Abstract: This introduction outlines the emerging field of early sound film studies, arguing that the transitional era around 1930 should be conceived in terms of a specific aesthetics characterized by gradual processes of renegotiation and reorientation. Rather than a period of aesthetic restrictions, it is one of aesthetic options and experimentation, less a unidirectional break than a protean and polymorphous period, which is embedded in film history in complex ways. In addition, more global and transnational perspectives on the media change are needed, along with increased visibility of early sound films, including those often marginalized in scholarship.

Keywords: media change, film history, early sound film, aesthetics

“What is this and what does it mean for us?” These might be two of the questions running through Greta Garbo's and Clarence Brown's heads as they suspiciously, but somewhat benevolently, look up at the microphone suspended above them in a 1930 set photograph for Anna Christie, Garbo's first talkie, which was directed by Brown (see cover image). Looking at the picture today, we might be reminded of our own encounters with new technologies and apparatuses, some of them quite recent, others already a little older: holding a smart phone in our hands, scrolling down a website for the first time; or looking at a video conference ‘set-up’ on our computer screen, with a small mirror image of ourselves next to the other participants.

New technologies are usually greeted with a mixture of scepticism, hopeful expectation, dreams and musings about their possible futures, and even more importantly, about our futures with them. When images and sounds are involved, especially in the realm of art and entertainment, aesthetic issues necessarily play a part in these transformations and projections into the future. Thus, the large-scale introduction of sound technologies into the film industry around 1930 resulted in major changes for film aesthetics, when the look and sound of films and the ways they were perceived by spectators were undergoing profound shifts. Take the beginning of Die Nacht gehört uns (The Night Belongs to Us) (1929, dir. Carl Froelich), one of the very first ‘all-talking pictures’ produced in Germany and, presumably, for many spectators in Europe the first feature film with sound they ever saw.