Silent movies - The Great Train Robbery

Today I have another short for you. When I started this project, I found a list of recommended silent films. This one was on it and we didn't have a Western yet.
So let's enter the world of the Western movie with "The Great Train Robbery". Kind of, but I'll get to that.

In the early 1900s when movies were still a novelty and mostly had been short glimpses into ordinary life - who could forget the train entering the station or workers leaving a factory, gripping stuff! (I'm not making fun of it, at the time it really was) - a movie 12 minutes long (although the versions on YouTube have different lengths, maybe a matter of speed?) and with a plot was really pretty incredible.

First comes the plot (with spoilers).
The title is a bit of a giveaway.
Two masked men enter a railroad telegraph office and force the operator to stop the train and to order the engineer to take water at this station before knocking him out and tying him up.
The band is hiding behind the water tank and then sneaks onto the train. Two of the bandits enter the express car where the messenger checks the mail. He gets killed and the robbers open the locked treasure box with dynamite.
Meanwhile, the other bandits head to the locomotive. In a fight on the tender, the fireman gets killed and thrown off the train. The engineer is forced to disconnect the locomotive.
The bandits make the passengers leave the coaches and take their valuables. One passenger who tries to escape is shot.
Afterwards, the band escapes in the locomotive. After a few miles they leave the train and go for their horses they had tied to some trees nearby.
The scene cuts back to the telegraph office where the operator is trying to telegraph for help before fainting again. His daughter enters, cuts the ropes, and wakes him up throwing some water at his face.
Next we see people dancing in a dance hall when the operator comes in to tell what has happened. The men get their guns and pursue the bandits.
When they find them, one of the bandits is shot, the other three escape. Feeling safe, they go through the mail bags, but the posse sneak up on them without horses. A fight takes place which costs the lives of the bandits and some of the posse.
The leader of the outlaws takes aim and fires point blank at the audience.

You think I added the picture a second time by mistake? No.
From the Edison Film Catalogue 1904:
"This section of the scene can be used either to
begin the subject or to end it, as the operator may choose."
I don't know how scared some of the viewers might have
been, but I believe it was a cool effect.

For a 12 minute short, this sure has quite the death toll (I think not even Midsomer Murders could keep up with that).
Now why did I say that this is "kind of" a Western?
To us it looks like one, we have horses, cowboys, the setting is right. To people back then, this could well be their ordinary surroundings, though, and the film could have been taken right out of the paper.
Train robberies "emerged shortly after the Civil War" and "became obsolete by the 1930s". The death toll among both robbers and passengers could be high especially if crew or passengers resisted, but if it worked out, the loot could be worth the try. As early robberies still often went unpunished and valuables were transported by train now rather than by stage coach, the idea of a crime you didn't need specialized skills for became quite popular in the USA.
The "Wild West" had also been shown on film before, for example footage of Annie Oakley or Buffalo Bill, but never with a plot, so you could say this kicked off the fascination with Western movies.

I also read that this was the first movie with a narrative and one blogger actually explained why for them it had more narrative than Méliès's Trip to the Moon, but I couldn't agree. Then I found a quote from a TCM article. The link didn't work anymore, but the quote says the movie "became the first influential narrative film in which the editing was imaginative and contributed to the narrative".
I could live with that.

The film used cross-cutting, that means cutting between two scenes happening simultaneously, in this case between the bandits and the posse.
While there were sets which looked like a stage, a lot of the plot takes place outside which gives the movie a more real look, and again, the plot was something people could relate to, either because they lived there or through newspaper articles.
It is a little funny to see the "clock" on the wall here, but at the same time you see a train pass by the big window. Here it's a matte shot that gives the scene reality.

Or take this scene. You don't only have the "special effect" of the explosion, but in the back you also see through the open wagon door that the train is speeding by some trees, also a matte shot.

The movie was a huge success. Imagine what it must felt like to the audience.
It was fast-paced, it showed violence and justice, and there was even a bit of comic relief when a man comes into the dance hall and the men shoot as his feet to make him dance (talk cowboy stereotype, but it seems to have actually happened). It's short, it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but we have scenes like that even today sometimes. Anything to entertain the audience.

To us, some of it seems funny today, such as the obvious dummy the bandit is throwing off the train. I didn't even mind the wire on the bat in Dracula almost 30 years later, though. Who knows, had it been a Keaton movie, they might have thrown a stuntman off.
I was impressed by the sheer amount of passengers leaving the train. I admit it made me think of a clown car for a bit, but then memories of my commute came to me and suddenly the number of passengers seemed totally normal to me.
And the theatrical acting? Loved it. If you can't scream when you're dying, you should at least be allowed to die dramatically. The more silent movies I watch, the more I'm making my peace with wringing hands and rolling eyes.

Believe it or not, this actor - Gilbert M. Anderson - is also one of the bandits
and the dancing tenderfoot in the dance hall scene,
he later became a real Western star as "Broncho Billy".

If you like Western movies, you should give this one a chance.
There are also versions in which some of the dresses or effects are hand painted, but the one I watched isn't, so I can't tell you if that enhances the experience.

This film also inspired another one by the same director, Edwin S. Porter, by the way.
You can watch "The Little Train Robbery" from 1905, which shows a gang of kids rob a miniature train for the loot of candy, here. I loved the ending. Not everyone was so happy with this short, though, because they thought it would make children become criminals!


