A Century+ of Cinema: The 1910s

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Century+, Silent Film

The film within a feature film goes at least as far back as Hoodoo Ann (1916), written by D.W. Griffith and directed by Lloyd Ingraham.

I think it’s safe to say that, before this project, the 1910s was probably my weakest decade in terms of exposure to the classics. Or any films at all really. Of the films that ended up on my essentials list (see my previous post on Considering the Essentials), I had only seen one of them prior to 2019—The Immigrant, a Charlie Chaplin short. So, even though many of the industry developments during this period were well known to me from my dissertation research, I had a lot to learn about the films of this decade.

But let’s start with what I knew.

To begin with, the defining characteristic of the 1910s is probably its transitional and inconsistent nature, with dramatic changes in the film medium as well as modes of production, distribution, and exhibition.

Although the first narrative features emerge in the middle of this decade,* until 1919, popular films could be anything from a one- or two-reel comedy (about 25 minutes) to grand epics of more than two hours to ten-episode serials with episodes of varying lengths. Many multi-reelers were episodic in nature and more like one-reelers strung together, for example, the grand epics Cabiria and Intolerance both have multiple narrative threads. My essentials list reflects this variety: There are eight shorts, sixteen features, and one serial. The sixteen features on my list have running times from 50 minutes to almost 200 minutes, although the majority run between 50 and 65 minutes. [Side note: For purposes of this project, I am using the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences definition of a feature, that is, a film with a running time of 40 minutes or longer.]

Production in the 1910s also experienced seismic shifts. At the beginning of the decade, French companies controlled the vast majority of film production: Before World War I, 60–70% of films imported into the U.S. were French. Gaumont was the largest studio in the world, with Louis Feuillade in charge and cranking out his popular crime serials Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), and Judex. Also in Europe, Scandinavian directors began experimenting with narrative continuity and, in 1913, Victor Sjöström directed the social drama Ingeborg Holm, which used long takes, precise compositions, and nuanced performances in what is often considered the first true narrative feature.*

The death of the family patriarch, which sets the film’s plot in motion, in Ingeborg Holm (1913), directed by Victor Sjöström.

At the beginning of the decade in the United States, production was still based in New York and New Jersey and primarily controlled by the Edison Trust. It was here that the star system emerged when Carl Laemmle revealed the identity of “the Biograph girl” (aka Florence Lawrence) to the world. While the trust’s monopoly would eventually end the European domination of the industry—with a large assist from the onset of war—it was also one reason many independent filmmakers shifted production to the West Coast. In Los Angeles, not only was there abundant sunlight and diverse geography for exteriors, but the distance from New York made it harder for the trust to exert control through patents and fees. The trust would eventually be dismantled in 1918 in the wake of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. While the Hollywood studio system wouldn’t fully develop until the 1920s, by the war’s end, Los Angeles had become the epicenter of film production and directors such as D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille had already made their mark there. More on them later.

Unsurprisingly, these production developments also affected the distribution and exhibition of films. As the United States entered the 1910s, it was the age of the nickelodeon—the first type of dedicated indoor cinema space where patrons paid a nickel for entrance. However, as longer films became the norm, people wanted more comfortable venues for watching them, leading to the death of the nickelodeon and the rise of the cinema palace. These purposely built cinemas represented a full evening’s entertainment, and it is at this point that we see the establishment of the newsreel. Longer, narrative films also led to a shift in the use of intertitles: By the mid-1910s, dialogue intertitles had begun to outnumber expository titles, and the concept of screenwriter was born.

In short, this was a turbulent but exciting time for the industry. Nevertheless, I was somewhat dreading looking at the films of this period, mostly because I didn’t really know much about them beyond The Birth of a Nation (which I have deliberately excluded from consideration as part of this project). I had seen a few Chaplin shorts, I had watched Suspense when I originally got the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers collection out of the library, and I had made it through the first couple of episodes of Les Vampires when I did my Great Unseen project back in 2017; however, everything else was new to me.

The innovative triple split screen of Lois Weber’s Suspense (1913).

Despite the fact that I think the 1910s is likely to be one of the weakest cinema decades when all is said and done, I’m happy to say I discovered some real gems.

Favorite Feature Film: Shoes (1916) by Lois Weber. I first watched Shoes on Valentine’s Day 2020 and it was love at first sight. While ostensibly strictly a “social” film inspired by Jane Addams’s book A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil about the problems faced by underpaid working women, it is also a proto-Sex and the City that opens with our heroine crushing on a pair of shoes in a shop window. We eventually learn that our heroine wants them, not just for a fashion statement, but because she has worn out her own soles working in a five and dime. However, her family is destitute and all her earnings must go to support them. Like an O. Henry story gone very, very wrong, she eventually trades sex for the shoes. The story is great, if bleak, but this film also stands above the rest for its innovative camerawork.

In Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916), a woman crushes on a new pair of shoes she can’t afford and takes desperate action.

Favorite Director (Drama): Cecil B. DeMille. After Shoes, one of my favorite discoveries of the 1910s was DeMille’s Male and Female (1919), which quickly replaced The Cheat (1915) on my essentials list. Not that The Cheat isn’t good, it is, but I had seen a sound version of it previously and so I already knew the story. Plus, Male and Female is simply on another level, both technically and artistically. The film, which is a drama about gender relations, a satire of social class, and an adventure story all rolled into one, is based on a play by J. M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) and stars Gloria Swanson as a spoiled aristocrat who looks down on the attentions of her butler until she finds herself and her family stranded on a deserted island with him. It is best known for an elaborate fantasy sequence about ancient Babylon. If you are an opera lover, I would also recommend DeMille’s Carmen (1915), which stars American soprano Geraldine Farrar in the title role alongside film star Wallace Reid, popularly known as “the screen’s most perfect lover.”

The Ancient Babylon sequence in Male and Female (1919), directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

Favorite Director (Comedy): Ernst Lubitsch. This wasn’t even close. I really enjoyed all three Lubitsch features that I watched for this decade. My favorite was Die Puppe (The Doll) (1919), somewhat based on the ballet Coppélia, but also Hoffmann’s short story “Der Sandmann” (later adapted into the opera Les contes d’Hoffmann). Ossi Oswalda, the star of all three Lubitsch features I watched, is incredible here as the daughter of the dollmaker who acts as “the doll” hired by the protagonist to fool his rich uncle into thinking he has gotten married. In Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man) (1918), Oswalda is an independent young woman who enjoys both playing poker and smoking (heavens!). When a new strict guardian arrives, she sneaks out on the town disguised as a young man. However, she soon discovers that her newfound freedom is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Finally, there was The Oyster Princess (1919), about a spoiled rich girl who absolutely insists her father find her a royal husband. Hijinks ensue. I didn’t like the broad comedy of this one quite as much as the other Lubitsch films, but it has an incredible foxtrot scene towards the end that is certainly worth watching.

Ossi Oswalda gets her drag on in Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man) (1918), directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

Favorite Discovery: The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) by Władysław Starewicz. I am no fan of animation, so I wondered whether I even wanted to include this Russian stop-motion animated short that uses dead insects as its protagonists, but it showed up on so many lists that I figured I’d give it a go. OMG! The detail! The drama! I’m linking to a subtitled version below since, if you’ve never seen this, you must watch it right now. It even contains the classic “movie with the movie” bit (which just goes to show you that almost nothing is truly new).

Favorite Epic: Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone. Where to begin? Cabiria is an Italian epic set during the Punic Wars with a plot revolving around a young girl (Cabiria) who gets separated from her family during the eruption of Mount Etna and later is kidnapped and taken to Carthage, where she is destined to be sacrificed to the god Moloch. Although she will continue to reappear, the story really isn’t focused on Cabiria but rather the great historical events of the day, including the alpine trek of Hannibal, the defeat of the Roman fleet at Syracuse, and Scipio’s North African campaign. In addition to being extremely entertaining (really, the 180 minutes just fly by), it is also extremely innovative, featuring the extensive use of a moving camera, including a type of dolly tracking shot initially referred to as a “Cabiria shot.” Cabiria was the first feature film shown at the White House and was a major influence on D.W. Griffith. I had already seen Intolerance by the time I watched Cabiria, and, frankly, Cabiria blows that film out of the water.

One of the quieter moments of Cabiria (1914), when Sophonisba dreams of triple-eyed Moloch.

Favorite “Social” Film: Traffic in Souls (1913) by George Loane Tucker. This is one of the first films of the decade I actually saw since I found it looking up which silent classics were on Kanopy. As shocking as it may sound for the time, Traffic in Souls is a frank crime melodrama about forced prostitution (aka white slavery). It is also one of the first examples of a narrative feature in the U.S. Like a number of social films during this decade, it takes on the plight of the naïve immigrant and the difficulties faced by working women. Gretchen the Greenhorn (1916), which stars Dorothy Gish, is another example of this genre, though a somewhat more romantic one. Both were enjoyable despite their grim subject matter, featuring exciting chase-and-rescue sequences. Gretchen the Greenhorn also features the legendary character actor Eugene Pallette, in an early role as the villain.

Favorite Mary Pickford: The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917) by Maurice Tourneur. I watched a bunch of Mary Pickford films for this project, including some of her early shorts under the direction of D.W. Griffith at Biograph, the best of which is The New York Hat (1912), from a screenplay by Anita Loos, and co-starring Lionel Barrymore. However, although Stella Maris (a 1918 film where Pickford plays the dual roles of wealthy invalid and orphan servant) is surely her acting tour de force, I have a fondness for The Poor Little Rich Girl, where she plays a fun-loving but neglected daughter of rich parents. This feature, adapted by Frances Marion from a Broadway play, was a certified box office hit. The production used forced perspective and other tricks to make it appear that the diminutive Pickford was an eleven-year-old girl. Unfortunately, the success of the film meant that Pickford got pigeon-holed in child roles for much of the rest of her career, even playing the lead in Little Annie Rooney in 1925, at the age of 33.

Mary Pickford is quite the charmer in Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), adapted by Frances Marion and directed by Maurice Tourneur.

Favorite Film That Changed the Course of Film History: Snow White (1916) by J. Searle Dawley. Snow White was another pleasant surprise. One reason I watched this was that it apparently had a major influence on Walt Disney, who saw this movie as a teen in Kansas City and recalled it as “a perfect story.” But, influence aside, I really like this version of the tale, which is based on a 1912 stage production where the witch and the evil stepmother are separate characters. Fun fact: The dwarves in this version are named Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick, and Quee. Dawley also directed the earliest known screen adaptation of Frankenstein in 1910, which you can find on YouTube but I wouldn’t particularly recommend (see below).

