Les premiers pas du cinéma - à la recherche du son

Although motion pictures emerged in the 1890s, they were for the most part in black and white, and didn't have sound, keeping them quite a bit short from being the true simulcarum of life they aspired to be. Numerous inventors and entrepreneurs over the years attempted to create synchronized sound and lifelike color presentations of their films, but it wasn't until the late 1920s and the mid 1930s that they actually managed to reliably do so. This pair of documentaries by Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg traces the history of sound and color in the movies from the earliest days to maturity.
　　Learning to Talk (2003) looks at the audio dimension, from the earliest days of sound recording, unrelated to motion pictures. The earliest eras feature the standard silent live accompaniment, with various ingenious additions such as a specified live singer or sound effects performed at the appropriate moments, or the Notofilm, which ran the melody line of the intended score across the bottom of the screen to guide a performer. But with Edison's invention of the phonograph, it was clear that recording of some kind would be the future. The problem was how to synchronize the sound with the pictures, though Edison managed some primitive achievements in this area as early as 1902.
　　There were two dueling formats of sound, one utilizing disc (which would evolve into the Vitagraph sound system, used by The Jazz Singer), and the optical format used by the Fox Movietone shorts, and which would eventually triumph as the method of choice for sound films. The narrative is reasonably clear, although it does tend to meander a bit from topic to topic. Because there were so many competing formats, however, that approach is probably unavoidable. The documentary depicts most of these versions in quality excerpts, with clips that demonstrate the systems and their limitations with clarity.
　　The accompanying documentary, Movies Dream in Color (2004), similarly tracks the evolution of color from painstaking hand-painting of individual frames to the gorgeous results of three-strip Technicolor in the 1930s. Before color could be represented directly on film as photographed, a great many dead ends were attempted, such as Kinemacolor, which gets surprisingly effective results from alternating red and green frames with the appropriate filters. There's also a good description of the tinting and toning processes, clarifying the often confusing differences and pointing out that both could be used at once, depending on the film.
　　Even when there is a determination to have film-based color, the approach was not clear. Most abortive attempts used an additive process, layering colors to an impractical extent. It wasn't until quite a bit later that a subtractive filtering process was arrived at to simplify the color photography system. Even then, there were a number of difficulties before Technicolor was ready to take the world by storm. And the differences in color quality are certainly striking enough; the specimens are highly variable in their effectiveness, though many of the primitive versions are surprisingly colorful. The two documentaries together tell a tale of struggle to arrive at verisimilitude, and they're well done. The one objection I have is that a significant chunk of both, dealing with the early magic lantern era, utilizes the same examples, and they're thus a bit repetitive when seen together.
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