Coincidentally, I just (finally!) went to the library and dug up the articles by Art Shifrin (who’s interviewed in the video you’ve linked to) about restoring the Kinetophone films, which he wrote in 1983 for SMPTE Journal and the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society (citations at the end of the article above). I’ve not yet had time to read them through, but they are quite detailed and generously illustrated.

And thank you very much for your answer ! (sorry, I’m almost three months late)

Thank you very much for adding the YouTube link to the Kinetophone demonstration film. What a shame Mssr. “nitratefury” offers no further information about his source.

I’m not personally aware of any Kinetophone films on DVD (or VHS or even Lasedisc, for that matter) except for the Dickson Experiment and “Nursery Favorites” — though I would love to be corrected on that point. The fact that the Kinetophone demo is on YouTube strongly suggests that one is available somewhere on some manner of home video format, no?

Thanks also for the list of fully-surviving “second generation” Kinetophone titles. After a little Googling, I think the sixth title you asked about may be The Politician, which is described as “a playlet” (i.e. a short play or excerpt of a play) and reported to be preserved by the Library of Congress. (Citation: Noel Burch, Life to Those Shadows, Univ. of California Press, 1990), p. 237 — see this Google Books preview page.) The same source also mentions the Kinetophone demonstration film (which we can now see does have its sound element), so I deduce the LOC probably has both elements for “The Politician” as well.

If that’s true, then we can presume there are seven second-generation Kinetophone titles with sound and film elements.

As an aside, Rick Altman reports in his book Silent Film Sound (at pg. 175) that The Deaf Mute was four reels, rather than five. His footnote cites Art Shifrin’s 1983 article for the SMPTE Journal, and since Shifrin was actively restoring the films at the time, I’m inclined to take his word for it (though I admit I’ve not read the original article).

Concerning the TV program “Entertainment Tonight,” that’s a long-running syndicated entertainment “news” program here in the US — basically, a televised version of a trashy fan tabloid, and just as disposable. Consequently, to the best of my knowledge there’s never been any “ET” home video releases.

As for later parts in this “series” — I’m afraid I simply haven’t gotten around to writing them! This is partly due to distractions and lack of free time, but I also continue to dig for more info. Eventually, I hope to write posts about the Phono-Cinema-Theatre and a more detailed examination of the second-generation Kinetophone.

BTW, I also agree: the comments are at least as useful as my original post, and I’m very grateful to all who have contributed!

Thanks again for commenting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRqQhUQTaUc

This is a presentation of the process. I knew that this film had existed, but not that it had survived! I’m really happy – the second live recorded sound film of this era including human voice I’m able to watch!

For both of the kinetophone systems it is quite difficult to find good and reliable informations. It is quite easy to see some of Gaumont’s phonoscènes, whereas it is very difficult to see some of the few surviving kinetophone films (except for the Dickson experimental sound film, of course). The only one which I know is available on DVD is “Nursery Favorites”. What about the others? As far as I know, there are only 6 films surviving with both sound and image (all from 1912-14):
-”Nursery Favorites”
-”The Deaf Mute” (1 reel out of 5, the cylinder for the fifth part also exists) – this is probably the civil war drama Jeff Kinzie was talking about in the first comment. I would really like to see this film, but I don’t know if there is a way to buy it (On the Edison imdb page, there is a thread about this film (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0249379/board/nest/94332834), which was apparently featured in a TV show titled “Entertainment Tonight”. Does this show exists on DVD?)
-The five bachelors
-Jack’s Joke
-The old violin? (I’m not sure about this one, but as it is not precised on the Edison National Historic Site webpage that the motion picture element is lost, it is probably because it still exists)
-? Do you know the title of the sixth one?

The fact that it is that hard to come across the list of the surviving films shows that the interest for this process is not as high as for other sound film experiments of the same period. The small number of surviving films might be the cause. It is quite strange in my opinion, as the fact that these films were live recorded make them very interesting (and also the fact that there were some fiction films instead of only songs). Maybe one day these movies will be available for a bigger public. I don’t even know if all of them were restored – I’m only sure of that for 4 out of 6.

I didn’t find the second part of this post on this blog – did you write it elsewhere, or is it still a project?

