application/pdf
2036-461X
16520
4
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
4
Introduction
2004-03-01
2021-10-01
2004-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Nataša Ďurovičová
2004/03/01
2036-461X
4
en
Introduction
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16520/14578
4
INTRODUCTION
Nataša Ďurovičová




  After hovering for decades at the very margins of the film-historical field as a mildly
bizarre curiosity – the two headed pig of the classical cinema – the phenomenon of lan-
guage versions (LVs), i.e. the simultaneous remaking of the same title in a variety of lan-
guage versions, has in recent years begun to draw the interest of film historians at expo-
nential speed. As an antonym to the monolithic and monolingual “Hollywood,” versions
have also provided a prime test case for the limits of the national cinema paradigm,
which had, from the mid-1980s, begun to be put into question.1 Even when not neces-
sarily front and center of the argument, the LVs have repeatedly cropped up to figure as
important evidence in the context of star studies, exile studies and sound studies.2
  Repeatedly but always anecdotally. For all this attention, doing research on LVs has
generally been a near-impossible task, since it depended first of all on a hands-on com-
parison. Beyond locating two versions of the same film (itself a challenge, given stan-
dard archiving as well as cataloging practices, as Davide Pozzi and Ivan Klimeš attest to
in this volume), the effort of bringing together the two titles (which by the fiat of dis-
tribution were meant to be mutually exclusive – to see the German version of Anna
Christie was usually meant to pre-empt seeing the American version), not to mention
arranging for two flatbeds next to each other, begged to be taken on as a collective
undertaking.

  The MAGIS Gradisca International Film Studies Spring School is among the very few
places where such an undertaking was conceivable. Wedged in a three-corner space
between Italy (proper), Slovenia, and Austria, Friuli is palpably polylingual. Added to
this is its unique regional investment in film-historical research and scholarship of the
last decade, as embodied in the Pordenone/Sacile “research festival” Giornate del cine-
ma muto, the Udine International Film Studies Conference, and now in the Gradisca
Spring School: all these have made Friuli a prime location for European as well as trans-
Atlantic film studies. It is more than a coincidence that one of the very first mono-
graphs on the subject of LVs, Mario Quargnolo’s La parola ripudiata, was published by
the Cineteca del Friuli in 1989.
  Adding a further essential dimension to the Spring School is the geographical and
intellectual closeness of Bologna, where academic film studies coexist with the
Cineteca del Comune di Bologna and its L’immagine ritrovata workshop. Their joint
contribution to the versioning project has been not only through prints and technical
support but also through a unique combination of restoration practice and the theoret-
ical discourse informing it, in which the classical philological tradition of textual edit-
ing is combined with new media theories.

CINEMA & Cie, no. 4, Spring 2004                                                         ­7
NATAŠA ĎUROVIČOVÁ

  But neither research nor theoretical work on the LVs can be divorced from the hands-
on moment of comparison which, after all, is what makes this topic so singular. And run-
ning two or three versions side-by-side is inherently (in a way almost perceptually) a col-
lective, or at least a dialogical enterprise: at its core the Spring School was above all a
workshop. It took a lot of organizational talent, energy and patience to assemble and
run, in the ad-hoc space of a 17th century palazzo, a 35 mm projection booth, a multime-
dia lab with dozens of titles, a document and book library and, above all, a revelatory
series of films screened in two to three versions. The team responsible for assembling
them included Mariapia Comand, Veronica Innocenti, Francesco Pitassio, Valentina Re,
Cosetta Saba and Laura Vichi, with the genial, generous and inspirational Leonardo
Quaresima at its helm. To these must be added the name of Hans-Michael Bock, whose
willingness to share films and documents, combined with superb organizational skills
and deep knowledge of the period, honed through his long-standing involvement with
the CineGraph project (in some respects the research precursor and natural future part-
ner of the MAGIS project ) influenced every aspect of the seminar.3

   The core Italian group had already laid ground for the Spring School in organizing,
during the preceding spring (2002) a conference in Udine entitled Il film e suoi multi-
pli/Film and its Multiples, out of which the theme for the Gradisca project emerged.4 At
the Udine International Film Studies Conference language versions had appeared in the
framework of all kinds of other cinematic series, and all kinds of methodological
approaches to seriality, ranging from semiotic through phenomenological to historical.
While the scope of papers presented in Gradisca was somewhat broader (Martin
Barnier on a French and an American adaptation of Les Misérables, Manlio Piva on the
Italian and the French release copies of Bresson’s Pickpocket, just to name a few), the
focus of attention was on language versions proper. These were loosely approached as
films which solve(d) the problem of dialogue translation not by adding a narrowly lin-
guistic supplement (dubbing and subtitling), but rather by replicating all or some por-
tion of the footage through reenactment, in a relatively close temporal arrangement,
one that would allow positing the films as “versions” (in contrast, in particular, to
“remakes” with their relatively longer temporal contract).

