'Talkies were not an evolution, but a mutation, a different art form entirely as a result, an art form was eliminated…' 1 Allusion and metaphor were the bedrocks of the silent medium, but dialogue literalized every moment, converted it from subjective to objective… Sound standardized movies, made them less malleable, less open to individual interpretation. 'The primarily visual was supplanted by the primarily verbal. 'It changed how movies were made, of course, but more importantly, it changed what movies were… While the accepted narrative is that sound was a natural evolution of film from its silent beginnings, historian Scott Eyman argues in The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 that sound 'grew up alongside silents…expanding voraciously and choking off the more fragile strain.' According to Eyman, sound so fundamentally altered the nature of cinema that its domination constituted 'the destruction of one great art and the creation of another.” Eyman writes: The market had spoken, and silent movies were on their way out.Īnd-make no mistake-the ascendancy of sound changed everything. By February of 1929 all of the major Hollywood studios were producing 'talkies,' and millions of dollars were being spent investing in better sound technology, and installing sound equipment in theaters around the world. had a smash hit with The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue. I can think of no two more fitting swan songs for an art form that was-when these films premiered-already on its last breaths. Though I can't honestly claim there was much method in my madness, I think it's appropriate that Man with a Movie Cameraand this week's entry, Un Chien Andalou, are the last two silent films on my arbitrarily assembled syllabus.

In this seventh entry in the series, I experience Un Chien Andalou (1929), a short cinematic fever dream from the minds of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. In “ Independent Study in World Cinema,” a self-educated film nerd attempts to fill in some fairly serious gaps in his self-education.

Luis buñuel my last sigh