When did sound in film first show up?
Classical Hollywood cinema
The beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. To some, it began with "The Jazz Singer", which was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films, as sound was introduced to feature films. To others, the era began in 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended. Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960s adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, and biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films; Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years; Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount Pictures; and director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth Century Fox. Similarly, actors were mostly contract players. Film historians and critics note that it took about a decade for films to adapt to sound and return to the level of artistic quality of the silents, which it did in the late 1930s.
Musical film
The first Indian sound film, Ardeshir Irani's "Alam Ara" (1931), was a major commercial success. There was clearly a huge market for talkies and musicals; Bollywood and all the regional film industries quickly switched to sound filming.
Kinetoscope
The Kinetophone (aka Phonokinetoscope) was an early attempt by Edison and Dickson to create a sound-film system. Reports suggest that in July 1893, a Kinetoscope accompanied by a cylinder phonograph had been presented at the Chicago World's Fair. The first known movie made as a test of the Kinetophone was shot at Edison's New Jersey studio in late 1894 or early 1895, which is now referred to as The Dickson Experimental Sound Film; this film, along with a short film from 1913 called Nursery Favorites and a 1912 demonstration film, are the only surviving movies with live-recorded sound made for the Kinetophone. In March 1895, Edison offered the device for sale; involving no technological innovations, it was a Kinetoscope whose modified cabinet included an accompanying cylinder phonograph. Kinetoscope owners were also offered kits with which to retrofit their equipment. The first Kinetophone exhibitions appear to have taken place in April. Though a Library of Congress educational website states, "The picture and sound were made somewhat synchronous by connecting the two with a belt," this is incorrect. As historian David Robinson describes, "The Kinetophone...made no attempt at synchronization. The viewer listened through tubes to a phonograph concealed in the cabinet and performing approximately appropriate music or other sound." Historian Douglas Gomery concurs, "[Edison] did not try to synchronize sound and image." Leading production sound mixer Mark Ulano writes, "[O]nly 45 Kinetophones were made. They did NOT play synchronously other than the phonograph turned on when viewing and off when stopped." Though the surviving Dickson test involves live-recorded sound, certainly most, and probably all, of the films marketed for the Kinetophone were shot as silents, predominantly march or dance subjects; exhibitors could then choose from a variety of musical cylinders offering a rhythmic match. For example, three different cylinders with orchestral performances were proposed as accompaniments for "Carmencita": "Valse Santiago", "La Paloma", and "Alma-Danza Spagnola".
Eugene Augustin Lauste
He joined the American Biograph Company in 1896 and remained there for four years before moving to Brixton, England. In 1904 he prepared his first sound-on-film model. On August 11, 1906 he (along with Australian Robert R. Haines and Briton John S. Pletts) applied for a British patent; their application was granted patent No. 18057 in 1907 for "a process for recording and reproducing simultaneously the movements or motions of persons or objects and the sounds produced by them," i.e., a strip of 35 mm celluloid film containing both image frames and a sound strip. In 1911 he exhibited a sound film in the United States, possibly the first-ever American showing of a movie using sound-on-film technology. Before he could market his system more widely, though, World War I intervened.
George Groves (sound engineer)
George Robert Groves (13 December 1901 – 4 September 1976) was a film sound pioneer who played a significant role in developing the technology that brought sound to the silent screen. He is also credited as being Hollywood's first ‘sound man’; he was the recording engineer on the seminal Al Jolson picture, "The Jazz Singer" (1927), as well as many other early talkies. In a career with Warner Brothers that spanned 46 years, he rose to become their Director of Sound and won two Academy Awards.
Audio commentary
The first audio commentary was featured on the Criterion Collection release of the original "King Kong" movie, on laserdisc in December 1984. It featured film historian Ronald Haver and his first words were:
The idea for the commentary track arose in the film-to-tape transfer room when laserdisc producers, Peter Crown and Jennifer Scanlin of Romulus Productions, Inc., thrilled by Haver's incredible commentary, suggested to Bob Stein and Roger Smith that this material needed to be included on the disc. They played back the completed movie as Ron watched and ad libbed his comments.
Huwen op Bevel
"Huwen op Bevel" was released in 1931, although several sources list it as being from 1932. It screened in Batavia (now Jakarta) in August, reaching Medan in late September and Surabaya by mid-October. The film was advertised as having full sound, including music and singing. Later advertisements compared it with Tan's production, "Njai Dasima". It was advertised as the first sound film in the Indies and referred to as such by some later writings. Biran, however, writes that Krugers's earlier film "Karnadi Anemer Bangkong" featured sound.
Sound film
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before sound motion pictures were made commercially practical. Reliable synchronization was difficult to achieve with the early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate. Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures using the technology, which took place in 1923.
Dream Street (film)
The premiere engagement of the sound version of "Dream Street" took place on May 2, 1921 at Town Hall in New York City with Griffith's introduction. On May 15, the film reopened, now also with two other short sound sequences — Ralph Graves singing, and background noise in a scene showing a craps game. No other theaters could show the sound version of the film, since no other theaters had the Photokinema sound system installed.
List of early sound feature films (1926–1929)
This is a list of early pre-recorded sound and part talkie/ all talking feature films made in Hollywood and Europe during the transition to sound, between 1926-1929. During this time a variety of recording systems were used, including most notably sound on film formats such as Movietone and RCA Photophone, as well as sound on disc formats like Vitaphone for instance. This list includes film titles, release dates, production companies, audio type and its current archive status; denoting whether it exists, lost, incomplete, the film or audio elements exist only, as well as the number of discs extant for films recorded with Vitaphone soundtracks.
André Charlin
Charlin became involved in cinematography at a time when sound was starting to be added to motion pictures, and began to build equipment for synchronous sound playback.
At first this used 33 rpm records.
The first "talkies" appeared in 1931, and Charlin began working on ways to improve sound quality through better recording technology.
He founded a recording studio in 1933 that produced the sound tracks for many prewar movies, including in 1934 a stereo sound track for Abel Gance's 1927 silent movie "Napoléon".
He moved into techniques for film projection with a 1935 patent for "Cyclope" focussing and a 1938 patent for "Actua Colour" to project colour films which was used in over 1,000 movie theatres by 1948. 
During World War II he turned to making dynamos to power the lamps of bicycles.
In 1949 Charlin stopped producing cinema equipment and sold all his related patents to Philips of the Netherlands.
Early in the 1950s Radio-Cinema, a subsidiary of the Compagnie générale de la télégraphie sans fil, acquired Charlin' company.
Stereophonic sound
However, beginning in 1957, films recorded in stereo (except for those shown in Cinerama or Todd-AO) carried an alternate mono track for theatres not ready or willing to re-equip for stereo. From then until about 1975, when Dolby Stereo was used for the first time in films, most motion pictures—even some from which stereophonic soundtrack albums were made, such as Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet"—were still released in monaural sound, stereo being reserved almost exclusively for expensive musicals such as "West Side Story", "My Fair Lady", or "Camelot"; epics such as "Ben-Hur" or "Cleopatra". Stereo was also reserved for dramas with a strong reliance on sound effects or music, such as "The Graduate", with its Simon and Garfunkel score.
History of film technology
Initially, there were technical difficulties in synchronizing images with sound. However, there was still significant interest in motion pictures for films to be produced without sound. The era from the 1890s to the late 1920s, is commonly referred to as the silent era of film. To enhance the viewers' experience, silent films were commonly accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects and even commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist. In most countries, intertitles came to be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film.
History of film technology
During late 1927, Warners released "The Jazz Singer", which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods such as Fox Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking pictures", or "talkies", were the future. A lot of attempts were made before the success of "The Jazz Singer", that can be seen in the List of film sound systems.
