Watch The General

Chaplin eats his boot and dances with bread rolls in the Klondike.

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

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.

Lang's 1927 city of the future: the Maschinenmensch, the workers below and a look every sci-fi film borrowed.