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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Prix de beauté as a Multiple Intersection. National Cinema, Auteurism, and the Coming of Sound
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2004-03-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Malte Hagener
2004/03/01
Universiteit van Amsterdam
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Prix de beauté as a Multiple Intersection. National Cinema, Auteurism, and the Coming of Sound
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PRIX DE BEAUTE AS A MULTIPLE INTERSECTION. NATIONAL CINEMA,
AUTEURISM, AND THE COMING OF SOUND
Malte Hagener, Universiteit van Amsterdam




                                               The period of the transition to sound film offers
                                          a splendid example of historical over determination.
                                                                                 Alan Williams


   Multiple versions of films in the period after the coming of sound can be conceptualised
around two basic issues. The first could be described as a multiplying of one film into sev-
eral different ones which oscillate between being identical and non-identical. Different
versions of the same film thus stage, foreground and allegorise on the level of mise-en-
scène, editing, dialogue, acting, sometimes even plot, the basic conflict of any commercial
film production between the standardisation of production methods and the differentia-
tion of the product. From a producer’s point-of-view, on the one hand, films should be as
similar as possible to one another in order to minimise production costs; on the other
hand, films have to be different from one another in order to promise a novelty value and
to be attractive to an audience. Every film has to take a position on this spectrum. This
problem comes to play in the similarity of the different versions of the same film to one
another as well as between different films made in language versions. Indeed, the discus-
sions of distinguishing a multi-language version from a remake or a dubbed film with
some reshot material revolves around such issues of identity, similarity and difference.
   The second issue to be considered comes in through the question of translation, lin-
guistically as well as culturally. Multiple versions propose different solutions to this
problem. Whereas Hollywood trusted in the universal appeal of its story lines, stars and
production values, and resorted fairly quickly to dubbing, the multi-language versions
strike a different note in this balancing act between self and other, between home-pro-
duced film and film manufactured in a foreign country. By substituting the actors, the
multi-language versions (MLVs) stressed two factors: firstly, the unity of body and voice
in its refusal to dub the voices into another language; secondly, the MLVs implicitly
trust in the drawing power of stars or well-known actors. The investment of spending
extra money on another set of actors was hoped to be recouped by extra revenues at the
box office. Since all other elements of the film usually stay the same, the stars were per-
ceived as the most important element in attracting an audience.
   Both issues take a paradoxical shape in the way they have to address both poles simul-
taneously: films produced with the intention to be exported have to try to be as specif-
ic and culturally grounded as possible (language, milieu, stars, setting, style) in order to
address a specific audience, yet they are also made with the intention to cross borders
in linguistic, political, and cultural respect as easily as possible. This translates into the

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                                                     PRIX DE BEAUTE AS A MULTIPLE INTERSECTION

production context where on the one hand ways have to be found to show a specific
place through language, geographical markers, gestures, objects, etc., while also not
complicating the production unnecessarily. This “catch-22”-situation, if you will, leaves
multiple versions in a difficult position where the solution often has been sought either
in an underdetermined setting and places reminiscent of fairy tale locations (operettas
in fantastic kingdoms somewhere in the far-flung expanse of the Balkans) while also
condensing in an overdetermined manner markers of a cultural modernisation around
technological progress and social transformation.
  I want to concentrate on a single film, Prix de beauté, directed by Augusto Genina, shot
in 1929 and released in 1930. A disclaimer to start with: Prix de beauté is not a MLV in a
traditional sense. The line between MLVs and other “multiplied versions” in the early
years after the introduction of sound is notoriously hard to draw. Indeed, there are many
cases in which different versions are hard to tell apart from remakes or from dubbed vari-
ants. Just to give one example: what is the relation between Liebelei (M. Ophüls, 1932-33)
and its French version Une histoire d’amour (1932–34): is it a remake, a multi-language
version or some other sort of deviation? And even within “classical” MLVs we have sig-
nificant differences: while UFA-MLVs seem to be very similar to one another in regards to
camera placement and movement, scene dissection and even look of actors, Paramount
obviously shot in a different style, using the same script and the same decorations, but
otherwise leaving the directors much more choice as to how direct and edit a sequence. It
could very well be that the title of the Gradisca Spring School, “Multiple and Multiple-
Language Versions,” maybe addresses exactly the gap between identity and non-identity.1
  Prix de beauté instantiates many of these problems, since the film was fabricated in four
different synchronised versions: French, German, English, Italian, as well as in a silent ver-
sion.2 Instead of comparing one version to another philologically and maybe even fetishis-
tically so as to find significance in the most minute of differences I intend to take another
approach: to look at the different strategies adopted with the coming of sound by production
companies and directors to get a more comprehensive overview within which the MLVs
would represent one specific position. Any film produced on the threshold between silence
and sound raises a number of issues around translatability as well as differentiation/stan-
dardisation. This period is fascinating because it opened up towards a huge uncertainty
which allowed many different choices until standardisation closed many of these avenues
down again. Martin Barnier has similarly argued for an understanding of the transitional
period around 1930 as a time of experimentation and opportunity.3 I believe that the period
of the coming of sound with its many different ways of converting and adapting poses a key
problem for the emergence of a European film historiography – as opposed to either nation-
al or global (which is often just another term for Hollywood) versions of film history.


