ABSTRACT
As cultural revolutions go, the transition between silent and sound cinema was swift, expensive and brutal. It cared little for the legacy of silent film as an art form, obliterating much of its own history and the work of the great silent directors and stars in the process. The art and practice of silent cinema and the industry that produced it were rapidly supplanted in the rush to develop the “talkies”. 1n 1928 and 1929, many intellectuals and critics echoed the sentiments of Hitchcock and Truffaut above, for by the time synchronised sound arrived, silent film had reached its apogee as an international art form with films like Murnau’s minimally intertitled Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), critically acclaimed around the world. Whilst much has been written about the transition in Hollywood, British cinema during this period has been largely overlooked, a lack this chapter will start to redress.
