A Film Found in Britain May Turn Out to Be the First Sound Film in History

For nearly a century, the film "The Jazz Singer" was considered the world's first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue (the so-called "talkie"), which cemented English's status as the first language of cinema. However, a chance discovery threatens to overturn our understanding of film history: it has emerged that the title may have belonged to another film, released a year earlier—a movie made in Glasgow and written in Scots. The Guardian reports, UNN writes.

Details

The discovery was made by historian and self-proclaimed "film buff" Mark David Jacobs. He was researching material for a book about the first wave of British talking cinema when he came across the story of the film Till the Bells Ring.

The 45-minute feature film, with dialogue and synchronized sound throughout, was first shown in Edinburgh in October 1926—one year before "The Jazz Singer," starring Al Jolson, was released in New York, causing a major sensation and going down in film history.

This was the beginning of what we today regard as modern cinema. At the time, it was an entirely new art form, and if Britain had embraced it, the history of cinema might have been completely different, with the Americans not gaining such an advantage or establishing such dominance

Till the Bells Ring was created by Scottish playwright Graham Moffat. It is a domestic comedy set in Glasgow. The film featured Moffat's troupe of six actors, which toured the country, including his wife Margaret and daughter Winifred. The author himself called the language of the film "lowland braid Scots"—a term for the simple Scottish dialect spoken in central and southern parts of Scotland.

At the time, the film was advertised as "a super-sound picture… about the life of a Victorian family," and after its premiere it was described as a cinematic milestone. In a review, the Edinburgh Evening News wrote that even America had not attempted anything similar, while the synchronization between the images on screen and the Scottish dialogue was so perfect that it might have seemed as though the viewer were listening to a stage version of the comedy.

However, according to Jacobs, the film was quickly forgotten. "It is part of the broader history of British cinema, which has been astonishingly neglected. I think that if it had been regarded as a purely Scottish production, it might have survived or been found earlier. But it was placed in the category of British cinema, and there is not much sense that the history of British cinema is worth researching at all," he said.

There is no evidence that the film was ever shown publicly again after its week-long run at Edinburgh's Poole’s Synod Hall, on the site of which the Traverse Theatre now stands. Moffat died in 1951 without making another film.

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