Top 10 silent movies
Charlie Chaplin in the 1931 silent film City Lights, released after the first talkies. Photograph: Charles Chaplin Productions/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
10. City Lights
City Lights was arguably the biggest risk of Charlie Chaplin's career: The Jazz Singer, released at the end of 1927, had seen sound take cinema by storm, but Chaplin resisted the change-up, preferring to continue in the silent tradition. In retrospect, this isn't so much the precious behaviour of a purist but the smart reaction of an experienced comedian; Chaplin's films rarely used intertitles anyway, and though it is technically "silent", City Lights is very mindful of it own self-composed score and keenly judged sound effects.
At its heart, Chaplin's film is a mismatched love story in the vein of DW Griffiths' Broken Blossoms, made some 10 years earlier, but Chaplin knowingly modernises it, moving the location from the seedy docks of Limehouse to the bustle of the city centre, where Chaplin's vagrant falls for a blind flower-seller. Indeed, the whole film hinges in some way on the Little Tramp being outside time: Chaplin deliberately plays him as a relic, a figure of fun for the street-corner newspaper boys, yet at the same time self-aware. (Critic Andrew Sarris described the character as being a model of sophisticated self-containment – "his own Don Quixote and his own Sancho Panza").
Though there are the usual sight gags in the Little Tramp's quest to find the money with which to restore the girl's sight, City Lights is more a film about personal relationships: a key figure in the film is a rich businessman who only recognises his new friend when drunk. Nothing, though, is more important than the final scene, still powerful in its ambivalence. Blind no more, the girl slowly realises that the hobo in front of her is her secret benefactor, and the flicker of conflicting feelings on Chaplin's face – humility and joy – vindicate his decision to stay silent. Damon Wise
9. Earth
BFI still Title: ZEMLYA Alternative Title: EARTH Director: DOVZHENKO Alexander Country: SU Year: 1930 Photograph: BFI
Earth, capped by that avowedly secular title, is a lyrical, carnal movie about birth, death, sex and rebellion. Officially, this Soviet-era Ukrainian silent is a paean to collective farming, crafted around a family drama, but its director, Alexander Dovzhenko, was a born renegade, for whom plots were far less important than poetry. As Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in this paper: "In Dovzhenko's world, the events often turn out to be the shots themselves."
Earth is the final part of Dovzhenko's silent trilogy (following the nationalist fantasy Zvenigora (1928) and the avant-garde anti-war film Arsenal (1929), and is brimming with exuberant youth, but haunted by the shadow of death. This is never more apparent than in the heart-stopping sequence when Vasyl dances home after a night with his true love. The young man performs an impromptu hopak on a dusty path as the sun rises, exemplifying passion, vigour and virility with every cloud that rises from his stamping feet. A kulak-ordered bullet stops the dance, and Vasyl, mid-action: a brutal execution, starkly underplayed.
Sketched as tribute to the boons of collectivisation, but released as those schemes were falling out of favour, Earth was condemned on its home turf on political grounds. It was also snipped by censors who objected to the nudity, and the infamous scene in which farmers urinate into their tractor's radiator. But while there was dismay and censure in the Soviet Union, critics elsewhere were overawed. In the UK, the Observer's CA Lejeune hymned its rare "understanding of pure beauty in cinema".
It's the latter impression that endures. Dovzhenko's symbolism is both rich and audacious. His scope comprises vast pastoral landscapes, and intimate fleshy nakedness. Perhaps its most celebrated sequence is the magnificent opening scene: the painful counterpoint between a dying man, his infant grandchildren and the bursting fruit of his orchard. This is living cinema, as refreshing and vital as the film's own climactic downpour. Pamela Hutchinson
8. Battleship Potemkin
Unforgettable ... Eisenstein's classic. Photograph: Robald Grant
In common with the beginning of Touch of Evil, the end of Some Like It Hot and the middle of Psycho, there is a sequence some way into Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin that has overshadowed the work as a whole and infiltrated the consciousness even of those who have not seen the entire film. Eisenstein set out to tell the story of a 1905 naval mutiny, a key moment in the Russian revolution, which was sparked by the serving of rotten meat to the crew of the Potemkin. But it was the episode which follows the crew's arrival in Odessa, and the solidarity shown to them by the oppressed civilians, that has earned the picture its legendary standing. Before it was paid homage to in The Untouchables and spoofed in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, the "Odessa Steps" sequence had for many decades served as the definitive masterclass in movie editing, admired by luminaries such as John Grierson and Alfred Hitchcock. It still merits that status, crammed as it is with fundamental lessons in the manipulation of rhythm and suspense through cutting, changes in shot length and position, camera movement and close-up.
