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1916 E1 - Hollywood Wealth Mounts
04 Nov 2026
00:03:34
As a medium located at the nexus of art and commerce, film is probably defined by “money” in every year of its existence. But with major Hollywood conglomerations and individual stars’ wealth skyrocketing amid European devastation, the entrenchment of American supply chains and aesthetic templates certainly stand out when discussing 1916, even as wider and further accomplishments also range in this season’s conversations.
At the risk of defining 1915 by Griffith and The Birth of a Nation (and spoiling, a bit, the most selected films): this season finale and the films guests and listeners chose to highlight buck this canonical entry which looms large. Indeed, the biggest group of submitters in the show’s history chose to uplift similarly epic, and relatively canonical, picks as well as lesser known works.
James Harrison, BBC Archives Researcher, puts that expertise to good use with his ultimate pick reflecting his interest in British moving image (and war) history. But on the way, he also discusses European innovation in defiance of World War I’s intensification and American narrative development.
James is also the co-director of South West Silents and Film Noir UK. He has written many articles about classic cinema and was a graduate of the Giornate del Cinema Muto Collegium.
Filmmaker, critic, and author Scout Tafoya brings some of his “unloved” sensibilities, as demonstrated in his titular video essay series, to his selections for 1915, although a couple of his picks overlap with films that have come into view as undeniably impactful for this season.
Daisuke Miyao, Professor and the Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego, is the author of Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. His ultimate selection factors greatly into that book, but also picks an international array of differing genres and forms.
Filmmaker, musician, and writer Jeremy Mathews takes a couple tacks in his selections for 1915. In addition to a couple National Film Registry entries and another widely praised American drama, he selects an offbeat short comedy and a surreal, macabre, and underseen Russian horror, of a kind.
Jeremy’s film criticism has appeared in Eye for Film in the UK and Paste Magazine in the US. He fronts the indie band NSPS as singer, songwriter and guitarist, with upcoming projects including the new NSPS album, No Truth Left to Tell, and a short film called Seize the Initiative, which he directed and edited.
Anthony Slide, prolific film historian, author, and archivist, personally knew a few people who acted in his selections of 1915. This secondhand view of their production is combined with his wide historical knowledge of their significance to bring valuable insight to the year and period.
Anthony is the author of numerous books since 1970 and has served as archivist at the American Film Historian and resident film historian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Perhaps his most relevant book to this conversation is American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon and his works can be found at his site.
To borrow a phrase from an upcoming guest of this season, Jeremy Mathews: 1915 has a white-hooded elephant in the room. D.W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation has to be mentioned when discussing film in this year, and although (spoiler) it was only selected by one guest, its shadow is cast somewhere into each of the conversations and diverse picks to come, addressing both its good and bad influence.
While the 1914 season introduction promised the omnipresence of “The Great War,” World War I, if still at least mentioned in every episode, didn’t dominate the conversations. Even still, its representation of sudden disruption, evolution, and modernity is still thematically connected to the aesthetic and industrial developments in film of the year.
Whether he had a hand in their restoration or not, Bret Wood, filmmaker, author, and SVP and Producer of Archival Releases at Kino Lorber, selects five films that hold some personal connections for him. While they shift back and forth from epic drama and short comedy, these picks also highlight some representative traits of American film in 1914.
The selections from Beja Margitházi, assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University's Department of Film Studies, begin in Canada and move eastward. They also jump between genres and culminate in an early directorial effort from Michael Curtiz and a representation of the cinema of her native Hungary.
Library professional Brian Darr once maintained a blog about the San Francisco Bay Area screening scene called Hell On Frisco Bay, an alias he still uses on Bluesky and Letterboxd. So some aspect of the theatrical experience, whether he caught a screening or not, comes into the conversation about each of his five picks (all from a different country!) in addition to their aesthetic recommendations.
Brian has written on media history for outlets like Senses of Cinema, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, SFGate, Screen Slate, the Independent Lens blog and The Maine Playweek. He's performed several audiovisual presentations at San Francisco's Other Cinema showcase and elsewhere on media history subjects from blacklisted directors to experimental music label Opus One.
Elyse Singer, Lecturer in the Department of Theater at Dartmouth College, selects a wide range of forms and genres for her five picks of 1914, from short comedy to serial action to epic tales (one historically dramatic and the other perhaps the first feature comedy). At least two relate to her recent research in female madness in film and the agency of women in serials of the time.
