The earliest history of cinematic film spans from its origins in North America and Europe in the 1880s until a decade later when the Lumiere Brothers made their fortune on the first working movie projector. By 1900, Charles Pathe was successful in establishing a highly reputable film studio in Britain. Small picture machines called nickelodeons were introduce in Pittsburgh in 1905. The nickelodeon was merely a novelty that would fade, but cinematic films would last far into the twentieth century.

In 1908, the Motion Picture Patents Company along with Eastman/Kodak became the leader in cinematic film released Read the rest of this entry »

An era of films long forgotten, silent films have been criminally overlooked by today’s blockbuster, slam-bang, 3-D-everything, big budget movies. Does today’s generation even know who Charlie Chaplin is? Arguably the best triple-threat director/actor/writer of silent films, his productions beautifully brought soundless cinema to life.

Other notables and pioneers of the silent film era include D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton and Sergei Eisenstein, who also told their stories visually and paved the way for directors like Kubrick and Hitchcock. The list of notable silent films is lengthy, but there are 10 Read the rest of this entry »

Silent films didn’t need sound to deliver some of the best comedy, drama, horror and spectacle to ever grace the silver-screen. When it comes to the best of silent cinema, these are the movies that are most often mentioned

City Lights; This Charlie Chaplin film is considered his best and most heartwarming. In it, the lovable tramp comes to the city, falls in love with a blind flower girl, and pretends to be a millionaire Read the rest of this entry »

The silent film era remains one of the most interesting of all the eras of film history. Sadly, many silent films are lost and gone forever due to the destruction of thousands of prints to procure their silver nitrate component when WWII arrived. Other prints were simply lost or destroyed. Of the archives that do remain, there are some truly stunning silent films of from the early part of the 2oth century. The following is a short list of the top ones:

The Birth of a Nation: Read the rest of this entry »