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.
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Genres / Silent / Silent War
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
