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144-493: The Liverbirds ( / ˈ l aɪ v ər b ɜːr d z / ) were an English all-female rock band from Liverpool , active between 1963 and 1968. The group consisted of vocalist and guitarist Valerie Gell, guitarist and vocalist Pamela Birch, bassist and vocalist Mary McGlory, and drummer Sylvia Saunders. They were one of the very few female bands on the Merseybeat scene, as well as one of the first all-female rock and roll bands in

288-470: A Pathé -Natan film, it is generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot, like Blackmail , at the Elstree studio , just outside London. The production company had contracted with RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest facility with the system. The Braunberger-Richebé talkie La Route est belle ( The Road Is Fine ), also shot at Elstree, followed a few weeks later. Before

432-444: A "musical." (Griffith's Dream Street had essentially been a "goat gland.") Expectations swiftly changed, and the sound "fad" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929. In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer' s debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight studios that would be known as " majors " during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first part-talking feature, The Lone Wolf's Daughter . In late May,

576-479: A Broken Heart " from their self-titled debut album , making Vixen erroneously a one-hit wonder, although their next hit, a cover of Jeff Paris 's "Cryin'", charted even higher in both Britain and the US. The band folded again in the early 1990s following musical differences, but reformed twice more in their history. Maxine Petrucci also joined Vixen, albeit as a touring bass guitarist, after her sister invited her in 1998 until

720-514: A Warner Bros. movie. This second Jolson screen smash demonstrated the movie musical's ability to turn a song into a national hit: inside of nine months, the Jolson number " Sonny Boy " had racked up 2 million record and 1.25 million sheet music sales. September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry 's Dinner Time , among the first animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. Soon after he saw it, Walt Disney released his first sound picture,

864-464: A Western Electric sound-on-film system. None of these pictures made much impact. The first successful European dramatic talkie was the all-British Blackmail . Directed by twenty-nine-year-old Alfred Hitchcock , the movie had its London debut June 21, 1929. Originally shot as a silent, Blackmail was restaged to include dialogue sequences, along with a score and sound effects, before its premiere. A British International Pictures (BIP) production, it

1008-524: A contract with Warner Brothers and W. J. Rich, a financier, giving them an exclusive license for recording and reproducing sound pictures under the Western Electric system. To exploit this license the Vitaphone Corporation was organized with Samuel L. Warner as its president. Vitaphone , as this system was now called, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of Don Juan ;

1152-607: A demonstration of the Western Electric sound-on-disc system and was sufficiently impressed to persuade his brothers to agree to experiment with using this system at New York City's Vitagraph Studios , which they had recently purchased. The tests were convincing to the Warner Brothers, if not to the executives of some other picture companies who witnessed them. Consequently, in April 1926 the Western Electric Company entered into

1296-670: A few songs performed by Richard Tauber . The movie was made with the sound-on-film system controlled by the German-Dutch firm Tobis , corporate heirs to the Tri-Ergon concern. With an eye toward commanding the emerging European market for sound film, Tobis entered into a compact with its chief competitor, Klangfilm, a joint subsidiary of Germany's two leading electrical manufacturers. Early in 1929, Tobis and Klangfilm began comarketing their recording and playback technologies. As ERPI began to wire theaters around Europe, Tobis-Klangfilm claimed that

1440-515: A furious pace on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow recordings to be played back over loudspeakers at theater-filling volume. The new moving-coil speaker system was installed in New York's Warners Theatre at the end of July and its patent submission, for what Western Electric called the No. 555 Receiver, was filed on August 4, just two days before the premiere of Don Juan . Late in

1584-456: A generation. The primary issue was synchronization: pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in tandem. Sufficient playback volume was also hard to achieve. While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of electric amplification could not project satisfactorily to fill large spaces. Finally, there

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1728-413: A gradual transition to sound—allowing the studios to spread out the capital costs of conversion and their directors and technical crews time to become familiar with the new technology. The Mandarin-language Gēnǚ hóng mǔdān ( 歌 女 紅 牡 丹 , Singsong Girl Red Peony ), starring Butterfly Wu, premiered as China's first feature talkie in 1930. By February of that year, production was apparently completed on

1872-456: A large section of the industry still saw the silent as a viable artistic and commercial prospect till about 1935." The situation was particularly acute in the Soviet Union; as of May 1933, fewer than one out of every hundred film projectors in the country was as yet equipped for sound. During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with

2016-406: A light valve, a thin ribbon of sensitive metal over a tiny slit. The sound reaching this ribbon would be converted into light by the shivering of the diaphragm, focusing the resulting light waves through the slit, where it would be photographed on the side of the film, on a strip about a tenth of an inch wide. In 1908, Lauste purchased a photographophone from Ruhmer, with the intention of perfecting

2160-668: A major Hollywood studio. The Jazz Singer had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theatre in London on September 27, 1928. According to film historian Rachael Low , "Many in the industry realized at once that a change to sound production was inevitable." On January 16, 1929, the first European feature film with a synchronized vocal performance and recorded score premiered: the German production Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame ( I Kiss Your Hand, Madame ). Dialogueless, it contains only

2304-562: A number of companies were making progress with systems that recorded movie sound on phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified film projector , allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add synchronized sound sequences to D. W. Griffith 's failed silent film Dream Street . A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves,

2448-457: A performing band in the late 1960s; by the time they had disbanded in 1975 their first album Philosophy of the World had caught the attention of Frank Zappa and by 1980, NRBQ arranged for it to have a wide release. The Shaggs, particularly in their early years, were noted for their inability to adhere to basic norms of popular music (their drummer, Helen Wiggin, often found herself detached from

2592-485: A screen. The phonograph was connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization. However, conditions were rarely ideal, and the new, improved Kinetophone was retired after little more than a year. By the mid-1910s, the groundswell in commercial sound motion picture exhibition had subsided. Beginning in 1914, The Photo-Drama of Creation , promoting Jehovah's Witnesses ' conception of humankind's genesis,

2736-468: A self-confident "bad girl" attitude at times, always willing to challenge assumptions about how an all-female band should behave. Courtney Love described the other females in Hole as using a more "lunar viewpoint" in their roles as musicians. In the 1990s, riot grrrl became the genre associated with bands such as Bratmobile and Bikini Kill . Other punk bands, such as Spitboy , have been less comfortable with

