1902 - 1925 (#1-29)

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#29. The Phantom of The Opera (1925)

The Phantom of the Opera is a 1925 American silent horror film adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, directed by Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney in the title role of the deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House, causing murder and mayhem in an attempt to make the woman he "loves" a star. The film remains most famous for Chaney's ghastly, self-devised make-up, which was kept a studio secret until the film's premiere.

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#28. The Eagle (1925)

The Eagle is a 1925 American silent film directed by Clarence Brown and starring Rudolph Valentino. Based on the novel Dubrovsky by Alexander Pushkin, the film is about a lieutenant in the Russian army who catches the eye of Czarina Catherine II. After he rejects her advances and flees, she puts out a warrant for his arrest, dead or alive. When he learns that his father has been persecuted and killed, he dons a black mask and becomes an outlaw.

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#27. Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Battleship Potemkin sometimes rendered as Battleship Potyomkin, is a 1925 Soviet silent film directed by Sergei Eisenstein and produced by Mosfilm. It presents a dramatized version of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers.

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#26. The Gold Rush (1925)

The Gold Rush is a 1925 American comedy film written, produced, and directed by Charlie Chaplin. The film also stars Chaplin in his Little Tramp persona. Chaplin, who believed tragedies and comics were not far from each other, decided to combine these stories of deprivation and horror in comedy. He decided that his famous rogue figure should become a gold-digger who joins a brave optimist determined to face all the pitfalls associated with the search for gold, such as sickness, hunger, loneliness, or the possibility that he may at any time be attacked by a grizzly. In the movie, we see scenes like Chaplin cooking and dreaming of his shoe, or how his starving friend Big Jim sees him as a chicken.

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#25. The Big Parade (1925)

The Big Parade is a 1925 American silent film directed by King Vidor, starring John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Hobart Bosworth, Tom O'Brien, and Karl Dane. The film is about an idle rich boy who joins the US Army's Rainbow Division and is sent to France to fight in World War I, becomes a friend of two working class men, experiences the horrors of trench warfare, and finds love with a French girl. Although other anti-war films chronologically preceded it, The Big Parade is nevertheless an early film to have neither glorified the war nor ignored its human costs. It heavily influenced a great many subsequent war films, especially All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

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#24. Strike (1925)

Strike is a 1925 silent film made in the Soviet Union by Sergei Eisenstein. It was Eisenstein's first full-length feature film, and he would go on to make The Battleship Potemkin later that year. The film depicts a strike in 1903 by the workers of a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia, and their subsequent suppression. The film is most famous for a sequence near the end in which the violent suppression of the strike is cross-cut with footage of cattle being slaughtered, although there are several other points in the movie where animals are used as metaphors for the conditions of various individuals. Another theme in the film is collectivism in opposition to individualism which was viewed as a convention of western film.

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#23. The Thief of Baghdad (1924)

The Thief of Bagdad is a 1924 American swashbuckler film directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks. Freely adapted from One Thousand and One Nights, it tells the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph of Bagdad. The imaginative gymnastics suited the athletic star, whose "catlike, seemingly effortless" movements, were as much dance as gymnastics. Along with his earlier Robin Hood (1922), the film marked Fairbanks's transformation from genial comedy to a career in "swashbuckling" roles.

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#22. The Great White Silence

The Great White Silence is a 1924 English documentary that contains brief cinematograph sequences taken during the Terra Nova Expedition of 1910–1913. The principal filmmaker was photographer Herbert Ponting.

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#21. Greed (1924)

Greed is a 1924 American silent film, written and directed by Erich von Stroheim and based on the 1899 Frank Norris novel McTeague. The film tells the story of McTeague, a San Francisco dentist, who marries his best friend Schouler's girlfriend Trina. Shortly after their engagement, Trina wins a lottery prize of $5,000, at that time a substantial sum. Schouler jealously informs the authorities that McTeague had been practicing dentistry without a license, and McTeague and Trina become impoverished. While living in squalor, McTeague becomes a violent alcoholic and Trina becomes greedily obsessed with her winnings, refusing to spend any of them, despite how poor she and her husband have become. Eventually McTeague murders Trina for the money and flees to Death Valley. Schouler catches up with him there for a final confrontation. Greed was one of the few films of its time to be shot entirely on location, with Stroheim shooting approximately 85 hours of footage before editing. Stroheim used sophisticated filming techniques such as deep-focus cinematography and montage editing. He considered Greed to be a Greek tragedy, in which environment and heredity controlled the characters' fates and reduced them to primitive bête humaines (human beasts).