It's a six-minute lesson in Eisenstein's montage technique, where our responses are steered and dictated by the unstoppable momentum of the editing. As the Tsar's soldiers march on civilians (an incident which never actually happened), the eye widens just to keep up with the action; the speed of the cuts and the frenzy of each frame makes it seem as though the action will spill from the screen. When the sequence ends with a close-up of a woman bleeding from behind her shattered glasses, it feels like a sick joke on what the images have done to us; we can well sympathise with the sensation of optical assault.
Of course, there is more to the film than simply that sequence. If there were not, it could hardly have survived its endless revivals and regenerations—including a screening in Trafalgar Square in 2004 to the accompaniment of a new Pet Shop Boys score. You could blame the techniques Eisenstein used here and in Strike for much of the stroboscopic editing that has dominated Hollywood for the past 30 years, but that would be to miss the beauty, clarity and rage of his methods. The film still stands as a distillation of all that was revolutionary about this filmmaker, and all that can still be revolutionary in cinema. Ryan Gilbey
7. The General
Buster Keaton in The General (1927). Photograph: Cinetext/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
Orson Welles, who knew a thing or two about silent movies, famously anointed Buster Keaton's crowning achievement "the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest civil war film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made".
This movie will very near send you into a frenzy. It's hilarious, poignant, how-did-he-do-that clever and so fast-paced that there are never enough repeat viewings to savour each gag, every elaborate stunt. And all the while that the mayhem is raging, Keaton, as you'd expect, is stoicism itself. He plays a quintessential Keaton hero: a man brave enough to go into battle, but conceivably wimpy enough to be rejected by the recruiters. A genius who can manipulate the heavy machinery of a steam locomotive to do his bidding, but who can't quite explain himself to his sweetheart.
The General is highly unusual among comedy films, simply for being based on a true story. Keaton seized upon the story of a civil war train hijack and embellished it with humour, spectacle (including a notoriously expensive train-wreck) and a slightly sour love story. For many years, he was alone in seeing the funny side. On its release, The General bombed, and Keaton entered his dark ages, shoehorned into a contract at MGM and cranking out talkies. His subsequent reclamation by critics and audience is a tribute to his entire body of work. But if you had to convert one stubborn refusenik to Keaton's greatness, to the magic of silent cinema itself, The General will cast that spell for you every time. PH
6. Metropolis
A futuristic city scene from the film, Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1927. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
We like to imagine we live in the presiding age of big, ambitious special effects movies, but Fritz Lang's colossally ambitious 1927 epic makes James Cameron look timid. It was the most expensive movie ever made at the time – a massive gamble whose failure practically bankrupted German cinema. But practically every futuristic/dystopian/cyborg movie made since is indebted to it. You can detect its DNA in everything from Blade Runner to Star Wars (C3PO could be Maria's robot husband).
Admittedly, it's a flawed story. The acting is theatrical, the characters bizarrely naive and neurotic, and the plot notoriously muddled. Even the recent release of a near-complete version failed to explain everything. But in its broader strokes, Metropolis draws on deep roots (Biblical, Jungian, Wagnerian, fairy-tale) to explore themes that continue to concern us: the dehumanising effects of industrialisation; the fetishisation of technology; the divide between the rich and poor, the rulers and the labourers, the "head" and the "hands". Politically, the film has been read across the spectrum, from social-democratic to pro-fascist. (Lang's wife and co-writer Thea von Harbou did, indeed, join the Nazi party later on.)
