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.

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

Films and resources mentioned:

• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914) - Mack Sennett
• Fantômas (1914) - Louis Feuillade
• The Perils of Pauline (1914) - Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie
• Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) - Florence Turner
• Trouble in Paradise (1932) - Ernst Lubitsch
• Photographing a Female Crook (1904) - Wallace McCutcheon
• Laughing Gas (1907) - Edwin S. Porter
• Black Panther (2018) - Ryan Coogler
• Woman Warrior White Rose (1929) - Zhang Huimin
• Les Vampires (1915) - Louis Feuillade
• The Violin (1908) - Louis Feuillade
• Tih Minh (1918) - Louis Feuillade
• Metropolis (1927) - Fritz Lang
• Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me - Lillian Gish
• Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes - Maggie Hennefeld
• “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film” - Tom Gunning