The first sound film

101 years ago, the premiere took place in Berlin - a public screening of a sound film. It was a film adaptation of the play “The Arsonist” by the Dutch writer Herman Geijermans.

The sound was recorded by the German company Triergon using the optical-electronic method, that is, the soundtrack was written directly onto film, and this was a revolution in cinema.

They have tried to dub films before: actors, like a theater troupe, traveled with the film and spoke from behind the screen. Thomas Edison's phonograph was also used, but it was not possible to synchronize the sound with the image.

By the way, at first Charlie Chaplin and Sergei Eisenstein were ardent opponents of sound in cinema.

The Triergon company subsequently sold the rights to the invention of film sound to the American film company 20th Century Fox, but the era of sound cinema was still ahead.

Pictured is a plaque on the site of the former Alhambra Theatre, Berlin, commemorating the first public showing of a sound film in 1922