Archives: Pioneers

Flossie A. Jones

by Richard Abel

In the late 1910s, the trade press heralded Flossie A. Jones as “the best-known woman manager” of movie theaters in the country (“Flossie A. Jones, of Waukesha”). Despite her position as a small-town exhibitor in Waukesha, Wisconsin (with a population of less than 10,000), this “title” made her a model for others in the industry.

Flossie A. Jones in Motography (1 June 1918): 1043.

Born Florence Adeline Diedrich in 1887, she was a small woman, often called a “girl” in newspaper articles. Sometime between 1910 and 1914, she married Harry Jones who, since 1900, had been active in the theater business, before becoming advertising manager and lecturer for the Unique theater. Florence first owned and managed the Park, a small theater that she sold for a profit after her lease ended. In 1914, adopting the nickname Flossie, she and Harry bought and remodeled the Colonial (formerly the much larger Silurian Casino). Within three months, unfortunately, it was partly destroyed by fire. Borrowing funds, she and Harry had it rebuilt, reportedly according to Flossie’s own designs. Furthermore, rejecting insufficient contractor offers, she bought all the materials required and supervised a score of workmen on every phase of the construction (Jones).

After the Colonial reopened in early 1916, Flossie separated from Harry. A year later, she joined several businessmen to establish the Waukesha Amusement Company, serving as vice president and general manager. The company now controlled the Colonial and two smaller theaters in town, the Unique (showing only movies) and the Auditorium (playing movies and vaudeville). “By having the different houses under a single management, the exhibitor could laugh at the salesman when he tried to boost his price [for renting a feature],” Flossie argued, “he simply couldn’t do it, that’s all” (“Running”). The flagship Colonial, with its 1,000 seats and very large stage, also could host roadshow theater productions and concerts. Jones herself acted as the Colonial’s house manager, treasurer, press agent, advertising manager, and booking agent. On Saturdays, children flocked to the theater when she sold them tickets in exchange for a potato, another vegetable, an egg, or a piece of fruit. Given her growing reputation, Flossie became a “state organizer” for the Wisconsin Theater Managers Association and a delegate representing the state at the 1917 National Film Exhibitors convention.

“I am really in competition with Milwaukee,” Flossie admitted to Motion Picture News in 1918 (“This Woman Exhibitor”). Waukesha was only sixteen miles west of Milwaukee, whose theaters could lure Jones’s patrons to the much larger city by interurban rail. She consequently had to find a way to handle expensive movies in order to maintain her clientele. Her strategy was to create a prologue or theatrical presentation that introduced the feature film, something only a few metropolitan exhibitors were staging in 1918: S.L. Rothapfel in New York, Sid Grauman in Los Angeles, S. Barret McCormick in Indianapolis, and Harold A. Franklin in Buffalo. In such a small town, Flossie recommended using local people, “‘actors’ that people know,” in order to best promote the feature (“Atmosphere Achieved”). “I work in union with the local societies,” she added, because “these societies aid me when I want some local talent for my prologues and I in turn aid them when they want benefit performances” (Moriarty).

The first prologue that the trade press praised in June 1918 was a Parisian cabaret scene that reproduced the opening scene of Revelation, in which Alla Nazimova performed an Apache dance. For this novelty, Jones arranged some tables and chairs, a player piano, and sketches on the stage walls, costumed her stagehands and a dozen high school boys in French student outfits, and hired a barefoot dancer for the Apache solo (Harris 1043). Several weeks later, Flossie created a relatively elaborate stage set for The Bluebird, which played for only two days and nights. She hired a professional dancer from out of town, three local girls who could dance (one of whom who could also sing), as well as two little children to perform in a fairyland scene, whose atmosphere matched that of the film. This prologue “helped put [her audience] into the mood of the play and proved an excellent advertising point” (“Gives ‘The Bluebird’”).

Colonial Theater program for Toys of Fate (1918). Courtesy of The Waukesha County Historical Society and Museum.

Later that summer, Jones staged a gypsy camp scene introducing Toys of Fate, also starring Nazimova. A tableau of trees and a misty distant landscape formed the background for a group of ragged street urchins sitting around a small campfire (stage right) and several basket weavers (stage left); a girl sang a gypsy love song to her lover who answered from off stage; lastly, Florence Tate (listed on the theater’s program) performed the “Gypsy Fire Dance,” the lights dimmed, and the film began (“Atmosphere Achieved”; Colonial Program). Finally, for one of the Liberty Loan campaigns later that fall, Flossie even constructed a double-sided tableau, with a darkened battlefield backing a group of soldiers about to attack over a trench (stage right) and a well-lit family interior (stage left), with a son apparently in the war. At the end, “a young lady stepped forward and sang “When the Boys Come Marching Home” (“Theatre Puts Over”). Despite its primary purpose in advancing the movie industry’s interests, the trade press promoted all three prologues and the Liberty Loan presentation, with accompanying photographs of the stage tableaux and performers—surprising evidence that even small-town theater managers could be as creative as those in much larger cities.

An image from the prologue for Revelation (1918) in Motography (1 June 1918): 1043.

An image from the prologue for The Bluebird (1918) in Motography (29 June 1918): 1208.

An image from the prologue for Toys of Fate (1918) in Motion Picture News (24 August 1918): 1231.

An image from a Liberty Loan spectacle staged by Flossie A. Jones in Motion Picture News (12 October 1918): 2363.

Miss Flossie Jones was one of only two women among the thirty Advisory Board members of Rothapfel’s Exhibitors Service Bureau and a strong advocate of efforts to support small-town exhibitors. She was becoming a well-known figure at the annual conventions of exhibitors, and, in October 1918, traveled to New York to attend the exposition of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry held at Madison Square Garden. Shortly thereafter, she contracted the influenza virus and soon died of pneumonia at the Hotel Webster. Adding to this loss, “only a few days before her death, she was elected vice-president of the Motion Picture Exhibitors Association of Wisconsin” (“Flossie A. Jones, of Waukesha” ). On October 24, the Waukesha Freeman printed a front-page tribute to Jones:

As business manager in the theaters, wresting success from what had been near to failure, [Flossie] found outlet for her abounding energy in a labor of love. Keen, constructive business sense was supplemented by qualities of imagination and vision.

Sincerity, frank friendliness, personal charm—these characteristics endeared her alike to the humble laborer, the social leader, the man of affairs, [just plain] “folks,” and children. (“In Memory”)

Had Flossie A. Jones survived past the young age of thirty-one, how prominent might she have become within the movie industry?

The author wishes to thank John Schoenknecht and the Waukesha County Historical Society and Museum.

See also: “Exhibiting Women: Gender, Showmanship, and the Professionalization of Film Exhibition in the United States, 1900-1930

Bibliography

“Aids Needed by Small City Exhibitors.” Motion Picture News (3 August 1918): 726-727.

“Atmosphere Achieved by Woman Exhibitor Who Uses Local Talent in Her Prologues.” Motion  Picture News (24 August 1918): 1231.

Colonial Program. July 23, 1918. Flossie A. Jones scrapbook, Waukesha County Historical Society and Museum.

“Flossie A. Jones Influenza Victim.” Exhibitors Herald and Motography (2 November 1918): 24.

“Flossie A. Jones, of Waukesha, Dies in New York of Pneumonia.” Motion Picture News (26 October 1918): 2650.

“From San Francisco to Waukesha.” Motion Picture News (21 September 1918): 1853.

“Gives ‘The Bluebird’ a Beautiful Setting.” Motography (29 June 1918): 1208.

Harris, Genevieve. “Woman Manager Packs Three Houses.” Motography (1 June 1918): 1043, 1062.

“In Memory.” Waukesha Freeman (24 October 1918): 1.

Jones, Miss Flossie A. “Miss Jones, Waukesha, Wis., Exhibitor, Wins Against Odds.” Exhibitors Herald (18 August 1917): 29.

Moriarty, Edith. “With the Women of Today.” Central Press Association (18 September 1918). Flossie A. Jones scrapbook, Waukesha County Historical Society and Museum.

“Rehearsal of Musical Comedy Company Used to Give Atmosphere to Stage Picture.” Motion Picture News (21 September 1918): 1858.

“Running the Small Town House.” Motography (25 August 1917): 391-392.

Schoenknecht, John. “From the Auditorium to the Avon.” [five-part series] Waukesha Freeman (29 August-1 September 2012).

“Theatre Puts Over Big Liberty Loan Spectacle and Citizens Join in to Make It Great Success.” Motion Picture News (12 October 1918): 2363.

“This Woman Exhibitor Tells You How.” Motion Picture News (6 July 1918): 76-77, 85.

“A Woman Sets the Pace for All of You.” Motion Picture News (26 June 1918): 3887.

Archival Paper Collections:

Flossie A. Jones scrapbook, Waukesha County Historical Society and Museum.

Citation

Abel, Richard . "Flossie A. Jones." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2023.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/b8k7-hw39>

Muriel Alleyne and Christabel Lowndes-Yates

by Luke McKernan

Muriel Alleyne and Christabel Lowndes-Yates were a screenwriting duo most notable for the advice they gave to others on making films. In the early 1920s, at a low point in the fortunes of the British film industry, they wrote with urgency, belief, and patriotic fervor on the value of film.

Muriel Alleyne was the professional name of Flora Middleton Stanley. She was born in 1875 in Flixton, Lancashire, UK, the eldest of the four children of Deane Stanley and Flora Middleton Stanley (née Ferneyhough). Her mining engineer father was the son of a follower of John Wroe’s controversial Christian Israelite Society, which had been established in their hometown of Ashton in Lancashire (Oliver, “John Stanley”; Oliver, “Mr. Wroe’s Virgins”).

In 1889, following financial reverses, the family moved from Ashton to Colwyn Bay, Wales, where Flora began a stage career after success in singing competitions. By 1896, she was singing under the name of “Muriel Alleyne,” which she kept for the rest of her professional career. She sang mezzo parts in touring opera productions, and, in 1899, joined a touring production of Sidney Jones’s musical comedy “The Geisha,” singing the lead role of O Mimosa San. She then toured in a version of the production that, over 1900-1901, visited India, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, China (she was present during the Boxer Uprising), and the Philippines (“‘La Poupée’ at Colwyn Bay”). On her return, Alleyne toured England and Wales for a number of years as the lead in Edmond Audran’s comic opera “La Poupée,” George du Maurier’s “Trilby,” and other crowd-pleasers. By late 1909, she had her own Muriel Alleyne Dramatic Company (“Muriel Alleyne Dramatic Company”).

Somewhere between 1910 and 1912 she began acting in films, probably for the Hepworth Manufacturing Company, though no credits have been traced (Kinematograph Year Book 249). Possibly stage work was becoming harder to find, and she had outgrown the young parts in which she had specialized. She turned to writing film scenarios in 1912, still using the name Muriel Alleyne. At this time, there were few women scriptwriters in British film, as the role began to be professionalized. Indeed, Alleyne may have been the first woman to write for British films who was not connected to a film company through family relationships, and among the first of any professional scriptwriters in British film (MacDonald, “Screenwriting,” 48-49).

Her first script, which today remains unidentified, was sold to director Bert Haldane at Hepworth, a company for which she would write A Bold Venture, In Wolf’s Clothing, The Indian Woman’s Pluck, The Forsaken, The Dead Heart, and possibly other titles between 1912 and 1915. The Indian Woman’s Pluck, one of only two of Alleyne’s films now known to survive, is a spirited chase drama in which a family’s faithful Indian wet nurse (played by Alleyne’s good friend Ruby Belasco in redface) tracks down the kidnappers of a baby, memorably doing so by following drops of blood down a garden path. Alleyne proved herself to be a versatile and reliable writer, additionally producing scripts for M.L.B. (Time and the Hour), Walturdaw, Barker Motion Photography, and Universal. She also worked before 1915 as assistant scenarist under Paul D. Hugon at the British branch of Pathé Frères (“Scribes of the Screen” [1921]).

Advertisement for “screen playwright” Muriel Alleyne in The Motion Picture Studio (October 29, 1921): 4.

Significantly, the lists of scripts that Alleyne provided for biographical entries in trade publications included scripts that were sold but never produced (“Scribes of the Screen” [1921]). For example, Her Son for His was sold to Walturdaw, and The Unfrocked Priest to Barker, but the scripts were not made into films. This view of her craft, where the effort put in by the writer was central to the idea of film production whether a film was made of a script or not, would inform the distinctive next stage of her film career.

Around 1919, after Alleyne had moved to Amersham, Buckinghamshire, to live with Ruby Belasco and her husband Albert Crowhurst, she met Christabel Lowndes-Yates, a journalist, dramatist, and short story writer. Lowndes-Yates was born in 1880 in Milverton, Norfolk, UK, the eldest of the two children of William, a church minister, and Henrietta Catharine (née Badcock). The family was wealthy and socially well-connected, giving Christabel ample opportunity to pursue writing ambitions. In the 1910s, she had stories published in prominent journals such as The Strand Magazine, The Smart Set, and Quiver, appearing alongside a number of the renowned writers of the period (in the September 1913 issue of The Smart Set, her story “Chance” appears beside pieces by W. B. Yeats, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and D.H. Lawrence). She was an active member of literary societies and self-help writing groups, including the Quill Club, the London Writer’s Circle, and the London School of Journalism (Hilliard 60). She had also been the honorary Dramatic Secretary for the Lyceum Club, the women’s club founded by Constance Smedley (“Scribes of the Screen” [1922]).

Alleyne and Lowndes-Yates started working together, first by putting on local productions of the latter’s plays, with Alleyne acting as stage manager and performing. In 1920, they formed a screenwriting partnership, promising “Original Scenarios and Adaptations” (“Professional Cards” 50). It is not clear how much work this brought in, with some scripts sold but only two produced, so far as can be determined. These were two short comedy films from 1922, starring South African comedian Kimber “Tubby” Phillips: Fatty’s Overtime and Hims – Ancient and Modern (a third comedy short, Agitated Agitator, was announced as being in production in 1923, but was not released).

In 1922, Alleyne and Lowndes-Yates shifted the partnership from scriptwriting to providing advice to would-be scriptwriters, work that Lowndes-Yates had previously done for another firm (“Scribes of the Screen” [1922]). They rebranded themselves as the Kinema Advisory Bureau, with Alleyne as its Director and Lowndes-Yates as Assistant Director (Meredith 65, 959). The Bureau read books, plays, and short stories submitted to them, suggested suitable markets, or gave advice on how to make manuscripts saleable.

This advisory work was accompanied by a remarkable series of short articles in the film trade paper The Motion Picture Studio, in which the two women, both individually and as a duo, called upon the British film industry to seize the advantages that awaited it, not least by putting greater value on the work of the scriptwriter. The early 1920s was a particularly poor period for the British film industry, hamstrung as it was by inadequate financing, the block-booking distribution system that flooded the market with American films, and a paucity of talent. For Alleyne and Lowndes-Yates, the answers were to seize initiatives and to put greater trust in writers.

A “letter to the editor” written by Muriel Alleyne in The Motion Picture Studio (September 2, 1922): 6.

Articles such as “What’s Wrong?” “Story Versus Star,” “Wake Up, England,” and “Do the Public Hate Our Pictures?” were bold in language and relentless in argument. Alleyne’s words on the neglect of scriptwriters, to the detriment of the industry, have been made by many a film author since:

A good story is worth more than a good star or much advertised director, but how are the Scenarists treated by the Industry? They have been made the Cinderellas long enough, their works in many cases have been tampered with by the director and mutilated in the cutting-up room, and the door of the studio is barred against them. (Alleyne, “Story Versus Star”)

On occasion, the women were controversial in their criticism. For example, Lowndes-Yates was at her sharpest in a response to a series of articles on “screen authorship” by director Sidney Morgan. Morgan bemoaned the lack of stories based on real lives, which necessitated the need to turn to novels and to rely on the celebrity of an author. Lowndes-Yates put the problem down to inadequate appreciation of, and payment for, professional writers, who found greater renumeration in other markets:

Authors are not blind to the value of publicity, but how often is the name of an author advertised in the ordinary paragraphs that appear in the Press as well as on the Screen? Hardly ever. The name of the Director is given, the name of the firm, the names of the stars, even the carmeraman [sic], but the name of the author comparatively seldom. Why? When it appears on the screen it is flashed on as one of a maze of names, and flashed off again very quickly. To the writer it is very much as though a book appeared heralded as the Startling Novel published by So-and-So, bound by Such-and-Such, printed by Mr. Someone Else, and sold by the well- known bookseller Mr. Blank. Yet it is on the author and his stories that the whole future of the British industry depends. (Lowndes-Yates, “The Position of the Screen Author”)

Such arguments were based on discussions they had had with industry players, and were certainly welcomed by many, to judge from the correspondence section of the journal. However, the duo’s arguments were challenged following Lowndes-Yates’s “What Are Films For?” in which she insisted that the only purpose of the feature film was to entertain:

At the present moment “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” is running at the Palace Theatre, which is a propaganda film against war. This film has split those interested in the kinema sharply into two classes. I have heard it widely discussed in omnibuses, clubs, in the street, in private houses, in the Kinema Club, in the theatre itself and among the Press. So far as it has been my lot to listen to these discussions, I have never yet heard a professional kinema worker of any kind who has not raved about the film, and I have yet to meet the member of any other section of the public who has cared for it. Why this divergence? No film in the last few years has, to my thinking, split the public into such sharp sections as this. Why? I think the answer is—propaganda. (Lowndes-Yates, “What Are Films For?”)

The critical responses to this argument focused on the need for film to inspire as much as to entertain, with some detecting a condescending view of the audience (“a rather unfair and sweeping judgment on the average public who patronises the kinema, ascribing to them a shallow and unprogressive mentality,” wrote Peggy R. Baker) (“Readers in Council”).

Lowndes-Yates’s reference to the Kinema Club was a possible sore point. In early 1921, as part of their efforts to galvanize the British film industry, Alleyne and Lowndes-Yates had initiated a “Kinema Arts Club” (“The Kinema Arts Club”). This was intended as a social organization where the members of the industry could discuss common issues in an informal setting, similar to the literary clubs and societies with which Lowndes-Yates was familiar. But it was swiftly superseded by the Kinema Club, which had better financial backing across the sector (Low 87). The duo lacked the influence they desired, perhaps due to their relative lack of a professional profile, perhaps because they were women. Both, however, became members of the Club (“Full List of Club Members”).

Advertisement for the Kinema Advisory Bureau alongside the article “Writing for the Films” by Christabel Lowndes-Yates and Muriel Alleyne for the Literary Year Book 1921.

The women had some success, however, speaking to the literary world. They contributed two substantial articles, explaining how to contribute material to the film industry, in the 1921 Literary Year-Book: “Authors and the Kinema” and “Writing for the Films.” Lowndes-Yates also wrote a well-informed guide to film for the 1923 edition of the important Writers’ and Artists’ Year-Book (“The Kinema and the Author”) and a fifteen-part series “Writing for the Films” for the amateur writers’ journal The Writer (“Writing for the Films”). These pieces provided common-sense advice for freelancers and amateurs on such topics like understanding how the industry operated, constructing a film narrative, and the types of film likely to succeed. They spoke the language that a writing world outside the film industry would appreciate, explaining the difficulties but always assuring the aspirants that others like them had succeeded, so they might do so too. However, they were guilty, to a degree, of encouraging amateurs in publications aimed at them, while simultaneously decrying amateurism to a professional film audience (e.g. Lowndes-Yates, “The Cult of the Amateur”).

The two women continued to be active in amateur theater and gardening—they won a national prize for their Amersham allotment in 1922 (“Women and Allotments”). They were also both involved in Conservative politics with Lowndes-Yates speaking to the local Conservative party about the UK film trade and Alleyne addressing the Women’s Parliamentary Council, a Conservative body, on the same topic in 1925 (“An M.P.’s Duty”; “Short Shots”). After approximately five years of collaboration, Alleyne and Lowndes-Yates’s partnership ended around 1924, for reasons that are not documented.

Alleyne continued to operate the Kinema Advisory Bureau until at least 1929. Her final film credit was the script for a feature film, The City of Youth (1928), which was noteworthy for having scenes shot within Oxford University. However, the film—on which future film director Thorold Dickinson worked as editor—appears not to have been distributed. She is last heard of in a film context in 1936, in a death notice for Belasco, whom she nursed through her final illness (“Deaths”). Alleyne died on November 19, 1940. She was unmarried.

Lowndes-Yates, who also never married, seems to have had no further involvement with film after 1924, though her name can be found in film trade directories as late as 1929. She wrote two novels in the early 1930s, Robbers in Purple and Gods Must Be Fed, then gained some unwelcome publicity when a promising composer, Kalitha Dorothy Fox, who had been living with her for around ten years, committed suicide. Lowndes-Yates publicly stated that Fox was upset by noise caused by roadworks, information that led to much press attention, but the coroner doubted that noise was a major contributory factor (“This Age of Noise”). Lowndes-Yates moved away from Amersham not long after, living with her younger sister Dorothy in London until the latter’s death in 1940. She died in Epsom, Surrey, in 1966, aged eighty-five.

Alleyne and Lowndes-Yates were impassioned advocates of the creative potential of film. They saw greater respect for writers as being the gateway to a more professional and commercially successful British cinema. Their relative lack of production experience—although Alleyne had played a pioneering role as a scriptwriter—probably limited their influence. That has kept them to the margins of British film history until now. Their enterprise, particularly their understanding of the hopeful amateur, merits rediscovery today.

Bibliography

Alleyne, Muriel. “Giving the Show Away.” The Motion Picture Studio (28 October 1922): 20.

---. “Story Versus Star.” The Motion Picture Studio (3 June 1922): 6.

Alleyne, Muriel and Christabel Lowndes-Yates. “Authors and the Kinema.” Literary Year Book 1921. Liverpool: [unknown publisher], 1921. 362-366.

---. “British Films Abroad.” The Motion Picture Studio (1 April 1922): 11.

---. “Writing for the Films.” Literary Year Book 1921. Liverpool: [unknown publisher], 1921. 359-362

“Deaths.” The Stage (3 December 1936): 2.

“Full List of Club Members.” The Motion Picture Studio (21 January 1922): 13.

Gledhill, Christine. Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion. London: British Film Institute, 2003.

Hilliard, Christopher. To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. Cambridge, MA./London: Harvard University Press, 2006.

“The Kinema Arts Club.” The Era (13 April 1921): 21.

Kinematograph Year Book 1929. London: Kinematograph Publications, 1929.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film 1918-1929. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971.

Lowndes-Yates, Christabel. “Agency Reform.” The Motion Picture Studio (9 December 1922): 13.

---. “Courage!’ The Motion Picture Studio (24 June 1922): 10.

---. “The Cult of the Amateur.” The Motion Picture Studio (23 June 1923): 8.

---. “Do the Public Hate Our Pictures?” The Motion Picture Studio (9 June 1923):

---. “The Kinema and the Author.” In The Writers’ and Artists’ Year-Book 1923: A Directory for Writers Artists and Photographers. Ed. Agnes Herbert. London: A. & C. Black, 1923. 170-2.

---. “Looking into the Future.” The Motion Picture Studio (17 December 1921): 8-9.

---. “An Opening in Africa.” Kinematograph Weekly (5 July 1923): 61.

---. “Plush-Chair Points of View.” The Motion Picture Studio (21 October 1922): 6.

---. “Politics and the Kinema.” The Motion Picture Studio (11 November 1922): 13.

---. “The Position of the Screen Author.” The Motion Picture Studio (29 April 1922): 13.

---. “A Question of Faith.” The Motion Picture Studio (3 June 1922): 16.

---. “Sharks.” The Motion Picture Studio (16 December 1922): 6-7.

---. “Short Cuts to Bankruptcy.” The Motion Picture Studio (2 December 1922): 10.

---. “Spring Cleaning.” The Motion Picture Studio (12 May 1923): 5.

---. “Submitting Scenarios.” The Motion Picture Studio (6 January 1923): 12.

---. “Wake Up, England.” Kinematograph Weekly (28 December 1922): 21.

---. “Wanted - a Standard.” The Motion Picture Studio (10 February 1923): 8.

---. “What Are Films For?” The Motion Picture Studio (28 October 1922): 27.

---. “What's Wrong?” The Motion Picture Studio (17 December 1921): 6.

---. “Where Are the British Films?” The Motion Picture Studio (17 February 1923): 11.

---. “Writing for the Films” [series]. The Writer (October 1922-December 1923).

“An M.P.'s Duty.” The Bucks Herald (19 July 1924): 4.

Macdonald, Ian W. “Forming the Craft: Play-Writing and Photoplay-Writing in Britain in the 1910s.” Early Popular Visual Culture vol. 8, no. 1 (2010): 75-89.

---. “Screenwriting in Britain 1895–1929.” In Analysing the Screenplay. Ed. Jill Nelmes. London: Routledge, 2010. 44-67.

“Manchester.” The Stage (3 December 1936): 7.

Meredith, Mark, ed. Literary Year-Book 1921. Liverpool: [unknown publisher], 1921.

“Muriel Alleyne Dramatic Company.” South London Press (31 December 1909): 9.

Oliver, Gay J. “John Stanley 1786-1855.” Gay and Mike's Family History [genealogy website]. http://gayandmike.co.uk/jschildren2.htm.

---. “Mr. Wroe's Virgins.”Gay and Mike's Family History [genealogy website]. http://gayandmike.co.uk/johnwroe.htm.

“‘La Poupée’ at Colwyn Bay.” The Weekly News and Visitors’ Chronicle for Colwyn Bay (6 September 1901): 12.

“Professional Cards.” The Bioscope (30 September 1920): 50, 52.

“Readers in Council on Matters of Film Interest.” The Motion Picture Studio (11 November 1922): 7-8.

“Scribes of the Screen.” The Motion Picture Studio (1 April 1922): 12.

“Scribes of the Screen: British Scenarists and All About Them and Their Work.” The Motion Picture Studio (20 August 1921): 13.

“Short Shots.” The Bioscope (22 March 1928): 43.

“This Age of Noise.” The Daily Mirror (14 August 1934): 2.

“Women and Allotments.” Westminster Gazette (30 August 1922): 9.

Archival Paper Collections:

Christabel Lowndes-Yates (1920-1925), File — Box: 59, Folder: 1 Identifier: id372787, James B. Pinker Papers, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University.

Digitized birth and death certificates, England and Wales census returns 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911.  http://www.Ancestry.com.

Digitized England and Wales census returns, 1921. http://www.Findmypast.com.

Citation

McKernan, Luke. "Muriel Alleyne and Christabel Lowndes-Yates." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2023.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/94qy-c160>

Berthe Dagmar

by Aurore Spiers

Best known for acting with wild animals in short comic and Western adventure films in France in the 1910s, Berthe Dagmar was also the co-director—with her husband, Jean Durand—of at least three feature films: Palaces (1927), L’Ile d’amour (1928), and La Femme rêvée (1929). For Dagmar, as for many women film pioneers, being close to one of the most popular male filmmakers of the silent era was both a blessing and a curse. While she gained access to opportunities behind the camera through her acting roles in Durand’s films, her work as a director (and possibly as a producer and writer) has remained largely obscured.

Berthe Dagmar on the cover of Mon Ciné 13 (18 May 1922). Private Collection.

Strangely enough, we know much less about Berthe Dagmar than did previous generations of film historians. I think primarily of Francis Lacassin, whose book A la recherche de Jean Durand (2004) relied on interviews, letters, and personal archives that have since been displaced or no longer exist. Although Lacassin was primarily interested in Durand’s career, he gathered information about Dagmar, especially her childhood in Normandy, her first meeting with Durand at the Lux studios in 1908, her acting roles in Durand’s films for Gaumont, and their work as independent producers and directors after World War I. But at least two problems arise when using Lacassin’s work to reconstruct Dagmar’s life and career today. First, the bulk of Lacassin’s primary sources, which included letters between Durand and French director Henri Fescourt, an interview with Durand, and various documents from Durand’s great-nephew Philippe, have gone missing. I have at least been unable to locate them in French archives. For example, the interview with Durand has since disappeared from the collection of the Commission de recherches historiques (CRH) at the Cinémathèque française. An excerpt of it was published in Georges Sadoul’s 1951 Histoire générale du cinéma. 3. Le cinéma devient un art 1909–1920 (159, 162). But only invitations to Durand from Henri Langlois in 1944 remain at the Cinémathèque française (CRH10-B1). Durand is otherwise mentioned during the meetings of the CRH that discussed early French comedy, on June 26 and 29, 1948 (CRH 54-B3, CRH55-B3).

Second, except for a few telegrams penned by Dagmar herself, Lacassin relied on secondhand accounts, not only from Durand but also from fellow screen actors and directors like Gaston Modot and Joë Hamman. Whereas Durand was apparently full of praise, others emphasized Dagmar’s “harmful, even catastrophic influence on her husband,” her “overbearing character,” and her “humiliating infidelities,” which Lacassin then reported in his book (154, 155). As far as I can tell, no account of Dagmar’s career by Dagmar herself is known to be extant. Archival materials were also never collected with the specific goal of learning about Dagmar, who has become, absent previously known primary sources, only more elusive with time.

Even though primary sources related to Dagmar are scarce, extant films as well as online resources like the Media History Digital Library and Gallica make it possible to recover some aspects of her life and career, first as an actress, and then as a director. How Dagmar developed the physical skills that she demonstrated in most of her acting roles remains unclear. So does the exact date when Dagmar began to appear in films. What I can say with more certainty is that Dagmar became well-known during her time at the Gaumont studios, where she acted in dozens of short comic and Western adventure films directed by Durand, from 1911 through 1914 or 1915. Both genres were hugely popular in France and the rest of Western Europe, probably due to the talent of the comedians and comediennes, and, in the case of Durand’s Westerns, the picturesque landscapes of the Camargue region where these films were shot. In Durand’s short comic films, Dagmar’s roles were admittedly minor compared to those of Clément Migé, Lucien Bataille, and Ernest Bourbon, who portrayed the titular characters in the popular series “Calino,” “Zigoto,” and “Onésime,” respectively. Yet Dagmar repeatedly distinguished herself, as in, for example, Calino dompteur par amour (1912), and Onésime et le gardien du foyer (1912), where she played strong fearless women who came in close contact with ferocious lions. Likewise, Durand’s Western adventure films like Coeur ardent (1912), Sous la griffe (1912), and Le Collier vivant (1913), which featured Dagmar in more prominent roles, often relied on the sensationalism of her performances with wild animals.

Berthe Dagmar in Mon Ciné 13 (18 May 1922): 12–13. Private Collection.

A comparison may be drawn here between Dagmar and the US serial queens, whose films were contemporaneous. Once described as “Europe’s Kathlyn Williams” in Picture-Play Weekly, Dagmar indeed calls to mind these “intrepid young heroine[s] who exhibited a variety of traditionally ‘masculine’ qualities: physical strength and endurance, self-reliance, courage, social authority, and freedom to explore novel experiences outside the domestic sphere” (Dench 13; Singer 221). In Durand’s films for Gaumont, Dagmar participated in lively chases, fought with wild animals, and rode horses, among other action sequences. She was, in Lacassin’s words, the “queen of the Pouittes,” which designated the troupe of performers—Dagmar, Modot, Hamman, Bourbon, Migé, Bataille, Léon Pollos, Edouard Grisollet—who regularly appeared in Durand’s films (Lacassin 153). Later, in the 1920s, Dagmar had her own series, “Marie,” discussed in more detail below, which I suspect was meant to emulate the very popular serial queen melodramas coming from the United States. It is also possible that, like Kathlyn Williams, Cleo Madison, Grace Cunard, and other US serial queens, Dagmar not only acted in but also wrote and produced some of her husband’s short films where she was the main performer.

After World War I, during which Durand and several other male members of the Pouittes served in the French Army, Durand and Dagmar’s return to filmmaking appears to have been somewhat difficult. Not only were they not as stably employed as in the early 1910s, when they worked for Gaumont, but also few (if any) of their post-war films received much popular and critical success. In 1920, Dagmar likely appeared in Durand’s serial Impéria, whose twelve episodes are now considered lost. That same year, the newspaper L’Intransigeant announced that the couple would soon travel to the United States, where they would, “with Léonce Perret, see how French methods could be combined with American craft” (“Le Cinéma”). Comoedia also reported that Dagmar had signed a “brilliant contract” with Perret, formerly from Gaumont, now at the head of Perret Productions, Inc., on the East Coast (“Les Cinémas”). But although Lacassin credits Durand with writing Tarnished Reputations (1920), produced by Perret and directed by Alice Guy Blaché, I have found no evidence that would confirm Durand and/or Dagmar’s involvement (Lacassin 242). The US press indicates instead that Tarnished Reputations was written by Perret himself.

Yet more traces of Dagmar and Durand may be found in France, where, like many others in the 1920s, including Jacques de Baroncelli, Jean Epstein, Abel Gance, Marcel L’Herbier, Musidora, and Jean Renoir, Durand created his own company, Les Films Jean Durand, in an attempt to make new films as an independent producer. Although no evidence remains, Dagmar was very likely co-producer of Durand’s films during that time. Their first, and probably only, fiction film with Les Films Jean Durand was the series “Marie,” which was released in France between 1921 and 1922, and which capitalized on Dagmar’s success as “the star of the wild animals” (Desclaux 11). “Marie,” considered lost today, included four episodes, Marie-la-gaieté, Marie chez les loups, Marie chez les fauves, and Marie la femme au singe, in which, press reports tell us, Dagmar interpreted four different women who may be seen as various avatars of the same woman, further embodiments of the French New Woman on screen. Dagmar was, successively, a single housekeeper working at a castle in Camargue (Marie-la-gaieté); a former ballerina turned street performer who marries in order to provide for her nephew (Marie chez les loups); a widow in Africa soon to be remarried to her one true love (Marie chez les fauves); and a “bohemian” who performs on the street with her monkey Peter and raises her child alone (Marie la femme au singe). On the one hand, Dagmar’s characters in “Marie” were similar to the US serial queens, with several publications reporting that Dagmar—like Williams and others—did her own stunts and had been attacked by a panther on set (“Une artiste”; “French Notes”). On the other hand, it is unlikely that “Marie” enjoyed the same level of success as the US serial queen melodramas.

Besides short nonfiction films like Aigues-Mortes (1923) and Voyez comme l’on danse (1927), which Lacassin attributes to Les Films Jean Durand, Dagmar and Durand probably did not produce any more titles with their own company (Lacassin 243, 244). In 1924, at least one newspaper indicates that Dagmar performed “a sketch, very perilous in fact,” on the stage of L’Alhambra with a certain Marcel Marceau (no relation to the famous mime artist and actor) (“Courrier théâtral”). But no further evidence of Dagmar’s work on stage remains in the archive.

Ad for La Chaussée des géants (1926), La Cinématographie française 380 (13 February 1926): n.p.

After Les Films Jean Durand ceased regular production, around 1923, Dagmar remained Durand’s closest partner. Although the feature film La Chaussée des géants (1926), which was based on a novel by Pierre Benoit, is considered lost today, articles published in French newspapers tell us that Dagmar was, with Marceau, assistant director to Durand on that film (“Votre autorisation”; “Ce qu’on a fait”; “Sous les projecteurs”). A trade press advertisement also suggests that the film had little to do with Durand and Dagmar’s previous comic and Western adventure films (La Cinématographie française). It was instead a prestige literary adaptation with lavish Art Deco set and costume design, taking place within the luxurious milieu of the wealthy upper class.

Photograph of Berthe Dagmar (in the white hat), Marcel Marceau, and Jean Durand during the filming of La Chaussée des géants (1926), from “Votre autorisation s.v.p.” Le Plaisir de vivre (5 March 1926): 8.

La Chaussée des géants, in fact, initiated a new cycle for Dagmar and Durand, one that responded to the trends of “Les Années folles,” especially Art Deco and its futuristic designs; the music hall, with its attractive leading ladies and chorus girls; and jazz music and dancing, which Petrine Archer-Straw, in her book Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (2000), calls the “pulse beat of modernity” (109). The three other feature films in that cycle, Palaces, L’Ile d’amour, and La Femme rêvée, this time co-directed by Durand and Dagmar for Natan and Franco-Film, are available online at Gaumont Pathé Archives. Palaces, based on a novel by Saint-Sorny and shot partly on location at the luxurious Hôtel Régina in Nice, tells the story of a rich young woman (Huguette Duflos) torn between two men, her fiancé (Gaston Norès) and a charming gambler with a mysterious past (Léon Bary). L’Ile d’amour, also based on a novel by Saint-Sorny, was shot at the Natan studios in Paris, as well as on location in Corsica. Several landmarks like the Monument to Napoleon and his Brothers, and the ancestral home of the Bonaparte family, in Ajaccio, appear in the film, which focuses on a rich woman from Nice, Xénia (Claude France), who falls for a young Corsican man of modest means nicknamed “Bicchi” (Pierre Batcheff). La Femme rêvée, adapted from a novel by Spanish writer J. Perez de Rozas, begins in Seville, where a young local noblewoman (Alice Roberts) becomes infatuated with a French banker (Charles Vanel) whom she then follows to Paris. The rest of the film depicts how she struggles to adapt to a life filled with excitement without losing herself and giving in to the temptation of adultery. It includes several remarkable scenes shot on location, for example, at the now-defunct indoor swimming pool of the Lido cabaret on the Champs-Elysées, on the mighty stage of the Casino de Paris, and at the historic car-racing tracks of Montlhéry.

All three films deserve further scholarly attention. For example, L’Ile d’amour is a compelling example of how cinema in 1920s France intersected with the popular stage through casting, performance, and mise-en-scène. It also illustrates that colonialism, mediated through the popular stage and cinema, played a central yet often conveniently overlooked part in the fashioning of French modernity. Near the end of L’Ile d’amour, when Xénia hosts a lavish party at her villa, Dagmar, wearing a shimmering white dress, comes down the stairs with a group of chorus girls and then dances the Charleston with Harry Fleming, a Black performer from the Moulin Rouge. The film, which survives in incomplete form, also included another sequence, either before or after, where Mistinguett, the “queen of the music hall” in France, made an appearance on the same stage, with her white dance partner Earl Leslie. But that Dagmar danced the Charleston, which Josephine Baker largely popularized in France, is most relevant here. Terri Simone Francis tells us that Baker was, since her breakout performance in “La Revue nègre” in Paris in 1925, “a known attraction, and she was part of the growing interest in and presence of African and African American cultural events, products, and people among Parisian tastemakers” (14). With her banana skirt, dance moves, and overall aesthetic on stage, “Baker’s performance tapped into colonialist culture as she helped to generate a new iteration of it” (Francis 15). In Les Spectacles, a journalist mentioned Baker when they wrote about visiting the Natan studios during the filming of L’Ile d’amour. They not only saw Dagmar and Fleming dancing together, but they also noticed “someone in the audience giv[ing] the signal for applause: it is Josephine Baker, who has come to advise and encourage her colleague [Dagmar], for the beautiful dancer, [who is] Black [de couleur], has become, as we know, a film artist” (“On tourne”). Whether Baker was really involved in the making of L’Ile d’amour, or simply visiting the set, remains unclear. But she certainly provides a valuable reference point for L’Ile d’amour, which might have been influenced by Baker’s La Sirène des Tropiques (dir. Mario Naplas, Henri Etiévant, 1927), released in France shortly before, with several dance sequences, and also co-starring Pierre Batcheff. More importantly, L’Ile d’amour, through Dagmar’s performance and appropriation of Baker’s signature style, engages in the “colonialist culture” that shaped modernity in France.

Photograph of Jean Durand and Berthe Dagmar with Mistinguett on the set of L’Ile d’amour (1928). Courtesy of the Cinémathèque française.

Based on the extant newspapers and magazines I have consulted online, Dagmar was rarely credited, at least explicitly, as the “director” or “co-director” of Palaces, L’Ile d’amour, and La Femme rêvée. That the press danced around the role she played in the making of these three feature films is somewhat expected. Indeed, the contributions of women filmmakers working in close collaboration with their husbands during the silent era were often systematically downplayed and even erased. Whereas La Semaine à Paris clearly indicated that Palaces was “directed by Jean Durand and Berthe Dagmar” (“Palaces”), most other publications employed the terms “collaborator” and “collaboration” to describe Dagmar and her contribution to Durand’s films. To cite but a few examples, the newspaper La Presse announced that Palaces had been “directed by Jean Durand, with the collaboration of Berthe Jean Durand” (“Ecrans et studios”). The next year, Le Courrier des cinémas told their readers that “Jean Durand, with the collaboration of Mme Berthe-Jean Durand, is finishing, for Franco-Film, ‘La Femme rêvée,’ [which he directs]” (“La Femme rêvée”). On the digitized copies of Palaces and L’Ile d’amour available for viewing online at Gaumont Pathé Archives, title cards in each film likewise indicate that the film was “directed by Jean Durand, with the collaboration of Berthe Jean Durand,” and with Marceau serving as “assistant.”  However, no such title card appears in La Femme rêvée.

After the release of La Femme rêvée in 1929, Dagmar apparently retired from filmmaking. Durand made one more film, Détresse, in 1929. Their names then resurfaced in 1932, when Durand and Dagmar co-wrote a serialized novel for the Breton newspaper L’Ouest-Eclair, titled Marie-la-Gaieté, based on their film series “Marie,” and illustrated with movie stills. That same year, Dagmar alone wrote “Les Animaux chez nous” for Paris-Soir. I suspect that Durand and Dagmar—like Alice Guy Blaché around the same time—might have turned to writing in the popular press as a way to make ends meet. Dagmar died of causes unknown to historians in 1934, about twelve years before Durand. The two had no children, but their personal archives ended up, at least for a while, in the care of Durand’s nephew Louis Durand and great-nephew Philippe Durand (Lacassin 211). If extant, and when located, these archives could reveal more about Dagmar’s work as a film director in the 1920s.

Bibliography

Archer-Straw, Petrine. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000.

“Ce qu’on a fait, ce qu’on va faire.” L’Intransigeant (27 June 1925): 4.

“Courrier théâtral.” Paris-Soir (2 January 1924): 5.

Desclaux, Pierre. “La vedette aux fauves: Berthe Dagmar.” Mon Ciné 13 (18 May 1922): 11–15.

Dench, Ernest A. “Picture Plays in Europe No. 2—France.” Picture-Play Weekly (8 May 1915): 12–13.

Durand, Berthe and Jean. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (27 October 1932): 20.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (28 October 1932): 12.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair 29 October 1932): 12.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (30 October 1932): 16.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (31 October 1932): 14.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (1 November 1932): 16.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (2 November 1932): 10.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (3 November 1932): 11.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (4 November 1932): 14.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (5 November 1932): 11.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (6 November 1932): 14.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (7 November 1932): 13.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (8 November 1932): 10.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (9 November 1932): 10.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (10 November 1932): 7.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (11 November 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (12 November 1932): 10.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (13 November 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (14 November 1932): 9.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (15 November 1932): 13.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (16 November 1932): 11.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (17 November 1932): 10.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (18 November 1932): 10.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (19 November 1932): 9.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (20 November 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (21 November 1932): 11.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (22 November 1932): 12.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (23 November 1932): 9.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (24 November 1932): 14.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (25 November 1932): 14.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (26 November 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (27 November 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (28 November 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (29 November 1932): 16.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (30 November 1932): 12.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (1 December 1932): 16.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (2 December 1932): 9.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (3 December 1932): 13.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (4 December 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (5 December 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (6 December 1932): 2.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (7 December 1932): 11.

---. “Marie-la-Gaîté.” L’Ouest-Éclair (8 December 1932): 13.

“Ecrans et studios.” La Presse (26 March 1927): 3.

Francis, Terri Simone. Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021.

“French Notes.” Variety (3 February 1922): 43.

Jean-Durand, Berthe. “Les Animaux chez nous.” Paris-Soir (8 September 1932): 2.

---. “Les Animaux chez nous.” Paris-Soir (9 September 1932): 2.

---. “Les Animaux chez nous.” Paris-Soir (10 September 1932): 2.

---. “Les Animaux chez nous.” Paris-Soir (11 September 1932): 2.

---. “Les Animaux chez nous.” Paris-Soir (12 September 1932): 2.

---. “Les Animaux chez nous.” Paris-Soir (13 September 1932): 2.

---. “Les Animaux chez nous.” Paris-Soir (14 September 1932): 2.

---. “Les Animaux chez nous.” Paris-Soir (15 September 1932): 2.

Lacassin, Francis. A la recherche de Jean Durand. Paris: Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 2004.

La Cinématographie française 380 (13 February 1926): n.p.

“La Femme rêvée.” Le Courrier des cinémas (15 June 1928): 10.

“Le Cinéma.” L’Intransigeant (19 September 1920): 2.

“Les Cinémas.” Comoedia (26 June 1920): 3.

“On tourne Bicchi au studio Natan.” Les Spectacles (14 October 1927): 9.

“Palaces.” La Semaine à Paris (15 December 1929): 77.

Sadoul, Georges. Histoire générale du cinéma. 3. Le cinéma devient un art 1909–1920. Paris: Editions Denoël, 1951.

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

“Sous les projecteurs.” La Liberté (14 July 1925): 4.

The Moving Picture World (28 February 1914): 1151.

“Une artiste de cinéma terrassée par une panthère.” Excelsior (12 July 1922): 4.

“Votre autorisation s.v.p.” Le Plaisir de vivre (5 March 1926): 8.

Archival Paper Collections:

Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique, CRH10-B1, CRH 54-B3, CRH55-B3. Cinémathèque française.

Iconothèque (“Berthe DAGMAR”), PO0036581. Cinémathèque française.

Citation

Spiers, Aurore. "Berthe Dagmar." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2023.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/neg1-yp56>

Marie Epstein

by Astrid Burnod, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis

Born to a French Jewish father and a Polish Catholic mother in present-day Poland, Marie Epstein moved to Switzerland with her mother Hélène and her brother Jean after the death of her father Jules in January 1907. The Epsteins later established themselves in Lyon, France, where Jean was completing his studies, and then in Paris around 1922, just a few months before Jean directed his first two feature films, L’Auberge Rouge (1923) and Coeur fidèle (1923). It was also in the early 1920s that Marie became involved in the world of cinema. She started as an actress—in L’Auberge rouge, where she appeared as an extra in just a few early shots (Flitterman-Lewis 143), and in Coeur fidèle, two films that she co-wrote with Jean—but found it difficult to secure more roles. She then turned fully to screenwriting, which led her to work as an assistant director and editor (EPSTEIN184-B40). Through the intervention of French director and producer Jean Benoit-Lévy, Marie also became a director at a time when there were few women filmmakers in France. After she had been Benoit-Lévy’s assistant on several silent film documentaries in the 1920s, she then co-directed, wrote, and edited eight sound fiction films with him in the late 1920s and 1930s. During that period, she also directed at least one short film on her own (EPSTEIN113-B26 3/3), possibly more. After World War II, and the death of her brother Jean in 1953, Marie was hired by Henri Langlois as a film preservationist at the Cinémathèque française, a job she held until her retirement in 1977.

Beyond this initial sketch, however, Marie’s film career is not easy to reconstruct with great precision. During the silent era, Marie was often credited for her contributions to the films she made with Benoit-Lévy, yet not in a consistent fashion across publicity materials, film periodicals, and newspapers. Further challenges, which will no doubt sound familiar to scholars interested in other women filmmakers from the silent cinema, have to do with the collaborative nature of Marie’s work and the scarcity of extant archival materials related to her contributions as a director, screenwriter, and editor. Although she worked relentlessly to preserve her brother Jean’s legacy from the 1950s through the 1970s, and to constitute the Jean and Marie Epstein collection at the Cinémathèque française, she rarely discussed or even documented her own film career in great detail. Finally, certain difficulties concerning Benoit-Lévy’s status as a Jewish filmmaker during World War II have emerged in recent years that further complicate one’s understanding of Marie. Yet, despite these challenges, traces of Marie’s work—and even perhaps her authorship—survive and call for our renewed attention.

Screenshot, Marie Epstein in Coeur fidèle (1923).

Screenshot, Marie Epstein in Coeur fidèle (1923).

What we do know—so far—is that Marie’s acting career apparently began and ended with Coeur fidèle, which was not very successful at the time of its release in 1923. Although Marie was under contract with Pathé-Consortium as an actress (Daire 63-64), the naturalism and sincerity of her acting style as the young disabled neighbor might have set her too far apart from the popular stars of the time, including her co-stars Gina Manès, Léon Mathot, and Edmond Van Daële. In any case, Marie quickly dropped acting and became a screenwriter full time. In addition to L’Auberge rouge and Cœur fidèle, Marie wrote the screenplays of several important films in the 1920s, such as L’Affiche (1924), Le Double Amour (1925), and Six et demi onze (1927), all directed by Jean Epstein; and Ames d’enfants (1927) and Maternité (1929), directed by Marie Epstein with Jean Benoit-Lévy. She even won a prize for Les Mains qui meurent in 1923 (awarded by Pathé-Consortium)—even though the film was never made—and this led to the complimentary comparison with filmmaker and critic Louis Delluc (“France finally had Louis Delluc. It now has Marie Antonine Epstein” [Henry]). However, only two other texts were published about her during her career (Doringe; Fescourt 402-8).

Screenshot, Marie Epstein in Coeur fidèle (1923).

Although the five films she co-wrote with her brother—L’Auberge Rouge, Coeur Fidèle, L’Affiche, Le Double amour, and Six et demi onze—predate Marie’s work as a director, these films played a formative role in shaping her entire film aesthetic. Stylistic features such as the reiteration of figures, repetitions of haunting images from the past, the use of significant objects and recurring motifs, which later became characteristic of Jean’s highly evocative cinema, all find their way into Marie’s most accomplished work as a director, the sound film La Maternelle (1933). Furthermore, Marie’s own films—like Jean’s—often focused on the impact of an oppressive social milieu on a character’s inner life. And, finally, Marie’s role as a disabled woman who cradles the heroine’s sick child at the end of Coeur fidèle foretells her preoccupation with the themes of childhood, womanhood, and motherhood that abound in the fiction films she co-directed with Benoit-Lévy, mainly Ames d’enfants (1927), Peau de pêche (1928), and Maternité (1929).

Marie began working with Benoit-Lévy almost by accident. Her brother, who was Benoit-Lévy’s assistant, bequeathed his sister to the documentary director when he wanted to make films of his own. But perhaps because Marie willingly cast herself “in the shadows” of the men who surrounded her (Jean Epstein, Jean Benoit-Lévy, and, several years later, Henri Langlois), speculation about this origin story abounds. For example, in her book Le Cinéma des femmes (1987), Paule Lejeune surmises that Marie decided to follow the path of Benoit-Lévy because she would have been intimidated by the cinematographic forefront where her brother was, or because she would have preferred to guarantee an economic income to support her brother (52). But these speculations deny Marie’s artistic agency; her work with Benoit-Lévy, first as assistant on his documentary films, then as director on the fiction films, indicates a talent and a vision that we associate with significant auteurs.

What can be asserted (although this too is problematic) is that Jean Epstein’s focus on experimentation was geared toward an avant-garde audience, while Marie’s films with Benoit-Lévy, whose focus was on women, children, and the social challenges they faced, were accessible for all audiences. Benoit-Lévy’s socially committed documentaries (three hundred of them) were geared toward his principles of education and learning, toward progressive social politics, and toward issues often deemed “secondary” as they concerned women’s lives and social realities. The documentary form served his purpose well because he approached his material with the chronicling attention of a documentarist. But when he turned to fiction films, the sensitivity, insight, and artistic sensibility of his scenario-writing co-director gained a place of prominence. Marie brought a particular aesthetic from the silent films to the sound films of the thirties. Furthermore, she was instrumental in transposing Benoit-Lévy’s documentary concerns with social issues, particularly as they related to women and children (poverty, public health, neglect, single motherhood, education, ethical and moral choices, social responsibility) to the form of the fiction film, with its emphasis on female characters, that comprised their output in the twenties and thirties.

World War II put an end to their creative collaboration for the duration of the conflict. After one year in relative safety in the countryside, the Benoit-Lévy family, being Jewish, was forced into exile in New York City, where the director had been invited by the Rockefeller Foundation. This explains the somewhat mournful tone of Benoit-Lévy’s dedication in his book written in America: “When she reads these lines, I would like Marie Epstein to feel that all the professional joys and sorrows through which we have lived together are reflected in this essay on the art we both love. I am certain that, over there, in the country of tragic heroism, she, like myself, retains the hope that we shall soon be able to revive our old group…” (Benoit-Lévy 276). For her part, Marie, whose family had converted to Catholicism when she was young, was still seen by the authorities as a Jew. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 but managed to avoid deportation and was released due to the intervention of friends in the French film industry and the Red Cross. The Benoit-Lévy family returned to France after the war, only to find their apartment, with its screening room and offices, vandalized. Nevertheless, Marie subsequently collaborated with Jean Benoit-Lévy on several documentary projects, including a film about the ballet, the first program broadcast on French television at its inception. This time, Marie worked with Benoit-Lévy as an assistant instead of a co-director (which was also the case for the last film they made before the war: Feu de paille, 1940). She also wrote scenarios for other filmmakers (e.g., La Grande Espérance [1953] by Léonide Azar, Liberté surveillée [1958] by Henri Aisner and Vladimir Vlcek) after Jean Benoit-Lévy quit filmmaking. She finally joined the Cinémathèque française to restore films, especially those made by her brother who died the year she was recruited to work at the organization run by Henri Langlois (Cauquy and Frappat).

At the time of her work with Benoit-Lévy, Marie Epstein was acknowledged in the film world by at least one prominent critic, Henri Fescourt, who said, “Marie Epstein, who stands in the shadows because she is too discrete, is one of the most complete cinéastes, as much for her ideas as a scenarist, as for her work as a director and editor. She was, for both her brother and for Jean Benoit-Lévy, a collaborator of the most inestimable efficacity” (Fescourt 311). Still, this did not prevent her from being totally unknown to English speaking audiences until Langlois’s death in 1977, at which point American feminist Sandy Flitterman-Lewis was able to interview her and screen her films. This resulted in Marie Epstein’s career being treated in To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema published in 1990, and in some of her films being shown at the Festival de films de femmes de Créteil in 1991, which led to Marie’s increased and continuing visibility.

However, for reasons having to do with both the archives and the collaborative nature of Marie’s work with Benoit-Lévy, it remains difficult to this day to research her film career. On the one hand, after 1940, Benoit-Lévy’s documentary films saw their authorship transferred to non-Jewish filmmakers in the process of Aryanization adopted by the French government. The Benoit-Lévy family is still trying to have authorial designation returned to Benoit-Lévy; because of this, speculation about gender concerns in the fiction films that Benoit-Lévy and Marie directed together has the danger of falling into a conventional (and misleading) attribution. More fruitful, perhaps, is the way that Benoit-Lévy’s chosen subjects (often involving powerful single women or childhood trauma brought on by poverty and neglect) were amplified by Marie’s stylistic choices, including the use of experimental editing techniques reminiscent of her brother’s silent films, such as rapid cutting, repetitions, and disparate images of memory or fantasy. Fiction films that preceded the attested directorial collaboration include La Future Maman (1925) and Le Voile Sacré (1926), but Marie’s influence is clear even though these films do not list her as co-director, and they act as prelude to the fiction films of the thirties.

Marie Epstein by F. Tannel © DR, coll. Cinémathèque Française.

On the other hand, questions arise as to the division of labor in her collaboration with Benoit-Lévy. What part did she really have in her collaboration with him? In an interview, Marie stated that the collaboration with Benoît-Lévy was so close as to render each person’s part indistinguishable from the other: “This answers all the questions of well-meaning people who always want to settle a collaboration and know: ‘Who did this?’ and ‘Who did that?’ There are two of us who did this and that, the good and the not so good” (Vincendeau, “Enthousiasmes” 80–83). Perhaps a bit modestly, she has asserted that, while Benoit-Lévy could have made the films without her, she could not have done so on her own. But it seems probable that this modesty is something of an exaggeration; her authorial signature is apparent everywhere in these films. On a more personal note, Marie was treated like a member of the Benoit-Lévy family, and professional life merged with private life, as some family pictures of costume parties and the like demonstrate. Although she never married or had children herself, she treated the Benoit-Lévy girls like daughters, and they in turn treated her like a beloved aunt.

Still from La Maternelle in Cinema Quarterly (Winter 1933-34): 114.

Nevertheless, we can find some hints in Jean Epstein’s interview with Musidora in 1946: “my sister who collaborated with Benoit Lévy, while she was mostly doing the artistic part of the film and he was doing the administrative part” (Epstein). But this might also create more problems than it solves, and bespeak of a prejudice retained by Jean Epstein from the early days of his working with Benoit-Lévy. The subjects for the films, at least for La Maternelle, Hélène (1936), and Itto (1934),  all came from Benoit-Lévy himself, first from his devotion to and friendship with Léon Frapié, whose writing inspired La Maternelle, then from his admiration for Vicki Baum’s novel, and finally out of a desire to critique Pierre Loti. While it may be true that the most experimental sequences in these films came from Marie’s editing and poetic vision, Benoit-Lévy did far more than accounting. The question of the collaboration process persists, but the closeness of these two filmmakers goes without objection.

To conclude, Marie Epstein’s story is a complex one that changed over the years as opinions shifted and new elements came to be considered. Although she has been more visible since the 1970s than she was during most of her film career, many questions remain unanswered, making it difficult—yet not impossible—to speculate about her work. What can be said with confidence, however, is that Marie Epstein wore many hats, from actress to screenwriter to director to editor and preservationist, and that her presence in many areas of French cinema and French film culture was not only long-lasting but also impactful. The full extent of her influence remains to be seen.

Bibliography

Cauquy, Emilie, and Marie Frappat, “Marie Epstein at the Cinémathèque Française.” Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 16, 2016), https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/evento/lidea-di-conservare-il-cinema-marie-epstein-alla-cinematheque-francaise/.

Daire, Joël. Jean Epstein: une vie pour le cinéma. Grandvilliers: La Tour Verte, 2014.

Doringe [pseudo. Henriette Blot]. “‘Rien n’est moins simple ni plus passionnant que de se mettre au niveau des enfants...’ ...dit Madeleine Renaud, vedette de ‘La Maternelle.’” Pour Vous 248 (17 August 1933): 3. https://bibnum.cinemathequetoulouse.fr/idurl/1/996.

Epstein, Jean. Interview with Musidora. 1946. Cinémathèque française, Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique, CRH47-B2. 11.

E.R.P. “Échos, Nouvelles, Informations: Une précieuse collaboration.” Le Cinéopse 92 (April 1927): 360.

Fescourt, Henri. La Foi et les montagnes ou le septième art au passé. Paris: P. Montel, 1959.

Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990. [Expanded edition, Columbia University Press, 1996].

Fronval, George. “Peau de pêche.” Comoedia 353 (19 January 1929): 6.

Lejeune, Paule. Le cinéma des femmes: 105 cinéastes d’expression française (France, Belgique, Suisse), 1895-1967. Paris: Editions Atlas Lherminier, 1987.

Henry, Pierre. “Les Compositeurs de film.” Cinéa-Ciné pour tous 81 (15 March 1927): 18.

Benoit-Lévy, Jean. Les Grandes missions du cinéma. Montreal: Lucien Parizeau et Compagnie, 1944.

P.M. “ Une Scénariste: Mlle M. Epstein nous parle de Un ‘Kodak.’” Cinémagazine 41 (8 October 1926): 85–86.

Vignaux, Valérie. Jean Benoit-Lévy ou le corps comme utopie: une histoire du cinéma éducateur dans l’entre-deux-guerres en France. Paris: AFRHC, 2007.

Vincendeau, Ginette. “Enthousiasmes et découvertes: Marie Epstein.” Catalogue du XIIIe Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil (April 5-14, 1991): 80–83.

---. “Marie Epstein.” In The Women’s Companion to International Film. Eds. Annette Khun and Susannah Radstone. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. 136–137.

Tognolotti, Chiara. “La sorella di Jean Per riscoprire Marie Epstein.” In Filmare il femminismo: Studi sulle donne nel cinema e nei media. Eds. Lucia Cardone and Sara Filippelli. Pisa: EDIZIONI ETS, 2015. 47-54. https://www.edizioniets.com/priv_file_libro/2746.pdf.

Archival Paper Collections:

Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique, CRH47-B2. Cinémathèque française.

Fonds Jean et Marie Epstein, EPSTEIN184-B40, EPSTEIN113-B26 3/3, EPSTEIN191-B42. Cinémathèque française.

Citation

Burnod, Astrid; Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. "Marie Epstein." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2023.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/y36n-ve41>

Alice Rosenthal

by Luke McKernan

Alice Rosenthal was, for a short period, the linchpin on which the nascent British film industry rested. Present at the beginning of film exhibition in Britain, her role as stock keeper and sales manager of the Warwick Trading Company, the leading British film business of the 1890s, made her a familiar and vital figure to all exhibitors engaged with the new medium. If you wanted to put on a good film show, you had to see “Rosie.”

Rosenthal was born in Kentish Town, London, on December 13, 1868, the youngest of ten children of Jewish jeweler and general trader Joseph Rosentall (the spelling was changed for the next generation). His forebears came to Britain in the early nineteenth century, probably from Germany. Her mother was his second wife, Matilda (née Brokenbrow), whose gentile family were Wiltshire farmworkers.

Around 1895-1896, Rosenthal was taken on as stock manager by the firm of Maguire & Baucus, having previously worked as a dressmaker. Franck Maguire and Joseph Baucus were American businessmen who had been awarded the exclusive license to manage Edison films in Europe, as Thomas Edison sought to exploit his recent invention of the Kinetoscope. This peepshow device, showing loops of 35mm film, was the means by which most of the first motion pictures were exhibited in 1894-1895. Maguire and Baucus put on the first exhibition of films in Britain at a parlor located at 70 Oxford Street in London, on October 17, 1894 (Barnes, Beginnings, 8-10). Not long after this event, they opened an office at Dashwood House on Broad Street, close to the Liverpool Street railway station. It is at this point that Rosenthal is likely to have been hired, stating later that she was “practically the only business assistant they had in London” (Acres; Rosenthal). Newcastle exhibitor William MacDonald remembered her from this time, as the industry moved from Kinetoscopes to projected film:

At the time I refer to, the number of films obtainable was strictly limited, indeed, there were only two or three places in London even where they could be purchased. Miss Rosenthal…was then in command of a depot at Old Broad Street, City, and I frequently ran up from Newcastle, and waited two or three days before I could secure a thousand feet of film to take back with me. (“Our Picture Pioneers”)

The Continental Commerce Company, the name Maguire and Baucus gave their business, was the sole agent for Edison films in Britain. In May 1897, they also added Lumière films in standard gauge format (Barnes, Rise, 158). At a time when British film production was minimal and the number of suppliers of film and equipment few, the growing number of exhibitors, from theater managers to touring showmen, came to Continental for the best of what was available.

Rosenthal was the public face of the business. She managed the rapidly-growing stock of films, conducted all sales, served as cashier, and demonstrated both films and equipment to clients. However, amid this activity, all was not well with the Continental Commerce Company. The focus of Maguire and Baucus was as much on other business opportunities as film, and there was the suggestion that their methods were lackadaisical. This was certainly the view of Charles Urban, a fellow American, who was brought in to manage the expanding business. He noted the difficult situation in which Rosenthal found herself:

Unfortunately she had no control over the money, once she deposited some to the firm’s account at the bank. As consignments of Edison films arrived we had a rush of buyers, once the information got out. As this was a cash business, considerable sums were collected on such days and it was “Rosey’s” business to see it in safe custody. Shortly after a film sales day, the managing director would usually find an excuse to go to Paris for a week or so. After his return a very small balance stood to the credit of one account at the bank. (Urban 42-43)

Urban was someone with a long-term vision for films, particularly films of actuality, who also came with a projector—the Bioscope—which he had commissioned, ownership of which would free the company from its dependence on Edison.

Urban joined the company in August 1897. Within a month, the business had moved to Warwick Court in central London, and the following year was renamed the Warwick Trading Company. The films on offer expanded to include those produced by Georges Méliès and George Albert Smith. With the popular Bioscope projector (so popular that “Bioscope” remains to this day a name for the cinema theater in India, the Netherlands and South Africa), the office that Rosenthal managed hummed with activity. In her words, she had contact with “large numbers of persons in connection with the animated picture trade including theatrical managers, showmen, exhibitors, operators, and all classes of person having anything whatever to do with animated photography” (Rosenthal). She knew everyone. Her industry knowledge and collection management and sales efficiency underpinned the spectacular rise of the Warwick Trading Company, whose sales to 1901 were to grow 50% year-on-year, putting it at the forefront of the early British film business (McKernan, Charles Urban, 23).

Among the new staff required were camera operators to generate product that would free Warwick from too great a dependence on the product of others. The first of these was Rosenthal’s brother, Joseph, a pharmaceutical chemist, whom she recommended to Urban for his knowledge of photography (Urban 54). Joseph Rosenthal would swiftly become the most celebrated British cinematographer of the period, filming travel scenes across the globe and famously pioneering a new form of war journalism by filming the Anglo-Boer War and later conflicts (Bottomore 260-265).

Warwick Trading Company staff at Warwick Court, London in 1898. Alice Rosenthal is seated in the center. Courtesy of The Charles Urban Archive, The National Science and Media Museum.

There is a photograph of the Warwick Trading Company offices in 1898 that shows us Alice Rosenthal’s domain (Barnes, Rise, 157). What may have been the entire staff of five are present: Urban and office assistant George Scott inspecting reels of film; probably Joseph Rosenthal hunched over a desk at the back; typist Lena Green preparing a letter; and, in the center, Alice, at her own typewriter. Next to her is a cabinet with row upon row of small cans of film, each with the film title and its catalog number, “like so much canned milk or metal polish,” as Urban pertinently recalled (Urban 48). The first Warwick Trading Company catalog was published in 1898 and was probably compiled by Alice, since her roles as stock manager and sales person required expert knowledge of every film. There are 649 film titles listed, of which only seventy were original Warwick productions. There are a few fantasy and trick films on the list, but the majority are films of travel and transportation. Warwick offered its clients scenes from Austro-Hungary, Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire (including Damascus, Jaffa, and Jerusalem), Russia, Switzerland, and the United States, with notable news events including the funeral of William Gladstone, the coronations of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and the Spanish-American War. Films of ship launches and views from trains emphasized the sense of discovery through travel (Descriptive List of New Film Subjects). Here was an emerging vision of a commodified world, with the stock manager at its center.

In 1903, Urban broke away from Warwick to form his own company, the Charles Urban Trading Company. Surviving an acrimonious dispute with a vengeful Maguire and Baucus, who unsuccessfully sought to bankrupt him, he took with him contracts with key film publishers and the most dependable of the Warwick staff, including Alice and Joseph Rosenthal (McKernan, Charles Urban, 33-35). The Charles Urban Trading Company achieved rapid success with its films of actuality and travel, its mission summed up by the slogan “We Put the World Before You.” However, the expansion of the business inevitably reduced Rosenthal’s role, as the multiple functions that she had previously fulfilled were taken on by several people. She left the company around 1904 to join the British offshoot of the French company Pathé Frères.

Pathé had been known predominantly for its phonograph recordings, but the cinematograph side was expanding rapidly, as it moved swiftly to become the world’s leading film business. The company’s expanded operation entailed a move to new offices at Lamb’s Conduit Street, London, in August 1903 (“Records and Trade Topics”). Rosenthal joined them not long after to support film sales, staying with Pathé when it moved in 1906 to 31-33 Charing Cross Road, London (Album d’illustrations). This must have been a significant position, indicative of the high reputation that she enjoyed in the film business, but unfortunately little is recorded of her time with the company.

Rosenthal left Pathé in 1909 to manage film sales at her brother Joseph’s Rosie Film Company (brother and sister shared the same nickname) (“Miss Rosenthal”). He had set up the company in mid-1908 following his dismissal by Urban at the end of 1907 (Bottomore 265). Offering both fiction and documentary films (which is where Joseph’s strengths lay), the new company was located in the late-seventeenth-century building and gardens of Wrencote in Croydon.

However, Alice had ambitions of her own, and must have had confidence in an experience of the business that few could match. In December 1909, she opened a cinema theater called the Cosie Picture Palace in her hometown of Croydon. By then, films had broken out of the halls and variety theaters where they had been mostly exhibited, and now had venues of their own. Most of these were modest affairs, however, established in converted shops, and the Cosie Picture Palace seated a mere two hundred, when the average cinema seated around five hundred (McKernan, “Diverting Time,” 132). Years later, in 1989, one attendee remembered it as being a small room, with bare boards, shop chairs, and a projector that broke down frequently, leaving the audience with long waits in the dark. Prices were a penny for children and twopence for adults (Eyles 18). It was a boom period for cinema construction, but too many hoped to profit from the new public craze for film, and many small cinemas quickly failed. The Cosie Picture Palace ceased operations in 1912 (“Cosie Picture Palace” [Croydon Times]). During its three-year run, Rosenthal did at least make sure that some of her brother’s films were shown at the cinema (“Round the Suburbs”).

Undaunted by her cinema’s closure, Rosenthal decided to follow Joseph into film production. Taking her initials, A.R. Film Co. Ltd. was formed in 1913, around the time that the Rosie Film Company folded. She may have taken equipment from the failed Rosie venture, including perhaps the open-air glass studio, which she set up in Thornton Heath, Croydon (“New Companies”). As with the Cosie Picture Palace, A.R. was a modest venture with little opportunity for expansion, and soon failed, hamstrung by a collapse in business caused by the war and Rosenthal’s ill health. As well as taking on film processing work and renting out its studio, the company produced four one-reel films in Croydon during 1913-1914: Quits, Scallywag Foils the Missus, Getting Even, and Two of Scotch Hot. These were knockabout comedies, whose cast members are not known today. All were filmed by Rosenthal’s nephew, also named Joseph, aged just nineteen when the company was formed (“Company No: 130607”). (He would go on to be a feature film cinematographer in the 1920s.) The A.R. films made little impact and none survive. Alice’s talents lay elsewhere, and the industry that she had helped spark into life had passed her by.

Little is known about Rosenthal following the closure of A.R. Film, after five years of inactivity, in 1920. She worked in a clerical capacity for the Royal Air Force in the 1920s, and then in the 1930s moved to Leysdown-on-Sea on the Isle of Sheppey, in Kent. She died on the island on October 10, 1935, aged sixty-six. Her death certificate states her profession as “manageress.” According to her death certificate, her brother Joseph was with her at the end.

Alice Rosenthal was a private person. She never married, had no children, and left little evidence of her life in film, or beyond it. We have only a few clues as to her character. Statements from her at the time of the Urban-Warwick court case demonstrate clarity and common sense (Rosenthal), while a tendency for shaving years off her true age in successive census returns suggests some vulnerability. Film director Cecil Hepworth, who worked at Warwick as a film developer, describes her as being “a plump and pleasant lady” (Hepworth 39). Most importantly, Rosenthal was remembered by cinema veterans as an essential figure in the pioneering days of film (Acres; “Our Picture Pioneers”; Turner; Urban 42-43), setting showmen and women on their way with projector, films, and hopes for the future. Film history tends to privilege producers, operators, and performers. But one such as Rosenthal, who cared for the physical films, promoted them, sold them, and was the commercial face for an emerging industry, played no less of a pioneering role, one that needs to be remembered now. The British film business, in some sense, began with Alice Rosenthal.

The author wishes to thank to Stephen Bottomore.

Bibliography

Acres, Birt [letter]. “Mr. Birt Acres and the Early Days of the Kinematograph.” Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (14 April 1910): 1257.

Album d'illustrations, paper dated 21 January 1931. Will Day collection, DAY47-B33. Cinémathèque Française (Paris).

“‘A.R’ Film Company, Limited.” The Bioscope (28 August 1913): 683.

Barnes, John. The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901: Volume 1, 1894-1896. Exeter: University Exeter Press, 1998.

---. The Rise of the Cinema in Great Britain. London: Bishopsgate Press, 1983.

The Bioscope Annual and Trades Directory. London: Ganes, vols. 1910-11, 1912, 1913.

Bottomore, Stephen. “Joseph Rosenthal: The Most Glorious Profession.” Sight and Sound (Autumn 1983): 260-265.

Brown, Richard. “‘England is Not Big Enough’…American Rivalry in the Early English Film Business: The Case of Warwick v. Urban, 1903.” Film History 10, no. 1, “Cinema Pioneers” (1998): 21-34.

“Cinematograph Licences.” Croydon Express (8 October 1910): 7.

“Company No: 130607; ‘A R’ Film Company Ltd. Incorporated in 1913. Dissolved between 1916 and 1932.” BT 31/21658/130607. The National Archives (UK).

“Cosie Picture Palace.” Cinema Treasures. http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/28520.

“‘Cosie’ Picture Palace.” Croydon Times (4 December 1909): 8.

Descriptive List of New Film Subjects Issued by the Warwick Trading Company Limited. London: Warwick Trading Company, [1898].

Eyles, Allen, with Keith Skone. Croydon Cinemas. Stroud: Tempus, 2006.

Fuller, Mark. “Augustus Rosenberg and his Kineoptograph: When Cinema Came to Bristol (Part 2).” Bristol Ideas (22 June 2012). https://www.bristolideas.co.uk/read/when-cinema-came-to-bristol-part-2.

Hepworth, Cecil. Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer. London: Phoenix House, 1951.

Herbert, Stephen and Luke McKernan, eds. Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey. London: British Film Institute, 1996.

McKernan, Luke. Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013.

---.“Diverting Time: London’s Cinemas and Their Audiences, 1906-1914.” The London Journal (July 2007): 125-144.

“Miss Rosenthal.”  The Bioscope (29 April 1909): 9.

“New Companies.” Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (21 August 1913): 1734.

“Our Picture Pioneers: No. 3 – Mr. Wm McDonald.” Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (31 March 1910): 1157.

“Picture Palaces.” Croydon Chronicle and East Surrey Advertiser (5 March 1910): 10.

“Records and Trade Topics.” The Talking Machine News (1 September 1903): 88.

Rosenthal, Alice. Affidavit (19 September 1903),  J4/6734/2167. The National Archives (UK).

“Round the Suburbs.” Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (7 July 1910): 569.

“The Story of the Films.” Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (20 November 1913): [supplement] xlv.

“Studios.” [classified advertisements]. Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (8 June 1916): [supplement] lvii.

Turner, E.G. “From 1896 to 1926: Recollections of Thirty Years of Kinematography.” Kinematograph Weekly (17 June 1926): 53.

Urban, Charles. A Yank in Britain: The Lost Memoirs of Charles Urban, Film Pioneer. Ed. Luke McKernan. Hastings: The Projection Box, 1999.

Archival Paper Collections: 

A.R. Film Company records (BT 31/21658/130607), Records of the Board of Trade, The National Archives (United Kingdom).

Digitized birth and death certificates and UK and England census returns for 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911. www.Ancestry.com.

Digitized England census returns for 1921, www.Findmypast.co.uk.

Charles Urban Papers. The National Science and Media Museum (United Kingdom).

Urban/Warwick court case records (J4/6734), Records of the Supreme Court of Judicature and related courts, The National Archives (United Kingdom).

Citation

McKernan, Luke. "Alice Rosenthal." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2023.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/z78r-4e59>

Sabahat Filmer

by Canan Balan

Sabahat Filmer’s name remains largely unknown today despite her dedication to the early film industry, women’s movement, and the nationalistic struggle in Turkey as well as her important role as one of the founders of an early film company there. According to Sabahat’s own words, her involvement with cinema began in 1918 during the occupation of Istanbul by the British, French, Italian, and Greek armies after the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I (S. Filmer, Atatürk 34). The late 1910s was also the period in which the women’s movement became largely Muslim and Turkish, compared to earlier decades, in the Ottoman lands (Özdemir 291-325). Filmer, who self-identified as a Turkish secular nationalist, was an active member of the Society of Modern Women, which was established in the 1910s (S. Filmer, Atatürk 44). Given all this, it is not surprising that her pioneering work in the early film industry in Istanbul is bound up with her efforts in the women’s liberation movement as well as the nationalist struggle for independence.  

Sabahat and Cemil Filmer at the time of their marriage in 1919. Private Collection.

The Ottoman Archives have a record of Sabahat Filmer first studying literature and then switching to science in 1916 (Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri [1916]). Perhaps this change in focus was due to her developing an interest in the technology of cinema: during her time at university, she started an internship at the Army Film Center, where soldiers with backgrounds in photography were trained as camera operators, and many early propaganda films, as well as early feature-length dramas, were made. Sabahat’s duties at the Center included organizing the screenings of the propaganda and feature films. She also most likely worked as an assistant director and collaborated with a team of screenwriters at the Center. During this period, she was also an assistant to a prominent female novelist, Halide Edip Adıvar, who occasionally wrote about cinema for the newspaper and used it in her novels as an analogy to depict her characters’ mental states and changing consciousnesses. (In the 1920s, Halide Edip Adıvar also worked on the cinematic adaptations of her novels.)

Owing to Sabahat’s connections with the Army Film Center, it became the meeting place for the Society of Modern Women , which was not only working to support women’s rights, but also assisting war veterans at that time (S. Filmer, Atatürk 34). Some of the organization’s meetings were attended by the future founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, when he was a high-ranking army commander before the start of the National War of Independence (1919-1922). According to Sabahat, the Center was then run by Ottoman soldiers who had worked on German propaganda films during World War I (Atatürk 34). Around this time, Atatürk was gathering troops to prepare for Turkey’s War of Independence, and he, along with other Ottoman generals, frequented the Center to see war newsreels (S. Filmer, Atatürk 35). As a result of her proximity  to Atatürk at the Center, Sabahat became an active participant in the independence movement (S. Filmer, Atatürk 88-89). In May 1919, for example, Sabahat and other members of the Society of Modern Women began organizing rallies that called upon the people of Istanbul to take action against the Entente armies that had occupied  Izmir, another major Ottoman city. Sabahat was among the public speakers at one of these events. The rallies reportedly gathered approximately 200,000 women and were rigidly controlled by the occupying armies (S. Filmer, Atatürk 49). Her soon-to-be husband, and the camera operator filming these rallies, Cemil Filmer, recalls that he had to be very careful and hide the equipment during the filming (C. Filmer 107). In later years, the couple reused the footage Cemil had captured at the rallies for a costume drama they produced entitled Allaha İsmarladık (Sami Ayanoğlu, 1951). This recycling of these images can be seen as closely connected to the couple’s active participation in the nation-making cultural revolution.

Sabahat and Cemil Filmer in 1934. Private Collection.

By 1919, Sabahat called the Army Film Center her workplace, a workplace where she had a “good time,” where she loved her job as well as her co-workers, but also where she felt “dependent on others” (S. Filmer, Atatürk 83). That same year, while enduring the pressures and threats of the occupying army, Sabahat was invited to work on the production of two feature-length films made by the Center (Çalıkışu 47). Both films featured female protagonists who could be classified somewhere between vamps and divas. It is unclear to what extent Sabahat, possibly the only woman working in the Center, influenced the development of these plots. However, it is evident from both her memoirs and the literary stories she published that year that she had a self-professed tendency to create abstract and stereotypical female characters (S. Filmer, Atatürk 54; Hüsameddin, “Kadın Kalbi”; Hüsameddin, “Zehirli Kudret”). The titles of these two films, both directed by Ahmet Fehim, were eponymous with their heroines: Binnaz (1919) and Mürebbiye/The Governess (1919). Of these two films, only parts of Binnaz seem to have survived today. It is difficult to determine Sabahat’s responsibilities during the production of both films, as the only thing we currently know is that she worked for the Center during the writing, production, and release of these films. Considering that she was also publishing short stories at the time and mentions working closely with the director of these films in an undated (and unpublished) letter to a Turkish film historian, I believe she was involved in the team of screenwriters and assistant directors (S. Filmer, Letter to Burçak Evren).

Binnaz, a costume drama about two men’s quarrel over a woman and the tragic death of one of them, was allegedly a rewriting of Victor Hugo’s play “Marion de Lorme” (And 12-15). Set in the 1770s, a period known in Ottoman history as one filled with debauchery and corruption, its depiction of a glorious past during a time of war and poverty could be considered a form of nationalistic nostalgia. As a historical drama, Binnaz was successful at the box office both in Turkey and in the United Kingdom, but it was still deemed a failure by a popular local journal on stage arts (K.R., “Temaşa Muhasebesi”). In reviews of the film, the character of Binnaz was depicted as a “yosma” (a Turkish pejorative word that refers to the beauty and low virtues of a woman) and she has been defined as a “vamp” more recently (Özgüç 25) since the source text was about a courtesan. According to a review written in 1920, the body language and movements of the main actress were “unpleasant” as the male reviewer found her seemingly “hysterical and ambivalent” gestures toward her lovers “immoral and tasteless” (Arcan 2).

Still from Binnaz (1919). Courtesy of Türk Sineması Araştırmaları.

The current version of Binnaz, found in the national archive, is fragmented and re-edited. This sole remaining copy is half the length of the original release. Having only seen this version, I am reminded of certain Italian diva films; Binnaz shares formal and narrative features with these melodramatic and emotionally excessive stories, such as a hedonistic mise-en-scene, close-ups on women’s faces and figures, and the incorporation of music, dance, prostitution, a love triangle, jealousy, and a femme fatale. Binnaz, as a courtesan, plays the mandolin, dances for men, wears luxurious costumes, and mingles with pashas and high-ranking officers. However, her heart belongs to an ordinary private soldier who is later sentenced to prison. It is also noteworthy that the film was made during a period in which Italian diva films were very popular among the Istanbulite audiences (Balan 55). Additionally, in the current version of the film, perhaps similar to the Italian divas, Binnaz is ultimately a victim of her own making. However, it is difficult to ascertain whether her character was deliberately modeled after the diva or vamp type. As much as Binnaz offers more visibility to women compared to the other extant Turkish silent films, its subtle misogyny is not less problematic.

Still from Mürebbiye/The Governess (1919). Courtesy of Türk Sineması Araştırmaları.

The Governess, the second feature that Sabahat worked on, was also an adaptation, this time of a novel about a French governess who corrupts and has affairs with the men in the Turkish family for which she works. Having been produced under dire conditions due to the war and the occupation, the film was disdained by contemporary Turkish critics for its technical inadequacies (Arcan 1-2). Moreover, the film encountered resistance as a result of the growing scope of the occupying countries’ methods of surveillance, which began including the inspection of local film shows in November 1918. The Governess was banned by the French army for misrepresenting French women (Özuyar 28). It is noteworthy that Sabahat does not mention the occupying forces’ involvement in the film inspections in her memoirs, nor have I seen her name in relation to the ban of The Governess in the press.

Unfortunately, Sabahat’s name was almost never mentioned in newspaper reports about Binnaz and The Governess. While searching for her name, I came across a mention of a “lady” clerk during the press screening of The Governess (Arcan 1-2). This anonymous “lady,” most likely Sabahat, was presented to the press by Sabahat’s future husband as the assistant of the Army Film Center. She not only introduced the film to the press, but also outlined the Center’s vision and its new film projects. The reporter describes her as “a serious and well-educated woman” with “a delicate voice and decent manners” (1-2). Decades later, it turns out that Sabahat’s nickname in the film industry was “the lady,” according to both a famous Turkish auteur (Akad 235) and a dubbing manager trained by Sabahat herself (Sarıcı, “Kendi Sesinden Sinemanın Sesi”).

The Filmer family in 1926. Private Collection.

After the war for national independence began in 1919, Sabahat and Cemil started working on processing and screening propaganda films at the Center, where Atatürk was again in the audience, along with the members of the Society of Modern Women (S. Filmer, Atatürk 88). One of the most popular newsreels they showed was Atatürk’s Inspection of the Izmit Front (88). Sabahat recalls that these screenings made them all feel “peaceful as if their hearts attended a religious service” (S. Filmer, Atatürk 90). She deemed these screenings very important for the national struggle as they imparted a sense of mission and purpose to people. (She does not mention if they showed images of the earlier rallies as well.) During the War of Independence, Filmer also worked as a nurse for the newly-founded Turkish Red Crescent, which was affiliated with the International Red Cross (Ömer and Hacıfettahoğlu 157).

After her marriage to Cemil in 1919, the couple moved to Izmir and opened up a movie theater (S. Filmer, Atatürk 90-91). In 1923, the year the Turkish Republic was founded, Sabahat organized a special film show for Atatürk. According to her memoirs, this was the first show where a mixed-gender Muslim audience sat together in the theater (134). The accuracy of this statement is speculative as there were different practices regarding gender segregation in the movie theaters of the Ottoman state. However, archival documents show us that as early as 1908, Muslim women and men were seated together, but that was soon strictly banned. Other official documents highlight certain patriarchal reservations regarding women’s attendance in movie theaters in general (Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri [1908]; Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri [1913]). It seems, then, that when Sabahat and her husband organized their show in the newly-founded Republic and the curtain separating men and women was removed, it was one of the first instances of a mixed gender audience in some time. Furthermore, according to Sabahat, this particular audience witnessed another “revolution” in show business: it was also the first time that Muslim actresses appeared on stage in Turkey (141).

That same year, the couple opened a second cinema hall in Izmir (S. Filmer, Atatürk 139). This time it was an open-air theater called Lale Bahçesi. Sabahat began bringing nitrate films from Istanbul to Izmir, putting her life at risk as she had to travel through navel minefields on and among battleships with easily flammable films. She was still working with the Army Film Center and preparing new film programs for Izmir with some of the films still produced by the army (S. Filmer, Atatürk 140). By the time Sabahat and her husband began running several movie theaters around Istanbul and Izmir in the 1930s, Sabahat had already been asked to be a member of Parliament and had become closer to her former mentor Halide Edip Adıvar (C. Filmer 153). In her husband’s words, she declined the offer to join Parliament “for the sake of the marriage” (153). Sabahat’s memoirs never mention any considerations of becoming a member of Parliament and her husband only mentions it in the one sentence. Sabahat was already the head of their film company by then, and perhaps joining Parliament would have been perceived as a threat by her husband both to their family business and her domestic duties.

The Filmer family in 1921. Private Collection.

Interested in the work of film studios abroad, Sabahat and her husband visited Egypt in the 1950s. After they came back to Istanbul, they founded a film studio, Lale Film. Sabahat owned a 51% share of the company, while her husband and children owned the rest of the shares (Akçura 65). Lale Film is referred to as “the studio managed by ladies” in the title of an interview with Sabahat in 1954 (Gürcan 14). At the end of the interview, when Sabahat was told that the studio was managed very well and the employees seemed dedicated to their work, she underlines that the head of the studio, dubbing manager, translator, editor, and the cleaner were all women (15).

At her studio, Sabahat’s educational background allowed her to work in English and French dubbing. Film dubbing was a common practice in this period in the cinema of Turkey, and Lale Film was among the first dubbing studios in the country (Çalışkaner 16). In her husband’s words: “Thanks to her foreign language skills and having studied literature, Sabahat had great success in dubbing films” (C. Filmer 197). In the following years, Sabahat continued working as the head of the company and dubbing manager while also producing films. In an interview carried out in 1954, she claims that Atatürk used to call her “young poetess” since she had also written poems (“Sabahat Filmer”). In the same interview, she mentions having recently written two film scripts, one of which was approved while the other was under review. I have yet to discover whether these films were ever realized. In the interview, Sabahat also remarks that “the best film of that year was Cahide Sonku’s Beklenen Şarkı (1953).” This film was made by Turkey’s first woman film director, Cahide Sonku, whose own studio–a competitor of Lale Film–produced it. Around a decade later, in 1964, Sabahat began acting as a representative for the union of film studios in Turkey (Özön). After fifty years in the film industry, the Filmers sold Lale Film to another dubbing manager, Necip Sarıcı, in 1979 (Sarıcı, “İlham kaynağı daima sinema”).

Sabahat Filmer’s long career in film is extremely significant, yet we must rely on alternative sources to fully understand her life and work. Even looking into the reviews of the films she worked on does not prove fruitful. It is mainly through personal accounts, such as her and her husband’s memoirs, that we can trace her work in film. Her grandchild provided me with the years of her birth and death in a private conversation. Her work in other areas, such as her stories (published under the name Sabahat Hüsameddin) like “Kadın Kalbi” (“Woman’s Heart,” 1919) and “Zehirli Kudret” (“Poisonous Power,” 1919), as well as the records of the Red Crescent, provide basic insights into her life and creative development. The main resource for this profile is Sabahat’s memoirs, entitled Great Steps on the Path to Atatürk. As this title suggests, it is filled with a sense of patriotic duty and passion in service to secular nation-building under the rule of Atatürk. Her devotion to a one-party state is also to be further investigated and critiqued. While there may not be records of Filmer’s life and early work in the official accounts of film history, she nevertheless remains the first woman behind the camera in Turkey, who worked extensively in the development of cinema.

See also: Bedia Muvahhit and Neyyire Neyir

Bibliography

Akad, Lütfi O. Işıkla Karanlık Arasında: Anı. Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2004.

Akçura, Gökhan. Aile Boyu Sinema. Istanbul: İthaki, 2004.

And, Metin. “Yusuf Ziya Ortaç ve Tiyatro.” Hisar (1967): 12-15.

Arcan, Galip. “Mürebbiye Filmi.” Temaşa 17 (1919): 1-2.

Balan, Canan. “Imagining Women at the Movies: Male Writers and Early Film Culture in Istanbul.” In Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future. Eds. Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 53-65.

Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri (Prime Ministry Archives), Zabtiye Nezareti, 621/109. 20 August 1908.

Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri (Prime Ministry Archives), Dahiliye Nezareti, 65/27, 12. 6 January 1913.

Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri (Prime Ministry Archives), MF. MKT. 1916, Mektubî Kalemi Defterleri, 1221/86. 15 December 1916.

Çalıkışu, Nevzat. “Bilge Olgaç Sinemasına Bir Bakış.” Ihlamur 52 (2017): 46-54.

Çalışkaner, Mine. “Türkiye’de Seslendirme ve Sözlendirme Sorunu.” Unpublished MA Thesis, Istanbul University, 1987.

Filmer, Cemil. Hatıralar: Türk Sinemasında 65 Yıl. Istanbul: [publisher unknown], 1984.

Filmer, Sabahat. Atatürk Yolunda Büyük Adımlar. Istanbul: Gül Matbaası, 1983.

---.  Letter to Burçak Evren [undated]. Private Collection.

Gürcan, Tarık. “Hanımların İdare Ettiği Stüdyo.” Resimli Yirminci Asır (1954): 14-15.

Hüsameddin, Sabahat. “Kadın Kalbi.” Edebiyat-ı Umumiye Mecmuası vol. 5 no. 104 (1919): 1308-1312.

---. “Zehirli Kudret.” Edebiyat-ı Umumiye Mecmuası vol. 5, no. 110 (1919): 1401-1406.

K.R. “Temaşa Muhasebesi.” Temaşa 18 (1920): 5.

Ömer, Besin, and İsmail Hacıfettahoğlu. Hanımefendilere Hilâl-i Ahmer'e dair konferans. Istanbul: Türkiye Kızılay Derneği Yayınları, 2009.

Özdemir, Esen. “Türkiye Feminist Hareket/Örgütlenme Tarihi.” In Toplumsal Cinsiyet Tartışmaları. Ankara: Dipnot Yayınları, 2016. 291-325.

Özgüç, Agah. Ansiklopedik Türk Filmleri Sözlüğü. Istanbul: Horizon, 2012.

Özön, Nijat. “Birinci Sinema Şurası: Bir Şuranın Öyküsü.” Yeni Film (24 December 2000). http://yenifilm.net/2000/12/birinci-sinema-surasi-bir-suranin-oykusu/.

Özuyar, Ali. Devlet-i Aliyye'de Sinema. Ankara: De Ki Basım Yayım Ltd. Şti, 2007.

“Sabahat Filmer.” Yelpaze (7 July 1954): 18.

Sarıcı, Necip. “İlham kaynağı daima sinema.” [interview] Dünya (22 August 2011). https://www.dunya.com/ozel-dosya/ilham-kaynagi-daima-sinema-haberi-152623.

---. “Kendi Sesinden Sinemanın Sesi: Necip Sarıcı.” [interview] Evrensel (17 July 2021). https://www.evrensel.net/yazi/89124/kendi-sesinden-sinemanin-sesi-necip-sarici-2-buyuk-sinema-ailesine-yesilcama-giris.

Archival Paper Collections:

Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri (Prime Ministry Archives), Istanbul, Turkey.

Citation

Balan, Canan. "Sabahat Filmer." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2023.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/th85-st02>

Madge Tyrone

by Marsha Gordon

Madge Tyrone is co-credited with Bess Meredyth for adapting Rose o’ the Sea (1922),  Motion Picture News, July 26, 1922.

In the early 1920s, Madge Tyrone was classed with Anita Loos, Jeanie MacPherson, and Frances Marion as a scenarist at the top of her game. She worked closely with Louis B. Mayer, who personally wrote a letter of support for her first U.S. passport application. Her death, in 1955, occasioned notice in The New York Times. Despite Tyrone’s reputation and contributions to the industry—as an actress, writer, and editor—her career was, for reasons we will likely never know, relatively short-lived; she has also been completely erased from film history.

As Madge Tyrone’s theatrical career ascended, her picture often appeared in the press. For example, The Post-Star of Glens Falls, New York, promoted her role in “The Common Law” on September 7, 1912.

Born Margaret Elizabeth Towle in Boston on January 5, 1884, to Irish Catholic parents, Dr. Henry Towle and Elizabeth Mooney, Margaret attended Radcliffe College from 1901 to 1904, though she did not graduate (“Margaret Elizabeth Towle”). Instead, she cast off her birth name to become stage actress Madge Towle before renaming herself Madge Tyrone (Blake; “At the Grand”). In 1909, she performed in San Francisco and Los Angeles in “Pals” with Edwin Carewe, with whom she would reunite when she eventually started making movies. In 1910, Tyrone traveled the country with the singing Irish comedian Fiske O’Hara. Appearing in a bit part as Kitty Adair in the musical “The Wearing of the Green” at Pittsburgh’s Lyceum Theater in February of that year, Tyrone performed alongside “real old-time Irish character players” who sang and danced “with unction and merriment.” This was ethnic, working-class entertainment, exemplifying “the joys and sorrows, the songs and poetry, the sentiment and pathos of Irish character” (“In the Theaters Last Evening”).

On October 9, 1913, The New York Times published Tyrone’s photograph from “In Old Dublin” while it was being staged at the Montauk Theater in Brooklyn.

In 1911, Tyrone nabbed the female lead in the Western love tragedy “Boots and Saddles,” deemed “one of the best attractions of the current season” at the Academy theater in Washington D.C. (“Academy—‘Boots and Saddles’”). She reunited with O’Hara’s troupe in 1913 as “an Irish lassie” in the play “In Old Dublin” on the vaudeville circuit. By then, Tyrone had become “the leading woman of the company,” described as “a gem” who was “handsome and statuesque” and who “[knew] how to act” (“Theatrical”).

In the summer of 1913, Tyrone traveled to England for several months, perhaps touring with O’Hara’s troupe. When she returned to New York in July 1913 on the S.S. Minnewasha, she headed to her apartment on 160 Claremont Avenue, not far from Columbia University (“Madge Tyrone”). Around this time, Tyrone transitioned from stage to screen and began acting in films made at New York City-area studios. She had a recurring role as Madge Travis in Reliance Motion Picture Corp.’s weekly serial Our Mutual Girl, released in installments over the course of 1914, and was described as one of the “well known players” in the 1915 divorce trial melodrama The House of Tears, directed by her old stage friend Edwin Carewe for Rolfe Photoplays (“The House of Tears”).

During this time, Tyrone was also an ardent suffragist. The New York City Woman Suffrage Party had a banner year in 1915, organizing over 5,000 outdoor meetings and almost thirty parades as part of a push to pass a state initiative for a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote (Schaffer 280-1). In mid-October of that year, Tyrone was one of a group of activists who made the rounds to banks, trust companies, and department stores in flamboyantly decorated automobiles to garner support for an October 23 suffragist parade across the city, convincing such major retail concerns as Bonwit Teller & Co., Bloomingdale Brothers, and John Wanamaker to allow their female clerks to skip work on October 23 without being “docked for their time.” Tyrone also camped out on Wall Street to recruit parade marchers (Brace).

On October 23, 1915, over 25,000 women marched from Washington Square Park to 59th Street to draw attention to New York’s Suffrage Amendment ballot initiative (Schaffer 281). The following week, Tyrone was one of a group of “lapboard ladies” who took to the elevated trains and the subway carrying placards announcing that “Woman Suffrage is Coming” and that “One Million Women of this State Want the Vote.” The lapboard campaign was front page news, described as “an inconspicuous and everyday way of arguing votes for women,” ensuring that “in thousands of homes…the lapboards and their plea for suffrage came on with the dinner.” According to a reporter, one passerby proclaimed, “We’re with you, sister!” to the sign-yielding suffragists, while a naysayer asserted that “women’s laps were made for holding babies, not lapboards” (Brace). On November 2, 553,345 men voted for the suffrage amendment and 748,332 voted against it (Schaffer 281-2). It took another two years before New York successfully passed a suffrage amendment in 1917, and an additional three years, until 1920, for women across the country to earn the ability to cast a vote for such matters themselves.

Tyrone’s last appearance on the screen was in the 1916 film One Day, directed by Hal Clarendon and adapted from a novel written by popular British writer Elinor Glyn. Her departure from film acting marked a new chapter: Margaret Towle, now aged thirty-two with an upper Manhattan address on West 142nd Street, married Pennsylvania-born Edwin Van Dusan Paul, aged forty-six, in Spokane, Washington, on September 21, 1916. It was time for Madge Tyrone to change her name again, this time to Margaret Towle Paul (“Margaret E. Towle”)

This marriage between a northeastern woman who had marched for women’s rights and acted on stage and screen and a once-divorced, Washington State farmer lasted less than three years, during which Margaret was mostly AWOL. Margaret Paul is listed as the defendant in divorce court records from Klickitat County, Washington, in which Edwin accused his wife of “cruel treatment” ranging from throwing “books, dishes and pans at plaintiff” to repeatedly striking him in the face and refusing to “sleep in the same room.” Margaret allegedly “refused to perform any of the ordinary household duties, and owing to the indolence and lazy-iness [sic] of defendant, plaintiff was forced to hire outside help for the ordinary household duties.”

Edwin further accused his wife of pressuring him to sell his ranch to support her “living in a manner beyond plaintiff’s means.” Margaret had “from the day of the marriage…demanded money with which to redeem her effects from pawn,” had brought “a maid from New York, at great expense,” and had insisted upon extravagant travel that they could not afford. Averring that Edwin “endeavored to be a kind and considerate husband,” his counsel argued that the betrothed had “natures so incompatible that it is impossible to harmonize them.” Despite attempts in March, April, and May of 1919 to summon Margaret to appear in court, she could not be located. The case before the judge went uncontested, with witnesses testifying only on behalf of the plaintiff. The judge issued a Decree of Divorce on July 28, 1919.

Madge Tyrone is credited with the adaptation of Habit (1920), which was directed by her friend Edwin Carewe. Motion Picture News, Nov. 27, 1920.

The adaptation of Eleanor Hallowell Abbott’s story was credited to J. Grubb Alexander and Madge Tyrone.

Around the time of her divorce, Tyrone returned to the motion picture industry. Her discoverable credits as a scenarist and title writer begin in 1920, when she started working with Louis B. Mayer, first in New York and then in Los Angeles. Mayer, who went on to found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1924, had an up-and-coming studio in Los Angeles at 3800 Mission Road, where he produced features and short films, with business offices on West 48th Street in New York. A press announcement regarding her return to Hollywood referred to Tyrone as a “former newspaper woman and magazine writer,” suggesting that at some point she worked as a journalist as well (“Madge Tyrone Returning”). In 1920, Margaret Towle (as she recorded her name in the census) was living at 1854 N. Vermont Avenue, just a few blocks from Barnsdall Park, where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House was under construction. Towle, who identified herself in the Federal Census that year as a thirty-six-year-old “scenario writer,” lodged with three other single women in their thirties and forties, two divorcées who performed as vocalists and one widow with no listed occupation (“Margaret E. Towle”).

Tyrone wrote dialogue and narration that would appear on screen; she also adapted previously published stories and novels. She was soon being described in the press as “one of filmdom’s cleverest subtitlers” (“‘Old Dad’ at the Rex”). At a time when on-screen credits for writing and titling were spotty, it is notable that at least ten films can today be definitively credited to Madge Tyrone. Tyrone’s work, however, was interrupted by an automobile accident in January 1921, in which she sustained “a severe injury” when her “automobile skidded and turned turtle in an attempt to avoid collision with another car” (The Los Angeles Evening Express). Tyrone was “rapidly recovering” at the Clara Barton Hospital until, a month later, she went home to recuperate (“Stage and Screen”). In mid-March, she had recovered enough to return to work as a “member of the scenario staff” with Louis B. Mayer (“Scenarioist at Work”).

An ad mentioning Madge Tyrone’s “technical assistance” on The Invisible Fear (1921), Motion Picture News, Oct. 22, 1921.

A review of Rio Grande (1920) crediting the scenario to Madge Tyrone and Edwin Carewe. The Film Daily, April 18, 1920.

Reviews for the pictures Tyrone worked on, such as The Invisible Fear (1921), fashioned her as a significant contributor. “In his treatment of Madge Tyrone’s scenario,” wrote one reviewer, “Director Edwin Carewe has succeeded in keeping up the suspense of the plot” (“The ‘Invisible Fear’”). Although Tyrone wrote the scenario for this film, advertisements for The Invisible Fear also touted her unspecified “technical assistance,” suggesting that she may have done additional work on the film’s production, perhaps in the editing room given her later work in this capacity.

In a 1922 article, Carewe praised Tyrone along with scenario writers June Mathis, Jeanie MacPherson, and Frances Marion for having “at their command that most important thing, visualization. The action moves through their minds in the form of pictures and from the action arises the fit title to each scene.” He described the photoplay script as “the blue print from which the builder works” and touted the importance of the “continuity writer” (“Writer Makes or Mars Pictures”). Carewe was not alone in his high estimation of Tyrone’s talents. Along with Anita Loos, Lucita Squier, and Dorothy Farnum, she was singled out as one of “the most important women playwrights” working with Louis B. Mayer (“Gossip Street” 34). This observer also perceived that the “long list of women who have contributed to the success of [the studio’s] photoplays reveals that there are hundreds of America women gaining fame as authors and scenarists.” In fact, one might say that women’s work in this area of the industry was in the process of being normalized.

Screenshot of digitized credit sequence for The Song of Life (1922). Courtesy of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

Tyrone also earned at least three screen credits for editing, on The Child Thou Gavest Me (1921), One Clear Call (1922), and The Song of Life (1922), all directed by John M. Stahl. From contemporary press mentions, we also know that she served as editor on Stahl’s presumed lost The Woman in His House (1920), for which she also wrote the scenario from a story by Frances Irene Reels (“Here and Expected”; “The Woman in His House”). It is unclear how she transitioned between writing and editing, or why. Was this was an exploration of a possible new line of work for a woman who had boundless curiosity and enjoyed learning new things? Was this work she only did for Stahl? Unfortunately, there is no extant documentation relating to her professional life or career decisions. At minimum, however, we know that she was good at the job: The Child Thou Gavest Me was a hit, inspiring H.B. Wright, manager of the Strand Theater in Seattle, Washington, to call it “the best picture I have played this season, both from a box-office angle and satisfied audiences” (“The Child Thou Gavest Me”).

A Letter from Louis B. Mayer to the Department of State, April 20, 1922. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

Madge Tyrone’s photograph submitted with her passport application, on which her birth name is scratched out. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

In the early 1920s, Tyrone continued working steadily for Mayer, whose future studio, MGM, would produce her younger half-sister Ursula Parrott’s (née Katherine Towle) first novel-to-film adaptation, The Divorcee (1930), several years later. The Film Yearbook, 1922-1923 lists Tyrone as the Scenario Editor for Louis B. Mayer productions on West 48th Street in New York City, indicating that she had returned east. On April 29, 1922, Mayer wrote to the Department of State to support Tyrone’s passport application. (When she went abroad in 1913, there was no enforcement of travel documentation.) Mayer vouched that Tyrone had been working with him as a “writer and editor” for the past two years. “It is necessary that Miss Tyrone go to Europe in the interests of her work,” Mayer explained, “and in order that she may secure the motion picture material which she is seeking, she will be obliged to go to Paris, Berlin, London, and Vienna, and possibly other countries, depending on the literary market” (“Margaret Towle”). Abroad she went, returning to New York in February 1923 and then heading west again to Los Angeles, where she kept writing until she earned her final writing credit (with Lois Zellner) in 1925 for The Lady Who Lied, an adaptation of Robert Hitchens’ novel Snake-Bite (1919).

After abandoning her motion picture career for reasons unknown, Tyrone returned east to New York and Massachusetts. She took to the stage again, performing a singing role in March 1926 at the annual Irish night celebration of the St. Alphonsus Association of Roxbury, Massachusetts, in a vaudeville act that included Gaelic singers, step dancers, and a playlet called “The Irish Millionaire” (“St. Alphonsus Ass’n”). In May, she played the role of Ada May in “Easy Come, Easy Go,” a three-act farce at the Park Theater in Boston (“Mirthful Farce”). In April 1928, she appeared in “Marriage on Approval” in New York, which on Thursday afternoons admitted only women. This was not a play, but rather a grouping of speakers discussing the subject of marriage (“For Women Only”). If a transcript of this performance survived, we might know much more about the sole marriage and divorce of Margaret Towle.

When her father, Dr. Henry Towle, died in the fall of 1930, Margaret was at his bedside (“Death of Dr. Henry. C. Towle”). A decade later, in 1940, fifty-six-year-old Margaret Towle was living in Greenwich Village at 52 Barrow Street between Bedford and Bleecker. She identified herself in the Federal Census as single instead of divorced, and as a writer (of what, she did not indicate) with a modest income of $1,000 a year (“Margaret Towle”). When she died on April 13, 1955, her death notice in The New York Times used an aptly hybrid name, Madge Tyrone Towle, to announce her requiem mass and interment at the Catholic Gate of Heaven Cemetery in New York (“Deaths”).

It is certain that Tyrone wrote, and perhaps edited, much more than I could identify here. In this early 1920s period, her contributions were far from novel or unique; being a woman writer or editor was, for the most part, uncommented upon in the advertising campaigns for, or the press coverage of, the films she worked on. Instead, Tyrone was part of a valued, well-known, and sizable female cohort of industry workers, respected by their colleagues and bosses for the quality work they produced. That Tyrone transitioned between acting, writing, and editing indicates a kind of fluidity in the industry that would disappear over the course of the 1920s, especially for women whose options behind the camera were in the process of greatly diminishing.

Screenshot of digitized credit sequence for Husbands and Lovers (1924). Courtesy of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

Bibliography

“Academy—‘Boots and Saddles.’” The Washington Post (9 May 1911): 4.

“At the Grand.” The Des Moines Register (14 April 1910): 6.

Blake, W. Herbert. “Art is Shown in Contortion Act.” The Los Angeles Herald (6 October 1909): 10.

Brace, Blanche. “Suffrage Lapboards Make Subway Grin, Then Think.” The New York Tribune (31 October 1915): 1.

“The Child Thou Gavest Me.” Exhibitors Herald (19 July 2022): 33.

“Death of Dr. Henry C. Towle.” The Boston Globe (5 September 1930): 15.

“Deaths.” The New York Times (15 April 1955): 25.

“For Women Only.” The New York Daily News (9 April 1928): 21.

“Gossip Street: From Hollywood Boulevard to Times Square.” The Photodramatist (September 1921): 31-4.

“Here and Expected.” The Film Daily (1 September 1920): 1.

“The House of Tears.” Middletown Daily Times-Press (26 February 1916): 5.

“In the Theaters Last Evening.” The Pittsburgh Post (1 February 1910): 7.

“The ‘Invisible Fear’ on Screen at the Princess.” Sioux City Journal (23 October 1921): 30.

“‘The Lady Who Lied’ is Fascinating Tale.” The Morning Call (26 November 1925): 10.

The Los Angeles Evening Express (21 January 1921): 29.

“Madge Tyrone.” S.S. Minnewasha. July 21, 1913. New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957.https://www.ancestry.com.

“Madge Tyrone Returning.” Camera! (4 December 1920): 17.

“Margaret Towle.” U.S., Passport Applications, 1795-1927. May 26, 1922. https://www.ancestry.com.

“Margaret Towle.” 1940 United States Federal Census. https://www.ancestry.com.

“Margaret E. Towle.” Washington, U.S., Marriage Records, 1854-2013. September 21, 1916. https://www.ancestry.com.

“Margaret E. Towle.” 1920 United States Federal Census. https://www.ancestry.com.

“Margaret Elizabeth Towle.” Radcliffe Transcript, 1901-1904. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

“Matters of General Interest to Playgoers.” The New York Times (19 October 1913): X7.

“Mirthful Farce at the New Park.” The Boston Globe (13 April 1926): 21.

“Miss Madge Towle, Who Pleases in an Old Corbett Play.” The San Francisco Examiner (12 September 1909): 5.

“‘Old Dad’ at the Rex Today and Wednesday.” The Pioneer [Bemidji, Minnesota] (15 February 1921): 4.

“Renco to Produce Reed Novel at Mayer's Studio.” Camera! (21 August 1920): 4.

“Scenario Editors.” The Film Yearbook, 1922-1923.  New York: Wid's Films and Film Folk, Inc., 1923. 22.

“Scenarioist at Work.” The Los Angeles Herald (14 March 1921): B5.

Schaffer, Ronald. “The New York Woman Suffrage Party, 1909-1919.” New York History vol. 42, no. 2 (July 1962): 269-287.

“Stage and Screen.” The Los Angeles Evening Express (24 February 1921), 23.

“St. Alphonsus Ass’n Irish Celebration on Two Evenings.” The Boston Globe (12 March 1926): 16.

“Theatrical.” The Anaconda Standard (9 November 1913): 3.

“Tiger Love.” Exhibitors Herald (28 June 1924): 41.

“The Woman in His House.” Camera! (15 January 1921): 5.

“Writer Makes or Mars Pictures, Claim.” The Oakland Tribune (22 October 1922): 4-W.

Archival Paper Collections

Divorce court records pertaining to complaint no. 2685, Superior Court of the State of Washington, Klickitat County. Washington State Archives.

Citation

Gordon, Marsha. "Madge Tyrone." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2022.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/khy3-a759>

Elizaveta Thiemann

by Peter Bagrov, Anna Kovalova

Elizaveta Thiemann is the first credited female film director in Russia, which is a substantial accomplishment in and of itself. But she is best known for her work as a producer. Together with her husband Paul Ernst Julius (Pavel Gustavovich) Thiemann (1881-1954), she managed one of the most successful film companies in pre-revolutionary Russia, known, at different times, as Thiemann and Rheinhardt Trading House, Russian Golden Series [Russkaia zolotaia seriia], and Era. In his memoirs, director Viacheslav Viskovskii writes about the “missises” [“khoziaiki”] who were often in charge of film company affairs no less than their producer husbands. Apart from “madame Thiemann,” he mentions “madame Khanzhonkova” (Antonina Khanzhonkova, the wife of legendary film producer Alexander Khanzhonkov), who he describes as “a very business-like lady, yet ignorant in literature and art” (Viskovskii 4-5). While most characterizations of Khanzhonkova in memoirs are similar to Viskovskii’s, or even more negative, Thiemann is usually described more positively: director Vladimir Gardin mentions “Thiemann, with his wife who knew the film industry quite well and took part in directing films” (Gardin 116); and cinematographer Alexander Levitskii recollects the Thiemanns very favorably, writing that, “Thiemann was set apart [from other producers] due to his high level of culture as well as decency. His wife Elizaveta Vladimirovna was also a great admirer and expert of art. Their house was often packed with Moscow writers, artists, and actors” (Levitskii 67). While the prominent role played by Elizaveta Thiemann in Russian film history was emphasized by memoirists, as well as later film scholars like Neia Zorkaia, Vladimir Mikhailov, and Denise J. Youngblood, it is hard to determine the extent of her contributions; her name was rarely mentioned in the trade press, and there are few surviving documents from the time.

We cannot even be sure about the spelling of Elizaveta’s maiden name, which she returned to at the end of her life (it seems to have been “von Mickwitz” in Russia and “von Minckwitz” in emigration), nor about her birthdate (1889 in the official family documents, 1885 in one of the earlier papers). Either way, she seems to have started her career in literature and arts quite early. In 1902, she corresponded with the famous Russian and Ukrainian writer Vladimir Korolenko whose short stories she translated into German, to his satisfaction (Korolenko 331). His daughters and biographers, Sofia Korolenko and Natalia Korolenko-Liakhovich, also note that Elizaveta Mickwitz had published several translations under the pseudonym Heinrich Harff (Korolenko 331). Between 1900-1905, several more translations of Russian prose into German were signed by this name: among them, the works of Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Kuprin, and Vikenty Veresaev. These were probably done by Elizaveta as well—which makes 1885 a much more realistic birth year than 1889, unless she was a child prodigy. It is also likely that she herself wrote fiction. In 1931, a short story entitled “She Remembered” by a certain E.V. Mickwitz was awarded the second prize at a small literary contest in Tartu (at that time, Elizaveta had already emigrated from Russia and indeed spent some years in Estonia) (Shor et al. 340-341).

