The good news is that you don’t ever have to watch a silent movie if you don’t want to, so this is entirely optional. No one should have to watch anything; this is why the best kind of romantic relationships are the ones where you both look at each other and smile guiltily and one of you says “Want to watch [thing we love] instead of [thing we’ve been meaning to get around to watching]?” and the other says “GOD, yes” and the worst kind of romantic relationships are the ones where one of you is always saying “You promised you’d come with me” and “You really need to see this.” So, just to be super clear, you should not go about gazing at silent movies unless the idea strikes you as interesting; there are a lot of movies that exist and you are not obligated to watch them all, particularly ones whose only redeeming value is that they’re very old.

So with that said, if you’re going to give silent movies a shot, you need to remember not to pizza when you’re supposed to french fry, or else you’re not going to have a good time. One of the worst ways to watch a silent movie is to load one up on Netflix or Youtube and settle down by yourself in your bedroom to watch it on a laptop or a small screen. I promise you, even if you are one of God’s most solemn and patient creatures, you will start playing Text Twist or fall asleep in the first five minutes under those conditions. It’s not that silent movies are boring (or that you’re a stupid person who can’t appreciate “good” films), it’s just that they were created for an entirely different time and context.

I tried watching Metropolis for years on my own in my parents’ basement, and while I could appreciate the unbelievable set work and the gorgeous mis-en-scene, I could never go more than a few minutes at a stretch before I had to check out and do something else. But when I managed to see it at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood with a packed house and a full orchestra at the TCM Film Festival, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Success! I had transformed a bad time into a good time; a pizza into a french fry.

So here are my tips for maximizing your silent-movie-going experience:

• Try to find a film festival or an old movie palace that occasionally plays silent films near you. There are loads of silent film festivals nowadays — San Francisco has one every year, as do Denver and Topeka; Chicago has a silent film society. The way an audience reacts to a silent film can be so helpful. When you’re watching at home, even with a soundtrack, your mind can wander because you’re so used to hearing dialogue and audible cues — the audeince’s laughter, boos, hisses, etc. can make up for that and energize a viewing. AND PEOPLE WILL BOO. I saw the John Gilbert version of The Merry Widow and every time the evil Baron Sadoja clumped his way onscreen, people lost their minds hissing at him. It was fantastic. I don’t know what it is about silent movies that brings out the Statler and Waldorf in everyone, but I love it.

•  If you can’t find a theater showing silent films anywhere near you, make sure whatever version of the movie you’re watching has a decent soundtrack with it. Plenty of them don’t — lots of silent movies’ original scores have been lost entirely, while plenty of others have been dubbed over with completely awful, inappropriate soundtracks, so do a bit of research before you pick the version you’re going to watch.
• Watch it on the biggest screen you have access to. Silent films rely heavily on the expressiveness and charisma of individual actor’s faces and body language, so the smaller the screen, the more you miss. You know that goofy, overdramatic and heavily-rouged pantomime style you sometimes see as a way of poking fun at silent film acting? It’s ridiculous in a sound context — not just a movie where characters are talking, but a movie that’s filmed in the style of a talkie, which we tend not to think of as a genre in its own right any more because it’s all we know — but it can be amazingly effective in a silent film. So go big.
• Don’t watch anything with Mary Pickford in it.
• Watch it with someone. Try not to have any other distractions around, but if you find yourself getting antsy, give yourself a break. Pause it for a few minutes, stretch your legs, talk about what you’ve seen so far. If you find you just can’t focus on a wordless screen for more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time, don’t force it. Come back to it later.

I know we’ve talked about the Code before, so I won’t go into detail here, but I’ll remind you not to be shocked if you run into a little Jazz-Age-era nudity. Let’s say, for practical purposes, Hollywood’s silent era runs from about 1915-1927. That’s not meticulously accurate; there’s at least one movie on my list that’s from 1911 and of course silent films had been produced and shown around the country since the 1880s, but the mid-teens is around when feature-length films started to predominate over one-reelers and shorts. Also it’s a nice, round number. 1927, of course, is the year The Jazz Singer was released, and 1928-1931 was a weird, ambiguous period full of intertitles and shoddy dialogue. It’s a big mess and I’m not ready to make any recommendations from that time.