Production

                                        L’odyssée de ce film permet d’evoquer diversees facettes
                            de cette irruption du parlant qui chambarde les moeurs du cinéma.
                                                                                  Pierre Billard

  It was in the spring of 1929 that Georg Wilhelm Pabst suggested the project Prix de
beauté to his colleague and friend René Clair.4 Pabst was at that time one of the most

                                                                                            ­103
MALTE HAGENER

celebrated directors of the European art film. He had turned out a string of film that
had struck a chord with critics and audiences alike: Die freudlose Gasse (1925),
Geheimnisse einer Seele (1925-26); subsequently he had imported Louise Brooks from
the United States to become the star in Die Büchse der Pandora (1928-29) and
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (1929).
  René Clair, more than ten years Pabst’s junior, had at this point just graduated
from the avant-garde (Paris qui dort, 1923; Entr’acte, 1924) into commercial feature
making and had scored a huge success with Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1927).
Clair had just lost his contract with Albatros when Romain Pinès and Michael
Salkin(d) of the French production company Sofar (Société des films artistiques)
approached the young director to be in charge of what would become Prix de
beauté, Brooks’ third European venture after the two films directed by Pabst. Pabst’s
role seems to involve not much more than an idea and the initial push that brought
together Clair, Brooks, and Pinès, and later added Augusto Genina to the group. In
fact, Genina had worked with Pinès before on Quartier Latin (1928), a German-
French co-production, while Pabst and Pinès knew each other from the production
of Die freudlose Gasse with another “transatlantic actress,” Greta Garbo, produced
through the Berlin office of Pinès’ and Salkind’s Sofar-production. Thus, as coinci-
dental as this meeting of these European players might seem at first sight, on clos-
er inspection it becomes clear that the net around these actors was already pretty
densely woven and only a little push was needed to draw them all together. This
project brought together Pabst, Clair, and Genina – three key players in the Avant-
garde, the art film, and the popular film which were not that far apart in those days,
but had many points of contact.
  The immediate production circumstances add transatlantic crossings to the
European networking. Louise Brooks had returned to the United States after finishing
Die Büchse der Pandora in the Winter of 1928-29.5 Both Paramount and RKO offered
her lucrative contracts, but she refused to work under their strict supervision and,
more importantly, she did not want to go back to Hollywood, a place she detested.
Thus, when a cable from her mentor Pabst arrived in April 1929, she was only too
happy to return to Europe. Clair had already drawn up a working schedule, starting
with the production on May 6 and wrapping up on July 2 – or so at least he thought.
The main reason that the production did not start as announced seems to be that the
financing had not been put together yet. Clair was subsequently taken under contract
with the French Tobis-subsidiary which led him to his next project Sous les toits de
Paris (1929-30) thus making Clair unavailable for Prix de beauté. Actually, in a
strange twist of fate typical of film history, Clair’s first script for Prix de beauté con-
tained what later became the first scene of Sous les toits de Paris, thus marking an
immediate contact between these two otherwise so different films.6
  When Louise Brooks prepared to return to the United States in early June after some
weeks of vacationing at the Mediterranean, Pabst took the opportunity to ask her
back to Berlin where Tagebuch einer Verlorenen was shot in June and July of 1929. In
late July Brooks boarded a ship for New York, but she had barely arrived in New York
when she was summoned back, since the financing for Prix de beauté had finally
been secured. She was back in Paris on August 28. In the meantime the Italian direc-
tor Augusto Genina – himself one of the large number of wandering for-hire directors
– had been asked to replace Clair and became attached to the project. The shooting

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                                                      PRIX DE BEAUTE AS A MULTIPLE INTERSECTION

period of the film lasted from September to November. Louise Brooks left Europe for
good on November 29, 1929.7
   In the first stages of the preparation the film was most probably planned as silent,
yet in the course of the year from the first exchanges between Pabst, Clair, and Pinès
in spring 1929 to the final stages of synchronisation in Spring-Summer 1930, the con-
text changed completely – and so did Prix de beauté . It is not quite clear at what point
the film metamorphosed from a silent into a sound feature, and it seems that both
forms overlapped in different ways in the production as well as in the finished prod-
uct. As early as June 1929 when René Clair was still assigned to the project, he was
reported as saying that it was being developed as silent, but – as the silent film “is
going through a terrible crisis” – Clair sees the possibility that the finished film will
have a “synchronisation.”8 The first positive mention of a sound version in the trade
press was on October 25, 1929 when it was announced that the film was currently
being shot and will be released in a German-language version.9
   Prix de beauté was meant to be distributed in four languages – English, French,
German, and Italian,10 and there is even mention of Spanish-language songs.11
Strangely enough, a special screening of the film “very close to its completion” is
reported in the German trade press already in December, mentioning “first verdicts
which refer to the film as one of the highest quality products of the German sound
film to date.”12 A premiere for January was announced, of which no further traces
could be found. Judging from the time lapses between different premieres, the dif-
ferent language versions seem then to have been produced one after the other rather
than side by side. The long gap between Brooks’ departure for the United States (late
November) and the premiere of the film – in Italy on April 12 in Milan (Odeon), in
France on May 9 in Paris (Max Linder-Pathé), in Germany on August 11 in Berlin
(Titania Palast) – is probably spent editing and post-synchronising, not an easy task in
those days.