Elyse has also taught at the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at CUNY and NYU Tisch. Her work has been published in Cinematic Explorations of the Mind, The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science, Faces on Screen, Feminist Media Histories, and Domitor’s Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema.
Susan Potter, Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Communication and English at the University of Sydney, wrote the book Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema. While its scope is broader than any one year, and just one of Susan’s 1914 selections is referenced within it, she also mostly highlights female agency and subversion before and behind the screen with her picks.
The event that has been foreshadowed the past few seasons comes to pass in 1914: the Great War, or World War I. And while not every facet of the conversations this season relates back to the disruption of the film industry that ensued (to say nothing of the disruption of every other aspect of life), it certainly looms large and provides context for filmmaking language and industrial developments in this year and to come through at least the end of the decade.
The 1913 season introduction episode’s title was “A Milestone Year?” And indeed, the guests for these past five episodes, as well as the representation of listeners based on their submission lists, made the case that it was artistically, industrially, critically, and popularly.
Charlie Keil, Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of History at the University of Toronto, is the author of Early American Cinema in Transition. His periodization of the transitional era, as explored in that book, ends with 1913 and his take on the traits of the time and how it shifts from the beginning of the period in 1907 defines the conversation.
Paul Gagliardi, Teaching Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, selects almost entirely comedy shorts for his 1913 highlights, although they connect with his proto-expressionist feature pick in that they all contain morbid underbellies. And diving into the comic commentary of these works, intended or not, reflects a few things about audience reception to movies and politics of the time.
Michael Gebert is the founder and co-moderator of NitrateVille, the online discussion site about vintage films of the silent era through the 1950s. Looking ahead to the advancements soon to come, his selections of almost all features demonstrate editing and performance style shifts, which branched off in slightly different ways in countries like America, France, and Sweden.
Michael is host of the NitrateVille Radio podcast, which talks to people doing "cool stuff" in the world of vintage film, from authors and filmmakers to the curators of retrospectives and festivals. He is also a food journalist in Chicago and the author of The Chicago Way: An Oral History of Chicago Dining.
Julie K. Allen, professor of Comparative Arts and Letters at Brigham Young University, is the author of Screening Europe in Australasia. So it makes sense that her selections, each from a different country, would embody the transnational dynamic of silent film just before the outbreak of World War I.
This is the 100th episode and just two weeks past the second anniversary of The 5 Best Films of Every Year Ever! It’s a special episode made even more so by Shelley Stamp, Distinguished Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She literally wrote the book on Lois Weber so it makes sense that pioneering filmmaker’s landmark 1913 film factors into the conversation, but all of Shelley's picks reflect the rapid development of American film grammar and stand in for women’s representation in front of and behind the camera, as well as their fights for equality in “real life.”
1913 is considered by many to be a milestone year in the development of film grammar and industry. And it perhaps is, as is set up by this context-setting introduction and the conversations with guests to come for this season!
Although the 1912 season introduction asserted that “Hollywood was incoming,” the top picks for the year (fueled by a record number of submissions from guests!) is mostly made up of old power players, even if that power would recede in short order. Indeed, both that dynamic and the fact that all of the most popular selections are shorts may change in the near future!
Film historian and cultural critic Paul (PT) Klein’s work focuses on American filmgoing cultures. So even when discussing his sole foreign pick, the conversation dives into audience reception to his selections, then and now, in addition to the various aesthetic strengths of each of his movies.
PT’s writing has appeared in Film Atlas, Film Matters, Foglifter, Metro Weekly, and more. His work can be found at ptklein.com.
Silent film accompanist and composer Stephen Horne has already composed for or accompanied a couple of his five multinational picks for 1912. But besides discussing the general aesthetic pleasures of his selections, he also ruminates on how he could approach playing for both these grounded features and short trick films (they were still hanging in there!).
Stephen is a house musician at London’s BFI Southbank. He released Silent Sirens, an album of solo piano pieces based on his silent film compositions, and has scored Stella Dallas, The Manxman, and many more films.
Marsha Gordon, Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, mostly highlights two directors credited with advancing film narrative with four picks. But she also sings the praises of a certain work of stop-motion animation, one taking this season by storm for both guests’ and listeners’ submissions.
As Founding Director of HippFest, Scotland’s first and only silent film festival, Alison Strauss is especially knowledgeable about the history of Scottish filmmaking and -going, as represented by three of her picks. But the conversation, which concludes with outlandish animation, also addresses the preponderance of short films in an era of increasingly long ones.
