Category: Projections

Print

Daughters of Mary and Gene: The Two Origins of the Serial Queen Action Heroine

The Motion Picture Story Magazine, 1913.

On July 26, 1912, the Edison Company released a film that changed history, reworking the conventions of stage melodrama into an exciting action film that would introduce a new type of female protagonist to the screen. The film was the first episode of What Happened to Mary, the first American film to be released in numbered episodes, and the performer was Mary Fuller, the first serial queen and the woman who laid the groundwork for more famous stars such as Pearl White.

Or so the story goes…

The Moving Picture World, 1909.

There is another version of the serial queen’s origin story, a version centered on Kalem Company actress Gene Gauntier, who, in 1909, wrote and starred in a short film entitled The Girl Spy: An Incident of the Civil War, the first of six films in which she starred as Nan, an adventurous Confederate woman who regularly dressed as a man to infiltrate Union lines and carry out spectacular acts of sabotage. The Girl Spy films, with their episodic structure and Gauntier’s spectacular stunts, share more with later serials than the relatively slow-paced What Happened to Mary, and suggest that Gauntier, and not Mary Fuller, should be considered the “first” serial queen. However, the Girl Spy films are generally excluded from histories of the serial queen phenomenon. In fact, Gauntier’s influence on the serial queen phenomenon was first written about less than fifteen years ago, when Jane M. Gaines discussed Gauntier in her 2010 article “World Women: Still Circulating Silent Era Prints.” This (re)discovery raises a crucial question: which one of these two origin stories is the correct one?

The answer may well be “both.”

Gene Gauntier in Motion Picture Story Magazine (August 1912): 14.

Mary Fuller. Courtesy of the Sayre (J. Willis) Collection of Theatrical Photographs, University Libraries, University of Washington.

Although the films of the serial queens, from today’s perspective, may seem to follow a relatively uniform pattern—following adventurous young women who fought against dastardly villains, often, but not always, in order to claim an inheritance or protect loved ones—for most of their heyday, they actually evolved along two separate, but parallel tracks. One of these tracks emphasized spectacular physical action and thrilling stunts, while the other emphasized the development of melodramatic narrative situations that frequently took precedence over physical action. These two trajectories can be mapped onto the two “founding mothers” of the serial queen phenomenon: Gene Gauntier, action-adventure heroine par excellence, and Mary Fuller, whose serials, though slower-paced and less concerned with spectacular stunts, can nevertheless tell us a great deal about the serial queens. In order to truly understand the serial queen phenomenon, we must not merely replace one currently accepted origin story with another. Instead, we must take the phenomenon’s multiple origin points into account in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the serial queen, who, of all the female figures recently brought (back) into our film-historical understanding of the silent era, has heretofore remained one of the most elusive.

In most works on the subject, the serial queen has been exemplified by stars such as Pearl White and Helen Holmes, who achieved fame primarily in serials, playing characters who demonstrate large degrees of self-reliance and perform demanding and often dangerous physical feats or stunts over the course of their films, often without the assistance of a stunt double. And there is nothing wrong with this characterization of the serial queen per se. The problem emerges when two or three actresses—namely, Pearl White, Helen Holmes, and sometimes Grace Cunard—are allowed to stand in for a much broader phenomenon.

In my research on the serial queens, I have identified no fewer than thirty-eight actresses in the United States alone whose action-oriented performances in serialized films during the silent era rightly earn them the title of “serial queen.” Furthermore, as a recent edited volume points out, the serial queen phenomenon was by no means limited to the United States (Dahlquist 2014).

My research thus far identifies thirty-eight American actresses who could be called serial queens.

This list reminds us that there was no one way to be a serial queen—while all of the serial queens were action heroines in some sense or another, not all of them were as known for death-defying stunts in the same ways that Pearl White or Helen Holmes were. Some, instead, starred in films that emphasized the development of melodramatic narrative situations that frequently took precedence over physical action. It is this variance that needs to be accounted for, and this is the reason that it is so important to have a detailed understanding of the serial queen’s origins.

Poster for Joseph Arthur’s 1890 play “Blue Jeans” depicting the famous buzz saw rescue scene.

The roots of the serial queens predate the films of Gene Gauntier and Mary Fuller. In fact, they predate cinema itself. Like so much early narrative cinema, the framework of the serial queen films originated in nineteenth-century stage melodrama, a theatrical form which, as Ben Singer has shown, had its own tradition of daring female heroes who rescued men from buzz saws and onrushing trains just as they would do in the serials (243-244). Furthermore, as Linda Williams points out, these plays centered on “a dialectic of pathos and action” (30), and it is this dialectic that can show us why the serial queen films are such interesting examples of cinematic melodrama—and why they are so unusual.

Singer writes that the serial queens never inspire pathos; their daring heroism is in fact incapable of inspiring pathos because “hardship, abuse, punishment…do not generate pathos if the victim enters into dangers voluntarily, or exhibits sufficient strength, skill, and fortitude of will to allow for the possibility of recuperation, retaliation, or glorification” (56). And while it is not true that the serial queens never inspired pathos, we can use this passage (somewhat against itself) to understand why it is so important when they do. Although pathos and valor do tend to be opposed within a melodramatic narrative, to argue that they can only exist in an inverse relation to one another is to deny the dialectic of pathos and action that Williams sets up. As she points out, these two attributes can interact in such a way that the pathos may “entitle [i.e., enable] action” (32). Importantly, this interaction works differently when the audience’s pathos is inspired by the serial queen’s predicament than it does when it is inspired by the situation that the serial queen is attempting to resolve. This variance is crucial, and the serial queen’s doubled origin may well be the key to understanding it and, in turn, the confounding gender dynamics at the heart of the serial queen phenomenon.

Screenshot, Gene Gauntier as Nan in The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg (1911).

Mary Fuller, Picture Play Magazine (May 1917): 17.

These gender dynamics have been the subject of a great deal of the scholarship on the serial queens. To return once again to Singer, he argues that the serials feature a paradoxical relationship between “power and peril”: although the serial queens were women of action who took control of their own destinies and performed death-defying physical stunts, the serials themselves often seem to punish their stars’ agency by placing them in spectacular danger week after week (221). And, as Shelley Stamp writes in Movie-Struck Girls, the serial queen’s performance of gender relies on a particular form of doubling by which the serial queen effectively plays two different characters, “one conventionally feminine and passive, the other masculine and active” (151). However contradictory it may seem, though, this doubled performance of gender begins to look less puzzling when we consider the fact that the serial queen’s origin is similarly doubled. The two halves of the her gender performance map very neatly onto the performances of the serial queen’s two “founding mothers”: Gene Gauntier’s Girl Spy films, fast-paced and full of spectacular action centered on the serial queen herself, presage the “masculine and active” serial queens while Mary Fuller’s serials typically show the serial queen’s more traditionally feminine side (although Fuller’s performance of gender is by no means conventional).

The differences between Gauntier’s and Fuller’s versions of the serial queen can best be demonstrated through selections from two of their films: Gauntier’s The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg (1911) and Fuller’s “A Way to the Underworld” (1912), the ninth episode of What Happened to Mary. Gauntier’s film, the third Girl Spy film, begins as her character’s father, a beleaguered Confederate general, writes her a letter asking her to once again disguise herself as a man to infiltrate the Union lines. This time, her mission is to sabotage a Union powder transport. She successfully gains the confidence of the Union troops and blows up the powder wagon. This, of course, reveals her as a spy, and she must make a narrow escape from the Union troops, who chase her through the forest, finally losing her trail at a river after she once again proves her physical endurance by hiding underwater for several minutes while the soldiers search for her. After they give up the search, she is able to emerge and return home to her mother—soaking wet and exhausted, but triumphant, and otherwise none the worse for wear.

The first remarkable thing about The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg is the sheer amount of action that it packs into its 14-minute runtime. The film features multiple exciting chase scenes and, of course, the sabotage of the powder wagon. Most importantly, all of this action centers on Nan. She consistently occupies the active position within the narrative, forcing the Union men into the reactive role by remaining one step ahead of them throughout the entire film. This is a characteristic that Nan shares with later serial queens, who consistently exhibit considerable narrative agency, which is to say that they actively initiate events as opposed to simply responding to events initiated by other characters or by “impersonal” causalities such as natural disasters (Bordwell 13).

