The arrival of sound opened a proverbial can of worms in the mute halls of cinema. For ten furious years (1930-1940), the ‘talkie’ would make and break itself again and again. The names are in the history books: Lang, Clair, Lubitsch, Dreyer, Mamoulian, Berkely, Vigo, Mizoguchi, von Sternberg, Hawks, Ford. Etc! But over these same years, cinema would begin to ossify – “where the experiments of 1930 became the shortcuts of 1939”. That’s Eugene Kotlyarenko, speaking in this episode – because he joined us for this episode; clearing a path through the whisper-singsong-chatter-belly laugh-screeching of the decade that made cinema cinema.