Lule Warrenton

We do not as yet have documentation on the “Hollywood Girls’ Club” or “the first all-woman film company” that Lule Warrenton was reputed to have started in 1923 (Slide 1996, 48). These would not have been her first efforts to get outside the niche she had occupied since she began at Universal in 1913. Dubbed “Mother” Warrenton, as a character actor she specialized in maternal roles. The first reference to Lule Warrenton as a director can be found in a 1916 article in the Moving Picture Weekly featuring the formation of her company within Universal Studios, formed to produce a picture then titled The Calling of Lindy. The following year, Moving Picture World announced that with the production of The Birds’ Christmas Carol, Warrenton would be “the first and only woman producer with a studio and company all her own” (1030). We now have a historical vantage on such hyperbole, however, and wonder how many times publicity from this period used the novelty of a woman producer or director to promote a picture

Jeanie Macpherson

Jeanie Macpherson is best known as Cecil B. DeMille’s screenwriter since she collaborated exclusively with the director-producer from 1915 through the silent era and into the sound era, in a working relationship lasting fifteen years. Like many other women who became established as screenwriters, she began her career as a performer, first as a dancer and then as an actress. Her numerous acting screen credits begin in 1908, and nearly thirty of the short films she appeared in for the Biograph Company, most directed by D. W. Griffith, are extant. At Universal Pictures, Macpherson began to write, but due to a fluke she also directed the one film that she wrote there—a one-reel Western, The Tarantula (1913), according to a 1916 Photoplay article (95). Although Anthony Slide cannot confirm the success of the film, both he and Charles Higham retell the story that when the film negative was destroyed by accident, the actress was asked to reshoot the entire motion picture just as she recalled it since the original director was unavailable (Slide 1977, 60; Higham 1973, 38)

Eugenie Magnus Ingleton

Very few women were involved in the early itinerant cinema business and Marie de Kerstrat was certainly one of the most singular figures in the field, having dropped from the social standing of a French countess to become the manager of a traveling show in eastern Canada and the United States. Her profile opens interesting questions to historians of cinema, as well as historians of the women’s life; for the Montreal based historian Chantal Savoie, women of this era had to constantly negotiate and compromise as a means of acceptance within the field they wanted to develop (2003, 196). Marie de Kerstrat was a good example of this situation, as well as another early Montreal woman film pioneer Emma Gendron

Alice and the Too Many Mattresses

With the release of the documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Pamela Green, 2018), it is certain that Alice Guy Blaché will now be heralded as the motion picture innovator that we in the field have always known her to have been. But the claim that the documentary makes—to Alice’s originality and imaginativeness—should please us and then immediately worry us as historians of the first decade of cinema. For the claim that Be Natural makes to Alice’s originality is made at the expense of the resourcefulness of that moment. For example, one of the titles that has been singled out for acclaim—even before Alice’s memorialization in the documentary—is Le Matelas épileptique/The Drunken Mattress, a film that she has been credited with having produced and directed at Gaumont in 1906

Wordlessness (to be Continued)

This is the first part of some thoughts toward how to open up again the question of the theoretical issues around the expressivity of the body, especially given the example of silent cinema. It is an old semiotic problem of what meanings words convey and what the body without words can be said to “express.” After deciding that “silence” is not the operative concept we want I return briefly to the no-word advocates like Béla Balász, and “pure cinema” theorists Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Louis Delluc, as well as to Christian Metz who was highly dismissive of what he called the “gibberish” of the silent screen. Peter Brooks comes in for some scrutiny for coming so close in his “Text of Muteness” chapter in The Melodramatic Imagination, but I find that he still sits on the fence, wanting to give the day to silent expression, but then signaling a preference for words. So I keep asking what is meant by the phrase “words cannot express,” wanting to know if this means that they fall short or that other signs must take up the slack, or that words will never substitute for gestures. Concluding with Lillian Gish’s essay on “Speech Without Words” and Asta Nielsen’s position that the American cinema had too many words, I call this an exercise in defining a problem although I do not consider this project anything more than “to be continued.

How Women Worked in the US Silent Film Industry

This project began just after the centennial celebration of the motion picture, during a distinct turn to historiography in the field, and in the light of intriguing new evidence that continues to surface. We set out to prove that women were not just screen actresses in the silent era, in the two decades before the advent of synchronized sound motion pictures. Carrying over the impetus from the 1970s, we looked first for evidence that they had worked as directors but in the process we found that they had been not just directors. Women’s participation in the first two decades was both deeper and wider than previously thought. In addition to costume designer, as one might expect, the researchers on this project found, as one might not expect, camera operators as well as exhibitors (theatre owner and/or theatre manager). In her groundbreaking business history of women filmmakers in the silent era, Karen Mahar adds the colorist and the film joiner as well as the supervisor and the executive producer to this list.1 At first, many jobs were not necessarily gender-typed, she says. In the first decade, however, some departments became exclusively organized along gender lines, with editing or joining being the most visibly gendered work

Women as Camera Operators or “Cranks”

During the silent era there does not appear to have been much serious thought given to the question of why there might or might not be women working as motion picture camera operators. The handful who did do this work kept a very low profile, and, as a consequence, many in the commercial industry may have thought that there was just no such thing as a female camera operator at all. Even one of the most well-connected women in the industry couldn’t think of one. Powerful executive producer and screenwriter June Mathis, when asked in 1925 to reflect on women’s contributions said she could think of cases in which a woman worked as a cutter or a title writer but had yet to find a woman “turning a camera crank” (664). There were, however, a handful of women who despite the skepticism and even hostility they must have encountered on the set, did operate the heavy 35mm motion picture camera and mastered the new technology despite cultural expectations

After the Facts – These Edits Are My Thoughts

Film industries have, historically, poor records of opportunities and recognition of women. This lack of gender parity in screen industries is paralleled in the lack of studies of women filmmakers. There is, compared to the resources available on men, little written about the ways that women filmmakers have been influential on film form, and the ways their work informs film theory. For example, there are numerous books in English on male filmmakers of the Soviet Montage period Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, but none to date on their colleague, teacher, and mentor, the highly innovative woman filmmaker, Esfir Shub. Wright (2009) proposes that a corrective to the analytic frameworks that efface women would be a “paradigm shift away from authorship and textual analysis and a move toward analysing industry practices and cultures of film and media production” (10). This video essay, After the Facts, aims to instantiate that shift. The underlying research project of After the Facts is inquiring into creative practice, distributed cognition, and feminist film histories. The research methodology involves both embodied creative practice and analysis of cognitive actions occurring in practices. These analyses demonstrate that filmmaking creativity is an instance of distributed cognition (see Pearlman 2018; Pearlman, MacKay and Sutton 2018)