The first time it came to my notice was in Bergen New Jersey. I was watching the summer blockbuster ‘Independence Day’ accompanied by an English colleague of mine, a man of relatively gentle disposition. As the American President on screen exhorted his fellow countrymen with a speech of some bluster, a speech of which the ex-real-life President Ronald Reagan would have been proud, the crowd around us took a moment to put down their jumbo crates of popcorn and bucket-sized cokes and holler their approval.

This in itself wasn’t unduly alarming, although I did notice a sideways look of terror on the face of my compatriot, as it came at the apex of a continuous and unrelenting babble which had begun pretty much from the moment the lights in the theatre had begun to dim. In fact as the film progressed I noticed that the audience felt it appropriate to talk at exactly the same time as the characters onscreen. It was as if some social nicety was being observed. “Ladies and gentlemen you may now chat freely amongst yourselves...”

Of course this was in an era before the ubiquitous mobile phone, so all conversations involved the people in the room rather than the limitless opportunities for communication afforded by a buzzing, chirping handset. But what stuck me, if in truth such conversations taking place weren’t taking their lead from the behaviour onscreen, was the notion that they were occurring because, in the eyes of the audience at least, the scripted speeches only served to signify that nothing of dramatic interest was taking place. This wasn’t some sub-conscious notion of manners, the filmgoers feeling it rude to eavesdrop. No, they simply felt that the concept of characters talking was of no import, no relevance to their enjoyment of the film whatsoever. Onscreen yakking was seen as marking time, filler before the next moment of action grabbed their emotions and gave them a good shake.

Since that fateful day in the American suburbs I have witnessed this type of behaviour more and more often, so much so that I have learnt to avoid Multiplexes at certain times and days of the week. But more profound than a simple re-arrangement of my social habits is the influence this kind of public reaction is having on Film itself.

In the days of its infancy, Film was a silent medium. It was then that the building blocks of its language were formed. These obviously evolved with the influence of sound but the fundamental expressions of technique and story-telling had been laid down. With the influx of sound, dialogue became a necessity. The audiences wanted to see their movie stars talk. The fact that several careers hit the buffers - the alto squeak of a barrel-chested leading man revealing his true predilections, the raven haired beauty’s Russian dialect proving as impenetrable as her personality - were a small price to pay. Besides, there were hundreds if not thousands of plays which could be cheaply put up on screen. Playwrights, often from New York, were paid to put words into the mouths of the more adept actors. Writers who had come from a verbal and character-driven medium (after all, what is most theatre except for people conversing in a room?) took the coin and moved West. The best of them sometimes directed - Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz - and in doing so produced some of Hollywood’s classics.

But times have changed. Television, once seen as Film's poor cousin, has in recent years raised its game. Writers who want time and space not only to develop more complex story-lines but deeper, more involved characters can now, thanks to the lead shown by HBO, find a more welcoming and appropriate stage for their work. They also for once receive due kudos (something they never got before) their work becoming if anything more entrenched in the zeitgeist than a film struggling to compete in a saturated market-place.

Meanwhile movies themselves seem to be travelling inexorably in an opposite direction. The only real money-makers are the ‘tent-pole’, franchise, star-driven pics aimed at the 15-25 year old demographic (the chatterers), a post-MTV generation who have developed the attention span of gnats. Childhood years spent being dumped in front of TV screens forced to imbibe hundreds of thousands of 30-second narratives have given them the ability to comprehend, retain and process a story-line far more effectively and quickly than their forebears. Talk has thus become unnecessary. Everything can be ‘said’ without words and a generation now growing up without reading but 'txt-speak' has no love for language. Words become the sole preserve of ‘Juno’-type freaks and geeks.

At the same time, Television, because of the size of the screen, always lending itself more graciously to the concept of talking heads, has undermined Film’s role in regards a more verbal form of storytelling. Unless it’s one of the great icons of the day - a Brad Pitt or Keira Knightley - no one wants to spend money to look at an anonymous nobody chuntering away.

So what’s the long-term prognosis? I like others, see Film returning to its roots. In an article in last weekend’s Sunday Times, the author Jonathan Coe quotes Hitchcock as saying, “The art of cinema does not consist of taking photographs of people talking.” Coe goes on to set down the thoughts of Irish critic Fintan O’Toole: “What we’re now seeing is the beginning of a return by cinema to its own distinctive essence - moving pictures.” O’Toole cites the 20-minute wordless sequence at the beginning of Pixar’s Wall-E, the silent first act of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and the long, dialogue-free sequences in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.

CGI and other spectacular means of presentation (3D & Imax) in which the studios seem to be investing heavily, imply that the movie-going experience will, like its early days, return to something of a more visceral, whizz-bang experience.

So if you want to see stories about human relationships you’ll find yourself forced to survive on small-screen fodder and the film screenwriter, with a passion for intricate, witty, sometimes moving dialogue, will be nor more than a relic of history, peddling software deemed well past its sell-by date.