With our modern obsession with technology, and related tendency to equate technological advancement with improved quality, the introduction of synchronized sound to the motion picture in the late 1920s seems, with hindsight, to have been not only inevitable but downright essential – a sine qua non of the development of a meaningful cinematic art. In spite of this widely held view, film soundtracks were until the last quarter of the twentieth century almost entirely ignored by film scholars and theorists, who continued to devote exclusive attention to the visual image. Rick Altman has argued that this situation arose as a result of two deeply ingrained fallacies: one historical, in which the introduction of sound to the cinema may be regarded as an afterthought, and the other ontological, in which it is believed that sound must by its very nature always be regarded as subservient to the primacy of the image as the chief vehicle of meaning and expression (Weis and Belton 1985, 50). Theorist Rudolf Arnheim went so far as to consider the introduction of sound as directly violating the motion picture's ontological status (Flinn 1992, 41). At the opposite extreme was Walter Ruttmann's experimental documentary Week-End, which in 1930 took the bold step of dispensing with an image track altogether and simply running through the projector a suggestive soundtrack made up from dialogue, noise and music (Winter 1941, 154).

It is a curious paradox that the most famous of early film pioneers, Thomas Edison, had established recorded sound first and then sought to add moving images to it – a reversal of most film-makers' subsequent priorities.