Silent Film When \"The Jazz

Silent Film

When "The Jazz Singer" opened in October of 1927 it unofficially sounded the end of silent films. This is not to say, however, that there was not resistance to the emerging trend. After all, films with talking sequences had been around nearly as long as film itself -- D.W. Griffith's "Dream Street" is one of the earliest reliable examples from 1921. The resistance came partly from the public, partly from technology, and partly from the industry. First, it took some time for "talkie" films to be perfectly synchronized with the picture. This generated a level of indifference from the public, who had become well accustomed to silent film and generally preferred it due to a high level of familiarity. Second, the industry, similarly, had become ensconced in the business of silent film and, "The twenty thousand or so movie theaters in the United States produced a gross revenue of about 360 million dollars," by the mid-1920's (Eyman 74). Consequently, an enormous business had grown out of the production and distribution of almost exclusively silent films -- talkies stood as a distinctly chancy endeavor. This viewpoint did not change with the emergence of "The Jazz Singer" but many more production companies were willing to take this chance on sound once the power and appeal of its appropriate application became apparent.

The technological advent that made sound in film more of a reliable possibility was known as the Vitaphone. Originally, the Vitaphone served to play original musical scores that reasonably complemented silent films as the producers chose. "Warner Brothers had produced 'Don Juan,' a John Barrymore swashbuckler that premiered on August 6, 1926. A Fairbanksian delight, 'Don Juan' came complete with a musical score that had been recorded on large wax discs and accompanied the feature in fair synchronization." (Eyman 74). This was one of the few feature length films to attempt this synchronization, but a series of shorts made efforts to achieve the same effect. Yet, despite a number of early successes synchronized sound, the huge moneymaking industry of silent film possessed little interest in drastically overhauling their nearly perfected means of production. A very distinct and reliable niche had been found; moving out of this niche was both expensive and dangerous.

Additionally, by 1927 the film industry had truly come into its own as a fully fledged art form. The art of drama had been nearly perfected by the silent stars. "Even ordinary actors seemed more than that when effectively presented in a silent film because their own specific identity was somewhat nebulous." (Eyman 73). In fact, the very absence of sound permitted the audience to draw their own conclusions and insert their own feelings and imagination into the film. Much like a reader conjures their own image of characters and settings, the silent film viewer envisioned the omitted aspects of reality according to their own, personal feelings. The consequences of this made silent film a particularly potent devise from an artistic perspective. Obviously, as an art form, film was not required to accurately mimic reality, but instead, render a representation of it that was equally powerful to the audience. This fact made arguments in favor of sound based upon accurate depiction of events groundless; they were analogous to saying that Picasso's paintings were somehow worth less than more realist-based works of art.

Naturally, silent actors had mastered the manner in which emotion and image could be portrayed though the medium. This presented an additional barrier to the advent of talkies. Many highly placed silent actors were ill-suited to the demands of speech, and the elaborate "overacting" that was necessary to silent film was undesirable with the addition of sound. "The great silent clowns -- Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd -- didn't seem as funny with dialogue as they had without." (Basinger 469). Essentially, stars who had become accustomed to making silent films did not want to enter the world of the talkies. This fact delayed the emergence of sound, but ultimately, was unable to forbid it.

In fact, "Cinema's pioneers had never intended their moving pictures to be silent. Reynaud's 'Rantomimes Luminseuses,' for example, had been accompanied by scores specially composed by Gaston Paulin." (Parkinson 83). Prior to the advent of the Vitaphone, inventors had been grappling with applicable methods for synchronizing picture with sound. "Sound on disk was fraught with drawbacks, however. The synchronization of sound and image was, at best, haphazard and the need to change discs in mid-film could irretrievably throw screenings out of sync, as could a damaged record or reel." (Parkinson 83). These drawbacks -- stretching as far back as 1896 -- generated a decades-old tradition of silent motion pictures. This provided ample time for resistance to the vision held by film's founders to be established.

As technology progressed, however, sound as a realistic option became more evident. Eight years prior to the breakthrough film "The Jazz Singer," a reasonably reliable method for both recording and synchronizing film with image had been devised:

In 1919, the German inventors Josef Engl, Hans Vogt and Joseph Massole patented the Tri-Ergon system, which used a photoelectric cell to convert sound waves to electrical impulses and thence into light waves, which were them photographed onto the edge of a celluloid. The original sound was reproduced when the strip passed through another photoelectric cell in the head of the projection. Synchronization was maintained by means of a flywheel." (Parkinson 84).

An additional development was conceived of by an American inventor, Lee de Forest, who mastered a method of changing sound waves into electrical impulses which could, in turn, be amplified and forced into speakers. This made recorded sound able to be pumped through these speakers at such an intensity that an entire theater, regardless of its size, could be provided with sound. Together, these advents constituted the Vitaphone and from the beginning of the 1920's the option of sound was reasonable.

From 1923 until 1927 de Forest made approximately a thousand sound films of varying length but, "At first, some observers thought sound merely a fad, one that would pass away once audiences got over their fascination with lips moving and voices seeming to come from them. Others thought that talkies might coexist with the silents, the one appealing to the rubes who like the yackety novelty, the other for the more sensitive and intelligent." (Ellis 123). Clearly, demand for talkies was less than overwhelming. It should not be surprising that they were greeted with the same enthusiasm that accompanied 3-D pictures decades later: they were enjoyable for a select few and even then, not all of the time. Yet, like most technological advancements, it was neither initial demand nor its practical possibility that ushered in the age of sound motion pictures, but economic necessity.

Structural barriers from within the industry were primarily held within the most successful studios, and by the most successful actors. Consequently, actors and production companies looking to dip their hands into the tremendous pot of the film industry saw talkies as their only possible avenue to success. This venture, seen as a risk by large actors and companies, was the only viable option for up and comers in film.

In 1924 and 1925 the comparatively small production firm of Warner Brothers, which owned no theater claims, was competing against the large theater companies that controlled distribution and exhibition. According to the Warner's account, accepted by many film historians, they decided in desperation to try the novelty of sound and see of it would help them out of their financial difficulties." (Ellis 120).

Don Juan" emerged out of this business decision. The competing companies were restrained by tradition and the high costs of completely overhauling production and projection materials. "The Jazz Singer" was Warner Brothers' forth feature film to utilize the technology of the Vitaphone, and their first dramatic success. For approximately three quarters of the film it is without dialogue but, "It was for the clink of plates, the rattle of ice cubes, the sound of a man singing, of two people talking, that silent films died." (Eyman 76). The lively exuberance of Al Jolson was truly what made this film an instant classic and demanded the continuation of Warner Brothers and the talkies. For the first time, music had a face to accompany the voice. By January of 1928, an increasing number of theaters were wiring for sound and making way for "They Jazz Singer," which by that time was playing to a million customers a week (Eyman 77).