Another element that the film shares with later serials is the spectacular stunt work. The scene in which Nan blows up the powder wagon is filmed using only two shots: a long take of Nan knocking out the guard, dragging him away, and returning to light the fuse, and another where she sprints away from the powder wagon and ducks out of sight as it explodes, only to immediately pop up after the blast and begin running away from the scene. There are no other edits in the scene—meaning that Gauntier actually was dangerously close to the exploding powder wagon. This was relatively commonplace for Gauntier, who wrote her own screenplays and included daring stunts in nearly every film she made for Kalem. As she writes in her memoirs:

My screen work was all strenuous, horseback riding for hours each day, water scenes in which I committed suicide or floated on spars in shark-infested waters, climbing trees, coming down on ropes from second-story windows, jumping from roofs or rolling down to be caught in blankets, overturning skiffs, paddling canoes, a hundred and one “stunts” thought out to give the action that Kalem films demanded. I was terrified at each daring thing I had to do…but for some inexplicable reason I continued to write them. They never seemed difficult when I was seated before the typewriter. (170)

Importantly, this phenomenon—female stars writing dangerous stunts for themselves to perform—is not unique to Gauntier’s experience and is in fact an integral part of later serial queen films. For example, Helen Holmes once told an interviewer that, “If a photoplay actress wants to achieve real thrills, she must write them into the scenario herself…Men usually won’t provide for a girl things to do that they wouldn’t do themselves” (Duryea 741). What is more, Gauntier shows absolutely no fear in the film’s action sequences, thus inspiring effectively no pathos. This is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the film, and one of the most obvious differences between her films and the films that Mary Fuller would make just a year later. While Gauntier’s films emphasized action and featured a fearless heroine who runs unhesitatingly into danger, Fuller’s films feature a different kind of action heroine for whom a viewer can feel pathos even as we marvel at her thrilling stunts and escapes.

Advertisement for “A Way to the Underworld,” The Bioscope (6 November 1913): 514.

“A Way to the Underworld” begins with the trial of Richard and Henry Craig, the crooked financiers who have spent the previous eight episodes attempting to swindle Mary, their ward, out of a six million dollar inheritance. They are convicted and sentenced to a long prison term, but even in prison, they continue to scheme. They bribe a prison guard to send a message to Billy Peart, the unscrupulous man who raised the orphaned Mary, instructing him to kidnap Mary and hold her captive until the deadline for claiming her inheritance has passed. Peart visits Mary in New York City and tricks her into a taxicab, where he drugs her, takes her to a run-down building, and imprisons her in a fifth-floor room. After waking up, Mary concocts a plan to escape. She ties together the sheets from her bed and dangles them out the window just as Peart bursts into the room. Hesitatingly, Mary climbs down to the ground and, after pausing briefly to regain her composure, she begins to run with Peart in hot pursuit. Peart is faster, but Mary is more resourceful, taking refuge in a Salvation Army outpost where the missionaries promise to protect her. At this point, the episode ends, reminding us to return to the theater in two weeks to find out “What Happened to Mary” next.

The most obvious point of comparison between What Happened to Mary and The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg is the amount of physical action in the two films. While Gene Gauntier performs several spectacular stunts over the course of her film, in “A Way to the Underworld,” Mary Fuller performs just one: her escape from imprisonment by means of a bedsheet rope. Furthermore, Mary is not as fearless as Gene: she is clearly afraid before attempting to climb down the rope and must shake off fear (and possibly fatigue) after reaching the bottom. There is a visible difference between this version of the serial queen and the one who detonated a wagonload of gunpowder directly behind herself and was up and running before the smoke even cleared. Fuller’s performance is much more likely to move an audience to feel pathos for Mary’s difficult situation than Gauntier’s dauntless performance as Nan.

However, this difference should not be seen as a deficiency. For one thing, although the pathos we feel for Mary does suggest that a rescuer is needed to extricate her from her situation, her resourcefulness allows her to position herself as her own rescuer. Furthermore, the overwhelming focus on spectacular stunts has left scholarship on serial queens with a noticeable blind spot. Yes, the serials of Pearl White and Helen Holmes are fascinating—thrilling pieces of feminist cinema and crucial parts of the history of the action-adventure film. But what do we do with all of the other serial queens—women who made serials in which they were unquestionably the central figures, but which may not have featured as much physical action? It is for the sake of these women’s place in history that I suggest we need to look back to the serial queen’s origins in order to expand our definition of the term, and to realize that while some of their films emphasize physical action and while others emphasize melodramatic situations, they nearly always include both elements. Even the “peerless, fearless” Pearl White generally settled down and married at the end of her serials,  although in the case of The House of Hate (1918), her marriage did not mark the end of her adventures as she spends the serial’s final reel as a battlefield nurse during World War I (Weitzel 716). Even serials that have previously been considered too focused on romantic melodrama to be of much interest (for example, Runaway June [1915], starring Norma Phillips and dismissed by Kalton C. Lahue as slow and overly reliant on dialogue titles [33]) appear to have included plenty of action, if its marketing copy can be believed.

Advertisement for Runaway June, Motion Picture News 11, no. 11 (20 March 1915): 14-15.

In conclusion, by examining the serial queen’s two origin points in conjunction with one another, we stand to gain a more nuanced view of the serial queen and her unusually complex performance of gender. The serial queen’s dual trajectory, launched by the figure’s origin in two different performers, allowed her, as a character type, the ability to operate uncommonly well within a variety of different narrative contexts: some centering primarily on spectacular physical action (the “Daughters of Gene”) and others prioritizing narrative situations (the “Daughters of Mary”). And while the former are far more present in current film historiography than the latter, in order to gain a complete picture of the serial queen phenomenon—one that can escape the binary opposition between “masculine” action and “feminine” sentiment—we will have to take both into account.

A version of this essay was originally presented at the Women and the Silent Screen XI conference in New York in June 2022.

Bibliography

Bordwell, David. “Story Causality and Motivation.” In The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, by Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, and Janet Staiger. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 12-23.

Brown, Robert Carlton. What Happened to Mary. New York: Edward J. Close, 1913.

Dahlquist, Marina, ed. Exporting Perilous Pauline. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Duryea, Bryan. “The Necessity of Thrills.” Green Book Magazine 15, no. 4 (April 1916): 741-743.

Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Gaines, Jane M. “World Women: Still Circulating Silent Era Film Prints.” Framework 51, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 283-303.

Gauntier, Gene. “Blazing the Trail: A Fascinating and Authentic History of the Early Motion Pictures [second installment].” Woman’s Home Companion 55, no. 11 (November 1928): 25-26; 166; 168-170.

Lahue, Kalton C. Continued Next Week: A History of the Motion Picture Serial. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964.

Mahar, Karen Ward. Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Stamp, Shelley. Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Stedman, Raymond William. The Serial: Suspense and Drama By Installment. 2nd ed. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977.

Weitzel, Edward. Review of The House of Hate, chapter 20: “Following Old Glory.” Moving Picture World 37, no. 5 (3 August 1918): 716.

Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Print
← News Archive

The Women Film Pioneers Explorer

The Women Film Pioneers Explorer (WFPE) allows users to explore the invaluable research of the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP). Implementing the WFPP’s biographical data, the WFPE offers additional perspectives on the rich collection with the means of interactive data visualizations. Different tools and techniques were applied by students to present the data in a geographical, chronological, and hierarchical manner. Besides exploring new ways of displaying research, the website seeks to encourage active participation in the WFPP by emphasizing the many blind spots in film history. Ideally, the WFPE will stimulate further initiatives to make creative use of existing research data in the field of women and film history.

The WFPE is the result of an application-oriented seminar in computer science that was conducted from Winter 2020 to Summer 2021 at Philipps-Universität Marburg. The project was co-led by Dr. Sarah-Mai Dang, Principal Investigator of the BMBF Research Group Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women in Film History (DAVIF) at the Institute of Media Studies, and Prof. Dr. Thorsten Thormählen, Head of the Graphics and Multimedia Programming Group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Philipps-Universität Marburg.

Students
Henri Dickel, Matija Miskovic, Kharazm Noori, Christian Schmidt, and Atefeh Soltanifard

Supervisors
Dr. Sarah-Mai Dang, Prof. Dr. Thorsten Thormählen

***

Click on the image to start interacting with the Women Film Pioneers Explorer!

Explore where women worked via an interactive map! 

Explore women’s various occupations via a cluster visualization!

Explore women’s lives via an interactive timeline!

Explore occupations via the hierarchical dendrogram!

WFPP is a partner project of DAVIF. The WFPE can also currently be accessed at the following URL: https://www.online.uni-marburg.de/women-film-pioneers-explorer/index.html.

Print

Research Update: Alice Guy Blaché at Columbia University

In 2017, to mark the centennial of Alice Guy Blaché’s visit to Columbia University, I wrote about her two lectures. It was a fairly open-ended post that outlined both what I knew and still did not know about these ephemeral moments in film history. Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update.

To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University”1Alice Guy Blaché, The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché. Ed. Anthony Slide. Trans. Roberta and Simone Blaché (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1986), 68. to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes to pick and how to handle dramatic situations, the rules of censorship in the different states and copyright laws.”2Alison McMahan. Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2002), 189. The second lecture was more technical and on “The Technique of Scenario Writing.”3“Mme. Alice Blache Lectures at Columbia.”Motion Picture News (11 August 1917): 981.

