Tri-Ergon


The Tri-Ergon sound-on-film system was developed from around 1919 by three German inventors, Josef Engl, Joseph Massolle, and Hans Vogt.
The system used a photoelectric recording method and a non-standard film size which incorporated the sound track with stock 35mm film. With a Swiss backer, the inventors formed Tri-Ergon AG in Zurich, and tried to interest the market with their invention.
Ufa acquired the German sound film rights for the Tri-Ergon process in 1925, but dropped the system when the public showing of their first sound film suffered technical failures.
The Tri-Ergon system appeared at a time when a number of other sound film processes were arriving on the market, and the company soon merged with a number of competitors to form the Tobis syndicate in 1928, joined by the Klangfilm AG syndicate in 1929 and renamed as Tobis-Klangfilm by 1930. While Tri-Ergon became the dominant sound film process in Germany and much of Europe through its use by Tobis-Klangfilm, American film companies were still squabbling over their respective patents. For a time Tri-Ergon successfully blocked all American attempts to show their sound films in Germany and other European countries, until a loose cartel was formed under an agreement in Paris in 1930.
However, William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation acquired the US rights for the Tri-Ergon system and, backed by Tri-Ergon AG, began a patent infringement battle in the courts in 1929 against much of the American film industry. The dispute wasn't settled until 1935, when Fox lost his final appeal in the US Supreme Court. A new Paris accord was signed in March 1936, which held until the start of the Second World War. The Tri-Ergon system continued in use in Germany and the continent during the war.
There were a number of companies which used the Tri-Ergon name:
  • Tri-Ergon AG, acquired the rights to the original 1919 patents from the inventors in 1923
  • Tri-Ergon-Musik AG, founded c1926, held the patents for the rest of the world outside Germany
  • Tri-Ergon-Musik AG, which made phonograph records and owned the patents for Germany, formed in 1927: a subsidiary or branch of the St. Gallen company
  • Tri-Ergon-Photo-Electro-Records, a record label subsidiary of Tri-Ergon-Musik AG

    Etymology

The name Tri-Ergon means "the work of three", and is derived from, meaning three, and ἔργον,, meaning 'deed, action, work, labour, or task'; cognate with . The erg also derives from the same word ἔργον.

Design

The Tri-Ergon process involved recording sound onto film using the "variable density" method, used by Movietone and Lee De Forest's Phonofilm, rather than the "variable area" method later used by RCA Photophone.
Tri-Ergon used a special form of microphone without mechanical moving parts for sound pickup and a special electric discharge tube for variable density film recording. For reproduction of sound, the system used an electrostatic loudspeaker.
Two specific patents in the Tri-Ergon system would later cause controversy. The Tri-Ergon film used an extra 7mm sound strip attached to the edge of a standard 35mm film, resulting in a new film 42mm wide. This was achieved by a "double-printing" method by which the film and sound tracks were recorded and developed separately, then printed together onto a common positive. This required special adjustments on the standard projectors, which was not well received by the industry. The other patent was a "flywheel" which allowed the film to flow smoothly through sound reproducing equipment.
An original Tri-Ergon sound movie projector is in the collection of the Deutsches Museum in München, Germany.

History

Beginnings

Massolle, Engl and Vogt secured patents from 1919 in Germany, and applied for a US patent on 20 March 1922.
The first public showing of Tri-Ergon sound films took place in the at 68 Kurfürstendamm, Berlin on 17 September 1922. One of the sound films shown was titled Der Brandstifter. It was an adaptation for the screen of a 1903 one-act play ' by Dutch author Herman Heijermans who lived in Berlin from 1907 to 1911. The peculiarity of this play rests in the fact that all the parts were played by the same actor. No known copies of this film remain.
In order to continue developing their process, the inventors sold their patent to Swiss financial backers in St. Gallen who formed Tri-Ergon AG in Zürich, Switzerland.
In 1924 Universum-Film AG produced three hours' worth of vaudeville shorts with sound, similar to those produced by Warner Brothers, using a sound-on-disc system. Tri-Ergon AG licensed the recording film rights to Ufa in January 1925 and Masolle briefly became technical director of Ufa's first sound-film division.
However, the non-standard film format was not popular: even a well-publicized tour of Germany in 1925 failed to generate much interest.
Ufa's first sound film using the Tri-Ergon system, the 20-minute short ', was directed by Guido Bagier. Bagier also wrote the music for the film; the screenplay was by Hans Kyser. It premièred at the Mozartsaal in December 1925, but was a total flop in terms of technical sound quality. According to Bagier, the fiasco was due to technical problems with the playback equipment.

