Collections

20 films

Silent 101

Twenty films, 1902 to 1929, laid out as a map rather than a trophy case.

17 films

First Steps

These are the years when nobody had agreed what a movie was for.

19 films

German Expressionism

These films came out of a Germany that had just lost a war and then lost the value of money.

9 films

Oscar Micheaux

Micheaux wrote, directed, and sold his own pictures because the studios would not.

20 films

Soviet Montage

After 1917 a group of Soviet directors treated the cut as the argument, not the glue.

19 films

Scandinavian Realism

Sweden and Denmark spent the 1910s and early 1920s shooting outside, in real weather, with a moral seriousness borrowed from Ibsen and Lagerlöf.

18 films

American Comedy

American screen comedy in these years is a set of methods, not a mood.

13 films

Anna May Wong

Wong Liu Tsong was born in Los Angeles in 1905 and was on screen by fourteen.

21 films

American Spectacle

These are the pictures that spent the money where you can see it.

18 films

French Avant-Garde

French filmmakers in the 1920s treated the camera as a way to think, not just to tell.

20 films

The Supernatural and the Occult

Cinema reached for ghosts early because the machine could do substitutions.

12 films

Japanese Early Cinema

Japanese silent cinema kept the benshi, a live narrator who spoke every role beside the screen.

10 films

Tod Browning's Underworld

Browning left Kentucky for the circus as a teenager and spent the rest of his career filming the people he had worked with: barkers, grifters, acts the respectable seats came to stare at.

20 films

Passion and Desire

Silent pictures had to show wanting.

9 films

Early Hitchcock

Hitchcock spent the second half of the 1920s at Gainsborough and then British International Pictures, learning the job in public.

14 films

Lon Chaney: The Man of a Thousand Faces

Chaney designed his own faces and often the pain that held them on.

8 films

Louise Brooks

Brooks was a Ziegfeld dancer Paramount used as decoration, then a face Hawks and Wellman could not quite place.

12 films

Lillian Gish

Gish came to Biograph in 1912 through Pickford and became Griffith's most exact instrument: a face that could hold a close-up without playing to the balcony.

10 films

Mabel Normand

Normand was already directing at Keystone when Chaplin arrived.

10 films

Buster Keaton

Keaton came out of knockabout vaudeville and spent the 1920s building gags you can still map.

9 films

Mary Pickford

Pickford produced her own films, chose the directors, and co-founded United Artists.

12 films

The Arrival of Sound

Don Juan already carried a Vitaphone score in 1926.

15 films

Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin walked onto a Keystone lot in 1914 and had the Tramp costume on screen within weeks.

18 films

The Silent West

The frontier had been declared closed when the cameras started staging it.

22 films

Women Pioneers of Silent Cinema

Women directed, produced, and wrote films from the first decade of cinema, then were written out of the story that followed.