Social Science Research Council

"Radio, Realism and the Hörfilm, 1923-1933"

My project is a study of the German Hörfilm (radio-film) between the years 1923 and 1933. It will combine traditional close reading of works from this genre of radio art with analysis of contemporary radio journals and theoretical writings. Along with concepts and methods developed in the neighboring discipline of documentary film history, it will use contemporary media theory to understand the significance of this improperly understood phenomenon in the history of the radio. I hope it will ultimately contribute to the comparative history of realism, where “realism” is understood to mean not only an aesthetic style, but also the codes, conventions and notions of “actuality,” “veracity” and “reality,” specific to any medium at a given historical moment. In achieving both of these goals, it will further historically-informed comprehension of what is still the world’s most popular medium, and perhaps its least understood.

Narrowly defined, the Hörfilm is a genre of 1920s and 1930s German radio literature, standing apart from the Hörspiel, or radio-play, which largely based itself on theatrical traditions. Consciously modeling itself on the more dynamic narratives of cinema, making use of actual locations, montage, real sound and music, the Hörfilm took its inspiration, its forms and, in some cases, its technology, from the slightly older medium of film. However, the relationship of radio and cinema in contemporary debates about radio is just as significant as the actual works produced. In these vigorous theoretical debates, the Hörfilm appears as a concept, but just as frequently as a rather fantastical notion, a way of imagining and discussing what it was that this new medium, as well as the old new medium of cinema, could and should do. In other words, it had a theory as well as a practice. Both of these, and their interrelationship, will be analyzed in my research.