01B-C2205-P1 8/17/02 3:37 PM Page 27
Sounds of Silence
/
27
Figure 2. Breaking the sound barrier: Ad for the German-language release of The Singing Fool (1928, Lloyd Bacon) ( Film-Kurier, June 1929).
tensity and realism. In spite of dramatic flaws and uneven performances, the first German sound film thus already anticipated what was to become dominant international sound-film practice: the joining of sound to the dynamic of the image, the articulation of sound and image into seemingly natural unity. But Melody of the Heart, as many critics pointed out, not
01B-C2205-P1 8/17/02 3:37 PM Page 28
28
/
Hollywood in Berlin, 1933 –1939
only revolutionized cinematic illusion but also offered a new approach to filmmaking according to which the popular imagination could be based in culturally specific strata of thought, feeling, and speech. “What a relief,”
wrote Ernst Jäger for the Film-Kurier, “sound film without a saxophone.”13
Whereas Al Jolson’s success earlier that year had reinforced the Weimar fascination with foreign rhythms and different sounds, jazz music in particular, Melody of the Heart portended a future in which native voices and domestic musical idioms would recenter German spectatorship and halt the increasing internationalization of leisure activities.
The German film industry entered the sound age from a comparatively strong position. In the second half of the 1920s UFA—the largest German film studio of the time—had taken crucial steps toward rationalizing production schedules and restructuring market operations. Hollywood imports during this time lost much of the attention they had captured during the early 1920s.14 Meanwhile, the German film industry bought out American interests and strengthened its export position on the markets of central Europe. By 1928 the industry “was sufficiently diversified and innovative to keep pace with American cinema.”15 German industry representatives therefore endorsed sound emphatically, hoping to strengthen local revenues and expand the marketability of German cinema abroad.16 Whereas in 1925, paralyzed by the costly production of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, UFA had suspended its “useless experiments” with nascent sound technologies,17 the industry now hailed the arrival of the talkie as an opportunity to reduce American market shares in Germany and German-speaking Europe. By late 1929 UFA and other German production companies pursued the production of sound films aggressively. In 1929 German studios still produced 175 silent and only 8 sound films; in 1930 the ratio diminished to roughly 2:1. In 1931 the total number of silent film productions decreased to 2, and in 1932 German studios shot no more silent pictures at all.18
Retrospectively, many have come to think of the silent era in terms of a lack, a juvenile stage in film’s maturing toward comprehensive illusionism and spectatorial identification. The arrival of the talkie, according to this line of reasoning, fulfilled what audiences had desired all along, namely the mutual integration of sights and sounds into organic representations. Historical research reveals a different picture, however. Synchronized sound in actual fact had very little appeal to the popular imagination prior to 1929, and the installation of sound equipment in German theaters had less to do with mass demand for new avenues of consumption than with the pressures of industrial production and marketing. Producers, not exhibitors,
01B-C2205-P1 8/17/02 3:37 PM Page 29
Sounds of Silence
/
29
urged rapid conversion, driven by the belief that sound allowed for a more efficient managing of resources and revenues. “Silent film presentations had been notoriously variable. Works could be projected at different speeds, with operators advised in some manuals of their trade to vary the rhythm of projection within a given film. A single work could exist in different versions: black and white, or colored by one of several methods; long, short, or medium length; accompanied by large orchestras using carefully planned cue sheets, or by a single drunken pianist.”19 Synchronized sound streamlined these variable relations of production, exhibition, and consumption. Whereas meanings, as well as profits, in early silent cinema had been highly contingent on local exhibition contexts, sound film—in the eyes of the industry—promised new possibilities to shape a unified mass-cultural audience.
Talking films helped standardize production codes and exhibition practices.
In doing away with what in early silent film had been “at the mercy of relatively unpredictable, aleatory processes,”20 sound film shifted the public’s attention away from the peculiar projection situation, for example the interior of a local cinema or the particular style of a musical accompaniment.
Instead, it refocused both the act of reception and the amassing of box office returns on mostly the film itself, while at the same time enforcing spectatorial silence and passivity as middle-class standards of respectability.
Whatever the actual driving force behind the conversion from silent to sound film, German audiences embraced the talkie quickly and decisively.
In spite of the fact that sound reduced stylistic diversity in the long run, the new rhythms, noises, and voices that filled German theaters struck an immediate and favorable chord in the popular imagination. The speed of this approval remains perplexing. It seems legitimate to argue, however, that given the complete absence of any previous signs of dissatisfaction, the ir-resistibility of sound film had less to do with aesthetic concerns than with larger transformations that disrupted the fabric of everyday life. We should remember, after all, that the breakthrough of sound film coincided with rampant social, economic, and political upheavals. Synchronized sound helped audiences fill the void that had suddenly opened up in the wake of the Great Depression. Whereas the economic crash of 1929 resulted in an unprecedented convulsion of global spaces and temporal coordinates, sound film seemed to offer an ordered and recognizable space where it became possible to articulate or even counteract feelings of displacement, to restructure memory and readjust fantasy. The rhythms and streamlined temporalities of the talkie actualized structures of experience that differed from the chaotic flexing of time during the late Weimar Republic. More
01B-C2205-P1 8/17/02 3:37 PM Page 30
30
/
Hollywood in Berlin, 1933 –1939
than simply an expression of escapism, the new vernacular of the sound film echoed real needs and provided a means of working out—in however distorted forms—fundamental, group-specific anxieties.
Against this backdrop we may also better understand why the talkie sparked acerbic criticism among some of the leading film critics of the Weimar period. “The talking film,” Herbert Ihering wrote as early as 1922,
“is a danger not only because it mechanizes the word, that which is the soul and spirit of a human being; but also because it undermines the laws of film that have emerged in the development of cinema.”21 Locating the laws of film in the primacy of the image, in the work of the camera and the virtuosity of editing, prominent critics rejected sound as redundant. Although directors such as G. W. Pabst, Fritz Lang, and Robert Siodmak quickly developed imaginative strategies to integrate sound and image, many critics remained skeptical and described the shift from silent to sound film as a move that would undo the poetry of film art. According to Rudolf Arnheim, for instance, the addition of sound reduced the difference between screen and reality and thus leveled the artistic status of the visual medium of film. Béla Balázs, by way of contrast, considered the introduction of sound to film the death knell for the universal nature of cinema and its ability to reveal the deeper magic of the visible world.
Noël Carroll and Rick Altman suggest that we ought to understand this critical rejection of sound film as an expression of a fundamental crisis in film aesthetics around 1930.22 Sound, for critics such as Arnheim, signified a precarious return to canned theater, to film’s earlier association with the principles of the stage. The coming of sound, for the partisans of the art of silent filmmaking, represented a monstrous return of silent cinema’s repressed. It obstructed camera mobility, subjected the image to extraneous imperatives, and thus invalidated the purity of film as artistic expression.
That many, such as the celebrated actor Emil Jannings,23 conceived of Germany’s considerable acting traditions as a powerful means to give sound film a uniquely German cultural elevation only added to Arnheim’s and others’ misgivings. Film, for the talkie’s critics, achieved artistic originality not by incorporating literary traditions or mimicking stage practices but by operating with an aesthetics of its own. Sound was seen as antithetical to this end. Composite and heterogeneous in nature, the talkie no longer allowed film to define its difference from other arts and thus unfold its full artistic possibilities.
To reconstruct the dissonant beginnings of sound film in Germany in terms of conflicting aesthetic standards and expectations is helpful, but what is missing in this kind of conceptualization is any reference to the
01B-C2205-P1 8/17/02 3:37 PM Page 31
Sounds of Silence
/
31
