I’ve always loved the cumbersome nature of old film and recording technology. At the same time, though, I’ve never been able to truly grasp it. Nowhere is this more true than with the above fascinating reel showing the method by which sound and film are recorded in the early 1930s and how they are then ‘married’ in the lab. The scene is a British movie set and the action will be a petulant though very pretty woman singing a song in a cafe. Was this a real set and a real movie that was being shot? Somehow I doubt it. It has the air of having been carefully set-up and the director’s performance is too hammy to be a real English director of the period. The big question is: was the massively complex method by which the sound was recorded and later married to the film the way that it was being done at the time all over the world? Is this the technology Hollywood used? How long was it in use? Am I simply such a creature of the tail end of the film years (my first two movies were shot on 35mm and that’s been it since) that I never bothered to figure out how all this technology worked? (Or perhaps I just a simple creature). Anyway, it’s a fascinating little behind-the-scenes look at dead technology, being used by a bunch of dead people for a movie that probably never existed, thus making it dead-on-arrival. And on that note, a jolly happy weekend to you all…