Silent
see all genres ›The silent era stretches from cinema's beginnings in the late 1800s through the late-1920s in the U.S. (and into the mid-1930s in Japan) when sound became the industry standard. Silent films are often distinguished for their visual sophistication. Really, a silent film can be made in any era: a silent film is merely one made without synchronized dialogue. Several filmmakers continue to produce silent films to better focus attention on the visual components of cinema.
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Genres / Silent
SUB-GENRES · Silent Action/Adventure · Silent Comedy · Silent Drama · Silent Horror · Silent Western · Silent Crime · Silent Science Fiction · Silent Fantasy · Silent War · Silent Documentary
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Cops
One of Buster Keaton's greatest and most famous comedies, COPS is universally enjoyed for the inventive comedy and amazing chase sequences. However, its darker aspects (Keaton's use of an anarchists bomb risked painful reminders of the horse and wagon, similar to the one Buster drives, that...Watch Movie
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Ghosts Before Breakfast
The Dadaists were closely attuned to cinema's native surrealism. And so it is fitting that Hans Richter's GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST should return to so many of the medium's first loves: trick shots, fisticuffs and slapstick are all thrown in the dada blender, unfettered from the...Watch Movie
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Love Moods
Reclining on her chaise lounge in a see-through robe, Lili St. Cyr decides she needs a wash. In a gilded tub fit for Marie Antoinette, she bares all that the law will allow. Then she squeezes into an evening gown and mink coat to paint the town red with you, dear viewer! Well, a guy can dream....Watch Movie
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New York of Today
During the nickelodeon era, various film companies made short films showing tourist scenes of New York City. When a French company released SEEING NEW YORK in 1908, Variety found it "rather odd" that such pictures were not made by the "many native manufacturers eager for new...Watch Movie
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The Wandering Shadow
Rich in symbolic imagery and striking location photography, THE WANDERING SHADOW was the first collaboration of Lang and Thea von Harbou. It follows a woman who, in the wake of a scandal, seeks solitude in the Bavarian Alps. There, she is continually haunted by her past, but...Watch Movie
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What's the World Coming To?
This zany Hal Roach production of WHAT'S THE WORLD COMING TO? takes place in a future "one hundred years from now, when men have become more like women and women more like men." The film opens with the "blushing groom" approaching the altar where his tuxedoed bride awaits to...Watch Movie
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The Adventures of Dollie
D.W. Griffith's cinematic debut was already laced with dramatic irony, dynamic staging and deft parallel editing. The film opens with mother and daughter enjoying a summer day by the water. A gypsy merchant disrupts their idyll, first offering items for sale and then trying to...Watch Movie
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Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
After garnering widespread acclaim with his mini-masterpiece THE HEART OF THE WORLD, Canadian cult auteur Guy Maddin concocted his most ravishingly stylized cinematic creation to date. Beautifully transposing the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's interpretation of Bram Stoker's classic...Watch Movie
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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The most brilliant example of that dark and twisted film movement known as German expressionism, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is a plunge into the mind of insanity that severs all ties with the rational world. Director Robert Wiene and a team of designers crafted a nightmare...Watch Movie
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Nosferatu
Before the assorted treatments of the Dracula tale starring either Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman or Klaus Kinski there was F.W. Murnau's NOSFERATU, one of the first and still most haunting of all vampire tales. With his shaven, bulbuous skull, elongated fingers that seem like raven's...Watch Movie
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The Massacre
Controversial (to some) "father of cinema" D.W. Griffith tackles cowboy-and-indian territory with THE MASSACRE. What could initially be interpreted as an anti-Native American portrayal becomes a sympathetic tale of familial sorrow and the extent to which retribution can be unbalanced.Watch Movie
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She
This sensational popular story was one of three Haggard novels filmed by Thanhouser. It has many of the elements found in the not-yet-invented adventure/fantasy serial genre. Thanhouser’s expertise in location work, costume fantasy, and elaborate storytelling pay off in in SHE, the studio’s first...Watch Movie
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Cowards Bend the Knee
"Cowardice!! The New Sexy!!!" squeals Guy Maddin about his shot-on-Super-8, expanded-to-35mm silent "autobiography" involving beauty salons, cowardice, femmes fatale, a father's severed hands (and the daughter who wants them sewn onto her lover's arms), orgies and the Soviet...Watch Movie
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The Coffin Ship
A love story filmed in Long Island Sound with a stowaway and a shipwreck. Because of 1911 production convention, a sprawling adventure is truncated to one-reel length. Good location work, a strength of Thanhouser pictures, creates a visually strong seagoing story. Long Island Sound locations were...Watch Movie
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Fantômas in the Shadow of the Guillotine
Based on the phenomenally popular French pulp novellas, Louis Feuillade's outrageous, ambitious FANTOMAS series became the gold standard of espionage serials in pre-WWI Europe and laid the foundation for such immortal works as Feuillade's own LES VAMPIRES and Fritz Lang's DR....Watch Movie