Photo of 1917 Summer Session bulletin, University Extension Files, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

In the original post, I spent a lot of time trying to discern and unpack the relationship between Columbia’s School of Journalism and the university’s early photoplay writing classes. I kept finding mentions about journalism students in my research on Columbia’s early forays into film education, but I could not find archival documents referring to an official class on the subject at the School of Journalism. (I did, however, find a reference to an apparent one-off lecture that Columbia professor Victor O. Freeburg gave at the School of Journalism in October 1916.) On the other hand, there were official mentions of photoplay writing courses in the 1917 Summer Session bulletin (classes were listed as being held in East Hall) and in the 1917-1918 Columbia Bulletin of Information catalog, which listed photoplay writing under the seemingly separate Extension Teaching program.4University Extension Files, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University. In terms of Guy Blaché’s lectures specifically, I had two pieces of information to go on: Alison McMahan’s statement that the filmmaker was invited by the School of Journalism and a mysterious Dr. Landon who was cited in two short newspaper articles as the professor who invited Alice to speak.

In the time since my post was published, two new articles have been brought to my attention that further solidify Guy Blaché’s connection to the School of Journalism. In the first, entitled “Woman Talks on Scenario Writing,” a Trenton Evening Times reporter details how Guy Blaché was invited to “give a series of lectures on the art of scenario writing to the students in a course which specializes in that subject, offered in conjunction with the Pulitzer School of Journalism.”5“Women Talks on Scenario Writing.” Trenton Evening Times (5 August 1917): 22.  In the second, which appeared in Motion Picture News in September 1917, the writer refers to Alice’s audience of “journalistic students.”6“Four Art Drama Stars Seen in Variety of Fall Offerings.” Motion Picture News (15 September 1917): 1827.

School of Journalism advisory board, 1917-1918 Bulletin of Information.

Furthermore, thanks to the two new articles quoted above and an email exchange with Martin F. Norden, I am now confident that this mysterious “Dr. Langdon” was actually John Langdon Heaton, a New York-based journalist who was instrumental in the creation of the School of Journalism in 1912. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, Langdon Heaton conducted “the detailed study and report on facilities for education in journalism on which [Joseph] Pulitzer founded the Columbia University School of Journalism.” 7“John Langdon Heaton.” Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944. Gale In Context: Biography. When the school opened, he “became a life member of the advisory board, representing the [New York] World, and he was instrumental in the selection of Talcott Williams as its first director.” Although most likely never a Columbia professor, Langdon Heaton did give a lecture on “The profession of journalism” at Columbia on October 7, 1912.8“Pulitzer Collections: About Joseph Pulitzer.” Columbia University Libraries. https://guides.library.columbia.edu/pulitzer/about. That the Motion Picture News and the New York Clipper articles that I relied on four years ago (and indirectly Guy Blaché as well) called him a professor is not impossible to imagine, especially since he was so involved in the program’s creation and early existence.

While I still would love to confirm what this course “offered in conjunction” with the School of Journalism was and if it had anything to do with the photoplay courses mentioned in the bulletins above, I did recently find that the latter were still being taught in East Hall a year after Alice’s lectures, during 1918 Summer Session. It seems likely, then, that she was invited by the School of Journalism and Langdon Heaton rather than any of the professors associated with the photoplay writing courses. This did not surprise Norden, who suggested to me that since the School of Journalism was already open to women at the time, Langdon Heaton and others there may have been “interested in bringing in professional women who might serve as role models for the students.”9Norden, Martin F. Email exchange. November 2017.

Alice Guy Blaché on the set at Solax in Fort Lee, circa 1910s. Courtesy the Barrymore Film Center/Fort Lee Film Commission.

Additionally, I can add one more bit of information about Guy Blaché’s August 3 lecture, where she was asked to bring a film to screen for those assembled. Based on her descriptions, I had previously ascertained that she brought the now-lost House of Cards (1917) to show, most likely because it was a film that she had recently made. The new Motion Picture News article mentions another film, Behind the Mask (1917), which was released in September 1917 and is also lost. She seems, at least per the article, to have mentioned it specifically in her second lecture, perhaps because writing the screenplay was also a recent memory.

Since I published my original research report in 2017, I continued to look through Columbia bulletins. Interestingly, I did discover that, by the 1919 Summer Session, the photoplay writing courses taught by professors like Freeburg and Frances Taylor Patterson, and connected to the Extension Teaching program, were moved to the Journalism building (in rooms 206 and 612, specifically). This move, in addition to the new information about Guy Blaché’s lectures that I have just outlined, highlights a fruitful avenue for further investigation: the relationship between early film study and journalism, both at Columbia University and more broadly.

Notes

Print
← News Archive

The “Camera Maid” Conundrum

Camerawomen collage by Buckey Grimm.

Introduction

The phrase “camera maid” seems to have originated in the late teens and early 1920s with the Fox Newsreels’ publicity department, who used it to announce the hiring of female camera operators. Women cinematographers in the silent era remain an under-researched area, especially compared to what has been uncovered about the many women who worked as directors, producers, and screenwriters during the period.

Challenges in Validating Data: The Conundrum

While many US trade journals and newspapers referenced the activities of these “camera-maids,” very little extant data exists today to confirm their efforts. Building a fuller picture of their work has thus proven to be a challenge. Many of these women had short careers, so official records tend to be spotty at best. US census records, another valuable resource, have been helpful to confirm the occupations for some women, but only represent a sliver of information captured every ten years. That so much early cinema is lost today also makes discovering more about these women difficult, especially since, in many cases, camerawomen were working for smaller or independent companies and/or not credited in any formal way, which means there is very little known surviving material to reference. We know these women existed, but we also know that much remains unknown about them today.

In order to encourage further exploration, the following research uses this conundrum as a starting point, and presents what I have found in my research in trade journals, newspapers, census records, and other resources, as well as what remains unknown about a handful of confirmed and unconfirmed US-based “camera-maids.”

Confirmed US-Based Camerawomen

The following table includes names of camerawomen that have been confirmed through the various sources mentioned above. “Years Active” in the following table and individual slides refers specifically to each woman’s time as a camera operator, although many of these women were involved in the film industry for a longer period of time (noted in the slides as well). In both cases, these dates are best estimates, based upon available research.

 

Name Years Active
Marguerita La Barnette Archambault 1919-1926
Francelia Billington 1914-1915
Katherine Russell Bleeker 1915-1920
Gladys Brockwell 1917-1918
Grace Davison 1915-1916
Maxine Dicks 1922-1927
Dorothy Dunn 1916-1917
Angela Murray Gibson 1919-1926
Louise Lowell 1919-1923
Margery Ordway 1915-1916

What We Know vs. What We Don’t Know

 

Unconfirmed US-Based Camerawomen

There is much research still to do. US census records, for example, offer tantalizing clues about other women who may have also been camera operators during the 1910s and 1920s.

The following table includes names of women who may have worked as a camera operators, but whose work still needs to be verified by other sources. I found these names in both newspaper articles and by searching census records for 1900, 1910, and 1920, continually modifying the search fields and making sure all searches were for the female gender. I kept narrowing the focus in occupation: photographer, motion picture, moving picture, cinema, etc. Of course, since the census is every ten years, I am likely missing women in the time in between. It is very tedious work, but it has yielded some potential results. The next step is to research each person individually to see where it leads.

Name Information
Vivian Adams Listed in The Statesman (Nov 9, 1919) as a “Cameraman” and a “camera-correspondent” for the Fox Film Corp. during a trip to the Holy Land. Likely a one-off collaboration.
May C. Brotherton Listed as “Photographer, Motion Pictures” in 1910 US Census. In the mid-teens, she was also listed as working in film lab at Balboa Studios, assembling prints.
Bessie M. David Listed as “Photographer, Motion Pictures” in 1910 US Census (living in Chicago).
Josephine Harrigan Listed as “Photographer, Biograph Co.” in 1910 US Census.
Carrie Haynes Listed as “Photographer, Pictures” in 1920 US Census (living in New York).
Mary Ida Leatherberry Listed as “Photographer, Motion Picture Theater” in 1910 US Census (living in Philadelphia).
Mae E. Lewis Listed as “Photographer, Motion Pictures” in 1920 U.S. Census (living in Los Angeles; husband has same occupation).
Mabelle Peters Wife of cameraman Thomas Kimmwood “Doc” Peters and listed in trade press as reportedly filming an expedition with him in the 1920s.
Caroline Schenermeier Listed as “Photographer, Motion Pictures” in 1910 US Census (living in Chicago).
Babe Stewart Listed in Motion Picture News (Dec. 30, 1922) as working as a director and camerawoman capturing shots of audiences in a theater in Baltimore, Maryland.
Susan Sturmer Listed as “Assistant Cameraman, Motion Pictures” in 1920 US Census (living in New York).

Conclusion

These confirmed and unconfirmed names exemplify the “camera-maid conundrum”: on the one hand, many women worked as camera operators during the early motion picture industry. However, on the other hand, with every new tidbit of information, we are made aware of the fact that much remains unknown about these women. We are certainly challenged not only by the paucity of extant material, but by the lack of verifiable personal data. Since, in general, the careers of “camera-maids” were limited in scope, and they worked during a period when credits for this work were not routinely published, the trail often goes cold quickly. While the results thus far have been uneven at best, my research continues. My focus will now shift to more regional sources in the hopes of excavating more details.

Further Reading

Dixon, A.J. “The Only Camera Woman.” Picture-Play (1 January 1916): 59.

