\n It wasn\u2019t until Jacobs was looking through the British Film Catalogue that he realised there were some irregularities around Till the Bells Ring\u2019s date citations.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
\n READ MORE: Anger as pipers call on BBC to U-turn on axing World Pipe Band Championship coverage<\/a>\n<\/p>\n \n \u201cIt just didn’t tally,\u201d Jacobs told The National, adding: \u201cI started delving into it, especially because it said it was from 1933 and I saw some other stuff that said it was from 1926.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \n \u201cThe more and more I looked into it, clearly the production was made by a Scottish company, by a Scottish writer-director, Scottish cast, Scottish setting, all this stuff, but then also it clearly had this sort of place in history in terms of it kept being referred to as kind of the first modern film.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n Jacobs discovered that Glaswegian playwright Graham Moffat had hired De Forest Phonofilms, based in London at the time, to make an adaptation of his 1908 play Till the Bells Ring.\n<\/p>\n \n The film\u2019s sound technology was widely seen at the time as a novelty best suited to lectures and short comedies.\n<\/p>\n \n However, Moffat\u2019s ambitious project featured his entire touring company performing with synchronised dialogue, which he described as Lowland braid Scots, throughout the film’s 44-minute run time.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n \n The film cast six actors and a dog, and starred Graham Moffat and his wife, Margaret, who was also one of the first Scots arrested for suffragist actions, alongside their daughter Winifred Moffat.\n<\/p>\n \n Jacobs explained that after a disastrous private demonstration with faulty equipment, possibly followed by a trial run at a London music hall, the film was finally presented for the first time in any cinema on October 11, 1926, as the main feature at Poole’s Synod Hall in Edinburgh.\n<\/p>\n \n The Edinburgh Evening News hailed Till the Bells Ring as a cinematic landmark, with one reviewer claiming \u201ceven America has never attempted such a work\u201d.\n<\/p>\n \n \n The review added: \u201cSo perfect was the synchronisation between the image on the screen and the broad Scots dialogue spoken by the image, that one might quite well have been listening to a legitimate stage version of the comedy.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n Jacobs said: \u201cIt became apparent that this was the very first example of that anywhere in the world, you know, a year before Hollywood, three years before the rest of the British film actually caught up to it.\u201d\n<\/p>\n \n However, he explained the film then disappeared for several years until it was re-released in 1933 as a tax dodge by an unscrupulous exhibitor, who marketed it as a new film, leading in later decades to its being mislabelled as a 1930s production.\n<\/p>\n \n READ MORE: SNP urge Andy Burnham to ‘wake up’ as key policy pledge delayed<\/a>\n<\/p>\nTill the Bells Ring review in the paper in 1926 (Image: Marc David Jacobs)\n<\/p>\n