IT CAME FROM THE BOTTOM SHELF!

Film historian and composer Ben Model will be releasing some real rarities on DVD from his Undercrank Productions label on August 7th.  THE KINETOPHONE: A FACT! A REALITY! will feature eight sound shorts made by the Thomas Edison Company in 1913 (14 years before The Jazz Singer).

No fan of film history will want to miss this DVD.  Below is the full press release:

THOMAS EDISON’S “KINETOPHONE” BROUGHT TALKIES TO THEATERS IN 1913 – SURVIVING FILMS RECENTLY RESTORED AND ARE NOW AVAILABLE ON NEW DVD

Digitally Restored From Rare 35mm Films and Cylinders Preserved By The Library of Congress and The Thomas Edison National Historical Park Museum, Eight Early Sound Films Can Now Be Seen…And Heard

NEW YORK, N.Y. (THURSDAY July 19, 2018) – Undercrank Productions (www.undercrankproductions.com) announced today the release of THE KINETOPHONE: A FACT! A REALITY! on DVD August 7, 2018. The disc features eight sound films made by the Thomas A. Edison Company in 1913, newly restored by the Library of Congress, plus a mini-documentary on the Kinetophone.

More than a dozen years before Al Jolson proclaimed “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” in the The Jazz Singer (1927), American movie audiences had already experienced synchronized sound in movies. In 1913, the Thomas Edison Company debuted talking pictures whose exhibition lasted for about a year. Showing the films in theaters involved a complex system involving a hand-cranked projector connected by a system of pulleys to a modified Edison cylinder player at the front of the theatre, operated at both ends by technicians connected by head-sets. The Kinetophone films, like the early Vitaphone shorts, were of theatrical or vaudeville acts, dramatic scenes and musical performances. Of the 200 films made, only eight currently survive with both film and cylinder elements intact, and they have now been painstakingly restored by the Library of Congress.

The Kinetophone films are a unique record of performance techniques of the time, and are each six minutes long, a duration dictated by the maximum recording time of the cylinders used. Made in a pre-microphone era, the performers of the dramatic and comedic sketches or musical numbers speak and project as if they were in a theater. This technique was necessary for the actors’ voices to be picked up by the cylinder recording horn, placed a safe distance to be out of camera range. These techniques are covered in a mini-documentary on the history of the Kinetophone films, technology and restoration process as a bonus on the DVD.

Each of the eight Kinetophone films has been digitized from rare, unique cylinder sound elements preserved by the Thomas Edison National Historical Park and from original 35mm prints or camera negatives preserved by the Library of Congress. Utilizing state-of-the-art digital technology, the films have been restored and synchronized by the Library of Congress to a state that both surpasses their original 1913 presentations and also realizes the effect originally intended by Edison and his technicians. With the exception of Nursery Rhymes, previously available in a decades-old restoration of lesser quality, these Kinetophone films have not available to the public since their original exhibition in vaudeville houses over 100 years ago.

THE KINETOPHONE: A FACT! A REALITY!

The Films (all 1913): The Edison Kinetophone, Musical Blacksmiths, Nursery Favorites, The Deaf Mute, The Edison Minstrels, The Five Bachelors, The Old Guard, and Jack’s Joke.

Bonus: “So Amazingly Perfect They Are Really Weird” (2018), mini-documentary on the Kinetophone films’ history, technology and their restoration; The Politician (1913), a Kinetophone film whose sound cylinder is still lost and is presented here with a musical score by Ben Model.