Film has played an inte­gral part in almost all of our cul­tur­al lives for decades and decades, but when did we invent it? “We have evi­dence of man exper­i­ment­ing with mov­ing images from a time when we still lived in caves,” says the nar­ra­tor of the video series One Hun­dred Years of Cin­e­ma. “Pic­tures of ani­mals paint­ed on cave walls seemed to dance and move in the flick­er­ing fire­light.” From there the study of cin­e­ma jumps ahead to the work of stop-motion pho­tog­ra­phy pio­neer Ead­weard Muy­bridge, Louis Le Prince’s build­ing of the first sin­gle-lens movie cam­era, the inven­tion of the kine­to­scope, and the Lumière broth­ers’ first pro­jec­tion of a motion pic­ture before an audi­ence.

The birth of cin­e­ma, his­to­ri­ans gen­er­al­ly agree, hap­pened when these events did, around the last decade of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and the first decade of the twen­ti­eth, and so the first episode of 100 Years of Cin­e­ma cov­ers the years 1888 through 1914. But then, in 1915, comes D.W. Grif­fith’s ground­break­ing and still deeply con­tro­ver­sial fea­ture The Birth of a Nation, which the nar­ra­tor calls “one of the most impor­tant films in cin­e­ma his­to­ry.”

100 Years of Cin­e­ma thus gives The Birth of a Nation its own episode, and in each sub­se­quent episode it moves for­ward one year but adheres to the same for­mat, pick­ing out one par­tic­u­lar movie through which to tell that chap­ter of the sto­ry of film.

For 1916 we learn about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the first pic­ture filmed under­wa­ter; for 1917, phys­i­cal come­di­an Buster Keaton’s debut The Butch­er Boy; for 1918, The Ghost of Slum­ber Moun­tain, which dared to inte­grate live actors with stop-motion clay ani­ma­tion. And so does 100 Years of Cin­e­ma tell the sto­ry of film’s first cen­tu­ry as the sto­ry of inno­va­tion after inno­va­tion after inno­va­tion, doing so through obscu­ri­ties as well as such pil­lars of the film-stud­ies cur­ricu­lum as Nanook of the North, Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, Metrop­o­lis, and Man with a Movie Cam­era.

The series, which began last April, has recent­ly put out about one new episode per month. Its most recent video cov­ers Scar­face — not Bri­an de Pal­ma’s tale of drug-deal­ing in 1980s Mia­mi whose poster still adorns dorm-room walls today, but the 1932 Howard Hawks pic­ture it remade. Here the orig­i­nal Scar­face gets cred­it­ed as one of the works that defined the Amer­i­can gang­ster film, lead­ing not just to the ver­sion star­ring Al Paci­no and his machine gun but to the likes of The God­fa­ther, Boyz N the Hood, and Reser­voir Dogs as well. Cinephiles, place your bets now as to whether 100 Years of Cin­e­ma will select any of those films for 1972, 1991, or 1992 — and start con­sid­er­ing what each of them might teach us about the devel­op­ment of the cin­e­ma we enjoy today.

You can view all of the exist­ing episodes, mov­ing from 1915 through 1931, below. And sup­port 100 Years of Cin­e­ma over at this Patre­on page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

Free MIT Course Teach­es You to Watch Movies Like a Crit­ic: Watch Lec­tures from The Film Expe­ri­ence

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumiere Broth­ers to Google Glass

Cin­e­ma His­to­ry by Titles & Num­bers

Hol­ly­wood, Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The ever more crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed, ever more res­olute­ly Austin-based auteur Richard Lin­klater grounds each of his movies in a par­tic­u­lar place, but even more so in a par­tic­u­lar time. His sec­ond fea­ture Slack­er, which broke him into the world of Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent film in 1991, takes place not just in Austin, but in a sin­gle day in Austin. Its much big­ger-bud­get but also Austin-set fol­low-up Dazed and Con­fused takes place on May 28, 1976, the last day before grad­u­a­tion for its high-school-age char­ac­ters. 1995’s Before Sun­rise began a tril­o­gy of films released every nine years, each of which con­tin­ues the sto­ry of the cen­tral cou­ple by fol­low­ing them in near-real time around a dif­fer­ent place: first in Vien­na, then in Paris, then in Greece.

