Silent Drama
see all genres ›Shorn of the dialogue that drove stage drama, silent movies had to express romance, tension and conflict via nuance and visual invention, achieving such artistic heights that many lamented the comparative crudity of communication the medium was reduced to in the early sound era.
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Genres / Silent / Silent Drama
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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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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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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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Battleship Potemkin
For eight decades, Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 masterpiece has remained one of the most influential silent films of all time. Yet each successive generation has seen BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN subjected to censorship and recutting, its unforgettable power diluted in unauthorized public...Watch Movie
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From Show Girl to Burlesque Queen
A pretty young woman steps behind a dressing screen to prepare for the stage in this teasing short from the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (a competitor of Thomas Edison in the already competitive distribution and exhibition market). - Robert AvilaWatch Movie
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Behind the Door
Writer Gouverneur Morris's bizarre tale unfolds in a series of disquieting flashbacks that serve to continually ratchet up suspense and foreboding. Producer Thomas H. Ince and director Irvin Willat showed daring and imagination in their adaptation of the sensational material. U-boat captain...Watch Movie
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My Grandmother
Forgotten for a half-century, Kote Mikaberidze's MY GRANDMOTHER is a delightful example of the Soviet Eccentric Cinema movement as well as a scathing satire of Soviet bureaucracy. Noted for its anarchic styles, stop-motion puppetry, exaggerated camera angles, animation and constructivist sets,...Watch Movie
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A Dog's Love
The fantasy centers on a dog and a child, a universally appealing movie subject. The loyal dog's attachment to his little girl playmate is treated with pictorial beauty and simple, honest sentiment. Reviewers of the time praised the double-exposure passages for their dramatic effectiveness. Baby...Watch Movie
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The Hearts of Age
CITIZEN KANE is perhaps the most famous directorial debut in movie history but it wasn't actually Orson Welles' first film. He'd already made a handful of shorts, the earliest being this project created at Illinois' progressive Todd School for Boys with fellow graduate William...Watch Movie
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Mothers of Men
Made two years before the Nineteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote, this melodrama depicts a future in which a woman holds high political office. Dorothy Davenport Reid plays an ardent suffragist who ascends from judge to governor and manages, despite the odds, to maintain her...Watch Movie
