The art of motion pictures grew into full maturity in the "silent era" (1894 in film – 1929 in film). The height of the silent era (from the early 1910s in film to the late 1920s) was a particularly fruitful period, full of artistic innovation.
The gradual transition from silent films to talkies took place between 1926 and 1930 and included many small steps — both technological developments and adjustments to audience expectations — before it was complete.
The movie business has very humble beginnings. In the 1800's, many inventors, such as Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers worked on machines that projected images. This led to the silent movie era which ranged from 1894 to 1929.
Why were movies once silent, no talking? For about the first three decades after the invention of motion pictures, no one could come up with a reliable and easily scalable way to synchronize picture and sound. Until 1927, even though both technologies existed, sound and picture could not be effectively synchronized.
In the 1920s, Hollywood studios were riding high. There was skepticism when a new technology came along that would let movie audiences hear actors talking. But Warner Brothers took a gamble and wired theaters for sound. Ben Shapiro has this story of the rise, and fall, of the Vitaphone short films.
Early combinations of sound and projection technology existed in the 1930s, and by the 1940s, the issue of capturing sound synchronised footage onto film had been widely solved. By the late 1940s, this technology was widespread to the point that production could exist around the country.
The Horse in Motion, animated from a plate by Eadweard Muybridge, made with an array of cameras set up along a racetrack 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 primary steps in the commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid-to-late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as "talking pictures", or "talkies", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects.
Made from the 1890s through the late 1920s, silent films are movies without synchronized sound and dialogue. Instead, music was often played live in theaters to accompany and punctuate the action that took place on the screen, and dialogue was conveyed through intertitles, or shots of printed text.
In Old California is a 1910 American silent Western film. It was the first film shot in Hollywood, California. It was directed by D. W. Griffith of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (then based in New York City).
In 1927, The Jazz Singer was the first feature length film to include sound. By the early 1930s, the silent film era was over as “talkies” became a theatre sensation.
It is generally said to have begun in 1894, as the first paying customers lined up at a Kinetoscope Parlor showing films made by Thomas Edison near the corner of Broadway and 27th Street in Manhattan, and was certainly over by 1931, when the last of Hollywood's silent features were released by Paramount and United ...
On October 6, 1927, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film to incorporate synchronized sound for sequences of dialogue. Though these sequences were limited and brief, hearing the voices of the film's stars was a revelation for audiences. The following year, Warner Bros.
Similarly, silent films were perceived as worthless after the end of the silent era. Film preservationist Robert A. Harris has said, "Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios. There was no thought of ever saving these films.
The Dickson Experimental Sound Film is a film made by William Dickson in late 1894 or early 1895. It is the first known film with live-recorded sound and appears to be the first motion picture made for the Kinetophone, the proto-sound-film system developed by Dickson and Thomas Edison.
“The Jazz Singer” from 1927 was not the first-ever motion picture with sound, but it was the first feature-length movie with synchronized dialogue and marked the end of the silent film era.
Silent filmmaking continued to grow in popularity, and by the 1920s, it had become the dominant form of filmmaking. At this time, there were many different types of silent films, including comedies, dramas, Westerns, and musicals.
Which legendary film was originally a silent movie in 1925?
The Phantom of the Opera is a 1925 American silent horror film adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, directed by Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney in the title role of the deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House, causing murder and mayhem in an attempt to make the woman he loves ...
Enter the 1926 film Don Juan, directed by Alan Crosland. This motion picture premiered at the Warner Theater in New York. And it was the first to feature a synchronized music score and sound effects.
The first color cinematography was by additive color systems such as the one patented by Edward Raymond Turner in 1899 and tested in 1902. A simplified additive system was successfully commercialized in 1909 as Kinemacolor.
Did you know that A Visit to the Seaside (1908) was the first commercially produced film in natural color? This eight-minute British short film used the Kinemacolor process to capture Brighton Southern England seafront shots.
Silent films were never silent. From their earliest days as an exhibition attraction, motion pictures were accompanied by some form of music–typically a piano, a musical combo in more modest sized houses, and sometimes an entire orchestra in movie palaces.
In response the intertitle is written in all caps: "YOUR FLY IS OPEN". Marcel Marceau reprises his "walking into the wind" routine while trying to lift a phone. He then shouts his, and the film's only spoken word: "Non!".
During the highpoint of the silent era, between 1926 and 1930, the form reached a zenith of poetic expression and subtlety before the coming of sound swept it all away.
