The sound of silent films.

Byline: Jeffrey O. Valisno

Today's audiences have only a vague idea of how the first plays were presented or what the first recognizable ballet looked like, or how early orchestras sounded like. But cinema bares its early years to anyone willing to sit through the screening of a silent movie.

Silent movies were made with no synchronized recorded sound, especially spoken dialogue. Technical challenges during the beginnings of cinema prevented the combination of motion pictures with recording sound until the late 1920s with the introduction of the vitaphone system.

Live music usually accompanied the showing of silent movies, with a pianist playing at the first reported public projection of movies by the Lumiere Brothers on Dec. 28, 1895 in Paris, France.

Despite the emergence of "talkies" or movies with recorded sound, silent films continued to be made until the 1960s and early 1970s.

Filipino audiences can take a step back in time and view the early charm of world cinema in the 2nd International Film Festival at the Shangri-la Plaza Mall in Mandaluyong City.

The two-week festival comes back with another collection of seminal works of the silent era, which have been restored to the same pristine condition as the first time that they flickered through a hand-cranked projector and danced across a screen to delight the virgin audience of a new art form.

This year, the Goethe-Institute, Instituto Cervantes and Japan Foundation are joined by the embassies of the Czech Republic, France and Italy in …