Selected sources:

1. Fritzi Kramer: The Great Train Robbery (1903) A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, November 3, 2013
2. Jeff Arnold: The Great Train Robbery (Edison, 1903). On: Jeff Arnold's West, March 8, 2021
3. Chris Scott Edwards: The Great Train Robbery (1903). On: Silent Volume, July 12, 2009
4. The Fascinating Story of 1903's Biggest Movie. On the YouTube channel "Toni's Film Club"
5. Rick Ruddell and Scott Decker: Train Robbery: A Retrospective Look at an Obsolete Crime. In: Criminal Justice Review, 42(2017),4, pp. 333 - 348 (closed access)

Nostalgia - "Glanzbilder"

Last Saturday I wrote about the tradition of the "Poesiealbum". I mentioned "Glanzbilder" (literally "glossy pictures", in English they are called "scraps" or "die cuts") and that we had used some in a gift for a retiring colleague.
What I hadn't mentioned was that I might have bought just a little bit more than we needed, mostly because we wanted some variety and all went overboard, overcome with memories.
Let's talk about "Glanzbilder".

The history of scraps began in the 19th century. At first, they were black and white and had to be cut out by hand.
The invention of color printing in the form of chromolithography in 1837 allowed printing ephemera in high numbers, in good quality and at low cost. Among those ephemera were series of collectible pictures which came with different products for advertisement, could be collected in special albums and were also traded (which is of course still popular today although the pictures changed from being just advertisement articles to stand-alone products over time).

Around 1860, the German company Hagelberg started to print, emboss and die cut sheets with several pictures connected by small strips of paper.
In English, they are called scrap reliefs.
Until 1900, Berlin was the heartland of the scrap production, but there were also many manufacturers in other countries although they often didn't make scraps exclusively.
Scraps were used in scrapbooking, I have to admit I never knew where the name came from because it's not something I have ever done myself. In Germany, but also in other German or Dutch speaking countries, they were also used for "Poesiealben".

Subjects were often sentimental and romantic, angels, kittens, puppies, birds, flowers, butterflies, holiday themes, children, and much more.
They were colorful, embossed for more depth, and of course there were those with glitter which we loved best, but which were also more expensive.

Scraps are not self-adhesive like stickers, by the way. They had to be glued into an album.
There was also a different way, though, as I found out thanks to a post by a Swedish blogger. She shared scrap albums with sticky leaves you could put your scraps on and then protect with a plastic cover (there's a video showing that).
Scraps are still popular today, thanks to a wave of nostalgia, even if it's a bit kitschy. There are only two big companies left, one in Germany which actually only started in 1948 and markets them worldwide, one in England which also makes paper masks and vintage-inspired cards.
They may not turn up in the old-fashioned poetry album anymore, but they are still collected and used in crafts such as scrapbooking, collages, decoupage or card-making.

Interesting is also that the co-owner of the German company has gone (still goes?) to rest homes to set up small exhibitions and talk about scraps.
The stories and the visual impact are supposed to awaken memories in people and make them think about positive experiences in their lives.

I gave some of my pictures away which will probably find their way into friendship books, the successors of the poetry album, but I also kept some although I have no idea yet what I'm going to do with them.
Actually I thought about starting another poetry album, but that would mean having to send the album around as most of my friends don't live in my town and for me that sounds like too much of a hassle for them.
So I guess I'm just going to look at them every, now and then ... and remind myself that I still haven't found my Poesiealbum"! 😆

Sources (Englisch and German):

1. Die Geschichte der Glanzbilder-Produktion. On: Ernst Freihoff - Glanzbilder - Reliefs / Glanzbilder Historie (in German)
2. Scrap Reliefs Collection. On: Mamelok Papercraft3. Peter Kolakowski: Glanzbilder. On: DW (Deutsche Welle), November 19, 2009 (in German)
4. Glanzbilder - heile Welt auf Papier gebannt. In: Mindener Tageblatt, December 22, 2012 (via Wayback Machine, in German)
5. Hanna Andersson: Collectible vintage Scrap die-cuts | Glanzbilder or Bokmärken. On: Studio iHanna, July 27, 2020 (with a video)
6. Scrapbooking and the origin of scrap relief. On: Fantastik, January 11, 2024

Random Saturday - "Poesiealbum"

The other day I rummaged through my book cabinets. Where was it? I was so sure it had always been right there. Which cabinet or drawer or "safe spot" had I absent-mindedly chosen this time?
I'm talking about my "Poesiealbum", literally "poetry album".
I don't know if you have ever heard of this tradition which has been around for centuries, mostly in German and Dutch speaking regions of Europe.
Thank you to my friend (one of my sisters couldn't find her album, either, and my friend saved the other one having to look for hers) who was so kind to send me pictures of her album to illustrate this post. Of course I edited out the names and location.

The tradition started with the "Stammbuch" or "Album Amicorum" in the early 16th century in the circle of the Wittenberg reformers. Followers of Luther and his associates asked them for handwritten notes to remember their connection.

"Stammbücher" could be books, often theological ones, with added empty pages, but also loose leaves which could then be bound into a Bible.