Reception

               Prix de beauté was unusual in many ways: it was antimarriage, proto-feminist,
                       and critical of the working class, the bourgeoisie, and the dilettante rich
                     in equal measure. It was not about “the ruination of her man” but, rather,
             the attempted liberation of a virtuous woman – for 1929 a fairly advanced theme.
                            Yet as a film, it was neither fish nor fowl: a transition period silent,
                          doctored up with music and some badly post synchronised dialogue.
                                                                                        Barry Paris

  As already mentioned, a relatively long time passed between the end of shooting
and the premieres, especially given the fact that with every week the public inclina-
tion shifted further toward sound. Thus, every delay and postponement meant a
blow to this film, a film that was so precariously balanced between sound and
silence, but also between different European nations and auteurs. I will now briefly
look at the reception of the German version which premiered under the title Miss
Europa in August 1930 in Berlin. It was the dubbing that met most criticism at the
time of its premiere:

                                                                                                ­105
MALTE HAGENER

  As soon as the dialogue begins, it is terrible. It is not possible to dub a dialogue that is spoken
  in French later into German. Even though the words of the dialogue were counted syllable
  by syllable in order to match, the spectator does not believe for a moment that the actors
  speak the German words because the lip movement does not fit. [...] Miss Europa is a proof
  for the failure of any linguistic synchronisation. The international sound film has to be put
  on another basis.13

  The reviewer assumes that the dialogue was spoken in French, yet as Louise Brooks
did not speak French this at least does not hold true for her. As a means of translation
from one nation or language to another, dubbing was not seen as a true possibility at
the time of Prix de beauté ’s premiere, at least by the German film critics. In a very sim-
ilar vein, the Reichsfilmblatt stated: “The acting is French, the talking is German, with
mediocre artistry. The contrast leaps to the eyes and ears. Synchronisation encounters
after all artistic difficulties, the technical ones can only just be overcome.”14 Thus, crit-
ics were well aware that still persisting technical problems could be mastered, yet they
did not see dubbing as a method feasible for international distribution from a cultural
and artistic point of view. Even if some reviewers were more laudatory, such as the
Lichtbildbühne which praised Genina’s direction, when they briefly dealt with the
issue of sound the verdict was, in keeping with most other critics, at best sceptical: “The
mainly German dialogue (the film is 100%) is unfortunately awkward and sounds
somewhat clumsy. But thankfully [the dialogue] is only very brief, thus not disturbing
the overall positive impression.”15 Another generally well-inclined voice remains
nonetheless also quite ambivalent: “As a real sound film [the film is] not particularly
successful. As a synchronised film it brings considerable novelties.”16 Yet the film obvi-
ously did not meet the expectations of the audience. An almost apocalyptic tone of
voice can be discerned in the Variety reviewer who concluded in early September, three
weeks after the premiere, that “owing to bad synchronisation this talker is a failure.
After five days it had to be removed. The Titania Palast has at no time done bad business
with a film as with this one.”17 One argument for this seeming disaster might be the
timing, for the film came at a time when the audience had already gotten used to direct
sound. A half year earlier the reception might have been quite different.


Crossing Borders

  Film has been an international art form and business from the very beginning to this
day: not only did the diverse technical inventions leading up to cinema originate in dif-
ferent countries, but it was also technical and artistic personnel that circulated across
borders. France in the interwar period was no exception to this rule: the two largest con-
tingents of foreign film workers in the interwar period came from the Soviet Union in
the 1920s18 (to name only the top layer: producer Joseph Ermolieff and his production
company Albatros, directors Volkoff and Tourjansky, art directors Lazare Meerson and
Andrei Andreiev, actor Ivan Mosjoukin), and from Germany in the 1930s19 (Curt and
Robert Siodmak, Kurt Bernhardt, Max Ophüls, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Seymour
Nebenzahl; Anatole Litvak who came to France from Russia via Germany falls in both
categories). Moreover, many key figures in the French cinema of this years are of foreign
origin: Alberto Cavalcanti and Luis Buñuel, the Italian directors Mario Bonnard, Mario

