1903: The Great Train Robbery

I guess you ought to have seen it once. In the end, someone shoots at the screen. (5)

1921: Manhatta

This silent ten-minute documentary, if you want to call it that, portrays a day in the life of Manhattan. Watching completely silent films (without music) is an experience I'm only getting used to, but it helps to look at the film as a series of animated photographs. "Moving pictures", you might say. (7.5)

1927: The Lodger

Though it is sometimes hailed as Hitchcock's first masterpiece, I was not that impressed by the story of a family who rents an apartment to a man who may or may not be the serial killer the whole town is looking for. Some interesting visuals at the beginning; apart from that it seems a little old, probably because it is. (6)

1909: A Corner in Wheat

Evil capitalist gains control of the wheat market, as a consequence of which poor people can't buy bread anymore in Griffith's early short which, despite running for a little over 14 minutes, is too long. A must-see if you're writing a history of anti-market films. (4)

1943: Meshes of the Afternoon

Mirrors, knives, waves - this experimental short has the whole psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. It's easy to see how someone could call this "meaningless experimental crap", but I quite like its Latin feel - the grainy b/w recording of the sunlight -, the music (not that I'd buy it on CD) and the crude surrealism. (7)

1928: Spione (Spies) (Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung Restoration)

Lang's film about the state fighting a criminal mastermind that's not called Mabuse is a tad unfocused and long, yet overall a decent bit of entertainment. First appearance of a stache-twirling villain that I'm aware of. (6)

1928: Oktyabr (Ten Days That Shook the World)

The Eisenstein film about the Russian Revolution, which I saw in a GDR version with German intertitles, Shostakovich's music and added sound effects, is interesting in that a certain interpretation of history affects the way the story is told at a very basic level: Unusually, here are practically no individual characters of relevance, which makes sense if you believe that there is no such thing as individuals, only classes with interests that fight each other. The film suffers from this, but makes up for it by being visually excellent. (7.5)

1919: Broken Blossoms or, The Yellow Man and the Girl

Girl suffers under the thumb of her adoptive father who suffers from bad English ("I'll teach yer!") and anger management issues ("I'll teach yer!"). Girl falls in love with gentle Chinaman (played by a pretty Caucasian-looking Richard Barthelmess). Violence. - There's not a lot to say about D.W. Griffith's acclaimed silent melodrama except that it's not very good. (5.5)

1929: Chelovek s kino-apparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera)

Dziga Vertov's silent experimental/documentary film about life in The Modern Russian City attempts to cover all central aspects of life - work and play, birth and death - and time and again puts the filmmakers themselves into the frame, perhaps in an attempt to alert the audience to the subjective nature of the seemingly objective medium, perhaps out of vanity. Despite an undeniable stylishness of the whole movie and quite a feeling for rhythm in particular, the film could still be somewhat boring with the wrong music, I guess, but Michael Nyman's 2002 soundtrack is not only cool music in and by itself, but fits perfectly with the pictures. (7.5)

1924: Paris qui dort (At 3:25)

René Clair's half-hour silent about a group of people who are the only ones awake and moving in a Paris that has otherwise come to a standstill is a mixture of the charming and the lengthy. (6)

1922: Häxan

Benjamin Christensen's educational silent film which uses feature-type scenes to argue against the existence of witchs, witchcraft and the devil, isn't nearly as fucked up as I had hoped, though the writer-director in the role of the devil looks really very good. For stoners. (6)

1921: The Kid

Crisp, funny, touching and featuring a great score (composed in 1971) as well as that certain something it's hard to put one's finger on, The Kid, about The Tramp's adventures with his cute adoptive son, may well be the quintessential Chaplin film. (8)

1914: Cabiria (123 min.s Kino Restored Print)

It's set during the Second Punic War between Rome and Cathargo, and apart from that the intricacies of the plot are hard to follow; this probbably isn't helped by a third of the footage missing from the version I saw - anyway, at its centre are Cabiria, who gets seperated from her parents as a little girl and the impressively muscular slave Maciste. Writer-director Giovanni Pastrone, who seems a little biased in favour of the Romans, fires on all cylinders: Volcanos! Elephants! Earthquakes! Armies! Camels! Mirrors that set ships on fire! Stuff falling down! Lots of it! The film's real megalomania, however, is in the title cards, which not only sometimes introduce multiple characters and plotpoints, but also have a tendency to summarize the entire scene we're about to see: Sandra pleads with the noblemen to be released, but to no avail, followed by a three-minute scene in which Sandra pleads with the noblemen to be released, but to no avail - that kind of thing. Sorta fizzes out at the end. (6)

1928: Steamboat Bill, jr.

Buster Keaton stars as the son of a steamboat captain in this loser-turned-hero story. The storm sequence is great, but it makes up only about a fourth of the film, and, let's face it, the rest is not that hot. (6.5)

1903: Alice in Wonderland

The fragment of the first-ever film version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (more info) is a bit weak in terms of overall narrative structure, the growth-shrink scene is too long and, worst of all, the cheshire cat is badly miscast! (5)

1920: Convict 13

Buster Keaton finds himself in a convict's uniform, and soon he's in a prison and about to be hanged. Rioting and lots of standard silent comedy jokes, in particular people falling down. Not the reason Keaton's famous. (5.5)

1897: Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer

I like it! (7.5)

1922: Daydreams

In this 22-minute fragment of a short, Buster Keaton writes home misleading letters to his sweetheart - when he writes about his success on Wall Street, it means he's actually cleaning it, etc. More than most old comedies this one suffers from its visual jokes having become not simply commonplace, but cliché. Reasonably entertaining nonetheless. (6)

1917: His Wedding Night

It is not quite clear what the general idea was when this Fatty Arbuckle vehicle was conceived, although in the end Buster Keaton is kidnapped while drunk and wearing a dress. Features an illustration of discriminative pricing and mental rotation deficiencies on the part of the filmmakers or the targeted audience. (5)

1917: The Rough House

A silent comic short featuring the usual silent comic short ado and the only film I can think of the trivia about which is more interesting than the film itself (6.0). From IMDb:

• Directorial debut of Buster Keaton.
• Buster Keaton hadn't yet solidified his "Great Stone Face" persona; he smiles, laughs, grimaces, and smirks.
• Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle performs a prototype of the "dancing dinner rolls" that Charles Chaplin used in The Gold Rush (1925). Until "The Rough House" - thought to be lost - was rediscovered, Chaplin was credited with creating the gag.