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The Verbal-Visual “Touch”: Reconsidering
Ernst Lubitsch’s Transition to Sound
Kyle Stine
Abstract
Using theories of intermediality, this article reconsiders film director Ernst Lubitsch’s transition to sound and argues, against the prevailing understanding that his sound films represent a continuation of his silent film style, that he cultivated two distinct ways of handling word–image interactions. Lubitsch, a director sworn to limiting his use of intertitles in his silent films, adhered to a visual logic that to a great extent reflects the narrative constraints of silent film style, in that his sophisticated comedies show causal structures motivated and constrained by vision. These narrative constraints, however, opened up considerably in his sound films, particularly in one of the director’s lesser-examined films, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931).
Beyond its relative obscurity, the film is an apt object of study for its unique thematic reaction to the intro-duction of sound. Its self-conscious response to sound technique and its ludic exchanges between word and image emphasize the new narrative and organizational configurations of Lubitsch’s sound films in particular and sound cinema more generally.
Résumé
Cet article s’appuie sur des theories d’intermédialité pour examiner à nouveaux frais le passage du muet au parlant dans l’oeuvre d’Ernst Lubitsch. Contre l’idée généralement reçue que la production sonore du réali-sateur ne fait que prolonger ses films muets, on défend l’idée que Lubitsch a utilisé deux types d’interaction texte-image bien distincts. Le réalisateur, qui avait toujours essayé de limiter l’usage d’intertitres dans ses films muets, adhérait à une logique visuelle reflétant dans une très large mesure les contraintes narratives du style muet, comme on le voit dans ses comédies sophistiquées dont les structures causales sont motivées et déterminées par la vision. Ces contraintes s’assouplissent considérablement au moment du parlant, notam-ment dans un des films les moins analysés du réalisateur, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931). En dépit d’être un film moins connu, The Smiling Lieutenant est un bon objet d’analyse. Le film exhibe une réaction consciente et avertie à l’introduction du son et ses échanges ludiques entre texte et image mettent en valeur les nouvelles configurations narratives et structurelles des films parlants de Lubitsch en particulier et du cinéma parlant en général.
Keywords
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Late in his life Ernst Lubitsch wrote would-be biographer Herman G. Weinberg a personal summary of his career in which he explained his silent film approach by saying,
In my silent period in Germany as well as in America I tried to use less and less subtitles. It was my aim to tell the story through pictorial nuances and the facial expressions on my actors. There were very often long scenes in which people were talking without being interrupted by subtitles. The lip movement was used as a kind of pantomime. Not that I wanted the audience to become lip readers, but I tried to time the speech in such a way that the audience could listen with their eyes. (Quoted in Weinberg 1968, 266)
Years later Kristin Thompson would echo Lubitsch: “We think of knowing glances and meaningful gestures as being central to the ‘Lubitsch Touch,’ which conveys narrative information visually rather than through nume-rous intertitles” (2001, 390). Each of these statements means to commend Lubitsch’s avoidance of intertitles, to show his mastery of visual techniques, but together they underline a curious constraint in the director’s silent film style.
Rather than speaking of the image as a self-sufficient source of meaning, each casts the discussion in terms of what the image lacks. Their praise poses the effort to eliminate intertitles in terms of reducing paratextual encroachment on the diegetic world, correspondingly emphasizing the need for the image to speak the omitted words. Although each addresses Lubitsch’s silent films retrospectively, and as such cannot fail to implicate them in their lack of sound, the choices of phrasing are no less instructive: a master of silent technique would mobilize the image to speak.
