Silent Films

Universal's ambitious silent adaptation of Jules Verne's novel, directed by Stuart Paton and produced by Carl Laemmle. Allen Holubar plays Captain Nemo, who stalks the seas in his submarine Nautilus seeking revenge against the man who destroyed his family, while a French professor and his companions are taken captive aboard the vessel. The production pioneered genuine underwater photography using the Williamson brothers' submarine tube, shot on location in the Bahamas, and was one of the most expensive films of its era at roughly half a million dollars. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Science Fiction · Silent

Chaplin's spoof of Cecil B. DeMille's Carmen, released the same year as the film it mocks. Chaplin plays Darn Hosiery, the Don José figure — a dim Spanish officer seduced and ruined by the gypsy Carmen (Edna Purviance) — with Ben Turpin as the toreador Remendado, mangling his name in the bargain. The parody is affectionate but pointed, and its mock-tragic ending is a real gag rather than a whimper. Essanay later padded the two-reeler out to four reels with discarded footage for a 1918 re-release, prompting Chaplin to sue the studio; most surviving prints derive from that expanded version. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

A Fool There Was is a 1915 silent drama that made Theda Bara a star and coined the word "vamp." Produced and distributed by the Fox Film Corporation and directed by Frank Powell, it is based on the play by Porter Emerson Browne, itself inspired by Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Vampire." Bara plays an unnamed femme fatale who sets her sights on a successful diplomat and husband (Edward Jose) and methodically destroys his career, his family, and his life. The film was a sensational hit, and Bara's image as the exotic, predatory "vampire" woman shaped Hollywood notions of screen sexuality for a decade. As a 1915 release it is securely in the public domain.

Drama · Silent

A silent comedy directed by Howard Hawks, starring Victor McLaglen as Spike Madden, a rough-and-tumble sailor who leaves a girl in every port he visits. When he befriends fellow sailor Salami (Robert Armstrong), the two become inseparable buddies—until they both fall for the same woman, the alluring Marie (Louise Brooks) in a French port. Brooks, in one of her earliest American roles, is magnetic, her bobbed hair and smoldering gaze already hinting at the icon she would become. The film's blend of brawling humor, male bonding, and exotic locales made it a hit, and Fox remade it as Goldie (1931) with Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

A fast-paced silent comedy short directed by William Beaudine for Christie Film Company. Jack wants to marry Betty but inadvertently offends her parents, who declare they'd accept "anybody in the world but that whippersnapper!" With the help of an old actor friend, Jack schemes to make his prospective in-laws rue their words. The film is a classic farce of mistaken identity and romantic perseverance, preserved by the Academy Film Archive from material provided by the New Zealand Film Archive. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Allan Dwan's A Modern Musketeer is a brisk Douglas Fairbanks comedy from the peak of his silent years, built on the short story "D'Artagnan of Kansas" by Eugene P. Lyle Jr. Fairbanks plays Ned Thacker, a Kansas boy raised on The Three Musketeers who dreams of chivalric adventure and gets more than he bargained for on a trip out west, where he single-handedly tangles with a bandit, rescues a damsel, and leapt from moving cars with the boundless energy that made Fairbanks a star. Produced by Fairbanks's own company and distributed by Artcraft, the film features an early appearance by ZaSu Pitts and cinematography by Victor Fleming, who would later direct The Wizard of Oz. As a 1917 release the film is securely in the United States public domain.

Adventure · Comedy · Silent

An anti-Mormon silent drama directed by Robert Z. Leonard and produced by Jesse L. Lasky's Feature Play Company. Mae Murray stars as Dora Hogue, a young woman traveling west with her family when their cabin is overtaken by a Mormon caravan. An elder demands Dora as his plural wife, setting in motion a melodramatic conflict that capitalizes on the anti-Mormon sentiment prevalent at the time. Frank Borzage — better known today as one of Hollywood's great directors — appears as an actor in the role of Tom Rigdon. The film was originally eight reels but cut to five before release. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A silent drama directed by D.W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish and Robert Harron. John Logan Jr. leaves his parents and sweetheart, Jennie Timberlake, in the rural Kentucky of Happy Valley to seek his fortune in New York City. Those he left behind fall into hardship in his absence, while John is seduced by the wealth and cynicism of the city. The film was believed lost for nearly fifty years until a print was discovered in the State Film Archives of the Soviet Union in 1965 and donated to the Museum of Modern Art. Carol Dempster, who would become Griffith's leading lady of the 1920s, made her film debut in a small role as a girl John meets in New York. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A Cecil B. DeMille western starring Mary Pickford. Jenny Lawrence travels to a California logging camp to find her uncle, unaware he has been killed and his identity assumed by a stagecoach robber (Elliott Dexter) hiding from the law; recognizing the truth, she accepts his protection rather than face the camp alone. Shot on location in the redwoods and at the Lasky studio, the film was one of Pickford's early features under her own production company. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Western · Drama · Silent

Harold Lloyd's first feature-length comedy, directed by Fred Newmeyer for Hal Roach Studios. Lloyd plays a wealthy young idler who joins the Navy to impress his girlfriend's disapproving father. After a shore leave brawl in a foreign port, he finds himself aboard a ship where he must rescue his girl from a villainous maharajah. The film marks Lloyd's transition from two-reel shorts to features, and his "glasses character"—an ambitious, all-American go-getter—was now fully formed. The film's blend of physical comedy and romantic adventure set the template for Lloyd's greatest features to come. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

A silent melodrama directed by Frank Lloyd for Goldwyn Pictures, based on an original screen story by Gouverneur Morris. During the Boxer Rebellion in China, a white orphan girl is adopted and raised by a Chinese man who brings her to San Francisco's Chinatown. As she grows up, played by Leatrice Joy, no one suspects she is not Chinese, and the film follows the collision between the two cultures of its title as the truth of her identity surfaces. Wallace Beery plays the villain Li Fang. The production built an elaborate Chinese street set at the Goldwyn studio in Culver City, and Lloyd took advantage of a real fire in Venice, California, filming it with his camera crew to use as a burning temple scene. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Shot by the Miles Brothers just days before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, this single continuous take rides a cable car down Market Street toward the Ferry Building, passing horse-drawn wagons, early automobiles, and pedestrians who wander casually into the frame. It is one of the most haunting pieces of early actuality footage ever made: the city it shows was largely destroyed by the quake and fire less than a week later. Historians have used everything from the cars' license plates to puddles on the street to pin down the exact filming date. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent · Short

A Charlie Chaplin Essanay comedy in which the Tramp disrupts a family outing in the park. After charming a young woman and infuriating her father and suitor, Chaplin retreats to a hotel where he encounters the family again. In the film's famous sequence, Chaplin disguises himself as a woman to evade pursuit, leading to a farcical series of mistaken identities and flirtations—including the girl's father making advances toward the cross-dressed Tramp. The film showcases Chaplin's mastery of gender-bending comedy, a device he would refine throughout his career. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Charlie Chaplin's first serious drama, written and directed by him as a starring vehicle for his longtime leading lady Edna Purviance—Chaplin himself appears only in a brief, uncredited cameo. Marie St. Clair (Purviance) believes she has been abandoned by her lover Jean and moves to Paris, where she becomes the mistress of wealthy playboy Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou). Years later, Jean reappears, and Marie must choose between respectability and the glamorous life she has built. Chaplin's sophisticated approach to adult relationships, his satirical eye for high society, and his rejection of melodramatic conventions stunned audiences and critics. The film was a commercial failure but influenced directors from Lubitsch to Renoir, and is now regarded as one of the great silent dramas. The film is in the public domain.

Drama · Romance · Silent

The Soviet Union's first science fiction spectacle, directed by Yakov Protazanov for Mezhrabpom-Rus and adapted from Alexei Tolstoy's novel. In post-revolutionary Moscow, engineer Los builds a rocket and flies to Mars, where he falls for the planet's queen, Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva), and helps spark a Martian proletarian uprising. The film's lasting fame rests on its astonishing constructivist design — Alexandra Exter's geometric Martian costumes and sets look like nothing else in silent cinema — while its Earthbound scenes offer a wry portrait of life under the New Economic Policy. Released in the United States as Revolt of the Robots. A 1924 production, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Science Fiction · Drama · Fantasy · Silent

One of the earliest feature-length adaptations of Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, directed by W.W. Young for the Nonpareil Feature Film Corporation. Stage actress Viola Savoy plays Alice, who follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole into Wonderland and encounters the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, and the Queen of Hearts. Shot on a wooded Long Island estate, the film was a $25,000 production and one of only two screen appearances by Savoy. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Fantasy · Silent

The pilot for Walt Disney's Alice Comedies, made at his Laugh-O-Gram studio in Kansas City. A live-action girl, played by Virginia Davis, falls asleep in a cartoonist's studio and dreams herself into an animated Wonderland full of lions, dancing cats, and marching soldiers. The short mixes live-action footage of Davis with hand-drawn backgrounds and characters, a technique Disney would build an entire series around after moving to Hollywood. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short · Family

American Aristocracy is a 1916 silent comedy-adventure directed by Lloyd Ingraham for the Fine Arts Film Company, with a story by Anita Loos and Douglas Fairbanks in the lead. Fairbanks plays Cassius Lee, a young entomologist and all-round egalitarian who tangles with a piratical arms smuggler while trying to win the heart of a rich man's daughter. The film gently satirizes American social climbing and the cult of European-style aristocracy, with Fairbanks doing his own stunts and radiating the athletic good humor that defined his early features. Produced under the Triangle banner, it is preserved at George Eastman House and is in the public domain.

Adventure · Comedy · Silent

A Harold Lloyd comedy directed by Fred Newmeyer for Hal Roach Studios. Lloyd plays a young man who works as an extra at a film studio and is mistaken for a society gentleman. Invited to a fancy dinner party, he must bluff his way through high-society etiquette with predictably disastrous results. The film's centerpiece is Lloyd's desperate attempt to ride a horse, a sequence of escalating physical comedy that showcases his trademark blend of daring and Everyman appeal. The film is a classic example of Lloyd's "glasses character" navigating social situations far above his station. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

The first film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play, this silent version stars Blanche Sweet as Anna Christie, a young woman raised by relatives after her father, a Swedish coal barge captain, abandoned her. When she reunites with her father on his barge, she falls for a rough-hewn sailor, Matt Burke, but cannot be honest with either man about the life she led before finding them. Produced by Thomas H. Ince, who paid $100,000 for the stage rights, and directed by John Griffith Wray, the film was considered lost for decades until Blanche Sweet herself helped locate a print with Russian intertitles in a Soviet archive. O'Neill, who was famously difficult about adaptations of his work, cited this silent version as the best film made from his writing. George F. Marion recreated his stage role as Anna's father. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A historical drama directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Norma Talmadge, set in 16th-century France during the wars of religion between Catholics and Huguenots. When Catherine de' Medici orders the massacre of French Protestants, the Comte de la Roche spares his enemy, the Huguenot Rupert de Vrieac, by reducing him to an indentured servant in his castle. Rupert falls in love with Yolande, the count's sister, only to find his rival for her hand is the Duc de Tours, a notorious persecutor of Huguenots. Produced by the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation and presented by Joseph M. Schenck, the film was an expensive prestige production with lavish 16th-century costumes and a reproduction of the Louvre ballroom. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent · History

A small-town girl hungry for a grander life leaves her devoted sweetheart behind for a wealthy businessman's Riverside Drive apartment in Frank Borzage's silent drama. Adapted by Frances Marion from a Fannie Hurst story and produced by Cosmopolitan Productions for Paramount, the film stars Seena Owen as a woman who discovers, too late, the cost of the comfort she traded for love. Borzage's early interest in the emotional lives of working women, the thread he would pull through much of his later career, is already visible here. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Sergei Eisenstein's account of the 1905 mutiny aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin, in which the crew rebels after being served maggot-ridden meat and the uprising spreads to the port of Odessa. The Odessa Steps sequence — tsarist troops firing on civilians as a baby carriage rolls down the stairs — remains one of the most studied and imitated passages in film history, and the picture is the foundational text of Soviet montage editing. Aleksandr Antonov plays the mutiny's leader Vakulinchuk, with Vladimir Barsky and Grigori Aleksandrov. Made as a state commission to mark the revolution's twentieth anniversary, it was banned in several countries on release and is still ranked among the greatest films ever made. The film is in the public domain.

Drama · History · Silent · War

A pampered millionaire named Alfred Butler goes on a camping trip to toughen up and falls for a mountain girl who has no patience for his softness. To win her, Alfred passes himself off as a famous boxer who happens to share his name, and the impersonation spirals toward a real fight he has no hope of winning. Buster Keaton directed and stars, and the film is one of his more plot-driven features, leaning on mistaken identity rather than pure stunt work. It was Keaton's highest-grossing picture at the box office, even if it is less celebrated today than The General or Sherlock Jr. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Comedy · Silent

John Barrymore stars as George Bryan "Beau" Brummel, the impoverished soldier who talks his way into the friendship of the Prince of Wales and the heart of Regency London society, only to fall when the prince withdraws his favor. Directed by Harry Beaumont for Warner Bros. and based on Clyde Fitch's 1890 play, the film is a showcase for Barrymore's stage-trained intensity, from the arrogant dandy at his peak to the broken exile in Calais. Mary Astor plays the woman he cannot have. The film survives in several cuts of differing length and is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

One of the great silent epics, adapted from Lew Wallace's novel. A Jewish prince in Roman-occupied Jerusalem is falsely accused of treason by his childhood friend, now a Roman tribune, and condemned to the galleys. He survives, is adopted by a Roman consul, and returns to confront his betrayer in a chariot race that remains one of the most famous sequences ever filmed. Fred Niblo directed on a scale that was staggering even by 1920s standards: thousands of extras, a full-size Roman arena, and a naval battle staged with real ships. Ramon Novarro is the prince and Francis X. Bushman the villainous Messala. The film saved MGM from financial trouble and remained the studio's top earner for decades. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Drama · Action · Silent

Walter Ruttmann's portrait of one day in Berlin, from the morning trains arriving at an empty city through work, meals, nightlife, and back to the factories at dawn. There is no story and no characters — the city itself is the subject, organized in five "acts" that move through the rhythms of modern urban life. Edited like a piece of music with a commissioned score meant to be performed live, it established the "city symphony" genre and directly inspired Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera two years later. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Documentary · Silent

Erich von Stroheim's directorial debut, in which he also stars as a predatory Austrian lieutenant who sets his sights on an American doctor's wife during a holiday in the Alps. Made for Carl Laemmle's Universal on a small budget, the film already bears von Stroheim's signatures: the meticulous detail, the moral rot beneath polite society, the contempt for men too absorbed in their work to notice their wives. Sam De Grasse and Francelia Billington play the couple, with Gibson Gowland as the mountain guide. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Rudolph Valentino stars as Juan Gallardo, a Seville matador who rises from poverty to national fame only to be undone by his infatuation with a wealthy aristocrat, Doña Sol. Fred Niblo directed this Paramount adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's novel, with June Mathis writing the scenario that helped cement Valentino's screen persona as the brooding, doomed lover. Lila Lee plays the wife he betrays and Nita Naldi, in her breakout role, the temptress. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

D.W. Griffith's tragic melodrama, subtitled *The Yellow Man and the Girl*, was his deliberate turn away from spectacle toward intimacy after the scale of *Intolerance*. Lillian Gish gives one of the great performances of the silent era as Lucy, the abused daughter of a brutal London prize-fighter (Donald Crisp), who finds fleeting tenderness with Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), a Chinese shopkeeper whose dreams of peace have curdled in the Limehouse fog. The interracial romance at its center was daring for 1919, though the casting and caricature reflect the era's prejudices. Shot in hazy, oppressive studio interiors, it is among Griffith's most visually beautiful films. Published in 1919, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A stage-struck country girl arrives in New York chasing Broadway stardom and lands in a chorus line, a Chinese cabaret, and finally a murder charge she did not commit. Colleen Moore stars as the aspiring actress, with Johnnie Walker as the songwriter who loves her and Alice Lake as a fellow hoofer. Irving Cummings produced and directed this independent feature, based on James Kyrle McCurdy's 1917 play, for release through Select Pictures. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A breezy, arrogant freshman arrives at Harvard and makes enemies of his roommate and a rival for a professor's daughter, then has to claw back his reputation on the crew and football teams. William Haines stars as Tom Brown, with Jack Pickford as his devoted friend and Mary Brian as the girl, in this MGM silent directed by Jack Conway. The film is best remembered today as John Wayne's screen debut, an uncredited turn as a Yale football player. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Alla Nazimova produces and stars as Marguerite Gautier, the doomed Parisian courtesan, opposite Rudolph Valentino's Armand Duval in this stylized silent adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camélias. Directed by Ray C. Smallwood from June Mathis's scenario, the film transplants the story to 1920s Paris and surrounds it with lavish Art Deco sets by Natacha Rambova, whom Valentino would marry. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 adaptation of Prosper Merimee's 1845 novella, the source material for Bizet's famous opera. Metropolitan Opera soprano Geraldine Farrar made her film debut as the gypsy Carmen, a wilful seductress who lures a soldier away from duty and into ruin. DeMille had intended to film the opera itself but its libretto was under copyright, so he had his brother William base the scenario on the public domain novella, whose Carmen is more calculating than the operatic version. Wallace Reid plays Don Jose, the officer destroyed by his obsession. The film was a major hit and established Farrar as a screen star. Existing prints derive from a re-edited 1918 re-release. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Charlie Chaplin plays a waiter at a cheap cabaret who passes himself off to a society girl as a foreign dignitary, then has to juggle both lives when her wealthy family invites him to a garden party. The imposture collapses in a brawl back at the cabaret, with Mabel Normand's character watching her two worlds collide. Made at Keystone in Chaplin's first year on screen, the film was directed by Normand, his co-star, though Chaplin later claimed he had taken over direction himself. Whoever called the shots, it is an early showcase for the Tramp's gift for turning class resentment into slapstick. A 1914 release, it is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Alfred Hitchcock's second film for British International Pictures, made during his silent period before he broke through with The Man Who Knew Too Much. A champagne heiress announces her engagement to provoke her father, who fakes bankruptcy to teach her a lesson, and the film follows the complications that spiral from the ruse. Hitchcock later dismissed the film as one of his weakest, saying he took it on without much interest in the material, and the thin story bears that out. What survives is the visual invention: a famous opening shot of a champagne cork popping into the camera, and a number of gags built around bottles and bubbles. It is a minor Hitchcock, but a revealing one for anyone tracing how he learned his craft. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

