Thomas Edison’s “Kinetophone” brought talkie to the theaters in 1913–and now, the Library of Congress has taken surviving films, restored them, and Undercrank Productions (undercrankproductions.com) has just released them on DVD.
That sound you hear? A standing ovation!
More than a dozen years before Al Jolson proclaimed “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” in the The Jazz Singer (1927), American movie audiences had already experienced synchronized sound in movies. In 1913, the Thomas Edison Company debuted talking pictures whose exhibition lasted for about a year. Showing the films in theaters involved a complex system involving a hand-cranked projector connected by a system of pulleys to a modified Edison cylinder player at the front of the theatre, operated at both ends by technicians connected by head-sets.
The Kinetophone films, like the early Vitaphone shorts, were of theatrical or vaudeville acts, dramatic scenes and musical performances. Of the 200 films made, only eight currently survive with both film and cylinder elements intact, and they have now been painstakingly restored by the Library of Congress.
The Kinetophone films are a unique record of performance techniques of the time, and are each six minutes long, a duration dictated by the maximum recording time of the cylinders used. Made in a pre-microphone era, the performers of the dramatic and comedic sketches or musical numbers speak and project as if they were in a theater. This technique was necessary for the actors’ voices to be picked up by the cylinder recording horn, placed a safe distance to be out of camera range. These techniques are covered in a mini-documentary on the history of the Kinetophone films, technology and restoration process as a bonus on the DVD.
Each of the eight Kinetophone films has been digitized from rare, unique cylinder sound elements preserved by the Thomas Edison National Historical Park and from original 35mm prints or camera negatives preserved by the Library of Congress. Utilizing state-of-the-art digital technology, the films have been restored and synchronized by the Library of Congress to a state that both surpasses their original 1913 presentations and also realizes the effect originally intended by Edison and his technicians. With the exception of Nursery Rhymes, previously available in a decades-old restoration of lesser quality, these Kinetophone films have not available to the public since their original exhibition in vaudeville houses more than 100 years ago.