­106
                                                   PRIX DE BEAUTE AS A MULTIPLE INTERSECTION

Camerini, Carmine Gallone, Augusto Genina, and the many Eastern European emi-
grants who were often referred to as Germans but came from the fringes of the former
Habsburg empire.
   On the surface Prix de beauté would quite obviously seem to be a French film: it was
produced by a French company, shot and post-produced in French studios, many of the
actors and technicians are of French origin and the story takes place in France, with a
short excursion to San Sebastian, just across the Spanish border. Nevertheless, many of
the key figures were less interested in a national cinema culture than in a European pro-
duction space. The director Augusto Genina had in previous years sold his Italian films
exclusively to Germany; he understood cinema as an international medium needing a
market bigger than one single country. In the mid-1920s, Genina was also involved with
the founding of an Italian company, Adia, which was co-producing films with the
French Sofar and the German Orplid. The triangle Italy-France-Germany for circulating
stories, personnel and market is thus already in place long before Prix de beauté, for
Genina as well as for producer Romain Pinès. The former’s Quartier Latin (1928) not
only boasts a programmatic title for this production strategy – pitching local specifici-
ty as global glamour and vice versa in evoking a multi-cultural Parisian borough whose
name is a household word all over the world – but was also a co-production between the
Berlin-based Orplid and the Paris-based Sofar. A year later the same group will produce
the third European Louise Brooks film, Prix de beauté. The period after the coming of
sound thus benefits by being situated within a longer history of European co-operation
that extends temporally in both directions.
   The producer Romain Pinès, a Jewish émigré from Latvia,20 had worked with Pabst
some years before, co-producing in 1924 through the Berlin-subsidiary of Sofar Die freud-
lose Gasse. Pinès and his partner Michael Salkind, another refugee from Soviet Union’s
periphery, had built up a European network of contracts and joint ventures, especially in
the triangle between France, Germany and Italy. Its partners and subsidiaries were com-
panies such as Hirschel-Sofar and Hisa-Allianz;21 the films were deliberately interna-
tional as were the artists and technicians. Thus, neither Pabst nor Genina were strangers
to Sofar. Pinès and Salkind should be seen in a series of trans-European producers such as
Erich Pommer and Alexander Korda, Gregor Rabinowitsch and Arnold Pressburger,
Sascha Kolowrat and Iosef Ermolieff, Heinrich and Seymour Nebenzahl (and later on
David Puttnam, Horst Wendtland, Carlo Ponti, Claude Berri and Bernd Eichinger). These
figure heads were the engine behind the countless international contracts and contacts
that made up “Cinema Europe”. In contrast to what has been labelled “Film Europe” in
literature, namely a series of conference and high-profile contracts masterminded by the
national associations of producers, distributors or exhibitors,22 I believe that there was a
“Cinema Europe” which, in its more durable and interesting form was instead a “rhi-
zomatic” network of contracts and contacts, of travel and communication, of influence
and exchange. The “modernist” attempt of constructing one single market through top-
down initiatives under the guidance of Franco-German conferences organized by their
national associations failed to deliver what it had promised. Instead, what did materialise
and survive well into the 1930s was the bottom-up version of co-operation, a network
that also helped many exiles to find work outside the Nazi sphere of influence. For a few
years after Hitler’s ascent to power.23 The centralist version of co-operation was interna-
tional in a very literal sense: representatives standing in for nation states talked to each
other on a bilateral basis; the model I propose is transnational in the sense that it down-

                                                                                        ­107
MALTE HAGENER

played nationality and regional specificity, stressing instead cultural and technological
modernisation and mobility which was affecting all of Europe in similar ways. It was the
outbreak of World War II which ultimately shattered this network of cont(r)acts. I
believe that the strategies of the MLVs are best considered within this European context,
as they were the preferred method of those producers who had earlier been the key play-
ers in this transnational European context.
   Prix de beauté is instructive with respect to Film Europe’s strategies, as well as to its
successes and failures. As a bottom-up collection of small contracts and contacts, of
friend and partnerships, Film Europe did not exist as a real entity. Thus a common
effort was impossible because there was no means to speak with one voice, nor the
power to act in unison. On the other hand European co-operation was an economic
and cultural imperative, as most key players from the 1920s continued their transna-
tional efforts after the introduction of sound. Now, Prix de beauté is not only simulta-
neously overdetermined and indeterminate regarding its position within Europe (does
it belong to the French cinema, the exile cinema or the international film? is it territo-
rial or extraterritorial?), but the (over)indetermination can be found in respect to its
stance vis-à-vis the United States.


Crossing Oceans

                         [I]n the traffic between Europe and America images are being traded,
                                                 images of America, but also images of Europe.
                                                                             Thomas Elsaesser

  Much of cinema’s history can be read as a policy of (mis-)recognitions across the
North Atlantic. From its initial dual fathers in the Lumières and Edison, the tension
between Europe and the US has played a key role in canonised film history. From the
founding fathers of the big American studios, eager to leave behind and shed their
Eastern European heritage, to the European émigrés of the 1930s and 1940s whose
pessimistic and time-convoluted labyrinthine films were labelled film noir when
they reached France after World War II, a transatlantic mirror maze characterises film
history. The Nouvelle Vague and the New Hollywood, cinephilia and film studies –
the axis Europe-United States (or more precisely Paris-Hollywood)24 has been central
for this field. Much more could be said about this “cultural politics of exchanging
compliments”25 and Prix de beauté forms one telling episode in this long history of
mutual self-(mis)-recognition – not just in the multiple crossings of Brooks men-
tioned above.
  Louise Brooks could be rightfully called a transatlantic actress, joining a category
which boasts the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, whose images, careers and
personalities took shape in the imaginary as well as real crossings of the Atlantic.
American Dream and European Art – all too obvious seems the great divide that these
actresses crossed with such ease. Two later entries could be filed in this category. After
initial successes in Sweden Ingrid Bergman followed Selznick’s call to the US where
she first played a martyr to the European resistance against fascism in Casablanca (M.
Curtiz, 1942) and then a martyr to the French nation in Joan of Arc (V. Fleming, 1947)
before returning to Europe for a legendary private and professional collaboration with

