In The First Auto, there is a scene in which a horse and an automobile are pitted against each other in a race. The man riding the horse is skeptical of the new-fangled invention of the car, and wants to prove it will never surpass the horse, and offers the race as a way to demonstrate this.
The race is shortly underway, and the horse takes off, making headway, while the car begin emitting smoke.
The horse rider yells at the driver, “hurry up progress! Don’t keep me waiting!”
The car begins to encroach on the horse, but it seems to have more technical issues and falls even farther behind. The man riding the horse wins in a landslide.
But, even though the horse rider delivered on precisely what he promised, and therefore proved that the automobile was not, as it stood, an improvement, nobody flocks to the horse rider to congratulate him. Instead, the crowd is still drawn towards the car. Even though it lost, the spectacle of the car itself is more impressive than the horse.
The horse rider is upset, and says to his friend, “don’t they know we won?”
His friend replies, “Sure, but it’s nothing to see a buggy go with a horse— the wonder is to see a buggy go without a horse.”
This scene perfectly illustrates, in a comical fashion, the ways in which progress doesn’t in fact promise something better, and doesn’t need to prove it’s better. It simply needs to promise something novel and new.
In the year 1927, the film industry was shook up by the dawning of the "talkie revolution". Up until then, silent films and the language of silent film making reigned supreme. The way films looked and felt was about to change. But some would have you think that one film, The Jazz Singer, would be solely responsible for this. That audiences saw that film and that it was full-fledged talkie.
But it is not so! There was, in fact, a very awkward period when silent films and sound technology came crashing together, and didn't really know what to do with each other yet, including that famous film, The Jazz Singer. There was a whole (short-lived) era of early sound films, often called part-talkies. Which were either silent films with key scenes of dialogue and sound effects, or they were films entirely shot as a silent, and then had sound added later. Some films even gave theaters "silent" and "sound" options. It was a strange time
This article will focus on two such "part-talkie" films, which both happen to have plots revolving around change and progress.
the new, hit tradition
The Jazz Singer was released in 1927 and is considered by many to be representative of the turning point between the silent and sound eras of cinema. The popular notion that the film was the first ever to have sound is incorrect, as that title belongs to The Dickson Experimental Sound Film.
The Jazz Singer utilized the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, which was introduced to the public in 1926, during the premiere of Don Juan (1926), only a year before the release of The Jazz Singer. So, what made The Jazz Singer more significant? It contained spoken dialogue. Even though Don Juan had a soundtrack, it was only used for a symphonic score and sound effects. The Jazz Singer was still largely a silent film, with only one scene containing spoken dialogue, and a few more containing singing. Despite the fact that it was still largely silent, the film caused a large stir and launched "the talkie revolution", which sent producers scrambling to catch hold of the trend, and even ended the careers of some silent stars whose voices were seen as unappealing.
The Jazz Singer is also highly significant in the history of film, in terms of how it depicts race. The lead actor is Al Jolson, a Lithuanian-born Jew who became known for his performances in blackface. In the film he plays a similar character: a young Jewish musician attempting to make a name for himself in the world of vaudeville. His father, a conservative Orthodox cantor is horrified by his son's attempts to enter the music trade, as he sees it as a betrayal of his destined role as his successor in the family tradition and the local synagogue as the next cantor. The plot has striking similarities to Jolson's own life, as his father was also a cantor/Rabbi.
The Al Jolson of the film, of course, also performs in blackface, although this is saved until the “finale”. As most people (myself included) go into the film only knowing about the significance of the sound sequences and the fact that there’s blackface, it comes as a surprise that most of the film is really just a cliche-riddled tale (even by 1920s standards) of a young man who rebels against his family in the pursuit of art.
We, of course, are meant to side with the son and see the father as backwards and ultra-conservative. The film expects this of us. And then thinks it’s clever by turning the father character on his head. The father character is at first entirely disapproving of his son’s pursuit of ““jazz”” (double scare quotes there, I mean business). The mother is more favorable towards their son’s artistic pursuits, although clearly wants him to not abandon his Jewish roots. And so Jolson’s character packs it up to try and make it in the big city. When he comes back home, he plays a jazzy tune for his mother, in a scene which includes singing and spoken dialogue! This is the film’s height in terms of technical innovation and predictability.
