‘Islands of Sound in the Silent Flow of Film’: German Part-Talkies Around 1930 as a Hybrid Medium

Abstract

Looking at the German production and reception context, this article argues for increased attention to part-talkies as a transitional phenomenon and hybrid medium in film history. Part-talkies are films that alternate between silent and sound film sequences, creating ‘changes in register’, ruptures and ambiguities, which point to the unevenness and duration of cinema’s conversion to sound. The article presents several types of part-talkies and other hybrid films from around 1930, giving reasons for their marginalization in film historiography and the need for a critical and non-judgmental examination of their cultural, economic, and aesthetic implications. As a look at contemporary reviews in German trade papers reveals, part-talkies were the subject of heterogeneous debates on film aesthetics, in which differing views on their artistic value clashed. Furthermore, an exemplary historical analysis of the German part-talkie Cyankali (Cyanide) (dir. Hans Tintner, 1930) shows how the film’s hybridity resulted from its production history and became the focus of contemporary censorship debates. A close reading of some of the film’s sound sequences brings to the fore the complex audiovisual methods operating in the film, especially at moments of transition.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Guido Altendorf, Jörg Schweinitz, and Guido Kirsten for providing valuable information. Translated from German by Susie Trenka.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 There is an earlier dream sequence in the film with diegetic sounds, barking dogs, and laughter. But as the scene makes clear, Valentin cannot speak yet at that point.

2 René Clair, Réflexion faite: Notes pour servir à l'histoire de l'art cinématographique de 1920 à 1950 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 154.

3 In stressing “longevity” and “uncertainty” in the cinema’s conversion to sound, I refer to Donald Crafton’s seminal study of the transition in the USA: Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1997). My contention is that, even though the transition was significantly more rapid than other major technological shifts such as to colour or widescreen, we gain from acknowledging its uncertain and experimental character.

4 Hitchcok’s Blackmail can again serve as a well-known example here; the two versions were released on DVD by the German publisher Arthaus in 2002.

5 Prominent examples of this include Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) (both dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau).

6 Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 168–169. One example is Louise Brooks’s first sound film, The Canary Murder Case (dir. Malcolm St. Clair, 1929), in which Brooks’s voice was dubbed by actress Margaret Livingston. Of course, the boundaries between all these categories are fluid. For instance, the sound version of Blackmail (which was marketed as the first British all-talkie) contains elements of postsynchronized silent scenes as well as elements of a part-talkie. Similarly, Louise Brooks’s second sound film, Prix de beauté (Miss Europe) (dir. Augusto Genina, 1930), was actually the retroactively produced version of a silent film – that is, a goat gland – where all voices were dubbed after shooting (though this was done much more successfully than in The Canary Murder Case). Finally, the ‘silent film segments’ of part-talkies also contain a soundtrack, so they are really synchronized films in the sense described above.

7 On the terminology, see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and ibid., Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).

8 Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films: Vol. 2, 1928–1933 (Berlin: Henschel, 1976), 39.

9 The few titles available on DVD include American productions from Warner Bros., a company that made many part-talkies – among them The Singing Fool (dir. Alan Crosland, 1928), Noah’s Ark (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1929), and Weary River (dir. Frank Lloyd, 1929) – as well as the sound version of British prodcution The Informer (dir. Arthur Robison, 1929) and the German part-talkie Cyankali, which is discussed in this article.

10 For an intriguing analysis of the especially fertile hybrid film production in Japan, see Johan Nordstöm, ‘Between Silence and Sound: The Liminal Space of the Japanese “Sound Version”’, in Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Japanese Cinema (London: Routledge, 2021), 213–230. For a brief discussion of the original, now presumably lost, talking sequence in the British production A Cottage on Dartmoor (dir. Anthony Asquith, 1929) see Laraine Porter, ‘The Talkies Come to Britain: British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound, 1928–30’, in I. Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter, and Justin Smith (eds.), The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History (London: Routledge 2017), 87–98.

11 Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 172.

