Silent Films Trivia
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50 free Silent Films trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This silent films trivia quiz covers cinema's first three decades, from Muybridge's galloping horse and Edison's kinetoscope to the night The Jazz Singer ended the era. It asks how 'silent' films actually sounded (pianists, Mighty Wurlitzers, Japanese benshi narrators), why so many were tinted blue or amber, what frame rates cameramen really cranked at, why 75 percent of American silents are lost, and how the Edison Trust pushed the studios west. It then covers the films and stars: Melies and A Trip to the Moon, The Great Train Robbery, Griffith and The Birth of a Nation, Chaplin's Tramp, Keaton's Great Stone Face, Harold Lloyd on the clock, Mary Pickford and United Artists, Valentino's funeral, Nosferatu and the court order to destroy it, Caligari, Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis and its lost reels, Wings, Sunrise, and the modern homages from Silent Movie to The Artist. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on silent film and the individual films and performers, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for film students, classic movie fans and quiz nights; for deeper dives on the two great clowns, try our Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton trivia pages.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1927 film, the first commercially successful sound feature, is said to have ended the silent era?
The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer opened on 6 October 1927 with none of the Warner brothers in the audience: Sam Warner, who had pushed the studio into sound, had died the day before.
Q 02What do film historians call the text cards that carry dialogue and narration in silent films?
Intertitles
Intertitles had specialist writers, and the first Academy Awards gave an Oscar for title writing. It was never presented again, because talkies were already making the cards obsolete.
Q 03Studios scrapped many unwanted silent film prints partly to salvage which precious metal from the image layer?
Silver
Silver forms the image in black-and-white film, so prints with no commercial value left were destroyed for its scrap value. About three-quarters of American silent features are now thought lost.
Q 04What kind of film stock made early movies so prone to decay and fire?
Nitrate
Nitrate film carries enough oxygen in its own molecules to keep burning without air, so dousing a blaze with water may not put it out. Kodak stopped making it for cinemas in 1951.
Q 05In which country did live narrators called benshi stand beside the screen and voice the characters of silent films?
Japan
Japan's benshi were a draw in their own right, with their photos printed on film posters. Their popularity helped keep silent pictures in the country's cinemas until the mid-1930s.
Q 06Which theatre organ, with train-whistle and pistol effects, accompanied silent films?
The Mighty Wurlitzer
The Mighty Wurlitzer was built as a 'unit orchestra', so that one organist could stand in for a whole pit band. Its maker turned out more than 2,000 of them for cinemas.
Q 07Which French composer, then in his seventies, wrote an early film score for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1908?
Camille Saint-Saens
Camille Saint-Saens was 73 and probably France's most celebrated composer when he took the job. He went away for the winter before the premiere, so another musician conducted his score.
Q 08In silent-era tinting, what colour usually signalled a night scene?
Blue
Blue meant night because the film stock of the day was too slow to shoot in the dark. Night scenes were filmed in daylight and dyed afterwards.
Q 09What problem helped end film tinting once sound-on-film arrived?
The dyes interfered with the soundtrack
The dyes interfered with the soundtrack, which was printed along the edge of the film itself. Kodak answered with Sonochrome, a pre-tinted stock whose colours did not disturb the track.
Q 10Why do silent films often look speeded-up today?
They're projected faster than filmed
They're projected faster than filmed: silent cameras were cranked by hand, often at around 16 frames a second, while projectors since the coming of sound have run at a fixed 24.
Q 11Which child star of Chaplin's The Kid grew up to play Uncle Fester in TV's The Addams Family?
Jackie Coogan
Jackie Coogan earned millions as a boy, then found as an adult that his mother and stepfather had spent nearly all of it. His lawsuit pushed California into a law protecting child actors' pay.
Q 12Which silent horror star, who devised his own make-up, was billed as 'The Man of a Thousand Faces'?
Lon Chaney
Lon Chaney was the son of deaf parents and grew up communicating through gesture and expression, a training that made him a natural for acting without words.
Q 13Germany's Skladanowsky brothers showed films to a paying Berlin audience in November 1895, weeks before which French brothers' famous debut?
The Lumieres
Q 21Which company did Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith help found in 1919?
