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This month, Cinelinx is taking you on a trip back through time. Join us as we examine how movies have changed over the last 100 years. To begin, we are going all the way back to 1917.

1917 was a year of tension and conflict. Europe was war-torn, having been engaged in World War I for 3 years with no hope for peace on the horizon. Several acts by Germany including resuming submarine warfare and the Zimmerman Telegram would cause the United States to reluctantly enter the war and bolster the Allied forces. On the homefront, numerous scientific advances around the turn of the century were proliferating their way through society to modernize cities and improve industrial efficiencies. However, the transition to having more machines and electricity in the workplace was not a smooth one. Industrial accidents were common, working conditions were terrifying, and child labor was the norm. Thus, free time was not...

Throughout the summer, an admin on the r/movies subreddit has been leading Reddit users in a poll of the best movies from every year for the last 100 years called 100 Years of Yearly Cinema. The poll concluded three days ago, and the list of every movie from 1914 to 2013 has been published today.

Users were asked to nominate films from a given year and up-vote their favorite nominees. The full list includes the outright winner along with the first two runners-up from each year. The list is mostly a predictable assortment of IMDb favorites and certified classics, but a few surprise gems have also risen to the top of the crust, including the early experimental documentary Man With a Movie Camera in 1929, Abel Gance’s J’Accuse! in 1919, the Fred Astaire film Top Hat over Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in 1935, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing over John Ford’s...

The great movie pioneer D.W. Griffiths once said “we do not want now and we shall never want the human voice with our films.” Shame he failed to realise that film-making is a technical medium that will always develop. In the last 100 years we have had the introduction of colour, trick photography, 3D and CGI, among other numerous innovations such as CinemaScope - and even Smellovision. But none of these compare to the most revolutionary of cinematic changes: sound.

The silent era of the twenties holds little more than curiosity-value for many modern film fans. Other than a few notable exceptions such as Nosferatu (1922) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), it’s become a long-forgotten part of cinema history. But back then we had the Brad Pitts and Angelina Jolies of their day! Big stars and talented actors who sadly failed to survive the test of time.

The coming of sound was controversial,...

Apparently prosaic, these grids hide portals to the underworld. Follow us down into the sewers of a cinematic obsession

On the face of it, a manhole cover isn't particularly romantic. It keeps a lid on the sewer and a floor on the road. The only time you notice them is when there's steam pouring out around them … or when they're simply not there at all and you fall into the hole one was covering. They're not as interesting as what's above or below, or what happens going between the two.

Pause for just a moment, though, and the cover becomes something far less prosaic. It's covering up a slim, mysterious passage that's already been opened up. Either someone needs access to the sombre underbelly of the street or to preserve an exit route from it. The cover itself means you have to make the decision to get in or out...

For me, comedy begins with Charlie Chaplin. I know there were screen comedies before he came along, and I appreciate the work of everyone from Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew to Max Linder. But none of them created a persona as unique or indelible as the Little Tramp, and no one could match his worldwide impact. The miracle of the “golden dozen” two-reelers he made for Mutual Film Corporation in 1916-17, just a few years after his motion picture debut, remains unmatched almost a century later: twelve perfectly-formed comedies (The Immigrant, Easy Street, The Adventurer, The Cure, et al), filmed…...

First the history, then the list:

In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.

Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.

The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.