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

Most silent-era film productions have been lost to time & hardly *any* material shot by Black filmmakers pre-1920 has survived. But recently, the earliest known footage produced by a Black film company was found, hiding in plain sight, in our collections. http://go.loc.gov/78Tl50L52k2 | The Library of Congress