­108
                                                 PRIX DE BEAUTE AS A MULTIPLE INTERSECTION

Roberto Rossellini. Just like Bergman Jean Seberg played the French arch-heroine Joan
of Arc for the Austrian émigré Otto Preminger in the American production of Saint
Joan (1957) after which she was appropriated by Jean-Luc Godard as a Parisian street
vendor of the New York Herald Tribune in his homage to the American B-movies A
bout de souffle (1959). Louise Brooks had, as the epitome of the mid-Western girl from
Kansas, made her way from a chorus girl to the Ziegfeld Follies to starring roles in
Hollywood working in A Girl in Every Port (H. Hawks, 1928) and in Beggars of Life (W.
Wellmann, 1928). After her three European films and a long period of decline and
oblivion it was the joint efforts of a European and an American archivist, Henri
Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and James Card of the George
Eastman House in Rochester, which resuscitated her from the past of the living dead.
And even though Brooks never played Joan of Arc, we have a statement from possibly
the greatest of her admirers, Henri Langlois, that provides us – almost too neatly – with
the missing link when he sings the praises of “Louise Brooks’s face, eyes, the hair cut
like that of Jeanne d’Arc.”26
  Only some months ahead of Prix de beauté the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer
had directed the Italian actress Renée Falconetti as Saint Joan in La Passion de Jeanne
d’Arc (1927-28); the credits both of this and Pabst’s film reveal the cameraman
Rudolph Maté, a Polish émigré who had come from Cracow via Budapest (where he
had worked with the young Alexander Korda), Vienna and Berlin to Paris. There he
was hired as the director of photography for Dreyer on his film about the French
saint. Jeanne d’Arc might just be the tip of the iceberg, signalling a cinema in which
the tension between a national(ist) icon and the transcendence of boundaries
becomes apparent. Without venturing too far into interpretations in this respect, I
believe that multi-language versions can be adequately assessed only when viewed
within a context of the various forms that cinema had tried out in order to cross and
overcome national borders. The MLVs were as much an answer to the coming of
sound, as they were an attempt to make the cinema European rather than French,
English, Italian or German.
  For everybody involved with film the passage from Europe to the United States is
more important still than the one in the opposite direction: “The traffic in movie
actors traditionally moved westwards, from Europe to Hollywood, where their nation-
al characteristics were sedulously exploited. Brooks, who was among the few to make
the eastbound trip, became in her films with Pabst completely Europeanized.”27 Not
coincidentally, this article appeared in that most Europeanised of American maga-
zines, The New Yorker. Yet on closer inspection at least two other actresses surfaced in
the same years around the coming of sound which were likewise US exports: Betty
Amann and Anna May Wong. It would be interesting to investigate at what point the
import of stars from the US occurs, and what motives the European film industry
might have had for this move. The late 1920s were seeing protective measures by many
European governments favouring the domestic film industries, as well as strong resist-
ance to Hollywood talkies, rendering more real the perspective of a viable home-
grown film production. In addition to the period around 1930, another period saw a
similar development: the 1960s when European westerns, often co-produced with
many international partners, also resorted to the strategy of importing US actors to
Europe. The Italian-Spanish or German-Yugoslavian co-productions boasted the likes
of Clint Eastwood and Lex Barker.

                                                                                      ­109
MALTE HAGENER

Allegorising the Coming of Sound

                                               No woman becomes Miss Europe with impunity,
                             and least of all at the time when film constantly needs new faces.
                                                       The demon sound film lures Miss Europe.
                                                                                  Anonymous

   Like many films of this period Prix de beauté dissolves characteristics of national
identity in favour of a technological and cultural modernisation which goes along with
cosmopolitanism and internationalism. It brings this internationalism into focus not
only in its crew but even more forcefully in its story line, and in the four (five) different
versions which to a certain extent allegorise their own conditions of possibility.
   Prix de beauté tells the story of Lucienne who works as a secretary at the newspaper
Le Globe (one of the many overdetermined instants of the film, here foregrounding the
globalising turn of the media) where her fiancée André is employed as a printer. They
spend their leisure time at fairgrounds or at the open-air swimming pool where the film
begins. The French language version opens with the title “Dimanche,” announcing the
free day of the week and then showing proletarian Parisians bathing and relaxing in an
open-air swimming pool. Immediately two classics from that same year come to mind
which also revolve around similar Sunday leisure activities, expressively addressed in
their titles: Menschen am Sonntag (R. Siodmak, E. G. Ulmer et al., 1929) and Nogent,
Eldorado du dimanche (M. Carné, 1929). And indeed, the opening sequence of Prix de
beauté fits in a perfect series with these two films, both of which are closely aligned
with the international avant-garde of the interwar period. Especially Rudolph Maté’s
mobile hand-held camera underlines this lineage, giving the seemingly spontaneous
images of lower-class recreation a documentary feel. The year 1929 – and Prix de beauté
is no exception to this – marks in many respects a convergence of many different trends
in the avant-garde, art cinema and commercial film. With Drifters (J. Grierson, 1929)
and Čelovek s kinoapparatom (D. Vertov, 1929) that year also saw new trends surfacing
which would come to dominate the 1930s: the social documentary, the commissioned
film and the political film.28 And indeed, even the man with the movie camera is visi-
ble in Prix de beauté, suggesting to the people “faites vous filmer.” The film is thus pre-
cariously balanced not only between silence and sound, between different nationalities
and auteurs, but also between different schools of filmmaking.
   Already the overture plays through the narrative of the film en miniature: Lucienne
takes the suggestion to be filmed quite literally, and puts herself on display. She
undresses in a car – one of the supreme symbols of modernity – and is introduced only
through a shot of her legs which dangle out of the door. Her body is reduced to parts,
like in a girl revue, that epitome of Americanism where Brooks started her career. I am
passing over the gender issue here since this subjugation of women under modernity’s
strict regimes has been discussed elsewhere.29 Lucienne makes a show of herself and
provokes André’s jealousy which she then soothes by a song. This song originates from
a gramophone so that technology gives her a voice not her own, and this song will then
circulate through the film, finally sealing her tragic fate. It is, among other elements,
this circulation of a popular song that answers to the “crisis of indexicality” which char-
acterises the coming of sound. The gap that opened up between the body of the per-
former visible on the screen and the voice heard through the loudspeakers – two com-

