Dickson Experimental Sound Film

The Edison company in the US made experimental motion pictures on photographic film from 1889, and first exploited film commercially with the Kinetoscope system in 1894. The Lumières in France, however, are usually credited with launching the cinema proper a year later, as they saw the virtue in projecting films so they could be enjoyed communally. Thomas Alva Edison, in contrast, seems to have regarded moving images as a novelty to be consumed in an atomised and slightly voyeuristic way, by an individual peering through a lens. In a time when people regularly watch theatrical features on their smartphones, this mode of consumption has made a comeback.

This experimental example from Edison's famous Black Maria studio in New Jersey is particularly remarkable as it's the earliest known sound film, a full third of a century prior to The Jazz Singer. It's perhaps less surprising when you realise that Edison's main interest in film was as an enhancement of his other great cultural invention, the phonograph, which he regarded as a more enduring content medium. The film is a test run for a planned Kinetophone system in which film is combined with a soundtrack recorded on a wax cylinder, an idea that finally had its day with the Scopitone visual jukebox of the 1950s and persists in contemporary music video.

Successful synchronisation defeated Edison's engineers and their pre-electronic mechanical equipment, however, and the kinetophone was eventually launched with unsynchronised musical accompaniment. This film was never exhibited and over the years film print and cylinder became separated. In 1998 researchers realised the connection between the two and veteran Hollywood editor Walter Murch finally completed the synchronisation using digital technology.

But the film also gets into this list for its intriguing content. While director and film pioneer William K L Dickson plays a simple fiddle tune into one of the massive horns then used for audio recording, two men dance together, one of them occasionally smiling. It's therefore been claimed as the first gay film, notably by Vito Russo in his book The Celluloid Closet, and features in the documentary of the same name based on the book (Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman 1995). More plausibly, it offers a window into an era where all male environments were common — in research and development as well as the naval setting that the lyrics of the song Dickson plays allude to — and where sex was so far off the agenda the obvious modern interpretation of the scene would have been unthinkable.

Quite a curiosity both technically and in its content, this very brief experimental film is an important part of the early history of the movies. It shows how very early in the history of cinema that film-makers hoped to synchronize sound with motion pictures, and perhaps also shows how close they came. If an early attempt like this had succeeded in making it possible to create 'talking' pictures while the whole industry was still in its earliest stages, it seems possible that movie history could well have developed in quite different ways than it actually did.

As it has now been reconstructed using more recent technology, from the film footage and the remains of the original sound cylinder, the sound quality is surprisingly good. In itself, it is not all that far from the sound in much later experiments like the 1925 Theodore Case movie starring Gus Visser, and to early part-sound releases like "The Jazz Singer". Since the initial filming succeeded in its goal, the snags with this attempt seem all to have come in playback, when every attempt at synchronization failed, leaving it to much later film-makers to solve that problem.

The unusual content also makes it a curiosity, as is evidenced by the sometimes widely varying responses to it. It would have been more expected for an experiment like this to use amusing but innocuous subject matter, as Case did much later with Visser's vaudeville act.

As short as the footage of this movie is, it has considerable interest as a piece of movie history, and it's even possible that there is still more to be learned about it.

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.

"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.

It was on a day in 1891 when Scottish inventor William K.L. Dickson surprised his boss, Thomas Alva Edison with his remarkable work in the development of motion pictures. After many experiments, Dickson was now able to capture scenes of real life with his camera, and reproduce them through his invention, the Kinetoscope, as if a fragment of time were preserved in celluloid. Soon, Dickson's Kinetoscope would become an enormous success as a new way of entertainment, with many people eager to pay the nickel that was charged to be able to watch people dancing, or acrobats performing stunts through the "peepshow" of the Kinetoscope. However, the invention wasn't complete, in order for it to capture on film the real life as we know it, sound was needed on the movies. So Dickson kept experimenting and this short experiment, Kinetophone's first film, was the result.

In this experiment, codenamed simply as "Dickson Experimental Sound Film", director William K.L. Dickson stands in front of a recording cone for a wax cylinder (earliest method of recording sound), with his violin on hands, playing a song named "Song of the Cabin Boy". The idea was to record the song into the cylinder at the same time that the camera was recording his movements. In order to show that this was a motion picture, two of Edison's "Black Maria" laboratory decided to do a little dance in front of the camera. Unlike what author Vito Russo claimed in his book, "The Celluloid Closet", this little dance had nothing to do with homosexuality as it obviously is a reference to the environment of loneliness of the lab, akin to the lonely sailors to whom the "Song of the Cabin Boy" was dedicated to (the title Russo suggests, "The Gay Brothers", is actually anachronistic as "gay" had no homosexual connotation in the late 1890s).

Sadly, Dickson was unable to achieve the desired effect, and the Kinetophone never could really produce the synchronized audio with images. While he had the cylinder with the sound and the celluloid with the images, the synchronization of the two elements was not exactly effective, and the sudden appearance of Auguste and Louis Lumière's Cinématographe prompted Edison's team to focus on projecting systems and eventually Dickson left the company. Fortunately, in 1998 Dickson's cylinder with the movie's sound was rebuilt and film editor Walter Murch made a restoration of the experiment as it was intended. Finally, "Dickson Experimental Sound Film" could be heard with synchronized sound, just as its creative inventor had intended. While it was not a successful attempt, this outstanding film is a testament of the enormous genius of the father of Kinetoscope. 8/10