"American Moviemakers: The Dawn of Sound" at the Museum of Modern Art

Abstract

Talking is an old-fashioned term. Nowadays we simply call them movies because all movies have synchronous sound. But movies were first produced commercially as silent films, and only after 30 years or so was it possible to add sound to the moving image. Moviemakers: Dawn of Sound, a traveling exhibit that opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City in October 1989, looks at the time in the late 1920s when sound became a practical reality and the first successful talkies played in theaters across the country. This small exhibit, a joint production of MOMA and the American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) Archives, is geared for theater and auditorium lobbies and traveled around the country during 1990. However, the exhibit is only the tip of the iceberg for a much larger restoration project involving several institutions (primarily the University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA], Film and Television Archives) to restore the Vitaphone movies, early sound-on-disc films produced by Warner Brothers, Metro-GoldwynMayer (MGM), and First National studios between 1926 and 1931. traveling exhibit includes screenings of these wonderfully restored Vitaphone classics. For movie lovers and restoration aficionados, The Dawn of Sound is a feast for both eyes and ears. To review briefly the history of sound movies and the role of Vitaphone movies in that history, commercial movies in the United States started in 1892-93 with experiments at Thomas Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. In the specially built Black Maria studio, the Edison lab created motion pictures in a form that established standards of technology and practice that molded the industry for years, to the present in some instances, as 35-mm film continues to be used today. Edison's original conception of movies included the idea of synchronous sound, and his famous patent caveat