Talk too much?

The first ‘Talkies’ produced in the coming era of movies with sound actually caused film quality to go down, not up…

In the web article “The History of Film; The 1930’s” T Dirks states, “Most of the early talkies were successful at the box-office, but many of them were of poor quality - dialogue-dominated play adaptations, with stilted acting (from inexperienced performers) and an unmoving camera or microphone.”

In the late era silent films camera work had become, well, almost elegant. Cinematographers were tracking their subjects across scenes or locations; they were panning, tilting, using cranes and taking moving shots from platforms or vehicles. That all came to screaming, screeching halt with the advent of talking films. Due to the need to keep the set quiet so as to not clutter up the track, and the fact that they were considerably loud, cameras became stationary objects enclosed in their own small soundproof rooms called an icebox.

Actors had become elegant, animated and very good at acting out the part… because their ability to tell the story visually was paramount. One more change that was not to the good; microphones and cameras were stationary, ergo, so must the actors be. The visual of the story took a back seat to the ‘telling’ of the tale, even though that ‘telling’ was in the form of low quality, scratchy sound that was more than likely not in sync with the story on the screen.
Backwards, in great leaps and bounds… though they did recover quickly…

Dirks, T. (2011). The history of film; the 1930s . Retrieved from http://www.filmsite.org/30sintro.html