The Jazz Singer, and the rise of CGI

You'd be forgiven for thinking that there isn't really much to say about The Jazz Singer once you get past it's status as the first 'sound' film. In fact, it isn't even really the first sound film at all... prior to its release in 1927 there had already been several films that had featured synchronised sound in one way or another (from as early as 1922), and the first all-sound film didn't come until about a year afterwards. The Jazz Singer is very much a transitionary film, staged and shot like a silent film (complete with intertitles) but with musical sequences featuring Al Jolson singing. There are actually only two bits in the film where he speaks dialogue, and it feels odd now to see him speaking and then have the film switch back to silence. It even seems that all the fuss made about this film over the years is much ado about nothing.

But... it's hard for modern audiences to imagine the effect The Jazz Singer had on audiences at the time. These were people who had grown accustomed to a technological wonder that put moving images captured from life itself up onto a screen in front of their very eyes. It put them within reaching distance of iconic stars they previously would only have read about... the rise of the movie star was fraught with a level of passion unmatched by today's audiences. Women actually commited suicide when silent screen romeo Rudolph Valentino died an untimely death, that's how hard it was for people to adapt to the concept of reality vs. the screen image. They felt like they knew the stars of the screen because they had been in a room with them (or more accurately, their image). Imagine if you lived in that world and then saw Al Jolson, already a big star of the theatre and musical recordings, and he spoke directly to you through the screen, even just for a moment. It would've been like being spoken to by God. Which is fitting, given the religious subject matter of The Jazz Singer.

Jolson plays Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a Jewish Cantor (a traditional religious figure who sings at Jewish congregations). Jakie wants nothing more than to sing jazz (or ragtime), but his father wants him to inherit the family Cantor business. Anyway, it's that old story of tradition vs. modern expression, with Jakie having to choose between becoming a famous Broadway singer in secular America or following in his father's cultural footsteps. In a way (probably unintentionally) it's an allegory for the advent of sound... those who had made their fame and fortune from silent films were opposed to and uninterested in the changes that synchronised sound heralded. They were stuck in the past, and were unequipped to truly ever accept the newer artform. The Jazz Singer holds fast to a belief that jazz is a sincere form of expression, and (as this film was made before the strangling emergence of the Hays Code) it's able to show Jewish culture in an open light and subtly explore the notion that Jews (and by extension, other ethnicities) have to temper or betray their heritage to some degree in order to make it in showbusiness. In this sense, the film is both a metaphor (Jakie changes his last name and turns his back on being a Cantor) and a meta-metaphor (Al Jolson himself was also Jewish, real name Asa Yoelson).

I think the way that The Jazz Singer uses sound has a lot of relevance to how the rise of CGI in modern film has been treated by fans, critics and some of those who make films. The sound sequences in The Jazz Singer are mostly static and stage-bound, restricted by the burgeoning technological constraints of the time. It's kind of like how the earliest CGI sequences took place in similarly artificial settings (either in space, ala The Last Starfighter, or in virtual reality, ala Tron). These films were almost tailored around the use of this new technology. Also, it's funny that Warner Brothers initially saw this new sound technology as only useful for a musical film (in actuality, the dialogue parts of The Jazz Singer were actually improvised on Jolson's part, and were very much an established part of his stage routine and it's rhythm). It's similar to how CGI was initially used only in a science fiction setting. Warner Brothers didn't see their use of sound technology in 1927 as the death knell for the silent era, they simply saw it as a way to bring the current popularity of stage musicals to the screen. I think you could also say that the first filmmakers to use CGI could never have forseen the technology now being used to digitally de-age characters for any film genre, or even to just make action set pieces bigger (and safer to film).

Jeff Bridges 'de-aged' for the 2010 film Tron Legacy

A lot of the criticism that CGI attracts is down to how unrealistic it looks, or the way it burdens films with a certain look. I think you only need to look at CGI usage in the 1990s to see how far we've come, and it isn't too much to ask that we imagine it could go a lot further in the years to come. When I read about a talented director like Quentin Tarantino bemoaning the rise of digital film it really surprises me... this guy is a self-confessed film freak, so how can he misunderstand film history so much? Charlie Chaplin had similar reservations about films with sound... it's understandable that a silent-era genius might fear a change in technology that could see an end to his career, but does anyone alive today really agree with him that the addition of sound to films was a bad idea? Just as people decry the value of CGI today and the way it's 'killing' film, the very same thing happened 80 years ago when synchronised sound revolutionised cinema. And just as CGI hasn't fulfilled its full potential yet, you only need to look back at the earliest 'talkies' and see how stagey and creaky they were to appreciate that these things take time.

The musical film was a genre that rose with the advent of sound, and it soared during the 1930s and 1940s before the novelty wore off and eventually we had great, revolutionary mainstream filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s (Cool Hand Luke, A Fistful of Dollars, The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange, Jaws, Star Wars, etc). When the novelty of CGI wears off, and the technology advances to a practically undetectable level, we'll see another age of truly great filmmaking... films that will be made in an age when there's no fuss and CGI is just another intrinsic part of filmmaking.

The Jazz Singer
DIRECTOR: Alan Crosland
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Alfred A. Cohn and Jack Jarmuth, based on a play by Samson Raphaelson.
KEY ACTORS: Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland, Eugenie Besserer, Otto Lederer, William Demarest

RELATED TEXTS:
- Raphaelson's play was based on a short story he had previously written called Day of Atonement.
- The play and film were also inspired by Al Jolson's blackface performances in Robinson Crusoe Jr. on the stage.
- The Jazz Singer was re-made in 1980 with Neil Diamond and Laurence Olivier. A film version was also made in 1952.
- Jerry Lewis appeared in a telemovie version of the story as well in 1959.
- Al Jolson went on to make a series of musical films for Warner Brothers over the next few years, including the hugely popular The Singing Fool, Say it With Songs, Mammy and Big Boy.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Honorary Award. Nominated for Best Writing.