But low-frequency military technology also had
consequences
for entertainment electronics.
Kittler-Friedrich-Optical-Media-pdf
(Zglinicki, 1979, p.
394)
Nothing more carne of Ludendorff's strategic goal - a happy ending to the war - even though Junger's world war novels rave about pre- cisely such a resolution. However, the tactical goal of the Supreme Army Command was achieved. Without the state being recognized as the string puller, two apparently private institutions - the Deutsche Bank and the gramophone company Lindstrom, where Kafka's eternal fiancee Felice Bauer had risen np the ranks from typist to authorized representative - created a company out of various private
183
? ? aPTICAL MEDIA
German and Danish film companies, whICh they named "Umversal Film AG" or UFA for short. The military industrial complex thus per- formed its own metamorphosIs: BUFA, a branch of the general staff, became UFA, a large-scale industrial film company that appeared to be privately owned on paper, yet was at the same time always half state-owned. UFA continued to produce war and peace propaganda in Babelsberg just south of Berlin until March 1945, when Marshal Zhukov's last offensive at dawn at the Oder front began to blmd the remaining German defenses witb antI-aircraft spotlIghts (a tactIC reminiscent of the Russo-Japanese War). But even after the Red Army marched into Babelsberg, UFA only needed to change two more letters in its name to start producll1g film propaganda for the German Democratic Republic as DEFA. That is how long-lived or lifeless the power of the state is . . .
So much for propaganda or the face of a war that did not end until November 1989. The history of propaganda, which we have traced from a papal institution in 1662 to a military agency in 1917, still does not deal with the real problem of war and cinema. The fact that it was ever necessary to entertain soldiers in their dugouts or influence neutral countries in their indecision is only a negative and therefore indirect way of saying that modern wars are no longer visually reproducible. At the same historical moment when film made the motion of a bullet in flight visible, no matter how fast it was going, the technologies that had made film itself possible in the first place disappeared into strategic invisibility. It was the machine gun, this generalization of Colt's revolver, which imposed this invisibility dUl'ing World War I. This serial killing machine, which had originally been developed and employed only against reds, blacks, and yellows, now turned on its white inventors. Due to the danger of being imme- diately shot in the head, soldiers were forced to disappear under cam- ouflage and into trenches, and they no longer saw anything between the fronts except for their piece of sky and possibly hallucinations of a Madonna or pin-up figure. The epoch of silent film thus comprised not only millions of spectators, but also millions of invisible people. A world war that demanded worldwide and thus analphabetic and thus silent film propaganda, had no propaganda material to offer at all. To film its material battles, one would also have to be able to film white noise.
This fact frustrated Griffith, the most famous American director of his time. He landed in Europe, planned one of his crowd scene propaganda films, went to the trenches, and saw that the battle- fields were empty (Virilio, 1989, pp. 14-15). So Griffith then built a
184
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
gIgantIc studio wIth gIgantIc but perfectly filmable trenches and simu- lated a world war as if national or civil wars were still the order of the day. From the very outset, the fictional battle scenes Griffith recorded from the obsolete panoramic perspective of a field com- mander laid themselves open to the jndgment of Schlieffen, who had already prophesied in 1909 as chief of staff of the imperial German army that there is nothing more to see in contemporary wars: the front had become vast and mcalculable, and for security reasons field commanders had already had to exchange their hill for a bunker.
In Germany, the sltnatton was much the same for the Berlin entre- preneur and film director Oskar Messter,8 an "old master of cinema technology" as ZglmickI so old-masterfully describes him. Messter came to film as the son of a precision mechanic and optician, who had constrncted (entirely in our sense of the words) electrical spotlight installations for military parades and theaters. Messter himself began mannfacturing the newly invented X-ray equipment for invisible light that was beyond even ultraviolet. After becoming acquainted with the Lumiere apparatus, Messter proceeded to set np a German film industry and an artificial light workshop, acquired 70 patents, and founded various firms that were ready to go into production, which all merged into UFA in 1918. While it was normal in the age of silent film to record films at horribly slow speeds and then project them in the cinema at much faster speeds to save time, Messter fonght for a standard frame rate of 24 hertz for recording as well as playback, which sound film was then supposed to enforce (Zglinicki, 1979, pp. 256-66).
Oskar Messter's film company became historically significant when World War I broke out, as Messter's various firms were made into snbdivisions of BUFA. Their rather monopolistic orders from the gov- ernment were to film newsreels of the war front and then project them on the home front to boost the morale of workers and the wounded. This order led to similar difficulties as Griffith had experiences. Even though there was nothing to see or film in the trenches, the military prohibited shooting on location simply because they did not want to supply the enemy with free intelligence reconnaissance. Like Griffith,
therefore, Messter's newsreels had to simulate battle scenes at the base, which unfortnnately lacked the desired propaganda effect. As a military hospital chief wrote to Ludendorff, "watching the German war newsreels has an important medicinal effect on the wounded.
8 In the original German text, Kittler incorrectly refers to Oskar Messter as "Oskar Meester. "
185
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
These gentlemen tell me that they have never heard such thunderous laughter as when those cinematographic images from the trenches and 'from the front' are shown - but laughter is an important remedy" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 390).
Unlike Griffith, however, Messter learned a lesson about experi- mental film from this propaganda film disaster. If the trenches simply could not be perceived optically and were also not permitted to be perceived militarily, the only remaining path for film was the vertical path. With the failure of Schlieffen's plan at the battle of the Marne, French Marshal Joffre led a successful counter-strike in August 1914 on the basis of photographic records made bv reconnaissance air- craft. After this battle, when the enemy armies disappeared into their trenches, the need for air reconnaissance became even more pressing. A few photographic and film records from the vertical could disclose invisible soldiers, camouflaged artillery positions, and unnoticed rear- ward connections to the enemy. For this reason, the reconnaissance pilots of World War I represented the origin of all air forces long before bombers and fighters.
In order to help German reconnaissance pilots, Messter constructed his patented "target practice device for the detection of deviations by means of photographic records" (German Reich Patent Office, Patent Specification No. 309108, Class 72 f, Group 7, July 18, 1916). According to the patent, this device was placed in the exact position of the machine gun in a fighter plane, with the aim of helping to monitor the precision of the machine gunners in real time for each individual shot. As Messter put it so beautifully, he employed "a cin- ematographic recording apparatus whose running gear was propelled by clockwork and whose visual field carries crosshairs, whereby a targeting set-up like that of the machine gun is to be arranged paral- lel to the visual axis. " As you can see, the structural correspondence
between perspective and ballistics became a technological reality by World War I at the latest. Messter's ingenious construction, which photographed at least 7. 2 million square kilometers of combat area using millions of kilometers of roll film' (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 273), could only be improved by combining shooting and filming, serial death and serial photography, into a single act. This was accom- plished by a French reconnaissance pilot who relocated the visual and ballistic axis of both the machine gun and the camera to the axis of the propeller (Virilio, 1989, p. 18).
9 Kittler misquotes Zglinicki when he says that "millions of kilometers" of film were used in World War I. Zglinicki's actual figure was only 950,000 km,
186
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
This coupling also took place in Germany. Guido Seeber, who built the Babelsberg studios in 1911 and filmed The Student of Prague there in 1913, was drafted two years later in 1915 and sent to the experimental seaplane station in Warnemiinde (not to say Peen- emiinde). There, he established at the same time a central educational film and photography hire service. Their first successful scientific film showed with the help of X-ray photography that countless airplane crashes were caused by lead balls built into the wooden propellers for balance; at high speeds these balls fly out and smash through the airplanes like bullets.
In a positive inversion of this negative test result, so to speak, Seeber also constructed a machine gun sight for fighter planes, which was supposed to optimize the machine gun firing rate. And just like the French reconnaissance pilot, Seeber combined this machine gun sight with a small film camera, which also shot film frames whenever the machine gun fired.
Strategically, therefore, filming and flying coincide. McLuhan sums this up succinctly in Understanding Media: "It was the photograph that revealed the secret of bird-flight and enabled man to take off" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 174). There was a reason why Marey had also studied the movements of bird wings and why photographers like Nadar had taken pictures from hot-air ballooons and passionately fought against zeppelins, supporting instead bird-like - or "heavier than air," as it was called at that time - plane constructions. Gabriele D'Annunzio, the decadent novelist and fighter pilot, already dem- onstrated in 1909 to a woman sitting next to him on an airplane that by approaching from the air the cathedrals and castles of Italy could be magnified or reduced by any amount and thus also visu- ally destroyed. This discovery, just before the outbreak of the First World War, which D'Annunzio himself only turned into a novel, also unleashed the tracking shots of the first world-famous period film Cabiria, which D'Annunzio contributed to as adviser and allegedly also screenwriter. During the war, his flight squadron "La Serenis- sima" proceeded to fly from Venice across the Alps (which was quite dangerous at that time) to mount an attack on Vienna. These attacks did not consist of bombs, as D'Annunzio explained to the Viennese on propaganda flyers dropped on the city, but rather the Austrians were permitted to remain alive so that they would be able to over- throw their emperor more effectively.
