It has always been the job of movies to mess with our heads, which you know if you’ve ever seen Robert Wiene’s nerve-jangling work of mad genius The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, now more than 100 years old and as chilling as ever. The unhinged hypnotist Caligari (Werner Krauss) keeps, like a pet, a 23-year-old sleepwalker whom he calls Cesare the Somnambulist (Conrad Veidt). Caligari has put Cesare to work as a sideshow attraction, parading him before audiences as a curiosity. But Caligari also uses this zombie servant to do his murderous bidding. In a shivery, archetypically psychosexual tableau, Cesare, with his zinc-white pallor, his eyes blank and tragic, enters the gauze-shrouded bedroom of a sleeping woman and startles her awake with the aim of killing her. Stunned by her beauty, he loses his nerve and, despite her cries of terror, carries her off, her white nightgown trailing in the stark moonlight. Wiene’s film, with its highly stylized painted-fabric backdrops and its angular, perspective-twisting sets, is a German Expressionist extravaganza, a shout of modernity, beckoning us into its mirror world of fractured visual poetry. Remain only as long as you dare.

The story of writer, producer, and director Oscar Micheaux is that of a ghost industry that might have been—in other words, an American film industry with plenty of latitude, opportunity and breathing space for filmmakers who weren’t primarily white. From the teens to the early 1950s, there was a small but thriving industry of films made primarily for Black audiences, commonly called race films. Micheaux was one of the genre’s most significant figures, and Within Our Gates stands both as a model of American film melodrama and an expression of the mores and attitudes in its day, in terms of how Black Americans saw themselves—as opposed to how they were seen by whites at the time. Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) is a young woman from the South visiting her Northern cousin, Alma (Flo Clements), who also, as it turns out, is secretly in love with Sylvia’s fiancé. That personal drama becomes entwined with a greater one: after Alma engineers the dissolution of Sylvia’s engagement, Sylvia returns to the South and becomes deeply involved with a school striving to provide an education for underserved Black children. Her efforts to raise money for the beleaguered school—and her own complex backstory—form a kind of archway for Micheaux to discuss significant social events of the day, including the Great Migration and the murderous persistence of the Ku Klux Klan. Micheaux’s sturdy throughline is that education would cut a path forward for Black Americans. To watch Within Our Gates today is to see how far we haven’t come, and to mourn the country we are still waiting to become.

Though it sometimes seems there’s an invisible force in the universe decreeing that we must all love Charlie Chaplin, complicated feelings are allowed. As the great critic Robert Warshow has said: if Chaplin’s insistent, naked message is “love me,” we’re also entitled to ask if he loves us back, and the answer may not be what we want to hear. “He does not love us; and maybe he doesn’t love anything,” Warshow writes. “Even in his most genial moments we get now and then a glimpse of how cold a heart has gone into his great blaze.” But even among those of us who don’t worship at the altar of Chaplin, his first full-length film as a director, The Kid, is a close to perfect picture in both its inventiveness and its warmth. The character Chaplin is most closely associated with, the Tramp, with his brushy mustache and battered bowler, finds an abandoned infant on the street and reluctantly takes him home. The baby grows into a child, Jackie Coogan, in a performance so beseeching and guileless that it seems he’s opening a world to us, rather than striving to make us feel. These two are both a family and a team, held close by genuine joy in one another’s company, even if they’re living off pennies. When they’re torn apart, it’s wrenching; when they’re reunited, it restores our faith in the order of the universe. Even by this point, Chaplin had invested a great deal in the on-screen persona he’d created in the previous decade. But his genius was still translucent; he hadn’t yet locked us down with a loyalty clause. It’s easiest to love him here, in The Kid, and to feel we’re getting something like love in return.

