Dickson Experimental Sound Film

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 very first talking picture has returned from oblivion, and now you can hear it and see it! In autumn of 1894, at the Edison lab complex in West Orange, New Jersey, Thomas Edison's associate William Dickson tried to combine two existing technologies (the phonograph and the kinetoscope) to record sound and image together. In the event, Dickson was unable to synchronise the playback of sound and image, so this experimental film was never released to paying audiences ... and consequently (unlike many silent films which Dickson made for Edison at this time) it has no official title. The silent image (recorded at 40 fps) has been in the Library of Congress for years, known to film historians as a mute curiosity. It was also known that the 'soundtrack' had been recorded on one of the crude wax cylinders languishing at the Edison National Historic Site ... although nobody knew which one.

But now that's changed. Recently, curators located the wax cylinder, which had broken into several pieces. These were reassembled: a playback was obtained, and the sound was digitised. Hollywood's veteran soundtrack editor Walter Murch cleaned up the background noise and tweaked the digitisation to make it synch with the film image, which Murch had digitally compressed to 30 fps. Sound and image are synchronised at last!

The film begins with an offscreen man's voice calling: 'The rest of you fellows ready? Go ahead!' (The unseen speaker remains unidentified, but was probably Dickson's assistant Fred Ott.) On screen, Dickson plays a violin into an immense funnel mounted on a tripod (one of Edison's sound-recording devices) while alongside him, in full view of the camera, two male lab assistants embrace each other for some quick ballroom dancing to the tempo of Dickson's music.

The film lasts barely 17 seconds: just long enough for us to marvel at this crude technology before being provoked to laughter at the sight of two men waltzing in each other's arms. Speaking of which, here's a WARNING: a well-known but extremely inaccurate reference book ('The Celluloid Closet', by the late Vito Russo) includes a frame enlargement from this movie and identifies it as 'The Gay Brothers'. That's incorrect. 'The Gay Brothers' is an entirely different movie, made by Dickson at the Edison lab during this same period. 'The Gay Brothers' never had a soundtrack: it's a brief fiction film about two brothers who are NOT 'gay' in the sense Russo meant it. The deceased Mr Russo, for his own reasons, wanted us to perceive Dickson's experimental sound film (arguably the first movie musical!) as an artefact of 19th-century homoeroticism. (Hmm, what is it about gay men and musicals?) Sorry, but there's just no such content here.

This vitally important film deserves a rating of 10 out of 10. I've often maintained that no 'lost' movie should ever be considered irretrievable unless it was deliberately destroyed: I'm delighted to report that this film is finally available to audiences as its producer intended it, more than a century after it was filmed!

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

There have been several books that have cited this as the earliest gay cinema. I don't really see this as all that gay in the homosexual sense but then seeing two men dancing in what has to be the worlds first movie musical does have its attraction.

There have been several earlier comments about this film dismissing any homosexual overtones. As to those that are quick to dismiss this film as just being silly and an experiment done late at night after too many drinks... Well I've heard that story before.

This film is of interest as an oddity and if folks want to consider it the first gay film so be it. Better this than the depressing 1919 Anders als die Andern.

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.