Silent Film Online

Silent Film Online is a collection of more than 1,000 silent feature films, documentaries, serials, and shorts originally created from the 1890s to the 1930s, representing the foundation of modern cinematic technique and film theory. Some rare films have been reconstructed or restored using modern digital techniques.

Through examples such as D.W. Griffith’s use of cross-cutting in Birth of a Nation, Robert Wiene’s experimentation with camera angles and stage settings in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Eisenstein’s demonstration of the power of editing in Battleship Potemkin, these films show us the origins of the narrative language of cinema that we know today. The collection contains works from legendary filmmakers such as Georges Méliès, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Charles Chaplin, F.W. Murnau, Luis Buñuel, Ernst Lubitsch, Victor Sjostrom, Erich von Stroheim, Carl T. Dreyer, Edwin S. Porter, and many others. The collection is global in scope, with examples of silent film from Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

Index terms are assigned to each video to aid in searching. The Alexander Street video platform offers the ability to create playlists, create video clips, permalink to videos, and embed videos in course management systems.