6 research outputs found
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Helen Holmes
Helen Holmes became a star playing the part of the fearless railroad telegrapher “Helen” in the Kalem Company’s long-running, stunt-driven serial The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917), and continued to make action films through the decade as an independent writer and producer. Not only were her films successful at the box office, but they featured some of the most heroic female images in silent cinema as she leapt to the top of speeding trains and handled pistols with ease. Did these images—at least some of them—originate with Holmes? Certainly Helen Holmes needs to be situated within a tradition that included the American branch of Pathé Frères Company’s Pearl White, Selig Polyscope Company’s Kathlyn Williams, and Universal Film Manufacturing Company’s Grace Cunard. Some would argue that Holmes carried on at Kalem in the tradition of Gene Gauntier, who had physically risked so much in the Girl Spy series. But Gauntier ’s memoir gives far more information about how she wrote scenarios and set up stunts for her character while at Kalem. With few sources other than extant films and popular and trade magazine discourse, it is difficult to discern the exact role Helen Holmes played behind the camera
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Clara Kimball Young
In 1916, Clara Kimball Young became only the second female film star, after Mary Pickford, to set up her own namesake production company: the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation. Soon after this, there was a flood of female star-producers, initiating what I have called a “second wave” of star companies, 1916–1923 (155)
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Exhibiting Women: Gender, Showmanship, and the Professionalization of Film Exhibition in the United States, 1900–1930
By operating traveling movie shows, managing nickelodeons and neighborhood theatres, playing musical accompaniments to films, selling tickets, and singing illustrated songs, thousands of pioneering women, long neglected in published histories, made vital contributions to the development of film exhibition throughout the silent film era. How did female exhibitors gain a foothold in the business in the first thirty years of film history, and why were all but the ubiquitous girl at the box office marginalized? Professionalization, at least in the US film industry, was a gendered process that negatively affected women, and eventually created a masculinized industry. Despite their eviction from picture palace management, women would nevertheless continue to work in all areas of theatres and would remain important as small town and rural exhibitors throughout Hollywood history