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.

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.

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!?”

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.