The 1800s

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.”

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.

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 the labor behind the camera is explored and expectations of this period in film are challenged.

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 possibilities of the earliest days of film, from anarchic comedy to those who worked behind the camera.

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.

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 explanation of a film residing in the French national film archive that Peter was able to identify this summer.

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 before and behind the camera associated with much later decades. In this finale, host Tristan Ettleman summarizes the trends of the era, shares his five picks for the 1800s, and creates a "mini-canon" from guests' and listeners' picks.