04.28.06
Posted in News of the World, What I'm Reading, Torture, Spooks, Covert Action at 12:17 am by Spencer
This really is gravely serious. Please act IMMEDIATELY: contact your Congressional Representative and tell them to oppose this terrifying and utterly irresponsible slide into a Gestapo state. Find/contact your Representative via http://www.house.gov/writerep/
The House version of the 2007 intelligence authorization bill — H.R. 5020 — would grant CIA and NSA security personnel the authority to make “warrantless arrests” for “any felony” committed in their presence, no matter how remote from the foreign intelligence mission it might be or where they occurred, the Baltimore Sun reported on April 25, 2006.
Section 432 of the bill grants similar authority to NSA security personnel.
For more info, see:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2006/04/house_poised_to_grant_arrest_p.html
and
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.spies25apr25,0,5928384.story
For the full bill –HR 5020 — see http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.5020:
(Relevant excerpts are also quoted below.)
This legislation would create what can only be characterized as a secret police force controlled directly by the President. This is precisely the American Gestapo that the Republicans themselves warned about when Truman first sought to create the CIA in 1945.
There are two (count ‘em) fig leaves in the legislation, both meaningless. First, the power of warrentless arrest would apply “only” to “personnel designated to carry out protective functions.” A literalist reading of this would equate to security personnel; in practice there is nothing to prevent the Director of Central Intelligence (Porter Goss, a partisan Republican warrior whose leadership had sharply divided the CIA) from “designating” every employee, agent, and asset of the CIA as having a “protective function.” Second (albeit not quoted below), the DCI’s and NSA director’s “policies” must be in line with “policies” promulgated by the Attorney General. But considering that our current Atty. Gen., Alberto Gonzales, signed on to the notion that no law or treaty or Constitutional provison in any way restricts the President from authorizing torture and, jeepers, unilateral secret detention of anyone anywhere, this is obviously a distinction without a difference.
Let us review the basic current situation:
* The President has claimed for himself the power to hold anyone, including any US citizen, in secret detention “exempt” from habeas corpus protection.
* The President claims the courts have no jurisdiction. After the Supreme Court challenged this, Congress recently passed a law (still untested in the courts) specifically declaring that the courts have no jurisdiction over such “detentions”.
* Ever-mounting evidence from multiple independent sources makes it undeniable that A) an unknown but presumably large number of persons have been abducted by US intelligence and military personnel, and B) an extensive “black” network of airplanes is secretly transporting these abductees to third countries for incarceration, interrogation, and torture (otherwise…why do it at all, and why fire CIA analysts for allegedly leaking the info)
* In January 2005, Newsweek reported senior Pentagon counterinsurgency planners were seriously considering what they referred to as “The Salvador Option” for Iraq — meaning creating and controlling death squads just as had been done throughout Latin America during the latter years of the Cold War. Less than a year later, the first press reports began to surface of death squad activity in Iraq, believed to be tied to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
* The Bush Administration has made it abundantly clear that it makes little or no distinction between tactics and strategies that can/should be applied abroad vs. domestically.
* The “warrantless arrest” provision was inserted into the bill at the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte. As US Ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s, Negroponte helped facilitate and cover-up, you guessed it, death squad activities in Latin America.
* There have been numerous accurate reports in recent months of sweeping abuses of power in the “war on terror” directly targeting the homeland population.
Now the House wants to grant arrest powers to the CIA and the NSA??!?!?!
SPECIFIC LANGUAGE:
H.R.5020
Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)
SEC. 423. ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONS AND AUTHORITIES FOR PROTECTIVE PERSONNEL OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.
[…snip…]
(b) Authority to Arrest-
(1) Chapter 203 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`Sec. 3065. Powers of authorized personnel in the Central Intelligence Agency
`(a) The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency may issue regulations to allow personnel designated to carry out protective functions for the Central Intelligence Agency under section 5(a)(4) of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 (50 U.S.C. 403f) to, while engaged in such protective functions, make arrests without a warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if such personnel have probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing that felony offense.
[…snip…]
SEC. 432. CODIFICATION OF AUTHORITIES OF NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY PROTECTIVE PERSONNEL.
