How sound would help them? Would you mind giving examples of films?

But my answer would be synchronized sound is the one greatest thing to happen to movies. Yes I love silent movies but synchronized sound opened up a whole new world to movie goers.

Can't remember The General's number of title cards, since I've seen it quite some time ago, but generally Buster Keaton can be watched without any title cards and you can still grasp it. However, it's quite weird you mentioned it, since I always thought Keaton films have very little intertitles. The close-ups to show some signs were a very common practice, not only specific to von Stroheim. I can't see anything wrong about it and somebody saying "there's butcher's" instead of a sign saying "butchery" makes no difference (saying this with a sign visible makes talking not only unnecessary, but even useless). The lack of sound has impact on achieving intentions, since the method must be different. However, it doesn't make the gap any larger. Or at least it doesn't have to in hands of a skilled director.

Of course, there's been a handful of modern silents made, but sadly not too many (I wondered about it the other day and I guess if I was a director I'd have made at least one silent). Guy Maddin, however, shows that silent movies not only have their place in contemporary cinema, but also that they work exceptionally well, even if tackling rather surreal and complex plots. He does it playfully, but he's full of respect for old masters. The thing is, modern directors don't want to give up sound, because it's become an irreplaceable part of films. It doesn't mean, however, that you can't make a masterpiece without it.

Some directors do require talking pictures to reach the full measure of their gift for directing - Gance for example.

It's just now that I see this. Maybe it's good that the conversation stopped after this. I usually am very understandable and liberal when it comes to other people's tastes and opinions, but you seem like an extremely ignorant person plus you hate every other film you watch. Not to mention most of them are great films. Not too sure if you're trolling, or something.

Filmmakers realizing that editing and moving the camera makes a film much more interesting. Took them a long time to figure that one out.

They did that in the '20s. :cool:

They did that in the '20s. :cool:

By the late 20's silent cinema reached its artistic peak as a visual medium. It told stories, built character's psychology and did it profoundly with no need of sound. Music played by a pianist or orchestra were enough as these films worked entirely on visual level -- beautiful frames, stories told through images, great camerawork and glorious montage (films of Vertov, Eisenstein, Gance are some of the best edited movies in history). Most of it died when sound cinema emerged. You couldn't move camera too much and actors couldn't move that much neither, since microphones were pretty insensitive and you had to hide them somewhere. Besides, since sound was a novelty, talkies started coming up and story instead of being told visually begun to be just told verbally - mostly in dialogues, which severely damaged film as a visual medium. Some directors still managed to maintain former glory and even sound didn't disturb them, but many new films, even though some of them were masterpieces, were pretty unimaginative and just plain visually. Filmmakers started to rely on speech too much, which resulted in films with hundreds of dialogue lines that could've been replaced with one or two intertitles in silent era (and these intertitles would have much more power, because would be all substance and no talking just for the sake of talking). In American cinema this talking mania lasted through the 40's, up to even the 60's (second best decade of cinema besides the 20's) and it can be seen, not to look far, in films of Alfred Hitchcock. At least Hitchcock had a good eye for visuals, too, but his silent masterpiece Lodger was much better than most, if not all, of his sound movies. Of course, with time filmmakers learnt how to master sound and combine it with visuals to make sound only one of the layers that in the end enriched cinema as a whole. However, there are some aspects of silent cinema, like montage, that very rarely were topped in sound cinema.

... I think we kind of backpedaled and became more uncinematic with the birth of sound, unfortunately...

Greatest Things That Happened To Film?

The discovery of the value of boredom as an artistic subject.