Marguerite Clark is justifiably suspicious of her visitor in Snow White (1916), directed by J. Searle Dawley.

Favorite Film to Feature a National Park: The Dragon Painter (1919) by William Worthington. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon the existence of The Dragon Painter, but when I saw that the library had a DVD copy, I jumped on it. The story is a sort of fairy-tale about a young Japanese painter who lives in the mountains and believes his true love has been captured and turned into a dragon. A visiting surveyor sees his artwork and convinces the painter to go to Tokyo to be mentored by a celebrated artist he knows (by telling the painter that his dragon love can be found there). There, the painter falls in love with his mentor’s daughter, but loses his ability to paint. Hijinks and much melodrama ensue. The film stars Japanese acting power couple, Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki, and was produced by Hayakawa, who had risen to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat. The easter egg for me was when I started the film and slowly but surely realized the painter lived in Yosemite National Park!

Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki in The Dragon Painter (1919), positioned (appropriately enough) at Artist Point in Yosemite National Park, with Half Dome in the background.

Favorite Hero: Judex (1916) by Louis Feuillade. As I noted in my post on Considering the Essentials, I had watched the first few episodes of Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915–16) during my The Great Unseen project, but I just couldn’t get into it at that time. However, I knew I should watch at least one of Feuillade’s serials for this decade and so chose Judex. Judex was a direct response to Feuillade’s earlier serials, which focused on criminal gangs and had been criticized for glorifying crime. With the character of Judex (Latin for judge), Feuillade essentially created a proto-Batman, a character who, in response to the death of his father, decides to make his life’s work seeking revenge on a villainous financier and his network. He has a secret identity and lair, multiple gadgets and disguises, and mad fighting skillz. Of course, along the way, he falls in love with the banker’s innocent daughter. The total length of this serial is five hours, but they really do fly by, in part because of the fantastic characters we meet along the way. My favorite was Le Môme réglisse, aka The Licorice Kid.

The Licorice Kid explains what’s what to his new friend in Judex (1916), directed by Louis Feuillade.

The Genre of the Decade: The Western

Like many genres, the western has been around since almost the beginning of film history, with Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery appearing in 1903 and The Story of the Kelly Gang, an Australian bushranger film often considered the world’s first full-length narrative feature,* appearing in 1906. [Side note: Unfortunately, only 17 minutes of the latter film are known to have survived.] About 1908 or so, the popularity of the genre exploded and, by 1910, one-reel westerns would account for 25 percent of U.S. production. Part of me actually wonders if the popularity of westerns is one reason for the industry’s move out to California, where obviously location shooting for this genre would be greatly facilitated. In any case, I love westerns, so I was happy to find so many during this period.

Though he wasn’t the first to make them, the producer most associated with the western genre is Thomas Ince. Ince leant a new authenticity to the genre, notably by bringing in Native Americans (primarily Oglala Sioux) to play Native American roles—groundbreaking! In 1912, he purchased a ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, which would become his first studio, featuring stages and elaborate sets, offices and prop houses, and even labs for printing film. Sadly, his legacy as Hollywood’s first producer and studio head has been overshadowed by his death after a trip on the yacht of William Randolph Hearst. For this project, I watched one of his early pictures, The Invaders (1912), a very serviceable cavalry western.

With the emergence of multi-reel westerns in the middle of the decade, one actor emerged as a key player: William S. Hart, often an uncredited director on his films. Even though he was almost fifty at his film debut, Hart had starred in a number of westerns on the stage. In 1915, Hart began production on Hell’s Hinges (1916), nominally directed by Charles Swickard, but helmed by both Hart and producer Ince. Hell’s Hinges was Hart’s sixth feature and one of the most famous of the early westerns (along with The Virginian, by Cecil B. DeMille). The film has a slow build, as an East Coast preacher moves out to a wild frontier town and gradually becomes corrupted by some of the locals who are plotting to get rid of him. In the meantime, one of the local gunslingers falls in love with the preacher’s sister. It all ends in a literal blaze of glory and/or hellfire, take your pick.

Hell’s Hinges was one of five westerns to make their way onto either my essentials list or my favorites list. The others were Le Railway de la mort (The Railway of Death) (1912), a dark western from France that reminded me of Frank Norris’s McTeague; ’49-’17 (1917) a light western that plays on nostalgia for the Old West (and directed by a woman who hails from my hometown!); Bucking Broadway (1917), an early John Ford western that starts off with the beautiful landscapes of the West and ends up with horses galloping through Manhattan; and Out West (1918), a two-reel western comedy directed by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and co-starring Buster Keaton. I also watched Wild and Woolly (1917), another comedy, written by Anita Loos and starring Douglas Fairbanks, and The Battle of Elderbush Gilch (1913), directed by D.W. Griffith. Like many of Griffith’s films, the basic plot was good but you have to be willing to overlook the egregious racism to appreciate it. (I’m not willing.)

Hell’s Hinges, the story of a preacher and his sister who move out west to a lawless town.

Personal Highs and Lows

One of the pleasant surprises for me in this decade was the strong presence of women. To start with, there are the directors: Alice Guy-Blaché, who was head of production at Gaumont until her marriage and founded her own studio in the U.S. in 1912; Lois Weber, who by the middle of the decade was Universal’s highest-paid director; and Mabel Normand, who was the first to direct Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character. Additionally, about half of all films written before 1925 were written by women. In fact, from 1915 to 1935, Frances Marion, who had been discovered by Lois Weber, was the highest paid screenwriter of all, eventually winning two Oscars in the 1930s (The Big House, The Champ). Finally, in a field that would long be dominated by women, there was editing. Perhaps the best known editor of the period is Margaret Booth, the editor for D.W. Griffith.

I like to direct, because I believe a woman, more or less intuitively, brings out many of the emotions that are rarely expressed on the screen. I may miss what some of the men get, but I will get other effects that they never thought of.

—Lois Weber (Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, p. 72)

Speaking of Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin, I watched a lot of comedy shorts for this decade, many coming out of Keystone Productions, where both Normand and Chaplin got their start under Mack Sennett. I also watched some early Harold Lloyd shorts directed by Hal Roach. I have to say, not being a huge vaudeville/slapstick fan, I don’t really “love” any of these, but, if that is your sort of thing, I think you would like most any of the following: Mabel’s Dramatic Career, Mabel’s Blunder, Mabel’s Busy Day, The New Janitor, Dough & Dynamite, Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day, One A.M., The Rink, A Dog’s Life, Bumping into Broadway.

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and Mack Sennett argue while watching Mabel Normand onscreen in Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913), a short directed by Mack Sennett.

And, at long last, we get to D.W. Griffith. I haven’t said much about him here because, frankly, I didn’t really like most of his features in this decade. I tried to watch The Birth of a Nation but turned it off after about fifteen or twenty minutes because I found it so utterly boring that I thought, “Why stick it out just to get to the super racist parts?” Broken Blossoms is a powerful story with some fantastic acting by Lillian Gish, but also incredibly racist and disturbingly violent. Intolerance is a tremendous spectacle but I don’t think it holds a candle to Cabiria. In fact, given that he didn’t actually invent the many things he gave himself credit for (close-ups, cross-cutting, etc.) and that others mistakenly credit to him as “firsts” even to this day, I even considered removing him from the essentials list altogether; however, I didn’t think I would quite get away with that. And I would recommend some of his shorts, including The Girl and Her Trust, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, and The New York Hat. In any case, we will be talking about Griffith again for the 1920s.

Mary Pickford, with co-star Lionel Barrymore, admires a hat in a shop window in The New York Hat, directed by D.W. Griffith.

Finally, a few adaptations that I was looking forward to but ultimately missed the mark. Oddly enough, these films were all released in 1910. They are all about a dozen minutes long.

As noted above, J. Searle Dawley, the director of Snow White, directed the earliest known Frankenstein. Like another adaptation of his the same year, A Christmas Carol, I could follow the story, but only because I knew it, and there were a lot of missed opportunities. In both, however, he was able to do interesting things with effects. Still, I thought R.W. Paul’s Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901), which is the first known use of intertitles, did a much better job at condensing Dickens in half the time. In a similar way, Edwin S. Porter’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a fun version of the Lewis Carroll story with great effects, but it really could have used better intertitles to tell the story for those unfamiliar with it. Lastly, if you want to see some truly bizarre sh*t, check out The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Otis Turner. This is the first surviving film of the Oz story and the story is surreal: the scarecrow is alive from the beginning in Kansas, Toto is a big puppet dog (and there’s also a cow and a mule for some reason), everyone line dances at one point, and the finale features an appearance by the unionized women workers of Emerald City.

Alice at the end of the trial of the Knave of Hearts, just before she wakes up from her dream in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1910), directed by Edwin S. Porter.

Additional Resources

In addition to the resources listed in my original post on the subject back in January 2020, for this period of cinema history, I highly recommend the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on both The Criterion Channel and Kanopy. The documentary tells the tale of the discovery in the 1970s of a treasure trove of silent films buried in the permafrost of the Yukon Territory and explains how and why they got there.

For podcast lovers, check out Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast. In 2018, she did a whole series on fact-checking Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, which included episodes on D.W. Griffith, Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Thomas Ince.

For more on Lois Weber, see Shelley Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (UC Press, 2015).

Finally, a boxed set that didn’t make my original post: Lubitsch in Berlin by Kino Lorber. This includes seven early Lubitsch features, including the three I discuss above.

Essential Films of the 1910s
Afgrunden (The Abyss) (Gad, 1910)
The Cameraman’s Revenge (Starewicz, 1912)
A Fool and His Money (Guy-Blaché, 1912)
Le Railway de la mort (The Railway of Death) (Durand, 1912)
Ingeborg Holm (Sjöström, 1913)
Suspense (Weber/Smalley, 1913)
Traffic in Souls (Tucker, 1913)
Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914)
Mabel’s Blunder (Normand, 1914)
Hell’s Hinges (Smith/Hart/Swickard, 1916)
Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)
Judex (Feuillade, 1916)
Shoes (Weber, 1916)
Snow White (Dawley, 1916)
Bucking Broadway (Ford, 1917)
The Immigrant (Chaplin, 1917)
The Poor Little Rich Girl (Tourneur, 1917)
Terje Vigen (A Man There Was) (Sjöström, 1917)
Out West (Arbuckle, 1918)
Stella Maris (Neilan, 1918)
La Cigarette (The Cigarette) (Dulac, 1919)
The Dragon Painter (Worthington, 1919)
J’accuse (I Accuse) (Gance, 1919)
Male and Female (DeMille, 1919)
Die Puppe (The Doll) (Lubitsch, 1919)

For those that took up my Century+ challenge oh so long ago, did you manage to see anything on my essentials list? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.