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pletely unconnected and different technological set-ups, synchronised in order to cre-
ate the illusion of simultaneity – was indeed very often addressed in the early 1930s
films, whether explicitly or implicitly.30 And in fact, Brooks herself was here into
French dubbed by another actress (Hélène Regelly), thus literalising this borrowing of
voice from the gramophone. In the beginning, the song is still employed in a playful
manner, even though André’s final bite of her neck hints already of his lethal jealousy.
   From the leisure of Sunday we move to the daily routine of work when a title
announces “Lundi” over images of city streets crowded with people rushing to work,
and is followed by loudspeakers announcing a beauty contest. A disembodied voice
invites all women to join up in a competition that will propel Lucienne out of her daily
life as a secretary into the international Jet Set. Let me stress two points before turning
to a closer look on the final sequence: firstly, in its insistence on the parameters of
mobility and immobility the film allegorises its own production process as the result of
a European co-operation. Lucienne wins the Miss France-pageant and is subsequently
sent to the Miss Europe-competition in San Sebastian where an international haute
volée of princes and maharajas compete for the attention of the new Miss Europe. It is
social and geographical mobility that allows Lucienne to leave the stability but also the
limits of her proletarian life. After she returns home, her enforced immobility in the
petit-bourgeois flat is rather crudely metaphorised by a caged bird while she is waiting
for André to return from work. Her only comfort is a gramophone record of the initial
song and the fan post she still receives as Miss Europe. The film continuously juxta-
poses luxury hotels, sleeping coaches and expensive spas with working class amuse-
ments, daily labour and the drudgery of a housewife’s routine. Two standard approach-
es can be found in multi-language versions and other productions meant to cross bor-
ders: either the films are set in fantastic operetta kingdoms, or they allude to the many
markers of modernity and modernisation transcending national limits: ocean liners
and overnight trains, upscale hotels and exclusive spas, racing cars and gramophones,
fashion, style and revue girls.31 Indeed, the maharaja and the prince embody the simul-
taneous cosmopolitanism, freedom and mobility, but also uprootedness of the aristoc-
racy. Set against this is the captivity and immobility, but also groundedness of the work-
ing class which nevertheless works for a transnational medium (the newspaper Le
Globe) and falls for the international jet set vacationing at a spa. In its use of cultural
modernisation, Prix de beauté anticipates some the MLVs’ strategies.
   My other point would be the film’s ongoing foregrounding of its use of sound, the
many “Allô! Allô!”-scenes calling attention to sound as a fact in itself.32 The rather poor
lip synchronisation contrasts with the richness of the film’s sound effects.
Furthermore, the film constantly foregrounds mechanical and electronic devices for
recording and replaying sound and images, such as loudspeakers, gramophones,
mechanical pianos and indeed even the sound film itself when the prince hires
Lucienne for a production of the International Sound Film Company. Especially inter-
esting for this self-reflexive aspect is the sequence of the beauty contest. A beauty con-
test is, after all, a visual event. Yet, as the disembodied voice of the host explains via a
loudspeaker, the success of the participants in the contest is measured by aural means,
i.e. by the length of the audience’s applause measured on a chronograph. In a similar
vein to the Superstar/Idols style TV shows, the decision process is handed over to the
audience in a travesty of democratic decision making. An excessive process of allegori-
sation seems to be at work in early sound cinema in the way the tension between

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silence and sound is played out in dramatic terms, much like in Blackmail (A.
Hitchcock, 1929).33 Moreover, early sound cinema had a deep fascination with devices
and machines that inscribed, recorded or replayed sound: an obvious example would be
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (F. Lang, 1932-33).34
   Sound is also dramatised through the way the song enters the narrative in the open-
ing swimming pool scene through the gramophone, and then again, at the end, via the
sound film, sealing her fate by guiding her jealous husband into the cinema. The film
in the film – in which we see Lucienne singing the theme song in a bourgeois setting
and expensively dressed – is called La Chanteuse éperdue. In a way, this title sums up
Europe’s reaction to sound film where the triumphant exclamation “You ain’t heard
nothin’ yet!” of the male American Jazz Singer was answered by a troubled female
singer imported from the United States. The ending of the film disconnects the body
from the voice again: as the first scene gave Lucienne a voice thanks to technology, both
in a literal and in a metaphorical way, the last scene severs this allegorical tie again. Her
image and voice continue after her death and “over her dead body.” Now, while Louise
Brooks’ (dubbed) singing voice in Prix de beauté ironically comments on her tragic fate,
life had (one is tempted to say, of course) just one other ironic turn to offer when – after
her return to the United States – it was exactly her refusal to lend her voice to a post-syn-
chronisation of The Canary Murder Case (M. St. Clair, 1929) that ultimately led to her
tragic fate as the Hollywood executives branded her a “difficult” actress, refusing to cast
her in any important roles. Thus, while the voice of Lucienne, Brooks’ last major role,
persisted into the sound film, it was Brooks’ silent image that persisted into our day. Her
refusal to comply with the Hollywood rules only underscored her retroactive image as
a proto-feminist and a stubborn individualist willing to defy the normative power of
the Hollywood studio system, granting her thus a honorary membership in cinematic
Europeanness.