The Sound of Music (film)
The film has been released on VHS, LaserDisc, and DVD numerous times. The first DVD version was released on August 29, 2000 to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the film's release. The film is often included in box sets with other Rodgers & Hammerstein film adaptations. A 40th anniversary DVD, with "making of" documentaries and special features, was released on November 15, 2005. The film made its debut issue on Blu-ray Disc on November 2, 2010, for its 45th anniversary. For the Blu-ray release, the original 70 mm negatives were rescanned at 8K resolution, then restored and remastered at 4K resolution for the transfer to Blu-ray, giving the most detailed copy of the film seen thus far. On March 10, 2015, Fox Home Entertainment released "The Sound of Music 50th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition"—a five-disc set featuring thirteen hours of bonus features, including a new documentary, "The Sound of a City: Julie Andrews Returns to Salzburg". A March 2015 episode of ABC's 20/20 entitled "The Untold Story of the Sound of Music" featured a preview of the documentary and interviews by Diane Sawyer.
Roaring Twenties
In 1923, inventor Lee de Forest at Phonofilm released a number of short films with sound. Meanwhile, inventor Theodore Case developed the Movietone sound system and sold the rights to the film studio, Fox Film. In 1926, the Vitaphone sound system was introduced. The feature film "Don Juan" (1926) was the first feature-length film to use the Vitaphone sound system with a synchronized musical score and sound effects, though it had no spoken dialogue. The film was released by the film studio Warner Bros. In October 1927, the sound film "The Jazz Singer" (1927) turned out to be a smash box office success. It was innovative for its use of sound. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying on a score and effects. When the movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. The "natural" sounds of the settings were also audible. The film's profits were proof enough to the film industry that the technology was worth investing in.
Optical sound
Optical sound is a means of storing sound recordings on transparent film. Originally developed for military purposes, the technology first saw widespread use in the 1920s as a sound-on-film format for motion pictures. Optical sound eventually superseded all of other sound film technologies until the advent of digital sound became the standard in cinema projection booths. Optical sound has also been used for multitrack recording and for creating effects in some musical synthesizers.
Njai Dasima (1932 film)
This was the first sound film released by Tan's, but far from the first in the Indies. The earliest sound films released in the Indies, "Fox Movietone Follies of 1929" and "The Rainbow Man", were both shown in 1929. The following year, a domestic part-talkie, G. Krugers' "Karnadi Anemer Bangkong", was also released, becoming the first domestic sound film. Two other directors had followed with full-talkies in 1931: The Teng Chun with "Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang" and the Wong brothers with "Indonesia Malaise". In order to ensure the quality of the sound, Tan's hired Krugers and his single-system camera to do the cinematography and sound direction for this black-and-white film.
Foley (filmmaking)
What is now called Foley originated as sound effects added to live broadcasts of radio drama from radio studios around the world in the early 1920s. Phonograph recordings of the era were not of sufficient quality or flexibility to faithfully reproduce most sound effects on cue, so a sound effects person had to create all sounds for radio plays live. Jack Donovan Foley started working with Universal Studios in 1914 during the silent movie era. When Warner studios released "The Jazz Singer", its first film to include sound, Universal knew it needed to stay competitive and called for any employees who had radio experience to come forward. Foley became part of the sound crew that turned Universal's then-upcoming "silent" musical "Show Boat" into a musical. Because microphones of the time could not pick up more than dialogue, other sounds had to be added in after the film was shot. Foley and his small crew projected the film on a screen while recording a single track of audio that captured their live sound effects. Their timing had to be perfect, so that footsteps and closing doors synchronized with the actors' motions in the film. Jack Foley created sounds for films until his death in 1967. His basic methods are still used today.
Atlantic (film)
"Atlantic" was one of the first British films made with the soundtrack optically recorded on the film (sound-on-film), and was Germany's first sound movie feature. In England, it was released in both sound and silent prints. The French version was the fourth French feature with sound-on-film.
The Sound (film)
The eponymous "sound" in the film refers to infrasound, which plays a large role in the film.Principal photography on the film began in early May 2015 in Toronto.
Sound film
The first successful European dramatic talkie was the all-British "Blackmail". Directed by twenty-nine-year-old Alfred Hitchcock, the movie had its London debut June 21, 1929. Originally shot as a silent, "Blackmail" was restaged to include dialogue sequences, along with a score and sound effects, before its premiere. A British International Pictures (BIP) production, it was recorded on RCA Photophone, General Electric having bought a share of AEG so they could access the Tobis-Klangfilm markets. "Blackmail" was a substantial hit; critical response was also positive—notorious curmudgeon Hugh Castle, for example, called it "perhaps the most intelligent mixture of sound and silence we have yet seen."
Roaring Twenties
At the beginning of the decade, films were silent and colorless. In 1922, the first all-color feature, "The Toll of the Sea", was released. In 1926, Warner Bros. released "Don Juan", the first feature with sound effects and music. In 1927, Warner released "The Jazz Singer", the first sound feature to include limited talking sequences.
Sound film
Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.' "The Jazz Singer" premiered. It was a smash box office success for the mid-level studio, earning a total of $2.625 million in the United States and abroad, almost a million dollars more than the previous record for a Warners film. Produced with the Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying, like "Sunrise" and "Don Juan", on a score and effects. When the movie's star, Al Jolson, sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience; the other an exchange between him and his mother. The "natural" sounds of the settings were also audible. Though the success of "The Jazz Singer" was due largely to Jolson, already established as one of U.S. biggest music stars, and its limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film (let alone the "first"), the movie's profits were proof enough to the industry that the technology was worth investing in.
Mid-Atlantic accent
American cinema began in the early 1900s in New York City and Philadelphia before becoming largely transplanted to Los Angeles beginning in the mid-1910s. With the evolution of talkies in the late 1920s, a voice was first heard in motion pictures. It was then that the majority of audiences first heard Hollywood actors speaking predominantly in the elevated stage pronunciation of the Mid-Atlantic accent. Many adopted it starting out in the theatre, and others simply affected it to help their careers on and off in films.
Dolby Stereo
The original involvement by Dolby Labs in movie sound was when film studios used Dolby A type noise reduction on studio magnetic film recordings. The first film to use Dolby noise reduction throughout the production process was "A Clockwork Orange", though much of the benefit was lost when it was released with a standard "Academy" optical soundtrack. This led to a proposal from Dolby that A type noise reduction be applied to the optical soundtrack on release prints.
Stereophonic sound
Motion picture theatres, however, are where the real introduction of stereophonic sound to the public occurred. Amid great fanfare, Stereo sound was officially proven commercially viable for the public on September 30, 1952 with the release of a Cinerama demonstration film by Lowell Thomas and Mike Todd titled "This is Cinerama". The format was a spectacular widescreen process featuring three separate 35mm motion picture films (plus a separate sound film) running in synchronization with one another at 26 fps, adding one picture panel each to the viewer's left and right at 45 degree angles, in addition to the usual front and center panel, creating a truly immersive panoramic visual experience, comparable in some ways to today's curved screen IMAX OMNI.
Sound film
The first sound feature film to receive near-universal critical approbation was "Der Blaue Engel" ("The Blue Angel"); premiering on April 1, 1930, it was directed by Josef von Sternberg in both German and English versions for Berlin's UFA studio. The first American talkie to be widely honored was "All Quiet on the Western Front", directed by Lewis Milestone, which premiered April 21. The other internationally acclaimed sound drama of the year was "Westfront 1918", directed by G. W. Pabst for Nero-Film of Berlin. Historian Anton Kaes points to it as an example of "the new verisimilitude [that] rendered silent cinema's former emphasis on the hypnotic gaze and the symbolism of light and shadow, as well as its preference for allegorical characters, anachronistic." Cultural historians consider the French "L'Âge d'Or", directed by Luis Buñuel, which appeared late in 1930, to be of great aesthetic import; at the time, its erotic, blasphemous, anti-bourgeois content caused a scandal. Swiftly banned by Paris police chief Jean Chiappe, it was unavailable for fifty years. The earliest sound movie now acknowledged by most film historians as a masterpiece is Nero-Film's "M", directed by Fritz Lang, which premiered May 11, 1931. As described by Roger Ebert, "Many early talkies felt they had to talk all the time, but Lang allows his camera to prowl through the streets and dives, providing a rat's-eye view."
