For this week's roundup on movies opening in theaters, let's start with the UK since Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll looks like it may be the most interesting of the bunch. As it happens, on the day of its UK premiere, the Berlinale (February 11 through 21) has announced that it's one of 25 films (out of eventual total of 50) to be screened in the Panorama section.

"According to estimates, at least 50 percent of all films made for public exhibition before 1951 have been lost," writes Marilyn Ferdinand. "Move into the silent era, and the estimate shoots up to 85 - 90 percent. The nitrate film on which nondigital movies are recorded is flammable and highly susceptible to deterioration. All or parts of thousands of films have burned up, broken down, or ended up in a dumpster. We can't do anything to recover those films, but we can all help ensure that not another frame is lost by supporting the work of film preservationists, restorers, and archivists. To that end, Farran Smith Nehme (The Self-Styled Siren) and I dreamed up a fun way to do it. We're holding a blogathon to shine a light on film preservation and raise funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation."

The Politics OfAvatar: Do They Matter?: The year is new, and there's not much to talk about, we suppose, so we also suppose it's only natural that this topic is what you'd call a hot one. Various critics and bloggers were noting the left-leaning politics inherent in the putatively allegorical content of James Cameron's Avatar from the very start; heck, yourcorrespondent was one of those folks. The subsequent discussion of them on his own blog wasfiery, and sundered at least one virtual friendship. Since then, commenters of all stripes have weighed in, expressing dubious notions. Oneargues thatAvatar's success means that audiences really aren't turned off by anti-Iraq-war sentiments. Another—a fellow who should havelearned a long time ago to never, ever, ever write about films—mourns that the slaughter of American military personnel (hired or not!) is now apparently your best entertainment value. And so on, my own fave being the fellow who'sunhappy with the wayAvatar "frames" its argument—what a card.

The only thing we find genuinely interesting aboutAvatar's politics is the extent to which they actually matter to the film itself and what it really puts across, and which we think is really not so much. Which is to say that its politics are not prescriptive.

Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass will be opening this year's South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival (SXSW), running March 12 through 20. At Twitch, Rodney Perkins, who saw a rough cut at Harry Knowles's Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin last month, calls the adaptation of Mark Millar's comic "an ultra-violent superhero homage that lives up to its name."

Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA, Quiet City) returns to SXSW with Cold Weather; click the title for the trailer.

Elektra Luxx, Sebastian Gutierrez's sequel to Women in Trouble, sees its world premiere in Austin. "Elektra Luxx ([Carla] Gugino) is a porn star whose life is turned upside down when she discovers she's pregnant," writes Variety's Michael Fleming. What's more, "Gutierrez is planning a third installment tentatively titled Women in Ecstasy."

James Franco's Saturday Night documents the making of an episode of SNL; Wes Orshoski spent three years making Lemmy, a doc on Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister; and SXSW presents the first public screening of Hubble 3D, an IMAX ride into deep space.

For the second year in a row, the Babylon theater in Berlin is presenting a series of American independent films, 22 this time around, ranging widely in genre, style, means of production and, for that matter, cultural milieu. Nearly all the articles appearing in the local press present some sort of capsule history of independent cinema in the US that leads straight up to the current dire economic climate for it. Same goes for Hannes Brühwiler, the programmer of Unknown Pleasures #2, who adds: "But despite, or even precisely because of these difficult conditions, there haven't been such interesting films as have appeared in the past few years in quite some time. Are the mounting challenges to successfully placing a film in theaters freeing up the filmmakers and leading to less self-censorship?"

Unlike some directors who give up on a bad script or else send it up, one senses that you always try to play fair; but in some of those early British films, one also sense a kind of irony behind their worst excesses. Is this so?

"There was, but it was a desperate irony because I was so badly in need of work and under such extreme pressure. This can be dangerous, because Tennessee Williams, for instance, had been told by all sorts of people who are not qualified to comment—people with whom I've never worked and who therefore don't know how I work—that I'm death on writers, that I cut ruthlessly, that I have no respect for a script. This couldn't be more untrue. Of course if I get a script which is a piece of nonsense, I will say that I'll do it only if it is rewritten; of course if I get a script from a writer I've previously worked with successfully, and the script isn't right, I will start all over again with another script. But once thereis a script, one I believe I can do and is right, I never make a change without consulting the writer. And when I say consulting, if he's available, he makes the change himself. I don't make cuts or even line changes, and this can be testified to by the two writers I have worked with most, Evan Jones and Pinter. The only line changed inAccident was changed by Pinter's wife, Vivien Merchant, with his consent and my approval—a very slight change. I believe in the writer's contribution and I foster it. It annoys me, these judgments passed by people who are presumably colleagues and who have no basis for making them; it's like all the people who said Charles Laughton is impossibly difficult, Wilfrid Lawson is hopelessly irresponsible; absolutely untrue in both cases, though maybe true in other circumstances. Like the man who said to me last night, 'I've dealt with people who are terribly difficult, almost as difficult as you'—and he'd met me fifteen minutes before, didn't know a damn thing about whether I'm difficult or not. I'm not difficult. I'm obstinate; I'm insistent on quality; and I fight like hell for it. And of course this is very inconvenient for some people."