D.W. Griffith was a racist, and his most famous and infamous film, the 1915 Birth of a Nation, is filled with made-up events and setups that glorified the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy in general. It’s also an astonishingly effective and affecting piece of filmmaking, revolutionary in its complex staging, in the way it propelled cinema toward greater realism, in its use of techniques like the close-up and the fade-in (which Griffith didn’t necessarily invent but used brilliantly). Isn’t it better to be realistic about the truth that filmmaking’s power can be marshaled for causes other than noble ones? By 1921, Griffith’s star had begun its descent, as other filmmakers—many of whom he’d influenced—raced faster into the modern world. But Orphans of the Storm, once you get past its wacky, sentimental patriotism, may be his last gasp of greatness, showing the delicacy of feeling he could bring to even the most extreme melodrama. Sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish play Henriette and Louise, young women raised together in late 18th century France as revolution brews. Louise is the daughter of a noblewoman, left as an infant on the steps of a church on a cold winter day. An impoverished local, having mournfully decided to drop his own offspring there, thinks better of it and takes both babies home with him. The girls grow up; their loving parents die; Louise is blinded by the plague. Henriette brings her to Paris, hoping for a treatment that will restore her sight. All of this happens—coincidentally—just as Robespierre and Danton are changing the face of France. It’s easy enough to get swept up in the film’s crazy, epic rush, but the Gishes are the main attraction, reaching toward one another in the midst of an anguishing separation, or embracing after finding one another again. Lillian, especially, even with her gently fluttering eyelids, her delicate rosebud mouth, is a defiantly resolute presence. You wouldn’t want to mess with her. She outlived silents for a reason.

Is Robert Flaherty’s celebrated picture a 100% unstaged and fully accurate picture of how members of the Inuit population of the Canadian Arctic lived in the early 1920s? Of course not. At the time of its release, audiences may have taken it as a kind of cinema verité, a concept that at the time did not yet have a name—in fact, the filmmaking techniques necessary to achieve it hadn’t even been developed. But Nanook of the North represents another kind of filmic truth: an artist and explorer’s desire to understand a way of life among a specific group of people and to capture some version of that reality for a greater audience. In that sense, Nanook of the North stands as a work of enduring beauty. Photographer and explorer Flaherty spent 16 months living with an Inuit named Allakariallak, called Nanook in the film, and two women who were presented as his wives, though in real life they were not. (At least one of them, called Nyla in the film, may have been Flaherty’s common-law wife.) These people are both Flaherty’s protagonists and friends, and he enlisted them to re-enact traditional—but at that time declining, or nearly altogether lost—modes of life, including the building of an igloo from blocks of snow and the hunting of walrus with spears. In reality, guns were already in common use for hunting, but it’s possible that Allakariallak was himself hoping to preserve, if only via Flaherty’s camera, ways of life that were already fading in his world. In any case, Flaherty’s film is luminous, haunting and joyful all at once—not a documentary, strictly speaking, but a document of one man’s attempts to see, and to help others do so as well.

Of all the swashbucklers featuring the swinging king of the silents, Douglas Fairbanks, none is more fanciful and dreamlike than The Thief of Bagdad. In this One Thousand and One Nights-inspired escapade, the suave, wiry Fairbanks is Ahmed, a devil-may-care thief who delights in stealing whatever he wishes, wheeling through the city in a pair of billowing chiffon pants, heedless of the laws of God or man or anyone who insists men shouldn’t wear printed silk. While the upstanding citizens of the city are distracted by their daily prayers, he steals a magic rope, a whatnot with a thousand and one nefarious uses. But his plans swerve when he falls in love with a stunningly beautiful princess (Julanne Johnston): he must win her love, even if that means outwitting her watchful servant (played by a very young Anna May Wong). The Thief of Bagdad, director Raoul Walsh’s breakthrough film, cost roughly $1.14 million, a small fortune at the time, and took 65 weeks to make. Audiences adored it, and even today, it’s easy to see why. (Fairbanks and some of the other actors wore brown makeup in their roles, not uncommon at the time, as unacceptable as it would be today.) The special effects may be technically primitive by today’s standards, but that doesn’t diminish their enchantment. In the final sequence, Fairbanks’ Ahmed whisks his beloved through the sky on a flying carpet, his arms crossed jauntily, as the stars reassemble themselves to spell out a final message: “Happiness must be earned.” Sometimes, though, it arrives in the form of a somersault, a mischievous silent cackle, or a silky little rug soaring on an air current, defying science in the name of delight.

