Within the urban immigrant communities, this element was depicted as a way of self-improvement, and it for a long time it continued to be used when the clarity of visual narrative was compromised. With the feature cinema becoming the core product of the industry, the deployment of lecturers went down and the application of title cards for the purposes of dialogue got more realistic, and with time displacing exposition cards. Bowser (1994) posts that Warner Brothers in 1925 developed Vitaphone system, disc sound system which started the end of the silent cinema, producing The Jazz Singer, two years later, nevertheless silent cinema continue to be produced in the 1930s and the Modern Time (1936) of Charlie Chaplin is a number of occasions have been noted to be the last silent cinema.
As a matter of fact, it is hard to envisage the cinematic experience in the course of the silent era due to the individualism in regard to the varieties both of projection and aural accompaniment. Cook (2005) argues that even though the standard speed for projection was 16fps, exhibitors could project cinemas slower or faster than the talking speed to make sure that the film started and ended within the proscribed time. As a medium developed from theater, vaudeville, and still photography, silent cinema adapted a number of their presentational techniques as the era progressed, nevertheless, the cinema industry diligently worked to become more reputable, trying to delink its products from the once peddled by nickelodeons and vaudeville houses.
Whereas older distribution methods and venues persevered, the grand film palaces of the silent period exaggerated the uplift movement’s goals to create a friendly-family, clean and safe environment for the middle-class orderly audience in an economical style with impressive orchestras, elegant lobbies and vast seating areas. In spite of the growth of the picture palace, smaller theaters remained the most prevalent with a number of them having a seating capacity of less than 500 seats. The Roxy Theater situated at the heart of New York City, which showed off for its 6,214 seats were indeed opulent, however it represented a unique case.
At the onset of the 1920s, there were about fifteen thousand theaters in the US and charging admission fees of between 10 and 25 cents. Out of this number, most of them were in rural areas as opposed to urban settings. The theaters presented different entertainments in a balanced method that increased in length as the era progressed. A classical mid-1920s bill could comprise combinations of a novelty film or brief comedy, a live revue, a lantern slide show, news weekly, a feature film and a musical overture (McCaffrey and Christopher, 1999).
Cinema exhibitors sough to start and wind up the program at particular times, which in some instance implied, apart from speeding up the projection, removing reels from the feature, or even leaving out some menu items, to put up with the repeated group audiences. Within the increase of the large theaters, the need for quick audience turnover declined and the multireel feature cinema developed into the core attraction. According to McCaffrey and Christopher (1999) film scores during the initial stages of the silent film were either complied or improvised with theatrical or repertory music.
Once complete of features became humdrum, nonetheless music was developed from the photoplay music by orchestra conductor, organist, the movie studio or the pianist and also comprised of a cue sheet. Such cue sheets were normally very lengthy, with well developed notes about the moods and effects to watch for. Beginning with the very initial score by Carl Joseph Breil for D.W Griffith’s (The Birth of a Nation 1915), a groundbreaking epic it became quite common for the huge-budgeted movies to get to the exhibition theater with specifically original scores.
Nevertheless, the original full blown designates scores were developed earlier in 1908, by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov and Camille Saint-Saens for the Stenka Razin and The Assassination of the Duke of Guise.
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