CUTs 1.04: Export and Foreign Versions in the Silent Film Era
CUTs 1.04: Export and Foreign Versions in the Silent Film Era
Translation and Alternate Cuts
Silent Film Translation and Export Versions
Even though it rarely carries this status in media studies, translation is arguably the most prominent variation practice in the American film industry, as it is intrinsic to the process of global distribution. Securing commercial exploitation in a predominantly non-English-speaking territory, such as France or Germany, has always required translating a motion picture into the language of the target market. The pre-transition-to-sound period is no exception to this rule.
However, what is unique about the period is that it initially required the editorial assemblage of “another original negative for foreign markets.”1 Key to this was the use of a second camera during the filming of a scene to record alternate camera angles of the same shot of every single scene.
Angles of the first camera composed the version for domestic distribution, whereas those of the second composed the one for export.2 Alternatively, in lieu of alternate angles, the export version had different takes of the same scene.3 Either way, accommodating translation and global distribution required shooting enough footage for two different versions of the same picture.
Kristin Thompson traced the origin of this approach to the Vitagraph company’s establishing foreign subsidiaries for distribution in Britain and France during 1907-1908. Vitagraph was initially unique, in that it used “two lenses and sets of magazines in the same body, making two negatives simultaneously.” In 1909, other producers began similarly “shooting a second negative for European printing; typically, however, they were to use two cameras side by side.”4
A potential reason for creating second negatives was that film duplication technology had considerable limitations. Continuous production of prints led to the negative’s gradual physical deterioration and so a reduction in image quality of the prints produced from it.5 Essentially, the more prints one made, the worse the quality of the print and the state of the negative itself.
Creating multiple negatives would initially resolve this issue. But after 1918, the beginning of the industry’s vertical integration created the impetus to circulate the same picture in a large number of venues. In turn, this “necessitated the technology to produce hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of release prints from a single original camera negative.” The existing “continuous contact printing” process at the time made it possible to only create “a few tens of prints” before the film accumulated too much physical damage to make any more.6
All this ultimately led to Eastman Kodak’s creation of a special positive intermediate duplicating film stock in 1926. Using it as a base made it viable to mass-produce and distribute film prints, which now came with little reduction in image definition and contrast from the original negative.7 Multi-camera filming would actually continue to be a prominent filmmaking technique in 1928-1931, providing the editor with a greater degree of coverage for assembling cuts.8
But the systematic creation of an alternate export cut came to an end.
Producers, Distributors, and Intertitles
Between 1907 and 1926 then, editors of a given silent film systematically assembled an export version with distinct editing from the domestic US version. Subsequently, this export version served as the master or source copy, from which all translations or “foreign versions” of the picture would be created.* These foreign versions then gained additional differences from the domestic version via the translation process, which in the pre-transition period entailed the replacement of a film’s initial English intertitles with those of the target language.9
*My use of the term ‘foreign versions’ should not be confused with what are termed as “Foreign Language Versions/FLVs“ or “Multi-Language Versions/MLVs.“ These are not so much ‘versions’ of the same film as foreign-language remakes of talkie films shot at the same time as the original English-language film, a new translation method developed during the transition-to-sound period prior to the standardization of talkie film subs and dubs.
Intertitles commonly served to influence a viewer’s reading or interpretation of a picture by designating the change from one scene to the next, providing expository narrative information for the audience, or communicating the dialogue characters were ostensibly speaking.10 Moreover, intertitles constituted a part of a film’s assemblage, linking disparate shots together and so contributing to a picture’s overall pace and duration.11 Changing them essentially meant re-editing the picture and potentially revising its narrative, dialogue, and characterization.
A couple of different translation strategies that arose during the first two decades of 20th century came into prominent use by producers in the 1920s. The first placed responsibility for the foreign intertitles primarily on the American producer, who supplied his foreign distributors with a list of intertitles to translate and send back to the US. He would then use this translation to create a complete print with foreign titles before shipping it to the distributors for circulation.