For previous posts in this Century+ series, click below:
Film 101—A Century+ Silent Film Resources
A Century+ of Cinema: The Early Silents, 1895–1909
A Century+ of Cinema: Considering the Essentials

For my film lists, click below:
A Century+: The Essentials
A Century+: Female Filmmakers
A Century+: Westerns
A Century+: Silent Films
Movies of the Decade: 1910-1919

*The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) is considered the world’s first full-length narrative feature. Said to have an original running time of 70 minutes, only 17 minutes are known to survive. Therefore, it is hard to know if it is truly a narrative feature. Otherwise, I have found no mention of any other films of this length until the 1910s.

Note to email subscribers, there is embedded video in this post that may not appear in your email. Please click through to the actual post to see the complete list of selections.

A Century+ of Cinema: Considering the Essentials

Tags

Century+, Silent Film

Contemplating the essentials in Bucking Broadway (1917), by John Ford.

It’s true! At long last I am getting back to my Century+ project. This past January, I managed to catch all the “essential” films I had planned on watching for the 1910s and I’m ready to state whether or not they are indeed essential. [SPOILER ALERT: #NotAllEssentials]

Before we get to my overview of the decade, however, I wanted to spend a minute or two considering the very idea of essentials. One reason for the delay in posting about my “January” films is that I went back and forth on whether my final essentials list for each decade should remain at twenty-five selections or not. I thought having a list of three hundred films was rather unwieldy—and it certainly is in some ways—so I initially decided that, as I went through the year, I would cut each decade’s list down to ten films, for a final total of 125 films, or approximately one film for each year of cinema history.

This was fairly easy for the first couple of decades, however, once I started thinking about what I would do for the 1920s, I realized that cutting down the lists like this would somewhat defeat one of my main purposes in undertaking this Century+ survey, that is, coming up with a more diverse list of essentials than one usually finds out in the wild (Sight & Sound, I’m looking at you). Of course, just by spreading the films out over the entirety of cinema history there would be selections you don’t usually find on these lists,* but, in cutting the number so drastically, it was going to be difficult to include the wider array of films I had planned on.

At the same time, as I started to finalize my list for the 1910s, and think about the one for the 1920s, I realized I was constantly wanting to include personal favorites. Sort of how favorite films always sneak into my Oscar Pool selections, even if I know they don’t realistically have a chance of winning. I just can’t bear to leave a movie I loved out of the running. This problem became more acute when paring the lists down even further.

Of course, this is a problem for any “best of” cinema list: Do I take into consideration the enjoyment a film might provide me (or anyone else), or do I only consider its “importance” or “quality” (however I decide that might be judged)? Both aspects seem important since another purpose of this project is to emerge from it with ready answers to questions like “What are the top five films of the 1950s?” or “What are your three favorite westerns?”

In the end, I decided to keep my essentials list at twenty-five films per decade, for a total of three hundred, and I also created a new series of lists, one for each decade starting with the 1910s. These decade lists will rank my twenty-five favorite films of the decade, whether they are deemed “essential” or not. You can find links to each list in progress on my main essentials list. [Side note: I also have an ongoing ranked list of silent films that covers every feature of the silent era that I have watched in the last five years.]

So, the basic plan for each decade is to make a list of twenty-five films that are seen as canon, watch them if I haven’t, and decide whether or not I agree. At the same time, I have a number of additional films I will try to get to if I can, and I will consider whether or not they (or anything else I have already seen) deserve to supplant what is on the canonical list. The twenty-five films that best represent the decade in cinema will go on the final essentials list and my twenty-five favorites will go on a separate ranked decade list.

Let’s see exactly what that means when it comes to the 1910s.

Contemplating the essentials in The Immigrant (1917), by Charlie Chaplin.

My original list of essentials was as follows:

Afgrunden (The Abyss) (Gad, 1910)
L’Inferno (Dante’s Inferno) (Bertolini, 1911)
À la conquête du pôle (The Conquest of the Pole) (Méliès, 1912)
The Cameraman’s Revenge (Starewicz, 1912)
Ingeborg Holm (Sjöström, 1913)
Suspense (Weber/Smalley, 1913)
Traffic in Souls (Tucker, 1913)
Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914)
The Cheat (DeMille, 1915)
A Fool There Was (Powell, 1915)
Les Vampires (Feuillade, 1915)
Hell’s Hinges (Smith/Hart/Swickard, 1916)
Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)
The Ocean Waif (Guy-Blaché, 1916)
One A.M. (Chaplin, 1916)
Shoes (Weber, 1916)
Snow White (Dawley, 1916)
Where Are My Children? (Weber/Smalley, 1916)
Terje Vigen (A Man There Was) (Sjöström, 1917)
The Poor Little Rich Girl (Tourneur, 1917)
Stella Maris (Neilan, 1918)
La Cigarette (The Cigarette) (Dulac, 1919)
J’accuse (I Accuse) (Gance, 1919)
Die Puppe (The Doll) (Lubitsch, 1919)
Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) (Lubitsch, 1919)

Some of these titles were mentioned in my film books (though I have very little on silent film), others I came across doing further research, and still others were added after watching the first segment of The Story of Film. Some were added simply because I knew I would be able to watch them in the boxed sets I took out of the library and mentioned in my resources post. All in all, I think it was a good list to start with. However, as I watched, it was clear I would need to make some alterations to it.

In the first place, I switched out Les Vampires (which I just couldn’t get into) for Judex (1916), another multi-episode crime serial by Louis Feuillade. Judex is lesser known, but I had read good things about it and, in fact, ended up liking it enormously. Otherwise, I watched all the films on the original list.

A few of these films came off the list immediately after watching them because I really, really didn’t like them and they weren’t innovative enough to keep despite that. These are L’Inferno (Dante’s Inferno), A Fool There Was, and Where Are My Children? [Side note: It’s a real shame that most of Theda Bara’s films are considered lost, because I did like her “vamp” character in A Fool There Was, I just didn’t like the film itself. Like many silent film fans, I would love to see her Cleopatra.]

A few other films got replaced by better examples of the directors in question. DeMille’s The Cheat made way for his Male and Female (1919), Chaplin’s One A.M. got bumped for The Immigrant (1917), and Alice Guy-Blaché’s A Fool and His Money (1912) replaced The Ocean Waif. In the two former cases, I not only preferred the final selections but thought they had more to say overall. In the latter case, it was simply a question of historical importance: A Fool and His Money is the oldest known film with an all-Black cast. Ever the pioneer, our Alice.

Other films I came across that I decided had to be added were Le Railway de la mort (The Railway of Death) (1912), a bleak French western short shot in the Camargue; Mabel’s Blunder (1914), a gender-bending comic short directed by former Gibson Girl turned comedienne turned Keystone director Mabel Normand; Bucking Broadway (1917), an early John Ford western that features a finale with horses galloping through New York City; Out West (1918), a very fun, smart send-up of westerns starring Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle; and The Dragon Painter (1918), a Hollywood motion picture partly filmed in Yosemite, but set in Japan and starring the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, who also produced the film. These new additions unfortunately also meant knocking À la conquête du pôle (The Conquest of the Pole) and Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) off the original list.

Contemplating the essentials in J’Accuse (1919), by Abel Gance.

Here is my final chronological list of essentials for the 1910s:

Afgrunden (The Abyss) (Gad, 1910)
The Cameraman’s Revenge (Starewicz, 1912)
A Fool and His Money (Guy-Blaché, 1912)
Le Railway de la mort (The Railway of Death) (Durand, 1912)
Ingeborg Holm (Sjöström, 1913)
Suspense (Weber/Smalley, 1913)
Traffic in Souls (Tucker, 1913)
Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914)
Mabel’s Blunder (Normand, 1914)
Hell’s Hinges (Smith/Hart/Swickard, 1916)
Intolerance (Griffith, 1916)
Judex (Feuillade, 1916)
Shoes (Weber, 1916)
Snow White (Dawley, 1916)
Bucking Broadway (Ford, 1917)
The Immigrant (Chaplin, 1917)
The Poor Little Rich Girl (Tourneur, 1917)
Terje Vigen (A Man There Was) (Sjöström, 1917)
Out West (Arbuckle, 1918)
Stella Maris (Neilan, 1918)
La Cigarette (The Cigarette) (Dulac, 1919)
The Dragon Painter (Worthington, 1919)
J’accuse (I Accuse) (Gance, 1919)
Male and Female (DeMille, 1919)
Die Puppe (The Doll) (Lubitsch, 1919)

And here is my ranked list of twenty-five favorites for the 1910s:

The Cameraman’s Revenge (Starewicz, 1912)
Die Puppe (The Doll) (Lubitsch, 1919)
Shoes (Weber, 1916)
Judex (Feuillade, 1916)
Male and Female (DeMille, 1919)
The Dragon Painter (Worthington, 1919)
Snow White (Dawley, 1916)
Traffic in Souls (Tucker, 1913)
Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914)
’49-’17 (Baldwin, 1917)
La Cigarette (The Cigarette) (Dulac, 1919)
Stella Maris (Neilan, 1918)
Gretchen the Greenhorn (C. Franklin/S. Franklin, 1916)
Hell’s Hinges (Smith/Hart/Swickard, 1916)
The New York Hat (Griffith, 1912)
Out West (Arbuckle, 1918)
The Broken Butterfly (Tourneur, 1919)
The Poor Little Rich Girl (Tourneur, 1917)
Hoodoo Ann (Ingraham, 1916)
When the Clouds Roll By (Fleming, 1919)
Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man) (Lubitsch, 1918)
Bucking Broadway (Ford, 1917)
The Ocean Waif (Guy-Blaché, 1916)
Carmen (DeMille, 1915)
Fanchon the Cricket (Kirkwood, 1915)

To read more of my thoughts on the cinema of the 1910s, see A Century+ of Cinema: The 1910s.

To see my revised list of potential essentials for the 1920s (i.e., viewing for this month), read on.