Whatever its meanings, Metropolis is above all an overwhelming visual experience. The scope of the film is staggering: from the Babel-like skyscraper city to its subterranean ghettos, via laboratories, cathedrals, factories, pleasure gardens. Lang was already the most modern film-maker of the era; to his knack for imagery and editing he added state-of-the-art special effects, here, which still hold up pretty well (it's all done with mirrors). He also had access to a more old-school special effect: personnel. Both armies of set-builders and vast crowds of extras (mostly poor Berliners), the latter of whom he conducts in great swathes across the screen as he orchestrates the story's mass uprising. Under his dictatorial command, nobody had an easy time. The shoot lasted almost a year and his lead actress, Brigitte Helm, was almost destroyed by Lang's perfectionism. But the result was a paradigm shift in the capabilities of cinema – a monumental spectacle that's rarely been surpassed. Steve Rose
5. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1919, Photograph: Courtesy of the BFI
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is unusual in that, for such a singular and one might say auteurist film, it did little for its director, the relatively unsung Robert Wiene. And yet this 1920 film is perhaps the very first art movie, since it is impossible to discuss it without mentioning its extraordinary set design, which perfectly complements its tale of murder and madness, as well as the deliberate abstractions in the storytelling. Nothing in this world is "real", and the odd geometry of its angles, plus the deliberately stylised, almost kabuki-like performances, give this the ambience of a true nightmare.
Based on the 11th-century myth of a "mountebank monk" who exerted a strange influence over a man in his keep – known here as the Somnambulist, aka Cesare (Conrad Veidt) – Wiene's film finds two men encountering Caligari (Werner Krauss) at a fairground. When one of the men is killed, the other begins to investigate, realising that Caligari is using the seemingly comatose Cesare to commit a series of murders. However, in the first of a series of twists, it is revealed that Caligari is the director of a local asylum, a tip-off that this is a story not of but in the mind.
Interestingly, Caligari is often credited as a horror movie, and it is significant that it pioneered many tropes of the genre that would hold over into the sound era. But it is Hermann Warm's sets that have endured, creating light traps of shade that not only paved the way for the dark postwar heyday of film noir but also planted seeds of macabre surrealism that carry on today, notably in the chiaroscuro works of David Lynch, still the undeposed master of the unsettling and the bizarre. DW
4. The Wind
LILLIAN GISH Film 'THE WIND' (1928) 01 May 1928 CTH25954 Allstar/Cinetext/MGM **WARNING** This photograph can only be reproduced by publications in conjunction with the promotion of the above film. For Editorial Use Only Entertainment Orientation Landscape Couples Film Still Drama Gun in Hand Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/MGM
The Wind is one of the four or five movies that best demonstrate the richness and variety, and the purity and clarity of expression that silent cinema had achieved by the time it was fatally and forever subsumed, like a lost Atlantis, beneath a deluge of sound and speech. King Vidor's The Crowd, Murnau's Sunrise, Paul Fejos's Lonesome and Fritz Lang's Metropolis all arrived, like The Wind, just in time to see silent cinema made obsolete in a matter of months in 1927-28.
Victor Sjostrom (Seastrom in Hollywood), as an actor and director, was preeminent in Sweden, enough so that Ingmar Bergman, an admirer, later made a movie about the filming of Sjostrom's classic The Phantom Carriage, and cast him as the lead in his Wild Strawberries in 1957. The last of his Hollywood masterpieces (after He Who Gets Slapped and a still-definitive adaptation of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter), The Wind nominally stars Lilian Gish and Swedish import Lars Hanson, but the real stars are the seven aircraft propellors Seastrom dragged out to the Mojave desert to lend his maddening titular onslaught more realism. It worked. After a while you almost feel the skin peeling from your face under its vicious assault - it will unbury a corpse, given time.
