Motion pictures are now over 100 years old. Yet most film buffs and video enthusiasts know very little about the first 30 years or so of film history, and even less about films from the silent era. Except for hardcore enthusiasts and experts, nearly everyone has misconceptions about silent films, and most of us resist the idea of even attempting to watch them. The stigma that silents are boringly naive and primitive, look murky and scratched, and play at ridiculously rapid, jerky speeds, accompanied by tinny, rinky-tink piano, still persist. But this was not the silent film as its public knew it. These films reached dramatic and subtle artistic height, capturing the hearts and imaginations of the whole world in a way that no succeeding art form has duplicated. Many silents were as powerful and as well made as any of the talking classics that followed. The drama and power was further enhanced by the vibrant orchestral scores that accompanied such films (the silents were never truly "silent") not to mention the luxuriously elegant picture palaces where they were exhibited. This form of presentation had an immediacy and impact that is nonexistent in one of today's small, banal multiplexes or in front of a TV screen. In fact, contrary to what most people would assume, the innovation of adding recorded sound to film was not universally viewed by the industry as an improvement at the time. In fact, many considered it to be an insurmountable detriment that would render obsolete and unusable all of the sophisticated artistry that had been carefully developed up to that time. The British historian and producer team of Kevin Brownlow and David Gill illustrate these points very convincingly in the The Pioneers, the first episode from their 13-part TV series Hollywood (HBO Video). A must see for anyone at all interested silent films, it contains many impressive and eye-catching examples from a variety of pictures. Interviews with people who were active during the silent days also illustrate that they felt they had discovered a magical international language that the whole world could understand.

Almost from the beginning of home video, silent films were very popular, as a great many of them had lost their copyright protection and fallen into the public domain and were easy to obtain. Familiar titles such as The Birth of a Nation, The Gold Rush, The General, The Mark of Zorro, Metropolis, Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, and The Thief of Bagdad have been released by just about every independent home-video company that has ever existed -- usually of horrid quality, furthering the many myths about silents. When renting or collecting silents, one should beware of the poorly packaged LP or EP speed tapes of unknown quality put out by little-known companies of dubious reputation. When dealing with common titles, it is wisest to stick with known labels -- HBO Video, MGM/United Artists, and Paramount have released very fine restored editions of such titles as Douglas Fairbanks's 1924 Thief of Bagdad, the 1926 Ben-Hur: A Story of the Christ, and Wings (the first film to win the Academy Award for "Best Picture," in 1927-28), all of which have held up extremely well across seven decades.

Laserdisc enthusiasts generally have an easier time choosing silent films, as both the format and the genre are basically a collector's medium, which discourages producers from issuing less-than-definitive editions. All of the major studios and laser producers have some silent films in their catalogs, most notably Voyager Company's It (1927), the classic sex comedy starring Clara Bow, MGM/United Artist's Ben Hur: A Story of the Christ, which contains restored Technicolor sequences, HBO Video's The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Cabiria (1914), Paramount's The Covered Wagon (1923), Lumivision with The Birth of a Nation (1915), MCA/Universal's Napoleon (1927), Image Entertainment's The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Republic Pictures' edition of Tumbleweeds (1925), starring William S. Hart, a stunning film and probably the most watchable silent western that there is.

All of this enthusiasm for silent film doesn't mean that the silent era didn't have its share of duds and misfires. Not every silent is a masterpiece, and not every silent picture has held up well as entertainment over a period of seven or eight decades. But for a generation of television and videophiles whose experience of the silents is confined to poor prints shown at the wrong speed, with mediocre or non-existent music, it is all-too-easy to dismiss the entire period. These films were originally shot and printed on highly flammable nitrate-based stock, which had a dazzlingly luminous quality and unmatched clarity and detail. Silents were originally shown at different director-approved speeds, occasionally with tints and tones but always with live musical accompaniment. When all of these elements are replicated correctly on home video, suffice it to say that except for the aura of live cinema, you've got something quite close to the real thing.

Brownlow and Gill's Hollywood series was responsible for sparking resurgence of interest in silent films and in helping build a commercial market for the release of many preserved and restored silents. Before that time, most of the silents recommended here were not available on home video. Despite this progress, however, much of the output of the major artists of the silent era is unavailable, including many major Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd comedies owned by the Rohauer Collection and the Lloyd trust, respectively (doubly ironic since both Keaton and Lloyd had some success in the talkies as well, most notably Lloyd's excruciatingly funny The Milky Way and Keaton's latter-day appearances in pictures such as A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, which helped make him a familiar figure to filmgoers in the 1960s). Also unavailable are the Fox silents, which include Janet Gaynor's Academy Award-winning performances -- most notably in the landmark film Sunrise -- as well as much of John Ford's early work and the Tom Mix westerns. For its part, however, Fox does have the exclusive license on the Charlie Chaplin classics and has kept his films available since the advent of home video in several tape reissues and a new series of special laserdisc editions.

Since the Hollywood series, Brownlow and Gill have continued to foster interest in the silents with such programs as Unknown Chaplin, Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, and, most recently, D.W. Griffith: The Father of Film. Lumivision and Image Entertainment, in association with George Eastman House, have taken increasingly active roles in releasing restored and preserved silents on laserdisc -- Image is about to release a special, annotated version of The Birth of a Nation on laserdisc, and they have been joined by such distributors as Kino International, whose videocassette releases have upgraded such familiar fare as The Hunchback of Notre Dame as well as previously "lost" titles like the 1916 version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.