[…snip…]
(b) Authority to Arrest-
(1) Chapter 203 of title 18, United States Code, as amended by section 423 of this Act, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`Sec. 3066. Powers of authorized personnel in the National Security Agency
`(a) The Director of the National Security Agency may issue regulations to allow personnel designated to carry out protective functions for the Agency to–
`(1) carry firearms; and
`(2) make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if such personnel have probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing that felony offense.
[…end quote…]
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Posted in Cinema, What I'm Reading, Silent Films, Cinema History, Early Sound Cinema, Books at 12:14 am by Spencer
Just arrived in my mailbox is a thin but precious volume that I strongly recommend to any and all film geeks: History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope, and Kineto-Phonograph by W.K.L. Dickson and his sister, Antonia Dickson. Published in 1895, when motion pictures were barely two years old, it is the first history of cinema ever. Mr. W.K.L. Dickson, as readers of this blog have prolly grokked, was the man most responsible for the ostensibly Edison invention of movies, and the book (really more of a monograph) is his profusely illustrated personal memoir of the voyage of discovery.
No (alas), I did not buy an original edition, but instead procured something arguably even better: MoMA’s facsimile edition of Mr. Dickson’s own personal copy, complete with his own handwritten annotations. (Dickson’s copy was obtained by MoMA in 1940, but the date of his notes is apparently not known. Fwiw, Dickson died in 1935.) MoMA’s facsimile edition was first published in 2000; my copy happens to be from the second edition of 2001.
Among the many juicy anecdotes and revelations is the amazing statement, in Dickson’s handwritten notes, that synchronized sound film was first projected in the Edison labs in 1889. Holy crap! This claim is followed by “See journals and witnesses.” Wouldst that I knew the current disposition of his journals.
Suffice to say, you owe it to yourself to get a copy while they’re still cheap (starting at a measly $4 according to tonight’s search of BookFinder.com).
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04.24.06
Posted in Whatever at 8:28 pm by Spencer
In case you were paying attention, I’ve got this here blog all moved to its new host. (Dreamhost, if’n you’re wondering — great price, tons o’ space, now with multiple domains per account, and PHP5. Sorry Pair, my hosting home of seven-odd years, but the last one was the clincher for me.)
As warned, I also moved the blog into its own directory. If I busted your links and/or bookmarks, I do apologize but really it was for the best.
While I was at it, I also upgraded WordPress. For some reason the mostly-great (if sometimes persnickety) HTML editor TinyMCE ain’t happenin’ in my admin interface…which really rather blows. Hopefully I just failed to flip some switch or something, cuz if I really have to hand-code all my HTML I’ll be pissed. I may have to resort to reading some documentation or something.
Or, heh, maybe I should just turn on JavaScript. Crazy!
Anyway, in the meantime there may be some broken images in a post here and there, tho I’ll try and get all that fixed asap.
Thanks for coming.
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04.22.06
Posted in Cinema, Silent Films, Cinema History, Books at 4:53 pm by Spencer
Carpe diem, o silent film geek: four of the five volumes of John Barnes’ landmark study of The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901 (the University of Exeter Press editions) are currently available for super-cheap (a measly $7-$12 each, or about $44 for the lot) via the respected remainder purveyor, HamiltonBook.com. (When you get there, seach for “Beginnings of the Cinema in England” and they should all show up.)
The missing volume there is, unfortunately, vol. 3 which examines the producers, exhibitors, films and equipment of 1898 — some of the most interesting and elusive history; but even without that it’s a screaming deal. I would suggest getting vols. 1, 2, 4, and 5 from HamiltonBook.com, then trolling BookFinder.com for volume 3 which, I warn you, is not very plentiful. (I managed to find my copy for about $30, including shipping.) To give you some perspective, I found one lone seller offering the full set, same edition, for $150. Using the above scheme, I got a complete set for about half that.
While early histories devote reams to Edison and the Lumière brothers, important pioneering British efforts qua the creation of cinema are, at best, relegated to mere passing references to Birt Acres and Robert Paul (whom we must thank for providing Georges Méliès with his first movie camera, the Lumières being unwilling to sell him one of their own Cinématographes, on the undoubtedly duplicitous grounds that it was all a passing fad and they could not possibly, heavens no, allow Mssr. Méliès waste his money). While no one can reasonably deny the primary importance of the gentlemen from West Orange, NJ and Paris, France, this is nevertheless a great injustice to film history and those who made it. Barnes’ Beginnings of the Cinema in England amply fills in the gaping chasm.
