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.

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

Films and resources mentioned:

• The Masquerader (1914) - Charlie Chaplin
• Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914) - Florence Turner
• Child of the Big City (1914) - Yevgeni Bauer
• Fantômas (1914) - Louis Feuillade
• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• L’Inferno (1911) - Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro
• Intolerance (1916) - D.W. Griffith
• Metropolis (1927) - Fritz Lang
• Maciste in Hell (1925) - Guido Brignone
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• Les Vampires (1915) - Louis Feuillade
• Judex (1916) - Louis Feuillade
• Tih Minh (1918) - Louis Feuillade
• Fantômas (1920) - Edward Sedgwick
• The Cameraman (1928) - Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton
• Spite Marriage (1929) - Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton
• Man with a Movie Camera (1929) - Dziga Vertov
• Where the Winds Blow (1910) - Laurence Trimble
• The Tramp (1915) - Charlie Chaplin
• His Trysting Place (1914) - Charlie Chaplin
• The Face on the Bar Room Floor (1914) - Charlie Chaplin
• Hollywood Babylon - Kenneth Anger
• Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film - Jay Leyda
• “1,000 Favorites: A Personal Canon” - Jonathan Rosenbaum
• Cinema’s First Nasty Women