I could name a dozen, but if I have to name only one it would have to be
La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc
(1928).
The time of the singing of the birds has come.

I liked that one, too. I also dug the silent Phantom of the Opera.
Don't worry - I brought the chainsaw.

I have a hard time getting absorbed into a silent film, so I tend to rate them harshly I also much prefer silent comedies.
The Passion of Joan of Arc would be my #1. Along with Andrei Rublev, it's a film that actually feels like you're watching documentary footage from before film technology existed. It also has one of the great performances of all-time.
And while it certainly gets plenty of credit without me listing it here, I'd give honorable mention to Un Chien Andalou if we're including shorts.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was also deservedly mentioned in the thread. Such a unique and highly entertaining film.
"My only enemy is time." - Charles Chaplin
http://paulopicks.blogspot.com/

Apart from
Metropolis
(if it's not dramatic enough for you),
The Wind

Sunrise
really reached a peak, right at the end of the silent era but there are so many the "modern" part of
Intolerance
, if pulled, is also great, for an earlier example.

For me a three way tie between "Greed", "Battleship Potemkin" and "Sunrise".

The Crowd
tops my list. And anyone who loves Hitchcock's work should see the silent version of
Blackmail
, plus
Downhill
and
The Lodger
. Others I like:
A Fool There Was (1915)
The Cheat (1915)
Regeneration (1915)
Hell's Hinges (1916)
J'accuse! (1919)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
Way Down East (1920)
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920)
The Last of the Mohicans (1920)
Tol'able David (1921)
Körkarlen (1921)
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)
The Ace of Hearts (1921)
Tess of the Storm Country (1922)
La roue (1923)
Schatten - Eine nächtliche Halluzination (1923)
Greed (1924)
(a version that uses stills to present missing elements of the story)
Der letzte Mann (1924)
Michael (1924)
Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925)
The Big Parade (1925)
Flesh and the Devil (1926)
Faust: Eine deutsche Volkssage (1926)
Sparrows (1926)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927)
La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)
The Wind (1928)
Street Angel (1928)
The Last Command (1928)
L'argent (1928)
Die Büchse der Pandora (1929)
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (1929)
Arsenal (1929)
Laila (1929)
Asphalt (1929)
Lucky Star (1929)
You gotta start off each day with a song even when things go wrong .

Hard to pick just one
One that I saw fairly recently, and really liked:
The Indian Tomb
(1921). German production, directed by Joe May, with a script by Fritz Lang. It comes in two parts: Part 1, titled "The Mission of the Yogi," runs 118 minutes; Part 2, titled "The Tiger of Eschapur," runs 94 minutes.
There is a restored version out, and it is very crisp and "new"-looking. Well worth checking out if you can find a good copy.
Part 1:
Das indische Grabmal (1959)
Don't mess with me, man! I know karate, judo, ju-jitsu.. and several other Japanese words.

Definitely 'Greed'. Still stands up today. Those scenes in Death Valley were amazing.

If we're going for silents that aren't comedies, The Iron Mask; if we're going for high drama, Sunrise, though it's a close run thing with The Last Laugh and The Late Mathias Pascal.
As much fun as his version of
The Three Musketeers
is, it positively pales into insignificance compared to Douglas Fairbanks' belated followup, 1929's
The Iron Mask
, which may well be the most perfect silent swashbuckler of them all. In his groundbreaking series
Hollywood
, Kevin Brownlow chose the film as not just Fairbanks swansong as a silent swashbuckler, but as a swansong for the entire silent era, and it's hard not to agree with him. It's as if everything that had ever been learned in the silent years had been poured magnificently into this one picture, resulting in as vivid, spectacular and enjoyable an entertainment as you're ever likely to find on any movie screen. After filming finished, Fairbanks said that with the coming of talkies the fun had gone out of movies, but there's plenty of fun here, with great stunts, stirring adventure and moments of comedy that really work while the bittersweet sentimental ending, at once sad and triumphant as the musketeers are finally reunited, won't leave a dry eye in the house.
In his groundbreaking series
Hollywood
, Kevin Brownlow chose 1929's
The Iron Mask
not just as Douglas Fairbanks swansong as a silent swashbuckler, but as a swansong for the entire silent era, and it's hard not to agree with him: it may well be the most perfect silent swashbuckler of them all. It's as if everything that had ever been learned in the silent years had been poured magnificently into this one picture, resulting in as vivid, spectacular and enjoyable an entertainment as you're ever likely to find on any movie screen. After filming finished, Fairbanks said that with the coming of talkies the fun had gone out of movies, but there's plenty of fun here, with great stunts, stirring adventure and moments of comedy that really work while the bittersweet sentimental ending, at once sad and triumphant as the musketeers are finally reunited, won't leave a dry eye in the house.
Like Fairbanks' version of
The Three Musketeers
eight years earlier, it's not the most faithful of adaptations this time round it's the good twin who initially reigns as king and his bitter brother who plots to usurp him and put him in the iron mask so that D'Artagnan can restore the natural order rather than stage a benign coup but the film does include many of the darker elements of Dumas' earlier novel that were skipped over in the earlier film as Milady gets her revenge. Yet the film does a fine job of balancing the light and shade, making a wildly entertaining film that's also surprisingly affecting when it needs to be. Not everything is perfect, with William Bakewell really overegging the pudding as the evil twin in a performance that's pure panto, while the spoken introduction with Fairbanks breaking out of a tableaux to address the audience in a spoken prologue is perhaps better in the thought than the execution, but so much here works so very well you can forgive it its failings.
And what a difference just eight years makes between the two films. The cast may have changed - different Musketeers (aside from Leon Barry's Athos) and king this time round, though Marguerite De La Motte's Constance returns as does Nigel de Brulier's Richelieu, in a much broader performance but it's the massive strides in filmmaking that really stand out. Where in the original film director Fred Niblo managed to hide the not terribly interesting sets somewhat by marshalling his limited number of extras well and giving them all something eye catching to do, this is a much more elaborate affair, with beautifully designed sets and thousands of extras to populate them, and Allan Dwan's fluid and often kinetic direction always makes the most of the considerable resources at his disposal. Fairbanks even hired Maurice Leloir, the French illustrator of the most popular edition of Dumas' novel to design the film alongside William Cameron Menzies, and the film is gorgeously shot, the prison scenes making atmospheric use of the kind of giant shadows Michael Curtiz would later make his signature shot in his Errol Flynn swashbucklers. You can even spot legendary fencing master Fred Cavens as one of Richlieu's ruffians and future director Robert Parrish as a page.
Sadly, Kino's DVD of the restored version doesn't impress as much as it should. While the film was lovingly restored by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, the DVD seems to suffer from excessive Dolby Noise reduction in places, giving it a soft look or blurry motion in places (nowhere near as overt as in the print broadcast on Channel 4) that detracts from the otherwise excellent work. Unlike the various public domain versions that use the shorter reissue prints that replaced the original captions with Douglas Fairbanks Jr's narration with Junior even dubbing his father's spoken introductions this is t

