Co-productions arose as a means to enhance collaboration
between countries with small, struggling, or ambitious
production industries so as to pool resources and compete
in an international market with Hollywood cinema. The
so-called Film Europe movement in the latter half of the
1920s was the first concerted effort in this regard. By
guaranteeing to import each other’s films, European film
industries could expect higher box-office revenues, which
could then be used to increase the production budgets of
their films and potentially compete with American films.
The German producer Erich Pommer (1889–1966) was at
the forefront of the Film Europe movement. As head of
Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa), the single strongest film firm in Europe, Pommer encouraged the production of big-budget films (e.g. Die Nibelungen [Siegfried/
Kriemhild’s Revenge, 1924], Tartu¨ff [Tartuffe, 1926],
Metropolis [1927]), but Germany’s market was too limited
to recoup the high production costs. His negotiations in
1924 with one of the major French distributors yielded the
first bilateral film import deal between two European
countries. Over the next four years others followed, and
the European film industries, with Germany, France, and
Great Britain at the forefront, built the base for a cooperative continental market that slowly reduced the number
of American imports and replaced them with European
product.
The coming of sound to Europe in 1929 cut Film
Europe short, but it also made possible the first wave of
international co-productions. National import quotas
or bans on foreign-language films in several countries
marked sound films from the beginning as a potential
threat to national culture and a problem for both the
European and American film industries. The latter
found it necessary to produce films adapted to national
markets in order to satisfy the requirement for films in other languages as well as to avoid import quotas, and it
did so by producing multiple language versions, or
MLVs. In 1930 American studios began to invest heavily in the European film industry to make MLVs, either
by importing Europeans (or, in the case of the Latin
American markets, Latin Americans) to Hollywood or
by setting up production centers in Europe. The building by Paramount of a studio complex in Joinville near
Paris is the most famous of these, in 1930 and 1931
turning out a total of 150 films in as many as 14
languages. Quickly, all the major American studios
established similar facilities in Paris, London, and
Berlin. The first MLV—Atlantic (Titanic: Disaster in
the Atlantic in the United States)—was not, however,
Hollywood produced, but European, a 1929 AngloGerman co-production directed by E. A. Dupont
(1891–1956) in English and German at Elstree in
England. European MLVs continued to be made
throughout the early 1930s (Die Dreigroschenoper/
L’Ope ´ra de quat’sous [The Threepenny Opera, 1930]
and Der Kongreß tanzt/Le Congre `s s’amuse [The
Congress Dances, 1931] most notably), though the vast
majority were produced under the auspices of
Hollywood studios. While MLV production was
dropped in the mid-1930s for the cheaper solutions of
dubbing or subtitling, it is noteworthy as the first concerted period of international co-production in cinema
history.