Gish arrives on the hostile, blasted prairie to visit her beloved step-brother, but her sister-in-law's wild jealousy drives her to marry a boorish homesteader (Larson). Trapped without money or means of flight at his isolated, rickety cabin, the wind - literalised as a bucking white ghost-stallion straight from Fuselian nightmare - slowly drives her out of her mind. Character, environment, elements and emotion become one, wild and untamable, relentless and intractable. The Wind remains surprisingly harrowing 85 years later, as harsh and elemental in its way as Greed had been three years earlier. John Patterson
3. The Lodger
Haunting ... Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1926). Photograph: BFI
Hitchcock's most successful silent movie, as he himself acknowledged to Francois Truffaut, was the first that could plausibly be called Hitchcockian. This variation on the hunt for Jack the Ripper features themes and motifs that would recur throughout Hitchcock's career: the suspected killer who may be innocent (see Suspicion and The Wrong Man, just for starters); the heroine who loves him but who may yet become his next victim; the phantasmagoric nocturnal London that will reappear in Sabotage and Frenzy; the bravura set-piece sequences and a thirst for technical innovation (here it's a glass ceiling through which we see from below the neurotic lodger relentlessly pacing his room); the first Hitchcock cameo appearance (two, in fact), and the familiar haze of sexual obsession that would overhang his career like another kind of fog.
Ivor Novello - the epicene, ivory-skinned idol of the 20s who is easily the most beautiful object in the film, takes a room with a family whose flaxen-haired daughter Daisy is being courted by a detective hunting the Avenger, a serial murderer of blondes. The lodger keeps odd hours, acts very secretively, and his first request is that all the portraits of blondes lining the walls of his garret be removed immediately. Daisy and he become enamoured of one another exactly as her parents' paranoia and suspicion reach fever pitch, while the detective's jealousy clouds his vision, and everything culminates in a mad pursuit of the lodger by an angry drunken crowd bent on rough justice.
Along with Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train, it's one of Hitchcock's most deeply Germanic movies. Hitch had made one feature at UFA in Berlin already, and observed Murnau and Lang at work while there. One might even argue that Lang's big city sex-crime melodrama M is indebted to The Lodger's baleful and pessimistic vision. JP
2. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Janet Gaynor, George O'Brien in the film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Sunrise seems to take place in our dreams. It's a macabre love-and-murder story that takes place in an almost-real landscape, somewhere between reality and our collective imagination. There's still nothing quite like it. The characters are nameless archetypes, and it revolves around an archetypal opposition: the country versus the city. The former innocent, stable and virtuous; the latter exciting, seductive and dangerous. Predictably for the era, they are personified by two opposing women: wholesome, angelic Janet Gaynor (The Wife) and vampy, bob-haired, cigarette-smoking Margaret Livingston (The Woman from the City). "The Man", of course, is hopelessly adrift, and doesn't know which to choose. He's seduced by Livingston's swivelling hips and urban fantasies. But what about the wife? "Couldn't she get drowned?" Livingston's femme fatale suggests.
Orson Welles would later describe Hollywood as "the biggest electric train set any boy ever had." FW Murnau, making his first American movie here, clearly felt the same. Far from capturing genuine village or city life, the whole film is a construct. Both locations are vast, expensive sets. And Murnau literally constructed a mile-long train track between them, so as to achieve one of the great tracking shots of cinema. He was renowned for his innovations: shooting from oblique angles, superimposing images on top of each other, mounting the camera on an overhead track to swoop over the moonlit marshes (another set, of course). You never sense he's doing it for its own sake. In fact, you don't sense he's doing it at all. Sunrise simply sweeps you away. It's gripping and tragic, menacing and romantic, beautifully orchestrated and paced, and imbued with a dreamlike radiance that seems to come from more than just well-placed studio lights. SR
1. The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
It takes a star to carry a closeup, they say in the film business — and by that token, it takes a superstar to carry an extreme closeup. But what Maria Falconetti did in Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc was something else again. As Joan, her beautiful face fills the screen, transfigured with agony, doubt, anguish and euphoria and yet it is preternaturally calm and still; it blazes out of the screen like a sun. Her eyes, fringed with those albino lashes, are turned upwards like depictions of the crucified Christ, and sometimes ruminatively downwards, like the Virgin Mary. She sometimes seems literally to have gone blind in a kind of ecstasy, and the interrogators' questions may seem to her to be coming from very far away. Or perhaps it is rather that we see her at the mysterious cusp of a spiritual evolution: in her hour of trial she is on the point of turning into something else: a higher order of being. There is hardly a single shot of her which is not a closeup. When we see her in medium- or long-shot, it is a shock to recognise that vulnerable figure from afar, as she is led into the trial in chains or out of her cell in preparation for execution. Dreyer inverts the usual impact of camera proximity.
