sound film

The idea of combining film and sound had been around since the invention of the cinema itself: Thomas Edison had commissioned the Kinetograph to provide visual images for his phonograph, and William Dickson had actually synchronized the two machines in…

The advent of the talking motion picture in the late 1920s caused variety theatres throughout Great Britain to be converted into cinemas. To keep comedians employed, a mixture of films and songs called cine-variety was introduced, and there were attempts to keep theatres open from noon to midnight with…

…the release of the first talkie, the Hindi-language Alam Ara (“Light of the World”). From then on, Indian filmmaking diverged into several regional offshoots in languages other than Hindi, such as Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali. After early experiments in silent film, the studio Bombay Talkies, launched in 1934 by actor,…