[100 years ago this week, the brothers Harry and Sam Warner struck a deal with Bell Labs to use their innovative Vitaphone technology in the production of the first sound films for Warner Brothers. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for talking pictures!]
On two
contradictory yet interconnected AmericanStudies layers to an iconic “talkie.”
About
seventeen and a half minutes into The Jazz Singer (1927),
the popular singer and vaudevillian Al Jolson, having just performed a
live-recorded version of the song “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,”
speaks directly to the audience (the folks listening to him perform in the film’s
nightclub setting; but also, clearly, the audience watching the film in
theaters) the first recorded
words of dialogue in an American film: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you
ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” As yesterday’s post hopefully made clear, the
development of sound technology in film was a multi-stage process, and it’s
important not to over-emphasize a single moment or film (at least not at the expense
of a nuanced sense of how such things evolve over time). But nonetheless, it’s
difficult to overstate how much of an
impact this audible line of dialogue (part of about two minutes’ worth of
recorded dialogue across The Jazz Singer) would have made on film
audience used to reading dialogue on caption cards inserted amidst filmed
scenes (a technique which Jazz Singer still uses for much of its
dialogue).
In this February
2019 Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the history
and influence of Blackface, I noted that for much of The Jazz Singer,
including its triumphant finale, Jolson’s character Jack Robin (the stage name
of Jacob Rabinowitz) performs
in Blackface. While he isn’t in Blackface for that iconic line of recorded dialogue,
Blackface minstrelsy overall is a defining feature of the film and its legacies
in American culture and society. So I’d ask you to check out that column if you
would and then come on back for a second AmericanStudying layer.
Welcome
back! If as I argue in that column one significant feature of much of 20th
century American popular culture (from Vaudeville to film to cartoons to TV
variety shows and more) was thus Blackface performance, another was the striking
number of Jewish
American artists who helped shape
that culture. High on that list was Al Jolson, who had been born Asa Yoelson in
Lithuania and who would become one of the first openly Jewish performers to become
stars in the United States. And to my mind it's no coincidence that the film role
which truly cemented Jolson’s cultural significance was that of Jacob Rabinowitz,
a character who is destined to take over his father’s role as cantor in a Lower
East Side synagogue before he rebels, runs away from home, and finds his way
instead to the titular role of jazz singer. I love the fact that it’s a Jewish
American performer who speaks the first recorded words of dialogue in an
American film—exactly as much as I loathe how much of that film said performer
spends in Blackface.
Next film
sound studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Examples of sound in film you’d highlight?
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