In 1909, Elizaveta married Paul Thiemann, who soon afterwards established a film production and distribution company together with Friedrikh Rheinhardt. As Ivan Kavaleridze, sculptor and film director, recalls:

The company belonged to Pavel Gustavovich Thiemann, a German born in Moscow, on Kuznetskii Most. At the age of twenty-eight, he married Elizaveta Grigorievna [sic] von Mickwitz; he used to work under the supervision of her father at some enterprise and proved himself a man of business. The daughter received five thousand rubles as a dowry. The sensible and practical newlyweds decided to invest this money into a film. Death of Ivan the Terrible, the first film of their studio, was scandalous but commercially successful. (Kavaleridze 47)

Portrait of Paul Thiemann, Sine-Fono no. 1 (1912): 15.

Paul was born in 1881; if Kavaleridze is accurate, the wedding indeed coincided with the foundation of P. Thiemann and F. Rheinhardt Trading House. The beginnings of this successful enterprise were described in the trade press frequently, but Elizaveta’s name was never mentioned (“Za piat’ let”; “Pavel Gustavovich Thiemann”). However, according to various memoirs, her role in Paul’s business was evident (in fact, it is the extent of Rheinhardt’s participation that still remains unclear to film scholars). It is difficult to say which of her father’s enterprises Kavaleridze had in mind, but we know that before 1909 Paul was employed by the Russian office of Gaumont (“Za piat’ let”), whereas Vladimir Mickwitz made a career as an engineer and, for his services in that field, was granted a barony. Later, however, Vladimir was actively engaged in the family film business and even became the director of his son-in-law’s trading house (“Khronika” [May 31, 1916]).

One of the most significant films of the new trading house was The Passing of the Great Old Man (1912), a chronicle of the last days of Leo Tolstoy during which he left his home and family and, after a day’s train journey, died at a rural railway station. The film was directed by Elizaveta Thiemann and Yakov Protazanov, who later became one of Russia’s most prominent film directors (and who made his screen debut, as an actor, in Thiemann’s first blockbuster, Death of Ivan the Terrible [1909]). The events depicted in the film took place only two years earlier, and the memory of Tolstoy’s death was still fresh and scandalous. This, along with the fact that the film shows Tolstoy’s wife Sophia Andreevna, still very much alive in 1912, in a rather unfavorable light, earned it severe criticism. Yet some reviewers gave it considerable credit and argued that it would play an important role in film history. For example, one critic wrote: “In this picture, you will find neither trendy tricks, nor a plot that would affect your nerves. The simplicity of the plot itself, of the acting, and everything revealed on the screen is where the world tragedy lies. That is what causes silent but scalding tears. That is what fills the viewer’s soul with something hard but also mild and clear. Aside from the plot, this film is marked by detailed staging and profoundly vivid performance” (“40.000 za negativ”).

The portraits of Elizaveta Thiemann and Yakov Protazanov, Sine-Fono no. 2 (1912): 26-7.

The Passing of the Great Old Man is the only official directorial credit in Elizaveta’s filmography, whereas Protazanov enjoyed thirty plus years of a distinguished film career in Russia, France, and Germany. It is no wonder that at some point this early motion picture became associated with Protazanov alone, while Thiemann’s contribution is usually overlooked or misrepresented. For instance, Mikhail Arlazorov, the author of an essential biography of Protazanov, notes that Thiemann was “assisting” Protazanov (Arlazorov 165). If he had any evidence for this assumption, he did not cite it in his book. Surviving contemporary sources suggest nothing of the kind; as the aforementioned critic wrote: “We cannot help expressing our amazement and admiration for Ms. Thiemann and Mr. Protazanov who directed the film. One should have enormous love and self-hearted devotion to the cinema to direct a film in the way they did it. Hats off to them!” (“40.000 za negativ”). Additionally, portraits of Thiemann and Protazanov were published next to each other. One may argue that Elizaveta received equal billing because the producer wanted to promote his wife, but, in pre-1914 Russia, directors were neither mentioned in the credits nor on posters, and their names were rarely discussed outside of the trade press.

Elizaveta Thiemann as Alexandra Tolstaya in The Passing of the Great Old Man (1912),  Sine-Fono no. 2 (1912).

Advertisement for The Nailed One (1912) starring Elizaveta Thiemann, Sine-Fono no. 6 (1912).

Elizaveta also made her debut as an actress in The Passing of the Great Old Man, playing Tolstoy’s youngest daughter Alexandra. Her manner onscreen seems to meet the average level of Russian screen acting for 1912, which, we must admit, was not particularly high. She acted in four more films: The Nailed One (1912), For the Honor of the Russian Banner (1913), How the Child’s Soul Cried (1913), and Fleeting Dreams, Carefree Dreams Are Dreamed Only Once (1913). In the early 1910s, Russian film reviews were often laconic, and acting was rarely discussed. However, Thiemann’s performances received noticeable praise. For example, a review of The Nailed One stated: “Ms. Thiemann, who played Dima, acted very successfully” (“Sredi novinok” [1912]). Elizaveta’s work in Fleeting Dreams also received favorable criticism: “Ms. Thiemann and Mr. Volkov, who played the leading parts, are excellent. Their performance breathes with poetry and lyricism” (“Sredi novinok” [1913]). After 1913, following the rise of the first Russian film stars—the so-called “Kings” and “Queens” of the screen—Elizaveta refrained from acting. She was wise enough to perform only while there were still no specific requirements for film acting and gave up her screen career when such requirements were established. The success of her company must have been more critical for her than her acting career. By late 1913, Thiemann and Rheinhardt had its own set of film stars—including such major names in the history of Russia cinema as Vladimir Maksimov and Olga Preobrazhenskaia—most of whom had proper theatrical training.

Photo of Paul Thiemann’s pavilion with the the cast and crew of The Love of a Japanese Woman (1913), Kino-gazeta no. 27 (1918).

According to the most fundamental filmography of early Russian films, compiled by Veniamin Vishnevskii, The Passing of the Great Old Man was the only film directed by Elizaveta Thiemann. However, Vladimir Gardin recalls that she “took part in directing films” (Gardin 116; emphasis added). We do know that she was frequently on set. One of the rare surviving behind-the-scenes photos for Russian Golden Series, as the company was known by 1913, depicts the cast and crew of The Love of a Japanese Woman (1913). While Elizaveta is not mentioned in the credits for this film, which was a Russian production with a partially Japanese cast released in the summer of 1913, she is at the very center of the picture (“V pavilione P. G. Timana”). Does her presence mean that she participated in the filming, or was she just curious to meet actors from an exotic country (including the legendary Hanako)? She certainly contributed to the studio planning as much as her husband. According to Levitskii’s memoirs, it was Elizaveta and Levitskii himself (but not Paul) who suggested one of the most ambitious projects of early Russian cinema, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1915) in two parts (Levitskii 64-65).

The logo for Russian Golden Series. Reproduced in Rannii russkkii kinoplakat, 1908-1919 (2019), p. 73.

Russian Golden Series was an outstanding cinema enterprise. Being active in both production and distribution, it gained a reputation for adaptations of classical and contemporary literature, the most notable of them directed by Protazanov and Gardin. Many of these films played a significant role in the the history of Russian cinema, including: Protazanov’s Anfisa (1912), which was based on Leonid Andreyev’s play, and Plebei (1915), based on Strindberg’s “Fröken Julie”; Gardin’s Anna Karenina, A Nest of Gentlefolk, and The Kreuzer Sonata (all 1914); and The Keys to Happiness (1913), an adaptation of Anastasiya Verbitskaya’s scandalous bestseller, and War and Peace (1915), directed by both. However, soon after the start of World War I, the company faced a severe crisis.

Symbolist writer Aleksandr Kursinskii, the studio’s principal screenwriter who also served as its literary director, left his job to join the army field forces (Kovalova and Ranneva 366-388). Vladimir Shaternikov, one of the company’s best actors (he played Tolstoy in The Passing of the Great Old Man) also left to fight, and was killed in action. Several months later, in April 1915, unsatisfied with their inadequate compensation, Gardin and Protazanov turned in their resignations (“Khronika” [April 4, 1915]). One month later, Paul Thiemann, who was a German subject, was exiled to Ufa, a small city in the Asian part of Russia (Deriabin et al. 178). He continued to work remotely while the Moscow office was run by Elizaveta, with certain assistance from her father Vladimir Mickwitz. It seemed that the whole business was falling apart. It was then that Elizaveta started negotiations with the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, a key figure in the history of twentieth-century theater. The outcome of these negotiations was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1915), based on Oscar Wilde’s novel, which not only helped to save the company, but also became one of the most significant films in the history of pre-revolutionary Russian cinema.

Advertisement for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1915) directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sine-Fono no. 18 (1915).

The film is considered lost, but reviews and memoirs show that it was a unique example of a literary adaptation that truly interpreted the original text rather than just illustrating it. Particular attention was paid to the film’s visual style, which belonged to a symbolic rather than realistic mode (Kovalova 69-74). Elizaveta’s involvement in this project is extensively described in Levitskii’s memoirs. Among other things, he mentions that it was she who came up with the idea of having a woman play Dorian Gray and suggested Varvara Yanova for the part (Levitskii 87).

At the end of 1915, the company announced a particularly challenging project of adapting two canonical texts of Russian literature (both in verse): Alexander Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit and Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin (“Khronika” [December 19, 1915]; “Khronika” [January 15, 1916]). Both productions were highly anticipated; however, they were “frozen” in the summer of 1916. One possible explanation for this can be found in the memoirs of cinematographer Yuri Zheliabuzhskii. According to him:

In the summer of 1916, there was a falling out between E. V. Thiemann and the leading staff of the atelier. Thiemann himself was in exile, as a German subject. His wife was a rather quarrelsome woman and, besides, had a lack of taste. In reality, business was run by the five consisting of the leading director and manager [Aleksandr] Volkov, director [Aleksandr] Uralskii, head of the screenwriting department [Vitold] Akhramovich, actress and administrator [Evgeniia] Uvarova. E. V. Thiemann started writing to her husband that she is being pushed into the background, people are pressing their tastes upon her. In response to this, not seeing the actual state of affairs from his exile, Thiemann decided to manage blindly. As a result, all of us, except for Uralskii, left Thiemann. (Zheliabuzhskii 182)

Advertisement for the never-produced Eugene Onegin, Sine-Fono no. 7 (1916).

This recollection cannot be completely accurate. Elizaveta could not have sent Paul such a letter in the summer of 1916 because she herself was forced to leave Moscow on May 23 of that year to join him in Ufa (Deriabin et al. 202). In the following two years, Thiemann’s company (which changed its name to Era) was able to produce a number of aesthetically challenging films (including Meyerhold’s The Strong Man [1917]). However, this new “poetic” period for the company (and, more generally, in Russian film adaptations) fell victim to either these disagreements within the studio or simply to Elizaveta’s forced departure.

The Thiemanns must have returned to Moscow after the February Revolution of 1917. Half a year later, soon after the October Revolution, Paul Thiemann announced his decision to leave Russia and set up a film company abroad (“Khronika” [1918]). He did produce a number of films in France in the early 1920s before settling down in Germany. While researching his émigré career, film scholar Rashit Yangirov came across what he thought was an obituary of Elizaveta’s younger sister Lydia, published in March 1926 (Yangirov 282). In reality, the obituary referred to Elizaveta’s mother, whose name was also Lydia. But somehow the confusion spread even further, and now, in a number of sources, such as Viktor Korotkii’s fine guide to early Russian film directors and cameramen, 1926 is wrongly provided as the date of Elizaveta’s death (Korotkii 364).

Yet the fact that, in the 1920s, Elizaveta was quite alive is confirmed by Natalia Noussinova’s important book on the history of the Russian émigré cinema. Noussinova cites a business letter from the cameraman Nikolai Rudakov to the producer Alexandre Kamenka, dated November 14, 1931, in which a new cinema enterprise organized by Elizaveta Thiemann is discussed (Noussinova 89-90). This venture most likely failed, otherwise we would know more about it. Life in Europe for the Thiemanns was rather chaotic, and full of financial problems, bumps in the road, and twists of various kinds. Both Thiemanns and Vladimir Mickwitz continued to associate themselves with cinema as long as they could. When Meyerhold visited France in 1928, he received several letters from Mickwitz, who tried to persuade him to renew his cooperation with Thiemann (Minckwitz). In 1941, Elizaveta and Paul divorced, but they had separated long before that, around 1933 (G. Thiemann 2).

The Thiemann family in October 1917. Courtesy of the Thiemann Family Archive.

It was because of Lydia the younger that we were able to track the later years of Elizaveta’s life. Lydia was married to Jimmy Winkfield, a legendary Thoroughbred jockey and horse trainer. In Winkfield’s biography, written by Ed Hotaling, Elizaveta is described in a somewhat ironical manner: “Beautiful and more than a bit eccentric, Elizabeth costarred at the Thiemann’s large estate, with fourteen servants, a monkey who had the run of the mansion, and a snake, a literal, living boa that Elizabeth wore around her neck at parties. She and Paul had a son and a daughter, who were apparently considered less amusing than the pets” (Hotaling 148-149). Hotaling was mainly relying upon the recollections of Elizaveta’s son Yuri (later George) Thiemann (1925-2018).

Jeannette Thiemann, George’s widow, generously shared with us a collection of family photos, letters, and stories. Unfortunately, there is practically nothing about Elizaveta’s work in cinema and not much about her later years. She was rather detached from her family. Soon after the separation with Paul, she sent both of her children away to be cared for by their aunt Lydia. “In 1941,” George recalls in an unpublished text, “my mother lived in Turin, Italy. One day she ‘remembered’ she had a son in France and sent for me. […] I was a minor and I had to follow my mother’s wishes. My mother and I lived there for a few months. Since it was too cold in Turin, she decided to move to San Remo, in the Italian Riviera. I started to work to support the two of us. My mother refused to work because it was too humiliating for her” (G. Thiemann 2). George worked as a waiter and bartender in a hotel, and later as an interpreter for the American troops with a side job as a night watchman (2-3). In 1954, he got married and two years later moved to the United States. Soon his first child was born, and he was no longer able to support his mother. Enraged, she tried to sue him. This did not improve their relationship, which was already somewhat tense (J. Thiemann).

Elizaveta Thiemann in Italy in 1950. Courtesy of the Thiemann Family Archive.

Elizaveta stayed in San Remo until the end of her life. Some of her letters to George from the 1950s and 1960s survive. They are full of ellipses and exclamation marks and mainly consist of complaints and accusations: “I have to save my life from this barracks at any cost. Another winter like this—I’d rather die” (E. Thiemann [June 14, 1951]); “I want to scream till death like an abandoned dog” (E. Thiemann [December 18, 1956]); and “The solitude kills me: weeks without exchanging a word” (E. Thiemann [June 27, 1964]). Time and again, she wrote about suicide. She did not kill herself, however. She died sometime in the late 1970s, approaching the age of ninety. The family was informed of her death via a letter from a local priest. Now that letter is lost, and the exact date of Elizaveta’s death remains unknown (J. Thiemann).

Elizaveta Thiemann’s letter to George Thiemann from August 20, 1964 (in French). Courtesy of the Thiemann Family Archive.

“She never worked a day in her life,” her son repeated on multiple occasions. And it looks like she did not—in his lifetime. Was it the misfortunes of a nomad life, isolation from the culture she knew, vain attempts to relaunch her film business in Europe, or simply the approaching old age that changed one of the most active people in the Russian film industry into a permanently discontent hysterical woman? Hopefully, now we can understand better that Elizaveta’s short filmography does not at all reflect her true participation in pre-revolutionary Russian film culture. As we continue to unearth more about early Russian cinema, the significance of Elizaveta Thiemann’s contributions as a director and producer will likely only grow.

See also: Natalia Bakhareva

The authors would like to express heartfelt gratitude to Arina Ranneva and Aleksandr Sobolev for their kind and open-handed help in this research. They authors are also deeply indebted to Jeanette Thiemann and Cynthia Stegman for the priceless family documents and photos that they have generously shared as well as for their support.

Bibliography

“40.000 za negativ”/“40.000 for the negative.” Sine-Fono no. 2 (1912): 27.

Arlazorov, Mikhail. Protazanov. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973.

Barkhatova, E.V. Rannii russkkii kinoplakat, 1908-1919/The Early Russian Film Poster, 1908-1919. Saint Petersburg: RNB, 2019.

Deriabin, A., V. Fomin, V. Mikhailov, V. Vishnevskii, R. Yangirov, V. Vatolin, eds. Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino 1863-1929. Moscow: Materik, 2004.

Gardin, Vladimir. Zhizn’ i trud artista/The Life and the Labour of an Artist. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1960.

Hotaling, Ed. Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield. Camden, ME: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press, 2006.

Kavaleridze, Ivan. “Teni bystro plyvushchikh oblakov”/“The Shadows of the Clouds That Are Swimming Quickly.” In Ivan Kavaleridze. Sbornik statei i vospominanii/Ivan Kavaleridze. A Collection of Articles and Memoirs. Kiev: Mistetstvo, 1988. 46-53.

“Khronika”/“The Chronicle.” Kine-zhurnal no. 23-24 (19 December 1915): 97-98.

“Khronika”/“The Chronicle.”  Sine-Fono no. 11-12 (4 April 1915): 75.

“Khronika”/“The Chronicle.”  Sine-Fono no. 5-6 (15 January 1916): 76.

“Khronika”/“The Chronicle.” Sine-Fono no. 13-14 (31 May 1916): 46.

“Khronika”/“The Chronicle.” Niemoe iskusstvo no. 1 (1918): 18.

Korolenko, Vladimir. “Pis’mo E. V. Mikvits ot 4 marta 1902”/“A letter to E.V. Mikvitz, 4 March 1902.” In Sobranie sochinenii v 10 tomakh/Complete Works in 10 vol.  vol. 10. Eds. S.V. Korolenko and N.V. Korolenko-Liakhovich. Introduction by A. Kotov. Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1956. 331.

Korotkii, Viktor. Operatory i rezhissery russkogo igrovogo kino 1897-1921. Biofil’mograficheskii spravochik/Cameramen and Directors of the Russian Feature Films 1897-1921. Moscow: NII Kinoiskusstva, 2009.

Kovalova, Anna. “The Picture of Dorian Gray Painted by Meyerhold.” Trans. Richard Taylor. Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema vol. 13, no. 1 (2019): 59-90.

Kovalova, Anna, and Arina Ranneva. “Symbolism in Early Russian Cinema and the Ghostwriter Aleksandr Kursinskii.” Trans. Tomi Haxhi. The Russian Review vol. 79, no. 3 (2020): 366-388.

Levitskii, Aleksandr. Rasskazy o kinematografe/Stories About Cinema. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964.

Mikhailov, Vladimir. Rasskazy o kinematografe staroi Moskvy/Stories of the Old Moscow’s Cinema. Moscow: Materik, 2003.

Noussinova, Natalia. “Kogda my v Rossiu vernemsia…”: Russkoe kinematograficheskoe zarubezhie, 1918-1949/“When we are back to Russia…”: Russian Émigré Cinema, 1918-1949. Moscow: NIIK, Eisenstein-tsentr, 2003.

“The Passing of the Great Old Man.” Gosfilmofond of Russia [catalog]. https://gosfilmofond.ru/films/252674/.

“Pavel Gustavovich Thiemann.” Kine-zhurnal no. 17 (1912): 33.

“Russkaia Zolotaia seriia”/“Russian Golden Series.” [advertisement]. Teatral’naia gazeta no. 51 (1915): 20.

Shor, T., R. Abisogomian, E. Shuvalova, G. Ponomareva. “Khronika literaturnoi zhizni russkogo zarubezhia. Estonia (1925-1940)”/“Chronicle of the Russian Émigré Literary Life. Estonia (1925-1940).” Literaturovedcheskii zhurnal no. 21 (2007): 265-436.

“Sredi novinok”/“Among the New Films.” Zhivoi ekran no. 9 (1912): 20.

“Sredi novinok”/“Among the New Films.” Sine-Fono no. 5 (1913): 27.

Thiemann, Jeannette. Skype Interview with the authors. October 7, 2020.

“V pavilione P. G. Timana”/“In P. G. Thiemann’s pavilion.” Kino-gazeta no. 27 (1918): 31.

Vishnevskii, V. “Katalog fil’mov chastnogo proizvodstva 1917-1921”/“Catalogue of Privately Produced Films.” In Sovetskie khudozhestvennye fil’my: annotirovannyi katalog. Vol. 3. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961. 248-306.

Yangirov, Rashit. Khronika kinematograficheskoi zhizni russkogo zarubezhia/Chronicles of the Russian Emigre Cinema Life. Vol. 1. Moscow: Knizhitsa, Russkii put’, 2010.

Youngblood, Denise J. The Magic Mirror: Moviemaking in Russia, 1908-1918. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

“Za piat’ let”/“For Five Years.” Sine-Fono no. 1 (1912): 14.

Zheliabuzhskii, Yuri. “Avtobiografiia”/“Autobiography.” Kino i vremia vol. 4 (1965): 178-182.

Zorkaia, Neia. Istoriia otechestvennogo kino/A History of Russian Cinema. Moscow: Belyi gorod, 2014.

Archival Paper Collections:

Minckwitz, Vladimir. Letter to Vsevolod Meyerhold. Fond 998, Opis’ 1, Ed. khr. 2008, L. 1. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Thiemann, Elizaveta. Letters to George Thiemann. Thiemann Family Archive.

Thiemann, George. An Ever Changing Life. [unpublished text]. Thiemann Family Archive.

Viskovskii, Viacheslav. “Moi dvadtsat’ let v kino” (Vospominania)/“My Twenty Years in Cinema (Memoirs).” Fond 2410, Opis’ 1, Ed. khr. 17. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Citation

Bagrov, Peter; Anna Kovalova. "Elizaveta Thiemann." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2021.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hnnd-rk78>

Ruth Harriet Louise

by Mary Mallory

A gifted and sensitive photographer, Ruth Harriet Louise worked for less than ten years in her chosen profession, running her own studio for three years in New Jersey before serving as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s head portrait photographer from 1925-1929. Today, photographers and scholars alike study her work, which skillfully captured the character as well as the beauty of her famous clients, encapsulating her theory “that every portrait should just as a motion picture does, tell a story, reveal a character or interpret a mood” (Tildesley). Attention to Louise’s career, however, is a fairly recent phenomenon; at the time of her death in 1940, Louise and her work were largely forgotten.

Ruth Harriet Louise portrait of Renée Adorée, Photoplay (November 1927).

Born Ruth Harriet Louise Goldstein on January 13, 1903, to Rabbi Jacob Goldstein and his wife Klara Jacobsen Goldstein, Louise grew up in New Jersey in the shadow of her older brother Mark, who would later achieve Hollywood fame under the name Mark Sandrich as the director of many Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals. According to The Dayton Herald, her mother pushed Ruth into portrait painting as a substitute for pursuing her own dreams in the discipline. Louise reportedly studied painting and drawing with artist Miles Evergood while also attending art schools. Talented in composition, she, however, discerned no great visionary skills in her painting (“Girl Turns Early Failure to Success”).

Recognizing her composition skills were better suited for the creation of photographs from light and shadow rather than the painting of landscapes or still lifes, Louise switched her ambitions to the new field after meeting and studying with renowned New York portrait photographer Nickolas Muray. As the same Dayton Herald article recounted, she dedicated herself to this new subject, studying at the Wolf-Miller School in New York before apprenticing with Muray. She quickly realized that, ‘To be successful in anything, a woman must give herself to it completely” (“Girl Turns Early Failure to Success”).

Self portrait, Ruth Harriet Louise, Picture Play (December 1927).

Ambitious and driven, Louise opened her own studio in Montalvo’s Temple of Music at 101 Albany Street in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in November 1922. She advertised the studio in The Central New Jersey Home News, promising “Photographs That Are Different.” Fighting for respect and attention in a male-dominated field, Louise heavily promoted herself in newspaper blurbs and through word-of-mouth, shooting portraits of local citizens that sometimes appeared in newspaper society columns. It was also at this time that she began using the name “Ruth Harriet Louise” professionally.

Ruth Harriet Louise with brother Mark Sandrich (l) and husband Leigh Jason (r), Photoplay (May 1928).

Louise focused her attention on Hollywood as early as 1923. Her cousin, motion picture actress Carmel Myers, offered a boost to her career, allowing Louise to shoot portraits of her in New York that spring. Louise ventured West in the fall of 1924, spending several months with her mother visiting her brother in Hollywood. At the end of that trip, The Central New Jersey Home News reported that Louise remained behind “for an extended stay to do special photographing…” (“Personals”).

The twenty-two-year-old officially moved to California in 1925 to focus on portraiture. One source reported that Louise rented a studio on Vine Street in Hollywood in which to work (Dance and Robertson 66) while The Central New Jersey Home News announced that she was “engaged in portrait photography at the Hollywood studio of the Fox Film Corporation, where her brother Mark Rex Sandrich… is director” (“Dr. Goldstein”). Given that Louise herself was probably giving the New Jersey paper its information, it is very likely correct; however, I have not yet found any other evidence to support either source’s claim. While it remains unclear whether or not Louise worked at Fox, we do know that she was soon employed at MGM after cousin Myers presented some of her portraits to studio head Louis B. Mayer. Impressed with her work, Mayer set up a test, which led to an interview, with the studio ultimately hiring Louise in the summer of 1925 (Dance and Robertson 67). With this hire, Louise became the first full-time female portrait photographer at any Hollywood studio. That September, Louise’s first Hollywood portraits—images of Hungarian actress Vilma Bánky in the Samuel Goldwyn picture Dark Angel (1925)—appeared in Photoplay.

Ruth Harriet Louise portrait of John Gilbert, Photoplay (February 1928).

Portraiture played a critical part in the film publicity ecosystem, selling films and stars to the general public. Portraits served as key art, newspaper and magazine illustrations, and fan give-aways. They shaped star images and personas, crafting an iconography of sensuality and glamour associated with the motion picture medium. Studios produced millions of photographs each year, sending them en masse to hundreds of magazines and newspapers desperate for illustrative product in a quid pro quo system of free usage in exchange for credit. Though a vital component of Hollywood public relations, still photographers received little to no recognition or publicity for their own work. Some earned occasional mentions in trade journals or magazines, but most simply saw their last names appear in print as a credit alongside their photographic work.

She Bosses the Stars: The Story of Ruth Harriet Louise,” Screenland (September 1928).

Ruth Harriet Louise portrait of Greta Garbo, Motion Picture Magazine (October 1926). For virtually her entire MGM career, Louise was the exclusive portrait photographer of the Swedish actress.

Louise, however, received credit for all her work, stamping “Ruth Harriet Louise” on the back of each print. As MGM’s head portrait photographer, she scheduled five to six sessions a day, six days a week. From her private studio atop the editing building on the MGM lot, Louise created indelible images of the studio’s stable of stars, including John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, and many others.

MGM stars loved the friendly, energetic Louise, who engaged her subjects in discussions regarding art, music, and books in order to put them at ease. According to The Washington D.C. Standard, music played a major role in her work:

Miss Louise is unique among motion picture portrait photographers not only because she is a woman, but also because of her methods and the results she has achieved with them. She leans heavily on music in photographing screen celebrities, choosing phonograph records for each sitting as gracefully as she changes her lights and shadows. Intelligently selected music, she explains, helps the subject to relax and drift into a mood that will make the portrait more interesting. (“Schwab Hard Movie Subject”)

Louise mainly employed diffused lighting for her portraits, giving them a romantic sheen that added a sense of beauty and glamour. Unlike most studio photographers, she shot full body portraits with her large format camera, working with her assistant, Al St. Hilaire, to blow them up and then crop them to close-ups before careful retouching was done by Andrew Korf (Dance and Robertson 81-82).

Ruth Harriet Louise portrait of James Murray and Eleanor Boardman for The Crowd (1928), Picture Play Magazine (June 1927).

Louise’s departure from the film industry in 1929 reflected a broader phenomenon taking place in the 1920s as the American film industry moved to more controlled assembly line systems of production and then to the corporate studio system. Thanks to Wall Street money, management and work structures became strictly centralized with hierarchies of authority that were “characterized by a massive vertical and horizontal integration for economy of scale… ” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 309). While, earlier, studios had welcomed women’s contributions throughout the entire creative and production process, these new monopolies forced many women out as businessmen took even more control.

Ruth Harriet Louise portrait of Lon Chaney, Photoplay (May 1928).

Ruth Harriet Louise portrait of Norma Shearer, The New Movie Magazine (1929).

In Louise’s case, the changing work environment proved difficult. On the one hand, calls to form unions grew louder in the late 1920s as corporations muzzled employees to maintain discipline, control, and salaries. Specialized workers organized to demand more rights, higher wages, and better working conditions for their members (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 311). Studio photographers themselves formed Local 659 in August 1928 to protect their work (Dance and Robertson 221). However, Louise chose to remain independent and refused to join. At the same time, work relationships began changing, as studios evolved from a tight, family-like atmosphere into that of a more impersonal factory and conglomerate. Growing hostility towards female employees and Louise’s refusal to join the union led to further challenges for the photographer, especially as actors began to seek out new opportunities. For example, Norma Shearer, one of MGM’s top stars and the wife of studio production chief Irving Thalberg, recognized that the coming of sound films offered the chance for her to play more challenging parts. On the advice of colleague Ramon Novarro, she visited the personal studio of photographer George Hurrell, who captured a sexy, uninhibited side of the star that was absent in Louise’s portraits of her (Dance and Robertson 219). When Variety reported Louise’s resignation from MGM, in December 1929, Hurrell was named as her replacement (“Hollywood and Los Angeles”).

Ruth Harriet Louise portrait of Joan Crawford, Screenland (September 1929).

While Louise found occasional freelance work shooting portraits after leaving MGM, her career slowly petered out. She devoted herself to caring for her husband and family. Married to film director Leigh Jason (Leon Jacobson) in 1927, she gave birth to two children: a son, who died in 1938 of leukemia; and a daughter, born in 1936. Louise died from complications of childbirth on October 12, 1940. She was listed as Mrs. Ruth Jason in most obituaries. When her brother donated two bungalows to the Motion Picture Country Home in 1942 in honor of his sister, The Film Daily called her “one of the country’s foremost portrait photographers…” (Wilk).

Bibliography

Albert, Katherine. “She Bosses the Stars: The Story of Ruth Harriet Louise.” Screenland, Vol. 17. No 5 (September 1928): 32, 94-95. https://archive.org/details/screenland17unse/page/n401/mode/2up?view=theater.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.

Dance, Robert and Bruce Robertson. Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2002.

“Dr. Goldstein To Make His Future Home In California.” The Central New Jersey Home News (14 March 1925): 2.

Fahey, David and Linda Rich. Masters of Starlight: Photographers in Hollywood. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987.

Finler, Joel W. Hollywood Movie Stills: Art and Technique in the Golden Age of the Studios. London: Reynolds & Hearn Ltd., 2008.

“Girl Turns Early Failure to Success by Quick Wit.” The Dayton Herald (31 July 1928): 2.

“Goldstein Family Has Wide Range of Talent.” The Central New Jersey Daily Home News (27 March 1924): 7.

“Hollywood and Los Angeles.” Variety (11 Dec. 1929): 73.

Kobal, John. The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers. New York: Harrison House, 1987.

“One of Hollywood’s Most Useful Families.” Photoplay vol. 33, no. 6 (May 1928): 104.

“Personal Notes.” The Central New Jersey Home News (5 Jan. 1923): 9.

“Personals.” The Central New Jersey Home News (29 Nov. 1924): 7.

“Photographs That Are Different.” [Advertisement]. The Central New Jersey Home News (15 Nov. 1922): 5.

“Schwab Hard Movie Subject, Says Woman Photographer.” The Washington D.C. Evening Standard (3 May 1927): 17.

Shields, David S. Still: American Silent Motion Picture Photography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Tildesley, Alice. “Secrets About Famous: Inside Facts About the Personalities of Cinema Favorites Revealed by One in a Position to Observe Them at Close Range and to Reveal Intimately the Side of Their Natures Not Disclosed on Screen.” The Miami Herald (25 July 1926): 56.

Wilk, Ralph. “Hollywood Speaking.” The Film Daily (3 Sept. 1942): 20.

Archival Paper Collections:

Ruth Harriet Louise production clipping files (scrapbooks & photographs, etc.). Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. [Biographical clipping files are not listed in online catalog].

Citation

Mallory, Mary. "Ruth Harriet Louise." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2021.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-08c4-na42>

Natalia Bakhareva

by Anna Kovalova

Natalia Bakhareva was the first self-sufficient female film producer in Russia. Unlike Antonina Khanzhonkova and Elizaveta Thiemann, who produced films for studios officially owned by their husbands, Bakhareva opened her own film company and became its official head. In the 1916 reference guide Vsia Kinematographia/All the Cinematography, there are two titles for her company: “The Artistic Film” [“Khudozhestvennaia lenta”] and “N. D. Bakhareva and K” (31). In the trade press, Bakhareva’s studio was later called “The Russian Film Business” [“Rossiiskoe Kino-delo”] and “The Film Business” [“Kino-delo”] (“Novye lenty” [1917]; “Khronika” [1916]). Sometimes films produced by her studio were associated with a company called Prodalent, which distributed them.

In her studio, Bakhareva worked not only as a producer but also as a screenwriter. She wrote scripts for six films, but none of her screenplays have been preserved. Moreover, all the films released by The Artistic Film (and later The Russian Film Business) are lost, and it is hard to judge their aesthetic value. We are fortunate to have Bakhareva’s memoirs today, which are held at the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture at Columbia University, but these papers are dedicated to the writer Nikolai Leskov, Bakhareva’s famous grandfather, and, unfortunately, provide very little information about her work in cinema and the films she made.

In fact, Bakhareva’s grandfather was a presence throughout much of her career. When the news about The Artistic Film first appeared in the trade press in 1915, journalists emphasized that the new company was founded by Leskov’s granddaughter (“Khronika” [1915]). Some readers could guess that “Bakhareva” was a pseudonym borrowed from Leskov’s novel No Way Out (1864); her real name was Natalia Dmitrievna Noga.

Bakhareva was the daughter of Leskov’s daughter Vera and Ukrainian landowner Dmitrii Noga. In her unpublished memoirs, she puts 1887 as her date of birth, but the evidence and documents collected by Andrei Leskov, who has written the fundamental book Nikolai Leskov’s Life, suggest that she was born earlier, between 1880 and 1885 (Leskov 109-130). She spent her childhood at her father’s estate named Burty. As Bakhareva recalls in her memoirs, in the mid-1890s, the family grew poor, sold the estate, and, soon after that, her parents separated. Natalia and her mother moved to Kyiv (Bakhareva 11). There, Natalia was a student at the Fundukleev gymnasium, the first and one of the most famous girl’s grammar schools in Russia, and then studied acting at the Kyiv drama school (I.T.).

In 1904, Natalia and her mother moved to St. Petersburg, and the family faced new financial problems. In her memoirs, Bakhareva mentions that she had to work for the Ministry of Public Instruction for five years (Bakhareva 12). However, she also continued with her theatrical career. In a letter to the famous publisher Alexei Suvorin, she wrote that she had been accepted to the troupe of the People’s House theatre [Narodnyi Dom] (Noga). It has also been reported that she acted in Lydia Yavorskaia’s New Theater [Novyi teatr] during this period (I.T.). In 1909, Bakhareva made her debut as playwright, adapting her grandfather’s story Skomorokh Pamphalon/Buffoon Pamphalon for the stage. The State Theater Library of St. Petersburg holds six plays written by Bakhareva between 1909 and 1917.

In the late 1900s, Bakhareva also became a journalist when the influential critic Aleksandr Izmailov got her a job at Peterburgskii listok, one of the major Russian newspapers (Leskov 129). She was the head of the theater department and acted as the newspaper correspondent in Europe: Bakhareva represented Peterburgskii listok in Venice when Countess Maria Tarnovksaia was involved in a scandalous murder trial (Orem 2-3). Due to her work in the theater and newspaper industries, Bakhareva gained many connections, which probably helped her as she set up her film business. In her memoirs, she does not mention why she turned from theater to cinema, but she likely considered the film business, which was still new in Russia, an easier and faster route to success.

The logo for The Artistic Film in Vsia Kinematografia.

In the trade press, the foundation of Bakahreva’s studio The Artistic Film was reported in June 1915 (“Khronika” [1915]), but the company’s first films were released earlier; Bakhareva recalls in her memoirs that she started the business in 1914 when she left Peterburgskii listok (Bakhareva 12). The chief film director of the new studio was Aleksander Panteleev who had worked in cinema since 1909. Bakhareva was fortunate to hire such an experienced film director as very few of them lived in St. Petersburg (the center of the Russian film industry was in Moscow at that time).

Vo Im’a Proshlogo/For the Sake of the Past (1915) is probably the most notable of the company’s early productions. Its plot is focused on Zakrevskii, an old land-steward who desperately loves his secret illegitimate son and steals the will that would disinherit him. However, it turns out that this young man was not Zakrevskii’s son, and his schemes ruined the life of the old man’s true daughter, who was to inherit the estate initially (“Novye lenty” [1916]). Bakhareva wrote the screenplay, drawing heavily on cinematic clichés; the majority of early Russian dramas were stories about illegitimate children, destroyed wills, and other melodramatic plots. For the Sake of the Past is significant, not due to its plot, but due to the casting: Zarkevskii’s part was played by the famous Russian theater actor Vladimir Davydov. His screen appearance was repeatedly highlighted in advertisements for the film and reviews (“Sredi novinok” [1916]).

Advertisement for For the Sake of the Past (1915) with the portrait of the “luminary of the Russian stage, honored artist of the Imperial theaters” Vladimir Davydov. Published in Sine-Fono no. 3 (1915).

Promotional photograph, For the Sake of the Past (1915) in Kinematograph no. 3 (1916).

It appears that Bakhareva placed a premium on famous names like many other film producers at the time. Aside from Davydov, she hired Lydia Yavorskaia who was very popular in the theater world (she starred in Bakhareva’s 1915 film Uragan strastei/The Hurricane of Passions). However, not all well-known people in St. Petersburg wanted to be involved in Bakhareva’s business. For example, in October 1916, the artist Aleksandr Benois wrote in his diary: “Miss Bakhareva called me and invited me to join some film enterprise that has pure artistic goals. I sympathize, but thanks to her amateur tone, I know for sure that it’s no God-damn use…” (Benois 28).

Overall, Bakhareva does not seem to have been an innovative or inventive screenwriter. Another film by her studio that attracted attention was Na nozhakh/At Daggers Drawn (1915), an adaptation of her grandfather’s novel of the same name. Bakhareva tailored Leskov’s book according to the period’s typical cinematic preoccupations. The socio-political and philosophical context was omitted, whereas the love affairs, rebuilt beyond recognition, became the basis of the picture. As a result, the titles of the film’s parts, indicated in the libretto (synopsis), had nothing to do with Leskov’s poetics and language: The Abyss Calls the Abyss, Fatal Encounters, Dark Force, The First Victim, and Down the Drain (“Novye lenty” [1915]).

Poster for At Daggers Drawn (1915).

One of the films written by Bakhareva, however, seems to have been rather uncommon in terms of its plot. A contemporary critic noted that Taina velikosvetskogo romana/The Mystery of the High Society Romance (1915) depicted “one of the recent criminal cases that had been investigated in Petrograd [that] made a lot of noise all over Russia” (“Sredi novinok” [1915]). Bakhareva likely relied on her past experience as a journalist while developing this script.

While Bakhareva did not give up writing scripts, she also began to hire professional writers such as Arkadii Bukhov, among others. Her main task as producer was likely “coordinating the shooting process” (“Khronika” [1917]), and that speaks well of her film producing skills. She could write herself and economize on the screenwriter’s salary, but she preferred to invest in the quality of the production. Moreover, she seems to have been generous in terms of business trips: the newspapers reported that, in the summer of 1917, her crew was spending time in the Caucasus shooting different picturesque places (“Erkan”; “Khronika” [1917]). She could have used her pavilion in St. Petersburg or done the shooting in the suburbs, but she organized this expensive trip in order to have on-location footage.

Advertisement for The Russian Film Business, which emphasizes that the films include “the marvellous [sic] views of the Caucasus.” Published in Teatr i iskusstvo no. 26 (1917).

Influential film studios usually had stars who represented them in the commercial marketplace. Bakhareva understood this and invited Kleo Karini to play the leading parts in her films. While many Russian film stars came from the theater, Karini was famous as a pianist and singer (an opera singer in particular). She was also the wife of Alexander Mozzhukhin, the brother of Ivan Mozzhukhin, who is considered to be the greatest Russian actor of the silent era. In this sense, Karini was probably a good choice to be the hallmark of the company, and her photos were printed on the studio’s advertisements and in the trade press. However, Bakhareva likely did not have enough time, skills, or finances to make Karini a major film star, and she, ultimately, never became a big name in the cinema.

Poster for Cobra Kapella (1917) referencing Kleo Karini by name alongside her image. Reproduced in The Silent Film Poster in the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg Collection 1914-1919 (2018), p. 93.

There were no absolute hits among the pictures released by Bakhareva’s studio in 1916-1918. But the reviews prove that some of the films could be compared with films shot in Moscow by the major film studios. The film journal Proektor, which often published smashing reviews, tolerated Bakhareva’s productions. For instance, in the review of The Hurricane of Passions, a critic wrote: “This drama’s plot is typical and is not above the established cinema pattern. The film is directed fairly well and adequately shot. Yavorskaia’s acting is rather impressive…” (“Kriticheskoe obozrenie”). The review ends on a negative note about the actress’s make-up, but, for Proektor, it was very common to analyze every single one of a film’s weak spots in detail. The key point here is that Proektor chose The Hurricane of Passions for serious discussion.

It might well be that, in time, Bakhareva’s studio could have developed and produced films that would be better appreciated by such demanding journals as Proektor. But soon after the October revolution Bakhareva was forced to close her business. She recalls in her memoirs: “The Bolsheviks, upon coming to power, took my studio away from me and did not even allow me to keep the portraits of the artists I had filmed. The day of the atelier’s requisition coincided with the day of my mother’s burial; she had died of cancer” (Bakhareva 12). According to Andrei Leskov, Vera Noga, Bakhareva’s mother, died around March 18, 1918 (Leskov 130). Bakhareva moved to Ukraine and worked for the newspaper Iuzhnyi golos/The Southern Voice, which supported the White Russians (Bakhareva 46). In Kyiv, some of The Russian Film Business’s films, as the studio was then called, were produced: Taina Vysokoi Damy/The Mystery of a Tall Lady (1917), I snova zasvetilo solntse/And the Sun Became to Shine Again (1918), Ona/She (1918). Very little is known about these films, but according to Veniamin Vishnevskii’s filmography, The Russian Film Business started to shoot in Kyiv in 1917 (Vishnevskii 297). Bakhareva probably continued her film work there when her studio in St. Petersburg was closed in the spring of 1918. In any case, after 1918, Bakhareva did not have anything to do with the film industry.

Bakhareva spent many of the following years in Yugoslavia, but in 1945, the pro-Soviet Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was declared. Josip Broz Tito’s followers shot Bakhareva’s husband, Vasilii Poliushkin, and she had to leave the country. Soon after that, she moved to Argentina, where she died in 1958.

Bakhareva’s name is sometimes mentioned in reports on the émigré cultural life. For instance, a newspaper announced in 1930: “In Belgrade, a meeting in memory of Leskov, organized by the Union of Poets at the university, was very successful. […] Nikolai Leskov’s granddaughter, N. D. Bakhareva-Poliushkina, and his grandson, Colonel Ya. D. Noga, were present” (“Za rubezhom”). According to Bakhareva’s recollections, she cooperated with different newspapers and journals, such as Literaturno-Khudozhestvennyi Al’manakh/Literary and Artistic Almanac (based in Salzburg), Za Pravdu/For the Truth (in Buenos Aires), and Russkaia zhizn’/The Russian Life (in San Francisco) (Bakhareva 46). Additionally, the author of her necrology noted that, “N. D. Bakhareva has written a number of short stories, novellas, plays, and memoirs. Of these, the most famous are: The Sister Varvara (Sestra Varvara), The Unknown Paths (Puti Nevedomyie), The Surf (Priboi), and On the Big Road (Na Bol’shoi Doroge), which were published in the émigré press” (I.T.). However, during these years, literature and journalism were not Bakhareva’s primary occupations, and she did not become a genuinely notable figure in the Russian émigré culture. In Belgrade, she worked as the head of a boarding house for Russian female students and unemployed intelligent women (Burnakin 21-22).

This profile and a more detailed paper written in Russian (Kovalova 2011) rely heavily on Bakhareva’s papers held in the aforementioned Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture. These papers include her memoirs and correspondence with the Slavic scholar William B. Edgerton. In the early 1950s, he found Bakhareva’s address and asked her to write memoirs about her famous grandfather. Bakhareva agreed to do so, but since she scarcely knew Leskov, she could not provide many new facts about his biography. Yet this manuscript and Bakhareva’s correspondence with Edgerton are impressive as documents representing her own biography and some details of the Russian émigré life. For example, in her letter to Edgerton from September 1953, Bakhareva wrote: “After the last illness, I have become completely incapacitated, I am about 70 years old. I have no funds. In these recent times, I have been leading [a] wretched existence. In other words, I cannot live without outside help” (Bakhareva 95). She was suffering from arthritis and had to dictate her manuscripts and letters. Edgerton managed to find some funding that would support Bakhareva in her financial difficulties; they exchanged letters for several years, and the correspondence became more and more affable and openhearted.

We still know very little of Bakhareva’s personality. Andrei Leskov had a low opinion of her, writing in his unpublished manuscript (held at The Institute of Russian Literature): “[She was] extremely ignorant (close to crudity), dissolute, very confident and creepy. She liked to drink, to borrow money (without return), knew how to flatter and please.” In the necrology published in Novoe Russkoe Slovo, the most influential Russian émigré newspaper in America, she is described very differently: “Having inherited from her grandfather a literary talent and being attracted to literature, she soon left the stage for writing. The genres of her works are diverse and rich: fiction, dramatic works, theater criticism. […] With her death, the Russian colony in Buenos Aires has lost a major cultural power” (I.T.). This necrology probably exaggerates Bakhareva’s literary achievements, but it does not even mention her work in cinema, where she has genuinely placed herself on record. Very few people in the émigré community knew that aside from being Nikolai Leskov’s granddaughter, Bakhareva was the first female film producer in Russia.

The author wishes to thank Maya Kucherskaya for generously sharing her notes taken at the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House).

This profile is dedicated to the blessed memory of the outstanding Slavic scholar Hugh McLean (1925-2017), who, with all possible care and generosity, helped the author to carry out her research on Bakhareva and shared copies of her manuscripts, without which this work would have been impossible.

Bibliography

Bakhareva, N.D. “Nikolai Semenovich Leskov. Semeinaia khronika. Nravstvennye cherty kharaktera. Obshchestvennye idealy. Religioznye ubezhdeniia. (Memuary vnuchki N.S.Leskova pisatelnitsy Natalii Dmiitrievny Bakharevoi).” Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture, Columbia University.

Benois, A. N. Moi Dnevnik 1916-1917-1918/My Diary: 1916-1917-1918. Moscow: Russkii put’, 2003.

Burnakin, A. “Leskov i ego vnuki.” Moskovskii zhurnal no. 4 (1995): 21-23.

“Erkan”/“The Screen.” Teatral’naia gazeta no. 13-14 (1917): 19.

I.T. “Vnuchka N. S. Leskova (Pamiati N. D. Bakharevoi)”/“N. S. Leskov’s Granddaughter (In memory of N. D. Bakhareva.” Novoe Russkoe Slovo no. 16551 (13 July 1958): 8.

“Khronika”/“The Chronicle.” Kine-zhurnal no. 11-12 (1915): 114.

“Khronika”/“The Chronicle.” Kine-zhurnal no. 5-6 (1916): 82.

“Khronika”/“The Chronicle.” Teatral’naia gazeta no. 31 (1917): 13.

Kine-zhurnal no. 5-6 (1917): 82. [Kleo Karini’s portrait].

Kovalova, Anna. “Vnuchka Leskova i dorevoliutsionnoe kino”/“Leskov’s Granddaughter and Pre-revolutionary Cinema.” Kinovedcheskie zapiski no. 98 (2011): 41-51.

“Kriticheskoe obozrenie”/“The Critics’ Reviews.” Proektor no. 9 (1916): 13.

Leskov, A. N. Zhizn’ Nikolaia Leskova/The Life of Nikolai Leskov. Vol. 2. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984.

“Novye lenty”/“The New Films.” Sine-Fono no. 1 (1915): 136.

“Novye lenty”/“The New Films.” Sine-Fono no. 5-6 (1916): 134.

“Novye lenty”/“The New Films.” Proektor no. 19-20 (1917): 17.

Orem, S. “Zolotaia pyl’”/“The Golden Dust.” Novoe Russkoe Slovo no. 15398 (24 June 1954): 2-3.

Sine-Fono no. 17-20 (1917): 34. [Advertisement for films starring Kleo Karini].

“Sredi novinok”/“The New Films.” Sine-Fono no. 11-12 (1915): 73.

“Sredi novinok”/“The New Films.” Sine-Fono no. 5-6 (1916): 76.

Terekhova, Maria. The Silent Film Poster in the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg Collection 1914-1919. Saint Petersburg: GMI SPb, 2018.

Vishnevskii, V. “Katalog fil’mov chastnogo proizvodstva 1917-1921”/“Catalogue of Privately Produced Films.” In Sovetskie khudozhestvennye fil’my: annotirovannyi katalog. Vol. 3. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961. 248-306.

Vsia kinematografiia/All the Cinematography. Moscow: Zh. Chibrario de Goden, 1916.

“Za rubezhom”/“Abroad.” Vozrozhdenie [Paris] no. 1862 (8 July 1930): 4.

Archival Paper Collections:

Andrei Leskov’s manuscripts. Fond 612, Ed. khr. 384, L. 2792. The Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House).

Natalia Dmitrievna Bakhareva Papers, 1952-1955. Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture, Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Noga, N. Letter to A. S. Suvorin. Fond 459, Opis’ 1, Ed. khr. 3016, L. 1. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Citation

Kovalova, Anna. "Natalia Bakhareva." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2021.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ypbm-6443>

Hu Ping

by Qin Xiqing

From 1931 to 1937, Hu Ping was a well-known left-wing film star and film critic (“Progressive Star”). Her abrupt withdrawal from the film industry in 1937, after the Chinese-Japanese War in Shanghai (also known as the “8.13 Incident”), led to repeated mentions in the wartime and post-war press about her, most of which portrayed her as a “fallen” actress. Among various queries about her possible whereabouts was one brief, positive review entitled “Thinking of Hu Ping,” which recalled her as a talented young actress active before the war, and noted that “since the anti-Japanese war ended successfully, most of the actors and actresses returned except the versatile Hu Ping. It’s so puzzling why nothing is heard about her” (Xiangshui). As a film star with a close connection to the Chinese left-wing cinema movement, Hu Ping is not completely forgotten today and is mentioned several times in Chinese Film Development History, the most widely read film history textbook in China, first published in 1963. The book credits her as an actress in more than a dozen silent and sound films and as the scenario writer of A Tragic Tale About My Sister/姊妹的悲剧 (1933), and notes her involvement with the League of Chinese Left-Wing Dramatists (Cheng et al. 185, 244, 272, 297). However, at the same time, Hu remains an obscure figure who, due to a lack of information about her, rarely attracts focused or in-depth scholarly attention today, except for the occasional journalistic interest in her (e.g., Ge 2007). Thus, in order to trace the contours of Hu’s film and journalistic career, this profile uses Chinese periodicals from the 1930s and 1940s, memoirs by contemporary playwrights and writers, Chinese Film Development History, and online sources as its main references.

Hu Ping in Ling Long/玲珑 no. 78 (December 14, 1932).

Hu Ping was born Hu Ying in either 1910 or 1913 in Changsha, Hunan Province, China. Her father, Hu Yinglin, was a proofreader for the New Hunan Newspaper (湖南新报) and was able to provide financial support for her education, though presumably with some difficulty (“Brief Autobiography”). After primary school, Hu attended either Changsha Provincial Girls School, Changsha Zhounan High School, or Ri Xin Women’s Fine Arts School, depending on different sources (Qi Ni; “Stars and Talented Women”; “Brief Autobiography”), and worked as a part-time waitress at the Far East Café Shop. In 1929, while still a student, she was asked by Zuo Tianxi (左天锡), co-founder of a school theatrical troupe called Frozen Rain Drama Troupe, to play a role in “Suzhou Night Talk” (“苏州夜话”) by the progressive playwright Tian Han (田汉). This experience aroused her interest in stage acting. She joined the troupe and appeared in other plays, such as Tian’s “Death of A Famous Actress” (“名优之死”),Trash Can” (垃圾桶”), and “Will to Life” (“生之意志”), as well as two Japanese plays, Eros,” by Mushanokoji Saneatsu, and “Father Returns,” by Kikuchi Kan, in December 1929 and February 1930, respectively.

Hoping to have an acting career, Hu moved to Shanghai in the summer of 1930 accompanied by Xiang Peiliang (向培良), a dramatist and friend of Tian Han. There, Hu attended Shanghai Art School and joined the South China Society (1927-1930), which was led by Tian. However, due to the group’s call for a people’s revolution during their staging of Tian’s adaptation of “Carmen,” the troupe was banned by the authorities. Hu then joined the Purple Song Drama Troupe and traveled to the city of Xiamen to stage “Nora” there for three days, playing the role of Kristine Lind (“Brief Autobiography”). After coming back to Shanghai, she and two friends founded their own theater troupe and staged the musical “Wang Zhaojun” (“王昭君”), in which she played a supporting role. Unfortunately, audiences were unfamiliar with the new musical theater art form and the production was a failure. The troupe dissolved soon after (Ma). Hu continued her stage career, however. In the early spring of 1931, she joined Big Road Drama Troupe. According to the 1935 article “Hu Ping’s Stage Life” in Qing Qing Cinema, she co-starred with Zheng Jun (郑君里), a well-known Chinese stage and film actor and director, in the play “The Men on the Kenk” by Alfred Sutro, and the “audience [was] deeply moved and even shed tears” (Fusheng). Through roles like this, Hu started to build a reputation in Shanghai, becoming known as an excellent actress. In this period, she also joined the League of Chinese Left-Wing Dramatists, which operated from 1931-1936, and became closely connected to a group of talented and pro-proletariat playwrights and dramatists.

Hu Ping on the cover of The Young Companion/Liangyou Magazine (February 1935).

In 1931, Hu transitioned into film acting with a starring role in Hero on the Sea/海上英雄 (1931) for Youlian Film Studio, a company famous for its martial arts films in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She then starred in Love Story of Forest Outlaws/绿林艳史 (1932) for Bai Hong Film Studio, but neither the name of the studio nor the title were included in her filmography in Chinese Film Development History. I also came across a very brief news item stating that she was going to play a seductive vamp in Three Riders/三骑士 for Fudan Film Studio (Niu), but I have not been able to find any further information about this project.

In 1932, Hu joined Star Film Company. There, she played supporting roles in Revival of National Spirit/国魂的复活 (1932), Adventures on Battle Ground/战地历险记 (1932), Cosmetics Market/脂粉市场 (1933), Prospects/前程 (1933), and Romance in Spring/春水情波 (1933), and starred in Love and Life/恋爱与生命 (1932) and A Tragic Tale About My Sister/姊妹的悲剧. As Chinese cinema went through the slow transition from silent to sound filmmaking, these films were all still silent except for Cosmetics Market. Heavily influenced by the guiding tenets of the League of Chinese Left-Wing Dramatists and other pro-Communist writers, most of these films were concerned with the suffering and pain of ordinary people. Consciousness-raising around women’s issues was also a repeated theme, and these films often focused on women’s struggles for independence.

In was within this context that Hu wrote her only film script: A Tragic Tale About My Sister. According to the original scenario, published in Star in 1933, this now lost film tells the story of Yu Ying, a poor village girl whose older brother and father, suffering from the hardships of rural life, die at the hand of the bullying landlord Wang Ruilin. Yu Ying and her younger brother, Ying Sheng, then flee to Shanghai to make a living working in a factory. While Ying Sheng gets involved in a worker’s strike and is put into prison, Yu Ying is dismissed from the factory and has to support herself, first as a housemaid and then as a dancer. She falls in love with a rich young man named Youlin who ultimately betrays her and even plans to give her away as a gift to a warlord. Miserable, Yu Ying then finds out that Youlin is the son of the landlord Wang Ruilin. Recalling the death of her older brother and father, she is furious and seeks revenge. She consequently attempts to murder Youlin while he is drunk one night, but, ultimately, gets arrested for attempted murder (Hu, “Script Story,” 3-4).

In this melodramatic story, Hu shows sympathy for the poor and tries to portray the cruel side of rural life in China in the early 1930s: the high price of land leasing, the low price of silk, vexatious taxing, and natural disasters like floods or drought. A Tragic Tale About My Sister echoes another film produced that year, Spring Silkworm (1933), made by the same studio, which tells the story of the hardships faced by a family of silk growers. While there is no information regarding how Hu came up with the story for A Tragic Tale About My Sister, she was publicly credited as the scenario writer of this film (Hu, “Script Story,” 3; Tu 22), and she was praised as a female screenwriter on par with Ai Xia (艾霞), who wrote and starred in A Modern Woman that same year (“Passionate and Bold Hu Ping”). The fact that this was Hu’s only script led to some doubt about her authorship, and a later news article even claimed that the script was written by Hu’s lover, Hou Feng, since Hu did not come up with any scripts after they split up (“Old Stories of Screen Stars”). However, Hu is not alone in creating only one piece of work; numerous Chinese women filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s produced only one film. For instance, China’s first woman screenwriter Pu Shunqing (濮舜卿) only wrote Cupid’s Puppet/爱神的玩偶 (1925), director Xie Caizhen (謝采貞) only made Orphan’s Cries/孤雏悲声 (1925), and Ai Xia only wrote A Modern Woman, which perhaps suggests how challenging it was for Chinese women to maintain behind-the-scenes roles in the film industry at that time.

Hu Ping in Film Weekly/电影周刊 no. 22.

Interestingly, Hu was reportedly planning to direct A Tragic Tale About My Sister herself, but her proposal was rejected by Star Film Company. According to a 1933 article in Ling Long, Wang Jiting, an actor at the studio, was appointed to be the director, which angered Hu, who announced her plan to leave the company when shooting was complete (“Anecdotes About Chinese Film”). Another news report stated that the company was carefully searching for a qualified director for the film and that Hu was going to be the assistant director (Suzhoulao). Based on these different versions of the story, it could be inferred that there was some sort of negotiation between Hu and the studio concerning the position of director. According to Chinese Film Development History, the film was co-directed by Gao Lihen, one of the studio’s important directors, and Wang Jiting (Cheng et al. 244, 542). No official record confirms Hu’s credit of assistant director on this project, and there is no indication that she tried to direct another film. Soon after production completed, she left the Star Film Company for the newly established Yi Hua Film Company.

Portrait of Hu Ping. Date unknown.

At Yi Hua, Hu starred or co-starred in Flames/烈焰 (1933), Women/女人 (1934), and The Golden Times/黄金时代 (1934), her last three silent films. In these, she played women who were charming, daring, and strong-minded—character types that are more often than not considered to be “fallen” women. In Flames, she played a woman named Ah Zhen who abandons her boyfriend for a rich man (Zheng and Guiqing 2659-60). In The Golden Times, she played Tao Li, a beautiful and vain young woman who ends up becoming a warlord’s concubine (Zheng and Guiqing 2955-56). In Women, however, she played Jin Ling, a strong-willed and independent young woman who is expelled from school for fighting against an injustice toward her female classmate,  eventually becoming a gynecologist (Zheng and Guiqing 2957-58). In 1933, the Yi Hua Film Company was attacked by the “Blueshirts,” a political organization supported by the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party), for its pro-Communist films that advocated for a class struggle between the rich and the poor. It became increasingly difficult for the left-wing filmmakers to work at the company. However, Hu stayed and acted in four more sound productions. She then moved to the Xinhua Film Company and was cast in four more talkies, among which The Phantom Lover/夜半歌声 (1937) and Youth on the March/青年进行曲 (1937) were the most successful and mark the peak of her stardom.

As a well-known writer, Hu regularly published articles in newspapers and magazines over the course of her film career. In these articles, she told stories about the struggles she faced in her acting career and expressed her tender feelings about the world and her life in a fresh and natural style. She also wrote about the cinema, arguing that it was an art form that should reflect the reality of life rather than avoid it. Unsurprisingly, her ideas about cinema were in line with Marxist-oriented left-wing thinking. For example, in “The Task of Cinema in My Point of View,” she wrote:

[I]n the contemporary society which is so chaotic and disconcerting, cinema shouldn’t be an entertainment for the leisured class, but should be an instrument for [the] masses to cry out. Therefore, the stories and descriptions of cinema should go deep into the life of the people, delicately and accurately represent their situation, point out a correct way-out for them. And this is exactly the mission for the modern cinema. (4)

Similarly, in “Chinese Cinema From Now ON,” she reiterated this belief that film should not only be entertainment but also an instrument for educating people: “Standing in the position of revolution, we naturally take film as the phonograph for the oppressed. It can be used as an instrument to inspire and awaken people and teach the oppressed to rebel against their enemy” (46). Seeing the rapidly developing economic crises around the world and the ways that imperialist countries exploited their colonies, Hu worried that China, a semi-colonial country and a potentially large market, was also in danger of being exploited. She wrote, “Undoubtedly, we are going to take film as an anti-imperialist weapon. We are going guide the people to be aware of the ugliness of the imperialism, to fight against the carving up China by imperialists by exposing their conspiracy” (46). For her, film was the best weapon for a developing nation to fight against imperialism and feudalism.

In an article entitled “About National Defense Movies,” Hu supported the 1936 call, made by leading left-wing writers and artists, for an anti-Japanese national defense film (国防电影). She agreed with many that the cinema could be used as a weapon for national liberation. (In answer to this call, a few anti-Japanese war films were produced, such as Blood on Wolf Mountain [狼山喋血记, 1936] and Soaring Aspiration [壮志凌云, 1936].) In her article, Hu also pointed out the importance of creating appealing cinematic products since the Chinese film industry was still subject to market and commercial forces at that time (14).

Hu Ping in Ling Long/玲珑 no. 160 (November 14, 1934).

What happened to Hu Ping after the “8.13 Incident” remains a mystery today. She stayed for a short time in Wuhan and then disappeared from public view after the city was occupied by the Japanese army in October 1938 (“Progressive Star”). There are numerous and contradictory descriptions of her later life. She reportedly either married a Hong Kong merchant (“Film Star Hu Ping ”) or a professor at Hu Nan University (“Hu Ping Becomes a Professor’s Wife”). Other sources suggested she either became the mistress of a military officer in Yunnan (Huang 285-56) or a Buddhist nun (Qing). Pan Jienong, a famous screenwriter, recalled seeing Hu in the arms of Xu Kan, the Minister of Food of the Kuomintang government, on the street in Chengdu in 1942 (189-91). And Fei Ge reported in 2007 that Hu lived anonymously until the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s in her hometown of Changsha (D2).

Hu Ping in Ling Long/玲珑 no. 251 (August 26, 1936).

While we do not know what happened to Hu, it is clear that she was a product of a particular moment in Chinese history, when there was a move for women’s liberation in education, the economy, and the arts in the 1920s and 1930s, which made it possible for her to pursue a theater and performance career. Actively involved in left-wing politics in the 1930s, she was an independent and bold figure on screen and on the page with her critical writing. Known as the “Red Girl” because she often dressed in red from head to toe, she was also a fashion icon, embodying with her chosen color both the revolution and urban modernity. In this way, as in her short but prolific film career, Hu epitomized the complex economic, political, and cultural forces that shaped mainstream Chinese cinema during both the late silent and early sound eras.

Bibliography

“Anecdotes About Chinese Film: Hu Ping Is Leaving the Star Film Company. ” Ling Long/玲珑 vol. 13, no. 14 (1933): 628.

“Brief Autobiography of Hu Ping”/ “圈外胡萍小传.” Cinema News/电影新闻 vol. 2, no. 1 (1935): 7.

Cheng, Jihua, Shaobai Li, and Zuwen Xing. Chinese Film Development History/中国电影发展史. Beijing: China Film Press, 1981.

“A Dozen Facts about Hu Ping”/ “关于胡萍一打.” Shadow Picture/影画 vol.1, no. 13 (1934): 17.

“Film Star Hu Ping, Temporarily Living in HK, Married to Sheng Laoqi”/“旅港明星胡萍,下嫁盛老七.” Electric Sound/电声 vol. 8,  no. 12 (1939): 565.

Fusheng. “Hu Ping’s Stage Life”/“胡萍的演剧生活.” Qing Qing Cinema/青青电影  vol. 11 (1935): 2.

Ge, Fei. “Red Girl Hu Ping”/“红姑娘胡萍.” Beijing Youth Newspaper/北京青年报 (14 May 2007): D2.

Hu, Ping. “About National Defense Movies”/“关于国防电影.” Xin Hua Pictorial/新华画报 vol. 1, no. 2 (1936): 14.

---. “Chinese Cinema From Now ON”/“今后的中国电影.” Cultural Circle/文化圈 vol. 1, no. 2 (1933): 45-6.

---. “A Fragment of Life”/“生活的片断.” Movie Fan Monthly/影迷月报 vol. 1, no. 9 (1934): 6.

---. “From Stage to Screen”/ “从舞台到银幕.” Drama/vol. 2 (1933): 15.

---. “How I Started Stage Playing (cont’d)”/ “我怎么演起戏来(续).” Modern News/现代新闻 vol. 1, no. 2 (1934): 38.

---. “On Peach Blossom Fan”/“关于桃花扇.” Xin Hua Special Peach Blossom Fan/新华特刊桃花扇 (1 Nov. 1935): Rpt. in Selected Historical Materials of Chinese Cinema: Movie Reviews (1921-1949). Ed. Duofei Chen. Beijing: China Film Press, 2014. 548.

---. Script Story of A Tragic Tale About My Sister.” Star/明星 vol. 1, no. 3 (1933): 3-4.

---. “Starvation”/“饿.” Oriental Magazine/东方杂志 vol. 32, no. 1 (1935): 48-9.

---. “The Task of Cinema in My Point of View”/ “电影任务的我见.” Star/明星 vol. 1, no. 3 (1933):1-4.

---. “Under the Mercury Lamp”/ “水银灯下.” Cinema of the Times/时代电影 no. 6 (1934): 23.

“Hu Ping Becomes a Professor’s Wife: Once A Coquettish Girl, Now Turning a New Leaf”/“胡萍作了敎授太太:當年風騷一時, 現在改過自新.” Drama World/戏世界 vol. 385 (1948): 7.

“Hu Ping: Red Girl with Red Passion”/“胡萍:红色的姑娘有着红色的热情.” Star/明星 vol. 3 (1938): 7.

Huang, Miaozi. “The Woman Who Loves Hot Pepper”/“爱吃辣椒的女人.” In A New Version of the Tales of the World/世说新篇. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2006. 285-6.

Ma, Jun. “A Wondering Girl: Hu Ping”/“一个流浪的姑娘胡萍. Chinese Cinema/中国电影 vol. 1, no. 4 (1937): 18.

Mingda. “Hu Ping, the Mystery of Disappearance: A Mysterious Legendary Life of a Woman Film Star ”/ “胡萍: 失踪之谜: 女明星的神秘传奇生活.” Film Drama/影剧 vol. 8 (1946): 1.

Niu, Si. “Stars News”/ “星訊.” Screen Weekly/银幕周报 vol. 3 (1931): 5.

“Old Stories of Screen Stars.” Star/明星 [Shanghai] vol. 8 (1939): 10.

Pan, Jienong. “Shining Hu Yin, Fallen Hu Ping”/“ 闪光的英茵殒落的胡萍.” In Sixty Years of Stage and Screen: Memoir of Pan Jienong/舞台银幕六十年. Nanjing: Jiangsu Ancient Works Publisher, 1994. 189-91.

“Passionate and Bold Hu Ping”/ “热情而勇毅的胡萍.” Star/明星 [Shanghai] vol. 4 (1938): 4.

“Progressive Star: Hu Ping’s Recent Developments”/“前进明星:胡萍的近况. Metropolis/都会 vol. 8 (1939): 136.

Qi Ni, Jiaying.  “Hu Ping, A Writer & Star in the Republic of China: ‘Red Girl’ with Multiple Skills”/ “民国 ‘作家明星’胡萍——‘红姑娘’一身本领.” Sohu.com (30 August 2017). https://www.sohu.com/a/168321577_301361.

Qing, Qing. “Hu Ping Becomes a Buddhist Nun”/“胡萍做了尼姑.” Southeast Wind/东南风 vol. 15 (1946): 6.

“Stars and Talented Women Connected with Changsha In the Republic of China”/“民国时期与长沙结缘的明星与才女. CNXXPL/新湘评论 (28 May 2018).

Suzhoulao. Brief News from the Film Circle: Hu Ping Is Going to be Assistant Director”/ “银坛屑闻: 胡萍将做副导演.” Modern Life/现代生活 vol. 3 (1933): 13.

Tu, Nan. “Hu Ping Is Both a Writer and Artist”/“胡萍是文学家又艺术家. Silver Picture/银画 vol. 3 (1933): 7, 22.

Xiangshui. “Thinking of Hu Ping”/“怀念胡萍.” New Light/新光 vol. 6 (1947): 1.

Zheng, Peiwei and Liu Guiqing, eds. Chinese Silent Films Scripts/中国无声电影剧本. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996.

Citation

Xiqing, Qin. "Hu Ping." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2021.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-5csf-xh71>

Anna Mar

by Anna Andreeva

According to the list of films in Veniamin Vishnevskii’s 1945 catalogue of early Russian feature films, the first Russian female screenwriters started working in 1910. Based on my analysis of the catalogue, approximately 7% of feature film production in imperial Russia was written by thirty-seven different female authors. Anna Mar, a famous Russian novelist who began her screenwriting career in 1914 for film producer Alexandr Khanzhonkov, was the second most productive of these female screenwriters. (The first one was Olga Blazhevich, a translator who wrote fifteen screenplays.) From 1914 to 1917, Mar wrote, according to Vishnevskii’s catalogue, eleven scripts for different Russian film studios: Lyulya Bek (1914), Stupefaction/Durman (1915), Three Kings’ Day/Den’ trekh koroley (1916), Mask of a Soul/Maska dushi (1916), Light-Blue Irises/Golubye irisy (1916), Storm of Love/Smerch l’ubovny (1916), Wild Force/Dikaya sila (1916), Aphrodite’s Taunt/Nasmeshka Afrodity (1916), Dominator/Vlastelin (1917), Heart Thrown to Wolves/Serdtse broshennoe volkam (1917), and Saving the Neighbor/Spasenie blizhnego (1917). In 1918, after Mar’s death, her last films, Bewitched Circle/Zakoldovannyi krug (1918) and Jellyfish’s Smile/Ulybka meduzy (1918), were released.

Screenshot. The entry for Wild Force (1916) on the Early Russian Film Prose project website.

Unfortunately, much of Mar’s film work is lost; only fragments of two films, Lyulya Bek and Wild Force, are preserved at Gosfilmofond. Moreover, all of her manuscripts are lost. Some of her letters to literary critics are preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI), but, in them, Mar makes no mention of her film career. Fortunately, however, some information about her film work can still be found today. Two of her thirteen scripts, Stupefaction and Storm of Love, were published in a pre-revolutionary journal called Pegas (Mar, “Durman” 7-22; Mar, “Smerch l’ubonyi” 3-24). There are also lists of intertitles from some of Mar’s films in the archive of the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). Brief descriptions of film plots (librettos), including nine librettos for Mar’s films, were published in the pre-revolutionary press and are digitally available on the Early Russian Film Prose project website. Although librettos, used for film promotion in the press, were rarely written by the screenwriters themselves, these materials give us vital access to Mar’s lost work. A great deal of information on the screenwriter’s output is still missing, however. For example, while we have the credit information for her film Jellyfish’s Smile, the plot remains unknown.

Film poster for Light-Blue Irises (1916) in The Silent Film Poster in the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg Collection 1914-1919 (2018).

Before Mar became one of the most well-known Russian screenwriters in the mid-1910s, she was a recognized writer. Born Anna Brovar in Saint Petersburg, she ran away from her parents’ home at the age of fifteen and got married in the city of Kharkov in the south of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) (Reitblat 514-15). In Kharkov, she worked as an obituary writer for the newspaper Southern Edge/Yuzhnyi krai where her pseudonym “Anna Mar” appeared for the first time. In 1906, Mar published her first collection of short stories, or so-called “cartes postales,” entitled Miniatures/Miniat’ury.

In 1910, Mar began to write short stories for various journals and newspapers based in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 1912, she moved to Moscow where her short story, The Impossible/Nevozmozhnoe, was published. The story, about a married woman’s love for a Catholic priest, was highly praised by literary critics and has resulted in the widespread belief that Mar was in love with a monk herself. From then on, critics tended to read Mar’s literary texts as autobiographical. For example, an unnamed reviewer in Moscow Newspaper/Moskovskaya gazeta wrote: “In the short story, the undeniable writer’s talent was revealed […] there is the truth and a vital, perhaps even subjectively experienced, private drama” (Moscow Newspaper). Even today, some scholars suggest that “real feelings became a base for Anna Mar’s esthetic self-expression” (Gracheva 60).

Portrait of Anna Mar. Courtesy of the Russian State Library.

The theme of religion was also central in Mar’s next three short stories, God/Bog, Unlit Icon-lamps/Lampady nezzazhennye, and The Passing By/Idushhie mimo, all published in 1913. Her next publication, the novel I Have Sinned Only for You/Tebe edinomy sogreshila (1914), which, like The Impossible was about a woman’s love for a priest, was seen as further evidence of Mar’s private affairs. Therefore, the private love life of this young Russian writer was already in the limelight during the first half of the 1910s.

In the mid-1910s, Russian film producers, following the example of foreign film companies, invited famous poets and authors to write screenplays for them. For example,  Alexandr Khanzhonkov signed contracts with writers like Fyodor Sologub, Leonid Andreev, Alexandr Kuprin, Anna Mar, and others (Kushnirovich 136). The writers (for example, Kuprin) usually worked on screen adaptations of their literary texts. Mar was no exception, and her first film, Lyulya Bek, was a screen adaptation of her short story of the same name. All other film scripts written by Mar, however, were original stories for the screen.

The preserved fragment of Lyulya Bek is too short to tell us much about the film: in it, the café-chantant singer named Lyulya is holding a letter from her lover Vitold. The figure of the performing woman in early Russian cinema has been discussed by Rachel Morley in her book Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema (2017). As Morley points out, early Russian filmmakers were focused on the “typical gender roles of woman as performer and man as observer” (217), and female protagonists of early Russian films were often performers, like Lyulya. However, unlike other instances of this pattern, Lyulya seems conscious of her position. According to the digitized libretto, she leaves Vitold to give him a chance at happiness with another woman because, as Lyulya believes, her reputation and social status as a performer cannot let them be happy together. After she announces her decision to him, Vitold shoots himself at Lyulya’s performance in the café-chantant.

It seems that Mar shunned the typical pre-revolutionary Russian film plot described by film historian Neia Zorkaia in her monograph At the Turn of the Centuries: At the Origins of Mass Art in Russia in 1900-1910 (1976). According to Zorkaia, who followed folklorist Vladimir Propp’s ideas, the typical protagonist (both male and female) of early Russian cinema was always a victim or a seducer (245). Yet Mar’s characters are often more complicated than this simple binary.

A scene from Three Kings’ Day (1916) published in Proektor no. 3 (1916).

For example, Jutta, the female protagonist of Three Kings’ Day is married but also has a lover. According to the libretto, on Three Kings’ Day (Polish Christmas), a second suitor—a count—promises to take Jutta to Paris. In order to unite with this new, second lover, she sets her husband and her first lover against each other and they both die in a shootout. Thus, she behaves like a seductress in a typical early Russian film plot. However, feeling guilty, Jutta soon reveals her involvement in the crime and the disappointed count leaves her. In an anonymous review, one critic drew attention to the final moments of the film when Jutta is suffering: “When the corpse of her husband is brought into a room full of guests, the heroine, addressing the count, immediately asks him to take her away…This action is not in the spirit of a sly, clever and careful woman” (“Den’ trekh korolei”). Jutta is no longer the seducer and transforms into the victim. This is likely why the critic, who was used to the typical binary in the film plots that Zorkaia described, was not satisfied with the final act of the film.

A scene from Mask of a Soul (1916) published in Proektor no. 5 (1916).

Additionally, in some of the films written by Mar, a woman is often a victim and a seducer at the same time. In Stupefaction, teenager Fanny dreams of becoming a model like her older sister Clara. She soon seduces the artist Mayevsky, who is also Clara’s lover. Learning the truth about her sister and Mayevsky, Clara throws herself out of the window, killing herself because she could not protect Fanny from working as a painter’s model (Mar, “Stupefaction” 7-22). From Clara’s point of view, the seductress Fanny is also the victim of Mayevsky. In Mask of a Soul, the main character, Irena Rembovskaya, is engaged to a count but is intrigued by the wealthy owner of an antique store, an Italian named Cesare Scabbi. She goes to visit and to seduce Cesare, but accidentally kills him “during lovemaking” (“Novye lenty”). She soon regrets betraying the count and punishes herself by committing suicide, blurring the line between seducer and sufferer.

Film poster for Wild Force with Anna Mar’s name referenced.

This is not to say that Mar’s films always complicated the victim/seducer binary. Wild Force seems to follow the typical Russian film plot. As Zorkaia noted, if there is a female protagonist, she is likely to repeat the life of Liza, the character of Nikolay Karamzin’s short story Poor Liza/Bednaya Liza (1792) who drowns herself after her lover abandons her (Zorkaia 245). In Mar’s film, Edda likewise ends up committing suicide after a homeless man breaks into her bedroom and rapes her. The preserved fragment of the film represents the scene of Edda’s suicide. In it, she is standing on a cliff, hesitating, looking back and forth. The landscape plays an important role in this scene; Edda looks small and helpless among the thick trees and against the fast-flowing river in the background. In this film, the woman faces both the brutality of humanity and the power of nature. A critic in Vestnik kinematografii praised the story, seeing Edda as an unconventional character for Mar: “The script […] is not one of the most vivid screenplays written by Anna Mar but at the same time the theme and its representation on the screen are unconventional for the writer who often repeats her templates in her best works for the screen” (“Dikaya sila”). Thus, what was seen as rare in Mar’s work was an acceptance of traditional, static victim/seducer characterizations. By following these conventions, Mar ultimately satisfied the critics.

Mar’s focus, in both her literary prose and her screenplays, was ultimately on the female condition and the challenges that women faced in society. This interest in women’s everyday experiences in Russia stemmed from a particular journalistic endeavor that put her in direct communication with them. From 1914 until her death, under the pseudonym “La princesse Lointaine,” Mar wrote short articles on women’s everyday life and answered readers’ letters in a column called “Private Talks” [“Intimnye besedy”] in the Journal for Women. Women wrote to La princesse Lointaine about their private lives, relationships, marriages, and loves. As she once noted, her column, “supported women who were left alone, who were afraid to keep a child, who did not know another way to get financial independence but prostitution and those who were about to commit suicide” (“Intimnye besedy” [1917]). Mar ultimately took part in the editing of seventy-four issues of the Journal for Women and answered hundreds of letters. Not only did this experience give Mar access to different women’s perspectives over the course of her career,  but she also seemed to consider these readers an important audience for her work. Addressing female readers of the Journal for Women, Mar claimed that, “All my stories and novels, from the first to the last, I dedicated only to you. […] Do you remember how often you wrote to me after reading my novels?” (“Intimnye besedy” [1914]).

Over the course of her film career, Mar wrote scripts for film studios like Akz. o-vo A. Khanzhonkov, T/d Perskii, T-vo Kinoiskusstvo, Argo, Biofilm, and Ekran. Looking at the film posters for many of her films, it is apparent that Mar was a recognizable entity in the film industry. Her name is often more noticeable than the actors’ names, and the critics often paid attention to her work even though it was more common to ignore the screenwriter altogether and comment on the director and the actors instead. Such attention to her work from the critics was likely due to her unconventional film plots and atypical female protagonists. In 1916, Mar also won the first competition for screenwriters in Russia with her script for Heart Thrown to Wolves (Korolevich 13). As Vladimir Korolevich noted, her win was unexpected because many popular and experienced male authors took part in this competition (13). Unfortunately, her winning script is lost and the plot of the film, which was released in 1917, can only be reconstructed thanks to a review of the film. According to the unnamed critic, the film involved, “an affair, exile from home, the rapprochement with a new lover, the murder of the previous lover, the suicide of the husband, regrets and horrors of the ‘bottom’ because of the return to the first lover” (Proektor).

In 1917, a few months after the release of her novel Woman on the Cross/Zhenschina na kreste, Mar poisoned herself in her rented apartment on Tverskaya Street in Moscow. She had been working on Woman on the Cross from 1914 until 1916 while she was writing screenplays and contributing to “Private Talks.” The controversial novel followed Alina Rushits, a rich twenty-eight-year-old woman who dreams of physical punishment at the hands of the book’s sadistic male character, fifty-four-year-old Heinrich Shemiot. The story covers their relationship and ends with the full and voluntary subordination of the woman to the man. The book was not well received, and the criticism of it affected Mar. In her obituary, Mar’s close friend Lidia Pisarzhevskaya wrote:

A criticism? It contributed to the sea of bitterness that had accumulated in Mar’s wounded, humble heart. ‘‘Woman On The Cross! I don’t know,” she said to me this summer with her voice broken with desperation. And with a nervous gesture, she threw out a whole pile of newspaper clippings, ‘‘Forty-nine negative reviews! Too much for one woman!” (Pisarzhevskaya)

The cover of the third edition of Anna Mar’s book Woman on the Cross (published in 1918). Private Collection.

Woman on the Cross was sold out within two weeks of its publication and was adapted for the screen that same year but without the permission of Mar, who was still alive at the time. Directed by Viacheslav Viskovskii, the film was released with the title Offended Venera/Oskorblyonnaya Venera. Viskovskii changed the main premise of Mar’s story, and had the female character kill the sadistic male protagonist in the end. Unhappy, Mar wrote to the anonymous screenwriter of Offended Venera: “I express to Mr. Anonymous not only my timid censure, I also dare remind him that I still have four books not stolen yet” (Mar, “Pis’mo v redaktsiyu” 126).

The lists of authors whose books were to be excluded, Red Librarian no. 1 (1924): 137-38.

After Mar’s suicide, her legacy began to fade. In 1924, the process of collectivization of Russian libraries led to the exclusion of Mar’s short stories and novels from libraries. The first lists of authors, whose books were supposed to be banned, were published in a journal called Red Librarian/Krasnyi bibliotekar.’ Mar’s name, with the indication “(all)” next to it, was included in the first part of the list entitled “Mass Literature” (“Primernye spiski” 138). Thus, Mar’s literary texts were difficult to access for Soviet readers. It was only in the 1990s that Woman on the Cross and some of Mar’s short stories were republished. Fortunately, there appears to be growing scholarly interest today in Mar’s literary prose, as well as in the work of her coevals, the other female writers who were also actively forgotten during the Soviet era. The newest collection of Mar’s literary texts, Woman on the Cross, was released by the publishing initiative “Common place” in Moscow in 2020. At the same time, the lack of filmic materials and the inaccessibility of sources make it difficult to reconstruct Mar’s screenwriting career, as well as the history of pre-revolutionary Russian cinema more broadly, which still seems more attractive to archivists rather than to film scholars. Therefore, Mar’s work for the screen remains under-explored today even though she was one of the most productive female screenwriters of her period.

The author wishes to thank Maria Nesternko and Maria Mikhaylova for the portraits of Anna Mar; Anna Kovalova for her advice and support; the archivists at VGIK for access to the preserved intertitles; and the archivists at Gosfilmofond for the opportunity to see the fragments of Mar’s films.

Bibliography

“Den’ trekh korolei”/“Three Kings’ Day.” Proektor no. 3 (1916): 11

“Dikaya sila”/“Wild Force.” Vestnik kinematografii no. 118 (1916): 8.

Gracheva, Alla.‘Zhiznetvorchestvo’ Anny Mar”/“Anna Mar’s ‘Life creating.’” Litsa: Biograficheskii alʹmanah, 1996. 56-76.

“Intimnye besedy”/“Private Talks.” Journal for Women no. 1 (1914): 9.

“Intimnye besedy”/“Private Talks.” Journal for Women no. 14 (1915): 11.

“Intimnye besedy”/“Private Talks.” Journal for Women no. 1 (1917): 12.

Ivanova, V., Mylnikova, V., Skovorodnikova, S., Tsivian, Y., Yangirov, R. Velikij Kinemo: Katalog sohranivšichsya filmov v Rossii/The Great Cinema: Catalogue of Preserved Feature Films in Russia. 1908-1919. Moscow: NLO, 2002.

Korolevich, Vladimir. Zhenshhina v kino/A Woman in Cinema. Moscow: Teakinopechat’, 1928.

Kushnirovich, Michail. “Russkij stsenarij: detstvo, ortochestvo, yunost'”/“Russian Screenplay: Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.” Ekrannye iskusstva i literatura. Nemoe kino (1911): 130-155.

Mar A. “Pis’mo v redaktsiyu”/“A Letter To an Editorial Board.” Pegas no. 11 (1916): 126-28.

Mar, Anna. “Durman”/“Stupefaction.” Pegas no. 2 (1915): 7-22.

---. “Smerch l’ubonyi/“Storm of Love.” Pegas no. 3 (1916): 3-24.

---. Zhenschina na kreste/Woman On the Cross. Moscow: Sovremennye problemy, 1916.

---. Zhenschina na kreste/Woman On the Cross. Moscow: Common Place, 2020.

Mikhaylova, Maria. “Anna Mar, pervaya zhenschina v professii”/“Anna Mar, the first woman in the profession.” Iskusstvo kino no. 1 (2015). https://old.kinoart.ru/archive/2015/01/anna-mar-pervaya-zhenshchina-v-professii.

Morley, Rachel. Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema. London: I.B. Taurus, 2017.

Moscow Newspaper (13 February 1912): 5.

“Novye lenty”/“New films.” Sine-Fono no. 19-20 (1916): 155.

Pisarzhevskaya, Lidia. “Tragicheskaya smert’ A. Y. Mar”/“A Tragic Death of A. Y. Mar.” Journal for Women no. 8 (1917): 14.

“Primernye spiski k instruktsii po ochistke bibliotek”/“The Preliminary Lists to the Instruction for 'Cleanings' in Libraries.”  Red Librarian no. 1 (1924): 137-38.

Proektor no. 11-12 (1916): 9.

Reitblat, Abram. “Anna Mar.” In Russkie pisateli 1800-1917. vol. 3. Ed. Peter Nikolaev. Moscow: Bolshaya Rossiiskaya Enciclopediya, 1994. 514-15.

Terekhova, Maria. The Silent Film Poster in the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg Collection 1914-1919. Saint Petersburg, 2018.

Vishnevskii, Veniamin. Khudozhestvennye filʹmy dorevol’utsionnoi Rossii/Feature films of pre-revolutionary Russia. Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1945.

Zorkaia, Neia. Na rubezhe stoletii: u isotkov massovogo iskusstva v Rossii 1900-1910 godov/At the Turn of the Century: The Origins of Mass Art in Russia 1900–1910. Moscow: Nauka, 1976.

Archival Paper Collections:

“A note about the woman.” [“Zapis' o zhenshhine”] Box 421, Folder 10. Archive and collection of N.V. Rykovskii. The Manuscript Department, Russian State Library.

Digitized librettos. Film Texts Database [part of the Early Russian Film Prose research project].

Intertitle lists at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK):

Letters written by Anna Mar. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Citation

Andreeva, Anna. "Anna Mar." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-s3tc-ry73>

Virginia Dale

by Richard Abel

Little is known about Virginia Dale before she began reviewing films for the Chicago Journal. One further complication is that no copies of the Journal seem to survive before 1921, although she did begin writing a column at least two years earlier. In October 1919, the Fort Wayne Sunday News, for instance, reprinted her review of Broken Blossoms (1919) in full (“New Picture Adds to Fame”). By 1921, the Journal considered Dale important enough for its readers to post a series of small advertisements repeatedly promoting her film reviews.

As other women columnists had before her, in late 1921 Dale toured a film studio, visiting the Fox Film Corporation in Fort Lee, New Jersey. What particularly struck her was not only the music performed for the actors to “work in rhythm” in a scene but also all the people walking around in costumes from every age of history, in a kind of “Alice’s Wonderland” (“Fox Studios Hive”). She was one of the few newspaper columnists to make note of the yellow make-up on actors’ faces, which, when recorded on orthochromatic film stock, ensured audiences that their characters were perceived as “properly” white.

Although Dale praised films such as Robin Hood (1922) unequivocally (“Time Can Not Tarnish This Film”), she quibbled about others like Flaming Youth (1923), warning Colleen Moore to avoid becoming “too cute” (“News of the Motion Picture World” [30 October 1923]). Dale’s frustration with Cecil B. DeMille’s upper-class melodramas, however, was more than a quibble: in the case of Saturday Night (1922), she found the director once again dazzled by money, concocting the opulent display of yet another infamous bathroom scene (“At the Theaters”). But Dale also devoted columns to less expected subjects: from the career of June Mathis, a model scenario writer (“News of the Motion Picture World” [25 October 1923]), to the Rothacker Film company, Chicago’s major manufacturer of advertising films and the laboratory responsible for developing the negatives and making positive prints of feature films from First National and other producers (“Moving Pictures: Chicago Movie Makers”). In a clever strategy to fulfill her readers’ demand for gossip, Dale also created the foil of a “Chatty Caller,” who, as if sitting beside her, kept serving up tasty tidbits in column after column (“Moving Pictures: Chatty Caller”).

Ad for Virginia Dale’s reviews in the Chicago Journal (18 June 1921): 8.

Through the 1920s, Dale served as both the motion picture and drama editor for the Chicago Journal. Theater advertisements often used quotes from her reviews to promote individual films, and not only in Chicago. By the late 1920s, she was known as a magazine writer of short stories and as the author of an entry summarizing the Chicago season for Burns Mantle’s annual theater volume (Donaghey). Whatever career she had after the Journal ceased publication in 1930 is unclear.

See also: “Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925,” Special Dossier on Early US Newspaperwomen

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. Movie Mavens: Early US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021.

Dale, Virginia. “At the Theaters: Saturday Night.” Chicago Journal (21 January 1922): 9.

---. “Fox Studios Hive of Industry.” Chicago Journal (17 December 1919): 7.

---. “Moving Pictures: Chatty Caller Brings News of Filmdom.” Chicago Journal (10 February 1922): 13.

---. “Moving Pictures: Chicago Movie Makers Celebrate Anniversary.” Chicago Journal (5 May 1922): 14.

---. “New Picture Adds to Fame of Griffith.” Fort Wayne Sunday News and Sentinel (18 October 1919): 3.12.

---. “News of the Motion Picture World.” Chicago Journal (25 October 1923): 11.

---. “News of the Motion Picture World.” Chicago Journal (30 October 1923): 17.

---. “Time Can Not Tarnish This Film.” Chicago Journal (27 January 1923): 8.

Donaghey, Frederick. “Mr. Mantle’s Volume Dated 1928-’28.” Chicago Sunday Tribune (16 December 1928): 7.1.

State-Lake Theater advertisement. Chicago Tribune (7 March 1927): 18.

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Virginia Dale." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-593f-ar61>

Harriette Underhill

by Richard Abel

Born in Troy, New York, Harriette Underhill came to New York City, fleeing a brief marriage, at age sixteen, and became interested in the theater. After touring with several companies (including as part of the chorus in the original “Floradora” company), she returned to New York in 1908 after the death of her father, Lorenzo Underhill, a “horse breeder and turf man” (“Harriette Underhill Dies”), and took over his sports column at the New York Tribune. “A rare beauty” with “flaming orange” hair often framed by “a large black picture hat,” in the words of Ishbel Ross, “she was cynical to the core, scorned sentiment, had a sophisticated wit, [and] was generous and courageous” (412-413). In 1916, for a weekly column in the Tribune, Underhill began interviewing stage actors who had turned to performing in the movies at the New York studios. A fluid, articulate writer, she let her interviewees speak as they wished, rarely calling attention to herself. Her profile of Olga Petrova, for example, concentrated on the star’s face, her “alabaster skin,” “red hair,” “sad, almost tragic eyes,” and “the wonderful piquancy” of her voice (“Petrova of the Pictures”). In late 1919, Underhill was hit by a car and severely crippled, but she continued to write, taking over the Tribune’s film review column from Virginia Tracy.

Underhill was a perceptive, intelligent film critic and a compelling stylist, whose “cleverness with her typewriter was never to be doubted” (Perrill). In her review of Madame Peacock (1920), starring Alla Nazimova, she was so taken with the dialogue, adapted from the play, that she reproduced some of the telling exchanges that the theater star in the film has with an author, producer, and adoring audience member (“On the Screen” [26 October 1920]). Unlike fellow critic Mae Tinée, she found Frances Marion’s The Love Light (1921) “a fascinating story beautifully produced and marvelously well acted,” with a “gorgeous performance” by Mary Pickford in an exceptionally sustained war story (“On the Screen” [10 January 1921]). She also made an observant remark on Lois Weber’s directorial style in The Blot and What Do Men Want? (both 1921): “She never has any ‘big moments’ in her pictures, and her people act as they do in real life” (“On the Screen” [15 November 1921]).

Unusually attentive as well to the experience of watching a film in a theater, Underhill included a description of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel’s epilogue of three candles being snuffed out on stage at the end of Ernst Lubitsch’s Passion (1921)—to symbolize the death of Pola Negri’s Madame Du Barry—in her review (“On the Screen” [13 December 1920]). Similarly, she praised his “elaborate program surrounding” The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) that amplified yet also softened an audience’s response to the puzzling German feature (“On the Screen” [4 April 1921]). But she wished that, rather than flash those unconvincing zigzag letters on the screen, a member of the theater’s chorus would simply shout “Caligari” several times at the end. A second viewing of Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1921/1922), which she loved, revealed telling differences between the fourteen-reel print at the premiere and the ten-reel version on its re-release. She missed the full length of the “dual [sic] scenes” but not the part coming after the death of the villainous count; overall, however, she could not help feeling as when she was given “a school edition of Shakespeare,” in which “scenes which some people considered objectionable have been cut” (“On the Screen” [27 January 1922]).

June 1924 ad in Film Daily for The Reckless Age (1924) that reproduces part of Harriette Underhill’s review (and a small photo of her).

In 1923, Underhill contracted tuberculosis, but she kept writing for the Tribune. Although invited to Hollywood and feted with parties, she hated the place and returned to New York (Ross 413). According to advertisements in Film Daily, she was still reviewing films and writing up chatty interviews with stars such as Negri and Rudolph Valentino for the New York Herald and Herald-Tribune until shortly before her death from tuberculosis (“Harriette Underhill Dies”). In fact, on the day she died in May 1928, she sent her last column, written by dictation, to the Herald-Tribune (Ross 412).

See also: “Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925,” Special Dossier on Early US Newspaperwomen

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. Movie Mavens: Early US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021.

Advertisement [Reckless Age]. Film Daily (15 June 1924): 1.

“Harriette Underhill Dies.” Brooklyn Times Union (19 May 1928): 16.

Perrill, Penelope. “From the Window.” Dayton Daily News (24 May 1928): 19.

Ross, Ishbel. Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936.

Underhill, Harriette. “On the Screen.” New York Tribune (26 October 1920): 8.

---. “On the Screen.” New York Tribune (13 December 1920): 8.

---. “On the Screen.” New York Tribune (10 January 1921): 8.

---. “On the Screen.” New York Tribune (4 April 1921): 6.

---. “On the Screen.” New York Tribune (15 November 1921): 8.

---. “On the Screen.” New York Tribune (27 January 1922): 8.

---. “Petrova of the Pictures.” New York Tribune (19 November 1916): 4.4.

Archival Paper Collections:

Digitized New York Tribune (1886-1922). Chronicling America database, Library of Congress.

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Harriette Underhill." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-keph-hf15>

Gertrude Price

by Richard Abel

To date, nothing has been found concerning Gertrude Price before she began working for the Midwestern newspaper chain Scripps-McRae. In November 1912, an announcement appeared in the Scripps’s weekly Chicago Day Book as well as in numerous other daily papers: as “a moving picture expert,” Price would be writing “The Movies” column of “personality sketches” of actors and actresses because the movies now were “the biggest, most popular amusement in the world” (“The Movies”). Apparently, she lived in Chicago as the 1912-1914 city directories listed her as a reporter there (Olsson 347).

From the beginning, Price focused her columns on screen personalities, addressing a new public interest the industry was exploiting to its advantage. All were illustrated with one or more halftone sketches drawn from publicity photos (sometimes copyrighted by the film companies). At first, the personalities she wrote about were associated with the licensed manufacturers, but gradually she included those working for the “Independents.” There are several striking patterns in her choice of players. One is the dozen or more columns on child actors, which paralleled several children’s stories she signed as “Aunt Gertie.” Another is the frequency—one out of every four or five performers—of those acting in westerns. Most striking, however, are the number of columns—at least two thirds in all—devoted to women. Overall, Price tended to focus on active young women, carefree but committed to their work, frank and fearless in the face of physical danger; tellingly, nearly all seemed unattached and without children. Kalem’s Ruth Roland, for instance, was “an athletic girl” who “runs, rides and rows with the freedom and agility of a boy” (“Runs, Rides, Rows”). Anna Q. Nilsson was another “movie beauty [who] risks [her] life to put thrill in the pictures for Kalem” (“Movie Beauty”). Jessylyn Von Trump, likewise, was “a capital rider” at American Film, who “likes herself in a cowgirl costume very much, indeed” (“She Reads Balzac”). And that “tall woman of the picture players,” Ann Schaefer, enjoyed acting lead roles for Vitagraph’s western production unit (“Face Is Fortune”).

Complementing these profiles were columns on women who had become successful filmmakers and/or scenario writers. For example, Price wrote about Nell Shipman (“Lucky Thirteen Word”), Lois Weber (“Sad Endings Are All Right”), and the pioneering Alice Guy Blaché, who now headed her own company, Solax (“Charming Little Woman Runs ‘Movie’ Business”). In one of her last columns, Price even described the “wonderful field which the moving picture has opened” as a “great new field for women folk,” where a woman’s “originality […] her perseverance and her brains are coming to be recognized on the same plane as [a] man’s” (“Sees the Movies”).

From November 1912 through June 1914, newspaper readers may have read Price’s column, syndicated through the United Press Association, more than any of the few others on the movies. So, why did she stop? Were changes in the movie industry, Scripps-McRae readers, and film audiences partly responsible? In 1914, feature films were beginning to attain prominence, and Price seemed less interested in them than in shorter films, especially cowboy and cowgirl westerns. At the same time, readers and fans were becoming more middle-class, with women aligned more closely with consumption and domesticity. In April 1913, Price had described Essanay’s multi-talented Beverly Bayne as a “clever horsewoman” (“Movie Girl in Social Whirl” ); by July 1914, the “Beautiful, Graceful Beverly Bayne, Society Actress of the Movies” was the subject of a series of newspaper articles Price wrote on proper feminine appearance and behavior (Gibson). By then, too, there was more competition, with Mae Tinée and Kitty Kelly introducing movie pages and film reviews in the Chicago Tribune.

According to Jan Olsson, by 1914 Price was living in Los Angeles, where the Los Angles Record was publishing her column as well as a few short pieces about her novice work as a movie extra in late 1914 and early 1915. By then, she had accepted a permanent position at the Record and soon became editor of the paper’s daily “Women’s Page,” answering readers’ questions as Cynthia. Later she was in charge of the newspaper’s “Club” page (346-348). Price remained a member of the Record’s staff until at least the 1930s.

See also: “Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925,” Special Dossier on Early US Newspaperwomen

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film  Culture, 1913-1916. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

---. Movie Mavens: Early US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021.

Gibson, Idah M’Glone. “Beverly Bayne Dispels Beauty Beliefs.” Des Moines News (16 July 1914): 5.

“The Movies.” Des Moines News (11 November 1912): 2.

Olsson, Jan. Los Angeles Before Hollywood: Journalism and American Film Culture, 1905- 1915. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2008.

Price, Gertrude M. “Charming Little Woman Runs ‘Movie’ Business by Herself and Makes Big Success.” Des Moines News (9 February 1913): 2.

---. “Face Is Fortune of Tallest Picture Player Who Sheds Real Tears for Sake of Art.” Des Moines  News (25 March 1913): 4.

---. “Lucky Thirteen Word Proves to Be a New Money Making Position.” Des Moines News (15 May 1913): 8.

---. “Movie Beauty Risks Life to Put Thrill in the Pictures.” Des Moines News (7 February 1913): 1.

---. “Movie Girl in Social Whirl Is Artist-Horsewoman-Wit.” Des Moines News (8 April 1913): 4.

---. “Runs, Rides, Rows.” Des Moines News (16 April 1913): 6.

---. “Sad Endings Are All Right, Says This Woman Director.” Des Moines News (27 September 1913): 5.

---. “Sees the Movies as Great New Field for Women Folk.” Toledo New Bee (30 March 1914): 14.

---. “She Reads Balzac, Likes Baseball, and is Pretty.” Des Moines News (9 April 1913): 4.

[Occasionally, there was no byline for Price in some of the columns, but these articles most likely belong to her given the textual style and captions. As such, this profile lists all articles attributed to Price, either directly or inferred, under her name in the bibliography—Eds.].

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Gertrude Price." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zv6r-p621>

Genevieve Harris

by Richard Abel

Genevieve Harris was rather unique among women newspaper writers. Graduating from Eau Claire High School [Wisconsin] in 1908, she received a Bachelor of Arts (her major is unknown) from the University of Wisconsin in 1913 and did some graduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris. By late 1915, at the age of twenty-four, she was writing movie reviews for Motography (published in Chicago), a position she held until July 1918, just before the trade journal merged with Exhibitors Herald. Although several men also wrote reviews, Harris was the most constant, regular film critic. Her weekly reviews covered not only features but also serial episodes and short comedies, westerns, and other genres. She also conducted a few interviews with stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and her last columns were notable for unusual interviews with local theater managers. This experience and her knowledge of the industry proved invaluable when, in August 1918, she took over writing daily movie reviews from Oma Moody Lawrence at the Chicago Post and, in November, began editing the weekly “Photoplay News and Comment” page.

A Genevieve Harris quote about Blind Husbands (1920) in Moving Picture World (17 Jan. 1920): 24-5.

Despite the Post’s low circulation, Harris soon became an influential columnist, rivaling even Kitty Kelly and Mae Tinée in Chicago. Early on, she took readers on a surprising tour of the new Famous Players-Lasky rental exchange in the city, and the one department she highlighted was where many young women inspected and repaired film prints (“A Visit to the Film Exchange”). At the same time, she drew on local luncheon talks by Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and Samuel Goldfish to ask what moviegoers found most important: “the artistic presentation” of a theater’s program or “the picture itself” (“Two Views on Film Problems”). She was an astute reviewer and, unlike Mae Tinée, rarely mocked a film or star. She was much impressed, for instance, with the acting, camerawork, and sets of London’s Limehouse district in Broken Blossoms (1919) (“Griffith Play Returns”). She recommended a second viewing of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), which confirmed its success, especially in the amazing Argentine section and in the moving scene between Julio, now in the uniform of France, and his father (“Second Thots on ‘Four Horseman’”). Her answer to the question “What makes a great picture?” was: “the perfect melding of story and star, that is, one in which the story provides a consistent, vivid characterization which the right player not only plays but rather brings to life” so that the picture gets “under your skin” (“What Makes a Great Picture”). Yet Harris’s interests ranged far beyond film reviewing. She was an early advocate of Mrs. Sidney Drew, not merely as a comedienne, but as a filmmaker in her own right (“Mrs. Sidney Drew as Film Director”). She wrote columns on the career of Jeanie Macpherson, Cecil B. DeMille’s chief scenario writer (“Screen Writing Distinct Craft”), as well as on Hettie Gray Baker, Fox’s managing editor responsible for the release print of a film (“Woman Editor of Film Plays”). She also took the unusual position of promoting the Society for Visual Education and its creation of “complete picture courses” as “a new and vital force” for teaching school children (“Motion Pictures in Education”).

Perhaps due to her early study at the Sorbonne, Harris also had an unusual fascination with French films. In late 1922, she devoted a whole column to the current state of French film art, summarizing the dozen film fragments shown at the second annual “Salon du cinéma” in Paris and reprinting (in translation) a lengthy quote from a Mercure de France article written by Léon Moussinac (“A French View of Film Art”). A year later, reporting directly from Paris, she quickly dispelled the myth that American films dominated the city’s screens and noted how French cinema was different. French movie stars did not receive a great deal of attention, and French audiences loved historical subjects, especially in lengthy serials, released weekly in “eight chapters of about four reels each,” with an emphasis on “picturesque backgrounds […] human interest and emotional appeal” (“French Films Show Artistry”). In late 1923, a story syndicated by NEA Services described Harris as a short story writer and “author of a course on scenario writing” as well as a movie reviewer (“Short Story Writer”). It also claimed that she was “the only American woman who wrote her criticisms of American films in French for publication in the Parisian movie magazine, ‘Le Courier.’”

Harris was the movie critic for the Chicago Post until it folded in 1934 and then began writing a Hollywood column, “Rambling Through the Studios,” for Movienews Weekly, a freely distributed newspaper (1933-1937) sponsored by a local department store in Chicago. Her last column, in early 1936, was devoted to one more important woman in the industry, Dorothy Arzner, who recently had become a producer at Columbia Pictures. In 1942, after writing publicity for the National Livestock and Meat Board, Harris joined the editorial staff of the Eau Claire Leader and Telegram and served as the woman’s page editor for the next five or six years. In 1973, obituaries named her not only as the “motion picture and drama critic for the old Chicago Evening Post” (“Obituaries” [Chicago Sunday Tribune]), but also as a publicist and freelance writer. Shortly before her death, Harris had traveled to Europe and begun writing “a series of articles comparing communist and socialist governments” (“Obituaries” [Eau Claire Leader and Telegram]).

The author made minor updates to the profile text and bibliography in November 2023.

See also: “Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925,” Special Dossier on Early US Newspaperwomen

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. Movie Mavens: Early US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021.

Harris, Genevieve. “Dorothy Arzner Fills the Role of Hollywood’s ‘Woman Executive.’” Movienews Weekly (11 January 1935): 4.

---. “French Films Show Artistry.” Chicago Post (29 December 1923): 2.8.

---. “A French View of Film Art.” Chicago Post (16 December 1922), 2.9.

---.“Griffith Play Returns.” Chicago Post (18 October 1919): 8.

---. “Motion Pictures in Education.” Chicago Post (22 May 1920): 8.

---. “Mrs. Sidney Drew as Film Director.” Chicago Post (1 February 1919): 4.

---. “Rambling Through the Studios.” Movienews Weekly (31 August 1934): 10.

---. “Second Thots on ‘Four Horsemen.’” Chicago Post (10 September 1921): 2.4.

---. “Screen Writing Distinct Craft.” Chicago Post (11 February 1922): 2.10.

---. “Two Views on Film Problems.” Chicago Post (7 December 1918): 9.

---. “Woman Editor of Film Plays.” Chicago Post (18 March 1922): 2.8.

---. “What Makes a Great Picture.” Chicago Post (7 October 1922): 2.7.

---. “A Visit to a Film Exchange.” Chicago Post (26 October 1918): 4.

“Obituaries, Genevieve Harris.” Eau Claire Leader and Telegram (8 August 1973): 117.

“Obituaries, Genevieve Harris.” Chicago Sunday Tribune (10 August 1973): 3.14.

“Short Story Writer Studies to Review Pictures in French.” Abilene [Texas] Reporter (4 November 1923): 5.

Archival Paper Collections:

Kodak Yearbooks (1908, 1909, 1911), Chippewa Valley Museum, Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Genevieve Harris." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-rm1v-f039>

Frances Peck

by Richard Abel

Born and raised in Colorado, Frances Peck worked briefly as a reporter for the Denver Republican and then the Denver Times. After a divorce, she moved to Chicago and, in 1911, joined the staff of the Chicago Tribune, writing features and other articles (Ross 411-12). In early March 1914, adopting the nom de plume of Mae Tinee, she introduced a Sunday page devoted to motion pictures, “Right Off the Reel.” Syndicated and much imitated by other newspapers, this page had a centered feature, “In the Frame of Public Favor,” with an exceptionally large publicity halftone (sometimes in a gilded frame) and a short profile of a current movie star supposedly chosen each week by readers. In early January 1915, in a publicity stunt, the Sunday Tribune editor put Mae Tinee in “The Frame of Public Favor” as that week’s most “popular player” (“Miss Mae Tinee”). Initially an editor and gossip columnist (and a recognized asset to the paper), she took over Kitty Kelly’s film review column in October 1916, retitling it “Right Off the Reel.”

“’Her Greatest Love’ Her Worst Film,” Chicago Tribune (5 April 1917): 10.

Mae Tinée’s review of The Romance of Tarzan (1918).

From early on, Mae Tinee cultivated a snappy, idiomatic writing style that could be controversial. She scorned stars such as Theda Bara and Francis X. Bushman (“Right Off the Reel” [8 November 1916]), satirically retold the story of William S. Hart’s The Devil’s Double (1916) as if concocted by a “bunch of youngsters” playing in a barn (“Right Off the Reel” [25 November 1916]), and tartly described Lois Weber’s Idle Wives (1916) as “pictorial goulash” (“Idle Wives”). But she also praised Alla Nazimova’s screen debut in the “tragic, tender probing of motherhood” that was War Brides (1916) (“Nazimova Makes Her Screen Debut”). It was likely her praise of Mothers of France (1917), which starred the aged and ailing Sarah Bernhardt as a mother who loses her husband and only son in the Great War (“The Divine Sarah”) that led Peck to place a French accent on her name, becoming Mae Tinée. By then, some industry figures took exception to her frequently sarcastic reviews, and even the Chicago Motion Picture Owners’ Association protested her “frivolous treatment” of the movies (“Latest News of Chicago”). Her review of The Romance of Tarzan (1918), for instance, opened with her breathing a sigh of relief that there would be no more sequels (“Being Final”).

After the war, Mae Tinée was impressed by the imported German films, especially those directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Pola Negri. An exception was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), whose diabolical tale and “queer, futuristic-cubic” set gave her “the willies” (“Whoops, My Dear!”). While praising masterful American films such as The Miracle Man (1919), The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), The Affairs of Anatol (1921), and even Weber’s The Blot (1921), Mae Tinée could not resist writing a frank pseudo-letter that took Mary Pickford to task for accepting the leading role in Frances Marion’s “mess” of a story, The Love Light (1921) (“O, Mary, Mary”).

In early 1922, she introduced a weekly column titled “Kick Korner,” asking readers to write to her with complaints, or “kicks,” about producers, exhibitors, or specific films in order to improve the movies (“Kick Korner”). Those “kicks” came in droves and occasionally called the critic herself to task. Two letters were especially vehement: “you seem to have a pretty good opinion of yourself and your column and I think that is all rot” (“Movie Fans’ Kick Korner”) and “when I saw your picture in the W.G.N. some months ago, I never could have believed that so cruel a nature could hide behind such a kindly face” (“Movie Fans’ Letter Box”). By late 1923, Mae Tinée seemed to be toning down her language. Beginning with an unexpected rave of The Merry Go Round (1923), she now opened her columns with a “Good Morning!”—sounding like a friend or neighbor sitting at a reader’s breakfast table—and left with a cheery “See you tomorrow.”

As a sign of her continuing influence, in early 1924, one column closed with the following: “Reprints of any review by Mae Tinée printed in the last thirty days may be obtained by mailing a stamped, addressed, return envelope to (or by calling at) The Tribune’s Public Service Bureau, 11 South Dearborn Street” (“Fiddlers Get Their Pay”). Long before Mae Tinée retired from the Tribune in early January 1945, another woman had taken over as the newspaper’s film critic and under the same name (“Obituaries”). Little is known of Peck’s personal life, but she did have a second and third husband as well as a daughter with a nursing career (Ross 412). When Peck died in an Evanston hospital in May 1961, the New York Daily News named her “one of the nation’s early full-time motion picture critics” (“Obituary”).