In the beginning, this tradition was not restricted to academic circles, but to Protestant ones. When it was mainly taken over by the academic community with students collecting notes by fellow students, but also professors, it spread to other countries and also among Catholics.
For some time, it was also adopted by nobility where guest books had already been a custom.

Usually, those albums were used during times of study or travel and ended with the start of a profession. They were kept not only for sentimental reasons to remember friends from that period, but also for references that could be helpful.

While the tradition had mostly vanished in academic circles in the early 19th century, the middle class, which had started taking it over in the late 18th century, kept it alive. Now also women and children collected inscriptions by family and friends and the "Stammbuch" became the "Poesiealbum" which also meant the type of inscriptions changed and were frowned upon by "opinion leaders in matter of artistic taste" who found them too trivial.

They changed even more, however, especially after the "Poesiealbum" mostly became a thing in elementary schools.
The inscriptions could be anything from single poetry verses, quotes, advice, adminitions, religious or secular, but in my time many of the little poems - some of which turned up regularly with some classmates using the same one for everyone's album - were confirmations of everlasting friendship or they were humorous, sometimes both.

Here's an example for the first one :
I sincerely hope that you will not forget me so quickly, and I wish you something special, stay just the way you are!

I can't remember the first ones I wrote, but I got bored of the usual quotes or proverbs after a while, so instead I took poems by a German humorist, for example the one about why the lemons turned sour. From what I read, that's not something many children did.

You usually wrote on the right page and the left page got some kind of picture.
Very popular were "Glanzbilder", literally "glossy pictures" (in English "die cuts" or "scraps"), of kittens, puppies, birds, flower bouquets (sometimes in baskets), angels, even better (and more expensive) if they had glitter. You can still get these today, by the way. When we did a kind of "Poesiealbum" for a retiring colleague, I got some for the nostalgic feeling.

My godmother put a pressed flower in my album, safely covered with adhesive foil.
There were also a lot of drawings, though. Or a mix of glossy and hand drawn pictures. I used to do bad illustrations myself to go with the poems chosen by me, for example lemons with stick legs.

When I look at album pages others share, they all look so familiar to me.
We still had lessons for "Schönschrift" = "beautiful writing" in our early school years - I never got a 1, which was our best mark, no matter how hard I tried - and of course that was expected from us to apply in the albums as well.
Therefore, a lot of those pages could be right out of my own album, down to the embellishments, the dog-ears hiding "secret" little messages, the pencil lines to make sure all lines were straight (sometimes erased afterwards, sometimes not, sometimes badly) - and the typos!
Of course we wrote with fountain pens back then and every, now and then see letters erased with what was called "ink killer" for example (and which came back again after a certain time) or are crossed out.
If you had a "Poesiealbum", you had to live with all of that because you had absolutely no influence on what the others wrote, how beautifully they wrote or not or how messy it got.

I had almost forgotten about this kind of pencil "rubbings"!

My album is quite messy which isn't entirely the others' fault.
I had reserved a spot for my mother and one of the coveted glossy pictures. A classmate thought it was meant for use and glued it in. I ripped it back out which of course looked ugly, so I glued the pages together.

Those who have been following me for a while know about my difficult relationship with glue ... yes, it looked terrible and also I felt really guilty for hiding my classmate's inscription that way. Brigitte, I'm so sorry, I was only 6 and overcome by emotion when I did that.
By the way ... my mother never got around to actually write into my album although I had found a note with a draft once (I knew she didn't want to because she didn't like her own handwriting), so all of that had been for nothing.

I'm always amazed how beautiful and clean older albums look, stunning handwriting, sometimes with drawings, really pretty.

Picture via pxhere

Interesting is also that there are actually books like that in 19th century US America, probably introduced by German or Dutch immigrants.
They didn't catch on, though, and were replaced by the more popular yearbooks.

The "Poesiealbum" finally got a successor, the so-called "Freundschaftsbuch" or "Freundebuch" = "friendship book" or "friend book" which is funny because that's what the old Latin name means.
It doesn't take us back to those old times, though.
The "Freundschaftsbuch" looks like a lot like a collection of questionnaires with pre-printed categories - name, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and so on. I'm not a fan, so I'm not even going to say more about it.

Of course I still haven't given up hope that I'll find my album soon, then I will share some of it (not the glued pages!) in an extra post. As we like to say, "the houses loses nothing", it must be here somewhere!


Sources:

1. Werner Wilhelm Schnabel: Das Album Amicorum. In: Album : Organisationsform narrativer Kohärenz, ed. by Anke Kramer and Annegret Pelz. Göttingen : Wallstein Verlag, 2013, pages 213 - 285 (in German)
2. Antje Petty: "Dies schrieb Dir zur Erinnerung ..." From Album Amicorum to Autograph Book. On: Max-Kade-Institute for German-American Studies. University of Wisconsin-Madison
3. Stefanie Bock: Das Poesiealbum: Eine evangelische Erfindung. On: indeon, August 16, 2022 (in German)
4. Peg Frizzell: My Cherished Poesie Album. On: FanningSparks

Happy Birthday! or Friday the 13th

Happy Birthday to me! Or not?
This is not something I usually do, congratulate myself, I mean, but I will reach the big 60 soon and that seemed like a good occasion to make something for myself in time.
It's not a medal for making it that far ... although years ago I did make a "medal" for a colleague for her 40th work anniversary (I'm close to that one myself, ugh). Just as a joke of course, we gave her something nice, too.

