A military brass band plays a march for the German fleet.
Although most people think of sound films as having arisen in the middle of the 1920s, experiments in merging sight and sound had begun thirty years earlier. In 1906, regular series of short sound films, almost invariably musical pieces, were produced in France and Germany. Regular production continued until about 1910. Although there was a theater in Berlin dedicated to showing these "tonfilms", the difficulty of distributing them widely meant they were of limited commercial value, and the long gap between their production and the revival of talkies in the 1920s meant they became a nearly-forgotten bypath.
Because of the primitive nature of the recording equipment, no one could move around. This one is remarkable in that the performers seem to be performing outside, albeit in a confined space.
Although most people think of sound films as having arisen in the middle of the 1920s, experiments in merging sight and sound had begun thirty years earlier. In 1906, regular series of short sound films, almost invariably musical pieces, were produced in France and Germany. Regular production continued until about 1910. Although there was a theater in Berlin dedicated to showing these "tonfilms", the difficulty of distributing them widely meant they were of limited commercial value, and the long gap between their production and the revival of talkies in the 1920s meant they became a nearly-forgotten bypath.
Because of the primitive nature of the recording equipment, no one could move around. This one is remarkable in that the performers seem to be performing outside, albeit in a confined space.
