50 Essential Films of the Silent Era (1890-1929) - Page 2

The following list includes only films produced in the sound era with the specific artistic intention of being silent. The 1920s saw a vast expansion of Hollywood film making and worldwide film attendance. Throughout the decade, film production increasingly focused on the feature film rather than the "short" or "two-reeler." This is a change that had begun with works like the long D. W. Griffith epics of the mid-1910s and became the primary style by the 1920s. By the mid-to-late-1920s, the silent "art film" was on the rise with some of the greatest silent film achievements, such as King Vidor's The Crowd, and F. W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Erich von Stroheim's ultra-realist films such as Greed also had a big influence. Stylistically, the influence of German Expressionism, Soviet Montage Editing, and realism made profound aesthetic changes to film over the course of the decade.