"Talking film is as little needed as a singing book." Such was the blunt proclamation of critic Viktor Shklovsky, one of the leaders of the Russian formalist movement, in 1927. While some regarded sound as irreconcilable with film art, others saw it as opening a new field of creative opportunity. The following year, a group of Soviet filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein, proclaimed that the use of image and sound in juxtaposition, the so-called contrapuntal method, would raise the cinema to "...unprecedented power and cultural height. Such a method for constructing the sound-film will not confine it to a national market, as must happen with the photographing of plays, but will give a greater possibility than ever before for the circulation throughout the world of a filmically expressed idea." So far as one segment of the audience was concerned, however, the introduction of sound brought a virtual end to such circulation: Elizabeth C. Hamilton writes, "Silent films offered people who were deaf a rare opportunity to participate in a public discourse, cinema, on equal terms with hearing people. The emergence of sound film effectively separated deaf from hearing audience members once again."
Lights of New York (1928 film)
Lights of New York is a 1928 American crime drama film starring Helene Costello, Cullen Landis and Eugene Pallette, and directed by Bryan Foy. Filmed in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc sound system, it is the first all-talking full-length feature film, released by Warner Bros., who had introduced the first feature-length film with synchronized sound "Don Juan (1926 film)" two years earlier. The film, which cost $23,000 to produce ("B" picture), grossed over $1,000,000. The enthusiasm with which audiences greeted the talkies was so great that by the end of 1929, Hollywood was producing sound films exclusively.
Sound film
One of the first commercial films to take full advantage of the new opportunities provided by recorded sound was "Le Million", directed by René Clair and produced by Tobis's French division. Premiering in Paris in April 1931 and New York a month later, the picture was both a critical and popular success. A musical comedy with a barebones plot, it is memorable for its formal accomplishments, in particular, its emphatically artificial treatment of sound. As described by scholar Donald Crafton,
Feature film
In 1927, Warner Bros. released the first feature-length film with sound, "The Jazz Singer", whose audio track was recorded with a proprietary technology called Vitaphone. The film's success persuaded other studios to go to the considerable expense of adding microphones to their sets, and scramble to start producing their own "talkies".
Sound film
A few innovative commercial directors immediately saw the ways in which sound could be employed as an integral part of cinematic storytelling, beyond the obvious function of recording speech. In "Blackmail", Hitchcock manipulated the reproduction of a character's monologue so the word "knife" would leap out from a blurry stream of sound, reflecting the subjective impression of the protagonist, who is desperate to conceal her involvement in a fatal stabbing. In his first film, the Paramount "Applause" (1929), Rouben Mamoulian created the illusion of acoustic depth by varying the volume of ambient sound in proportion to the distance of shots. At a certain point, Mamoulian wanted the audience to hear one character singing at the same time as another prays; according to the director, "They said we couldn't record the two things—the song and the prayer—on one mike and one channel. So I said to the sound man, 'Why not use two mikes and two channels and combine the two tracks in printing?'" Such methods would eventually become standard procedure in popular filmmaking.
Cinema of South Africa
"", the first Afrikaans-language sound film, was released in 1931. Subsequent sound releases such as "Die Wildsboudjie" (1948), a 1949 "Sarie Marais" remake, and "Daar doer in die bosveld" (1950) continued to cater primarily to white, Afrikaans-speaking audiences.
Sound film
In 1913, Edison introduced a new cylinder-based synch-sound apparatus known, just like his 1895 system, as the Kinetophone; instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the Kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto a screen. The phonograph was connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization. However, conditions were rarely ideal, and the new, improved Kinetophone was retired after little more than a year. By the mid-1910s, the groundswell in commercial sound motion picture exhibition had subsided. Beginning in 1914, "The Photo-Drama of Creation", promoting Jehovah's Witnesses' conception of mankind's genesis, was screened around the United States: eight hours worth of projected visuals involving both slides and live action were synchronized with separately recorded lectures and musical performances played back on phonograph.
Blackmail (1929 film)
"Blackmail", marketed as one of Britain's earliest "all-talkie" feature films, was recorded in the RCA Photophone sound-on-film process. (The first U.S. all-talking film, "Lights of New York", was released in July 1928 by Warner Brothers in their Vitaphone sound-on-disc process.) The film was shot at British and Dominions Imperial Studios soundstage in Borehamwood, the first purpose-built sound studio in Europe.
René Clair
Clair was initially sceptical about the introduction of sound to films, and called it "an unnatural creation". He then realised the creative possibilities that it offered, particularly, in his view, if the soundtrack was not used realistically; words and pictures need not, and indeed should not, be tied together in a clumsy duplication of information; dialogue did not always need to be heard. Between 1930 and 1933, Clair explored these ideas in his first four sound films, starting with "Sous les toits de Paris" ("Under the Roofs of Paris"); this was followed by "Le Million" (1931), "À nous la liberté" (1931), and "Quatorze juillet" ("Bastille Day") (1933). All of these films portrayed an affectionate and idealized view of working class life, and they did much to create a popular romantic image of Paris which was seen around the world. These films were made at the Epinay Studios for Films Sonores Tobis, a French subsidiary of the German-owned Tobis company.
Roaring Twenties
In 1928, the film studios Famous Players-Lasky (later known as Paramount Pictures), First National Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Universal Studios signed an agreement with Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI) for the conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well. Also in 1928, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) marketed a new sound system, the RCA Photophone system. RCA offered the rights to its system to the subsidiary RKO Pictures. Warner Bros. continued releasing a few films with live dialogue, though only in a few scenes. It finally released "Lights of New York" (1928), the first all-talking full-length feature film. The animated short film "Dinner Time" (1928) by the Van Beuren Studios was among the first animated sound films. It was followed a few months later by the animated short film "Steamboat Willie" (1928), the first sound film by the Walt Disney Animation Studios. It was the first commercially successful animated short film and introduced the character Mickey Mouse."Steamboat Willie" was the first cartoon to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons. It became the most popular cartoon of its day.
The Sound of Music (film)
The first American television transmission of "The Sound of Music" was on February 29, 1976 on ABC, which paid $15 million for a one-time only broadcast that became one of the top-rated films ever shown on television to that point. The movie was not shown again until NBC acquired the broadcast rights and telecast the film on February 11, 1979. NBC continued to air the film annually for twenty years. During most of its run on NBC, the film was heavily edited to fit a three-hour time slot—approximately 140 minutes without commercials. The thirty minutes edited out of the original film included portions of the "Morning Hymn and Alleluia" sung by the nuns, part of the dialogue between Mother Abbess and Maria in the abbey, part of Liesl and Rolfe's dialogue preceding "Sixteen Going on Seventeen", Liesl's verse of "Edelweiss" sung with the Captain, the Captain and Baroness waltzing at the party, and minor dialogue cuts within existing scenes.
King Vidor
Vidor's first sound film was "Hallelujah", a groundbreaking film featuring an African-American cast. He had no difficulty adjusting to sound and he continued making feature films until the late 1950s. Some of his better known sound films include "Stella Dallas", "Our Daily Bread", "The Citadel", "Duel in the Sun", "The Fountainhead", and "War and Peace". He directed the Kansas sequences in "The Wizard of Oz" (including "Over the Rainbow" and the twister) when director Victor Fleming had to replace George Cukor on "Gone with the Wind", but did not receive screen credit.
The X-Files
Snow was tasked with composing the score for both "The X-Files" films. The films marked the first appearance of real orchestral instruments; previous music had been crafted by Snow using digitally sampled instrument sounds. Snow's soundtrack for the first film, "", was released in 1998. For the second film, Snow recorded with the Hollywood Studio Symphony in May 2008 at the Newman Scoring Stage at 20th Century Fox in Century City. UNKLE recorded a new version of the theme music for the end credits. Some of the unusual sounds were created by a variation of silly putty and dimes tucked into piano strings. Snow commented that the fast percussion featured in some tracks was inspired by the track "Prospectors Quartet" from the "There Will Be Blood" soundtrack. The soundtrack score, "", was released in 2008.
