Research on silent movies

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s.

Acting techniques
Silent film actors emphasized body language and facial expression so that the audience could better understand what an actor was feeling and portraying on screen.  

For the first twenty years of motion picture history most silent films were short--only a few minutes in length. At first a novelty, and then increasingly an art form and literary form, silent films reached greater complexity and length in the early 1910's. The films on the list above represent the greatest achievements of the silent era, which ended--after years of experimentation--in 1929 when a means of recording sound that would be synchronous with the recorded image was discovered. Few silent films were made in the 1930s, with the exception of Charlie Chaplin, whose character of the Tramp perfected expressive physical moves in many short films in the 1910's and 1920s. When the silent era ended, Chaplin refused to go along with sound; instead, he maintained the melodramatic Tramp as his mainstay in City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). The trademarks of Chaplin's Tramp were his ill-fitting suit, floppy over-sized shoes and a bowler hat, and his ever-present cane. A memorable image is Chaplin's Tramp shuffling off, penguin-like, into the sunset and spinning his cane whimsically as he exits. He represented the "little guy," the underdog, someone who used wit and whimsy to defeat his adversaries.

Films from the Silent Era

YEAR	FILM	DIRECTOR	COUNTRY
1915	Birth of a Nation	D. W. Griffith	USA
1919	Broken Blossoms	D. W. Griffith	USA
1919	The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari	Robert Wiene	Germany
1922	Nosferatu	F. W. Murnau	Germany
1922	Nanook of the North	Robert J. Flaherty	USA
1924	The Last Laugh	F. W. Murnau	Germany
1925	Strike	Sergei Eisenstein	Russian
1925	Potemkin	Sergei Eisenstein	Russian
1925	The Gold Rush	Charlie Chaplin	USA
1925	The Street of Sorrow	G. W. Pabst	Germany
1926	Metropolis	Fritz Lang	Germany
1927	Sunrise	F. W. Murnau	Germany
1929	The Blue Angel	Josef Von Sternberg	Germany
1930	All Quiet on the Western Front	Lewis Milestone	Germany
1931	M	Fritz Lang	Germany
1931	City Lights	Charlie Chaplin	USA
1936	Modern Times	Charlie Chaplin	USA