Weltwunder der Kinematographie: Film History auf DVD, Vol. 1 (review)

This impressive DVD presents a range of eclectic short films from across the twentieth century. It is published as a supplement to volume 6 (2002) of the Polzer Media Group's Weltwunder der Kinematographie book series. Each book in the series anthologizes essays that focus on the development of a particular technology, usually in its infancy: the coming of sound, color, wide-screen, home video, and so on. Volume 6, Aufstieg und Untergang des Tonfilms (Rise and fall of the sound film), as its title suggests, is a collection of essays in German and/or English devoted to innovations in early synchronous and more recent digital sound. The essays range from Brian Winston's history of "The Coming of 16mm Sync Sound" to an interview with Hans Henneke (Kodak Entertainment Imaging) about the digital future of the cinema, and Rüdiger Sünner's critical consideration of corruption, decadence, nationalism, and heroism in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000). While only six of the thirty-plus essays are written in English or accompanied by full English translation, an English synopsis of a number of the German texts makes the collection accessible to the English-language reader.

The images on the DVD span across genres, forms, technologies, and inventions. The archival footage ranges from a yet-to-be-restored print of a 1916 film, Concerning $1,000,the first "actual" color Kodak film (not tinted or toned), to the digitally shot Y2K (1998) by Daniel Hubp. As a book supplement, the DVD presents an idiosyncratic history of film. Unlike other film histories on DVD and video, Weltwunder der Kinematographie does not narrate a linear history; rather, it focuses on important moments in technological development as they played out in Germany, the United States, and France: the development of light-sensitive sound, the X-ray film, early 16mm amateur sound film, Technicolor, Agfacolor, Kodak two-color film, and digitization. To tell this story, Polzer draws on short and feature-length fiction, documentary, educational film, trailers, and contemporary sound sculpture. And there is a polemical reason behind these organizational choices.

The structure of the DVD reflects the argument made by Joachim Polzer as editor of the Weltwunder der Kinematographie book series: as the linearity of film narration and of analog image-sound relations has been superseded by the episodic logic of the digital, so the history of film has left its linear path. Polzer argues for structural parallels between the transition to sound (and color) film in the first half of the twentieth century and the shift to digital sound and image at the end of the century. Accordingly, the DVD is organized both to reinforce the episodic nature of film history's most important moments and to draw parallels between these two critical phases in image-sound production.

When approached as a self-contained publication and compared to other "history of film" videos and DVDs—such as Paul Killian's Silents Please! (1960-61 television series) or Kevin Brownlow's Cinema Europe series (1996)—the format and presentation of the DVD is innovative for its digression from the standard use of archival footage and contemporary voice-over. These techniques are conventionally used to tell a history of linear development. Polzer's focus on the historical nodal points of sound, color, and digital technologies pushes all other developments (narrative, genre, aesthetic, industrial, commercial, and so on) to the background. Even the transitions to sound and color are not identified with a single historical moment; rather, each spans a period of approximately twenty-five years, with the invention of different techniques being used in different arenas at various intervals before 1950. This looser, more arbitrary history of these developments is convincing and comes as a refreshing alternative to more conservative conceptions.

It is roughly divided into two halves that correspond to the "rise" and "fall" of the sound film: the rise is marked by the development of sound and color...