Laura Marcus, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, New College Oxford will speak on ‘Silence, Sound and the City in 1920s Cinema’.

This talk will discuss the debates around the transition to sound in the late 1920s, and will use film examples (including F. W. Murnau's Sunrise [1927], Paul Fejos's Lonesome [1928] and René Clair's Under the Roofs of Paris) to explore the idea that these late silent/early sound films staged the ambivalence towards the coming of sound. Sound can appear as communicative immediacy and connectivity but also as irritant and contagion. In city films of the period, in particular, sound can also be noise.