The article discusses the concept of ‘radio-film’, a term which repetitively entered the vocabulary of practitioners and theoreticians during the transition to sound, and raises several well acknowledged historical notions by adopting a slightly different question: has an idea of cinema as an entirely aural art — i.e. sound cinema as ‘cinema made of sound’ — ever come up in media history? Starting by considering the European scenario and by focusing more specifically on the case of the early Italian radio-play between 1925 and 1935, this article explores this path as a concrete historical possibility: in this context, the surfacing of two hybrid terms such as fonoquadro [phonoscene/phonoframe] and suonomontaggio [sound-montage] will represent the case studies for a discussion on ‘intermediality’ both as an epistemological framework to apply and ‘a state of historical transition’ to investigate. By questioning the role of cinema as an always present term of comparison in the debate on the medium specificity of radio and the ways in which a cinematic imagination has affected the development of entertainment genres in radio production, the essay aims at demonstrating how a hypothesis of aural cinema as a radio art can be grounded in several concrete aesthetic and technological intermedial exchanges.
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Notes for a History of Radio-Film: Cinematic Imagination and Intermedia Forms in Early Italian Radio
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Notes for a History of Radio-Film: Cinematic Imagination and
Intermedia Forms in Early Italian Radio
Simone Dotto, Università degli Studi di Udine




Abstract

    The article discusses the concept of ‘radio-film’, a term which repetitively
    entered the vocabulary of practitioners and theoreticians during the transition
    to sound, and raises several well acknowledged historical notions by adopting a
    slightly different question: has an idea of cinema as an entirely aural art — i.e.
    sound cinema as ‘cinema made of sound’ — ever come up in media history?
    Starting by considering the European scenario and by focusing more specifically
    on the case of the early Italian radio-play between 1925 and 1935, this article
    explores this path as a concrete historical possibility: in this context, the
    surfacing of two hybrid terms such as fonoquadro [phonoscene/phonoframe]
    and suonomontaggio [sound-montage] will represent the case studies for a
    discussion on ‘intermediality’ both as an epistemological framework to apply
    and ‘a state of historical transition’ to investigate. By questioning the role of
    cinema as an always present term of comparison in the debate on the medium
    specificity of radio and the ways in which a cinematic imagination has affected
    the development of entertainment genres in radio production, the essay aims at
    demonstrating how a hypothesis of aural cinema as a radio art can be grounded
    in several concrete aesthetic and technological intermedial exchanges.


Sound Cinema as an Aural Art: a Hypothesis in Media History

   During the transition to sound cinema, the concept of a cinematic art conceived
for radio seemed to surface sporadically all over Europe. Between the late 1920s
and the early 1930s, shortly after Dziga Vertov had announced that ‘a method for
recording auditory phenomena on film tape had been discovered’,1 filmmakers
and critics in the Soviet Union started talking about ‘radio-film’. According to
Stephen Lovell, at that time radio productions were conceived in analogy with
cinema, since ‘the aesthetic lexicon of the 1920s had no other term for a form of


1
 Dziga Vertov, ‘KinoPravda & RadioPravda’, The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. by Annette Belson,
(London, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 95.

                                       Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                          Simone Dotto


aural performance that was not theatre […], not a literary or journalistic text […],
and not news report or commentary […]’.2 In the meanwhile, the Breslau radio
station in Germany premiered Werner Milch and Friedrich Wilhelm Bischoff’s
Hallo! Hier Welle Erdball! (1928), an audio piece that combined four previously
recorded albums ‘as a testing ground onto stereophonic disc’.3 A different
version of the same work would be broadcast again in 1930, together with Walter
Ruttman’s notorious sound-collage Weekend — one of the first attempts at an
artistic composition that relied on an optical recording procedure, following
the version perfected by the Tri-Ergon Company just some years before. These
two radio-artworks have repeatedly been interpreted as the starting points of
the tradition of Film-Hoerspiele or, as a critic of that time put it, ‘films without
moving images’.4
    On March 1926, just two years after the first official radio transmissions in
Italy, the National Broadcasting Company’s agency Radiorario hosted an article
named ‘Acoustic Film and Radiophonic Literature’ by the poet Mario Vugliano.
In it he makes a direct comparison between the early age of cinema and the first
years of radio, suggesting that the two media would grow together on parallel
paths.