Chang is a remarkable early documentary feature from the team who would later make King Kong. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack traveled to the jungles of northern Siam, now Thailand, to film a real farming family's struggle against the wilderness. Kru, his wife, and their children battle a leopard, a tiger, and a herd of elephants that destroys their home. The film is staged in places, but the danger and the animals are real, and the result has the grip of an adventure story. Chang was nominated for an Academy Award and is now a forgotten gem. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Documentary · Adventure · Drama · Silent

The first film adaptation of Maurine Dallas Watkins' 1926 play Chicago, produced by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by Frank Urson. Phyllis Haver stars as Roxie Hart, a fame-obsessed housewife who kills her lover in cold blood and, after trying to coerce her husband into taking the blame, is put on trial for murder. Victor Varconi plays her long-suffering husband Amos, who has a much more sympathetic and active role than in later adaptations. The film was a box office disappointment upon release but modern viewers praise its sharp satire and acting. The story would be adapted twice more, most famously in the 2002 Oscar-winning musical version. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Comedy · Drama · Silent

A Mary Pickford vehicle directed by James Kirkwood for Famous Players, and one of the earliest feature-length Cinderella adaptations. Pickford plays the fairy-tale heroine tormented by her stepmother and stepsisters, with her then-husband Owen Moore as Prince Charming. The film features early special effects in the pumpkin-to-coach transformation and was released as a Christmas attraction in December 1914. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Fantasy · Silent

A fire drives a wolf pack out of the mountains and into the desert, where they threaten local ranchers. The pack leader, Lobo, is actually a half-breed dog, and when he is wounded during a chase he is found and nursed back to health by a prospector named Dave Weston. The two become loyal companions, and Lobo helps Dave protect his borax claim from a scheming claim jumper. Rin Tin Tin, the German Shepherd who was one of Warner Bros.' biggest box-office draws in the 1920s, is the star, and the film is a good showcase for his athleticism and screen presence. Selected for the National Film Registry in 2004. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Western · Silent

Helen Gardner's independent production was one of the first feature-length films made in America, a lavish six-reel telling of Cleopatra's seduction of Caesar and Antony that predates both the Theda Bara and Claudette Colbert versions. Gardner starred and produced through her own company, the Helen Gardner Picture Players, staking her own money on a spectacle with real Egyptian-style sets, a barge scene, and hundreds of extras. Directed by Charles L. Gaskill, it was marketed as an event rather than a program filler, helping convince American audiences and exhibitors that features were the future. A 1912 release, it is in the public domain.

Drama · History · Silent

Rudolph Valentino plays an Italian count and big-game hunter who moves to New York to work for a friend's antiques firm and is drawn into an affair with his employer's wife, a predatory socialite played by Nita Naldi. The title refers to the cobra that mesmerizes its prey, a metaphor the film lays on heavily. Valentino is in his element as the charming, doomed lover, and Nita Naldi's vamp persona is given full rein. The film was one of Valentino's last releases before his death in 1926, and it is a late showcase for the star persona that made him a phenomenon. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A bookish high school graduate gives a graduation speech condemning athletics, which costs him the girl, who prefers the jock. Ronald follows her to college and tries to win her back by joining every sports team on campus, failing at baseball, track, and rowing in a string of set pieces built around his total lack of athletic ability. When the girl is threatened by the school bully, Ronald finally gets to act instead of fumble, sprinting and pole-vaulting across campus in a rescue that reuses every sport he failed at earlier. James W. Horne directed, with Keaton producing and doing his own stunts, including the pole vault into a second-story window. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Action · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a young man who is mistaken for an escaped convict and sentenced to death. After a series of chaotic prison sequences—including a golf game with a noose around his neck—he escapes and tries to rescue his girlfriend from a gang of criminals. The film features some of Keaton's most audacious physical gags, including a scene where he is nearly hanged for real when the prop rope was accidentally replaced with a real one. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

One of Buster Keaton's greatest short comedies, co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a young man trying to win the hand of his girlfriend, whose father insists he must become a successful businessman first. Through a series of mishaps involving a stolen wallet, a horse-drawn wagon of furniture, and a lit bomb, Keaton finds himself pursued through the streets of Los Angeles by the entire Keystone Kops-style police force—hundreds of officers in a escalating chase of breathtaking choreography. The film's famous opening, with Keaton rejected behind a gated door, and its apocalyptic climax, with cops everywhere, make it one of the most perfectly constructed chase comedies ever made. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Mary Pickford stars in this 1919 silent comedy-drama based on Jean Webster's 1912 novel. An orphan named Judy Abbott is sent to college by a mysterious benefactor she knows only as "Daddy-Long-Legs," on the condition that she never try to meet him. She writes him letters chronicling her new life, falls into a romantic triangle, and eventually discovers that her benefactor is the man she has come to love. Directed by Marshall Neilan, the film was the first under Pickford's new production deal that gave her approval over the final edit, a hard-won concession that paid off: it was one of her biggest hits. The film's blend of comedy, sentiment, and Pickford's irrepressible screen presence made it a favorite with audiences. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Romance · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a young man who travels to the city to make his fortune, promising to send for his girlfriend once he succeeds. Each letter he writes home describes a glamorous new career—as a steam room attendant, a street cleaner, and an amusement park ride operator—but the reality is far less impressive. The film's structure, alternating between the girlfriend's romantic fantasies and the grim truth of Keaton's menial jobs, creates a comic tension between aspiration and reality. Though not as celebrated as Keaton's other 1922 shorts, it features excellent physical comedy and a memorable amusement park sequence. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

The second half of Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied adaptation, picking up after Siegfried's murder. Kriemhild marries the Hun king Etzel (Attila) to gather an army, then engineers a massacre of the Burgundians at his court. Where the first film was a myth of heroism, this one is a study of grief hardening into vengeance, ending in a burning hall strewn with bodies. Lang's staging of the climactic siege, with Huns setting the hall alight and Burgundians choosing death, is one of the most violent images in silent cinema. The two films together were meant as a national epic for Weimar Germany, and their ambivalence about loyalty, honor, and revenge has been read and re-read through every German crisis since. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Fantasy · Adventure · Drama · Silent

The first half of Fritz Lang's two-part adaptation of the medieval Nibelungenlied, written with his wife Thea von Harbou. Siegfried of Xanten forges a magic sword, slays a dragon, bathes in its blood to become invulnerable, and travels to Worms to woo the Burgundian princess Kriemhild. Lang stages the legend on a monumental scale, with carved forests, a mechanical dragon, and geometric compositions that turn myth into architecture. The film was a prestige production for UFA, meant to assert German cinema's ambition after the First World War, and its visual grandeur has influenced fantasy filmmaking ever since. The story continues in the companion film, Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Fantasy · Adventure · Drama · Silent

John Barrymore at the peak of his matinee-idol powers, swashbuckling through Borgia-era Italy as the legendary lover. Directed by Alan Crosland for Warner Bros., it's a lavish silent spectacle — duels, dungeons, and Lucrezia Borgia herself — but its place in history is technical: Don Juan was the first feature released with a synchronized Vitaphone musical score and sound effects, the experiment that led directly to The Jazz Singer a year later. Mary Astor and a young Myrna Loy are among the women pursued through its nearly two hours. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Romance · Silent

A sequel to The Mark of Zorro (1920), with Douglas Fairbanks now playing Don Cesar, the son of the original Zorro, in Spain rather than California. Framed for the murder of a rival archduke, he fakes his death and returns to clear his name and win back the woman he loves. Fairbanks produced and starred, and Donald Crisp directed while also playing Don Cesar's father. The swordplay is elaborate even by Fairbanks's standards, and the film leans into the swashbuckling spectacle that made him the action star of the silent era. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Action · Romance · Silent

Downhill is one of the darkest of Hitchcock's early films, a bleak downward spiral he later dismissed but that still carries his signature. Ivor Novello plays a schoolboy who takes the blame for a theft committed by his best friend and is expelled, disowned by his father, and sent sliding through a succession of humiliations in Paris and London. Each act is a step down, and Hitchcock makes the descent literal with a famous shot of an escalator. The film reunites Hitchcock with Novello after The Lodger and is one of the silent pictures restored by the BFI. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Drama · Silent

The definitive silent adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella, directed by John S. Robertson for Famous Players-Lasky. John Barrymore delivers a tour de force as the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose experiments in separating good from evil unleash the hideous Mr. Hyde. Barrymore's transformation, achieved largely through facial contortion and makeup rather than camera tricks, remains one of the most effective in screen history. Nita Naldi plays the dance hall temptress who draws Jekyll toward his darker self. The film cemented Barrymore's reputation as a serious screen actor and established the visual vocabulary for cinematic split-personality horror. The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Drama · Silent

Fritz Lang's two-part criminal epic introduced cinema's first great supervillain. Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is a hypnotist, master of disguise, and criminal psychologist who manipulates Berlin's decadent gambling clubs, ruins the industrialist Hull, and destroys the young Count Told — all while state prosecutor von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke) doggedly hunts the phantom pulling the strings. Adapted from Norbert Jacques's novel and subtitled *A Picture of the Time*, the film is both a cracking crime saga and a portrait of Weimar Germany's postwar instability. Mabuse's chilling final descent into madness made him an archetype Lang would revisit twice more. Published in 1922, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Crime · Thriller · Silent

The only film John Grierson directed himself, made for the Empire Marketing Board at the birth of the British documentary movement. It follows a North Sea herring fleet from port to fishing grounds to the market where the catch is sold — an ordinary industry turned into an epic through montage borrowed from Eisenstein and underwater photography that still looks remarkable. Grierson, who coined the word "documentary," made the film to argue that cinema could dignify everyday work. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

A 1923 silent melodrama directed by Tod Browning and set in the opium underworld of Shanghai. Priscilla Dean plays Cassie Cook, an American woman smuggling opium who falls under the surveillance of a government agent disguised as a mining engineer. When she falls in love with him, she tries to leave the drug trade, but the head of the ring will not let her go. Wallace Beery plays her menacing confederate, and Anna May Wong appears in a supporting role. The film is based on the 1910 Broadway play by John Colton and Daisy H. Andrews and was produced by Carl Laemmle at Universal. It is a precursor to the stranger, darker films Browning would make later in the decade. The film's copyright expired at the end of its first term, and it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Drama · Crime · Silent

The final film of Alexander Dovzhenko's "Ukraine Trilogy," and his last silent film. Earth follows a Ukrainian village through the upheaval of collectivization: the arrival of the first tractor, the resistance of the kulak landowners, and the murder of the young communist Vasyl by a hostile neighbor. Dovzhenko was commissioned to make propaganda for Stalin's farm policy, but what he delivered is a lyrical, almost pantheistic meditation on birth, death, and the soil. The film is built from images, apples in the sun, a farmer's face against the sky, a body laid out in the orchard, that have been quoted by filmmakers for decades. It was banned by Soviet authorities nine days after release. At the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, a poll of critics named it one of the twelve greatest films ever made. Published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.

Drama · Silent

Directed by Allan Dwan and based on Felix Riesenberg's 1927 novel, this silent drama was shot extensively on location in New York City, from the Bowery to Fifth Avenue to Harlem. George O'Brien stars as a man who rises from the Lower East Side slums to the world of high society, with Virginia Valli as the woman he loves and June Collyer as the socialite who comes between them. The film culminates in a spectacular maritime disaster sequence loosely inspired by the sinking of the RMS Titanic. O'Brien, fresh from his lead in Murnau's *Sunrise* earlier that same year, anchors the production with his naturalistic presence. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of the Noël Coward play, made during his British silent period. A woman divorces her abusive husband, flees the scandal to the Riviera, and marries a younger man whose aristocratic family does not know her past and turns on her when they learn it. Hitchcock was not fond of the material and the film is largely a commission job, but it shows his early interest in the social trap: a woman judged by a code that does not apply to the men around her. Most of the Coward dialogue is conveyed through intertitles rather than spoken, since this was a silent film of a talkie play. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Colleen Moore stars as a small-town drudge who wins a newspaper beauty contest with a prize trip to Hollywood — only to discover the contest was a fraud. She stays anyway and bluffs her way onto a movie set, where chaos on the soundstage turns her into an accidental star. Directed by Alfred E. Green and based on the popular comic strip by Bill Conselman and Charles Plumb, itself a riff on Cinderella, the film was one of the biggest hits of 1926 and the peak of Moore's run as America's top box-office comedienne. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

Made by Émile Cohl at Gaumont in Paris, Fantasmagorie is generally considered the first fully hand-drawn animated film. Cohl drew roughly 700 frames on paper, then photographed them onto negative film to create a glowing white-on-black line that constantly morphs: a figure becomes an elephant, a bottle, a clown, a woman's hat, dissolving and reforming in a stream-of-consciousness flow. The title nods to the magic-lantern phantasmagoria shows of the era. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short

A silent Keystone comedy starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, directed by George Nichols. After Fatty rescues the police commissioner's daughter from drowning, he is rewarded with a position on the police force. His enthusiasm far exceeds his competence, and his attempts to enforce the law result in chaos. The film showcases Arbuckle's remarkable physical agility—his size belied a cat-like grace that made him one of silent comedy's most gifted performers. Made during Arbuckle's early Keystone period under Mack Sennett, the film features the kind of rough-and-tumble slapstick that defined the studio's output. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

F.W. Murnau's final German film is a lavish silent adaptation of the Faust legend, drawing on Goethe and older folk versions of the tale. An archangel and Mephisto wager over the soul of an aged scholar, and the devil unleashes a plague to drive Faust to desperation. The pact gives Faust youth and worldly pleasure, but the story turns on his seduction of the innocent Gretchen and the tragedy that follows. Emil Jannings plays Mephisto as a leering, theatrical tempter, while Gosta Ekman ages and de-ages across the picture. The film is a high point of German Expressionism, famous for its optical tricks, painted skies, and the surreal image of Mephisto's wings spreading over a miniature town. It was a financial disappointment on release but has been revered by critics ever since. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Fantasy · Horror · Drama · Silent

Two childhood friends, Leo and Ulrich, return from military service and fall for the same alluring woman, Felicitas, with destructive consequences. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert's on-screen chemistry was matched by a real-life romance that began during filming, and the picture made them one of Hollywood's first great celebrity couples. Clarence Brown directs with a fluid, intimate camera that was advanced for its time, and the film's sensual love scenes pushed the boundaries of what censorship would allow. Based on Hermann Sudermann's novel The Undying Past, the film was a sensation at New York's Capitol Theatre, where it ran longer than any picture before it. It was selected for the National Film Registry in 2006. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Romance · Drama · Silent

Erich von Stroheim's third directorial effort was advertised as "the first million-dollar picture," a claim producer Carl Laemmle happily promoted even as he battled his director over the spiraling budget. Stroheim stars as Count Karazmin, a phony Russian aristocrat who, with his "cousins" Marietta and Olga, sets up in a villa above Monte Carlo to prey on wealthy women. The production recreated the casino and plaza of Monte Carlo on the California coast at Point Lobos, with hundreds of carpenters building an entire Riviera resort. Stroheim's obsessive attention to detail, from hand-tailored uniforms to accurate military decorations, established the template for his later extravaganzas. The surviving version runs about 130 minutes, a fraction of the director's original cut. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

