TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The moment when talking cinema became widespread is an essential one in the history of world cinema.^[1] Unlike the shift to digital technology, which took place in several stages (sound, cameras, projectors) and changed virtually nothing for viewers, the transformation brought about by sound projection radically altered the reception of films. Each viewer could observe that silent cinema, once his or her neighbourhood movie theatre was equipped, had become talking cinema. All the screenings of the Chronophone and other systems which had operated until 1915 in numerous exhibition venues appear to have been forgotten a decade later.