The cinema’s provenance lies in the silent movie. But stereotypes, like habits, die hard. Since 1927, when the first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, was released, movie-goers have associated films with dialogue, sound and music. A successful film, in terms of the accepted stereotype, is one in which all these elements come together with images to tell a story that appeals to the emotions of human beings. A silent film is considered a throwback in time: it has historical value but is unacceptable within the canons of modern cinema. Hence, film-goers in Britain have refused to accept the Oscar-winning film, The Artist. People have walked out of cinemas and some have been so outraged that they have asked for their money back. The Artist has raised the question: what is cinema? The film is not only silent, it is also in black and white. This obviously does not match what large numbers of people expect from a movie that has been commercially released. They expect to be entertained and believe that without sound and without colour they have been short changed. This reaction only indicates that tastes have dramatically changed in less than a hundred years.

Pioneers of the cinema — D.W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Sergei Eisenstein — all worked in the silent era of films. They realized that it was possible to endow images with meanings, and that such meaningful images, when put together in a particular manner, could convey emotions and tell a story. And that story could be made to unfold over a given period of time in the manner a piece of music does. Thus was born the grammar of film-making. Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charles Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, all made films in the silent era that are even today regarded as timeless masterpieces. The arrival of sound added extra dimensions to film-making. Words, sound and music, and not just mute images, could take forward the story. Film audiences came to take these aspects for granted. As the response to The Artist suggests, a silent film from the early days of the cinema is acceptable because it is historical, but a silent film in the high noon of the talkies is reckoned to be an anachronism.

Behind this apparent rejection of The Artist lie profound questions about the future of the cinema. Is it to remain confined within what ‘talkies’ have made it into? If Cecil B. DeMille or David Lean or even an Ingmar Bergman (in Fanny and Alexander) could stretch the duration of a film well beyond the conventional two hours, why can’t there be a film that is shorter, maybe lasting only 10 minutes? (Satyajit Ray’s Pikoo runs for only 26 minutes but could never be shown on its own.) Similarly, why not a silent film made in the 21st century? Film-making, for its own survival, is poised to change through experimentation. If film audiences do not allow this, the cinema could die.