2880-449: A society with gender equality would not describe types of musical groups based on the gender of their members. Prominent bands who have adopted this viewpoint include American pop rock trio Haim , and Australian alternative rock trio Camp Cope . All-female bands are not restricted to the mainstream genres. The British/Australian string quartet Bond play classical crossover (first and second violin , viola , and cello ) and sing

3024-445: A sound version of The Devil's Playground , arguably qualifying it as the first Australian talking motion picture; however, the May press screening of Commonwealth Film Contest prizewinner Fellers is the first verifiable public exhibition of an Australian talkie. In September 1930, a song performed by Indian star Sulochana , excerpted from the silent feature Madhuri (1928), was released as

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3168-476: A subsidiary of British Talking Pictures, which purchased the primary Phonofilm assets. By the end of 1930, the Phonofilm business would be liquidated. In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. In 1919, the same year that DeForest received his first patents in the field, three German inventors, Josef Engl (1893–1942), Hans Vogt (1890–1979), and Joseph Massolle (1889–1957), patented

3312-559: A synchronized-sound short, the country's first. The following year, Ardeshir Irani directed the first Indian talking feature, the Hindi-Urdu Alam Ara , and produced Kalidas , primarily in Tamil with some Telugu. Nineteen-thirty-one also saw the first Bengali-language film, Jamai Sasthi , and the first movie fully spoken in Telugu, Bhakta Prahlada . In 1932, Ayodhyecha Raja became

3456-550: A system that recorded sound on a separate filmstrip running parallel with the image reel. Gaumont licensed the technology and briefly put it to commercial use under the name Cinéphone. US competition eclipsed Phonofilm. By September 1925, De Forest and Case's working arrangement had fallen through. The following July, Case joined Fox Film , Hollywood's third largest studio , to found the Fox-Case Corporation. The system developed by Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, given

3600-407: A talkie: G'schichten aus der Steiermark ( Stories from Styria ), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film production. On September 30, the first entirely German-made feature-length dramatic talkie, Das Land ohne Frauen ( Land Without Women ), premiered. A Tobis Filmkunst production, about one-quarter of the movie contained dialogue, which was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response

3744-506: A third of all movies produced in Japan were shot without dialogue. The enduring popularity of the silent medium in Japanese cinema owed in great part to the tradition of the benshi , a live narrator who performed as accompaniment to a film screening. As director Akira Kurosawa later described, the benshi "not only recounted the plot of the films, they enhanced the emotional content by performing

3888-630: A tour of Japan. They briefly reunited in 1998. Three members of the band settled in Germany permanently. Saunders moved to Spain, settling in Alicante with her husband, John (died 2 April 2017). Sylvia Saunders is now living in Glasgow . McGlory runs a Hamburg-based company called Ja/Nein Musikverlag ("Yes/No Music Publishing") which she founded with her husband, German songwriter Frank Dostal (died April 2017), who

4032-415: A variety of ways. An increasing number of motion picture systems relied on gramophone records —known as sound-on-disc technology. The records themselves were often referred to as "Berliner discs", after one of the primary inventors in the field, German-American Emile Berliner . In 1902, Léon Gaumont demonstrated his sound-on-disc Chronophone, involving an electrical connection he had recently patented, to

4176-627: Is Cyntia , who are believed to have been the first of the movement to join a major record label when they signed to Victor Entertainment in 2013. Other bands include Mary's Blood , Fate Gear , and Lovebites , the last of which won the 2018 Metal Hammer Golden Gods Award for Best New Band. Another example of all-female band is the Brazilian death metal band Crypta , formed 2019 in São Paulo. They released their first album titled Echoes of The Soul through Napalm Records in 2021. Crypta performed at

4320-681: The French Photographic Society . Four years later, Gaumont introduced the Elgéphone, a compressed-air amplification system based on the Auxetophone, developed by British inventors Horace Short and Charles Parsons. Despite high expectations, Gaumont's sound innovations had only limited commercial success. Despite some improvements, they still did not satisfactorily address the three basic issues with sound film and were expensive as well. For some years, American inventor E. E. Norton's Cameraphone

4464-602: The Kinetophone in 1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded by successes in film projection. In 1899, a projected sound-film system known as Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, based primarily on the work of Swiss-born inventor François Dussaud, was exhibited in Paris; similar to the Kinetophone, the system required individual use of earphones. An improved cylinder-based system, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre,

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4608-570: The Melodears , from 1934 to 1939. Eunice Westmoreland, under the name Rita Rio, led an all-girl band appearing on NBC Radio and in short subjects for Vitaphone and RKO before changing her career to acting and her professional name to Dona Drake , appearing in numerous 1940s movies. Ivy Benson 's "All Girls Band" was the BBC 's resident dance band in 1943 and toured until the 1980s. All-girl bands active in vaudeville, variety shows, and early sound films during

4752-457: The Mickey Mouse short Steamboat Willie . Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to the popularity of its sound films , the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. Paramount, the industry leader, put out its first talkie in late September, Beggars of Life ; though it had just a few lines of dialogue, it demonstrated

4896-526: The Motion Picture Association of America , all with live-recorded sound. These were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio. Warner Bros.' The Better 'Ole , technically similar to Don Juan , followed in October. Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of fundamental technical advantages: Nonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had

5040-563: The Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, the Tri-Ergon group gave a public screening of sound-on-film productions—including a dramatic talkie, Der Brandstifter ( The Arsonist ) —before an invited audience at the Alhambra Kino in Berlin. By the end of the decade, Tri-Ergon would be the dominant European sound system. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, patented

5184-601: The Vixen and Rev It Up era made a one-time appearance on VH1 's Bands Reunited , as its Canadian host has been a fan of the band. The line-up from 2001 recorded a fourth album, Live & Learn , released between 2006 and 2007. Kuehnemund died in 2013 and Vixen was reformed with three-quarters of the "classic" line-up plus Gina Stile , the lead guitarist from the Tangerine period, to honor her legacy. Both Stile and long-time frontwoman/rhythm guitarist Janet Gardner have left

