817K views · 21K reactions | Charlie Chaplin returned to the United States for the first time in over a decade to accept his honorary Oscar in 1972. He received a 12-minute long standing ovation, the longest in Oscar history. | The Academy | Facebook

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