Which Speech?

From the Hollywood fictions of the end of the silent era to those of the beginning of the sound era, a sharp decline can be detected: less complex, less elaborate, the latter are largely underpinned by the bourgeois theatrical schemas ascendant on Broadway. The reference (whether explicit or not) to musical and/or novelistic forms ¹ gave way to popular theater, from which were imported not only a great part of the fictional subject matter, but an entire range of verbally determined narrative codes, which, while they did not go without exerting some pressure on filmic narration, had beforehand only done so externally and, in a certain fashion, analogously, whereas from that point on their naturalization posed no problem whatsoever, and the recourse to theatrical models even appeared as the most fitting solution to the “new” demands of the spoken word, and the most immediately profitable solution, both formally and economically. Two main reasons presided over this rapprochement between Hollywood and Broadway – or rather, this invasion of the former by the latter.