There is no denying that October is some sort of masterpiece, but figuring out what kind is a real challenge. As a
didactic tool, a means of explaining the revolution to the masses at home and abroad, the film is simply ineffective. For many audiences, sitting through it is a real chore. The characterizations are all paper thin, and anyone with even a smattering of historical knowledge can see right through its crude propaganda. Yet what is perhaps most powerful and touching about October is simply its level of ambition. Sergei M. Eisenstein was surely the cinemas most remarkable personality for the first 50 years of its existence, impossibly erudite, with an unlimited belief in cinemas potential. At his most delirious, Eisenstein imagined that cinema could represent visual thinkingnot just arguments, but the process by which the mind constructs arguments. Photographic images, the raw material of cinema, had to be neutralized into sensations and stimuli so that a film could reveal concepts and not just people or things. The real engine that would drive the cinema machine as Eisenstein saw it was montage, editing: the mystical interaction that occurs when two separate pieces of film are joined together.
October is the purest, most cogent example of Eisensteins theory and practice of cinema. There are several absolutely breathtaking sequences: the toppling of the Czars statue, the raising of the bridge, and especially the frequently cited For God and Country sequence. Evidence of the cold engineer that Eisenstein originally trained to be might be found in the cathedral-like intricacy of its editing. However, scratch just below the films surface and you can feel the exhilarationand the touch of madnessof an artist standing on the I threshold of what he believes will be a brave new world. RP
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1920s
THE JAZZ SINGER (1927)
U.S. (Warner Bros.) 88m BW
Director: Alan Crosland
Screenplay: Alfred A. Cohn, Jack Jarmuth
Photography: Hal Mohr
Music: Ernie Erdman, James V. Monaco, Louis Silvers, Irving Berlin
Cast: Al Jolson, May McAvoy, Warner Oland, Eugenie Besserer, Otto Lederer, Bobby Gordon, Richard Tucker, Cantor Joseff Rosenblatt
Oscar: Alfred A. Cohn, Jack Jarmuth (honorary award for pioneering talking pictures)
Oscar nomination: Alfred A. Cohn (screenplay)
Throughout film history, certain movies have been the center of special attention, if not for their aesthetics, then for their role in the development of cinema as we know it. Alan Croslands The Jazz Singer is undoubtedly one of the films that has marked the path of motion pictures as both an art form and a profitable industry. Released in 1927 by Warner Brothers and starring Al Jolson, one of the best-known vocal artists at the time, The Jazz Singer is unanimously considered the first feature-length sound movie. Although limited to musical performances and a few dialogues following and preceding such performances, the use of sound introduced innovative changes in the industry, destined to revolutionize Hollywood as hardly any other movie has done.
In its blend of vaudeville and melodrama, the plot is relatively simple. Jakie (Jolson) is the only teenage son of the devoted Cantor Rabinowitz (Warner Oland), who encourages his child to follow the same path of generations of Cantors in the family. Although profoundly influenced by his Jewish roots, Jakies passion is Jazz and he dreams about an audience inspired by his voice. After a family friend confesses to Cantor Rabinowitz to having seen Jakie singing in a café, the furious father punishes his son, causing him to run away from the family house and from his heartbroken mother Sara (Eugenie Besserer). Years later Jakie, aka Jack Robin, comes back as an affirmed Jazz singer looking for reconciliation. Finding his father still harsh and now sick, Jack is forced to make a decision between his career as a blackface entertainer and his Jewish identity.
A milestone in film history representing a decisive step toward a new type of cinema and a new type of entertainment, The Jazz Singer is more than just the first talkie. As Michael Rogin, the famed political scientist, has argued, The Jazz Singer can be cited as a typical example of Jewish transformation in U.S. society: the racial
assimilation into white America, the religious conversion to less strict spiritual dogma, and the entrepreneurial integration into the American motion picture industry during the time of the coming of sound. CFe
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1920s
NAPOLÉON (1927)
France / Italy / Germany / Spain / Sweden / Czechoslovakia (Gance, Soc. générale) 378m (original) Silent BW (some color)
Director: Abel Gance
Producer: Robert A. Harris
Screenplay: Abel Gance
Photography: Jules Kruger, Joseph-Louis Mundwiller, Torpkoff
Music: Arthur Honegger
Cast: Albert Dieudonné, Vladimir Roudenko, Edmond Van Daële, Alexandre Koubitzky, Antonin Artaud, Abel Gance, Gina Manès, Suzanne Bianchetti, Marguerite Gance, Yvette Dieudonné, Philippe Hériat, Pierre Batcheff, Eugénie Buffet, Acho Chakatouny, Nicolas Koline