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 fictiona…

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 fi…

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 beyo…

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, 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’…

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 inte…

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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 gr…

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 evol…

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, e…

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, inc…

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 …

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 th…

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 pic…

As a feminist film historian and scholar, Aurore Spiers (she/her) is mainly focused on women’s contributions to film, with her work interrogating historiographical processes—what history gets written, how, and why—through the lens of gender and intersectional and multidimensional feminism. That focus is reflected in her five picks for the 1800s, as…

As the first guest of The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever and its 1800s season, writer and avid "prehistoric" film watcher J.J. DiUbaldi explores sound, color, and positive racial depictions (among other topics) through his five picks; things one might not expect to find in the earliest motion pictures of the 1880s and '90s. J.J. maintains zepfanma…

Welcome to The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever. Ahead of guests and listeners sharing their picks for the first decade or so of cinema up until the end of the nineteenth century, instructor and host Tristan Ettleman provides some context on the podcast and the creation of “moving pictures.”Av Tristan Ettleman