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Free silent films
Most silent film is gone. What survives does so because somebody kept a print in a shed, or a collector struck a copy, or an archive reached a nitrate reel before it went. That is why the material here matters more than its condition suggests: for a good number of these titles, the copy you are watching is close to all there is.
Silent films are also where our audio description work fits most naturally, because a silent film has no dialogue to talk over and the title cards can simply be read aloud. Where we have written description for one of these, its page says so.
6 films
2 of them carry an audio description track written and recorded here — all the described films are listed together.
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One Week (1920)Audio described
A newly married couple are given a build-it-yourself house, assemble it by the numbers on the boxes, and end up with two storeys twisted round each other and a roof that never…
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The Great Train Robbery (1903)Audio described
Bandits tie up a railroad telegraph operator, rob a train and its passengers, and ride off into the woods. Edwin S. Porter's ten-and-a-half-minute western for Edison, told…
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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)
The Universal Film Manufacturing Company was not known in the silent era as premier producer of motion pictures. Yet, in 1916 they produced a film that could not be made…
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Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Considered one of the most important films in the history of silent pictures, as well as possibly Eisenstein's greatest work, Battleship Potemkin brought Eisenstein's theories of…
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Frankenstein (1910)
This is Edison's COMPLETE 1910 silent Frankenstein film.
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The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
At the Opera of Paris, a mysterious phantom threatens a famous lyric singer, Carlotta and thus forces her to give up her role (Marguerite in Faust) for unknown Christine Daae…