Contemplating the essentials in Shoes, by Lois Weber.

In light of the above, I will be revising each decade’s original list of selections as I move on to focus on that decade.

For the 1920s, I will be considering the following as “canon” to start with:

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (Weine, 1920)
Way Down East (Griffith, 1920)
Häxan (Christensen, 1922)
Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922)
Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922)
Safety Last! (Newmeyer & Taylor, 1923)
Greed (Stroheim, 1924)
The Thief of Bagdad (Walsh, 1924)
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Niblo & Brabin, 1925)
The Big Parade (Vidor, 1925)
Body and Soul (Micheaux, 1925)
Bronenosets Potyomkin (Battleship Potemkin) (Eisenstein, 1925)
The Gold Rush (Chaplin, 1925)
Lady Windermere’s Fan (Lubitsch, 1925)
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed)
   (Reiniger, 1926)
The General (Keaton, 1926)
Konets Sankt-Peterburga (The End of St. Petersburg) (Pudovkin, 1927)
Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Napoléon) (Gance, 1927)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
Wings (Wellman, 1927)
La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) (Dulac, 1928)
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) (Dreyer, 1928)
Chelovek s kino-apparatom (The Man with a Movie Camera) (Vertov, 1929)
Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (Buñuel, 1929)

Again, these are the films that I have determined are considered “canon” for the decade, based on film books, major critical lists such as the Sight & Sound 250 and the AFI Top 100, and other research.

Tune in at the end of the month to see what makes my final lists!

Contemplating the essentials in Lady Windermere’s Fan, by Ernst Lubitsch.

For previous posts in this Century+ series, click below:
Film 101—A Century+ Silent Film Resources
A Century+ of Cinema: The Early Silents, 1895–1909

For my film lists, click below:
A Century+: The Essentials
A Century+: Female Filmmakers
A Century+: Silent Films
Movies of the Decade: 1910-1919

*There are only four silent movies on the AFI list and only twenty-one on the Sight & Sound 250, and of course, the Oscars only start up just at the end of the silent period.

A Century+ of Cinema: The Early Silents, 1895–1909

Tags

Century+, French Cinema, Silent Film

When I was first putting my Century+ project together, I hesitated over how to divide up the silent period, or whether even to divide it up at all. I ended up deciding to cover the first fifteen years of cinema history, from 1895 to 1909, as one “decade” and then look at the 1910s separately in February. Of course, that was when I thought this post would actually go up in January. Thank god we have one extra day in February this year.

In any case, this division seemed to make sense, since in my initial research it looked like the year 1909 served as a transitional year, when films shifted significantly in length, moving from being extremely short shorts (1–6 min), to more of a mid-length short (12–15 min). I have since realized that that is not exactly the case and the cut-off year for this decade is really just as arbitrary in terms of film content and style as any other decade.

Besides covering more than ten years of cinema production, this post will also be different from my other decade posts in months to come because it is really more about the industry than the films themselves. Because, while I enjoy watching (some of) these films, and would certainly consider many of them essential, they are not generally going to make anyone’s top ten list of all time.*

So, a bit of cinema history…

Birthplace(s) of Cinema

There are numerous national claims to being responsible for the first film, but any consideration of the early silent era basically comes down to two countries—France and the United States. In the United States, with the development of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope in 1891–1893 by Thomas Edison and William Dickson, we see the first moving pictures, albeit in the form of a peepshow device available to only one person at a time. In France, with the Lumière brothers’ first projection of films for an audience in March 1895, and then a paying public in December of that same year, we see the birth of cinema, that is, the experience of watching films together in the dark.

French Industrialists and Innovators

We begin in France since it is developments there that are responsible for the spread of this technology and form of entertainment so quickly across the globe and French production companies dominate the industry until the early 1910s.

Auguste and Louis Lumière

The cinématographe, which gave its name to the new medium, was invented in Lyon, France, by Auguste and Louis Lumière, the two eldest sons of Charles-Antoine Lumière, a photographer by trade. When his sons were rather young, Charles-Antoine had opened a factory to produce photographic plates; however, he wasn’t very successful until his sons returned from technical school and essentially took it over. While still in his teens, Louis invented and patented a new type of photographic plate that reduced the need for darkroom development, essentially setting up the Lumière company (and families) for life. It was his father, however, who first saw moving pictures in a Kinetoscope and encouraged his sons to figure out a way to improve upon that invention.

Of course, the Lumière brothers were not the only inventors to be working on developing a mechanism to project moving pictures—other pioneers include Max Skladanowsky who debuted his invention in Berlin in late 1895—however, the brothers’ invention had three key advantages over its competitors: 1) the camera served as both a projector and film developer; 2) it was hand-cranked and illuminated by limelight and so did not rely on electric current; and 3) it was relatively light. This meant that the cinématographe was much more portable and adaptable than anything else on the market. The brothers further capitalized on these advantages by training twenty or so cameramen/projectionists to go out and make and show motion pictures on site throughout France and abroad. Not only did this put their incredible machines on display for a larger number of people, but it also provided a large supply of varied films.

The Lumière brothers referred to their films as actualités, which is a word used today for the news, and is usually translated as documentaries, but they are not what we think of as documentaries today. Rather, these films, which are all about fifty seconds long (because that’s how much film stock could fit in the camera), mostly document scenes and events of daily life: a train arriving at a train station, two parents feeding a baby, or simply workers leaving the Lumière factory. That is not to say these films don’t tell stories, one of the most famous Lumière films is L’Arroseur arrosé, a short comic play in which a boy plays a trick on a gardener, and which Louis filmed in three different versions, my favorite being Arroseur et arrosé (1897), where the gardener delivers a little payback.

In all these films, like most others of the early period, the camera remains in a fixed position, but, given the photography background of the brothers, these images display a strong command of black & white photography and sense of composition within the frame, often playing with diagonals and planes. Two of my favorite films of theirs do this: Lancement d’un navire (The Launching of a Ship), which use three planes of depth of field (the foreground of the crowd, the middle ground of the ship, and the background of the people on the other side as the ship slips away into the water) and Laveuses sur la rivière, which has three vertical planes of action. In many ways, the Lumière films are the “prettiest” of the early films. [Side note: I was wondering how the clip I picked out below was so much sharper than other versions I found online and then Ricky alerted me to this, so maybe the same thing was done here? Anyway, it was the composition choice I wanted to highlight.

Of course, for the first audiences, just seeing these everyday events depicted on screen was a visual spectacle in and of itself. Although, despite reports to the contrary, audiences did not flee in terror at the sight of the oncoming train in L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.

Top Ten Lumière Films Ranked:
L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896)
L’Arroseur arrosé (Tables Turned on the Gardener) (1895)
Laveuses sur la rivière (1897)
Lancement d’un navire (1896)
Barque sortant du port (1895)
Water-to-bogant (Montagnes russes sur l’eau) (1896)
Danse serpentine (1897)
Quai de l’Archevêché (1896)
Bataille de boules de neige (Snowball Fight) (1896)
Sortie d’usine (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory) (1895)

Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès, a magician by trade, and one of the first to see the cinématographe in action, immediately saw the potential of this new invention. By 1896–97, he had established a production company and built his own studio just outside Paris. Of all the French film pioneers, Méliès was simultaneously the most interested in visual spectacle and theatrics while also remaining the most studio-bound, often relying on trick photography to create fantastical tableaux, similar to what he must have wanted to do on the stage as a magician. As a result, his work is very stagey and, to me, his early short works seem very repetitive. Let’s just say there are a lot of disembodied heads in Méliès.

This is not to say that his stop-motion effects aren’t cool—they are—but, much like Marvel movies, the films just all seem to blend into each other after a while. I can only see a devil (or a scantily clad lady) appear, do a dance, and disappear so many times. Still, some of his tableaux are really beautiful, especially the longer color-tinted ones, so you should seek out at least one or two to see how inventive he was for the technology available. If your taste runs more in a Jules Verne direction, check out Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) or Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (The Impossible Voyage). If classic boys adventure is more your thing, try Les Aventures de Robinson Crusoé (Robinson Crusoe) or Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les géants (Gulliver’s Travels). If fairy tales are to your liking, try Barbe-bleue (Bluebeard), Le Royaume de fées (The Kingdom of Fairies), or his 1912 version of Cinderella: Cendrillon, ou, la pantoufle merveilleuse.

Occasionally Méliès did stray from the realm of sci fi-fantasy and present straight historical subjects, such as his nine-part series on the Dreyfus Affair and his Jeanne d’Arc, each about ten minutes total and these are well worth watching at least once. My favorite of his purely trick films is probably Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner), which was rather disturbing, but made me laugh anyway. Really, you have to give him props for showing what was possible so quickly. However, given his emphasis on special effects, it is perhaps not surprising that when the film industry begins to transition at the end of this period towards a more narrative-based medium, his type of novelty film quickly fell out of favor and his Star Film Company was bankrupt by 1913.

Top Ten Méliès Films Ranked:
Le Royaume de fées (The Kingdom of Fairies) (1903)
Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902)
Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc) (1900)
Cendrillon, ou, la pantoufle merveilleuse (Cinderella) (1912)
Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (The Impossible Voyage) (1904)
Barbe-bleue (Bluebeard) (1901)
Le Bourreau turc (The Terrible Turkish Executioner) (1904)
Cendrillon (Cinderella) (1899)
L’Affaire Dreyfus (1899)
Le Mélomane (The Melomaniac) (1903)

Alice Guy
I’ve written at length about Alice Guy-Blaché (The Great Unseen 1: Matinée Idle) so I won’t go into detail about her career here, but suffice it to say that after watching a whole slew of films in this era (before Guy married and moved with her husband to the United States), I remain absolutely committed to the idea that she fully belongs alongside the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès in the French pantheon. In fact, of the three, only Guy breaks into the 1910s in any lasting way. Not only was she one of the very first to make a narrative fiction film (La Fée au choux, of which only later remakes survive), but she conducted early sound experiments with Gaumont’s Chronophone sync-sound system and, in 1906, made a big-budget religious epic with La Naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ, which used three hundred extras.

Guy’s work during this period also represents a nice bridge between the actualités of the Lumière brothers and the fantasy films of Méliès. She really does it all: comedy (Chez le photographe), drama (Sur la barricade), dance (Danse serpentine and Le Tango), fairy tales (La Fée aux choux), epics (La Naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ), social satire (Les Résultats du féminisme), travelogues (Spain), and even trick films (Comment Monsieur prend son bain). If you want to learn more about Guy and her work, I highly recommend last year’s documentary on her, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, available on Kanopy.

