Silent and Early Cinema Landmarks

Landmark films from before the coming of synchronized sound, the era in which the vocabulary of narrative and documentary film first took shape: the earliest story films, the first purpose-built film studios, and the national schools such as German Expressionism and Soviet montage that established editing and visual style as tools of meaning. Belongs here: silent-era films chosen for the National Film Registry and comparable archives as foundational to film language, whatever their country of origin. Does not belong here: silent-era documentary landmarks, grouped under documentary and nonfiction film because their significance is the birth of that form rather than of narrative technique, or sound-era films from any tradition, however early, which belong under Hollywood and English-language studio cinema or world and international narrative cinema.