Essays – Women Film Pioneers Project

by Victoria Duckett

Introduction

Until its 2019 website relaunch, the landing page of the Women Film Pioneers Project stated: “Women Film Pioneers Project features silent-era producers, directors, co-directors, scenario writers, scenario editors, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, and more to make the point that [women] were not just actresses (italics in original).” Readers were reminded of the important fact that women’s work in the silent film industry was also behind the camera, work that had been hidden from view, elided, and lost. This article, however, takes the actress–or, rather, what Shelley Stamp terms the “sphere of performative labour”–as its focus.¹ My aim is to expose the range of creative and business roles that actresses undertook in early film, and to re-focus our attention onto the actresses whose work we presume to see and understand on screen. I seek to highlight and celebrate the breadth of the actress’s engagement with film, as well as to expose the networks, relationships, and exchanges that were developed between theater and silent film.

As I make clear, my foregrounding of the important and often groundbreaking work of the theatrical actress in early film emerges from collective research and scholarship. Drawing on this scholarship, I bring together and affirm the rich history of the theater actress’s varied and vital work in the nascent film industry. I also draw upon Europe (rather than America) for my case studies. I do this for two reasons: in the first place, a European focus allows me to speak to my own area of expertise, which is the relationship between the late nineteenth-century French actress and early transnational film; secondly, a focus on the European actress allows me to document the significant contributions that actresses from the Old World made to the nascent film industry. The late nineteenth century was, after all, the “golden age” of the actress. It is not surprising that she sallied forth so distinctively and effectively into the opportunities and horizons that film newly afforded.²

Reconsidering the Relationship Between Theater and Film

The last few of decades of film studies have brought tremendous change to our appreciation of the relationship between stage and screen, theater and film, and live and recorded performance. Those of us schooled in film and media departments in the late twentieth century had the good fortune to be on the cusp of this change, spurred on by teachers, educators, film festival directors, and archivists who challenged us to reconsider the traditional separation between the late nineteenth-century theater and early film history. Scholars and educators such as Heide Schlüpmann, Miriam Hansen, Yuri Tsivian, David Mayer, Eric de Kuyper, Thomas Elsaesser, Christine Gledhill, Linda Williams, Martin Loiperdinger, Charles Musser, André Gaudreault, Janet Staiger, Richard de Cordova, Ben Brewster, and Lea Jacobs (and many others!) prompted us, through their groundbreaking research, to look differently and afresh at the role of performance on screen.³

Silent film festival directors, archivists, and programmers equally drove and enabled our rapprochement of theater and film. The foresight, advocacy, and sheer hard work of people such as David Robinson and Paolo Cherchi-Usai at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy, and Gian Luca Farinelli and Mariann Lewinsky at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, have provided both a public platform and positive proof of the fecund relationship between stage and screen.⁴ The recent work of Julie Allen, Ivo Blom, Jon Burrows, Annette Förster, Hilary Hallett, Elena Mosconi, Matthew Solomon, and many others (including myself) evidences the profound impact that this generation has exerted in film studies.⁵ Likewise, the generative relationship between the theatrical actress and early film is today developed and enriched by a new generation of festival directors, programmers, and archivists. Among this contemporary group must be acknowledged the ongoing advocacy and work of Jay Weissberg (director of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto), Bryony Dixon (British Film Institute), Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (EYE Filmmuseum), and Vanessa Toulmin (National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield). Finally, those of us who attend film festivals with live musical accompaniment unfailingly attest that the work of the actress on screen is also supported, enriched, and even made visible by the deft professional work of brilliant musicians such as, but not limited to: Neil Brand, Maud Nelissen, John Sweeney, Donald Sosin, and Mauro Colombis.

Our reconsideration of the relationship between the late nineteenth-century theater and early twentieth-century film is a vital and ongoing task. Significantly, the return to a more inclusive, theatrically-informed early film history often demands the identification of–and access to–films that are often either overlooked, elided, or lost in traditional film histories. The return to a theater/film nexus also demands a consideration of the galvanizing contribution that the stage actress brought to entertainment industries more broadly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Important research by theater historians has demonstrated that the theatrical achievements of the late nineteenth-century actress have been obfuscated, silenced, replaced, or occluded by male endeavors. As Jacky Bratton contends in The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830-1870 (2011), women were not only performers on stage but also artistic directors and theater managers; they were implicated in all forms of creative entrepreneurship in London’s West End during the mid to late nineteenth century.⁶ Bratton explains that a new and more nuanced understanding of women’s role in helping to legitimize both leisure and pleasure in Victorian Britain can help us appreciate women’s agency in theater history.

The scholarship of theater historians such Katherine Newey, Kerry Powell, Maggie B. Gale, Viv Gardner, and John Stokes supports this point, underscoring the central role of the actress in the late nineteenth century.⁷ As Stokes argues in The French Actress and her English Audience (2005), the late nineteenth century was dominated by renowned female performers who ushered in a “golden age of acting.”⁸ In Maggie B. Gale and Stokes’ collection, The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (2007), this discussion of transnational celebrity actresses slides into early film. Hence, in David Mayer’s contribution to the volume, “The actress as photographic icon: from early photography to early film,” the actress provides the conceptual and commercial focus for a study linking female stage renown to the technological diffusion of celebrity. The commercial reproduction of the photograph and film could, as Mayer explains, enhance a theater actress’s renown “to all parts of the country, and beyond, to the Empire.”⁹ The Cambridge Companion to the Actress also includes Christine Gledhill’s article, “The screen actress from silence to sound.” As Gledhill demonstrates, just as screen acting offered different opportunities to the legitimate player and “the modern girl,” so too was the transnational circulation of her image differently inflected into local conditions.¹⁰

This breakdown in the divide between theater and film history also emerges from an increase in scholarly work on melodrama. Melodrama–a sensational, spectacular, and sometimes even excessive mode of expressiveness that was fully available to the early cinema–demands a consideration of the links and crossovers between theatrical forms and performance practices. The most recent exemplification of this consideration can be found in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams’s co-edited collection, Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media and National Cultures (2018). As Gledhill explains in the prologue of this substantial and important collection, melodrama is “a cross-generic modality that…infuses mainstream media fictions.” Rather than being assigned, therefore, to a specific period of theatre history or considered a feminized genre of mid twentieth-century film (“the weepies”), melodrama is instead propounded as a genre-generating machine. Its central function is “its recognition of the personalized virtues and vices of characters whose actions have consequences for others.”¹¹

The capacity of melodrama to be unpacked in this way, through a consideration of its centrifugal richness, has had profound consequences for the consideration of the actress’s significance to film history. As David Mayer and Helen Day-Mayer demonstrate in Melodrama Unbound, sensitivity to physical expression and an awareness of the articulate role of music enables us to appreciate gestural nuance in silent film acting.¹² The contribution by Hilary Hallett, entitled “Melodrama and the Making of Hollywood,” highlights the modernity of melodrama. As Hallett argues, melodrama helped fuel the birth of Hollywood precisely because it gave agency to women both on and off the screen.¹³ In an important development for the ongoing task of rethinking the relationship between stage and screen, Melodrama Unbound also includes a consideration of melodrama in Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Latin American contexts. Such a transnational analysis opens the nexus between theater and film to further cultural encounters and hybrid forms.

The idea that the popular theater was a potent platform for feminist opportunity has been embraced by cultural studies more generally. In Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (2000), Susan A. Glenn argues that in America between the late 1880s and the late 1920s, actresses on the popular stage were a proto-feminist vanguard “helping to define the modern social and sexual terrain.” ¹⁴ While Glenn does not consider acting in silent film (and seems genuinely oblivious to the fact that an irreverent female spirit can be found in films produced before the 1930s), she nevertheless makes the theatrical actress the centerpiece in her discussion of modern feminism. In this way, we are reminded that the actress was a flashpoint for social protest, progressive politics, and cultural change.

Glenn’s elision of the silent screen actress illustrates a central argument made in the opening pages of Jane Gaines’ book, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (2018). As Gaines explains, the screen actress has been “lost in plain sight.” ¹⁵ Taking the early American stunt actress Pearl White as her example, Gaines argues that one celebrity actress can obfuscate and incarnate the stage and screen work of earlier, forgotten actresses. Gaines contends that the silent film actress consequently is at once visible yet invisible. She is lost in film history (because we know little about screen actresses) yet, once seen and acknowledged, she nevertheless presents a loss (of the other actresses and performers who, as Gaines argues, preceded and “underwrote” her). My discussion will therefore shift backward, away from Pearl White, into a consideration of the renowned stage actresses who “underwrote” her when they transitioned into silent film. In the opening decade of the twentieth century, actresses such as Asta Nielsen, Eleanora Duse, and Sarah Bernhardt forayed into the cinema as mature performers, their celebrity well established before they engaged with film. Younger performers such as the music hall actress Mistinguett also built their celebrity on film while they amassed audiences in popular theaters. As I explain in the next section, the subsequent removal of these actresses from film history–that is, one of the reasons why it has taken roughly a century to celebrate the stage actress’s perspicuous entrepreneurship and cultural significance to the nascent cinema–can be linked to the circumstances of film’s emergence as a discipline within the university.

Undated Mistinguett postcard. Laurence Senelick Collection.

Defining a Discipline: The Emergence of Film Studies

Film history has a complex and changing relationship with theater history. The relationship between the two fields was determined by the complexities of film’s emergence and integration into the arena of arts practice and criticism (including theater practices, media practices, and popular performance practices). From the opening decades of the twentieth century, there were continuing debates about film from a wide range of cultural, industrial, and critical activists, both hostile and celebratory.¹⁶ As Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson explain in their 2008 essay “The Academy and Motion Pictures,” the fragmented nature of film studies as a discipline reflects its “diffuse interests, diverse political orientations, and changing intellectual formations.”¹⁷ Historically, this diffusion and diversity was evidenced in the exploration and contestation of what film represented, and what its relation to theater was or should be. Debate was necessarily contextual, and tied to the specific and located conditions of a given institution and/or cultural industry. Arising from these widespread debates, expressed through popular opinion and critical judgement, there later arose a division between theater and film historians.¹⁸

Each author, critic, historian, and/or activist was arguing for stakes that were intertwined with possibilities for government funding, educational recognition, and/or institutional acceptability. Early film critics like Vachel Lindsay, writing The Art of the Moving Picture in the early teens, spoke of Sarah Bernhardt in Camille (La Dame aux Camélias, André Calmettes and Henri Pouctal, 1911) as “a tintype,” and stated that she was “[t]he prime example of complete failure” on screen.¹⁹ Film failure, in Lindsay’s view, was explained by the fact that Bernhardt’s film “might be compared to watching Camille from the top gallery through smoked glass, with ones ears stopped with cotton.”²⁰ Hugo Münsterberg, writing two years later (in 1917), also separated stage from screen. Münsterberg argued that “With the rise of the moving picture has come an entirely new independent new art which must develop its own life conditions…the shortcomings of one as against the other reflect only the fact that the one has a history of fifteen years while the other has one of five thousand years.”²¹ Erwin Panofsky, publishing one of the most famous and influential articles on film aesthetics in 1936 (later republished as “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in 1947) contended that it was “a significant fact” that the great actors of the silent period did not come from the legitimate stage.²²

Nicholas Vardac’s 1949 study Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith was particularly damning in its consideration of a separation between the late nineteenth-century theater and early film. Concluding his treatise, Vardac argued that the cinema did “so much better the selfsame things which had been the aim and objective of the nineteenth century theatre.”²³ Roughly half a century later, when early film history first entered graduate school curricula in the United States in the mid 1990s, books such as Eileen Bowser’s The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (1994) brought new insights and nuances to our understanding of the development of early film, and highlighted the tremendous changes that occurred within the industry in a very short period of time. Scholarly attention like Bowser’s to filmmaking processes, as well as to exhibition and reception contexts, helped to contextualize the emergence of stabilized production and distribution systems.²⁴ However, notwithstanding a reconsideration of film history, the stage actress–and particularly the European stage actress–was still seen to incarnate the stylized performance of the legitimate theater. Her acting style, seen in contrast to what Bowser called naturalistic, “modern film acting,” remained positioned as an anachronism in the otherwise developing field of film studies.²⁵

While decades of scholarship can be mined for these different (but effectively quite similar) divisions between stage and screen, we must recall that educated film enthusiasts were at the time of cinema’s systemization (in the 1920s and 1930s) struggling to have film recognized as a separate and unique art form. The Close Up critics in the United Kingdom, as well as those that followed them, sought to have film distinct from, not an adjunct to, theater and the other arts (such as sculpture, painting, and music).²⁶ This aim to have film recognized as an identifiable field of academic study–that is, as a discipline separate from English, Theater Studies, and Art History–became even more important for getting film into higher education in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The hurdles faced by advocates for Film Studies included the claim of film on publishers’ finances, art gallery and educational budgets, and curriculum spaces. For film practitioners, producers, makers, actors and actresses, and writers, the advent of the cinema meant new resources, new openings, and a myriad possibilities of specializations and combinations.

In sum, the critical complexities of cinema’s emergence and integration into the arena of arts practice and criticism fueled the foundation of Film Studies, just as it established a complex division between theater and film historians. As I have already shown, only in the last thirty or forty years has the division between stage and screen been redressed, whittled down, and positively re-conceived. David Mayer explains that the relationship between the late-Victorian and Edwardian stage and early film can today been seen as “a fluid period of explorations and experimentations, developments, borrowings, and mutual rip-offs.”²⁷ With screen practices incorporated into performance pieces and theater shows today, we also see contemporary evidence of the richness of these overlaps and interweavings.²⁸

Finding Feminisms: The Actress’s Work in Front of and Behind the Camera

Frame enlargement. Bernhardt spirals to her death in Camille (1911). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Frame enlargement. Bernhardt spirals to her death in Camille (1911). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Frame enlargement. Bernhardt spirals to her death in Camille (1911). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

A significant strand of recent scholarship has involved the act of uncovering women lost to us in the film archives. The identification of hitherto overlooked or unknown female directors, editors, writers, projectionists, film critics (and so on) demonstrates that women were implicated and active within all aspects of the moving picture industry. This process of identifying and contextualizing women as makers behind the camera (that is, away from the public gaze) is important because it foregrounds females as agents in technological and industrial change, while contesting traditional gendered divisions of labor. The stage actress, working in front of the camera, equally levels challenges to traditional understandings of early film. Actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and Lyda Borelli not only performed on film; they adapted their renowned stage plays in their own idiosyncratic ways to the demands of the new medium. These actresses modified the length of their plays, often eliminating entire acts so that audiences were presented with a familiar but very changed works. The tempo and range of their gestures were similarly adapted to the changed spatial and temporal affordances of film. Actresses also chose key moments or sequences of physical expression to relay narrative and emotional meaning. For example, in Camille, a film that drew upon over thirty years of Bernhardt’s global fame as Marguerite in “La Dame aux Camélias” on the live stage, Bernhardt swivels to her death at the end of the film. Her body is caught by her lover while she spirals her descent to the ground. In this brief action, we see her white nightdress (so familiar as a costume for women on the nineteenth-century stage) wrap itself one final time around her thin and falling body. We also see Bernhardt’s final tendrilic turn, and hence the actress’s capacity to incarnate art nouveau on film. Through film, the theater thus emerges as a modern art form whose unique and expressive physical phrases of action are now made available to popular audiences.

The late nineteenth-century stage actress was a highly respected and creative individual performer; her career was built upon the differentiation between her own performance and that of another actress. Hence, when Bernhardt first introduced this standing, tendrilic death to “La Dame aux Camélias” on stage, critics paid attention to her “curious novelty” because it changed the traditional representation of Marguerite expiring on a bed, or stretched on a chaise lounge.²⁹ In this context, it is important to appreciate that Bernhardt–as well as her renowned peers on the stage, such as Lyda Borelli, Eleanora Duse, and Asta Nielsen–did not follow instructions but instead chose her roles, authored her own performance style, selected costumes, and provided her own sets and props. Moreover, celebrated actresses such as Bernhardt and Réjane were managers and directors of their own theaters in Paris (the eponymous Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt and the Théatre Réjane).³⁰ As Bernhardt’s feature film, Queen Elizabeth (Les Amours de la Reine Élisabeth, Louis Mercanton and Henri Desfontaines, 1912), announces: “Dresses, Armor and Furniture from the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, Paris.”³¹ The actors that performed on film were also those who were in Bernhardt’s original theatrical productions and who worked at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt.³² Moreover, other theatrical practices–time set aside for rehearsals and a separate rehearsal room to explore scenes away from the set–were associated with the work of the theatrical actress moving into early film.³³ A recent special issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film that I co-edited with Vito Adriaensens, “The Actress-Manager and Early Film,” draws attention to the figure of the actress-manager and her transition to early film, presenting research into well-known actresses such as Bernhardt, Duse, Betty Nansen, and Marion Davies, as well as the little-known figures of Mrs. Kate King, Mrs. Almena Garrett, Mrs. Frances Latimer, Miss Marie Clegg, and Helena Cortesina.³⁴

The agency that the late nineteenth-century actress enjoyed “behind” the camera also included the significant work she undertook in the development of collective, institutional networks. The Danish actress Asta Nielsen provides a good example of the actress’s capacity to operationally engage the film industry to serve her own business needs. Unlike Bernhardt and Réjane, Nielsen was not a major celebrity actress before she entered the silent film industry. It was through her inaugural film, The Abyss (Afgrunden, Urban Gad, 1910), that Nielsen gained international fame, particularly within Europe. Nielsen went on to make over seventy films, mostly within Germany and with German film production companies. While her acting on film was popular with audiences, recent scholarship has highlighted other, productive ways of thinking of Nielsen’s contribution to early film. Prime among these is Nielsen’s status as a global film star circulating in a new, monopoly distribution system. Indeed, within a year of gaining fame on film, Nielsen negotiated a deal with the distribution company, Internationale Film-Vertriebs-GmBH. As Julie Allen explains in her WFPP career profile of Nielsen, in return for the distribution rights to thirty-two Nielsen films, Nielsen gained a generous salary and revenue from her films as well as “full artistic freedom in choosing her screenplays, costumes, and supporting actors, and, perhaps more importantly, the right to be directed exclusively by her soon-to-be husband [Urban] Gad.” These conditions were gained in 1911 and come on the heels, I contend, of celebrities like Bernhardt and Réjane entering the entertainment industry as both actresses and managers in the live theater.³⁵

The changes Nielsen introduced to film practice in the silent period were important.³⁶ As Annette Förster explains, Nielsen’s monopoly distribution system was adopted by the German actress, film director, and screenwriter Rosa Porten and her husband, Franz Eckstein, when they were affiliated with an independent production company (the Treumann-Larsen Filmvertriebs-GmbH) between 1913 and 1922. Using the pseudonym Dr. R. Portegg, Porten marketed her own films as “Rosa Porten Serie.” Porten marketed, to similar effect, the films of Wanda Treumann, labeling them the “Wanda Treumann Serie.” Moreover, Porten collaborated with Nielsen on the script for Hedda Gabler (1924) and Die Schmetterlingsschlacht (1924).³⁷ Porten highlights the actress’s capacity to strategize as a performer, writer, and business manager in the film industry, as well as the collaborative nature of the actress’s work on screen. Instead of working under the thumb of a given director, and instead of engaging with other actresses in an adversarial manner, Nielsen and Porten demonstrate the range of skills as well as the professional bonds and networks that enabled actresses to succeed in the film industry.

In her recent book, Women in the Silent Cinema: Histories of Fame and Fate (2017), Förster develops her argument about the range and depth of professional engagements that actresses enjoyed in the entertainment industries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Explaining that actresses enjoyed a “careerography,” Förster develops our understanding of who an actress was and what she could achieve in the nascent film industry. Taking three different but related case studies, Förster examines the careers of the Dutch actress Adriënne Solser, the French actress Musidora, and the Canadian actress Nell Shipman. Förster demonstrates that these actresses learned “their metier in practice” before acting in, producing, and directing film (and in the case of these three, by establishing production companies).³⁸ A shift from the live stage to film did not mean that the live stage was relinquished and abandoned. Rather, the actress enjoyed a careerography that moved between art forms (the theater, film, and writing). This was not a hierarchical career, where a teleological endpoint was the achievement of film. Indeed, Förster is very clear when she states that the actress’s professional and creative flexibility did not “necessarily privilege cinema over other disciplines and media.”³⁹

Curating Flexible Fame: The Actress and Popular Audiences

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, established stage actresses lent their craft, respectability, and celebrity to the nascent screen. They also, importantly, lent their business acumen, developing practices in the industry that had their genesis on the nineteenth-century stage. A prime example of this was the actress’s decision to draw attention to specific phrases of physical performance on film. I mentioned, above, Bernhardt’s spiralling death in Camille. At this time in America, in the early teens (around 1911), Bernhardt was appearing in single acts drawn from her most famous plays on the live stage. There is an extensive record of Bernhardt’s practice of curating her live programs around single theatrical excerpts. Even in 1887, almost a quarter of a century before she brought Camille to film, Bernhardt appeared in a ‘Special Performance’ of Act II of “Phèdre” and Acts IV and V of “La Dame aux Camélias” at the Lyceum Theatre in London.⁴⁰ Moreover, on her first tour to America in 1880, Bernhardt drew audiences by appearing in the most emotionally engaging scenes of her plays. Performances were therefore often curated theatrical ellipses of Bernhardt’s current (and most famous) acts collected into a single playbill. Hence, the Globe Theatre playbill of December 18, 1880, advertises Bernhardt in the Second and Third Act of “Frou Frou,” the single-Act play “La Passant,” as well as the Fourth and Fifth Acts of “Adrienne Lecouvreur.”⁴¹ Well before appearing on the music hall stage to great fanfare in the 1910s (at the London Coliseum) and variety theaters in America in 1911 and 1913 (beginning at the Palace Theatre in New York), and decades before appearing on film, Bernhardt adapted herself to international and popular tastes by curating punchy, theatrical shows that global audiences could understand and enjoy. In this context, we can better understand a 1910 review of Camille in America explaining to readers that each of Bernhardt’s “great scenes” were included in the film.⁴²

Lyceum Theatre Program, listing Bernhardt in a performance with single acts of her plays, for July 25, 1887. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Theatre and Performance Collection.

Cover of the Bernhardt Season, London Coliseum, 1911. Courtesy of Special Collections, Exeter University.

The curated fluidity that we can trace between an actress’s movement across legitimate and popular theaters, as well as into early film, indicates that she played an important role in the formation, expansion, and characterization of popular culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theater scholars such as Jacky Bratton have explored how the making of the West End of London in the mid-nineteenth century (1830-1870) involved the expansion of theaters in the city, as well as female agency at all levels of cultural production. The exuberant theater that Bratton identifies was often authored, managed, performed, and enjoyed by women. When theater actresses later entered silent film, a similar diversity of performance styles and dramatic vehicles expanded their renown, now circulating as products in global film distribution markets. A vital and vibrant group of diverse female actresses circulated on film, expressing coterminous exuberance with the live stage. We might cite, for example, Eleanora Duse and Francesca Bertini from Italy, Asta Nielsen from Denmark, Adriënne Solser from The Netherlands, Sarah Bernhardt, Mistinguett, and Musidora from France, Chrissie Bell and Gladys Sylvani from England, as well as Rosa Porten from Germany.⁴³

Mistinguett in Fleur de Paris (Flower of Paris, André Hugon, 1916). © LCJ Productions – Collections CNC.

Förster explains that local programming initiatives in variété theaters–known as the music-hall in France and England, vaudeville in America, and Spezialitäten-Programm in Germany–joined short, varied stage performances with film screenings imported from across the world. In this way, the kaleidoscopic joining of the theatre actress and film was also a located event. Actresses such as Solser therefore appeared in the same programs as films. Later, Musidora became renowned in the genre of film that drew from this tradition of the variety program, the ciné-vaudeville, in her collaboration with Louis Feuillade.⁴⁴ In other words, the actress provided her support and skill to a popular and varied entertainment industry that, like the transformations in the West End a generation earlier, helped to transform the nature, scope, and audiences for the theater across the globe.

This advertisement reads: “Bet in an awful fix” will irrevocably be the final film with which Mrs. Adrienne Solser, our popular “Tante Bet,” will be lecturing in person. So don’t be too late and book this film immediately.’’ In Nieuw Weekblad voor de Cinematografie vol. 5, no. 13 (24 Dec. 1926): n.p. With thanks to Annette Förster.

At the same time that popular theaters were including film alongside (and even within) live acts on the stage, cinemas offered theatrical performances for their patrons. For example, the world’s largest cinema in the early teens, the 3,400-seat Gaumont-Pathé cinema in Paris, also advertised virtuoso theatrical attractions as part of its film program.⁴⁵As Förster notes, in structuring a film as one would structure an evening at the theatre–the program was divided into two acts, it was presented in a spacious hall, and food and drink were offered during the show–film and theater could also elevate cultural experience.⁴⁶ Solser did not disentangle the theater from the cinema even after the First World War, accompanying her films with live appearances in The Netherlands into the 1920s.⁴⁷ This practice of mixing recorded and live performance is a feature of our heterogenous performance landscape today.⁴⁸

The importance of the theatrical actress to early film expands well beyond considerations of creative practice. It includes, most pressingly, the awareness that women were at the vanguard of early cinema audiences and constituted a fan base for many actresses on screen. Hilary Hallett’s Go West Young Women!: The Rise of Early Hollywood (2013) demonstrates women’s significant contribution to commercial entertainment in early Hollywood. As Hallett explains: “The reorientation of fan culture toward women during the 1910s was sped by the creeping conviction among many industry insiders that their good fortune demanded catering to the female trade.”⁴⁹ Rightly noting that this was a strategy adopted from the stage, Hallett highlights how women’s central roles in creating the entertainment landscape of Hollywood put them at the vanguard of the cinematic century that followed.⁵⁰

A Cautious Conclusion

“Sarah Bernhardt Honors Pearl White.” The Moving Picture World, February 1917.

My discussion about the relationship between the late nineteenth century stage actress and early film has been written through the lens of Europe and America. There remains many continents, countries, exchanges, networks, and certainly many stage actresses, who will reveal different histories to us.⁵¹ While I look forward to learning about these theater actresses, I remain aware that even within the broad group of Western countries and continents I discuss, film studies often mistakenly divides older, European theatrical actresses from newer, American or Canadian film actresses of the early twentieth century. Well-known younger actresses–performers such as Pearl White, Blanche Sweet, Mary Pickford, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Fuller, Florence Lawrence, Florence Turner, and Clara Kimball Young–become representative of the American film actress, and are separated from their European counterparts who incorporated film into their broader managerial and creative repertoires. What is left out of this equation are the ongoing and fertile links between theatre and film, the relationships that were built by actresses of a given generation, as well as the relationships between the actresses of the Old and the New World. A number of these younger actresses also worked as businesswomen, writers, producers, directors and founders of film studios. Rather than pitch differences, I believe that we would do well to cite similarities. It is a significant fact that Bernhardt, Vachel Lindsay’s “tintype” actress, was an innovative game-changer who organized a meeting with Pearl White while on a trip to promote American involvement in the First World War in 1917. These two generations of actresses, mutually aware and respectful of their achievements, were eager to pay tribute to each other. As the French press reported, the two also solidly joined, through the celluloid link, “the country of Washington to the gentle country of Joan of Arc.”⁵²

Notes

1
Shelley Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 3.
2
For information about the importance of the French actress, in particular, during the late nineteenth century, see John Stokes, The French Actress and Her English Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1, 2, 4-5.
3
See, for example, Heide Schlüpmann, The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early German Cinema. Trans. Inga Pollmann (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010 [orig. 1990)]. Note that this was originally published in two volumes (the English publication is only the first half of the German edition) as Unheimlichkeit des Blicks: Das Drama des Frühen deutschen Kinos; Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Culture Reception. Trans. Alan Bodger (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) [orig. 1991]); Eric de Kuyper, “Le Théâtre comme ‘mauvais objet.’” Cinémathèque 11 (1997): 63-75; David Mayer, “Learning to See in the Dark.” Nineteenth Century Theatre vol. 25, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 92-114 and “Acting in Silent Cinema: Which Legacy of the Theatre?” In Screen Acting. Eds. Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 10-30; Christine Gledhill, Reframing British Cinema 1918-1928: Between Restraint and Passion (London: British Film Institute, 2003); Martin Loiperdinger and Uli Jung, eds., Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910-1914 (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2013); and Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
4
I note, in particular, Paolo Cherchi Usai’s instigation and curatorship of The Griffith Project at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone. This project was organized in 1996 under the joint sponsorship of the Cineteca del Friuli, the British Film Institute, the Library of Congress, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum). See Paolo Cherchi Usai, general editor, The Griffith Project. Volumes 1-12 (London: British Film Institute, 1999-2008). Note also the brilliant advocacy and programming work of Mariann Lewinsky at Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna. See the program archives, available at: https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/edizioni-precedenti/ (accessed August 8, 2022).
5
See, for example, Annette Förster, Women in the Silent Cinema: Histories of Fame and Fate (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016); Hilary Hallett, Go West, Young Women!: The Rise of Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Jon Burrows, Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003); Victoria Duckett, Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Screen (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2015); and Julie K. Allen, “Divas down under: the circulation of Asta Nielsen’s and Francesca Bertini’s films in Australian cinemas in the 1910s.” Studies in Australasian Cinema vol. 11, no. 2 (2017): 59-76 and Screening Europe in Australasia: Transnational Silent Film Before and After the Rise of Hollywood (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2022).
6
Jacky Bratton, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
7
See, for example, Katherine Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, New Histories, New Historiographies: Women, Theatre, and Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and John Stokes and Maggie B. Gale, The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
8
Stokes, The French Actress, 1, 2, 4-5.
9
David Mayer, “The actress as photographic icon: from early photography to early film,” op. cit. 74.
10
Christine Gledhill, “The screen actress from silence to sound, ” ibid. 193-214.
11
Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds. Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 5.
12
David Mayer and Helen Day-Mayer, “Performing/Acting Melodrama,” ibid. 99-113.
13
Hilary Hallett, “Melodrama and the Making of Hollywood,” ibid., 115-134.
14
Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3.
15
Jane M. Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 11.
16
See Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell’s discussion of “film studies” in A Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). See also, Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, “The Academy and Motion Pictures.” In Inventing Film Studies, eds. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), xi–xxxii.
17
Grieveson and Wasson, “The Academy,” xxix.
18
I thank Christine Gledhill for her generous direction, support, and articulation of these points in her review of this overview essay.
19
Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan Co., 1915 [rev. ed., 1922]), 157. Available at: https://archive.org/details/cu31924074466933/page/n203/mode/2up/search/Camille.
20
Ibid., 108.
21
Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1916), 141. Available at: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.82037/page/n149/mode/2up.
22
Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures.” Bulletin of the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1934; Reprinted in Angela Dalle Vacche, The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 79.
23
A. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 251. Available at: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.60521/page/n325/mode/2up.
24
Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
25
Ibid., 92.
26
See Richard Lowell MacDonald, The Appreciation of Film: The Post-war Film Society Movement and Film Culture in Britain (Exeter: The University of Exeter Press, 2016). See also Laura Marcus, “Cinema and Visual Culture: Close-Up (1927-33).” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, eds. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Vol. 1, Britain and Ireland; and James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus, eds., Close Up, 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). I thank Christine Gledhill again for her helpful comments which clarified these points for me.
27
David Mayer, Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 27, 29. See also the articles in Kaveh Askari et al, Performing New Media 1890-1915 (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2014), particularly Gwendolyn Waltz, “20 Minutes or Less: Short-Form Film-and-Theatre Hybrids- Skits, Sketches, Playlets, & Acts in Vaudeville, Variety, Revues, &c,” pp. 245-253.
28
A particularly strong example of this can be seen in the recent staging of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Eryn Jean Norvill (adapted and directed by Kip Williams) where video, screens, and live performance merge and intersect on stage. See https://rising.melbourne/festival-program/the-picture-of-dorian-gray for images of this (accessed August 8, 2022).
29
“The French Plays.” The Times (13 June 1881): 13.
30
As Jane Gaines reminded me in her review of this overview essay, there is no easy equivalent to a figure like Bernhardt in the United States, particularly in the context of a stage actress who transitioned to motion pictures. Bernhardt’s transnational reach into America enabled her to become localized and shared in new contexts and ways. See my forthcoming Transnational Trailblazers: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Mistinguett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023).
31
See Gerda Taranow, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972) who speaks of how “Photographs and film reveal the magnificence of the acclaimed mise en scène” (168).
32
Note that although the film gives credit for Mlle Romain, she is sometimes cited as “Romani.” See Bert’s photograph in (screen 1), “La reine Elisabeth,” pièce d’Emile Moreau: documents iconographiques, 1912, available at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84387335.item (accessed August 8, 2022). See also the credits of the film given by the CNC at http://lise.cnc.fr/Internet/ARemplir/Parcours/100ans/juillet1913.html (accessed August 8, 2022).
33
For example, discussion by The Moving Picture World, in relation to Bernhardt’s Camille, indicates that rehearsal practices were continued when the actress moved to film. We are told that “’Camille’ was rehearsed a few times with the watch in order to get it timed right…” See “Bernhardt conquers new world.” The Moving Picture World (9 March 1912): 874-875. Further, actresses who worked in the theater insisted that actors be allowed rehearsal time and an actual–separate–rehearsal space where a scene could be explored away from the set. An actress who should be credited with this is Blanche Sweet who, circa 1910-11, persuaded Griffith and Biograph that rehearsals were needed and that Biograph studio needed a separate rehearsal room. See Martin Sopocy, “Behind the Scenes: An Interview with Blanche Sweet.” Griffithiana, La Rivista della Cineteca del Friuli no. 71 (2001): 111- 123, especially 117-118. See also Karen Ward Mahar’s Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), particularly Chapter 2.
34
Victoria Duckett and Vito Adriaensens, eds. “The Actress-manager and Early film.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film vol. 45, no. 1 (September 2018).
35
Julie Allen, “Asta Nielsen.” In Women Film Pioneers Project. Eds. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-dw7e-x721. I would like to thank Christine Gledhill, in review of my work, for highlighting the fact that the feminist division between women “in front of” or “behind” the camera has occluded knowledge that the actress brought to the development of film.
36
I thank Jane Gaines for reminding me that Nielsen was exceptional among European women in negotiating the PAGU contract, but lost out later. See discussion also in Schlüpmann, The Uncanny Gaze.
37
Annette Förster, “Rosa Porten.” In Women Film Pioneers Project. Eds. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-q5qw-0p84.
38
Förster, Women in the Silent Cinema, 10.
39
Ibid., 11.
40
See Program Box, May 1887-Oct. 1888, file 49b. Theatre and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum.
41
Box 8, folder 8.2. Sarah Bernhardt Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin.
42
“Bernhardt as Marguerite.” New York Times (28 January 1896), 5. Note that both David Mayer and Jon Burrows have demonstrated the importance of variety programming and film. See David Mayer “Eighteen Minutes.” In The Showman, the Spectacle and the Two-Minute Silence: Performing British Cinema Before 1930, eds. Alan Burton and Laraine Porter (Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 2001), and discussion in Jon Burrows, Legitimate Cinema.
43
See Förster, Women in the Silent Cinema, Introduction. See also, for example, Maria Pia Pagani and Paul Fryer, eds., Eleonora Duse and Cenere (Ashes): Centennial Essays (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017); Loiperdinger and Jung, eds., Importing Asta Nielsen; and Jon Burrows, “Girls on film: the musical matrices of film stardom in early British cinema.” Screen, vol. 44, no. 3 (2003): 314-325.
44
Förster, Women in the Silent Screen, 183.
45
Ibid., 190.
46
Ibid., 191
47
Ibid., 80.
48
Note that in discussions of theater training and theatrical shows, the use of screens and videos are often included. See, for instance, Sean McLoughlin’s recent reflection on NIDA (The National Institute of Dramatic Art, Australia) in “Theatre in the age of video: NIDA and TDC reflect on how video has influenced theatre” available at: https://www.aussietheatre.com.au/news/theatre-in-the-age-of-video-nida-and-tdc-reflect-on-how-video-has-influenced-theatre (accessed August 8, 2022).
49
Hallett, Go West Young Women! 23.
50
See also the work of Shelley Stamp in Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) as well as Janet Staiger, “‘The Eyes Are Really the Focus’: Photoplay Acting and Film Form and Style.” Wide Angle vol. 6, no. 4 (1985): 14-23; and Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1991), particularly Introduction and Chapter 2.
51
See, for inspiration, the programming for the 2022 Women and the Silent Screen conference (New York): https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/silentscreenconference/nycschedule2022 (accessed August 8, 2022). I also thank Jane Gaines for bringing my attention to what she termed “one of the most interesting discoveries” of 2019: early Korean cinema as “combination drama.” See Chonghwa Chung, “How Roleau Became Songsan Instead of Matsuyama: Early Film Practices in Colonial Korea and the Influence from American Serial Films.” Busan International Film Festival, 9 Oct. 2019, http://forum.biff.kr/eng/addon/10000001/page.asp?page_num=2115 (accessed August 8, 2022). Note that the combination drama was made up of two discrete companies: a group of actors who performed the straight play, and a second group of variety performers who added in variety elements. David Mayer was the theater scholar who first linked the combination drama to early film. See David Mayer and Helen-Day Mayer, “A ‘Secondary Action’ or Musical Highlight? Melodic Interludes in Early Film Melodrama Reconsidered.” In The Sounds of Early Cinema, eds. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 220-331. See also David Mayer’s explanation of the combination system, its emergence as well as its application to early film in Stagestruck Filmmaker, op. cit., 36-40.
52
L. Sazie, “La Chaîne de Celluloïd.” Le Cinéma (10 May 1917): 1; See also, “Sarah Bernhardt Honors Pearl White.” The Moving Picture World (10 February 1917): 864.

by Georgina Torello

Introduction

Women were involved in the cinematographic field in Uruguay since its beginnings and throughout the entire silent period. This early and sustained participation of women in the cultural sector is not surprising considering the consolidation of the modern Uruguayan State in the first decades of the twentieth century. Led from 1903 by progressive president José Batlle y Ordoñez, Uruguay was the terrain of innovative reforms at the continental level, both during Batlle’s two presidencies (1903-1907 and 1911-1915) and, subsequently, until his death in 1929 through his political affiliates, the Batllista sector of the Colorado Party. Within a broad framework of economic, fiscal, rural, and social reforms—among them, the eight-hour work day, the secularization of education, and the ability for women to file for divorce—the female population was able to carve out spaces of relative autonomy. Women participated in the debates about their position in society, fighting for their own rights and for the rights and well-being of those in need, thus taking part in direct social actions.¹ Their many political and social crusades not only gave women more freedoms, but also a new visibility in the rapidly modernizing society. One group of women that was particularly outspoken and visible during this time was also especially active in cinema: the elite. Upper-class society ladies quickly understood the many possibilities of the medium and, unlike other groups of women (the working class, middle-class wives, or even feminists), they had the social and economic power to engage with this new field. Thus, while female participation in the cinema transcended class, as this essay reveals, the elite’s powerful position in society, with direct access to the press and time for creative endeavors, determined the group’s (omni)presence.

This overview essay deals with the various modalities of female participation within the Uruguayan cinematographic arena, from an early example in 1900, through the 1910s when the field began to consolidate, and until the end of the silent period in the late 1920s.² It seeks to not only insert these modalities of interaction into the historiography of a national cinema, but also to “rescue” women’s names and images, removing them from the anonymity in which they were plunged by the passage of time and a century-long lack of interest from chroniclers and researchers. Given the absence of specialized archives on the subject, both names and practices can only be (re)constructed from fragments: news items in the daily press, specialized magazines, occasional publications, and ephemera. This new information forces us, as feminist film historians, to not only rethink the cinematographic field of that time, but also to reconsider our own research in fundamentally more fragmented terms as well as to reassess the ways in which our work develops, including the gaps it fills and the absences that remain. In short, this reconstruction process necessitates the reorganization of feminine action in the past and ours in the present.

Advertisement for the premiere of Del pingo al volante (1929) that “name drops” all the upper-class women involved. El País (4 August 1929).

The title of this essay is a play on the expression of “name dropping.” Taken seriously, it refers to the social prestige that several of the upper-class women discussed below had in Uruguayan society at the time as well as to the reputation and authority that these names hypothetically transferred onto whomever was quoting them. In addition, the phrase brings into play the practice of listing (their own) names (or, again, the practice of “name dropping”) that some groups of women did for themselves, as I will show, when promoting film events they organized. Conversely, it tacitly comments on how no such prestige was associated at that time with quoting, for instance, the names of middle-class musicians who performed in movie theaters. Finally, the title of this essay is an ironic comment on all these women’s total erasure in the present; it is a reflection upon the often frustrating scholarly work of reinstating “dropped” names that are unknown today or perceived as irrelevant to film history. To this end, this essay claims that despite any strategic “uselessness” of compiling names, it is urgent work in order to fully understand the Uruguayan cinematographic field and to integrate these women into the seemingly “neutral”—but exclusively male—list of names that has for decades shaped silent film history in Uruguay.

Thus, in this essay, I both quote these original lists and create new ones at the end of each section: lists of names that, in most cases, are all that remain from these film-related activities. Since there are practically no printed interviews or statements from the women involved in Uruguayan silent cinema, it is not possible to hear their voices, not even mediated by journalists or editorials. For this reason, I am unable to interpret their ideas and (dis)comforts. There are no declarations, just names and facts—actually, chronicles of the facts. However, using these names and facts, I will map out and reflect upon women’s involvement in the cinematographic field. The danger is, at times, to slide into stark inventories. Yet, I believe it is a necessary risk and, hopefully, will inspire continued research.

A charity film being shot in the Prado neighborhood in Montevideo. “Fridays at the Cine Doré.” La Mañana (19 March 1922).

One of the goals of this essay is to shed light on the importance of women in the creation of the first film productions in Uruguay, an activity that was mainly carried out by high-society women—those who obviously had the means and connections to sustain such endeavors. As the essay unfolds, it will become clear that the engine behind many (relative) accomplishments and enterprises in primordial Uruguayan cinema were upper-class female charitable associations, whose members were eager to explore cinema’s possibilities as part of their social and civic agendas.³ On a smaller scale, women of other social strata played a part in this emerging field, and this essay constitutes a first survey of other key figures. As cinema as a social phenomenon grew stronger, middle-class women were attracted to its potential as both an object of intellectual reflection and as a possibility for work and emancipation. This is true, to varying degrees, for women writers and intellectuals and for female musicians who accompanied films in theaters.

The first section of this essay situates my research in relation to several key feminist film historiographical interventions in recent decades. Responding to the calls for wider fields of inquiry, I embrace the need to look at practices where female action was relevant but was not sufficiently considered. As I will show, this is particularly important when rethinking Uruguayan film historiography more broadly. Thus, connecting two projects—the feminist agenda and a specific national historiography—allows me to (re)construct a field that, until today, was inevitably disjointed. I also include here a brief survey of “professional” actresses, who, due to my larger focus, I will not consider in the rest of the essay.

Newspaper announcement for the premiere of Pervanche (1920). “El acontecimiento de hoy.” La Razón (11 June 1920).

Musician Sisa Bonino. Private Collection.

The sections that follow are organized chronologically. The second section examines the early participation of women in film exhibition, especially the presentation practice of combining still and moving images that started in 1900 and spanned through the 1920s. In fact, for many decades, both fixed projection (which often allowed women to integrate Uruguayan themes into the program) and moving images (generally, foreign films) animated Uruguayan society soirées. The third section considers a fiction film project, Artigas (1915), which was conceived by a female charitable association but was never completed. The fourth section focuses on the first feature film, Pervanche (1920), made possible by another female charitable association. It is followed by a discussion of key women intellectuals and writers and their public engagement with the new medium. The sixth section is dedicated to the last silent film produced by a female charitable association, Del pingo al volante (1929). Finally, the last section of this essay before the conclusion moves toward the middle-class, also the largest group of film consumers, to explore women’s relation to cinema as a workplace, focusing on the role of female musicians during film exhibitions. Though information is scarce—we have just a few names of women who performed in movie theaters in the 1920s—the fragments we do have underscore the link between cinema, women, and work. This final section allows me to “give back names” to those women who entertained Uruguayan moviegoers.

“Diverse Figures”

Although much work has been done by Uruguayan feminists at diverse levels, the relation between women and cinema was only recently taken into account.⁴ For women in silent cinema, the situation is even less articulated. Indeed, histories of Uruguayan cinema devote little space to the silent era and references to women are reduced to only a few names of actresses. Thus, I operate at a sort of degree zero. Yet, it is a degree zero that has the advantage of looking at positions and discussions in feminist scholarship from a distance, and putting them to the test in this national context with its specific conditions of existence and production.⁵ In fact, in Uruguay, as in most Latin American countries, early film production was artisanal and episodic, and the country never succeeded in building a real film industry.⁶ In this context, it is thus necessary to specify the terms of the aforementioned alliance between women and cinema because it is an alliance only thinkable if we consider how current research on cinema and women has questioned central categories in order to explore “diverse figures.”⁷ On the one hand, recent feminist film scholarship has incorporated into its scope marginal presences beyond the more traditional and widely studied professional categories of female directors or actresses. On the other hand, it has started considering women with no direct feminist or progressive agendas, integrating different strata of society and political positions into the conversation. Both “turns” are key to my work.

Luisa T. de Cavalieri. Courtesy of the CDC-Cinemateca Uruguaya.

Frame enlargement, Judith Acosta y Lara in Almas de la costa (1923). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Uruguaya.

Perla Mary and Nieves Alonso, “Dos estrellas y un astro uruguayos.” Mundo uruguayo VI, no. 297 (18 September 1924).

In the first instance, if we did not widen our scope, we must wait until 1938 for the first female director, namely Rina Massardi, who produced, directed, and starred in her only film, the musical Vocation.⁸ Moreover, the majority of women involved in Uruguayan silent cinema, as I mentioned before, were elite amateurs that approached movies with no training in the field or with the intention of becoming professionals. Indeed, if we are to be guided only by such a historically charged category like professional, we must wait until the middle of the 1920s for the first “professional” Uruguayan actresses. These women appeared in the first “commercial” fiction films—that is, films conceived outside the charity sphere but equally not industrial in nature—which were small one-off productions made by local entrepreneurs and that followed the narrative prerogatives of foreign cinema at the time, centering their plots around female protagonists. The first of these one-time actresses was Luisa T. de Cavalieri, who played a girl suffering from tuberculosis in Almas de la Costa/Souls of the Coast (1924), directed by Juan A. Borges. She competed for the male protagonist with a character played by Judith Acosta y Lara, a “flirtatious, frivolous and seductive” femme fatale, according to the press.⁹ The same year, the Uruguayan public was able to admire Perla Mary for the first time, the only one of these actresses who would later have a film career (in Argentina).¹⁰ She starred as a “rich and capricious girl” in the presumed lost Una niña parisiense en Montevideo/A Parisian Girl in Montevideo (1924), directed by Frenchman Jorge M. De Neuville.¹¹ The film also included a femme fatale character played by Nieves Alonso. Finally, it is also worth mentioning El pequeño héroe del Arroyo del Oro/The Little Hero of the Golden Stream (1932), by Carlos Alonso, the last and most popular film of the silent period. Although the female characters are secondary in the story, based on a real-life murder from 1929, I will still “drop” their names here: Celina Sánchez and Hilda Quinteros.

Thus, if women acted very little professionally and did not direct at all during the silent era in Uruguay, the concept of “diverse figures” productively reorients attention to other activities, such as acting in and producing amateur productions, organizing film programs in local cinemas, outlining screenplays, writing about film in literature and the press, playing music in movie theaters, and producing actualities that captured elite social activities that would be screened at charity events. It also allows for an appreciation of the non-professional work of charitable associations. As noted in the Introduction, the most solid and organized form of female cinematic participation—and the one on which I will mainly focus—was through charitable associations that identified the new medium as an effective tool for raising funds and promoting their causes. Charities actually influenced the entire Uruguayan cinematic domain through the screenings of imported movies, as well as through the production of short documentaries and fiction films. In fact, two of the five fiction films produced in the country during the silent period were the result of women’s initiatives of this kind.

The second aforementioned feminist film historiographical “turn,” toward “diverse figures” occupying various ideological positions, enables me to give space to women not directly involved with feminist or progressive agendas. This entails both elite women working in charitable associations, many of whom were married to upper-class intellectuals, politicians, landowners, and descendants of patrician families, and middle or even working-class women without any known political affiliation. Concentrating on these “diverse figures” allows us to focus on their actions vis-à-vis the cinematographic field and what they generated in symbolic terms. In the case of the former, for example, we are able to identify how their elite status largely determined how films were produced, what their literary and aesthetic models were, what parts of the city were shown onscreen, which topics they addressed and, finally, the very representation of their gender. For instance, it is clear that their privileged position and group synergy permitted these elite women to establish alliances with producers in order to construct their own narratives, with theater owners to negotiate deals with central and prestigious venues, and with the press to spread the word about their activities. Although, of course, women’s power was still feeble compared to men’s influence, as already noted, from the turn of the twentieth century it had increased and, in the 1920s, it grew stronger as female presence in the public sphere augmented notably in the country.¹² It is evident thus that elite women acted in and influenced the cultural milieu of their time. Rescuing their names, along with those of other Uruguayan middle-class intellectuals and musicians, has to do with the need to inquire about their concrete practices and to have a more complete panorama of Uruguayan silent cinema.

Although the connections between Uruguayan silent cinema and charitable work has not been completely ignored, early historians did not delve into it.¹³ It was Christine Ehrick who, in her pioneering 2006 article “Beneficent Cinema: State Formation, Elite Reproduction, and Silent Film in Uruguay, 1910s-1920s,” effectively explored for the first time women’s key role, accounting for charities’ feminine origins and analyzing Del pingo al volante, the only charitable film that survives.¹⁴ Interested in the power dynamics existing between these associations and the Uruguayan State, Ehrick correctly highlighted to what extent the “beneficent cinema speaks to the ways in which film, as a visual medium, played to elite audiences’ narcissistic and nationalistic desires to see themselves (literally and symbolically) projected on the big screen.”¹⁵ In addition, she foregrounded how charities also used cinema to promote their pedagogic, aesthetic, and social agendas. What follows, thanks to extensive research in the Uruguayan press and in film archives, builds upon Ehrick’s hypothesis with a corpus of data and footage not previously available, furthering the importance of elite women’s complex participation in early Uruguayan cinema. Yet while Ehrick was focused on charity and cinema, I am interested here in cinema and women more broadly. This wider focus allows me to also look beyond the upper class and present some new names of women who, despite being less prominent, also helped to shape the cinematic field at the time.

Frame enlargement, Almas de la costa. Courtesy of the Cinemateca Uruguaya.

Film still, El pequeño héroe del Arroyo del Oro (1932). Celina Sánchez (mother of Dionisio) and Hilda Quinteros (baby sister). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Uruguaya.

The First Professional Film Actresses in Uruguay: Luisa T. de Cavalieri, Judith Acosta y Lara, Mrs. De Lara, Ida Gracia Livio, Perla Mary, Nieves Alonso, Nenucha Puig Chucarro, Pina García, Rosario Millán, Celina Sánchez, Hilda Quinteros.

Film Exhibition: Between Stillness and Motion

The connection between charity and entertainment can be found in Uruguay as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, during the Guerra Grande [Civil War] (1839–1851). Before the century came to a close, charitable associations often held bazaars, recitals, dances, live paintings, and other public performances to raise money for their projects. Therefore, it is not surprising that they quickly embraced the new medium of cinema in a similar capacity.¹⁶ One of the earliest examples dates from 1900. It was a “perfected magic lantern” show directed by an “intelligent and distinguished young lady of our society” to raise money for an unnamed charity and took place in the provinces.¹⁷ It is difficult to be certain whether this was literally a magic lantern show or a cinematic projection since, for a considerable period of time, the term “magic lantern” was used for both.¹⁸ This anonymous young woman could also have been performing an early version of the type of spectacle that, in the following decades, would become customary for elite entertainment, namely the screening of a combination of fixed and moving images at charity events. Regardless, she was taking part in early film presentation practices. If much research on the subject still needs to be done, it is safe to assume, looking at the presence in the press of women organizing similar exhibitions during the following decades, that the legitimating process from 1900 onward was rather quick. In fact, by the 1910s, anonymity was abandoned and women’s names appeared often in connection to similar events; as I will show, the names of the organizers would specifically become a big part of the promotion of the event in the newspapers.

As noted above, during the 1910s, one of the practices adopted by charity groups was the inclusion of photo projections in their film exhibitions. The concomitance of still and moving images was a very common practice, globally, in the first decade of the twentieth century, but it progressively fell into disuse as cinema acquired autonomy. In Uruguay, however, this practice was prolonged, in charity film exhibition, until the end of the 1920s. In these decades, charity shows often mingled the latest foreign feature films and self-produced actualities with projections of photographic series. These fixed presentations offered portraits of the ladies and children (sometimes also the gentlemen) of the ruling class—both in serious and comic fashion—and shots of social events, mostly charity parties, walks on the beach, outings to the racetrack, dances in sumptuous hotels, and weddings.