John Ford's silent drama about a Bavarian widow whose four sons are scattered by the First World War: three go to fight for Germany, and one emigrates to America and ends up on the other side of the lines. The film was Ford's answer to the wave of anti-war films that followed The Big Parade, and it is built around the mother waiting at home while the war absorbs her family one by one. Ford's feeling for family and loss, the thing his later films are most remembered for, is already fully formed here. The film was a hit and established Ford as a director who could handle large-scale emotional material, not just westerns and action pictures. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · War · Silent

The first known film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, produced by Edison Studios and directed by J. Searle Dawley. In this 12-minute silent short, Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) creates his monster (Charles Ogle) not through electricity but through chemical means in a boiling cauldron, and the creature manifests as a skeletal apparition born of fire and smoke. Ogle designed his own monster makeup, creating a hunched, wild-haired figure that bears no resemblance to Boris Karloff's later icon but established the first screen image of Shelley's creation. The monster haunts Frankenstein's wedding night, a psychological torment that ends when the creature sees its own reflection and vanishes. Long believed lost, a print was rediscovered in the 1970s. The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Short · Silent

Gertie the Dinosaur is the earliest animated film to feature a character with a distinct personality. Winsor McCay drew thousands of frames by hand, creating a friendly brontosaurus that eats, drinks, dances, and responds to his commands like a trained pet. Originally performed as a live stage act where McCay "interacted" with the projected dinosaur, the surviving print frames the animation with a live-action prologue. Gertie is a foundational work of character animation. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short

One of the earliest screen adaptations of Henrik Ibsen, this silent film was produced by D.W. Griffith and directed by George Nichols. Henry B. Walthall, fresh from *The Birth of a Nation*, plays a dual role as both Captain Arling, a dissolute father, and Oswald, the grown son who inherits his father's alcoholism and disease. When Oswald falls in love with the family maid, Regina, not knowing she is his half-sister, the family doctor intervenes to stop the marriage, and the sins of the father are visited upon the son. Erich von Stroheim, then a young technical assistant at Griffith's studio, served as wardrobe assistant and appeared in a bit part. The film was rereleased in 1919 under the title *The Curse*. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Harold Lloyd's first feature as an independent producer, and one of his best. He plays a stuttering, girl-shy tailor's apprentice who writes a bogus advice book on how to woo women, then has to live up to it when he falls for a wealthy girl visiting from the city. The film builds to a celebrated chase in which Harold races a jalopy, a horse, a trolley, and finally a stolen motorcycle (with no driver) through Los Angeles traffic to stop his beloved's wedding. Lloyd's gift was for ordinary-guy heroism, and here the romantic setup and the stunt climax feed each other perfectly. It was the first release from his own Harold Lloyd Corporation. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

A broke wanderer hops a freight train west and lands a job on a ranch where he is hopeless at everything, until he forms a bond with a dairy cow named Brown Eyes. When the herd is shipped to market, Friendless goes along to protect his companion, and the climax turns into a stampede through downtown Los Angeles as hundreds of cattle thunder through city streets and department stores. The sequence is an enormous practical stunt staged in real streets with a real herd. Keaton wrote, directed, and starred, and the film is unusually warm for him, built around a man and a cow rather than a romance. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Action · Adventure · Silent

Before King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made their name with this astonishing ethnographic documentary. They joined the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia on its annual migration — some 50,000 people and half a million animals crossing icy rivers and a 12,000-foot mountain pass in search of pasture. The scale is still hard to believe, and the sequence of the migration over the Karun River on inflated goatskin rafts is one of the great images in documentary history. Released by Paramount in 1925 and never renewed, the film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

Erich von Stroheim's adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague follows a gentle San Francisco dentist who marries the woman his best friend courted, and watches their life curdle over a lottery jackpot she hoards while he drinks. Von Stroheim shot a film that reportedly ran over nine hours; MGM cut it to roughly two, and the excised footage is believed lost. What survives is still one of the most celebrated silent films ever made, famous for its naturalistic location shooting in San Francisco and Death Valley and for ZaSu Pitts's harrowing portrait of avarice. The final crawl across the baking desert, with the two survivors handcuffed to a corpse, is one of the great endings in cinema. The film was a financial failure on release and is now regarded as a high-water mark of American silent drama. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Silent

Haldane of the Secret Service is a 1923 silent serial-style adventure produced by and starring Harry Houdini, directed by Burton King for the Houdini Picture Corporation and distributed by Famous Players-Lasky. Houdini plays Heath Haldane, a government agent who infiltrates a vicious gang of counterfeiters to rescue a captive agent and smash the ring. As in his other film vehicles, the picture was built around Houdini's escapes and physical stunts, though the acting is stiff and the plot is thin. It was the last feature Houdini made before returning to the stage. As a 1923 work, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Mystery · Action · Silent

John Ford's silent drama set against the Irish War of Independence. Victor McLaglen plays a man who returns to Ireland disguised as a hangman to avenge himself on the brutal commandant who drove his family out, while a young woman is forced into a marriage she does not want. Ford, who was born in Maine to Irish immigrant parents, made several films about Ireland across his career, and this is one of the earliest: the sympathy for the rebel cause and the suspicion of the colonial authorities are already in place here, decades before The Quiet Man. The film was made in the transitional sound period and uses a synchronized score and effects rather than spoken dialogue. A young John Wayne appears briefly as an uncredited spectator at a horse race. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a down-on-his-luck man who decides to end it all, but every suicide attempt fails spectacularly—he can't even drown properly. A series of opportunities to better his situation arise, each ending in comic disaster, until he finally finds success in the most unlikely way. The film's famous ending—a wild diving stunt gone wrong—was considered lost for decades and was only rediscovered in the 1990s, making the film complete again. Keaton reportedly considered this his favorite of his short comedies. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

The first production to begin filming at the newly formed MGM, directed by the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom from Leonid Andreyev's play. Lon Chaney plays a scientist humiliated when his patron steals his wife and his work; he flees to a circus and reinvents himself as a clown whose act consists of being slapped by the audience, turning private shame into public spectacle. Chaney's performance is a study in dignified suffering, and the film gave early prominent roles to Norma Shearer and John Gilbert, both soon to be MGM stars. It was also the first film to feature Leo the Lion as the MGM logo. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2017. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Silent

Heading Home is a 1920 silent comedy produced by Yankee Photoplays and directed by Lawrence C. Windom, starring the baseball legend Babe Ruth as himself in a lightly fictionalized story. Ruth plays a country boy who dreams of playing in the major leagues, gets his chance, and hits the home run that wins the big game. The film was made quickly to capitalize on Ruth's exploding fame after his sale to the Yankees, and it amounts to a gentle, promotional vehicle full of baseball action and the Babe's awkward but game screen presence. As a 1920 release it is securely in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent · Sports

A silent Oz fantasy written and produced by L. Frank Baum and directed by J. Farrell MacDonald for Baum's own Oz Film Manufacturing Company. Violet MacMillan plays Dorothy, who wanders into the Land of Oz and joins the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion in a quest to free Princess Gloria from the wicked King Krewl and the witch Mombi. The film draws on incidents from several Baum Oz books and is one of only three surviving features from his short-lived studio. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Fantasy · Adventure · Silent

Directed by Edward Sloman and produced by Carl Laemmle at Universal, this silent drama tells the story of a poor Russian-Jewish pushcart peddler on New York's Lower East Side and his two sons. The elder son, Morris, ashamed of his immigrant roots, wants to become a lawyer and assimilate into American society. The younger son, Sammy, secretly becomes a prizefighter under the name "Battling Rooney" to help support the family. When the father falls ill and Morris denies his own parent at an engagement party, Sammy denounces his brother and drags him home. The film was praised for its sympathetic and detailed portrayal of Jewish immigrant life, and was a major commercial success, reportedly grossing $3 million. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A D.W. Griffith silent feature built around the life of John Howard Payne, the impoverished songwriter who wrote "Home, Sweet Home," and three episodic stories in which the song redeems its hearers. Henry B. Walthall plays Payne, with Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, and Robert Harron in the surrounding tales. Shot by G.W. Bitzer and advertised at the time as the first "all-star" cast, the film was produced at the Reliance-Majestic studio and distributed by Mutual. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

An orphan abandoned on a Friday the thirteenth grows up believing she is cursed, and a string of mishaps seems to prove it, until she rescues a fellow orphan from a fire and is adopted by a grieving couple. Mae Marsh plays the superstitious heroine with the naturalness Griffith prized, opposite Robert Harron as the boy next door. Written and supervised by D.W. Griffith and directed by Lloyd Ingraham for the Fine Arts Film Company, the comedy-drama was released through Triangle. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

A Harold Lloyd feature comedy directed by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor. Lloyd plays a young newlywed whose blissful marriage is complicated when his formidable mother-in-law moves in, followed by her shiftless son and her henpecked husband. The film is structured as a series of domestic comic set pieces, culminating in the famous sequence where Lloyd tries to drive home a carload of groceries while a streetcar full of passengers watches in horror. The film's gentle satire of family life and its expertly staged physical comedy make it one of Lloyd's most charming features. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

A Lower East Side boy from an immigrant Jewish family grows up to become a celebrated violinist, only to enlist and head to the trenches as war breaks out. Frank Borzage directed this Cosmopolitan Productions release, adapted by Frances Marion from a Fannie Hurst story, with Vera Gordon's Mama Kantor anchoring the family and Gaston Glass as the adult Leon. The film was a hit and a model for the immigrant-family melodramas that followed. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Made by J. Stuart Blackton at Vitagraph Studios, this short is widely cited as the first American animated film. Blackton combines stop-motion photography of chalk drawings on a blackboard with cut-out figures and a few hand-drawn frames, making faces appear to morph, smile, and react on their own. The technique is crude by modern standards, but the idea of bringing a drawing to life on screen was new. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short

D.W. Griffith's mammoth reply to the criticism of The Birth of a Nation, intercutting four stories of intolerance across the ages: the fall of Babylon, the crucifixion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and a modern labor conflict. The Babylonian sets, with their towering walls and armies of extras, remain among the largest ever built, and the cross-cutting between the strands influenced nearly every epic that followed. Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, and Constance Talmadge lead the enormous cast. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · History · Silent

It is the film that coined the phrase "It girl" and made Clara Bow the embodiment of the 1920s flapper. She plays a department store salesgirl with plenty of "It", that magnetic self-confidence author Elinor Glyn defined on screen, who sets her sights on the store's handsome young owner. Bow's charm carries the whole picture, and the film was a sensation when it was released. Long considered lost, a print surfaced in Prague in the 1960s, and the Library of Congress selected It for the National Film Registry. The film's copyright was renewed in 1954 and expired on January 1, 2023, when it entered the public domain.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

Cecil B. DeMille's first historical epic, with Metropolitan Opera soprano Geraldine Farrar as Joan of Arc, framed by a modern story in which a British officer on the eve of a dangerous mission is inspired by her vision. Wallace Reid, Theodore Roberts, and Hobart Bosworth support, and DeMille's early experiments with color effects light the burning-at-the-stake scenes. Produced through the Cardinal Film Corporation for Paramount, the film was among the first screen spectacles devoted to Joan of Arc. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · History · Silent

A Kentucky horse breeder of the old school loses his fortune at the card table and pins everything on a colt that breaks down in the Futurity, then watches years later as the colt's offspring carries the hopes of his family and his trainer. John Ford directed this gentle Fox silent, one of his lesser-known works, with Henry B. Walthall as the breeder and J. Farrell MacDonald as the loyal trainer. Several real thoroughbreds appear, including the legendary Man o' War. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

The film that introduced the world to Charlie Chaplin's Tramp character. Chaplin plays a spectator at a children's soapbox derby in Venice, California, who keeps wandering into the frame of a newsreel camera, annoying the filmmaker and the crowd. The Tramp's costume—bowler hat, tight jacket, baggy pants, cane, and mustache—appears here for the first time, though the character's personality was still rough and improvisational. The film was shot in a single day at an actual soapbox derby, with Chaplin improvising his gags amid real crowds who didn't know they were watching cinema history. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Ernst Lubitsch's silent adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play about a respectable woman who suspects her husband of infidelity, receives a fan as a birthday gift, and finds herself at a party where the fan becomes the center of a misunderstanding that threatens her reputation. Lubitsch, working without dialogue, strips the play to its emotional mechanics and lets gesture, glance, and editing carry the wit. The result is a showcase for the "Lubitsch touch," the blend of sophistication and feeling that defined his career. Ronald Colman plays the husband and May McAvoy the wife. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Herbert Brenon's silent drama about a circus clown who adopts an abandoned girl and raises her, only to fall in love with her as she grows up and to watch her turn toward a wealthy suitor instead. Lon Chaney plays Tito, a role that lets him do what he did best: contort a face into a smile that hides a wound. The film is built around the gap between the painted grin and the man beneath it, and Chaney's performance in the final scenes is the reason the film is still watched. Loretta Young was fourteen when she played Simonetta, an early role in a career that would run for another half century. The title comes from the opera Pagliacci, and the story follows its logic to its end. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A 1928 American silent crime comedy directed by Elmer Clifton for DeMille Pictures Corporation. Young Gallagher (Frank Coghlan Jr.) wants to be a newspaper reporter. One day he witnesses a murder committed by a mysterious man with only four fingers on one hand. He gives his account of the murder and a description of the killer to his hero, newsman Henry Callahan (Harrison Ford), resulting in his getting a job on the paper as an office boy. When circumstances arise that result in Callahan losing his job, he and Gallagher team up to discover the identity of the killer and help Callahan get his job back. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Comedy · Silent

Marion Davies plays twins separated at birth in this Monta Bell directed comedy-drama: one raised in a wealthy Dutch family, the other in the tenements, who grows up to be a musical-comedy star. The film uses the dual role to contrast old-money respectability with the rough energy of the immigrant streets, and the two worlds collide when the twins fall for the same man. Davies, a gifted comedienne whose talents were often overshadowed by her relationship with William Randolph Hearst, gets to show her range. The film includes early Technicolor and Handschiegl color sequences. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Comedy · Silent

Mary Pickford stars in a dual role as both the young Cedric Errol and his devoted mother "Dearest" in this adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's beloved 1886 novel. Cedric, a poor American boy living in Brooklyn, discovers he is the heir to an English earldom and is sent to live with his estranged, irascible grandfather in England, where his innocence and kindness gradually melt the old man's heart. Directed by Alfred E. Green with uncredited assistance from Jack Pickford, the film was one of Pickford's most successful productions and showcased her remarkable ability to play both a child and an adult in the same picture. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Family · Silent

Winsor McCay's first animated film, based on his own popular newspaper comic Little Nemo in Slumberland. The short opens with live-action footage of McCay making a bet that he can bring his drawings to life, then cuts to the animation: Nemo and his friends stretch, flip, and grow in surreal ways that were impossible in live action. McCay hand-drew every frame himself, a level of labor that set the standard for character animation. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short

Paul Fejos's lyrical tone poem about two lonely strangers in New York City who meet at Coney Island and fall in love over the course of a single day, only to be separated by the crowd and the city's relentless pace. Glenn Tryon and Barbara Kent play the unnamed couple, whose brief connection stands in vivid contrast to the mechanized urban world around them. The film features early Technicolor sequences at Coney Island and brief synchronized sound dialogue scenes, making it a fascinating transitional work between the silent and sound eras. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A silent comedy directed by Frank Capra, starring Harry Langdon as Harry Shelby, a sheltered young man who finally receives his first pair of long pants—a rite of passage into manhood. But when he falls for a seductive female smuggler, his innocence leads him into a world of danger and absurdity. Langdon's baby-faced, slow-burn comedy style was a sensation in the mid-1920s, and Capra—who was then Langdon's writer-director—helped craft some of his best films. The partnership ended acrimoniously when Langdon fired Capra, a decision that contributed to Langdon's rapid career decline. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Maurice Tourneur's atmospheric adaptation of R.D. Blackmore's 1869 novel, set in 17th-century Exmoor, England. Madge Bellamy stars as Lorna Doone, a young woman raised by a clan of outlaw Doones who falls in love with John Ridd (John Bowers), a farmer's son whose father was murdered by the Doones. Tourneur, one of the great visual poets of silent cinema, brought a painterly sensibility to the moors and the romance, creating one of the most admired literary adaptations of the era. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Adventure · Silent

MGM's second teaming of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, this time in a loose silent adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The studio changed the title from Heat to Love so the marquee could read "Garbo and Gilbert in Love," one of the great publicity stunts of the silent era. The plot follows a married woman who ruins her social standing for a young officer, and the film leans hard into the erotic chemistry that made the pair famous after Flesh and the Devil. Edmund Goulding directed, and William Daniels photographed Garbo in the soft light that became her signature. The film is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Drama · Silent