5328-461: The Wacken Open Air 2022 festival. In the 2010s, some groups that would typically fit the description of an all-female band began expressing their ambivalence towards the term, and similar terms such as "girl band" or "female-fronted band". Female musicians have written about the gendered double standard behind such descriptors, pointing out how seldom the term "all-male band" is used, and that

5472-561: The 1920s to the 1950s are documented by Kristin McGee in Some Liked it Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television . Sally Placksin, Linda Dahl, D. Antoinette Handy, and Frank Driggs along with professor Sherrie Tucker , in her book Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s , have also documented this era. A Polish group Filipinki was established in 1959. Bands composed solely of women began to emerge with

5616-803: The 1930s, "all-girl" bands such as the Blue Belles, the Parisian Redheads (later the Bricktops), Lil-Hardin 's All-Girl Band, the Ingenues , the Harlem Playgirls led by the likes of Neliska Ann Briscoe and Eddie Crump, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm , Phil Spitalny 's Musical Sweethearts, "Helen Lewis and Her All-Girl Jazz Syncopators" as well as "Helen Lewis and her Rhythm Queens were popular. Dozens of early sound films were made of

5760-504: The 1980s and 1990s have gone on to more high-profile gigs. The Pandoras ' former members include members of the Muffs ; Leather Leone , the singer from Rude Girl and Malibu Barbi, went on to sing for Chastain ; Warbride's founder and lead guitarist, Lori Linstruth joined Arjen Lucassen ; Abby Travis from the Lovedolls has played with Beck , Elastica , and Bangles ; Meredith Brooks , from

5904-495: The 2010s brought a boom of all-female heavy metal bands forming and gaining mainstream attention. Although considered pioneers as the first to form in 2007, Destrose never achieved commercial success. Aldious have been cited as the initiators of the movement when their first album Deep Exceed (2010) topped the Oricon Indies Albums Chart and reached number 15 on the main chart. Another notable girls metal band

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6048-522: The Bangles many females were frustrated at not being taken seriously or only thought of as "cute chicks playing music" and either joined rock bands or formed all-female metal bands. One such band that was playing harder music in San Francisco was Rude Girl. Originally signed to CBS Records , the band splintered before an album would be released and the remaining members released a 12-inch single in 1987 under

6192-820: The Banshees and X-Ray Spex . The expansion of punk into Europe gave rise to Switzerland's die Kleenex /LiLiPUT. In Australia in 1977 all-girl band Sweet Jayne began doing regular gigs with the original lineup: Cris Bonacci , Chris Scheri, Robyn Clark and Sally Zylstra. Labelled "Sweet and Heavy Rock", Sweet Jayne played mostly original material. Winning the Australasian Yamaha Battle of the Bands in 1978, Sweet Jayne went on through various cassette, vinyl and film clip releases and line up changes and played 700 gigs over 6 years. Sweet Jayne split up in 1983 when Chris Scheri (flute and vocals) and Cris Bonacci (guitar) were invited to

6336-666: The Beat " at No. 2 sent a strong message out to many industry heads that females who could play could bring in money. While Joan Jett played "no-frills, glam-rock anthems, sung with her tough-as-nails snarl and sneer", the Go-Go's were seen as playful girls, an image that even Rolling Stone magazine poked fun at when they put the band on their cover in their underwear along with the caption "Go-Go's Put out!". However musician magazines were starting to show respect to female musicians, putting Bonnie Raitt and Tina Weymouth on their covers. While

6480-529: The Beatles infamously told the group that "girls" were unable to play guitars. This remark motivated the band, and they proved him wrong as The Liverbirds became one of the top attractions at the Star-Club and released two albums and several singles on the club's own label. One of those singles, a cover of Bo Diddley 's " Diddley Daddy ", reached No. 5 on the German charts. The group broke up in 1968, just after finishing

6624-526: The Deadly Nightshade recorded and released a third album Never Never Gonna Stop in 2012 and they continually toured until Brandt's death in 2015, dissolving the band. The 1980s, for the first time, saw long-sought chart success from all-female bands and female-fronted rock bands. On the Billboard Hot 100 year-end chart for 1982 Joan Jett 's " I Love Rock 'n' Roll " at No. 3 and the Go-Go's' " We Got

6768-568: The Gallows ). Several European nations with minor positions in the field also produced their first talking pictures—Belgium (in French), Denmark, Greece, and Romania. The Soviet Union's robust film industry came out with its first sound features in December 1930: Dziga Vertov 's nonfiction Enthusiasm had an experimental, dialogueless soundtrack; Abram Room 's documentary Plan velikikh rabot ( The Plan of

6912-429: The Go-Go's and the Bangles , both from the L.A. club scene, were the first all-female rock bands to find sustained success, individual musicians paved the way for the industry to seek out bands that had female musicians and allow them to be part of the recording process. While the 1980s helped pave the way for female musicians to get taken more seriously it was still considered a novelty of sorts for several years, and it

7056-482: The Graces , went on to solo success and Janet Robin , from Precious Metal, was the touring guitarist for Brooks as well as Lindsey Buckingham and Air Supply . Sweet Jayne's Cris Bonacci became Girlschool's lead guitarist in 1985 and stayed with the band for fewer than 10 years. Girlschool , despite numerous line-up changes, have never broke up despite a brief hiatus and celebrated their 40th anniversary in 2018. In Japan,

7200-731: The Great Works ) had music and spoken voiceovers. Both were made with locally developed sound-on-film systems, two of the two hundred or so movie sound systems then available somewhere in the world. In June 1931, the Nikolai Ekk drama Putevka v zhizn ( The Road to Life or A Start in Life ), premiered as the Soviet Union's first true talking picture. Throughout much of Europe, conversion of exhibition venues lagged well behind production capacity, requiring talkies to be produced in parallel silent versions or simply shown without sound in many places. While

7344-709: The Liverbirds (1962–1967), the Ace of Cups (1967), the Heart Beats (1968), and Ariel (1968–1970) which included the three members of the Deadly Nightshade . From 1964-1968 the Pandoras was an all-girl band (one of the first) playing a few original tunes and a bunch of popular covers at concerts and dances throughout New England. They started out as a trio, with Simmons College students Kathy Kinsella and Pinky Keehner on rhythm guitar and lead guitar, and Sally Levy on drums. Much later, under

