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Your ballots for the Pre 1920s list are due at 1st June 2010. PM them to me. This means 17 weeks of watching time which should be sufficient since the number of available films is far smaller than in any other era and their average length considerably shorter.

THE RULES

1) Each individual list is to comprise no more than 50 films, ranked in your order of preference. However - due to the limited amount of available films - if you don't find 50 films being great enough and deserving a place on the list, you may leave blank spots at the bottom of your list and send in a list of less than 50 films. But if you haven't seen 50 films from the years 1888-1919 among them a good selection of the films by the major countries, directors and stars, don't bother voting.
2) Any feature, documentary or short film, released between 1888 and 1919 is eligible. Some of the earliest films are extremely short, but if you feel they deserve a vote, don't hesitate.
3) The date given on imdb is the relevant date for determining eligibility, even when it's clearly wrong.
4) Multi-part films released separately (mostly serials in this case) count as one single film since the imdb handles them in an inconsistent way for no discernible reason. According to this principle The Spiders' also ranks as a single film, eligible for this list.

VIEWING GUIDE

The following guide is intended to be a help for your exploration of the era and a check list when you compile your final list, so that we don't have the usual problem of people forgetting to vote for certain films. Please read it therefore at least when you are giving your final vote.

This era is spread into two, arguably three parts, the pre-feature era lasting up to 1912/13 and the feature era from 1913/14 onward. However one can make a good case that the early very short films up to 1905 form a seperate unit from the later shorts with an average length of 15 minutes, Griffith' Biographs being the most famous example.
The most essential set for the pre-feature era which everyone should see is The Movies Begin (Kino) with the two by far most popular pre-1913 films Voyage dans la lune and Great Train Robbery as well as a good selection of films from the brothers Lumiere, from the leading firms of Pathe and Edison and a very comprehensive look at the British Brighton school with films of James Williamson, R.W. Paul and G.A. Smith on discs 2 and 3 which is also widely known as BFI's Early Cinema program. The fourth disc brings you more films of Georges Melies and if you can't get enough of the director Flicker Alley has released an almost complete edition of his films plus a supplemental set with improved prints. The fifth disc collects some films from the transitory (and often neglected) era between 1907 and 1913.
If you want to broaden your perception of this era, there are the complete films of R.W. Paul and Mitchell & Kenyon (BFI) on the British side, the BFI also published a Silent Shakespeare set with the earliest adaptations as well as a Dickens before Sound set party relevant for us. France is not all Melies, maybe you can find Kino's OOP The Lumière Brothers’ First Films if you want more, but especially Gaumont gave us a treat with two huge boxes of which the first got released in a slightly thinned out version in the US featuring on two of the three discs good selections of early films by Feuillade and Alice Guy-Blache. The second set includes as its highlight the complete animation of Emile Cohl which is also seperately available, but also the comedies of Jean Durand are worth a look. For the USA finally there’s the big Edison set from Kino as well as their, Image's and Grapevine's collections of Griffith' Biograph films, the filmmakers thread on him lists all available Biograph shorts and their location. Otherwise it's not easy to hunt down this early epoch since many of these shorts are hidden in collections.There's the Unseen Cinema set (Image) with e.g. Lois Weber’s Suspense as its most significant contribution. Even more important are the three Treasures from American Film Archives boxes (Image) including e.g. the sensitive Land beyond the Sunset in the first box, The Invaders, Children who labor and Falling Leaves in the second and e.g. Courage of the Commonplace in the 3rd box. As for early animation besides Cohl in the Origins of Film set (Image, out-of Print) was a disc devoted to American animation from Blackton and others and there's a fine DVD collecting the work of Winsor McCay. For the more adventurous the huge collection of films from the Thanhouser studio http://www.thanhouser.org/DVD-1-2-3.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Finally six volumes of Lobster's Retour de Flamme series present various films and their Premier Pas du Cinema DVD collects very early color and sound films, all can be ordered on the Edition Filmmuseum page as can be another collection of early films, the Crazy Cinematographe.

