The Sounds of Early Cinema

Available for over a year

The live music and sound effects, the unruly audiences, the performers paid to interpret mysterious foreign intertitles, the usherettes spraying the audience with disinfectant. Matthew Sweet explores the sound-world of cinema's beginnings, from the orchestras of big-budget epics to the small improvising bands of the fleapits - and discovers how their ghosts haunt the modern cinemagoing experience. First broadcast September 2013.