NOTE IMDb
6,7/10
2,7 k
MA NOTE
Deux hommes dansent sur un air de violon.Deux hommes dansent sur un air de violon.Deux hommes dansent sur un air de violon.
- Réalisation
- Casting principal
- Récompenses
- 1 victoire au total
William K.L. Dickson
- Violinist
- (non crédité)
Avis à la une
The Library of Congress has discovered the missing sound-track for this film, which was at the Edison National Historical Site all along. It was a cylinder, broken in half, labelled "WKL Dickson Violin with Kineto" and it has recently been repaired, transcribed, and put in synch with the image. This short film now takes its place as the oldest existing sound film. Before the image starts, you can just hear someone saying "Are the rest of you ready? Go ahead!"
"The synchronized sound version was restored in 2000 by Walter Murch, Rick Schmidlin, Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound, which is a division of Lucas Digital, Ltd., LLC (a George Lucas company) in collaboration with the Library of Congress and the Edison National Historic Site."....IMDB.
I won't rate this film, as it's just too short and is a purely experimental film that was never released back in the day. It consists of a guy playing the violin into a gigantic cornucopia-like device attached to an Edison cylindrical recording device. As he plays, two guys dance about with each other (in a father familiar manner). Towards the end, some other guy shows up for no apparent reason.
This is not a fun film you should rush to show all your friends. However, it IS historically significant as one of the first sound films...albeit crudely made. Well worth seeing for film historians and nuts like me.
I won't rate this film, as it's just too short and is a purely experimental film that was never released back in the day. It consists of a guy playing the violin into a gigantic cornucopia-like device attached to an Edison cylindrical recording device. As he plays, two guys dance about with each other (in a father familiar manner). Towards the end, some other guy shows up for no apparent reason.
This is not a fun film you should rush to show all your friends. However, it IS historically significant as one of the first sound films...albeit crudely made. Well worth seeing for film historians and nuts like me.
The broken sound "cylinder" for this 1894 film was found in the 1960's and repaired in 1998, so film enthusiasts take heart, we might be finding some lost films twenty years from now!
In 1913 Edison announced that all the problems with talking pictures had been solved - his pronouncement was somewhat premature, and the assumption that Edison was right prevented the success of a couple of European inventors that came to the U.S. seeking financial backing for systems that might have worked in the 1910's, including a sound on film system.
Synchronizing movement and sound was not too hard - although this film was not a true attempt at synchronization. It was synchronizing speech and film in a manner such that the results looked the least bit natural and were the least bit repeatable that were the sustained problems.
And about my precode comment, Joe Breen, head censor in America from 1934 to 1952, would never allow two men to dance together in a film under any circumstance. The last time that was tried in an American film prior to the production code was "Wonder Bar" in 1934, with Al Jolson looking on, rolling his eyes, and making the remark "boys will be boys!". Although, in fairness, this film was never exhibited to the public, and the two dancing men were probably workers in Dickson's lab, the female engineer being a rarity in 1894.
In 1913 Edison announced that all the problems with talking pictures had been solved - his pronouncement was somewhat premature, and the assumption that Edison was right prevented the success of a couple of European inventors that came to the U.S. seeking financial backing for systems that might have worked in the 1910's, including a sound on film system.
Synchronizing movement and sound was not too hard - although this film was not a true attempt at synchronization. It was synchronizing speech and film in a manner such that the results looked the least bit natural and were the least bit repeatable that were the sustained problems.
And about my precode comment, Joe Breen, head censor in America from 1934 to 1952, would never allow two men to dance together in a film under any circumstance. The last time that was tried in an American film prior to the production code was "Wonder Bar" in 1934, with Al Jolson looking on, rolling his eyes, and making the remark "boys will be boys!". Although, in fairness, this film was never exhibited to the public, and the two dancing men were probably workers in Dickson's lab, the female engineer being a rarity in 1894.
This is a pretty interesting experiment to watch. It's the first ever, still existing attempt, to unite sight with sound. It features two men dancing to a violin player (possibly William K.L. Dickson himself), who is standing next to an Edison recording cylinder, that is capturing the sound.
The sound and images were not linked together as one yet. And it wasn't until recently that the sound and image have been added technically together. It's probably the reason why people hesitate to call this movie the first ever sound picture.