        Just like cinema, to begin with radio took advantage — as it still does now — of the
    ‘materials’ that were conceived for the other arts: literature and music. But every art
    has its own style, which simply does not suit the others: just as the cinematographer —
    who has a visual way of thinking — gradually rejected chapters of novels and dialogue
    from stage plays and instead created visual literature, so radio, especially in foreign
    countries, is now looking for what we can call a microphonic style. […] The acoustic
    film consists in uttering sounds that can make the ear feel the same sensations as those
    felt by the eye in front of cinematographic images.5

   Vugliano later dismissed these experimentations as ‘phonotechnical witticisms’
or ‘suburban fairground attractions’, being convinced that ‘radio will unfold its
unpredictable possibilities and outline its own technique’6 only when it faces
the challenge of telling a story or staging a drama. Differently from the previous

2
  Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp.
83–84.
3
  Daniel Gilfillan, Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2009), pp. 76–77. For a recent contribution on Ruttman’s intermedial approach in
Weekend see Andy Birtwistle, ‘Photographic Sound Art and the Silent Modernity of Walter Rutt-
mann’s Weekend (1930)’, The New Soundtrack, 6.2 (2016), 109–127.
4
  Ivi, p. 77.
5
  Mario Vugliano, ‘Pellicola acustica e letteratura radiofonica’, Radiorario, 2.18 (May 1926), p. 1.
(My translation. From now all translations from the Italian are the author’s own.)
6
  A few months later, an updated version of the article — featuring references to the Irish essayist
Clive Staple Lewis’ Broadcasting from Within and to the pièce radiophonique ‘Mare Moto’ by the
French playwrights Pierre Cusy and Gabriel Germinet — was published in the same magazine,
significantly renamed Radiotheatre. See Mario Vugliano, ‘Radioteatro’, Radiorario, 2.36 (Septem-
ber 1926), p. 4.

108
                                Notes for a History of Radio-Film


examples, such a conception of ‘acoustic film’ did not involve the use of any
actual ‘film’:7 Vugliano used the word as a synonym for cinema, essentializing the
art of moving images as ‘a visual way of thinking’ and its aural counterpart as ‘a
test to see through sound’.8 A similar synesthetic task was suggested in 1930 by
the theatre and film director Anton Giulio Bragaglia:

    someone provided the examples of the way in which the audience learns to under-
    stand cinema, and how a bi-dimensional sense of sight has grown, relying on a subcon-
    scious convention; in similar ways, new sensory abilities would be acquired by radio
    listeners, in order to overcome those absences which are instead the real treasure of
    this new mean of expression.9

  Bragaglia then imagined radio listeners as ‘an immense crowd of régisseurs/
spectators’,10 capable of creating the show by themselves using the means of an
inner vision to aid their sense of hearing. Radio listening becomes, in these terms,
an even stronger ‘visual way of thinking’.

   This brief and patchy overview necessarily does not mete the ambitious aim of
retracing all of the exchanges that occurred between radio and cinema as emer-
ging media.11 Nevertheless, the aforementioned examples aim to raise several
well acknowledged historical notions by adopting a slightly different question:
has an idea of cinema as an entirely aural art (i.e. sound cinema as ‘cinema made
of sound’) ever come up in media history? The mere facts that film was at some
point a support used in radio stations, and that a term such as the ‘radio-film’
repetitively entered the vocabulary of practitioners and theoreticians, make this
path a concrete historical possibility. Since the analysis of this article will mainly
focus on the Italian case, my starting point will be the ideas expressed by Vuglia-
no and Bragaglia concerning radio as a ‘medium for the inner vision’. It will re-
trace their concrete applications in the history of the Italian radio-play, from the
earliest examples to the moment when sound-on-film technologies entered radio
production as technical support. By exploring the ways in which a cinematic
imagination has affected the development of entertainment genres in radio pro-
duction, this essay will demonstrate how a hypothesis of aural cinema as a radio
art can be grounded in several concrete aesthetic and technological intermedial
exchanges.



7
  German experimentations in ‘acoustic films’ included the first work of Hoerspiele pioneer Alfred
Braun.
8
  Vugliano, ‘Pellicola acustica e letteratura radiofonica’, p. 1.
9
  Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Sottopalco. Saggi sul teatro (Florence: Barulli e Figlio, 1937), p. 135.
10
   Ivi, p. 128.
11
   In this respect, my reflection builds on Paola Valentini’s insights on how radio paved the way for
the reception of sound cinema in Italy. See Paola Valentini, Presenze sonore. Il passaggio al sonoro
in Italia tra cinema e radio (Florence: Le Lettere, 2007).

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                                          Simone Dotto


   In order to do so, I will rely on two different understanding of intermediality.
The first refers to an epistemological horizon and a historiographical approach,
as formulated by Fickers, Aalbers, Jacobs and Bijsterveld: intermediality in this
sense, is not only a theoretical category for the study of the complex interrela-
tions among different media forms and their intramedia reference, but also a
lived reality where new cultural practices emerge’.12 The second is the notion of
‘intermediality as a state of historical transition’, theorized by Rick Altman: the
search of a single medium for its specificity and the establishment of its specific
identity is historicized in the passage from an intermedial instability to an all-
encompassing state of multimediality.

