- Great Britain, 1 January: The Quota Act has been put into practics. This Act stipulated that domestic production must make up a minimum of 7.5 percent of films screened.
- Germany, 2 January:
 The new year has begun with some major changes in the German film industry. The largest studio of all, the giant Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft, or UFA, is in serious financial trouble after the box-office failure of two of its most prestigious productions, F. W. Murnau's version of Faust and, more notably, the extremely costly Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang. Last May the company revealed that Metropolis had cost an unbelievable 5 million marks, and Lang was blamed for the company's growing financial problems. He protested, but found little support among the management or from producer Erich Pommer. In fact, Pommer himself was dislodged from his position as the head of the company, while Alfred Hugenberg has emerged as the new man of the moment. An independent producer who had previously founded Deulig, a company specializing in propaganda films since 1912, Hugenberg is also an active member of the right-wing National Socialist Party. He has managed to save the debt-ridden UFA from bankruptcy by organizing a new controlling trust; however, unfortunately, under his influence UFA is becoming an outlet for nationalist propaganda.
- Hollywood, 21 January: The success of Underworld has given Josef von Sternberg the opportunity to make The Last Command with Emil Jannings.
- Los Angeles, 27 January:
 Charles Chaplin's new film, The Circus, which premiered in New York on 6 January, has just opened in California at Grauman's Chinese Theater. The production has occupied Chaplin for a little over two years, not least because of his marital problems with Lita Grey and the subsequent complications of their divorce. At several points during the divorce proceedings, possession of the film itself was fought over by the two sides' lawyers. Production on the nearly-completed film was suspended early in December 1926 and not resumed until October 1927. The filming itself also had its fraught moments, particularly the 200 takes Chaplin made in a cage with real lions. Now this is almost forgotten in the excitement surrounding the film's release. The Circus contains some vintage Chaplin, but the public response has been less enthusiastic than the ecstatic reception given The Gold Rush. The filmmaker's obsessive pursuit of perfection has once again resulted in colossal quantities of discarded film -- the final 6,500 foot version was edited down from 211,000 feet. Reportedly, Chaplin did hundreds of takes before being satisfied with a particularly tricky tightrope scene, in which the Tramp is beset by both monkeys and falling trousers. The result reflects the influence of Harold Lloyd's "thrill comedy" while betraying some of Chaplin's feelings about his recent marital woes.
- Paris, 9 February: The history of the cinematographic avant-garde will remain, without a doubt, indebted to Mme. Germain Dulac for a night to remember, and for a film that lasts barely 25 minutes. The director of The Smiling Madame Beudet unintentionally caused a riot when she presented her latest film, The Coquille and the Clergyman, in a program of experimental films at the Studio des Ursulines. It is based on a scenario by the poet Antonin Auraud, who intended to direct it and play the lead. He later withdrew, and claims that the film has betrayed his intentions by using the device of a dream as an alibi for his eroticism. Determined to demonstrate his opposition, Artaud alerted his friends who comprise the group of surrealists and who arrived in full force at the Studio des Ursulines to sabotage the performance. Robert Desnos got the rebellion started by shouting, "Madame Dulac is a cow!" Armand Tallier, the owner of the theatre and organizer of the evening, protested that he would not tolerate such an outrage. Other spectators then started to attack the protestors. It very quickly got out of hand in the auditorium, and in the adjoining bar, where René Clair, Philippe Hériat, Alexandre Arnoux and several others tried in vain to intervene. Confronted with this disaster, Armand Tallier nevertheless refused to call the police. This attitude earned him the heartfelt congratulations of the surrealists, little accustomed to such good-hearted indulgence. The writer André Breton decided to take it upon himself to report the proceedings to other surrealists.
- Los Angeles, 13 February: Release of Four Sons, the first sound (but not talking) film directed by John Ford.
