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120 years of cinema in 120 seconds

Via the Moon Film team:

This is not a ranking of the best movies of all time by any means, but merely a celebration of cinema’s 120th anniversary. Though we did include the best movies according to SIGHT & SOUND and THEY SHOOT PICTURES, DON’T THEY? such as Vertigo, Citizen Kane and Tokyo Story, we also considered BOX OFFICE MOJO’s all time box-office movies like Gone With the Wind, The Sound of Music and Titanic, the INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE’s #1 The Shawshank Redemption and other cult movies such as Blade Runner, Scarface and The Matrix.

After a brief overview of the processes that led to Cinema, from Nicéphore Niépce’s oldest surviving photograph in 1826 or 1827 to Charles-Émile Reynaud’s Théâtre optique in 1892, you’ll find 75 movies by 75 different directors starting with La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon) which opened the first commercial public screening in Paris on 28 December 1895. Though the first film was an obvious choice, we don’t have the necessary perspective to choose the last one objectively. By selecting Avengers: Age of Ultron we simply acknowledge the fact that the comic book movies have dominated the box office in the past decade.

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1895 La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (Lumière)
1900 Grandma’s Reading Glass (Smith)
1901 Histoire d’un crime (Zecca)
1902 Le Voyage dans la Lune (Méliès)
1903 The Great Train Robbery (Porter)
1914 Cabiria (Pastrone)
1916 Intolerance (Griffith)
1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene)
1925 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
1926 The General (Keaton)
1927 Sunrise (Murnau)
1927 The Jazz Singer (Crosland)
1928 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Dreyer)
1929 The Man with the Movie Camera (Vertov)
1931 M (Lang)
1936 Modern Times (Chaplin)
1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand)
1938 Bringing Up Baby (Hawks)
1939 La Règle du Jeu (Renoir)
1939 Gone with the Wind (Fleming)
1941 Citizen Kane (Welles)
1942 Casablanca (Curtiz)
1945 Les Enfants du paradis (Carné)
1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophüls)
1948 The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger)
1948 Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
1949 The Third Man (Reed)
1950 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder)
1952 Singin’ in the Rain (Donen & Kelly)
1953 Tokyo Story (Ozu)
1954 Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
1956 The Searchers (Ford)
1957 The Seventh Seal (Bergman)
1957 The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatov)
1958 Vertigo (Hitchcock)
1959 Les Quatre Cents Coups (Truffaut)
1959 Ben-Hur (Wyler)
1960 À Bout de Souffle (Godard)
1960 L’Avventura (Antonioni)
1961 Viridiana (Bunuel)
1962 Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
1963 8 ½ (Fellini)
1965 The Sound of Music (Wise)
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
1968 Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski)
1968 Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone)
1972 The Godfather (Coppola)
1973 The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice)
1973 The Exorcist (Friedkin)
1975 The Mirror (Tarkovsky)
1975 Jaws (Spielberg)
1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman)
1976 Taxi Driver (Scorsese)
1977 Annie Hall (Allen)
1977 Star Wars (Lucas)
1982 Blade Runner (Scott)
1983 Scarface (De Palma)
1985 Come and See (Klimov)
1986 Blue Velvet (Lynch)
1987 Wings of Desire (Wenders)
1987 A Short Film About Killing (Kieslowski)
1990 Close-Up (Kiarostami)
1994 Pulp Fiction (Tarantino)
1994 The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont)
1996 Fargo (Coen)
1997 Titanic (Cameron)
1999 The Matrix (Wachowski)
2000 Yi Yi (Yang)
2000 In the Mood for Love (Kar-Wai)
2001 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson)
2005 Caché (Haneke)
2007 There Will Be Blood (Anderson)
2008 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Mungiu)
2011 The Tree of Life (Malick)
2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron (Whedon)
1901 The Big Swallow (Williamson)

Music : Danse Macabre by Kevin MacLeod from the YouTube Audio Library & Danse Macabre Busy Strings by Kevin MacLeod from YouTube Audio Library.

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