  One theoretical framework offered here up-front was François Jost’s semio-pragmatic
account of pertinent categories of identity and difference between two “works.”5 The
point of departure is the concept of replicability: what makes a second work, in an oxy-
moron, a “true copy” of the first, i.e. when is it similar enough to be a facsimile (like the
prints of a photographic negative) of the first, and consequently also potentially a fal-
sificate? And when is the second work different enough so as to no longer have a rela-
tionship of identity to its presumed precedent, i.e. when does it become a “version” of
some preceding work? The terms “autographic” and “allographic” (borrowed from
Nelson Goodman via Gérard Genette’s body of work) chart two different principles of
difference: an autographic work is unique and thus possible to falsify (= be copied per-
fectly, such as a painting), while an allographic work (e.g. a play) exist only in each of
its many possible manifestations (e.g. a variety of performances). To extrapolate from
Jost’s presentation, the claim for a version being strictly a communicative act of lin-
guistic translation into another language of a “version originale” (its “functional equiv-
alent”) would thus emphasize its autographic characteristics, while a more expressive-

­8
                                                                               INTRODUCTION

ly driven view of versions as “cultural translations” (as Joseph Garncarz would have it)
would search out and dwell more on their “variant” allographic properties. Both in
Genette’s and Jost’s use much modification of Goodman’s binary set follows, but for our
purposes it provided one conceptual handle on the spectrum of versioning processes.
  Pierre Sorlin’s historicist stock-taking of the near-endless heterogeneity of the concept
of a “version,” together with the critical survey of the historical writing on the versions
and its methods provided by Rémy Pithon, blocked out many of the guideline questions
of the coming days.6 Together the two overviews agreed, implicitly if not explicitly, on a
preamble: our definitional problems are first and foremost a function of scarce data. Until
we can accurately determine the degree of planning, that is, of intentionality involved in
the decision to substitute elements x and y but not w and z, it will remain impossible to
draw a distinction between a version and a remake, a version and an adaptation, and even
a version and a generic cluster, which in turn will make periodization impossible.

  The search for a definition can be sought in the direction of theory (“what is the par-
ticular nature of repetition in the LVs?”), or in history (“when were versions?”). The bulk
of papers presented here, and the Spring School’s general tenor, were in the latter cate-
gory – research papers with a historical-culturalist bent. Brought up to historiographical
scrutiny, however, there are in them leads toward larger issues of history of representa-
tions from which it is but a close step to more general media-theoretical concerns.

   As studied in Gradisca the LVs were assumed to be a finite series, limited to the 1929-
1939 decade; though there are odd instances of LVs during and after WWII, these really are
extremely rare. This periodization then begs the question of whether it is accurate, as sys-
tems-driven historiography would have it, to view the LVs as a “glitch,” a historically con-
tained moment of experimentation during the unruly period of transition to sound. On
this view translation through versions was a deviation from some sort of norm (whether
that norm be understood in textual or production-related terms) which at some point
became reinstated. Or, should the LVs, given their large numbers and considerable perva-
siveness, be viewed as a distinct, even autonomous form/at/ion brought about by the con-
frontation of competing or complementary media regimes of sight and sound, such as on
one hand the stage, on the other for instance the recording industry and radio? This latter
point was advanced in discussion especially by Thomas Elsaesser, in whose perspective
the chief interest of the LVs is as one symptom of what he called “a generalized crisis of
indexicality.” On this view the versions’ approach to the body/voice split represents sim-
ply one strategy among many for the wholesale reconfiguration, in 20th century moder-
nity, of perception and knowledge, a process in which the newest medium of sound cine-
ma joined its technological predecessors and competitors – photography, silent film,
radio, telephony –in molding new reality-effects and new forms of subjectivity.
   Some of the debates issuing from here then circled around to the question of whether
dubbing (the historically privileged translation substitute for version-making) was in
some sense ontologically inevitable, the “natural” functional equivalent of the LVs which
was bound to put an end to this practice, or whether it needed to be checked against, and
found in some respect constitutionally different from, the LVs’ extreme form of duplicat-
ing in which the process of translation included cultural as well as linguistic elements.7
If we take the LVs as more than just a transitional form, we are bound to return to the sur-
plus of “body” – as (gendered) actor, as performance, as agency.8

