The moving pictures are such a mixture of secret manoeuvres and false
publicity that right before your eyes an event slips into a legend out of
which is it hard to disengage a germ of truth.
GILBERT SELVES, Movies for the Millions, 1937

The film that emblematizes the birth of the talkies is TIE JAZZ SINGER. Jolson's blackened face, tear-jerking performance, and unabashed vocal gusto are understood to signal the end of Hollywood's silence. The 1927 film enjoys this stature not only in popular opinion but in academic discourse. An insightful article about TIE JAZZ SINGER, for example, has described the musical "as a summation of those various elements which came to distinguish the musical genre." The film was an event (in Foucault's use of the term), "since it firmly established a new and promising direction in which movie narrative...