In the UK, we could say, the silent cinema perishes in its moment of triumph. The five landmark films of the silent era came at the instant of transition to sound in 1929. Let us list them: John Grierson's documentary of North Sea herring fleets, Drifters, Anthony Asquith's fugitive narrative, A Cottage on Dartmoor, E. A. Dupont's racial city drama, Piccadilly, Alfred Hitchcock's psychosexual melodrama, The Manxman and finally his famous transition to sound, Blackmail, which exists in both silent and talkie versions and whose title, plot-wise, says it all. If we call these films ‘avantgarde’ because they are pathbreaking, which they were, let us remember they are not part of a clearly unified British avant-garde movement. They are more accurately modernistic, experimenting with the possibilities of silent film narrative in an epoch of artistic modernism. If we add a sixth title, exploring the new sound medium but with the same pathbreaking panache and inventiveness, it would have to be Hitch's throwaway constructivist thriller Number Seventeen, made in 1931 but not released until the following year. And then we have to face the fact that three of the six pictures bear the signature of one director, generally recognised as the most talented that England has ever produced. Yet all six films are still products of their time, of a crucial moment of transition that is impersonal and folds into history.