Version film

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As version films or multi-language versions ( MLV , acronym of Multiple Language Versions ) refers to movies , which were also re-shot in other languages in order to export them to the respective countries. In this production process of film translation, the actors speak the respective language of the target country themselves.

The foreign-language versions are languages called that because of their mode of production independent films represent, but in contrast to remake follow an almost unchanged script and are usually produced by the same production company. In addition, version films are usually planned as such during the preparation phase of the film, while a remake is made after a film that has already been published has been submitted; the decision to do so depends mostly on its popularity or artistic importance.

Compared to dubbing , shooting version films as a translation option offers more leeway to better address cultural differences. The dialogues do not have to be adapted to the images and their temporal and visual requirements, and incomprehensible national contexts can be removed more easily or new cultural references incorporated or replaced. But due to the significantly higher production costs, this process is economically inefficient, so it was only used for a few years at the beginning of the talkie era.

First international marketing strategy for sound films

With the technical development of the sound film at the end of the 1920s, international marketing was considerably restricted, the dialogues were hardly understood abroad and the variant with subtitles was not accepted in the largest customer countries . Before the film dubbing was technically mature, they looked for another way of producing export versions in the relevant national languages.

A silent film version with easily interchangeable subtitles was no longer enough for international success, because from 1929 cinemas were rapidly converted with sound film equipment, for example in Germany three quarters of the German cinemas had already been converted into sound film cinemas in 1932. In order to continue serving the lucrative market in the large linguistic areas of Europe, the large film studios produced newly staged foreign-language versions of their film products, even for the British audience, which initially rejected the American accent. Multi-language versions were primarily produced for France (44%) and Germany (26%), but Great Britain (9%), Spain (8%) and Italy (6%) also produced or imported versions in their respective mother tongue . The large American and European film studios developed different methods of making such export products.

In the US, multi-language versions were first abandoned as a translation method. After Metro Goldwyn Mayer produced almost 50 foreign-language export versions in 1930 and produced more than 30 version films in 1931, the company decided in the summer of the same year to discontinue this process and only use the cheaper dubbing . Also Warner Brothers ended the manufacturing version films at the same time. The reason for this was the high production costs, because each additional language version increased them by around 70 percent and the sales achieved abroad could not justify this.

In Europe, this export strategy was held for a few years longer. The German company Universum Film AG (UFA) was particularly active in the years 1931 to 1933 and produced mainly French versions of their exclusive equipment films, produced by Erich Pommer , who had already gained experience in Hollywood. This not only opened up the market of the francophone countries, but these versions were also successfully distributed in the Spanish-speaking area.

Although multi-language versions were an optimal translation method, as cultural peculiarities of the respective target country could be taken up without any problems, it was economically not in proportion to the high production costs, because each language version meant a budget increase of around 70 percent. The far cheaper alternative to film translation was dubbing , the technical development of which resulted in suitable sound mixing and editing processes as early as 1932. The initially violent criticism against the separation of body and voice subsided, the audience gradually got used to the new voices, so that this “acoustic version” soon caught on in the large linguistic areas. In smaller countries, the most economical version of translation, subtitling, was used . The heyday of version films ended around 1935, although multi-language versions were still being made in isolated cases until the 1940s. Later experiments with version films ( The Moon Is Blue / The Virgin on the Roof from 1953) did not prevail.

Different production methods of the big film studios

US film companies

Due to the technical development of the sound film around 1928, the US film industry lost its leading position on the international market. In order to reach the audience in the important customer countries, especially in Europe, the spoken dialogues had to be translated into the respective national language. One possibility was the production of multi-language versions by shooting the same film in the same sets with the same camera setting based on the same script (“double shooting”), using native speaker actors. This method was very costly, so it was promised to share the costs through co-productions with European companies and at the same time to be able to hire well-known actors from the target countries.

The big US film studios had separate groups for each language version, consisting of native-speaking actors, screenwriters and directors, so that very self-sufficient works were created in foreign language versions. This approach was economically very unprofitable, so by the end of 1931 most employees had been sent back to Europe. So Anna Christie (1930) with Greta Garbo by Clarence Brown , whose very original German version of Jacques Feyder on the grounds of MGM has been rotated in direct connection using the same film sets and camera angles, one of the few well-known American version films.