Following is what Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan have to say about Barnes’ mammoth study in their bibliographic notes at Victorian-Cinema.net, the excellent companion site to their book, Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey (BFI, 1996)…which is also currently available for half-cover-price from co-author Herbert’s The Projection Box site.
Barnes, John, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901 (Exeter: University Exeter Press, 1996-1998)
Volume one of John Barnes’ history of Victorian Cinema, The Beginnings of Cinema in England (London: David & Charles, 1976) tells the story of how the Edison Kinetoscope and Lumière Cinématographe came to Britain, the first English films made by Birt Acres and Robert Paul, and Britain’s first film shows to the end of 1896. Detailed descriptions of the equipment used and the films produced. Further volumes in the series are: (vol. 2) The Rise of the Cinema in Great Britain (London: Bishopsgate, 1983), continues the story, covering 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year; (vol. 3) Pioneers of the British Film (London: Bishopsgate, 1988), examines the producers, exhibitors, films and equipment of 1898; (vol. 4) Filming the Boer War (London: Bishopsgate, 1992), takes us through 1899, with the war being just one of the activities covered; (vol. 5) The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901: Volume Five – 1900 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997) takes the story to the end of the Victorian era. All five volumes (volume one revised) have now been published as a set, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894-1901, by University of Exeter Press. An essential reference for anyone interested in the origins of film in Britain and the personalities involved.
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04.18.06
Posted in Cinema, Cinema History, Early Sound Cinema, Online Video at 9:20 pm by Spencer
The following is an excerpt from a 2004 interview with Walter Murch in which he discusses what is provisionally known by archivists as the Dickson Experimenal Sound Film, an unreleased motion picture shot sometime between September 1894 and March 1895 that is the earliest surviving effort at creating synchronized film and sound.
Murch, a legendary and Oscar-winning sound designer and film editor, was personally involved in reuniting the film with its cylinder phonograph soundtrack for the first time since the 19th century. (The film and its history are discussed in a previous post to this blog.)
The interview is copyrighted, and I beg the kind indulgence of holder William Kallay. The web is a notoriously ephemeral medium, and I merely wish to help preserve this important history. I hasten to add that the rest of the interview is well worth reading.
Credit: William Kallay, “The Three Fathers of Cinema & The Edison/Dickson Experiment, with Walter Murch” (From Script to DVD web site, Sept. 27, 2004).
From Script to DVD: Do you mind telling our readers about your involvement in the work-in-progress on the Dickson/Edison sound recording?
Murch: This was a real detective story involving a forgotten, broken sound cylinder at Thomas Edison’s lab in Menlo Park [New Jersey]. Patrick Loughney, the head of television and film at the Library of Congress, developed an intuition that this cylinder might actually be the soundtrack for a short kinetoscope that Edison made in 1894. The film is of one of Edison’s key assistants William Dickson playing a violin into a recording horn: it’s clear from looking at the image that the violin must have been being recorded (on a cylinder) as they were filming. But the accompanying sound had never been located. Until a few years ago, when Patrick located this particular broken cylinder and had it repaired. In fact, it turned out to be a recording of someone playing the violin. But the Library of Congress had no means to put the image and the sound in sync: the film was shot at 40 frames a second (rather than our standard today of 24) and only lasted 17 seconds: whereas the sound on the cylinder was two and half minutes long. So the question was: which 17 seconds of sound went with the film? And then, once you’ve decided that, how do you put it in sync with the film, which is playing at a non-standard frame rate?
FSTD: Quite a restoration dilemma. How did you get in touch with Mr. Loughney?
Murch: I was put in touch with Patrick through Rick Schmidlin, who had produced the restoration of Touch Of Evil, and Patrick asked if I could help them. I wound up digitizing both the sound and the picture, and was consequently able to render the film at normal speed and then find various sync points with the music. I tried dozens and dozens over a period of a couple of hours until I finally found the one that worked the soundtrack and the picture were finally in sync with each other for the first time in a 106 years!
