Daisuke Miyao, Professor and the Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of California, San Diego, is the author of Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. His ultimate selection factors greatly into that book, but also picks an international array of differing genres and forms.

Daisuke is also the author of Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy, Le Samouraï: BFI Film Classics, Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema, Cinema Is a Cat: A Cat Lover’s Introduction to Film Studies, and The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema. He is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema and the co-editor of The World of Benshi with Michael Emerich and Transnational Cinematography Studies with Lindsay Coleman and Roberto Schaefer.

Visit the5bestfilmsofeveryyearever.com/list to submit your own top five for 1915!

Mentioned media:

• The Cheat (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• The Tramp (1915) - Charlie Chaplin
• Les Vampires (1915) - Louis Feuillade
• The Golem (1915) - Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen
• Assunta Spina (1915) - Gustavo Serena
• The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - David Lean
• The Birth of a Nation (1915) - D.W. Griffith
• Carmen (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• Cabiria (1914) - Giovanni Pastrone
• The Last Diva (1982) - Gianfranco Mingozzi
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) - Eleuterio Rodolfi
• The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) - Paul Wegener and Carl Boese
• The Golem and the Dancing Girl (1917) - Paul Wegener and Rochus Gliese
• King Kong (1933) - Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack
• Fantômas (1913) - Louis Feuillade
• Irma Vep (1996) - Olivier Assayas
• It’s Tough Being a Man (1969) - Yoji Yamada
• The Circus (1928) - Charlie Chaplin
• The Ten Commandments (1956) - Cecil B. DeMille
• Sunset Boulevard (1950) - Billy Wilder
• Temptation (1915) - Cecil B. DeMille
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) - Robert Wiene
• A Page of Madness (1926) - Teinosuke Kinugasa
• Dragnet Girl (1933) - Yasujirō Ozu
• The Kumamoto Cat (1915) - unknown
• House (1977) - Nobuhiko Obayashi
• Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood - Robert S. Birchard