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7488-509: The Midwest, but in St. Paul , Minnesota , by Jan Kuehnemund during the mid-1970s. Kuehnemund folded the band a few months later, when her bandmates either dropped out or joined other bands, and she reformed it after moving to L.A. at the start of the 1980s. Vixen was sometimes described as "the female Bon Jovi ", eventually becoming commercially successful due largely to the band's signature hit " Edge of

7632-455: The Mouse (31 minutes of dialogue) in May. On July 6, 1928, the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York , premiered. The film cost Warner Bros. only $ 23,000 to produce, but grossed $ 1,252,000, a record rate of return surpassing 5,000%. In September, the studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture, The Singing Fool , which more than doubled The Jazz Singer' s earnings record for

7776-432: The Paris studios were fully sound-equipped—a process that stretched well into 1930—a number of other early French talkies were shot in Germany. The first all-talking German feature, Atlantik , had premiered in Berlin on October 28. Yet another Elstree-made movie, it was rather less German at heart than Les Trois masques and La Route est belle were French; a BIP production with a British scenarist and German director, it

7920-480: The Petruccis and their fellow band members were forced to disperse when Kuehnemund, feeling left out and her lead in representing Vixen being usurped, successfully sued to keep the rights to her band's name. She reunited Vixen in 2001, with a new bassist in tow, until disagreements with the band's management caused Kuehnemund's bandmates to leave, driving her to search for and hire new members. In 2004, Vixen's line-up from

8064-512: The Right was released along with the single "High in High School". The Petrucci sisters were a focal point of the band – Maxine, the lead guitarist, and Roxy , the drummer. However, based on management decisions, it was decided that it would be better if only one of the sisters was in the band and Roxy was placed in another band, the all-female, Los Angeles –based Vixen . Vixen was founded also in

8208-521: The Royal Hungarian Patent Court in 1918; the patent award was published four years later. Whether sound was captured on cylinder, disc, or film, none of the available technology was adequate for big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major Hollywood film studios saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures. A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by

8352-538: The UK to work for Mike Oldfield . The all-female heavy metal band Girlschool , from South London, formed in 1978. While somewhat successful in the UK, they became better known in the early 1980s. One of the original members of the band, Kathy Valentine , departed to join the all-female band the Go-Go's , switching from guitar to bass. Among Girlschool's early recordings was an EP titled St. Valentine's Day Massacre which they recorded with Bronze label-mates Motörhead under

8496-647: The United Kingdom, the advent of punk in the late 1970s with its "anyone can do it" ethos lead to the formation of such bands as the Slits , the Raincoats , Mo-dettes , Dolly Mixture , and the Innocents among others, and the formation of other groups where the female members influenced the music and lyrical content ( Au Pairs , Delta 5 ) or were the featured artist within the ensemble, notably The Pretenders , Siouxsie and

8640-529: The United States ). In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere), the new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of silent cinema. In Japan , where the popular film tradition integrated silent movie and live vocal performance ( benshi ), talking pictures were slow to take root. Conversely, in India, sound

8784-469: The United States. By 1930, only half of the theaters had been wired for sound. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well. However, even with access to both technologies, most of the Hollywood companies remained slow to produce talking features of their own. No studio besides Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until

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8928-492: The United States. Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West. It appears that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai ( Dawn ), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system. Using the sound-on-disc Minatoki system, the leading Nikkatsu studio produced a pair of talkies in 1929: Taii no musume ( The Captain's Daughter ) and Furusato ( Hometown ),

9072-404: The Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying, like Sunrise and Don Juan , on a score and effects. When the movie's star, Al Jolson , sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience;

9216-649: The Western Electric system infringed on the Tri-Ergon patents, stalling the introduction of American technology in many places. Just as RCA had entered the movie business to maximize its recording system's value, Tobis also established its own production operations. During 1929, most of the major European filmmaking countries began joining Hollywood in the changeover to sound. Many of the trend-setting European talkies were shot abroad as production companies leased studios while their own were being converted or as they deliberately targeted markets speaking different languages. One of Europe's first two feature-length dramatic talkies

9360-494: The advent of rock and roll . Among the earliest all-female rock bands to be signed to a record label were Goldie and the Gingerbreads , to Atlantic Records in 1964, the Pleasure Seekers with Suzi Quatro to Hideout Records in 1964 and Mercury Records in 1968, the Feminine Complex to Athena Records in 1968, and Fanny (who pioneered the all-female band sound in the early to mid-1970s) in 1969 when Mo Ostin signed them to Warner Bros. Records . There were also others, such as

9504-403: The all-talking Niebezpieczny romans ( Dangerous Love Affair ) in October. In Italy, whose once vibrant film industry had become moribund by the late 1920s, the first talkie, La Canzone dell'amore ( The Song of Love ), also came out in October; within two years, Italian cinema would be enjoying a revival. The first movie spoken in Czech debuted in 1930 as well, Tonka Šibenice ( Tonka of

9648-428: The band by the end of the 2010s. With the resurgence of interest in pop-punk bands in the US in the early 1990s, along with the sunset strip "hair metal" scene becoming extremely crowded, bands who combined a "non-image" with loud raw music started were gigging at clubs like Rajis in Hollywood. Bands such as Hole , Super Heroines , the Lovedolls, and L7 became popular, while demonstrating on stage, and in interviews,

9792-463: The band, published an autobiography The Liverbirds: Our life in Britain’s first female rock ‘n’ roll band in 2024. Tablyrics.com lists some songs that are not known outside of the site. Their existence is unknown. The story of the Liverbirds is the subject of the 2019 musical, Girls Don't Play Guitars , written by Ian Salmon and directed by Bob Eaton at the Royal Court Theatre, Liverpool . Founding members McGlory and Saunders have been involved with

9936-476: The banner of De Forest Phonofilms . The set included the 11-minute short film From far Seville starring Concha Piquer . In 2010, a copy of the tape was found in the U.S. Library of Congress , where it is currently preserved. Critics attending the event praised the novelty but not the sound quality which received negative reviews in general. That June, De Forest entered into an extended legal battle with an employee, Freeman Harrison Owens , for title to one of