FSTD: Is this the first known recording of film with sound?
Murch: Yes. It pushes the threshold of film sound back by a couple of decades. There’s anecdotal evidence of something done a couple of years earlier, in 1891, but neither the film nor the image for that have turned up yet.
FSTD: I’ve read somewhere that it was actually Dickson who really did most of the work on the sound elements.
Murch: Well, not only that: Dickson was the man who invented motion pictures as we know them: the use of celluloid, the 35mm width, the size of the image, the sprocket wheel, the four sprockets to each frame, and so on.
FSTD: Edison gets a lot of credit for the development of film.
Murch: Well, he should: Dickson was an employee of the Edison research laboratory, after all. There were many, many things, invented there over the years, including film. Edison obviously had a controlling hand in it, but it was Dickson who actually did the detailed work. And as I mentioned, Dickson is the man playing violin in that test. So now you can see (and hear) the man who invented film, appearing in the first sound film ever made!
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04.17.06
Posted in Whatever, Cinema, Music, Events, Avant Experiwhosis at 9:58 pm by Spencer
On Thurday, April 27 at The Rendezvous (10 pm), Rob Millis (of Climax Golden Twins) will be screening his new video project for Sublime Frequencies, which he tells me involves a lot of drunken Thais. He’s not shared the title with me, but methinks it may be this one.
Also coming up are sublime frequencies of a different sort, namely Eric Lanzillotta’s analog synth pieces. Listed below are his upcoming shows:
Friday, April 28th
Signal and Noise festival
Vancouver, BC
Sunday, April 30th
No Tomorrow @ The Baltic Room
1207 Pine Street (Pine and Minor)
Seattle, WA
Doors at 9 PM; $5.00 cover; 21 and over
Also on the bill is Fibrillation from Portland
Wednesday, May 17th
Gallery 1412
1412 18th Ave E (18th Ave and Union St)
Seattle, WA
8 PM; $5-15 sliding scale; all ages
Opening up for Adam Sonderberg (laptop & electronics), Carol Genetti (voice), and Katherine Young (bassoon).
(Coincidentally, I know Carol Genetti from my Chicago days. She’s a talented avant vocalist [think, perhaps, along the lines of Jaap Blonk] who’s collaborated with folks like Jack Wright, Eric Leonardson, Tatsu Aoki, and many others.)
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04.12.06
Posted in Whatever, Nifty Links, Indiana at 8:34 pm by Spencer
Bloomingpedia is a wiki devoted to Bloomington, IN — home of IU and a couple-few ol’ pals-o-mine, and locale of the film Breaking Away as well as not a few mis-/well-spent days of my own pun krock yoot.
(Tip o’ the hat to Mikey, who learned of it from his fellow Bton expat née childhood chum, ES…um, who I seriously owe a couple CDRs to!!)
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04.10.06
Posted in Cinema, Cinema History, Early Sound Cinema at 10:13 pm by Spencer
“Motion pictures will do for the eye what the phonograph has done for the ear.”
– Thomas Edison
Contrary to popular conception (if one can call interest in such arcana “popular”), the history of sound cinema begins far earlier than 1927’s The Jazz Singer. Indeed, efforts to synchronize recorded sound and film are very nearly as old as motion pictures themselves.
First, some background. A prototype of the Edison Kinetoscope — a peepshow-in-a-box (pictured at left) that was arguably the first successful true motion picture system (cf. Augustin Le Prince and others) — was first demonstrated outside the lab in May of 1891 at the annual convention of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. Two years later, the (mostly) finished product was first publicly unveiled in May of 1893 at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Within a year, Edison’s Kinetoscopes were offered for sale with the first Kinetoscope parlor opening in New York City on April 1, 1894. By the end the year, Edison’s latest wonder had spread (and was being reverse-engineered) across the globe.
