The silent origins of documentary film sound

This article reconstructs a prehistory of documentary film sound in the practices of the silent period. Documentary studies have long treated documentary sound as an arrival of the late 1920s and 1930s, a corollary of synchronization technology; I argue, on the contrary, that by the time documentary consolidated as a stable audiovisual form around 1930, a substantial sonic legacy had already taken shape in the non-fiction and avant-garde production of the 1910s and 1920s. I trace this legacy through three intertwined strands, each reconstructed from a distinct archive – instructional manuals and music anthologies, cue sheets, and original scores. The first is a ‘realistic’ paradigm for sounding ‘real’ images, an ethics of accompaniment rooted in the exhibition of newsreels and travelogues. The second is the development of sound as a dramatic and structural-narrative device, through which music and noise came to articulate temporal axes, characters, and social meaning. The third is the migration of defamiliarization, fragmentation, and authorial subjectivity from the avant-garde score into the sonic imagination of non-fiction. None of these strands alone produced the sound documentary; together, and contingently, they furnished resources the tradition would recombine, after 1930, with voice, commentary, and rhetoric.