World-famous silent film stars such as Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton (e.g. in Casanova unwillingly from 1931; English title Parlor, Bedroom & Bath ) could not be replaced, so MGM temporarily tried to have these actors recite foreign languages ​​by means of phonetic reproduction , called phonetic versions . If the dialogues were then dubbed by native speakers, this was called the optical version , the cost of which was around 15 to 20 percent of the original.

A well-known example of an MVL film from Universal Studios is the horror film Dracula (1931), which was filmed in English during the day by director Tod Browning with Bela Lugosi in the title role. During the night, the Spanish language version Drácula with Carlos Villarías as the undead count and Lupita Tovar as the female protagonist, directed by George Melford , who worked with an interpreter due to a lack of Spanish, was made in the same film sets and with the same script . The differences between the versions in terms of film length and the editing of the sequences are mainly due to the different approaches of the directors, and Melford also had to pay less attention to the American moral code.

In 1930, the Warner Brothers produced four of the John Barrymore hits for the South American market as Spanish versions with the Spaniard Antonio Moreno under the direction of the Mexican Ramón Novarro , as well as 4 French and 6 German language versions. From February to June 1931, version films were made exclusively in England at Teddington Studios, a total of 13 French versions, and then completely discontinued.

The production company Paramount Pictures recognized very early on that the extremely time-consuming journey of European actors could be minimized if they set up a new location on the east coast. In late 1928, Paramount opened the Astoria studio in New York City under the direction of Walter Wanger . With the French cabaret artist Maurice Chevalier , many successful film operettas were also shot as French versions, including the sound film debut by Ernst Lubitsch Love Parade / Parade d'amour (1929), The Big Pond / La Grande Mare (1930) by Hobart Henley, as well One Hour with You / Une heure près de toi (1932) again by Ernst Lubitsch.

Paramount studio in Joinville near Paris

Paramount Pictures had a different strategy than MGM and the rest of the US studios in producing version films. They wanted to use the talent of European actors and filmmakers locally and take advantage of the tax advantages in France. In the winter of 1929/30 they bought a site near Joinville , southeast of Paris, for 10 million dollars from the French company Ciné-Romans and built six recording studios for the French company "Les Films Paramounts" under the direction of Robert T. Kane.

Production took place day and night. During the day the rooms were occupied by the French, German, Hungarian, Portuguese and Spanish film teams, and at night the Italian, Polish, Swedish and Czech filming took place. Typical practices of the Joinville productions were, for example, to have each version performed by a different native-speaker director, and outstanding screenwriters or theater actors with big names were also hired. At first, successful US films served as models and were reproduced there in as many languages ​​as possible. For example, the 1930 Oscar-nominated film adaptation of Sarah and Son in Joinville was again written in French ( Toute sa vie ), German ( lullaby ), Swedish ( Hjärtats röst ), Italian ( Il richiamo del cuore ), Spanish ( Toda una vida ) , Portuguese ( A Canção do Berço ) and Polish ( Glos serca ). By the end of 1930, 66 feature films had been completed in series in up to twelve languages ​​after this broad-based production. Thereafter, the language diversity was limited to the central markets of Europe. For example, the US film drama The Letter (1929) only has four foreign-language versions, filmed in French ( La lettre ), German ( Woman in the jungle ), Spanish ( La carta ) and Italian ( La donna bianca ) in the European Joinville studio were.

But in 1931 Paramount began to pursue a new strategy. In order to have films recognized as French in favor of the quota laws, a template from the States was dispensed with and French theater plays began to be adapted , especially by Marcel Pagnol , which were successful in Europe. So Marius was created in 1931 as a purely French film with a German and a Swedish version.

Since the occupancy rate in the studios was already declining in 1931, a new focus was placed on the exportability of film productions. The technical equipment for dubbing was purchased and production of dubbing versions of Paramount's Hollywood and Astoria films began under the supervision of the local German production manager Karol Jakob . The Joinville studios were in operation until 1933.

The version films by Paramount are largely among the lost films except for their primary English versions, a few Swedish language versions (e.g. Marius ) and a few Spanish versions (e.g. Topaze ).

British International Pictures in Elstree

As early as the mid-1920s, plans arose in the European film industry to form an alliance under the visionary name "Film-Europa" between the leading companies in order to establish themselves on the world market alongside the US studios. With the introduction of the sound film, it was hoped to be able to implement this strategy with the help of the production of multi-language versions, paying attention on the one hand to international character and on the other hand to cultural variance by providing the individual language versions with partially adapted dialogues and different star cast.