For this reason and others, Lubitsch’s career across silent and sound cinema offers a particularly useful frame for analyzing word–image interactions in film. As Kamilla Elliott notes, addressing words at all in cinema has been a difficult task because of the propensity “to treat films as though they had no words” (2004, 3). Lubitsch’s sworn resistance to verbal narration in his silent films is only a perspicuous example of this tendency; a prevalence of critics from the silent era to the present day has upheld the view both tacitly, in admiring visual direction, and openly, in denigrated words as uncinematic.1
Whereas Lubitsch’s considerable achievements in silent film style have been predominately laudatory, my aim in this paper is to assess them so to say “negatively” for their conspicuous aversion to words, a reversal of emphasis for the point of analysis rather than evaluation.2
The goal is to consider the stylization of Lubitsch’s silent comedies and in this sense to
1 Raving about visual style and panning the use of intertitles was a common refrain among commentators of silent cinema. For Hugo Münsterberg, cinema had at its disposal all the dramatic techniques for captivating audience attention as enjoyed by the theater, with the exception of the spoken word; however, any attempt to convey this missing voice, whether through “ ‘leaders’ between the pictures” or within the image itself on newspapers or letters, was “extraneous to the original character of the photo-play.” Béla Balász lamented the coming of sound for closing down the possibility of a resurrected form of visual communication, the return of general human understanding of the human face and gestures. Not to be outdone, Rudolf Arnheim developed an entire aesthetic theory of the cinema founded on the limitations of its expressive materials, adding wariness of sound and color to his criticism of silent intertitles. See Münsterberg 2002, 82; Balász 2011; and Arnheim 1957, specifically “The Complete Film,” 154–160.
2 It is also worth noting that the avoidance of intertitles was an issue for not only film directors but also film scholars. Brad Chisholm was perhaps the first to make a devoted case that intertitles were a neglected area of film scholarship. Despite
Chisholm’s call to action, only a handful of studies have addressed the issue directly. See Chisholm 1987; Nagels 2012; Nebesio 1996; and regarding the experimental film tradition of the 1920s, Sitney 1979.
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consider them as a reversal of what Rudolf Arnheim diagnosed in the history of the theater:
Perhaps the point has never been made explicitly—and it seems significant that it occurs to very few theatergoers—how unnatural, how stylized, all stage art is because the actors never stop talking. Every action is overlaid and clothed with words. Even in the first outline, every scene is so planned that the plot shall be unfolded by unceasing conversation. Indeed every preponderance of mere action over the spoken word is regarded as a defect. The spoken word, the most important distinguishing trait of the drama, has developed into a medium of radical purity during the evolution of the art through thousands of years. (1957, 84)
The type of purity of verbal style cultivated in drama over the course of millennia Lubitsch refined in visual style, through the avoidance of intertitles, within the first decade of feature filmmaking. Yet what makes Lubitsch such an appropriate focal point for considering words and images in film has as much to do with his mastery of sound techniques. As Thompson (2005, 12) notes, Lubitsch’s career provides an appropriate focal point for understanding the transformations of Hollywood style and practice because of his successive mastery of different techniques. While Thompson looks at his mastery of two national styles in the mutual influences of American and German cinemas, I call attention to his mastery of silent and sound film aesthetics to exa-mine the altered narrative potentialities of his sound films. For just as classics of his German period, such as
Madame DuBarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920), find counterparts in his mastery of the Hollywood style,
silent masterpieces such as The Marriage Circle (1924) and Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) find counterparts in sound-era standouts such as Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Ninotchka (1939).
Analysis of the relationship between words and images in cinema has largely been the province of intermediality and film adaptation.3
Yet I would like to make the case that intermediality offers something more than a framework for understanding the cross-influences between cinema and other media. The same lens as that directed at the relationships between films, novels, and stage plays offers a number of critical insights through which to recast the history of cinema itself. Drawing on André Gaudreault and Phillippe Marion’s (2004) insight that the intrinsic configuration of a medium determines its “informing and deforming constraints” (58) on narrative expression, to the point that the medium “becomes itself a material for fiction” (60), I argue that the advent of sound opens cinema to new material configurations different enough to be amenable to intermedial analysis. In addressing the subject of intermediality, however, I do not intend to make the case that sound cinema represents an ontologically separate medium from its silent counterpart; rather, as a technical and formal shift, the coming of sound functions in ways analogous to intermedial adaptation. If the intrinsic configuration of a given medium determines its constraints on expression, and if words and images comprise two ontologically opposed language elements in cinema, then reliance on one or the other necessarily results in a unique form of cinematic expression.4
3 The study of film adaptation is obviously broad, but some relevant examples to the present discussion are Ellis 1982, Stam and Raengo 2004, McFarlane 1996, and Leitch 2003. Leitch argues provocatively that “there is no such thing as contemporary adapta-tion theory” (149).
