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Inanarticle that appeared in the New Yor\ Times attending the release of City Lights in 1931, Charlie Chaplin sketches the transition from silent to talking picture and outlines the terms of his own "Rejection of the Talkies." Like film theoreticians and other practitioners of the time, Chaplin offers a lapsal narrative in which we move from an idyllic situation that requires no (spoken) language to one that replaces the imaginative work of the Audience with a mere receptivity to "the particular tongue of particular races."1 On this view, the introduction of sound cinema abolished the freewheeling internationalism of the silent films with their easily substituted in ter ti ties, their montage principle, and a gestural vocabulary ass urne d to be nearly universal. Suddenly, film was capable of constructing viewing communities, interpellating certain spectators, and marking others as outsiders. These communities come into existence through a shared understanding - they know what the characters are saying. But perhaps more importantly they also constitute themselves through incomprehension - the "intended" or "proper" Audience is one that does not know or understand certain things, codes, and in particular languages. Chaplin himself relied on this latter effect in one of his most famous films: The Great Dictator undertakes its critique of Fascism by offering us a language that we the viewing community cannot understand and spends its running time working out the implications of this nonunderstanding.
As Michel Chion has pointed out, debates precipitated by the advent of the talkie circled around the question of speech and language, shirking the category of the voice entirely2 - even though speech and language had been characteristic of films long before the introduction of the sound cinema.3 Rather than language, what was genuinely new in sound cinema was the particular embodiment of human vocal ity: tone, cadence, and accent brought a bodiliness to filmic communications that the abstract rhythm of intertitles had previously kept at bay. Sound film revealed whether an ostensibly Anglophone everyman or everywoman was actually saddled with a thick European accent. It introduced the question of how to mark difference and particularity in human speech while rendering it comprehensible: How does dialogue make clear that characters are speaking German while translating their conversation? And, conversely, what about speech...