See also: “Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925,” Special Dossier on Early US Newspaperwomen

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film  Culture, 1913-1916. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

---. Movie Mavens: Early US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021.

“Kick Korner.” Chicago Sunday Tribune (26 February 1922): 7.9, 7.11.

“Latest News of Chicago.” Motography (16 February 1918): 328.

Mae Tinée. “Being Final Chronicles of a Monkey Man.” Chicago Tribune (3 October 1918): 10.

---.“‘The Divine Sarah’ Divine Still in Tale of War and Woe.” Chicago Tribune (11 April 1917): 14.

---. “Fiddlers Get Their Pay in ‘After the Ball.’” Chicago Tribune (16 February 1924): 15.

---. “‘Idle Wives’—A Pictorial Goulash.” Chicago Tribune (7 December 1916): 14.

---. “Nazimova Makes Her Screen Debut.” Chicago Tribune (6 December 1916): 18.

---. “O, Mary, Mary, and We Held Our Breath for This.” Chicago Tribune (25 January 1921): 14.

---. “Right Off the Reel.” Chicago Tribune (8 November 1916): 15.

---. “Right Off the Reel.” Chicago Tribune (25 November 1916): 14.

---. “Whoops, My Dear! Do Bring on the Strait Jacket.” Chicago Sunday Tribune (15 May 1921): 8.3.

“Miss Mae Tinee.” Chicago Sunday Tribune (3 January 1915): 8.7.

“Movie Fans’ Kick Korner.” Chicago Sunday Tribune (10 September 1922): 7.12.

“Movie Fans’ Letter Box.” Chicago Sunday Tribune (12 November 1922): 7.19.

“Obituaries.” Chicago Tribune (10 May 1961): 36.

“Obituary.” New York Daily News (9 May 1961): 33.

Ross, Ishbel. Ladies of the Press: The Story of Women in Journalism by an Insider. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936.

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Frances Peck." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-rwre-nn82>

Dorothy Gottlieb

by Richard Abel

Born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Dorothy Gottlieb was a family friend of A.H. Blank, who owned the largest circuit of movie theaters in the city and elsewhere in the state. In 1914, she and Mrs. Blank won top prizes in a card game involving forty paired players (“This Page”). In August 1915, she began writing a “News of the Movies” column for the Des Moines Tribune. As the newspaper’s coverage expanded, she eventually was identified as the editor/writer of all the material printed under the “News of the Movies” banner and assumed the nom de plume of Dorothy Day.

Often chatty and colloquial in her communications with readers, Day also could concisely summarize the essential elements she looked for when judging a movie. In praising The Golden Chance (1915), for example, she focused on the “uncommonly strong” story, with its “well constructed introduction” and unexpected twists that—in a domestic metaphor shared with several other women writers—so neatly wove together the plot’s three “threads” into the film’s “exquisite texture” (“News of the Movies” [28 January 1916]).

Image of Dorothy Day, “News of the Movies.” Des Moines Tribune (21 August 1917): 3.

In September 1918, a Tribune advertisement promoted Day as such “an authority on photo plays” that “her name is a household word in nearly every home in Des Moines and Iowa” (Advertisement). She continued to be as chatty as before, directly addressing her readers as “girls—gurls—girruls!” when claiming that they might prefer a more ordinary player like Herbert Rawlinson to familiar stars like William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks (“News of the Movies” [8 January 1918]). Similarly, in watching Cecil B. DeMille’s Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), neither she nor the “girls” in an afternoon audience could resist the “he-vamping” of Lew Cody, and they “giggled and laughed  […] at the typical ‘husbandish’ details” (“News of the Movies: Don’t Change Your Husband”). While fans “stormed the Rialto” to see Salomé (1918) one Sunday, Day seemed unsure if what appealed was the horror of the story, Theda Bara as “a creature of evil,” or her plentiful costumes—even more than she had worn in Cleopatra (1917) (“News of the Movies” [4 March 1919]).

Day’s film reviews continued to appear until the summer of 1920, but, with few exceptions during the last year, they became shorter and less trenchant, perhaps because, from April through November 1919, she also penned a column in the Des Moines Sunday News that drew on publicity materials to summarize the new feature film releases of the coming week. She already may have been transitioning to a new position, for Dorothy Day disappeared around the time that Dorothy Gottlieb became head of the public relations department first for Blank’s circuit of cinemas and eventually for the Central States Theater Corporation, aligned with Paramount, from 1933 to 1965.

See also: “Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925,” Special Dossier on Early US Newspaperwomen

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913-1916. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

---. Movie Mavens: Early US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021.

Advertisement. Des Moines Tribune (17 September 1918): n.p.

Day, Dorothy. “News of the Movies.” Des Moines Tribune (28 January 1916): 11.

---. “News of the Movies.” Des Moines Tribune (8 January 1918): 5.

---. “News of the Movies.” Des Moines Tribune (4 March 1919): 7.

---. “News of the Movies: Don’t Change Your Husband.Des Moines Tribune (18 February 1919): 10.

“This Page of Special Interest to Women.” Des Moines Capital (14 September 1914): 8.

Variety Obituaries. vol. 6, 1964-1968. New York: Garland, 1988.

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Dorothy Gottlieb." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-n7pk-3054>

Beulah Livingstone

by Richard Abel

Born and initially educated in Atlanta, Georgia, Beulah Livingstone moved to New York City with her Jewish parents, Harry and Lucy Frank, and graduated from Ethical Culture Normal School (“Jewess Is Highest Salaried Publicity Director”). For a few years she taught kindergarten and also wrote newspaper articles for the New York Sun and the New York American as well as sold short stories to the New York Tribune. With savings, she took a trip to Europe, where she conducted celebrity interviews and met Sarah Bernhardt’s leading man, Lou Tellegen, who hired her as his press agent (“Woman’s World”). Soon after opening her own office for freelance publicity work in New York, Livingstone counted Anna Pavlova, Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle, David Belasco, F. Ray Comstock, and other high-profile theatrical figures as clients.

In 1916, she was lured into the movie industry, joining the Thomas Ince company to head its New York publicity department and to promote the release of Civilization (“Larger Offices for ‘Civilization’ Staff”). A year later, Olga Petrova engaged Livingstone as her personal representative in charge of special publicity work for her feature films (“Petrova Organization Completed”). While serving Petrova Pictures, which included publishing the sheet music for the “Petrova Waltz” that accompanied Daughter of Destiny (1918) and writing a story version of The Light Within (1918) for Photoplay, Livingstone organized the star’s 1918 touring appearances in support of the War Savings Stamp Drive (“Petrova Starts on Nation-Wide Tour”). After briefly handling the publicity for En L’Air Cinema’s Romance of the Air (1918), on January 1, 1919, Joseph Schenck hired her as publicity director for the Norma Talmadge Film Company, headquartered in New York (“Miss Talmadge Gets New Press Agent”). A few months later, Livingstone also took on a similar role for the Constance Talmadge Film Company (“Representing Both Talmadges”).

As publicity director for two of the biggest Hollywood stars of the time, Livingstone now ranked at the top of her profession. In 1921, she accompanied Norma on a tour of First National’s foreign exchanges in England, France, and Italy. While in Europe, one task was to contract newspapers to publish “The Life Story of the Talmadges” in twenty installments (“Talmadge Press Agent to Europe”). While in Europe, Livingstone observed the local film output, and, in an article published in Filmplay entitled “Trailing the Movies Thru Europe,” she compared ordinary Germany productions to the high-quality imports such as Passion (1920), Deception (1920), and Gypsy Blood (1920) that had won such praise in the United States. Her appraisal was devastating but also wittily snobby:

The heroines of these average German pictures are fat, ponderous and dowdy. They wear cotton stockings and their gowns would be scoffed at by Elsie Ferguson’s maid. They saunter into obviously painted drawing rooms where the sets fairly reek of cheap, second-hand furniture. The stories are often disgustingly vulgar or lurid and tawdry. The clean, domestic melodramas, the healthy boy and girl love stories which are so dear to the Americans, are considered sentimental piffle by our German and French cousins. (qtd. in “German Motion Pictures”)

Returning to New York, Livingstone mounted special campaigns for each Talmadge sister in 1922. For Smilin’ Through (1922), she had the Fair Department Store in Chicago put up a prominent window display of “the 1869 bridal gown and the quaint traveling costume worn by Norma in the picture” (“Putting It Over”). A few months later, for Constance’s East is West, she urged Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel to decorate the lobby of his New York Rivoli Theatre to create a Chinese atmosphere for the film’s premiere (“Grand Premiere for ‘East Is West’). At the same time, Livingstone did far less lucrative gigs, organizing a visit to Sing Sing prison to screen Norma’s film Within the Law (1923) for the enthusiastic inmates (G. Hall). By then, Livingstone’s position also encompassed the Buster Keaton productions. By 1925, all three companies were part of Joseph M. Schenck Productions, which became affiliated with United Artists (Schenck was chairman of the Board of Directors), although contractual arrangements allowed First National to release Norma and Constance’s features for another year. The following year, Schenck made Livingstone director of United Artists’ editorial department for the Talmadge sisters, Mark Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore, and Buster Keaton. In this role, among other tasks, she supervised the selection of stories for all of these stars (“Beulah Livingstone Is in New U.A. Position).

In October 1926, the Associated Motion Picture Advertisers chose a dozen women “who had accomplished the most for the industry” (Spargo, “Pickford, Talmadge, and Mathis”). Seven were famous stars (the Talmadge sisters, Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Corinne Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Colleen Moore); four were major scenario writers (June Mathis, Anita Loos, Frances Marion, and Jeanie Macpherson); the only other influential figure was Beulah Livingstone. In a telegram, she wrote: “I deeply appreciate the Associated Motion Picture Advertisers’ kindness in placing me in such distinguished company and trust” (qtd. in Spargo, “Eberhardt Gets Telegrams”). After Schenck made her the “publicity director of all the West Coast feature productions” released through United Artists in 1927 (Starr), numerous newspaper stories described her as “the highest paid publicity woman in the United States” (“Her Publicity Pays Her”). Livingstone served in that position for the next ten years, reserving her barbed wit for the competition: when, at a party, Jesse Lasky boasted that “in some ten years Hollywood would be the center of culture,” she “remarked mildly‘Oh, yes—of horti-culture’” (Herzog). In 1936, she moved to Universal Pictures, taking charge of its feature publicity department, and one of her first coups was get New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to grant an interview with starlet Deanna Durbin (Martin). In 1939, after publishing Remembering Valentino: Reminiscences of the World’s Greatest Lover (1938), Livingstone also became the publicity director of the Film Alliance of the U.S. Inc., which planned to release a dozen British and French films annually in the United States (“Beulah Livingstone Obtains New Post”). When she died in New York City in January 1975, the Detroit Free Press named her the “agent for film stars Rudolph Valentino, Lupe Velez, Bela Lugosi and many others” (“Deaths Elsewhere”).

Throughout her career, Livingstone showed a great interest in contemporary social and political issues. In 1921, she was vice president of the Lucy Stone League, which sought “to assure to married women the legal right to retain their maiden names” and, consequently, to change laws that forced them to use their husbands’ names for legal documents (M. Hall). With other industry women, she also founded a “Woman Pays” club that met weekly to interview celebrities. By 1948, the club had 200 members (Livingstone was honorary president) and was inviting important figures such as Dr. Kinsey to give talks to the group (Grether).

Livingstone also actively encouraged young women to try their hand at publicity work in the film industry. Unsurprisingly, given her own beginnings, she saw a connection between the profession and other journalistic endeavors, suggesting in 1922 that:

A good way to break into motion picture publicity is to cultivate a snappy idiomatic style and start in via the motion picture magazine route. They will always take interesting articles about stars, and as the “fan” magazines are taken by the publicity departments of all motion picture companies, your stuff will come beneath the eye of the director. Then, when you apply for a job your name will not be quite unknown. (qtd. in Talmadge)

“I think publicity is the coming game for women,” she added, and “I call it a ‘game’ because it is a fascinating one.”

See also: Mabel Condon, Leila Lewis

Bibliography

“Beulah Livingstone Dies.” New York Times (14 January 1975): 35.

“Beulah Livingstone Is in New U.A. Position. Exhibitors Herald (17 April 1926): 22.

“Beulah Livingstone Obtains New Post.” Brooklyn Eagle (24 March 1939): 11.

“Deaths Elsewhere.” Detroit Free Press (15 January 1975): 10.

“German Motion Pictures.” Nebraska State Journal (29 January 1922): 21.

“Grand Premiere for ‘East Is West.’” Motion Picture News (9 September 1922): 1250.

Grether, Grace. “Club Women Talk to Dr. Kinsey.” Salt Lake Tribune (11 November 1948): 14.

Hall, Gladys. “The Diary of a Professional Movie Fan.” Washington Star (31 May 1923): 44.

Hall, Marian. “Wives Battle for Maiden Name.” Bismarck Tribune (2 June 1921): 1.

“Her Publicity Pays Her.” Rochester Sunday Democrat and Chronicle (15 April 1928): 3.10.

Herzog, Dorothy. “Backstage at Hollywood.” Waterloo Courier (16 March 1929): 12.

“Jewess Is Highest Salaried Publicity Director.” American Israelite [Cincinnati] (12 July 1923): 4.

“Larger Offices for ‘Civilization’ Staff in New York.” Motion Picture News (1 July 1916): 4040.

Martin, Mildred. “Camera Angles on Film Folk.” Philadelphia Inquirer (29 December 1936): 6.

“Miss Talmadge Gets New Press Agent.” Motion Picture News (11 January 1919): 250.

“Petrova Organization Completed.” Moving Picture World (15 September 1917): 1721.

“Petrova Starts on Nation-Wide Tour Selling W.S. Stamps.” Exhibitors Herald (6 July 1918): 20.

“Putting It Over.” Film Daily (14 June 1922): 2.

“Representing Both Talmadges in New York.” Exhibitors Herald and Motography (17 May 1919): 35.

Spargo, John S. “Eberhardt Gets Telegrams and Letters from 12 Immortals.” Exhibitors Herald (13 November 1926): 38.

---.  “Pickford, Talmadge, and Mathis Head New A.M.P.A. List.” Exhibitors Herald (16 October 1926): 44.

Starr, Jimmy. “cinematters.” Los Angeles Record (27 May 1927): 19.

Talmadge, Constance. “Film Professions: Publicity Writer.” Oakland Tribune (9 July 1922): W3.

“Talmadge Press Agent to Europe.” Oklahoma City Times (29 June 1921): 36.

“Woman’s World: A Young Pioneer in a New Field for Women.” Greenwood [South Carolina] Journal (2 December 1914): 6.

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Beulah Livingstone." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-920t-be44>

Audrie Alspaugh

by Richard Abel

Born and raised in “a small Iowa town” (Chase), Audrie Alspaugh graduated from the University of Iowa with an English degree in 1909 and two years later was hired as a book reviewer at the Chicago Tribune. In July 1914, she began signing a daily film review column, “Today’s Best Photo Play Stories,” with the nom de plume of Kitty Kelly. Soon after, she retitled the column “Flickerings from Filmland.”

Kelly exhibited an exuberant writing style, spinning out tongue-in-cheek metaphors, neologisms, and syntactic tangles, and her evident love of language sometimes verged on showboating. In early March 1915, for example, she invited female readers to share her tongue-in-cheek delight with a press release puffing Francis X. Bushman’s addition of “an amethyst colored automobile to his collection of ‘jewels’” with: “My Goodness Gracious Girls! Isn’t He Lovely!” (“Flickerings from Filmland” [4 March 1915]). Yet her own sense of judgment and taste was always so perceptive that her criticism often served to “train” fans in what to look for while watching movies. In May 1915, she summed up her critical principles in a review of Stolen Goods (1915): what mattered was not only the quality of acting and characterization in the leading roles (here, Blanche Sweet) but also a film’s narrative construction, atmosphere, and editing—attributed in this case to the scenario writer Margaret Turnbull and director George Melford (“Flickerings from Filmland: STOLEN GOODS”). A year later, she defended Lois Weber’s Where Are My Children? (1916), a “problem play” about contraception and abortion that was implicitly about class and gender relations and revealed the unstated assumptions of the eugenics movement (“Flickerings from Filmland: Where Are My Children?”). One of Kelly’s more intriguing columns was an unexpected, intelligent review of Hugo Münsterberg’s 1916 book The Photoplay. She highlighted his defense of motion pictures as a new medium of art that not only could achieve a harmonious form in and of itself but one that also created an immersive psychological parallel to human consciousness (“Flickerings from Filmland: Handing One to the High Brows”).

For more than a year, Kelly closed her Tribune columns with a wittily captioned list—i.e., “Zowie” and “Why Exhibitors Go Insane”—of what the Chicago censors ordered to be cut or banned from the films soon due for release. These lists constitute a rare treasure trove of censorship data. Presumably, they can be accepted as accurate; otherwise, the censors would have forced her to discontinue them.

The Tribune thought so highly of Kelly that it took the unusual opportunity, in late April 1916, to promote her columns with a rare half-page advertisement (Advertisement). However, several months later, in October 1916, Kitty Kelly’s name disappeared from the Chicago Tribune altogether. Her daily “Flickerings from Filmland” column reappeared the following year in the Chicago Examiner. For a year or so, she stuck to reviewing new films, but by mid-1918, after William Randolph Hearst merged the Examiner with the Herald, she also was editing a page titled “The Screen” in the new Sunday edition, which had the largest circulation in the city. One of her Sunday columns appealed directly to movie fans by inviting them to submit short reviews of the film she had chosen for the week; each of the winning reviews would be printed in the weekly “Lay Critics’ Corner,” and the writers paid a dollar (“Be Your Own Critic”).

The Herald and Examiner is not digitized beyond April 1918, so it is difficult to research Kelly’s work beyond that date. Quotes from her reviews in Tribune theater ads, however, reveal that her columns continued at least through April 1919. Although I recently discovered that the University of Illinois Library holds microfilm of the Chicago Herald and Examiner, from May 1918 into the 1930s, the Covid-19 pandemic has kept me from consulting that microfilm. Whether Kelly continued to write regularly for Chicago newspapers, on the movies or other subjects, is unclear.

In October 1915, Alspaugh had married the Tribune’s features page editor, Al Chase, and they announced their wedding in a comic film script dubbed a “reel romance” (McQuade 1286; “It Can Be Done”). Chase later served as the Tribune’s financial and then real estate editor; once he retired, they moved to Willow Brook farm near Glen Ellyn, Illinois. In 1956, either before or shortly after Chase died, perhaps as a tribute to her long love of American wildlife, Alspaugh bequeathed their 43-acre farm to the DuPage county forest preserve, which converted the tract into a wild animal refuge. When she herself died in November 1965, she had been living with friends, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Julius, northwest of San Antonio, Texas. In a brief obituary, the Pittsburgh Press referred to her as “the nation’s first movie critic […] under the pen name of ‘Kitty Kelly’” (“Obituaries”).

See also: “Newspaperwomen and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925,” Special Dossier on Early US Newspaperwomen

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913-1916. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

---. Movie Mavens: Early US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming.

Advertisement. Chicago Sunday Tribune (30 April 1916): 7.4.

“Audrie Chase, Once Tribune Writer, Dies.” Chicago Tribune (21 November 1965): IB.16.

Chase, Audrie Alspaugh. “In Memoryland.” Chicago Tribune (16 March 1961): 16.

“It Can Be Done: A Reel Romance.” Chicago Sunday Tribune (31 October 1915): 2.3.

Kelly, Kitty. “Be Your Own Critic.” Chicago Herald and Examiner (17 September 1918): 5.6.

---. “Flickerings from Filmland.” Chicago Tribune (4 March 1915): 8.

---. “Flickerings from Filmland: Handing One to the High Brows.” Chicago Tribune (29 April 1916): 16.

---. “Flickerings from Filmland: STOLEN GOODS.” Chicago Tribune (25 May 1915): 18.

---. “Flickerings from Filmland: Where Are My Children?Chicago Tribune (31 July 1916): 11.

---. “Flickerings from Filmland: WILD LIFE.” Chicago Tribune (2 March 1915): 10.

McQuade, Jas S. “Chicago Film Brevities.” Moving Picture World (13 November 1915): 1285-7.

“Obituaries.” Pittsburgh Press (22 November 1965): 53.

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Audrie Alspaugh." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-7azf-m970>

Stefania Zahorska

by Agata Frymus

Stefania Zahorska was one of the most respected Polish film critics of the interwar period. Her pioneering approach toward moving pictures, which she considered to be a new artistic form, arose from her background as an art scholar. Fascinated by Impressionism and painting that moved away from literal representation toward abstraction, she saw a similar potential in avant-garde filmmaking. For Zahorska, an ideal film formula would arise from a “mixture of poetics, montage and documentary” (Rees 12).

Zahorska was born Stefania Ernestyna Leser in Cracow to a middle-class family of assimilated Polish Jews. At the time, the city was part of Austro-Hungary. After the death of her mother, presumably when she was still a teenager (no death records survive), Zahorska relocated to Budapest where she lived with her older sister Helena. Her years in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire proved to be formative; Zahorska mastered the Hungarian language—later in life, she also became fluent in English, German, and French—and, after seeing the works of Cezanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, discovered her passion for painting. After spending two or three years as a medical student, she enrolled in the department of Art History at Jagiellonian University, back in her hometown of Cracow. Zahorska’s dissertation, which examined the aesthetics of the early Enlightenment in Poland, was defended sometime between 1917 and 1919, just over twenty years after the University opened its gates to female students. A doctorate was, as Anna Clarke notes, still “a rather unusual distinction for women” at that time (419). Looking back, Zahorska explained that her decision to study art was influenced by the urban landscape of Cracow, especially the awe-inspiring beauty of Wawel Royal Castle, and the city’s old townhouses (Zahorska, “Przełomy mego pokolenia”).

Sometime after completing her PhD, Zahorska moved to Warsaw, the capital of the newly-independent Republic of Poland, where her career as a writer and a columnist flourished. In 1924 and 1925, Zahorska worked as the editor of the art section of Przegląd Warszawski [Warsaw’s Review]. In the following year, as she started writing for Wiadomości Literackie [Literary News], Zahorska began to extend her critical focus to the possibilities and limitations of the cinematic medium. Even though the magazine had a rather limited circulation, hardly exceeding 15,000 copies per week, its cultural impact was significant (Zawiszewska 131). Wiadomości Literackie published works by leading writers and intellectuals of the era. While the levels of illiteracy were relatively high at the time—with almost 38% of Polish women unable to read or write in 1921 (Paczkowski 17)—the magazine’s readership consisted almost entirely of Warsaw cultural elite, and the reviews pertaining to film, theater, and art exhibitions rarely included events held beyond the Polish capital.

One of Stefania Zahorska’s articles, titled “Film and Poetry” (1928), in KinoTeatr.

This high-brow status enjoyed by Wiadomości Literackie points to the sophisticated nature of Zahorska’s writings, which did not focus simply on plot synopses, but often interrogated the issues inherent to art theory and the capacities of the cinematic medium. She was a proponent of photogénie, a film theory developed in France by Man Ray, Henri Chomette, and, most importantly, Jean Epstein, himself a Polish émigre. A complex concept, photogénie related to the very essence of film art, which could not simply be captured by the analysis of the visual layer of the film. Mary Ann Doane affirms that “photogénie is designed to account for that which is inarticulable, that which exceeds language and hence points to the very essence of cinematic specificity” (89).

The titles of Zahorska’s articles, which furnished the pages of various magazines, are in themselves a good indication of her intellectual ambition. Headlines such as “Experimental Film,” “Film and Poetry,” “Film of Abstraction,” “Formal Issues of Film,” and “Narrative or Abstraction?” reveal the ideas about cinema’s specific nature that inspired her the most. The ideal cinema that emerged from Zahorska’s essays disposed of narrative structures in favor of experimentation with movement, tempo, and rhythm; she considered moving pictures to have more in common with music than the visual arts, due to the fact that film could engage with varying speeds and temporal durations:

After all, film is a thing similar to a musical composition. […] What is unfortunate is that directors, most often then not, do not have a feel for the musical composition of the whole. They are not aware of the compositional importance of the of lyrical moments; they cannot measure the doses; they cannot contrast. Fascinated by the situations they put their characters in, and seduced by the charms of their primadonnas, they keep on grueling in the bland expansiveness. They are stuck in the sticky, slimy smudge of sentiments. IF Greta Grabo can perversely pout her lips, then they ask her to do it fifteen times per hour. (Zahorska, “Film i liryka”)

The covers of magazines that published Stefania Zahorska’s columns. Courtesy of Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa [Digital Library of Greater Poland] and Digital Library of Małopolska, respectively.

Zahorska also found the works of Francis Picabia and René Clair particularly inspiring, admiring their abstract, stylistic innovations and the ways in which they portrayed the play between light and shadow (Zahorska, “Kubizm i jego pochodne”; Kuc 109). In other words, Zahorska saw cinema as a groundbreaking medium that, through experimentation in form, structure, and montage, was capable of much more than serving as means for narrative storytelling (Zahorska, “Treść czy abstrakcja?”).

Undated personal document. The photograph is used as the cover of Maja Elżbieta Cybulska’s Potwierdzone istnienie. Archiwum Stefanii Zahorskiej (1988).

While Zahorska’s professional life blossomed, her personal life was teeming with turmoil. Sometime in her early thirties—in the beginning of the 1920s—the journalist married an officer of the First Brigade, Bohdan Zahorski. (In the Polish language, family names change their endings depending if the first name is male [-i or -y] or female [-a]. So, the last name “Zahorska” is a female variant of “Zahorski.”) Very little is known of Zahorska’s private matters, and most of the existing information about this relationship is extrapolated from surviving correspondence. According to letters to Leonia Jabłonkówna, Zahorska’s long-term editorial assistant and friend, her marriage was dictated by a passionate, yet very short-lived love. Soon after leaving Zahorska for another woman, Zahorski developed a serious health condition, probably Parkinson’s disease. In Jabłonkówna’s account, the rapid deterioration of her ex-husband’s health was, to Zahorska, a tragedy greater than his betrayal, which is evidenced by the fact she maintained regular correspondence with the woman who took her place beside Zahorski (Cybulska 20). The women discussed possible treatments, hoping to save Zahorski from falling into a depression and taking his own life, which, unfortunately, he ultimately did. Zahorska’s tragic romantic involvement with Zahorski served as the basis for the fictionalized relationship portrayed in her debut novel Korzenie [Roots], which was published in 1937.

Stefania Zahorska at a conference in June 1930. Courtesy of the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive] of Poland.

Throughout the 1920s, Zahorska often expressed her disappointment in the national film product and worked to legitimize both filmmaking and film analysis as worthy of study. As a critic, she reasoned that the poor quality of Polish films could be blamed on low standards of scriptwriting and a lack of talented professionals within the young industry (Zahorska, “Film w naftalinie”). She lamented the fact that no educational institutions in the country taught filmmaking as a subject (a situation that remained unchanged until 1948). Zahorska was also involved in popularizing film analysis as an academic discipline in its own right. For instance, she gave a presentation on aesthetic and formal properties of cinema at the Philosophy Conference in 1927 in Warsaw.

Stefania Zahorska in 1934. Courtesy of the Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive] of Poland.

In the 1930s, Zahorska concentrated her intellectual efforts primarily on film criticism, and she continued to challenge the national industry. At the time, the notion of nationhood resonated particularly loudly in Poland, which had gained independence from German, Austrian, and Russian empires only twelve years earlier. She often criticized Polish film productions for their triviality and sentimentalism, deeming the vision of the nation they propagated as problematic. “When the wars end, and when the map of Poland placed itself on the screens, in all its glory, the director looks around, anxiously, at the Polish reality, and all he can see is military parades. Where is the Poland that lives, works and progresses after wars, and independently from military parades?” she asked in a 1935 article in Wiadomości Literackie (Zahorska [title unknown]).

Initially, Zahorska was somewhat skeptical about the popularization of talkies, which occurred a few years later in Poland than in the United States (Hendrykowska 121). In her writing, she framed sound as a potential distraction from the moving image. “Cinema,” she suggested in an article from 1930, “requires more variety, as well as more limitations of its separate elements” (qtd. in Radkiewicz 340). Soon, however, she changed her mind, believing that this added dimension could be incorporated into the plot with productive results, creating a more authentic diegesis (Zahorska, “Sprawy i sprawki XI muzy”).

Fully aware of the dangers she faced as a woman of Jewish heritage, Zahorska left Warsaw for Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War. After spending a year in France, she then went to London, where she resided for the remaining twenty years of her life. An emigrant status never stopped her from engaging with the cultural life of her home country. She was a founder of the Association of Polish Writers in London, and, from 1950 onward, she co-wrote (with Adam Pragier) a regular cultural column titled “Puszka Pandory” [Pandora’s Box] for Wiadomości Literackie. In addition to being a frequent collaborator, Pragier was Zahorska’s longtime partner. To her own disappointment, Zahorska did not live long enough to see the fall of the Communist regime in Poland. Toward the end of her life, she wrote to one of her friends: “What will happen to our homeland, our Europe, our culture, our European tradition? […] All values, it seems to me, are under threat” (qtd. in Lisiewicz).

Stefania Zahorska via Wikimedia Commons (Jszeredi / CC BY-SA).

The sheer volume of Zahorska’s output, combined with her intellectual curiosity, earned her the title of “the most inquisitive observer of Polish silent film” (Lubelski 43-44). Despite being grounded in international, contemporary debates on cinema, and garnering acclaim for her witty, sharp prose, Zahorska is virtually unknown outside of her native country. To date, her rich oeuvre remains accessible only to Polish speakers. Additionally, some issues of the magazines that she wrote for, namely Kino-Teatr and Wiadomośći Literackie, have been digitized, but the vast majority remain unsearchable and difficult to access. This points to the difficulties we must face while trying to insert Zahorska, and other women like her, into a broader history of international film criticism.

See also: Nina Niovilla

The author wishes to thank Monash University, Malaysia.

Bibliography

Clarke, Anna. “Stefania Zahorska and Her World.” The Polish Review vol. 45, no. 4 (2000): 417-433.

Cybulska, Elżbieta Maja. Potwierdzone istnienie: archiwum Stefanii Zahorskiej. London: PFK, 1988.

Doane, Mary Ann. “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies no. 14, vol. 3 (2003): 89-111.

Furgał, Ewa. Krakowski szlak kobiet. Kraków: Fundacje Przestrzeń Kobiet, 2011. [Also available at http://www.herstorie.pl/kobiety/].

Hendrykowska, Małgorzata. Kronika kinematografii polskiej 1895–1997. Poznań: Ars Nova, 1999.

Kuc, Kamila. Visions of Avant-Garde Film: Polish Cinematic Experiments from Expressionism to Constructivism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

Lisiewicz, Piotr. “Pandora w lustrze.” Nowe Państwo no. 5, vol. 51 (2010). https://www.panstwo.net/1849-pandora-w-lustrze.

Lubelski, Tadeusz. Historia kina polskiego: Twórcy, filmy, konteksty. Katowice: Videograf II, 2009.

Paczkowski, Andrzej. Prasa polska w latach 19181939. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo PWN, 1980.

Pilch, Anna. Symbolika form i kolorów. O krytyce artystycznej Stefanii Zahorskiej. Warszawa: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2004.

Radkiewicz, Małgorzata. “Galicyjskie kobiety w polskiej kulturze filmowej lat dwudziestych i trzydziestych XX wieku.” Przeglad Kulturoznawczy, no. 3, vol. 21 (2015): 336-352.

Rees, A.L. “The Themersons and the Polish Avant-Garde.” In The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film 1916-1989. Eds. Kamila Kuc and Michael O’Pray. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 7-30.

Skaff, Sheila. The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896-1939. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008.

Szpakowska, Małgorzata. ‘Wiadomości Literackie’ prawie dla wszystkich. Warszawa: Wydawinctwo W.A.B., 2012.

Zahorska, Stefania. “Drogi rozwojowe filmu.” Miesięcznik Literacki no. 5 (1930).

---. “Film abstrakcyjny.” Wiek XX no. 8 (1928).

---. “Film eksperymetalny.” Kino-Teatr no. 10 (1929).

---. “Film i liryka.” Kino-Teatr no. 3 (1928).

---. “Film w naftalinie.” Wiek XX no. 3 (1928).

---. “Kubizm i jego pochodne.” Południe. Kwartalnik Ilustrowany no. 1, vol. 3 (1924): 31-51.

---. “Przełomy mego pokolenia.” Wiadomości Literackie  no. 35 (1957): 2.

---. “Samoobrona głupoty.” Film i Kino no. 13 [supplement for Głos Prawdy] (1929).

---. “Sprawy i sprawki XI muzy.” Wiadomości Literackie no. 45 (1930).

---. “Treść czy abstrakcja?” Wiek XX no. 13 (1928).

---. “Zagadnienia formalne filmu.” Wiadomościi Literackie no. 52 (1931).

---. [Title Unknown]. Wiadomości Literackie no. 13 (31 March 1935).

Zawiszewska, Agata. “Komunikacja prasowa a komunikacja literacka: na przykładzie Wiadomości Literackich (1924-1939).”  Media–Kultura–Komunikacja Społeczna vol. 1 (2005): 121-136.

Citation

Frymus, Agata. "Stefania Zahorska." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6mq0-h451>

Gemma Bellincioni

by Valeria Festinese

An opera singer turned film actress, screenwriter, director, and producer, Gemma Bellincioni was born in the Italian city of Monza on August 18, 1864. Both of her parents were opera singers, and Bellincioni made her own theatrical debut at age six (Baccioni 4). Her first leading role was in Carlo Pedrotti’s opera “Tutti in maschera,” which opened in Naples in November 1880. Critics were immediately impressed by her stage presence. Following this performance, Bellincioni began touring around Italy and the world, appearing in many different operas.

Gemma Bellincioni as Carmen, photographed by Giacomo Brogi, c. 1894. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Philip Hale Photograph Collection/Digital Commonwealth.

Bellincioni became a world-renowned opera diva who, in addition to performing, composed two opera libretti during her career. Her soprano voice was recorded in the early 1900s, first for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company in Milan in 1903 and then for Pathé in Paris in 1905 (Scott). Bellincioni’s last opera role was the lead in Richard Strauss’s “Salomè” at the Opéra national de Paris in 1911 (D’Amico 201). In her autobiography, she later wrote that “after this creation I realized that I had nothing more to give to art and to the public and that the public had nothing more to expect from me…and, despite the insistent proposals, I said to myself: enough!” (G. Bellincioni 137). She was forty-seven years old. At the end of her musical career, Bellincioni started to teach singing, first in Berlin, until 1914, and then in Rome at the Santa Cecilia Conservatoire.

While there was a close relationship between opera, theater, and early Italian cinema, the presence of female opera singers on screen in the first decades of the twentieth century was not that common. As Elena Mosconi writes, “It is well known that at this time in Italy, many actors made the transition from the theatrical stage to the cinema, in the hope of better financial conditions. Film actresses came mainly from the theatre, where they had done their apprenticeship. But despite the surprising number of theatrical actresses who made their debut on screen between 1910 and 1920… the singers who came from the lyric stage were very few” (340). While we do not know Bellincioni’s reasons for choosing to work in this new field, she appears to have been one of only a handful of female opera singers who made the transition (Mosconi 340-344).

When Bellincioni started to work in film in the late 1910s, she was still quite famous. However, cinema history texts mention her only in passing or, more often, do not mention her at all. One of the reasons for this omission may be that all of the films she wrote, directed, and/or produced are lost and only one film in which she appeared is extant. Contemporary scholars are faced with the difficult task of evaluating and contextualizing Bellincioni’s work as an actress and as a filmmaker using only surviving primary documents, such as film reviews from the period.

Advertisement for Cavalleria rusticana (1916) in Cinemagraf no. 10 (May 28, 1916), p.2.

At the age of fifty-two, Bellincioni appeared for the first time on screen in Cavalleria rusticana (1916) and Suor Teresa (1916). Both were adaptations of operas, and both were directed by Ugo Falena at Tespi Film, a film company in Rome. The opera “Cavalleria Rusticana,” by Pietro Mascagni, had been a major success for Bellincioni as a singer when she performed it with her husband, Roberto Stagno, in 1890. In the film version, Bellincioni played Santuzza, the same character that she embodied on the stage. It is not surprising that she chose to make her cinematic debut with an adaptation of this opera or with this character. As Bellincioni recalled later in her autobiography: “Santuzza was a character that I have long dreamed of…which allowed me to reveal my true ideal of art to the public” (G. Bellincioni 108). Unfortunately, the film could not be advertised as an adaptation of Mascagni’s melodramatic opera because the author had sold the rights to another film company, Flegrea Film. Tespi Film dodged this problem by promoting the film in relation to the author of the opera’s literary source material, Giovanni Verga, who had given permission to use his work (Mosconi 342). Having the famous Bellincioni also helped; as Elena Mosconi notes, “the marketing strategy of Tespi was astute: the name of Gemma Bellincioni, considered to be the ultimate Santuzza, was enough to provide a direct reference to Mascagni’s opera” (342).

Cavalleria rusticana is the only Bellincioni film that partially survives today. The extant material, held at the Cinema Nazionale, in Rome, shows us that her acting style is exaggerated in some scenes, similar to the typical melodramatic style of that period, but more realistic and natural in other moments. At the time of the film’s release, critics praised her performance as Santuzza, but the public was not as enthusiastic, reportedly wanting a different actress in the role. According to one critic in Film: “Bellincioni shows all her magnificent intentions in acting, but the film audience wants younger and more charming actresses. Therefore, we have to note that her interpretation was of no interest to the public” (qtd. in Martinelli, Il cinema muto italiano 1916 87).

Part of a multipage spread on Suor Teresa (1916) in L’ Arte muta no. 6-7 (1916), p. 183.

Reviews for her performance in Suor Teresa, the second film in which she appeared, were more positive, however. For example, one critic wrote that Bellincioni’s appearance on screen “leaves…a deep groove in the soul of every spectator” (“Il lavoro della Tespi Film”). A second unnamed critic, writing a year later, observed that “[another] very important element of this sensational success of this film is the intelligent and suggestive interpretation of Gemma Bellincioni. Sober, elegant, harmonious in the gesture, very effective in the expression of the face” (La Cine-Fono). And a third critic noted that “the aching heroine is played by Mrs. Gemma Bellincioni, whose sublime and powerful dramatic art is very beneficial to the film” (Fasanelli).

Advertisement for Donna Lisa (1917) in Film no. 11 (1918), p. 13.

In March 1917, the film press announced that Bellincioni had created her own film company, called Gemma Film, in Rome (La cinematografia italiana ed estera [1917]). The company’s first film was Donna Lisa (1917), which also marked Bellincioni’s directorial debut. This move to directing did not mean that she stopped acting, and she often appeared in her own films. Between 1917 and 1919, Bellincioni produced four films that she also directed (besides Donna Lisa, she directed Il prezzo della felicità, Vita traviata, and La baronessa Daria, all from 1918), as well as two others—Fiamme avvolgenti (1918) and La leggenda dei tre fiori (1919)—directed by Eduardo Bencivenga. Bellincioni was also the screenwriter for La leggenda dei tre fiori. In 1919, her film company changed its name to Bellincioni Film, and Gemma began directing her own scenarios. The first films she directed, produced, and wrote, advertised as “passional [sic] and dramatic,” were not critically acclaimed, but the public viewed them favorably (Martinelli, “Les metteuses-en-scène” 24).

Portrait of Gemma Bellincioni in Vittorio Martinelli’s Il cinema muto italiano 1920 (1995), p. 159. The caption in the book reads: “Gemma Bellincioni, director and interpreter of Giovanna I d’Angiò, regina di Napoli.”

The most popular at the time of its release was Giovanna I d’Angiò, regina di Napoli (1920), which also starred Bellincioni. The scenario for this film is located in the Luigi Chiarini Library at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, in Rome, and this remarkable document includes numerous photographs and text in French, English, and German. The narrative focuses on a woman who was once a queen. What emerges from reading the scenario is a complex female character, with fears and weaknesses, who must deal with the passage of time, and, consequently, with her decaying beauty and desire to be a mother. Giovanna I d’Angiò, regina di Napoli is the only film of Bellincioni’s that received all positive reviews, and, three years after its premiere, it was reportedly still playing in some Italian cinemas, such as Cinema Edison in Parma (Gianni). The film was appreciated for its thorough historical details and, above all, for Bellincioni’s ability to play the role of the queen from youth—even though she was fifty-six years old at the time—to old age. There were problems with the Italian censors, however, and a scene in which the queen is assassinated by suffocation was ultimately cut, according to the Italia Taglia project database of censorship information (“Giovanna Iª d’Angiò”), although a still from the scene remains in the archived scenario.

In September 1920, Gemma Film was sold (La cinematografia italiana ed estera [1920]), and, in 1921, Bellincioni created another film company called BiancaGemma Film. Like fellow Italian Elvira Notari did with Dora Film, Bellincioni used her daughter’s name for her company. At BiancaGemma Film, Bellincioni produced and directed six films starring her daughter, Bianca Stagno Bellincioni, who was a famous actress after a short career as an opera singer. At BiancaGemma Film, Bellincioni was also responsible for the commercial distribution of the films, selling the rights to Aurea Film, who exported them all over the world. She also acquired the literary rights to the work of the writer Maurizio Nordak (Martinelli, “Les metteuses-en-scène” 24).

Advertisement for Tatiana, la danzatrice polacca (1921) in Corriere del cinematografo no. 2 (February 1921), p. 5.

Reviews of these mother-daughter collaborations often focused positively on Bianca’s beauty while criticizing the narrative or technical aspects of these films. Writing about Tatiana, la danzatrice polacca (1921) in La rivista cinematografica, Aldo Gabrielli disliked the subject matter, but seemed to like Bianca’s beauty and Bellincioni’s direction and photography:

This is one of those films that say[s] nothing from the point of view of the subject, but that say[s], as they are [directed], what Italian artistic taste can also be in the cinema. […] The subject says nothing: it creates nothing, concludes nothing, and demonstrates less than nothing, [and] in reality demonstrates something: the cerebral anemia of cinematographic writers. I’m talking about the film only because Gemma Bellincioni has spread such beauty in every shot that I have rarely been able to praise so much in other films. […] [A] film destined to be nothing [became] something thanks to Gemma Bellincioni. (18-19, emphasis in original)

La principessa d’azzurro (1922), adapted by Bellincioni from a novel by Nordak, also received negative reviews (Scipio).

Bellincioni’s directing career effectively ended in 1923 with the Naples-set drama Satanica, which follows a tormented love affair between a poor, young couple. This film also had some trouble with the censors, and two scenes—one depicting seduction and one showing a stabbing—were cut, according to the Italia Taglia project database of censorship information (“Satanica”). After her film career ended, Bellincioni went back to teaching singing, opening a school in Vienna in 1930. She remained there for two years before returning to Italy, first to Siena and then to Naples, where she taught singing at the Conservatoire. Bellincioni’s return to musical education is not surprising given her pre-World War I teaching work (during which time she also wrote an instructional manual for singers that was published in 1912). She died in Naples on April 24, 1950, and is buried in the cemetery of Montenero in Livorno.

Despite the difficulty of reconstructing the plots of Bellincioni’s lost films, it appears that overall, out of the twelve films she directed at her three different companies, at least eight have a female character as the central protagonist. Some of these women show some shades of independence, but others follow the traditional model of womanhood set by the patriarchal society of the time. For example, in Papillon (1921), a frivolous woman is punished with death, and in Liana spezzata (1922), a poor girl cannot marry the man she loves because she does not belong to his social class. The most interesting and complex female character is certainly the protagonist of Giovanna I d’Angiò, regina di Napoli, who was based on the real-life Giovanna I d’Angiò, the queen of Naples from 1343 to 1381 and one of the first European women to reign by hereditary right. That Bellincioni chose to make a film about this revolutionary woman, who became queen at age sixteen, married her lover after killing her husband, and resisted the invasion of her kingdom, is telling. Although the queen was ultimately excommunicated and killed in prison, the archival film script shows us how Bellincioni tried to present a fascinatingly complex woman who faced numerous challenges and adversities.

Portrait of Gemma Bellincioni by Giacomo Brogi, date unknown. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

It is interesting to note that, in 1920, when Bellincioni published her autobiography, Io e il palcoscenico, about her life as an opera singer, she was still involved in the cinema industry. Yet despite this, she did not mention her film work at all. Perhaps she viewed opera as her “real” career and filmmaking as secondary, or maybe she was not fully satisfied with her productions. While her successful opera career seems to have eclipsed Bellincioni’s often poorly-received work as a film actress, director, producer, and screenwriter, her presence in the early Italian cinema industry should be valued because it demonstrates the enterprising spirit of a woman who was not afraid to experiment with a new art form and the different behind-the-scenes responsibilities it offered her.

Bibliography

Baccioni, Giovan Battista. Gemma Bellincioni. Biografia aneddotica. Palermo: Salvatore Biondo, 1902.

Bellincioni, Bianca Stagno. Roberto Stagno e Gemma Bellincioni intimi. Firenze: Monsalvato, 1943.

Bellincioni, Gemma. Io e il palcoscenico: trenta e un anno di vita artistica. Milano: Società Anonima Editoriale Dott. R. Quintieri, 1920.

D’Amico, Silvio. “Gemma Bellincioni.”  Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo. Vol. II. Rome: Le maschere, 1954. 199-202.

Fasanelli, Pio. “Suor Teresa.” La Cine-Fono no. 356 (1916): 124.

Gabrielli, Aldo. “Da Verona. Cinema Calzoni.” La rivista cinematografica no. 4 (25 February 1922): 18-19.

“Giovanna Iª d'Angiò, regina di Napoli.” Italia Taglia database [Bianca dati della Revisione Cinematografica/The Database of Cinematographic Review]. http://www.italiataglia.it/search/1913_1943.

“Il lavoro della Tespi Film.” La Cine-Fono no. 334 (1916): 110.

La Cine-Fono no. 345 (1917): 98.

La cinematografia italiana ed estera (15 March 1917): 60.

La cinematografia italiana ed estera (20 September 1920): VI.

Gianni. “De Parma.” La rivista cinematografica no. 13 (10 July 1924): 40.

Martinelli, Vittorio. Il cinema muto italiano 1916I film della Grande Guerra. 1916. Vol. 1. Rome: Nuova ERI Edizioni RAI, 1992.

---. Il cinema muto italiano 1918. I film della Grande Guerra. 1918. Rome: Nuova ERI Edizioni RAI, 1991.

---. Il cinema muto italiano 1920. I film del dopoguerra. 1920. Rome: Nuova ERI Edizioni RAI, 1995.

---. “Les metteuses-en-scène.” In Cinema 60: mensile di cultura cinematografica no. 141 (September-October 1981): 20-25.

Mosconi, Elena. “Silent Singers: The Legacy of Opera and Female Stars and Early Italian Cinema.” In Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives. Eds. Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, and Lucia Tralli. Bologna: University of Bologna and University of Melbourne, 2013. 334-352.

“Satanica.” Italia Taglia database [Banca dati della Revisione Cinematografica/The Database of Cinematographic Review]. http://www.italiataglia.it/search/1913_1943.

Scipio. “Da Bologna. Cinema Modernissimo.” La rivista cinematografica vol. IV, no. 4 (25 February 1923): 31.

Scott, Michael. The Record of Singing, vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977. [See also: The Record of Singing, 1899-1952: The Very Best of Vols. 1–4. CD. EMI Classics, 2009.]

Archival Paper Collections: 

Scenario, Giovanna I d'Angiò, regina di Napoli (1920). Luigi Chiarini Library, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

Advertisements used to illustrate this profile were accessed from the Museo Nazionale del Cinema's digitized “Riviste e monografie del cinema muto italiano” collection.

Citation

Festinese, Valeria. "Gemma Bellincioni." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-qn78-9210>

Ruth Gould Dolesé

by Martin L. Johnson

One of the sharpest critiques of the cinema in the late aughts and early 1910s came from Progressive reformers, who sought to regulate both the spaces where movies were seen, particularly the “nickel” shows in poor, urban areas, and the stories and images presented in the cinema. But in addition to pushing for commercial regulation of the picture show, reformers also dreamed of an “educational cinema,” which would take the most edifying films screened in theaters and bring them to other sites, including schools. Ruth Gould Dolesé, trained as an arts educator, and one of the early members of the New York Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures (later the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures and then the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures), was one of the key players in the creation of an educational motion picture sector in the United States. In particular, her establishment of the Educational Department at the General Film Company in 1911, and, that same year, her publication of the Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures made her a widely celebrated figure in the educational film movement, even though her early death in 1913 cut short a promising second career.

Ruth Ellen Gould was born in Delhi, New York, in 1868. The granddaughter and great-granddaughter of two United States congressmen (Herman D. Gould and Samuel Sherwood, respectively), Gould was a member of a prominent family in Delhi, a town of 3,000 people in upstate New York, ninety miles southeast of Albany. Her father, a railroad station agent, died in 1892. A few years later, Gould went to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she began her career as an arts educator.

By 1898, Gould was working for the largest publisher of arts curricula in the United States, the Louis Prang Company. Although Prang got his start as a producer of commercial art, including some of the first Christmas cards, in the 1880s he began to move into the field of education. In Massachusetts, where Prang’s company was based, educational reformers had successfully pushed a new approach to art instruction in primary and secondary schools, including an 1870 state law that required school systems to teach drawing. In 1882, seeking to capitalize on the growing trend of arts instruction, Prang hired Mary Dana Hicks, author of successful curricula, and began pushing her manual under the Prang brand (Stankiewicz 145).

For five years, between 1898 and 1903, Gould was an energetic promoter of the Prang curricula, giving talks at teacher’s institutes, conferences, and club events across the country, including in cities and towns in Iowa, Montana, California, and, most frequently, Pennsylvania. While it is not clear whether Gould was paid for these speeches, it appears that her primary objective was to convince school boards to adopt Prang materials and to hire her as their district’s “supervisor of drawing” (“Artist To Be Wedded”), a role she could take on as an occasional consultant rather than as a permanent, full-time position. During this period, she also studied with Denman Ross, the most prominent design theorist of the early twentieth century, at Harvard, taking a summer course with him that he created specifically for arts educators (Frank 218).

Logo for Ruth Gould’s advertising firm, printed in The Week in New York.

By 1904, Gould appears to have quit working for Prang in order to explore other opportunities. Now living in New York, she established several businesses, including, with her close friend and business associate Laura Skinner, a magazine titled The Week in New York that was published between 1904 and 1906, and the R.E. Gould Company, a printshop and advertising firm. Advertisements for the latter appeared in the pages of The Week in New York, which provided event listings for busy New Yorkers. While neither of these businesses experienced long-term success, they established Gould as an important figure in the city’s art scene, which likely made her an attractive candidate for inclusion in other local organizations. In 1907, Gould married Henry Dolesé, vice president of a stone manufacturing company in Chicago. While a wedding announcement suggested that the new couple was planning to travel to Europe, and then move to Chicago, there is no evidence that either occurred (“Miss Ruth E. Gould Weds”). Instead, Dolesé—she now used her husband’s last name—remained in New York City, traveling alone to London in 1909, and staying active in the arts in New York while Henry lived in Chicago. In February 1910, Dolesé signed a new will, leaving her jewelry and businesses to her friend, Laura Skinner, and any remaining property to her sister, Katherine Gleason (“Ruth Gould Dolese” 83).

In early 1909, Dolesé became active in the nascent motion picture reform movement, which was centered in New York City. In what is now seen as a seminal event in American cinema history, in late December 1908, New York City’s mayor, George B. McClellan Jr., ordered the shuttering of all the city’s movie theaters, joining a swelling campaign by New York Progressives to regulate the production and exhibition of motion pictures. Four months later, in March 1909, the People’s Institute—one of the leading social work organizations in the city—established a new organization, the New York Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, which would be the de facto censor for New York City and, because many film manufacturers were based in the city, the United States. From the start, the Board of Censorship relied on financing from the motion picture industry, particularly the newly established Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC), an effort by Thomas Edison to use patent law to secure control of the motion picture industry. While this financing tied the Board of Censorship to the film companies, particularly those in the MPPC, its members were also interested in using their political power to force the industry to make films appropriate for children, and to encourage exhibitors to improve conditions in their storefront theaters.

In addition to setting up facilities to review motion pictures, the reformers behind the Board of Censorship were also interested in continuing work on another front, the establishment of an educational motion picture industry. In June 1909, board members voted for salaried positions for secretaries to direct its film censorship operations as well as its educational, national, and local and civic outreach work. In that same meeting, the board proposed sending a representative to London to acquire a “set of Urban educational pictures,” referring to the catalog created by the British traveling exhibitor and distributor Charles Urban in 1906 (Meeting Notes).

A month earlier, in May 1909, Dolesé was in attendance at a meeting of the Board of Censorship, evidence that supports her later claims that she was one of the founding members of the organization (“Mayor Finds No Law”). While it is unclear why Dolesé was selected to be on the board, her membership in the National Arts Club, which had been established almost a decade earlier, might have been a factor. Concerned that its reliance on film manufacturers for financing would damage its reputation, the Board of Censorship sought out members from a cross-section of New York society, provided, of course, that these individuals believed in its platform of voluntary censorship, not state action. While the educational activities of the Board of Censorship were less prominent than the “seal of approval” title cards that were soon inserted before the start of many films, board members appeared to be concerned with defining a role for the group that went beyond doing damage control for the industry.

Although it is not known when Dolesé was named to the Board’s Censoring Committee, newspapers articles from 1910 list her as a member, and her membership is noted in meeting notes and letterhead several times in 1911. That same year, Dolesé gave interviews and made public appearances on behalf of the Board of Censorship. For example, in March 1911, Dolesé argued in a newspaper interview published in the New York Evening Telegram that motion pictures held “moral and intellectual value” for education as well as the home life of children (Bean).

Title page, Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures.

Later in 1911, Dolesé joined the General Film Company, the distribution arm of the MPCC, working as the head of the newly established Educational Department. While the Edison Film Company had long been interested in selling projectors and films to nontheatrical audiences, a broad category that included, per a 1906 ad, “fairs, schools, Y.M.C.A.’s, churches, [and] lodges,” it did not invest in making educational films until the early 1910s (Advertisement [Red Book Magazine]). At the same time, once Edison turned to educational cinema, it did so with fervor, claiming in a nationally circulated advertising campaign that the company was investing $3 million ($78 million adjusted for inflation) into the field (Advertisement [Seattle Star]). In September 1911, Dolesé published an editorial in the exhibitor trade publication Moving Picture World, which had started a column on educational film earlier that year. In her piece, Dolesé discussed the Educational Department and argued for the experiential value of motion pictures in the classroom:

Do you recall, as a child, the doubts that were foremost in your mind when you were told about some great natural phenomenon you had never seen? What does a mountain mean to a child who has never traveled beyond the boundary of the plains? What does the ocean mean to a child who dwells in the interior? A name only. And so we use pictures, photographs, drawings and paintings and they are helpful. But think what it means to see a motion picture! (Dolesé, “The Moving Picture as an Educator”)

One of Dolesé’s first, and most consequential, achievements in her new position was her creation of a film catalog, titled Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures, which was published at the end of 1911.

In effect, this catalog can be seen as an effort to reposition the MPPC’s films as educational, thus creating a market that Edison would go on to dominate. Dolesé claimed that she viewed 300,000 films in order to select the 684 titles that ultimately appeared in the catalog, an unlikely feat, but evidence of the task at hand (“Death of Mrs. Dolese”). While the subjects of the films listed in the Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures are similar to those in Charles Urban’s catalog, published five years earlier, Dolesé put considerable effort into making the catalog orderly, and designed it to be adapted to school curricula. The films are classified according to the Dewey Decimal System, featuring selections in seven of the ten classes outlined by Dewey: religion, sociology, natural science, useful arts, fine arts, literature, and history. Instead of giving the number of reels or feet of film, the catalog simply lists how many minutes it takes to view the film, which assumes that the operator is showing it at a standardized speed. All the films have short, descriptive titles, and are summarized in one sentence, giving it a certain economic poetry, as evinced by the following descriptions:

From the Field to the Cradle
Milk industry traced from farmer’s field and barn to the ultimate consumer—our baby (20);

Otter Hunt
Story of the pursuit and final capture of creatures whose fur we covet (29);

North Sea
In tempestuous mood, showing a wild sea with great foam covered waves. (15)

Sample pages from the religion and sociology film programs in the Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures.

The catalog’s most novel feature are its film programs, designed either for an evening’s entertainment for particular audiences, such as churches and schools, or for integration in school curricula. In these film programs, Dolesé reconceived the use of motion pictures by focusing on their quality as representations of “objects” to be studied beyond entertainment. For example, she listed films to supplement a forty-week course titled “‘A Progressive Road to Reading’ by Motion Pictures,” modeled after a popular curriculum, offering titles within general subjects such as “Toys,” “Animals,” “Birds,” and “Flowers” (62). Dolesé also created film programs for the audiences who might be interested in educational films, including programs on religion, sociology, and one that was just for “general entertainment” (63).

Most importantly, however, Dolesé’s catalog was backed by the General Film Company, which committed to keeping the films she selected in circulation. In a 1912 letter, she assured one concerned exhibitor that “the subjects in our library are sometimes a year or two old, but we have only new prints” (Dolesé [Letter to J. Pelzer]). As a result, Dolesé managed to take an industry that was based on novelty—new titles, constantly—and ensure that one small piece of it would instead be based on permanence.

Dolesé died in September 1913, and the Educational Department of the General Film Company closed soon after. The films she collected were eventually sold to the Beseler Film Company, and, through the 1920s, it was considered to be one of the largest collections of educational films. In Arthur Edwin Krows’s serialized history of educational film, published in Educational Screen in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he credits Dolesé with the “reclamation idea,” the notion that a business could be founded on the “salvage of theatrical films for non-theatrical exhibition” (154). Although short-lived, Dolesé’s work as an editor and catalog writer casts a considerable shadow, as many educators, film distributors, and exhibitors continued to speak fondly of her, and the catalog that became her legacy.

See also: Anita Maris Boggs

Bibliography

Advertisement. Red Book Magazine (November 1906): 150.

Advertisement. The Seattle Star (24 May 1912): 8.

“Artist To Be Wedded.” The Morning Call [Allentown, PA] (12 September 1907): 1.

Bean, Theodora. “Expects to See Moving Pictures Soon In Schools.” New York Evening Telegram (24 March 1911): 4.

Burchill, Georgine, William L. Ettinger, and Edgar Dubs Shimer. Progressive Road to Reading. Book One. New York: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1909.

Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures. New York: General Film Company, 1911.

“Death of Mrs. Dolese.” Schools (9 October 1913): 53.

Dewey, Melvil. Decimal Classification and Relative Index for Libraries, Clippings, Notes., etc. Sixth edition. Boston: Library Bureau, 1899.

Dolesé, R.G. Letter to J. Pelzer. September 7, 1912. Thomas A. Edison Papers, Rutgers University.

---. “The Moving Picture as an Educator: Its Possibilities at Last to be Realized.” [“Education and Science” column]. The Moving Picture World (9 September 1911): 707.  https://archive.org/stream/moviwor09chal#page/n723/mode/2up.

Frank, Marie Ann. Denman Ross and American Design Theory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011.

Gaycken, Oliver. “‘A Casual Glance Reveals a Perfect Mine of Treasures’: George Kleine’s Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures (1910).” In The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. Eds. Marina Dahlquist and Joel Frykholm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 147-163.

Keeler, Amanda R. “John Collier, Thomas Edison and the Educational Promotion of Moving Pictures.” In Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema. Eds. Marta Braun, Charles Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 117-125.

Krows, Arthur Edwin. “Motion Pictures—Not for Exhibition.” Educational Screen (May 1939): 153-56.

“Mayor Finds No Law To Stop Fight Pictures.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (9 July 1910): 1.

Meeting Notes. June 8, 1909, National Board of Review Collection, New York Public Library.

“Miss Ruth E. Gould Weds.” The New York Times (5 October 1907): 11.

Monaghan, E. Jennifer. “Gender and Textbooks: Women Writers of Elementary Readers, 1880-1950.” Publishing Research Quarterly 10 (1994): 28-46.

Rosenbloom, Nancy J. “Between Reform and Regulation: The Struggle over Film Censorship in Progressive America, 1909-1922.” Film History vol. 1, no. 4 (1987): 307–325.

“Ruth Gould Dolese.” Record of Wills, 1665-1916; Index to Wills, 1662-1923. [online database] #0989-0991, 1913-14. pp. 79-84. http://ancestry.com.

Stankiewicz, Mary Ann. Developing Visual Arts Education in the United States: Massachusetts Normal Art School and the Normalization of Creativity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Archival Collections:

National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division,  New York Public Library.

Thomas A. Edison Papers, Rutgers University.

Citation

Johnson, Martin L . "Ruth Gould Dolesé." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-my6w-8615>

Nina Niovilla

by Agata Frymus

Very little is known about Nina Niovilla, who is considered to be Poland’s first female director, and possibly the only woman in the country who worked behind the camera during the silent film era. Even the roots of her last name—most likely a pseudonym—remain unknown. (Nina is a common diminutive form of the Polish name Antonina.) While we do know her family name, it is spelled multiple ways, most commonly as Petrykiewicz, but also as Petekiewicz or Petykiewicz; none of these variants appear in the country’s census or other legal documentation that could help us learn more about her background. A newspaper column from 1972 reasoned that Niovilla changed her original name to brand herself as a foreign film professional, and perhaps to boost her status while establishing her popular acting schools in the 1920s (Szletyński 5). While a reasonable assumption to make, it seems that she was using the name “Nina Niovilla” professionally since 1908, at least ten years before promoting herself as an educator.

Promotional photograph of the director in Ekran i Scena no. 18-19, 1923. The same picture was used in the advertising for Youth Triumphs/Młodość Zwycięża (1923).

Like many other film pioneers, Niovilla entered the movie business from theater, where she worked adapting stage plays from French and English to Polish. Film historians Janina Falkowska and Marek Haltof both suggest that the filmmaker started her directing career in 1918 in the Weimar Republic, where she took on the nom-de-plume of Nina Von Petry (Falkowska and Haltof 99; Haltof 259), but I have found no further evidence to support that claim. However, between 1919 and 1923, Niovilla directed four screen dramas: Tamara (1919), The Guards/Czaty (1920), We Are Coming to Thee, Poland, Our Mother/Idziem do Ciebie, Polsko, Matko Nasza (1921), and Youth Triumphs/Młodość Zwycięża (1923). For Youth Triumphs, Niovilla also acted as a producer and a screenwriter, and it is entirely possible that her creative control extended beyond directing in the other productions as well. Interestingly, Niovilla’s curiosity with the cinematic medium developed relatively late in life, as she was in her early forties at the time of her directorial debut.

Although Youth Triumphs was ultimately her last film project, in 1926, a fan weekly reported that Niovilla was working on a “monumental” film titled In the Claws of Jackals/W Szponach Szakali, which would be based on a screenplay written by a professor specializing in Russian culture, presumably to maintain historical accuracy (Kinematograf). The following year, an article from the French press referred to the same production, calling Niovilla the “Polish Germaine Dulac” (“Cinémagazîne en Province”). It seems that the film never saw the light of day, and if it did, I have been unable to locate any other press mentions referring to it.

While Niovilla’s entire cinematic oeuvre is considered lost today, existing plot synopses indicate that her first three films were highly reliant on ideas of Polish patriotism and local folklore. The Guards was, in fact, an adaptation of a ballad by a renowned romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz. The choice of this source material worked to propagate cinema as a respectable, high-brow medium. In many ways, it was also reflective of wider trends in Polish filmmaking at the time: Poland gained independence from Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary in 1918, which had a decisive impact on the types of stories that made it to the screen. The country’s cinematic culture was invested in promoting stories of Polish identity, national struggle, and eventual victory against the odds. Many contemporaries, including film critic Stefania Zahorska, viewed such narratives as stifling and overall damaging to the quality of the nation’s creative output, but Niovilla continued to develop these themes in her work. We Are Coming to Thee, Poland, Our Mother was set in the Podhale region of the Tatra Mountains, and followed the life of the Gorals, its indigenous inhabitants. Little else is known about the film, except for the fact that it featured a Romanian woman in one of the leading roles.

Apart from patriotic themes, Niovilla’s work drew on established modes like the melodrama. The plot of Youth Triumphs, for instance, tells the story of a dramatic love-triangle between a young sculptor Jan (Michał Halicz), who returns to Poland after studying abroad, and two women, Irena and Lena. Throughout the film, Jan is torn between their affections. A series of tragedies ensue after, finally, he separates from Lena to be reunited with Irena. Halicz was a successful stage actor, known to moviegoers from his performances in Niovilla’s two previous films.

1923 advertisement in Film Polski for Youth Triumphs/Młodość Zwycięża (1923). Note the photograph of the director, and the spelling of her name with a single “L.”

While a reviewer for Film Polski [Polish Film] spoke highly of Niovilla’s sensibility as the director of Youth Triumphs, he was less impressed with her skill as a storyteller:

While Mrs. N. Niovilla’s screenplay does not have a deeper ideological underpinning, it does not differ vastly from the standard template we encounter in the majority of foreign films […]. The subject is filled with hopeless sadness—pessimism. If the world is not so gay, shouldn’t we choose subjects that are more light-hearted? Truth be told, the author of the screenplay ends the film joyfully and happily, but five and a half acts [out of six] are not lightened up by a single bright ray. Mrs. Niovilla is rehabilitated by her directing. The work is conscientious, meticulous, not inventive, with no directing ideas, on the whole is well-grounded and polished in every detail. And the most important: the film has no cardinal directing errors. There is a familiarity with the craft, a conscious method (Russian and Italian influences): the director knows what they want. They are not distracted, walking on the trodden path, not confused—not lost in the labyrinth of chaos. (Trystan)

It is worth noting that this critic saw the aesthetics of Youth Triumphs as equal to those of higher budget, foreign pictures. We can speculate that, as a multi-linguist, Niovilla kept up to date with the most recent developments in the global film industry, perhaps reading French or English trade magazines.

Senatorska street in Warsaw, where Nina Niovilla lived in the 1920s.

Tenement house at Senatorska 6, Warsaw, where Niovilla resided, as seen today.

Surviving documents indicate that Niovilla also had some experience in front of the camera, although we do not know which films, if any, she may have appeared in. A compendium of Polish screen actors compiled in 1928 lists her name and address at Senatorska 6, a rather up-scale location in the middle of the historical center of Warsaw (Malczewski 145). Remarkably, the famous Hollywood actress Pola Negri lived at the same address in the 1910s (Kotowski 12).

Niovilla’s involvement in the burgeoning movie industry was not limited to film production. According to Rewia Filmowa [Film Revue], she was the founder and director of a network of acting schools based in the country’s key cultural centers, from Warsaw, through Cracow, to Łódź, Poznań, and Lwów (Banaszkiewicz and Witczak 206). It seems that these institutions were established sometime in the 1920s. Although the column refers to them as “film schools,” instruction focused solely on screen acting rather than any other occupation within the industry.

Wiesława Czapińska has argued that institutions of this kind became particularly popular in the 1920s, and that their founders often had few ethical concerns, and were interested in capitalizing on the ambitions of young, sometime gullible actors, above all else (115). Indeed, by the end of the decade, Niovilla’s enterprises attracted a lot of negative attention, as one of her co-directors—Jan Czesław Sikorowicz—was prosecuted for fraud. This is the context in which, unfortunately, this pioneering woman is most remembered today. Sikorowicz used his association with Niovilla to advertise his own, non-existent school for screen performers in Cracow. After collecting a hefty advance payment from each prospective student, Sikorowicz left town for good (Włodek 78). Niovilla testified at Sikorowicz’s trial, and ultimately never faced legal charges herself. The journalist Marek Sołtysik maintains that as a creative director permanently based in Warsaw, she had no involvement in the scam, and that her only fault was to trust such a skilled manipulator (256). Still, Niovilla’s activities as a businesswoman raised some concerns.

After the scandal, which culminated in 1934 with five years of imprisonment for her former employee, Niovilla started to move away from the public eye. Her acting schools closed down in the same decade, and very little is known about their founder’s career after that, except for the fact that she went back to translating plays by the end of the decade. We know that at some point—probably before the outbreak of the Second World War—Niovilla migrated to France. Her tombstone in the Batignolles cemetery, in Paris, lists 1966 as the year of her death.

See also: Stefania Zahorska

The author wishes to thank Monash University, Malaysia.

Bibliography

Banaszkiewicz, Władysław and Witold Witczak. Historia filmu polskiego, 1985-1929. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1966.

“Cinémagazîne en Province et à l'Étranger.” Cinémagazîne no. 4 (January 1927): 199.

Czapińska, Wiesława. Pola Negri – polska królowa Hollywood. Warszawa: Philip Wilson, 1996.

Falkowska, Janina and Marek Haltof, eds. The New Polish Cinema. London: Flicks Books, 1999.

Haltof, Marek. Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema. Lanham and London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Kinematograf no. 75/35 (10 August 1926): 6.

Kotowski, Mariusz. Pola Negri: Hollywood's First Femme Fatale. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

Malczewski, Wacław. Polscy aktorzy filmowi. Książka-spis. Warszawa: Polska Biblioteka Filmowa, 1928. https://sbc.org.pl/Content/293713/i12485-0000-00-0001.pdf.

Skaff, Sheila. The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896-1939. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008.

Sołtysik, Marcin. “Szumowiny polskiej kinematografii. O człowieku przepełnionym bezczelnością.” Palestra. Pismo Adwokatury Polskiej vol. 5-6 (2014): 254-259.

Szletyński, Henryk. “W szkole teatralnej.” Stolica: Warszawski tygodnik ilustrowany no. 29 (1972): 5.

Trystan, Leon. “Przegląd ekranów stołecznych. Wytwórczość polska.” Film Polsk (April-May 1923): 29.

Włodek, Roman. 100 lat Marzenia. Historia kina w Tarnowie. Tarnów: Tarnowskie Centrum Kultury, 2013.

Citation

Frymus, Agata. "Nina Niovilla." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-he7c-3h80>

Betty Burbridge

by Katherine Tartaglia

In 1941, publications like Life and The Saturday Evening Post featured an advertisement for Smith-Corona typewriters. Presenting an image of screenwriter Betty Burbridge at work, the advertisement described her as “Gene Autry’s script writer,” having “typed her way to the top” (117). Although she did, indeed, work with Autry on many films for Republic Pictures during the 1930s and 1940s, becoming a prominent screenwriter for B-movie Westerns in particular, Burbridge’s career in Hollywood started long before that.

1941 advertisement in Life for Smith-Corona typewriters that features Betty Burbridge as “Gene Autry’s script writer.”

While many recognize her success within the field of screenwriting—particularly as a woman writing Westerns—they simultaneously fail to acknowledge the length of her career and the breadth of her work in the American movie industry. In fact, a 1942 article based on an interview with Burbridge suggests the writer’s career in Westerns, and film in general, only truly began in the 1930s:

Masculinity-Plus—that’s the movie cowpuncher-hero. And, of course, you reason all these good swashbuckling, hard-riding, hard-hitting yarns must be written by a man. But that’s where you’re wrong! Some of the most popular Western stories today are written by a red-headed gal who, until she began writing them, didn’t know the front from the hind-end of a saddle and had never ridden a horse in her life. Her name is Betty Burbridge and she writes stories for Gene Autry…She packs more wallop and masculinity into her Western yarns than most men and expertly captures the tone and pattern of Western screen stories […]

Who is this Western-writing gal…and how did she get that way?

Betty is the daughter of a New York newspaper woman—one of the many “Prudence Pennys.” She attended a smart finishing school and then began her writing career by editing her mother’s cooking page. She didn’t know beans about cooking but she made good. Then a family friend who was making Western pictures invited her to come to Hollywood and try her hand at writing Western scripts. Betty didn’t know beans about the West either—she’d never been farther West than Detroit and the only horse she knew by sight was the traffic cop’s. She bought herself a ticket to Hollywood and an armload of Western pulps. All the way across the continent she read Westerns. When she arrived in Hollywood she could talk of “honkey-tonks” and “bangtails.” The producer bought her first script for fifty dollars—not because he felt obliged to but because it was the best, swiftest-moving script submitted to him.

That was ten years ago [emphasis added]. Betty has been writing and selling Western scripts ever since…She spends her week-ends on a dude ranch; she can ride; and she knows all the Western lingo. (Poole 9)

In its focus on the exceptionality of Burbridge’s career in Westerns, this article reveals the general belief that the genre was a masculine one, even though several women contributed to the form in the silent and sound eras, including Adele Buffington, Bertha M. Bower, and Grace Cunard. Additionally, although Poole’s piece provides readers with the idea that Burbridge was writing before she was in Hollywood, it disregards her experience as an actress in the early industry, and upholds the notion that persists today: that what made the writer was her work with Autry.

While offering some additional details about Burbridge’s early film career, historian Lizzie Francke outlines a similar narrative in her book on women screenwriters:

[Burbridge] started her career as an actress but soon switched to journalism, becoming a syndicated columnist specializing in the traditional woman’s page subjects of home economics, etiquette and child training. From this to Westerns seems a bit of a leap, but Burbridge made the transition in the early 1930s when she was asked by a producer friend at Republic to work as a story doctor on a “cow epic.” The producer liked her ideas and hired her to work on subsequent projects. Unsurprisingly, she decided that Westerns would be more fun to write about than “cheese soufflés and chintz curtains.” (Francke 74, emphasis added)

As in Poole’s article, Francke presents Burbridge’s move into the Western genre as a dramatic shift. Here, Burbridge’s experience as actress and writer is foregrounded; however, certain important details are missing. According to a 1948 New York Times article about women who wrote Westerns, Burbridge was not a stranger to the genre in the early 1930s. As the author writes, “Betty Burbridge, whose mother was Prudence Penny, a home economics columnist for the now defunct New York American, wrote a column herself as Prudence Penny Jr. before she became an ingenue in silent Westerns under the name of Elizabeth Burbridge” (Colton). While this article recognizes her long relationship to the Western genre that I found in my own research, it still glosses over this early period and fails to acknowledge her potential career agency.

In fact, Burbridge’s early work as an actress and screenwriter during the silent era set the stage, so to speak, for her career as a Western screenwriter during Hollywood’s studio era. Not unlike many screenwriters in early Hollywood, she began her career as an actress in the 1910s. She worked with the Biograph Company, Thomas Ince, and the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, among others. According to fellow B-Western writer C. Jack Lewis, Burbridge acted in eight films over the span of two years before she moved on to writing (173). However, the trade press and other sources credit her for over several dozen roles in other films between 1913 and 1916. For the most part, she was well received as an actress, referred to as “little,” or “dainty,” Elizabeth Burbridge in some cases (Melbourne 11; “The White Alley”). Fan magazines often listed her alongside popular stars like Cunard, Mae Marsh, Norma Talmadge, and Helen Holmes (Coward 131); and she often received positive reviews in the trade press. For example, a writer for Reel Life noted that, “Elizabeth Burbridge, leading woman of the New York Motion Picture studios, has been coming rapidly forward in her art during the last few weeks. As Ella Wheeler in the ‘Shorty’ series, she has done some remarkably clever Western character work” (“Real Tales” [1914]). During her acting days, Burbridge worked on numerous Westerns, often with Ince, and established herself as capable of depicting the “Western character,” or what Reel Life, at different times, described as presenting “a vivacious heroine, with a great deal of the ‘snap and go’ quality,” with a tendency to “rarely [betray] timidity, no matter what dangerous stunt she may be asked to do” (“Real Tales” [1914]; “Real Tales” [1915]). The list of her films featuring this type of character includes, according to the trade press, Richard V. Spencer and Ince’s The Fires of Ambition, Ince and C. Gardner Sullivan’s One of the Discard, and The Word of His People, all from 1914, and Ince and Sullivan’s “Shorty” series mentioned above. One could argue then that these acting experiences influenced Burbridge’s later status as “typical of the women [writers] who ended up in the B-Western stable” (Francke 74).

Betty Burbridge in Raymond B. West’s Rumpelstiltskin (1915) pictured on the cover of Reel Life (May 1, 1915).

While it can prove difficult to accurately track Burbridge’s film writing credits released before the emergence of the Writers Guild of America in 1933 and the implementation of more systematized accreditation and archiving—the Writers Guild Foundation only has records of Burbridge’s credits from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s and Francke’s filmography for her only lists work from 1931 to 1949—credits listed in the trade press and multiple, international film collections and databases suggest that Burbridge did more than write for “traditional woman’s page subjects” between the time that she was acting and when she became a full-time writer in the 1930s. In 1916, The Moving Picture World wrote of Burbridge: “In addition to her activities before the camera Miss Burbridge has written and, more important, seen produced several scenarios” (“Elizabeth Burbridge with Powell”). In 1917, three years after she is said to have started acting for the screen, the trade press began to credit Burbridge as a writer of film stories. For instance, Moving Picture World reported her work on Captain Kiddo (1917) and The Film Daily and Motion Picture News her work on Milady o’ the Beanstalk (1918) (“Second Series”; “Baby Marie”; “Pathe Names Eight”).

Lantern slide, The Cowboy Cavalier (1928). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Although there appears to be a gap between 1918 and 1922 when the trade press was not reporting Burbridge’s work in Hollywood, in the mid-1920s sources began regularly crediting her for work on stories and scenarios. For example, The Film Daily credited her with the story and scenario for Battling Buddy (1924), Exhibitor’s Trade Review with the story for Rough Ridin’ (1924), and Exhibitor’s Herald with the scenario for Reckless Courage (1925) (as Betty Burbridge) (“Battling Buddy”; Cruikshank; “New Pictures”). In the case of Battling Buddy, The Film Daily stated of the story: “Western comedy-drama. ‘Battling Buddy’ certainly runs away with itself toward the last couple of reels. The action gets wilder and wilder and reaches its greatest heights when Buddy [Roosevelt], on horseback, takes a nose dive off a cliff and lands right in the burning cabin in time to save the girl” (“Battling Buddy”). And although Burbridge wrote dramas, comedies, and action adventure films—sometimes even hybrids of these—her action-adventure films, like Tearin’ Into Trouble (1927), were often described as fitting a certain story pattern:

“Tearin’ Into Trouble” contains one of the popular formula type western stories wherein the hero is suspected of pulling off all the crimes in the west and even the girl believes him guilty. Wally [Wales] manages to evade capture and thus provides five reels of good action until he is ready to pull off the mask and disclose his true identity…Good action is derived from the pursuit in which the posse hits the trail. (“Wally Wales”)

Such evidence suggests Burbridge was, in fact, known to work on less-than “feminine” subjects before the early 1930s.

As an actress, and in her early years as a scenario writer, Burbridge was credited as Elizabeth, but around 1925 her credits began to read as Betty Burbridge. One can argue this switch in professional name coincided with a switch in professional capacity, from actress and storywriter to full-blown scenario and continuity writer. Very generally, this move from actress to writer was not uncommon for women in Hollywood at this time; in fact, it “was considered a good career move,” allowing them longevity in the industry after their onscreen appeal faded (Francke 12). In Burbridge’s case, she moved rather quickly from story writer to scenario and continuity writer, laying the groundwork for a career that lasted into the early-1950s. Although definitions vary, both scenarios and continuity scripts take into account much more than story. Janet Staiger claims scenario scripts are more focused on shooting order and arrangement than a story from which a film is shot (126); and Kevin Brownlow describes the scenario script as “the sequence of scenes, the story told in visual terms…From this scenario was written the continuity, or ‘shooting script,’ as it is known today” (270-272). In this sense, the scenario writer was less a storyteller than a translator, making a story comprehensible to those who make films. The continuity script, in comparison, was more about the production process and the creation of scenes. A practice that came about in the early to mid-1910s when a more complex and specialized “central producer system” of production required a more detailed script (Staiger 138), the scenario became an industry standard and “scenario writing was regarded as a more specialized and ‘professional’ craft,” by the early 1920s (Francke 18). As Francke says of Burbridge, “she proved to be dependable at her swiftly learnt craft, adhering to the formula and notching up during her career nearly a hundred film credits” (75). Moving quickly from story writer to scenario/continuity/screenplay writer, Burbridge therefore became more immersed in the movie-making process, gaining success as a screenwriter on her own merit as the industry itself grew more organized along the lines of big business.

Given her career trajectory, one can imagine that Burbridge fell into writing for B-Westerns less through default than through previous experience, both in the film industry and out. C. Jack Lewis also numbers Burbridge’s total writing credits at around one hundred, and states that seventy-seven of them were for Westerns alone (173). Burbridge may not have been born a “Western” gal—as Poole’s article points out—but her success was certainly not coincidental. As I have already shown, Burbridge not only starred in early Westerns, but many of her first writing credits were for action-adventure and Western films for companies like Action Pictures, Inc. and for early Western series stars like Buddy Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Jr. These films often received positive feedback in the press. Presumably, then, Burbridge had gained quite a bit of experience, both as a writer and a figure in the Western production arena, before the 1930s Westerns for which she is continually credited.

Burbridge did establish a formula for writing Westerns that fit Autry’s 1930s style; but it also fit that of earlier silent Westerns—the 1927 Film Daily review of Tearin’ Into Trouble featured above certainly recognized as much. In 1939, in a New York World Telegraph article titled “She Writes Westerns for Films,” Burbridge said:

I read pulp Westerns until I was bored to tears. But that’s how I learned the story racket–that and talking to the movie cowboys on the set. When I began doing these things I’d take my plots from New York stage plays that I had seen. I’d simply change the setting to the wide-open spaces, put the characters on horses, work in a couple of chases with a sheriff and a posse–and there would be a screen story. (qtd. in Francke 75)

Here, Burbridge suggests that not only did pulp Westerns—a source previously recognized as important for her education in the genre—bore her, but most of what she learned, she learned on the set, on the fly. It is a story similar to that in other sources. Yet no specific time frame is given here. The formulaic nature of what she describes, and which Francke recognized, could just as easily have been established during the silent and serial Western period of early American cinema as it could have been well honed during the 1930s B-Westerns. In her 1942 interview with Poole, Burbridge outlined a handful of features particular to her Westerns:

The hero must never smoke or drink—and tobacco chewing is out!…no intoxicants”; “The hero may go into a saloon to rescue someone, to consult someone, to meet someone or to beat up someone—but not to drink”; “The hero never kisses the girl if he can help it but he always wins her in the end”; “Keep gunplay at a minimum, and let the hero outwit the heavies rather than mow them down with a blitzkrieg of lead”; “If the villain must die…let it be accidentally.” (9)

These may be familiar traits of the genre for anyone who has seen numerous silent and B-Westerns; and they would have easily transferred from one era to the next as Burbridge moved from the silent to the sound period.

Elizabeth Burbridge’s signed portrait in Filmland Favorites (1915), p. 47.

One reason that Burbridge’s early cinematic contributions are given little attention may be that many of her films are no longer extant—at least as far as we know now. Additionally, information on Burbridge’s career, as well as her personal life, is full of inconsistencies. Sources even appear to be torn about her actual birthdate—some, such as Western aficionado Boyd Magers, claim Burbridge was born on December 7, 1895 (44), but Filmland Favorites states she was “[b]orn in San Francisco” on December 12, 1894 (47). While you can find Burbridge’s name in the contemporary trade press for being a writer of numerous films, and you can track her contributions there and in catalogs like the AFI’s—even these sources often miss numerous credits in their reports—not much beyond this can be found regarding her career in early American cinema. Few academic sources focus on Burbridge’s work, and although there is one archive—the American Heritage Center in Laramie, Wyoming—that holds material dated from 1918-1938, providing details of at least part of her early career, I have yet to find any other collections with more evidence. Nor have I, at the time of this writing, successfully identified any relations who can share memories of Burbridge or her career. All of this makes concrete knowledge of her early contributions even more unlikely than other historical subjects. For instance, any jobs for which she went uncredited during this time will most certainly be difficult to track without further information about the writer. Interestingly, IMDb claims that Burbridge also wrote under the names of Barr Cross, Bessie Burbridge, and Robert Bridgewood, but I have found no evidence of this in the rest of my research. However, if this is the case, then the list of early contributions, both credited and uncredited, made by Burbridge may be longer than the research here suggests. With the discovery of more historical evidence we may one day get closer to the full picture of Burbridge’s role in early Hollywood history. That said, the material I have found does point to the fact that she was an important player in early as well as studio-era Hollywood, particularly in the realm of B-Westerns, in which she was already well established as a writer before she began working for the renowned cowboy and media mogul, Gene Autry.

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Advertisement [Smith-Corona typewriter]. Life (27 Oct. 1941): 117.

“Baby Marie and Pickanniny Get More Chance In This.” The Film Daily (24 Nov. 1918): 23.

“‘Battling Buddy.’” The Film Daily (14 Sept. 1924): 6.

Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By… New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968.

Colton, Helen. “Meet the Gals Who Write ‘Em, Not Ride ‘Em.” New York Times (31 Oct. 1948): X5.

Coward, Neil G. “Screen Gossip.” Picture-Play Magazine 4 (March-Aug. 1916): 125-131.

Cruikshank, Herbert K. “‘Rough Ridin’’ is Right,” under “Box Office Reviews.” Exhibitor’s Trade Review (5 April 1924): 25.

“Elizabeth Burbridge.” Filmland Favorites: Being the Autographed Photographs with Biographical Sketches of the Leading Photo Play Stars. Los Angeles: American Publishing Co., 1915. 47.

“Elizabeth Burbridge with Powell.” The Moving Picture World 29 (16 Sept. 1916): 1806.

“‘Fire of Youth’ Heads Universal: Butterfly Five-Reeler Starts Off a Week Containing a Wide Variety of Subjects.” The Moving Picture World (23 June 1917): 1963.

Francke, Lizzie. Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood. London: British Film Institute, 1994.

Lewis, C. Jack. White Horse, Black Hat: A Quarter Century on Hollywood’s Poverty Row. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2002.

Magers, Boyd. Gene Autry Westerns. Madison, NC: Empire Publishing, Inc., 2007.

Melbourne, Dick. “Inceville.” Movie Pictorial (Sept. 1915): 10-11.

“New Pictures.” Exhibitor’s Herald (16 May 1925): 85.

“Pathe Names Eight Months Releases.” Motion Picture News (28 Dec. 1918): 3905.

Poole, Oliver. “Betty Burbridge on Western Technique.” The Author & journalist vol 27, no. 7 (1 July 1942): 9-10.

“Real Tales About Reel Folk.” Reel Life: A Magazine of Moving Pictures vol. 5, no. 4 (10 Oct. 1914): 19.

“Real Tales About Reel Folk.” Reel Life: A Magazine of Moving Pictures vol. 5, no. 25 (6 March 1915): 20.

“Second Series of 15 Pathe Playlets Ready for Release Beginning May 14.” Moving Picture World (22 April 1922): 847.

“She Writes Westerns for Films.” New York World Telegraph (27 July 1939): n.p.

Staiger, Janet. “The Hollywood Mode of Production to 1930.” In David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 85-153.

“Wally Wales in ‘Tearin’ Into Trouble’.” The Film Daily (13 March 1927): 8.

“The White Alley.” Motography vol. 15, no. 1 (3 Feb. 1916): 315.

Archival Paper Collections:

Elizabeth Burbridge papers, 1913-1938. The American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

Research Update

June 2023: For more information on Burbridge's sound-era career, see Tartaglia's recent PhD dissertation:

Johnson, Katherine A., "Working in Studio Era Hollywood and Early Television: Women Who Made the Western." PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2021.

Citation

Tartaglia, Katherine. "Betty Burbridge." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-xfvd-2p66>

Eva Nil

by Luciana Corrêa de Araújo

A delicate hand-colored photograph of Eva Nil’s face graces the cover of 50 Years of Film Archives, 1938-1988, edited by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in 1989. The caption inside the book reads: “Eva Nil, one of the most famous Brazilian stars of the 20’s. […] All films she has starred in are lost” (1). Nil’s stardom, carefully built up in the late 1920s, certainly remains alluring today. Her star persona, though, has somehow eclipsed other dimensions of her brief film career that deserve to be brought to the foreground, such as her activities as a producer, her keen sense of publicity, her technical skills and, in a broader sense, the professional attitude she adopted toward her career.

Letter from Eva Nil to Pedro Lima. Cataguases, 19 August 1928. Courtesy of Acervo Cinemateca Brasileira.

Mining archival sources proves fundamental to shedding light on Nil’s many activities. Her correspondence with journalist Pedro Lima—unfortunately divided between two archives, Cinemateca Brasileira, in São Paulo, and Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, in Rio—provides detailed information while also giving us access to Nil’s thoughts and opinions. Other letters, received from journalists and fans, are found at Cinemateca Brasileira in the artist’s personal archive, which also holds many press clippings and some movie theater programs. Rich material on Nil can also be found in newspapers and magazines, particularly in the Rio-based film magazine Cinearte. Engaged in a campaign to promote Brazilian cinema and to create its own star system, Cinearte journalists Adhemar Gonzaga and Pedro Lima gave Nil wide publicity through numerous articles and photographs. When Gonzaga directed his first feature, Barro humano/Human Clay (1929), which had Lima on the production team, Nil was even cast in a supporting role. That same year, however, when Nil was only twenty years old, she decided to withdraw from cinema, never working in film again (Ramos 514-516). Sadly, none of her films are preserved today, except for very short fragments of Barro humano and Senhorita Agora Mesmo/Miss Right Now (1927), the two-reel film she produced and starred in, which was directed by her father, Pedro Comello.

Nil’s connection with the early works of Humberto Mauro, who was to become one of the most acclaimed Brazilian film directors, along with the magnetism that her exquisite face and figure never fail to exert, has fueled a constant interest in her. Another decisive contribution to her long-lasting appeal was the essential book on Mauro’s early career, Humberto Mauro, Cataguases, Cinearte, published in 1974 by film historian Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, which provides invaluable information on and insightful analysis of Nil’s films and personality.

Portrait of Eva Nil. Courtesy of Acervo Cinemateca Brasileira.

Born in Egypt, where her father, the Italian Pedro Comello, served in the military and married Ida Tonetti, Eva Comello moved to Brazil with her family in 1914, settling in Cataguases, a town in Minas Gerais state. At the age of thirteen, Nil started helping her father in the photography studio he had opened in the early 1920s, an unusual job for a young woman in the eyes of the locals. There, she learned the craft and was in charge of the business during her father’s travels and after his death.

Nil’s first film role is usually considered to be the heroine kidnapped by the villain in Valadião, o cratera/Valadião, the Crater (1925), the first attempt at filmmaking by Humberto Mauro and Comello. In a letter to Cinearte journalist Pedro Lima, however, Nil claimed that she was filmed for the first time when working on the unfinished Três irmãos/Three Brothers, directed by her father in 1925 (Nil 1928). This information raises some questions, considering that Valadião, o cratera, shot with a Pathé-Baby 9.5mm camera, certainly preceded Três irmãos, a more professional project, in which an Ernemann 35mm camera was used. Perhaps Nil did not work on Valadião, o cratera, or she may have considered this amateur experience not worth reporting. Or it could be that declaring Três irmãos as her film debut was a way to reinforce her father’s importance in her career. A photograph published in Cinearte magazine a few years later shows Comello shooting a scene of Três irmãos. Interestingly, rather than being part of the scene, Nil stands at her father’s side, close to the camera, looking at the set, suggesting her concern with the technical aspects of production (Vidal 7).

In 1926, Nil starred in the feature Na primavera da vida/In the Spring of Life, directed by Mauro, with Comello operating the camera, and worked on Os mistérios de São Mateus/The Mysteries of São Mateus, another unfinished film directed by her father. She was to be the leading actress in Mauro’s following feature, Tesouro perdido/Lost Treasure (1927), but, after disagreements between her and the director, she refused to take part in it. This conflict with Mauro would last for years, which certainly explains Nil’s insistence in affirming, in her correspondence with Lima, that she was always directed by her father, even when he was credited only as the cameraman. The precise reasons she left Tesouro perdido remain unclear, but do seem to be related to a combination of financial, personal, and professional issues. Having already worked on the previous film, Nil did not accept being paid the same amount as the other unexperienced actors. Moreover, considering the story very uninteresting, she asked Mauro to make some changes; when he refused to do so, she quit the production (Nil 1928). Another reason may have been her refusal to be carried in the arms of an actor, in a scene that Mauro would not change (Schvarzman 154). This episode may reveal Nil’s conservative values, not unlike those of other young women of the time, as well as her professionalism. Right from the beginning of her career, she strove not only to make a creative contribution in shaping the roles according to her artistic—and moral—views, but also to be properly paid. As she had once declared to her mother, her goal was to earn a living working in cinema and photography (Estanislau 1).

Founding a production company seems to have been Nil’s way to pursue the professional standards she desired and to gain autonomy to develop more suitable projects. After Tesouro perdido, when Comello left Phebo Sul América, the production company he had founded with Mauro, he planned to produce non-fiction films (Gomes 179). Nonetheless, Nil convinced him to stay in fiction filmmaking and they both founded the production company Atlas-Film. In a 1927 letter to Lima, Comello reported that he decided to set up Atlas-Film “to satisfy my daughter’s aspirations,” adding that he also longed to make fiction films, “but the lack of capital is a big thing!” (Comello; emphasis in original).

Atlas-Film’s only production was the two-reel adventure film Senhorita Agora Mesmo, whose costs were limited to the purchase of film stock, according to a 1929 interview with Nil (“Ouvindo ‘estrelas’”). Although released at Cinema Glória, a first-run movie theater in downtown Rio, the film did not enjoy other commercial exhibitions, except for a couple of screenings in Cataguases and a nearby town, Miraí. Despite all the difficulties, which were far from unusual in Brazilian cinema at the time, owning a production company allowed Nil to develop a personal project in which she took on a variety of responsibilities. In Senhorita Agora Mesmo, not only did she play a strong female protagonist, but she also worked as a camera and laboratory assistant to her father alongside her activities as a producer and publicist.

Eva Nil in Senhorita Agora Mesmo (1927). Courtesy of Acervo Cinemateca Brasileira.

In the film, Nil plays the fearless farm owner who, threatened by bandits, fights them to protect her mother and their property. The protagonist’s “energetic temper, always ready and determined” (“Senhorita Agora Mesmo”), earned her the nickname “Miss Right Now,” and mirrors the actress’s own personality. Instead of playing a romantic, fragile leading lady, Nil is an action heroine who, wearing masculine attire characteristic of the western genre, handles a gun and ties up the villains on her own—although in the end, imprisoned by the bandits, she is rescued by the young neighbor whose love advances she once rejected.

Modeled after the popular American serial queens from the 1910s, her character contradicted the dominant image of Nil built up by both the press and herself, through the pictures she regularly sent to journalists and fans. Nil was seen as “insinuating, gorgeous, gracious, natural in gestures, always with delicate expressions” (Folha Comercial), and as the “ethereal type of a Griffith ingénue” (IGO). For Atlas-Film’s follow-up film, Canção das ruas/Song of the Streets, which never came to fruition, she may have wanted to avoid a similar mismatch between her part and her star persona, announcing she would play “an interesting sentimental role” (Cinéfilo) this time.

While most references to Senhorita Agora Mesmo in the Brazilian press highlighted Nil as the film’s protagonist, sometimes also mentioning Atlas-Film as her production company, more detailed information on the technical work she performed was provided by the Portuguese film magazine Cine. Illustrated with a photograph of Nil with a dedication to the magazine, the piece, published in November 1928, presented information about her life and work, adding that in Senhorita Agora Mesmo she “held the megaphone and operated the camera’s hand crank. She also helped her father in film developing, cutting, editing and adapting the film according to her own artistic taste” (Cine). In Brazil, Nil’s camerawork was reported by Pedro Lima in Cinearte, who remarked that Pedro Comello was “substituted many times by the star of Cataguases [Nil], in the absence of anyone else who could replace him efficiently” (Lima [5 Oct. 1927]). Nil herself was the probable source of the information reported by both Cine and Cinearte, given her correspondence with Lima and the Portuguese journalist Mário D’Almeida, and it could be read as part of her effort to be regarded for other abilities, beyond acting.

Eva Nil and Pedro Lima. Dedication: “For Eva Nil, so that you never forget the one who most trusts in your success, here is Pedro Lima 12/5/1928. Courtesy of Acervo Cinemateca Brasileira.

Lima also stressed Nil’s work in production, writing the following month that she was “the only independent female producer in our country, even though she is so young” (Lima [2 Nov. 1927]). Throughout their correspondence, it is clear how she was personally engaged in creating the production company Atlas-Film and in promoting Senhorita Agora Mesmo, in tandem with the promotion of her own star persona. Working in a photography studio gave Nil both the practical conditions and the technical skills to provide the press and her fans with a wealth of photographic material. Her portraits, some of them developed and printed herself, certainly benefited from her father’s basic knowledge of painting and visual arts.

Nil’s keen sense of publicity was soon spotted and praised by Cinearte as one of her most remarkable features. According to a brief note published in 1927, she was the only female artist who regularly sent them her most recent pictures; rarely a week passed without her writing to them. Likewise, her fans’ requests never went unanswered. The note, along with the three pictures published on the same page, is a striking example of Nil’s promotional abilities. Not only was she the only actress to congratulate the magazine on its first anniversary, but she also presented the publication “with each photo a treat”: one of them holds a dedication to Cinearte and, in the other two, Nil stands in a carefully arranged setting, flipping through the pages of Cinearte, while sitting next to a pile of what seems to be all the magazine’s previous issues (“Eva Nil”).

Nil’s professional attitude toward her career is also reflected in the way she faced her work in Barro humano, the only one of her films to enjoy distribution in several Brazilian states. In a letter to director Adhemar Gonzaga before shooting began, she expressed her excitement with the film. She looked forward to receiving his instructions, in order to study her part, which she wanted to be a sensation (Nil [2 Oct. 1927]). To Pedro Lima, she admitted that she desired a role “in which the work is not completely passive, but rather presents some challenges” (Nil [5 Sept. 1927]). Her critical concern about the role and her commitment to carefully prepare for it were not usual attitudes among Brazilian actresses and actors of the time. Nil’s work on the set was praised by Gonzaga in a letter to Humberto Mauro: “Eva Nil did very well. A sensation indeed” (Gonzaga).

Portrait of Eva Nil. Courtesy of Acervo Cinemateca Brasileira.

The release of Barro humano in June 1929 to both public and critical acclaim encouraged Nil and her father to continue with their production company. A new project for Atlas-Film was announced, Canção das ruas, a feature film whose main scenes would be shot in Rio, and investments were made to remodel the studio and improve its technical resources. In a letter to Lima, Nil reported the acquisition of a new camera (“our Ernemann has already become a Debrie”) as well as professional printer and projection machines (Nil [29 June 1929]). Surprisingly, however, only a month after this letter, loaded with enthusiasm and promising news, Nil communicated to Lima her “complete withdrawal from working for the current national cinema” (Nil [20 Nov. 1929]). In stark contrast to her previous letter, Nil expressed her disappointment with Brazilian cinema. In doing so, she directly confronted Cinearte‘s discursive and promotional strategies, laying bare its false premises. “You say it [Brazilian cinema] does exist,” she wrote to Lima on November 20, 1929, “but you know very well it does not.” Her letter exposed “the awareness of an actress in the face of the economic and cultural limitations to which film activity in the country was imprisoned” (Melo 107). Although personal reasons cannot be discounted, the difficulties of making a living as a film professional in Cataguases certainly contributed a great deal to Nil’s decision. Nil and her father’s plan to pursue a film career in Rio, as Humberto Mauro would do soon afterwards, did not come to fruition. Nil stayed in Cataguases, working in the photographic studio until the 1970s, when it closed (Ramos 515).

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

The author would like to thank the Cinemateca Brasileira for kindly providing the photographs and the permission to use them and David Rushton for his collaboration with the translations.

Bibliography

Araújo, Luciana Corrêa de. “‘A Role in Which the Work Is Not Completely Passive’–Eva Nil, Miss Right Now (1927), and Women’s Work in Brazilian Silent Cinema.” Feminist Media Histories, vol. 3, no 4, 2017. 102-125. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.4.102.

Cine (November 1928): n.p. Eva Nil Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

Cinéfilo, undated press clipping. Eva Nil Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

Comello, Pedro. Letter to Pedro Lima. 3 June 1927. Pedro Lima Archive, Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

Estanislau, Lidia Avelar. “Transcrição da entrevista concedida pela Sra. Eva Comello”/“Transcript of the interview given by Ms. Eva Comello.” Cataguases, 25 April 1988; 14 July 1988. Cinemateca Brasileira.

“Eva Nil.” Cinearte (2 March 1927): 10. Biblioteca Nacional – Hemeroteca Digital.

Folha Comercial (5 July 1927): n.p. Eva Nil Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

Futemma, Olga Toshiko and José Francisco de Oliveira Mattos. Reconstituição com adaptação livre de enredo do filme, a partir de sinopse publicada na revista Cinearte, n.81. São Paulo: Cinemateca Brasileira, n.d.

Gomes, Paulo Emilio Salles. Humberto Mauro, Cataguases, Cinearte. São Paulo: Perspectiva/Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1974.

Gonzaga, Adhemar. Letter to Humberto Mauro. August 1928. Pedro Lima Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

IGO. “Registro cinematográfico.” Estado do Rio Grande (11 March 1930): n.p. Eva Nil Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

The International Federation of Film Archives. 50 Years of Film Archives/50 ans d’archives du film, 1938-1988. Brussels: FIAF, 1989.

Lima, Pedro. “Filmagem brasileira.” Cinearte (5 October 1927): 4. Biblioteca Nacional – Hemeroteca Digital.

---. “Filmagem brasileira.” Cinearte (2 November 1927): 4. Biblioteca Nacional – Hemeroteca Digital.

Melo, Luís Alberto Rocha. “O discurso historiográfico em Mulheres de cinema.” In Feminino e plural: Mulheres no cinema brasileiro. Eds. Karla Holanda, Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco. Campinas: Papirus, 2017. 101-113.

Nil, Eva. Letter to Pedro Lima. 5 September 1927. Pedro Lima Archive, Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

---. Letter to Adhemar Gonzaga. 2 October 1927. Pedro Lima Archive, Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

---. Letter to Pedro Lima. 17 May 1928. Pedro Lima Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

---. Letter to Pedro Lima. 29 June 1929. Pedro Lima Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

---. Letter to Pedro Lima. 20 November 1929. Pedro Lima Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

“Ouvindo ‘estrelas.’” Cataguases (25 June 1929): n.p. Eva Nil Archive, Cinemateca Brasileira.

Ramos, Lécio Augusto. “Eva Nil.” In Enciclopédia do cinema brasileiro. Eds. Fernão Ramos, Luiz Felipe Miranda. São Paulo: Editora do Senac/Edições Sesc SP, 2012. 514-516.

Schvarzman, Sheila. “O cinema silencioso em Minas Gerais (1907-1930).” In Nova história do cinema brasileiro. Eds. Sheila Schvarzman, Fernão Pessoa Ramos. São Paulo: Edições Sesc, 2018. 124-173.

Senhorita Agora Mesmo.Cinearte (14 September 1927): 6. Biblioteca Nacional – Hemeroteca Digital.

Vidal, Barros. “Humberto Mauro.” Cinearte (11 December 1929): 6-7. Biblioteca Nacional – Hemeroteca Digital.

Archival Paper Collections:

Biblioteca Nacional, Hemeroteca Digital [database].

Eva Nil Archive. Cinemateca Brasileira.

Pedro Lima Archive. Cinemateca Brasileira.

Pedro Lima Archive. Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

Citation

Araújo, Luciana Corrêa de. "Eva Nil." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-qtcy-pd98>

Anita Maris Boggs

by Laura Isabel Serna

Anita Maris Boggs was the co-founder of the Bureau of Commercial Economics, a Washington D.C.-based distributor of industrial and educational films that was founded in 1913 and dissolved sometime in the 1930s. Despite its official sounding name, the Bureau was not a government agency. Rather, it was a charitable institution supported by sponsors, donors, and the modest fees it charged for the shipping of film prints. International in scope, the organization described itself as “an association of the governments, institutions, manufacturers, producers and transportation lines of America and other countries,” whose goal was “to engage in disseminating geographical, commercial, industrial, and vocational information by the graphic method of motography” (Bureau of Commercial Economics 2). Its films, distributed via a network of university extension services and other partners, were screened free of charge to audiences in universities, high schools, convention halls, community centers, prisons, and even on screens set up outdoors. In 1920, the Bureau claimed to be reaching two million viewers a month (Publicity with Moving Pictures 1).

A drawing of Anita Maris Boggs in Educational Screen, April 1939.

Because the Bureau left no consolidated archive, its activities and Boggs’ career must be pieced together through scattered sources. Indeed, I was first alerted to Boggs via correspondence between the Bureau and Universal Film Manufacturing Company in the Harry and Roy Aitken Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society, a collection I was exploring for a completely different purpose. Piecing together Boggs’ role at the Bureau, as much as I have been able to, required mining the press, alumni association publications, government reports, and scattered archival documents held at various institutional repositories, including the New York Public Library.

Boggs was born into a comfortable Pennsylvania family. After attending a school for girls in her hometown of Harrisburg, she enrolled at Bryn Mawr College and subsequently was granted a scholarship to study at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business for the academic year 1910-1911 (“Pleasant Features”; “Personal and Social News”; “Leave for School Monday”; “Scholarships”). Although we do not know the details of her course of study either at Bryn Mawr or the Wharton School, those experiences seemed to have shaped how she thought about media and its role in society.

Two essays published around the time of the Bureau’s founding, which Boggs wrote a year apart for Pedagogical Seminary, a journal edited by psychologist and eugenics advocate G. Stanley Hall, suggest as much. In the first essay, “Cultural Schools or Continuation Schools,” Boggs makes the case for educating American workers via continuation schools. In the second, “Visualized Opportunity,” she argues forcefully for the potential role of motion pictures in vocational education. In this essay, she explicitly invokes the work of the Bureau, emphasizing that its goal was to “depict fully and accurately the industrial processes and to illustrate how things in common use are made and produced” (449). She argues that these films, which she refers to as “films of opportunity,” will open the world of industry and commerce and thus of employment to their viewers (448). She also describes the audiences the Bureau hoped to serve: university students and subsequently high school students, clients served by settlement homes and missions, members of commercial clubs, and attendees at trade conventions. Although Boggs gestures toward serving other populations —“negroes of the South” and “illiterates of the back country of the United States”—those projects never seem to have materialized (451-452). These two essays suggest that Boggs may well have been the intellectual architect of the Bureau’s mission, or was at least as important to its conception as her co-founder Francis Holley.

Over the course of the Bureau’s first ten years, Holley, who had a compelling backstory that involved being cured of sudden blindness (“Once Blind”), became the organization’s public face and mouthpiece, traveling around the country to promote its work to university leaders, members of industrial associations and corporations, and veterans’ groups. Boggs, however, was deeply involved in the Bureau’s everyday operations and strategic initiatives. The daily work of the Bureau involved corresponding with organizations at home and abroad about film prints, putting together the organization’s catalogues, which went from simple listings of subjects to fairly detailed synopses, and editing the Bureau’s quarterly house organ, Vision. And, when Holley entered into a contract with Universal in 1918 to solicit business for the firm’s industrial film production division, Boggs took on the lion’s share of Holley’s work at the Bureau (Francis Holley to Pat Powers; Francis Holley vs. Universal Film Manufacturing Company). Some evidence suggests that she provided funds for the Bureau’s work and that she leveraged the organization’s connections with Universal to help the budding female filmmakers Adriana and Dolores Ehlers who came from Mexico to study at the company’s various labs and studios (Sherman; A. Maris Boggs to P.A. Powers).

Boggs, her face obscured, with an actress next to one of the Bureau’s projection trucks, Photoplay, July 1921.

In a 1916 speech to the Second Pan American Scientific Conference, Holley talked at length about the work of the Bureau and its advisory council “composed of college presidents and men of international distinction in science and letters,” but made no mention of twenty-eight-year-old Boggs (“The Bureau of Commercial Economics” 86). Some four years later, in a profile written after Oklahoma Senator Robert Owen had advocated for giving the Bureau a federal charter on the floor of Congress, the author noted that Holley seemed to have a “sincere admiration for the talents and activities” of his young collaborator (Sherman). Indeed, Boggs seems to have been engaged in a wide array of professional activities; she was the president of the League of American Pen Women, a literary society, and a member of the Royal Geographic Society, the Academy of World Economics, and the Academy of Political and Social Sciences.

When Holley died in 1923, Boggs became the director of the Bureau and her younger brother, Randolph, its Dean. It appears that under their direction the focus of the Bureau’s work shifted from vocational education to intercultural understanding. In 1933, Frances Mangum profiled Boggs in The Washington Post in an article titled “Dr. A. Maris Boggs Heads Enterprise for World Amity.” The piece, as far as I have been able to ascertain, is the only profile of Boggs that was ever published. Mangum observed that Boggs—“a very tiny, feminine person”—was doing the important work of “introducing the peoples of this old world to one another” by means of “films and lectures distributed to 54 major nations” (Mangum). Boggs offered the example of Syrian audiences whose encounter with the U.S., Germany, or Britain in the form of industrial or educational films might “derive new ideas both for themselves and their community.”

While this aspect of the Bureau’s work focused on, in Boggs’s words, “working people,” she also used Mangum’s profile to highlight the Bureau’s program of “diplomatic salons.” That program gathered U.S. diplomats, military officials, and government workers to hear lectures and watch films about other countries, in an effort to counter what Boggs called “false propaganda.” Surviving evidence of those events indicates that these screenings also promoted the U.S. military and even, sometimes, showed foreign feature films years after their release (“Romantic Uses of Our Movies”;“Navy Night”). This heterogeneity suggests the ways that the Bureau’s activities might have fostered intercultural understanding while also providing opportunities to promote the U.S. military and other institutions.

Sometime in the next few years, the precise date unknown, the Bureau closed after Boggs was forced to retire because of health issues. She died of brain cancer in July 1937 in Jerusalem, where she had been living with the explorer Dorothy Quincy Smith. Obituaries published in major U.S. and international newspapers described her as a “widely known economist and educator” (“Dr. Maris Boggs”) and noted her work at the Bureau, which was described by The Washington Post as a “philanthropic institution designed to promote international understanding” (“Dr. Boggs Dies in Jerusalem”).

Although Arthur Edwin Krows mentions Boggs in one of the series of articles he wrote about the history of nontheatrical film for Educational Screen in 1939 (as does Sean Savage in his 2006 master’s thesis), her role in promoting industrial films as a tool for education and intercultural understanding through the mundane work of connecting interested parties with prints, which had, in turn, been collected from businesses, trade associations, and foreign governments, remained unexcavated until quite recently (Serna 2015). The contours of Boggs’ career suggest the ways in which women’s involvement in the field of nontheatrical film overlapped with other early twentieth-century reformist projects, such as vocational education, Americanization, and Pan-American unity, among others. Research into a figure such as Boggs, who worked for half of her career in the shadow of a male business partner, requires patient multi-archival investigation, allowing us to piece together her contributions while placing nontheatrical film distribution in the wider social, political, and cultural contexts that shaped its aims.

See also: Cora Johnstone Best and Audrey Forfar Shippam, Ruth Gould Dolesé

Bibliography

“American Legion: Nation-Wide News.” The Bristol Daily Courier (1 March 1921): 2.

“Anita M. Boggs.” Who’s Who in the Nation’s Capital 1921-1922. Washington, D.C.: Consolidated Publishing Company, 1922. 38.

“Boggs, Anita Uarda Maris.” Bryn Mawr Calendar: Register of Alumnae and Former Students. Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College, 1922. 22.

Boggs, Anita U. M. “Cultural Schools or Continuation Schools.” Pedagogical Seminary vol. 20 (January 1913): 71-77.

---. “Visualized Opportunity.” Pedagogical Seminary vol. 21 (January 1914): 445-53.

Boggs, A. Maris. Letter to P.A. Powers. Triangle Film Corporation papers. US MSS 9AF Box 18, Folder 4. Harry and Roy Aitken Papers 1909-1940, Wisconsin Historical Society.

Bureau of Commercial Economics. Bureau of Commercial Economics: Department of Public Instruction. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Commercial Economics, Inc., 1915.

---. Publicity with Moving Pictures. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Commercial Economics, 1920.

“Dr. Boggs Dies in Jerusalem; D.C. Educator: Woman Economist Worked Here, in Japan and South Africa.” The Washington Post (14 July 1937): 22.

“Dr. Maris Boggs.” New York Times (14 July 1937): 21.

