FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

122 Transition and Transformation
played. Add to these box office assets the fact that now they can hear her speak for
the first time and what you’ve got is a picture to sell the public that’s sure to get the
big business. 7
When the film finally opened, the reactions were varying; where a trade magazine
like Film Daily was positive, many other critics complained about her accent.
As Crafton concludes: “Of course, it did not help the film that, by mid-
1929, part-talking sound tracks were passé. In the final tally, Goldwyn lost
$200,000, Banky’s career was nearly over, and Goldwyn, the story goes, tried to
deduct $50 from her $5000-a-week salary to pay for the voice lessons.” 8 Her
double role in A Lady to Love and Die Sehnsucht Jeder Frau was actually to
become Banky’s last part in Hollywood.
The case of Banky – and not least Goldwyn’s hesitation – serves to highlight
the continuously shifting landscape of Hollywood production at the turn of the
decade, where the rapidly improving technologies led to constant changes in
production policies; orientation, indeed, was difficult, and it was even harder to
predict the developments to come. Anna Sofia Rossholm, in her dissertation on
early European sound film, states that the question of “whether conversion to
sound is marked by continuity or disruption” has been subject to intense debates;
I would agree with her conclusion that “the early years of sound film
was both a period of uncertainty, experimentation and cultural diversity, and a
period of homogenisation and standardisation which reinforced the ‘universal’
model of story telling”. 9
The utopia of universalism, in Rossholm’s words “a matter of film politics
and film culture, hinged on the historical processes of cultural differentiation”,
which here seems to be “deconstructing itself from inside, depicts both sides of
the myth of the Tower of Babel, the utopia of a perfect language and the barriers
and obstacles preventing perfect communication”. 10 During the early years of
sound, interestingly enough, universalism was also often equalled to Americanism,
as Miriam Hansen has shown in her analysis of discourses on Hollywood
cinema, which were linked to ideas of universal values of democracy and the
American dream. 11
The making of multi-language versions remains on the side of diversity; here,
concrete dialects, accents and sociolects in different spoken languages enter the
public sphere through sound recording, but the concept of the film as a unified
work with a potential for universalism is also challenged. Through extensive
use of accents, early sound film also exploited speech as a signifier of social or
regional identities, thus expressing both linguistic and cultural differentiation.
That the question was first and foremost linguistic becomes clear in the case
of A Lady to Love as the two film versions actually remain very similar to one
another, apart from the casting of different actors in several roles as previously
mentioned. There are a few minor changes in camera angles. However, the