No, of course I wanted something beautiful and something that was yelling my name.
There was something I had been planning for years now, but I didn't know if my fingers were up for it. Wire wrapping has become so hard for me, but I really wanted this.

I had written until here and then this happened today.

After several days with a lot of breaks - and a lot of whining - the piece was ready to be oxidized. I took it to the kitchen and then there was that sound. The lampwork shark I wanted to use with the octopus had been tangled in the tentacles - the irony because that had been the plan - without my noticing it (both my own fault) and it had fallen to the ground.

Couldn't it have fallen three steps earlier in the hallway with the PVC floor which would have given it a better chance? Well, it didn't. I glued the two pieces I could find back on as best I could, but one part is missing. Now I'm heartbroken because I can't get another shark like it.

I had been saving that shark for myself for years.
It won't get thrown away, but I don't know if I will be able to make something with it. It will definitely not work with the octopus. I don't even know if I want to finish that now and also didn't feel like taking a picture the octopus WIP or the broken shark 😭

I just needed to vent.

Silent movies - Silent Movie

My sister knows more about movies than I do, so I asked her the other day if there was a silent movie she thought I should do.
She said "Silent Movie".

Oh.
I really wouldn't have thought of that myself which is rather funny for a movie whose title is literally what I'm looking for.
Mel Brooks's parodies may not be everyone's cup of tea - I haven't seen all of them, but I definitely have my favorites (Young Frankenstein at the top) while there are others that I can live without - but silly was just what I needed now.

Here's the plot (with spoilers).

Mel Funn, who was a great director once before he took to the booze, is ready for a comeback. He and his sidekicks, Marty Eggs and Dom Bell, plan to make the first silent movie in 40 years.
When the chief of Big Picture Studios rejects the idea, Funn convinces him by saying he will get the biggest stars to sign up. This could save the studio from being taken over by the conglomerate Engulf & Devour.
Funn, Eggs, and Bell set out to recruit stars. While doing that and surprisingly succeeding, they encounter different mishaps, opportunity for a lot of slapstick including Bell's fight with a soda can launching vending machine.
To stop them from making the movie and save the studio, Engulf & Devour pay nightclub singer and dancer Vilma to seduce Funn who falls in love with her. When Eggs and Bell find out about it and tell him, he goes back to boozing with a huge bottle of liquor. Vilma, however, has refused the money because she has fallen in love with him as well, and she helps finding Funn and filling him up with coffee, so he can shoot the movie after all.
On premiere day, Engulf & Devour steal the only copy, but the friends can save it just before it can get burnt while Vilma entertains the audience. During the chase back to the theater, they defend themselves by launching soda cans at the attacking executives.
The movie is a big hit and is celebrated frenetically by the audience.

When talking about "Silent Movie", let's keep in mind that it's almost 50 years old.
Some of the jokes haven't aged well and maybe they wouldn't be included in a remake of today.

On the other hand, this is very much a Mel Brooks movie, completely with visual jokes, ba-dum-tsss jokes, potty jokes and parody of things that I may not always get, especially if they refer to the film industry of those times.
For example, I was not aware that Engulf & Devour hinted at a real-life conglomerate buying up entertainment companies at the time.

There are also some slapstick jokes that would have been funnier if they hadn't been dragged out, like the one when the three are in armor to get access to Liza Minnelli and keep falling over.
And there are scenes that bow to the old silent films and their kind of humor and are very funny, maybe more so now that I got a feeling for it.
For me, the music and sound effects were a bit much sometimes, but they worked really well in other scenes.

Of course, we can't forget the stars who are a parody of themselves in the movie, Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft, Marcel Marceau, and James Caan.

All in all, it was a fun and easy watch and I wasn't bored or tempted to stop in between.
You really need to like a bit of slapstick, though. If Mel Brooks movies are not your thing, this one will definitely not be.

I can't end this post without the biggest spoiler - the movie isn't completely silent.
There is a brilliant scene with world famous mime Marcel Marceau. While all the other stars agree to be in the movie, he's the one who declines the offer - with a loud "Non!" 😆


Sources:

1. Roger Ebert: Silent Movie. On: RogerEbert.com, January 1, 1976
2. Steve Pulaski: Silent Movie (1976) review. On: The Official Steve Pulaski Website, June 14, 2022
3. Fritzi Kramer: Silent Movie (1976) Review. On: Movies Silently, October 27, 2013
4. Alex Dueben: Review: Silent Movie. On: Alex Dueben, February 1, 2021

Enid Blyton and the "non-Blytons"

Have you ever read Enid Blyton?
Blyton was an English writer of children's books which have been wildly popular since the 30s and sold millions of copies worldwide.
A lot of German kids were fans of one or another of her series or maybe still are as grownups.
A while ago, I got a video recommendation on YouTube called "These Enid Blyton novels don't exist - but Germans are obsessed with them anyway" on the channel "Spinster's Library" (I think the title has a touch of click bait, but the video was interesting).

The comment section on that video absolutely blew up with comments by a lot of German women, but also men, about their own experiences with "Hanni und Nanni", "Die fünf Freunde", "Dolly", maybe known to you as "St Clare's", "The Famous Five", and "Malory Towers" if you ever read Blyton, but also with other series of hers and even other authors.
Then there were those who read the original series and were surprised to hear that ... I'm getting ahead of myself. The whole thing is quite confusing.