Gaines, Jane; Michelle Koerner. “Women as Camera Operators or ‘Cranks.’” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/women-as-camera-operators-or-cranks/.

Gordon, Marsha, and Charles “Buckey” Grimm. “’Lights, Camera, Action!’: Women Behind the Lens in Early Cinema.”Los Angeles Review of Books, January 20, 2020.  http://staging.lareviewofbooks.org/article/lights-camera-maids-action-women-behind-the-lens-in-early-cinema.

Peterson, Elizabeth B. “The Premier Camera Maid.” Motion Picture Magazine (January, 1921): 75.

Print
← News Archive

“Women ‘Movie’ Owners of St. Louis”

“Women ‘Movie’ Owners of St. Louis.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (15 August 1915): 5. Access the article as a pdf.

WFPP contributor Gregory Waller stumbled upon this article and thought it might be of interest to WFPP readers who may want to research some of these women further.

Reporting on the “feminine invasion” of the field of motion picture exhibition, this article surveys how a handful of local women manage their respective movie theaters, from getting to know the clientele personally by spending time at the box office window to visiting the operating booth every night. Unsurprisingly, their gender is emphasized here as part of their ability to create a “homey” atmosphere and run their organizations efficiently.

Women featured:


Also mentioned (women who work with their husbands)

  • Mrs. John W. Cornelius, manager of three Lyric Theaters (one downtown & two in the West End)
  • Mrs. D. T. Williams, manager of the Ashland Theater
  • Mrs. Roettgers, manager of the Fairy Theater
  • Mrs. Charles Warner, manager of the Queen Airdome


Recommended further reading:

“Exhibiting Women: Gender, Showmanship, and the Professionalization of Film Exhibition in the United States, 1900–1930” by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Karen Ward Mahar

“Decoration, Discrimination and ‘the Mysteries of Cinema’: Women and Film Exhibition in Sweden from the Introduction of Film to the Mid-1920s” by Ingrid Stigsdotter

Print
← News Archive

Special Dossier on Early US Newspaperwomen

Introduction

From the early 1910s through the early 1920s, a large number of women took up professional positions in the US movie industry, not only as filmmakers and scriptwriters but also as production managers, continuity clerks, film cutters, location finders, and more. At the same time, many women worked as newspaper editors, columnists, and film critics, and they played a crucial role in developing an American popular film culture for a mass audience of movie-goers. Indeed, newspaperwomen deserve as much attention as those working more directly in the industry, for they formed an essential node that linked film production with theater audiences and often shaped their experiences, especially those of women readers in love with the movies.

A surprising number of these newspaperwomen were in the Midwest, notably in Chicago. They included Gertrude Price for the Scripps-McRae chain, Kitty Kelly (Audrie Alspaugh) and Mae Tinee (Frances Peck) at the Chicago Tribune, Genevieve Harris at the Chicago Post, Virginia Dale at the Chicago Journal, and Dorothy Day (Dorothy Gottlieb) at the Des Moines Tribune. To acknowledge their importance, the Women Film Pioneers Project expands its coverage of women’s work in the industry with a profile of each, along with another of Harriette Underhill at the New York Tribune. These seven profiles, all written by Richard Abel, complement his 2016 overview essay “Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925” by providing a closer look at each woman’s life, career, and particular journalistic output. While each profile is individually available on the main Pioneers page, they are grouped together here to invite comparative analysis, which reveals fascinating points of critical overlap and disagreement in these women’s film reviews, writing styles, and perspectives.

Genevieve Harris and Virginia Dale’s opinions about the The Exquisite Thief (1919) in a Motion Picture News advertisement (May 24, 1919).

The Profiles

Print
← News Archive

After the Facts – These Edits Are My Thoughts

This content was originally published online in an issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies (vol. 6, no. 4, 2019)

After the Facts

A film by Karen Pearlman (Macquarie University)

These Edits Are My Thoughts

Film industries have, historically, poor records of opportunities and recognition of women. This lack of gender parity in screen industries is paralleled in the lack of studies of women filmmakers. There is, compared to the resources available on men, little written about the ways that women filmmakers have been influential on film form, and the ways their work informs film theory. For example, there are numerous books in English on male filmmakers of the Soviet Montage period Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, but none to date on their colleague, teacher, and mentor, the highly innovative woman filmmaker, Esfir Shub.

Wright (2009) proposes that a corrective to the analytic frameworks that efface women would be a “paradigm shift away from authorship and textual analysis and a move toward analysing industry practices and cultures of film and media production” (10). This video essay, After the Facts, aims to instantiate that shift.

The underlying research project of After the Facts is inquiring into creative practice, distributed cognition, and feminist film histories. The research methodology involves both embodied creative practice and analysis of cognitive actions occurring in practices. These analyses demonstrate that filmmaking creativity is an instance of distributed cognition (see Pearlman 2018; Pearlman, MacKay and Sutton 2018).

Once we understand that thinking is distributed—it doesn’t just happen in the brains of individuals, but arises through and within entangled engagements of brains, bodies, and worlds—we can look at women in early film and see that what they were doing was more than “just helping.” Although their ideas may not be documented on paper, we can see their creative and intellectual participation in their processes.

This research program has thus far focused primarily on editing. In part because this is my own area of filmmaking expertise and in part because women are well known to have been present in the editing rooms in the early days of cinema (Hatch 2013). Women continue to be better represented in editing than many other disciplines of filmmaking to the present day.

However, editing as an art form, and women’s participation in the development of film form, both suffer from what Jane Gaines calls: “an unequal distribution of narrative wealth” (2018, 22). The cognitive complexity of editing remains hidden behind industry truisms about an editor’s work being “intuitive” (see Oldham 2012; 1992) and good editing being “invisible.”

Thus, women editors are subject to a double erasure: invisible women making invisible edits.

My films about editing and women editors assert that good editing is not invisible and neither are the women who do it.

The development of editing processes, techniques, and conventions in the early 20th century was a global phenomenon. However, the self-mythologizing of the cinema industries gives the impression that innovations in practices and their resulting film forms, arising almost simultaneously in filmmaking communities around the world, were the work of individual men. There is a groundswell of debate in the field of film history, questioning this mode of historicizing film. After the Facts contributes to that debate by calling into question the naming of point of view editing: “The Kuleshov Effect.”

After the Facts begins with a version of the most famous of Kuleshov’s many “experiments.” This “experiment” consisted of three shots. The first one apparently showed a person looking. The second shot revealed what they see. The third shot was described as neutral expression. However, recollections of that experiment claimed that because of its juxtaposition with different content, the expression in the third shot was not experienced as “neutral.” It was seen as sorrowful, hungry, pleased, or something else depending on the content of the middle shot.

Murray Smith (2017) vigorously disputes aspects of these claims, particularly that a neutral expression can do the heavy lifting of revealing emotion purely through juxtaposition. Though I tend to agree with Smith, After the Facts does not weigh in on that particular question. Instead, it disputes the naming of the effect after Kuleshov.

The slightly tongue-in-cheek recreation of the “experiment” seen in After the Facts works with emotionally-inflected shots. The woman who “looks” in the first shot and reacts in the third one is filmmaker Esfir Shub as she appeared in Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov et al. 1929). Each time the sequence repeats, the middle shot changes to an image of a different man; a member of the reviled pre-revolutionary military, priest class, or aristocracy as seen in Shub’s archival remix film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Shub et al. 1927). Shub’s expression, when we return to it each time, is always the same, and not neutral. Skepticism and disdain flash across her face before she turns away.

These facial expressions are activated in two ways. First, they cast judgment on the men she “sees.” Then later, by association, her skepticism falls on the idea that the effect was named for one man. Although this sequence suggests that justification could be made for claiming a “Shub Effect” in editing, this video essay ultimately follows Shub’s own reflections on the creative process and the collective efforts of women editors (Gadassik 2018), and re-names “the Kuleshov Effect,” “the Editor’s Effect.”

After the Facts is the second in my trilogy of films about Russian women in the Soviet Montage era. Each of these films aims to reveal the creative and intellectual work of its subjects by using their innovations to tell their stories. Woman with an Editing Bench (2016), a stylized biopic about Elizaveta Svilova, uses Svilova’s quicksilver montage techniques to express her premonitions and, implicitly, to say that her edits are her thoughts. I want to make a film about women (2019) draws directly on techniques of construction described by Esfir Shub in an article of the same name. After the Facts (2018) follows Esfir Shub’s early methods of filmmaking, and the ones for which she is best known: remixing the archive.

My research into distributed cognition via creative practice also follows the example set by Esfir Shub. Shub’s writing reveals an implicit sense of her creative cognition as distributed. For example, as quoted in After the Facts, she writes about solutions arising when you hold filmed material in your hands, acknowledging that editing ideas arise through distributed “thinking” with film pieces. The making of After the Facts activated this principle. Its ideas came into being not just in my brain or my body, but through working with film pieces in editing. Just as in Shub’s work, these edits are my thoughts.