          L’intermédialité devrait désigner, à mon avis, une étape historique, un état transitoire
     au cours du quel une forme en voie de devenir un média à part entière se trouve encore
     partagée entre plusieurs médias existants, à un point tel que sa propre identité reste en
     suspens. […] Car le système proposé ici ne se limite pas au seul cinéma: au contraire,
     il s’applique au double mouvement d’inscription et d’eirfacement de l’intermédialité
     propre à l’introduction de toute nouvelle technologie.13

    Similar concepts were further elaborated by André Gaudreault and Philippe
Marion in their theory of the double birth of a medium. Relying on the prototype
of early cinema, they offer a general model that prescribes multiple stages of the
life-span of each medium, where the appearance of a new technological process
is followed by the emergence of particular procedures and, as a final step, by the
constitution and institutionalization of an established medium. Along this pro-
cess, new media, which are at first received as ‘a new way of presenting already
well-established entertainment genres’ and an ‘extension of earlier practices’,14
are born again when they finally find their ‘medium-specific expression capable
of disassociating the medium from other media or generic ‘expressibles’ that
have already been distinguished and are being practiced’.15 In Gaudreault and
Marion’s vision, the search for a distinctive expressive feature goes hand in hand
with technological and institutional development: the spheres of institutional-
ized discourse, semiotic means of expression and materials, technological appa-
ratuses and technological means of dissemination variously contribute in defin-
ing the medium’s identity with respect to other media.16



12
   Andreas Fickers, Jasper Albers, Andres Jacobs, Katrin Bijsterveld, ‘Sounds Familiar: Intermedi-
ality and re-mediation in the written, sonic and audiovisual narratives of Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in
Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage, ed. by Karin Bijsterveld
(Buelefed: Transcript Verlag, 2007), p. 81.
13
   Rick Altman, ‘De l’intermédialité au multimédia: cinéma, médias, avènement du son’, Cinemàs,
10.1 (1999), 37–53 (pp. 38, 51).
14
   André Gaudreault, Philippe Marion, ‘A Medium is Always Born Twice…’, Early Popular Visual
Culture, 3.1 (2005), 3–15 (p. 4).
15
   Ivi, p. 3.
16
   Ivi, p. 6.

110
                                Notes for a History of Radio-Film


   Within these theoretical frameworks, my analysis will start from the discursive
formation of the radio-play genre during the ‘constitutive’ period of Italian radio
(the first decade of its history as a mass medium, from 1925 to 1935), providing
the two key-terms fonoquadro (which, as will be explained, had the double mea-
ning of ‘phonoscene’ and ‘phonoframe’) and suonomontaggio (‘sound-montage’)
with some contextualization. More specifically, this study will retrace the search
for medium-specific artistic expression by analysing several articles — published
on the EIAR (Italian Institution for Radiophonic Auditions) periodicals Radio-
rario and RadioCorriere as well as in other newspapers or cultural magazines
— which directly questioned the existence of a radio art. At first, the majority
of practitioners, writers or intellectuals who took part in the debate considered
dramas aired on the radio as a (more or less legitimate) extension of theatre with
new technological means.17 In this same challenge against other ‘expressibles’, as
will be argued below, cinema played a quite different role: its presence as a term
of comparison was more rarely addressed than the theatre, however it can none-
theless be inferred in the lexicon and the techniques of some radio productions.
An insight into both the discursive dimension and the material practices in use
at that time could therefore provide an overview of how radio observed cinema
while searching for its own expressive form.


     From the Aural Scene to the Sonic Frame. Building the Fonoquadro

    The term ‘fonoquadro’ emerged alongside the very first attempts to stage a drama
that was prepared specifically for the radio: the original radio-play, Luigi Chiarelli’s
L’anello di Teodosio [Theodosius’s Ring] was broadcast in November 1929, and
officially introduced as ‘a radio-comedy in thirty fonoquadri’.18 Three years later,
Alessandro De Stefani used an almost identical term — ‘quadro acustico’ — to present
his work La dinamo dell’eroismo [‘The Bravery Engine’], the second original play
to be premiered on the national frequencies, on 3 October 1932. The Italian word
quadro has itself an ‘intermedially’ ambiguous meaning, as it may refer both to a
theatrical and a cinematographic realm. In the former it indicates a smaller division
of the act, a narrative unity (a ‘scene’), in the latter it corresponds to a spatial and
temporal unity of representation (a ‘frame’). Strictly speaking, there is evidently no
actual equivalent of the cinematographic frame that could possibly occur during the
staging of a dramatic representation, whether it takes place in a radio studio or not.
However, according to Bragaglia, the increasing number of stage plays organized in
quadri at that time indicated specifically the willingness of theatre to compete against
the modes of representation introduced by film art. As he would later recall:


17
   Enzo Ferrieri promoted an ‘inquiry on radiotheatre’ in the pages of the theatrical magazine
Convegno, 8 August 1931.
18
   N.a., ‘Una novità di Luigi Chiarelli a 1Mi e 1TO: “L’anello di Teodosio”’, Radiorario, 8.46 (No-
vember 1929), p. 4.

