The sounds of silence.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD - Column

THE RECENT CRITICAL acclaim of Michel Hazanavicius' silent film "The Artist" (2011)--including multiple Academy Awards--again has turned attention to how the coming of sound turned many Hollywood careers into a topsyturvydom while also spawning a legion of new stars. However, one silent icon, Charlie Chaplin, simply ignored "talking pictures" for years. Cinema's premier clown wanted to maintain the universality of his Tramp character. Chaplin's little fellow "spoke" a language understood around the world--pantomime. Anything else, such as adapting English dialogue, would have undercut the everyman nature of his character severely. Chaplin's writing and interviews from this period also would apply that same universality to all of silent cinema, celebrating the specialized art form it represented.

Chaplin screen contemporary Mary Pickford articulated this sentiment in the most provocatively succinct manner: "It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around." A closer look at the long gestation period of Chaplin's first sound era silent film, the classic "City Lights" (1931), provides a capsule overview of arguably Hollywood's most turbulent time.

When Chaplin began shooting "City Lights" in late 1928, he already had been working on the story for nearly a year. Though the autumn 1927 release of the part-talkie "Jazz Singer" signaled the birth of the sound era, many movie insiders initially felt that silent and sound pictures would coexist. Moreover, even with the first full-length, all-talking film, "The Lights of New York," opening in July 1928, only 1,300 American movie theaters (of 20,500) had sound installations by the end of the year. Thus, many pictures were released in sound and silent versions throughout 1928 and 1929, given the added expense to theaters of wiring for the "talkies."

While the general public was fascinated by sound (fueled, in part, by the huge new popularity of that 1920s phenomenon, radio), cinema critics and connoisseurs were quick to mourn the artistic loss of silent film's often subtle expressive imagery in the rush to talking heads. Indeed, as late as 1939, pioneering movie historian Lewis Jacobs would write in his watershed The Rise of the American Cinema, "[with] the incorporation of spoken dialogue as a permanent element of motion pictures [the] technique lost its sophistication overnight and became primitive once more.... The interest in artistic...