Dimitrios Latsis, Associate Professor in Digital and Audiovisual Preservation at the University of Alabama, has worked extensively in the fields of American visual culture, early cinema, archival studies, and digital humanities. These interests are brought into the conversation about his five eclectic picks, in addition to some “runner-ups” that paint a fuller picture of cinema in 1904.
Dimitrios is the author of How the Movies Got a Past: A Historiography of American Cinema, 1894-1930. He has also co-edited a special issue of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists on the topic of Digital Humanities and/in Film Archives and an anthology on documentaries about the visual arts in the 1950s and 60s for Bloomsbury Academic.
Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1904!
Films and resources mentioned:

• Ball Passing Through a Soap Bubble (1904) - Lucien Bull
• A Butterfly’s Metamorphosis (1904) - Gaston Velle
• How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns (1904) - Edwin S. Porter
• The Impossible Voyage (1904) - Georges Méliès
• Tracked by Bloodhounds; or, A Lynching at Cripple Creek (1904) - Harry Buckwalter
• The Great Train Robbery (1903) - Edwin S. Porter
• Life of an American Fireman (1903) - Edwin S. Porter
• Évènements russo-japonais (1904) - Lucien Nonguet
• Living London (1904) - unknown
• The Wrong Door (1904) - Ferdinand Zecca
• Burglars at Work (1904) - Gaston Velle
• Japanese Varieties (1904) - Gaston Velle
• Personal (1904) - Wallace McCutcheon
• A Trip to the Moon (1902) - Georges Méliès
• How the Movies Got a Past: A Historiography of American Cinema, 1894-1930 - Dimitrios Latsis
• The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 - Richard Abel