As a feminist film historian and scholar, Aurore Spiers (she/her) is mainly focused on women’s contributions to film, with her work interrogating historiographical processes—what history gets written, how, and why—through the lens of gender and intersectional and multidimensional feminism. That focus is reflected in her five picks for the 1800s, as the labor behind the camera is explored and expectations of this period in film are challenged.

Aurore received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from The University of Chicago in 2022. Since 2015, she has been a contributing editor to the Women Film Pioneers Project, edited by Jane Gaines, Monica Dall’Asta, Radha Vatsal, and Kate Saccone, and published by Columbia University Libraries. Her Twitter handle is @AurSpiers.

Visit https://www.the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own five favorites of the 1800s for a final tally in the season finale!

Films and resources mentioned:

• The Dairy Maid's Revenge (1899) - Frank S. Armitage
• Something Good/Negro Kiss (1898) - William Selig
• The Cabbage Fairy (1896) - Alice Guy-Blaché
• The Cabbage Fairy (1900) - Alice Guy-Blaché
• Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) - Louis Lumière
• Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) - William K.L. Dickson and William Heise
• The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1895) - Louis Lumière
• Midwife First Class (1902) - Alice Guy-Blaché
• Madame's Cravings (1907) - Alice Guy-Blaché
• Annabelle Butterfly Dance (1894) - William K.L. Dickson
• The Lily of Life (1920) - Loie Fuller
• Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) - Louis Lumière
• Women Film Pioneers Project
• Cinema's First Nasty Women
• "Do You Believe in Fairies? Cabbages, Victorian Memes, and the Birth of Cinema: Seeing Sapphic Sexuality in the Silent Era" - Kiki Loveday
• Auguste and Louis Lumière Letters: Inventing the Cinema
• Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema - Daisuke Miyao
• Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema - Tom Gunning, Giovanna Fossati, Joshua Yumibe, Jonathon Rosen