How we Learned to Listen to Noise. Theoretical Issues, Practical Problems. Sonic and Media Materiality in Italian Early Sound Cinema (1929 – 1935)

Most of the recent theoretical contributions in film and media studies claim an adequate consideration of sound reproduction in its material features. With the aim of underlining how two distinct conceptions of materiality (concerning the physical composition of reproduced sound itself on the one hand and a material approach to the media for sound recording and sound reproduction on the other) might be mutually intervolved, the first part of the article will point out some significant intersections between the theoretical accounts on mediated sound offered by Rick Altman, Tom Levin and Wolfgang Ernst. Those notions will be subsequently applied to the historical context of the conversion to sound in Italian cinema: in doing so, we will first outline the way in which film theorists rejected both the sonic and technological ‘materialisation’ of the film-medium and how, by contrast, practitioners dealt with the technological novelties as concrete problems to solve; secondly, by focusing on the film-making practices and the film-editing and projecting techniques we will re-formulate to the notion of noise with the double meaning of ‘obtrusive materiality’ and ‘technological materiality’, depending on the different context. In order to verify how new theoretical accounts can serve as epistemological frameworks for our investigation on historical film practices, the essay will discuss the way in which the materiality of mediated sound (as an aural phenomenon to be recorded and a technological inscription to be reproduced) changed the habits and challenged the skills of the workers involved in a film-making process.