“Now in its 17th year, MoMA’s annual celebration of film preservation, To Save and Project, features newly preserved and restored films from archives, studios, distributors, foundations and individual filmmakers around the world. This year’s program begins with the restoration premiere of two major silent films from MoMA’s archive: D.W. Griffith’s powerful drama Isn’t Life Wonderful (1924), filmed on location in postwar Germany, and Raoul Walsh’s Loves of Carmen (1927), a rowdy adaptation of Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen, which established Dolores del Rio as Hollywood’s first woman star of Mexican descent.”
First up is The McDonaghs: Sisters of Silent Film (23 mins), featuring NFSA-held oral histories recorded by WFPP contributor Graham Shirley in the 1970s-80s. Following that comes NFSA’s Beth Taylor on Annette Kellerman: Stuntwoman, Diver, Badass (13 min).
Annette Kellerman. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Frame enlargement, Le Matelas épileptique/The Drunken Mattress (Alice Guy, 1906). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Introduction
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.
Le Matelas épileptique/The Drunken Mattress (Alice Guy, Gaumont, 1906).
The Drunken Mattress and Alice’s Memory
Question: Did Alice make what she said she had made? When she said she had made it?
Answer: Let’s see.
I have written elsewhere about the differences between Alice’s memory and her several extant cabbage fairy films, and established that her memoirs, written between 1941 and 1953, do not exactly correspond to extant film titles (Gaines 2018). With that in mind, here is the crucial passage on the The Drunken Mattress:
Searching for a setting for a film La Pègre de Paris, I walked along a part of the old fortifications which still existed in those days. A mattress-maker had installed her frame for stretching the canvas. She finished filling it with wool which she had just carded. For I know not what reason, she left her work and went away for a few minutes. Almost at once a drunk arrived, climbed the mound and rested in contemplation before the half-finished mattress.
This little tableau suggested the idea for a film [Matelasalcoolique, 1906] which later had a great success. Here is the scenario:
“Some days before his marriage, a young man left his mattress with a mattress-maker who promised to put it in excellent shape before the wedding night.”
I reconstructed the scene I had witnessed but in my story,
the wine-loving drunk really lay down in the bed and was completely buried. The mattress-maker, unsuspecting, returned and finished her work. A porter arrived, loaded the mattress on his cart and left in haste. The drunk, half-wakened, stirred, upsetting the balance and there was a series of tumbles down the stairways of Montmartre, across a little bridge, near a washhouse, into a urinal, etc., always followed by the unfortunate porter. The young couple waited impatiently for the mattress. Finally, it arrived. The exhausted porter flung the mattress on the bed-spring, pocketed his tip and fled.
In haste, the newlyweds made the bed and prepared to pass an agreeable night. The drunk, inconvenienced, began a series of jumps. The distracted couple cried for help. The police of that era came running and led the lovers and the mattress to the police station. All was finally explained and the drunk went to finish his nap in a cell (36-37).
We’ll get to the discrepancies between the film that you just saw and Alice’s recollection of having seen a mattress-maker and a drunk eyeing her comfortable mattress—but not climbing into it. But first, let’s note an 1888 cartoon published in La Caricature. Here, two men dump a third into a mattress which he then brings to life, terrifying the mattress-maker but not the gendarme before whom he sheepishly drops his mattress disguise:
“Le Matelas a pattes.” La Caricature, March 1888.
Comparing the Mattresses
Comparison #1:
L: La Cardeuse de matelas/The Tramp and the Mattress Maker (Georges Méliès, May 1906).
R: Le Matelas épileptique/The Drunken Mattress (Alice Guy, Gaumont, September 1906).
Here, to counter Alice’s claim to have actually stumbled onto the drunk eyeing the mattress on the street one day, is the Georges Méliès film The Tramp and theMattress (1906), whose release in May is earlier than the September release of what Alice recalled as Le Matelas alcoolique, but not Le Matelas épileptique.
Comparison #2:
L: Le Matelas de la marieé/The Bride’s Mattress (Pathé, 1906).
R: Le Matelas épileptique/The Drunken Mattress (Alice Guy, Gaumont, September 1906).
Here, we have what we might call “identical twin gags.” If I am not mistaken, this is the same gag in films shot and released in France the same year. The rule of thumb in this period of wild invention and theft: one good gag begets another that is likely to be the same gag. Let’s not fail to notice that Alice’s cross-dressed maid is more funny than the one on the left.
Comparison # 3:
L: Le Matelas de la mariée/The Bride’s Mattress (Pathé, 1906).
M: Zijn Eerste Baas/Boy and Mattress/Le Avvenure de un Molella (1912).
R: Le Matelas épileptique/The Drunken Mattress (Alice Guy, Gaumont, September 1906).
Here, in the Italian version, retitled for the Dutch market, from 1912 (middle clip), we have the running mattress gag with the boy substituted for the maid. But it is the same “drop the mattress from the window” gag only 6 years later.
Comparison #4:
L: Le Matelas de la mariée/The Bride’s Mattress (Pathé, 1906).
R: Le Matelas épileptique/The Drunken Mattress (Alice Guy, Gaumont, September 1906).
Finally, to the issue of the drunken mattress in the bridal suite. Again, if we are not mistaken, we see here a scene that corresponds with Alice’s description of two lovers getting into bed from her memoirs. But the newlywed lovers are not in the Gaumont film, they’re in the Pathé film. Alice’s Gaumont title features an elderly couple who get into bed with the drunk in their mattress and are shocked to find a man in bed with them. Could it be that Alice saw either Pathé’s The Bride’s Mattress (1906) or Méliès’s TheTramp and the Mattress Maker sometime in 1906? Later, while writing her memoirs, she may have mis-remembered where it was that she had seen the scene. The writer-director-producer who was so squeamish about the term “midwife” that she objected to the title Gaumont gave her 1902 film (Gaines 55) would likely not have shot this risqué honeymoon night. Then again, anyone who has seen either La femme collante/The Sticky Woman (Gaumont, 1906) or Les Résultats du féminisme/The Consequences of Feminism (Gaumont, 1906) would not deny that before she was a married woman Alice was making awfully suggestive films in the best French comic tradition.
Conclusion
My experiment is not intended to challenge Alice’s originality. Perhaps, however it is meant to challenge the critical acclaim she is suddenly enjoying, which, predictably, is based on an idea of “originality” borrowed from high art. That Alice was resourceful and imaginative, I do not dispute. As historians of mass culture, however, we cannot seek to elevate one work over another on this basis. The point is that we do not want to elevate Alice to the detriment of early cinema, which those of us who have seen so much of know to be full of endless variation, but also fascinating similarities. These very repetitions call for serious study. The key to my point is that they all copied each other–from stage to film to film to film and back again, and that is how popular culture has been and still is sourced.
A version of this material was originally presented at the Women and the Silent Screen X conference in Amsterdam in May 2019. Thanks to Insook Park and Kate Saccone.
Bibliography
Gaines, Jane M. Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois, 2018.
Guy Blaché, Alice. The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché. Ed. Anthony Slide. Trans. Roberta and Simone Blaché. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1986.
“On Mary Manning,” Film Screening at Light Industry in Brooklyn, December 10, 2019
“On Mary Manning” at Light Industry (155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn) at 7pm on Tuesday, December 10.
Presented with the Women Film Pioneers Project
Introduced by Fanny Howe, Helen Howe, and Susan Howe
Mary Manning. Private Collection.
Though a number of long-neglected female auteurs from cinema’s first decades have been recuperated in recent years—consider, for instance, the welcome revival of Lois Weber—many important women remain overlooked, particularly those who were involved in other facets of film culture. The considerable contributions of Mary Manning are a case in point. She is today best remembered as a leading figure in early-20th-century Irish theater; a playwright and performer for the Abbey Theatre and the Gate Theatre, Manning was a close friend of Samuel Beckett’s and in the 1950s she adapted James Joyce’s most challenging novel for the stage with her play Passages from Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. But the multifarious roles she played fostering cinema in Ireland are just as remarkable. Manning not only directed at least one film (Bank Holiday, 1930, now lost), but served as screenwriter, assistant director, performer, and producer for several others. She wrote regular film criticism for the Irish Statesman and the Gate’s drama journal Motley, while also co-founding the Dublin Film Society and an amateur filmmaking club, Irish Amateur Films.
Screening of:
By Accident. Dir.: J. N. G. (Norris) Davidson, asst. dir./casting: Mary Manning, sc.: Norris Davidson (Irish Amateur Films IE 1930) cas.: C. Clarke-Clifford, Olive Purcell, Mary Manning, Paul Farrell, si, b&w, 16mm (digital projection).
Guests of the Nation. Dir.: Denis Johnston, adp./props: Mary Manning (Denis Johnston Productions IE 1935) cas.: Barry Fitzgerald, Frank Toolin, Cyril Jackson, Charles Maher, Georgina Roper, Fred Johnson, Shelah Richards, Cyril Cusack, Hilton Edwards, si, b&w, 35mm (digital projection).
Screening in the Rain. Cam.: J. N. G. (Norris) Davidson, misc. crew: Mary Manning (Irish Amateur Films IE 1930) cas.: Mary O’Moore, Grace McLoughlin, Judge Johnston, Lord Longford, Hilton Edwards, Micheál MacLiamóir, si, b&w (tinted), 16mm (digital projection).
All films courtesy of the IFI Irish Film Archive.
Tickets – $8, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm.
For more information, please visit Light Industry’s website.
Spotlight on Bess Meredyth: Screening of The Song of Life (1922), Anthology Film Archives, December 3, 2019
SPOTLIGHT ON BESS MEREDYTH
Screening of The Song of Life (1922), scripted by Bess Meredyth
Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY
Tuesday, December 3 at 7pm.
The Song of Life was preserved by the Library of Congress in cooperation with Warner Bros.
Bess Meredyth led a robust and noteworthy career as a silent-era screenwriter, director, title writer, cutter, and comic actress. She made films in the U.S. and briefly in Australia, and was a respected figure in early Hollywood. In 1924, MGM sent her to Italy to save the chaotic production of BEN-HUR (1925). In 1928, Meredyth was one of 36 co-founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (She was herself nominated for Best Writing for A WOMAN OF AFFAIRS [1928] and WONDER OF WOMEN [1929].) While many of her silent films are lost today, Meredyth continued to work as a writer into the sound era, and was also known to provide behind-the-scenes feedback and support to her third husband, Michael Curtiz.
Bess Meredyth. Private Collection.
Meredyth’s script for THE SONG OF LIFE was based on an idea from John M. Stahl’s wife, Frances Irene Reels. The film, publicized as a “Drama of Dishes and Discontent,” follows a young wife and mother who, sick of her unending domestic labor, abandons her family and ends up living in New York’s Lower East Side.
“Cinematographer Ernest Palmer, making his second film with Stahl, would go on to photograph Borzage’s SEVENTH HEAVEN and STREET ANGEL and Murnau’s CITY GIRL; here his work is both concise and atmospheric, making palpable the sweaty, noisy, claustrophobic environment that the young wife played by Grace Darmond yearns to escape. […] The script hedges its sharp observations on women’s problems – for instance, the vanity of men’s desire to be the sole breadwinners and the degree to which they take for granted women’s unpaid and unglamorous domestic labor – with more conventional sentiments.” –Imogen Sara Smith, LE GIORNATE DEL CINEMA MUTO CATALOGUE
Guest-curated by WFPP Project Manager Kate Saccone.