Alison works as Falkirk Council’s Arts Development Officer (Film and Media), programming the Hippodrome year-round. Alison is the ‘face of the Festival’ and leads on the artistic programme, commissioning, funding, research and development, and touring.
Tanya Goldman, Assistant Professor of Film at Missouri State University, has a strong interest in what could variably be called “nontheatrical movies,” “minor cinema,” “useful films,” and other such phrases, reflected by her two concluding picks dealing with sponsored films, whether by social progress groups or farm equipment manufacturers. But much of the conversation concerns morbid humor, whether in live action or animation, and all of the shorts demonstrate the offbeat character of 1912.
https://www.tanyagoldmanphd.com/ focuses on media access, considering how the distribution of documentary + nonfiction film is a political and cultural taste-making practice. She is currently completing a monograph on the career of labor activist-turned-film distributor Thomas J. Brandon.
1912 seems to offer more threads of industrial, technological, and social changes in the global film industry than the previous few years, but maybe just because a few still recognizable names can essentially “headline” this season. The threads introduced in this intro, and many more, will be picked up by five guests to explore just how exciting the period is becoming.
The introduction to this 1911 season made a big point (or did it?) that the features have begun, and although the majority of the five most selected films from guests and listeners indeed operate in that mode, the vast majority of selections in general still conform to the time’s global film industry norm of one or two reelers. They reflect, or foreshadow, how quickly the cinematic form was evolving throughout the early and middle years of the 1910s decade.
Casper Tybjerg, Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Copenhagen, selects five films that reflect the advancement of narrative cinematic drama. Whether they offer visual and emotional spectacle or crusading social messages, his picks demonstrate the international refinement of the cinematic medium.
A scholar of Danish and international silent film, Casper is the co-editor of the anthology Danish and German Silent Cinema: Towards a Common Film Culture. He was awarded the Dr. Phil. (Habilitation) degree for his forthcoming book, The Historiography of Filmmaking – through the Lens of Carl Th. Dreyer.
Eva Hielscher, head of film-related collections at Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, selects a wholly international survey of 1911 films, jumping from country to country and genre to genre. This heterogeneous view of the year ranges from French comedy and animation experiment shorts to an Italian epic and German feature…and a document of a historic expedition!
Thomas Christensen is Curator at the Danish Film Institute, so it stands to reason that all of his selections hail from Denmark. All but one of them come in at “feature length” (and from the same director) as well, reflecting the country’s place in advancing film grammar, subjects, and character psychology at a crucial transitional time.
Thomas also serves on the Executive Committee of the European Cinematheque Association and served on the FIAF Technical Commission from 2003 to 2015. He has recently been involved in a project digitizing all surviving Danish silent films from 1896 to 1929.
Patrick Friel, educator and programmer, is very interested in non-narrative and experimental film. Therefore, his five selections totally fit into those designations (well, with one semi-exception), but each of them offer totally different visual experiences and intentions.
Patrick is currently an Adjunct Professor of Instruction at Columbia College Chicago and has previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was also the former Program Director at Chicago Filmmakers and the Festival Director and Programmer of the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival.
Kathy Feeley, professor of history at the University of Redlands, wrote Mary Pickford: Hollywood and the New Woman, so it makes sense that two of her picks center the film icon and pioneer, still in the early years of her career. But the rest of Kathy’s selections also paint a picture of women’s contributions before and behind the camera in an era before mass corporatization and the sidelining of women in various roles across the film industry.
1911 really feels like the beginning of the feature film. Oh sure, it didn’t suddenly define the output of the global film industry, but ambitious experiments from Italy, Denmark, Russia, and only very tentatively, America, sat alongside narrative, as well as plenty of non-narrative, successes and intriguing failures in the short form.
Hopefully you’re not too tired of hearing about how 1910 and its surrounding years are part of a transitional era, but this season’s conversations also revealed how diverse the global medium was at the turn of a new decade with offbeat modes, genres, and subjects. With a record slate of submissions from listeners, in addition to the guests’ selections, 1910’s collective list paints a broad picture of the year’s releases.
As Executive Director of San Francisco Film Preserve, Kathy Rose O’Regan works hard to highlight our shared film heritage. Her five picks certainly paint a picture of the international nuances of 1910 filmmaking, with each hailing from a different country and operating in a different narrative mode (or lack thereof).
Kathy also served as the Senior Film Restorer for San Francisco Silent Film Festival, overseeing all operations of the preservation department and managing the restoration of dozens of silent era titles. Previously, she managed the preservation department of the Bay Area Video Coalition.
