Number of user reviews: 18
User score: 6.8
Here is an excellent example of a movie that has become significant for completely different reasons from what its creators intended. The title of the film, Dickson Experimental Sound Film (directed by, once again, William K. Dickson, in Edison's lab), identifies the introduction of sound as its key innovation, and really, why should I not do the same? After all, I have gone to pains to discuss the pioneering features of every previous entry in the Canon, and the introduction of bloody SOUND has to be one of the most important developments in cinematic history. But the whole sound thing is only the second-most-discussed aspect of Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Part of the reason for this displacement is that the film's use of sound is, frankly, just not that interesting. There is no attempt at synchronizing lip movements to speech, and, in fact, the only speech in the film is barely audible, and is spoken before the footage begins to roll (the first words of cinema: "Are the rest of you ready? Go ahead!"). Once the camera comes on, the sole sound accompanying the film is the rhythmless wailing of a mediocre fiddler. When sound film caught on over 30 years later, both inventors and filmmakers alike assumed, correctly, that the spoken word would be the "killer app" for sound. Hence the preponderance of musicals in the early sound days; The Jazz Singer, The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Revue of 1929, and so on. But in this first attempt, the inclusion of speech seems an afterthought, or even an accident; the focus is on the dancers, with the music--ostensibly the reason for the film's existence--relegated to background noise. Oh yeah, and both of those dancers are...get ready for it...men. Light those powder kegs.
Though often interpreted as the first LGBT film--and indeed, the film was virtually unknown until Vito Russo advanced this argument in The Celluloid Closet in 1981--this line of analysis is generally spurned by more contemporary critics, who will be quick to retort that dancing between men was just what they did back then, nothing to see here (especially nothing gay!) But despite this critical backlash against queer film theory, seemingly every review and every online comment of the Experimental Sound Film remarks upon its homoerotic undertones. Why is it so important to clarify that it was perfectly normal for men to dance with each other in the 1890s, and that it was most definitely NOT!!!! intended in any way as a gay thing? First, I am not sure why "intention" matters at all here, nor why the audience's* nonchalance toward male-male dancing matters. If anything, their blindness to such homoeroticism would only put into sharper focus the unconscious ideologies guiding their consumption. Dancing (and especially the hand-in-hand slow dancing seen here) is, by its very nature, an intimate activity. There need not be sexual acts performed onscreen for the residue of homosexuality to be present; Eve Sedgwick introduced the term homosociality for this type of male-male bonding, which is typically accompanied by a strong disavowal of a romantic element. This reflexive distancing from homosexuality (whether knowingly or not) leads to the odd discursive pattern surrounding the film, wherein even scholars go out of their way to downplay the film's homoerotic content. The argument goes as thus: the dancers in the film may both be men, and they may be touching and interacting with each other in exactly the way a couple would, and pretty much everyone sees that and feels the need to comment on it, but don't mention any of that queer stuff, because it's not there, so shut up.
Now, I may be a little too harsh on the critics who brush off the LGBT angle of Experimental Sound Film. I imagine that few of them are raging homophobes. But isn't the fact that people can support gay rights, have gay friends, etc., and still want to erase the possibility of LGBT content film history, itself a phenomenon worthy of discussion? This simultaneous awareness and dismissal of gay-related content in film would continue (and still continues) to be a running theme in the development of cinema, sometimes enforced by censorship, and sometimes not--it has been the constant coping mechanism for filmmakers throughout the history of the medium, allowing them to indulge in the fetishistic consumption of the ideal male image while divorcing that fetish from sexuality, and thus, from cognitive dissonance. Certainly, women are fetishized also, but typically as objects only, as if they were simply well-made flesh puppets for sexual gratification--indeed, a hypersexualization, consequent of and compensatory for the disavowed male-homosexual desire at the heart of so many film narratives. Yes, it is true that women are objects defined solely by their relations with men in many films, but even this objectification is a facade, used to deflect homosexuality into homosociality. Men want more than a puppet; if their romantic gratification was attainable by merely possessing another person's body, wouldn't something like Carmencita, the first appearance of a sexy lady on film (and title #0000001 on IMDB), be a more fitting entry for this year, one that would foreshadow the heteronormative gaze of Hollywood for the next century and more? If so, then the fact that the Canon's entry for 1894 consists of two men slow-dancing in each other's arms should indicate that Hollywood's gaze is more than heteronormative; it is also, I argue, homosocial. And I further argue that the emergence of such a gaze is the very root of what makes the Experimental Sound Film interesting, since for all of the technical advances on display here, for all its prescient use of the aural dimension of film long before it was viable, the thing that sparks debate is the possibility that (omg!) it might have a whiff of the gay.
*the notion of an "audience" for this film is hypothetical, since it was never publicly shown.
Other connections: The Kinetoscope used to make the Experimental Sound Film wasn't very popular, probably because it was almost impossible for the primitive mechanism (which was simply a cylinder phonograph attached to a camera) to synchronize sound to onscreen action. Not until the 1920s would a reliable and feasible method be developed to match lip movements to spoken words.
Other most-voted titles of 1894:
2. Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (William K. Dickson | 1,283 votes)
3. Carmencita (William K. Dickson | 1,222 votes)
4. Sandow, No. 1 (William K. Dickson | 824 votes)
5. The Barbershop (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 775 votes)
6. Annie Oakley (William K. Dickson | 757 votes)
7. The Boxing Cats [Prof Welton's] (William K. Dickson, William Heise | 704 votes)
8. Buffalo Dance (William K. Dickson | 588 votes)
9. Glenroy Brothers [Comic Boxing] (579 votes)
10. Annabelle Butterfly Dance (William K. Dickson | 550 votes)
IMDB lists 94 titles for the year altogether.
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