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Before sound came along, all films were silent, not just pretentious student art films. What these films lacked in dialogue they made for with exaggerated facial expressions and wild gesticulating. Classic silent films give a good look into the early days of film and Hollywood, as great artists worked to define the medium that would become one of the most popular in the world.
Chaplin is the name most associated with silent film, and the image of him in costume as The Tramp with his bowler hat and moustache is one of the most iconic in all of cinema. Check out this selection of some of Chaplin's finest silent comedies.
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Featuring one of Chaplin's most famous routines: the dancing bread rolls, this was Chaplin's favourite out of all his films. |
The Tramp finds a baby in an alley and raises him, until the evil child welfare services come to take him away. This was one of the first Chaplin films to mix a drama element in with the comedy. |
Chaplin's Tramp befriends a drunken millionaire and tries to raise the money to get a flower girl her sight back. Wackiness ensues. |
Although talkies had taken over cinema by the time Chaplin made Modern Times, he chose to keep it silent, feeling his Tramp character would be ruined if the audience heard him speak. |
This film was made during World War 1 and was Chaplin's ode to the troops, with the Tramp going to war but keeping his bowler hat. |
After Chaplin, Buster Keaton is the next best known silent film star. Although he was less successful than Chaplin at the time, many critics now believe he is the equal of his more famous counterpart.
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Often considered one of the greatest films ever made, Keaton plays a southern train engineer who inadvertently gets involved in the civil war. |
Keaton goes the titular direction in search of his fortune, and gets into lots of western themed slapstick scrapes. |
Keaton plays a Mississipi steamboat captain in this film, featuring his most famous stunt in which the front of a house collapses onto him but he is unharmed as he was standing where the window is. |
A college scholar attempts to take up sports in an effort to impress a girl who prefers athletes to nerds. |
A romantic in training to be a detective dreams of winning the girl of his dreams. |
Not all silent films were comedies of course. Many of the better known silent films were very serious in tone, with epic dramas and horror films being the two genres that seemed to thrive especially during this period, perhaps due to their heightened emotions suiting the format.
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Fritz Lang's dystopia future tale is one of the most famous silent films, and perhaps the one that holds up best for audiences today. |
One of the best examples of the German Expressionist movement in film, this creepy tale is the first film to have a twist ending, and features sets that Tim Burton has based his whole career on. |
D.W. Griffith's controversial epic is both celebrated as a ground-breaking film that established the language of the medium as well as decried as racist hate-mongering for it's depiction of the KKK as heroes. |
Griffith responded to the criticism of his previous film's racism by making Intolerance, which took the opposite stance of the "intolerance is good" message of The Birth of a Nation, and was the most expensive film of it's day. |
The first vampire movie, an adaptation of Dracula with the names changed due to rights issues, and starring Max Shrek as the creepy bald headed vampire. |
