Free silent movies to watch online

152 titles on the air now, made between 1902 and 1930 - about 149 hours of viewing in all. 91 are feature-length (40 minutes or more) and 61 are shorts. 152 are silent films presented with a public-domain (CC0) piano score.

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Every silent film and short on Starlite TV, from the earliest narrative films to the end of the silent era. Silent films published before 1931 are in the U.S. public domain, so this is one of the largest parts of our library.

Where a copy's added soundtrack could not be verified, we mute it and play a CC0 (public-domain) Chopin piano recording from Musopen instead; titles marked below play with that piano score. Silent films air across many of our channels - comedy, horror, drama, action and cartoons.

Where to start

Prime-time headliners and titles with full background guides.

• Battleship Potemkin (1925) 73 min · Silver Screen
  Battleship Potemkin was commissioned for the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905, and its young director, Sergei Eisenstein, then still in his twenties, chose one episode from that year to stand for the whole: the mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet.
• Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) 143 min · Adrenaline
  Long before Charlton Heston drove a chariot in the 1959 version, there was this: the original big-screen Ben-Hur, and the most expensive film of the silent era.
• The General (1926) 79 min · Laugh Track
  The General is Buster Keaton's Civil War comedy, inspired by a real event: the Great Locomotive Chase of April 1862, when Union raiders stole a Confederate train in Georgia and were pursued by its crew.
• Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) 12 min · Saturday Morning
  Winsor McCay was one of the greatest newspaper cartoonists of all time, creator of the lavish fantasy comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. He also toured the vaudeville circuit with a "chalk talk" act, drawing pictures live in front of audiences.
• The Gold Rush (1925) 87 min · Laugh Track
  Charlie Chaplin wrote, produced, directed and starred in The Gold Rush, and he often said it was the film he most wanted to be remembered for.
• The Great Train Robbery (1903) 10 min · Dusty Trails
  The Great Train Robbery was made by Edwin S. Porter for Thomas Edison's film company in November 1903, shot in the Edison studio in New York and on location in New Jersey.
• Intolerance (1916) 197 min · Silver Screen
  After the enormous commercial success of The Birth of a Nation (1915), D. W. Griffith was the most powerful director in America — and one of the most criticised. The NAACP and many others condemned The Birth of a Nation for its racist stereotypes and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan.
• The Kid (1921) 53 min · Laugh Track
  The Kid was Charlie Chaplin's first feature-length film as a director, and it was a gamble: a full-length story that mixed slapstick with genuine sadness. An unmarried mother, unable to care for her baby, leaves him in a wealthy car with a note asking whoever finds him to love and care for him.
• The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) 91 min · Case Files
  The Lodger is where Alfred Hitchcock became "Hitchcock". It was his third feature as a director and his first thriller, and he later called it the first true "Hitchcock picture".
• The Lost World (1925) 68 min · Rocket Age
  Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, published his adventure novel The Lost World in 1912. It introduced the explosive Professor George Edward Challenger, who insists that dinosaurs still survive on a remote plateau in South America — and leads an expedition to prove it.
• The Man Who Laughs (1928) 111 min · Graveyard Shift
  Universal had scored huge hits with Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, and studio head Carl Laemmle wanted another lavish Gothic melodrama from a classic novel.
• Man with a Movie Camera (1929) 65 min · Doc Vault
  Dziga Vertov was a Soviet documentary filmmaker and the leader of a group who called themselves the "kinoks" ("cine-eyes").
• The Mark of Zorro (1920) 74 min · Adrenaline
  In 1919 the pulp writer Johnston McCulley introduced a new hero in a serial called The Curse of Capistrano: Zorro, a masked swordsman defending the poor of Spanish California against corrupt officials.
• Metropolis (1927) 119 min · Silver Screen
  Metropolis is the most ambitious production of Germany's silent era. Director Fritz Lang and writer Thea von Harbou, who were married at the time, built the story from von Harbou's novel of the same name.
• Nosferatu (1922) 92 min · Graveyard Shift
  Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was made in Germany in 1921 and released in 1922 by Prana Film, a short-lived studio co-founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and the occult-minded artist Albin Grau. Director F. W. Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen based it, without permission, on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) 82 min · Silver Screen
  The Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer was invited to France to make a film, and he chose Joan of Arc, who had been canonised as a saint in 1920 and was enjoying a wave of renewed popularity. Rather than a sweeping epic about her battles, Dreyer made a film about her trial.