Thus spake Joseph Losey to Tom Milne, for the interview book Losey on Losey, just as he was embarking on Boom!, which his new collaborator Tennessee Williams was adapting from his failed stage play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Not to be glib about it, but the piece can be most succinctly described as being of the subgenre in which the Gay Male Artiste casts a gimlet eye on the haughty, aging, much-divorced (perhaps former) socialite who's possibly going a bit batty. That this female character is named Sissy Goforth is indicative of the problems of the text—it's both gimlet-eyed and symbolic, aieee. Sissy lives in splendid-morphing-to-decadent isolation on a Mediterranean island, dictating her memoirs to a younger woman and entertaining the likes of "The Witch of Capri." An intruder named Chris, a one-time poet whose visits to various patrons and such seems to invariably lead to their deaths, shows up at Sissy's estate, and a somewhat diffuse battle of wills and lusts ensues.

Updated through 1/8.

A few previews are already in. At In Contention, Kristopher Tapley lists ten big budget roll-outs he's looking forward to in 2010; the New York Times (where Michael Cieply explains why some films opening this year have been in the can and waiting their turn for as long as two years now) and the Boston Phoenix's Peter Keough draft local schedules for the weeks ahead; Geoffrey Macnab (Independent) and Kevin Maher (London Times) do the anticipating for the UK; Martin A Grove's preview for Reuters runs through June; and at Techland, Steven James Snyder looks ahead to the year in science fiction. Dark Horizons is previewing the good, the bad and the ugly, a gadzillion movies, in alphabetical order. As I write, they've made it to the letter "S."

But two entries Screen's Fionnuala Halligan posted at her blog back in November present far more tantalizing prospects than all that. In the first, she lists over twenty films that might make it into February's Berlinale lineup (and of course, we now know about seven that have), and in the second, she lays out an even longer of list of contenders for Cannes 2010. While I'd happily get in line for most of titles on these pages, I thought I'd pick out about a dozen that seem most intriguing and poke around to see what we know about them so far. Comments on these and other films you're looking forward to are welcome.

Updated through 1/7.

So as not to play favorites or anything, we're simply going to take a look at three retrospectives of work by Elia Kazan, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa in Chicago, London and New York, respectively, in the order in which they're opening.

Updated through 1/8. Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. See, too, The Notebook's 2nd Annual Writers Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2009, parts 1, 2 and 3.

Moving Image Source introduces one of the annual collections many of us look forward to most: "We invited our regular contributors and colleagues, as well as some of our favorite writers and artists, to select their moving-image moment or event of 2009 - anything from an entire movie or TV series to an individual scene or shot, from a retrospective or exhibition to a viral video or video game."

Above: Ninety-seven years after he retired from filmmaking and several decades after his rediscovery by historians, Georges Méliès (left) continues to be a relevant and emblematic figure. James Cameron (right) is an innovator at the center of the new digital form of making movies, but will he be remembered a hundred years from now?

PART ONE. MY LIFE IN THE REPERTORY SCREENING HOUSE; OR, HOW I STARTED THE ARGUMENT

It started in mid-September, when the ballots for the Cinematheque Ontario's Best of the Decade (2000-2009) poll were due. Not long after, in November, the choices had been tallied, prints had been reserved for a retrospective series consisting of many of the top voted titles, and curator James Quandt had put together a nifty analysis of the results (fashioned much like J. Hoberman's year-end introductions for the Village Voice). Commentary followed, personal lists emerged—the decade seemed to be the inevitable talking point for the next several weeks.

The decade...and Avatar, of course. The latter has inspired reverent summary pieces that attempt to tackle fundamental questions related to spectatorship and the future of digital technology. Manohla Dargis, joining the fray rather late, has thoughtfully invoked Edison and the year 1896, when the Vitascope was first introduced, to relate this phase of discovery in cinema to the experience of watching Avatar with a rapt audience in 2009. Both, she seems to suggest, created or are creating audience enchantment and a fierce climate of technological proprietorship: enchantment in the sense that Avatar's release is being hyped as a landmark that could very well be as important as the first Vitascope and Cinématographe projections; and proprietorship, in the way the success of the film signals new advances in technology, which big companies perfect and are able to license (digitally) now as Edison did (mechanically) over a hundred years ago. The enchantment of an art and the industry that disseminates and makes that same art possible: strange bedfellows. And yet, cinema is the same, a hundred years later, having been shaped by the same decisive factors.