Historians only later recognized that the Viennese-Venetian air war scenario had already been attempted half a century before D'Annunzio, only I I I reverse. You will recall that Field Marshal
187
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Lieutenant Baron von Uchatius started projecting stroboscope draw- ings in 1841, and somewhat later he also began manufacturing explo- sive Uchatius powder. In 1849, after a civil revolution that also promised freedom to the Italian and especially the Venetian subjects of Austria-Hungary, an Austrian General based in Mestre besieged the rebellious Venetian republic of Serenissima. To the general's chagrin, it appeared that Venice's lagoon prevented it from being captured or even fired on by the artillery. That is, until Uchatius and his brother, two artillery lieutenants from Vienna, then made the world-historical suggestion of attacking from the air: bombs "were to be carried over the city in hot-air-filled balloons made of paper, which would be made to rise if wind conditions were favorable. Prior to being released from the balloon, the 30 pound bomb was supposed to be set [with a time fuse] according to the strength of the wind at that moment. If everything went according to plan, therefore, the impact of the explosives had to take place ronghly where it was expected," becanse the "range" of the bombs "far exceeded the range of artillery at that time" (Knrzel-Runtscheiner, 1937, p. 48). The wind actually very rarely helped, bnt between June and July 1849 a few of the 110 Uchatins bombs manufactured in Vienna did indeed explode over the astonished Venetians. A field marshal lieutenant, who invented cinematic projection, thus also had to invent the projection or throw- ing of projectiles.
Once these bombs or later planes were manned, the cinematic high-angle shot was born. So World War I not only produced the new professions of reconnaissance and bomber pilots, bnt also a new kind of film director. These directors had all previously been fighter pilots, and on the basis of their technologically altered visual perception they also revolntionized the entertainment medium of film. Jean Renoir, the director of Grand Illusion, was a fighter pilot, just like Howard Hawks, who filmed his war memories in 1930 as Dawn Patrol. The clearest example of this nexus between air combat and cinema, however, was Dziga Vertov, the Soviet director, film theorist and above all Lenin's propaganda conductor. Vertov's so-called "rules" for experimental film, which cancelled out all bourgeois infatuation with images, began first with a "General instruction for all tech- niques: the invisible camera. " Eight individual points then followed. No. 1 was: "Filming unawares - an old military rule: gauging speed, attack. " No. 6: "Filming at a distance. " No. 7: "Filming in motion. " And finally No. 8: "Filming from above" (Vertov, 1984, pp. 162-3).
So much for Vertov's combat rules as general staff officer - and now, in a free adaptation of Ernst Junger, the aerial combat film as
188
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
mner expenence of a Vertov demoted to become his own front-line soldier:
I am the camera's eye. I am the machine which shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today, I am forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. r. . . ] I approach and draw away from things - I crawl under them - I climb on them - Jam on the head of a galloping horse - I burst at full speed ioto a crowd - I run before running soldiers - I throw myself down on my back - I rise up with the aeropianes - I fall and 1 fly at one with the bodies falling or rising through the air. (Virilio, 1989, p. 20)
In other words, the experimental and entertainment films made with a camera that was no longer only mobile, like Griffith's, but also truly unleashed through tracking shots, simply converted the perceptual world of World War I into mass entertainment. The same thing also happened incidentally in the new media art form known as the radio play, which European civilian radio developed in 1924. And because the war dead returned as an acoustic barrage in postwar radio plays and optical air combat in postwar films, the large cinema palaces between Hollywood and Berlin were also constructed like giant mau- soleums. After the European monarchies fell and the old conspiracy between state and church propaganda disintegrated, these cinema palaces became churches of state propaganda that no longer praised a king by the grace of God, but rather (to adapt Lenin freely) war technology and electrification (Virilio, 1989, p. 28).
But it seems to be a law of media history (at least for Berliners) that new applications are secondary compared to new circuit technology. The lessons that film directors learned from World War I pale before the lessons learned by electrical engineers.
The lesson was that film could stop being silent. The technologies of World War I led to sound film, which leads us to the next chapter of these lectures.
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
The history of sound film has to begin with the assertion that silent film was never silent. Edison had already designed a link between the kinetoscope and the phonograph, which could have been built at a pinch despite problems with sound recording from a distance and synchronization. Many hobbyists and tinkerers followed Edison's lead and attempted to couple a half-mechanical, half-electrical optics
189
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
with a purely mechanical acoustics prior to World War I, but without any appreciable results. There were also experiments that attempted to connect silent film and electromagnetic sound recording, namely Poulsen's telegraphone. Although these experiments did not yield any concrete snccesses, they were theoretically significant because they established the principle of magnetic audiotape, which was ready to go into production during World War II. With the audiotape and the cassette, sound recording acquired for the first time the same material format as film: as a roll that allowed variable time axis manipulation, unlike the phonograph and the gramophone. Not only are time rever- sals possible, as with Edison, but also stop tricks, cuts, and montages, as with Melies. The simple manipulable acoustics of audiotape led to rock music, as you know, which could then in tum be coupled with manipulable videotapes, and the video clip was born.
But for us, those are all still musical dreams of the future. In the non-experimental everyday lives of people prior to 1929, silent film was never silent simply because films were never presented without some form of accompaniment. The cheapest form was the film explainer, who was often recruited (as we can gather from contem- porary adverts) from among the academic proletariat, and who would explain the plot of the film to the spectators while it was playing. Cinemagoers, who had always already been listeners and readers, needed training in the new semiotics of film, which essentially con- sisted of cuts and montages and thus empty spaces. Kurt Pinthus' Das Kinobuch (The Cinema Book), which was published by the expression- ist in 1913 and is full of screenplay proposals by his novelist friends, shows what an intellectual step it was to demand films suitable to the medium - film plots, in other words, that were intelligible based on image sequences alone without any intertitles or film explainers. But this I'art pour I'art of silent film had not been commercially successful. More expensive forms of sound accompaniment saw to that: music either from records or living musicians, who often also had the honor of generating theatrical sound effects fitted to the scene in addition to sounds on the piano. As a synthesis of two contradictory elements, Greek atmosphere and media-technical noise, Richard Wagner in particular triumphed in the cinema. Wagner not only invented the darkening of the auditorium, but also a kind of music that was itself noise. Printed piano score excerpts from Wagner's works, such as
Liebestod and The Ride of the Valkyries, accompanied films long before Apocalypse Now, where The Ride of the Valkyries was no longer shown as a lanterna magica effect, as it was in Wagner's opera in 1876, but rather as a helicopter attack in the Vietnam War.
190
? OPTiCAL MEDIA
This brings us back to war and its innovations. In a word: World War I transformed Edison's simple light bulb into the electron tube, which made the live musical accompaniment of silent films obsolete. I am interested in the historical development of this technical wonder because the tube allowed for the possibility of synchronized film soundtracks and television up to the present day. It was not replaced until the development of contemporary LCD displays and other semi- conductor technologies.
The electron tube, as I said, emerged from Edison's simple light bulb, which allows me to bring the history of lighting to a close. Edison had methodically searched for a cheap and safe light - so methodically that he brought every conceivable type of tropical wood to his laboratory asa possible filament for his bulb. The acciden- tal combination, on which Daguerre had still subsisted, was thus systematically eradicated. Edison would have been able to electrify America after a couple years of research if a considerably more pow- erful competitor named Westinghouse had not replaced his direct current system with an alternating current system. On the other hand, Edison's discovery that light bulbs also work as electron tubes, as they emit ions under electrical voltage, was made entirely in passing. He was also unable to do anything more than have this so-called "Edison effect" named after him simply because he knew nothing about theoretical physics.
For this reason, a physics professor at the new and very modern Reichsuniversitiit in Strasbourg named Ferdinand Braun was the first to discover a possible application of the Edison effect in 1897. He deflected the electron beam inside the tube with electromagnets, which were in turn attached to the general alternating voltage of the Strasbourg power grid, and sent it to a phosphorescent screen. The controlled beam - the last and most precise variant of the actively armed eye - then inscribed the visible graphic sine wave of an alter- nating power supply on the screen. Braun had invented the oscil- loscope. When his assistants later suggested to him that the electron beam should project beautiful images rather than mathematical func- tions, Braun rejected this first notion of television receiver tubes. He was "personally surprised" that Westinghouse's alternating power grid had not generated any ugly jagged peaks or rectangles, but rather an "ideal sine wave" (Kurylo, 1965, p. 137). Oscillograph means "vibration writer," and it is therefore the electronically per- fected variant of all the movement writers, from Scott to Marey, that led to the writing of sounds and images. You will notice that the television played back equations rather than film characters when
191
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
it first began with Ferdinand Braun. It will possIbly do so again at the end.
Braun's tube was not crucial for film and radio tecbnology, however, but rather another tube variant: the so-called triode. Lee de Forest in Palo Alto and Robert von Lieben in Vienna simultaneously conceived the idea of building tubes out of two electrical circuits, one controlling and the other controlled. Two mputs were needed along with a general ground return, and it was therefore called a triode or three-way in the artificial Greek of technology. According to Pynchon's brilliant commentary, this separation of control circuit and output circuit in 1906 solved a fundamental problem of the twentieth century: that of control. Triodes were actually more bulky, they were more sensitive to heat, and they required more voltage than the transistors that have replaced them since 1947, but they were also unbeatably economical. In other words, a variably small control current, which assumed the function of Braun's electromagnets, could switch variably large output currents on or off, thus amplifying or weakening it. Thus, the electron tube first decoupled the concept of power from that of physical effort. But because power does not simply have negative effects, according to Foucault's thesis, the tube is also economically still insufficiently described. Immediately before the outbreak of World War I, de Forest discovered for the allies and Alexander Meillner for the central powers that tubes not only amplify but also provide a new type of power called feedback. When the output current of a triode is steered in the opposite direction of the control grid - when a voltage decrease in the first circuit thus corre- sponds to a voltage increase in the second circuit - negative feedback can be generated by leading the output signal, which for physical reasons is always delayed for fractions of a microsecond, back to the control circuit. The entire feedback system begins to oscillate between the minimum and maximum voltage without breaking up the oscilla- tion. In other words, it becomes a high-frequency transmitter, which must then only be coupled with a low-frequency amplifying tube
in order to send radio or television signals. In the first step, after they are converted to electricity, the acoustic or optical data signals are variably increased through low-frequency amplification. In the second step, the data signals become transmissible without wires over variable distances by modulating them on a high carrier frequency.
