It doesn't take long for a novelty to be hailed as a trend. Internet film rental service Lovefilm reports that the buzz around The Artist has sparked a boom in curiosity about early cinema, with a 40% rise in the number of people streaming silent films on its site in the week leading up to the Oscars.

The top 10 most-streamed silents include a clutch of Buster Keaton's ingenious comedies, some heady Hollywood melodrama (A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara, and The Son of the Sheikh, with Rudolph Valentino) and creepy Swedish horror The Phantom Carriage. There are only two films on the list that seem to bear any relation to Michel Hazanavicius's surprise hit: Frank Borzage's mournful romance Seventh Heaven (which inspired the "tuxedo scene" in The Artist) and FW Murnau's City Girl, a sweet romance that turns terribly dark, and which Hazanavicius has repeatedly claimed as an influence.

Obviously those choices reflect the range of silent films on offer at the streaming site rather than all the era had to offer, and one might wonder how many new rentals that 40% rise really represents. But this news does pose a question: if The Artist, and Hugo too, have piqued your interest in silent cinema, where is the best place to start? I've got a few suggestions, but I'd love to hear yours too.

1) Underworld (1927)

The Artist's nostalgia is primarily for the final five or so years of Hollywood's silent era: the silvery cinematography, the glamorous locations and the easy, smart wit. I could suggest any number of Josef Von Sternberg movies, but I'll plump for the Ben Hecht-scripted gangster drama Underworld, because – like The Artist – it seems to be slightly out of time: a 1920s movie that excels in a genre which hadn't been invented yet. If you prefer romance to gunfire and double-crossing, try Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in the woozily passionate Flesh and the Devil (1926) or a heartbreaking fable from Murnau, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).

2) Show People (1928)

Hollywood's navel-gazing desire to make films about itself is nothing new, so if you smirked at the in-jokes of The Artist, seek out King Vidor's comedy, with Marion Davies as an aspiring movie star (shades of Peppy Miller) and cameos by big names from Charlie Chaplin to Douglas Fairbanks. Fans of Hollywood gossip know Davies as William Randolph Hearst's mistress, but she was a fine comic actor too. You can see Show People on the big screen at the Hippodrome festival of silent cinema in Bo'Ness later this month. The Crowd, by the same director, is a wonderful film and a big influence on Hazanavicius, too. An artier, more paranoid take on the movie industry comes courtesy of The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, a short, spiky film directed by Robert Florey, who worked with everyone from Louis Feuillade to the Marx brothers.

It's impossible to think about the silent era without slapstick comedy– and the patrons of Lovefilm have already wisely found their way to the balletic stunts of Buster Keaton. If you're in the mood for a tribute to Hollywood's allure, try his genuinely delightful fantasy, in which a projectionist dreams he's on the other side of the movie screen.

I'd also suggest a couple of Charlie Chaplin movies: The Circus and The Kid are both gorgeous films that pair well with The Artist, being emotionally deft as well as laugh-out-loud funny. Harold Lloyd's Safety Last! has a similar relaxed charm to The Artist, and if you've seen Hugo you'll want to know exactly how that poor sap came to be hanging from a clock in the first place. And sometimes women got the best jokes: Beatrice Lillie masters both slapstick and sentiment in backstage comedy Exit Smiling.

Yes, this is another Murnau film, but it's an excellent choice for a silent film novice who finds reading dialogue on intertitles a strain: it gets by without them. Emil Jannings plays a hotel doorman who loses his job and his spirit – but there's a twist ending that's more twisted than most. The Last Laugh is a German film, and in the silent era, as ever, it's well worth venturing beyond American cinema. In the 1920s, Berlin was producing glamorous, sexy films such as Pandora's Box (with Louise Brooks) and Asphalt. You'll find experimental, impressionistic melodramas from France – by Marcel l'Herbier and Abel Gance – and sophisticated, perhaps unexpectedly arty films made in Britain: A Cottage on Dartmoor, The First Born and Hitchcock's early work, including The Lodger and The Manxman.

5) The Heart of the World (2000)

Don't forget the modern silents. Guy Maddin's short film thrillingly remixes Soviet montage with German Expressionism. Check out Aki Kaurismaki's Juha, too, which transplants silent-era techniques to the 1970s. And it's worth keeping an eye out for new silents at festivals, particularly now The Artist has put the era back in vogue. One such short film that was premiered last year, to great acclaim, is Otto Kylmälä's The Force That Through the Green Fire Fuels the Flower – a tender, and very 21st-century slant on silent cinema, with intertitles integrated into the scenes and a score by silent film musician Stephen Horne.

Each of these film should point you in the direction of another and soon it will be obvious that there is more to silent cinema that histrionic acting and the Keystone Kops. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. If you keep following the thread, you could find yourself venturing as far as Soviet classics such as Battleship Potemkin, Mother and Man With a Movie Camera; to the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's French-made, unforgettably cathartic The Passion of Joan of Arc (there's a season of his films starting at BFI Southbank in London this month; and to the earliest days of cinema and the pyrotechnics of Georges Méliès – the inspiration for Hugo, of course.

So what do you think? There are far too many to mention here, and I'll confess that after The Artist's triumphant tap-dancing finale the next film I wanted to watch wasn't a silent at all, but a Fred and Ginger musical. Share your recommendations for post-Artist viewing below. The first one to say Vertigo is a rotten egg.