In considering why it took so long for cinema to acquire sound it is important to compare between different historical periods. The slow-paced evolution of film sound (this was everything but a revolution) is not well known or documented in good measure because few people know just how diverse the environments for film screenings were during the first 30 years of cinema.
Conférences

Although Walter Benjamin is frequently cited in film studies scholarship, there is little consensus on what he really offers the discipline. Working with several PhD students, I have tracked citations of Walter Benjamin in two major film studies journals, Cinema Journal and Screen from 1990 to 2014.


La présence accrue de la photographie à l'intérieur du cinéma depuis lesannées 1960, puis le développement de la vidéo à partir des années 1970, ont longtemps rendu nécessaire de comprendre la nature des opérations de passages entre les différentes modalités d'images, au niveau de la réalité du mouvement comme de l'analogie de la représentation.

John MacKay's talk: Dziga Vertov and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Materialist Film Practice, March 28, 16h, MB 2,270

