It's a sound film of a crowing rooster from 1906, which sounds very odd. What's even odder is that it's a Gaumont short, and not a Pathe short, since the crowing rooster was the Pathe symbol and mascot.... a cute joke and they must have giggled about it at the front office.
Although it may come as a surprise to people who think that THE JAZZ SINGER was the first sound film, there were hundreds of sound shorts produced at this time in France and Germany, most of them song or novelty shorts like this one. Ron Hutchinson of the Vitaphone Project, which is dedicated to finding the missing sound disks for early sound films and restoring them to their films, tells me that there are hundreds of sound disks from 1905-1906, which coincidentally look and play just like the Vitaphone disks: sixteen inches and they play from the inside out. Unfortunately for us, it's the film elements that are missing.
So keep an eye out if you want to see more films as good as crowing roosters from 1906.