In 1927 the newly founded film companies Gaumont British and BIP set up shop at the Elstree studio near London with the ambitious goal of creating a “British Hollywood”. A year earlier, John Maxwell had acquired British National Studios , converted it into a vertically structured film group and renamed it British International Pictures in order to be able to successfully place its products on the international film market.

In early 1928, Maxwell began implementing his plan to gain a foothold in the continental European market. The acquisition of the Berlin distribution company Südfilm AG was supposed to make it easier to present own productions in Germany. When the contract was signed, BIP was also able to engage the German producer and director Richard Eichberg for a future collaboration. When the Elstree studios were ready for sound film recordings a year later in the summer of 1929, Richard Eichberg was brought to England, where he was hired for three multi-language versions. His first version film was The Flame of Love (German version Hai-Tang. Der Weg zur Schande ), a drama about a Chinese dancer in the Russian Empire, which was played in both language versions by Anna May Wong . Production work began in November 1929, using the typical BIP procedure of filming both language versions in parallel with two different native speakers but the same technical staff. Another French version of Haï-Tang was not produced until a few weeks later when the financial participation of Jacques Haïk's French production company was established. The international and commercial success failed to materialize, Eichberg's two other MLV productions, Night Birds / Der Greifer (1930) and Let's Love and Laugh / The Bridegroom Widow (1930/31) were only made in English and German.

The best-known BIP version films were made under the direction of Ewald André Dupont . His first film adaptation of the Atlantic Titanic catastrophe , which was filmed alongside the English version as a German language version ( Atlantic ) between June and July 1929, was not only the first British multi-language production, but also the first sound film in German. The German premiere took place in Berlin on October 28, 1929 and aroused great interest. John Maxwell commented that his decision to go with the multi-language version was to apply ordinary economic principles . A few weeks later, a French version ( Atlantis ) was produced under their own direction , all three versions received very positive reviews and achieved internationally respectable box office results, just not on the US market. Dupont's subsequent films Two Worlds / Zwei Welten / Les deux mondes (1930), a tragic love story during the First World War, and Cape Forlorn / Menschen im Käfig / Le cap perdu (1930) were made in three language versions from the start.

British directors were also commissioned for multi-language versions, for example Alfred Hitchcock was to write his third sound film Murder! shoot in both English and German, but the German version Mary. Sir John intervenes did not achieve the same quality of dramaturgy and acting.

From mid-1932, Maxwell changed his production strategy in that he wanted to buy the rights to foreign commercially successful films in order to remake English versions in his own studios, with the option of reusing footage from mass scenes and possibly using polyglot stars from the original version. Negotiations with the UFA board were held, but the financial ideas of the contractual partners differed too much. For example, in the negotiations on Gustav Ucicky's film Im Secret Service (1931) ... demanded that the dress that Brigitte Helm wore in the film and the German negative be used to double some scenes .

In 1934, for example, BIP produced a remake of the successful German music film Ein Lied goes around die Welt by Richard Oswald from 1933 with the popular German tenor singer Joseph Schmidt . Both stars fled Germany after Hitler came to power because of their Jewish roots. In June 1934, filming in the Elstree Studios with the same director, cameraman and leading actor took place within two weeks, a third of the film material could be reused from the original version and the exterior shots from Venice provided with inserts of English dialogues.

Ufa studio in Neubabelsberg

When the German film company Universum Film AG was on the verge of ruin in 1927, the Hugenberg Group acquired its shares and commissioned General Director Ludwig Klitzsch to bring UFA back on the road to success with a strict austerity policy and a new structure. The development of the sound film technology in 1927/28 was initially only observed, but in April 1929 the decision was finally made to make a cost-intensive conversion after a contract including a " most-favored-nation clause " had been negotiated with Tobis-Klangfilm .

A completely new building with four crosswise arranged sound film studios, which met the acoustic requirements, the so-called Tonkreuz , was built for this purpose. It was completed at the end of September 1929, so work on the first sound film to be produced in Germany, Melodie des Herzens , directed by Hanns Schwarz, took place there. This was initially planned as a silent film and filming began in Budapest in May of the same year, but then it was decided to add dialogue scenes and, in addition to the silent film version, a German, a French ( Mélodie du coeur ), an English ( Melody of the Heart ) and to produce a Hungarian version ( Vasárnap délután ) with Dita Parlo and Willy Fritsch in the lead roles.

