DW Griffith at The White House in 1921
Credit: Bettmann
This year, a slew of major silent films celebrate their centenaries – reflecting, in 1921, a vigorous torrent of new productions coming through after the economic drain of the Spanish Flu and First World War. Chaplin’s evergreen The Kid was among these, as were the hit war epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, which made Rudolph Valentino an international sex symbol.
What none of these films boasted, though, was an experiment with sound, six years before The Jazz Singer changed the medium for good. The man to try it out was DW Griffith in his romantic drama Dream Street, which premiered on May 2 of that year. Indeed, his was the first voice New Yorkers would have heard: the main feature was preceded by a filmed introduction from Griffith, which he had recorded in a nearby studio using the early sound-on-film process Photokinema.