Works Cited

Gadassik, Alla. “Ėsfir’ Shub on Women in the Editing Room: ‘The Work of Montazhnitsy’” [1927]. Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe 6 (2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2018.0006.125.

Gaines, Jane. Pink-Slipped:What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? Champaign-Urban: University of Illinois Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt212172p.

Hatch, Kristen. “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/cutting-women/.

Oldham, Gabriella. First Cut, Conversations with Film Editors. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

———. First Cut 2: More Conversations with Film Editors. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Pearlman, Karen. “Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition.” In A Cognitive Approach to Documentary Film. Eds. Catalin Brylla and Mette Kramer. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018. 303-319

Pearlman, Karen, John MacKay, and John Sutton. “Creative Editing: Svilova and Vertov’s Distributed Cognition.” Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe 6 (2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2018.0006.122.

Smith, Murray. Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalised Aesthetics of Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790648.003.0001.

Wright, Julia.“Female Editors and Representation in the Film and Media Industry.” UCLA: Center for the Study of Women. 2009. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pz3k79s.

Filmography

I want to make a film about women (Pearlman et al. 2019). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11044474/

After the Facts (Pearlman et al. 2018). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8070500/

Woman with an Editing Bench (Pearlman et al. 2016). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5870326/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov et al. 1929). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019760/

The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Shub et al. 1927). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018246/

Bio: Dr. Karen Pearlman is a senior lecturer in screen practice and production at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing (2016), now in its second edition with Focal Press, and numerous articles on film and dance-film in scholarly journals and arts publications, including “Editing and Cognition Beyond Continuity” (Projections vol 11, no. 2). Her creative research film Woman with an Editing Bench (2016), a stylized biopic about Elizaveta Svilova, the editor of Man with a Movie Camera, won the 2016 Australian Teachers of Media Award for Best Short Fiction, the 2016 Australian Screen Editors Guild Award for Best Editing in a Short Film and six other film festival awards. In 2018, After the Facts was also honored with an Australian Screen Editors Guild award for Best Editing in Open Content.

Review by Jane M. Gaines

In After the Facts we have what feminist film theory never achieved in the 1970s—a theory of women’s editing practice. Theorization in After the Facts is not only in Karen Pearlman’s voiceover commentary—“Facts become thoughts” and “These edits are my thoughts.” But her theorization is in the cutting itself, is rhythmically patterned theory. After the Facts is about cutting “to find” and finding in the cut. It is a practiced theory. Or, even better, it is a creative practice of a theory of editing. And even more, After the Facts is a celebration of the theory and practice of creative cutting, itself exquisitely cut to draw attention to cut-on-action technique using dancers in alternation with workers. After the Facts is not just a lesson in cutting; it is a lesson in how to see the cut. And, also, it’s a lesson in what to “cut into” the scene, although the compilation film, to which this is an homage, entails an additive process: one shot + another shot + another.

The content of After the Facts is that of the very historical found footage cut by Soviet women, those legendary cutters like Esfir Shub who elevated women’s agricultural labor to the level of artistry while reminding us that it is still work. After the Facts is a meditation on Shub’s invention of the compilation film so long associated with The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). Yet After the Facts is a sly homage to the Shub film that should have been canonized—Today, or Canons or Tractors (1929), a film so incendiary that police confiscated it when it was screened in Newark, New Jersey, in 1932.

After the Facts stimulates the field, challenges it to return women to the top, taking as its premise that to start with “women in the early industry” is to transform motion picture filmmaking as a historical field. If we start with the women who worked, especially in the Soviet revolutionary society, surprise, surprise—everything looks different. Instead of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov we have the triangulation of Esfir Shub, Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova, and Vertov sandwiched between the two female tour de force editors. And no longer can it be claimed that Vertov’s classic is “his” alone. Svilova is all over The Man With a Movie Camera (1929)—on the screen, and, where montage theory maintained we should “look”—between shots as well as within each shot. After the Facts demonstrates that there are more places to “look” than we “thought to look,” especially if we are looking for women working at editing. She is in the shot/reverse shot patterning controlled by the close-up of our smiling Soviet heroine, a young female non-actor representing the “point of view of the revolutionary class.”

What we have here is “theoretical research” on the historical film text. After the Facts demonstrates nothing more nor less than a new theory and practice of historical research—no traditional “fact-finding.” Think how After the Facts treats found footage with both reverence and license. For here is an editing experiment that takes us beyond close text analysis to the re-creation of the work of creation, following the lead of the original footage to discover its conceptual and political premises.

Thus After the Facts works as counter factual, imagining another motion picture film history and asking “what if”? So “what if” the famous editing experiment had not been called the “Kuleshov effect”? After the Facts re-names that conceptual discovery the “Editor’s effect,” crossing out Kuleshov’s name in a gesture of re-attribution. While the original “Kuleshov” experiment is lost we should not mourn it but instead embrace After the Facts. The dour face of Ivan Mozzhukhin has been replaced with the cheerful face of the young female Soviet who “looks” and “sees,” illustrating the political power of the conceptual cut. We see what she sees and she sees women working, playing, dancing, watching, washing clothes, and washing faces.

Bio: Jane M. Gaines is Professor Emerita of Literature and English, Duke University, and currently Professor of Film, Columbia University. Author of three award-winning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (North Carolina, 1991), Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, 2001), and Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Early Film Industries? (Illinois, 2018), she received the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2018. Recent publications are on documentary activism, intellectual property in the Internet age, the history of piracy, and, most recently, a critique of the “historical turn” in film and media studies.

***

Special thanks to the [in]Transition editorial team and issue editor Julia Vassilieva.

Print
← News Archive

Video Gallery: Unassigned US Screenwriters

This post is intended to jumpstart research on a handful of US-based screenwriters by providing avenues for exploration and the opportunity to engage directly with archival moving image materials. Bringing together films held at the EYE Filmmuseum (many in the incomparable Desmet Collection) and valuable digital resources like the AFI Catalogue and Media History Digital Library, WFPP hopes to make research on some of our unassigned pioneers more accessible for both scholars and students. This compilation of tools, archival materials, and information is by no means exhaustive, and individuals interested in researching these screenwriters should use additional resources to confirm behind-the-scenes participation. Our intention is to spark engagement with these materials and encourage a wide range of uses and users for this video gallery, from instructors creating course assignments to individual film scholars looking to contribute to WFPP, or anyone who wants to research women’s participation in early cinema but is unsure where to start.

The videos below are organized by screenwriter. They have all been preserved and digitized by EYE and have Dutch intertitles, which may be translated into English or any other language using Google Translate or other free online translation services. All plot summaries are provided by EYE. We have linked directly to credit data in the AFI Catalogue when possible. (Read more about AFI’s new data-driven gender parity initiative, “Women They Talk About,” on the organization’s website.) In some cases, the featured film is not listed in any official credits, which will require researchers to look to other primary and secondary sources.

 

***

Evelyn Campbell

The Wicked Darling (1919), co-written by Evelyn Campbell

A crime drama about a girl from the slums whose poverty compels her to steal. The thief falls in love with the ex-husband of a wealthy woman, whose pearls she has stolen. She repents, and starts a new life in the countryside.

***

Elizabeth R. Carpenter

The Good in the Worst of Us (1915) (story by Elizabeth R. Carpenter)

Minnie flees from her brother Jim Colby to escape his bad influence. She becomes a household maid, and marries the milkman. During a burglary, Jim shoots a man down, and demands that Minnie help him escape. Minnie’s husband is suspicious, which means that Jim ultimately has to pay with his own life.

***

Marion Carr

Over the Back Fence (1913), written by Marion Carr (as Marian Carr?)

A short comedy about a couple in love, whose parents are fighting. By means of a staged argument, the couple manages to get approval for their courtship.

***

May Foster

The Bachelor’s Baby (1913), written by May Foster

A romantic film in which a young mother leaves her child as a foundling with a wealthy bachelor. By a strange twist of fate, the mother becomes the nanny of her own child. Ultimately, the mother and the bachelor fall in love.

***

Eliza G. Harral

Mixed Identities (1913), written by Eliza G. Harral (aka Elizabeth G. Harral)
A short silent comedy about the twin sisters Alice and Edna, who have received their stenography diplomas. They are taken on by Mr. Redmond and Mr. Freddy, who are friends of each other. When the two men decide to eat with their stenographers in the same restaurant, many complications arise, which are ultimately resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

***

Betty Harte

Their Only Son (1911), written by Betty Harte
The parents of a young man who is wrongly accused of theft eventually find their son on a ship, where he is working as a sailor.
***
Maie B. Havey

At the Masquerade Ball (1912), written by Maie B. Havey (aka M.B. Havey or Maibelle Havey)
A short comedy about the romance between Margaret and John. At a masked ball at the home of John’s mother, Margaret is suspected of stealing jewelry. When the misunderstanding is cleared up, nothing more stands in the way of their romance.

***

Eleanor Hicks

The Two Brothers (1910), written by Eleanor Hicks (as Elinore Hicks)

In the principality of Camarillo, a son is rejected by his mother because of his misconduct. He attacks the bridal carriage of his brother and his bride, and wants to murder the brother, who had threatened him with death. The bride intervenes.

