The Birth of the Talkies, Reflexive Doubling, and Masked Blackface

"You ain't heard nothin' yet."

I'm taking the excuse that this is number 2,000 for reviews I've posted online to finally address one of the two films I, and surely plenty of others, see as, if not the most influential films ever made, the biggest foundational cinematic myths. They've certainly been talked about around-and-around in film, cultural, and other history texts. It only took me a hundred or so reviews on IMDb, years ago before I switched to Letterboxd, to get to "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), the racist American epic blockbuster at the center of analysis of film as an art and a business, of the emergence of Hollywood, the reemergence of the KKK, of riots, of cementing racist caricatures on screen, of inspiring censorship protests led by the then-nascent NAACP, etc. It's about time I get to, as film historian Donald Crafton (see works cited) says, "the film that emblematizes the birth of the talkies," "The Jazz Singer."

Although there've been corrections in film scholarship, it seems that much of the, at least popular, discourse on "The Jazz Singer" is backwards: overvalued for its influence in the revolution of sound cinema, important as it was, and undervalued as an artistically significant picture, subjectively-perceived flaws though there may be. Hardly a newfound critical rejection with a grudging admission of its historical significance for the film of a past generation, either, this is a misconception almost as old as the film itself. What more recent movie-goers have mostly added to this is a largely ahistorical, if not often uncritical, condemnation of the film's star, Al Jolson, wearing blackface in late scenes. Indeed, it's oft compared to the obviously white supremacist and patriarchal ideology of "The Birth of a Nation," with its anti-miscegenation obsession and representational blackface.

Perhaps the most forceful (and arguably too much so) demythologizer of the status of the "The Jazz Singer" as the pivotal, eureka moment in Hollywood's transition to synchronized sound cinema is film historian Douglas Gomery, also echoed to varying degrees by others like Crafton and Jonathan D. Tankel. While another historian on the talkie transition, Scott Eyman, calls the 6 October 1927 Broadway première of "The Jazz Singer," "the theatrical equivalent of the moon landing," others equating it to the crossing of the Rubicon, and its arrival causing immediate panic and studio shutdowns to wire for sound according to depictions such as of that in "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), the reality was a more measured appreciation of the film and gradual transition to sound for Hollywood. Moreover, that some would be surprised that the so-called first feature-length talkie (also, predating "Show Boat" on stage, the first backstage musical, as well as a proto-jukebox one) is in fact, mostly a silent film (Eyman estimates it's only 15% talkie) suggests how misunderstood the sound transition is.

As Gomery has outlined, "The Jazz Singer" was part of a period of innovation, after the invention of the technology required for talkies (whether the sound-on-disc system adopted by Warner Bros' Vitaphone or sound-on-film adopted by Fox's Movietone) and preceding the diffusion period of the adoption of sound cinema across Hollywood and cinemas. Vitaphone short films, Vitaphone feature films including "The Jazz Singer," which incrementally went from recorded scores and sound effects as in the first such instance of "Don Juan" (1926) to all-talking as in the first example of that with "Lights of New York" (1928), in addition to Fox's Movietone experiments in newsreels (see here) and also with recorded musical accompaniment and sound effects for its features comprised this innovation phase. The other Hollywood studios conspired to wait and see which sound system to adopt and let Warner Bros and Fox do the innovating. When "The Jazz Singer" was released, the wiring of theatres for sound remained slow and most wouldn't be wired until years later; that is, most audiences during the initial run of this "first talkie," saw an entirely silent version of it. Studios continued to release silent versions of synchronized-sound films into the beginning of the '30s for unwired theatres. Additionally, its wired Broadway run, while a hit, wasn't as successful as that of contemporary silent epic "Wings" (1927). It wasn't until after 11 May 1928 when the studios signed with a subsidiary of AT&T and for optical sound that the rest of Hollywood fully began converting to talkies--and, even then, gradually, and theatres across the country and the world even more gradually.

That said, Gomery may be going too far in attempting to elevate Warner Bros' subsequent Jolson vehicle, "The Singing Fool" (1928), as "the" talkie milestone film, although doubtless the title has fallen into undeserved relative obscurity and, granted, it made more money. Reportedly, it was the highest-grossing sound film before either "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937) or "Gone with the Wind" (1939) took the title. On the other hand, that's because it benefited from the precedent of "The Jazz Singer" and other innovative early talkies that encouraged the subsequent diffusion of sound technology. Even though Jolson was the biggest stage star of the '20s, one doesn't sign him to a three-picture deal with a bonus of 10% of the profits after passing a million dollars if one doesn't already have a good idea from "The Jazz Singer" that it'll pay off. "The Singing Fool" was released after the 11 May signing, too. Crafton even concedes that it was likely the January 1928 national opening of the sound version of "The Jazz Singer" that helped convince producers to settle the sound issue and sign the agreement quickly. "The Singing Fool" confirmed the success of the talkies that prior films, "The Jazz Singer" foremost among them, suggested. Regardless, too, the star charisma of Jolson was key.

