Ryan Swen is a Los Angeles-based freelance film critic and a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He has written for Reverse Shot, Film Comment, Variety, Criterion, Sight and Sound, Slant Magazine, the British Film Institute, Filmmaker Magazine, MUBI Notebook, and The Film Stage.
Ryan Swen
Ryan Swen participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Ryan Swen’s submission:
| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia | Hollis Frampton | USA | 1971 | 36’ | ||
| La Jetée | Chris Marker | France | 1962 | 28’ | ||
| Duck Amuck | Chuck Jones | USA | 1953 | 7’ | ||
| Wavelength | Michael Snow | Canada, USA | 1967 | 45’ | ||
| All My Life | Bruce Baillie | USA | 1966 | 3’ | ||
| La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory | Louis Lumière | France | 1895 | 1’ | ||
| Rose Hobart | Joseph Cornell | USA | 1936 | 20’ | ||
| Spacy | Takashi Ito | Japan | 1981 | 10’ | ||
| The House Is Black Khaneh siah ast | Forugh Farrokzhad | Iran | 1963 | 22’ | ||
| Je vous salue, Sarajevo Hail, Sarajevo | Jean-Luc Godard | France | 1993 | 2’ | ||