10080-417: The camera for particular shots. The necessity of staying within range of still microphones meant that actors also often had to limit their movements unnaturally. Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), from First National Pictures (which Warner Bros. had taken control of thanks to its profitable adventure into sound), gives a behind-the-scenes look at some of the techniques involved in shooting early talkies. Several of

10224-402: The childhood-centered issues of much of the riot grrrl aesthetic, but nonetheless also have dealt explicitly with feminist and related issues. All-female Queercore bands, such as Fifth Column , Tribe 8 , and Team Dresch , also write songs dealing with matters specific to women and their position in society. A film put together by a San Diego psychiatrist, Dr. Lisa Rose Apramian , along with

10368-403: The commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid-to-late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as " talking pictures ", or " talkies ", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie (although it had only limited sound sequences)

10512-707: The crucial Phonofilm patents. Although De Forest ultimately won the case in the courts, Owens is today recognized as a central innovator in the field. The following year, De Forest's studio released the first commercial dramatic film shot as a talking picture—the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song , directed by J. Searle Dawley and featuring Una Merkel . However, phonofilm's stock in trade was not original dramas but celebrity documentaries, popular music acts, and comedy performances. President Calvin Coolidge , opera singer Abbie Mitchell , and vaudeville stars such as Phil Baker , Ben Bernie , Eddie Cantor and Oscar Levant appeared in

10656-531: The device into a commercial product. Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which came to an effective dead end. In 1914, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt was granted German patent 309,536 for his sound-on-film work; that same year, he apparently demonstrated a film made with the process to an audience of scientists in Berlin. Hungarian engineer Denes Mihaly submitted his sound-on-film Projectofon concept to

10800-404: The edge over sound-on-film in two substantial ways: As sound-on-film technology improved, both of these disadvantages were overcome. The third crucial set of innovations marked a major step forward in both the live recording of sound and its effective playback: In 1913, Western Electric , the manufacturing division of AT&T, acquired the rights to the de Forest audion , the forerunner of

10944-435: The film "a good gimmick, but that's all it was." Not until May 1928 did the group of four big studios (PDC had dropped out of the alliance), along with United Artists and others, sign with ERPI for conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. It was a daunting commitment; revamping a single theater cost as much as $ 15,000 (the equivalent of $ 220,000 in 2019), and there were more than 20,000 movie theaters in

11088-434: The film's soundtrack consisted of a musical score and sound effects (including, in a couple of crowd scenes, "wild", nonspecific vocals). Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.' The Jazz Singer premiered. It was a smash box office success for the mid-level studio, earning a total of $ 2.625 million in the United States and abroad, almost a million dollars more than the previous record for a Warner Bros. film. Produced with

11232-493: The firm's pictures. Hollywood remained suspicious, even fearful, of the new technology. As Photoplay editor James Quirk put it in March 1924, "Talking pictures are perfected, says Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil ." De Forest's process continued to be used through 1927 in the United States for dozens of short Phonofilms; in the UK it was employed a few years longer for both shorts and features by British Sound Film Productions,

11376-507: The first all-color, all-talking feature, Warner Bros.' On with the Show! , premiered. Yet most American movie theaters, especially outside of urban areas, were still not equipped for sound: while the number of sound cinemas grew from 100 to 800 between 1928 and 1929, they were still vastly outnumbered by silent theaters, which had actually grown in number as well, from 22,204 to 22,544. The studios, in parallel, were still not entirely convinced of

11520-465: The first commercial motion picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine his image-casting zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology. No agreement was reached, but within a year Edison commissioned the development of the Kinetoscope , essentially a "peep-show" system, as a visual complement to his cylinder phonograph . The two devices were brought together as

11664-423: The first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical score and added sound effects , but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying Don Juan , however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by Will H. Hays , president of

11808-570: The first movie in which Marathi was spoken to be released (though Sant Tukaram was the first to go through the official censorship process); the first Gujarati-language film, Narsimha Mehta , and all-Tamil talkie, Kalava , debuted as well. The next year, Ardeshir Irani produced the first Persian-language talkie, Dukhtar-e-loor . Also in 1933, the first Cantonese-language films were produced in Hong Kong— Sha zai dongfang ( The Idiot's Wedding Night ) and Liang xing ( Conscience ); within two years,

11952-542: The first reported U.S. demonstration of a sound-on-film motion picture to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers . As with Lauste and Tigerstedt, Tykociner's system would never be taken advantage of commercially; however, De Forest's soon would. On April 15, 1923, at the New York City's Rivoli Theater, the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film took place. This would become

12096-501: The first self-produced all-female band in the R&;B/pop style of music to play all instruments; several of their singles - including " Meeting in the Ladies Room " and " I Miss You " charted in both R&B and pop countdowns. Leading into the 1990s, the surge of heavy metal in the 1980s helped to shed another light on the role of females in music. Because of the success of the Go-Go's and

12240-468: The first woman to establish a Christian band, specifically an all-female group. Even though Rachel Rachel's success was short lived when they folded due to "creative differences" and too great a geographic distance, future rock bands or non-rock musical groups in the Christian genre that have only women as members followed their lead in the next decades to come. Many female musicians from all-female bands in

12384-558: The former drummer from the Motels and the Droogs , Kyle C. Kyle, the documentary Not Bad for a Girl explored some of these issues with interviews from many of the female musicians on the riot grrrl scene at the time. In contemporary Christian music history, there was the first all-female Christian rock band Rachel Rachel , which existed only during the early 1990s and who performed in an album-oriented rock style. Jennifer York became

12528-526: The front-runners came up with. In May, Warner Bros. sold back its exclusivity rights to ERPI (along with the Fox-Case sublicense) and signed a new royalty contract similar to Fox's for use of Western Electric technology. Fox and Warners pressed forward with sound cinema, moving in different directions both technologically and commercially: Fox moved into newsreels and then scored dramas, while Warners concentrated on talking features. Meanwhile, ERPI sought to corner

