A small portion of this very early talking picture is missing and is replaced with a still--and the music is still intact. You can't blame the film makers for this, as nitrate decomposition destroyed so many of the early films. It was a highly unstable medium and the film tended to degrade quickly--turning to powder, melting or even catching fire! So, the fact that this ephemeral film remains even in a truncated form is amazing--and so important to our history. Hopefully one day they'll find the very beginning of this film so they can piece it back together. It's included as an extra on the third disk from the DVD release of "The Jazz Singer"--a wonderful collection of early sound films and documentaries about the emergence of sound in movies.
This particular short consists of a recreation of a WWI scene. Elsie Janis sings popular songs which would have been enjoyed by soldiers a decade earlier. Some are solo and others are sung with men dressed up like soldiers in front of a set that looks like a WWI scene. In addition, a French singer arrives to sing "Madeline".
For a very early sound film, the audio quality is excellent, as the Vitaphone process produced excellent sound. It was, however, replaced by the much more practical sound on film system a few years later, as creating a system that synchronized the record and film projector was not an easy task.
This particular short consists of a recreation of a WWI scene. Elsie Janis sings popular songs which would have been enjoyed by soldiers a decade earlier. Some are solo and others are sung with men dressed up like soldiers in front of a set that looks like a WWI scene. In addition, a French singer arrives to sing "Madeline".
For a very early sound film, the audio quality is excellent, as the Vitaphone process produced excellent sound. It was, however, replaced by the much more practical sound on film system a few years later, as creating a system that synchronized the record and film projector was not an easy task.