Holley, Francis. “The Bureau of Commercial Economics.” Commercial Education: A Report on the Subsection of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress December 1915-January 1916. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1916. 85-86.

---. Letter to Pat Powers. February 16, 1920. Triangle Film Corporation papers. US MSS 9AF Box 21, Folder 1. Harry and Roy Aitken Papers 1909-1940, Wisconsin Historical Society.

Holley, Francis. vs. Universal Film Manufacturing Company, ca. June 1920. Triangle Film Corporation papers. US MSS 9AF Box 21, Folder 4. Harry and Roy Aitken Papers 1909-1940, Wisconsin Historical Society.

Krows, Arthur Edwin. “Motion Pictures: Not for Theaters.” Educational Screen (April 1939): 121-124.

“Leave for School Monday.” Harrisburg Telegraph (28 September 1906): n.p.

Mangum, Frances. “Dr. A. Maris Boggs Heads Enterprise for World Amity.” The Washington Post (20 December 1933): 13.

“Navy Night.” Screening Ticket. National Board of Review Motion Pictures records. Box 18. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

“Once Blind, He Now Helps Others to See.” American Magazine (October 1921): 55.

“Personal and Social News.” Harrisburg Daily Independent (20 September 1906): 7.

“Pleasant Features of Closing of the Misses Sergeant and Bent School.” Harrisburg Telegraph, (16 June 1904): 1.

“Romantic Uses of Our Movies.” Screening Ticket. National Board of Review Motion Pictures records. Box 18. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

Savage, Sean. “The Eye Beholds: Silent Era Industrial Film and the Bureau of Commercial Economics.” MA thesis. New York University, 2006.

“Scholarships.” Harrisburg Daily Independent (12 April 1910): n.p.

Serna, Laura Isabel. “Anita Maris Boggs: Historical Invisibility and Gender in the History of Sponsored and Educational Film.” Feminist Media Histories vol. 1, no. 2 (2015): 135-143. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.2.135.

“A Service You Ought to Know About.” The Interstate Film News vol. 5, no. 31 (1925): 1.

Sherman, John Dickson. “Pictures without Money and without Price.” The Muldrow Sun [Muldrow, OK] (1 June 1923): 5.

“Showing Them to the Indians.” Photoplay 20, no. 2 (July 1921): 86.

Archival Paper Collections:

Correspondence. 1920 February - August. Harry and Roy Aitken Papers 1909-1940, US MSS 9AF. Wisconsin Historical Society.

Subjects Correspondence, Bretinger - Campfire Girls. National Board of Review Motion Pictures records. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.

Citation

Serna, Laura Isabel. "Anita Maris Boggs." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-0jrk-m825>

Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier

by Stéphanie Salmon, Jacques Malthête

Élisabeth Thuillier is best known by film historians for having colored Georges Méliès’s films and films produced by Pathé. In his overview essay on “French Film Colorists” written for this publication, Joshua Yumibe notes that Méliès “outsourced his hand-coloring work from 1897 to 1912 to a Vincennes firm in Paris run by Elisabeth Thuillier who managed a workforce of over 200 female colorists.” Like other film historians before him, Yumibe relies on the journalist François Mazeline’s interview with “Mme Thuillier,” which took place just a few days before a gala organized in honor of Méliès at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1929. In that interview, “Mme Thuillier” told Mazeline:

I did the coloring for all of M. Méliès’s films (…). That type of coloring was entirely done by hand. I employed two hundred and twenty women in my workshop. I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colors, and during the day, my workers applied the color according to my instructions. Each specialized worker applied only one color, and there were often more than twenty colors to apply on one film. We used very fine aniline dyes. They were then successively dissolved in water and alcohol. The tone obtained was transparent and luminous. The false tints were not neglected. (…) M. Dufayel was my last client. He always demanded that the films be hand-colored. The cost was higher, six to seven thousand Francs per copy, for a 300-meter film, and that was before the war. We made an average of sixty copies for each film. So, hand-coloring was a fairly heavy burden on producers’ budgets. (Mazeline 4)

Georges Méliès’s notebook, ca. 1930. Courtesy of the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée and the Cinémathèque française.

But contrary to what we thought for so long, the woman cited above was not Élisabeth Thuillier but her daughter Marie-Berthe Thuillier, known as Berthe Thuillier, who probably worked with Élisabeth and then took over the workshop after her death in either 1904 or 1907. Only recently did we find out about Berthe Thuillier thanks to Georges Méliès’s address book from the 1930s, which indicates the city where “Mrs. Thuillier” lived. The address book reads as follows: “Mrs. Thuillier—Film colorist in Forceville-en-Vimeu near Oisemont (Somme)” (Fonds Méliès 55-B5). We then followed this first lead to various private, national, regional, and local archives, where we uncovered information about Berthe, her mother Élisabeth, and their career as film colorists during the early days of cinema.

Élisabeth Thuillier (née Aléné) was born in 1841 in the town of Guénange in Moselle (near the French border with Luxembourg and Prussia) to a family of Catholic farmers. After the Franco-Prussian War, the Moselle region was annexed by Prussia, but in 1872, Élisabeth chose to keep the French nationality. She had six siblings and her father lived in Paris where he made a modest living as an unskilled worker. Around 1848-1850, when social upheavals and cholera epidemics forced populations in France to migrate from rural to urban areas, Élisabeth left her village and moved to Paris with three of her older siblings. In Paris, she was apparently under the responsibility of her brothers and sisters, with whom she maintained a close relationship for many years. According to official documents from the État civil de Paris at the Archives de Paris, her siblings were with her in 1864 and 1865, when she gave birth to two children “of unknown father,” and when they both died in infancy. In 1867, Élisabeth’s third child, Marie-Berthe, was born and recognized legally by her father, Jules Arthur Thuillier (1846-1875), the son of a landowner from Forceville-en-Vimeu (Somme), even though Élisabeth and Jules were not officially married until 1874.

When she first arrived in Paris, Élisabeth lived in a working-class neighborhood bordered by the Canal Saint-Martin on one side and gypsum quarries on the other, on the site of the Octroi Wall and on the edge of La Villette and Belleville, two villages in the North of Paris that were incorporated into the capital in 1860. Because of the Falloux Law of 1850, which required that every commune of more than 500 inhabitants have a public school for boys and girls, both Élisabeth and Berthe were able to go to public school and to receive a good education. Berthe’s education was probably better than her mother’s since the Falloux Law had been in place for about twenty years when she lived with her paternal aunt in Quevauvillers, a town of about 1000 people in the Somme. Yet Élisabeth still benefitted from the development of new economic opportunities during the Second Empire (1852-1870). As suggested by the address listed on Berthe’s birth certificate from 1867, Élisabeth, who had been a cook and a house servant before, was now working as an “employee” at A. Binant’s shop (5-7 rue de Cléry, 2nd arrondissement). Binant, whose successor would be E. Souchard, was an art dealer who sold “all sorts of watercolors, gouache colors, miniature paints, oil colors, and paint tubes” (Annuaire-almanach du commerce 758), as well as restored paintings, specialized in marouflage on canvas, and published Gustave le Gray’s Nouveau traité théorique et pratique de la photographie sur papier et sur verre [New theoretical and practical treatise on photography, upon paper and glass] (1851). Little information remains about the following years of Élisabeth’s career, when she started her own business as a colorist of photographs and positive plates. Yet it was most likely after she became a widow in 1875 that she started practicing coloring on her own. Although Jules Arthur Thuillier had become a lawyer after having been a shopkeeper, he died without leaving Élisabeth anything, which means that she might have opened her own business out of financial necessity after he died. Under the Napoleonic Code, her status as a widow allowed her to earn a living and support her family on her own.

As for Berthe, she might have started working with her mother around 1886, when she was nineteen years old. Or Berthe might have been employed by Albert Saulieu, a photographer who was a witness at her wedding in 1888. Official documents issued by the État Civil around that time indicate that Berthe was herself a photographer, which was still a very rare profession for a woman, and that she remained a photographer until at least 1889, when her only daughter, Georgette, was born. Berthe might have signed her photographs with the name of her husband Eugène Boutier, a sculptor who attended the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs starting in 1885 and who displayed a bust of “Mlle B.T.” (probably Berthe Thuillier) at the Salon of 1887 (Exposition des Beaux-Arts 47). Berthe and her husband belonged to the thriving community of Parisian artists and lived on the rue André-del-Sarte in Montmartre, near the Grands Magasins Dufayel, which would later show some films that would have been colored by the Thuilliers (Mazeline 4). Berthe and Eugène’s separation in 1902, followed by their divorce upon Berthe’s request in 1906, might be the reason why she then used Thuillier as her professional name.

With the emergence of cinema in 1895, Élisabeth and Berthe started specializing in the coloring of films using the same aniline dyes that were already employed for photographs and stereoscopic glass prints. Yet their business is not listed in the extant professional directories of the time that we consulted. Because the Thuilliers specialized in coloring, their business might have been quite modest at first, or they might have done subcontracted work for a photographer. In any case, the Thuilliers might have started working for Méliès as early as 1897 since Méliès considered colors essential to the visual spectacle that his féeries and trick films offered to audiences already used to colorful magic lantern shows (Malthête 1987, 6). Méliès probably designed the sets, costumes, and tricks in most of his films knowing what colors he would instruct the Thuilliers to apply later (3). But at the same time, the Thuilliers might have had some control over the coloring process since “colors often varied from one print to the next based on the head colorist’s taste and skillfulness” (3). During her interview with Mazeline in 1929, Berthe also stated that, “I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colors” (4), which certainly suggests that she made at least some of the decisions about the coloring of Méliès’s films.

Frame enlargement, Monsieur et Madame sont pressés (colored nitrate, Pathé frères, 1902). Courtesy of Filmoteca Vasca and Filmoteca de Catalunya.

Embossed stamp, “Coloriste Vve Thuillier” at the end of Monsieur et Madame sont pressés. Courtesy of Filmoteca Vasca and Filmoteca de Catalunya.

At Pathé, the first mentions of “Thuillier, Coloriste” and “Vve Thuillier” [Widow Thuillier] in the bookkeeping records date back to January 4, 1898, and February 12, 1898, respectively (Journaux comptables de Pathé 8, 115). Yet the Thuilliers might have worked for Pathé frères before that, when the firm had not yet been formed as a limited company. At any rate, the Filmoteca de Catalunya recently restored a fragment from the hand-colored nitrate print of a film released by the company in 1902 entitled Monsieur et Madame sont pressés/In A Hurry to Catch A Train, which bears the following mention (in French): “COLORISTE/Vve THUILLIER /7 MEDAILLES/OR ARGENT BRONZE/PARIS 1886 A 1900” [Colorist/Widow Thuillier/7 medals/gold silver bronze/Paris 1886-1900]. According to archivists Nere Pagola and Joxean Fernández, this fragment is “particularly interesting since there is apparently no other film whose coloring can be attributed directly to the famous colorist’s workshop” (97). But if we are unable to establish the Thuilliers’ filmography, then we can say that they most likely worked on a large number of Pathé films from at least 1898 until around 1912. Based on Pathé’s bookkeeping records, by November 1903, Pathé was working with three different workshops: Verdier, Vallouy, and Thuillier. At that point, the firm was just a few months away from its first trials for mechanized coloring. During the second half of 1905, Pathé placed orders mostly from the Thuilliers, who would deliver up to 3,800 meters of film every month for the price of 1.25 Francs per meter, even though stencils had just been introduced at Vincennes. At the Archives départementales du Finistère in Brittany, letters dated 1908 and 1909 and written from Bermuda by film exhibitor Marie de Kerstrat to Francis Gaouyer, her law clerk, and two letters from Berthe to Gaouyer, suggest that Berthe (and perhaps her mother before her) worked with at least one other film organization besides Méliès and Pathé around the same time (Fonds Pouliquen).

L’Exposition internationale du théâtre et de la musique (1896), p. 132.

Annuaire du commerce et de l’industrie photographiques (1902), p. 118.

Berthe Thuillier’s writing paper, 1909. Courtesy of Archives départementales du Finistère (Fonds Pouliquen).

Today there is still very little published scholarship about Élisabeth and Berthe. Yet official records, directories, and the Thuilliers’ administrative papers from the beginning of the twentieth century show that their contributions to photography (and possibly film) were acknowledged by their peers. For example, Élisabeth was awarded a bronze medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition (L’Exposition universelle 163; “1° Liste” 149), where she competed as an expert in “albumen colors,” which she had used since at least 1896, probably because they allowed for precise and transparent corrections on photographic prints (Exposition internationale du théâtre et de la musique 132). The Annuaire du commerce et de l’industrie photographiques from 1902 also mentions that “Mme Vve Thuillier” [Élisabeth Thuillier] specialized in the application of “colors for painting photographs, positives on glass, opals, and silks, etc.,” and that she “colored any film and photograph” (118), which no other listed professional seems to have offered. Based on the Annuaire-almanach du commerce, where the Thuillier name was listed between 1903 and 1909, the Thuillier workshop received three gold medals, one vermeil medal, one silver medal, and one bronze medal (abbreviated as “OOO, V, A, B” in French). The heading on Berthe’s writing paper from around 1908-1909 also includes two gold medals, four silver medals, and one bronze medal, which we have been unable to trace in newspapers and catalogues. Still, that writing paper makes it clear that the Thuilliers regarded the coloring of film prints as one of their principal activities at the time.

Together with the honors mentioned above, the workshop’s various locations over the years might be evidence of the Thuilliers’ success. In 1907, the Thuilliers’ workshop was located on a coveted street in the 7th arrondissement (40 rue de Varenne, upper floors), before moving just down the street (87 rue du Bac), where they stayed at least until 1909. Berthe probably described the workshop on the rue du Bac to Mazeline in 1929 and said that she would have employed up to 220 female workers (4), but these statements cannot be verified today. According to the prenuptial agreement for Berthe’s second marriage, she then lived in a bourgeois apartment on the rue du Four in the 6th arrondissement and earned more money than her husband Eugène Beaupuy, a lawyer and the main editor of the Contentieux des Chemins de fer de l’État, which compiled claims involving the State Railways.

Berthe Thuillier’s signature. Courtesy of the Archives départementales du Finistère (Fonds Pouliquen).

During the industrialization of the coloring process at the Pathé studios in Vincennes, which allowed them to lower the price down to 0.5 Francs per meter of film, Pathé even considered taking control of the Thuillier workshop. Berthe (most likely) was also approached to take over the new workshop in Vincennes and she might have helped train the women working there. But Pathé’s takeover of the Thuillier workshop in Paris never happened. This may have been due to Élisabeth’s poor health and subsequent death on July 7, 1907; or because of the increased use of the coloring machines of Mr. Florimond, chief colorist at Pathé; or because of a disagreement between Mrs. Thuillier and Mrs. Florimond, who was also asked to manage the company’s workshop (Salmon 188; Livre du conseil d’administration de Pathé n°1 1906, 288-289). In any case, Berthe took over her mother’s workshop, remained independent from Pathé, and continued working as a film colorist for Pathé until 1911 and for others until around 1912. Between 1922 and 1924, Berthe, now known as the Veuve Beaupuy [Widow Beaupuy], moved to her father’s village, Forceville-en-Vimeu in the Somme, where she still owned a house and where her parents and husband were buried. She died there in 1947.

We can only speculate about the reasons behind the closing down of the Thuillier workshop, whose artisanal methods for hand-coloring might have been made obsolete by new mechanized coloring processes. Many questions about the Thuilliers’ work for Méliès, Pathé, and others, and about their business practices also remain unanswered. But we have come a long way since Georges Méliès’s address book first pointed us to Berthe Thuillier. Our trips to the various archives where materials about the Thuillier family are scattered allowed us to establish that there was not one but two women working as film colorists in France at the turn of the century, and that the Thuilliers ran a family business that adapted to and thrived with the emergence of cinema. Even though the Thuilliers had different careers from other film colorists, these new discoveries shed light not only on Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier, but also on the work of film colorists, who were mostly women in the early days of cinema.

Translated by Aurore Spiers

The authors would like to thank Simon Bohbot, Maître Marie Brunet, Rosa Cardona, Giulia Cucinella, Lorenza Fenzi, Anne-Sophie Godin, Germain Lacasse, Bernard Lécrivain, Jérôme Legrand, Nere Pagola, and Isabelle Parizet, who provided access to rare archival materials.

Bibliography

“1° Liste alphabétique des Exposants. Constructeurs, Opticiens, Produits chimiques, Etc.” In Photo-Gazette. Eds. Georges Carré and C. Naud. Paris, 1899-1900. 149-151.

Annuaire-almanach du commerce, de l'industrie, de la magistrature et de l'administration: ou almanach des 500.000 adresses de Paris, des départements et des pays étrangers: Firmin Didot et Bottin réunis. Paris, 1870-1914.

Annuaire du commerce et de l’industrie photographiques. Paris: Charles Mendel, 1902.

Archives municipales de Guénange. “Construction d'une maison école à Guénange en 1826.” Chroniques d’histoire locale 9 (1987): 1-10.

Davron, Édouard. “Les enseignements d'un recensement à Guénange en 1841.” Chroniques d’histoire locale 10 (1987): 2-11.

Exposition des Beaux-Arts. Salon de 1887. Catalogue illustré. Peinture et Sculpture. Paris: L. Baschet, 1887.

Grimoin-Sanson, Raoul. Le Film de ma vie. Paris: Henry Parville, 1926.

“L’Activité cinégraphique. En France. En Allemagne. En Angleterre.” Cinéa 146 (15 December 1929): 26-7.

L’Exposition internationale du théâtre et de la musique. Paris. 1896. Catalogue officiel de l’Exposition. Paris, 1896.

L'Exposition universelle de 1900 à Paris. Liste des récompenses. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1901.

Malthête, Jacques. “Les bandes cinématographiques en couleurs artificielles. Un exemple: les films de Georges Méliès coloriés à la main.” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 2 (1987): 3-10. https://doi.org/10.3406/1895.1987.880.

---. “Un nitrate composite en couleurs: le Voyage dans la lune de Georges Méliès, reconstitué en 1929.” In 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze no. 71 (Winter 2013): 163-181. https://doi.org/10.4000/1895.4784.

Mazeline, François. “Mme Thuillier nous rappelle…Le temps où le cinéma ne manquait pas de couleurs.” L’Ami du Peuple (13 December 1929): 4.

Pagola, Nere and Joxean Fernández. “Tesoros del cine a ras de suelo.” Journal of Film Preservation 90 (April 2014): 91-99.

Salmon, Stéphanie. Pathé, à la conquête du cinéma, 1896-1929. Paris: Tallandier, 2014.

Yumibe, Joshua. “French Film Colorists.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/french-film-colorists/.

Archival Paper Collections:

Archives notariales d'Oisemont, France.

Archives paroissiales de Guénange + Chroniques d’histoire locale [journal published by the association Vie et Culture]. Association Vie et Culture, Guénange, France.

Catalogues du Salon. Société des Artistes Français.

Contribution foncière des propriétés privées. État des changements constatés pour l'année 1940, Forceville-en-Vimeu, France. Archives départementales de la Somme, France.

État civil de Forceville-en-Vimeu et recensements de cette commune. Archives départementales de la Somme, France.

État civil de Paris. Archives de Paris.

État civil, Fonds généalogique Coutot. Geneaservice.

Fonds de l’étude Cotelle. Paris, France. Archives Nationales.

Fonds de l'étude Pouliquen 60 J 67, Quimper, France. Archives départementales du Finistère.

Fonds Georges Méliès. Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC). Cinémathèque Française.

Journaux comptables de Pathé, 1898-1912. [HIS-F-579 à 598]. Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé.

Livre du conseil d'administration de Pathé n°1, 1896-1907. [HIST-F-214]. Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé.

Citation

Salmon, Stéphanie; Jacques Malthête. "Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-734m-kr16>

Suzanne Marwille

by Martin Šrajer

To date, there are only about ten women screenwriters known to have worked in the Czech silent film industry. Some of them are more famous today as actresses, directors, or entrepreneurs. This is certainly true of Suzanne Marwille, who is considered to be the first Czech female film star. Less known is the fact that she also had a talent for writing, as well as dramaturgy and casting. Between 1918 and 1937, she appeared in at least forty films and wrote the screenplay for eight of them.

Suzanne Marwille in Láska slečny Věry/The Love of Miss Věra (1922). Courtesy of Národní filmový archiv.

Born Marta Schölerová in Prague on July 11, 1895, she was the second of four daughters of postal clerk Emerich Schöler and his wife Bedřiška Peceltová (née Nováková). There is a scarcity of information about Marta’s early life, but we know that in June 1914, at the age of eighteen, she married Gustav Schullenbauer. According to the marriage registry held at the Prague City Archives, he was then a twenty-year-old volunteer soldier one year into his service in the Austrian-Hungarian army (Matrika oddaných 74). Four months later, their daughter—the future actress and dancer Marta Fričová—was born. The marriage lasted ten years, which coincided with the peak years of Marwille’s career.

As was common at the time, Marwille was discovered in the theater, although probably not as a stage actress. While many unknowns still remain about this occasion, it was reported that film industry professionals first saw her sitting in the audience of a Viennese theater at the end of World War I (“Suzanne Marwille” 2). Not long after, she was cast, together with the popular Czech singer and cabaret performer Ferenc Futurista, in the comedy Ošálená komtesa Zuzana/The Fooled Comtesse Zuzana (1918) and then in the romance Démon rodu Halkenů/The Demon of the Halken Family (1918), which was written by Czech actress Hana Temná.

Marwille’s first two films were directed by Václav Binovec, the founder and main director of the newly-created Wetebfilm, a Czech production company that enjoyed several years of success during the silent era. It was Binovec who shaped Marwille’s star image early on, and came up with her professional name, which was used in the press from the very start of her film career. Binovec had a taste for creating cosmopolitan names; the name of his company was a combination of the letters W (for his Americanized name, Willy, during a trip to the United States), T (for his confirmation name, Tomáš), and B (for his surname) (Bartošek 70). For Marta, he paternalistically gave her part of his own name as “Marwille” is a combination of “Marta” and “Willy.” He complemented this surname with an exotic first name—the French version of the Czech “Zuzana.” The fact that he co-authored her professional name at the very beginning of her career later led to Binovec’s self-confident, albeit partially justified, claims that it was he who made Marwille a star.

Marwille starred in the third film she made for Binovec, the two-reel romantic drama A vášeň vítězí/And Passion Triumphs (1918). In this film, for which Hana Temná also wrote the libretto, Marwille plays the wife of an ignorant banker who chooses a passionate relationship with a man from the Prague underworld over her wifely duties. Initially, the film was banned in Austria for romanticizing Prague criminals (Bartošek 71). It only appeared in the cinemas after World War I when Czechoslovakia gained independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The film uses narrative tropes that would become typical of Marwille’s filmography, as well as other melodramatic films of the time, such as a love triangle, conflict between reason and passion, and stolen identity.

In fact, there is a certain consistency in the types of characters Marwille initially played, which is due, in part, to her constant collaborations with Binovec, who truly shaped her star image and his company around it. She frequently appeared as the femme fatale or vamp whose passionate relationships usually had tragic consequences. Based on the reports and advertising of the time, Marwille became one of the main attractions of Wetebfilm, and Binovec visibly promoted his films in relation to her popular star image, pushing her name to the forefront of all her films and “drumming it […] into the audiences in all [the] free spaces in Prague streets” (Dr. B. R. 132-133). As a key person within the company, Marwille even lent her name to the title of Marwille detektivem/Detective Marwille (1922), a parody of American detective films.

In its search for suitable stories that would resonate with audiences, Wetebfilm focused on light melodramas and adventure narratives. Books by famous authors, both domestic and international, were adapted to increase the company’s prestige and the attractiveness of its productions. For example, the company’s Sivooký demon/The Grey-Eyed Demon (1919) is considered to be one of the very first cinematic adaptations of a classic work of Czech literature. In this lost film, Marwille played a young mother mourning the death of her child. Also considered lost is the adventure drama/spy film Bogra (1919). In the role of a dancer forced to marry a high-ranking official, Marwille continued to develop her acting skills, “which already appeared very promising in The Grey-Eyed Demon,” according to a review in Československý film (“Posudky předváděných filmů” 5). The author of the review elaborated further on his interest in the emerging Czech film star: “Her suggestive appearance is most remarkable in close-ups. The play of her face is so poignant that the subtitles, which are scarce anyway, become completely pointless […] With her perfect acting, elegance and beauty—at times demonic, at other times angelically simple—she has attracted the attention of foreign countries. It would be an irretrievable loss for Czech film had Miss Marwille accepted one of the several tempting offers she received from abroad.”

According to film historian Karel Smrž, Wetebfilm was the only film production company “overcoming the critical period of distrust of Czech film while enhancing its quality to be able to compete with foreign films both in technical and artistic terms” (Film 284-285). Binovec, Smrž argued, was the first “to understand that if we wanted to produce films actively, we had to get them abroad as well. And if we wanted to get them abroad, they had to be international like most films on the global market.” The fear that Marwille’s fame would grow and that Czechoslovakia would soon be too small for her, expressed in the review of Bogra, was a symptom of a relatively early and successful, albeit incomplete, fulfillment of this ambition for Binovec. Thanks to the company’s high-quality films, “his” actress with an exotic-sounding name was soon seen as a world-class star.

The early 1920s saw the biggest boom for Wetebfilm with the commercial success of its most ambitious films. It was also during this time that Marwille exerted more official control in shaping her star image and film roles as a screenwriter, although she was likely involved in writing librettos for and consulting on earlier films without ever receiving credit. Having made Wetebfilm famous with her acting, her need for greater authorial control might have been related to her inability to identify with the heroines of her films, or the types of stories (Hrbas, “Svět Martina Friče” 5). She was not alone in this opinion; in the spring of 1920, an article in Kinopublikum stated: “We know that miracles do not exist, but we do not understand why Miss Marwille cannot find a competent author who would be not only able to write a leading role for the main actress, but also an actual film story, i.e., a dramatic one” (“Suzanne Marville” 3). Marwille ultimately found a competent author in herself.

Suzanne Marwille in Irčin románek I/Irča’s Little Romance I (1921). Courtesy of Národní filmový archiv.

Suzanne Marwille in Irčin románek I/Irča’s Little Romance I (1921). Courtesy of Národní filmový archiv.

The actress, who had originally wanted to devote herself solely to a career in literature, grew up admiring feminist writer Růžena Svobodová, the founder of the magazine Lípa, whose work often focused on modern women who did not submit to men (Hrbas, “Svět Martina Friče” 4-5). As a child, Marwille wrote letters to the magazine, and so it is not surprising that, in 1921, she made her screenwriting debut with Černí myslivci/Gamekeepers in Black, an adaptation of an anthology of short stories by Svobodová. Marwille was reportedly very well-read in world literature, and her other early attempts at screenwriting reflect this. For example, she also wrote the screenplay for the drama Román boxera/Boxer’s Novel (1921), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s nineteenth-century novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, and the screenplay for Poslední radost/Last Joy (1921), which was based on a novel of the same name by Knut Hamsun. In addition to providing the script for the latter, it is likely that she was the one who initially encouraged Binovec to adapt Hamsun’s story (Dr. B. R. 133).

Suzanne Marwille in Irčin románek I/Irča’s Little Romance I (1921). Courtesy of Národní filmový archiv.

Marwell also wrote the screenplay for the popular Irčin románek I/Irča’s Little Romance I (1921), adapting the story from a book of the same name by Josef Roden, a popular author of stories for young adults. The character of sweet high school student Irča represented Marwille’s attempt to play a new type of heroine and added the role of a charming young girl to the actress’s portfolio. The Czech publisher and writer Otakar Štorch-Marien, a great admirer of Marwille, later speculated that with her independent, sweet, and cheeky manner, Irča appealed to girls of the same age, presenting an alternative role model not common at the time (126). This role seems to be much more in line with Marwelle’s off-screen personality, which sources have characterized as, among other qualities, independent, intelligent, witty, and athletic (Smrž, Dějiny filmu 28; Hrbas, “Martin Frič. Lidový vypravěč IV” 184), with the “agility and boldness of a true Amazon” (ský 7). Unfortunately, Marwille’s follow-up to Irča’s story, Irčin románek II/Irča’s Romance II (1921), is considered lost.

Suzanne Marwille as Eve in Adam a Eva/Adam and Eve (1922). Courtesy of Národní filmový archiv.

As individuals who knew Marwille recollected, she resisted the conventional idea of “womanhood” (Štorch-Marien 126), and her creative interest in challenging gender roles is evident in the subversive 1922 cross-dressing comedy Adam a Eva/Adam and Eve. Marwille based her screenplay on a story by Jarmila Hašková, and the film follows two identical twins who play pranks on each other by pretending to be one another in order to get away with something, eventually sabotaging each other’s efforts to establish a romantic relationship. The twins as children are played by Marwille’s daughter Marta. Their sixteen-year-old teenage versions are played by Marwille, who switches between female and male poses, gestures, and costumes with extraordinary vigor. The film boldly plays with gender stereotypes, raising the question of whether the male and female identities are derived from clothes and behavior rather than any biological predispositions. By playfully amplifying the attributes commonly associated with each gender, the film reveals their artificiality. In addition to the frequent changing of clothes and hairstyles, the performative nature of gender is emphasized with Marwille, as both Adam and Eve, breaking the fourth wall several times, looking directly into the camera to find reassurance about her identity.

In November 1922, Binovec announced to the film press that he was leaving for Berlin to meet contractual obligations (Bartošek 77). At the same time, due to economic hardship, he decided to voluntarily liquidate Wetebfilm. (He gradually abandoned film production and ran only a rental company specializing in the import of Soviet films.) Faced with a lack of film roles, other actors and actresses at the company returned to the stage. However, this was not an option for Marwille, who likely had no experience with theater acting. Having rejected an offer from Pathé frères to make films in Paris (Svoboda 25), she accompanied Binovec to Germany.

As early as December 1922, Marwille was at work in Germany, making a film based on Friedrich Schiller’s unfinished eighteenth-century novel Der Geisterseher. It was Binovec who got her the role, and later she made more films with him at the Berlin Kinegrafia Atelier, such as the romantic drama Madame Golvery (1923), a Czech-funded film based on an original libretto by Otakar Štorch-Marien. Marwille worked as a film actress in Germany for three years, and appears to not have written any scripts while there. However, during this period, Czechoslovakian audiences saw the premiere of Láska slečny Věry/Miss Vera’s Love (1922), which was made before Marwille left the country. In this now lost film, which Marwille wrote, she played the lead, a young village girl sent by her parents to study in Prague. With the character of Vera, like her playful and wild portrayal of Irča, Marwille had the chance to “show all the varieties of her acting nuances, smiles and movements, letting out a geyser of youthful freshness” (F. L. M. 14).

Marwille’s return to Czechoslovakia in 1925 marked the end of her fruitful partnership with Binovec. Unfortunately, there was a legal epilogue to their long collaboration with Marwille seeking to recover unpaid fees from her former business partner (Bartošek 71). Although little is known about the nature of their dispute, it is possible that Marwille felt her contributions to Wetebfilm were not (financially) valued enough.

Suzanne Marwille in Láska slečny Věry/The Love of Miss Věra (1922). Courtesy of Národní filmový archiv.

Around 1926, Marwille married for the second time. Her husband, and the father of her daughter Eva, was the civil engineer František Hess. In the years following the end of her partnership with Binovec, Marwille’s screen appearances began to decrease. She no longer had a permanent contract at a single company, instead working with different ones. This period also seems to mark the end of any official behind-the-scenes involvement as a writer; she is not directly credited as a screenwriter on any film not made by Binovec.

Suzanne Marwille in Láska slečny Věry/The Love of Miss Věra (1922). Courtesy of Národní filmový archiv.

In 1928, Marwille married again, this time to the director and screenwriter Martin Frič, who would make some of the most critically- acclaimed films of her late career. The first to premiere was one he wrote, Dům ztraceného štěstí /The House of Lost Happiness (1927), which was well received by critics. Marwille then appeared in the melodrama Životem vedla je láska/Love Led Them Through Life (1928), also scripted by Frič. In this film, she plays one of two friends who leave their home in the village together in the hopes of finding love and happiness in the city. Instead, they face several problems with lovers, children, and jobs.

In 1929, Frič directed two more films featuring his wife, starting with Varhaník u sv. Víta/The Organist at St. Vitus’ Cathedral. With her hair cut short, reminiscent of Louise Brooks, Marwille plays the foster child Klára. Her face, often intently looking directly at the camera, is frequently captured in close-up, perhaps in an attempt to remind audiences of her presence after many years out of the spotlight. However, it was Frič whose fame and career grew as a result of The Organist, and he eventually proved himself to be one of the great filmmakers of Czechoslovak cinema. The second film the couple made that year was Chudá holka/Poor Girl, an expressive melodrama in which Marwille again plays a village girl who tries to make it in the city but who ultimately falls prey to several men.

With the advent of sound, Marwille’s career basically came to an end. She only appeared in three more films by Frič: Sestra Angelika/Sister Angelika (1932), Pobočník jeho výsosti/Adjutant to His Highness (1933), and Hordubalové/The Hordubals (1937). Even though she did not appear in many films, she remained active in the film industry during this period. For instance, in 1931, she became a member of the ČEFID, a Czech film co-operative that was founded by screenwriter Václav Wassermann and chaired by Frič. The co-operative worked with local production and rental companies, as well as cinemas, to ensure capital for domestic productions (Zdražilová v).

Suzanne Marwille in Láska slečny Věry/The Love of Miss Věra (1922). Courtesy of Národní filmový archiv.

Marwille’s artistic contributions to her husband’s sound films remain an under-explored part of her career. In his series of essays about Frič, Jiří Hrbas called Marwille a “special engine of Martin’s life” and his “wife, friend, colleague, inspirer and creative partner” (“Svět Martina Friče”4). Another of Hrbas’s written recollections, speaking to the fact that casting was very important to the filmmaker, admitted that Frič often followed the recommendations of his wife, who “had a very strong instinct when it came to different types of people” (“Martin Frič. Lidový vypravěč” 16), and was “very sensible and capable in assessing the character and artistic talents of people” (“Martin Frič. Lidový vypravěč II” 69). Additionally, according to Hrbas, Marwille not only advised Frič in casting, but also in film dramaturgy. Writing about her behind-the-scenes contribution to the popular comedy Škola, základ života/School is the Foundation of Life (1938), Hrbas explained, “Suzanne Marwille kept reminding them that the plot had to be structured in a closer, more compact and more robust way” (“Martin Frič. Lidový vypravěč II” 75). Frič continued to work as a director until his death in 1968. Considering that they were partners both in their personal and professional lives, one can assume that Marwille, who passed away in 1962, also remained active in the Czechoslovak cinema industry, albeit no longer as one of its brightest film stars and screenwriters, but as one of the many women in the background who have yet to be fully appreciated.

Bibliography

Bartošek, Luboš. Dějiny československé kinematografie I. Praha: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1979.

Branald, Adolf. My od filmu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1988.

Dr. B. R. “Návrat první filmové star: Suzanne Marville.” Kinorevue (7 June 1937): 132-133.

F. L. M. “Láska slečny Věry v českém filmu.” Český filmový svět no. 2 (1922): 14.

Hrbas, Jiří. “Kapitoly o našem a světovém filmu III.” Film a doba no. 4 (1971): 178–179.

------. “Martin Frič. Lidový vypravěč.” Film a doba no. 1 (1972): 12-20.

------. “Martin Frič. Lidový vypravěč II.” Film a doba no.  2 (1972): 68-76.

------. “Martin Frič. Lidový vypravěč IV.” Film a doba no. 4 (1972): 178-187.

------. “Svět Martina Friče.” Záběr (18 Feb. 1971): 4-5.

k. “Irčin románek.” Československý film no. 8 (1 May 1921): 6.

Kokeš, Radomír D. “Filmové herectví, česká němá kinematografie a otázky studia stylu.” Iluminace, no. 2 (2018): 21-57.

ksž. “Chudá holka.” Studio: měsíční revue pro filmové umění, no. 1 (1930): 28.

Matrika oddaných, Nusle, 1913-1918, Matriční záznam o sňatku s pozn. o rozvodu. Unpublished registry. Archiv hlavního města Prahy [Prague City Archives].
http://katalog.ahmp.cz/pragapublica/permalink?xid=9A01AD75BC064F349EF6172C8FDB518F&scan=80.

“Naše kinohvězdy.” Pražský ilustrovaný zpravodaj (16 Feb. 1923): 4.

“Nové české filmy. WETEB-Film. Adam a Eva.” Film, no. 11 (16 Aug. 1922): 11.

“Posudky předváděných filmů.” Československý film no. 26–27 (23 Oct.1919): 5.

ský. “Chudá holka.” Studio: měsíční revue pro filmové umění no. 1 (1930): 28. 

Smrž, Karel. Dějiny filmu. Praha: Dužstevní práce, 1933.

------. Film: podstata, historický vývoj, technika, možnosti a cíle kinematografu. Praha: Prometheus, 1924.

Štorch-Marien, Otakar. Sladko je žít. Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1966.

“Suzanne Marville.” Kinopublikum (30 April - 6 May 1920): 3.

“Suzanne Marwille.” Hollywood no. 1 (1928): 2.

Svoboda, Jan. “Úspěch české filmové herečky v Berlíně.” Film no. 17 (31 December 1922): 25.

Tabery, Karel. Filmová publicistika Otakara Štorcha-Mariena. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 2004.

Zdražilová, Milica. Český filmař Václav Wasserman. M.A. Thesis. 1971. FAMU, Prague. https://nfa.cz/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Wasserman-V%C3%A1clav.pdf.

Archival Paper Collections:

All contemporary newspaper and trade press articles used for this profile are from the collections of the Národní filmový archiv.

Citation

Šrajer, Martin. "Suzanne Marwille." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4can-qz78>

Margaret J. Winkler

by Malcolm Cook

As the leading distributor of animated cartoons in the 1920s, Margaret J. Winkler played a pivotal role in the professionalization of the animation industry. Her company, M. J. Winkler, distributed and financed several of the most significant animated series of the period, including Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat, the Fleischer brothers’ Out of the Inkwell, and Disney’s Alice Comedies. (“Disney” here and throughout refers to the Disney Brothers Studio. Walt Disney as an individual will be referred to by first and last name.) Winkler’s management of these series shaped their development in both economic and aesthetic terms. Unfortunately, after her marriage to Charles Mintz at the end of 1923, her involvement in the business declined, and by 1926 she had retired from the film industry following the birth of their two children.

Winkler was born in Hungary in 1895 and moved to the United States as a child (Kaufman 2009, 105). She established her career in the film industry working for Harry Warner as a private secretary in the 1910s (“Distributor As A Woman Proves Surprise” 90). Working with Warner and attending conventions gave Winkler considerable knowledge of and experience in film distribution through the nationwide network of film exchanges and the process of selling state rights (“The Felix Vogue” 16). Winkler chose to leave Warner Bros. in late 1921 to establish her own company to distribute the Felix the Cat series (“M. J. Winkler to Release State Right Product” 1249). Warner later praised Winkler in a letter to Walt Disney, stating that “she has done very well, and I believe she is responsible for anything she may undertake…I don’t think you need any hesitancy in having her handle your merchandise” (qtd. in Johnson 2017, 40).

Announcement in Film Daily, August 6, 1922.

Felix had already established a reputation as one of the most popular features of the Paramount Magazine reel (“Cartoonist Pat Sullivan” 1927). Pat Sullivan’s agreement with Winkler in late 1921 to distribute a stand-alone series would expand that fame, making Felix the most famous cartoon character of the 1920s, not only in America but also worldwide. Winkler clearly recognized the imagination and skill of these cartoons and the abilities of Otto Messmer, who was the creative force behind them, despite producer Sullivan taking public credit. Yet Winkler’s most significant contribution was her talent for identifying and building a market for these short films.

Within months of the availability of the first installment in Felix the Cat, Winkler had sold the series on a state rights basis across much of the United States. Exhibitors Trade Review noted that sales in March 1922 for Greater New York, northern New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin followed “close upon the heels” of the initial agreement between Winkler and Sullivan (“‘Felix’ Bought By Joe Friedman” 972). Further large deals ensued, and within five weeks, sixty percent of the domestic territories had been sold, with Motion Picture News hailing Winkler’s achievement as “unprecedented in state rights marketing” (“60 Per Cent of ‘Felix’ Territory Sold” 1962).

Screenshot, Felix Comes Back (1922).

Winkler was equally successful in securing overseas sales for Felix the Cat, building an international audience that would be crucial to the series later in the decade. Canadian rights were secured by the end of March 1922 (“‘Felix’ Cartoons Sold for Canada” 1778), and by July the series was being distributed in Brazil and Czechoslovakia (“Charnas Buys ‘Felix’ Cartoons” 3). British audiences also started seeing the films in July 1922, where they would grow in popularity (“Eve’s Film Review” 31).

These accomplishments were a reflection of a number of business practices that Winkler implemented. For example, she consistently reported these successful sales to the trade press, not only self-promoting and marketing herself to exhibitors, but also ensuring the popularity of the series was known and implying a scarcity. Winkler placed a large number of trade press advertisements illustrated with comic drawings of Felix, which were used to generate further demand. These explicitly targeted “Mr. State Rights Buyer” (“Mr. State Rights Buyer-Listen!” 1116), highlighting the world rights that were available (“Felix Comics” 93) and emphasizing that sales were “Going Fast!” (“Felix Cat Comics” 2564).

Ensuring Felix played in prestigious first run venues allowed Winkler to bring the series to the attention of industry figures in the major cities and then to publicize this to exhibitors around the United States. The first film under Winkler’s agreement with Sullivan premiered at the notable Rivoli Theatre in New York in January 1922, before being distributed on a state rights basis (“Felix Saves the Day” 1056). Later trade press advertisements emphasized that Felix played in venues such as the Strand Theatre in New York, the Chicago Theatre (“Read it and Reap!” 414), and Grauman’s Million Dollar Theatre in Los Angeles (“‘Felix’ Cartoons are Booked” 1186).

In addition to promoting films within the industry, Winkler oversaw the marketing of the series to the public, arranging with Sullivan that he would provide the illustrations for advertising posters (“Cartoonist to Draw Posters” 1332). This decision was in response to market research conducted by Winkler, via a questionnaire she sent to exhibitors and state rights buyers, which was seen by Motion Picture News as “but another bit of evidence of the desire of Miss Winkler to make ‘Felix’ a national figure” (“Cartoonist Plans ‘Felix’ Poster Illustrations” 2082). In 1924, Winkler added “new and beautiful accessories together with an up to date press book,” which were also produced with “no expense spared in making Felix a necessity to the exhibitor” (“Sullivan Comedies Remain” 52). Similarly, Winkler arranged for Al Feinman, an independent publicity agent, to handle advertising for the series, further indicating her understanding of the connection between distribution and marketing (“Gossip of the Trade” 274).

Felix was also promoted and exploited through other tie-in arrangements, including the production of Felix soft toy dolls (“‘Felix’” 850; “‘Felix,’ in Toy Form” 1960), a syndicated “full page colored comic supplement” for newspapers arranged in conjunction with King Features Syndicate (“‘Felix, the Cat,’ to be Syndicated” 653), and “novelties of all sorts” produced by George Borgfelt’s company (“Sullivan Comedies Remain” 52). Reports in the trade press credited Winkler for these initiatives, even while some of the contracts may have been directly with Sullivan as the rights holder. However, Winkler’s close attention to these advertising and marketing activities undoubtedly contributed to the huge success of the Felix the Cat series and differentiated it from the other cartoon series being released in this period.

Distributor As A Woman Proves Surprise. ”Exhibitors Herald, 1922.

That Winkler obscured her gender by naming her company “M. J. Winkler” can be understood as another important professional tactic, especially at a time when discrimination could lead partners to disregard or underestimate her ability to conduct business. While a number of trade press articles did refer to her as “Miss Winkler” (“M. J. Winkler to Release State Right Product” 1249), her directly-placed advertisements typically only referred to the non-gendered company name, as did the title cards of the animated cartoons themselves. After Winkler had successfully established her business, a number of trade press articles addressed her unusual status as a female distributor. One article recounted the confusion of Joseph Plunkett, managing director of the Strand Theatre in New York, who had assumed Winkler must be a man until he met her in person (“Distributor As A Woman Proves Surprise” 90). This is revealing of the prejudice and inequality that was already deeply rooted in the film industry, which Winkler had to overcome. Nevertheless, the article ended on a positive note, with a statement from Winkler: “I think the film industry is full of wonderful possibilities for an ambitious woman, and there is no reason why she shouldn’t be able to conduct business as well as the men.” Yet the need to state this indicated implicitly that there were barriers that could thwart those possibilities.

Both Winkler’s importance as a female pioneer and her responsibility for the commercial success of Felix were sometimes acknowledged in the trade press. In 1924, Film Daily stated “few know Sullivan but there is hardly anyone who doesn’t know Margaret J. Winkler, the only woman distributor of short subjects in the business…her success has been most unusual” (“The Felix Vogue” 16). Additionally, Winkler was the only female businessperson included in a list of “Prominent Film Folk” attending a Chicago convention in 1923, alongside figures such as Marcus Loew and Lewis J. Selznick  (“Prominent Film Folk” 2633).

Winkler’s reputation made her a leading figure in the nascent animation industry she was helping to build and a natural contact for animation studios looking for financing and distribution. It is important to note that roles and titles within the animation industry were at an embryonic stage at this time and distinctions between “distributor” and “producer” were fluid and do not necessarily reflect our present day understanding of these positions. Winkler was consistently referred to in the trade press as a distributor; however, this does not fully communicate the central role she had in instituting production and underwriting the financial expenditure of production, responsibilities more typically associated with a producer. There is good evidence that Walt Disney would not have been able to make the Alice films if he did not have a contract with Winkler, as it guaranteed a financial return.

Following the commercial success of Felix, M. J. Winkler would add two very significant cartoon series to its roster: the Fleischer brothers’ Out of the Inkwell in 1922 and Disney’s Alice Comedies in 1924. At this stage, Walt Disney and his studio was an unknown and unproven quantity in the animation industry. In contrast, his correspondence at the time shows his deep respect for Winkler and her high standing in the industry. Writing to the parents of child actor Virginia Davis who would star in the Alice Comedies, Walt Disney described Winkler as “very reliable” and emphasized that she “believes in advertising.” As an example of her “speed and pep,” he further recalled that Winkler had arranged the Sunday newspaper Felix the Cat comic strip and that “she is always doing publicity stunts like this” (Letter to Margaret Davis). After the contract with Winkler for the Alice Comedies was signed, Walt Disney wrote several letters to his Kansas friend and future Mickey Mouse animator Ubbe Iwerks that show his continued respect for Winkler’s important role. He called her the “big boss” and revealed he was eager to receive “high praise” for the quality of the series (Letter [1 June 1924]; Letter [10 June 1924]).

Screenshot, Alice in the Jungle (1925).

Screenshot, Alice’s Wild West Show (1924).

In addition to the important business leadership Winkler provided for Disney, there is also evidence that she shaped the aesthetic development of the Alice Comedies. Her contract with Disney stated that the cartoons needed to be produced in a “high-class manner…and satisfactory to the Distributor” (“Contract” 2). Winkler pushed Disney to generally improve the quality and timeliness of their films, such as, the under- or over-exposure of the combination scenes in which a live-action Alice interacted with cartoon characters (Merritt and Kaufman 1993, 63). In 1924, she wrote to Walt Disney: “I might suggest that in your cartoon stuff you use a cat wherever possible and don’t be afraid to let him do ridiculous things” (qtd. in Merritt and Kaufman 63). Equally, Winkler promoted the use of humor and gags in these films. In another 1924 letter, she wrote: “I would suggest you inject as much humour as you possibly can. Humour is the first requisite of short subjects such as Felix, Out of the Inkwell, and Alice” (qtd. in Merritt and Kaufman 57). Disney was clearly taking heed of this advice, with Walt Disney noting in a letter to Iwerks after a visit from Winkler that “we are trying in every way to improve” (Letter [10 June 1924]).

Trade press advertisement, Film Year Book (1923).

The business practices Winkler implemented for the Felix the Cat series were also evident in the distribution of the Disney and Fleischer cartoons. The cartoons were placed in first run theaters and this was publicized to attract further sales (“Yea Bo!” 3077). Rapid state rights sales were made and announced (“Territories Sold on ‘Out of the Inkwell’ Series” 3025; “State Rights Sales” 220). The contract for the Alice Comedies included a provision for Disney to provide “a sketch from which a one-sheet poster can be made,” ensuring the publicity artwork maintained quality and character consistency (“Contract” 2). Winkler published regular trade press advertisements featuring these new animated characters and suggesting scarcity with only “a few territories still open” (“Out of the Inkwell” 3077). A number of these trade advertisements placed the hugely popular Felix the Cat alongside the newer characters, indicating the economies of scale that Winkler could achieve by distributing these major cartoon series together, rather than placing them in direct competition (Film Year Book 1923, 200; “Newer Bigger Better” 1786).

A consistent and frequent release schedule was a feature of the Felix the Cat series, and Winkler implemented a similar pattern for her later short film series, which was crucial to their success. For instance, the Fleischers had initially produced the Out of the Inkwell films in 1918 for inclusion in the Paramount-Bray Pictograph, later named the Goldwyn-Bray Pictograph, an arrangement that continued into 1921 (“Progress in Animated Drawing” 1707). While receiving positive reviews, the Fleischers’ films appeared only intermittently in this regular magazine series. The magazine format of Pictograph was a way to provide reliable and frequent releases to theaters when labor-intensive animation production typically could not sustain the dependable release schedule needed by exhibitors (“Goldwyn Pictures Has Control” 43). It was only when M. J. Winkler started distributing Out of the Inkwell that they adopted a monthly release schedule and publicized this in resources like the 1923 Film Year Book (200). Similarly, the contract with Disney for the Alice Comedies explicitly called for them to be delivered “one (1) each following month and not later than the first of the month” (“Contract” 1). Walt Disney’s letters to Iwerks also indicate that Winkler visited the Los Angeles studio in June 1924 after six films had been produced to arrange a “twice a month” schedule (Letter [1 June 1924]). Thus, Winkler’s understanding of the needs of exhibitors shaped the production practices of animation studios.

As an independent distributor, Winkler’s awareness of exhibitors’ needs is further reflected in her membership to the Independent Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (IMPPDA), an industry coalition that offered exhibitors “A Complete Year’s Program for Your Theatre” (“To the Exhibitors” 20). This arrangement gave exhibitors the opportunity to build a “combination” program from a range of independent distributors like M. J. Winkler. Not only did this allow for more freedom and choice than would be available from large providers, but it also gave exhibitors the assurance of a regular slate of films and “Big Stars–Big Stories–Big Authors” (“Mr. Exhibitor” 4; “To the Exhibitors” 20). Winkler’s involvement in the leadership of this organization points to the fact that it was a challenging climate for independent distribution at the time, as she was clearly attempting to support exhibitors’ needs to secure her own success.

The challenges of independent distribution were evident for Winkler as early as 1923 when Pat Sullivan started to look for another distributor for the Felix the Cat series. Winkler had exercised an option to continue the series under an existing contract, but Sullivan disputed that she had any rights once the remaining episodes were delivered (“In The Courts” 5). To protect her business interests, Winkler threatened “extreme legal measures” in a full-page trade press advertisement and court proceedings were initiated (“Warning 19 December 1923” 4). Winkler asserted that “after two years of building up the Felix cartoons, she did not intend relinquishing her rights” (“In The Courts” 5). This dispute was settled out of court as “the difficulties between her [Winkler] and Pat Sullivan the producer have been straightened out” (“Acquires New Holmes Series” 1), and, in May 1924, Winkler placed full-page advertisements announcing twenty-four new Felix subjects (“The Life of the Program” 28). Winkler’s adherence to standard business practice and the rule of law was in sharp contrast to Sullivan’s reputation for personal volatility and unconventional negotiating tactics (Canemaker 1996, 59), further demonstrating Winkler’s efforts to professionalize the animation industry.

Winkler’s warning in Film Daily, June 21, 1925.

Sullivan and Winkler came into conflict again in 1925 over release scheduling. The rights to the Felix the Cat films in Britain had been sold to British Pathé for inclusion in their Eve’s (and Everybody’s) Film Review. Whereas Felix was produced on a bi-weekly basis at this time, the British magazine reel had a weekly release schedule. As a result, the Felix cartoons were divided into two parts and included alongside other fashion, travel, and topical segments. While this decision had a clear rationale—to allow exhibitors to change their program each week and thus attract a regular audience—Sullivan publicly stated that this “mutilated” the cartoons (“Uncorked” 34). He subsequently started negotiations with other distributors to finance future episodes of Felix the Cat, finally signing an agreement with the British company Ideal, which resulted in considerable legal conflict between British Pathé and Ideal (“Buys Up Shorts” 1). Winkler again posted warnings of legal action in the trade press, promising to “prosecute the action vigorously and protect all my rights” and to “use legal measures wherever necessary” (“Warning 21 June 1925” 34; “Warning 5 July 1925” 3). On this occasion, the New York Supreme Court ruled in Sullivan’s favor, with the 1924 agreement superseding any earlier contracts, leaving Sullivan free to negotiate with other partners. While she lost this case, the conflict nevertheless demonstrated the extent to which, thanks to Winkler’s work, animated cartoons had become an important business, with parties willing to undertake costly legal battles with large sums of money at stake.

M. J. Winkler advertisement with Charles Mintz featured as manager. Exhibitors Herald, June 1925.

By the time of this second dispute, Winkler was already withdrawing from the film industry following her marriage to Charles Mintz in November 1923 (Kaufman 109). Mintz had already begun to play a role in her business before this, serving as the witness, for example, when her contract with Disney was signed the month prior (“Contract” 4). The incorporation of M. J. Winkler Productions in 1923 with a capitalization of $20,000 demonstrated the credentials of Winkler and her organization (“Incorporations” 2). However, coming soon after her marriage, it also instated Mintz and Margaret’s brother, George Winkler, as company directors alongside its female founder (“The Week’s Record of Albany Incorporations” 260), showing their increasing control. By 1925, Mintz was being listed as the manager of the M. J. Winkler organization in advertisements (“Krazy Kat” 2; “Krazy Kat” 135). Winkler’s withdrawal from the industry reflected contemporary social conventions; while women were gaining greater involvement in the paid workforce at this time, it was still common that “white women overall tended to stop working after they married” (Patterson 2008, 12).

Motion Pictures News, April 1924.

Winker’s career trajectory in the animation sector mirrors what was occurring more broadly in the American film industry. As Jane Gaines and others have observed, early cinema was an area of such rich activity by women precisely because it was not yet fully defined either industrially or aesthetically— “with so little at stake (so little power, so little capital) much more could be entrusted to women” (Gaines 2002, 105). As an independent distributor with savvy marketing know-how and an understanding of exhibitors’ needs, Winkler demonstrated the economic viability and potential of animated cartoons, but this would ironically exclude her from the industry, as her husband took control of a now-established enterprise. Ultimately, Mintz would suffer the same fate, as the Hollywood studios replaced independent production when they recognized the economic value of animated cartoons. While the technical or aesthetic innovations of animated cartoons can be credited to others, Winkler founded animation as a profitable business and established it as a vital part of film programs worldwide.

Bibliography

“60 Per Cent of ‘Felix’ Territory Sold.” Motion Picture News (1 April 1922): 1962.

“Acquires New Holmes Series.” Film Daily (25 May 1924): 1.

“Buys Up Shorts.” Film Daily (15 March 1925): 1.

Canemaker, John. Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996.

“Cartoonist Pat Sullivan Signs Contract With Famous Players.” Moving Picture World (20 March 1920): 1927.

“Cartoonist Plans ‘Felix’ Poster Illustrations.” Motion Picture News (8 April 1922): 2082.

“Cartoonist to Draw Posters.” Exhibitors Trade Review (8 April 1922): 1332.

“Charnas Buys ‘Felix’ Cartoons.” Film Daily (22 July 1922): 3.

“Contract Between Margaret J. Winkler and Walt Disney.” Dated 16 October 1923. The Treasures of the Walt Disney Archives. Oct. 16, 2013-Jan. 4, 2015. Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, IL.

Disney, Walt. Letter to Margaret Davis. 16 October 1923. The Walt Disney Family Museum.

------. Letter to Ubbe Iwerks. 1 June 1924. The Walt Disney Family Museum.

------. Letter to Ubbe Iwerks. 10 June 1924. The Walt Disney Family Museum.

“Distributor As A Woman Proves Surprise.” Exhibitors Herald (30 December 1922): 90.

“Eve's Film Review (57).” The Bioscope (13 July 1922): 31.

“‘Felix.’” Moving Picture World (22 April 1922): 850.

“‘Felix’ Bought By Joe Friedman and the Elk Photoplays.” Exhibitors Trade Review (4 March 1922): 972.

“‘Felix’ Cartoons are Booked in Many First Run Houses.” Exhibitors Trade Review (25 March 1922): 1186.

“‘Felix’ Cartoons Sold for Canada.” Motion Picture News (25 March 1922): 1778.

“Felix Cat Comics.” Motion Picture News (18 November 1922): 2564.

“Felix Comics.” Motion Picture News Booking Guide (October 1922): 93.

“‘Felix,’ in Toy Form, to Be Sold to Public.” Motion Picture News (1 April 1922): 1960.

“Felix Saves the Day.” Motion Picture News (11 February 1922): 1056.

“‘Felix, the Cat,’ to be Syndicated by Newspapers.” Motion Picture News (11 August 1923): 653.

“The Felix Vogue.” Film Daily (11 May 1924): 16.

Film Year Book 1922-23. New York: Wid's Films and Film Folks Inc., 1923. https://archive.org/details/filmyearb1922192223newy.

Gaines, Jane. “Of Cabbages and Authors.” In A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Eds. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 88-118.

“Goldwyn Pictures Has Control of Bray Pictures Corporation.” Exhibitors Herald (7 February 1920): 43.

“Gossip of the Trade.” Moving Picture World (18 March 1922): 274.

“In The Courts.” Film Daily (20 February 1924): 5.

“Incorporations.” Film Daily (8 November 1923): 2.

Johnson, Mindy. Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney's Animation. Glendale, CA: Disney Editions, 2017.

Kaufman, J. B. “The Live Wire: Margaret J. Winkler and Animation History.” In Animation: Art and Industry. Ed. Maureen Furniss. New Barnet: John Libbey, 2009. 105-110.

“Krazy Kat.” Film Daily (14 June 1925): 2.

“Krazy Kat.” Exhibitors Herald (27 June 1925): 135.

“The Life of the Program.” Film Daily (11 May 1924): 28.

“M. J. Winkler to Release State Right Product.” Motion Picture News (25 February 1922): 1249.

Merritt, Russell, and J. B. Kaufman. Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney. Pordenone, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1993.

“Mr. Exhibitor Build Your Own Combination.” Film Daily (29 May 1924): 4.

“Mr. State Rights Buyer - Listen!” Exhibitors Trade Review (18 March 1922): 1116.

“Newer Bigger Better.” Motion Picture News (19 April 1924): 1786.

“Out of the Inkwell.” Motion Picture News (16 December 1922): 3077.

Patterson, Martha H. “Introduction.” The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894-1930. Ed. Martha H. Patterson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. 1-26.

“Progress in Animated Drawing.” Moving Picture World (22 June 1918): 1707.

“Prominent Film Folk.” Motion Picture News (2 June 1923): 2633.

“Read it and Reap!” Exhibitors Trade Review (8 July 1922): 414.

“State Rights Sales.” Moving Picture World (15 November 1924): 220.

“Sullivan Comedies Remain in State Rights Market.” Exhibitor Herald (31 May 1924): 52.

“Territories Sold on 'Out of the Inkwell' Series.” Motion Picture New (16 December 1922): 3025.

“To the Exhibitors of the MPTOA.” Film Daily (27 May 1924): 20.

“Uncorked.” The Bioscope (1 October 1925): 34.

“Warning 5 July 1925.” Film Daily (5 July 1925): 3.

“Warning 19 December 1923.” Film Daily (19 December 1923): 4.

“Warning 21 June 1925.” Film Daily (21 June 1925): 34.

“The Week’s Record of Albany Incorporations.” Moving Picture World (10 November 1923): 260.

“Yea Bo!” Motion Picture News (16 December 1922): 3077.

Archival Paper Collections:

Exhibition materials. The Walt Disney Family Museum.

Citation

Cook, Malcolm. "Margaret J. Winkler." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-a66j-3856>

May Watkis

by Mark Terry
A previous version of this material can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-304q-ze87

One of the early women pioneers in the Canadian film industry was May Watkis, a determined individual who never performed in front of the camera, but who had a long and fascinating career in the government. Having always wanted to work in show business, Watkis began exploring other career possibilities when she soon learned she was not “a type, and would have little chance as an actress,” according to a later interview with Edith M. Cuppage in Maclean’s Magazine (1921, 64). Government records, as well as newspaper articles and secondary sources, paint a contradictory and fascinating picture of Watkis, whose career behind the scenes generates just as many questions as answers.

Watkis was born Hilda May Gowen on July 22, 1879, in Victoria, British Columbia, and spent her early years living there. In 1901, she married Frank T. Watkis (“News of the City” 5) with whom she would go on to have one daughter (“Mrs. M.G. Watkis Dies” 26). According to a 1933 profile in The Vancouver Province, for the first five years of her marriage, Watkis traveled around Europe with her husband, “an accompanist to some of the leading singers of his day” (Marion 38). The couple met when he was on tour in Victoria, when she was about twenty years old, and, according to the article, just out of a “Toronto boarding school.” It seems that Watkis was from a well-to-do family and throughout her life, she regularly appeared in various society columns of the local newspapers.

When the province of British Columbia established a film censorship office in Vancouver in 1913, Watkis reportedly applied for the position of film censor. However, the attorney-general gave the job to a man. Undeterred, she went to the new censor and offered her services as his assistant. He hired her conditionally. The catch was she had to work as his projectionist (Morris 1978, 149). While this sounds like a modest learning assignment by today’s standards, it was virtually impossible to do in 1913 when the projectionists’ union in British Columbia and the nearby US state of Washington was entirely male and refused to teach her. At a time when women did not have the right to vote in British Columbia, learning a skill generally considered to be exclusively “men’s work” was going to be a tall order. Watkis told Maclean’s Magazine in 1921, “having tried to learn by fair means, I was now determined to learn by any means at all” (Cuppage 64). The Maclean’s article reports that Watkis made friends with a local projectionist and asked him to show her the ropes without explaining her motives. Watkis recalled: “he really became quite interested in me, and under his tutelage I projected successfully for several shows…” (64). The new censor was suitably impressed and gave her the job of his assistant. The male union members were reportedly quite upset at the prospect of losing one of “their” jobs to a woman and protested against Watkis’s appointment for more than a month, all to no avail (Morris 150).

An order in council dated May 15, 1914, officially appointed May G. Watkis to be an “Operator” within the “office of the Censor of Moving Pictures,” in Vancouver, at a rate of $100 a month (in effect as of April 1, 1914). Her salary was $10 more than the other appointee in the letter, a male clerk. Digitized public salary records indicate that Watkis continued to work in this capacity for the next few years.

On September 26, 1917, another order in council appointed Mrs. May G. Watkis “of the city of Vancouver” to be an “Inspector” under the Amusements Tax Act, with the same salary of $100 a month (in effect as of October 1, 1917). The Amusement Tax Act, approved in May 1917, imposed a tax on ticket prices at “places of amusements” (theaters,  music halls, athletic parks, and more)(“Taxation-Amusements” 331). An article published on September 27 in the Vancouver Daily World also announced Watkis’s appointment to inspector, explaining that the office of the censor, where she had been working, was in charge of enforcing the tax (“New Tax Inspector” 10). According to the article, Watkis’s duties as inspector included “to watch the working of the act and be on a sharp lookout for possible infractions.”

Two years later, in 1919, the provincial film office in British Columbia adopted a mandate to foster economic development for Canadian industry and trade in addition to education. According to Mike Gasher, “an amendment to the Moving Pictures Act in 1920 created the British Columbia Patriotic and Educational Picture Service under the Department of the Attorney-General and introduced a quota provision that required British Columbia movie theatres to introduce each film program with fifteen minutes of films either produced by, or approved by, the Picture Service” (2002, 32). BCPEPS was quite clear about the kinds of films it was to provide: “films…of a patriotic, instructive, educative, or entertaining nature; and, in particular…films…depicting the natural, industrial, agricultural or commercial resources, wealth, activities, development, and possibilities of the Dominion…” (qtd. in Gasher 32-33). The quota also represented “the first government film unit in North America with statutory authority to compel the screening of its productions” (Duffy and Mattison 1989, 32). According to Gasher, however, corporate opposition was incessant and it even became a political issue in the 1920 provincial election. As a result, the fifteen-minute quota was no longer enforced by 1924 (33).

May Watkis, Maclean’s Magazine, 1921.

Historian Peter Morris states that BCPEPS was “headed by a woman [Watkis]” (149), but this statement is likely based on the 1921 Maclean’s article, which calls her a “directress” of the organization. Morris claims that when BCPEPS came into existence, “[Watkis] applied for, and got, the job of ‘directress’” (150). Yet official government records contradict this statement and there is no archival evidence that she applied for the “Director” job. In fact, Albert Richard Baker was appointed Director of BCPEPS (Order in Council #0677-1920) with a salary of $300 a month (Order in Council #1429-1920). Instead, on July 7, 1920, Mrs. M.G. Watkis was appointed to the position of “Clerk in the Office of the Director of the British Columbia Patriotic and Educational Picture Service.” Her salary is listed as $125 per month (in effect as of July 1, 1920). While in her own research Juliet Thelma Pollard acknowledges that all government records contrast Morris’s statement (58), she claims that the “bureau was directed from Victoria by Richard Baker with the assistance of May Watkis who ran the Vancouver office and operated as an adjunct to the Game Conservation Board of which Baker was chairman” (43), although she provides no supporting evidence. The 1921 Maclean’s article also indicates that Watkis was working separately in the Vancouver office.

Order in Council appointing May Watkis to position of clerk at BCPEPS, July 1920. Courtesy of the BC Laws website (reproduced under the Queen’s Printer License—British Columbia).

Since no official job descriptions exist, we cannot know for certain what Watkis’s actual daily tasks and responsibilities were. A February 1921 news item (also written by Edith M. Cuppage, who calls her “Mary Watkis”) broadly outlines that Watkis “takes a responsible part in selecting suitable subjects for filming industries and travel scenes which go to all parts of Canada, to the United Kingdom and other parts of the world” (“Woman Film Service Director” 14). While Cuppage calls her the assistant director rather than a clerk, it may be that, as the latter, Watkis acted as an assistant to Baker, and because she was in the Vancouver office while he was in Victoria, she essentially was running the former on an administrative level, although she was not an official “Director” of the organization. It would not be surprising that, as a female clerk, she was in charge of most of the administrative work and taking on more than her official title indicated. While Cuppage and others calling her the “directress” of the organization is erroneous, it is possible that Cuppage was slightly more correct in describing Watkis as the “assistant directress upon whom most of the practical work of the department falls” (64).

The questions concerning Watkis’s role at BCPEPS remain complicated even when more official credits exist. She is credited as a producer, along with BCPEPS, of the travelogue Beautiful Ocean Falls (1920). This title, part of a larger Pacific Coast Scenics series, is, according to Gasher (who gives an incorrect release date of 1926), the only “government-initiated film” to survive (32). According to the entry on the film in The Canadian Educational, Sponsored and Industrial Film Archive database, Library and Archives Canada—which holds a 35mm print of the film—describes it as “a promotional film which stresses the industrial possibilities, the beauties, and the opportunities for enjoyment and recreation of this area” (“Beautiful Ocean Falls” n.p.), with scenes showing power dams, lumber camps, beaches, and mountains, among other locations and subjects. Watkis’s “producer” credit in the database comes from Morris, who likely came to this conclusion based on his belief that she was the “directress” of BCPEPS. The opening credits on the film print only say it was “produced by Pathescope of Canada Ltd. for the British Columbia Patriotic and Educational Picture Service” and make no mention of Watkis (or Baker for that matter) (Todd 2019, n.p.). In reality, if Watkis was involved with this film at all, it was more likely in an administrative capacity in relation to the selection or approval of this film for exhibition.

Copy of the 1921 Census. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada. May Gowen Watkis appears on line no. 16.

The confusion around Watkis’s role at BCPEPS is further complicated given the inconsistency between official government records and Watkis herself. In a 1921 census, digitized by Library and Archives Canada, she is listed as divorced, the head of the household, and living in Vancouver. (Her recorded age in the census would have her born in 1883.) She gives her occupation as “Director” of the “Picture Service.” Was this her simply exaggerating her role at BCPEPS? Or was this a self-assigned or unofficial indication that she was doing more than her title of “clerk” encompassed, and perhaps running the Vancouver office?

Either way, Watkis’s time at BCPEPS was short-lived. A July 1921 order in council referred to “May G. Watkis, of Victoria,” as an “Inspector of Moving Pictures” who “had made an application for her appointment as a Commissioner for taking affidavits within the Province.” Furthermore, on August 16, 1921, another order in council appointed a Miss H.A. Johnston to be “Clerk” in the office of the Director of BCPEPS, replacing Watkis, who was to be “transferred” (this was all in effect as of July 18, 1921). Moreover, a few months later, in a December 1921 article in the Victoria Times, it was announced that the Vancouver office was being closed to save money: “The work of the office has been transferred to Walter Hepburn, censor of moving pictures” (“Cut Down Film Service” 13). The article noted that this was supposed to be temporary, but was most likely permanent, and that it had to do with the resignation of Dr. A.R. Baker, the director.

Watkis continued to work as an inspector for the rest of her life. According to the BC government’s public accounts from the years 1910 to 1945 (digitized via the University of British Columbia), Watkis received an annual salary (and various traveling expenses) as an inspector under the Amusements Tax Act continuously from 1921 until her death on December 6, 1940, at the Craigflower Hotel in Esquimalt, near Victoria. Her death certificate, held in the BC Archives at the Royal BC Museum, lists the cause of death as suicide by gas poisoning. Watkis is listed as widowed and her occupation is given as “Assistant Inspector, Amusement Tax.” The certificate states that her last day of work was the day before and that she had worked in the industry for about twenty-four years. Her residency is listed as Vancouver. Watkis is buried in the Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, British Columbia.

Over the course of her career, Watkis was profiled in the press several times. In addition to the 1921 Maclean’s article, she was interviewed by the Vancouver Daily World in September 1920, in a similarly hyperbolic article that raises more questions about her career. Titled “Provincial Film Exchange Representative Sees Studios and Recounts Experiences,” the piece explains that Watkis spent six months prior to her appointment to her current position (clerk at BCPEPS) in Los Angeles, learning more about film production and studio infrastructure (7). Cuppage’s 1921 Maclean’s interview also connects Watkis to Hollywood, describing it as a “sojourn in California, where she was engaged in the scenario departments of leading producing companies” (64). Watkis’s father was born in California, according to her death certificate, which could account for a trip there, and passenger records show that Watkis arrived in Victoria, via the steamship S.S. President, from San Francisco on July 1, 1920 (mere days before she was appointed clerk) (“May Watkis”). While the aforementioned salary records indicate that she was employed consistently, which raise questions about the actual duration of her stay (to date, no passenger records show when she left Canada), it may be that she went to California on research or business as an inspector. While we cannot be certain that this was the discussed Hollywood trip, in the manifest for the S.S. President, her occupation is listed as inspector in both the “occupation in country from which you came” column and the “what is your intended occupation in Canada” column (“May Watkis”). Since the only primary sources that mention a trip to Hollywood are the Vancouver Daily World piece and the two articles by Cuppage, further research is required to understand the exact dimensions of this reported trip.

Watkis was profiled again in August 1933 in the Vancouver Province. The article repeats her origin story of how she got into the industry, with some colorful details about her projecting her first film upside down (Marion 38). The article calls her the “first woman moving-picture operator in Canada,” and states that in 1916 “when the amusement tax was first imposed she became Vancouver’s first inspector of amusement tax.” Interestingly, the article makes no mention of her involvement with BCPEPS or the organization itself. Instead, it states that after working as an inspector in Vancouver for six years, she was “transferred to her home town, Victoria, and for five years there was inspector of amusement tax for Vancouver Island. She liked this, being her own boss, working by herself, making her own returns.” Starting in 1927, the article continues, “she has been back in Vancouver assisting Mr. Wm. H. Kelly, still in the same office” (38).

As a participant in the emerging Canadian film industry and its affiliated government agencies, Watkis’s career warrants further research, especially given the contradictory nature of many of the sources used to update this profile. However, as a government official and not a filmmaker like fellow Canadian Nell Shipman, for example, Watkis offers a productive way of expanding our notions of women’s “behind-the-scenes” labor during the early years of film. Moving between Victoria and Vancouver, Watkis, working as a projectionist, assistant, clerk, and inspector, actively participated in film exhibition in British Columbia.

With additional research by Dennis J. Duffy, Chantaal Ryane, and Kate Saccone.

Bibliography

“Beautiful Ocean Falls.” The Canadian Educational, Sponsored and Industrial Film Archive [online database]. http://www.screenculture.org/cesif/film/10255.

Cuppage, Edith M.” She Wasn't a 'Type,' so She Became a Directress." Maclean’s Magazine (1 May 1921): 64.

------. “Woman Film Service Director Aids Industrial Progress In Province.” The Vancouver Sun (20 February 1921): 13-14.

“Cut Down Film Service.” Victoria Times (19 December 1921): 13.

Duffy, Dennis J., and David Mattison. “A.D. Kean: Canada's Cowboy Movie-Maker.” The Beaver (February - March 1989): 28-41. https://canadashistory.partica.online/canadas-history/the-beaver-feb-mar-1989/flipbook/28/.

“Hilda May Gowen.” British Columbia, Canada, Birth Indexes, 1851-1903. https://www.ancestry.com.

“Hilda May Gowen.”  British Columbia, Canada, Marriage Index, 1872-1935. https://www.ancestry.com.

Gasher, Mike. Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002.

Marion. “She Taxes Our Laughs.” The Vancouver Province (19 August 1933): 38.

“May Gowen Watkis.” 1921 Census. Genealogy, Library and Archives Canada. http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/CollectionSearch/Pages/record.aspx?app=census1921&IdNumber=4672555.

“May Gowen Watkis.” Death Certificate. Genealogy Records,  BC Archives, Royal BC Museum. http://shorturl.at/xALT6.

“May Watkis.” Canadian Passenger Lists, 1865-1935. Library and Archives Canada, RG 76-C; Roll: T-14875. https://www.ancestry.com.

Morris, Peter. Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978.

“Mrs. M.G. Watkis Dies in Victoria.” The Vancouver Sun (7 December 1940): 26.

“New Tax Inspector.” Vancouver Daily World (27 September 1917): 10.

“News of the City.” Calgary Herald (1 August 1901): 5.

Order in Council #0637-1914. May 15, 1914. BC Laws [database]. https://bit.ly/37u6VrQ.

Order in Council #1017-1917. September 26, 1917. BC Laws [database].  https://bit.ly/2uKHqFx.

Order in Council #0677-1920. April 23, 1920. BC Laws [database]. https://bit.ly/2u074G3.

Order in Council #1214-1920. July 7, 1920. BC Laws [database]. https://bit.ly/37xzEMN.

Order in Council #1429-1920. July 30, 1920. BC Laws [database]. https://bit.ly/39EoxmB.

Order in Council #1012-1921. July 25, 1921. BC Laws [database]. https://bit.ly/3254UBH.

Order in Council #1113-1921. August 16, 1921. BC Laws [database]. https://bit.ly/38vCBPc.

Pollard, Juliet Thelma. “Government Bureaucracy in Action: A History of Cinema in Canada 1896-1941.” The University of British Columbia, M.A. Thesis, 1979.

“Provincial Film Exchange Representative Sees Studios and Recounts Experiences.” Vancouver Daily World (13 September 1920): 7.

“Taxation-Amusements.” Chapter 63 [orig. pp. 331-333]. Historical Annual Statutes Collection. BC Laws [database]. https://bit.ly/2US7SHP.

Todd, Eveline [BAC archivist]. Email correspondence. September 2019.

“Mrs. M. G. Watkis Dies in Victoria.” The Vancouver Sun (7 December 1940): 26.

Archival Paper Collections:

Attorney-General Files. British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum.

May Watkis’s annual salary records and employment history. Public Accounts. BC Sessional Papers 1865-1982. Available online via The University of British Columbia.

Citation

Terry, Mark. "May Watkis." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4ac7-fq81>

Abby Meehan

by Luke McKernan

Abby Meehan was a British fashion journalist, whose brief but distinctive engagement with film arguably gave birth to a new genre, the cinemagazine (McKernan 2008, ix-x). Her father, Bartholomew Meehan, was an antiquarian bookseller originally from Cork, who moved from Ireland to Liverpool, then Swansea in Wales, where Abby, the eldest of four children, was born in 1853. The Irish Catholic family finally settled in Bath, England. The family business was located at 1 Henrietta Street, from where Meehan and her sister Catherine established a millinery shop around 1880 (Advertisement [Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette] 5).

Meehan had an earlier engagement with motion pictures than most. She was acquainted with Bath resident John Arthur Roebuck Rudge, a scientific instrument maker and magic lanternist. In the 1880s, he experimented with photographic sequences that could give the illusion of movement, and also collaborated with another Bath resident who dreamed of moving pictures, William Friese Greene (Carpenter 1996, 125-126). Meehan recalled, with some inaccuracy:

I have been deeply interested in cinematography in all its branches since I was a girl. I knew the late Mr. Henry [sic] Rudge, of Bath, the first inventor of moving pictures, very well. As a special treat he used to allow me to penetrate into the mysteries of his studio and workshop, and I soon learned much of interest concerning the wonders of the cinematograph. The first moving picture—one of a horse—was taken at Bath at that time (“Fashions on the Film” 211).

These were not true motion pictures, but Rudge’s experiments were a stepping stone toward the medium that would emerge a decade later. Henry Rudge was John Rudge’s father, and the so-called moving picture of a horse likely refers to the work of Eadweard Muybridge. Although Meehan probably never met Friese Greene, he would later play a part in ending her short film career.

It was after the death of her father in 1892, when she was thirty-nine years old, that Meehan (who never married, and had no children) broke free. She moved to London, where she established herself as a fashion journalist. Meehan seems to have written for many newspapers and magazines, becoming a familiar figure in an industry where women writers still struggled for recognition. She launched and edited her own journal, The Millinery Record, in 1896, following this up with The New Album in 1905 and The Sportswoman in 1908. Three years after its creation, however, The New Album went into voluntary liquidation. Meehan was bankrupt the following year (“Court of Bankruptcy” 5).

Undaunted, Meehan revitalized her career through a combination of vision, patriotic appeal, and abundant energy. In a 1911 article for the Daily Mail on “An All-British Dress,” she championed British costumery and design over the common practice of deferring to Paris (Meehan 9). Meehan was instrumental in setting up the Ladies All-British Fabric and Fashion Association (for which she became organizing secretary), whose inaugural fashion show was held at London’s Claridge’s Hotel in March 1911. The event was marked by the publication of a souvenir book edited by Meehan: The Ladies All-British Fabric and Fashion Book. The Official Organ of the Ladies’ All-British Fabric & Fashion Association, a copy of which was received by Buckingham Palace (“All-British Shopping” 13). This proselytizing work was followed up by an All-British Fabric and Fashion Association event in June 1911, in Kensington Gore at the home of Mrs. Robert Yerburgh. The affair attracted the interest of Anglo-American film producer Charles Urban, whose Kinemacolor natural color film process was enjoying great success at the time. While ordinary monochrome films were shown in cinemas, Urban’s Kinemacolor films appeared more often in theaters. With higher ticket prices, these spaces marketed themselves to upper class audiences who might shrink from cinemas but who found Kinemacolor, with its focus on exotic travel, royalty, and fine society, appealing (McKernan 2013, 93-99).

Urban’s Natural Color Kinematograph Company filmed the Kensington Gore event on June 10, 1911, releasing it as a 410-foot film entitled All-British Fashions Exhibition at Kensington Gore. Urban was to have filmed a second All-British Fabric and Fashion exhibition held at the Royal Botanic Gardens in July 1912, but poor weather halted the plans (“A Lady’s London Letter” 2). For both ventures, Meehan’s role appears to have been that of contact and organizer, rather than film director, but she made a strong enough impact on Urban to persuade him to let her make a more ambitious fashion film. The Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette was designed as the film equivalent of the kind of magazines Meehan edited, just as the newly-invented newsreels were an extension of newspapers. It was to be a series, issued at least four times a year, in keeping with seasonal changes in fashion (“Editor’s Dream Come True” 1).

Fashion films had become a regular part of cinema programs by this time. The latest trends from the Paris fashion houses were featured items in the newsreel films produced by Gaumont and Pathé. These often utilized stencil color (that is, color artificially applied frame-by-frame to black-and-white film via a stencilling process typically performed by women) to enhance the spectacle. The French branch of Kinemacolor had produced a film of Parisian models in 1912 (Cher 1912, 741), while its American counterpart produced a number of films of New York models that same year, which were billed as the “Kinemacolor Fashion Service” (“Kinemacolor for Ladies Only” 414). Meehan’s vision for the Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette was for it to be a regular, practical series of fashion films, as opposed to one-offs or a supply service. Such a series, if only seasonal, was an innovation, not just for fashion but for any non-fiction subject that did not fit exclusively into the category of news. It was planned as a magazine film, in form and content, a genre that was to enjoy a long life in the cinemas and remains a staple of television programming to this day.

The Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette was first exhibited publicly on October 13, 1913, at the Scala Theatre, in London, which was used by Urban as a showcase venue for his Kinemacolor productions before they were exhibited more widely. The film featured the models (most of whom were better known as actresses or singers) Lydia Yavorska (Princess Bariatinsky), Joy Chetwyn, Madame Bonita, Dorothy Minto, Sybil de Bray, Violet Essex, Nora Charsley, Elsa Collins, Renée Winter, and Clarissa Selwynne, with June Ford giving a demonstration of tango dancing with Ian Holt. The clothes came from a number of London and Paris fashion houses, among them Peter Robinson and Thomas & Sons (“Fashions on the Films” 213). It is likely that the now-lost Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette was a single reel film, running nine or ten minutes. The models were posed at relevant locations, including at a golf links, a tennis court, a hunt, the Hendon Aerodrome, and outside of Urban’s London home (Bushey Lodge) (“Editor’s Dream Come True” 2).

Press coverage of the film was extensive, in the national and regional press, as well as in film journals. The reports were generally laudatory: the Pall Mall Gazette noted that it was drawing crowds into the Scala (“On the Film” 14), and The Globe called it “a delightful living fashion plate…exceedingly well produced” (“The Scala Theatre” 6). However, the Daily Telegraph was less impressed. Its reporter admired the clothes, but added “from the point of view of entertainment and spectacle it must be pronounced exceedingly tedious” (“Scala Theatre” 7). The reporter also found the succession of tableaux too repetitive and the film likely to prove a “severe strain” upon the patience of younger members of the audience.

The film continued to be a part of the Scala program, and was shown in several cities across the country, until at least January 1914 (“Snippets from Southport” 148). It also formed part of a prestige “world’s fashion revue” film show for dressmakers and milliners that Meehan organized at the West End Cinema, on Coventry Street, on November 18, 1913. This event was organized in collaboration with The Evening News newspaper, which was celebrating its 10,000th issue. The program was a combination of the Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette and scenic items from the Kinemacolor library, featuring views from Switzerland, Egypt, Italy, and India, as well as scenes from historic homes and gardens (“The Fashion Revue” 7). A number of the latter had been taken under Meehan’s direction, including Claremont, Clarence House, Knole Park, Strawberry Hill, and Holly Lodge, and were part of planned series on the stately homes of England (“Fashions on the Film” 213).

Unfortunately for Meehan’s cinematic aspirations, this was to be her final film venture. Urban’s Natural Color Kinematograph Company became embroiled in a court battle over the Kinemacolor patent, brought on by rival color film inventor, and former Bath resident, William Friese Greene. The case reached the courts at the end of 1913, and although the original verdict was in Urban’s favor, it was overturned on appeal and the patent was declared invalid. Urban put his company into liquidation, and all of his grand plans for Kinemacolor—including any hopes of further editions of the Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette—came crashing down (McKernan 2013, 118-122).

Meehan remained active in promoting British fashion, however. Notably, at the start of the First World War, she formed the British Women’s Workers organization at 200 Marylebone Road, London, later Dorset Square, which mobilized women to produce objects to sell in support of the war effort, in particular flags, but also bags, toys, and lampshades (“New Opportunities for Women” n.p.). The goal was to find work for unemployed women, and it was organized as a profit-sharing exercise, for which Meehan gained the written support of Queen Alexandra (who purchased twenty-four flags) (“Our London Letter” 4). There were British Women’s Workers exhibitions, the last of which was held in Knightsbridge in May 1916 (“British Women-Workers Exhibition” 6). However, Meehan seems to no longer have been involved by then (although one of the women who did take part was the pioneer war cinematographer Jessica Borthwick, exhibiting sculptures under the name of Nell Foy).

Meehan is last recorded as a journalist in 1920, presumably retiring thereafter. Most likely, she pursued the antiquarian interests that she had long shared with her brother John Francis Meehan, a noted Bath historian and bookseller. She died in St. George Hanover Square parish, London, in 1931, at the age of seventy-eight. Although her film career was brief, and the cinemagazine film that she arguably pioneered never expanded into the series she envisaged, Meehan’s enterprise and vision are worthy of notice. Sadly, very few Kinemacolor films survive today, and none of the films with which she was associated are known to exist.

See also: Ada Aline Urban

Bibliography

“About Women’s Sphere and Interest.” The Sphere (24 June 1911): iv.

Advertisement. Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette (20 February 1884): 5.

Advertisement. The Bioscope (16 October 1913): lii [supplement].

“All-British Fashions Exhibition at Kensington Gore.” Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects. London: The Natural Color Kinematograph Co. Ltd., 1912. 282.

“All-British Shopping.” The Daily Telegraph (1 April 1911): 13.

“A Boom in Kinemacolor: Big Changes and Additional Attractions.” Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (9 October 1913): 2556.

“British Women-Workers Exhibition.” The Globe (2 May 1916): 6.

Carpenter, Peter. “John Arthur Roebuck Rudge.” In Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey. Eds. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan. London: British Film Institute, 1996. 125-126.

Cher, John. “Parisian Notes.” The Bioscope (6 June 1912): 741.

“Court of Bankruptcy.” The Daily Telegraph (4 December 1909): 5.

“Editor’s Dream Comes True.” Pall Mall Gazette (19 August 1913): 1-2.

Evans, Caroline. “The Walkies: Early French Fashion Shows as a Cinema of Attractions.” In Fashion in Film. Ed. Adrienne Munich. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. 119-122.

“The Fashion Revue.” The Evening News (17 November 1913): 7.

“Fashions in Kinemacolor.” The Times [London] (19 November 1913): 10.

“Fashions on the Film: A Chat with the Creator of the ‘Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette.’” Picturegoer (22 November 1913): 211-213.

“A Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette.” Pall Mall Gazette (8 October 1913): 7.

“Kinemacolor for Ladies Only.” Motography (31 May 1913): 414.

“Ladies Page.” Illustrated London News (24 June 1911): 1032.

“A Lady’s London Letter.” Cheltenham Examiner (25 July 1912): 2.

“London as a Fashion Centre.” Daily Express (27 March 1911): 3.

“London Fashion Tableaux in British Fabrics at the Scala Theatre.” Preston Herald (22 June 1912): 10.

McKernan, Luke. Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013.

---. “Introduction: Cinemagazines – The Lost Genre.” In Projecting Britain: The Guide to British Cinemagazines. Eds. Emily Crosby and Linda Kaye. London: British Universities Film & Video Council, 2008. ix-x.

Meehan, Abby. “An All-British Dress: A New Chapter in the Story of Fashion.” Daily Mail (4 February 1911): 9.

“New Opportunities for Women.” Marylebone Remembered 1914-1918. https://www.maryleboneremembered.com/new-opportunities-for-women.

“On the Film.” Pall Mall Gazette (21 October 1913): 14.

“Our London Letter.” The Manchester Courier (5 October 1914): 4.

“Scala Theatre.” The Daily Telegraph (4 October 1913): 7.

“The Scala Theatre.” The Globe (14 October 1913): 6.

“The Scala Theatre.” The Westminster Gazette (16 October 1913): 11.

“Snippets from Southport.” The Bioscope (8 January 1914): 148.

“Trade Topics.” The Bioscope (9 October 1913): 91.

Citation

McKernan, Luke. "Abby Meehan." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-xm0b-w777>

Elizaveta Svilova

by Eva Molcard

A film editor, director, writer, and archivist, Elizaveta Svilova was an intellectual and creative force in early Soviet montage. She is best known for her extensive collaborations with her husband, Dziga Vertov, on seminal early documentary films, and especially for instances when she appeared on camera demonstrating the act of editing itself. The fact that Vertov’s filmic theory and practice focused on montage as the fundamental guiding force of cinema confirms the crucial role Svilova’s groundbreaking experimentation played in early Soviet film and global film history. Her career, which spanned far beyond her collaborations with her husband, significantly advanced the early principles of cinematic montage.

Svilova was born Elizaveta Schnitt in Moscow on September 5, 1900, to a railway worker and a housewife. She began working in the cinema industry at age twelve, apprenticing in a film laboratory where she cleaned, sorted, and selected film and negatives (Kaganovsky 2018). This sort of work, seen as akin to domestic chores like sewing, weaving, and other “feminine” activities, was often the domain of women in film industries worldwide. At age fourteen, Svilova was hired as an assistant editor at Pathé’s Moscow studio, where she cut and photo-printed film until 1918. She worked as an editor for Vladimir Gardin while at Pathé, and edited iconic early films such as Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1915 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1918, like many of her colleagues, she joined the film department of Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat of Education, where she worked as an editor for four years. She then joined Goskino, the centralized, state-run production and distribution company, in 1922 (Kaganovsky). There, she managed the editing workshop populated by women editors and laboratory workers known as montazhnitsy (Gadassik 2018). These rooms, full of boisterous activity at places like Narkompros and Goskino, are important to study further; while scholarship has illuminated the work of figures like Svilova and director/editor Esfir Shub, there is more to learn about lesser-known women editors, including Klaudia Ivanovna Kulagina, Katerina Nikolaevna Kozina, and Vera Kimitrovna Plotnikova (Shub 1927), as well as the many unknown female workers from this period.

Elizaveta Svilova with cinema colleagues, date unknown. Private Collection.

In 1919, Svilova met Vertov, a documentary filmmaker who was working on newsreels at Narkompros and later Goskino, whom she would marry in 1923 and with whom she would collaborate throughout their marriage. Vertov was an eccentric figure and a militant documentarian. The pair famously became involved after Vertov left a basket of one-frame shots in the editing room, only to become dejected when the editors discarded the shots in the garbage thinking they were scraps. Svilova reportedly took pity on Vertov’s disappointment and edited a short film together with the segments (Pearlman, MacKay, and Sutton 2018). While the veracity of the interaction is uncertain, it reflects Svilova’s innovative understanding of editing and her willingness to engage with Vertov’s antics. Artistic montage was reserved for feature-length films in the late teens and early twenties, but through Vertov and Svilova’s collaborations, the newsreel became a significant element of early avant-garde montage theory and practice.

Svilova took a leading role in Vertov’s Kinoki group, which argued for documentary film that would capture the reality of everyday life in the nascent Soviet Union. The Kinoki collective centered around the Council of Three: Vertov, the director of the group’s projects; Svilova, the chief editor; and Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman, the principal cameraman. Svilova’s role as the group’s editor has, in general scholarly memory, cemented her place at the post-production montage table. However, she consistently worked on site at the group’s film shoots, as Vertov relied on her editorial eye to choose locations and subjects to be filmed (Kaganovsky). The Kinoki considered every portion of the filming process to be part of montage, and Svilova’s work and decisions went far beyond the cutting together of film fragments.

In the early 1920s, the group published significant articles that established their working theories of film in Lef and Kino-fot, the critical Soviet journals that featured debates surrounding early Soviet cinema. These articles ardently called for a cinema without scripts, stage sets, actors, or costumes, and linked the cinematic apparatus to the factory machine and the filmmaker to the Soviet laborer. In “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” from 1922, the group announced:

WE proclaim the old films, based on the romance, theatrical films and the like, to be leprous.
—Keep away from them!
—Keep your eyes off them!
—They’re mortally dangerous!
—Contagious!
(…) Openly recognizing the rhythm of machines, the delight of mechanical labor, the perception of the beauty of chemical processes, WE sing of earthquakes, we compose film epics of electric power plants and flame, we delight in the movements of comets and meteors and the gestures of searchlights that dazzle the stars. (qtd. in Michelson 1984, 7-8)

The language of these manifestos signaled the marriage between documentary cinema and the Communist Revolution. In “To the Council of Three: An Application,” an article likely written to bring visibility to the group (Kaganovsky), Svilova explained: “I understand that doing fascinating things without actors is difficult…nevertheless I will go hand in hand with you. It could lead to a distant but sure victory” (Svilova 1923, 221).

The group’s Kino-Pravda newsreel series, which ran from 1922 to 1924, presented documentary fragments of the everyday experiences of Soviet workers, and introduced the notion that the camera could produce a deeper understanding of the truth than the human eye. Svilova appears in Kino Pravda No. 19 (1924), seated at the editing table, sorting through negatives of images the audience has just seen. The intertitle captions the scene with “selection of negatives for Kino-Pravda N. 19” as Svilova appears in quickening succession alongside the fragments she cuts, which appear again in negative black (Kaganovsky). The groundbreaking sequence presents a self-referential explanation of the task of editing, as Svilova literally highlights her own activity as a force and producer of filmic vision.

Screenshot, Elizaveta Svilova in Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

With each new project, the Kinoki established increasingly radical montage techniques, thanks to Svilova’s experimental editing practices. With Kino-Glaz/Film Eye (1924), the group’s first major feature-length film, Svilova intensified the complexity of her editing, with superimposition and repeated frames, proving the Kinoki tenet that film could present reality more accurately than what was possible within the scope of human perception. Using reverse playback of a cow’s death at a slaughterhouse, Svilova’s editing reanimates the animal, securing its position at the public cooperative rather than at a private vendor, allowing for film itself to save Soviet consumers from capitalism. Another sequence in the film presents divers jumping in slow and reverse motion, highlighting that Soviet audiences could learn to perform impressive physical feats—a crucial concept in the Soviet propagandistic conceptualization of the human body—through film itself (Tsivian 2011). Svilova reappeared on camera in the group’s 1929 silent cinematic masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera, seated again at her editing table, splicing images together immediately following the images themselves. In this now highly-celebrated reflexive sequence, she demonstrates the act of editing and showcases her own contribution to early cinema.

Using reworked footage from her and Vertov’s One Sixth of the World (1926), Svilova directed and edited Bukhara, her first solo project, in 1927. A travelogue film capturing daily urban life, Bukhara presents the ethnographic and cultural diversity of the far reaches of the Soviet Union. Following Svilova and Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1930), the Soviet Union’s first documentary sound film, Vertov’s career began to decline, and Svilova took on independent projects in addition to her continued collaborations with her husband. In 1930, like many of her avant-garde colleagues who faced increased suspicion and difficulty securing work, she began teaching montage at the Lenin Institute while simultaneously researching her and Vertov’s films at night. She progressed to co-director on their projects of the late 1930s, with films like Glory to Soviet Heroines (1938) and Three Heroines (1939). Although Vertov avoided the purges of the 1930s, he struggled to obtain work, and Svilova supported them both for the remainder of his life, teaching as well as editing and directing over one hundred films and newsreel episodes between 1939 and 1956.

Svilova’s work during the 1940s is often overlooked despite its crucial role in twentieth-century history. She completed For You at the Front (1942) from Alma Ata (now Almaty, in present day Kazakhstan), where the Soviet film industry had been displaced during World War II. Fall of Berlin (1945), co-directed with Yuli Raizman, won Svilova the Stalin Prize the following year. Her documentary Auschwitz (1946) presented the opening of the death camp by the Red Army alongside reenactments directed by Svilova, and premiered at the “Filming the War: Soviets and the Holocaust 1941-1946” exhibit at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. For Fascist Atrocities (1946), Svilova edited together documentary material of Auschwitz and Majdanek, including images of mass graves, piles of human remains, and camp barracks, alongside intimate footage of individual victims, such as stolen belongings, survivors’ tattoo numbers, and women weeping. Significantly, the film was included as documentary evidence in the Nuremberg Trials, which were themselves the subject of Svilova’s eponymous 1946 documentary (Penfold 2013, 10).

Following Vertov’s death in 1954, Svilova changed her name to Elizaveta Vertova-Svilova, tying their legacies together and their identities to film. She also left the film industry, and, until her death in 1975, she promoted the Kinoki’s early work and championed her husband’s legacy within and outside of the Soviet Union. She traveled across Western Europe showcasing their feature-length films and preserving Vertov’s archives in Austria, which cemented his fame in the West, as most Soviet archives would remain trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Svilova’s groundbreaking and controlled command of the editing table established the heyday of the Soviet avant-garde. As more film scholars begin to examine her rich career, Svilova’s legacy will be that of a committed filmmaker and documentarian, whose intellectual and creative approach to film editing continues to reach audiences today.

See also: “After the Facts – These Edits Are My Thoughts

Bibliography

Ahwesh, Peggy, and Keith Sanborn. Vertov from Z to A. New York: Ediciones La Calavera, 2007.

Attwood, Lynne. Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era. London: Pandora, 1993.

Christie, Ian, and Richard Taylor, eds. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

------, eds. Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. London: Routledge, 1991.

Drubek-Meyer, Natascha, John MacKay, et al. “Fragments of Vertov.” In Dziga Vertov: The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum. Eds. Thomas Tode and Barbara Wurm. Vienna: SYNEMA, 2006. 7-32.

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Women Film Directors: An International Bio-critical Dictionary. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1995.

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

Hicks, Jeremy. Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2007.

Hutchings, Stephen. “Introduction.” In Russia and its Other(s) on Film: Screening Intercultural Dialogue. Ed. Stephen Hutchings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 1-24.

Kaganovsky, Lilya. “Film Editing as Women’s Work: Esfir Shub, Elizaveta Svilova, and the Culture of Soviet Montage.” Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 6 (2018): n.p. http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2018.0006.114.

Lambert, Anthony, and Karen Pearlman. “Editing (for) Elizaveta: Talking Svilova, Vertov and ‘Responsive Creativity’ with Karen Pearlman.” Studies in Australasian Cinema (2017): 157-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503175.2017.1407063.

Lawton, Anna. “Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: A Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema.” Pacific Coast Philology 13 (1978): 44-50.

Michelson, Annette, ed. Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Trans. Kevin O'Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Michelson, Annette, and Malcolm Turvey, eds. “New Vertov Studies.” Special Issue of October vol. 121 (Summer 2007).

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

Penfold, Christopher. “Elizaveta Svilova and Soviet Documentary Film.” University of Southampton, England, PhD dissertation, 2013. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/367302/1/C%2520Penfold%2520Thesis.pdf.

Petrić, Vlada. Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, A Cinematic Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Roberts, Graham. The Man with the Movie Camera. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2000.

Romberg, Kristin. “Labor Demonstrations: Aleksei Gan’s Island of the Young Pioneers, Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye, and the Rationalization of Artistic Labor.” October 145 (Summer 2013): 38-66.

Romberg, Kristin, and Anna L. Vinogradova. Dziga Vertov as Remembered by His Contemporaries. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976.

Shub, Esfir. “Women Editors.” Fund 3035, no. 1, file 44. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Svilova, Elizaveta. “V sovet troikh. Zaiavlenie.” LEF 4 (1923): 220-221. http://www.ruthenia.ru/sovlit/j/2942.html.

Tode, Thomas, and Barbara Wurm, eds. Dziga Vertov: The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum. Vienna: Synema, 2006.

Tsivian, Yuri, ed. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Udine, Italy: La Cineteca del Friuli-Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004.

------. “Introduction to KinoPravda Screenings.” Dziga Vertov Retrospective, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. April 16, 2011.

Archival Paper Collections:

Collection Dziga Vertov. Austrian Film Museum.

Dziga Vertov Fund (no. 2091). Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Esfir Ilyinichna Shub Fund (no. 3035). Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Citation

Molcard, Eva. "Elizaveta Svilova." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-y8we-0736>

Yan Shanshan

by Xin Peng

Wedding photos of Yan Shanshan and Li Minwei in Women’s Times in 1914.

While existing scholarly and documentary efforts are obsessed with naming Li Minwei (黎民偉) as the founding father of Hong Kong cinema, the contributions of female figures like his wife Yan Shanshan—except for being fetishized as the legendary first Chinese film actress—have been largely overlooked. On the other hand, while contemporary feminist film scholarship strives to recover the history of women working behind the scenes, the act of being in front of the camera in the particular historical and cultural context of early twentieth-century China cannot afford to be ignored. Yan’s role as a pioneer in Chinese film history thus not only derives from her involvement in business matters at her husband’s film companies, but also from the mere fact that she displayed her body, with an uncertain degree of willingness, in a new, and public, medium.

Photos from Yan Shanshan and Li Minwei’s wedding and honeymoon in Women’s Times in 1914.

Photos from Yan Shanshan and Li Minwei’s honeymoon in Women’s Times in 1914.

Born Yan Shuji (嚴淑姬) in Nanhai County, Guangdong Province, at the end of nineteenth century and the twilight of the Qing dynasty, Yan was among the first generation of Chinese women to obtain a modern education. The earliest public information about Yan that I am able to locate under her birth name Shuji (lit. virtuous/fair lady) appears in Women’s Times/婦女時報 in 1914. A photo insert features images from Yan and Li’s wedding and honeymoon, showcasing her Western-style wedding dress and their modern lifestyle with honeymoon travel. A caption also references Yan’s status as a student at the Hong Kong Overseas Vernacular Yide Normal School for Women (香港懿德女子師範學校). Before her marriage, in March 1912, the then fifteen-year old Yan joined the first-aid team of Guangdong’s North Expedition army at the dawn of the Xinhai Revolution and did rescue work in Nanjing and Xuzhou for several months (Li 2003, 4). In 1926, Zou Lu (aka Zou Haibin), the leader of the revolutionary army and later a Guomindang high official, wrote a short piece for Minxin Special/民新特刊 in memory of Yan’s bravery, agility, and youth, recalling how she was adept at horsemanship, a skill that came in handy when she played Mulan in The God of Peace/和平之神/heping zhi shen (1926) (38). Yan’s remarkable horsemanship was also a valuable asset behind the scenes. On July 22, 1926, Shen Bao/申報 published an article about how, during the production of The God of Peace, a horse-riding Yan rescued a friend who fell from a startled horse right in front of an approaching car (23).

In either 1913 or 1914, Yan became the first woman in China to perform onscreen when she played the servant girl in Zhuangzi Tests His Wife/莊子試妻/zhuangzi shiqi. (Scholars have not reached a consensus on the year of the film’s production and release.) She appeared alongside Li, the writer of the film, who cross-dressed as the wife. Female impersonators were the common practice in Imperial China since actresses were viewed by the public as comparable to prostitutes. The stigmatization of the actress’s body did not dissipate with women’s increased public visibility onscreen as China transformed into the Republican era. Consequently, as Yiman Wang powerfully argues, contrary to the conventional argument that writing—an assumed sign of female authorship—entails more agency than performing, in Republican China, acting proved to be a more politically provocative and precarious profession for women like Yan (2011, 244). The suicides of Ai Xia (艾霞) and Ruan Lingyu (阮玲玉) in the 1930s testify to the precarity of acting as a profession for women, which may help, in retrospect, to explain the phenomenon of Chinese actresses retiring from film en masse in the late 1920s. Yan was but one of them.

Portrait of Yan Shanshan in Minxin Special in 1926.

Apart from acting, Yan was involved in the financial matters of her husband’s film companies, though this often took the form of domestic labor. According to film director Ouyang Yuqian (歐陽予倩), Li Minwei’s Minxin Company (民新公司) was a family business created by two friends, Li and Li Yingsheng (李應生), whose wives, it seems, were also involved in company business. According to Ouyang’s memoir, “[There are] two bosses, three official boss ladies—Li Yingsheng’s wife, Li Minwei’s wives Yan Shanshan and Lin Chuchu (林楚楚)—and another intimate lady friend of Li Yingsheng, Xu Yingying (許盈盈). They are all bosses” (1984, 2). Little else is known about Yan’s role as “boss” here. In the context of Ouyang’s memoir, the term “boss” (老板/laoban) may have meant business owner, especially considering the nature of family business in which everyone was involved, and private funds were often used for the sake of the public entity.

After the founding of Minxin Film Company in 1925, Yan retreated off-camera, while Li’s second wife Lin Chuchu became one of the main actresses for the company. Entries in Li’s diary document how Yan took charge of financial matters in Hong Kong on behalf of her husband. In 1926, she dealt with a debt crisis while Li and Lin were shooting in Shanghai. For example: “27/3/1926 – Lily [Yan] goes back to Hong Kong by sea to handle the problems of World Theatre shareholding and a bank overdraft of 27,000 dollars [yuan] to first brother Hoi-shan” (10). Yan again oversaw financial matters for the film company in 1930 when she had to cable Li saying that “the money is barely enough for the [Lunar] New Year expenses” (13). Yan was, at that time, facing the Hong Kong creditors’ pressure for repayment alone in Shanghai while Li was shooting He’s Back from the Jailhouse/故都春夢/gudu chunmeng (1930) in Beijing. She acted as mediator between Li and his business partner Li Yingsheng, who refused to help them out with the crisis initially, but eventually lent them 2000 yuan after negotiations (12). Given Yan’s experience with financial matters, it is not surprising that after the destruction of another of Li’s film companies, Qiming (啟明) Studio, by Japanese bombardment in 1942, she accompanied Li to visit the director Chen Junchao (陳君超) with a request to “solve the livelihood of Qiming employees” (24). Yan’s financial and social activities remain sparse in the published diary, but we are still able to trace the important role she played to keep these film companies running.

In addition to her pioneering status as an early actress and her involvement behind the scenes in financial matters, I contend that Yan is also important through her relationship to actress Lin Chuchu. In a still-polygamous society, a man like Li Minwei was expected to have more than one wife, and his diary details how proactive Yan was in picking Lin as his future wife, inviting her to stay over when he was away, negotiating with Lin’s parents, and arranging the bride-price with his father (6). With Yan’s matchmaking, Li and Lin were married in 1920, and a few years later, Yan and Lin appeared together in several films produced by Li’s company, such as Rouge/胭脂/yanzhi (1925), The God of Peace, and Five Revengeful Girls/五女復仇/wunü fuchou (1928). Given the blurred boundary between family life and business, as well as domestic and public labor, it is important to challenge the view of Yan’s matchmaking as merely a residue of the premodern, polygamous culture. In fact, this personal relationship could invite a speculative reading that sees Yan as Lin’s scout and an unofficial agent for both Li and Lin. That is to say, in bringing Lin into the family, Yan discovered and nurtured a major star in the Chinese film industry and, in so doing, managed to extricate herself from appearing onscreen after 1928.

The elliptical evidence of Yan as an influence behind the camera speaks to the complexity of understanding domestic labor in both the archive and traditional historiography. Breaking the taboo of women performing in public onscreen, handling financial crises for her husband, and potentially fostering a young actress to become a star, Yan presents challenges to a woman pioneer model that privileges creative labor behind the scenes in the traditional sense. Her life and career call for a more contextualized way of thinking about female agency in early cinema in relationship to specific national industries and cultural formations.

Bibliography

“The Horsemanship of Minxin Actress Yan Shanshan”/“民新女演員嚴珊珊之馬術.” Shen Bao/申報 (22 July 1926): 23.

Li, Minwei. The Diary of Lai Man-wai /黎民偉日記. Collated by Lai Shek; translated by Ma Sun. Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003. [Ed. note: the page numbers quoted in the text refer to the English translation.]

Ouyang, Yuqian. A Memoir of My Film Career/電影半路出家記. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1984.

Wang, Yiman. “To Write or To Act, That is the Question.” Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. Ed. Lingzhen Wang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 235-254.

Women’s Times /婦女時報 no. 13 (1914): n.p.

Zou, Haibin. “A Profile of Yan Shanshan”/“嚴珊珊小傳.” Minxin Special /民新特刊 no. 2 (1926): 38.

Archival Paper Collections:

Digitized newspapers, including the ones used to illustrate this profile, can be accessed online in the Chinese Periodicals Database for the Republican Period 1911-1949 (民国时期期刊全文数据库) and Shenbao Database (申報數據庫). [Note: databases may require a login/university subscription.]

Citation

Peng, Xin. "Yan Shanshan." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-sb7c-ww77>

Dorothea Donn-Byrne

by Donna Casella

Silent films in Ireland from 1914 to 1935 focused on Irish rural life, the long struggle for independence from Great Britain, and the civil war that raged from 1922-1923 over the formation of the Irish Free State. Films like those from producers Ellen O’Mara and James Mark Sullivan’s indigenous Film Company of Ireland (1916-1920) specialized in romantic comedies/dramas of Irish life and historical melodramas on the Protestant Ascendency and its exploitation of Irish Catholic tenants. Screenwriter Mary Manning’s Guests of the Nation (1935) explored the Anglo/Irish War (1919-1921) and its devastating impact on the Irish countryside and its people. English-Irish author Dorothea Donn-Byrne worked in and outside this nationalist tradition. As Dolly Byrne, she provided the source material for Enter Madame (US 1922), a drawing room comedy about a self-absorbed opera singer and her troubled marriage, and, as Dorothea Donn Byrne, she wrote the original story for Land of Her Fathers (IE/US 1925), a romantic drama set against the backdrop of the Anglo/Irish War. In her prolific career, Donn-Byrne wrote for the stage and screen, and penned essays and short stories on a variety of topics that reflected the political and popular culture of the Anglo/Irish/American societies in which she lived. Her work in cinema points to the early dependence on source authors and story writers—particularly women—the nature of their contribution as cinematic authors, and the uncertainty surrounding their involvement in production.

Despite Donn-Byrne’s productive writing career, very little has been written about her life and work. With a scarcity of biographical information, the following digitized records have proven invaluable in piecing together her early life and career as a teacher and writer: England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1837-1915; National Archives: Census of Ireland 1901/1911; UK, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960; and New York, Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden & Ellis Island), 1820-1957. These databases indicate that Donn-Byrne was born to Irish parents in Seacombe, Cheshire, near Liverpool where her father, a merchant naval officer for Lamport & Holt, was based. Her mother died in childbirth as did Donn-Byrne’s twin (“Dorothy Mary Cadogan” n.p.). Since her father was frequently at sea, sailing from ports in the UK and New York, she was raised mainly by her grandfather in various locations throughout Dublin and Waterford counties, though passenger records indicate she also lived with relatives in Liverpool and the surrounding areas (“Dorothy Cadogan” [National Archives] n.p.; “Dorothy M. Cadogan” 1903, 1908, n.p.). She frequently visited her father in New York both as a child and an adult. Later passenger records note her living in Dublin first as a teacher and then as a student (“Dorothy M. Cadogan” 1903, 1908, 1910, 1911, n.p.; “D. Cadogan” 1904, n.p.).

Dorothea Donn-Byrne with her husband. Courtesy of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society.

Donn-Byrne exhibited an early interest in the arts, reading literature at University College, Dublin, according to her friend, writer Margaret Widdemer’s 1964 memoir Golden Friends I Had (177). There, she met her first husband, Irish-American author Bryan Oswald Donn-Byrne (hyphen and prenames were dropped as an adult). Her husband always considered himself an Irish writer, though born in New York to Irish parents, according to John Bradley in “The Donn Byrne Story” (187, 189). When he was six, Donn Byrne, his sister, and mother (father’s whereabouts remain unknown) returned to the family home in County Armagh in Northern Ireland, where his education was shaped by cultural nationalism, something he shared with Dorothea (190-97). After university, the couple briefly parted ways, meeting up again in New York where they were married in 1911 (198). They first took up residence in Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, quickly found literary success, and started moving in the New York literary, theatrical, and visual artist communities, according to Thurston Macauley in Donn Byrne, Bard of Armagh (26-36).

