The Silent Film Era: 1894 to 1929
The silent film era lasted from roughly 1894 to 1929 — thirty-five years in which movies went from a peep-show novelty to the dominant form of popular entertainment in the world. The first public screening of projected motion pictures was held in Paris in December 1895; by 1929, Hollywood was selling 60 million tickets a week in the United States alone. The silent era invented nearly every basic technique of motion picture storytelling, trained the first generation of movie stars, and built the studio system that would govern the industry for half a century.
This page is a survey of the era. For the 1920s motion picture business as a whole, see the parent cluster the motion picture industry in the 1920s. For the 1929 transition that ended the era, For the actors who defined it, For the directors and the studio system,
The Origins: Edison and the Lumière Brothers
The technology of motion pictures was developed almost simultaneously in the United States and France in the early 1890s. The American contribution was the work of Thomas Edison’s West Orange laboratory, where William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, an Edison employee, developed the Kinetoscope — a peep-show device in which a continuous loop of 35mm film passed over a light source and a viewing lens. The first public Kinetoscope parlor opened in New York in 1894, and the device spread rapidly to amusement arcades. The film was shot in Edison’s Black Maria studio, the world’s first motion picture studio, a small tar-papered shed on a rotating base to chase the sun.
The French contribution was the work of the Lumière brothers — Auguste and Louis — whose Cinématographe combined camera, printer, and projector in a single portable device. On December 28, 1895, the brothers held the first public screening of projected motion pictures at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, showing a program of short films including L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train), whose famous legend of panicking audiences may or may not be true. The first American public screening of projected motion pictures was held on June 29, 1896, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York, using Edison’s Vitascope projector — actually a licensed copy of a design by Woodville Latham.
The First Storytellers
The first narrative films were one-reel shorts, generally under fifteen minutes, made primarily for the nickelodeon theaters that sprang up in working-class neighborhoods after 1905. The first major narrative filmmaker was Georges Méliès, a former stage magician who had been a Lumière audience member and immediately grasped the storytelling potential of the new medium. Méliès made hundreds of trick films in his Star Film studio outside Paris, including the 14-minute Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), which featured the famous image of a rocket landing in the moon’s eye.
The first American narrative filmmaker of note was Edwin S. Porter, whose The Great Train Robbery (1903) — a ten-minute, fourteen-scene Western about a gang of outlaws — introduced many of the basic techniques of film editing: cross-cutting between parallel action, the establishing shot, the on-camera movement toward and away from the camera, and the in-camera effects. The film was a sensation and the prototype for the Western genre.
Griffith and the Birth of the Feature
The figure who most shaped the silent film was David Wark “D.W.” Griffith, the Kentucky-born director who, between 1908 and 1931, made more than 500 films. Working at the Biograph Company from 1908, Griffith developed virtually every basic technique of film grammar: the close-up, the iris shot, the flashback, the cross-cut chase, the tracking shot, the use of light and shadow, and the casting of expressive actors in front of naturalistic settings. His two epic features — The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) — established the feature film (over an hour long) as the industry’s standard product. The Birth of a Nation, a Civil War epic with deeply racist content, was both a popular sensation (it was the first film shown at the White House, to President Woodrow Wilson) and a commercial breakthrough that proved the feature could make money.
The success of Griffith’s features triggered the formation of the major studios. Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, Jesse Lasky’s Lasky Feature Play Company, William Fox’s Fox Film, the four Warner brothers, and Carl Laemmle’s Universal all began producing features in the 1910s. By 1920 the industry was dominated by a handful of vertically integrated studios that controlled production, distribution, and exhibition.
The 1920s: The Silent Art Form at Its Peak
The 1920s were the peak of the silent film era, the decade in which the medium produced its greatest art and its most popular entertainments. The 1920s silent film was a sophisticated art form, with conventions that included the intertitle (the on-screen text that carried dialogue and exposition), the live musical accompaniment in the theater (piano, organ, or small orchestra), the hand-painted color sequences, the two-color Technicolor effects, and the standardized camera and editing techniques pioneered by Griffith.
The decade saw several national schools of filmmaking in their prime. German Expressionism produced the distorted-set visual style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the vampire classic Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang’s dystopian cityscape Metropolis (1927). Soviet Montage produced Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), with its revolutionary editing rhythms. French Impressionist cinema, led by Abel Gance (Napoleon, 1927) and Germaine Dulac, experimented with subjective camera and dream sequences. Hollywood produced the great comedies, dramas, and Westerns of the decade.
The Major Films
The 1920s produced an extraordinary list of films that remain classics. The great silent comedies include Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), and The Circus (1928); Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), and The General (1926); and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! (1923) with its iconic clock-hanging scene. Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), a four-hour study of avarice shot on location in Death Valley, is one of the great realistic dramas. F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) won the first Academy Award for Best Picture (Unique and Artistic Production). Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacles The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927) blended religion and sex in a manner DeMille would repeat for decades. King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928) were major MGM productions. The 1925 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and the 1927 Wings — the latter the first Best Picture winner — were among the most expensive films of the silent era.
Technical and Economic Development
The technical conventions of the silent era were largely fixed by 1920. The 35mm film format, with four perforations per frame running vertically, was the universal standard. The hand-cranked camera was the industry workhorse, with a standard 16 frames per second. Lighting techniques evolved from flat overhead illumination to the more atmospheric three-point lighting developed by cinematographers such as Karl Freund. Set design moved from painted backdrops to constructed three-dimensional sets.
The economics of feature production changed dramatically. The average cost of a feature rose from about $100,000 in 1915 to $2 million by 1929. The major studios built permanent production lots, employed thousands of workers, and integrated vertically into distribution and exhibition.
The End of the Era
The silent era ended with astonishing speed. The Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, developed by Bell Labs and Western Electric, was used for the 1926 Don Juan (with synchronized music but no dialogue) and then dramatized in The Jazz Singer of October 6, 1927. By 1928 the studios were rushing to convert; by 1929 the dominance of sound was clear; by 1930 the silent feature was essentially over. The transition is detailed in the first talking picture: The Jazz Singer and the end of silence.