Lin­klater has main­tained his pen­chant for tem­po­ral speci­fici­ty, set­ting last year’s Every­body Wants Some!! in south­east Texas in 1980, specif­i­cal­ly on the day before the begin­ning of col­lege for its char­ac­ters. Before that, his low-key epic Boy­hood made cin­e­ma his­to­ry by hav­ing been shot over a peri­od of twelve years, demon­strat­ing defin­i­tive­ly that the direc­tor’s inter­est in time goes well beyond sim­ply evok­ing peri­ods or repli­cat­ing the real flow of events.

“It’s a big ele­ment, isn’t it, of our medi­um?” he asks in “On Cin­e­ma & Time,” the video essay made by “kog­o­na­da” for the British Film Insti­tute at the top of the post. “The manip­u­la­tion of time, the per­cep­tion of time, the con­trol of time — kind of the build­ing blocks of cin­e­ma.”

“What I’ll say is, like, ‘Carve out some­thing of real time,’ you know?” says Lin­klater, with his char­ac­ter­is­tic deliv­ery of artis­tic insight in a high­ly casu­al, Texas-inflect­ed locu­tion, in the Film Radar video essay “Richard Lin­klater and Time” (not view­able in all regions). “Some kind of hyper­re­al­i­ty, you know? Try­ing to make sense of the world in a movie way, of just how peo­ple live or think or inter­act.” But would his time-carv­ing, expert­ly though he does it, strike us as pow­er­ful­ly with­out he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors’ equal­ly high skill at craft­ing images (whether live-action or, occa­sion­al­ly, in ani­ma­tion, as in the roto­scop­ing of the philo­soph­i­cal dia­logue-dri­ven Wak­ing Life, or his Philip K. Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly, exam­ined in Siob­han Cavanagh’s “Form and Func­tion”)?

You can see that skill on dis­play in the video essays “Cin­e­matog­ra­phy in the films of Richard Lin­klater” and “Silent Con­nec­tions” just above. In the lat­ter, fre­quent Lin­klater col­lab­o­ra­tor Ethan Hawke quotes the direc­tor: “I’ve nev­er been in a gun­fight. I’ve nev­er been involved in espi­onage. I’ve nev­er been involved in a heli­copter crash. And yet I feel like my life has been full of dra­ma, and the most dra­mat­ic thing that’s ever hap­pened to me is, real­ly, con­nect­ing with anoth­er human being. When you real­ly con­nect, you feel like your life is dif­fer­ent, and I want to make a movie about that con­nec­tion.” In a sense, Lin­klater has spent most of his career tak­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es to mak­ing that movie, always draw­ing on his vast breadth of film knowl­edge; the video essay “Real Time and New Wave Her­itage” just above looks at just a few of the par­al­lels between his work and that of his pre­de­ces­sors in cin­e­ma.

“It’s fun­ny, the way mem­o­ry works,” Lin­klater says in a ten-minute Inde­pen­dent Film Chan­nel fea­turette on the mak­ing of Boy­hood. “I’m kind of obsessed with that.” You can see a younger Lin­klater speak about his life as a film­mak­er, then only just begin­ning, in the 1991 Austin pub­lic-access tele­vi­sion clip just above. “I don’t get work,” he says. “For me, film­mak­ing’s not even a job, it’s not a career, it’s just some­thing I’m doing. For the first time it looks like I should be mak­ing mon­ey at it, but we’ll see.” Now we’ve seen what Lin­klater can do, though he’ll sure­ly sur­prise and impress us for decades to come with the ways he can dig, cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly, into his obses­sions — and the obses­sions his films have let us share. To quote a 23-year-old Hawke in Before Sun­rise, quot­ing Dylan Thomas read­ing W.H. Auden: “ ‘All the clocks in the city began to whirr and chime. Oh, let not time deceive you; you can­not con­quer time. In headaches and in wor­ry, vague­ly life leaks away, and time will have its fan­cy tomor­row or today.’ Some­thin’ like that.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Great Mix­tapes Richard Lin­klater Cre­at­ed to Psych Up the Actors in Dazed and Con­fused and Every­body Wants Some!!

