In 1918, three inventors came up with the German sound-on-film system, Tri-Ergon. From 1922 to 1926, the inventors tried to introduce the process, and the giant firm Ufa took an option on it. Probably because of Ufa’s mid-1920s financial woes, however, the firm did not move into sound production.
Dividing the International Pie
In August 1928, various international companies pooled their sound patents, including those for TriErgon, and formed the Tonbild-Syndikat (“Sound Film Syndicate”), usually referred to as Tobis. A few months later, major electronics and recording firms formed a second company, Klangfilm, to promote another sound-on-film system. After a brief court battle, in March
1929 the two companies merged into Tobis-Klangfilm, soon to be the most powerful sound firm outside the United States. In April, spurred by news of Vitaphone’s successes, Ufa signed a contract with Tobis-Klangfilm and began building sound studios.
The interests controlling Tobis-Klangfilm, which included powerful Swiss and Dutch financial groups, were determined to compete with the American firms. When Warners opened its immensely successful The Singing Fool (1928, Lloyd Bacon) in Berlin in 1929, Tobis-Klangfilm obtained a court injunction to stop the film’s run. The firm claimed that the Vita phone equipment Warners had installed in the theater infringed its patents. When it became apparent that Tobis-Klangfilm’s officials were bent on keeping American sound systems out of Germany, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) declared that all American firms would stop sending films to German theaters and stop importing German films to the United States.
This period of uncertainty slowed the German transition to sound. Producers were reluctant to make sound films, for lack of wired theaters and for fear of being unable to export to the United States. Reciprocally, exhibitors hesitated to buy expensive projection systems when there were few sound films available. The first German talkie, The Land without Women (Carmine Gallone) was finished in 1928, but it was not until early
1930 that sound production and exhibition accelerated. By 1935, virtually all of Germany’s theaters were wired.
In the meantime, the American firms discovered that their boycotts were not working. Both Warner Bros. and RKO started paying licensing fees to Tobis-Klangfilm in order to bring their films and equipment into Germany. Tobis-Klangfilm also set up foreign subsidiaries and made patent-sharing agreements with sound firms in several countries. By obtaining further court orders to block American equipment shipped from Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, Tobis-Klangfilm threatened to control large portions of the world market.
Soon the MPPDA and firms linked to the Western Electric system reached a settlement with Tobis-Klangfilm. On July 22, 1930, at a meeting in Paris, all parties agreed to an international cartel that would divide up the world market. Tobis-Klangfilm received exclusive rights to sell sound equipment in Germany, Scandinavia, most of eastern and central Europe, and a few other countries. American manufacturers gained control of Canada, Australia, India, the USSR, and other regions. Some countries, such as France, remained open to free competition. Anyone distributing sound films in any territory had to pay a fee to the appropriate member of
9.16 In M, as a police psychologist dictates a profile of the unknown criminal’s abnormal mental state, Lang cuts to the killer’s home, where he experiments with grotesque expressions in a mirror.
The cartel. Although there were countless patent cases and battles over high licensing fees internationally, the global sound-film cartel operated until 1939, when World War II put an end to it.
The Early Sound Era in Germany
Despite the departure of many German filmmakers for Hollywood during the 1920s, the early sound era saw a last flowering of creativity before the Nazi regime took control of the nation in 1933. Both veteran silent directors and important newcomers found ways to use sound creatively and to retain the stylistic flexibility of the moving camera and complex editing.
The first sound film of Fritz Lang, who had been central to the German Expressionist movement of the 1920s (pp. 103-109), was one of his finest. M (1931) tells the story of the search for a serial killer of children. The police dragnet so inconveniences the underworld of Berlin that the criminals capture the killer and try him in a kangaroo court. Lang chose to avoid all nondiegetic music, concentrating on dialogue and sound effects. Not lingering on any one character, he used crisp editing to move quickly among many. Far from creating static, lengthy scenes, Lang used sound to rapidly stitch together disparate actions and locales. He experimented with sound bridges, carrying over the sound, particularly voices, from one scene into the next—a technique that would not be commonly used until the modern Hollywood cinema (9.16). In portraying the two manhunts, Lang used sound and image to create parallels between the police and the highly organized criminal world by cutting back and forth between the two groups meeting (9.17, 9.18). A sonic motif also becomes an important clue: the killer’s
9.17, 9.18 A cut from a criminal boss gesturing during a conference to a police commissioner similarly gesturing creates an apparent “match on action” and draws a parallel between the two meetings.
9.20 The penultimate shot of Westfront 1918 shows the dying Karl declaring he will go back to his unfaithful wife, for “we are all guilty. ”
9.21 A group photograph at the end of The Bartered Bride becomes a freeze-frame and then a framed photograph (labeled “In memory of the year 1859”).
9.19 An exhausted student, sent back from the trenches for help, walks past a group of soldiers preparing coffins while a shell explodes in the background in Westfront 1918.
Distinctive whistled tune indicates his offscreen presence and eventually leads to his capture.
Before leaving Germany, Lang also made a sequel to his 1922 Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. In Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (“The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse,” 1933), the arch-criminal Dr. Mabuse continues to run his gang from an insane asylum and even from beyond the grave.
Veteran silent director G. W. Pabst made three notable films in this early sound era: Westfront 1918
(1930), The Threepenny Opera {1931), and Kamarad-schaft (“Comradeship,” 1931). Both Westfront 1918 and Kamaradschaft were pacifist films, pleas for international understanding in an era when nationalism and militarism were growing in Germany. The first portrays the senselessness of World War I; the second shows German miners risking their lives to save fellow French workers after a mine disaster.
