The Jazz Singer and Modern Times: the advent of talking pictures and Chaplin´s first talk

Abstract

The advent of sound represented technical, aesthetical and ideological transformations and conflicts in the cinema. For many theorists and moviemakers of that period, the introduction of speech in the movies could threaten the formation of its specific artistic language, based on moving pictures and montage until then. The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927) marked the beginning of the talking pictures as the industrial standard practice. One of its major opponents, Charlie Chaplin, would resist to the use of voice for another nine years, until the release of Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), in which the Tramp, his alter ego, speaks for the first time. This text compares the scenes where the voice reveals itself in both films, so to comprehend the symbolical representations of the conflict between the defense of speech as an enrichment to cinema and the opposition to its hegemony.