                                                                                               111
                                          Simone Dotto


          Quadri, then, means lightness, fantasy, multiplicity, a revolving stage: theatre wants
     to speed up its pace. To say ‘to act’ will soon equate to saying ‘oppressive, slow, boring,
     stifling, tedious, tiresome’. It is something we started to say fifteen years ago […]. The
     revolution in the stage techniques mostly deals with the representational rhythm: a
     question of time, rather than space […] In the era of cinema, the theatre too must
     keep pace with accelerating representations of our time.19

    The theorist of photodynamism stated that theatre could have equated cinema
only by fastening its mode of representation. From this perspective, the notion of
‘scene’ was valuable as a mere unit of duration, for its rhythmical functions rather
than/as well as the strictly narrative ones. As a ‘one dimensional medium’, radio
could not help but to inherit such an enhanced temporal dimension: the unfol-
ding of a radio-piece structure ‘in “almost scenic” sequences, differently placed
through time and space’ eases the perception of the passing of time in a more
‘concrete’, ‘tangible form’, since it is organized in ‘discrete spatiotemporal blocks’
instead of passing in a constant flow.20 To put it in simpler words: given that it
cannot provide visual evidence of a given space in a given time, the entire aural
representation depends on how sonic elements are ordered throughout time. As a
consequence, early writings for radio tried to take advantage of these specificities
by referring to the notion of fonoquadro as a spatiotemporal unit rather than as
an autonomous narrative section (i.e., more as a ‘phono-frame’ than as a ‘phono-
scene’). In both aforementioned radio-plays, the fonoquadri followed one another,
often marked by changes of settings. L’anello di Teodosio’s plot — three detecti-
ves chasing two imaginary thieves in an international scenario — was, according
to the Italian radio historian Malatini, nothing more than ‘an excuse to exploit the
specific capabilities of the radio to easily and quickly displace the action from one
location to another, using noises to provide clues’.21 All the (admittedly disparate)
locations where the drama took place (‘hotels, an ocean liner travelling from Ge-
neva to New York, a movie theatre, a theatre, a bar, the inside of an elevator…’)22
allowed for clearly acoustic, sometimes musical, characterizations. The characters
run from an opera theatre to a jazz club, often passing through a stereotypical
array of urban sounds (‘street noises, the cries of the paperboys selling L’Eco di
Genova, streetcar bells, train whistles, car horns’).23 As is proven by the several
redundant lines in the dialogues (‘We have just arrived in Geneva’; ‘Now we have
stopped in front of a theatre…’),24 the writer was more concerned with the con-
struction of a diegetic space than with narrative coherence itself.


19
   Bragaglia, p. 39.
20
   Angela Ida De Benedictis, Radiodramma e arte radiofonica. Storia e funzioni della musica per radio
in Italia (Turin: EDT, 2007), p. 83.
21
   Franco Malatini, Cinquant’anni di teatro radiofonico in Italia 1929-1979 (Turin: ERI-RAI, 1981),
p. 21.
22
   N.a.,‘Una novità di Luigi Chiarelli a 1Mi e 1TO: “L’anello di Teodosio”’, p. 4.
23
   Quoted in Malatini, p. 22.
24
   Ibidem.

112
                                Notes for a History of Radio-Film


   Two years later, Alessandro De Stefani — who had been working both as a
playwright and a screenwriter — further enriched the definition of the fonoqua-
dro by using almost cinematographic terms. While commenting on his work, La
dinamo dell’eroismo, he specified that ‘street noises and night noises, sounds co-
ming from a tavern, an aerodrome, an anarchist club and a fire will interchange
in a fast sequence of acoustic scenes [quadri] in order to recall those places’.25
Moreover, he clearly underlined the intermingling of narrative development and
the listener’s experience of fictional space: ‘The audience is required to follow
the characters as they move from one place to another, and this movement, this
different perspective, must be rendered with a different shading of noise’.26 Fur-
ther notes on the script detailed the composition of the fonoquadri and provided
a prescription of how a given sound should move from the background to the
foreground, or the other way round (‘Electric bells, urban street noises, speakers,
advertising, fast and fleeting sensations; then the noise of the city diminishes
and fades away, as though swallowed by a dense fog; eventually, a voice emerges
from total silence’).27 Whereas the listeners could sometimes infer their point
of audition from the specifics of what they heard (as another note on the script
reads: ‘we can hear [car] noises very well because the windows are presumed
to be open’),28 more often they had to discover their coordinates in the diegetic
space hearing one sound at the time. Most of the doors and the windows that
are repeatedly slammed, being alternatively closed or opened in both Chiarelli’s
and De Stefani’s plays, serve no other function than that of gradually revealing
to the listeners where the action is taking place. As De Stefani wrote: ‘One must
be able to see and to recognize the places, the people and even their gestures by
counting on the only clues coming from the “environment” and the dialogues’.29
   Shortly after the broadcast of the radio-plays, the editorial staff of the National
Radio magazine RadioCorriere (as it was named at the time) asked the listeners
to provide feedback by submitting reviews. In order to respond to those critics
who lamented that the plot had no inner logic and the characters lacked any
sense of reality, the editors clearly specified that the main purpose of these ex-
perimentations was not to provide a ‘realistic representation’, but to ‘assemble a
set of impressions that could suggest, through simple acoustic means, the sight
of a place or an action’.30 The impressionistic and synesthetic task of a ‘truly
radiophonic comedy’ could then be considered fulfilled, as long as almost all