His film imagines the catastrophic aftermath to Joan of Arc's heroism on the field of battle in the Hundred Years war; she claimed divine guidance, and indeed showed miraculous untrained military genius — in some ways, this is a film to set alongside Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) — but after the 1430 defeat at Compiègne, she has been sold out to pro-English forces and now put on trial on a charge of heresy for reasons which are at least partly cynical: to neutralise Joan as a revolutionary figurehead and turn the pious populace against her. So when Falconetti's 19-year-old Joan is brought into court, which is where this drama begins, it is not in the armour in which she is traditionally represented but in a coarse male jacket. She is utterly stripped of her martial status, although one of her longest answers in court is a shrewd denunciation of perfidious Albion: "I know not whether God loves or hates the English but I know that the English will be driven out of France, except for those that die here." This is an importantly political moment in the film, especially for a secular audience who, however deeply moved by her tragedy, may not care to subscribe to Joan's martyrdom, steeped as it is in nationalist ideology. (Those who admire Paul Scofield's performance as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, may still remember that while More himself was Lord Chancellor, he had six heretics burned at the stake.) If the boot was on the other foot, might Joan not approve a similar tribunal of any enemy who opposed her, opposed France, and claimed divine justification? From the first, we are shown a series of living portraits of Joan's face in compelling closeup, and the faces of her tormentors, too. They loom out of the screen: men who will sneer and literally spit at her. One remarkable cameo comes from Antonin Artaud, who plays the cleric Massieu, sympathetic, scared, wrestling with his own disapproval. His face, like all the others, is vividly etched. The questions thrown at her are weaselly, disingenuous, transparently designed to trick Joan and lure her into incautious displays of vanity and apparent sacrilege. Yet the extraordinary thing is that Joan appears to take each question entirely seriously. At each dishonest prompting, she will ponder the question of God's will, and her own worthiness, and give a gentle, dignified reply, all the while gazing at a far horizon of truth which exists above and beyond this cackling gallery of political time-servers. Some will denounce her; some will murmur that she does indeed appear to be the daughter of Christ. The audience will spend an extraordinary time inspecting Falconetti's remarkable face — an aggregate time perhaps unmatched in film history. We can trace the tiny crinkly lines on her lips. We will see the thin, plain eyebrows, and the hair which reveals itself to be slightly longer than we might expect when Joan turns in profile: it is her profile which we will finally see in silhouette though the smoke and flame. Her hair is incidentally something on which she will gaze with infinite pain and sadness, when it is all shaved off in preparation for her execution and swept up off the floor. And of course there are the eyes, so often subtly convex with tears. The window-light reflected in them is visible: a light which she will later see on the floor, the frames making the shape of a cross: a sign. Twice, a fly will land on her face and she will brush it away; a third time a fly appears to come close as she is bound to the stake itself. However apparently banal, these are painterly touches of detail and heart-stopping moments of serendipitous realism. It is an internal drama, a process which TS Eliot in his Murder in the Cathedral, described as making perfect one's will. Joan is preparing for her destiny, while apparently entirely inactive. The Christ parallel will become even more striking after Joan repents signing the abjuration document in return for being allowed to take Holy Communion. She demands to retract the statement and to accept death, and she cries out that she has "forsaken" God — a clear echo, surely, of Christ's agonised words on the cross about being forsaken. This was made in 1928, but it could have been filmed this morning. It could almost be happening right now: by some sort of live courtroom feed. When she is taken into the torture chamber, Joan is horrified at the glimpses of spikes, chains — and a jug of water and a funnel. Waterboarding? When she is being bled, and the attendant binds her forearms, she looks as if she is submitting to a modern lethal injection. The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of those films whose clarity, simplicity, subtlety and directness transcend their time. There is real passion in every frame. Peter Bradshaw
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