For more information, visit Anthology Film Archives’ website.
WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA features six short films by the first woman in film!
December 7, 3:15pm at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, CA.
French filmmaking pioneer Alice Guy got into the movie business at the very beginning—in 1894, at the age of 21. Two years later, she was made head of production at Gaumont and started directing films. One of the very first directors to make narrative films, her work is marked by innovation—she experimented with color-tinting, special effects, and sound! In 1910 she and her husband moved to the United States and she founded Solax film studio. Ninety-nine years after the opening of Solax, Alice Guy remains the only woman to have ever owned a movie studio. The program includes MIDWIFE TO THE UPPER CLASS (1902), THE RESULTS OF FEMINISM (1906), THE DRUNKEN MATTRESS (1906), MADAME HAS HER CRAVINGS (1906), THE GLUE (1907), and THE OCEAN WAIF (1916).
Live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin
Introduction by WFPP contributor Jennifer Horne
Co-presented by Alliance Française, Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, Roxie Theatre, and the Women Film Pioneers Project
Join Women and Film History International (WFHI) Today!
WFHI is an international organization that connects and sustains a community of scholars, archivists, librarians, critics, programmers, students, and others interested in the history of women and early cinema. We are a self-supporting, self-governing, non-profit organization.
Mary Pickford and Frances Marion. Private Collection.
Membership benefits
Membership of WFHI grants exclusive access to voting meetings and opportunities to connect to our network of scholars. Membership is required to participate in the Women and the Silent Screen conferences, held biennially.
Membership dues are used to secure matching funding for the biennial conferences, and WFHI funds may also be distributed for purposes related to supporting the activities of our membership, such as conference registration subsidies and travel stipends.
Membership period
Members may join at any point in the two year cycle, but the membership period expires on the same date, regardless.
The current dues period runs from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2020.
Governance
WFHI is a registered South Carolina nonprofit corporation with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in the United States.
For more information on how to join, visit the Women and Film History International website.
“A Celebration of the Fort Lee Film Commission: Women and the Silent Film Era,” National Arts Club, November 15, 2019
“A Celebration of the Fort Lee Film Commission: Women and the Silent Film Era”
Friday, November 15 @ 8pm
National Arts Club, New York, NY (15 Gramercy Park S.)
“Join Tom Meyers of the Fort Lee Film Commission and other silent film experts as they discuss women and the silent film era. When Hollywood was mostly orange groves, Fort Lee was the center of American film production with as many as 17 working studios including Fox, Universal, and Goldwyn. Meyers will be joined by Jane Gaines, author of Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries and Steve Massa, author of Slapstick Divas.”
WFPP in the media: The New Yorker’s “The Women Who Helped Build Hollywood”
Read Margaret Talbot’s excellent piece in the November 4 issue of The New Yorker, which discusses recent books focused on women in Hollywood.
“In a way, the early women filmmakers became victims of the economic success that they had done so much to create. As the film industry became an increasingly modern, capitalist enterprise, consolidated around a small number of leading studios, each with specialized departments, it grew harder for women, especially newcomers, to slip into nascent cinematic ventures, find something that needed doing, and do it. “By the 1930s,” Antonia Lant, who has co-edited a book of women’s writing in early cinema, observes, “we find a powerful case of forgetting, forgetting that so many women had even held the posts of director and producer.” It wasn’t until a wave of scholarship arrived in the nineteen-nineties—the meticulous research done by the Women Film Pioneers Project, at Columbia, has been particularly important—that women’s outsized role in the origins of moviemaking came into focus again.”
On the eve of our 6-year anniversary, the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) is excited to relaunch a reimagined and invigorated home for our thriving digital resource. This redesign enhances our commitment to the advancement of research on women filmmakers in the silent era.
Our design updates focus on improving reader experience and accessibility across the website, making the text more readable and improving navigation through and between content. The redesign also features an improved image viewing experience, a reimagined news archive, and new, clearer guidance on how to use our unique resourceand contribute to our publication.
A reorganization of WFPP’s Resources Indexhighlights vital contributions to our research community with an unmatched collection of bibliographies, current events, and digital and audio-visual tools. We have also made information about archival materials around the world more accessible. Archival paper collections referenced in pioneer profiles now link to the institution where they are held or directly to an online finding aid, when available; Filmographies now directly link to online catalogues or websites for film archives around the globe, providing immediate access to the holding organization for a particular film title.
We value our authors and their contributions to our scholarly community and bring increased visibilityto their work with this relaunch. Recognizing the importance of WFPP as a scholarly resource, each profile and overview essay has now been archived and given a DOI, aiding in citation and discoverability of our content by researchers. As WFPP continues to grow and evolve, we will be able to provide versioned records of articles via these archives, creating a historiographic record of the study of women in silent cinema.
Pioneer profiles on our site have been updated to include “Research Update” boxes, when relevant. These sections will highlight new career or credit information and/or archival film discoveries, ensuring that developments in silent film research are continually accessible and foregrounded.
With this relaunch, we are delighted to debut Projections, a forum for original scholarship, multimedia content, and digital-friendly approaches to silent film research and feminist scholarship. Projections posts will take the form of self-reflexive essays, online curatorial projects, image galleries, data visualizations, multimedia analyses of a particular film, research updates, and more. Inaugurating this exciting multimedia section is Kiki Loveday’s queer reading of Alice Guy’s early films with the timely “Do You Believe in Fairies? Cabbages, Victorian Memes, and the Birth of Cinema: Seeing Sapphic Sexuality in the Silent Era.”
“The Female Gaze: Rediscovering the Films of Louise Kolm-Fleck,” Vienna International Film Festival, Oct. 24 – Nov. 6, 2019
At this year’s Vienna International Film Festival (Oct. 24-Nov. 6, 2019), there will be a section focused on Austrian director, producer, and screenwriter Louise Kolm-Fleck.
Kolm-Fleck (1873–1950) established the first Austrian film-production company and, in 1919, founded Vita-Film, the largest studio complex in Europe at the time. Addressing themes such as rape, abortion and impotence, she introduced specifically female perspectives to the cinema of the silent-film era. Her films, which have now been rediscovered through international research and newly restored by Filmarchiv Austria, reveal a director who brilliantly mastered cinematic grammar and knew how to translate her stories in a virtuoso manner. Above all, they show her to be an author of surprising topicality whose emphatic gaze was directed at her female protagonists acting in a male-dominated environment.
Louise Kolm-Fleck was the daughter of Louis Veltée, owner of Vienna’s Stadtpanoptikum (an establishment presenting moving images, curiosities and attractions), and the granddaughter of a pyrotechnic showman. She wrote at least two dozen scripts and directed well over 100 films. The life of the first Austrian director reads like a parable of Austrian film history: the rapid rise of the silent film, the golden age in the 1920s, the transition to sound film, the expulsion of filmmakers by the Nazis, and obscurity after 1945. In exile in Shanghai, she still succeeded in making a film with her second husband, Jakob Fleck. In Austrian post-war cinema, her voice was lost.
In this first presentation of works curated by Filmarchiv Austria, the rediscovered productions reveal Louise Kolm-Fleck to be an impressive film artist whose legacy deserves greater attention.
Films (selection):
DER MEINEIDBAUER (D 1926)
FRAUENARZT DR. SCHÄFER (D 1928)
DAS RECHT AUF LIEBE (D 1929)
MÄDCHEN AM KREUZ (D 1929)
DIE WARSCHAUER ZITADELLE (D 1929/30)
Do You Believe in Fairies? Cabbages, Victorian Memes, and the Birth of Cinema: Seeing Sapphic Sexuality in the Silent Era
French postcard, “Dance of the Cabbage Fairy,” c. 1900. The title “Dance of the Cabbage Fairy” appears to have been given to the card in 2014 when it was listed for sale on Etsy.
Introduction
Famed early filmmaker Alice Guy is back in the news in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Guy inaugurated the cinematic century with her early work La fée aux choux/The Cabbage Fairy (1896),[1]In 1996, the film now circulating under the title The Cabbage Fairy was first identified by scholars, although there remains controversy over whether this is indeed Guy’s The Cabbage Fairy, and if … Continue reading which many scholars have argued was the first film to tell a story, with others dissenting. Recent attention to Guy runs the gamut from a significant new documentary narrated by Jodie Foster, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), which is currently in theaters and streaming, to a novelized version of Guy’s life that imagines a secret love affair between her and the engineer of the Eiffel Tower.[2]Janelle Dietrick, Mademoiselle Alice: A Novel (Portland, OR: BookBaby [self-published], 2017). On the scholarly front, the award-winning box set Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, curated by Shelley Stamp, includes eleven newly restored films by Guy, while Jane Gaines’s latest book, Pink Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? returns to the scene of The Cabbage Fairy with the intensity of a serial crime drama.[3]Jane Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). Taken together, this flurry of interest in Guy, her love life, and her famous first film reignite critical questions, not only about her place in film history, but also about the relationships between history, biography, and sexuality onscreen.
Despite all the controversy over The Cabbage Fairy, the film’s significance as a document of sexual history has been nearly completely neglected. More specifically, the sexual imagery of The Cabbage Fairy takes part in the lesbian chic of the Belle Époque (1871-1914). While the terms “lesbian” and “Sapphic,”[4]Throughout this essay, the terms “lesbian” and “Sapphic” are used interchangeably to denote a variety of sexual desires, activities, relationships, identifications, and embodiments, which … Continue reading originate from the ancient poet Sappho of Lesbos (600 BCE), their association with lesbian sexuality as we understand it is, in the words of literary scholar Yopie Prin, “a particularly Victorian phenomenon.”[5]Yopie Prin, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 94. When understood in the context of its historical milieu, the Sapphic visuality of The Cabbage Fairy radically transforms common assumptions about the so-called “birth of cinema.” Close attention to Guy’s early work reveals the centrality of queer sexualities, not only to her trademark disruptions of gender norms, but to the development of motion picture industries more broadly at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Cabbage Fairy is an ideal starting point for a consideration of Sapphic silent cinema due to its early date, its vaunted place in existing film histories, and the controversy it continues to engender by its very existence. The film engages with core questions of screen and sexuality studies, such as: Where do we locate lesbianism in film and film history?(Is it in the text, the narrative, the iconography, performance, authorship, and/or reception?)How do we see lesbianism in periods with different sexual norms than our own?Who counts as lesbian and on what evidence? For our purposes, the film currently identified as The Cabbage Fairy—misidentified according to Gaines—does double duty, making visible both the intertextual structures of Sapphic meaning-making in early film and the compulsory heterosexuality that continues to dominate contemporary film scholarship.
The Cabbage Fairy, Take One
At first glance, The Cabbage Fairy might not seem particularly Sapphic. There is only one womxn in it, she appears to conform to the gender norms of the period, and the content of the film suggests procreative sexuality. Moreover, Guy’s biography includes a heterosexual marriage (later divorce notwithstanding) and two children of her own. The dominant heterosexualized reproductive meaning attached to the cabbage patch is indisputable, as the following 1889 postcard advertisement for fertilizer that graces the cover of a recent monograph on The Cabbage Fairy clearly illustrates.[6]Janelle Dietrick with forward by Alice-Guy Blanche Peeters, La Fée Aux Choux: Alice Guy’s Garden of Dreams (Portland, OR: BookBaby [self-published], 2017). Page numbers refer to the Kindle … Continue reading
Trade card, c. 1880s. Private Collection.
