

A collection of news and information pertaining to silent era films.

Copyright © 1999-2019 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company.

All Rights Reserved.

The Top 100 Silent Era Films

Buster Keaton in The General (1926).

Photograph: Silent Era image collection.



The list is not limited to features exclusively. There are several short silent film masterpieces, and they are considered equally with feature films. And while our definition of the silent cinema timeline usually spans from about 1891 to 1929, we accept votes for later true silents like City Lights (1931) or Japanese or Chinese silent films from the early 1930s, for example. (We firmly judge Modern Times [1936] to be a mute sound film.) Films receiving votes must still exist somewhere and in some viewable form. Without surviving prints there is no way to validate the true value of a film, and no lost film can fairly be included on the list based solely on its reputation. We limit the list to films that were produced to be silent films exclusively (synchronized music tracks are acceptible, but part-talkies and talkies that have only survived as silents are out).

The voting continues on. The Top 100 list continues to change based on the ongoing votes that we receive. If you think the current standing results are unrealistic then send in your votes today and let’s see how this list continues to shake out. Once a lesser film is on the Top 100 list the only way it can be removed is to vote it off the list. The more votes we receive for the better films, the faster the lesser films get pushed off the bottom of the Top 100 list to our Off the List tabulation.

Use the link below to e-mail your votes to us. List the films you think deserve to be included in a list of the best silent era films. No particular order is necessary, but please include the full title, the year of release, the country of its production, and the film’s director (if known). Feel free to vote for as many films as you would like up to 100 films, but — remember — you can only vote once for each individual title. In the case of a tie in the number of votes, we exercise our own editorial opinion and rank the tied films accordingly.

Very few of the films on this list are unavailable on home video. Because of home video, more people have an opportunity to enjoy these silent masterpieces and can make informed judgments on each film’s historic and aesthetic value.

We would like to thank the people who took a few moments to vote for their favorite silent era films over the past years, you are the ones who make this project work through your involvement. We are also working on an automated voting and tabulation process that will allow you to register online as a voter and cast your ballot. The voting would then be tabulated automatically and remain up-to-the-minute, whenever a reader pulls up the Top 100 pages. This process would do away with our current slow, labor-intensive method of list updates.

COMMENTS ON THE LATEST UPDATE: None of the rankings of the top ten films change, even with continued voting. The top ten films just continue to gain distance from the lower ranked films on the list. A few films make their first appearance on the bottom of the list (below 100), and several new films have been nominated, bringing the total number of films nominated to the list to more than 550. Rankings below the Top 100 are still quite wild, with only 2-3 votes making the difference of a jump of 10 ranks or more. We have found, not surprisingly, that the popularity of a silent era film is related to its availability on home video.



CAST YOUR VOTES HERE

Remember: Title, year, director, country.



CAST YOUR VOTES HERE

Remember: Title, year, director, country.