Charlie Chaplin's very first film, directed by Henry Lehrman for Keystone Studios. Chaplin plays a smooth-talking swindler who competes with another man for the affections of a woman, then fakes his own death to get a newspaper story published. The character is not yet the Tramp—Chaplin wears a top hat, frock coat, and monocle, and his performance is broad and stagey, still rooted in the music hall tradition. Chaplin was reportedly unhappy with Lehrman's direction and editing, and the experience motivated him to demand creative control over his subsequent films, leading to the revolution in screen comedy that followed. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Dziga Vertov's radical experiment: a day in the life of Soviet cities shot by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, assembled with every trick the silent era allowed — split screens, double exposure, freeze frames, slow motion, and editing so fast it still feels modern. Vertov's "Kino-Eye" manifesto argued the camera could reveal truths invisible to the naked eye, and the film keeps showing its own machinery, including the cameraman at work and the audience watching. Routinely ranked among the greatest documentaries ever made. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

Gloria Swanson stars as Tessie McGuire, a department store clerk who rises through New York's social strata after a wealthy man takes an interest in her, only to discover that high society can be as exploitative as the shop floor. Directed by Allan Dwan from a story by Frank R. Adams, the film is a sharp class comedy that gives Swanson ample opportunity to display both comic timing and dramatic depth. The film's critique of urban capitalism and its treatment of working women was unusual for a mainstream Paramount production of the period. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

Two of America's great modernist photographers, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, spent a summer shooting New York City and assembled the result into this ten-minute film, organized around lines from Walt Whitman's poetry. Skyscrapers, harbor traffic, and crowds are framed as pure geometry — it is generally considered the first avant-garde film made in America and the earliest of the "city symphony" documentaries that culminated in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Man with a Movie Camera. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent · Short

Cecil B. DeMille's social drama about Lydia Thorne (Leatrice Joy), a wealthy, reckless socialite whose careless driving kills a policeman and lands her in prison. There she encounters the district attorney who prosecuted her, Daniel O'Bannon (Thomas Meighan), a man who once loved her, and Evangelin (Lois Wilson), a selfless fellow inmate whose example forces Lydia to confront the moral emptiness of her privileged life. The film's parallels between Jazz Age excess and Roman decadence, conveyed through one of DeMille's trademark flashback sequences, gave it a moral weight that resonated with 1920s audiences. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Crime · Silent

A silent comedy-drama directed by Victor Fleming, based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. Clara Bow stars as Alverna, a restless manicurist from Minneapolis who marries a backwoods trader (Ernest Torrence) to escape city life, only to find herself bored in the wilderness. When a city lawyer (Percy Marmont) arrives on a fishing trip, Alverna sees her chance to return to civilization—with disastrous results. The film showcases Bow at the height of her "It Girl" fame, her magnetic energy and modern sensibility clashing with the primitive frontier setting. Fleming's direction captures both the beauty of the Canadian wilderness and the claustrophobia of a love triangle with no easy exit. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

Carl Theodor Dreyer's intimate domestic drama about a husband who takes his hardworking wife for granted, mistreats her, and is reformed by the quiet intervention of his old nanny. After Ida is driven to leave, the nanny moves in, takes over the household, and forces Viktor to confront how much his wife did and how little he appreciated it. Dreyer, better known for his austere spiritual films like The Passion of Joan of Arc, here works in a warm, observational register, using close-ups and carefully composed interiors to build a portrait of a marriage. The film was a commercial success in Denmark and helped establish Dreyer's reputation. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

In a vast future city, the wealthy live in pleasure gardens above ground while workers toil underground to keep the machines running. Freder, the son of the city's master, follows a woman into the workers' city and sees the human cost of his father's order. A robot built in the shape of Maria is set loose to destroy the workers' hope. Fritz Lang's film is one of the most influential ever made; its images echo through every science fiction film since, from the robot design to the towering cityscape. The film was cut down and re-edited for years after its premiere, and a near-complete restoration was assembled decades later from archives around the world. Thea von Harbou wrote the screenplay and the novel it is based on. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Sci-Fi · Silent

Mabel Normand's only feature-length production, made under the banner of the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company, a short-lived division of Mack Sennett's Keystone studio. Normand plays Mickey, a tomboyish orphan raised in a western mining camp who is sent to live with her aunt in New York society. The film's production was troubled — it was begun in 1916, halted by Normand's illness, and then shelved for nearly two years because distributors thought it was a flop. When it finally screened at a small theater in Bayside, Long Island, it became a surprise smash, eventually grossing millions and proving that Normand could carry a feature as easily as a two-reel comedy. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

Directed by William C. deMille (Cecil's older brother) and based on Zona Gale's Pulitzer Prize-winning play and novel, this silent drama is a quietly devastating portrait of a woman's self-emergence. Lois Wilson stars as Lulu Bett, an unmarried woman in a dull Midwestern town who serves as an unpaid household drudge for her sister and overbearing brother-in-law. When a chance at marriage seems to offer escape, only to collapse, Lulu gradually evolves from servitude into self-assurance. The film was selected for the National Film Registry in 2001. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

John Gilbert stars as Edmond Dantès in this Fox Film Corporation adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's classic novel of wrongful imprisonment and revenge. Directed by Emmett J. Flynn, the film follows Dantès from his betrayal by jealous rivals, through years of solitary confinement in the Château d'If, to his transformation into the Count of Monte Cristo and his methodical vengeance against those who destroyed his life. Estelle Taylor plays Mercedes, the woman he loves. Long thought lost, a print surfaced in the Czech Republic and the film has been restored. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Adventure · Silent

Vsevolod Pudovkin's adaptation of the Maxim Gorky novel, set during the failed Russian revolution of 1905. Vera Baranovskaya plays a timid working-class mother whose son Pavel (Nikolai Batalov) joins the strike against the factory owners; when he is arrested, she takes up the cause herself and is transformed from bystander into revolutionary. Pudovkin uses montage for emotion rather than Eisenstein's intellectual collision — the famous sequence cuts the prison break to melting ice on the river, movement itself becoming hope. Made at Mezhrabpom-Rus studio, it was a huge international success and established Pudovkin as a major director alongside Eisenstein. Baranovskaya's performance is often cited among the greatest of the silent era. The film is in the public domain.

Drama · Silent

Lon Chaney plays a dual role — both the Chinese patriarch Mr. Wu and his grandfather — in this MGM silent drama directed by William Nigh. When Wu's daughter Nang Ping (Renée Adorée) falls in love with a young Englishman and becomes pregnant, Wu kills her according to custom and then turns his vengeance on the Englishman's family. Louise Dresser co-stars as the mother who offers her own life to save her children. Chaney's elaborate makeup and prosthetics for the role were as remarkable as ever, though the film's racial politics have not aged well. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a hapless man who is tricked into marrying a woman from a large, combative family of roughnecks. The in-laws torment him relentlessly, but when a bootlegger hides a stash of liquor in their house, Keaton's ingenuity turns the tables on his tormentors. The film's comic premise—Keaton as the outnumbered outsider in a hostile household—allows for a cascade of physical gags and clever set pieces. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

The first feature-length documentary and still one of the most famous ever made. Robert Flaherty spent years among the Inuit of the Hudson Bay region and returned with the story of Nanook — really a hunter named Allakariallak — and his family struggling through an Arctic winter. Flaherty staged and romanticized much of it: "Nanook's" family was cast for the film, and harpoons were used after rifles had already arrived. Critics have argued about that for a century, but the film invented the documentary feature and remains gripping survival cinema. The film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline, often described as a comic Romeo and Juliet. Keaton plays a young man in love with the girl next door, but their families are feuding and have built a fence between their tenement houses. The boy's attempts to reach his beloved involve increasingly elaborate acrobatic stunts, including a spectacular sequence where Keaton is tossed back and forth between the two families like a human projectile. The film's blend of romantic longing and breathtaking physical comedy makes it one of Keaton's most charming early shorts. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

A Harold Lloyd short directed by Fred Newmeyer. Lloyd plays a young man who, believing his girlfriend has rejected him for another, decides to end it all. But every suicide attempt fails spectacularly—he can't even jump out a window without landing on a fire escape. The film's masterstroke is a vertiginous sequence on a construction site, where Lloyd dangles from a girder high above the street, a precursor to his famous skyscraper climb in Safety Last! (1923). The film's dark comic premise—suicide as slapstick—is handled with Lloyd's characteristic optimism, as the boy's despair gives way to increasingly inventive physical comedy. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

A Canadian wilderness drama based on James Oliver Curwood's own 1919 novel, co-directed by David Hartford and Curwood himself. Lon Chaney plays Buck McDougall, a man who fabricates evidence that Nanette Roland's (Betty Blythe) long-absent fiancé Raoul Challoner (Lewis Stone) is dead so he can marry her. When Raoul returns alive, a fight erupts, a man is killed, and Raoul and Nanette flee into the northern wilderness with the North West Mounted Police in pursuit. The film features extensive location photography of the Canadian wilderness and a dramatic bear fight sequence. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, made without securing the rights. The names were changed but the Stoker estate sued anyway and won, ordering all copies destroyed. A few survived, which is why we can watch it today. Count Orlok, the rat-faced vampire, buys a house in the fictional town of Wisborg and brings plague with him from Transylvania. Max Schreck's performance is still unsettling a century later. The film is a landmark of German Expressionist cinema and one of the earliest feature-length horror films.

Horror · Silent

Jackie Coogan, fresh from his triumph in Chaplin's *The Kid* (1921), stars as Dickens's orphan hero in this First National silent adaptation directed by Frank Lloyd. Lon Chaney plays Fagin, the sinister fence who trains young street urchins as pickpockets, in one of his most memorable character performances beneath layers of makeup. The film was considered lost for decades until a print surfaced in Yugoslavia in 1973. Sol Lesser produced the picture for Jackie Coogan Productions at a budget of nearly half a million dollars, with elaborate sets recreating Victorian London. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A 1922 American Gothic silent mystery film directed by D. W. Griffith. The plot revolves around a series of murders on a wealthy estate and the attempts of the cast to uncover the murderer's identity. A young orphan girl (Carol Dempster), courted by an unpleasant older wealthy man who has a hold over her adoptive mother, falls in love with a young stranger (Henry Hull) at a party. Odd noises begin to be heard as a group of bootleggers clandestinely try to get away with their hidden loot. One of them is killed and the young man is suspected of being the killer. Griffith reassembled the cast and shot a new ending involving a terrifying hurricane, using a combination of real hurricane footage and studio special effects. The film is in the public domain.

Mystery · Crime · Silent

Widely considered one of the greatest comedy shorts ever made, One Week was Buster Keaton's first independent release as a director-star. A newlywed couple receives a prefabricated house in a box, with instructions to assemble it in one week. But a jealous rival has tampered with the numbering, and the resulting house is a surreal architectural nightmare—walls where doors should be, stairs leading nowhere, and a facade that defies gravity. The film culminates in one of Keaton's most celebrated sequences: the house, caught in a storm, is swept onto train tracks and demolished by a locomotive. Keaton's engineering genius and deadpan physical comedy are on full display in every frame. The film was selected for the National Film Registry in 2008. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

D.W. Griffith's lavish silent epic, set against the French Revolution. Two orphaned sisters, the sighted Henriette (Lillian Gish) and the blind Louise (Dorothy Gish), travel to Paris seeking a cure and are swept apart by aristocratic abduction and the coming Terror, until a kindly chevalier (Joseph Schildkraut) and the rise of Danton (Monte Blue) turn the tide. Griffith built enormous period sets and staged crowd scenes on a scale to rival Intolerance, and the film marked Lillian Gish's final role for him. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Willie McKay travels south to claim his inheritance, unaware that his family has been locked in a generations-long feud with the Canfields. On the journey he meets and falls for Virginia Canfield, and is invited to the Canfield home, where the men want to kill him but southern hospitality forbids them from shooting a guest under their own roof. Willie stretches his stay as long as he can, then escapes into a chase that moves to a river, where he dangles from a rope over a waterfall and swings to rescue Virginia from the rapids. The falls and cliff stunts were done for real. Keaton's own father, Joe Keaton, plays the train engineer, and his wife Natalie Talmadge plays the lead. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Action · Romance · Silent

A silent Western comedy directed by and starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, with Buster Keaton and Al St. John in supporting roles. The film is a parody of Western movie conventions, with Arbuckle as a drifter who arrives in a lawless frontier town, tangles with a saloon owner, and rescues a damsel in distress. Keaton, still in his early years as a supporting player in Arbuckle's Comique films, has a smaller role but already displays the comic precision that would make him a star. The film features the kind of rough-and-tumble slapstick that defined Arbuckle's Comique comedies, with plenty of barroom brawls, pratfalls, and visual gags. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Western · Silent

The first film adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play, made with Barrie's blessing and his personal choice of Betty Bronson for the title role. Herbert Brenon's production preserves the stage business, including an animal impersonator as the Darling family's dog Nana and the crocodile, and the famous moment when the audience is asked to clap if they believe in fairies. Ernest Torrence's Captain Hook set the template for every screen Hook to follow, and the film's success helped convince a young Walt Disney that Peter Pan was worth adapting himself. Long thought lost, a copy was recovered by film historian James Card in the 1950s. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Fantasy · Adventure · Family · Silent

Chaplin's last film for Essanay before he jumped to Mutual for ten times the salary. Released from prison, Chaplin's ex-convict is determined to go straight, but the world won't let him: a bogus parson swindles him out of what little money he has, and an old cellmate ropes him into a bungled burglary. Inside the house, the family's daughter (Edna Purviance) takes pity on the would-be thief, giving the short a surprising streak of sympathy for its outcast hero. Less frenetic than the earlier Essanays, Police points toward the blend of slapstick and sentiment Chaplin would perfect at Mutual. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

Directed by Raoul Walsh, Regeneration is a 1915 American silent crime drama and one of the first full-length gangster films. Based on the 1903 memoir My Mamie Rose by Owen Frawley Kildare, the film stars Rockliffe Fellowes as Owen Conway, a poor orphan who rises to become a gang leader on the Lower East Side before a chance encounter with social worker Marie Deering (Anna Q. Nilsson) inspires him to seek redemption. Long feared lost, the film was rediscovered by preservationist David Shepard and selected for the United States National Film Registry in 2000. It was the first full-length feature directed by Walsh, who would go on to become one of Hollywood's most prolific directors.

Crime · Drama · Silent

Henry King's adaptation of George Eliot's novel was filmed on location in Florence, giving this tale of Renaissance intrigue an authenticity Hollywood couldn't build on a backlot. Lillian Gish plays Romola, the scholar's daughter whose world collapses when she discovers her charming husband Tito (a young William Powell in an early villainous role) has betrayed her father, secretly wed the trusting Tessa (Dorothy Gish), and sold his loyalty to Savonarola's enemies. Ronald Colman co-stars as the principled Carlo Bucellini. The climactic bonfire of the vanities — with the real Piazza della Signoria standing in for itself — makes the film a lavish time capsule of 1920s prestige filmmaking. Published in 1924, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A small-town clerk moves to the city to make his fortune and tells his sweetheart back home he is a success. When she visits, he has to keep up the act, and to earn real money he arranges a publicity stunt in which a friend will climb the outside of the department store. The friend is chased off by a policeman, so the clerk does the climb himself, floor by floor, dodging pigeons, a collapsing ledge, a flagpole, and finally a clock that leaves him hanging from its hands high above the street. The climb is the most famous image in silent comedy. Harold Lloyd produced the film, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor directed, and real buildings on real streets were used with carefully placed platforms just out of frame. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Action · Silent

Alla Nazimova produced and stars in this adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play, with Charles Bryant directing. Nazimova plays Salomé, the stepdaughter of Herod who demands the head of John the Baptist in exchange for her dance. The film is a sustained art-deco experiment, shot almost entirely on a single set draped in beaded curtains, with designs by Natacha Rambova that lean hard into the stylized look Wilde's text invites. The cast and crew were largely gay and lesbian, and the production has long been read as a coded piece of queer cinema. It was a financial failure on release and nearly disappeared, but surviving prints made it one of the most talked-about rediscoveries when 1923 works entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Drama · Religious · Silent

John Ford's Salute is a military drama set at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, where two brothers — one a West Point cadet, the other a Navy midshipman — find themselves on opposite sides during the annual Army-Navy football game. George O'Brien stars as the older brother, with Helen Chandler as the love interest. The film features early sound sequences and was made during the transition from silent to sound cinema. A young John Wayne, then a prop man and extra at Fox, served as an assistant on the production. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent · War

A young broker learns he will inherit seven million dollars only if he is married by seven o'clock that evening. His proposal to his longtime sweetheart goes badly, so his business partner puts an ad in the paper, and soon hundreds of would-be brides in wedding veils descend on the church. Jimmie spends the second half of the film running for his life through the city, chased by the brides and then by a cascading avalanche of boulders that he dodges down a hillside in one of the great chase sequences in silent comedy. Keaton reportedly disliked the play the film was based on but bought it anyway, then let his gag men rework it. The boulder chase grew organically from a handful of rocks into the famous stampede.