Westfront 1918 creates an antiwar stance through bitter symbolism and a realistic depiction of battlefront conditions (9.19). One scene shows the protagonist, Karl, coming home on leave and finding his wife in bed with the butcher’s delivery boy. This scene use s many subtly varied framings to trace Karl’s reactions, changing from rage to bitter resignation. Only in the wrenching final scene in a field hospital full of maimed and dying soldiers does Karl, himself near death, forgive his wife (9.20). The film closes with a title, “The End?!” accompanied by the sound of explosions. Pabst made films in France during much of the Nazi regime (p. 287) but returned to Germany to work during World War II.
Max Ophiils, a stage director, began his film career in the early sound period. His first important work was The Bartered Bride (1932), an entry in a favorite German genre, the operetta. The Bartered Bride used several stylistic devices that would typify Ophiils’s style, including deep staging, elaborate camera movements,
9.22-9.24 In Liebelei, the camera dances with the characters and then discreetly loses them.
9.25 The headmistress inspects the schoolgirls in Madchen in Uniform.
9.26, 9.27 In 9.26, the three heroes dance about to a prerecorded song in the outdoor gas-station set in Three from the Filling Station; 9.27 shows a second set for the station, built in the studio and used for recording direct sound.
And direct address to the audience (9.21). Ophiils’s first mature work was Liebelei (1933), in which the innocent daughter of a violinist and a dashing lieutenant fall in love. Ophiils is known for creating an intense romanticism, especially through elaborate camera movements that swirl around the characters. In one scene of Liebelei, the camera begins by simply following the couple as they dance (9.22). Then they whirl vertiginously around the camera as the background moves by (9.23). Finally, the camera pauses on the music box to which they have been dancing, they move away from our view (9.24), and the scene fades out.
One of the most acclaimed directorial debuts of the early sound period in Germany was Leontine Sagan’s Madchen in Uniform (“Girls in Uniform,” 1931). It deals with a sensitive girl, Manuela, sent to a private school run by a tyrannical headmistress (9.25). Manuela develops a crush on her only sympathetic teacher, and after blurting out her love at a party, she attempts suicide. Madchen in Uniform was a rare early attempt to deal sympathetically with lesbianism. Sagan made a second film in England, Men of Tomorrow (1932), before moving to Johannesburg, South Africa, and becoming one of the central figures in the theater there.
Perhaps the most successful early sound films, both on the domestic German market and internationally, were musicals. Erik Charell’s The Congress Dances
(1931) combined lavish historical costumes and sets with elaborate camera movements. Less grandiose, but no less infectiously cheerful, is Three from the Filling Station (1930, Wilhelm Thiele). Early on, three friends return home to discover bailiffs repossessing all their furniture. The three dance about, singing a nonsense song, “Cuckoo,” and smilingly bidding farewell to each item as it is carried out; the scene is shot from a variety of vantage points. Finally the trio decide to move to the country, and they jump out the window into their car.
Like many important early sound films, Three from the Filling Station avoids multiple-camera shooting and moves the action out of the studio whenever possible. The filmmakers even built the set of the Kuckuck (“cuckoo”) gas station twice (9.26, 9.27). Scenes that could be postsynchronized or that used only music were
9.28, 9.29 A cut-in in The Blue Angel maintains lip synchronization, though the scene was shot with one camera. Note that Lola’s head is in a slightly different position after the cut and that Rath is holding her powder case higher. Their poses would have remained identical across the cut with multiple-camera shooting.
Shot in the outdoor set, while those that needed synchronized sound were shot in the studio.
A very different sort of musical became one of the most widely seen of German sound films. Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg directed Emil Jannings (who had worked with Sternberg in Hollywood before the arrival of talkies forced him to return to Germany) in The Blue Angel (1930). The film also brought world fame to Marlene Dietrich, until then a minor actress.
Jannings plays Professor Rath, a repressed, unpopular high-school teacher. In the first scene, street sounds establish Rath’s dreary neighborhood and his morning routine. The first break in his routine is in fact a moment of silence, when he whistles to his beloved canary and receives no response. The bird has died. Rath is plunged into a completely different world when he tries to catch some of his students at the Blue Angel, a sordid bar where they have gone to hear the sexy singer Lola-Lola. He falls in love with Lola himself, gives up his job to marry her, and becomes a clown in order to help earn money. Eventually he dies in despair after Lola is unfaithful to him.
Von Sternberg avoided multiple-camera shooting almost entirely, yet he still managed to create dialogue scenes with excellent lip synchronization (9.28, 9.29). The Blue Angel is also famous for its realistically motivated offscreen sound. A ringing bell becomes a motif associated with Rath’s routinized life. When he assigns his students a punitive essay, there is silence as they write; he opens a window, and we hear a boys’ choir singing nearby. Aside from its ingenious use of sound, The Blue Angel’s international success was based in part on Dietrich’s sultry performance as Lola. It led her to a Hollywood career, and there she made several more important films with Josef von Sternberg in the 1930s.
By 1933, all of these German directors—Lang, Pabst, OphLils, Sagan, Charell, Thiele, and von Sternberg—were working outside Germany, largely because the Nazi regime had gained power (see Chapter 12).
World History