Why Warner Bros initially led the talkie revolution is another story that Gomery and others have detailed. It was part of a plan, along with vertical integration by way of owning a theatre chain and steady banking investment, to push the company from the ranks of one of Hollywood's minor studios to one of its majors, up there with Paramount and MGM, which they accomplished in only a couple years. Indeed, the rise of talkies coincided with the increased monopolization of Hollywood and the cementing of the studio system. Sam Warner was the studio's chief backer of talkies and who, along with Darryl Zanuck, is said to have paid special attention to the production of "The Jazz Singer," giving the impression that it was something of a producer's film. Indeed, Joel Rosenberg just says what others seem to be implying by calling director Alan Crosland and screenwriter Alfred A. Cohn "hacks." Like Zanuck, both Crosland and Cohn were gentiles assigned to an exceptionally Jewish story (as based on the short story and play by Samuel Raphaelson, which were in turn inspired by the life of Jolson). Charles Musser, too, rather speculates about the unknown (albeit tantalizing) contributions to the treatment, including remaking the German film "The Ancient Law" (1923), made by Jewish émigré auteur Ernst Lubitsch, originally assigned to make "The Jazz Singer," before he left Warner Bros (and, somewhat ironically, to team up on screenwriting with Raphaelson).

The life of Sam Warner (née Szmuel Wonsal) as a Jewish émigré who made it rich in show business and married a shiksa almost mirrors as much as, along with a bit from Raphaelson's personal experiences, the life of Jolson (née Asa Yoelson) the arch of protagonist Jakie Rabinowitz/Jack Robin. His death the day before the film's première seemed inauspiciously to portend the death of talkies, the actual film thoroughly suggests the opposite, of the death knell being wrung for the silent era. At least one contemporary reviewer predicted as much, too, with "Life" magazine critic Robert E. Sherwood writing, "one feels that the day of the great transformation has dawned -- that the silent drama can never be silent again." That "The Jazz Singer" is liminal, a hybrid text, is narratively reflected in it being a doubles film. Its central dilemma between tradition and modernity is expressed on multifold levels beyond its doubly named protagonist, himself a doubling of the actor Jolson: there are two Yom Kippurs and two cantors, there's the religious and the secular, even on a linguistic level there's the dichotomy between Yiddish and Aramaic and English (see Rosenberg), on a musical note between "white ethnic" traditional ballads and "black-inflected" syncopated ragtime--all songs coming in "conflicting pairs" (see Linda Williams), even between full silent film score and song interludes, stylistically between documentary and fiction (again, see Rosenberg), between Jakie and his blackface "shadow," and between stage and screen by way of adaptation and remake (Musser), all of which reflexively alludes to the schism in Hollywood at the time, between silent and talkie.

Jolson's Jack Robin, the jazz singer, is of course the talkie; he does most of what there is of it here, particularly Jolson's trademark quip headlining this review (repeated later silently in an intertitle) and the one-sided conversation with his mother at the film's midway point and in between renditions of "Blue Skies." The silent film, then, is embodied by Warner Oland's Cantor Rabinowitz, Jakie's father. (An irony being that Oland and Eugenie Besserer, who plays the mother, were gentiles. Oland was otherwise routinely seen in yellowface roles.) When Jolson is jabbering away at the piano, the Cantor musters all his remaining strength to shout Oland's one word in the film, "Stop!" As Williams says, "For a stunningly prolonged moment, it is as if the film does not know what to do," and like Eyman argues, "The sudden reversion to an abruptly passé convention is far more damaging to the traditions and values of silent cinema than any all-talkie could have been." Indeed, it eventually returns to a silent film; only songs are sung thereon out, no oral dialogue. No wonder Charlie Chaplin picked the theme of "Blue Skies" to originally conclude his reflexive "The Circus" (1928) as the show abandons its clown.

The silent film has the last word, but thereby hastens its own death. Interestingly enough, Oland is also dubbed for the Cantor's rendition of "Kol Nidre," so "Stop!" really is the only word he says. Furthermore, his singing is dubbed by another theatrical talkie, albeit a more explicitly liturgical one, by real-life cantor Yossele Rosenblatt playing a version of himself who Robin observes on stage in one scene, offering the picture's first glimpse of a potential resolution between the parochial and the cosmopolitan, if not also between silent and talkie. Ultimately, however, the silent film died, spiritually confined here to the synagogue, a joke for which only a new prayer shawl can be gifted, put at ease by a compromise song of "Kol Nidre" crosscut with the home next door that's filmed like a silent film, Jolson's voice providing the sound bridge.

