Claus Tieber

Fascinating Rhythm: Rhythm in screenplays of the early sound era

Universität Wien, Austria

The integration of sound in the screenplay led to a greater emphasis on rhythm and a certain musicality of the screenplay in general. One of the aesthetic problems of early sound films was a film’s tempo. The inclusion of dialogue seemed to slow down the action. Questions of tempo and pace were thus regularly discussed in the American trade press (see Jacobs 2015, 6ff). The overall question of film rhythm became a practical problem, not just an academic topic. In my paper I will argue that the screenplay offers the basics on which these problems were solved. Rhythm is a form of structuring time. On the page of a screenplay, the film’s duration is structured in scenes and/or shots. Rhythm is a pattern of repetition and variation that can be detected on the pages of a screenplay: in its format, in its repetitions and variations on all levels, from scene headers, to the repeating of single words. The coming of sound led to more repeated elements in the screenplay format – this aspect already makes it more rhythmical than the screenplay formats of the silent era. This tendency can clearly be detected in American screenplays, less so in European ones. In my presentation I will use case studies from Hollywood, Germany and Austria to present my approach.

Claus Tieber was principal investigator of a several research projects about screenwriting at the University of Vienna and the University of Salzburg. He teaches film studies at universities in Vienna, Brno, Kiel and Salamanca. After working as a commissioning editor for TV movies at the Austrian Broadcast Company (ORF) he started to write his Habilitation (post-doc thesis) about the history of the American screenplay (Schreiben für Hollywood: Das Drehbuch im Studiosystem, Münster: Lit Verlag, 2008) and switched from practice to research. He recently edited volumes on film music (When the Music Takes Over in Film, ed. with Phil Powrie and Anna K. Windisch, Palgrave 2023) and Screenwriting (The Palgrave Handbook of Screenwriting Studies (ed. with Rosamund Davies and Paolo Russo, 2023). He is a former chairperson of SRN.