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...