Top Ten Guy Films Ranked (1897–1907 only):
Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) (1906)
Danse serpentine (Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter) (1897)
La Naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ (The Birth, Life and Death of Christ) (1906)
La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy) (1900)
Chez le photographe (At the photographer’s) (1900)
L’Espagne (Spain) (1905)
Comment Monsieur prend son bain (How Monsieur Takes His Bath) (1903)
Saharet, Boléro (Saharet Performs the Bolero) (1905)
Sur la barricade (On the Barricade) (1907)
Le Matelas épileptique (The Drunken Mattress) (1906)

Gaumont and Pathé-Frères
Alice Guy worked as head of production for Gaumont, a newly established company of photographic equipment that quickly moved into film production after the debut of the cinématographe. When Guy married and moved to the United States in 1907, she was replaced by her protégé, Louis Feuillade, who would work for the company until 1918. It was while working at Gaumont that Feuillade made the serials he is best known for: Fantômas (5 episodes, 1913–14), Les Vampires (The Vampires) (10 episodes, 1915), and Judex (12 episodes, 1916), at least one of which I will try to watch in February. In this period, I particularly enjoyed his Le Récit du colonel (The Colonel’s Account) (1907), in which an old colonel reenacts the Franco-Prussian war for his dinner guests, and Une Dame vraiment bien (A Very Fine Lady) (1908), which uses ten different shots edited together to make it seem like the camera is following a young woman’s walk through the city, where she is constantly distracting men (carrying firehoses, guns, ladders, etc.) so they trip over themselves or otherwise cause injury to themselves or others.

The other major French company to emerge in the 1890s was Pathé-Frères. Pathé was founded in 1896 as a maker of phonograph equipment and a network of recording studios. Pathé immediately made a place for itself in the film industry by an aggressive system of acquisition, expansion, and exportation. The company acquired the Lumière patents in 1902 and the Méliès company just before World War I. They were often the only company to have a presence in developing countries and the Pathé rooster quickly became an international cinematic emblem. This market domination did not exclude the United States. By 1908, Pathé distributed twice as many films in the U.S. than all American companies combined. This is likely a key reason for the consolidation and monopolization of the industry engineered by Edison at the same time. Pathé’s roster of directors included head of production Ferdinand Zecca, Albert Capellani, Louis J. Gasnier, Max Linder, Gaston Velle, and cinematographer Segundo de Chomón, who would go on to photograph Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914).

If you watched the first episode of The Story of Film, as I recommended in my post on silent film resources, you’ve seen at least one Pathé film, Le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse), which demonstrates both intercutting and parallel editing to advance two stories at once. This film is a key example of the strides made in the transitional period from 1902 to 1907 where cinema moves firmly into the realm of multi-shot fiction narratives. Though the director of this film is somewhat disputed, the company itself is solidly represented in my list of essentials, with six films on the list.

Both Gaumont and Pathé remain working in film production to this day.

Top Ten Pathé Films Ranked:
Le Médecin du château (A Narrow Escape) (1908)
Vive la vie de garçon (Troubles of a Grass Widower) (1908)
Premier prix de violoncelle (1907)
Ali Baba et les quarantes voleurs (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) (1902)
Le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse) (1907)
Aladin ou la lampe merveilleuse (Aladin, or the Wonderful Lamp) (1906)
La Poule aux œufs d’or (The Hen That Laid the Golden Eggs) (1905)
Pied de mouton (The Talisman) (1907)
Par le trou de la serrure (Peeping Tom) (1901)
Histoire d’un crime (The Story of a Crime) (1901)

British Pioneers

Since I was aware of much of the above history from my graduate school days, the real discovery of this period for me were the British film pioneers, which, in comparison to the work going on in both France and the U.S. just seems remarkably refined in terms of technique and storytelling. In my research, three names stand out, George Albert Smith, James Williamson, and R.W. Paul. Smith and Williamson were both part of what would later be termed the Brighton School, which pioneered the use of film editing and close-ups, while Smith was a London electrical engineer who took advantage of the fact that Edison didn’t patent his Kinetograph abroad to make his own camera. When Edison cut off the supply of films, Paul went into production for himself.

Smith, who originally worked on stage as a hypnotist and psychic, made extremely innovative films including A Kiss in the Tunnel, a scene made to be edited into a “phantom ride” film (a popular genre in the early 1900s whereby the camera was mounted on the front of a train), The Sick Kitten, which featured a close-up of a kitten on a little girl’s lap being fed medicine from a spoon, and Santa Claus, likely the first Christmas movie, which uses double exposure to show Santa Claus visiting a house on Christmas Eve. My favorite film of his is Mary Jane’s Mishap; or, Don’t Fool with the Paraffin, a comedy in which a kitchen maid causes an explosion by putting paraffin on the stove. After she is blown up through the chimney with her remains scattering on the ground, we cut to a cemetery and her ghost rising from a grave marked “Rest in Pieces” to seek out her beloved paraffin can before going to her final reward.

Williamson, who is best known for The Big Swallow—a trick film whose innovative use of extreme close-up represents an ingenious meta commentary on the subject-spectator relationship—was also perhaps the first action director. With the films Fire! and Stop Thief!, he enacted multiple-shot narratives containing chase sequences, comedic and dramatic elements, and a remarkable amount of suspense. It is truly incredible that all three of these films were made as early as 1901.

R.W. Paul was extraordinarily clever in both the way he shot films and the tricks he learned. See, for example, the framing of A Chess Dispute or the trick photography of Extraordinary Cab Accident (both in the second volume of The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894–1914). Paul’s engineering background also led him to innovate when it came to the camera itself, using a double Maltese cross system to advance the film in his camera, reverse cranking to allow for multiple exposures, and rudimentary panning and dollying mechanisms. He also produced Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost, the oldest known adaptation of A Christmas Carol, a remarkable condensation of the story and the first known use of intertitles.

Top Ten British Films Ranked:
A Photographic Contortion (The Big Swallow) (1901)
Mary Jane’s Mishap; or, Don’t Fool with the Paraffin (1903)
Stop Thief! (1901)
Scrooge, or Marley’s Ghost (1901)
Sick Kitten (1903)
Fire! (1901)
A Chess Dispute (1903)
Santa Claus (1898)
Extraordinary Cab Accident (1903)
An Interesting Story (1905)

American Inventors and Storytellers
As noted above, France dominates the film industry throughout this period. However, Edison’s contributions, or rather the contributions of people who worked for Edison, especially William Dickson and Edwin S. Porter, cannot be discounted.

William Kennedy Dickson

William Dickson is the person who shared the patent for the Kinetograph, built the “Black Maria” studio in New Jersey, and directed the first films shown in the Kinetoscope parlors of New York. Of course, this didn’t stop Edison from claiming the cinema was his invention, even though for him the cinema seemed to mostly be about profit and litigation and he would be the main driving force in the attempt to consolidate the industry through patent control by forming the conglomerate commonly known as the Edison Trust in 1908. This, combined with the fact that the United States has almost always been the single greatest market for films, would result in the United States eventually taking over the industry through a vigorous export policy, new techniques and inventions, and industry consolidation. With the move to Hollywood in the early 1910s, and then the advent of World War I, this shift was complete.

As in France, the first subjects of the Kinetograph weren’t really narratives but rather focused on simply capturing something, anything, on camera—for example, Fred Ott’s Sneeze in 1894, or The John C. Rice-May Irwin Kiss in 1896. In the case of Edison, this mostly meant New York vaudeville and other performers whose acts were captured in his New Jersey studio. After Dickson left Edison to work with the Latham brothers (What is it with brothers and the early film industry anyway?) and help invent the Latham loop, a projection system that would allow for longer strips of film, motion pictures could become more focused on narrative. One of the first was Rip Van Winkle (1896), starring venerated actor Joseph Jefferson (Remember him?). Dickson is also one of the founders of Biograph, which would become the first home of director D.W. Griffith. Despite Dickson’s incredible achievements in getting motion pictures off the ground, he was really more inventor than storyteller and it was another key director working for Edison who would go on to create the films we think of as representing the best of American early silents.

Edwin S. Porter

Originally a projectionist and exhibitor, Edwin S. Porter made trick films in the style of Méliès as well as documentaries in the style of the Lumière brothers, but his two best-known films fall into neither camp: Life of an American Fireman depicts the full sequence of a fire and rescue, from the close up on a fire alarm box to the life-saving actions of a fire crew, and The Great Train Robbery is considered both the first action film and the first western, using multiple locations and cross-cutting to show action happening simultaneously. The Great Train Robbery famously ends with one of the robbers turning the gun on the audience.

Porter also directed a version of The Night Before Christmas and A Winter Straw Ride, both of which appear in the A Christmas Past collection on Kanopy, and Dream of a Rarebit Fiend, based on the well-known comic strip by Winsor McCay, who would go on to make animated films in the 1910s. However, my absolute favorite Porter film is The “Teddy” Bears, made with cinematographer Wallace McCutcheon. The film tells the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears and features, among other things, a “teddy bear” belonging to Baby Bear—seen through a keyhole in a humorous stop-motion animated sequence that took Porter a full week to photograph—and a chase sequence that ends in a scene of dark political satire with Teddy Roosevelt as a hunter.

D.W. Griffith and the Transition from the Early Silent Period

After the initial development of Edison’s Kinestoscope and the first narratives of Edwin S. Porter, we sort of hit a fallow period. This is likely just the result of the fact that more than ninety percent of the silent films of this period are now lost. However, it is clear that by the latter part of the decade change was in the air. Films started to move away from being strictly a novelty item and toward a longer narrative format that depicted more realistic stories of daily life.

This is when D.W. Griffith comes on the scene. I will have a lot to say about this director in my next post, but one can see already in 1909 that Griffith is a great story teller. Of course, from a film history perspective he also had the good fortune to work at Biograph, which deposited film prints on paper for copyright at the Library of Congress and whose nitrate negatives were rescued by MOMA’s film department in the late 1930s. Because over four hundred of Griffith’s films survive, many early film histories credit him with inventing almost everything (from close-ups, backlighting, and masking, to parallel editing, the dolly shot, and changing camera angles) and this has been repeated ad nauseum over the years. We now know that Griffith was not really a great innovator, but could certainly use the medium well to wring the most out of any drama.

