The First Talking Motion Picture Ever Made

Welcome back my fellow learners, today we are going to learn about the first talking motion picture, it was not as many people are led to believe The Jazz Singer, but we will look into this anyway.

On the 6^th of October in 1927 in New York history was made. This was when the first spoken voice (and I must state this IN FEATURE FILMS ) was heard. This voice belonged to the legendary Al Jolson and the movie was, yes you guessed it, The Jazz Singer. The theatre's audience reaction to it was thunderous, it was stated that they got to their feet, and began to applaud with gusto. The moment came someone where in the middle of the film, during a nightclub scene, that Jolson spoke the first words ever in a movie, and they are still legendary even now, they were in a way poetic, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothin' yet!" which in today's movie industry shows the leaps and bounds we have truly taken since then.

From the breakthrough part in the film when Jolson spoke for the first time, the film made ample use of the new technology. Jolson sitting at a piano In one scene talks to his mother whilst singing lines from Blue Skies. Al Jolson ad-libbed numerous lines in the musical and they were so good the studio decided to leave them in.

The Jazz Singer is about a young Jewish man coming from a line of cantors. But, much to his families horror he decides to break with tradition and be a Jazz singer. The movie is jammed packed full of songs that became famous, like "˜Mammy', "˜Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye,' and of course"˜Blue Skies.' The movie has scenes of the Yom Kippur ceremony. The film is a combination of silence and talking. The film is obviously dated judging by today's standards with Jolson's acting and typical Jewish stereotypes which would have been severely frowned upon by today's standards. Al Jolson was a minstrel singer for most of his life. He was a white man that played a black man for his last scene in the movie. This has led some to think he was in fact a black man.

So there you have it my lovelies my short version of talking pictures and the ground breaking history it made.