Transitioning into Noise: 1930s Film Technology Debates in India

ConTrust Research seminar „India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia“

With Neepa Majumdar

Using film excerpts, ads for sound recording and projection equipment, sound technicians’ columns, as well as reports by and about salesmen-technicians, such as the Americans Wilford Deming Jr. and C. Willman, this talk will present debates about audio technologies and sonic cultures circulating in India during the period of cinema’s conversion to sound (1931 to 1935). Since many audio discussions at the time centered on the problem of noise in sound recording and projection, the talk will approach the transition to sound through the lens of a spectrum of noise and meaning through which the audiovisual was understood. Analyzing ads for competing film sound technologies that made claims about swadeshi (or indigenously developed) recording equipment, I will use the lens of „imaginary media,“ as theorized by media archaeologists, to focus on „impossible“ machines such as the locally developed tropically sensitive sound machines advertised in film magazines of the period.

Neepa Majumdar is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s to 1950s (2009) and co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema(2022). Her research interests include film sound, star studies, South Asian early cinema, and documentary film. She is co-editor of the journals [In]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. 

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