The earliest Kinetoscope films released to the public were storyless vignettes, lasting 30 seconds at most, predominantly featuring vaudeville performers (including a “boxing cats” act and serpentine dancer, Annabelle Whitford — in one of the very first hand-colored films), athletes, and others who were brought to Edison’s Black Maria tar-paper film “studio” in West Orange, NJ from New York City, just across the river. There were also staged scenes (again, storyless) enacted by Edison’s workers, such as “blacksmiths” at “work”, gentlemen at a “barbershop,” and what is probably the first horror/special-effects film (of a sort), a still-startling reenactment of The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots that, at the time, must have had early audiences running for the doors. But even without faked beheadings, it is hard to overstate the impact on the public of pictures that could move. For the first couple years, anything that moved was literally a jaw-dropping wonder.
(It must be noted here that a number of the very earliest Edison films, including ultra-rare experiments dating to 1889, are available on the wonderful and invaluable Kino Video four-DVD box set, Edison: The Invention of the Movies, co-produced with the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and Library of Congress. The set includes 140 films produced up through 1918, two hours of commentary from top scholars, and reproductions of more than 200 original documents. Suffice to say that if you’re serious about film history, it’s worth every red cent. And no, I don’t get any kick-backs.)
The true inventive force behind Edison’s motion pictures was the Scottish-English immigrant
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (pictured at right), who joined Edison’s staff in 1883 and quickly ascended to “senior associate.” Work on motion pictures first began at the Edison labs in 1888, the year Edison met Eadweard Muybridge, though progress was stop-and-start at best. Dickson was one of the first assigned to work on the project.
In addition to the movie work, Dickson’s professional interest in sound recording dates at least to the spring of 1894, when an article in Phonogram magazine noted that Dickson was an “artist” working (probably as a violinst) with Dr. Wangemann, the “musical expert” in charge of Edison’s recording department.
From the earliest days Dickson and his staff made efforts to combine motion pictures and sound. By Dickson’s own account, he produced a more-or-less successful synchronized sound film circa October 1889 (three and a half years prior to the Brooklyn unveiling of the Kinetoscope), combining phonographic sound and kinetoscopic visuals. Upon Edison’s return from the Paris Expedition of 1889, a brief welcome-home film was presented to him in which, reportedly, Dickson “stepped out on the screen, raised his hat and smiled, while uttering the words of greeting, ‘Good morning, Mr. Edison, glad to see you back. I hope you are satisfied with the kineto-phonograph.” Alas, no physical trace of this very earliest of sound films is known to survive, although other (silent) test films from 1889 do. Because of this, some have questioned whether the 1889 “welcome home” sound film was ever actually made or if it is simply yet another example of early cinema braggadocio.
But there is no question whatsoever that W.K.L. Dickson appears in an unreleased but surviving test film shot sometime between the autumn of 1894 and the spring of 1895. Never officially titled, but known to archivists by the supplied title of Dickson Experimental Sound Film, it is the earliest known surviving experiment at creating sound film (see below). The idea was quite simple, and based on its apparent 1889 predecessor: shoot motion picture film while also recording the live sound using another Edison invention, the wax cylinder phonograph. Lasting only 21 seconds, the film depicts two men dancing together as a third — Mr. Dickson — plays violin into the recording horn of the phonograph.
The archival history of the film and its soundtrack is a little convoluted. Following Edison’s death, all of the Edison archives were kept in the holdings of the Edison Historic Site, under the control of the National Park Service. To quote from an account in The Sounds of Early Cinema (Indiana Univ. Press, 2001):
The physical separation of the film and sound artifacts first occurred when the Museum of Modern Art acquired a 35mm nitrate print, measuring forty feet in length, from the Edison Historical Site and preserved it to safety film in 1942. The sound track lay dormant until the US National Park Service began the task of inventorying and cataloging the holdings of the Edison Historical Site (EHS) in 1960. At that time the EHS staff found and catalogued a brown wax cylinder in the Music Room of the Edison Laboratory in a metal canister labeled “Dickson — Violin by W.K.L. Dixon with Kineto.” [National Park Service catalog number: EDIS 30142; E-number: E-6018-1.] In 1964 it was discovered that the cylinder had broken into two pieces. In the same year, the EHS staff arranged the transfer of all surviving nitrate film materials at the Site to the Library of Congress for preservation. Included in that collection was a nitrate print, measuring thitry-nine feet and fourteen frames [two frames short of 40 feet], which the Library staff cataloged in 1968 as Dickson Violin, probably after the title information found on the EHS cylinder [sic?] container. That was the second occasion when the film and sound artifacts were separated to two different locations.
