Silent films
For the first twenty years of motion picture history most silent films were short--only a few minutes in length. At first a novelty, and then increasingly an art form and literary form, silent films reached greater complexity and length in the early 1910's.
Few silent films were made in the 1930s, with the exception of Charlie Chaplin, whose character of the Tramp perfected expressive physical moves in many short films in the 1910's and 1920s. The silent era ended after years of experimentation in 1929 when a means of recording sound that would be synchronous with the recorded image was discovered. But Chaplin refused to go along with sound; instead, he maintained the melodramatic Tramp as his mainstay in City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). The trademarks of Chaplin's Tramp were his ill-fitting suit, floppy over-sized shoes and a bowler hat, and his ever-present cane.
The list of the greatest silent films:
SOUND in monochrome films
Almost all 'silent' films had some sort of sound accompaniment. Early film shows had lecturers who gave a commentary on the images going past on the screen, explaining their content and meaning to the audience.
Along with speech came music. This was at first improvised on the piano, then adapted from the current popular repertoire, and then came to be specially commissioned. On big occasions this music would be performed by orchestras, choirs, and opera singers, while a small band or just a pianist would play in less luxurious establishments.
Music was sometimes accompanied by noise effects. These were usually obtained by performers equipped with a wide array of objects reproducing natural and artificial sounds. But the same effects could be produced by machines, of which a particularly famous and elaborate example was the one in use at the Gaumont Hippodrome cinema in Paris.
The alternative to synchronizing films was to print the sound directly on the film. The first experiments in this direction took place at the beginning of the century, and in 1906 Eugene-Auguste Lauste patented a machine capable of recording images and sound on the same base. It was only after the First World War that the decisive steps were taken towards the achievement of synchronized sound film.
In 1926 the Hollywood studio Warner Bros, presented Don Juan, with John Barrymore, using the Vitaphone system of sound synchronization. This was a sound-on-disc system, linking the projector to large discs, 16 in. in diameter, which ran at a speed of 33$ r.p.m., with the needle starting at the centre and going outwards. The Vitaphone system was used again the following year for the first “talking” picture, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, and continued in being for a few more years. Meanwhile a rival studio, Fox, had bought up the rights on the Tri-Ergon and Photophone patents, using them to add sound to films that had already been shot. Fox's Movietone sound-on-film system proved far more practical than Vitaphone, and became the basis for the generalized introduction of synchronized sound in the early 1930s.
