conciliated spoken dialogue with the sound dimension of film.