A link bween both era's are the two by a wide margin best known filmmaker's of this era, Griffith and Chaplin both coming from the leading film country, the USA.
Griffith's major films like Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Avenging Conscience and True Heart Susie are available from Kino and Image; Home Sweet Home, Judith of Bethulia, The Greatest Question, Romance of Happy Valley and Hearts of the World are available on tape (http://www.lifeisamovie.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;), Scarlet days from Grapevine.
Chaplin's Essanays and Mutuals are available from BFI; A Dog's Life, Shoulder Arms, Sunnyside and Day's Pleasure from Warner, the definitive edition of the Keystone's is announced for this year from BFI, but too late for us.
Regarding other comedians Keaton/Arbuckle are available from MoC, Harold Lloyd is in the big Lloyd box and the two Kino Lloyd collections add 8 shorts missing in the box. Max Linder is available on Laugh with Max Linder, but mostly relevant for the 10s is Grapevine‘s collection. His films ran on German TV adecade ago, but a fine DVD release is overdue.
If you can't get enough silent comedy there's 10 volumes of Slapstick Encyclopedia.
DeMille can also be easily obtained: Cheat, Joan the Woman, Don’t Cheat your Husband, Golden Chance, Whispering Chorus, Old Wives for new, Male and Female are all available from Kino and Image, Carmen from VAI and there’s a box by Passport with lesser editions which however include Squaw Man and Virginian.
Tourneur is represented by Blue Bird, Wishing Ring and Victory plus an abridgement of Girl’s Folly (both on the Before Hollywood there was Fort Lee, N.J. DVD). Trilby is available on reelclassicdvd.com. Alias Jimmy Valentine is in the Origins set mentioned above.
Douglas Fairbanks' early features of the 10s are almost completely available through Flicker Alley, see at least Wild and Wooly while Mary Pickford also fares well with Cinderella, Little Princess, Stella Maris, Daddy-Long-Legs, Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, M'Liss, Heart o' the Hills released by Image; Pride of the Clan is added by Grapevine, The Little American and Romance of the Redwoods are available in the big, legally dubious DeMille set from Passport. Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm are also floating around on youtube or in cheap editions.
Stroheim's Blind Husbands is out from Edition Filmmuseum.
Walsh's Regeneration was released by Kino. Traffic in Souls and The Italian from Flicker Alley offer similar looks at US society. Browning's Wicked Darling is available, too. Among other early US features on DVD are Richard III and From the Manger to the Cross as is the surviving Theda Bara film A Fool there was or a version of 20000 Leagues under the Sea. The early Frankenstein is available on graveyard records. World War Films of the Silent Era and the similiar Civil War Films offer some features, too. Civilization by Ince was released on tape. Young Romance or Hodoo Ann are bonus material with other films. 3 early Westerns by Frank Borzage are available on the German The River DVD, William S. Hart’s Hell’s Hinges is in the first Treasures box.
The ladies shouldn't be forgotten Lois Weber‘s Hypocrites got a sole DVD release as did Guy-Blache’s Ocean Waif together with 49-17 by Ruth Ann Baldwin. Weber’s Where are my Children? is in the third treasures box and the Origins set carries more films by her and Guy-Blaché.

So much for the USA. Mad Love - The Films of Yevgeni Bauer and The Cameraman’s Revenge with the films of Starewicz are the main DVDs for those interested in Russian cinema. More of both directors and Russian cinema can be found on the 10 volumes of Early Russian cinema. Protazanov's Father Sergius appeared in France on DVD.
Danish cinema can be found via the DFI DVDs, Benjamin Christensen leading the pack as the most outstanding director, followed by Lind, Nielsen, Psilander, Blom's Atlantis, Dreyer's President, shorts from 1899-1913 and the science fiction films Verdens Undergang and Himmelskibet.
Sweden is famous thanks to the efforts of two directors. Sjöström is represented by Ingeborg Holm, Terje Vigen and Berg-Eyvind via Kino plus Dödskyssen on the German Körkarlen DVD; Stiller fares less well with only Herr Arne's Treasure available via Kino.
As for France Gance’s J’accuse is available from Flicker Alley and Feuillade's serials Les Vampires, Fantomas and Judex are also easily obtained, BTW regarding the US serials the recut Perils of Pauline is available from Grapevine. Thanks to the first Gaumont box L'Enfant du Paris by Leonce Perret is now in wider circulation.
German cinema fares less well. The Student of Prague is available on a lesser Alpha disc. Lang's The Spiders is available from Image, Lubitsch's Oyster Princess, Doll, I don’t want to be a Man from Kino, Das Fidele Gefängnis on the Trouble in Paradise DVD, not to forget Oswald's Different from the Others and Reinert's Nerven from Edition Filmmuseum. Madame Dubarry is on Grapevine.
Cabiria, The Last Days of Pompei and Assunta Spina from Kino represent Italian cinema of the 10s. L’inferno is available with music by Tangerine Dream. The Cineteca Bologna released the 1915 Maciste.
Canada‘s contribution Back to God’s Country is an Image DVD, Australia’s Sentimental Bloke was released on DVD, Great Britain contributes The Life Story of David Lloyd George.
Among the very few early long documentaries on DVD are In the Land of the War Canoes, The Battle of the Somme and South.

