Category: Blank and Empty Things; A History of

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 370

In the American motion picture industry, the sound technician position did not exist in 1927; in about 1000 days it would be almost as important as the director.  1927 marked the first year of the synchronous, simultaneous sound-on-film motion picture, with the first commercial production appearing in 1929. Prior to this, all dialog, all sound effects, were confined to the mind of the viewer.  Two years later, sound was in, and silence (as an absolute, give) was out.  The subtitles of having sound had an overwhelming effect on the medium—not only because the actors could speak, but because they could also act within the subtitles of now being heard.  Whereas just the other day actors had to pantomime hearing different sorts of sound, or act in such a way that the audience knew that they were weeping—much had to be visually over-acted to support the lack of actually being able to hear things.  Once sound was incorporated, the dramatic range of actors advanced exponentially.  Of course there was also everything else outside of voice that could be incorporated by the director:  ticking clocks, advancing footsteps, thunder,  sirens, heartbeat, a soft wail, a chortle, an echo.  And silence could now be used to its true effect, its importance rediscovered.

The last, true silent film came in 1931, with Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.  Chaplin acted/directed/produced the film, which, interestingly, was not really, altogether, absolutely, a “silent” film.  The movie—which directors Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tartofsky both selected as their fifth film in their top-ten all-time movie lists—actually used idiosyncratic and unintelligible sounds as speech in a spectacular salute to non-speech speech.  This was one smart man.


The advent of sound curiously silenced the careers of some of the great silent-era actors whose voices were really just beyond reach and the range of the enjoyable.  Clara Bow bowed out as a result of her deep Brooklyn accent, as did John Gilbert for his very high-pitched voice, and many others.  Such are the few ironies that came along with this rich technical advancement, small price to pay for a piece of the future.

(Image at right is of Chaplin and Einstein at the premier of City Lights.)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 368

Think what you will of the religious organization of General Booth’s Salvation Army, they really do some good albeit with a whomping hammer of the creator’s message at the end of it all.  This is the 16th in a series of posts on the History of Blank and Empty Things, an unfilled, blank ticket for the promise of a safe and warm place to sleep and a good sturdy meal.  It was a promise for some sort of hope, for attention, addressed to “the waste” of society, the specialty of the Army, “fighting want and hunger and hopelessness”, doing this via the “industrial home”, training men for work and finding them jobs.  The Salvation Army was adamantly opposed to “wanton charities”:  “the bread line breads bums; banish the Bread Line!; the professional beggar is created by indiscriminate charity…”  They took a very hard line.  On the other hand the hard line may not have worked all that well for far as filling the ranks for the soldiers of god; people certainly took advantage of the charity offered by the SA.  The financial report for the Industrial Home (in Washington DC) for 1917 showed that there were 122 meetings held, with an attendance if 4,300, with 34,921 meals supplied, and 21,215 beds made available–and only 21 “conversions”.  

The blank admission card for the industrial home, shown below, seems to me a look at a piece of hope that may have been in the hands of a person who needed it; I can imagine staring at it, wondering what I should do with it, exactly; to take the help, or not.  In 1917, there weren’t that many options….

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 337

 This  IWW unused release form for political prisoners is yet another entry in
our Blank/Missing People/Things category. 
This was pretty radical envelope-edgy stuff for political liberalism in
the U.S.
in the early part of the 20th century, butt that was really the modus operandi
of this group.  Founded in Chicago just a
year or so earlier than this form was printed, the Industrial Workers of the World
was an anarchist/socialist/radical and sprinkling of trade unions and
organizations conglomeration organization as a general answer to a malaise and
dissatisfaction with the policies of larger trade groups (mainly the American
Federation of Labor (AFL)).  What it
really was, or became, was the most important movement of the century for the protection
of workers and unions, though it did bolster the underlying belief in
overthrowing the ruling economic class for the benefit of all who labored to
make that class even more wealthy and dominating. 

I have no doubt that such a piece of propaganda was needed and necessary—labor
workers, organizers, unionists and the like were granted little clemency by big
business, and could be often treated with great brutality, not the least of
which was physical.  It was not in the
interest of the controllers of the means of production to allow such
interference from labor groups such as the IWW, as they saw it as a diminishing
assault on their source of revenue. 
There was also another reason for fear and condemnation of this group—it
was also about the only major group which allowed membership along all race and
belief systems.  The possibility of a
cohesive laboring class threatened the established (and still established)
fracturing of the working classes by petty differences, fostering internecine
warfare among the working classes and keeping them more divided and weak. 

This broadside looks as though it is newer than what the Library of Congress
guesses is 1906/7—the design, woodcut and typeface all look later—but the document
does have the imprimatur of William D. (“Big Bill”) Haywood, which would make
the date correct.  Still, the design
doesn’t look quite right to me.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 300

This installment on blank and
empty things is a continuation of the empty diary thread. The Jahrbuch der Jungmaedel
1937 is unsued and empty of unpublished thoughts; it was intended as a receptacle
for the girls who were accepted into the Jungmaedlbund (translatable as “Young
Girl’s League”), an extension of the Hitler Youth organization to female children
aged 10-14.  Girls between the ages 14 and 18 were encouraged to be members of the Bund Deutsche Maedel (BDM), and finally, for the last stage of girlhood, there was the Glaube und Schoenheit section (“Belief and Beauty”) for girls 18 to 21, for grooming into the married and domestic (Nazi) life. The Jungsturm Adolf Hitler, the umbrella organization for all of this,  began in 1922, soon after the creation of the NSDAP, and sought to develop the next generation of Aryan supermen, thoroughly indoctrinated in Nazism, and come their 18th birthday (or sooner) would become reliable and trusted soldiers.  There were various subgroups in a web-y complication of organizations, all of which kept the minds of dozens of thousands of children under close control; and, by 1936, all German boys were compelled to become Hitler Youth. 

The forward to this booklet was by
the leader of the Jungmaedel, Baldor von Schirach, who was later the head of the
Hitler-Jugend
(HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter (“Reich Governor”)
of Vienna. He lived until 1974, ably surviving his
prosecution and conviction as a war criminal for his role in the deportation
of Viennese Jews. His work in shaping
the propaganda and the minds of children in Nazi Germany was so far as I can
see not an issue at his trial. He and
Albert Speer did denounce Hitler during their trials at Nuremberg—the only officials brought to justice who did so—and was
sentence to 20 years in Spandau

Schirach’s wife, Henriette, divorced him a few years into his retirerment.  She lived until 1992.  I wonder what Baldor and Henriette talked about at dinner?  What was there pillow talk like?  I
wonder what she was thinking in the years that she spent alone, or in
her final 37 days on earth? Did she wait for death’s embrace to take
her to some higher Aryan plane?  Did she regret her own acquiesence of
what her husband was doing, or did she fool herself into believing
that nothing horrible was happening?  Her husband gave some evidence
during his trial that he sent protesting notes to Martin Bormann about
the “bad” treatment of the Jews, and that he had no idea about the
exterminations.  (He also claimed that the idea for the antisemitism
in Germany came from Henry Ford’s The International Jew.  That Ford bears some responsibility for this and other pro-Fascist actions is correct and not debatable.)  I’d like to see Henriette’s diary if she dared keep one.  If there wasn’t a diary, it would be interesting to write it for her.