October 7, 2007 New York Times

DISCOVERING CINEMA

“This ain’t no movie — this is a talkie!” exclaims the jazz pianist Eubie Blake in an experimental sound short from 1923, sounding as if he’s just coined the term. He may well have. Filmed by Lee de Forest a full four years before “The Jazz Singer” made talking pictures commercially viable, this three-minute film, included in its entirety on “Discovering Cinema,” was one of dozens if not hundreds of attempts to resolve a problem that had haunted movies since Thomas Edison: how to make these shadows talk.

This two-disc set, an English-language import of a French production from Serge Bromberg’s Lobster Films, contains two 60-minute documentaries on early technologies: “Learning to Talk” and “Movies Dream in Color.” Better, it features several pioneering sound and color movies in their entirety, rather than recycling the choppy extracts that invariably make these films look cruder than they were.

Here, for example, is a five-minute, fully synchronized musical from the Edison studios of 1913, “Nursery Favorites,” with a distinctly surreal, David Lynch vibe; in a travelogue shot to promote the Cinecolor process, the Marx Brothers and Margaret Dumont fool around in the full glory of their “Animal Crackers” costumes (though Harpo has forgotten to put on his pink wig). All lab work should be this beautiful. (Flicker Alley, $29.98, not rated.)