| 1929 |
 Chronomedia index
Numbers after entries link to the list of references. |
links and notes |
| January 2 |
Australia's Censorship Board and Appeals Board, created following the
Royal Commission on the film Industry in 1927, come into operation |
|
| January 4 |
Radio Corporation of America and the Victor Talking Machine
Company agree to a takeover in which, although described as 'a new joint company', the latter becomes
the RCA Victor division of the former (which acquires Marconi patents). RCA pays $5 cash plus one share
of common stock and one of $5.00 preferred stock for each share in Victor. Victor had made a net profit
of $7,324,019 in 1928. |
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| January 8 |
The Singing Fool opens at the Piccadilly Cinema, Denman Street, London. |
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| January 10 |
First appearance in print of Tintin, the cartoon character drawn by Hergé (Georges Remi, 1907-1983). |
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| January 16 |
First edition of the BBC publication The Listener. |
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| January 18 |
Walter Winchell, a columnist on the New York Daily Mirror, makes his first radio broadcast. |
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| January 21 |
Paramount talkie Interference opens at the Plaza Cinema, Piccadilly Circus, London. |
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| January 20 |
Fox releases In Old Arizona in US
cinemas, the first all-talking Western to be shot outdoors on location. |
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| February 18 |
French government officially recognises 12 private radio stations operating in the country. |
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| February 27 |
France's Chambre Syndicale decides to change the American film import quota from a ratio
of seven imports for each French film to three. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association
(MPPDA) refuses to negotiate, preferring to implement a high tariff—a strategy that would favour its
members over all others without giving French films an entrée to the US market.
[0041] |
|
| February |
Gaumont-British assumes control of
Provincial Cinematograph Theatres (PCT), taking the size of its circuit to 287 screens. |
|
| March 4 |
  Fox's
talkie In Old Arizona opens at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, London. It runs for six weeks.
Another talkie, The Wolf of Wall Street [right] is shown at the Plaza Cinema, Piccadilly Circus, London. |
|
| March 12 |
 Première
of Melodie der Welt, the first talkie made in Germany. |
See also November 22—which contradicts this entry |
| March 18 |
Another talkie, The Canary Murder Case, opens at the Plaza Cinema,
Piccadilly Circus, London. |
|
| March 28 |
A letter to The Times from the British Postmaster General advises that, although
there will be no restrictions placed on the sale of Baird Televisors, ‘the purchaser must understand
that he buys at his own risk, at a time when the system has not reached a sufficiently advanced stage to
warrant its occupying a place in the broadcasting of programmes. |
|
| March |
Klangfilm and Tobis combine to compete against American sound film technology, presenting
a strong European alternative by claiming all German patent rights in sound film and thereby sparking a
patents war. Tobis-Klangfilm also forms a production subsidiary in France. |
|
| March |
Last issue of The Australasian Gazette silent cinema newsreel. |
â November 2 |
| March |
Baird demonstrates 30-line television to the BBC at Savoy Hill. |
|
| April 4 |
Governmental conference, proposed by Czechoslovakia to regulate broadcasting frequencies
in Europe convenes in Prague. Hitherto agreement has been made only between broadcasters. |
â April 13 |
| April 10 |
US film companies implement a boycott of the French market.
[0041] |
 American film boycotts |
| April 13 |
Prague Plan allocates wavelengths for use by broadcasters in
Europe. Agreement is reached between 27 post and telegraph administrations, eight abstain. |
á April 4
â June 30 |
| April 26 |
Warner Bros decides to break the boycott of French cinemas unilaterally to gain
advantage but is pressured by the MPPDA not to break ranks.
[0041] |
|
| April 29 |
 Musical film Show
Boat (subsequently re-made in 1936 and 1951) opens at the Tivoli Cinema in the Strand, London. |
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| May 1 |
Construction begins of the Ufa sound studios at Neubabelsberg in the suburbs of
Berlin. Four sound stages are arranged in the form of a cross ('Tonkreuz'). |
â September 24 |
| May 11 |
 MGM's
Broadway Melody musical, with Technicolor scenes, opens at
the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, London. It runs for three months. |
|
| May 16 |
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences holds its first
Academy Awards presentation in Hollywood. (The term ‘Oscar’ is first used in
1931.) Best film is Wings (Paramount); best actor Emil Jannings, best actress Janet
Gaynor. The statuette is designed by Cedric Gibbons, art director at MGM, and manufactured
by Dodge Trophy Company of Crystal Lake, Illinois; it measures 13 inches high and weighs 8 lb. |
|
| May 20 |
Mother's Boy, a talking picture starring
Morton Downey, opens at the Palace Cinema, Cambridge Circus, London. |
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| May 28 |
Warner Bros’ full-length colour talkie On with the Show premiered
at the Winter Garden, New York, using two-colour Technicolor and Vitaphone sound. |
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| May |
RCA Victor issues the first catalogue of country music:
800 titles under the name Victor Records of Native American Melodies. |
|
| June 3 |
The Singing Fool opens at the Gloria Palast cinema in Berlin, the first
American sound film shown in Germany. In the first six days it is seen by over 30,000 people. |
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| June 9 |
First edition of British Movietone News cinema newsreel, with the slogan ‘It
speaks for itself’. It is the result of a collaboration between the American newsreel Fox Movietone News
and Esmond Harmsworth, later 2nd Viscount Rothermere, of the family that founded the
Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. |
|
| June 12 |
Riots occur in Poland over films with German subtitles.
