User Reviews

I love films--particularly the older ones. I have seen hundreds, no perhaps thousands of silent films--including many of the really early ones by Edison, the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès--yet several shorts directed by Alice Guy absolutely blew me away tonight. I thought I knew a lot about the history of film--when suddenly several of Guy's films from 1905 and 1906 featured sound. Real, honest to goodness sound. The sound, of course, was not recorded on the film like later sound films but had the sound on an accompanying record that they tried to play in sync with the images. It was a primitive process, but the fact that they were working on it as early as 1905 shocked me. Yes, I knew about an experimental film Edison made with a guy and his violin at about 1897, but this was soon abandoned as impractical. I didn't know anyone was working on this in 1905--I thought the process was not picked up again until about 1920. What a shock.

An even bigger shock about this amazing film is that not only is it a sound picture, but it also had color!!! I am not talking about hand painted cels, but some sort of color. Now IMDb does not say this was a color film, but trust me--it was. See the Kino DVD of Alice Guy's work yourself--this amazing lady had sound AND color in 1906 (though the DVD says this is 1905). Breathtaking--even if it only consists of a Frenchman singing.

Alice Guy was not just the first woman director, she directed the first regular series of sound films for Gaumont in 1905 and 1906. This one, starring the French music hall artist Felix performing one of his popular, saucy songs, is also in color! Not a photographic color process, true enough, but one of the stencil methods popular at the time, and very well done.

The result is one of the very important records of performances of the era. We have plenty of disc recordings from the era, certainly of equal or greater quality. But what did these people look like on the stage? Photographs don't tell the whole story.