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

Watch Matthew McConaughey’s Audi­tion Tape for Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Con­fused, the Indie Com­e­dy That Made Him a Star

In Dark PSA, Direc­tor Richard Lin­klater Sug­gests Rad­i­cal Steps for Deal­ing with Tex­ters in Cin­e­mas

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When’s the last time you watched Reser­voir Dogs? For myself, it real­ly has been a while, but cer­tain icon­ic scenes stick in my mind: the slo-mo walk (par­o­died end­less­ly since), the open­ing din­er dis­cus­sion, the “Mex­i­can stand­off” of guns. But there’s a lot I’ve for­got­ten (and since hav­ing been under­whelmed by Taran­ti­no’s last film, the relent­less cru­el and much too long The Hate­ful Eight), I won­dered, much like Evan “The Nerd­writer” Puschak, does in his video essay above, “Has Reser­voir Dogs Aged Well?”

Puschak’s quick answer is yes, and in his usu­al jam-packed but salient style he goes through the rea­sons.

Though this is Tarantino’s first fea­ture (or rather the first ful­ly sur­viv­ing one), it con­tains the seeds of a style, but one held back by bud­get. A clip of Siskel & Ebert sug­gests that favor­able crit­ics knew this too. Siskel calls the film “an exer­cise in style” and wish­es it went fur­ther. Pulp Fic­tion would grant Siskel’s wish.

Puschak points out the adren­a­line of its in media res open­ing, with Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) bleed­ing out in the back of Mr. White’s car. We already know a heist has gone wrong, but not how, and we’re not hope­ful about Mr. Orange’s chances of sur­viv­ing. Taran­ti­no would go on to pull a sim­i­lar trick in Pulp Fic­tion, but as he’s matured, he’s left this kind of jolt­ing open­ing behind.

The film pro­pels ahead not like a nov­el, as Taran­ti­no once remarked, but, as Puschak says, more like a clas­sic album, a per­fect­ly sequenced selec­tion of con­trast­ing moods and pac­ing.

Where the film hasn’t aged as well, he con­tin­ues, is in its use of dat­ed ref­er­ences that don’t land like they once did 25 years ago. Yet, Puschak notes, this sort of pop-cul­ture laden dia­log still exists. In fact, it’s every­where, from Mar­vel block­busters to Net­flix series.

If the film is one of the weak­est in Taran­ti­no’s filmography–I would dis­pute that, actu­al­ly, but feel free to hash that out in the comments–it does con­tain a thread that ris­es above its pulpy, ref­er­en­tial style, and that’s the “com­mode” sto­ry, which we see Mr. Orange learn, rehearse, per­form, and per­fect through the film. Its exam­i­na­tion of per­for­mance, of play­ing a role, would lat­er get a full work­out in Pulp Fic­tion and in many oth­er Taran­ti­no films, and here’s where that fas­ci­na­tion begins. Last­ly, why does the film still hold up? Sim­ply: because of videos like this, and web arti­cles also like this. We can’t help revis­it­ing those Reser­voir Dogs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Quentin Taran­ti­no Cre­ates Sus­pense in His Favorite Scene, the Ten­sion-Filled Open­ing Moments of Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds

The Music in Quentin Tarantino’s Films: Hear a 5‑Hour, 100-Song Playlist

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.