ACH/PC: silent movies remain a thriving medium

With a few exceptions, such as Mel Brooks' Silent Movie, or the occasional sequence or homage, silent movies pretty much went extinct after the development of sound recording technology. How plausible is it to have silent movies continue to survive as an art-form and medium with a degree of mainstream appeal, possibly for comedies (a lot of early American cartoons were basically a continuation of silent slapstick comedy).
 
I think if they artfully set it to music, which they did do, but then live orchestras stayed too expensive compared to alternatives.

So, maybe movies with only a music soundtrack? For it is a different experience where you have to watch carefully, and not just listen to dialogue.

Maybe if there were three famous directors/studios competing with each other and bringing out the best in each.
 
I'm not sure silent films would last long. When The Jazz Singer debuted, it was a major sensation, and that was 1927. By 1929, it had gained enough traction so that vaudeville-style comedy in the movies (the Marx Brothers' movie The Cocoanuts) was getting the full sound treatment. IIRC, W. C. Fields' work also made a very quick move to talkies.
 
The main way I can see silent films surviving longer than OTL is to create a world where the Anglophone nations (namely the United States) don't dominate film production. Silent film is all subtitles, and so translating it into multiple languages is much easier than dubbing a talkie, the technology for which was fairly primitive at the time. During the early talkie era in the '30s, it was common practice for Hollywood to make separate Spanish-language versions of films for distribution in Spain and Latin America, as that was seen as more economical than dubbing. A more international, multilingual film industry will keep the economics of international distribution on the side of silent film for some time.

Even then, however, this only buys silent film a decade, tops. Once dubbing gets cheap enough to do regularly in the late '30s, the talkies will take over and there will be no turning back.
 
While I do think a talkie is better at one long story with a only one or several main characters, a silent film can be better and richer and deeper for a series of vignettes. Say about World War I:

a soldier who makes it back from the war,

a soldier who doesn't,

someone from a Quaker family,

a girl worried about her older brother,

'

'

'

So, an hour and 40 minute silent film might have a series of ten or eleven different stories. When one ends, there's a couple of second pause when you can let your concentration slump, and then large words on the screen "Heinz Kohl is a thirty-five year-old doctor who worked in a field hospital in France" introduce the next. And after that, there is another vignette which humanizes an older French general.

And you walk out of that theater, Wow, so many ideas and experiences and thoughts. And you have the experience, Oh, yeah, yeah, there was that one, which you had almost forgotten.
 
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