Favourite silent movie

[cine]

Yeah if we were listing runners up, I'd definitely have those 6 on my list, but also The Gold Rush, Greed, Metropolis, and Nosferatu, rounding it to 10... there's so many great silents, I wish somebody like PTA would try one.
For the record, I would include "un chien andalou" on my personal top 10 favs since I love Bunuel but I'm thinking silent feature films.. I know I didn't clarify that but I don't care anyway. 'andalou' will always be the greatest silent short film.

[samsong]

oh, how could i forget Metropolis... and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

i've yet to see Greed, The Crowd, Nosferatu, and as depressing and sad as this is, any Chaplin films

[cowboykurtis]

i'd have to say greed and intolerance -- meshes of the afternoon is pretty imporessive as well.

[Mesh]

i've yet to see......any Chaplin films

Get on that. See four or five shorts first, then move on to The Kid and Modern Times.  That's a decent start.

[yarsrevenge]

^

[Alethia]

Man with a Movie Camera

ooh, excellent choice.

[samsong]

sorry... have one more to add:

D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms

[Pubrick]

sorry... have one more to add:

D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms

u already listed that up top, dude.

i suggest u look up all the remaining silent films on imdb and then come back and name them.

[aclockworkjj]

I like the one with the horse....from some french guys...yeah.

[snaporaz]

i'll avoid making a favourite. aside from keaton, i haven't seen many other silent pictures. saw metropolis when i was like 15, so i don't remember much. i've got it on tape, but the girlfriend has it on dvd. she hasn't seen it, so i might watch it with her real soon. really wanna see battleship potemkin. fell alseep during birth of a nation.  

[snaporaz]

hey, this does look pretty cool.

what i read about it, i mean. not just the cover art.

[Ravi]

I tried to watch Birth of a Nation once, but I got bored and stopped it.  I probably wasn't in the mood for a long Civil War epic at the time.  I'll try it again someday.  I did see Griffith's Way Down East, which was a good movie.  The climax was all the more suspenseful because it didn't use any special effects.

Ben-hur:  A Tale of Christ is a terrific production.  Very lavish, but the story is quite touching.  I haven't seen the Wyler version in a few years so I can't compare the two.  It features a few 2-strip Technicolor sequences.

Anyone seen any of Melies' films?  Even at the birth of film he was experimenting and performing various special effects.  I'm sure you've at least seen a few stills from A Trip to the Moon.  The Smashing Pumpkins video Tonight, Tonight is a tribute to this film.  There is a great French DVD (it's all region NTSC) with several of Melies' films and a two-hour documentary on his life.

[ono]

I tried to watch Birth of a Nation once, but I got bored and stopped it.  I probably wasn't in the mood for a long Civil War epic at the time.  I'll try it again someday.

I wouldn't bother if I were you.  It's horrible pretty much all the way through, and it's only revered (or reviled) for two reasons: the racist content, and the advancements in editing technique, which really, are nothing to be proud of, because someone else would've done it eventually.

[Lance]

hey mesh, what movie is that first picture of yours from?

[Mesh]

hey mesh, what movie is that first picture of yours from?

It's brilliant.  Hilarious, inventive, as death-defying as any of his films, technically innovative as hell.  Plus it's totally a movie about movies, the dreamlike quality of movies, the whole viewer-identification-with-onscreen-characters angle so prominent in film theory.

So thrilling, at several moments, it's chill-inducing.  For real.  Keaton was a genius.