<P> The end of silent film in the West and in Japan was imposed by the industry and the market, not by any inner need or natural evolution...Silent cinema was a highly pleasurable and fully mature form . It didn't lack anything, least in Japan, where there was always the human voice doing the dialogues and the commentary . Sound films were not better, just more economical . As a cinema owner you didn't have to pay the wages of musicians and benshi any more . And a good benshi was a star demanding star payment . </P> <P> By the same token, the viability of the benshi system facilitated a gradual transition to sound--allowing the studios to spread out the capital costs of conversion and their directors and technical crews time to become familiar with the new technology . </P> <P> The Mandarin - language Gēnǚ hóng mǔdān (歌 女 紅 牡 丹, Singsong Girl Red Peony), starring Butterfly Wu, premiered as China's first feature talkie in 1930 . By February of that year, production was apparently completed on a sound version of The Devil's Playground, arguably qualifying it as the first Australian talking motion picture; however, the May press screening of Commonwealth Film Contest prizewinner Fellers is the first verifiable public exhibition of an Australian talkie . In September 1930, a song performed by Indian star Sulochana, excerpted from the silent feature Madhuri (1928), was released as a synchronized - sound short, the country's first . The following year, Ardeshir Irani directed the first Indian talking feature, the Hindi - Urdu Alam Ara, and produced Kalidas, primarily in Tamil with some Telugu . Nineteen - thirty - one also saw the first Bengali - language film, Jamai Sasthi, and the first movie fully spoken in Telugu, Bhakta Prahlada . In 1932, Ayodhyecha Raja became the first movie in which Marathi was spoken to be released (though Sant Tukaram was the first to go through the official censorship process); the first Gujarati - language film, Narsimha Mehta, and all - Tamil talkie, Kalava, debuted as well . The next year, Ardeshir Irani produced the first Persian - language talkie, Dukhtar - e-loor . Also in 1933, the first Cantonese - language films were produced in Hong Kong--Sha zai dongfang (The Idiot's Wedding Night) and Liang xing (Conscience); within two years, the local film industry had fully converted to sound . Korea, where pyonsa (or byun - sa) held a role and status similar to that of the Japanese benshi, in 1935 became the last country with a significant film industry to produce its first talking picture: Chunhyangjeon (春香 傳 / 춘향전) is based on the seventeenth - century pansori folktale "Chunhyangga", of which as many as fifteen film versions have been made through 2009 . </P> <P> In the short term, the introduction of live sound recording caused major difficulties in production . Cameras were noisy, so a soundproofed cabinet was used in many of the earliest talkies to isolate the loud equipment from the actors, at the expense of a drastic reduction in the ability to move the camera . For a time, multiple - camera shooting was used to compensate for the loss of mobility and innovative studio technicians could often find ways to liberate the camera for particular shots . The necessity of staying within range of still microphones meant that actors also often had to limit their movements unnaturally . Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), from First National Pictures (which Warner Bros. had taken control of thanks to its profitable adventure into sound), gives a behind - the - scenes look at some of the techniques involved in shooting early talkies . Several of the fundamental problems caused by the transition to sound were soon solved with new camera casings, known as "blimps", designed to suppress noise and boom microphones that could be held just out of frame and moved with the actors . In 1931, a major improvement in playback fidelity was introduced: three - way speaker systems in which sound was separated into low, medium, and high frequencies and sent respectively to a large bass "woofer", a midrange driver, and a treble "tweeter ." </P>

The first indian 'talkie' film - a film with dialogues - released in 1931 was _