The jazz singer

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2011)

This is one of the most purely exhilarating films you will see in a lifetime of movies, pure Hollywood royalty. You didn't need me to tell you though, so let's talk about something else.
Visually, the thing is as magnificent and minutely controlled as Kubrick's 2001, as vibrantly colored as The Red Shoes, with a weave of self-reference layered deep enough to make Peter Greenaway sit down and write a list about it.
Of course the whole idea behind the thing is that it is a movie about the makings of a movie, the one we have come to see. Warners pioneered this in the early 30's, and they had Busby Berkeley staging wonders, but this goes beyond.
Why the film amazes to this day, beyond its technical credentials, I think has all to do with the spontaneous engineering of the design. How it has been choreographed to dance around the burdens of a thinking mind and speak directly to the eye, the pull smoothed over so that it appears completely natural. I shudder to think what painstaking effort must have went into choreographing the lights and camera and individual performances, and then timing everything to flow at once.
It is a perfect accomplishment in how we're engaged to dance; first with the fictional space as though it were real, but gradually, getting to know the steps of the spell, coming to understand that we were only using the fictional to hover closer to what is real and matters. Love in our case, the glorious feeling.
Consider for example the scene where Don takes Kate to an empty studio lot and begins to arrange an illusion around her, movie lights, wind machine, painted horizon in the back, but all arranged to allow him to speak about a love that is true. They erupt in spontaneous dance, adding to the illusion arranged for us. It doesn't make a lick of sense why they would suddenly dance, but we absorb naturally because the spark is natural.
Consider how love for this woman transforms the entire film in production. The many times that characters avail themselves truly while framed inside a fiction, before a camera or in front of a screen. How the plot of The Jazz Singer is cleverly mirrored in the plot of a man pursuing his dream about dancing.