While her husband wrote poetry, short stories, and novels steeped in Irish culture, Dorothea launched her literary career co-authoring (with Gilda Varesi) the 1920 play “Enter Madame,” a romantic comedy set in Boston’s opera scene. “Enter Madame” was one of only two works by Donn-Byrne (the other a scenario: A Heart Between Two Rugs, year unknown) that did not focus on Irish life and culture. Proceeds from the play’s successful run and her husband’s writing allowed them to purchase a home in Riverside, Connecticut (Macauley 59). The couple, however, spent money as quickly as they made it. After eleven years in the US, financial difficulties forced them to foreclose on this home and, according to Stanley J. Kunitz, return to England and Ireland (“Authors Home Attached” 21; Kunitz 122, 123). The couple’s combined literary earnings and her husband’s gambling allowed them to lease and eventually buy Coolmain Castle, Co. Cork, in 1926 (Macauley 147, 156). They divided their time between England and Ireland with occasional trips to the US; however, they often lived, wrote, and traveled apart, something common in the early years of their marriage. Widdemer’s memoir and Mary E. Keller’s study of Bryan’s life and work both attribute this arrangement to Donn-Byrne’s frustration with her husband’s drinking and gambling (Widdemer 164, 178, 183, 185; Keller 28). Two years after buying the castle, he tragically died in a car accident (“Swerving Car’s Fall Into the Sea” 5).

By the time of her husband’s death, Donn-Byrne already had made a name for herself in theatrical and cinematic circles. She was busy raising twins when she collaborated with lead actor Varesi on “Enter Madame,” which was influenced by Varesi’s own stage career (Patterson 360). The hugely successful romantic comedy follows a self-centered opera singer and her troubled marriage. The play opened on August 16, 1920, at New York’s Garrick Theatre and, according to Thomas S. Hischak’s Broadway Plays and Musicals, ran for 350 performances (“‘Enter Madame’ Fills the Garrick” 8; Hischak 529). The play’s popularity and critical reception led New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott to include it in his top ten list of the 1920-1921 season (1). “Enter Madame” also had runs in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Chicago, as well as London (“Important Plays Among Offerings” 1; “Enter Madame” [Evening Public Ledger] 16; “The Theaters” 7; “Enter Madame” [Chicago Tribune] 21; “Enter Madame” [The Times] 8). As “Enter Madame” was closing in New York, Donn-Byrne also had a small role in the musical revue “Some Party” (as Dolly Byrne), which opened on April 15, 1922, at Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre and promptly closed after seventeen performances (“Some Party” n.p.). Donn-Byrne showed no further interest in acting, instead devoting her career to writing.

Donn-Byrne began exploring Irish themes in her second play, the less successful “The Land of the Stranger” (1924), which follows the difficulties of Irish expatriates in the US who return to Ireland. Loosely based on her husband’s experience moving between New York and Northern Ireland, the play focuses on Pat McCann, a Brooklyn-based Irishman, who returns to his homeland in County Armagh only to find that he has become more like the stereotyped Irish featured in American theater. According to studies by Margaret McHenry and Robert Goode Hogan and Richard Burnham, “The Land of the Stranger” featured the Belfast Players and opened on December 8, 1924, at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin and on December 15, 1924, at the Opera House in Belfast (McHenry 53, 55; Hogan and Burnham 231-32). Early reviews were poor, but the play underwent considerable revisions with more successful runs at the Belfast Empire Theatre in 1929 and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1931 (“The Land of the Stranger” 4; Programme 1931, n.p.). The Irish Times reported that after a weak showing in Dublin in 1924, the revised play was later “received with complete approval by a large audience” (Quidnunc 4). The reviewer praised Donn-Byrne’s cultural authenticity and called the rewrite a “shrewdly ironic commentary upon those sentimental ‘exiles,’ whose dream is now so far from reality” (4). This proved to be Donn-Byrne’s final play. According to McHenry, she quickly lost interest in the art form (68).

Clara Kimball Young in Enter Madame (1922). Courtesy of Metro/Photofest.

Donn-Byrne’s writing career, however, was not over; it just took another turn. By the 1920s, she joined the ranks of the many women writers who contributed to early cinema in a variety of capacities. While still in repertoire, “Enter Madame” was adapted for the screen by Frank Beresford who stayed faithful to the original material. Directed by Wallace Worsley, the film starred Clara Kimball Young in the Gilda Varesi role. Enter Madame played in small and large cities in the US, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Tulsa, Annapolis, Washington D.C., Lima (Ohio), and Elwood (Indiana), as well as abroad in places like Nottingham and Derby in England (“Enter Madame” [The Evening World] 16; “Boston’s Capitol Will Open” 534; “Enter Madame” [Evening Public Ledger] 15; “Something about ‘Enter Madame’” 16; “Enter Madame” [The Evening Capital] 4; “Photoplays” 24; “‘Enter Madame’ Pleases Quilna Audiences” 19; “Enter Madame” [The Call-Leader] 6; “Local Amusements” 5; “Amusements in Derby” 2). Available research provides no information as to whether Donn-Byrne was involved in other aspects of this production or what she thought of the film.

Still from Enter Madame (1922). Courtesy of Metro/Photofest.

Reviews were generally positive, highlighting the film’s production value, the narrative’s cleverness, and the impact on Young’s struggling career, rarely crediting or commenting on Varesi and Donn-Byrne as source authors. Photoplay selected the film as one of the seven best films of the month, noting “this picture is entertaining, splendidly directed and has an amazing subtlety” (“The Shadow Stage” 63; “The National Guide to Motion Pictures” 64). In Moving Picture World, C.S. Sewell called Enter Madame a “clever and unusually subtle comedy” (182). Abroad, the film was credited as having a “novel finish” by the Nottingham Evening Post, which also noted that “Miss Young, as usual, wears some wonderful dresses” (“Local Amusements” 5). The Derby Daily Telegraph addressed the film’s narrative, observing that “The story is told in an interesting manner, with touches of humour, and makes quite a good picture” (“Amusements in Derby” 2). A number of reviewers focused on how the film gave Young’s career a much-needed boost. Variety’s “Fred” argued that the film resurrected Young’s failing career: “In this picture Miss Young is giving a performance better than most she has done in the past two or three years” (33). The Lima News believed this was Young’s best work to date. This review was one of the few to acknowledge source authors Varesi and Donn-Byrne, adding that the film was “winning as much favor on the silver screen as did the original production” (“‘Enter Madame’ Pleases Quilna Audiences” 19). Similarly, the aforementioned Photoplay review attributed the film’s success to Varesi’s and Donn-Byrne’s “excellent basic material” (63). Such reviews, however, were uncommon. The article by “Fred” in Variety ignored the source authors completely, crediting “Adaptation of the play of the same title by Frank Beresford” (33). With few exceptions—for example The Evening Capitol and The Evening Public Ledger—advertisements also failed to mention the source authors, even though the play’s success could have been used as a marketing tool (“Enter Madame” 4; “Enter Madame” 15). One explanation for this absence is that by the 1920s writing in Hollywood had become an assembly line of production with the last hand on the script often receiving the credit.

Donn-Byrne’s contribution to the film Land of Her Fathers points to crediting problems faced by women writers who wrote original stories for the cinema. It is unclear whether Donn-Byrne sent Irish producer Séan Hurley an unsolicited manuscript or if he requested she submit a story for his film. The story was never published and there is no record of any correspondence between Donn-Byrne and Hurley, though she made frequent trips to New York in the 1920s when Hurley was gathering his American crew for filming in Ireland. A 2004 letter and attached film notes from Maureen Hurley, the producer’s daughter, to Sunniva O’Flynn, head of Irish programming at the Irish Film Institute, does refer to “Dorothea Donn Byrne” as the scriptwriter (Hurley n.p.). However, Maureen may have confused “original story” and “script.” Furthermore, the shot list for the fragments held at the RTÉ identify director Herbert Hall Winslow as the writer with no mention of Donn-Byrne, though this credit probably refers to his adaptation (Chatterjee n.p.). Irish film scholar Kevin Rockett in Cinema and Ireland notes only that “Dorothea Donn Byrne…provided the story” (57).

Still from Land of Her Fathers (1924). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Donn-Byrne’s authorship here is complicated further by reviews that do not give her writing credit and a screening history shrouded in mystery. Reviews of the “rough cut” shown at the Grafton Cinema in Dublin on October 1, 1925, praised the indigenous qualities of the film and the strength of its narrative, never mentioning Donn-Byrne. F.S. in the Evening Herald found “a complete absence of any of the stage Irishness common to all previous attempts at native picture-making” (6). And the Irish Independent believed “The story of the film has much in it that will make a universal appeal” (“A New Irish Film” 8). The British trade paper The Bioscope also gave it a positive review, calling the film “a brave attempt to start a film industry in this country,” suggesting there were plans for public screenings in Ireland and possibly England (“Land of Her Fathers” 75). However, there is no record that the film was screened in Ireland or England, and complete prints, which might shed light on writing credits, have disappeared. Soon after the Grafton showing, according to both Hugh Oram and Hurley’s daughter, the producer gave a copy of the completed film to the American distributors with the intent that they would work together on the US screenings. The distributors, however, disappeared with the print and screened the film in several US cities (Oram 13; Hurley n.p.). Research thus far, however, has uncovered no details on screening locations or dates. Hurley’s copy of the film also has disappeared. Maureen notes that her father presented his print to the National Library in Dublin, but film historian Liam Ó Laoghaire (O’Leary) could not find that print for his 1976 “Exhibition of Irish Cinema” at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin (Hurley n.p.). Correspondences between Herbert Hall Winslow and James Wingate, Director of the Motion Picture Division of New York’s State Education Department at the New York State Archives, point to the existence of a third copy of the film, but this too has been lost. Per the Certificate of License held in the New York State Archives, Winslow was granted the license to screen the film in the State of New York after the requested eliminations were made. He even reserved a projection room, but again there is no evidence of screenings and the New York State Archives has no copy of the film (“Order on Projection Room” n.p.). Furthermore, there is no print of the film in the Winslow holdings at the Hasting’s Historical Society in Westchester, New York, according to its president Natalie Barry (Barry n.p.), even though correspondences between Wingate and Transatlantic Film Co. indicate that Winslow’s home at 587 Broadway, Hastings-on-the-Hudson, served as the production company office. The whereabouts of Donn-Byrne’s only Irish film of the silent era remain unknown.

Though Land of Her Fathers is lost, fragments, newspaper reviews, stills and correspondence in the O’Leary Archive, and eliminations Winslow made for a US screening license provide enough information to determine the film’s plot, which clearly bears the imprint of Donn-Byrne’s interest in Irish history and culture and the US involvement in both. The film tells of a romance between an Irish woman and an Irish revolutionary during the Anglo/Irish War, a political theme common in early Irish cinema. There is also a villain, according to critic F.S. in an Evening Herald review (6). Eliminations indicate that the villain turns the hero over to the Black and Tans: “I was a political prisoner and you know it, it was you who betrayed me to the Black and Tans” [Reel 4] (Winslow [March 19, 1928]). The eliminations further reveal an ideological conflict between Americans and Irish: “We in America do know what it means to fight for a principle” [Reel 2]; “You are an American and cannot understand” [Reel 4]; “I am Irish you are not, that is why you cannot understand” [Reel 6]. These Anglo/Irish/American influences on Donn-Byrne’s work are not surprising given her and her husband’s backgrounds. Though they were born outside of Ireland and lived in America, they grew up in Ireland and lived in the Irish Free State when it formed in 1922. As a result, they self-identified as Irish (Bradley 220, 197-98). The Anglo/Irish War had just concluded when Donn-Byrne crafted her story of the Irish struggle for independence from Britain and America’s view of that fight. Producer Hurley, a political activist, shared Donn-Byrne’s interests. After traveling extensively in China and the US, he returned to Ireland in 1915 and was close political friends with Michael Collins, a leading figure in Ireland’s struggle for independence (Oram 13). Hurley produced Land of Her Fathers for the American company Transatlantic Pictures, founded by Irish-born American James Sullivan. Intrigued by the idea of an Irish/American co-production, Hurley brought US distributors and crew (director Winslow and cameraman Walter Pritchard) to Ireland and drew his cast predominantly from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, which supplied actors for many of Ireland’s indigenous silent films (Slide 18; Oram 13).

Still from Land of Her Fathers (1924). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Donn-Byrne departed sharply from her interest in Anglo/Irish affairs with her only film adaptation, A Heart Between Two Rugs, housed in the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library. The date of the adaptation remains a mystery and there is no evidence it was ever produced. However, a stamp on the first page indicates it was the property of Dr. Edmond Pauker, a literary agent who worked in New York in the 1920s and 1930s primarily with European authors. The 52-page adaptation is structured more like a scenario with its chapter summaries, and is identified as such in the library catalogue. A Heart Between Two Rugs is a comedy of errors following the romantic trials of Toto Sugarbean who inherited his father’s wealth after a tragic accident in a sugar refinery. The scenario’s whimsical tone is more in keeping with Donn-Byrne’s first play, “Enter Madame,” than her later more serious Irish-themed writings.

Donn-Byrne’s writing continued to influence cinema in 1930s. While still in repertoire, “Enter Madame” was adapted for the radio and remade as the musical Enter Madame! (US 1934) starring Cary Grant and Elissa Landi (“Ft. Humphreys” A-6; “Local Drama Guild” C-2). Elliott Nugent directed the film from an adaptation by Gladys Lehman and Charles Brackett. Enter Madame! suffered from mediocre reviews that often praised the stars and director, but found the story hackneyed. F.S.N. in “A Farce with Music” called the cast “hard-working,” but found the ending “contrived” and “the theme, not exactly novel” (12). H.M. in “Grand Opera in the Making of this Film” wrote that “Elissa Landi’s charm and beauty, Cary Grant’s likeable nature, Lynn Overman’s amusing comedy relief, a fine musical score, and Elliot Nugent’s light treatment, make of ‘Enter Madame,’ now at Columbia, an entertaining film.” The reviewer added, however, “there is nothing to be excited about in the story” (B-12). Once again, Donn-Byrne and Varesi are rarely mentioned in reviews, though Variety’s “Chic” managed to correct the trade’s earlier confusing statement regarding authorship, noting that this later version is based on the stage play by “Dorothea Donn Byrne” and Varesi (Chic 63).

Donn-Byrne returned to her interest in Irish culture with the original story for her next film, Irish and Proud of It (NIR/UK/IE 1936), which had a mixed reception in the US, but fared better in Ireland where her authorship was frequently acknowledged in previews and reviews. Richard Hayward, whose Belfast Repertory Theatre Company brought her earlier play, “The Land of the Stranger,” to Belfast and Dublin, stars as an Irishman in London who returns to his native Ireland, falls for a young “Colleen,” and struggles with a mob of Chicago gangsters. B.C. in The New York Times gave the film an unflattering review, noting that this Irish-made film is more Hollywood than indigenously Irish with its “Irish ballading and some pretty scenes of Irish countryside” (12). In sharp contrast, The Irish Press, found “no touch of the stage-Irishman that has condemned so many films presuming to represent Ireland (“‘Irish and Proud of It’” 7). However, what is significant here is that The Irish Press perceived Donn-Byrne’s contribution as a selling point. The newspaper extensively covered the production in the months leading up to its release, frequently mentioning Donn-Byrne’s authorship. In July, “Another Irish Film” noted that “the story for the film has been written specially by Mrs. Dorothea Donn Byrne” (2). And in August, “Films of the Week” announced the film’s production, calling it “Mrs. Dorothea Donn Byrne’s ‘Irish and Proud of It” (MacG 5). Reviews like “‘Irish and Proud of It’” also acknowledged Donn-Byrne’s authorship: “…screened from a story by Dorothea Donn Byrne” (7). Donn-Byrne’s visibility in the industry was growing.

Irish and Proud of It, however, proved to be Donn-Byrne’s final contribution to cinema, though her interest in Irish arts never faltered. Throughout the 1930s, she served as an editor, arts manager, essayist, and short story writer. After her first husband’s death, she traveled between New York and Coolmain Castle overseeing reprints of his Irish works, according to newspaper reports (“Widow of Donn Byrne Here” 34; “Tea for Mrs. Dorothea Donn-Byrne” 20), and, in 1934, she edited Poems by Donn Byrne. According to Irish and US newspapers, Donn-Byrne also served as general chair of the art rooms at New York’s Irish Theatre in the late 1920s and early 1930s (Quidnunc 4; “Irish Theatre Asks Shaw” 2). Furthermore, in 1929 and 1930, Donn-Byrne wrote articles on Ireland, an Irish woman’s view of American fashion, and British horse racing for the American Vogue (“Ireland in 1929,” “An Irishwoman Looks at the Mode,” and “The Grand National”). She also wrote short stories on Irish life that were published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1933 (“The Turn of the Wheel” and “Eliza, Soldier of Fortune”) and Redbook Magazine in 1935 (“Bad Beginnings”).

By the early 1940s, however, Donn-Byrne had lost all interest in writing. After the death of her second husband, Willoughby Craig, whom she married in 1929, she moved to London with her daughter Jane (“Mrs. Donn Byrne Wed to Willoughby Craig” 19; “Fatally Injured at Work” 6). She worked for Lutterworth Press, a publishing company outside the city, and became part of the Chelsea artist community, socializing in a film and literary circle that included Welsh writer Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin and Irish food writer and film/theater actress Theodora FitzGibbon who later married Irish filmmaker George Morrison (FitzGibbon 153-54). FitzGibbon’s memoir notes that in their Chelsea gatherings “there was always a drink, endless cigarettes…and stories from Dolly” (154). Little is known of Donn-Byrne’s life after the war, except that her daughter Jane tragically died (153). This may have prompted her to move from London to Brighton where she died in 1963 (“Dorothea Mary Elizabeth Antonia Craig” 716).

Information on Donn-Byrne’s life and work is scarce. Her husband’s prolific and public writing career often overshadowed her own literary and film successes. In search of a more complete understanding of Donn-Byrne’s contribution to early cinema, researchers struggle to piece together material from friends’ memoirs and books, a few scholarly references, and newspaper coverage of her husband’s life and literary output. Future research needs to determine the full creative output of a woman who worked in an industry heavily reliant on source authors and original story writers. Donn-Byrne is part of a larger untold story, that of the female author in early cinema, their writing, authorship, and participation in film production.

Bibliography

“Amusements in Derby.” The Derby Daily Telegraph (31 July 1923): 2.

“Another Irish Film.” The Irish Press (7 July 1936): 2.

“Authors’ Home Attached.” The New York Times (2 Mar. 1922): 21.

Barry, Natalie. E-Mail Correspondence. December 27, 2018.

Barton, Ruth. Irish National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.

B.C. “At the Belmont.” The New York Times (31 Oct. 1938): 12.

“Boston’s Capitol Will Open December 4, Gordon Reports.” Moving Picture World vol. 59, no. 6 (9 Dec. 1922): 534.

Bradley, John. “The Donn Byrne Story.” Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society. vol. 24, no. 1 (2012): 183-239.

Certificate of License. Mar. 12, 1928. “Land of Her Fathers.” Motion Picture Division, New York State Archives.

Chatterjee, Razib (RTÉ Library Sales). E-Mail Correspondence. November 15, 1918; July 3, 2019; July 4, 2019.

Chic. “Enter Madame” (15 Jan. 1935): 63.

“D. Cadogan” and “Dorothy Cadogan.” UK, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960. http://ancestry.co.uk

Director (James Wingate). Letter to Transatlantic Film Co. Mar. 12, 1928. “Land of Her Fathers.” Motion Picture Division, New York State Archives.

------. Letter to Transatlantic Film Co. Mar. 17, 1928. “Land of Her Fathers.” Motion Picture Division, New York State Archives.

Donn-Byrne, Dorothea. “Bad Beginnings,” Redbook Magazine vol. 65, no. 2 (June 1935): 36-38, 39, 93-94.

------. “Eliza, Soldier of Fortune.” The Saturday Evening Post (6 May 1933): 12-13, 59-60, 62.

------. “The Grand National. Vogue (15 Mar. 1930): 60-63.

------. A Heart Between Two Rugs. London: Elkan Services, 19--.

------. “Ireland in 1929.” Vogue (9 Nov. 1929): 94, 156, 158.

------.“An Irishwoman Looks at the Mode.” Vogue (15 Feb. 1930): 69, 134.

------. The Land of the Stranger: A Kindly Comedy. London: Samson Low, Marston, 1931.

------. “The Turn of the Wheel.” The Saturday Evening Post (14 Oct. 1933): 14-15, 82-83, 85-86.

------, ed. Poems by Donn Byrne. London: Samson Low, Marston, 1934.

“Dorothea Mary Elizabeth Antonia Craig.” Wills and Probate, 1958-1966. The National Archives. 716. https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/Calendar?surname=Craig&yearOfDeath=1963&page=2#calendar

“Dorothy Cadogan.” National Archives: Census of Ireland 1901/1911. http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie

“Dorothy M. Cadogan,” “Dorothy Cadogan.” New York, Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden & Ellis Island), 1820-1957. http://ancestry.co.uk

“Dorothy Mary Cadogan.” England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1837-1915. http://ancestry.co.uk

“Enter Madame.” Advertisement. The Call Leader (13 June 1923): 6.

“Enter Madame.” Advertisement. The Evening Capital (1 May 1923): 4.

“Enter Madame.” Advertisement. Evening Public Ledger (5 Nov. 1921): 16.

“Enter Madame.” Advertisement. Evening Public Ledger (2 Dec. 1922): 15.

“Enter Madame.” Advertisement. The Evening World (14 Dec. 1922): 16.

“Enter Madame.” Advertisement. The Times (13 Feb. 1922): 8.

“Enter Madame.” Chicago Tribune (21 Nov. 1921): 21.

“‘Enter Madame’ Fills the Garrick with Applause.” The New York Tribune (17 Aug. 1920): 8.

“‘Enter Madame’ Pleases Quilna Audiences.” The Lima News (19 Jan. 1923): 19.

“Fatally Injured at Work.” Gloucester Citizen (29 Mar. 1941): 6.

FitzGibbon, Theodora. A Taste of Love. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2015.

Fred. “Enter Madam (1922).” Variety (22 Dec. 1922): 33.

F.S. “Land of Her Fathers.” Evening Herald (3 Oct. 1925): 6.

F.S.N. “A Farce with Music.” The New York Times (12 Jan. 1935): 12.

“Ft. Humphrey’s Club Will Present Play.” The Sunday Star (13 May 1934): A-6.

Hischak, Thomas S. Broadway Plays and Musicals. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.

H.M. “Grand Opera in the Making of this Film.” The Evening Star (2 Feb. 1935): B-12.

Hogan, Robert Goode and Richard Burnham. The Years of O’Casey, 1921-1926: A Documentary History. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

Hurley, Maureen. Letter to Sunniva O’Flynn. May 2o, 2004. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

“Important Plays Among Offerings of the New Week.” The Washington Herald (8 Jan. 1922): sec. 4, 1.

“‘Irish and Proud of It’ Well Received.” The Irish Press (18 Nov. 1936): 7.

“Irish Theatre Asks Shaw to Come Here.” The New York Times (12 Jan. 1931): 2.

Keller, Mary E. “A Critical Study of the Live & Novels of Donn Byrne.” M.A. Thesis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1948.

Kunitz, Stanley J. “Donn Byrne 1889-1928.” In Authors Today and Yesterday. New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1934. 121-24.

“Land of Her Fathers.” The Bioscope (8 Oct. 1925): 75.

“The Land of the Stranger.” The Irish Times (1 Dec. 1931): 4.

“Local Amusements.” The Nottingham Evening Post (10 July 1923): 5.

“Local Drama Guild Announces Its Plans.” The Evening Star (11 Oct. 1934): C-2.

Macauley, Thurston. Donn Byrne, Bard of Armagh. London: Samson Low, Marston, 1929.

MacG, L. “Films of the Week.” The Irish Press (18 Aug. 1936): 5.

McHenry, Margaret. “The Ulster Theatre in Ireland.” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1931.

“Mrs. Donn Byrne Wed to Willoughby Craig.” New York Times (11 Nov. 1929): 19.

“The National Guide to Motion Pictures Saves Your Picture Time and Money.” Photoplay vol. XXIII, no. 2 (Jan. 1923): 64-67.

“A New Irish Film” Irish Independent (6 Oct. 1925): 8.

Oram, Hugh. “An Irishman’s Diary.” Irish Times (20 Aug. 2005): 13.

“Order on Projecting Room.” Mar. 12, 1928. “Land of Her Fathers.” Motion Picture Division, New York State Archives.

Patterson, Ada. “ Gilda Varesi–Star and Playwright.” Theatre Magazine vol. 32 (Dec. 1920): 360.

“Photoplays.” The Evening Star (28 Mar. 1923): 23-24.

Programme. “The Land of the Stranger.” Belfast Empire Theatre. 1929. Mageean Collection. MG-0021. Digital Theatre Archive, Linen Hall Library. http://www.digitaltheatrearchive.com/archives/1844

Programme. “The Land of the Stranger.” Abbey Theatre. Nov. 30, 1931, Mageean Collection. MG-0026. Digital Theatre Archive, Linen Hall Library. http://www.digitaltheatrearchive.com/archives/1849

Quidnunc. “Irish Theatre in New York.” The Irishman’s Diary. The Irish Times (2 May 1931): 4.

Rockett, Kevin. “Part One: History, Politics and Irish Cinema.” In Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988. 1-144.

Sewell, C.S. “Enter Madame.” Moving Picture World. vol. 59, no. 2 (11 Nov. 1922): 182.

“The Shadow Stage.” Photoplay vol. XXIII, no. 2 (Jan. 1923): 63.

Slide, Anthony. The Cinema and Ireland. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988.

“Some Party.” Playbill (1 Mar. 2019): n.p. http://www.playbill.com/production/some-party-jolsons-59th-street-theatre-vault-0000006272

“Something about ‘Enter Madame.’” Tulsa Daily World (30 Nov. 1922): 16.

“Swerving Car’s Fall Into the Sea.” The Derby Daily Telegraph (20 June 1928): 5.

“Tea for Mrs. Dorothea Donn-Byrne.” The New York Times (6 June 1929): 20.

“The Theatres.” Minnesota Daily Star (9 Oct. 1922): 7.

Varesi, Gilda, and Dolly Byrne. Enter Madame. New York: Putnam, 1921.

Widdemer, Margaret. Golden Friends I Had, Unrevised Memories of Margaret Widdemer. New York: Doubleday, 1964.

“Widow of Donn Byrne Here With Her Father.” The New York Times (28 May 1929): 34.

Winslow, Herbert Hall. Letter to Mr. James Wingate. Mar. 15, 1928. “Land of Her Fathers.” Motion Picture Division, New York State Archives.

------. Letter to Mr. James Wingate. Mar. 19, 1928. “Land of Her Fathers.” Motion Picture Division, New York State Archives.

Woollcott, Alexander. “Second Thoughts on First Nights.” The New York Times (15 May 1921): sec. 6, 1.

Archival Paper Collections:

Billy Rose Theatre Division (A Heart Between Two Rugs scenario). New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Correspondence, Research Notes, Articles and Production Stills of the Film “Land of Her Fathers,” 1925-1987. Early Films and Filmmakers, 1896-1992. Liam Ó Laoghaire (Liam O’Leary) Archive. MS 50,000/284. National Library of Ireland.

Donn Byrne Papers, 1915-1932. Boston Public Library. [currently closed].

Liam Ó Laoghaire (Liam O’Leary) Collection. AD 142. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Mageean Collection. Digital Theatre Archive. Linen Hall Library

Margaret McHenry Papers, 1930-1948. First Series, Box 1. MS 244. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. University of Pennsylvania.

Motion Picture Collection, M2939. UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Motion Picture Division, State of New York Education Department. Series A1418, Box 2678. New York State Archives.

Paper Collections. Box 107. SOF05/90. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Special Collections. British Film Institute (Enter Madame [1922] stills; Enter Madame! [1934] pressbook; Irish and Proud of It stills and pressbook).

Various promotional materials: an Enter Madame (1922) pressbook is held at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique; and Enter Madame! (1934) stills are held at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

Citation

Casella, Donna. "Dorothea Donn-Byrne." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-gqmp-9s43>

The Brumberg Sisters

by Maya Balakirsky Katz

Born exactly a year apart, sisters Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg worked together their entire careers in the Soviet animation industry, becoming known as the “grandmothers of Russian animation” for their work in the fairytale genre (Katz 2016, 248n1). The Brumberg sisters are notable in Russian animation because they were among the first generation of animators in the country during the Revolutionary years, a unique environment that allowed women—even Jewish women—to make their way to the top of the industry. Perhaps their presence is more notable in the international arena as animation was dominated by men in the early decades and Valentina and Zinaida were among the first women in world animation, alongside anatomized pockets of female artists, such as Lotte Reiniger in Germany, Helena Smith Dayton in America, and Hermína Týrlová in Czechoslovakia. The Brumberg sisters were also at the forefront of many technical and aesthetic innovations, such as the projection of animated segments on theatrical stages, the use of paper cut-outs, the integration of folk styles for the stylization of indigenous tales, and the introduction of sound to Soviet animation.

The sisters initially aspired for the fine arts, enrolling in the cutting-edge VKhUTEMAS (the Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops) in 1918, which soon merged with the more traditional Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, from where they graduated in 1925. In a short but lucid essay on her career, Zinaida recalled that “we went into animation in the 1920s when Soviet art was boiling, transforming, ventilating, going up and down. Everything was bubbling…” (1979, 4). Indeed, the 1920s were charged with experimentation and the sisters’ teachers were the avant-gardists Ilya Mashkov, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Abram Arkhipov, Robert Falk, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Zinaida also credited the theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the young Sergei Eisenstein as the primary influences on their student work (4).

It is a testament to VKhUTEMAS’ pedagogical focus on investigating the unique attributes of artistic form that, even before graduating in painting, the sisters began to work in animation. The Brumbergs joined forces with other young avant-gardists who migrated to animation, such as Leonid Alekseevich Amal’rik, Aleksandr Bushkin, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, the sibling team Nikolai and Olga Khodataev, Yuri Merkulov, and Zenon Komissarenko.

The new medium of animation, especially in the silent era, was well-suited for the many ethnic nationalities that found themselves absorbed into the Soviet Union. In one of their first films, Kitai v ogne/China Aflame (1925), the Brumberg sisters integrated Chinese landscape and topography with paper cutouts and an avant-garde constructivist style. At a running time of over fifty minutes and a length of 1,000 meters of film, China Aflame was one of the first feature films in world animation. The film is an unprecedented amalgam of various techniques, with the use of paper cut-outs alongside classical animation while folk-art styles were used to satirize the caricatured bourgeoisie.

The year 1927 was a busy one for the Brumberg sisters. Out of the twenty or so animated films produced in the Soviet Union that year, they made three: Samoedskii malchik/Eskimo Boy/The Samoyed Boy, Odna iz mnogikh/One of Many, and the now lost Daesh’ khoroshii lavkom!/Give Us a Good Store! All three films were made under the auspices of the workshop All-Union National Institute of Cinema (GTK, later VGIK). In its formative years, GTK sought to produce silent animated films that highlighted the new medium’s potential to create a progressive culture.

Screenshot, Samoedskii malchik/Eskimo Boy/The Samoyed Boy (1928).

Together with the Khodataev siblings, Valentina and Zinaida directed The Samoyed Boy, the first Soviet animated film for children (Margolina and Lozinskaia 2016, 28-33). The film follows the story of a young Eskimo named Chu in the Tundra Nenets language. Chu heroically conquers a bear, skins it, and hangs the hide in his family home. In the meantime, the village Shaman claims the bear for himself and sets Chu to work a mechanical device to animate a statue that the villagers wor­ship. Still bitter from the loss of his bear hide, Chu retaliates against the Shaman’s exploitation of the people by exposing the machinery he uses to evoke the illusion of lifelike movement in a statue. Chu’s act of rebellion picked up on the much-maligned concept of animism, a Marxist term referring to the magic endowment of life to inanimate objects or beings, which, in the 1920s, became a buzzword in the attack on the primitivism of folklore for its inculcation of children to the idea and experience of enchant­ment (Katz 79). Chu’s exposure of the priest’s animism makes Chu a harbinger of enlight­ened atheism within the film’s narrative arc. At the same time, the scene makes a clear distinction between the false animism that backward priests preach and the transparent scientific approach that animation brings to the subject of folklore. After the ruined Shaman lures Chu into the sea, a modern Soviet ship rescues the boy and takes him to Leningrad, where a title card states, “Our Samoyed Boy is no fool / He went to the Workers’ School.” Here, again, the directors mount a defense of folklore by referencing an actual school in Leningrad that catered to “Northern Peoples” by teaching them how to use their artisan skills in the industrialization efforts of the country. The film also makes a more subtle case for the continuum between old and new by rendering the carefree character of Chu in hand-drawn paper cut-outs and then naturalizing this Old World Chu in the village scenes through the adoption of a style reminiscent of the Samoyed art of scrimshaw carvings. The directors then contrasted the elaborate and ter­rifying beauty of the village scenes with the simplified and measured architec­tural draftsmanship of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky for the Leningrad scenes (Bagrov 2013, 130).

Alongside the politically-driven content of The Samoyed Boy, the Brumbergs created more lightweight entertainment with One of Many, which was advertised as a satire ridiculing the popular fascination with American movie stars, but betrayed a real understanding of American films and the star culture of Hollywood. As film scholar Sergei Kapkov observed, One of Many “should probably be viewed as a supplement to [the Soviet film] The Kiss of Mary Pickford (1927), an ‘acted’ comedy about the excesses of fandom and admiration for Hollywood” (2004, 10). In fact, Valentina and Zinaida used the same documentary footage of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’ 1926 visit to the Soviet Union that was used in The Kiss. They featured it in the live-action sequence of One of Many alongside animated versions of Pickford and Fairbanks. In One of Many, the heroine dreams of going to Hollywood. Her wish comes true, and she arrives to meet Pickford and Fairbanks, as well as other silent stars (who had recently visited Moscow in real life), such as D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin and the Danish comic actors Carl Schenstrøm and Harald Madsen. The film ends, however, with a terrifying sequence where Fairbanks leaves the dreamer to be attacked by lions that descend from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer logo. In horror, the heroine wakes up, having lost all interest in Hollywood.

Zinaida Brumberg at work in Moscow, 1930. Courtesy of Beit Hatefutsoth/The Museum of Jewish People.

The Brumbergs also animated the Khodataev siblings’ hand-drawn film Groznyi vavila i Tetka Arina/Terrible Vavila and Aunti Arina (1928), the first animated film in the Soviet Union to directly address women’s rights. In the film, the arrival of Women’s Day on March 8 stops the daily grind for two rural women as their pails of water force them to take the day off and reclaim their rights. One woman’s husband complains that he wants supper, but despite his dog-like face contorting in anger and shock and his hanging on to his wife’s apron strings, the two women head off to the collective. All the women from the village fill the school building, discuss the issues that matter to them, and sing national anthems to celebrate the day while the husband and another aggrieved chum are schooled—and beaten up by—implements of labor, the sickle and cane.

Besides their contributions to the GTK workshop films in 1927-8, the Brumbergs and the Khodataevs created animated clips for the theater in collaboration with Natal’ia Sats, the founder of the first children’s theater in the world. Projecting film clips—especially documentary footage—onto the theatrical set was a hallmark of Soviet theater in the 1920s, a practice Sats criticized as devaluing theater, “which has its own truth, for all its conventionality” (1985, 111). Sats felt differently about the projection of animation onto the theater set and she was the first, several years ahead of Erwin Friedrich Piscator in Germany, to specifically incorporate animation into the theatrical action on stage for her 1927 children’s pantomime ballet “Negritenok i obez’iana” (The Little Negro Boy and the Monkey). The performance focused on the friendship of an African boy named Nagua and a monkey in their native land, which the Brumbergs animated as a primitive but idyllic world. The production was an unparalleled hit, and the Moscow Children’s The­ater reportedly performed it one thousand times in its first six years and other Eastern European theaters soon incorporated into their repertoires (Sats 112). The multimedia perfor­mance, which would become the signature performative mode of the Moscow Children’s Theater, brought Sats and the Brumberg sisters wide rec­ognition in both the Soviet and foreign press as the sort of creative artists that Soviet socialism produced.

The animated segments for “The Little Negro Boy and the Monkey” do not seem to have survived, but they were described in some detail by both Zinaida and Sats, as well as in the script, contemporary theatrical reviews, and stage-set photographs (Rozanov and Sats 1930, 30-34, 37). In her memoir, Zinaida described the setup of the stage as containing the actors in the foreground and a big screen in the background, behind which “the actors hid themselves from time to time. The lights went off and drawings and images of those same actors appeared on the lighted screen” (14). The Soviet press singled out the use of silent animation in the achievement of a “synthetic production” that combined dance, pantomime, animation, and music (Water 2019, 133). “Animated cartoons are close to children’s pictures,” wrote Sats in her autobiography Sketches from My Life, “they have the virtue of dispensing with unnecessary detail and conveying the essentials in the most dynamic manner” (112). Sats was especially taken with the theatrical dramatization inherent in the medium of animation and its solution to the sticky problem of “dramatic time,” writing that the animated films made for her theater “would extend the possibilities of theatre without interfering with the overall artistic design, they would help to show rapid sequences of scenes of nature and adventure” (112).

After the initial success of using animation, Sats commissioned stage-specific animations from the Brumberg sisters and the Khodataev siblings for the 1928 children’s play “Pro Dzyubu” (About Dzyuba). The play tells the story of Vasya, a young boy who identifies himself as “Dzyuba” from the fairytale land of Pashukania. No one but a young girl named Nina believes his tales, and she defends him against accusations of lies with the help of animated segments featuring creatures collaged from a variety of different animal bodies. Sats integrated the animated segments “in conjunction with stage action” to support the theme of “the child’s right to creative fantasy” (Sats 117). She projected one animated segment upside down for the scene of Upsidetown, with the roots of the trees in the sky and the houses standing precariously on their roofs, while, for the scene of Backtofrontown, the animation was projected in reverse (Sats 117). Ivan Ivanov-Vano, who would become the official face of Soviet animation for the next fifty years, later observed that years before the advent of sound cinema, the production’s live musical performance kept time with the movements in the film sequences, which “amazed [even] the animators that even before the invention of sound cinema [this] could have such a great emotional impact” on the production (Ivanov-Vano 1980, 45). “This was,” he continued, “in effect, the first experiment in combining synchronized music and cartoon action, though, at that stage, this was only achieved in the theatre rather than the cinema.” Ivanov-Vano concluded his exuberant review by turning to his own contribution to the development of sound: “We realized for the first time what great opportunities lay in the synthesis of music and visual imagery.”

Despite the praise that Ivanov-Vano would later shower onto Sats’ avant-garde use of animation, the Brumbergs forged their directorial identities in reaction to him. While Ivanov-Vano’s group, known as IVVOSTON, an acronym of the surnames of the male directors Aleksandr Ivanov, Nikolai Voinov, and Panteleimon Sazonov, was pushing for technological breakthroughs in synchronized sound, the Brumbergs were producing non-synchronized animated films at a rather astounding rate. Unfortunately, many of these films are now considered lost. For example, in 1930, the Brumbergs made Vesennii Sev’/Spring Sowing, which called for a sowing campaign. The following year, the Brumbergs made agit-prop films like the hand-drawn animation short promoting the activities of “Avtodor,” a motor improvement society in operation between 1927-1935. They also made artistic films, such as Blokha/Flea (1931), a non-synchronized short animating M.P. Mussorgsky’s song “Pesniu o blokhe” (The Song of the Flea). The following year, Zinaida, working alone, made Parovoz, leti vpered/Train, Go Forward (1932), an agit-prop animated short protesting drunkenness and idleness.

While the invention of sound technology inspired Ivanov-Vano’s IVVOSTON group to develop the technical side of sound, the Brumbergs took the opportunity to make a more practical case for a reconceptualization of employees working on a film as a cohesive group. In a 1935 article, Valentina turned to Disney’s Silly Symphonies series (1929-39) to expound on Walt Disney’s successful implementation of stable proj­ect teams as a useable model for Soviet animation (4). Although some animators resisted the use of sound, seeing it as a disruption of their creative autonomy and distribution (because the majority of theaters were not yet equipped for sound), Valentina celebrated the end of silent film if only because the adoption of sound required more crew members and the formation of stable “groups.” In shap­ing the Brumberg group on the pretext of introducing sound to animation, the sisters transformed themselves and their employees into members of a new pro­fessional circle. In her memoir, Zinaida wrote that “in the beginning of our career, we did a lot ourselves. We were at once scriptwriters and artists and directors,” but consistent innovation came about “only through the group” (20).

In 1936, the sisters were among the founding employees of Stalin’s Soyuzmultfilm, where they achieved official director status as state employees. At Soyuzmultfilm, Valentina and Zinaida sheltered and nurtured underemployed artists from Moscow’s avant-garde milieu, including those who had lost traction after the silent era, such as Boris Barnet and Zenaida Naryshkin. Their experience in the silent era was critical to their creation of animated political shorts during World War II, which were, for all intents and purposes, produced as silent films even if music and a soundtrack were later added. This need to return to silent filmmaking was both because of the haste in which wartime shorts needed to be produced and because of the need for national communication that would reach the wide range of ethnic populations in the country. The sisters went on to co-direct more than forty animated films over their long careers until they were pushed out by the studio head, Mikhail Valkov, in the mid-1970s as part of a staff turnover engineered to wrest control from directors. “Older directors were not given scripts,” recalled art director Lana Azarkh, “and if they found them on their own, there was no place in the studio for them to shoot them…The cruel and crude manner in which the directors were treated made it clear to them that it was necessary to retire” (Azarkh, part II 165).

Because they worked in the Soviet Union, everything that was published about Valentina and Zinaida during their lifetimes appeared in state-sponsored publications, such as biographical profiles in state newspapers and reports on their films in official film journals. After the opening up of state archives in the 1990s, the Soyuzmultfilm archive became available, which includes a vast number of materials directly relevant to the Brumberg sisters, such as their story meeting notes, the notes of the Artistic Council that discussed their films and other films for which they served as peer-reviewers, their original scripts and multiple versions of the scripts as they went through production, and the contracts they doled out to freelance artists and writers to work on their films. Furthermore, despite the political overturns of the twentieth century, Russia’s film archive, Gosfilmofond, has preserved many animated Soviet films from the silent era, including those of the Brumberg sisters.

Bibliography

Azarkh, Lana. “Mul’tiplikatory.” Part I. Iskusstvo kino 9 (September 2010): 136-145.

------. “Mul’tiplikatory.” Part II. Iskusstvo kino 10 (October 2010): 155-169.

Bagrov, Peter. “Samoyedskii Malchik.” Pordenone, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Catalogue, 2013. 129-30.

Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Brumberg, Valentina. “Kak ozvuchivaiutsia fil’my Disneia.” Kino (22 June 1935): 4.

------. “Zvukovaia mul’tiplikatsiia,” Proletarskoe kino 2 (March 1931): 63-64.

Brumberg, Zinaida. “Liubimaia rabota.” In Zhizn’ v kino: Veterany o sebe i svoikh tovarishchakh (part II). Ed. O. T. Nesterovich. Moscow: Isskustvo, 1979. 4-29.

Gamburg, Efim. Tainy risovannogo mira. Moscow: Sov. Khudozhnik, 1966.

Ivanov-Vano, Ivan. Kadr za kadrom. Moscow: Iskussvo, 1980.

------. Risovannyi fil’m – Osobyi vid kinoiskusstra. Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1956.

Kapkov, Sergei. “Legendy Soiuzmul’tfil’ma: Grymzy iz akademii peda­gogicheskikh nauk govorili, chto deti nashi fil’my ne poimut.” Gazeta 133 (26 July 2004): 10.

Katz, Maya Balakirsky. Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

Khoda­taev, Nikolai. “Iskusstvo mul’tiplikatsii.” In Mul’tiplikatsionnyi fil’m. Ed. Grigorii Roshal. Mos­cow: Kinofotoizdat, 1936. 15-100.

Margolina, Irina, and Natal’ia Lozinskaia, eds. Nashi mul’tfil’my. Litsa, kadry, eskizy, geroi, vospomina­niia, interv’iu, stat’i, esse. Moscow: Interros, 2006.

Merkulov, Yuri. “Sovetskaia mul’tiplikatsiia nachinalas’ tak.” In Zhizn’ v kino: Veterany o sebe i svoikh tovarishchakh. Ed. O. T. Nesterovich. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1971. 126-127.

Migunov, Evgenii. “Iz vospominaniia.” Kinograf 8 (2000): 4.

Rozanov, Sergei Grigotevich, and E.S. Mikulina. The Moscow Theatre for Children. Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1934.

Rozanov, Sergei, and Natal’ia Sats. Negritenok i obez'iana. Illustrated by Andrei Andreevich Brei. Moskow: Gosizdat, 1930.

Sats, Natalia. Sketches from My Life. 1934. Trans. Sergei Syrovatkin. Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1985.

Viktorov, Viktor. The Nataliia Sats Children’s Musical Theatre. Trans. Miriam Morton. Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1986.

Volkov, Ana­tolii. “Mul’tiplikatsiia.” In Kino: politika i liudi, 30-e gody: K 100-letiiu miro­vogo kino. Ed. L. Kh. Mamatova. Moscow: Materik, 1995. 120-121.

Water, Manon van de. “Natalia Sats: A Soviet Life in the Theatre.” In Russian Theatre in Practice: The Director’s Guide. Ed. Amy Skinner. London: Methuen, 2019. 127-140.

Archival Paper Collections:

Personnel file for Valentina Brumberg. Fund 2469, inventory list 6. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Personal VKhUTEMAS student file for Valentina Brumberg. Fund 677, inventory list 1. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Personnel file for Zinaida Brumberg. Fund 2469, inventory list 6. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Personal VKhUTEMAS student file for Zinaida Brumberg. Fund 677, inventory list 1. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Citation

Katz, Maya Balakirsky. "The Brumberg Sisters." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-92y0-qy20>

Cora Johnstone Best and Audrey Forfar Shippam

by Gregory Waller

Through most of the 1920s, Cora Johnstone Best and Audrey Forfar Shippam engaged in what seems to have been in this period a rare if not unique form of professional collaboration, with Best delivering lectures illustrated with lantern slides and motion pictures that had been shot by Shippam during the pair’s adventures in the remote Canadian Rockies. Best, a medical doctor who became widely known for her mountaineering exploits, had been a public speaker since at least 1918. Her active career as a lecturer lasted from 1922, when she was hired as a representative of the Bureau of Commercial Economics (BCE), until her death in 1930. During these years, the film lecture was a widely popular nontheatrical exhibition format, and Best was possibly the most successful woman in the United States working in what was an overwhelmingly male-dominated field. After Best’s death, there is no record of Shippam (who lived until 1975) continuing to shoot film or to create hand-colored lantern slides. Unfortunately, none of the motion pictures shot by Shippam for use in the lectures seem to have survived.

Virtually the only sources of information about Best and Shippam are the promotional material they generated and the newspaper coverage of Best’s performances. These materials regularly note that both women were married (Best to a doctor, Shippam to an Army officer), but these men never figure in accounts of the women’s challenging treks into the North American wilderness. The press discourse instead highlights that Best and Shippam were “pals” and “companions.” These terms usually appear in quotation marks in the original text, with no other speculation about the relationship between the two women, who, in a widely reprinted publicity photograph, pose dressed alike in stylish trekking attire. Newspaper accounts do not explain how the two women met. Given the focus on Best, the featured performer who was often billed as “the biggest little woman in the out-of-door world” (“Dr. C. J. Best to Lecture in Ju-Co Pay Assembly” 1), it is notable that Shippam is mentioned at all, underscoring the novelty—and likely promotional value—of educated, securely middle-class female pals becoming acclaimed mountaineers and intrepid media-makers.

Cora Johnstone Best in the St. Louis Star and Times, January 1927.

An obituary from her hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, described Best as an “internationally known lecturer, mountain climber and huntress” and “a conservationist and leading exponent of outdoor life” (“Dr. Cora J. Best, Mountaineer, Dies” 1). Her success as a traveling lecturer during the late silent film era not only stands as a prime example of what a woman could achieve in the expanding world of nontheatrical cinema, but also underscores the significant role of the Bureau of Commercial Economics in that period. Never actually a part of the federal government, the BCE was incorporated in 1914 as a non-profit organization dedicated to distributing sponsored industrial motion pictures for free screenings. It attracted much attention for its investment in truck-mounted projectors, which allowed films to be exhibited in open-air sites. As Laura Isabel Serna has explained, Anita Maris Boggs, another long-overlooked woman film pioneer, played an essential administrative role in the BCE, which, in addition to hundreds of sponsored films, also had a roster of what it called “special lecturers” (2015, 135-43).

Although initially many of these speakers were men affiliated with commercial firms like Standard Oil and General Electric, by the late 1910s the BCE’s roster prominently featured multimedia “travelogues” that pictured remote regions and thrilling outdoor adventures—with Canada and the American West as prime locales. Hence the logic for engaging Best, whose three lectures for the BCE were:

“Unblazed Trails and Shining Peaks,” covering her wilderness adventures in the Canadian Rockies, climbing previously unnamed peaks over ice fields and “labyrinths of crevasses,” and capturing as well images of rare flowers, birds, and animals (Best 1924, 11);

“Hell Roaring Waters,” detailing her 200-mile canoe trip down the dangerous Columbia River in northern British Columbia, home to “rip snorting water” and “death dealing rapids” (Best 7-9);

“Kingdom of the Clouds, recounting her successful effort to be the first [white] person to reach the summit of Mount Pope in the interior of British Columbia (“Speaks to Clubs of Explorations” 2).

Unlike other BCE lecturers, Best was not directly promoting Canada or the American West as a tourist destination or as a repository of potentially lucrative natural resources. She extolled the benefits, more generally, of strenuous outdoor activity, called for an appreciation of North America’s natural splendor, endorsed conservation initiatives, and pitched “visual education” as a valuable pedagogical tool. Without question, when she was making these points her physical presence and gendered self-presentation registered strongly. According to a 1927 feature article, Best was “a short, rather slight woman, who might be a music teacher or a librarian” (Childs 1927, 93). But promotional notices touted her fearless adventuring. This presumably gave her credibility when it came to criticizing the 1920s version of the American male who, in Best’s own words, “looks like a modern Ajax,” but was weak and easily frightened, not least of all because he thought playing nine holes of golf counted for exercise (“Woman Tells of Adventures” 5). Channeling the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, Best made clear the all-important racial implications of her critique of modern American masculinity: “the whole life of the white race,” she told an audience in Battle Creek, Michigan, “depends on learning how to live, to eat right, exercise properly, to really live” (“Die from Worry, Not Over-Work” 14). And clearly this responsibility was from her perspective equally important for white women. Best insisted “there is no sex in mountain climbing,” which was not her way of demanding that climbers take a vow of celibacy, but rather her oft-stated belief that nothing prevented women from taking on the challenges of the great outdoors (“Mountains No Barrier” 3).

Audrey Forfar Shippam in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 1927.

For all Best’s overt messaging, her presentations were not instructional lectures. Best celebrated her own self-styled unprecedented accomplishments. These included that she and Shippam had brought back still and moving pictures that she claimed were:

taken in territory that has not been photographed by anyone else; they are full of thrills from start to finish—enough to satisfy the reddest blooded adventurer; they are educational and beautiful to a degree not often found in combination (“Free Illustrated Lecture” 3).

Best also asserted that the women produced their own slides, tinting them based on notes taken on-site. Shippam’s film sequences reportedly showed perilous mountaineering, revealing “time and again where a misstep or misjudgment would have sent one of the party catapulting down a steep cliff to certain doom” (“Rotary Goes on Tour” 3). According to the Riverside Daily Press, Shippam captured the experience of running the Columbia River rapids with “every turn in the stream a new picture” (3). She also recorded, the article continued, the details of camp life, including footage of Best “doing apparently with ease the heavy work but few would attempt,” like “felling a large pine tree and then hoisting it onto her shoulder, and tramping with it into camp, crossing a stream on a log on the way.” Best accompanied these stirring, one-of-a kind images, reported the newspaper in Fort Scott, Kansas, with “narratives of personal experiences out in the open, in the wild places,” while also explaining “the techniques of mountain climbing and the compensations…derived from the hard work and the dangers encountered(“Dr. C. J. Best to Lecture in Ju-Co Pay Assembly” 1).

Best’s “motion picture lectures” found success across a range of nontheatrical sites, occasions, and sponsors. Most often, she appeared at high school auditoriums and churches, though she also performed at universities, hotels, and all manner of public halls. (Newspapers generally mentioned that Shippam took the motion pictures during the pair’s treks, but only very rarely noted whether Shippam was present during Best’s lecture tours.) For these bookings, the BCE required at least one local sponsor, including, typically, women’s organizations, service and social clubs, and groups devoted to local boosterism or outdoor recreation. While press materials emphasized Best’s singular accomplishments as a woman and claimed that “women will be especially interested in the record of one of their sex who has done things that would give pause to most men” (“Sportswoman Will Address Ikes” 14), Best’s appeal was never limited to female audiences and her career depended on sponsors well beyond formally organized women’s groups. For example, in February 1926, in Lincoln, Nebraska, Best lectured at a downtown hotel to a joint meeting of the Izaak Walton League (devoted to fishing and preserving outdoor recreational opportunities) and the Knife and Fork Club (a social club for married couples). In the small town of Bend, Oregon, Best’s visit was jointly sponsored by the Kiwanis Club, the Lions Club, the Commercial Club, and the Women’s Civic League. Judging from the sites and sponsors of her varying lectures during the 1920s, all positioned well outside the commercial mainstream cinema, the public that welcomed Best was largely composed of well-to-do, white, and prominently-situated citizens in American towns and mid-sized cities, especially in the upper Midwest, but stretching south into Ohio and westward to California.

For these audiences, Best and Shippam fashioned a product that aimed to be inspirational (yet not overtly religious) and educational (yet not instructional) in its celebration of America’s remaining “virgin country full of adventure, romance and opportunity” (Best 6). Best translated first-hand experiences into uplifting entertainment that attested to the courage and capabilities of women, yet did not advocate for political change that addressed sex and gender inequities. As such, Best and Shippam figure in a much broader history of nontheatrical cinema, sponsored screenings, and multimedia performances. Their transportable, repeatable, and profitable lectures on “Hell Roaring Watersand “Unblazed Trails point to other histories—of, for example, nonfiction cinema put in the service of documenting what would become known as extreme or high-risk sports, of promoting conservation, and of encouraging audiences during the 1920s to appreciate and perhaps venture out to meet the challenges posed by what was assumed to be a still majestic natural world.

As an afterword, it is worth noting in this context that Best and Shippam’s most extraordinary adventure—described in a 1927 Sunday supplement article by M.W. Childs—did not take them into the American wilderness, but rather deep into Manchuria, China, in 1927. Venturing alone, with the aim of hunting exotic snow leopards, the two women found only danger at the hands of menacing bandits. Firing their revolvers to ward off unseen assailants, Best and Shippam managed to escape by traveling on foot and by train, posing as native men or boys, having applied “chrome yellow” paint from Shippam’s artist’s palette to “darken” their faces. Best suffered from dysentery and hid in the bottom of a boat grounded on a mudbank while Shippam nursed her back to health. The women finally escaped from China on a Japanese ship. Once in Japan, they climbed various peaks in Hokkaido, then ascended Mount Fuji (93). This spectacular “Oriental” and Orientalist adventure—which reads like the outline for a movie serial, complete with gender and racial passing—received widespread press coverage in America. While Best seems to have mentioned the China episode in her subsequent appearances, she did not make it the subject of a new lecture, perhaps because the women apparently were not able to bring back moving pictures as nonfiction evidence.

Bibliography

Advertisement. Best Lecture. Bend [Oregon] Bulletin (31 January 1929): 3.

Childs, M. W. “Two Women in the Manchurian Wilds.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (30 October 1927): 93.

“Die from Worry, Not Over-Work.” Battle Creek [Michigan] Enquirer (23 October 1923): 14.

“Dr. C. J. Best to Lecture in Ju-Co Pay Assembly.” Scribbler [Fort Scott, Kansas] (10 January 1927): 1.

“Dr. Cora J. Best, Mountaineer, Dies.” Star Tribune [Minneapolis Minnesota] (20 November 1930): 1.

“Dr. Cora Johnstone Best, Adventurer, To Lecture at Teachers’ College March 6.” La Crosse [Wisconsin] Tribune and Leader Press (21 February 1928): 12.

“Free Illustrated Lecture at High School February 15.” Sheboygan [Wisconsin] Press (8 February 1927): 3.

“Intrepid Woman Makes Friends With the Clouds.” St. Louis Star and Times (11 January 1927): 11.

“Mountains No Barrier--She Just Steps on 'Em.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (8 April 1930): 3.

“Mrs. Bent Tells of Many Trails.” Pantagraph [Bloomington, Illinois] (15 April  1924): 8.

“News of the World Told in Pictures.” The Philadelphia Inquirer (29 August 1924): 15. [Features syndicated photo of Best and Shippam].

“Optimists Hear Noted Woman Explorer Talk.” Daily Illinois State Journal [Springfield, Illinois] (17 March 1925): 10.

“Rotary Goes on Tour of Wilds.” Riverside [California] Daily Press (14 March 1929): 3.

Savage, Sean. “The Eye Beholds: Silent Era Industrial Film and The Bureau of Commercial Economics.” M.A. Thesis, New York University, 2006.

Serna, Laura Isabel. “Anita Maris Boggs: Historical; Invisibility and Gender in the History of Sponsored and Educational Film.” Feminist Media Histories vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 135-43. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.2.135?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

“Speaks to Clubs of Explorations.” Lincoln [Nebraska] Star (20 February 1926): 2.

“Sportswoman Will Address Ikes on Nov. 4.” Morning Star [Rockford, Illinois] (1 November 1925): 14.

“Woman Tells of Adventures.” Billings [Montana] Gazette (12 March 1927): 5.

Archival Paper Collections:

Best, Cora Johnstone. Hell Roaring Waters and Other Motion Picture Talks (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Commercial Economics, 1924). Margaret P. Hess Pamphlet Collection, University of Calgary.

Citation

Waller, Gregory. "Cora Johnstone Best and Audrey Forfar Shippam." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-qknc-pz80>

Ouida Bergère

by Laura Jacquelyn Simmons

Ouida Bergère was perhaps best known in the film industry as Mrs. Basil Rathbone and party hostess extraordinaire. However, before her marriage, to Rathbone, Bergère was a prominent and top paid scenario writer. Bergère was born in Spain, but moved to the US at the age of six. Her father was French-Spanish and her mother, British (Lowrey 1920, 22). There is some conflicting information regarding her birth name; most sources claim she was born Ida Bergère, others Eulalia Bergère. Regardless, upon entering the film industry, she changed her name to Ouida.

Ouida Bergere (w) caption: "Clever scenario writer who has gone abroad for a rest and vacation until September." (1924) NYPL

1924 Ouida Bergère clipping with caption: “Clever scenario writer who has gone abroad for a rest and vacation until September.” Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Bergère began her film career by serving as scenario editor and actress for Pathé Freres, eventually writing her own scripts and branching out to other companies, including Vitagraph and Famous Players-Lasky, according to the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1915 (24). Much of Bergère’s screenwriting career coincides with the career of her second husband, George Fitzmaurice, to whom she was married before Rathbone. She met Fitzmaurice after she started her screenwriting career, and after their marriage, he directed almost all of the films she wrote. As is the case with the many Hollywood marriages, Bergère’s relationship to Fitzmaurice must be considered when discussing her career, and, typically, because her career was so closely linked to that of Fitzmaurice, there is confusion about their credits. She very well might have had her hand in directing some of the films that have been credited to him, as was the case with other couples such as actress Alice Terry and director Rex Ingram. Conversely, Ouida Bergère is assumed to have been the screenwriter, simply because Fitzmaurice directed, as in Cytherea (1924), which is credited to her in her New York Times obituary although not elsewhere (83). The exact dynamics of husband-wife teams working in the industry are now difficult to assess, but we now look to clues such as the article on the production of The Cheat (1923)—a remake of DeMille’s 1915 film—in the Morning Telegraph where it is mentioned that, as always, Bergère would be present during shooting (5). In another Morning Telegraph article, Bergère claims to have directed several scenes, explaining to the reporter that “Once when Mr. Fitzmaurice, my husband, was ill, I directed ever so many scenes in a picture on which he was working” (2).

Lantern slide, Our Better Selves (1919), Ouida Bergère (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

We receive some insight into Bergère’s idea of scenario writing in Dorothy Day’s 1924 article, strangely titled “Ouida Bergère Wants to be Barriesque,” perhaps a reference to British writer J. M. Barrie, author of “Peter Pan.” By “Barriesque” is meant working with the director to develop “a simple and life-like story” (2). Bergère’s desire to move in a new direction may reflect the lukewarm reviews that the popular and trade press gave of her stories. Most of her scenarios were adaptations from stage or novel and were generally accepted as standard, but not exceptional film fare. The films for which she wrote story and scenario, such as The Hillcrest Mystery (1918) and The Profiteers (1919), were criticized as unoriginal. By 1924, near the end of a productive career, Bergère was best known for her flamboyant style and exotic stories, as Day argues, rather than for simple stories. Critically, Bergère’s stories succeeded the most when the extravagance of the narrative matched that of the production values for which George Fitzmaurice was known, as in Arms and the Woman (1916), which was referred to as “uncommonly interesting” and a “smashing dramatic” by Variety (29). She wrote mostly dramas, with just two known comedies, More Trouble (1918) and Three Live Ghosts (1922). Her dramas tended to be high in action, centering on war, crime, drugs, and social issues, typically with a romantic subplot. One of her best-known films is a remake of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 film The Cheat (1923), starring Pola Negri in one of her first roles. Some of her extant crime dramas are Idols of Clay (1920), Kick In (1923), and The Man From Home (1922), all collaborations with George Fitzmaurice. The fact that they were all distributed by Famous Players-Lasky–Paramount Pictures, the biggest of the US production-distribution companies in those years, may explain their survival.

Lantern slide, Common Clay (1919), Ouida Bergère (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Despite her status in the field and the top salary she was receiving as a scenarist, Bergère gave up most of her career ambitions after she divorced Fitzmaurice and, at forty-one, married Rathbone in 1926. An article in the New York Post in 1964, titled “At Home with Mrs. Basil Rathbone,” reports that she stayed “at home” so that she could guide his career as well as raise their family.

See also: Alice Terry, “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

“Arms and the Woman.” Rev. Variety (10 Nov. 1916): 29.

“The Cheat.” Rev. The New York Times (27 Aug. 1923): 14.

Day, Dorothy. “Ouida Bergère Wants to be Barriesque.” Morning Telegraph (13 July 1924): 2.

“Fitzmaurice to Direct ‘The Cheat.’” Morning Telegraph (24 Dec. 1922): 5.

“George Fitzmaurice-Ouida Bergère Join in New Deal with Famous Players-Lasky.” Moving Picture World (28 Feb. 1920): 1490.

Murphy, Agnes. “At Home With Mrs. Basil Rathbone.” The New York Post (17 May 1964): 45.

“Ouida Bergere Rathbone Dies; Dramatist Was Actor’s Widow.” Obit. The New York Times (1 Dec. 1974): 83.

“Woman Heads Company. Ouida Bergere, Former Pathé Scenario Editor, to Manage Film Company.” The New York Dramatic Mirror (17 Feb. 1915): 24.

“Work on Elsie Ferguson Photoplays Establishes Ouida Bergère as One of Foremost Scenario Writers.” Moving Picture World (13 Sept. 1919): 1652.

Archival Paper Collections:

Essanay Film Manufacturing Company records. Series 5, Box 21, FF 6 “The Love of Jose,” by Ouida Bergère, undated scenario. Chicago History Museum.

Gloria Swanson papers. University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center.

Ouida Bergère clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Ouida Bergère clippings file. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Reminiscences of Basil Rathbone. February, 1959. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Research Update

November 2019: Recent information concerning Ouida Bergère's birth location and name has come to our attention, revealing that she was born in the United States and not Spain (a likely self-promotional origin story). Census records and passport applications indicate that she was born Eula Branch, on December 14, 1885, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Furthermore, the adoption of the name Ouida Bergère may have come from the fact that her married name in 1911 was Burgess, which could easily be exoticized to Bergère. According to these documents, her mother's name was Ida, which could have also contributed to the creation of Ouida. For more information, see: https://www.flickr.com/photos/puzzlemaster/11624464274/.

--The Editors

Citation

Simmons, Laura Jacquelyn. "Ouida Bergère." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-q4a4-rn17>

Clara Beranger

by Lori Rossiter

A gifted and dedicated writer, Clara Beranger managed a career spanning three decades, as a scenarist and screenwriter and, in her later years, as a book writer and lecturer. As a woman who thrived in the fledgling art form, Beranger leaves behind an impressive footprint—credits on eighty silent films of which sixteen are extant and four sound films as well as a handful of published interviews in which she is outspoken and passionate about women working in the industry. Privately, she began an affair with the director and screenwriter William C. deMille that led to years of successful professional collaboration.

Clara Beranger (w). NYPL

Clara Beranger. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

As one of the most prolific female pioneer writers, Beranger moved with ease between creating her own stories and adapting novels, plays, and others’ scenarios to the screen. Credited mostly as Clara S. Beranger but once as Charles S. Beranger, a pseudonym, Beranger excelled in dramas of domestic relations and wrote a handful of Baby Marie Osborne comedies. She is noted today for such career highlights as Anna Karenina (1915), an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and the adaptation of a popular novel and Pulitzer Prize-winning play of its day, Miss Lulu Bett (1921), which was placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2001. Beranger remains for us a well-documented but critically overlooked female film industry pioneer.

Lantern slide, The Bluffer (1919), Clara Beranger (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Having begun her career as a journalist, Beranger jumped into the fledgling moving pictures industry in the 1910s as a freelancer for such notable companies as Edison, Vitagraph, and Kalem. A December 1918 article in the Moving Picture World looked back on Beranger’s earlier career iteration as contributing stories for one-reelers on a weekly basis to Edison, then one of the industry leaders (1324). Later, Beranger was part of the writing staff at both Fox Film Corporation and Pathé.

Lantern slide, Craig’s Wife (1928), Clara Beranger (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

In March 1918, Beranger joined the scenario department of World Film Corporation, which was set to film her first original story as Her Great Moment (1918), starring Kitty Gordon. In articles from these years in the Moving Picture World, one begins to feel the unbridled, ebullient optimism of Beranger for women working in the new industry. In August of 1918, she is quoted as saying:

It needs no cursory glance at the current releases and those of even six months ago to prove that there are more writers among the feminine sex than the male persuasion. The heart throb, the human interest note, child life, domestic scenes and even the eternal triangle is more ably handled by women than men because of the thorough understanding our sex has of these matters (1128).

A year later, in 1919, Beranger gives an even more positive assessment of women’s successes. They have “scored as directors,” she says. But in one particular arena, says Beranger, “women are more than holding their own and in many instances proving that the female angle is worth serious consideration and that is in the contriving of situations in building up a continuity” (662). Beranger herself was “more than holding her own” at work and at home. Journalist Edward Weitzel, visiting Beranger in her family apartment in New York City in June 1920, told readers about a woman who elegantly combined the roles of wife, mother, and “scenario expert” with seeming effortlessness (1445). Thus Beranger also diffused criticism of women in the work force. But her personal life was about to turn around.

Lantern slide, The Love Net (1918), Clara Beranger (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Zona Gale’s play “Miss Lulu Bett,” adapted for the screen by Beranger and released in 1921, was a best-selling novel that Gale herself had adapted for the theatre. The film is one of the few extant examples not only of Beranger’s work but of director William deMille, and it is the first film on which Beranger and deMille collaborated. The Cinderella-like tale follows an unfortunate single woman who must toil for her unscrupulous sister, Ina, and Ina’s husband, Dwight. When Dwight’s itinerant brother, Ninian, comes to town, Dwight tricks him into marrying Lulu. Lulu Bett reluctantly returns to her sister’s family after this marital disaster, but frees herself at last and marries a local schoolteacher. The novel and play’s original ending gave Lulu the courage to go it alone in the world, despite societal and family disapproval. When stage audiences objected, Gale rewrote her work to reunite Lulu and her brother-in-law Ninian. Thus, Beranger and deMille’s cinematic ending, in which Lulu finds love with a man unconnected to her family, is notable for its diversion from both the novel and the play and is in keeping with the expectations of the period that a woman should find happiness with a man.

Clara Beranger is most remembered for her work, from 1919 to 1926, with the screenwriter-director William deMille at the Famous Players-Lasky company, which would become Paramount Pictures. According to the biography of deMille’s daughter, the dancer and choreographer Agnes deMille, which cites letters from deMille to his wife, Agnes’s parents’ marriage had faltered. In 1921, deMille fathered an out-of-wedlock child by his mistress, the screenwriter Lorna Moon. When the child was adopted by deMille’s brother Cecil and his wife, the secret was kept from nearly everyone. But four months after the birth of his son, deMille became romantically involved with his new collaborator, Clara Beranger. At some point Beranger separated from her husband of thirteen years, Albert B. Berwanger, with whom she had had a daughter, Frances, born in 1909. When deMille’s wife learned that her husband was seeing Beranger, she forced her husband to make a choice. William attempted to have it both ways, but, in 1927, deMille and his first wife divorced. DeMille married Beranger a year later.

Continuing to work as a team, Beranger and deMille are cocredited on at least twenty-three films. In a 1922 interview with columnist Louella Parsons, around the time of the release of The World’s Applause (1923), Beranger describes the advantages of working on fewer scenarios for one director, as well as being part of the process from story to screen. The older brother of producing and directing legend Cecil B. DeMille, William deMille wrote and directed films that were generally thought to be less extravagantly showy than those his brother directed. Beranger’s exit from Famous Players-Lasky in 1926 warranted a Moving Picture World article (316). But she continued as a freelancer and her collaboration with deMille continued through the end of the silent era with Craig’s Wife (1928) and into the Talkies with This Mad World (1930), their last film together.

After Clara Beranger retired from motion picture work, she taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California and, along with deMille, was one of the original faculty of the USC School of Cinema-Television. Beranger continued to promote both the art and technique of motion pictures in Writing for the Screen, published in 1950 when Beranger was sixty-four years old. Only four years later, with World War II in mind, Beranger wrote Peace Begins at Home, a treatise on aggressive nationalism, war, and chaos. Beranger thus left behind a legacy built on both the realities of a century that waged two world wars and the fantasies of the century’s newest art form, moving pictures. William died in 1955, and Clara followed him only a year later.

See alsoLorna Moon, Louella Parsons,“Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

“Are Women the Better Script Writers?” Moving Picture World (24 Aug. 1918): 1128.

“Beranger [sic] Leaves F. P.-L.” Moving Picture World (23 Jan. 1926): 316.

“Clara Beranger to Free Lance.” Moving Picture World (21 Dec. 1918): 1324.

de Mille, Agnes. Portrait Gallery. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Easton, Carol. No Intermission: The Life of Agnes de Mille. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

“Feminine Sphere in the Field of Movies is Large Indeed, Says Clara S. Beranger.” Moving Picture World (2 Aug. 1919): 662. Rpt. in Red Velvet Seat. Eds. Antonia Lant, and Ingrid Perez. New York and London: Verso, 2006. 654.

Parsons, Louella. “Clara Beranger Comments on The World’s Applause.” The New York Telegraph (7 May 1922): n.p.

Weitzel, Edward. “Clara Beranger Explains How to Combine Duties of Wife, Mother and Scenario Expert.” Moving Picture World (12 June 1920): 1445.

Archival Paper Collections:

Agnes de Mille collection, ca. 1914-1984. New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

William C. De Mille papers, 1899-1940. New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Citation

Rossiter, Lori. "Clara Beranger." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-24k6-jd71>

Helena Smith Dayton

by Jason Cody Douglass

Helena Smith was born in 1883 and appended Dayton to her name upon marrying Fred Erving Dayton on June 26, 1905. Dayton began her career as a reporter at The Hartford Courant and described her transition into sculpting as follows:

Helena Smith Dayton’s work in the New York Sun, 1914.

In one day I did everything there from writing up the latest society scandal to the death of a whole family by gas, with eight hours of ordinary work thrown in. From reporting I went to writing for magazines, and [in early 1914] I was sitting at my typewriter, when my fingers began to itch for something to mould, though I didn’t even know what artists’ clay was, and had never seen an artist or sculptor at work (“Caricatures in Clay Are Her Contribution” B12).

Equipped with nothing more than copious amounts of clay, nimble fingers, a sharpened match, a hairpin, and “an incorrigible sense of humour,” Helena began crafting hundreds of eight- to twelve-inch tall statuettes inspired by “modern city life” (“Cartoons in Clay by a Woman” B7). Lining the many bookshelves of her brownstone residence at 313 East 18th Street in New York City, these water-colored clay figures would ultimately play starring roles in some of the earliest known works of stop-motion clay animation.

Helena Smith Dayton and her work in The Times Dispatch, 1914.

In the second half of 1914, only a few months after the start of Dayton’s foray into sculpting, numerous articles written in celebration of her innovative and “delightfully grotesque” (“Caricatures in Clay Are Her Contribution” B12) figurines began to pop up in the likes of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the New York Tribune, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. These articles reveal many crucial aspects of Dayton’s creative process, including her extensive background in dance, which endowed her with a trained eye for human anatomy and movement. The numerous photographs and vivid descriptions of Dayton’s sculptures lining the pages of such articles also attest to the breadth of her subject matter: not only did she craft models of “fashionable society leaders” to be showcased in “many of New York’s finest palaces,” but she also parodied classical art with a “pensive salamander” in the style of Rodin’s The Thinker, and exhibited a willingness to forsake realism through creations such as a slack-jawed, anthropomorphized lighthouse (“Fashionable Society Leaders in the New Clay Cartoons” S6).

An announcement dated January 16, 1915 in the popular humor magazine Puck marks the start of what became an extremely lucrative year for Dayton:

Mrs. Helena Smith-Dayton, wonder-worker in clay, carries off Puck’s $250.00 for the best cover submitted before January 1. Her entry in the prize contest [“Tango Party”] is by long odds the quaintest conceit that has come into the Puck sanctum in many moons. So original, so strikingly new in conception is it, that we felt obliged to repress a natural impulse to print a black-and-white reproduction of it on this page. We prefer to let the cover speak for itself upon its appearance February 6, in order that your surprise may be as complete as ours, when the cover was first show to us (“What Fools These Mortals Be!” 3).

Helena Smith Dayton’s prize-winning work in the New York Tribune, 1915.

In the same issue of Puck, Dayton debuted a recurring comedic series, “Mrs. Canary’s Boarding House,” which she wrote and illustrated with photographs of her clay figures. She began copyrighting some of her sculptures (“Works of Art” 450-451),  attracting local artists to her weekly Sunday studio salons, and establishing herself as a frequently reported upon somebody within the flourishing Greenwich Village art scene. By year’s end, Dayton netted more than $12,000, as detailed in a New York Tribune article patronizingly titled, “Woman’s Place, If You Insist, Is in the Home; but Who’s Going to Fuss About It If She Wants to Earn $10,000 Or So a Year Somewhere Else?” As Chairwoman of the Art Committee of the Empire State Woman Suffrage Party, Dayton applied this commercial savvy to organizing fundraisers that featured her artwork before the unsuccessful statewide referendum in November 1915.

With a considerable amount of capital at her disposal, Dayton began developing a photographic means by which to animate her characters of clay. Despite the common misconception that Dayton’s first (or only) film was the one-reel Romeo and Juliet, which was distributed by Educational Films Co. in the fourth quarter of 1917, the earliest documented screening of her shorts actually occurred at the Strand Theater half a year earlier, on March 25, 1917 (“Latest Picture Novelty” 58). It remains unclear exactly when she started to experiment with the technique she called “stop action,” though in the same year Dayton recounted, “the difficult thing at first was to determine just how much to move an arm or a head, to avoid an appearance of jerkiness. I used to make the changes too great, but am learning to overcome that now” (“Romeo and Juliet–In Clay!” 434). The two reviews below, both concerning Dayton’s untitled films shown at the Strand, shed a glimmer of light on the impact of her technique on audiences:

Helena Smith Dayton’s animated sculpture was a weird and amusing picture, quite baffling to the lay mind (“On the Screen” 11).

Animated sculpture is the best novelty in motion pictures. It owes its existence to Helena Smith Dayton, a New York sculptress of note. The method employed in making the Animated Sculpture films is similar to that of animated cartoons. The figures are first modeled in clay, then changed to different poses, photographed one by one and projected upon the screen, showing them jumping about as if they were real. The effect is highly amusing […] (“Sparks from the Reel” C13).

In the months between her theatrical debut at the Strand and the wintertime release of Romeo and Juliet, Dayton juggled her participation in a large independent art exhibition at Grand Central Palace, suffragist parades and fundraisers, and the continued production and release of comic films. The various strands of her professional and personal life appear considerably interwoven during this period. For example, one of Dayton’s films, produced by the S.S. Film Company of New York, seems to have been shown to Governor Whitman at a suffragist fundraising event on August 29 (“Animated Sculpture Appears” 546); Pride Goeth Before a Fall (1917), her short which concluded Pathe’s Argus Pictorial No. 2 program, featured “dances and other stunts” (“Pathe’s Argus Pictorial No 2” 1523); Dayton’s miniature statues of actor George M. Cohan were on display in the Strand lobby during the theatrical run of his film Broadway Jones (1917) (“Statues of Cohan” 175); and a description in Moving Picture World of her contribution to Pathe’s Argus Pictorial No. 3 program–starring “clay figures around the banquet board”–is reminiscent of a banquet scene from Dayton’s aforementioned recurring series in Puck (“Items of Interest” 1774).

“Romeo and Juliet – In Clay!” Film Fun (November 2, 1917): 434.

Much of what is currently known about Romeo and Juliet comes from a full-page review in Film Fun from November 2, 1917. Three stills from the short film are accompanied by the uncredited author’s confession, “when the immensity of the thing had dawned upon us, we hustled over to the studio to find how the wheels went round.” To the interviewer’s surprise, Dayton confesses, “there are no wheels and no strings.” Special attention is drawn to a ballroom scene in Romeo and Juliet containing thirty moving figurines, no small accomplishment for an independent animator even by today’s standards. The image of a bug-eyed moon spying on Romeo beneath Juliet’s vine-covered balcony reveals a busy mise-en-scene and asymmetrical composition. Clay figures are draped in elaborate costumes, and each shot incorporates a belabored use of shadow (“Romeo and Juliet–In Clay!”434).

While various sources suggest that Romeo and Juliet was produced and/or “filmed” (at least in part) by the S.S. Film Company (“Animated Sculpture Appears” 546), distributed by Educational Films, and made “under the guidance of J. Charles Davis, Jr.” (“Prominent Sculptor in Film” 1164), calling into question both the extent of Dayton’s financial investment in Romeo and Juliet and whether or not she operated the camera, a reviewer for Moving Picture World noted that the film actually begins by showcasing Dayton’s authorial role and creative process:

“Statues that Run, Dance, and Fight.” Popular Science Monthly (February 1917): 257.

Little need be said here of the wonderful talent of Helena Smith Dayton: her work speaks for itself. In the introduction to the picture we are privileged to watch her deft fingers fashion the form of Juliet from an apparently soulless lump of clay. This mere lump of clay under her magic touch takes on the responsibilities of life, and love, and sorrow which the play requires, and finally grasps in desperation the dagger with which it ends its sorry life, falling in tragic fashion over the already lifeless form of its Romeo (“Prominent Sculptor in Film” 1164).

In addition to appearing onscreen as herself in Romeo and Juliet, Dayton reportedly also wrote “the clever jingles which sub-title her pictures,” according to the Film Fun coverage of the film (“Romeo and Juliet–In Clay!”434).

Despite being well covered by a variety of media outlets, and despite her ambitious plans to create more shorts for Educational Films at the rate of “one picture a month” (“Romeo and Juliet–In Clay!” 434), Dayton’s career as a stop-motion animator was unfortunately short-lived. A few months after achieving the right to vote in New York, in November 1917, Dayton took up a new cause by relocating to Paris to manage a YMCA canteen for soldiers. Upon her return to America after World War I, Dayton pursued work as a columnist, novelist, playwright, and portrait painter, but never again, it seems, as an animator.

Helena Smith Dayton in the New York Tribune, 1915.

At present, Library of Congress records contain no mention of Dayton’s films or copyrights for those films. Online searches through the websites of several prominent American film archives return no results for her name, the few known names of her shorts, or the Argus Pictorial reels. The apparent absence of her films from the archive–a consequence of, at least in part, her gender, her chosen medium, the brevity of her career, the small scale of her productions, and the limited distribution afforded to her films–may continue to drive Dayton into the margins of early animation history. However, the sheer volume of words penned after screenings of Dayton’s stop-motion animation testifies to the magnitude of her impact on New York City audiences. The absence of Dayton from most influential histories of animation, then, speaks to the need for scholars to look beyond extant films when it comes to writing film history. The rich variety of reviews of–and photographs from–Dayton’s productions can easily serve as a launchpad for further research and analysis, and the timing of Dayton’s career places her contributions in direct dialogue with exalted American contemporaries such as Willie Hopkins and Winsor McCay. With any luck, such research may lead to the identification of one or more of Dayton’s innovative animated works.

Bibliography

“The Alley Fiesta.” Cartoon Magazine vol. 12, no. 2 (1917): 286-287.

“Animated Sculpture Appears.” Motography (15 September 1917): 546.

“Caricatures in Clay Are Her Contribution.” New York Tribune (28 February 1915): B12.

“Cartoons in Clay by a Woman.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (9 August 1914): B7.

“Catalogue of Educational and Selected Pictures.” Moving Picture World (2 February 1918): 659.

“Councilman Dayton Married.” The Hartford Courant (27 June 1905): 7.

Douglass, Jason Cody. “Artist, Author, and Pioneering Motion Picture Animator: The Career of Helena Smith Dayton.” Animation Studies Online Journal (December 2017): n.p. https://journal.animationstudies.org/jason-douglass-artist-author-and-pioneering-motion-picture-animator-the-career-of-helena-smith-dayton-runner-up/

------. “Helena Smith Dayton: An Early Animation Pioneer Whose Films You Have Never Seen.” Animation Studies 2.0 (September 2018): n.p. https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=2641

“Fashionable Society Leaders in the New Clay Cartoons.” The Times Dispatch (30 August 1914): S6.

Frierson, Michael. Clay Animation: American Highlights 1908 to the Present. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Furniss, Maureen. A New History of Animation. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016.

“Helena Dayton Has New Figure Show.” The Hartford Courant (4 October 1915): 2.

“Helena S. Dayton Back from France.” The Hartford Courant (11 August 1919): 3.

“Independent Artists’ Big Exhibit Opens in Grand Central Palace.” New York Times (11 April 1917): 12.

“Items of Interest.” Moving Picture World (22 December 1917): 1774.

“Latest Picture Novelty.” Billboard (10 March 1917): 58.

“Mrs. Helena Dayton.” New York Times (23 February 1960): 31.

“On the Screen.” New York Tribune (26 March 1917): 11.

“Pathe’s Argus Pictorial No 2.” Moving Picture World (8 December 8 1917): 1523.

“Prominent Sculptor in Film.” Moving Picture World (24 November 1917): 1164.

“Romeo and Juliet – In Clay!” Film Fun (2 November 1917): 434.

“Sparks from the Reel.” Detroit Free Press (25 March 1917): C13.

“Statues of Cohan.” Billboard (24 March 1917): 175.

“Statues that Run, Dance, and Fight.” Popular Science Monthly vol. 90, no. 2 (February 1917): 257-258.

“Statuette Cartoons of Metropolitan Life.” The New York Sun (21 June 1914): 11.

Wells, Paul. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge, 1998.

“What Fools These Mortals Be!” Puck (16 January 1915): 3.

“Woman’s Place, If You Insist, Is in the Home; but Who’s Going to Fuss About It If She Wants to Earn $10,000 Or So a Year Somewhere Else?” New York Tribune (17 December 1916): F5.

“Works of Art.” Catalogue of Copyright Entries Part 4. Washington D.C.: The Library of Congress, 1915. 450-451. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b2988721?urlappend=%3Bseq=496

Citation

Douglass, Jason Cody. "Helena Smith Dayton." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-tdeb-8845>

Giulia Cassini-Rizzotto

by Alessandro Faccioli, Marzia Maino

One of the most renowned theater actresses, film actresses, and film acting teachers of her time, Giulia Cassini-Rizzotto was also one of the few female film directors it Italy during the silent cinema era. Possessing wide-ranging interests, she was also engaged in other activities, such as screenwriting and producing, as well as teaching nursery school and authoring short stories. Additionally, she was a correspondent for South American newspapers and a French translator (M.P.R. 1916, 19). Like many of her contemporaries who were involved in both theater and film, Cassini-Rizzotto’s cinematic career was shaped by her theatrical endeavors.

A child of artists, Cassini-Rizzotto was born into a family of theater actors on June 15, 1865. Her father, Giuseppe Rizzotto (1828-1895), was a well-known Sicilian dialect actor who was part of Giacinta Pezzana’s troupe during its South American tour in 1873 and 1874. He was then capocomico [director] of his own modest theater company and also ventured into playwriting with plays like “I mafiusi de la Vicaria” (1863). His works garnered interest when they were performed by Giovanni Grasso Sr. and then translated into the Milanese dialect and inserted into the repertoire of Edoardo Ferravilla’s theater company (Becherini 1954, 1035; Pieri 2000, 1099). Cassini-Rizzotto’s brother, Salvatore, who died at age forty-five during World War I, acted in prestigious theater companies and alongside the actress and capocomica Italia Vitaliani, the cousin of Eleonora Duse.

Postcard, Giulia Cassini Rizzotto. Private Collection. 

It was within this stimulating artistic environment that Cassini-Rizzotto grew to adulthood and received her initial theatrical training, making her stage debut in her father’s company. Throughout the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, she worked with some of the greatest actors in Italian theater, including Grasso Sr., Ermete Novelli, Virgilio Talli, Irma Gramatica, Ruggero Ruggeri, Gualtiero Tumiati, and Ermete Zacconi. Her time with Talli is particularly significant because of the influence that he had on her future film work. Wanting to move away from strict textual analysis and rigorous work on performance style common in nineteenth-century theatrical traditions, Talli trained his actors to engage actively with their characters, forcing them to abandon the repetitiveness of superficial performance traits in favor of seeking out a deeper truth (D’Amico 1985, 137; Alonge 1988, 217-218). Cassini-Rizzotto’s apprenticeship with him allowed her to experiment with a comprehensive approach to acting, which combined a highly theatrical/expressive performance style with an experienced attention to staging. This approach would become a rule of thumb in her later film directing.

Giulia met Alfonso Cassini (1851-1921), an esteemed dramatic tragedian, through Ermete Novelli. They were married in 1902, and would go on to have two children together (“La morte di Alfonso Cassini” 58). Alfonso held the role of generico [bit-part] and caratterista [character actor] in the companies belonging to Novelli and Talli. He was also an active film actor with various production houses. Giulia and Alfonso shared numerous professional experiences over the course of their lives, and, consequently, from a historiographic perspective—at least until the end of World War I—it is more effective to think about their theatrical and cinematic work as collaborative.

Cassini-Rizzotto enjoyed a long and noteworthy theatrical career. She was seen as an “esteemed actress” (Savio 1954, 187), and one of her most important stage performances was in “Figlia di Jorio,” the pastoral tragedy in three acts written by Gabriele d’Annunzio in 1903. (Cassini-Rizzotto did not take part in the 1917 cinematic adaptation directed by Edoardo Bencivenga.) The play debuted at the Teatro Lirico, in Milan, on March 2, 1904. It was presented  by the Talli-Gramatica-Calabresi company, which had employed both Giulia and her husband since 1901. Giulia played the part of Splendore in the celebrated play and in its repeat performances (Valentini 1993, 301-334). With Talli-Gramatica-Calabresi, she and Alfonso worked intensively until 1905, as demonstrated by their constant participation in numerous productions carried out by the distinguished company. From 1906 to 1912, the couple acted with the troupe belonging to Tina Di Lorenzo and Armando Falconi. Following these theatrical experiences, they decided to turn their professional interests toward cinema (Ascarelli 1978, 483). Very little is known about their move into the world of film—a move that was quite natural for many theater actors at that time. As far as we know, Giulia’s theatrical career came to an end once she started working in cinema.

We can confirm that Cassini-Rizzotto made her film debut, at the age of forty-seven, in 1912, assuming secondary and maternal roles. Her first films were with Latium Film in Rome, a company that had already hired numerous theater actors. Her early work included Il passato che non perdona, Redde rationem, Capriccio fatale!, and Il segno indelebile, which were all heavily emotive melodramas produced in 1912.

By 1913, the Cassinis were working for Roma Film, where they acted in Il romanzo di Luisa that year. Cassini-Rizzotto had a secondary role, playing Liliana, a beautiful woman who steals the main character’s partner. In 1914, the couple moved to Etna Film in Catania, Sicily, which at the time was considered an excellent production company due to the quality of its equipment and its technical-artistic staff (Bernardini 2015, 301-309). At Etna Film, Cassini-Rizzotto was hired as a leading lady and received acclaim for her portrayal of Xenia in Christus/La sfinge dello Jonio (1914), directed by Giuseppe De Liguoro. In the film, Xenia is a powerful woman from Syracuse, Sicily, who, in the year 1000 A.D., lived despotically in the lap of luxury. A critic for La Cine-Fono wrote that Cassini-Rizzotto “exceeded all expectations in her fantastic interpretation; one that won’t soon be forgotten” (Olleja 1915, n.p.). In La Vita Cinematografica, Pier da Castello stated that the performance of “Mrs. Cassini-Rizzotto has moments of eroticism, inebriation, fury—dangerous manifestations, artistically speaking, which can easily deviate an actor and an actress even more—[and] are treated with great measure” (1915, 63).

The Cassinis continued working at Etna Film for the next few years, appearing in Gian Orlando Vassallo’s Paternità (1914) and Anton Maria Mucchi’s Pulcinella (1915). In the latter, Giulia played the wife of her husband’s character, the honest young puppeteer after whom the film is named. The couple also acted together in De Liguoro’s Patria mia! (1915).

In 1915, when Italy entered World War I, the couple returned to Rome and began collaborating with Tiber Film. Cassini-Rizzotto made a supporting appearance in Baldassarre Negroni’s La signora delle camelie (1915) alongside Hesperia (the pseudonym of actress Olga Mambelli). The film was made at the same time that Gustavo Serena and Francesca Bertini at Caesar Film were producing their own adaptation of the same source material by Alexandre Dumas fils. Tiber Film’s version was deemed an act of unfair competition and this led to one of the first famous legal trials in the cinematic world, paving the way for important debates on intellectual rights in the field (Martinelli 1992, 12:194-197; Soro 1935, 77-95). After this episode, Cassini-Rizzotto continued to work with Tiber Film. Her films there included the aristocratic drama Primo ed ultimo bacio (1916), directed by the promising young Gennaro Righelli, who would also direct her in the carefree comedy Alla Capitale! (1916), and Negroni’s Gli onori della guerra (1917), a love triangle set in France based on the vaudeville by Charles-Maurice Hennequin.

Screenshot, Giulia Cassini-Rizzotto in Malombra (1917).

Following their collaboration with Tiber Film, the Cassinis moved on to work with Società Italiana Cines, an important production company specializing in historical films (Bernardini 2015, 18). Cassini-Rizzotto acted alongside Lyda Borelli in La falena (1916) and Malombra (1917), both directed by Carmine Gallone. She also appeared in La bella salamandra (1917), which was shot in the Roman studios by the young director Amleto Palermi. La falena was only recently restored, in 2017, by the Cineteca Italiana di Milano, while Malombra was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna in 1991. In the latter, Cassini-Rizzotto plays the part of Contessa Salvador with an impressive naturalness. She gracefully assumes the role of the elderly woman, providing a nuanced performance that is entirely devoid of pretense. That Cassini-Rizzotto sought plausibility in her acting set her apart from the highly stylized performances embodied by many of the Italian divas at the time.

In Fabiola (1918), directed by Enrico Guazzoni for Palatino Film, Cassini-Rizzotto played the part of Lucina, the mother of a young Christian named Pancrazio who was persecuted in pagan Rome in 302 A.D. At the start of the film—fortunately, numerous copies have survived and are held in various archives—we can see Giuila’s uncertain gestures, painful and measured, as Lucina gives her son the cruet containing the blood of her husband, who had also died because of his faith. Although limited to just a few  sequences in the film (including the memorable scene where she bids farewell to her son before he is killed by wild beasts in the Roman circus), the actress’s bravura is evident as she balances the impulses of such a melodramatic character with the needs of the script. What emerges is yet another expressive performance striving for believability.

As World War I came to an end, Cassini-Rizzotto took her career in a new direction. In 1918, she dedicated herself to teaching at Ars Film in Rome, one of the first schools of cinematic acting, producing actresses like Irene Saffo Momo, Claretta Rosai, and Lia Formia (Mattozzi 1920, 220; Dall’Asta 2008, 319). The school had likely been established by 1914 (Savio 188; Bernardini 2018, 80). Giulia had opened another school in Florence in 1916, called Artistica Scuola Film, which would become one of the most renowned cinematic acting academies during the 1910s (Alovisio 2005, 204n117). News reports of the time abound with remarks on the quality of the acting training provided, which at the time was defined as “a new art” (M.P.R. 14). The founding of Cassini-Rizzotto’s school in Florence had been considered a daring business venture as there was a high probability of failure, but it enjoyed the support of her friends and colleagues from the outset. Many held Cassini-Rizzotto in high regard for her sweet persuasiveness and artistic skill, which were features that made her a “very earnest teacher” (M.P.R. 20).

The proliferation of film schools in Italy during this period was an important signal of the industrialization of film production, as well as a trend toward professional specialization. It is within this context that Cassini-Rizzotto decided to test her mettle as a director, becoming one of the first Italian women to work behind the camera. She directed five films between the end of World War I and the early 1920s, which was not a favorable period for production in the Italian film industry. Unfortunately, only two films survive (Leonardo da Vinci from 1919 and A mosca cieca from 1921) and there is very little information about this period in her career in the specialized film magazines of the time. As a result, we know very little about the artistic and critical success of her directorial work today.

Her directorial debut was Scugnì (1918), self-produced by Casa Cassini-Rizzotto and written by and co-starring Alfonso. The story involves the misadventures of a poor young man from Naples, whom Cassini-Rizzotto had actually met. The part of the main character was given to Franca Di Leo, one of her students (Dall’Asta 319).

In 1919, in collaboration with the journalist and film director Mario Corsi, Cassini-Rizzotto directed Leonardo da Vinci. Inspired by the life of the celebrated painter, the film was produced by an obscure production company called Historica Film. The film enjoyed a degree of success and international distribution that included the Scandinavian countries (Dall’Asta 319-320). News reports from the time emphasized Corsi’s grand scenography, along with film’s remarkable historically-accurate set reconstructions. These elements were accentuated in part by an impressive system of stereoscopy designed and created by Lamberto Pineschi that was utilized to increase the 3D effect of the images (Brunetta 2008, 265). Pineschi and his brother, Azeglio, had founded the Società Italiana Pineschi in 1907, which became Latium Film in 1909, where Giulia and her husband had previously worked. The surviving copy of Leonardo da Vinci, held at the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, offers a chance to witness what a critic at the time deemed rather unrealistic acting (Ruffo-Marra 1923, 61). The actors appear so intent upon representing the characters of the past that they are unable to convey natural sentiments, passions, and actions in a convincing manner. Interest in the film today lies mainly in its set design, the sumptuous costumes, the settings in historical locations, and in the works of art that accompanied the life of Leonardo.

Giulia Cassini-Rizzotto. Courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna.

In 1920, Cassini-Rizzotto directed two more films, both produced by Perseo Film: Senza sole, in collaboration with Camillo De Rossi, and La piccola Manon, in which she also acted. The latter was well received by critics. For example, in La Rivista cinematografica, Aurelio Spada noted that the film was “conducted with grace […] with a measured calm in its scenes and effects,” that the “quality and intelligence of the artistic direction” emerged, and that the name Cassini was synonymous with “competence” (1921, 31). He also stated how the photography was appropriate, “the set decoration sober and tasteful and the outdoor scenes picturesque and beautiful.” He expressed slight disappointment at the leading actors, Lya Isauro and Alberto Monti, reasoning that if they had been more successful in their performances the film would have certainly acquired more value. In contrast, he praised Cassini-Rizzotto’s performance in the role of Duchessa d’Albenga, which successfully combined “the noble bearing of the matron with the most dramatic expressions of an indignant and sorrowful mother.”

In 1921, Cassini-Rizzotto directed her last production, A mosca cieca, which she also starred in and scripted. The film was a lively comedy produced by San Marco Film in Rome, a production company with hagiographic intentions financed by the Vatican and certain members of the Roman and Neapolitan aristocracy. A mosca cieca was filmed for charitable purposes and involved illustrious members of the city’s aristocracy acting alongside young unknown actors who were most likely students trained at Cassini-Rizzotto’s school. Overall, it is a modest film, although it includes a few enjoyably humorous scenes. Its first screening took place on March 17, 1921, at the Teatro Valle di Roma with an audience made up largely of Roman nobility (Martinelli 1996, 19:26). One of the few writers that reviewed the event stated that the amateur noble performers appeared “as experienced actors of the silent scene” and are “exceedingly charming, especially the two female protagonists” (Ugoletti 1921, n.p.) According to this writer, the set design was comprised of “the beautiful exteriors of Roman villas,” which were normally inaccessible to regular film production companies. However, the film was deemed irreverent by the religious members of the Società San Marco, and was immediately pulled from circulation. A copy of the film is held in the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, and is available for viewing there.

After her  husband’s death, in 1921, Cassini-Rizzotto continued to work in cinema for only a short time. She appeared in two films in 1923, when Italian film production was well into its period of crisis. Cassini-Rizzotto acted in Germaine, produced by Palatino Film, and Triboulet, the six-part period piece directed by Febo Mari for Società Italiana Cines. Following these productions, her work in European cinema came to an end. She moved to Argentina with a theatrical company run by Maria Melato, an esteemed theater performer, cinematographer, and radio broadcaster. Cassini-Rizzotto continued her work as an acting teacher there, opening a school for stage acting in Buenos Aires, which she would direct until her death on August 24, 1943. Although unlikely, we cannot rule out that Cassini-Rizzotto returned to the cinema in her later years—a hypothesis that would require further research in South American archives to confirm.

Bibliography

Alacci, Tito. Le nostre attrici cinematografiche studiate sullo schermo. Firenze: Bemporad, 1919.

Alovisio, Silvio. Voci del silenzio: la sceneggiatura nel cinema muto italiano. Milano: Il castoro, 2005.

Alonge, Roberto. Teatro e spettacolo nel secondo Ottocento. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1988.

Ascarelli, Roberta. “Cassini, Alfonso.” In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Vol 21. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1978. 483-484.

Becherini, Bianca. “Rizzotto, Giuseppe.” In Enciclopedia dello spettacolo. Vol VIII. Ed. Silvio D’Amico. Roma: Le Maschere, 1954. 1035.

Bernardini, Aldo. Cinema muto italiano protagonisti. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2018.

------. Le imprese di produzione del cinema muto italiano. Bologna: Persiani, 2015.

Brunetta, Gian Piero. Il cinema muto italiano: da “La presa di Roma” a “Sole.” 1905-1929. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2008.

Chiti, Roberto. Dizionario dei registi del cinema muto italiano. Roma: M.I.C.S., 1997.

Da Castello, Pier. “Christus o la Sfinge dell’Jonio.” La Vita Cinematografica no. 1 (7 January 1915): 63.

Dall’Asta, Monica. “Appendice. Le protagoniste.” In Non Solo Dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall’Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 317-330.

D’Amico, Silvio. Il tramonto del grande attore. Firenze: La Casa Usher, 1985.

Jandelli, Cristina. I ruoli nel teatro italiano tra Otto e Novecento. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2002.

“La morte di Alfonso Cassini.” La rivista cinematografica no. 16 (25 August 1921): 58.

Martinelli, Vittorio. Il cinema muto italiano 1915-1931. 21 vols. Rome: RAI-ERI, 1992-96.

------. Le dive del silenzio. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2001.

------. “Le metteuses-en-scène.” Cinemasessanta no. 141 (Fall 1981): 20-75.

Mattozzi, Rino. La rassegna generale della cinematografia. Roma: Unione Cinematografica Italiana, Società Editrice Rassegne, 1920.

Meldolesi, Claudio. Fondamenti del teatro italiano. La stagione dei registi. Roma: Bulzoni, 2008.

M.P.R. “Per l’Artistica Scuola ‘Film.’” Film vol. III, no. 30 (10 October 1916): 14-20.

Olleja. La Cine-Fono (16-29 January 1915): n.p.

Pieri, Marzia. “Problemi e metodi di editoria teatrale.” In Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo. Vol. II. Eds. Robert Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino. Torino: Einaudi, 2000. 1099.

Ruffo-Marra, Enrico. La rivista cinematografica  (25 July 1923): 61.

Savio, Francesco. “Cassini Rizzotto, Giulia.” In Enciclopedia dello spettacolo. Vol I. Ed. Silvio D’Amico. Roma: Le Maschere, 1954. 187-188.

------. “Cassini, Alfonso.” In Enciclopedia dello spettacolo. Vol. I. Ed. Silvio D’Amico. Roma: Le Maschere, 1954. 187.

Soro, Francesco. Splendori e miserie del cinema: cose viste e vissute da un avvocato. Milano: Consalvo, 1935.

Spada, Aurelio. “Piccola Manon.” La rivista cinematografica (25 August 1921): 31.

Ugoletti, Ugo. Febo (19 March 1921): n.p.

Valentini, Valentina. Il poema visibile: le prime messe in scena delle tragedie di Gabriele D’Annunzio. Roma: Bulzoni, 1993.

Citation

Faccioli, Alessandro; Marzia Maino. "Giulia Cassini-Rizzotto." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-704d-n502>

Emilie Sannom

by Isak Thorsen

“Frygten for Døden var ikke så stor/Større var Frygten for Livet på Jord” [Trans.: The fear of death was not too great/Larger was the fear of life on earth]. These lines, written on Emilie Sannom’s headstone, are from a commemorative poem composed by the famous Danish author Tom Kristensen at the time of Sannom’s tragic death in 1931. Sannom died in front of an audience of 8,000 people when her parachute did not unfold while performing an aerial show in the Danish town of Grenaa. Her early death–she was only forty-four years old–marked the end of a remarkable life and career.

Sannom was born in 1886, in Copenhagen, to Fritz Emil Sophus Sannom (1854-1935), a first mate and furnace stoker on a ship, and Johanne Kamilla Hansen (1861-1936). In 1887, the entire family immigrated to Florida where they unsuccessfully ran an orange plantation. After seven years abroad, the Sannom family returned to Denmark and settled down in Copenhagen, where Sannom’s mother dreamed of seeing her daughters on the stage. According to Sannom, she made her theatrical debut as an extra at the age of nine, and her sisters, Charlotte (1884-1954), Thora (1893-1954), and Ragnhild (1896-1953), acted on the stage and in films as well (Nielsen 2003, 914). Sannom continued to perform in Copenhagen theaters, and also toured the Nordic countries before making the leap to the new medium of film.

Emilie Sannom as Ophelia in Hamlet (1911). Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

According to Sannom, she first appeared onscreen, between 1907 and 1909, in small parts in productions by the leading Danish company of the silent era, Nordisk Films Kompagni (Nørgaard 1992, 116; Nielsen 914). However, the first film that we can be certain that Sannom participated in was Gøngehøvdingen/The Partisan Chieftain (1909), made by Biorama. In the company Kosmorama’s famous Afgrunden/The Abyss (1910), which launched Asta Nielsen’s career, Sannom played a supporting role as the flirtatious Lilly, who tempts Nielsen’s lover and gets into a fight with Nielsen. Nielsen and Sannom also appeared together in Balletdanserinden/The Ballet Dancer (1911), produced by Nordisk. In another of the company’s productions, Hamlet (1910-11), Sannom played Ophelia, Hamlet’s wife-to-be. In a spectacular scene, Sannom throws herself into the castle moat, and thereby became the first stuntwoman in Danish cinema and laid the groundwork for her reputation as a daredevil.

Emilie Sannom fighting in Nattens Datter II (1916). Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

It was Sannom’s engagement with the Danish film company Skandinavisk-Russisk Handelshus/Filmfabriken Danmark that led to her fame. The company specialized in the genre known as sensationsfilm–films featuring spectacular action scenes and stunts. Sannom signed her first contract with the company in 1912, at the same time that the French film company Pathé Frères offered her a lucrative contract of 2,000 francs a month. However, Sannom chose to stay in Denmark. From 1912 to 1919, she was part of the company’s core staff and became its main attraction, marketed as “Danmarks Vovehals Nummer Et,” or “The Number One Daredevil of Denmark.” In numerous films, she performed her own dangerous stunts: participating in wild car or motorbike chases, performing balancing acts across a dangerous abyss, or hanging on the rotating blades of a windmill. “I’m born with the conviction that whatever will happen to me, I’ll make it,” Sannom once said about her stunts. “I’m never going into panic, never clueless, never senselessly flustered” (qtd. in Debora 4). Besides doing her own stunts, Sannom also worked as stunt double for the company’s other actors (Nielsen 914). It is unclear if Sannom designed her own stunts, but as Skandinavisk-Russisk Handelshus/Filmfabriken Danmark worked with a small central staff, a plausible assumption would be that she collaborated in the staging of her stunts. Hardly any of Sannom’s films have survived, but a short compilation of her films, Filmens Vovehals/Daredevil of the Movies (1923), gives an impression of Sannom’s spectacular stunt work.

Emilie Sannom in Nattens Datter III (1917). Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

Her increasing popularity led to two series of films about bold female detectives with Sannom playing the main character. Four films were made in the Nattens Datter/Daughter of the Night series (1915-1917), and four films were made in the detective serial Panopta (1918-1919). The Panopta episodes were probably the most successful of Sannom’s films, and also the last that she made in Denmark.

As a member of the core staff at Skandinavisk-Russisk Handelshus/Filmfabriken Danmark, Sannom was also involved in the creation of two scripts during her time there. The extent of her contribution is uncertain, but she is credited for the script of For Barnets Skyld (1915), in which she also had a role. It also seems very likely that Sannom came up with the scenario for the film Elskovsbarnet (1916), which is now lost (Nørgaard 73; Nielsen 609). More research is necessary to better understand Sannom’s possible screenwriting endeavors.

Emilie Sannom riding under a stagecoach in Dilligencekusken fra San Hilo (1914). Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

In 1919, Skandinavisk-Russisk Handelshus/Filmfabriken Danmark ceased production of fiction films, and Sannom went back to the stage, performing in Denmark, Norway, and Germany. Sannom returned to the screen in the early 1920s, making two films in Germany: Die Frau im Delphin (1920) and Das Land der Finsternis (1921). Additionally, invited by a fellow-countryman, director Alfred Lind, Sannom shot La faniculla dell’aria/Mistress of the Sky (1923) in Italy, which was ultimately her last film. From then onward, she earned her living performing on the stage and in the circus, as well as performing parachute jumps from airplanes, sometimes only wearing a bathing suit and high-heeled shoes. In 1929, she tried in vain to get a pilot certificate, pretending she was six years younger than her actual age. In an interview from 1919, Sannom, unwittingly prefiguring her own untimely death, explained: “Life is not worth living without danger, and if death arrives, well then it arrives…” (qtd. in Nørgaard 107).

Emilie Sannom performing an aerial stunt, c. 1925. Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

In her time, Sannom stands out as a modern, emancipated woman. During her career, she supported herself and her family economically. She gave birth to a daughter, Grethe, out of wedlock in 1912, and never hid the identity of the father, the actor Axel Schultz (1890-1974), whom she considered a good friend. Though she had many admirers, Sannom never married. In an interview from 1925 with the headline: “What would you have done if you had been a man?” Sannom replied: “I would have been a really wild cowboy” (“Hvad vilde De gøre” 14).

Bibliography

Debora. “Pigen, der ikke kan Gyse.” Tidens Kvinder [n.d]: 4.

Hending, Arnold. Filmens Vovehalse. København: Urania, 1948.

Hove, Peder. Mille. København: Gyldendal, 1992.

“Hvad vilde De gøre, hvis De var Mand?” Eva (October 1925): 14.

Nielsen, Jan. A/S Filmfabriken Danmark. København: København: Multivers, 2003.

Nørgaard, Erik. Mille–mændenes overmand: Den eventyrlige beretning om skuespillerinden Emilie Sannoms liv. København: Holkenfeldts Forlag, 1992.

Sundholm, John, et al. Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema. Kanham, Toronto, Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Archival Paper Collections:

Emilie Sannom folder. The Danish Film Institute.

Citation

Thorsen, Isak. "Emilie Sannom." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-heyt-zq34>

Marguerite Viel

by Maya Sidhu

Marguerite Viel was a French filmmaker known primarily for her work in the 1930s, when her wide-ranging contributions to the cinema as a pioneering sound editor, dialogue writer, and director were often mentioned in the press. But Viel’s film career started a few years prior, during the silent era, when she collaborated with Jean Epstein. In 1926, Viel became the assistant sales manager and silent partner at Epstein’s independent production company, Les Films Jean Epstein, where he came to rely on Viel’s financial support (Daire 2014, 79-80). After Epstein completed La Glace à trois faces in 1927, Viel came to his aid again and provided him with the funds necessary to finish his celebrated film La Chute de la Maison Usher (1928) (Daire 94). Receipts held at the Cinémathèque française reveal that, instead of giving her any monetary compensation for her investment, Epstein transferred ownership of three of his films to Viel in 1928: Mauprat (1926), La Glace à trois faces, and Six et demi onze (1927). In 1929, Viel worked on Czech director Leo Marten’s film Dzungle velkomesta/La Jungle d’une grande ville (Fronval 1929, 10), either as co-director or artistic consultant, as the credits on the extant print from the National Film Archive in Prague indicate. According to an online synopsis published by the archive, the drama, which was shot silent but was ultimately released with sound in 1930, concerns a young woman who becomes involved with a con man and his partner (“Jungle of the Big City” n.p.). Dzungle velkomesta is the only silent film that we know of today where Viel was directly involved in the production.

Marguerite Viel in Ciné-Comoedia, August 1930.

In the sound era, Viel directed several other films: Terre Farouche (1930), which is considered lost today; two comedies in 1932 with Richard Weisbach, Occupe-toi d’Amélie and Une Petite bonne sérieuse (also considered lost); and her most widely accessible film, La Banque Némo, which was shot in 1933 and released in July 1934. If very little is known about Viel’s silent film work, then the sound films she directed show her interest in comedy, particularly the subgenre of identity swapping, and in the subversion of moral codes and sexual propriety. According to film scholar Colin Crisp, who studied 1,300 films from the period, La Banque Némo uses the comedic mode to present a very cynical take on French society (2002, 81).

Through the first two years of the 1930s, Viel also worked steadily as a sound editor and dialogue writer. As such, she handled sound and/or adapted several early sound films for a French-speaking audience. She was responsible for the dubbing of Erich von Stroheim’s The Great Gabbo (1929), Erich Waschneck’s Passions (1931), and Walter Ruttmann’s Feind im Blut. She was sound editor for the documentary Les Chemins de la renommée (1931) by Claude Lambert and Mon ami Tim (1932) by Jack Forrester. Viel also wrote the dialogue for William Thiele’s L’Amoureuse aventure (1932).

Marguerite Viel portrait. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.

The reasons for Viel’s disappearance from the film industry after 1934 is, at the time of this writing, unknown. Her career, marked by the transition from silent to sound filmmaking, deserves more attention as an example of women’s versatility throughout cinema history. The financial support Viel provided for Epstein and her work at the end of the silent era and on early sound films highlight the more ambiguous ways, beyond the clear-cut categories of “director,” “screenwriter,” or “producer,” that women worked in film throughout the silent period and into the sound era.

With additional research by Aurore Spiers

Bibliography

“Bruits de Studios.” Paris-Soir (13 December 1931): 6.

“Chez Nous.” Figaro Film (24 May 1931): 5.

“Courrier.” Ciné-Comoedia (17 October 1931):  1.

Crisp, Colin. Genre, Myth and Convention in the French Cinema 1929-1939. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Daire, Joël. Jean Epstein: Une Vie pour le Cinéma. Grandvilliers: La Tour Verte, 2014.

Fronval, Georges. “La Jungle d’Une Grande Ville.” Bordeaux-Ciné no. 53 (4 October 1929): 10.

“Gabbo, le ventriloque.” Ciné-Comoedia (4 March 1931): 1.

“Jungle of the Big City.” Filmový Přehled [online database]. National Film Archive, Prague. http://www.filmovyprehled.cz/en/film/395468/jungle-of-the-big-city

“Les Présentations.” Hebdo-film (11 June 1932): 14.

“Petites et grandes nouvelles: ‘Erotikon’ sonorisé.” Ciné-Comoedia (22 August 1930): n.p.

R.L. “Du monde entier.” Pour Vous no. 86 (10 July 1930): 10.