Stereophonic sound
Bell Laboratories gave a demonstration of three-channel stereophonic sound on April 27, 1933, with a live transmission of the Philadelphia Orchestra from Philadelphia to Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. over multiple Class A telephone lines. Leopold Stokowski, normally the orchestra's conductor, was present in Constitution Hall to control the sound mix. Five years later, the same system would be expanded onto multi-channel film recording and used from the concert hall in Philadelphia to the recording labs at Bell Labs in New Jersey in order to record Walt Disney's "Fantasia" (1940) in what Disney called Fantasound.
Later that same year, Bell Labs also demonstrated binaural sound, at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 using a dummy with microphones instead of ears, . The two signals were sent out over separate AM station bands.
Sound design
The terms "sound design" and "sound designer" began to be used in the motion picture industry in 1969. At that time, The title of "Sound Designer" was first granted to Walter Murch by Francis Ford Coppola in recognition for Murch's contributions to the film The Rain People. The original meaning of the title "Sound Designer", as established by Coppola and Murch, was "an individual ultimately responsible for all aspects of a film's audio track, from the dialogue and sound effects recording to the re-recording (mix) of the final track". The term "sound designer" has replaced monikers like "supervising sound editor" or "re-recording mixer" for what was essentially the same position: the head designer of the final sound track. Editors and mixers like Murray Spivack ("King Kong"), George Groves ("The Jazz Singer"), James G. Stewart ("Citizen Kane"), and Carl Faulkner ("Journey to the Center of the Earth") served in this capacity during Hollywood's studio era, and are generally considered to be sound designers by a different name.
Sound film
During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with the United States. Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West. It appears that the first Japanese sound film, "Reimai" ("Dawn"), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system. Using the sound-on-disc Minatoki system, the leading Nikkatsu studio produced a pair of talkies in 1929: "Taii no musume" ("The Captain's Daughter") and "Furusato" ("Hometown"), the latter directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. The rival Shochiku studio began the successful production of sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called Tsuchibashi. Two years later, however, more than 80 percent of movies made in the country were still silents. Two of the country's leading directors, Mikio Naruse and Yasujirō Ozu, did not make their first sound films until 1935 and 1936, respectively. As late as 1938, over a third of all movies produced in Japan were shot without dialogue.
Pál Jávor (actor)
The opportunity to appear in movies first came in 1929, when he starred in "Csak egy kislány van a világon", what was to be the last Hungarian silent film. Ironically, this was also the first one to feature voice, as technicians got hold of the technology by the last days of shooting. This allowed Jávor to sing a song in one of the scenes, which, combined with the charm and temperament that became his later trademark, secured him firm employment in the country's waking film industry. He took the lead role in the first Hungarian movie with sound, "Kék Bálvány", and a smaller one in the second, "Hyppolit, a lakáj", which became the first real hit among the public. Jávor quickly became an idol of the 30s, appearing in numerous movies, but also remained popular on stage. The sudden fame weighed heavily on the young actor, leading to him returning to alcohol, and to frequent clashes with co-workers and the then-powerful newspaper owners, resulting in numerous scandals. His life was eased when he met and, in 1934, married the Jewish Olga Landesmann, a widow with two children, who provided him with a welcoming home and family.
The Dickson Experimental Sound Film
The Dickson Experimental Sound Film is a film made by William Dickson in late 1894 or early 1895. It is the first known film with live-recorded sound and appears to be the first motion picture made for the Kinetophone, the proto-sound-film system developed by Dickson and Thomas Edison. (The Kinetophone, consisting of a Kinetoscope accompanied by a cylinder-playing phonograph, was not a true sound-film system, for there was no attempt to synchronize picture and sound throughout playback.) The film was produced at the "Black Maria", Edison's New Jersey film studio. There is no evidence that it was ever exhibited in its original format. Newly digitized and restored, it is the only surviving Kinetophone film with live-recorded sound.
Opening credits
The first sound film to begin without any opening credits was Walt Disney's "Fantasia", released in 1940. In the film's general release, a title card and the credit "Color by Technicolor" were spliced onto the beginning of the film, but otherwise there were no credits, although closing credits were added to the 1990 re-release and are on the videocassette. This general release version has been the one most often seen by audiences. In the roadshow version of the film, unseen by most audiences until its DVD release, the title card is seen only at the halfway point of the film, as a cue that the intermission is about to begin. The intermission was omitted in the general release version.
Triumph Cinema
Vigo Olsen died in August 1929, and the property passed to his widow, Ida Elizabeth Olsen, in April 1931. Around this time Mrs Olsen raised a further mortgage on the property from EA Burmester, possibly to purchase sound equipment for the theatre. Sound movies were introduced in 1927 with Warner Brothers' production of The Jazz Singer, and over the next few years motion picture exhibitors either converted their theatres to sound or went out of business, as demand for the "talkies" swept the world.
The Jazz Singer
While many earlier sound films had dialogue, all were short subjects. D. W. Griffith's feature "Dream Street" (1921) was shown in New York with a single singing sequence and crowd noises, using the sound-on-disc system Photokinema. The film was preceded by a program of sound shorts, including a sequence with Griffith speaking directly to the audience, but the feature itself had no talking scenes. On April 15, 1923, Lee De Forest introduced the sound-on-film system Phonofilm, which had synchronized sound and dialogue, but the sound quality was poor, and the films produced in this process were short films only.
Englert Theatre
Englert Theatre screened the first talkie motion picture displayed in Iowa City on June 9, 1928, of a first run (film) titled "The Jazz Singer" featuring Al Jolson, the first sound film to be originally presented in that format. It had been premiered in New York City in October 1927. Early road show movies presented at the Englert such as "The Covered Wagon" (1923) and "All Quiet on the Western Front (1930 film)" were accompanied by up to 60-piece orchestras.
Economy of California
With Thomas Edison's invention of the Kinetoscope (early movie camera) in 1894, California would become a leader when "talkies" were introduced in the sound film movie industry. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the introduction of the Vitaphone system. After the release of "The Jazz Singer" in 1927, "talkies" became more and more commonplace. Within a decade, popular widespread production of silent films had ceased. Cheap land, good year-round climate and large natural spaces prompted the growing film industry to begin migrating to Southern California in the early part of the 20th century. The film patent wars of the early 20th century actually led to the spread of film companies across the U.S. Many worked with equipment for which they did not own the patent rights, and thus filming in New York was "dangerous"; it was too close to Edison's company headquarters, and to his agents which the company sent out to seize "illegal" cameras. By 1912, most major film companies had set up movie production facilities in Southern California near or in Los Angeles because of the region's favorable year-round weather and the rapidly growing supply of "talent" both before and behind the cameras. Since the 1920s California continues to be a major U.S. center for motion-picture shows, television shows, cartoons, and related entertainment industries, especially in Hollywood and Burbank areas.
History of film
This awkward period was fairly short-lived. 1929 was a watershed year: William Wellman with "Chinatown Nights" and "The Man I Love", Rouben Mamoulian with "Applause", Alfred Hitchcock with "Blackmail" (Britain's first sound feature), were among the directors to bring greater fluidity to talkies and experiment with the expressive use of sound (Eyman, 1997). In this, they both benefited from, and pushed further, technical advances in microphones and cameras, and capabilities for editing and post-synchronizing sound (rather than recording all sound directly at the time of filming).
Sound films emphasized black history and benefited different genres more so than silents did. Most obviously, the musical film was born; the first classic-style Hollywood musical was "The Broadway Melody" (1929) and the form would find its first major creator in choreographer/director Busby Berkeley ("42nd Street", 1933, "Dames", 1934). In France, avant-garde director René Clair made surreal use of song and dance in comedies like "Under the Roofs of Paris" (1930) and "Le Million" (1931). Universal Pictures begin releasing gothic horror films like "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" (both 1931). In 1933, RKO Pictures released Merian C. Cooper's classic "giant monster" film "King Kong". The trend thrived best in India, where the influence of the country's traditional song-and-dance drama made the musical the basic form of most sound films (Cook, 1990); virtually unnoticed by the Western world for decades, this Indian popular cinema would nevertheless become the world's most prolific. ("See also Bollywood.")