12672-420: The fundamental problems caused by the transition to sound were soon solved with new camera casings, known as " blimps ", designed to suppress noise and boom microphones that could be held just out of frame and moved with the actors. In 1931, a major improvement in playback fidelity was introduced: three-way speaker systems in which sound was separated into low, medium, and high frequencies and sent respectively to

12816-411: The future standard. It consisted of a set of short films varying in length and featuring some of the most popular stars of the 1920s (including Eddie Cantor , Harry Richman , Sophie Tucker , and George Jessel among others) doing stage performances such as vaudevilles , musical acts, and speeches which accompanied the screening of the silent feature film Bella Donna . All of them were presented under

12960-669: The group formed in early 1962 as the Debutones. Irene Green left to join Tiffany's Dimensions and Sheila McGlory to the Demoiselles. They achieved more commercial success in Germany than their native Britain. Early in their career, they followed in the footsteps of fellow Liverpudlians the Beatles and made their way to Hamburg , where they performed at the Star-Club after the Beatles' own tenure and were billed as "the female Beatles". John Lennon of

13104-476: The late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback: In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was awarded several patents that would lead to the first optical sound -on-film technology with commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded onto the side of the strip of motion picture film to create a composite, or "married", print. If proper synchronization of sound and picture

13248-456: The latter directed by Kenji Mizoguchi . The rival Shochiku studio began the successful production of sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called Tsuchibashi. Two years later, however, more than 80 percent of movies made in the country were still silents. Two of the country's leading directors, Mikio Naruse and Yasujirō Ozu , did not make their first sound films until 1935 and 1936, respectively. As late as 1938, over

13392-535: The lines are of varying width.) By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's newest major studio, RKO Pictures . Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had released three more talkies, all profitable, if not at the level of The Jazz Singer : In March, Tenderloin appeared; it was billed by Warners as the first feature in which characters spoke their parts, though only 15 of its 88 minutes had dialogue. Glorious Betsy followed in April, and The Lion and

13536-481: The local film industry had fully converted to sound. Korea, where pyonsa (or byun-sa ) held a role and status similar to that of the Japanese benshi, in 1935 became the last country with a significant film industry to produce its first talking picture: Chunhyangjeon ( Korean :  춘향전 ; Hanja :  春香傳 ) is based on the seventeenth-century pansori folktale " Chunhyangga ", of which as many as fifteen film versions have been made through 2009. In

13680-439: The low-budget-oriented Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) premiered The Perfect Crime on June 17, 1928, eight months after The Jazz Singer . FBO had come under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor, General Electric 's RCA division, which was looking to market its new sound-on-film system, Photophone . Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone

13824-718: The management guidance of Peter Bonfils, the band had some success, including a recording contract and a couple of singles with Liberty Records ("About My Baby", b/w "New Day," and "Games" b/w "Don't Bother"), and gigs that showed all around the U.S. as well as in Newfoundland and Puerto Rico , opening for acts including the Kingsmen , Dionne Warwick , the Byrds , and Gary Lewis & the Playboys . The Shaggs were an all-female family band who earned some regional notoriety during their time as

13968-424: The market by signing up the five allied studios. The big sound film sensations of the year all took advantage of preexisting celebrity. On May 20, 1927, at New York City's Roxy Theater , Fox Movietone presented a sound film of the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh 's celebrated flight to Paris, recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox sound newsreel depicting his return welcomes in New York City and Washington, D.C.,

14112-515: The music her sisters Dot and Betty were singing and playing on guitar), which somewhat ironically (and to their bewilderment) made them icons of outsider music . Roger Ebert , in his audio commentary for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls ( 1970 ) gives the film credit for inspiring all-female rock bands, with the fictional band Carrie Nations created for the film, stating that such bands were quite rare at

14256-553: The name Headgirl . In 1974, the Deadly Nightshade, a rock/country band (Anne Bowen, rhythm guitar/percussion; Pamela Robin Brandt, electric bass; Helen Hooke, lead guitar/violin) was signed by RCA 's custom label Phantom. The contract made RCA/Phantom the first mainstream record label to grant a band the right to reject any advertising offensive to feminist sensibilities. The band released two albums, The Deadly Nightshade in 1975 and F&W (Funky & Western) in 1976. Reunited in 2009,

14400-582: The name Movietone , thus became the first viable sound-on-film technology controlled by a Hollywood movie studio. The following year, Fox purchased the North American rights to the Tri-Ergon system, though the company found it inferior to Movietone and virtually impossible to integrate the two different systems to advantage. In 1927, as well, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film. Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology,

14544-469: The name Malibu Barbi. When Cara Crash and Wanda Day left 4 Non Blondes and joined Malibu Barbi their sound shifted from heavy metal to a sound described as combining a "driving beat with Johnny Rottenesque vocal and post-punk riffs". Around the same time in the Midwest, Madam X was signed to an offshoot of Columbia Records , Jet Records . In 1984, the Rick Derringer -produced album We Reserve

14688-582: The occasional vocals that accompany some of their tracks. Many bands across many genres are all-female, such as the psychedelic folk group Spires That in the Sunset Rise . Sound film A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film . The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before sound motion pictures became commercially practical. Reliable synchronization

14832-403: The other an exchange between him and his mother. The "natural" sounds of the settings were also audible. Though the success of The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as one of U.S. biggest music stars, and its limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film (let alone the "first"), the movie's profits were proof enough to the industry that

14976-521: The pace of conversion was relatively swift in Britain—with over 60 percent of theaters equipped for sound by the end of 1930, similar to the U.S. figure—in France, by contrast, more than half of theaters nationwide were still projecting in silence by late 1932. According to scholar Colin G. Crisp, "Anxiety about resuscitating the flow of silent films was frequently expressed in the [French] industrial press, and

15120-472: The production and join in the cast on stage for the encore. Also in 2019, The New York Times produced a sixteen-minute documentary about the band called We're Britain's First Female Rock Band. This is Why You Don't Know Us. | 'Almost Famous' by Op-Docs . It featured surviving members Mary McGlory and Sylvia Saunders. It is also known as The Other Fab Four . All female band In the Jazz Age and during

