10. Körkarlen (1921) [The Phantom Chariot]

Sweden 93m Silent BW

Director: Victor Sjöström

Producer: Charles Magnusson

Screenplay: Victor Sjöström, from novel by Selma Lagerlöf

Photography: Julius Jaenzon

Cast: Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Tore Svennberg, Astrid Holm

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A celebrated world success in its initial release, The Phantom Carriage not only cemented director-screenwriter-actor Victor Sjöström and the Swedish silent cinema’s fame but also had a well-documented, artistic influence on many great directors and producers. The most well-known element of the film is undoubtedly the representation of the spiritual world as a tormented limbo between heaven and earth. The scene in which the protagonist-the hateful and self-destructive alcoholic David Holm (Sjöström)-wakes up at the chime of midnight on New Year’s night only to stare at his own corpse, knowing that he is condemned to hell, is one of the most quoted scenes in cinema history.

9. Way Down East (1920)

US 100m Silent BW

Director: D.W. Griffith

Screenplay: Anthony Paul Kelly, D.W. Griffith

Music: Louis Silvers

Cast: Lilian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Lowell Sherman, Burr McIntosh

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Soon after The Birth of a Nation (1915), one of the most profitable films ever made, D.W. Griffith saw his career go into decline, mostly as a result of his inability to adapt to the changing desires of the filmgoing public. Griffith had specialized in bringing Victorian melodrama, with its talesof threatened female innocence, to the screen. By 1920, however, audiences had began to show less interest in virtue rescued or preserved. It was therefore a surprise that Griffith decided to adapt for the screen the 1890s stage melodrama Way Down East, not to mention that he was able to breathe new life into the story and make it into a very successful film.

8. Within Our Gates (1920)

US 79m Silent BW

Director: Oscar Micheaux

Producer: Oscar Micheaux

Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux, Gene DeAnna

Music: Philip Carli

Cast: Evelyn Preer, Flo Clements, James D. Ruffin, Jack Chenault, William Smith, Charles D. Lucas

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Successful author, publisher, homesteader, and filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux is widely considered the father of African American cinema; only his second effort, Within Our Gates is one of 40 films Micheaux wrote, directed, and independently produced between 1919 and 1948. Besides its gripping narrativeand artistic merits, Within Our Gates has immense historical value as the earliest surviving feature by an African American director. Powerful, controversial, and still haunting in its depiction of the atrocities committed by white Americans against blacks during this era, the film remains, in the words of one critic, “a powerful and enlightening cultural document [that] is no less relevant today than it was in 1920″.

7. The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Germany 71m Silent BW (tinted)

Director: Robert Wiene

Producer: Rudolf Meinert, Erich Pommer

Screenplay: Hans Janowitz, Carl Mayer

Photography: Willy Hameister

Music: Alfredo Antonini, Giuseppe Becce, Timothy Brock, Richard Marriott, Peter Schirmann

Cast: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Rudolf Lettinger

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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the keystone of a strain of bizarre, fantastical cinema that flourished in Germany in the 1920s and was linked, somewhat spuriously, with the Expressionist art movement. If much of the development of the movies in the medium’s first two decades was directed towards the Lumiere-style “window on the world”, with fictional or documentary stories presented in an emotionally stirring manner designed to make audiences forget they were watching a film, Caligari returns to the mode of Georges Melies by constantly presenting stylised, magical, theatrical effects that exaggerate or caricature reality. In this film, officials perch on ridiculously high stools, shadows are painted on walls and faces, jagged cutout shapes predominate in all the sets, exteriors are obviously painted, and unrealistic backdrops and performances are stylized to the point of hysteria.

6. Broken Blossoms (1919)

US 90m Silent BW

Director: D.W. Griffith

Producer: D.W. Griffith

Screenplay: Thomas Burke, D.W. Griffith

Photography: G.W. Bitzer

Music: D.W. Griffith

Cast: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp, Arthur Howard, Edward Peil Sr., George Beranger

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D.W. Griffith’s reputation in film studies is, if slightly overstated, nevertheless entirely unimpeachable. American (and world) cinema would be a different beast without his many contributions. The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance are, rightly, his most renowned films, remembered for their remarkable manipulations of story and editing. But another of his films, 1919’s Broken Blossoms, has always stood out as among his very best, and it is surely his most beautiful.

