As silent movies reached their highest peaks of success, the popularity of plays and dramas slowly waned. Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation(composed by Joseph Carl Breil). The first ever movie to have an original music score was D.W. However, most of the movies adapted theater music and improvised on it. Theater organs were used to create special sound effects too. Later, movies came to be accompanied with live music performances that coordinated with the scene. In the very beginning, music was only used to entertain the audiences before the actual movie began, and during the intertitles. The importance of music in creating a mood was already known – music was effectively used to the same purpose in plays and dramas. But they all managed to do it beautifully and that is sheer brilliance. Exaggerating grief is something that can very quickly and easily go wrong. You may notice many actors exaggerate their actions in silent films – you fall, it has to be dramatic you are sad, you have to be melodramatic you are falling in love, you have to bat your eye-lashes and blush! Exaggeration worked especially well for comedies. Many actors hence adopted hyperbole in their acting. No sound meant no dialogs, so your body language and facial expressions had to do all the talking. In fact, so adept was the film fraternity with the concept of silent films, that for quite a few years after the ‘talkies’ arrived, movies failed to create the impact they did in the silent era, for directors and actors alike could not deal with all the sound! ActingĬharlie Chaplin, one of the geniuses of the silent era, very correctly once said that “Cinema is pantomimic art”. By the 1920s, people had mastered the art of speaking volumes without saying a word. Silent movies were at their peak by the 1920s – the decade saw the birth of many a legend and many a masterpiece. It is this short period of a few decades that is referred to as the era of silent cinema. Motion pictures matured into full-length feature films in the 1920s, but still lacked sound. It was released on 14 October 1888, and was only 2 seconds long! Louis Le Prince is considered the true father of motion picture. The first narrative film ever, Roundhay Garden Scene was made by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince. However, in spite of being a ‘motion’-picture, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop cannot be really called a ‘film’, as it was merely a relay of successive photographs that created the ‘illusion’ of motion. It used the same basic technique of relaying successive photographs to create the illusion of motion. Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope was the inspiration behind the Kinetoscope, which was meant for individual viewing. The film consisted of a series of 24 photographs that were projected on the Zoopraxiscope (considered the first movie projector) in succession at high speeds to create the illusion of motion. It documented equine motion and was released in 1878. Eadweard Muybridge’s Sallie Gardner at a Gallop was the first silent film ever to be made. The history of silent movies begins with the history of cinema itself as all movies made in those times did not have sound. The Journey of Silent Cinema First Motion Picture Documentation
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