María Elena Larriera, c. 1916, in Anales. Revista nacional, no. 11.

For example, in 1917, María Elena Larriera, the president of Entre Nous, an association of upper-class women who sewed items for the lower classes and organized different events to finance their activities,¹⁹ arranged a screening at the Buckingham Salón, one of the most prestigious venues in the capital. In addition to listing the names of the women involved in the event, the program, printed in the press, informed the public that feature films would be screened. But whereas no film titles were given, a detailed list of the photographs of social events sponsored by Entre Nous, which would be projected on the screen during the event, appeared. This list included the description of group portraits of the members of Entre Nous and its general assembly, choir rehearsals, prize distributions, horse races, sewing workshops, excursions, and other gatherings. Hence, a picture of high society of the time was drawn: visually, on the screen, and discursively, on the newspaper page.

“En los Pocitos.” La Razón (1 February 1918). Like the example discussed in this paragraph, these pictures would later be projected onscreen during the event.

Similarly, in 1918, a committee presided over by Martha Horne Flynn, and featuring many sponsors (all listed in the newspaper announcement), organized a charity screening event at Cine Rex.²⁰ Unlike the previous example, in this instance, some of the still images that would be projected during the screening also appeared in the society section of the newspaper, signaling their importance in the context of the event. From today’s perspective, the publication of these images also partially preserves this ephemeral charity screening.

Invitation to a charitable event with the complete list of organizers, June 1923. Private Collection.

It is clear from these two promotional press items, and others like them, that in their fundraising activities, these elite charitable associations not only relied on a combination of moving images and fixed projection, but also that fixed projection was an important part. In the press releases transcribed in the social sections of the newspapers, fixed projections were constantly indicated as the chief attraction at these events (the French word for such an attraction, clou, recurs in the texts) whereas the feature films shown were often not mentioned at all. Aside from the technological benefit of fixed projection—it was likely a practical and cost-effective strategy for charities’ fundraising goals—if we think, particularly, of a female audience to whom these social fundraising exhibitions were generally aimed,²¹ then the emphasis on fixed projection—both at these events and in the press—functioned as a way for the organizers to manage priorities, highlighting where to look and at what.

A charity film exhibition organizer, María Elena Mendivil Netto, in Guía mundana del Uruguay VI, 1930-1931.

In other words, these upper-class women publicly associated themselves with cinema rather quickly, shrewdly shaping and using these events and the press around them to also draw attention to themselves, their social status, and their work. As noted above, in addition to projecting still images and screening foreign films, these associations also produced their own actualities, which would also be exhibited at these fundraising events. Although these short films are all presumably lost today, we could imagine their contents thanks to their descriptive titles, which were also published in the press. They ranged from patriotic gatherings and sport activities (e.g., dance of the Pericón Nacional, tennis matches), to walks in the park (in the green Prado neighborhood), and private events (at least two weddings were filmed).²² Thus, through the adoption and maintenance of a mixed mode of exhibition that included moving and still images produced by these women, alongside foreign films, these elite women effectively “forced” their way—i.e., their names, faces, bodies, histories, priorities, and everyday activities—onto the screen, cohabiting with the most famous movie stars of the time. To a certain extent, these members of the elite were kind of celebrities. In 1923, for example, a newspaper announced an upcoming photo-shoot for still images that would be projected at the Cine Rialto in Montevideo. By giving the temporal and spatial coordinates of the shoot, the unnamed benefic association (and the press) invited the reader to participate, as a real-life spectator and to see “behind the scenes,” even though the people to be gazed upon were not true cinematic stars, but members of the elite.²³ The practice of extensively listing names of the society figures involved in these film exhibitions also enhanced their glamour, a practice that would be maintained during the following decade, both in the press and on printed invitations. Thus, compared to the beginning of the century, when we saw one anonymous fundraiser organizing a projection, by the 1910s and 1920s, lists of female names, detailed event descriptions, and still images appeared regularly in the press, giving the charity events, but especially the women involved in these presentations, a key media visibility, and potentially an escape from the anonymity assigned to their gender in the private sphere.

Charity film exhibition organizers and sponsors: María Elena Larriera, Martha Horne Flynn, María Helena Méndez Previtale, Carolina López Acosta y Lara, Nina de Malherbe Christophersen, Paulina Algorta Camusso, Margarita Sosa Díaz Piñeyrúa, Amelia Belfort Carril, María Angélica Márquez Castro, María Carlota Montaldo De León, Margarita Gallinal, Marta Villegas Suárez, Corina Seré Rucker, María Elena Algorta Guerra, Lolita Rodríguez Ramos, Delia Christophersen Ungo, María A. Requena Lenzi, Elina Penco Ylla, Ana C. Rovira Carve, Irene Munyo, Amalita Maeso de la Torre, Blanca Caravia Guerra, María Teresa Velazco Piñeyrúa, Juanita Saenz, Rosario Requena, Fanny Altamirano Balparda, Helena Gómez Larravide, María Angélica Sienra, Rosa Ferreira Correa, Olga De León Ayala, Estrella Acosta y Lara, María Teresa Piaggio Garzón and Emilia Balparda. María Elena y Margot Zalduondo Lerena, María Carlota Raggio Micoud, Blanca Guillemette Méndez, Susana Cranwell Suárez, Elía María Méndez Previtale, Clela y Beba Cordero Sloanm, Delia Givogre, Mercedes y Margarita Micoud, María Elena Mendivil Netto, Carola Díaz Larriera, María Manuela y Margot Pou Cardozo, Rosa Blanca y María Angélica Olivera Guani, Zulema y Haydée Conde, Liropeya De Leon Risso, María Isabel y Teresa Isola, Popona Ibáñez Tálice, Esther y Mercedes Barbot, Delia y Herminia Martínez Etchevarne, María Teresa Freire Pastoriza, Nené y Beba Coutinho Bica, Sara Blanco Acevedo, Eloisa Gómez Harley, Laura Zelmira y Elena Reyes Rivas, Livia y Olga Dauver, Julia y Pía Bonomi Costa, Marina F. Stirling. Marta y Alicia Castellanos Villarnobo, María Angélica y María Irma Carbonell Gutiérrez, María Carolina y Margarita Pérez, María Ernestina Canesa, Herminia Mendoza y Durán, María Esther y Sara Costa Doassan, Rosa y Amira Clara Menéndez, Coca Pittaluga Suárez.

The 1910s: Cinema, Nation, and Pedagogical Impulses

“With her eyes lost on the screen and the seriousness that ‘the case requires,’ it seems that nothing of what happens around her exists for her…but if you look closely, you will see an imperceptible smile of triumph or of spitefulness […].”²⁴ These lines were written in 1916 by an anonymous chronicler for “Resonancias Mundanas,” the society section of La Razón, one of the most popular newspapers in Uruguay at the time. With these words, the writer invited the reader to reflect on the female gaze in the movie theater—not any gaze, of course, but the gaze of an upper-class woman to whom the society pages of La Razón were dedicated and directed as readers, describing their recreational activities, the days of receptions at home, the marriages, births, and deaths, and the charity events. In the chronicler’s telling, at first the woman seems immersed in the images on the screen, but a closer look told (and tells us) another story. Everything was a pose, the chronicler insinuated and, observed carefully, her facial gestures imperceptibly revealed that something else was going on in her mind: the female spectator here was, the chronicler continued, “weaving a seduction plot and preparing her combat weapons.” The film, then, would seem like a mere stimulus for an action that would be consummated on an extra-filmic level. Interestingly, the writer avoided a well-established trope in the readers’ imaginary—the seductive power of cinema and its potential dangers, including the specifically feminine prototype of the movie-struck girl²⁵—to fall into another, equally established one—that of the femme fatale who “plots” seductions and combats. Despite this, the writer was not mistaken when s/he pointed out the strategic gaze this woman (possibly an efficient metonymy for elite women) had toward cinema at that time in Uruguay. For her (for them), the new medium did not seem to have been mere fun to dive into, but a sort of promotional tool as well. A tool to plot and combat, but in the cultural arena.

Margarita Uriarte de Herrera in 1920, Anales. Revista nacional, no. 55.

Matilde Regalía de Roosen, Artigas. Revista de informaciones, crónica y actualidades. Órgano de la defensa nacional I, no. 1 (25 August 1915).

Indeed, the first attempt to produce a fiction film in Uruguay, in 1915, was fostered by an elite women’s charity association with nationalistic and educational aims. Although the film, titled Artigas, was never completed, for almost a year news of the project occupied space in the society sections of several newspapers and, therefore, in people’s collective imagination. According to the newspapers, the film was to focus on the life of José Gervasio Artigas, Uruguay’s national hero, and would be interpreted by the descendants of the very patricians who had helped fight for an independent nation. The idea for the film was developed by Margarita Uriarte de Herrera, president of the Ladies Commission of the Committee for Schools and Patronages of the League of Catholic Ladies of Uruguay. Matilde Regalía de Roosen, president of the Uruguayan League Against Tuberculosis, was appointed as the film’s director.²⁶ The choice of Regalía de Roosen as director was particularly significant: on the one hand, she was part of a lineage of patricians and, therefore, could ideally direct the story with insider information. On the other hand, her connection with cinema dated back to the beginnings of the new medium. In fact, the first Lumière screening in Uruguay, in July 1896, was held at her family home, Casa Roosen, which was soon converted into Montevideo’s first movie theater, the Salon Rouge.²⁷

Margarita Heber Uriarte in Tabaré. Revista Literaria vol. 1, no. I (July 1914).

As a project, Artigas was well received by the community, and was assured a significant budget. The press reported several details about it: the script would be written by two renowned authors, Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, already considered by 1915 to be the preeminent national poet, and Raúl Montero Bustamante; the music would be played by the very popular César Cortinas orchestra; and the production would be completed by the largest producer and distributor of the time, Max Glücksmann’s Casa Lepage.²⁸ This list of male participants is noteworthy as it highlights how these upper-class women were able to establish productive agreements with important artists and entrepreneurs of the time in order to make their film. While the actor playing Artigas was never announced, the organizers did disclose the actress chosen for the female role: Margarita Heber Uriarte, one of the “protagonists” of the social scene whose portrait often appeared in magazines.²⁹

Towards the end of 1915, Artigas was abandoned without any public explanation and was never taken up again. Regardless of the project’s abrupt termination, its very existence embodies the beginning of fiction filmmaking in Uruguay. It also forces us to think about the first connections between cinema, fiction, national history, and patriotism, putting female agency in the foreground (as it should have always been) and answering, at least partially, the question of who would be in charge of these narratives. Furthermore, it establishes a clear link between cinema and pedagogy, since, as one newspaper claimed, the film would be of “great educational interest for the formation of our young students because it is well known that it is not as easy to admire heroes in patriotically enthusiastic sentences than it is to see them move and throb at the impulse of that same high feeling; nor to study a moment in history than to see it unfold before the eyes.”³⁰

Hortensia Turenne de Victorica in Guía mundana del Uruguay VI, 1930-1931. In 1917, her name was Hortensia Turenne Puig and she was one of the members of the Child Protection Committee.

The unproduced film’s potential pedagogical effect paralleled the discussions around the relationship between cinema and childhood, which, precisely in the early 1910s, began to proliferate in the country, either to demonize cinema or to distinguish between good and harmful applications of the medium. Significantly, cinema was mentioned in 1913 for the first time in the report of the Theater Censorship Commission compiled by the League of Catholic Ladies of Uruguay, led by Laura Carreras de Bastos.³¹ In it, Carreras de Bastos begged upper-class women to “draw the attention of Uruguayan mothers to the dangers that cinematography embodied for children’s brains.”³² La Liga was not alone in this crusade because, even outside religious spheres, there was a general interest in regulating and censoring film exhibitions for children. Nevertheless, by 1915, much of the elite charity sphere understood that regulations should not prevent the use of cinema as a pedagogical tool.³³ Even the Child Protection Committee itself, headed by Gladys Shaw, established, by 1917, agreements with businessman Max Glücksmann to program children’s matinees.³⁴ It is clear, then, that the development of Artigas fit into the elite’s broader interest in (first and foremost) exploiting the cinema to raise interest (and money) for their enterprises, but also as a way to showcase their own kin, (re)write the past and present of their country, and educate younger generations through the reinforcement of a certain set of patriotic and cultural values.

Planned producer, director, and actress for Artigas; pedagogues and committee members: Margarita Uriarte de Herrera, Matilde Regalía de Roosen, Margarita Heber Uriarte, Laura Carreras de Bastos, Gladys Shaw, Julia Muñoz Nin, Magdalena and Lucila Lussich Siri, Susana Soca Blanco, Helena Hughes García Lagos, Hortencia de Herrera Uriarte, Maria Cecilia Etchepare Herrera, René Pietracaprina Méndez, María Celia and Elida Schiaffino Espalter, Hortensia Turenne Puig, Sarita Durán Guani, Inah Mañé Azevedo, Adelita and Isolina Castels Eastman, Martha and Mirta Beherens Muñoz, Maria Hortensia Serratosa Carvalho, Amelia, and Sara Méndez Schiaffino, Emita and Elina Capurro Castels, Glady, Castellanos Cranwell, Albertina Deluchi Turenne, María D., Elisa Nocetti Mullins, Sara and Laura Lussich Márquez, Martha and Raquel Zás Allende, Rosita Piccardo Ruano, María Celia Gallinal Risso, Blanquita Blanco Hughes, Blanquita and Elba Pérez Castels, Emita Seré Rücker, Delia and Susana Pascual Castellanos, Coquita Regalia Muller, Marujita Seré Castellanos, Margarita Sienra Castellanos, Cristina Mourelle Ruano, Beba and María M. Ponce de León, Nilza L., Lida E. Díaz Ayala, María C. Gómez.

Charity as a Pioneer of Fiction: Pervanche (1920)

Otilia Pereira Braga in 1920 in Anales. Revista nacional, no. 53.

María Magdalena Villegas Márquez in Selecta 1, no. 7 (November 1917).

Gladys Cooper de Buck in Anales. Revista nacional, no. 52.

The cinematic ambitions of charity groups—and Uruguayan fiction filmmaking tout court—were met in 1920 with Pervanche, a production of the aforementioned female association Entre Nous, led by Otilia Pereira Braga. The film, presumed lost today, was based on a screenplay outlined by María Magdalena Villegas Márquez, a member of Entre Nous, and one of the film’s protagonists, along with Gladys Cooper de Buck.³⁵ While Pervanche’s title referred to the almost homonymous novel Pervenche (1904) by the famous female French writer Gyp, the film’s plot was an adaptation of Mademoiselle de la Seiglière (1848) by Jules Sandeau, and contained all the basic ingredients of melodrama: the decline of a wealthy family, a dangerous love triangle, and a happy ending with a marriage. The film premiered at the Teatro Solís, the most lavish venue of the capital. It was directed by León Ibañez Saavedra, and featured members of the Uruguayan elite.³⁶

Sylvia Azevedo Braga c. 1919 in Anales. Revista nacional, no. 43.

Pervanche was not the first attempt by Entre Nous to produce a fiction film. (The organization also produced actualities, as discussed earlier.) In fact, in September 1918, the society section of La Razón announced that, under the banner of the association, a local author would write a comedy and members of the elite would be in charge of the performances.³⁷ By November, it was stated that the script would be written by a “distinguished and intelligent lady, a prominent figure in the literary milieu” whose name, perhaps titillating readers’ curiosity, was not given.³⁸ It was also reported that production would start as soon as Sylvia Azevedo Braga, President of the Club, returned from Rio de Janeiro.³⁹ Yet, by December, when she was back in Montevideo, as stated in the press, the project was abandoned. Even if there are some coincidences that would suggest—given the recurrence of Entre Nous and the “Braga” surname in the two projects—that the project from 1918 was Pervanche itself, what seems important here is the maintained interest, within the association, in filmmaking (both actualities and fiction) in addition to their film exhibition practices as well as their faith in the power of the medium.

From the few stills available, and from the coverage in the press, we know that, in addition to following foreign narrative tropes, Pervanche was intended to create a very precise image of Uruguay, and its capital. The story depicted Montevideo as a modern and cosmopolitan city, an image of the city that other media, such as postcards or magazines, had previously presented. That is to say, the city where the elite circulated (urban areas and parks), and where it lived (the film showed several of the city’s most beautiful palaces). Pervanche built a fragmented and exclusive discursive map, but it also, at least symbolically, invited the general public to voyeuristically “enter” that world, and rub shoulders with and observe the ways and fashions of the elite. In this way, the film not only functioned as a means of self-representation for the upper class, a practice already established at events and in the press as I have shown; it was also a form of self-representation that, under the guise of a fiction film, was perhaps more glamorous, immediate, and powerful than the actualities or static pictures, and one in which its elite makers had more conscious control.

Film program, Pervanche (1920). Courtesy of the CIDDAE-Teatro Solís.

Pervanche producers, script writers, and actresses: Otilia Pereira Braga, María Magdalena Villegas Márquez, Gladys Cooper de Buck, Margarita Savedra Barrozo, María Isabel Moreno, Elvira Mousques, Elisa Vargas, María Guerrero, Sylvia Azevedo Braga.

Intellectuals and Cinema

Fabiola in La Razón (3 March 1919).

Criticized for its technical imperfections, Pervanche was defended by a renowned social activist, journalist, and writer: Fabiola, the pseudonym of middle-class writer Teresa Santos de Bosch.⁴⁰ In her response to the criticisms of the film, she associated economic precariousness and aesthetic results, pragmatically establishing the need to think about film production from the periphery, and with the resources of the periphery. Her article intelligently transcended the “merely” aesthetic questions in favor of an analysis that pinpointed, as the main problem, the difficulties for marginal markets to produce films. In short, her discourse assumed that Uruguayan cinema could only be called what later film historians have articulated as a cinema of a “small nation.”⁴¹ And, because of that, she suggested that critics should adapt their notions according to the country’s economic and material conditions in order to promote a much-needed development of the industry. Fabiola’s review of Pervanche in 1920 thus constitutes the first articulate and lucid discourse on the question of critical reception and national cinema in Uruguay.⁴²

María Elena Crosa de Roxlo, A través de la vida (Montevideo: Bertani, 1913).

Fabiola was not the first female writer who dealt publicly with cinema. María Elena Crosa de Roxlo, in her collection of stories entitled A través de la vida/Through Life (1913) included one called “La cinta cinematográfica,” or “The Film.”⁴³ In it, Crosa de Roxlo—a long forgotten writer—developed an exciting plot that fused medicine, hypnosis, and control over the female body, although she never mentions the “film” of the title. However, the title is a crucial piece of “para-text” that necessarily frames the reading: it is like declaring that everything that happens in the story, printed on paper, is “film” material. “La cinta cinematográfica” is therefore a specimen of the early association, and possible intersection, of cinema and literature in Uruguay. The book came out precisely when European film producers consolidated their melodramatic and diva film narratives and massively exported their products to Latin America. These films would soon become hegemonic in the continent, at least until the First World War; Crosa de Roxlo’s story was perfectly timed, as Uruguayan audiences were very much attuned to this kind of intricate plot on the screen. Another liaison between women, literature, and cinema was established by Edgarda Cadenazzi—an extraordinary figure of avant-garde writing—in her long “Poema en serio a Carlitos Chaplin,” or “A serious poem to Charlie Chaplin” (1928), in which she offered a labyrinthine and “modern” portrait of Charles Chaplin.⁴⁴ Her voice joined those of other avant-garde Latin American writers, mostly men, who regarded the actor as a paradigm of dissent functioning at the very heart of the United States film industry.⁴⁵ While more conventional, production-oriented film historiographies would perhaps ignore Fabiola, Crosa de Roxlo, and Cadenazzi’s respective critical and literary work, I mention them here to foreground the different ways that some Uruguayan women outside of the upper class actively engaged with cinema and film culture during the silent era.

Poet Juana de Ibarbourou (standing with hat). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay.

“Un festival de beneficencia.”Montevideo Film I, 2 (6 November 1923). Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay.

When considering the relationship between female intellectuals and writers and cinema, it is also worth mentioning another charity project. In 1923, The Committee for the Support of the Fermín Ferreira Poor Children’s Hospital, run by María Laura Viana Giuria, produced a short scenic film about a park in the Prado neighborhood.⁴⁶ For the occasion, two poets, Juana de Ibarbourou and Esther Parodi Uriarte, offered their verses for the intertitles. Whereas no chronicle of the screening was given in the press, the magazine Montevideo Film published these women’s poems, highlighting the importance of the poetic contributions to this project.⁴⁷ The actuality, shot by the French cameraman Henry Maurice, was set in the Prado, one of the greenest and most beautiful neighborhoods in the city, and apparently featured children. “You are going to see a festival of children and flowers/Spring of lights and colors/It takes place on emerald meadows/harmonizing wings, flowers, children and trills,” announced the prologue of the film, written by Parodi Uriarte. The main park of the neighborhood was itself the theme of Ibarbourou’s “poetic commentary.”⁴⁸ While Fabiola, Crosa de Roxlo, and Cadenazzi’s critical and literary work described above suggests that the cinema was a theme or topic for some female intellectuals and writers, Ibarbourou and Parodi Uriarte’s poetic contributions to this film project perhaps suggest that cinema was also a medium with which to further their particular artistic practice.

Intellectual and writer Luisa Luisi. Courtesy of the Biblioteca nacional de autores uruguayos.

The children at Luisa Luisi’s conference screening. “El cine aliado de la escuela.” La Razón (22 May 1917).

Both Ibarbourou and Parodi Uriarte would appear a few years later, along with ten other female intellectuals and university graduates, to support a project for the monopolization of cinema by the State, as developed in the publication El biógrafo (1926) by Enrique Barlocco.⁴⁹ In the booklet, these twelve public figures were asked to write brief statements endorsing the ambitious project to reduce the hegemony of foreign cinema. This is the only known example of Uruguayan women openly advocating for a national cinema.

Among these twelve women, we also find one of the most prominent voices in the field of education, that of the feminist writer, intellectual, and educator Luisa Luisi, a member of a middle-class Italian immigrant family whose sisters were the first female university students in Uruguay. Her link to cinema was well known by then and mirrored the pedagogical impulses within the charity sphere mentioned earlier in this essay. Almost a decade earlier, in 1917, Luisi organized the conference “Cinema, a School Ally,” held in the Biógrafo Uruguayo, which was conceived to be laboratory for testing the potentialities of films projections in pedagogical contexts.⁵⁰ According to one newspaper chronicler, Luisi achieved this successfully by combining her speech with the screening of scientific and industrial films in front of an audience comprised of mesmerized children and prestigious intellectuals of the time. Remarkably, one article also offers photographic “proof” of the children’s interest.⁵¹

To return to the notion of “diverse figures,” it is possible to map out a variety of ways that women outside of the upper class engaged with cinema during the silent era. These scattered but very specific examples of intellectual and literary engagement with cinema by female writers, poets, and thinkers show how women, in fact, not only participated in film screenings and events to promote and fund their charitable work. They also reflected upon the possibilities of the national cinematic production (opening debates their male counterparts chose not to participate in), elegantly included the new medium in their literary creations or used it to further their artistic practices, and actively participated in the discussions around the importance of cinema in Uruguay.

Intellectuals, poets, writers, and doctors (signatories in El biógrafo): Teresa Santos de Bosch, Elena Crosa de Roxlo, María Laura Viana Giuria, Juana de Ibarbourou, Esther Parodi Uriarte, Nylia Molinari Calleros, Enriqueta Compte y Riqué, Luisa Luisi, Ema Elsa Tiribocchi, Elisa Barros Daguerre, Rosa Mautone Falco, Sofía Álvarez Vignoli de Demicheli, Noel Demateis, Aurora Velazco de Brunetto, Ángela Scalone, Edgarda Cadenazzi.

Charity and the Uruguayan Flapper: Del pingo al volante (1929)

Film program, Del pingo al volante (1929). Private Collection.

Film program, Del pingo al volante (1929). Private Collection.

Del pingo al volante/From the Racehorse to the Steering Wheel premiered in 1929. It was produced by Bonne Garde, an association that helped single mothers with their newborns by giving them instruction and housing, under the guidance of Ana Chain de Piñeyro. It starred Luisa Ramírez García Morales—in the role of Susana Aguiar—a member of the elite, as was the rest of the cast.⁵² Fortunately, the film is still extant and is held at the Cinemateca Uruguaya.⁵³

Luisita Ramírez García Morales, frame enlargement, Del pingo al volante (1929). Courtesy of LAPA (AGU- UDELAR) and the Cinemateca Uruguaya.

Directed by Robert Kouri, the film reflected, as Pervanche did, the anxieties of the upper class, staging a family in decline whose only economic salvation was the marriage of Susana to a rancher cousin who was obviously rich. Susana does not suspect that a plot for the two to meet is planned by her mother and the family’s notary. To complete the (necessary) love triangle, and ignite the action, the film includes an indolent and equally rich man from Montevideo. Christine Ehrick has argued that Del pingo al volante “is most obviously a film about modernity and masculinity, but it is also a film about breeding and the reproduction of elites.”⁵⁴ She also rightly refers to Susana’s mother’s power within the plot. Building on that, it is essential to emphasize that Del pingo al volante also represents Susana as part of a new generation of women, one that adopts flapper haircuts and fashionable dresses, and hints at the girl’s possible rebellious attitude. Not only is the young protagonist rather independent, speeding around town in her own car, but early in the film, in response to the wedding solution offered by the notary, her mother replies: “A marriage? For God’s sake, doctor! Susana is a very difficult girl…” Yet as the film progresses, the audience understands—and is therefore reassured—that her “difficulty” is only a mild one and that it will eventually be overcome by love. Thus, while this new generation of women was represented in the film as fashionable and modern, they were not politicized like the more feminist figure of the New Woman. And while the film seems to allow Susana a final say—she ends up choosing the “right” mate, her cousin, without discovering her mother’s plot—she ultimately helps to maintain her family’s economic position. Thus, Del pingo al volante portrayed a national version of the moderate (upper-class) flapper.⁵⁵

Frame enlargement, Del pingo al volante (1929). Courtesy of LAPA (AGU-UDELAR) and the Cinemateca Uruguaya.

Frame enlargement, La Bonne Garde (1929). Courtesy of LAPA (AGU- UDELAR) and the Cinemateca Uruguaya.

Del pingo al volante is a story about the upper class and, through it, Bonne Garde presented images of a world familiar to its members. Likely that same year, the charitable association also produced a short documentary film, titled La Bonne Garde, about the institution’s house for single mothers.⁵⁶ The film, which is also still extant and held at the Cinemateca Uruguaya, shows the practical side of the association’s work: groups of young mothers with their “saved” children in a safe environment. In short, it complements Del pingo al volante and serves as an equally effective platform for advertising Bonne Garde’s mission. In other words, it is rather fruitful to think about these two productions together as it shows more clearly Bonne Garde’s aims. (Even if no information was found about the production, or even the premiere, of La Bonne Garde, it is likely that these two films were produced simultaneously.)⁵⁷ With one film, the organization portrayed the lively and entertaining (imaginary but credible) activities of the elite families, while, with the other, it presented the hard reality of young, single, and poor mothers, whose only hope came from the help provided by young women like the heroine of Del pingo al volante. In this sense, the elite’s version of the modern woman was one who could alternate between her luxurious, active, and fashionable world and the world of women in need.

Del pingo al volante producers and actresses: Ana Chain de Piñeyro, Luisa Ramírez García Morales, Mrs. de García Morales, Cotina Jiménez de Aréchaga, María Elena Algorta Guerra, Marta Preve Thevenet, María Adelaida Ramírez García Morales, Renée Pietracaprina Méndez, Emilia Varzi Castell, Sarita Etchegaray Vidal.

Movie Theaters and Musicians

Frame enlargement, a ladies orchestra, unknown film, c. 1920. Courtesy of SODRE.

Female musicians in cinema theaters were less frequently employed than men but not unusual. In actuality, from the 1920s onward, musical performances by women took place, both in the capital and inland. While there are no specific studies on the subject, it is possible to relate this appearance in movie houses and, therefore, in the professional sphere, with the education Uruguayan girls received between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Indeed, in the private realm, music was a key part of the female elite and middle-class upbringings and, as researcher Marita Fornaro has pointed out, the “nineteenth-century piano is the adornment of marriageable young women, who after their marriage can play it during family reunions.”⁵⁸ Likewise, as the century progressed, girls began to study in conservatories located in different parts of the country, graduating as piano, music theory, and violin teachers. Following the steps of Jacinta Furriol, Carmen Luna, Orfilia Pozzolo, and Dolorcita Renteia, all composers from the nineteenth century—as Roberto Lagarmilla pointed out in his chapter about “Woman in Uruguayan Music”—some of these educated women composed, published, and premiered their opuses, as was the case with María Galli, María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, Carmen Barradas, Aurora Calo Berro, Socorrito Morales de Villegas, and María Esther Roosen de Regalía.⁵⁹

Music by Professor Juana C. de Sarti. Film program from Teatro Lavalleja, c. 1924. Private Collection.

Symphony by Professor María del Carmen Deubaldo. Film program from Teatro Lavalleja, 1924. Private Collection.

Our movie theater musicians thus had, undeniably, multiple female role models. From 1900 up to the 1920s, female orchestras and soloists, some of them mentioned above, used to appear in the press. But unlike these musicians, performing often at charitable events, middle-class female musicians in movie theaters (like their masculine counterparts) did not seem to reach the press. Some information about them, however, can be found directly in film programs. The ephemeral nature of this material, and the lack of significant collections in Uruguayan archives, makes any kind of survey extremely difficult and somewhat random. An important private collection of film programs from the inland city of Minas (Department of Lavalleja), somehow scattered among collectors, shows that women’s participation in cinema theaters as musicians spanned the 1920s. Between 1920 and 1925, professors Juana C. de Sarti, María del Carmen Deubaldo, and Adelina Salazar were often in charge of the musical performances at the Teatro Lavalleja. By 1927, Sisa Bonino, Ignacia Poroli, and violin teacher Miss M. Demicheli, also a member of the Orquesta Cañela, played at the Teatro Escudero. Lastly, in 1929 a Professor Minita Ricetto de Acciari was performing a symphony at the Teatro Florida, in the inland city of Florida.

María Isabel Cary, director of Tersípcore Ladies Orchestra “El cine Plus Ultra,” in Uruguay Cinema 1, no. 5 (5 November 1927).

For Montevideo, even less information can be gathered. I found only one, but rather significant, mention of a woman playing in cinemas in the magazine Uruguay Cinema. In 1927, María Isabel Carry—or Cary, the spelling changes in the same article—was the conductor of the Tersípcore Ladies Orchestra that usually performed at the Cine Teatro Plus Ultra. As the article stated, “she garners extended applause for the performance of an outstanding and varied repertoire, featuring fashionable and classical music that properly interprets the heterogeneous temperaments enjoying the show.”⁶⁰ Although not much data is given, the way the article presents Tersípcore—that is, as nothing out of the ordinary, just a modern orchestra—allows us to conjecture that a certain number of female orchestras regularly performed during the period, maybe even in movie theaters, but were simply forgotten. Finally, The Golden Book of Cinema in Uruguay, written in the 1950s, devoted a chapter to musicians of the silent era. It included a long list of orchestras and male performers, but only cited two women: Libertad Balsán at the Cine Porteño and the unnamed “daughter of Don Angelo, the businessman from Cine Olivos.”⁶¹

The names of these middle and potentially working-class women revealed here allow us to think of female performances in movie theaters in the first decades of the century as important professional (cinematic) work. Not only are they instances of female engagement with cinema outside of the elite (charity) sphere, but they also go beyond the domestic musical activities of “marriageable” girls or the conservatory environment. Their names also return to us a space in the new modern social order in which these women took part and, in which, following the fast and multiple images on the screen, they could improvise and create music with their pianos, violins, and orchestras as part of their jobs.

Music by Adelina Salazar. Film program from Teatro Lavalleja, 1925. Private Collection.

Symphony by Ignacia Poroli. Film program Teatro Escudero, 1927. Private Collection.

Grandiose debut by violin professor M. Demicheli. Film program from Teatro Escudero, 1927. Private Collection.

Symphony by Professor Minita Ricetto de Acciari. Film program from Teatro Florida, 1929. Private Collection.

Musicians in movie theaters: Sisa Bonino Juana C. de Sarti, María del Carmen Deubaldo, Adelina Salazar, Ignacia Poroli, Miss M. Demicheli, Minita Ricetto de Acciari, María Isabel Carry (Cary), Libertad Balsán, the “daughter of Don Angelo.”

Closing and Opening

Sarita Etchegaray Vidal, who appeared in Del pingo al volante, in Guía mundana del Uruguay VI, 1930-1931.

Through extensive research in the press and archives, this overview essay explored the wide-ranging participation of women in the precarious Uruguayan cinematographic field of the early twentieth century. It constituted a first mapping of the areas in which mostly upper to middle class women contributed to the construction of the cinematographic field of the period. Doing so, they significantly set a model for how to understand cinema for other women: those reading the newspapers and learning about the cinematic events organized by the charitable associations; those watching a charitable film; those reading their critical writing about cinema; or those listening to the music played by one of the artists mentioned above. While not the focus of this essay, the female audience—an entity that has gained much academic attention in the last decades—was the ideal public for all these women’s work. This unknown group of women from all strata of society is, in a way, also present here.

My use of “name dropping,” perhaps at times exasperating, was intended to make specific women’s contributions to the field visible. Not only as part of categories (actresses, intellectuals, musicians, etc.) or groups (charities), but as concrete people, with names, surnames, and bodies, who progressively engaged with the cinematographical field. To show these different, and often overlapping, modalities, I chose to present my research chronologically instead of grouping all the charity-related work together, for example. The kind of name-rescue that I do here is only possible due to surviving, and fragile, pieces of evidence, such as photos, programs, invitations, films, articles in newspapers, and novels. These artifacts functioned here in two ways: as a concrete and verifiable foundation for my research, and as substitutes for a presence that, until now, seemed non-existent. As secular contact relics, in other words, every piece of information kept us “close” to the protagonists. In its incompleteness, this essay also seeks to lay the foundation for future studies. Now that we do have some names, much more remains submerged, anxiously awaiting to be discovered and analyzed.

See also: “Writing the History of Latin American Working in the Silent Film Industry”

Notes

1
On the relations between women, politics, and the state in Uruguay see Silvia Rodríguez Villamil and Graciela Sapriza, Mujer, Estado y política en el Uruguay del siglo XX (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1984); Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Christine Ehrick, The Shield of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 1903-1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Inés Cuadro Cawen, Feminismos y política en el Uruguay del novecientos. Internacionalismo, culturas políticas e identidades de género (1906-1932) (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2018). On political anti-feminism tendencies and discourses in Uruguay, see Inés Cuadro Cawen, “Antifeminismos en el Uruguay en las primeras décadas del siglo XX.” In Historia de los conservadores y de las derechas en Uruguay. De la contrarrevolución a la Segunda Guerra Mundial, eds., Magdalena Broquetas and Gerardo Caetano (Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 2022), 176-191.
2
Although imported sound films arrived in Uruguay in 1929, the last national silent production—El pequeño héroe del Arroyo del Oro—dates from 1932. As in many countries, silent and sound films coexisted in Uruguay until the mid-1930s.
3
The participation of the female elite in the cinematographic field seems to have been a constant in Latin America, although there are still few specific studies on the subject. The most consistent example is: Lucio Mafud, Entre preceptos y derechos. Directoras y guionistas en el cine mudo argentino (1915-1933) (Mar del Plata: Festival de Mar del Plata, 2021), and by the same author, “Mujeres cineastas en el periodo mudo argentino: los films de las sociedades de beneficencia (1915-1919).” Imagofagia no. 16 (October 2017): 51-76.
4
For initiatives and discussions in other periods, see, among others, Soledad Castro Lazaroff, “Las historias ausentes.” La diaria (7 May 2018). https://ladiaria.com.uy/feminismos/articulo/2018/5/las-historias-ausentes/; Álvaro Lema Mosca,“Historia del cine en uruguay: mujeres y cine.” Revista Film (2020). https://www.revistafilm.com/historia-del-cine-en-uruguay/; Marta García, Isabel García, Noelia Torres, Agostina Dati, Rocío Llambí, Raquel Sabrido, Rocío López, and Alicia Cano, ¿Quiénes cuentan las historias? El cine uruguayo desde una perspectiva de género 2008-2018 (Montevideo: MAU, 2020); Jorge Fierro, “Nietas de las pioneras.” Brecha (February 2021). https://brecha.com.uy/nietas-de-las-pioneras/.
5
Outside of Uruguay, in the last two decades, there have been important theoretical and historiographic developments, in addition to the investigation of specific cases, that not only questioned the ways historical narratives are constructed, but that also incorporated female work in different areas of the global cinematographic field. Here, I only list a selection of key texts with which this essay, in some way, is in conversation: Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Rosanna Maule and Catherine Russell, eds., “Cinephilia and Women’s Cinema.” Framework no. 1 (2005); Monica Dall’Asta, ed., Non solo dive. Pioniere del Cinema italiano (Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008); Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight, eds., Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Jane M. Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
6
See Ana M. López, “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America.” Cinema Journal vol. 40, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 48-78; Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España, 2003).
7
Christine Gledhill, “Pensare le donne nella storia del cinema.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del Cinema italiano, ed. Monica Dall’Asta (Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008), 31.
8
Inés Olmedo, Rina, la primera. Catálogo de la muestra (Montevideo: FCC/MEC, ICAU, 2014).
9
“Almas de la Costa. Judith Anna Betty, una estrella de especiales merecimientos artísticos.” El Plata (24 September 1924): 6. The rest of the female cast included Mrs. De Lara and Ida Gracia Livio.
10
The same happened with the Uruguayan Orfilia Rico, protagonist of the Argentine films Nobleza Gaucha/Gaucho Nobility (1915?), directed by Humberto Cairo; Hasta después de muerta/Until After Death (1916), directed by Florencio Parravicini; and Viruta y Chicharrón/Viruta and Chicharrón (1915 -1916?), presumably directed by Héctor G. Quiroga and José González Castillo. See Lucio Mafud, La imagen ausente. El cine mudo argentino en publicaciones gráficas. Catálogo. El cine de ficción 1914-1923 (Buenos Aires: Teseo, 2016), 67, 105, 134. She also appeared in Cine-Mundial, the Spanish version of The Moving Picture World. See “Favoritos del cine.” Cine-Mundial (October 1917): 500.
11
The rest of the female cast included Nenucha Puig Chucarro, Pina García, Rosario Millán, and the participation of “450 girls,” as stated in the film program.
12
See Gabriela Sapriza, “La Nueva Mujer en las carátulas de Mundo Uruguayo.” In Los veinte: el proyecto uruguayo; arte y diseño de un imaginario 1916-1934, ed. Gabriel Peluffo Linari (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes, 1999): 123-126.
13
See José Carlos Álvarez, Breve historia del cine uruguayo (Montevideo: Cinemateca Uruguaya, 1957); Eugenio Hintz, ed., Historia y filmografía del cine uruguayo (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Plaza, 1988); Manuel Martínez Carril and Guillermo Zapiola, La historia no oficial del cine uruguayo (1898-2002) (Montevideo: Ediciones Banda Oriental, 2002); Jorge Ruffinelli, Para verte mejor. El nuevo cine uruguayo y todo lo anterior (Montevideo: Trilce, 2015).
14
Christine Ehrick, “Beneficent Cinema: State Formation, Elite Reproduction, and Silent Film in Uruguay, 1910s-1920s.” The Americas vol. 63, no. 2 (October 2006): 205-224. Her article states that three fiction films were produced by these associations. However, only Pervanche (1920) and Del pingo al volante (1929) were products of charity associations. The third one mentioned by Ehrick, Adventures of a Parisian Girl in Montevideo (whose correct title is A Parisian Girl in Montevideo) was not a charity production, and it was released in 1924 and not in 1927 as stated in the article. These inaccuracies do not diminish the importance of an article that analyzes, in a very articulated way, several of the dynamics involved in these charitable productions and, in particular, the narrative construction of Del pingo al volante.
15
Ehrick, “Beneficent Cinema,” 206.
16
See: José Salgado, “Las damas orientales en la Beneficencia Pública.” Revista Nacional. Literatura, arte, ciencia no. 49 (January 1942): 30-42; Mariano Ferreira, “La mujer Uruguaya en la Beneficencia pública.” Revista del Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay (1920): 99-116.
17
“Linterna Mágica.” La Campaña (11 July 1900): 2.
18
See André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion,“A Medium is Always Born Twice.” Early Popular Visual Culture vol. 3, no. 1 (May 2005): 3-15; Giusy Pisano, “Les spectacles mixtes. Tradition ou anachronisme? Survivances sonores et visuelles de Robertson à Georges Lordier.” In Le muet a la parole. Cinéma et performances à l’aube du XXe. Siècle, eds. Giusy Pisano and Valérie Pozner (Paris: AFRHC, 2005): 101-134. On this practice in Uruguay, see Georgina Torello, La conquista del espacio. Cine silente uruguayo (1915-1932) (Montevideo: Yaugurú, 2018): 77-110.
19
“Entre Nous.” La Razón (19 June 1917): 4.
20
“Gran Festival de esta noche en el Rex Cinema.” La Razón (3 May 1918): 3.
21
In addition to these charitable associations’ love for the inclusion of lists of the promoters and protagonists of their events, the press started early on to include long lists of spectators’ names. These “pragmatic” lists—to quote Umberto Eco’s book on the subject—were also highly symbolic (then, and for us now) in terms of audience construction, and offered gendered enumerations divided into “Mrs.” and “Miss” (thus, classifying the spectators into “already taken” and “available”). See, “Cine Stella.” La Colonia (2 December 1924): 5; Umberto Eco, La vertigine della lista (Milan: Bompiani, 2009).
22
Examples of these first early productions include the Pericón Nacional (“La nota social de hoy.” La Razón [9 November 1915]: 5); Proyecciones del Círculo de Tennis (“Exposición cinematográfica de los matches y concurrencia asistente ayer al festival del Círculo de Tennis.” La Razón [26 May 1916]: 4); Una mañana en el Prado. (La Razón [28 October 1917]: 3); Paseando por el Rosarium (“Cosas de Entre Nous. Impresión de un film.” La Razón [26 August 1918]: 3); Boda Bourdieu-Shaw Pareja (“Por los cines. Viernes del Doré.” La Mañana [26 October 1923]: 2); Boda María Teresa Zumarán Arocena y Hernán Milberg (“Los viernes del Doré.” La Mañana [3 October 1923]: 3). Again, these titles are descriptive.
23
“Del Gran mundo. De beneficencia.” La Mañana (25 March 1923): 5.
24
“S.E. el Cine.” La Razón (20 June 1916): 4.
25
Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls.
26
“Damas distinguidas.” Artigas. Revista de informaciones, crónica y actualidades. Órgano de la defensa nacional I, no. 1 (25 August 1915).
27
“El cinematógrafo.” El Día (21 July 1896): 1. See “Nuestra primera sala cinematográfica. Salón Rouge.” Álvaro Sanjurjo Toucon. http://www.uruguaytotal.com/salon_rouge/index.html.
28
For more on this project, see Georgina Torello, “Artigas: gestación y fracaso de un proyecto cinematográfico.” In La pantalla letrada: estudios interdisciplinarios sobre cine y audiovisual latinoamericano, eds. Georgina Torello and Isabel Wschebor (Montevideo: Universidad de la República, 2015): 49-61; then expanded in Torello, La conquista del espacio, 57-72.
29
At the time, cultural magazines, and even literary magazines, included “society news pages” with numerous photographs taken at social events and studio portraits of the elite. The most relevant of these magazines, since its first issue published in 1915, was Anales Mundanos (then Anales Revista Nacional). The magazine, a lavish publication, was aimed at a readership of elite women since very elegant portraits of socialites like Margarita Heber Uriarte filled its pages. As Juan Antonio Varese has pointed out, the magazine indulged these socialites’ vanity: Anales “did not have an edition date so that the age of women of lineage who were portrayed could not be calculated.” See, Juan Antonio Varese, “Fotografía en los años veinte: la popularización de la imagen.” In Los veinte: el proyecto uruguayo; arte y diseño de un imaginario 1916-1934, ed. Gabriel Peluffo Linari (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes, 1999), 139. Anales serves as an indicator of the public relevance of many of these women and is an indispensable, and often unique, iconographic source for scholars and for my present purpose (to make women’s names, but also their bodies) present. Although many of the portraits illustrating this essay were taken from Anales, for Margarita Heber Uriarte, I selected one from Tabaré. Revista Literaria. This photo, published not long before Artigas was conceived, shows her in full body, looking confidently at the photographer, in a studio with the standard painted landscape backdrop. Like the other portraits here, this one shows her at ease with the medium, in what we can assume is a picture taken for public viewing.
30
“Una bella iniciativa. El film Artigas. Preparativos.” La Razón (15 January 1915): 4.
31
Magdalena Broquetas and Inés Cuadro Cawen, “Del arte juzgado o defensa de la moral católica. Estudio de la Comisión de Censura Teatral de la Liga de Damas Católicas del Uruguay (1907-1916).” Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Montevido, 2001. I thank the authors for giving me access to this unpublished article.
32
Laura Carreras de Bastos, Pro-arte dramático. Clasificación de las obras estudiadas por la Comisión de Censura Teatral de la Liga de Damas Católicas del Uruguay (Montevideo: la Liga de Damas Católicas del Uruguay, 1916): 76. A detailed study of the impact of the League in the field of cinema has not been done and it is much needed.
33
See “El biógrafo y los niños. Al margen de un proyecto.” La Razón (14 April 1915): 1; Enrique Reyes, “Por los niños. Las exhibiciones cinematográficas. Opinión de un distinguido educacionista.” La Razón (15 April 1915): 1; “Las películas morbosas. Principio de saneamiento.” La Razón (7 October 1915): 1.
34
“Committee for the Protection of Children.” La Razón (13 November 1917): 4. The committee members were: Gladys Shaw, Julia Muñoz Nin, Magdalena and Lucila Lussich Siri, Susana Soca Blanco, Helena Hughes García Lagos, Hortencia de Herrera Uriarte, Maria Cecilia Etchepare Herrera, René Pietracaprina Méndez, María Celia and Elida Schiaffino Espalter, Hortensia Turenne Puig, Sarita Durán Guani, Inah Mañé Azevedo, Adelita and Isolina Castels Eastman, Martha and Mirta Beherens Muñoz, Maria Hortensia Serratosa Carvalho, Amelia, and Sara Méndez Schiaffino, Emita and Elina Capurro Castels, Glady, Castellanos Cranwell, Albertina Deluchi Turenne, María D., Elisa Nocetti Mullins, Sara and Laura Lussich Márquez, Martha and Raquel Zás Allende, Rosita Piccardo Ruano, María Celia Gallinal Risso, Blanquita Blanco Hughes, Blanquita and Elba Pérez Castels, Emita Seré Rücker, Delia and Susana Pascual Castellanos, Coquita Regalia Muller, Marujita Seré Castellanos, Margarita Sienra Castellanos, Cristina Mourelle Ruano, Beba and María M. Ponce de León, Nilza L., Lida E. Díaz Ayala, María C. Gómez.
35
The rest of the female cast included Margarita Savedra Barrozo, María Isabel Moreno, Elvira Mousques, Elisa Vargas, and María Guerrero.
36
After the film’s premiere, very detailed lists of spectators’ names were published in the press. Interestingly enough, one of them contained, together with the female audience listed, a brief description of their attire (color and fabric). This list worked as an efficient medium of self-promotion, but also functioned as an upcoming fashion show for women outside the elite. “To give a complete list of the people who attended this event would be impossible, we’ll mention only the ones that we were able to write down in our chroniclers’ card, as well as the gowns that attracted the most attention: Ladies: María E. Christophersen de Puig, was in black tulle; María Elena Uriarte de Montero, in charmeuse and blue tulle; María Magdalena Villegas de Souza, in black silk, colored flower; Elena Alvarez de Calamet in brick-colored gauze, Elisa Ferrando de Birabén, in purple gauze […].” “El festival de anoche.” La Mañana (12 June 1920): 2.
37
“Cosas de Entre Nous. Impresión de un film.” La Razón (13 September 1918): 3.
38
“Cosas de Entre Nous. Impresión de un film.” La Razón (20 November 1918): 3.
39
“Cosas de Entre Nous. Impresión de un film.” La Razón (5 December 1918): 3.
40
Fabiola (Teresa Santos de Bosch), “Pervanche.” La Razón (14 June 1920): 1.
41
Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, eds., The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
42
For further analysis of her article, see Georgina Torello, “‘Han llegado hasta mí ecos de críticas tan injustas.’ Notas sobre cine silente.” In La crítica uruguaya ante el cine nacional (1920-2001), eds. Mariana Amieva and Germán Silveira (Montevideo: Yaugurú, 2021): 23-40. It is also worth mentioning that Fabiola gave, in 1915, a lecture at the Ateneo of Madrid about Uruguay and Uruguayan women, and that she used projections during her speech. (It is unclear whether these were still or moving images.) See Ángeles Ezama Gil, Las musas suben a la tribuna. Visibilidad y autoridad de las mujeres en el Ateneo de Madrid (1882-1939) (Madrid: Geneuve Ediciones, 2018): 146.
43
María Elena Crosa de Roxlo, A través de la vida. (Montevideo: Bertani, 1913). See Martina Bertone, “Escribir sobre el cine: María Elena Crosa de Roxlo, una pionera uruguaya.” Sotobosque. https://www.sotobosque.uy/post/literatura-crosa.
44
Edgarda Cadenazzi, “Poema en serio a Carlitos Chaplin.” Vanguardia 1 (September 1928).
45
Jason Borge, Avances de Hollywood. Crítica cinematográfica en Latinoamérica, 1915-1945 (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 2005).
46
“Un festival de beneficencia.” Montevideo Film I, no. 2 (6 November 1923). The magazine Montevideo Film, which announced the production, is a very significant resource since it exclusively targeted female readers, even in such a small market, showing the importance this group had locally in the 1920s. This can be easily corroborated by other ephemera, such as invitations to film events, often patently aimed at women.
47
“Un festival de beneficencia.”
48
This park, an example of cosmopolitan beauty with its lakes, rose gardens, fountains, and statues, was one of the favorite film locations during the silent period, both in fiction and in documentaries.
49
The complete list of signatories contains Professor of Micrography and assistant of the Pathological Anatomy Laboratory of the Faculty of Medicine (but also poet) Nylia Molinari Calleros; the poets Juana de Ibarbourou and Esther Parodi Uriarte; the pedagogue and publicist Enriqueta Compte y Riqué; the poet, writer and educationist Luisa Luisi; Ema Elsa Tiribocchi, the head of the Obstetric Clinic in Maternity; Elisa Barros Daguerre, the head of the Clinic of the Faculty of Medicine and Head of the Group at the University for Women; the legal consultants Rosa Mautone Falco, Sofía Álvarez Vignoli de Demicheli, and Noel Demateis; the educationist Aurora Velazco de Brunetto; and Dr. Ángela Scalone. Apart from the cinematographic project, this small book contains another project, devoted to the promotion of a national construction of machinery, Academy of Inventions. In it, Barlocco looks for support from eleven personalities of Uruguayan culture, in this case, all men. The gesture is significant as it allocates specific fields to specific genders: if inventions and machines are masculine matters, cinema is female, something that accounts for the strong association between the cinema and women in the country. Enrique Barlocco, El biógrafo. Academia de los inventos (Montevideo: Imp. La Uruguaya, 1926).
50
“El cine aliado de la escuela. Conferencia de Luisa Luisi.” La Razón (22 May 1917): 5. On the pioneering figure of Luisa Luisi, see Lourdes Peruchena, “Las desobedientes. Luisa Luisi, entre Concepción Arenal y Virginia Woolf, un pionero pensamiento feminista desde el sur.” Contemporánea. Historia y problemas del siglo XX 11, no. 13 (August-December 2020): 65-74.
51
“El cine aliado de la escuela.” Two years later, in her booklet Educación Artística, (1919), Luisi would mention the cinema as “an irreplaceable factor in school: not only as a teaching instrument but also as an educational, moral and artistic medium.” Luisa Luisi, Educación Artística. Trabajo presentado al Congreso Americano del Niño (18-25 Mayo 1919) (Montevideo: Renacimiento, 1919): 74.
52
“El film pro-Bonne Garde. Del pingo al volante.” La Mañana (10 August 1929): 3. The rest of the female cast included Mrs. de García Morales, Cotina Jiménez de Aréchaga, María Elena Algorta Guerra, Marta Preve Thevenet, María Adelaida Ramírez García Morales, Renée Pietracaprina Méndez, Emilia Varzi Castell, and Sarita Etchegaray Vidal.
53
The film was digitized in 2018 by the Laboratorio de Preservación Audiovisual (UdelaR) and is available online as of this writing: https://youtu.be/OsCxamBqvq0. For more information, see: https://archivosdocumentales.udelar.edu.uy/index.php/del-pingo-al-volante This digitization integrated some parts of the film previously unavailable. My analysis of the film is based on this new version.
54
Ehrick, “Beneficent Cinema,” 216.
55
Although the film was reviewed in the press, nothing was said about its depiction of this modern woman. It is thus not possible to know how the press or the female audience members understood the protagonists.
56
For further information, see Ehrick, “Beneficent Cinema,” 211-213; Torello, La conquista, 164-166.
57
Both the documentary and Del pingo al volante have similar intertitles (fonts and frames). This would corroborate 1929 as the year of production, the date proposed by the Cinemateca Uruguaya.
58
Marita Fornaro Bordolli, “María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira y la música: las invisibilidades múltiples.” In María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira. “Me muestro siempre en mi oscuridad, ” eds. Hugo Achugar and Marita Fornaro (Montevideo: MEC, 2013), 35.
59
For information about these composers, see Roberto Lagarmilla, Músicos uruguayos (Montevideo: Editorial Medina, 1970); Mirta Amarilla Capi, La música en el Uruguay. Los compositores de música culta (Montevideo: Ediciones del eclipse, 2000).
60
“El cine Plus Ultra.” Uruguay Cinema 1, no. 5 (5 November 1927): 13.
61
Luciano Mosteiro, ed., El libro de oro del cine en el Uruguay. Special Dossier for the magazine Cine Radio Actualidad XX, no. 1000 (September 1955): 22. See also, Osvaldo Saratsola, Función completa, por favor. Un siglo de cine en Montevideo (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2005). Mosteiro does not give dates. However, if one looks at information about cinema theaters’ activities contained in Saratsola, Libertad Balsán could have played between 1923 and 1926, and the unnamed daughter of Don Angelo, between 1910 and 1923 (271-2).

by Ingrid Stigsdotter

Introduction

This essay investigates the role of women in Swedish film exhibition from the early days of ambulating film exhibitors, through the formation of a cinema culture with permanent venues, and all the way up to the coming of sound. Although membership and leadership of professional organizations, such as Sveriges Biografägareförbund/Sweden’s National Association of Cinema Owners (founded in 1915) or Svenska Film-och biografmannasällskapet/The Swedish Film and Cinema Society (founded in 1917), as well as contemporary articles in the trade press, reveal that cinema-owners and film exhibitors were male-dominated professions, a large number of women were nevertheless involved in running Swedish cinemas in the silent era. The title of the essay refers to the ways in which–as we shall see–women cinema managers have been described as respectable hostesses, turning their cinemas into tasteful, comfortable venues. However, “discrimination” can also refer to practices of unfair treatment, which have circumscribed women’s agency in different circumstances, and limited their presence in film history textbooks.

