Brooksie's Silent Film Collection

Over the past few week’s I’ve been posting reviews from Australia’s Silent Film Festival 2010. The bulk of the festival took place in a quite nondescript auditorium named the Lyceum, part of the Wesley Mission building on Castlereagh St in Sydney. Little did many people know that it was here that one of Sydney’s most important early theatres once stood - and here, just over 80 years ago, that sound made its debut in Australia, with a showing of `The Jazz Singer’. This is a program from that season.

Australia converted to sound almost faster than any nation, at a time where it could barely afford the change. Aside from the looming Great Depression, a Royal Commission into the future of the Australian film industry was being conducted, and the entire industry had ground to a halt while it awaited their findings. Though much needed, the Royal Commission couldn’t have come at a worse time. By the end, film itself was a different beast, and it took the once-vibrant Australian film industry nearly 50 years to fully recover.

A number of different technologies were employed to bring sound to Australian cinemas, many of which was locally made and developed. It is said that the Raycophone sound-on-disk system was so effective that some international distributors briefly refused to send films to cinemas that had installed them, afraid that they were too large a threat to their own far more expensive systems.

Raycophone was also used in the recording of what was arguably Australia’s first part-talking film, `The Cheaters’, made by the McDonagh Sisters. Their film had originally been conceived as silent, but in order to give themselves a greater chance of winning a newly announced Commonwealth award for Australian film, some sound sequences were hastily added.

This program is in very fragile condition, so I’m unable to show you much more of it for the moment - a really exciting artefact, nonetheless!

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be featuring more souvenirs from the age in which filmgoing was an event in itself, and audiences flocked to the many Sydney theatres which, sadly, are no longer with us (and fortunately, a few that are).