As the basic circuit of microphones and radio transmitters, this was already clear in 1913. But World War I provided new applications for the technology and the means for its mass production. Trenches brought an end to the possibility of commanding soldiers from a
192
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
distance through optical or acoustic signals, yet this was precisely why a need for electronic feedback between invisible fronts and equally invisible control centers emerged. The first radio transmitters only served to entertain radio operators with music in exceptional cases, and eventually this was officially forbidden as a "misuse of army equipment. " But to a greater degree they were used to manu- facture feedback loops between ground personnel and reconnaissance flyers, who were told over the radio which enemy objects were invis- ible from the ground and still needed to be photographed or filmed.
This high-frequency military technology led to the worldwide explosion of electronics companies. Five years later, and again through the misuse of army equipment, the national radio institu- tions of Europe and the commercial stations of the USA emerged, and this was followed a decade later by the first television transmitter.
But low-frequency military technology also had consequences for entertainment electronics. The triumph of amplifier tubes allowed electronics companies to revolutionize Edison's and Berliner's old- fashioned mechanical sound recording technology. AT&T in the USA and Siemens & Halske in Germany wired a record player with a pick-up and electrically controlled speakers. This also resolved the problem that Edison's sound recording system failed to remedy in the Black Mary studio. The trumpet of the phonograph worked only when it was held directly in front of the actors' mouths, and it could thus embarrassingly be seen in the film that was being made at the same time. Tube amplifiers first made media acoustics into a sixth sense that could match up to the sixth sense called the camera.
Sound film was developed simultaneously in Germany and in the USA immediately after World War I, but it is completely senseless, at least on the American side, to list the individual inventors by name. It is enongh to know that Warner Brothers was in serious financial trouble compared to the competition, and for this reason they reached for the life saver of sound film. The leading American electronics laboratory, AT&T's Bell Labs, gave the technically clue- less Sam Warner a hand. After the record had been electrified, AT&T was also able to offer Warner Brothers a special model: a huge record that could be synchronized with the silent film and broadcast in the cinema hall using an amplifier and loudspeaker. This vitaphone system was and remained a patent of Western Electric.
For this reason, it was useless to interpret or explain films any more. Becanse the content of a medinm is always another medium, sonnd films simply enhanced the reputation of the electronics compa- nies that had made them possible. The first sound film in 1929 was
193
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
not called The Jazz Singer by chance. A Jewish ex-chOIrboy, who had sung with religious wise men in synagogues in New York as a child, defects to the American media after puberty and becomes a jazz singer (at least that is what white people called it in 1929). It breaks the heart of his pious father, who had not yet been disabused of his Mosaic faith by the melting pot of New York. The jazz singer is in the middle of a concert when he receives the news that his father is dying - let us say of heart failure - and he strikes up an old Jewish song that brings the entire audience to tears. Let us rather say: the recently electrified record companies, which are on the hunt behind the backs of all concert-goers, have a new hit in record sales. The Jazz Singer implies, therefore, that with the introduction of sound film Hollywood became a branch of electrical companies like Western Electric or General Electric, which possessed both record companies and radio stations at the same time and which, in turn, were only branches of large banks like Rockefeller or Morgan (Faulstich, 1979, p. 160).
In Germany, the development of sound film proceeded more sys- tematically and on a much smaller scale. After losing the war, there was hardly any money, and instead demobilized army radio equip- ment stood around everywhere in 1919. In only four years, the signal corps had increased from 3,000 to almost 300,000 men. But even with misused army equipment, it was still possible to develop the very first sound film system without the use of records.
The developers of this wondrous work called it Tri-Ergon, which seems reminiscent of the triode tube but was actually intended to combine the names of the three developers - Hans Vogt, Joseph Masolle, and Dr. Joseph Engl - into a single anonymous "work of three. " Luckily Vogt, the main player, left his memories to the German Museum in Munich. His "first contact with silent film" took place in 1905, when he was a 1S-year-old peasant boy and he saw documentary films from the ongoing Russo-Japanese war in the cin- ematograph. "Eight years later," when he was already serving in the imperial navy at the experimental radiotelegraphy station in Kiel, the German auteur film had replaced the documentary cinematograph. Vogt enjoyed the "beautiful, highly dramatic" film The Student of Prague, as Evers and Seeber had just filmed it. However, there were two things that disturbed the young radio technician, who had been entrusted with the latest AEG tubes: "in close-ups, the lips of the actors moved like ghosts," and "the comments of the explainer ruined the atmosphere" (Vogt, 1964, p. 7). As is usual with autobiog- raphies, Vogt claims that he would have immediately invented a new
194
? OPTICAL MEDIA
media system If only World War I had not broken out. Four years later, partly at the front and partly at the high-frequency laboratory of a certam Dr. Seibt in Berlin, Vogt took part in the ether war:
Soon I was active on the water, air, and earth fronts, soon again in the Berlin laboratory. A medium for communicating with buried trenches had to be created and tested. Radio direction finders and radio stations for the weather contingent zeppelins. The sad end of the war came. (Vogt, 1964, p. 7)
Vogt overcame this sadness while unemployed in postwar Berlin by once again returning to his film idea. With world war technology and know-how, it must have been possible to combine both of the media of the pre-war period - moving images without sound and constant noise without image - into the multimedia system of sound film. For this reason, the first thing that the Tri-Ergon people did was to establish technical specifications with systematic clarity:
We take the following principles as the basis of our work:
1. The same film that carries the image must also serve as a sound carrier.
2. The sound must be recorded and reproduced through photo-
graphic processes.
3. All of the equipment necessary for sound recording, amplifica-
tion, transmission, storage, reproduction and playback are not
permitted to deform the original sound print. (Vogt, 1964, p. 11)
The most difficult part of this project was naturally amplification. Sound signals are initially so weak that at best they can make a hog's bristle vibrate, like Scott's phonautograph. Accordingly, the Tri-Ergon people first had to develop a tube amplifier that reacted "with a repro- ducible steepness of approximately six milliamperes of anode current change per volt of grid voltage change" (Vogt, 1964, p. 16). It turned out that a very similar tube amplifier had already been developed at Siemens by the great Dr. Schottky, to whom today's transistor tech- nology owes all Schottky diodes. Patent rights thus no longer applied, but the Tri-Ergon people had still resolved their fundamental problem.
Only Tri-Ergon had now become a system project comparable perhaps only to Edison's electrification of theaters, streets, and resi- dential homes. It could no longer be managed through individual inventions, but rather it required an entire chain reaction of new developments. After the solution of the amplifier problem, there
195
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
was still the task on both the transmItter and the receiver side of transforming an acoustic signal into an optical signal that would be compatible with the filmstrip. Vogt, Massolle, and Engl solved this problem in a way that already prefigures the merging of sound and television technologies: because electricity had become the medium of all possible media or sensory channels, the sound signal could first be converted into current through a newly developed, highly sensi- tive, and inertia-free microphone, whose noise had been minimized compared to the old carbon button microphone. This current, which was still amplified by the new tube, then regulated a glow-discharge lamp, whose oscillations were visible and thus filmable when they were in the high-frequency range of up to 100 kHz (Vogt, 1964, p. 20). Despite their name, therefore, soundtracks are not sounds at all, but rather they are varyingly bright and varyingly wide images of the vibrations that sounds or noises physically are, which makes them extremely close to the Braunian tube.
And because the receiver side of a media system - according to Shannon's information theory - implements the inverse mathemati- cal function of the transmitter side, the three Tri-Ergon developers constructed a selenium cell for their film projectors, which was also crucial for television. Selenium cells converted light into electricity again, which then in turn only had to be converted to the cinema sound system - and this was the historical reason why sound film engineers also included a few early television engineers, like Mihaly or Karolus. Vogt, Massolle, and Engl completed their technical speci- fications most elegantly: namely, they built the first electrostatic loud- speaker, which at that time conld fill the entire cinema with sound and which is still ideal for headphones and stereos today. With this static loudspeaker, Edison's entire mechanics of sound storage was replaced by an electronic control.
So far, so good. Tri-Ergon had done its work and integrated an entire chain of new developments into a single media system. On February 22, 1920, the sound of a harmonica and the noteworthy word "milliampere" could be heard in a playing film for the first time (Vogt, 1964, p. 37). One year later, shortly after midnight, this contemptible yet wonderful word from the mouth of a technician was replaced with a female speaker "in close-up" reciting the poem Heather Rose by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Vogt, 1964, p. 38). This would have pleased Miinsterberg, who claimed that film techni- cally liquidates all classical-romantic substitute sensuality, such as the virtual reality of that rose, which as you know represents a virgin shortly before her defloration.
. ? . 1
196
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
However, those sorts of successes did not yet make the new multimedia system a commercial success. As the Tri-Ergon people presented their technical Gesamtkunstwerk to the director of a large electrical company, which to my mind could only have been Siemens, their absolutely correct argument was that a systematically developed chain of tube amplifiers, microphones, and loudspeakers could support sound film as well as civilian wireless telephony - in today's words, therefore, entertainment radio. The director's counter- argument was that no listener "would spend good money for some- thing that comes into his house for free like air and light" - in other words, no one would make Siemens happy by paying radio license fees (Vogt, 1964, p. 47).
In September 1922, the silent film industries reacted accordingly to the first public demonstration of sound film. From the viewpoint of their financial area of competence the Berliner Borsenzeitung briefly wrote: "The extent to which talking films are really the future, however, remains to be seen. It should not be forgotten that the talking film loses its internationality, and it must always remain limited to smaller works, as large films are only profitable on the world market" (Vogt, 1964, p. 44).