Background

In the Swedish census of 1910, two women described themselves as cinema-owners [biografägare].¹ At the time of the previous census in 1900, permanent venues for film exhibition had not yet been established, so the 1910 census was the first in Sweden to include the term that would become the established Swedish word for cinema theatres, biograf. The total number of self-described cinema-owners in this census was thirty-four. Considering that permanent venues for film exhibition had been established in both the Swedish capital of Stockholm and Gothenburg (Sweden’s second largest city) in 1904-1905, and continued to spread across the rest of the country from 1905 onwards,² and that there were twenty-five permanent cinema venues in Stockholm alone already by 1909,³ clearly not all Swedish inhabitants who owned and/or managed cinemas had their occupation labeled as such in the census of 1910.⁴ Among those who did, however, women represented almost six per cent, a figure that can be compared to Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Karen Ward Mahar’s estimate that women accounted for two to five per cent of American nickelodeon owners in 1907 and over the next few years.⁵ In Sweden, the percentage of women among film exhibitors appears to have remained more or less the same throughout the teens, at least in the capital. In a 1918 article about the Stockholm-based female cinema owner Wilhelmina Larsson (later known by her married name Acrel),⁶ the Swedish film trade journal Filmbladet⁷ stated that just under five per cent of the cinemas in Stockholm were managed by women.⁸

Since Sweden remained neutral during World War I, women did not enter the film exhibition sector to fill jobs being vacated by men at war, as was common in other European nations in the late 1910s. However, as in many other countries, the formation of a Swedish cinema culture coincided with campaigns for women’s right to vote; Sweden’s constitutional law was amended in 1921 to include women’s suffrage. At this time, debates around labor legislation were also affected by the increase of women undertaking paid work.⁹ By going through Swedish film trade journals, registers published by Sveriges Biografägareförbund and internal archival records belonging to the same organization, census records from the year 1910, and some other materials, I have so far found evidence of around one hundred and twenty women who owned and/or managed cinemas or showed film in temporary venues in Sweden during the silent period.¹⁰ This figure includes most of the women who became members of Biografägareförbundet in the silent era¹¹ and many women who remained active as cinema owners in the same location for long periods. However, it is likely to exclude a large number of women involved in film exhibition in temporary venues,¹² as well as many of those who tried their luck in the business for only a few years, and women who ran cinemas owned by their husbands without receiving individual credit. A register that Biografägareförbundet started to publish regularly beginning in 1930¹³ provides useful details on women who owned or managed cinemas at the end of the silent era, whereas mapping of ownership and management in the teens and twenties has proven more difficult. In addition, numerous women who were not cinema owners or managers were involved in cinema exhibition in other ways, employed as musicians, usherettes, or box office assistants and, as we shall see, women often gained experience from more than one area of work in film exhibition or related businesses before becoming the manager or owner of a cinema.

Wilhelmina Larsson-Acrel in Stockholm

Wilhelmina Larsson-Acrel in Filmbladet, 1918.

Wilhelmina Larsson-Acrel in Biografägaren, 1934.

In 1912, Wilhelmina Larsson-Acrel started to work for Anton Gooes at the Bostock cinema in central Stockholm.¹⁴ Gooes and his brothers, Gunnar and Gustav, were among the early pioneers of ambulating film shows in Sweden. Larsson-Acrel first worked as a cashier/box office assistant, but only two years later she bought the cinema from her employer,¹⁵ making her first application for permission to run film programs with instrumental music to the authorities in July 1914.¹⁶ The 1918 Filmbladet article describes Larsson-Acrel’s advancement from cashier to owner and manager of the cinema in enigmatic terms, claiming that the story of how she got hold of funds to buy the cinema included enough excitement to provide inspiration for a screenplay, but–frustratingly–provides no further details of this “hunt for money.”¹⁷ Larsson-Acrel became one of the first women to join Sveriges Biografägareförbund in May 1919,¹⁸ and, in that same year, she was also active as cashier and member of the steering board of the local Stockholm cinema owners’ association called Stockholms Biografägarförening.¹⁹ In the Filmbladet profile, as well as in a later interview in another trade journal, Biografägaren, Larsson-Acrel described Bostock as run-down at the time she took over the business in 1914.²⁰ She improved the cinema through renovations and refurbishments.²¹ She also enhanced the cinema through program selection, booking first runs of Pathé Frères films, and making a deal with the distributor Skandinavisk filmcentral for Bostock to receive their programs, which included Chaplin shorts, immediately after the cinema that premiered them.²² Larsson-Acrel’s statements in Biografägaren in 1934 emphasize cinema management as involving, on the one hand, looking after the venue so that the physical place is comforting and attractive, and on the other hand, being clever in selecting the right programs for the intended audience.

Stockholms-Tidningen ad for Kvinnans hygien (1922) at the Grevture cinema, 1924.

In the July 1916 application to the authorities for permission to screen films at the Bostock, “Stig Arne Acrel” is named as the cinema’s projectionist. In December 1921, Wilhelmina Larsson became Mrs. Acrel, but as a married woman she would continue to be Bostock’s owner and manager for more than thirty years, apparently standing behind the counter and selling the tickets herself throughout the silent era. She also had shorter stints as the director of other Stockholm cinemas. She bought Skånebiografen in the Södermalm neighbourhood in 1916 and renamed it Södra Kvarn before selling it again in 1917.²³ Additionally, for a few months in 1923-1924, she managed two cinemas in central Stockholm in addition to Bostock: Grevture and Stjärnbiografen. Interestingly, an ad for Grevture in the local daily newspaper, Stockholms-Tidningen, in January 1924 shows that when Larsson-Acrel screened the Austrian sex education film Kvinnans hygien/Hygiene der Ehe (Erwin Junger, 1922)²⁴ there, she promised the intended audience that they would be served by female staff:

Make sure to get hold of your tickets in time, because you must see what every woman ought to know:

Women’s hygiene

The film is constructed on the latin motto “Homo sum nihil humani a me alienum puto,” that is, “Since I am a human being, nothing human should be unknown to me.” Every Swedish woman should know both her own organism as well as the process of fertilization and her duty as mother to give life to healthy capable citizens.

Shown to adult women only.

Attention! Female service.²⁵

Elisabet Björklund has pointed out that the distributor of this film, Oscar Rosenberg, ensured the Swedish censors that it would be shown to female audiences exclusively.²⁶ At this time, a practice of gender-segregation at screenings of sex education films was being established in order to create a respectable and safe context for communication around this sensitive topic, although paradoxically, the practice could be interpreted (and criticized) as sensationalist. In Björklund’s words: “in contrast to what might be expected, gender-segregated screenings were in fact often interpreted […] as a publicity trick to attract a greater audience to the theatre by suggesting that the film contained bold material.”²⁷ Contemporary ads in other cinemas present Kvinnans hygien in terms fairly similar to the Grevture ad, but Larsson-Acrel appears to be unique in offering the female audience gender-segregation extending also to the staff.

Larsson-Acrel would continue to manage Bostock until 1945, when she sold the cinema to the company AB Europa Film. In 1929, she became director of a distribution company created by Biografägareförbundet called Filmbyrån/The Film Agency, renamed Sverige Film/Sweden Film in 1945. She remained head of this venture until the mid 1950s.²⁸ Among the women cinema owners in Sweden active in the silent era that I have identified, Larsson-Acrel had the longest career, and she did not go unnoticed by her peers in the silent era.²⁹ Most of her contemporary female colleagues led more anonymous lives. But despite the fact that Larsson-Acrel was an active member of several professional organizations, and was profiled several times in trade journals and publications, she is completely absent from accounts of cinema history where the Bostock cinema features. Kurt Berglund’s book about Stockholm cinemas, published in the 1990s, mentions only the Gooes brothers and Europa Film as owners of Bostock,³⁰ even though Anton Gooes ran the cinema for less than nine years, whereas Larsson-Acrel directed the business for over three decades, including during the transition from silent to sound. The Gooes brothers are known as early film exhibition pioneers in Sweden, and Europa Film was a long-running and well-known film production company, active from the early sound period until the 1980s, and thus presumably the cinema owners that already form part of the received national film historiography have been deemed more relevant for the contextualization of the Bostock cinema than the unknown Larsson-Acrel.³¹ But film history is not just a succession of great inventions, deeds, and achievements, it also involves work by individuals who never became famous because their work–whether in production, distribution, or exhibition–was only moderately successful. Additionally, in a field where the internal jargon reveals that being a man is presumed as natural and normal,³² gender inequality and sexism no doubt play a role in why certain figures are excluded by mainstream film history. When placing the (non)treatment of Larsson-Acrel in existing film historical accounts into a broader context, and considering other conspicuous absences, one might argue that it is indeed typical of the low value placed on women’s contributions to film culture.

Chansonette Artists and Theatre Directors

As Fuller-Seeley and Ward Mahar point out, the scientific and technological context in which the phenomenon of film first appeared made it closely connected with “traditionally masculine areas of expertise,” and the work of projecting films was from the very beginning seen as involving “masculinized” skills. But as they highlight, “the business of running a small retail, entertainment, or service establishment was not as severely gender-typed.”³³ This statement also holds true in the Swedish context, where–as in the United States–many women were already active for example as theatre directors and in retail.³⁴ Particular to the Swedish context is also the important role played by temperance lodges as early film exhibition venues. This may be relevant for women’s involvement in film exhibition in the sense that many Swedish women were engaged in the temperance movement³⁵ and such venues would represent respectable public spaces for women to visit outside of the home.

Ad for Annette Teufel’s Cinematograph at Berns’ in Dagens Nyheter, 1896.

Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre poster, 1900.

However, several of the women who were involved in early film screenings in Sweden came from a background in variety entertainment. This is the case with the chansonette artist Annette Teufel, a popular performer in the Stockholm entertainment culture of the 1890s, whose name and image were associated with a film screening at Berns’ salon in Stockholm already in the summer of 1896.³⁶ The machine involved in the projection was advertised as “Annette Teufel’s cinematograf”³⁷ and Stockholms-Tidningen claimed that Teufel owned the “Zinematograf” used at Berns’ as well as another machine in London.³⁸ Rune Waldekranz claims that Teufel’s popularity was exploited just to attract audience interest, whereas a French film exhibitor was in charge of the actual screening.³⁹ Regardless of Teufel’s role in the arrangement, the use of her name, image, and reputation to promote the film medium is interesting. As Antonia Lant has shown, the inclusion of women in ads for film screenings can be understood as continuing a pre-cinematic pictorial tradition of women demonstrating magic lanterns or being portrayed showing dioramas to children.⁴⁰ This tradition is worth keeping in mind when considering Madame Vrignault Chenu’s early film screenings in Sweden. This French woman visited the Swedish cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö in 1901 with a program of film experiments with sound and music that had premiered in 1900 at the Paris Exposition Universelle under the name Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre. In François Flameng’s poster from the Exposition Universelle, the audiovisual attractions are advertised using the image of Sarah Bernhardt placed in between the camera/projector and the gramophone, drawing attention to the technology.

In Sweden, the films were toured under the name “Odödliga Teatern,” which translates to “Immortal Theatre.” Waldekranz’s version of this moment in Swedish film history is that the photographer Clément Maurice, through his agent “Madame Rignault,”⁴¹ introduced the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre in Sweden.⁴² According to Robert Hamilton Ball, however, Madame Vrignault (apparently better known under her second family name Marguerite Chenu), who managed the small theatre at the Paris exposition where the films were first shown to audiences, was the owner of the films touring Europe, rather than an agent acting on Maurice’s behalf.⁴³ Contemporary press coverage of the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre screenings in Stockholm in 1901 give all credit to Madame Vrignault, describing her appearance and her lecture before the screenings in some detail and even suggesting that she herself ought to become “immortal”⁴⁴ through her invention.⁴⁵

While some of Waldekranz’s conclusions regarding women who are mentioned in his research may be open to challenge, his work is still a useful source for information on this period, since his attempt to map film exhibition practices across the whole of Sweden, rather than focusing on the introduction of film in the big cities, was ahead of its time.⁴⁶ And in fact, Waldekranz was among the first to bring attention to the variety artist and theatre director Anna Hofman-Uddgren’s pioneering efforts as a film director in 1911-1912.⁴⁷ But in his book Filmens Historia, Waldekranz draws attention to Hofman-Uddgren primarily as a filmmaker, even though his own dissertation had included references to her involvement in early film exhibition culture in Stockholm, as director of programs for Svea-Teatern, Varieté-Teatern, and Victoria-Teatern between 1898 and 1904, where film screenings were mixed with performances of various kinds. Considering that Hofman-Uddgren’s producer, when she became a filmmaker, was H.P. Nilsson, one of Stockholm’s early cinema-owners, and that her first film-related activities occurred within the context of exhibition, her early work as a director might be understood as a natural continuation of her use of film within the Stockholm variety theatre scene, in which she had been a leading figure since the late 19th century.

Film Exhibition and the Woman’s Movement

The two women who identified themselves with the title of cinema-owners in the Swedish census of 1910 did not belong to the Stockholm cinema culture where Larsson-Acrel and Hofman-Uddgren started their film-related careers. Matilda Andersson (née Pettersson, born 1847 in the town of Borås) was based in Karlstad, whereas Selma Åman (born 1879) ran a cinema in Eskilstuna. About Andersson little is known, except for the fact that she was a widow, and that in the year when the census was collected, she also registered her name in Kvinnligt yrkesregister, a Swedish publication that appeared between 1904 and 1922, initially on an annual basis but slowing down during World War I. The register featured ads and listings for businesses run by women and individual professional women and its stated aim, in the words of its editor Bertha Wiman, was to “disseminate knowledge about professional independent women working in our country in various fields, in order to make the capital of female labor force, knowledge and professional skills as extensively fruitful as possible.”⁴⁸ Kvinnligt yrkesregister also reported from national and international congresses of women’s organizations and published articles about the social and legal position of women in Sweden, with yearly summaries of what had been achieved in the on-going campaigns for women’s rights, in particular in terms of suffrage and legal regulations of the labor force. The publication of Kvinnligt yrkesregister ended in 1922, one year after women’s suffrage was introduced in Sweden, signaling a strong link between the motivation for publishing the register and the campaign for women’s suffrage.

Listing for Matilda Andersson and Anna Ternow in Kvinnligt yrkesregister, 1913

Andersson’s listing of her cinema business appeared in the 1910, 1911, and 1912 issues of the register, and in 1913 her name was joined by a second cinema-owner, Anna Ternow in Oskarshamn. After this, the publication did not feature any more cinema theatre listings, but the fact that these two women chose to advertise their businesses in this context is thought-provoking. And there is evidence of at least one woman working in Swedish film exhibition in the silent era who was also a women’s movement activist: although more famous as a social democrat politician and union official than in the role of cinema owner, Anna Johansson-Visborg is an example of a woman engaged in progressive labor politics and campaigns for women’s vote who also contributed to Stockholm cinema culture. Anna Johansson met her husband Sven Wisborg⁴⁹ when he was working as a cinema musician. In 1914, the couple started to rent Hornstullsbiografen in the Stockholm neighbourhood of Södermalm⁵⁰ and a few years later, in 1921, they built Brommateatern, which Johansson-Visborg would manage for more than thirty years.⁵¹

Selma Åman in Eskilstuna

Selma Åman in Filmbladet, 1916.

Åman, the second woman cinema-owner listed in the 1910 census, is not quite as mysterious as Andersson, thanks to an interview in Filmbladet in 1916⁵² and a profile in Biografägareförbundet’s Sveriges Film-och biografmän in 1920.⁵³ In Filmbladet, Åman explains that her career in film exhibition began in the town of Borås in 1904, when her husband took over a cinema business there and she–after some negotiation with her husband–was trusted with the responsibility of selling tickets. In 1906, the couple relocated to the town of Eskilstuna,⁵⁴ and, after her husband fell ill, Åman gradually came to manage the business, becoming its formal owner when her husband passed away. She bought a better venue for the business, and successfully directed the cinema for several years before selling it to the large film company Svenska Bio in 1913. Åman stayed on working as local manager for Svenska Bio, and this was her role when Filmbladet interviewed her in 1916. Having started in the business before the first major Swedish debates about the potential damaging effects of film, which would eventually lead to the establishment of state censorship in Sweden in 1911,⁵⁵ Åman explicitly contrasts the “simple” entertainment of the early years with the mature art form that she sees in the cinema of 1916.⁵⁶

Selma Åman in Sveriges film-och biografmän, 1920

In some parts of the interview, Åman’s description of the gendering of the cinema space resonates with Lant’s description of the projectionist’s booth as a male sphere;⁵⁷ Åman talks about her late husband’s initial reluctance to allow her access to “all the mysteries of Cinema,” on the basis that it “was something that us dames could not understand. The projection booth, this ‘world of wonder’ was not to be entered on any account.”⁵⁸ But she goes on to explain that her own curiosity, coupled with necessity when her husband fell ill, led her to teach herself the business of cinema, including how to project films, after an incident with a drunken projectionist: “After that experience there was practice and experimentation night and day, until I felt safe by the cinema machinery and had the time to train a new projectionist.”⁵⁹

Projectors, Cash Registers, and the “Unerring Judgment of a Woman”

K. Hjalmar and Stina Lundblad in Sveriges film-och biografmän, 1920.

Lant contrasts the “opaque box” where the usually male projectionist worked with the see-through glass boxes where the usually female box office assistants were on display as they sold tickets,⁶⁰ and these two professions do appear to be among the most divided along gender lines in the Swedish cinema business as well. The first part of the business that Åman’s husband gave her access to was the area of ticket sales, and as previously mentioned, Bostock’s Larsson-Acrel started her cinema career as a cashier. The Stockholm cinema owner K. Hjalmar Lundblad, who would become an important local cinema manager, started his cinema career in 1906 as a projectionist at Östermalmsbiografen,⁶¹ and he seems to have met his wife Stina (née Schagerström) when she worked as a box office assistant in that same cinema.⁶² In Filmbladet in 1919, Stina Lundblad was put forward as an example of how “the unerring judgment of a woman” can result in a cinema characterized by “meticulous order, good selection of pictures,” and “comfort and wellbeing.”⁶³ According to this article, a woman’s touch can be important to the success of a cinema, considering that women make up more than half of the cinema’s audiences, and that a woman might be better placed than a man to cater to female audiences’ taste.

Östermalmsbiografen, Grevturegatan 20, unknown photographer, circa 1905-1920. Courtesy of the Stockholms Stadsmuseum/Stockholmskällan.

Considering how K. Hjalmar’s and Stina’s respective backgrounds are described in 1920 in Sveriges Film-och Biografmän,⁶⁴ one might presume that at least in the beginning, Stina was more qualified to deal with accounts and figures than her husband. K. Hjalmar started his career as a mechanic before becoming a projectionist when he was twenty-five.⁶⁵ His wife, on the other hand, trained at a business school (Påhlmans Handelsinstitut) and worked in a book and music store before becoming a cinema cashier.

Filmbladet‘s 1918 article about Larsson-Acrel shares similarities to the description of Stina Lundblad, in that Larsson-Acrel’s good taste is also emphasized. The author points out that having bought the Bostock, Larsson-Acrel had to “paint and renovate and decorate and embellish” the venue while “at the same time, the programmes were selected with greater discrimination.”⁶⁶ Both Larsson-Acrel in 1918 and Åman in 1916 refer to an earlier era of “bad” films, which they contrast with a contemporary, more sophisticated film culture. For example, Åman talks about competition from an ambulating exhibitor who showed much poorer film programs but attracted children by giving away sweets and lowering the price of tickets.⁶⁷ And when Larsson-Acrel mentions the business she took over in 1914, she describes it as being “dragged down” by all sorts of inferior music and variety performances, but she claims that four years later, “…the cinema is something completely different. And the audience is also a different one.”⁶⁸

Taste and Music

Detail from December 1910 program sheet from Eskilstuna-Biografen, promising “First class music by Miss Signe Björklund.”

Larsson-Acrel links bad taste to bad musical performances in the cinema. Piano-playing skills were an important component in middle-class female education in the early 20th century, and it is well known that many women worked as cinema musicians. Indeed film programs from Åman’s cinema in Eskilstuna in the years 1910-1913 advertise that the films are accompanied by “first class music by Miss Signe Björklund.”⁶⁹ And just as women could advance from working in the cash register to managing the cinema, female musicians could also move on from accompanying programs to curating them, like the musician Ingeborg Sofia Emelia Krysell (née Kahl) who started her film-related career as a pianist at Visby Biografteater and later became director and musician at a rival cinema, Skandiabiografen.⁷⁰

Ingeborg Krysell in Sveriges film-och biografmän, 1920.

To replace rowdy variety acts with respectable women pianists could help towards elevating the status of the cinema–or it could simply be a way to cut the costs. Regardless of whether the audiences attending the cinemas managed by Åman and Larsson-Acrel really did change or not, their statements belong within a teleological discourse of cinema culture as constantly improving, which serves the interest of the film industry. In this context, it is interesting to remind ourselves how women directors and screenwriters at a certain point in early American film production came to represent “propriety and uplift” in a much criticized business sector, and, in addition, how a discourse around taste, interior decoration, comfort, and politeness formed around women working in American cinema exhibition.⁷¹ When it comes to the overall management of the cinema venue and the selection of film programs, some characteristics that at this time were associated with femininity seemed to be welcomed in Sweden in the 1910s, allowing Filmbladet to profile women cinema-owners as well suited for their jobs.

Conclusion

Fuller-Seeley and Ward Mahar suggest that the American film industry’s “concerns over outside censorship gave women influence in the business,” and state that some women film exhibitors “really did appear to be interested in cleansing the movies.”⁷² It is difficult to determine to what extent the individuals whose work in film exhibition I have discussed in this essay were influential beyond the realm of their own cinemas, and how to describe for example Larsson-Acrel’s women-only screenings of a sex education film on “marital hygiene” within a context of taste and cleanliness. But considering that Sweden, unlike the United States, actually introduced state censorship in 1911, after years of debate in which female teachers, such as the censor Marie Louise Gagner were highly active,⁷³ women can of course be seen to have shaped silent Swedish film culture in terms of influencing what was not to be screened.

In any case, like its American counterparts, it seems as though the trade journal Filmbladet championed women cinema-owners in the latter half of the teens. This was possibly part of a general drive to create a cleaner, nicer image of the cinema-going context. However, further research is needed into the work practices and curatorial choices of women cinema-owners in order to clarify the relationship between cinema culture and women’s rights and to map women’s access to opportunities in early film exhibition.⁷⁴

Notes

1
Riksarkivet/The National Archives of Sweden’s digitized census records for 1910 are currently accessible only for on-site users at institutions that subscribe to the National Archives’ digital service “SVAR”. Unfortunately, the digitization of Swedish censuses does not yet include the census of 1920, and only parts of the census of 1930 have been digitized. When searchable records from 1920 and 1930 become available it should be easier to establish whether the percentage of women among cinema owners and managers in Sweden increased, remained stable, or decreased during the teens and twenties.
2
Åsa Jernudd, “Spaces of Early Film Exhibition in Sweden 1897-1911,” in Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History, eds. Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Phillipe Meers (London: Routledge, 2012), 23.
3
Kurt Berglund, Stockholms alla biografer: Ett stycke Stockholmshistoria från 90-tal till 90-tal (Stockholm: Svenska Turistföreningen, 1992), 38.
4
Cinema-owners whose educational background or managerial status allowed this probably used other titles like “director,” “engineer,” or “architect” rather than “cinema-owner,” which in 1910 had a lower status than these more established titles.
5
Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Karen Ward Mahar, “Exhibiting Women: Gender, Showmanship and the Professionalization of Film Exhibition in the United States, 1900-1930,” in Women Film Pioneers Project, eds. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (New York: Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries, 2013), n.p.
6
For clarity’s sake, she will be referred to as “Larsson-Acrel” from here onwards, even though she is referred to as Miss Larsson in earlier sources, and as Mrs. Acrel after her marriage.
7
This journal was published between 1915 and 1924.
8
“Film-och Biogubbar XXIV: Fröken Wilhelmina Larsson, Bostockbiografen, Stockholm,” Filmbladet vol. 4, no. 3 (1918): 37.
9
According to the official statistics based on the Swedish census, the percentage of adult Swedish women who worked rose from thirty per cent in 1910 to thirty-six per cent in 1920, and continued to increase throughout the 1920s so that by 1930, thirty-eight per cent of the adult female population in Sweden belonged within the paid workforce in some capacity. See Statistiska centralbyrån. Folkräkningen den 31 december 1920: V Yrkesräkningen II: Yrke, inkomst och förmögenhet kombinerade inbördes samt med kön, civilstånd och ålder (Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt, 1927), 68-69; and Folkräkningen den 31 december 1920: VIII. Folkmängden efter yrke, inkomst och förmögenhet: 3 avd (Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt, 1938), 70.
10
To put this figure in context: in the early 1920s, the cinema owners’ association Biografägareförbundet had around 200 members, and in a publication from 1920, the association estimated the total number of cinema theatres in Sweden (run by both members and non-members) to be 703. See Sveriges Film-och biografmän. Porträttgalleri (Stockholm: Sveriges Biografägareförbund, 1920), 95.
11
I have gone through all available records about membership from 1915 to 1931, but much of the documentation is handwritten (i.e., readable to varying degrees), and since gender specific titles (Miss, Mrs., Mr.) are not consistently used in the materials, I am likely to have missed a few women listed with only a surname and a first name initial.
12
When it comes to early ambulatory screenings and short-lived early venues, my survey is so far restricted mainly to the Stockholm area.
13
Förteckning över Sveriges biografer (Stockholm: Sveriges Biografägareförbund, 1930); Förteckning över biografer, biografägare och biografföreståndare (Stockholm: Sveriges Biografägareförbund, 1936); and Förteckning över biografer, biografägare och biografföreståndare (Stockholm: Sveriges Biografägareförbund, 1942).
14
Berglund, 26-27.
15
“Film-och Biogubbar XXIV: Fröken Wilhelmina Larsson, Bostockbiografen, Stockholm,” 37-38.
16
Olle Waltå Collection, vol. 14. This collection, held at the Swedish Film Institute, consists of copies of articles and official records related to Stockholm cinemas. Olle Waltå (1923-2004) was an amateur film historian, who collected materials about Swedish cinema history both during his forty years of work in Swedish film distribution and exhibition, and after his retirement. Waltå’s source is the police register for events [tillställningsdiarier] at the Stockholm City Archives.
17
“Film-och Biogubbar XXIV: Fröken Wilhelmina Larsson, Bostockbiografen, Stockholm,” 37.
18
The first woman to be listed as member was Miss Alma Markusson, another Stockholm-based cinema owner (membership number 24) in November 1918. Larsson-Acrel appears to have been the second woman (membership number 55).
19
Sveriges Film-och biografmän, 26.
20
“Kort intervju med 20-årsjubilerande biografägarinna,” Biografägaren vol.9, no. 12 (25 August 1934): 4.
21
Public records copied in the Waltå Collection support this claim; in particular there appears to have been a major refurbishment in 1922. See vol. 14. Swedish Film Institute.
22
“Kort intervju med 20-årsjubilerande biografägarinna,”4.
23
“Film-och Biogubbar XXIV: Fröken Wilhelmina Larsson, Bostockbiografen, Stockholm,” 38; Sveriges Film-och biografmän, 26.
24
The Swedish distribution title Kvinnans hygien translates to “Women’s hygiene” or “Female hygiene,” whereas a more literal translation of the original German title, Hygiene der Ehe, would be “marital hygiene” or “the hygiene of marriage.” The Swedish distributor’s choice of title is probably connected to his strategy of showing the film to segregated female audiences.
25
Stockholms-Tidningen (21 January 1924): 4. The emphasis on reproduction of “healthy capable citizens” suggests that the film was based on ideals associated with eugenics, which also fits with the original German title Hygiene der Ehe. See note 24.
26
Elisabet Björklund, The Most Delicate Subject: A History of Sex Education Films in Sweden (Lund, Sweden: Lund University, 2012), 67. As suggested in note 24, the title chosen for Swedish distribution might be connected with this stated intention.
27
Ibid. As evidence of this in relation to Kvinnans hygien, Björklund cites a letter sent to the trade journal Biografbladet, published on February 5, 1924, with the critical headline: “‘For adult women only’ A strange stipulation that serves advertising” (338) (note 197).
28
Waltå Collection, vol. 14. Swedish Film Institute. Larsson-Acrel also appears to have returned to cinema management in the 1950s, despite having sold the Bostock in 1945, because she is listed as running the Atlas cinema in records from the early 1950s, and she seems to have taken over the Artist cinema from another female cinema owner, Svea Zetterström, in 1957, but then sold it again in 1958.
29
Apart from the sources already cited, I have found information about Larsson-Acrel in the records of Sveriges Biografägarförbund and the local cinema owners’ organization Stockholms Biografägareförening, which was taken over by the national organization in 1920. Additionally, I have found information in the registers of Swedish cinema owners published by Biografägarförbundet in 1930, 1936, 1939, and 1942.
30
Berglund, 288.
31
The change of surname from Larsson to Acrel may have contributed to the oversight, although this seems unlikely, considering that the headline of the 1934 article in Biografägaren mentions that she was then celebrating twenty years as cinema-owner (4).
32
Examples include the title of Filmbladet’s series profiling people in the industry, “Film och biogubbar,” which translates to “Film and cinema fellows,” and frequent references in the press and in professional organizations to “biografmän,” which translates to “cinema men.”
33
Fuller-Seeley and Ward Mahar, n.p.
34
Tommy Gustafsson lists “funfair owners, wholesale dealers, bank managers, restaurant owners, bookkeepers, magicians, and manufacturers” among the professional backgrounds of early film exhibitors in Sweden. See “The Formation of a Cinema Audience in Sweden, 1915-1929,” in A Companion to Nordic Cinema, eds. Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist (Chichester, Wiley Blackwell: 2016), 245.
35
Jernudd, 21. According to Jernudd, the Free Church movement in particular attracted younger women from the working classes among its members.
36
A short piece in Stockholms-Tidningen states that the audience will encounter her “charming representation” [tjusande återbild] as a dancer in the film show, which suggests that the film program included filmed images of Teufel dancing. See Stockholms-Tidningen (6 August 1896): n.p.
37
Dagens Nyheter (28 July 1896): n.p.
38
Stockholms-Tidningen (6 August 1896): n.p.
39
Rune Waldekranz, Levande fotografier: Film och biograf i Sverige 1896-1906, Unpublished Licentiate Dissertation (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 1969), 70.
40
Antonia Lant and Ingrid Perez, eds., Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (London: Verso, 2006), 563. See also pages 9 and 581 for discussions of women in ads for cinematic attractions and women as managers of magic lantern shows.
41
A misspelling probably inherited from the French film historian George Sadoul; See Robert Hamilton Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), 304.
42
Waldekranz, Levande fotografier, 208-209.
43
Hamilton Ball, 27-28.
44
This is a play on the Swedish title of her show, “the immortal theatre.” See Stockholms-Tidningen (2 September 1901): n.p.
45
Waltå collection, vol. 7. Swedish Film Institute.
46
See Jernudd, 20.
47
Rune Waldekranz, Filmens Historia (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1986), 257-272.
48
Bertha Wiman, “Företal,” Kvinnligt Yrkesregister 7 (1912): 9.
49
They opted for different spellings when they married, so it is correct to spell her surname with “V” and his with “W.” See Gunhild Höglund, Stridbar kvinna–några blad ur Anna Visborgs liv och svensk kvinnorörelse (Stockholm: Tidens förlag, 1951), 62.
50
Waltå Collection, vol. 20. Swedish Film Institute; Höglund, 64.
51
Berglund, 75-76.
52
“Film- och biogubbar XV,” Filmbladet 10 (1916): 149-150.
53
Sveriges Film-och biografmän, 80.
54
Åman explains that the reason they moved to Eskilstuna was that it was one of the few towns in Sweden that did not yet have a cinema. See “Film-och biogubbar XV,” 149.
55
Gustafsson, 245; Jernudd, 23.
56
“Film-och biogubbar XV,” 149.
57
Lant, 579.
58
“Film- och biogubbar XV,” 149.
59
Ibid., 150.
60
Lant, 579.
61
After Lundblad sold Östermalmsbiografen in 1921, it was renamed Grevture and it was in this venue that Larsson-Acrel screened the sex education film Kvinnans hygien in 1924.
62
“Film-och biogubbar XXXXIV & XXXXV,” Filmbladet vol. 5, no. 20 (1919): 356-357.
63
Ibid., 356.
64
Sveriges Film-och biografmän, 27.
65
He studied at Tekniska Skolan in Stockholm, but the portrait does not specify which subjects or to what level.
66
“Film-och Biogubbar XXIV:Fröken Wilhelmina Larsson, Bostockbiografen, Stockholm,” 38.
67
“Film- och biogubbar XV,” 149-150.
68
“Film-och Biogubbar XXIV:Fröken Wilhelmina Larsson, Bostockbiografen, Stockholm,” 37.
69
Another example: when the Elite cinema in Stockholm wanted to recruit a pianist in 1910, they advertised in the “female” job section of the newspaper Dagens Nyheter and specified in the ad that they preferred a woman. See Dagens Nyheter (6 December 1910): 12.
70
Sveriges Film-och biografmän, 60.
71
Lant, 561, 580.
72
Fuller-Seeley and Ward Mahar, n.p.
73
Jernudd, 23.
74
Archival paper collections used for this piece (all held at the Swedish Film Institute) are as follows: Sveriges Biografägareförbunds arkiv, Hjalmar Lundblads arkiv, Olle Waltås collection. Filmarkivforskning.se, an online resource, features many digitized cinema programs, journals, and magazines.

by Donna Casella

In a 1921 Picturegoer article, Jeanie Macpherson advised prospective writers not to worry about submitting scenarios with scene by scene outlines; instead they should send in a synopsis of 3000 words and a scenario staff would reshape the material for shooting. She warned her audience: “Do not have the camera in mind as you write.”¹ In contrast, by 1926 Frances Marion in Photoplay was advising those interested in adaptations to go beyond plot, to translate the original story “into screen language.”² Their different perspectives on how to write for the screen reflected the rapid changes in the craft during Hollywood’s silent period. Women, like Macpherson and Marion, were very much a part of these changes. As Wendy Holliday points out, about 50% of the scenarios were written by women; although, the exact percentage is unknown due in part to inconsistent crediting.³ In fact women’s presence was felt in multiple areas of the American film industry including writing, directing, producing, and editing, as the industry initially welcomed, even sought out, their contribution. Women wrote both original and adapted scenarios. In addition, they contributed story ideas, served as story editors and continuity writers, and wrote titles. As department and unit heads, they further impacted the stories being told. Women were everywhere as the craft of screen writing took shape.

Photoplay article “Why Do They Change the Stories on the Screen?” by Frances Marion.

With many of the films and scripts from this period lost, scholars have turned to archival sources, such as fan and trade publications, memoirs and biographies, to explore women’s contribution. They have documented women’s work, and have examined both the social and economic forces that influenced women’s entrance into the industry and the gendered context and nature of their work. However, research has been relatively silent on the ways in which these women influenced screen writing as a developing craft. Women writers offered insights on how to write the scenario or shooting script. And while many women met the studio and audience expectations for female-centered narratives, female protagonists and subject matter, they also pushed the boundaries of expectations by crafting strong independent female characters, by refusing to “write to gender,” and/or by producing alternative cinematic forms. During their time in the industry, women helped shape the form and technique of cinematic writing and influenced both its tone and content. They carved a place for themselves in the history of a developing art form.

Advancing the Form

When women entered the industry as “writers,” there was no existing craft to learn as there were no written scripts. Writing for cinema prior to 1912 involved submitting story ideas/plot synopses or writing titles. Ideas and synopses were elicited through magazine advertisements or contests, freely submitted, or written by company staffers. Women were counted among the many early contributors of these “stories,” as gender was not an impediment. Karen Ward Maher notes in Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood that women in all areas of cinematic production “enjoyed low craft and gender boundaries” in the very early days of cinema–a situation that would later change.⁴ These early stories took the form of a few lines of text, a paragraph or a one-page plot summary. Producers/directors then took the story from page to screen, while a clerk on set “held the script,” recording scenes, action, dialogue, and shooting directions.⁵ These clerks were called script girls, since most were female secretaries or assistants, a testament to the different ways women were tied to early storytelling in Hollywood.

Writing for the screen was attractive to women, both those who freelanced from home (through open submission or writing contests) and those who sought full-time careers. Martin F. Norden in his study of The Moving Picture World articles from the teens explains that the open submission structure was appealing to women bound to the home as it offered them an opportunity “to pursue more creative experiences.”⁶ Maher finds a similar attraction in the company-sponsored contests advertised in popular fan magazines. Her research indicates that most winners of early company contests for the best “story idea” or plot synopsis were women.⁷ Such women followed in the footsteps of those women writers who had been contributing stories to popular magazines since the nineteenth century.⁸ Women also were drawn to full careers in the cinema. Cari Beauchamp argues in Creative Screenwriting that writing for the screen appealed to women, as did other jobs in the industry, because “With few people taking the new industry seriously, the doors were wide open to women.”⁹ Lizzie Francke in Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood believes the arts in general, including cinema, offered attractive careers particularly to the white, middle class “New Woman” of the time, “the independent career minded and mostly middle-class females who were striding into the twentieth century.”¹⁰ For many, there was a financial need to work. As Sumiko Higashi explains in Virgins, Vamps and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine, this need successfully challenged the separate spheres model that argued for women’s place in the home. As a result, between 1910 and 1920 women’s presence in the work force increased as did their wages.¹¹ The need for writers in Hollywood, then, emerged at a time when women were looking to expand opportunities, financial and/or creative, beyond the home.

Anita Loos, 1928. Courtesy of Photofest.

Among the documented early career writers were Edison’s Carolyn Wells who joined the staff as a writer in 1909, according to Lux Graphicus in Moving Picture World.¹² Mary Pickford began her career the same year, writing and acting in both Getting Even (1909) and The Awakening (1909). And Kathlyn Williams started as a writer with The Last Dance (1912), before her run as a serial queen. Gene Gauntier was also one of those early writers. She quickly became a driving force as both an actor and writer for Kalem productions. In “Blazing the Trail,” which first appeared as a serialized article in the 1928 Women’s Home Companion, she explains that though she was hired at Kalem as an actor, she began writing “crude” scenarios in 1907: “A poem, a picture, a short story, a scene from a current play, a headline in a newspaper. All was grist that came to my mill.”¹³ Her comments reflect the skeletal nature of early writing. When she first started, stories consisted of outlines with a few words describing each scene: “There was never a scenario on hand.”¹⁴ Like Gauntier, Anita Loos entered the business early; however, Loos focused her career solely on writing. In her 1977 memoir, Casts of Thousands, she explains how she began submitting stories from home, and was only a teenager when she captured the attention of D.W. Griffith. In fact when Loos came to Hollywood to meet him, at his request, he mistook her mother for his intrepid new writer. Loos writes that her first produced story was The New York Hat in 1912, and for the next three years, she turned out over one hundred stories/scenarios. Whatever Biograph rejected went to Vitagraph, Kalem, or Selig.¹⁵ Loos admits in an interview with Film Fan Monthly in 1967, however, that what were called scenarios were pretty bare: “As a matter of fact, the films were practically composed on the set.”¹⁶

This assembly line of film production that both Gauntier and Loos identify resulted in early crediting problems that impacted the woman writer. In the absence of detailed scenarios, the final film was often far from the original story idea or plot summary, and the author forgotten. As a result, writing credits typically were either absent or assigned to producers or directors.¹⁷ Scholars have explored this early issue, identifying gender bias as a “possible” cause. Jane M. Gaines in “Anonymity: Uncredited and Unknown in Early Cinema” sees the “anonymity” issue prior to 1911 as affecting both players and screen writers. Fan and trade magazines, she explains, eventually called for the crediting of players, but not writers. Though she does not argue for gender as a key factor in early anonymity, she admits that “In the first two decades of the century, anonymous is almost synonymous with the ‘woman’ writer.”¹⁸ Holliday, however, makes this issue the centerpiece of her 1995 dissertation, Hollywood’s Modern Women: Screenwriting, Work Culture, and Feminism, 1910-1940. Uncredited status was linked to women, she argues, because most of the early amateur/freelance screen writers were women, and freelancers were usually not credited.¹⁹ The link between gender and crediting bears further study. This problem only intensified as women took on full-time careers as writers.

The Art of Photoplay (1914) by Catherine Carr.

By the mid-teens, the scenario started to take shape as something more than an idea implemented on set by a director. Women contributed to this developing craft by writing more detailed scenarios and instructing on the art itself. Among those women who actively wrote original or adapted scenarios, or both, were Zoë Akins, Hetty Gray Baker, Clara Beranger, Catherine Carr, Russian-born Sonya Levien, Loos, Macpherson, Marion, June Mathis, Bess Meredyth, and Eve Unsell. Jane Murfin adapted her own plays or wrote original scenarios, and Edith M. Kennedy is mentioned in the online AFI catalogue as a story contributor, scenarist, and adapter. Many of these women also advised prospective writers on the continually expanding scenario format. Their advice, which appeared in interviews and in their own written manuals, articles, and books, emphasized the importance of picturizing the material. Carr in The Art of Photoplay Writing (1914) asserts the need to visualize an action and even an emotion. This, she says, will produce “a human interest story.”²⁰ Mathis in The Photo-Play Journal in 1917 explains, “In your mind’s eye you must visualize your plot, just as you would stand on a mountain-top and gaze at beautiful scenery surrounding you. You must visualize your characters…You must see your characters.”²¹ Marguerite Bertsch in her book How to Write for Moving Pictures (1917) also provides detailed descriptions of what goes into a scenario and models for aspiring writers. Scenarios, she explains, must include a title, the number of reels, a one paragraph synopsis, a cast, a list of scenes, a list of props, and a detailed summary of each scene including its setting, character action, and maybe some dialogue.²² By 1920 Loos and John Emerson in How to Write Photoplays were telling prospective writers to add descriptive subtitles and visual aids for the director, like telegrams or letters.²³ Writing for the screen had evolved well beyond the initial story ideas or plot summaries.

“Pursuing a Motion Picture Plot” by June Mathis. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

The need to bridge the gap between page and screen and to include the business end of film production led to further changes in the scenario and to the birth of the continuity or shooting script. Women again were on the frontlines. Janet Staiger, in “Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts,” argues that between 1908 and 1917 the increase in film length (more reels) and the desire for well-made films with narrative fluidity resulted in a shift prior to production “from the scenario script to the continuity script.”²⁴ In “Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System,” Staiger explains that continuities added the following to a scenario: director, cast and actors, locations, detailed mise-en-scene, intertitle placement, shooting schedule, budget, and distribution plan.²⁵ Women, like Beranger, Sada Cowan, Beulah Marie Dix, and Meredyth, were among the many continuity writers. However, it was Mathis and Ince at Metro who developed continuity scripts as the backbone of production. According to Lewis Jacobs “they can be credited with the make-up of continuity as we know it today.”²⁶

How to Write for Moving Pictures (1917) by Marguerite Bertsch.

Women also penned titles well before the continuity script came into play and instructed on the aesthetic of this new practice. Among the first title writers were women like Lenore Coffee, Katharine Hilliker, Loos, and Dorothy Yost. As Bertsch explains in her 1917 how-to book, title writing provides information on action, sets, and character emotion, and includes character dialogue, the latter a recent addition. She even advises on the art of title writing: “We must seek in our subtitles that harmony with our picture which causes them to heighten the action, bring out or express its underlying meaning or atmosphere;–all in that unobtrusive way which makes them part and parcel of the effect in toto.”²⁷ Titling was a natural transition from story writing for women like Loos. As she notes in Kiss Hollywood Good-By (1974), Griffith shelved many of her early scenarios because they contained written dialogue. He believed that “people don’t go to the movies to read.”²⁸ He changed his mind when he saw the reception for her titled 1916 His Picture in the Papers.²⁹ As story, scenario, and title writer, Loos witnessed all aspects of the developing craft. According to her 1968 interview with Kevin Brownlow, Loos was Biograph’s scenario department.³⁰

As screen writing was codified as a respected profession, women were represented in all areas of writing in all the major studios. Epes Winthrop Sargent in his 1914 The Moving Picture World article, “The Literary Side of Pictures,” notes the following women writers and their studios: Baker (Bosworth), Carr (Vitagraph and North American), Beta Breuil (Vitagraph), Peggy O’Neil (Vitagraph), Bertsch (Vitagraph), Maibel Heikes Justice (Selig), and Mary Fuller (Edison).³¹ According to John William Kellette that same year, Elizabeth Lonergan had worked at Biograph, Kalem, and Majestic.³² Marion also was starting out at this time. By 1914 she was involved in all aspects of production as Lois Weber’s assistant at Bosworth. She then moved briefly to the smaller Balboa in 1915 hoping to write, finally settling in at Famous Players where she began scripting for Pickford.³³ Sought after for her writing skills, Marion worked throughout the 1920s for a number of companies, including Norma Talmadge Productions, Goldwin Pictures (eventually Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), and Fox Films. Macpherson, who acted before she took to writing in 1915, regularly contributed stories and adaptations for Jesse L. Lasky, prompting Alice Martin in 1916 to call her the “left half of Cecil de Mille’s brain.”³⁴ By 1919 Unsell had already worked with Pathé, Kalem, Universal, Metro, Triumph, and Famous Players-Lasky, according to a writer with the initials M.H.C. in The Picture Show.³⁵And a 1923 Photoplay article, “How Twelve Famous Women Scenario Writers Succeeded in This Profession of Unlimited Opportunity and Reward,” lists Beranger, Ouida Bergère, Cowan, Dix, Marion Fairfax, Loos, Marion, Mathis, Murfin, Olga Printzlau, Margaret Turnbull, and Unsell as actively working in the industry. The article notes that these women “have caught the trick of writing and understand the picture mind.”³⁶ Fan magazines found women’s accomplishments noteworthy, as companies jockeyed for their skills.

June Mathis, circa 1920s. Courtesy of Photofest.

Women’s readiness to handle the complex art of writing for the screen is not surprising. Most career women joined the field from acting and/or related professions. Bergère began as a stage actor, and Beranger, Marion, and Printzlau were newspaper and/or magazine writers. Novelists and playwrights included Dix, Murfin, Turnbull, and Unsell.³⁷ Justice was a fiction writer, Marian Lee Patterson a magazine writer, and Baker a law librarian.³⁸ Carolyn Lowry in her 1920 First One Hundred Noted Men and Women of the Screen notes that Fairfax was a stage actor and dramatist, Mathis a stage actor and magazine fiction writer, and Weber a soprano and stage actor.³⁹ Loos was also a stage actor, a profession that bored her so much she started writing film plots.⁴⁰ Adele S. Buffington was a cashier at a movie house prior to writing horse operas at Fox, and Isabel Johnston was a journalist and book editor before writing for Vitagraph.⁴¹ English fiction writer Elinor Glyn was recruited by Famous Players-Lasky in 1920 to write original film stories and to supervise their production. Scottish-born writer Lorna Moon was living in Minneapolis as a journalist when she was recruited by Cecil B. DeMille. Canadian-born Nell Shipman was a stage actress before writing scenarios and starting her own company in the US where she produced, directed, and wrote wilderness films.⁴² And French-born Alice Guy Blaché was a secretary for Gaumont in France before moving to the US in 1907 and starting her own company, Solax, in 1910. Here she wrote, directed, and supervised productions. Women like Shipman and Guy Blaché found an early control in the industry because they could write, direct, and produce.

Influencing the Story

MGM portrait, Frederica Sagor, 1927. Courtesy of Photofest.

In addition to shaping the form of their craft, women influenced its content. Writing for the screen quickly emerged as a female art form, written by women for women. By 1910, 40% of the working class audience was female, according to Kathy Peiss, and company heads were well aware they had to meet the needs of this demographic.⁴³ To do so, they turned to the popular literary marketplace, and the romantic comedies, romantic dramas, and melodramas that had gained popularity among female readers in the previous century. These female-centered literary narratives were penned mostly by women and focused on women’s social concerns as girlfriends, wives, and mothers.⁴⁴ Film companies hired women to write and adapt such stories for the screen. E. Ann Kaplan in “Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film 1910-1940” identifies some of these films collectively as the “woman’s film.” Unlike the maternal melodrama which speaks to both the male and female spectator, she explains, “the woman’s film more specifically addresses the female spectator.”⁴⁵ The common belief of the time was that women were uniquely suitable for writing the kinds of stories a female audience demanded. As Gary Carey explains in his study of Loos, women writers were seen as “more attuned than men to turning out the kitsch melodramas and hot-house romances that dominated the run-of-the mill Hollywood product of the period.”⁴⁶ Even women writers acknowledged their innate ability to deal with stories of love and marriage. In a 1918 Motion Picture World article, Beranger asserts that domestic stories, love triangles, and human interest narratives are “more ably handled by woman than men because of the thorough understanding our sex has of these matters.”⁴⁷ In a 1925 article in The Film Daily, Mathis declares that women know best the female mind and, as a result, “seem to succeed in the careful, fine detail work of scenario writing.”⁴⁸ Among the women who delivered on these popular stories were Frederica Sagor who scripted romantic comedies, Mrs. Sidney Drew (Lucille McVey) who penned domestic comedies along with her husband, and Loos who was known for her slapstick comedies in the early years and romantic comedies throughout her career. Coffee, Julia Crawford Ivers, and Marion wrote the intensely emotional dramas and melodramas. There was no shortage of women writers in Hollywood willing to turn out the “writing to gender” studios demanded of them.

Lantern slide, The Marriage of William Ashe (1921), Ruth Ann Baldwin (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Elinor Glyn and Clara Bow on the set of It (1927). Courtesy of Photofest.

