The problem of America; the problem of sound

LAURA MULVEY The problem of America; the problem of sound In 1999, Exeter University Press published `Film Europe' and `Film America': Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920±1939, a collection of essays, edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, that analyse the complex web of economic, political and cultural relations between the European and American film industries during the 1920s. The editors and several of the essayists comment on the striking similarities between the debates taking place then and those of the 1990s. For instance, Jens Ulff-Moller makes the point: the MPPDA [the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Inc. ± Hollywood's powerful trade association headed by Will Hays] continued to combat European quotas at the Second Conference . . . in the summer of 1928, where the United States and France were again the principal adversaries. The Americans insisted that films were merely a commercial product, whereas the French delegate, Serruys, claimed that film contingents and quotas were a legitimate means of cultural protection. The arguments were strikingly similar to those presented at the Uruguay round of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) negotiations in 1994.1 These parallels are telling, and the book is an essential supplement to David Putnam's Undeclared War which, perhaps for polemical reasons, gives strangely little attention to this crucial episode in the story of the global film industry's development. Several essays in `Film Europe' and `Film America' meticulously document the ways in which the United States established and then secured hegemony over film in Europe, not simply as a Hollywood initiative to expand and control its markets but as a consciously coordinated government initiative in which the way `trade follows the American motion picture not the flag' was clearly understood. This aggressive policy was pursued with subtlety and flexibility. The Americans were prepared to respond to and adapt to measures taken to halt their advance by European governments that were only just beginning to grasp the problem. And then, of course, the problem was articulated within 4 Critical Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3 differing ideological and rhetorical terms which, in turn, bear witness to the confused European response to `Americanisation'. This aspect of the book also echoes across the decades. The balance between the American and European film industries had altered during World War I when, for the first time, more American films crossed the Atlantic than vice versa. Although the Americans were quick to take advantage of the war's devastating effect on film production and cinema-going in Europe, changes in the country's internal demography were just as important. Around 1920, America became a predominantly urban country for the first time. Film can perfectly well flourish in nonor semi-urban surroundings, but a concentration of population allows the standardisation of exhibition and distribution practices that are the necessary basis for the industry's vertical integration. By the time that Hollywood's `European war' was underway, an American film could recoup its profits within its own national economy but the crucial European market was essential for the American cinema to develop beyond the level of enterprise and into an industry. Furthermore, the American economy had been booming since it recovered from the depression of the 1890s. The new urban population, swelled by immigration, was the crucible in which a mass leisure market could be formed and consolidated. Broadly speaking, urban America in the 1920s turned casual entertainment into industry and, within that significant shift, the new, young, working woman played a key part. Just as the modern city, and its rush of sensations, seemed to merge with the speediness of the modern cinema, so the modern `girl' became an emblem for both. On the cultural front, European reactions to these phenomena ranged from celebration to panic. And it gradually dawned on European industries, struggling to rise from the ashes of war, that no one country could establish a national cinema and fight off American domination. The New York Times correspondent on Paris, Martha Gruening, summed up the situation in a piece `The European Revolt against our Films' on 31 October 1926: `In the face of the overwhelming prosperity of the American motion picture industry, any one European nation attempting to fight it seems very much like a pygmie up against a giant.' However, European national identities had developed within a long history of trans-continental wars, of which the latest was, of course, only the last of many. At the heart of the problem of Europe was the deep-seated hostility between France and Germany. It was only political developments (Gustav Stresemann became Chancellor in Germany, cooperating with the socialists; the Cartel des Gauches formed a government in France) that allowed the `atmosphere of Versailles' to be replaced by the `spirit of Locarno'. At the signing of the Treaty of Locarno in 1925, French Foreign The problem of America; the problem of sound 5 Minister Aristide Briand declared, `Everyone should be a citizen of Europe.' The previous year, 1924, the League of Nations `adopted' the cinema, in recognition of its cultural and international importance. The idea of Film Europe emerged alongside these developments. It is, of course, easy to look back with cynicism on the optimism that characterised the mid-twenties: Locarno, the League of Nations, the Kellog-Briand pact . . . But the cinema itself was part of that optimism, and its symbolic status as modern elided with current aspirations for a new world which would reject the politics of class and nationalism that had led to World War I. The first signs of a Film Europe emerged with the Ufa±Aubert deal of 1924. And then, the ambitious vision of Vladimir Wengeroff a Russian eÂmigre in Paris combined with Westi-Film to create the European Film Syndicate in which production, distribution and exhibition would be organised on a truly panEuropean basis. This initiative was celebrated in CineÂa-Cine pour tous by Jean Tedesco, writing in 1925, in terms that vividly illustrate the significance of the Film Europe idea. He begins with the cinema's, unlike the theatre's, international appeal, arguing that the film-going public does not distinguish between `a Griffith or a Gance' and looks with equal favour on `a Lillian Gish or a Raquel Mellor, on a Fairbanks or a Mosjoukine'. But this internationalism, he points out, can only be secured by finance, of the kind offered by the European Film Syndicate, enabling the production of major films, across nations and achieving equivalently wide-scale distribution. He is, of course, implying that only pan-European capital can allow the nations of Europe to make movies on a scale that can both balance Hollywood domination and achieve distribution in America. And Abel Gance's Napoleon would then be the first of many. These arguments do, of course, seem strangely familiar. But the article's conclusion, on the contrary, is simply strange in 2001: Remember the old idea `The spirit of the nation is formed on the battlefield'. To which we would now add: `It is only through collective endeavour, associated interests and common ideals that the spirit of internationalism is formed'. Surely it will only be thus that peace