1929 in Film

1929 In Film

The days of the silent film are numbered. A mad scramble to provide synchronized sound is on.

• January 20 - The movie In Old Arizona is released. The film is the first full-length talking film to be filmed outdoors.
• May 16 - The first Academy Awards, or Oscars, are distributed
• July 13 - The first all color talkie (in Technicolor), On with the Show, is released by Warner Bros. who led the way in a new color revolution just as they had ushered in that of the talkies.
• November 10 - Première of John Grierson's documentary film Drifters about North Sea herring fishermen, made for the Empire Marketing Board, effectively inaugurating the British Documentary Film Movement. (It debuts at the private Film Society in London on a double-bill with the UK première of Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin.)
• Hallelujah!, first Hollywood film to contain an entire black cast.
• Atlantic is the first sound on film movie made in Germany. It is also the first Titanic movie with sound.
• The Broadway Melody is released by MGM and becomes the first major musical film of the sound era, sparking a host of imitators as well as a series of Broadway Melody films that will run until 1940.