Sound image

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Edison's Kinetophone, ca.1895

In the early days of cinema , sound images were called short films, usually three to four minutes in length, which, due to the sound played at the same time, can be regarded as pre-forms of the sound film .

Technical implementation

The principle of sound images was based on the principle of playing a film strip and a record with the associated sound recording in parallel. In this way the illusion of "living, speaking and singing photographs" should be created. The projection apparatus and gramophone were kept in approximately synchronicity using various electro-mechanical processes.

A disadvantage was that you had to record picture and sound separately and play them back on separate devices. Since the sound recording technology of the time was based solely on mechanical processes, in which the interpreter had to sing or speak into a recording funnel instead of into a microphone, and the power of his voice alone had to be sufficient, without the possibility of amplification, to enter the groove via the membrane and graver Cutting recording wax eliminated an "original sound" recording. The record was therefore first discussed in the studio so that it could be played on a gramophone during the image recording, for which the actors on the scene moved their mouths more or less synchronously.

The capacity of gramophone records at the time also limited the possible film length to 3 to 4 minutes. This allowed individual songs, arias, or variety numbers to be played, but not longer plot acts. On top of that, the longer the duration of the presentation it became correspondingly more difficult to maintain the synchronicity of image and sound over the long term.

Flowering period and further development

Audio recording with Oskar Messter , approx. 1908. Carl Froelich films a scene from The Regiment's Daughter , played from a gramophone record sung about by Hedwig Francillo-Kaufmann and Albert Kutzner .

The German film pioneer Oskar Messter performed sound images for the first time on August 29, 1903 in the Berlin Apollo Theater as part of a variety program. He had the recordings for his films made by Deutsche Grammophon AG . Messter's sound images showed recordings of the greats of the time from opera, operettas and cabaret scenes. He secured the participation of well-known artists such as Henry Bender , Alexander Girardi , Otto Reutter , Gustav Schönwald and the siblings Rosa and Henny Porten early on . The success was so great that it was soon able to make guest appearances on all major variety stages at home and abroad. In 1904 Messter showed his apparatus to the public for the first time in America at the World Exhibition in St. Louis . For this purpose he had sound recordings made in English; among them was the then music hall hit The Whistling Bowery Boy by T. W. Thurban.

Messter had made further considerations in order to solve the problem of the limited playing time of the sound recordings. He constructed a double turntable in which a turntable with tonearm, sound box and funnel was alternately activated so that sequences of record sets could be played back. The shortened second act from Johann Strauss' operetta Die Fledermaus is said to have been performed with a playing time of around 20 minutes.

Messter also considered a funnel system that would allow the sound to be recorded while the image was being taken. The scene should be closed off towards the camera by a glass wall, which should reflect the sound of the voices into the receiving funnel introduced into this stage space from above. Whether it was ever carried out has not been proven; we only know about it from Messter's memories and a model of the arrangement.

By 1913 a total of around 500 movie theaters had installed Messter's apparatus, the “ biophone ”. In addition to Messter, competing companies such as Buderus , Duskes and Deutsche Mutoskop und Biograph GmbH soon threw themselves . Sound images on the market.

In France , clay pictures were produced by Léon Gaumont , in America by Thomas Alva Edison . Edison stuck to the wax cylinder as a phonogram and to the inscription, while all the other records used side-by-side writing to store the sound.

To achieve a match between image and sound, Messter used electrical synchronous motors in the projector and gramophone. The sound was reproduced mechanically by means of a sound box and funnel. This limited the radius of the screenings considerably, because large cinema halls could not or only insufficiently receive sound.

A costly solution was offered by the compressed air operated "Auxetophone" by Victor Co., which was manufactured between 1906 and 1918, in which the gramophone needle no longer controlled a mica membrane, but a comb valve that modulated the air flow from a compressor. This made it possible to generate higher sound pressures, but the background noise also increased. Messter started using Auxetophone in his “Biophon” theaters around 1910.