Of course, the father enters shortly after the son begins singing, and is horrified by his son’s cultural appropriation of jazz music. Now, I’m only half-joking there. The father is horrified by the ways in which his son has abandoned the family tradition in favor of new-fangled show tunes. And the way a modern viewer might react to this is complex, because we know that the black face scene is coming, and we know that there’s a a moral dubiousness (at least!) to Al Jolson performing a style of music he essentially stole.
So, in an ironic twist, we are likely to side with the father here. Because he really is abandoning his family for something we’re not likely to see as noble, something that we’re more likely to see as genuinely morally debased. So the role of the young, hip, liberal artist in this story becomes flipped on his head. He engages with a practice which alt-right, white nationalist types like to point to as a “lost art”, that of minstrelsy. But, in a further ironic layer, this film is surely not to be embraced by the modern alt-right (in the way that something like Birth of a Nation is) due to it’s positive depiction of Judaism, particularly the triumphant ending, where the leading man has his cake and eats it too… Just after his “acclaimed” minstrelsy performance he goes and performs as a cantor at the Day of Atonement service at the synagogue while his father finally comes to approve of his son’s art on his deathbed. The simultaneous embrace of something modern culture sees as deeply immoral and racist, as well as of something old-fashioned yet opposed to white nationalist values, makes the film’s place in history even more complex than it may first appear.
The film is really about the way in which cultures change and pivot. The idea of being "rebellious" against stingy conservatism in this film and context takes on a character which seems absurd today. It shows how arbitrary our conceptualizations of "traditionalism" can be. And it shouldn't be considered insignificant that the first sensational face of the sound era is representative of something older and nefarious. To the white audiences of the 1920s, the singing film star may have seemed as if he was revolutionizing the world of film, some may even have thought of themselves as "progressive" for their ability to appreciate the music of jazz, vaudeville, and the "low arts" of that time.
everything’s speeding up
The First Auto is an early sound film, released the same year as The Jazz Singer, and is mainly silent, but is notable for extensive use of sound effects, including some spoken dialogue, cheering, laughter, and even kazoo. The film achieved sound by also utilizing a Vitaphone sound-on-disc system.
Where The Jazz Singer comes across as clunky, The First Auto comes across as playful. Rather than using the limited sound capabilities on key musical scenes, First Auto peppers sound throughout, so that it occupies a truly strange grey area between the grammars of silent and sound film. I discovered this film because my instructor mentioned it, calling it a “film begging to talk”.
The plot takes place in 1895, and follows the residents of a small town as they encounter the invention of the automobile. Russell Simpson plays Hank Armstrong, a buggy race champion and owns a livery stable. He plans for his son to take over the livery business, but when cars start to arrive in town, Bob Armstrong (Charles Emmett Mack) becomes interested in automobile work. Hank interprets this as a betrayal of his family, and grows depressed as everyone around him seems to be abandoning the horse, and embracing the new device of the automobile.
To prove the insufficiency of the automobile, he engages in the aforementioned race and insults people who become interested in cars. But it’s not enough to change the tides.
His son decides to rebel against his father’s business, and pursues the burgeoning world of race car driving. The father meanwhile goes bankrupt and sells all his belongings, including his horses. When there’s a local automobile race, he decides to turn towards terrorist action, and puts sulpher in one of the race car’s gas tanks the night before the race.
But when his son turns up back in his hometown for a surprise visit, it turns out the race car he put the sulpher in was his son’s. The car explodes and his son appears to be fatally injured.
Hank grows depressed with the thought he’s killed his own son, and burns down his barn, his own symbol for the old ways of transportation.
But then, in a tonally bizarre ending, we see Hank at a local automobile race, it turns out the son survived the explosion but is off watching the horse show instead.
The father-son parallels between the two films are stunning, as both follow a son who falls in love with a certain, new art form/sport, he desires to pursue it, the father sees it as a betrayal of the family’s role in society, and then eventually reach a point where the father is forced to accept the reality of this new fad and it’s cultural role, resulting in a reconciliation of father/son. In a way, these father/son stories are dialogues (or, if you like, dialectical) which result in a reconciliation. Just as the reconciliation between visual and sound was underway at that time.