Archival Paper Collections:

Photographies de personnalité. “Marguerite Viel.” Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

“Au pays de Georges Sand.” Fonds Jean et Marie Epstein. Box EPSTEIN 19-B12. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Citation

Sidhu, Maya. "Marguerite Viel." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-bsqj-ee49>

Mabel Condon

by Carolyn Jacobs

It would have been hard to page through any major trade publication of the 1910s and 1920s without coming across an item about Mabel Condon. During this time, Condon wore many hats in the film industry, working as a journalist, publicist, trade journal editor, and business owner. In 1916, Moving Picture Weekly called her “the best known newspaper woman in the film world to-day [sic]” (“At Work and Play” 25). Her fame was frequently the subject of jokes in the trade press, as when Photoplay columnist Delight Evans expressed her shame at always having to say no when people asked, “Have you met Mabel Condon?” (22). However, by the time of her death in 1965, Condon’s work was largely forgotten.

Mabel Condon in Moving Picture World, July 1918. Media History Digital Library

Condon was born on January 31, 1894, in Chicago, Illinois, to Timothy and Rosa Condon (née McDevitt). In 1912, when she was just eighteen years old, Condon began writing for Motography, a well-known film industry trade journal published in Chicago. In her first few months there, she wrote on a wide variety of topics, from the inner workings of Chicago’s film censorship board to the opening of a new picture palace in Winnipeg to the process of turning a scenario into a film. In the October 26, 1912 issue, Condon was listed for the first time as an associate editor of the journal. She once again moved up the ranks in 1913, when she became Motography’s East Coast representative and took charge of the publication’s new office in New York City. In a short piece announcing the branch’s opening in October 1913, Motography justified the selection of Condon, saying she was “already known personally to most of the trade, and through her departments at Motography, to most of our readers” (“Our New York Office” 228).

During her time at Motography, Condon frequently penned the publication’s “Sans Grease Paint and Wig” feature, which profiled a different celebrity each issue. Condon’s witty, first-person accounts of her encounters with different stars worked to humanize these larger-than-life figures. Rather than focusing on the glamorous nature of their lives, she emphasized the mundane, everyday aspects, such as leading lady Beverly Bayne’s self-professed candy addiction and Adrienne Kroell’s devotion to her pet canary “Billy” (1912, 325; 1912, 403). In these pieces, Condon highlighted the celebrity-fan relationship, frequently noting that stars corresponded personally with their fans and even, in the case of actor Francis Xavier Bushman, proudly displayed photographs sent to them by admirers. Through her writing, Condon emerges as a no-nonsense reporter who asked the right questions and was not afraid to tease and prod her subjects. She also refused to be treated differently because of her gender. She boasted in one essay, for instance, that she refused to sit in the only chair in actor William Russell’s dressing room when it was offered, instead insisting that Russell sit while she perched on the edge of his desk (1913, 159).

Mabel Condon in Picture-Play, June 1921. 

In June 1915, Condon officially left Motography and moved to Los Angeles to write for film magazines on the West Coast, according to an announcement in Motion Picture News (“Changes of the Week” 68). In her early days in LA, according to the trade press, not only did she write film reviews and pieces on stars, but she also worked as a press agent, became the West Coast representative for The Dramatic Mirror, and headed up a committee to represent activities of the Motion Picture Board of Trade in Southern California (“Committee on West Coast to Represent” 64). In 1916, Condon also wrote her first scenario, entitled The Man Who Would Not Die, a now-lost drama directed by and starring Russell. Later that year, she wrote the story for a comedy entitled Cupid Wins the Handicap, also for Russell’s production company, although it does not seem that a film with this title was ever released.

At some point between 1915 and 1916, Condon used her experience and contacts in the film industry to start her own business in Los Angeles. The Mabel Condon Exchange served as both a publicity agency and an employment exchange, and Condon’s responsibilities included finding roles for actors, arranging contracts, managing stars’ publicity and finances, and selling scripts and story rights. Among the earliest to join the Mabel Condon Exchange as executives were Ernest Shipman, a Canadian promoter and producer; Adelaide Woods, a former actress; and Myrtle E. “M.E.M” Gibsone, a well-known businesswoman who previously managed Kalem’s Hollywood studio. That Woods, Gibsone, and a number of other women worked at the company as publicists and agents challenges the notion that Condon was the “one successful woman” working in publicity during this time, an idea often reported in the press (Hoff 321). Though Condon was certainly not the only woman, these statements indicate that she was better known than many others in her field.

Mabel Condon (r) and Vola Smith in front of the visitors’ gallery at Universal City, in Moving Picture Weekly, June 1916.

Throughout the teens, the Mabel Condon Exchange grew in size and reputation. In September 1916, according to Motography, Shipman went to New York City to open an East Coast branch of the firm (“Join Condon Exchange” 619). Condon took a highly publicized, extended trip to New York in 1917 to hire new employees and secure new clients for the East Coast office. It seems likely that she traded on her longstanding relationship with Motography in this new venture, as her office in New York was located just two floors below her former employer. Condon once again became affiliated with the journal when she became its West Coast representative in 1917. The same year, Motion Picture News called the Mabel Condon Exchange “one of the largest publicity and engagement bureaus in Los Angeles” (“Mabel Condon Will Visit” 2889). The firm managed a number of important stars and filmmakers of the day, including Russell, Nell ShipmanAnita Stewart, William Duncan, Maude George, Bessie Love, and Helene Chadwick. A 1921 article in Picture-Play also attributed the success of Gloria Swanson to Condon, suggesting that it was she who introduced Swanson to director Cecil B. De Mille (Brynn 99).

In November 1923, Condon married Russell Juarez Birdwell, an advertising executive and publicist, with whom she later had a son, Russell Jr., and a daughter, Joan. Between the birth of her first child in 1924 and the mid-1930s, it seems that Condon closed her business to raise her children full-time, as there are almost no references to Condon or her exchange in the trade press during that time. In the mid-1930s, Condon used her new identity as a mother and homemaker to re-launch her publicity career. In 1936, she took a four-month long trip to Asia, producing at the end of it a book entitled Housewife Abroad. She timed the release of her book with the opening of a new publicity venture, the Mabel Condon Agency, which was much publicized in trade journals and Los Angeles newspapers. Stationary from 1937 indicates that her new firm had offices in Beverly Hills and Singapore. Whether Condon’s new firm was ultimately successful remains unclear, however. Condon’s name, once ubiquitous in the pages of industry publications, rarely comes up during this period. Instead, it seems that during the 1930s and 1940s, her career was often overshadowed by that of her husband, who became head of publicity for David O. Selznick in the mid-1930s and later opened his own firm, Russell Birdwell and Associates. After her marriage, mentions of Condon often cited her relationship to Birdwell, who was frequently mentioned in the trade press between the 1930s and 1950s, suggesting that he was the better-known half of the couple during this period.

Letters between the two, however, suggest that Birdwell frequently relied on Condon’s connections and advice in his work as a publicist, and that Condon played a crucial role in maintaining professional relationships with clients and the press in California when her husband spent extended periods on the East Coast. In 1944, Condon officially joined her husband’s advertising firm as a public relations executive. A draft of the press release announcing her new position indicates that she had been working for the company on a freelance basis before her official hire. She removed a line identifying her as “Mrs. Russell Birdwell” from the original draft of this release, and exclusively used her maiden name once at the firm, suggesting both that she did not wish to trade on her husband’s reputation and that her own name still had some currency in the 1940s. In a note to Condon on her first day in the 30 Rockefeller Plaza office of his agency, Birdwell acknowledged her contributions to the business that bore his name, welcoming her to the office they “created together” and predicting that it will be “more profitable than ever before” with her there (Birdwell n.p.).

Mabel Condon silhouette in Motography,  July 1914.

It is not clear from Birdwell’s papers or from the press how long Condon worked at the agency, though reports of her death allude to a prolonged struggle with heart disease in her later years that may have removed her from her work. She died from a heart attack in 1965, at the age of seventy-one. Her obituary in the Los Angeles Times identified her only as “wife of publicist Russell Birdwell” and made no mention of her own career achievements (B15). A New York Times obituary also identified her first and foremost as Birdwell’s wife, but at least mentioned that she had been “a former writer and literary agent” (25). The trajectory of Condon’s life from celebrated film industry personality to “wife of publicist” is mirrored in her archival legacy, as much of what we know about Condon’s early career comes from the trade press, while almost all information about her later life comes from a collection of her husband’s papers. In both of these archives, we find evidence of a talented, creative woman who was incredibly passionate about her work and achieved immense success and recognition at a time when the contributions of other women to the field of film publicity were largely overlooked. Though she was not properly recognized by the press at the end of her life, and has so far been ignored by scholars, Mabel Condon and her many contributions to the film industry deserve to now be reinserted into film history.

See also: Gladys Hall, Leila Lewis, Beulah Livingstone, Louella Parsons

Bibliography

“Actress Joins Condon Exchange.” Motography vol. 16, no. 12 (16 Sept. 1916): 679.

“At Work and Play With the Stars In and About Universal City.” Moving Picture Weekly vol. 2, no. 26 (24 June 1916): 24-25.

“Committee on West Coast to Represent Board of Trade.” Motion Picture News vol. 12, no. 25 (25 Dec. 1915): 64.

Birdwell, Russell. Letter to Mabel Condon. July 14, 1944. In “Office Memoranda: Condon, Mabel ca. 1944,” Box 32, Folder 9, Russell Birdwell Papers.

Brynn, Celia. “Ladies’ Day.” Picture-Play vol. 14, no. 4 (June 1921): 73-75, 98-99.

“Changes of the Week.” Motion Picture News vol. 11, no. 22 (5 June 1915): 68.

Condon, Mabel. “Sans Grease Paint and Wig.” [Adrienne Kroell] Motography vol. 8, no. 11 (23 Nov 1912): 403.

------. “Sans Grease Paint and Wig.” [Beverly Bayne] Motography vol. 8, no. 9 (26 Oct. 1912): 325.

------. “Sans Grease Paint and Wig.” [Francis Xavier Bushman] Motography vol. 8, no. 10 (9 Nov. 1912): 351.

------.“Sans Grease Paint and Wig.” [William Russell] Motography vol.10, no. 5 (6 Sept. 1913): 159-60.

Evans, Delight. “Grand Crossing Impressions.” Photoplay vol. 14, no. 1 (June 1918): 22.

The Goat Man. “On the Outside Looking In.” Motography vol. 11, no. 13 (27 July 1914): 465.

Hoff, James L. “Publicity—What is it?” Moving Picture World vol. 37, no. 1 (20 July 1918): 319-21.

“Join Condon Exchange.” Motography vol. 16, no. 11 (9 Sept. 1916): 619.

Longacre. “Just to Make Talk.” Motion Picture News vol. 12, no. 16 (23 Oct. 1915): 71.

“Mabel Condon Exchange Grows.” Motography vol. 17, no. 12 (24 March 1917): 651.

“Mabel Condon in a Nutshell.” Motography vol. 16, no. 2 (8 July 1916): 103.

“Mabel Condon Will Visit New York for Vacation.” Motion Picture News vol. 16, no. 17 (25 Oct 1917): 2889.

“Mrs. Russell Birdwell.” The New York Times (23 Jan. 1965): 25.

“Our New York Office.” Motography vol. 10, no. 7 (4 Oct. 1913): 228.

“Pacific Coast Notes.” Motography vol. 16, no. 3 (15 July 1916): 163.

“Russell Birdwell and Mabel Condon Wed.” Exhibitors Herald (24 Nov. 1923): 24.

“Shipman Establishes Office for Mabel Condon Exchange in New York.” Motion Picture News vol. 14, no. 14 (7 Oct 1916): 2200.

“Wife of Publicist Birdwell Dies.” Los Angeles Times (22 Jan 1965): B15.

Archival Paper Collections:

Russell Birdwell papers, 1915-1951. UCLA, Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections.

Citation

Jacobs, Carolyn. "Mabel Condon." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-e930-tj57>

Cleo de Verberena

by Marcella Grecco de Araujo

Cleo de Verberena was the first woman to recognize herself and to be recognized as a film director in Brazil. She was the protagonist and the director of the silent feature film O Mistério do Dominó Preto/The Mystery of the Black Domino (1931), based on the story of the same name by Aristides Rabello. Born Jacyra Martins da Silveira in Amparo, a small city in the state of São Paulo, she moved to the capital after the death of her father to be with some of her eight siblings who already lived there.

Cleo de Verberena in Cinearte in 1931. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Digital das Artes do Espetáculo.

Life in the capital was different than in Amparo, and São Paulo of the 1920s was changing and expanding dramatically. It was the home of the great coffee barons and a rising elite class that benefitted from industrialization, as well as a place of immigrants, especially Italians, and former slaves and their descendants. The center of São Paulo was already full of movie theaters, stores selling musical instruments, bookstores, theaters, haute couture studios, and confectioneries. Planned neighborhoods were built for the wealthy population, automobiles shared the streets with electric trams, and the streets were no longer as dangerous with the full installation of electricity in 1930 (Schpun 1997). Going to the cinema was a common practice for the modern women of São Paulo and Jacyra loved to watch films and think about the person behind the camera. According to an unpublished interview, given by her son, Cesar Augusto Melani, to the journalist José Maria do Prado, she was interested in the “brain” that put everything in order–the individual who oversaw the technicians and crew and made history come alive on the screen (Prado 1981, n.p.).

It was in the city of São Paulo that Jacyra met Cesar Melani, with whom she married and had a single child, around 1925. Melani was born in Franca, a small town in the state of São Paulo on May 28, 1903 and went to the capital to study medicine. When they got married, however, Cesar had already given up on that ambition and was trying to make it, unsuccessfully, as a businessman. According to their son in the aforementioned unpublished interview, the couple shared a common passion for the cinema (Prado n.p.).

1930 Cinearte headline:  “The first Brazilian woman filmmaker.” Courtesy of the Biblioteca Digital das Artes do Espetáculo.

Cesar was from an important family in Franca and after the death of a relative, he inherited a great amount of money. The couple decided to use this inheritance to start making films. Cesar hoped to become a great businessman and Jacyra desired to be a great filmmaker. Together, they opened EPICA-FILM, a production company that had an office in a building in Praça da Sé, one of the most prestigious neighborhoods at the time. They also rented a house in the upscale neighborhood of Santa Cecilia, where they built a small studio in the back and allocated equipment imported from France for the enterprise. In 1930, the couple started the production of O Mistério do Dominó Preto. Thinking about the sound of their names and the names of Hollywood stars, Jacyra adopted the pseudonym of Cleo de Verberena and Cesar became Laes Mac Reni.

There was a lot of publicity during the production of the film, especially in the magazine Cinearte, which was trying to strengthen Brazilian cinema through the consolidation of a star system similar to that of the United States. Between 1930 and 1931, many images of Verberena and stills from the film were published in Cinearte. For example, in May 1930, an article celebrated the pioneering work of Cleo de Verberena as the first Brazilian woman filmmaker (Rosa 1930, 6).

In addition to her role as director, Verberena also played a major role in the now lost O Mistério do Dominó Preto. It is likely that only one copy was made and did not survive the passage of time. Fortunately for contemporary scholars, shortly before its release, a considerable synopsis, as well as images from the film, was published in Cinearte (“O Mistério do Dominó Preto” 8-9, 40-41). The story centers on the murder of a married woman named Cleo, played by Verberena, who is dressed in a black Domino costume during the carnival in São Paulo. This famous character, coming from the tradition of Commedia dell’arteallowed anyone complete anonymity since it was composed of a long tunic that covered the whole body, as well as a mask and gloves. O Mistério do Dominó Preto makes this anonymity part of the plot. On her way to see her lover, Cleo is poisoned by someone pretending to be him, who is also dressed as a Domino. Although killed early, Cleo appears very alive throughout the film through the use of flashbacks, which set up her relationships with various characters in the story, while an ex-lover leads the investigation into her murder.

Cinearte image of Cleo, dressed in the black Domino costume, going to see her lover in O Mistério do Dominó Preto (1931). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Digital das Artes do Espetáculo.

Rabello released three different versions of the film’s source material in magazines and a newspaper between 1912 and 1926. Today, we have access to all three and can compare them to the published film synopsis. Verberena considerably modified the narrative, making it less conservative and moralistic. In the film, after being poisoned while drinking juice with the man she thinks is her lover, Cleo is rescued in the street by an ex-lover, a medical student who takes her home to try to reverse the effects of the poison. In Rabello’s versions, the medical student is not an ex-lover, but rather just someone she knew. Additionally, in Verberena’s film, before running into her killer, Cleo tells her husband that she is going out to enjoy the carnival. In Rabello’s versions, the main character, who does not have a name, secretly goes to the carnival to see her lover. Ultimately, Verberena makes the female character more daring and independent, gives her multiple lovers, and has her go to the carnival alone, without having to lie to her husband about her activities. Verberena also changed the ending of the story. In her version, the murderer is a man and the character of Cleo is properly buried. On the other hand, in Rabello’s versions, the murderer was another woman, the jealous girlfriend of the lover that Cleo was going to meet. Additionally, the victim does not meet the same end in the source material; the police are unaware of the crime, and the body of the “unworthy” woman dressed as the black Domino is quartered, packed, and dumped into a wasteland by the lover, the medical student, and his friend in the first version and, in the other two versions, the body is thrown into the sea.

Cleo de Verberena and Carmen Santos in Cinearte in 1932. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Digital das Artes do Espetáculo.

O Mistério do Dominó Preto debuted in São Paulo on February 9, 1931. It was shown in five theaters in the capital and one in the city of Curitiba, according to the Cinemateca Brasileira’s entry on the film online (“O Mistério do Dominó Preto” n.p.). In order to increase the couple’s income and to cover the expenses of the film, Cleo acted in two theatrical pieces directed by Luiz de Barros in 1931. In the same year, it was announced by the newspaper A Gazeta that she would play the main role in the film Canção do Destino, by Plínio Ferraz (“Cinemas” 6). Unfortunately, this production was never realized. In 1932, the family left for Rio de Janeiro with the intention of having O Mistério do Dominó Preto screened there. They visited the Cinédia studios, the first Brazilian attempt at film industrialization, and Cleo met the producer, actress, and future director Carmen Santos and other big names in Brazilian cinema. However, there is no evidence that the film was shown in Rio de Janeiro.

Like other Brazilian productions of the period, O Mistério do Dominó Preto was more of a financial loss than a profit. The distribution of national films was difficult since exhibitors often gave preference to the titles that generated profit, such as American films. In the aforementioned interview, Cesar Augusto told Prado that in this period his father was suffering from nervousness because he had put his entire inheritance into the production of O Mistério do Dominó Preto. He said that his mother sold everything she had to try to cover the expenses of the film, but the gap was too big (Prado n.p). In 1935, on his son’s birthday, Melani was found dead in an armchair in his living room. He was only thirty-one years old.

Cleo de Verberena and Laes Mac Reni in 1932. Private Collection. 

Her premature widowhood and her financial loss were probably what forced Verberena to abandon the cinema. In the 1940s, she remarried a Chilean diplomat, Francisco Landestoy Saint-Jean, with whom she would live in Rio de Janeiro, England, and Chile. Her daughter-in-law, Judith Haltenhoff Meza, said that Cleo did not talk about her past in film (2017 n.p.). Verberena died at the age of sixty-eight in the city of São Paulo. Her history has never been told and in Brazilian cinema books, when mentioned, only a few lines are reserved for her. Yet, at a time when women did not have the right to make decisions for themselves—the Brazilian Civil Code of 1916, then in force, dictated that they should be treated as minors dependent upon a father or husband—Cleo de Verberena, or Jacyra Martins da Silveira, directed her own film, led a team composed mostly of men, and presented Brazilian audiences with a modern story and female character.

See also: Carmen Santos

Bibliography

Araújo, Luciana Corrêa de. “Cléo de Verberena e o trabalho da mulher no cinema silencioso brasileiro.” In Feminino e plural: mulheres no cinema brasileir. Eds. Karla Holanda and Mariana Cavalcanti Tedesco. Campinas: Papirus, 2017. 15-29.

Camargo, Marcos [grand-nephew]. Email correspondence. March 2018.

“Cinemas.” A Gazeta (23 February 1931): 6. https://bit.ly/2FIQdwx

Galvão, Maria Rita. Crônica do cinema paulistano. São Paulo: Ática, 1975.

Gomes, Paulo Emilio Sales. Humberto Mauro, Cataguases, Cinearte. São Paulo: Ed. Universidade de São Paulo, 1974.

Marins, Paulo César Garcez. “Habitação e vizinhança: limites da privacidade no surgimento das metrópoles brasileiras.” In História da vida privada no Brasil 3. República: da Belle Époque à era do rádio. Ed. Nicolau Sevcenko. São Paulo: Companhia das letras, 1998. 131-214.

Melani, Rodolfo [grandson]. Personal interview. March 16, 2018.

Meza, Judith Adriana Haltenhoff [daughter-in-law]. Personal interview. December 15, 2017.

Noronha, Jurandyr. No tempo da manivela. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Brasil-America; Kinart Cinema e Televisão; Embrafilme, 1987.

“O Mistério do Dominó Preto.” Cinearte vol. 6, no. 256 (1931): 8-9, 40-41.

“O Mistério do Dominó Preto.” Cinemateca Brasileria. Filmografia [online database]. n.d. https://bit.ly/2Azd5J9

Pessoa, Ana. Carmen Santos. O cinema dos anos 20. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2002.

Prado, José Maria do. Memórias do cinema paulista: 1896-1981. Unpublished  typed manuscript. 1981. Cinemateca Brasileira.

Ramos, Fernão, ed. História do cinema brasileiro. São Paulo: ArtEditora, 1987.

Rosa, Ary. “A primeira directora do cinema brasileiro.” Cinearte 222 (May 1930): 6.

Schpun, Mônica Raisa. Les années folles à São Paulo: hommes et femmes au temps de l’explosion urbaine (1920-1929). Paris: l’Harmattan/IHEAL, 1997.

Schvarzman, Sheila. “Salas de cinema em São Paulo nos anos 1920: diferenciação social e gênero no imaginário crítico.” Unpublished conference paper, Women and the Silent Screen VI, Bologna, 2010.

Archival Paper Collections:

Pedro Lima archive. Cinemateca Brasileira.

Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes archive. Cinemateca Brasileira

Cinearte magazine collection. [online database]. Biblioteca Digital das Artes do Espetáculo.

Citation

Araujo, Marcella Grecco de. "Cleo de Verberena." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-stg6-p955>

Angela Murray Gibson

by Charles "Buckey" Grimm

Angela Murray Gibson’s versatility allowed her to fill many roles during her time in the film industry, the most important of which was studio head for the Gibson Studios in Casselton, North Dakota. Prior to this, Gibson spent her formative years studying to be a teacher in home economics. However, she always loved performing. According to her 1953 obituary in The Forum, upon graduation from North Dakota Agricultural College, she traveled to the East Coast to further her studies in teaching, where she also continued with her efforts in the entertainment field by studying voice and elocution. Gibson’s performing career took her on a tour of the Canadian northwest (“Miss A. M. Gibson Was Greeted” 5).

Angela Murray Gibson, c. early 1900s. Courtesy of North Dakota State University. 

Mary Pickford, who was about to start production on Pride of the Clan (1917), spotted Gibson while she was performing. Since Gibson’s routine consisted of many of the costumes and songs from her youth in her native Scotland, “She was called upon to aid Mary Pickford in a matter of costuming,” in order to add authenticity to the film, which was set in Scotland (“Producer De Luxe” 13). Gibson became quite interested in the workings of the motion picture industry, and, in 1919, took a course in Photoplay Making at Columbia University, which was taught by pioneering cinematographer Carl Louis Gregory (“Amateur Movies” 108).

According to a later article in The Cass County Reporter, she attempted to break into the film business by going to work for a short time at Famous Players-Lasky in New York (1953, n.p.). However, by the early 1920s, Gibson had moved back to Casselton and went about setting up her own studio. As related in the December 13, 1920 issue of The Pioneer out of Benidji, Minnesota, it was Gibson’s goal to set up a “North Dakota Hollywood” by opening up her own studio there (6). The article went on to state that Gibson’s plan was to make educational films and comedies, and her first film would be scenes of wheat farming in the Red River Valley area. This film, titled The Wheat Industry, was completed in early 1921. Not only was Gibson the writer and director of this production, but she was also the camerawoman, a position she would fill on all of her films.

Frame enlargement, Angela Murray Gibson filming The Wheat Industry (1921). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Paper Print Collection.

She next began work on her first comedy, a one-reeler titled That Ice Ticket, which had one of its first showings, according to The Forum, at the opening of the State Theater in North Dakota on November 28, 1921 (31). In That Ice Ticket, Gibson plays the role of Madge Jaspar, the object of affection of three different suitors. Her brother, Bud, decides to pull a prank and change a free “ice” sign on the outside of their residence to a “smallpox” sign, which causes two potential suitor to quickly drop out of the running for Madge’s hand. The last suitor is not fazed by the potential smallpox outbreak and offers to nurse her back to health. In the end, the joke is discovered and the new couple have a good laugh at Bud’s prank.

Frame enlargement, Angela Murray Gibson, Arrested for Life (1923). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Paper Print Collection. 

Gibson’s productions were uniquely grounded in her community. She had her mother run the camera when she appeared in a scene and she employed local talent in her productions. Following That Ice Ticket, she made the educational film How to Cook an Omelet/A Lesson in Cooking (1922), which was well received and utilized by various schools of domestic science in New York (“Amateur Movies” 108; Wilk 1926, 14). The period from 1921-1923 was a time of maximum film output, and, during these years, Gibson continued her original pattern of alternating between comedies and educational films. After How to Cook an Omelet, Gibson made another comedy titled Arrested for Life (1923), which was her most ambitious film to date. It was her first foray into two-reel pictures and gave her the chance to expand the story and spend more time developing the characters. In Arrested for Life, Gibson portrays her character, Nora Johnson, as a go-getter, someone who may not be too adept at whatever task is at hand, but who continues to keep her perpetually cheery outlook. The film centers around Nora, who arrives in a new town looking for work. The town policeman helps her get a job as a domestic. However, due to her poor cooking skills, Nora is quickly fired. The same policeman then helps her get a job running errands for and cleaning a boarding house. A local gentleman who has been courting a female boarder solicits Nora’s help with his marriage proposal, asking her to deliver a letter along with an engagement ring to his intended. However, Nora inadvertently delivers the ring to the wrong woman and confusion abounds. Upon learning of her mistake, she attempts to retrieve the ring and deliver it to the proper party, resulting in a chase scene and, subsequently, in her arrest. The mix-up is finally rectified and the film closes as the policemen offers her a job cooking for him, at which point she is “Arrested For Life” in marriage.

By the mid-1920s, Gibson’s studio output had slowed considerably. Much of the finances for her studio in Casselton came from her sister Ruby, who owned a successful women’s clothing and novelty shop in town. While Gibson was most likely finding it difficult to afford the rising production costs, there is no definitive mention of her closing the studio. In trade publications such as The Film Daily and The Educational Screen, articles from 1926 indicated that Gibson was still active and making films (“Producer De Luxe” 13; “Notes and News” 46). When her film production eventually stopped, she seemed to focus on a career as a camerawoman. For example, the March 4, 1928 issue of The Film Daily had the headline “First Newsreel Camera Girl Claimed by Kinograms” (7). While Gibson was certainly not the firstpreceded by Dorothy Dunn and Louise Lowellthe brief article explained how she became employed as a newsreel camera “girl”:

January 1925 The Educational Screen ad for “The Gibson Pictures.” 

Rodeo pictures she sent to Kinograms and the nerve she displayed in taking them won her appointment as a news camera women [sic]. She first attracted the attention of H.E. Hancock, associate editor of Kinograms, when she asked him for suggestions on newsreel pictures. She stated she had gained considerable experience in taking pictures, and had several educational, industrial and scenic subjects to her credit (7).

The rodeo footage, filmed in her adopted hometown of Casselton, was of the annual Killdeer rodeo and Screenland described “Miss Gibson’s courageous work in photographing the plunge of the fear-maddened steers, and kicking, bucking bronchos that appeared to be about to topple over on the daring camerawoman…” (“Lot Talk From Hollywood” 74). This is the only substantiated filmed piece she is known to have made for Kinograms. By the end of the 1920s, Gibson’s career in the motion picture industry had certainly concluded. She spent the 1930s teaching drama and elocution in Casselton, and, in the 1940s, she went to work for the WPA in the same capacity. In the latter part of the 1940s her health began to seriously decline, and, initially thought to have contracted tuberculosis, she spent several years receiving treatment in sanatoriums and hospitals. She passed away from cancer on October 22, 1953 in North Dakota (Olsen 1999, 24-3o).

Angela Murray Gibson in Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, 1928. 

Angela Murray Gibson, like many other women in the early motion picture industry, managed to successfully carve out a niche for herself. Mostly working outside of Hollywood in her local community, Gibson is a fascinating figure. However, due to the brevity of her career and the lack of extant material, considerably more research is necessary to gauge her place as a regional filmmaker and a camerawoman in the history of American film and the history of the industry more broadly.

See also: “Women as Camera Operators or ‘Cranks’

Bibliography

“Amateur Movies.” Photoplay (May 1928): 106-108.

The Bismark Tribune (5 February 1925): 3.

The Cass County Reporter (22 October 1953): n.p.

“First Newsreel Camera Girl Claimed by Kinograms.” The Film Daily (4 March 1928): 7.

The Forum [Fargo, North Dakota] (27 November 1921): 31.

The Forum [Fargo, North Dakota] (23 October 1953): 9.

“The Gibson Pictures.” [Advertisement] The Educational Screen (January 1925): 59.

“Lot Talk From Hollywood.” Screenland (June 1928): 73-78.

“Miss A. M. Gibson Was Greeted by Large Audience.” The Evening Times [Grand Forks, North Dakota] (18 October 1912): 5.

Motion Picture News (3 March 1928): 692.

“Notes and News.” The Educational Screen (January 1925): 44-46.

Olsen, Michael J. “The Five Faces of Angela Gibson.” North Dakota Horizons (Spring 1999): 24-30.

“Pictorial Section.” Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World (10 March 1928): 31.

The Pioneer [Bimedji, Minnesota] (13 December 1920): 6.

“Producer De Luxe.” The Film Daily (16 July 1926): 13.

“Regional News from Correspondents.” Motion Picture News (24 March 1928): 967-970.

Slide, Anthony. Early Women Directors. South Brunswick, N.J: A.S. Barnes, 1977.

Wilk, Ralph. “A Little from ‘Lots.’” The Film Daily (18 July 1926): 14.

Archival Paper Collections:

Angela Murray Gibson Collection (small collection #679). North Dakota State University, Archives.

Angela Murray Gibson (misc. clippings file). Bonanzaville-Cass County Historical Society

Angela Murray Gibson Collection. State Historical Society of North Dakota.

1919 Columbia University Course Bulletin. Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Citation

Grimm, Charles "Buckey". "Angela Murray Gibson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-d4x7-z664>

Virgínia de Castro e Almeida

by Tiago Baptista

Portuguese film pioneer Virgínia de Castro e Almeida is still better known today for her work as an author of children’s books, travel literature, and digests on the history of Portugal. She was married to João da Mota Prego, an agronomist, and lived in France and Switzerland. She took an interest in cinema during the first half of the 1920s, founding the production company Fortuna Films in 1922. The company released two features: A Sereia de Pedra (1922) and Os Olhos da Alma (1923), both written by Castro e Almeida and directed by the French director Roger Lion. In 1923, she took part in the foundation of another production company, Rosy Film, whose only output was the non-extant commercial O Castelo de Chocolate (1923) for the Portuguese chocolate company Suissa. This was the first film by Portuguese director Arthur Duarte, who began as an actor in Fortuna Films’ two features and also starred in O Castelo de Chocolate as a young man in love with a Suissa factory worker. Castro e Almeida’s Fortuna Films was registered both in Lisbon and in Paris and was likely the earliest Portuguese attempt to establish an international film company. To that end, not only did Castro e Almeida choose a French director, but both films also featured several French actors (including Lion’s wife, Gil Clary) and originally premiered in Paris, and only later in Portugal. Castro e Almeida’s two sons were her right-hand men at Fortuna Films, as was Ayres d’Aguiar, a college friend of the two young men who would later have an important career as a film distributor in France.

Virgínia de Castro e Almeida portrait. 

Castro e Almeida played an important role in defining Portuguese silent cinema and actively worked for the advancement of filmmaking in that country. Working as a producer, screenwriter, and source author, she is, to the best of our knowledge, one of only a few women filmmakers during the silent period in Portugal. Whether her films and screenplays show a different worldview or a different representation of gender roles than her male counterparts would require further research. Based on examinations of the trade press, it seems likely that the reception of her feature films was similar to other Portuguese films from the early 1920s, whose appraisal often depended on how well they adhered to the notion that cinema was an international “calling card,” and a powerful tool to promote Portugal’s natural, built, and cultural heritage. Castro de Almeida also subscribed to this perspective, describing her intentions to “show to other nations, using cinema, the most powerful propaganda tool today, Portugal’s nature, its historical monuments, and the folk traditions of its people, all of which are generally not very well known, and unfortunately often slandered” (Castro e Almeida 1925, n.p.).

Still from A Sereia de Pedra (1922). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa.

Still from A Sereia de Pedra (1922). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa.

A Sereia de Pedra is unfortunately a lost film. Plot descriptions and contemporary reviews suggest that it was a melodrama with Portuguese star Maria Emília Castelo Branco and the acrobat Nestor Lopes, with sophisticated flashbacks and plenty of shots of the Convento de Cristo, in Tomar, a national monument since 1910, and the true protagonist of the film. In fact, when one reviewer complained that there were too many shots of Lopes climbing up and down the outside walls of the Convento, another quickly replied that it was a small price to pay for the screen time that such an outstanding monument deserved (Carvalho 1923, n.p.).

Frame enlargement, Os Olhos da Alma (1923). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa.

Frame enlargement, Os Olhos da Alma (1923). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa.

The extant Os Olhos da Alma includes all the tropes considered fundamental to a Portuguese film of that period–the stunning natural scenery of Nazaré, making here its first appearance as one of the most recurrent locations in the history of Portuguese cinema; the folk traditions of the fishermen; and the inevitable visit to Mosteiro da Batalha, another national monument and a key site for Portuguese nationalist historiography across different political regimes. The film mixed these national traditions with some fantasy elements, including a visionary miller, something that gained Castro de Almeida the reputation of “Portuguese Selma Lagerlof” (Nobre 1964, 33). However, Os Olhos da Alma is quite unique in its representation of the turbulent political atmosphere of the young Portuguese republican regime (established after the 1910 revolution that overthrew an eight century-long monarchy). It was the only film of this period to include footage from topical newsreels (showing republican meetings) and to re-enact a coup in the streets of Lisbon, which eventually led to the confiscation of some reels by the police, who also brought in Castro de Almeida and the director for questioning (“Um film indesejável” n.p.). In fact, the film’s villain is a republican politician who engages in audacious plots against the government, embodying a series of clichés about this period, namely the alleged senseless violence and incessant turmoil. But the villain’s greatest sin, for which he will be struck by lightning at the film’s end, is to have brought politics to the utopian community of Nazaré’s fishermen, and worse, to have seduced several Nazaré men to follow him into politics in Lisbon. In other words, Os Olhos da Alma makes it clear that people have predetermined spaces and roles. Terrible consequences, it argues, come to those who turn rural people into political subjects rather than letting them stay passive recipients of the decisions made by urban, republican politicians.

Frame enlargement, Os Olhos da Alma (1923). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa.

Frame enlargement,  “Scenario and artistic direction by Virgínia de Castro e Almeida” and “Staging by Robert Lion.” Os Olhos da Alma (1923). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa.

The production of the film was no less conflictual than its plot. Disagreeing and violently falling out over the editing of the film, Lion eventually quit and left Castro e Almeida to finish the film with the help of Aguiar. The entire affair was not made public, but, according to archival paper collections such as Aguiar’s memoirs and Castro e Almeida’s correspondences, it is possible to suggest that Lion did not accept Castro e Almeida’s supervision of the entire project, least of all her presence during the editing stage. Her presence throughout was, of course, highly exceptional as far as the gendered division of labor went in Portuguese cinema in the 1920s. Both A Sereia de Pedra and Os Olhos da Alma expressly credit in their opening cards and in the paid trade press advertisements Lion as the director of the films (in charge of “staging”), reserving for Castro e Almeida the more ambiguous credit of “artistic director” (or in some cases “a film by”). Today, we might ask whether Castro e Almeida should not be credited as co-director of the film. Here, we can only hypothesize and remember that terms like “director,” “author,” and “producer” had different meanings in Portugal in the 1920s. At that time, the director was often identified using the French phrase “metteur-en-scène” and often had a rather secondary role compared to the author of the original or adapted screenplay. In this sense, it could be anachronistic to wonder whether or not Castro e Almeida co-directed the films—she was publicly attributed much more importance as their producer and author, probably much to the dismay of Lion’s masculine ego.

Frame enlargement, Os Olhos da Alma (1923). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Portuguesa.

In late 1923, her correspondence shows that she was preparing a new film about the Portuguese aristocrat families of the Douro valley, provisionally titled Nobreza. It was to be directed by the French filmmaker André Hugon. However, Fortuna Films went bankrupt and eventually dissolved in 1925. In a last attempt to prevent the end of the company, Castro e Almeida boldly (and perhaps surprisingly) suggested a merge with Invicta Film, the oldest and most important Portuguese production company of the silent period. She was turned down and abandoned any further production plans, participating, however, in the distribution companies founded by Aguiar in France (Aguiar & Cie in 1925 and Gray Film in 1929). Her participation in the Paris Convention for the Protection of Intellectual Property, in 1925, signaled her definitive return to her literary career.

Bibliography

Baptista, Tiago, ed. Lion, Mariaud, Pallu: franceses tipicamente portugueses. Lisbon: Cinemateca Portuguesa, 2003.

Carvalho, F. de [Felcar]. “Produções portuguesas. A Sereia de Pedra.” Invicta Cine vol. I, no. 2 (27 April 1923): n.p.

Castro e Almeida, Virgínia de. “Introdução.” In Os Olhos da Alma. Rio de Janeiro: Typographia do Annuario do Brasil, 1925. [Eds. page numbers unknown].

Instituto Português do Livro, ed. Dicionário Cronológico de Autores Portugueses, vol. III. Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América, 1990.

Nobre, Roberto. Singularidades do Cinema Português. Portugália Editora, Lisbon, 1964.

Ribeiro, M. Félix. Filmes, figuras e factos da história do cinema português, 1896-1949. Lisbon: Cinemateca Portuguesa, 1983.

“Um film indesejável.” Cine Revista 67 (December 1922): n.p.

Archival Paper Collections

Ayres d'Aguiar. Memórias dos meus tempos de cinema. Primeira parte (de 1923 até 10 de Maio de 1949 e cinco páginas de seguimento até ter deixado o cinema). Typed manuscript. Cinemateca Portuguesa, Centro de Documentação.

Correspondence between Virgínia de Castro e Almeida and her sons. Lisbon, Paris, and Madeira, 1922-1925. Private Collection.

Citation

Baptista, Tiago. "Virgínia de Castro e Almeida." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-z3m3-7s77>

Aili Kari

by Hannu Salmi

Aili Kari made a career for herself in the early Finnish film industry, but her name is very seldom remembered or mentioned. During the silent era, she worked as a production secretary and as an actress at the major film company Suomi-Filmi, which had been founded in 1919 under the name of Suomen Filmikuvaamo and regularly produced fiction films. Later, Kari was involved in the founding of another major studio, Suomen Filmiteollisuus, and worked there as an office manager and chief accountant.

During her childhood, Kari was surrounded by creative people. Her father was Kaarlo Kari (1872-1941), an artist and a cartoonist, as well as an actor, a stage designer, and a leader of a theater company. Her mother was Naimi/Naëmi Kari (née Kylmänen, 1878-1968), an actress who worked in her husband’s theatrical company and toured around the country. She also appeared in three silent feature films in the 1920s. Kari’s older brother was the cinematographer and editor Eino Kari (1897-1954), who worked in the film business from 1920 to 1952. Her younger brother, Kullervo (1903-1981), was also employed by Suomi-Filmi as a camera assistant. Additionally, Elli Kylmänen, her mother’s sister, was married to Erkki Karu, who became the most productive film director of the silent era. Both Karu and Kylmänen had previously worked in Kaarlo Kari’s ensemble (Uusitalo 1988, 21).

By the time she reached her twenties, Kari was known for her singing and recitation performances. She was used to being on stage having performed with her father’s ensemble during her childhood. In the early 1920s, her parents were most likely very enthusiastic about the possibilities of filmmaking and film acting. Their oldest son Eino was hired as a cinematographer in 1920, and soon after, in November 1921, Aili was recruited by Erkki Karu to be “an officer and an accountant” for Suomi-Filmi (Uusitalo 1988, 90). Soon, other members of the family joined the industry. When Erkki directed his short comedy Kun isällä on hammassärky/When Father Has a Toothache in 1922, he cast Kari’s mother in a small role. The next year, he made the first cinematic adaptation of Aleksis Kivi’s famous play “Nummisuutarit”/“The Village Shoemakers,” a Finnish silent classic, and Kari’s father got the role of Sakeri. In this film, Aili was credited as a production secretary for the first time. From that year on, she worked regularly as a production secretary for Suomi-Filmi. While it is difficult to determine the exact dimensions of the position, as production secretary Kari was most likely an overall secretary at the director’s disposal. The production secretary was probably never on location or in the studio, but was based in the office and helped the director keep the project moving. At that time, Suomi-Filmi produced only one film at a time and there were no parallel productions (Uusitalo 2018). The Finnish National Archive credits Kari with seven feature-length films as production secretary (“Aili Kari” n.p.). Otherwise, as a full-time employee of the company, she was taking care of the financial accounts of the studio.

Aili Kari (left) with Juhani Turunen, Rovastin häämatkat/The Dean’s Honeymoon Travels (1931). Courtesy of the Kansallisen Audiovisuaalisen Instituutin. 

Soon, Kari also got roles in front of the camera. She appeared in the historical drama Rautakylän vanha paroni/The Old Baron of Rautakylä (1923), directed by Carl Fager. Her mother was given the role of the housekeeper, Lisette Hallström, but since the story spanned a long period of time, someone else had to play young Lisette. This part was given to Aili. In 1931, she also appeared in Rovastin häämatkat/The Dean’s Honeymoon Travels, where she was seen as Anni, the daughter of the main character, the Dean. Furthermore, Kari made one uncredited appearance in Meidän poikamme/Our Boys (1929).

It seems that Kari was an all-around worker for Suomi-Filmi throughout the 1920s, and she became a close  confidante of her uncle Erkki. When he decided to leave Suomi-Filmi in the fall of 1933 and establish a new company, Suomen Filmiteollisuus (SF), Kari decided to follow. In fact, she became the first employee of the new company, an office manager, and most likely faced a great deal of work in organizing everyday practices and taking care of financial matters (Uusitalo 1975, 72; Uusitalo 1988, 170; “Pikku paloja elokuvamaailmasta” 14). Kari remained a loyal employee of SF until the company went bankrupt in 1965. She saw the rise of SF into a dominant company in the 1940s and 1950s (“10 vuotta SF:ssä!” 14), but also its downfall in the early 1960s. She was the closest partner of T. J. Särkkä, the producer who led SF after Karu passed away in 1935. After the mid-1930s, Kari’s work was restricted to economic matters, which were crucial to the ever-growing business. In a 1943 interview in the company newsletter SF Uutiset, she concluded: “I couldn’t have imagined a more exciting career than the one that [was] finally realized for me. Film business is really a ‘fairytale land’ where something new and unexpected always happens” (“10 vuotta SF:ssä” 14).

Bibliography

“10 vuotta SF:ssä!” SF-Uutiset 7 (1943): 14.

“Aili Kari.” Elonet Kansallisfilmografia [online database]. National Audiovisual Archive, Finland. http://www.elonet.fi/fi/henkilo/100019

Obit. Helsingin Sanomat (6 August 1994): A6.

“Pikku paloja elokuvamaailmasta.” SF-Uutiset 1 (1938): 14.

Uusitalo, Kari. Lavean tien sankarit: Suomalainen elokuva 1931-1939. Helsinki: Otava, 1975.

------. Meidän poikamme: Suomalaisen elokuvan perustanlaskija Erkki Karu ja hänen aikakautensa. Helsinki: Valtion painatuskeskus, 1988.

------. Personal Interview. October 9, 2018.

Citation

Salmi, Hannu . "Aili Kari." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-9epe-wr37>

Frances Baker Farrell, Lettice Ramsey, and Máirín Hayes

by Donna Casella

Indigenous Irish cinema of the silent period (1916-1935) consisted of two waves, 1916-1926 and 1930-1935. Each wave drew filmmakers from both the theatrical and private sectors, with Irish theatre shaping cinematic content and style. The Abbey Theatre artists contributed to the theatrical, highly-charged nationalist films of the first wave, while the Gate Theatre artists strove to experiment in both style and content in the second wave. Formed by Micheál MácLiammóir and Hilton Edwards as an alternative to the Abbey in 1929, the Gate focused on more “modern and progressive plays unfettered by theatrical convention,” according to writer and theatregoer Joseph Holloway (39). This artistic vision carried over into Ireland’s last two silent films of the 1930s, Some Say Chance (1934) and Guests of the Nation (1935), both of which showcased the work of women pioneers. Siblings Frances Baker Farrell and Lettice Ramsey designed the indoor sets and scouted outdoor locations for Some Say Chance, which featured Gate actor Máirín Hayes in a small role. Baker Farrell’s husband, Irish novelist Michael Farrell, wrote, directed, and produced Some Say Chance and served as a cameraman on Guests of the Nation. Hayes edited the latter film with director and Gate playwright Denis Johnston. According to scholars, these three women worked on films that offered a contemporary, more realistic, and less nationalist image of Ireland than the pre-1930 films.

Lettice Ramsey. Private Collection.

Baker Farrell and Ramsey were not theatrical artists, but their interest in filmmaking is not surprising as the sisters grew up in an artistic household. Though born in England, part of their childhood was spent in Ireland, first on an oyster farm outside of Sligo leased by their parents. As noted in the 1985 obituary “Mrs. Lettice Ramsey” in The Times, their mother, Frances, was a photographer and a painter who trained at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London and exhibited her work throughout Great Britain and Ireland (12). When their father died, their mother moved the family to the village of Ballysadare, Co. Sligo where she supported her daughters by selling her artwork. Her artistic interests made an impression on the sisters. According to Martin Lynch in “Michael Farrell Carlowman (1899-1962),” Baker Farrell became a weaver, working with her mother in the family weaving mill and workshop, The Crock of Gold, in Blackrock, Dublin (46). In 1926, she married Peter Trench, then divorced him and married Farrell in 1930. Ramsey read philosophy at the University of Cambridge where she met and married mathematician/philosopher Frank Ramsey who tragically died from liver disease in 1930. She took up photography as a profession, also working with pottery and collages. In 1932, she opened a studio in Cambridge with Helen Muspratt specializing in portrait photography of literary, intellectual, and social figures. Among their clients were Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, C.P. Snow, and Guy Burgess (“Mrs. Lettice Ramsey” 12). When Farrell decided to try his hand at filmmaking, the sisters jumped at the chance to be part of this new creative venture.

Photo of Frances Baker Farrell, taken by sister Lettice. Private Collection.

Some Say Chance, completed in only five months according to J.A.P. in the 1934 Irish Independent, tells the story of Helen, a troubled young woman in a Wicklow boarding school who agonizes over her broken family (5). When she was younger, her father abandoned her and her mother, Irish Moll. Her father leads her to believe her mother is dead. Irish Moll, who turned to prostitution after her husband left, longs to reunite with her daughter. The film cuts between Helen’s days in an oppressive boarding school and her mother’s dangerous lifestyle in London. Scholars agree that in both subject matter and form Some Say Chance marked a new kind of cinema, one that told stories of the present, abandoning the literary forms of the past, particularly the romantic comedies/dramas and historical melodramas. As Ruth Barton notes in the 2004 Irish National Cinema, the earlier films were “regressive discourses,” focusing on stereotypes of Irishness and a history of injustices particularly at the hands of the British (25, 33). Some Say Chance, however, stood out not only in contrast to these earlier films, but also to other films of the 1930s. According to Kevin Rockett, “With the notable exception of Michael Farrell’s Some Say Chance (1934), a story linked to the moral decay of a city…film-makers in the 1930s turned their back on an exploration of contemporary Ireland” (1988, 59). The film’s focus on the subject of broken families and prostitution was groundbreaking.

Wicklow countryside in Some Say Chance (1934). Courtesy of the Irish Film Institute. 

The sisters’ set design reflects the narrative’s dark tone. Constructed and on-location sets contribute to Helen’s unsettling boarding school experience and her mother’s dangerous lifestyle. The open, lush Wicklow countryside contrasts sharply with the restrictive boarding school as teachers are both physically and emotionally abusive. Indoor scenes include a basic, almost antiseptic classroom, principal’s office, and dormitory. Working on a budget, the sisters used bed sheets for the walls in the dormitory. For the mother’s working girl scenes, they chose London streets at dusk and gritty indoor sets that portray the seedier side of the city’s nightlife. And Irish Moll’s barren bedsit reinforces her loneliness. Filmmaker Dean Kavanagh, who later rebuilt the film from rushes and edits, finds the sets “the most stand-out element…I have a particular fondness for the sequence where Irish Moll sits alone, in a state of despair, drinking in her abode and the walls are billowing. And of course that Epstein-esque moment when she dies and the wind flutters through the curtains” (2018, n.p.).

Dormitory setting in Some Say Chance (1934). Courtesy of the Irish Film Institute. 

Dublin papers covered both the filming and initial screening, emphasizing the “Irish” production and the sets, but never crediting the sisters. “New Irish Film” in the Evening Herald proudly notes that Irishmen were working on a film in Ireland and London (5). And “This Weeks Examples” in the Irish Times indicates the filming “is going very well” (6). The film had a private showing on December 16, 1934, according to “Irish Amateur Film” in the Irish Independent (8). Reviews were generally positive, praising the effort, while noting the amateur quality. The Irish Press titles their coverage “Promising Film Made By Amateur” (8). According to J.A.P. in the Irish Independent, “the photography is very fine, indeed, and includes some unusually beautiful scenery” (5). And “Irish Amateur Film” applauds the sets and scenery, attributing the work, however, to the director even though the sisters received onscreen credit: “Not only has Mr. Farrell secured some very beautiful exteriors in Co. Wicklow and in Dublin, but he has been very successful in his London exteriors, particularly the glimpses of the moving illuminated signs” (8). The author also notes that the plot was “thin,” but this could be corrected with further edits prior to public exhibition. Reviewers in the Evening Herald and Irish Times assumed there would be future screenings throughout the Republic and the United Kingdom (“New Irish Film” 5; “New Irish Film” 4). A study of Irish and British newspapers, however, reveals no further screenings–until recently.

Bar setting in Some Say Chance (1934). Courtesy of the Irish Film Institute. 

The story of the film’s rediscovery, archiving, and rebuilding began in the late 1940s when Farrell found fragments of the film in an outhouse. In a 1948 letter to a Miss Gibson at the Switzer’s Circulating Library in Dublin, he asks if she knows someone who can treat the film for screening. There is no evidence, however, that he ever sent the film to the Switzer or that a treated version screened. In an undated letter on RTÉ letterhead to film historian Liam Ó Laoghaire (O’Leary), documentary filmmaker Colm Ó Laoghaire explains that Baker Farrell deposited several cans of rushes and edited material of the film with him after her husband’s death in 1962. Colm indicates that the film is 1½ hours long and that he is trying to piece it together. He also informs Liam of a suitable extract for a program. Colm eventually deposited the cans with the Irish Film Archive. In 2015, the archive asked Kavanagh to rebuild the film using the existing footage. As he explains in his website post, “Though unfortunately not a restoration project (hopefully the missing elements of the film will be discovered one day) the film now stands as a new experience gleaned from surviving elements of the original plot, with scenes expanded and shaped using rushes and additional material. I was given the freedom to create a new cut, concentrating on the surviving narrative elements” (2016, n.p.). Kavanagh believes he kept true to the filmmaker’s intent by focusing on “coherent/character-driven shots,” though he admits that the ending was a challenge due to missing footage (2018, n.p.). The original ending, involving the death of the mother and her pimp and the reuniting of father and daughter, has been lost. In its place, Kavanagh closes with a letter indicating the father’s intent to return and scenes of Helen and other young women in the Wicklow countryside. Kavanagh’s thirty-seven minute film premiered at the Barbican in London on November 24, 2016 and later screened at the Carlow Arts Festival on June 9, 2017.

Local newspapers did not review these screenings, though previews briefly discuss the rebuilding, and one online silent film resource offers a review. None of these sources address the sisters’ set designs. Instead, they focus on the “screen debut” of Maureen O’Hara, then FitzSimons. O’Hara was an extra in the film, one of the school children recruited from the Abbey and Gate. Her three other sisters–Margot, Peggy, and Florrie–also filled the roles of school children, and her mother, Rita, a local actor and contralto, played Irish Moll. O’Hara was fourteen years old at the time and had just started training at the Abbey, according to the 2004 ‘Tis Herself: An Autobiography. However, her discussion of her early film career makes no mention of Some Say Chance, perhaps because the role did not include a speaking part (8, 18-22). The Times’ headline for an article on the Carlow screening notes “Maureen O’Hara’s screen debut to be shown at film festival” (Sanz n.p.). Similarly, Frances Mulraney’s article title in the online IrishCentral reads “Maureen O’Hara’s screen debut to be aired in Ireland for the first time in 83 years” (n.p.). In a rare review, “Irish Film Institute 1916 Centenary Ciné-Concert featuring Some Say Chance (1934),” a writer for Silentfilmcalendar.org discusses the Barbican screening, including a summary of the film and a brief history of Kavanagh’s work, before noting that the film is unremarkable except for the fact that Farrell would later serve as a cameraman on the “much better and better-known melodrama Guests of the Nation” (n.p.). The film’s original production, including the sisters’ contribution, even now remains unexplored.

The sisters left the film industry as quickly as they entered. Baker Farrell continued managing The Crock of Gold with her mother, taking it over after her death, according to “Ireland’s Industrial Advance” in the 1957 Gaelic Echo Agricultural and Industrial Review. The article also notes that she had reached international acclaim as a weaver, becoming “so famous for fine weaving that the Swiss hung her work in their galleries, brought her to Zurich to demonstrate her techniques there and appointed her chief instructor at the Cours Institute” (8). Ramsey continued her work as a photographer. When Muspratt left in 1937 to set up their studio in Oxford, Ramsey remained with the Cambridge studio until her retirement in 1978 (“Mrs. Lettice Ramsey” 12). Both Baker Farrell and Ramsey continued in the pursuit of these arts until their deaths, leaving behind a film that scholars acknowledge not just changed the direction of Irish cinema, but also stood out amongst the majority of 1930s films for its honest portrayal of contemporary Irish life.

***

Photo of Máirín Hayes in the 1939 production of “Marrowbone Lane” at Gate Theatre, Dublin Evening Mail. Courtesy of Northwestern University.

Máirín Hayes, unlike Baker Farrell and Ramsey, came straight from the Dublin theatre scene. Hayes was born in New York City in 1914 to Irish parents who were living there. At the age of seven, Hayes secured her first acting job, according to Maeve in the 1934 Dublin Evening Mail, “when she played a boy in ‘Dregs’ by Mrs. Havelock Ellis, in America” (5). When her parents returned to Ireland, Hayes began acting in Dublin theatre, notably with the Dublin Repertory Players. She eventually settled at the Gate where she initially played children’s parts. In his 1947 theatrical autobiography, All for Hecuba, MácLiammóir remembers her “as a baby in these days; she wore two plaits and played children’s parts with ease and confidence. Now she is a very grown-up person and the plaits have disappeared, but I still see them there swinging at her back with all the jaunty conviction of fifteen years” (111). In addition to acting, Hayes served as an assistant stage manager at the Gate, working on seventeen plays, including film pioneer Mary Manning’s “Storm Over Wicklow” (1933), according to the Irish Theatre Institute’s online database PLAYOGRAPHYIreland. As the Gate broadened its creative scope, Hayes found herself caught up in the theatrical world’s commitment to the burgeoning film industry.

Photo of Máirín Hayes in the 1939 production of “Marrowbone Lane” at Gate Theatre, Irish Press. Courtesy of Northwestern University.

Both the Gate and Abbey theatres were determined to make indigenous cinema a vital part of the period’s cultural renaissance. Prior to 1930, theatrical artists, predominantly from the Abbey, launched the industry with romantic comedies/dramas and melodramas, some historical, and all focused on Irish history and culture. Abbey directors, actors, and writers worked for the prolific Film Company of Ireland, founded by Ellen O’Mara Sullivan and her husband James, as well as its successor Irish Photo-Plays. According to Barton, this was a cinema of heroic nationalism, focusing on Ireland’s struggle to be culturally and politically free of Britain (23, 27). The last film of this first wave, Irish Destiny (1926), chronicles the events surrounding the 1919-1921 War of Independence from the perspective of the rebelling Irish. After a four-year hiatus, the industry, spearheaded by the newly formed Gate, produced another kind of cinema, one that broadened the imagined national community and experimented with both cinematic and theatrical styles. Christopher Fitz-Simon notes in The Irish Theatre (1983) that “The Gate started as a reaction against ingrown nationalism, and emerged as a vital part of the national heritage” (181). Addressing the theatre’s formation, MácLiammóir explains in Theatre in Ireland (1963) that he and Edwards were dissatisfied with the Abby’s narrow interpretation of “national life” (24-25). They also wanted a theatre that experimented with all aspects of production, particularly lighting and design: “We secretly hoped, and indeed are still hoping, that through our experiments…we would at last discover a way more evocative than literal, more suggestive than photographic, that might serve as a mould for the Irish dramatist of the future…” (28). Six silent films were made in the 1930s, all of which reflected this artistic shift: the non-fiction shorts Bank Holiday (1930), Screening in the Rain (1930), and Pathetic Gazette (1930), along with three feature-length films, By Accident (1930), Some Say Chance, and Guests of the Nation.

Though Hayes only had a small part in Some Say Chance, in her work as co-editor of Guests of the Nation she touched a corner of the Irish industry that had eluded women. According to director Johnston’s journals, titled “3rd Omnibus X Book,” he invited Hayes to join him in editing the film. Shooting began in the spring of 1933, and editing commenced a year later in July 1934 (MS 10066 181/94/193; 181/101/207; 166/110/307). In his only reference to methodology, Johnston explains that he planned the shots with editing in mind (26/1-3). This suggests that either he and Hayes shared creative input or Hayes was employed only as a technician. However, when the film opened on January 20, 1935 at the Gate, Hayes received sole editing credit, suggesting that her contribution went beyond the technical.

Guests of the Nation (1935). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

The film’s editing works alongside Manning’s adaptation in telling the story of British and Irish prisoners during the War of Independence. Like the short story by Frank O’Connor on which it is based, the film fails to take sides in the conflict. Parallel editing sequences alternate between Irish prisoners in a British jail cell and British prisoners guarded by Irish rebels in an old woman’s home. Newsreels and a damaged Irish countryside are edited into the dramatic scenes emphasizing the toll the war is taking on both sides. Anchoring the narrative is the growing bond between the Irish captors and British prisoners as they joke, play, and help with chores around the cottage. The editing, like the script, elicits audience sympathy for “the boys” and the old woman who separates herself from the conflict. However, while the O’Connor short story privileges one of the Irish soldiers through his narration of the growing relationship with the British prisoners, Manning’s script and the Hayes/Johnston editing situate the old woman at the center of the evolving human drama. Through the placement of close ups and reverse shots in the sequences, the editing emphasizes the old woman’s shock and helplessness as she slowly realizes the British prisoners will be executed in retaliation for the death of their Irish counterparts.

Scholars agree that the film stands out in its avoidance of the pre-1930 preoccupation with heroic nationalism, some even acknowledging Hayes’ input as editor. In The Cinema and Ireland (1988), Anthony Slide mentions both Hayes and Manning, noting the unfolding human drama that expresses “the helplessness of the two IRA men ordered to murder two British soldiers in revenge for the execution of two IRA men held by the British” (19). Barton, myself, and Rockett all address the outright defiance of a national discourse. Barton regards Guests of the Nation as “The sole film of the period to question the prevailing orthodoxies of heroic nationalism…” by focusing on the “loss of human values in war” (46). In a 2013 article, I note Hayes’ editing and argue that the stereotypical “Irish mother,” obvious in the earlier Irish Destiny, is absent: “The Irish mother holds no symbolic value here. She has given no sons to the nationalist cause, nor is she able to care for other mothers’ sons” (Casella 67). Rockett sees Guests of the Nation as the first indigenous film that avoided a romanticized version of the conflict: “Little indication is given as to why the people were fighting, merely that they were pawns in a system outside their control” (61). Rockett also notes the effectiveness of the editing. Speaking of the ambush scene, he writes: “In addition, the tempo of the editing, in particular at the ambush, contrasts with the slow pace of the story. In fact this section is clearly influenced by Eisenstein’s montage: extreme close-ups of ‘typed’ faces intercut in rapid succession provides a strong sense of IRA camaraderie, unity and determination” (61). He makes no mention of Hayes’ contribution.

Hayes’ work as co-editor, however, resulted in a film that scholars continue to study, and exhibitors continue to screen. Johnston’s journals note public and private screenings throughout Great Britain and Ireland from its premiere through the 1980s (167/57/114; 301/534; 290/470; 290/3425; 301/531). A semi-private screening was held at the Irish Film Institute in 1990 for Manning and her brother, cameraman John, according to a 1990 press release “Guests of the Archive” (n.p.). And Sunniva O’Flynn, head of Irish Film Programming at the IFI, reports that in the last fifteen years the film has screened in Ireland, Italy, Czech Republic, England, and the United States (n.p.). It is not known whether Hayes was present at or knew about these screenings before her death. After the opening, she returned full time to the Gate. A study of Irish and British newspapers reveals Hayes was active with the Gate in Dublin and in their touring company abroad through the 1940s.

Hayes, Baker Farrell, and Ramsey contributed to the varied cinematic stories of this early period. Both Guests of the Nation and Some Say Chance were significant in that they broke with a tradition of Irish filmmaking that until the 1930s had emphasized pro-republican nationalist images. Some Say Chance avoided such nationalism by exploring Irish life untouched by either the War of Independence or the Civil War, and Guests of the Nation refused to take sides in the struggle for independence. However, both films were made with limited resources and, by the mid-1930s, there was little support for indigenous filmmaking in Ireland. Women pioneers like Hayes, Ramsey, and Baker Farrell returned to the theatrical arts or to other pursuits, their voices remaining silent until the 1980s when Irish women once again began to shape cinema in Ireland. The work of these early pioneers as well as that intervening “silence” bears further study.

See alsoMary Manning, Ellen O’Mara Sullivan

Bibliography

Barton, Ruth. Irish National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Burch, Stephen [Ramsey grandson]. Email Correspondence. July 7 and 21, 2017.

Carlow Arts Festival. Program. June 7-13, 2018. https://issuu.com/carlowartsfestivaleigse/docs/final-caf-2017-05-29-nocrops-opt

Casella, Donna R. “Women and Nationalism in Indigenous Irish Filmmaking of the Silent Period.” In Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives. Eds. Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, and Lucia Tralli. Bologna: University of Bologna, 2013. 53-80.

Farrell, Frances. Letter to Mr. Harpin. Jan. 24, 1977. Contemporary Irish Films and Filmmakers, 1912-1993 file. Irish Films and Filmmakers, 1896-1993. Liam O’Leary Archive, MS 50,000/313/5.  National Library of Ireland.

Farrell, Michael. Letter to Miss Gibson. Feb. 4, 1948. Contemporary Irish Films and Filmmakers, 1912-1993 file. Irish Films and Filmmakers, 1896-1993. Liam O’Leary Archive, MS 50,000/313/2. National Library of Ireland.

Fitz-Simon, Christopher. The Irish Theatre. London: Thames & Hudson. 1983.

“Frances Baker.” Ireland Civil Registration Marriages Index, 1845-1958 [online database]. https://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=2572

“Frances Cautley Baker.” England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1837-1915 [online database]. https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=8912

“Frances Cautley Baker.” The Peerage [online genealogical survey]. http://www.thepeerage.com/p3923.htm#c39225.1

“Frances C. Trench.” England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1916-2005 [online database]. https://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=8753

“Guests of the Archive.” Press Release. June 12, 1990. Paper Collections. Box 49. SOF/5/56. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Holloway, Joseph. Joseph Holloway’s Irish Theatre. Eds. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill. Vol. 1: 1926-1931. Dixon, CA: Proscenium Press, 1968.

“Ireland’s Industrial Advance. Crock of Gold.” Gaelic Echo Agricultural and Industrial Review (Mar. 1957): 8.

“Irish Amateur Film.” Irish Independent (17 Dec. 1934): 8.

“Irish Film Institute 1916 Centenary Ciné-Concert featuring Some Say Chance (1934).” Silentfilmcalendar.org (24 Nov. 2016): n.p. https://silentfilmcalendar.org/reviews/irish-film-institute-1916-centenary-cine-concert-featuring-some-say-chance-1934/

J. A. P. “Talented Irish Amateurs Complete Two Pictures.” Irish Independent (15 Dec. 1934): 5.

Johnston, Denis. “3rd Omnibus X Book.” Denis Johnston Papers (MS 10066). Trinity College Dublin.

Kavanagh, Dean. E-Mail Correspondence. June 6, 2018.

-----. “Some Say Chance (1934/2016) screens at Barbican.” Dean Kavanagh.com (Nov. 24, 2016): n.p. https://www.deankavanagh.com/single-post/2017/10/13/Some-Say-Chance-19342016-screens-at-Barbican

“Lettice C. Baker.” England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1916-2005 [online database]. https://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=8753

Lynch, Martin. “Michael Farrell Carlowman (1899-1962). Writer or ‘Die, Publish and be Damned.’” Carloviana 48 (Dec. 2000): 46-47.

MacLiammóir, Micheál. All for Hecuba: An Irish Theatrical Autobiography. London: Methuen, 1947.

-----. Theatre in Ireland. Dublin: Three Candles, 1964.

Maeve. “A Stage-Manager of Nineteen.” Dublin Evening Mail (27 Oct. 1934): 5.

“Máirín Hayes.” PLAYOGRAPHYIreland [online database]. Irish Theatre Institute. http://www.irishplayography.com/person.aspx?personid=39529

McSweeney, Pat, comp. “Mairín Hayes.” Irish Independent Newspaper Obituaries: May 2001-June 2002 [online database]. https://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/db.aspx?dbid=6097

“Mrs. Lettice Ramsey.” Obit. The Times (30 July 1985): 12.

Mulraney, Frances. “Maureen O’Hara’s screen debut to be aired in Ireland for the first time in 83 years.” IrishCentral (8 June 2017): n.p. https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/entertainment/maureen-o-hara-s-screen-debut-to-be-aired-in-ireland-for-the-first-time-in-83-years

“New Irish Film.” Evening Herald (15 Dec. 1934): 5.

“New Irish Film.” Irish Times (13 Dec. 1934): 4.

“Moira E. Hayes.” New York, New York, Birth Index, 1910-1965 [online database]. https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=61457

O’Flynn, Sunniva. E-Mail Correspondence. July 18, 2017.

O’Hara, Maureen and John Nicoletti. ‘Tis Herself: An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Ó Laoghaire, Colm. Letter to Liam Ó Laoghaire. n.d. Contemporary Irish Films and Filmmakers, 1912-1993 file. Irish Films and Filmmakers, 1896-1993. Liam O’Leary Archive, MS 50,000/313/6. National Library of Ireland.

-----. “Some Say Chance.” Handwritten Notes. Contemporary Irish Films and Filmmakers, 1912-1993 file. Irish Films and Filmmakers, 1896-1993. Liam O’Leary Archive, MS 50,000/313/7. National Library of Ireland.

Our Cinema Correspondent. “This Weeks Examples: New Gracie Fields Picture: Irish Films: An Expensive News-Reel.” Irish Times (30 Oct. 1934): 6.

“Promising Film Made by Amateur.” Irish Press (17 Dec. 1934): 8.

Rockett, Kevin. “Part One: History, Politics and Irish Cinema.” In Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill. Cinema and Ireland. London: Croom Helm, 1988. 1-126.

Sanz, Catherine. “Maureen O’Hara’s screen debut to be shown at film festival.” The Times (8 June 2017): n.p. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maureen-oharas-screen-debut-to-be-shown-at-film-festival-fms7bd5pb

Slide, Anthony. The Cinema and Ireland. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988.

Archival Paper Collections:

Denis Johnston Papers. Trinity College Dublin.

Liam O’Leary Archive. MS 50,000. National Library of Ireland.

Paper Collections. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Irish Newspaper ArchivesThe British Newspaper Archive, and The Irish Film and Television Research Online [online databases] for biographical information and production and screening histories for Some Say Chance and Guests of the Nation.

Citation

Casella, Donna. "Frances Baker Farrell, Lettice Ramsey, and Máirín Hayes." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-wpm5-zz78>

Kathleen Romoli

by Isabel Arredondo

Research thus far has only illuminated one Colombian silent film made by a woman. She was not a native Colombian, but a self-taught anthropologist born in the United States. The travelogue, made by Kathleen Romoli, was independently produced ten years after the end of the silent film era in the United States. Brought to light by the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, it is significant because of its subject matter. The mining company Gold Platinum (GP) requested a promotional film about its operations in the Colombian Pacific coast. Romoli, a prominent historian and anthropologist, shot A Journey to the Operations of the South American Gold Platinum Co. (1937), also known as Gold Platinum, paying special attention to the Embera community, which was in contact with the dredge camps in the 1930s. She never mentioned Gold Platinum to her family or colleagues. The film, which depicts the area where Romoli lived in Colombia and portrays the indigenous groups that Romoli wrote about, was found in her library after her death. In the 1990s, Patrimonio Fotográfico y Fílmico del Valle del Cauca, a Colombian regional institution under the Ministry of Culture, ran a preservation campaign in the Chocó region (Vidal 2011; Torres and Moreno 2009, n.p.). People living in “La Esmeralda,” Romoli’s estate in Trujillo, gave them twenty cans of 16mm film. These included Gold Platinum, left over material from the travelogue, and other footage from a later time. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Romoli was the author of Gold Platinum.

The daughter of Irish immigrants, Romoli (née Martin) was born in Santa Rosa, California. She had experience with other cultures starting in her youth. At sixteen, she moved to Yokohama, Japan, where her father was a Presbyterian minister. In 1916, after marrying Ralph Cahoon Whitnack in Tokyo and having a son, Romoli moved to Bombay, India, and worked as a publicist (Pachon, 2014, 16).

Kathleen Romoli. Courtesy of the Fundación Patrimonio Filmico Colombia.

One of Romoli’s first interests was writing. After Whitnack’s death in 1919, sometime between 1920 and 1924, Romoli moved to Venice and married Italian banker Guglielmo Reiss Romoli (Witnack 2011). They first lived in Italy, where Kathleen, at age thirty-seven, curated an edition of Benito Mussolini’s speeches, Eleven Years of Fascism Through the Word of the Duce (1934), for which he publicly thanked her. In 1934, Guglielmo, who worked for the Banca Commerciale Italiana, was transferred to New York City and the couple lived on Park Avenue. Kathleen made a living there as a free-lance writer, according to the 1940 U.S. census. Romoli’s first visit to Colombia was in the mid-1930s. Romoli most likely became interested in Colombia after she met the Colombian minister of education, Agustin Nieto Caballero, at a dinner party in New York City (Whitnack 2011). In the late 1930s or early 1940s, Romoli moved to Colombia where she lived until her death. Gold Platinum’s leftover footage probably depicts William Avery, Romoli’s third husband, who worked as an engineer for GP. It is likely that Romoli met Avery during her 1936 and 1937 trips, when he was one of GP’s engineers (Cardale de Schrimpff 2011). Avery was probably married to the woman with the little girl that is depicted in Gold Platinum’s leftover footage. In the mid-1940s, Romoli bought “La Esmeralda,” near the operations of GP, where Gold Platinum was found. By 1946, Romoli was living in the “La Esmeralda,” and in 1950, she married Avery, who died in 1953. Eventually, Romoli moved from the Chocó region to an apartment in Bogotá (Whitnack 2011), where she became part of a community of historians and anthropologists.

Romoli was one of Colombia’s most important colonial historians and anthropologists. (She was the second woman admitted to Colombia’s Academy of History in the 1950s, and, in 1961, she was admitted to Colombia’s Institute of Anthropology.) In 1941, she wrote an introduction to Colombia’s history, geography, and political economy called Colombia: Gateway to South America. This very successful book went through multiple reprints, even as late as 1996, and was translated into Spanish, with a title that highlights its political analysis, Colombia: panorama de una gran democracia, or Colombia: Panorama of a Great Democracy (1944). In recognition for writing Colombia, Romoli was given the Cross of Boyacá, an award granted to the armed forces and to extraordinary citizens. With this medal and a letter of support from Colombia’s president, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943 to study the colonial history of Colombia’s Pacific Coast. The fellowship resulted in the publication of Balboa of Darien: Discoverer of the Pacific (1953). Her last book, published post mortem by the research team of the Instituto de Antropologia, shows Romoli’s contributions to the study of Central American indigenous cultures. In Los de la lengua cueva, Romoli countered prevailing theories that argued that the Cueva and Cuna communities were related, highlighting the differences between both communities linguistically by reconstructing the Cuna language using Spanish manuscripts from the 1500s (Morales Gómez 1980). While much has been written about her work as a dedicated anthropologist, Romoli’s single foray into film requires more visibility.

Gold Platinum’s intertitles indicate that the sequences were filmed in 1936 and 1937. The film depicts a visit to the operations of the mining company. In 1919, the British-based company GP acquired 10,000 acres of land and 50 miles of river bottom and flat for extracting gold and platinum (“Organize to Work Colombian Mines” 1919, 23). To increase returns from the extractions, GP upgraded its machinery. It is likely that someone at GP asked Romoli to make a travelogue for investors to promote the new technology. Like other travelogues from the 1920s, Gold Platinum begins by pointing out the direction of travel on a map. As the dampness of the west coast made roads difficult to traverse, the expedition moved along a river route, traveling upstream from the Pacific Coast to the interior. The intertitles identify the towns of Andagoya, Quibdó, Istmina, and Tadó in the Chocó region, and Barbacoas in Nariño, as well as the riverside communities of Atrato and San Juan. Leftover footage includes shots of tables floating in an office, a common flooding event in tropical rivers, and life at one of the dredge camps, where the company’s staff played baseball and families enjoyed picnicking.

Frame enlargement,  A Journey to the Operations of the South American Gold Platinum Co. (1937). Courtesy of the Fundación Patrimonio Filmico Colombia.

Stylistically, Gold Platinum addresses ethical issues regarding mining. In the initial shots in the port of Buenaventura, the new machinery for extraction dominates the foreground. Towards the end of the travelogue, the mining apparatus recedes to the background and the Colombians living next to the dredge camp are in the foreground. In one of the shots, Romoli’s camera pays attention to a member of the Emberá community, distinguished by his loincloth and accessories. He walks with two local workers of African origin, wearing small hats, cotton knee-length pants, and shirts. They are the center of attention in the shot. In the background are GP staff wearing long pants, accompanied by a woman in a wide brimmed hat. In another shot, taken from a high angle, probably the river bank, Romoli focused on an Emberá woman in a canoe. This shift in attention can perhaps be understood as an awakening and, in this way, Gold Platinum can be considered as an early manifestation of post-colonial awareness, which was prominent later in 1970s Latin American third cinema documentaries. Films like Santa María de Iquique (Claudio Sapiaín, 1971) and Descomedidos y chascones (Carlos Flores Delpino, 1973) denounce the neo-colonial practice in which industrialized countries make private deals with the president or the military of industrializing countries to take advantage of their national resources. Thirty years earlier, Romoli was aware of these transactions, as her collection at Colombia’s National Archive contains correspondence that was once classified between Colombia’s presidents and international mining companies in the 1940s. Romoli understood the power imbalance she witnessed on her trip, and she responded by never mentioning Gold Platinum and by writing a history for the indigenous communities that she encountered while filming her travelogue. A cinematic encounter that turned into a history for history-less subjects.

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

Bibliography

Cardale de Schrimpff, Marianne. Email correspondence. January 19, 2011.

“Fallecimiento de la académica correspondiente Doña Kathleen Romoli.” Boletín de historia y antigüedades vol. 66, no. 726  (July-September 1979): n.p.

Morales Gómez, Jorge. “Katheleen Romoli.” Boletín de historia y antigüedades vol. 67, no. 728 (1980): 63-68.

“Organize to Work Colombian Mines: South American Gold and Platinum Company Formed by Lewisohns.” New York Times (13 June 1919): 23.

Pachón, Ximena. “Tras las huellas de la señora Kathleen Romoli.” Boletín de historia y antigüedades 101 (2014): 11-40.

Ruoff, Jeffrey. Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Torres, Rito Alberto and Blanca Isabel Moreno. “Avances en la preservación del patrimonio audiovisual colombiano.” Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano (2009): n.p.

Vidal, Rodrigo. Personal Interview. 2011.

Whitnack, Ellen [Romoli’s granddaughter]. Email correspondence. January 18, 2011.

------. Email correspondence. March 1, 2011.

Archival Paper Collections:

Kathleen Romoli Collection. Archivo General de la Nación (Colombia).

Citation

Arredondo, Isabel. "Kathleen Romoli." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-3gfd-ng57>

Louise Kolm-Fleck

by Claudia Walkensteiner-Preschl

Louise Veltée, later called Louise Kolm and then Louise Fleck due to her two marriages, is the first known female film producer, screenplay author, and director in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Although several documents on this female film pioneer have been preserved, it is still almost impossible to draw an exact picture of her contributions, especially as her archival papers and estate, located at the Austrian Film Archive, are not publicly accessible and detailed research has so far not been possible. While many of her films from 1919 onward are extant, only a few films from the early 1910s have been preserved, allowing for only a narrow appreciation of the beginning of her career as a screenplay author, producer, and director. As Kolm-Fleck frequently worked with her husbands on film productions, her work can be understood in the context of collaboration, as she was a team member and a partner, as well as an influential comrade-in-arms in the efforts to construct a national film industry at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

Louise, the daughter of a pyrotechnist, was born on August 1, 1873 in Vienna, which was at that time the center of a multinational state. Her father founded the Stadtpanoptikum, or City Panopticon, on one of the finest shopping streets of present day Vienna, the Kohlmarkt, where he presented his first so-called “living pictures,” along with numerous curiosities and attractions as early as the autumn of 1896 (Fritz 1981, 21). Starting in 1906, Louise filmed–with her husband Anton Kolm, who owned a photographic studio, and his cameraman Jakob Fleck–her first documentaries of street scenes, military parades, and horse races, as well as the hustle and bustle of the Prater, which was a popular amusement park in Vienna.

Logo for Wiener Kunstfilm GmbH. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In 1910, the team, made up of Louise, Anton, and Jakob, founded the Erste österreichische Kinofilms-Industrie AG, or the First Austrian Cinema Film Industry Corporation, with financial support from Louise’s father. One year later, the company was renamed the Österreichische-ungarische Kinoindustrie, or the Austro-Hungarian Cinema Industry. Due to financial difficulties and differences of opinion between the management, the three-person team soon disbanded the production company (Thaller 2010). In October 1911, they set up a company called Wiener Kunstfilm, or Viennese Art Film, with the goal of producing highbrow entertainment films following the then popular film d’art movement. Along with Saturn, a small company that had been producing erotic films since 1906 for the so-called “Gentlemen’s Evening Film” genre [Herrenabendfilme] and another company in Budapest, Viennese Art Film was the first larger domestic film production company in Austro-Hungary. It was very productive, as Paolo Caneppele emphasizes: “The output of this company was prodigious, especially given the constraints under which is operated; by December 1912, the company had released more than ten films, including dramas, comedies, and documentaries” (2005, 52).

As novices, Anton, Jakob, and Louise did not have an easy position in the industry. By 1910, Austro-Hungary was supplied very successfully by French, Italian, German, and American film companies and the public was used to watching foreign productions. To compete as young entrepreneurs, the pioneers set their stakes from the beginning in a certain kind of local color, or to put it another way, in a patriotic strategy for success. Their intentions were depicted clearly in the first announcements about the company made by Mitteilungen der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Kinoindustrie on March 27, 1911:

French and Italian scenes, events from the history of all states and countries have been presented but there is nothing to be seen from the scenic beauty of our monarchy, none of the ethnographic peculiarities from our national tribes ruled by the Hapsburg scepter, none of the great events from our fatherland’s history, which simultaneously forms the history of the Christian Occident (2).

To fill this gap, the announcement continued, the team made it their task “to make that subject, which was closer to the hearts of our citizens, as one of their cinematic depictions.” A clearly nationalistic appeal followed: “Austrians! Support the local industry! Free yourselves of foreign influences! In fulfilling your patriotic duties you will receive innumerous millions for the wealth of the nation and for your fatherland!” The company’s patriotic endeavors were recognized by the press. For example, in 1910, when the Kolm-Fleck team–along with the French company Pathé Frères–received permission to film the funeral of the Viennese mayor Dr. Karl Lueger, which was at the time a great event in Viennese society, Österreichischer Komet wrote with pride on March 24, 1910 about “the Viennese film that would make its way around the world” (n.p.).

Louise Kolm-Fleck (in the middle), date unknown. Courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria.

In spite of all these efforts to assert national films against the stiff international competition, the press commentaries on the team’s films were varied. On one hand, they expressively supported the efforts of an Austrian film production company. However, on the other hand, they found fault with the company’s first cinematic adaptions of great literary texts. Especially for larger film productions, the team fell back on popular local writers such as Ludwig Anzengruber and Franz Grillparzer, and engaged actors and directors from the Viennese theaters, keeping in accordance with the film d’art movement.

Of those productions from the 1910s, only two films have been preserved and restored: Der Müller und sein Kind/The Miller and His Child (1911), based on Ernst Raupach’s drama, and Die Ahnfrau/The Ancestress (1919), adapted from Grillparzer’s play “Die Ahnfrau.” The Miller and His Child is regarded as the oldest preserved Austrian feature film and, for this reason alone, is interesting as a historical document. From today’s perspective, the staging is clumsy (especially when comparing it internationally). The art direction [Ausstattung] and mise en scène are sparse, the acting is noticeably theatrical, and there is little understanding of the film technology. The Ancestress is more ambitious in its rhythm and spatial perception, but the film’s narrative flow adheres exactly to its complex literary model, allowing little leeway for a concise cinematic interpretation.

When going through the Kolm-Fleck filmography, one notices that the pioneers repeatedly formed new collaborative teams with individuals from film and theater, working across a wide range of genres. In this way, they tried their hand at the social drama [Soziales Drama], along with the sensational drama [Sensationsdrama], the detective story genre [Kriminalgenre], and the comic drama [Komisches Genre]. From the beginning, the team clearly addressed women when selecting their material. Film titles and the available plot descriptions are evidence of this. For instance, Mutter/Mother (1911), Die Glückspuppe/The Lucky Doll (1911), written by Louise and her partners, Das Goldene Wiener Herz/The Golden Viennese Heart (1911), Der Weibliche Detektiv/The Female Detective (1912), and Unrecht Gut Gedeihet Nicht/Goods Ill Gotten Never Prosper (1913), directed and scripted by Louise and Jakob, all emphasize contemporary women’s issues.

Very early on the team took up the topic of cross-dressing with the so-called topsy-turvy world comedy. For example, the presumably non-extant Martha mit dem Hosenrock/Martha in Cutlottes (1911), scripted by Louise, “pokes fun at the follies and foibles of women’s fashion, taking on the subject of the new woman’s pant-dress, which emerged from the immobile hobble skirt of the time” (von Dassanowsky 2004, n.p.). The outcome of the story was not kept in descriptions of the plot. Whether the world functioned “correctly,” and the woman no longer wore trousers, at the end or whether–as in many short comedy films of the time–the ending was left open, we do not know. In comparison to the later cross-dressing comedies [Hosenrollenfilme], which often exhibited the motive of jealousy as the reason for a woman to put on trousers, it is interesting to note that the reason for wearing trousers in the Kolm-Fleck films is the fashion-conscious lead character. This is similar to the film Der Sieg des Hosenrocks/The Victory of the Culottes (1911), which appeared the very same year in Germany and is about women being up to date with the fashion of the times. Additionally, the Austrian production contains scenes later used frequently in other cross-dressing comedies, such as a woman’s irritation using the toilet while wearing pants.

Louise worked alone from time to time on writing screenplays and directing. As the author of screenplays, she focused on issues such as the fate of women and relations between the sexes, especially in her social dramas. She gained recognition in the press as the sole director of Der Unbekannte/The Unknown (1912), Viennese Art Film’s first large feature film. For example, Kinematographische Rundschau announced on February 18, 1912: “It appears as our duty to also mention Mrs. Kolm, the spouse of the untiring Commercial Director Kolm, in her contribution to the film’s success, who, concerning her directing work, made quite an achievement” (8f). Unfortunately Der Unbekannte is now lost and, due to the lack of archival materials, it is difficult to reconstruct how Louise staged this and other productions, as well as more generally which accents she set in the direction of the acting in her scripts and how much she was interested in specific filmic procedures.

The cast and crew of Das Fürstenkind (1927), with Louise Kolm-Fleck and Jakob Fleck seated in front. Courtesy of the Deutsches Kinemathek.

Eventually, Anton took over the production company’s commercial direction (and founded Vita Film in 1919, which was connected to the establishing of the famous Rosenhügel Studios). He died in 1922 (von Dassanowsky 1999, 199). In the mid-1920s, Louise and Jakob, who married in 1924, moved to Berlin and co-directed numerous films there for Hegawald Film and Ufa, among other companies. These films included Liebelei (1926), Der Orlow (1927), and Die Warschauer Zitadelle (1930). In 1938, they were interned in Dachau and Buchenwald because Jakob was Jewish. In 1939, with the help of friends, they managed to flee to Shanghai, where they collaborated on and directed Chinese film productions. According to Guogiang Teng, one such film was Sons and Daughters of the World (1941) (1994, 50-58). Due to World War II, which broke out in the Pacific in December 1941, they were put up–like many other foreigners–in so-called “Godowns,” or warehouses, where they were again subjected to abject conditions (Teng 50-58). Both, however, returned to Vienna in 1947, where Louise died in 1950 and Jakob in 1953.

Although the films produced by Louise and her collaborators are primitive when compared internationally, the three filmmakers’ contributions to the cinema in Vienna and Austro-Hungary cannot be underestimated. As pioneers, they paved the way for a local film production at a time of heavy competition and so were then able to work internationally–first in Germany in the 1920s and then as displaced persons in China. Louise was an important early director, screenwriter, and producer, yet the exact dimensions of her career require further research. As a member of a collaborative team, her filmography highlights some of the complexities in understanding women’s authorship in early cinema.

See also: Ida Jenbach

The author wishes to thank Christina Wintersteiger for her help with research and proofreading. 

Bibliography

Canepelle, Paolo. “Austro-Hungary.” In Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Ed. Richard Abel. New York: Routledge, 2005. 52-54.

Fritz, Walter. Kino in Österreich. Der Stummfilm 1896-1930. Wien: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1981.

Kinematographische Rundschau 208 (18 February 1912): 8f.

Mitteilungen der Österreichisch-Ungarischen Kinoindustrie 1 (27 March 1911): 2.

Nepf, Markus. Die Pionierarbeit von Anton Kolm, Louise Velteé/Kolm/Fleck und Jacob Fleck bis zu Beginn des 1. Weltkrieges. Wien: ÖFA, 1991.

Österreichischer Komet 38 (24 March 1910): n.p.

Streit, Elisabeth. “Nackte Tatsachen–Zur Darstellung des nackten, weiblichen Körpers im frühen österreichischen Film.” In Screenwise. Film.Fernsehen.Feminismus. Eds. Monika Bernold, Andrea B. Braidt, Claudia Preschl. Marburg: Schüren, 2004. 131-136.

Teng, Guogiang. “Fluchtpunkt Shanghai. Louise und Jakob Fleck in China 1939-1946.” Filmexil (April 1994): 50-58.

Thaller, Anton, ed. Österreichische Filmografie, Band 1: Spielfilme 1906–1918. Wien: Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, 2010.

------, with Paolo Caneppele, Günter Krenn, Armin Loacker. “Österreichische Filmografie 1906-1944.” In Das tägliche BrennenEine Geschichte des österreichischen Films von den Anfängen bis 1945. Eds. Elisabeth Büttner and Christian Dewald. Vienna: Residenz Verlag 2002. 412-467.

von Dassanowsky, Robert. “Louise Kolm-Fleck.” Senses of Cinema 33 (October 2004): n.p. http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/great-directors/kolm_fleck/

------. “Male Sites/Female Visions: Four Female Austrian Film Pioneers.” Modern Austrian Literature vol. 32, no. 1 (1999): 126-138.

Citation

Walkensteiner-Preschl, Claudia. "Louise Kolm-Fleck." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kfc8-qh42>

Aloha Wanderwell Baker

by Jessica DePrest

A traveler, adventurer, and filmmaker, Aloha Wanderwell Baker’s career spanned over twenty-five years and took her to over fifty countries. Heralded in the promotion of her lectures as “the world’s most widely travelled girl,” Aloha participated in the production of eleven travelogues from 1921 until approximately 1952. She presented these films with live lectures across the United States and internationally. The travelogues ranged in both length and style, reflective of the changing practice of travel lecture filmmaking in the first half of the 20th century and Aloha’s own evolution from crew member to producer-director.

Colorized studio portrait, Aloha Wanderwell. Courtesy of the Richard Diamond Trust..

Idris Galcia Hall was born on October 13, 1906 (or 1908) in Winnipeg, Canada to Herbert and Margaret Headley Hall. After Herbert was killed in action as a British Army reservist during the first World War, Margaret and her two daughters, Idris and Margaret, or “Meg,” moved to France. While in France, Idris became aware of the Wanderwell Expedition led by self-proclaimed “Captain” Walter Wanderwell (né Valerian Johannes Piecynski), a Polish expat who was participating in an automotive endurance race. Walter had started this race in 1919 with his first wife Nell Wanderwell (née Miller). However, by 1921 Nell and Walter had separated, and Walter needed a new star for his travelogues. According to Aloha’s memoirs, Walter advertised his search for a secretary to join his expedition team, and his ad in the French Riviera edition of The Paris Herald specified that she have “brains, beauty and breeches” (Boyd 2013, 1). With excitement and the blessing of her mother, Idris joined the expedition in 1922, and adopted the new stage name Aloha Wanderwell.

Early promotional postcard for the Wanderwell Expedition, Cape Town to Cairo. Courtesy of the Richard Diamond Trust.

Aloha and Walter Wanderwell at Halemaumau Crater, Hawaii. Courtesy of the Richard Diamond Trust.

Aloha participated in the production of four travelogue films while working with Walter Wanderwell: With Car & Camera Around the World (1919-1929), The Last of the Bororos (1930-1931), Flight to the Stone Age Bororos (1930-31), and The River of Death (1934). For these films, Aloha was sometimes actress, director, cinematographer, or editor. Indeed, rather than be limited to rigid production roles, all of the Wanderwell expedition crew served in different capacities–working together to complete and present their travelogues and lectures. The first feature Aloha worked on, With Car & Camera Around the World (hereafter Car & Camera), follows Aloha, Walter, and their crew on a worldwide expedition from 1921 to 1929. The footage is comprised of sequences taken in North America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Unlike many other travelogues of the time, Car & Camera was a constantly evolving production; material would be developed and edited while traveling, and financing would largely come from local businesses. In a 1982 interview with American Cinemeditor, Aloha explained, “Our motion picture editing was done in our hotel rooms. Rewinds consisted of pencils held through the hubs of reels. […] We would barter with local merchants and Ford dealers for gas and services in exchange for endorsing their products during our stage performance. It was a ‘finance as you go’ expedition” (4). As a result, Car & Camera was edited to target specific audiences and to match the demands of different venues, with a running time that would range anywhere from nine to ninety minutes.

Aloha and Walter Wanderwell with expedition vehicle and Chango the monkey. Courtesy of the Richard Diamond Trust.

In December 1924, Aloha and the expedition crew arrived in the then-U.S. territory of Hawaii. By this point, they had traveled to China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, the Soviet Union, Spain, Sudan, Switzerland, Turkey, and Yemen. In early 1925, Aloha and Walter arrived in the continental United States and were married on April 5, 1925 in Riverside, California. A few months later, their arrival in Detroit, Michigan marked the official end of the world tour Walter had started in 1919. While in Detroit, Aloha and Walter put together the first “complete” version of Car & Camera for the U.S. lecture circuits. By December 1926, Aloha, Walter, and the crew had departed for South Africa for another expedition, this time from Cape Town to Cairo, Egypt. Aloha and Walter had two children, Valri (born 1925) and Nile (born 1927), and they continued traveling and filming for Car & Camera until 1929 before planning for their next travelogue film and expedition. Aloha would later recount her experiences while making Car & Camera in her 1939 published memoir The Call of Adventure.

Aloha Wanderwell with Mary Pickford, With Car & Camera Around the World (1919-1929). Courtesy of the Richard Diamond Trust.

Wanderwell Expedition vehicle in front of United Artists Theater, with marquee “Also Aloha Wanderwell in person.” Courtesy of the Richard Diamond Trust.

Aloha and Walter Wanderwell’s next expedition focused on South America, and particularly the Mato Grosso region. The South American expedition ultimately resulted in three travelogue films: The Last of the BororosFlight to the Stone Age Bororos, and The River of Death. Each shares the same expedition footage, with a few sequences made in Hollywood for The River of Death. The River of Death was Aloha and Walter’s only theatrically-released sound film, featuring a voice-over narration by Aloha. Aloha also recorded a voice-over narration for The Last of the Bororos, but it was not circulated like The River of Death. The footage used in these films is some of the earliest film footage of the Bororos Indians (Martins 2013, 160).

In addition to participating in world tours and lecture circuits, Aloha and Walter saw the expedition as a platform to promote their political views and interests. In 1919, Walter founded the “Work Around the World Educational Club” (hereafter WAWEC) and its subsidiary the International Police. He saw these organizations as part of the larger worldwide efforts for peace through education and disarmament. When Aloha joined the expedition in 1922, she became involved with these causes. The Richard Diamond Trust holds a personal journal entry, from December 1923, where Aloha described Walter’s intentions for WAWEC thusly: “Cap [Walter] flung himself into work on a Peace Plan we were to create interest for, as we covered countries. Cap decided to devote much of his future to publicizing a practical solution to the supervision and control of the manufacture and distribution of armaments. He proposed an elite Corps–the International Police with the slogan For God and All Countries” (n.p.). Their efforts were not lost on the press. In 1926, Variety reported on the Wanderwells: “[The Wanderwells] are a bevy of men, all in the uniforms of the International Peace Police force; men from different nations who volunteered for the world-wide tour under Captain Wanderwell’s direction. For the long motor trip made in Fords the caravan carried machine guns and camp equipment that makes the cars appear all the more conspicuous” (82).

Aloha’s personal and professional collaboration with Walter Wanderwell would last until his death in 1932. Walter was murdered on the yacht Carma that he and Aloha owned on December 5, 1932 in Long Beach, California. Aloha was in Los Angeles at the time, and despite an extensive police investigation, Walter’s assassin was never found and the crime remains unsolved.

Aloha Wanderwell with expedition car, circa 1934. Courtesy of the Richard Diamond Trust.

On December 26, 1933, Aloha married Walter Baker, whom she met in Laramie, Wyoming. Their first professional collaboration as a couple was the travelogue To See the World By Car (1937)–a film that revisited many of the sites that Aloha had traveled to with Wanderwell. To See the World By Car is more stylistically polished than Car & Camera. However, the film recycles some shots made during Aloha’s earlier expedition.

Aloha and Baker next collaborated on Explorers of the Purple Sage (1945), which features the flora and fauna of Wyoming with sequences of ranching, horseback riding, and a wild horse round up. In the horse round up, they captured the only known footage of the stallion known as “Desert Dust.” The couple’s later World War II rallying efforts, India Now (1942-44) and Australia Now (1940-1944), were produced with the cooperation of local governments and businesses and utilize those institutions’ footage. In the post-war period, Aloha continued filmmaking and lecturing. Her final films were Victory in the Pacific (1945), My Hawaii (1949), and Magic of Mexico (1950).

After the production of her final films in the late 1940s into the 1950s, Aloha refocused her attention to preserving and promoting her legacy. As early as 1931, Aloha and Walter Wanderwell had presented Aloha’s personal story in Hollywood with the hopes that it would be picked up as a feature film. While they were ultimately unsuccessful in securing a film deal with a studio, Aloha continued to work to preserve her legacy long after Walter Wanderwell’s death and her retirement from filmmaking.  Indeed, Aloha recognized the importance not only of her place within history, but the historical significance of what she had captured on film. She carefully preserved the films and artifacts from her travels, and additionally arranged for her vast collection of films, photographs, journals, letters, and artifacts to be distributed across a number of museums and archives in the United States.

Aloha and Walter Wanderwell in front of the expedition vehicle. Courtesy of the Richard Diamond Trust.

In 1982, Aloha gave her last public performance as a travel lecturer at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, California for family and friends. As with her earlier performances, Aloha appeared in the complete expedition costume and lectured alongside her travelogue films. Aloha died on June 3, 1996 in Newport Beach, California. Aloha’s remarkable life and career endure as a complex example of the power of self-invention, marketing, and a woman who defied the limitations of her era.

Bibliography

“Aloha Baker.” American Cinemeditor vol. 32, no. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1982): 4-5.

Boyd, Alan. “Aloha Wanderwell Baker: An Introduction.” Aloha Wanderwell: Call to Adventure. Ed. Alan Boyd. Orange County: Nile Baker Estate, 2013. 1-6.

Linville, Heather. “Across the World and Back: Rare 1920s and 1930s Footage from Aloha Wanderwell Baker.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (March 2015): n.p. http://www.oscars.org/news/across-world-and-back-rare-1920s-and-1930s-footage-aloha-wanderwell-baker 

Martins, Luciana. Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Mashon, Mike. “The Films of Aloha Wanderwell Baker: An Archival Collaboration.” Now See Hear! Library of Congress (March 2015): n.p. https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2015/03/the-films-of-aloha-wanderwell-baker-an-archival-collaboration/

Ruoff, Jeffrey, ed. Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Wanderwell, Aloha. Call to Adventure! New York: Robert M. McBride, 1939; Rpt. as Aloha Wanderwell: Call to Adventure. Ed. Alan Boyd. Orange County: Nile Baker Estate, 2013.

“Wanderwell Returns After 5 Year Tour.” Rev. Variety (20 October 1926): 82.

Archival Paper Collections:

Aloha Baker Collection. National Automotive History Collection. Detroit Public Library.

Richard Diamond Trust. Personal Collection. Aloha Wanderwell.

Citation

DePrest, Jessica . "Aloha Wanderwell Baker." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-c4ct-7j76>

Edna Williams

by Donald Crafton

The career of Edna Williams, an unrecognized pioneer in the field of international film distribution, demonstrates not only the importance, but also the pervasiveness, of many individuals who worked behind the scenes performing the all-important work of connecting moving picture producers and their audiences. One searches film history texts in vain, however, for any mention of Williams, despite having been dubbed in 1921 by Photoplay (albeit incorrectly) “The Film’s First Woman Executive” (94). In 1918, at least one trade journal, Exhibitors Herald, singled out Williams as a sign that distribution might be an emerging domain suitable for women:

Feminism is advancing in the motion picture industry. Feminine stars long have been one of the pillars of the industry. Feminine exhibitors abound the country over, but women who head their own producing or distributing concerns, or who devote their energies to the selling side of the business are still attracting considerable attention. (“Edna Williams, Film Executive” 28)

Having achieved a prominent position in the virtually all-male world of the motion picture front office in the late 1910s through the 1920s, Williams and other “feminine” exhibitors and distributors nevertheless have all but disappeared from the annals of film.

Very little is known about Williams. We can piece together her career from some scant references in the trade press, augmented by research in online genealogical resources like Ancestry.com. Her parents were Charles Edward Williams and Caroline M. “Carrie” (Sanders) Williams. They were married in 1885, and their first child, Edna I. Williams, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on March 12, 1887. According to the United States Census of 1900, Edna had two siblings at the time: Mazie and Sarah. Williams’ middle initial “I” appears uniquely in Edna Williams’ Certificate of Death and the “California Death Index, 1940-1997.”

When Williams was a teenager, she moved to California, where “she and her mother, from whom Miss Williams inherited her uncommon ability, controlled in Los Angeles some of the biggest and best apartment hotels in the city” (“Edna Williams, Film Executive” 28). After gaining some success as an amateur songwriter in Los Angeles, Williams, at twenty years of age, set out to join her mother, who had moved to New York. There, she found “the music publishers…very different human beings from what she had imagined. She found them crafty and designing” (McNamara 1922, 26). While working as a book peddler and cashier, she was also tendering her songs, one of which, “If the Wind Had Only Blown the Other Way,” was picked up by the Jos. W. Stern publishing company, one of the leading Tin Pan Alley sheet-music producers located in the rapidly expanding entertainment district around the newly-named Times Square. It was a genuine hit and resulted in royalties of $1,500 and an offer to join the Stern staff, probably in 1910, when she was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. There, she ground out tunes, focusing on a certain genre: “songs which were not exactly vulgar, but with just that little French tang of naughtiness which Americans do not know how to simulate” (McNamara 27). Her biggest hit was in 1913 with “Over the Great Divide.” “You ought to know that it’s a hit,” she told a reporter for the New York Clipper, showing a penchant for hyperbole. “Why, I am offered $10,000 for my royalty interest in the song, that’s going some, isn’t it? But take it from me, they couldn’t buy it for twice that sum” (Edwards 1913, 12).

The music business was converging with motion pictures. Williams’ entrée into cinema appears to have been the result of a visit to Stern by Sir Ben Fuller, an Australian theater magnate. After hosting his tour, he offered her the position of his buying agent. As Sue McNamara reported later in 1922:

Of course she accepted. This was at the time when only a few small and struggling concerns were in the business—Carl Laemmle, David Horsley, Pat Powers, Addie Kissell being among the first. But Miss Williams, with her far-sighted intelligence saw that this was to develop into one of the world’s biggest industries, and, with more and more companies springing up and more and more people demanding to see the pictures, the principal need would be good stories. Thus she reasoned. (27)

Edna Williams, in her new job in international sales, Motion Picture News, December 1914.

Williams’ transition into film continued in 1914 when she joined a nearby import-export company called the National Movement Motion Picture Bureau, Inc. Her publicity portrait shows a self-confident woman of twenty-seven years, dressed in a vested tweed suit, with a carnation and diamond stick-pin. A later passport application provided this legal description: Height, 5 feet 6 inches; high forehead, blue eyes, straight nose, medium mouth, round chin, blonde hair, fair complexion, and round face. The 1914 press release in Motion Picture News provided the surprising information that “Miss Williams has long been connected with the theatrical world, and is well known to the heads of many film houses on account of her heavy purchases for Australia and South America” (“Alec Lorimore Active” 48). Although film was taking up more of her time, she did keep her “day job” as a song plugger until 1916, when it was announced in the New York Clipper that she had severed her connection with the Jos. Stern company (“Melody Lane” 24). Soon after, Motion Picture News reported that she took a position as “foreign representation” for another upstart film dealer, Frank J. Seng (“Seng Sells ‘Parentage’” 1917, 2574).

Williams’ career took a decisive turn when she began an association with a livewire newcomer to the film business, Frank G. Hall, based in Newark, New Jersey. According to The Billboard, in May 1917, she negotiated an important deal on his behalf, selling the Australian rights to The Bar Sinister (1917), a sensational feature about miscegenation, written and directed by Edgar Lewis (82). Hall was so pleased that he put her in charge of foreign sales for his company, U.S. Exhibitors Booking Corporation (“New York Will Be” 1917, 246; “Active Foreign Market” 1917, 155).

In this tumultuous period for the film industry, World War I had rejiggered traditional international film markets and producers’ methods for reaching them. While major Hollywood companies, notably Universal, Famous Players-Lasky, and Fox, had their own subsidiary agencies and exchanges abroad, smaller studios and independent producers relied on foreign agents that essentially expanded the old “state rights” model to the entire world. The central clearing house was London (Vasey 1997, 15). Williams’ customer, Australasian Films Ltd., for example, controlled Union Theatres, a chain of seventy houses in Australia and New Zealand (Thompson 1985, 91-82). The deals were for a one-time payment that would allow the buyer to exhibit or sub-distribute the title in the specific territory.

Williams’ prescient observations about the significance of postwar distribution for American filmmakers have been validated by contemporary historians:

The close of the [First World War] will see New York in the position formerly held by London as the central distributing plant. Many buyers are now doing business through New York who bought only in London before the war, and it is natural that, their connections once made, they will continue to do so….The limited amount of production now done outside of America has made our pictures more popular than ever, and it is doubtful whether other countries will be able to compete with us for a long time to come. The only possible exception in this regard is Italy, where the public has been educated to accept the artistic and the beautiful in pictures irrespective of the story value, and still prefer extra footage with long drawn out scenes showing attractive backgrounds in place of our closely cut scenes full of action. (“New York Will Be” 246; “Active Foreign Market” 155)

Hall was not a sound businessman and his house of cards (that included movie houses and a film studio) soon would collapse. But Williams, either fortunately or astutely, made her exit in November 1918 and joined the organization of one of Hall’s primary business partners. The Robertson-Cole company contacted Williams while trying to fulfill a client’s request for the rights to a certain American film. She obliged and suggested that the company ought to open an American branch. The executive, Rufus S. Cole, agreed and hired her to run it (McNamara 27). Robertson-Cole was a British-based banking house. Recently, their import-export trade had diversified into film, moving quickly from financing, to distributing, and now producing. They hired Williams just as the Film Division was expanding into new offices at 1600 Broadway (the “Mecca Building,” home to several film corporations). Again, her new employers crowed in Motion Picture News about landing her services: “Miss Edna Williams, special representative of the Robertson-Cole Company of New York and London, which has acquired the foreign distributing rights to the productions released by the U.S. Exhibitors’ Booking Corporation, has encountered no difficulty in disposing of the subjects thus far put on the market by the booking concern…Rights to the new Thomas H. Ince spectacle, The Zeppelin’s Last Raid, have been sold for Japan, China, India, Burma, Ceylon, Dutch East Indies, Philippines and Hawaiian Island.” Asked about future prospects, “Miss Williams said: ‘Although conditions in the foreign field have not been of the best, we have been quick in disposing of the U.S. productions. I have found that foreign purchasers are willing to pay big prices for the right kind of subjects even in view of slack conditions and take a chance on deriving a profit on the investment. It is the play in which they are most interested. Foreign picture devotees have become quite as discriminating as the film fans of America’” (“Big Sales in Orient” 1917, 4573).

Although Robertson-Cole no doubt planted it for publicity, Exhibitors Herald published an unusually in-depth article called “Edna Williams, Film Executive” in 1918:

One of the handful of successful women who are heading their own organizations is Miss Edna Williams, general manager of the Robertson-Cole Company’s film department, famous explorers of New York and London, to which concern has been allotted the foreign territorial rights to all productions distributed by the U.S. Exhibitors Booking Corporation.

In her office in the Times Building this energetic young woman—she is yet this side of the thirty-year milestone [sic]—directs virtually single-handed one of the largest enterprises now operating in the foreign film field. She is in touch with exhibitors in all parts of the globe…

In less than three months this enterprising young woman has established by her own efforts a distributing organization that has become an important factor in the foreign field. It is her intention to distribute only special productions—subjects above the accepted program standard of merit—as she believes there is a larger demand for that kind of pictures [sic] in the foreign field than for program material…

“I have spent the past year in studying the foreign film market from New York very closely,” declared Miss Williams. “I have realized that there are many obstacles to be overcome before one can really dispose of pictures in foreign countries as they should be marketed.

“Unfortunately a great deal of foreign sales must be made by cable through the various brokers in New York City and this way the purchaser never knows until after his money is spent and the film is sent to him for inspection, just what he has received for his money. It is virtually a lottery. Naturally, many sales have been a distinct loss to the purchasers in the different territories and it has been my idea that a company with branch offices in the principal foreign cities would overcome all these disadvantages. Hence, the organization of the [Robertson-Cole] company through which the U.S. productions are distributed in the foreign markets.” (28)

They soon added Latin American territories to her sales inventory (“Robertson-Cole” 1918, 555; “Recent Sales” 1918, 572). Ethel Smith, a stenographer fresh from Smith College, was hired on as her assistant (“Ethel Smith” 1938, 4). (Smith would go on to take over many of Williams’ duties when Robertson-Cole evolved into F.B.O. and then RKO.)

Once again, the trade press reporters went to Williams for intelligent commentary on current affairs. Regarding a new tariff bill, she responded authoritatively in Motion Picture News in September 1921: “We are opposed to the proposed tariff. Twenty per cent of the revenue from our gross business has to come from foreign countries. A 30 per cent ad valorem duty will exclude from the United States practically all foreign pictures. Retaliatory tariffs will exclude American pictures from practically all the foreign countries. The loss of the foreign market will cost American producers and distributors millions of dollars annually. England, South America, Australia and Mexico depend upon America for about 80 per cent of their films, whereas the foreign films in America are hardly two per cent of our total consumption and probably never will be over five per cent” (“Sees Salaries Reduced” 1192).

Edna Williams, head of foreign distribution, Robertson-Cole, in Photoplay, December 1921.

Williams’ reputation continued to grow. However, often it was based as much on the novelty of being a female executive in a man’s world as on her accomplishments in selling films, as in the 1921 Photoplay profile cited above (94). An accompanying portrait of Williams caught her in a pensive pose.

Robertson-Cole was financially unstable and undergoing reorganization. The co-founder Cole was let go in 1922, and the New York-based financing and distribution wing of the company was merged into an entity to be called Film Booking Offices of America (F.B.O.). In an envoi for the executive, Variety recognized Williams’ role in the success of the enterprise: “It was Edna Williams who is accredited with first visualizing for Cole the El Dorado an American producing plant offered” (“Inside Stuff on Pictures” 1922, 35).

Apparently swayed by Williams’ argument for more of their foreign branches to augment the London exchange, the new F.B.O. management sent her on an extensive trip to major European film-importing countries. In the passport application that she filed in November 1922 (her first one), she listed her occupation as Export Manager of R-C Pictures Corporation, and declared her intentions to visit Czechoslovakia, England, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. She sailed from New York on the S.S. Majestic on January 6, 1923, and returned from her European mission on June 2 (“Eight Liners” 14).

Edna Williams, U.S. Passport application photo, 1924.

The press summarized the results of the junket: “Miss Edna Williams, foreign representative for the Film Booking Offices, returned last week on the Berengaria after a tour of six months over Europe, during which time she established F.B.O. connections for the entire Continent and arranged to open branch offices in London, Paris and Berlin. It is understood that these connections are in no way to be exchanges of the F.B.O. or will in any way handle the physical distribution of their product, but will be branches of the home office for the purpose of acting as an outlet for F.B.O. films in those countries” (“F.B.O. to Have Offices” 1923, 562). Furthermore,  additional branches were planned in Mexico, Cuba, and South America (“The Film Mart” 1923, 57).

In 1924, F.B.O. arranged a follow-up trip to Europe to finalize the new network. In September of that year, it was reported in Moving Picture World that:

Edna Williams, foreign sales manager of F.B.O., was sent abroad by the organization early in May to survey conditions affecting the industry in the various foreign countries. After a short stay in London, she proceeded to the Continent where, after an extensive study of foreign film conditions, she realized that the time was ripe for opening permanent offices in the more important film centers.

She made Paris her headquarters and at present is arranging for opening an office in that city, which will take care of F.B.O. sales in Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as in Asia Minor. After the completion of her work in France, Miss Williams plans to go to Berlin, where another office will be opened to take care of the entire Central European territory, including Russia, which is beginning to open up at this point.

Miss Williams will also visit Rome, Vienna, Prague and Copenhagen before returning to the States. (“F.B.O. Active Abroad” 123)

Williams did relocate to Berlin, where she abided in the luxurious Hotel Adlon until returning on the S.S. Leviathan on April 27, 1925. Once again, in the summer of 1926, Williams returned to Germany on F.B.O. business (“Kann Returns” 1926, 38).