All three series mentioned can teach us a little about continuation books and also domestication and foreignization.
I had thought about writing a post just about domestication and foreignization, also because it would go quite well with my post about dubbing from a few days ago, after all translations are also a part of dubbing. There are different theories and opinions about these, though, and I don't even know if I would always choose the same one myself depending on what kind of literature it is.
So I'll make this very short, and if you are interested in more, there are some sources at the end of the post.

Domestication = translate a text in a way to make it understandable for the target audience by adapting it to their culture which can/will lead to information loss compared to the original
Foreignization = translate the text in a way that stays true to the original and the culture it comes from even if it may be difficult for the target audience to understand without further research

The books I'm going to talk about come under the header "domestication" which really isn't that surprising for the time (Blyton wrote these mostly in the 40s and 50s, in Germany they were published in the 50s and 60s).
Just as with dubbing, the question is how far can you go with a translation. How far do you want to go? And of course the eternal question - what will probably make more money ... which usually also defines who makes those decisions. Translators in the comment section of the video shared that often they don't decide about changes, but the editors/publishers do.
Of course it's always controversial, especially if the target audience are children. How much can and do you expect from young readers?

I read "Hanni und Nanni" at my friend's house and had only one of the books myself. I was somewhere between 7 and 10 years old when I read them, and I got to volume 15. Then I bought the collection 1 to 19 years later for sentimental reasons which was when I found out that Enid Blyton had actually just written six volumes of the "St Clare's" books.

Illustration for "Hanni und Nanni"
by Nikolaus Moras who illustrated other Blyton books and other
series for the German publisher Schneider-Verlag.
As you can tell, the illustrations have also been adapted to the
time of publication, not just the text!
I liked the shoes because they reminded me so much of 
one kind of the Barbie shoes at the time.

Like others in the comments, I hadn't be aware as a kid that the books were originally English - well, the first six, anyhow - and in the beginning we even happily pronounced the author's name as if it were a German one. As a child, especially in the 70s, you still accepted a lot of things without overthinking them even if some of them sounded a bit strange.
I read a lot of different books, not all of them appropriate for my age, no doubt, but then that probably didn't mean the same as today, anyway.

So maybe I wouldn't have had a problem to read all English names, to hear about Lacrosse (which only came to Germany in the 90s, I wonder if I would have found it in our encyclopedia at all) and school uniforms and would have thought it fascinating, but maybe we kids would also have got bored with something that wasn't relatable to us. Who can say?
I do remember that I did wonder more than once how other children were just allowed to go off somewhere by themselves, in a horse wagon, for example 😂
Part of me longed to do something crazy like this, but in my heart I knew I would never have had the courage - or the necessary skills!

Domestication was one point in the video, another one was that there are a lot more "Hanni and Nanni" books than there are originals.
That's not just a German thing, though. Continuation books are sequels of books or book series written by a different author after the original author's death, authorized or unauthorized. Sometimes even unfinished books were finished by someone else, authorized by the rights holder.
The English "St Clare's" series" consists of six books written by Enid Blyton and three continuation books written by Pamela Cox much later.

In Germany, the series called "Hanni and Nanni" is so popular that there are 39 books at the moment of which 1 to 4, 11, and 13 were based on the original Blyton books, 19 and 20 on two of the Cox books. So they started making up their own stories even before using all originals.
We also have audioplays (remember my post about "Die drei ???"?) and even movies!
Quite a few people mentioned the Japanese anime series from the 90s as well which brought them to the books in the first place.

Interestingly, some of the commenters who know both said they preferred the German books because the English ones were meaner.
If that has to do just with the domestication or also because the German books were published about 20 years later and adapted to that time, I can't tell you.
Anyhow, Blyton has not only been criticized for her work being rather repetitive at times, but also sexist, xenophobic or racist stereotypes, so there have been updates to her work even in English.

What I can say is that Germany didn't have as many boarding schools as the UK at the time and still doesn't as far as I know. The books sold us a kind of romantic idea of them - community, pranks, and midnight feasts - which I think was fun to read about for us, but not necessarily something we would have wanted for ourselves, at least not the girls in my circles.

Of the "Malory Towers" series, there are six books by Blyton and six continuation books, again by Cox (from the 2000s).
I never had "Dolly" books - that was what the series of 18 books was called in Germany - and read them at a different friend's house, but can't really remember anything. I guess I could only handle one boarding school setting.
Again the German publisher changed the text and names heavily, also to adapt the books to the 60s - for example, gramophones became record players. Sometimes they even left out whole chapters.
Since 2020, there's has been a BBC series which follows the original books closely. There is already a dubbed German version for at least part of the series which, believe it or not, refrains from domestication. Don't tell me we can't learn anything 😉

The last series I want to mention is "The Famous Five", in German "Die fünf Freunde" = "The five friends".
Although I tutored a boy who had the whole collection and was willing to lend them to me, I never made it through the whole series, but I have a few 60s/70s editions from fleamarkets in my own children's book collection.
Blyton had planned just a few books in that series, but it was so successful commercially that she wrote 21 volumes in the end (and a few more series following the same pattern of children solving crimes while on holiday or visiting someone - my holidays were usually quite boring compared to theirs 😂).