What women wrote, however, frequently straddled both Victorian and modern sensibilities. On the one hand, women in these films were stock characters, recognizable types: the virgin, the flapper, the working girl, the sacrificing wife/mother, the reformer, and the deceived/seduced woman. They were positioned in the social order as (potential) girlfriends, wives, and/or mothers who struggled to find and keep a man or to survive difficult domestic situations. Many, however, were also independent-minded women who negotiated for freedom inside of conventional relationships, sought unconventional relationships (across classes, for example), and tried to make the best of difficult relationships. Their stories showcase the tensions surrounding the gendered expectations of women in both the public and private sphere.⁴⁹ These edgy women are found in such films as Beranger’s Miss Lulu Bett (1921), Ruth Ann Baldwin’s The Marriage of William Ashe (1921), Marion’s The Wind (1928), and Glyn’s It (1927). Berenger’s Lulu challenges the convention that women, unlike men, are solely defined by their marital status. Baldwin’s Lady Kitty publishes political satire and poses nude for a charity event. And Marion’s Letty struggles for dignity in an abusive relationship.⁵⁰ Glyn’s Betty Lou is a working girl and a flapper, wielding both social and sexual power. Higashi argues that the working woman status of the time shaped the female characters in these Cinderella-themed stories. Careers led to marriage even for those women not actively seeking a partner. Betty Lou, however, is also a flapper. As such, she represents what Higashi calls a new style of femininity: rebellious, sexually precocious, and capable of male friendships.⁵¹ Refusing to wait for a man, Betty Lou openly initiates a romance with her boss. Complications ensue as a result of class differences and Betty Lou’s brazen personality, but the two eventually find common ground. While marriage is mentioned only briefly, this is the assumed next step in their relationship. The pull of marital expectations remained strong in these films, even for sexually-liberated flappers like Betty Lou.

Some women writers avoided stories of love and marriage by focusing on female characters who operate outside of the domestic sphere, though these stories frequently contained a romantic subplot. Grace Cunard and Gauntier created girl adventurers. Cunard, in collaboration with her husband Francis Ford, specialized in the female-lead adventure serials for Universal: Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery (1914) and The Broken Coin (1915). Gauntier’s action-packed stories feature spunky, athletic women engaging in death-defying exploits. Her Girl Spy (1908-1911) is based on the exploits of Belle Boyd, a Confederate spy in the Civil War. Francke argues that Gauntier’s choice of genre was an open challenge to the male action writer: “Gauntier had established that a woman writer was as adept with the thrills and spills of action-adventure genres as her male colleagues.”⁵² Gauntier does marry her girl spy off at the end of the series, but she admits in the November 1928 installment of “Blazing the Trail” that she did so because of the physical toll of doing her own stunts. In addition, her brains had been “sucked dry of any more adventures for the intrepid young woman.”⁵³ Betty Burbridge, Carr, Baldwin, and Buffington also worked in another action arena: the western.⁵⁴ Beranger took on the thriller in The Bedroom Window (1924) about a female mystery writer who brings her talents to a murder case. And Shipman’s women meet the challenges of wilderness life in such films as The Girl from God’s Country (1921) and The Grub-Stake (1923). According to Kay Armatage, Shipman’s heroine is a blend of vulnerable femininity and unbridled heroism which “allows her to resist conventional narrative inscriptions of the woman protagonist as victimized and rescued.”⁵⁵ Both films were the work of her newly-formed Nell Shipman Productions, which she moved to Idaho in part because of Hollywood’s continual challenge to the kinds of stories Shipman wanted to make.⁵⁶

In addition, women tackled controversial social issues or broadened the narrative scope of their work to include a focus on male protagonists. Fairfax’s The Honor of His House (1918) and Macpherson’s The Godless Girl (1928) deal with alcoholism and juvenile delinquency respectively. Writer/director Weber devoted her career to making films that called attention to social problems. Where Are My Children? (1916) explores reproductive rights, while both Shoes (1916) and The Blot (1921) grapple with poverty and its impact on women. Dorothy Davenport Reid also focused on the social problem film, confronting drug addiction in Human Wreckage (1923) in which she also starred. As with some of her other films, however, writing credit remains uncertain. Among the writers who expanded the narrative focus of their films were Mathis, who adapted Frank Norris’ novel McTeague (Greed, 1924) about a dentist in the Midwest, and the epic Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925). Refusing to be labelled a woman’s writer, Dix regularly wrote films for male stars like her original The Call of the East (1917), starring popular Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa. Dix’s uncompromising approach to writing in Hollywood bears further study.

Jeanie Macpherson with Cecil B. DeMille and Paul Iribe on the set of Adam’s Rib (1923). Courtesy of Photofest.

Though some women may have challenged the “writing to gender” expected of them, they were still part of a collective codified in fan magazines as conventional working women. Authors were eager to assure readers that women could be “feminine” and still work in Hollywood. According to Photoplay’s “How Twelve Famous Women Scenario Writers Succeeded,” these were “normal, regular women…not short haired advanced feminists, not fadists.”⁵⁷ Speaking of Macpherson, Doris Delvigne writes in the 1920 Motion Picture Magazine that “There’s nothing masculine about this little French-Scotch girl who has interested the dramatic world with her craftsmanship. She’s not a blue-stocking with emancipated ideas, nor has her contact with the biggest men in the motion picture world given her that swaggering independence which is supposed to adhere to begoggled authors. She is the most utterly feminine thing you ever beheld.”⁵⁸ Of Unsell, M.H.C. writes, “She is so womanly–without the slightest trace of ‘pose’ or ‘literariness,’ and gives one a ‘homey’ feeling at once.”⁵⁹ And Aline Carter in the 1921 Motion Picture Magazine praises Weber’s ability to produce, write, and edit without giving up a home life: “… she is the original woman who loves to linger over the table and ask for recipes.”⁶⁰ These popular magazines reminded the female audience that writing for the screen was women’s work.

In some cases, however, this ideologically-coded image contrasted sharply with the woman writer’s professional or personal life. According to Francke, Dix was a “self-confessed bluestocking”; she dressed informally on set and smoked with the crew.⁶¹ Her daughter’s biography notes that Dix openly refused female lead stories, disapproving of the Hollywood stereotypes of women and the fact that female-centered stories tended to deal with lighter topics.⁶² Levien’s biographer, Larry Ceplair, explains that before her film work she expressed radical political and social views, particularly as a writer for the Woman’s Journal, the voice of the suffragette movement. He acknowledges, however, that she had difficulty reconciling her film work with these radical views.⁶³ Adela Rogers St. Johns, a Hollywood journalist, story consultant, screen writer, and author of source material, wrote about both conventional and unconventional women. Throughout her life St. Johns confronted gendered views of men and women, prompting sports journalist Mel Durslag to comment in her 1988 obituary that “She was a kind of wild, uninhibited woman before feminism came in.”⁶⁴ In silent era Hollywood women negotiated a fragile balance between their public and private lives.

Among the women who made films outside the Hollywood system were African-American filmmakers Tressie Souders, Eloyce King Patrick Gist, and Zora Neale Hurston. As noted earlier, careers for women in Hollywood were pretty much accessible only to white women, particularly middle class white women. There is no evidence, however, that Souders, Gist, or Hurston even desired to work in Hollywood. Very little is known about the making or distribution of director/writer Souders’ feature, A Woman’s Error (1922), which was produced by the Afro-American Film Exhibitors Company in Kansas City. More is known about Gist and Hurston who made films that furthered their political, religious, and/or social agendas. As Gloria J. Gibson writes in “Cinematic Foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston and Eloyce King Patrick Gist,” Hurston and Gist recognized the impact of the motion picture camera.⁶⁵ Gist and husband James made highly moralistic, non-theatrical films that accompanied their religious services. Hell Bound Train (ca 1929-1930), which she retitled and orated, consists of a series of religious allegories, while the short Verdict Not Guilty (1930-1933) tells the story of a woman pleading for entrance to heaven despite her efforts to “prevent” motherhood, a reference to either birth control or abortion.⁶⁶ Similarly, African-American folklorist and novelist Hurston’s ethnographic films–Logging (1928), Children’s Games (1929), and Baptism (1929)–chronicle the daily life of southern black culture. Little is known of the purpose of Hurston’s filmmaking other than to present her research in a pictorial format. In fact, while black male filmmakers of the period have been the subject of extensive research, there has been very little scholarship on the work of black women filmmakers. Yet, as Gibson has argued, such women made their “mark with a camera.”⁶⁷

Navigating Industry Problems

The same could be said for those women working inside of the Hollywood system, but by the 1920s, a top-down model of studio production resulted in a series of ongoing problems, including both threats to creative autonomy and continuing struggles with low salaries. Marion and Pickford were frustrated particularly with the overly sentimental plots expected of them. According to Marion in Off With Their Heads: A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood, she and Pickford were fed up with Pickford’s “eternal child” character and the endless happy endings studios demanded. She and Lillian Gish experienced similar constraints while working on The Wind. When told she had to soften the ending of the film, Marion and some of the crew “created our own storm, to no avail.”⁶⁸ Also troublesome was the increasingly complex assembly line of production that resulted in a shooting script that bore little resemblance to the original scenario. Though promised pre-production control, Glyn found it difficult to shepherd her work through with minimal interference. Like many literary writers in Hollywood in the 1920s, her work was severely altered. According to her son’s biography, “It was their names and not their literary abilities which were required by the studios.”⁶⁹ In a 1923 New York Times interview entitled “Scenario Writers Must Find Theme,” Mathis notes that when she first started out, she had to fight for her ideas. Though she gradually gained control of the production process, she still faced opposition: “… if a director does not want to make a production in a particular way, he needs a healthy guard to force him.”⁷⁰ In addition to struggles with creative autonomy, writers in the growing story departments also grappled with low salaries. Though top writers like Marion, Loos, and Macpherson eventually commanded good salaries, the profession as a whole did not. Marion admits in Off With Their Heads, that “scenario writers were pushed into the background, poorly paid, their talent unexploited.”⁷¹ Coffee was particularly outspoken on the issue of equitable pay and suffered the consequences. In the 1920s, Louis B. Mayer fired her for demanding too much money, rehiring Coffee five years later. In the interim she found work with DeMille.⁷² The career woman in Hollywood was experiencing the growing pains of a changing industry.

In addition, crediting problems continued well into the 1920s, even though freelance submissions, rarely credited in the early days, had fallen.⁷³ When multiple writers in the newly-formed story departments worked on the scenario and the final shooting script, crediting frequently acknowledged only one author, and not always the major contributor. Sometimes the last person who had a hand in the script, even only minimally, was the one receiving screen credit. Often writers who rescued weak scenarios, did not get acknowledged at all. Coffee, known as the fixer-upper for saving troubled productions through rewrites and titling, admits in an interview with Patrick McGilligan that she did not always get credit for such work. She recalls one time in the early days of sound when she had written additional dialogue on a film. Another writer phoned her and wanted her to give up the credit. She told him “I’ve heard the age of chivalry is gone, and now I believe it.”⁷⁴ Coffee then hung up the phone. Sometimes adapters, particularly early and lesser-known writers, found their screen credit eclipsed by the author of the original works. They also were forgotten in film reviews, again in favor of the author of the original work. Even Fairfax, well-known in the business by the 1920s, experienced this problem. In 1926 she wrote and produced The Blonde Saint, from a Stephen French Whitman novel. However the only writing credit listed on the BFI copy is Whitman’s. Reviews in Bioscope and the New York Times also ignore her authorship in favor of Whitman’s.⁷⁵ Staiger believes that the “division of labor” resulting from the growing corporatization of the industry accounted for this threat to authorship.⁷⁶

Mary Pickford (r) and Frances Marion (l). Private Collection

Women, particularly those who had long careers in the industry, handled these problems with autonomy and authorship in a number of ways. They formed writer/director and writer/writer partnerships. They also became writing department and company heads, joined or formed independent units or companies, held multiple positions as writers, directors, and producers, and organized writing guilds. Marion quickly discovered that the only way to maintain complete control over her script was to be the writer and director.⁷⁷ The next best thing was to be part of writer/director partnerships. These included Loos and Emerson (co-writer), Meredyth and Wilfred Lucas (co-writer), and Macpherson and DeMille.⁷⁸Among the husband and wife writing partnerships, in addition to Loos and Emerson, were Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew. Early teams included Anne and Bannister Merwin at Edison and Maria A. Wing and William E. Wing at Biograph and Selig, though little is known about Anne and Maria’s contributions.⁷⁹ Some writers were also scenario editors: Breuil and Bertsch at Vitagraph, Carr at North American, and Baker at Bosworth.⁸⁰ Both Marion and Fairfax formed their own companies: Frances Marion Pictures and Marion Fairfax Productions. Gauntier held multiple positions at Kalem–writer, actor, producer, director, critic, scenario editor, and studio manager–and founded her own company Gene Gauntier Feature Players with Sydney Olcott.⁸¹ Lillian Case Russell started a film company with her husband. And Mathis headed the script unit at Metro; she also was a producer at Goldwyn and First National. The collaborative, egalitarian nature of their work and their presence in the upper echelons meant they had a hand in the final product. In addition, women were tackling inequities as active members of societies and leagues launched to protect authorship and autonomy. Baker and Weber were among the founding members of the Photoplay Authors’ League, according to the Mariposa Gazette in 1914.⁸² Finally, women’s friendships helped them navigate a continually changing industry. According to Marsha McCreadie in The Women Who Write the Movies (1994), “there seems to have been an informal but strong and highly effect networking system among women.”⁸³ Marion confirms this in an interview with De Witt Bodeen. St. Johns helped her secure the meeting with Weber that launched her career.⁸⁴ By the end of the silent period, women were hiring each other and teaching newcomers the business.

The women writer’s dominance in the industry, however, virtually disappeared with the coming of sound. The industry that afforded them jobs and sometimes lucrative careers had altered drastically. Maher argues that the transformation of Hollywood into a business with both a national and international market and a centralized producer system pushed women from positions of power and left little room for both the independent and collaborative working culture women were used to. She notes, however, that such changes affected predominantly producers, directors, and editors, as women screen writers continued working into sound.⁸⁵ Some women writers, like Akins, Buffington, Burbridge, Coffee, Dix, Lillie Hayward, Adelaide Heilbron, Levien, Loos, Lovett, Marion, Meredyth, Murfin, Marion Orth, and St. Johns, did make the transition into sound, but they faced a severely altered professional environment. Marion quickly learned that writers now were “like Penelope–knitting their stories all day just to have somebody else unravel their work by night.”⁸⁶ In a 1939 letter to Alice Kauser, Akins expresses her frustration with the movie business, noting that writing what one chooses had become “a rare privilege.”⁸⁷ Those writing from home found their services were no longer wanted as both story ideas and scenarios now emerged from story departments. Drew and Williams, who made names for themselves in serials, discovered the form no longer desirable. Though long out of the business by the coming of sound, Gauntier noted in a 1924 letter to Photoplay that changes in the industry had made it impossible for her to continue working. Speaking of her final years in the business after her company folded in 1914, she writes, “Conditions had changed so. I went with Universal for a short time, when the new plant, Universal City, was opened. After being master of all I surveyed, I could not work under the new conditions.”⁸⁸ Once a dominating force in the industry, women writers had become workers in a well-oiled machine. They were quickly fading from the public limelight.

Women who wrote for the screen in the silent era, however, did leave their mark. They were a significant part of concretizing the language of their craft. They legitimized writing for the screen as a new medium at a time when screen writing was not a discipline and only beginning to be a business. And they offered constructive views on the art of photoplay writing. However, due to the assembly line of production, the absence of pre-production shooting scripts in the early days, and the lack of systematic crediting throughout the period, the extent and nature of women’s contribution in all areas of writing continue to be important subjects for researchers. There is still much work to be done on how women distinguished themselves as writers, sometimes resisting the formulaic Hollywood model of storytelling. Studies also need to explore how they struggled to establish authorship in the wake of industry changes, and how and why some women writers adjusted to these changes. The role of the independent filmmaker/writer, like Fairfax, Hurston, and Gist bears further study. Finally, scholarship needs to interrogate the intersection of social and economic factors that contributed to the woman writer’s eventual loss of power in an industry they helped forge.

Notes

1
Jeanie Macpherson, “The Market for Scenario Writers,” The Picturegoer 2, no. 12 (December 1921): 40.
2
Francis Marion, “Why Do They Change the Stories on the Screen?,” Photoplay XXIX, no. 4 (March 1926): 144.
3
Wendy Holliday, Hollywood’s Modern Women: Screenwriting, Work Culture, and Feminism, 1910-1940 (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1995), 100, 114, 140 (note 49), 144 (note 82).
4
Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 42. See also Holliday, 18.
5
See William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York: DaCapo Press, 1998), 32; and Tom Stempel, Framework: A History of Screenwriting in American Film (New York: Continuum, 1988), 10-14.
6
Martin F. Norden, “Women in the Early Film Industry,” Wide Angle 6, no. 3 (1984): 64. Anne Morey’s study of gender expectations in “fictional” Hollywood also finds that such opportunities allowed women to write without sacrificing their domestic duties or threatening traditional concepts of femininity. See Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913-34 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 48-49.
7
Mahar, 41.
8
For information on women’s contribution to nineteenth century popular magazines, see Donna Rose Casella Kern, “Sentimental Short Fiction by Women Writers in Leslie’s Popular Monthly,” Journal of American Culture 3, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 113-15.
9
Cari Beauchamp, “Frances Marion: ‘Writing on the Sand With the Wind Blowing,’” Creative Screenwriting 1, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 56. Though Maher acknowledges the very early opening of the field to women, she disagrees with this “empty field” theory, arguing that “all work emerges from some previously gendered context” (5).
10
Lizzie Francke, Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood (London: BFI Publishing, 1994), 6.
11
Sumiko Higashi, Virgins, Vamps and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine (St Albans, VT: Eden Press, 1978), 96-97.
12
Lux Graphicus, “On the Screen,” The Moving Picture World 5, no. 11 (11 September 1909): 342.
13
Gene Gauntier, “Blazing the Trail,” Woman’s Home Companion LV, no. 10 (October 1928): 183.
14
Ibid., 181.
15
Anita Loos, Cast of Thousands (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977), 20-21, 25.
16
“FFM Interviews Anita Loos,” Film Fan Monthly 69 (March 1967): 4.
17
See Stempel, 136. Norden also notes that women in the teens were poorly paid and frequently did not receive screen credit. He mentions the case of Grace Adele Pierce who was not credited for adapting Judith of Bethulia (1913) from the Bible, poem, and play. See “Women in the Early Film Industry,” 64.
18
Jane M. Gaines, “Anonymity: Uncredited and Unknown in Early Cinema,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, eds. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 444, 445.
19
Holliday, 3, 37, 133, 319, 387.
20
Catherine Carr, The Art of Photoplay Writing (New York: H. Jordan, 1914), 9.
21
June Mathis, “Pursuing a Motion Picture Plot,” The Photo-Play Journal II, no. 6 (October 1917): 25.
22
Marguerite Bertsch, How to Write for Moving Pictures (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1917), 32-130; see also Carr, 51-74.
23
John Emerson and Anita Loos, How to Write Photoplays (New York: James A. McCann, 1920), 15, 35, 38-41.
24
Janet Staiger, “Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 177.
25
Staiger, “Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System,” Cinema Journal 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 20
26
Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Columbia University, Teachers College Press, 1967), 328.
27
Bertsch, 74-83. See also Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By…(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 82, 295-97.
28
Loos, Kiss Hollywood Good-By (New York: Viking, 1974), 7.
29
Ibid., 7-10.
30
Brownlow, 275.
31
Epes Winthrop Sargent, “The Literary Side of Pictures,” The Moving Picture World 21, no.2 (11 July 1914): 202.
32
John William Kellette, “Makers of the Movies: The Lonergans,” The Moving Picture World 21, no. 11 (12 September 1914): 1498.
33
See Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (New York: Scribner, 1997), 36-37, 41, 44.
34
Alice Martin, “From ‘Wop’ Parts to Bossing the Job,” Photoplay X, no. 5 (October 1916): 95.
35
M.H.C. (May Hershel Clarke). “Introducing Eve Unsell. Famous Scenario Writer Chats on Photo-Plays and Players,” The Picture Show 1, no. 25 (18 October 1919): 12.
36
“How Twelve Famous Women Scenario Writers Succeeded,” Photoplay XXIV, no. 3 (August 1923): 31-33.
37
Ibid., 31-33.
38
See Sargent, “The Literary Side of Pictures,” 202.
39
Carolyn Lowry, The First One Hundred Noted Men and Women of the Screen (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1920), 52, 118, 190. https://archive.org/details/firstonehundred00lowrgoog.
40
See Loos, Cast of Thousands, 23
41
See Francke, 25; and Ann Martin and Virginia M. Clark, eds., What Women Wrote: Scenarios 1912-1929 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, Cinema History Microfilm Series, 1987), 22.
42
See the following: Anthony Glyn, Elinor Glyn: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 273-74; Richard de Mille, My Secret Mother Lorna Moon (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 176-77; and Nell Shipman, The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart (Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1987), 11-35, 40-43.
43
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure at the Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 148.
44
See Casella Kern, “Sentimental Short Fiction by Women Writers in Leslie’s Popular Monthly,” 113-22.
45
E. Ann Kaplan, “Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film 1910-1940,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 124, 126.
46
Gary Carey, “Written on the Screen: Anita Loos,” Film Comment 6, no. 4 (Winter 1970-71): 51.
47
Clara Beranger, “Are Women the Better Script Writers?,” The Moving Picture World 37, no. 8 (24 August 1918): 1128. She also argues on the same page that there are more women than men writing in Hollywood.
48
Mathis, “The Feminine Mind in Picture Making,” The Film Daily XXXII, no. 58 (7 June 1925): 115.
49
Interviews of and articles by women writers in the New York Times, Variety, Photoplay, The Moving Picture World, Motion Pictures News, Motion Picture Magazine, Picturegoer, Bioscope, and Skoll-Herald indicate that some women willingly turned out the “writing to gender” demanded of them, while others criticized the dominant ideology presented in such narratives. See Casella, “Feminism and the Female Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood, 1896-1930,” The Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23 (2006): 222-32.
50
The multiple shooting scripts for The Wind indicate how Marion’s gritty tale of Letty’s defiance of an arranged and brutal marriage softened with each rewrite. See The Margaret Herrick Library, Turner/MGM Scripts, 3376-f.W-836-839 and 3377-f.W840-844. See also note 68.
51
Higashi, 102-106.
52
Francke, 9.
53
Gauntier, “Blazing the Trail,” Women’s Home Companion LV, no. 11 (November 1928): 170.
54
See Helen Colton, “Meet the Gals Who Write ’Em, Not Ride ’Em.” New York Times (31 October 1948): X5.
55
Kay Armatage, The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 31.
56
Ibid., 118-119.
57
“How Twelve Famous Women Scenario Writers Succeeded,” 31.
58
Doris Delvigne, “Mind the Little Things,” Motion Picture Magazine XIX, no. 6 (July 1920): 73.
59
M.H.C., 12.
60
Aline Carter, “The Muse of the Reel,” Motion Picture Magazine XXI, no. 2 (March 1921): 62, 105.
61
Francke, 23-24.
62
Evelyn F. Scott, Hollywood. When Silents Were Golden (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 73.
63
Larry Ceplair, “A Great Lady: A Life of the Screenwriter Sonya Levien,” in Filmmakers, No. 50, ed. Anthony Slide (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1966), viii, 15.
64
“Hearst Reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns Dies.” Obit. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (11 August 1988): 10.
65
Gloria J. Gibson, “Cinematic Foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston and Eloyce King Patrick Gist,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, eds. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 195. Gibson also notes that Gist and Hurston worked under the financial constraints of independent filmmaking, much like women of color today (195). Scholars also have mentioned journalist, historian, and musician Drusilla Dunjee Houston, though she was never actively involved in filmmaking. Houston wrote an anti-lynching screenplay, an answer to Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) that was never produced.
66
Ibid., 199-204.
67
Ibid., 196.
68
Marion, Off With Their Heads: A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 64, 67, 160.
69
Glyn, 275.
70
“Scenario Writers Must Find Theme,” New York Times (15 April 1923): X3.
71
Marion, Off With Their Heads, 17.
72
See Thomas Slater, “Lenore J. Coffee,” in American Screenwriters, Second Series, ed. Randall Clark (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1986), 93.
73
Staiger notes the disappearance of freelance submissions in “Blueprints for Feature Films,” 190.
74
Patrick McGilligan, “Lenore Coffee: Easy Smiler, Easy Weeper,” in Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age, ed. Patrick McGilligan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 142-43.
75
“The Blonde Saint.” Bioscope 70, no. 1066 (17 March 1927): 55-56; and Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen,” New York Times (23 November 1926): 27.
76
Staiger, “Dividing Labor,” 21-23.
77
See De Witt Bodeen, “Frances Marion: Part II, She Wrote the Scripts of Some of the Milestone Movies,” Films in Review XX, no. 3 (March 1969): 139.
78
When she was a script supervisor, Macpherson worked closely with DeMille to guarantee her work was filmed as written. Francke believes that DeMille’s output was far more varied due to his collaboration with Macpherson (16).
79
See Edward Azlant, “Screenwriting for the Early Silent Film: Forgotten Pioneers, 1897-1911.” Film History 9, no.3 (September 1997): 243-44.
80
See Azlant, 241. Writer/actor teams also were common with women film writers pairing with women actors. Marion wrote regularly for Pickford, Clara Kimball Young, Constance and Norma Talmadge, and Marie Dressler (Bodeen, “Frances Marion Wrote the Scripts of Some of the Milestone Movies,” Films in Review XX, no. 2 [February 1969]: 80-81, 87).
81
Researchers continue to struggle with determining Gauntier’s authorship, since existing screen credit does not reflect the extent of her contribution. In “Blazing the Trail,” which covers her Kalem years, Gauntier notes writing, producing, and directing activities, but does not address the frequent absence of screen credit (October 1928, 183-184; November 1928:166, 168-170; LV, no. 12 [December 1928]: 132, 134; and LVI, no. 3 [March 1929]: 19). The final installment of “Blazing the Trail” in March, does mention one disagreement with Kalem over crediting: “Now we learned among other disconcerting facts that From the Manger to the Cross was to be distributed without our names. The Kalem Company alone would profit by our own work” (146). A few paragraphs later, she alludes to possible career problems, but provides no detail: “So our family of pathfinders disbanded, as pioneers do when the long trail is ended, and each one departed into a new environment to build for himself. As settlers in a new land, some were submerged while others rode blithely on the top crest of popularity” (146). Correspondence five years earlier with Photoplay author Frederick James Smith, however, suggests the breadth of her work: “In addition to playing the principal parts, I also wrote, with the exception of a bare half-dozen, every one of the five hundred or so pictures in which I appeared. I picked locations, supervised sets, passed on tests, co-directed with Sidney Olcott, cut and edited” (“Unwept, Unhonored and Unfilmed,” Photoplay XXVI, no. 2 [July 1924]: 67, 101). See also Gaines, “Pink-Slipped: What Happened to the Women in the Silent Film Industry,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of Film. Volume 1. Origins to 1928, eds. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), 157. This situation never seemed to bother Gauntier as she was involved in multiple aspects of a production and did receive credit for her acting. Gauntier saw filmmaking as an ensemble endeavor. However, the tone of the March installment of “Blazing the Trail” suggests that even this ensemble contribution was getting lost in industry expansion.
82
“Photoplay Authors’ League Organized,” Mariposa Gazette 1 (30 May 1914): 3. http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=MG19140530.2.51. Pierce sought the assistance of both the Photoplay Authors’ League and the National League of Pen Women when she was denied screen credit for adapting Judith of Bethulia. See Sargent, “The Photoplaywright,” The Moving Picture World 20, no. 8 (23 May 1914): 1109.
83
Marsha McCreadie, The Women Who Write the Movies. (New York: Burch Lane Press, 1994), 6.
84
Bodeen, “Frances Marion Wrote the Scripts,” 75. See also Bodeen, “Frances Marion: Part II,” 139, 142.
85
Maher, 134, 157, 203. Gaines in “Pink-Slipped: What Happened to the Women in the Silent Film Industry” notes that women filmmakers did not totally disappear with the coming of sound. She recommends that scholars “move from the narrative of ‘no woman in 1925’ to the narrative of the ascendance for some that was ‘over by 1925’” (164).
86
Bodeen, “Frances Marion: Part II,” 139.
87
Zoë Akins to Alice Kauser, 20 October 1939, Zoë Akins Papers, ZA 1898, Box 79, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. See also Alan Kreizenbeck, Zoë Akins: Broadway Playwright (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), 149, 208.
88
Smith, 102.

by Lisa Stead

Introduction

Film fan magazines were an important element of British silent cinema culture, and a significant platform for mediating between the film industry and its female spectators. Film periodicals–magazines dedicated to movies and film culture–were read by both men and women. Across the teens and into the 1920s they increasingly targeted a female readership as women came to constitute a larger part of the British audience, and stars became a primary commodity for communicating with female consumers. Popular British magazines like Picturegoer and Girls’ Cinema addressed women as consumers of film culture beyond the picture palace by offering up-to-date compilations of star gossip, behind-the-scenes information, and glamorous illustrations. Fan magazines were repositories not just of film content, but of linking commercial “intertexts,” acting as intermdiaries between film and a broader consumer culture. They featured star-endorsed advertising, and commentary on women’s fashion, cosmetics, and domestic labour. As such, fan magazines worked to make cinemagoing and knowledge of gendered cinema culture an important aspect of British women’s everyday experience of modernity.

“The Girl Who Dared” in The Picture Show in 1919. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

The aims of this article are twofold. First, I seek to explore the ways in which such magazines mediated between film producers and British moviegoers, focusing on their specific address to female readers. I briefly survey the development of magazines on the UK market and their role in cultivating a gendered culture of cinemagoing. To do so, I focus on three popular British papers from the silent era: Picturegoer (1921-22, which then continued as Pictures and the Picturegoer [1922-1925], Picturegoer and Theatre Monthly [1925], and Picturegoer [1925-1931]); The Picture Show (1919-1960); Girls’ Cinema (1920-1932). Examining the similarities and differences between these publications illuminates their distinctive appeal for British women, relative to issues of class, age, and marital status.

Textual analysis of magazine content is contextualized with equal attention to their modes of consumption, considering how fans used periodicals in practices such as scrapbooking and collecting. I place this analysis in dialogue with the ways in which popular culture more widely represented film magazines and their female readers, looking at examples of their depiction in journalism, films, and fiction from the period. Such sources reveal the use of fan magazines in perpetuating popular caricatures of “cinema struck”¹ girls, feeding wider anxieties about female film consumers in this period. Attention to both the textual structures of the magazines themselves and their wider presence in silent-era popular culture thus facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of how fan periodicals were perceived as gendered objects.

Second, the article moves to focus on storytelling as a central feature of British periodicals in the silent era. Fiction was a significant linking thread across the multi-media modes of address that fan magazines utilized. They featured short story adaptations, included a great deal of film star “life stories,” and used narrative structures (such as seriality) to advance their advertising. Examining how magazines employed fictional and narrative tropes offers a new way of thinking about their gendered address, relative to their position within a larger fiction market aimed at women. At the same time, it facilitates a dual focus on women’s creative roles as the makers of such storytelling content in their work as adaptors and magazine writers.

Structuring this kind of analysis requires a detailed interaction with a large volume of magazines. British periodicals are currently accessible in relatively complete runs in original paper form and on microfiche/film at a variety of national and regional archives. These include the British Film Institute and the British Library, and a range of university libraries. Historical film magazines are also increasingly accessible in digital format through projects such as The Media History Digital Library. Beyond official repositories, original copies of fan magazines further exist in great numbers in personal collections.² This kind of increased access allows the researcher to survey changes over time, and to illuminate the specificities of their multi-media format, which utilized photographs, illustrations, interviews, advertising, and prose fiction across both color and monochrome.

Such access facilitates an alternative way of using the film periodical in film historiography. Fan magazines have most commonly been used as supporting materials, assisting in analyses of the reception and marketing of particular films and stars. Less work has been produced on the publications themselves, looking at their specific modes of address and the way they related to broader publishing cultures targeting female consumers–particularly in the UK context. Scholarly work into women and fan magazines has produced a range of significant insights into models of early cinema fandom and star systems (Studlar 1996; Orgeron 2009; Morey 2002), but such work has largely focused on American film magazines and American film culture.

Given the extensive gaps and ellipses relating to women’s roles as creators and consumers in existing historical accounts, fan magazines offer an exciting opportunity to connect film culture with cinemagoing cultures. That is, they allow us to explore the interaction between the images of modern womanhood that film industries produced on their screens. They further allow us to explore the way audiences experienced, sustained, and potentially challenged such representations beyond the theatre, both as consumers and creators.

British Periodicals

Several periodicals developed within the early UK market, beginning with The Pictures in 1911, which, on October 21 of that year, advertised itself as a “guide to all that is best and most worthy of being seen in the picture theatres” (1). A range of other short-lived and long-term publications emerged from the early teens onwards. These included The Picture World (1914-1916), Pictures and Pleasure (1913-1914), Film Flashes (1915-1916), The Picture Show, Girls’ Cinema, and Photo Bits and Cinema Star (1923-1924).

Film magazines developed to support a growing culture of cinemagoing, addressing both the casual cinemagoer and the ardent film fan. Their contents were largely focused upon female stars, and their featured advertising promoted domestic, cosmetic, and other commercial goods. Their editorial content included a range of male and female journalistic personas and column writers, but many of these were gendered explicitly female. Girls’ Cinema, for example, was shaped around the editorial voice of “Fay Filmer.” Further, in pages dedicated to reader letters and questions, female names tend to dominate the printed correspondence. Both officially and unofficially, therefore, female voices coalesced across a range of popular British periodicals. Whilst early papers focused more heavily on short stories and film fiction, into the later teens and 1920s greater space was given to film reviews and notices about upcoming releases, star interviews, advice columns, behind-the-scenes features, home life articles profiling the off-screen lives of stars, competitions, and a range of advertising for film-related and non-film related material.

One of the most prominent magazines on the British market in the silent era was Pictures and Picturegoer, which promoted itself in March 1928 as “the screen’s most popular magazine” (3). Published by Odhams, the paper addressed a largely middle-class readership, seeking to market to women who “enjoyed cinema-going as one part of a modern and aspirational lifestyle” (Glancy 2014, 51). In contrast, Girls’ Cinema and The Picture Show targeted working class women, but the two papers diverged in their address to women of different ages and marital status. Girl’s Cinema solicited a more explicitly youthful audience, addressing its readers as “Up-to-Date Girls” on October 16, 1920 (30). In contrast, The Picture Show addressed “married and middle-aged” readers (Glancy 56). Both magazines were published by the major newspaper and magazine publisher Amalgamated Press, which was founded in 1901 by Alfred Harmsworth.

These three publications serve as a useful indicator of the range of formats adopted by British periodical publishers in this period. Girls’ Cinema was shorter in length than its weightier counterpart Pictures and Picturegoer. It included a large number of competitions, prose serialisations, and original short stories in its early entries, and was dominated by its editorial persona of Filmer, who prefaced features and articles with a direct address to her readership as fellow cinemagoing “girls.” Pictures and Picturegoer was more text-heavy and featured fewer stories than Girls’ Cinema. It fostered a more explicit and consistent focus on cinema and cinemagoing, with less competitions and a greater array of behind-the-scenes reporting, star profiles, reviews, and notices about forthcoming features, alongside a wealth of high quality illustrations and photographs. Mark Glancy’s research has suggested that the paper targeted readers from the “new middle class” of the interwar period, who were “more likely to be regular cinema-goers” and more closely aligned with “a flourishing culture of consumerism” (52). The Picture Show was less expensive than Pictures and Picturegoer: like Girls’ Cinema, it was also smaller than Pictures and Picturegoer, and printed on cheaper paper. In further contrast to its Odhams counterpart, The Picture Show had far more pictorial content and featured far less prose.

Female Readership: Address and Representation

All three of these papers worked to solicit a female readership by facilitating the film industry’s gendered marketing campaigns. Full page advertisements promoted film content aimed at women, including serials and melodramas, whilst tie-in advertising used female stars to sell cosmetics and household products to female readers. In their address to women, Picturegoer and Girls’ Cinema also went some way to emulate popular women’s magazines and working girl story papers, including of a range of content dedicated to fashions, dress-making, cosmetics, and feminine etiquette. In the case of Girls’ Cinema, this material was often quite loosely tied to film itself (if at all): cinema and cinemagoing instead often provided a generalised backdrop for magazine content, which focused on representations of and advice about modern girlhood.³

British female film critic C. A. Lejeune described the gossipy intimacy of fan magazines in the early 1920s: “the personal note predominates and familiarises; you are made to feel at home as if you and the editor and the star were all on the best of terms. Your vanity is tickled. Your curiosity gratified” (1922, 7). This was certainly the case with Girls’ Cinema. Its intimate tone, inviting its readership into the editor’s confidence through agony aunt-style columns and letter pages, echoed the chatty informality of working girl magazines like Peg’s Paper (1919-1940). Pictures and Pictureoger also regularly gave readers access to the personal lives and spaces of its stars to pique the readers’ “curiosity,” fostering a sense of intimate access to stars’ private lives. The paper included regular “home life” features, which allowed readers to glimpse the domestic identities of their screen favorites. A piece from January 1925 is one such example. The article, titled “Pola Negri at Home,” details the actress’ domestic life alongside her work at the film studio, reassuring the reader that “Always she is the charmingest of hostesses, making you sit in the most comfortable chair, chatting with you as though you were her dearest friend” (25).

Fan magazines can be read textually for the content they presented to women, offering an impression of how the film and film publishing industries conceptualised gendered consumers. But periodicals were also interactive media, featuring the voices and responses of their readers in competitions, letters, and poetry. In doing so, they offer a distinctive resource for examining women’s historical cinema reception. Attention to this kind of material foregrounds some distinctly British aspects of these film periodicals, particularly where reader letters suggest how British women negotiated the overwhelming American content that film magazines presented. As my work on reading fan letters has suggested, fan letters published in periodicals like Pictures and Picturegoer show readers discussing and debating the appeal of domestic and foreign female stars, the perceived austerity of British actresses in regards to clothing and personal glamour, and the enticing modernity of American female star images in contrast (Stead 2011; 2013).⁴ Fan magazines here allow women readers themselves to mediate between the film industry and the publishing industry, finding a space for their own voices and concerns.

The Picturegoer, March 1923. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

Beyond their own textual structures, attention to the physicality of fan magazines yields further insight into their uses and meanings for female cinemagoers. As ephemeral objects, film papers were quite beautiful things, and their status as collectable items is a relatively underexplored aspect of their appeal to and use by female readers. The more expensive periodicals like Pictures and Picturegoer featured full color covers in the 1920s, whilst The Picture Show’s reliance on photographic content meant that it offered a vivid visual archive of clothing, costumes, fashions, and styles. Many magazines included glamorous star portraits, and actively encouraged their readers to disassemble their pages. Editors often printed reader letters that spoke of making scrapbooks and collections from such images. Early issues of Girls’ Cinema directly used such activities to market the paper; a December 1920 issue included an article titled “Helping to Make the ‘Girls’ Cinema’ Known,” for example, featuring letters from readers which mention cutting out pictures and pasting them into books, or making mini art galleries from the magazine picture plates (n.p.). First-hand examples of these kinds of activities can be found in archives such as the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum (BDCM) in Exeter, which contains fan scrapbooks dedicated to early stars such as Vilma Bánky and the Talmadge Sisters. These scrapbooks feature images, articles, and interviews cut from the pages of British fan magazines and pasted into new configurations.

Film culture more broadly offers further insight into the way fan magazines were used by female cinemagoers, and the ways in which the film and publishing industries conceived of these uses. This is particularly the case where they appear in fictional and journalistic texts, which use women’s relationship with film periodicals as indicative of their broader identity as pop culture consumers. For example, the British silent film Shooting Stars (1928)–a behind-the-scenes satire of the film industry–features scenes poking fun at the feminized and romanticized tone of fan papers. One such sequence features a female fan magazine writer interviewing a young female star, Miss Mae Feather. The reporter records on her notepad such soundbites as: “Beauty to her the very Breath of Life” and “Adores all furry and feathery things.” Fan magazines are here positioned as a conduit for star promotion, but also as signifying a feminized pop culture discourse rife for parody.

This light-hearted caricature echoes the ways fan magazines were positioned in British culture more widely. They frequently functioned as emblems of female film fandom, which was depicted as intellectually void and symptomatic of the feminization of mass culture. In another article for The Manchester Guardian, for example, Lejeune described Picturegoer as “pathetic reading” (1922, 9). The Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen used the same magazine in her 1929 short story “Dead Mabelle.” The story revolves around the experiences of the awkward, “cinema-shy” (303) bank-worker William Strickford, who is persuaded to go to the movies for the first time to see a film starring Mabelle Pacey, a fictionalized star-actress with whom he becomes besotted. Bowen described his accidental “outing” as a cinema devotee specifically through ownership of a British fan paper:

One night Jim Bartlett, routing about among William’s possessions, pulled out the Picturegoer from between some books and the wall. On the cover Mabelle, full length, stood looking sideways, surprised and ironical, elegantly choked by a hunting-stock, hair ruffled up as though she had just pulled a hat off, hand holding bunched-up gauntlets propped on a hip. Jim, shocked into impassivity, stared at the photograph (305-306).

Jim’s “shocked” reaction reads the magazine as signifying an inappropriate outlet for heterosexual desire, whilst simultaneously emasculating William by virtue of the magazine’s feminized and feminizing associations.

The value of film magazines to those who consumed them went beyond their association with lowbrow and potentially damaging reading matter, however. The printed letters of many of the women who wrote to publications like Picturegoer, for example, suggest its value as a source of virtual community, education in matters of personal style and etiquette, and access to a wealth of cheap entertainment. A Picturegoer fan letter from August 1928 describes the paper and its participatory qualities as constituting a “delightful debating society, open to all readers” (56). Another earlier letter writer describes the magazine as a place in which the voices of female fans matter, suggesting that “it is only through PICTURES that we are able to express our opinions” (1918, 518). Fan magazines were thus sites of female representation that came to themselves be represented within silent-era media, but they were also platforms for women to speak back to such representation through their participatory modes.

Storytelling

Turning to the magazines’ focus on storytelling offers an alternative way of interrogating their address to and use by female readers, in tandem with their creation by female writers. Storytelling was a significant aspect of silent-era film periodicals, and presents one of the clearest links between the developing film fan magazine and women’s popular print culture more widely at this time. A significant volume of cinema-themed short story content can be found on the British fiction market during the silent era, featuring in novelettes, story papers, and women’s and girls’ magazines. As I have suggested elsewhere, the “trend for cheap fiction” at this time “facilitated a greater discourse between cinema and fiction markets, both constituting equally low cost, popular, accessible and regularly consumed leisure forms, and both increasingly used by and addressed towards women” (Stead 2016, 52).

Fiction was used in a variety of forms within British fan paper. Most immediately, fiction appeared in prose adaptations of recent film releases, or in original cinema-themed short stories. Fictionalizing a movie could create an audience for a forthcoming film, thus offering a clear point of mediation between the film industry and its female spectators. Early issues of The Pictures featured around nine short stories, which corresponded “to moving pictures which are about to appear in the leading picture theatres” (1911, i). The editorial on December 23, 1911 promised readers that “As fiction,” its stories would be found “most interesting,” but also that having encountered a film narrative in prose form, a reader would be able to “more easily understand and more thoroughly enjoy the films to which they refer” (i).

Girls’ Cinema, December 1, 1923. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum..

The promise of fiction was further used as a tool to draw in female readers by promoting interest in the private lives of stars. An early issue of Girls’ Cinema from December 1, 1923, for example, includes the promise of a “Long Complete Novel Inside” on its front cover, alongside a preview for “The Life Story of Rudolph Valentino” (n.p.) as its leading attraction. The magazine here uses fiction to transform stars’ lives into “stories” to be discovered and uncovered via print media. As the dual headline suggests, the magazine could present a unique blend of the romantic short “novel”–which constituted pre-sold popular reading matter for female consumers more generally–with the equally romantic and glamorous stories of the lives and adventures of stars.

Girls’ Cinema offers a clear illustration of how fiction could be centralized in the fan magazine in order to appeal to a distinctly female readership. The magazine included both adapted and original romance and adventure stories featuring female protagonists. It featured a great deal of serialized girl/cinema stories, such as the four-issue story “The Temperamental Wife,” featured in an early November 1920 issue, and billed as “A Charming Story of How a Petted, Spoilt Girl Nearly Ruined the Happiness of Many Lives by Her Whims” (n.p.). In doing so, it closely replicated the fiction-focused structure of other girls’ magazines of the period.

In contrast, Pictures and Picturegoer included but did not centralize fiction in its early issues. Where it did appear, a similar format was used to the earlier Pictures, including illustrative stills capturing moments of action and screen stars in costume. An issue from mid-1916 features a typical story drawn from a British film production: “The Spendthrift, Adapted from the Globe Exclusive By Marjorie MacKay.” The editorial describes the piece as an “intensely fascinating film in four parts” (7, 9). These kinds of tie-in adaptations were often focused on female protagonists, offering readers the chance to interact with female stars in formats other than interviews or picture plates. In doing so, they gave a sense of the multiplicity of female presentation that cinema culture offered its female consumers. Any given star image represented in an illustrated story simultaneous showed a woman playing a character and signifying as the “real” star themselves. At the same time, their image circulated within the same and other issues of the magazine, where they might feature in interviews, stories about their home life, or photo shoots featuring other characterizations. As such, female consumers were offered depictions of modern womanhood marked by diverse characterizations and multiple identities. As I have argued elsewhere, this allowed fan magazines to foreground and sustain complex contradictions in star images which balanced both traditional and more progressive gender ideals for selection, adaptation, and appropriation by a female reader (Stead 2016; 2017).

Beyond short stories, storytelling techniques were also employed in advertising material as a method for selling domestic goods and cosmetic products. Attention to these techniques allows us to make connections between different multi-media aspects of the magazines and their gendered address. Such advertisements were presented as mini-fictions centred upon female characters seeking to improve their appearance or personal style. Illustrated adverts for cosmetics or domestic products were often constructed as tableaus, offering scenes frozen in motion centered upon young women, wives, or mothers in the act of dressing, washing, shopping, or conversing.

An advert from an October 1925 issue of Pictures and the Theatre, for example, features an illustrated image of a fashionably dressed young flapper, with bobbed hair, streamlined dress, and cloche hat, applying Glycola before a mirror. Her coat and umbrella are cast over the chair behind her, implying motion. The image is signed with the caption: “Before going out—just rub a little Glycola into the pores of the skin” (55). In contrast, a Picture Show advert from October 6, 1923 promoted Pompeian Day Cream by adapting the story format used more widely within the magazine, creating a fictional female character as the heroine of a half-page short story titled “The Dangerous Age” (1923, 23). The advert narrativizes her anxieties, representing her as a middle-aged woman jealous of her youthful daughter. The story credits Pompeian with resolving the friction between mother and daughter, leading to a typical “happy ending” resolution revealed through illustrated inserts. Female readers were thus increasingly schooled by fan magazines to read in these kinds of intermedial modes. They were encouraged to navigate prose and illustration, led by female protagonists and female stars across a range of commercial material–from film adaptations to advertisements.

The Picture Show, June 24, 1922. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

Beyond tie-ins and advertising, fiction also bled less visibly into the presentation of star biographies, which tailored their “facts” to present specific inflections of modern womanhood. In some instances the life stories of young female stars were converted into feature articles or serialised first person installments accompanied by detailed illustrations. Such features thus adapted star biography into a more overtly “literary” mode. A typical example featured in Girls’ Cinema presents the life story of Juanita Hansen, titled “The Girl with the Courage of Ten” (1920, 18). The article profiles the American film star, recounting her early life in detail and beginning with tales about her pranks and mischief during her rebellious school days. An earlier issue similarly focused on “Madcap Mabel or, Mabel Normand’s Schooldays,” recounting “By special permission her tempestuous youth,” narrated by Filmer “for the very first time for the benefit of GIRLS’ CINEMA readers” (1920, 24). The piece again explores the girlhood of an aspirational adult star, and uses biography as both an entertaining mode of storytelling and a way to forge a connection between girl readers and female performers through potentially shared early experiences. Female stars were also given space to write their own stories. On June 24, 1922, The Picture Show promised readers many such life stories would be “told by [the stars] themselves” (15). Offering the life stories of female performers purportedly in their own words allowed magazines to market a sense of intimacy, promising to give readers less mediated access to the thoughts and feelings of stars.

Beyond such life writing, storytelling also provided a way for professional women writers to see their work featured in print, capitalizing on the career opportunities that new periodical publishing presented. Many magazines featured work by current popular novelists, who would either supply original content or pen adaptations of screen fictions, providing an opportunity for self-promotion. In the October 1, 1920 issue of Girls’ Cinema, for example, the editor, presents “Edith Nepean, the gifted novelist” as the writer of “our splendid serial story, ‘Shown up by her Family’ on page 17” (14). She expounds: “Mrs. Nepean was born in Wales, and is well known in literary and cinema circles” (14).

Other writers used tie-in story adaptations as a temporary means to support themselves. In her biography of British novelist Margery Allingham, Julia Jones writes of Allingham’s work with the Amalgamated Press in the teens, where she “tried [sic] her hand at viewing a film (they were silent, of course), and writing it up for publication in […] Girl’s Cinema” (2009, 87). Margery’s aunt, Maud Allingham, was the editor of The Picture Show at this time, and offered her niece an opportunity to write for the Amalgamated Press film papers. Jones offers the following description of this process:

Margery would attend a private showing, usually in Wardour Street, make note of the film’s plot and main characters then write it up at home into a 5,000 word short story. It was a tough, uncongenial discipline but it provided her with regular income for more than a decade. The titles of some of the stories which Margery was paid to write up during 1922 are eloquent of their content–Love’s Pay-day, The Path She Chose, Gilded Dream, The Dawn of Love. Margery may well […] have been somewhat cagey about admitting to her idealistic contemporaries that such were her sources of income (88).

Jones’ story emphasizes the lowbrow connotations of such subject matter. In doing so, it rehashes a popular conflation of the period between film culture, female spectatorship/readership, and romance (as earlier suggested in the references from Bowen and Lejeune); one which frequently cast the female cinemagoer and female reader as a hysterical and uncritical devotee of popular fictions.

At the same time, however, it also highlights the opportunities that such a culture of remediation offered women as creative figures. Stories are turned into films, and films turned into stories in the production and consumption of British film papers. These processes, seemingly wholly commercial in nature, nevertheless offered writers the chance to hone a distinctly new creative craft in producing a novel language of adaptation across media. They required new skills, too, from a female readership who sought to navigate the movement of stories–not just between media, but also within media–in the process of navigating the multi-media of the pages of these magazines, which included prose, illustrations, photographs, advertisements, and varied typography.⁵

Magazines as a Resource in Women’s Film Historiography

Fan magazines from this period thus offer a variety of access points to silent-era British female audiences. More remains to be said, however, about the women (and men) who wrote for them. New work might interrogate in new detail the varied modes of gendered labour attached to their creation and circulation. In the 1920s, Picturegoer writers included figures such as Dorothy Owston Booth (contributor to a range of interwar magazines), Adele Whiteley Fletcher (American magazine writer and later editor of Photoplay in the 1940s), Elizabeth Lonergan, Nanette Kutner, and Helen Carlisle, for example. These names are representative of a much larger body of creative figures whose careers and experiences of working within extra-textual print networks of early film culture on both sides of the Atlantic have yet to be substantially researched. Fan magazine thus have considerably more to tell us about women and cinema culture in the silent era, and offer a distinctly different tool for reclaiming female creative labour in the early film industries, beyond the credit lists of films themselves.

The Picturegoer, May 1922. Courtesy of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum..

As this article has shown, greater attention to the structures and textures of individual magazines is a vital access point to thinking about how film industries addressed female consumers at this time, and how cinema culture developed around its female audiences. Close reading of the magazines reveals the complexity of their address to female reader-spectators. Considering how such papers where themselves represented within popular culture further allows us to look in greater detail at how British female cinemagoers were conceptualized as media-consumers, and the negative and positive connotations of such images. Archival research is thus greatly enhanced by contextualizing such ephemera within a wider, intermedial understanding of popular British culture, where the reputation and representation of fan magazines and their female consumers circulated across fiction, film, and journalism.