United Artists
United Artists let its star founders distribute their own films and keep control of their work. A rival studio boss is said to have remarked that the inmates were taking over the asylum.
Q 22Which film was Chaplin's first true talkie, with spoken dialogue throughout?
The Great Dictator
The Great Dictator ends with Chaplin dropping the comedy for a long, earnest plea for brotherhood and democracy. He had resisted talking pictures for more than a decade.
Q 23What nickname did Buster Keaton's deadpan expression earn him?
The Great Stone Face
The Lumieres had plainly the better machine: the Germans' Bioscop had to alternate frames from two separate reels, and their booking at the Folies Bergère was cancelled once its owners saw the French show.
Q 14What was the nickname of the Motion Picture Patents Company formed in 1908 to control the industry?
The Edison Trust
The Edison Trust enforced its patents so hard that many independents moved to distant California, where suits were harder to press. A federal court ruled against it as an illegal monopoly in 1915.
Q 15Which 1914 adventure serial made Pearl White the best-known 'serial queen' of the silent screen?
The Perils of Pauline
The Perils of Pauline had its star doing most of her own stunts, and she injured her spine during filming. Her studio later stopped her taking the risks, deciding she was too valuable to lose.
Q 16Which actress has been called film's 'first true actress' for pioneering screen acting under D. W. Griffith?
Lillian Gish
Lillian Gish lay on a real ice floe for the climax of Way Down East, her hair and hand trailing in the freezing river. It left her with lasting nerve damage in several fingers.
Q 17Which French filmmaker made the fantasy film A Trip to the Moon in 1902?
Georges Melies
Georges Melies was a stage magician who turned his tricks into some of cinema's earliest special effects. Bankrupt by the 1920s, he ended up selling sweets and toys from a stand in a railway station.
Q 18Which 1903 Western has a famous close-up of an outlaw firing his pistol straight at the audience?
The Great Train Robbery
The Great Train Robbery's gunshot had nothing to do with the story, so director Edwin S. Porter left it loose: projectionists could run it at the start or the end of the film as they pleased.
Q 19D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation was adapted from which novel?
The Clansman
The Clansman, Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel, cast the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. The film's huge success is credited with helping inspire the Klan's revival a few months after its release.
Q 20At which studio did Charlie Chaplin first find fame in 1914?
Keystone
Keystone hired Chaplin straight from a touring stage troupe, and he found its comedies crude at first. Within months he was directing nearly every short he appeared in, at about one a week.
The Great Stone Face came later: in his first films, as Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle's sidekick from 1917, Keaton often smiled and even laughed on screen.
Q 24Which Buster Keaton film did Orson Welles call 'the greatest comedy ever made'?
The General
The General cost so much and earned so little that Keaton lost his independence as a filmmaker and signed with MGM. The title is the name of a locomotive, not an officer.
Q 25In which 1923 film does Harold Lloyd dangle from the hands of a clock high above the street?
Safety Last!
Safety Last! was made by a man with eight fingers: a bomb mistaken for a prop had cost Lloyd his right thumb and forefinger in 1919, and he hid the loss on screen with a special glove.
Q 26Which silent star was known as 'America's Sweetheart'?
Mary Pickford
Mary Pickford was in fact Canadian, born Gladys Smith in Toronto. Off screen she was a producer in her own right and one of the founders of the Academy that hands out the Oscars.
Q 27Which silent star died suddenly in 1926, aged only 31?
Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino, the star of The Sheik, died of peritonitis days after emergency surgery. Tens of thousands of mourners mobbed the New York funeral home where he lay in state, and police struggled to control the riot.
Q 28Nosferatu (1922) was an unauthorised adaptation of which novel?
Dracula
Dracula's author was dead, but his widow Florence Stoker sued, and a court ordered every copy of the film destroyed. Several prints survived anyway, and it became a horror classic.
Q 29Who played the vampire Count Orlok in Nosferatu?
Max Schreck
Max Schreck was so eerie in the role that the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, with Willem Dafoe playing him, imagined the actor really was one of the undead.
Q 30In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), what is Cesare, the character played by Conrad Veidt?
A somnambulist
A somnambulist, or sleepwalker: Cesare is sent out to kill by the showman Caligari. Conrad Veidt later left Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife, then played the Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca.