Hopefully the linkity will work.
I can’t stomach either version of Jazz Singer. They both give me the dry heaves. Why, oh, why were good films left to spontaneously combust?
It makes one cry, it does.
Thanks, all. This question popped up in my head again because I’ve been going through the Universal horror films on DVD (lotsa extras, including restored scenes and “making of…” documentaries), and I just got the Milestone DVD of Phantom of the Opera – the 2-disc set includes two complete versions and stills from two more lost editions (I had no idea that three significantly different versions of the film were released in 1925, and a fourth in 1929). For the 1929 release they also included a Sound Disc, so there was an issue of PotO with at least partial sound. Some excerpts are on the DVD set.
It’s not Lon Chaney’s voice, and LC was reportedly pissed that they released a sound version. The studio quickly noted that the voice wasn’t really supposed to be the Phantom’s – it was an assistant. This proves that studio weaseling is eternal.
It’s pretty clear that the sound isn’t well-synchronized, and doesn’t really have to be. I saw a brief scene from The Jazz Singer once, and got the same impression. This started me wondering about the whole synchronization issue.
The Frankenstein DVD has Colin Clive’s line “By God, now I know what it feels like to be God!” restored. It was cut because a lot of audiences found it blasphemous. They either literally cut it or, in the best copies, “covered” it with a convenient thunderclap. The line has been restored, and at first I thought it was through use of some sophisticated filtering and computer restoration. Nope. They found a copy of the original sound disc. Sound disc? What was Frankenstein doing with a sound disc? They had synchronized tracks by then. So then I learned that Universal was still turning out sound discs, apparently for showings in theaters that still weren’t outfitted for the new sound movies. Not only Frankenstein, but a lot of their early horror flicks still used this technique. Forrest J. Ackerman apparently has quite a collection of them.
My question still stands about the early use of sound. Despite what Walloon says, I don’t think you can compare sound to 3D as a movie gimmick. I’m a big fan and proponent of 3D (as I’ve recently said, at length, in another thread), but even I have to admit that it’s pretty peripheral. So, when you come down to it, is color. But sound makes a huge difference in any performance. It makes an enormous difference in acting styles if you have to convey meaning, expression, and nuance without words. It makes a big difference to the director’s task, too. (For a imple, crude example, look at the huge and obvious shots of outsized gongs used in Metropolis and The Thief of Bagdad. You wouldn’t need those in a sound film – you’d simply have the sound of the gong.) People were used to dialogue in plays and stage shows – pantomime was a specialty and a comparative rarity.
With a technology like the phonograph ready at hand, I can’t believe that they didn’t take advantage of it. It would be limited to small audiences, but that would be a feature of the art, not something that prevented its exploitation.
So ---- was there a subculture of “non-amplified” sound films before the generally recognized advent of the “Talkies” in the late 1920s? Where would I even go to find out?
Aha!
Here’s an entire SITE devoted to such pre-talkie sound movies.
Edison’s company made nineteen sound movies in 1913! He had a Nickelodeon-like device with synchronized sound, and later they played sound movies before audiences:
Oh, yeah – and they apparently managed to find the original cylinder of that clip from The Celluloid Closet and synchronize it with the film clip – you can download it at the site above.
You misspelled “Verhoeven.”
And it wasn’t even Anny Ondra’s real voice. Acccording to Hitchcock, Ondra’s Czech accent was so thick that there was an English actress standing off-camera lip-synching her dialogue.
Take note, everyone, of the great (and always improving) film resource that is Turner Classic Movies.
Some BRILLIANT films coming up; I have like 30 hours of taping set up this next week alone.
Including, on Sunday I think it was (their site seems to be down right now), to commemorate the first release of their Turner Archive DVD imprint, the will be showing something like 7 or 8 hours of Lon Chaney films back to back. (Anyone watch the Tod Browning film, The Unknown, starring Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford, last Sunday? One of the most bizarre movie experiences I’ve ever had. And it was made in 1927!)
Not cut because of audiences. That line was censored upon the re-issue of Frankenstein in 1935, to coincide with the release of Bride of Frankenstein. The Motion Picture Production Code, although written in 1930, began to be enforced in late 1934, and included this prohibition: “Pointed profanity (this includes the words, God, Lord, Jesus, Christ—unless used reverently—Hell, S.O.B. damn, Gawd), or every other profane or vulgar expression, however used, is forbidden.” You’ll hear film afficionados talk about some movie being very “pre-Code”, and it’s surprising what Hollywood could get away with before 1934.
It was like the competition between Betamax and VHS, or Windows and Mac OS. In the early talkie era the studios made their films available in both sound-on-disc and sound-on-film versions for theaters that were outfitted for only one system. This duality lasted until 1932, when sound-on-film won. Some early talkies that are otherwise lost today because of the unstable nature of nitrate film, do survive as their soundtracks on disc.
You sound very wishful about this! No, there wasn’t any salon subculture of sound movies in the 1900s or 1910s. Without an amplification system that could fill a theater, sound movies were not economically feasible for professionals, and too mechanically complex for amateurs.
That having been said, I can point you to at least two series of sound movies made in that era. The first were a series of short, sound-on-disc films that Biograph made in 1901 in cooperation with the U.S. Dept. of Interior, for the Education Building at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York. The films showed students being instructed or performing at an Indian reservation school in Pennsylvania, and at schools in the District of Columbia.
The other series were 18 short, sound-on-disc music films made by the film company Gaumont in 1908, with song titles like Stupid Mr. Cupid, I’ve Taken Quite a Fancy to You, and A Lemon in the Garden of Love.
Walloon:
see my posts four and five above this
I’ve seen several of these—most, if not all, were fairy tales. In one of them, wee Shirley Mason plays The Queen of the Fairies and, as her sister Viola Dana recalled, her voice recorded for some reason as a booming bass baritone. I’ve also seen c1900 French sound films of music-hall artists Little Tich and Albert Chevalier. Never seen/heard The Divine Sarah, though . . .
My all-time favorite is the early 1920s sound-on-film short of a comic singing “Ma! He’s Makin’ Eyes At Me,” during which he squeezes a duck, causing it to quack on the word “Ma!” Inexplicably hilarious.
Eve:
Wonderfully bizarre!
Where did/can you see these?
I’ve seen the Edison nursery rhyme talkie from 1913 with Shirley Mason. Viola Dana saw a restoration from the 1970s that had the sound at the wrong speed, hence her sister’s low voice. A more recent restoration got the speed correct. The players were obviously miming to a previously made sound recording, hence I assume that the playback speed was correct back in 1913, too.
Gus Visser and his Singing Duck (1925), a sound test film by Theodore Case, was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry last year.
You can see clips from both of those films in the television documentary series Hollywood (1980), about the silent era. The last episode deals with the coming of sound. The series is available on VHS.
And about time, too! I would hate to think that future generations might be denied the sight (and sound) of a man squeezing a duck to the tune of “Ma! He’s Makin’ Eyes At Me!”
And about time, too! I would hate to think that future generations might be denied the sight (and sound) of a man squeezing a duck to the tune of “Ma! He’s Makin’ Eyes At Me!”
Eve:
Wonderfully bizarre!
Where did/can you see these?
OK, what is UP with the hamsters today?
Richard Gere?
Why? Is something missing? Has my comment on Al Jolson been forgotten? Will the sun rise tomorrow?