Phonoscène
The Phonoscène was a forerunner of sound film. It combined a chronophone sound recording with a chronograph film shot with actors lip-synching to the sound recording. The recording and film were synchronized by a mechanism patented by Léon Gaumont in 1902. The first Phonoscènes were presented by Gaumont in 1902 in France.
3D film
April 1953 saw two groundbreaking features in 3D: Columbia's "Man in the Dark" and Warner Bros. "House of Wax", the first 3D feature with stereophonic sound. "House of Wax", outside of Cinerama, was the first time many American audiences heard recorded stereophonic sound. It was also the film that typecast Vincent Price as a horror star as well as the "King of 3-D" after he became the actor to star in the most 3D features (the others were "The Mad Magician", "Dangerous Mission", and "Son of Sinbad"). The success of these two films proved that major studios now had a method of getting filmgoers back into theaters and away from television sets, which were causing a steady decline in attendance.
Dinner Time (film)
"Dinner Time" was one of the first publicly shown sound-on-film cartoons. It was premiered in New York City on 1 September 1928 and released by Pathé Exchange on 14 October 1928, a month before Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie", which premiered on 18 November 1928 at the 79th Street Theater in New York City. "Dinner Time", however, was not successful with audiences and Disney's film would go on to be widely touted as the first synchronized sound cartoon.
Film industry
"Pundalik" ("Shree Pundalik") (1912), by Dadasaheb Torne alias Rama Chandra Gopal, and "Raja Harishchandra" (1913), by Dadasaheb Phalke, were the first and second silent feature films respectively made in India. By the 1930s the industry was producing more than 200 films per annum. The first Indian sound film, Ardeshir Irani's "Alam Ara" (1931), was a major commercial success. There was clearly a huge market for talkies and musicals; Bollywood and all the regional film industries quickly switched to sound filming. "Joymoti (1935 film)" by Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla was the first Indian dubbed film, released in Calcutta on 10 March 1935. Till then, all dialogues of all talkies were had to be recorded at locations during the shooting of the film. Through "Joymoti (1935 film)", dubbing technology was successfully introduced to Indian cinema by Assamese filmmaker Jyoti Prasad Agarwalla.
The Sound of Music (film)
In 1966, American Express created the first "Sound of Music" guided tour in Salzburg. Since 1972, Panorama Tours has been the leading "Sound of Music" bus tour company in the city, taking approximately 50,000 tourists a year to various film locations in Salzburg and the surrounding region. The first "Sing-along Sound of Music" revival screening was at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 1999, leading to a successful run at the Prince Charles Cinema which is ongoing as of 2018. During the screenings, audience members are often dressed as nuns and von Trapp children and are encouraged to sing along to lyrics superimposed on the screen. In July 2000, "Sing-along Sound of Music" shows opened in Boston and Austin, Texas. Some audience members dressed up as cast members and interacted with the action shown on the screen. The film began a successful run at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City in September 2000, with the opening attended by cast members Charmian Carr (Liesl), Daniel Truhitte (Rolfe), and Kym Karath (Gretl). "Sing-along Sound of Music" screenings have since become an international phenomenon.
Sound film
Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to the popularity of its sound films, the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. Paramount, the industry leader, put out its first talkie in late September, "Beggars of Life"; though it had just a few lines of dialogue, it demonstrated the studio's recognition of the new medium's power. "Interference", Paramount's first all-talker, debuted in November. The process known as "goat glanding" briefly became widespread: soundtracks, sometimes including a smatter of post-dubbed dialogue or song, were added to movies that had been shot, and in some cases released, as silents. A few minutes of singing could qualify such a newly endowed film as a "musical." (Griffith's "Dream Street" had essentially been a "goat gland.") Expectations swiftly changed, and the sound "fad" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929. In February 1929, sixteen months after "The Jazz Singer"'s debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight studios that would be known as "majors" during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first part-talking feature, "Lone Wolf's Daughter". In late May, the first all-color, all-talking feature, Warner Bros.' "On with the Show!", premiered.
Joan Crawford
After the release of "The Jazz Singer" in 1927—the first feature-length film with some audible dialog—sound films, or talkies, as they became nicknamed, were all the rage. The transition from silent to sound panicked many, if not all, involved with the film industry; many silent film stars found themselves unemployable because of their undesirable voices and hard-to-understand accents, or simply because of their refusal to make the transition to talkies.
Phoenix Cinema
In 1924, the cinema's name changed to the 'Coliseum'. In 1925, the cinema was sold to Home Counties Theatres Ltd, which also owned the Athenaeum Picture Playhouse and the Summerland Cinema, both in Muswell Hill. At this time, the typical programme was silent movies accompanied by live music, plus variety acts such as singers, magicians and comedians. But in 1928, British cinema went through a huge transformation when the first sound film, "The Jazz Singer", featuring the voice of the film's star Al Jolson, premiered in the Piccadilly Theatre, London . Cinemas across London started the transition to sound and on 22 July 1929 this cinema was the first in the area to show a sound film, screening Al Jolson's "The Singing Fool".
Raquel Meller
The sight and sound of Meller were captured for the Fox Movietone sound system, first demonstrated to the public at the Sam H. Harris Theatre in New York City on 21 January 1927. The clip, not quite synchronized, was shown by a movie projector equipped to play sound-on-film, and preceded the feature film "What Price Glory?" originally released by Fox in November 1926.
Live event support
In 1935, 16 mm Kodachrome film projectors added the first fully animated visual reinforcement to live events.A sound reinforcement system is professional audio, was first developed for movie theatres in 1927 when the first ever talking picture was released, called "The Jazz Singer". Movie theatre sound was greatly improved in 1937 when the Shearer Horn system debuted. One of the first large-scale outdoor public address systems was at 1939 New York World's Fair.
Film score
Before the age of recorded sound in motion pictures, efforts were taken to provide suitable music for films, usually through the services of an in-house pianist or organist, and, in some cases, entire orchestras, typically given cue sheets as a guide. A pianist was present to perform at the Lumiere brothers' first film screening in 1895. In 1914, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company sent full-length scores by Louis F. Gottschalk for their films. Other examples of this include Victor Herbert's score in 1915 to "The Fall of a Nation" (a sequel to "The Birth of a Nation") and Camille Saint-Saëns' music for "The Assassination of the Duke of Guise" in 1908. It was preceded by Nathaniel D. Mann's score for "The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays" by four months, but that was a mixture of interrelated stage and film performance in the tradition of old magic lantern shows. Most accompaniments at this time, these examples notwithstanding, comprised pieces by famous composers, also including studies. These were often used to form catalogues of photoplay music, which had different subsections broken down by 'mood' and genre: dark, sad, suspense, action, chase, etc.
Cinema of Germany
The arrival of sound at the very end of the 1920s, produced a final artistic flourish of German film before the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933. As early as 1918, three inventors came up with the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film system and tried to introduce it to the industry between 1922 and 1926. UFA showed an interest, but possibly due to financial difficulties, never made a sound film. But in the late 1920s, sound production and distribution were starting to be adopted by the German film industry and by 1932 Germany had 3,800 cinemas equipped to play sound films. The first filmmakers who experimented with the new technology often shot the film in several versions, using several soundtracks in different languages. The film "The Blue angel" (1930), directed by the Austrian Josef von Sternberg and produced by Erich Pommer, was also shot in two versions - German and English, with a different supporting cast in each version. It is considered to be Germany's first "talkie" and will always be remembered as the film that made an international superstar of its lead actress Marlene Dietrich. Other notable early sound films, all from 1931, include Jutzi's adaptation to Alfred Döblin's novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz", Pabst's Bertolt Brecht adaptation "The Threepenny Opera" and Lang's "M," as well as Hochbaum's "Raid in St. Pauli" (1932). Brecht was also one of the creators of the explicitly communist film "Kuhle Wampe" (1932), which was banned soon after its release.
