ABSTRACT
In the 1920s Hepworth and his contemporaries had established the film of fiction as the universal pattern of entertainment, as in a more sweeping and imaginative way Griffith, Rex Ingram and de Mille had done and were doing in America. Sound was a severe shock to the whole industry and struck at its very foundations, and this when the laws of the silent film, according to its most devoted practitioners, were still being formulated. All techniques were brought to nothing and the art had to begin again. Immense technical and physical problems confronted film directors, many of them solved by ingenuity or guesswork or the wit of acoustic experts. America poured a stream of pictures into Europe of boundless vitality and richness. Griffith towered above everyone. And these American films joined an assured technique to an imcomparable flair for entertainment. The background of production is still tenuous and uncertain and provides a precarious foothold for the creators of film fiction.
