The Artist
Silent Film The Artist has been this year’s huge breakout hit, already winning three Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy, Best Original Score, and Best Actor.
With the BAFTAs taking place this weekend and The Artist receiving 12 nominations in addition to its 10 nominations at this year’s Oscars, it is being tipped as this year’s big winner.
With the hype surrounding The Artist and its portrayal of the demise of the silent film and the success of the talkie, we are taking a look back through the archive and into the era of Silent Film to see how the phenomenon grew and developed.
The first Academy Awards were presented on May 16, 1929, at a private brunch at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel with an audience of about 270 people.
It was at these first awards that Wings, won an Academy Award for Best Picture, this was the only silent film and the first ever film to win this Oscar. It also won a second Academy Award for Engineering Effects.
Wings was a silent film about World War I fighter pilots and was distributed by Paramount Pictures and released on August 12, 1927. It starred Clara Bow, Charles "Buddy" Rogers, and Richard Arlen, and Gary Cooper appears in a role which helped launch his career in Hollywood and also marked the beginning of his affair with Clara Bow.
Wings also gained notoriety as it was the one of the first films to show two men kiss in a fraternal moment during the finale, it was also one of the first widely released films to show nudity.
Wings was a great success, however another film that found success at these first ever Oscars was The Jazz Singer which was also released in 1927.
This ground-breaking movie was the first ever talkie to be released with Al Jolson playing the lead, singing 6 songs and speaking 281 words of ad-libbed dialogue. Warner Bros. notched up a special award for producing the film at the Oscars in 1929.
Following the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, "talkies" became more and more popular and within a decade, production of silent films had ceased.
In 1996, The Jazz Singer was selected for preservation in the American National Film Registry of "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" motion pictures and in 1998, the film was chosen in voting conducted by the American Film Institute as one of the best American films of all time, ranking at number ninety.
1927 came to be a pivotal year in the history of film, as the release of The Jazz Singer took the first steps to placing a whole new genre in to the history books.
A story that is mirrored in The Artist as Peppy Miller puts silent movie star George Valentin out of business with her popularity in talkies and his demise as the last silent film star.
The Jazz Singer is available to buy on DVD now