                                                                                          ­9
NATAŠA ĎUROVIČOVÁ

  The contributions that follow in this issue can be divided into two broad groups. One
takes as its implicit assignment Sorlin’s set of questions: what can be identified, historical-
ly, as the common element(s) for a cluster of films so that they can qualify as “versions” of
each other? In other words, exactly what were the procedures and/or textual elements that
could be duplicated economically and practically (and thus copied “autographically”), and
which were instead the elements in need of local modification, that is, elements seen as the
required signals of national difference (i.e. “allographic” elements of non-identity)?
  The other set of papers extrapolates from this research to ask: what can we learn from
the interaction between LVs and the historiographic category they most apparently
challenge, that of the national cinema(s)? And in extension of this, is there (not) a line
to be drawn between the type of seriality deployed in the Hollywood-made “foreign”
versions (FLVs) and the “multilingual” versions made in Europe (MLVs)?
  The answer to the former question is to be found, and was sought, in the format of
close reading. The assumption underlying this approach is then that a critical mass of
precise details will give us a “bottom-up” account, mapping “exactly” what could or had
to be varied in order to create difference significant enough to qualify as a version.

   Beyond the chronological primacy of his material, Davide Pozzi’s gloss on the restora-
tions of Nana and Prix de beauté also perfectly illustrates Sorlin’s call for research on
production procedures. Aiming to ascertain the exact relation between “one title… two
editions [silent and sound]… and four [dubbed] versions” the restoration story as told
here demonstrates that the two editions did not as stand in a hierarchical – let’s say
autographic – relationship, in other words that the sound version was not simply a
silent version with inserted sound shots. Rather, the silent and the sound “editions” (to
use the philological term favored by the Bologna scholars) are allographic, two separate
“performances” of the title Prix de beauté. This non-identity is beautifully confirmed in
the reconstruction which revealed that while the film-within-film ending of the silent
version fills the frame completely, in the sound version the corresponding film-within-
film shot consists of a film strip that includes an optical sound track. The two mutual-
ly exclusive variants thus carry with them a substantial allegorical baggage, as Malte
Hagener’s very different essay on the same film suggests later in this issue.
   The four subsequent essays share the procedure of close and comparative reading.
What they differ in is the choice of the materials of expression through which the
national “reassignment” is accomplished: music, narrative, language/cultural idiom
and spatial markers respectively.
   Like Pozzi, the musicologist Roberto Calabretto tracks a two-step inter-media version
switch – from Weill/Brecht’s stage opera to Pabst/Weill/Mackeben’s film with songs
(German/original) to Pabst/Weill/Mackeben’s (French/secondary) version. Generally
siding with the view critical of the film’s revision of the stage version, Calabretto in
turn sides with the German version over the French, which he finds better correspon-
ding to both the original stage score and to Brecht’s theories in general. He notes
changes in performance (Oswald’s aggressive contra Florelle’s lyrical tone), as well as in
scoring (the German version’s more complex use of recitative in the wedding sequence
than that of the French version, yet its failure to deliver on Brecht’s preference for
“speaking against music”). Ultimately an instance of philologically-informed textual
comparison, Calabretto’s analysis concludes without extrapolating to a general
“nationalizing” interpretation of the differences he identifies.9

­10
                                                                             INTRODUCTION

  If it was the musical structure that was the chief evidence of a two-step “degradation”
for Calabretto, Francesco Bono’s discussion of the opera-film Casta Diva and its English
version The Divine Spark (C. Gallone,1935) locates difference squarely in the realm of
narrative. Chiefly by tracking divergences in editing and framing Bono shows the dif-
ference between the longer Italian version which centers on the protagonist Bellini’s
Faustian deal with his musical career and is complemented by a distinctly divine vision
of his muse Maddalena, and the shorter English version in which the muse’s “spark”
invokes a less ephemeral and more human female character counterbalancing a less
“predestined” composer. This drift away from the operatic and more toward the roman-
tic modality is then also present in Gallone’s 1954 Italian “auto-remake” of Casta Diva.
  The pair of papers by Peter Szczepanik and Petr Mareš, deliberately triangulated with
Ivan Klimeš’s overview of the Czechoslovak 1930s situation elsewhere in the issue, put
into focus a major national cinematography otherwise largely ghettoized in its post-
WWII “East” incarnation. Jointly they highlight its complex participation in the trans-
national film space via its special relationship to the German and the Austrian state, as
well as to the larger Germanophone “imagined community.” Attending to the full range
of permutations in the clefts between the social space and the linguistic space of both
the diegesis and the spectator, and to the versions’ attempts to overcome these gaps by
various ways of “stitching” spaces together, Szczepanik proposes, on the Czech exam-
ple, a conceptual framework for the work of cultural translation (Garncarz’ term again)
amongst several variations of such an “imagined community.” Mareš ’s essay, with its
linguistic focus, proceeds in the complementary direction. Attending closely to what
we might call “the shifter function” of linguistic and cultural idiom, he tracks the ver-
sioning procedures of the bilingual Czech star Vlasta Burian as a loop from his “mit-
teleuropean” Habsburg Empire themes in their distinctly local Czech formulation
(both in terms of the characters’ punning and ornate language and in terms of the films’
mildly Schweikian anti-Habsburg ironies), which he then re-packaged in version for-
mat for the sensibilities of the “mitteleuropean” German-speaking audiences. As laid
out by Mareš, the Burian example also demonstrated the non-linear ricochet effect of
“cultural translation”: a version’s failure may be an index signaling that a non-nego-
tiable and thus non-translatable border exists between national(ist) spaces.
  In counterdistinction to these “bottom-up” close readings, several contributions
offered a reverse top-down perspective, placing the LVs within the paradigm of nation-
al cinemas. In Joseph Garncarz’ analysis of the German situation that paradigm not
only remained intact right until the mid-1960s, but was in fact buttressed by the LVs in
their collective effort to mobilize, satisfy and thus mirror a given set of national norms
(whether linguistic, stylistic or typological). In a comparable scenario, Charles O’Brien
identifies the signature effect of the French (national) cinematography of the 1930s as a
direct legacy of Paramount’s Joinville studio, whose “canned theatre” (i.e. direct-record-
ing) sound model, elsewhere limited to the transition era, came to correspond particu-
larly well to the performance-driven French mode and became adopted as its dominant
stylistic norm.10 In these two essays the LVs thus became a kind of primus inter pares
of their “host” national cinematographies.
  In contrast to the model in which a national cinema is equated with and measured
through the box office records in that country, the model implied in Ivan Klimeš’ study
of the Czechoslovak interwar situation drives a wedge between the concept of national
cinema as a market and as a discursive entity. Aiming for a basic factographic invento-

                                                                                       ­11
NATAŠA ĎUROVIČOVÁ

ry of versions produced in the country, and therefore concentrating on production
more than on reception, Klimeš ’s account nonetheless offers the picture of a complex
national non-identity within the state’s boundaries. The Czech-language films were
thus versioned (largely into German) as a strategy to help finance them, the target audi-
ences being not just the German speakers abroad but also the country’s own substantial
German minority. But access to both these markets was regulated by the multi-nation-
al Czechoslovak state through a range of legal and economic tools, such as import quo-
tas and quality subsidies. In the border areas the Czechoslovak German versions would
thus compete with the imported German-language originals, the two sets thus no
longer functioning as mutually exclusive “functional equivalents.” Almost simultane-
ously this minoritarian versioning nexus also became a transitional landing point in
the lines of flight along which some Jewish émigrés were moving out of the widening
realm of the Nuremberg laws.
  Klimeš’s account lends empirical as well as conceptual resonance to Malte Hagener’s
schema. It is no accident that Hagener too takes up Prix de beauté, sometimes known as
Miss Europe. At once famously lost, fragmented, mythical (thanks to Louise Brook’s
cinephiliac standing on the right side of the Atlantic), multi-national and multi-medi-
al, caught between the allographic (via its two media versions, silent and sound) and
the autographic (via dubbing) poles of duplication, the film served Pozzi as an exem-
plum of the restoratorial challenge to notions of single origins. It serves Hagener as a
case study for, as well as allegory of what he calls the “over-in-determination,” (i.e. mul-
tiple causality in uncertain hierarchy) of the transitional early sound period in a Europe
at once heterogeneous and crisscrossed by an array of inter-national production net-
works. It is then his claim that the European MLVs, the multi-language versions pro-
duced in the nexii of such production networks (held together by powerful producer
figures, from Joe May and Erich Pommer down through today’s Claude Berri and David
Puttnam) signal a different (more allographic, let’s say) kind of cinematic seriality than
the vulgarly mechanical the FLVs, the (let’s say quasi-autographic) “foreign language
versions” made in Hollywood.
  There is room for a polemic with this account. Hollywood’s several versioning strate-
gies (generally not at the center of discussions in Gradisca) were more diversified than
the contemporaries (especially the irate European guest talent, confronted with the
strict routines of the American studio system) were able to judge and describe.11 Thus
MGM’s mid-1930s Chevalier films such as Folies Bergéres/Man from Monte Carlo were
cut and tailored with utmost care around the French star’s persona, much like the UFA
versions of Lilian Harvey’s films, and were very successful both at home and in France.
This is then to be contrasted with the same studio’s completely mechanical Laurel and
Hardy films in which the duo speaks a phonetically acquired Spanish, though with
tongues firmly in cheeks. Here the role of parody as a kind of “preemptive anti-nation-
alist strategy” remains to be examined. And in extension of O’Brien’s argument much
can be said about Paramount-Joinville’s effort to acquire a full gamut of French features,
from stylistic to legal, to the point of producing some of France’s best-loved national
classics, such as Pagnol’s Marius (1930).
  But arguments about the various “continental“ types of seriality don’t subtract from
(in fact probably add to) Hagener’s broader methodological proposition, namely that
overdetermination is the versions’ sine qua non. For the multitude of representational
transfers – linguistic, stylistic and legal – which is so thoroughly laid out in Sorlin’s arti-

­12
                                                                                INTRODUCTION

cle cannot ultimately be sorted out by “getting it right,” by cumulatively adding produc-
tion datum to production datum. The definitional boundaries of the version corpus will
remain unstable, dovetailing not only with versions achieved via partial reshooting and
reediting but also, for instance, with the phenomenon of remakes ongoing until today,
and encountering further difficulties when new storage media such as DVDs make their
own use of versions. Best understood via a multiplicity of causes arranged in uncertain
hierarchies, and often formally or thematically preoccupied with their own “conditions
of representability,” versions in the term’s broadest sense make a case for “crisis histori-
ography” which aims precisely to acknowledge shifts in definitions, and the ongoing
jurisdictional battles in the process of trying to stabilize them.12

  A few summarizing thoughts. There is no data available that can sustain the widely
accepted claim that it was some generalized “change in public taste” that led to the
abandonment of versioning and to its replacement by dubbing and/or subtitling. Had
that been the case, we would be able to explain how “public taste” could differ so
instantly and radically between countries like (1) Sweden and the US where dubbing
never became prevalent, (2) France which operated with a dual system of dubbing for
provinces and versions originales for select urban audiences, (3) Italy and Germany
which lined up thoroughly behind dubbing, etc. The format in which linguistic trans-
fers were happening was instead determined in Europe by a wide-ranging series of top-
down decisions, legally secured by the state, while in the US it was quasi-sanctioned
through the state’s intermittent tolerance of monopoly manifested in the film indus-
try’s vertical integration. And because of the additional factor of a massive and vast eco-
nomic depression that was unfolding simultaneously with the technological transi-
tion, scarcity of films was the case more than an array of choices. Put otherwise, the lin-
guistic air space of a given country was regulated not by what the public preferred but
by a mix of national cultural policies, the strength of the exhibitors vs. the producers’
organizations, the impact of patents, the standing of intellectual property rights etc. It
was in this “over-in-determinate” mix (to use Hagener’s term) rather than in some aes-
thetic free market that the versions’ viability was decided.
  As a phenomenon versioning participates in the generalized world-wide mobiliza-
tion of cultural boundaries in the post-Crash, an era forming a dialectical hinge
between the Amerikanismus of the 1920s and the reactive nationalisms of the 1930s.
But the desire for acoustic self-recognition also on the level of speech, akin to what
Benjamin calls “modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced,” of which the LVs
were such a radical manifestation, doesn’t disappear with this format’s disappear-
ance.13 It finds its more permanent expression instead in the 1930s (state-supported)
boom in national cinemas and their specific genres. Even while the exports of
Hollywood films grew again in mid-1930s, to higher levels than they have been around
the crisis of the transition period, their market share (as Garncarz and O’Brien have
pointed out here) remained relatively lower, certainly much lower than their near-com-
plete penetration so common world-wide a decade earlier, as well as today.
  It is this internal faultline, the built-in duck-rabbit effect of identity politics running
through the versions that makes them so worthy of study. In their initial emergence,
whether in the US or in Europe, the LVs represented the recognition, the acknowledge-
ment of and the capitalizing on the continued existence of the local (or what has some-
times been referred to as “vernacular modernism”) by the behemoth of global media