12 Steve J. Wurtzler, Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 247–250.

13 Crafton, The Talkies, 174.

14 Irmela Schneider uses the term for aesthetic practices that mix heterogeneous elements in such a way as to keep the original elements perceptible as such. Irmela Schneider, ‘Von der Vielsprachigkeit zur “Kunst der Hybridation”: Diskurse des Hybriden’ in Irmela Schneider and Christian W. Thomsen (eds.), Hybridkultur: Medien, Netze, Künste (Cologne: Wienand, 1997), 13–66. For a different approach, see also Yvonne Spielmann, Hybridkultur (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).

15 Anna Sofia Rossholm, Reproducing Languages, Translating Bodies: Approaches to Speech, Translation and Cultural Identity in Early European Sound Film (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2015), 83–84. Further, one could argue that part-talkies inspire a kind of ‘intermedial reception’ by inducing the spectator to comparatively weigh the medium of silent film in relation to the medium of sound film. I have developed the term of ‘intermedial reception’ with reference to early cinema around 1900, drawing on Charles Musser’s rather casually introduced term of ‘intertextual reception’: Daniel Wiegand, Gebannte Bewegung: Tableaux vivants und früher Film in der Kultur der Moderne (Marburg: Schüren, 2016). See Charles Musser, ‘A Cornucopia of Images: Comparison and Judgment across Theater, Film, and the Visual Arts during the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Nancy Mowll Mathews, Charles Musser, and Marta Braun (eds.), Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910 (Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005), 5–38 and Charles Musser, ‘A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s’, in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 159–180.

16 Michael Slowik, After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 40–86.

17 Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films, 39.

18 ‘Der erste Tonfilm’, in Berliner Börsen-Courier, no. 254 (04.06.1929). Quoted in Herbert Ihering: Filmkritiker (München: Edition Text + Kritik, 2011), 133. In the USA, The Singing Fool was a follow-up to The Jazz Singer (dir. Alan Crosland, 1927), another part-talkie with some songs and only a few talking sequences. The Singing Fool contained significantly more talking scenes than its predecessor. In Germany, it was one of the first sound films screened at all, and it contributed significantly to the growing euphoria about the media change.

19 ‘Die große Premiere im Picadilly in London: Die Arche Noah’, in Der Film (23.03.1929).

20 ‘Betitelung von Tonfilmen’ in Film-Kurier (21.06.1929). Quoted in Wolfgang Jacobsen, Karl Prümm, and Benno Wenz, Willy Haas: Der Kritiker als Mitproduzent: Texte zum Film 1920–1933 (Berlin: Hentrich, 1991), 218.

21 Ibid., 218.

22 Béla Balázs, ‘Das Tonfilm-Manuskript’ in ibid., Schriften zum Film, Vol. 2: ‘Der Geist des Films’: Artikel und Aufsätze 1926–1931 (Munich: Hanser, 1984), 253.

23 For some positive statements by US sound film pioneer Lee DeForest, see Wurtzler, Electric Sounds, 242–243.

24 Hans Wollenberg: ‘Filmbesprechung: Das Land ohne Frauen’ in Lichtbild-Bühne (01.10.1929).

25 Felix Henseleit, ‘Das Land ohne Frauen: Der erste deutsche Großtonfilm im Capitol’, in Reichsfilmblatt (05.10.1929), 15.

26 The film featured the popular boxer Max Schmeling. It was also released in a silent version that is still available today. Whether a copy of the sound version has survived is not known.

27 Deutsche Film-Zeitung (04.04.1930), 9.

28 Deutsche Film-Zeitung (13.12.1929), 6.

29 See Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 13–19. Spadoni takes the concept of the ‘medium sensitive viewer’ from Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (London: Routledge, 1994).

30 Crafton, The Talkies, 177–179.

31 See e.g. Jan-Christopher Horak, ‘Prometheus Film Collective (1925–1932): German communist Kinokultur, pt.1’, in Jump Cut, no. 26 (December 1981): 39–41; Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 85–103.

32 The film shares this concern with another notable leftist part-talkie from the same year, produced in Switzerland in collaboration with Soviet filmmakers Eduatd Tissé, Sergej Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov: Frauennot – Frauenglück (Misery and Fortune of Women) (dir. Eduard Tissé, 1930).

