When synchronized sound came to the movies, American film studios no longer had a universal product that only needed the title cards translated into different languages to be exported to markets around the world. Dubbing spoken dialog has never been a satisfactory alternative, except for cartoons.
Thanks to the ubiquitous distribution of American silent movies in their day, every so often copies show up in other countries. The latest example is a cache of American films that were preserved in Russia.
I saw this yesterday and was going to send it to you but the phone interrupted me. The quality of preservation is remarkable, unless they’ve already worked it over with the new computer technologies. It’s such a treat when old treasures like these are discovered. I do know that literally thousands of old films have been lost forever because they were on silver nitrate film that disintegrated because of poor storage. Hence, that big storage vault out west somewhere in a salt mine with the original prints of the big classics from our past.