Eileen Alice Soper illustrated the complete original set of
the "Famous Five" books

There are continuation books for this series as well, the French translator for it wrote 24 of them of which 18 were then translated into English and German (mostly the same ones)!
The Germans also got two books called "Geisterbände" = "ghost volumes". They had been published without permission of the rights holder and had to be withdrawn from the book market. You can still get them second-hand, but they are regarded as rarities and are more expensive.
There is also a whole bunch of German continuation books which have not been translated into English, that series ended in 2014.

If you think that's it, you're wrong.
There is an English series with the famous five having grown up, 15 obviously rather short books which are more satire as you can tell from titles like "Five Go Gluten Free" or "Five Escape Brexit Island". A few of them have been translated into German.
Then there are of course the TV shows, of which I know the one from the 70s myself, and the films and the audioplays (some English ones, a lot of German ones), the musical and gamebooks, comics and ...

Illustration by Eileen Alice Soper

So yeah, I didn't quite get some of the comments (not that I read all of them). Surprise, okay, I was surprised myself when I first found out, but the outrage, no. It's probably because people on the web are outraged at everything quickly these days.

Domestication was not that big a topic back then and not just German publishers were or are guilty of it. Also they had acquired the rights, and while you may well discuss the quality of the books (original and continuation, especially long-running series), audioplays, etc. and of course domestication in general, it didn't mean the Blyton estate was ripped off even if money was quite surely the motivation.
The main point is that the continuation books still have Blyton's name on the cover, but remember the Three Investigators books were never by Alfred Hitchcock and had them as the author, just like other book series were written by a syndicate, so not even that is that unusual.
Anyhow, the controversy goes on.

What really amazed me was how many people engaged speaking about their own memories in connection with the books.
My own memory is lying on the floor in my friend's room with my feet up and reading, and then we thought about adventures we could have.
For lack of boarding schools, smugglers, secret passageways, and horse wagons, however, we just did the usual - riding our bikes, picking flowers, playing in the forest - until we had grown too old for most of the books, anyway.

I read the first St Clare's book in English for this post and there was still that whiff of nostalgia although I cringed at some of the descriptions and I'm aware Blyton was not a very nice person and mother. Actually, her life would easily fill another post that I'm not keen on writing, though.
My guess is that it's probably more nostalgia for the time itself and the memories the books conjure up and not so much the books themselves (after writing this, I found an article about just that - childhood nostalgia in regards to Blyton).

I'm sorry if you are completely confused now, but I warned you.
Had you thought the children's book market used to be simpler in the olden days? I suppose it has always been a jungle out there, and I even talked about just three of the many series Blyton churned out (she wrote so much that people thought it was impossible she did it all by herself).

By the way, guess the recommendation I got when I went to YouTube on my TV after finishing this post - the 2009 TV film "Enid" which has been uploaded around the same time I started the post draft. So creepy!


Selected sources:

On Blyton:
1. These Enid Blyton novels don't exist - but Germans are obsessed with them anyway. On the channel of Spinster's Library on YouTube 
2. Fiona ?: Blyton by others: A guide to prequels, sequels and continuations. On: World of Blyton, January 22, 2020
3. Continuation books. On: The Enid Blyton Society
4. Pranay Somayajula: My Nostalgia for Enid Blyton is Complicated: Reckoning with the racism of my favorite childhood author. On: Electric Lit. November 2, 2022
5. Rowan Morrell: Five Have Adventures Abroad. Website on Enid Blyton continuation novels
6. The Soper Collection - Eileen Alice Soper
7. Jasmin Klein: Hanni und Nanni besuchen eine Ausstellung. On: Meine Südstadt. November 13, 2015 (in German)

On domestication and foreignization:
1. Ao Sun: Domestication and Foreignization in Translation: A Theoretical Exploration. On: J&Y Translation
2. Wenfen Yang: Brief Study on Domestication and Foreignization in Translation. In: Journal of Language Teaching and Research. 1(2010), 1, pp. 77 - 80 (Open Access)
3. Jekatherina Lebedewa: Mit anderen Worten - Die vollkommene Übersetzung bleibt Utopie. In: Ruperto Carola 3(2007) (in German)
4. Anna von Rath: Writing and translating are not neutral: an interview with Kavitha Bhanot. On: poco.lit., March 15, 2023

10 on the 10th - What I really like or love

"Show us photos of things you really like or love."
That sounds like an easy enough prompt for this month's 10 on the 10th, but as I wrote in my comment to Marsha's preview post, it really seems impossible to choose just ten from my thousands of cat pictures, especially because so far there have been 12 cats I've had the honor to serve.
Not kidding, at this point I didn't even know if I was going to get to ten this time, not because there are not enough things (which I will be interpreting loosely as cats and other animals are not things, neither are people, but you know I don't show people on my blog, anyway), but because I probably don't have pictures of them all.
Also this is difficult because we already did the "Diamonds in your life" post in April and I'm bound to repeat myself. Sorry about that. I'll try to choose different pictures at least.
As usual, the order is quite random (except for the cats, they rightfully insisted to be at the top) and I could keep going if I had the pictures for it (for example movies and music are missing for lack of good pictures) or if I had thought of the other things first.

