Women and the Silent Screen Conference

For 22 years, Women and the Silent Screen (WSS), a biennial international conference sponsored by Women and Film History International (WFHI), has brought together researchers focused on women’s pivotal roles in the first decades of motion picture history. WSS has supported the creation of a new view of the film industries that demonstrates the centrality of women in economic and labor history, criticism, aesthetics, narrative development, film culture, and film production in a globalized world.

In 2021, WFPP and the Film & Media Studies program at Columbia were set to host the eleventh edition of WSS. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, only a small, online only event called Women and the Silent Screen: Entr’acte took place that year (from June 4–6, 2021). By popular demand, Entr’acte’s 4 topics—American & Chinese film connections, early Soviet women documentary makers, Alice Guy Blaché, and Digital Humanities—were continued during the 2022 conference. More information on the 2021 event is available here.

Women and the Silent Screen 2021 – Speaker and Participant Bios

The following year, Columbia was able to host Women and the Silent Screen XI: Women, Cinema, and World Migration (June 1–4, 2022). The theme was chosen to highlight new scholarship connecting early cinema history to the migration and social mobility that caught up women globally when motion pictures arrived more than a century ago. We invited students, scholars, distributors, curators, and archivists from around the world to return to where the U.S. film industry began to explore how the new medium intersected with women’s movement across boundaries of gender, ethnicity, race, and class, considering occupational and national borders that excluded some women and welcomed others. As part of this research, WSSXI started Jump Start, a platform for sharing research conducted by Columbia students before the conference began.

Women and the Silent Screen XI 2022 – Speaker and Participant Bios

2022 Conference Poster

In Manhattan: WSSXI opened with an archivists panel and screening at the Museum of Modern Art on the evening of June 1 (Wednesday), and then continued June 2–4 (Thursday to Saturday), at Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts and Dodge Hall. Conference panels, workshops, short presentations, and plenary sessions took up questions of migration and mobility in the context of the development of motion pictures as this relates to histories of women worldwide. Access the program information, schedule, and list of screenings for the 2022 conference here.

Secretary at work: Empire Film Co., New York, NY, 1910.

Big Themes: Women, Cinema, & World Migration

1. When New York Was Hollywood: Moving Up in the World
From the unique site of New York City, we figured questions of women and American film culture at its place of technological origin in West Orange, New Jersey, and adjacent to the legitimate theatre in Manhattan. Industrious women were getting their chance to capitalize on the circulation of populations and possibilities within this bustling metropolis at this specific historical location. What does the movie theater become for an immigrant daughter of the tenements negotiating the customs of the old country and the new city? How does studying women like Marguerite Bertsch and Margaret Turnbull working in Ft. Lee, New Jersey, during its prime enlighten us about “how women worked” during the silent film industry? What roles do Columbia University and Barnard College play in elevating movie-making to an academic discipline, with Frances Taylor Patterson teaching a course on “Photoplay Writing” and Alice Guy Blaché giving lectures on campus? How did New York make Hollywood?

Left: White Rose Woo (吴素馨). In film magazine Dianying yuebao.

Right: Pearl White, Pearl of the Army (1916).

2. International Serial Queens
Whether on the river bluffs of Ft. Lee, NJ, or in the heart of cosmopolitan Shanghai, women played integral roles in the production and popularity of the “cliffhanger” serials. How were women engaging with the action film heroines of the silver screen as they adventured through the city? Circulating globally, what do serial queens signify in different national contexts and how do local theatrical practices and genres, such as Hindi action films or Chinese martial arts, engender new iterations of serial queen stardom? WSS XI featured Pearl White and her “imitators” in screenings that included her Chinese namesake White Rose Woo: The Valiant Girl Nicknamed White Rose / Nüxia Bai Meigui (Zhang Huimin, Huaju Film Co., China, 1929) and “lost” reels of The Perils of Pauline (Pathé, US, 1914), along with extant Danish, French, and Italian serial queen episodes. Our “International Serial Queens” program featured the American Pearl White and the Chinese White Rose Woo (吴素馨).

3. Migratory Diaspora and Motion Pictures
Cinema emerged as great waves of migrants from all parts of the globe arrived in cities to work and play at the turn of the 20th century. Many migrants were young women who worked in, and went to, the movies, where they encountered representations of their new working environments, living arrangements, dreams, and fears. How did women participate in the forging of new identities through silent film production, movie theaters, and fan culture? What were the stakes when silent screen actresses like Alla Nazimova, Beatriz Michelena, Anita Thompson, or Tsuru Aoki performed roles and characters that crossed conventions of gender, nationality, ethnicity, or race? What part did women play in the Orientalism and exoticism of the silent film era? What particular challenges or rewards did silent cinema represent for women in (im)migrant communities, colonial contexts (India, Hong Kong, Manchukuo, Taiwan, or Korea), or other contested spaces?

4. Cross-Cultural Melodrama
We also sought to expand frameworks pertaining to women, gender, and historical inquiry by historicizing the role of women and border-crossing in generating early film culture. How do women reimagine, translate, or adapt melodrama for the screen from its diverse theatrical, literary, and musical roots? In what ways do the photoplay manuals, scripts, criticism, and scholarship produced by women in the silent era shape the structures and conventions of motion pictures? What kinds of new cross-continental or transnational works and careers in silent cinema emerge from nascent networks of female screenwriters, agents, and exhibitors?

See the original call for papers here.

Women and the Silent Screen XI: Trailer

Publicity Images

Sponsors

Women and Film History International

MA in Film and Media Studies Program Columbia University School of the Arts

Columbia University History Department

The Harriman Institute at Columbia University

Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University

Dragon Summit Culture Endowment Fund for C.V. Starr East Asian Library

Digital Scholarship at Columbia

Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture

Columbia Maison Française

Fort Lee Film Commission

Center for Comparative Media at Columbia

Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia

Peking University School of the Arts

The Center for Korean Research at Columbia

The Center for American Studies

The Division of Humanities in the Arts and Sciences

Iona College

Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation

Credits

Columbia University Co-chairs
Jane Gaines (Film and Media Studies); Hilary A. Hallett (History)

Coordinator
Cindi Rowell

Student Workers
2020–21: Daniel Aufmann, Sonia Brand-Fisher, Madeleine Collier, Marissa C. deBacca, Maria Teresa Fidalgo, Zoe Jiao, Kyna McClenaghan, Jing Peng, Muxin Zhang, Jie Zou
2021–22: Jung-Aa Ahn, Annie Berman, Benjamin Crabtree, Jack DeGhetto, Yulong Hu, Mollie Murtagh, Asiyah Syed, Gavin Riley Thibodeau

Program Committee
Hilary A. Hallett (Columbia University), Kristine Harris (SUNY New Paltz), Drake Stutesman (NYU; President, WFHI), Tami Williams (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee)

Contact
For general questions: soa-wss-conference@columbia.edu

Press
Read a report about the conference in Cineaste here.

Read the Spring 2023 issue of Feminist Media Histories, dedicated to the 2022 Women & the Silent Screen Conference, here (behind a paywall).

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If you’d like to access the original, archived conference website, it’s available at the Wayback Machine.