Free Silent Film Classics Everyone Should See
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Silent films have a reputation for being hard work. They aren’t, or at least the good ones aren’t. Many of the most exciting films ever made come from the 1910s and 1920s, when nobody yet knew what cinema couldn’t do. Every film published in the United States before 1931 is now in the U.S. public domain, along with the U.S. rights to many foreign silents, and Starlite TV airs a big collection across several channels. Every silent feature plays with a public-domain piano score.
Here’s where I’d start.
The big ones
Metropolis is the film people picture when they think of silent science fiction: Fritz Lang’s vast city of towers above and workers below, and the robot built in the image of a woman named Maria. The sets and effects are still astonishing, and you’ll recognize its influence everywhere.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans might be the most beautiful film on this list. F. W. Murnau came from Germany to Hollywood to make it, and it tells a very simple story – a farmer, his wife, a woman from the city – with camera movement and imagery that feel decades ahead of their time. It won an award for Unique and Artistic Production at the first Academy Awards, and Janet Gaynor’s performance was part of what won her the first Best Actress Oscar.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s account of Joan’s trial, told almost entirely in close-ups. Renee Falconetti’s face carries the whole film. It’s intense, but it’s also one of the most moving things cinema has produced.
Battleship Potemkin is Sergei Eisenstein’s dramatization of a 1905 mutiny, and its massacre on the Odessa Steps is one of the most studied sequences in film history. Watch it for the editing; nobody had cut images together like that before.
Hollywood’s first giants
D. W. Griffith shaped how American movies were made, for better and worse. Intolerance is his enormous answer to critics, cutting between four stories across thousands of years, with a gigantic Babylon set built in Los Angeles. Broken Blossoms is the opposite: a small, sad story starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess. Way Down East has Gish’s famous climax on a frozen river breaking up into ice floes, and Orphans of the Storm puts Gish and her sister Dorothy in the French Revolution.
King Vidor’s The Crowd is about an ordinary young man trying to make his mark in New York, and it’s one of the most honest films Hollywood made in the decade. And Wings, William A. Wellman’s First World War aviation epic, was the first film honored as the year’s best picture at the Academy Awards.
Europe
Beyond Metropolis, Germany produced some of the best films of the era. Pandora’s Box, directed by G. W. Pabst, made Louise Brooks an icon. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu are the essential horror films; see our classic horror guide for more. And People on Sunday follows a handful of young Berliners on a day off – it was made by a group of young filmmakers who would go on to big careers.
From Japan, we air Yasujiro Ozu’s Walk Cheerfully, a crime film from early in his career.
Comedy
You can’t talk about silent film without the clowns. Buster Keaton’s The General and Sherlock Jr., Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! are as funny now as they ever were. Our Keaton and Chaplin guide covers them in detail.
The real world
Some of the most influential silents are documentaries. Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty’s portrait of an Inuit family in northern Canada, is often called the first feature-length documentary, though many scenes were staged for the camera. Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov’s portrait of a Soviet city, is basically a feature-length demonstration of everything a camera can do. Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis does something similar for Berlin, and Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness was shot on location in Siam (now Thailand) by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.
How to watch silent films
A few tips. Give each film the first ten minutes before deciding; the rhythm is different, and your eyes adjust. Watch on the biggest screen you’ve got, because these films were designed for a theater. And don’t worry about the intertitles – you’ll stop noticing them quickly.
Starlite TV is scheduled television, so films start when the schedule says. Each title’s page lists its next airings in your local time. Silver Screen carries most of the dramas, Laugh Track the clowns, Graveyard Shift the Expressionist chillers and Doc Vault the early documentaries. Pick one and tune in.