Yet, it is precisely in such naturalized iconography that we might expect to find queer resistances to hegemonic norms. The folktale of the cabbage patch is anything but straightforward. It is, after all, a euphemism, supposedly told to children to avoid explaining sexuality and reproduction. Recent scholarly accounts position The Cabbage Fairy correctly in relation to the postcard craze of the fin de siècle, yet they mischaracterize it by positioning it “politely” in relation to ourcontemporary stereotypes about Victorian prudery.[7]See Jesse Olszynko-Gryn and Patrick Ellis, “‘A Machine for Recreating Life’: An Introduction to Reproduction on Film,” British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 50, no. 3 (September … Continue reading In contrast, I highlight the mise-en-scène of the cabbage patch, which reveals sexual meanings that the story itself obfuscates. The film’s iconography points us toward the allegorical and elliptical meanings that structure Victorian discourses of representation and constitute Sapphic meaning-making at the turn of the twentieth century.
Postcard, c. 1900. Private Collection.
The cabbage fairy of the film’s title would have evoked the slang term “fairy,” with its queer connotations already in place during this period.[8]George Chauncey, “The Fairy as an Intermediate Sex,” chap. 2 in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 47-64; on the … Continue reading It is significant that the fairy figure has only one traditional accoutrement of fairydom—a magic wand—which she drops in the first seconds of the film.[9]On the wand as slang for penis in this era, see Jonathon Green, The Vulgar Tongue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 20, 191. For an example of contemporary controversy over sexual visual … Continue reading This easily discarded phallic object emphasizes the fairy’s relationship to fantasy and wish fulfillment. The cabbage fits snuggly within the venerable tradition of edible metaphors for (in this case female) genitalia and reproductive organs.[10]See Jonathon Green, “Cabbage,” Green’s Dictionary of Slang (Digital Edition, 2019), https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/bcvjvsq. The pun is doubled in the French language by the reference to “choux” pastry, which is often split and filled with cream, making it easy to read as a suggestive metaphor for the vulva.[11]On the prominence of “literal punning” and vulgar humor in Guy’s early work, see Kimberly Tomadjoglou, “Alice Guy’s Great Cinematic Adventure,” in Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing … Continue reading French audiences would have associated The Cabbage Fairy with the popular French nursery rhyme “Savez-vous planter les choux?” (“Do You Know How to Plant Cabbage?”), which taught children the parts of the body with the lyrics “we plant them with the finger, we plant them with the hand,” suggesting the significance of the hand in lesbian sexual play.[12]Thanks to Fabiola Hannah whose linguistic and cultural knowledge of French enabled this reading through our conversations. On the bawdiness of this song, see Yvonne Knibiehler, De la pucelle à la … Continue reading On top of all this playful lesbianized punning, we can also read the fairy’s performative display of maternal indifference as she all but drops the babies on the ground. But how can we know if any of these textual associations were intended by Guy, or if they speak more directly to retrospective twenty-first-century lesbian longings?[13]On longing and “retrospectatorship,” see Patrica White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Moreover, how can we possibly know whether these cultural resonances were actually perceived by fin de siècle audiences?[14]Guy’s own claims to authorship of the Gaumont “series N” films (nude films made as early as 1897) reposition The Cabbage Fairy in relation to its own historical moment. See Dietrick, La Fée … Continue reading
The Cabbage Fairy, Take Two
Production still, First-Class Midwife. Private Collection.
Production still, First-Class Midwife. Private Collection.
In two widely reproduced photographs, a cross-dressed Guy stands in a classic pose of sexual fantasy between two corseted young womxn. These images raise historiographic questions about how we read a film in relation to extra-textual material, as Gaines has noted.[15]Gaines, Pink-Slipped, 52-55. See also Jane Gaines, “First Fictions,” Signs vol. 30, no. 11 (2004): 1311; Judith Mayne, “Lesbian Detection,” conclusion in Directed by Dorothy Arzner … Continue reading In both photographs, Guy appears at ease, projecting an air of candid pleasure as though she is enjoying the moment. Her gaze is directed intently to one of the womxn standing beside her. In one of the photographs, a smiling Guy suggestively offers a phallic object (perhaps an edible treat or a cigarette) to the womxn on her left in a manner that seems flirtatious. These images create a sharp contrast with other photos of Guy where her erect corseted figure overdetermines retrospective readings. The two stills here were taken on the set of Sage-femme de première classe/First-Class Midwife (1902), a film that reworks the cabbage patch theme.[16]In the third of Guy’s cabbage series, Madame a des envies/Madame Has Her Cravings (1906), a pregnant woman steals and consumes a stick of candy, a glass of absinth, and a smoking pipe before giving … Continue reading In First-Class Midwife, either famously or apocryphally, Guy performs the role of the lover, which is often called “the husband.”[17]Dietrick quotes Guy’s own claims that she did not perform in the film but put on the lover’s costume afterwards “for fun.” Dietrick, La Fée Aux Choux, 118. In footnote 137, she cites a … Continue reading On the one hand, Gaines points to the cross-dressing in the film to suggest that it may yet wind up in the queer film canon.[18]Gaines, Pink-Slipped, 70. On the other hand, Laura Horak productively questions the a priori assumption that cross-dressing was necessarily a sign of lesbianism in her groundbreaking work on cross-dressed womxn in early film.[19]Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 3. Yet, the cross-dressed lover is but one among many elements of the film’s queer structure, as we shall see. Either way, dressed as the lover in the cabbage patch, Guy projects a free youthful confidence that exudes sexuality.
What are we to make of these images? Queer media scholars have generally agreed that cross-dressing and gender inversion are the predominant mode of queer representation before Stonewall. Shall we therefore read them in relation to Guy’s extensive oeuvre, which has long been associated with her penchant for cross-dressing comedies and other forms of gender inversion? For example, her 1912 gay cowboy filmAlgie the Miner is often cited as the earliest extant film representing male homosexuality onscreen.[20]Shane Brown, Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy (New York: IB Tauris, 2016) 3; David M. Lugowski, “Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the … Continue reading A string of associations in Guy’s memoirs, in which one of the photos above is published, heightens the queer plausibility of The Cabbage Fairy. In just a few paragraphs, she moves from gossip about the “odd couple” of Émile Zola and “his wife,” to the masculine Princess Bibesco’s “lightly shaded lip,” to an interaction with René Viviani who asks her flirtatiously when she is going to marry, to which she replies, “I suppose that I love my work too much. If I decide someday to marry it will only be to have children.”[21]Alice Guy Blaché, The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, ed. Anthony Slide (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1986), 18. What are we to do with the similarity between René Viviani’s name and that … Continue reading
The Cabbage Fairy, Take Three
In First-Class Midwife, the proverbial cabbage patch has been replaced by a fantasy baby boutique, a shop filled with dolls representing babies for purchase. The “fairy,” now the “midwife” of the title, is represented as the proprietor of the shop. Her magic wand has been replaced by a feather duster—that mundane object of feminized work that doubles as a classic sex toy. The feather duster gives the femme fairy her wings while locating her in a specific class position, which is important to the film’s meaning. A lesbian couple enters, with one of the partners dressed almost identically to the cabbage fairy and the other partner cross-dressed. As we have seen, scholars have rightly cautioned against presuming a relationship between cross-dressing and lesbianism, and Alison McMahan has argued that in First-Class Midwife, “having a woman play the husband signals that this is a children’s story.”[22]McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, 212. In this instance, I disagree with McMahan. The film’s structure and cultural context point clearly to a lesbian iconography that was a defining part of French culture in this moment.[23]Nicole G. Albert, Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-siécle France (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016); Francesca Canadé Sautman, “Invisible Women: Lesbian … Continue reading
Antoine Magaud’s 1885 photograph “A Kiss in the Glass” is a classic example of the trope of the lesbian double. Public Domain.
Alice Austin’s 1891 photograph “Trude & I” literalizes the trope with classic lesbian irony. Public Domain.
The mirrored figures of the similarly dressed wife and midwife emphasize lesbian visuality through the trope of the lesbian doppelgänger, reinforcing the lesbian specificity of the cross-dressed figure. The iconography of the lesbian double is generally understood as emerging from pathologized stereotypes about womxn, vanity, and the threat of lesbianism—but it is historically significant nonetheless.[24]The motif of the lesbian double is also connected to lesbian fashion of the Victorian era. It is historically significant in relation to lesbian cultural practice. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate … Continue reading Barbara Creed calls this fin de de siècle motif of the lesbian look-alike “the narcisstic female double.”[25]Barbara Creed, “Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys, and Tarts,” in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (London: Routledge, 1995), 86. Mandy Merck points out that “the very doubling that implies a sexual pairing also denies it in a repetition too exact to suggest an encounter rather than a reflection.”[26] Mandy Merck, “‘Transforming the Suit’: A Century of Lesbian Self-Portraits,” in Perversions: Deviant Readings (New York: Routledge, 1993), 96. The cliché of the lesbian double emerges from misogynistic conceptions of female narcissism, which associate lesbianism with auto-eroticism—i.e., non-reproductive sexuality.[27]Olu Jenzen, “Revolting Doubles: Radical Narcissism and the Trope of the Lesbian Doppelgangers,” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 17 (2013): 348.So, just what are these figures doing in the cabbage patch?![28]The doubling trope is not confined to the dyad. Especially in its pornographic variants, it frequently evokes triangular relationships through the use of the mirror. This creates an uncanny effect of … Continue reading
Alongside the cross-dressing and doubled femme figures, the lesbian couple in First-Class Midwife kisses, twice. If we accept Linda Williams’s premise that a cinematic kiss stands in for the sex act, we might infer that it is the “overtness” of the doubled lesbian kisses within the film’s queer structure that makes the femme figure of the fairy with the tell-tale magic wand no longer necessary to sustain the queerness of the scene.[29]Linda Williams, “Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies,” chap. 1 in Screening Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 28; On cross-dressed kisses, see Chris Straayer, … Continue reading In any case, the couple rejects the dolls in the shop before the midwife escorts them through a door into what we might describe as a secret or magical space: a mythical cabbage patch reminiscent of the earlier film. In this iteration, there is an over-abundance of living, wriggling, white babies. In distinction, two of the many babies that the couple dismisses are portrayed by dolls, one black and one seemingly Native American or indigenous.[30]On the racialization in First-Class Midwife, see Kim Tomadjoglou, “Wonderment—Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Alice Guy Blaché,” in Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer, ed. Joan Simon (New … Continue reading The couple refuses the two dolls with exaggerated gestures, chooses a live white baby instead, pays the midwife, and then leaves.
