The Sound of Postwar Cinema: Listening with Hanswolfgang Bergs

Meters and meters of film sound, radio chatter about stars, movies, and film shoots, a passion for Schlager from German films, outtakes and unused footage, and fragmented interviews with famous and lesser known names of film history: This is what we hear on the hundreds of tapes recorded and collected by Hanswolfgang Bergs now stored at the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Bergs understood the sound film not only as a visual but primarily as an acoustic medium. From 1946 to 1969, he produced countless radio programs for German public broadcaster Südwestfunk about films and filmmakers, making radio a now nearly forgotten site of popular film culture in West Germany. To do so, Bergs and his colleagues traveled with tape recorders to festivals, premieres, and film sets. The focus of Bergs’ work gradually became a collection of re-recorded film soundtracks, which he systematically organized into a film sound archive. The question today is: What can we do with this archive?