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A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. The silent film era lasted from 1894 to 1929. In silent films for entertainment, the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards which contain a written indication of the plot or key dialogue. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the introduction of the Vitaphone system. During silent films, a pianist, theatre organist, or in large cities, even a small orchestra would often play music to accompany the films. Pianists and organists would either play from sheet music or improvise; an orchestra would play from sheet music.
The term silent film is therefore a retronym, that is, a term created to distinguish something retroactively – the descriptor silent used before the late 1920s would have been a redundancy and possibly in modern times a misnomer. After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, the "talkies", also known as "sound film" or "talking pictures" became more and more commonplace. Within a decade, popular widespread production of silent films had ceased, hence production moved into the sound era, in which movies were accompanied by synchronized sound recordings of spoken dialogue, music and sound effects.
A September 2013 report by the United States Library of Congress announced that a total of 70% of American silent feature films are believed to be completely lost. There are numerous reasons for the loss of so many silent films, three of the chief causes being intentional destruction by film studios after the silent era ended, extensive damage as a result of environmental degradation of the films themselves, or fires in the vaults in which studios stored their films.
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