Free Silent Films — Watch Cinema's First Masterpieces

Silent film is where cinema invented its own grammar, and because copyright protection on pre-1928 US works and many foreign productions has long since expired, this is the most completely public corner of film history. The catalogue spans continents and moods: Georges Méliès's hand-tinted trick film "A Trip to the Moon" (1902), the birth of special effects; Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920), all crooked doorways and painted shadows, the founding text of German Expressionism; F.W. Murnau's unlicensed "Nosferatu" (1922), a Dracula adaptation so brazen a German court ordered every print destroyed — a few survived, and it's now free everywhere; and Dziga Vertov's kinetic Soviet montage experiments a few years later. Comedy shorts from the Keystone lot, chase sequences built for live orchestras, and title cards doing the work modern films hand to dialogue all sit side by side. Because these films predate synchronized sound, the version you watch is necessarily an interpretation — a particular tinting, a particular music cue — and that variability is part of the pleasure. Watch for the craft that had to substitute for sound: expressive make-up, exaggerated blocking, and lighting doing the emotional labor a raised voice would do today. Start with "Caligari" if you want the style that influenced everything from noir to horror, or Méliès if you want to see cinema's very first special effect.