Seeing voices: Oral pragmatics and the silent cinema

Abstract

This article suggests that we have perhaps too willingly dichotomized silent and sound cinema. Historically and conceptually cleaving these two forms based on the presence (or absence) of the voice may have aided in obfuscating other narrative pressures that traverse, complicate, and in some sense call into question the insuperability of the silent–sound barrier. One of these pressures entails narrative and performative norms that are fundamentally oral – that is, that are hinged on non‐writing‐based ways of knowing. By drawing connections between silent film and a subset of Hindi sound films (which has elsewhere been shown to be contoured by orality), this article will force a re‐evaluation of the etiological roots of some of silent cinema's traits, such as its propensity for melodrama and spectacularity. Further, it will posit that scholars need to think of early film no more in terms of image than in terms of an epistemically inflected (as opposed to merely aurally inflected) centrality of the mouth.

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