Silent Movies
183 videos • 2,677 views • by Donald P. Borchers A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when necessary, be conveyed by the use of title cards. The term "silent film" is something of a misnomer, as these films were almost always accompanied by live sounds. During the silent era that existed from the mid-1890s to the late 1920s, a pianist, theater organist—or even, in large cities, a small orchestra—would often play music to accompany the films. Pianists and organists would play either from sheet music, or improvisation. Sometimes a person would even narrate the inter-title cards for the audience. Though at the time the technology to synchronize sound with the film did not exist, music was seen as an essential part of the viewing experience. "Silent film" is typically used as a historical term to describe an era of cinema prior to the invention of synchronized sound, however it also naturally applies to sound-era films such as City Lights, Silent Movie and The Artist which are accompanied by a music-only soundtrack in place of dialogue. The term silent film is a retronym—a term created to retroactively distinguish something from later developments. Early sound films, starting with The Jazz Singer in 1927, were variously referred to as the "talkies", "sound films", or "talking pictures". The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is older than film (it was suggested almost immediately after Edison introduced the phonograph in 1877), and some early experiments had the projectionist manually adjusting the frame rate to fit the sound, but because of the technical challenges involved, the introduction of synchronized dialogue became practical only in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the advent of the Vitaphone system. Within a decade, the widespread production of silent films for popular entertainment had ceased, and the industry had moved fully into the sound era, in which movies were accompanied by synchronized sound recordings of spoken dialogue, music and sound effects. Most early motion pictures are considered lost because the nitrate film used in that era was extremely unstable and flammable. Additionally, many films were deliberately destroyed because they had negligible continuing financial value in this era. It has often been claimed that around 75 percent of silent films produced in the US have been lost, though these estimates may be inaccurate due to a lack of numerical data. Elements and beginnings (1833–1894): "Roundhay Garden Scene", which has a running time of just over two seconds, was filmed in 1888. It is believed to be the world's earliest surviving motion-picture film. The elderly lady in black is Sarah Whitley, the mother-in-law of filmmaker Louis Le Prince; she died ten days after the scene was filmed. Film projection mostly evolved from magic lantern shows, which utilized a glass lens, and a persistent light source (such as a powerful lantern) to project images from glass slides onto a wall. These slides were originally hand-painted, but, after the advent of photography in the 19th century, still photographs were sometimes used. The invention of a practical photography apparatus preceded cinema by about fifty years. In 1833, Joseph Plateau introduced the principle of stroboscopic animation with his Fantascope (better known as the phenakistiscope). Six years later, Louis Daguerre introduced the first successful photographic system. Initially, the chemicals were not light-sensitive enough to properly capture moving subjects at all. Plateau suggested an early method to animate stereoscopic photographs in 1849, with a stop motion technique. Jules Duboscq produced a simplified device in 1852, but it was not very successful. Early successes in instantaneous photography in the late 1850s inspired new hope to develop animated (stereo) photography systems, but in the next two decades the few attempts once again used stop-motion techniques. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge used a row of a dozen cameras to record a running horse (as suggested by others much earlier) and surprised the world with the results, published as The Horse in Motion cabinet cards with rows of small still pictures. Many others started to work with chronophotography and tried to animate and project the results. Ottomar Anschutz had much success with his Electrotachyscope since 1887, with very clear animated photographic images displayed on a small milk-glass screen or inside coin-slot viewers, until he started projecting the images on a large screen in 1894. His recordings only lasted a few seconds, and inspired the Edison Company to compete with films that could last circa 20 seconds in their Kinetoscope peep-box movie viewers from 1893 onward.