- New York, 28 February:
 The great German actor Emil Jannings, who is the lead in F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh in Germany, has finished his second Hollywood film. Fresh from being directed by Victor Fleming in The Way of All Flesh, Jannings submitted himself to the instructions of the Austrian-born Josef von Sternberg for The Last Command. In it, he plays an exiled Czarist general who winds up in Hollywood reduced to playing extras in motion pictures. Flash back to the year 1917, when a young man (William Powell), an actor serving in the army, is captured, beaten and humiliated by that same general. His actress-fiancée (Evelyn Brent) then seduces his tormentor, gains his confidence, and betrays him when the Revolution triumphs. Ten years later, the young revolutionary has become a film director, and employs the former general to take part in a film about the war in Russia and the Revolution. The general, confusing reality and fiction, is meticulous in the role before dying on the set. The scenario, written by Sternberg himself, deals with the "irony of fate" as well as the distortion of memory. Echoing the subject of The Last Command, the director experienced great difficulties with Jannings, even though he has managed to extract a truly moving performance out of the capricious German star.
- Moscow, 5 March: Release of Prodannyi appetit (The Sold Appetite, by Nicolai Okhlopkov, based on a short story by French writer Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law.
- Moscow, 14 March:
 A number of films have been commissioned by the Soviet government to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. Among them is Sergei Eisenstein's film October, which is based on John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World. (Others were directed by Pudovkin, Boris Barnet and Esther Shub.) However, both the shooting of Eisenstein's film and the editing ran into difficulties, and the director was obliged to reduce 49,000 metres of footage to 2,000, mainly due to the intervention of politics and censorship. For example, Trotsky had originally figured prominently in the film, but then had to be expunged from it altogether. Eisenstein's ambition was to evoke Petrograd's history between February and October 1917, from the fall of the Czar to the capture of the Winter Palac at the time when the Bolsheviks brought down the Kerensky government. But this film tends toward fiction rather than truth, and must be considered as a lyrical and heroic epic about the very beginnings of a new nation. The only real participants identified in the Revolution are Lenin and Kerensky, the head of the bourgeois government. The former, played by a worker, makes a fleeting but impressive appearance. The latter, on the contrary, is a leading character, who allows Eisenstein to display all his satiric verve. October reveals the chaos of the epoch by the use of dynamic footage, constantly contrasting images and visual metaphors, such as Kerensky pictured as a strutting mechanical peacock. Some of the most striking emotional and rhythmic scenes include the dismantling of the statue of Alexander III, Kerensky climbing an unending stairway, the excited crowds converging on the Winter Palace, and the opening of a drawbridge from which a dead horse is suspended.
- Berlin, 22 March: Release of Spione (Spies), directed by Fritz Lang for UFA, with Rudolph Klein-Rogge, Gerda Maurus and Willy Fritsch.
- Paris, 23 March: Abel Gance has filed a complaint against Gaumont-Metro-Goldwyn for screening a revised version of his film Napoléon without his consent.
- Ukraine, 13 April: With the release of Zvenigora, a lyrical hymn to his native country, Alexander Dovzhenko proves himself equal to Eisenstetin and Pudovkin, the two greats of Soviet cinema.
- Moscow, 12 May: Sergei Eisenstein has been appointed to a professorial chair at the GTK Institute of Cinema.
- Los Angeles, 15 May: Mickey Mouse takes his first steps in Walt Disney's Plane Crazy.
- Copenhagen, 11 June: Axel Peterson and Arnold Poulsen have demonstrated their new sound and talking film system at the Grand Theatre.
- Paris, 15 June: The Bruno Rahn film with Asia Nielsen, The Tragedy of the Streets, which has been running for four months at the Studio des Ursulines, is now showing at the Corso Opera.
- Paris, 30 June: The Jazz Singer, the film from Warner Bros. that has revolutionized the American film industry, has been given a press showing in Paris and will be seen across the capital next month. Clearly, the arrival of the "talkers" will have a big impact on the European film industry. With an eye on the future of talking films, Paramount has recently signed a deal with the French music-hall star Maurice Chevalier. The celebrated boulevardier had already made a screen test for MGM, but when it proved fruitless he was snapped up by Paramount's Jesse Lasky.
- New York, 6 July: Preview of the first 'real talking' film, Lights of New York. Directed by Brian Foy, with Helene Costello and Cullen Landis, the film features dialogue in 22 of its 24 sequences.
- Moscow, 1 August: Sergei Eisenstein has been invited to Hollywood by Joseph M. Schenck, the president of United Artists.
- Berlin, 31 August: Release of Zuflucht (The Refuge), directed by Carl Froelich and starring Henny Porten. It addresses the human consequences of war.
- Paris, 14 September: Charles Dullin is the producer for Jean Grémillon's first full-length film, Maldone.