For the second sound film production boss could Erich Pommer about his Paramount -Contacts the German Oscar winner and silent film star Emil Jannings retrieve already in May 1929 to Berlin, won in August Dr. Karl Vollmoeller as a dramaturgical advisor and at the same time hired the successful Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg for the literary film The Blue Angel , adapted by Carl Zuckmayer . In October, Marlene Dietrich was hired to play the role of vaudeville artist "Lola Lola", and the shooting took place from November 1929 to January 1930, with the English version being recorded in parallel with the same actors. Not only was the film a great success, but also the songs composed by Friedrich Hollaender: “I am set to love from head to toe” (English title Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It) ) and “Ich bin die fesche Lola " (English title " Naughty Lola " ), which Marlene Dietrich sang in both German and English, became world famous.

This marked the beginning of the UFA version films in the Neubabelsberg studios with a very efficient and successful production strategy. When casting, actors were selected who spoke two or more languages ​​and could therefore be used in different versions. Above all, the polyglot leading actresses such as Lilian Harvey , Renate Müller or Käthe von Nagy became European stars. Actors who were famous in the target countries were also chosen for the other leading roles, for example Willy Fritsch was continuously replaced by Henri Garat in the French export versions .

The foreign language versions were filmed in parallel, with native-speaking actors and multilingual stars playing scene by scene in the same film sets under the instructions of the same director, who was assisted by a dialogue director in the event of linguistic uncertainties. The technical production team remained the same, and camera settings and film sequences were hardly changed. That required little change in the script, so in the Ufa version films there are usually only minor cultural variances in the different language versions, smaller ones such as name changes of people and places or different accessories. The responsible producer Erich Pommer then endeavored to lay out the plot as generally as possible: The supreme law is the material. The very idea must provide the basis for an understanding of the world and the script must necessarily take into account the great longings of people, which are fairly similar internationally.

The chairman of the foreign department, Berthold von Theobald, tried to develop an international marketing strategy overseas, Great Britain and France in order to negotiate financing models for the expensive export versions. The UFA branch in New York had tried in vain to find US trading partners, so they soon refrained from establishing themselves on the US market. In 1930 the English language versions Melody of the Heart , The Blue Angel , The Love Waltz and The Temporary Widow, which had already been shot , were sold to the British film company “ British International Pictures ”. At the suggestion of company boss John Maxwell , a new strategy of cooperation was considered: Sale of the rights for the production of English versions with the possibility of using "mass scenes" of the primary version. This principle could not prevail because of different ideas about cost sharing, but in 1935 BIP was enabled to re-shoot the literary film Emil and the Detectives from 1931 under the direction of Milton Rosmer, with scenes from the original version being purchased and used by the UFA. In the production year 1932/33 a cooperation was made with the film company " Gaumont-British ", which resulted in English-language versions of two Lilian Harvey films, Happy Ever After and The Only Girl , the comedy Early to Bed and the FP1 aviator adventure .

Von Theobald's contacts in France were far more successful, because through the French subsidiary "Alliance Cinématographie Européenne" (ACE), pre-financing of national-language versions was made possible by means of loans from the French government. Thus, in April 1930, it was decided to produce a French version with the title Le chemin du paradis instead of the planned English language version of Die Drei von der Gasstelle . Since then, the focus of Ufa export production has shifted to France. Especially the music films with Lilian Harvey , who played the popular French dream couple together with actor Henri Garat , were very successful.

Ufa produced a total of 62 French versions, significantly more than the 13 English language versions. The French language versions were also marketed in Central and Southern Europe, as the audience there was opposed to German-language films. Above all, however, the francophone and Spanish- speaking areas opened up, which willingly accepted French films with subtitles because of its different dialects.

Indian version films

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Since there are several official languages ​​in India, several film centers have also developed. In the north, Hindi is predominantly spoken, in the south of the subcontinent the main languages are Marathi , Kannada and Malayalam on the west coast and Tamil and Telugu on the east coast .

Even with the introduction of the sound film, version films were also produced, for example the director V. Shantaram shot the Marathi language version Kunku with the same cast at the same time as the Hindi film Duniya Na Mane .