Riton (And sorry for my english, I’m french)

PS : Apparently the american channel PBS will show a sound-on-film experiment made by Eugène Augustin Lauste between 1910 and 1914 on the 5th of July (http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/video/8_bts_lauste.html). I hope I’ll find a way to see it. For anybody who is interested in sound film history, this might be worth seeing. Lauste’s sound film are maybe even harder to see than the kinetophone films!

Thankfully everyone I’ve talked to on the subject has dropped this, either a requirement for a new site or a practice on an existing one. We will stamp it out!!

Re: your P.S. — Point well taken. I’ve updated the footer “legalese” [cough] to better reflect my intent.

Thanks for the reminder re: a Pete Smith Specialty being the likely provenance of the “Jack’s Joke” clip. A quick search of the UCLA database for “Pete Smith” does indeed produce quite a number of relevant hits, though none that jump out as likely candidates…though I (or someone) may excavate better particulars when time permits. Fwiw, the UCLA film archive can be searched at http://cinema.library.ucla.edu/ and BAM/PFA has their own starting point at http://library.bampfa.berkeley.edu/

I greatly appreciate the additional info about the second-generation Kinetophone’s amplification. Yes, it is surprising Edison didn’t leverage his own extant patents in this regard, tho perhaps its relevant that the British and US patents were entirely separate beasts (which famously led his loss of primacy with the Kinetoscope in Britain). I theorize only, of course.

I wonder if another factor may not have been at play: Edison’s famously, shall we say, “economical” business model. No doubt better, more sophisticated amplification would have meant added cost of production — not to mention a higher cost of adoption for exhibitors, who I suspect would have already been chary about an experimental process. In any case, I can’t but wonder what further information about all of this may lay buried in the Edison archives.

I remain surprised how precious little detail, scholarly or otherwise, about the Kinetophone is available, even in the best works I’ve seen on early sound processes (in English at least).

cheers

No argument — as with Vitaphone, a less than fastidious projectionist
could easily screw up the synchronization. In fact, in the same Viola
Dana interview, she recalls seeing her film and being startled to hear
herself transformed into a baritone. Even sound-on-film can be run at
the wrong speed, or with a bad loop or impaired slit contact, but it
is certainly more robust and idiot-proof.

The excerpt from “Jack’s Joke” shown at PFA may have been lifted from
the same circa 1940 Pete Smith short mentioned in another comment, so
you might want to check the UCLA holdings for that series.

As far as my occasional researches over the years told me, the 1890s
edition of the Kinetophone played recordings which were simply in the
nature of asynchronous added-value mood music, despite implications
of synchronous sound made in some latter-day documentaries, and the
1913 system featured live-recorded sync sound subjects exclusively.

I recently came across a discussion group posting by an apparently
well-informed participant who states that Edison originally planned
to pre-record the soundtracks for the second-generation Kinetophone,
but was persuaded of the impossibility of getting convincing results
that way. The near-inevitability of illusion-destroying lip-sync
lapses, amply demonstrated by the examples on “Discovering Cinema,”
does suggest that reduced sound quality is the lesser evil.

The Higham reproducer that Kinetophone used for amplification was a
device employing a rubber “shoe” riding on an amber wheel to provide
a friction assist to the to-and-fro motions of the diaphragm. If I
remember my phonographic lore aright, it made its debut at the 1904
Saint Louis fair, affixed to a Columbia Graphophone which was touted
as “The World’s Loudest Talking Machine.” Apparently, it was still
not really loud enough for theatrical use. Why Edison did not employ
some variety of the pneumatic valve, a means of sound amplification
included in his own 1877-81 British phonograph patent, is a mystery.

My P.S. was just a bit of self-defense prompted by the intimidating
your-soul-is-mine legalese at the bottom of your pages.

Best regards, and appreciations for the excellent site,

Russ Karas

Thanks so much for your contribution to the discussion. And yes, of course you can do whatever you wish with your comment (but I can, too).

Flicker Alley’s “Discovering Cinema” DVD set is indeed very much worth the price just for the early sound material (in my estimation at least). For the benefit of other readers not familiar with it, it includes both the aforementioned documentary as well as 18 of original sound shorts (and a couple excepted works) from 1908-1929, including a number of exceptionally rare European titles from Gaumont and others, plus similarly rare Theodore Case experiments. The set also includes a likewise-worthwhile documentary-plus-samples disc on early color processes.

