The Kinetoscope Parlor - Text 3
From the United States to Canada by way of Europe, phonographic listening combined with moving images met with great success.[8] According to L’Industriel forain,[9] the Kinetoscope Parlor arrived in France in 1894. This device set in motion a wave of experiments which were foundational for the advent of the film industry: on the one hand, Lumière, Pathé, Gaumont, Baron and others saw and understood, to varying degrees, the commercial possibility of moving photographs, and on the other hand phonographic listening combined with moving images became the subject of dozens of patent applications. Hence the fact that many systems, in the way they conceived the connection between sound and image, remained attached to the principle of two distinct devices: one for the ear, the other for the eye. Hence also the shifting expressions found, in French, in both texts and “chronophonography”[10] experiments: “combination of the phonograph and the kinematograph”; “joining of the phonograph and the kinematograph”; “simultaneous reproduction”; and finally “synchronism.”
While phonography was being improved and taking its place on stage, therefore, patent applications for inventions (Auguste Baron, patent FR 276,628, 4 April 1898; Louis Alfred Berthon, Charles François Dussaud and Georges François Jaubert, patent FR 268,369, 1 July 1897) beginning in the late nineteenth century pictured systems for simultaneous reproduction of scenes in motion and the sounds accompanying them through combining and/or joining. The expression “simultaneous reproduction” underscored the existence of two distinct events: one the one hand, recorded sounds and on the other recorded images, created at the same time. And given the fact that the recording was based on the principle of pre-recording the sound, this “at the same time” was quite relative: the performer was asked to mime the words recorded on the cylinder (or disc) which was played while the images were being recorded. Then, during projection, the same cylinder or disc was heard again, this time by the audience: “the result was a film that is obviously post-synced, shot to playback, and the effect is more akin to an illustrated phonograph recording than the recording of a slice of reality,”[11] in James Buhler’s description.
The term synchronism began to appear in patent applications filed in 1900: Henri Joly, patent FR 296,067, 11 January 1900; Henri Louis Huet, patent FR 296,753, 1 February 1900; Société L. Gaumont, patent FR 312,613, 11 July 1901; and many others in their wake. The principle of the mechanical combination of two distinct phenomena gradually yielded to the illusion of two recordings made and then played back at the same time. Nevertheless, in movie theatres the phonographic listening model continued on.