Kynan Dias, Assistant Professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is no stranger to podcasting as co-host, with Lester Ryan Clark, of a series of film history podcasts on the TruStory.FM network. His picks reflect some of the conversation surrounding this 1910 season regarding literary adaptations and real-world impact, but the discussion finds new angles to explore, including a landmark work of Native American filmmaking.
Kynan earned a B.A. in film from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he pursued acting, screenwriting, and directing. Later, Kynan earned his MFA in screenwriting from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he developed a love for writing TV sitcoms that was further nurtured during his time studying improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade.
Laura Horak, Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, is the author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema. Therefore, most of the conversation addresses the transgression, or lack thereof, of films that depicted such changes in dress, a rich topic represented by four of her five picks.
David Morton, Lecturer at the University of Central Florida, is the author of Motion Picture Paradise: A History of Florida’s Film and Television Industry. With this expertise in mind, the opening of the conversation covers the American film industry’s halting migration to the southern state, but moves on to American migrations to other locations and censored films.
David received his Ph.D. in Texts and Technology in 2019 from University of Central Florida in 2019. He was a 2017-18 recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship and served as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies at Ghent University.
Ned Thanhouser is president of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation and grandson of film pioneers Gertrude and Edwin Thanhouser. It makes sense, then, that he and Tristan discuss the founding of his family’s studio, which released its first film in 1910, but they also move on to Ned’s picks of classic literature adaptations and controversy.
The start of the 1910s doesn’t quite immediately usher in the cinematic measurement that would come to rule the decade: the feature film. But proto-forms of what would become the narrative standard arise in 1910, and otherwise, exciting images, narrative experiences, and affecting displays of historical milieu can be found in the productions of the year.
One of the most diverse lists of films selected for any season so far defines this brief conclusion to 1909. The unique array of selections does ultimately lead into a universal appreciation for comedy, rising above some of the efforts to “legitimize” the cinematic medium as has been discussed at the tail end of the first decade of the 20th century.
Paul Flaig, Lecturer in Film Studies at University of St Andrews, wrote a stellar synthesis of disciplines with his new book Weimar Slapstick and Hollywood Comedy Transformed. While it clearly deals with a later period than 1909, he still works German and American (and French!) comedy into his picks, in addition to a sound novelty and an actuality with a connection to Franz Kafka.
Paul is also the co-editor, with Katherine Groo, of New Silent Cinema and co-director, with Dora Osborne, of the German Screen Studies Network (GSSN). His writing has appeared in many journals and edited collections, including Cinema Journal, Screen, Camera Obscura, animation, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS).
Yuki Irikura, Assistant Professor at Waseda University, mostly selects D.W. Griffith films for her 1909 list, reflecting the director’s growing powers and appeal. She concludes, however, with old-school tricks and the debut of Japan’s first film star.
Yuki’s research focuses on Japanese and American silent film history. She earned her Ph.D. in February 2024 with a dissertation on Bluebird Photoplays, examining the company’s production of five-reel feature films, their popularity in Japan, and the contributions of the company’s female filmmakers and actresses.
Kathy Fuller-Seeley, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, studied early cinema audiences with her book At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture. Since then, her research interests have ranged to radio and back again to mid-1910s film history, and her interests similarly weave back and forth from morbid drama and eye-popping tricks.
Author and scholar Donald Crafton wrote Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928, a defining work of early animation history. Yet with the exception of one example from a filmmaker much discussed in that book and especially his other Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film, his picks range into the live action territory of editing innovations alongside the still-surviving tradition of trick films and actualities.
Donald also wrote on the transition from silent cinema to sound production in The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931. Since retiring, he has written a play, Winsor and Gertie, that has been produced in Europe and the U.S, and which he has recently adapted as a feature-length screenplay.
Paddy Adamson, Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, recently published his monograph Projecting America: The Epic Western and National Mythmaking in 1920s Hollywood. While this particular research interest is represented by one pick, albeit through a Danish interpretation of the genre, the rest of his picks showcase film comedy as it was interpreted in France, Italy, America, and beyond.
Paddy is also editor of Open Screens and Film Journal. His research on 1920s Westerns has appeared in journals including Film History.
The end of the first decade of the 20th century is a fitting time to reflect on the monumental changes facing the cinematic medium and the global industry that supported it in 1909. As this season will demonstrate, with an extremely diverse array of guest picks that features the least amount of overlap for the show so far, established genres and techniques, which are effective and pleasurable, coexist with the exciting refinement of composition, effects, narratives, and screen acting.