"By listening to noise, Meredith Ward deftly weaves a story about the history of American film sound that takes readers on a journey from a nineteenth-century Chicago symphony hall to the twenty-first-century streets of Baltimore in order to demonstrate the importance of the body in the construction of listening. Ward relies on extensive historical research to craft an argument that privileges space over text, audience agency over technological determination to show that sonic culture is a contested terrain that might not always align with the model envisioned by producers of these spaces and the films screened within them. Static in the System is an essential book for film historians and sound scholars."—Jennifer Fleeger, author of Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz

"Ward offers a deep and compelling account of the importance of attempts to control 'noise' in its myriad forms to the history of American film."—James Lastra, author of Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity

"In Static in the System, Meredith Ward expands the sonic range of film history, mobilizing impressive and original research to show how discourses about noise have played a key role at pivotal historical moments, and lending a keen ear to cinema sound as it fades into architectural acoustics, the urban soundscape, sound art, and mobile audio."—Jacob Smith editor of Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship

"By listening to noise, Meredith Ward deftly weaves a story about the history of American film sound that takes readers on a journey from a nineteenth-century Chicago symphony hall to the twenty-first-century streets of Baltimore in order to demonstrate the importance of the body in the construction of listening. Ward relies on extensive historical research to craft an argument that privileges space over text, audience agency over technological determination to show that sonic culture is a contested terrain that might not always align with the model envisioned by producers of these spaces and the films screened within them. Static in the System is an essential book for film historians and sound scholars."—Jennifer Fleeger, author of Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz

"Ward offers a deep and compelling account of the importance of attempts to control 'noise' in its myriad forms to the history of American film."—James Lastra, author of Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity

"In Static in the System, Meredith Ward expands the sonic range of film history, mobilizing impressive and original research to show how discourses about noise have played a key role at pivotal historical moments, and lending a keen ear to cinema sound as it fades into architectural acoustics, the urban soundscape, sound art, and mobile audio."—Jacob Smith editor of Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship

CHAPTER 1

Songs of the Sonic Body

Noise and the Sounds of Early Motion Picture Audiences

We may wish we could hear the sounds of an early cinema auditorium. Few, however, would ever have thought to record the sounds of a motion picture's accompaniment, much less those of the motion picture house. The sounds of the audience have never been deemed to have any such significance. But the historian who devotedly wishes for what few have wished for is in luck: what exists are accounts of these sounds. These accounts emerged in the motion picture trade press, to describe and then, later, police noisy behaviors within the nickelodeon. Through them, the soundscape of the early cinema era comes to life. We can form the soundscape that we lack in audio recordings through words. Drawing together specific examples from Moving Picture World from 1908 to 1912, we may draw a scene in this way.

The slim teenaged girl moves quietly through the crowded room to reach the old piano that graces the front of the house. She tucks her hair behind her ear, and for a moment she just listens. Her surroundings are overwhelming: the room is hot and overcrowded. Most of all, it is noisy. Everyone has gathered here for the moving picture show. As they wait for the show, they fill the room to the brim with conversation, laughter, and, tonight, the sounds of flirtation. Several girls she knows giggle loudly, performatively, so that people notice, as boys she does not know whisper in their ears. She could be out there among them, but tonight she is working. She sits on the stool and glances over her shoulder. Her boyfriend is there, smiling broadly in the front row. He calls out to her by name; she smiles and gestures quietly but does not respond out loud. It is showtime. The sounds of the environment swirl all about the girl pianist: a tornado that fills her mind and distracts her. She can almost feel the sounds, they are so pervasive. She listens for a moment, with her eyes closed. She attempts to block the sounds out, focusing in on the task at hand. She readies her fingers to play and strikes the keys. The sound of the audience continues around her, and it does not stop for the entire show.

The sounds of the socially engaged cinema audience were part of the soundscape of the movie house from its inception in the United States. This chapter argues that a social conflict over the body played out in the sounds made by spectators in moving picture venues from 1895 through the first decade of the 1900s. The cinema house became a site of a debate over noise, class, gender, and the body. The cinema house, as a result of the presence of what I call the "sonic body"— a body that makes itself heard and felt within social space — had a complex and indeed even corporeal soundscape, full of the sounds of spectators going about their social, embodied, and even sexual business during film screenings. These sounds died down rather quickly in the early 1910s. Media historians have accounted for this mostly by citing the changing class structure of the audience. While this is accurate, the work already done underemphasizes the strong connections between noise and class that were at work in the debate. I will take quite a different tack here, arguing that the change in the cinema soundscape was equally, if not more, linked to a changing understanding of how the body should be heard within public space — and especially the space of entertainments. The quieting that we experienced in film culture in the 1910s was not unique to film culture. Appealing to a broader explanation that goes beyond class in cinema as its primary indicator, I arrive at a solution that is connected to a broader aural culture that was manifesting these problems at the same time as, and just before, cinema's great "turn to silence."

By 1912, a shift had definitely occurred. Certain classed and gendered associations with noise had to be excised from the soundscape of the cinema theater. For this change to be enacted, the sounds of certain classes and genders needed to be quieted within the soundscape. These sounds stopped nearly altogether in cinemas in white, middle-class American communities. And with the rise of white, middle-class mores in viewing etiquette, silence began to reign over the picture houses. Understanding why the quieting occurred reveals certain tensions within film culture. It indicates where sounds that were deemed noises began to challenge boundaries, and it reveals cinema culture's relationship to the power dynamics of the culture that gave birth to them. Listening to these sounds, we can see what social distinctions this new aural etiquette of the cinema house sought to reinforce, and what ties it had to a greater aural etiquette that governed the culture at the time.

Several moral panics marked early motion picture culture. One centered on sexuality and the body. It resulted in some notable policing of the nickelodeon environment in which people experienced motion pictures. Another centered on audience noise and its associations with a lower economic class of spectator. It resulted in the imposition of a new form of projection and musical accompaniment, which led to greater audience concentration on the film. We will cover both developments briefly at the top of this chapter in order to ground our sound analysis that follows. Aural culture is rarely discussed as an aspect of these moral panics expressed in the varied sounds of moviegoing: the way cinema's sound culture combined concerns about class and sexuality. It was a problem of aural culture, and it was dealt with via aural culture through the cultivation of a sonic etiquette. This soundscape, I argue here, manifested many of the same cultural anxieties regarding gender and sexuality that we are more familiar with in a more conventional film historical context.

With regard to the moral panic centered on the body and sexuality, many film historians have written about the anxiety produced by the presence of spectators' bodies in the dark. This might be expressed in an anxiety over crime, but more often it was expressed in the form of a need to police sexual behaviors at the cinema house, and particularly the desire to protect women moviegoers from sexual threat. The concerns among early twentieth-century reformers that movie theaters were becoming recruiting grounds for "white slavers" provide a clear example of this impulse, as does the discourse on "mashers" who accosted women in the theater. Further, as Jan Olsson has shown, debates over the threats that cinema houses posed to public health and sexual safety focused specifically on the bodies of female spectators. According to cinema reformer Anna...