Over-In-Determination

  I have tried to understand and analyse Prix de beauté across a number of topics: the
employment of sound; the question of authorship (where much more could be done
around the contributions of Pabst and Clair); the issue of national cinema and the ques-
tion whether it is applicable in any meaningful sense to put this film in relation to
other films such as Casta Diva and its English version The Divine Spark (C. Gallone,
1935); finally, I addressed the cinematic interrelationship across the Atlantic, between
the US and Europe. All these topics, which in my opinion are highly important to any
discussion of the MLVs and the coming of sound can be found on the level of produc-
tion history as well as inside the story – a process of condensation and allegorisation is
at work. In fact, the way these topics are played through on both levels reveals a high
degree of over determination. At the same time, the film ultimately remains poised in
between any firm stances, in an indetermined posture.

  The same sort of (over-)indetermination, to coin a term, can be found in another quin-
tessential European product with a similar global approach to marketing and scope :
the James Bond-series. In its uses of mobility and technological gadgets, but also in its
ambition to draw together production crews and actors from widely diverse back-

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grounds, and finally in the way it engages the cinematic divide between the US and
Europe, the Bond series could be seen as one among many possible objects of compari-
son to the multi-language versions. Seen under this perspective, the MLVs appear much
less an aberration or a dead end, but rather form a central chapter of a transnational and
truly European film history which remains as yet to be written.



1 See Rémy Pithon, “Les ‘Versions Multiples’ ont-elles existé?,” in Anna Antonini (ed.), Il film e
   i suoi multipli/Film and Its Multiples (Udine: Forum 2003), pp. 123-129.
2 The only surviving versions are the French language version and the silent version recently
   restored by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna; more on the history of the restoration can
   be found in Davide Pozzi, “Prix de beauté: un titolo, due edizioni, quattro versioni,” in A.
   Antonini (ed.), op. cit., pp. 67-78.
3 Martin Barnier, En route vers le parlant. Histoire d’une évolution technologique, économique
   et esthétique du cinéma (1926–1934) (Liège: Éditions du Céfal 2002).
4 Pierre Billard, Le Mystère René Clair (Paris: Plon, 1998), p. 435.
5 See for a biography Barry Paris, Louise Brooks (London-New York: Hamish Hamilton-Knopf,
   1989); see also Brooks’ own collection of (autobiographical, critical and historical) articles:
   Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).
6 Thanks to Davide Pozzi for bringing this to my attention.
7 For more on this European venture see Malte Hagener, “Unter den Dächern der Tobis.
   Nationale Märkte und Europäische Strategien,” in Jan Distelmeyer (ed.), Tonfilmfrieden,
   Tonfilmkrieg. Die Geschichte der Tobis vom Technik-Syndikat zum Staatskonzern
   (München: text + kritik/CineGraph, 2003).
8 Claude Doré “Du film ironique au film dramatique. Les projets de René Clair,” Cinémiroir
   (June 7, 1929), article reprinted in and quoted after: <http://www.pandorasbox.com/louise-
   brooks/pix/articles/6-7-29cinemiroir.jpg>
9 “Der Schönheitspreis”, Kinematograph, Vol. 23, no. 250 (October 25, 1929).
10 P. Billard, op. cit., p. 152f.
11 “Au sujet de Prix de beauté,” La Cinématographie française, no. 584 (January 11, 1930), p. 38.
12 Reichsfilmblatt, no. 51-52 (December 21, 1929) p. 37.
13 “Miss Europa,” Kinematograph, Vol. 24, no. 187 (August 12, 1930). [“Sobald der Dialog begin-
   nt wird’s fürchterlich. Es geht eben nicht an, einen französisch gesprochenen Dialog später-
   hin mit deutschen Worten synchronisieren zu wollen. Obgleich die Dialogworte silbenge-
   treu nachgezählt wurden, glaubt der Zuschauer in keinem Augenblick, daß die Darsteller die
   deutschen Worte sprechen, denn ihre Lippenbewegungen stimmen damit nicht überein. [...]
   MISS EUROPA ist ein Beweis für das Versagen jeder sprachlichen Synchronisation. Der interna-
   tionale Tonfilm muß auf eine andere Basis gestellt werden.”]
14 -go, “Miß Europa,” Reichsfilmblatt, Vol. 8, no. 33 (August 16, 1930). [“Gespielt wird franzö-
   sisch, gesprochen wird deutsch mit mäßiger Redekunst. Der Kontrast springt ins Auge und
   ins Ohr. Dies Zusynchronisieren stößt eben doch auf künstlerische Schwierigkeiten, die tech-
   nischen lassen sich gerade noch überwinden.”]
15 H.H. [Hans H. Wollenberg], “Miß Europa,” Lichtbildbühne, Vol. 23, no. 192 (August 12, 1930).
   [“Der größtenteils deutsche Dialog (der Film ist 100prozentig) ist leider schwerfällig und
   klingt etwas unbeholfen. Doch ist er dankenswerterweise sehr kurz gehalten, so daß der gün-
   stige Gesamteindruck gewahrt bleibt.”]

