4 - Babbitt’s Wives and Lovers: White Socialism, Gender, and the Poetry of the Machine

Summary

ON A SULTRY EVENING IN AUGUST 1926, Ann Tizia Leitich stepped under the dazzling marquee of Warners’ Theater and out of the heat and noise of Manhattan's famous Broadway. After she took her seat and the lights dimmed, Leitich and her fellow audience members were confronted by the beginning of new era, a technological revolution that changed the way that the world experienced the art of cinema. In her article “Vitaphon, das sprechende Bild” (Vitaphone: The Talking Picture), Leitich describes her experience of seeing—and hearing—a demonstration of the new technology that enabled the synchronization of moving pictures and sound:

Es war fast unheimlich, gespensterhaft—ein Theater, vollgepackt mit lauschenden Zuschauern. Ein zerstäubender Lichtstrahl und die Leinwand. Sonst nichts, kein Orchester, kein Dirigent, und doch der Raum voll Musik: jubelnde Geigen, klagende Harfen, die rauschenden, satten Stimmen der Celli, darüber die Fanfarenklänge der Posaunen—Tannhäuser Overtüre. Kein Orchester, kein Dirigent, und doch sehen wir sie in greifbarer Gegenwart, lebendig mit allen Fibern, hingegeben an ihre Instrumente, ihnen jene Musik entlockend, die uns umrauschte.

[It was almost uncanny, ghostly—a theater packed full with a listening audience. A dusty ray of light and a screen. Nothing else, no orchestra, no conductor, and yet the room was full of music: exulting violins, lamenting harps, the murmuring, full sound of the cellos, above them the fanfare sound of the trombones—the overture to Tannhaüser. No orchestra, no conductor, and yet we see them right in front of us, close enough to touch, every fiber alive, pouring their souls into their instruments, conjuring up the music that rushes around us.]

Much like those audiences who first had seen moving pictures, Leitich sensed something spooky about the sounds that matched the images on the screen. Even when writing about her experience later, she cannot get over the fact that there was no live orchestra and no conductor in the theater, for she mentions it twice. Leitich continues to be amazed as a young opera star opens her mouth, and an aria from the opera Rigoletto “strömt aus diesem halb geöffneten Mädchenmund” (flows out of this half-opened mouth of a girl).