4 For more on the ontological difference between words and images, see Elliott, “Novels, Films, and the Word/Image Wars,” 1–22; W. J. T. Mitchell, “Image and Word,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 42–46; and Roland Barthes, “Text and Image,” in Image–Music–Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 25–27.
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With the advent of sound as the point of departure, I point a critical lens both forward, as Lubitsch adapts his aesthetics, form, and narrative to the possibilities of sound, and backward at his silent period to provide a point of comparison for the alterations at work. In terms of his silent films, I address how Lubitsch, in eliminating intertitles, adhered to a visual logic that to a great extent constrained the possibilities of his silent film style and consider how his sophisticated comedies show causal structures motivated and limited by vision. By framing the investigation of his silent films in terms of sound, the focus will take on a sort of inverted determinism in which his sophisticated comedies react to the absence of sound. In this sense, the analysis extends Mary Ann Doane’s insight that, in silent cinema, in lieu of synchronous sound, “the absent voice reemerges in gestures and contortions of the face—it is spread over the body of the actor” (1980, 33). But beyond erupting within the mise-en-scène, in acting, the absent voice in Lubitsch’s style reemerges also in elaborate structures of vision embodied by the film camera, that is, in cinematography, in a sort of ghost-ventriloquism where the absent voice continues to move the image through methods of narrative causality.5 Then, I turn to one of the director’s
lesser-examined sound films, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), which presents a unique thematic reaction to the introduction of sound. Importantly, to use Michel Chion’s provocative phrasing, Lubitsch sought in such early sound films to avoid the voice being “swallowed up” by the fiction and “triaged” by the image (1999, 3). His effort was to make the voice and the image coequal partners that, as I will attempt to show, could engage in a romance mirroring the one enjoyed by the film’s protagonists.6
Lubitsch’s Silent Period: Comedies of Re-Vision
After being lured from Germany by the prospect of working with Mary Pickford only to have the collaboration dissolve after only one film, Rosita (1922), Lubitsch signed a contract with Warner Brothers in 1923 to direct a series of sophisticated comedies featuring the director’s famed European sensibility and light “touch” with matters of sexuality. The genre of the sophisticated comedy served as an ideal artistic forum for a director devoted to cutting down on intertitles. Centering on the misunderstandings and suspicions of married life, these witty, often risqué comedies tended to feature narrative conflict arising from the juxtaposition of objective and subjective camera views that transmitted character and plot information visually and thus limited the need for explanatory intertitles.
The forceful absence of words in Lubitsch’s silent comedies is especially apparent in his direction of the adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), where he attempted to translate Oscar Wilde’s verbal wit to visual aesthetics. Surprisingly, while the film had little actual dialogue from the play, critics widely hailed it as a great success of silent cinema. Much of the reason it was so well received was that, in its reliance on visual aesthetics, the film in no way attempted to reproduce Wilde’s witty dialogues and as such avoided comparison to the theater. Though, as David Davidson points out, the transformation to visual means of storytelling changed the focus of the play: “without Wildean dialogue to divert the spectator, the underlying seriousness of Lady Windermere’s Fan could rise to melodramatic prominence” (1983, 122). Davidson sees this as one of the film’s great merits, but his observation suggests also that Wilde’s epigrammatic wit gives way
5 Here, I invoke Rick Altman’s (1980) understanding of moving lips as cinema’s form of ventriloquism.
6 Shifting his style in this way, Lubitsch was able to evade the oft-leveled plaint that early sound films fell into slavish devotion to theatrical performance, perhaps expressed nowhere more forcefully than in Truffaut (1976). The term “canned theater” is intro-duced in parts one and two of Bazin’s (1967) essay “Theater and Cinema,” 76–124. The term first appears on page 94.