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#20. Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Sherlock Jr. is a 1924 American silent comedy film directed by and starring Buster Keaton and written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph A. Mitchell. It features Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton and Ward Crane.

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#19. The Last Laugh (1924)

The Last Laugh (German: Der letzte Mann (The Last Man)) is a 1924 German silent film directed by German director F. W. Murnau from a screenplay written by Carl Mayer. The film stars Emil Jannings and Maly Delschaft. In German, the title means, "The last man." A nameless hotel doorman loses his job. It is a cinematic example of the Kammerspielfilm or "chamber-drama" genre, which follows the style of short, sparse plays of lower middle-class life that emphasized the psychology of the characters rather than the sets and action.

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#18. La Roue (1923)

La Roue (pronounced [la ʁu], 'The Wheel') is a French silent film, directed by Abel Gance, who also directed Napoléon and J'accuse!. It was released in 1923. The film used then-revolutionary lighting techniques, and rapid scene changes and cuts.

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#17. Our Hospitality (1923)

Our Hospitality is a 1923 silent comedy film directed by and starring Buster Keaton. The film uses slapstick and situational comedy to tell the story of Willie McKay, who gets caught in the middle of the infamous "Canfield"–"McKay" feud, an obvious satire of the real-life Hatfield–McCoy feud. It was a groundbreaking work for the comedy film genre, as Keaton included "careful integration of gags into a dramatically coherent storyline", "meticulous attention to period detail" and "beautiful cinematography and extensive location shooting". This was a contrast to the usual slapstick comedies of this era. 

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#16. The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923)

La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet) is a short French impressionist silent film made in 1922, directed by pioneering avant-garde cinema director Germaine Dulac. It stars Germaine Dermoz as the protagonist Madame Beudet, who has grown tired of her husband's foolish antics and Alexandre Arquillière as Monsieur Beudet. It is considered by many to be one of the first truly "feminist" films. It tells the story of an intelligent woman trapped in a loveless marriage.

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#15. Haxan - Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

Häxan is a 1922 Swedish-Danish documentary-style silent horror film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Based partly on Christensen's study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts. The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatised sequences that are comparable to horror films. With Christensen's meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made. The film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion.

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#14. Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922)

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (German: Dr. Mabuse der Spieler) is the first film in the Dr. Mabuse series, about the character Doctor Mabuse who featured in the novels of Norbert Jacques. It was directed by Fritz Lang. The film is silent and would be followed by the sound sequels The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). It is four and a half hours long and divided into two parts, originally released a month apart: Der große Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit and Inferno: Ein Spiel von Menschen unserer Zeit. The title, Dr. Mabuse der Spieler, makes use of three meanings of the German Der Spieler which can mean gambler, puppeteer, or actor. The character Dr. Mabuse, who disguises himself, manipulates people, and is a notorious gambler, embodies all senses of the word. Therefore, the Player might be a more appropriate translation of the title.

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#13. Nanook of the North (1922)

Nanook of the North (also known as Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic) is a 1922 American silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty, with elements of docudrama, at a time when the concept of separating films into documentary and drama did not yet exist. In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk man named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic. The film has been incorrectly considered the first feature-length documentary. Some have criticized Flaherty for staging several sequences, but the film is generally viewed as standing "alone in its stark regard for the courage and ingenuity of its heroes."

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#12. Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror; or simply Nosferatu) is a 1922 German Expressionist horror film, directed by F. W. Murnau, starring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok. The film, shot in 1921 and released in 1922, was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Stoker's heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed. However, a few prints of Nosferatu survived, and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.

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#11. Foolish Wives (1922)

Foolish Wives is a 1922 American silent drama film directed by Erich von Stroheim. When released in 1922, the film was the most expensive film made at that time, and billed by Universal Studios as the "first million-dollar movie" to come out of Hollywood. Originally, von Stroheim intended the film to run anywhere between 6 and 10 hours, and be shown over two evenings, but Universal executives opposed this idea. The studio bosses cut the film drastically before the release date.

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#10. Orphans of The Storm (1921)

Orphans of the Storm is a 1921 silent drama film by D. W. Griffith set in late-18th-century France, before and during the French Revolution. Like his earlier films, Griffith used historical events to comment on contemporary events, in this case the French Revolution to warn about the rise of Bolshevism. The film is about class conflict and a plea for inter-class understanding and against destructive hatred. At one point, in front of the Committee of Public Safety, a main character pleads, "Yes I am an aristocrat, but a friend of the people."

