The Cheat, Movie Poster - A poster for a movie starring a man in a tuxedo

Movie posters and movie theaters.

The popularity of “moving pictures” grew in the 1920s. Movie "palaces" sprang up in all major cities. For a quarter or 25 cents, Americans escaped their problems and lose themselves in another era or world. People of all ages attended the movies with far more regularity than today, often going more than once per week. By the end of the decade, weekly movie attendance swelled to 90 million people. The silent movies gave rise to the first generation of movie stars. At the end of the decade, the dominance of silent movies began to wane with the advance of sound technology.

By 1908 there were 10,000 permanent movie theaters in the U.S. alone. For the first thirty years, movies were silent, accompanied by live musicians, sound effects, and narration. Until World War I, movie screens were dominated by French and Italian studios. During Great War, the American movie industry center, "Hollywood," became the number one in the world. By the 1920s, the U.S. was producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total. Hollywood's system and its publicity method, the glamourous star system provided models for all movie industries. Efficient production organization enabled mass movie production and technical sophistication but not artistic expression. In 1915, in France, a group of filmmakers began experimenting with optical and pictorial effects as well as rhythmic editing which became known as French Impressionist Cinema. In Germany, dark, hallucinatory German Expressionism put internal states of mind onscreen and influenced the emerging horror genre. The Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. In Spain, Luis Buñuel embraced abstract surrealism and pure aestheticism. And, just like that, at about its peak time, the silent cinema era ended in 1926-1928.

Pola Negri was a Polish stage and screen actress. Born Barbara Apolonia Chałupec on 3 December 1897 in Lipno, Poland, she began her career as a stage actress in Poland before moving on to film. Negri rose to prominence in German cinema during the silent era, starring in such notable films as "Madame DuBarry" (1919) and "Sumurun" (1920). She moved to Hollywood in the mid-1920s and became one of the most popular and highly paid actresses of the time. Some of her Hollywood films include "A Woman of the World" (1925) and "The Spanish Dancer" (1923). Known for her dramatic and exotic persona, both on and off screen, she was romantically linked to several high-profile figures, including Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino. With the decline of her Hollywood career in the 1930s, Negri returned to Europe and continued to work in European films. However, her popularity waned over time. She continued to make occasional film and television appearances and wrote her autobiography, Memoirs of a Star (1970). Pola Negri died on 1 August 1987 in San Antonio, Texas, USA, at the age of 90. She is remembered as one of the first international film stars and a pioneer for women in the film industry, with contributions to both European and Hollywood cinema.