Questions 21-25The shift from silent to sound film at the end of the 1920’s marks, so far, the most important
transformation in motion picture history. Despite all the highly visible technological developments in
theatrical and home delivery of the moving image that have occurred over the decades since then, no
single innovation has 21 being regarded as a similar kind of watershed. In nearly every language, 22 the words are phrased, the most basic division in cinema history lies between films that are
mute and films that speak.
Yet this most fundamental standard of historical periodization conceals a host of 23 . Nearly
every movie theater, however modest, had a piano or organ to provide musical accompaniment to
silent pictures. In many instances, spectators in the era before recorded sound experienced elaborate
aural presentations alongside movies’ visual images, from the Japanese benshi (narrators) crafting
multivoiced dialogue narratives to original musical compositions performed by symphony-size
orchestras in Europe and the United States.
Beyond that, the triumph of recorded sounds 24 the rich diversity of technological and
aesthetic experiments with the visual image that were going forward simultaneously in the 1920’s.
New color process, larger or differently shaped screen sizes, multiple-screen projections, even
television, were among the developments invented or tried out during the period, sometimes with
limited success. The high costs of converting to sound and the early limitations of sound technology
were among the factors that suppressed innovations or retarded advancement in these other areas. The
introduction of new screen formats was put off for a quarter century, and color, though utilized over
the next two decades for special productions, also did not 25 until the 1950’s.
【題組】23.
(A) fantasies
(B) modules
(C) depositions
(D) paradoxes
(E) pretexts