Introduction: The Uncertainty of Sound | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Introduction: The Uncertainty of Sound

The serious problem of injecting sound into the now silent drama is in
the offing. What producers will do in this regard, of course, is an
unknown factor
MAURICE KANN, Film Daily, 2 APRIL 1928

Silent and Sound cinema. Few demarcations are so sharply drawn, so elegantly opposed, so pristinely binary. In the movies, sound is either off or on. Everyday conversation, reference books, shelving in video stores, college film courses and their textbooks, film rental catalogs, and festivals are organized around this fundamental rift in the history of the medium. Over the years the story of the transition from silence to talking has been retold so many times that it has become a kind of urban legend. Everyone just knows it to be true. The components of the popular retelling of sound always represent it as a dividing line between the Old and New Hollywood. In no small part, this is a matter of rhetorical convention. Sound divides the movies with the assuredness of biblical duality. The emphasis often is on the effects of sound on individual actors-the great lover whose career was wrecked by a squeaky voice. The transition was also inevitable: sound was something that cinema lacked, and sooner or later it would have to be added.

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