See also: C.A. Lejeune

Notes

1
Author Beth Mavor uses this term to describe female fans in her 1932 novelette The Cinema Star (5). Shelley Stamp has made use of the term “Movie-Struck” in the American context, whilst Liz Conor has explored the use of the term “film-struck” in 1920s Australian cinema culture.
2
In the process of researching British fan papers across the last decade, I have been contacted several times by private individuals wanting to donate their collections of old issues of magazines such as Picturegoer or Picture Show, often passed down from older relatives. The impressively unscathed condition of these collections (some of which are now around a hundred years old) would seem to testify to the personal value that they held for their original consumers, giving them lasting significance beyond their ephemeral status.
3
A fuller discussion of girlhood and British film fan magazines between the wars, and a more detailed reading of how this operated in Girls’ Cinema in particular, can be found in Stead (2017).
4
For a more detailed discussion of letter writing and the exploration of national models of female stardom in British film papers, see Stead (2011). See also Marsha Orgeron’s work on American fan participation with magazine competitions and other interactive features.
5
For a more focused discussion of the intermedial structures of storytelling in British fan magazines and its relation to gendered representations, see Stead (2016).

by Ned Thanhouser

Introduction

The family mode of production in the early motion picture industry was firmly established by stage actors and theater management veterans Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser with brother-in-law and journalist Lloyd F. Lonergan. The three joined forces in 1909 to establish what would become one of America’s pioneering independent silent motion picture studios during what is known as the “transitional” era in early cinema. The talent and the uniqueness of each family member blended seamlessly to create one of the most popular and successful independent motion picture production companies in America’s burgeoning motion picture industry. Under their leadership, the Thanhouser studio strove for and produced high quality films, and by the summer of 1910, Thanhouser films were praised by The New York Dramatic Mirror: “…Thanhouser pictures, of course, rank highest [among the independent producers]” (Woods 1910, 20). The Mutual Film Corporation, a major Chicago-based film distributor, recognized the success of this independent enterprise and, in April 1912, acquired the company under the leadership of Charles J. Hite as one of several to produce films to be distributed to exhibitors under the Mutual banner (McQuade 1912, 212).

Husband and wife Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser, along with brother-in-law Lonergan, were one of only a handful of studios managed by a close-knit family during the early motion picture industry. A comparison of the evolving production roles at the Thanhouser studio with other contemporary husband-wife teams like Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley at the Rex studio and Alice Guy Blaché and her husband Herbert Blaché at the Solax Company provides a unique insight into the success of the Thanhouser studio.

On the Stage with Edwin Thanhouser

Edwin Thanhouser as Capt. La Rolle in play "Under the Red Robe" (1897-98). PC

Edwin Thanhouser as Capt. La Rolle in “Under the Red Robe” (1897-98). Private Collection.

Edwin Thanhouser joined the Salvini theatrical troupe in 1894, playing mostly “one night stands” in numerous cities, towns, and hamlets from coast to coast. When, as reported by The New York Times, Salvini died suddenly of tuberculous in 1896, Edwin joined Charles Frohman’s traveling company and performed in minor roles, such as Captain La Rolle in “Under the Red Robe,” but never in a starring role (1896, 1). Edwin traveled to New York in 1898 where he interviewed for an acting position with the Shubert brothers, but his business acumen impressed the Shuberts more than his acting ability, and he was instead offered a position managing the Academy of Music Theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (L. Thanhouser 1970, 11). Edwin accepted the offer and moved to Milwaukee where he managed a theatrical stock company that typically had a repertoire of comedies, dramas, and adaptations of popular novels of the time. Lighter fare consisted of melodramas, such as “Blue Jeans,” “Lady Audley’s Secret,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or some other tear-jerking or emotionally inspiring story. If the plays presented were short, with one or two acts, the program of a typical American theatre of the time would have additional features, such as an acrobat, clown, magician, a troupe of dancers or singers, or a monologist who would declaim on politics, the wonders of science, or travel. Beginning in the 1890s, short films were used as fillers between acts. Over time, the program of Thanhouser’s Academy of Music tended toward more sophisticated fare, presenting the works of Shakespeare such as “Othello,” where well-known actors were sometimes secured as guest stars.

Enter: Gertrude Homan

Gertrude Homan was a child star on the New York stage starting in 1888 at age six in “Partners” at the Madison Square Theatre in New York City. The Partners company went to the West Coast in the summer of the same year. An article in The Daily Alta California from August 10, 1888 relates: “‘I am told,’ said the reporter, ‘that you have a remarkable little lady in Gertie Homan; ‘is that so?’ ‘Indeed we have,’ said Mr. Palmer, enthusiastically. ‘She is a wonderful little woman–yes, little woman–for six years of age. We found her very entertaining on our trip, and she was the life of the party. You will see her in Partners’” (8).

Gertrude Homan as Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1892. PC

Gertrude Homan as Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1892. Private Collection.

During the 1890s Gertrude played roles in “The Burglar” (which was retitled “Editha’s Burglar”), “Bootles’ Baby,” “Romeo and Juliet” (playing Juliet in 1892), “The Childhood of Jack Harkaway,” and many other productions. Her greatest renown was achieved with her roles as Editha and Little Lord Fauntleroy. An undated, unattributed clipping from Gertrude’s scrapbook collection labeled “Partners-Madison Square Theatre” gives a review of Gertrude F. Homan as Little Lord Fauntleroy in the play of the same title: “The fact that the leading role is assumed by so young a character makes the play the more interesting. Miss Gertie Homan played the part of Cedric Errol, Lord Fauntleroy, in a most pleasing manner. She won the admiration of the audience from the start. Her acting is so graceful and her style so charming. Much could be said of this little actress that could hardly be said of many older ones now playing as stars” (n.p.).

Courtship and Marriage

In the days before air conditioning, many theaters–if not most of the larger venues in America, including those on Broadway–were dark during most of June, July, and August due to the oppressive heat indoors. It was therefore customary for headliners to apply for positions out “in the sticks” during the summer months. The reputation of Edwin Thanhouser’s Milwaukee stock company spread as far east as New York, and the Academy of Music was unusual among large Milwaukee theaters in that it remained open during the summer. At these summer playhouses, it was often the practice to employ seasonal troupes consisting of less experienced actors.

Academy Theatre program, 1900. Private Collection.

One such actor hired by Edwin Thanhouser was sixteen-year-old “Gertie” Homan, who arrived in Milwaukee in early summer of 1898 and was described as “barely five feet tall, crowned with a mass of dark, curly hair surrounding her pansy-like face” (L. Thanhouser 1970, 14). In short: she was quite a charmer. Edwin Thanhouser immediately fell desperately in love. He courted her at every opportunity. After a series of swooning love letters from Edwin and a few crushing rejections from Gertrude, the ever-persistent Edwin eventually won Gertie’s affections and they were married in Brooklyn on February 8, 1900. A front-page article in The New York Times, entitled “Miss Gertie Homan Married,” described the event: “Miss Gertie Homan, who has been known in this city and in the South for some time as an actress in ingénue parts, was married to Edward [sic] Thanhouser last evening at the home of her mother, 291 Prospect Place, Brooklyn” (1900, 1). This union was critical in the formation of the Thanhouser film enterprise as Gertrude’s years on the stage developed her skills in scenario development, production, and stagecraft; she was a perfect complement to Edwin Thanhouser’s business shrewdness and public relations skills.

Exit Milwaukee, Hello Chicago

Gertrude Thanhouser portrait, circa 1890s. PC

Gertrude Thanhouser, c. 1890s. Private Collection.

Edwin Thanhouser’s success managing the Academy of Music Theatre in Milwaukee had, by this time, made him a man of wealth. By 1908, one can imagine that he longed for a greater challenge. Edwin enlisted some of his Thanhouser Stock Company members and departed for seemingly greener pastures in Chicago, a theatre center second only to New York City. There, Edwin leased the Bush Temple Theatre. Although trade reviews in the Chicago Daily Tribune (1908, 8) and The Billboard (1908, 88) were favorable, as was custom, any attendance issues would not have been highlighted, and the Bush Temple Theatre was unfortunately outside the city’s central loop area and suffered often from too many empty seats. By the end of 1908, the nature of the entertainment business in America was changing rapidly as motion pictures gained legitimacy as both entertainment and media. Across the country, many storefronts were being converted into nickelodeons. Being the savvy businessman that he was, and with his box office receipts in decline, Edwin Thanhouser decided to get into the motion picture business.

Enter Lloyd F. Lonergan: Brother-in-Law and Newspaperman

Lloyd F Longeran, writer, circa 1914. PC

Lloyd F Lonergan, writer, c. 1914. Private Collection.

In the spring of 1909, after researching the motion picture industry, Edwin Thanhouser terminated his lease on the Bush Temple Theatre. With their two young children, Lloyd and Marie, they relocated to New York City and moved in with Gertrude’s brother-in-law Lloyd F. Lonergan who was married to Gertrude’s sister, Marie Homan. Lonergan came from a family steeped in storytelling. He was born in Chicago on March 3, 1870 to Thomas Lonergan, a newspaper publisher and editor, and Ellen Lonergan, a newspaper writer born in Ireland. He was educated at the United States Naval Academy, but washed out due to poor eyesight; he followed his family into the newspaper business. He worked for the Hearst organization in Chicago, was on the staff of The New York Evening Journal in 1902, and by 1909 he held a well-paying position at the New York Evening World. In addition, he authored numerous articles and short stories for publication in magazines. His fertile imagination and keen sense of humor enabled him to eventually devise innumerable intriguing and amusing stories for filming at the Thanhouser studio. In those days, he was a short, heavy-set man with a full beard surrounding a smile and a big cigar (L. Thanhouser 1970, 31).

Into the Motion Picture Business

Edwin and Gertrude enticed Lonergan to join them in establishing the Thanhouser Company as an independent motion picture production studio. From the certificate of incorporation dated October 28, 1909, the stated purpose of the company was, “To take, make and exhibit, moving, animated, and stationary pictures and photographs, and to lease rights to exhibit the same…” (1). Edwin Thanhouser needed equipment to produce his films, but was denied a license by the Motion Picture Patents Corporation (MPPC) as part of their monopoly strategy. But, as Terry Ramsaye notes in his 1926 book A Million and One Nights, Thanhouser became a licensee of the Bianchi camera by obtaining a “Columbia License” that allowed him to begin production (498). Both an article in The Photoplay Arts Portfolio and Leon J. Rubenstein at The Billboard noted that Edwin was the first to head an American motion picture studio with a theatrical background (1914, 20; Rubenstein 1911, 14).

According to the certificate of incorporation, the company was capitalized with $10,000 divided into 100 shares; 98 in Gertrude’s name as “secretary,” and one share each to Edwin, as “president,” and Lloyd Lonergan, as “vice-president” (1909, 1). In the 2014 documentary The Thanhouser Studio and the Birth of American Cinema, film historian Shelley Stamp speculated that Gertrude’s 98% share in the company might have been a legal dodge since women were assumed to be less liable in business ventures, or perhaps this was a foreshadowing of her future contributions to the success of the company.

At the Thanhouser Company, the distribution of responsibilities between the three founders was organized around their respective strengths: Edwin was the business leader and external face of the enterprise to the public, Gertrude focused her talents on what she knew best, production design, and the duty of scenario development fell upon the shoulders of newspaperman Lloyd Lonergan.

Edwin Thanhouser: Buisnessman, Visonary, and Spokesman

Edwin’s years of theatrical management in Milwaukee and Chicago thrust him into the role as the manager of the company and chief promoter for the new venture. In a March 1910 interview titled “Thanhouser Company: A New Film Producer,” Edwin articulated why the studio would be successful in the motion picture business: “The Thanhouser Stock Company [in Milwaukee] for years was recognized as one of the foremost in the country. I produced many hundreds of plays, [and] the experience gathered in this way is very helpful, for it has given me…one of the most vital necessities for producing good motion pictures, the knowledge and the value of a dramatic situation and its proper staging” (374).

Later in the same interview, he targeted his audience and the type of films the company would produce:

We do not care to do any pictures that the masses cannot grasp, but that does not mean that our pictures cannot be of a high order. They must appeal to the best instincts of all audiences, and must always tell a moral and logical story. We hope to turn out artistic productions, particularly in the field of legitimate drama and comedy. And when I say comedy, I mean comedy, not slapsticks. From my standpoint, a good moving picture must possess these qualifications: first, it must tell a good, wholesome, logical story without being involved; second, it must be well cast, well-acted, and artistically produced…and, third, it must be as near photographically perfect as possible. These are the kind of pictures we want the Thanhouser films to be–and we will not be satisfied with anything less (374).

Gertrude Thanhouser: The Creative Force Behind the Scenes

Gertrude Thanhouser was not only a talented actress, but from her years on the stage and helping to manage the Academy Theater in Milwaukee and the Bush Temple Theatre in Chicago, she applied her knowledge of stagecraft to the fledgling company. Magazine articles, as well as family history, document Gertrude’s central role in the formation, management, and operation of the company. In the years in New Rochelle during the film business, Gertrude reviewed scripts, wrote scenarios, edited films, and helped Edwin Thanhouser in many ways (Woods 1912, 20).

As I have written in my Women Film Pioneers Project career profile on Gertrude Thanhouser, she was featured in the company’s second release: St. Elmo (1910). The Morning Telegraph‘s review was critical of the acting, complaining that “… the story… is told by the sub-titles in the film, and not so much by the acting” (1910, n.p.). It was the only film on which she received acting credit. Now the mother of two, Gertrude realized that her time before the camera was over, so she applied her theatrical skills behind the scenes to develop future films. Robert Hamilton Ball, in his book Shakespeare on Silent Film, gives credit to Gertrude as a co-scenario writer with Lonergan for the first “Thanhouser Classic” production, The Winter’s Tale (1910), the company’s 14th release on May 27, 1910 (1968, 69). A review of this film published by Moving Picture World on May 28, 1910 was enthusiastic, while not making any mention of Gertrude Thanhouser:

THE THANHOUSER TRIUMP…Dealing with kings and queens, of course, gives an opportunity for magnificence of mounting, costumes and the like of which Mr. Thanhouser is taking full advantage. We come now to the acting, and for this we have none but the highest praise. We have never seen better acting in any moving picture that has come before our eyes. All the parts struck us as properly cast, and throughout the entire production we thought, nay, we are sure, we saw the master hand of an accomplished producer. Every movement, every gesture, every action, was suited to the text of the story. From the point of view of film production Thanhouser’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is a masterpiece. And, think of it now, the man who made and produced this picture was absolutely unknown in the moving picture field three months ago (876).

Advertisement for Thanhouser Company in The Moving Picture World

Moving Picture World Advertisement for the Thanhouser Company.

By the summer of 1910, the Thanhouser Company had earned enthusiastic approval as one of the leading independent motion picture production companies. Frank Woods wrote in the New York Dramatic Mirror: “On the other side of the Independent fence, Thanhouser pictures, of course, rank highest. Indeed, the manner in which this new company without previous experience in picture making has developed in quality shows what may be done in film manufacture when intelligence and energy are employed” (1910, 20).

Lloyd Thanhouser, Edwin and Gertude’s son, recalled, in an August 1980 taped audio interview, that Gertrude’s contributions to scenario development, mise-en-scène, and editing helped make these glowing reviews possible:

All the editorial work, the writing of the manuscripts, was handled by the team of my mother and Lloyd Lonergan. She became a very skillful editor of these films. I remember being in the cutting room. She’d count, ‘one, two, three, four…cut!’ And she became extremely adept at matching action when one piece stopped and another started. She was known throughout the industry as one of the most competent technicians in the cutting and editing of motion pictures.

In an interview in the documentary The Thanhouser Studio and the Birth of American Cinema, Stamp also ventured that because of Gertrude’s behind-the-scenes activities and experience in the theatrical realm, she was also most likely intimately involved with wardrobe selection and costuming.

Lloyd F. Lonergan: Master of Scenarios

In the early years from 1910 to 1912, nearly every scenario was credited to Lonergan. During this period, Lonergan, sometimes with the assistance of Gertrude, crafted one scenario a week starting with the company’s first film, The Actor’s Children, released on March 15, 1910. In an interview published on March 6, 1915 in The New Rochelle Pioneer, Lonergan related his work ethic to reporter John W. Kellette: “What are your best hours of work, Mr. Lonergan?” the scribe asked. Lonergan’s answer: “Any old time when the spirit moves me. I have written at every hour of the day.” The reporter continued, “How do you work?” Lonergan responded, “My method is simple. I get an idea, dope it out roughly, smooth off the rough corners, then dictate to a stenographer. I often work on more than one script at a time. I find that while working on drama, it rests me to dash off a comedy in between” (1).

Epes Winthrop Sargent, an American film critic, also wrote in Moving Picture World on April 4, 1914 of Lonergan’s production duties, with no mention of any collaboration with Gertrude:

Almost since the formation of the Thanhouser Company, Lloyd Lonergan has written practically all of the Thanhouser releases; not by merely putting his name on the script he revises, but digging out the idea, getting it on paper and generally cutting the film afterward. We are inclined to think that he has written more produced plays than any single photoplay writer, and his batting average runs about .980. He has kept on year after year, turning out two or three a week and yet never letting the suggestion creep into his stuff that it is machine made (44).

Selling the Studio to Mutual

Just two years after opening, the Thanhouser studio had released 228 films to wide industry praise, many of which went into worldwide distribution according to extensive research that I compiled as “Thanhouser Filmography Analysis” (n.p.). The business of filmmaking had grown from a novelty shown between acts at a vaudeville show to a full-fledged industry in its own right. In April 1912, a group of well-heeled investors led by Charles J. Hite approached the Thanhousers, and they sold their shares in the enterprise to the Mutual Film Corporation for $250,000–twenty-five times their original investment, about $6.5 million in today’s dollars–and the business was renamed the Thanhouser Film Corporation. Initially, Edwin remained as general manager, facilitating the transition in ownership. He was quoted frequently in the trade press and remained the spokesman for the firm bearing his name, but, by autumn of 1912, Edwin and Gertrude decided to leave filmmaking behind and enjoy an extended grand tour of Europe. Lloyd Lonergan remained at the studio in charge of production and scenario development.

Edwin and Gertrude Return

After a two-year hiatus, and unforeseen tragic circumstances that included the untimely death of Charles Hite and the outbreak of World War I, Edwin Thanhouser was approached in February 1915 by Mutual’s board to resume leadership of the Thanhouser studio. Under a three-year contract he resumed his role as president and spokesperson for the studio, Gertrude returned to her desk as head of scenario development, and Lonergan maintained his role as chief of production (Blaisdell 1915, 1451). As I wrote in my career profile on Gertrude, upon returning to the Thanhouser Film Corporation in February 1915, she immediately resumed her role as supervisor of the scenario department and was credited for writing the scenario for their first “new” release, Their One Love (1915). This extant one-reel drama capitalized on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War and was a shrewd, competitive response to Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Her scenario received positive reviews, such as from Wid Gunning in the Evening Mail, who wrote, “As a whole: A gem; Story: Different…” (1915, 5). Gertrude was also credited as scenario writer for four other films in 1915, including a two-reel comedy-drama, a one-reel drama, and two four-reel “Mutual Masterpicture” feature films. She remained active in company affairs; Moving Picture World noted on February 12, 1916 that she attended a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson (930).

Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser in 1951. PC

Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser, 1951. Private Collection.

However, contemporary records show that by the fall of 1917 the Thanhouser studio, having produced over one thousand films in just under eight years, was now a minor participant in the burgeoning film industry, as were many other independent early producers like Biograph, Lubin, Kalem, and Edison (Robinson 1968, 112-119). The motion picture industry had moved west to Hollywood and Edwin, once known as “The Wizard of New Rochelle,” did not want to move to California. In fact, he had his sights set firmly on retirement when his three-year contract with Mutual expired. In March 1918, Edwin and Gertrude retired, recommending to the Mutual board to liquidate the studio’s assets. They moved to their new home built on Long Island, permanently leaving the industry; Gertrude died in 1951 and Edwin in 1958.

Lonergan was hired in March 1918 by Theodore C. Deitrich, president of De Lux Pictures, to manage the leased Plimpton Studio in Yonkers where Doris Kenyon was producing her film The Street of Seven Stars (1919), according to a March 1918 article in Moving Picture World (1666). As time went on, suffering from osteoarthritis, his bones shrank, turned brittle, and were easily broken. He suffered several bad fractures, became lame, and eventually housebound; he died in the early 1920s.

In Context: Thanhouser Family Mode of Production

Two other family-led motion picture organizations in early film are worthy of examination to contrast with the Thanhouser studio. First, husband and wife team of Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley were running the Rex brand for Universal starting in 1911. In Shelley Stamp’s analysis for the Women Film Pioneers Project, Weber was the dominant member of this partnership with Smalley often deferring to his wife to make important decisions. Starting in 1917 when they broke away from Universal, Weber’s role was not only as script author, director, and producer, but she was the public face and primary business manager of her company, Lois Weber Productions. Weber believed that cinema went beyond highbrow entertainment to tackling controversial social causes to achieve political change, for example drug abuse in Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916), poverty and wage equity in Shoes (1916), and contraception in Where Are My Children? (1916) (Stamp 2013). While the Thanhouser studio produced several social issue-oriented films, for example child labor abuse in The Cry of the Children (1912) and the battle-of-the-sexes comedy Petticoat Camp (1913), the Thanhousers were more interested in a financial return than political transformation.

After leading a failed effort for the Gaumont studio to join the Motion Picture Patents Corporation, Alice Guy Blaché, and her husband Herbert Blaché, established the Solax Company in 1910 in Flushing, New York. She was the artistic director and directed many of its films, while her husband managed production for the new company. Solax earned the couple enough income to build a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey in 1912 that produced melodramas such as A Man’s Man (1912) and comedies like A Comedy of Errors (1912). According to my “Thanhouser Filmography Analysis,” the Thanhouser studio was producing a similar lineup of films with 47% of its titles classified as melodramas and 30% comedies (n.p.). By 1914, however, distribution issues, the shift of the industry from the one-reel format to feature films, and the shift of the industry to the West Coast eventually led to Herbert and Alice Guy hiring out to direct feature films for other studios. The Thanhouser studio was also experiencing the same industry pressures that eventually resulted in its demise in 1917. The roles of the husband and wife founders of Solax in the 1912 to 1914 period align closely with the roles of Edwin and Gertrude at the Thanhouser studio. But the Thanhouser’s retired from the industry in 1918 and remained a couple while Alice Guy and Herbert Blaché divorced in 1920. He continued to work in the motion picture industry into the 1920s while Alice Guy wrote novelizations of film scripts and lectured extensively, but she never made another film (McMahan 2013).

Ahead of Its Time

Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser (a/w/p) in Egypt, c. 1920, PC

Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser in Egypt, c. 1920. Private Collection.

Family lore, scrapbooks, magazine articles, and written and oral records attest to the unique relationship of the Thanhouser studio founders as independent motion picture producers. They successfully matched each member’s talents to a defined role, giving the Thanhouser studio the ability to produce high quality films that were critically reviewed by the press and admired by the filmgoing public. Edwin and Gertrude’s background in the theatre, both in management and presentation of the films, plus Lonergan’s craft of storytelling and production management distinguished Thanhouser from the competition. The Thanhouser production organizational structure was a forerunner of modern motion picture systems and, in many ways, presaged the modern studio system with its standardized, delineated roles, and a steady eye on the bottom line. In this way, as in others, the Thanhouser studio demonstrated that it was ahead of its time in bringing compelling stories, both classic and studio developed, to the screen with outstanding production design and high quality output. The films that survive today attest to these successes that were enabled by each family member’s background and their forward-looking production model.

Surviving Thanhouser Films Available on DVD and Online

Starting in 1997, I started releasing surviving Thanhouser films for scholarly access and cinephile viewing, complete with new original music composed exclusively for each film along with notes on each film in the collection. As of the writing of this essay, seventy extant Thanhouser films have been released on fifteen DVDs with most available for online viewing at no charge on the Thanhouser Company Film Preservation Inc. website. Additional Thanhouser films are being discovered each year and another release of newly preserved extant Thanhouser titles is scheduled to be released in 2017.

With Q. David Bowers

See also: Gertrude Thanhouser

by Richard Abel

Introduction

If, as Gertrude Price claimed in 1914, the movies were “a great new field for women,”¹ that field encompassed far more than acting, which drew many star-struck girls to Los Angeles, or being hired for a range of professional positions in producing and marketing films. Indeed, extending that field to include newspapers, for instance, allows one to argue that women journalists played a significant role in the emergence of early American popular film culture in the mid-1910s.² Specifically, that role involved women with writing skills who edited pages devoted to the movies in weekend newspaper editions as well as compiled gossip on stars and reviewed films, often in daily columns. In Chicago alone, at least three women quickly exerted considerable influence: Mae Tinee (Frances Peck) and Kitty Kelly (Audrie Alspaugh) at the Chicago Tribune, and Louella Parsons at the Chicago Herald. But did many women continue to write about the movies in newspapers beyond the mid-1910s; and, if they did, in which papers, in what capacities, and with what kind of impact? Samantha Barbas and Hilary Hallett, from different perspectives,³ have shown that Parsons became even more influential in the late 1910s and early 19120s, but was she at all representative, one of a select few, or an anomaly? And how can a historian go about addressing such questions?

One initial source to consult might be the “First Annual Newspaper and Theater Directory” that Motion Picture News compiled in late 1919.⁴ The trade journal had sent out “a questionnaire to all newspapers in cities of over twelve thousand population” in the United States and Canada and compiled a “census” of their responses. The census obviously was selective because newspapers in a great number of cities were not included, from the Tribune and Herald in Chicago or the Times in Los Angeles to the Constitution in Atlanta or the Herald in Syracuse—belying the trade journal’s claim that those not responding seemed to have no interest in motion pictures. In the case of Chicago, Mae Tinee continued editing and reviewing at the Tribune through the 1920s; Kitty Kelly wrote reviews for the Examiner at least through 1918; and Parsons that year moved to the New York Telegraph. Moreover, most of the hundreds of “photoplay editors” or writers listed had only initials and last names, so that the two dozen with definite women’s names may have been a fraction of the real number.⁵ An added problem arises when one searches the Internet for digital copies of those women’s newspapers; then, the number of confirmed writers is reduced to no more than a few. Still, those few that are accessible allow one to gain a very limited sense of how women were writing about the movies in the period of 1918-1919.

Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA

Two of those women were already familiar to their newspaper readers. For the New York Sunday Tribune, Harriette Underhill had been writing a weekly column since late 1916 based on lengthy interviews with a single actor or actress.⁶ In Ishbel Ross’s words, Underhill “was cynical to the core, scorned sentiment, [and] had a sophisticated wit,” but the interviews, full of dialogue in which she engaged with her subjects as “we” or an inquisitive “visitor,” also revealed that she could be generous and unobtrusive.⁷ In late 1918, after the peak of the influenza epidemic, she let Enrico Caruso talk about his career by describing the photos, books, and scrapbooks in his hotel suite and then open his mail and comment on one or more letters from fans.⁸ Others Underhill interviewed ranged from D.W. Griffith in rehearsal or “Bill” Hart, who acknowledged the cowboy Snowy Baker as an inspiration, to Bryant Washburn whose fans wondered if his dimple was real or painted on.⁹ The latter interview led her to briefly take up similar questions from fans: is Olga Petrova’s figure “all her own”; “how tall [is] Marguerite Clark”; does Douglas Fairbanks “act like that in real life”; does Bill Hart “have any one to double for him”? Searching for Underhill’s interviews also turns up another column on the same page in the Tribune written by Virginia Tracy. While Tracy sometimes did profiles—i.e., of Fairbanks or director Maurice Tourneur—she more often addressed broader issues—i.e., intellectuals’ persistent disdain for the movies; the “curse of sweetness” for ingénues; or the need for more than plot to make a good picture.¹⁰ She even offers a lengthy review or two, as in her pithy put down of A Scream in the Night (1919): The heroine “is very pleasant to look at, swaying and flashing about in the jungle on her rope of moss, but as soon as she comes down to earth she shows us that her wildness is of the hop, skip, and a jump variety.”¹¹ For reasons yet to be determined, neither woman’s byline appears in the Sunday Tribune after early November 1919.

Mary Lefler column in Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

For the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a young journalist, Mary B. Lefler, had been writing two daily columns, “Flashes from Filmland” and “Gossip of the Film World,” beginning in the summer of 1914, and then editing a full Sunday page, “In the Photoplay World,” by the following summer. Four years later, under her own byline, she still was editing that same Sunday page, now headed “Reel News and Views” of the “plays and players to appear here the coming week.”¹² Among the star photos, theater ads, and stories (probably summarized from publicity material shared by those advertising theaters) was a column, “Reel-Y True,” that fulfilled the promise of “little chats about your screen favorites [with] questions and answers.”¹³ By summer 1919, Lefler’s coverage of the movies—apparently compiled from the trade press, fan magazines, and studio publicity—included part of a second page, and she gave special attention to Griffith’s “supreme triumph,” Hearts of the World (1918), in a separate article that added to the distributed publicity a quoted paragraph of high praise from an unnamed “famous Western critic.”¹⁴ In late August, “Reel News and Views” turned into “At the Movies,” with the same kind of photos, ads, and stories, including the “Reel-Y True” column and one or more ads that ran onto a second page.¹⁵ But Lefler’s byline had disappeared; if someone replaced her, that writer went unnamed.

Marjorie Daw column in Cleveland Plain Dealer.

One woman not listed in the Motion Picture News directory would have been familiar to readers of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where Harlowe R. Hoyt, in the fall of 1917, had expanded its Sunday coverage of the movies to three pages—with lots of photos, half a dozen or more theater ads (often large), a syndicated gossip column from “Gertrude,”¹⁶ and other regular columns (among them, one bylined “The Answer Man”). In June 1918, Marjorie Daw introduced a column profiling people in the industry with links to Cleveland;¹⁷ that fall, when Hoyt turned to editing the theater pages, Daw assumed his former position as photoplay editor.¹⁸ Like Lefler, Hoyt, and other such editors, Daw compiled columns of publicity material and wrote up summary program descriptions supplied by the theaters sponsoring these pages with ads. Additionally, she framed those summaries with chatty, playful introductions.¹⁹ In mid-September 1918: “This is ‘ladies week’ at the first run photoplay houses, not a single male star being listed…the fair sex holds sway…”²⁰ In late November 1918: “By their stars ye shall know them—the movies! The best story, the wisest direction, the most splendid settings, the wildest of scenery, the most costly of stagings, will avail nothing if the star be not popular.”²¹ In June 1919: “Summer is with us once more in theory as well as fact…In the words of Kipling, [some may] exclaim ‘It’s pretty, but is it art?’ The real movie fan doesn’t worry about anything so banal.”²² Daw also voiced her own impressions of films for readers, as in her concise comments one week on John Barrymore and Douglas Fairbanks.²³ In the stage adaptation, On the Quiet (1918), “Barrymore’s skill as a comedian saves the picture from a single dull moment.” A “typical” Fairbanks vehicle, Bound in Morocco (1918), has “a paucity of plot, perhaps, but plenty of action, unusual situations, and numerous ‘stunts.’” A few weeks later, she noted the “little German plot” added to the western, Mr. Logan U.S.A. (1918), in which Tom Mix wraps up the film by “capturing a girl and a spy with the same rope.”²⁴ By the summer of 1919, she had a weekly column of local movie news, one of which reported an interview with Clara Joel and Maggie, her pedigree bulldog, registered as “Marjorie Daw.”²⁵ That earned the quip: “one Marjorie at least is registered.” In September, Hoyt returned as Sunday photoplay editor, and Daw’s name, like Lefler’s, disappeared from the newspaper.

Virginia Dale column in Chicago Journal.

Although one obviously has to question how representative these four women may be, their disappearance as newspaper editors, columnists, and reviewers in 1919 does pose a puzzle. And that puzzle has an uncanny parallel, around the same time, in the declining number of women who could work as filmmakers in the industry. Karen Ward Mahar was one of the first to highlight this decline and the broader phenomenon of an increasingly gendered division of labor defining the industry as big business.²⁶ Accepting in part her argument that this division was due to the impact of finance capital, Mark Cooper examines the case of Universal, which employed the most women directors in the 1910s, and argues that the development of more standardized genre conventions was equally important, linking women filmmakers to an outmoded concept of the “woman’s film,” with the result that the company released not a single film credited to a woman director in 1920.²⁷ In the specific case of Lois Weber, Universal’s highest salaried director at one time, Shelley Stamp attributes her marginalization in the late 1910s not only to the formation of her own independent company (affiliated initially with Universal) but also to her choice of directing films that critiqued the American consumer society of which the movies were a crucial part.²⁸ A gendered division of labor also may have characterized the newspaper industry, for it seemed to mark most newspapers’ coverage of the movies, according to that Motion Picture News directory.²⁹ Although the cause of this apparent decline in the number of women editors and writers in the late 1910s may be beyond the scope of this short essay, one can wonder whether, besides the increasing influence of finance capital and institutional professionalization, other systematic socio-economic changes and masculinizing cultural patterns following the end of the Great War and the return of American soldiers had just as much impact.³⁰ Still, a later source, a 1926 New York Film Arts Guild document, seems to question that decline, suggesting that their number actually may have increased in the 1920s. For, of the fifteen film reviewers affiliated with newspapers that were named as members of the guild’s Advisory Council, at least six were women.

Virginia Dale column in Chicago Journal.

Refocusing attention on Chicago in the early 1920s, one finds that women continued to edit pages and/or write columns devoted to the movies in most newspapers.³¹ Virginia Dale, for instance, whom the Motion Picture News had named as photoplay editor of the Chicago Journal,³² held that position at least through 1925, editing the Saturday edition’s “News of Photoplays and Players” page and writing a daily film review column.³³ Each Saturday, Dale’s long column compiled not only gossip of the stars and brief notes on major theater programs but also discussed current issues such as Carl Laemmle’s effort to educate censorship boards, industry leaders testifying in Congress against “the 5 percent film rental tax” (a carry over from the war), and the “menace” of German film imports—i.e., Passion (1925), Deception (1920), and The Golem (1915)—denounced by no less than Cecil B. DeMille.³⁴ As for her reviews, the Journal promoted those with frequent ads.³⁵ Some highlighted the personal attraction of certain stars: in Wedding Bells (1921), Constance Talmadge displays “that delightful air of detached recklessness as she defies the various conventions that threaten to curtail her pleasures”; in Salvage (1921), Pauline Frederick is “a deeply intense, vividly emotional actress, playing as she loves to play, running the whole gamut of human emotions as she unfolds the involved threads of this rather improbable drama.”³⁶ Others could be unkind even to a film by Lois Weber. Too Wise Woman (1921), “another effusion from the workshop of Lois Weber,” sadly, had “a too superficial thought structure on which to build and project ideas.”³⁷ By contrast, The Woman God Changed (1921) she thought would only have “an appeal for those who like their religion sugar-coated and who swallow an idea whole.”³⁸ One of Dale’s more interesting columns showed how closely she was connected to the industry by printing “a list, as accurate as any such list can be, of the greatest money-makers” among American films.³⁹ The top five were The Miracle Man (1919) ($2,475,000), Birth of a Nation (1915) ($2,125,000), Traffic in Souls (1913) ($1,260,000), A Dog’s Life (1918) ($1,140,000), and Where Are My Children? (1916) ($990,000)—but she was silent on the source for these figures.

Elizabeth Kern column in Omaha World Herald.

Finally, one of the six newspaperwomen named as members of the New York Film Art Guild’s Advisory Council was Elizabeth Kern, a young writer for the Omaha World-Herald. Like many other papers, the World-Herald had covered the movies extensively since the mid-1910s. By summer 1922, that coverage included not only several Sunday pages (no editor was named) but also a Monday review column, “This Week at the Movies,” signed by A.H.M.⁴⁰ At the same time, the paper was running a syndicated series, “Opportunities for Women in the Movies,” that for each of seventeen weeks through November focused on a single industry position and one exemplary woman.⁴¹ In the midst of this series, in mid-September, Kern took over the film review column with a slangy riff on Rudolph Valentino’s rift with Famous Players: “This famous he-vamp announces that he will ‘take his doll rags and go home’ if the business of publicity and advertising doesn’t straighten out.”⁴² That first week, while praising Grandma’s Boy (1922) as “the best picture Harold Lloyd ever made,” Kern seemed ambivalent about the “regular fashion show” in No Trespassing (1922), where Irene Castle showed off “evening gowns, the smartest of street dresses, riding and bike outfits, and motoring garb.”⁴³ The following week she exhorted “any little flappers in Omaha who think existence is drab [to] go see Colleen Moore in The Wall Flower [1922]…”⁴⁴ She also could pan a film like Devotion (1920), starring Hazel Dawn, “an outstanding example of what we mean when we say motion picture hash, with all the melodramatic punch of the old ten-twenty-thirty shows…”⁴⁵ Intriguingly, Kern also drew on trade press and other sources to “teach” Omaha fans about the movies. She reported on Will Day’s London “exhibition of moving picture relics,” reprinted an interview with Alvin Wyckoff in which he made trenchant comments on “atmospheric lighting,” and challenged them to see how a film like The Impossible Mrs. Bellew (1922) seamlessly integrated location and studio shots within a scene.⁴⁶ In classifying fans one week, she even used the pronoun, “He,” whether as a sign of accepting the masculine conventions of discourse at the time or as an explicit means of enticing more men in Omaha to become moviegoers.⁴⁷ By 1925, Kern’s reputation was such that Douglas Fairbanks sent her a telegram personally thanking her for “a most wonderful review of ‘The Thief of Bagdad.'”⁴⁸

Omaha World Herald Thief of Bagdad ad, using Elizabeth Kern review.

Omaha World Herald ad for Thief of Bagdad (1924), using Elizabeth Kern’s review.

In 1914, Gertrude Price’s claim had merit—the movies indeed were a great new field for women—a field that definitely included professional writing for the newspapers. But would that claim have held up five or ten years later? The answer, at least for now, has to be inconclusive—and the reasons, one way or another, speculative. While some women like Mae Tinee and Parsons enjoyed “starring roles” for more than a decade, others such as Underhill, Tracy, Lefler, and Daw apparently left the spotlight, perhaps not of their own volition. New recruits like Dale, Kern, and others may have heralded a new generation of women editors and reviewers in the early 1920s, and others may remain “hidden” behind the apparent practice that had writers identified only by last names and first name initials. Furthermore, were the targeted readers/fans of these new recruits largely women or, rather, were they just as often men; if the latter, did the reviews and commentary seeming to address them complement an apparent industry strategy that sought to broaden and transform what was assumed to be a predominantly female audience for the movies? More definite answers will depend in part on future researchers continuing to construct useful databases not only by accessing and reliably searching more and more digitized newspapers but also by “getting dirty,” that is, examining all kinds of material remains in local and regional libraries and consulting with their knowledgeable curators. Perhaps this short essay will have turned up more clues for them to follow and that may lead to even more challenging questions, given the sources referenced, the women writers briefly studied, and those with unfamiliar names much in need of becoming more known.⁴⁹

Notes

1
Gertrude Price, “Sees the Movies as Great, New Field for Women Folk.” Toledo News-Bee (30 March 1914): 1.
2
Richard Abel, Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913-1916 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
3
Samantha Barbas, The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Hilary Hallett, Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 71-85, 88-99.
4
“Motion Picture News First Annual Newspaper and Theater Directory.” Motion Picture News (27 December 1919): 156-168.
5
Among those were Mary Connelly of the Elmira [New York] Herald, Elida Bedell of the Bridgeport [Connecticut] Post, Pauline Brady of the Brockton [Massachusetts] Times, Mary Ley of the Akron [Ohio] Times, May Cameron of the Evansville [Illinois] Press, Mrs. M.M. Wallace of the Beloit [Wisconsin] News, Mrs. Leonora Fishel of the Denver Express, and Mrs. Alida F. Sims of the Albuquerque Herald.
6
Abel, Menus for Movieland, 169. According to the Motion Picture News directory, the New York Tribune’s circulation numbers were 110,000.
7
Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936), 412-413. After touring as a stage performer, Underhill took over writing her father’s sports column in the Tribune (after his death) before introducing her movie interview column. She suffered from tuberculosis and died in 1928.
8
Harriette Underhill, “How to Fill in the Time Until Caruso Arrives.” New York Sunday Tribune (8 December 1918): 4.5.
9
Harriette Underhill, “Snowy Baker Fires Bill Hart’s Ambitions.” New York Sunday Tribune (19 January 1919): 5.4; “Some Startling Information Anent Bryant Washburn.” New York Sunday Tribune (26 January 1919): 4.4; and “David Wark Griffith Agrees The Play Is Not the Thing.” New York Sunday Tribune (12 October 1919): 4.6.
10
Virginia Tracy, “And Still No Surrender By the Intellectual.” New York Sunday Tribune (8 December 1918): 4.5; “The Curse of Sweetness Laid Upon Ingenues.” New York Sunday Tribune (12 January 1919): 5.5; “More Than Plot to Make a Picture” New York Sunday Tribune (19 January 1919): 5.4; “The Dazzling Sameness of Douglas Fairbanks.” New York Sunday Tribune (26 January 1919): 5.4; “Tourneur Brings An Old Melodrama Back to Life.” New York Sunday Tribune (5 October 1919): 4.8.
11
Virginia Tracy, “A Monk, a Girl and Thrills.” New York Sunday Tribune (12 October 1919): 4.6.
12
“Reel News and Views Edited by Mary Lefler.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (7 July 1918): 30. Lefler’s first position on the paper was as the “circulation bragger” of the “Sunday Sandwich”—four columns of miscellany on the editorial page. According to the Motion Picture News directory, the Star-Telegram’s circulation numbers were 62,125 daily and 65,00 on Sundays.
13
“Reel News and Views Edited by Mary Lefler.”Fort Worth Star-Telegram (15 September 1918): 31.
14
“Reel News and Views Edited by Mary Lefler.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (13 July 1919): 2.6-7. On page 6, the highlighted article was “‘Hearts of the World’ Griffith’s Famous Story of War, Opens Week’s Run Today at Hippodrome.”
15
“At the Movies.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (31 August 1919): 2.6, and (21 September 1919): 2.6-7.
16
This “Gertrude” wrote from New York, so she was not Gertrude Price, who was based in Los Angeles by this time.
17
Marjorie Daw, “Cleveland Youth Wins Fame in Screen World.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (9 June 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 5, and “Famous Director of Films Claims Cleveland as Home.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (16 June 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 5. She also wrote a profile of Lieutenant Pierre Daye who was visiting the city after serving with the Belgian Army in the Congo—Marjorie Daw, “Belgian Hero of African War Visits City.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (17 November 1918): 1.8.
18
Marjorie Daw, “Players of Shadow World Undimmed by Autumn Days.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (1 September 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 4.
19
Daw, “Players of the Shadow World Undimmed by Autumn Days,” 4, and “Stars of First Magnitude Seen in Plays That Suit.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (24 August 1919): Editorial/Dramatic, 4.
20
Marjorie Daw, “Popular Feminine Stars Shown in Pleasing Roles.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (15 September 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 3.
21
Marjorie Daw, “Real Merit in Pictures Offered at Local Houses.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (24 November 1918): 3.4.
22
Marjorie Daw, “Every Cinema Has Its Day During Sultry Months.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (1 June 1919): Editorial/Dramatic, 4.
23
Daw, “Players of Shadow World Undimmed by Autumn Days,” 4.
24
Marjorie Daw, “List of Film Favorites Billed for This Week.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (22 September 1918): Editorial/Dramatic, 3.
25
Marjorie Daw, “What’s Doing in Photo Play.” Cleveland Sunday Plain Dealer (24 June 1919): 14. Clara Joel acted in both theater productions and motion pictures.
26
Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
27
Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
28
Shelley Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
29
That directory listed several hundred editors and writers, the vast majority men.
30
See, also, for instance, Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).
31
Others, besides Mae Tinee at the Chicago Tribune, included Genevieve Harris at the Chicago Post and theater critic Amy Leslie eventually at the Chicago News.
32
See also a reprint of Dale’s review of Griffith’s Broken Blossom (1919) in “New Picture Adds Fame to Griffith.” Fort Wayne News and Sentinel (18 October 1919): 2.12.
33
“News of Photoplays and Players Conducted by Virginia Dale.” Chicago Journal (27 August 1921): 9; and Virginia Dale, “Moving Pictures.” Chicago Journal (1 June 1921): 8. According to the Motion Picture News directory, the Journal’s circulation numbers were 118,000. No copies of the Chicago Journal survive at the Chicago Historical Society Library before June 1921; the Saturday page initially was simply bannered “Movies,” with Dale’s byline. For the purposes of this short essay, my analysis of Dale’s work focuses on the months of June through September 1921.
34
Virginia Dale, “Autumn Season Brings Best of Film Offerings.” Chicago Journal (3 September 1921): 7. Passion, with Nazimova, was still playing at the downtown Rose in early June; Deception, “with Henny Porten and Cast of 7000,” played for a week at the downtown Roosevelt in early August; and The Golem had a two-week run at the Orchestra Hall through late August.
35
See, for instance, the ads in the Chicago Journal (6 June 1921): 11, and (18 June 1921): 8.
36
Virginia Dale, “Moving Pictures.” Chicago Journal (7 June 1921): 9, and (8 June 1921): 8.
37
Virginia Dale, “Moving Pictures.” Chicago Journal (9 June 1921): 10.
38
Virginia Dale, “‘Woman God Changed’ Now at Randolph.” Chicago Journal (2 July 1921): 8.
39
Virginia Dale, “What’s a ‘Movie’ Worth?” Chicago Journal (10 June 1921): 13.
40
“Movies.” Omaha Sunday World-Herald (6 August 1922): E.9; and A.H.M., “This Week at the Movies.” Omaha World-Herald (7 August 1922): 3. A.H.M. remains unknown.
41
See, for instance, “Opportunities for Women in the Movies: V. Scenario Writer.” Omaha World-Herald (27 August 1922): E.10; and “Opportunities for Women: VI. Publicity Writer.” Omaha World-Herald (3 September 1922): E.9. Other positions singled out were secretary, location finder, continuity writer, film editor, production manager, teacher, continuity clerk, assistant director, hairdresser, director, artist in an art department, and musician. The example for a director was Dot Farley, who worked for Mack Sennett.
42
E.M.K., “This Week at the Movies.” Omaha World-Herald (18 September 1922): 6. E.M.K. became Elizabeth Kern sometime in 1923.
43
E.M.K., “This Week at the Movies,” 6.
44
E.M.K.,“This Week at the Movies.” Omaha World-Herald (25 September 1922): 2.
45
E.M.K., “This Week at the Movies.” Omaha World-Herald (9 October 1922): 3.
46
E.M.K., “This Week at the Movies.” Omaha World-Herald (9 October 1922): 3, (23 October 1922): 7, and (30 October 1922): 7.
47
E.M.K., “This Week at the Movies.” Omaha World-Herald (6 November 1922): 3. Most cinema historians agree that women comprised the majority of moviegoers in the 1920s, and most likely even earlier.
48
The Sun theater reproduced this telegram in a large advertisement in the Omaha World-Herald (26 April 1925): E.8.
49
All images used in this essay are already cited in the text, except for the following: Mary Lefler, “Reel News & Views.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram (20 July 1919): 3.6; Marjorie Daw, “Favorite Stars Listed in Suitable Films.” Cleveland Plain Dealer (15 June 1919):4; E.M.K., “This Week at the Movies.” Omaha World-Herald (27 August 1923):9.

by Moira Fradinger

Women in Argentine Silent Cinema

By Moira Fradinger

Mi Derecho (1920), Maria B. de Celestini (w). CA

Mi Derecho (1920), written by María B. de Celestini. Courtesy of the Cinemateca Argentina.

A vibrant and growing Italian community settled in Argentina as far back as the early nineteenth century and rapidly increased at the turn of the century with a massive flow of immigrants. As in other countries of the continent, Italians disembarked in Buenos Aires with the hope to “make it in America.” But unlike in other countries, they were not only manual laborers. They were also professionals, artists, photographers, musicians, theater actors, and, not to be forgotten, political exiles coming from the ranks of communist and anarchist turn-of-the-century Italy. Unlike in New York, Italians disembarking in Buenos Aires mostly came not from the South but from the North; they all found a country not “made” but “to be made.” Some of these immigrants were just touring through Buenos Aires and decided to remain in the teeming city that was barreling “full steam” towards industrial modernity. Although the overwhelming majority of these travelers were Italians and Spaniards, the wave also brought every kind of European.

Maria B. de Celestini's (w) son in Mi Derecho (1920). CA

María B. de Celestini’s son in Mi Derecho (1920). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Argentina

Few cities in the world were so foreign in the make-up of their population at the time. The municipal census of 1909 shows Buenos Aires had 1,231,698 inhabitants, of which 670,513 were Argentine, 561,185 were foreign (46%). Among the latter, 174,291 were from Spain and 277,041 were Italians (“El Censo de 1909,” 109). It is estimated that from 1869 to 1915, 45% to 53% of the population of Buenos Aires remained of foreign origin, and 80% was composed of foreigners and children of foreigners. By 1914, 80% of immigrants to Argentina were either Italians or Spaniards and Italians composed from 25% to 32% of the foreign population of Buenos Aires (Argentina National Census 1914, 83-94). Business and industry largely depended on this immigrant wave. The film industry was no exception. The “kinescope” entered the country thanks to the German Federico Figner, who also filmed the first views of the city. The photographic equipment firm Lepage pioneered the importation of Gaumont cameras: the owner, Enrique Lepage, was Belgian. Lepage’s collaborator, Eugenio Py, filmed the first short documentary, La bandera argentina/The Argentine Flag (1897) and the first professional news report, El viaje a Buenos Aires del Dr. Campos Salles/Dr. Campos Salles’s Trip to Buenos Aires (1900). Py was French. Another of Lepage’s collaborators, the Austrian Max Glucksmann, was the pioneer of the production and exhibition of films in the Argentine capital. Mario Gallo, an Italian, directed the first Argentine fiction film, La Revolución de Mayo/The May Revolution (1909). Federico Valle, another Italian, filmed the first weekly newsreel (Film Revista Valle, 1916-1931) (Marrone 2003, 27-57; Finkielman 2004, 5-31; Zago 1997, 1-23; Caneto et al. 1996; Couselo 1984, 11-22).

María B. de Celestini’s son in Mi Derecho (1920). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Argentina

Mi Derecho (1920), written by María B. de Celestini. Courtesy of the Cinemateca Argentina.

Three women working in the film industry during the silent period have appeared in citations, but little is known of them. María B. de Celestini filmed Mi Derecho in 1920 and is invariably mentioned in film histories, but so far we do not possess any of her biographical information. Her film seem to have been destroyed in a fire, although the Cinemateca Argentina has production stills from Mi Derecho. Paraná Sendrós, in his article for the newspaper Ámbito Financiero (1988), mentions that the film had to be finished by the director of photography Alberto Biasotti, a major associate of the Ariel studios in Buenos Aires (n.p). To judge from the stills, the film was produced by Andes films and the story was written by Celestini, whose child seems to have been one of the actors. From the images, we can reconstruct that the film is a moral drama involving a woman perhaps of “low life” or “dubious reputation,” as well as a child and a man. The woman is dressed for a cabaret performance of some kind; the child is beaten by the man and the woman is shown consoling the child who lies on the floor of what we presume is the cabaret where she works.

Mi Derecho (1920), written by María B. de Celestini. Courtesy of the Cinemateca Argentina.

René Oro (also Renée) is also mentioned as having directed the documentary film La Argentina (1922), but more research into this film and other possible documentaries is necessary (Finkielman 48). La Patria mentions Elena Sansinena de Elizalde as having written and directed Blanco y negro/ Black and White, which premiered on November 22, 1919, at the Grand Splendid Theater (“Blanco y Negro” 5). The film is usually listed as having been directed by Francisco Defilippis Novoa in 1919, and starring Victoria Ocampo, who by then was a friend of Sansinena and who would later become a famous writer (Zago 28). Daughter of land-owners in the province of Buenos Aires, Sansinena was the founder and president of a vibrant all-female cultural association in Buenos Aires, La Asociación Amigos del Arte (1924-1942), which had a strong impact on the cultural scene of the city.

Bibliography

Argentina National Census 1914. Redalyc vol. 5, no. 8 (October 2008): 83-94.

“Blanco y Negro.” Rev. La Patria (9 November 1919): 5.

Caneto, Guillermo, et al. Historia de los primeros años del cine en la Argentina, 1985-1910. Buenos Aires: Fundación Cinemateca Argentina, 1996.

Couselo, Jorge M., et al. Historia del Cine Argentino, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1984.

“El Censo de 1909 de la ciudad de Buenos Aires.” Redalyc vol. 5, no. 7 (April 2008): 109.

Finkielman, Jorge. The Film Industry in Argentina: an Illustrated Cultural History. Jefferson: McFarland, 2004.

Marrone, Irene. Imagenes del Mundo Historico: Identidades y Representacions En El Noticiero y El Documental En El Cine Mudo Argentino. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2003.

Sendrós, Paraná. “La Celestini hizo un solo film.” Ámbito Financiero (4 April 1988): n.p.

Zago, Manrique, ed. Cine Argentino: Crónica de 100 años. Buenos Aires: Manrique Zago Ediciones, 1997.

by Jane Gaines, Michelle Koerner

Women_as_Camera_Operators_fig1_WFP-PIC20

Mary Pickford with camera, c. 1916. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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

“Women with Cameras” vs. Women Camera Operators

Alla Nazimova (p/w/e/a) and Herbert Brenon 1916, LoC

Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news (22). A bigger story, however, was not women and “little” 16mm cameras it was women with big 35mm cameras on the motion picture set. Yet not all women photographed with cameras were professional camera operators—some were actress directors or female producers, and here the photographic composition is telling. When actress-directors or female producers are photographed with cameras, either with men or alone in the frame, they are next to the motion picture camera. The female camera operator, however, is photographed behind the motion picture camera and in this she is a total novelty. In her strange new relation to the technological device this female aberration becomes a metaphor for the wondrous strangeness of motion picture photography itself.