***

Madeline Matzen

Burglar by Proxy (1919), written by Madeline Matzen (as M. Matzen)

A romantic crime comedy about a young man who is falsely accused of theft by the real culprit, who is the boyfriend of the girl he fancies. By chance, he meets a real burglar who helps him to get to the truth by blowing up a safe.

***

Olga Scholl

The Right to Happiness (1919), written by Olga Scholl

The story of twin sisters, one of whom grows up in Jewish revolutionary circles in Russia, and the other who grows up as the daughter of a wealthy American factory manager.

Man-Woman-Marriage (1921), written by Olga Scholl

Victoria marries David, the man of her dreams. After a number of years and two children, the marriage turns out not to be what she had expected. Then she discovers her faith, and everything turns out for the best.

***

Elaine Sterne

The Floor Below (1918), written by Elaine Sterne

A romantic farce about a journalist who, pretending to be a pickpocket, gets admitted to a rehabilitation house. She exposes the true criminal, and she gets a marriage proposal from the director of the facility.

Print

Alice and the Too Many Mattresses

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 [Matelas alcoolique, 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 the Mattress (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 The Tramp 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.

Filmography

Georges Méliès:

La Cardeuse de matelas/The Tramp and the Mattress Maker: Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, Library of Congress, Academy Film Archive.

Alice Guy Blaché:

Le Matelas épileptique/The Drunken Mattress: Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, BFI National Archive.

Le Matelas alcoolique/The Drunken Mattress (Alice Guy and Romero Bosetti? Gaumont): George Eastman Museum, Library of Congress.

Other film print sources:

Le Matelas de la mariée/The Bride’s Mattress (Pathé, 1906): EYE Filmmuseum, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, Lobster Films, Deutsche Kinemathek.

Le Avventure di un Monello (Italia Film, 1912)/Zijn Eerste Baas/Boy and Mattress (Dutch print): EYE Filmmuseum.

Print

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),1In 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.  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.2Janelle 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.3Jane 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,”4Throughout 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. 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.”5Yopie 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.

Screenshot, The Cabbage Fairy. Courtesy of Movies Silently.

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.6Janelle 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.

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 our contemporary stereotypes about Victorian prudery.7See 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. 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.8George 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. 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.9On 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/. 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.10See 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.11On 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. 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.12Thanks 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 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?13On 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?14Guy’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.

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.15Gaines, 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 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 173-181. 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.16In 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. In First-Class Midwife, either famously or apocryphally, Guy performs the role of the lover, which is often called “the husband.”17Dietrick 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). 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.18Gaines, 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.19Laura 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 film Algie the Miner is often cited as the earliest extant film representing male homosexuality onscreen.20Shane 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. 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.”21Alice 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.

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.”22McMahan, 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.23Nicole 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.

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.24The 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 calls this fin de de siècle motif of the lesbian look-alike “the narcisstic female double.”25Barbara 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.27Olu 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?!28The 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.

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.29Linda 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. 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.30On 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. 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.31For 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. 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.32The 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. 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.33French 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).  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.”34Olszynko-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).

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.35One 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.

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.36I 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. 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.”37Andrea 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. 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.38This 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. 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…”39Alice 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. 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.40I 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.

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.”41See 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. The international development of the moving image was shaped, in part, by what Tami Williams calls “the Sapphist liberty of the Belle Époque.”42Tami 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.43Tomadjoglou, “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.44Susan 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.”45McMahan, 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.46McMahan 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.

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.48The 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. 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.49My 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.50See 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.

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.51As 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. The magical movements of the electric fairy that were so widely imitated in early film were produced by the manipulation of a patented wand.52For 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.”53Potter, 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. 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.”54McMahan, 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.55Mme. 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.

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.56This 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. 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.57All 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.”58Vicinus, “‘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. 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.”59Matthew 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 Fernandez, “The Forgotten Mother of Cinema,” The Paris Review, December 7, 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/07/the-forgotten-mother-of-cinema/; Marcia G. Yerman, “The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, the Mother of Cinema,” NextTribe, May 3, 2019,  https://nexttribe.com/alice-guy-blache/. 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?”60Jodie 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.61The 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. 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. 62See, for example, Elena Nicolaou, “This Fact Will Make You View the Cannes Film Festival Differently,” Refinery29, May 8, 2018, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/05/198577/lack-of-women-representation-cannes-film-festival; Foster and Green, The Close-Up. For an overview of recent statistics and the EEOC investigation, see Martha Lauzen, “Gender Ratios Are Improving in Indie Films, but Visibility’s a Greater Goal,” Variety, July 11, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/voices/columns/gender-ratios-indie-films-improving-1203263005/.  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.63White, 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.

Notes

Print
← News Archive

Alice Guy Blaché at Columbia University: One Hundred Years Later

Earlier this spring, while rereading a portion of Alison McMahan’s book Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema, I was reminded that, in the summer of 1917, Columbia University invited the eponymous film director, producer, screenwriter, and studio head to come give two lectures on the art of cinema. These lectures took place on the evenings of July 13 and August 3, 1917, two Fridays during the university’s notable Summer Session. Having been involved with the Women Film Pioneers Project for a while, I have always been aware that Guy Blaché visited Columbia at some point, but I knew nothing else and, admittedly, hardly thought about it. However, realizing that the centennial was approaching, I wanted to learn more. With no idea if there was anything more to even find (or what I was looking for), I began to dig. As you would expect, my small-scale archival scavenger hunt was ultimately one with infuriating absences, endless questions, and fascinating contradictions. It also was an exciting opportunity to reflect on WFPP’s mission and its place within the broader history of film studies at Columbia.

Alice Guy Blaché. BEL.

In conceptually reconstructing this moment in the summer of 1917, I depended upon a mix of sources, from trade press and newspaper articles to secondary scholarship on the history of film education at Columbia. A mere two pages in Guy Blaché’s memoirs provided further insight into this time in the filmmaker’s career. Online resources such as the archives for The Columbia Spectator and the Media History Digital Library allowed me to access an incredible number of digitized articles from the period. The Columbia University Archives, housed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library here, contained a variety of materials—from faculty appointment cards and event announcements to Summer Session bulletins and lecture tickets—that offered a glimpse of Columbia activities at that time. After conducting some of this research, I was baffled with how to proceed. It is easier to celebrate the centennial of a film—you screen it, if it exists and is available. But what about events—ephemeral in nature—of which there is little information to be found and nothing really to watch? Certainly, a focus on the extant output from these early women filmmakers is necessary and a vital part of scholarly initiatives like WFPP, but simply screening one of Guy Blaché’s films at Columbia this summer did not feel like the most appropriate form of celebration. Instead, I decided to present my findings in a loose narrative and recreate the events of the summer of 1917 in writing. I chose to model this informal chronology—very much a work in progress— after the WFPP profiles, which allow space for a mix of concrete historical findings, speculation, and commentary.

What do we know about these two lectures? We know that Guy Blaché was most likely invited by professors at Columbia sometime in the spring of 1917. Having recently sold 51% of Solax to ward off debt, the director was then working under the banner of the U.S. Amusement Corporation (McMahan 2002, 186, 189). At forty-four years of age, Guy Blaché was still collaborating with her husband, Herbert Blaché, on upcoming cinematic projects. In The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, the director recollects that when “the professors at Columbia University paid me the great honor of an invitation to give a talk about cinema to their students,” she and Herbert were developing the scenario for House of Cards (1917), which was released in June 1917 and is now considered lost (Guy Blaché 1986, 68; McMahan 189). Guy Blaché explains that she was hesitant to agree to Columbia’s request, as her “English was faulty” and suggested her husband go in her place (69). However, the unnamed professors were adamant she come. “…[I]t’s you we want!” they apparently said, “…Because you’re a woman” (69). This emphasis on Guy Blaché’s gender is also evident in the two press mentions that I found regarding these summer lectures. In July 1917, The New York Clipper announced the lectures with the headline “Woman Director Honored” (36), while, in August 1917, Motion Picture News called her “Mme. Alice Blache” and identified her (incorrectly) as “one of the two woman [sic] directors in the field” (981). It seems very likely that Columbia was interested in having Guy Blaché lecture because of her already lengthy transnational filmmaking career and because she was a woman. Guy Blaché was apparently aware of this fixation on her gender, stating in her memoirs that this “anecdote [Columbia’s request and the subsequent lectures]…illustrates very well the interest taken by the American public in a woman’s career” (68).

Buell Hall today.