The other nice thing about silent movies is that almost all of them are now in the public domain, and quite a few of them are available in full streaming on Netflix, Hulu, or on YouTube. If you’re not willing to make a purchase, you can almost always just google the name of the film you’re interested in watching and something (legal, even!) will pop up. So! 1915-1927 it is. What should you be watching?

The Heavies

These are the silent movies that even non-film buffs know about, or at least know they’re supposed to know about. Should you watch them?

Metropolis (1927) — This is an Important Movie for Serious People, so give yourself an out. It’s visually stunning — it’s unbelievable what they were able to pull off at the time; Fritz Lang is a fucking genius, and it’s influenced everything from Star Wars to the posters in your dorm freshman year. It’s also ver-r-r-y long and they repeat “between the head and the hands must be the heart” at least eight dozen times, so maybe give yourself a couple of breaks; pace yourself. The last ten years have brought at least three rediscoveries of previously lost footage, so be sure to watch the Kino or the F.W. Murnau foundation edition. Anything after 2011 is your best bet.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors (1922) — You’ve seen this! If you’ve seen Muppet Babies, I guarantee that you have seen at least one scene from this. You’re also probably familiar with the basic mythology: that Nosferatu was supposed to be a straight adaptation of Dracula, but Bram Stoker’s widow blocked it so they had to change the name and parts of the story, “something something German Expressionism,” and maybe you’ve even seen John Malkovich’s excellent fan-fiction The Shadow of The Vampire. Nosferatu is 100% worth watching in its own right, but you should definitely watch it in order to understand The Shadow of The Vampire, which I cannot possibly oversell.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — Man, I guess. We’re already leaning real heavy on the German Expressionism at this point, so if you’re ready to check out, I do not blame you. Watch the last five minutes and check out a few stills so you can ooh and ahh over the set design. Visually, it is cool as balls, so it’s worth watching at least for that, but the plot (while revolutionary at the time) is nothing you haven’t seen before in Jacob’s Ladder or Shutter Island. If you are the kind of person who enjoys doing drugs and watching movies, you will enjoy getting high and watching this movie quite a lot, I think.

Sunrise (1927) — Not the 1926 Australian comedy of the same name. Not that you would ever confuse the two, but still. It is sentimental and Theme-y to the hilt. Nobody has a name and it’s very archetypal. An evil Woman From the City, a tormented Man Who Wants Sex, a virtuous Wife Who Almost Gets Drowned But Is Not In Fact Drowned. You could not possibly make this movie with dialogue. It’s like a fairy tale in the original meaning of the phrase, full of portents and dread and awful temptations and has an eerie, dreamlike quality. It helps to think of it as a fairy tale, I think, because those are always full of surprising, out-of-nowhere violence, and otherwise it’s really hard to appreciate the sweet, dreamy getting-to-know-you-again sequences in the city when it’s like Hey, lady, this guy just tried to drown you. Watch it!

City Lights (1931) — I’m sorry, I really am, but Chaplin doesn’t do it for me. I finally got around to seeing it this year with a great audience (Jason Lee introduced it! Apparently it is his favorite film!) and I appreciated it and I get that he was a visual genius and yet it left me totally cold. Every time I see the Little Tramp, I just want to punch that stupid grin off his stupid face.

The ending was as good as everyone says it is; I genuinely loved the ending. You’ll probably like it; I think the problem here is me, not Chaplin.

(I also do not like Buster Keaton’s The General, please do not tell Orson Welles.)

The Phantom of the Opera (1925) — YESSSS. YES TOTALLY WATCH IT, IT IS AMAZING, LON CHANEY’S FACE IS UNBELIEVABLE AND MESMERIZING AND THERE IS AN INTENSE SEQUENCE THAT WAS SHOT IN TECHNICOLOR AND I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW THEY DID IT BUT IT IS SO CREEPY AND WHEN YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES THAT NIGHT LON CHANEY’S TWISTED VISAGE WILL SWIM ACROSS THE TRANSOM OF YOUR FEVERED MIND, UNBIDDEN AND UNBOUND.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPr8ojt9qr4

Also while you are at it, watch The Man Who Laughs (1928). They both fall into the category of “romance/melodrama” but are mostly semi-misremembered as horror films because of how arresting and horrifying the protagonists’ appearances are.

Then I guess never sleep again.