Judging by this information, it appears that the EHS and LOC archivists were not able to specifically link the film with its sound cylinder. However, it was at least generally known that the cylinder survived. Specifically, the MoMA catalog of 16mm Early Edison Shorts in its collection stated that the wax cylinder soundtrack survives at the Edison Historical Site.
And there the matter rested for the next 30 years, with efforts at reuniting the visual and sound elements hampered by governmental inter-agency bureaucracy and a general lack of sufficient interest (and thus funding) to motivate such a project.
Finally, in 1998 the Domitor film society succeeded in breaking the logjam. Working with EHS curators George Tselos and Jerry Fabris, and obtaining funding from the Library of Congress, the audio from the broken wax cylinder was recovered. Since the EHS lacked the needed facilities, Fabris contracted with Peter Dilg and Adrian Cosentini who, thanks to the LOC backing, were able to use the lab at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound of the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. According to notes by Fabris (dated June 3, 1998), quoted in The Sounds of Early Cinema:
Dilg, Cosentini, and Fabris pieced the cylinder together on the phonographic mandrel, secured the parts with thin tape around the outer edges of the cylinder (outside the groove area), then carefully filled the open crevices in between the cracks with small shavings from another broken wax cylinder.
Using a period recording lathe phonograph specially modified by Dilg to incorporate an electrical pick-up, the delicately restored cylinder was then recorded onto analog 1/4-inch reel-to-reel tape. DAT copies were subsequently made from that master.
Two days later, on June 5, 1998, one of the audio DATs and a 35mm film print were delivered to the closing session of the annual Domitor conference. There, for the first time in a century, the film and its audio were reunited, albeit imperfectly. The film had been shot at approximately 40-46 frames per second, but the variable-speed projector available could only do a maximum of 30 frames per second. There was also the fact that the audio recording is almost two minutes long — considerably longer than the film — and contains various false-starts and indistinguishable studio chatter. At one point, there is “an audible command to ‘Go ahead,’ followed by a clear segment of unidentified violin waltz music, lasting twenty-three second.” After two attempts at playing the off-speed film and the DAT simultaneously, the attendees agreed that the 23 second waltz fragment was the true soundtrack.
Ultimately, the music was identified as being from Les cloches de Corneville, an 1877 operetta by Robert Planquette. This is a little less arcane than it might seem at first. It was a huge hit in its day, and its English-language version, The Chimes of Normandy, actually had a longer run in London — 708 performances — than the contemporary original production of HMS Pinafore. In 1917 it was still popular enough in Britain to be produced there as a (silent) feature film (released under its original French title) directed by Thomas Bentley. Because the lyrics of the particular tune played by Dickson — “Song of the Cabin Boy” — describe the joys of being at sea without any women around, coupled — as it were — with the image of two men dancing together as another man plays violin, has given this film the reputation in some circles as being the first gay movie. This is undoubtedly stretching things a little.
In 2000, two years after the historic Domitor screening, Oscar-winning film sound designer and editor Walter Murch was recruited to perform a true reconstruction. Working at George Lucas’ Skywalker Sound and using an Avid digital editing system, the film was digitized, readjusted to a standard video frame rate of 30fps, and then carefully synced up with the audio. (Murch’s remarks on the project to a now-defunct message board are reproduced in part at FilmSound.org. Murch also discusses the reconstruction in this excerpt from a 2004 interview by William Kallay.) 35mm sound prints were ultimately struck.
The reconstructed Dickson Experimental Sound Film is today available to the public on the aforementioned Kino Edison DVD box set. A 15-second sound version of the film is also available on the equally invaluable DVD box set, More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894 - 1931 (National Film Preservation Foundation / Image Entertainment, 2004). A public-domain downloadable version of the reconstructed film (image and sound) is available in various MP4 and MP2 resolutions from Archive.org (web site of the Internet Archive in San Francisco), which worked from a 35mm sound print loaned by Walter Murch. A silent version of the film can also be downloaded from the Library of Congress web site in Mpeg and streaming RealVideo formats. (Unfortunately and inexcusably, a downloadable copy of the original cylinder audio in any form is not available there.)