Other Professional Camera Women

Mabel Normand sitting by camera. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

Elinor Glyn, Sam Wood and Al Gilks, on set of Beyond the Rocks (1922). Private Collection.

“How many of you have ever heard of a woman camera man?” begins the most in-depth of these stories, “The Only Camera Woman” (59). The Picture Play Magazine writer’s story angle is the attempt to correct incorrect assumptions about women’s technological abilities that the story attributes to the 1916 reader. Although the author byline is the gender inspecific A.J. Dixon the contemporary reader may assume that the writer is male from remarks made about the interview-shy “Miss Davison” as well as from an easy familiarity with men on the Astor Company set—director Al Ray and veteran cameraman Harry Fischbeck. Part of the writer’s approach is to make a joke about the expectation of female incompetence, all the better to turn the tables on the reader. The writer has imagined footage out-of-focus and either over or under-exposed negative. Before arriving on the set she wants to know from the two men about the camera woman’s technological skill, a segue into questions that give the writer a chance to display technological knowledge. “And does Miss Davison understand all about trick photography?” the writer asks (61). The writer is assured that she does triple exposure as well as double exposure (61). Davison then explains to the writer that she started with a Graflax still camera because it is easier to master than the motion picture camera because there is “no crank to turn” (62). But it is the professional Fischbeck, not Davison, who gets to explain the technique of one-crank motion animation produced with the hand crank on the side of the camera which he says is turned and stopped while the pose is changed, then turned and stopped again. Cameraman Fischbeck, continuing to testify to Grace Davison’s competence hands the fan magazine writer a strip of Eastman Kodak film negative which turns out to be Davison’s own experimental footage shot with the “one-crank motion” technique he has explained. The fascinated writer sees from the “little pictures that looked like ping-pongs” that Davison has taken an image of herself against black velvet using a mirror and reflector (64). Thus the “new and startling” woman camera operator advances a metaphor for the “new and startling” phenomenon of motion pictures (65).

Margery Ordway in Photoplay, 1916.

In addition, the female camera operator’s looks are “startling.” In October, 1916, Photoplay featured a full page photo of camera woman Margery Ordway wearing a checked cap, striped blouse, and checked puttees. The caption below attempts to make light humor out of the gender switch: “This is the New Fall Style in Camera ‘Men’” (103). The quirky unconventionality of her outfit confirms the atypicality of women on this job. The gender-unspecified writer A.J. Dixon describes Grace Davison’s outfit similarly. What she calls her “camera dress” is a checked suit with a matching cap (61). The dress goes with the oddity of the terms “grinding” or “cranking” used to in the article to describe camerawork, slyly invoking the double meaning of the slang “crank” for operator without exactly saying that a woman behind a camera is bad-tempered.

Francelia Billington: From Film Actress to Camera Operator and Back

In a 1914 Photoplay article based on an interview with “camera operator” Francelia Billington the motion picture actress herself comments on the double fascination of the strange machine and a woman operating the mechanical wonder: “I suppose that it is still a novelty to see a girl more interested in a mechanical problem than in make-up” (59). Like Davison, Billington says that she started with the still camera at a young age and moved up to the motion picture camera although she says that her interest in photography did not mean that she was interested in popular films. Katherine Synon’s interview finds Francelia Billington on the Los Angeles set of the Reliance-Majestic Studio “assisting” director W. C. Cabanne. She is effectively doing the work of the “cameraman” or what would later be credited as “photography by,” described as “turning a crank as she keeps close watch on the scene that a group of players are enacting” (n.p.) In 1914, however, Billington’s work is not taken so seriously and the reference to her “double role of actress and camera operator” suggests that she is a lucky cameraman stand-in who helps out with the camera operation when she isn’t acting (n.p.)

Considering the organization of work on the set, one can see from this still taken from around the same time at the Edison Studio that jobs are already gender-hierarchized and one imagines the difficulty with which Billington moved back and forth across the invisible line between the all-male camera department and the dramatic scene. Like Davison, Billington says that she began as an actress but preferred camera work. However, the year of the interview must have been her last opportunity. The Reliance-Majestic Studio was new on the West coast under director-in-chief D.W. Griffith and he had big plans that did not include a woman camera operator.

Edison Studio, Bronx, NY 1909. Courtesy of Bison Archives.

Francelia Billington’s career trajectory, summarized in William M. Drew in “More Than Just a Pretty Face,” gets a slow start by association with an aborted 1915 project written by Nell Shipman, but picks up soon after. She was prolific as an actress at American Film Co. and Universal Pictures beginning around 1916-17 and even though she no longer worked with cameras she was featured in Movieland Notes working, like a mechanic, on her car.

Francelia Billington, The Sea Master (American Film Co., 1917). Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

The high point in her career was a co-starring role in director Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919). But it is down hill for Billington in the 1920s, with parts in western and adventure genre films and an appearance in one sound film before she died in 1934. Grace Davison’s career similarly accelerates once she resigns herself to acting after 1916, but like others she also took advantage of the 1917–1918 window of opportunity for independent production and started “her own” producing company. See Women’s Production and Pre-Production Companies. A note in the American Film Catalog refers to actress Davison as having started the company in order to produce Wives of Men (1918), directed and written by John M. Stahl. While Harry Fischbeck (as Fishbeck) gets the credit for photography, Davison is credited as part of the cast in publicity and reviews but not as producer (Hanson, 1050). After producing Wives of Men she took one or two acting roles per year with independent productions until 1922.

Lantern slide, Frencelia Billington, The Day She Paid (Universal, 1919). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

The female camera operator was a phenomenon of the first decade which explains why in 1925 Mathis had never seen nor heard of one. It was not until the 1970s when Anthony Slide began to discover women directors in the silent era that camera operators were also brought to our attention. In his first book he refers to Grace Davison and Margery Ordway, having found them in the fan magazines referenced here, and briefly mentions Dorothy Dunn who he says was part of a “corps of cameramen” working at the Universal Animated Weekly (Slide 1974, 168). Dunn confirms the pattern of women beginning as actresses before they take up cameras, but unlike Davison and Billington who give up camera work for acting, Dunn gives up acting, becoming the “only woman staff photographer,” according to the Moving Picture World (1609). In his later book Slide mentions Dunn, Davison, and Ordway and adds Louise Lowell who worked for Fox News in 1920 (1996, 5-6). But the trope of “the first” or “the only” continues to lure us and more recently Suzy Groves discovers Katherine R. Bleecker as the “earliest professional moving camera woman” (qtd. in Krasilovsky 1997, xxi). While the New York Times covers Bleecker in 1915 and Photoplay discovers Billington in 1914, the difference between the kind of work the two undertook is more important than the year between them. While Billington had some opportunities to shoot motion picture fiction shorts, Bleecker wrote, directed and photographed scenarios set in New York prisons, casting inmates as themselves, and thus should also be understood as pioneering what we today call documentary fiction.

See also: Angela Murray Gibson

by Joanne Hershfield, Patricia Torres San Martín

The historiography of silent cinema in Latin America tells a story of good fortune in the face of adversity, enterprising individuals, and collective frustrations. Until recently women were virtually absent from published histories, however; this omission from the major works in Latin American film historiography is evidence of the way in which women’s work has been made invisible in the main tradition. Thanks to the interest and persistence of a number of film scholars, however, we can now celebrate the names of the Latin American women who made significant contributions to silent film in producing, screenwriting, acting, editing, and directing, as well as in film journalism and motion picture exhibition. Reporting on and reevaluating the careers of these women has been a very complicated job primarily due to the dearth of written materials and extant films. In the following career profiles we examine the work of a number of women whose participation in the development of silent film practices has recently been documented: the Brazilian film pioneer Carmen Santos; the Chileans Alicia Armstrong de Vicuña, Gabriela von Bussenius Vega, and Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna; the Peruvians Ángela Ramos de Rotalde, María Isabel Sánchez Concha Aramburú, Teresita Arce, Stefanía Socha; and the Mexicans Mimí Derba, Adriana and Dolores Ehlers, Cándida Beltrán Rendón, Cube Bonifant, Elena Sánchez Valenzuela, Adela Sequeyro, and Adelina Barrasa. Research on women in the Argentinean and Peruvian film industries remains at a less developed stage. Paulo Paranaguá has identified the participation of two Argentinean women filmmakers: Emilia Saleny (Niña del bosque, 1917, Paseo Trágico, 1917, and Clarita, 1919) and María V. De Celestini (Mi derecho, 1920).¹ Moira Fradinger also mentions René Oro and Elena Sansinena de Elizalde in the Women in Argentine Silent Cinema section below, indicating that further research must be done on both of these pioneers.

Carnen Santos (a) poster Onde a terra acaba (1933). CB

Carnen Santos, poster Onde a terra acaba (1933). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Brasileira.

Women’s participation in the early Mexican motion picture industry has been reclaimed only recently in the wake of broader political and cultural formations. These include Mexico’s Second Wave feminist movement in the 1970s; the celebration of the “Year of the Woman” in 1975; the founding of two world-renowned film schools—the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC) in 1964 and the Centro de Capacitación Cinematografica (CCC) in 1973; the formation of the first and only women’s film collective in Mexico, the Colectivo de Cine Mujer (1975–1987); and the emergence of a vibrant group of film scholars in the 1980s and 1990s, who were actively dedicated to the recovery of a century of Mexican film history. As a result of these diverse developments, a range of analytical approaches to the history of women in Mexican film has emerged. ²

Examples of early scholarship on the silent period include Aurelio de los Reyes’s 1986 Filmografía del cine mudo mexicano, 1896–1920 and Gabriel Ramírez’s 1994 Crónica del cine mudo mexicano. More recently, a number of published monographs have recovered and reevaluated the work of two Mexican women directors who made significant contributions to Mexican silent cinema: Ángel Miquel Rendón’s Mimí Derba (2000) examines the participation of Derba in the areas of production, direction, and distribution while Eduardo de la Vega and Patricia Torres San Martín’s Adela Sequeyro (1997) evaluates the work of Sequeyro in film journalism and in producing, acting, and directing during the transition between silent and sound cinema.

Poster of Adela Sequeyro (a/w/d/p) La mujer de nadie (1937). PC

Poster of Adela Sequeyro for La mujer de nadie (1937). Private Collection.

In other national contexts, Ana Pessoa’s 2002 Carmen Santos: O cinema dos anos 20,brings to light the life and work of Brazilian filmmaker Santos, and in 1993, the Chilean film journalist Eliana Jara Donoso published one of the most important histories of the silent period in Chile, Cine mudo chileno, which included information on women who participated in silent cinema production in Chile. Thanks to these works, we are now able to make a more precise map of the participation of women in the silent cinemas of Mexico, Brazil, and Chile.

A major obstacle to scholarship is the absence or loss of materials. Even in the case of Mexico, researchers have not been able to rely on the films themselves since the majority of silent Mexican motion pictures have disappeared or were destroyed. Dramatically, a devastating fire at the Cineteca Nacional, Mexico’s national film archives, destroyed over 6,000 films and ancillary materials in 1982. Without the films themselves, scholars have had to rely on other archived materials. The Chilean case is as unfortunate. Only a few Chilean silent films out of more than eighty feature-length films produced between 1898 and 1936 survive. The history of the period must therefore be constructed from photographs, newspaper clippings, essays by filmmakers, and published reviews of films. In the words of Chilean scholar Eliana Jara Donoso, echoing Giuliana Bruno on the work of the Italian filmmaker Elvira Notari, the situation of Latin American silent cinema remains a “ruined map.” ³

Comparative Industrial Conditions

Understanding the conditions for silent cinema in Latin America depends upon a grasp of the culture industries as part of the new global capitalist interdependence of world nations in the early twentieth century. The Lumière brothers introduced motion pictures to major Latin American urban audiences in 1896, only a few months after the premiere of their cinematograph in Paris on December 28, 1895. French and enterprising Latin American film producers immediately began photographing local events and subjects and distributing these actualities across the region. While a number of Latin American countries quickly developed domestic film industries, these industries were dependent on Europe and the United States for raw stock and motion picture technology as well as for 35mm films to fill exhibitors’ screens. By the 1920s, Latin America was Hollywood’s largest export market and companies like Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO set up distribution centers in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro in an effort to circulate their films to local exhibitors. In spite of the dominance of Hollywood, at least two Latin American film industries achieved some measure of success in their own domestic market. In Brazil, 1,685 films were made during the silent period and in Mexico filmmakers left a legacy of over a hundred silent fiction features and shorts and documentary shorts and features made between 1898 and 1928.

Mimí Derba portrait, Compañía Industrial Fotográfica. Private Collection.

Mimi Derba, Compañía Industrial Fotográfica, 1925. Courtesy of the Museo Soumaya.

The histories of the various national film industries testify to the fact that each country found a way to build its own cinematic identity in the face of Hollywood’s globalizing competitive strategies. For example, the embryonic Mexican film industry was a private venture funded by independent Mexican entrepreneurs who were instrumental in initiating the national film industry. Two important production periods defined Mexican silent cinema: 1896 to 1915 and 1917 to 1931. The first phase saw experimentation with fictional genres modeled on Italian and North American films. When narrative filmmaking came to a virtual standstill during the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1917, filmmakers perfected their craft through the production of documentaries that chronicled the encounters between revolutionary forces and the state’s federales. The end of the war’s military phase in 1917 and the ensuing economic and social stability allowed for the establishment of a Mexican studio system, the development of Mexican feature-film production, and the emergence of cinematic and narrative conventions that were to endure for decades. But the earlier Italian and North American influences were tempered by a vibrant postrevolutionary intellectual, political, and aesthetic nationalism. It was this second period of silent film that finally provided Mexican women with the chance to help make a national film industry. In 1917 the popular theatre actress Mimí Derba established Azteca Film Company with Enrique Rosas and produced five feature films in that one year. One of Derba’s primary objectives was to produce a “national cinema” that would provide European and North American audiences with a new image of Mexico to counter Hollywood stereotypes of the pelado (a lower-class, uneducated male) and la china poblana (a colorfully dressed village girl), types visible in US films such as Across the Mexican Line (1911), The Mexican Defeat (1913), Captured by Mexicans (1914), and The Mexican Chickens (1915). ⁴

Sisters Adriana and Dolores Ehlers also contributed to the refashioning of Mexican silent film with their newsreel-style documentaries that challenged conventional images of Mexico. Their films also countered post-revolutionary depictions of the country as a socially and economically backward nation populated by colorfully dressed Indians. The Ehlers’s newsreels instead presented images of a vibrant, cosmopolitan urban society. The sisters also made a contribution to the technological development of the entire Mexican film industry through their distribution of cameras and projectors produced by a US firm, Nicholas Power Company. ⁵

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Private Collection.

Cinema emerged in Brazil at the turn of the century, primarily in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, according to historian Ana Rita Mendonça. The first production and exhibition entrepreneurs in the Brazilian film industry were European immigrants, mainly Italians, who promoted the idea that European films were technically better than those made in Brazil. According to Mendonça, until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the only local Brazilian film producers were the Italian-Brazilian Segreto brothers. However, by the end of the first decade, there were cinema venues in other Brazilian cities that featured the screening of regional programs (Mendonça 1989, 84). In Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco located in Brazil’s Northeastern region, more than thirty titles, including thirteen short and feature fiction films and approximately twenty nonfiction short films were produced. During these early years, a number of production companies were formed, and ten of them were able to produce and exhibit at least one film. In Brazilian film history, this period is known as “Ciclo do Recife”/“The Recife Cycle,” one of the so-called “regional cycles” of the silent period. ⁶

While foreign films dominated the market in Brazil, as in Mexico, the most popular films were national productions composed of noticiarios, or newsreels, and posados, or feature films, primarily of the thriller genre. In the first decade, more than 100 of these nationally produced films circulated all over the country. However, by 1911, the apparent success of the national film industry collapsed in the face of increased competition from foreign producers and distributors, and Brazilian distributors turned to exhibiting foreign films on which they could make more money.

For a period of almost twenty years the Chilean film industry was able to maintain continuous production levels in several locations, thus creating a film culture with regional identities in cities such as Valparaíso, Antofagasta, Punta Arenas, and Iquique, the city where the very first films were made as early as 1897. Chilean motion pictures were shown on the screens of the “biographs” in the big cities and elsewhere in small regional venues. As with the case of Brazil and Mexico, these films were popular because they were national productions and had “no reason to envy foreign productions,”a phrase repeated in advertisements.

Ultimately, the success of the Mexican, Brazilian, and Chilean silent film industries was dependent on one or more of the following: the heavy industrialization of the industry, substantial state support in the form of quotas and tariffs on imported foreign films, and significant tax breaks. The most successful national industries were those that aimed for a limited domestic market, but in the end these small film industries were at the mercy of political and economic upheavals. Finally, although these three countries stand out because they were able to start domestic motion picture industries during the silent era, primarily by capitalizing on national themes and stories, they never approached the size of Hollywood’s industrial machine nor did they challenge its ascendancy over the Latin American film market. It is safe to say that although we distinguish successful national efforts and projects in the silent era, it is clear that the US motion picture industry inhibited the growth of individual domestic film industries.

Comparative Social Contexts

Mimí Derba portrait. Private Collection.

While women of the middle and upper classes were enjoying newfound freedoms during the 1920s and 1930s in many Latin American countries, the economic and cultural environments in which they moved were still quite restricted for them. Thus, it remained difficult for women to freely enter emerging labor markets such as that provided by the motion picture industry and to move up through the ranks in the new film professions. In light of this social labor context, we must ask the following question: What cultural and social issues allowed or restricted women’s entrance into emerging film industries in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico? Where did women find work in the film industry? Two general observations can be made here.

Elena Sanchez Valenzuela. Private Collection.

First, these women worked in a social, institutional, and economic environment that was explicitly designated as a male arena. We recognize the extreme exclusion of women, for example, in the Chilean state regulations that prohibited young women from even entering motion picture theatres unless they were chaperoned. The only women who were able to work in the public sphere were those who, due to their social standing, already commanded a level of economic independence. These were not working-class but were educated women representing a social class that already had access to public cultural space. Second, we find that in Mexico, Brazil, and Chile women entered the emerging film industries primarily through avenues such as the theatre and film journalism, suggesting the need for a comparison between points of entry. In a number of cases, women moved into the film industry through their work as film journalists in national and local newspapers and periodicals. Film journalism was a relatively open territory through which a number of male as well as female filmmakers moved into the cinema. For example, in Mexico during the 1920s, Elena Sánchez Valenzuela, the founder of the first film archive in Latin America as well as the director and actress Adela Sequeyro, both inaugurated their careers as columnists for Mexico City newspapers at a time when writing about motion pictures was beginning to be considered an important profession (Torres San Martín 1992). In addition to El Demócrata, other leading Mexico City newspapers such as Excélsior and El Universal published sections devoted to cinema. Women writing for columns in these papers during the 1920s and 1930s, in addition to Elena Sánchez Valenzuela and Sequeyro, included María Celia del Villar as well as Cube Bonifant.

Kathleen Romoli. Courtesy of the Fundación Patrimonio Filmico Colombia.

In Mexico and Brazil, the alliance of film production companies with the major national newspapers also contributed to the fluidity with which women crossed between the two professions in the era of silent cinema. For example, in Mexico a number of producers worked with El Demócrata in the early 1920s in an attempt to create Mexican film stars. Actresses such as Dolores del Río and Lupe Vélez emerged as icons of international cinema and important figures in Hollywood cinema during this period (Ramón 1993; De los Reyes 1996b; Hershfield 2008). According to Jara Donoso, the Chilean silent cinema distinguished itself through the participation of theatre performers and well-known writers and artists, some of whom were women. A few of these women were from the elite sectors of society while others came from theatre, where they worked as cuple dancers or cupletistas, singers, and vaudeville artists. ⁷ These activities were not always viewed favorably by a moralistic society that worried about the behavior of young women. In addition to these actresses, at least three women have been identified as directors of Chilean feature-length films, according to Jara Donoso. She notes that it was a woman, Gabriela von Bussenius, who made the second feature-length Chilean film in 1917 at the exact moment when film production was becoming a legitimate industry (Jara Donoso 1994, 34). Years later, in 1925 and 1926, two Chilean women, Alicia Armstrong de Vicuña and Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna, would follow in her footsteps.

Although we find clusters of women filmmakers in Mexico, Brazil, and Chile, and isolated cases in Colombia (Kathleen Romoli) and Peru, it is difficult to affirm a women’s cinema, feminist cinema, or even an oppositional cinema emerging from women’s conditions of social inequality. Follow the links below for descriptions of each career. We see that the success of women in motion picture production was sometimes due to chance or luck as well as to their dedicated struggle to overcome social conditions adverse to women’s full social participation.

See also: Cleo de Verberena, Eva Nil

Notes:

Paulo Paranaguá, “Women Film-Makers in Latin America,” Framework 37 (1989): 129-139. ↩
Luz Cecilia Greaves, “La mujer como cineasta en México,” PhD dissertation, Universidad Intercontinental, 1994; Ana María Amado Hernández, et al. Colectivo cine mujer (Mexico City: Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, 1982); María Guadalupe Benítez Sauri and Martha Leticia Villafuerte Aranda, “Del hogar a la realización fílmica. El caso de dos directoras (Matilde Soto Landeta y Marcela Fernández Violante),” B.A. thesis, Universidad Latinoamericana, Escuela de Comunicación, 1993; Ana Cecilia González Velasco, “La prostituta en el cine mexicano,” B.A. thesis, Departamento de Comunicación, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1979; Luis Bernardo Jaime Vázquez, “Cine al borde de un ataque de mujeres: apuntes para una filmobibliografía de las directoras del cine Mexicano (1917–1999),” B.A. thesis, ITESO, 2001; Angélica Patricia Martínez Sustayta, “Análisis de algunos personajes femeninos en el cine mexicano. Visión de cuatro directores,” B.A. thesis, UNAM, 1989; Octavio Moreno Ochoa, “Catálogo de directoras de Cine en México,” 2 vols, B.A. thesis,UNAM, 1992. ↩
Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993). ↩
Emilio García Riera, México visto por el cine extranjero. vol. 1 (Mexico : D.R. Ediciones Era, 1987). ↩
J. M. Sánchez García, “Apuntes para una historia de nuestro cine,” Novedades, Feb. 26, 1940. ↩
Luciana Corrêa de Araújo, “Modernity and Morality: Female Film Stars and Feminine Characters in Regional Silent Cinema,” Paper Presentation, Woman and Silent Cinema IV, Guadalajara, México, June 2006. ↩
The cupletistas were the cuple dancers. The cuple is the contradiction resulting from traditionalism and modernity in Spain from the earliest part of the twentieth century. Its musical source comes from nineteenth-century Spain, and its etymology is from the French word couplet. ↩

Additional Research Reports

The Trace of the Feminine in Chilean Silent Era

By Mónica Villarroel

Translated by José Miguel Palacios

In Chile, the presence of the feminine world was prominent both in the film chronicles of the silent era and in censorship. It was a common practice for exhibitors to invite the press and local elites to the first screenings, including authorities and ladies and gentlemen of high society, as recounted in numerous publications. Lucila Azagra, in a chronicle titled “Los gustos del público” [The Tastes of Audiences], referred to the heterogeneity of preferences that film spectators had toward 1918, distinguishing three groups: “el [público] de los que en las obras buscan ideas, el de los que buscan pasión, y finalmente el de los que al arte le piden acción o movimiento” [the audience that looks for ideas in the works, the one that looks for passion, and finally, the one that demands action and movement from art]. The first group is the most reduced and was formed by thinkers, sociologists, and men of literature. The second group was formed mainly by women; and the third one, the largest, “el grueso del público” [the majority of viewers], was formed by “las gentes vulgares de todas las edades y condiciones, por los obreros, por los estudiantes, por los agricultores, por los comerciantes, por los empleados de oficina, por los industriales y, en general, por todas aquellas personas de alta o baja cuna que no han logrado intelectualizarse lo bastante” (…) [the vulgar peoples of all ages and conditions, by workers, students, farmers, businessmen, office employees, industrial workers, and in general, by all those who, whether high or low class, have not been cultured enough], according to the La Semana Cinematográfica (“Editorial” n.p.). I highlight here the existence of a woman chronicler and the explicit reference to gender as a way to classify spectators.

On another hand, one of the early manifestations of censorship was the one exercised by the Liga de Damas Chilenas [Chilean Ladies League], an organization established in Santiago on July 10, 1912, whose first task was to “combatir la licencia de los espectáculos y pronto organizó una Comisión de Censura Teatral compuesta de señoras y caballeros de alto prestigio social y de reconocida ilustración y experiencia” [dispute the licensing of spectacles. Soon it organized a Commission of Theatre Censorship formed by ladies and gentlemen of high social prestige and recognized culture and experience], according to El Eco de La Liga de Damas Chilenas (1915, 2). The League, supported by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, realized a systematic campaign in its newspaper, El Eco de la Liga de Damas [The Echo of the Ladies League], later called La Cruzada [The Crusade]. Amalia Errázuriz de Subercaseaux was designated president. Her goal was to censor those works deemed immoral in Santiago and nationally. The act of censorship was exercised by the Committee of Censorship, which evaluated theater and film productions. Three categories were established, first in relation to theater, but they were later applied to cinema as well: “buenas o aceptables para niñas; regulares o aceptables solo para señoras y malas e inconvenientes para unas y otras” [good or acceptable for girls, regular or acceptable only for married women, and bad and inconvenient for both], according to El Eco de La Liga de Damas Chilenas (1915, 2).

The League watched over the cinema theaters, especially those frequented by the elite of Santiago: the Royal (or Kinora) and the Unión Central. Besides direct censorship, they published texts that condemned cinema. In June 1917, for instance, they reprinted an article from El Mercurio that warned the reader about the dangers of cinema, stressing how inconvenient it is for women and children to see films.

On the other hand, local production was small if compared to the abundance of foreign films on national screens. Commissioned works were a common practice, and so was the alternation of fiction and documentary by production companies that were equally devoted to both modes. Family companies and the arrival of immigrant technicians marked the realization of local productions, from the Lumière cameramen to the Italian Salvador Giambastiani Dall’Pogetto, with a special predominance of French technicians. Giambastiani founded the Chile Film Co. (also cited as Giambastiani Film), whose first production was, in 1917, La agonía de Arauco o el olvido de los muertos [The Agony of Arauco or the Forgetting of the Dead], directed by his wife Gabriela von Bussenius Vega, sister of the cameraman Gustavo von Bussenius, who worked with the Italian. When Giambastiani died Gustavo and Gabriela took over the company.

I also highlight Rosario Films, a company that produced two of the few films directed by women, Malditas sean las mujeres [Damned be women] (1925) and La envenenadora [The Poisoner] (1929), both by Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna.

It is worth mentioning that in Chilean fiction film, melodrama stands out as the main genre. Nonetheless, the films’ scarcity should also be noted. The aesthetics were realist and naturalist, with some stories based on national heroes where a stereotyped criollismo anchored in nationalism was dominant, a tendency that coexists with cosmopolitan desires manifested mainly in documentary. As of now, eighty-two fiction films and two animated works are known to have been produced between 1910 and 1934, of which only three complete features are extant: El húsar de la muerte, 1925; Canta y no llores, corazón, 1925; and El Leopardo, 1927, as well as fragments from Vergüenza (1925) and Manuel Rodríguez, the first fiction film, dated on 1910. Out of all these productions, four were made by women directors Gabriela von Bussenius Vega, Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna, and Alicia Armstrong de Vicuña.

It should be noted too that the construction of the nation in documentary images of Chilean silent cinema alludes to an aesthetic associated with the oligarchy. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the emphasis is on the display of the lives of aristocrats, military, civilian and religious authorities, with their quotidian rites, parties, and social events. The learning of French, first, and English, secondly, constituted an element of social distinction between the elites and the emergent middle classes in Chile. This was the case of writers such as Inés Echeverría, Iris, who published in French. Likewise, Paris was the main reference for the elite, as the model of modern metropolis and avant-garde. Women fashion from Europe can be seen in the few documentary images that have survived, even though the presence of women in views and actualities is rare.

Bibliography

Bongers, Wolfgang, María José Torrealba and Ximena Vergara, eds. Archivos i letrados. Escritos sobre cine en Chile: 1908-1940. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2011.

El Eco de La Liga de Damas Chilenas vol. 3, no. 57 (1 January 1915): 2.

Jara Donoso, Eliana. Cine mudo chileno. Santiago: Self-published, 1994.

“Editorial.” La Semana Cinematográfica 2 (16 May 1918): n.p.

Vicuña, Manuel. La belle époque chilena: alta sociedad y mujeres de élite en el cambio de siglo. Santiago: Editorial Catalonia, 2010.

Villarroel, Mónica. “El mapa del cine temprano en Chile: hacia una configuración del asombro en el contexto latinoamericano.” Revista Aisthesis 52 (2012): 9-30.

Women in Argentine Silent Cinema

By Moira Fradinger

Mi Derecho (1920), written by María B. de Celestini. Courtesy of the Cinemateca Argentina.

María B. de Celestini’s son in Mi Derecho (1920). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Argentina

Mi Derecho (1920), written by María B. de Celestini. Courtesy of the Cinemateca Argentina.

Bibliography

Argentina National Census 1914. Redalyc vol. 5, no. 8 (October 2008): 83-94.

“Blanco y Negro.” Rev. La Patria (9 November 1919): 5.

Caneto, Guillermo, et al. Historia de los primeros años del cine en la Argentina, 1985-1910. Buenos Aires: Fundación Cinemateca Argentina, 1996.

Couselo, Jorge M., et al. Historia del Cine Argentino, Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1984.

“El Censo de 1909 de la ciudad de Buenos Aires.” Redalyc vol. 5, no. 7 (April 2008): 109.

Finkielman, Jorge. The Film Industry in Argentina: an Illustrated Cultural History. Jefferson: McFarland, 2004.

Marrone, Irene. Imagenes del Mundo Historico: Identidades y Representacions En El Noticiero y El Documental En El Cine Mudo Argentino. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblios, 2003.

Sendrós, Paraná. “La Celestini hizo un solo film.” Ámbito Financiero (4 April 1988): n.p.

Zago, Manrique, ed. Cine Argentino: Crónica de 100 años. Buenos Aires: Manrique Zago Ediciones, 1997.

by Kyna Morgan, Aimee Dixon

Maria P. Williams (d/p/a) portrait My Work and Public Sentiment

Maria P. Williams portrait in book My Work and Public Sentiment (1916).

In the first decades of the twentieth century, five African-American women filmmakers helped to establish the US cinema industry and to better the representation of African-Americans on film. Hailing from different regions of the country, from Kansas City, Missouri, to Montclair, New Jersey, to Washington DC, they were geographically separated but united by a belief that the motion picture was socially transformative. Some tried to make a living for a short time from their film work while others seemed to have made one motion picture and disappeared from the field altogether. These women wanted to present a vision of the life of African Americans that was authentic, and in attempting this they were often entrepreneurial, arranging theatrical exhibition and distribution or taking film prints directly to audiences themselves in order to reach more communities. Apart from their risk-taking and trailblazing, their efforts to shift the prevailing view of African Americans is what binds them, marking their achievements as emblematic of a movement to establish the validity of the lives of African Americans. While the recent wave of interest in African-American director-producer Oscar Micheaux and the “race movie” makers of his time has helped to confirm and affirm the existence of black independent filmmakers in the silent era, the resulting research largely uncovered only the men involved.

Taking a second look, however, we discover not just African-American giants but women involved with their husbands in creative teamwork—best exemplified by Micheaux’s second wife, Alice B. Russell, and Eslanda Robeson, the wife of singer, stage and screen actor, and activist Paul Robeson.

Who was the “First” African American Female Filmmaker?

Eslanda Robeson. Courtesy of Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

However, with the exception of Eloyce King Patrick Gist, who has received some critical attention for her work making 16mm educational religious shorts and Zora Neale Hurston, known primarily because of her work as a writer and ethnographer, African-American women filmmakers have not come to the attention of historians. Yet in their own time the achievement and consequently the attribute “first woman filmmaker” was important to the African-American press. The press claimed on separate occasions a year apart that both Tressie Souders and Maria P. Williams, also both from Kansas City, Missouri, should be acknowledged as the “first.”

It could also be argued that the first female filmmaker of African-American descent was Madame E. Touissant Welcome, born Jennie Louis Van Der Zee, sister of famed photographer James Van Der Zee. She directed a film of black soldiers from World War I, part of a twelve-part documentary produced in partnership with her husband, E. Touissant Welcome, for the Touissant Motion Picture Exchange (Dixon 20). Thus, in retrospect we see not just individuals but a group of women, all breaking barriers of different kinds.

Eslanda Robeson, Borderline (1929). Courtesy of Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

That the black community pinned their hopes on such women is suggested by the title of a 1921 article in The Competitor: “Our Growing Importance in the Amusement World.” Here, author Birdie Gilmore is mentioned as having had her Jungle God produced by the Delsarte Film Company and reference is made to another story accepted by the Metro Company (38). In 1915, the Chicago Defender mentions the “three-reel drama” Shadowed by the Devil in their section “Among the Movies” (5). The feature-length Shadowed by the Devil was the only product of Chicago’s Unique Film Company, which may have been founded by husband and wife producers. Mrs. M. Webb is the source of the original story for the film directed by her husband, Miles M. Webb (Sampson, 183). Considered together, Tressie Souders, Maria P. Williams, Eloyce King Patrick Gist, Alice B. Russell, Eslanda Robeson, Mrs. M. Webb, Birdie Gilmore, Madame E. Touissant Welcome, and Zora Neale Hurston all deserve recognition and a firm place in the history of silent cinema.

Drusilla Dunjee Houston’s 1902 Answer to Dixon and Griffith

Drusilla Dunjee Houston, who wrote a screenplay she titled “Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob,” should also be added to this group as an African-American woman who wanted to make a difference in the era of the silent film. Houston’s screenplay, most likely the earliest African-American response to Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), but never produced as a motion picture, represents one woman’s almost decade-long documentation of the destructive race-based social ideas espoused by Thomas Dixon in his novels, staged plays, and later The Birth of a Nation. These ideas represented a violent social stratification taking root in the American West and throughout the country.

The recent repatriation to the US of 35mm prints of Oscar Micheaux’s silent-era Within Our Gates (1920) and Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), from archives in Spain and Belgium respectively, has helped to revive historical interest in early African-American independent filmmaking, as documented in the Oscar Micheaux and His Circle touring catalogue (xxiii). These fortunate discoveries have also inspired new hope that more motion pictures, if only in fragments, may be found. We continue to search for clues to the existence of other “lost” titles as well as evidence that helps us to fill in the sketchy figures of these women who took up producing, acting, directing, and writing in an earlier age of institutionalized racism.

by Kay Armatage, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier

How would women’s film history be written if there were no women filmmakers? This problem is not entirely hypothetical in the case of Canada because Canadian film history cannot be centered on film production, the model of so many other national film histories, because there was relatively little film production in Canada in the first decades. The dearth of Canadian domestic film production, whether with men or women in creative control, however, stands in stark contrast to a rich film-going culture in the silent era in Canada. The possibility of a history of Canadian women filmmakers from the silent era thus grapples with the processes that integrated moving pictures into the Canadian social formation, despite their imported status, most notably from the U.S. Because of this foundation of “history from below” rather than from the motion picture studio “down,” the Canadian Women’s Film History Project provides a significant and atypical historiographical intervention in the Women Film Pioneers Project as well as film history generally (Morris 1978; Lacasse 1988; Gaudreault et al. 1996). In order to study the particularities of the Canadian case, the project inverts traditional power dynamics between production and consumption, filmmaking and film-going, and film as an aesthetic expression of authorship versus film as a popular pastime.

Film and film-going made the modernity of urban life a legible, everyday practice. Within film studies, this “modernity thesis” is now a core problematic, articulating a significant shift in social relations, perception, and interpretation in the late nineteenth century as reflected and heightened in the swift rise of film-going in the early twentieth century (Keil, 2004,; Gunning, 1989, 51). The crux of gender in the emergence of popular culture is central, often distinguishing a film studies approach from overlapping historical and sociological analyses of industrialization or urbanization (Friedberg 1994; Rabinovitz 1998).

In the Canadian case, the question of how the Dominion of Canada incorporated women into the social nexus makes particularly evident how gender was entangled with the rise to mass awareness in everyday life of modernity and modernism, nation and nationalism, secular commerce and consumption. The limitations of focusing on women creative producers have already come to the fore in the U.S. Women Film Pioneers Project, with so many still-unaccounted for workers, even as archival work on women in early Hollywood continues. The limitations of implicit auteurism become more clear after retrieving a wealth of work on women directors, writers, and producers. As it explores other parts of the world, the Women Film Pioneers Project has the potential to explore these conventional categories. It is timely to recognize that such an auteurist framework would never have sufficed in the historical case of Canada, which is one way the Canadian Women Film History Project plays an important role in global cultural history.

Map of present day Canada.

Starting from outside the dominance of Hollywood studios as a research site, this project treats film production as inseparable from women’s wider social place. There were a few women film producers (Nell Shipman, Dorothea Mitchell), but they must be considered in relation to women as consumers in the audience, as reformers and parents in local institutions, and as workers in regional film “showmanship” and local distribution. Often in conflicting ways, women worked to articulate the relation of film to the social, making the global technological and commercial product part of local and regional culture. This cultural work took place primarily in the metropolitan cities of Toronto (Ontario) and Montréal (Québec), and is significantly at odds with the way in which Canadian culture has been constructed in the North American imagination as pastoral and incorruptible—unlike the blighted American urban experience. Urban modernity is as important in Canada as in other national film histories, although less easily cast in terms of race, mass immigration, or secular urbanization. Specifying Canadian inflections in issues of ethnicity, secularization, and industrialization in relation to women’s social place will highlight regional sensitivity in the emergence of mass culture. Thus we have organized our approach regionally as follows:

English Canada

poster The Girl From God's Country (1921) Nell Shipman (a/w/d), BSU

Poster, Nell Shipman’s The Girl From God’s Country (1921). Courtesy of Boise State University.

The key case from English Canada is that of Nell Shipman, the director, writer, and lead actor of the silent-era “God’s Country” films. Shipman is a challenging case, for she left Canada as an adolescent and made her career as an actor, independent producer, and director in the U.S. Nevertheless her films were set in a mythical Canadian wilderness, “God’s Country,” and she has been claimed as Canadian by indigenous scholars. Capitalizing on popular literary trends that highlighted the exotic Canadian northern pastoral wilderness, Shipman interlaced traditional tropes of the connection between women, nature, and animals with the heroic exploits of women figures of the cinematic serial queen adventurers. Distributed through commercial film channels even after her studio career ended, Shipman’s films are linked firmly to modernity. Many important women in the early American film history were Canadian-born. Most notably, the local roots and family connections of Mary Pickford and Marie Dressler were well-known and heavily promoted as home-grown movie stars in their heydays. Both continue to be celebrated in their hometowns, although more for their starring role than for their work behind the screen. Pickford received a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 1999 in her hometown of Toronto while Dressler’s hometown of Cobourg hosts a museum and annual silent film festival in her honor.

Toronto, Ontario

In the Canadian province of Ontario, there was no production “center,” precisely because domestic filmmaking was virtually non-existent. Yet Ontario was a center of sorts, at least within the domestic context. It was one of the two most populous provinces at the turn of the century in Canada, and was a major hub of manufacturing and finance for the country. Ontario’s proximity to American production centers and its colonial ties to Great Britain add a dimension of complexity to the context of film reception. Although Ontario film audiences were typically dependent on producers from other nations to supply cinematic representations of themselves and the rest of the world, those same audiences looked for ways to reassert their own centrality both to the images on the screen and to the building of their nation. Ontario therefore represents an important instance of how, in a colonial environment, cinema comes to construct an imagined community through foreign-produced images that delineate local identities.

Canada’s early film industry was essentially devoted to exhibition and distribution, with local views and newsreel services providing almost the entirety of commercial film production. Ray Lewis was editor of the Canadian Moving Picture Digest from 1918, just after its creation, until her death in 1954 (Pelletier and Moore, 2006). Lewis was the link between head offices and exhibitors across the country, editor of the only national film trade paper at the time. With Canada’s film business dependent on communication and distribution networks, Lewis was as prominent as the presidents of theatre chains and Hollywood franchises and one of the most important individuals in the Canadian film industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout her career as a film industry journalist, she used the Digest to advocate more screen time for Canadian and British films, lobby and motivate independent exhibitors, organize minority shareholders, and generally support greater independence from Hollywood. In her editorials and reporting, but equally in simply keeping a Canadian film trade-paper viable and in print, Lewis was an early agent in distinguishing Canadian film culture from American norms. According to the Canadian Moving Picture Digest in 1940, she was one of two charter women members of the Canadian Picture Pioneers.

Women also played vital ancillary roles in distribution and exhibition. According to Paul Moore’s unpublished summary of Toronto women exhibitors, 1912 – 1924, at least twenty women theatre owners or managers, eighteen women musicians or pianists in theatres, fifty-seven women stenographers or secretaries in film exchanges, and forty women clerks, cashiers, or bookkeepers in film exchanges. The highest paid women workers were musicians, with Lillian Whitney, organist at the Strand, earning up to 2500$ per year. Yet the average women’s wage in the film industry was only 400$ annually, in comparison with the average men’s yearly wage of 1100$. This contrasts sharply with the highest men’s wages in the Canadian film industry, up to 30,000$ annually for each Allen Brother and N.L. Nathanson at Famous Players.

French Canada

Universal Moving Pictures, Montréal, QC (1913). McMC

Universal Moving Pictures, Montréal, QC (1913). Courtesy of the McCord Museum of Canadian History.

Québec represents an exception to received ideas about the Canadian film industry, since in the silent era moving pictures were actually produced there on a relatively large scale. By the early 1920s, organizations like the Associated Screen News and Léo-Ernest Ouimet’s Specialty Film Import were releasing new films on a weekly basis (Morris 1978; Lacasse 1988). Like most Canadian producers, however, these organizations largely conceded the fiction film market to foreign producers. As a result, the vast majority of films produced in Québec were actualities, newsreels, travelogues, industrial and sponsored films – all genres tending to dispense with the creative functions (screenwriters, actors) usually filled by women. Still, as Jocelyne Denault has demonstrated, the production of these films relied on the work of many women whose names unfortunately have not been recorded (Denault 1996). The women who worked on the few fiction films produced in Québec in the silent era have fared slightly better: the names of Emma Gendron and Marguerite Marquis (screenwriters) as well as Estelle Bélanger (actress) have been retrieved by historians. Many more Québécoises are known for their work within the US film industry: Florence LaBadie and Pauline Garon, both fairly prominent actresses in the 1910s and 1920s, had roots in Montréal, while one bona fide star, Norma Shearer, grew up in the wealthy city of Westmount, a predominantly English suburb of Montréal. (Jacobs and Braum, 1976).

Montréal, Québec

Universal Exchange, Montréal, QC (1915). McMC

Universal Exchange, Montréal, QC (1915). Courtesy of the McCord Museum of Canadian History.

In terms of distribution and exhibition, women were regularly employed in clerical positions by distributors, as demonstrated by an exceptional series of photographs taken in Universal’s Montréal bureau in 1913. Exhibitors also routinely employed women as ticket sellers and ushers. A few women managed to follow in the footsteps of pioneer exhibitor Marie de Kerstrat to reach more prominent positions in this predominantly male industry. Pianist Vera Guilaroff was one of most celebrated film accompanists in Montréal. In small-town Rivière-du-Loup, Yvonne Giguère (Mrs. Lucide Bertrand) was involved in the exhibition business from the 1910s until the 1970s, both as manager and owner of the landmark Théâtre Princesse – possibly the oldest Québec film theatre still in operation today.

Paradigm Development

First and most broadly, the Canadian Women’s Film History Project is engaged in researching the social history of gender in Canadian modernity through film and film-going. This theoretical concern is approached iteratively and collaboratively, building upon case histories of specific women, places, and practices. The Canadian Women’s Film History Project brings together disparate cases to begin exploring the common grounds of a shared problematic, and thus a possible new paradigm.

See also: May Watkis

by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Karen Ward Mahar

By operating traveling movie shows, managing nickelodeons and neighborhood theatres, playing musical accompaniments to films, selling tickets, and singing illustrated songs, thousands of pioneering women, long neglected in published histories, made vital contributions to the development of film exhibition throughout the silent film era. How did female exhibitors gain a foothold in the business in the first thirty years of film history, and why were all but the ubiquitous girl at the box office marginalized? Professionalization, at least in the US film industry, was a gendered process that negatively affected women, and eventually created a masculinized industry. Despite their eviction from picture palace management, women would nevertheless continue to work in all areas of theatres and would remain important as small town and rural exhibitors throughout Hollywood history.

When and How Women Became Film Exhibitors

Nickelodeon store show 1920s main entrance

Nickelodeon store show main entrance, c. 1920s. Private Collection.

While many of the earliest movie shows were incorporated into urban vaudeville bills, itinerant exhibitors, some of whom were female, took film shows on the road, appearing in small town opera houses and church halls. Fannie Shaw “Harris” Cook and husband Bert Cook played villages in central New York State and northern New England with their Cook and Harris High Class Moving Picture Company from 1903 to 1911; French-born Marie de Kerstrat and her son took a movie show from the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis to towns across Quebec. Sophie Hancock and Annie Holland were among women who operated Bioscope shows touring English fairgrounds.¹ There were probably many other women like them, but it was not because film exhibition was an entirely new field and therefore ungendered. The skill required to run a film projector was already masculinized. The Latin-derived names of the first film machines—Kinetoscope, Vitascope, and Kineoptikon—suggest an association with science and technology, traditionally masculine areas of expertise. However, the business of running a small retail, entertainment, or service establishment was not as severely gender-typed. Women had headed troupes of actors and traveling companies from the middle of the nineteenth century, and women business owners can be traced back to colonial times.

Outside of a Bioscope theater. Private Collection.

Why did women go into film exhibition? Some had a family background in the amusement business, or were already performers; others sought a means to support children or family. A few women were single, but most were either widows with children or associates with spouses, parents, or siblings in a family operation. Fannie Cook was determined to take a full partner’s role, assuring Bert as they discussed starting a moving picture show of their own in fall 1903 (following her recovery from the birth of their child):

I’ll tell you what we will do, Sweetheart, when I get to working. I will pay every cent that is due on the machine, so that it is all paid up by November, and you can lay your money away to put into films, then you and I will take in what fairs we can get and next winter you and I will be in shape to start out for ourselves. Then we will be our own bosses and you can be handling your own door money and we can’t help but make money. Only do as I tell you to, Sweetheart, and you will see that when winter starts in you and I will have something of our own. That’s the only way to make money and you can just be sure that I am the little Girl that is in for making money.²

Advertisement for exhibitors Bert and Fannie Cook.

Advertisement for exhibitors Bert and Fannie “Harris” Cook. Private Collection.

Nevertheless, like most working women, Fannie Cook faced many obstacles in entering the new field. Three managers of itinerant movie shows with whom Bert interviewed for projectionist jobs firmly rejected Fannie’s request to work and travel with their companies, arguing that it would be highly improper. Ironically, the most vociferous critic was Mrs. Alonzo Hatch, manager of the Alonzo Hatch Electro Photo Musical Company, who needed assistance while her husband recovered from burns sustained in a projector fire. When Bert rejected her solo offer and insisted that if not hired as a pair, the Cooks would form their own troupe, she responded tauntingly that he could never raise the two thousand dollars the new venture required. “To barn storm it I would advise you never to start.” To flaunt her own success, she ended her reply, “Well I must go to the Opera House. Business has been great.”³ Fannie and Bert Cook thus decided to mount a traveling show of their own.

Even as a partnership, the division of labor employed by the Cook and Harris traveling exhibition company reflected traditional gender roles as they were expressed in small business—Bert was the manager of the troupe of four performers and an advance man; he also served as projectionist and occasional soloist. Fannie was musical director, accompanist, ticket seller, and treasurer. A similar gendered division of labor was seen in stationary nickelodeons; while the artists and even business managers were often female, the projectionists were always male.

Nickelodeon, Pittsburgh, 1907. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

A DC theater, c. 1900-1915. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By the time that Fannie and Bert gave up itinerant shows in 1911 to operate a nickelodeon, Fannie enjoyed considerable company with regard to other female exhibitors. Women appeared in 1907 in the very first pages of the Moving Picture World’s running account of buyers and sellers of nickelodeons. While always a minority, perhaps two to five percent of the total, the names of women in exhibition appeared with regularity over the next several years in published records of theatre property transfers. A sampling of the Moving Picture World from February to December 1909 reveals that there were female exhibitors in urban centers like Baltimore, Boston, Brooklyn, and Chicago, as well as in smaller towns, like Ardmore, Oklahoma; Connersville, Indiana; Cooperstown, New York; Maitland and Warrensboro, Missouri; Ottawa, Kansas; Paw Paw, Michigan; and the Illinois towns of Abingdon, Kankakee, and Leroy. In 1909, Mrs. F. F. Fuller bought all the moving picture theatres in Hartford City, Indiana.⁴ A survey of US film trade journals from 1907 to 1918 finds mention of nearly 140 women who were primary purchasers of theatres.⁵ They were a small minority of the approximately 12,000 theatre owners, but were nevertheless discussed in print as colleagues. The six female projectionists noted in the trades, however, were reported as curiosities. Perhaps hundreds more unmentioned women were key to movie theatres as participants in family businesses, partners, or employees holding major responsibilities.

Intriguing for further investigation to enrich our changing view of early cinema is the fact that these women were involved in exhibition during the period when theatre managers exercised great power over the creation of the show. Exhibitors not only selected what films to rent or purchase, but arranged the two-to-fifteen-minute films into programs. “If a piece grows dull at any point,” noted the Moving Picture World in 1907, “the manager can take a pair of shears and cut out a few yards to liven it up.”⁶ They chose the musical accompaniment, sound effects, “illustrated songs,” and other live entertainment. In early days they often interpreted the films for their patrons by providing a lecture to accompany the screening. The movies themselves were only one component of an exhibitor’s production of a sometimes quite elaborate and lengthy multimedia “show.”

What did the presence of female exhibitors mean to the industry? Because much more research needs to be done on exhibition, we do not know enough yet about what male exhibitors thought of their female colleagues. Most available information comes from the pages of movie theatre trade journals that, while aimed at a male-dominated readership, were fully engaged in the female-friendly project of social uplift. Press coverage of exhibitor politics, for example, depicted a high-testosterone, acrimonious milieu in which women exhibitors may well have felt out of place. Exhibitors organized themselves into a trade association at an early date, but getting them to march in the same direction was akin to herding cats. During the campaign to elect a president of the Motion Picture Exhibitor’s League of America in 1913, the challenger to the incumbent was a politically ambitious theatre owner from Fort Worth, Texas. He showed up at the annual convention “in full cowboy regalia, with his six-guns strapped on him,” which he patted menacingly. A New York exhibitor and former prizefighter named Sam Trigger supported his candidacy. But despite superior weaponry, the Texan lost.⁷

While it appears that female exhibitors were notably absent from the highest ranks of internal exhibitor politics, it also appears that the industry’s concerns over outside censorship gave women influence in the business. Women were believed to be morally superior to men, thanks to lingering remnants of the nineteenth-century ideology of “true womanhood.” The mere presence of women could cleanse an audience, a business, or an industry, as it did vaudeville in the 1890s. Impresarios continued to exploit true womanhood after the turn of the century, and we can see evidence of this in the world of film exhibition. The trade journals made enthusiastic note when social reformer Jane Addams installed a movie theatre in the Hull House settlement in 1907.⁸ Others female exhibitors facilitated public dialogue about political and racial issues. Amanda Thorpe, a forty-five-year-old widow and film exhibitor from Norwalk, Ohio, came to Richmond, Virginia, seeking virgin territory in which to open movie shows. With the financial backing of local vaudeville impresario Jake Wells, in 1907 she established the Dixie, the city’s first nickelodeon, and then in 1914 the Hippodrome in Richmond’s Jackson Ward, center of the segregated city’s African-American social life. She cooperated closely with the black community, arranging with the black newspaper the Richmond Planet to publish the novelization of the Thanhouser Company serial The Million Dollar Mystery while she played the weekly episodes at her theatre. Thorpe also offered the Hippodrome auditorium as a Sunday meeting hall for civil rights activists.⁹ In New Haven, Connecticut, in 1914, African-American exhibitor Anna L. Tucker and her husband, J. H. B. Tucker (publishers of a Black community newspaper, The Plain Dealer), opened the Pacific Theatre for local Black audiences. When the Universal exchange refused to place ads in their paper supporting the film showings, the Tuckers responded with a scathing editorial on their ill treatment, resulting in a flurry of lawsuits and trade journal publicity.¹⁰ The Tuckers were not the only African Americans who found a niche in the Black community running theatres. In Chicago, Maria P. Williams was assistant manager of the motion picture theatre for which her husband Jesse L. Williams worked general manager.