1. Cats.
I love them. I'm obsessed with them. They are beautiful and elegant (most of the time), they can be very goofy and sweet, and they can be very effective predators. Big and small. Also they have been with me through good times and hard times.
The names are in the order they came into my life.

2. Animals.
I didn't have any pets of my own as a kid, but I always had animals in my life - dogs at my friends' houses, cats, cows, and bunnies at the farm of my godmother's parents.
Then the ex and I had not only our little zoo at home once we moved in together, but also the little zoo in my hometown where we volunteered. How many people can say they have been "combed" by a coati (there was no one around to take a picture, sorry)?
This is just a very, very small selection of animals from home and the real zoo.

3. Books.
You already know this picture, but I think it expresses it best.

4. My collections.
I have already told you how I feel about my collections, but at least I can show you some different pictures.
My main collections are Steiff animals and vintage Barbies.
 

5. Flowers.
I'm no gardener and like to tell anyone that I have ten black thumbs. That doesn't mean I don't like flowers or plants, though.
I have taken these pictures in our little garden and on trips, in Botanic Gardens and zoos.

6. Beads and wire and cabs and everything else you can create with!
That probably doesn't come as a surprise. There is so much you can make and do with tiny bits of glass or roving, stone or metal.
Here's a little selection.

7. Museums and libraries.
Can't say I always approve of the method of acquisition, but I could never resist a nice museum.
Unfortunately, I don't have many pictures without someone standing in front of a museum or library.
These are the best I have (a mix of Cardiff, Cambridge, Edinburgh, London, and Weil am Rhein).

8. Cemeteries.
They have something peaceful. I like the smaller ones, with trees and with benches where you can sit and dream and feel the stories of the people around you.
My town has two cemeteries that we call the old and the new one (the new one opened up in 1903). The old one is around our oldest building, the Oberhofenkirche (built from 1436 - 1490).

9. Vintage.
Vintage this and that. Toys, furniture, decorations, books, paintings, calendars, clothes, fabric, tools, needles, dishes, glasses ... I could go on and on. Unfortunately I have neither the space nor the money for everything I love, but I may have one or the other item around.

10. Chocolate.
I can't help it. I don't have the habit of photographing chocolate, though. So this one picture from a birthday a few years back will have to suffice. These are so-called "Göppingerle", named after our town and made in our oldest café (macaroon with a vanilla souffle in fine chocolate, available in different flavors).

Random Saturday - Dubbing

In our daily thread on my jewelry forum, I talked about dubbed movies some time ago and found that my English speaking friends had never really thought about those much because they often have not even seen one themselves.
I, on the other hand, had never been too aware about not all countries having as huge a dubbing industry as Germany, Italy, Spain or others.
Actually, I had never given much thought to the history of dubbing at all before learning about multiple-language movies thanks to one of my favorite films, the 1931 Dracula, which was also filmed in Spanish (more about that here).

Why is it that in Germany allegedly 90 % of consumers watch dubbed versions? I have to admit that the high number really did surprise me.
Is this just a historically grown habit because almost all movies and shows are being dubbed or are there other reasons as well?

Picture via pxhere

Let's start with the history.
In 1929, sound films were still pretty young. The lead actress Anny Ondra in Hitchcock's movie "Blackmail" had a Czech accent when speaking English, but post-dubbing was technically not possible yet. So Ondra lip-synced the lines spoken off-camera by Joan Barry which is said to be the first example of "dubbing".

To market movies to non-English speaking audiences, there were either the above mentioned multiple-language movies meaning a movie was filmed in different languages with native speakers which was understandably the most popular method with audiences.
Another possibility was to have the actors learn the lines in the other languages. It sounds quite cute to hear for example Laurel and Hardy speak German, but it can be difficult to understand.
Then there are the subtitles. I know a lot of people who feel subtitles distract from what's happening on the screen. I've also heard American friends saying they don't want to watch foreign films because of the subtitles, so I find it a bit confusing if they are surprised that Germans (and others) don't want to do that, either. There are countries that are used to it, though, Sweden for example.

Dubbing, which was done in Hollywood first and then in France before the first studios opened in Germany, has always been controversial and heavily criticized especially for the first movies that tried to match the lines closely to the lip movements which ended up in awkward German.

After World War II, movies were shown not only for entertainment, but also for re-education of the Germans. Movies were shown in the original languages - American or British English, Russian, French - with few subtitles which was not popular with the audience, so dubbing became the norm and Germany built up one of the biggest dubbing industries in the world.

Germany wasn't ready yet to deal with her past, though. Do you know the Hitchcock movie "Notorious"? The Nazis from the original turned into international drug smugglers in the German dubbing, therefore the movie title was "Weißes Gift" = "White Poison".
"Casablanca" got a German version in which all Nazis in uniform got cut out.
No worries, we don't have these versions anymore, I don't even remember ever having seen them myself.