When Hans Vogt told this counter-argument to his wife, she came up with an idea that led to the Tri-Ergon people's siugle lucrative patent: the Gisela patent. Gisela Vogt proposed, namely, "to over- come speech difficulties in the future by making consecutive record- ings of each sound film scene in the studio in multiple idioms, in the primary cultural languages" (Vogt, 1964, p. 44).
With this new principle of synchronization, which had been con- ceived by a woman, the multimedia system was perfect. By rights, it would have had to wipe ont the cinema equipment that had already been established, but the three amateurs were not able to also finance this mnlti-billion dollar replacement. It was clear that the conver- sion of silent film to sound film was only the first in an entire series of conversions that would turn the existing media system operating worldwide completely inside out without interrupting its efficiency or its finances. The same holds true for television systems or technical wars in general, both in the recent past and in the future.
In the case of sound film, it is easy to predict the outcome of this immense need for capital: as in the USA, the German film industry also fell into the hands of electrical concerns like Siemens and AEG, which got involved in lawsuits with the American patent holders for years until the worldwide marlcets were divided up, as usual, and UFA was taken over by Deutsche Bank and Hugenberg. And one
197
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
fine day, after the inconsequential Tri-Ergon patents had long been sold in Switzerland, an American film giant conceived of the idea of commercially surpassing Warner Brothers and their vitaphone system. William Fox, who had first made money, as I said, with Edison's automatic kinetoscopes, bought the Tri-Ergon patents and converted them into a completely auto-referential form of film publicity: Fox's Movietone talking newsreels, the first sound documentary film.
However, all of the international networks between companies and banks, or between Zurich and Hollywood, could not alter the fact that sound film - in contrast to silent film - does not constitute an international medium. The Gisela patent is and remains a com- promise. As long as people continue to speak American or German, and have thus not yet defected to a worldwide standardized computer language like Algol, C or Ada, sound film will continue to serve as national propaganda in so-called national languages. This is rather inconsequential today, in the age of the computer, as the greatness of film is now a thing of the past and only computer languages still count. But because the English themselves refused at that time to recognize the dialect of Hollywood and California as English (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 612), sound film virtually appeared to form nations, just like the radio of that time. It thus restricted the com- panies of the interwar period to national language borders, which also committed them to the possibility of a second world war. Our film history must therefore turn to this war.
It should be emphasized beforehand that the difficulties of sound film synchronization also have an internal technical-aesthetic aspect. The numerous conversions between sound, image, and electricity that are necessary for this process already indicate that acoustic and optical signals are naturally less compatible. For precisely this reason, sound film was the first model case of a multimedia system long before television - if this term is understood as a system that manufactures not natural or physiological but rather technical con- nections. Sound film thus had to bridge two fundamental differences between optics and acoustics, which can briefly be explained.
First, acoustic signals only depend on a single independent vari- able: time (provided that stereophonic sound effects are disregarded, of course). Every musical signal is the momentary amplitude of a complex yet solitary vibration in time. As moving images, film, and television also depend on time. However, they also depend on two spatial coordinates: the height and width of each individual pixel (apart from 3-D experiments, the third spatial coordinate of depth
198
? OPTICAL MEDIA
can be ignored in the same way that stereophonic sound can be dis- regarded when making sound recordings). A one-dimensional vibra- tion or line is thus adequate for sound recording, whereas optical media principally require two-dimensional signal processing. When calculated by the technical-economic standards of engineers, this means that the amount of information to be processed is raised to tbe second power. For this reason, the image fills almost the entire celluloid of a sound film, whereas a band at the edge of the image is sufficient for the optical soundtrack, which in principle could even
be implemented as a simple line.
Second, the acoustics compensate for this simplicity by functioning,
since Edison's days, as an analog medium. In every given moment, the stored technical signal corresponds to the precise amplitude of the recorded sound signal. Until the introduction of audiotape, as I said before, this continuous image of continuous vibrations made it unimaginable and unfeasible to cut the soundtrack into pieces and then rearrange these clips arbitrarily, as is customary with film montage. According to the Breslau radio play pioneer Friedrich Bischoff, when the first radio play directors received the strange assignment to invent a new art form they in desperation chose the feature film as their specific model. Their quasi-cinematic radio play tricks even included slow dissolves and fades, which the new radio art borrowed from films. On the other hand, abrupt cuts and montages, which Andre Malraux called the operating principle of film, did not find their way into the emerging radio play.
By the same token, film and television are discrete processes that deal with nothing but individual frames or pixels, because optical storage is impossible even today. Even electronic switches work far too slowly to store or process light as the mixture of frequencies that it physically is. As is well known, audible sound ranges from approximately 25 Hz to 16 kHz, and that is why it was so easily conquered by low-frequency technology. Visible light is ten billion times faster and ranges from 700 to 380 terahertz. These are numbers with 14 zeroes, which is roughly 8 zeroes beyond the switching time of today's standard electronics, and therefore no medium could even come close. For this reason, film and television do not store light itself but rather only its photochemical effects (as we have already thoroughly discussed), which can then be stored and played back every twenty-fifth of a second, that is, in the low-frequency range. A compact disc that would sample sound events not at the usual 40,000 times per second but rather as slow as film or television would be a unique disaster for the ears.
199
? ? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
The problems of television and sound film can only be understood on the basis of these physical principles of media technology. The Tri-Ergon process had to be capable of transporting the film images jerkily as a discrete signal, while simultaneously reading the optical soundtrack continuously as an analog signal.
To soften this collision between digital and analog, the Tri-Ergon people developed a new film transport system. Before and after a frame was projected, the celluloid went into a waiting loop, which compensated for the static images during the projection time. Behind the second waiting loop, the film roll continued running the entire time without any interruption, which also made it possible to read the soundtrack as an undisturbed continuum.
The mechanical solution to this problem also had a systematic side. Through millisecond-precise coupling between image and sound, sound film had carried out Messter's standardization proposals for the first time, which means that it had also required an absolutely fixed recording and playback speed for film images. Otherwise, a film star with a soprano voice would have been able to sound like a bass and a film star with a bass voice like a eunuch. You all know
such sound manipulations from tape recorders that run too quickly or too slowly.
In the days of silent film, on the other hand, time loops and time lapses were not technical-experimental exceptions but rather daily practices in order to sell as many meters of celluloid as possible to a paying audience. For the first time, therefore, sound film opened up an absolute difference between experimental films and feature films. Real-time processing of tbe visuals first became genuinely verifiable through the ear and the acoustics. For this reason, sound film was a revolution in film aesthetics.
To begin with, many performing artists became unemployed in the middle of the global economic crisis. In 1929, a flyer with the following headlines in bold print was circulated in German moving picture theaters, as they were still so beautifully called (I have left out the fine print):
To the public!
Attention! Sound film is dangerous!
Sound film is kitsch!
Sound film is economic and spiritual murder!
Sound film is bad conservative theater at higher prices! Therefore:
Demand good silent films!
200
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Demand orchestral accompaniment with musicians! Demand stage exhibitions with artists!
Reject sound film! (quoted in Greve et aI. , 1976, p. 287)
This social-revolutionary pamphlet, written in the style of the Com- munist Party or the Nazi Party, was of course signed by the Inter- nationale Artisten-Loge, the performers union, and the Deutscher Musiker-Verhand, the musicians union. These unions were some- what Justified, as the epoch of easy and therefore pointless theater or literary adaptations had indeed begun, bnt they were unable to comprehend a technology that entirely dispenses with acceptance or rejection, needs or fears. Circus artists and musicians were therefore just about as intelligent as many theorists, from Miinsterberg to Bela Balazs, who praised silent film as a self-contained art form and harshly called the possibility of adding a soundtrack absurd. Only theorists, at least at that time, were less frequently unemployed.
The second point is reminiscent of a real historical joke that sound film played on a famous silent film star. John Gilbert had enchanted America's screens and women for 11 long years without having to betray the secret of his voice. However, in 1929 Gilbert's first sound film made what I have presented to you as a technical possibility literally or physiologically true: even without time-axis manipulation or sound time lapse, Gilbert's voice sounded like Mickey Mouse or a eunuch. Immediately after the premiere of this film, the star was a dead man in his own lifetime. Only Garbo threw a pair of roses into his grave (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 607).
The total securing of evidence through which people are registered by multimedia systems can also have a rebound effect on people themselves. Sound film changed the standard of voices and even more noticeably that of movements. As you all know, all of the expressionistic gestures employed by silent film actors for 30 years, which had barely made up for the lack of words and simulated the superimposed intertitles, disappeared; in facial expressions and ges- tures, sound film asserted a verifiable ordinariness. The crude time of small people - in other words, Hollywood cinema - could begin. For reasons that were less democratic than technical, it became practi- cally impossible to cut or interrupt people in the middle of speaking, unlike the old days of silent film when the actors were inaudible. Even today, we must patiently watch and listen in front of the screen until no one in the studio has anything more to say. Expressionistic gestures, which had been developed as the last defense against cuts, film doubles, and trick film shocks, thus gave way to a new movement
201
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
style, as the inability to cut acoustic events also dictated the optical
events.
Funnily enough, one of the last German silent films, which had actually been made in the era of sound film, illustrated the difference between the two media within the plot as the difference between two generations. Using expressionistic silent film gestures, Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) depicted an old, poverty-stricken professor who dreams only theoretically of moon rockets. In contrast, the young engineers, who turned this theory into blitzkrieg technology at practically the same time as the real Wernher von Braun, are depicted with the economical gestures of sound film, the new objectivity, and the Wehrmacht.