[0041] |
|
| June 17 |
 Movietone
Follies opens at the New Gallery Cinema, Regent Street, London. |
|
| June 21 |
 Alfred Hitchcock’s
Blackmail, is premiered at the Regal Cinema, Marble Arch, London. Claimed to be the first British
talkie, made by British International Pictures, it also includes an early (first?) example of dialogue
re-voicing (dubbing). |
|
| June 30 |
Prague Plan for allocation of radio
broadcasting frequencies in Europe comes into effect. |
|
| July 1 |
 The British
talkie The Unwritten Law opens at the Capitol Cinema, Haymarket, London on the same day that the Marx
Brothers talking comedy The Cocoanuts opens at the Carlton Cinema, Haymarket. |
|
| July 8 |
Fox dialogue film Through Different Eyes opens at the Astoria Cinema, Charing Cross
Road, London. |
|
| July 9 |
 Erich von Stroheim's
film The Wedding March, made in the USA with sound on disc, is the opening film at the Mozartsaal cinema
in Berlin. |
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| July 29 |
Hitchcock's Blackmail goes on official
release in London at the Capitol, Haymarket. It runs for eight weeks. |
|
| July |
Flying spot colour scanner with three banks of
photocells (for red, green and blue) is demonstrated over a short telephone link by Dr
Herbert E Ives of Bell Laboratories. Neon and argon lamps are used at the receiving end. |
|
| August 19 |
Baird transmits a commercially made film, The Bride—a monologue
by the comedian George Robey—from his studios in Long Acre, London. |
|
| August 23 |
Première of the first Austrian talkie, G’schichten
aus der Steiermark (Tales from Styria), directed by Hans Otto Löwenstein for Eagle Film and Ottoton Film. |
|
| August |
Two-way sound and vision video telephone service is demonstrated at the Berlin Radio
Exhibition by G Krawinkel on behalf of the German Post Office. |
|
| September |
The Fox Movietone Follies of 1929, the first film made in the Fox Grandeur 70mm
wide-screen process, is shown on a 28ft x 14ft screen at the Gaiety Theater, Broadway, New York. |
|
| September 24 |
Agreement between French and American negotiators keeps the previous agreement of a 7:1 ratio
for imported and local film releases in place until 1 October 1930 and for a further year if no replacement is
agreed by 1 May 1930. This allows up to 1,200 US imports against a market requirement of about 800 releases
overall. It is assumed that the language barrier created by the advent of sound will protect French producers.
[0041] |
|
| September 24 |
Ufa's sound stages at Neubabelsberg are handed over for the start of production. |
â December 16 |
| September |
The Aird Committee’s report on Canadian broadcasting is tabled before the House of
Commons in Ottawa. Its main proposals are the establishment of a coast-to-coast national service from seven
high-power transmitters plus some local in-fill, funded by a $3.00 license receiving fee and sponsorship (a
company name may be mentioned, but no advertising of products). Programme content is to be mainly Canadian,
but the issue of provincial against federal control is not clear. All private
stations are to be expropriated. |
|
| September |
In a paper for the Institute of Radio Engineers, Weinberger, Smith and Rodwin propose that
the aspect ratio of television should be determined by that used for the cinema and, because the sound track
has reduced the width of the picture area on film, proposes a ratio of 6:5. |
|
| September 30 |
Start of daily experimental picture-only 30-line television transmissions by Baird from
his studio at 133 Long Acre, in the presence of the President of the Board of Trade, William Graham, via
the BBC’s 2LO transmitter. |
|
| l |
Fox Film Company acquires Loew’s, the owner of MGM but the federal government vetoes the deal. |
|
| l |
Associated Talking Pictures is established, soon to be based at Ealing Studios, West London. |
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| October 2 |
NBC Radio first broadcasts The National
Farm and Home Hour, a mixture of entertainment and adviced for rural dwellers. |
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| October 21 |
First twin-wave station of the BBC’s
regional scheme, at Brookman’s Park, is brought into service. |
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| October 28 |
 Berlin premiere of Atlantik,
a British-German co-production made at Elstree Studios and directed by E A Dupont in separate English,
French and German versions but reckoned to be the first German-language talkie to be released. |
|
| October 31 |
First French talkie to be premiered is Les Trois
Masques, starring Marcel Vibert and Renée Heribel, directed André Hugon for Pathé-Natan. |
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| November 1 |
Thomas A Edison Inc ceases production of records and
phonographs and will concentrate on making radio receivers and dictating machines. |
|
| November 2 |
First news cinema—the Embassy on Broadway,
New York—opens. It closes in 1949 'owing to the competition from television'. |
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| November 2 |
First issue of Australian Movietone News
sound newsreel includes a speech by prime minister J H Scullin. |
á March |
| November 3 |
Marconi-Wright facsimile system, using super high-speed Morse telegraphy, is demonstrated;
documents and images could be transmitted across the Atlantic within three minutes. The earliest enthusiastic
