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PODCAST

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever

Tristan Ettleman

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever features experts and enthusiasts and, well, their favorite films of every year ever. Host Tristan Ettleman sits down with a new guest every week to dive into the history and beauty of some of the best movies to ever come out of the cinematic medium.

tv & film film history

All Episodes

3:22

1902 E1 - A Trip to the "Industry?"

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/11/20

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 (1902) - Georges Méliès

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6:46

1901 E7 - Truth and Tricks

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/11/06

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 films submitted for the season, can be found at the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list.The 5 Best

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71:11

1901 E6 - Lawrence Napper

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/10/30

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 repeat film viewing and traditional religious ceremonies.Lawrence’s publications include The Great War

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62:37

1901 E5 - Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/10/23

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 discovery, restoration, and presentation of presumed lost films starring forgotten or neglected actresses

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65:57

1901 E4 - Grazia Ingravalle

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/10/16

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, digitization, archival remix, colonial histories, and decolonization in several edited volumes and in The

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51:13

1901 E3 - Pamela Hutchinson

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/10/09

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 deconstructing the still-fledgling medium, through the lens of her five picks.Pamela is a freelance

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57:50

1901 E2 - Ian Christie

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/10/02

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 our contemporary eyes.Ian is an author and Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University

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4:03

1901 E1 - Entertainment as Propaganda

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/09/25

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 our modern eyes, from the idea of a moving picture "tableaux" to colonizing forces. Join host Tristan

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6:17

1900 E7 - Sound, Color, Trickery, Oh My!

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/09/11

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 recurring themes in the conversations throughout the season.In this finale, host Tristan Ettleman briefly

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42:19

1900 E6 - Enri Ceballos

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/09/04

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 Mexico International Silent Film Festival, a PhD student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico

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43:24

1900 E5 - Carolyn Jacobs

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/08/28

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 Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Communication Department at Central Connecticut State University

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55:37

1900 E4 - Frank Kessler

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/08/21

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 activities concern mainly the field of early cinema and visual media in the 19th and early 20th century. His

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44:31

1900 E3 - Matthew Solomon

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/08/14

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.Matthew is the author of Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth

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44:17

1900 E2 - Malcolm Cook

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/08/07

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 of Early British Animation: From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens (2018) and co-editor (with Kirsten

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4:17

1900 E1 - The Beginning of a Century

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/07/31

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 illustrate increased output and popularity.From medical viewpoints to "animation," retroactive markers of

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7:00

The 1800s E7 - The End of a Century

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/07/17

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

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71:41

The 1800s E6 - Peter Domankiewicz

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/07/10

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

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53:49

The 1800s E5 - Bryony Dixon

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/07/03

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 numerous articles and book chapters on silent cinema and archiving. She is co-director of the British Silent

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50:34

The 1800s E4 - Maggie Hennefeld

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/06/26

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

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60:06

The 1800s E3 - Aurore Spiers

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/06/19

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.Aurore received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from

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62 results

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