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to the play’s “underlying seriousness” because the material of expression has changed from word to image. In deploying cinematic possibilities unavailable to the theater, such as insert shots and subjective viewpoints, the film demonstrates that changing the materials of expression has tremendous implications for narrative tone.7
Even more prominently than changes to narrative tone, Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies assemble causal structures uniquely inflected by vision. As Sabine Hake points out, “interpretation in the sophisticated comedy takes place by means of an elaborate point-of-view structure” (1992, 140). In films such as The Marriage Circle (1924), Kiss Me Again (1925), and So This Is Paris (1926), visual information comes out in the desirous looks and suspicious glances of the characters, which serve to structure cause-and-effect relationships throughout the plot and typically set the rule from the outset. Hake demonstrates, in this regard, that the initial disruption in Lubitsch’s comedies is routinely an act of a visual misreading (1992, 140). For instance, in The Marriage
Circle, a comedy that parallels two marriages (one supposed to be ideal and the other signaled from the
beginning as being more tempestuous), the initial disruption involves a visual cue. When Professor Joseph Stock (Adolphe Menjou) witnesses his wife get into a taxi with another man, he uses this visual information as grounds to hire a private detective to produce further evidence for a divorce. Here, the image functions as the primary means of narration because character information emerges in the conflicting information of subjective and objective camera views. When Stock’s wife, Mizzi (Marie Prevost), does nothing especially incriminating in the car, the viewer must reinterpret the gaze as a misunderstanding. The viewer’s privileged knowledge comes into conflict with Professor Stock’s initial suspicion of his wife’s infidelity, and the differences in visual interpretation set up the narrative conflict for the private detective’s ensuing investigation. In this way, visual misreading in The Marriage Circle not only structures the plot but also takes on actual presence and causal agency in the private detective’s role as the “eyes” of both Professor Stock and the viewer.
Similar point-of-view structures can be found in Lady Windermere’s Fan and So This Is Paris. In the same way that The Marriage Circle sets out narrative conflict in terms of visual misreadings, So This Is Paris uses two apartment buildings opposite each other on a Paris street to set up the visual desires and suspicions of two couples. The windows of the two couples’ apartments become frames for a series of misreadings that bring about a chain of attractions between opposite partners. The plot of So This Is Paris progresses by means of the spatial conflicts set out in the distance between characters, in which the street acts as the line of ransgression between marriage and infidelity.8
Similarly, the famous ascot racetrack scene in Lady Windermere’s Fan uses a series of binocular shots to visually establish Mrs. Erlynne’s (Irene Rich) isolation from the rest of “respectable” society. As he does throughout the adaptation, Lubitsch tailors the scene in a way that captures Wilde’s wit visually and thereby conceals the limitations of the silent image. In each of these films, performance and visual deception structure the relationships between characters (and the viewer’s interpretation of said relationships) in a way that limits not only the use of intertitles but also the need for them. That is, the narrative subject lends itself to the given material of expression in a way that allows for clarity of visual information while also dissimulating the constraints of visual narration.
The list of examples could certainly go on, but speaking of Lubitsch’s adept use of the image runs the risk
7 For an extensive comparison between Lubitsch’s film and Wilde’s play, as well as of the general unity of stage and screen, see Musser (2004).
8 For more, see Hake (1992, 147–157), who offers a thorough textual analysis of So This Is Paris’s “tyranny of vision” from a feminist perspective.
