Man With A Movie List

Director: Georges Méliès Year: 1902 Seeing the painstakingly restored hand-colored print of A Trip to the Moon, in a literally mind-numbing 14 frames per second, makes it utterly clear that cinema is and has always been witchcraft. Every frame of this short feels bursting with magic, and even watching it on a modern TV in a space age that would have blown the mind of any of the actors of this film, you're left thinking "How did they do that?".

Directors: William Hanna and Joseph Barbera Year: 1947 I'm sure it's no coincidence that music plays such a strong role in many of the animated films featured on the list. By this point, there's nothing especially novel about this Tom and Jerry  short by another great animation studio led by Hanna and Barbera, except that the execution is so spot-on. This is eight minutes of pure delight. 

Director: Roberto Rossellini Year: 1946 The greatest innovation in cinema around this period is the emergence of mainstream films that are anchored so specifically in contemporary life, that were deliberately not timeless. Rossellini went further than anyone else in this direction - Paisan  deliberately interweaves stock war footage with staged settings, real actors with non-professionals, to create something that deliberately skirts the line between fiction and documentary. Paisan  is also the first great bilingual film on the list, not only featuring English and Italian but many different dialects, making the film extremely difficult for a native Italian to understand. The performances are often extremely stilted, and there are glaring editing mistakes, but many of the stories are extremely compelling.