Charles O’Brien came to Carleton in 1994, after receiving his Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa in 1992.  He is currently (Sept.-Dec.2010) on sabbatical, supervising graduate theses and writing.  In January 2011 he will resume duties as Film Studies program director and teach a fourth-year film course on research methods and a third-year course on film colour.

O’Brien’s publications include Cinema’s Conversion to Sound:  Technology and Film Style in France and the United States (Indiana U. Press, 2005), as well as articles and book chapters on various topics, including:  staging and lighting in D. W. Griffith’s Biograph films;  French and German film versions of Weill-Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper;  the statistical analysis of film style;  film noir’s beginnings in 1930s France;  the film-theoretical implications of Susan Sontag’s film criticism;  voice-dubbing practices;  digital restorations of early film colour;  the reception of Hollywood musicals in 1930s France;  French films of the German occupation;  film and electrification in Europe and North America prior to WWI;  and films set in the French colonies.  His translations include Francesco Casetti’s Inside the Gaze (1996).   Forthcoming publications on Jean Renoir’s soundtrack, film colour prior to World War One, the use of music in Coeur de Lilas (1932), and Technicolor in King of Jazz (1930) are listed below under “recent publications, forthcoming and in print.”

Since arriving at Carleton O’Brien has received awards and fellowships including:  a Chateaubriand Fellowship;  a residential fellowship at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France;  and four research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.   In 2006 O’Brien was appointed Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., where he spent the 2006-2007 academic year.

O’Brien is now completing a new book, “Entertainment for Export:  Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound,” which examines the aesthetic impact of the changeover from silent to sound film through an investigation into musical films made in the United States, Germany, France, and Britain.  Focusing on techniques that allowed these films to circulate across national and linguistic borders–from dubbing to subtitling and the making of full-length “foreign versions”–the book investigates the role of electric-sound distribution in shaping cinema aesthetics on a transnational scale.  The book draws on a filmography comprised of 500 films made in Britain, France, Germany and the U.S. during 1927-1934;  statistical analyses of most of the films are available via O’Brien’s some 600 entries to the database at www.cinemetrics.lv.

Recent publications, forthcoming and in print (last five years):

“Coeur de Lilas:  Songs in French-Language Cinema, National and International Trends.”  Forthcoming in Studies in French Cinema.

“Music and Sound in the Films of Jean Renoir.”  Forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to Jean Renoir, eds. Ginette Vincendeau and Alastair Phillips.

“Early Film Colour, Today and Yesterday.”  Forthcoming in Beyond the Screen:  Institutions, Networks, and Publics.  [anthology of papers delivered at 2010 Domitor conference on early cinema.]

“Colour as Image Schema: King of Jazz.”  Forthcoming in Colour and the Moving Image from the American Film Institute/Routledge, eds. Sarah Street et al.

“Motion Picture Colour and the Industrialization of Cinema.”  Forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault.

“Alain Carou and Béatrice de Pastre, eds. Le Film d’Art et les films d’art en Europe, 1908-1911.“  [book review]  Forthcoming in Modern and Contemporary France.

“Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, eds., Lowering the Boom:  Critical Studies in Film Sound.”  [book review] Forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity.

“The ‘Cinematisation’ of Sound Cinema in Britain:  Hitchcock’s La chant du Danube and the French Film Market.”  In Je t’aime…moi non plus: Anglo-French Cinematic Relations, eds. Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley.  New York and Oxford:  Berghahn Books, 2010.

“Lighting and Staging in Griffith’s Biograph Shorts:  Electrification and Film Style, from East to West.”  In Domitor 2008:  Peripheral Early Cinema, ed. François Amy de la Bretèque.  Perpignan:  Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2010:  39-50.

“Sous les toits de Paris and French Film, at Home and Abroad.” In Studies in French Cinema 9; no. 2. (2009): 111-125.

“Sound-on-disc Cinema and Electrification prior to WWI:  Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.”  In Early Cinema and the “National,” eds. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King.  Eastleigh, England:  John Libbey Press, 2008:  40-49.

“Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture.”  [book review]  In Canadian Journal of Film Studies 17, no. 1 (2008):  98-102.

“Susan Sontag’s Erotics of Film Style:  Between Meaning and Presence.” In Post-Script 26, no. 2 (winter/spring 2007):  41-51.

“Film Color and National Cinema before WWI:  Pathécolor in the United States and Great Britain.”  In Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution, eds. Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff.  Eastleigh, England:  John Libbey, 2007:  30-37.

“Versionen, Radio und Grammophon: Die 3-Groschen-Oper and L’opéra de quat’ sous.”  In FilmEuropa Babylon: Mehrsprachenversionen der 1930er Jahre in Europa, ed. Jan Distelmeyer.   Munich:  text + kritik, 2006:  123-132.

“Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light:  Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany.”  [book review] In Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (2006).  397-399.