Nothing more carne of Ludendorff's strategic goal - a happy ending to the war - even though Junger's world war novels rave about pre- cisely such a resolution. However, the tactical goal of the Supreme Army Command was achieved. Without the state being recognized as the string puller, two apparently private institutions - the Deutsche Bank and the gramophone company Lindstrom, where Kafka's eternal fiancee Felice Bauer had risen np the ranks from typist to authorized representative - created a company out of various private
183
? ? aPTICAL MEDIA
German and Danish film companies, whICh they named "Umversal Film AG" or UFA for short. The military industrial complex thus per- formed its own metamorphosIs: BUFA, a branch of the general staff, became UFA, a large-scale industrial film company that appeared to be privately owned on paper, yet was at the same time always half state-owned. UFA continued to produce war and peace propaganda in Babelsberg just south of Berlin until March 1945, when Marshal Zhukov's last offensive at dawn at the Oder front began to blmd the remaining German defenses witb antI-aircraft spotlIghts (a tactIC reminiscent of the Russo-Japanese War). But even after the Red Army marched into Babelsberg, UFA only needed to change two more letters in its name to start producll1g film propaganda for the German Democratic Republic as DEFA. That is how long-lived or lifeless the power of the state is . . .
So much for propaganda or the face of a war that did not end until November 1989. The history of propaganda, which we have traced from a papal institution in 1662 to a military agency in 1917, still does not deal with the real problem of war and cinema. The fact that it was ever necessary to entertain soldiers in their dugouts or influence neutral countries in their indecision is only a negative and therefore indirect way of saying that modern wars are no longer visually reproducible. At the same historical moment when film made the motion of a bullet in flight visible, no matter how fast it was going, the technologies that had made film itself possible in the first place disappeared into strategic invisibility. It was the machine gun, this generalization of Colt's revolver, which imposed this invisibility dUl'ing World War I. This serial killing machine, which had originally been developed and employed only against reds, blacks, and yellows, now turned on its white inventors. Due to the danger of being imme- diately shot in the head, soldiers were forced to disappear under cam- ouflage and into trenches, and they no longer saw anything between the fronts except for their piece of sky and possibly hallucinations of a Madonna or pin-up figure. The epoch of silent film thus comprised not only millions of spectators, but also millions of invisible people. A world war that demanded worldwide and thus analphabetic and thus silent film propaganda, had no propaganda material to offer at all. To film its material battles, one would also have to be able to film white noise.
This fact frustrated Griffith, the most famous American director of his time. He landed in Europe, planned one of his crowd scene propaganda films, went to the trenches, and saw that the battle- fields were empty (Virilio, 1989, pp. 14-15). So Griffith then built a
184
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
gIgantIc studio wIth gIgantIc but perfectly filmable trenches and simu- lated a world war as if national or civil wars were still the order of the day. From the very outset, the fictional battle scenes Griffith recorded from the obsolete panoramic perspective of a field com- mander laid themselves open to the jndgment of Schlieffen, who had already prophesied in 1909 as chief of staff of the imperial German army that there is nothing more to see in contemporary wars: the front had become vast and mcalculable, and for security reasons field commanders had already had to exchange their hill for a bunker.
In Germany, the sltnatton was much the same for the Berlin entre- preneur and film director Oskar Messter,8 an "old master of cinema technology" as ZglmickI so old-masterfully describes him. Messter came to film as the son of a precision mechanic and optician, who had constrncted (entirely in our sense of the words) electrical spotlight installations for military parades and theaters. Messter himself began mannfacturing the newly invented X-ray equipment for invisible light that was beyond even ultraviolet. After becoming acquainted with the Lumiere apparatus, Messter proceeded to set np a German film industry and an artificial light workshop, acquired 70 patents, and founded various firms that were ready to go into production, which all merged into UFA in 1918. While it was normal in the age of silent film to record films at horribly slow speeds and then project them in the cinema at much faster speeds to save time, Messter fonght for a standard frame rate of 24 hertz for recording as well as playback, which sound film was then supposed to enforce (Zglinicki, 1979, pp. 256-66).
Oskar Messter's film company became historically significant when World War I broke out, as Messter's various firms were made into snbdivisions of BUFA. Their rather monopolistic orders from the gov- ernment were to film newsreels of the war front and then project them on the home front to boost the morale of workers and the wounded. This order led to similar difficulties as Griffith had experiences. Even though there was nothing to see or film in the trenches, the military prohibited shooting on location simply because they did not want to supply the enemy with free intelligence reconnaissance. Like Griffith,
therefore, Messter's newsreels had to simulate battle scenes at the base, which unfortnnately lacked the desired propaganda effect. As a military hospital chief wrote to Ludendorff, "watching the German war newsreels has an important medicinal effect on the wounded.
8 In the original German text, Kittler incorrectly refers to Oskar Messter as "Oskar Meester. "
185
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
These gentlemen tell me that they have never heard such thunderous laughter as when those cinematographic images from the trenches and 'from the front' are shown - but laughter is an important remedy" (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 390).
Unlike Griffith, however, Messter learned a lesson about experi- mental film from this propaganda film disaster. If the trenches simply could not be perceived optically and were also not permitted to be perceived militarily, the only remaining path for film was the vertical path. With the failure of Schlieffen's plan at the battle of the Marne, French Marshal Joffre led a successful counter-strike in August 1914 on the basis of photographic records made bv reconnaissance air- craft. After this battle, when the enemy armies disappeared into their trenches, the need for air reconnaissance became even more pressing. A few photographic and film records from the vertical could disclose invisible soldiers, camouflaged artillery positions, and unnoticed rear- ward connections to the enemy. For this reason, the reconnaissance pilots of World War I represented the origin of all air forces long before bombers and fighters.
In order to help German reconnaissance pilots, Messter constructed his patented "target practice device for the detection of deviations by means of photographic records" (German Reich Patent Office, Patent Specification No. 309108, Class 72 f, Group 7, July 18, 1916). According to the patent, this device was placed in the exact position of the machine gun in a fighter plane, with the aim of helping to monitor the precision of the machine gunners in real time for each individual shot. As Messter put it so beautifully, he employed "a cin- ematographic recording apparatus whose running gear was propelled by clockwork and whose visual field carries crosshairs, whereby a targeting set-up like that of the machine gun is to be arranged paral- lel to the visual axis. " As you can see, the structural correspondence
between perspective and ballistics became a technological reality by World War I at the latest. Messter's ingenious construction, which photographed at least 7. 2 million square kilometers of combat area using millions of kilometers of roll film' (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 273), could only be improved by combining shooting and filming, serial death and serial photography, into a single act. This was accom- plished by a French reconnaissance pilot who relocated the visual and ballistic axis of both the machine gun and the camera to the axis of the propeller (Virilio, 1989, p. 18).
9 Kittler misquotes Zglinicki when he says that "millions of kilometers" of film were used in World War I. Zglinicki's actual figure was only 950,000 km,
186
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
This coupling also took place in Germany. Guido Seeber, who built the Babelsberg studios in 1911 and filmed The Student of Prague there in 1913, was drafted two years later in 1915 and sent to the experimental seaplane station in Warnemiinde (not to say Peen- emiinde). There, he established at the same time a central educational film and photography hire service. Their first successful scientific film showed with the help of X-ray photography that countless airplane crashes were caused by lead balls built into the wooden propellers for balance; at high speeds these balls fly out and smash through the airplanes like bullets.
In a positive inversion of this negative test result, so to speak, Seeber also constructed a machine gun sight for fighter planes, which was supposed to optimize the machine gun firing rate. And just like the French reconnaissance pilot, Seeber combined this machine gun sight with a small film camera, which also shot film frames whenever the machine gun fired.
Strategically, therefore, filming and flying coincide. McLuhan sums this up succinctly in Understanding Media: "It was the photograph that revealed the secret of bird-flight and enabled man to take off" (McLuhan, 1964, p. 174). There was a reason why Marey had also studied the movements of bird wings and why photographers like Nadar had taken pictures from hot-air ballooons and passionately fought against zeppelins, supporting instead bird-like - or "heavier than air," as it was called at that time - plane constructions. Gabriele D'Annunzio, the decadent novelist and fighter pilot, already dem- onstrated in 1909 to a woman sitting next to him on an airplane that by approaching from the air the cathedrals and castles of Italy could be magnified or reduced by any amount and thus also visu- ally destroyed. This discovery, just before the outbreak of the First World War, which D'Annunzio himself only turned into a novel, also unleashed the tracking shots of the first world-famous period film Cabiria, which D'Annunzio contributed to as adviser and allegedly also screenwriter. During the war, his flight squadron "La Serenis- sima" proceeded to fly from Venice across the Alps (which was quite dangerous at that time) to mount an attack on Vienna. These attacks did not consist of bombs, as D'Annunzio explained to the Viennese on propaganda flyers dropped on the city, but rather the Austrians were permitted to remain alive so that they would be able to over- throw their emperor more effectively.
Historians only later recognized that the Viennese-Venetian air war scenario had already been attempted half a century before D'Annunzio, only I I I reverse. You will recall that Field Marshal
187
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Lieutenant Baron von Uchatius started projecting stroboscope draw- ings in 1841, and somewhat later he also began manufacturing explo- sive Uchatius powder. In 1849, after a civil revolution that also promised freedom to the Italian and especially the Venetian subjects of Austria-Hungary, an Austrian General based in Mestre besieged the rebellious Venetian republic of Serenissima. To the general's chagrin, it appeared that Venice's lagoon prevented it from being captured or even fired on by the artillery. That is, until Uchatius and his brother, two artillery lieutenants from Vienna, then made the world-historical suggestion of attacking from the air: bombs "were to be carried over the city in hot-air-filled balloons made of paper, which would be made to rise if wind conditions were favorable. Prior to being released from the balloon, the 30 pound bomb was supposed to be set [with a time fuse] according to the strength of the wind at that moment. If everything went according to plan, therefore, the impact of the explosives had to take place ronghly where it was expected," becanse the "range" of the bombs "far exceeded the range of artillery at that time" (Knrzel-Runtscheiner, 1937, p. 48). The wind actually very rarely helped, bnt between June and July 1849 a few of the 110 Uchatins bombs manufactured in Vienna did indeed explode over the astonished Venetians. A field marshal lieutenant, who invented cinematic projection, thus also had to invent the projection or throw- ing of projectiles.
