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"I have just been, for the first time, to see and hear a picture talk," Aldous Huxley writes in a 1929 essay called "Silence Is Golden" (Essays 2: 19). "A little late in the day," he imagines his ".up-to-date" reader remarking "with a patronizing and contemptuous smile." After all, the film that introduces Huxley to the world of sound cinema, The Jazz Singer, had been released two years earlier. The "gigantically enlarged" (21) images on the screen spouting noise send Huxley into paroxysms of scorn and fury; he is especially horrified by the scene in which Al Jolson sings "Mammy" in blackface:
My flesh crept as the loud-speaker poured out those sodden words, that greasy, sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed. (23)
While only half feigning his reactionary pose, Huxley condemns the talkies as "the latest and most frightful creation-saving device for the production of standardized amusement" (20).
Huxley's violent response to The Jazz Singer is a window onto a key moment in the history of cinema, when articles such as "Silence Is Golden," "Why Talkies' Are Unsound" (Betts), "Ordeal by Talkie'" (Betts), and "The Movies Commit Suicide" (Seldes) contended with equally impassioned defenses of sound film.1 The crisis occasioned by the coming of sound now appears as an overblown objection to a transition that in hindsight seems inevitable. But just as the cinema itself was often perceived as revolutionary-George Bernard Shaw remarked in 1914 that "The cinema is going to form the mind of England... .The cinema is a much more momentous invention than the printing press" (9)2-the coming of sound was greeted by many as a watershed moment. Beyond the changes in the industry (the retirement of actors who had unpleasant voices, for example), the talkies raised more philosophical questions about the social, moral, and even physical effects of moving and talking images.
Cinema history would not be accurately represented by a chronicle of technical development from, say, Muybridge to the present. Such a history would miss a crucial component of the story of cinema: spectatorship. Accounts from the period such as Huxley's and Iris Barry's Let's Go to the Pictures emphasize not...