The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever

It's not like the established actuality suddenly evaporated in 1902, but as guests have pointed out throughout this season, a diversification of film topics, aesthetics, and technology fostered new genres and production styles. In this season finale, Tristan briefly summarizes the common threads of his conversations and puts together the most selected 1902 films. Films mentioned: The Treasures of...

Tristan welcomes two guests to one episode for the first time: the husband-and-wife film historian, archivist, and curator duo of Tamara Shvediuk and Federico Striuli. The pair showcase spectacle with their five picks, from the féerie to chronicles of a significant political change. Tamara has curated film programs for several events, including the Moscow International Festival of Archival Films a...

Vanessa Toulmin, Chair in Early Film and Popular Entertainment at the University of Sheffield, is an expert on variety theater, circus, travelling exhibitions, fairgrounds, and other aspects of the history of show business. She brings this expertise to her five picks from 1902, ranging from her vast experience with the Mitchell & Kenyon films to an intriguing connection between A Trip to the M...

Lea Stans has been writing about the silent era on her blog Silent-ology since 2014, informed by her college interests and even younger fascinations with the obscure. Her 1902 picks reflect the increasing diversity of the worldwide filmic output of the year, from the French féerie genre to actuality chronicles of downtown Indianapolis and northern England. Lea is also a columnist for Classic Movie...

Karl Wratschko, curator, filmmaker, and artist, has been working as a film curator for the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna since 2016. He brings his experience of programming screenings based in specific years, not unlike this very show (he’s even done 1902 for the festival!), to craft an abridged program you might have seen in that year. Karl’s artistic work includes film, photography, in...

Film scholar and preservationist Clara Auclair and Tristan talk quite a bit about comedy and tricks, those originating from the stage and those that could only come from the magic of filmic technology. That conversation leads into discussing the phenomenon of early recreations of real events…or are they “fakes!?” Clara teaches media studies at DIS Stockholm and works as a consultant for film archi...

A Trip to the Moon looms large in looking at the picture of 1902 in film. Georges Méliès' masterpiece is inarguably the most famous film of the early cinema period. But as will be explored by this season's guests, its part in reshaping the aesthetics, genres, and industrialization of the global film community exists alongside another version of film history. Films mentioned: A Trip to the Moon (19...

Propaganda, comedy, tricks; these approaches may seem to obscure truths. That is certainly their potential in film, but in this 1901 season finale, Tristan reflects on the through lines of his guests' picks and the conversations that stemmed from them. Also, he shares his personal five selections for 1901 and puts together the collective list of guest and listener submissions. That list, including...

All but one of the picks from Lawrence Napper, senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, come from the huge trove of discovered Mitchell & Kenyon films. These fascinating records of everyday life in Victorian and Edwardian England and the United Kingdom lead to an array of exciting tangents, while Lawrence also uses his one fictional choice to make a resonant comparison between...

Tristan has been the grateful viewer of many an eye-popping restoration from Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam on YouTube . He expresses his thanks to Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Curator of Silent Film at Eye, before the two mostly discuss comedy films, with the broad genre nevertheless inspiring many different tangents from sexuality to the beginning of the film industry’s self-parody. Elif has worked on the...

Grazia Ingravalle, Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Film at Queen Mary University of London, focuses her 1901 picks in relation to colonialism. She creatively tackles the premise of this show by talking not of the “best films” of the year, but “quite the opposite,” in her own words, to illustrate the effect of the medium at this time and beyond. Grazia has published about film archives, digi...

Pamela Hutchinson's Silent London has been a great resource for Tristan since even before he started the written essay series that gives this podcast its name about seven years ago. Now, she joins the show to provide some context yet again, especially for how 1901 filmmakers weren't marching neatly toward narrative (they were tiptoeing toward it, dancing around it) and how some were specifically d...

Film historian Ian Christie rewires Tristan’s brain a bit in this episode, as Ian draws parallels between the early film “adaptation” and the tableaux painting, both of which benefit from contemporary shared pathos. During the discussion of his five picks, among other things, he also provides insight into the Anglo-Boer War and the actuality genre’s dominance in 1901 even as trick films still draw...

About five years into film's existence as a publicly available invention and art form, 1901 offers up a number of exciting threads for where the medium did and did not go. Some aspects may appear familiar: a form of a "close-up," attempts at adapting "narrative," and the use of the movies as a propaganda tool. But as guests will point out, the intent and reception of such things may be alien to ou...

Although this season has emphasized that the sudden transition into the 20th century didn't magically advance the still very young art form of cinema, the films selected by the guests for the 1900 edition of The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever represent exciting developments. Color, sound, trickery, medicine, animation, and the ever-present regret that so many films from this era are lost were rec...

The affinity Enri Ceballos has for dance is intensely represented by his picks for 1900, four of which feature the sheer joy of human movement. Both in front of and behind the screen, these films (all French and helmed by women!) also represent the diversity of gender and sexuality at play, along with sound and color technologies, in early cinema's history. Enri is the General Director for the Mex...

Considering Carolyn Jacobs' research focuses on the cultural history of media, especially in relation to histories of medicine, science, and public health, it makes sense that she examines her five picks through those lenses. From kissing panics to women being barred from performing surgery, the medical view of the discussed films brings new angles to understanding early cinema. Carolyn is an Assi...

From misattribution to missing sound, this conversation with Frank Kessler has a bit of lamentation for the lost works and context of early cinema. But there's also some celebration that we can view any films from the turn of the century (and earlier), including his picks that include trickery and evolving film language. Frank is professor in media history at Utrecht University. His research activ...

Matthew Solomon has taught film history and theory at the University of Michigan since 2011, with special interests in early and silent cinema, classic Hollywood filmmaking, and French film. He brings all that to bear on his five picks for 1900, which contain techniques that have only retroactively been considered early displays of evolving film grammar...and indeed, they are two-fifths French. Ma...

Malcolm Cook, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Southampton, found it challenging to pick just five works to represent 1900. But his selections embody the cross-section of genres and approaches across three countries, demonstrating how the turn of the century didn't suddenly disrupt the paradigms of the cinema of attractions but evolved them in exciting ways. Malcolm is the author o...

The second season of The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever narrows down from the decade-plus of the first down to just one calendar year. The first year of the 20th century didn't suddenly erupt the cinematic world into wholly unprecedented developments. But it fits into the trends and patterns steadily evolving through the last years of the 1800s, even as exciting changes and quality films illustra...

Invented within the last decade or so of the 1800s, "cinema" (a fluid definition not owed to any one person or group as this season has demonstrated) grew exponentially through the end of the century. The guests for this first season of The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever have demonstrated the diversity of filmic form in this incubatory period, including technologies, genres, and representation be...

Peter Domankiewicz is a film director ( Tea & Sangria ), screenwriter, and journalist with a long-standing interest in the origins of cinema. That interest manifests in five picks that deconstruct some of the myths surrounding early film, including the definition of “cinema” and its “invention,” a widescreen format at least 70 years before it became a standard, and a genuinely exclusive explan...

Bryony Dixon is the curator of silent film at the BFI National Archive and her picks for the 1800s reflect that expertise. Bryony discusses five British films that are emblematic of key developments in the earliest days of film, which align with the end of the Victorian era that she details in her book  The Story of Victorian Film . Bryony is also the author of 100 Silent Films  and has written nu...

Maggie Hennefeld, Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has literally written the book(s) on early cinematic feminist humor.  Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema  and Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes tackle similar themes to those explored in her five picks from the 1890s, which reveal the expansive po...