Book excerpt: "There is the old debate about the difference between silent film and sound film. The former goes through a rapid development, freeing itself from the framework of the theater, and reaches a brief but rich maturity before yielding its audience to the latter, which, with its return to theater via spoken dialogue, initially entails a regression in artistry. The unique formal language of silent film at its best - a language of gestures and of faces in constant permutation, hieratic and mask-like at times, given to passages of extreme acceleration and of near paralysis, with spatial layering as a rule and the sometimes scarcely perceptible proliferation of decor"--