The Art of Buster Keaton and Many Other Great Silent FilmsI love silent movies. The only place where you can see silent movies on a regular basis, that I know of, is on the Turner Classic Movies channel on Sunday night (note to Time Warner, if TCM doesn't start to look better I am switching back to DirectTV). If you haven't watched any silent movies they do have their own little quirks, the pacing is sometimes slower and over acting was quite the rage, but there are still many treasures that can be found. I find it very sad that we have lost so many films that will never be seen again. The prints which can be found on the DVDs put out by Kino Video ( www.Kino.com ) are quite good and make you feel like you have stepped back in time. They are not cheap though. This is a personal selection of silent movies DVDs I have enjoyed. I am sure there are others besides these that are available and some of the movies are available on many different DVDs. This is a list intended for people that want to stick their toes into the subject of silent movies and see what the water is like.

1) “The Art of Buster Keaton” – This is an eleven DVD set of the great stone-faced from Kino. This now includes a new complete version of Hard Luck . This is not a cheap set (runs for $149.96 on the Kino web site when I am writing this) but is worth every penny and then some. This set contains whole worlds that you may not have not even known existed. Almost any Buster Keaton movie is good (there is no such thing as bad Buster Keaton), but The General , Seven Chances , Sherlock, Jr . , and Steamboat Bill Jr . are nothing short of breathtaking and all are damned funny. The DVDs are available individually but life is short, buy the whole thing. I cannot recommend this set high enough to do it justice. This is absolutely priceless material. Most of the sets include a movie along with two shorts, and the shorts are a subject onto themselves. If you think we are pulling some nice tricks nowadays I dare you to watch this set and be prepared to be amazed. Sadly Buster never made a smooth transition to sound films, but he did live long enough for his films to be recognized as the masterpieces they clearly are. He also worked as a gag writer for the studios and appeared in a couple of films in his later years. There are DVD sets from Kino of the films that Buster made with Fatty Arbuckle before Buster struck out on his own. There are also many books available on Buster Keaton if you are interested in exploring the history of his films further.

2) The Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1-This series is a collection of Laurel and Hardy silent films in very good prints. I include it here because one of them, Big Business , is a classic Laurel and Hardy short. This is the short about Laurel and Hardy selling Christmas trees door to door (and it was not shot or set in July). They clash with one of their potential customer. The short builds from beginning with Laurel and Hardy ringing the doorbell one too many times till at the end of the short the house lays in ruins. It is a beautiful piece of work. The best part of the short is Stan Laurel's reaction when he suddenly becomes aware that a cop is standing behind him watching him gleefully tear the home owner's piano apart. This just has to been seen, and it is brilliant acting and hysterically funny. The reason Laurel and Hardy had such a long career is that they were great at what they did and one of the few acts that made a smooth transaction from silent to sound pictures.

3) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - a German film made in 1921 with painted sets, leaning houses, crooked windows and painted shadows. There are several different DVD versions of this floating around so beware, the Image or Kino versions are probably not a bad place to start. The acting looks quite strange given today's standards but the film still holds up well and should be seen just for the extremely bizarre sets. This was a very influential film and the echoes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari can be felt in many horror films.

4) Sunrise : A Song of Two Humans - This film is a good old melodrama about a married man messing around with a city woman. The photography is beautiful, and this movie took this first cinematography award. The official Fox release may be out of print but it should not be too hard to find a copy. The film does pop up on cable from time to time if you watch for it.

5) Metropolis -A German film by Fritz Lang released in 1927. Fritz Lang is a great director and well worth checking out on his own merits. Fritz Lang, along with John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, all directed silent movies and had interesting and long careers with Hitchcock going all the way into the 1970s. M , an early German sound film which was directed by Fritz Lang and starring Peter Lorre is very clever and very creepy at the same time. There is a version of Metropolis on Kino Video but there are several others floating around including a 1984 release that uses Queen on the soundtrack. The version on Kino is probably the most complete version, though of the original footage of Metropolis is now assumed to be lost forever. This is a science fiction film set in 2026, even if you haven't seen the actual film, you may have seen one of the stills from the film which pop up in all kinds of places. The film has great sets and costumes, and it is well worth tracking down.

6) The Phantom of the Opera - I was first introduced to this 1925 Lon Chaney film through showings of it on PBS when I was a kid and then later buying a good VHS transfer from Castle Films (remember that company with their 8mm films). If you want to stick your nose into Lon Chaney Sr. films then this movie or The Hunchback of Notre Dame are probably the two films to check out. The makeup that Lon Chaney used is still striking. There are two versions of this movie worth checking out on DVD, one on Image and one on Milestone. The Milestone set has a lot of extras.

7) The Gold Rush - I honestly prefer Keaton to Chaplin but this movie is probably Chaplin's greatest work. Also a pretty cool DVD on Chaplin is Unknown Chaplin: The Master at Work which is a three part series you may remember from seeing it on PBS. It shows Chaplin's outtakes and gives example of how Chaplin made up the movies as he went along, sometimes not having a clue as to what he was going to shoot next. For the time The Gold Rush was a big production and has some classic comedy bits.

8) Faust -another German silent film, available from Kino that has some of the most interesting special effects for such an early film. This is a beautiful film and a good example of how mature silent films had become in such a short time. It is disheartening to go watch some of the current Hollywood product and realize that some of the tools available to the modern director are more sophisticated, but that does not mean we make better movies.

9) Nanook of the North -one of the very first full length documentaries, it is about the life of an Eskimo. It has been surrounded by a lot of controversy about what part of the documentary was staged and so forth, but it holds up quite well and the movie is available in a Criterion edition. Nanook and his lead-filled snowshoes are mentioned in a Frank Zappa song. He said peak-a-boo.

10) The Man Who Laughs -this film is based on the Victor Hugo novel about a child whose face is forced into a permanent grin to become a side show freak and what happens to him when he grows into an adult. Visually this is a very mature movie. It was released in 1928 (with synchronized music and sound effects) just at the time when the silent era was getting ready to come to an end.