Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894) User Reviews

The first ever, still existing, attempt to put sound to moving images.

[Boba_Fett1138 · 8/10 · 2 February 2007]

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 first sound film, the first precode!

[AlsExGal · 8/10 · 31 March 2013]

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.

Synchronised film sound a third of a century before The Jazz Singer

[des-47 · 8/10 · 20 October 2013]

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.

Missing sound has been discovered

[palasota · 17 January 2002]

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!"

Might be the first sound experience on film but it's not the real thing

[Rodrigo_Amaro · 7/10 · 25 December 2011]

Good film historians are right in not calling this experiment as the first sonorous picture. It's just like flight of Icarus, it's a almost there kind of thing. And I wonder who watched this back in 1894 since this wasn't released at all.

The sound of a violin is the one featured here and it was captured by a cylinder, most precisely an Edisonian recording cylinder, that was repaired and synced by the great editor Walter Murch (of "Apocalypse Now" fame). 17 seconds of a guy playing a violin and two other guys dancing together, cheek to cheek, enough reason for much controversy among dull viewers. The whole discussion about them is pointless, just look at the time this was made, things were different and even now there's nothing wrong with that.

We can't possibly know if what Murch made in 2002 was close to the effect the unknown director made in 1894 but what we have is an incredible sound perfectly matched with the images, and this was way before "The Jazz Singer" (1927) placed his mark on films as the first talkie.

It's just an experiment, a trying and a good one. 7/10

An Early Sound Film

[gavin6942 · 7/10 · 19 January 2016]

The sound has been found in the form of an old Edisonian recording cylinder. The cylinder was repaired, then Walter Murch ACE MPSE synced the film to the correct music in (I believe) 2002. Total running time is approximately 17 seconds.

The debate is whether or not this was the first sound film or not. And there are two factors to take into account: one, whether this film came out before any other with sound. And two, what does it mean to be a film with "sound"? Seemingly, what we have here are a few seconds of a man playing the violin while two other men dance. The violin was recorded to an Edison cylinder. It was likely then played at the same time as the short film, thus having sound. But does that count?

Now hear this!

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 10/10 · 27 March 2003]

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!

The first experiment with sound...

[jluis1984 · 8/10 · 16 May 2007]

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

For Film History Buffs

[ccthemovieman-1 · 4/10 · 22 December 2007]

This is the first recorded effort to put sound with a movie, and a the oldest that, obviously, is still in existence. This historic piece of film is the opening segment in the "More Treasures Of The Natural Archives" DVD.

It's only a 15-second clip of a man playing a violin in front of a huge recording cylinder. Next to him are two men dancing. Near the end, another man walks on the stage. William Dickson, the director of this experiment, is the violin player. This "movie" had several titles over the years but the sound experiment was not really a success. It took over 30 years from this point to the synchronize sight and sound to the point where something could be issued to the public for entertainment. However, this was a start, no matter how primitive it came off.

For more of the technical information and history of this film process, see the other review here by "Boba Fett1138."

See it for the curiosity value.

[Havan_IronOak · 8/10 · 10 September 2004]

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.

comment on subject matter

[stuff_1004 · 5/10 · 19 January 2001]

I first saw this short when it was incorporated into the independent film, THE CELLULOID CLOSET. It was a film that dealt with the way the film industry handled the situation of homosexuality over the years. This short was the first thing they showed. I thought that that was appropriate since it showed two men dancing in each others arms. I'm not gay myself, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film (CELLULOID CLOSET) as it gave me a fairly new insight in the world of homosexuality.

A Curiosity With Considerable Historical Significance

[Snow Leopard · 22 August 2005]

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.

Eery

[mirosuionitsaki2 · 10/10 · 23 January 2008]

This film is an eery, but interesting film. I will tell you why it is eery later in this review.

The film is interesting because it was the first film to ever contain sound. No, it may not be a one hour and forty two minute film, no it may not contain great action scenes, but it is still a wonderful film to me. It sparked a whole knew revolution if you will, of sound movies. This can be a little eery to watch, knowing that everyone in that film are now dead, I can hear the voice of a man in the beginning who no longer walks the Earth visible, and that the sound is cracky and broken.

I recommend this video for everyone to watch. This created movies as we know it today!

Somebody sent this to my cell phone yesterday . . .