25
   The author’s reflections, which originally appeared on RadioCorriere, March 1932, p. 3, were
republished as ‘La dinamo dell’eroismo. Commedia radiofonica di Alessandro De Stefani’ in the
journal Cinema Studio, 3.11–12 (July-December 1993), p. 37. Together with the text of script (pp.
38–77). The following quotations will make reference to this version.
26
   Ibidem.
27
   Ivi, p. 57.
28
   Ivi, p. 41.
29
   Ivi p. 37.
30
   N.a.,‘I giudizi critici degli ascoltatori su La dinamo dell’eroismo’, RadioCorriere, 8.10 (March
1932), p. 3.

                                                                                               113
                                          Simone Dotto


the listeners appreciated how ‘you do not need your sight to enter the many
settings where the radio-comedy takes place. Your hearing is enough’,31 ‘to one
of our critics the impression was so strong that he could even feel the smell of
the tavern through the transmission’.32 To prove further their point, the editors
of RadioCorriere reported the opinion of an unusual listener. Professor Musella,
‘blind since his infancy’, gave a definitive confirmation about the efficiency of the
sonic representation by stating: ‘I felt like I was attending a theatrical play and a
sound film at the same time’.33
   Conversely, the engineers of the ‘sonic staging’ at the radio stations in Milan
and Turin played a significantly different role from that of sound-makers on the-
atrical productions or silent movie projections. To face the ‘specific problems
owed to the reproduction of the infinite number of sounds and noises that com-
pose the fonoquadri’34 meant not only to look after the strictly material qualities
of sounds, in order to provide an adequate acoustic backdrop (known among
the German Hoerspiele practitioners with the specific name of Geräuschkulisse).
Instead of synchronizing their movements to the lines spoken by the actors, so as
to add aural information or enhance the believability of what the audience was
already seeing on a stage or on a screen, they were required to ‘build’ the sur-
roundings in the scene or in the frame anew, to make them ‘visible’ to the liste-
ning audience. Since they act both as stage technicians and set designers at one
time, their task was not to ‘stage’, in its literal sense of ‘putting something on the
stage’; rather, they had to ‘put something between the scenes, put it into action’.35
As Valentini notes, in reference to the same examples: ‘what is at stake here, is
not just the construction of a mere décor de bruits, but also complex work on
the sonic perspective, simultaneities and sequences which would ultimately have
contributed to the presentation of a proper soundscape’.36
   Though still far from being a proper ‘unit’, the fonoquadro rapidly lost the
meaning that it originally held, as a narrative section, and gradually came to con-
stitute an abstract notion that mirrored all the semantic overlaps that occur du-
ring the construction of a new media. Nevertheless, we can assume that the term
had at least a two practical functions: on the one hand, by implying that writing
a radio-play equated to writing a script for a theatre without a scene, or for a
film which had no images, it allowed playwrights to re-imagine their work. On
the other, it helped to organize — or rather, ‘to frame’ — the experience of the
listeners throughout a rhythmical structure.




31
   Ivi, p. 4.
32
   Ibidem.
33
   Ibidem.
34
   N.a., ‘Una novità di Luigi Chiarelli a 1Mi e 1TO: “L’anello di Teodosio”’, p. 4.
35
   Bragaglia, p. 20.
36
   Valentini, p. 95.

114
                               Notes for a History of Radio-Film


Sound Montage and the Need for Technical Dramaturgy

         We used to recreate the sound of the wind by spinning a wooden wheel, while
     a few small lead spheres were supposed to imitate the sound of the sea, taking cue
     from the most conventional tradition. We usually looked for the right corner in the
     room so to obtain an echo effect. Within a space of twenty square meters we collected
     an armoury of touching noises […]. Oh, the lost innocence of radio, the passion of
     youth! As a sign of progress, all of that world has now been replaced with many black
     records, well aligned in packages, each with a different label on it: ‘train’, ‘army’,
     ‘thunderstorm’, ‘disaster’, like the burnt down fables in a mourning dress.37

