The article I read titled, “Movies Talk” was an interesting interpretation of how the film industry was changed when sound was included in movies. The author of the article, Scott Eyman, provided a great analysis of how sound changed movies. He first talked of how sound, “Standardized movies, made them less malleable, less open to individual interpretation. Allusion and metaphor were the bedrocks of the silent medium, but dialogue literalized every moment, converted it from subjective to objective.” After I read this passage, I took away two interpretations. One is that silent films did serve a valuable artistic quality in regards to letting its viewers interpret the film in their own way. This is an important characteristic of all artistic expressions because just as if you were looking at a painting and interpreting it from your own perspective, viewers of silents movies were interpreting the movies in a similar fashion. A second interpretation that I drew from this passage is that sound truly brought a new aspect of interpretation to the viewers of films. The scenes that viewers were seeing with sound for the first time gave them a chance to both hear a literal scene with the characters speaking and then they have the opportunity to individually interpret those scenes. Another interesting quote that I found in the article read: “Talkies were not an evolution; as a result, careers were extinguished. Major directors were ruined, great stars plummeted.” The elimination of silent films did cause people to loose jobs because the creation of movies with sound. Silent films have been eliminated and thus a form of artistic expression has been eliminated, which is interesting to think about. In result of sound films being established it eventually led to silent films being eliminated, leaving many in that industry out of a job. The creation of movies with sound is an interesting medium progression to think about because it had such an effect on how people watch and think about movies.
Innovations in Media 