Bijou Theatre. Private Collection.

The first female exhibitor celebrated by the film exhibitor trade journals was Josephine Clement, profiled by three different trade journals, the Nickelodeon, the Moving Picture World, and Motion Picture News, between 1910 and 1913. The Nickelodeon lauded Clement’s refined management of Boston’s B. F. Keith Bijou Theatre first when it noted her theatre’s “wholesome condition” and “spick and span attendants” in August 1910. Importantly, the Nickelodeon noted that Clement successfully raised the price of admission to twenty cents.¹¹ When the Moving Picture World profiled Clement a few months later, the journal attributed her success to the fact that she was a woman: “As we have said before, and as we say again this week elsewhere, the influence of good women in the moving picture field is of incalculable advantage and value.” Clement’s gender allowed her to “aestheticalize [sic] the moving picture house,” and distinguished her from “ignorant, obstinate commercialism of a short-sighted, money-grabbing” exhibitor, the type who “unfortunately rul[ed] the roost.”¹² Becoming perhaps the most renowned exhibitor of her era, and publishing a book Standardizing the Picture Theater, Clement once again became the object of praise in 1913, when Motion Picture News gushed over her refined employees. Even the cashier is

not the giggling, gum-chewing kind;… the man at the ticket receiving box is most gentlemanly; the woman in charge of the coat room is a lady who might well grace a drawing-room; the ushers, all women, are courteous and thoughtful, and the show itself is beyond criticism. There is no comedian, with his disgusting and stale bowery jokes; the illustrated song is not twanged out to a rag-time tune… And as to the pictures themselves, not one is presented that has not some strong lesson to teach.¹³

For their part, female exhibitors really did appear to be interested in cleansing the movies. In 1911, when the Moving Picture World related the surprising story that a film exhibitor filled the empty pulpit of a vacationing Baptist minister, it was, of course, a woman who did so. Miss Ida Mayor, an elocutionist and lecturer as well as a film exhibitor, claimed that her sermon-like shows were “carefully planned to elevate the spectators.”¹⁴ When several women in Los Angeles banded together in 1912 to buy an $80,000 theatre, it was to show “only pictures with real educational or artistic value.”¹⁵

Female theatre owners could not exist in a neutral space since observers successfully played on the belief that women naturally uplifted the industry. But ironically, both male and female exhibitors also employed women for their ability to allure. The most famous example was the ubiquitous “girl in the box office.” It was considered good business to employ a pretty girl to sit in the ticket booth out in front of the theatre and attempt to attract passersby. Manuals for new exhibitors on how to run a theatre instructed them to carefully select a cashier as “the girl’s appearance and dress, her voice and her speech, her glance and her manner” are all noticed by patrons. “The impression she makes is lasting” wrote another, suggesting that a lovely box office attendant attracted like vibrant posters and shining marquee lights and distracted moviegoers from shabby theatre furnishings.¹⁶ The use of female employees to accomplish the contradictory goals of uplift and titillation increased as the theatres increased in size. Interestingly, female exhibitors seemed more likely to employ women. Clement was one of the first to use girl ushers, a common gimmick by the mid-1910s, and in 1918, Sara Maxon, the female manager of the 900-seat Ascher Brothers Theatre in Chicago, employed a seven-piece all-girl orchestra.¹⁷

When its doors opened in Los Angeles in 1912, the 900-seat Mozart Theatre incorporated some of the hallmarks of women’s film exhibition—attractive décor, cleanliness, enlightening programming and an all-female staff—including a policewoman, photoplayer operator, and Nellie Lee, the only female projectionist in town. A daring innovator, Mrs. Anna Mozart, the Mozart’s owner and manager, was considered by some to have been the first to show five- and six-reel motion pictures on a regular basis. When they married in 1898, Anna and her husband Edward Kuttner purchased a “French cinematograph” with the intention of exhibiting films in Washington State. Seasoned vaudevillians, the Kuttners owned and managed theatres in Elmira, New York, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, presenting live performance as well as motion pictures.¹⁸ Evoking nineteenth century lantern culture’s successful formula of education and entertainment while anticipating the art house cinema of future decades, the Mozart Theatre’s high-quality features, vivid travelogues, and Gaumont newsreels provided programs of exceptional interest and variety. It was considered highly unusual for a motion picture establishment to attract “automobile patronage” to the unlikely location of Grand Avenue and 7th Street, and for an audience to “break out into plaudits” for projected screen entertainment, but for several years Mrs. Anna Mozart attracted an appreciative, well-heeled audience of international luminaries, temporarily transforming a lackluster corner of downtown Los Angeles into a micro-cosmopolis.¹⁹

How Did Male Exhibitors View Their Female Colleagues?

We can start answering this question by considering what the trade journals themselves identified as the best practices of theatre exhibition in the silent era. A model theatre was 1) physically well-maintained, 2) drew an orderly audience, preferably the family trade, and 3) enjoyed consistently high attendance. Female exhibitors drew positive attention because their theatres scored high on all three qualities. In a few cases, women claimed that their sex was particularly well suited to film exhibition. When a journalist praised the female manager of the Lafayette Theatre in Washington DC for keeping her theatre especially clean, comfortable, and well-ventilated, she replied that “it is attention of this nature that is a strong point in a woman’s management of a picture house.”²⁰ Furthermore, families would naturally want to attend a nice, clean theatre. Women were assumed to come by these traits naturally, but male exhibitors could imitate them.

Apollo Theatre. Private Collection.

In 1925, when the manager of the large and impressive Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York, was asked what it took to run a picture palace, he cited qualities that could be defined as traditionally feminine: “The house manager of a big theatre is a combination of housekeeper, butler, host, and guardian of the property. His first duty is to see that his guests are happy and comfortable.”²¹ But part of this role implied crowd control. One exhibitor objected vigorously to female ushers on this point in particular, arguing that if a fight broke out, the women would be screaming and climbing over the seats.²² But more often women were admired for their allegedly innate ability to control the behavior of children, including rowdy adolescents. In 1924, exhibitor Janet Noon claimed she got off to a good start at her Schenectady theatre by making it known from the beginning that she would brook no “cutting up” by boys.²³ Ellen Mohrbacher, a young widow and mother of three who bought a small-town Oklahoma theatre in 1921, also put her foot down on the first day on the job. When a group of rowdy boys persisted in throwing popcorn and nuts, she turned the lights on, stood in front of them, and said, “I’m going to tell you just like it is… I want you to come in here and enjoy the show and be ladies and gentlemen so your fathers and mothers can enjoy the show, too… I’ve never been used to all this noise and I won’t have it, that’s all.” For the next thirty-five years she enforced her code of conduct by making “purposeful” trips down the aisle with her flashlight.²⁴ Twenty-year-old Nettie Hutchinson, who inherited the Idle Hour in Leon, Iowa, in 1920, rued that it had “become sort of a clubroom for the Younger Masculine Set,” but soon she drew a thriving family trade.²⁵

“Ladies Kindly Remove Your Hats” card, 1912. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Good attendance stemmed not only from an orderly audience but also from good showmanship. Showmanship required insight into human nature and human desires; in other words, it required intuition, a quality particularly associated with women. When the Exhibitor’s Trade Review asked a Belasco executive to define showmanship in 1925, he replied that it was “merely an applied knowledge of the strength and the weakness of human beings—of their likes and dislikes and of certain fundamental ideas that are common to us all.”²⁶ A good example of a female exhibitor using such insight was Theresa Nibler, profiled by the same trade journal in 1919. Having been promoted from box office girl to manager by the owner of the Electric Theatre in Springfield, Missouri, she observed that mothers hesitated to leave expensive baby carriages in the lobby. When she devised a way for women to bring their buggies into the auditorium, ticket sales rose. They rose again when she made an effort to reach farm families through direct mail advertising. She thought up all of her techniques, she said, while selling tickets in the box office and observing customers.²⁷

Gender and Exhibition under the Studio System

Women remained in exhibition in the 1920s, at which time the film production studios swiftly amassed theatre empires by building ornate urban picture palaces and purchasing established chains. How did this change the landscape for female exhibitors? Three specific questions come to mind: 1) What happened to women who wanted to enter the field when the picture palace upped the ante, requiring much greater outlays of capital, even in smaller towns? 2) Were female exhibitors, and their allegedly moral leadership, rendered obsolete as it became clear that the middle classes embraced the movies? 3) Were women seen as fit for the job of theatre manager as the vertically integrated studios increasingly controlled first-run theatres and attempted to professionalize exhibition on their own terms?

Bijou auditorium, 1910. Private Collection.

The first question concerns capital and credit. In the early 1910s, when theatres cost between $1,000 and $12,000 to open, the names of female exhibitors appeared in the trade journals with steady frequency. But by the mid-1920s, according to one trade journal, a new theatre cost upwards of $100,000.²⁸ Without knowing the exact numbers of women entering exhibition during this period, we can surmise that the most expensive first-run theatres were unlikely to be owned or run by women, as banks generally refused to grant women that level of credit. However, established female exhibitors and women in smaller towns probably experienced fewer obstacles in buying or renting larger theatres. Expansion wasn’t a problem for Ellen Mohrbacher, who ran the Savoy Theatre in a small town in Oklahoma. The twenty-nine-year-old widow, whose first-day-on-the-job speech cowed adolescent audiences into submission, was teaching music when two men approached her in 1921, wishing to sell her one of the only two movie theatres in town. She bought it, and despite an agricultural depression, the theatre did well. She easily gained building loans to expand for sound film in the late 1920s, and to expand again in 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression. Was she unusual? Apparently not; by 1940, women ran about ten percent of the movie theatres in Oklahoma, corresponding roughly to the proportion of women in exhibition during the nickelodeon era.²⁹

The second question concerns the fate of the woman exhibitor as an uplifter, since the middle classes wholeheartedly embraced the movies in the 1920s and the censorship threat seemed at bay. Did the female exhibitor bring anything of value to the industry in the 1920s? The answer is yes—but it was no longer morality and the family trade. The time-worn belief in female moral superiority all but vanished in the 1920s, but the belief that women drew the better-heeled did not. This was especially true if the woman herself came from the upper classes. An extreme example of the female-exhibitor-as-high-class magnet occurred when MGM entered exhibition. The expensive, 600-reserved-seat MGM Theatre premiered at Broadway and 46th Street in New York City in 1926. At this event, MGM vice-president Edward J. Bowes introduced the theatre’s manager, Gloria Gould, the 19-year-old granddaughter of (reviled) railroad tycoon Jay Gould. She was appointed to head a staff composed entirely of women. The married Gould had an infant daughter, and, according to the publicity surrounding her appointment, practiced one hour of Russian ballet a week. But it did not sound like Gould’s value stemmed from her ability to spend long hours at the office. According to one account, “Society will be well represented due to the fact that Gloria Gould is the managing directress; screen and stage stars and literary folk as well as civic and national officials will be in attendance. Society matrons and debutantes will act as ushers and program girls on the opening night.”³⁰

Loew’s Palace Theater in Washington DC. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Gloria Gould’s debut as manager of the MGM Theatre was obviously a publicity stunt. It does not answer our last question: what happened to female exhibitors as exhibition outlets were bought up by the large corporations that comprised the burgeoning studio system? What we find is not surprising. As theatres became part of the new vertically integrated film studios, studio heads imposed a masculinized model of professionalization that rendered obsolete the female-run theatre novelty. This is most clearly demonstrated by the Paramount Publix chain of theatres that sprang onto the scene in the mid-1920s. Publix quickly established a training school for theatre managers. Despite the long history of successful women in theatre administration, its definition of the necessary management qualifications now emphasized masculinized skills and traits. When the Exhibitor’s Trade Review first profiled the school in 1925, students were visiting a factory that produced projectors and learning about the technical intricacies of the various lamps.³¹ Although the era when the exhibitor doubled as projectionist was long over, the Publix school for managers defined this masculinized skill as part of a professional theatre manager’s training. Not surprisingly, photos of the first three classes of theatre managers reveal no women in the ranks, despite the continued emphasis on the need for exhibitors to understand human nature.³² One reason may be that Publix managers no longer needed to have their finger on the pulse of the local community (women were believed to know intuitively how to reach their neighbors). Within the Publix organization, exploitation ceased to be the sole responsibility of the individual exhibitor. Instead, four former theatre managers ran a central office in charge of advertising and publicity.³³

Did this mean that female exhibitors were squeezed out of jobs as movie theatre owners and managers? Our guess is sometimes yes, but mostly no. It is yes with regard to first-run theatres that were tightly controlled by the big, vertically-integrated companies that made up the studio system. It is no with regard to most theatres in the United States—smaller second- and third-run theatres that depended upon local community support. As long as running a neighborhood theatre was a small business—whether independent or franchised—there was room for female proprietors.

Female exhibitors can be compared to their colleagues in film production, who likewise appeared to flourish in the 1910s and disappear in the 1920s. Both occupied rising boats during the film industry’s high tide of emphasis on uplift before World War I, and both suffered when their fields professionalized, because professionalization is implicitly masculinization. But female exhibitors appeared to survive the 1920s much better than did their sisters in film production. This was because the chains of theatres controlled by the major studios did not completely eliminate the smaller neighborhood houses, and the most important factor for the presence of women was the size of the business enterprise.

Notes

1
Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1997; rpt. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Serge Duigou and Germain Lacasse, Marie de Kerstrat: L’Aristocrate du cinematographe (Quimer, France: Ressac, 1987); Vanessa Toulmin, “Women Bioscope Proprietors—Before the First World War,” in Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema, ed. John Fullerton (Sydney, Australia: John Libbey, 1998); Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
2
Fannie Cook to Bert Cook, 11 June 1903, Cook papers, file 1903 personal, New York State Historical Association.
3
Mrs. Alonzo Hatch to Bert Cook, 2 March 1905, Cook papers, file 1905 business, New York State Historical Association.
4
This conclusion is based on a reading of the Moving Picture World from 1907-1911; examples are taken from Moving Picture World (20 April 1907): 102; (26 June 1909): 875; and (August 1909): 196.
5
Max Alvarez, unpublished index of women in exhibitor trade journals, 1900-1918.
6
“The Nickelodeon,” Moving Picture World, 4 May 1907, 146.
7
Merritt Crawford, “The Organized Exhibitor,” Moving Picture World, 26 March 1927, 313.
8
Moving Picture World, 1 June 1907, 198; Billboard, 3 Aug. 1907, 119.
9
Motography, 12 October 1912, 304; “That Anti-Segregation Meeting,” Richmond (Va.) Planet, 27 March 1915; Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Celebrate Richmond Theater (Richmond: Ditz Press, 2001), 24–26.
10
Motion Picture News, 29 August 1914, 64, Alvarez n.p.
11
George J. Anderson, “The Case for Motion Pictures,” The Nickelodeon, 15 August 1910, 97.
12
“Mrs. Clement and Her Work,” Moving Picture World, 15 October 1910, 859.
13
“The Current Problem and Opportunity of the Moving Picture Show,” Motion Picture News, 11 January 1913, 20, qtd. in Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915. (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), 123.
14
“Observations by Our Man About Town,” Moving Picture World, 2 September 1911, 615.
15
“Los Angeles News,” Moving Picture World, 18 May 1912, 641.
16
Harold Franklin, Motion Picture Theater Management (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1927), 70, https://archive.org/details/motionpicturethe00haro/page/n7; Frank Ricketson, Management of Motion Picture Theaters (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1938), 137, qtd. in “The ‘Theater Man’ and ‘The Girl in the Box Office,” in Exhibition: The Film Reader, ed. Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 2001), 148.
17
“Ascher Brothers, Chicago, First in Their City to Have ‘The Female of the Species’ for Theater Manager,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 28 September 1918, 143.
18
Bowser 46-47; Jan Olsson, Los Angeles Before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905 to 1915 (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2008), 132-152.
19
“Premiere of Peck of Pickles,” Los Angeles Times, 7 August 1912, II5; “Labor Day at the Belasco,” Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1912, II5. See also “Success Hers in Woman’s New Field,” Los Angeles Times, 2 August 1913, III1; “Mrs. Kuttner, Veteran of Theater, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, 27 May 1952, 28.
20
Motion Picture News, 19 December 1914, 37.
21
John O’Neill, “The Patron is Right,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 26 December 1925, 33.
22
Monte W. Sohn, “Baker on Women,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 1 October 1921, 123.
23
“Janet Noon Makes Her Theatre Pay in Dimes,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 17 May 1924, 12.
24
Doris Henson Pieroth, “The Only Show in Town: Ellen Whitmore Mohrbacher’s Savoy Theatre,” The Chronicles of Oklahoma 60 (3): 268.
25
“Mere Girl Takes Man’s Job and Makes Idle Hour Most Attractive Theater,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 10 April 1920, 2144.
26
“Sebastian Defines True Showmanship,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 11 April 1925, 27.
27
“Theresa Nibler, Graduate from Box Office, Became Manager of the Electric,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 17 May 1919, 1838.
28
“What Should Your Theatre Cost to Build?” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 26 December 1925, 49.
29
Pieroth, “The Only Show in Town,” 269.
30
“Embassy Theater Will Be Watched by Exhibitors,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 29 August 1925, 35, 37.
31
“Theatre Managers’ School Visits Nicholas Power Plant,” Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 17 October 1925, 41.
32
John F. Barry, “Theatre Management,” Moving Picture World, 26 March 1927, 325.
33
Epes W. Sargent, “Exploitation: Its Beginning and Advance,” Moving Picture World, 26 March 1927, 288.

by Kristen Hatch

The finishing of pictures—the cutting and titling, has been, until quite lately, the most neglected branch of motion picture production. Nobody, with one or two conspicuous exceptions, paid any attention to it. It was a case of let Jakey cut the picture and Lizzie, the Typewriter, title it.

— Frank Woods, Moving Picture World (1917)

In 1926, the Los Angeles Times informed readers that “one of the most important positions in the motion-picture industry is held almost entirely by women” whose job it was to assemble “thousands of feet of film so that it tells an interesting story in the most straightforward manner” (B7). Assembling reels and cutting negatives was tedious work that often fell to young working-class women. However, out of the ranks of these film joiners and negative cutters emerged a handful of women who would help to develop the editing techniques that would become the hallmark of Hollywood’s visual style.

It is difficult to uncover much information about these early film editors. Some, like Dorothy Arzner, who cut Rudolph Valentino’s Blood and Sand (1922), moved up from editing to play a more visible role in Hollywood. But for the most part, the women who cut film in the silent era remained unacknowledged in film credits or the trade press. Their work was considered to be merely technical rather than creative, especially during a period when many directors oversaw the editing of their own films. At least once, however, the case was made for the special aptitude women had for editing, as when Florence Osborne wrote in a 1925 Motion Picture Magazine article:

Among the greatest ‘cutters’ and film editors are women. They are quick and resourceful. They are also ingenious in their work and usually have a strong sense of what the public wants to see. They can sit in a stuffy cutting-room and see themselves looking at the picture before an audience (665).

Dorothy Arzner. Courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television. Archive

Film credits that appeared on the 35mm prints themselves tell us very little about the role women played in editing early films, and what they do tell is often at odds with other sources. Jeanne Spencer, for instance, was cited as the editor of The Devil’s Passkey (1920), but according to the American Film Institute Online Catalog, later sources identify her as an assistant director on the film. She is credited as a “film cutter” on The Amateur Gentleman (1926) and as a “film editor” on Resurrection (1927). However, according to the Los Angeles Times, in 1927 director Edwin Carewe “personally edited Resurrection, assisted by Jean Spencer,” who is identified as “the young lady who was with von Stroheim in Foolish Wives and Greed and who cut The Iron Horse” (C17). Jeanne Spencer, however, is not listed in the American Film Institute online as either editor or assistant director on any of these films.

When an Editor was a Cutter

To further complicate matters, the term “editor” was used inconsistently during the silent era. The word “editor” might be used to describe the person who cut a film, or the one whose role it was to shape written stories into coherent, dramatic films. For instance, twenty-four-year-old Winifred Dunn became an editor for Metro in 1923, but she was only minimally involved in cutting film. Instead, she culled story proposals, reshaped novels and plays into film scripts and wrote intertitles. Unlike film cutters, the women who worked as “scenario editors”— Dunn, Hettie Gray Baker, and Katherine Hilliker—were often college educated and had worked in journalism or theatre before arriving in Hollywood. They also figured more prominently in publicity about the budding film industry than did film cutters.

Still from Intolerance, D.W. Griffith, 1916. Rose Smith (e).

Screenshot, Intolerance (1916), edited by Rose Smith.

The focus here is on the women who worked as film editors in the contemporary definition of the job and who, at the time, were commonly referred to as film “cutters” in the silent era. These are the women who screened dailies with directors and producers to help decide what footage should be used, what cut, and whether additional footage needed to be shot. They attended test screenings to determine where a film’s pacing flagged, where the drama might be heightened with a close-up, or where a sequence needed to be cut. One of the best sources of information about these women is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences interview with Margaret Booth, who began her career as a negative cutter for D. W. Griffith in 1915 and became one of Hollywood’s most influential cutters. Booth’s Academy interview includes detailed information about her years working for D. W. Griffith, Louis B. Mayer, and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio.

Margaret Booth: From D.W. Griffith to Irving Thalberg

Screenshot, Way Down East (1920).

Margaret Booth began work at D. W. Griffith’s Los Angeles studio shortly after graduating from Los Angeles High School in 1915. Her brother, Elmer Booth, had been a Broadway performer who acted in a number of Griffith’s films for the Reliance Company. When Elmer died in a car crash in 1915, Griffith gave a moving eulogy at the funeral, as Moving Picture World reported (289). Elmer’s sister Margaret was then urged to come to work for the studio. There, the only jobs available to an inexperienced, female high-school graduate were in the “laboratory,” where Booth soon began work as a film “joiner,” assembling two-hundred-foot rolls of film into thousand-foot reels. “[All] of the film,” she explains, “came in rolls and they had young girls… who assembled the reels and… [checked] to see that it was all right, that it was assembled right and there were no bad frames” (Behlmer 5).

D.W. Griffith and Rose Smith. Courtesy of The Family of Rose Holderness.

After working briefly as a film joiner, Booth was promoted to negative cutter, supporting Griffith’s cutters, Jimmie and Rose Smith who edited the positive print materials. Booth and Irene Morra, who would also become a cutter, then matched the corresponding frames in the negatives. In the years before it became common practice to print key numbers on the edges of film negatives, the job of negative cutter was difficult, time-consuming, and intricate, which perhaps explains why it fell so often to women. Key numbers, or edge numbers, finally made it easier to match each frame of a print to its corresponding frame on the negative. With no key numbers references, Booth and Morra had to match the negative to the positive print by eye. As she recalled to Kevin Brownlow: “It was very tedious work. Close-ups of Lillian Gish in Orphans of the Storm would go on for miles, and they’d be very similar” (Brownlow 1968, 302).

Margaret Booth.

In 1919, when Griffith closed down his Los Angeles studio and moved his production facilities to New York, Booth was out of a job. She worked briefly at Paramount, assembling tinted films for the studio before she found better work at Louis B. Mayer’s small studio, where she got her foot in the door when she helped one of Mayer’s cutters, Billy Shea, who was behind schedule and needed a negative cutter on a Sunday. Booth was soon hired to cut and assemble negatives at Mayer’s studio, where she worked exclusively with director John Stahl. She recalls that Stahl explained his principle of the close-up: “‘Always play it in the long shot unless you want to punctuate something’” (Atkins 52). Booth would repeat this advice in her 1938 essay, “The Cutter”: “A line spoken by a character in a long shot achieves much greater importance if it is stressed and underlined with a close up” (148). Booth would also describe rhythm as essential to editing and was convinced that film directors with talent used a distinctive rhythm in all of their motion pictures, and it was the job of the cutter to find that rhythm and bring it out in the editing. However, this was particularly difficult to do at a time when cutting was done by hand. In the years before the Moviola editing machine came on the market in 1924, film cutters ran the film on reels controlled by hand-cranked rewinds, through a small box that was set into a table and covered with frosted glass. A light bulb inside the box illuminated the film, which the cutter physically cut and glued back together by hand. “Before we had Moviolas for editing, we would run the pieces of film through our fingers. I would count, as if I were counting music, to give the scene the right tempo” (Champlin O1).

Booth appears to have developed the ambition to become a cutter while working with John Stahl. In her interview with Rudy Behlmer she explains that Stahl would always shoot five takes of a scene, print them all, and screen the dailies with her to tell her what he wanted to use from which take. Booth practiced editing with the unused footage from his films, staying at the studio late into the night to experiment with the outtakes. At one point, Stahl was unhappy with the way he had edited a scene, and used Booth’s footage instead (Behlmer 15). Soon, Booth was roughing out scenes for the director. In an interview she explains that beginning with The Dangerous Age (1923), she began to receive screen credit for editing his films, though she attributed the actual editing to Stahl; “I got credit for all the John Stahl pictures…. They just put my name there, but I was not a cutter there. John Stahl was really the cutter” (Atkins 52).

Poster, The Mysterious Lady (1928), edited by Margaret Booth.

In 1924, Louis B. Mayer merged with Metro-Goldwyn to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Booth moved from the Mission Road studios to Culver City. There she joined a staff of roughly two dozen cutters. Other than Booth and Blanche Sewell, all the cutters were men. At Mayer’s studio, Booth had worked exclusively with Stahl, but MGM had far too many motion pictures in production to permit one director to monopolize a cutter. She began to edit independently of Stahl, cutting The Enemy (1927) and The Mysterious Lady (1928) for Fred Niblo, A Lady of Chance (1928) for Robert Z. Leonard, Bringing Up Father (1928) for Jack Conway, and Telling the World (1928) for Sam Wood. When Stahl left MGM for Universal, he asked Booth join him. However, she saw more opportunity in working with Mayer and Irving Thalberg than in remaining under the wing of a single director. Years later, she would credit her career longevity to this decision. By contrast, Anne Bauchens would work almost exclusively with Cecil B. DeMille, from We Can’t Have Everything (1918) through The Ten Commandments (1956). While Booth became one of the most powerful editors in Hollywood, named by members of the profession as one of the top ten editors in the history of the medium, Bauchens’s career would remain subordinated to that of the notoriously extravagant director.

Anne Bauchens and Cecil B. DeMille. Courtesy of Brigham Young University.

At MGM, Booth enjoyed the excitement of editing and reediting films for test screenings. She recalls one instance in which she reedited an entire film in a single day; Irving Thalberg had told her that he wanted to preview an uncut film as early as that night. Thalberg, Bernie Hyman, and Harry Rapf were there, and when they left the screening room, they applauded her for successfully changing the picture for the preview (Behlmer 26). The pace at MGM kept up, and she describes being rushed to Burbank or Pasadena for a test screening, hurriedly assembling footage in the car, and delivering the final reel to the projectionist as the first reels were unrolling on the screen. After the screening, she would return to the studio and spend the night reediting the film (Behlmer 11).

Women Editors Make the Transition to Sound

The transition to sound presented a particular challenge to Booth and other cutters accustomed to working with silent film. Silent film gave cutters a fair amount of flexibility in selecting and juxtaposing footage. With the addition of a soundtrack, they lost that flexibility. As Booth explains the difference, with silent film “you could throw the film around in any way. When you got the sound track, you had to be careful that it was always in sync” (Atkins 52). Not the least of Booth’s worries, however, were the new experts—the men in the studio’s effects department, from RCA, or from Western Electric—who interfered with the editing of early sound films. Decades later, Booth remained resentful of their interference, complaining that “sound was their background, and they all knew everything. And they didn’t know a damn thing, but they ‘knew everything’” (Behlmer 37).

Erich von Stroheim and Viola Lawrence. Foolish Wives (1922). PCRK

Erich von Stroheim and Viola Lawrence on set of Foolish Wives (1922). Private Collection.

Despite the perceived need for experts to manage the new film technology, many of the earliest sound films were edited by women. Blanche Sewell edited MGM’s first sound film, as did Viola Lawrence for Goldwyn. Barbara McLean edited Mary Pickford’s first sound film, Coquette (1929). That same year, the Los Angeles Times explained how a Paramount cutter, Jane Loring, eliminated misspoken dialogue in Fast Company (1929):

During the showing of “rushes,” Jane Loring, the cutter on the film, observed that one of the minor actors in an important scene repeated a word twice during a speech. The scene was too well executed to take over. Hence, it was up to Miss Loring to eliminate the extra word from the sound track…. Miss Loring… cut out the offending word by chalking over with a black crayon the striations at that point. This eliminated all sound at the point on the track so that when the scene was again run in the projection room, there was a slight but not noticeable pause where the word was cut out (B9).

Jane Loring at work. Private Collection.

A number of the women who had helped to develop the craft of film editing enjoyed prominent positions in the film industry in the decades that followed. Booth became the supervising editor for MGM, overseeing the work of all the studio’s editors until 1969. She continued working freelance until the mid-1980s. Anne Bauchens was still editing films for Cecil B. DeMille until the director’s death in 1959; Irene Morra remained with Twentieth Century-Fox until the late 1930s and continued editing throughout the 1950s; Blanche Sewell remained an editor at MGM until shortly before her death in 1949; and Viola Lawrence was still editing for Columbia Pictures in the 1950s.

Towards the end of the silent era, a new crop of women—Helen Lewis, Barbara McLean, Dorothy Spencer, Eda Warren—began to cut films for the Hollywood studios. Barbara (Pollut) McLean is the best known among them. As a child, McLean had worked in her father’s studio, E. K. Lincoln Studio, patching release prints and cutting negatives. In 1924, she was hired to work in the Fox laboratory and later became an assistant to cutter Grant Whytock and his wife, Leotta Whytock, at First National Pictures and then at Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Darryl Zanuck admired her work and hired her as a cutter for The Bowery (1933). McLean would become one of Zanuck’s most trusted advisors and would continue working at Twentieth Century-Fox until her retirement in 1969. However, despite the continued prominence of these pioneering film cutters, in 1940, the Los Angeles Times declared “lady film cutters a vanishing profession” (C3). Although these and other women would continue to play an important role in shaping Hollywood film, entry-level positions were now going to men more often than to women, and it would become increasingly difficult for women to work their way into the studios’ editing rooms.

With additional research by Melissa Wye

by Joshua Yumibe

A previous version of this material can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hyaq-ma53

Perhaps the earliest production work available to women in the film industry was coloring work—hand-coloring dyes onto film prints frame by frame. Female colorists were also common in the nineteenth century in the lantern-slide and postcard industries, for at least initially, they could be exploited at a lower wage than men to perform the repetitive and detailed tasks. By the mid-1890s, the film industry had adopted similar labor strategies for coloring prints. Aesthetic assumptions also grounded this practice: an enduring trope of western color theory pertains to the gendering of color—females have long been assumed to be more attuned to color. Women were not only cheaper in general to employ but also were thought to be, with their supposed sensitivity and nimble fingers, innately suited to the detailed work of coloring films.

Serpentine Dance—Annabelle. Dir.: W. K. L. Dickson and William Heise (Edison Mfg. Co, US, 1895)

Frame enlargement, Serpentine Dance—Annabelle (1895). Private Collection.

Sources suggest that the Edison Company employed the wife of Edmund Kuhn in the mid-1890s to hand color prints such as the popular serpentine dance films (Yumibe, 45). According to Charles Edward Hastings, writing in the Moving Picture World in 1927, there were a number of other well-known female colorists working in the U.S. film industry at the turn of the century: “colorists in the early days were Miss Martini, of West Orange, N.J.; Miss Sarah Levy of New York City, and Miss Tompkins, of Brooklyn, N.Y. These famous hand colorists brought their art to a high degree of perfection, and displayed remarkable patience in working out their results” (346). However, scant documentation has been found about these women’s labor.

Mme Thuillier’s Company and Méliès

Le Chaudron Infernal dir. Georges Méliès (1903)

Frame enlargement, Le Chaudron Infernal, (1903). Private Collection.

Fortunately, the recorded history is somewhat better for female colorists in France. Georges Méliès, for example, outsourced his hand-coloring work from 1897 to 1912 to a Vincennes firm in Paris run initially by Élisabeth Thuillier, and subsequently by her daughter Marie-Berthe Thuillier, who managed a workforce of over 200 female colorists (Mazeline 74n1; Fossati 122-123; Malthête, 6-9; Yumibe 48). An earlier version of this essay only identified Élisabeth Thuillier, but thanks to Stéphanie Salmon and Jacques Malthête’s wondrous discovery, reported here on the Women Film Pioneers Project, it was Berthe Thuillier who in fact headed up most of the film coloring work formerly attributed to her mother, who died in either 1904 or 1907 (Salmon and Malthête). The Thuillier firm began as a lantern-slide lab and became involved with film coloring in the late 1890s, also working for other companies and filmmakers such as Pathé and Raoul Grimoin-Sanson. In an interview in 1929, Berthe Thuillier recalls, “I colored all of Méliès’ films, and this work was carried out entirely by hand. I employed two hundred and twenty workers in my workshop. I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colors, and during the day; the workers applied the color according to my instructions. Each specialized worker applied only one color, and we often exceeded twenty colors on a film” (Mazeline 74n1, author’s translation). From Thuillier’s account, one can begin to surmise the complexity of the firm’s coloring operation. The Thuillier firm structured its workforce in assembly-line fashion, dividing the labor by hue to increase productivity. Based upon surviving Méliès prints and fragments from the turn of the century, the colored results were remarkable.

Colorists at the Pathé lab in Paris, in book Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (1912).

Méliès continued to use hand coloring throughout the early 1900s; in contrast, beginning in 1903, the Pathé Company transitioned its color work from hand coloring to stenciling as part of a larger project to industrialize its production methods. Though still a manual process, stenciling facilitated the application of dyes to positive prints. Each color on a print had its own stencil, which laboriously was cut out frame by frame for the length of the coloring sequence. Once produced, the stencils could be reused on multiple prints, thus saving time and labor on lengthy print runs. As with hand coloring, Pathé hired women to prepare the stencils. Rapidly expanding in 1906, the company attempted to recruit the Thuillier firm to carry out this work exclusively for Pathé at its Vincennes factory. Élisabeth and/or (more likely) Berthe Thuillier initially signed with Pathé but then broke contract a few weeks later when it became apparent that they would have to share authority with one of Pathé’s chief colorists, Mme Florimond. Despite this setback, Pathé proceeded to expand its coloring workforce in 1906, more than doubling its female colorists from 80 to over 200 (Yumibe 78-90).

Women Colorists as the “hens of Pathé”

Colorists at the Pathé lab in Paris, in book Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (1912).

One of the more remarkable accounts of Pathé’s colorists is a 1984 interview with Germaine Berger by Jorge Dana in Positif in 1992. Along with her sister Lucie, Berger began cutting stencils for Pathé in 1911 at the age of 15. She had a strict upbringing and worked for her father (a furniture draughtsman) for several years before Pathé. Ironically, even when employed in the film industry, Berger was not allowed to go to the cinema—her only experience of film as a young woman was through stencil cutting. Mirroring her domestic life, the work day at Pathé was also highly regulated. Working in close quarters, Pathé’s colorists were not allowed to converse or socialize during the day. Nonetheless, Berger enjoyed the work, and because she and the other colorists grew remarkably adept at stenciling, they were well-paid by Pathé, receiving 21 francs per week, as opposed to the 15 francs averaged by less-specialized, male factory workers surrounding Pathé’s workshop. Thus, the stereotype that females are innately attuned to color worked to the economic advantage of Pathé’s skilled colorists. However, the work also came with its diminutive epithets: due to their nest eggs of well-deserved earnings, Berger and the other colorists came to be known around the Vincennes neighborhood as the “poules de chez Pathé [hens of Pathé].”

Frame enlargement, Pathé company logo. Private Collection.

Metro Pictures Corporation – Weekly Payroll – 1915-1920

July 2, 1921

Scenario Dept. – est. 5 women of 9 or 10

Lenore J. Coffee, prod. # 117, Rate: $200

June Mathias, #115, #113, Rate: $750

Florence Hein, #115, #113, Rate: $50

Evelyn Kenyon, #110 Rate: $50

Winnifred Dunn,#118, # 114, #150

Ethel Kennedy, #118, $200

*******(Not titled, but blank filled with Star or Artist or nothing)

Viola Dana, Star # 116, $1,750

Ethel Grandin, (blank) $150

Laboratory – 19

Bertha Moore ($30), Helen Weiner ($35), Mabel Knettles ($40) – 3 of 19

Cutting, Cameraman, Projection (no females)

Art – 8

Josephine Dillon (Research) $35 – much less than men, ranging to $175

Drapery – 3

Mrs. Hoppe $25 (later category is seamstress)

Property – 9 – all male

Business Managers – 5 – all male

Directors – 5 – all male

Rex Ingram, #115, $1,000

Asst. Dir – 3 – all male

Still Room – 3; Art Title – 4; Stage – 3

Telephone Operator: Lillian Chapman $25; Eva Cram, $25

Janitor – 6; Mrs. H. Peterson – $21

Purchasing & Stores – 9

Machine Operator – Mrs. A. Greene, $35;

Stenographer – Inez Bowser, $30

Wardrobe – 3; Marion Rae, $25

July 9, 1921

Winnifred Dunn, #118, $150

Ethel Grandin, #118, $150

June Mathis, #115, $750

September 20, 1922

Laboratory – 18 positions, all male except the Negative Cutters

Negative cutter: Mabel Nettles, $35

Negative cutter: Helen Weiner, $30

Negative Cutter: Mildred Cox, $25

Other jobs: Superintendent: $150, Supervisor, Asst Supervisor, Positive Dev, Negative Dev, Printer, Helper, Stock library, Dry Room Helper ($25/week – 3), Negative Wrapper, Assembler, Hypo Man, Wrapper

October 7, 1922 – Broken down as units

Vidor Unit, Beaumont Unit, Willat Unit, Sawyer Unit (either director or business mgr at head) Not finding Scenario Dept. But Winnifred Dunn listed as #136, Sawyer Unit at $100/week as Writer:

Note: Title Writers appear around 1922, paid very little

Executives Not always listed. Maybe they were being paid monthly?

by Eliana Jara Donoso, Mónica Villarroel

The Trace of the Feminine in Chilean Silent Era

By Mónica Villarroel

Translated by José Miguel Palacios

Bibliography

Bongers, Wolfgang, María José Torrealba and Ximena Vergara, eds. Archivos i letrados. Escritos sobre cine en Chile: 1908-1940. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2011.

El Eco de La Liga de Damas Chilenas vol. 3, no. 57 (1 January 1915): 2.

Jara Donoso, Eliana. Cine mudo chileno. Santiago: Self-published, 1994.

“Editorial.” La Semana Cinematográfica 2 (16 May 1918): n.p.

Vicuña, Manuel. La belle époque chilena: alta sociedad y mujeres de élite en el cambio de siglo. Santiago: Editorial Catalonia, 2010.

Villarroel, Mónica. “El mapa del cine temprano en Chile: hacia una configuración del asombro en el contexto latinoamericano.” Revista Aisthesis 52 (2012): 9-30.

Perhaps because it was considered a purely mechanical and tedious undertaking, requiring only attention to detail, keen eyesight, and nimble hands, film editing in the first decade was often carried out by anonymous, young working-class women. Their duties were considered to be no more creative than cutting and pasting hundreds of feet of negative and positive film, and, as such, cutters and joiners were not mentioned in the trade presses, which the first century of US motion picture history relied upon so exclusively.

Blanche Sewell (e). Private Collection.

As the moving picture became longer, however, working conditions changed. With two and three reels, as the process became more complex and editors’ decisions had a more obvious impact on the cinematic narrative, a handful of women became major editors in their own right. These include Margaret Booth, who became the supervising editor at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1936–1969); Irene Morra (1921–1958) and Viola Lawrence, who became supervising editor (1925–1960) at Columbia Pictures; and Blanche Sewell (1925–1956) at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. These women were able to keep their jobs into the era in which Hollywood film production had become almost entirely male.

While women did maintain somewhat of a foothold in screenwriting throughout the first century of US cinema, they were never there in the numbers they had been in the silent era. While Booth, Sewell, Morra, Lawrence, and Anne Bauchens continued working from the silent era into the late 1940s and 1950s, Jane Loring and Rose Smith both worked until the mid-1930s. If we can say one thing about all of the women profiled here, it is that they would become exceptions in a business that, although it did not begin that way, became a male-dominated industry over its first twenty years.

by WFPP

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

As motion picture production became more capital intensive, beginning around 1917, and as fewer companies began to control an increasing percentage of the exhibition and distribution as well as the production business, as a preface to vertical integration, it became increasingly difficult for independent, sometimes family-run businesses to survive. We see this in the diminished number of women-headed production companies in the 1920s in contrast to the 1910s, and in the fact that those women who may have wanted to produce their own films either quit entirely, freelanced, or moved outside Hollywood—to regional and rural areas where they worked in modes such as educational, documentary, or ethnographic film, considered secondary to the main business of feature-length fiction film studio production.

A similar trend is evident in the history of women in exhibition. Itinerant husband-and-wife exhibitor teams like Fanny Cook and her husband Bert were able to successfully ply their trade during the first decade of the twentieth century. After motion pictures ceased to become just a fairground novelty, women continued on as owners and operators of storefront nickelodeons, beginning around 1906. Again, this confirms the trend: women participated in the new entertainment industry when it was still in its “cottage-industry phase,” when small businesses were able to be competitive. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Karen Ward Mahar, using trade journal listings from the period, conclude in their overview essay that women constituted a minority of theatre owners in the 1910s, but more may have been “uncredited” partners in family-run theatre businesses, or non-owner participants in the operation of theatres.

In another parallel with the production side, where hiring women writers and directors was part of a short-term business strategy to associate motion pictures with “respectability,” the presence of women in the exhibition side (as owners or box-office attendants) established motion pictures as “high-class” and “family friendly entertainment.” While women operating a small retail-style business was not considered unusual at the time, say Fuller-Seeley and Mahar, the few women projectionists at the time were treated as an anomaly; working with the technology of film projection, like operating film cameras, was considered masculine. But while female exhibitors disappeared in the 1920s from first-run theatres in major markets, they continued to own and operate smaller, regional second- and third-run theatres that required less capital and infrastructure to stay afloat.

How to Write Photoplays (1920).

Screenwriting Manuals by Women

Barker, Ellen Frye. The Art of Photoplay Writing. Colossus Publishing, 1917.

——. Successful Photo-Play Writing. New York: Frye Publishing, 1914.

Beranger, Clara. Writing For the Screen, With Story, Picture Treatment and Shooting Script. Dubuque: WM. C. Brown, 1950.

Bertsch, Marguerite. How to Write for Moving Pictures. New York: George H. Doran, 1917.

Carr, Catherine. The Art of Photoplay Writing. New York: Hannis Jordan, 1914.

Corbaley, Kate. Selling Manuscripts in the Photoplay Market. Los Angeles: Palmer Photoplay, 1920.

Emerson, John, and Anita Loos. How to Write Photoplays. New York: McCann, 1920.

Lytton, Grace. Scenario Writing Today. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921.

Macpherson, Jeanie. The Necessity and Value of Theme in the Photoplay. Los Angeles: Palmer Photoplay, 1920.

Marion, Frances. How to Write and Sell Film Stories. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937.

Parsons, Louella O. How to Write for the “Movies.” Rev. ed. Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1917. Excerpt

Patterson, Frances Taylor. Cinema Craftsmanship. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.

——. Scenario and Screen. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.

Radinoff, Florence. The Photoplaywright’s Handy Text-Book. New York: Manhattan Motion Picture Institute, 1913.

Radnor, Leona. The Photoplay Writer. New York: Leona Radnor, 1913.

Russell, Lillian Case. “Here Lies”: Containing Fifty Themes That Are Now Forbidden, Fifty “Donts,” “Manufactured Plots,” and a Sample Photoplay Complete. New York: M.P. Publishing, 1914.

——. The Photo-playwrights Primer. New York: M.P. Publishing, 1915. St. Johns, Adela Rogers. How to Write a Story and Sell It. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956.

Women Scenario Editors

Bosworth: Hettie Gray Baker

Éclair: F. Marion Brandon

Edison: Ashley Miller and E. S. Porter

Essanay: Louella Parsons and Josephine Rector

First National: Florence Strauss

Fox: Hettie Gray Baker

Lubin: Lillian Spellman Stone

Metro: Kate Corbaley and June Mathis

North American: Catherine Carr

Pathé: Ouida Bergère

R. C. Pictures: Eve Unsell

Thomas A. Ince: Bradley King and Miriam Meredith (also assistant director)

Vitagraph: Beta Breuil, Marguerite Bertsch

Thanhouser: Gertrude Thanhouser

Universal: Eugenie Magnus Ingleton (with Eugene B. Lewis)

Women’s Production and Preproduction Companies

Anita Stewart Productions — 1918–1922, with Louis B. Mayer (producer)

Beatriz Michelena Features — 1917–1919, with George Middleton (director/producer)

Bessie Barriscale Feature Company — 1917, with Howard Hickman (actor/director)

B.B. Features — 1918–1920, Bessie Barriscale with Howard Hickman

Blaney-Spooner Feature Film Company — 1913, Cecil Spooner with Charles E. Blaney (producer)

Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation — 1916–1917, with Lewis J. Selznick (producer)

C.K.Y. Film Corporation — 1917–1919, Clara Kimball Young with Adolph Zukor (producer)

Equity Pictures Corporation — 1919-1924, Clara Kimball Young with Harry Garson (director)

Constance Talmadge Film Company — 1917, with Joseph M. Schneck (producer)

Eleanor Gates Photoplay Company — 1914 (announced)

Eve Unsell Photoplay Staff, Inc. — 1921

Fanchon Royer Productions — 1928

Fay Tincher Productions — 1918–1919

Flora Finch Company — 1916-1917

Flora Finch Film Frolics Pictures Corporation — 1920

Florence Turner Productions, Ltd. — 1913–1916, with Larry Trimball (actor-director)

Frieder Film Corporation — 1917, Lule Warrenton

Gem Motion Picture Company — 1911, Marion Leonard with Stanner E. V. Taylor (writer-director)

Monopol Film Company – 1912, Marion Leonard with Stanner E. V. Taylor (writer-director)

Mar-Leon Company — 1913, Marion Leonard with E. V. Stanner E.V. Taylor (writer-director)

Gene Gauntier Feature Players — 1912–1915, with Sydney Olcott (director) and Jack Clark (actor) (1915)

Olcott-Gauntier Unit — Kalem Co. — 1910–12, Gene Gauntier with Sydney Olcott (actor-director)

Gloria Swanson Productions — 1926–1928

Gloria Films — 1928, Gloria Swanson and Joseph P. Kennedy (producer)

Grace Davison Productions — 1918

Grace S. Haskins — 1923

Smallwood Film Corporation – 1913, Ethel Grandin with Ray C. Smallwood (director), Arthur Smallwood (brother)

Grandin Films — 1913–1915, Ethel Grandin with Raymond C. Smallwood (director)

Helen Gardner Picture Players — 1912–1914, with Charles L. Gaskill (director)

Helen Gardner Picture Players — 1918

Helen Gibson Productions — 1920

Helen Holmes Production Corporation — 1919

Signal Film Corporation — 1915, Helen Holmes with J. P. McGowan (producer)

S.L.K. Serial Corporation — 1919, Helen Holmes with J. P. McGowan (producer)

Helen Keller Film Corporation — 1919

Ida May Park Productions — 1920, with Joseph DeGrasse (director)

Leah Baird Productions, Inc. — 1921–1927, with Arthur Beck (writer)

Liberty Feature Film Company — 1915, Sallie Lindblom

Lois Weber Productions — 1917–1921, with Phillips Smalley (actor-director)

Rex — 1912–1914, Lois Weber with Phillips Smalley

Louise Lovely Productions — 1917

Lowell Film Productions — 1925, Lillian Case Russell with John Lowell [John L. Russell] (writer)

Mabel Normand Feature Film Company — 1916, with Mack Sennett (producer)

Madeline Brandeis Productions — 1924–1929

Mandarin Film Company — 1917, Marion E. Wong

Marie Dressler Motion Picture Corporation — 1916–1917, with Jim Dalton

Marion Davies Film Corporation — 1918–1920

Cosmopolitan Productions — 1918-1923, Marion Davies with William Randolph Hearst

Margery Wilson Productions — 1921

Marion Fairfax Productions — 1921–1922

Mary Miles Minter — 1928 (announced)

Micheaux Film Company — Alice B. Russell (actress) with Oscar Micheaux (director)

Model Comedy Company — 1918–1919, Gale Henry with Bruno J. Becker (director)

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew Comedies — 1917–1919, with Sidney Drew (actor)

Mrs. Sidney Drew Comedies — 1920

Mrs. Wallace Reid Productions — 1924–1929

Nazimova Productions — 1917–1922, Alla Nazimova

Nell Shipman Productions, Inc. — 1921–1925, with Bert Van Tuyle (director)

Norma Talmadge Film Company — 1917, with Joseph M. Schneck (producer)

Pacific Motion Picture Company — 1914, Josephine Rector with Hal Angus (actor)

Petrova Pictures Corporation — 1917, Olga Petrova

Pickford Film Corporation —1916–1919, Mary Pickford

United Artists — est. 1919, Mary Pickford with Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks

Ruth Roland Serials, Inc. — 1919

Solax Company — 1910–1922, Alice Guy Blaché (writer-director) with Herbert Blaché (director)

Blaché American Features —1913, Alice Guy Blaché with Herbert Blaché (director)

Texas Guinan Productions — 1920–1921

Tiffany Productions — 1921–1924, Mae Murray with Robert Z. Leonard (director)

Trimball-Murfin Productions — 1922, Jane Murfin and Larry Trimball

Unique Film Company — 1915, Mrs. M. Webb (writer) with Miles M. Webb (producer)

Valda Valkyrien Production Company (announced)

Vera McCord Productions — 1921

Victor Films — 1912–1914, Florence Lawrence with Harry Solter (actor)

Touissant Motion Picture Exchange —Madame E. Touissant Welcome with E. Touissant Welcome (co-producers)

The Western Film Producing Company and Booking Exchange—Maria P. Williams (writer-producer – Jesse L. Williams (producer)

Working Partnerships

Husband-Wife Teams

Mary Jobe Akeley — Carl Jobe Akeley

*Leah Baird (actress-writer) — Arthur F. Beck (producer)

* Bessie Barriscale (actress-producer) — Howard Hickman (actor-director)

Cora Beach (writer) — Walter Shumway (writer)

Dwinelle Benthall (writer) — Rufus McGosh (writer)

Clara Beranger (writer) — William deMille (writer)

Ouida Bergère (writer) — George Fitzmaurice (director)

Pauline Bush — William Dowlan

*Lillian Chester (writer-producer) — George Randolph Chester (writer-producer)

Frances Hubbard Flaherty — Robert Flaherty

*Gene Gauntier (actress-writer-director-producer) — Sydney Olcott (actor-director-producer)

*Gene Gauntier (actress-writer-director-producer) — Jack C. Clarke (actor-director)

Eloyce Gist (editor) — James Gist (director-writer-producer)

*Ethel Grandin (actress) — Ray Smallwood (cinematographer-director)

*Alice Guy Blaché (director-producer) — Herbert Blaché (director-producer)

Ella Hall – Robert Z. Leonard

*Gale Henry (comedienne-writer-producer) — Bruno J. Becker (producer)

Katharine Hilliker — H. H. Caldwell (editors, producers)

*Helen Holmes (actress) — J. P. McGowan (director)

Osa Johnson (producer, cinematographer) — Martin Johnson (producer, director)

Agnes Christine Johnston (writer) — Frank Mitchell Dazey (writer-director)

*Florence Lawrence (actress-producer) — Harry Salter (actor-producer)

*Marion Leonard (actress-producer) — Stanner E. V. Taylor (director)

*Anita Loos (writer) — John Emerson (director-writer)

Hope Loring (writer) — Louis “Buddy” Lighton (writer-producer)

Josephine Lovett (writer) — John S. Robertson (director)

Sarah Y. Mason (writer) — Victor Heerman (writer)

*Lucille McVey (Mrs. Sidney Drew) (actress-director-producer) — Sidney Drew (actor-director-producer)

Bess Meredyth (writer) — Wilfred Lucas (actor-director)

* Mae Murray (actress) — Robert Z. Leonard (director)

*Ida May Park (writer-director) — Joseph DeGrasse (director)

Dorothy Phillips (actress) — Allen Holubar (director-writer)

*Mary Pickford (actress-producer) with Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Charles Chaplin

*Josephine Rector (writer) — Hal Angus (director)

*Lillian Case Russell (writer) — John Lowell (actor-writer)

Alice B. Russell (actress-producer) — Oscar Micheaux (director-producer)

Florence Ryerson (writer) — Colin Clements (writer)

*Norma Talmadge (actress-producer) — Joseph M. Schneck (producer)

Alice Terry (actress) — Rex Ingram (director)

*Gertrude Thanhouser (actress-writer-producer) — Edwin Thanhouser (producer)

Rosemary Theby — Robert Henley

*Mrs. M. Webb (writer) — Miles M. Webb (producer)

*Lois Weber (actress-writer-director-producer) and Phillips Smalley (actor-producer)

*Madame E. Touissant Welcome — E. Touissant Welcome (co-producers)

*Kathlyn Williams (actress-producer) — Charles Eyton (producer)

*Maria P. Williams (writer-producer) — Jesse L. Williams (producer)

Elsie Jane Wilson (actress-director-writer) — Rupert Julian (director)

*Clara Kimball Young (actress-producer) — Harry Garson (director-producer)

Dorothy Yost (writer) — Dwight Cummings (writer)

Relationship Unknown

*Beatriz Michelena (actress-producer) and George Middleton (director)

Never-Married Couples

*Gale Henry (actress-producer) — Bruno J. Becker

*Helen Gardner (actress-producer) — Charles L. Gaskill (writer-director)

*Jane Murfin (writer) and Larry Trimble (actor-director-producer)

*Nell Shipman (actress-writer-director) — Bert Van Tuyle (director)

*Florence Turner (actress-director-producer) — Larry Trimble (actor-director-producer)

Fake Marriage

*Marie Dressler (actress-producer) — Jim Dalton (business manager)

Team, Not Romantic Couple

Sada Cowan (writer) — Howard Higgin (writer)

*Grace Cunard (actress-writer-director) — Francis Ford (actor-director)

*Gene Gauntier (actress-writer-director-producer) — Sydney Olcott (actor-director-producer)

Julia Crawford Ivers (writer) — William Desmond Taylor (director)

* Indicates started production company together. Note: See Women’s Production and Pre-Production Companies for dates and company names.