The Parufmet agreement

In the meantime, Ufa, having ducked the whole issue of sound films, had still fallen into severe financial difficulties with productions of vastly expensive silent films accompanied by a live symphony orchestra playing a specially composed score, such as F. W. Murnau's Der Letzte Mann, with Emil Jannings and Faust ; and both parts of Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen, with a score by Gottfried Huppertz.
Paramount Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stepped into the financial breach with the highly restrictive Parufamet agreement of December 1925, whereby the American firms took control of all Ufa's first-run theatres to show American films. Only one significant German film was shown in Ufa first-run cinemas in Berlin during this whole time the agreement was in effect: Joe May's silent The Farmer from Texas. The film received no publicity build-up and was dropped after only one week at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo. Almost no German films were shown in US cinemas: and Ufa made no new films in Germany at all while the Parufamet contract was in force.
Although this injection of foreign capital allowed the construction in 1926 of Ufa's enormous new Große Halle studios at Neubabelsberg, the Ufa management with Erich Pommer in charge of production continued to over-spend by enormous amounts. Lang's Metropolis cost over an . Yet the only venue where Metropolis could be seen in the whole of Germany was at a single, small—yet exquisitely decorated—cinema showing second-rate films, the Ufa-Pavillon am Nollendorfplatz. The box office receipts amounted to approximately, slightly over 0.01% of the budget.

Expansion

From 1926, needing more revenue, Tri-Ergon AG sought backers in the US. On 5 July 1927 the Hungarian-American William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation personally purchased the US rights to the Tri-Ergon patents for $50,000, forming the American Tri-Ergon Corporation.
Fox Film had also purchased sound-on-film patents from Freeman Harrison Owens and Theodore Case, although it seems that only the Case patents were actually used in creating the new sound-on-film system he dubbed Fox Movietone. One of the first feature films to be released in Fox Movietone was Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans directed by F. W. Murnau. Fox also used the system for the long-running newsreel series Fox Movietone News.
On 5 March 1927 Alfred Hugenberg's industrial Hugenberg-Gruppe took over Ufa and, as part of their initial cost-cutting measures, closed down the Tri-Ergon department. Ludwig Klitzsch, the managing director, dismissed Bagier and his team, sidestepping the problem of "the talkies" with their vast technical, financial, and legal problems.
On 12 May 1927, Tri-Ergon-Musik-AG, a subsidiary of Tri-Ergon-Musik-AG was formed by Joseph Masolle. By 1931 it was a subsidiary of IG Farben, which was founded in 1925. In December 1927 the Dutch firm of H. J. Küchenmeister founded a new company, International Maatschappij voor Sprekende Films NV to profit from its patented 'Meisterton' system. Within a year the Dutch company would have almost total control of the Tobis and the Tri-Ergon patents.
At the 1927 Baden-Baden festival of contemporary chamber-music, pioneering sound films with original scores by leading avant-garde composers were shown at special 'Film and Music' sessions. Walther Ruttmann's abstract experimental film Opus III, with an original score for chamber orchestra by Hans Eisler, was shown twice: firstly as a silent film with the music performed live and synchronized using Blum's Musikchronometer, and then as a sound film using the Tri-Ergon process. The sound-film recording was supervised by Bagier, now working for Tri-Ergon-Musik A.G.
Other films shown at the festivals in 1928-9 included American cartoons with music by Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch, newsreels, and abstract films by Hans Richter.
By mid-1928 a number of short films had been made using the Tri-Ergon process, produced by Tobis-Industrie GmbH . Some of them were shown at the first public showing of sound films in Austria on 8 June 1928 at the cinema in the Urania, Vienna, a public educational institute and observatory They included:
In September 1928 Walter Ruttman's full-length Stätten von deutscher Arbeit and Kultur was shown in the Vienna Urania cinema, along with Hans Moser als Wiener Dienstmann, starring the Viennese comic actor Hans Moser. In the autumn of a touring exhibition of sound films was shown throughout Austria. The German première of Ein Tag auf dem Bauernhof took place on 12 September 1928 at the Mozartsaal.
In July 1928 German State Radio commissioned Tri-Ergon-Musik A.G. to produce a sound film for the opening of the fifth German Radio Exhibition in Berlin. Their film Deutscher Rundfunk, with music by Edmund Meisel, showed at the exhibition in August. Reviewers of the Radio Exhibition screenings were impressed by the reproduction of natural sounds, such as street noises, marching soldiers, hammering machines, steam ships and zoo animals. It was later released in a shorter version, Tönende Welle.