Inspecting the passenger manifests for these transatlantic trips, we see that Williams was traveling with Nella Clarke, who resided at the same home address (145 West 71st Street, New York). This was actually Williams’ companion, former vaudeville star Nella Walker, sailing incognito. Her relationship to Walker had a significant impact on Williams’ future career and her private life. According to her birth certificate, Walker was born Nellie Edna Walker to Charles Edwin Walker and Anna Savage Walker in Chicago, on March 6, 1886. She had been half of a successful vaudeville song-and-dance duo, Mack and Walker. She married Wilbur Mack, the stage name of George Feear Runyon, in 1911 (“Mack and Walker Wed” 10), but it was a turbulent relationship. In 1918, Variety—showing little respect for the couple’s privacy—wrote that they “again separated.” “They were due to leave to open in Duluth Thursday last,” the story continued, “but Wednesday Miss Walker informed Mack she had decided not to accompany him. The couple has been married for some years but according to friends have led a rather stormy marital life, the final[e] coming with Miss Walker’s refusal to go West” (“Mack and Walker Finale” 1).

We may speculate that Williams and Walker might have met through connections in the music business. Whatever the circumstances, they were identified as a couple in a brief Variety squib in July 1925: “Nella Walker (late of Mack and Walker) and Edna Williams of the O.B.U. Picture Company [sic] were also there [at a vaudeville show]” (“Germans Seek” 60). Perhaps this rather gratuitous gossip in the paper was innocent. Or perhaps it was an “outing.” In any case, from this time or earlier, until the end of their lives, the two women were together.

In early 1926, Joseph P. Kennedy, the banker and stock player who had been advising Robertson-Cole and F.B.O., purchased the company. Thus, Williams again had a new boss. Kennedy had a reputation for ruthless downsizing and set about slashing the overhead and personnel at the California studio and the New York home office. We do not know how these actions directly affected Williams’ relationship with the company. Nor do we know how open her same-sex partnership with Walker was, or what Kennedy’s reaction to it might have been, had he known. But, by September 1926, she no longer worked for F.B.O. “After nine years association with the Company she founded,” reported Motion Picture News, “Miss Williams resigns her post as foreign manager of Film Booking Offices of America. Her future plans will be ready for announcement shortly” (“Edna Williams Resigns As Foreign Manager” 1176).

Ad for Ednella Export, Film Daily Yearbook 1927.

The next phase of Williams’ career began in October 1926: “Edna Williams, founder of original company out of which the existing F.B.O. organization has grown and for years head of its foreign department, has formed the Ednella Export Corp., which will engage in foreign distribution throughout the World. Miss Williams sails on the Berengaria on Oct. 13 to open offices in London, Paris and Berlin. Headquarters will be located in New York. Miss Williams’ experience in export covers a period of 15 years” (“Ednella Corp. Formed” 4). The new corporation’s name was a mashup of the partners’ first names. Ednella was capitalized with 1,000 preferred shares at $100 each, and 3,000 common shares, no par. On October 5, the New York Times listed the officers as E. I. Williams and N.W. Clarke, presumably Walker’s alias (44). (It is not known why Walker used “Clarke” as an alias; it was not her mother’s maiden name, nor is there any record of a marriage after she left Wilbur Mack.)

Trade ad for Mountains of Manhattan (1927), in Motion Picture News, April 1927.

The partners returned from their European trip on the Leviathan on November 29, 1926, and publicized their success in setting up branches on the Continent. According to Film Daily, the corporate office of Ednella was 1560 Broadway, above the Embassy Theater (“Edna Williams on Her Own” 14). Williams announced in the 1927 Film Daily Yearbook, “My faith in foreign markets during 1927 is best evidenced by the fact that I have just entered business under my own name” (“1927 Abroad” 921). An advertisement for Ednella Export Corporation a few pages later stated that, “Miss Williams takes this opportunity of thanking her many clients in the industry for their valued business in the past, and hopes to be favored with their patronage in this new enterprise” (926). On March 3, 1927, Film Daily reported that Ednella was taking over another exporter, Tower, and their foreign rights to the output of three small producers, including Bill Lumas’ Gotham Productions (2). These dozen Gotham releases included, for example, the 1927 Mountains of Manhattan, which was directed by James P. Hogan and starred Dorothy Devore.

Despite the optimism behind Ednella Export, the company did not last even one year. We may speculate about numerous reasons for its demise. Obviously, the inability to secure consequential titles was significant. The introduction of sound in Hollywood in the late twenties would shock the international marketing of Hollywood talkies. And the major American distributors were using their economic and political prowess to consolidate their international distribution, squeezing out the low-budget independent productions of the sort that Ednella could acquire. Furthermore, the structure of international distribution was changing. As Williams had predicted, the market for world distribution had shifted from London to New York after the Great War. She could not have foreseen, however, how drastically the rise and consolidation of the major vertically-integrated producing corporations would fundamentally change distribution. As Ruth Vasey observed, Universal, Fox, Famous Players-Lasky, and Goldwyn “together managed to encircle virtually the entire globe with regional networks” (15). The old system of selling territorial rights outright that Williams inherited was giving way to a strategy that let producers retain more control, distributing product on a royalty basis (“American Picture Market” 1940, 64). The Ednella enterprise ended abruptly, but not so Williams’ fascinating life story.

In the summer of 1929, Williams and Walker relocated from New York to Los Angeles, where the former vaudevillian aspired to become a movie actor. According to Hollywood Filmograph, “Nella Walker, that attractive and clever actress who is among the newcomers to Hollywood…is one of the few who come to Hollywood that pictures seek, for she had retired from the stage and has been spending much of her time abroad. But an old friend broadcast the news of her presence and picture offers followed. Now Miss Walker is delighted with her work, has taken a place in Hollywood and plans to remain” (“Nella Walker” 1930, 12). This is tantalizing. Was the “old friend” Edna Williams who put the word out that her partner was looking for work in the pictures? And was the person she spoke to Joseph P. Kennedy?

In October 1928, Kennedy’s F.B.O. became part of a new conglomerate Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), set up to make, distribute, and exhibit talking pictures (“Radio to Join Keith-Orpheum” 4). Kennedy was not actively involved with running the studio, but we might speculate that his word would have carried some weight. In any case, it was RKO Radio Pictures that gave Walker her first roles in the movies. She signed her Equity contract in August 1929, and was cast as a society matron in the comedy Tanned Legs, directed by Marshall Neilan, and released in November 1929 (“Some Cast” 1929, 20; Hodges 1929, 38). A string of RKO Radio Pictures followed rapidly: Vagabond Lover (Dir. Neilan, December 1929), Seven Keys to Baldpate (Dir. Reginald Barker, December 1929), and Alias French Gertie (Dir. George Archainbaud, April 1930), all featuring Walker as a player. In September 1930, she appeared in What a Widow!, a vehicle for Gloria Swanson produced by Kennedy, her lover. Walker went on to become a leading character actress. She appeared in over one hundred films, specializing in “mature” sophisticated roles, culminating in the Oscar-winning Sabrina (Dir. Billy Wilder, 1954).

Throughout Walker’s long career, her constant companion, according to U.S. Census enumerations, was Williams. Walker was listed always as the head of the household, while Williams variously is noted as “guest,” “lodger,” or “boarder,” reflecting the sexual mores of the times. Williams died in Los Angeles of metastatic cancer on July 4, 1965, at the age of seventy-eight. Walker died on March 22, 1971. They are interred together in one crypt at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.

In 1940, when Motion Picture Herald compared the current state of global marketing to how it was in 1915, the author included Williams among the “conspicuous names” responsible for the expansion. Of the thirty-seven individuals, only a very few, such as Winfield Sheehan and Colvin W. Brown, are well-known to contemporary film historians (“American Picture Market” 64). Despite recent scholarship, clearly, much research on early cinema distribution remains to be done. Also significant, of the thirty-seven names on that roster of international film distribution pioneers, every one is male—except for Edna Williams.

Bibliography

“1927 Abroad—The Outlook.” Film Daily Yearbook 1927. New York: The Film Daily, 1927. 919-921.

“Active Foreign Market Soon.” Motography (21 July 1917): 155.

Advertisement. Ednella Export Corporation. Film Daily Yearbook 1927. New York: The Film Daily, 1927. 926.

“Alec Lorimore Active in Two Companies.” Motion Picture News (26 December 1914): 48.

“American Picture Market ‘Over There’ From War to War.” Motion Picture Herald (28 September 1940): 64.

“Big Sales in Orient Reported by U.S. Corporation.” Motion Picture News (29 December 1917): 4573.

The Billboard (26 May 1917): 82.

“Edna Williams, Film Executive.” Exhibitors Herald (23 February 1918): 28.

“Edna Williams on Her Own.” Film Daily (19 December 1926): 14.

“Edna Williams Resigns.” Film Daily (19 September 1926): 2.

“Edna Williams Resigns As Foreign Manager for F.B.O.” Motion Picture News (25 September 1926): 1176.

“Ednella Corp. Formed.” Film Daily (1 October 1926): 4.

“Ednella Gets Tower Output.” Film Daily (3 March 1927): 2.

Edwards, Jack. “In Melody Lane.” New York Clipper (22 November 1913): 12.

“Eight Liners Carry Year's Record List.” New York Times (2 June 1923): 14.

“Ethel Smith, Aide to Reisman, Passes.” Motion Picture Daily (23 February 1938): 4.

“F.B.O. Active Abroad.” Moving Picture World (13 September 1924): 123.

“F.B.O. to Have Offices in London, Paris and Berlin.” Moving Picture World (16 June 1923): 562.

“F.B.O. Will Open Two Offices Abroad.” Exhibitors Herald (20 September 1924): 25.

“The Film Mart.” Exhibitors Herald (23 June 1923): 57.

“The Film’s First Woman Executive.” Photoplay (21 December 1921): 94.

“Germans Seek English Aid.” Variety (8 July 1925): 3, 13, 60.

Hodges, Douglas. “Sixteen New Pictures Start; Many Players Sign for Work.” Exhibitors Herald-World (24 August 1929): 38.

“Inside Stuff on Pictures.” Variety (24 February 1922): 35.

“Kann Returns from Europe.” Exhibitors Herald (12 June 1926): 38.

“Mack and Walker Finale.” Variety (23 August 1918): 1.

“Mack and Walker Wed.” Variety (2 September 1911): 10.

McNamara, Sue. “The Girl Who Just Wouldn’t Quit: A Tale of Persistence.” Pantomime (1 April 1922): 26-27, 30.

“Melody Lane” New York Clipper (7 October 1916): 24.

“Nella Walker.” Hollywood Filmograph (3 May 1930): 12.

“New Incorporations.” New York Times (5 October 1926): 44.

“New York Will Be World Film Center, Says Hall.” Motion Picture News (14 July 1917): 246.

“Radio to Join Keith-Orpheum.” Wall Street Journal (24 October 1928): 4.

“Recent Sales of Robertson-Cole Co.” Motion Picture News (27 July 1918): 572.

“Robertson-Cole in Foreign Markets.” Moving Picture World (27 July 1918): 555.

“Sees Salaries Reduced if Tariff Goes Through.” Motion Picture News (3 September 1921): 1192.

“Seng Sells 'Parentage' for Australasia.” Motion Picture News (13 October 1917): 2574.

“Some Cast.”  Hollywood Filmograph (24 August 1929): 20.

Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907-34. London: BFI Publishing, 1985.

Vasey, Ruth. The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Archival Paper Collections:

New York, New York Passenger and Crew Lists, 1909, 1925-1957. Microfilm publication T715. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Edna Williams passport application, 1924. “United States Passport Applications, 1795-1925,” Passport Applications, January 2, 1906-March 31, 1925; microfilm publications M1490 and M1372. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Research Update

A sample of Edna Willams' songwriting work has been put online via the UC Santa Barbara Library. Listen to “Don't go up in that big balloon, Dad” (1910).

Citation

Crafton, Donald. "Edna Williams." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-0gjb-wr23>

Leila Lewis

by Nathalie Morris

In 1920, Leila Lewis gave a lecture to the Women’s Freedom League, a UK organization that campaigned for suffrage and sexual equality. The subject of her talk was “Opportunities for Women in the Film Business.” Although not yet thirty, Lewis was already an established film publicist and the object of her talk was to promote the wide range of film industry jobs that were open to women. A June 17, 1920 article in Kinematograph Weekly reported that Lewis had questioned the “monopoly held by men in so many jobs in the film industry,” arguing that “it ought not to be a question of sex when anybody was selected for work, but a question of ability to do the work” (135). Attempting to dispel the widely held notion that the only opportunities for women were in front of the camera, Lewis outlined a range of potential roles, including producer (meaning director), scenario writer, art director, casting director, censor, wardrobe and make-up, and working on “the business side” (135). Interestingly, she made no mention of her own professions of publicity and journalism, despite these being two areas in which women had already begun to distinguish themselves.

Leila Stewart photographed by her husband, Alex ‘Sasha’ Stewart, 1925. Courtesy of the Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Lewis had entered the film business via editorial and advertising work and, according to an October 12, 1939 article in Kinematograph Weekly, was at one point the only woman to run her own Fleet Street advertising agency (5). Her first film job was with the rental company Bolton’s Mutual Films where she attracted attention with her series of articles, “Mutual Interests,” which ran from February to June 1917 in the trade paper The Bioscope. While musing on a range of issues regarding cinema and its role in modern life (education, escapism), Lewis’ pieces also served as persuasive “advertorials” for the latest Bolton’s releases. From Bolton’s, Lewis moved to the Stoll Picture Theatre, Kingsway, one of central London’s grandest cinemas. Establishing a reputation as an imaginative and innovative publicist, Lewis set up a magazine for the cinema called the Kingsway Gossip and, in 1918, created the Stoll Picture Theatre Club, which offered its members cinema season tickets and also hosted talks, events, and tours of British studios. Lewis’ work grabbed the attention of the film trade press, who noted in a May 2, 1918 article in Kinematograph Weekly that “the theatre owes not a little of its success to its capable press lady” (51).

Lewis was an active figure in the industry. As well as giving talks and contributing articles to the trade papers, she also sat on the committee of the Film Press Club, which was, as The Bioscope reported on June 3, 1920, formed for those working in film publicity, advertising, and journalism (5). She was keen to develop the style and reach of film publicity and worked constantly to engage the popular—as opposed to trade—press in the business of reviewing and promoting films. In her “Opportunities for Women” talk, Lewis suggested that women were “born wheedlers” (135) and this comes across in an article she wrote for The Bioscope in December 1928, which asserted that a good publicist needed to present film stories as “news”:

If film publicity is presented to them [newspaper editors] as news, they welcome it, but they will not put in a bald announcement giving the name of the film, the name of the star, the theatre at which it is being shown […] the usual material, which, they feel, ought to be paid for as an advertisement. […] They must have a large quantity of jam in the shape of interesting material in which to swallow their pill–advertising a theatre for nothing in their editorial columns (223).

After leaving the Stoll Picture Theatre, Lewis set herself up as a publicity consultant and also had a stint as a film critic, writing for the magazines Tit-Bits and Daily Graphic, according to Kinematograph Weekly (1926, 42) and Stoll’s Editorial News (1920, 4). She also undertook freelance work for British producer George Clark and was briefly at British & Colonial, as noted later by Kinematograph Weekly (1939, 5). In 1921, she joined Allied Artists, the British distribution arm for United Artists, as Publicity Director, beating, as The Bioscope pointed out, several prominent publicity men to the job (1921, 12). Lewis ran the campaign for Allied’s first UK release, the Mary Pickford vehicle Pollyanna (1920), but does not appear to have stayed with Allied Artists for long after this.

From around 1923 until 1926 she was head of publicity at the distributor W&F. While there, she worked on the promotion of Harold Lloyd releases as well as British productions made by Gainsborough. In 1926, she joined Warner Brothers as Publicity Manager and was responsible for promoting the Vitaphone sound system. Lewis claimed in The Bioscope in December 1928 that “I am so sold on the value of adding sound to the silent screen, that I have found it an easy matter to talk and write all day, every day and almost every night about Vitaphone” (223).

It was around this time that Lewis began working under her married name of Stewart, although she had been married to the photographer Alexander Stewart (professionally known as Sasha) since 1919. In the 1920s, Sasha established himself as portrait photographer and became well known for his photographs of society, theater, and film figures. Their two professions no doubt supported each other, and Lewis almost certainly secured commissions for her husband, especially in the early 1930s when he set up as a film publicity stills photographer. Together, they were a talented and well-connected couple, and Sasha’s studio “day books” contain a number of references to Leila and to attending various society and film-related events. Sasha also took several portraits of his wife, many of which are held in Sasha’s archive in the Hulton Archive, now owned by Getty Images.

Page 1156 of The 1938 Film Daily Year Book

Lewis was clearly a skilled and hard-working networker, communicator, and persuader, and had a natural inclination to use her connections to help people. Director Adrian Brunel recalls Lewis inviting him to her and Sasha’s Bloomsbury flat for dinner “in order to meet Michael Balcon and his lovely wife Aileen. Mick Balcon was a coming producer and Leila, who was always plotting to help people, thought that we might be useful to each other” (1949, 108). Tough and respected, Lewis also inspired affection. Annual editions of the Kine Yearbook show that in the 1930s Leila worked for a time as a casting director at Gaumont-British (1933, 271) before returning to publicity, first as Publicity Manager at Gaumont-British distributors (1936, 291) and then, in the same role, at General Film Distributors (1937, 298). She remained at GFD until her early death, at the age of forty-six, in October 1939. An obituary in Kinematograph Weekly lamented the loss of  “a great publicity chief, the acknowledged head of her profession” (1939, 5). Today’s Cinema described her as “one of the most hard-working and conscientious executives in the trade” and felt that “the effect of her work will live as a monument to carefully conceived, expertly planned and successfully launched publicity” (1939, 2).

See also: Mabel Condon, Beulah Livingstone

Bibliography

The 1938 Film Daily Year Book. New York: The Film Daily, 1938.

The Bioscope (3 June 1920): 5.

The Bioscope (7 April 1921): 12.

The Bioscope (December 1928): 223.

Brunel, Adrian. Nice Work: The Story of Thirty Years in British Film Production. London: Forbes Robertson Ltd., 1949.

Kinematograph Weekly (2 May 1918): 51.

Kinematograph Weekly (16 September 1926): 42.

Kinematograph Weekly (12 October 1939): 5.

Kine Yearbook 1932. London: Kinematograph Publications Ltd., 1933.

Kine Yearbook 1935. London: Kinematograph Publications Ltd., 1936.

Kine Yearbook 1936. London: Kinematograph Publications Ltd., 1937.

“Opportunities for Women.” Kinematograph Weekly (17 June 1920): 135.

Stoll's Editorial News (3 June 1920): 4.

Today’s Cinema (10 October 1939): 2.

Archival Paper Collections:

Catherine O’Brien collection [references to Leila Stewart as mentor]. British Film Institute, Special Collections

Sasha collection. Hulton Archive, Getty Images.

Citation

Morris, Nathalie. "Leila Lewis." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-p8yb-ee90>

Marguerite Renoir

by Maya Sidhu

Best known as Jean Renoir’s film editor and life partner during the 1930s, the career of Marguerite Renoir (née Houllé) before (and after) their collaboration has been largely overlooked, partly due to the scarcity of extant archival materials. Marguerite’s career began at the Pathé Studios of Joinville-le-Pont, where she worked as an apprentice-colorist starting around 1921 (Bertin 1991, 70). Although the Pathé Archives hold no records of Renoir’s early film career, her personal testimony in the professional journal Le Technicien du Film indicates that she became an editor that same year (“L’Actualité” 1960, 4-5). She met famed director Jean Renoir in 1927, while she was working as the editor of Alberto Cavalcanti’s La P’tite Lili (1929), which featured Jean in an uncredited performance and his first wife, Catherine Hessling, in the starring role. Marguerite and Jean’s first collaboration occurred in 1929, when Marguerite edited Jean’s seventh and last silent feature, Le Bled, and the two became romantically involved. Although they never married, Marguerite used Renoir as her name and retained it throughout her career. She is sometimes referred to as Marguerite Houllé-Renoir or Marguerite Mathieu, Mathieu being the name of her husband, the singer Adolphe Mathieu, whom she shot in self-defense in 1948 (“Bagarre sur le palier” 1948, n.p.). After one month in prison, Marguerite was released and continued working as an editor for many celebrated filmmakers (e.g., Jacques Becker, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Pierre Mocky) until the early 1970s.

Marguerite Renoir and Jean Renoir, date unknown, in the book Jean Renoir (2012).

Much of what we know about Marguerite’s work comes from accounts written by and about Jean and other filmmakers, some of whom are mentioned above. Jean has acknowledged Marguerite’s independence as the editor of his films, especially Toni (1935), Une Partie de campagne/A Day in the Country (1936), where she also played the part of the waitress, and La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game (1939). For example, in a correspondence between Jean, Marguerite, and their producer Pierre Gaut, preserved at the Bibliothèque du Film of the Cinémathèque française, Jean confirms Marguerite’s total control over the editing of Toni. “You had mentioned Suzanne [de Troeye, Renoir’s assistant editor] in your previous letter,” Jean wrote to Gaut, “and I would like to reassure you. First of all, Marguerite oversees all the editing, nothing is done without her. Suzanne has the role of a ‘factory editor.’ If we were editing in a Parisian factory, we would have several women provided by the factory and they would all be at Marguerite’s disposition […].” For Une Partie de campagne, Jean again expressed his complete trust in Marguerite when he explained that he had to “abandon the film to start the production of Les Bas Fonds [The Lower Depths, 1936].” “I left the film with Marguerite, my editor and partner,” he continued. “Then, the war started and I left for America. Marguerite did the editing all by herself (…)” (Renoir 2005, 117). As Marguerite herself stated in the aforementioned interview with Le Technicien du Film, the editor has the most “intense” relationship with the film, sometimes working on it for four or five months at a time (“L’Actualité” 5).

In the two silent films we know Marguerite edited, La P’tite Lili and Le Bled, her methods remain unknown. Even though Célia Bertin’s biography of Jean advances that “Jean Renoir had taught her [Marguerite Renoir] to edit” (70), she most likely started working as an editor on a number of films (perhaps for Pathé and/or other studios) before she met Renoir during the production of La P’tite Lili in 1927. La P’tite Lili was based on a 1912 song by Eugène Gavel about a sixteen-year old seamstress with beautiful blonde hair and blue eyes who becomes a prostitute and is stabbed to death by her pimp at the end. With music composed especially for the film by Darius Milhaud, the film also includes excerpts of the song’s lyrics as sheet music inserts. Through trick photography and editing, the film effectively portrays Lili (or Lillie in the version available online), played by Hessling, as an angel among the living.

Le Bled, which was produced for the centennial of the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, was shot on location in the towns of Ferruch, Biskra, Boufarik, and Staouéli (Bertin 356). The most remarkable sequences include the opening with its views of Algeria’s modernization in a Soviet-inspired style, the conversation about the history of the conquest between the farmer Christian Hoffer (Alexandre Arquillère) and his nephew Pierre (Enrique Rivero), the gazelle hunt, and the final chase through the desert using cars, horses, dromedaries, and falcons. Perhaps because of its colonialist discourse about the cultural, industrial, and agricultural progress brought by the French, Le Bled is rarely discussed among the scholars interested in Jean Renoir. Together with La P’tite Lili, however, Le Bled remains a rare example of Marguerite’s silent film work. Considering these titles in conversation with her later films directed by Renoir, Becker, and others may shed new light on these directors’ work and complicate the primacy of directorial authorship. Although few traces of Marguerite’s work as one of the most prominent editors of her time are still extant, her contributions to filmmaking should be investigated further.

With additional research by Aurore Spiers.

Bibliography

“Bagarre sur le palier. La monteuse De cinéma Marguerite Renoir abat son mari le chanteur Adolphe Mathieu.” Le Parisien Libéré (20 October 1948): n.p.

Bertin, Célia. Jean Renoir: A Life in Pictures. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

“L’Actualité du montage.” Le Technicien du Film (15 January 1960): 4-5.

Mérigeau, Pascal. Jean Renoir. Paris: Flammarion, 2012.

Renoir, Jean. Ma Vie et mes films. Paris: Editions Flammarion, 2005.

Sidhu, Maya. “Reconsidering Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise through editor Marguerite Renoir.” French Screen Studies (7 May 2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/26438941.2020.1741988.

Archival Paper Collections:

Pierre Gaut Collection (letters from Marguerite Houllé-Renoir and Jean Renoir to producer Pierre Gaut). GAUT14-B1. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Citation

Sidhu, Maya. "Marguerite Renoir." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-v1zd-dw30>

Kinuyo Tanaka

by Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández

Kinuyo Tanaka was, and still is, one of the most celebrated stars in the history of Japanese cinema. She dedicated her whole life to cinema, acting in over 250 films and collaborating with the most important directors. In the post-war period, Tanaka herself became a film director, the second woman in Japan after wartime filmmaker Tazuko Sakane. Between 1953 and 1962, Tanaka directed six feature films working within the mainstream cinema produced by the Japanese studio system. She was the only female director active during the post-war Golden Age of Japanese cinema in the late 1950s. Her outstanding career in front of and behind the camera not only accompanies the history and technical transformations of cinema in Japan, from the silent era until the late 1970s. It also embodies the socio-political and cultural changes of Japanese society and its female members, offering a unique opportunity to examine the intersections between women’s authorship, representation, and gender discourses in modern Japan.

Born in Shimonoseki, in the southwest of Japan, Tanaka entered the film world in 1924. She was 14 years old and was hired as an actress by Shōchiku studios, one of the major film companies in pre-war Japan, which specialized in modern genre films [gendai geki], and particularly in woman’s films [josei eiga]. In the 1930s, she became one of the most representative stars of the studio, participating in the first successful Japanese talkie, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (1931), and gaining audience favor through her roles in romantic melodramas such as The Dancing Girl of Izu (1933), Okoto to Sasuke (1935), and The Love-Troth Tree (1938-39). Her popularity and success were such that Tanaka’s name was even used in film titles to attract the public, for example, in The Story of Kinuyo (1930), Kinuyo the Lady Doctor (1937), and Kinuyo’s First Love (1940).

Kinuyo Tanaka in Jinsei no onimotsu (1935). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Tanaka worked exclusively for Shōchiku until 1950 when she became a freelance actress. Her years at Shōchiku overlapped with times of profound transformation in Japan, particularly for women. Tanaka’s characters and star persona bore the traces of those changes, often becoming a site for their production, circulation, and negotiation. For instance, in films such as A Burden of Life (1935), Tanaka played the role of the “modern girl” [moga], a female figure that embodied the national and gender anxieties of Japanese modernity (Wada-Marciano 2008, 76-110). Similarly, during the wartime years (1931-1945), Tanaka participated in propaganda productions such as Pray at Dawn (1940) and Army (1944). In these films, she represented, but sometimes also challenged, the female ideal of “good wife, wise mother” [ryōsai kenbo], which was encouraged by the militarist ideology driving the Japanese nation at the time (Lee 2011). In the aftermath of the Japanese war defeat in 1945, Tanaka also adapted her career to the new post-war order. Following the film policy of the Allied Occupation forces, many films promoted democratic ideas and political reforms, as well as notions of gender equality and women’s rights (all according to American standards at the time). Tanaka contributed to this trend by acting in the so-called “women’s liberation trilogy” directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, which included Victory of Women (1946), The Love of Sumako the Actress (1948), and My Love Has Been Burning (1949). Moreover, after the war, Tanaka also engaged, on and off screen, with the national traumas and gender contradictions that emerged in this turbulent period of Japanese history. Departing from her image as a national sweetheart, she impersonated the problematic post-war figure of the streetwalker prostitute [pan pan] in Women of Night (1947) and was involved in a media scandal after her tour of the United States as cultural ambassador led to her being accused of Americanization.

In addition to the changing socio-historical context, Tanaka’s post-war career was also determined by her collaboration with Mizoguchi. Their work together lasted 15 years (1940-1954) and accounted for 14 films (12 of which are extant), becoming one of the most successful and critically acclaimed actress-director teams in post-war Japanese cinema. Tanaka’s challenging roles in Mizoguchi’s films shaped her acting profile as a mature and skillful actress, and films such as The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) brought them international recognition, making Mizoguchi one of the most renowned Japanese auteurs. The rumors of a love affair between the two extended the professional partnership to their private life, reinforcing the myth of the “male director-female muse”–although Tanaka always denied any romantic involvement (Shindō 1975, 418-419).

Pamphlet photo of Kinuyo Tanaka with Silver Bear statue for Best Actress from 1975 Berlin International Film Festival, 1999. Courtesy of the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute.

However, despite the undeniable relevance of their collaboration, the long career of Tanaka in front of the camera went far beyond her work with Mizoguchi. She collaborated with world-famous directors such as Yasujirō Ozu (10 films spanning from 1929 to 1958) and Mikio Naruse (for example, Mother [1952] and Flowing [1956]). In Japan, her name was also associated with filmmakers such as Heinosuke Gosho, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Hiroshi Shimizu, who was her partner for a brief time at the beginning of her career and directed her in films such as Ornamental Hairpin (1941). Another example of Tanaka’s meaningful collaborations was her work with Japanese director Kei Kumai in his film Sandakan No. 8 (1974), for which Tanaka received a last recognition by winning the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1975, only two years before her death as a result of a brain tumor in 1977.

Side by side with her acting work, Tanaka also developed a less known but significant career behind the camera. Her decision to become a film director in the early 1950s was likely motivated by personal ambitions and desires as she was passionate about cinema and dedicated her whole life to it. Tanaka often said that she chose to marry cinema, a catchphrase that expressed her passion, but that also reflected the social expectations upon Japanese women at the time (Tanaka 1997, 293). In fact, Japanese actresses of the period typically retired young, when they got married, but Tanaka never married nor had children. Instead, she chose to continue her work and became a mature actress and director. In 1953, the year in which Tanaka made her debut as a director with Love Letter, she was 43 years old and faced the same unfair destiny of many middle-aged actresses, with ever fewer opportunities for playing interesting parts, let alone protagonist roles.

Photo of Kinuyo Tanaka on set of Love Letter (1953) in the film magazine Eiga Fan, January 1954. Courtesy of the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute

The move to the director’s chair seemed a natural choice for her, but it was also inspired and made possible by the political and ideological transformations mentioned before, which occurred in Japan after the country’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. Changes such as the right to vote and the legal equality of the sexes included in the new post-war Constitution particularly affected women and their social position in Japanese society. “After the war also in Japan, women’s advancement became evident in every aspect of society, including the entrance of women in parliament. […],” Tanaka explained. “I too felt like trying to do something new by working as a female director” (1997, 372).

Tanaka’s star status and her contacts in the Japanese film industry also played in her favor and enabled her to direct films with different studios and to collaborate with a wide range of stars and technical and artistic staff. Her ties with the great directors of the period also proved important (even if her great collaborator, Mizoguchi, was vocally resistant to her move to directing): Naruse employed Tanaka as his assistant for two months during the shooting of Older Brother, Younger Sister (1953) and Kinoshita and Ozu wrote the scripts for her first two films, Love Letter and The Moon Has Risen (1955), respectively.

Photo of Kinuyo Tanaka on the set of Love Letter (1953) in the film magazine Eiga Fan, January 1954. Courtesy of the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute.

The six films Tanaka directed, while moving broadly within the genre conventions of the romantic melodrama to which she was mostly associated as an actress, disrupted the dominant representations of women in Japanese cinema of the time. She tackled unexplored topics such as breast cancer and women’s colonial experiences and questioned social issues such as female prostitution and women’s sexuality from an incisive perspective. In one way or another, the six films directed by Tanaka highlight women’s experiences and subjectivity, but do so working within the boundaries of mainstream cinema.

For instance, post-war gender politics about female prostitutes are problematized in two of her works. In Love Letter, the national (male) trauma of the war defeat is represented through the love story of an ex-Japanese soldier who discovers that his beloved girlfriend had a sexual relationship with an American official after the war. In her fifth film, Girls of Dark (1961), Tanaka also explored this issue from another angle, depicting the difficulties of a former prostitute to change her life after the enforcement of the Anti-Prostitution Law in 1956. Unlike many post-war films, these films do not offer a sexualized representation of the female body for male consumption. Instead, Tanaka represented more daring portrayals of women’s sexuality, constructing unusual female characters. For example, in her most celebrated film, The Eternal Breasts (1955), she described the tragic fight of a female poet against breast cancer, not in terms of a passive self-sacrificing victim, but as the emergence of an audacious female subject able to express and reclaim her sexual desires and subjectivity.

Pamphlet commemorating Kinuyo Tanaka’s centennial in 2009. Private Collection.

The central place of female characters and women’s issues in Tanaka’s filmography was in part reflective of the wider Japanese cinema of the time, but it also reveals Tanaka’s agency and authorial strategy as a woman filmmaker negotiating her circumstances in 1950s Japan. Being a star and the only female director at the time, Tanaka developed her career behind the camera from a gendered position that determined her choices and the reception of her films. However, instead of resisting her categorization, she turned this to her advantage, constructing spaces of female authorship and subjectivity within the male-dominated cinema industry and its images of women. Starting with The Eternal Breasts, Tanaka chose to collaborate with other women filmmakers and writers. She formed a team with female scriptwriters such as Sumie Tanaka for The Eternal Breasts and Girls of Dark and Natto Wada for The Wandering Princess (1960). These films adapted biographical stories or fictional novels written by female authors and focus on the multifaceted experiences and points of view of female protagonists, who in turn were played by charismatic stars like Yumeji Tsukioka or Machiko Kyō. Tanaka’s last film, and the only period drama [jidai-geki] of her career, Love Under the Crucifix (1962), was produced by Ninjin kurabu, a film company founded by three actresses, Yoshiko Kuga, Keiko Kishi, and Ineko Arima (who also starred in the film). The idea behind the project also came from a woman, the executive producer Hisako Nagashima, who discussed the production with Tanaka for a few years.

Cover of film program for retrospective dedicated to Kinuyo Tanaka on the occasion of her centennial in 2009. Private Collection.

Despite her fame and prestige as an actress–or perhaps precisely because of it–Tanaka’s pioneering career as a film director is still widely unknown, and the films she made as a director mostly lack any kind of availability. However, working with women filmmakers to articulate women’s experiences onscreen, she became an important node of female authorship and expression in post-war Japanese cinema. Luckily, in recent years, the work of scholars and programmers in the fields of Japanese film studies and women’s film history is bringing Tanaka’s career and films into focus (e.g., González-López and Smith 2018). These efforts directly question the formation of the cinematic canon and its mechanism of exclusion, and help us to recognize the relevance of Tanaka’s filmography in the history of Japanese cinema and beyond.

See also: Tazuko Sakane

Bibliography

Armendáriz-Hernández, Alejandra. “Tanaka Kinuyo, actor and director.” Sight & Sound (October 2017): 49.

------. “Repensando el autor en el cine japonés. La autoría femenina de Tanaka Kinuyo en La luna se ha levantado (1955).” In El Japón contemporáneo: Una aproximación desde los estudios culturales. Ed. Artur Lozano Méndez. Barcelona: Editions Bellaterra-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2017. 79-104.

Fujiwara, Chris. “Love Letter. A Centenary Valentine to Japanese Screen Legend Kinuyo Tanaka.” Moving Image Source (23 October 2009): n.p. http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/love-letter-20091023

Furukawa, Kaoru. Hana mo arashi mo: joyū Tanaka Kinuyo no shōgai. Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2004.

González, Irene and Mayu Ashida. “Josei no seiteki yokubō no hatsuro: Tanaka Kinuyo kantoku sakuhin ‘Chibusa yo eien nare.’” CineMagaziNet! no. 19 (Autumn 2015): n.p. http://www.cmn.hs.h.kyoto-u.ac.jp/CMN19/PDF/kinuyo_article2015.pdf

González-López, Irene and Michael Smith, eds. Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

Katō, Mikirō. “Josei ga kantoku ni naru toki: Tanaka Kinuyo ‘Chibusa yo eien nare’ (1955).” In Nihon eiga-ron 1933–2007: Tekusuto to kontekusuto. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2011. 160-170.

Johnson, William. “In Search of a Star: Kinuyo Tanaka.” Film Comment vol. 30, no.1 (January/February 1994): 18-25.

Lee, Kyoung-suk. “Senji-ka Nihon eiga ni okeru Tanaka Kinuyo no hyōshō henka kenkyū.” Bungaku kyōiku no. 43 (2011): 111-146.

McDonald, Keiko. “Married to Cinema: Actress and Filmmaker Kinuyo Tanaka (1909-1976).” Asian Cinema Journal vol.16, no.1 (Spring/Summer 2005): 184-204.

Ōba, Kenji. Ginmaku no koi: Tanaka Kinuyo to Ozu Yasujirō. Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 2014.

Saitō, Ayako. “Onna ga kaki, onna ga toru toki: nihon eigashi ni okeru futari no Tanaka.” In Meiji gakuin daigaku geijutsu gaku kenkyū. Tokyo: Meiji gakuin daigaku, 2012. 13-31.

Shindō, Kaneto. Aru eiga kantoku no shōgai: Mizoguchi Kenji no kiroku. Tokyo: Eijinsha, 1975.

------.  Shōsetsu Tanaka Kinuyo. Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1986.

Smith, Michael. “Stardom: Tanaka Kinuyo.” In Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2. Ed. John Berra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 142-148.

Tanaka, Kinuyo et al. “Eiga ni okeru josei no tachiba: Zadankai.” Kinema junpō 283 (April 1961): 65-68. Rpt. in Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández and Irene González-López, “Roundtable: the Position of Women in Post-War Japanese Cinema (Kinema junpō, 1961).” Film Studies 16 (Spring 2017): 36-55.

Tanaka, Kinuyo. Tanaka Kinuyo kikigaki. 1975. Kyoto: Kyoto Bunka Hakubutsukan, 1997.

------. “Tanaka Kinuyo.” 1975. Rpt. in Watakushi no rirekisho: Joyū no unmei. Ed. Kobayashi Shunta. Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 2016. 289-387.

Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2008.

Archival Paper Collections:

Periodicals, films, pamphlets, photos, ephemera, archival documents, and books related to Kinuyo Tanaka are held in various collections in the following institutions:

National Film Archive of Japan

Kawakita Memorial Film Institute/Kawakita kinen eiga bunka zaidan/川喜多記念映画文化財団

Tanaka Kinuyo Cultural Museum/Tanaka Kinuyo Bunka-kan/田中絹代ぶんか館

Musée du Cinema/Cinémathèque Française

Citation

Armendáriz-Hernández, Alejandra. "Kinuyo Tanaka." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-jp6a-j763>

Francesca Bertini

by Monica Dall’Asta

Francesca Bertini was an extremely careful guardian of her image and legacy throughout her whole life. A major star of the international silent screen, she has recounted her hugely successful career in different autobiographic writings and interventions. An invaluable source of information for the history of Italian cinema, these documents are notoriously reticent—and sometimes unreliable—about certain personal details of her life. For example, she never revealed to have been first registered in 1892 at an orphanage in Florence as Elena Taddei, the daughter of Adelina di Venanzio Fratiglioni, a single mother and possibly a stage actress (Jandelli 2006, 31-2). While many sources indicate her first surname to be Seracini, the only concrete information we have about her acquired identity is that she became Elena Vitiello in 1910, when her mother married Arturo Vitiello, a Neapolitan propman or furniture dealer. Bertini was introduced to the sprightly Neapolitan theatrical milieu at an early age. She got her first, supporting role on stage when she was just seventeen, in the widely acclaimed 1909 production of “Assunta Spina”—an intense southern melodrama by reputed author Salvatore Di Giacomo. One of the most representative texts of the new Neapolitan popular theater, “Assunta Spina” was later transposed on screen by Bertini in 1915. The final result is still regarded as one of the masterpieces of Italian silent cinema and an emblematic example of Verist cinema. By 1915, Bertini had already been cast in more than 50 films, including many one and two-reel historical reconstructions and a few features. The following years saw her continuing to grow in popularity, with her films gaining huge acclaim wherever they were presented, from Europe to Latin America and from Russia to the United States.

Photo from a 1909 stage performance of Salvatore Di Giacomo’s “Assunta Spina,” featuring Francesca Bertini (far right). “Arte e vita di Francesca Bertini. ” Film no. 28.

The diva’s first autobiography was published in several installments during the summer of 1938 in a popular film magazine. Later revised and extended, this text served as a base for a book published in 1969, Il resto non conta. In addition, Bertini gave many interviews in her later years. The most extraordinary interview was filmed by Gianfranco Mingozzi in 1981—partially during a private screening of Assunta Spina at the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome—and was later included in L’ultima diva (1982), a TV documentary in three episodes, which also had a shorter theatrical edition now available on DVD.

Photo of Francesca Bertini, from an undated promotional booklet L’arte muta: La vita delle attrici. Courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna.

Bertini’s different autobiographical interventions are consistent in reclaiming a creative as well as managerial role in the production of all her major star vehicles. Especially in the long interview recorded by Mingozzi, she credits herself not just for obtaining the rights to adapt “Assunta Spina” from Di Giacomo, but, more importantly, she argues for directorial recognition for that film. This claim was later confirmed in a 1981 interview with her co-star, and the official director of the film, Gustavo Serena (Martinelli 1992, 1:56). As with most of Bertini’s subsequent films, Assunta Spina was produced by Caesar, a company owned by Giuseppe Barattolo, a man who was to play a major role in the future of Italian silent cinema.

Francesca Bertini, Assunta Spina (1915). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The huge success achieved by her early features—for example Histoire d’un Pierrot (1914), in which she performed en travesti in the title role, Sangue bleu (1914), Nelly la gigolette (1915), and La signora delle camelie (1915)—gave Bertini substantial negotiating power that she used to obtain higher salaries and the freedom to choose the scripts of her films (Ghione 1930, 45). In 1917, three films were released whose stories were attributed to a Frank Bert, who—as the reviewers were ready to point out—was just a male stand-in for Bertini herself (Dall’Asta 2006). None of these films are extant today, so it is impossible to judge whether the negative reviews they received were grounded. However, based upon the surviving documentation, their plots do not stick out as particularly original. Rather, they repeat conventional narrative formulas, chosen to provide the diva with multiple occasions to show off her glamorous persona and her luxurious toilettes, which were intended to arouse the admiration of her numerous female spectators. At the same time, the plots reveal how strenuously Bertini was working to consolidate her image as an international film star. The narrative of La perla del cinema (1916), in particular, repeated the meta-cinematographic plot of one of Asta Nielsen’s major vehicles, Die Filmprimadonna (1913), chosen as the ultimate model for an exemplary sad ending. Italian cinema, and especially the diva film, was then known by audiences around the world for its preference for tragic endings, a feature that often required the female protagonist to die spectacularly in the last scene. Bertini was a virtuoso of the death scene and there is no doubt her films had largely contributed to this stereotype.

Still, La perla del cinema (1917), Francesca Bertini. Courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna.

Like the plot of Nielsen’s film, La perla del cinema had Bertini perform in the role of a double of herself, a star at the height of her popularity. However, the two characters were presented in very different ways. While Nielsen was introduced as an established film actress, already influential enough to easily convince the producer to hire her new lover as her male lead, Bertini appeared in the role of an ingénue. She was a simple shepherdess who entered the film industry by chance after accidentally meeting—and falling in love with—a male star. In each film, Nielsen and Bertini’s characters follow parallel paths as they grow more successful and ultimately became the target of their respective partners’ increasing jealousy. In the end, depressed and exhausted by men’s harassment, they both commit suicide. Unlike Nielsen, however, Bertini had her character perform suicide just in front of the film camera, as the final scene of an autobiographic melodrama inspired by the character’s tragic life.

The cold critical reactions and, supposedly, poor audience response may have influenced Bertini to drop her screenwriting ambitions forever. But they certainly did not damage her popularity. Nor did they stop her from striving to empower her position within the film industry. Around 1918, Bertini was probably the most powerful woman in Italian cinema. She was certainly the highest paid, and her authoritative temperament and exorbitant privileges were so well known that they could even become an object of irony on screen. For example, in Mariute (1918), another meta-cinematographic film that contains sequences shot at the Caesar studios, Bertini performed the role of herself: a whimsical star who sleeps all morning and is regularly late to the set, causing all the other actors to complain.

Still, La piccola fonte (1917), Francesca Bertini. Courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna.

Bertini’s charismatic, authoritative temperament on the film set has been most suggestively described by Verist writer Roberto Bracco, who wrote the scripts of two of her titles from 1914 and 1917, Don Pietro Caruso and La piccola fonte, respectively. In recalling the shooting of a particularly dramatic scene, he remembered her not just as “surprisingly beautiful,” but also as exceptionally “fit to rule, to dominate, to master madly!…She did not pay any attention to me, so busy she was acting crazy as her fantasy suggested her to do. The cameraman turned the crank with absorbed devotion. The director observed in a corner, silently, in rapture” (Bracco 1929, 9). While imbued with the romantic stereotype of the hysterical, crazy woman, this picture is also indicative of Bertini’s determination to be in total control of her film image, with her appointed director reduced to a marginal, even irrelevant, position. As a matter of fact, Bracco also called her both a “superdiva” and a “cinematografaia”—the latter a brilliant neologism translatable as “female filmmaker.”

Repeatedly, in her autobiographic writings, Bertini claimed a directorial status with arguments that demonstrate both her knowledge of later cinema and her acquaintance with the discourse of film history. In the interview with Mingozzi, she goes as far as to state that “film history has to be rewritten,” for, as the true author of Assunta Spina, she should be regarded as a forerunner of Neorealism, and therefore a pioneer of Italian cinema’s most representative style. She claims to be responsible for the whole “idea of shooting down in the streets, going to the Tribunal, finding the extras in the streets.” Therefore, she concludes: “To not be immodest, I should say I was truly the director—or, more precisely, I was responsible for the film’s script, adaptation, setting and direction,” and elsewhere in the interview she even mentions editing.

Poster for Invidia (1919), by Carlo Nicco. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In his 1930 memoirs, her old collaborator Emilio Ghione, an actor and director who had worked with her on several features at Celio in 1912-13, blamed the outrageous salaries of Bertini and other major divas for precipitating the crisis of Italian cinema, which reached its peak in the aftermath of World War I (Ghione 45). While the reasons for the industrial disaster that national film production underwent in that period are certainly more complex, Bertini’s subsequent work is representative of the inability of Italian cinema to innovate its products. When, in 1919, Barattolo launched the unfortunate project of a trust among the major film companies (Unione Cinematografica Italiana), Bertini entered the deal with a new company created in her name. Unfortunately, the new company’s first production resulted in some of the  worst critical responses of her entire career. Inspired by Eugene Sue’s serial novel of the same name, I sette peccati capitali was an anthology series specifically designed for Bertini’s performative versatility and emotional expressiveness. Her performance was unanimously criticized for being excessively stereotyped, but this did not prevent the films from being distributed abroad, particularly in Germany and Czechoslovakia (where the complete series was found and restored in 2003).

“Sensazioni e ricordi. La prima posa.”

“Sensazioni e ricordi. La prima posa.”

Bertini kept making films at the rate of four or five every year, assisted by her faithful director Roberto Roberti (a pseudonym for Vincenzo Leone, the father of Sergio Leone). In 1920, she was offered a contract by Fox to go to Hollywood, but she declined. Her marriage to Alfred Paul Cartier, the heir of an important Swiss family and a soccer player, and the birth of her son Jean in 1921 did not interrupt her career, but during the 1920s she appeared increasingly less on screen. Her feeble voice and outdated acting style did not facilitate her transition to sound. After the advent of sound cinema Bertini starred in only a couple more films. The first of these, La femme d’une nuit/La donna di una note (1931), was shot in both French and Italian simultaneously. Bertini came back in 1935 with Odette, a remake of one of her old hits by Victorien Sardou, and in 1943 with Dora o le spie, an obscure Italian-Spanish co-production. In 1976, Bernardo Bertolucci paid homage to the memory of the diva film by giving Bertini a cameo as a nun in 1900/Novecento (1976).

See alsoAsta Nielsen

Bibliography

Allen, Julie K. “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.

Bertini, Francesca. “Arte e vita di Francesca Bertini”/“Art and life of Francesca Bertini.” Film nos. 28-42 (August-November 1938).

------. Il resto non conta/The Rest Doesn’t Count. Pisa: Giardini, 1969.

------. “Sensazioni e ricordi. La prima posa.” In penombra (June 1918): 22-5.

Biagi, Enzo. Amori. Milano: Rizzoli, 1988.

Bianchi, Pietro. Francesca Bertini e le dive del cinema muto. Torino: UTET, 1969.

Bracco, Roberto. “Francesca Bertini, Giovanni Grasso, e io.” Comoedia vol. VI, no. 6 (15 June 1929): 9-11.

Brunetta, Gian Piero. Il cinema muto italiano. Da “La presa di Roma” a “Sole” (1905-1929). Bari: Laterza, 2008.

Costa, Antonio. “Autobiografia come ritratto d’artista.” In Prima dell’autore. Eds. Anja Franceschetti and Leonardo Quaresima. Udine: Forum, 1997. 160-166.

Costantini, Costanzo. La diva imperiale. Milano: Bompiani, 1982.

Dall’Asta, Monica. “The Singular Multiple: Francesca Bertini as Star and Director.” Immagine. Note di storia del cinema no. 12 (2006): 48-68.

Dalle Vacche, Angela. Diva: Defiance and Passion in Italian Silent Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.

Ghione, Emilio. “Le cinéma en Italie.” L’art cinématographique vol. 7. Paris: Alcan, 1930. 29-68.

Jandelli, Cristina. Le dive italiane del muto: Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, Pina Menichelli. Palermo: L'Epos, 2006.

Martinelli, Vittorio. Il cinema muto italiano 1915-1931. 11 vols. Rome: RAI-ERI, 1992-96.

Mingozzi, Gianfranco, ed. Francesca Bertini. Recco (GE): Le Mani, 2003.

Ramsey-Portolano, Catherine. Performing Bodies: Female Illness in Italian Literature and Cinema (1860–1920). Lahman and London: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018.

Citation

Dall’Asta, Monica. "Francesca Bertini." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-8nvt-px53>

Renée Deliot

by Micaela Veronesi

Renée Deliot is best known as Mario Guaita’s screenwriter and wife. She collaborated exclusively with her husband, an actor and director best known as a strongman of the Italian silent cinema, in the style of Maciste. Deliot’s role, however, was nonetheless central and much more important than film scholarship has revealed to date. Notably, Deliot and Guaita’s relationship, which lasted thirty-seven years, was both a professional partnership and a love affair, even if they only were married toward the end of their life together, in 1955.

Renée Deliot’s signature. Private Collection.

Based on existing birth and marriage certificates currently held in France at the Archives de Paris and Mairie de Marseille (City Hall), Renée Felicie Deliot was born in Paris in 1881. Her mother, Annette Berger, died when Deliot was still a child. Her father, Joseph Deliot, remarried in 1886 for the third time. In 1897, at the young age of sixteen, Deliot got married for the first time to Felix Leon Ligot, who was ten years her senior. On the marriage certificate, she declared herself an “embroiderer,” while her husband is identified as a “designer.” No further information is available about the years of Deliot’s first marriage, nor about her first husband. One theory suggests that he may have died in World War I.

Renée Deliot’s birth certificate. Private Collection.

Evidence shows that Deliot met Guaita in 1919 and they started working together that same year. Guaita had become very famous in the 1910s when, as a member of the Trio Ausonia, he appeared in athletic performances and in tableaux vivants based on renowned paintings and sculptures. In 1912, he started to act for the cinema under the alias “Ausonia.”

Screenshot, L’atleta fantasma (1919), Renée Deliot (w). Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Screenshot, L’atleta fantasma (1919), Renée Deliot (w). Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Deliot’s screenwriting work began for the De Giglio production house in Turin, Italy. Her first completed film was L’atleta fantasma (1919). Despite this being her first scenario, she demonstrated a definite personal style and complete mastery of the techniques and tools of cinematic storytelling through the use of dialogue, plot twists, filmic tricks, and more. L’atleta fantasma is a spy story, in which a band of criminals is involved in the trafficking of stolen jewels. Ausonia plays Harry Auderson, a gentleman who leads a double life as a masked hero who protects the weak (at the beginning of the film we see him catch a thief who attacked a man in the street). Harry is engaged to Jenny Ladimoor, a young woman of wealthy descent, who is ignorant of his double life, but madly in love with the masked hero’s deeds. She dreams of living an equally adventurous life. Harry, however, when not fighting criminals, behaves in a shy manner in order to avoid being discovered. Committed to defend a precious medallion against various attempts of theft, his phantom athlete collides with the criminal gang headed by a shady individual nicknamed “the Professor.” In order to create suspense, the film makes frequent use of motifs such as a listening ear, and a hand writing notes in a notebook, as well as espionage gadgets. The camera often does not show Ausonia’s face, but rather parts of his body, such as his hands touching his top hat or mask (both symbols of his character).

La Vita Cinematografica ad for L’atleta fantasma (1919), Renée Deliot (w). Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

In this script, and Deliot’s others, she improved Ausonia’s character by making him more sophisticated. From L’atleta fantasma onward, Ausonia’s films exhibit qualities typical of the serialized novel, with adventurous plots, espionage, bourgeois drama, tropes from grand guignol, and mysterious and transformational characters, fitting within a larger tradition of the doppelgänger motif. Deliot wrote many adventures, drawing inspiration from everything from popular narratives and high literature to front-page news and stage melodramas. In every story, Ausonia’s strength and muscular body are in the spotlight as Deliot continually highlights his athletic prowess. Almost all of her films reach their climax when Ausonia confronts the villain. In these sequences, his strong body is shown lifting a heavy weight, breaking a chain open with just his bare hands, or climbing up something by holding a rope with this teeth.

Beyond his physicality, Ausonia’s characters, as written by Deliot, present him as a modern hero, individualistic and bourgeois. His actions are spurred by a personal principle for justice, defending the weak, but also his own interests, and delivering criminals to justice, but also operating outside of the law. Often, he works on his own (e.g., Mes p’tits [1923] and Dans les mansardes de Paris [1924]) or with the help of chosen collaborators (e.g., L’atleta fantasma and Gli spettri della fattoria [1923]). Deliot continually presents Ausonia’s character as a sturdy gentleman, handsome and good-hearted, a sort of superman ante-litteram, with similarities to characters like Arsène Lupin and Fantômas. It is worth noting too that Deliot’s female characters show physical strength as well, and are often modern and dynamic, playing active roles alongside Ausonia. An analysis of the films that have been preserved, and of contemporary advertisements, shows how Ausonia in time became a brand name mainly by virtue of Deliot’s scripts. Yet, she has been largely forgotten in cinema history.

La Vita Cinematografica ad for the Ausonia brand. Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Deliot is featured, however, in various reviews of the time, the most important being a 1923 article in La Rivista Cinematografica entitled “La Buona Fata d’un Grande Attore,” which translates to “The Good Fairy of a Great Actor.” In this article, Deliot is portrayed as “the angel of the hearth” (Morozzoni 57) who devoted her life to supporting the career of Ausonia–here wrongly described as her husband so as to conform to the cultural standards of propriety of the time–writing stories for him while never neglecting the housework. The articles describes her as follows:

Modest, working in the shadow of the great star, inspired by her love for him, she wrote one after another: L’atleta fantasma, Il figlio di Ercole, La cintura delle Amazzoni, Atlas, La nave dei miliardi, Sotto i ponti di Parigi, an adaptation of the Balzac novel, Il fantasma d’acciaio, Frisson, Il pescatore di perle, I fantasmi della fattoria, and a film that will come out next winter, I miei piccoli e la corsa all’amore by Paul Barlatier (Morozzoni 57).

La Vita Cinematografica ad for Ausonia’s brand. Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

The tone of the article is decidedly dismissive of Deliot’s talent as separate from her husband’s work, and the content features a few errors. For example, it is incorrect to state that Sotto i ponti di Parigi (1921), directed by Guaita, is an adaptation of Balzac’s novel of the same name, when the film is actually an adaptation of Ferragus (1833), the first short novel in the trilogy Histoire des Treize from Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (1829-1859). Essentially, it becomes clear that the author of the article considers Deliot’s achievements significant only in so far as they contribute to Ausonia’s success:

Despite the fact that she lived in Turin, she would always travel with her husband in all his journeys and would help him insofar as her intelligence and her good heart would allow it.  Ausonia directs most of the works he acts in; M.me Renée de Liot is always by his side, ready to offer her observations as a writer and as an artist, thus accomplishing the necessary bond between the technical and the spiritual in developing the subject (Morozzoni 57).

Although crediting Deliot with the scriptwriting, the author of the article still considers her greatest role that of supportive wife. However, she perhaps did a good deal more on set, an assessment that Italian film history has repeatedly overlooked. According to Vittorio Martinelli and Mario Quargnolo:

According to the cameraman Fiorio, who worked with Guaita in France, it was the wife, the not very attractive Felicie, who wrote the subjects and took part in directing the films. She was a very good-natured and patient lady, who always put up with her husband’s whims and tantrums (37).

Future research must address the significant and complex ways that Deliot, in addition to screenwriting, may have shaped her cinematic collaborations.

Only one of Deliot’s scripts still survives. The screenplay for Atlas (1920) is preserved at the National Cinema Museum of Turin. Fortunately, many of her films are preserved in various archives around the world and give us access to Deliot’s corpus. Deliot and Ausonia’s overall film production work may seem frenetic; in less than four years they released over ten films, among which are L’atleta fantasma, Lotte di giganti (1919), AtlasLa cintura della Amazzoni (1920), Sotto i ponti di ParigiLa mascotte di Sparta (1922), La nave dei miliardi (1922), Frisson (1922), Gli spettri della fattoria, and Il pescatore di perle (1923).

La Revista Cinematografica ad for Sotto i ponti di Parigi (1921), Renée Deliot (w). Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Deliot and Ausonia worked in Italy until 1923 and then moved to Marseille, France, presumably because the Fascist regime did not favor stories like the ones that they produced, in which foreign names were used. According to a 2001 issue of the periodical 1895, at the time of the couple’s move, one headline read: “Suspected of vulgar Parisianism, Mario Guaita and Renée de Liot leave Italy for Marseille” (Albera and Gili 223). In Marseille, Deliot set up a production and distribution company, Ausonia Film, in order to sell their films and produce new ones. The couple also collaborated with Lauréa Film, under the direction of Paul Barlatier. As with their Italian period, the couple worked very hard in France, producing many films in just a few years. These included: Mes p’titsLa Course à l’amour (1923), Dans les mansardes de Paris, Follie d’atleta (1926), and La donna carnefice nel paese dell’oro (1926). Deliot wrote the screenplays for all of these films.

Still from Mes p’tits (1923), Renée Deliot (w). Private Collection.

In 1926, Deliot applied to the Marseille city council for permission to store films in her own house, presenting a project for a storehouse. She may have been trying to increase her distribution activity. After 1926 Guaita stopped acting and Deliot stopped writing as well. According to Martinelli and Quargnolo, they managed and ran a movie theater in Marseille for some time (37). Guaita died in 1956, just one year after he and Deliot were married in Marseille. He had just been left a widower when his first wife Ersilia Amorosi, a café-chantant singer from whom he had been separated since 1911, died. Deliot died in Marseille four years later, on August 27, 1960. On her death certificate, she is listed as “without profession.”

La Revista Cinematografica ad from 1923, using a signed telegram by Renée Deliot to promote the film Mes’ p’tits (1923). Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Bibliography

Albera, François and Jean A. Gili, eds. “Dictionnaire du cinéma français des années vingt.” 1895 33 (June 2001): 1-424.

Blom, Ivo, and Micaela Veronesi. “Muscoli e cervello. I film di Mario Guaita Ausonia tra avventura e crime story”/“Muscles and Brains: the Films of Mario Ausonia Between Adventure and Crime.Giallo italiano. Eds. Luca Mazzei and Paola Valentini. Bianco e Nero no. 587 (2017): 18-29.

Martinelli, Vittorio and Mario Quargnolo. Maciste & Co.: I giganti buoni del muto italiano. Gemona: Edizioni Cinemapopolare, 1981.

Morozzani, F. “La Buona Fata d’un Grande Attore. Una visita ad Ausonia.” La Rivista Cinematografica vol. IV, no. 18 (25 September 1923): 57.

Veronesi, Micaela. “Dimmi soldato! Il carteggio Deliot/Giusti sulle pagine di Film durante la Prima guerra mondiale.” In Narrazioni e immagini delle donne in guerra (1914-1918). Eds. Giulia Albanese, Alessandro Faccioli, Carlotta Sorba. Torino: Kaplan, 2016. 129-139.

------. “Femminismi pionieri. Scrivere la vita di una donna che non c’era.” In Filmare il femminismo. Eds. Lucia Cardone and Sara Filippelli. Pisa: Ets, 2015. 17-26.

------. “Molta fantasia per un unico uomo. Le sceneggiature avventurose di Renée Deliot.” Gesti silenziosi. Presenze femminili nel cinema muto italiano. Eds. Cristina Jandelli and Lucia Cardone. Bianco e Nero no. 570 (May-August 2011): 83-91.

------. “Una vita spericolata: Renée Deliot sceneggiatrice avventurosa negli anni Venti.” In Cinema e scritture femminili. Letterate italiane tra la pagina e lo schermo. Eds. Lucia Cardone and Sara Filippelli. Rome: Iacobelli editore, 2012. 31-43

Archival Paper Collections:

Atlas script, n.d. Typescript with handwritten notes. 47 ff. A171/28. Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Deliot's application to Marseille city council to store dangerous materials/“Deliot Renée, quartier Thiers à Marseille: Etablissements classés, demande d'autorisations d'ouverture ou de stockage de produits dangereux: Films (1924 et 1925).” 5M330 e 5M331. Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône.

Citation

Veronesi, Micaela. "Renée Deliot." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4dmh-as89>

Pearl Ing

by S. Lousia Wei

Pearl Ing as a young girl. Private Collection.

Pearl Ing, or Yin Mingzhu, was the first woman to play the leading role in a film made in Shanghai—the earliest center of Chinese filmmaking. Ing’s original name was Shangxian. Like most children born into upper-middle class families, she also had another name, Longguan. Later, she adopted the name “Pearl” in English, or “Mingzhu” in Chinese (J. Chen 59). Her father died when she was a child, but left her and her mother a lottery ticket that won the grand prize. This windfall allowed Pearl’s mother to move the family to Shanghai, where she went to the prestigious McTyeire School for Girls. As a top student there, Ing learned new ideas and manners. She was good at dancing, swimming, singing, bicycling, driving, and horseback riding (Zheng 15). She adopted her early fashion style from American serial queen Pearl White (Song n.p.), who became very popular in China for films where she played the detective role of “Pearl” and adventurous young women like Pauline in The Perils of Pauline (1914) and Elaine in The New Exploits of Elaine (1915) (J. Chen 59). Ing ordered custom-made clothes and shoes that she designed herself, and these items were often displayed in the windows of tailors and shoemakers as the newest fashion (Zheng 15). Nicknamed “Miss F.F.” (Foreign Fashion), she was already a star in Shanghai’s social circles at seventeen. Ing and her two schoolmates—Fu Wenhao (“Miss A.A.” or Ace Ace) and Yuan Danru (“Miss S.S.” or Shanghai Style)—formed a trio of Shanghai flappers, and were often invited to high-class parties in Shanghai (J. Chen 60).

Pearl Ing, Some Girl/重返故鄉 (1925). Private Collection.

Ing was a young woman with a progressive mind. She was known for persuading girls from conservative families to unbind their feet. At a party, seventeen-year-old Pearl met a young artist who was already famous for painting calendars with beautiful women dressed in modern fashion: Dan Duyu. He had obtained a camera and was about to make his first film. Both Ing and Dan loved Pearl White, and Ing accepted his invitation to be his leading lady (J. Chen 60). In a press article, Ing stated that she was touched by Dan’s determination to make Chinese films about real Chinese life, in order to counter portrayals of the Chinese as thieves and barbarians in Western films. In order to join his cause, Ing decided to “sacrifice herself” (Yin n.p.), suggesting that the idea of women on screen was still seen by many as improper or degrading for middle or upper class women.

In her first role, in Sea Oath (1922), Ing played Fuzhu (literarily meaning “lucky pearl”), a girl from a peasant family who falls for a poor artist. The girl makes an oath with her lover, but later is lured into marriage by her wealthy cousin. At the wedding, she runs away, trying to go back to her love. Rejected, she attempts suicide by jumping into the sea. The artist comes in time to save her. The film’s plot is “very similar to John Griffith Wray’s Lying Lips, which was exhibited in Shanghai in November 1921” (Qin 256). The film also used a set that imitated those used in Western melodramas that caused mixed reviews; but all praised Pearl’s performance (Haishang n.p.). The publicity, however, caused her mother to forbid her from making more films (Zheng 17).

The following year, Ing helped her good friend Fu Wenhao get the female lead—the role of the young widow—in Dan’s next next feature, Ripples of an Old Well/古井重波記 (1923). Fu was credited as “Miss A.A.” on screen. This film was likewise a success, but Fu had made it without telling her parents. They met her wish to continue making films with fierce resistance (Bi and Chen 24; Zheng 22). Yet, Fu, the first woman to obtain a driving license in Shanghai’s foreign concession, did not back down. She appeared again as a supporting actress in Between Love and Filial Duty/新人的家庭 (1925), before settling down as a doctor, and finally, as a tea merchant’s wife.

Title card for Some Girl/重返故鄉 (1925). Private Collection.

Ing herself was absent from the screen for three years and during this time, Helen Wang, Yang Naimei, Zhang Zhiyun, and Xuan Jinglin became the so-called “Four Amazons” of Star Film Company and made Star the biggest film company in the industry. When Dan invited Pearl back to filmmaking in 1925, her mother gave in, partially because film actresses enjoyed a much better social status than traditional opera actresses. Ing’s comeback film, Some Girl/重返故鄉 (1925), was a so-called “philosophy film” where Ing played the central figure Purity. Seduced by the materialism and glamour of urban life, Purity moves to the city and meets many characters similarly named after certain characteristics of the human condition. More than one critic at the time mentioned that Dan wrote the film expressly for Ing:

The character Purity, embodied by F.F., has both virtue and vanity. She is young and beautiful, having met [a string of characters including] Money (金錢), Seduction (引誘), Pamper (溺愛), Meek (懦弱), Desire (色欲), Enchantment (妖 冶), Might (強權), and Treachery (陰險) in her life. She eventually finds refuge with Honesty (誠懇) and Virtue (貞潔), realizing the truth about life and returns home (Song n.p.; Yihong 1103-4).

Such a “philosophy film” mirrors a dramatic style that involves characters as symbols and does not follow the conventions of traditional storytelling. An example here would be a stage play titled “Daybreak,” written around the same time by China’s first female scriptwriter, Pu Shunqing (Pu 83-98). Some Girl proved too avant-garde in concept for ordinary audiences, but was praised by critics like Yihong, who liked exactly this omission of a traditional scenario (1103-4).

Pearl Ing, The Spiders’ Cave/槃絲洞 (1927). Private Collection.

After making Family Heirloom in 1926, Ing and Dan were married. By that time, her first husband, a Frenchman, had returned to France from Shanghai. She refused to go to France with him, so he gave her a settlement for a divorce (Wang n.p.). Ing’s collaboration with Dan, however, was different from that of other film industry couples, in which the director/husband made the actress/wife a star. In their case, it was widely recognized that it was Ing’s fame and beauty that brought Dan his success. Regrettably, Dan was not an inventive storyteller and mostly presented Pearl as an onscreen spectacle. Of the over thirty films the couple produced during their ten-year partnership, the biggest commercial success was the 1927 Cave of the Spider Spirit (also known as The Spiders’ Cave/槃絲洞), adapted from two episodes of the great 19th century Chinese novel Journey to the West. Ing appealed to local audiences in the title role of Spider Spirit by appearing in Dan’s elaborate set along with a cast of half-clad actresses. The film was so successful that a sequel was made shortly after. From existing film synopses and accounts of the time, it seems that Ing was not given many chances to display her talent—other than exposing her pale flesh and playing up her coquettish beauty. As a visual artist, Dan paid particular attention to lighting and was one of the first Chinese filmmakers to use soft light. Thus, his films tend to highlight Pearl’s beauty in sensual and mysterious ways. This was done largely to appeal to audiences’ lower tastes, but was also likely due to the pressure to consolidate their film business.

Pearl Ing, The Spider Cave II/續盤絲洞 (1929). Private Collection.

Off  screen, however, her knowledge, intelligence, and  communication skills made her an excellent business partner for Dan. His Shanghai Shadow Play Company almost went bankrupt due to the failure of a film titled Imperial Concubine of Yang/楊貴妃 (1927), because Ing could not play the leading role due to her pregnancy. Ing invested her own savings into the company so it could continue to operate (Wang n.p.; Zheng 41). When the Japanese bombed their studio in early 1932, they were both out of work until she helped Dan set up the Shanghai Talkie Company in 1934. When Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese in August 1937, the family moved to Hong Kong. There, with her English skills, she obtained a bank job, while her husband worked as a cartoonist. After World War II, Pearl faded from the film industry. One of her four daughters who inherited her beauty, Judy Dan, was the champion of 1952’s Miss Hong Kong beauty contest and the second runner up at Miss Universe that same year. Judy made one screen appearance, in The King and I (1956) with Yul Brynner, married a Chinese-American, and has been living in the United States ever since.

Pearl Ing portrait. Private Collection.

As the first leading actress in China’s first romance film, Ing was one of the few actresses of the era who managed to extend her career for more than a decade. This was partly due to her beauty, but also (and more importantly) because of her professional commitment to her work. In addition to acting, Pearl also played the role of production coordinator on set for the films made by Shanghai Shadow Play Co. from 1928 until the company became a branch studio under the United China Film Group in the later part of 1931. Ing passed away in Hong Kong in 1989.

Bibliography

Bi, Yuncheng, and Chen Zhichao. “China’s First Tragic Drama Ripples in an Old Well.” Film Reviews/電影評介 no. 5 (1981): 24.

Chen, Jianhua. “Yin Mingzhu and the Origin of Stars”/“殷明珠与‘明星’的由來.” Book Town/書城 (January 2009): 58-67.

Chen, Wenping and Cai Jifu. A Hundred Years of Shanghai Cinema/上海電影一百 年. Shanghai: Shanghai Culture Press, 2007.

Haishang, Shuomengren. “F.F. in Sea Oath”/ “海誓中之 FF.” Film Magazine/電影雜 誌 no. 1 (May 1924): n.p.

Pu, Shunqing. “Daybreak”/ “黎明.”  Paradise  on  Earth/人間的樂園.  Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927. 83-98.

Qin,  Xiqing.  “Pearl  White  and  the  New  Female  Image  in  Chinese  Early  Silent Cinema.” In Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives. Eds. Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, Lucia Tralli. Bologna, Italy: University of Bologna, 2013. 246-62.

Song, Yuansheng. “A Brief Biography of Miss F.F.” Xinxin Special Issue/新新特 刊 (1 July 1925): n.p.

Wang, Gong.  “Dan Duyu’s  Success and Yin Mingzhu”/“但杜宇的成功與殷明珠.” Silver Pictures /銀畫 no. 5 (5 November 1932): n.p.

Yihong. “On Back Home from the City”/ “評 重返故鄉 影片.” Shanghai Pictorial /上 海畫報 no. 13 (1925): n.p. Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲 電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 1103-4.

Yin, Mingzhu. “On Chinese Shadow Plays”/ “中國影戲談.” Happy Magazine/快活 no. 3 (1922): n.p.

Zheng,  Yimei.  Memories of the Film Circle/影壇舊聞.  Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Press, 1982.

Citation

Wei, S Lousia. "Pearl Ing." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cb3d-7945>

Xie Caizhen

by S. Louisa Wei

Caizhen Xie is regarded by several existing sources as the first female director of Chinese cinema who worked in China. (This is, of course, with Marion E. Wong in mind as the first Chinese woman to direct a film anywhere.) Tan Ye and Yun Zhu’s 2012 Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema, for instance, has the following description of her work:

While working for Li Jiran’s newly founded and short-lived Nanxing Film Company [Southern Star Film Company], Xie directed and starred in the silent feature film, Orphan’s Cries [sic] (1925). The only product released by Nanxing [Southern Star], the film tells about the tragic experiences of two orphans, whose late father was framed by his stepmother and estranged from his wealthy father (184).

They note that, as an actress, Caizhen also starred in Dan Duyu’s 1925 film Little Master. Prior to this, Caizhen had co-starred with leading actress Pearl Ing in Dan’s “philosophy film” Some Girl (1925). While Pearl played a country woman named Purity, Caizhen played one of her egos: Vanity. Her performance was praised by a critic using the pen name of Aiyun (17).

Xie Caizhen. Private Collection.

Shenbao article from August 1, 1926 called Caizhen a veteran actress, and listed three more of her films before Some Girl, including Little Brother (1924), and two films produced by the Lily Film Company—The Student’s Hard Life (1925) and Filial Girl Takes Revenge (1925) (“Escape from the Sea” 17). Another brief news item in Shenbao on March 9, 1926 suggested that Caizhen played the second billing role with Han Lanzhen as the female lead in a comedy entitled He’s Not a Fool (1925), which might have been a remake of a 1921 film of the same title. Yet this is the only source for this piece of information (“Entertainment News” 12).

The highlight of Caizhen’s film career is, of course, her only known directorial work: An Orphan’s Cry (1925). From September to December 1925, the newspaper Shenbao ran a series of reports on the film’s production. A press release on September 4, for example, stated that the film was written by Lu Zutong, and Zhang Shewo had been invited to be the producer and director’s consultant. The leading actresses were Caizhen and Zhu Xueqin, while the male lead was Xie Yonglan (also known as Xie Yunqing). The report suggested that Caizhen and Yonglan were siblings, and already had plenty of experience acting (“Entertainment News” 18). Ten days later, another brief report in Shenbao identified Yonglan as the director of the film (“Southern Star’s” 17). On September 20, a reporter named Hong described the biggest scene of the film, which involved forty or fifty extras playing guests at a rich man’s banquet. Yonglan was reportedly directing the actors, and all of Southern Star’s employees were present (18).

A short article in Shenbao on December 19, 1925 announced that “An Orphan’s Cry Will Premiere in Victory Theatre” the next day (15). A week later, the critic named Aiyun wrote a relatively detailed report on the audience’s reaction to the first public screening:

The premiere was in the Victoria Theatre with considerable attendance. 20-30% of the audience consisted of foreign gentlemen, ladies and children, which reflected the film’s attraction. I heard that many came to witness the art of Xiang Yingying. Because most foreigners do not think that Chinese can really act, they came to see how this child actor plays his tragic role. I think this film reflected the realistic struggle in life. It has a tight structure, and the editing was well done. Without excellent acting from Xie Caizhen and Xiang Yingying, however, this film would not be interesting (17).

Xie Caizhen, An Orphan’s Cry (1925). Private Collection.

The report also mentioned that Chinese and English subtitles were available, though the projection was a little too dark (17). The report did not mention the director’s name.

In a combined issue of Shanghai Film History Documents from 1993, an editorial note on the inside page of the back cover claimed:

In the spring of 1925, Ms. Xie Caizhen was invited by Mr. Li Jiran to direct a film for the newly founded Southern Star Film Company: An Orphan’s Cry. The film has a family-problem theme, and Ms. Xie also plays an important role in the film. Before this, she played important parts in films like Back Home from the City and had abundant filming experiences. In December of the same year, An Orphan’s Cry was screened in Victoria and Empire Theatres for eight days and had a rather impressive box-office record (n.p.).

In the mid-1920s, the average run of a film in big theaters like Victoria and Empire was three to five days, so eight days was considered rather successful. Even though one report mentioned in passing that the technical deficiency of the film affected its reception (Guiyan 17), the film had a couple more screenings at the Republican Theatre, though only for one day, May 17, 1926 (“An Orphan’s Cry to be Shown in Republican Theatre” 20).

On New Year’s Day, 1926, Shenbao printed a chart of films, listing only the names of leading actors, actresses, and directors. An Orphan’s Cry was listed with “Xie Caizhen” and “Xie Caizhen” as both protagonist and director (“Brief News” 54). Her brother and co-star in the film, Yonglan, moved on to a very prolific career as an actor. He appeared in more than fifty films between 1925 and 1937, including the two other films in which Caizhen also co-starred: Some Girl and Little Master. Yonglan also wrote and directed a popular film entitled Don’t Change Your Husband (1929), possibly adapted from the Hollywood film of the same title starring Lyton Wong and T.S. Tang (Xiao 10). The last news item on Caizhen in Shenbao was a brief story in August 1926 announcing that she joined the cast of Escape on the Sea, a film to be produced by the recently founded New Shanghai Film Co. Caizhen was invited to play the sassy maid of a quiet and elegant young mistress (“Escape from the Sea” 17). It is not clear whether the film was completed, since neither the film nor the production company is searchable in any existing database.

A 1932 article by Wei Taifeng in a short lived film daily, Camera, mentioned in passing that Yonglan’s older sister once directed a film, which is another source asserting Caizhen’s role behind-the-scenes (n.p.). Since the print of An Orphan’s Cry is lost, we cannot see how Caizhen was credited in the film–and whether or not her brother Yonglan received a credit for anything besides his role as an actor. Despite the film’s success, Caizhen disappeared from the public eye in 1926. Other information concerning her life and work, as yet, remains undiscovered.

Bibliography

Aiyun. “On An Orphan’s Cry”/ “記孤雛悲聲.” Shenbao/申報 (27 December 1925): 17.

“Brief News”/ “本報訊.” Shenbao/申報 (1 January 1926): 54.

“Entertainment News”/ “游藝消息.” Shenbao/申報 (4 September 1925): 18.

“Entertainment News”/ “游藝消息.” Shenbao/申報 (9 March 1926): 12.

“Escape from the Sea.” Shenbao/申報 (1 August 1926): 17.

Guiyan. “Entertainment News.” Shenbao/申報 (25 April 1926): 17.

Hong. “On the Zabei Set of ‘An Orphan’s Cry.’” Shenbao/申報 (20 September 1925): 18.

“An Orphan’s Cry to be Shown in Republican Theatre”/ “民國戲院開映  孤雛悲聲.” Shenbao/申報 (17 May 1926): 20.

“An Orphan’s Cry Will Premiere in Victory Theatre.” Shenbao/申報 (19 December 1925): 15.

An Orphan’s Cry Will Soon Have Its Press Preview.” Shenbao/申報 (17 December 1925): 18.

“Report on the Press Preview of Some Girl”/“重返故鄉試片記.” Shenbao/申報 (9 July 1925): 20.

Shanghai Film History Documents. Vol. 2-3. Shanghai: Shanghai Film Bureau History Editorial Office, 1993.

“Southern Star’s An Orphan’s Cry Is in Production”/“南星影片公司攝製 孤雛悲 聲.” Shenbao/申報 (14 September 1925): 17.

Wei, Taifeng. “Pu Shunqing and Zhang Shunqing: A Film Director’s Wife and a Famous Writer’s Wife.” Camera/開麥拉 156 (1932): n.p.

Xiao, Zhiwei. “For Better or for Worse, Don’t Change Your Husband! Remakes and Appropriations of American Films in Republican China, 1911-1949.” In American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows. Eds. Lisa Funnell and Man-Fung Yip. New York: Routledge, 2015. 9-23.

Ye, Tan and Yun Zhu. Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Citation

Wei, S Louisa. "Xie Caizhen." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-44qm-9m38>

Yang Naimei

by S. Louisa Wei

Born to a wealthy Cantonese merchant father, Yang Naimei was named Yang Lizhu and attended the first girl’s school founded by the Chinese in Shanghai: Wuben. As a student, Yang witnessed Pearl Ing’s stunning appearance in her screen debut—Sea Oath—in 1922. When Star Film Company’s Orphan Rescues Grandfather was playing in theaters in 1923, she was deeply moved by Helen Wang’s role. According to her biographer, Shen Ji, Yang immediately had the urge to perform on screen herself (100).

Yang Naimei, The Poor Children/苦兒弱女 (1924). Private Collection.

By the time Wang started working on her second film, Jade Pear Spirit, in early 1924, Yang already managed to get herself on the set, playing Liniang’s sister-in-law, Junqian. The film was adapted from a modern romance novella of the same name, which mildly criticizes the  Confucian restriction of  a  women’s second  marriage, by  depicting the  tragic life  of  a beautiful widow Liniang—played by Wang. After Liniang dies of a broken heart, Junqian succeeds in traveling a long distance with her orphaned nephew to find his tutor and Liniang’s love, Mengxia. The three eventually form a new family in memory of Liniang. Bing Xin, a prominent female writer at the time, was impressed with Yang’s fresh-faced, sassy portrayal of Junqian. From the spoiled daughter of a rich family to a determined young woman showing strength and responsibility, the cinema first-timer revealed a genuine talent for acting. Some critics challenged the possibility of Junqian traveling with a child in such a chaotic time, but Bing declared, “Most people simply underestimate what Chinese women are capable of!” (1112).

Yang Naimei, Lured into Marriage/誘婚  (1924). Private Collection.

Yang Naimei, Orchid in an Empty Valley/空山蘭 (1925). Private Collection.

Yang Naimei, Confession (1926). Private Collection.

After her screen debut, Yang played three very different roles for Star in the same year, including an evil landlady in The Poor Children (1924); a vain young woman in Lured into Marriage (1924); and a selfish rich widow in Good Brothers (1924). Lily Film Company then invited her to play one of the two female leads in Tea Picking Girl (1924), which was quite successful with its story pattern of two contrasting female roles. Star followed suit and offered Yang the chance to play the second female lead with Zhang Zhiyun in Orchid in an Empty Valley (1925), which was an immediate success, followed by an equally successful sequel. After her success in these films, Yang became a top-billed actress. She gained greater popularity with Confession (1926), a film adapted from Tolstoy’s 1899 novel, Resurrection. Her unreservedness made her a perfect candidate to perform live in theaters screening the films in which she starred, a publicity stunt film companies used in the silent film period. For example, in a scene in Family Heirloom (1926), when her character is about to sing a lullaby, the screen would cut to black and the stage lights would turn on. In her character’s full costume, Yang would sing the sentimental song on stage and, afterwards, the film would resume. Such a performance was, of course, planned by Zhang Shichuan, founder and director of Star Film Company, who was also a shrewd businessman, trying to get more people into the theater. Yang’s mother was deeply affected by seeing her daughter on both stage and screen when she sat in the audience (Shen 138-9).

Yang Naimei, Her Sorrows/她的痛苦 (1926). Private Collection.

Zhang Shichuan noted that Yang’s personality was almost the opposite of Helen Wang’s. While Wang was quiet and reserved, Yang loved parties and the spotlight (S. Zhang 405). In fact, among Star’s “four amazons,” or its four biggest stars—Wang, Zhang Zhiyun, Xuan Jinglin, and Yang (Shen 149)–Yang was the opposite of the other three. While they mainly played tragic victims of society, Yang was the only anti-heroine. Her specialization was in playing amorous seductresses and social butterflies. In April Roses (1926), for instance, there were three female roles: a wife, a concubine, and a seductress with three lovers. Yang was praised for showing different manners and attitudes while facing each of the three lovers (J. Gu 1143). In A Flower of Passion (1927), she also succeeded in portraying the transformation of an innocent daughter into the top-billed courtesan of the pleasure quarter (W. Zhang 317). She was typecast in a string of seductress roles, and like other leading actresses at the time, was also given a Hollywood nickname: the “Chinese Marlene Dietrich”  (C. Zhang 93). At the height of her film career, Star Film Company published a special pictorial issue on Yang, with several articles on the art of her performance in order to promote the film Her Sorrows (1926).

Yang Naimei, Spring Dream by the Lakeside/湖邊春夢 (1927). Private Collection.

Yang Naimei, Spring Dream by the Lakeside/湖邊春夢 (1927). Private Collection.

In a film entitled Spring Dream by the Lakeside (1926), written by Leftist playwright Tian Han, and directed by a top director, Bu Wancang, Yang played the unusual Li Yibo. When the writer Sun Pijiang first meets her on a train, she sits beside a rich man, elegantly holding a cigarette in a long holder with a coquettish smile. When he arrives at a lakeside house, he has a hallucination, in which Li Yibo becomes his sadistic lover. In the lakeside house, she wears a man’s shirt and tie, holding a whip in front of the shirtless male lead. She dresses as a man, whips him until he is bleeding, and then licks off the blood, all to his pleasure. Later, she puts a gun in his hand and urges him to kill for her. He then wakes up in a hospital and the nurse tells him that he had a high fever. When he recovers, he goes to look for the lakeside house. Instead of seeing a beautiful woman, there is only an old lady with white hair (Qian 1168-9). Yang played the “dream woman” with two faces in this film. While the earliest female roles in Chinese films made in the 1910s and early 1920s were mostly played by men, Yang was perhaps the first actress to dress as a man on screen. In Ashes of the Lotus (1928), we also see her in a military uniform. The leftist writers of China, who were largely influenced by nineteenth-century Western literature, created images of Chinese women never seen before; but such female characters could only come alive onscreen with the embodiment of actresses like Yang, the very rare femme fatale of the 1920s.

Yang Naimei, Ashes of the Lotus/美人関 (1928). Private Collection.

As her career and popularity soared, Yang readily took up the role of celebrity without shying from the public eye. Star Film Company director Zhang Shichuan recalled that in the social circle of Shanghai, “she was quite notable, with her hair styled to a crazy height. Every Shanghainese knew her” (405). He also commented, that because she lived a wanton and unrestrained personal life, she was most fit to play those dissolute and unconventional women (408). Several sources support the fact that she lived a comfortable life “as a trend-setter on the Shanghai fashion scene” (Chang 137):

The reputations of stores such as Yong’an Company and the Huiluo Company located on the Bund were based upon the patronage of stars such as [Helen] Wang and Yang [Naimei]. All eyes at the Carleton Dance Hall fell on Yang Naimei, decked out in her sequined dresses; and within a week everyone who was anyone was dressed to match (Chang 137).

Yang Naimei, Spring Dream by the Lakeside/湖邊春夢 (1927). Private Collection.

In fact, Star also took advantage of Yang and Wang, asking them to prepare their own costumes. Even when not making films, Yang knew how to make news. She once famously asked a young department store salesman to take off her stockings for her and help her to try on the new style. Reporters were called in to take photographs, and again she generated tabloid news, including one titled “Romantic Female Star Trying Stockings in the Public Eyes,” which, at the time, was also free advertising for Spring Dream by the Lakeside (Shen 147-8).

Even though Yang generated great box office income for Star, her poor professional attitude, which consisted of often being late or absent on the set, eventually cast her in a bad light (S. Zhang 408). In 1928, Star decided not to renew Yang’s contract. According to Shen, other film companies did not offer her contracts either in later 1928, as her poor work ethic became well-known (149-150). Zhu Fei, a frequent co-star and lover, encouraged her to set up her own company and make her own films. To raise funds for the Naimei Film Compnay, she accepted an invitation to Jinan in Shangdong Province by Warlord General Zhang Zongchang, a well-known womanizer. Although many in Shanghai’s film circle did not expect her to come back to Shanghai in one piece, she did raise a great sum of money and safely returned within a month (Shen 154-64). As a result, she was able to hire some of her acting friends, including Zhu Fei, who played Meiyan’s true love, and move into production.

Yang Naimei, A Wondrous Woman/奇女子 (1928). Private Collection.

The story she chose for her film was a real-life event that generated a great deal of news coverage: Yu Meiyan’s suicide. While reading a report titled “Strange Encounters of a Strange Woman,” Yang first learned about the stories of Meiyan (Shen 153), whose parents forced her into an arranged marriage even though she already had a lover. Shortly after the wedding, her husband left home to do business overseas. She then lived the next decade as a dissolute playgirl, during which she reportedly met more than 3,000 men while traveling throughout Southeast Asia and other countries. Among her amorous stories, there was one about a rich man who wanted to date her. She asked him to bring 3,000 silver coins, but he brought only half of the agreed amount. Despising him, she opened her hotel window and threw the money out, causing a mad scramble in the street below. In 1928, tired of her life and hopeless about her future, she consulted a journalist on how to commit suicide. Near Shanghai, she jumped into the sea from a Canadian cruise ship, leaving one last letter “to all women,” telling them that she spent years rebelling against her fate as a woman, but still could not marry the man he loved. She warned other women not to follow her example, revealing the complex psychology of a “new woman” still chained by strong patriarchal Confucian ethics (Hou 252-3).

Yang Naimei and Zhu Fei, A Wondrous Woman/奇女子 (1928). Private Collection.

Cai Chusheng, also from Guangdong Province like Yang and Meiyan, and later a prominent director, highly praised the former’s choice for her film’s subject (Yang 6). Fully realizing the sensation created by Meiyan’s playgirl life and planned suicide, Yang wrote the screenplay based on Meiyan’s life encounters that would  eventually become A Wondrous Woman (1928). According to some sources, in her self-promotional ads, Yang claimed that she could play Meiyan very realistically as she knew her personally. Yang invited Shi Dongshan, a director famous for making women’s films, to direct her production. From a photo of the lavish set, we can see that this film was quite an investment. With the publicity surrounding the real-life events that it was based on, the film was a huge box-office success.

Although the filming of A Wondrous Woman began a little later than Wang’s Revenge of an Actress (1929), thanks to the funds that Yang raised, she managed to complete her film first and thus became the first woman producer in the history of Chinese cinema. During the making of this film, the whole crew took opium to relax between tight shooting schedules. In the end, Yang squandered her earnings from the film on her opium addiction. Yang herself was not able to make more films as she soon ran out of money. Her fate seemed to be heading steadily downhill until a young man who had been educated in America proposed to her. Eventually they married, and she finally retired from filmmaking after producing Han Xiuwen, the Shanghai Beauty (1932). Hong Kong’s The Industrial and Commercial Daily News (which later adopted the English title of Kung Sheung Daily News), published an article titled “The Lovers of Yang Naimei” in 1932, detailing her relationship with three husbands, praising her film art, yet disapproving of her personal lifestyle (Can B1).

Yang Naimei featured in newspaper. Private Collection.

Yang attempted a comeback in the early 1940s, but did not succeed. Her last film attempt was a small role in Beauty Contest (1954). In February 1957, The Industrial and Commercial Daily News ran a series of brief articles on her, after news reporters spotted her near the Shaw Studio in Kowloon, Hong Kong, where extras were lining up for daily jobs. It seemed that people who recognized her gave her money out of compassion, but Hong Kong’s newspapers reported that she had been seen “begging in the streets” (“Chen Junjing” 6). Eventually, her daughter and son-in-law in Taiwan were in the news, telling reporters that they did send money to her though their own income was quite modest. Apparently, she was still addicted to drugs and her daughter needed her mother to declare that she would get sober before an organization could help to make arrangements for a move to Taiwan (“Yang Naimei’s Daughter” 5). Yang died in Taiwan on February 27, 1960 at the age of 56. Her death was reported by newspapers like Ta-Kung-Pao (“Queen” 4), Kung Sheung Daily News (“Yang Naimei Died” 6), and others.

Yang Naimei, A Flower of Passion/花國大總統  (1927). Private Collection.

Bibliography

Bing, Xin. “A Critique on Jade Pear Spirit”/玉梨魂 之評論觀.” Film Magazine 2 (1924): n.p. Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 1110-2.

Can, Ming. “The Loves of Yang Naimei”/“楊耐梅之愛.” The Industrial and Commercial Daily Press (18 November 1932): B1.

Chang,  Michael  G.  “The  Good,  the  Bad,  and  the  Beautiful:  Movie  Actresses  and  Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s-1930s.” In Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Ed. Yingjin Zhang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 128-59.

“Chen Junjing, Yang Naimei’s Husband, Died of Disease”/“楊耐梅丈夫陳君景病逝.” Kung Sheung Daily News (17 June 1957): 6.

Gu, Jianchen. “Talking about Roses in a Rainy Season.” Star Special Issue 13 (1926): n.p. Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 1143-4.

Gu, Lian. “On Orchid of an Empty Valley.” Star Special Issue 9 (1925): n.p. Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 1132.

Hou, Yanxing. “Death of a Social Butterfly: Suicide of Yu Meiyan”/ “交際花之死:俞美顏自殺.” In Studies on Shanghai Women’s Suicides: 1927-1937/上海女性自殺問題研究: 1927-1937. Shanghai: Shanghai Lexicographic Publishing House, 2008. 248-253.

Qian, Bai. “After Watching Star Film Company’s Spring Dream by the Lakeside.” Star Special Issue 27  (1927): n.p. Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 1168-9.

“Queen of Silent Film Yang Naimei Died in Taiwan Three Days Ago”/ “默片影后楊耐梅三天前老死台灣.”  Ta-Kung-Pao (2 March 1960): 4.

Shen, Ji. “‘Legendary Woman’ Yang Naimei”/“‘奇女子’ 楊耐梅.” Tragic and Happy Memoirs of Movie Stars/影星悲歡錄. Shanghai: Shanghai Books Press, 2001. 99-177.

Wang, Yiman. “To Write or to Act, That Is the Question: 1920s to 1930s Shanghai Actress-Writers and the Death of the ‘New Woman.’” In Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. Ed. Lingzhen Wang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 235-54.

Xu, Daoming and Sha Sipeng. A Brief History of Chinese Cinema/中國電影簡史. Beijing: China Youth Press, 1990.

Yang, Cun. “Yang Naimei and ‘Wondrous Woman’ Yu Meiyan”/ “楊耐梅和‘奇女子’余美顏.” In Encounters of Chinese Film Actors/中國電影演員滄桑錄. Hong Kong: World Press, 1954. 1-6.

“Yang Naimei’s Daughter Talked to Taiwan Press”/“楊耐梅親生女兒,在台灣發表談話.” The Kung Sheung Daily News (25 February 1957): 5.

“Yang Naimei Died to Disease in Taiwan”/ “楊耐梅在台病逝.” The Kung Sheung Daily News (2 March 1960): 6.

Ye, Tan and Yun Zhu. Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Zhang, Caihong.“Rebel Angel: Yang Naimei in Early Chinese Films”/ “叛逆天使:中國早期女影星楊耐梅藝術形象.” Journal of Shanghai Business School  no. 10, vol. 3 (May 2009): 93-96.

Zhang, Shichuan. “Since I Became a Director”/“自我導演以來.” Star Biweekly/明星半月刊 no. 1, vol. 3-6 (1935): n.p. Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 401-8.

Zhang, Weitao. “The Making of A Flower of Passion.” China First Film Co. Special Issue (1927): n.p. Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 317-9.

Zhang, Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Citation

Wei, S Louisa. "Yang Naimei." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-care-1e44>

Lottie Lyell

by Margot Nash

Lottie Lyell was a much-loved silent film star in Australia. She was also a scenario writer, director, editor, producer, and art director. Quietly working alongside director Raymond Longford, she had a significant influence on the twenty-eight films they made together. Lyell starred in nearly all the films, but it is now generally accepted that she contributed a great deal more than was officially acknowledged at the time (Wright 1986, 1-14; Pike and Cooper 1998, 19, 109; Dooley 2000, 4).

Lottie Lyell, The Sentimental Bloke (1919). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The Australian feature film renaissance of the 1970s awakened interest in the rich history of Australian cinema, and feminist scholars and archivists like Andrée Wright and Marilyn Dooley began to research the role of women in the early days of Australian cinema. In 1985, Wright produced a feature documentary called Don’t Call Me Girlie. Lottie Lyell featured in the section on the silent era and Wright included camera interviews with surviving actors and crew who testified to the major role Lyell had played both on and off screen. The following year, Wright published Brilliant Careers, devoting the first chapter to Lyell and calling it “The Sentimental Girl” (1-14). The title refers to Lyell and Longford’s most successful film, The Sentimental Bloke (1919). Based on the poem by C.J. Dennis, the film tells the story of a “knock about” bloke just out of jail who falls in love with a local lass. Lyell starred as the lovable Doreen, but she also holds screenplay, art direction, editing, and production assistant credits. The film screened to acclaim both nationally and internationally and is considered to be one of the greatest Australian films ever made. It is the only film Longford and Lyell made together that has been restored in its entirety. Some scenes from The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole (1911) and The Woman Suffers (1918) are held in the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) and clips can be viewed on YouTube. The restoration of The Sentimental Bloke was made possible because the original 35mm camera negative was discovered in 1973 at George Eastman House in New York (Case 2009, 67). It had been reedited and the intertitles had been changed to alter the Australian vernacular for the American market. By marrying the few existing print materials in Australia with the 35mm negative, the film was restored in its entirety. This included the original color tinting, which could be matched to the edges of the frame on the one surviving faded nitrate print reel that had not been exposed to the projector’s arc, and the traces of color found there were a significantly deeper hue (Case 71). This use of color is an area of interest for future researchers as some of the original scenarios, which Lyell had meticulously typed, show the careful use of different colored ribbons, as do surviving typed letters from their production company (Nash 2015, n.p.). Lyell often worked uncredited as the art director and the distinctive use of color in The Sentimental Bloke arguably shows her artistic influence. The Sentimental Bloke was lovingly restored by a team of archivists and scholars and completed in 2003. It was released by the NFSA in 2009 in a box set containing extensive written documentation and two DVDs, which include extras.

Lottie Lyell in The Picture Show promotion for The Sentimental Bloke (1919). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Dooley, an archivist at NFSA, took a special interest in Lyell, working for years searching the archives for evidence of Lyell’s unacknowledged contribution to the films that she collaborated on with Longford. In 2000, she published a monograph called Photoplay Artiste: Miss Lottie Lyell, 1890-1925. This detailed her historical research plus some of Lyell’s scenarios (retyped) and accompanying stills, often from the lost films. The copyright requirements of the time meant the scenario plus high quality stills from each scene had to be submitted for copyright clearance and some of these are now held in the National Archives of Australia (NAA). My interest in Lyell comes from being both a screenwriter and a teacher. Examining the original scenarios opened up a new area of inquiry for me and I have published on Lyell’s often un-credited work as a scenario writer (2015, n.p.), as well as the work of other women scenario writers during the silent era in Australia (2015, 169-179). Of the twenty-eight films Longford and Lyell made together, Lyell holds scenario-writing credits on between thirteen and fourteen, just over half their combined output.

Born Charlotte Louise Cox, Lottie adopted “Lyell” as her stage name at the age of nineteen from the name of her neighbor’s house. In 1909, when she toured New Zealand in the play “An Englishman’s Home,” her parents put her into the care of fellow actor, Raymond Longford, a family friend, and a married man. Lyell shared Longford’s enthusiasm for the new medium of film and they soon formed a partnership, both on and off screen, that lasted right up until her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1925, at the age of thirty-five.

Lottie Lyell, The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole (1911). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Lyell did not fit easily into the image of a glamorous screen star. Instead she had a genuine quality and an understated performance style unusual for the time. She never played antagonistic characters, usually appearing as plucky, intelligent heroines facing danger, exploitation, or discrimination.  She did all her own stunts and was an accomplished horsewoman. In 1911, Longford and Lyell made The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole. It was based on the true story of a woman convict transported to the penal colony of New South Wales for stealing a horse to help her lover escape. When Lyell stole the horse, disguised as a boy, and bravely rode it while pursued by the law, she rode into the hearts and minds of audiences looking for new kinds of heroines.

Lottie Lyell, The Church and the Woman (1917). Courtesy of the National Archives of Australia. 

Years later, in a short typescript memoir now held at the NFSA, Longford wrote: “Lottie Lyell was my partner in all our film activities” (n.p.). Yet Longford’s name is on all the films as director up until Mutiny of the Bounty (1916), when Lyell received an assistant director credit as well as screenwriting and editing credits. The following year, Lyell starred in The Church and the Woman (1917) and then The Woman Suffersbut, curiously, is not credited as a writer on either. Both films are about young women unjustly accused of crimes, or treated poorly by men they have loved and trusted, so it is hard to imagine Lyell did not have a hand in both. In The Woman Suffers, Lyell’s unmarried character is seduced by a cad, becomes pregnant, and seeks an abortion. The Church and the Woman ran into copyright problems and the censor banned The Woman Suffers. Longford was probably trying to protect Lyell from litigation, but there is no documentation of this.

Lottie Lyell, The Church and the Woman (1917). Courtesy of the National Archives of Australia.

It was no secret in film circles that Longford and Lyell’s relationship was more than just a professional one. Longford’s Catholic wife refused to give him a divorce but when Lyell’s father died, Longford moved into the family home with her and her mother. Longford’s wife did finally agree to a divorce, but it did not come through until after Lyell’s death. Lyell left no personal papers, and apart from her signature on some letters, there is only one handwritten letter in existence. A great deal of documentation of their work, such as photographs, newspapers, playbills and posters, and letters, are held in the NFSA, although much of this focuses on Longford.

Lottie Lyell and Raymond Longford (right) with cinematographer Arthur Higgins and lighting assistant on the set of The Blue Mountains Mystery (1921). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

In 1921, Longford and Lyell made The Blue Mountains Mystery together. It was adapted from the novel The Mount Marunga Mystery by Harrison Owen, and for the first time Lyell was formally credited as both co-director and sole scenario writer. In 1922, they registered The Longford-Lyell Australian Picture Productions Limited and began developing and making a slate of films, but the big Hollywood companies were increasingly dominating exhibition and distribution in Australia and it was becoming more and more difficult for local filmmakers to get their films made and seen. Lyell’s death in 1925 meant the end of a dynamic and creative partnership. Longford never again achieved the success of the early films, ending up a solitary figure working on the Sydney waterfront as a night watchman. Lyell and Longford are buried in the same grave. Her epitaph reads “Lottie Lyell Cox–Photo Play Artiste.” After industry consultation, in 2014, the Raymond Longford AFI (Australian Film Institute) and AACTA (Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts) Award for outstanding contribution to the enrichment of Australia’s screen environment and cultures was changed to the Longford Lyell Award.       

See also: Caroline Frances Pugliese

Bibliography

Case, Dominic. “The Restoration of the Sentimental Bloke.” [Chap. 3.2. in accompanying booklet by Anthony Buckley, Dominic Case, Ray Edmondson, and Andrew Pike for DVD release Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke–The Restored Version]. National Film and Sound Archive Australia, 2009. 67-75.

Dooley, Marilyn. Photoplay Artiste: Miss Lottie Lyell, 1890-1925. Canberra, Australia: ScreenSound, 2000.

Nash, Margot. “Lottie Lyell: The Silent Work of an Early Australian Scenario Writer.” Screening the Past 40. Special Dossier: Women and Silent Screen (2015): n.p. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2015/08/lottie-lyell-the-silent-work-of-an-early-australian-scenario-writer/.

------. “The Silent Work of Australian Women Scenario Writers.” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes and Julie Selbo. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 169-179.

Pike, Andrew and Ross Cooper. Australian Film 1900–1977. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Wright, Andrée. Brilliant Careers: Women in Australian Cinema. Sydney: Pan Books, 1986.

Archival Paper Collections:

Lottie Lyell Documentation (still photographs). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Raymond Longford Documentation (assorted papers including correspondence, invitations, and unrealized scripts). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Marilyn Dooley The Sentimental Bloke research papers. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Original photographs, publicity materials, and production documents for the following: The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole (1911), The Fatal Wedding (1911), The Tide of Death (1912), ‘Neath Austral Skies (1913), Australia Calls (1913), Trooper Campbell (1914), The Silence of Dean Maitland (1914), Mutiny of The Bounty (1916), A Maori Maid’s Love, (1916), The Church and the Woman (1917), The Woman Suffers (1918), The Sentimental Bloke (1919), Ginger Mick (1920), Rudd’s New Selection (1921), The Dinkum Bloke (1923), The Blue Mountains Mystery (1921), The Pioneers (1926).  National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The Sentimental Bloke (1919) intertitles script and scenario copy. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The Sentimental Bloke (1919) original film scenario. State Archives and Records Office, New South Wales.

Original film scenarios, including high quality still photographs of the following: Mutiny of the Bounty (1916), The Church and the Woman (1917), and The Woman Suffers (1918). National Archives of Australia

Citation

Nash, Margot. "Lottie Lyell." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-82dq-w121>

Helena Cortesina

by Elena Cordero-Hoyo

Little is known—and even less is written—about the role that women played within the Spanish silent cinema. Cinema, along with other visual arts, constituted what was known then as a frivolous entertainment industry. Although, in many countries it was an area that was more open to the presence of women than other established businesses or artistic fields, in Spain we can find very few names of women pioneers who gained the space to experiment and the freedom to create. However, Helena Cortesina was one of them. Cortesina started her career as a dancer in variety shows, then moved to acting, and then became a director and producer with the film Flor de España o la Leyenda de un Torero/Spanish Flower or the Bullfighter’s Legend (1921).

From left to right: Helena Cortesina with her sisters, Ofelia and Angélica, year unknown. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración.

Cortesina managed to enter the Madrid cultural elite before the Civil War in 1936. Despite being one of the few women directors in the early Spanish cinema, she has not been studied by academia, and there are few references to her in encyclopedias and other overview books, which are full of undocumented and misleading information. Incongruities go as far as asserting that Flor de España had only been directed by its screenwriter José María Granada, even though all the press releases from the 1920s attribute the sole responsibility of the film to Cortesina.

Elena Cortés Altabas/Helena Cortesina’s birth certificate, July 17, 1903. Private Collection. 

Her absence in the official history of the Spanish cinema, and the disappearance of the film and other personal documents, such as diaries or letters, determined the methodology of this research project to be one of archival science. Consulting press documents, libraries, museums, and archives, I found her birth certificate, being able to establish the authenticity of her name and date of birth for the first time. Cortesina was the oldest daughter in an artistic family. She began her career as a variety show dancer as a teenager, touring across Europe. Following in her footsteps, her sisters, Ofelia and Angelica Cortesina, were also performers and eventually formed part of the cast of the film she directed. They were known in the press as the “Hermanas Cortesina,” thus making it difficult to distinguish between the three in reviews and articles. However, Helena, a dancer influenced by classical Greek art, stood out from the others by choosing music from respected Spanish composers, such as Isaac Albéniz, Manuel de Falla, and Enrique Granados.

Helena Cortesina portrait, circa 1916. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración.

Her popularity started to grow thanks to her high visibility in the press, where she was often called “Venus valenciana” and praised for her sculptured body and talent as a ballerina. Helena even modeled for the famous Impressionist artist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida for the painting “Danzarinas griegas”/ “Greek dancers” in 1917. A first sketch of the painting, found on the website of the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, led to discovery of the friendship between Sorolla and the Cortesina family. This fact can be verified by the correspondence from Helena’s mother to the painter that is kept in the Sorolla Museum in Madrid.

Helena Cortesina, circa 1915. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración.

Cortesina made her cinema debut in 1920 with the film La Inaccessible/The Unapproachable Woman. The film was well-received, especially for Cortesina’s performance. For example, a writer going by the initials M.R. in La Correspondencia de España advocated that Cortesina was “not to stray far from cinematography, not to mistake it as a secondary art, but as the main career move for her future, a future full of glory, popularity and fabulous contracts” (1921, 3).

Cortesina’s transition from the theatrical stage to the silent film industry was a common career move in Spain for both men and women due to the lack of professional actors in the new medium. The theater world in Madrid was very conservative and close-minded, which made it difficult for new talents to break through (Dougherty and Vilches 1990, 37). Because of this, Cortesina established her acting career in the film industry very rapidly; her presence was welcomed and not overlooked despite her past as a variety show dancer.

Helena Cortesina with Florián Rey in La Inaccesible (1920). Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración.

Enjoying her economic independence, and motivated by the success of La Inaccesible, Cortesina decided to invest in her own film production company, Cortesina Films. In 1921, she produced and directed her first and only film, Flor de EspañaMundo Gráfico announced the creation of Helena’s company on May 25, 1921:

Ladies and gentleman: we have a new Madrilenian film production company. The beautiful dancer Helena Cortesina, praised by her successful role in La inaccesible, is jumping into the arms of the cinematographic industry. Like the North American film stars, she will produce her own films and choose her own cast. We sincerely hope to see beautiful Helena, if she has success, as she is bound to, to take this enterprise to a successful conclusion (Prada 31).

Program for Helena Cortesina’s Flor de España (1921). Private Collection. 

With this new film project, in which she would star, Cortesina could establish her professional credentials and support her sisters’ burgeoning careers in the new medium. The Cortesina family was used to collaborating with one another and helping to launch each other’s careers. For example, another joint venture, which most likely never left the planning stages, was the “Great Cortesina Company,” a project that was to allow them to tour around Europe performing Spanish songs and dances.

Flor de España was a melodrama about a bullfighter named Juncales (Jesús Tordesillas), following him from the beginning of his career up through fame and success. Having achieved his dreams, he becomes tired of his success and marries the dancing star “Flor de España” (Cortesina), who, years before, as an insignificant flower girl, had been his girlfriend. Both the storyline and the mise-en-scène were directly influenced by common topics in Spanish culture, which was a tactic consciously adopted by Cortesina and the scriptwriter Granada, who believed stereotypical representations constituted the best strategy to sell Spanish culture abroad (Fernández Fígares 2002, 260; Brasa 1927, 15). The film was officially released on February 13, 1923, in Madrid.

Helena Cortesina in Flor de España (1921), featured in La Esfera in 1921. Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Digital, Biblioteca Nacional de España.

After this cinematographic experience, Cortesina was able to transition back to a professional career in theater, which was her real goal because it had greater artistic and cultural prestige. Her first collaboration with a renowned theater group was with the Catalina Bárcena and Gregorio Martínez Sierra Company. It was within this company, in 1921, that Cortesina met her partner, the stage designer Manuel Fontanals, with whom she would have a relationship for the next fifteen years and two children. Through her involvement in the company and her relationship with Fontanals, Cortesina gained access to the intellectual elites of Madrid, making friends with some of the most renowned artistic figures of the time, the famous Generation of ‘27: Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and María Teresa León, among others. During these years, Cortesina’s career in the theatrical world pushed her further and further away from the film industry. She joined the Lola Membrives Company, with whom she would perform in numerous plays from famous Spanish and Argentinian playwrights.

Helena Cortesina (seated on right), in scene from “Santa Rusia” (1932), in Teatro Beatriz in Madrid with the Lola Membrives Company. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración.

Her second pregnancy (not recognized by Fontanals), and the death of her daughter, led to her separation from her partner. However, Cortesina did not give up on her cultural and political interests and, in September 1936, with the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, she joined the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture. Cortesina and her son Juan Manuel Fontanals were forced to go into exile. According to the database Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos/Center for Latin American Migratory Studies, Cortesina’s family arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on June 3, 1937, on the boat Lipari, in order to escape Spanish fascism. She joined the Argentinian artistic scene, taking parts in films along with other Spaniards in exile. She did not abandon her theatrical career, and with Andrés Mejuto, she created her own company. Together they produced a large number of Spanish plays and enjoyed great success in Argentina. Cortesina died at the age of eighty on March 7, 1984, in Buenos Aires.

Helena Cortesina, circa 1933. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Administración.

Future research on Cortesina’s film career should focus on studying the practical conditions of the production and shooting of Flor de España. We need a more in-depth understanding of Cortesina’s behind-the-scenes work on the film. We still have much to learn about the history of Spanish cinema and the involvement of women during the silent film era.

Bibliography

Aguilar, Carlos. Guía del cine español. Madrid: Cátedra, Colección Signo e Imagen, 2007.

Bentley, Bernard P.E. A Companion to Spanish Cinema. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008.

Borau, José Luis and María Pastor, eds.  Diccionario del cine español. Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España. Madrid: Alianza, 1998.

Brasa, Juan. “Por los teatros de París. Los ojos de la estrella de ‘la estrella.” Nuevo Mundo no. 1,721 (14 January 1927): 15.

Casares Rodicio, Emilio, ed. Diccionario del Cine Iberoamericano. España, Portugal y América. Madrid: SGAE, 2011.

“Cines y Variedades. Helena Cortesina, en Madrid.” El Imparcial no. 18,666 (24 January 1919): 5.

Climent Viguer, Susana. “Rescatando desconocidas: Helena Cortés Altabás, una pionera del cine.” In Me veo luego existo: mujeres que representan, mujeres representadas. Eds. Ester Alba Pagán and Luis Pérez Ochando. Madrid: CSIC, 2015. 701-718.

------, and Carmen Garcia Monerris. “Xarxes familiars.” In De l’ofici a la fàbrica. Una familia industrial valenciana en el canvi de segle. “La Maquinista Valenciana.” Valencia: Universitat de València, 2000. 255-281.

Díaz Morales, Juan J. “Las primeras mujeres que en España se han dedicado al cine.” La Pantalla no. 58 (10 March 1929): 966.

Dougherty, Dru, and María Francisca Vilches. La escena madrileña entre 1918 y 1926. Análisis y documentación. Madrid: Fundamentos, 1990.

Escofet, José. “Danzarinas.” La Vanguardia no. 16, 750 (19 July 1919): 8.

