Bryan is lecturing on Alan Crosland’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer, which is often described as the first “talkie,” because of its use of the Vitaphone recording process. Actually, it’s only the songs and some of the dialogue surrounding them that make use of the Vitaphone, and one of my favorite moments in the film occurs when Jolson’s Jackie sings “Blue Skies” to his mother (his “mammy”), played by Eugenie Besserer. Jolson ad libs dialogue here, and Besserer seems a little taken aback but tries gamely to play along. For most of the film, Besserer uses the broad acting styles that mark silent film and melodrama, in contrast to Jolson’s seemingly more naturalistic style. But in this sequence, the father, played by Warner Oland, enters in and interrupts Jackie’s song — and the film abruptly switches to silent mode. It’s a formal counterpart to what’s going on thematically: the new, the modern, and the consensual are interrupted by the return of the old, the traditional, and the claims of genealogical descent.
The film serves several of our course’s storylines: theater in New York, representation of ethnic cultures New York, the interplay of word and image in New York “writing,” and New York’s competition with Los Angeles to the site where the national popular culture is produced. In particular, we ask our students to think about these questions:
- What does it mean for the son of Jewish immigrants to be a Jazz
Singer? To replace immigrant patriarchy with American sentimentalism
(“Mother!”)? - In what ways and to what effect does this film preserve older or
competing forms of cultural expression (print, stage, live music)? - What do these preservations say about the relationship between New York and Hollywood as cultural capitals?
One of the things that often shocks the students is the film’s use of blackface, and the first clip that Bryan shows is Jolson’s “blacking up,” looking in the mirror, and imagining his father the cantor singing at the synogogue.
This year, I’m put in mind of the comments that Ralph Ellison made about D. W. Griffith’s landmark film The Birth of a Nation (1915). Ellison wrote,” Usually The Birth of a Nation is discussed in terms of its contribution to cinema technique, but as with every other technical advance since the oceanic sailing ship, it became a further instrument in the dehumanization of the Negro.”
Is the same kind of thing going on with blackface in The Jazz Singer? Spike Lee certainly thinks so, and if he has time today, Bryan will show the blackface montage that Lee created for his film Bamboozled (2000). You can watch it below:
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