That's only one part of the big controversy around dubbing, however.
Can a dubbed film bring a message across just like the original? How is dubbing done without losing impact from the original culture? Without accents, dialects, or country-specific vocabulary?
To be honest, if someone doesn't know British accents - just one example - and would watch those movies/shows with subtitles, I doubt they would analyze the accents or even be able to do it while trying to follow the plot through subtitles.
Sometimes accents have been replaced with German accents. In the movie "Airplane!", the black men from the South speak Bavarian in the German dubbing, and I always thought that was terrible because it didn't transport the joke well for me. Mostly, however, dubbing is in so-called "Hochdeutsch", literally "High German" which is free of any regional accent. That is controversial in itself because "sceptics argue that this Hochdeutsch is a strand of dangerous, homogenising nationalism, erasing the diverse variety of German voices from the silver-screen".
I wonder, however, which accents those sceptics would choose for dubbing then?
Should the actresses and actors just speak in their own original dialect? Should production choose a dialect for them to use, for example have a character from Scotland speak Plattdütsch from Nothern Germany and one from London speak Oberbayerisch?
I can assure you people would have big problems with that. I speak Swabian, not thick, but obviously enough that there are people who can't understand everything, and I couldn't understand my grandmother when she talked in Platt. Where would that get us? I have even seen German programs with heavy dialects which got sutitles.

Picture via pxhere

Of course there is good and bad dubbing, just as there are good translations and bad ones - and as there is good acting and bad acting.
We may not always know their names - which really is a shame - but nevertheless we appreciate our voice actors and actresses. They usually don't dub for just one person and sometimes you don't even notice right away unless you start hearing a voice more and more often.
That's the art of dubbing, just like actors slip into different characters, voice actors slip into different actors, and if they are good, it's believable, too.

One of our best known voice actors, Christian Brückner, is Robert de Niro for us, but also Martin Sheen or Harvey Keitel. Cary Grant had several different voices over time. Movies had more than one dubbed version, for example "Arsenic and Old Lace" (or "Notorious" 😉).
Sometimes a new dubbed version gets made for a new DVD or BluRay edition.
We are shocked when the long-term "voice" of a star dies which means we will have to get used to a new one. Will they choose the right one? Or maybe someone gets a new voice because the old one doesn't have time, wants more money or because there has been a fallout. David Duchovny got a new voice and I could never watch the dubbed version again, it just sounded wrong to me.
You also have to keep in mind that before the Internet we might not even have had the chance to see the original.

There can also be censorship, though (see "Notorious" again), but also "censorship". By that I mean that some shows were dubbed in so-called "Schnodderdeutsch" which you could translate as "flippant German", not really censorship, but ... heck if I know what it should be called.
"Such a manifestation of the German language is used for the purpose of humor and satire and is characterized by neologisms, apparent proverbs, atypical metaphors and comparisons, stylistic breaks, violations of norms and breaks in logic".
You could also say they went completely overboard. I was completely flabbergasted when I saw some of the shows of my childhood in the original.
Matching the lines to lip movements can also lead to small (?) changes in the German script, but it also means you don't feel something's off.

As mentioned, however, this is not just a German thing. I have DVDs with multiple languages on them and even more subtitles.
It's also not just controversial here and that doesn't even have to do with the concept of dubbing itself, but with differences of the languages in different countries. Austrians don't speak "Hochdeutsch", why should they? Obviously, Latin Americans don't like the way Spanish is spoken in Spain. French in Québéc isn't the same as in France. I'm sure there is more.

I watch originals and/or their dubbed versions.
Sometimes
- I watch both to compare and like I said, there are good ones and bad ones. I think you can tell how much money has been spent on dubbing - Hallmark Christmas movies don't seem to get the star treatment - or how quickly something has been dubbed. A pet peeve of mine is if names or cities are pronounced incorrectly.
- I watch English originals with English subtitles, for example if the accents are too much for me, if people speak too fast or mumble a lot or if the sound isn't that good or if I watch something late at night and don't want to turn the volume up. Another pet peeve of mine is if the TV channel offers me an English original, not with English subtitles, but only with German or French subtitles that can't be turned off, ARTE, I'm looking at you here).
- I have to get used to a new accent first.
- I even prefer the dubbed version because I don't like the original voice (can you even call it original in case of an animated character, though? 😋), or because that version triggers positive memories for me, like shows or movies from my childhood, especially if we have quoted from them all our lives.

By the way, what I completely forgot to mention how countries like to do their completely own version of popular movies and TV shows even today. Take the BBC show "Ghosts" (which I love) - there is a US American and German version, and when I last looked, they had announced versions for Australia and France.

For the end of this long post I have a short video for you. How do stars react to hearing their foreign voices? 😉




Sources (in random order):

1. Thomas Bräutigam: Deutschland, eine Synchronnation. On: Goethe-Institut USA, January 2017 (in German)
2. Emily Manthei: Film dubbing as high art in Germany. On: DW (Deutsche Welle), May 24, 2019 (in English)
3. Miranda Stephenson: Unanswered Questions of German Culture I - Why are Foreign Films Still Dubbed for the German Viewer? On: The Cambridge Language Collective - Features (in English)
4. Peter Hoffmann: Die ersten Synchronversuche. On: Die vergessenen Filme - Synchronisierte Filme in Deutschland 1930-1945, November 23, 2015 (in German)
5. Damien Pollard: The political history of dubbing in films. On: The Conversation, July 13, 2021 (in English)
6. Christina Focken: Synchronisierte Filme sind super. In: taz - Die steile These, September 5, 2020 (in German)
7. Kevin Tierney: Quebec movies have a dubbing problem. In: The Gazette (Montreal), August 3, 2017 (in English)
8. Article "Schnodderdeutsch" on German Wikipedia (in German)