Phonofilm
Phonofilm is an optical sound-on-film system developed by inventors Lee de Forest and Theodore Case in the early 1920s.
In 1919 and 1920, de Forest, inventor of the audion tube, filed his first patents on a sound-on-film process, DeForest Phonofilm, which recorded sound directly onto film as parallel lines.
These parallel lines photographically recorded electrical waveforms from a microphone, which were translated back into sound waves when the movie was projected.
These films are particularly valuable to entertainment historians, as they include recordings of a wide variety of both well-known and less famous American vaudeville and British music hall acts which would otherwise have been forgotten.
[3] On April 15, 1923, de Forest premiered 18 short films made in Phonofilm — including vaudeville acts, musical performers, opera, and ballet — at the Rivoli Theater at 1620 Broadway in New York City.
De Forest later took his show on the road, pitching Phonofilm directly to the general public at a series of special engagements across the country.
One of the few two-reel films made in the Phonofilm process was Love's Old Sweet Song (1923), starring Louis Wolheim, Donald Gallaher, and the 20-year-old Una Merkel.
"Siegfried", the first part of the Fritz Lang film Die Nibelungen (1924) had a Phonofilm soundtrack, but only at the New York City premiere at the Century Theatre on August 23, 1925.
Also in 1924, the Fleischer brothers partnered with de Forest, Edwin Miles Fadiman, and Hugo Riesenfeld to form Red Seal Pictures Corporation, which owned 36 theaters on the East Coast, extending as far west as Cleveland, Ohio.
Warner Bros. released the feature film Don Juan starring John Barrymore on August 6, 1926, in Vitaphone, with music and sound effects only.
As a consequence, Case's tests and de Forest's early Phonofilms, shot at about 21 frames per second, gave speakers and singers high-pitched "helium voices" if they are run on a standard sound projector.
The Library of Congress and other film archives have printed new copies of some early Phonofilms, modifying them by periodically duplicating frames and correspondingly "stretching" the soundtracks to make them compatible with standard projectors and telecine equipment.
In July 1925, The Gentleman, a comedy short film excerpt of The 9 to 11 Revue directed by William J. Elliott, was made using Phonofilm, the first sound-on-film production in England.
The last films made in the UK in Phonofilm were released in early 1929, due to competition from Vitaphone, and sound-on-film systems such as Fox Movietone and RCA Photophone.
The release of Alfred Hitchcock's sound feature film Blackmail in June 1929, made in RCA Photophone, sealed the fate of Phonofilm in the UK.
On April 6, 1927, Minister for Trade Herbert Pratten appeared in a DeForest film to celebrate the opening of a Phonofilm studio in Rushcutters Bay in Sydney.
(*) Included in program of Phonofilms at the Rivoli Theater in NYC on April 15, 1923(**) Fleischer "Song Car-Tunes" series (some titles later re-released by the Fleischers in their "Screen Songs" series, through Paramount Pictures, with new soundtracks recorded in RCA Photophone)(***) Found in a trunk in Windsor, New South Wales, Australia in early 1976, and restored by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