15264-466: The redubbed Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of Don Juan and its accompanying shorts over the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for Warners films was markedly superior to those made for the company's sound-on-film competitors. Meanwhile, Bell Labs —the new name for the AT&;T research operation—was working at

15408-431: The running time of 1000 ft of film at 90 ft/min (24 frames/s). Because of the larger diameter the minimum groove velocity of 70 ft/min (14 inches or 356 mm/s) was only slightly less than that of a standard 10-inch 78 rpm commercial disc. In 1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved system of electronic audio, including sensitive condenser microphones and rubber-line recorders (named after

15552-562: The selenium's resistance to electrical currents, which was used to modulate the sound produced in a telephone receiver. He called this invention the photographophone , which he summarized as: "It is truly a wonderful process: sound becomes electricity, becomes light, causes chemical actions, becomes light and electricity again, and finally sound." Ruhmer began a correspondence with the French-born, London-based Eugene Lauste , who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and 1892. In 1907, Lauste

15696-457: The short term, the introduction of live sound recording caused major difficulties in production. Cameras were noisy, so a soundproofed cabinet was used in many of the earliest talkies to isolate the loud equipment from the actors, at the expense of a drastic reduction in the ability to move the camera. For a time, multiple-camera shooting was used to compensate for the loss of mobility and innovative studio technicians could often find ways to liberate

15840-666: The sound quality was very poor and no other theaters could show the sound version of the film as no one had the Photokinema sound system installed. On Sunday, May 29, Dream Street opened at the Shubert Crescent Theater in Brooklyn with a program of short films made in Phonokinema. However, business was poor, and the program soon closed. In 1925, Sam Warner of Warner Bros. , then a small Hollywood studio with big ambitions, saw

15984-473: The sound-on-disc system were able to draw on expertise that Western Electric already had in electrical disc recording and were thus able to make faster initial progress. The main change required was to increase the playing time of the disc so that it could match that of a standard 1,000 ft (300 m) reel of 35 mm film. The chosen design used a disc nearly 16 inches (about 40 cm) in diameter rotating at 33 1/3 rpm. This could play for 11 minutes,

16128-462: The studio's recognition of the new medium's power. Interference , Paramount's first all-talker, debuted in November. The process known as "goat glanding" briefly became widespread: soundtracks, sometimes including a smatter of post-dubbed dialogue or song, were added to movies that had been shot, and in some cases released, as silents. A few minutes of singing could qualify such a newly endowed film as

16272-466: The sublicense, both Warners and ERPI received a share of Fox's related revenues. The patents of all three concerns were cross-licensed. Superior recording and amplification technology was now available to two Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction. The new year would finally see the emergence of sound cinema as a significant commercial medium. In 1929 a "new RCA Photophone portable sound and picture reproducing system"

16416-479: The talkies' universal appeal—until mid-1930, the majority of Hollywood movies were produced in dual versions, silent as well as talking. Though few in the industry predicted it, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United States would soon be little more than a memory. Points West , a Hoot Gibson Western released by Universal Pictures in August 1929, was the last purely silent mainstream feature put out by

16560-437: The technology was worth investing in. The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts before The Jazz Singer , and the film's success did not change things overnight. Influential gossip columnist Louella Parsons ' reaction to The Jazz Singer was badly off the mark: "I have no fear that the screeching sound film will ever disturb our theaters," while MGM head of production Irving Thalberg called

16704-662: The time, but started to spring up in the film's wake. On November 6, 1971, Fanny became the first all-female band to reach the Hot 100's top 40, with "Charity Ball" peaking at No. 40. In 1975, the Canadian duo of sisters, Kate & Anna McGarrigle , recorded the first of a string of albums, sometimes joined by their sister Jane . The Runaways were an early commercially successful, hard-edged, all-female hard rock band, releasing their first album in 1976; band members Joan Jett , Cherie Currie , and Lita Ford all went on to solo careers. In

16848-407: The transmitting arc-light as varying shades of light and dark bands onto a continuous roll of photographic film. He then determined that he could reverse the process and reproduce the recorded sound from this photographic strip by shining a bright light through the running filmstrip, with the resulting varying light illuminating a selenium cell. The changes in brightness caused a corresponding change to

16992-567: The triode vacuum tube . Over the next few years they developed it into a predictable and reliable device that made electronic amplification possible for the first time. Western Electric then branched-out into developing uses for the vacuum tube including public address systems and an electrical recording system for the recording industry. Beginning in 1922, the research branch of Western Electric began working intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film synchronised sound systems for motion-pictures. The engineers working on

17136-415: The use of a rubber damping band for recording with better frequency response onto a wax master disc ). That May, the company licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for commercial motion pictures; he founded Vitagraph, in which Warner Bros. acquired a half interest, just one month later. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for

17280-551: The vaudeville style all-girl groups, especially short subject promotional films for Paramount and Vitaphone . (In 1925, Lee de Forest filmed Lewis and her band in his short-lived Phonofilm process, in a film now in the Maurice Zouary collection at the Library of Congress . ) Blanche Calloway , sister of Cab Calloway , led a male band, Blanche Calloway and Her Joy Boys, from 1932 to 1939, and Ina Ray Hutton led an all-girl band,

17424-468: The voices and sound effects and providing evocative descriptions of events and images on the screen.... The most popular narrators were stars in their own right, solely responsible for the patronage of a particular theatre." Film historian Mariann Lewinsky argues, The end of silent film in the West and in Japan was imposed by the industry and the market, not by any inner need or natural evolution.... Silent cinema

17568-444: The world. They took their name from the fictional liver bird , which is the symbol of their native Liverpool. They were mostly a cover band, except for three of their songs being written by Pamela Birch. Gell, Saunders, and McGlory formed the band in 1963, along with guitarist Sheila McGlory (Mary's sister) and vocalist Irene Green, both of whom quickly left to join other bands and were replaced by Pamela Birch. According to Bruce Eder,

17712-474: The year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to handle rights to the company's film-related audio technology. Vitaphone still had legal exclusivity, but having lapsed in its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in ERPI's hands. On December 31, 1926, Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the Western Electric system; in exchange for

17856-465: Was The Jazz Singer , which premiered on October 6, 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone , which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures. By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States, they helped secure Hollywood's position as one of the world's most powerful cultural/commercial centers of influence (see Cinema of