Edison, ever attuned to profit potential, was fairly quick to exploit this marriage of technologies (especially since he owned them both). This is not too surprising since as early as 1890 he spoke to reporters about his desire to merge sound and film. (See Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound [Columbia Univ. Press, 2004], p. 78.) By April 1895, the novelty of his silent Kinetoscopes was already beginning to wane just a year after their commercial introduction. At that time, Edison introduced the Kinetophone, which was nothing more than a Kinetoscope with a cylinder phonograph occupying the spot where the battery had been. Viewers watched the films as before — through the binocular-like goggle atop the Kinetoscope box — while inserting a tube in each ear. These tubes then merged into a single tube that in turn was inserted in the phonograph’s receptacle normally used for the amplifying horn. In other words, quite possibly the very first ear-buds.
As one might imagine, synchronization with these early Kinetophones was a haphazard affair at best. Nevertheless, it appears that Edison put some weight behind this early innovation. The surviving records are spotty, but about one third of the Edison films released that year are of the type known to be most commonly installed in Kinetophones, namely march and dance films plus one film each of a juggler and a contortionist (suggesting they merely had background music versus what would be considered sync sound). But the combination of high cost and poor synchronization proved to be commercially untenable — only 45 of the original Kinetophones were ever sold, and by the end of 1896 they were discontinued. (Edison would later revive the Kinetophone brand many years later, circa 1913 — a tale for a later post.)
Mind you, as far as anyone knows it was not until the autumn of 1895 that anyone actually projected motion pictures. While the history of this volatile period is notoriously imprecise, in all likelihood the very first public exhibitions of projected motion pictures onto a screen were in Berlin beginning on November 1, 1895 — a full month prior to the Lumiere screenings in Paris. The films were produced by Max Skladanowsky using his unique two-strip Bioskop process and included novelties such as a boxing kangaroo. Sadly for Herr Skladaowsky, history deemed that he would be forgotten and the December 1895 screening in Paris by the Lumiere brothers would be remembered as the birth of modern (projected) cinema.
Despite Edison’s early efforts, sound cinema would be temporarily superceded by the then-mind-boggling spectacle of projected film — an accomplishment he poured his considerable resources into replicating. But novelty — even the earth-shattering kind — is a fleeting thing and within just five years, the turn of the century would bring a whole new (attempted) revolution in marrying sound and motion pictures. And more than a decade after that Edison would seek to re-introduce the Kinetophone, redeveloped and repackaged for the era of projected film and movie houses.
(The Dickson Experimental Sound Film was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2003.)
Related Links on Mugu Brainpan:
Sources:
Patrick Loughney, “Domitor Witnesses the First Complete Public Presentation of the [Dickson Experimental Sound Film] in the Twentieth Century” in Richard Abel & Rick Altman, eds., The Sounds of Early Cinema (Indiana Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 215-219. At the time, author Loughney was curator of Film and Television at the Library of Congress. At this writing, he is currently curator of the Motion Picture Department at the George Eastman House.
“History of Edison Motion Pictures: Origins of Motion Pictures — the Kinetoscope”, Edison Motion Pictures, American Memory web site (Library of Congress, n.d.)
“The Marriage of Sight and Sound: Early Edison Experiments with Film and Sound,” Edison Motion Pictures, American Memory web site (Library of Congress, n.d.)
Walter Murch, “Dickson Experimental Sound Film 1895″ (FilmSound.org, n.d.) Edited excerpt from: discussion thread “Dickson Experimental Sound Film 1895″, The Cinema Audio Society Discussion Board, June 3, 2000. (Original URL deprecated.)
Stephen Herbert & Luke McKernan, “William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson,” Who’s Who in Victorian Cinema web site (n.d.). Companion site to the book of the same name.
“Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” Archive.org (n.d.)
Scott Simmon, Program Notes (pp. 1-3) for More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894 - 1931 (National Film Preservation Foundation / Image Entertainment, 2004).
Edison: The Invention of the Movies, DVD box set (Kino Video / MoMA, 2005)
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (Columbia Univ. Press, 2004), p. 77ff.
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