can be secured? And it is the cinema that will be the sign, today, of a new page in the history of our, ancient, Europe.2 In fact, the European Film Syndicate lasted for only a few months. But it was symptomatic, on the one hand, of hard-headed business-like initiatives to create a cinema that could compete with the Americans, still familiar to us today, and, on the other, the idealism which seems to have little place in the present rhetoric of Europe. This mixture is evoked by Andrew Higson in his `Film Europe' and `Film America' chapter on E. A. Dupont, whose presence 6 Critical Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3 in the newly revived British cinema of the late twenties was emblematic of its polyglot nature. Higson quotes a visiting German journalist: At Elstree all the Englishmen speak broken German and all the Germans speak broken English. An international hodge-podge is emerging; one feels momentarily that a mutual understanding between peoples is possible through film. (Did we actually shoot at each other, you Elstree boys?)3 It was understood that industrial cooperation needed supplement and support by the state, particularly in the form of import quotas, of which the German system became the model. It was here that the European film industry split apart. While the production arm had every reason to support limits on the import of Hollywood movies, the exhibitors had none. They insisted that Hollywood films were more popular with the public than any indigenous product and were generally prepared to put up with the blockbooking imposed by the Hollywood studios to keep the Hollywood product flowing. The French government's attempt, in 1928, to impose quotas on Hollywood films foundered on this issue. William Hays responded with a total boycott and the French initiative collapsed in the face of economic disaster. Whatever the true taste of the European film-going public might be, not even pan-European production could make enough films to satisfy its appetite. It is clearly argued in `Film Europe' and `Film America' that this period should be understood as liminal, as in transition, and it would thus be wrong to judge the Film Europe initiatives as intrinsically doomed to failure. Two factors, mutually re-enforcing, brought an end to the Film Europe experiment: the coming of synchronised sound, officially accepted by the Hollywood majors in the summer of 1928, and the Crash, in the autumn of 1929, with the economic depression it brought in its wake. The technologies that introduced synchronised sound into the cinema were originally designed more with music, song and dance in mind than simply speech itself. The mass leisure market of the 1920s United States did not only sustain the film market. It also fed into popular music through radio, records, dance crazes that threatened to leave the cinema with its image of modernity slightly tarnished. However, the lasting legacy of synchronised sound, so far as the international film market is concerned, has been speech. Language introduced an element into the cinema which, while it has brought obvious aesthetic advantages, has always left problems of translation. Both Europeans and Americans were convinced that the European market would demand European language films and, in the technological limbo before Hollywood mastered dubbing by 1932, the industry on both sides of the Atlantic resorted to making movies aimed at The problem of America; the problem of sound 7 an international audience simultaneously in different languages. Although sound brought interesting experiments and imaginative aesthetic devices in its early years, the appearance of language had a symbolic significance of its own. The always fragile `internationalism' of non-synch cinema had disappeared for ever. Furthermore, this apparently innocent technological development came into a world in which the fragile `internationalism' of twenties politics, the first articulation of the European idea, was collapsing under the rising tide of new nationalisms. Partly in response to the confusion and suffering brought by economic collapse and unemployment, governments tended to try to retrench by adopting protectionist policies in trade. Economic hardship aggravated the right/left split that had dominated twenties politics, with the rise of the right in Germany culminating in the election of the Nazis to power in 1933 and the two sides deeply divided in France. Stalin's first Five Year Plan of 1928 was followed by the enforced collectivisation of farming and, in 1929, new Soviet nationalism overcame communist internationalism with the doctrine of `socialism in one country'. In the context, Pabst's first sound film, Kameradschaft, is a particularly moving reflection on the lessons of the past. As miners across the French±German border attempt to rescue the victims of a mining accident, each speak their own language while the aesthetics of sound are used in their own right. But the film clearly refers back to the legacy of World War I, to the particular conflicts between France and Germany that had haunted its aftermath which the Film Europe initiative, in its political guise, had intended to defuse. Walter Benjamin commented on the political aspects of synch sound in Footnote 7 to `The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction': In 1927 it was calculated that a major film, in order to pay its way, had to reach an audience of nine million. With the sound film, to be sure, a setback in the international distribution occurred at first: audience became limited by language barriers. This coincided with the Fascist emphasis on national interests . . . the simultaneity of both phenomena is attributable to the depression . . . the introduction of the sound film brought temporary relief [to capital] not only because it again brought the masses into the theatres but because it merged new capital from the electrical industry with that of the film industry. Thus, viewed from the outside, the sound film promoted national interests, but seen from the inside it helped to internationalise film production even more than previously.4 Even writing in 1936, Benjamin saw the key effects of synchronised sound. The long patent war over the wiring of theatres between America and Germany, took place effectively between electrical giants. 8 Critical Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3 And in Hollywood, the first anxieties about the impact of synchronised sound on the international market were accompanied by characteristic confidence. William de Mille said: In as much as the introduction of the American film into Europe has resulted in Europeans wearing American hats and shoes and almost everything else, so we may be sure that, in a couple of generations from now, all Europeans will be speaking English so that they can continue to see and understand American films. Notes 1 2 3 4 Jens Ulff-Moller, `Hollywood's Foreign War: the Effect of National Commercial Policy on the Emergence of American Film Hegemony in France, 1920±1929', in A. Higson and R. Maltby (eds), `Film Europe' and `Film America' (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999). Jean Tedesco, `Pour un cineÂma international', CineÂa Cine pour tous, Paris, 1 January 1925. Andrew Higson: `Polyglot Films for an International Market' in Higson and Maltby (eds), `Film Europe' and `Film America'. Walter Benjamin, `The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations (Fontana: London 1973), 246.