1927

100 years after the first ‘talkie’ dramatically reshaped cinema history, re:group work with acclaimed director Hannah Goodwin to reinvestigate what we lost when silent movies went loud.

In a performance that is part lecture, part play and part cinematic rave, 1927 responds to two major pieces of source material. The Warner Brothers film The Jazz Singer, and Napoleon the silent French masterpiece by the enigmatic director Abel Gance. These two films were released in the same year. Both used new cinematic technologies. Both were trying something new. One became a massive sensation, eventually being listed as one of the 80 days that changed the world, while the other was literally lost, its film degraded and forgotten. 

re:group’s investigations of cinematic form and genre are deeply theatrical, our live cinema has spanned documentary, 90s indie movie, emulations of Philip Seymour Hoffman, prison break, Sci-Fi and musicals. With 1927, we’re turning back the clock to a critical moment in history with uncanny parallels to today. In 1927, just as the artform of silent cinema was hitting its peak artistically, with films like Metropolis, Napoleon and Wings released, a minor Hollywood musical drama (with a lot of blackface in it) became a major blockbuster hit and changed the whole industry, effectively killing silent cinema.

We’re setting out to change that history.

What if The Jazz Singer wasn’t the massive hit it was? What if it had been forgotten, instead of Napoleon? What if the human voice never stained the artform of cinema? What if we could change one of the 80 days that changed the world?

Drawing on the hallucinatory fascist aesthetics of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, this project attempts to rewrite history. re:group’s customary DIY live cinema repurposes the triple cinema screen polyvision Napoleon is famous for in an overwhelming onslaught of image. In doing so, the piece reflects on the contemporary impulse towards strongman politics and the rise of fascism and nationalism globally. It asks, when so much bullshit is being said: wouldn’t it be nice to go back to silence?