Today is the anniversary of the premiere of the first ever “talkie” — The Jazz Singer<\/i>. About three decades into the existence of cinema, that event ushered in a fundamental shift in the art of motion pictures.<\/p>\n
When we think of movies now, we don’t generally think about silent movies, because people haven’t been making them for nearly a century. Yet until that day, a movie was<\/i> a silent movie. There was no other kind of movie.<\/p>\n
Before that premiere, telling stories with moving images but without sound was a well developed and mature art form, a visual language for conveying and receiving entertainment that audiences at the time knew well. It is a language that is now largely forgotten.<\/p>\n
Silent movies now look strangely alien and unnatural. But that’s not the way they looked to audiences a century ago. Back then they were just movies.<\/p>\n
I wonder what other languages of art are destined to become discarded and eventually forgotten by millions of people, because technology will one day usher in something different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is the anniversary of the premiere of the first ever “talkie” — The Jazz Singer. About three decades into the existence of cinema, that event ushered in a fundamental shift in the art of motion pictures. When we think of movies now, we don’t generally think about silent movies, because people haven’t been making … Continue reading “Something old \/ something new”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23735"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23735"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23736,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23735\/revisions\/23736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}