There had been attempts to make talking pictures almost before the the motion picture industry was born. Edison had announced his vision of movies coordinated to his phonographic cylinders when his labs were still developing the process, and there was one short movie of a man playing a violin while two other men danced in the 1890s. From 1906 through 1910, French and German producers offered three-minute short subjects, and in 1913, Edison issued several movies, with coordinated soundtracks. He called these Kinetophones. Eight have survived and recently been collected on dvd in a coproduction from the Library of Congress, Undercrank Productions and Greenbriar Picture Shows. This is one of them.
It's a minstrel show. It's a form of entertainment that was in terminal decline then, and more than a hundred years later, a modern audience will recoil at its stereotyped, black-faced performers. Nonetheless, it's an interesting and important historical record. Most of our records of minstrel shows were made decades later and lacked the ambient assumptions of the era; the closest they could come was a nostalgia for the form which lent its set and tired details a freshness they did not possess. Those of us who study very old movies are tourists in a foreign land. We are largely happy to return home to the 21st Century, but when we visit 1913, we want to see how the natives think and talk and behave, not our fellow tourists complaining about how foolish the locals are not to be us.
Here we have the local natives And now I have gone home, glad to be in my own time and place.
This essay at talking pictures would not last. It would be more than a dozen years before technical and financial issues would come together and silent pictures would be wiped away, and early efforts like this forgotten for a century.