Generally spoken the period is not badly represented on DVD though there are some gaps here and there, as far as I'm aware Love and Journalism as well as Song of the Scarlet Flower by Stiller and Girl from Marshcroft and Ingmarssönerna by Sjöström are not accessible even on the half-legal exchange markets or otherwise circulating among fans and unlikely to garner many (if any) votes here. So swedish cinema is hit heavily by the complete unavailability of these films.
You have to look out quite a bit for Der Andere by Max Mack, Asta Nielsen's German films, Homunculus, Furcht by Wiene, Tih Minh by Feuillade, Rose France by L'Herbier, Cenere with Eleonora Duse, Il Fuoco and Tigre reale by Pastrone, Rapsodia satanica, the semi-futurist Thais, both of Stiller's Thomas Graal films, Oswald's Unheimliche Geschichten, Reinert's Opium and Gance's Mater Dolorosa, a search on the internet for these hard-to-find titles might prove successful, there are forums and download sites.
For the commercially available films, please try to watch official quality releases and not some cheap bootlegs you may run across and which may cloud your perception of these early films.

Excellent work, lubitsch.

Can we agree on some Lumiere and Mitchell & Kenyon titles, so as to ensure their making the final list. Otherwise we'll probably find that votes will be split among several of their films.

But if you haven't seen 50 films from the years 1888-1919 among them most of the essential longer features, don't bother voting, a list of eight films with five Chaplins and three Griffiths will not be accepted.

Good-- a sharp and well-articulated point that truly deserves mentioning, as it's an issue that clouds even hi-profile so-called "best of" lists of the silent and early sound era, and seems to limit, if even to a slight degree, the output of labels in deciding where to invest funds for restoration and home video production. Participation for the sake of itself, without even a modest insight into the era, is no participation at all. I daresay if by the end of the list you're not in a position of having to leave a substantial number of titles out, then your list will merely be a presentation of The Pre-1920 Silent Films That You've Seen... which does nobody any good.

This rule naturally applies to any list/date-range, but deserves special emphasis in this-- even versus a general silents list, or post-1915-to-sound-era silents list-- timeframe, which naturally is the most underrepresented era as far as home video is concerned. A good list of 50 films from this range is really only going to be available from genuine enthusiasts.

EDIT: I didn't read the whole of your post, but I caught this--

Stiller fares less well with only Herr Arne's Treasure available via Kino.

which is not true-- Kino also released Erotikon, as well as The Saga of Gosta Berling along with Arne (as a sort of, a la their Stroheims, "The Mauritz Stiller Collection".

That's true Schreck, but those films are post-1919.

However, I prophecy at least a Top Five ranking on the list for "Sir Arne". At the very least.

denti alligator wrote:Can we agree on some Lumiere and Mitchell & Kenyon titles, so as to ensure their making the final list. Otherwise we'll probably find that votes will be split among several of their films.

For the Mitchell and Kenyon films - which were marketed by the BFI as one body of work, more or less - I suggest to vote for the whole Collection, as these films are much more similar than the Lumière films. But if you want a suggestion for just one title, I'd go for "Panoramic View of the Morecambe Sea Front" (1901), the final film on the 'Electric Edwardians' disc : it somehow feels like the sum of their work, and is incredibly beautiful.

Ai caramba... that's what happens when posting before your morning coffee has passed the gullet in full.

(Nasal falsetto whine:) "Ney-verrr miiyyynnnnd!"

This will probably be a good time for people to get acquainted with what's allegedly the earliest extant American feature, James Keane's Richard III, filmed in my neighborhood in the Bronx (nearby City Island & Pelham Bay Park)... surprisingly entertaining, tight version of the famous play, and coming down to us in amazingly excellent shape on 35mm. Another little-discussed Kino gem.

denti alligator wrote: Can we agree on some Lumiere and Mitchell & Kenyon titles, so as to ensure their making the final list. Otherwise we'll probably find that votes will be split among several of their films.

There are good reasons to do that and equally good against it. First it would mean we would have to choose also for Griffith' Biographs and for Chaplin, too. In fact one could say that for every director or star we could narrow the selection. And what if you think a Lumiere should be in, but think the chosen one among the worse?
I don't see why we should exclude films in advance. Let's vote first and then we can see if some splits are too heavy so that we readjust that. And there's a certain charme in getting to know which films impressed the viewers instead of narrowing these bodies of work down to four/five established classics and getting predictable results. Finally I guess really strong films will always win over their audience, no matter how large the competition. After all you don't narrow Hitchcock's over 50 films down and still the tiop films are likely to be Psycho, Vertigo and so on. I'd say let's first trust our impressions, we still can make any corrections.