The film is essentially a dirty lesbian joke structured around white Victorian racism. The blackness of the doll marks the punchline of the cinematic joke as the fear of miscegenation. At the fin de siècle, Guy’s queer cabbage fairies engaged in part of a pop culture cabbage patch craze in which the centuries-old folktale spoke to social anxieties about the declining French birth rate, as other scholars have noted.[31]For instance, see Gina Greene, “In the Garden of Puériculture: Cultivating the Ideal French Infant in Real and Imagined Landscapes of Care (1895–1935),” Change Over Time, vol. 6, no. 2 (2016), … Continue reading Far from the polite Victorian prudery often attributed to it, the cabbage patch meme spoke to adult anxieties and was both a racialized and sexualized phenomenon.[32]The idea of a “Victorian meme” is an anachronism, but I hope a productive one, highlighting the ongoing imagined relationship between cultural and biological reproduction. The term “meme” was … Continue reading The reproductive imaginary of the Victorian cabbage patch was a cultural phenomenon that engaged the pro-natalist French eugenic discourse known as puericulture, or “soil and seed.” In the sexualized eugenic garden of “soil and seed,” the female body is aligned with the natural and fertile French landscape. Within the context of French colonialism, this is certainly a racialized discourse, as we see in the structure of First-Class Midwife.[33]French eugenic thought has been differentiated from US and UK eugenics with the suggestion that French eugenics did not share the racism or classism of the broader movement. See, for example, William … Continue reading Consider the following postcard, circa 1900, which has recently been described as a typical example of the postcards “politely premised” on the “the folk notion of babies emerging from cabbage patches.”[34]Olszynko-Gryn and Ellis, “‘A Machine for Recreating Life,’” 383-409. On the relationship between postcards and early film more broadly, see Lauren Rabinovitz, “The Miniature and the Giant: … Continue reading
French postcard, c. 1900. “Seed of cabbage.” Private Collection. Interestingly, the back of my copy of this card is addressed to “Monsieur Madame,” with a message that reads only “Choose?” (Choisissez?).
It seems a self-evident example, but its meaning is legible only in context. (After all, what would be a typical example of a pop culture meme today?) When compared, for instance, to the likewise typical example of the cabbage patch trend below, this postcard begins to look quite different. The phallic placement of the woman’s watering can suddenly comes into relief, as does the ethnic ambiguity of the babies and the woman.[35]One notices the small Star of David that appears like a logo printed in the bottom right-hand corner. This is a feature of the card and appears on all the copies I have seen. The Star of David has … Continue reading
French Postcard, c. 1900. Private Collection.
In First-Class Midwife, racialized humor is produced on the condition that the lesbian couple poses no threat of miscegenation; this is not only because they appear to be of the same race, but because their sexuality is presumed to be non-reproductive. That’s the laugh line; the joke only works when the lover is a lesbian.[36]I would note that it is possible to read the film as a lampoon of the racism of the white upper class. Such a reading is supported by McMahan’s description of the film as a satire. She writes … Continue reading As we have seen, the racialized structure of the film’s comedy is organized through doubling: the doubled figures of the wife and midwife mirror the lesbian visuality of the film alongside the perhaps less obvious lesbian connotations of the figure in drag. The doubled racist joke exists in direct relation to the doubled lesbian kisses (sex acts) that produced them. This then is the cultural terrain into which Guy released one of the most debated works of film history. The Cabbage Fairy and First-Class Midwife queerly intervene in the heterosexual imagination of the cabbage patch and starkly underline the essential racialization of this reproductive imagery. In short, as with any mass cultural phenomenon, the cabbage patch craze of the Belle Époque cannot be understood so easily through a single seemingly self-evident instance. Rather, multiple iterations proliferate in which we should expect to find a diverse range of meanings and possibilities in dialogue with each other.
Possibilities
French postcard, c. 1900. The mise-en-scene of the vegetable stand, as featured in First-Class Midwife, shifts the reproductive logic of the cabbage patch into new terrain. Private Collection.
Taken together, the textual, intertextual, and extratextual discourses surrounding the cabbage fairy series surely suggest what scholars like to call the “possibility of lesbianism.”[37]Andrea Weiss, “‘A Queer Feeling When I Look at You’: Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, … Continue reading Certainly, if we do not consider the possibility of lesbianism, we are so deeply in the realm of compulsory heterosexuality that we should speak of disavowal rather than invisibility. Put another way, when we watch two womxn cast as a romantic couple kiss each other, yet insist on a heterosexual interpretation, we reveal more about the limits of our own historical moment than about what was going on in the Victorian cabbage patch.[38]This is the classic formulation of fetishistic disavowal, “I know very well, but just the same…” in which perceptual evidence is refused (in this case in favor of the heterosexual fetish). See … Continue reading As Alice Hegan Rice put it in her best-selling 1901 novel Mrs. Wiggs and the Cabbage Patch, “It was not a real cabbage patch, but a queer neighborhood…”[39]Alice Hagen Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Toronto: William Briggs, 1901), 4. Scholars differ on attributing lesbian meaning to words such as “queer,” “gay,” or even “peculiar,” … Continue reading Yet, the playful lesbianized humor that we see in the two existing versions of the cabbage fairy narrative, and in so much of Guy’s early work, has been all but erased from contemporary understandings. It is hardly surprising then, like so much of lesbian history, that its very existence is being called into question. However, my aim here is not to claim an ex post facto lesbian identity for Guy. Rather, I am saying that lesbian representations were central to her oeuvre, because they were central to the representational systems and cultural context in which she produced her work.[40]I believe Guy deployed these meanings deftly, with the inexplicable mix of unconscious instinct and intentional gesture frequently called artistic talent or genius. As McMahan and others have … Continue reading
To begin to see early films as they would have been experienced by early audiences, they must be analyzed internationally as well as intertextually. Scholars have emphasized the transnational nature of the early film industries, in which France was the dominant exporter until World War I. This is significant because France has a unique relationship to Sapphic sexual cultures, including what we might call “the lesbian imaginary.”[41]See Gretchen Schultz, Sapphic Fathers: Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from Nineteenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). On the visible geographies of lesbian cruising in … Continue reading The international development of the moving image was shaped, in part, by what Tami Williams calls “the Sapphist liberty of the Belle Époque.”[42]Tami Williams, Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 89. In fact, the tension between Guy’s French sensibilities and “American prudishness” became a source of conflict in her later career.[43]Tomadjoglou, “Alice Guy’s Great Cinematic Adventure,” 102-103. Those interested in “overt” representations of lesbian sexual acts will note that the kisses between the lovers in First-Class Midwife discussed above are by no means the first lesbian kiss in cinema or in Guy’s oeuvre. Film scholar Susan Potter begins her groundbreaking new book, Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema, with what she calls the “unruly erotics” of Guy’s 1898 Gavotte.[44]Susan Potter, Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 43. According to McMahan, Gavotte is structured around “the eroticism of seeing two women kiss.”[45]McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, 212. Likewise, the climax of Guy’s Les Fredaines de Pierrette/Pierrette’s Escapades (1900) is the kiss that ends the scene, suggesting that eroticized kisses between womxn were a staple of Guy’s trade and early cinema more broadly.[46]McMahan connects First-Class Midwife to Pierrette’s Escapades when she describes the costumes of the couple in the cabbage patch: “Guy’s costume resembles a Pierrot costume, and Germaine … Continue reading
Early film audiences would have been fluent in the literal punning and visual metaphors that Guy mined as she experimented with the visual language of cinema. Such fluency is necessary to see the intertextual references being mobilized in later periods. Almost a century after Guy’s kissing cabbage fairies, queer conservative Florence King lambasted the new positive images of lesbians in the media by sarcastically declaring that “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was into Cunnilingus.”[47] Florence King, “Democrazy,” chap. 8 in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1990), 95. In short, early film history was a cinema of citations that developed out of nineteenth-century visual, narrative, and sexual cultures.[48]The concept of a cinema of citations underscores the way that film form functions through conventions: it is citational. This reading inverts Charles Musser’s productive conception of early … Continue reading It can only be understood intertextually. Throughout most of the silent era, particularly before the end of World War I, intertextual marking, euphemism, and double entendre were among the most common ways that lesbian meanings circulated in popular culture. This is neither an absence nor an invisibility, it is a specific cultural formation with its own representational conventions.
Screenshot, Mrs. Wiggs and the Cabbage Patch (1919). For years, the stage role was played by lesbian actress Ada Dwyer Russell.
Femme Fairies and the Queer Reproduction of Femininity
French postcard, c. 1900. Private Collection.
Guy’s cabbage fairies circulated alongside other femme fairies that are unquestionably among the most popular of early films: the iconic serpentine or butterfly dances were produced by most major filmmakers, including the Lumière Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Guy herself.[49]My formulation of the femme fairy follows Patricia White’s paradigm of the “femme film” as “women’s pictures that sustain lesbian inference.” White, Uninvited, xviii. Although these films feature a variety of performers, they are all imitations of Loie Fuller’s revolutionary stage performances for which she earned the moniker of la fée électricité, or the electric fairy.[50]See Rhonda, K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Bud Coleman, “The Electric Fairy: The Woman Behind the Apparition … Continue reading
Like The Cabbage Fairy, at first glance, such films seem to conform to later models of womxn as object of the gaze. But when analyzed intertextually and in their historical context, it becomes clear that something more interesting is happening. In the femme fairies of early cinema, we witness the emergence of the normative hetero-feminine ideal of the twentieth century as it is being produced in imitation of and in relation to racialized lesbian sexualities and performance traditions.[51]As case in point, the dancer most closely associated with the genre, “Annabelle the Dancer,” was the first Gibson Girl of the Ziegfield Follies. On the Gibson Girl in relation to the New Woman, … Continue reading The magical movements of the electric fairy that were so widely imitated in early film were produced by the manipulation of a patented wand.[52]For more on Fuller’s patent, see Garelick, Electric Salome, 41. In performances and films, the wand disappears, reminiscent of Guy’s cabbage fairy’s discarded wand. But in other ephemera, such as the postcard above, the wand is part of the iconography of the dance, reinforcing the association between the iconic movements and the figure of the femme fairy.
Screenshot, Ballet Libella.
Not surprisingly, Guy’s contributions to this genre are infused with a Sapphic eroticism that Potter describes as part of “culturally normative nineteenth-century modes of female homoerotic spectatorship.”[53]Potter, Queer Timing, 102. Potter argues that Fuller’s erotic identity and performances are not intelligible in terms of contemporary concepts of sexuality including lesbianism, gender inversion, … Continue reading Guy made four such films in 1897 alone, beginning with Ballet Libella, which McMahan describes as “a beautiful hand colored film showing two women, one in a fairy costume, preparing to dance and then beginning to dance, while the second one watches her with an intense gaze.”[54]McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, 51, 211-212. Ballet Libella begins this video compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGjZB9bJQJQ. Guy’s intriguing Danse Serpentine Mme. Bob Walter/Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter (1897) is another beautiful example of the genre.[55]Mme. Bob Walter’s chosen name in the title/listings suggests the significance of her star persona to any reading of the film. I have found little material on her in English. See “Madame Bob … Continue reading
The ubiquity of the femme fairy at the advent of cinema underscores the fact that when kinetoscope parlors and projected cinema were first being commercialized in the 1890s, these lesbian figures, networks, representations, and audiences were central to the development and marketing of the new medium—and they would remain so throughout the silent era. Indeed, this period was so saturated with Sapphic claims to authorship, queer performance trends, and lesbian hyper-visuality more broadly that it could be called the Sapphic era, but that is a story for another time.
The foundational nature of lesbian visuality to early film culture comes clearly into view when we trace the Victorian aesthetic vernacular. While deep intertextual research is often necessary to access, or “see,” the meanings made in early film, these significations would have been obvious to their initial audiences. As is well known, reception studies of early cinema present a unique set of challenges. The Cabbage Fairy’s relationship to the postcard craze of the 1890s underscores the potential value of the brief messages often written on postcards to offer us fleeting contact with early film audiences.[56]This methodology follows feminist and queer work on scrapbooks by Leslie Midkiff DeBauche and Diana W. Anselmo. See Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, “Memory Books, the Movies, and Aspiring Vamps,” … Continue reading The lesbian iconography, which I have argued was central to the popularity of Guy’s famous cabbage patch films, is echoed in the cabbage fairies on the apparently popular postcard below (circa 1910). The doubled femme figures mirror each other, reaching their hands provocatively into the cabbages. An apparently older androgynous figure looks on from behind, recalling the cross-dressed lesbian lover in First-Class Midwife. The lover leans in from out of frame, cutting off the figure below the waist so that one cannot be sure of whether they wear pants or a skirt.