William Kennedy Dickson
Dickson was the first to direct and likely star in a film with live recording. In 1894, he directed "The Dickson Experimental Sound Film". A man (likely Dickson) played "The Song of the Cabin Boy" on the violin into a megaphone used for a partially off-camera phonograph. The film was the first to use the Kinetophone, the first device used in the earliest sound films.
Once Upon a Time in the West
Except for about a minute of the "Judgment" motif, before Harmonica kills the three outlaws, no soundtrack music is played until at the end of the second scene, when Henry Fonda makes his first entry. During the beginning of the film, Leone instead uses a number of "natural sounds", for instance a turning wheel in the wind, sound of a train, grasshoppers, shotguns while hunting, wings of pigeons, etc., in addition to the diegetic sound of the harmonica.
History of music in Paris
The arrival in France of the first sound film, "The Jazz Singer" in 1927 caused a revolution in the French movie business, and was quickly followed by the production of French film musicals at the studios just outside Paris. New French films featured the singing talents of Jean Gabin ("Pépé le Moko", "Cœur de lilas"), and Danielle Darrieux ("La crise est finis", "Mon cœur t'appelle", "Un mauves garçon"), Maurice Chevalier et Claudette Colbert ("La Chanson de Paris") both made successful careers in Hollywood; Colbert remained in the U.S., but Chevalier returned to Paris and continued his singing career on the Paris music hall stage. Music hall singers, including Fernandel, Frehel and Josephine Baker, began making musical films. The 1934 musical film "Zouzou", with Jean Gabin and Josephine Baker, was the first film to star a black actress. The French music industry was born, as movie studios merged with record companies and used films to promote records. The route to success for Paris singers became the recording and film.
French comedy films
When the sound entered cinema in 1927, comedy films returned to popularity, due to dialogue now being available for usage.
Sound film
On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with a talkie: "G'schichten aus der Steiermark" ("Stories from Styria"), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film production. On September 30, the first entirely German-made feature-length dramatic talkie, "Das Land ohne Frauen" ("Land Without Women"), premiered. A Tobis Filmkunst production, about one-quarter of the movie contained dialogue, which was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response was underwhelming. Sweden's first talkie, "Konstgjorda Svensson" ("Artificial Svensson"), premiered on October 14. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film came out with "Le Collier de la reine" ("The Queen's Necklace"), shot at the Épinay studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French feature. On October 31, "Les Trois masques" debuted; a Pathé-Natan film, it is generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot, like "Blackmail", at the Elstree studio, just outside London. The production company had contracted with RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest facility with the system. The Braunberger-Richebé talkie "La Route est belle", also shot at Elstree, followed a few weeks later.
Surround sound
The first documented use of surround sound was in 1940, for the Disney studio's animated film "Fantasia". Walt Disney was inspired by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's operatic piece "Flight of the Bumblebee" to have a bumblebee featured in his musical "Fantasia" and also sound as if it was flying in all parts of the theatre. The initial multichannel audio application was called 'Fantasound', comprising three audio channels and speakers. The sound was diffused throughout the cinema, controlled by an engineer using some 54 loudspeakers. The surround sound was achieved using the sum and the difference of the phase of the sound. However, this experimental use of surround sound was excluded from the film in later showings. In 1952, "surround sound" successfully reappeared with the film "This is Cinerama", using discrete seven-channel sound, and the race to develop other surround sound methods took off.
Acoustic coupler
An acoustic coupler is prominently shown early in the 1983 film "WarGames", when character David Lightman (depicted by actor Matthew Broderick) places a telephone handset into the cradle of a film prop acoustic modem to accentuate the act of using telephone lines for interconnection to the developing computer networks of the period—in this case, a military command computer. The earliest major motion picture depicting an acoustic coupler was probably the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt.
Ladislas Starevich
Often mentioned as being among his best work, "The Tale of the Fox" (, ) was also his first animated feature. It was entirely made by him and his daughter, Irene. Production took place in Fontenay-sous-Bois from 1929–1930. When the film was ready, the producer, Louis Nalpas, decided to add sound by disc support but this system failed and the film was not released. German film studio UFA got interest to show the film in two parts. Sound was added in German and it premiered in Berlin in 1937. Later, in 1941, Roger Richebé (Paris Cinéma Location) produced a French sound version, which premiered on April 1941. It was the third animated feature film to have sound, after Quirino Cristiani's "Peludópolis" (1931) and "The New Gulliver" (1935) from the Soviet Union.
The Vicar of Vejlby (1931 film)
One year earlier, George Schnéevoigt had made the first Danish sound film of feature length, however the dialogue was spoken in Norwegian. "Præsten i Vejlby" was the first feature-length sound film with Danish dialogue. Although the public had seen short Danish "talkies" since 1923, and experienced foreign features with sound for two years, the Danish language film was unique enough to create a huge success and make the film very profitable.
Dolby Laboratories
The first film with Dolby sound was "A Clockwork Orange" (1971), which used Dolby noise reduction on all pre-mixes and masters, but a conventional optical sound track on release prints. "Callan" (1974) was the first film with a Dolby-encoded optical soundtrack. In 1975, Dolby released Dolby Stereo, which included a noise reduction system in addition to more audio channels (Dolby Stereo could actually contain additional center and surround channels matrixed from the left and right). The first film with a Dolby-encoded stereo optical soundtrack was "Lisztomania" (1975), although this only used an LCR (Left-Center-Right) encoding technique. The first true LCRS (Left-Center-Right-Surround) soundtrack was encoded on the movie "A Star Is Born" in 1976. In less than ten years, 6,000 cinemas worldwide were equipped to use Dolby Stereo sound. Dolby reworked the system slightly for home use and introduced Dolby Surround, which only extracted a surround channel, and the more impressive Dolby Pro Logic, which was the domestic equivalent of the theatrical Dolby Stereo.
Sound film
During 1929, most of the major European filmmaking countries began joining Hollywood in the changeover to sound. Many of the trend-setting European talkies were shot abroad as production companies leased studios while their own were being converted or as they deliberately targeted markets speaking different languages. One of Europe's first two feature-length dramatic talkies was created in still a different sort of twist on multinational moviemaking: "The Crimson Circle" was a coproduction between director Friedrich Zelnik's Efzet-Film company and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released as the silent "Der Rote Kreis" in Germany, where it was shot; English dialogue was apparently dubbed in much later using the De Forest Phonofilm process controlled by BSFP's corporate parent. It was given a British trade screening in March 1929, as was a part-talking film made entirely in the UK: "The Clue of the New Pin", a British Lion production using the sound-on-disc British Photophone system. In May, "Black Waters", a British and Dominions Film Corporation promoted as the first UK all-talker, received its initial trade screening; it had been shot completely in Hollywood with a Western Electric sound-on-film system. None of these pictures made much impact.
The Sound of Music (film)
In November 1969, "The Sound of Music" completed its initial four-and-a-half year theatrical release run in the United States, having earned $68,313,000 in North American (United States and Canada) rentals and $44,168,000 in foreign rentals, for a worldwide total of $112,481,000 in gross returns. It was the first film to gross over $100 million. The film was re-released in 1973, and increased its North American rentals to $78.4 million. By the end of the 1970s, it was ranked seventh in all time North American rentals, having earned $79 million. The film's re-release in 1990 increased the total North American admissions to 142,415,400—the third highest number of tickets sold behind "Gone with the Wind" and "Star Wars"—and about 283.3 million admissions worldwide. "The Sound of Music" eventually earned a total domestic gross of $163,214,076, and a total worldwide gross of $286,214,076. Adjusted for inflation, the film earned about $2.366 billion at 2014 prices—the fifth highest-grossing film of all time.