The limited volume of the mechanical gramophone, the synchronization problem and possibly also the fact that longer game plots with more sophisticated content and more artistic means began to be filmed around the time shortly before the First World War led to the audience's interest waning and the Sound images gradually disappeared again. After the World War, however, inventors in Germany, France and America set about tackling the problem of light and electricity independently of one another: in the end there was the “photographed sound”, the optical sound film in which the image and sound recordings are stored on a common carrier.

Tradition situation

Very few sound images have survived in German archives. According to Oskar Messter, around 1,500 audio images were produced in Germany, of which only a few examples are available today. The film historian Martin Loiperdinger assumes a loss rate of 99 percent. The reasons given for this loss are that the combination of film roll and record did not fit into the collection scheme of the film or sound archives and therefore sound images were often wrongly viewed as not worth archiving . Even private shellac collectors would have often spurned the records belonging to audio images as second- or third-class recordings.

Examples of preserved and restored examples include the following:

  • “Dickson Experimental Sound Film” from 1895 [9] : The film features William Dickson playing the melody “Song of the Cabin Boy” from the light opera “The Chimes of Normandy”, composed by Robert Planquette in 1877. Restoration: Walter Murch, Rick Schmidlin [10] .
  • "Schutzmann-Lied" from the Metropol-Revue "Donnerwetter-Fadellos!" (Music: Paul Lincke ), actors: Henry Bender, "Tonbild" Berlin 1908 [11]
  • "Rauschlied" from "Künstlerblut" (music: Edmund Eysler ), actors: Alexander Girardi, the composer conducts the accompanying orchestra. "Sound image". Film recording: Oskar Messter, Berlin, exact date unknown, possibly during Girardi's guest performance in Berlin in January 1908. Sound recording: Gramophone Concert Record 3-42691, Matrize 9871 u, aufgen. in Vienna, December 1906 [12] : Video and audio restoration: Christian Zwarg.

In 2013/14 the German Film Institute undertook a project to digitize 33 audio images that had come from the estate of the film pioneer Ludwig Neumayer to the DIF collection. 2K digitization and DCPs were made of the sound images , although not all of the film materials were synchronized with the sound. Where this was not the case, fundamental restoration problems arose. With the batch digitized in 2013, it was decided to manipulate the playback speed of the film image in order to enable a synchronous sequence of image and sound. In 2014, the restorers switched to putting the synchronicity back in favor of authenticity.

Illustrations

  • DicksonFilm Still On the still image from the Experimental Sound Film by Edison employee William KLDickson from 1895 you can see the receiving funnel of the phonograph.
  • Gramophone record , made especially for Messter's »Biophon« (“special recording”)

literature

  • Dennis Basaldella: On the trail of sound images. An interview with Dirk Förstner from the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. In: fragmentfilm.de. December 21, 2012 (online at: fragmentfilm.de )
  • Herbert Birett: Between silent and sound films - the "sound image" film. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. February 24, 2006. (online at: nzz.ch )
  • Jana Dugnus: Natural Allies - The mutual relationship between image and sound in film. Diploma thesis in the Audiovisual Media course, Electronic Media Faculty at the Stuttgart Media University, June 30, 2008, pp. 13–15. (online at: hdm-stuttgart.de )
  • Dirk Förstner: Rauschlied a. Artist blood. Reconstruction of sound images in modern playback systems. In: Matthias Knaut (ed.): Creative industries: design, fashion, media, games, communication, cultural heritage. (= Contributions and positions of the HTW Berlin. Volume 1). BWV Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8305-1915-7 , pp. 9, 204-212.
  • Oliver Huck: The musical drama in the 'silent film' - opera, sound image and music in the Film d'Art. Verlag Georg Olms, 2012, ISBN 978-3-487-14846-5 .
  • Harald Jossé: The making of the sound film. Contribution to a fact-based media historiography. Freiburg / Munich 1984, p. 48ff.
  • Anke Mebold: Prelude to a sonorous future. The sound images of the Neumayer Collection in the archive of the German Film Institute. In: Filmblatt No. 61/62 (2017), pp. 37–59.
  • Corinna Müller: Early German Cinematography - Formal, Economic and Cultural Developments 1907–1912. Stuttgart / Weimar 1994, p. 79ff.
  • Ulrike Oppelt: Film and Propaganda in the First World War: Propaganda as media reality in topical and documentary films. (= Contributions to the history of communication. Volume 10). Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-515-08029-5 , pp. 203-205.
  • Guido Seeber: The Seeberograph and the Seeberophon. In: The Wandering Image. The film pioneer Guido Seeber. Published by the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation. EP 23, pp. 35-44.
  • Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation (ed.): The wandering image. The film pioneer Guido Seeber. Published by the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation. EP 23, Elefanten Press Verlag, Berlin 1979.
  • Michael Wedel: The German music film. Archeology of a Genre 1914–1945. Edition text and criticism, Rich. Boorberg Verlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-88377-835-8 , KNV title number: 16277371.
  • Friedrich v. Zglinicki: The way of the film. The history of cinematography and its predecessors. Rembrandt Verlag, Berlin 1956.

