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, thus dispensing with narrators, but
in Japanese cinema human narration
remained popular throughout the silent
era. The technical problems were resolved
by 1923. Illustrated songs were a notable
exception to this trend that began in 1894
in vaudeville houses and persisted as late
as the late 1930s in film theaters. Live
performance or
sound recordings
were paired with
hand-colored glass
slides projected
t h r o u g h
stereopticons and
similar devices. In
t h i s w a y, s o n g
narrative was
illustrated through a
series of slides
whose changes were
simultaneous with
the
narrative
development. The
main purpose of
illustrated songs was
to encourage sheet
music sales, and
they were highly
successful with sales
reaching up to the
millions for a single song. Later, with the
birth of film, illustrated songs were used
as filler material preceding films and
during reel changes. There was a noncommercial attempt to combine the
motion picture with a combination of
slides and synchronize the resulting
moving picture with audio. The film
included hand-painted slides as well as
other previously used techniques.
Simultaneously playing the audio while
the film was being played with a projector
was required. This monumental
production, released in 1915, was entitled
“The Photo-Drama of Creation” and lasted
eight hours.
The sound era
Experimentation with sound film
technology, both for recording and
playback, was virtually constant
throughout the silent era, but the twin
problems of accurate synchronization and
sufficient amplification had been difficult
to overcome (Eyman, 1997). In 1926,
Hollywood studio Warner Bros introduced
the “Vitaphone” system, producing short
films
of
live
entertainment acts and
public figures and adding
recorded sound effects
and orchestral scores to
some of its major
features. 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.