The ghostly double exposure effect, too, would be overly melodramatic except that I think it plays well into one of my favorite pet film theory issues of film-as-death. That is, film is already a ghost, of stilled images from life projected as a cinematic afterlife. So, here, we have a "live" disembodied song, "a tear in his voice," conjuring the silent film spectre as visual, the only way it may exist, unlike the talkie with its voice that may carry beyond the seen body. Additionally, there's a focus throughout on still photographs, the first of which, a portrait of young Jakie, is highlighted when the son has entered a spiritual death, disavowed by his father. Later, Jack is visually positioned between two photographs, one of his shiksa dancer sweetheart on his left and one of his mother on his right, as he's meanwhile haunted in the mirror by his stage-bound blackface dissolving into another memory of the Cantor. The entire film visually and acoustically becomes a representation of his divided soul, a divided film.

Literally, the film is not only part silent and part talkie, it's shot on two different stocks of celluloid, with different lighting, and even the frame rates sometimes conspicuously differ, such as in the sped-up silent-film footage of the audience intercut with Jolson singing in synchronized-sound footage at the Coffee Dan's club. Not only was Hollywood transitioning to talkies, the industry was also replacing orthochromatic film with panchromatic film and arc and mercury vapor lights with incandescent lighting, which worked better with the new celluloid stock and conveniently were also quieter. Thus, the talkie scenes not only sound different than the silent ones; they also look different. The extra hassle of sound editing seems to have largely ended the popular silent era practice of tinting and toning, for one. Here, the silent documentary-like opening montage of the Lower East Side ghetto, the streets of which the silent characters will subsequently pull young Jakie through in taking him away from singing in a saloon, are especially striking, as is the entirety of the picture's docu-fiction-like scenes of immigrant Jewish life in New York contrasted with Los Angeles sound stages for the clubs and Broadway where Jolson sings. So, not only technically, but silent films and talkies were also stylistically oppositional, as sound standardized continuity editing and, as Eyman says, "made them less malleable, less open to individual interpretation. Allusion and metaphor were the bedrocks of the silent medium, but dialogue literalized every moment, converted it from subjective to objective."

This additional verisimilitude is also behind "The Jazz Singer" being credited with ending one form of cinematic blackface, the sort represented in "The Birth of a Nation" where darkened white actors portray black characters, while simultaneously popularizing another form, of white actors playing white characters who performatively put on blackface, are "made-up," in the scenarios. Later uses of blackface would be different, such as for gags on ineffective disguises to evade other characters, but the use here is more integral to the narrative, as others have already pointed out. If looking for a more academic and critical version of simple dismissals of blackface in "The Jazz Singer" as racist, the go-to text is political scientist Michael Rogin's oft-cited and overly-imitated book. Essentially, Rogin claims "The Jazz Singer" employs it, as well as jazz, for the protagonist to escape his Jewish identity, to assimilate as American and white, by way of racial cross-dressing and ventriloquism, speaking for and replacing absent African Americans at the same time as confirming his non-blackness.

All of which begs the question why one would call attention to their crossing the color line so as to cross that line or how that would help them do so? Others, including Musser, Rosenberg, and, more politely, Williams, have rebuked Rogin's thesis. Both Musser and Rosenberg, borrowing a phrase from Rogin himself referring to the film, call it "hysterical." Both criticize the lack of consulting contemporary African-American sources on the subject, especially Musser who makes the love of the contemporary black press for Jolson and the film the titular query of his essay. In fact, neither Jolson nor his Robin double ever denied their Jewish identity. His singing "Kol Nidre" in between the film's two blackface performances being the obvious filmic evidence thereof in a film otherwise bracketed by observances of Yom Kippur and that goes to unusual lengths to depict Jewish culture. "The Jazz Singer" is more integrationist than assimilationist, theatrical multiculturalism as opposed to the Cantor's monocultural traditionalism. As Rosenberg says, "Jack's particular evasion of Jewishness is complicated by his disguise, not facilitated by it," and it hardly mitigates any implied miscegenation melodrama.