 - Hollywood, 22 September: Buster Keaton has made his first silent feature for MGM, The Cameraman. Edward Sedgwick directs this picture in which Luke Shannon (Keaton), a tintype photographer, tries to become a newsreel lens man at MGM to impress his girl (Marceline Day). When he finally gets a showing for the newsreel bosses, his screening is all double exposures, the wrong way around, and totally incomprehensible. He thought the camera crank turned backwards, not forward. In a classic sequence, Keaton runs up and down flights of stairs in his apartment building to answer a phone call from his girlfriend.
- New York, 22 September: Paramount has released its part-talking film, Beggars of Life. It is directed by William Wellman, with Richard Arlen and Louise Brooks.
- Paris, 25 September: General Films have decided not to go ahead with The Fall of Eagles, as a sequel to Abel Gance's Napoléon. Gance has passed the script to German producer Peter Ostermayer.
- New York, 29 Sepember:
 Director Josef von Sternberg has brought his remarkable visual artistry to full flower in The Docks of New York. Light and darkness, mist and shadows, make the camerawork almost as compelling as the story. A drama of love and death, it tells of a ship's stoker (George Bancroft) who falls in love with and marries a girl (Betty Compson), whom he rescues from suicide on the waterfront. He promptly deserts her, but jumps ship in order to save her from a false murder charge, and serves a prison sentence to clear her of a further charge of theft. The girl is understandably grateful. Both leads are tremendously touching -- though most surprising is "good" tough guy Bancroft, who previously played a ganster in Sternberg's earlier film Underworld. There is also a lot of pleasure to be had from the balance between the contrasting personalities of the tender Compson and the sharp Olga Baclanova. The simple story can give no clue to its masterly execution. Like The Salvation Hunters (Sternberg's first film in 1925, made on location at the docks of San Pedro Bay and considered a failure) and the subsequent Underworld (a success), the director has approached urban squalor with poetic realism. Pictorial compositions are used in The Docks of New York to illuminate the characters and express their motivations.
- Paris, September: By mutual agreement, Gaumont and MGM dissolved the partnership they set up in April 1924. Both parties prefer to be independent.
- New York, 1 October: Warner Bros. has bought a majority stake in First National Pictures. Henceforth, it controls its studios, distribution network and movie theaters.
- New York, 2 October:
 The ongoing saga of the brilliant Erich von Stroheim's problems with his producers continues with the long-delayed release of his latest production, The Wedding March. The writer-director-star has again returned to the Vienna of his youth and to themes that he first began exploring in his abortive production of Merry-Go-Round in 1922. In the new film, Stroheim himself plays the lead, the aristocratic officer Prince Nikki, with a new young discovery, Fay Wray, as the girl he loves, and ZaSu Pitts, the rich businessman's daughter whom he is forced to marry. Conceived on an epic scale, the film required the construction of three dozen elaborate sets and a replica of St. Stephen's Cathedral. After a number of disappointingly unsuccessful previews, and other delays over the past year with the growing interest in sound, the film as at least now been issued with a synchronized music and sound effects score that, it is hoped, will bring The Wedding March some added public appeal.
- Paris, 5 October: Studio 28 has released The Fall of the House of Usher, adapted from Edgar Allan Poe, and directed by Jean Epstein with the assistance of Luis Buñuel.
- Paris, 25 October: Directed by the Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer, the new French movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc, is being released in an atmosphere of polemic. Although the Archbishop of Paris was consulted in advance, he was displeased with it, and the film being shown to the public is his own censored version. Among other problems, when the film was announced nationalists protested about a foreigner daring to make a film about the Maid of Orleans, a symbol of French heroism. After having created a strong impression in France with Master of the House, shown in April 1926, Dreyer was offered the chance to direct his own choice of subject and was allowed a free hand in the treatment by his producers, the Soci&eacture;té Général de Films. The filming took place from May to October 1927 against the austere sets constructed by Herman Warm, a German designer whose name is linked to two of the great successes of German Expressionist cinema: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Three Lights. In the course of filming, which chronologically follows the actual records of the trial, Dreyer told his interpreters, Michel Simon, Antonin Autaud and Eugene Silvain, to speak the exact phrases that appear in the subtitles. In the name of realism, the director asked the young actress Renée Falconetti, who plays Joan, to crop her beautiful hair and to strip her face of all makeup. Filmed mostly in close-up, the agonized face of the actress, free of all cosmetic artifice, appears even more moving and human. The photography of Rudolph Maté has also conferred on the film a power and rigor that makes The Passion of Joan of Arc a universal work.