Comedy · Action · Romance · Silent

A silent comedy directed by and starring Max Linder, the French comedian whom Charlie Chaplin called "my professor." Linder plays a wealthy young man who breaks a mirror and becomes convinced he is cursed with seven years of bad luck. His attempts to avoid catastrophe only create more chaos, culminating in a famous sequence where his servant, believing Max has been murdered, tries to dispose of a "body" that is actually Max himself. The film's most celebrated scene—a split-body gag where Max appears to be severed in half by a closing door—was later echoed in Keaton's Sherlock Jr. Linder's elegant, understated comic style was a major influence on Chaplin and the entire silent comedy tradition. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

7th Heaven is the romance that won Frank Borzage the first Academy Award for Best Director and helped win Janet Gaynor the first Best Actress award. She plays Diane, a young woman abused by her sister and rescued from the Paris slums by Chico, a sewer worker who invents a marriage to protect her. Their love grows real, only to be interrupted by the First World War. Borzage directs with a soaring, almost spiritual faith in love that survives distance and death. The film was a huge hit for Fox and was selected for the National Film Registry. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Romance · Drama · Silent

Shadows is a silent drama starring Lon Chaney as Yen Sin, a gentle Chinese immigrant who settles in a small New England town and quietly befriends the community while operating a laundry. When he discovers a plot to blackmail the local minister (Harrison Ford) and his wife (Marguerite De La Motte), Yen Sin devises a plan to expose the scheme. Chaney's nuanced portrayal of a sympathetic Chinese character was notable for its era, spending hours each morning applying his makeup. Directed by Tom Forman and produced by B.P. Schulberg through Preferred Pictures, the film was praised by critics upon release. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A 1916 American silent film and the only surviving filmed record of William Gillette's legendary stage performance as Sherlock Holmes. Directed by Arthur Berthelet for Essanay Studios, the film adapts Gillette's 1899 play, which drew on Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Final Problem," and A Study in Scarlet. Gillette had played Holmes over 1,300 times on stage and shaped many of the character's iconic elements, including the deerstalker hat and calabash pipe. Long believed lost, a nitrate print was discovered in the Cinémathèque Française archive in 2014 and restored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The film is in the public domain.

Mystery · Crime · Silent

The 1922 Sherlock Holmes stars John Barrymore as Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective in one of the earliest surviving feature-length adaptations of the character. Roland Young, later famous for the Topper films, plays Dr. Watson, while Gustav von Seyffertitz portrays Moriarty. A young William Powell appears in a supporting role, years before his own stardom. Produced by Goldwyn Pictures and directed by Albert Parker, the film was long considered lost until a print was recovered in the 1970s. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Mystery · Silent

A projectionist who dreams of being a detective is framed for a theft he did not commit and banished by his rival. Back in the booth he falls asleep and walks into the film on screen, becoming the world's greatest detective, Sherlock Jr. The movie inside the movie is a parade of stunts, including a famous sequence where Keaton rides on the handlebars of a motorcycle through traffic, unaware the driver has fallen off. The scene where the screen keeps cutting to new locations while Keaton stays in place was one of the earliest jokes about editing itself. Keaton wrote, directed, and performed his own stunts, and broke his neck on the water-tower gag without realizing it for years.

Comedy · Action · Silent

Shoes is a social-problem drama directed by Lois Weber, one of the most important women directors of the silent era. Mary MacLaren stars as Eva Meyer, a young shopgirl who works in a five-and-dime store to support her destitute family. When her worn-out shoes finally fall apart and she cannot afford new ones, she faces an agonizing moral dilemma. Weber's film is a powerful indictment of poverty and the exploitation of working women, made with a realism and sensitivity that was unusual for its time. The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2014. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Richard Barthelmess plays "Bilge" Smith, a hard-fisted merchant sailor who puts into a sleepy New England port and falls for Connie Martin (Dorothy Mackaill), the town dressmaker, in this silent adaptation of Hubert Osborne's 1922 Broadway play. Directed by John S. Robertson for Barthelmess's own Inspiration Pictures, it mixes roughhouse comedy — including a memorably chaotic shipboard brawl — with a tender romance about two lonely people from very different worlds. The story proved durable: RKO remade it a decade later as the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936). As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

A Laurel and Hardy silent short directed by James Parrott for Hal Roach Studios. Ollie and his wife invite Stan over for a quiet Sunday, but Stan's arrival turns the domestic peace into chaos. A golf outing degenerates into a series of disasters, and the boys end up in a mud fight with a group of women golfers. The film's comic premise—the destructive potential of an unwanted houseguest—was a perfect vehicle for the duo's escalating misfortune. The golf sequences showcase their physical comedy in an outdoor setting, and the escalating mud fight is a classic Roach studio free-for-all. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Short · Silent

A Charlie Chaplin comedy set during World War I, released just weeks before the Armistice. Chaplin's Little Fellow enlists in the army, endures the absurdities of military training, and is sent to the trenches of France, where his bumbling courage leads him to capture a group of German soldiers and infiltrate enemy lines. The film was a risky proposition—making comedy out of an ongoing war—but it was a enormous hit with both audiences and soldiers, who appreciated its humane, anti-authoritarian spirit. Chaplin's genius for finding comedy in adversity is on full display, particularly in the famous sequence where he sleeps in a flooded trench while standing upright. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · War · Silent

King Vidor's affectionate comedy about a small-town girl who comes to Hollywood to become a dramatic star and ends up a hit in slapstick instead. Marion Davies plays Peggy Pepper, and the role is a quiet argument for her real talent: she was a gifted comedienne whose reputation was buried under the myth that William Randolph Hearst's patronage was the only reason she worked. Vidor fills the film with cameos from real stars of the era, including Charlie Chaplin playing himself in a single scene, and stages gags that gently mock the machinery of stardom. The film was made at the very end of the silent era and is one of the best records of how a studio lot actually functioned. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

Smouldering Fires is a silent drama directed by Clarence Brown for Universal Pictures. Pauline Frederick stars as Aurelie Kimball, a successful businesswoman whose much younger secretary (Laura La Plante) catches the eye of her husband, setting in motion a story of jealousy, desire, and self-discovery. The film explores the tensions between age, ambition, and romantic longing with a subtlety characteristic of Brown's direction. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A silent fairy-tale feature directed by J. Searle Dawley for Famous Players, starring Marguerite Clark, who reprises her Broadway stage role as Snow White. The film follows the Brothers Grimm tale of a princess menaced by her jealous stepmother, sheltered by dwarfs in the forest, and restored to her prince. Long believed lost in a vault fire, a substantially complete print with Dutch intertitles was rediscovered in Amsterdam in 1992 and restored by the George Eastman Museum. Walt Disney reportedly cited this film as the inspiration for his 1937 animated feature. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Fantasy · Silent

A silent comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch for Warner Bros. Dr. Paul Giraud (Monte Blue), a respectable Parisian physician, and his wife Suzanne (Patsy Ruth Miller) become entangled in a web of romantic misunderstandings when a flirtatious dancer and her husband move into their apartment building. The film is a showcase for the "Lubitsch Touch"—the director's trademark blend of sophisticated wit, sexual innuendo, and elegant visual storytelling. The famous dance sequence, where the characters' increasingly frantic movements mirror their emotional confusion, is one of Lubitsch's most celebrated silent set pieces. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

A young woman flees her marriage on the train to a small town and ends up in a desert film camp, where she stumbles into the movie business and becomes an extra, then a star. novelist and filmmaker Rupert Hughes wrote, produced, and directed the picture from his own novel, and the result is one of the great inside-Hollywood silents, full of real behind-the-scenes footage of a working studio. The film-within-a-film sequences show cameras cranking, sets being built, and stunts being rigged, and a string of famous directors of the day, including Erich von Stroheim and Fred Niblo, appear as themselves. Eleanor Boardman, in one of her first leads, carries the picture as Remember Steddon, a runaway who learns that fame costs something. Barbara La Marr, the "girl who was too beautiful," plays her rival. The film was a Goldwyn release and is one of the quieter rediscoveries of the 1923 public domain class. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Sparrows stars Mary Pickford as Molly, the oldest orphan on a Louisiana bayou "baby farm" run by the cruel Mr. Grimes (Gustav von Seyffertitz). When a kidnapped baby is brought to the farm, Molly resolves to lead the children to safety across the treacherous swamplands. Directed by William Beaudine and produced by Pickford through her own company, the film is a Gothic melodrama featuring atmospheric photography by Charles Rosher, Karl Struss, and Hal Mohr, including a celebrated night sequence in the alligator-infested swamp. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent · Thriller

Harold Lloyd's last silent feature, and a love letter to New York City shot largely on location. Lloyd plays a young man so perpetually in a hurry that everyone calls him "Speedy," who tries to save his girlfriend's grandfather's horse-drawn streetcar from a transit monopoly bent on putting it out of business. The set pieces are built around motion: a wild cab ride to Coney Island, a baseball game at the old Yankee Stadium, and a finale in which Speedy rounds up a crowd of fans to move the horse-car to its barn before a deadline. The location footage of 1920s New York is now a documentary record as much as a comedy. Lloyd produced the film through his own company and retired from silent filmmaking as sound took over. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Comedy · Silent

A steamboat captain's effete college son comes home to a Mississippi river town and falls for the daughter of his father's business rival. Willie tries to live up to the image of the rough riverman his father wants, with little success, until a cyclone tears through the town. The storm sequence is the film's centerpiece, with buildings collapsing around Keaton, and it contains the most famous single shot in silent comedy: the full facade of a house drops over him and he survives only because he is standing exactly where an open window in the wall passes around his body. The real clearance was a matter of inches. Keaton's deadpan expression never changes throughout. This was his last independent production before moving to MGM.

Comedy · Action · Silent

A small-town woman marries a wealthy man, finds herself out of place in his social world, and eventually sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of her daughter's future. Belle Bennett gives the definitive performance of the mother who, recognizing that her daughter will have a better life without her, steps aside and lets the girl's father and his new wife raise her. Ronald Colman plays the husband, and Lois Moran the daughter who grows up ashamed of her mother and then too late realizes what she has lost. Henry King directs with the emotional directness that made the film a major hit. The story was filmed again in 1937 with Barbara Stanwyck. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Mary Pickford plays a celebrated dual role in this Marshall Neilan drama adapted from William J. Locke's novel by Frances Marion. Stella Maris is a rich, sheltered invalid who has never been allowed to see the world's ugliness; Unity Blake is a beaten-down orphan from the workhouse who knows nothing else. When Unity is taken into the household of Stella's cousin (Conway Tearle), the two women's lives cross in ways neither understands, and Pickford's transformation into the plain, hunched Unity remains startling — she asked to be made as unbeautiful as possible. One of the best showcases of what silent-era star vehicles could do when their stars wanted to act rather than pose. Published in 1918, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Frank Borzage's silent romance about a destitute woman in Naples who flees the police and finds love with a struggling painter, only for the past to catch up with her. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell were paired here for the first time and became one of Fox's most popular screen couples, making a string of films together through the early sound years. The film is one of three for which Gaynor received the first Academy Award for Best Actress, awarded for her body of work that year rather than a single performance. Borzage's direction favors a soft, fatalistic sentimentality that was out of step with the harder realism coming into fashion, but the film's emotional directness is its own thing. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

F.W. Murnau's first American film and one of the high points of silent cinema. A farmer is lured by a woman from the city into a plan to drown his wife and run away with her; the wife escapes, the husband is consumed by guilt, and the two travel by tram to the city, where their marriage is slowly, tenderly rebuilt. The story is simple, almost a fable, but Murnau tells it with layered dissolves, forced perspective, and tracking shots that move through spaces as if the camera were breathing. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss shared the first ever Academy Award for cinematography, and the film won the only Oscar ever given for "Unique and Artistic Picture." Janet Gaynor's performance is the quiet center of the film. Its copyright was renewed in 1954, and it entered the public domain on January 1, 2023.

Romance · Drama · Silent

A 1921 silent Western directed by Charles Bartlett and produced by Neal Hart Productions. Corporal Jack Borden of the Northwest Mounted Police trails the man who killed his partner to New York City, where the killer is selling worthless stock in a gold mine. With the help of Blanche Hall, Borden locates the man in a Bowery dive, but he escapes back to Canada. Along the way, Borden discovers that Blanche and his sweetheart Milly are long-separated sisters and brings about a reconciliation. The film stars Neal Hart and Violet Palmer. The film is in the public domain.

Western · Action · Silent

A Keystone comedy directed by Mack Sennett, featuring Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle together on screen. Set in a dance hall, the film features Chaplin as a troublemaker who disrupts the dancing, while Arbuckle appears as a large, clumsy tango enthusiast. The film is a rough, raw example of the Keystone style—fast, chaotic, and full of physical mayhem—made before Chaplin developed the Tramp character that would make him world-famous. Seeing Chaplin and Arbuckle together is a rare treat; both would go on to become two of the most important figures in silent comedy. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Tess of the Storm Country is a 1914 silent drama directed by pioneer filmmaker Edwin S. Porter and starring Mary Pickford as Tessibel Skinner, a spirited young woman from a community of squatters living at the bottom of a hill. When a wealthy man builds a house atop the hill and seeks to evict the squatters, Tess fights to protect her family and neighbors. Based on the 1909 novel by Grace Miller White, the film was a major hit and helped establish Pickford as "America's Sweetheart." She would reprise the role in a 1922 remake. The film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2006. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A secret society holds a meeting to determine what to do about a powerful and dangerous man whom they have been studying closely for the past three months. They all agree that he deserves to die. Two of the members, Farallone and Forrest, are both in love with Lilith, the group's only female member. But Lilith accepts neither of them, preferring to devote herself to the group's cause. When the group meets again and deals cards to all the members, Forrest draws the ace of hearts, meaning that he will be the one to carry out the assassination. Lilith then suddenly agrees to marry him, in order to give him courage. But after their first night together, both of them begin to feel differently about what they have planned. Lon Chaney stars in this silent crime drama directed by Wallace Worsley, distributed by Goldwyn Pictures Corporation. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama · Silent

The last of Charlie Chaplin's twelve Mutual comedies, directed by and starring Chaplin. He plays an escaped convict who rescues a wealthy family from a cave-in and is taken in as their butler. His new respectability is threatened when a detective recognizes him, leading to a spectacular chase through the city and down to the docks. The film features some of Chaplin's most celebrated physical sequences, including the famous opening escape along a cliffside and the dockside finale where he balances on a rolling barrel. The Mutual shorts are widely considered the finest work of Chaplin's early career, and The Adventurer is a fitting capstone. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

The oldest surviving animated feature film, made by Lotte Reiniger over three years using silhouette animation. Reiniger cut every figure by hand from paper and lead, then photographed them frame by frame on a multiplane camera she and Carl Koch designed. The story draws from the Arabian Nights: Prince Achmed rides a mechanical horse, battles demons, and courts Princess Peri Banu across a world of shadow and color tinted by hand. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Fantasy

The Affairs of Anatol is a 1921 silent comedy-drama directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Wallace Reid as Anatol, a wealthy man who repeatedly tries to "save" women from moral peril, often to the distress of his wife Vivian (Gloria Swanson). Based on the 1893 play by Arthur Schnitzler, the film features a lavish production design by Paul Iribe and showcases DeMille's growing taste for opulent sets and decadent subject matter. The all-star cast includes Bebe Daniels as the mysterious Satan Synne, Elliott Dexter, Wanda Hawley, and Monte Blue. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Romance · Silent

A D.W. Griffith silent feature inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, particularly "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "Annabel Lee." A young man (Henry B. Walthall) lives under the tyrannical rule of his uncle, whose murder he plots and commits. But guilt gnaws at him—apparitions of Poe's vision haunt his waking hours, and the beating of a dead heart seems to echo from beneath the floorboards. Griffith blends psychological horror with pastoral romance, intercutting the nephew's torment with scenes of courtship with his sweetheart (Blanche Sweet). Cinematographer G.W. Bitzer's inventive use of tinting and irises gives the film a dreamlike, Expressionist quality that anticipates the German Expressionist movement. Released August 2, 1914, the film is in the public domain.

Horror · Drama · Crime · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a young man who wanders into a balloon and accidentally launches himself into the sky. He crash-lands in the wilderness, where he encounters a young woman and demonstrates his survival skills—or lack thereof. The film features a series of inventive gags involving canoes, fishing, and campfire cooking, all executed with Keaton's trademark deadpan precision. Though one of his lesser-known shorts, The Balloonatic showcases Keaton's ability to find comedy in any setting, from the sky to the rapids. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent · Adventure

A masked criminal known as the Bat terrorizes the guests of an old dark house rented by a mystery writer, while a stolen bank fortune is hidden somewhere inside. The Bat announces his crimes in advance and dares the police to stop him, and the household spends the night hunting for the money, the Bat, and a killer who may or may not be the same person. Roland West directed this adaptation of the 1920 Broadway hit by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, and his use of a bat signal and a caped figure inspired Bob Kane's later creation of Batman. The film was considered lost for decades before a print surfaced in the 1980s. Pre-1930 films are in the public domain in the United States.