Hazard E. Reeves
Utilizing separate magnetic film, Reeves created a seven-channel sound system for Cinerama, the company of which he was president by 1952. That same year, Cinerama released its first picture, "This is Cinerama". Reeves' sound system was the first, discrete stereophonic sound system used in post-war commercial application. (Walt Disney had originally released "Fantasia" (1940) in three-track optical sound, but the Disney "Fantasound" system was not used for any other film afterwards.)
Phonoscène
The Phonoscène was an antecedent of music video and was regarded by Michel Chion, Noël Burch and Richard Abel as a forerunner of sound film. The first Phonoscènes were presented by Léon Gaumont in 1902 in France. The first official presentation in the United Kingdom took place at Buckingham Palace in 1907. The last phonoscène was presented in 1917.
Ampex
In 1952, movie producer Mike Todd asked Ampex to develop a high fidelity movie sound system using sound magnetically recorded on the film itself, as contrasted with the technology of the time, which used magnetic tracks on a separate celluloid base film (later commonly known as mag stock). The result of this development was the CinemaScope/Todd-AO motion picture sound system, which was first used in movies such as "The Robe" (1953) in 35mm and "Oklahoma" (1955) in 70mm (and also in 35mm). In 1960, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ampex an Oscar for technical achievement as a result of this development.
Sound film
"The Jazz Singer" had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theatre in London on September 27, 1928. According to film historian Rachael Low, "Many in the industry realized at once that a change to sound production was inevitable." On January 16, 1929, the first European feature film with a synchronized vocal performance and recorded score premiered: the German production "Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame" (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame). Dialogueless, it contains only a few songs performed by Richard Tauber. The movie was made with the sound-on-film system controlled by the German-Dutch firm Tobis, corporate heirs to the Tri-Ergon concern. With an eye toward commanding the emerging European market for sound film, Tobis entered into a compact with its chief competitor, Klangfilm, a joint subsidiary of Germany's two leading electrical manufacturers. Early in 1929, Tobis and Klangfilm began comarketing their recording and playback technologies. As ERPI began to wire theaters around Europe, Tobis-Klangfilm claimed that the Western Electric system infringed on the Tri-Ergon patents, stalling the introduction of American technology in many places. Just as RCA had entered the movie business to maximize its recording system's value, Tobis also established its own production operations.
Smell-O-Vision
The use of scents in conjunction with film dates back to 1906, before the introduction of sound. In this first instance, a 1958 issue of "Film Daily" claims that Samuel Roxy Rothafel of the Family Theatre in Forest City, Pennsylvania, placed a wad of cotton wool that had been soaked in rose oil in front of an electric fan during a newsreel about the Rose Bowl Game. However, between 1903 and 1915, there were no games held, so it is unknown what the newsreel was about, although the Rose Parade (which has been held annually since 1890) seems likely.
The Circus (film)
"The Circus" finally premiered in New York City on January 6, 1928, at the Strand Theatre, and in Los Angeles on January 27 at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. It came right at the beginning of the sound film era, with the very first feature sound film, "The Jazz Singer" (1927), having been released just months earlier.
Filmmaking technique of Luis Buñuel
Buñuel has been hailed as a pioneer of the sound film, with "L'Age d'Or" being cited as one of the first innovative uses of sound in French film. Film scholar Linda Williams has pointed out that Buñuel used sounds, including music, as nonsynchronous counterpoint to the visual image, rather than redundant accompaniment, in accordance with theories that had been advanced by Sergei Eisenstein and others in a 1928 manifesto on the sound film. Critic Marsha Kinder has posited that Buñuel's years as a film dubber in Europe and Hollywood put him in the position of "mastering the conventions of film sound, to subvert them more effectively". In his later years, Buñuel was almost completely deaf, but he continued to assert control over the sound effects in his films, such as "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", in which seemingly important speech, especially political discourse, is often drowned out by the noise of urban life, in such a systematic manner that Kinder has identified Buñuel as one of the first professional sound designers in cinema. As further illustration of this, scholar Sally Faulkner has described the means by which, in his film "Tristana", Buñuel "engineers a kind of figurative deafness, or disability, in the spectator" in scenes which involve deaf characters, by, for example, combining the sound of gushing water with an image of a stagnant pool, or exaggerating the volume level of chiming bells.
Sync sound
Even in the silent film era, films were shown with sounds, often with musical accompaniment by a pianist or an orchestra keeping time with the screen action. The first synchronization was a turning recording device marked with a white spot. As the white spot rotated, the cameraman hand cranked the camera to keep it in sync with the recording. The method was then repeated for playback, but with the projectionist hand cranking the film projector. "Single-system" sound recorded sound optically to part of the original camera film, or magnetically to a stripe of magnetic coating along the film edge.
Herbert Wilcox
Generally, Alfred Hitchcock's "Blackmail" is regarded as the first film with sound, but Wilcox's "Black Waters" was trade-shown several weeks earlier in May, 1929.
History of film
During late 1927, Warners released "The Jazz Singer", which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film; but this process was actually accomplished first by Charles Taze Russell in 1914 with the lengthy film "The Photo-Drama of Creation". This drama consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking pictures", or "talkies", were the future. A lot of attempts were made before the success of "The Jazz Singer", that can be seen in the List of film sound systems.
The Sound Barrier
Contrary to what is depicted in the film, the first aircraft to break the sound barrier was the rocket-powered Bell X-1 flown by Chuck Yeager of the United States Air Force in 1947. As Yeager, who was present at the US premiere, described in his first biography, "The Sound Barrier" was entertaining, but not that realistic – and any pilot who attempted to break the sound barrier in the manner portrayed in the film (forcing the centre stick forward to pull out of a dive) would have been killed. Because the 1947 Bell X-1 flight had not been widely publicised, many who saw "The Sound Barrier" thought it was a true story, and that the first supersonic flight was made by a British pilot.
Sound film
Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology, a number of companies were making progress with systems that recorded movie sound on phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified film projector, allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add synchronized sound sequences to D. W. Griffith's failed silent film "Dream Street". A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves, was recorded, as was a sequence of live vocal effects. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened incorporating them. On May 1, 1921, "Dream Street" was re-released, with love song added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal sequence. There would be no others for more than six years.
In 1925, Sam Warner of Warner Bros., then a small Hollywood studio with big ambitions, saw a demonstration of the Western Electric sound-on-disc system and was sufficiently impressed to persuade his brothers to agree to experiment with using this system at New York's Vitagraph Studios, which they had recently purchased. The tests were convincing to the Warner Brothers, if not to the executives of some other picture companies who witnessed them. Consequently, in April 1926 the Western Electric Company entered into a contract with Warner Brothers and W. J. Rich, a financier, giving them an exclusive license for recording and reproducing sound pictures under the Western Electric system. To exploit this license the Vitaphone Corporation was organized with Samuel L. Warner as its president.
Vitaphone, as this system was now called, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of "Don Juan"; the first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical score and added sound effects, but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying "Don Juan", however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, all with live-recorded sound. These were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio. Warner Bros.' "The Better 'Ole", technically similar to "Don Juan", followed in October.
Cinema of Peru
In Lima, the first Peruvian sound film (with synchronized music and some talking sequences) was Alberto Santana's "Resaca", which was released in 1934. This was followed by another sound film entitled "Cosas de la vida" in 1934. The first all-talking picture, "Buscando Olvido", was finally released in 1936.
Sound film
The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts before "The Jazz Singer", and the film's success did not change things overnight. Not until May 1928 did the group of four big studios (PDC had dropped out of the alliance), along with United Artists and others, sign with ERPI for conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well. However, even with access to both technologies, most of the Hollywood companies remained slow to produce talking features of their own. No studio besides Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until the low-budget-oriented Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) premiered "The Perfect Crime" on June 17, 1928, eight months after "The Jazz Singer". FBO had come under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor, General Electric's RCA division, which was looking to market its new sound-on-film system, Photophone. Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the standard. (In both sorts of systems, a specially-designed lamp, whose exposure to the film is determined by the audio input, is used to record sound photographically as a series of minuscule lines. In a variable-density process, the lines are of varying darkness; in a variable-area process, the lines are of varying width.) By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's newest major studio, RKO Pictures.
