1930'ernes danske filmkomedie i et lyd-, medie- og genreperspektiv ...

Danish Film Comedies of the Thirties in a Sound-, Media-, and Genre
perspective By Niels Henrik Hartvigson
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The dissertation aims to give a comprehensive aesthetic portrait of the Danish film
comedies of the thirties by taking into account three central factors: sound, media
convergence and genre.
The dissertation is structured in two parts. The first deals with the films’ sound
characteristics and how sound comedies convergence with other media; the second
part deals with the thirties’ comedies, their motives and characters in perspective of a
comedy aesthetics of fracture and elasticity.
A modified version of Rick Altman’s crisis historiography serves as the
methodological basis of the dissertation. Crisis historiography, which is designed to
analyze media in phases of development and transition, argues that these media tend
to define themselves broadly and to a large degree in convergence with other media.
In the course of five chapters dealing with music, voices, language, sounds, and
musical numbers, the films’ salient sound features are analysed along with their
linkages with the visual features of the films.
The conclusion of the first part presents the following terms as salient of the films’
general sound focus: breadth of sound, synchronization of sound and source, lyricism,
contact, physicality and performance.
Also presented as salient is a prevalent convergence with a broad range of media. The
most important media convergent with films are different kinds of musical and
performance theatre. Also, the aesthetics and other characteristics of the radio,
telephone, record player, and wireless telegraph are shown to be a direct inspiration
upon sound film comedy.
The comedy aesthetics of fracture and elasticity are the main theoretical terms of the
genre part. These are developed on the basis of the writings of Ole Thomsen, Jens
Kruuse and L.J. Potts, who represent a non-media specific understanding of comedy.
In the main analytical section it is demonstrated though analyses of seven films, how
the films’ elements are staged differently in terms of the aesthetics of fracture and
elasticity. More specifically it is shown how comedy’s aesthetics are put in to play
through an art of quotation and through the development of a fictive irony through
references to reality and fiction.
In the chapter about motives it is shown how the couple, a happy ending, a coming
together of classes and stage/fiction are employed in accordance with comedy’s
aesthetics of fracture and elasticity.
The same point is made regarding the four comedy prototypes, which the dissertation
has developed as the main descriptive categories for the thirties’ film: The classicistic
character, the physical character, the star character and the collage character.
The dissertation concludes that it is possible to give a comprehensive aesthetic
description of the Danish sound film comedies of the 1930s by analysing the films
according to sound, media and genre.
Finally, it is proposed that the dominance of the sound comedies in this decade should
be explained through the films’ aesthetic breadth, and that comedy functioned as a
testing ground for the identity of sound film as such.
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