According to the director’s memoirs, the first lecture on July 13 was in a classroom. She describes her arrival and the discovery of “groups of men and women students in the classroom, some seated on the ground” (69). It could be that this first lecture was held in Room 201 in East Hall on campus. As far as I can tell, this is the previous name for the current Buell Hall (home today of Columbia’s Maison Française), but the physical location and size of the building may have changed between then and now. The 1917 Summer Session bulletin lists this room as the location for the Photoplay Composition classes, which were taught by Dr. Victor O. Freeburg1I have doubts about Freeburg’s involvement in Photoplay Composition during the 1917 Summer Session. His faculty appointment card in the Columbia archives shows him resigning from the Summer Session on July 1, 1917, only 8 days before the program started (but after the bulletins were printed and circulated). This is substantiated by Richard Koszarski, who says that Freeburg taught at Columbia until the spring of 1917 (95). I have a hunch that he resigned before the session started—we know he was in the naval reserves by the fall of 1917, as reported by The Columbia Spectator on September 26, 1917 (1)—and perhaps Patterson quickly took over. Finding Patterson’s appointment card, if it exists in the archives, is the next step. and held at 9:30am (Elementary) and 10:30am (Intermediate) (90). While Guy Blaché’s lecture was held in the evening, The New York Clipper states that she was invited for the express purpose of “[delivering] a series of lectures on the photoplay before classes in script writing” (36), so it seems likely that the first talk took place in that classroom. Additionally, since this event was on a Friday evening and publicized in at least two news outlets, there’s a chance that it was also open to the public, perhaps through the Institute of Arts and Sciences (a division of the University Extension program established in 1913 that focused on cultural or artistic educational events, such as evening concerts, lectures, and recitals).2To date, I have found that the Institute did a broad range of public evening lectures during the academic calendar, but there is no record of any events during the summer months (or at least no materials concerning summer events saved in the specific files that I looked through). However, I have found no concrete evidence to support this claim so far.

Photo of 1917 Summer Session bulletin, University Extension Files, University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, CU.

It is necessary to pause here and give some background on Photoplay Composition at Columbia. The course was first offered in the fall of 1915 through University Extension, an adult-education program within the university that evolved in different guises from as early as 1830 (Burrell 1954, 3-4). By the time the 18th edition of the Summer Session—part of the University Extension program—rolled around in 1917, Photoplay Composition had been in existence for approximately two years and, according to an April 1917 New York Times article, sixty students were registered for the course during that spring (X5). It was first taught by Freeburg and then by Frances Taylor Patterson.3Decherney provides a detailed look at the fascinating context and origins of Columbia’s early film course, especially in regards to the involvement of industry figures in its creation. Both instructors were interested in the techniques of photoplay construction and development (plot structures, visuals, character psychology). They saw the potential for this new medium to be a “force of artistic uplift” and the necessity of training students—through weekly screenings, script writing exercises, and visiting industry lecturers—to be skilled makers and cinemagoers (Polan 2007, 8). Within the context of University Extension, these early Photoplay Composition classes were part of Columbia’s larger pedagogical mission to provide non-credit educational opportunities and professional training for individuals—workers, immigrants, housewives—who were not able to attend school in a traditional manner or perhaps would never have been admitted to Columbia otherwise (Burrell 9-10; Decherney 2000, 449, 451). While adult education/extension teaching was not exclusive to Columbia at that time, scholars have documented the relationship between the program at Columbia and the institution’s early film courses (arguably the first of their kind). For both Peter Decherney and Dana Polan, University Extension at Columbia was a space of learning that was perhaps not as highly controlled or respected as the regular degree-granting programs. As Decherney argues, “As Columbia redefined its mission to accommodate its changing constituency, the University frequently used its adult education school as ‘an experiment station’ for new programmes’” that would most likely not be given the same freedom to develop in the University-proper (452). For Polan, “offered in the nether region of extension programs…removed from the mainstream humanistic mission of institutions of higher learning, the first film courses slipped stealthily into the academic context…” (35).4Polan uses a 1916 budget breakdown for the extension division to illustrate “the place of Photoplay Composition in the overall scheme of things” (40). In 1916, the “total budget for the extension division was $130,516 with $10,850 allotted to English, a very successful track in terms of enrollment, while a mere $350 was designated for what was termed the film ‘department.’”

In front of these diverse Photoplay Composition students, what did Guy Blaché speak about on July 13, 1917? McMahan describes the topic of this first lecture as “What themes to pick and how to handle dramatic situations, the rules of censorship in the different states and copyright laws” (189). On August 11, Motion Picture News reported that the first lecture was on “The Forms in Which Scenarios Should be Presented” (981). In Guy Blaché’s own words, the first lecture comes across as a bit more personal, almost like a revisiting of her career both in France and later in America with Solax: “I told [them], as best I could, of the difficult beginnings, our joy at each discovery, the hope we founded on the next generation, and what they might draw from our discoveries. I invited them to visit the studio” (69). With these inconsistencies in mind, it is apparent that the first lecture was somewhat focused on screenwriting, but seems to have been a more general celebratory career retrospective or masterclass—to borrow a contemporary term—with a respected filmmaker.

The lecture on August 3, 1917 was apparently held in a much larger space than before. Guy Blaché remembers that she was told that the “second lecture would take place in the big conference hall which held 3000 persons” (69). What lecture hall was this? Was it an auditorium at Horace Mann School in Teacher’s College, which was regularly used for Institute of Arts and Sciences events at that time (Burrell 27)? Or was it in a screening space in the School of Journalism, which was used as early as 1914 for outside classes—for example, in economics, literature, and psychology—to watch motion pictures related to their coursework (Voorhies 1915, 93; Decherney 451)? These questions remain unanswered for now, but are conceivable starting points for future research. Unfortunately, wherever the event ultimately took place, it seems like it was not well-attended, which pleased the nervous Guy Blaché: “Happily for me, on that occasion the weather was dreadful and the audience was small” (69).

Poster for House of Cards (1917). PD

As for the topic, Motion Picture News announced that this second lecture would be on “The Technique of Scenario Writing” (981), which corresponds to what McMahan identifies as “How to write the screenplay” (189). Evidently, the subject matter was more technical this time and focused on relaying the skills necessary to be an effective screenwriter. Since this second lecture was in a large auditorium, Guy Blaché recalls that she was asked to bring a film to accompany her talk. She apparently chose the aforementioned House of Cards (produced by U.S. Amusement Corporation and distributed by Art Dramas), which was a five-reel family drama starring Catherine Calvert, Frank Mills, and Kittens Reichert. Trade press articles tell us that the film focused on a family in which both parents worked—she as a doctor and he as the District Attorney. Neglected, their young daughter runs away with the help of a servant boy and her parents’ marriage consequently unravels. Eventually, the father, while investigating factory conditions and child labor, finds his daughter alive and working in one such factory. Allegedly, House of Cards was more concerned with the wife’s responsibility as a mother. In his review for Motion Picture News, Peter Milne writes “this picture advances the preachment that woman’s place is in the home before in the office, even though in the latter place she may labor long and hard for the benefit of humanity” (4108). Guy Blaché uses her memoirs to explain how she and Herbert developed this scenario—a description worth relating here since it is probable that it was part of her talk on scenario development on August 3. According to Guy Blaché, she and Herbert wanted to create a story about a couple who shared a career. Herbert thought that the theme as they had it was treated too seriously, apparently arguing “We’re not merely addressing ourselves to an audience of intellectuals, but one of peasants, also, of miners and cowboys. One must lighten this with a few gay scenes’” (68). Consequently, Guy Blaché says that she decided—due to the public’s interest in child labor at that time—to include the part about the young girl running away from her parents and finding employment in a factory. While the couple in House of Cards does not share the same profession, it is evident that the film was concerned with issues relating to the idea of a woman’s career outside of the home, an interesting point given the fact that Guy Blaché was invited to speak at Columbia as a female professional. It is not difficult to imagine that Guy Blaché related how she and Herbert came up with the plot for House of Cards to her audience at Columbia, thus presumably presenting the aspiring screenwriters with a model for how to develop a story, mix differing themes, and be mindful of the audiences’ expectations.

Even if the second lecture was not well attended (and we have no sense of the size of the audience in July), Guy Blaché’s two lectures can be understood as successful. Topically, they were very much aligned with the larger mission of the Photoplay Composition course: to better understand the cinematic industry and form, specifically the scenario, at a time when the medium was rapidly becoming understood as a legitimate art form, as well as a central part of popular culture, the global economy, and everyday life. Guy Blaché’s lectures can be understood as one small part of the course’s mission at the time to professionalize the craft of screenwriting for a broad range of students. It appears that on both occasions students and faculty were in the audience, and everyone seemed to respond vocally to the material that she presented. Guy Blaché describes the conclusion of her second lecture, as she was “surrounded and complimented very politely” (69). Some professors apparently were critical of the inclusion of the storyline dealing with the children, but the director laughs this off in her memoirs, saying that it is quite challenging (for a woman) to “[please] ‘all the world and one’s father’” (68).

“Mme. Blache Lectures at Columbia.” Motion Picture News

Given the scarcity of information on Guy Blaché’s visits to Columbia, many questions remain. Who specifically invited her to speak? Guy Blaché utilizes the plural “professors” when talking about her invitation. Was Freeburg and/or Patterson part of this group? The two short articles that I found regarding these lectures both name a “Dr. Langdon” as the individual who extended the invitation. However, I have been unable to find any record of a Dr. Langdon anywhere in the Columbia archives. According to The New York Clipper, he was a professor at the university, but I have yet to find a faculty appointment card for him. His name is not in any of the general faculty files that I have looked through or in any of the University Extension materials. What was his department or program affiliation? Did he have anything to do with Photoplay Composition? For now, this Dr. Langdon remains a maddening mystery.

