ABSTRACT
In his chapter in The Sounds of Early Cinema, Tom Gunning suggested that the widespread advent and acceptance of recorded and synchronized sound cinema in the late 1920s was likely a product of the desire to reunite hearing and vision, which had been divided by technology (photography, phonograph, and film) a few decades earlier. This is an intriguing idea. There was “a desire to heal the breach,” as he puts it (Gunning 2001: 16). This seems like an unfashionable, sentimental, and untestable hypothesis, yet one that attempts to account for the emotional character at the heart of cinema that is more easily avoided by most historians and aestheticians.