The director of the gorgeously stylized 1922 horror film Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau was already considered a master of German Expressionism when he emigrated to Hollywood in 1926. The first film he made there, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, was also one of the first films to feature a synchronized score and sound effects, pointing the way to the future of talkies. But Sunrise seems to exist in a world without time. It’s a close to perfect story, universal in its painful, iridescent truth: That even when two people truly love each other, the human desire for novelty can exert a dangerous pull. George O’Brien is the character known only as the Man, a country farmer who was happy with his life until he fell under the sway of the Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston), a manipulative flapper. Janet Gaynor, in a performance of exquisite porcelain dignity, is the Wife, quietly distraught as she sees her husband drifting away from her. One day she gets a glimmer of hope—he’s invited her for a day in the city—and she puts on her best dress, not knowing his plan is a murderous one. Yet the story shifts again, illuminating the way people who have been together for a long time can rediscover one another, in this case bolstered by the energy and spirit of the city. Sunrise is both joyous and piercing, and gorgeously filmed: Murnau’s sense of invention was outshone only by his deep, radiant affection for his troubled characters. In the years following, silent pictures would be left behind forever, like a lost, shimmering shore. Sunrise is a final echo from that rapturous island, a reminder of all that can be said without uttering a word.

A face can make a movie. We’re used to that idea today, though it’s hard to comprehend that the mere notion of the movie close-up—anecdotally, at least, popularized by D.W. Griffith—was still relatively young when Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer embarked on his film version of the story of Joan of Arc. Broken down into its basic filmmaking components, The Passion of Joan of Arc is a brazen, experimental work, a symphony of sharp angles and austerely expressive lighting. But once you’ve seen this film, the face of its star, Renée-Jeanne Falconetti, sometimes known also as Maria Falconetti, becomes its most haunting element. As the doomed 15th century political prisoner, tortured and taunted for adhering to her faith, Falconetti holds the film around her in something close to a state of suspended animation. Her suffering, captured in the unwavering gaze of Dreyer’s camera, is less beatific than intimately human. Falconetti’s face, lunar in its radiant complexity, holds multiple truths at once—there’s anguish in her eyes but peace in her soul. Impossible to watch casually, The Passion of Joan of Arc is a film that melts the space between decades, and centuries.

To pick a favorite Buster Keaton is to face a momentous choice, along the lines of having to decide whether you’d like to play with puppies all day or have your favorite person bake a cake for you. But the last of Keaton’s independently made features, Steamboat Bill, Jr., co-directed with Charles Reisner, is a sturdy choice—unlike the storm-battered house façade that famously falls around this most genially hapless of stars, leaving him standing miraculously unscathed. Keaton plays recent college grad William Canfield Jr., who reconnects with the father he hasn’t seen since he was a baby, a crabby steamboat operator (Ernest Torrence) who wants nothing to do with him. Keaton’s William spends the movie alternately defying and trying to win over his father, and ultimately saving him from a deadly storm. (That’s when he also wins his pixiesh lady love, Kitty, played by 16-year-old Marion Byron.) Keaton’s stunts here—including the collapsing house, the most elaborate version of a feat he’d pulled off in earlier movies like One Week—are both astonishing and astonishingly dangerous. Yet there’s so much deadpan joy in them, as if this generally unhappy and somewhat unlucky man had poured his very soul into the physical and mental discipline required to pull them off. His movements are economical and precise, though they appear unstudied. But it’s his inherently serene face that gets you. It’s not the face of a man who can’t believe what’s happening to him, but that of a man who saw it coming all along. It’s a face that will always feel modern.

There are few tragic heroines more alluring than Lulu, the heartbeat of Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, brought to life by a performer whose image—the winsome, mischievous eyes, the glossy, art-deco bob—remains a symbol of sexual charisma and freedom. Louise Brooks’ Lulu is both a wily opportunist and a sympathetic survivor. She’s the kept woman of a powerful newspaper publisher (played by German stage actor Fritz Kortner, who’s said to have despised Brooks, stomping off the set the instant he’d finished a scene with her), and when her position is threatened by his bland blonde fiancée, she summons infinite reserves of petulance to get him to marry her instead. She’ll be the death of him, he knows, but her ill-advised marriage is also the beginning of her own fatal spiral: the picture’s ending quietly knocks the wind out of you, because over the course of the movie’s runtime, a world without Brooks’ Lulu comes to seem unimaginable. Pandora’s Box was based on a duo of plays by German playwright Frank Wedekind, and upon its release, critics in Berlin and elsewhere reviled Pabst’s adaptation, and Brooks’ performance in particular. The consensus at the time was that she couldn’t act. She certainly could, though what she brings to Pandora’s Box goes far beyond technique. To watch her today is to become her prisoner all over again. She’s as dismissible as a moonbeam.