1924 line-ups.

Nice list, haven't seen many but I enjoyed The Last Laugh. Also very excited to see both He Who Gets Slapped and Greed.

Thanks! I would say at least check out any in that top five you haven't seen, the bottom five range from serviceable to poor. Which is a shame considering the bottom five consist of Victor Sjostrom (my favorite director of the 1920s), a Gloria Swanson picture, a Harold Lloyd comedy, and my first foray into John Ford and Ernst Lubitsch. Should have made for a killer year, but while some had some shining spots, they felt pretty run-of-the-mill compared to the type of stuff the top half of my list was doing that year.

Eh, I've seen both and I still get the impression that she's supporting, but it's even more apparent in the extended version, particularly because it feels much more Gowland-centric. But either way, she is a force to be reckoned with. As for female performances of the year, yeah, not too well-versed. I've been on an early Russian cinema kick of late, though, starting with 1915 and trucking merrily along. I'll keep an eye out once I get to '24.

For 1925, here are some hidden gems:

Master of the House
The Big Parade
The Lost World
The Freshman
Tartuffe

That's an interesting lineup. I've seen half of your and 14 in general from 1924 (including shorts and counting Nibelungen as 2). I would rank them something like this:

1. The Last Laugh
2. Sherlock Jr.
3. Greed
4. The Navigator
5. He Who Gets Slapped
5. Die Nibelungen (the whole thing)
7. The Marriage Circle
8. Entr'acte
9. Paris qui dort
10. Micheal
11. Au secours!
12. Ballet mécanique
13. Opus III

*Niebelungen and He Who gets Slapped are on the same place because I currently find them somewhat hard to rank because in hindsight Nibelungen looks much better but I enjoyed He Who Gets Slapped a lot while watching it.

The Last Laugh is a film that really impressed me. I just love Murnau and when it comes to pure expression, this is so incredibly powerful because for once it's all in the images, no dialouge intertitles at all but still every little corner of the plot is so evocatively explored. Just the opening scene hits you with so much already and everything seems to fit. I agree that it's better crafted than Nosferatu but I still prefer Nosferatu for the nightmare-like narrative (the editing is very unusual, shots linger on for strange periods of time and often it cuts away from the action, one time even to a scene that has nothing to do with the plot of the film) which is pretty unparalleled.

Sherlock Jr. is all around incredible fast paced and inventive fun.

Greed I think has it's flaws (ok, really it's the cutting...) but it is aswell such an incredibly evocative film which oozes with atmosphere. It reminds me quite a bit of Sjöström with all that violence and the incredible tension. It's more decadent than Sjöström though.

I'm a little curious as to why you skipped Niebelungen and The Navigator. Both are great films. Niebelungen might be a tad long but it's entirely one of a kind and perhaps the most creative of all films Fritz Lang made (even more so than Metropolis). The visuals are incredibly stunning and probably the best evocation of german myth there has ever been. The Navigator is Keaton at his peak, it's not as good as Sherlock but still a lot of fun (and with amazing special effects as usual).

I don't know if I have that much to say about the others. I think I said quite a bit about The Marriage Circle already. Otherwise the Rene Clair shorts (Entr'acte and Paris Qui dort) I would highly recommend because they are so incredibly inventive (just read the plots and you'll see what I mean). Micheal was a disappointment coming from Dreyer (who I'm a big fan of). It has it's moments but it felt incredibly stale.

Of yours I still really want to see The Thief of Bagdad (which looks incredible, I wonder if it can live up to P&P's version from 1940 which is also very good), The Hands of Orlac (I should have gotten around to this much sooner because I love german expressionism and Wiene's Caligari) and Girl Shy. Do you have anything (spoilerfree) to say about the Hands of Orlac? Another question I have is: What is your perfect 10 of the decade then?

I would probably put Murnau and Jannings at #1 for Director and Actor but Greed and Sherlock are of course also great in both categories.

Lastly perhaps this website could be interesting to you, they have write-ups around the top 10 films from 1917-1926 and I think they do one new year at the end of every year (90 years later): www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2016/12/26/the-ten-best-films-of-1926/

Yeah, He Who gets Slapped seems very much like a Hollywood story, not something Sjöström would get to himself. Supposedly one critic back then even compared Sjöström to Chaplin and Lubitsch based on this film (I guess he hadn't seen Sjöström's swedish films)... I still like it quite a lot though. It's a shame Tower of Lies is lost because it seems like Sjöström actually picked the material himself for that one (it's based on a work by the author who also wrote The Phantom Carriage and multiple of Sjöström's other swedish works) and worked with Chaney and Shearer again. Generally it seems like half of Sjöström's Hollywood work is lost and that actually more of his swedish films persist... The 2 Gish films are great though, The Wind is up there with Phantom Carriage imo (really, it's amazing), Scarlet Letter is a bit mundane for Sjöström but Gish gives a hell of a performance which elevates the film, it would not have worked with a lesser actress (her performance in Wind is probably the best silent cinema performance though).