Horror · Comedy · Silent

The first great war documentary, assembled from footage shot by official cameramen Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell during the opening of the Somme offensive in July 1916. Released in British cinemas while the battle still raged, it was seen by an estimated 20 million people in its first six weeks — audiences at home had never before watched soldiers go over the top on screen. Much of the most harrowing "combat" footage was staged behind the lines, a fact that sparked one of the earliest debates about documentary truth. As a British government film from 1916, it is in the public domain.

War · Documentary · Silent

A silent crime-horror film directed by James Young, based on the 1867 French play Le Juif Polonais by Erckmann-Chatrian. Lionel Barrymore stars as Mathias, an innkeeper who murders a wealthy Jewish merchant for his gold on New Year's Eve, then is haunted by the sound of sleigh bells and ghostly visions. Boris Karloff appears in an early role as a sinister mesmerist who arrives to torment Mathias with supernatural visions of hell. The film blends murder melodrama with Gothic horror, and Karloff's menacing presence, years before Frankenstein made him a star, hints at the iconic monster roles to come. The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Crime · Silent

A loose, swashbuckling portrait of the 15th-century French poet Francois Villon, played by John Barrymore at the height of his stage and screen fame. Villon is a tavern brawler and versifier who runs afoul of King Louis XI, played by the German actor Conrad Veidt in a Hollywood sojourn between Caligari and his later work in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari's shadow. The production was lavish, with sets by William Cameron Menzies and an estimated million-dollar budget. The only surviving domestic print was found years later in Barrymore's own former mansion by its next occupant, Edgar Bergen, and donated to the American Film Institute. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2023.

Adventure · Drama · Silent

A silent comedy directed by Cyril Seaward for Warner Bros., starring Syd Chaplin (Charlie Chaplin's half-brother) as Old Bill, the beloved WWI cartoon character created by Bruce Bairnsfather. Old Bill is a grizzled British soldier in the trenches of France who, along with his mate Bert, navigates the absurdities of army life with phlegmatic humor. The film features a Vitaphone synchronized music score and sound effects, making it one of Warner Bros.' early sound experiments. Bairnsfather's Old Bill was one of the most popular comic characters of the WWI era, and the film captures the character's blend of grumbling resilience and quiet heroism. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · War · Silent

King Vidor's World War I epic follows a wealthy young idler who enlists on a whim, ships out to France, falls for a French farm girl, and is marched into the meat grinder of the Western Front. The film was a sensation: it became the highest-grossing silent film of the 1920s and turned John Gilbert into a major star. Vidor stages the battle sequences with a grim, ground-level realism rare for the period, and the famous march through a forest under shellfire is still studied. Beneath the spectacle is an antiwar streak that distinguishes it from the gung-ho pictures that came after. MGM made it on a large budget and a long schedule, and it paid for itself many times over. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

War · Drama · Romance · Silent

D.W. Griffith's Civil War and Reconstruction epic was the first true blockbuster — the film that proved the feature-length movie could be a mass cultural event. Its technical innovations in cross-cutting, night photography, and large-scale battle staging reshaped the language of cinema. It is also infamous propaganda: adapted from Thomas Dixon's novel *The Clansman*, it depicts the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors and portrays Black characters — mostly white actors in blackface — through vicious racist caricature. The film sparked protests led by the newly formed NAACP and helped inspire the Klan's real-world revival. It is presented here as a historically significant work that must be understood in that context. Published in 1915, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · History · War · Silent

A nobleman's son vows revenge after pirates murder his father, so he infiltrates the pirate band to destroy it from within. Douglas Fairbanks produced, starred in, and drove this swashbuckler, performing his own stunts including the famous slide down a sail on the point of a knife. The film is one of the earliest feature-length pictures shot entirely in two-strip Technicolor, and the limited red-and-green palette gives it a storybook look unlike anything else from the silent era. Fairbanks pushed the budget to roughly $1.3 million, an enormous sum at the time, which limited the profit even though the picture was a hit. The Black Pirate is a landmark of color filmmaking and one of the great action spectacles of the 1920s. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Adventure · Action · Silent

Buster Keaton plays the long-suffering assistant to a monumental blacksmith (Joe Roberts) in this two-reel silent comedy co-directed with Malcolm St. Clair. In twenty minutes Keaton wrecks a Rolls-Royce, mis-shoes a horse, turns the shop's anvil into a weapon, and woos the local girl (Virginia Fox) through escalating disaster. The film is packed with signature Keaton engineering gags — the hinged car body, the horse that lifts a customer skyward — and a nude-statue routine that got the short censored in some territories. Made at the peak of Keaton's shorts period for producer Joseph M. Schenck, a year before he moved into features. Published in 1922, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a man who builds a boat—the "Damfino"—in his basement, only to discover it's too large to fit through the door. After demolishing his house to get it out, he launches the vessel with his family aboard, and things go from bad to worse as the boat proves spectacularly unseaworthy. The film's nautical gags showcase Keaton's gift for engineering-driven comedy, with each mechanical failure cascading into the next. The name "Damfino" (a play on "damn if I know") becomes the film's running punchline, uttered by Keaton each time disaster strikes. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

In a German village, a series of murders follows the arrival of a fairground showman named Dr. Caligari, who displays a sleepwalker named Cesare and claims he can answer any question. Cesare is made to kill at night. The story is told by a young man named Francis, and the truth of what he describes is called into question by the ending. The film defined German Expressionist cinema. Every set was painted with sharp angles and distorted perspective, with no right angles, so that the world itself looks like it is bending. The visual style was a direct influence on film noir and on horror for the next century. Werner Krauss plays Caligari and Conrad Veidt plays Cesare; both performances are unsettling and physical. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Horror · Silent

Buster Keaton's last true silent feature, made after his move to MGM and the last film over which he retained real creative control. He plays a tintype photographer who falls for a studio secretary and decides the way to win her is to become a newsreel cameraman. The gags are built around the camera and the newsreel business: a botched assignment at a Chinese tong war, a famous single-take baseball sequence filmed at Yankee Stadium, and a runaway bedroom that rolls down a hill with Keaton trapped inside. The chemistry with Marceline Day is easy and unforced. MGM would soon team Keaton with sound pictures and a production process that ground him down, which is why The Cameraman is often called the end of his golden period. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

The relatives of the eccentric Cyrus West gather at his brooding mansion twenty years after his death to hear the reading of his will. The heir is Annabelle West, but only if she is deemed sane; otherwise the fortune passes to a successor whose name is sealed in an envelope. Before the lawyer can reveal it, he disappears, and the night brings secret passages, a escaped lunatic known as the Cat, and a growing sense that someone in the house is not what they seem. Paul Leni, a German Expressionist director who came to Hollywood late in his career, blended stylized shadows with broad comedy in a way that defined the "old dark house" genre for decades. The film was a cornerstone of Universal's early horror line and a direct influence on the 1939 Bob Hope remake. Pre-1930 films are in the public domain in the United States.

Horror · Comedy · Silent

A venal socialite embezzles from a charity and turns to a Burmese ivory trader to cover the loss, only to find he expects her body as payment. When she tries to renege, he brands her with a hot iron. Cecil B. DeMille's 1915 melodrama was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for its significance and for Sessue Hayakawa's landmark performance, which made him one of the first Asian stars of American cinema and a genuine matinee idol. The film's treatment of race and sexuality was controversial even at the time: a Japanese-American newspaper in Los Angeles campaigned against it, and the 1918 re-release changed Hayakawa's character from Japanese to Burmese to avoid offending a wartime ally. Fannie Ward plays the spoiled wife whose recklessness sets the catastrophe in motion. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Crime · Silent

Chaplin's Tramp stumbles into a circus and accidentally becomes the star of the show. The audience laughs at him, not with his act but at his bumbling, and the ringmaster realizes the Tramp is the draw. The Tramp himself is oblivious, thinking he is a serious performer. He falls for the ringmaster's daughter, who in turn falls for the tightrope walker. Chaplin produced, directed, wrote, edited, and starred in the film, and composed the score years later. It won an Academy Award for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing, and producing.

Comedy · Silent

A silent college sports drama directed by David Butler for Columbia Pictures. The film follows a college student who rises from underdog to campus hero through athletic prowess, navigating romance and rivalry along the way. Pauline Garon stars as the love interest in one of the many college-themed films that were popular in the 1920s. The film is a product of the era's fascination with collegiate culture, which would reach its peak with Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (1925). The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

A Mutual two-reeler and one of the best of Chaplin's 1916 run. Charlie is a tailor's apprentice who burns a count's trousers with a hot iron and gets fired; the tailor then sneaks off to impersonate the count at a society party, and Charlie turns up in the same borrowed identity. Eric Campbell, Chaplin's towering half-courted villain of the Mutual years, plays the rival suitor, and Edna Purviance is the object of everyone's attention. The party sequence — Charlie dancing, wolfing food off other people's plates, and dodging Campbell — is some of the purest slapstick he ever filmed. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

The Cradle of Courage is a 1920 silent drama starring William S. Hart as 'Square' Kelly, a former crook who serves in World War I and returns home to join the police force — only to find himself confronting his old gang. Directed by Lambert Hillyer and produced by Hart through his own production company, the film explores themes of redemption and moral courage. Ann Little plays Hart's love interest, with Tom Santschi as her criminal brother. The film was distributed by Paramount Pictures through the Artcraft Pictures Corporation. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent · Crime

King Vidor's film about an ordinary man who believes he is meant to be somebody and discovers he is, in fact, nobody. John Sims grows up dreaming of greatness, marries, has children, and slowly drowns in the routine of office work and a marriage that curdles. Vidor opens with a montage of a boy's birth and the title "The crowd laughs with you always, but it will cry with you never," then follows John into a vast, fluorescent office floor that was built as a single set to dwarf him. The film was a departure from the glamour MGM usually sold, and Irving Thalberg reportedly backed it against his own instincts. It was not a hit, but its influence on social realism in American film is hard to overstate. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Silent

A Charlie Chaplin short from his Mutual period, directed by and starring Chaplin. He plays a wealthy alcoholic who arrives at a spa to dry out, bringing a trunk full of liquor instead of luggage. His attempts to "cure" himself are undermined by his own ingenuity, as he shares his stash with the other patients and undermines the spa's strict regimen. The film features one of Chaplin's most celebrated comic devices—the revolving door—and a famous sequence where he accidentally gets everyone drunk at the health spa. The film's gentle satire of wellness culture and its inventive physical comedy make it one of the highlights of the Mutual series. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

A Mack Sennett two-reel comedy built around Ben Turpin and his famous cross-eyed double take. Turpin plays a hapless suitor who competes with Harry Gribbon for the girl, played by Madeline Hurlock, and stumbles through the kind of physical chaos Sennett's studio was known for, with Del Lord directing the mayhem. The surviving version is abridged but keeps the core gags and gives a clean sample of Sennett's short-form style at its peak. Like the other 1923 releases, the film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Comedy · Silent · Short

A roughneck stoker on a coal-fired ship comes ashore for a single night in New York and falls for a dance-hall girl who is trying to kill herself. Josef von Sternberg's fog-shrouded portrait of the waterfront is one of the most exquisitely photographed films of the silent era, with Harold Rosson's cinematography and Hans Dreier's expressionist sets creating a world of smoke, steam, and shadow. George Bancroft is the brawling stoker and Betty Compson the weary dance-hall girl, and the film follows their brief, doomed romance through a single shore leave. The Docks of New York was selected for the National Film Registry in 1999. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A loose adaptation of Pushkin's novel Dubrovsky, with Valentino as a Cossack lieutenant who catches the eye of Catherine the Great, rejects her, and goes on the run. When a corrupt nobleman seizes his father's lands and kills the old man, Vladimir dons a black mask and becomes the Black Eagle, a Robin Hood figure, then infiltrates the nobleman's household as a French tutor and falls for his daughter. Clarence Brown directs with a light, fleet touch, and George Barnes's cinematography includes a celebrated extended tracking shot across a banquet table. Vilma Banky is the love interest and Louise Dresser a memorably imperious Czarina. Valentino, in his first United Artists picture, gets to swashbuckle in the Fairbanks mode and romance in his own, and the balance suits him. Published in 1925, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Adventure · Silent

A Buster Keaton short co-directed with Edward F. Cline. Keaton plays a botanist who, through a mix-up, is hired to electrify a wealthy man's house. He installs a series of automated gadgets—an escalator staircase, a self-setting dinner table, a motorized pool table—that all go hilariously wrong. The film is a showcase for Keaton's engineering ingenuity, with each mechanical contraption designed to fail in the most spectacular way possible. The escalator sequence, where Keaton is repeatedly carried up and dumped back down the stairs, is one of his most celebrated mechanical gags. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Mabel Normand stars as Sue Graham, a small-town girl who wins a fake screen test and heads to Hollywood to become a star, only to find herself working as an extra and a wardrobe assistant while the studio tries to pry her away from her sweetheart back home. The picture balances comic set pieces, including a runaway lion and a chaotic fashion-show sequence, with a behind-the-scenes look at a working studio lot. Mack Sennett produced through his own company, F. Richard Jones directed, and Normand, one of the biggest comediennes of the silent era, gets to play both slapstick and pathos. The film was released by Associated Exhibitors and is one of Normand's surviving features. Its copyright expired at the end of its first term, and it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Comedy · Silent

A silent comedy directed by Alan Crosland, considered the first film to feature a flapper character and a major influence on the 1920s flapper phenomenon. Olive Thomas stars as Genevieve "Ginger" King, a restless young woman sent to a strict boarding school who rebels against convention, sneaks out to parties, and dreams of romance and adventure. The film captures the spirit of the new generation of young women who defied Victorian expectations of propriety. Thomas, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl, brings a natural charm and modern energy to the role. Tragically, she died later that same year at age 25, making this one of her final films. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

Harold Lloyd plays a small-town boy so primed for college life that he has rehearsed his entrance greeting in front of a mirror for months. He arrives on campus full of pep and immediately becomes the patsy of the football team and the joke of the student body, all while believing he is the most popular man in school. The film builds to a football finale where he finally gets his chance on the field. Lloyd's everyman optimism was never better matched to a story, and The Freshman was one of the biggest hits of the silent era. The glasses character, Lloyd's signature screen persona, is in full form here. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

A swaggering gaucho leader in the Argentine Andes falls for a mountain girl, but his head is turned by a woman known as the Miracle Girl of a mountain shrine. Misunderstanding her spiritual hold over him, the mountain girl betrays him to the authorities, and the Gaucho must escape to save the shrine and the priest who sheltered him. Douglas Fairbanks produced, wrote, and starred, and his then-wife Mary Pickford appears in a cameo as the Virgin Mary. The film was shot at the height of Fairbanks's box-office clout, with lavish sets and a budget to match, though he chose to film it in black and white rather than the Technicolor of The Black Pirate. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2023.

Adventure · Drama · Silent

Johnnie Gray is a railroad engineer in the South who is turned down for service when the Civil War breaks out because he is more useful driving trains than fighting. His sweetheart thinks he is a coward. Union spies steal his locomotive, The General, with Annabelle on board, and Johnnie gives chase in another engine. The chase runs in both directions and is built almost entirely from real trains, real track, and real stunts, with no miniatures. The famous shot of a locomotive plunging into a river was a single take with a real engine, and the wreckage sat in the river for years. The film was a commercial disappointment on release but is now regarded as one of the greatest comedies ever made. Buster Keaton produced, directed, and starred, and performed his own stunts.

Comedy · Action · Silent

Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp heads to the Klondike during the gold rush and finds himself stranded in a remote cabin through a blizzard, starving alongside a towering prospector named Big Jim McKay. The famous sequence of Chaplin boiling and eating his boot, twirling the laces like spaghetti, began here. The film follows the prospector into a frontier town, where he falls for a dance-hall girl named Georgia and tries, mostly badly, to win her regard. Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, scored, and starred, and the production was enormous: a full Alaskan town built on a Hollywood backlot, real location work in the Sierra Nevada, and a shoot that ran more than a year. The result is the film Chaplin said he most wanted to be remembered by. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Adventure · Silent

The surviving masterpiece of German expressionist horror. In 16th century Prague, Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) sculpts a giant of clay and brings it to life with a magic word to defend the ghetto from an imperial decree of expulsion — but the Golem (Paul Wegener, who co-directed with Carl Boese) will not remain a servant. The staggered Expressionist sets, built like crooked clay houses, and the creation sequence's Kabbalistic ritual became templates for Frankenstein and every creature feature after. This was Wegener's third Golem film and the only one to survive substantially intact. A century on, it remains genuinely uncanny. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Horror · Fantasy · Silent

The film usually credited with proving movies could tell a real story. Four bandits hold up a railroad telegraph office, board the train, rob the mail car, and escape across the New Jersey countryside with a posse in pursuit — all in about twelve minutes. Edwin S. Porter made it for Edison's studio in 1903, cutting between the telegraph office, the train, and the chase in a way audiences had never seen. Its most famous image is a close-up of a bandit (Justus D. Barnes) firing his revolver point-blank at the camera, a shot exhibitors could place at the start or the end of the reel. Selected for the National Film Registry in 1990. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Western · Crime · Silent

Herbert Ponting was the official photographer on Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition, and this film — assembled from footage he shot between 1910 and 1912 — is the most complete motion picture record of early Antarctic exploration. Ponting filmed the voyage south, life at the Cape Evans hut, and Scott's team preparing for the pole, and he lectures his own footage like a showman. The film ends before the expedition's tragic end: Scott and four companions died on the return from the pole in 1912. Made for a British expedition and released in 1924, the film is in the public domain.