   As the director of the first staging of L’anello di Teodosio and the tireless pro-
moter of the debate on radio-theatre, Enzo Ferrieri nostalgically mourned the
early times of the radio-play. What used to be the prerogative of the ‘director/
noise intoner’, as he called it — to broadcast radio scripts by ‘sticking to the
chosen rhythm’ and discarding ‘anything that does not belong to ‘the uniform
sonic material, which is exclusively composed by words, noises, sounds and mu-
sic’38 — were then partially superseded by new technologies. Though recorded
music had constituted a significant part of transmission schedules since their be-
ginning, only in the mid-thirties did sound recording complete the technological
apparatus of Italian radio. In 1933, the publicly owned record label C.E.T.R.A.
was founded as an extension of the EIAR society in order to serve two main
functions. First, it acted as a publishing company, recording and producing or-
chestras, theatrical companies or the artists that were already employed by the
National Institution for Radio broadcasting. Second, some of its record-pressing
machines were placed at the radio stations in Turin and Rome for internal pro-
duction purposes.39 Unlike those that were produced for the mass market, these
records could be broadcast immediately after having been pressed. Before 1935,
technological equipment was enriched by the introduction of both optical and
magnetic recording systems. Due to the advantages and disadvantages of their
technical specificities (no recording time limits versus the long lasting chemical
processes required), the two Selenophone U7 apparatuses placed in the stations
of Rome and Turin were only used to record those transmissions which were
considered to be worth preserving. Conversely, almost every station employed
a Blattnerphone steel tape recorder: since it could be employed repeatedly and
facilitated ‘erasures, corrections and superimpositions’, it allowed for a trial-and-
error process.40 Sound recording technologies came to represent a new means of
radio dissemination, preservation and production together, that deeply affected


37
   Enzo Ferrieri, ‘Il regista radiofonico’, RadioCorriere, 26.41 (October 1949), p. 30.
38
   Ivi, p. 30.
39
   See Luca Cerchiari, Jazz e fascismo. Dalla nascita della radio a Gorni Kramer (Palermo: L’Epos,
2003), pp. 23–24.
40
   EIAR, Annuario dell’anno XIII. Dieci anni di radio in Italia (Turin: Società Editrice Torinese,
1935), pp. 161–68.

                                                                                              115
                                          Simone Dotto


the productive practices and routines behind different pre-established genres
(such as sport chronicles, journalistic reportage, the transmission of institutional
speeches, etc.)
   During the same years, a brand new word made its appearance on the pa-
ges of Radiocorriere: two radio-works aired on 13 February 1934, called ‘suono-
montaggi’ [‘sound montages’], were broadcast during the ‘G.U.F Radio Hour’,
a programme that disseminated the creative efforts of Groups organized by the
Fascist regime in Italian Universities.41 While taking part in the newly established
cultural-artistic competition Littoriali della Cultura e dell’Arte, every group of
students was allowed to fill a one-hour time transmission per week, presenting
their works from the nearest radio station.42 In La fontana malata [‘The Sick
Fountain’] and In linea [‘On the Line’], both by Renato Castellani and Livio
Castiglioni, sound montage indicated simultaneously a new expressive form and
an innovative technical practice borrowed from film production.

         Consider the loudspeaker not as a means for reproducing or disseminating plays,
     which can be technologically perfected day after day, but as an instrument capable
     of producing sound. Such a perspective opens up an entirely new field for the radio
     transmissions, not so different from the one encountered by the camera and the movie
     camera when they were no longer used as simple means of diffusion but as new arti-
     stic tools. The obvious comparison between sound and image led the young students
     from the G.U.F. in Milan while composing their work: they called it sound montage
     by analogy with the editing process, which converts the ‘documentary pieces’ shot in
     studio in the harmonic entirety of ‘film’.43

    La fontana malata was an acoustic interpretation of a poem of the same name
written in 1904 by Aldo Palazzeschi. As the author is often considered to be a
forerunner of the futurist aesthetics, his anti-subjectivist poetics of ‘impersona-
lity’ and the intensive use of onomatopoeia in the literary text allowed the two
young students to have an inanimate object acting as the main character in their
aural drama. Gradually, the sound of water drops is surrounded by the noise of
the courtyard (a young boy taking piano lessons, an old man playing arias from
a Verdi’s opera with an harmonica, some school kids spelling aloud, etc.), un-
til ‘the evening comes and the fountain is alone again, dreaming and regretting
the past times’.44 Excluding the ‘weeping and coughing’ of the fountain, all the
sonic events in the piece were specifically written for the radio adaptation and
juxtaposed in order to give the impression of a soundscape evolving throughout
different moments of the day. The Fascist-inspired In linea was an even more
abstract, almost musical composition, arranged over three moments: the untied


41
   See Luca La Rovere, ‘Fascist Groups in Italian Universities: An Organization at the Service of the
Totalitarian State’, Journal of Contemporary History, 34.3 (July 1999), 457–75.
42
   N.a.,‘I Littoriali della Cultura e dell’Arte’, RadioCorriere, 12.9 (February 1936), p. 11.
43
   N.a., ‘I suonomontaggi del Guf Milano’, RadioCorriere, 10.74 (February 1934), p. 10.
44
   Ibidem. See also Malatini, p. 39.

