Two films that significantly changed the look and sound of motion pictures are being released in newly restored versions on DVD.
Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” a silent epic from 1925, may be the most influential film of the silent era, while Warner Brothers’ “The Jazz Singer,” made two years later in Hollywood, was the first feature-length film to include synchronized dialogue and singing.
“Battleship Potemkin,” which will be released on DVD Tuesday (two discs, $29.95), was immediately recognized as a cinematic masterpiece. Making it to commemorate the ill-fated Russian Revolution of 1905, Eisenstein chose to focus on the mutiny of Russian sailors on a battle cruiser near Odessa who wanted to join the insurgency.
One of the film’s crucial scenes – where counter-revolutionary soldiers (Cossacks) massacre an unarmed group of protesters on the Odessa steps, including one mother holding her injured son in her arms and another who loses her grip on her baby carriage – became one of the most celebrated scenes in film history.
Most significantly, Eisenstein pioneered the use of montage – or cutting – and editing to heighten dramatic effect. Eisenstein also was one of the first major filmmakers to take his cameras outside of film studios and onto streets and ships, and to use many nonprofessional actors.
By restoring missing shots and title cards as well as Eisenstein’s original scenes and music, “Battleship Potemkin” has re-emerged in all of its original glory and fervor.
It’s the use of sound – specifically Al Jolson singing such songs as “Toot-Toot-Tootsie, Goodbye,” “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face,” “My Mammy” and “Blue Skies,” and ad libbing the remark, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” – that made “The Jazz Singer” such a trailblazing film. And its impact is shown in a three-disc 80th Anniversary Collector’s Edition DVD box set ($39.92), released last week.
Although by 1927 movie fans had already seen short subjects with sound, “The Jazz Singer” is the film that really broke the sound barrier – even though at least 95 percent of the dialogue is silent.
It’s a melodramatic tale about a young man, Jakie Rabinowitz, from an orthodox Jewish family whose father is an esteemed cantor. Jakie wants to be a jazz singer – and he’s banished from home by his angry father. Later, after years on the road as a successful vaudeville singer, the man now named Jack Robins returns to New York and discovers that his father is deathly ill.
One of the difficulties in viewing “The Jazz Singer” with modern sensibilities is Jolson’s problematic use of blackface, a musical style known as minstrelsy first popularized in the 19th century in which white performers put on makeup to look like African-Americans.
In Jolson’s case, the use of blackface did not seem to be intentionally hateful toward people of color – as it was, say, in a racist movie such as D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” – and in many ways it indicated a measure of respect for “black music.”
Yet Jolson’s use of blackface also included the promotion of such offensive racial stereotypes as the happy- go-lucky slave. In the 1926 short “Al Jolson in ‘A Plantation Act,”‘ included in the DVD set, Jolson is seen in blackface wearing tattered clothes as he emerges from a slave shack to sing and dance “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along.”