Seven Keys to Baldpate
(1917 thriller)although I really prefer the 1929 talkie version.
Midnight Faces
(1920s whodunit)
The Cat and the Canary
(1920s horror-whodunit)
Blackmail
(1920s thrillerI prefer the silent version over the talkie. Both versions of this Hitchcock film are out there.)
Doomsday
(1920s drama)

Jim Hutton (1934-79) & Ellery Queen
=

-Diary Of A Lost Girl 1928
With, Louise Brooks
Every man's death diminishes mebecause I am involved in mankind

Sunrise (1927)

Gonna have to go with what is probably my favorite silent film, Intolerance.
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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443/data.filmboards/images/upload/eZs03TU.png

.
Mine is a film called
Michael (1924)
.
.

and of course, for meMetropolis

Pandora's Box. Louise Brooks' Lulu is possibly the greatest female performance of the Silent Era. Fantastic ending.
Sunrise. Great from beginning to end.
La Roue. Great cinematography, great direction. I liked it better than Abel Gance's other masterpiece Napoleon. Not a happy movie and not to everyone's taste.
The Artist. The question wasn't limited to the Silent Era.
NH's:
The Crowd
Ben-Hur
The Last Laugh (sans hokey ending)
City Lights
Mare Nostrum
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Battleship Potemkin
Your future's all used up.

I can't name 1, nut here's a list of my favorite 20s directors with films I liked the most. I removed comedic directors
From outside of 20s - Griffith (I only liked one of his 20s films (Orphans), liked most of his 10s features. need to see more from 20s, and Feillaide with his terrific Fantomas and Vampires).
From 30s dramatic silents - Dovzhenko's 'Earth' is on the top, and I also liked some Japanese films
Fritz Lang (Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge)
King Vidor (The Crowd, Big Parade, Bardelys the Magnificent, Showpeople)
Erich von Stroheim (Wedding March, Greed, Merry Widow, Foolish Wives)
Fred Niblo (Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, Mysterious Lady, The Mark of Zorro, The Temptress)
Joseph von Sternberg (The Last Command, The Docks of New York, Underworld, The Salvation Hunters)
F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Sunrise, Last Laugh, Finances of Great Duke)
G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box, Joyless Street, Diary of a Lost Girl, The Treasure)
Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, October Strike, Staroe I Novoe)

The YouTube download, alas, cuts the triptych into separate segments. A real disappointment. Now that I know it's on dvd, I'll order it.
We are the makers of music and we are the dreamers of dreams.

The new DVD has an option for watching it on three screens!
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Napoléon (just watched the new restoration)
I was able to download the movie from YouTube. This is going to be heretical for a lot of people, but I prefer Carmine Coppola's warmer and more emotional score over Carl Davis's combination of classical and original music.
Davis is a brilliant composer, the foremost when it comes to scoring silent movies , but it would have been prohibitive for him to write an entirely new score for a seven hour film. Still, it's great to be able to have this new edition of a truly monumental motion picture.
We are the makers of music and we are the dreamers of dreams.

The Crowd
among Hollywood films,
Napoléon
(just watched the new restoration) among others.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

The Passion of Joan of Arc
Broken Blossoms
The Birth of Nation
Sunrise

Broken Blossoms
was the first silent movie I fell in love with, and it will always have a special place in my heart.
But many years passed by since I first watched it (now I own it on DVD), and despite I love Lillian Gish very much indeed, Pola Negri has become my #1 actress from that era. I'd say my most favorite of her dramatic movies is
Barbed Wire
.
Animal crackers in my soup
Monkeys and rabbits loop the loop