bout the time when the Gramophone Company adopted the new ‘Dog and Horn’ trademark, the record manufacturing activity was in full swing at Calcutta. The new premises at Sealdah were already established. This was also the time when the silent movie industry was making inroads. Silent films were shown in tents, empty garages, and small halls, or in open spaces at night. In large cities, these films were exhibited in theatres built for drama troupes. The projections were rudimentary and hand-operated. Even in Europe the small cinema operators moved from place to place in caravans. Based on that era, the famous Czech director Jerry Menzel produced a film titled Those Magnificent Men With Their Cranking Machines and this film was screened at a recent MAMI film festival in Mumbai. In this film, the silent films were tagged on to cylinder phonographs for songs and dialogue. It was quite interesting to see how the system operated in that period.
In India, particularly in cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Delhi, silent movies were becoming quite popular. In these films the ‘action’ was the mainstay and contained lots of fights, horse-riding, jumping and stunts. Whenever dialogue were very much in need, the clipping, with printed matter and dialogue would appear. Gramophone records were used rampantly to provide sound effects. One person operated the hand-cranked projector and the other was involved in playing appropriate records on gramophone. Also, there used to be a person in front of the screen narrating the story and the events in the film.
In 1909, during the visit of British Emperor George V, a big exhibition was organised in Madras in which a Crown Megaphone, brought by a British Company, happened to be a major attraction! In this machine, the projector and the gramophone were connected together so that the sound and the picture were seen and heard simultaneously. However, synchronisation of picture and sound could not be accomplished properly. This was particularly apparent during the dialogue and songs. A person named Raghupati Venkayya, a photographer by profession, purchased all this machinery and started a cinema theatre in a tent erected near Madras high court. Similar attempts were made by Hiralal Sen in Calcutta, Patwardhan, Divekar and Chitre, and of course by Dadasaheb Phalke in Maharashtra. They used a theatrical model, which was in vogue for dramas. In front of the screen, there used to be a pit to accommodate instrumentalists playing sarangi, harmonium, violin, tabla etc. They used to play music as per the scene on screen. In horse-riding and fighting scenes, some even used empty coconut shells to make the desired sound.
Foreign films were accompanied with the orchestrations. One of the musicians of that period, Francis Nazareth, has recorded in his memoirs that they used to freely play the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and others during these shows. Some of the British residents used to import notation books and the gramophone records. The instrumentalists used to sit in the wings of the hall, or behind the screen, and provide required music and sound effects. Nazareth himself was a violinist and a pianist of repute.
Despite all these efforts, there was a growing realisation that in order to achieve the required synchronisation between sound and the picture, it is necessary to record on film-strip along with the picture frame. Several persons were working and technology was very slowly developing to revolutionise the film industry.
