Behind The Silent Film: The Jazz Singer

Have you ever made a hard decision? That’s what Mel has to do. He has to decide between has friends band garage or a career in a jazz band. While Mel may enjoy the time and band with his friends but he should do the Jazz band. Mel should do the Jazz band because we should always do what we can to get better at what we love. Even if that means we lose something else.

     The music called Jazz was born sometime around 1895 in New Orleans. It combined elements of Ragtime, marching band music and Blues. What made Jazz such a different perspective of traditional music was its act of improvising. There was a widespread use of improvisation often by more than one player at a time. Songwriters would write the music down on a piece of paper, and then the Jazz musicians would try their best to play the music. Usually in a Jazz piece, musicians would use the song as a starting point to improvise around. Jazz musicians would play a familiar song to the audience, and by the time they were done with the piece they would stir up a totally different feeling away from the

Occasionally there would be subtitles of dialogue, but they were often short to ensure that audience would not be distracted. Live music played a large role in silent films and conveying the emotions to the audience. One ruinous aspect of the transition from silent films to sound films is the actors lack to transition with them. Important silent film stars such as Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino faded away with silent films. However, stars like Charlie Chaplin and Lionel Barrymore were able to make a successful transition from silent to sound, and continued their strong acting

The end of the 1920s was known for the ending of the silent film in Hollywood. With the advancement of sound technology, it has transformed the way we view films in today’s world. It all began with a film called The Jazz Singer, directed by Alan Crosland, starring Al Jolson, Warner Oland, and May McAvoy. The film is about a little boy named Jakie, whose father is a Jewish cantor, and he defied his father by not wanting to follow the family tradition of cantors. He wanted to be a performer, specifically, a jazz singer. One day, he was discovered by his neighbor Moisha and thus he got beat up and kicked out of the house. Jakie vowed to never return home. A decade later, Jackie is a performer with the help of his lover Mary with a new identity by the name of Jack Robin who wears a black face when on stage. One night, his father fell ill and was asked to sing at the synagogue, however, it fell on the same day as his opening show on Broadway. Jakie had to make a tough decision choosing between his family or his career.

This essay will analyse and discuss The Great Train Robbery (1903) in relation to the narrative structure of silent cinema. The Edison Manufacturing Co, with the estimated budget of $150, produced The Great Train Robbery. Directed by Edwin S. Porter the film has a runtime of 11 minutes, with an aspect ratio of 1:33:1. The film was printed on 35mm hand coloured film and ran at 18 (FPS). The film was later released on December 1st 1903; the majority of the film was shot in New Jersey, USA.

Movies were becoming one of the biggest businesses during the 1920s and most people would spend their leisure time going to the theatre to watch the silent films. They were becoming huge in the popular culture and Hollywood was the place to be. Roughly by 1922, 40 million people a year in attendance over the entire country for the movie theatres and in 1930 over 100 million people would attend the movies every year. By 1927, the movie industry became the fourth largest industry in the country. “The Great Train Robbery” which was released in 1903 was the beginning of the film industry and would eventually change everything. “Jazz Singer” was the first movie that had synchronized sounds throughout the entire film. The popular genres during this decade were western,

Throughout history sound has been used to help convey a story. As early as the 1900’s, without today’s technology, movies would often be accompanied by a soundtrack played on a piano or record players. In 1927 The Jazz singer was released, a warner bros movie that featured music and dialog on the actual filmstrip. This film is

At its core, The Jazz Singer is ostensibly a Jewish-American story. The central conflict is Jakie Rabinowitz’s heritage, family, and upbringing coming to a head with his chosen career and where his heart lies: performance in an American pop cultural milieu. A reading of the film suggests that although hybridity can be found between the old and the new; the traditional and the modern; they are fundamentally in conflict with each other and cannot co-exist in their established forms: one must supersede the other. Cantor Rabinowitz is introduced with an intertitle description of his religious role in the synagogue, saying that he “stubbornly held to the ancient traditions of his race”. The adult Jakie Rabinowitz, by contrast, is introduced eating ham and eggs in a café before performing two numbers in the genre forbidden to him by his father as it debases “the voice God gave him.” He has changed his name - like Al Jolson, originally born Asa Yoelson - to Jack Robin, as he announces to his parents in a letter, who show concern over his choice of partner: his father thinks she may be (which indeed she is) a shiksa, while his mother emphasises that a non-ethnic name is not indicative of heritage (or lack thereof) in the “theayter.” Quintessentially American ‘Jazz’ music and performance is diametrically opposed to “the songs of Israel.” In The Jazz Singer, Jewish culture is preserved and assimilated into American life, but Jewish ethnicity is rendered invisible in showbusiness, and

When silent movies were beginning to be replaced by movies with sound, or ‘Talkies’, controversy began to surround Hollywood and it stars. Between Fatty Arbuckle hitting an actress at a party

Before watching “The Jazz Singer”, I had no idea of its cultural or historical significance. I learned that it was the first motion picture to have synchronized dialogue and words. It set the precedent for cinematography, live voice recordings, and real-time dialogue. The film was based on a short story written only a few years prior. The story was called “The Day of Atonement” and was authored by Samson Raphaelson. The short story was then adapted into an onstage musical in 1925 before finally becoming a full length feature film in 1927.

The motion picture of Singin’ in the Rain by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly was significant in 1952 when the footage was released into the world. In the film, it explores the idea of showing a romance between an actor and an actress, who at first thought movie production was sort of a laughingstock. Additionally, seeing some of the transitions between a silent picture to voice recording picture. Including how Hollywood assembles some of their movies in the paramount studio.

Jazz music – and the musicians – played a pivotal role in World War II. During the war there were a lot of patriotic songs, as well as songs about military life, humor, and religion written in the Jazz genre. There were also numerous artists that went overseas to perform. One of these artists was Glen Miller, who raised soldier’s morale by modernizing the army band. Jazz was also used as a type of weapon in the war.

The first film that showed early signs of a rise in the quality of technology was the Western “The Great Train Robbery.” When this film first came out the audience were so amazed at the fact that they could watch something on a TV or at the cinema. Although this film was very good for the 1900s it still lacked some key features that make films much easier to understand such as dialogue, sound and camera shots. The one feature of a film that developed the quickest over the period of time was sound. Sound was introduced in October 1927 in the film “The Jazz singer”, which had three song numbers and a few lines of spoken dialogue. Apart from these few songs and words, the rest of the movie was silent, but the audience still thought that it was amazing that words had been spoken in the film, they used to call it “the movie that talked”.

The Quiet American uses a wide range of film techniques to tell a compelling and enjoyable narrative, even the dialogue is a little bit choppy at times. In retrospect, some of these film techniques were highly successful while others were incredibly detrimental to the motion picture. Perhaps the most noticeable film technique the movie used, and therefore perhaps the most debatable, is the immense foreshadowing that takes place at the beginning of the movie. In the first five minutes of the film, the audience already knows that one of the main characters will be stabbed to death. Although this does not make reaching the end of the movie impossible, the movie would have no doubtingly had a much greater hangover effect had Pyle’s death been a complete surprise.

The release of Gordon Hollingshead and Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer in 1927 marked the new age of synchronised sound in cinema. The feature film was a huge success at the box office and it ushered in the era David Bordwell describes as ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema’; Bordwell and two other film theorists (Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson) conducted a formalist analysis of 100 randomly selected Hollywood films from the years 1917 to 1960 in order to fully define this movement. Their results yielded that most Hollywood made films during that era were centred on, or followed, specific blueprints that formed the finished product. Through this analysis of Hollywood films the theorists were able to establish stylised conventions and modes of