The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1895)

Original title

Dickson Experimental Sound Film

Directed by

William Kennedy Dickson

Genre

musical film, sound film, LGBTQ-related film, essay film

Country

United States

Runtime

17 min

Rating

6.1 of 10 from 118 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This is a very early film from the 1890s showing a man playing a violin into a recording horn. It was the first movie made with live recorded sound using a prototype system from Thomas Edison's lab.

historicalquietexperimentalprimitivenoveltyfragmentaryearnestlow-key

What happens

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. In 2003, The Dickson Experimental Sound Film was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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