And what drama! From Corner in Wheat, an adaptation of Frank Norris’s The Pit, to The Sealed Room (1909), an extremely melodramatic Balzac adaptation about a French king walling in his wife and her lover, to The Country Doctor (1909), where a doctor chooses to leave his sick daughter to treat a poor child instead, someone always seems to be dying a horrible death. Even the somewhat comic A Trap for Santa (1909) starts off by focusing on a family so impoverished that the unemployed alcoholic father leaves because the family will be better off without him. The only pure comedy by Griffith I saw from this period was Those Awful Hats, a shorter film featuring a parade of women in comically large hats looking for seats in a theater.

One of the many Griffith deaths I witnessed, this time in Corner in Wheat

Top Ten American Films Ranked:
The “Teddy” Bears (1907)
Corner in Wheat (1909)
Life of an American Fireman (1903)
From Leadville to Aspen: A Hold-Up in the Rockies (1906)
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
A Trap for Santa (1909)
Those Awful Hats (1909)
Jack and the Beanstalk (1902)
The Country Doctor (1909)
The Kiss (The John C. Rice-May Irwin Kiss) (1896)

To close out an already ridiculously long post, a word on the “essentials” for this period. I realized while catching up with the new-to-me films on my list that this era was far richer in innovation than I ever would have given it credit for and that I should therefore expand my list of “essential” films for these early decades from twenty to twenty-five. In addition, I ended up removing five films from my original list to make way for other films. Sadly, this meant removing a number of perfectly fine examples of the art—Panorama du Grand Canal vu d’un bateau (1896) by Alexandre Promio (the first traveling shot), Le Départ d’Arlequin et de Pierrette (Pierrette’s Escapades) (1900) by Alice Guy-Blaché, Aladin ou La Lampe Merveilleuse (1906) by Albert Capellani, the hilarious Premier prix du violoncelle (First Prize for Cello) (1907), and A Trap for Santa Claus (1909) by D.W. Griffith—but resulting in a more diverse selection of films and filmmakers.

My final proposed list is as follows:

Essential Films of the 1890s–1900s
L’Arroseur arrosé (Tables Turned on the Gardener), Louis Lumière, 1895
L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, Louis Lumière, 1896
Danse Serpentine, Auguste Lumière & Louis Lumière, 1897
La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy), Alice Guy, 1900
Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc), Georges Méliès, 1900
Barbe-bleue (Bluebeard), Georges Méliès, 1901
Fire!, James Williamson, 1901
Histoire d’un crime (History of a Crime), Ferdinand Zecca, 1901
A Photographic Contortion (The Big Swallow), James Williamson, 1901
Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), Georges Méliès, 1902
The Great Train Robbery, Edwin S. Porter, 1903
Life of an American Fireman, Edwin S. Porter & George S. Fleming, 1903
Le Royaume des fées (The Kingdom of Fairies), Georges Méliès, 1903
Mary Jane’s Mishap; or, Don’t Fool with the Paraffin, George Albert Smith, 1903
The Sick Kitten, George Albert Smith, 1903
La Poule aux œufs d’or (The Hen That Laid the Golden Eggs), Gaston Velle, 1905
La Naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ (The Birth, Life, and Death of Christ),
    Alice Guy, 1906
Les Résultats du feminisme (The Consequences of Feminism), Alice Guy, 1906
Pied du mouton (The Talisman, or Sheep’s Foot), Albert Capellani, 1907
The “Teddy” Bears, Wallace McCutcheon & Edwin S. Porter, 1907
Le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse), Louis J. Gasnier, 1907–1908
Le Médecin du château (The Physician of the Castle/A Narrow Escape), 1908
Vive la vie de garçon (Troubles of a Grass Widower), Max Linder, 1908
Une Dame vraiment bien (A Very Fine Lady), Louis Feuillade, 1908
Corner in Wheat, D.W. Griffith, 1909

For those that took up my Century+ challenge, are there any essentials you think I have missed? Let me know in the comments.

*Though it should be noted that Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) by Georges Méliès does appear in the Sight & Sound Top 250.

Note to email subscribers, there is embedded video in this post that may not appear in your email. Please click through to the actual post to see the complete list of selections.

Film 101—A Century+ Silent Film Resources

Tags

Century+, Feminism, French Cinema, Silent Film

Olga Petrova and George Irving on the set of Daughter of Destiny

For those taking up my Century+ Challenge, or who just want to explore the first decade of cinema history, I thought it might be helpful to talk about resources you might turn to in your quest to view early silent films.

The essential films for the period from 1895 to 1909 are generally quite short, ranging from 1 minute to 15 minutes. While I imagine most could be found on YouTube, personally, I hate to watch videos on YouTube. For starters, I try to avoid using Google products whenever possible. Also, it can be a pain to look for dozens of very short films there and the quality of these free versions sometimes leaves a lot to be desired.

Luckily, a number of these films have been collected into various boxed sets for purchase, but also may be available to borrow at your local library or streaming on Kanopy. Note: Kanopy also has a number of standalone silents from the 1910s and 1920s that I haven’t be able to find elsewhere so it will likely come in handy for February and March viewing as well. If you can access Kanopy through your local library or a university account, I highly recommend it. And it’s free! [For more on streaming services, see I Wake Up Streaming.]

General Collections

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011)

For an overview of film history it is hard to beat The Story of Film, a 15-hour documentary by Mark Cousins, which covers a century of cinema in fifteen episodes. The narration style will not be to everyone’s taste, but I appreciate his effort to look at cinema in a broad, inclusive way while also covering key industry developments and major figures. The first episode is the one that most immediately concerns us; it covers the years 1895–1918. The entire DVD set may be available at your local library, but episodes are also available streaming on Hulu and on Kanopy.

The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894–1914 (Kino International)

This anthology is perhaps the best set to get if you want a general overview of the various types of films made in the early silent period. It is organized vaguely thematically in five volumes on 5 DVDs of varying lengths from about 60 minutes to 100 minutes.

Volume 1 (Disc 1): The Great Train Robbery and Other Primary Works includes films by Edwin S. Porter, Thomas A. Edison, Auguste and Louis Lumière, Georges Méliès, and Ferdinand Zecca. Two films on this disc are absolutely essential viewing, namely A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès and The Great Train Robbery by Edwin S. Porter. However, these films pop up in a number of collections and are generally easy to find; so, if you watch only one DVD in this set, I’d opt for Volume 2. Beyond the two essentials, other interesting films in this volume are The Kiss (Edison), Transformation by Hats, Comic View (Lumière), The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (Porter), and The Golden Beetle (Pathé). For those interested in glimpses of U.S. cities, there is footage of trains going over the Brooklyn Bridge as well as images of the fires and destruction in the aftermath of San Francisco earthquake. There are also some “blue” movies from American Mutoscope & Biograph, which were essentially mechanized burlesque peep shows.

Volume 2 (Disc 2): The European Pioneers features formative works by the Lumière brothers and key British pioneers, among others. As I note above, if you watch only one DVD in this set, make it this one. This volume has a better selection of Lumière films—including the classics L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat), L’Arroseur arrosé (Tables Turned on the Gardener), Repas de bébé (Feeding the Baby), and Sortie d’usine (Workers Leaving the Factory)—as well as the work of R.W. Paul (A Chess Dispute, Extraordinary Cab Accident), G.A. Smith (Mary Jane’s Mishap; or, Don’t Fool with the Paraffin, Sick Kitten) and James Williamson (The Big Swallow, Fire!, Stop Thief!). A word of warning: the brief audio commentary is somewhat frustrating since it is not a separate track and is very hard to hear once the music of the film starts.

Volume 3 (Disc 3): Experimentation and Discovery includes a number of important Pathé Frères films including Aladin ou la lampe merveilleuse (Aladin, or the Wonderful Lamp), Ali Baba et les quarantes voleurs (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves), Le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse), (L’Histoire d’un crime) (History of a Crime), Le Médecin du château (A Narrow Escape), and Par le trou de la serrure (Peeping Tom). These Pathé films represent important benchmarks in the development of film as a narrative form.

Volume 4 (Disc 4): The Magic of Méliès has fifteen fantastic works including La Sirène (The Mermaid), L’Éclipse du soleil en pleine lune (The Eclipse), Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (The Impossible Voyage), and the documentary Georges Méliès: Cinema Magician. Personally I’m not a huge fan of Méliès overall, but these aren’t even my favorite films of his, so I wouldn’t recommend this volume. Rather, if you like his stuff, get your hands on the Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema or Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color collections listed below.

Volume 5 (Disc 5): Comedy, Spectacle, and New Horizons presents cinematic milestones by Winsor McCay, Max Linder, and Alice Guy-Blaché. However, most of these films are from the 1910s and not of particular interest. One exception is Max Linder’s Vive la vie de garçon (Troubles of a Grass Widower), which I added to my list of essential films once I saw it because it serves as a great example of Linder’s comic style and a perfect companion piece to Alice Guy-Blaché’s The Consequences of Feminism, an essential film in the Gaumont collection below.

Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Kino Lorber)

A six-disc set that mostly covers the 1910s, including Alice Guy-Blaché’s work in the United States. Key films include Alice Guy-Blaché’s Falling Leaves (1912) and The Ocean Waif (1916), Lois Weber’s Suspense (1913) and Where Are My Children? (1916), and Mabel Normand’s Caught in a Cabaret (1914). Some of the films in this collection can be found on Netflix.

Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology (Flicker Alley)

Another six-disc set, but one that covers a larger time frame than the set above, with twenty-five films spanning the years 1902–1943. Key films include Alice Guy-Blaché’s Falling Leaves (1912) and Making an American Citizen (1912), Lois Weber’s Suspense (1913) and The Blot (1921), Mabel Normand’s Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914), Germaine Dulac’s La Cigarette (1919) and La Souriante Mme. Beudet (The Similing Madame Beudet) (1922), three of Lotte Reiniger’s animated films, and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943).

French Early Silents

The Lumière Brothers’ First Films (Kino Video)

This is a collection of films that I bought back in my grad school days. I believe it is out of print now and rather expensive, but you may be able to find it at the library. Although you can see the most well-known films in the Movies Begin collection above, or in the collection of twenty Lumière films (Lumière’s First Picture Shows) on Kanopy, this contains eighty-five Lumière films from the years 1895–1897. If you have any interest in photography, I highly recommend seeking this collection out. Coming from a photography background, the Lumière films are all about composition within the frame and some of their most stunning films in this regard are little known, films like Lancement d’un navire (1896), Quai de l’Archevêché (1896), and Laveuses sur la rivière (1897).

Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema 1896–1913 (Flicker Alley)

There are a number of sets that feature the work of Georges Méliès. The most complete is Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema 1896–1913, a five disc set with over 150 films. I borrowed this from my local library. Personally, I find his work very repetitive so I don’t necessarily recommend completism with this set. Focus on the essential films, or stop and check something out when a title takes your fancy. [Side note: I’ve heard many mispronunciations of this name in the past year. The best way to approximate it in English is MELL-YES.]

Disc 1 = 60 films (1896–1901)
My favorite films on this disc are Un homme de tête (The four troublesome heads) (1898), L’Affaire Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair) (9 parts) (1899), Cendrillon (Cinderella) (1899), Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc) (1900), and Barbe-bleue (Bluebeard) (1901).

Disc 2 = 48 films (1902–1904)
Favorite films on this disc are Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les géants (Gulliver’s Travels among the Lilliputians and the Giants) (1902), Le Mélomane (The Melomaniac) (1903), and Le Bourreau turc (The terrible Turkish Executioner) (1904).

Disc 3 = 25 films (1904–1906)
Key films on this disc are Le Voyage à travers l’impossible (The Impossible Voyage) (1904), Les Cartes vivantes (The Living Playing Cards) (1905), and Le Diable noir (The Black Imp) (1905).

Disc 4 = 30 films (1907–1908)
Key films on this disc are Le Tunnel sous la manche ou Le Cauchemar franco-anglais (Tunneling the English Channel) (1907) and L’Éclipse du soleil en pleine lune (The Eclipse) (1907).

Disc 5 = 10 films (1908–1913)
Key films on this disc are Le locataire diabolique (The Diabolic Tenant) (1909), Les hallucinations du Baron de Münchausen (Baron Munchausen’s Dream) (1911), À la conquête du pôle (The Conquest of the Pole) (1912), and Cendrillon, ou, La pantoufle merveilleuse (Cinderella) (1912).

Méliès: Fairy Tales in Color (1899–1909) (Blackhawk Films/Flicker Alley)

If you want to get a taste of Méliès at his most glorious, get your hands on this set of newly restored Méliès works in color, including A Trip to the Moon, which was originally released in both black & white and hand-tinted color versions. This set also includes Joan of Arc, Robinson Crusoe, The Impossible Voyage, The Diabolic Tenant, and The Witch. These films have been newly scored and feature English narration based on Méliès’s original narration scripts.

Gaumont Treasures, 1897–1913 (Kino International)

For the work of early pioneer Alice Guy, the first head of production at Gaumont, turn to this three-disc collection, which features her work on the first disc. (Disc 2 covers the work of Louis Feuillade and Disc 3 that of Léonce Perret.) Favorite early Guy films included here are Mrs. Bob Walter, Danse serpentine (Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter) (1897), Chapellerie et charcuterie automatiques (Automated Hat-Maker and Sausage-Grinder) (1900), Les Fredaines de Pierette (Pierrette’s Escapades) (1900), La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage-Patch Fairy) (1900) (a remake of an earlier lost film), Saharet, Boléro (Saharet Performs the Bolero) (1905), the 35-minute La Naissance, la vie et la mort du Christ (The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ) (1906), Une femme collante (A Sticky Woman) (1906), Une histoire roulante (A Story Well Spun) (1906), Le Matelas épeliptique (The Drunken Mattress) (1906), Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism) (1906), and Sur la barricade (On the Barricade) (1907). For Guy’s later work, after she moved to the United States with her husband Herbert Blaché, see the Pioneers set above.

American Early Silents

Treasures from American Film Archives: 50 Preserved Films (NFPF)

This set is an anthology of films from American film archives. There are fifty films on 4 discs including silent features, avant-garde works, documentaries and newsreels, cartoons and experimental animation, home movies and travel films, training films from the 1920s and political ads from the 1930s. The most important disc for our purposes is the first one, which includes selected early films from the Edison Company, the western feature Hell’s Hinges (1916), and the horror short The Fall of the House of Usher (1928).

More Treasures from American Film Archives, 1894–1931: 50 Films (NFPF)

This set is a second anthology of films from American film archives. There are fifty films on 3 discs including rare silent features, avant-garde shorts, documentaries and newsreels, cartoons and animation, and ethnographic footage. There are also six previews for lost features and serials. Personally, I thought this collection was far more interesting than the previous one. Highlights include the Dickson experimental sound film, The Country Doctor, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Thomas Ince’s The Invaders, Gretchen the Greenhorn, From Leadville to Aspen, The “Teddy” Bears, Gus Visser and his singing duck, Rip Van Winkle, The Life of an American Fireman, Falling Leaves, and Lady Windermere’s Fan.

Lost & Found: American treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive (NFPF)

This collection is presented on 1 disc and includes lost works not seen in decades and a variety of industrial films, news stories, cartoons, travelogues, serial episodes, previews, and comedies. Highlights include the short films Lyman H. Howe’s Famous Ride on a Runaway Train (1921) and Mabel Normand’s Won in a Cupboard (1914), a 60-minute feature by John Ford entitled Upstream (1927), and The White Shadow (1923), an uncredited Alfred Hitchcock film.

Edison: The Invention of the Movies (Kino Video)

For more Edison films than you may know what to do with, this collection, put out by Kino International, contains all 140 complete films produced by the Edison Company between 1889 and 1918 on 4 discs. All films have been restored and re-mastered with new musical scores. Highlights include the Edison kinetoscopic record of a sneeze, the Dickson experimental sound film, the John C. Rice-May Irwin kiss, and Edwin S. Porter’s The Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery.

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894-1941 (Image)

A mammoth seven-disc collection that contains 155 avant-garde films of American filmmakers working in the United States and abroad. A scattershot collection that includes a lot of documentary and experimental footage. Each disc is broken up into multiple playlists for viewing on Kanopy.

Disc 1. The mechanized eye: experiments in technique and form
Disc 2. The devil’s plaything: American surrealism
Disc 3. Light rhythms: music and abstraction
Disc 4. Inverted narratives: new directions in storytelling
Disc 5. Picturing a metropolis: New York City unveiled
Disc 6. The amateur as auteur: discovering paradise in pictures
Disc 7. Viva la dance: the beginnings of cine-dance

Griffith Masterworks (Kino Video)

A seven DVD set that includes four feature films (The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and Orphans of the Storm) as well as twenty-three of Griffith’s Biograph shorts, made from 1909 to 1913. The shorts can also be found on Kanopy in two volumes under the heading D.W. Griffith: Years of Discovery 1909–1913 from Flicker Alley.

Finally, if you want to see some comic shorts, I recommend Chaplin’s Mutual Comedies (1916–1917) from Blackhawk Films/Flicker Alley, which includes The Immigrant, The Rink, and One A.M., among others, and Kino Lorber’s Buster Keaton: The Shorts Collection 1917–1923 or The Art of Buster Keaton, which includes eleven features and twenty-one shorts.

[ETA: I have since found and watched a number of works in the Chaplin at Keystone collection, which includes films directed by both Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett. I highly recommend that collection if you want to see Chaplin’s earliest film work and first appearance of The Tramp on screen.]

Well, that should tide you over for some time, or at least until a week from today, when I summarize the years 1895–1909 and see who managed to complete my Century+ January challenge.

I Wake Up Streaming: The Year in Film, Part 1

Tags

Feminism, Film Noir, James Bond, Media, Silent Film

375.

That’s how many feature films I watched in 2019, either at home or in the theater. Though, truth be told, it was mostly at home. [Side note: I really want to get out to the theater more in 2020.] I also saw 98 shorts, all at home, most of which were early silent films that I watched in preparation for my Century+ project.

For this reason, I decided to once again break my year-end film wrap-up into two parts. This post will focus on films released prior to 2019 and the next will feature 2019 releases. Since that still leaves 334 films to talk about here, I will not be going into any great detail, but, never fear, many of these films are sure to pop up again in Century+ posts throughout the year.

First, some stats on my 2019 viewing (both new and old films):
Films watched in the theater: 11%
Films watched on DVD: 48%
Films watched via streaming: 41%
Most used streaming service: Criterion Channel (51 films)

Films released in the 1890s: 15 (all shorts)
Films released in the 1900s: 48 (all shorts)
Films released in the 1910s: 10 (+ 26 shorts)
Films released in the 1920s: 32 (+ 8 shorts)
Films released in the 1930s: 57
Films released in the 1940s: 57
Films released in the 1950s: 42
Films released in the 1960s: 14
Films released in the 1970s: 14
Films released in the 1980s: 20
Films released in the 1990s: 17
Films released in the 2000s: 15
Films released in the 2010s: 97

Most popular genre: film noir (52 films)

Most watched director: Ernst Lubitsch (8 films)
Runners-up: George Cukor (7 films), Buster Keaton (6 films)

Films directed by women: 52 (14%)

So, with all that, what did I like the most? What would I recommend?

Read on, MacDuff…

Streaming Services

What Price Hollywood? (1932) by George Cukor

Although DVDs from the San Francisco Public Library and the Mechanics Institute Library together remained my best source for older films, after launching in April, the Criterion Channel quickly became my go-to streaming source for the classics. Next in popularity was Kanopy (29 films), which is a free streaming service that grants membership via public libraries and universities with ten credits* per month that can be used on feature films, documentaries, and educational programming. Their collection is a mixed bag of old and new films but often they have something I just can’t get anywhere else. Just below Kanopy was Netflix (25 films), and then MUBI (18 films). I was a bit surprised to see MUBI below Netflix in these stats but I quickly realized that was due to the fact that I did a full James Bond rewatch primarily on Netflix, so I think that ranking is a 2019 aberration.

There has been a lot talk on Twitter about streaming services and how the costs add up to where the customer is getting screwed, but, frankly, I still pay far less for these services than I did for cable, where I had almost no channels I really wanted. When I first cut the cord in 2012, my monthly cable bill was $75. Adding the channels I really wanted at the time—HBO, TCM, TV5, and the Fox Soccer Channel (for the Premier League)—would have increased that bill to roughly $125/month. And that did not include internet service.