Once these bombs or later planes were manned, the cinematic high-angle shot was born. So World War I not only produced the new professions of reconnaissance and bomber pilots, bnt also a new kind of film director. These directors had all previously been fighter pilots, and on the basis of their technologically altered visual perception they also revolntionized the entertainment medium of film. Jean Renoir, the director of Grand Illusion, was a fighter pilot, just like Howard Hawks, who filmed his war memories in 1930 as Dawn Patrol. The clearest example of this nexus between air combat and cinema, however, was Dziga Vertov, the Soviet director, film theorist and above all Lenin's propaganda conductor. Vertov's so-called "rules" for experimental film, which cancelled out all bourgeois infatuation with images, began first with a "General instruction for all tech- niques: the invisible camera. " Eight individual points then followed. No. 1 was: "Filming unawares - an old military rule: gauging speed, attack. " No. 6: "Filming at a distance. " No. 7: "Filming in motion. " And finally No. 8: "Filming from above" (Vertov, 1984, pp. 162-3).
So much for Vertov's combat rules as general staff officer - and now, in a free adaptation of Ernst Junger, the aerial combat film as
188
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
mner expenence of a Vertov demoted to become his own front-line soldier:
I am the camera's eye. I am the machine which shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today, I am forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. r. . . ] I approach and draw away from things - I crawl under them - I climb on them - Jam on the head of a galloping horse - I burst at full speed ioto a crowd - I run before running soldiers - I throw myself down on my back - I rise up with the aeropianes - I fall and 1 fly at one with the bodies falling or rising through the air. (Virilio, 1989, p. 20)
In other words, the experimental and entertainment films made with a camera that was no longer only mobile, like Griffith's, but also truly unleashed through tracking shots, simply converted the perceptual world of World War I into mass entertainment. The same thing also happened incidentally in the new media art form known as the radio play, which European civilian radio developed in 1924. And because the war dead returned as an acoustic barrage in postwar radio plays and optical air combat in postwar films, the large cinema palaces between Hollywood and Berlin were also constructed like giant mau- soleums. After the European monarchies fell and the old conspiracy between state and church propaganda disintegrated, these cinema palaces became churches of state propaganda that no longer praised a king by the grace of God, but rather (to adapt Lenin freely) war technology and electrification (Virilio, 1989, p. 28).
But it seems to be a law of media history (at least for Berliners) that new applications are secondary compared to new circuit technology. The lessons that film directors learned from World War I pale before the lessons learned by electrical engineers.
The lesson was that film could stop being silent. The technologies of World War I led to sound film, which leads us to the next chapter of these lectures.
3. 2. 4 Sound Film
The history of sound film has to begin with the assertion that silent film was never silent. Edison had already designed a link between the kinetoscope and the phonograph, which could have been built at a pinch despite problems with sound recording from a distance and synchronization. Many hobbyists and tinkerers followed Edison's lead and attempted to couple a half-mechanical, half-electrical optics
189
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
with a purely mechanical acoustics prior to World War I, but without any appreciable results. There were also experiments that attempted to connect silent film and electromagnetic sound recording, namely Poulsen's telegraphone. Although these experiments did not yield any concrete snccesses, they were theoretically significant because they established the principle of magnetic audiotape, which was ready to go into production during World War II. With the audiotape and the cassette, sound recording acquired for the first time the same material format as film: as a roll that allowed variable time axis manipulation, unlike the phonograph and the gramophone. Not only are time rever- sals possible, as with Edison, but also stop tricks, cuts, and montages, as with Melies. The simple manipulable acoustics of audiotape led to rock music, as you know, which could then in tum be coupled with manipulable videotapes, and the video clip was born.
But for us, those are all still musical dreams of the future. In the non-experimental everyday lives of people prior to 1929, silent film was never silent simply because films were never presented without some form of accompaniment. The cheapest form was the film explainer, who was often recruited (as we can gather from contem- porary adverts) from among the academic proletariat, and who would explain the plot of the film to the spectators while it was playing. Cinemagoers, who had always already been listeners and readers, needed training in the new semiotics of film, which essentially con- sisted of cuts and montages and thus empty spaces. Kurt Pinthus' Das Kinobuch (The Cinema Book), which was published by the expression- ist in 1913 and is full of screenplay proposals by his novelist friends, shows what an intellectual step it was to demand films suitable to the medium - film plots, in other words, that were intelligible based on image sequences alone without any intertitles or film explainers. But this I'art pour I'art of silent film had not been commercially successful. More expensive forms of sound accompaniment saw to that: music either from records or living musicians, who often also had the honor of generating theatrical sound effects fitted to the scene in addition to sounds on the piano. As a synthesis of two contradictory elements, Greek atmosphere and media-technical noise, Richard Wagner in particular triumphed in the cinema. Wagner not only invented the darkening of the auditorium, but also a kind of music that was itself noise. Printed piano score excerpts from Wagner's works, such as
Liebestod and The Ride of the Valkyries, accompanied films long before Apocalypse Now, where The Ride of the Valkyries was no longer shown as a lanterna magica effect, as it was in Wagner's opera in 1876, but rather as a helicopter attack in the Vietnam War.
190
? OPTiCAL MEDIA
This brings us back to war and its innovations. In a word: World War I transformed Edison's simple light bulb into the electron tube, which made the live musical accompaniment of silent films obsolete. I am interested in the historical development of this technical wonder because the tube allowed for the possibility of synchronized film soundtracks and television up to the present day. It was not replaced until the development of contemporary LCD displays and other semi- conductor technologies.
The electron tube, as I said, emerged from Edison's simple light bulb, which allows me to bring the history of lighting to a close. Edison had methodically searched for a cheap and safe light - so methodically that he brought every conceivable type of tropical wood to his laboratory asa possible filament for his bulb. The acciden- tal combination, on which Daguerre had still subsisted, was thus systematically eradicated. Edison would have been able to electrify America after a couple years of research if a considerably more pow- erful competitor named Westinghouse had not replaced his direct current system with an alternating current system. On the other hand, Edison's discovery that light bulbs also work as electron tubes, as they emit ions under electrical voltage, was made entirely in passing. He was also unable to do anything more than have this so-called "Edison effect" named after him simply because he knew nothing about theoretical physics.
For this reason, a physics professor at the new and very modern Reichsuniversitiit in Strasbourg named Ferdinand Braun was the first to discover a possible application of the Edison effect in 1897. He deflected the electron beam inside the tube with electromagnets, which were in turn attached to the general alternating voltage of the Strasbourg power grid, and sent it to a phosphorescent screen. The controlled beam - the last and most precise variant of the actively armed eye - then inscribed the visible graphic sine wave of an alter- nating power supply on the screen. Braun had invented the oscil- loscope. When his assistants later suggested to him that the electron beam should project beautiful images rather than mathematical func- tions, Braun rejected this first notion of television receiver tubes. He was "personally surprised" that Westinghouse's alternating power grid had not generated any ugly jagged peaks or rectangles, but rather an "ideal sine wave" (Kurylo, 1965, p. 137). Oscillograph means "vibration writer," and it is therefore the electronically per- fected variant of all the movement writers, from Scott to Marey, that led to the writing of sounds and images. You will notice that the television played back equations rather than film characters when
191
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
it first began with Ferdinand Braun. It will possIbly do so again at the end.
Braun's tube was not crucial for film and radio tecbnology, however, but rather another tube variant: the so-called triode. Lee de Forest in Palo Alto and Robert von Lieben in Vienna simultaneously conceived the idea of building tubes out of two electrical circuits, one controlling and the other controlled. Two mputs were needed along with a general ground return, and it was therefore called a triode or three-way in the artificial Greek of technology. According to Pynchon's brilliant commentary, this separation of control circuit and output circuit in 1906 solved a fundamental problem of the twentieth century: that of control. Triodes were actually more bulky, they were more sensitive to heat, and they required more voltage than the transistors that have replaced them since 1947, but they were also unbeatably economical. In other words, a variably small control current, which assumed the function of Braun's electromagnets, could switch variably large output currents on or off, thus amplifying or weakening it. Thus, the electron tube first decoupled the concept of power from that of physical effort. But because power does not simply have negative effects, according to Foucault's thesis, the tube is also economically still insufficiently described. Immediately before the outbreak of World War I, de Forest discovered for the allies and Alexander Meillner for the central powers that tubes not only amplify but also provide a new type of power called feedback. When the output current of a triode is steered in the opposite direction of the control grid - when a voltage decrease in the first circuit thus corre- sponds to a voltage increase in the second circuit - negative feedback can be generated by leading the output signal, which for physical reasons is always delayed for fractions of a microsecond, back to the control circuit. The entire feedback system begins to oscillate between the minimum and maximum voltage without breaking up the oscilla- tion. In other words, it becomes a high-frequency transmitter, which must then only be coupled with a low-frequency amplifying tube
in order to send radio or television signals. In the first step, after they are converted to electricity, the acoustic or optical data signals are variably increased through low-frequency amplification. In the second step, the data signals become transmissible without wires over variable distances by modulating them on a high carrier frequency.