This list is not exhaustive and reflects research done prior to publication (2013)

by Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal

Who Worked at What and When

The Vitagraph Company of America, 1910. Bison

The Vitagraph Company of America, 1910. Courtesy of Bison Archives.

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

Yet the most comprehensive overview of the industry, Business Woman, in 1923 listed twenty-nine different jobs that women held (in addition to actress), including that of typist, stenographer, secretary to the stars and executive secretary, telephone operator, hairdresser, seamstress, costume designer, milliner, reader, script girl, scenarist, cutter, film retoucher, film splicer, laboratory worker, set designer and set dresser, librarian, artist, title writer, publicity writer, plasterer molder, casting director, musician, film editor, department manager, director, and producer.²

Essanay Film Mfg Co. Laboratory personnel, Chicago. AMPAS]

Essanay Film Mfg Co. Laboratory personnel, Chicago. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

When Were Motion Pictures Silent?

Clare West (des) with design sketch, AMPAS

Clare West with design sketch. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Scholars date the advent of motion pictures from the first public Lumière Company cinématographe exhibition in Paris, France, on December 28, 1895, and in the United States, from the Edison Company’s New York City kinetoscope premiere on April 4, 1896.³ Yet, as Mahar has pointed out, the first years were defined by competition over equipment patents, the realm of men (2006, 25). The best way of explaining early opportunities for women is to first think of the growth spurt represented by the US nickelodeon boom, 1906–1909, which meant increased demand for short, one-reel films to screen at these storefront theatres. The influx of the women we are tracking begins around 1907—the year Gene Gauntier wrote a scenario at the Kalem Company based on Ben Hur, Florence Lawrence took a role in the Edison Company’s Daniel Boone; or, Pioneer Days in America, and Alice Guy Blaché, married three days, set sail for New York from Paris, as each recalls in a memoir (Gauntier Oct. 1928, 184; Lawrence 1914, 40; Slide, 1986a, 60-61).

Agnes Christine Johnston (w/a) MGM publicity photo. AMPAS

MGM publicity photo, Agnes Christine Johnston. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Although 1927–1928 marks the official transition to sound years in the US, many of the titles we list were issued in both silent and sound versions.⁴ Titles after 1928 are included for other reasons. First, experimental and documentary work expand the definition of “silent film” because in the late 1920s and into the 1930s low-budget work was often shot silent with a nonsynchronous soundtrack added later, if at all. This allows us to consider, for instance, the extant 16mm print of the fourteen-minute A Journey to the Operations of the South American Gold Platinum Co., in Colombia South America (1937) made by anthropologist Kathleen Romoli, now in the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano in Bogotá. Or, we include the work of American experimental filmmaker Stella F. Simon, whose extant short Hände/Hands (1927–28) was restored by the Museum of Modern Art in 2001. Second, some women whose careers began in the silent era became more important in the sound era. Although she was a popular Mexican film actress in the silent era, Adela Sequeyro did not direct motion pictures until the 1930s, and two of the sound titles she directed are extant: Más allá de la muerte/Beyond Death (1935) and La mujer de nadie/Nobody’s Woman (1937).⁵ There was, however, no equivalent to Sequeyro in the United States.

No silent era US motion picture actress began another career phase directing in the sound era, although some writers began before 1927 and continued to work productively into the sound era. Latin American industry examples contrast here with the US industry, where, the evidence shows, the ranks of women working as scenario writer, director, or producer thinned out by 1923 (Mahar 2006, ch. 2 and 6). It is commonly asserted that by 1925 the only woman still working as a Hollywood studio system director was the now-celebrated lesbian Dorothy Arzner. Less exclusive focus on directors, however, opens up this territory. Certainly Wanda Tuchock was another woman to stay employed in Hollywood, as Anthony Slide pointed out early (Slide 1996, 136). But her 1934 credit is not for director but for codirector on Finishing School for RKO with George Nichols, Jr. Her first silent era credit is as continuity writer on the Marion Davies star vehicle Show People (1923), the treatment for which was written by Agnes Christine Johnston while Johnston was on the staff at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. One of her next assignments at MGM was as scenario writer for the all-black cast classic Hallelujah (1929), directed by King Vidor, who also wrote the story. Like hundreds of other titles in the silent to sound transition years, Hallelujah was released in both sound and silent versions. Motion picture titles that straddle two technological moments, such as John S. Robertson’s The Single Standard (1929), written by Josephine Lovett, and Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929), written by Sonya Levien and edited by Katharine Hilliker, call attention to the women whose careers began in the silent era and continued into the sound era: Lovett, Levien, Dorothy Yost, Sarah Y. Mason, Zoe Atkins, and Virginia Van Upp.

US Companies Outside Hollywood: 1915–1935

Dorothy Davenport Reid. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Leah Baird, actress-writer-producer. AMPAS

Leah Baird portrait. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

It is now well established that the phasing out of women paralleled the development of the motion picture business into the corporate studio system, in place by the mid-1920s. Yet the exceptions to the “over by 1925” rule are important.⁶ Many writers and most editors continued to work within the studio system, and a few companies started by Hollywood insiders remained, such as the Dorothy Davenport Reid company, Mrs. Wallace Reid Productions, operating from 1924 to 1929, and Leah Baird Productions, started with cool producer Arthur Beck, and lasting from 1921 to 1927.

Another economy is operative outside Hollywood, and thus we find women financing companies with family fortunes, organizational fund-raising, professional earnings, and divorce settlements. Some, like Madeline Brandeis, worked on the edge of Hollywood, where she started Madeline Brandeis Productions to produce educational shorts, operating between 1924 and 1929. A Midwesterner whose first film was produced in Chicago, Brandeis funded her first production with her settlement from the Omaha, Nebraska, Brandeis Dry Goods Store heir to whom she was married. A number of the short films Brandeis produced as part of the Children of All Lands series, distributed by Pathé, are extant.

Women such as Brandeis and Ruth Bryan Owen, who produced just a handful of films or even a single title, or whose involvement in film production took a secondary or, at best, equal place to other careers or to their roles as wives or mothers, might be understood as “mere dilettantes” or “amateurs.” The practice of overlooking them and their work is not restricted to standard histories of the silent motion picture era. The filmmakers themselves sometimes downplayed their own efforts as, for instance, Brandeis does when she describes her filmmaking as a “pastime” in an article tellingly entitled “Woman Makes Films for Fun.” This seemingly casual reference sheds some light on the conflicting imperatives that organized women’s abilities and desires to make motion pictures outside Hollywood, especially since, by the late 1920s, “outside” may have been the only place where they were able to continue working as filmmakers.

As a professional writer and lecturer, Osa Johnson continued to produce motion pictures after her husband’s 1935 death. The work of Frances Flaherty with her husband, Robert, considered the first American documentary maker, spans 1921–1932. Still photographer Nancy Naumburg made the 16mm titles Sheriffed (1934) and Taxi (1935) under the auspices of the Film and Photo League, the leftist New York collective. These initiatives have in common their nontheatrical distribution and their educational or political goals. While some ventures defined themselves as oppositionally outside Hollywood, others, such as the silent project The Flame of Mexico (1932), undertaken by a Washington DC diplomat’s wife, might be considered hybrid projects. Producer Juliet Barrett Rublee envisioned theatrical distribution for her tribute to the Mexican people, shot by a professional Hollywood crew. Thus, because The Flame of Mexico, a 35mm print of which surfaced in 2006, has such high production values, it is visually comparable to the Warner Brothers feature Juarez (1939) although the documentary sections remind us of Soviet avant-gardist Sergei Eisenstein’s footage for Que Viva Mexico (1932). Little research has been done on the earliest companies founded by women outside Hollywood, but Mahar mentions the Blaney-Spooner Feature Film Company in 1913, the Liberty Feature Film Company in 1914, and the company organized in 1914 by author and playwright Eleanor Gates, who was interested in adapting her own literary work for the screen (2006, 66).

Regional Producing and Directing: Before and Never Hollywood

Women’s productions were fostered by the distance from bottom line-oriented major production centers, and the number of locations they used suggest that they discovered more possibilities in region-centered filmmaking. In the first decade, when film production sprouted around New York before the exodus to the West Coast, however, there was no major production center. Recent interest in filmmaking in New Jersey calls our attention to the earliest, the Solax Company, founded by Alice Guy Blaché in 1910 in Ft. Lee. When Helen Gardner left the New York City studios of the Vitagraph Company in 1911, she started Helen Gardner Picture Players in Tappan-on-Hudson, New York. In recent years, three of her feature films, Cleopatra (1912), Sister to Carmen (1913) and A Daughter of Pan (1913) have been restored and screened. Beta Breuil made short motion picture melodramas in Rhode Island in 1915 and 1916, four of which are extant: My Lady of the Lilacs, Violets, Daisies, and Wisteria. A strong African-American community in Kansas City, Kansas, constituted a viable audience for filmmakers Tressie Souders and Maria P. Williams in an era of race-segregated theaters.

Elizabeth B. Grimball (p/d) The Lost Colony 1921. NCCPA

Elizabeth B. Grimball filming The Lost Colony Film (1921). Courtesy of the University of North Carolina.

Beatriz Michelena (a) Salomy Jane (1914). PC

Beatriz Michelena, Salomy Jane (1914). Private Collection.

Nell Shipman outside, c. 1918. Private Collection.

Regional history itself provided the impetus for another extant title, The Lost Colony (1921), commissioned by the state of North Carolina and directed by Elizabeth B. Grimball, recruited for the job from the New York theatre after she directed the “Lost Colony” pageant. Nell Shipman Productions (1921–1925) specialized in melodrama set in the North woods, taking dramatic advantage of the wildlife and rugged Priest Lake, Idaho, landscape. A representative sample of her shorts and features are extant, including the short White Water (1921), featuring an exquisitely photographed, tightly cross-cut river rescue scene that rivals D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920). Lost, however, is the Ruth Bryan Owen production Once Upon a Time (1922) shot in Coconut Grove and Key Biscayne, Florida, which stood in for mythical Arabia in a production the director-producer cast with local amateur theatre actors.

Immigrant Outsiders and Outside Insiders

Mexican-American actress Beatriz Michelena headquartered her 1917–1919 company, Beatriz Michelena Features, in San Rafael, California, north of San Francisco. One of the titles the company produced, Just Squaw (1919), is held by the Library of Congress along with earlier Western genre films in which she starred produced by other companies. In Oakland, another part of the Bay Area, Marion E. Wong started the Mandarin Film Company and worked as actress, director, scenario writer, and producer of The Curse of the Quon Gwon (1917), recently discovered and restored. An intriguing reference leads us to wonder what kind of unit Japanese-American Tsuru Aoki, wife of actor-producer Sessue Hayakawa, was working in since she is cited as having in 1913 begun a “company of players.”⁷ But ethnicity and immigrant status don’t map perfectly along inside/outside lines, leading us to consider some as outside-insiders. Alison McMahan reminds us that Alice Guy Blaché was an immigrant from France and convincingly interprets her extant The Making of an American Citizen (1913) in these terms (2002, 142). But unlike so many others, Blaché did not arrive poor. When she disembarked in 1907 she held $50,000 worth of Gaumont stock that she would sell to start the Solax Company in 1910 (2002, 76).

Tsuru Aoki portrait for Kay-Bee, Broncho & Domino. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Sonya Levien portrait. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

It has long been established that the immigrant Jews who founded the US motion pictures studios, all of them male, began in dry goods and entertainment because these were the avenues open to them. The case of immigrant Jewish women is the reverse of that of the men who became moguls. For women, the two vehicles to entry were acting and writing, and these worked in different ways. Actresses of Asian or Hispanic descent or those who had migrated from Eastern Europe made difference, exotic-tinged, work for as opposed to against them. In changing her name from Miriam Edez Adelaida Leventon to Alla Nazimova, a young girl from a Russian Jewish immigrant family borrowed an exotic-ethnic effect, but later, as a mysterious lesbian and political radical, her persona acquired new associations. Nazimova Productions, 1917–1921, operating inside Metro and later linked to United Artists, was an artistically “outside” gamble in which she finally lost the money she had invested.

In the silent era, European exoticism was also faked. Welsh immigrant Muriel Harding styled herself as Polish countess Olga Petrova and as a move for artistic control, started Petrova Pictures Corporation in 1917, outside the studio system (McMahan 2002, 180). Valda Valkyrien, the Danish actress born in Reykjavik, Iceland, adopted the aristocratic persona of Mademoiselle Valkyrien to help her career when she immigrated to the US. She found work at the Thanhouser Company and later announced the Valda Valkyrien Production Company, although the evidence that the company produced any films has yet to be found.

Writers Sonya Levien and Anzia Yezierska were both from poor Jewish families that emigrated from Russia and settled on the Lower East Side of New York City. Yezierska, a reluctant transport to Hollywood, wrote about her bitter disillusionment in Cosmopolitan magazine in an article that begins, “I was very poor. And when I was poor, I hated the rich.”⁸ Her collection of short stories was produced by Goldwyn Pictures as Hungry Hearts (1922), 16mm prints of which are held in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and the National Film and Television Archives in London. Frederica Sagor Maas, a second generation Jewish American born in the US in 1900, and blacklisted along with her husband in the 1950s, died January 5, 2012 at the age of 111.

One openly bisexual writer, Mary MacLane, became famous for her nonfiction The Story of Mary MacLane published in 1902 when she was only nineteen. She would sign a contract for several films with the Essanay Company, then in Chicago. Only one, however, was made, as Men Who Have Made Love to Me (1918), adapted by MacLane from her own short story and starring herself. The single film phenomenon is a pattern and marks another way insiders were outsiders. Temporary insiders were soon “outsiders,” and often on the verge of losing the precarious foothold they had established (sometimes as heads of companies or units within larger companies)—unless they achieved stardom as actresses or unless they were part of a powerful producing family. See “The Family System of Production.”

New York, California Before Hollywood, and Hollywood: 1907–1923

Women’s Work before It Was “Women’s Work”

Gene Gauntier (a/w/d/p) Kalem stock company. AMPAS

Gene Gauntier and Kalem stock company in Florida. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Work on the early motion picture set was relatively flexible, and in 1908 acting and directing were jobs like any other, on a par with lab work (Jacobs 1975, 59).⁹ Gene Gauntier describes the Kalem Company ensemble work from 1907 to 1912 as a scramble in which she did almost every job (Gauntier 1928). Actress Florence Turner even did the accounting at the Vitagraph Company studio in Brooklyn, New York, according to Stuart Blackton’s memoirs. At the Famous Players-Lasky Company in California, writer Beulah Marie Dix, newly arrived from the East Coast in 1916, stood in as an extra, learned about the camera, and took care of the lights (Brownlow 1968, 276). Many, like Bradley King, moved up from the lowest rung jobs as stenographers.¹⁰ As Mark Cooper describes the layout of the new Universal City lot completed in 1915 in Los Angeles, it created a kind of “laboratory for gender experiment” facilitated by “physical mobility” on the set in contrast to the New York office hierarchy (Cooper 2010, 63). These conditions produced the phenomenon we call the “Universal Women,” the largest concentration of women who worked as directors, sometimes also as writers, actresses, and producers, from 1916 to 1921: Ruth Ann Baldwin, Grace Cunard, Eugenie Magnus Ingleton, Cleo Madison, Ida May Park, Ruth Stonehouse, Lule Warrenton, Lois Weber, and Elsie Jane Wilson.

The Family System of Production

Gertrude Homan Thanhouser. Private Collection.

Boundaries between family and business were often blurred, best exemplified by the position of Gertrude Thanhouser, listed on articles of company incorporation as primary company stockholder,who acted, wrote, and served as a Thanhouser Film Company executive. Lloyd Lonergan, Edwin Thanhouser’s brother-in-law, wrote roughly nine hundred Thanhouser scenarios, and his sister Elizabeth Lonergan wrote for the Biograph and Kalem companies (Azlant 1997, 241).¹¹ The DeMille dynasty that begins with mother Beatrice deMille is well known, but she is noted less for the scenarios she wrote for the Lasky company. The paternalism of Cecil B. DeMille and his brother William deMille (spelled differently) benefited writers Jeanie Macpherson, Olga Printzlau, Beulah Marie Dix,and Clara Beranger, as well as executive secretary Gladys Rosson and editor Anne Bauchens. All had long tenures beginning in the 1910s when what became Paramount Pictures was the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Players and then the Famous Players-Lasky Company.

Lorna Moon, MGM publicity portrait. AMPAS

MGM publicity portrait, Lorna Moon. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Scenario writer Lorna Moon’s illegitimate child with William deMille was adopted by his brother Cecil and his wife. Paula Blackton as director and actress was recruited along with her children in Vitagraph Company cofounder Stuart J. Blackton’s Brooklyn, New York, studio.Later in London, at Blackton Productions, Stuart Blackton gave daughter Marian Constance Blackton a valued place in production decisions as well as her start as a writer. Close working relationships fostered what could be called a “familial system of production,” which crossed and sometimes overrode the stages film historians have identified: the cameraman system, the director-unit system, and the central producer system of production.¹²

The motion picture set was also a newly gender-mixed workplace that fostered liaisons, and the married or romantically linked creative team was a norm. Going it alone was the exception. In the majority of these cases, however, the woman, not the man was “the ticket” since it was her stardom that commanded resources. See “The Star Name Company.” Men most often handled the money and business side in the partnership (Mahar 2006, 73). Historical evidence, however, challenges gender assumptions. We find men who were financially irresponsible (as in the case of the Victor Company started by Harry Solterer with Florence Lawrence) and women who demonstrated remarkable business acumen. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, recollects Mary Pickford at the meeting to form United Artists in 1919: “She knew all the nomenclature: the amortizations and the deferred stocks, etc. She understood all the articles of incorporation, the legal discrepancy on Page 7, Paragraph A, Article 27, and coolly referred to the overlap and contradiction in Paragraph D, Article 24.”¹³ he jury is still out, however, on the role that husband Herbert Blaché played in the dissolution of the Solax Company (1910–1922), which became Blaché American Features (1913–1914), effectively demoting Guy Blaché from company president to vice president (Mahar 2006, 73–76; McMahan 2002, 77, 121, 172–73).

Jeanie Macpherson with photo of Cecil B. DeMille. Courtesy of Brigham Young University.

Josephine Lovett at desk. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library

The couple mode within the familial system was most likely a continuum, from the rocky liaisons undermined by infidelities to the collaborators-for-life, exemplified by teams whose contracts stipulated joint work, like writer-editor team Katharine Hilliker -H. H. Caldwell, who practiced job-sharing. See also “Women Scenario Editors”; “Scenario Writer to Screenwriter.” Mr. and Mrs. George Randolph Chester and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew gave their marital status names to production companies although of a very different kind since the Chesters were writers who attempted to produce only once (The Son of Wallingford, 1921). The Drews developed a married couple comic persona for their “Mr. and Mrs. Drew” series, precursor, Mahar says, of the domestic screwball comedy. Further Mahar raises the delicate issue of who did the work, suggesting that it was Mrs., not Mr. Drew who produced and directed the series within the Vitagraph Company (2006, 117).¹⁴ Anthony Slide writes that Alice Terry was known to have stepped in to finish directing scenes for husband Rex Ingram (1996, 130–31). In a 1922 interview Louella Parsons conducted with husband of writer Josephine Lovett, director John S. Robertson, he describes their relationship as the “work and play together” ideal personified by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Mary Pickford (Parsons 1922, 4). The fan magazine publicity that espoused an equal partnership ideal, however, creates a smoke screen around the circumstances. As Shelley Stamp explains in her critical analysis of the domestic discourse around directing-producing team Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, these relationships contained many ingredients.¹⁵ Countering the image of perfect partnership, however, is the evidence that Weber was the dynamo (Mahar 2006, 91–92). In many cases the separation of female from male partner in a creative team may be an artificial after-the-fact operation. Unofficial information that conflicts with published motion picture credits is indicated in the “Credit Report” note following the Archival Filmography and Not Extant Films at the end of each profile. The following list of working partnerships indicates that most were husband-wife relationships.

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew. Private Collection.

Working Partnerships

Husband-Wife Teams

Mary Jobe Akeley — Carl Jobe Akeley

*Leah Baird (actress-writer) — Arthur F. Beck (producer)

* Bessie Barriscale (actress-producer) — Howard Hickman (actor-director)

Cora Beach (writer) — Walter Shumway (writer)

Dwinelle Benthall (writer) — Rufus McGosh (writer)

Clara Beranger (writer) — William deMille (writer)

Ouida Bergère (writer) — George Fitzmaurice (director)

Pauline Bush — William Dowlan

*Lillian Chester (writer-producer) — George Randolph Chester (writer-producer)

Frances Hubbard Flaherty — Robert Flaherty

*Gene Gauntier (actress-writer-director-producer) — Sydney Olcott (actor-director-producer)

*Gene Gauntier (actress-writer-director-producer) — Jack C. Clarke (actor-director)

Eloyce Gist (editor) — James Gist (director-writer-producer)

*Ethel Grandin (actress) — Ray Smallwood (cinematographer-director)

*Alice Guy Blaché (director-producer) — Herbert Blaché (director-producer)

Ella Hall – Robert Z. Leonard

*Gale Henry (comedienne-writer-producer) — Bruno J. Becker (producer)

Katharine Hilliker — H. H. Caldwell (editors, producers)

*Helen Holmes (actress) — J. P. McGowan (director)

Osa Johnson (producer, cinematographer) — Martin Johnson (producer, director)

Agnes Christine Johnston (writer) — Frank Mitchell Dazey (writer-director)

*Florence Lawrence (actress-producer) — Harry Salter (actor-producer)

*Marion Leonard (actress-producer) — Stanner E. V. Taylor (director)

*Anita Loos (writer) — John Emerson (director-writer)

Hope Loring (writer) — Louis “Buddy” Lighton (writer-producer)

Josephine Lovett (writer) — John S. Robertson (director)

Sarah Y. Mason (writer) — Victor Heerman (writer)

*Lucille McVey (Mrs. Sidney Drew) (actress-director-producer) — Sidney Drew (actor-director-producer)

Bess Meredyth (writer) — Wilfred Lucas (actor-director)

* Mae Murray (actress) — Robert Z. Leonard (director)

*Ida May Park (writer-director) — Joseph DeGrasse (director)

Dorothy Phillips (actress) — Allen Holubar (director-writer)

*Mary Pickford (actress-producer) with Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Charles Chaplin

*Josephine Rector (writer) — Hal Angus (director)

*Lillian Case Russell (writer) — John Lowell (actor-writer)

Alice B. Russell (actress-producer) — Oscar Micheaux (director-producer)

Florence Ryerson (writer) — Colin Clements (writer)

*Norma Talmadge (actress-producer) — Joseph M. Schneck (producer)

Alice Terry (actress) — Rex Ingram (director)

*Gertrude Thanhouser (actress-writer-producer) — Edwin Thanhouser (producer)

Rosemary Theby — Robert Henley

*Mrs. M. Webb (writer) — Miles M. Webb (producer)

*Lois Weber (actress-writer-director-producer) and Phillips Smalley (actor-producer)

*Madame E. Touissant Welcome — E. Touissant Welcome (co-producers)

*Kathlyn Williams (actress-producer) — Charles Eyton (producer)

*Maria P. Williams (writer-producer) — Jesse L. Williams (producer)

Elsie Jane Wilson (actress-director-writer) — Rupert Julian (director)

*Clara Kimball Young (actress-producer) — Harry Garson (director-producer)

Dorothy Yost (writer) — Dwight Cummings (writer)

Relationship Unknown

*Beatriz Michelena (actress-producer) and George Middleton (director)

Never-Married Couples

*Gale Henry (actress-producer) — Bruno J. Becker

*Helen Gardner (actress-producer) — Charles L. Gaskill (writer-director)

*Jane Murfin (writer) and Larry Trimble (actor-director-producer)

*Nell Shipman (actress-writer-director) — Bert Van Tuyle (director)

*Florence Turner (actress-director-producer) — Larry Trimble (actor-director-producer)

Fake Marriage

*Marie Dressler (actress-producer) — Jim Dalton (business manager)

Team, Not Romantic Couple

Sada Cowan (writer) — Howard Higgin (writer)

*Grace Cunard (actress-writer-director) — Francis Ford (actor-director)

*Gene Gauntier (actress-writer-director-producer) — Sydney Olcott (actor-director-producer)

Julia Crawford Ivers (writer) — William Desmond Taylor (director)

* Indicates started production company together. Note: See Women’s Production and Pre-Production Companies for dates and company names.

This list is not exhaustive and reflects research done prior to publication (2013)

Domestic Relations

Fan magazine writers liked to point out exceptions to the rule that creative teams were husband-wife teams. Motion Picture Magazine had to tell readers that Francis Ford was not married to Grace Cunard, but that he had a “real wife,” as they put it—Mrs Elsie Van Name Ford—who wrote the stories he used in the independent productions he made after leaving Universal Pictures.¹⁶ But where the studios specialized in publicizing spouses, thus advertising the heterosexuality of creative personnel, the industry community was divided about children and upheld what might be called a “double standard” of domestic disclosure. In 1916, Photoplay, typically obtuse on the subject, stated the obvious—that in the screen industry, actresses were always “Miss” whether married or not. But the editors take to task those women who keep their children secret, referring to them as “queer movie mothers ashamed of their babies.”¹⁷ Researchers on this project confirm that there are relatively few contemporary references to children born to and raised by women working primarily as screen actresses. Writer Frances Marion in a 1958 interview later explained the practice of camouflaging not only pregnancy but child-rearing when she confirmed that “Husbands and babies had to be hidden in the background.” Marion thinks that Gloria Swanson was the first to dare to say that she was married and also that she was a mother.¹⁸ Still in 1958 terminated pregnancies and illegitimate children could not be mentioned and researchers have had to wait decades for “reveal all” autobiographies in order to begin studying the work-to-domestic relations ratio in these women’s emotional lives.¹⁹ The moral code, however, may have been more strict for actresses than for female scenario writers. A rare photograph of mother Sarah Y. Mason, who worked with Victor Heerman as a husband-wife writing team, plays on her double role dexterity. Also unusual is this image of parents and children not featured as a performing family. The photo of Dorothy Davenport Reid with husband Wally Reid and their children Betty and Wallace Reid, Jr., circulated as a publicity image after he tragically died as a consequence of morphine addiction in 1923 and she returned to work, visibly the suffering widow. Sometimes atypical units were featured in fan magazine articles as when the home life of Cleo Madison was filled in with a mother and the invalid sister she supported. A woman was single because she was divorced (as Madison) or in between husbands or lovers. She was single even if, especially if, she was in an established lesbian relationship like Dorothy Arzner and her partner Marion Morgan or writer Zoe Akins and actress Jobyna Howland. Researching these alliances requires us to look behind references to a woman’s “single” status or see the terms “companion” or “roommate” for the code words they really are. We learn to be sensitive to the references to serial relationships that point to gay and lesbian liaisons as, for instance, Anita Loos ’s mention in a 1938 letter to H. L. Mencken that Zoe Akins had a “new lover” (qtd. in Holliday 1995, 233).

Dorothy Davenport Reid with Wally Reid and children. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

What we want to know most of all is what went on inside the homes of Hollywood celebrities and their friends. Zoe Akins was noted for the parties she threw at her home at 6350 Franklin Avenue in Hollywood for guests such as Dorothy Arzner, director George Cukor, writer Somerset Maugham, and actress Billie Burke (once allied with Arzner). From a Cecil Beaton article in Vogue in 1931 we know that “the house shared by the Misses Zoe Akins and Jobyna Howland” was “full of the most exquisite objects, full of charming and literary personalities” (qtd. in Mann 2001, 74).

Mabel Normand with chauffeur. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

We can infer from the great number of exterior photographs of motion picture celebrity homes that fan magazines tantalized readers with these images. Photoplay made the connection between these exteriors and the domestic comfort of their interiors in a 1917 article. The publication of images of the homes of Marie Doro, Gladys Brockwell, Louise Glaum, Ruth Stonehouse, Mary Pickford, Bessie Barriscale, Tsuru Aoki, and Kathlyn Williams suggests that mansions and adorable bungalows were good publicity for their owners. Strangely, Photoplay dares to address the means by which these players were able to acquire the capital to buy luxurious homes, tying their earnings to the enthusiasm of fans in a reference to the “net proceeds of homage.”²⁰ But fan magazine writers had to strain to make a connection between what looks like real estate advertising and the lives of favorites. To score a photograph of Nazimova standing outside her mansion in jodhpurs would have been a coup. Then again, the number of willing subjects reminds us of how many not only understood the motion picture advertising value of signs of wealth but also its diversionary function. Mabel Normand outside her home sitting in her chauffeur-driven limousine belies a life of scandal and chronic illness. The diversion of the home also promoted diversion itself as an ideal. Here, the aura of work-as-play enveloped writers as well as players. Highly paid Famous Players-Lasky scenario writer Beulah Marie Dix walking her dachshund in front of her luxurious Southern California stucco residence reassures readers that her work is not exactly work. One angle on the story about Dix (and a rationale for taking interior publicity photographs), might have been that she worked from home.

Whose Work: Credits and Uncredited Work

Male-female working partnerships raise the difficult question as to whether the female contribution was submerged or whether joint authorship had its own assumed standard. Collaboration was the norm in the first decade at the start of which all creative workers were uncredited. One early film historian would thus describe the development of the motion picture industry as moving from anonymous production to screen credit (Jacobs 1975, 121).²¹ Attribution, if there was any, was unofficial, as Eileen Bowser explains in her study of the 1907–1915 years. Credits were not advertised in trade papers until in 1911 when the Edison Company published relatively complete cast lists (actors, directors, authors) and around the same time a few companies placed cast credits in titles, as Bowser determined from examining surviving motion picture film prints (Bowser 1990, 118).²² The combination of early anonymity and the very conditions of collaboration in the case of creative couples can create some confusion. Following the Archival Filmography and Not Extant Films, contradictory records and retrospective corrections are referenced in the “Credit Report” note.

Director and/or Producer

Lillian Gish (a/d) (Remodelling Her Husband, 1920), PCMC

Lillian Gish directing, Remodelling Her Husband (1920). Private Collection.

The focus here on women directors is both a misnomer and a key. In her important introduction to the “Cinema as a Job” section of The Red Velvet Seat, Antonia Lant explains that, given the “fluctuation” of opportunities in this period, directing, the plumb job, is a “most sensitive indicator of job range” (562). That the trade press, fan magazines, and the women most involved also saw directing as a key indicator is borne out in what Lant terms the “debate” over the question of the female director. She finds that these public discussions kept alive the terms of the debates around women’s suffrage, terms that were echoed in the 1970s (568).²³ One finds among the figures quoted here the position that women were not suited to direct (Lillian Gish, Alice Guy Blaché) as well as the position that women were uniquely suited to it (Clara Beranger, Lois Weber, June Mathis). Ida May Park espoused both positions at different times in her career (Denton 49; Park 335–37). Many have noted the apparent inconsistency between public statements and the responsibilities these women undertook, most notably directing, producing, and executive managing, and Lant reminds us to consider the historical moment in which these statements are made (562). Here we also emphasize the conditions under which women worked. For instance, the months in which Lillian Gish, in the absence of D. W. Griffith, acted as supervisor of the Mamaroneck, New York, studio, she also directed her only motion picture, the feature Remodelling Her Husband (1920). Richard Koszarski provides the information that the studio, the former Flagler estate, was under construction and the cameraman Gish relied upon was suffering from World War I shell shock (2008, 17).

The findings here indicate no perfect correspondence between directing or writing jobs and identification with feminism or even espousal of equality for women. A very few associated themselves with feminism (Sonya Levien, Adela Rogers St. Johns), and at least one first associated with and then disassociated herself from feminism (Olga Petrova). Surprisingly, one of the most unqualified statements on behalf of women’s equality comes in 1912 from Beatrice deMille, the mother of motion picture impresarios William and Cecil B. DeMille, and in her own right a powerful New York theatrical agent who became a scenario writer: “This is the woman’s age. I think it has come to stay. Every relation between the sexes has changed. Hereafter, no woman is going to get married without feeling that she is getting as much as she gives. This may sound… crude… but it expresses pretty clearly what I mean…. This theme ‘women’s equality’ lives very close to my heart.”²⁴ We could take up this theme and claim the first two decades as a “Golden Age of Women in Cinema.” Or, we can approach the question with more caution since the evidence is not all in as yet.

Alice Guy Blaché (d/p) My Madonna (Solax, 1915). BFI

Alice Guy Blaché, set of My Madonna (Solax, 1915). Courtesy of the British Film Institute.

The competing evidence of women’s own writings as well as other sources from the 1910s and 1920s point to an evolution of job terminology as well as of the jobs themselves. While Alice Guy Blaché would be called a “directrice,” she was also clearly a producer, beginning in France at the Gaumont Company and continuing in the US, where she was producer as well as president of the Solax Company, as Alison McMahan tells us in her definitive study (McMahan 2001, chs. 3 and 4). Consider as well the power of retrospective recollection in memoirs and later interviews to make claims as well as to issue disclaimers. Charlie Chaplin notoriously credited himself as director on Keystone Company films on which Mabel Normand was assigned as director.²⁵ Terminology in addition to roles themselves was in flux, so there was no standard way of referring to a woman who stage-directed a one-reel motion picture production as Jeanie Macpherson, who in 1916 was referred to as a “directress,” did (Martin 95).

Jeanie Macpherson (a/d) The Tarantula (1913). AMPAS

Jeanie Macpherson, The Tarantula (1913). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Often male as well as female directors were “picturizers,” and, ambiguously, just “producers.” Even the Universal Weekly, the company house organ, through the 1910s uses “director” and “producer” almost synonymously, Cooper finds. To complicate matters, a unit within a larger company (effectively a company within a company), might be headed by a “producer” or a “producing director,” he further explains (Cooper 2010, 40). Here, we have credited women who were involved in production companies as “producers” as a means of adding a facet to a career, understanding, however, that there is more variance under the term “producer” than under “director.” Karen Mahar has used the term “actor-producer” picked up below. See “The Star Name Company.”

Not only were “producing” and “directing” terminologically interchangeable, but the distinction between directing, acting, and writing was not always clear. As an actress who in 1917 would start a company, Petrova Pictures Corporation, Olga Petrova recalled in her memoir, Butter With My Bread, that in the “infancy” of the industry, written scenarios were conceived as well as abandoned by both director and actors. Here she describes the creative exertions of “Mr. K.,” the director who rewrites by enacting, and the ravishment of the heroine, an expectant mother, in a scene from an unnamed domestic melodrama:

Although the scenarios were always read to me for approval, it was quite possible for a director to change them out of all recognition as we went along. Members of the supporting cast rarely knew more of the piece than the episodes in which they appeared. These scenes were outlined by the director, but for the most part he left the dialogue to the imagination of the performer. As it was considered very amusing by some artists to try to break one another up, the dialogue, during the actual photographing of the scene, had very often nothing in common with the action. This was disconcerting enough, but the habit of a certain director of counting aloud between bellows through a megaphone, to “hop it up” or “ease it up,” was more disconcerting still. Very early in Mr. K’s direction I found the only way to combat this was to stop in the scene and beg his pardon for not having understood. This of course wasted considerable film, for we had to start all over again. Usually after the first day or so of the filming of a story, Mr. K would discard the script and outline the scenes from memory. Sometimes he improved on the original, sometimes he didn’t, but his manner of telling was always picturesque. I remember very well one scene going something like this: “You’re in your living room, working on some baby clothes. You register great joy at the coming of the little stranger. Your husband’s away and you’re thinking about a surprise he’s going to get when you give him the glad news. There’s a knock at the door… the mail man… a letter from your husband. Perhaps it’s to say he’s coming back sooner than you expected. You press it to your heart. You break the seal. You read it once. You can’t believe your eyes. You read it again. He ain’t coming back. He ain’t never coming back. He’s gone off with your best friend. Here we’ll count five for you to faint. You drop all of a heap, the letter clutched in your hand. We count five again. You come to. You look around you. ‘Where am I?’ you register. You drag yourself on your hands and knees to the couch, and you throw yourself face down on… shoulders… sobs. Your whole life’s ruined. Nothing matters no more. Suddenly you hear a sound. The latch clicks. You look up. The Baron enters. With a lascivious smile on his lips he comes toward you. “‘So… he’s gone,’ says the Baron. ‘What did I tell you?’ he says. ‘Didn’t I say he was a no-good bum? Didn’t I tell you he was playing around with this dame? And you wouldn’t believe me, would you? You sacrificing yourself, doing your own housework, wearing mangy old duds, never going anywheres, just so he could build up his business. Now you see where he’s brought you.’ “‘Don’t, don’t. Have mercy. Have pity,’ you says. Then he says, ‘Now maybe you’ll listen to me. Maybe you’ll come to have a little sense. There’s lots left to live for. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken. You can have beautiful clothes. You can have maids to wait on you. You can have a fine house, not a dump like you got now. You can have diamonds and yachts, and travel. I’ll settle a hundred thousand dollars on you. All you’ve got to do is say the word.’ “Now he starts coming nearer. He gets his arms around you. You try to push him off of you. You struggle to your feet. But he’s still grabbing you by the waist. Your hair gets all loose and falls over your shoulders. Your kimono tears open at the throat. You try to pull it together, but no use. As you struggle and struggle it gets ripped all the way down. Still you fight on, but you’re no match for the Baron. At last he overpowers you. You fall exhausted…. Cut.” By this time Mr. K had worked himself into a very interesting state of emotion. He was, as was once said of Mr. Gladstone, “carried away by his own exuberance of his own verbosity.” I felt I could never do any sort of justice to the scene after his description of it. This conviction was further strengthened by the fact that the “Baron” was a short, thin, pale weed of an individual whom I could very easily have taken over my knee and given a good trouncing (Petrova 1942, 260–61).

Lantern slide, ad for Olga Petrova at Paramount Pictures, 1917. Private Collection.

Petrova’s description of Mr. K’s direction contrasts with her experience of working under the direction of Alice Guy Blaché, who was more open to actor’s contributions:

In the first scene, as in all succeeding ones, Madame Blaché outlined vocally what each episode was with action, words appropriate to the situation. If the first or second rehearsal pleased her, even though a player might intentionally or not alter her instructions, as long as they did not hurt the scene, even possibly improve it, she would allow this to pass. If not she would rehearse and rehearse until they did before calling camera. When she had cause to correct a player, she would do this courteously, and in my case, which was more than often, she might resort to her native tongue. This gentle gesture touched me deeply, softened any embarrassment I might feel. After all the scenes were set for the day had been shot, the close-ups followed…. These concluded, Madama looked, and was, tired. But during rehearsals and shooting she never lost her dignity or poise. She wore a silken glove, but she would have been perfectly capable of using a mailed fist if she considered it necessary (Petrova, “A Remembrance,” in Slide 1986a, 102–103).

Women’s Producing Companies: “Her Own” or Not Her Own?

Slide Cheating Cheaters (1919) Clara Kimball Young (a), Kathryn Stuart (w), PC

Lantern slide, Cheating Cheaters (1919). Private Collection.

Second Wave feminists often quoted modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s advice that if she is to write “A woman must have money and a room of her own.” The case of women who helped to start companies in the motion picture business, however, is not exactly parallel. Even while the attempt to gain more creative freedom may have explained the fact that there were more total independent companies with women’s names than men’s names, many factors intervened in the complicated process of industrial motion picture production. First, the concept of “Her-Own-Company” that Karen Mahar has retrieved for us is somewhat ironic in that it comes from a 1916 Photoplay editorial that refers to a “‘her-own-company’ epidemic,” by which the magazine means that from its point of view there were entirely too many companies started by star actresses following the example of Mary Pickford and Clara Kimball Young. Second, Mahar divides the phenomenon of women’s companies including the star name company into two “waves” or movements, with Photoplay’s imagined “epidemic” applying to the second. Thus: Movement 1: 1911–1915 and Movement 2: 1916–1923.²⁶ Third, and perhaps most important, Mahar cautions that the star actress’s name is no guarantee of the amount of power she wielded in the enterprise, particularly since the majority of these businesses were male-female partnerships (2006, 62). In the absence of company business records, most telling are documents such as distributor George Kleine’s deposition in the 1915 legal proceedings against Grandin Films involving Ethel Grandin and her husband Ray Smallwood. Clearly we cannot tell from the company name alone about either business arrangements or creative dynamics, and the term “company” may refer to either an independent legal entity or to a creative team, which might include an actress, a director, a writer, a camera operator, and others assigned to work together—again, a company within a larger company.

The Star Name Company

Marion Leonard portrait. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Gene Gauntier portrait. Private Collection.

Film studies scholarship on the US star system has been particularly strong on the commodification of the star actress as a modern form of public personhood.²⁷ In this scholarship, female stars such as Marlene Dietrich have been understood as taking symbolic control of their on-screen images.²⁸ Until recently, however, the idea that women in the silent era attempted to take control of their images by legal and economic means was an anomaly. Now, however, a second wave of star studies will need to consider the silent era “actor-producer” as well as the “actor-writer” as we imagine the many who also wrote their own scenarios. The question once posed of how to interpret image and narrative as favoring a woman’s point of view now becomes one of how actresses first used scenario writing as well as performance to turn the tables on convention. If, after they achieved fame, they chafed against creative constraints, how did they manage to break away and start up one business after another? In this regard, Marion Leonard may be as historically significant as Florence Lawrence, so often cited as the first motion picture star. At the Biography Company, Leonard is thought to have written and/or directed the extant one-reel Lucky Jim (1909), in which Jim is not so lucky because he has married a physically abusive shrew. In 1911, Leonard and her director husband, Stanner E. V. Taylor, left Biograph to set up Gem Motion Picture Company, the first of two companies they would start, capitalizing on Leonard’s popularity because they could.

The star name company in which the star’s name may or may not have been used in the title was either a company or a “unit” within a larger studio or company, thus more of what might be called a “dependent company” as opposed to an independent company. For example, actor-director Sydney Olcott and Gene Gauntier worked together as the Olcott-Gauntier unit within the Kalem Company, 1910–1912. After Olcott and Gauntier, along with her husband Jack C. Clark left the Kalem Company, they operated as Gene Gauntier Feature Players Company, an independent company, between 1912 and around 1915. The differences between being a totally “indie” company or a semi-independent company that was part of a larger studio or company boiled down to the sources of capital, the advantage of self-contained departments (editing, publicity, legal), and, most significant in terms of public exhibition, commercial distribution that might be undertaken by the larger company that had its own distribution channels. For some, as was the case with the Kalem Company, distribution to exhibiting theatres was guaranteed by the Motion Picture Patents Company cartel. Later, beginning in 1915, larger companies began to buy up their own theatres, a means of insuring exhibition. Independent companies, however, had to contract with separate distributing or releasing companies, sometimes at their peril. Producer-writer-director Nell Shipman recalled in her autobiography that she had been tricked into taking too low a percentage on the distribution deal that she struck with American Releasing Corporation for The Grub-Stake (1922). As a consequence, she lost money when she should have been the one to profit (114–115).

In the US, companies formed pre-World War I, 1910–1915, were coincident with the foundation of the first moving picture businesses, the transition from one- and two-reel to multireel films (from shorts to features). Post-World War I company foundation corresponded with the American rise to world film industry dominance made easier by weakened French, German, Italian, and British motion picture businesses.²⁹ Here is how social and economic conditions in Mahar’s two high points for US star name companies favored initiatives differently:

Wave 1: 1911–1915: Actresses left Biograph, Kalem, and Vitagraph, the companies that had promoted them to stardom. Marion Leonard, the second “Biograph Girl,” started Gem (1911) and later the Mar-Leon Corporation (1913); the Vitagraph star who gave her name to Helen Gardner Picture Players (1911–12) produced features; and Ethel Grandin, with Raymond C. Smallwood, formed Grandin Films (1914–1915) and later Smallwood Film Corporation. With Sydney Olcott, Gene Gauntier started the Gene Gauntier Feature Players Company (1912–1915), and the first “Biograph Girl” Florence Lawrence, with Harry Solter, her husband, formed the Victor Film Company (1912–1914). Here, as counter to the myth of available US capital, it is notable that “Vitagraph Girl” Florence Turner, frustrated in her attempt to raise financing in the United States, found it in the United Kingdom. With Larry Trimble she set up Turner Films, which operated in Britain, 1913–16, but was curtailed finally by World War I.³⁰ Renting the Hepworth Studios in London, the two produced, among other titles, the extant one-reel comedy in which they compete in a funny face-making contest, Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914). One might have thought that US women, replacing men drafted into the armed forces in World War I, would thus get a foot in the door in the film industry. While women did not replace men in the US, they did in the German film industry, where even an American, a circus performer from Watseka, Illinois, seized the opportunity. She hyphenated her first and last names as the Fern-Andra Company, begun in 1915.

Frame enlargement Florence Turner Daisy (a/p) Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner Films, 1914). USW

Frame enlargement, Florence Turner, Daisy Doodad’s Dial (Turner Films, 1914). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Wave 2: 1916–1923: Let us consider this second high point from the industry perspective of “too many women.” Recall that in December 1916, Photoplay editors identified what they thought was a disturbing development in Hollywood. They count six “producing companies headed by women” either already “grinding out plays” or in early stages of formation (“Close-up,” 63-64). Yet Photoplay makes two exceptions— companies started by Mary Pickford and Clara Kimball Young. Early historical accounts of the US film industry written by Terry Ramsaye and Benjamin Hampton also feature Pickford and Young, although not the many others that the magazine blames for causing an “epidemic” (63). The star name company in the Ramsaye and Hampton versions is seen as part of the story of how US motion pictures became big business. Female stardom is not an opportunity for players to gain creative control. Rather, star recognition is an asset turned to the advantage of the great moguls. In Hampton, Lewis J. Selznick’s idea for a company named for actress Clara Kimball Young, an offshoot of his World Film Corporation, is a “daring” means of financing production through franchises sold as advances against film rentals. Buyers were wealthy investors, including mail order entrepreneur Arthur Spiegel and theatrical agent William O. Brady (135). Terry Ramsaye’s narration of the protracted 1916 deal-making between Pickford and Adolph Zukor gives somewhat more weight to Pickford, who emerges as a canny negotiator. But in Ramsaye’s telling it is Zukor’s Pickford coup that cinches the Famous Players-Lasky purchase of distributor Paramount Pictures Corporation. In time, the birth of mammoth producer-distributor Paramount Pictures would dwarf the actress’s contractual triumphs—the Mary Pickford—named studio and the separate distribution company for her films, Artcraft Pictures Corporation (741–751). See “Motion Picture Distribution: 1910–1923.”

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, founders of United Artists, 1919. Private Collection.

Recent reevaluation of the careers of Clara Kimball Young (Mahar 2006, 164–166) and Mary Pickford (Schmidt 2003, 59–81) see the struggle for creative control more complexly and open the door to understanding the way actress-producers threatened the forces of corporatization in the 1916–1923 moment. The 1919 formation of United Artists as the only production-distribution company run by powerful actors and directors, however, has been just the most visible sign of actor rebellion against studio management.³¹ But Pickford’s victories were not lost on the other actors and actresses who sought script control, guaranteed distribution, studio space, and a share of the profits in the short moment when stars could take advantage of their bargaining power. Some of these would form Bessie Barriscale Productions, Leah Baird Productions, Anita Stewart Productions, Helen Holmes Production Corporation, and Texas Guinan Productions. Less well known are the attempts of actresses Ruth Stonehouse and Lule Warrenton at producing and directing after they left Universal Pictures.

Alla Nazimova, Camille (1921). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

The risks of independent financing were great, as the case of actress Alla Nazimova illustrates. Nazimova Productions was set up by Lewis J. Selznick within Metro Pictures, where the extant art deco classic Camille (1921), written by June Mathis and designed by Natacha Rambova, was produced. But when in 1922 Nazimova became a United Artists partner, producing the more experimental Salome (1923) with her own capital, she lost everything and was never able to finance another film.³² See “US Companies Outside Hollywood: 1915–1935.” Less dramatic losses were sustained by Margery Wilson Productions on That Something (1921) and Vera McCord on Good-Bad Wife (1921), although these companies never made another film after the first venture.

Lule Warrenton portrait. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Highlighted in this overview are only a fraction of cases. There were many more than six “her own” production companies in 1916 and more by 1922, and forty is a better estimate for this second moment if one counts cases in which women started more than one company. See “Women’s Production and Preproduction Companies.” But the new industry attitude toward women in the business is starkly apparent in the Photoplay editorial. Because US fan magazines had been beating the drum enthusiastically for women as producers and directors, the editorial’s negative tone seems an abrupt reversal. Photoplay editors are worried that these start-ups signal a throw-back to a less rigidly stratified and controlled mode of production. Aligning itself with new principles of management applied to the creative process, the magazine sees women’s independent companies as the “bane of the industry,” because, harkening back to an earlier stage, they threaten to “drag film-making back to its days of solitary, suspicious feudal inefficiency” (63–64). Here, in one of the very few articulations of the threat star name companies must have represented to the hierarchization of the studio, we glean insight into the perception of women. They were not team players (“solitary”) and not organized to maximize profit (“inefficient”). Terry Ramsaye, writing the first comprehensive history under the auspices of Photoplay in 1926, would sum up the pro-management terms: “Every element of the creative side of the industry is being brought under central manufacturing control” (833). Finally, in a reversal of their earlier support for the star system, new studio heads Carl Laemmle (Universal) and Adolph Zukor began to identify star actors as a problem. Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount retaliated against actresses and actors’ active resistance to centralization and “efficiency” by announcing in 1922 a war on the star system.³³

Constance Talmadge (a/p) <i>Lessons in Love</i> (1921). PC

Lantern slide, Constance Talmadge, Lessons in Love (1921). Private Collection.

Mae Murray (a/p) advertising slide Fascination (Tiffany Productions, 1922)

Lantern slide, Mae Murray’s Fascination (Tiffany Productions, 1922). Private Collection.

Another reversal was more devastating to women’s companies. First National Exhibitors’ Circuit, which had been the salvation of independent companies as a distributing consortium, became itself a producing company, Associated First National Pictures. See “Motion Picture Distribution: 1910–1923.” Beginning in 1917, First National had provided production funds for motion pictures planned by Olga Petrova, Anita Stewart, Mary Pickford, Constance Talmadge, Norma Talmadge, Anita Loos, Katharine MacDonald, Mildred Harris-Chaplin, Hope Hampton, and Marguerite Clark.³³

Corinne Griffith. Private Collection.

Under centralized control in Burbank, California, in 1922, those actresses who had signed with First National lost the advantages of independence. A case study in these changes is Corinne Griffith Productions, whose 1923 First National contract spelled out the new terms. She left the weakening Vitagraph Company at a high point in her career, expecting to make all of the creative decisions for the new Corinne Griffith Productions. Her contract, the prototype of the seven-year contract of the studio system, gave her no control over budget, casting, or script, and no profit-sharing. In 1928, First National was bought by Warner Brothers. Griffith was not an isolated example, considering, for one, Tiffany Productions and Mae Murray, who lost control of her company to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer between 1922 and 1924.³⁵