Greed (1924) — NOPE. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. It’s super influential and I love von Stroheim, but I would rather watch a Stanley Kubrick film than this nine-hour monstrosity. Do you know what you should watch instead? The Grand Illusion, from 1937. It’s not a silent film, so this is cheating, but von Stroheim has a wonderful part in it, and not nearly enough people have seen it. I feel about The Grand Illusion the way I feel about William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, which is really saying something.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) — Watch the hair-cutting scene and the last twenty minutes. Renee Falconetti has one of the most incredibly expressive faces in the world.

It (1927) — You have to. Everyone has to watch at least one Clara Bow movie just to, you know, understand the past, and Wings doesn’t count because she’s barely in it and neither of the two male romantic leads care about her at all, so it might as well be It. She wiggles fetchingly throughout. You’ll have a good time as long as you don’t get too worked up about the obvious sexual double standard. Just…just pretend it doesn’t bother you, and you’ll have a good time, I promise. Plus there’s a great Coney Island sequence.

Birth of a Nation/Intolerance (1915/1916) — I mean, you already know that D.W. Griffith invented the closeup, right? You don’t need to sit through Three Cheers For the Ku Klux Klan. And Intolerance is just stressful to watch. So many jump cuts!

Broken Blossoms (1919) — AHHH, I am of two minds about this. ON THE ONE HAND, it’s about a Chinese missionary who attempts to spread Buddhism “throughout the Anglo-Saxon lands” and falls in love with/rescues a white woman, which is pretty daring and interesting stuff, given the time period. On the other hand, the role is played by a white American in yellowface, which is pretty predictable and tiresome stuff, given the time period. Also, everyone dies in the end. I say give it a shot, but leave yourself an out if you find you don’t have the patience for it.

 

You Gotta See These Though Dude

The Merry Widow (1925) — This version of The Merry Widow — there have been, like, NINE adaptations — is easily my favorite. It is my opinion that John Gilbert was the handsomest man in the world and Greta Garbo was crazy not to marry him. HE WAS SO DASHING. I got so caught up in this when I finally saw it on the big screen; I was like my great-aunt Earline and her soaps. I hissed at the evil Baron and I sighed whenever John Gilbert swashbuckled his way onscreen. Also there is a scene where the merry widow disappears from the screen EXCEPT FOR HER DIAMONDS, to highlight what the evil Baron sees in her, and that’s pretty amazing. Watch it and then call me right away so we can talk about John Gilbert!!!!!

Wings (1927) — It’s so good. No, it’s SO GOOD. It does not feel like a movie that was made in 1927. It has just about every modern war-movie trope in it, but they’re executed so perfectly it feels completely fresh. Every time the strains of “My Buddy” start to play, I well up. I sobbed like a baby at the end of this movie, but in a way that felt terrific.

The Wind (1928) — LILLIAN GISH GOES INSANE IN THE DESERT. Silent movies can do eerie visual motifs like nobody’s business, and this one pulls it off perfectly. Plus a woman gets away with murdering an evil man in this movie, because the desert hates sexism. Four stars.

Girl Shy (1924) — The greatest movie in the world, hands down. I love Harold Lloyd. Harold Lloyd is a mensch and a delight and I wish he were still alive today and was also my best friend. It is so, so funny, and I think also is the first romantic comedy where somebody stops a wedding in progress to declare their love for one of the celebrants, which is something.

Also notable for creating the PUA community:

Beau Geste (1926) — Every single adaptation of Beau Geste is worth watching (you’ve seen the Gary Cooper version, right? RIGHT?), and this one has Ronald Coleman in it, which is great.

Borderline (1930) — 1. It’s got Paul Robeson in it. 2. It’s one of the earliest movies to deal with black-white interracial relationships that treats its black characters with dignity and nuance. 3. IT’S GOT PAUL ROBESON IN IT.

L’Inferno (1911) — It’s an early Italian adaptation of Dante’s Inferno with just unbelievable special effects. You might find that it looks oddly familiar because a lot of later films borrowed footage from it to illustrate hell, including Go Down, Death and Hell-O-Vision, which you should see for the title alone.

Robin Hood (1922) — For the Alan Hale completist! It’s been pretty much superseded (and rightly so!) for the Errol Flynn version, but luckily Alan Hale plays Little John in both versions.