Recording on Film, Transmitting by Signals: The Intermediate Film System and Television's Hybridity in the Interwar Period

Abstract

In 1928, Telefunken (a major German telecommunications cor poration) prepared two technological novelties for the visitors to its exhibition booth at the Funkausstellung, the annual radio fair held in Berlin. Materializing “the future” of the radio industry, the two exhibits promised new ways of seeing and hearing “at a distance.” 1 The “television Karolus” (named after its inventor, August Karolus, who had developed the apparatus in collabora tion with the corporation’s laboratories) was praised as “the ultimate stage in the development of picture telegraphy.” 2 Its transmitter allowed the broadcasting of slides and film excerpts via wire over a short distance. On the receivers’ end, the visitors saw a screen eight-by-eight centimeters in size, as well as a pro jector that could enlarge the televisual image up to seventy-five square centimeters. 3 “This is how pictures can be made accessi ble to a certain number of persons at a time,” a German scientific journalist wrote for the British journal Television . 4 In the imme diate vicinity of this technological attraction, a second experi mental machine was exhibited: the Gleichlaufkino (synchronized cinema). This invention added a visual element to radio broad casting by allowing its users “to show the same movie simultane ously in any number of places and in exact synchronicity with the acoustic component.” 5 Standing in front of a microphone and a cinema screen, a lecturer provided a live commentary on the projected silent film. His speech was transmitted wirelessly to the affiliated movie theaters showing the same picture. The two devices’ spatial contiguity within Telefunken’s exhi bition halls reflected their common origins in the scientific and industrial laboratories of their parent corporation and demon strated their conceptual proximity. Both machines were hybrid and heterogeneous artifacts whose media identity was not char acterized by specificity but by conceptual “impurity” and tech