A Trip to the Moon (1902, Georges Méliès, France)
The Great Train Robbery (1903, Edwin S. Porter, USA)
The Birth of a Nation (1915, D. W. Griffith, USA)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920, Robert Wiene, Germany)
The Thief of Bagdad (1924, Raoul Walsh, USA)
The Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein, USSR)
Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov, USSR)
Un Chien Andalou (1929, Luis Buñuel, France)
M (1932, Fritz Lang, Germany)
Triumph of the Will (1935, Leni Riefenstahl, Germany)
Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio De Sica, Italy)
Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton, USA)
A MOVIE (1958, Bruce Conner, USA)
La Jetée (1962, Chris Marker, France)
Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero, USA)
The Street Fighter (1974, Shigehiro Ozawa, Japan)
Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch, USA)
DAICON IV (1983, DAICON Film, Japan)
All those links go directly to the films if anybody's interested.
I did a little more searching, and added The Birth of a Nation, The Thief of Bagdad, Triumph of the Will, Bicycle Thieves, A MOVIE, and The Street Fighter to my earlier post. The Birth of a Nation was the biggest blockbuster of all time when it came out and invented a few new camera tricks that are common today, The Thief of Bagdad was the biggest blockbuster of all time when it came out and invented a few new special effects that are common today, and Triumph of the Will is the greatest propaganda film of all time, the most important film of the 20th century to be made by a woman, and parts of it were lifted shot-for-shot for the ending of Star Wars: A New Hope. Bicycle Thieves introduced the rest of the world to Italian Neorealism and many critics believe it's the best example of the genre, A MOVIE pretty much invented messing around with found footage, and The Street Fighter was the first movie to get rated X for violence instead of sex, and it invented the slow-motion X-ray skull-cracking punch shot, which is now going to be in the new Mortal Kombat game.
And Triumph of the Will just led me to my new favorite YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/openflix It's got over 500 public domain movies organized and without any ads.