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of becoming excessively obvious. Lubitsch is not only famous for his visual flourishes but also widely praised for them, as evidenced by their centrality to the “Lubitsch Touch.”9
Nevertheless, the praise for such visual techniques can conceal the ways in which Lubitsch’s reliance on a visual style constrains narrative form in his sophisticated comedies. In adhering to a visual logic, Lubitsch not only eschews the witty repartee of Lady
Windermere’s Fan but also neglects the interaction between words and images throughout his work in the
genre.
Lubitsch largely relegates words and images to specific, limited roles. In the same way that his images become locked into point-of-view structures, his intertitles come to perform a secondary function of conveying information that the images cannot. Rather than using words and images to form exchanges or relays of meaning, Lubitsch uses intertitles in ways that only loosely connect with the overall visual logic of the scene. (For contrast, consider Sergei Eisenstein’s effort to use intertitles in dynamic montages.) Intertitles instead function as setup to a scene that will then proceed by pictorial means or as explanatory cards used to supplement a message that the image cannot express alone. It is not that words and images never enter exchanges of meaning but that they are constrained in their interactions by specialized roles that work upon the other’s limitations.
Part of Lubitsch’s avoidance of intertitles can be connected to this separateness of word and image because, in its secondary role, the intertitle speaks with heightened and exaggerated purpose. An example from the ascot racetrack scene in Lady Windermere’s Fan is illustrative. As mentioned earlier, the scene consists of a series of point-of-view shots framed within several sets of binoculars gazing down upon Mrs. Erlynne. The owner of one of the looks, an elegantly uptight woman sitting with several other elegantly uptight women, remarks: “I wonder where she [Mrs. Erlynne] gets all her money?” The suffused black screen of the intertitle forcefully breaks the subtlety of the preceding glances and announces itself as a glimpse into the minds of the onlookers. The phrase comes to ring with all the suspicion and foreshadowing of the imminent revelation (which the viewer already knows) that the money comes from the pocketbook of Lord Windermere, and louder still with the resultant anticipation that someone might reveal to Lady Windermere that Mrs. Erlynne is in fact the mother whom she has long adored only in memory. The questions posed by the intertitle hover within each of the preceding binocular shots, but the card itself conjures them in a way that screams the separation between visual images and written words. The visual logic of Lubitsch’s adaptation makes intertitles seem superfluous, like add-ons to a rightfully image-based narrative.
Although some directors attempted to use intertitles as partial statements in relay with images to form hybrid messages, or played with rhythm and repetition to integrate them into a scene, as Murnau does in Sunrise (1927), Lubitsch largely forgoes such an approach. An exception to the rule, however, can be seen in the sequence in Lady Windermere’s Fan wherein Lord Augustus Lorton “familiarizes” himself with the doorbell to Mrs. Erlynne’s apartment. The scene begins with an intertitle that guides the reading of the proceeding images: “A gentleman’s relation to a lady is indicated by the manner in which he rings her doorbell.” Through this explanatory lens the hesitant finger retreating from the doorbell and the nervous buttoning of a coat come to form a metaphor that the image cannot speak alone. Indeed, the scene’s comedy emerges in this privileged look, a secret and knowing glance at one man’s awkwardness and indecision. Far from entering into a complex
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exchange with the image, however, this use of an intertitle works more like a caption for interpreting actions in the image. Word and image retain their relative autonomy and the scene becomes something like a self-enclosed vignette that could stand independently from the rest of the film. Of course, such use of intertitles is not uncommon in the sophisticated comedy. Explanatory inserts, however, are not necessary in the genre’s point-of-view schemes and typically appear at the outset of a film or, as evidenced by the scene’s curious (though charming) autonomy, in scenes not structured by subjective camera views.