American postcard, c. 1910. Private Collection.
Three different hand-written notes sent via this card offer ambiguous messages, each with its own lesbian potential.[57]All three of the cards discussed are from my personal collection. The first reads in part: Don’t be caught by fairies as are on the opposite side of this card, they may be looking for you. While the message might carry either heterosexualized or queer meanings, it is significant that the three figures on the card are clearly identified as fairies themselves even without their wands or feather dusters. This is important because it underscores the aggressive sexualization of the fairy figure, which is at odds with accounts that situate the discourse in relation to prudery, children, or the folkloric past. Another copy of this card, apparently hand-delivered in Elmira, California, reads: Take your time and make your choice, B.Y. The use of initials and the lack of postmark suggest the choice in question might be of an intimate nature that requires some discretion. Granted, this choice may have been about any number of things, from a marriage proposal to an abortion. Yet, the joviality associated with a holiday postcard (the mirthful dangers of Halloween in particular) and the lesbian imagery on the card itself, certainly flirt with the possibility of a queer proposition. Finally, a third copy of this card carries a message that could be read as either the most innocuous or the most telling. This card, even more than the last, is conspicuously blank. It is dated by hand as Oct. 31, 1913, with no postmark, and inscribed only To Trina with no other identifying information such as a last name or address. The correspondence section of the card reads only: From Mother. While it is certainly conceivable that this was a mundane note passed from actual mother to daughter, given the iconography on the card it seems more plausible that this inscription marks a lesbian relationship in the Victorian tradition of “Mother-love.” As Martha Vicinus and other scholars have demonstrated, during this period, womxn in erotic relationships with each other frequently adopted the idealized language of maternal love as a “highly regarded vocabulary to describe same-sex love.”[58]Vicinus, “‘A Strenuous Pleasure’: Daughter-Mother Love,” chap. 5 in Intimate Friends, 113. See also Carolyn Tate, “Lesbian Incest as Queer Kinship: Michael Field and the Erotic Middle-Class … Continue reading Hold this thought.
Conclusion
The historical context of turn-of-the-century “mother-love” offers an opportunity to rethink the spate of recent headlines blaring declaratives such as “Hollywood Froze Out the Founding Mother of Cinema.”[59]Matthew Wills, “Hollywood Froze Out the Founding Mother of Cinema,” JStor Daily, March 13, 2019, https://daily.jstor.org/hollywood-froze-out-the-founding-mother-of-cinema/. See also Toniann … Continue reading Such headlines frame reviews of the documentary Be Natural, but they also reveal more about the current crisis of gender discrimination in Hollywood than about Guy’s work. After a screening of the documentary at the 2018 New York Film Festival, lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer raised what may be the most pressing question about Guy’s career for the present moment. Hammer recalled hearing stories in the 1980s that Guy had thrown her negatives into one of the Finger Lakes in Upstate New York. “Did you run across this story?” Hammer asked director Pamela Green, “Maybe it’s a mythology?”[60]Jodie Foster and Pamela B. Green, The Close-Up, Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #223, April 17, 2019, https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/the-close-up-pamela-b-green-and-jodie-foster-talk-be-natural/.
Image from Women I Love(Barbara Hammer, 1976). Courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Hammer’s incisive question queerly disrupts the naturalized way Guy’s story is framed as a rescue narrative, with scholars and filmmakers performing a heroic recovery of Guy and her lost films.[61]The rescue narrative has been the dominant framing of Guy’s career from Francis Lacassin, “Out of Oblivion: Alice Guy- Blaché,” Sight & Sound vol. 40, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 151-54, to A.O. … Continue reading The problem with the rescue narrative as a framing device is that, however feminist its intentions, it functions by positioning the profoundly successful Guy as a damsel-in-distress.
In the wake of #MeToo and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s findings of systemic discrimination against womxn in the film industry, it is tempting to draw parallels between Guy’s struggles and those of twenty-first-century womxn. [62]See, for example, Elena Nicolaou, “This Fact Will Make You View the Cannes Film Festival Differently,” Refinery29, May 8, 2018, … Continue reading Yet, now more than ever, it is imperative to disrupt the damsel-in-distress narrative and the heterosexist gendered stereotypes that propel it. The “untold,” “lost,” and “forgotten” history of Guy involves more than the insertion of a “forgotten mother of film” into a naturalized and heterosexualized account of film history. The repetition of such rhetoric renders it natural and thus reproduces the status quo, as Patricia White has pointed out in another context.[63]White, Uninvited, xii. Much of Guy’s legacy stems from her persistence in combatting such gender stereotypes in her life and across her prolific body of work. Close attention to the lesbian cultural contexts and visual iconographies of Guy’s influential output reveals a radically different story about the so-called “birth of cinema” than the ones we have been told. From cross-dressed lesbians kissing in the “cabbage patch” to the erotic encounters of femme fairies, Guy’s innovative play with film language presented lesbian pleasures to cinema’s first audiences and preserved them for future fairies. Mother of cinema? Mother-love, indeed!
Portrait of Alice Guy Blaché in 1912. Courtesy of Be Natural Productions/Zeitgeist Films.
Acknowledgements: With thanks to Kate Saccone, Maggie Hennefeld, and Shelley Stamp for their patient, generous, and incisive comments on this essay. I would also like to thank Susan Potter for her generative conversations, questions, and reading suggestions.
In 1996, the film now circulating under the title The Cabbage Fairy was first identified by scholars, although there remains controversy over whether this is indeed Guy’s The Cabbage Fairy, and if so, which version, the original or a remake.
Throughout this essay, the terms “lesbian” and “Sapphic” are used interchangeably to denote a variety of sexual desires, activities, relationships, identifications, and embodiments, which today might be called lesbian, bisexual, non-binary, pansexual, queer, trans, intersex, or gender nonconforming, among other terms. I use lesbian and Sapphic because they are era-appropriate, predate the dominance of the sexologists, and retain a gendered meaning that insists on feminist analysis within a patriarchal culture, while remaining capacious enough to include people who may have understood themselves in multiple, variable ways. Additionally, I use the contemporary intersectional feminist term “womxn” to denaturalize racialized and gendered language.
Janelle Dietrick with forward by Alice-Guy Blanche Peeters, La Fée Aux Choux: Alice Guy’s Garden of Dreams (Portland, OR: BookBaby [self-published], 2017). Page numbers refer to the Kindle version.
See Jesse Olszynko-Gryn and Patrick Ellis, “‘A Machine for Recreating Life’: An Introduction to Reproduction on Film,” British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 50, no. 3 (September 2017): 383-409.
George Chauncey, “The Fairy as an Intermediate Sex,” chap. 2 in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 47-64; on the Sapphic Fairytale as structure, see Elaine Marks, “Lesbian Intertextuality,” in Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts, eds. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 186.
On the wand as slang for penis in this era, see Jonathon Green, The Vulgar Tongue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 20, 191. For an example of contemporary controversy over sexual visual metaphor in public space, see Rachel Kraus, “These Sex Toy Ads Banned from the Subway. Now the Company is Suing,” Mashable, June 18, 2019, https://mashable.com/article/dame-mta-sex-toy-ad-lawsuit/.
On the prominence of “literal punning” and vulgar humor in Guy’s early work, see Kimberly Tomadjoglou, “Alice Guy’s Great Cinematic Adventure,” in Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, eds. Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 105-107. In English, the “cream puff” also carries queer feminized meanings dependent on this vulval imagery.
Thanks to Fabiola Hannah whose linguistic and cultural knowledge of French enabled this reading through our conversations. On the bawdiness of this song, see Yvonne Knibiehler, De la pucelle à la minette: les jeunes filles, de l’âge classique à nos jours/From the Virgin to the Pussy: Young Girls, from the Classical Age to Today) (Paris: Messidor, 1989), 109.
On longing and “retrospectatorship,” see Patrica White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
Guy’s own claims to authorship of the Gaumont “series N” films (nude films made as early as 1897) reposition The Cabbage Fairy in relation to its own historical moment. See Dietrick, La Fée Aux Choux, 867. But what shall we make of recent claims that Guy did not make this film at all? As for the possibility that this film is not one of Guy’s cabbage fairy stories, the best we can do at the moment is understand that this film has been adopted to stand in for Guy’s claims to authorship. After all, if we follow the dominant theories of authorship, it is her claims that matter to her author function.
In the third of Guy’s cabbage series, Madame a des envies/Madame Has Her Cravings (1906), a pregnant woman steals and consumes a stick of candy, a glass of absinth, and a smoking pipe before giving birth in the cabbage patch. Although, at first there appears to be no “fairy” in this film, it is present through visual play: absinth was known as “the green fairy,” while the simulated fellatio that Alison McMahan associates with the early use of the close-up also marks the protagonist as the “fairy,” in the slang of the time, suggesting oral sex, an act connected etymologically with “lesbian.” See Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2002), 36-42; Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 282-283.
Dietrick quotes Guy’s own claims that she did not perform in the film but put on the lover’s costume afterwards “for fun.” Dietrick, La Fée Aux Choux, 118. In footnote 137, she cites a letter from Guy to Louis Gaumont, dated January 15, 1954, which is held at the Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française (Ref no. LG371B50).
Shane Brown, Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy (New York: IB Tauris, 2016) 3; David M. Lugowski, “Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of Hollywood’s Production Code,” Cinema Journal vol. 38, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 4.
Alice Guy Blaché, The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, ed. Anthony Slide (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1986), 18. What are we to do with the similarity between René Viviani’s name and that of Renée Vivien, one of the most famous lesbians at the time, other than simply to note it? On reading Guy’s memoirs as montage, see Amelie Hastie, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 77.
Nicole G. Albert, Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-siécle France (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016); Francesca Canadé Sautman, “Invisible Women: Lesbian Working-Class Culture in France, 1880-1930,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, eds. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 179, 187.
The motif of the lesbian double is also connected to lesbian fashion of the Victorian era. It is historically significant in relation to lesbian cultural practice. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9-11.
Barbara Creed, “Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys, and Tarts,” in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (London: Routledge, 1995), 86.
The doubling trope is not confined to the dyad. Especially in its pornographic variants, it frequently evokes triangular relationships through the use of the mirror. This creates an uncanny effect of queer reproduction. For example, consider this erotic stereoview of two naked womxn on a bed. The bedroom setting suggests a sexual encounter between the two, but the standing woman’s narcissistic doubling stages a lesbian ménage à trois effect.
“Unknown photographer, France. Two nude women in a room with a mirror, c.1850-1855, Stereo daguerreotype,” featured in Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography [online gallery] via the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University.
Linda Williams, “Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies,” chap. 1 in Screening Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 28; On cross-dressed kisses, see Chris Straayer, “The Paradoxical Bivalent Kiss,” in chap. 3 in Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 54.
