Scottish film may be the world’s first talkie, not The Jazz Singer

A Scottish film made in Glasgow and written in Scots may have beaten The Jazz Singer to the title of the world’s first feature-length “talkie” by a full year, according to The Guardian. The historian Marc David Jacobs found that Till the Bells Ring, a 46-minute feature with synchronised sound throughout, premiered in Edinburgh in October 1926.

What happened

For almost a century, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, has been known as the first feature-length film with synchronised dialogue. It opened in New York in 1927 to wide acclaim. Its place in film history also made English the first language of cinema.

The Guardian reports that this account may now need revising. Jacobs, a historian who calls himself a “film nerd”, was researching a book on the first wave of British sound films when he came across the story of Till the Bells Ring. The film had spoken parts and synchronised sound throughout. It premiered in Edinburgh in October 1926, a year before The Jazz Singer reached American screens.

The film was created by the Scottish playwright Graham Moffat. It is a domestic comedy set in Glasgow, performed by Moffat’s six-part touring company, which included his wife, Margaret, and his daughter, Winifred. The dialogue was in what Moffat called “lowland braid Scots”, a term for the plain-language Scots dialect of central and southern Scotland. The story began as a stage play, and The Guardian publishes a photograph of it being performed at the Coliseum in London.

At the time, the film was promoted as a “super talking picture … of Victorian family life” and hailed as a milestone. The Edinburgh Evening News wrote in its review: “Even America has never attempted such a work … So perfect was the synchronisation between the image on screen and the broad Scots dialogue spoken by the image, that one might quite well have been listening to a legitimate stage version of the comedy.”

Despite that reception, the film soon disappeared from view. The Guardian reports that there is no evidence it was ever shown publicly again after its week-long run at Poole’s Synod Hall in Edinburgh, the site where the city’s Traverse theatre now stands. Moffat died in 1951 and never made another film.

Jacobs also found that two of the film’s reels, which together make up more than half of its length, survive in the BFI National Archive in Hertfordshire. According to The Guardian, they have not been screened since the archive acquired them more than 50 years ago.

Why it matters if you live in United Kingdom

If the claim holds, one of cinema’s best-known firsts belongs to Scotland rather than Hollywood, and the first feature-length talkie was spoken in Scots rather than English. For anyone living in the UK, and especially in Scotland, that changes a story many people learn as settled fact.

Jacobs told The Guardian that the discovery points to a wider problem. “This fits into a larger narrative about British cinema, which has been uniquely neglected,” he said. He argued that if the film had been celebrated as “a distinctly Scottish production, it might have survived or been discovered by now,” but that it had instead been filed under British cinema, where “there’s no real sense that British cinema history is actually worth looking at.”

He also suggested what might have followed if the technology had been taken up in Britain. “This was the start of what we would consider modern film,” he said. “It was a completely new art form at the time, and if it had been taken up in Britain there could have been a real alternative history of cinema where the Americans didn’t take over and get such a lead on things.”

For newcomers in Edinburgh, the story has a local connection. The hall where the film had its only known run stood where the Traverse theatre is today. The surviving reels are held by the BFI, the UK’s national film body, at its archive in Hertfordshire. The Guardian does not report any public screening dates, so there is currently no confirmed way to see the film.

What to watch next

This year is the film’s centenary, and Jacobs hopes it will lead to the surviving reels being shown at last. He also wants archives in other countries to search their collections. “I hope this becomes more than just a Scottish story, and that archives around the world might be able to take a look and maybe find the missing reel,” he told The Guardian.

Because Till the Bells Ring began as a stage play and Moffat’s manuscripts have survived, Jacobs has suggested a way to present the incomplete film. “You can imagine perhaps playing those surviving reels and then performing that missing part on stage,” he said. “It would be an amazing moment to recreate this important landmark in world cinema history.”

Readers interested in British film history should look out for any announcement from the BFI or Scottish venues about a centenary screening, and for Jacobs’ book on early British sound films. He hopes the find will also prompt a wider reassessment. “If this has been sitting around for 100 years,” he said, “what else might be out there?”

Source: The Guardian