users are newspapers. |
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| November 18 |
V K Zworykin demonstrates a television receiving system of essentially surviving design to
the Institute of Radio Engineers in the US. Called the Kinescope, it scans motion picture film. |
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| November 21 |
Berlin premiere of Die Königsloge, an all-talking German-language film, starring
Alexander Moissi and shot by Warner Bros in Brooklyn, New York (see also October 28). |
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| November 22 |
Berlin premiere of Dich hab’ ich geliebt, first German-language talkie shot
in Germany (see also March 12—which contradicts this entry). It is released in the
US as Because I Love You. |
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| November |
Edison pulls out of the audio recording business. |
|
| end November |
MGM announces a $2m programme to bring foreign actors to Hollywood to make French,
German and Spanish versions of films. [0041] |
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| December 9 |
In Nice, France, rioters rip out cinema seats during a screening of Les Innocents
de Paris. [0041] |
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| December 12 |
British Broadcasting Company is wound up. |
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| December 16 |
Premiere of the first Ufa sound film, Melodie des Herzens,
produced by Erich Pommer, at the Ufa Palast am Zoo cinema in Berlin. |
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| December 16 |
The first British all-talking feature film is The Clue of the New Pin, made by
British Lion at Beaconsfield Studios from an Edgar Wallace novel. Among the bit part players is John Gielgud. |
|
| December |
A conference is held in Paris to reach international agreement on excluding educational
films from import duties. The MPPDA, representing US producers, argues for limiting the definition of educational
films: 'All our entertainment films are educational,' says Harold L Smith, the MPPDA Paris representative.
[0036] |
|
| l |
Warner Bros acquires First National Pictures. |
|
| l |
British and Dominions Film Corporation spends £250,000 installing Westrex sound film
production facilities in its Imperial Studios at Elstree. A team under Stanley Watkins is sent by Western
Electric from the US to the UK to convert studios. Gaumont-British’s Shepherds Bush Studios are rebuilt
for sound production at a cost of £500,000. [0019] |
|
| l |
German Telegraphie-Patent Syndikat, launched by entrepreneur-inventor Dr Kurt Stille,
sells the rights in a modified Telegraphone to film producer Louis Blattner. |
|
| l |
 Blattnerphone,
first magnetic tape recorder—with six-inch steel tape—introduced for adding sync sound to films
at Blattner Colour and Sound Studios, Elstree, near London. The tape has sprocket holes for synchronisation
with the picture and runs at six feet a second. The tape could be physically edited like film, could be
erased and recorded over. (The recorder is also known as the Blattner-Stiller machine.) |
|
| l |
Of 290 films released by the seven Hollywood majors, only 38 are silent—13 per cent,
compared with 75 per cent in 1928. Three companies make no silents: Fox, United Artists and Warner Bros.
All-talking pictures total 166, a further 50 were part-talkie and 36 have music and sound effects without
dialogue. Paramount releases both the most talkies (47) and the most silents (13). |
 Hollywood goes for sound |
| l |
Of 395 films released in Denmark, only three are Danish. US productions account
for 74 per cent of the Danish market and German films 20 per cent. |
à 1942 |
| l |
Six two-strip Technicolor films are released—half as many again as ever released
before—including three from Warner Bros (Gold Diggers of Broadway, On with the Show
and The Show of Shows), two from MGM (The Mysterious Island and The Viking, the latter
co-produced with Technicolor Corporation) and one, Mamba from independent producer Tiffany. |
|
| l |
Crane mount for a film camera is used on the production of Broadway (Universal). |
|
| l |
Consolidation in the French film production sector: three companies merge to become
Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert (the latter being part of the 1924 Franco-German agreement with Ufa). Also,
Pathé and Nathan merge to become Pathé-Nathan. |
|
| l |
Italian law prohibits the exhibition of films in any
language other than Italian. Portugal and Spain briefly follow suit. |
|
| l |
Kapal Kundala, made by Madan Theatres of Calcutta, is the first Indian film to
achieve a ‘silver jubilee’ run of 25 consecutive weeks—standard measure of success in the
Indian film industry. |
|
| l |
New Babylon, the silent film by Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg features a musical
score by Dmitri Shostakovich—one of the last silent films to have music written by a leading composer. |
|
| l |
Eight sound films are made in UK during year. Various estimates are given for wiring of cinemas
for sound: one source says 22 per cent of cinemas (980 of them during the year), another gives 500 as the total. |
|
| l |
France has 4,200 cinemas, of which around three-quarters are part-time, small and usually
rural houses—not purpose-built—and open only at weekends.