On the racialization in First-Class Midwife, see Kim Tomadjoglou, “Wonderment—Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Alice Guy Blaché,” in Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer, ed. Joan Simon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 109, 101-107; Tomadjoglou, “Alice Guy’s Great Cinematic Adventure,” 105-107.
For instance, see Gina Greene, “In the Garden of Puériculture: Cultivating the Ideal French Infant in Real and Imagined Landscapes of Care (1895–1935),” Change Over Time, vol. 6, no. 2 (2016), 192-214.
The idea of a “Victorian meme” is an anachronism, but I hope a productive one, highlighting the ongoing imagined relationship between cultural and biological reproduction. The term “meme” was coined in 1991, and combines the Greek word “mimesis” with “gene” to describe the “evolutionary cultural process by which social symbols are formed, cross-fertilized, and reproduced in new and diverse iterations of an original (or ‘genetic’) idea.” See Eileen Hunt Botting, Christine Carey Wilkerson, and Elizabeth N. Kozlow, “Wollstonecraft as an International Feminist Meme,” Journal of Women’s History, vol. 26, no. 2 (2014): 13-38. See also Giles Fraser, “Nobody is better at being human, Professor Dawkins, least of all you,” The Guardian, August 29, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/aug/29/nobody-better-at-being-human-richard-dawkins.
French eugenic thought has been differentiated from US and UK eugenics with the suggestion that French eugenics did not share the racism or classism of the broader movement. See, for example, William H. Schneider, “The Eugenics Movement in France, 1890-1940,” in Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 69-109. Yet, although significant differences certainly exist, the rhetoric of differentiation between good and bad (or positive and negative) eugenics suggests the possibility of a seemingly benign “biologically based movement for social reform” (Schneider 69). It is through such thinking that we get to current statements such as, “The old eugenic dream, temporarily discredited by Nazi pursuits of a ‘superior race,’ has been resurrected.” See Calum MacKellar and Christopher Bechtel, eds., The Ethics of the New Eugenics (Edinburgh: Berghahn Books, 2014), 2. On the relationship between eugenics, scientific racism, and colonialism in the French context, see Crystal Marie Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).
Olszynko-Gryn and Ellis, “‘A Machine for Recreating Life,’” 383-409. On the relationship between postcards and early film more broadly, see Lauren Rabinovitz, “The Miniature and the Giant: Postcards and Early Cinema,” chap. 4 in Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 96-135. On womxn as consumers of postcards, see Lisa Z. Sigel, “Filth in the Wrong People’s Hands: Postcards and the Expansion of Pornography in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1880-1914,” Journal of Social History vol. 33, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 859-885. For the foundational work on the racialization of postcards within the context of colonialism, see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Marie-Monique Huss, “Pronatalism and the Popular Ideology of the Child in Wartime France: The Evidence of the Picture Postcard,” in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work, and Welfare in Europe, 1914-1918, eds. Richard Wall and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 329-368. On the racialization of motherhood, see Ruby Tapia, American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death and the Maternal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
One notices the small Star of David that appears like a logo printed in the bottom right-hand corner. This is a feature of the card and appears on all the copies I have seen. The Star of David has been loosely associated with Judaism for centuries and this association grew during the nineteenth century. In 1897, the symbol was chosen to represent the Zionist movement. See “Star of David,” The Encyclopædia Britannica (Online), https://www.britannica.com/topic/Star-of-David; “The Flag and the Emblem,” Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, April 28, 2003, https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/israelat50/pages/the%20flag%20and%20the%20emblem.aspx.
I would note that it is possible to read the film as a lampoon of the racism of the white upper class. Such a reading is supported by McMahan’s description of the film as a satire. She writes “Sage-femme pokes fun at the way men use romance to coax women into producing children, but also at the way women insist that their babies meet certain class standards”(112). Such a reading would depend partially upon the film’s title which may have been written retrospectively by someone other than Guy. Dietrick argues that this film was originally titled La Fée Choux. See Dietrick, La Fée Aux Choux, 404n45-46.
Andrea Weiss, “‘A Queer Feeling When I Look at You’: Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991), 286.
This is the classic formulation of fetishistic disavowal, “I know very well, but just the same…” in which perceptual evidence is refused (in this case in favor of the heterosexual fetish). See Linda Williams, “‘Something Else Besides A Mother’: Stella Dallas and The Maternal Melodrama,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 137-162; Teresa de Lauretis, “The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian: The Fantasy of Castration and the Signification of Desire,” chap. 5 in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 222-229.
Alice Hagen Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Toronto: William Briggs, 1901), 4. Scholars differ on attributing lesbian meaning to words such as “queer,” “gay,” or even “peculiar,” but such words frequently index meanings that are made interstitially.
I believe Guy deployed these meanings deftly, with the inexplicable mix of unconscious instinct and intentional gesture frequently called artistic talent or genius. As McMahan and others have documented, in the years between 1900 and 1907, Guy was recognized as a leader and innovator in the field. Although The Cabbage Fairy and First-Class Midwife are early works in relation to the unusual longevity of her career, her persistent success with vulgar visual punning strongly suggests that we attribute the popularity of her cabbage fairies to her knowing and meaningful play with the Sapphic cultural zeitgeist.
See Gretchen Schultz, Sapphic Fathers: Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from Nineteenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). On the visible geographies of lesbian cruising in nineteenth-century Paris, see Lowry Martin, “Nymphomaniacs and Polymorphic Monsters: Imagining Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century France,” Paper presentation, Queer History Conference, San Francisco State University, June 18, 2019.
McMahan connects First-Class Midwife to Pierrette’s Escapades when she describes the costumes of the couple in the cabbage patch: “Guy’s costume resembles a Pierrot costume, and Germaine Serrand, who plays the wife, is dressed like Columbine” (112). For a description of a relevant intertext, the 1898 “Pierrot in Lesbos” by Lucien Merlet, see Albert, Lesbian Decadence, 51-52.
The concept of a cinema of citations underscores the way that film form functions through conventions: it is citational. This reading inverts Charles Musser’s productive conception of early cinema’s “aesthetics of discernment,” which is oriented toward spectatorship. In distinction, what I call the cinema of citations emphasizes authorship, following Judith Mayne’s assertion that “lesbian and gay readings take citation and replacement as central strategies.” See Charles Musser, “A Cornucopia of Images: Comparison and Judgement Across Theatre, Film, and the Visual Arts During the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2005), 6; Judith Mayne, “A Parallax View of Lesbian Authorship,” chap. 8 in Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 155.
My formulation of the femme fairy follows Patricia White’s paradigm of the “femme film” as “women’s pictures that sustain lesbian inference.” White, Uninvited, xviii.
See Rhonda, K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Bud Coleman, “The Electric Fairy: The Woman Behind the Apparition of Loie Fuller,” in Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theatre History, eds. Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 311-337; Tom Gunning, “Loie Fuller and the Art of Motion: Body, Light, Electricity, and the Origins of Cinema,” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucinda: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, eds. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 75-89.
As case in point, the dancer most closely associated with the genre, “Annabelle the Dancer,” was the first Gibson Girl of the Ziegfield Follies. On the Gibson Girl in relation to the New Woman, see Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfield Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 76-78. On Annabelle the Dancer, see Paul C. Spehr, “1890-1895: Movies and the Kinetoscope,” in American Cinema 1890-1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 35-36. On the racialization and “Imperial Gaze” of Fuller’s work, see Garelick, Electric Salome, 63-117.
Potter, Queer Timing, 102. Potter argues that Fuller’s erotic identity and performances are not intelligible in terms of contemporary concepts of sexuality including lesbianism, gender inversion, or Sapphic communities. This is important to her larger argument about the emergence of modern sexual identities and the sexuality effects of cinema. See pages 110-111.
Mme. Bob Walter’s chosen name in the title/listings suggests the significance of her star persona to any reading of the film. I have found little material on her in English. See “Madame Bob Walter-A Notorious Arranger of Elopements,” The Old Motor, June 14, 2014, http://theoldmotor.com/?p=121472.
This methodology follows feminist and queer work on scrapbooks by Leslie Midkiff DeBauche and Diana W. Anselmo. See Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, “Memory Books, the Movies, and Aspiring Vamps,” Observations on Film Art, February 8, 2015, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/02/08/memory-books-the-movies-and-aspiring-vamps/; Diana W. Anselmo, “Made in Movieland: Imitation, Agency, and Girl Movie Fandom in the 1910s,” Camera Obscura 94, vol. 32, no. 1 (2017): 129-165.
Vicinus, “‘A Strenuous Pleasure’: Daughter-Mother Love,” chap. 5 in Intimate Friends, 113. See also Carolyn Tate, “Lesbian Incest as Queer Kinship: Michael Field and the Erotic Middle-Class Victorian Family,” Victorian Review vol. 39, no. 2, Special Issue: Extending Families (Fall 2013): 181-199. My own archival findings corroborate the discourse of “Mother-love,” but suggest a more diverse and ironic interpretation than that of Vicinus or Tate.
The rescue narrative has been the dominant framing of Guy’s career from Francis Lacassin, “Out of Oblivion: Alice Guy- Blaché,” Sight & Sound vol. 40, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 151-54, to A.O. Scott, “‘Be Natural’ Review: Rescuing Alice Guy Blaché, a Film Pioneer, From Oblivion,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019, C10, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/movies/be-natural-untold-story-alice-guy-blache-review.html.
“Almost 75 years after its creation, this is the first published edition of Germaine Dulac’s What is Cinema? Composed of the cineaste’s lectures (1925-1939), compiled by her partner Marie-Anne Colson-Malleville and preserved in the Light Cone archives, the book illuminates the vital role of this pioneer of the 1920s French avant-garde, as an innovator of modern cinematic thought, who was reflecting, early on, in a sustained and analytical way about what cinema is.”
The book is available for purchase on Light Cone’s website.
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Italy, October 5-12, 2019
Le Giornate del Cinema Muto returns October 5-12 with another excellent lineup of rare titles and restorations.
This year’s edition of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto features sections dedicated to Mistinguett, Nasty Women part two, and Estonian silent cinema. Films like Joan the Woman (1916), which was scripted by Jeannie Macpherson, and The Lodger (1926), which Alma Reville assisted in directing, will also screen.
For the full program lineup and more information about the event, visit the festival’s website.
Helen Gardner’s Cleopatra (1912) Airs on September 29 as part of TCM’s Silent Sundays
Helen Gardner’s Cleopatra (1912), the first film produced by her own Helen Gardner Picture Players, will screen on TCM on Sunday, September 29 at 12:45am.
Book Talk & Event: “Slapstick Divas: The Women of Silent Comedy,” New York Public Library, Sept. 12, 2019
On Thursday, September 12 at 6pm, WFPP contributor Steve Massa will discuss his book Slapstick Divas: The Women of Silent Comedy and the many funny women of early cinema at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
“In America and abroad, the early cinema was full of funny ladies who were beloved by the audiences of their day but have since been overshadowed by the “boy’s club” of male comedians. Author Steve Massa takes a look at – and gives a nod to – the scores of hard-working women who from 1895 to the end of the silent era worked in front of the camera to keep audiences entertained.
Tickets will be distributed at the door on the day of the talk beginning at 5pm. Doors open at 5:30pm. Any tickets that were previously reserved on Eventbrite will be honored up to 5:45pm, at which time those seats will be open to standby.”
“In Queer Timing, Susan Potter offers a counter-history that reorients accepted views of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema. Potter sees the emergence of lesbian figures as only the most visible but belated outcome of multiple sexuality effects. Early cinema reconfigured older erotic modalities, articulated new—though incoherent—sexual categories, and generated novel forms of queer feeling and affiliation.