116
                              Notes for a History of Radio-Film


and low sounds of the first part become gradually concise in a ‘straight sonorous
movement’, and are then resolved in the final part through the appearance of a
voice that resembles Mussolini’s.45 According to RadioCorriere, the plot was a
metaphor of a ‘righteous’ education: ‘after having struggled to nail a simplici-
ty and reality that he could not grasp, a man encounters the fascist doctrine’.46
Months later, Renato Castellani employed again the sound montage technique
for another celebratory piece La battaglia del Piave [‘The Battle on the Piave
River’], which is officially presented as a ‘radio-synthesis’ and aired nationwide
on 18 June 1934.47 This patriotic, commemorative occasion gave to the author
a chance to invoke the First World War battle between the Italian and the Au-
strian armies, by means of a series of acoustic impressions: the quiet flow of the
river and the soldiers’ whispers overnight suddenly gave way to the explosion
of a sonic warfare, where the human voices alternatively ‘get lost like leaves in
a hurricane’, ‘engage a duel against each other while the artilleries fight’ and
finally ‘find themselves again in a choral resonance’. Then ‘the realism of tele-
graphic transmissions weaves in the tremendous orchestra of the battle’,48 finally
announcing that the enemy’s attack has failed.
   Castellani himself highlighted the discontinuities from former attempts in ra-
dio drama (which he compares to ‘theatrical representation on a revolving stage’
with short acts, short dialogues and fast changing scenes), and provided a little
theorization of his working methods. Radiophonic representation, he wrote,
‘must be an open window on the wider field of sound, choral in its essence, not
for some abstract speculations on the specificities of radio, but as a result of
the systematization of the technical necessities underlying the realization of any
work’.49 According to his conception, the foregrounding of the sonic landscape
‘as the leading actor’, as well as the implicit underplay of the strictly narrative
components, came as a direct consequence of the possibilities disclosed by the
manipulation of recorded sound. During an interview years later — when he
was already a well known film director — he emphasized how these ideas were
related to the search for a medium-specific expression: ‘It came to my mind that
radio, which until then had been used as a means of dissemination, could turn
out to be also a means of expression, if one was allowed to take the raw material
of sound, record, elaborate, manipulate and edit it’.50
   Castellani’s considerations resemble strikingly the experimentations with sound-
on-film technologies that had taken place in Germany and in the Soviet Union just
some years before. Although he never explicitly mentions them, he appears almost


45
   See Valentini, p. 94.
46
   N.a., ‘I suonomontaggi del Guf Milano’, p. 10.
47
   N.a.,‘La battaglia del Piave’, RadioCorriere, 10.26 (June 1936), p. 3.
48
   Ibidem.
49
   Quoted in Gi.Mi., ‘Spettacolo Corale’, RadioCorriere, 10.50 (December 1934), p. 4.
50
   Quoted in Aldo Zappalà, ‘Alla radio il cinema eternamente grato’ in La radio. Storia di ses-
sant’anni. 1924/1984, ed. by Peppino Ortoleva and Franco Monteleone (Turin: ERI Edizioni Rai,
Piemonte Vivo, Crt, 1984), pp. 180–87 (p. 185).

                                                                                           117
                                        Simone Dotto


to quote Walter Ruttmann’s 1929 ‘Ars Acustica’ manifesto (‘All the audible in the
world becomes material’)51 and to share Bishoff’s conviction that ‘acoustic drama-
turgy is unthinkable without technical dramaturgy’.52 Moreover, despite being in-
spired by a different ideology, his understanding of radio-art was related to the ‘ra-
dio ear’ theorized by Vertov in the Kino-Pravda and Radio-Pravda manifesto, which
stated that the primary aim of the radio was to broadcast ‘audible phenomena’53
captured from the workers’ real life rather than operas or symphonies.
   What is even more relevant to this analysis is the way in which this concep-
tion of radio-drama re-configured the relationship with cinema. In an article
significantly entitled ‘Radio Takes Lessons from Cinema’, Castellani explicitly
compares cinema and radio both as technological media and art forms. The two
apparatuses are outlined in an essential transmitter-receiver model (camera —
projector versus microphone — speaker), and the specificity of ‘simultaneity’
on the radio is dismissed as an inessential feature for true artistic expression.
Castellani argues that as long as the tasks of the medium are limited to report-
ing/transmitting the aural portion of an event taking place somewhere else, radio
listening will be considered as a secondary activity — or, in the particular case of
radio-play, a ‘surrogate of live theatre’.54 In order to develop its own expressive
form, radio must follow the example of cinema as a purely visual art:

     it is the silent film of radio (a purely aural spectacle) that we must look for […] In
     fact, the ‘sound-spectacle’ has been potentially achievable since the advent of the gra-
     mophone, but only the film soundtrack enables its concrete existence, thanks to an
     efficient montage technique.55

   The article goes on to provide practical advice on how to obtain an alternate
montage à la Griffith by ‘shortening the film soundtrack from a three meters to,
let’s say, a one meter length’ and ‘gradually raising the volume into a crescendo
and a purely sonic emotion’. The author concludes that the few conventional
elements that allow the comprehension of a similar art form will be acquired by
the spectators ‘at least as quickly as they did with the passages from a long shot
to a close up during the early years of silent cinema’.56



51
   Walter Ruttmann [1929], ‘A New Approach to Sound Film and Radio, Programme for a photo-
graphic Sound Art’ / ‘Neue Gestaltung von Tonfilm und Funk. Programm einer photographischen
Hörkunst’, in Walter Ruttmanns Tonmontagen als Ars Acustica, ed. by Jeanpaul Goergen, (Sie-
gen: Universität Gesthochschule Siegen, 1994), pp. 25–26 (p. 25). For an extended dissertation
about the use of montage in German radio-plays see Antje Vowinckel, Collagen im Hörspiel. Die
Entwicklung einer radiophonen Kunst (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995).
52
   Quoted in Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film and the Death of the Weimar Cul-
ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 89.
53
   Vertov, pp. 96–97.
54
   Renato Castellani, ‘La radio a lezione dal cinematografo’, Cinema, 1.12 (1936), pp. 465–66.
55
   Ibidem [emphasis in the original]
56
   Ibidem.