In sum, while the visual conventions prevalent in Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies do not make up the entirety of his work, the points at which he uses them most effectively reveal a set of limitations inherent in visual storytelling. His use of the silent image can be seen as a response to what he regarded as an overreliance on the written word in other Hollywood films. Inversely to the limitations of visual narration, Lubitsch recognized that the excessive use of intertitles changed the narrative capacities of cinematic form by not making use of the possibilities of the image. He argues in The Truth About Movies:
A photoplay today is often nothing else than the narration of a story told in subtitles and interrupting a series of motion pictures. In some cases, this goes so far that not only the telling of the plot but also the characterization is done almost totally by means of subtitles and the motion pictures serve merely as illustrations. (As quoted in the commentary of The Marriage Circle 2000)
Although critics widely commend Lubitsch for his expert use of the image, it is precisely what he is lauded for that obscures the limitations of his own style. Perhaps it is so obvious that it goes without saying: Lubitsch’s silent films, in their strict reliance on visual means of storytelling, tell visual stories. They are structured in vision. More than being a commendable aesthetic choice, however, the adherence to visual means of expres-sion functions also as a material constraint. It was only with the introduction of sound that Lubitsch found a new terrain for exploring the possible interactions of word and image. Sound cinema no longer necessitated separate roles for the two, and very early on Lubitsch’s work showed experimentation with the new material possibilities.
Lubitsch’s Sound Period: Speech and The Smiling Lieutenant
Lubitsch began his work in sound with a series of musicals in what Rick Altman (1987, 126) identifies as the “fairy tale” subset of the genre. It would not be until 1932 with his work on Trouble in Paradise that he would direct his first sound comedy. Unlike other Austrian-German émigrés, such as F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, whose works pushed the boundaries of visual style, Lubitsch experimented with the conventions of popular genres, a choice that no doubt played a role in his “curious immunity” (Sarris 1972, 55) throughout the 1930s to the decline in reputation experienced by such directors as King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, and René Clair.
Accounts of his early musicals—The Love Parade (1929), Monte Carlo (1930), and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)—fall on either side of the line dividing image-bound and sound-focused approaches to film criticism. Yet despite their diverging points of emphasis, the two approaches generally privilege the image as a point of analysis. Image-focused histories, such as David Bordwell’s (1985) account of the classicism of Hollywood
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cinema, tend to see sound as an add-on to an already established system of production, either supplementing or debasing the aesthetics of silent cinema. Similarly, accounts that stress sound technique typically do so in terms of synchronous music and sound effects, privileging their use in sequences that exhibit remarkable imagery. Accordingly, in Lubitsch’s early work with sound, the “touch” comes to refer almost exclusively to what Arthur Knight sees as the director’s success in “liberating” the camera from the constraints of early sound technology (1985, 213). In this view, we see Lubitsch return to the hallowed aesthetics of silent film, in the face of its adversary (sound), through his mastery of postsynchronization. Although Knight lauds Lubitsch’s sound technique in his early musicals, his praise says less about the use of sound than it does about the image not being constrained by the limitations of the new technology.
As early as his first musical, The Love Parade, Lubitsch’s works show efforts to exploit the new possibilities of sound by privileging aural cues and effacing the image. In a notable scene that offers an inversion of his silent technique by using dialogue as the primary means of expression, we see an ensemble of maids and servants overlooking a dinner party that is obscured from view. It is only through their interpretation that we receive information about the blossoming romance taking place in the other room between the film’s leads. This use of aural cues in exchange for visual information is common in Lubitsch’s early sound films and culminates in the masterful clock sequence in Trouble In Paradise in which the image of a clock’s revolving hands relays with offscreen speech to form a metaphor for the film’s themes of love and deception. Still, this is only one of the novel and self-reflexive uses of sound in Lubitsch’s early work.
With The Smiling Lieutenant we see a self-conscious reaction to synchronous sound as a new material of cinematic expression. Unlike The Love Parade and Monte Carlo, which were originally intended to be silent pictures, The Smiling Lieutenant was scripted for sound throughout its adaptation from Oscar Straus’s 1907 operetta Ein Walzertraum (A Waltz Dream). As with Lubitsch’s previous musicals, the film periodically privileges aural information at the expense of the image. Yet in being tailored for sound throughout its scripting, it offers something more in its reaction to the new possibilities that sound opened for structuring film narratives.
