The Silent Films Era 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 adj

The Great Silent Era of Films In the 1800's, many inventors, such as Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers worked on machines that projected images. This led to the silent movie era which ranged from 1894 to 1929. During this time period, a number of moving pictures were created and shown in theaters on big screens. The Circus is a 1928 silent film written, produced, and directed by Charlie Chaplin. The film stars Chaplin, Al Ernest Garcia, Merna Kennedy, Harry Crocker, George Davis and Henry B

African American filmmaking began in the silent era when independent producers made movies, known as race films, for segregated audiences. Like the vast majority of silent era film productions, most race films of this period are lost. In fact, hardly any material survives that was shot by Black filmmakers prior to 1920. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, helmed by brothers George P. Johnson and Noble Johnson (arguably, the first Black movie star), made five feature films between 1916 and 1922.