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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DIALOGUE
When the talkie made its appearance, there was a panic among the producers, directors, actors and script writers. This was another thing that had never happened before in the history of any other art; that the technical development of the medium of expression should have so embarrassed the artists who practised the art.
The anxiety and uncertainty had many reasons. The talking film seemed to threaten the international validity of the silent film and by rendering export much more difficult, endanger the financial and business interests which had invested in it. Many directors and actors lacked the required ability to deal with speech. It is characteristic that no one objected to the appearance of sound in the film. Charlie Chaplin was prepared on the spot to use the craziest sound effects. In his first sound film he accidentally swallows a whistle which begins to whistle at the most inopportune moments. It was only speech against which the almost universal objections were raised. Artists and theoreticians mobilized the traditional laws of art, philosophy and aesthetics against the talking film, just as they had done against the silent film — and with the same lack of success.
How silly the resistance to the talking film was can be gauged if we imagine what would have happened if the Lumieres had constructed a sound camera at the same time as the silent camera — a supposition which is not impossible in principle. Had they done so, no one would have conceived the crazy idea of presenting dramatic scenes in dumb-show. Everyone would have condemned such an idea as inartistic, unnatural and ridiculous. To show people talking without sound, mouthing the words without saying them ! And then they disappear and we read what they were supposed to say, in the
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