Silent film: History and Key Facts

A silent film is a film without synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible spoken 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 intertitles.

The term "silent film" is something of a misnomer, as films were almost always accompanied by live sounds. During the silent era, which existed from the 1890s to the 1920s in most countries, a pianist, theater organist—or even, in larger cities, an orchestra—would play music to accompany the films. Pianists, organists, and orchestras 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, which was the 1890s to the 1920s, but it also applies to sound-era films of the 1920s and 1930s, such as City Lights and Modern Times, which are accompanied by a synchronized music-only soundtrack in place of spoken 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 owing to their physical decay, as the nitrate filmstock used in that era was extremely unstable and flammable. Many films were destroyed, because they had negligible remaining financial value in that era. It has often been claimed that around 75 percent of silent films produced in the US have been lost, though these estimates' accuracy cannot be determined due to a lack of numerical data.

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