As the basic circuit of microphones and radio transmitters, this was already clear in 1913. But World War I provided new applications for the technology and the means for its mass production. Trenches brought an end to the possibility of commanding soldiers from a
192
? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
distance through optical or acoustic signals, yet this was precisely why a need for electronic feedback between invisible fronts and equally invisible control centers emerged. The first radio transmitters only served to entertain radio operators with music in exceptional cases, and eventually this was officially forbidden as a "misuse of army equipment. " But to a greater degree they were used to manu- facture feedback loops between ground personnel and reconnaissance flyers, who were told over the radio which enemy objects were invis- ible from the ground and still needed to be photographed or filmed.
This high-frequency military technology led to the worldwide explosion of electronics companies. Five years later, and again through the misuse of army equipment, the national radio institu- tions of Europe and the commercial stations of the USA emerged, and this was followed a decade later by the first television transmitter.
But low-frequency military technology also had consequences for entertainment electronics. The triumph of amplifier tubes allowed electronics companies to revolutionize Edison's and Berliner's old- fashioned mechanical sound recording technology. AT&T in the USA and Siemens & Halske in Germany wired a record player with a pick-up and electrically controlled speakers. This also resolved the problem that Edison's sound recording system failed to remedy in the Black Mary studio. The trumpet of the phonograph worked only when it was held directly in front of the actors' mouths, and it could thus embarrassingly be seen in the film that was being made at the same time. Tube amplifiers first made media acoustics into a sixth sense that could match up to the sixth sense called the camera.
Sound film was developed simultaneously in Germany and in the USA immediately after World War I, but it is completely senseless, at least on the American side, to list the individual inventors by name. It is enongh to know that Warner Brothers was in serious financial trouble compared to the competition, and for this reason they reached for the life saver of sound film. The leading American electronics laboratory, AT&T's Bell Labs, gave the technically clue- less Sam Warner a hand. After the record had been electrified, AT&T was also able to offer Warner Brothers a special model: a huge record that could be synchronized with the silent film and broadcast in the cinema hall using an amplifier and loudspeaker. This vitaphone system was and remained a patent of Western Electric.
For this reason, it was useless to interpret or explain films any more. Becanse the content of a medinm is always another medium, sonnd films simply enhanced the reputation of the electronics compa- nies that had made them possible. The first sound film in 1929 was
193
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
not called The Jazz Singer by chance. A Jewish ex-chOIrboy, who had sung with religious wise men in synagogues in New York as a child, defects to the American media after puberty and becomes a jazz singer (at least that is what white people called it in 1929). It breaks the heart of his pious father, who had not yet been disabused of his Mosaic faith by the melting pot of New York. The jazz singer is in the middle of a concert when he receives the news that his father is dying - let us say of heart failure - and he strikes up an old Jewish song that brings the entire audience to tears. Let us rather say: the recently electrified record companies, which are on the hunt behind the backs of all concert-goers, have a new hit in record sales. The Jazz Singer implies, therefore, that with the introduction of sound film Hollywood became a branch of electrical companies like Western Electric or General Electric, which possessed both record companies and radio stations at the same time and which, in turn, were only branches of large banks like Rockefeller or Morgan (Faulstich, 1979, p. 160).
In Germany, the development of sound film proceeded more sys- tematically and on a much smaller scale. After losing the war, there was hardly any money, and instead demobilized army radio equip- ment stood around everywhere in 1919. In only four years, the signal corps had increased from 3,000 to almost 300,000 men. But even with misused army equipment, it was still possible to develop the very first sound film system without the use of records.
The developers of this wondrous work called it Tri-Ergon, which seems reminiscent of the triode tube but was actually intended to combine the names of the three developers - Hans Vogt, Joseph Masolle, and Dr. Joseph Engl - into a single anonymous "work of three. " Luckily Vogt, the main player, left his memories to the German Museum in Munich. His "first contact with silent film" took place in 1905, when he was a 1S-year-old peasant boy and he saw documentary films from the ongoing Russo-Japanese war in the cin- ematograph. "Eight years later," when he was already serving in the imperial navy at the experimental radiotelegraphy station in Kiel, the German auteur film had replaced the documentary cinematograph. Vogt enjoyed the "beautiful, highly dramatic" film The Student of Prague, as Evers and Seeber had just filmed it. However, there were two things that disturbed the young radio technician, who had been entrusted with the latest AEG tubes: "in close-ups, the lips of the actors moved like ghosts," and "the comments of the explainer ruined the atmosphere" (Vogt, 1964, p. 7). As is usual with autobiog- raphies, Vogt claims that he would have immediately invented a new
194
? OPTICAL MEDIA
media system If only World War I had not broken out. Four years later, partly at the front and partly at the high-frequency laboratory of a certam Dr. Seibt in Berlin, Vogt took part in the ether war:
Soon I was active on the water, air, and earth fronts, soon again in the Berlin laboratory. A medium for communicating with buried trenches had to be created and tested. Radio direction finders and radio stations for the weather contingent zeppelins. The sad end of the war came. (Vogt, 1964, p. 7)
Vogt overcame this sadness while unemployed in postwar Berlin by once again returning to his film idea. With world war technology and know-how, it must have been possible to combine both of the media of the pre-war period - moving images without sound and constant noise without image - into the multimedia system of sound film. For this reason, the first thing that the Tri-Ergon people did was to establish technical specifications with systematic clarity:
We take the following principles as the basis of our work:
1. The same film that carries the image must also serve as a sound carrier.
2. The sound must be recorded and reproduced through photo-
graphic processes.
3. All of the equipment necessary for sound recording, amplifica-
tion, transmission, storage, reproduction and playback are not
permitted to deform the original sound print. (Vogt, 1964, p. 11)
The most difficult part of this project was naturally amplification. Sound signals are initially so weak that at best they can make a hog's bristle vibrate, like Scott's phonautograph. Accordingly, the Tri-Ergon people first had to develop a tube amplifier that reacted "with a repro- ducible steepness of approximately six milliamperes of anode current change per volt of grid voltage change" (Vogt, 1964, p. 16). It turned out that a very similar tube amplifier had already been developed at Siemens by the great Dr. Schottky, to whom today's transistor tech- nology owes all Schottky diodes. Patent rights thus no longer applied, but the Tri-Ergon people had still resolved their fundamental problem.
Only Tri-Ergon had now become a system project comparable perhaps only to Edison's electrification of theaters, streets, and resi- dential homes. It could no longer be managed through individual inventions, but rather it required an entire chain reaction of new developments. After the solution of the amplifier problem, there
195
? ? ? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
was still the task on both the transmItter and the receiver side of transforming an acoustic signal into an optical signal that would be compatible with the filmstrip. Vogt, Massolle, and Engl solved this problem in a way that already prefigures the merging of sound and television technologies: because electricity had become the medium of all possible media or sensory channels, the sound signal could first be converted into current through a newly developed, highly sensi- tive, and inertia-free microphone, whose noise had been minimized compared to the old carbon button microphone. This current, which was still amplified by the new tube, then regulated a glow-discharge lamp, whose oscillations were visible and thus filmable when they were in the high-frequency range of up to 100 kHz (Vogt, 1964, p. 20). Despite their name, therefore, soundtracks are not sounds at all, but rather they are varyingly bright and varyingly wide images of the vibrations that sounds or noises physically are, which makes them extremely close to the Braunian tube.
And because the receiver side of a media system - according to Shannon's information theory - implements the inverse mathemati- cal function of the transmitter side, the three Tri-Ergon developers constructed a selenium cell for their film projectors, which was also crucial for television. Selenium cells converted light into electricity again, which then in turn only had to be converted to the cinema sound system - and this was the historical reason why sound film engineers also included a few early television engineers, like Mihaly or Karolus. Vogt, Massolle, and Engl completed their technical speci- fications most elegantly: namely, they built the first electrostatic loud- speaker, which at that time conld fill the entire cinema with sound and which is still ideal for headphones and stereos today. With this static loudspeaker, Edison's entire mechanics of sound storage was replaced by an electronic control.
So far, so good. Tri-Ergon had done its work and integrated an entire chain of new developments into a single media system. On February 22, 1920, the sound of a harmonica and the noteworthy word "milliampere" could be heard in a playing film for the first time (Vogt, 1964, p. 37). One year later, shortly after midnight, this contemptible yet wonderful word from the mouth of a technician was replaced with a female speaker "in close-up" reciting the poem Heather Rose by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Vogt, 1964, p. 38). This would have pleased Miinsterberg, who claimed that film techni- cally liquidates all classical-romantic substitute sensuality, such as the virtual reality of that rose, which as you know represents a virgin shortly before her defloration.
. ? . 1
196
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
However, those sorts of successes did not yet make the new multimedia system a commercial success. As the Tri-Ergon people presented their technical Gesamtkunstwerk to the director of a large electrical company, which to my mind could only have been Siemens, their absolutely correct argument was that a systematically developed chain of tube amplifiers, microphones, and loudspeakers could support sound film as well as civilian wireless telephony - in today's words, therefore, entertainment radio. The director's counter- argument was that no listener "would spend good money for some- thing that comes into his house for free like air and light" - in other words, no one would make Siemens happy by paying radio license fees (Vogt, 1964, p. 47).
In September 1922, the silent film industries reacted accordingly to the first public demonstration of sound film. From the viewpoint of their financial area of competence the Berliner Borsenzeitung briefly wrote: "The extent to which talking films are really the future, however, remains to be seen. It should not be forgotten that the talking film loses its internationality, and it must always remain limited to smaller works, as large films are only profitable on the world market" (Vogt, 1964, p. 44).