Documentary · Silent

Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, turned Maurice Renard's novel into a late Expressionist horror about a concert pianist whose hands are crushed in a train wreck and replaced with those of an executed murderer. Conrad Veidt plays Orlac as a man slowly convinced that the graft has passed the killer's violence into his own body, his long fingers curling and twitching as if with a will of their own. The film trades Caligari's painted sets for shadowed, realistic spaces, but keeps the same dread of identity dissolving from within. The premise has been remade twice, most notably as Mad Love (1935) with Peter Lorre, but Wiene's original remains the purest version of the body-horror idea. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Horror · Thriller · Silent

The most ambitious American silent production to that point, and the film that proved Universal could mount a spectacle. Lon Chaney plays Quasimodo, the deaf, deformed bell-ringer of Notre Dame, who falls in love with the kind gypsy dancer Esmeralda and tries to protect her from the forces closing in around her: a lecherous archdeacon, a treacherous captain, and the beggar king Clopin. Chaney designed his own horrific makeup, contorted his body under a 72-pound hump, and hung by a rope from the cathedral's towers for real. The Paris sets were built full-scale on the Universal lot and helped define the look of the studio for decades. The film was a huge hit and saved Universal from financial trouble. Its copyright was not renewed at the end of its first term, and it entered the public domain in the United States in 1951.

Romance · Drama · Silent

John Ford's first large-scale Western chronicles the building of the first transcontinental railroad, framed as a romance between a surveyor's son and the daughter of a railroad boss. Ford shot on location with thousands of extras, real locomotives, and a reconstructed frontier town, giving the film a documentary weight rare for the genre at the time. The Iron Horse was a major hit for Fox and established Ford as a director who could handle epic scope, the beginning of his long association with the Western. Abraham Lincoln appears as a guiding presence, and the film treats the railroad as the fulfillment of his vision of a united continent. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2011. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Western · History · Silent

Douglas Fairbanks' sequel to his 1921 hit The Three Musketeers, and the last of his great swashbucklers. He plays D'Artagnan, racing to protect the rightful King of France from the schemes of Cardinal Richelieu and the masked prisoner who may hold the secret of the throne. The Iron Mask is a part-talkie, one of the few films in which Fairbanks spoke on camera, and his farewell to the silent action hero he had defined for a decade. The stunts are fewer than in his earlier pictures, and the tone is darker, with a tragic ending that surprised audiences used to seeing him win. Allan Dwan directed, and the production was mounted with Fairbanks' usual ambition. Published in 1929, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Adventure · Action · Silent

A Venetian gondolier emigrates to America dreaming of fortune and instead finds himself shining shoes in a New York tenement, where a corrupt ward boss and the brutality of poverty grind down his young family. Stage actor George Beban stars opposite Clara Williams in this Thomas H. Ince production directed by Reginald Barker, one of the earliest feature films to center an immigrant experience with sympathy rather than caricature. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Charlie Chaplin's first feature film and one of the greatest films of the silent era. The Tramp discovers an abandoned baby in an alley and, after trying to leave it, raises the boy as his own. Five years later, the Kid (Jackie Coogan) is his partner in a glass-replacing scam, and the two share a tender, scrappy life together. When the boy falls ill and welfare officials try to take him away, the Tramp fights to keep him. Chaplin balanced broad comedy with genuine pathos, and Coogan's performance made him the first major child star in film history. The dream sequence, in which Chaplin imagines heaven as a rooftop populated by angels and devils, is one of the most imaginative passages in silent cinema. The film was co-founded through United Artists, the distribution company Chaplin had helped create in 1919. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Drama · Silent

The King of Kings is Cecil B. DeMille's silent epic of the life of Jesus, from the healing of Mary Magdalene through the crucifixion and resurrection. H.B. Warner plays Jesus with a restrained dignity DeMille demanded of the cast and crew, who were asked to behave with reverence during filming. The film was a serious religious picture, not a spectacle, and it was seen by hundreds of millions of people over the decades, often in churches and schools. DeMille's sense of scale is here, but the heart of the film is intimate. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Drama · History · Silent

Josef von Sternberg's first American film with Emil Jannings, made the year before they would make The Blue Angel together. Jannings plays a deposed Russian grand duke who has fled the Revolution and now scrapes by as a Hollywood extra, hired to play a general in a film about his own downfall. The role-within-a-role lets Jannings collapse the distance between his past authority and present humiliation, and the framing device is what the film is built on. William Powell plays the revolutionary who once served him and now directs him. The Last Command is a film about cinema's power to re-stage a life, and it earned Jannings the first Academy Award for Best Actor. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · War · Silent

F.W. Murnau's study of a proud hotel doorman, played by Emil Jannings, who is demoted to washroom attendant and stripped of the uniform that gave him his identity. Working from a screenplay by Carl Mayer, Murnau tells nearly the whole story without a single intertitle, letting Karl Freund's unchained camera convey the porter's humiliation and fantasies of grandeur. The camera rides up elevators, swings through the hotel lobby, and tilts with the porter's drunken reeling, techniques that astonished audiences in 1924. A tacked-on happy ending, imposed against Murnau's wishes, only underscores the bleakness that precedes it. The film was a landmark of German Kammerspielfilm and a direct influence on the move toward purely visual storytelling in the late silent era. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Silent

James Fenimore Cooper's novel as a sweeping silent epic, shot in the California mountains standing in for 1757 upstate New York. Wallace Beery is the vengeful Huron Magua, Albert Roscoe the scout Hawkeye, and Barbara Bedford the kidnapped Cora, with Harry Lorraine as the Mohican Chingachgook. Maurice Tourneur began the picture but was injured when a car drove off a cliff, and his assistant Clarence Brown — later the director of Garbo's finest films — finished it, earning his first screen credit. Regularly ranked among the best silent adaptations of American literature, it was restored by the Library of Congress. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Drama · Silent

Mary Pickford plays an American girl whose ship is torpedoed by a German U-boat on the way to France — a sequence Cecil B. DeMille staged as open propaganda while the United States was still deciding whether to join the war. Rescued and sheltered in a French chateau near the front, she is caught between a French officer and a German officer who both love her, and the film builds to the occupation of the chateau and an attempted assault that American audiences in 1917 read as Germany's crimes in miniature. Released months after the US entered the war, it was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. A 1917 release, it is in the public domain.

Drama · War · Silent

Alfred Hitchcock considered The Lodger his first true film, the moment he found the themes that would define his career. A mysterious young man takes a room at a London boardinghouse just as a killer called the Avenger begins murdering blonde women in the fog. The landlady grows suspicious, and her daughter falls for the stranger. Ivor Novello stars as the lodger. The film is drenched in the imagery Hitchcock would return to again and again: the wrong man, the blonde in peril, the guilt that cannot be escaped. The Lodger is the earliest Hitchcock film to survive intact. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Thriller · Crime · Drama · Silent

An expedition led by the bombastic Professor Challenger ventures to a remote South American plateau where dinosaurs still roam. The film adapts Arthur Conan Doyle's novel and is most remembered today for Willis O'Brien's stop-motion animation, a direct ancestor of his work on King Kong (1933). The brontosaurus rampaging through London at the climax is the sequence everyone cites. Wallace Beery glowers his way through the lead, and the supporting cast includes Bessie Love and Lewis Stone. The effects were astonishing for 1925 and remain a key milestone in the history of visual effects. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Adventure · Fantasy · Sci-Fi · Silent

Mary Pickford stars as Angela Carlotti, an Italian lighthouse keeper's sister whose life is upended when a wounded Austrian spy (Fred Thomson) washes ashore during World War I. Believing him to be a deserter seeking refuge, Angela shelters and falls in love with him, unaware of his true mission. Directed by Frances Marion, one of the most celebrated screenwriters and one of the few female directors of the silent era, the film showcases Pickford in a more dramatic, less childlike role than her usual fare. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Romance · Silent

Paul Leni's adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel, made at Universal during the silent horror boom that followed The Phantom of the Opera. Conrad Veidt plays Gwynplaine, a nobleman disfigured as a child with a permanent carved grin, who becomes a fairground attraction and falls for the blind girl Dea. Veidt's fixed, grotesque smile is the image the film is remembered for, and it is widely cited as a visual reference for the Joker in Batman. Leni, a German Expressionist who came to Hollywood to design for the screen, fills the frame with baroque shadows and carnival imagery. He died of sepsis the year the film was released, making this one of his last works. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Horror · Romance · Silent

The first screen appearance of Zorro, and the film that turned Douglas Fairbanks from a modern comedian into the swashbuckler who defined an era. Based on Johnston McCulley's 1919 story "The Curse of Capistrano," it follows Don Diego Vega, a foppish aristocrat newly returned to old California, who dons a mask and cape at night to fight the corrupt oppressors of the common people and court the lovely Lolita Pulido. Fairbanks's athleticism is the engine of the picture: he leaps over rooftops, fences with whip-crack speed, and carves his signature "Z" into the scenery. The masked-avenger template it set would echo through every costumed hero to follow. Produced by Fairbanks's own company, it was the first picture released through United Artists. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Adventure · Silent

Ernst Lubitsch's first American film for Warner Bros. is the crystalline comedy of manners that critics would later call the "Lubitsch Touch" in its purest early form. Around a circle of suspected and real infidelities in Vienna, Lubitsch suggests everything and states nothing, letting a glance, a closed door, or a misplaced glove carry the joke. Florence Vidor plays a wife whose faith in her husband is tested by the scheming of her unhappily married friend, and Adolphe Menjou is the physician at the center of the misunderstandings. The film was a hit and established Lubitsch as a Hollywood director of sophisticated comedy. He remade it as the musical One Hour with You (1932). The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Comedy · Romance · Silent

A Keystone one-reeler from Charlie Chaplin's first year in pictures, set behind the scenes at a movie studio — a sly bit of self-reference from Mack Sennett's comedy factory. Chaplin plays a film actor who keeps ruining takes until the director fires him; he returns in drag as a strikingly elegant actress and turns the set upside down before being unmasked. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Chester Conklin play fellow actors, and the studio door glimpsed in the film is Keystone's own. Written and directed by Chaplin in 1914, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

Erich von Stroheim's lavish adaptation of the operetta follows a American showgirl who marries a European prince, is banished by his royal family, and returns years later as the wealthy widow the whole kingdom is courting. Stroheim, never one for restraint, packed the film with decadent set design, a famous masked-ball sequence, and the kind of obsessive detail that made his productions famously expensive. Mae Murray's ballet training is put to use in extended dance numbers, and John Gilbert plays the prince with the smooth melancholy that made him a silent-era matinee idol. The film was a hit despite the studio's cuts to Stroheim's preferred cut. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Drama · Silent

An early "old dark house" horror-comedy directed by Roland West, starring Lon Chaney as Dr. Gustave Ziska, a mad scientist who terrorizes a small town. When an amateur detective (Johnny Arthur) investigates a series of disappearances, he finds himself trapped in Ziska's labyrinthine mansion, complete with secret passages, trapdoors, and a hulking assistant named Caliban. Chaney's grotesque makeup and sinister mannerisms elevate the film above its stage-play origins, while Arthur provides comic relief as the bumbling would-be detective. The film was released with lavish color tints that enhanced its eerie atmosphere, and is considered one of the first horror films to top the North American box office. The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Comedy · Silent

A spoiled rich man and the woman who turned down his proposal end up alone together on an abandoned ocean liner drifting out to sea. Neither can cook, open a can, or manage the simplest chore, and the comedy comes from watching two helpless people improvise a household on an enormous scale, rigging kitchen gadgets with ropes and pulleys. When the ship drifts near a cannibal island, Rollo has to fend off boarders in a deep-sea diving suit, and the famous underwater sequences were filmed in a real tank with Keaton inside the heavy gear. The ship was a real decommissioned passenger liner the production bought for the shoot. Keaton co-directed with Donald Crisp and performed his own stunts.

Comedy · Action · Silent

A silent comedy starring Douglas Fairbanks, directed by Theodore Reed. Fairbanks plays Charlie Butters, an eccentric inventor and self-styled "scientific detective" who tries to win the heart of a beautiful social worker by helping her rescue a young woman from white slavery. The film was intended as a spoof of the detective genre and a showcase for Fairbanks's athletic comedy, but it was one of his few box office disappointments. Still, Fairbanks's boundless energy and physical virtuosity are on full display, and the film offers a fascinating glimpse of the star testing material that would later inform his swashbuckling adventures. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Silent

Carl Theodor Dreyer's account of Joan of Arc's trial and execution is built almost entirely from close-ups. Renée Falconetti, in her only major film role, gives one of the most studied performances in cinema history using little more than her face. Dreyer shot the film on a specially constructed set and rewrote the dialogue from the actual trial transcripts, then cut the film against the wishes of the producers, who had their own version assembled. The original negative was lost in a fire, and the cut most people know today was reconstructed decades later from a print found in a Norwegian mental institution. It is a silent film that feels nothing like other silent films: austere, relentless, and almost unbearably intimate. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Historical · Silent

L. Frank Baum's own Oz Film Manufacturing Company produced this feature-length adaptation of his 1913 novel, making it the first Oz film shot at real feature length. Ojo and his uncle Unc Nunkie journey to gather the ingredients that will restore the Patchwork Girl's victims to life, joined by Scraps herself — the life-sized doll brought to life by the Powder of Life — along with the Woozy and a young Dorothy. Pierre Couderc, a French acrobat billed as "the Marvelous Couderc," plays Scraps with full-body contortions that remain the film's chief marvel, and Violet MacMillan plays Ojo. A fascinating glimpse of Baum attempting to film his own creation before Hollywood got there. Published in 1914, it is in the public domain.

Fantasy · Adventure · Silent

A powerful psychological thriller crime film starring Lon Chaney and directed by Wallace Worsley. Chaney delivers one of his most memorable performances as Blizzard, the legless crime boss of the San Francisco Barbary Coast underworld. As a child, Blizzard's legs were unnecessarily amputated by Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary) during a botched operation. Now an adult, Blizzard is driven by two ambitions: revenge against Dr. Ferris and the looting of San Francisco. To get close to the doctor, Blizzard poses for a bust of Satan created by Ferris's daughter Barbara (Claire Adams). Chaney's remarkable performance includes wearing leather stumps and using crutches, demonstrating his legendary commitment to physical transformation. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama · Silent · Thriller

A disfigured composer named Erik lives in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House and falls in love with Christine, a young soprano he secretly trains. When she lifts his mask, he kidnaps her, and her fiancé Raoul descends into the cellars to find her. Lon Chaney designed his own makeup for the role, including wires to distort his nose and a technique that has never been fully reproduced. The unmasking scene, when the audience first sees his face, is one of the most famous moments in silent film; some theaters reportedly kept smelling salts on hand for audience members who fainted. The film was Universal's first horror production and helped establish the genre as a studio staple. The famous two-strip Technicolor ball sequence is included in this print. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Horror · Silent

James Cruze, who had scored a hit with The Covered Wagon (1923), returned to the frontier epic with this story of the Pony Express and the riders who carried mail across the West. The plot follows a rider framed for murder and the woman who believes him, set against the backdrop of the short-lived but legendary mail service. Wallace Beery plays a villain, Ricardo Cortez the accused rider, and Betty Compson the woman who helps clear him. Cruze stages the riding sequences with the same eye for scale that made his westerns spectacles. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Western · Adventure · Silent

Mary Pickford, then twenty-five, plays eleven-year-old Gwendolyn, a wealthy girl whose parents are too busy with money and society to notice her. Raised by servants and kept at a distance from other children, Gwendolyn finally gets sent to school, where a lonely life collides with playground cruelty. A near-fatal dose of sleeping medicine tips the film into a celebrated dream sequence in which director Maurice Tourneur lets his visual imagination run loose. It was one of Pickford's biggest hits and the film that proved audiences would accept her as a child well into adulthood, paving the way for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Pollyanna. Made in 1917, it is in the public domain.

