THE SILENT ERA
The first 35 years of motion picture history are called the silent era, even though films were accompanied by the music of pianists or organists or small orchestras of house musicians, because there was no practical means for recording and playing back recorded dialogue or music in synchronization with the reel of film. Films of this era progressed from very rudimentary to much more elaborate in the years 1894 to 1928 that bookend the era of silent films. The films of this era can quite logically be divided into three phases: the primitive era (1894-1907), the transitional era (1908-1917), and the mature era (1918-1928).
The primitive era began when the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope, inventions created in Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratory in 1892 to film and to view short sequences resepctiveiy, were used to create and present 30-second vignettes of novelty acts in U.S. and European cities in 1894. (1) An alternative to Edison’s equipment, the Cinématographe, was developed by Auguste and Louis Lumière; the Cinématographe was a camera that was lighter than Edison’s and could be easily converted into a projector, and it was this machine that turned the motion picture into a worldwide phenomenon. (2) The Lumières held the first public screening of their motion pictures in Paris in 1895. (3) For the next few years, the films created were rather short and primitive: each film consisted of a single shot from a lone stationary viewpoint. (4)
The period from 1908 to 1917 was known as the transitional era. In this era, motion pictures changed from a primitive form of recreation to a well-respected part of popular culture. Actors developed in their ability to convey ideas without words, and creative intertitles provided commentary and narrative between sections of frames. Filming techniques were developed, with the introduction of such stylistic devices as alternating close-ups and long shots. Films became much longer, and the repertoire of film topics expanded considerably from the earlier scenes of real life to include film adaptations of popular and classic literature and plays. During this period, newspapers also began carrying reviews of films so that audiences would know which films were worth seeing. By 1917, a major shift in the film industry had occurred. France had been the world’s leading exporter of films prior to World War I, but the war had decimated the film industry in France. By 1917, the United States had assumed leadership in the motion- picture industry, and the sleepy town of Hollywood, California, which had been used as a winter shooting site for filmmakers from the East Coast as early as 1907, had become the seat of the filmmaking industry. By 1920, Hollywood boasted a clique of movie stars with worldwide fame, and, as the decade progressed, fan magazines and gossip columns devoted to publicizing both the public and private lives of the stars flourished. The 1920s were also a time of great expansion of the Hollywood studios, as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) was created from a merger to form the largest studio in Hollywood, as Universal, Paramount, and Fox became firmly established as studios, and as the small company Warner Brothers, which was to grow immensely in later decades, introduced a series of films featuring the canine star Rin Tin Tin.
However, by the end of the 1920s, the era of silent films ended rather abruptly. Edison and other inventors had introduced technology for creating motion pictures with sound at various times throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, but those early devices could not ensure good enough sound quality and amplification to induce studios to try any of them out. Finally, Warner Brothers took a chance with the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer, which starred popular recording artist Al Jolson and featured both singing and talking. When The Jazz Singer became a tremendous hit, Warner Brothers and Fox immediately converted to producing motion pictures with sound; the other large studios, believing that talking pictures might be only a passing fad, continued making silent pictures for one more year. When it became clear that talking pictures were the future of film rather than a passing fad, the remaining studios converted to the exclusive production of talking films a year later; by 1929, all of the films produced in Hollywood studios were talking pictures, and the era of silent films was over.