DICKSON SOUND FILM

"Silent" film was seldom silent in practice--a fact underscored by this remarkable recent restoration of the earliest surviving synchronized sound film. Produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company in its West Orange, New Jersey, studio sometime between September 1894 and March 1895, the film appears to have been a test for the "kineto-phonograph" (also known as the "phono-kinetograph"), an individual viewing machine equipped with rubber ear tubes. When it worked, image and sound were roughly synchronized by a mechanical belt, but this seems to have been too seldom to be commercially viable, and only forty-five Kinetophone machines were sold. Predictions in the March 16, 1895, Orange Chronicle that these new "Opera at Home" machines would be "a living
reality in the homes of thousands" were premature.

Seen on violin is William K.L. Dickson, the individual most central to the invention of motion pictures in the United States. He plays into the phonograph funnel a barcarole (or boatman's song) from Les cloches
de Corneville, Robert Planquette's French light opera of 1877, which became an English-language hit as The Chimes of Normandy. This "Song of the Cabin Boy," with its evocation of men at sea without women, is appropriate to the scene. The two dancing men have given this
fifteen-second movie a reputation as "the first gay film," although the dancers' gender may be more a reflection of that of the workers in Edison's lab.

Dickson claimed to have constructed a kineto-phonograph as early as 1889, demonstrated through a photo-emulsion and sound cylinder (now lost); he raised his hat and was heard to say, "Good morning, Mr.
Edison, glad to see you back. I hope you are satisfied with the kineto-phonograph." The original sound cylinder for the film seen here opens with a voice asking, "Are the rest of you ready? Go ahead!"--the earliest recording of a filmmaker giving the "Action!" cue.

This first surviving sound film also underscores how the motion picture was invented as only one phase of a revolution in communication and entertainment at the end of the nineteenth century, and initially conceived as a way to add pictures to sound. The fourth Edison employee wandering into the background at the film's end reinforces
that we are watching a test, never commercially released and never officially titled, but surviving to allow us a privileged glimpse into an era of experiment and rapid implementation.--SS