18000-425: Was a highly pleasurable and fully mature form. It didn't lack anything, least in Japan, where there was always the human voice doing the dialogues and the commentary. Sound films were not better, just more economical. As a cinema owner you didn't have to pay the wages of musicians and benshi any more. And a good benshi was a star demanding star payment. By the same token, the viability of the benshi system facilitated

18144-416: Was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the standard. (In both sorts of systems, a specially-designed lamp, whose exposure to the film is determined by the audio input, is used to record sound photographically as a series of minuscule lines. In a variable-density process, the lines are of varying darkness; in a variable-area process,

18288-453: Was achieved in recording, it could be absolutely counted on in playback. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of equipment and patents licensed from another American inventor in the field, Theodore Case . At the University of Illinois , Polish-born research engineer Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was working independently on a similar process. On June 9, 1922, he gave

18432-497: Was also shot in English as Atlantic . The entirely German Aafa-Film production It's You I Have Loved ( Dich hab ich geliebt ) opened three and a half weeks later. It was not "Germany's First Talking Film", as the marketing had it, but it was the first to be released in the United States. In 1930, the first Polish talkies premiered, using sound-on-disc systems: Moralność pani Dulskiej ( The Morality of Mrs. Dulska ) in March and

18576-400: Was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the transformation of sound into light waves that are photographically recorded direct onto celluloid . As described by historian Scott Eyman, It was a double system, that is, the sound was on a different piece of film from the picture.... In essence, the sound was captured by a microphone and translated into light waves via

18720-511: Was created in still a different sort of twist on multinational moviemaking: The Crimson Circle was a coproduction between director Friedrich Zelnik 's Efzet-Film company and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released as the silent Der Rote Kreis in Germany, where it was shot; English dialogue was apparently dubbed in much later using the De Forest Phonofilm process controlled by BSFP's corporate parent. It

18864-813: Was described in the industry journal Projection Engineering. In Australia, Hoyts and Gilby Talkies Pty., Ltd were touring talking pictures to country towns. The same year the White Star Line installed talking picture equipment on the s.s. Majestic. The features shown on the first voyage were Show Boat and Broadway . In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five leading Hollywood movie companies: Famous Players–Lasky (soon to be part of Paramount ), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , Universal , First National , and Cecil B. DeMille 's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). The five studios agreed to collectively select just one provider for sound conversion, and then waited to see what sort of results

19008-609: Was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet excerpts to be presented at the Paris Exposition in 1900. These appear to be the first publicly exhibited films with projection of both image and recorded sound. Phonorama and yet another sound-film system—Théâtroscope—were also presented at the Exposition. Three major problems persisted, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for

19152-411: Was difficult to achieve with the early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate. Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures using the technology, which took place in 1923. Before sound-on-film technology became viable, soundtracks for films were commonly played live with organs or pianos. The primary steps in

19296-509: Was given a British trade screening in March 1929, as was a part-talking film made entirely in the UK: The Clue of the New Pin , a British Lion production using the sound-on-disc British Photophone system. In May, Black Waters , which British and Dominions Film Corporation promoted as the first UK all-talker, received its initial trade screening; it had been shot completely in Hollywood with

19440-565: Was one of the band's former colleagues from the Star-Club and later vice-chairman of the German performance rights organization GEMA . Birch also settled in Hamburg and worked for many years in the city's clubs. She died at the UKE on 27 October 2009, at the age of 65. Gell, who settled in Munich but later returned to Hamburg, died on 11 December 2016, aged 71. Saunders and McGlory, the two surviving members of

19584-462: Was recorded on RCA Photophone, General Electric having bought a share of AEG so they could access the Tobis-Klangfilm markets. Blackmail was a substantial hit; critical response was also positive—notorious curmudgeon Hugh Castle, for example, called it "perhaps the most intelligent mixture of sound and silence we have yet seen." On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with

19728-422: Was recorded, as was a sequence of live vocal effects. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened incorporating them. On May 1, 1921, Dream Street was re-released, with love song added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal sequence. However,

19872-474: Was screened around the United States: eight hours worth of projected visuals involving both slides and live action, synchronized with separately recorded lectures and musical performances played back on phonograph. Meanwhile, innovations continued on another significant front. In 1900, as part of the research he was conducting on the photophone , the German physicist Ernst Ruhmer recorded the fluctuations of

20016-507: Was shown. These were the two most acclaimed sound motion pictures to date. In May, as well, Fox had released the first Hollywood fiction film with synchronized dialogue: the short They're Coming to Get Me , starring comedian Chic Sale . After rereleasing a few silent feature hits, such as Seventh Heaven , with recorded music, Fox came out with its first original Movietone feature on September 23: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans , by acclaimed German director F. W. Murnau . As with Don Juan ,

20160-420: Was the challenge of recording fidelity. The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the cumbersome recording devices (acoustical horns, for the most part), imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound. Cinematic innovators attempted to cope with the fundamental synchronization problem in

20304-650: Was the primary competitor to the Gaumont system (sources differ on whether the Cameraphone was disc- or cylinder-based); it ultimately failed for many of the same reasons that held back the Chronophone. In 1913, Edison introduced a new cylinder-based synch-sound apparatus known, just like his 1895 system, as the Kinetophone. Instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the Kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto

20448-452: Was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the nation's film industry . The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, a couple of days after photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture not far from the laboratory of Thomas Edison , the two inventors met privately. Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before

20592-465: Was underwhelming. Sweden's first talkie, Konstgjorda Svensson ( Artificial Svensson ), premiered on October 14. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film came out with Le Collier de la reine ( The Queen's Necklace ), shot at the Épinay studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French feature. On October 31, Les Trois masques ( The Three Masks ) debuted;

20736-452: Was very much a male-dominated world. In 1984, when film maker Dave Markey , along with Jeff and Steve McDonald from Redd Kross , put together the mockumentary Desperate Teenage Lovedolls , a comically punky version of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls , it also spawned a real band. While the Lovedolls could barely play at first, because of the film, and because they were an "all-female band", they received press and gigs. Klymaxx became

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