However, the First Auto lends a much more skeptical framework for this narrative of generational progress. The film, unlike The Jazz Singer actually follows the father, rather than the son. It pokes fun at the stingy conservatism, and the denial of the reality of time’s passage. But it also has real sympathy for him. It sees his concern about racing as genuine, and often lingers on his concerns over the speed and dangers of automobiles, while emphasizing the intimate relationship a horse-owner can have with his animal. When the film gets far more serious, it forces the plot into a place where it recognizes that the automobile is not better, not true progress, but it’s near-enchanting efficiency and speed will make it inevitable. Perhaps it even, somewhat cynically, suggests we must just accept this as part of the ever-churning machinations of culture. But the film’s surprisingly dark tone is both from within and without, as the on set circumstances enhance a certain subtext in the film’s plot.
The film’s race car-loving son, the 31-year old Charles Emmett Mack, was driving to set one day, to film the climactic racing scene, however, on his way he was killed in a car accident. The irony is so obvious and tragic it hardly needs to be elaborated. The film plays around with ideas of progress, but also sincerely tries to be cautionary; reality was apparently not so reserved with it’s cautionary tale. It’s important to remember just how dangerous cars really are, and how genuine of a concern people had when they were first being introduced. While it may seem amusing to us now, just as it was then, how quaint the resistance to the automobile was, but maybe we are too quick to assume that this change needed to happen, and that we’re somehow truly better off for it.
don’t mistake change for progress
We live in a culture obsessed with technological progress. We continually look for ways to improve the efficiency of our tools, with no conception of an “end point”. While technology in the past may have been (so to say) made to order in order to address needs and desires, technology is now increasingly designed to anticipate desires, or even create them. I want to ask, briefly, why? Why our fetishization of technological progress?
The inaugural event of motion picture film is usually considered to be the Muybridge series of photographs, “The Horse in Motion” (although if you read my previous post, you’ll know the origin story is more complex). In the metaphorical terms of this paper, this perfectly represents the beginning of the silent film era, while also capturing the essence of horse racing.
The film synced with sound was workable, to some extent, for many years before The Jazz Singer, but it took a true spectacle in order to get audiences to see this as progress. And that spectacle was achieved by utilizing a distinctly racist art form. In many ways, blackface is as much a technology as sound film. They are all different tools with a single concern: to capture paying audiences. But when this is our key concern, when we equate technological progress and monetary gain, we can confuse the change that occurs with the introduction of a new “tool” with progress itself. And morality is pushed aside as a concern.
However, in my humble opinion, “progress” of this sort is a sort of mythology. We often assume history has a direction, that there is a natural flow towards greater efficiency, greater happiness, etc. Of course the capitalist version of this is that the pursuit of self-interest achieves a utopian state of constant flow of wealth and resources; the Marxist version of this is seeing capitalism as inevitably becoming synthesized with it’s antithesis, making the communist world an inevitable endpoint. But I insist on a type of existentialism here, that there is no “essence” to history, that it is fundamentally determined by the actions and interest of human beings, which were chosen with their own will, and little to nothing else.
Coming back down to earth here from my philosophical ivory tower— Our great fallacy is thinking cars must replace horses, that sound films must replace silents. In both cases there are legitimate benefits which are obvious. But we, as a society, are capable of adopting something without abandoning the “obsolete” thing. Imagine a world where we still have the live option of using a horse as our means of transportation. I mean, really. How many deadly accidents could have been prevented? Why can we not even imagine a world where cars and horses co-exist? Why does this fable of technological progress intoxicate us?
This skepticism is perfectly lampooned in a lighthearted manner at the end of First Auto, when the father is watching the automobile races. He has clearly accepted the role of the car, but is astounded by the increasing speed of the cars. Then he sees a plane zoom overhead. He stares in awe and disbelief at how fast things are changing. It's a wonderful reminder of a simple truth. Even if you try to accept change, you can never truly keep up. The best we can do is approach these shifts with equal amazement and caution.