For almost a century, The Jazz Singer has been celebrated as the world’s first feature-length film to include synchronised dialogue (known as a “talkie”), and English as the first language of cinema. But a chance discovery threatens to upend film history with the news that it may have been beaten to the title by a full year – and by a film made in Glasgow and written in Scots.
The breakthrough was made by the historian and self-confessed “film nerd” Marc David Jacobs, who was conducting research for a book on the first wave of British sound films when he came across the story of Till the Bells Ring.
The 46-minute feature film, featuring spoken parts and synchronised sound throughout, premiered in Edinburgh in October 1926, a year before The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, hit New York’s screens to widespread fanfare and took its place in the history books.
“This was the start of what we would consider modern film,” Jacobs 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.”
The creation of the Scottish playwright Graham Moffat, Till the Bells Ring is a domestic comedy set in Glasgow and performed by Moffat’s six-part touring company, including his wife, Margaret, and daughter Winifred, in what he called “lowland braid Scots”: a term for plain-language Scots dialect originating from central and southern Scotland.
It was billed at the time as a “super talking picture … of Victorian family life” and heralded upon its premiere as a cinematic milestone. The Edinburgh Evening News wrote in a 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.”
But Jacobs said the film was quickly forgotten about. “This fits into a larger narrative about British cinema, which has been uniquely neglected,” he said. “I think if it had been celebrated as a distinctly Scottish production, it might have survived or been discovered by now. But it’s fallen under this rubric of British cinema and there’s no real sense that British cinema history is actually worth looking at.”
There is no evidence that the film was ever screened publicly again after its week-long run in Edinburgh’s Poole’s Synod Hall, where the city’s Traverse theatre stands today. Moffat died in 1951 having never made another film.
Among Jacobs’ discoveries are that two of the film’s reels, comprising more than half its length, survive in the BFI National Archives in Hertfordshire but have never been screened since their acquisition more than 50 years ago. With this year marking the film’s centenary, Jacobs hopes that will change.
“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 said. “But this is a film that had its origins as a stage play and the manuscripts have survived, so you can imagine perhaps playing those surviving reels and then performing that missing part on stage.
“It would be an amazing moment to recreate this important landmark in world cinema history. But beyond that, hopefully it spurs people on to reconsider British cinema history as a whole and think: if this has been sitting around for 100 years, what else might be out there?”
