The Very Best Films From the Silent Era

In the first years of filmmaking, directors made silent films that used actions, emotions, and the occasional title card to convey story points, filling in the gaps left behind without audio. Though filmmaking has evolved tremendously since them, many of those early silent films paved the way for the movies we love today. The Silent Era produced incredible classics that still hold up today.

In this highly acclaimed award-winning classic film, an enchanting young woman from the city captures the attention of a farmer who is bored with his wife and child, convincing him they should run away together.

Buster Keaton stars in The General, which is known as one of the greatest silent comedies ever made. When a railroad engineer’s fiancée is unintentionally abducted by Northern forces during the American Civil War, he vows to stop at nothing to bring her home.

Metropolis is one of the earliest science-fiction films to come out of Germany. The film is set in a futuristic city where utopia and the underworld sit side by side, and when a young man from the former tries to help those caught in the latter, conflict inevitably ensues.

Set in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, The Man with a Movie Camera is half film and half documentary, and embraces the mundanity of daily life in the city.

One of the earliest horror films, Nosteratu is also one of the first film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s classic, Dracula.

Charlie Chaplin plays a loveable tramp who falls deeply in love with a blind young woman as they both struggle to survive on the streets. The tramp does everything he can to take care of her and her grandmother, but it’s when he unknowingly saves the life of a drunken millionaire that all of their lives change for the best.

Louise Brooks stars in this German film about a young woman who bears a child in the aftermath of a rape, and when she rejects the idea of marrying her attacker, she’s shipped off to a reformatory. When she escapes, she learns that her child is dead and begins to work her way to a better life despite her dark past.

Iconic director Alfred Hitchcock made two versions of his film, Blackmail– one with sound and one silent. In the film a young woman has a fight with her boyfriend, which sends her into the arms of another man with nefarious intentions. She kills him as an act of self-defense but the involvement of a common thief with a penchant for blackmail complicates her situation.

In this silent classic, Buster Keaton plays a photographer who falls head over heels for a secretary in the newsreel department at MGM and goes to great lengths to win her affections.

This classic comedy starring Charlie Chaplin tells the story of a Tramp in pursuit of the 1890s gold rush who meets and falls in love with a beautiful barmaid along the way.

Directed by F.W. Murnau, 7th Heaven delivers audiences the highs of romance and the lows of war in a tale about a lonely woman who falls madly in love with a street cleaner only for war to come between them.

Sergei Eisenstein’s most influential and acclaimed film has become standard curriculum for film studies worldwide. The film tells a fictionalized account of the true story of the 1905 rebellion of the crew aboard the Russian battleship, Potemkin, against its officers.