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