Potter draws on queer theory, silent film historiography, feminist film analysis, and archival research to provide an original and innovative analysis. Taking a conceptually oriented approach, she articulates the processes of filmic representation and spectatorship that reshaped, marginalized, or suppressed women’s same-sex desires and identities. As she pursues a sense of “timing,” Potter stages scenes of the erotic and intellectual encounters shared by historical spectators, on-screen figures, and present-day scholars. The result is a daring revision of feminist and queer perspectives that foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality.”
On the 125th anniversary of the first projection of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (1895), this 16th international conference turns its attention to all that occurs behind the factory doors: that is, the crafts, trades, and techniques that, while not always represented on screen, shape our experience of it.
Long part of Domitor’s mission, this reevaluation of the skills and practices that defined the cinema in its early decades aims to gain a better understanding of the medium in its varied industrial and professional aspects. The art, techniques, and gestures of craftspersons – such as performers, camera operators, editors, directors, designers, engineers, projectionists, programmers, and critics – like those of the factory or laboratory worker, had to be developed in their new specificity and in relation to existing cultural and technological forms.
Courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society.
We are interested in discovering how the industrialization of cinema, professionalization of workers, and standardization of techniques, alongside developing technologies, led to the creation (or at times, the diversion or subversion) of norms, legitimizing certain skills, crafts and techniques at the expense of others. Such fluctuating practices and professions, and their accompanying discourses and representations, merit further historical inquiry across hierarchies, divisions of labor, and lines of class, gender, race, ethnicity, region, and nation.
We are pleased to share the call for submissions for the Domitor 2019 Student Essay Award. If you are currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program, or have received a degree after January 2019, please consider submitting your paper. And if you teach scholars, archivists, or artists, please spread the word to your students. The deadline is September 15, 2019, and the award consists of a $500 prize and assistance with its publication in a professional film historical journal. Please find details attached and on our website: https://domitor.org/awards/.
CFP: Journal of Screenwriting, Special Issue: Female Screenwriters
The Journal of Screenwriting is calling for articles for a special issue with a focus on female screenwriters, to be published in August/September 2020.
Deadline: October 4, 2019
The Journal wants to emphasize the importance of female screenwriters across eras, genres, mediums. This importance may arise from an analysis of bodies of work, from individual scripts written by women, or from case studies where female screenwriters have worked collaboratively to express screen stories. Articles may also include women’s work behind the scenes in advocating for/promoting greater gender equality within screenwriting milieux. Articles on female screenwriters from diverse cultural backgrounds are encouraged.
Articles may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:
•Female screenwriters in silent cinema
•The influence of female writer(-directors) in contemporary culture
•Case studies on individual screenwriter’s work, collaborations between women, or on how women-centred stories have been brought to the screen
•Historiography of manuals and screenwriting pedagogy where this reflects the work of female screenwriters
•National and global tendencies with regard to women within screenwriting – relations, influences, cultural transfers
•Censorship and women’s stories and women’s writings
•Biographies of female screenwriters of any era
•Female screenwriters within writing partnerships
•The work of female screenwriters within script production (e.g. as showrunners, script editors or consultants)
•The question of a female voice within screenwriting
In the first instance, please email abstracts of up to 400 words and a short biography, no later than Friday, October 4, 2019, to both of the editors of this special issue:
Rosanne Welch: rosanne@welchwrite.com
Rose Ferrell: rosieglow@westnet.com.au
Completed articles of between 4000 and 8000 words should be sent by end January 2020 via the Journal of Screenwriting’s web page, where you can also access information on the journal’s house style: https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=182/
Peer review and acceptance/rejection will be completed by end of May 2020. Rewrites will be due by end of July 2020.
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international peer-reviewed journal published three times annually by Intellect, and is abstracted and indexed by Thomson Reuters: ISI Web of Knowledge, MLA and FIAF. It explores the nature of writing for the screen image; this includes not only writing for film and television but also computer games and animation. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
Book Talk: Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, Bryant Park, NYC, August 5, 2019
Maggie Hennefeld (University of Minnesota) will discuss her recent book Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes with Scott Adlerberg, as part of the Reel Talks program at Bryant Park in New York City.
Date: Monday, August 5
Time: 12:30-1:45pm
Location: Bryant Park, Reading Room
This event is free and open to the public. Books are available for purchase at the event and for signing by the author. Stick around for a Q&A.
The theme of this conference–‘Forming Histories/ Histories in Formation’–aims to foreground issues pertaining to the production, curation and archiving of women’s histories in film and television as well as the methods for, and approaches to, producing and shaping these histories as they form. More particularly, much can be learned from the diversity of practices, experiences and narratives of women’s film and television history as they pertain to: national, transnational, world and global histories; neglected, peripheral or hidden histories; organisations such as museums, archives and universities; collectives, groups and movements such as #MeToo; local communities and community media; emergent forms and platforms; and historical approaches to women’s reception of film and television as well as historicising current practices and experiences of reception, fandom and consumption.
This three-day conference casts the net wide so that it can capture a range of experiences, practices, industries, nationalities and voices that are situated in relation to women and their histories. The conference provides a platform for those working in and researching film, television and media more generally as well as those invested in the production of these histories and narratives of the past and as they materialise.
We invite papers that can provide added richness to the theme of ‘Women in Film & Television,’ and are, in addition, especially interested in the following areas:
▪International and comparative perspectives on women in film and television
▪Histories of women’s creative practice, production and technical work and film/cinema and television work more generally in various national, regional, or local contexts; transnational film and television; migration and diasporas
▪Approaches to histories of women’s indigenous production, including Third Cinema and grassroots film and television production
▪Representations of women in historical film and television
▪Female audiences, reception, fandom of film and television
▪Considerations of methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of women in film and television and their audiences
▪Archival research methods and approaches including feminist archiving practices
▪Use of recently established or historically neglected women’s media archives
▪Artefacts and ephemera in women’s archives: moving image, photographic and digital media, scripts, merchandise, etc.
▪Considerations of how gender intersects with race, class, ethnicity, in relation to film and television production, reception or representation
▪Revisiting production and labour through the lens of #MeToo and #TimesUp, including historical formations of, and historicising, such movements
▪Changing meanings of women and womanhood as reflected and shaped by the interventions of women in film and television as producers, critics, and campaigners.
▪Teaching women’s film and television history; feminist pedagogies; the politics of education and training; women’s experiences of moving from education to employment in film and television
Please submit proposals of 250 words along with the paper’s title and a 50-word biography. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes, including clips and images. We welcome pre-constituted panels of three to four presenters (with panel title and abstract of 150 words), proposals for roundtables or workshops and presentations from researchers, practitioners, creatives and industry professionals. Deadline for proposals Oct 11th 2019. Email: dwfthv@gmail.com
Visit the website for the conference and follow its Twitter account for updates.
Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival, Bologna, Italy, June 22-30, 2019
This year, Il Cinema Ritrovato, a film festival dedicated to rare films and rediscoveries, runs from June 22-30, 2019! As always, this rich festival will take place in Bologna, Italy.
Poster by Guy Arnoux for Les Vampires (1916), Musidora as Irma Vep
“Once again Il Cinema Ritrovato will act as a time machine, exploring three centuries of cinema, from the end of the 1800s to the start of the twenty-first century; a machine travelling through space, taking us on many journeys through European, American, African, Asian and Latin American cinema. Discover never-before-seen works and rediscover those we’ve loved forever, with the screening of the best copies, newly restored, and with ideal projection conditions.”
Mostly Lost 8, Culpeper, Virginia, June 12-15, 2019
Mostly Lost returns for its 8th edition, running from June 12-15, 2019!
“The Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus presents ‘Mostly Lost 8: A Film Identification Workshop’ in Culpeper, Virginia. ‘Mostly Lost’ will feature the screenings of unidentified, under-identified or misidentified silent and sound films. Beginning with an opening reception the evening of Wednesday, June 12, the event continues until the evening of Saturday, June 15.
Early film experts and archivists are encouraged to attend, but the workshop is also open to anyone willing to actively help identify and research the films showcased at the workshop. In addition to films from the Library of Congress collections, ‘Mostly Lost’ features material from other film archives around the world. Throughout the event there will also be presentations, live musical accompaniment during the workshop and evening presentations of silent films will also be featured.”
In 2002, Annette Kuhn reflected, in Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory, that in regards to 1930s British cinemagoers, “we hardly know these people at all” (2002, 3); Jackie Stacey (1994, 49) focusing on British female movie fans of the 1940s and 1950s, made a similar observation in 1994, when she noted that “there is a history of female cinematic spectatorship which has yet to be written.” In their respective works, both scholars used sources such as magazines, questionnaires and interviews to begin to write exactly that history.
This conference wishes to build upon this observation that “we hardly know these people at all” by expanding its meaning in terms of the people involved, both in terms of time and in terms of demographics. We therefore invite papers focusing on marginalised female audiences in the broadest sense, and interpret this in two distinct ways. Firstly, we seek to hear from scholars focusing on rediscovering or uncovering particular audiences, marginalised vis-à-vis the texts they consumed through racial, ethnic or religious identity, through geographic or linguistic distance, through sexual orientation or gender identity, through disability status, through social class, etc. This includes a demographic analysis of such audiences, an examination of their specific and varied fan practices and attitudes, the intersectional identities of certain audience members, etc.
It also includes, however, broader contemplations on the very notion of the “marginalised” audience.
Firstly: if we are indeed all, as Henry Forman wrote in 1933, “movie-made”, what, then, does it mean to be “made” by movies or media texts specifically aimed at demographic groups with a privilege inaccessible to many other audience members? Secondly, we are keen to acknowledge and discuss the methodological challenges involved in studying such audiences, and the ways in which difficulties in terms of scholarly research may essentially serve to marginalise the group in question further. Thirdly, we wish to invite auto-ethnographic reflections from scholars working on such research topics, while also members of one or more marginalised groups themselves.
While the organisers’ own research is rooted within a film-historical context, and indeed we are very interested in hearing from those engaged in rediscovering lost historical audiences, we also invite submissions from those working on contemporary LGBTQ+, disabled, or racial/ethnic/religious minority women spectators. We particularly hope to reach out to scholars working within the multidisciplinary field of fan studies, where much fascinating work has been done, in recent years, on examining the practices of such audiences, as well as their relationship to traditional conceptions of fandom (such scholars include Kristen J. Warner, Rukmini Pande, Julie Levin Russo, Eve Ng, and others). While film and television history and fan studies have largely operated in distinct and separate spheres from one another, we believe the disciplines can come together in fruitful and methodologically interesting ways in order to allow us a more complete picture of these often invisible fans.
Potential topics can include, but are not limited to:
• Historical perspectives on cinemagoing in ethnic communities
• Immigrant spectatorship
• The consumption of Hollywood movies by minority women
• LGBTQ+ fandoms
• Methodologies to access historically lost audiences
• Film archives and the marginalised audience
• Black women as movie fans
• Disability and spectatorship
• Studies of film reception amongst specific religious groups
• Women-only film screenings and film clubs
• Characteristics of marginalised spectatorship
• The methodological challenges in examining female audiences
• Theorising lesbian spectatorship
• Working class women and the movies
• Women and film criticism
• Gender and race-specific viewing pleasures
• National minorities and cinema culture
• Girlhood and fandom
• Geographically specific viewing practices
We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20-minute papers, as well as panel proposals for pre-constituted panels (consisting of three papers). Conference attendance will be free of charge.
