Watch The Gold Rush

The Tramp and the blind flower girl; the last close-up is the one critics call the greatest in cinema.

Chaplin caught in the gears of a factory, the last stand of the silent comedy.

Buster Keaton chases a stolen locomotive through the Civil War, doing every stunt himself.

A silent, black-and-white French film about the end of silent film; and it won.

The first Best Picture: a silent Great War dogfight epic with real biplanes and Clara Bow.

German Expressionism in painted shadows: a somnambulist, a fairground and the first twist ending.

Murnau's unauthorised Dracula, with Max Schreck's rat-faced count climbing the stairs in shadow.

The Odessa Steps sequence, the pram, and the montage theory every editor still learns.