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Programmes to watch in order: the movements and eras of early cinema, its genres and themes, and the people who made it. Each one is printed in its own tint.
Movements and eras
20 films · 1902–1929
Silent 101
Twenty films, 1902 to 1929, laid out as a map rather than a trophy case.
17 films · 1895–1911
First Steps
These are the years when nobody had agreed what a movie was for.
19 films · 1920–1931
German Expressionism
These films came out of a Germany that had just lost a war and then lost the value of money.
20 films · 1924–1930
Soviet Montage
After 1917 a group of Soviet directors treated the cut as the argument, not the glue.
19 films · 1913–1932
Scandinavian Realism
Sweden and Denmark spent the 1910s and early 1920s shooting outside, in real weather, with a moral seriousness borrowed from Ibsen and Lagerlöf.
18 films · 1902–1929
French Avant-Garde
French filmmakers in the 1920s treated the camera as a way to think, not just to tell.
12 films · 1921–1936
Japanese Early Cinema
Japanese silent cinema kept the benshi, a live narrator who spoke every role beside the screen.
12 films · 1926–1938
The Arrival of Sound
Don Juan already carried a Vitaphone score in 1926.
Genres and themes
18 films · 1917–1931
American Comedy
American screen comedy in these years is a set of methods, not a mood.
21 films · 1916–1930
American Spectacle
These are the pictures that spent the money where you can see it.
20 films · 1896–1932
The Supernatural and the Occult
Cinema reached for ghosts early because the machine could do substitutions.
20 films · 1919–1929
Passion and Desire
Silent pictures had to show wanting.
18 films · 1903–1931
The Silent West
The frontier had been declared closed when the cameras started staging it.
22 films · 1896–1928
Women Pioneers of Silent Cinema
Women directed, produced, and wrote films from the first decade of cinema, then were written out of the story that followed.
Filmmakers and stars
9 films · 1920–1938
Oscar Micheaux
Micheaux wrote, directed, and sold his own pictures because the studios would not.
13 films · 1919–1933
Anna May Wong
Wong Liu Tsong was born in Los Angeles in 1905 and was on screen by fourteen.
10 films · 1919–1929
Tod Browning's Underworld
Browning left Kentucky for the circus as a teenager and spent the rest of his career filming the people he had worked with: barkers, grifters, acts the respectable seats came to stare at.
9 films · 1925–1930
Early Hitchcock
Hitchcock spent the second half of the 1920s at Gainsborough and then British International Pictures, learning the job in public.
14 films · 1919–1929
Lon Chaney: The Man of a Thousand Faces
Chaney designed his own faces and often the pain that held them on.
8 films · 1926–1930
Louise Brooks
Brooks was a Ziegfeld dancer Paramount used as decoration, then a face Hawks and Wellman could not quite place.
12 films · 1912–1928
Lillian Gish
Gish came to Biograph in 1912 through Pickford and became Griffith's most exact instrument: a face that could hold a close-up without playing to the balcony.
10 films · 1914–1923
Mabel Normand
Normand was already directing at Keystone when Chaplin arrived.
10 films · 1920–1928
Buster Keaton
Keaton came out of knockabout vaudeville and spent the 1920s building gags you can still map.
9 films · 1915–1927
Mary Pickford
Pickford produced her own films, chose the directors, and co-founded United Artists.
15 films · 1914–1931
Charlie Chaplin
Chaplin walked onto a Keystone lot in 1914 and had the Tramp costume on screen within weeks.