Vitaphone Shorts at the PFA

Last night I attended the screening of ten Vitaphone shorts at the Pacific Film Archive. It was part of their current UCLA Festival of Preservation series. Vitaphone was Warner Brother’s early talking film technology, synchronizing image on film with sound on phonograph discs. The system was used for features—the best known being The Jazz Singer—but every Vitaphone feature was preceded by a collection of shorts.

Warners continued to use the name Vitaphone for their short subjects long after movie sound was unique or recorded on phonographs. I’ve seen Technicolor two-reelers from the late 1930s with the Vitaphone moniker.

Seven of the ten shorts screened last night were Vitaphone shorts in the classic sense of the term: crudely filmed vaudeville acts. They couldn’t edit the sound (how do you cut and splice a disc?), so they would film and record a stage act straight through using two or three cameras (the technology limited them to about 11 minutes maximum). Then they would edit the picture, always keeping it in sync with the unalterable sound.

Of these seven, the best was easily “Frank Whitman ‘That Surprising Fiddler’.” He played the violin in all sorts of ways. He used a matchstick for a bow, then a glass flask. And when he used a conventional bow, he didn’t always use it conventionally. He held it with his mouth or his knees, and moved the violin across it. Foreshadowing Jimi Hendrix, he played the violin behind his back (although he didn’t set it on fire). But I also liked “Born and Lawrence ‘The Country Gentlemen’,” “Harry Fox and His Six American Beauties,” and “The Wild Westerner with Val Harris, Ann Howe.”

But three of the shorts were of a very different nature. They were more cinematic–clearly written and designed for film. They cut back and forth between scenes in a way that required at least crude audio editing. With two of these shorts, that wasn’t really surprising. “Niagara Falls” and “What A Life” were made in 1930. By that time Warners was recording sound on film like everyone else, and could edit audio. These were titled “Vitaphone Varieties,” clearly signifying a different kind of beast.

But the other cinematic short, “Hollywood Bound,” is a mystery to me. It was released in 1928, and I didn’t know that Warners could cut audio that early. I’m not sure how that one was made.