Lil Hawthorne sings "Kitty Mahone" on a stage.
Here's another forgotten example of sound films before sound films. Although the phenomenon is usually thought to have begun in 1926, there was a long history of coordinated sound and film, running back to speculation at the time Edison made known the fact that his labs were working on motion picture. Blackton made a movie showing two men dancing while he played the violin in 1895, and regular production of sound-on-disc (or in Edison's case, on cylinder) began in 1906 in Europe, fading out by 1914.
What you probably didn't know -- I certainly didn't -- was that Walter Gibbons, whose total record as producer, director and occasionally actor, consisted of about ten films in 1900, made a sizable number of them with sound. Released as "Gibbons' Bio-Tableaux" -- and I thought "Yahoo" a weird name for a serious business -- these came out at about the same time as another producer was releasing similarly coordinated movies from the Paris Exposition.
Miss Hawthorne was a popular singer of the era. She dressed as a man, although she was certainly not a male impersonator. This is her only known movie appearance. It's a pity it's done in long distance, but that was probably intended to cover up imperfections in matching the recording and picture. The gestures would not have to be exact, but if her mouth was not moving in concert with the song, that would be disruptive; at this distance, you can't see her mouth.
Here's another forgotten example of sound films before sound films. Although the phenomenon is usually thought to have begun in 1926, there was a long history of coordinated sound and film, running back to speculation at the time Edison made known the fact that his labs were working on motion picture. Blackton made a movie showing two men dancing while he played the violin in 1895, and regular production of sound-on-disc (or in Edison's case, on cylinder) began in 1906 in Europe, fading out by 1914.
What you probably didn't know -- I certainly didn't -- was that Walter Gibbons, whose total record as producer, director and occasionally actor, consisted of about ten films in 1900, made a sizable number of them with sound. Released as "Gibbons' Bio-Tableaux" -- and I thought "Yahoo" a weird name for a serious business -- these came out at about the same time as another producer was releasing similarly coordinated movies from the Paris Exposition.
Miss Hawthorne was a popular singer of the era. She dressed as a man, although she was certainly not a male impersonator. This is her only known movie appearance. It's a pity it's done in long distance, but that was probably intended to cover up imperfections in matching the recording and picture. The gestures would not have to be exact, but if her mouth was not moving in concert with the song, that would be disruptive; at this distance, you can't see her mouth.