Just as intertitles inform and deform narrative causality in Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies, synchronous sound in The Smiling Lieutenant affects individual utterances in a way that also transforms the film’s causal structure and narrative theme. Whereas his silent films establish separate roles for words and images, constraining narrative to a visual logic, The Smiling Lieutenant uses the two in ways that complement each other. The film makes strong use of presenting information through the relay of word and image, and in doing so liberates narrative structure from the confines of visual storytelling. These relays not only function at the level of the scene but also play a key role in the development of the film’s theme, which reflexively addresses the use of sound.
The Smiling Lieutenant’s use of relay between word and image addresses the implications of sound by
making a spectacle of the expressive capacities of the new technology. This use of spectacle comes to play a prominent role in the film’s love triangle in which the assets of silent and sound means of storytelling are set against each other in the defining character traits of Niki’s (Maurice Chevalier) two love interests. The Lieutenant’s initial attraction to Franzi (Claudette Colbert) is grounded in the charm of her musical performances and comments on the tonality of the human voice in film. Franzi is a violinist at a local beer
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garden whose role in the film is set as nearly antithetical to verbal language, preferring the expressiveness (and sexiness) of the musical possibilities of the voice. On the other side, Princess Anna (Miriam Hopkins)— who misinterprets the film’s fateful smile and, after a series of messy apologies from Lieutenant Niki, arranges to marry him—represents the dreary flatness of the written word. In this way, the conflicting character traits of Franzi and Princess Anna work not only at characterization but also at commenting on the new expressive capacities of sound technology.
The Smiling Lieutenant sets up the values of its love triangle and telegraphs its experimentation with
sound from the outset of the film. The opening scene’s interactions between sound and image prefigure sound technique in relation to the major narrative conflict involving Lieutenant Niki’s choice between Franzi and Princess Anna. The scene is handled almost like a silent segment, using only nondiegetic music and written signs to stand in for title cards. Quickly, silent technique gives way to a series of musical flourishes that signal the film’s playful approach to sound design. A man on official business ascends a wide staircase with the deep staccato of an oboe synchronized to his plodding footfalls. When he reaches the top, the scene privileges visual narration once again by explaining the purpose of his visit on an official record: he has come to summon Lieutenant Nikolaus von Preyn. He knocks a dull and routine knock on the door to the lieutenant’s apartment, and when no one answers he prepares to leave. As he descends the stairs his motif resumes cadence only to ascend and quicken as its object of reference suddenly changes to a stylish young woman springing upward. When the man exits frame and the woman reaches the top of the stairs, her knock on the door parallels the earlier knock: b-d-rum-bum-bum, b-d-rum-bum-bum, b-d-rum, b-d-rum, b-d-rum-bum-bum. This stylized knock speaks back to the regularlized intervals of the officer’s and presages the stylized use of sound in relation to the film’s love triangle. Narratively, the woman’s knock sends a clue as to the cleverness and charm of the protagonist (escaping his duties to womanize). It also sets up his desire and taste for women in terms of sound: he shies away from the drab formality of the written word (as referenced by the officer’s record) and prefers the vitality and style of music.
After a sequence of visual “touches” turns a dimming lamp into an innuendo of the lieutenant’s night with his guest, the film gives us the first glimpse of our protagonist. To this point, all information about the lieutenant has been indirect, speaking about him, but never with his presence. When we first see Niki, he stretches and yawns after his long night. A personal assistant enters the room, but just as he does the doorbell rings. When the assistant returns after attending to the door, he explains that the call is for the lieutenant. To this, Niki mumbles some incoherent speech that the servant responds to with energy and excitement. The moment plays on the unintelligibilty of characters mouthing words in silent film. However, it does not have the same function as deliberately unintelligible speech as used by, say, Francis Ford Coppola, because here Lubitsch favors a more performative style of acting rather than any great regard for realism. This concentration on performance rather than realism allows the film’s style to come into narrative prominence. When the assistant unexpectedly understands the wordless speech, it has no motivation within the narrative and only has significance in relation to how synchronous sound has changed the conventions of silent cinema.
