SOUNDS OF THE 20s, VIA FOX MOVIETONE

Above is fifteen minutes of so of the earliest recorded synchronized picture and sound of everyday current events, all of which take place in New York. Fox Movietone had licensed an optical sound-on-film process in which recording sound separately and later being synced via disk (a la early Vitaphone) was eliminated. Intead, the Fox Movietone camera crew simply set up the incredibly massive camera (it weight over 1500 pounds and took at least three big dudes to move it around) at any event that seemed unlikely to have ever been simultaneously captured--both sonically and pictorially--up to that time. In these fascinating shots, you'll see views of dancers on the Astor Roof, a strange Dragon dance in Chinatown, a building demolition on West 45th street, a group of black men playing dice in Harlem (they keep staring at the camera suspiciously, perhaps wondering why they'd agreed to let their illegal little game be captured by a group of white men on film) and an unbelievably charming kids baseball game in Central Park. The kids really do look like the Our Gang kids of the period--caps, half-length pants, occasional ties (!) and a very much from-the-past kind of vernacular--a 'kidspeak' that belongs to an even earlier century (probably 19th) and really does sound something like the dialogue in 'Annie' and 'Newsies'. By the way the Fox Movietone Newsreel collection has a nice (though premature) website with some good info on the history of this sound-on-film stuff and a collection of footage that appears, at this point, to be not yet accessible. Many thanks to the Youtube poster who put this footage up only a couple of weeks ago. It's already attracted over eight-thousand hits, which makes me feel much less alone in my obsessive pursuit of this kind of stuff.

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