Abstract: This contribution considers how four war films released in 1930 use sound: the trench warfare dramas All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918, the air warfare film The Dawn Patrol, and the comedy Doughboys. These films present the sounds of war as a tapestry of noise to create a feeling of disablement as the essential characteristic of World War I, thereby capturing the entropic and fragmented nature of modern society reeling from economic collapse amidst technological progress. In this way, they provide a self-reflexive counter-discourse to the role of the sound film in positing against its narrative of progressive and utopian “electrical entertainment” a critique of film sound as an emblem for a machine age hostile to humanity.

Keywords: war films, noise in early sound film, human voice, silencing, modernity

According to most scholars, by 1930 sound was “consolidated into [an] unostentatious presence” in American films. After a brief period of foregrounding the ability of the medium to reproduce synchronized sound as a special effect, removed from direct narrative purposes, sound had entered a stage of “containment,” modulated and orchestrated so as to provide service to narrative and spatial coherence and continuity without drawing attention to itself as a technological phenomenon.

While I don't dispute this general narrative of the development of sound film in American and most Western cinemas, I want to point out the peculiar role of the war film genre in this respect, more particularly the string of films released in 1930 that use World War I as a backdrop: All Quiet on the Western Front (dir. Lewis Milestone), Westfront 1918: Vier von der Infanterie (Westfront 1918, dir. G. W. Pabst), Doughboys (dir. Edward Sedgwick), and The Dawn Patrol (dir. Howard Hawks). Donald Crafton argues that the development of the sound film in the 1920s was “plugged” into a culture-wide narrative of the progression of science and technology heralding “the promise of a better future,” which is why early sound films often staged moments of synchronized sound as an “encounter […] with technological modernity.” If by 1930 the cinema had overcome this staging of synchronized sound as a special effect, then the war film returns to the treatment of sound as an encounter with technological modernity, only not in the form of benevolent scientific advancement, but as traumatizing shock.