Classical Hollywood cinema
The beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. To some, it began with "The Jazz Singer", which was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films, as sound was introduced to feature films. To others, the era began in 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended. Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960s adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, and biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films; Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years; Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount Pictures; and director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth Century Fox. Similarly, actors were mostly contract players. Film historians and critics note that it took about a decade for films to adapt to sound and return to the level of artistic quality of the silents, which it did in the late 1930s.
René Clair
Clair was initially sceptical about the introduction of sound to films, and called it "an unnatural creation". He then realised the creative possibilities that it offered, particularly, in his view, if the soundtrack was not used realistically; words and pictures need not, and indeed should not, be tied together in a clumsy duplication of information; dialogue did not always need to be heard. Between 1930 and 1933, Clair explored these ideas in his first four sound films, starting with "Sous les toits de Paris" ("Under the Roofs of Paris"); this was followed by "Le Million" (1931), "À nous la liberté" (1931), and "Quatorze juillet" ("Bastille Day") (1933). All of these films portrayed an affectionate and idealized view of working class life, and they did much to create a popular romantic image of Paris which was seen around the world. These films were made at the Epinay Studios for Films Sonores Tobis, a French subsidiary of the German-owned Tobis company.