Nanook of the North is often hailed as the first documentary — though both the “first” and “documentary” parts of that are up for debate.
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Nanook of the North (1922)
Tag: 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
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Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922)
Film serials peaked in the mid-to-late-1910s, but their epic-yet-episodic storytelling mode didn’t completely vanish.
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The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923)
Many of the very early — like 1925 and before — films that have endured in the canon are epics.
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The Phantom Carriage (1921)
I was recently watching some YouTube videos on Crash Course about film history with my three year old daughter.
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Orphans of the Storm (1921)
The French Revolution turns out to be a very good match for DW Griffith.
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Way Down East (1920)
This is the fourth DW Griffith film I’ve watched in my tour through film history, and the fourth starring Lillian Gish.
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Within Our Gates (1920)
For the first hour or so of its 75 minutes, Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates is far more compelling as a historical artifact than as cinema.
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Broken Blossoms (1919)
DW Griffith, the premier American epic filmmaker of the 1910s, had his biggest financial stumble in the hugely ambitious, 3.5-hour Intolerance.
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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
In the the late 1910s and 1920s, a bunch of German filmmakers invented the tone and aesthetics of horror movies amidst postwar defeat drudgery in a movement called “German expressionism.”
The problem with choosing “intolerance” as a theme for your time-sprawling opus is that it is so shapeless and blunt as to lose all meaning.