M (1931 film)
"M" was Lang's first sound film and Lang experimented with the new technology. It has a dense and complex soundtrack, as opposed to the more theatrical "talkies" being released at the time. The soundtrack includes a narrator, sounds occurring off-camera, sounds motivating action and suspenseful moments of silence before sudden noise. Lang was also able to make fewer cuts in the film's editing, since sound effects could now be used to inform the narrative.
Silent film
Warner Bros was the first studio to accept sound as an element in film production and utilize Vitaphone, a sound-on-disc technology, to do so. The studio then released "The Jazz Singer" in 1927, which marked the first commercially successful sound film, but silent films were still the majority of features released in both 1927 and 1928, along with so-called goat-glanded films: silents with a subsection of sound film inserted. Thus the modern sound film era may be regarded as coming to dominance beginning in 1929.
Musical film
Musical short films were made by Lee de Forest in 1923–24. Beginning in 1926, thousands of Vitaphone shorts were made, many featuring bands, vocalists, and dancers. The earliest feature-length films with synchronized sound had only a soundtrack of music and occasional sound effects that played while the actors portrayed their characters just as they did in silent films: without audible dialogue. "The Jazz Singer", released in 1927 by Warner Brothers, was the first to include an audio track including non-diegetic music and diegetic music, but it had only a short sequence of spoken dialogue. This feature-length film was also a musical, featuring Al Jolson singing "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face", "Toot, Toot, Tootsie", "Blue Skies", and "My Mammy". Historian Scott Eyman wrote, "As the film ended and applause grew with the houselights, Sam Goldwyn's wife Frances looked around at the celebrities in the crowd. She saw 'terror in all their faces', she said, as if they knew that 'the game they had been playing for years was finally over'." Still, only isolated sequences featured "live" sound; most of the film had only a synchronous musical score. In 1928, Warner Brothers followed this up with another Jolson part-talkie, "The Singing Fool", which was a blockbuster hit. Theaters scrambled to install the new sound equipment and to hire Broadway composers to write musicals for the screen. The first all-talking feature, "Lights of New York", included a musical sequence in a night club. The enthusiasm of audiences was so great that in less than a year all the major studios were making sound pictures exclusively. "The Broadway Melody" (1929) had a show-biz plot about two sisters competing for a charming song-and-dance man. Advertised by MGM as the first "All-Talking, All-Singing, All-Dancing" feature film, it was a hit and won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1929. There was a rush by the studios to hire talent from the stage to star in lavishly filmed versions of Broadway hits. "The Love Parade" (Paramount 1929) starred Maurice Chevalier and newcomer Jeanette MacDonald, written by Broadway veteran Guy Bolton.
Loudspeaker
Altec Lansing introduced the "604", which became their most famous coaxial Duplex driver, in 1943. It incorporated a high-frequency horn that sent sound through the middle of a 15-inch woofer for near-point-source performance. Altec's "Voice of the Theatre" loudspeaker system arrived in the marketplace in 1945, offering better coherence and clarity at the high output levels necessary in movie theaters. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences immediately began testing its sonic characteristics; they made it the film house industry standard in 1955.
Vertigo (film)
In 1996, the film was given a lengthy and controversial restoration by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz and re-released to theaters. The new print featured restored color and newly created audio, using modern sound effects mixed in DTS digital surround sound. In October 1996, the restored "Vertigo" premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, with Kim Novak and Patricia Hitchcock in person. At this screening, the film was exhibited for the first time in DTS and 70mm, a format with a similar frame size to the VistaVision system in which it was originally shot. When restoring the sound, Harris and Katz wanted to stay as close as possible to the original, and had access to the original music recordings that had been stored in the vaults at Paramount. However, as the project demanded a new 6-channel DTS stereo soundtrack, it was necessary to re-record some sound effects using the Foley process. The soundtrack was remixed at the Alfred Hitchcock Theatre at Universal Studios. Aware that the film had a considerable following, the restoration team knew that they were under particular pressure to restore the film as accurately as possible. To achieve this, they used Hitchcock's original dubbing notes for guidance of how the director wanted the film to sound in 1958. Harris and Katz sometimes added extra sound effects to camouflage defects in the old soundtrack ("hisses, pops, and bangs"); in particular they added extra seagull cries and a foghorn to the scene at Cypress Point. The new mix has also been accused of putting too much emphasis on the score at the expense of the sound effects.
Optical sound
In 1926, Fox hired Sponible, bought Case's patents (they had already acquired Freeman Owens' and Tri-Ergon's), and mass-produced Case's Aeo-light for use in all Movietone News cameras from 1928-1939. These cameras recorded all Fox feature films during this period, beginning with F. W. Murnau's "Sunrise" (1927). As the first professionally produced feature with an optical sound track, it included mostly music and sound effects, with a very few unsynchronized words.
Stereophonic sound
In April 1953, while "This is Cinerama" was still playing only in New York City, most moviegoing audiences heard stereophonic sound for the first time with "House of Wax", an early 3-D film starring Vincent Price and produced by Warner Bros. Unlike the 4-track mag release-print stereo films of the period which featured four thin strips of magnetic material running down the length of the film, inside and outside the sprocket holes, the sound system developed for "House of Wax", dubbed WarnerPhonic, was a combination of a 35 mm fully coated magnetic film that contained the audio tracks for Left-Center-Right, interlocked with the two dual-strip Polaroid system projectors, one of which carried a mono optical surround track and one that carried a mono backup track, should anything go wrong.
Arthur Edeson
When sound came in, Edeson experimented with camouflaging the microphones in exterior shots. "In Old Arizona" (1929), the first sound film to be shot outside a studio, provided evidence to Hollywood executives that talking pictures need not be confined to the sound stage. The western "The Big Trail" (1930), starring John Wayne in his first starring role, was also filmed by Edeson in the 70mm widescreen process, known as "Fox Grandeur".
Stefano Pittaluga
Pittaluga's power grew in 1926 when he acquired the traditional leading production outfit Cines from the conglomerate Unione Cinematografica Italiana. Following on the heels of the development of sound film in America, Britain and Germany, Pittaluga had the Cines Studios in Rome fitted for sound production. Cines produced the first Italian sound film "The Song of Love" (1930), although another of the company's films "Resurrection" (1931) was actually made earlier but released later. Cines became the dominant force of the early sound era.
Music Box Theatre (Chicago)
Although when the theatre was built, sound films were a new technology, the plans included both an orchestra pit and organ chambers if sound films failed and silent film accompaniment was needed. Photos of the theater in the year it was built show "Western Electric Sound System" and "Vitaphone" advertised on the marquee. The first known silent film presentation at the Music Box theatre was "Wings" in 1983 using the operators home theatre organ and accompanied by Barbara Sellers, the daughter of Preston and Edna Sellers who were Chicago Silent Film and radio theatre organ personalities of the 1920s - 1940s. The first Theatre organ - an Allen three manual electronic - was installed in the previously empty organ chambers, in 1984. The Music Box has continued to screen silent films with live organ accompaniment monthly since 2012.
Cinema of Korea
Korea's first sound film was Lee Myeong-woo's 1935 "Chunhyang-jeon". The sound technique was reportedly poor, but Korean audiences appreciated hearing their own language in the cinema.
Laurel and Hardy
In 1929 the silent era of film was coming to an end, and many actors saw their careers decline with the advent of sound. Many silent film actors failed to make the transition because they decided their prime duty was to tell stories in words or they overemphasized their speech. Laurel and Hardy avoided this pitfall because they continued making primarily visual films. They did not ignore sound but were not ruled by it. As a team they proved skilful in their melding of visual and verbal humor and made a seamless transition to the talking era in their first sound film "Unaccustomed As We Are" from 1929. The title took its name from the familiar phrase "Unaccustomed as we are to public speaking". In the opening dialogue, Laurel and Hardy began by spoofing the slow and self-conscious speech of the early talking actors which became a routine they would use regularly.