When Hans Vogt told this counter-argument to his wife, she came up with an idea that led to the Tri-Ergon people's siugle lucrative patent: the Gisela patent. Gisela Vogt proposed, namely, "to over- come speech difficulties in the future by making consecutive record- ings of each sound film scene in the studio in multiple idioms, in the primary cultural languages" (Vogt, 1964, p. 44).
With this new principle of synchronization, which had been con- ceived by a woman, the multimedia system was perfect. By rights, it would have had to wipe ont the cinema equipment that had already been established, but the three amateurs were not able to also finance this mnlti-billion dollar replacement. It was clear that the conver- sion of silent film to sound film was only the first in an entire series of conversions that would turn the existing media system operating worldwide completely inside out without interrupting its efficiency or its finances. The same holds true for television systems or technical wars in general, both in the recent past and in the future.
In the case of sound film, it is easy to predict the outcome of this immense need for capital: as in the USA, the German film industry also fell into the hands of electrical concerns like Siemens and AEG, which got involved in lawsuits with the American patent holders for years until the worldwide marlcets were divided up, as usual, and UFA was taken over by Deutsche Bank and Hugenberg. And one
197
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
fine day, after the inconsequential Tri-Ergon patents had long been sold in Switzerland, an American film giant conceived of the idea of commercially surpassing Warner Brothers and their vitaphone system. William Fox, who had first made money, as I said, with Edison's automatic kinetoscopes, bought the Tri-Ergon patents and converted them into a completely auto-referential form of film publicity: Fox's Movietone talking newsreels, the first sound documentary film.
However, all of the international networks between companies and banks, or between Zurich and Hollywood, could not alter the fact that sound film - in contrast to silent film - does not constitute an international medium. The Gisela patent is and remains a com- promise. As long as people continue to speak American or German, and have thus not yet defected to a worldwide standardized computer language like Algol, C or Ada, sound film will continue to serve as national propaganda in so-called national languages. This is rather inconsequential today, in the age of the computer, as the greatness of film is now a thing of the past and only computer languages still count. But because the English themselves refused at that time to recognize the dialect of Hollywood and California as English (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 612), sound film virtually appeared to form nations, just like the radio of that time. It thus restricted the com- panies of the interwar period to national language borders, which also committed them to the possibility of a second world war. Our film history must therefore turn to this war.
It should be emphasized beforehand that the difficulties of sound film synchronization also have an internal technical-aesthetic aspect. The numerous conversions between sound, image, and electricity that are necessary for this process already indicate that acoustic and optical signals are naturally less compatible. For precisely this reason, sound film was the first model case of a multimedia system long before television - if this term is understood as a system that manufactures not natural or physiological but rather technical con- nections. Sound film thus had to bridge two fundamental differences between optics and acoustics, which can briefly be explained.
First, acoustic signals only depend on a single independent vari- able: time (provided that stereophonic sound effects are disregarded, of course). Every musical signal is the momentary amplitude of a complex yet solitary vibration in time. As moving images, film, and television also depend on time. However, they also depend on two spatial coordinates: the height and width of each individual pixel (apart from 3-D experiments, the third spatial coordinate of depth
198
? OPTICAL MEDIA
can be ignored in the same way that stereophonic sound can be dis- regarded when making sound recordings). A one-dimensional vibra- tion or line is thus adequate for sound recording, whereas optical media principally require two-dimensional signal processing. When calculated by the technical-economic standards of engineers, this means that the amount of information to be processed is raised to tbe second power. For this reason, the image fills almost the entire celluloid of a sound film, whereas a band at the edge of the image is sufficient for the optical soundtrack, which in principle could even
be implemented as a simple line.
Second, the acoustics compensate for this simplicity by functioning,
since Edison's days, as an analog medium. In every given moment, the stored technical signal corresponds to the precise amplitude of the recorded sound signal. Until the introduction of audiotape, as I said before, this continuous image of continuous vibrations made it unimaginable and unfeasible to cut the soundtrack into pieces and then rearrange these clips arbitrarily, as is customary with film montage. According to the Breslau radio play pioneer Friedrich Bischoff, when the first radio play directors received the strange assignment to invent a new art form they in desperation chose the feature film as their specific model. Their quasi-cinematic radio play tricks even included slow dissolves and fades, which the new radio art borrowed from films. On the other hand, abrupt cuts and montages, which Andre Malraux called the operating principle of film, did not find their way into the emerging radio play.
By the same token, film and television are discrete processes that deal with nothing but individual frames or pixels, because optical storage is impossible even today. Even electronic switches work far too slowly to store or process light as the mixture of frequencies that it physically is. As is well known, audible sound ranges from approximately 25 Hz to 16 kHz, and that is why it was so easily conquered by low-frequency technology. Visible light is ten billion times faster and ranges from 700 to 380 terahertz. These are numbers with 14 zeroes, which is roughly 8 zeroes beyond the switching time of today's standard electronics, and therefore no medium could even come close. For this reason, film and television do not store light itself but rather only its photochemical effects (as we have already thoroughly discussed), which can then be stored and played back every twenty-fifth of a second, that is, in the low-frequency range. A compact disc that would sample sound events not at the usual 40,000 times per second but rather as slow as film or television would be a unique disaster for the ears.
199
? ? ? ? oPTICAL MEDIA
The problems of television and sound film can only be understood on the basis of these physical principles of media technology. The Tri-Ergon process had to be capable of transporting the film images jerkily as a discrete signal, while simultaneously reading the optical soundtrack continuously as an analog signal.
To soften this collision between digital and analog, the Tri-Ergon people developed a new film transport system. Before and after a frame was projected, the celluloid went into a waiting loop, which compensated for the static images during the projection time. Behind the second waiting loop, the film roll continued running the entire time without any interruption, which also made it possible to read the soundtrack as an undisturbed continuum.
The mechanical solution to this problem also had a systematic side. Through millisecond-precise coupling between image and sound, sound film had carried out Messter's standardization proposals for the first time, which means that it had also required an absolutely fixed recording and playback speed for film images. Otherwise, a film star with a soprano voice would have been able to sound like a bass and a film star with a bass voice like a eunuch. You all know
such sound manipulations from tape recorders that run too quickly or too slowly.
In the days of silent film, on the other hand, time loops and time lapses were not technical-experimental exceptions but rather daily practices in order to sell as many meters of celluloid as possible to a paying audience. For the first time, therefore, sound film opened up an absolute difference between experimental films and feature films. Real-time processing of tbe visuals first became genuinely verifiable through the ear and the acoustics. For this reason, sound film was a revolution in film aesthetics.
To begin with, many performing artists became unemployed in the middle of the global economic crisis. In 1929, a flyer with the following headlines in bold print was circulated in German moving picture theaters, as they were still so beautifully called (I have left out the fine print):
To the public!
Attention! Sound film is dangerous!
Sound film is kitsch!
Sound film is economic and spiritual murder!
Sound film is bad conservative theater at higher prices! Therefore:
Demand good silent films!
200
? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
Demand orchestral accompaniment with musicians! Demand stage exhibitions with artists!
Reject sound film! (quoted in Greve et aI. , 1976, p. 287)
This social-revolutionary pamphlet, written in the style of the Com- munist Party or the Nazi Party, was of course signed by the Inter- nationale Artisten-Loge, the performers union, and the Deutscher Musiker-Verhand, the musicians union. These unions were some- what Justified, as the epoch of easy and therefore pointless theater or literary adaptations had indeed begun, bnt they were unable to comprehend a technology that entirely dispenses with acceptance or rejection, needs or fears. Circus artists and musicians were therefore just about as intelligent as many theorists, from Miinsterberg to Bela Balazs, who praised silent film as a self-contained art form and harshly called the possibility of adding a soundtrack absurd. Only theorists, at least at that time, were less frequently unemployed.
The second point is reminiscent of a real historical joke that sound film played on a famous silent film star. John Gilbert had enchanted America's screens and women for 11 long years without having to betray the secret of his voice. However, in 1929 Gilbert's first sound film made what I have presented to you as a technical possibility literally or physiologically true: even without time-axis manipulation or sound time lapse, Gilbert's voice sounded like Mickey Mouse or a eunuch. Immediately after the premiere of this film, the star was a dead man in his own lifetime. Only Garbo threw a pair of roses into his grave (Zglinicki, 1979, p. 607).
The total securing of evidence through which people are registered by multimedia systems can also have a rebound effect on people themselves. Sound film changed the standard of voices and even more noticeably that of movements. As you all know, all of the expressionistic gestures employed by silent film actors for 30 years, which had barely made up for the lack of words and simulated the superimposed intertitles, disappeared; in facial expressions and ges- tures, sound film asserted a verifiable ordinariness. The crude time of small people - in other words, Hollywood cinema - could begin. For reasons that were less democratic than technical, it became practi- cally impossible to cut or interrupt people in the middle of speaking, unlike the old days of silent film when the actors were inaudible. Even today, we must patiently watch and listen in front of the screen until no one in the studio has anything more to say. Expressionistic gestures, which had been developed as the last defense against cuts, film doubles, and trick film shocks, thus gave way to a new movement
201
? ? ? ? OPTICAL MEDIA
style, as the inability to cut acoustic events also dictated the optical
events.
Funnily enough, one of the last German silent films, which had actually been made in the era of sound film, illustrated the difference between the two media within the plot as the difference between two generations. Using expressionistic silent film gestures, Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) depicted an old, poverty-stricken professor who dreams only theoretically of moon rockets. In contrast, the young engineers, who turned this theory into blitzkrieg technology at practically the same time as the real Wernher von Braun, are depicted with the economical gestures of sound film, the new objectivity, and the Wehrmacht.