Your point about the “lip synch” factual gaffe in the “Discovering Cinema” booklet is well made and noted, though in fairness my readings on the subject indicate that at least some Kinetophone titles used, if not a lip synch technique, then at least non-synchronous sound. I’ve read of some titles were simply scenes accompanied with music…though if memory serves me I do believe this was so for the first-generation Kinetophone (Kinetoscope “peep show” boxes augmented with cylinder players), and not the later projection version of the technology ca. the teens.

Thanks also for the tidbit about the Viola Dana interview in the Brownlow-Gill “Hollywood” series — a local video rental shop has the series, so I’ll have to look into that. Her observation that the horn was “up high” is a most interesting one, suggesting an early “boom” concept — perhaps the first such use?

Searches for “Jack’s Joke” in the online databases of the UCLA Film & Video Archive and BAM/PFA produced zero hits (tho the latter archive is currently in the process of moving and recataloging their collection). I did locate the BAM/PFA schedule blurb for the 1996 program you attended, and while that particular film is not mentioned, it does state the prints were courtesy of the UCLA archive, though perhaps this was not 100% accurate.

Re: other surviving Kinetophone films, my best (albeit wild) guess at this point is whatever there may still be must be in the holdings of the Library of Congress, but in an unrestored state. I know the AV branch moved into an entirely new facility ca. 2007, and that once settled in they intended to step-up efforts to transfer their holdings to digital formats in the interest of providing greater public access. One can only hope that these precious and important titles are on the short list, but time and further scholarship will tell.

Concerning your “rant” (which is welcome), I do take minor issue insofar as contemporary reviews of the second-generation, projected version of Edison’s Kinetophone productions mention poor synchronization and somewhat dim volume. It reminds me of ’50s-vintage reviews of dual-projector polarized 3D films of the time complaining of poor alignment and headaches — having seen quite a number of these films, I can attest that if properly projected (and attended throughout the film), there were no such problems in most cases. But a careless or inattentive projectionist could easily ruin the experience and induce blinding headaches. I’m quite sure the same principle was true for the Kinetophone.

That caveat aside, you’re quite right that Gaumont in particular had perfected a very impressive non-electrical amplification system, which I understand could accommodate houses of up to 1,000 people. I also understand their sound films were quite popular and enjoyed a rather lengthy run of it over several years. It’s also worth mentioning that Gaumont had a Chronophone-equipped theater in Los Angeles from 1908 until (perhaps) 1914.

Thanks again, and best regards.

“Nursery Favorites” is available as one of the numerous bonus items on Flicker Alley’s two-DVD “Discovering Cinema,” which features a pair of English-overdubbed French documentaries on the early history of sound and color in film, a must-have for anyone interested in either topic.

Each of the features manages to pack an unusually comprehensive survey of its subject into its under-one-hour running time. They should serve nicely as a corrective to some of the widespread misinformation about both developments. Although both are unusually free from major errors of fact, the accompanying pamphlet does contain one whopper: it states that Edison Kinetophone films were mimed to a pre-recorded soundtrack. In the case of “Nursery Favorites” the fallacy is fairly self-evident, as that would require ten actors and one black dog to make it through six minutes of playback in one take without a single lip-sync slip-up, along with frame-perfect timing in throwing down those bags of “gold.”

Even though everyone speaks in a very loud hear-me-in-the-back-balcony pre-microphone stage voice, it is still a testament to the prowess of Edison’s recording technic that an even halfway intelligible recording could be made of actors so distant from the recording horn, in various locations, facing in various directions and sometimes moving around.

The intriguing citation by one of your correspondents of a patent for recording with arrays of telephone-type microphones notwithstanding, it seems Edison’s secret was simply the use of a very large recording horn, so that the actors were proportionally near enough even when ten feet away from its mouth. In the final part of the 1980 Brownlow-Gill “Hollywood” series, Viola Dana, who played the Queen of the Fairies in “Nursery Favorites,” recalled that “we talked into a horn, and it was up high,” if memory serves me for exact words. Perhaps the microphone array was just a clever idea that looked good on paper but in practice proved inferior to old-fashioned non-electrical horn recording due to the low fidelity and sensitivity of circa 1913 telephone transmitters.