It's also quite surprising Manhandled would be such a big disappointment with such a high rating. Personally I had never heard of it but generally I would like to watch some of the Swanson picks sometime (the De Mill films mostly but of course also Von Stroheim's unfinished Queen Kelly). Somehow I never got around to any of them despite actually having some interest.

As far as Thief of Bagdad goes, it sounds like it would be right up my alley. I love visual extravaganza and I don't much mind bad acting (mostly). I have also never seen a Fairbanks film actually.

Generally I would like to check out the 3 major Wiene films I haven't seen (Genuine, Crime and Punishment and The Hands of Orlac). I think I'll try to watch them in chronological order because with Orlac last because that seems to have the best reputation and by the way you describe it, it sounds like it's a really well narrated film which is lovely (while Genuine is often described as an overexpressionistic mess, it's also only available in a heavily cut version). I must say that personally I adore Caligari (and I also thought Veidt was excellent), I can't imagine anything really beating that but the narration is admittedly somewhat disjointed (which I actually liked), I guess maybe that's what turned you off.

Oh boy, my list of "please finally recover these lost films!" is so incredibly long by now that I almost think they must recover one of them sometime. However I don't know how likely it is still to recover those specific films but then again, I'm also baffled about how one could even lose them to begin with. From Sjöström I would actually most hope for a recovery of the Divine Woman as it stars Greta Garbo (there is a 9 minute surviving fragment though and I guess if the findings would exceed 45 min. the film could potentially be semi-watchable already (if we had the most important scenes)). As far as all lost films go, Murnau's 4 Devils would be to die for (but any of his other films, especially would be such an incredible find aswell, that I would probably travel major distances to attend a screening of it, especially Der Januskopf among Murnau's german work is something I'm incredibly excited about).  

I think Lilian Gish is probably my favorite silent film actress aswell (Garbo is the only major competetion, although I probably should watch more with Brigitte Helm) but while Sjöström is among my favorite directors in the silent age, I would still have to go with Murnau.

I'll be sure to let you know what I think of the other 2 Wiene films. I think I might watch Genuine soon as there is a good looking print on YouTube. The Crime and Punishment print I found is decisively more messy, I'm thinking about tinting it myself to tarnish that a little or maybe I'll wait for a better version. Also thanks for the score recommendation for Orlac, there is often not enough empathis put on this. I would wish there was some kind of database about the best scores for a specific film, perhaps also with recommendations for other music (with a specific mood) if there is no score. I certainly hate to watch something with an unfitting score. It can destroy the entire experience.

I have actually seen a few silent films recently though. So perhaps I'll just report back on them:

