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Silent War
see all genres ›The spectacle and brutality of war was one thing the movies could reproduce more effectively than any medium before it and the unprecedented destruction of World War I made audiences' curiosity more urgent than ever before.
Discover Silent War Films
Genres / Silent / Silent War
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The Battle
Unlike many of D.W. Griffith’s early Civil War melodramas, THE BATTLE focuses on actual combat. A Union soldier panics during his first fight and flees to his girlfriend's house. She bullies him back into harm's way as the balance of war begins to shift. Dynamic battle scenes jammed with uniformed extras anticipate Griffith's...Start your free trial to watch
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Capture of Boer Battery by the British
The Edison Manufacturing Company had already staged war scenes of the Spanish-American War and the Filipino Insurgency. By the outbreak of the Boer War, shooting battle re-enactments had become routine. In this one, the Gordon Highlanders prove victorious as they charge a Boer cannon and the camera....Start your free trial to watch
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The Fugitive
Five years before his controversial epic THE BIRTH OF A NATION, D.W. Griffith directed this relatively muted melodrama of two Johns fighting in the Civil War (one for the Union and the other for the Confederacy). Both men say goodbye to mothers and sweethearts and make haste for overgrown battlefields. A desperate fight...Start your free trial to watch
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The House with Closed Shutters
D.W. Griffith throws an exciting wrench in this otherwise conventional Civil War melodrama when a proud daughter of the confederacy takes her coward brother’s place on the battlefield. She’s killed in heroic fashion and her mother shutters the house to protect the secret of who maintained the family’s...Start your free trial to watch
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In the Border States
A little girl for the Union shelters a Confederate soldier, thereby initiating a chain of events that symbolically repairs the damages wrought by the Civil War. D.W. Griffith takes advantage of pictorial landscapes to stage his battle scenes and his famous parallel editing works here not only to create...Start your free trial to watch
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In the Hands of the Enemy
A story of a woman spy, her son and a firing squad draws its analogies from the world war; full of intense situations and graphic action. Just 15 months after the outbreak of war in Europe, it was still very early for an American film to be produced on the subject for release in isolationist U.S.A. Edwin...Start your free trial to watch
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J'accuse
Abel Gance’s extraordinary breakthrough work is a WWI drama considered to be one of the most technically advanced films of the era and the first major pacifist film. It was referred to by Gance as “a human cry against the bellicose din of armies.” It stars Marise Dauvray as Edith, a woman who is unhappily married to an older...Start your free trial to watch
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The Little American
Karl, a German living in America, returns to Germany at the outbreak of World War I to fight for his country, leaving his American sweetheart, Angela, behind. A rival for Angela's affections, Jules, returns to his native France to fight. When Angela goes to France to care for a dying aunt, she arrives to...Start your free trial to watch
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Montmartre's Kids
MONTMARTRE'S KIDS, from 1916, was filmed on the Parisian hill, which with its height, light, and cheap rents, was home to such artists as Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Braque and Picasso. Another figure of the period, Francis Poulbot, created the archetypal street urchin in his drawings of Montmartre kids. His...Start your free trial to watch
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On the Barricade
Taking a page from Victor Hugo’s LES MISÉRABLES, Alice Guy-Blanché’s historical drama imagines a boy unwittingly caught up in an insurrection. Her surprisingly frank picture of military executions tempers the film’s sentimental ending. ON THE BARRICADE was one of the last films Guy-Blanché made in France...Start your free trial to watch
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Sea Fighting in Greece
It's often said that Georges Méliès never thought to move his camera. Whether he thought to or not, he never really needed to, not with the vast experience he had mounting ambitious stage productions for audiences in stationary seats. Faced with the challenge of simulating the rocking of a ship at sea, a...Start your free trial to watch
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Shooting Captured Insurgents
This staged scene of Spanish soldiers executing Cuban prisoners was designed to underscore Spanish brutality and support American intervention in the war. According to one catalog description, "The Spanish officer, resplendent in gold lace and buttons, raises his sword. One can imagine his commands by his...Start your free trial to watch
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The Surrender of Tournavos
We tend to think of August and Louis Lumiere as the fathers of the documentary and Georges Méliès as the father of the fiction film (or at least the fantasy film). Yet, while the Lumieres and their cameramen were fanning out to record slices of life from across the globe, they rarely were present at the...Start your free trial to watch
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Swords and Hearts
D.W. Griffith packs an epic feature's worth of marauding, heartbreak and syrupy nostalgia into this short Civil War romance. Hugh Frazier (Wilfred Lucas) is the son of a wealthy tobacco farmer who leaves the plantation to fight for the Confederacy. He loves a well-heeled belle named Irene Lambert (Claire...Start your free trial to watch
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The Unbeliever
This was perhaps the last Thomas Edison film ever to be released and features Erich von Stroheim as a German army officer who enjoys killing old women and children. He would reprise and modify this role in Jean Renoir's GRAND ILLUSION. Besides the wartime propagandistic clichés, the film offers a set of moralizing beliefs. As...Start your free trial to watch