The Musical
Sound arrived — and that alone was enough to create a genre. The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927, was mostly silent. It was a 'part-talkie': only the songs and a few lines of dialogue were synchronized. That was enough. Two years later, The Broadway Melody became the first talking picture, and the first musical, to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. And the transition itself later became material for the genre's best film. Singin' in the Rain turns the chaos of the shift from silent to sound into song and rain. It placed 10th in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll, and 1st in the AFI's musical category. Technology opened the door, the genre was born, and the mess of the transition itself became a classic. It's the cleanest example on this map of a movement driven by technology.
Singin' in the Rain was not always where it sits now. It was well received, but only a moderate earner. It climbed to this position much later. This map has a lineage elsewhere for things that arrive late — Keaton, the Altamira paintings, af Klint. Add one more.
Two people set the forms. Busby Berkeley settled his overhead kaleidoscope in 1933 with 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933: people become shapes. Fred Astaire did the opposite, keeping the dance unbroken and the whole body in frame: people do not become shapes. He made ten films with Ginger Rogers, nine of them at RKO. Those two ways of pointing a camera are the two sources for everything after. At MGM, Arthur Freed's unit made around fifty films, among them An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain.
In the 1960s the genre lost its footing quickly. Three reasons are usually given: rock and roll split the audience by generation; acting moved toward realism; and studios, watching The Sound of Music land in 1965, made one big musical after another and missed one after another.
It did not disappear. In 1964 Jacques Demy made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in which every line is sung, and it took the Palme d'Or. Half a century later Damien Chazelle said he had watched that film more than 200 times, and made La La Land. Demy was not the only name he gave: Minnelli's dream ballets, Berkeley's overhead numbers, Gene Kelly, Astaire and Rogers — he screened their films for the cast during production. The line running from this node into the present is made of those words.