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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

42:14

1903 E3 - Bruce Calvert

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2025/01/29

Silent film historian Bruce Calvert has been collecting silent film memorabilia for 30 years, showcased on his site The Silent Film Still Archive. He shares his story of how he came to develop this interest and addresses how supporting materials can help us understand how incomplete, missing, and even fully surviving movies were made, seen, and received.Bruce is also a moderator of the classic film discussion site NitrateVille.Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five

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72:46

1903 E2 - Neil Brand

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2025/01/22

Neil Brand has been a silent film accompanist for nearly 40 years. He shares his musical expertise, which also includes composing new scores for silent film re-releases, while exploring exciting threads of fantasy, comedy, and violence in his five picks.Neil regularly plays at the Barbican and BFI National Film Theatres in London and film festivals around the world. His scores include Blackmail (1929), Underground (1928), Easy Street (1917), Robin Hood (1922), and The Lodger (1927) and he is also a

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4:33

1903 E1 - The Great Film Robberies

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2025/01/15

The law (at least in America) had a significant effect on the development of film genres, aesthetics, production, and viewing practices from 1903 on. The world over, tightly run studios were becoming more and more prevalent, shifting story films further and further into the spotlight, and dedicated filmviewing spaces were cropping up. It's difficult to define any one calendar year as fundamentally shifting the development of cinema, but as guests will demonstrate, new techniques, technologies, and

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5:44

1902 E7 - From the Streets to the Studio

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2025/01/02

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 Satan (1902) - Georges MélièsThe Spring Fairy (1902) - Ferdinand ZeccaGulliver's Travels Among the

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63:56

1902 E6 - Tamara Shvediuk and Federico Striuli

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/12/26

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 and the Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna. She also has collaborated with archives such as the

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65:42

1902 E5 - Vanessa Toulmin

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/12/18

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 Moon and an early amusement park ride.Vanessa has published 11 books including Electric Edwardians: The

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43:31

1902 E4 - Lea Stans

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/12/11

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 Hub and has written for The Keaton Chronicle and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.Visit

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52:19

1902 E3 - Karl Wratschko

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/12/04

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, installation, radio art, and public art. He was co-responsible for several retrospectives of early Austrian

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56:49

1902 E2 - Clara Auclair

The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever ·

2024/11/27

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 archives. She is a DAFIV research fellow and co-secretary of Domitor, the International Association for the

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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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