Dickson Experimental Sound Film

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.