When sound first came to the screen, the main problem was that recorded sound had to be continuous. Whether recorded on disc, or on film with the picture, there was no way it could be cut and edited. Changing viewpoints were obtained by having several cameras running continuously, covering different aspects of the scene and cutting between them. Technology subsumed creativity. Sound became dominant and answered a call that had long hovered like a spectre at the feast of silent films: the spectre of realism.

The absence of a verbal dimension in silent films demanded that communication be structured from a mixture of carefully tuned performances, sensitive composition, and the distillation of meaning from a single filmed image and its relationship with those that preceded and followed it. The inability to use speech meant that filmic communication was essentially unreal, and this unreality gave it a unique status: its absent voice placed it in the realm of abstraction; its flow of images told more than they showed. To achieve this level of communication, both filmmaker and spectator were required to reach into film in order to grasp the full extent of its potential; it required a quality of commitment that largely disappeared with the arrival of the talking picture.