The combination of the opening scene’s shifting musical motifs and unintelligible speech frames the understanding of sound as it structures Lieutenant Niki’s attraction to Franzi, the violinist. The man calling for Niki ends up being a fellow officer, Max, who insists, despite being married, that he has to meet the
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beautiful performer at the beer garden. After a postsynchronized sequence showing Franzi’s performance (with praiseworthy camera movement for such an early sound film), Max gets his opportunity to speak to her. Max is not savvy, however, to the film’s meditation on sound technique. He botches his chance by saying, “Will you permit me to tell you that I think you are the most beautiful, the most fascinating lady that I have ever met.” It is a statement that proves all too “wordy” for Franzi’s tastes, when she replies, “You are very much mistaken sir. You haven’t met me.” Where Max fails, Niki shows an adept understanding. He quickly catches up to Franzi as she is leaving and asks her about one of her choruses. He tries to sing it, fumbles a bit, and she corrects him. The mistake matters little though. He is speaking her language, and they sing it together as they walk away, leaving Max behind. As a whole, the scene comments on the nature of sound as specific from verbal language, highlighting the expressiveness of nonverbal communication and preferring music and tonality to words.
However, the attraction between Niki and Franzi proves all too extreme for the film’s theme. By shunning words altogether, Niki and Franzi make themselves vulnerable in two ways. First, their unique understanding based on tone and music emerges in another set of nonverbal cues that incite the film’s fateful misreading: gestures and facial expressions. Although this register of signs is perfectly understandable to the two lovers, it is prone to misunderstanding from outsiders. When Niki goes on duty to oversee a parade welcoming Princess Anna to his native Vienna, he cannot help but be drawn into flirtation with Franzi, who watches from a nearby window. His series of smiles and winks not only catches the eye of Franzi, but also Princess Anna, who misinterprets the final smile as an insult. In response, Anna’s father, the King of Flausenthurm, runs a newspaper headline. The headline has more than narrative importance; it also has thematic importance. It reimposes the written word on the screen, marking an irrevocable turning point for Lieutenant Niki and the film: “My daughter is no laughing matter.” In accordance with the new verbal order, the King forces Niki to rethink his gesture within the constraints of verbal language: If his intentions were honorable, then he should marry the King’s daughter. If they were dishonorable, “he has to marry her.”
The second vulnerability of nonverbal expression manifests in Princess Anna’s eventual incorporation of music and gesture into her classically verbal education and royal formality. The process is slow and requires some tutelage from Franzi, but as the film draws to an end, Anna’s synthesis of the two forms of expression catches Niki’s eye (now her unwilling husband). The Lieutenant’s long resistance to his wife’s advances dissipates when he realizes that he now has the best of both worlds.
Lieutenant Niki’s acceptance of his wife’s synthesis of verbal and nonverbal expression, in the end, mirrors the viewer’s new understanding of sound technology. As Altman points out, the fairy tale musical ends with a synthesis of a thematic dichotomy. “In the most profound way,” he explains, “the love stories of the fairy tale musical are never the courtship of a man and a woman alone, they always imply the romance of spectator and image as well” (1987, 153). In the case of The Smiling Lieutenant this could be adapted to express the armistice of silent and sound techniques, in which synchronous sound weds the written word to the image. Unlike Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedies, which set out separate roles for the two, The Smiling Lieutenant makes them co-reliant. The romance between spectator and film becomes a wedding not only with the image but also with the complex exchange between word and image.
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Kyle Stine currently teaches film history at the Maryland Institute College of Art and English at Stevenson
University, and has recently held postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation in Washington, DC, and Media@McGill at McGill University in Montreal.