-La petite marchande d'allumettes (1928) - I don't think there would be space on this for your 1928 ballot because it's such a ridiculously great year (it would surely drown in the '28 thread) but still for what it's worth this is a really (bitter-)sweet and visually ambitious rendition of the classical fairy-tale and it's the least lofty impressionist film I've seen, it has Renoirs basic humanism on full force already but also visual effects that look surprisingly excellent and such a lovely horse-chase sequense.
-Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918) - This was the weakest Lubitsch I have seen so far (says more about Lubitsch's great ouvre though). It is fun and actually surprisingly relevant today with the gender debates and it actually has a rather commendable vision about how people might have false illusions about the opposite gender. The ending is great but the film lacks the visual inventiveness of Lubitsch's later films (still his wit was very much in place already and the film is definitely ahead of it's time).
-La glace à trois faces (1927) - Experimental film with a capital E. It's really hard to find a proper stance on this film, one one hand,
 I found the narrative somewhat trite and disconnected (I always feels this a little with Epstein but it's especially bad here) but on the other hand it is structurally incredibly accomplished, or to say it in another way: It expresses ideas I have never seen in cinema before. It is almost ruizian in it's approach to identity... I'm certainly glad I watched it but I find it utterly flawed aswell, it's hard to balance out a great invention and flawed storytelling.
-Storm over Asia (1928) - This is close to masterpiece status. I wrote about it in another thread: Perhaps this could be dubbed Russia's answer to Greed (maybe an odd comparison but there are quite a few similarities)... I'm shocked to say that it does not pale in comparison. It incorporates the most visionary uses of montage I have ever seen and the images in this are generally so starkly observant. There are quite a few scenes in this that are more impressive than anything Greed has to offer qutie frankly (and the ending is one of the very best endings I've ever seen, it truly carries the weight of the entire film into a gigantic explosion, I don't think I have ever seen an ending of such culminative dramatic weight). Still all the intellectualism comes at the prize of the narrative which is somewhat clunky compared to the beautiful and vast narrative that Greed has to offer. The characters likewise are half-objects. Of course this is all intentional but as a result it can't quite reach Greed.
-Klostret i Sendomir (1920) -I think I made 2 mistakes when watching this film: I was tired and I watched it with a rather poor score and only later found out that there was one with actual choire music which would have fit the film a billion times better... Thus I kind of had trouble getting into the film but the ending floored me I must say and let me to reevaluate what came before. Sjöström is just so gutwrenchingly violent, it gets me every time (he is much more violent than films of this century it seems, at least when one considers the mental impact). I also very much liked the gothic sets in the film but I wish there was slightly more outdoor footage (especially for Sjöström who otherwise uses landscapes so much and so evocatively). There were a lot of incredibly details in the visuals but I felt that they were a little lost due to the rather poor print that spared out much of the darker parts of the image (and it is probably the only one in home video distribution, it looks like from a VHS copy). If a restauration would occur I would immidiatly rewatch it (and perhaps I'll do it anyway sometime with the other score). Generally it's unfathomable how not all of Sjöström's films are available to the public but I guess this is perhaps because of the dichotomy between critical evaluation of him and mass market viability of any of the unreleased films (I'm particularly thinking of the 3 hour long Sons of Ingmar). Generally the film is incredibly accomplished though, it's told with such overwhelming skill and security which shows Sjöström's experience and it's also allegedly hard to forget and even somewhat inspiring because of how visceral and concise the tale is.

I also watched some shorts, most prominently Pudovkin's Chess Fever from 1925 (after being so eneamored by Storm over Asia) - and I must say I'm incredibly surprised. This feels just like it could have been made by one of the silent comedy giants (Keaton, Chaplin or Lloyd). It just hits all the right spots despite being Pudovkin's first (and I believe only) try at silent comedy and even his first fiction film in general. Of course this increased my respect for Pudovkin even more but generally it's incredibly baffling to see such an audatious, action packed and visually inventive comedy from someone else than the comedy giants, it's thousand times more accomplished than Chaplin's first try for instance and although I haven't seen Keaton's or Lloyd's first, I don't think they would have any chance at topping this. I would highly recommend to check it out, if only to be baffled about this not being a Keaton film. On YouTube there is a version which plays this to a loop of 3 Kevin MacLeod pieces and although 2 the 2 piano tunes sound a little too typical for silent films, the 3rd tune (which underlines the chess fever) fits so incredibly well that I would recommend to watch that version. Here's a link if you're interested, it's only 20 min.:

Well, with Garbo you have to consider that her very first film performance ever was in 1920 when she was just 15. In Flesh and the Devil she is actually only 21 (which sounds completely crazy to me). It's actually similar with Swanson, she got her first screen credits with 15 and then had her really big roles at about 20. Gish only started film acting when she was almost 20. However Garbo gets much better later with more experience. Her performance in Ninotchka is in the running for best female performances of all time I'd say. Flesh and the Devil was the film where I was the least enamoured with her performance from the 4 I've seen. From my memory I thought she was considerably better in The Mysterious Lady from 2 years later.

Yes, it's somewhat unfathomable with the lost films but I think even some of the big ones are probably lost forever but I sincerely hope we get lucky with some major finds in the future aswell (there are also quite a few interesting films in archives which never got a home video release). Dreyer's Joan of Arc actually was never completely lost as far as I'm concerned (Anna Karina watches it in Godard's Vivre Sa Vie from 1962 for instance, which was many years before the find and it featured as #7 on Sight and Sounds first 1952 poll) but the only version known to exist was a cut version for a long time and the one they found in the insane asylum in '78 was the original. It's a little similar with Metropolis which was found in 2008 (which only very little material missing): Metropolis existed for many years only in a version which omited about an hour, where it was allegedly hard to follow the plot. 

