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.

Susan’s research investigates the relation of cinema as modern mass medium to the intensification of sexuality since the late nineteenth century and audiovisual media's role in queer identity and culture formation. Their essay on Filibus (1915) is forthcoming in The Silent Film Companion: A Recovered and Expanded History, edited by (former guests!) Martin Johnson and Liz Clarke.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1914!

Films and resources mentioned:

• The Perils of Pauline (1914) - Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie
• Fantômas (1914) - Louis Feuillade
• A Florida Enchantment (1914) - Sidney Drew
• Mabel’s Strange Predicament (1914) - Mabel Normand
• Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) - Henry Lehrman
• Pandora’s Box (1929) - G.W. Pabst
• Filibus (1915) - Mario Roncoroni
• Shoulder Arms (1918) - Charlie Chaplin
• The Tramp (1915) - Charlie Chaplin
• Fantômas (1913) - Louis Feuillade
• One A.M. (1916) - Charlie Chaplin
• Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913) - Mack Sennett
• Mädchen in Uniform (1931) - Leontine Sagan
• Gilda (1946) - Charles Vidor
• The Hazards of Helen (1914) - J.P. McGowan and J. Gunnis Davis
• Screening Europe in Australasia: Transnational Silent Film Before and After the Rise of Hollywood - Julie K. Allen
• Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade - Vicki Callahan
• Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture - Rob King
• A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema - Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra, eds.
• Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 - Laura Horak