Grazia Ingravalle, Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Film at Queen Mary University of London, focuses her 1901 picks in relation to colonialism. She creatively tackles the premise of this show by talking not of the “best films” of the year, but “quite the opposite,” in her own words, to illustrate the effect of the medium at this time and beyond.

Grazia has published about film archives, digitization, archival remix, colonial histories, and decolonization in several edited volumes and in The Moving Image, Screen, and the JCMS. Her monograph, Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (also very relevant to the “tension” of this show) came out in December 2023. She serves as Vice-President of Domitor: The International Society for the Study of Early Cinema.

Note: apologies for Tristan’s audio quality. It’s cleaned up as much as possible but it was captured in an inferior state!

Films mentioned:

• Hands Off the Flag (1901) - unknown
• Nankin Road, Shanghai (1901) - Joseph Rosenthal
• Panorama of Grand Harbour, Malta, Showing Battleships, Etc. (1901) - William K.L. Dickson
• Royal Visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York to New Zealand (1901) - Joseph Perry
• Manchester and Salford Harriers' Cyclists' Procession (1901) - unknown
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• Nosferatu (1922) - F.W. Murnau