Web links

  • Jan-Christopher Horak: Biophone. in the dictionary of film terms.
  • Jan-Christopher Horak: Chronophon. in the dictionary of film terms.

See also

Single receipts

  1. cf. Article on Oskar Messter on the Media Studies website of the University of Trier, online here
  2. cf. JPMüller No. 3 note 13, Jossé p. 69; The Saxon film pioneer Guido Seeber ensured synchronization with his Seeberophon, which was introduced in 1904, by means of a perforated film tape with which he coupled the projector and gramophone without slipping, cf. Seeber p. 42 and Oppelt p. 204 along with note 97
  3. Examples are given by Martin Koerber (Deutsche Kinemathek), Laurent Mannoni (Cinémathèque française) and Manuela Padoan (Gaumon Pathé Archives) in [1]
  4. Wedel p. 25.
  5. ^ Deutsche Grammophon AG also worked for Léon Gaumont, cf. Plate label GAUMONT'S PATENT stuck over Zonophone label , at [2]
  6. cf. Zglinicki p. 281, audio sample by baritone Samuel H. Dudley on Victor 3175 (mx. 713) from March 13, 1901 at [3]
  7. Zglinicki p. 282, Seeber p. 42.
  8. ^ Model in the possession of the former Paul Sauerlaender Collection, now in the Deutsches Film-Museum Frankfurt am Main; a description can be found in the article in Filmwelt number 47 - Berlin, from November 22, 1936.
  9. ^ The Deutsche Mutoskop & Biograph GmbH. held in 1908 Henry Bender's number Schutzmann-Lied from the Metropol-Revue Donnerwetter-Fadellos! (Premiere September 1908, music by Paul Lincke), which makes fun of the complacency and stupidity of the Berlin police, in a “sound image” lasting a little over three minutes
  10. cf. Zglinicki p. 281.
  11. The retail price at the time was $ 500.
  12. cf. The Auxetophone & Other Compressed-Air Gramophones [4] , The Story of the Victor Auxetophone [5]
  13. cf. Seeber p. 42, audio demonstration by Rene Rondeau on youtube [6]
  14. cf. starkton Feb 6, 2009 at 2:25 pm [7]
  15. cf. JPMüller No. 5 Lichtton: An art of time
  16. ^ Martin Loiperdinger: German Tonbilder of the 1900s. Advanced Technology and National Brand. In: Klaus Kreimeier, Annemone Ligensa (ed.): Film 1900. Technology, Perception, Culture. John Libbey Publishing: New Barnet 2009, pp. 187-199, for the loss rate see p. 193.
  17. cf. Mebold pp. 47-48
  18. cf. Mebold pp. 57-58
  19. In note 93 on p. 203 the author confuses Messter's normal format 25 u. 30 cm gramophone records with the American 40 cm pin-tone film records with 33 13 / min and internal start, which were only introduced too long ("Vitaphone") . Only the records that Karl Valentin dreamed of had a diameter of one meter (!) (In the text "Die Uhr von Loewe": "A record should actually have a diameter of one meter ...!", Homocord matrix H 20 977 , 1928, to be heard on youtube [8] )