Send your proposal and a short bio to Lies Lanckman and Agata Frymus at womenspectatorship.conf@gmail by 30 June 2019.
“She’s the North Side original and influential woman pioneer in early film making you may have never heard of!
Celebrate Lois Weber’s 140th birthday with the unveiling of a new historical marker outside the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny branch during the day, then join the History Center in the evening for a special conversation between acclaimed actor and Turner Classic Movies host Illeana Douglas and film historian Shelley Stamp.
Lois Weber (p/d/w/a), PC
At 2 p.m., join Illeana Douglas, representatives from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and the Heinz History Center for the unveiling of a new state historical marker outside the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Allegheny branch.”
Women and the Silent Screen 10/Eye International Conference 2019 – Sisters, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 25-29, 2019
The 10th Women and the Silent Screen conference will take place May 25-29, in Amsterdam at the Eye Filmmuseum!
“Women and the Silent Screen (WSS), an international conference held biennially, brings together research focusing on all forms of women’s presence in the earliest decades of motion picture history. After its first edition in Utrecht in 1999, the conference is coming back to the Netherlands to celebrate its twentieth year. The theme of WSS X is Sisters, taken both literally and figuratively within a wide range of theoretical and historical angles.
The Eye International Conference, held annually, explores contemporary archival and academic debates, catering to film heritage professionals, scholars, archivists, curators, and restorers. The conference includes panels and special screenings of (restored) films.”
For the full conference schedule and more information, click here.
Film Screening: Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Thursday, May 9, 2019
The Cinema Studies Group at The Graduate Center, City University of New York is pleased to present a screening of silent films by women filmmakers, restored as part of Kino Lorber’s “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers” release.
The screening will take place on Thursday, May 9, 2019, at 5:30pm at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (365 Fifth Avenue, Room C-197, Concourse Level)
Curated by Elyse Singer, Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance/Film Certificate
WFPP’s Kate Saccone will be on hand to introduce some of the films and filmmakers and for a post-screening discussion.
For more info/to register for the screening, click here.
This year’s lineup includes The Oyster Princess/Die Austernprinzessin(1919), The Home Maker (1925), Opium (1919), Husbands and Lovers (1924), Japanese Girls at the Harbor/Minato no nihon musume (1933), and much, much more!
Ossi Oswalda in The Oyster Princess (1919).
“This year’s program features 25 programs (including an illustrated lecture presentation at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley), all with live musical accompaniment! There are films from ten different countries— Bali, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Sweden, US, and the USSR—and more than 40 brilliant musicians from around the world to accompany!”
For the full schedule and more information, click here!
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché Opens at New York’s IFC Center on April 26, 2019!
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, directed by Pamela B. Green, opens at New York’s IFC Center on Friday, April 26, 2019!
“Alice Guy-Blaché was a true pioneer who got into the movie business at the very beginning – in 1894, at the age of 21. Two years later, she was made head of production at Gaumont and started directing films. She and her husband moved to the United States, and she founded her own company, Solax, in 1910 – they started in Flushing and moved to a bigger facility in Fort Lee, New Jersey. But by 1919, Guy-Blaché’s career came to an abrupt end, and she and the 1,000 films that bore her name were largely forgotten.
Pamela B. Green’s energetic film is both a tribute and a detective story, tracing the circumstances by which this extraordinary artist faded from memory and the path toward her reclamation. Narration by Jodie Foster. — New York Film Festival.”
The Denver Silent Film Festival is back! Running from April 26-28, 2019, the festival lineup includes a discussion with Amy Heller and Dennis Doros of Milestone Films and screenings of Blackmail (1929), Shiraz (1928), Within Our Gates (1920), Dragnet Girl (1933), and more!
Shiraz: A Romance of India (1928)
“The Denver Silent Film Festival was established in September of 2010. The Denver Silent Film Festival presents a broad spectrum of silent film by programming a lively and thought-provoking mix of educational and entertaining films. American and foreign classics, as well as lesser-known rare and restored films will be presented.”
For more information, visit the festival’s website or Facebook page.
Feminist Media Histories special issue on Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media is now out!
The Spring 2019 issue of Feminist Media Histories is now out! This issue, guest edited by Elena Gorfinkel, focuses on sex and the materiality of adult media.
“This issue’s contributions bring together approaches that expand and complicate distinctions between high and low forms, commercial porn industries and independent productions, and queer and straight sex media, contesting the purisms of what can count as cinema, art, and value by instead foregrounding the materiality of the sex film. They suggest that we must contend with how sexual representations—across practices, communities, publics, and counter-publics—have always revealed adult media to be vexed sites of materiality.”
Women Film Pioneers Symposium, Milwaukee, WI, April 19, 2019
Curated by WFPP contributor Tami Williams, the Women Film Pioneers Symposium will take place at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on April 19, 2019!
Speakers include WFPP contributors Maggie Hennefeld, Shelley Stamp, and Jennifer M. Bean, as well as WFPP founder Jane Gaines.
“Film and media scholars have long been interested in questions of gender equity and representation, from theorizing gender to restoring the historical contributions of women as subjects, producers, and spectators. In recent years this work has been facilitated by a return to the archives and their material sources: from newspaper clippings and correspondence to production files and film prints.
As this research has revealed, women’s participation in the first decades of cinema was much more extensive than previously thought. Not only as colorists, camera operators, and exhibitors, but also as screenwriters, directors, and producers, women played an integral role in the early artistic development of the medium, bringing unique viewpoints and an imaginative exploration of crucial topics of the time, many of which remain surprisingly relevant today. The Women Film Pioneers Symposium brings four leading early cinema scholars together to explore questions of historiography, archival research, and affect.”
For more information on the symposium speakers and the companion film screenings, click here.
The Toronto Silent Film Festival will take place this year from April 5-8, 2019, at the Fox Theatre!
2019 marks the 10th anniversary of the Toronto Silent Film Festival, and titles this year include Shiraz: A Romance of India (1928), The Temptress (1926), and the Canadian restoration premiere of Skinners Dress Suit (1926).
Film News: Entire Danish silent film heritage to be digitized!
The Danish Film Institute announced in December 2018 that their entire Danish silent film heritage will now be digitized and disseminated!
Asta Nielsen and Poul Reumert performing in Afgruden (1910). DKK
“One of the most important chapters in Danish film history will now become available thanks to a donation of DKK 30 million from the A.P. Møller Foundation, the Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen Foundation and the Augustinus Foundation.
From around 1910, the Danish film industry was a world leader, both commercially and artistically, with Nordisk Films Kompagni (now Nordisk Film) at the forefront. Stars like Asta Nielsen, Valdemar Psilander and Fy & Bi were famous way beyond their home country, and Denmark’s greatest film director, Carl Th. Dreyer, was prolific during this period as well. When sound films gained ground in the early 1930s, production companies scrapped their inventories of silent films. Only an estimated 20% of the Danish silent film production exists today.”
Hippodrome Silent Film Festival, Bo’ness, Scotland, March 20-24, 2019
Scotland’s first and only silent film festival, HippFest, is back from March 20-24, 2019!
The Blot (1921)
Events include a screening of The Blot (Lois Weber, 1921) introduced by Pamela Hutchinson and an illustrated talk by WFPP contributor Lawrence Napper on the changing role of women in the workplace in relation to the silent film Hindle Wakes (1927)
“ALICE HOWELL, FORGOTTEN FUNNY LADY OF THE SILENT SCREEN, FEATURED IN NEW TWO-DISC DVD SET OF REDISCOVERED AND NEWLY RESTORED COMEDY SHORTS. Undercrank Productions Teams with Library of Congress To Bring Star Comedienne and Films Back From Obscurity To The Public for Women’s History Month.”
The set will contain:
Disc One: Shot in the Excitement (1914), Father Was a Loafer (1915), Under New Management (1915), How Stars Are Made (1916), Neptune’s Naughty Daughter (1917), In Dutch (1918).
Disc Two: Distilled Love (1920), His Wooden Leg-acy (1920), Her Lucky Day (1920), Cinderella Cinders (1920), A Convict’s Happy Bride (1920), Under A Spell (1925).
The Alice Howell Collection is curated by Steve Massa and Ben Model, produced for video by Ben Model, and released by Undercrank Productions.
For more information and to purchase a copy, click here.
Film Series: “William Fox Presents: More Restorations and Rediscoveries from the Fox Film Corporation,” MoMA, March 1-26, 2019
“William Fox Presents: More Restorations and Rediscoveries from the Fox Film Corporation”
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
March 1-26, 2019
From MoMA’s website:
“Following last summer’s three-week program of rarely seen Fox films, here is another selection of Fox gems from the MoMA vault, including new digital restorations of several important titles, including Frank Borzage’s 1928 masterpiece Street Angel, as well as archival prints not publicly screened in decades.”
In addition to Street Angel (titles by Katharine Hilliker), the series includes Hangman’s House (1928) (scenario by Marion Orth), and Lazybones (1925) (written by Frances Marion).
Athena Film Festival, Barnard College, February 28-March 3, 2019
Athena Film Festival
Barnard College, New York, NY
February 28-March 3, 2019
“The Athena Film Festival at Barnard College in New York City, is a weekend of inspiring films that tell the extraordinary stories of fierce and fearless female leaders.”
The 2019 Athena Film Festival has announced its lineup, which includes a screening of the documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2019), on Saturday, March 2.
For more information about the festival, click here.
CFP: The British Silent Film Festival Symposium, April 11-12, 2019
The British Silent Film Festival is back for its 20th edition, running from September 12-15, 2019 at the Phoenix in Leicester!
The British Silent Film Festival Symposium is also back this year (taking place on April 11-12), at the Strand campus of King’s College London. The deadline for paper proposals is February 28, 2019.
BSFFS invites proposals for presentations on any aspect of film making and film going in Britain or across the British empire before 1930. Please submit abstracts under 300 words before 28th February 2019 to Lawrence.1.Napper@kcl.ac.uk
“In thinking about what we wanted to do for our 23rd event it dawned on us that we talk a lot about what is lost—there is a pretty high percentage out there of silent films that are lost and gone forever. But what about the successes? What about the films that were thought lost but were found in foreign archives, with collectors, and in some really lucky cases, tucked in the hay in a barn. All the films showing this year were lost then found, or simply needed restoration to bring them back to life.”
We invite proposals for a special issue on Feminist Approaches to Media and the Environment. This issue of Feminist Media Histories considers the role of women and gender in film and media about the environment in a range of different global contexts and time periods.
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
• Feminist theory, ecocriticism, new materialism
• Lesbian, gay, queer, trans, and genderfluid environmental media histories – film and media makers, producers, writers, communities
• Histories of indigenous media and the environment
• Global environmental case studies and media practices
• Women in early environmental history (19th and early 20th century)
• Women and media in the popular environmental movement (1950s to present)
“The field of Asian feminist media studies is inchoate and under-defined. Despite increasing archival endeavors to excavate women’s work in early to mid-twentieth-century film and media cultures in Asia and continuous scholarly attention to the accomplishments of contemporary Asian women film and media makers, a concerted, in-depth reexamination of women’s media work in different parts of Asia has been lacking.”
https://wfpp.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/18_Lovday-300x187.jpg 300w, 