[0041] |
|
| l |
At the year end, Gaumont-British now has 280 screens in its Gaumont cinema chain. |
See also February |
| l |
Associated Radio Pictures Corporation buys the existing film studios at
Ealing in west London. The chairman of ARPC is actor Sir Gerald du Maurier;
another director is theatrical producer Basil Dean. [0019] |
à 1931 |
| l |
Fire destroys the small De Forest Phono Films studio at Wembley and partly
destroys Teddington Studios. [0019] |
|
| l |
Baird Television Development Company opens an additional laboratory at Kingsbury Manor,
near Wembley. |
|
| l |
Whitehall Films opens Whitehall Studios at Elstree, the fourth studio in the district. It
is next to the railway station and someone is employed to watch from the roof to warn of approaching trains
and halt filming. [0019] |
|
| l |
There are now 83 film production companies in Germany. |
à 1934 |
| l |
Four wide-screen film formats are considered by the Standards Committee of the Society of
Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE) including 35mm with 10-perforation horizontal pulldown and 70mm, with aspect
ratios ranging from 1.85:1 to 2.27:1. |
|
| l |
Australian feature production, affected by both the failure of the 1927 Royal Commission to
have any effect and by the financial and technical implications of the introduction of sound, are at the
lowest level since 1909. |
|
| l |
First Canadian talkie is North of ‘49, directed by Neal Hart for British
Canadian Pictures. |
à 1943 |
| l |
Vsevelod Pudovkin gives a lecture in London entitled ‘Model instead of actor’ to
describe effects pioneered by Lev Kuleshov but hereafter ascribed in the
West to Pudovkin. |
|
| l |
International Congress of Avant-garde Film is held at La Sarraz, Switzerland. Among those
present are Sergei Eisenstein, Alberto Cavalcanti, Ivor Montagu, Béla Balázs and Hans Richter and Walter Ruttman. |
|
| l |
In the Soviet Union, ARC is renamed the Association of Workers
of Revolutionary Cinematography (ARRC) with the aim of supporting the cultural revolution by making ‘100
per cent proletarian ideological film’. |
|
| l |
The surface of the moon, featuring the Copernicus crater, is filmed at Princeton University in
the US, using a 23-inch telescope. The 50-foot long film is recorded at the rate of one frame every six seconds. |
|
| l |
Practical cable relay of radio programming is announced by the US National Academy of Sciences
as a way of reducing airwave congestion. General G O Squier calls his invention 'wired wireless' or the
'monophone'. Power consumption is small: the equivalent to a small incandescent lamp will provide power
to deliver signals to 5,000 homes. |
|
| l |
Production of Edison music phonograph cylinders and players finally ceases as Thomas A
Edison Inc withdraws from the audio entertainment market. |
|
| l |
Marconi Company in UK sells all radio receiver and other ‘home entertainment
apparatus’ patents to the Gramophone Company, now controlled by the Victor Talking Machine Company. |
|
| l |
BBC publishes Broadcast English I: Recommendations to announcers regarding certain
words of doubtful pronunciation. The booklet is also incorporated, with comments, by the Society for
Pure English in its Tract no XXXII. The latter runs to two further impressions within as many years,
testifying to the interest in the subject. |
ß 1926
Broadcast English |
| l |
 Radio Fécamp, French commercial station,
changes its name to Radio Normandie (in English: Radio Normandy). |
Click on the picture for more about Radio Normandie |
| l |
Radio Toulouse in France begins commercial broadcasts
in English, the programmes being sponsored by UK record companies. |
|
| l |
 Coaxial cable, in which the signal-carrying
central core is surrounded by insulation and then a second concentric physical layer in the form of a mesh,
is invented by Lloyd Espenschied and Herman Affel of the Bell Telephone Laboratories [right]. Several
coaxial cable can be grouped within the outer sheath.
Source of picture: AT&T |
à 1939 |
| l |
Decca Record Company is founded in the UK with a strategy of releasing cheaper records:
classical releases for 3s 6d (17½p), compared with HMV Red Label at 6s 6d (32½p). Most of its classical
releases are acquired under licence from Polydor. The name Decca has been used previously for a portable
gramophone introduced during the First World War. |
|
| l |
Scottish Daily Express newspaper is launched and printed in Glasgow. |
|