The question of who invited Guy Blaché to Columbia becomes more complicated when looking at other sources. McMahan tells us that Guy Blaché was invited by the School of Journalism (190). The connection between early film classes and the School of Journalism is supported by Vachel Lindsay, who, in his book The Art of the Moving Picture, states that an earlier edition of the text was used by “Victor O. Freeburg as one of the text-books in the Columbia University School of Journalism, in his classes in photoplay writing” (2). However, I believe that connecting the nascent film classes with the School of Journalism is incorrect. It is well-documented that the Photoplay Composition classes were part of the University Extension program and do not seem to have any administrative connection to the School of Journalism, which opened in 1912. I believe the fact that the School of Journalism had a screening room for outside classes to utilize as early as 1914 may have falsely connected it to the study of motion pictures at Columbia. According to documents in the Columbia archives, later Photoplay Composition classes (for example in 1923), taught by Patterson, were held in classrooms in the School of Journalism, but it seems as if they were still separate from the latter. Another factor in this confusion might be the fact that Freeburg did lecture before journalism students in October 1916, but these, as reported by The Columbia Spectator, seem unconnected to his regular teaching. On October 10, the campus newspaper reported that Freeburg was present to give an educational talk on “The Social Function of the Motion Picture,” which was part of what seems to be a regular Tuesday afternoon lecture series at the School of Journalism (3). According to the school newspaper the following day, Freeburg outlined cinema’s democratic and educational values and argued that “It is the duty of you journalists…to create a public demand for better motion picture plays by showing the people how to pick the good from the bad” (7). It seems like this was a one-time event, although the earlier article in The Columbia Spectator reports that students would be required to hand in weekly reports, making it sound like this could become an ongoing meeting or class (3). However, I have not seen any other mention of Freeburg speaking to journalism students. I would like to find a way to access any archival collections related to the School of Journalism’s history, which perhaps could prove useful in clarifying the relationship between the program and early film classes at Columbia.

Alice Guy Blaché c.1904. PC.

While we may never know who invited Guy Blaché to Columbia, her memoirs outline that she “kept up friendly relations” with some of her contacts there (88). Following the summer of 1917, Guy Blaché remained in the United States for only a few more years, eventually moving back to France in 1922 after her divorce from Herbert and the liquidation of her studio in New Jersey (McMahan 204). Guy Blaché writes that she “remained on good terms with the Columbia professors, and the pentagonal figure (of the university?) gave me the idea of a little cinematography college which might take that form, each branch being reserved for a particular science” (69). It is unclear how much time passed between her lectures and this suggestion of a “cinematography college.” It seems likely that she is referring to efforts at Columbia in the mid-1920s to form a legitimate degree granting program in film. According to Polan, “At the end of 1926, [Nicholas] Butler put together a committee to investigate the possibility and desirability of creating a ‘School of Moving Picture Technology,’ and a far from insignificant effort was expended in negotiating such a school with film industry luminaries” (80). In early 1927, letters were even sent out from Columbia and the office of Will Hays (who was collaborating on this initiative) to industry figures for feedback (Polan 81). Additionally, Polan’s research highlights that the planning group anticipated three tracks for this program: cinema architecture, cinema photography, and cinema writing (83), which together covered both the business and technical aspects of film production and may correspond to the “branches” that Guy Blaché mentions. Is Butler the “pentagonal figure” to whom Guy Blaché alludes? Was she one of the “film industry luminaries” contacted even though she had moved back to France? McMahan briefly indicates that Guy Blaché came back to the United States in 1927 to locate copies of her films (xxii), but it is unclear exactly when this trip occurred. In her memoirs, Guy Blaché does say “…if my stay in the United States had been longer we would certainly have tried to do something of the sort, Columbia University being disposed, it seems, to finance the costs” (69). Whenever I previously read this passage, I just assumed she meant her time in America prior to moving back to France, but now I wonder if she was referring to her brief trip back. This passage also highlights the difficult task of using memoirs as sources—in Guy Blaché’s words, this “cinematography college” sounds as if it was suggested by Columbia to only her and that she was vital to its creation. However, as Polan has outlined in detail, there were many factors at play (and people involved) in Columbia’s actual efforts to start this film school, which ultimately never came to fruition at that time.

***

It strikes me now that I undertook this reassembling of Guy Blaché’s visit to Columbia—and the context surrounding these events—for personal reasons. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to reconstruct something ultimately unknowable, just as much as I liked the idea of finding some elusive clue (Saying what? I don’t know). It is exciting to think that Guy Blaché was at my alma mater and place of work, just as it is exciting to imagine who was in the audience and the content of her lectures. (Did they ever take her up on her offer to visit the studio?) More importantly, it was a way of reminding myself that these “women film pioneers” that I interact with daily were real people. I was fascinated by how nervous Guy Blaché says she was about giving these lectures in English and her description of the first lecture: “A little platform had been prepared for me. I climbed up and took some few seconds to find my voice. Finally, I gathered my courage and chose a sympathetic face to address” (69). I also love that she was happy that the inclement weather decreased the size of the audience at the second lecture. Not only does this give us a sense of the day/event, but it also allows a figure, who has, unfortunately, become almost just a data point for me—evidence of women’s involvement in early cinema—to be humanized.

“Woman Director Honored.” The New York Clipper

The summer of 1917 also marks a fascinating point of intersection between Guy Blaché and Columbia’s early film courses. One was on the rise, while the other was, in many ways, on the decline. The summer of 1917 was still just the beginning of Columbia’s academic relationship to cinema—a legacy that has included collaborations with Iris Barry and the Museum of Modern Art, the development of a degree-granting program within the School of the Arts, professors like Andrew Sarris, and the launch of the Women Film Pioneers Project in 2013. However, in 1917, Guy Blaché had by then enjoyed an already long transnational filmmaking career as one of the earliest film directors and producers. She had owned and operated her own studio and made hundreds of films across numerous genres. As Motion Picture News pointed out at the end of its blurb on her Columbia lectures, “Mme. Blache has been engaged in the production of pictures for twenty-one years…” (981). Similarly, The New York Clipper reported that “The invitation came as a great surprise to Mme. Blache, for the fact that Columbia considered her sufficient authority to address the students was a high tribute to her ability and scholarship” (36). In both cases, the heft of her lengthy career is foregrounded in a way that today strikes me as being cognizant of the fact that the bulk of her work was already behind her.

One hundred years later, I started this research project secretly hoping to find some evidence of these lectures—a program, a ticket, anything that mentioned Guy Blaché’s name and was proof that she was here—in campus archives. While I may not have found any such materials, I did get a better sense of Columbia’s attention to film education in 1917 and Guy Blaché’s small role, as a notable female filmmaker, in that larger mission to institutionalize cinema as a viable educational track—a field of study that ultimately marginalized her. The irony that WFPP—which is fueled by this broader absence of women like Guy Blaché from standard film histories and canons—is now located at Columbia is not lost on me. Ultimately, in describing what little I know—and what I do not—of these events, I am reminded that a woman’s participation in early cinema can take many shapes, from an extant film that she directed and wrote to fleeting and intangible evening talks on the nature of an emerging art form.

See also: “Research Update: Alice Guy Blaché at Columbia University”

Bibliography

Burrell, John Angus. A History of Adult Education at Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 1954.

“Columbia Resources Now Contributing to Every Department of Service.” The Columbia Spectator (26 September 1917): 1-2.

Decherney, Peter. “Inventing Film Study and Its Object at Columbia University, 1915-1938.” Film History vol. 12, no. 4 (2000): 443-460.

“Domestic Problem—Modern Ideas Questioned in ‘House of Cards.’” Motion Picture News (16 June 1917): 3754-5.

“Dr. Freeburg at Journalism, To-day.” The Columbia Spectator (10 October 1916): 3.

Guy Blaché, Alice. The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché. Ed. Anthony Slide. Trans. Roberta and Simone Blaché. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1986.

“Home-Made Motion Pictures Predicted for Near Future.” New York Times (22 April 1917): X5.

Koszarski, Richard.  An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan, 1922.

McMahan, Alison. Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2002.

Milne, Peter. “House of Cards.” Motion Picture News (30 June 1917): 4108.

“Mme. Alice Blache Lectures at Columbia.” Motion Picture News (11 August 1917): 981.

Polan, Dana. Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

“Talk on Movies by Dr. Freeburg.” The Columbia Spectator (11 October 1916): 7.

Voorhies, J. “Columbia Movies.” Motion Picture Magazine (August 1915): 93-94.

“Woman Director Honored.” The New York Clipper (25 July 1917): 36.

Archival Paper Collections:

University Extension Files, Summer Sessions Files (1917 Summer Session Bulletin), Division of Film Studies, 1920s-1930s Files, and Faculty Appointment Cards. Columbia University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University.

Notes

⤒ Return to top