Introduction: The Year 1927

This issue is dedicated to saving 1927 from The Jazz Singer.

In anthropological terms, a calendar year counts for nothing. But the history of cinema is much shorter, and sometimes a single year has stood out. This collection provides alternatives to the too-frequent reduction of 1927 - along with 1928, 1929 and 1930 - to 'the coming of sound' in mainstream American film, that process too often encapsulated in just one title, the rest of the world forgotten.

History books are vivid only by exception. Voices from 1927 can help bring that year back to life. Josef von Sternberg remembered that 'motion picture theatres, where one could sleep, were not yet open all night. It is amusing to mention that a film of mine (Underworld, 1927) forced a theatre to stay open for the entire night, never closing its doors, for the first time in the history of motion pictures'.¹

Many of the essays in this collection cite voices from the past, reviving the vernacular in different contexts. Some, like Lea Jacobs's essay, take the vernacular as one of their subjects.

While the essays included here cannot cover all aspects of the cinema during 1927, they do represent different perspectives, different mental maps and physical geographies, different senses of chronology and different styles of presentation. I hope the reader will appreciate contributions from film restoration experts, reference librarians and/or historians who are experimenting with new ways to present their research and extend the audience for silent cinema (written film history, documentaries, DVD essays, special screenings...). An important presence behind this collection is the community-building that has been going on at places like the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, and, more recently, conferences devoted to multiple language versions of the early sound era in the late 1920s (the past few years at the Udine International Film Studies Conference in Udine, Italy and the related MAGIS Gradisca Spring School).

Kevin Brownlow, in his uniquely erudite and enthusiastic style, begins with a guided tour of films and their personnel that made 1927 a special year, describing such unexpected titles as The Enemy, Sorrell and Son (the subject of archivist James Hahn's essay) or The Scar of Shame, produced by the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia. As for the talking sensation of the year, 'It was pure accident that Vitaphone gave The Jazz Singer immortality', relegating to oblivion 'the lavish silent When a Man Loves ... which the same director ... made the same year for the same studio'(since restored, with its own Vitaphone score, by UCLA). 1927 gave us Keaton's The General, Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother, and of course Sunrise. Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary and The Man Who Laughs were amazing contributions from a newcomer to Hollywood (see also Jan-Christopher Horak's essay). Germany's Ufa released not only Metropolis, but the 'more exhilarating' Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Loves of Jeanne Ney). For Brownlow, the most significant film of the year was Gance's Napoleon, which he has restored more than once. Brownlow mounts a spirited campaign to lift legal restrictions that prevent his five and a half hour tinted and toned final restoration, carried out in 2000 with the British Film Institute, from being released or even shown publicly. The only version that can now legally be shown is Brownlow's earlier version, two hours shorter.

Everyone knows that the studios began on the East Coast and later moved their production facilities to the West Coast. The photo essay, 'Fox 1927, a Year in Pictures', contributed by 20th Century Fox film restoration specialist Schawn Belston (who was involved in the restoration of Sunrise) and Fox photo archivist Rob Easterla, provides just one example of a studio's continuing operations on both coasts. Fox was still going strong in New York in 1927, with Allan Dwan shooting East Side, West Side on the streets of the city (and inside their New York studio) at the same time that Fox's West Coast operation was undergoing dramatic expansion, with the construction of Movietone City across town from...