Six Silent Films That Inspired "The Artist." Notes by Michel Hazanavicius.

This is the first gangster movie in the history of cinema, written by Ben Hecht, the year after he wrote "Scarface." All of "Scarface," and even Brian De Palma's "The Untouchables," comes from "Underworld." The way that director Josef von Sternberg shot women was incredible. It's super-sensual, and really amazing to see a gangster movie as good as anything by Tarantino from this period.

Tod Browning ("Dracula") directed this movie. He had a long collaboration with Lon Cheney, who only acted in silent movies. "The Unknown" is really great. It's short, like 75 minutes, but really gypsy-circus-romance weird, all the things that Browning is known for.

F.W. Murnau would have made some great sound movies, but the work of the silent format was absolutely incredible…the images he created, with very few title cards, were really poetry. It was a strange mix of something that could be absurdly realistic and just pure poetry. You don't know much about the people in "Sunrise." But you don't need to know much.

A lot of people know about F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise," but not many really know "City Girl." It's more extravagant. Murnau's movies are really beautiful, and this one is about the grammar of cinema since it's so simple. You don't know what country they're in. It's just about two people.

King Vidor's classic is actually a very modern movie, an American historic epic, but it's really about a human being in a crisis.

This is a perfect movie. It really was the inspiration when I wrote the script, because I thought that everything that was true for Charlie Chaplin was not true for other directors. The last scene, when the blind woman recognizes Chaplin by his hands--I absolutely watched that scene 20 times when I was writing the script. When I did that, I realized it was worth it to work on a silent movie. There's a lot of invention here. It's perfectly done.

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