Earth

One of the last of the silents, and though increasingly an absentee from Ten Best lists, a very great film indeed. The director's trademarks - a field of sunflowers all waving goodbye, a lowering sky filling three-quarters of the frame - remained well nigh constant throughout his career, but he seldom recaptured the pantheistic phosphoresence of this hymn both to nature and to the gleaming new tractors and ploughs which aimed to transform it. Such is the authenticity of its pictorialism, in fact, that one has to remind oneself that it was actually shot like other films.