                                                                                          ­13
NATAŠA ĎUROVIČOVÁ

modernity. But from the hindsight of the developments in the 1930s the persistence of
versioning may also need to be paired with its replacement technique, dubbing. For
both are manifestations of a kind of visceral reaction against the threat of modernity’s
polylingual babble, of an acoustic battening down of hatches and closing of ranks, a
wish to block out all Others’ voices, that the audio-visual spheres of the various coun-
tries could accomplish. Technology invited overhearing across various boundaries; pol-
itics aimed to regulate, even block that flow. Paris, the exile capital of the entre-deux-
guerres, the mythical home of every true western cosmopolitan, was possibly the only
place where one could experience and thus compare the spectrum of sound cinema’s
representational possibilities on an urban dérive, to hear the polyphony of voices, lan-
guages and translation modalities in their widest spectrum.
   Finally, the present volume – as well as the ongoing Spring School project on lan-
guage versions – testifies not only to the wealth of historical and archival research yet
to be done of this complex topic. It testifies as well, I think, to a fascination with the LVs
for a different, a more strictly aesthetic reason. As we approach and take in the corpus
of all the versions in the attentive posture of comparison, the films’ palimpsest offers us
the flickering specter of endless alternatives. “What if” one thinks, the colonization of
the American West had indeed been achieved by Italians (Men of the North/Luigi la
volpe, Fox 1930)? What if that embodiment of German Bürgerbildtum Dr. Rath were
the humiliated victim of a chanteuse from New York rather than of a local girl (Der
blaue Engel/Blue Angel, UFA 1930)? What if American jails were filled with French
inmates, staff and mores (Big House/Big House, MGM 1930)? What if Swedish sailors
felt most at home in Marseilles (Marius/Längtan till havet, Paramount 1930)? What if
the Habsburg empire were still standing, and everyone in it still, or again, spoke only
the language of their emperor (C. a k. polní maršálek/K. und K. Feldmarschall, Elekta-
Film, 1930)? And conversely, what of a world in which the same prying eye of a televi-
sion set could penetrate simultaneously households in thirteen different countries
(Television, Paramount 1930, in 13 language versions)?
   While each of these differentials taken alone can be dismissed as nothing else but a
symptom of a flat word of ethnic stereotypes, the composite effect that arises out of col-
lating them is that of cinema as harboring, or rather figuring, a series of parallel and
alternative worlds – not exactly utopian, simply different. It is this effect that Pierre
Huygue taps in his museal installation of the 3 versions of Atlantic.14 Projected in loops
on three large canvases hung next to one another, as if three of Monet’s haystacks or
cathedral facades, or like the Arles innkeeper Mme Ginoux, painted first by Van Gogh,
then by Gauguin, then by van Gogh again, the three versions hum there with the
ephemeral pleasure of contingency and difference, shimmering against the running
strips of a world seized technologically.



1 A seminal article was Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, “The Cinema After Babel: Language,
  Difference, Power,” Screen, Vol. 26, no. 3-4 (1985). Early among revisionist approaches were
  for instance Dudley Andrew, “Sound in France: the Origins of a Native School,” in M.L. Bandy
  (ed.), Rediscovering French Film (New York: MOMA, 1983); Ginette Vincendeau, “Les
  Versions multiples,” in Jacques Aumont, Michel Marie, André Gaudreault (eds.), Histoire du
  cinéma: nouvelles approches (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne, 1989).