118
                                Notes for a History of Radio-Film


Conclusions

   Some general observations can be made in the light of this overview. The first
concerns the way in which the development of the radio-play traced out here
mirrors an evolving conception of the medium and its specificities through a
constant comparison to cinema. Since it was seen at first as an essentially ‘real
time’ medium, radio found itself associated to live theatrical staging: it is then not
surprising to see how radio dramatic production were often defined in essentially
pejorative terms (‘one dimensional theatre’ or ‘theatre for blind people’), i.e.
defining the contours of the medium’s opacity as evidences of its technical limita-
tions. Broadcasting stage plays acoustically would deprive them of 1) the physi-
cal presence of the audience as a collective entity in front of the stage, and 2) all
of the sensorial channels of perception except for hearing. In this first phase, cin-
ema helped as a useful term for comparison, it being an art of ‘illusionary percep-
tion’. In the same way that the juxtaposition of still images (frames/quadri) could
provide the illusion of movement in a spatiotemporal continuum, so assembled
sounds of different durations (fonoquadri) could create an illusionary, synesthetic
impression of visual space. At a later stage, as soon as sound film and other
audio-recording technologies emerged, the analogy with cinema was renewed in
view of material consistency: ‘sound montages’ revealed how the mediation of
radio could consist of multiple stages, rigidly distinguishing the technical issues
related to the creation of a piece from those strictly bounded to its broadcasting.
The aesthetization of the sound-spectacle as an ‘art of post-production’ relied on
a new temporal and epistemological dimension, which would shortly after prove
to be pivotal in other radio genres too, for aesthetic manipulation as well as for
censorship interventions.57
   Focusing on an aesthetical dimension, it is furthermore worth noting that the
aims of older radio-plays (to make the listener ‘see through sound’, not to men-
tion the rhythmical organization of listening) became exaggerated through the
application of sound montage techniques. In a sense, the more similar the work-
ing methods grew on a material level, the more abstract the comparison with
cinema became. Whereas at first radio could not resist reference to sound cinema
(i.e. ‘the talking film’) as its ideal counterpart, the employment of sound film (i.e.,
sound-on-film-technologies) allowed Castellani to talk use ‘the silent film of ra-
dio’ as a metaphor for a purely mono-sensorial form of art. Within this process,
the definition of ‘radio-film’ changed as the terms of the analogy with cinema
shifted from one idea of the radio-film (a radio work that sounds like a talking
film without moving images) to another (a radio-work that features recorded
sound-on-film instead of moving images). Paradoxically, by employing the same
technological means as the film medium and by constantly referring to cinema


57
  See EIAR, Annuario dell’anno XIII. Dieci anni di radio in Italia (Turin: Società Editrice Torinese,
1935), pp. 161–68.

                                                                                                119
                                        Simone Dotto


as an art, radio sought to emancipate itself and to develop a symmetrical — and
therefore equally respectable — expressive form.
   One could provide further reflection on the intermedial concept of cinema as
a radio art by expanding this focus to an international scale. For instance, Rudolf
Arnheim’s radio writings in the same years took stock of most of the topics that
have been analysed here. He addressed radio as ‘the countermedium of silent
film’58 and advocated the use of editable sound recordings for spatial and tem-
poral manipulation. Moreover, his conception of ‘sound drama’ as a particular
form of radio-play, which represented the ‘possibility of a compelling aural art
form drawn from the materials of radio but with broader applicability for film,
as well’,59 was not so different from the examples of radio-film mentioned here.
However, the various references he made to the ‘radio film’ as a ‘hybrid creature’
are in fact allusions to the television medium60 (radio-film as ‘the broadcasting
of sounds and moving images’, once again without necessarily involving a film
stock) therefore further complicating the picture, and making the study of such
intermedial notions an even more challenging task.




58
   Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Confessions of a Maverick,’ Salmagundi, 78-79 (Spring/Summer 1988), p. 50.
59
   Rudolf Arnheim, Film, (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), pp. 215–16. For an overview on Arn-
heim’s intermedial thought, see Shawn Vancour, ‘Arnheim on Radio: Materialtheorie and Beyond’,
in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. by Scott Higgins (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp.
177–94.
60
   Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Radio-Film’, in The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933, ed.
by Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer and Michael Cowan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016),
pp. 602–03.

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