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.
Njai Dasima (1932 film)
This was the first sound film released by Tan's, but far from the first in the Indies. The earliest sound films released in the Indies, "Fox Movietone Follies of 1929" and "The Rainbow Man", were both shown in 1929. The following year, a domestic part-talkie, G. Krugers' "Karnadi Anemer Bangkong", was also released, becoming the first domestic sound film. Two other directors had followed with full-talkies in 1931: The Teng Chun with "Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang" and the Wong brothers with "Indonesia Malaise". In order to ensure the quality of the sound, Tan's hired Krugers and his single-system camera to do the cinematography and sound direction for this black-and-white film.