The Earliest Works of Lumiere Brothers in France
The Earliest Works of Lumiere Brothers in France
The famous “Silent era” starts from the late nineteenth century and is firstly connected with the earliest works of Lumiere brothers in France and Thomas Edison in America and last till the early 1930s, when silent films were substituted by the new films where the people were able to listen and hear the speeches of the narrators and actors (of the movies). Thomas Edison, actually, was the first creator of Kinematograf and then Lumiere brothers copied the system and brought it to France where Kinematograf was further developed and improved and as we all know, made them rich in some time. However, there are some uncertainties about America. Many scholars nowadays stress that the silent era in America was between 1910s and 1920s and was represented by multi-reel feature films showed to public in famous cheap cinemas of that time – nickelodeons. The end of the silent era in America was connected with Griffiths “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) which was a kind of window to the new Classical era. This film was successful.
While the word “silent” in silent cinema refers to the lack of the sounds, early cinema was not totally and completely silent in this respect. From the nickelodeon era towards 1920s, films were accompanied with live music, for example: pianos (this case was quite popular at that period of time), organs, large orchestras, etc. Pianos used for two purposes: to attract people and to accompany the movie in order to cover down the sound of Kinematograf which was very loud and created some disturbance for sure. All these features were dependant on the place or venue, in another words. There were many small store-front theaters and big picture palaces as well. Of course, because of these differences there were discrepancies in the quality of cinema as well. Various studio releases came up with some specific music scores for particular cinemas. These score included source music and underscore. Famous cue sheets gained huge popularity at that time as well. Cue sheets were designed as musical themes for specific scenes. Sometimes, solo musicians more or less expert at reading visually designed cue sheets improvised a score on the spot and exhibitors also drew on large published collections of sheet music.
Besides musical accompaniment, many different theaters in silent era used a trick: they were able to invite “descriptive talkers” or “lecturers” who acted as narrators and narrated the film. Sometimes those people even participated in improvising the dialogues which were not included on intertitles. In highly developed urban communities, in many countries comprised mostly by foreigners – immigrants, this feature represented self-improvement and this was constantly employed whenever visual narrative clarity was compromised. As the time passed, the feature film became central industry product, being profitable for many investors and rich people from business and economic perspective. The cinemas were profitable because the was a huge interest from the populations and the demand from the existing period of time.
As a medium derived from photography, vaudeville and theater, silent film adapted many of their presentational methods; however, as the time passed, the movie industry started to become a kind of distinct business opportunity with dissimilar services to public. Vaudeville houses still were used in some places, but nickelodeons were the innovation, the new players in the movie industry, firstly appeared in America. But which benefits were brought by the creation of nickelodeons? Lets analyze this in a moment.
Nickelodeons were quite cheap, available for everyone in the public, I mean for all social classes. They were able to create a safe, clean, family-friendly environment for an orderly, middle-class audience in an economical fashion with vast seating capacities, elegant lobbies and just perfect and amazing orchestras who used to both attract people as well as pianos did and accompany the movie by covering the sound from loud Kinematograf and the sounds coming from crying babies in the theatre, for example. There are many such kind of possibilities. However, this does not necessarily mean that there were no movies shown in big picture palaces. The only difference was that