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.

Marsha is the author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, Film, Form & Culture (with Robert Kolker), and Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Films. She is currently writing a biography of the pioneering Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner.

Films mentioned:

• Falling Leaves (1912) - Alice Guy-Blaché
• Making an American Citizen (1912) - Alice Guy-Blaché
• The Girl and Her Trust (1912) - D.W. Griffith
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) - D.W. Griffith
• The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) - Wladyslaw Starewicz
• The Divorcee (1930) - Robert Z. Leonard
• Next Time We Love (1936) - Edward H. Griffith
• The Immigrant (1917) - Charlie Chaplin
• The Brutalist (2024) - Brady Corbet
• The Consequences of Feminism (1906) - Alice Guy-Blaché
• The Lonedale Operator (1911) - D.W. Griffith
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) - Mervyn LeRoy
• The Great Train Robbery (1903) - Edwin S. Porter
• Gangs of New York (2002) - Martin Scorsese
• Regeneration (1915) - Raoul Walsh
• Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (1909) - J. Stuart Blackton