Even today, the production of multi-language versions is a common marketing strategy, as the local film stars are intended to attract viewers to the cinema halls. The current well-known director Mani Ratnam had shot a Tamil language version with the title Aaytha Ezhuthu parallel to his second Hindi film Yuva in 2004 , in which the roles of Abhishek Bachchan , Ajay Devgn and Vivek Oberoi by the Tamil actors R. Madhavan , Surya Sivakumar and Siddharth have been replaced. Six years later he shot the thriller Raavanan in the Tamil language with Vikram and Aishwarya Rai in the leading roles, at the same time the Hindi language version Raavan , with Abhishek Bachchan taking on the male part at the side of his wife.

List of version films

literature

  • Jan Distelmeyer: Babylon in FilmEuropa: Multilingual versions of the 1930s . Catalog book for the CineFest 2005. Edition Text & Criticism, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-88377-833-8 .
  • Tim Bergfelder, Christian Cargnelli (Ed.): Destination London. German-speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950. Film Europe: German Cinema in an International Context. Vol. 6., Berghahn Books, Oxford / New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-84545-532-3 . ( Reviewed by: Marlis Schmidt )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Babylon in FilmEuropa , chapter: "Subtitles, language version, synchronization" by Joseph Garncarz, pp. 9-18.
  2. ↑ Guido Marc Pruys: Die Rhetorik der Filmsynchronization - How foreign feature films are censored, changed and seen in Germany (1997), p. 146.
  3. ^ Babylon in FilmEurope. P. 13: Statistical data refer to the version database of CineGraph
  4. ↑ a b c d Dissertation by Christoph Wahl , pp. 17–39; Faculty of Philology at the Ruhr University Bochum; 2003; accessed on January 31, 2012.
  5. ↑ Radim Sochorek: Version film - predecessor of synchronization. Sochorek.cz, February 28, 2006, accessed February 1, 2012 .
  6. ↑ a b c Jürgen Kasten: The Garbo speaks German. NZZ Online, February 24, 2006, accessed on March 13, 2019 .
  7. ↑ The rhetoric of film synchronization. Pp. 147/148.
  8. ↑ a b Babylon im FilmEuropa , chapter: “Mehrsprachversionversion / Dubbing?” By Leonardo Quaresima, pp. 19–37.
  9. ↑ sochorek.cz , article from February 28, 2006, author: Radim Sochorek
  10. ↑ The Document of Horror - A Chronicle of Horror Film , Volume II: 1930–1945, Author: Ralf Ramge; Version from 2006.
  11. ↑ Dissertation by C. Wahl ; Source: Kevin Brownlow Pioneers of the Film. The parade's gone by ... Basel / Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 661 // footnote 79: Cf. Wedel 2001, p. 69.
  12. ↑ a b c Babylon in FilmEuropa , chapter: "Paramount and the homeostatic moment" by Nataša Durovicová, pp. 65–78.
  13. ↑ Lullaby. On: imdb.com. Retrieved March 14, 2012.
  14. ↑ Woman in the jungle. On: imdb.com. Retrieved March 14, 2012.
  15. ↑ Dissertation by C. Wahl. P. 37, footnote 132.
  16. ↑ a b c d e dissertation by Christoph Wahl: The speaking of films. About verbal language in feature films (PDF; 1.5 MB), pp. 22,30-34 / pp. 37–39; Faculty of Philology at the Ruhr University Bochum; 2003.
  17. ↑ a b Babylon in FilmEuropa , chapter: "Eurovision - Hans May, Richard Eichberg, Joseph Schmidt and the Grand Prix de la Chanson" by Geoff Brown, pp. 107–122.
  18. ↑ Babylon in FilmEuropa , Chapter: "National Locations - Global Understanding" by Chris Wahl, pp. 146–156.
  19. ^ Babylon in FilmEurope. P. 122, footnote 9; Quoting John Maxwell from the Kinamatograph Weeklys report of November 7, 1929.
  20. ↑ a b c d Babylon in FilmEuropa , chapter: "Business is business" by Horst Claus, pp. 133-145.
  21. ↑ The clay cross. filmportal.de, accessed on February 21, 2012 .
  22. ↑ DVD bonus material from The Blue Angel
  23. ↑ Multi- language versions. filmportal.de, accessed on March 12, 2012 .
  24. ^ Babylon in FilmEurope. P. 23.
  25. ^ Babylon in FilmEurope. P. 151.
  26. ↑ Sunayana Suresh, Prathibha Joy: Kannada actors now opt for multilingual films. Times of India, January 2, 2013, accessed July 22, 2013 .