HerrSchreck wrote: which is not true-- Kino also released Erotikon, as well as The Saga of Gosta Berling along with Arne (as a sort of, a la their Stroheims, "The Mauritz Stiller Collection".

My text and all remarks are all about pre-1920 films. Referring to the only release of a Stiller film meant not that there are no later films by him released but that his other 10s work especially his Thomas Graal films and Love and Journalism are unavailable.

Which probably means that there will be little chance they will make it on the final list, however good they are
To add to the list of unavailable but great films: Abel Gance's "La dixième symphonie" (1918) should be seen by everyone who can lay their hands on it. And of course the completely freaked-out "La Folie du Docteur Tube" (1915). 10 minutes of sheer madness.

Tommaso wrote:However, I prophecy at least a Top Five ranking on the list for "Sir Arne". At the very least.
.

No doubt. Along with the incomprehensibly brilliant and decadent The Dying Swan, the staggering After Death, (or Child of the Big City, or the astonishing Daydreams) all by Yevgeni Bauer, the most profound revelation in Russian cinema, ever.

As for Lumiere, I'd suggest Workers Leaving a Factory (1st film - I know, it's not really, but still), The Sprinkler Sprinkled (fiction! comedy!), Demolition of a Wall (they knock down a wall, it rebuilds itself! Camera trickery ahoy!) and Arrival of a Train (Arrgghhhh!! Help!! There's a train coming towards me - Ok, probably not 100% accurate but... print the myth and all that).

I don't know about anyone else, but these very early films affect me in a way that even those from a few years later don't. I suspect it's to do with their age (now 2 centuries ago), romantic myths about pioneers, that they're brief glimpses of a different age, that their very primitiveness (by contemporary standards) is in itself fascinating, or just the fact that we have a record of the period - I find them extremely moving.

Now by the time we come to a few years later, trick films are another love - for a very different reason, charm. Melies (must buy the box!) is someone I've loved since I was a kid, and films such as Paul's The ? Motorist (which I was lucky enough to catch at a Brighton cinema with Neil Brand accompanying) just appeal to me.

And talking of the Russians, Kuleshev's "Project of Engineer Pright" (1918) can make some claims to have invented the montage technique the Russians became so famous for a few years later. Out on an excellent German disc from absolut medien.

If we're throwing out suggestions, I have to admit my favorite Feuillade so far has been Spring, which is so much like a song that it almost isn't a movie. Utterly perfect. Also are there any Perret's in the US beyond the two on the Kino Gaumont?
Edit: Also I think a minimum of twenty-five should be applied.

knives wrote:Edit: Also I think a minimum of twenty-five should be applied.

If some people do a top 25 and some do a top 50 or whatever, how do you score it? Does everyone's #1 score the same? It's implied that the people who submit longer lists are more qualified to assess the period, and so should maybe count more. However, I think the only point of participating in this list is if you are willing to go to the effort of seeing everything that can reasonably be seen. Sure, some will have the drive to seek out some of the harder-to-find films, or will have easier access to films only released in their region, but my vote is for agreeing upon one number for everyone. I'd be better qualified to say what that number should be after I've had a chance to go through most of the films, but it sounds like it's somewhere between 25 and 40.

As for the deadline of May 9th, that may be fine, though I'd request an option to reassess that date in a couple months and extend it if there's enough demand to. As I've expressed in the Lists Project thread, I'm a little concerned about the availability of a lot of these titles from Netflix, which, along with my local library, will be my source for seeing the majority of these films. As much as I want to dive into this period, I'm not going to shell out $500 on a bunch of films I've never seen before.

I agree with you, Swo, on both points, but Lubitsch seems assured that 50 won't work and that people can get this all done by May.

Difficult question; personally I think it should be at least 40, otherwise we will again end up with the same films that are relatively well-known already.

Perhaps we can indeed wait with the final decision until April or so. If then there are enough people who request an extended time for handing in the lists, I'd have no problem with that. But if we extend the deadline, lists should contain 50 films or only slightly less. Which by the rules means you should have seen many, many more.

