Donna Kornhaber is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches film. Her current book project is a study of Charlie Chaplin as a director. 
Hollywood’s Recurring Dream: Myth and Fantasy in The Artist
“In the silent era, the film artifact always stands at greater or lesser remove from our sensory experience of the world, never in concordance. It is for this reason that Jean Epstein saw the coming of sound not as the fulfillment of the cinema but as its end point, drowning the fantastic world of the silent screen in what he called a ‘superabundant banality.'”