5. Intolerance (1916)

US 163m Silent BW

Director: D.W. Griffith

Producer: D.W. Griffith

Screenplay: Tod Browning, D.W. Griffith

Photography: G.W. Bitzer, Karl Brown

Music: Joseph Carl Breil, Carl Davis, D.W. Griffith

Cast: Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Lillian Gish, Gino Corrado, Douglas Fairbanks, King Vidor

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Perhaps in part a retort to those who found fault in the racial politics in The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith was equally concerned to argue against film censorship. This was addressed more directly in the pamflet issued at the time of Intolerance’s exhibition, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America. Griffith’s design for this film, which he finalised in the weeks following the release of his earlier epic production, is to juxtapose four stories from different periods of history that illustrate “Love’s struggle throughout the ages”. These include a selection of events from the life of Jesus; a tale from ancient Babylon, whose king is betrayed by those who resent his rejection of religious sectarianism; the story of St. Batholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants by King Charles IX of France on the perfidious advice of his mother; and a modern story in which a young boy, wrongly convicted of the murder of a companion, is rescued from execution at the last minute by the intervention of his beloved, who gains a pardon from the governor. These stories are not presented in series. Instead, Griffith cuts from one to another and often introduces suspenseful crosscutting within the stories as well. This revolutionary structure proved too difficult for most filmgoers at the time, who may also have been put off by Intolerance’s length (more than three hours). Griffith may have invested as much as $2 million in the project, but the film never came close to making back its costs, even when recut and released as two separate features, The Fall of Babylon and The Mother and the Law.

4. Les Vampires (1915)

France 440m Silent BW

Director : Louis Feuillade

Screenplay: Louis Feuillade

Music: Robert Israel

Cast: Musidora, Edouard Mathe, Marcel Levesque, Jean Ayme, Fernard Herrmann, Stacia Napierkowska

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Louis Feuillade’s legendary opus has been cited as a landmark movie serial, a precursor of the deep-focus aesthetic later advanced by Jean Renoir and Orson Welles, and a close cousin to the surrealist movement, but its strongest relationship is to the development of the movie thriller. Segmented into ten loosely connected parts that lack cliffhanger endings, vary widely in length, and were released at regular intervals, Les Vampires falls somewhere between a film series and a film serial. The convoluted, often inconsistent plot centers on a flamboyant gang of Parisian criminals, the Vampires, and their dauntless opponent, the reporter Philippe Guerande (Edouard Mathe).

3. The Birth Of A Nation (1915)

US 190m Silent BW

Director: D. W. Griffith

Producer: D. W. Griffith

Screenplay: Frank E. Woods, D. W. Griffith, from the novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the novel The Leopard’s Spots, and the play The Clansman by Thomas F. Dixon Jr.

Photography: G. W. Bitzer

Music: Joseph Carl Breil, D. W. Griffith

Cast: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, Miriam Cooper, Mary Alden

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Simultaneously one of the most revered and reviled films ever made, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is important for the very reasons that prompt both of those divergent reactions. In fact, rarely has a film so equally deserved such praise and scorn, which in many ways raises the film’s estimation not just in the annals of cinema but as an essential historic artifact (some might say relic).

2. The Great Train Robbery (1903)

US 12m Silent BW (hand-colored)

Director: Edwin S. Porter

Screenplay: Scott Marble, Edwin S. Porter

Photography: Edwin S. Porter, Blair Smith

Cast: A. C. Abadie, Gilbert M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, George Barnes

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Most histories regard The Great Train Robbery as the first Western, initiating a genre that was in a few short years to become the most popular in American cinema. Made by the Edison Company in November 1903, The Great Train Robbery was the most commercially successful film of the pre-Griffith period of American cinema and spawned a host of imitations.

1. Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902)

France 14m Silent BW

Director: Georges Méliès

Producer: Georges Méliès

Screenplay: Georges Méliès, from the novel Le Voyage dans la Lune by Jules Verne

Photography: Michaut, Lucien Tainguy

Cast: Victor André, Bleuette Bernon, Georges Méliès, Jeanne d’Alcy, Henri Delannoy

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When thinking about A Trip to the Moon, one’s mind is quickly captured by the original and mythic idea of early filmmaking as an art whose ”rules” were established in the very process of its production. This French movie was released in 1902 and represents a revolution for the time, given its length (apprx 14 minutes), as compared to the more common two-minute short films produced at the beginning of last century.