I think there are ways to accommodate lists with fewer than 50 titles, while giving more weight to those lists that do include 50 titles. One idea is to allot as many points to a #1 film as the number of films on the list (e.g., in a list of 25 films, the #1 would get 25 points, #2 would get 24 points, and so on). One downside to this would be that it may encourage some people to pad the bottoms of their lists with film that they are not enthusiastic about, but it seems to me that that is also a danger if 50-film lists are required. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

As for the availability problem, I agree that we should leave ourselves open to revising the deadline at a later date. In addition to the Netflix shortages, I am having trouble getting titles from GreenCine. I've been waiting on J'accuse! now for about four months, and the discs in The Movies Begin are going to be hard to get as well.

The deadline is just a suggestion, I simply needed one for the first post and wrote how I calculated it, but again please keep in mind that judging from my viewing experience (and I've watched world cinema up to 1941 very closely) the 20s offer three times the amount of available and interesting films, while the 30s already give you six times the amount. If you want to be equally fair and give each decade the time it deserves, we'd have to calculate with 9 months for the 20s and one and a half year for the 30s. I guess in 2027 we'll be ready to tackle the 90s ...
Please also keep in mind that we're talking about an era which is seperated by more differences from the 20s than the 20s are from our time. These films aren't always easy to watch and some are likely to go nuts if they focus for months on this epoch.
As for the voting, I'm against padding out my list with weaker films, most likely will not make it 50 films and I've seen most of the commercially available and most of the mportant unavailable ones. Watching The Movies Begin already means you've seen more than 50 films and everybody should see the 20-25 features I've marked in red, but this is anyway a competition in which most likely only people will participate which are really interested, so I don't see that much danger in a flood of amateurish lists.

Please keep in mind that this thread and my first post is just the starting gun. We can change the final vote date, we can change the point rules and we can change the number of films. I just want to get people started watching and help them to organize their viewing and voting.

I think it will stick in people's minds much better if you start off with a deadline of May 1.
Pre-1920's list due by May Day, International Labor Day. May 1st.
Much easier to remember.
And then can be amended later if necessary.

Lemmy Caution wrote:I think it will stick in people's minds much better if you start off with a deadline of May 1.
Pre-1920's list due by May Day, International Labor Day. May 1st.
Much easier to remember.
And then can be amended later if necessary.

I chose Mother's Day which has the advantage of being a sunday, so you have the whole weekend for last thoughts and revisions, while the 1st May is a Saturday and I also didn't want to dip under 3 months assuming that not everybody throws itself into the new film list after finishing the last one.

Considering we're dealing with the era running up to the feature film, including shorts and short actuality films, knocking over 50 films is nothing... remember, some of these films--hundreds, thousands of these films-- are less than a minute long. Really, owning or renting one of the more obvious of the sets out there should get you well over a hundred. In terms of this zone of the chronology, 50 films can be less than an hour of viewing. So I think everyone should be assured that there's not really all that much of a challenge to take in enough films to come up with your fifty favorites. Even if you're totally new to the era, with very casual viewing, requiring little more than a few key rentals per month, you can see hundreds by May.

However this zeroes down to a very serious problem: how do you exactly rate a 30 second film? And are you rating it for any artistic value or rather a feeling of nostalgia or as a respectful nod to the achievement of the director. I think the ideas of linking shots in Come along do or the cut ins in Mary Janes mishap show the towering awareness of film style by the early British filmmakers. But is this really something which can be rated especially since it's a singular instance, meaning that the importance of the film is based on exactly this one aspect. So finally how am I supposed to evaluate an approaching train against a powerful dramatic work capturing my interest at different levels like lighting, setting, story and acting , let's say e.g. Herr Arne's Treasure.
I think we can all deal with the feautures and something like Biograph or Chaplin shorts is also rather fine since we are used to shorts. But what about these ultra-short films with arunning time of up to two minutes? At the moment I don't see myself including any of them except an Emile Cohl film.

Life of an American Fireman tops my provisional list for the moment. Be sure you watch the version that isn't reedited!

To extend Domino, I actually favour the kiss to at least one normal short, A Cure for Pokeritis, I've seen form the period. I doubt the Kiss, either version, would make it onto any list of fifty, but there is a way to favour it over something more modern. Even discounting the pre-editing shorts, there's a vast reservoir of 5-30 minute shorts widely available.
On an unrelated note my library only has the VHS version of The Movies Begin, is there any difference between the two?versions that the other available sets don't have?
Also people please take into consideration Spring, it is my favorite short ever and I hope you'll have at least a third of my enthusiasm.

Knives is referring to a post I made warning that I would be voting for a lot of the short actualities and Edison shorts, including the Kiss

Does anyone with webspace want to donate a place to up and host some of the rarer films that are obviously now in the public domain? Or create a YouTube channel or something?