It's already 2010 as I start to write this, roughly a hundred years after Griffith started making films for Biograph, and in retrospect it seems perfectly reasonable that one should be eager not only to want to share what he has learned from another decade in cinema, but also to predict where things are headed. The most obvious strategy, then, would be to attempt to encapsulate the most recent trends in the wide world of film (certainly much wider than in 1910, a period when only three countries around the globe could reasonably be called filmmaking hubs). In reality, it helps to cast one's net wider—a lot wider—as a way to give greater historical nuance to what's right in front of you.

One can safely assert, in the time since they started, that some of the most important figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were D.W. Griffith, Edwin S. Porter, Charles Pathé, and Georges Méliès. This is inarguable. Similarly, a look at the late 20th and early 21st centuries a hundred years from now will perhaps yield the names Apichatpong Weerasethakul, John Lasseter, Pedro Costa, and James Cameron. However, such pronouncements boil down to nothing more than hyperbole if one considers how cinema started and where it has wound up. To say that Méliès would be remembered a hundred years from now in 1910 would be a radical thought indeed. And as Richard Abel has aptly detailed, the Lumière brothers were so firm in their conviction that cinema was a passing fad that they stopped producing their own films after only a few years in the business. The examples go on. Fast-foward to the present and the sentiment behind the musings of an overwhelming number of critics seems to be that James Cameron, for example, is one the greatest and most important filmmakers ever. How does one know?

What are the reasons for only focusing on the technological breakthroughs of figures like Lasseter and Cameron, and the artistic advances of Weerasethakul and Costa? Dargis provides an exception rather than the rule here in expanding the discussion. A helpful hint may lie in the fact that critics nowadays—whether talking about Avatar or any other film—are fearful of alienating younger generations who regard old films as relics. There are hardly any commentators who have attempted to steer the discussion, productively, to the pre-2000's in these polls or "think" pieces. (David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, in addition to Dargis, are another singular example, discussing the best films from ninety years ago for three consecutive years on their blog.) Perhaps the enormous gap between Cameron and Costa, to make one comparison, wouldn't be so exasperating if spectators were better versed in films made before Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. To say that there weren't blockbusters before these films is a mistake that somehow lives on in mainstream criticism.

Outside of critics' circles, what does it say that the majority of film festivals choose to show dozens of mediocre contemporary films but almost never project older works? Or that the repertory and archival divisions of the major studios continue to let their holdings go to waste by refusing to strike new prints or engage in restoration activities? The curator and museum director Alexander Horwath has argued that this attitude ethically violates a corporation's responsibility to history and the community. Critics and their editors seem to be following step by treating studios' latest, biggest products with front-page headlines and feature reviews, whereas articles on revivals are relegated to capsule summaries at best.

To those of us in a growing minority who spend most of our free time in either repertory screening houses or at home watching DVDs of older films, the insistence on the new is a numbing and ultimately disappointing mind-set. On the bright side, the cinephile of today and tomorrow has all the tools he needs to assume a posture of activism on the internet and in the places where people care about such things, such as alternative screening spaces, libraries and schools. In my hometown of Chicago, there are several individuals and groups doing exactly that.

Partly as a symbolic gesture, partly as a historical survey intended to study canonical shifts, I have initiated a counter-thrust to the deluge of commentary on the last decade by asking a coterie of friends and experts in the field to submit their ten (or more) best films from the years 1899-1909, and to include a figure of the decade. If they couldn't think of ten, I asked them to submit five. Some nominated an important person; others opted not to. Why 1899 to 1909? A more appropriate delineation would have been the best films of 1895—date of the first Lumière projection—to 1914—year of both the start of World War I in Europe and Griffith's filming of a recreation of the American Civil War in The Birth of a Nation (1915). However, 1899-1909 represents a round decade, much like 2000-2009 (which is just as arbitrary a time bracket if one wants to catalogue world cinema tendencies), leaving at least one year (1899-1900) as a safety zone for uncertain release dates. In any case, I elected to leave in any titles that were included for one reason or another (some explained, others not) outside of the permissible range.

As you'll see from their serious commitment to this survey, the folks below do not regard these films as museumified objects, but rather, living artworks that contain in them a fascinating challenge to our changing artistic sensibilities and consumptive habits. The question of whether cinema—not film, as in nitrate or acetate or polyester cellulose—is dead is an interesting polemic, but if one considers the reality of filmmaking as industry, moving images should endure at least another hundred years, easily.

In this first installment to the "Best of the Decade...One Hundred Years Ago" project, I present the individual lists of the sixteen participants. To see a tally of the most cited films (with links to YouTube versions of all but one of the titles), scroll to the very bottom. Check in next week for observations on the submitted lists, my own choices of the decade's ten best, and further notes.