Compare that to what I pay now on a monthly basis (I have yearly subscriptions to Criterion and MUBI, which make them a bit cheaper):
HBO Now ($14.99)
Netflix Basic ($8.99)
Hulu Base Plan ($5.99)
Criterion Channel ($7.50)
MUBI ($8.00)
Kanopy ($0.00)
Amazon/Apple TV (per movie)

So the total cost is about $45–$50 per month depending on whether I watch something on Amazon or Apple TV. And, in fact, it is really about $30–$35 per month since the HBO subscription is paid for by the Math Greek and I would probably drop it if that weren’t the case since I rarely watch it myself. Nor do I really watch Hulu so I could probably let that one go as well. I just don’t watch TV shows anymore.

One thing that has simplified all this streaming is buying a Roku. I really only bought it so that I could stream the Criterion Channel, which wasn’t available as an app on my (older) Smart TV or Blu-Ray player, but I absolutely love it and can’t believe I lived without it for so long. It has a number of free channels (albeit with ads), which sometimes have older films not available on other streaming services, and it is fantastic for road trips, where you can just hook it up to your hotel TV and watch whatever you might watch at home.

In any case, if you are a cinephile, I can’t recommend the Criterion Channel enough. If you’re wondering, they show far more than the films they have released on DVD. My favorite thing about them is the themed collections they put together. For example, “Caught on Tape” includes films like Blow Out, Caché, The Conversation, Diva, A Face in the Crowd, Klute, and The Lives of Others. Other recent collections include The Art of the Heist, Blue Christmas, Glorious Food, MGM Musicals, and 70s Sci-Fi. They also put together great collections featuring specific directors (Cukor, Hitchcock, Wyler) or stars (Bette Davis, Alec Guinness) and put female filmmakers front and center on their homepage. My only quibble with them is that they are so upfront about what is expiring at the end of the month (unlike say Netflix or Hulu) that I find myself streaming massive numbers of films at the end of each month before certain films or my Kanopy credits expire.

Here are the top fifteen films I watched on Criterion this year:
Gaslight (1944)
Girlfriends (1978)
The Kid (1921)
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
Hopscotch (1980)
Jubal (1956)
White Heat (1949)
L’assassin habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21) (1942)
Top Hat (1935)
A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
The Gay Divorcée (1934)
What Price Hollywood? (1932)
Craig’s Wife (1936)
My Name Is Julia Ross (1945)

Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) by Dorothy Arzner

52 Films By Women

The Bride Word Red (1937) by Dorothy Arzner

By the skin of my teeth (I saw Greta Gerwig’s Little Women on December 29), I managed to meet my yearly goal of watching #52FilmsByWomen. In fact, films by women make up half of my top ten for 2019. But I saw many great older films as well, some of which were new to me and some of which weren’t.

Here are my top fifteen of those films:
Winter’s Bone (2010)
The Tale (2018)
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
Obvious Child (2014)
Stories We Tell (2013)
Girlfriends (1978)
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)
Caramel (2008)
White Material (2009)
The Bride Wore Red (1937)
Two Days in Paris (2007)
Enough Said (2013)
Blockers (2018)
Skate Kitchen (2018)

You’re very inflexible.
—Who, me?
—I don’t like you when you’re inflexible.
—I don’t like it when you exaggerate to make sure I’ll listen to you.
—Well, I can’t stand it when you don’t listen to me.
—I don’t like it when you’re loud.
—Well, I don’t like you when you’re not loud. I don’t know why I like you.
—Because you can tell me why you don’t like me.
—I like me when I don’t need you.
—I don’t want you to need me. I want you to want me.
—There’s no truth like bullshit.
—Very good, Susan. 2 points.
—Thank you.

—Susan to Eric in Girlfriends

Girlfriends (1978) by Claudia Weill

Silent Films

La Cigarette (The Cigarette) (1919) by Germaine Dulac

When I wasn’t watching films specifically directed by women, I was catching up on silent films in preparation for my Century+ project—37 features and 97 shorts to be exact. A few of these were even directed by women (specifically, 3 features and 13 shorts).

Here are my top fifteen of those films:
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925)
The Patsy (1928)
The Kid (1921)
It (1927)
Die Puppe (The Doll) (1919)
City Lights (1931)
Tol’able David (1921)
Our Hospitality (1923)
Traffic in Souls (1913)
Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh) (1924)
Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928)
Gretchen the Greenhorn (1916)
Show People (1928)
La Cigarette (The Cigarette) (1919)

Traffic in Souls (1913) by George Loane Tucker

Film Noir

Gaslight (1944) by George Cukor

Between taking in four double features as part of Noir City at the Castro Theatre in January and creating fifteen double features for my own #Noirvember celebration at home in November, it was not surprising to see film noir turn up as my most watched genre.

Here are my top fifteen of those films:
Gaslight (1944)
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)
Lured (1947)
Private Hell 36 (1954)
The Burglar (1957)
White Heat (1949)
The Big Combo (1955)
Tension (1949)
Split Second (1953)
The Big Clock (1948)
They Live By Night (1948)
Dark Passage (1947)
The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950)

Best Noir City Double Feature: Pushover (1954) and Private Hell 36 (1954)

Though somewhat underwhelmed by my first outing to Noir City 17, nevertheless, I persisted, and the night I saw Pushover and Private Hell 36 I came back home positively glowing with excitement. I liked both these films a lot. I had high expectations for Pushover, a voyeuristic tale of a police stakeout and investigation, starring Fred MacMurray and Kim Novak in her first starring role, but the real surprise was Private Hell 36, which I had never heard of before. I should have known this tale of two dirty cops would be good—it was directed by Don Siegel (The Big Steal, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Lineup, Dirty Harry, and Escape from Alcatraz).

Pushover (1954) by Richard Quine

The Name Is Bond, James Bond

Sean Connery in Goldfinger, my favorite Bond in my favorite Bond film

As noted above, one reason I watched so much Netflix this year is that I noticed in early March that most of the Bond films were available there. When I realized soon after that the films would be leaving April 1, I decided to pack in as many as I could. I then filled in the gaps with library DVDs and managed to watch the entire franchise. For most of these films, that actually meant a rewatch, but there were a few stragglers I hadn’t yet seen. I scored these films in the usual way but also developed a secondary ranking system with categories such as Allies, Bond Girls, Credit Sequence & Theme Song, Devices & Escapes, and Nemesis.

Here are my top fifteen of those films:
Goldfinger (1964)
From Russia with Love (1963)
Skyfall (2012)
Casino Royale (2006)
You Only Live Twice (1967)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
Thunderball (1965)
Moonraker (1979)
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Dr. No (1962)
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Goldeneye (1995)
Octopussy (1983)
A View to a Kill (1985)
The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Eva Green as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale is by far my favorite Bond girl.

The Best of the Rest

And that is pretty much it for my major projects of the year. But the films in these top fifteen lists aren’t the only pre-2019 movies worth watching. If you are looking for something beyond the films above, here are some other ideas and recommendations.

Manbiki Kazoku (Shoplifters) by Hirokazu Kore-eda

Best of the Unseen 2018: Manbiki Kazoku (Shoplifters). In my year-end round-up last year, I listed the eighteen 2018 films I was most looking forward to catching up on in 2019. Shoplifters ended up blowing me away and vaulting to the top of my final 2018 list.

Best Surprise of 2018 (tie): Bad Times at the El Royale and Searching. Neither of these films were on my radar, but when I finally saw them, I thoroughly enjoyed both and definitely recommend them if you are looking for an entertaining thriller.

Best New-to-Me Film: Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). One of my biggest film history gaps is musicals. When I decided to start filling those gaps, I first turned to the few on Edgar Wright’s 1000 favorites list, figuring that he would have the best of the best on there. Once I watched (and loved) 42nd Street (1933), I quickly turned to the others on his list. My favorite of those was Gold Diggers of 1933.

Most Surprising New-to-Me Film: Five Easy Pieces (1970). This was one I avoided for the longest time simply based on the scene that everyone has seen from it, you know the one, which never really seemed interesting or funny to me. But that scene is so not the rest of this movie! I had no clue about the surprising direction in which this story was headed. Really a fascinating character study with a great performance by Nicholson and so many subtle little touches of humanity.

Most Surprising New-to-Me Film (runner-up): The Bridges of Madison County (1995). I watched this on my return from a road trip through Iowa, where I had actually visited the literal bridges. I didn’t have high hopes for what I thought was going to be a schmaltzy romance but instead I discovered a film that was remarkably moving and some of Eastwood’s best work.

Best on Rewatch: The Thin Man (1934). What can I say? This is a film I inevitably include on any favorites-of-all-time list but I hadn’t actually watched it in some time. I rewatched it this past December as part of an eventual Christmas film project and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.

Best “Holiday” Discovery: It Happened on 5th Avenue (1947). I discovered this title when I was putting together the spreadsheet for my review of classic Christmas films. I absolutely adored this tale of a homeless man who spends every winter squatting a 5th Avenue mansion while the owners winter in West Virginia.

Best Math Greek Selection (tie): Buffalo ’66 (1998) and Collateral (2004). Some of the films I watched this year that I might never have seen without the Math Greek’s coaxing include Persona (1966), Bugsy Malone (1976), Lost Highway (1997), and The New World (2005), among others, but my favorites of the films that fall under this description are Collateral and Buffalo ’66, the former of which I always meant to see and the latter of which I almost certainly never would have chosen myself.

Best Foreign-Language Film: Les Gardiennes (The Guardians) (2018). A gorgeous film by Xavier Beauvois about women on a French farm holding down the home front during World War I. Its slow-moving, painterly qualities would make an interesting pairing with 1917.

Les Gardiennes (The Guardians) by Xavier Beauvois

And, finally…

Top Five Films I Just Can’t Recommend
The World Is Not Enough (1999)
Tank Girl (1995)
A Fool There Was (1915)
Casino Royale (1967)
So Dark the Night (1948)

One from pretty much every category above, these were my lowest-ranked films of the year.

I wanted to like Tank Girl, I really did.

How many films did you watch at home this year? What was your greatest discovery? What was your favorite rewatch? What are your favorite streaming services? What do you find yourself subscribed to but never watch? Let me know in the comments.

*I have since learned that my sister in the Boston area only gets eight credits per month so I guess the number of credits granted varies depending on the library or university system. Note, however, that sometimes films are listed as double features or playlists that use only one credit. Still, even eight credits per month means two free films a week so that is not bad.