As for Murnau, I don't think his early films look all that great, it seems that he was still learning (although Murnau learned so incredibly fast), you have to remember that he directed his very first film in 1919 (while Sjöström started in 1912 and had 9 years to build towards The Phantom Carriage). I have not seen Schloß Vogelöd and Der Gang in die Nacht but they seem more "flat" than his later work (still I very much would like to watch them at some point). Der brennende Acker however has a very distinct visual style already, I find that it recalls some of the violence in Sjöström's or Von Stroheim's films in how it renders the landscape but the acting isn't memorable. It's hard to asses when excactly Murnau developed which new skills because so many of his films are lost but to me it seems like Nosferatu is the first film where he really got it all together for the first time (I also think the acting is excellent, especially Schreck but I do understand the expressionistic overacting is not for everyone, especially not in a film like Nosferatu which is otherwise ratehr romantic). Phantom from the same year is visually even more ambitious (it even potentially is inspired by Sjöström's Phantom Carriage) but the narrative is too grounded in conventions and the parts of visual excellence are too few and too far between. Generally it seems like Phantom is a first step towards the more audatious visual style of his later career which he then almost mastered already with The Last Laugh. Generally Faust and Sunrise do even expand on this though. Sunrise is my pick for best direction of all time. Noone else could have done it that way. Apart from this Murnau always had a bit of a penchant for simplicity it seems, while he pushed his visual style with a lot of films, Tartüffe from '25 is much less sophisticated than The Last Laugh and City Girl is also a step back from Sunrise (but studios gave Murnau a hard time).

I have actually seen Genuine (1920) yesterday and I feel somewhat awkward by how incredibly surprised I was by that film. I was so sure it would be a cheap Caligari rip-off with little artistic thought put into it (because everyone said so) but now I have to roll back and say that I'd probably is a masterpiece, way ahead of it's time and really expanding on what was done with Caligari (I wouldn't go so far to say that it's a better film but it seems thematically more ambitious). I don't think there is any way people in the 20's could have really understood this (maybe some very few) and I think time has only just caught up with the film now. It feels incredibly contemporary; dealing with themes of beauty, life, lust and death in a symbiotic fashion it's perhaps an expressionist rendering of baroque themes but the great thing about Genuine is that it all falls together into a complete vision. Nothing is explained, nothing makes sense, it just happens. However on the basis of you not being teribly mad about Caligari I'm hesistant to recommend it (because it seems like all the things you disliked about Caligari are even more empathized here). It very curiously only "exists" (for home media purposes) in a heavily truncated form that is basicly only half the film, while the entire film is available in multiple archives it seems (Next time I'll get to Munich I'll be sure to check out if one can actually see it at the archive there which I've read somewhere). It really shows that the film is so heavily truncated, you can not follow the plot without thinking around multiple edges (it's so bad that characters randomly pop up and you have to guess who they are) but still the 44 min. fragment is around masterpiece status to me. Make of that what you want... I think I might write a full review soon. The film really is in dire need of revision. It's the most underrated film I've ever seen. I must count myself as a fan of Wiene now (although with so many of his films being lost, it's almost impossible to classify him as a director, I have no clue what the hell he was thinking when he made this), I'm very excited for Crime and Punishment and The Hands of Orlac. I think one advise I would give if you do one day decide to watch it would be to not think so much about it from a plot standpoint but only about what happens in the image you are just watching (the film feels like a nightmare and as disjointed), likewise I would much recommend P. Emerson Williams score (is uploaded on YouTube by himself) because it captures the atmosphere of the film so incredibly well.

The story behind Metropolis is actually that it was truncated for American release to fit what Paramount thought was the taste of the American people. The original German version was slammed by critics and was poorly received by audiences aswell. Thus it was destroyed and the American cut was played in Germany aswell. I personally like Alfred Abel quite a lot actually and if I remember correctly his role in Metropolis is a bit more restrained and somewhat different from his earlier work (also because he actually plays an older person). Apart from that his role also isn't thaaaat huge. He is by no means a lead.

Him going mad is one of my favorite parts of Dr. Mabuse actually. I liked him a lot in that and generally I enjoy his flat and bewildered portrayals (always slightly apathic), I always sympathize a lot with him. I think he gets top billing for Metropolis because he's the most well known actor in it (or at least was at the time). But if I remember correctly the leads are really Gustav Fröhlich and Brigitte Helm (Fröhlich probably puts Abel to shame when it comes to overacting and I don't think his performance is particularly great but in a film like Metropolis it really doesn't need to be, perhaps a better performance would have actually hurt the film - but Helm is perhaps the most incredible german actress of the silent era and her performance in Metropolis is amazing).