Conversely, the second made intertitles primarily the concern of foreign distributors. In this case, the producer supplied the distributors with a print that featured “flash titles,” which were temporary English titles that were only a frame or two long. The distributors themselves would subsequently shoot and insert new translated titles into the print in place of the flash titles. This constituted a comparatively cheaper method of creating a foreign version, as it required purchasing, developing, and shipping less film stock to another country.12 Foreign intertitles, in that sense, resulted from the interplay between producers and distributors.
Foreign Version Censorship
The title-related decisions of both producers and distributors, however, often depended on cultural, political, and other values of the territory the foreign version was to circulate in. As Vasey states, translation theoretically “allowed anything inappropriate or potentially offensive to be changed.”13 By tailoring pictures to the moral standards of other countries like Australia and New Zealand, producers and distributors promoted the universal appeal of an American picture and removed its cultural specificity.14 From this perspective, foreign versions are a natural result of producers’ and distributors’ interest in penetrating foreign film markets.
Illustrative of this is Serna’s examination of how Her Husband’s Trademark (1922, dir. Sam Wood) transformed after the Mexican government threatened to embargo the picture when Mexicans found the picture’s domestic version offensive. Famous Players-Lasky subsequently altered nineteen dialogue and expository intertitles for the Spanish-language version to remove any direct allusions to the picture’s setting. Among other things, Mexico became a fictional location in South America called “Cristobana,” a four-day train ride to the location turned into a two-week trip by steamer, and “Rio Blanco” replaced references to Rio Grande.
Serna highlights how, despite this, the revision retains visual referents to Mexico, such as costumes and sets, creating a disjunction between the onscreen images and the text.15 This is central to her argument that intertitles “were more than just a strategy for appealing to far-flung audiences” and that translation “demonstrates the ways in which filmic texts intersected with other discourses such as those on national identity, class, or cultural imperialism.”16
Differences between domestic and foreign versions therefore reflect how the cultural, political, and other contexts of a foreign market can affect an American motion picture. In turn, they attest to the fact that, even if producers or distributors were in control of exhibition elements such as sound accompaniment during the silent period, films would still exist in multiple versions, as they couldn’t possibly circulate worldwide without some degree of transformation.
When we consider all these factors, it becomes evident that the silent film’s instability cannot simply be attributed to film exhibition alone but rather to the complex dynamics between exhibitors, producers, and distributors.
Variation then was a fundamental aspect of all three stages of a silent film’s lifecycle, a default state rather than the exception. With this established, it is now possible to reinterpret the transition-to-sound period’s impact on textual variation.
In the following issues, I will attempt to illustrate how, rather than having led to the end of textual variation in the film industry, synch sound merely helped producers and distributors strengthen their control over it.
This article is the fifth entry in an ongoing series called Cinema’s Unstable Texts (CUTs). If you like it, then please, by all means, share it!
Want to learn more? Then be sure to click below and check out the other entries!
Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915-1928 (New York: Schribner, 1990), 134.
William Parrill, European Silent Films on Video: A Critical Guide (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 6. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 2009), 198.
According to Brownlow and Gill, this occurred when a production utilized a single camera, as opposed to two, and so lacked alternate angle coverage. See Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, "Thames Silents Become Channel Four Silents," program notes for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, London Film Festival, 1993, quoted in Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 64. Vasey herself argues that their claims are open to debate.
Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-34 (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 3.
Salt, Film Style and Technology, 198.
Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital (London: Wallflower, 2005), 14.
Enticknap, Moving Image Technology, 15-16.
David Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 305.
Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 91-97.
Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990), 140-143. Brad Chisholm, "Reading Intertitles," in Journal of Popular Film and Television 15, no. 3 (Fall, 1987): 137.
André Gaudreault in particular highlights the connection between the intertitle and assemblage. Indeed, for him, the definition of an intertitle lies in the notion that it must specifically connect disparate images together. See André Gaudreault and Timothy Barnard, "Titles, Subtitles, and Intertitles: Factors of Autonomy, Factors of Concatenation," Film History: An International Journal 25, no. 1 (2013): 90-92.
Nornes, Cinema Babel, 97-99.
Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 68.
Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 69-72.
Laura Isabel Serna, "Translations and Transportation: Toward a Transnational History of the Intertitle," in Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, eds. Bean Jennifer M., Kapse Anupama, and Horak Laura (Indiana University Press, 2014), 132-135.
Ibid., 132.