The UCLA Film Archive apparently has a print of “Jack’s Joke,” because an extended excerpt from it was included in a Bob Gitt presentation on the history of film sound which I attended at the Pacific Film Archive around 1996. The joke of the title is that a young man and woman are introduced after each has been falsely informed that the other is very hard of hearing. As a result, they converse at maximum decibel levels (“I suppose you like to go to the [silent] MO-VIES?” he shouts at her. “No, I pre-fer CON-CERTS,” she patiently screams back at him), a great boon to the unquestionably hard-of-hearing recording apparatus.

Several Kinetophone soundtrack cylinders — which, by the way, were recorded on wax but issued on sturdy celluloid, like Edison’s smaller contemporary Blue Amberol cylinders for home use — may be heard at:

http://www.nps.gov/edis/edisonia/motion_picture.htm

Elsewhere on the site there is, or was, an automatically-playing audio excerpt from a promotional film which extols the Kinetophone’s value to posterity in the most grandiose terms, e.g., quoting approximately, “Imagine how different the world might be now if we had such a record of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, or Our Savior!” but it eluded me when I last tried to find it. It may require a plug-in I now lack.

The notes about the two lectures state that the film is believed lost, implying that the film for the other two releases DOES exist, so it is all the more frustrating and puzzling that “Nursery Favorites” is the only example available for study. The Edison archives and all rights were donated to the Government and are therefore in the public domain, apart from any underlying music rights still in force a century later thanks to the Sonny Bono Perpetual Copyright Act (I suppose those few bars of Irving Berlin’s “International Rag” in “The Old Violin” might have to be squelched), so the usual rights-clearance morass preventing the reissue of so much vintage material is not the problem here.

Caution: Rant regarding an item of film sound history dogma follows.

Along with the uncanny sensation to be had by watching a live-recorded “talkie” from 1913, and the sideways glimpse of a stage musical-comedy performance of that era which it affords, “Nursery Favorites” can also serve to demonstrate why sound films were only a curiosity until well into the 1920s. It was NOT because there was no way to satisfactorily synchronize the film with sound on a disc or cylinder, or to amplify the sound, as conventional wisdom would have us believe.

Synchronous electric motors worked nicely for interlocking projectors with disc or cylinder players, and pneumatic valve amplification could play the recorded sound at ear-damaging levels more than sufficient to fill the largest theater. Gaumont was successfully using both devices before 1910. Edison’s belt-and-pulleys contraption and employment of the less powerful Higham reproducer for increasing playback volume may simply reflect his aversion to paying for licenses on other inventors’ patents, especially when he himself was arguably the inventor of their basic principles. The odd, questionable and inferior synchronization methods employed by other pre-Vitaphone separate sound systems, which seem to show that this was a very difficult problem still waiting for a satisfactory solution, may likewise have been cobbled together only because the best methods had already been patented and would have had to be either licensed or avoided.

The fatal flaw was in the recordings being synchronized and amplified.

Can you imagine sitting through a feature film which had a soundtrack demanding such close attention and effort for comprehension as the one for “Nursery Favorites,” featuring actors all relentlessly projecting their lines in stentorian voices in order to be adequately recorded, no matter how perfectly synchronized and splendidly amplified it was? Maybe such an ordeal would be worthwhile to see and hear a performance by Bernhardt or Duse, but certainly not for ordinary entertainment.

The successful cure was a highly sensitive wide-range microphone which would allow clear recording of conversational speech and environmental sounds at a substantial distance — in other words, Western Electric’s improved condenser microphone of the early ’20s. Had he been recorded from several feet away by horn or with a telephone-quality microphone, Jolson’s intimate ramblings to his mother in “The Jazz Singer” would have been mostly unintelligible muffled mumbling. Those naturalistic noises which captivated the public and whetted the appetite for sound (Lindbergh’s plane sputtering off into the fog; Shaw’s feet crunching along his garden path to the accompaniment of English birdsong; the appealingly authentic incidental sounds which redeem “In Old Arizona”) would have been too feeble to record recognizably or at all.

Russ Karas

P.S. Although you are welcome to include this on your site if you see fit, I reserve the right to recycle it, in part or whole, in future correspondence with others. A few mini-crusades to demolish prevalent misconceptions in some arcane fields of interest to me are shaping up as a worthwhile use of time in my declining years. There are only so many ways to say a thing, and having to paraphrase myself is a bore!