Drama · Silent

Fred Niblo directed Ramon Novarro the year before they made Ben-Hur together, and this smaller, darker film shows what both could do without a chariot race. A young couple in Brittany are separated on the night they flee to Paris together; the boy is wrongly jailed and sinks into the city's underworld, while the girl becomes a cabaret dancer. The film follows them through the Paris slums, where Wallace Beery's pickpocket pulls Jean into crime, until fate and a recognizable scar reunite them. Victor Milner's cinematography moves from the misty Brittany coast to the nocturnal streets of Paris, and the film's mood of romantic despair was a contrast to Novarro's usual swashbuckling roles. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Romance · Silent

The Ring is the only film Alfred Hitchcock wrote from an original screenplay, and he called it his second true picture after The Lodger. A love triangle set in the world of boxing, it follows a fairground fighter called One Round Jack who is beaten by a mysterious challenger, an Australian heavyweight champion who then becomes his rival for the girl he loves. The title refers to the boxing ring, the wedding ring, and the bracelet the rival gives the girl. Hitchcock was a regular at London fights and filled the film with the details he observed, the champagne sprinkled on fighters, the well-dressed crowds. The Ring was his first film for British International Pictures. It entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Drama · Romance · Sport · Silent

A short Chaplin two-reeler. The Tramp works as a waiter, makes a mess of things, then goes to a roller skating rink where he causes more chaos. The skating scenes are genuinely impressive; Chaplin was a skilled skater and does his own stunts. The film was based on a sketch called "Skating Rinks" that Chaplin had performed on stage before he went into films. At 24 minutes it is a quick watch and a good introduction to Chaplin's silent short work for anyone who has only seen his features.

Comedy · Silent

A faithful silent adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, directed by the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom (credited as Victor Seastrom) from a screenplay by Frances Marion. In 17th-century Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is condemned to wear the scarlet letter for bearing a child out of wedlock, and she refuses to name the father, the Reverend Dimmesdale. Lillian Gish fought to make the picture at MGM and gives a restrained, dignified performance that is often cited as one of her finest. Lars Hanson plays the tortured minister, and Henry B. Walthall reprises the role of Chillingworth he had played in an earlier adaptation. Long considered the best screen version of the novel, the film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Drama · Silent

Frank Lloyd's lavish silent adaptation of Rafael Sabatini's pirate novel, one of the most expensive films of its day. Four full-scale sixteenth-century ships were built for the production, and the action ranges from Cornish manors to slave galleys to the deck of a Moorish pirate fleet. Milton Sills plays an English nobleman betrayed by his half-brother, sold into slavery, and reborn as the pirate captain known as the Sea Hawk, who returns to harry the Spanish and avenge himself. The film was a huge hit and set the visual template for Hollywood swashbucklers that the later Errol Flynn version would build on. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Adventure · Romance · Silent

Based on E.M. Hull's bestselling 1919 novel, The Sheik made Rudolph Valentino a star almost overnight. Agnes Ayres plays Lady Diana Mayo, a headstrong Englishwoman who insists on traveling alone into the Algerian desert, only to be abducted by Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, a desert chief who falls in love with his captive. The film is a silent romantic adventure of the desert-romance school, all tents and horses and yearning close-ups, and it struck a nerve with 1921 audiences that few films before or since have matched. Valentino's dark, smoldering presence became a cultural phenomenon. The portrayal has not aged well in every respect, but the film's place in cinema history is secure as the picture that defined a new kind of leading man. It was published in 1921 and is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Adventure · Silent

A Lon Chaney silent for Universal, directed by Lambert Hillyer. Chaney plays Wilse Dilling, a crippled San Francisco underworld enforcer sent to infiltrate a rural household, where his growing conscience and affection for the daughter (Virginia Valli) pull him against his boss's scheme. One of the rare Chaney films in which his character wins the girl, it showcases his gift for transformation through a physically demanding, sympathetic performance. Made for roughly $90,000, it was a sizable hit for the studio. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

The Show is a Tod Browning film set in a Hungarian carnival, among the performers of a sideshow called the Palace of Illusions. John Gilbert plays Cock Robin, the ballyhoo man who stars in a reenactment of Salome's dance that ends with a staged beheading. Lionel Barrymore is the Greek, a jealous villain who conspires to make the beheading real. Renée Adorée plays Salome, the woman both men want. Browning, who would go on to make Freaks, was drawn to the strange world of carnival performers, and The Show is thick with that atmosphere. The film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A patriotic silent war thriller from Fox, notable as Bela Lugosi's American film debut. Edmund Lowe plays a naval officer who feigns disgrace to infiltrate a ring of foreign saboteurs, led by Benedict Hisston (Lugosi), plotting to destroy the Panama Canal and the Atlantic Fleet. Director J. Gordon Edwards emphasized Lugosi's hypnotic eyes in extreme close-up, helping forge the screen persona that would make him Dracula. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Winsor McCay's animated depiction of the 1915 torpedoing of the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat, an event that helped pull the United States into the First World War. McCay made the film as a piece of wartime propaganda, animating the liner, the attack, and the drowning of passengers in a somber, documentary-like tone unlike his comic Gertie work. It is one of the earliest serious animated films and a rare example of animation used for journalism. The film is in the public domain in the United States as a pre-1930 work.

Animation · Silent · Short · War

A King Vidor silent western based on Ralph Connor's novel, shot on location in the Sierra foothills. John Bowers plays a missionary preacher who arrives in a rough cowboy camp determined to build a church in the saloon, while Colleen Moore is the rancher's daughter injured in a cattle stampede whom he helps heal. Vidor packed the film with action, including a climactic stampede, and the production built its own "Vidor Village" set in the mountains. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Western · Silent

Germaine Dulac's short feature, adapted from the play by Denys Amiel and André Obey, is one of the first feminist films and a touchstone of early narrative avant-garde. Madame Beudet sits at the piano in a provincial house, trapped in a loveless marriage to a petty, boastful merchant who mocks her dreams and pretends to shoot himself with an unloaded revolver as a cruel joke. Dulac tells the story almost entirely from inside Madame Beudet's head, using superimpositions, distorted lenses, and repeated images of the piano and the empty revolver to render a woman's mental life on screen. Germaine Dermoz plays Madame Beudet with a still, inward sadness, and Alexandre Arquillière is the husband. The film was produced by Films Albatros, the Russian émigré studio in Paris, and was largely overlooked for decades before being reclaimed as a landmark of women's cinema. A 1923 work, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019.

Drama · Silent · Avant-garde

A Hal Roach two-reel parody of Rex Beach's rugged Yukon novel The Spoilers — released the same year as yet another straight adaptation of the story. Stan Laurel, in one of the solo shorts he made before teaming with Oliver Hardy, plays prospector Bob Canister, whose gold claim is jumped by the corrupt local sheriff, played by perennial Roach foil James Finlayson. Directed by Ralph Ceder, the short spoofs the novel's legendary climactic brawl with a saloon fight that keeps escalating. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Western · Silent · Short

Valentino's final film, released two weeks after his death from peritonitis at thirty-one. He plays a double role: the aging Sheik Ahmed and his hot-blooded son, who falls for Yasmin, a dancing girl, and is tricked by a band of outlaws into believing she betrayed him. The younger Ahmed abducts her in revenge, and the story plays out as a compressed echo of the first film, sharper and a little harder. Vilma Banky is a strong match for Valentino, and the desert photography has a clean, harsh beauty. The film was selected for the National Film Registry in 2003. Long held under copyright by the Copyright Term Extension Act, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2022, and is now freely watchable.

Romance · Adventure · Silent

D.W. Griffith's lavish adaptation of Marie Corelli's bestselling novel. A penniless writer (Ricardo Cortez) is granted wealth and fame by a suave stranger (Adolphe Menjou) who is Satan in disguise, only to find that every wish brings misery, while the woman who truly loves him (Carol Dempster) stands beyond his corrupted reach. One of Griffith's most expensive productions, the film pairs its Faustian plot with opulent sets and a European cast including Lya De Putti. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

A social-problem silent directed by William Desmond Taylor and based on the work of Denver juvenile-court judge Ben Lindsey, who appears as himself. Lewis Sargent plays a boy born to an unmarried mother and raised through brutal orphanages and the streets until Judge Lindsey's court places him with a kindly family, where he is given a chance at a real childhood. The film argues for the then-new juvenile court movement and survives as a testament to Taylor's talent before his infamous 1922 murder. As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Frank Capra's feature directorial debut is a silent comedy built around the gentle, elfin persona of Harry Langdon. A meek Belgian soldier carries a letter and photograph from an American girl named Mary Brown through the trenches of World War I. After the war he travels to America to find her, falling in with a strongman act along the way. Langdon's comedy is the opposite of Keaton's athleticism or Chaplin's sentiment: he plays a bewildered innocent who survives by accident, and Capra's staging lets the slow burns land. The film was selected for the National Film Registry in 2007. It is now regarded as one of the finest silent comedies of the late 1920s. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2022.

Comedy · Silent

A cloistered young prince is sent to the university town of Heidelberg for his education, where he falls in love with a warm, down-to-earth barmaid named Kathi. When duty calls him back to the throne, he must leave her behind. Ernst Lubitsch directed this MGM silent for an enormous budget, and the film is an early showcase of what critics would later call "the Lubitsch Touch": the love story is built from small, specific gestures rather than grand declarations. Ramon Novarro plays the prince and Norma Shearer the barmaid, with Jean Hersholt as the tutor whose own attachment to Heidelberg is the film's quietest heartbreak. The film's copyright was renewed but it fell into the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Romance · Drama · Silent

Cecil B. DeMille's first pass at the story he would remake in 1956, and the most expensive American film up to that time. The picture is built in two halves: a biblical prologue telling the story of Moses, from the bulrushes to the giving of the law on Mount Sinai, and a modern parable about two brothers, one who keeps the commandments and one who breaks them. The prologue is the part everyone remembers, with the Exodus staged on a vast scale, the parting of the Red Sea done with a clever combination of miniatures and reversed footage, and Theodore Roberts playing Moses as a bearded patriarch. The modern story, starring Richard Dix and Leatrice Joy, is a morality play about a corrupt contractor who ignores his mother's teachings. DeMille built full-scale Egyptian sets in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes in California and left the buried sphinxes there for archaeologists to dig up decades later. The film was a huge hit and saved Famous Players-Lasky from a slump. Its copyright expired at the end of its first term, and it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2019, along with the other 1923 works.

Drama · Religious · Silent · Epic

A silent romantic fantasy-adventure on a scale that still startles. Douglas Fairbanks plays a thief of Bagdad who, on a whim, sneaks into the Caliph's palace, steals an apple, and falls in love with the Princess. To win her he must best rival princes in a quest across a world of magic: a flying horse, a six-armed statue, an underwater kingdom, a monstrous spider, an invisibility powder. Raoul Walsh directs from a scenario Fairbanks co-wrote under a pseudonym, and the production design draws on the illustrations of Edmund Dulac to build an Arabian Nights dreamscape out of lumber, paint, and ingenuity. Anna May Wong is a standout as the treacherous Mongol slave. The film's influence on the fantasy genre is hard to overstate. Published in 1924, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Romance · Fantasy · Adventure · Silent

The silent original of the story Tod Browning later remade in 1930 as Lon Chaney's only sound film. Three sideshow performers, a ventriloquist, a strongman, and a dwarf, leave the circus and set up a pet shop as a front for a burglary ring. Echo, the ventriloquist, uses his talent to throw his voice and frame an innocent man for the murder he commits. Chaney, in one of his most unsettling roles, plays a man who manipulates others through their voices, and the film is a prime example of the grotesque, circus-inflected material Browning was drawn to throughout his career. This is the silent version; the 1930 sound remake is also in the collection. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Crime · Drama · Silent

A circus knife thrower known as "Alonzo the Armless" performs with his feet and falls for the carnival girl Nanon, who cannot bear to be touched by a man. What no one knows is that Alonzo's arms are strapped to his body to hide a double thumb that marks him as a criminal on the run. When Nanon finally overcomes her fear and turns to another man, Alonzo takes a terrible step to become what he has pretended to be. Lon Chaney gives one of his most disturbing performances, and a young Joan Crawford is the love interest in her first major role. Tod Browning, who would go on to make Freaks and Dracula, sets the whole story in a circus of grotesques. The film was considered lost until a print turned up in 1968. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2023.

Horror · Thriller · Silent

Erich von Stroheim's lavish romance set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, in which a penniless aristocrat falls for a brewer's daughter but is pushed into an arranged marriage for money. Stroheim directed and starred, and the production was as extravagant as everything he touched: real period uniforms, a full-scale carnival sequence, and a budget that ran far over what Paramount had agreed to. The studio cut the film down sharply, and the version that survives is only the first half of Stroheim's intended two-part story; the second half, The Honeymoon, is largely lost. Fay Wray, a year before King Kong, plays the girl he cannot marry. What remains is a film of extraordinary visual density and a director's refusal to compromise. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.

Drama · Romance · Silent

A young woman from Virginia moves to her cousin's ranch on the western prairie, where the constant wind drives her to the edge of madness. Lillian Gish conceived the project herself, chose the novel, hired her leading man Lars Hanson, and assigned Victor Sjostrom (credited as Victor Seastrom) to direct, reuniting the team from The Scarlet Letter. The film was shot in the Mojave Desert with wind machines blasting the cast for days, and Gish's performance in the climactic sandstorm is one of the most physically committed in silent cinema. MGM forced a more hopeful ending than the novel's, but the film's power is in the imagery of a woman swallowed by an empty landscape. The Wind was selected for the National Film Registry in 1993. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2024.

Drama · Western · Silent

A silent-era, very loose adaptation of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, written, directed by, and starring Larry Semon as the Scarecrow. The plot barely resembles the familiar 1939 film: a tyrannical wizard rules Oz, a farmhand disguised as a scarecrow helps a deposed princess, and Oliver Hardy (before his partnership with Stan Laurel) plays the Tin Woodsman. Semon stuffs the film with his trademark gag-heavy, slapstick style, and the result is a curious artifact more than a classic, but it is the earliest surviving feature-length Oz adaptation. Published in 1925, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Fantasy · Comedy · Adventure · Silent

One of the Keystone one-reelers Charlie Chaplin directed as well as starred in during his astonishing first year in pictures, Those Love Pangs — released in some markets as The Rival Mashers — casts Chaplin and Chester Conklin as competing mashers who chase the same girls through a park and into a movie theater, where the brawl that erupts in front of the screen mirrors the slapstick playing on it. Chaplin was still refining the Tramp here, but the short already shows his gift for building gags on top of gags. Made for Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios in 1914, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Comedy · Silent

Underworld is the film that launched the American gangster genre. Josef von Sternberg directed it from a story by Ben Hecht, who would win the first Academy Award for Best Original Story the year the awards began. George Bancroft plays Bull Weed, a criminal kingpin whose jealous devotion to his moll, Feathers, drags him into a war with a rival and the law. Evelyn Brent is the woman caught between the gangster and the alcoholic lawyer he befriends. Von Sternberg's camera work is fluid and expressive, already showing the style he would bring to his films with Marlene Dietrich. The film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

Crime · Drama · Silent

Paul Leni's German Expressionist anthology strings together three tales a wandering poet invents for the figures in a wax museum. Emil Jannings plays the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, slipping through Baghdad in disguise to court a baker's wife; Conrad Veidt is Ivan the Terrible, spiraling into paranoid madness over a poisoned hourglass; and Werner Krauss is a nightmarish Jack the Ripper who seems to step out of the poet's dreams. Leni's sets tilt and bend, his shadows are painted on, and the camera pushes in close on faces twisted by fear and obsession. The film was a bridge between German Expressionism and the horror cinema Leni would help found after he emigrated to Hollywood, where he directed The Cat and the Canary (1927). The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Fantasy · Horror · Silent

Wings is the film that won the very first Academy Award for Best Picture, and it remains the only fully silent film to take the top prize. Directed by William A. Wellman, a former World War I fighter pilot, it follows two young American aviators who enlist in the Army Air Corps and become combat pilots in France, bound by friendship and divided by their love for the same woman. Clara Bow plays the hometown girl waiting back home. The aerial dogfight sequences were shot with real planes and real pilots, hundreds of them, and they still rank among the most thrilling ever filmed. Gary Cooper appears briefly in an early role that helped launch his career. The film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2023.

War · Drama · Romance · Silent

The earliest surviving feature by Oscar Micheaux, the most important Black filmmaker of the silent era, was made in direct answer to *The Birth of a Nation*. Schoolteacher Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) travels north to raise funds for an impoverished Southern school, and the film unfolds her past in flashbacks — culminating in an unflinching lynching sequence that depicts the racial violence Griffith's film celebrated. Made for Black audiences and frequently cut by censors who feared it would provoke unrest, it survives only in a single print rediscovered in Spain in the 1970s. It was inducted into the National Film Registry. Published in 1920, it is in the public domain in the United States.

Drama · Silent

Considered the first werewolf film ever made, this silent horror film stars George Chesebro as Dick Bannister, the new field boss of a Canadian logging company locked in a bitter feud with a rival firm. After being attacked and left for dead, Dick suffers such severe blood loss that no human donor can be found—so the surgeon performs a transfusion using wolf blood. Soon, Dick begins experiencing visions of running with phantom wolves, and when his rivals are found killed by what appears to be a wolf, the lumberjacks become convinced that Dick has become a werewolf. Co-directed by Chesebro and Bruce Mitchell for Ryan Bros. Productions, the film is a fascinating artifact of early horror cinema, blending logging-camp melodrama with proto-werewolf mythology decades before Universal's The Wolf Man (1941). The film is in the public domain.

Horror · Silent