Meanwhile, the history of blackface is more Janus-faced than some have suggested. Of course it was used for racist stereotypes, as in "The Birth of a Nation," but light-skinned black Bahamian entertainer Bert Williams wore the burnt cork throughout his career. I've reviewed two short films he made (see here and here). Although lamenting the use of blackface, W. E. B. Du Bois enthusiastically praised Williams. Spike Lee less so in "Bamboozled" (2000). He was hardly the only blackface black performer, either. It's employed as a comedic mask by an African-American performer in Oscar Micheaux's early-talkie race film short "The Darktown Revue" (1931), for another example. Critics of Rogin's book point out, too, that underlying Jewish entertainers like Jolson becoming the most popular blackface performers was a form of identification with African Americans, both groups racialized in the U.S. as "other," in addition to any past commonality with American and biblical slavery. Such conviviality also played out in the history of jazz, at least in the more generalized meaning of the word in the Jazz age. In this sense, such minstrelsy in "The Jazz Singer" becomes the film's sole acknowledgement of, or homage to, these African-American and cross-cultural artistic contributions, as well as another of the film's forms of doubling. Jolson and his Robin double as wearing burnt cork and wool wig to associate themselves with African-American culture, not white culture, assimilating America as much as the other way around. Jazz as prayer, blackface singer as modern cantor. For Rosenberg, an intertitle referring to the mask as Robin's "shadow" holds biblical connotations from Genesis. As Musser points out, too, and the contemporary writings he cites evidence, Jolson was considered a friend and ally of African Americans and would do more to share the stage with them in his subsequent pictures even though he continued to wear blackface. Moreover, in black cinemas where the silent version of the film was screened, live African-American singers accompanied the songs--white face, black voice.

The more undeniable contention of Rogin's psychoanalytically-infused reading of the film, which if nothing else neatly ties together criticism of both its use of blackface and its moments of more weepie melodrama is the film's Oedipal subtext. Like most of psychoanalysis, though, it's more interesting as intellectual masturbation than really meaning anything (and the reason they teach Freud, Lacan, et al in humanities courses nowadays rather than in social sciences). I'm also disappointed I haven't read anyone make something out of the "mirror stage" of the mirror scene here--it's rather the soft pitch for psychobabble musing. Anyways, Jolson's son is straight up flirting with his mother during renditions of "Blue Skies," the only extensive dialogue scene in the picture. In Raphaelson's play, the song "Red Hot Mamma" was even more to the point. The entire scenario boils down to love the mother, associated with home, and kill the father, associated with the law. Resolution, then, comes in Robin's displacement of mother love onto both the shiksa, inter-faith or even interracial relationships as relief from the incestual, albeit never as convincingly. More convincing is the displacement onto his theatrical career, which Jack explicitly tells his sweetheart is more important to him than her. So much for outdated sentimentality. Here, performance is more real, more spiritual than anything else. This is what's behind his actions, of treating mother and girlfriend as members of his audience, from the first moment he's seen swinging his hips proto-Elvis Presley style, fingers-in-mouth whistling "Toot, Toot, Tootsie" at Coffee Dan's. "Jazz" at its etymological root as "jism." Where blackface here comes closest to stereotypical is in Robin's childlike regression wearing it, but then the same could be said for his singing "Kol Nidre" in regard to his father's wishes. Before that, though, he literally sings sorry to his mother, and the final song makes a pun of mammy/mommy.

"The Jazz Singer," then, is a more remarkably concise and rich text than it's often given credit for. Even the blackface, taboo today, is historically interesting if history and its complications are actually considered. The film's layered twoness offer various paths of interpretation. It's remembered as the innovative talkie, and it's reflexively about the transition from silent era to sound era. In that respect, it'd make a good two-sided debate pairing with Chaplin's "City Lights" (1931), the coronation of the talkie versus the lament of the silents. Certainly its historical primacy and significance have been overstated by some, but it's mythologized as the talkie for good reason. Some landmark productions aren't good movies. The all-talking, singing, dancing, Oscar-winning rubbish that is "The Broadway Melody" (1929) comes to mind; actually, a lot of early talkies come to mind, which surely also helps explain the vaunted status of "The Jazz Singer." It must, as Tankel says, "be considered an important film aesthetically, and not simply a 'milestone.'" A milestone and a masterpiece.

Works Cited
Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931. Scribner, 1997.

Eyman, Scott. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930. Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Gomery, Douglas. The Coming of Sound: A History. Routledge, 2005.

Musser, Charles. "Why Did Negroes Love Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer?: Melodrama, Blackface and Cosmopolitan Theatrical Culture." Film History 23, no. 2 (2011): 196–222. www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/filmhistory.23.2.196

Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. University of California Press, 1996.

Rosenberg, Joel. "Review: Rogin's Noise: The Alleged Historical Crimes of The Jazz Singer." Prooftexts 22, no. 1–2 (2002): 221–39. www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/pft.2002.22.1-2.221

---. "What You Ain't Heard Yet: The Languages of The Jazz Singer." Prooftexts 22, no. 1–2 (2002): 11–54. www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/pft.2002.22.1-2.11

Sherwood, Robert E. "The Silent Drama: The Jazz Singer." Life (27 October 1927): 24.

Tankel, Jonathan D. "The Impact of The Jazz Singer on the Conversion to Sound." Journal of the University Film Association 30, no. 1 (1978): 21–25. www.jstor.org/stable/20687409

Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton University Press, 2001.