­14
                                                                                     INTRODUCTION


2 For instance Dominique Lebrun, Paris Hollywood: les Français dans le cinéma américain
   (Paris: Fernand Hazan, 1987); Heike Hurst, Heiner Gassen (eds.), Tendres Ennemis: Cent ans
   de cinéma entre la France et l’Allemagne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991); Jürgen Bretschneider
   (ed.), Ewald André Dupont: Autor und Regisseur (München : text+kritik/CineGraph, 1992);
   Sibylle M. Sturm, Arthur Wohlgemuth (eds.), Hallo? Berlin? Ici Paris! Deutsch-französische
   Filmbeziehungen 1918-1939 (München: text+kritik/CineGraph, 1996); Martin Barnier, En
   route vers le parlant: Histoire d’une évolution technologique, économique et esthétique du
   cinéma (1926-1934) (Liège: Editions du Céfal, 2002).
3 While the plan to have the present issue of this journal be accompanied by a DVD-Rom (to
   have been edited by Hans-Michael Bock) didn’t materialize for practical reasons, it remains
   the plan of the MAGIS project on versions to eventually generate a comprehensive electron-
   ic bibliography and filmography, accompanied when possible by clips and documentation.
4 Proceedings published as Anna Antonini (ed.), Il film e i suoi multipli/Film and Its Multiples
   (Udine: Forum, 2003).
5 François Jost, “Territoires de l’oeuvre cinématographique,” unpublished paper, MAGIS
   Gradisca International Film Studies Spring School, March 2003.
6 Rémy Pithon, “Les versions multiples: composantes, limites et problèmes d’une définition,”
   unpublished paper, MAGIS Gradisca International Film Studies Spring School, March 2003,
   and “Les ‘Versions multiples’: ont-elles existé?” in A. Antonini (ed.), op. cit., pp. 123-129.
7 On the parallel development of versions and dubbing see Nataša Ďurovičová, “Local Ghosts:
   Dubbing Bodies in Early Sound Cinema,” in A. Antonini (a cura di), op. cit., pp. 83-98.
8 A discussion of norms determining which bodies and which languages can be made “function-
   ally equivalent” under what circumstances would benefit from a comparison with the other
   great systemic filmmaking paradigm, that of cinema in India. There version-making in an array
   of languages continues to be a common practice, even while it coexists alongside the open and
   artful post-synchronization of songs. For more on the general topic see Shoma A. Chatterji, “The
   Culture Specific Use of Sound in India Cinema,” at http://www.filmsound.org/india/.
9 For a complex discussion of the film’s relationship to various modes of duplication, and the
   attendant issues of intellectual property rights see Thomas Elsaesser, “Transparent
   Duplicities: The Threepenny Opera (1931)” in Eric Rentschler (ed.), The Films of G.W. Pabst
   (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 103-115. The essay doesn’t, however,
   take up the French version, nor the film’s deployment of the musical score.
10 For a wide variety of models of influence between the American and the French cinema see
   Martin Barnier, Raphaëlle Moine (eds.), France/Hollywood. Echanges cinématographiques et
   identités nationales (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).
11 For a particularly emotional reaction see for instance Claude Autant-Lara, Hollywood Cake-
   Walk (1930-1932) (Paris: Veyrier, 1990) which touches on Buster Keaton’s versioning work for
   MGM. For an exemplary documentation and assessment of seriality involved in a Hollywood
   FLV production see Giuliana Muscio, “Come The Big Trail divenne Il grande sentiero e Men
   of the North divenne Luigi la volpe” in A. Antonini (ed.), op. cit., pp. 105-114.
12 For an outline see for instance Rick Altman, “Introduction: Sound/History,” in Rick Altman
   (ed.), Sound Theory /Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 122-125.
13 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
   Illuminations, edited by Harry Zorn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 232 and note no. 7.
14 The English and German versions of Atlantic were directed by E.A. Dupont in 1929 for BPI,
   the French, directed by Jean Kemm, was made in London and Paris in 1930. On the installa-
   tion see Anne-Françoise Lesuisse, “Le Cinéma d’exposition: mémoire et remake du specta-

                                                                                                ­15
NATAŠA ĎUROVIČOVÁ

      teur” in A. Antonini (ed.), op. cit., pp. 197-203. On Huyghe’s other work with cinema, includ-
      ing the installation entitled “Dubbing,” see for instance Christine van Asst, “Framing the
      Spatial,” in Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture and Design from France,
      1958-1998 (New York: Guggenheim/DIA, 1999).




­16
