Ivo Blom, lecturer in Comparative Arts & Media Studies at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, connected, through the lens of an early film pioneer in the Netherlands, international aesthetics and film industry markets with his book Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade. His five selections for 1908 similarly give a broad picture of filmic development in the year and period, from attempted artfulness to technological novelties.
Ivo has frequently published on Italian silent film and its links to art and visual culture, resulting in his most recent monograph Quo vadis?, Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema's Appropriation of Art and Archaeology. He is also the author of Reframing Luchino Visconti and is currently involved in the research project Museum of Dream Worlds: Silent Antiquity Films in the British National Film Archive.
Films and resources mentioned:

• The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (1908) - Charles le Bargy and André Calmettes
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1908) - Arturo Ambrosio and Luigi Maggi
• The Adventures of Dollie (1908) - D.W. Griffith
• Lion Hunting (1908) - Viggo Larsen
• Unterm Paraplui Nr. 87 (1908) - unknown
• Fantômas (1913) - Louis Feuillade
• Judex (1916) - Louis Feuillade
• Queen Elizabeth (1912) - Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaines
• La dame aux camélias (1912) - André Calmettes, Louis Mercanton, and Henri Pouctal
• The Fall of Troy (1911) - Giovanni Pastrone and Luigi Romano Borgnetto
• L’Inferno (1911) - Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro
• Fabiola (1918) - Enrico Guazzoni
• Quo Vadis (1913) - Enrico Guazzoni
• Ben Hur (1907) - Sidney Olcott and Frank Oakes Rose
• The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) - Eleuterio Rodolfi
• Jone or the Last Days of Pompeii (1913) - Ubaldo Maria Del Colle and Giovanni Enrico Vidali
• Way Down East (1920) - D.W. Griffith
• Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) - Edwin S. Porter or Jacob Blair Smith
• The Adventures of Milo and Otis (1986) - Masanori Hata and Kon Ichikawa
• Atlantis (1913) - August Blom
• The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 - Richard Abel