Revolution in Sound (2012)
⭆ Film & Art | An unfinished essay film by Martin Reinhart & Thomas Tode
Finding Edmund Meisel’s lost score on Vitaphone discs and the subsequent reconstruction of the sound version of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin provided the impetus for a film project commissioned by ARTE Germany. Unfortunately it was never completed as originally planned. But it didn’t grind to a halt either, simply changed focus and storyline becoming, eventually, our award winning 2015 documentary Dreams Rewired.
Like all unfinished projects, an huge number of ideas and and immense amount of work had gone into this one and it seemed a pity if these efforts were to be lost forever. So I decided to dedicate a few lines to this film in this section of my website.
Everything started around 2000, when I was working as a curator for photography and film at the Technische Museum Wien (TMW). It was there that I found a set of five Vitascope discs labeled Panzerkreuzer Potemkin. With the help of our partner institution, the Österreichische Mediathek, I had the non-standard discs dubbed and was amazed by what I heard: the recordings were obviously some kind of soundtrack with music, dialogues and foley sounds. Since I couldn’t find any information about a sound version of the classic silent movie, I contacted film historian Thomas Tode, a well known specialist for pre-war Russian avantgarde. Even then, after Thomas’ first hasty inquiry, it was clear that the discs were a sensational find.
Then several things happened at the same time. First, we learned that Enno Patalas was working on a reconstruction of a silent version of Potemkin at the UdK in Berlin and contacted him immediately. Second, we met with Nina Goslar, head of the ARTE Silent Film Department who also had an interest in Edmund Meisel’s work. She had already made new recordings of a whole series of his compositions. Nina Goslar was completely mesemerized by the news that the long lost Potemkin score had re-emerged, not just as a written musical notation but as a orchestrated recording conducted by the composer himself. The collaboration with Enno Patalas and the UdK ultimately led to a reconstruction of the 1930 sound version of Potemkin and Nina Goslar suggested that we make a twenty-minute ARTE documentary about the newly found music to be shown together with the completely restored film. This was the beginning of two parallel projects that was to occupy us for the next 15 years.
In order to research our documentary, Thomas and I began to visit international film archives . After five years of intense search we had collected around 80 hours of thrilling and mostly unknown archive footage from the early days of media history. It soon was clear that 20 minutes would never be enough to show, contextualise and comment even a fraction of our findings. So we started with a script for a feature-length essay film which we titled »Revolution in Sound«. The story we wanted to tell was that of the human voice. Modern storage and transmission media has detached it from the body and engineered a separate existence for it such that it wanders through space and time.
For us it was clear from the beginning that we would not want a series of talking head interviews, but that our subject – the human voice itself – would tell its story. To find the right tone for this narration, we turned to the writer Marcel Beyer, whom we both admired for his book The Karnau Tapes (Flughunde). To our surprise Marcel agreed to write the voice over and from there on an intense and very fruitful cooperation began.
We were able to raise more money and so also the team grew. For the shots we had planned in the vaults of the Opéra Garnier in Paris we worked together with camera man Martin Putz and the idiosyncratic animations we wanted were drawn by the wonderful artist couple Hanna Nordholt and Fritz Steingrobe. We were able to win over the comonist Siegfried Friedrich for the demanding score and Lars Rudolph as the narrator's voice.
Until then neither ARTE nor our production company had restricted our work in any way, so a wonderfully creative and productive atmosphere prevailed for a while. The rude awakening came when Nina Goslar's superiors refused to accept the fine cut of the film and the project came to a standstill. The accusation was that the film was too intellectual, incomprehensible and politically too radical for a television audience. After months of uncertainty, it became apparent that we would have to change the content of the film and completely re-cut it. After more than eight years of work, Thomas and I felt unable to do this, so we asked our friend Manu Luksch for her help.
And once again a miracle happened: Manu fell in love with the material we had gathered and agreed to try the impossible. Within three years, she actually managed to make an exciting and highly topical story out of it and, on top of that, to get Tilda Swinton as a narrator. She has sensitively retained many of our ideas and thus saved them for the new version – and yet created something completely new. However, some of our favourite scenes did not make it into Manu's version and the beautiful text by Marcel Beyer also went unheard.