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Film & Media, Music O 'B MOVIES r ie , n SONGS How did the introduction of recorded music affect the production, viewing experience, , and global export of movies? In Movies, Songs, and Electric Sound, Charles O’Brien examines American and European musical films created circa 1930, when the world’s and sound-equipped theaters screened movies featuring recorded songs and filmmakers ELECTRIC in the United States and Europe struggled to meet the artistic and technical challenges M of sound production and distribution. The presence of singers in films exerted special O pressures on film technique, lending a distinct look and sound to the films’ musical SOUND V sequences. Rather than advancing a film’s plot, songs in these films were staged, I E filmed, and cut to facilitate the singer’s engagement with her or his public. Through S , an examination of the export market for sound films in the early 1930s, when German S O and American companies used musical films as a vehicle for competing to control the N world film trade, this book delineates a new transnational context for understanding G the Hollywood musical. Combining archival research with the cinemetric analysis S of hundreds of American, German, French, and British films made between 1927 , a n and 1934, O’Brien provides the historical context necessary for making sense of the E d aesthetic impact of changes in film technology from the past to the present. L E C T R Charles O’Brien is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. He is I C author of Cinema’s Conversion to Sound: Technology and Film Style in France and the U.S. S O U N D COVER IMAGE: Marlene Dietrich slaying the audience in Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), 1930. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Centre for Film and Theatre Research, University of Wisconsin–Madison. TRANSATLANTIC TRENDS iupress.indiana.edu Charles O'Brien PRESS MOVIES, SONGS, AND ELECTRIC SOUND M OV IE S, SONGS, A N D ELEC TR I C SO U N D Transatlantic Trends Charles O’Brien IndIana UnIversIty Press This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2019 by Charles O’Brien All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-253-04039-8 (hdbk.) ISBN 978-0-253-04040-4 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-253-04042-8 (web PDF) 1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19 This book is dedicated to the memory of Samnang Thary O’Brien CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Movies and Songs in Transition 18 2 Electric Sound as New Medium 46 3 Voices and Bodies, Direct and Dubbed 64 4 Film Editing after Electric Sound 89 5 American Film Songs, Inside the Films and Out 118 6 Musical Films Made in Germany 142 Conclusion: Songs in Cinema, from Electric to Digital 164 Appendix A: Methods of Measurement 173 Appendix B: Samples and Tests 185 Bibliography 189 Index 207 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Finishing this book took a long time, which means that there are a lot of people to thank and the risk that an important name will be left out. I’ll begin at the beginning with Hans-Michael Bock, Francesco Pitas- sio, Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Vichi, and others behind the Gradisca Spring School from 2003 through 2005, when the school’s focus was on the multiple-version films of the early 1930s. The viewing of archival prints of rare films, along with participation in workshops and conversations with Horst Claus, Nataša Ďurovičová, Joseph Garncarz, Malte Hagener, Anne Jäckel, Ivan Klimeš, Anna Sofia Rossholm, Petr Szczepanik, Chris Wahl, and others, led me to want to write a book on the period’s musical films. Special thanks to Hans-Michael for encouraging my work on German cinema by inviting me to Hamburg to give a talk at the CineGraph conference in 2005. An initial draft of this book was completed while I was senior fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, DC (2006–7). What a great place. Thanks to directors Elisabeth Cropper, Peter Lukehart, and Therese O’Malley, along with that year’s community of fel- lows, for providing a stimulating and collegial research environment. Crucial support for the project came from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which helped fund archival research con- ducted in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and London at the following libraries and archives: the Library of Congress, the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the UCLA Film and Televi- sion Archive, the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Ber- lin, the Deutsche Kinemathek, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque du film in Paris, the British Film Institute, and the British Library. Special gratitude to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and the Deutsche Kinemathek for permission to use photos from their fabulous collections. Research related to this book was presented at conferences sponsored by the following scholarly societies: the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2008, 2014, 2015), the Society for Cognitive Studies in the Moving ix