- New York, 28 October: A recently-created weekly newsreel, Movietone News, will be distributed regularly to movie theaters throughout the US beginning 3 December.
- Berlin, 30 October: The UFA circuit has inaugurated the Universum cinema, which seats 1,791 and is equipped with impressive Oskalyd organs.
- Paris, 31 October: The Société des Cinéromans has constructed a studio to make films in "natural colors" using the method invented by the Frenchmen Keller-Dorian and Berthon. Jacques de Baroncelli is already there to film La Femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet), with André Roanne and Dolly Davis.
- Prague, 2 November: Release of Mountain Village, made by Miroslav Josef Krhansky and based on the novel by Bozena Nemcová, one of the great classics of Czech literature.
- Hollywood, 5 November: Maurice Chevalier, who arrived here on 26 October for a Paramount project, has started making his first film, Innocents of Paris, under the direction of Richard Wallace.
- Moscow, 5 November: Release of Storm over Asia, directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin.
- Hollywood, 8 November:
 Greta Garbo was making her eighth American film, and shooting an intimate love scene with leading man Nils Asther, when she received a cable from Stockholm. Mauritz Stiller had died in the hospital, a photo of Garbo by his bedside. White with shock, she left the set and locked herself away in her dressing room. Waiting for her there was a small bottle of brandy and a note from Louis B. Mayer: "Dear Gretta, I feel for your grief but the show must go on." Garbo laughed before surrendering herself to tears. Stiller had never recovered from his failure in America and the resulting separation from his brilliant protégée.
- Los Angeles, 18 November: In his third film, Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse speaks for the first time. It follows on the first all-talking cartoon, Paul Terry's Dinner Time, which premiered in New York in September.
- New York, 23 November: Swedish-born director Victor Sjöström (who is known in America as Seastrom) has scored a triumph with The Wind, starring Lillian Gish and fellow Swede Lars Hanson. This uncompromising melodrama contrasts sharply with the director's recent collaboration with Gish, in which she gave a superb performance as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. In The Wind, Gish plays a delicate Virginia girl who comes to live with her cousin and his wife on a desert ranch. The wind howls unrelentingly around the cabin until the young woman's jangling nerves are stretched to the breaking point. Sand gets in everywhere, coating the carcass of a steer that swings ominously in the center of the shack. She is forced into marriage and, in Seastrom's original version, finally wanders off into the desert. However, distributors refused to run a picture with such a bleak ending, and MGM's production supervisor Irving G. Thalberg insisted on shooting a "happier" conclusion in which the sad heroine accepts her fate.
 Interior scenes for The Wind were shot at the MGM studios in Culver City, and the exteriors were filmed on location in the Mojave Desert. In the sandstorm scenes Gish was blasted with sand, cinders and sawdust hurled at her by an enormous nine-propellor wind machine. Smoke pots increased the murk as Gish, unprotected against the scouring blast, buried the body of Montagu Love (the villain) in the drifting sand. A great actress used to grueling location work, she found this one of her toughest assignments.
Seastrom is an interesting man. Born in Sweden but brought up in America, he returned to his native country where he became a successful actor and then a leading director in the burgeoning Swedish film industry. His was a close friend of Mauritz Stiller who recently died. In 1923 he accepted an offer from Goldwyn and when it merged into MGM, he was asked to direct the new studio's first production, He Who Gets Slapped in 1924.
- Berlin, 6 December: A fire broke out in the UFA buildings, destroying all the films in the laboratories. These included a print of Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc.
- Los Angeles, 18 December: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has filmed an opening logo in its Culver City studios. It consists of a superb roaring lion enclosed in a scroll-like frame, accompanied by the firm's new motto, Ars gratia artis (Art for art's sake). The lion is known as Leo.
- Rome, 20 December: The journalist Alessandro Blasetti has created a production cooperative with a group of aspiring filmmakers. He has called it Augustus and is presently starting work on his first film as a director, Sole.
- Hollywood, 31 December: Fox has released Howard Hawks' first aviation film The Air Corps.
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1 January - Cleveland, OH,