Submitted by: Submitted by chowki
Views: 10
Words: 1802
Pages: 8
Category: Music and Cinema
Date Submitted: 05/11/2016 04:42 AM
The Rise of Sound Film
The Jazz Singer is a well-known sign of a conversion from silent movie to sound. The Jazz Singer is the first synchronized sound film. Even more, The Jazz Singer is a sign of the decline of the silent film era. I determined the New York Times during 1927 as my mainly primary sources. The reason that I chose particular time is that it gives me a sense of how people thought about The Jazz Singer that time when it came out. I chose the New York Times in New York because it may delegate the mainstream newspapers in the US. My thesis would be why filmmaker keeps trying to add sound to film. Why people think The Jazz Singer in different ways. Why or why not people think The Jazz singer was successful.
The Jazz Singer is the first synchronized sound film because the traditional Hollywood film industry has been trying to erase the audience perception of the existence of the voice recording equipment (which is Vitaphone in The Jazz Singer). There is another sign to prove the tradition of erasing the audience perception of the existence of the equipment, Hollywood film uses continuity editing to let the audience immerse into films. The continuity editing creates no sense of the presence of the camera and editing. The audiences throw themselves into the narrative illusion. “Continuity editing is a system of editing devices that establish a continuous presentation of space and time.” (Berliner 45) It makes the audience feel nature and narrative in film at the same time.
The Jazz Singer is a sign of the decline of the silent film era. There was short dialogue in many earlier sound films. For instance, D. W. Griffith used the sound-on-disc system Photokinema in Dream Street in 1921. The film was preceded by a program of shorts, but there are no talking scenes in the feature. Later, on April 15th, 1923, Lee de Forest, “Father of Radio,” introduced another sound-on-film system Phonofilm for short films only. The quality of the sound was poor. Don...