33 See also the censorship records and other bonus materials contained on the DVD edition by Filmmuseum Potsdam. Guido Altendorf (ed.), Cyankali: Filme von Hans Tintner und Jurij Kramer (Berlin: absolut Medien, 2016). The film was eventually banned by the Nazis in 1933.

34 The dialogue in the talking scene is mostly based on the original intertitles as documented in the censorship files. However, there are three crucial changes: in the talking version, the two prisoners are brought into the room at a later point; the explicit reference to §218 by the investigating officer was removed (even though the censors hadn’t objected to it; only the word ‘severe’ in front of ‘prison sentence’ had to be removed, likely because it was seen as tendentious); and the confession no longer comes from the mother herself but from the neighbour. We can only speculate about the reasons for these changes. The reshot talking sequence also had to be edited afterwards: the inspector’s line ‘I hereby declare you under arrest’ had to be cut because it supposedly presented the work of the police in a negative light (in the surviving version, the cut creates a noticeable ‘jump’ on the soundtrack).

35 Quoted in the booklet of the DVD edition.

36 The analysis here is based on a copy from the German Federal Archive that was released on DVD (Altendorf 2016). The length of this print (2458 m) does not match any of the information in surviving censorship records. It is therefore likely that the copy was compiled from several different censored versions. Further, about 30 minutes of the original soundtrack are lost (on the DVD, music from other parts of the film was added to these scenes). However, based on the information in the censorship files, we can assume that the scenes analysed here largely correspond to the final cut from September 1930.

37 The song of the ‘Gardener’s Wife’ exists in several versions with differing lyrics and is known under several titles. It tells the story of a woman who has betrayed her lover and thus breaks into tears upon his return.

38 Ursula von Keitz, Im Schatten des Gesetzes: Schwangerschaftskonflikt und Reproduktion im deutschsprachigen Film 1918 bis 1933 (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), 344.

39 Film-Journal. Quoted in an advertisement in Film-Kurier (31.05.1930).

40 The soundtrack of this scene is lost. The passage here refers to the scene in which Hete is treated by the abortionist Frau Heye.

41 Petition to the Film Review Office Berlin (07.08.1930), 9–10. Quoted in Altendorf 2016.

42 Petition to the Film Review Office Berlin (18.11.1930), 5. Quoted in ibid.

43 Decree of the Film Review Office Berlin (12.12.1930), 3. Quoted in ibid.

44 Decree of the Film Review Office Berlin (12.12.1930), 3. Quoted in ibid.

45 Film-Journal. Quoted in an advertisement in Film-Kurier (31.05.1930). Similarly, an article on the launch of film production company Atlantis in Der Film (published on the same day as a review of Cyankali) mentioned the company’s “artistic idiosyncracy that wants to break away from the routine of sound film by using dialogue only when it is dramaturgically necessary” (“Erfolgreicher Start der Atlantis”, in: Der Film (24.05.1930)). Another reviewer in Film-Kurier saw the silent film aesthetic of Cyankali as a form of resistance against commercial tendencies that he/she associated with the emergence of sound film; at the same time, he/she lauded Hete’s intense and “accusing” screams (Film-Kurier, 24.05.1930). An exception was film critic Kurt London’s sentiment that the use of additional sound effects in this film was “naïve” and that the mix of audible dialogue and intertitles had no artistic justification, but even he thought that the “attempt at an intensified expression through the use of dialogue only at dramatic high points is interesting in principle” (Der Film, 24.05.1930).

46 The inspector’s statement regarding the arrest was cut at the censors’ request. In late 1930, during the debate on the film’s ban, one topic of discussion was whether viewers would still understand the intent of arrest.

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Daniel Wiegand

Daniel Wiegand is an assistant professor in the Department of Film Studies at University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research on silent cinema and early sound film has been published in journals such as Montage AV and in the proceedings of the Domitor conferences. He was a postdoc researcher at Stockholm University (Sweden) and Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France). His PhD thesis on early cinema has been published as Gebannte Bewegung: Tableaux vivants und früher Film in der Kultur der Moderne. Other book publications include Film Bild Kunst: Visuelle Ästhetik im vorklassischen Stummfilm (edited with Jörg Schweinitz).