I hate making lists like this, largely because I have absolutely no idea how to whittle them down to anything like manageable size. I have about 600 albums and have seen about 1800 films, so trying to cut that down to a top ten or twenty is beyond my meagre abilities. I tried to do a list just of my favourite songs by going through my list of albums and picking the best songs from each. By the time I'd got to the E's the list already had about two hundred songs, so I stopped.

Still, Eric asked us all nicely to come up with a list of our favourites, so after many days of dithering, I present you with this. At another message board someone once asked people for their five favourite films. I couldn't keep myself to that limit, of course, and ended up with a list of about two hundred. That list, with a few additions, is what follows. Make of it what you will.

1910s and earlier: The ? Motorist (1906), The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), The Cameraman's Revenge (1911), A Florida Enchantment (1914), The Great Train Robbery (1903), Intolerance (1916), A Trip To The Moon (1902).

1920s: The Affairs of Anatol (1921), Alraune (1928), Battleship Potemkin (1925), Big Business (1929), The Big Parade (1925), Un Chien Andalou (1928), Cops (1922), The Crowd (1928), Cyrano de Bergerac (1925), Diagonal Symphony (1921), Entr'acte (1924), The Fall of the House of Usher (Webber & Watson version, 1928), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), The General (1926), The Gold Rush (1925), The Golem (1920), Greed (1924), Hallelujah (1929), Häxan (1922), The Lodger (1926), The Man With The Movie Camera (1929), Metropolis (1926), Napoleon (1927), Nosferatu (1922), October (1928), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Safety Last (1923), Sherlock Jr (1924), Siegfried (1923), The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg (1927), Sunrise (1927), Tol'able David (1921), Two Tars (1928), The Wind (1928), Wings (1927).

1930s: The Adventures Of Robin Hood (1938), L'age d'or (1930), All Quiet On The Western Front (1930), L'Atalante (1934), Berkeley Square (1933), Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1931), Duck Soup (1933), Frankenstein (1931), The Front Page (1931), It's A Gift (1934), Kameradschaft (1931), King Kong (1933), M (1931), Le Million (1931), The Most Dangerous Game (1932), The Music Box (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Nothing Sacred (1937), Pie In The Sky (1935), Queen Christina (1933), Rules of the Game (1939), Sabotage (1936), Salt For Svanetia (1930), Scarface (1932), Vampyr (1932), Way Out West (1937), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Zero de Conduite (1933).

1940s: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), La Belle et la Bete (1946), The Best Years of our Lives (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), A Canterbury Tale (1944), Citizen Kane (1941), Dead of Night (1945), Detour (1946), D.O.A. (1949), Double Indemnity (1944), Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), Fantasia (1940), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), I Walked With A Zombie (1943), The Killers (1946), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), To Be Or Not To Be (1942), White Heat (1949).