[cricket30 · 8/10 · 27 January 2013]

. . . and I definitely would NOT recommend it to you for use as a ring tone. Bill Dickson does NOT play the violin as well as the average fifth grader in my school district, unless you make some allowances for the allegations that this soundtrack was assembled from a crushed toilet paper roll made out of wax by Luke Skywalker. That is why I rated this 8 points out of 10: if I were on Planet Clare, and I was in the advance guard producing a whole new form of communication (flicks, in Bill's case), and I was going to add a new sensory track to this medium (sound for Bill, but it just as easily could be smell-o-rama on Planet Clare) for the first time in the history of the planet, I definitely would be timid about choosing such a complicated secondary performing device (the violin for Bill, but it could just as easily be the smell of shepherd's pie just ready to eat on Planet Clare) as Bill seems to have done hear. So even though this "reconstituted" operatic passage sounds WAY flat, it still deserves at least one curtain call, all things considered.

P.S.--Who is that creepy guy in black who's slinking between Bill and the gay boys at the end? They show this twice, but my cell phone resolution is not good enough to tell IF this is two separate sneak-ins.

The Sound of Music

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 4 September 2013]

This is truly a milestone in the history of cinema. While the sound quality obviously leaves a lot to be desired, I like that they chose the violin for this groundbreaking little video. It's a beautiful piece he's playing.

I wonder what the 4 people in the video would say if they knew over 120 years later, people are still watching them playing and dancing. Maybe that's what one of the dancers was thinking of that very moment. He seems to be smiling occasionally and having an enjoyable time. His partner's face expression, however, has more of a "what am I doing here?"-note. Moving pictures and noise going together must have been a pretty big thing back in the day given the fact that silence movies were still made for a truly long time after 1894.

Man-on-man dancing...

[kobe1413 · 2/10 · 30 July 2014]

This was the first known experiment with syncing sound with film. W.K.L. Dickson plays the violin in the film, while two men dance in the foreground. The sound was recorded on a wax cylinder at the same time as the film. William Heise, Dickson's frequent collaborator, was the cameraman on this short.

There is not much to the film, but the addition of sound makes the short interesting. If only because of its novelty, it is a cut above the normal films from 1894.

YOU WILL LIKE THIS FILM- IF YOU LOVED: "Mr. Holland's Opus" IF YOU HATED: "Annabelle Sun Dance"

Hard to rate because it's so short AND so experimental.

[planktonrules · 21 August 2018]

"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.

Burgess Shale

[tedg · 8 January 2006]

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.

A Terrific Part of History

[Michael_Elliott · 28 June 2010]

Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894)

Landmark film should probably be better known than it is but I'm sure every film buff has seen it at least once. If you haven't seen it then you're lucky as it's posted all over the internet and is easy to come by. The film runs 22-seconds and is the earliest surviving example of trying to put sound to film. We see a man, Dickson, playing a violin while two men dance at the top of the frame. The entertainment here is certainly in the history that this film captures. It's funny to think that it would take another thirty-three years before THE JAZZ SINGER would come along yet here we have the earliest attempt at something historic. The film has a surreal nature to it just because of the men dancing and how slowly and rather hypnotic it all is. The Kinetophones that this movie used to pull off the "sound" never really took off as only 45 were produced but thankfully this film remains to show us where the dream of talking pictures started.

First Attempt to Combine Sound & Film

[Tornado_Sam · 26 June 2017]

This short film (about 15 seconds) is the first film to ever include sound in film. I repeat: the first sound film! It features a man playing violin while 2 other men dance. There is no argument about this being the first sound film, (people have continuously argued about "Roundhay Garden Scene" by le Prince being the worlds first celluloid film) because this was probably the only sound film made at the time. Just saying that this short deserves 9 out of 10 stars. I thought the violin that is heard to go with the film was very pretty and pleasant to listen to.

This film is of big historic value and film buffs will be fascinated by it.

Of course the sound wasn't part of the film, because this was made on a reel of film like all the others at the time. The history of it is that to create the sound to go with the film, Edison used the Kinetophone, a proto-sound-film system. Apparently the Kinetophone was not a real sound-film system; the music doesn't go with the action. Also we do not hear the footsteps of the men dancing, just the violin. So while this film gets credit for being the first attempt at making sound with film, in truth the sound and the film were not all one device, not like if we were to record something similar with a modern camera. Remember that now.

Still, historically important because it's the thought that counts. Edison was on the right track.