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#9. The Phantom Carriage (1921)

The Phantom Carriage is a 1921 Swedish film generally considered to be one of the central works in the history of Swedish cinema. It was directed by and starred Victor Sjöström, alongside Hilda Borgström, Tore Svennberg and Astrid Holm. The film is notable for its special effects, its advanced (for the time) narrative structure with flashbacks within flashbacks, and for having been a major influence on the works of Ingmar Bergman.

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#8. Within Our Gates (1920)

Within Our Gates is a 1920 American silent film by the director Oscar Micheaux that portrays the contemporary racial situation in the United States during the early twentieth century, the years of Jim Crow, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration of blacks to cities of the North and Midwest, and the emergence of the "New Negro". It was part of a genre called race films. The plot features an African-American woman who goes North in an effort to raise money for a rural school in the Deep South for poor black children. Her romance with a black doctor eventually leads to revelations about her family's past and her own mixed-race, European ancestry. The film portrays racial violence under white supremacy, and the lynching of black people. Produced, written and directed by Micheaux, it is the oldest known surviving film made by an African-American director.

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#7. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is a 1920 German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark and striking visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets.

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#6. Broken Blossoms (1919)

Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl, often referred to simply as Broken Blossoms, is a 1919 American silent drama film directed by D.W. Griffith. It stars Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, and Donald Crisp, and tells the story of young girl, Lucy Burrows, who is abused by her alcoholic prizefighting father, Battling Burrows, and meets Cheng Huan, a kind-hearted Chinese man who falls in love with her.

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#5. Intolerance (1916)

Intolerance is a 1916 epic silent film directed by D. W. Griffith. Widely regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the silent era, the three-and-a-half-hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines, each separated by several centuries: (1) a contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption, (2) a Judean story: Christ's mission and death, (3) a French story: the events surrounding the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, and (4) a Babylonian story: the fall of the Babylonian Empire to Persia in 539 BC. Each story had its own distinctive color tint in the original print, but not in the currently available versions. The scenes are linked by shots of a figure representing Eternal Motherhood, rocking a cradle. Intolerance was made partly in response to criticism of Griffith's previous film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was criticized by the NAACP and other groups as perpetuating racial stereotypes and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.

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#4. Les Vampires (1915)

Les Vampires is a 1915–16 French silent crime serial film written and directed by Louis Feuillade. The main characters are a journalist and his friend who become involved in trying to uncover and stop a bizarre underground Apache gang, known as The Vampires. The serial consists of ten episodes, which vary greatly in length. Being roughly 7 hours long, it is considered one of the longest films ever made. Upon its initial release Les Vampires was given negative reviews by critics for its dubious morality and its lack of cinematic techniques. The film has since come under re-evaluation and is recognised for developing thriller techniques, adopted by Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, and avant-garde cinema, inspiring Luis Buñuel and others.

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#3. Birth of a Nation (1915)

The Birth of a Nation (originally called The Clansman) is a 1915 American silent epic drama film directed and co-produced by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish. The film is three hours long[5] and was originally presented in two parts separated by an intermission; it was the first 12-reel film in the United States. The film chronicles the relationship of two families in the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era over the course of several years: the pro-UnionNorthern Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy Southern Camerons. The film was a commercial success, though it was highly controversial for its portrayal of black men (many played by white actors in blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women, and the portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as a heroic force.

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#2. The Great Train Robbery (1903)

The Great Train Robbery is a 1903 American silent short Western film written, produced, and directed by Edwin S. Porter, a former Edison Studios cameraman. At twelve minutes long, The Great Train Robbery film is considered a milestone in film making. The film used a number of then-unconventional techniques, including composite editing, on-location shooting, and frequent camera movement. The film is one of the earliest to use the technique of cross cutting, in which two scenes are shown to be occurring simultaneously but in different locations. Film historians now largely consider The Great Train Robbery to be the first American action film and the first Western film with a "recognizable form".

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#1. A Trip to The Moon (1902)

A Trip to the Moon is a 1902 French adventure film directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by a wide variety of sources, including Jules Verne's novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites (lunar inhabitants), and return to Earth with a captive Selenite. It features an ensemble cast of French theatrical performers, led by Méliès himself in the main role of Professor Barbenfouillis, and is filmed in the overtly theatrical style for which Méliès became famous.