Artheme Swallows his Clarinet is a rather bizarre short film from 1912. [more inside]
posted by hydrophonic on Jun 24, 2009 - 10 comments

"Did you hear a stalk of celery being cut? If you did, you understand the magic of the Foley Artist." A short film that is just too long about silent films from the previously mentioned podcast You Look Nice Today
posted by Del Far on Jan 8, 2009 - 19 comments

The IMDB is hosting movies and TV. If the expanding collection doesn't yet do it for you, there's always http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/, or, for your silent film needs, plain old youtube.
posted by StrikeTheViol on Sep 30, 2008 - 13 comments

After 80 years, a complete version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been discovered in Buenos Aires. [more inside]
posted by Nathaniel W on Jul 2, 2008 - 81 comments

Charlie Chaplin Filter. [more inside]
posted by miss lynnster on May 26, 2008 - 22 comments

D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation [previously] is now viewable in its entirety at YouTube. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Or at Internet Archive, if you prefer.
posted by flapjax at midnite on Apr 6, 2008 - 25 comments

Enjoy some silent film this week: Battleship Potemkin. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The General. The Immigrant. Haxan. Intolerance (1, 2, 3). Nosferatu.
posted by TrialByMedia on Dec 2, 2007 - 27 comments

Silent Star Wars. (YouTube)
posted by fandango_matt on Jul 28, 2007 - 13 comments

Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. was born into vaudeville. He quickly became a popular and controversial part of his family's stage act; an act that had his father violently hurling the "disobedient" child across the stage into scenery, the orchestra pit, or even into the audience, only to see him emerge amazingly unharmed. After the boy took an unplanned and particularly clamorous fall down a hotel stairwell, an astonished Harry Houdini cried out to the parents, "What a buster your kid took!" And thus, as legend has it, did little Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. become Buster Keaton.

At 22, Keaton made his cinematic debut with mentor Fatty Arbuckle. Afterward, he immediately founded Buster Keaton Studios, releasing a series of brilliant short (and later longer) comedies. Dozens of these are freely available to stream or download at the Internet Archive, including Steamboat Bill Jr, Convict 13, The Electric House, and his seminal The General (alt), which, despite completely failing at the box office, would be later hailed by many as one of the greatest films of all time. [more inside]
posted by churl on Apr 25, 2007 - 58 comments

«The silent queen of all that is snowy and pure» (.pdf) I will never forget the first time I saw Giovanni Pastrone’s extraordinary Cabiria... I wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer scope and beauty of this film. And I was completely unprepared for having my sense of film history re-aligned. There are so many elements that we took for granted as American inventions – the long-form historical epic, the moving camera, diffused light. Suddenly, here they were in a picture made two years before Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. -- Martin Scorsese
It was the first film to be over three hours long, the first to use a moving camera, the first to cost 20 times the average cost of a motion picture; Pastrone took several elephants and hundreds of extras to the Alps, in the dead of winter, to film scenes that only lasted a couple of minutes onscreen. He hired an ex-dockworker and turned him into one of the first action movie heroes, Maciste. And, he also created the first international marketing campaign of the history of cinema. The Americans were so impressed that Cabiria became the first film to be ever shown on White House grounds. Last week, at the Cannes Film Festival, a beautiful, painstakingly restored version of this forgotten masterpiece has just been shown to the public.
posted by matteo on May 29, 2006 - 13 comments

The Unhappy Medium. If you like modern silent films like Doc Hammer's Rub, linked here previously, you may also enjoy the work of Chelsea Spear. Her Alphabet is a short about math, music and a precocious child, while The Unhappy Medium, set in the 1920's, is about spiritualism, fraud, adults and children. And some good news for the would-be filmmaker: Kodak still makes Super-8 film, and there are plenty of cameras both old and new available.
posted by box on Feb 6, 2005 - 6 comments

When little girls rub their eyes, the face of the man to whom they're destined will become visible in the swirling eddy of light. (a short film from Doc Hammer of Venture Bros. fame)
posted by buriednexttoyou on Dec 18, 2004 - 26 comments