04.18.06
Walter Murch on Reconstructing the [Dickson Experimental Sound Film] (1894-5?)
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!
mike said,
April 19, 2006 at 8:00 pm
Spence!
I freakin’ INSIST you cross post at least a teaser and a link to this stuff! Am I so lame that I misrecall giving you a login over at SIFFblog?