Top 20 Silent Films

Charlie is best known as the Little Tramp but he was much more than a funnyman, he was also a master storyteller. A film that alternates between side-splitting hilarity and heart-breaking sentiment, the film still genuinely affects audience to this day. Chaplin plays a man with nothing who still sacrifices every thing he has—and even some things he doesn’t have—to help a woman get an operation to restore her sight. When we arrive at end of the film and the woman finally realizes that the Little Tramp is the man to whom she owes her sight to, you realize you’ve watched a perfect film.

Most critics feel Buster Ke.aton’s best film is The General and they might be right but Sherlock Jr. is the film that most embodies the genius of Keaton. A simple premise executed masterfully, Keaton gets out of his seat in the audience and walks inot the film he’s watching. From there we get to watch the Stoneface at his best.

The first sci-fi masterpiece and the blueprint for many sci-fi films that followed. It’s influence is clear even in Bladerunner which came out 55 years later. A 1927 German expressionist film, it is a beautifully visual futuristic urban dystopia. The most expensive silent film ever made, it was substantially cut after its release. That footage was thought lost forever until an additional 30 minutes was found recently in Argentina. Wtach the shortened version tat watch the longer cut and prepare to be blown away.

In looking at the history of film, there’s two periods: before Battleship Potemkin and after Battleship Potemkin. The plot resolves around the 1905 Potemkin mutiny but it is the visuals that have made the film legendary. A visual display that concentrated Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet film theory, the film is still dazzling. Montage editing, amazing cinematography, audiences had never seen anything like this when it hit the silver screen. As much as modern cinema owes a great debt to this film, much of it is still very radical. A case in point being that the film has no main character.

While Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are the comedians most associated with the silent era of American cinema Harold Llyod was the second most silent comedian of the time. Since then he’s become the forgotten star of that era which is a shame because while Chaplin and Keaton were probably better filmmakers for pure laughs no one could beat Lloyd. This one is pure laughs from front to back in a way no modern comedy can match.