The movie is made by William K.L. Dickson, a assistant to Thomas Edison himself who ordered him to come up with a way to unite pictures and sound. The answer he provided was the Kinetophone, a Kinetoscope (basicly a large wooden box with a peephole in it, so people could watch the moving images) with a cylinder phonograph inside of it, for the sound. This is the first, that we know off, surviving movie-experiments that feature this technique. All of the later movies using this same technique were shot as silent movies and sound effects were recorded later and separately. So the Kinephone was not an attempt to synchronize sound and images but more an attempt to have images accompanied by sound. In some cases, people could even choose from three sound cylinders, featuring 3 different orchestral performances to accompany the images. Only 45 Kinetophones were ever made so you could hardly call the Kinephone a success. Also after this experiment, focus went off to other cinema techniques, mainly regarding movie-projectors.
So the experiment itself obviously did not become a success, also since it took over 30 more years before the first movies with sound were made and commercially released. They just couldn't yet technically synchronize and put the sound and the images together yet at the time and even if they could and techniques would had been available, it would had been a very expensive job to do so. It therefor really isn't the most influential or historically important movies out of cinematic history but it's very interesting to watch, how people constantly tried to improve the quality and techniques of early cinema and movie-making.
8/10
http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/
The sound and images were not linked together as one yet. And it wasn't until recently that the sound and image have been added technically together. It's probably the reason why people hesitate to call this movie the first ever sound picture.
The movie is made by William K.L. Dickson, a assistant to Thomas Edison himself who ordered him to come up with a way to unite pictures and sound. The answer he provided was the Kinetophone, a Kinetoscope (basicly a large wooden box with a peephole in it, so people could watch the moving images) with a cylinder phonograph inside of it, for the sound. This is the first, that we know off, surviving movie-experiments that feature this technique. All of the later movies using this same technique were shot as silent movies and sound effects were recorded later and separately. So the Kinephone was not an attempt to synchronize sound and images but more an attempt to have images accompanied by sound. In some cases, people could even choose from three sound cylinders, featuring 3 different orchestral performances to accompany the images. Only 45 Kinetophones were ever made so you could hardly call the Kinephone a success. Also after this experiment, focus went off to other cinema techniques, mainly regarding movie-projectors.
So the experiment itself obviously did not become a success, also since it took over 30 more years before the first movies with sound were made and commercially released. They just couldn't yet technically synchronize and put the sound and the images together yet at the time and even if they could and techniques would had been available, it would had been a very expensive job to do so. It therefor really isn't the most influential or historically important movies out of cinematic history but it's very interesting to watch, how people constantly tried to improve the quality and techniques of early cinema and movie-making.
8/10
http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/
Some commentors note that this is of historic importance. But the point is precisely that it is not.
Film is like everything else, but moreso. It is what it is because of a process of evolution, accident, selfish urges and technology circumstance. Film affects us profoundly, indeed defines large parts of our lives. The unhappy fact is that what it makes in us is twisted by its past, how it got to us.
So our worlds have all sorts of legacies of its accidental past, just as our bodies have vestigial tails and gills. You just cannot be a person at all unless you know who you are, and part of that self-discovery is in understanding the snowball of cinema.
This isn't part of that snowball because the technology was forgotten, almost as if it never happened. Maybe if they worked late one night, if it hadn't rained, if a joke hadn't been so funny, it would have become part of the medium.
Then we would have avoided all that adventure in pantomime and shadow that forms the nervous system of our images today.
See this as a reminder of all the extinct possibilities that were pruned from what we have. Maybe it will help illuminate what wasn't pruned.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
Film is like everything else, but moreso. It is what it is because of a process of evolution, accident, selfish urges and technology circumstance. Film affects us profoundly, indeed defines large parts of our lives. The unhappy fact is that what it makes in us is twisted by its past, how it got to us.
So our worlds have all sorts of legacies of its accidental past, just as our bodies have vestigial tails and gills. You just cannot be a person at all unless you know who you are, and part of that self-discovery is in understanding the snowball of cinema.
This isn't part of that snowball because the technology was forgotten, almost as if it never happened. Maybe if they worked late one night, if it hadn't rained, if a joke hadn't been so funny, it would have become part of the medium.
Then we would have avoided all that adventure in pantomime and shadow that forms the nervous system of our images today.
See this as a reminder of all the extinct possibilities that were pruned from what we have. Maybe it will help illuminate what wasn't pruned.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
Le saviez-vous
- AnecdotesThe synchronized sound version was restored in 2000 by Walter Murch, Rick Schmidlin, Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound, which is a division of Lucas Digital, Ltd., LLC (a George Lucas company) in collaboration with the Library of Congress and the Edison National Historic Site.
- Citations
Man: Are the rest of you ready? Go ahead!
- ConnexionsFeatured in The Miracle of Sound (1940)
- Bandes originalesThe Chimes of Normandy
(1877) (uncredited)
(Originally called "Les cloches de Corneville (The Bells of Corneville)"
Written by Robert Planquette
Small section played on violin by William K.L. Dickson
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