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MALTE HAGENER

16 l., “Im Titania-Palast: Miss Europa,” Der Film, Vol. 15, no. 33 (October 15, 1930).
17 Variety (September 3, 1930), p. 44; reprinted in and quoted after B. Paris, op. cit., p. 342.
18 For Soviet émigres in France see François Albera, Albatros. Des russes à Paris 1919–1929
   (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1995); Jörg Schöning (ed.), Fantaisies russes. Russische
   Filmmacher in Berlin und Paris 1920–1930 (München: text + kritik/CineGraph, 1995).
19 For an overview see Thomas Elsaesser, Ginette Vincendeau (eds.), Les Cinéastes allemands en
   France. Les années trente (Paris: Goethe Institut, 1983).
20 On the life and work of Romain Pinès see Eric Le Roy “Romain Pinès, ou l’itinéraire d’un pro-
   ducteur racé,” Archives, no. 73 (December 1997), pp. 22-30.
21 “Kleines Lexikon,” in Sybille M. Sturm, Arthur Wohlgemuth (eds.), Hallo? Berlin? Ici Paris!
   Deutsch-französische Filmbeziehungen 1918-1939 (München: text+kritik/CineGraph, 1996),
   pp. 179-184, here p. 183.
22 I am thinking here especially of the highly valuable work of Kristin Thompson and Andrew
   Higson. See Kristin Thompson: “The End of the ‘Film Europe’ Movement,” in Tom O’Regan, Brian
   Showsmith (eds.), History on/and/in Film (Perth: History and Film Association of Australia 1987),
   pp. 45-56; Kristin Thompson, “National or International Films? The European Debate During the
   1920s,” in Film History, Vol. 8, no. 3 (1996), pp. 281-296. See also Andrew Higson, “Film-Europa.
   Kulturpolitik und industrielle Praxis,” in S. Sturm, A. Wohlgemuth (eds.), op. cit., pp. 63-76. See
   also the essays in Andrew Higson, Richard Maltby (eds.), “Film Europe” and “Film America”.
   Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920 – 1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999).
23 Francesco Bono’s ongoing work on the (loose) production team around Willi Forst, including
   Géza von Bolvary, Walter Reisch, Arnold Pressburger, Gregor Rabinowitsch and others, with
   Leise flehen meine Lieder as the network node, proposes a very similar model of co-operation
   to the one that I am putting forward here. See for instance: Francesco Bono, “Casta Diva. Das
   deutschsprachige Kino und der italienische Musikfilm,” in Malte Hagener, Jan Hans (eds.),
   Als die Filme singen lernten. Innovation und Tradition im Musikfilm 1928–1938 (München:
   text + kritik/CineGraph, 1999), pp. 155-165.
24 It is not coincidental that Peter Wollen’s recent collection of essays is entitled Paris –
   Hollywood. Writing on Film. (London: Verso 2002).
25 Cf. Thomas Elsaesser, “Über den Nutzen der Enttäuschung: Filmkritik zwischen Cinephilie
   und Nekrophilie,” in Irmbert Schenk (ed.), Filmkritik. Bestandsaufnahmen und
   Perspektiven (Marburg: Schüren, 1998), pp. 91-114, here p. 107.
26 Henri Langlois, “More than Garbo,” in Paola Cristalli, Valeria Dalle Donne (eds.), Louise
   Brooks, l’européenne (Paris et al.: Cine Classics, 1999), p. 83, brochure accompanying screen-
   ings at the Cannes International Film Festival.
27 Kenneth Tynan, “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” The New Yorker (June 11, 1979), pp. 45-78,
   here p. 57 ff.
28 On the “birth” of the documentary from the spirit of the Avant-garde see the important arti-
   cle: Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry, no.
   27 (Summer 2001), pp. 580-610.
29 Tracy Cox, “Consuming Distractions in Prix de Beauté,” Camera Oscura, Vol. 17, no. 2 (2002),
   pp. 40-67.
30 A fascinating discussion of this and other issues surrounding the employment of sound in
   the cinema can be found in James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema.
   Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
31 A description and analysis of some of the elements as they are used in the films with Jan
   Kiepura can be found in Malte Hagener, Jan Hans “Der Sängerstar im Zeitalter seiner tech-

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   nischen Diversifizierbarkeit,” in Günter Krenn, Armin Loacker (eds.), Zauber der Bohème.
   Marta Eggerth, Jan Kiepura und der deutschsprachige Musikfilm. (Wien: Filmarchiv Austria,
   2002), pp. 299-333.
32 This formulation is taken from Marc Chevrie, “France années 30: L’Internationale et la voix,”
   Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 42 (April 1984), pp. IX–X, here IX.
33 Cf. also Elsaesser’s reading of Das Lied einer Nacht, a film which also excessively dramatises
   the tension between real, recorded and fake voices. Thomas Elsaesser: “‘Going Live’. Körper
   und Stimme im frühen Tonfilm am Beispiel von Das Lied einer Nacht,” in G. Krenn, A.
   Loacker (eds.), op. cit., pp. 271-298.
34 Tom Gunning, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” in The Films of Fritz Lang. Allegories of Vision
   and Modernity (London: British Film Institute, 2000), pp. 139-159.




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