All you had to do if the flicker was going to be shown in a foreign country was change the title and replace the title cards. Thus, with one production, you could sell it all over the world.

As many of the earliest films were of less than 60 seconds duration, all that was needed was the title itself and that was usually provided on the Billboard or the marquee.

In this age of "reality" programming, it is odd to learn that a lot of the early short films were just that, real events being filmed. They weren't even "documentary" films, as that implies an educational or political bent. They were basically home movies. The Lumiere Brothers actually exhibited a short of their factory workers leaving the factory gate for lunch. Other classics included feeding a baby and watching a train pull into a station. Truly, it was a fact even then, in the late 1880s, that people would watch anything.

Length seemed to be a matter of preference. Early films were limited in length by reel size, so many feet. 21 minutes was the reasonable length for one reel, depending upon how fast the cameraman had cranked during filming.

It was apparently thought by American producers that the audience's attention span was limited, so they gave them 20 minutes of ten minute films rather than a single film. When other country's producers had already moved into feature film territory, making continous narrative films of over sixty minutes in length (four reels), the American producers were still making do with two-reelers. The biggest producers of early feature films were the Australians. The first of their features arrived in 1906, directed by Charles Tait and telling the often-refilmed story of Ned Kelly in five reels. Only fragments of the film survive today.

Modern viewers of early films find it hard to sit still through even the short ones. The camera staging was of the prosenium type, like a live theatre, the lighting was unimaginative, and the acting was non-existent. Yet they are worth a little work to study and dig through the dross to find the gold. Some of the clothing and scenery cannot be duplicated today without an enormous amount of research and production cost. And where else but in Buster Keaton's "The General" will you find an actual train wrecked on an actual bridge?

There are people who will tell you that with the advent of sound, silent production ceased almost immediately. Don't you believe them. Just as with black and white film during the advent of color, there were directors and audiences who believed that there was an art to miming it up on the screen. You could hear sound just by leaving the theatre.

The last great advantage of the silent film is that it didn't discriminate against deaf people.

The usefulness of film for blind people is debatable. What did they get from a sound film that they didn't already receive from radio and at a cheaper cost?