Fernández Fígares, Mª Dolores. “Flamenco y cine. Apuntes para una perspectiva histórica y etnográfica.” In VI Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Antropología Aplicada. Simposio: El sentido práctico de la antropología. Ed. José González Alcantud,, 2002. Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2002. 257-270.

“Flor de España, por Helena Cortesina.” Revista Cinema Variedades (9 November 1921): n.p.

“Flor de España. Un triunfo de Helena Cortesina.” La Correspondencia de España no. 23,172 (29 October 1921): 4.

González López, Palmira, and Joaquín Cánovas Belchi. Catálogo del cine español. Volumen F2. Películas de ficción. 1921-1930. Madrid: Filmoteca Española, 1993.

La Esfera no. 405 (10 August 1921): 18.

Mateo Hidalgo, Javier. “Flor de España o la vida de un torero. Una partitura para el cine mudo español.” Sineris. Revista de Musicología no. 25 (Summer 2015): 1-23.

Méndez-Leite, Fernando. Historia del cine español. Madrid: Rialp, 1965.

M.R. “La producción nacional. ‘La inaccesible’ obtiene un éxito ruidoso.” La Correspondencia de España no. 23,001 (13 April 1921): 3.

Ontañón, Santiago and José Moreiro. Unos pocos amigos verdaderos. Madrid: Fundación Banco Exterior, 1988.

Peralta Gilabert, Rosa. Manuel Fontanals, escenógrafo: Teatro, cine y exilio. Madrid: Ed. Fundamentos, 2007.

Pérez Perucha, Julio. “Narración de un aciago destino (1896-1930).” In Historia del cine español. Eds. Román Gubern, et al. Madrid: Cátedra, 2010. 19-122.

Prada, Carmen [Duquesa de Borelli]. “Peliculerías.” Mundo Gráfico no. 499 (25 May 1921):  31.

Vargas Machuca, G.M. “Historia del Cine Español. Memorias de un veterano.” La Libertad no. 2,763 (26 January 1929): 6.

Zecchi, Bárbara; “Dos pioneras entre el teatro y el cine: Elena Jordi y Helena Cortesina.” In De los orígenes a la revolución tecnológica del siglo XXI. Eds. Emma Camaero, María Marcos Ramos. Salamanca: Hegar, Ediciones Anatema, 2013. 377-388.

Archival Paper Collections:

Letters between Emma Cortesina and Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. Nº inv. CS 1465. Museo Sorolla.

Elena Cortés Altabas/Helena Cortesina's birth certificate. Vol. 171-1. pg. 13. Registro Civil nº 2 de Valencia.

Images related to Helena Cortesina. Archivo General de la Administración, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte.

Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos [Center for Latin American Migratory Studies] [online database].

Citation

Cordero-Hoyo, Elena. "Helena Cortesina." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-8gj6-1v69>

Mrs. M.T. Pender

by Donna Casella

Mrs. M. T. Pender was a prolific Ulster fiction writer and outspoken nationalist whose serialized novel, O’Neill of the Glen (1891), was the source for the Film Company of Ireland’s (FCOI) first indigenous Irish feature, O’Neil of the Glen (1916). The FCOI was incorporated in March 1916 with the goal of producing Irish films with Irish themes and an all-Irish cast and crew, according to “Irish Film Production” (1916, 6). The Irish Limelight reports in “What the Irish Film Co. is Doing,” however, that never-released work was destroyed in the Dame Street office fires during the Easter Rising in April: “… the first three months work was wiped out in a week” (1917, 3). The FCOI immediately resumed production and O’Neil of the Glen was released to censors and the press in June, exhibitors in July, and the public in August. It is widely regarded, then, as the company’s first production. Founded and managed by Jim Sullivan and Ellen O’Mara Sullivan, the FCOI went on to produce highly nationalist films until 1920 when O’Mara Sullivan died. Pender’s writing, which promoted Irish culture and advocated a free and united Ireland, appealed to the company’s nationalist leanings.

Mrs. M.T. Pender. Private Collection.

Pender’s literary upbringing and the political turmoil of the period shaped her writing. She was born on a small farm in Killead, County Antrim, Ulster province, in what is now Northern Ireland. Alexander Millar, descended from Pender’s maternal line, notes in “Discovering Mrs. Pender,” that her father was a poor Roman Catholic farmer, while her mother came from a landed Presbyterian family that disowned her when she married (49-50). Pender was raised as an Irish Catholic patriot in a literary household and went on to train as a school teacher (50). During her lifetime, Ireland was plagued by land disputes and early struggles for independence from Britain, both of which became the subject of her poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. “The Irish at Gallipoli,” like her other poetry, celebrates Irish nationalism, in this case the country’s contribution to international struggles (1916, 2). The non-fiction essay, “Some Men and Episodes of ’98,” honors early Irish rebels and advocates for a united Ireland (1897, 123-26). She also lectured on these subjects, particularly for the Belfast branch of the Nationalist Association of Irish Women, later the Irish Women’s Centenary Union (Urquhart 91-92). Pender’s fiction is equally nationalistic, portraying British antagonists, Irish victims of colonial rule, and Ulster resistance. One of her more well-known novels, The Green Cockade: A Tale of Ulster in Ninety Eight (1898), tells the story of the Battle of Antrim during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 from the rebel’s point of view. In addition to her novels, she frequently contributed fiction to both newspapers and “story papers” (illustrated literary periodicals). Her fiction appeared regularly in the Irish Independent, Dundalk Democrat, Leinster Leader, and Shamrock. The latter featured the first installment of O’Neill of the Glen on page 1 of the August 1, 1891 edition. The serial ran for 24 weeks until December 12, 1891.

Pender, then, had already made a name for herself as a poet, fiction writer, and political spokeswoman, when W. T. Lysaght adapted her novel for the FCOI production. The film opened at the Bohemian Picture Theatre in Dublin on August 7, 1916. An advertisement in the Irish Times enticed Dubliners by informing them that a camera man would be taking moving pictures of the audience to be later shown on the screen: “Don’t miss this chance of seeing what you look like on the Screen” (4). Unfortunately, there are no surviving prints, but reviews and announcements suggest it stayed close to the original Shamrock serial. (“O’Neil” and “O’Neill” are both used in advertisements and press coverage for the film.) The column “Stage and Gallery” in the Dublin Evening Mail notes the film is set in Ulster and tells the story of a romance between Don O’Neil, the son of a landowner, and Nola, the daughter of a solicitor who swindles and murders Don’s father (5). Nola is tormented by a suitor, Graves, who threatens to release this information, but is eventually subdued by Don. The film’s nationalism centers on the O’Neils, proud Irish landowners, whose property is threatened by “outsiders”–a thinly veiled reference to the Land Wars in the second half of the 19th century. The Film Company of Ireland regularly explored this conflict between the Irish (both tenants and landowners) and often absentee British landowners.

O’Neil of the Glen (1916) film program. Courtesy of the Irish Film Institute. 

Research thus far indicates that Pender was not involved in the film’s production. However, her name was consistently used in promotional material, and the film drew crowds throughout Dublin and the provinces from August through December of its initial run. An early program highlights her authorship on its first page: “O’Neil of the Glen By Mrs. M. T. Pender,” mentioning Lysaght in the line beneath. The Irish Times also assigns her authorship in “Irish Film Production” (6). And an advertisement in the Kerry News refers to O’Neill of the Glen as a “Homeland Production” by Mrs. M. T. Pender (2). Great Britain’s The Bioscope, the only trade journal covering Irish filmmaking until January, 1917 and the first issue of The Irish Limelight, recounts how the film garnered attention in Dublin and the provinces. In the column “Ireland. With Renters and Exhibitors,” a writer going by the name Paddy notes queues outside the Dublin’s Bohemian Picture House each night (655). Our Dublin Correspondent reports “crowded houses” all week in Dublin for “the famous story by Mrs. M. T. Pender, the eminent Ulster novelist” (689). The film was equally popular in Ulster. Paddy states that 10 runs were scheduled in Belfast that fall (1060). Newspapers also picked up on the film’s popularity. According to “O’Neill of the Glen” in Tralee’s The Liberator, “Enormous crowds are expected to-night, tomorrow night and Saturday to see the glorious work of Mrs. M. T. Pender on the Picturedrome screen” (2). The writer lauds her as the greatest woman writer of the Irish race” (2). The success of O’Neil of the Glen prompted the company to market some two-reel comedies and dramas in 1916 alongside the film, according to an advertisement in The Bioscope (754) and Paddy’s “Ireland. With Renters and Exhibitors” (1060; 1285; 518). Revivals later appeared at Dublin’s Rotunda and Corona Cinema (“Picture Houses” 6; “O’Neil of the Glen” 2).

Pender continued to use her writing to promote the Irish nationalist cause until her death in 1920. Reprints of her novels were published in the 1920s and 1930s. And in 1962, the RTÉ aired a radio adaptation in Gaelic of An Cnota Glas, The Green Cockade. Obituaries speak fondly of her patriotism and the popularity of her fiction writing. According to the Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner’s “Mrs. M. T. Pender Dead,” she was “for many years, the centre in Belfast of a brilliant group of literary and political enthusiasts many of whom have since won enduring fame” (1920, 6). Though the adaptation of her novel marked the birth of indigenous feature filmmaking in Ireland, obituaries, reviews of her fiction, and coverage of her political activism fail to mention her contribution to Ireland’s early film industry.

See also: Ellen O’Mara Sullivan

Bibliography

“Births–Marriages–Deaths.” Irish News and Belfast Morning News (18 March 1920): 1.

Country Antrim, Ireland 1851 Census. Household of Daniel Doherty. Killead Parish. http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=49109

“Irish Film Production.” Irish Times (30 June 1916): 6.

“Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Film Company of Ireland, Limited.” (3 March 1916): n.p. Dublin Records Office. M5190. National Archives of Ireland.

Millar, Alexander. “Discovering Mrs. Pender.” Causeway: Cultural Journal Traditions vol. 5, no.1 (Spring 1998): 49-52.

------. E-Mail correspondence. 26 July and 1 September, 2017.

Morris, Catherine. Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revolution. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012.

“Mrs. M. T. Pender Dead.” Irish Examiner (20 March 1920): 3.

“Mrs. M. T. Pender Dead.” Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner (27 March 1920): 6.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” Advertisement. The Bioscope vol. 32, no. 515 (24 Aug. 1916): 754.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” Advertisement. Evening Herald (3 May 1920): 2.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” Advertisement. Irish Times (7 Aug. 1916): 4.

“O’Neill of the Glen.” Advertisement. Kerry News (11 Oct. 1916): 2.

“O’Neill of the Glen.” The Liberator (12 Oct. 1916): 2.

Our Dublin Correspondent. “First Irish Film.” The Bioscope vol. 32, no. 515 (24 Aug. 1916): 689.

Paddy. “Ireland. With Renters and Exhibitors.” The Bioscope vol.  32, no. 514 (17 Aug. 1916): 655.

------. “Ireland. With Renters and Exhibitors.” The Bioscope vol. 32, no. 518 (14 Sept. 1916): 1060.

------. “Ireland. With Renters and Exhibitors.” The Bioscope vol. 32, no. 520 (28 Sept. 1916): 1285.

------.“Ireland. With Renters and Exhibitors.” The Bioscope vol. 33, no.  525 (2 Nov. 1916): 518.

Pender, Margaret T. “The Irish at Gallipoli.” Freeman’s Journal (21 Aug. 1916): 2.

------. [Mrs. M. T.] An Cnota Glas. Adapt. Séamus Mac Ciarnáin. Trans. Pádraig Mac Seágáin. Radió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Dublin. 26 June 1962. http://www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/1379-a-glimpse-into-rte-written-archives/374392-cuimhnigh-ar-orr/

------. The Green Cockade, A Tale of Ulster in ’98. Dublin: Sealy, 1898.

------. O’Neill of the Glen. Shamrock [serialized] (1 Aug. 1891–12 Dec. 1891).

------. “Some Men and Episodes of ’98.” Shan Van Vocht vol. II, no. 7 (5 July 1897): 123-26. Linen Hall Library.

“Picture Houses.” Irish Times (30 May 1917): 6.

Program. O’Neil of the Glen. Paper Collections, Box 157. Access No. 08/641. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

“Stage and Gallery.” Dublin Evening Mail (5 Aug. 1916): 5.

Urquhart, Diane. Women in Ulster Politics: 1890-1940. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000.

“What the Irish Film Co. Is Doing.” The Irish Limelight vol. 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1917): 3.

Archival Paper Collections:

Irish Periodicals. Linen Hall Library.

Paper Collections. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Irish Newspaper Archives [online database] contains Irish newspapers that feature Pender's fiction and poetry.

Citation

Casella, Donna. "Mrs. M.T. Pender." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-c4sw-v043>

Alice Smythe Jay

by Kendra Preston Leonard

Alice Smythe Jay was a cinema organist, conductor, composer, and inventor. She spent much of her career in Hawaii and the West Coast. Over the course of her career, Jay composed music for accompanying film and for the concert hall; conducted orchestras and ensembles in concert; became a well-known commentator on music for the cinema; made recordings to use in accompanying film; and patented her own recording process and ran her own production company using it.

In 1915, Jay, already an established cinema organist, became well-known nationally when she began corresponding with Ernst Luz, the editor of the “Music and the Picture” column in Motion Picture News. Discoursing on what music to use and what to avoid in cinema accompaniment, how to prepare a compiled score (a score made up of pre-existing pieces), and how to improvise, Jay’s letters, which Luz published frequently, offered erudite and practical advice and commentary on the creation and performance of music for film. It was essential, Jay wrote, that cinema musicians have a comprehensive knowledge of Western art music as well as current popular songs. She insisted that study—both of long-existing classics and of new music—was indispensable for compiling a successful score, and noted that her own sources were the Western European canon of art music; well-established vernacular songs; and new music, both that written for the screen and published as photoplay music and new popular songs (Burton 1915, 191).

An orchestrion, an automated instrument designed to replicate the sounds of an orchestra in a moving picture theater. Private Collection.

Jay’s desire for good motion picture music, along with her frequent frustrations with poor accompaniments, led her to begin making recordings of her scores for the many and varied automated instruments that were becoming popular in the cinema, such as the player-piano-like Bartola and orchestrion. Believing that recorded accompaniments would bring about a time “when music will fit into each and every picture the same as opera music to a libretto” (Jay 1919, 2346), Jay wanted to produce her recordings for all makes and models of instrument. Finding that many recording companies were limited to a specific format of recording, she filed plans to construct a $12,000 factory in Los Gatos, California for “the manufacture of music rolls” in February 1916 (“New and Enlarged Shops” 78). She began marketing the rolls that same year in the major trade journals, advertising that her “hand-played inspiration music rolls for motion pictures” were, when appropriately used, a complete replacement for a live orchestra (Jay 1916, 1670). Jay also made short rolls that could be used for specific kinds of scenes and combined to create a compiled soundtrack of rolls, according to a March 1916 Smythe Jay Music Company advertisement in Motion Picture News (1365). Her piece “The Storm at Sea,” one of her only known extant works, was composed for one of these rolls.

Alice Smythe Jay’s “Storm at Sea.” Private Collection.

In June 1921, Jay patented her own process for their production, the “Masteroll Perforated Machine” (Jay 1921, n.p.). For all of her rolls, Jay viewed a film several times before creating a score for it through both compilation and improvisation. She then recorded the score on her machine while watching the film to ensure accuracy in matching the music to the image. Her recordings, she wrote to Exhibitor’s Trade Review, produce “music rolls for automatic players and organs to be used in conjunction with moving picture presentation—cued and timed approximately fourteen minutes to a thousand feet of film. [….] The method covers a perfectly synchronized roll to the picture” (Jay 1921, 1274). Jay’s invention received good press; Music Trade Review noted  in August 1921 that the rolls should be a great success: “Certainly it appears that a step forward has been taken and that the long-prophesied art of synchronizing the film with suitable and universally available music has been worked out” (15).

Advertisement, Smythe Jay Music Company, Motion Picture News, 1916.

At some point, however, Jay closed the Smythe Jay Music Co. and moved to Medford, Oregon, where she was the organist at the Rialto Theater and, according to the Medford Mail Tribune, conducted several ensembles (1923, 2). Jay appears to have gone into radio in the late 1920s, a common career change for many cinema accompanists. There are tantalizing references in newspapers from the late 1920s and early 1930s of “Alice Jay and orchestra” in the Burlington, Iowa, newspaper, and radio show references to “Alice Jay” in various Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois newspapers, but little else.

Alice Smythe Jay’s drawing for her patented music roll. Private Collection. 

Jay’s influence on cinema musicians was likely considerable. As the in-house musician for large West Coast cinemas, hundreds if not thousands of people would have heard her accompaniments in the theater and on her recordings, which were shipped across the United States. Although much of her music is lost today, she had a deep and broad knowledge of the Western art music repertoire, and included works from the canon in her scores as a matter of course, influencing taste and creating musical connections with visual tropes. She insisted on the importance of developing this knowledge as essential to being able to create effective scores and to communicate with audiences. Audiences who heard and accompanists who made use of compiled scores by Jay experienced a blend of musical genres and sources that can be located in scores to the present. Her experiments in developing technology to pair music with film were replicated by numerous artists and companies, and encouraged the industry to seek out a satisfactory solution to creating synchronized sound. While much of her music is lost, the sounds she helped create for the cinema remain with us.

See also: Hazel Burnett

Bibliography

Advertisement. Smythe Jay Music Company. Motion Picture News vol. 13, no. 9 (4 March 1916): 1365.

Burton, Alice S. “A Woman’s Suggestion for Musical Scores.” Motion Picture News vol. 12, no. 2 (17 July 1915): 191.

Jay, Alice Smythe. “Can Too High Standard Be Placed on Musical Inspiration for Pictures?” Motion Picture News vol. 13, no. 11 (18 March 1916): 1670.

------. [as A. S. Jay] “Music-roll for piano-players and method of producing same.” Patent US1381641A. 14 June 1921.

------. “Roll for Music Interpretation.” Exhibitors Trade Review vol. 10, no. 18 (1 October 1921): 1274.

------. Letter. “What a Progressive Musician Has to Say.” Motion Picture News vol.19, no. 15 (12 April 1919): 2346.

Medford Mail Tribune (3 August 1923): 2.

“New and Enlarged Shops.” American Machinist vol. 44, no. 5 (3 February 1916): 78.

“Securing Suitable Music for the Motion Picture.” Music Trade Review vol. 73, no. 9 (27 August  1921): 15.

Archival Paper Collections:

Silent Film Music on Microfilm. [Microfilm available: MUSIC 3236 & MUSIC 3212, which contains “Storm at Sea”]. Library of Congress, Music Division.

Silent Film Sound & Music Archive [digital resource].

Citation

Leonard, Kendra Preston. "Alice Smythe Jay." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-yy39-xn57>

Hazel Burnett

by Kendra Preston Leonard

Hazel Burnett, as she was primarily known, was a theater accompanist who performed in Texas’s biggest motion picture palaces in the 1910s and 1920s. Burnett performed for both cinema and live theater as an organist and pianist. After an early career in Ohio, she moved south, where she played at the Majestic Theater in Austin and the Queen Theater and the Aztec Theatre in San Antonio. Burnett’s life as a cinema accompanist at some of the biggest theaters in the United States is documented by the Burnett Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Named for Josephine Burnett, who donated her grandmother’s music to the Ransom Center, this collection contains a wide variety of Hazel Burnett’s materials, including printed cue sheets and full scores; photoplay albums; sheet music; hundreds of pieces clipped out of The Etude and Melody magazines; and handwritten cue sheets and notes.

Hazel Burnet in front of the Aztec Theater, San Antonio, Texas, circa 1927. Private Collection. 

Burnett’s music library and notes indicate that she created many of her scores for accompanying films by combining pieces she already knew well with new works written as characteristic or descriptive pieces for cinema or stage accompaniment. One particularly useful example for understanding Burnett’s practices is her compiled score for the 1920 Paramount film Humoresque, a classic melodrama about a young Jewish violinist. Hugo Riesenfeld, the conductor of several large New York moving picture palace orchestras and a prolific composer for film, created an original score for Humoresque for the film’s premiere, but Burnett, drawing on her own music library, compiled a different one. She used Antonín Dvořák’s “Humoresque” and Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidre” to provide repeated and recognizable themes for the picture, and accompanied the rest of the film with pieces drawn from The Etude and Melody magazines. These magazines catered to cinema accompanists and published numerous short generic or character pieces in each issue. Burnett cut out pieces from the magazine and attached them to other pieces, handwritten cue sheets, or notes indicating their place in a film score. Women frequently published in the magazines, and Burnett clipped hundreds of their pieces out of The Etude. In this male-dominated field, Burnett scored films with pieces written by black English composer Amanda Aldridge, Carrie Jacobs Bond, Esther Gronow, Mae Davis, and others. Audiences in Ohio and Texas who experienced Burnett’s cinematic accompaniments would have heard her original musical accompaniments of Hollywood films with music by women, something previously undocumented in silent film performance. According to documents in the Josephine Burnett Collection, Burnett appears to have sometimes included pieces that would have local resonances into her compiled scores; her Texan audiences would have heard songs by Texan composers and pieces about Texas and the Southwest in Burnett’s accompaniments.

Sheet music with notation, “Merry Hunting Party,” used to musically identify Calamity Jane in My Old Kentucky Home (1922). Private Collection.

Another example of Burnett’s scores is for the 1922 feature film My Old Kentucky Home. At seven reels, the film ran about seventy minutes. For this score, Burnett used music from several years of The Etude and sheet music. She opened the film with “Plaisantrie” [sic] by film composer Irenée Bergé and used Chapman Tyler’s “Afternoon at the Villa” when the hero arrives at his mother’s home. In keeping with the practice of assigning leitmotivs to characters, Burnett assigned “Merry Hunting Party” by Emil Söchting to the character of Calamity Jane and accompanied workouts at the horse track with “Saltarello” by Richard Goedeler. At the end of the film, Burnett led the audience in a sing-along of the title song. Aside from the Stephen Foster title song, all of the pieces in Burnett’s compiled score were taken from The Etude from between October 1920 and August 1921. According to the regular column “What the Picture Did for Me” in the Exhibitor’s Herald, the film was widely advertised as a picture for the entire family: it did well and ran for several months in large cinemas such as the ones in which Burnett played (1923, 67). At the Majestic in Austin, Burnett’s compiled score for My Old Kentucky Home could have been heard by as many as 3,810 people a day during the height of the film’s popularity: According to the venue’s website, the Majestic Theater (now the Paramount), built in 1915, has a seating capacity of 1,270 (“Venue Rentals” n.p.).

Burnett’s compiled scores indicate that she drew from a variety of genres, using music from the Western art tradition, what we might call “light classical” today, and vernacular song. Most of the pieces she used were widely available either through sheet music vendors or publications marketed for home performance. Although the theaters at which she worked had large music libraries, Burnett used those holdings less frequently than her own personally owned pieces and the clippings from the magazines. This suggests that Burnett required a selection of works she either already knew or could learn quickly for accompanying, and that she was always seeking new music to use in the cinema. The pieces from The Etude and Melody, pitched for wide use (Melody advertised itself as “for the Photoplay Musician and the Musical Home”), were ideal for her needs. The multiple handwritten notes and cue numbers on individual pieces indicates that Burnett maintained some kind of system or had excellent recall for what pieces she had used for what kinds of scenes; it is clear that she re-used both sheet music and clippings in compiled scores for various films.

Although Burnett did not leave any evidence of original compositions or make recordings, the theaters at which she played had seating capacities of at least 750 and held at least three showings per day, suggesting that thousands of people heard Burnett’s film accompaniments every month. Like that of other women in cinema music, Burnett’s influence on helping shape the sound of the American cinema has gone mostly unrecognized. In examining her music, however, we can begin to understand how she created enduring connections between music and image for audiences in Ohio and Texas.

See also: Alice Smythe Jay

Bibliography

Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

“Venue Rentals.” Paramount Theater. http://www.austintheatre.org/about-us/venue-rental/

“What the Picture Did for Me.” Exhibitor’s Herald (27 January 1923): 67-75.

Archival Paper Collections:

Josephine Burnett Collection. University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center.

Silent Film Sound & Music Archive [digital resource].

Citation

Leonard, Kendra Preston. "Hazel Burnett." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-na1j-2967>

Bedia Muvahhit and Neyyire Neyir

by Eylem Atakav

The Ottoman Empire dissolved after the First World War and was replaced by the self-consciously modern and Westernized Republic of Turkey in 1923. Turkish culture under the Ottoman rule has been characterized by historians as a traditional Islamic culture that experienced very little change for centuries. What change did occur has typically been attributed to Western contact. The Republican state evolved into what later scholars called a feminist state, which made women’s equality in the public sphere a national policy. Indeed, a secular civil code replaced the Islamic law in 1926, giving women equal civil rights. It is in this transitional period that Bedia Muvahhit became a pioneer in cinema.

Within this historical context, the idea of a new Republican woman who represented the modern, secular, Westernized state, and who was expected to behave and dress in what the state defined as a modern, secular, and Western manner, was established. The new regime encouraged women to take on professions that were traditionally perceived as masculine and at times, for religious reasons, were forbidden for women. Acting of Muslim women in cinema was one example of this. However, in the early 1920s, this changed with Muvahhit and Neyyire Neyir’s performances in films as the first Muslim actresses. The state reforms of this period represented the vision of a single charismatic leader, the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Muvahhit recalled the story of her meeting with Atatürk and the beginning of her acting career, a turning point in Turkish cultural history, in a fascinating 1988 interview on Turkish Radio Television 2:

It is one of Atatürk’s biggest reforms for the Turkish woman to get rid of her veil and go on stage to act. Ms. Halide Edip wanted her novel to be adapted into a film and a Turkish woman to act in it. Mr. Muhsin [Ertuğrul], a friend of my husband, who directed the film invited me to act. […] My husband and his fellow actors invited Atatürk to İzmir to see their play. İzmir, at the time, was only just freed from Greek occupation. It was a city literally covered in ashes and fire. Atatürk asked who the actors in the play were. There was Ms. Isabelle, Ms. Maria, etc. [all non-Turkish names]. Then he enquired if there were any Turkish actresses. Before that a Turkish woman, called Afife Jale, tried acting in another play, but the police arrested her as she was on stage and took her away and put her in custody, and the play got cancelled. […] Atatürk asked Mr. Muvahhit why I did not act, as he had seen me in the film Ateşten Gömlek and was very impressed with my performance. […] They told me I would be acting that evening. […] Given that it was Atatürk’s order, I happily memorized all the lines during the day and performed that evening as the Principal in the play “Ceza Kanunu.” After the play, Atatürk thanked me [and] asked me to cover my head with a modest headscarf. I asked him why. He responded: “We need to get the nation used to it slowly rather than attracting negative attention. You acting on stage is in itself a big step forward.”

Although Muvahhit’s account above is particularly significant in the context of theatre, it is important to note that her visibility in film allowed her to ultimately break barriers in the theatrical world.

There are debates in Turkish film history as to the identity of the first Turkish film actress. While Muvahhit is written about as the first Muslim woman to act in a film in Turkey, there are other film historians, including Ali Özuyar, who claim that the first Muslim woman on screen was Nermin Hanım, who played Esrarengiz Şark in The Mysterious East (1922), which was directed by a French engineer (1999, 18). It is worth noting for this reason that this is a contested period as some scholars see the transition between the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic from a historically linear approach, and others regard 1923 as a clear cut-off point, claiming that year as the beginning of the history of cinema in Turkey. Up to 1923, when female characters were needed in films they were chosen from those living in Turkey who were not Muslims, including Greek, Armenian, and Russian women. As noted by film historian Agah Özgüç, in the early 1920s, “women performers are typically insignificant characters…who cannot go beyond archetypal roles” (1988, 23).

Poster for Ateşten Gömlek (1923). Private Collection.

When Muhsin Ertuğrul decided to adapt Halide Edip Adıvar’s novel, Ateşten Gömlek/The Shirt of Fire (also translated as The Daughter of Smyrna), in 1923, Muvahhit’s career in cinema started, marking her as one of the first Muslim and Turkish actresses in the history of cinema in Turkey. The film told the story of a young woman who worked for the liberation of her country. In order to be faithful to the novel, which focused on the Turkish National Independence War, female characters had to be Turkish. As Muvahhit’s above interview suggests, the author of this novel was also a woman who promoted the idea of women acting in films. Indeed, the author insisted that she would only permit her novel to be filmed if the lead character was performed by a Turkish Muslim woman. The film was also the first in Turkish cinema to focus on the Independence War. As its poster suggests, it was influential in establishing national identity while emphasizing the importance of Turkishness with its tagline (“A big Turkish masterpiece,” referring perhaps not only to the film itself, but also the victory of Turks in the war), as well as the use of a Turkish flag as its background image. It is in this film that Muvahhit acted alongside Neyyire Neyir and the two became pioneering Muslim Turkish film actresses. It tells the story of the Turkish Independence War by focusing on the life of a strong independent woman, Ayşe (played by Muvahhit), whose husband and child are killed during the occupation of İzmir (the third biggest city in Turkey). After leaving İzmir, Ayşe travels across Anatolia and falls in love with an army officer who is also killed at the end of the film. Ateşten Gömlek is regarded as the first of the Turkish epic films.

Kadınlar Dünyasıw/Women’s World journal. Private Collection.

It is also worth acknowledging Muvahhit’s involvement in the Ottoman organization, Mudafaa-i Hukuk-u Nisan Cemiyeti, which advocated women’s rights in working as civil servants. As outlined by the research done by the İstanbul Kadın Müzesi/Istanbul Women’s Museum, Muvahhit was one of the first women to work as a civil servant and was influential in the publication of the organization’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası/Women’s World. It is thanks to this organization that, in 1913, one section of the government recruited the first-ever Muslim woman. Muvahhit took part in more than forty films throughout her career in cinema, and over two hundred plays. She translated four plays from French to Turkish. She was awarded a variety of prizes in her lifetime, including the Atatürk Art Award in 1981 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993 on the 70th year of her career. Currently, one of the most prestigious theatre awards in Turkey commemorates her pioneer status in acting under the title of the “Bedia Muvahhit Theatre Award.”

***

Neyyire Neyir and Muhsin Ertuğrul in Ateşten Gömlek (1923). Private Collection.

In Article 204, issued by the Dahiliye Nezareti/Ministry of Internal Affairs, dated February 27, 1921, Muslim Turkish women were banned from acting. Within this historical and social context that offered limited career options for women, Neyyire Neyir proved to be a success story. In 1921, Neyir graduated from the Teachers Academy for Girls in İstanbul. In 1923, she joined Darülbedayi/City Theatres and got her first acting role on stage in “Othello.” This was also the year when the author of Ateşten Gömlek/The Shirt of Fire, Halide Edip Adıvar, decided to have Muslim Turkish women appear in Muhsin Ertuğrul’s film adaptation of her book. Working in collaboration with Adıvar, Ertuğrul recounted in his memoirs:

I could not miss this priceless opportunity to encourage women to act and decided to cast Turkish women for the lead female characters in this national film which offered a sight into the Independence War. I invited Bedia, Mr. Muvahhit’s wife, to perform the role of the nurse, Ayşe, in the film. In an extremely courageous move and despite the period’s reactionary ideas about women, she accepted the offer. We advertised in newspapers for the other female character, Kezban. There was only one person who applied: Münire Eyüp [Neyir], a young graduate from a school which provides teacher training. Halide Edip was extremely happy for Turkish girls to act in the film (qtd. in Yüksel 2013, n.p).

In a journal entitled Mecmua, Neyir was praised for her performance as Kezban in the film:

What makes this film a masterpiece is the role Kezban. She represents the caring and noble Anatolian woman…The Turkish woman who performs as Kezban in the film is the one who understands the author of the novel best. The heart and soul of the characters are in the actress’s face and expressions that the audience can feel (qtd. in Yüksel n.p).

This kind of positive response to the film and one of the first Muslim Turkish actresses in it suggests change in the audience’s, and hence the public’s, attitudes toward women and women’s roles. This is the reason why a review like the one quoted above is an invaluable resource in appreciating women’s contributions to cultural production in the early 1920s in Turkey.

Bedia Muvahhit and Neyyire Neyir. Private Collection

In 1929, Neyir married theatre producer, actor, and filmmaker Ertuğrul. She continued to act in his films, including Kız Kulesinde Bir Facia/A Disaster in Maiden’s Tower (1923) and Ankara Postası/Ankara Post (1928). The majority of her artistic contributions, however, were in theatre. She acted on stage in hundreds of plays–including in plays with Muvahhit–and both set up new theatre groups and joined existing ones through City Theatres. In the mid-1920s, Neyir visited the Soviet Union to learn more about Russian theatrical styles. In 1930, Ertuğrul started publishing a journal entitled Darülbedayi, and Neyir became the editor  and wrote articles about Russian literature and theatre under the name of Münire Eyüp. In 1941, together with Ertuğrul, she began publishing another journal entitled Perde ve Sahne/Screen and Stage. In its first issue, Neyir explained the main aim of the publication: “[…] to acknowledge and emphasize the significance of cinema and theatre in a period during which interest in these art forms may not be taken seriously.” She asserted that the editors of the journal “dedicated their lives to cinema and theatre and their only desire is to serve the arts” (qtd. in Yüksel n.p).

During her career, fellow actor Vasfi Rıza Zobu, who wrote an obituary for Neyir, observed the latter’s contributions to art in general and cinema and theatre in particular:

She loved reading. She wanted to learn everything and would not get tired of running after knowledge no matter what it took. She was well versed in the arts of theatre and film. I heard her talking in French with French comedians Alexander and Robin; English with English painters Cecile de Mille [sic]; and Russian with the Russian artist Pirof. She was a musician, a painter and a writer (Zobu 1944, n.p.).

Neyir was clearly an extremely significant woman in the establishment of an intellectual environment where cinema and theatre were highly regarded and discussed in detail. Neyir’s companionship with Ertuğrul is reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre’s intellectual friendship. Ertuğrul has been acknowledged as a key name in the establishment of cinema in Turkey. In fact, in textbooks about the history of Turkish cinema, he is referred to as the leader of the Theatre Period. Theatre Period here is used to connote the heavy effects of theatre on visual style in early Turkish films. What is thought-provoking and is worth exploring in further research is the influence of Neyir on his work, not only within their fourteen years of marriage (1929-1943), but also beginning in 1923 when they first worked together. It is possible that Neyir’s influence on Ertuğrul’s work is rather invisible. In fact, to this date, in many resources around Turkish cinema history, Neyir is only acknowledged for being the first Muslim Turkish actress, and perhaps for being Ertuğrul’s wife, yet there is an urgent need to fill in this gap in knowledge (both in Turkish and English) by rewriting Neyir’s significant contributions to cinema. As it demonstrates her pioneer status and significance in Turkish cultural history, it is worth noting that there is a street in her name (Neyyire Neyir Street) in İstanbul, to commemorate her work in the cinema and theatre of Turkey.

Bibliography

Akçura, Gökhan. Bedia Muvahhit: Bir Cumhuriyet Sanatçısı/Bedia Muvahhit: A Republican Artist. İstanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Yayınları, 1993.

Akkent, Meral. “Bedia Muvahhit.” İstanbul Kadın Müzesi/Women's Museum Istanbul [online exhibition] (2012): n.p. http://www.istanbulkadinmuzesi.org/en/bedia-muvahhit

------. “Neyyire Neyir.” İstanbul Kadın Müzesi/Women's Museum Istanbul [online exhibition] (2012): n.p. http://www.istanbulkadinmuzesi.org/en/neyyire-neyir

Atakav, Eylem. Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013.

“Bedia Muvahhit.” SinemaTurk [online database]. http://www.sinematurk.com/kisi/1150-bedia-muvahhit/

Çomak, Nebahat Akgün. “Bedia Muvahhit: Türk Sineması'nda Ateşten Gömlek Filmi ve İlk Türk Kadın Sanatçısı”/ “Bedia Muvahhit: Atesten Gomlek’s Place in Turkish Cinema and the First Turkish Woman Artist.” In 100. Yılında Bir Sinema Klasiği. İstanbul: İÜ İletişim Fakültesi Yayını, 1995. 60.

Ertuğrul, Muhsin. Benden Sonra Tufan Olmasin: Anilar. İstanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2007.

Özgüç, Agah. Türk Sinemasında Cinselliğin Tarihi/The History of Sexuality in Turkish Cinema. İstanbul: Broy Yayınları, 1988.

Öztürk, Ruken. Sinemanın Disil Yüzü: Türkiye’de Kadın Yönetmenler/The Feminine Face of Cinema: Women Filmmakers in Turkey. İstanbul: Om Yayınevi, 2003.

Özuyar, Ali. Sinemanın Osmanlıca Serüveni/The Adventure of Cinema in Ottoman. Ankara: Öteki, 1999.

Yüksel, Selçuk. “Türk Tiyatrosunun Güneşi: Neyyire Neyir”/“The Sun of Turkish Theatre: Neyyire Neyir.” www.tiyatromuzesi.org (2013): n.p. http://tiyatromuzesi.org/drupal/neyyire_neyir

Zobu, Vasfi Rıza. “Neyyire Neyir.” Türk Tiyatrosu Dergisi/Journal of Turkish Theatre no. 167 (15 February 1944): n.p.

Citation

Atakav, Eylem. "Bedia Muvahhit and Neyyire Neyir." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hq42-n960>

Marija Jurić Zagorka

by Dijana Jelača

Marija Jurić Zagorka. 

Marija Jurić Zagorka was one of the most important feminist figures in the history of Croatia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Marija Jurić, who later added the pen name Zagorka, was born to a well-to-do Croatian family in 1873. During this historical period, women were not provided with the same educational opportunities as men. Despite this, Zagorka received a solid private education due to her family’s upper class status. In 1891, as a reaction to her expressing desire to become an actress, Zagorka’s parents arranged for her to marry a Hungarian man whom she did not know. After three years of marriage, which, according to Dragutin Prohaska, Zagorka likened to being “subjected to a moral inquisition” (qtd. in Jakobović Fribec 2006, 196), she fled from her husband, eventually settling in Zagreb. In Croatia’s capital, she started her pioneering journalistic career, becoming the first female journalist in the country and in the region of South East Europe more broadly. Her first journalistic piece was published in 1896 in Obzor, at the time the most esteemed Croatian daily. She was a political journalist, but was often not allowed to publish under her real name. Obzor’s editor-in-chief famously referred to her as “a crone with no name or reputation, a cowgirl from Zagorje and, what’s more, infected with a socialist mentality and feminist notions” (Lasić 1986, 69). Moreover, she was made to work in a separate room behind a curtain out of fear that a woman’s presence would scandalize the visitors of the newspaper’s offices.

Stills from The Grič Witch (1920). Courtesy of the Croatian State Archives.

Zagorka exhibited “a deep sense of social justice and a ‘revolutionary nature’ at an early age” (Jakobović Fribec 195), and such tendencies only grew more prominent in her adult years. She was an outspoken feminist, mobilizing the working women’s political activity and leading the first women’s protest in Zagreb in 1903. She was also the founder of Ženski list/Women’s Paper, Croatia’s first women’s magazine, in 1925. After she left Ženski list, she started another feminist magazine, Hrvatica/Croatian Woman, in 1938. During World War II, under the rule of Croatia’s collaborationist Nazi state (NDH), her assets were confiscated and she was banned from publishing. After the war, she continued her feminist activism, which often earned her ridicule from male colleagues. She died in Zagreb in 1957, and her apartment is today a museum. Subsequent feminist scholarship has largely embraced Zagorka’s populist legacy (Kolanović 2008), with Lydia Sklevicky dubbing her “the tiny Amazonian of Croatian feminism” (1996, 245).

Stills from The Grič Witch (1920). Courtesy of the Croatian State Archives.

Zagorka is best known for her literary work, which remains extremely popular to this day. Her numerous novels, which came out in installments, frequently centered on strong and independent female protagonists who overcame improbable odds and fought off various patriarchal and moralistic social pressures. What is more, her literary plot twists often featured cross-dressing and other forms of playing with traditional gender roles. Critics dismissed her literary work as trivial (Kragić 2005, n.p.) while readers, and particularly women, embraced it on a mass scale. Moreover, Zagorka’s literary work exhibited solidarity with working class women in particular. Some of her most famous works include the series Grička vještica/The Grič Witch, which started coming out in 1912, Kći Lotrščaka/The Daugher of Lotrščak (1921), and her longest series, Gordana (1934). In another first, she was also the author of Croatia’s first sci-fi novel, Crveni Ocean/The Red Ocean in 1918.

Zagorka’s multifaceted professional activities made her a factor in the very emergence of Croatia’s film production. Namely, she was credited as a screenwriter on arguably the two most significant Croatian motion picture films made before 1945: Matija Gubec (1917), based on August Šenoa’s novel Seljačka buna/Peasants’ Uprising, and directed by Aleksandar “Aca” Binički, and The Grič Witch (1920), based on her own novel, and believed to be directed by Hinko Nučić (Šakić 2014, 303). However, neither film has been preserved, and this makes it particularly challenging to properly historicize Zagorka’s role as a regional film pioneer. What documentation remains about these film consists of written accounts by participants, critics, and film historians, as well as occasional film posters and stills that have been preserved at the Croatian State Archives. Due to the fact that neither film is extant, in writing about them one has to engage in some circumstantial speculation exhibited below.

Both films’ literary sources were first staged as theatrical plays in Croatia’s Hrvatsko narodno kazalište/Croatian National Theatre (HNK), and Zagorka initially adapted both works for the theater. Because of this, it could easily be assumed that her screenplays grew organically out of these theatrical adaptations. This assumption is further strengthened by the fact that Croatia Film, which produced both films, was founded in 1917 by two HNK workers, Hamilkar Bošković and Julio Bergmann, and that HNK’s directors and actors participated in the film versions of both Matija Gubec and The Grič Witch.

Screening announcement for Matija Gubec (1917), “screenwriter Mrs. Zagorka.” Courtesy of the Croatian State Archives.

In addressing her pioneering participation in cinema, film historian Ivo Škrabalo notes that it fully aligned with Zagorka’s general efforts to de-stigmatize popular culture made in the local language, as opposed to the elitist and imperialist privileging of “high culture” in German or Hungarian. This is precisely why, he argues, she embraced participating in Matija Gubec, a film about “domestic forces and domestic themes” (33). The literary source is a historical novel that describes the 1573 uprising of local peasants against unfair exploitation and terror they endured by the hand of aristocracy. The film’s titular character, Matija Gubec, was the leader of the uprising. While some written accounts suggest that Zagorka was not entirely happy with the director’s final achievement, the film was nevertheless lauded as a significant historical spectacle about important events in local history (Škrabalo 1984). It also marked one of the most ambitious projects of the nascent Croatian film industry to date.

Poster, The Grič Witch (1920). Courtesy of the Croatian State Archives.

Even though The Grič Witch has been lost and there is almost no information about the film aside from a few stills that survive, Zagorka’s overall legacy suggests that the film version of her work most likely retained the feminist overtones of its literary source, particularly because the source material was adapted to the screen by its original author. The original story of The Grič Witch centers on the young and outspoken Countess Nera, played in the film by actress Melita Bohinec, whose independent spirit scandalizes the powers that be so much so that she is eventually accused of being a witch and almost burned at the stake. Eventually, Nera triumphs over the narrow-minded moralism of the time without compromising her convictions.

Actress Melita Bohinec in The Grič Witch (1920). Courtesy of the Croatian State Archives.

Since little else is known about the film, some accounts dispute that it was ever actually made, after initial plans and announcements to do so. This is indicative of the challenges faced by the history of women’s participation in early cinema more generally, which often has to account for “ghost stories” as a way to compensate for a lack of existing evidence. With the loss of the two films for which Marija Jurić Zagorka served as a screenwriter, an important part of regional feminist film history has been lost as well. This makes it all the more important to reconstruct said history in writing, however partially, from the fragments that remain.

The author wishes to thank Tomislav Šakić and Maša Kolanović for their help and input.

Bibliography

Jakobović Fribec, Slavica. “Jurić, Marija (1873-1957).” In A Bibliographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries. Eds. Francisca De Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, Anna Loufti. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006. 195-199.

Kolanović, Maša. “Zagorkin popularni feminizam u međuprožimanju novinskih tekstova i romansi.” In Neznana junakinja: nova čitanja Zagorke. Eds. Maša Grdešić and Slavica Jakobović Fribec. Zagreb: Centar za ženske studije, 2008. 203-220.

Kragić, Bruno. “Jurić, Marija (Zagorka).” Hrvatski biografski leksikon (2005): n.p. http://hbl.lzmk.hr/clanak.aspx?id=155

Lasić, Stanko. Književni počeci Marije Jurić Zagorke (1873–1910): uvod u monografiju. Zagreb: Znanje, 1986.

Šakić, Tomislav. “Hrvatski film između nacionalizirane i nacionalne kinematografije.” In Hrvatska na prvi pogled: udžbenik hrvatske kulture. Ed. Sanda Lucija Udier. Zagreb: FF Press, 2014. 299-335.

Sklevicky, Lydia. Konji, žene, ratovi. Zagreb: Druga, 1996.

Škrabalo, Ivo. Između publike i države: Povijest hrvatske kinematografije, 1896-1980. Zagreb: Znanje, 1984.

Archival Paper Collections:

Fotografska kolekcija hrvatskog filma/Photographic Collection of Croatian Film/HR-HDA-1392. Croatian State Archives. 

Citation

Jelača, Dijana. "Marija Jurić Zagorka." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-qsha-6x70>

Diana Karenne

by Cristina Jandelli, Linda Del Gamba

Diana Karenne was one of the most interesting personalities in the Italian and European film scenes of the early 1900s. Star, actress, intellectual, artist, director, screenwriter, and producer, she is representative of an effectual coexistence between two different ways of considering a woman’s role in both the film industry and in a society that was undergoing deep changes as to gender boundaries (Guerra 2008, 39; Pravadelli 2014, 5; Vicarelli 2007, 13). Through her artistic career, she supported demands concerning female identity, widely felt between 1800 and 1900 (Bianchi 1969, 190): in this very period, Europe was facing a process of modernization and large transformations at every social level. Karenne never took sides towards women’s emancipation movements, yet she opposed conservative morals and social conventions of that time through her personal, aesthetic, and professional choices (Gaines 2008, 20), and helped to update the idea of cinema thanks to her bold artistic proposals and acting style (Bianchi 192).

Information about Karenne’s early life is very scarce. We know her actual name, Leukadia (or Leucadia) Konstantin, and that she was born in 1888, yet the date is still unknown (maybe between April 21 and May 20), as is her birthplace. The actress maintained she was born in Danzig, now Poland, even though many sources claim she was Ukrainian (Bianchi 189), Russian, or more generically “Slavic” (“Cinema italiano del tempo che fu” 11; “Diana Karenne al Modernissimo” 50). She was likely to have received theatrical training, but this has not been confirmed. As for her marital status, she is said to have been married and then divorced before emigrating to Italy, according to an article on April 30, 1917 in Film (23).

Karenne arrived in Italy in 1914. She had her first film experiences in Turin, hired in minor roles and not always credited. She paid her dues at Roma Film, where she was employed at the end of the year as an extra. She then moved to Aquila Film, where, though not mentioned in the credits, she attracted the audience’s attention for her showy make-up in Karval lo spione (1916) (Jandelli 2006, 211).

Diana Karenne, Passion tsigana (1916), in La cinematografia italiana ed estera.

In between 1914 and 1915, her career reached a turning point. Karenne entered into a professional and intimate relationship with producer Ernesto Maria Pasquali, who signed her up at Pasquali Film and cast her as the leading actress in Passione tsigana (1916). This film was a hugely popular success and launched Karenne onto the Italian film scene thanks to her beauty and vivid acting. The characteristics of her performance were unusual—besides her peculiar, natural style, she was the first Italian star of that time who dared to look straight into the camera. Karenne was able to immediately construct a unique star persona. On one hand, she showed the usual features of a film star at that time: beauty, grace, elegance, competition (real or supposed) with other leading actresses, gossip on her star fancies, wide international celebrity, and popular fandom. On the other hand, however, she offered the image of a modern and unconventional woman who kept away from the stereotype of a star as only a good-looking object and proposed a new way of thinking about the actress as an intellectual artist. Press outlets, such as La rivista cinematografica, used to call her “the most intelligent of all” (1923, 53; Alacci 1919, 50; Bianchi 190). Indeed, Karenne had an outstanding artistic knowledge and education. Creative as she was, among her talents we can mention painting and drawing—she created Disegni fantastici (a series of paintings that represent faces expressing different emotions) in a vaguely expressionistic style, maybe while she was training for her performance in Pierrot (1917). Additionally, Karenne was musically gifted and could play the piano, as shown in a scene from Miss Dorothy (1920), where she visibly plays the instrument without the use of editing. She also befriended a number of Italian intellectuals, among whom some leading figures of the futurist circle can be found, in particular writer Umberto Fracchia, who was also the general manager of Tespi Film, and artist Arnaldo Ginna.

In 1916, Karenne started climbing to the top of her splendid career as a star. The actress was in almost unanimous favor with the press, in spite of her frequent clashes with censorship and unfriendly attitudes on the side of some film critics. In her second film with Pasquali, La contessa Arsenia (1916), she confirmed her talent and success. In her third picture, Quand l’amour refleurit (1916), she worked behind the camera as well, writing the story treatment (Jandelli 2006, 212). In Oltre la vita, oltre la morte/Anime solitarie (1916), she had the chance to work closely with Alberto Capozzi, considered to be one of the most outstanding Italian actors of that time. Around mid-1916, Karenne temporarily parted with Pasquali Film and moved to Jupiter Film, in Turin, where she acted in Il marchio (1916). Soon after she became a director for the first time, shooting Lea (1916) for Sabaudo Film (Jandelli 2006, 212). Guglielmo Zorzi helped her adapt the homonymous novel by the radical writer Felice Cavallotti for the screen. After Lea, Karenne went back to Pasquali Film to be directed in Sofia di Kravonia (1916). This was probably her last collaboration with Pasquali, who died in 1919 from a serious form of hyperthyroidism. It seems, however, that their love affair went on until his death (Martinelli 2001, 142).

Towards the end of 1916, Karenne collaborated with Megale Film on Catena (1916), acting in the film and supervising the mise-en-scène. In 1917, when she was already one of the most sought-after and successful stars of Italian cinema, Karenne went under contract with Ambrosio Film in Turin, where she took part in the serial Il fiacre n° 13/Cab Number 13 (1917). In the same year, Karenne went back to directing with Il romanzo di Maud (1917), adapted from Les demi-vierges, a novel by Marcel Prévost. Working on that film turned out to be very hard because of a number of violent clashes with censorship, and marked the end of the contract between Ambrosio Film and Karenne (Jandelli 2006, 212).

Diana Karenne as Pierrot, Pierrot (1917).

The most important event in 1917, however, was the establishment of the film company David-Karenne by Manfredo Lombardi and Bernardo Cecconi (Jandelli 2006, 213). Its artistic plan included top-level productions and Karenne was put in charge of the whole film manufacturing process. David-Karenne Film started its activity with Pierrot, for which Karenne supervised the story, direction, and staging, and played the demanding leading role en travesti. Unfortunately, very soon the society showed serious economic problems. For instance, Lombardi had commissioned the writer and journalist Matilde Serao to write two original stories for two films starring Karenne. The fee had to be 16,000 liras, but when the first subject, Il doppio volto, was handed in, no payment followed (Annunziata 2008, 250). Serao withdrew from the contract and threatened to sue Lombardi, but, according to a February 10, 1917 article in La cine-gazetta, after a long series of failed attempts at reaching an agreement, she renounced her fee and abandoned the lawsuit (4). In May 1917, Karenne’s career arrived at a new turning point: the actress decided to take over David-Karenne Film, which was still undergoing serious financial problems. She renamed it Karenne Film and started producing pictures on her own. The first two films produced, directed, and starring Karenne were Justice de femme (1917) and La damina di porcellana (1917). In 1918, in addition to her activity at Karenne Film, she continued to work with other production companies, taking roles in the fourth episode of Trittico italico (1918), a propaganda film produced by Cines and the Ministry of the Navy, and in the series “Karenne Films” that Tiber Film, in Rome, had launched especially for her. This series included La peccatrice casta (1918), La fiamma e le ceneri (1919), and La signora delle rose (1919), where Karenne joined Gaetano Campanile Mancini in writing the script. Around March or April 1918, she started working with Medusa Film on the production of the historical epic Maria di Magdala (1919), which was renamed Redenzione. This film was released in Italian theaters at the beginning of the following year, met with outstanding success, and cemented Karenne’s performance in the history of silent cinema. In the meantime, the actress applied herself to Sleima (1919) as director, producer, and star, and then acted in Zoya/La signorina Zoya (1920), her last picture with Tiber Film.

In 1919, Karenne left Tiber Film, probably because of some internal disagreement, as highlighted in the satirical magazine Contropelo, which often commented on the arguments the actress was said to have with Mecheri, the owner of the society (1918, 8). She entered into a contract with Umberto Fracchia’s Tespi Film, which launched a “Series Diana Karenne” just for her. The series included Ave Maria (1920), which she also directed, La spada di Damocle (1920), Catene infrante (1920), and Oghzala (1920), all co-produced by Karenne Film. In October, she started shooting Indiana (1920), adapted from a novel by George Sand, scripted and directed by Fracchia. In 1920, Karenne worked on her last known title as director and producer for Karenne Film: La veggente (1920). After one more picture with Tespi Film, La studentessa di Gand (1920), Karenne moved to Nova Film, where she took part in the well-received Miss Dorothy and Smarrita! (1921). At that time, Karenne had her appendix removed, which forced her to rest for a few months. She then recovered completely and resumed work.

In the meantime, the Italian film industry was undergoing a serious crisis that had started in 1915, when the country entered World War I, and that affected “diva films,” as popular as they were (Alovisio 2014, 19-24; Bianchi 79-82). This led Karenne to make the decision to leave Italy and find a job abroad, with no language obstacles due to the absence of sound in films. At the beginning of 1921, she was in Berlin shooting Das Spiel mit dem Feuer/Playing with Fire (1921) with Robert Wiene. She went back to Italy a month-and-a-half later to take part in the challenging historical reconstruction Dante nella vita e nei tempi suoi (1922). The film was written by Valentino Soldani and directed by Domenico Gaido for V.I.S. (Visioni Italiane Storiche) on the occasion of Dante’s centennial and it was a stunning success. From then on, however, Karenne worked almost solely abroad, going back to Italy just for short periods of rest. In those years, her producing and managing experience at Karenne Film also came to an end. While it is uncertain exactly when she closed down her company, a major reason was surely her move abroad, along with a hostile attitude towards female professionals that was still prevalent at the time. In France, Karenne worked with the company Visions of Art and with Ermolieff Cinema, shooting L’ombre du péché (1922) for the former and Le sens de la mort/The Meaning of Death (1922) for the latter. In Germany, I.F.A. and Meinert Film engaged her for another historical drama, Marie Antoinette (1922). With Transozean Film, she had a role in Arme Sünderin (1923); for Caesar Film, she made Frühlingsfluten (1924); and for Richard-Oswald Produktion, she acted in Die Frau von vierzig Jahren/A Woman of Forty (1925). Information about these years in Germany is very scarce and less and less reliable. Her presence in France, however, seems to be confirmed, as the actress took part in the film adaptation of Giacomo Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie, Casanova (1927), for Société des Cinéromans.

Diana Karenne, on set of Fecondità (1929), in Kinema.

In 1928, Karenne traveled back to Italy for the last time to appear in La vena d’oro (1928), based on a play by Guglielmo Zorzi, who also directed the film. In 1928 and 1929, she went back and forth between Germany and France. In Germany, she shot Rasputins Liebesabenteuer/Rasputin, the Holy Sinner (1928), Liebeshölle/L’inferno dell’amore/Pawns of Passion (1928), and Die Weißen Rosen von Ravensberg/The White Roses of Ravensberg (1929); in France she played the double role of Marie Antoinette and her daughter Oliva in L’affaire du collier de la reine/La collana della regina (1929), one of the first French films to add a soundtrack. The last known performance of Karenne as a leading actress was in Fécondité/Fecundity (1929), which was produced by La Centrale Cinématographique and L’Écran d’Art, and was an adaptation of the novel by Émile Zola, for which she received high praise.

At the end of the 1920s, Karenne bowed out of cinema along with other stars and female figures engaged in the film industry at that time. The Depression and the rise of totalitarian regimes put an end to women’s emancipation efforts (Vicarelli 13). The film business took on more strict features and industrial rules, wiping out all experimentation and small independent companies. Finally, sound films, ultimately, ended the age of silent film stars (Bianchi 192; Martinelli 143). Karenne’s last appearance, which was nothing more than a cameo, was in Manon Lescaut (1940), directed by Carmine Gallone. By that time, the actress had retired to Aachen, Germany, where she lived with her second husband. In July 1940, during bombing raids on Aachen at the beginning of World War II, the star became trapped under the ruins of her house and was seriously injured. After three months in a coma, she died on October 14 without having regained consciousness (Jandelli 2006, 216; Martinelli 142).

Diana Karenne, 1917. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Unfortunately, the majority of Karenne’s productions are lost (Martinelli 142). A handful of her films survive, some of them incomplete; therefore our study is based mainly on indirect sources such as magazine articles, books, photographs, or reports. The little we have, however, reveals her desire for experimentation, for moving past common patterns, and for breaking with convention, both in the practice of acting and in the representation of female figures on screen. Karenne’s style had a greatly progressive value in the Italian cinema panorama at that time. Her acting style, as far as we can analyze it through her few extant films, emerges as a mixture of naturalism and anti-naturalism and reflects many influences. The melodramatic style of Italian stardom is present, yet it is diluted with realism and a deep sobriety that seems influenced by contemporary Nordic cinema as Asta Nielsen was frequently mentioned by the actress as a model (Martinelli 142). Staginess is more enhanced and the naturalistic style fades into the background only when the dramatic strain in the narrative flairs up. In such occasions of deep and emotional melodrama, Karenne’s style is obviously affected by clear influences of Italian stardom, but mostly by the expressionistic mimic and gestural overacting. Moreover, in her powerful physical portrayal of her characters and her attitude to stylized gestures, we can acknowledge some elements of Soviet acting, which was emerging in that period (Jandelli 2006, 26). Her films also show Karenne’s inborn talent for communicating and her skill at drawing out the expressive potential of the cinematic medium. Moreover, her marked versatility enabled the actress to play different character types with great intensity. A peculiar feature of many of her performances was acting in a double role, where she showcased her brilliant talent.

Diana Karenne self-portrait in the book Non solo dive (2008).

Karenne’s activity behind the camera as director, scriptwriter, and producer is very interesting, even though none of the films where she worked in these roles seem to be extant. Her contribution to the establishment of David-Karenne Film and her decision to take over as owner illustrate her unconventionality. It was a daring step, in contrast to the common notion of female professional competence at that time. However, it was exactly in line with the changes in women’s roles that were taking place in Italian society. The 1912 Libyan War and, most of all, World War I, had caused a break with the past from which it was very hard to turn back. Women’s horizons opened wide, making them more and more conscious of their value and giving them more chances for their enterprises. Additionally, the structure itself of the film industry in the early decades, mostly made up of small companies and family businesses, fostered experimentation and female professional achievement: they were not only actresses, but they were also in charge of direction and management (Dall’Asta 2008, 9).

The few sources we have at our disposal present an image of Karenne as a compulsive and whimsical director: she was well-known, according to Cinemagraf in October 1917, for claiming to endlessly shoot a scene until she felt it was perfect (15). As to the characters she used to play on the screen, Karenne seemed to show a preference for female figures with complex personalities: gypsies, adulteresses, murderers, prostitutes, wild girls, masculine or working women and, very often, women who commit suicide (a recurring situation in her films, which was considered outrageous and morally unbearable at that time). Her frequent clashes with censorship and the press can be understood in relation to the modern reach of her characters. Censorship interfered many times with the release of her films because of the subjects treated; film critics often used scornful, misogynist, and sometimes insulting and racist terms on pictures written, directed, and starring Karenne. For instance, Quand l’amour refleurit, the first film Karenne scripted, not only showed a perverse and revengeful lead, but also ends with the girl’s suicide, a conclusion audiences may have found objectionable at that time (Bianchi 192; Jandelli 2006, 212). Even Il romanzo di Maud, directed by Karenne and adapted from Prévost’s novel Les Demi-vierges, ran into serious difficulties with censorship and many scenes had to be cut in order to get a rating to be released. Justice de femme and La damina di porcellana, both directed by Karenne among the early Karenne Film productions, provide us with further examples of unconventional plots and characters. In the former, we find the controversial subject of illegitimate motherhood, while in the latter, the actress plays a life-sized china doll who comes alive and makes her young owner fall in love with her. In La fiamma e le ceneri, written by Karenne along with Gaetano Campanile Mancini, we come across a libertine woman who disguises herself as a beggar just to be received into the house of an organist whom she likes. The trope of the femme fatale is present in Sleima, together with another much-discussed topic: working women. Sleima is the story of a humble and modest girl who works as a mannequin in a fashion store to support herself and her paralyzed mother; when she finds out that she is the illegitimate daughter of Count Dalma, who has seduced and deserted her mother, she decides to take her revenge by becoming a dissolute woman and piling up riches through cheating and violence. All of these characters, as played by Karenne, have in common a slightly feminist connotation. They all engage in a personal fight for individual achievement and rebel against middle-class respectability and moral rules. In doing so, they place themselves as a direct result of a changing female status, and can be understood as models for the aspiring “New Woman” of that time.

In short, Karenne can be regarded as a unique figure in the film scene of her period. She not only helped to spread a modern notion of womanhood and female professional competence, but she also used her advanced artistic skills to back an entirely personal idea of filming and acting. As a prolific actress, director, producer, and screenwriter with a transnational career, she certainly succeeded in an independent way.

Translated by Chiara Tognolotti

Bibliography

Alacci, Tito. Le nostre attrici cinematografiche: studiate sullo schermo. Firenze: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1919.

Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 7 (18  February 1923): 15.

Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 9 (4 March 1923): 2.

Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 20 (20 May 1923): 2.

Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 27 (8 July 1923): 2.

Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 28 (15 July 1923): 2.

Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 45 (11 November 1923): 10.

Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 12 (23 March 1924): 15.

Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 44 (1 November 1925): 15.

Alovisio, Silvio. “Il cinema italiano dalle origini all’avvento del sonoro.” In Introduzione al cinema muto italiano. Eds. Silvio Alovisio, Giulia Carluccio. Torino: Utet, 2014. 19-24.

Annunziata, Gina. “Matilde Serao e il cinematografo.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall’Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 250-256.

Bianchi, Pietro. Francesca Bertini e le dive del cinema muto. Torino: Utet, 1969.

“Casanova.” Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà 44 (30 October 1927): 9-11.

Chiti, Roberto. Dizionario dei registi del cinema muto italiano. Roma: Museo Internazionale del Cinema e dello Spettacolo, 1997.

Cinemagraf 9 (14 May 1916): 21.

Cinemagraf 16 (25 October 1916): 6.

Cinemagraf 1-2 (15-31 June 1917): 9.

Cinemagraf 3-4 (31 March-15 April 1917): 48.

Cinemagraf 14-15 (15 October 1917): 15-19.

“Cinema italiano del tempo che fu. Memorie di Gaetano Campanile-Mancini apparse su 'Il Piccolo,' Roma, 14.4.1941.” Immagine vol. 14, no. 5 (1990): 9-17.

Cinemalia 15-16 (1-16 August 1928): 9.

Cinematografo [Roma] 5 (3 March 1929): 14.

Cine mondo 34 (20 February 1929): 27.

Cine mondo: rivista quindicinale illustrata di cinema 21 (5 August 1928): 33.

Cinemundus 5 (May 1919): 27-28.

Cine sorriso illustrato 16 (20 April 1930): 2.

Contropelo 52 (28 December 1918): 8.

Cronaca cinematografica di Roma 23 (30 July 1917): 8.

Dall’Asta, Monica. “L’altra metà del cinema muto italiano.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall’Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 9-15.

“Diana Karenne.” The Complete Index to World Film Since 1895 database [online]. http://www.citwf.com/person237781.htm

“Diana Karenne al Modernissimo.” La cinematografia italiana ed estera 6 (1916): 50.

“Diana Karènne ‘Lea.’” Film 25 (31 August 1916): 19.

Film 15 (15 May 1916): 4.

Film 23 (10 August 1916): 4.

Film 25 (31 August 1916): 20.

Film 34 (5 November 1916): 19.

Film 13 (30 April 1917): 23.

Film 15 (19 May 1917): 13.

Gaines, Jane. “Esse sono noi? Il nostro lavoro sulle donne al lavoro nell’industria cinematografica muta.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall’Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 19-28.

Guerra, Elda. “Oltre i confini. Il movimento delle donne tra Otto e Novecento e l’affermazione di una nuova soggettività.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall’Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 39-47.

“Il gran successo di Redenzione a Roma.” Film 6 (23  February 1919): 8.

Indiana della Tespi Film.” Film 34 (30 October 1919): 2.

In penombra 1 (June 1918): 52.

Jandelli, Cristina. “‘La più intelligente di tutte’: Diana Karenne.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall’Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 51-58.

------. Le dive italiane del cinema muto. Palermo: l’Epos, 2006.

La cine-gazzetta 1 (10 February 1917): 2-4.

La decima musa 2 (May 1920): 30.

“La prima interpretazione di Diana Carènne al Modernissimo.” La cinematografia italiana ed estera 6 (1916): 56.

La rivista cinematografica 20 (25 October 1921): 70.

La rivista cinematografica 23-24 (25 December 1922): 122.

La rivista cinematografica 16 (25 August 1923): 53.

L’arte muta 6-7 (15 December 1916-15 June 1917): 36, 162.

Le maschere 18 (2 May 1920): n.p.

Le maschere 4 (25 June 1920): n.p.

Le maschere 1 (2 June 1921): n.p.

Le maschere 3 (16 June 1921): n.p.

Le maschere 7 (19 February 1922): n.p.

“Le protagoniste.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall’Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 317-330.

Martinelli, Vittorio. Le dive del silenzio. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2001.

Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali e della Cineteca di Bologna. “Diana Karenne.” Progetto di ricerca sulla censura cinematografica in Italia. [online database]. 2008. http://www.italiataglia.it/search/opera

Nanà di Zola.” Cinemagraf 10 (28 May 1916): 13.

Passione tzigana (Pasquali).” La cinematografia italiana ed estera 7 (1916): 31.

Pravadelli, Veronica. Le donne del cinema. Dive, registe, spettatrici. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2014.

Quand l’amour refleurit! (Pasquali Film) all’Ettore Vernazza di Genova.” La cine-fono e la rivista fono- cinematografica 336 (1916): 120.

Redenzione.” Film 2 (19 June 1919): 2.

“Un grande film: Fecondità.” Cinema Teatro 4-5 (15 March 1930): 2.

“Un monito.” L’eco del cinema 39 (February 1927): 1.

Vicarelli, Giovanna. “Introduzione.” In Donne e professioni nell’Italia del Novecento. Ed. Giovanna Vicarelli. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007. 10-23.

Citation

Jandelli, Cristina; Linda Del Gamba. "Diana Karenne." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4rjf-2m17>

Helen Wang

by S. Louisa Wei

Born in 1903 as Peng Jianqing, Helen Wang was raised in a traditional scholarly family within a confined compound in Wuhu, Anhui Province. She was the only girl and her parents’ favorite. At thirteen, her father moved the entire family to Shanghai so she could attend St. Mary Girl’s School. While there, she learned English, read Western literature, enjoyed music, and adopted the English name of Helen (Shen 56). Before she graduated, both her parents passed away, leaving her in the care of her eldest brother, who soon married her off to a man working for a Sino-Japanese mine in Fengtian (now Shenyang) that was more than a thousand miles away from Shanghai. Sixteen-year-old Helen bore her husband’s debauchery and anti-Chinese deference to his Japanese employers for a brief time before returning to Shanghai to try to make her own life. Since her brother was unwilling to take her back in, she took up residence with her godmother and managed to secure a job as a typist in a company under British American Tobacco (S. Zhang 404).

Helen Wang (seated), Orphan Rescues Grandfather/孤兒救祖記 (1923). Private Collection.

Helen Wang, Orphan Rescues Grandfather/孤兒救祖記 (1923). Private Collection.

Helen’s personal engagement with film began when she visited the set of Laborer’s Love (1922) with a friend to see how a film was made. While she observed the awkward performance of a first-time actress, director Zhang Shichuan was impressed with her modern fashion sense and elegant manners (S. Zhang 404). This father figure of Shanghai cinema had, until then, only worked with stage actors from the lower class. He felt that Helen exuded the air of a young mistress from a wealthy family, which made her perfect for the female lead in his then upcoming film, Orphan Rescues Grandfather (1923). As a novice in the film industry, Helen abandoned her original name of Jianqing Peng and took the new name of Hanlun Wang: while Hanlun was in fact the Chinese pronunciation of Helen, “Wang” was a surname she picked because this Chinese character resembled the pattern on a tiger’s forehead (H. Wang 1962, 51). In her very first acting job, she was fortunate enough to work with renowned dramatist Zheng Zhengqiu, in a role that positively portrayed “a new domestic subject, a self-assertive woman who [is] economically independent and taking the responsibility of educating the younger generation” (Chen 31).

Helen Wang, Jade Pear Spirit/玉梨魂 (1924). Private Collection.

Helen Wang, The Poor Children/苦兒弱女 (1924). Private Collection.

Orphan Rescues Grandfather became a box-office hit and a significant cultural event of 1923, not only saving its production company, Star Film Company, from bankruptcy, but also lending hope to the promise of the budding film industry (Xu and Sha 59; S. Zhang 405). Helen was immediately recognized as a promising star. Star Film Company lost no time in making two more films with her the following year, Jade Pear Spirit (1924) and The Poor Children (1924), casting her in both films as a tragic young widow. These three films earned Helen the title of “the leading Chinese actress for tragedy” or the “Chinese Lillian Gish” (Chen 31-2). Despite quitting her job as a typist to work for Star full time, the company reneged on her promised salary. Disillusioned, Helen left to work with Great Wall Pictures Company instead.

Great Wall’s founding members studied filmmaking in the United States and were younger, more progressive filmmakers. In her first film with Great Wall, The World Against Her (1924), Helen played the role of Zhiruo, a young woman abandoned by her husband because he falls for another woman. Thrown out by her husband and mother-in-law, Zhiruo tries to make her way as an independent woman, even joining a woman’s association at one point, only to be thwarted at every turn by men who seek to exploit her weak social standing. In the end, she dies dreaming of a new society that is not so hostile to women. It is not hard to see the parallels between Zhiruo’s life and Helen’s life, which might have contributed to the success of her performance. Although the film does not have a happy ending, Zhiruo was purported to be the role Helen loved most (1962, 57). The performances of both Helen and Pu Shunqing, China’s first female scriptwriter, were particularly praised by critics (Tang 1093).

Helen Wang, The World Against Her/棄婦 (1924). Private Collection.

Helen Wang and Pu Shunqing (middle) The World Against Her/棄婦 (1924). Private Collection.

The success of The World Against Her established Great Wall’s reputation for producing “problem dramas” with a serious goal of making society better (He 1065). Thereafter, Helen made two more films with Great Wall, Between Love and Filial Duty (1925) and The Person in the Boudoir Dream (1925), continuing to capitalize on her positive box office reception as a tragedienne. In an article written by Wang in Chinese Cinema, she complained that despite  the commercial success of these films, Great Wall once again refused to pay her as agreed. She sued the company and won the case, only to receive a bad check in the compensation (1996, 1478). Unfortunately, this would not be the last time that Helen was exploited by a film company. In the following years, she played the female lead in A Widow (1926) for The First China Film Co.; costarred with the famous Butterfly Wu (a.k.a Hu Die) in Tianyi’s The Movie Actresses (1926); appeared in a supporting role in A Child Worker (1926), once again for Star Film Company; and finally, played the lead again in A Virtuous Woman (1927) for Newcomer Co. In each of these cases, the film company neglected to pay her the agreed upon amount (H. Wang 1962, 57). An earlier self-account published in the Young Companion magazine, however, stated that she did receive 1000 yuan from Great Wall and 2000 yuan for her Singapore adventure, for which Tianyi received 7000 yuan (H. Wang  2004, 109-110). This statement could be true, but there is also the possibility that she was hiding the truth about being exploited for various reasons.

The Movie Actresses/電影女明星 (1926) co-star Butterfly Wu. Private Collection.

Helen Wang, The World Against Her/棄婦 (1924). Private Collection.

In any case, Helen persevered in the face of unfair treatment and exploitation. She was, after all, an actress who embodied the role of the modern woman by daring to “show her unbound feet on the screen” and to have “her long hair cut in front of the camera” (Z. Zhang  36; H. Wang 1962, 57). In late 1927, she embarked on an eight-month venture in Singapore, where male businessmen once again took advantage of her by putting her on display while charging people who came to see her and to seek her autograph (H. Wang 1962, 56). This humiliation was the catalyst that pushed Helen to return to Shanghai and work on her own films. As early as 1925, Helen wrote,

In the Chinese tradition, women rely on men and thus cannot resolve the sufferings they feel at home. I like women to have an independent spirit, and by “independent” I mean self-supporting. In order to achieve this, a woman needs to find a proper job; otherwise the talk of independence is an empty one. Before I was independent, I had suffered a lot in my own family and felt life was rather meaningless (n.p.).

Helen recalled that ever since making her first film, she tried her best to avoid the extras on the film set, as they were often hooligans and prostitutes who came to make a few dollars and who talked and flirted in vulgar language. Helen joined the film industry for a very different purpose, but she could not single-handedly change the public’s attitude towards the profession.

Helen Wang, The Person in the Boudoir Dream/春閨夢裏人(1925). Private Collection. 

Eventually, in 1928, Helen decided to make one more film of her own and then quit the film industry altogether. She bought a screenplay from the famous novelist and screenwriter Bao Tianxiao, rented a studio space belonging to the Minxin Film Company, hung up a plaque for the self-named “Hanlun Film Company,” and began work on Revenge of an Actress/Blind Love (1929). She invited the renowned director Bu Wancang to direct the film, but, as the troubled director spent a great deal of time at the racetracks instead of the set, she ended up directing and editing the film herself. When Minxin moved to reclaim their studio space for their new projects, Helen had to finish filming at home, with the help of Cai Chusheng, who was then still an assistant director but who would soon become an important director (Shen 86-87). Helen recalled in a memoir: “I bought the scene breakdown script with 800 yuan, and a projector. I played the film bit by bit at home, and cut it bit by bit. After forty days of hard work, I finally succeeded” (1996, 1476-7). She took the film on tour and screened it in over a dozen cities. She made a fortune and left the film community in 1930, just as she promised she would when she returned to Shanghai from Singapore.

Helen Wang at work in her beauty salon, Hanlun Beauty Parlor. Private Collection.

In terms of critical reception, Revenge of an Actress was a “family melodrama” written in the style of Mandarin-ducks-and-butterfly romances that were sympathetic to the idea of free love in a time when arranged marriage was still a common practice (L. Wang 27). In the very making and distributing of the film, however, Helen had succeeded in exacting her own “actress’s revenge.” One of Helen’s biographers, Shen Ji, recounts how, with the money made from the tour, she was able to pay her husband her divorce fee—topping it by a 1000 yuan to expedite the process out of spite (88). With what remained, she took lessons from an expert French cosmetician, and opened her own business, the Hanlun Beauty Parlor. Her first customer was none other than Butterfly Wu (Shen 90), her co-star in The Movie Actresses, who was well on her way to becoming China’s reigning actress of the era. Wang’s parlor thrived under the fame of the former star and ran successfully until the Japanese occupation halted business in 1937. True to her earlier nationalist sentiments, she had refused Japanese demands to become part of their propaganda machine (H. Wang 1996, 1477).

Helen Wang. Private Collection.

In 1954, Helen became a regular staff member at the Shanghai Film Studio, but as an actress, she could not adapt to the proletarian roles of the revolutionary period. In fact, no first-generation Chinese actors could. She played the mother of Wu Xun—the title role of The Life of Wu Xun (1950)—which became the target of attack in one of Mao’s political campaigns. In 1958, she made two brief appearances in The Legend of Lu Ban and A Great Upsurge, which wrapped up her entire film career. Helen led a peaceful, though lonely, life until her death in 1978 at the age of seventy-five.

See alsoPu Shunqing

Bibliography

Chen, Jianhua. “D.W. Griffith and the Rise of Chinese Cinema in Early 1920s Shanghai.” In The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinema. Eds. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 23-38.

“The Hanlun Beauty Parlor”/“漢倫美容院.” Film Life/影戲生活 (10 April 1931): n.p.

He, Xinleng. “My Impression of Great Wall Films”/“長城派影片所給我的印象.” Great Wall’s Special Issue The Hippocrates (1926): n.p.; Rpt. In Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolan Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 1065-6.

Shen, Ji. “Hanlun Wang.” Memoirs of Movie Stars/影星悲歡錄. Shanghai: Shanghai Books Press, 2001. 3-95

Tang, Bihua. “On The World Against Her”/ “評《棄婦》影片.” Minguo Daily/民國日報 (27 December 1924): n.p.; Rpt. In Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 1093.

Wang, Hanlun. “How I Began My Film Career”/“我入影戲界之始末.” Cinema Magazine/電影雜誌 (Autumn 1925): n.p.

------. “My Experience with the Cinema”/“我的從影經過.” Chinese Cinema/中國電 影  no. 11 (1956.): n.p.; Rpt. in Remembering the Old Days/感慨話當年. Wang Hanlun et al.  Beijing: China Film Press, 1962. 50-59.

------. “My Experience with the Cinema”/“我的從影經過.” Chinese Cinema/中國電 影   no. 2 (1956.): n.p.; Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 1471-77.

------. “Remembrance from the Film Studios”/“影場回憶錄.” Young Companion/良友 no. 64 (1929): n.p.; Rpt. in The Companion Pictorial: 1926-1945/良友人物: 1926-1945. Eds. Cheng Peide, Gao Yuanbao and Yang Yang. Shanghai: Shanghai Social Science Press, 2004. 107-113.

Wang, Jun. “Early Filmmaker and Retired Star: Meeting Silver Screen Pioneer Wang Hanlun”/“初期影人隱退銀星: 會見銀壇元老王漢倫.” Popular Film News/大衆影訊 vol.2,  no.13 (4 October 1941): n.p.

Wang, Lingzhen, ed. Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Xu, Daoming, and Sha Sipeng. A Brief History of Chinese Cinema/中國電影簡史. Beijing: China Youth Press, 1990.

Ye, Tan, and Yun Zhu. Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Zhang, Shichuan. “Since I Became a Director”/“自我導演以來.” Star Biweekly/明星半月刊 vol. 1, no. 3-6, (1935): n.p.; Rpt. in Chinese Silent Cinema/中國無聲電影. Ed. Xiaolain Dai. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996. 401-8.

Zhang, Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Citation

Wei, S Louisa. "Helen Wang." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zc8b-7c47>

Winnifred Eaton

by Vito Adriaensens

Winnifred Eaton is best known for her success as a novelist under the pseudo-Japanese pen name Onoto Watanna, but she also worked as a screenwriter, title writer, literary advisor, and scenario editor for Universal and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer between 1921 and 1930, and wrote a number of poignant articles on both the profession of the Hollywood screenwriter and the Asian-American experience. Eaton was born to a British father and a Chinese mother who left England for Hudson, New York, before settling in Montreal, where she was born. She supposedly wrote under a Japanese pseudonym to safeguard herself against fervent anti-Chinese sentiments of the time (Hicks et al. 2000, 201), expressed through legislation such as Chester A. Arthur’s 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which was not repealed until 1943. As Onoto Watanna, Eaton played into and strengthened the popular late-nineteenth century Japanese strand of orientalism known as japonisme, which permeated the arts, design, fashion, film, and literature, even though she would never visit Japan. She was progressive for her time, however, in that her romances were often characterized by interracial relationships. Her older sister, Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914), tackled anti-Chinese sentiments head on, writing both journalism and fiction about the rough Chinese-American experience under the pen name of Sui Sin Far (Chen 2016, 185).

Detail from frontispiece of Onoto Watanna’s book Miss Numè of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance (1899). Private Collection.

Eaton started writing around 1898, but it was not until she moved to New York City with the manuscript of her second book, A Japanese Nightingale (1901), that her career really took flight. Eaton’s rising fame is evidenced by a 1902 article on the front page of The New York Times, notifying the general public that none other than stage director David Belasco had decided to bring a suit against her (1). Eaton had been shopping around A Japanese Nightingale and sold the dramatic rights to the powerful theatrical production duo of Klaw and Erlanger. She accused Belasco of borrowing a little too generously from her work for his own contribution to japonisme, the 1903 play “The Darling of the Gods: A Drama of Old Japan,” written with the author of the short story Madame Butterfly (1898), John Luther Long.

“A Japanese Nightingale” opened on Broadway at Daly’s Theatre in 1903, but it was another decade before Eaton’s name was linked to motion pictures. In December 1914, the Selig Polyscope Company advertised her name (misspelling it as Onota Watanna) in Motography, in a list of “some of the best known and highest priced writers” that they had optioned (902). A few months later, Motion Picture News reported that Selig was “planning to build a regular Japanese garden for the filming of the Onoto Watanna stories, which have gained a big following” (1915, 34). In The Writers Bulletin and Literary Reporter, Eaton is reported to have taken a tour of the Selig studio in Chicago, and she stated to reporters that “the coming field for the novelist and the short-story writer is the profession of photoplay writing […]. I hope to be able some time to write motion picture plays. That is, not to have my stories adapted by others but to be able to build a working scenario from the very foundations to the last scene. No one realizes that this necessitates study on my part but I am willing to work, for I feel I will be rewarded” (Jordan 1915, 10). Little seems to have come of Eaton’s contacts with Selig, and though her granddaughter states that William Selig became one of her agents (Birchall 2001, 98), she was also represented in the film business by the agency that represented Mary Pickford, C.C. Wilkening, as per their January 1916 ad in Motion Picture News (147).

According to the American Film Institute Catalog, Eaton’s first credit appeared on the 1921 Paul Scardon-directed Universal feature False Kisses,  a love triangle set in a fishing town, which she adapted from Wilbur Daniel Steele’s one-act play “Ropes.” Motion Picture News listed the film as a “rugged drama,” and a film about the “storm and stress of lighthouse life,” but faulted it for its excessive reliance on intertitles to get the story across (1921, 2733). Exhibitors Herald went even further, calling the story “amateurish” and “far from convincing” (1921, 52). The poor reception of the film—and in particular the critical emphasis on the story—might have caused Eaton to shift her focus back to writing novels, as she published three books between 1922 and 1925, before being hired to run Universal’s East Coast scenario department in December 1924.

A January 1925 issue of The Universal Weekly reports a meeting between Eaton and Burl Armstrong, Universal’s West Coast story editor, in which she is described as the new story editor for Universal in New York, noting that “Universal feels very happy over securing such a well-known authoress as Mrs. Reeve to deal with the authors from whom it must secure twelve more books for its 1926 schedule” (8). According to Moving Picture World, Armstrong and Eaton’s meeting led to them buying a “large group of novels, serial stories and plays” for Universal (1925, 878), so it seems that Universal’s Carl Laemmle Sr. hired Eaton not only for her literary talent, but also for her large network of personal contacts; this is evidenced by the fact that in this period, Eaton is also described by Motion Picture News as Universal’s Editor-in-Chief and literary advisor (1925, 2030), and by an Exhibitors Trade Review article that divulges Universal’s strategy quite openly, reporting that Eaton sent out a letter to “every well known author in the United States” urging them to write for pictures–Universal’s pictures, of course (1925, 14). We know that she oversaw the New York scenario branch upon her arrival and she continued to do so after Laemmle Sr. brought her to Universal City in Hollywood as a scenario editor in late 1925, according to a Film Daily article entitled “Scenario Editor Changes Quarter” (2).

Poster, East is West (1930).

Laemmle Sr. was initially a mentor figure for Eaton. He thought her brilliant and she in turn dedicated her 1925 novel His Royal Nibs to him. As Birchall notes, however, her quick rise to power did not sit well with other high profile Universal executives, especially on the West Coast; they saw their reading department shut down because of Eaton’s arrival and, worse, had to answer even more directly to her when she was redirected to Hollywood by Laemmle Sr. (156). The studio politics and back talk became so unbearable that Eaton quit in December 1926, and, as Variety reported on January 5, 1927, moved  to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to write original screenplays and adaptations (58). Her stint at MGM was brief, however, and two years later she returned to Universal as a screenwriter. She was credited for work on five sound films between 1929 and 1930, though four of them were also produced in a silent version; two of these, Shanghai Lady (1929), directed by John S. Robertson, and East is West (1930), directed by Monta Bell, dealt explicitly with Chinese (-American) tropes.

Eaton’s screenwriting experience does not seem to have been ideal, and she confirmed this in a scathing Motion Picture Magazine article in 1928. In “Butchering Brains: An Author in Hollywood is as a Lamb in an Abattoir,” Eaton colorfully described the Hollywood experience that renowned authors receive, not only from her perspective as a renowned author, but also as someone who was hired by Universal with the express purpose of attracting renowned authors to the picture industry. While first they are wined and dined and praised into the heavens, most authors’ contract is dropped after three months, Eaton states, for it is not “creative brains, talent or inventive genius” that Hollywood is seeking but “sharp wits, craft, salesmanship, pull, politics and the thousand and one petty tricks that contribute to one’s influence in this game” (28). Eaton noted that being assigned to adapt original stories from “Susy Swipes” or “Davy Jones” of Hollywood is a wrath-inducing and mind-numbing nightmare, since they are written in a language that is “almost beyond credence” and are populated by “incidents and characters and gags and plots of a hundred or more stories that are horribly reminiscent”; there is no point in complaining to your studio bosses either, Eaton writes, for a lot of them are “bright young fellows” who would “mistake Maeterlinck for a patent medicine and have been known to a reject a story by Victor Hugo because he ‘keeps a restaurant downtown’” (29).

“Butchering Brains” by Winnifred Eaton.

As if this article did not yet enough foreshadow Eaton’s exit from the motion picture industry, she took to the pages of Motion Picture Magazine again in early 1929 to interview Japanese star actor Sessue Hayakawa on his overnight departure from the screen in 1924. Hayakawa explained that he “did not like the stories [he] was required to play in” (33), but when pressed by Eaton he revealed the true reason that compelled him was a racist expletive uttered by men who owed him money: “only an ignorant coward throws up to a man that he does not like his race. I come of a proud people–a man of my quality could not endure such insult” (90); the next day Hayakawa packed his bags and returned to Japan. Almost five years later, Eaton was there to follow up on an issue that must have been close to her heart. Hayakawa experienced a “friendlier feeling” upon his return, and a “marked desire for Oriental pictures” that he appreciated, but he acknowledged that it might just be his feelings that had mellowed over time (91).

Eaton returned to work for Universal reluctantly, given her demoted position. Her work there might have been fueled in part by necessity, as she lost all of her savings in the 1929 Wall Street Stock Market Crash. Having become somewhat estranged from her husband–who she feared was having an affair–and coming to terms with the fact that her heyday as a screenwriter was over, she returned to Calgary intent on focusing on her family (Birchall 191).

See also: “The Absence of Canadian Women in the Silent Picture Industry

Bibliography

“Authors, Dramatists, and Artists, Represented by C.C. Wilkening, Inc.” Motion Picture News vol. 13, no. 4 (29 January 1916): 146-147.

“Authors Urged to Write Photoplays: Universal Sends Request to Every Famous Author in the Country to Write for Screen.” Exhibitors Trade Review vol. 17, no. 15 (7 March 1925): 14.

Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

“Brevities of the Business.” Motography vol. 12, no. 26 (26 December 1914): 901-904.

Chapman, Mary, and Jean Lee Cole, eds. The Winnifred Eaton Archive, v. 1.0, 16 August 2020, https://winnifredeatonarchive.org/index.html.

Chen, Minjie. The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.

“Digest of Pictures of the Week.” Exhibitors Herald vol. 13, no. 20 (12 November 1921): 52.

Eaton Reeve, Winnifred [Onoto Watanna]. “Butchering Brains: An Author in Hollywood Is as a Lamb in an Abattoir.” Motion Picture Magazine vol. 36, no. 2. (September 1928): 28-29, 110-111.

------. “What Happened to Hayakawa: This Japanese Gentleman Reveals Why he Forsook the American Screen.” Motion Picture Magazine vol. 36, no. 6. (January 1929): 33, 90-91.

“False Kisses (Universal): Contains Dramatic Material but Runs Excessively to Titles.” Motion Picture News vol. 24, no. 22 (19 November 1921): 2733.

Hicks, Jack, James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston and Al Young. eds. The Literature of California Volume 1: Native American Beginnings to 1945. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2000.

Jordan, Modeste Hannis. “An Author in Movieland.” The Writer’s Bulletin and Literary Reporter vol 8, no. 1 (August 1915): 10.

“Los Angeles.” Variety vol. 85, no. 12 (5 January 1927): 58.

“Onoto Watanna Stories Scheduled for Selig.” Motion Picture News vol. 11, no. 19 (15 May 1915): 34.

“Order for Author’s Arrest: David Belasco Brings Suit Against Onoto Watanna, Who Charges that He Appropriated Her Ideas.” The New York Times vol. 52, no. 16,508 (3 December 1902): 1.

“A Savage in Silks Rights Bought by Universal.” Motion Picture News vol. 32, no. 18 (31 October 1925): 2030.

“Scenario Editor Changes Quarter.” The Film Daily vol. 34, no. 20 (25 October 1925): 2.

“Universal Moviegrams.” The Universal Weekly vol. 20, no. 24 (24 January 1925): 8.

“Wray with Universal.” Moving Picture World vol. 72, no. 9 (28 February 1925): 878.

Archival Paper Collections:

Winnifred Eaton Reeve Fonds. University of Calgary, Archives and Special Collections.

Research Update

In 2020, the Winnifred Eaton Archive launched online (Phase 1).

“The Winnifred Eaton Archive is an accessible, fully searchable, digital scholarly edition of the collected works of Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve, best known for the popular Japanese romances she signed Onoto Watanna. It comprises page images and transcriptions of nearly 200 located publications and manuscripts, as well as supplemental materials that will aid students and scholars of Eaton’s work. Ultimately, it aims to collect all known publications, manuscripts, and films by Eaton in one location.”

Citation

Adriaensens, Vito. "Winnifred Eaton." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zf18-vk03>

Christiane Mendelys

by Annie Fee

Christiane Mendelys’ career as a mime, actress, film critic, and acting teacher mirrored the major developments in French cinema culture, from the early days of cinema as a music-hall attraction, through the first attempts at “theatrical cinema” for middle-class audiences in the mid-1900s and the emergence of newspaper film criticism in the mid-1910s, to, finally, the height of cinema popularity in 1920s Paris. However, unlike fellow critics such as Louis Delluc, Émile Vuillermoz, and Léon Moussinac, her contribution to the development of cinema culture in France has been all but overlooked. While their work circulates in edited volumes, accessing the film criticism of Mendelys requires entering the ornate corridors of the Palais Garnier Opera House, where newspaper clippings of her writings are archived.

Poster for “Les Cantomimes” (1899), drawn by Charles Léandre. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon.

Pantomime was enjoying a revival in Paris when in the late 1890s the young Mendelys met Georges Wague while studying mime at the Paris Conservatoire under Félicia Mallet. In 1900 countless curious tourists flocked to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, and, according to Le Petit Journal, many of them saw the two perform pantomime at the Roulotte theatre (1933, 6), a show where they shared the stage with the cinématographe (Picard 231). By the mid-1900s, Mendelys was already a renowned mime and recognizable member of the vie parisienne, performing in the belle époque salons of aristocrats alongside her good friend Colette as well as in several theaters. According to reviews in daily press outlets such as Le Matin, La Justice, La Lanterne, Gil Blas, and Le Petit Parisien, by 1907 Mendelys had performed at the Théâtre des Mathurins, the Bodinière, the Gaîté-Montparnasse, the Théâtre des Capucines, the Théâtre d’Antin, the Théâtre Mondain, the Théâtre Rabelais, the Eiffel Tower theatre, the théâtre Grévin, the Grand Guignol, the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, and the Théâtre de Montrouge. Her nom de ville, Christiane Wague, regularly appears in newspapers on the guest lists for Parisian theatrical events and society fundraisers. According to two separate January 1907 articles in Journal officiel de la république française and Le Temps, her success as a performer was such that that year the French Minister of Public Instruction awarded her the title of officier de l’instruction publique in recognition of her services to the arts (551; 3).

Portrait of Christiane Mendelys by Charles Léandre. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Poster for Michel Carré’s Pantomime “L’Enfant prodigue” (1890). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

The early cinema pioneer Edmond Benoît-Lévy saw a commercial opportunity in transferring the popularity of Mendelys and Wague onto the screen. In 1907 he produced a 1600 meter film version of the three-act pantomime performance “L’Enfant prodigue,” directed by its creator Michel Carré for Gaumont (Meusy 188). He was sure to have an eager audience since the pantomime was well known, having enjoyed success at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in 1890. In an article published in Comoedia on March 10, 1914, Jean-Louis Croze remembered the film’s release as an important turning point in cinema’s “regeneration” with Benoît-Lévy, providing an “enormous thrust forward” (4). Indeed, the film is an important precedent to the later success of the Film d’Art series created by Paul Lafitte for Pathé the following year. Mendelys played the role of young Pierrot, a part her mime tutor Mallet had originally played in 1890. Benoît-Lévy reserved the Théâtre des Variétés for the film’s premiere on June 16, 1907 and reduced the price of tickets, making the screening an elegant yet accessible event, according to an article in Le Petit Parisien published the day before the screening (La Herse 5). A year before the film’s release the central boulevard area around the Théâtre des Variétés had witnessed the opening of three cinema palaces: the Kinéma Théâtre Gab-Ka, the Cinématograph-Théâtre, and Benoît-Lévy’s Omnia-Pathé. L’Enfant prodigue was thus released into an exciting new landscape of film exhibition in which companies like Pathé and Gaumont increasingly sought to cater to the new bourgeois public with theatrical and artistic subjects.

“Les Mimes.” Comoedia illustré, 1908. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Negative appraisals of the film made by Carré have come to overshadow the “enormous artistic and financial success” the film garnered with Parisians in the summer of 1907, as reported by one Fulgus in Comoedia (5). Carré retrospectively called it “…un très mauvais film, fait avec toute l’ignorance d’un débutant […]” [Trans.: …a very bad film made with all the ignorance of a beginner] (Coissac 405) and this assertion that the film was “unsuccessful” has been absorbed into contemporary film history, perhaps partially contributing to the erasure of Mendelys’ name (Sirois-Trahan 337). Yet primary sources from the trade press reveal the centrality of Mendelys, Wague, and other mimes in the transition to theatrical film. Edmond Claris, in his November 1, 1909 article in Ciné-Journal, placed them at the center of recent advances in “Cinematographic Theater,” writing:

La séléction s’est faite peu à peu dans le personnel. Pierrot bon enfant a souri devant l’appareil enregistreur. Il a conquis le cinématographe. C’est lui qui triomphe. Dans ce nouveau genre, seul le langage des gestes, seuls, les jeux de physionomie permettent d’exprimer les sentiments, les idées. Voilà comment nous retrouvons là nos deux grands mimes Séverin et Georges Wague. Colombine ne pouvait abandoner Pierrot; Christiane Mendelys a été vite engagée [Trans.: Little by little actors were selected from theaters. The good-humored Pierrot smiled at the cinématographe. He conquered the cinematograph. It is he who triumphs in this new genre where only gestures and facial expressions are capable of expressing thoughts and feelings. There you have them, our two greatest mimes Séverin and Georges Wague. Colombine could not abandon Pierrot, so Christiane Mendelys was quickly employed] (14).

Mendelys’ film career took off immediately. It was Louis Feuillade who spotted her talents on the set of L’Enfant prodigue and asked that she, Wague, and Jeanne Marie-Laurent come to work with him at Gaumont. At the time Feuillade had just taken over from Alice Guy as head of film production and was producing one chronophone film per week. In an interview with the Cinémathèque Française’s historical commission on December 15, 1945, Wague recounted the couple’s beginnings in film and remembered that Mendelys appeared in “an enormous amount” of Feuillade’s chronophone films (12).

Mendelys’ role with Gaumont was not simply as an actress. In a 1910 article for Fantasio she stated that her role included screenwriting. She wrote, “J’ai moi-même imaginé souvent des scénarios de cinéma comme la Légende de la Fileuse, l’Étoile filante, le Fil de la Vierge...Et pensez à mon orgueil: ces pièces là, imaginées et créées par moi, sont sûres de vivre longtemps” [Trans.: I myself have often conceived of scenarios for the cinema, for example, La Légende de la Fileuse, L’Étoile filante and Le Fil de la Vierge…And think how proud I am that these plays that I have invented and created are sure to survive a long time] (567). If only Mendelys had elaborated on her screenwriting role in this interview. How many films lie behind this ellipsis? What we know is that two years into her employment with Gaumont she had “often” written scenarios. The implications of “often” are huge considering that Feuillade made around 700 films during his career.

Portrait of Christiane Mendelys in Le Film, 1919. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.

Fortunately, one can also find sparse references to her screenwriting work in the cinema press. In an adulatory summary of Mendelys’ career for Cinémagazine in 1921 we learn that her acting and screenwriting contributions reach beyond Gaumont to three other major companies: Lux, Pathé, and Film d’Art. According to Lucien Doublon, “Puis elle tourna ensuite chez Pathé, chez Lux et pour quelques autres firmes disparues à présent. Faut-il ajouter que l’excellente artiste est l’auteur de nombreux scenarios qui furent tournés chez Pathé, chez Lux et au Film d’Art?” [Trans.: She then acted for Pathé, Lux and for several companies that no longer exist. Might one add that the excellent actress is the author of many scenarios for films made by Pathé, Lux and Film d’Art?] (20). Another rare allusion to her screenwriting work appears in the Christmas 1919 issue of Le Film. In an overview of French film industry figures, a section called “…and we haven’t forgotten” lists Mendelys as one of cinema’s first scenario auteurs (de Rovera n.p.), and she again appears in the film critics section as a contributor to the daily newspaper Le Victoire. Here, the film critic and scenarist Nozière wrote,

Après avoir joué la comédie et la pantomime, Christiane Wague, qui tourna dans la première bande de 1500m [sic](L’Enfant prodigue) le rôle du Pierrot fils, fut engagée à la Maison Gaumont, où elle fut pendant plusieurs années la protagoniste de films nombreux. Douée d’une vive imagination, elle écrivit des scénarios pour les maisons Gaumont, Lux, le Film d’Art. Sous le pseudonyme Le Rat du Moulin […] elle lutte courageusement pour la défense du film artistique, contre tous les philistins, qui veulent en entraver l’essor. Sa grande compétence dans le métier cinématographique rend sa critique fort intéressante [Trans.: After acting in theater and pantomime, Christiane Wague, who played the role of Pierrot’s son in the first 1500m [sic] film (L’Enfant prodigue), signed to the Gaumont Company where for several years she played the lead role in many films. Gifted with a lively imagination, she wrote scenarios for Gaumont, Lux and Film d’Art. Under the pseudonym Le Rat du Moulin […] she courageously defends artistic film from all the philistines who seek to hinder its development. Her great expertise in the cinema industry renders her criticism extremely interesting] (n.p.).

It would seem that a period of financial hardship brought Mendelys to seek work as a film critic. Her first port of call was Henri-Diamant Berger’s Le Film where her good friend Colette had previously worked as a critic. In September 1917, Wague wrote to Colette on Mendelys’ behalf to ask whether Diamant-Berger had given his answer and to identify their current film critic who was writing under the name La Femme de nulle part (it was the wife of Delluc, Ève Françis). Colette replied that she had not heard from Berger, did not know the mystery critic’s name, and advised against such work since it did not pay (Colette 126-127). From these uncertain beginnings Mendelys soon became one of the most influential film critics in Paris.

Fortunately, a complete record of her criticism can be found in press clippings collected and bound by her husband and held at the Opera Library in Paris. On January 2, 1919, she began a weekly column in the daily newspaper La Victoire under the pseudonym “Le Rat du Moulin.” Here, she explained that, considering cinema’s French birth and the legacy of the frères Lumière, the duty of improving cinema fell uniquely upon the French. She continuously advocated for the promotion of French cinema, and, for example, on January 9, 1919, praised Feuillade as one of France’s best directors (n.p.). She also beckoned Léonce Perret to “return to France as quickly as possible to take up [….] his rightful place” in an article on January 16, 1919 (n.p.). On December 26, 1919, she even called for readers to boycott cinemas that did not show at least two French films in their weekly programs (n.p.).

Her criticism was informed by her technical knowledge of filmmaking, and she paid detailed attention to the scenario and the cinematography, making a point to name the camera operator and showing annoyance, on January 9, 1919, for example, when Gaumont did not provide the name of the camera operator for Feuillade’s Vendémiaire (1919) (n.p.). A first-hand knowledge of film history enlivens her reviews, as do colorful descriptions of daily life as a film critic. In one column, on March 17, 1919, she noted that she missed the beginning of a film because “the trams are always full!” (n.p.). In another piece from June 27, 1919, she gave a first-hand history of the animated film in France, recalling the screening of Émile Cohl’s first animation short Fantasmagorie (1908) and contested the American assertion that Winsor McCay invented the cartoon (n.p.). Her direct address to the reader lends a sense of camaraderie as she asked, “Mais il me semble, cependant,  que nos amis et alliés exagèrent autant lorsqu’ils attribuent à Windsor Mac-Cay [sic] l’invention de la caricature animée, que lorsqu’ils insinuent qu’eux seuls ont gagné la guerre. Je n’ai pas vu le fameux premier film de Windsor Mac Cay [sic] (qui l’a vu ici?…)” [Trans.: Yet it seems to me that our friends and allies exaggerate just as much when they attribute the invention of the cartoon to Windsor Mac-Cay [sic] as when they insinuate that they alone won the war. I haven’t seen the famous first film of Windsor Mac Cay [sic] (who here saw it?…)] (n.p.). With the question “who here saw it?” she transformed her column into a participatory sphere much like the letter forums in contemporary women’s fashion magazines such as Les Modes de la Femme de France, in which young women discussed films they had recently seen.

During her first year as critic with La Victoire, Paris saw the release of a new type of film that would come to be known as Impressionist Cinema or the Narrative Avant-Garde (Abel 279). In a February 28, 1919 article, Mendelys greeted the first of these films, Marcel L’Herbier’s Rose-France (1919) with the lines, “Cette façon de ‘visualiser’ les pensées, les souvenirs de ses personnages […] est une manière neuve de comprendre le cinématographe” [Trans.: This way of ‘visualizing’ characters’ thoughts and memories […] is a new way of understanding the cinématographe] (n.p.). On February 21, 1919, she reflected on the public reception of the films: “Il n’est pas certain que ceux qui vont tenter de donner au cinéma une forme nouvelle soient compris tout de suite; il n’est pas sûr, non plus, qu’il réussissent à être immédiatement très intéressants; mais ils auront toujours le mérite d’avoir fait faire un pas en avant sur la route du progrès et il est souhaitable qu’on les encourage et qu’on les aide” [Trans.: It is uncertain whether those seeking to give cinema a new form will be understood straight away; nor is it sure that they will be of immediate interest; but they will still deserve credit for having taken a step forward on the road to progress and I hope they receive help and support] (n.p.). This is not to say that Mendelys was indulgent of First Wave directors in her columns. Although she appreciated L’Herbier’s artistic efforts in Rose-France, she conceded in her February 28 article: “On pourrait même dire, cela serait plus exact, que le scénario lui manque complêtement” [Trans.: One could go as far as saying—and it would be true—that the film is totally missing a scenario]. She continued, “La psychologie des personnages a quelque chose de faux, d’anormal, qui provoque une sorte de répulsion. Leurs sentiments ne sont pas humains; on ne se sent aucune sympathie pour eux, on n’a aucune pitié de leurs chagrins voulus de dilletantes et de neurasthéniques. Leurs larmes mêmes ne sauraient émouvoir” [Trans.: The psychology of the characters has something false, abnormal, provoking a kind of repulsion. Their feelings are not human, we feel no sympathy for them, one has no pity for their dilettante grief and neurasthenia. Even their tears cannot move us] (n.p.).

“Studios.” Cinémagazine, 1921. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française

Mendelys’ column was highly respected in the very masculine world of film criticism. When in early 1920 the journalist Pierre Costar complained that the general public had no one to guide them in their choice or criteria of films, Jean-Louis Croze replied that such advice could be found in the columns of Christiane Mendelys in La Victoire (1920, 3). There is a self-reflexive to-and-fro movement to her writing, as she asserts her expertise and then reflects on her own critical judgment—a self-reflexivity that perhaps came from being a woman critic in a newspaper office full of men. This trait, very much unique to her personal style of film criticism, appears in an October 17, 1919 review of Feuillade’s film L’Engrenage (1919), in which she wrote: “Ce que je reproche à ce scénario, c’est de ne pas oser aller jusqu’à la catastrophe, c’est ce souci, visible, de ne pas déplaire au spectateur en le poussant jusqu’à l’extrême limite de l’émotion, en lui faisant la concession d’un dénouement un peu trop facile. Mais j’ai peut-être tort et le public préfère, sans doute, que tout s’arrange pour le mieux” [Trans.: I reproach this scenario for its palpable fear of displeasing the audience. Instead of pushing them to the extreme limit of their emotions, it doesn’t dare end with a catastrophe, but rather makes the concession of an overly facile ending. But maybe I’m wrong, since the public no doubt prefers that everything turns out alright in the end] (n.p.).

Advertisement for Mendelys’ film school in Ciné pour tous, 1920. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française

In 1920, while still working as a film critic, Mendelys opened an acting school with Wague in their Pigalle studio (“Informations” 7). The reputation of Mendelys and Wague as performers in early film lent the school an attractive reputation for aspiring actors in the capital. Although it was reported that they opened the school together, Doublon in Cinémagazine gives the impression that Mendelys was in charge of most of the teaching and the general running of the school. Mendelys told Doublon and Cinémagazine that “Elle […] tient essentiellement à ce que ses élèves comprennent la psychologie de leurs rôles et expriment avec vérité les sentiments divers qui y sont indiqués” [Trans.: She […] wishes her students to understand the psychology of their roles and truthfully express the sentiments of the character] (1921, 20).

Despite Mendelys’ influential career throughout the silent era, there are several striking omissions of her name. When René Jeanne and Charles Ford listed the names of pantomime actors in early French cinema, she is not mentioned (1947, 60). This is more than surprising considering that Jeanne knew Mendelys well and, according to a November 29 article in Le Gaulois, the two were board members of the French cinema press association, known as the Association Professionnelle de la Presse Cinématographique, at the same time in 1922 (1922, 5). Stranger still is that Jeanne, in Cinéma 1900, gives the name of Félicia Mallet instead of Mendelys as the actress in the film L’Enfant prodigue (102).

L’Ouïe, L’Odorat, Le Toucher, and La Vue, Christiane Mendelys and Georges Wague. Private Collection.

Recent digitizations of trade newspapers and magazines do help to shed light on such historical oversights, yet the relative anonymity of pre-1910 films means that in publications such as Ciné-Journal (created in 1908), films are listed by title, genre, and length without names of cast members or filmmakers. Although the Gaumont troupe of the immediate prewar years are familiar to film historians, it seems by then Mendelys was no longer with Gaumont as her name does not appear in the luxurious Gaumont Palace programmes of the early teens. Furthermore Mendelys was not in attendance the day her husband attended an interview at the Cinémathèque Française to discuss the career of Feuillade, although actresses Alice Tissot, Renée Carl, and Yvette Andréyor all were. Nor is she named by Carré in his interview with the historical committee the same year. However, Mendelys was consistently at the heart of the French cinema industry, from prewar filmed pantomime and Gaumont sound experiments to the emergence of newspaper film criticism and the vogue for film acting in the 1920s. Though largely forgotten, her career cannot in fact be untangled from the major transitions in French film culture during the silent era.

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Advertisement. Ciné pour tous (31 December 1920): 8.

“Aimez-vous la pantomime?” La Justice (9 December 1902): 3.

“Au Théâtre de Montrouge.” Gil Blas (14 November 1905): 3.

“Au Théâtre Grévin.” Gil Blas (6 March 1907): 3.

Bastide, Bernard. “Les ‘séries d’art’ Gaumont : des ‘sujets de toute première classe.’” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 56 (2008): 304-326.

“Bouffes-Parisiens.” Le Matin (24 April 1903): 4.

Claris, Edmond. “Le Théâtre Cinématographique.” Ciné-Journal (1 November 1909): 12-15.

Coissac, Georges Michel. Histoire du cinématographe de ses origines à nos jours. Paris: Éditions du Cinéopse, 1925.

Colette. Lettres de la vagabonde. Eds. Claude Pichois and Roberte Forbin. Paris: Flammarion, 1989.

Croze, Jean-Louis. “On synchronisait…en 1907.” Comoedia (10 March 1914): 4.

------. “Suivre le guide?” Comoedia (2 January 1920): 3.

“Dans les cinémas” Le Gaulois (29 November 1922): 5.

de Rovera, Jean. “Et nous n’avons pas oublié.” Le Film (December 1919): n.p.

Doublon, Lucien. “Studios.” Cinémagazine (15 April 1921): 20.

E.B. “La pantomime à l’honneur avec Georges Wague.” Le Petit Journal (18 March 1933): 6.

“En 1910…Les Comédiens n’entrent pas au cimetière…des livres.” Comoedia (6 October 1910): 2.

Fulgus. “Cinématographe.” Comoedia (7 November 1907): 5.

“Informations.” Le Film (16 April 1920): 7.

Jeanne, René, and Charles Ford. Histoire encyclopédique du cinéma: I, Le cinéma français 1895-1929. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1947.

Jeanne, René. Cinéma 1900. Paris: Flammarion, 1965.

La Herse. “Spectacles divers: Aux Variétés.” Le Petit Parisien (15 June 1907): 5.

Le Rat du Moulin. “Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (2 January 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------. “Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (9 January 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------. “Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (16 January 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------. “Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (21 February 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------. “Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (28 February 1919): n.p.Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------.“Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (17 March 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------.“Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (27 June 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------. “Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (17 October 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------. “Le Moulin à Images.” La Victoire (12 December 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

------.“Le Moulin à Images: L’industrie cinématographique française en peril.” La Victoire (26 December 1919): n.p. Christiane Mendelys Press Clippings File, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

“Les Coulisses.” La Lanterne (27 December 1902): 3.

“Les Mimes.” Comoedia illustré (15 December 1908): 209-210.

“Louis Feuillade: réunion du 15 décembre 1945.” Committee on Historical Research Collection [Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique], CRH24-B1. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Mendelys, Christine. “Leurs Confidences.” Fantasio (15 March 1910): 566-567.

Meusy, Jean-Jacques. Paris-Palaces ou le temps des cinémas (1894-1918). Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2002.

“Michel Carré: réunion du 12 février 1945.” Committee on Historical Research Collection [Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique], CRH19-B1. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

“Ministère de l’instruction publique des beaux-arts et des cultes.” Journal officiel de la république française (24 January 1907): 551.

“Nos Confrères...”Le Film (December 1919): n.p.

Nozière. “La Critique Cinématographique.” Le Film (December 1919): n.p.

“Palmes Académiques.” Le Temps (25 January 1907): 3.

Picard, Alfred. Exposition Universelle Internationale de 1900 à Paris. Rapport Général Administratif et Technique. Vol. 7. Paris: Ministère du commerce, de l’industrie des postes et des télégraphes; Imprimerie Nationale, 1903.

Sirois-Trahan, Jean-Pierre. “Film d’art.” Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Ed. Richard Abel. New York: Routledge, 2005. 337-339.

“Tour Eiffel.” Le Petit Parisien (16 October 1904): 4.

Williams, Tami. “The ‘Silent’ Arts: Modern Pantomime and the Making of an Art Cinema in Belle Époque Paris. The Case of Georges Wague and Germaine Dulac.” In A Companion to Early Cinema. Eds. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 99-118.

Archival Paper Collections:

Fonds Commission de Recherche Historique/Committee on Historical Research Collection. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Mendelyes, Christiane. Articles de presse signés le Rat du Moulin, par Christiane Mendelyes-Wague/Journalistic articles signed the Rat du Moulin, by Christiane Mendelyes-Wague. D-412 (9) [catalogue number for the entire folder of press clippings held in the Georges Wague Collection/Fonds Georges Wague]. Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Scenario for La Légende de la fileuse (1908). 4-COL-3 (0203) [catalogue number]. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Citation

Fee, Annie. "Christiane Mendelys." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-2x25-5d16>

Harriet Bloch

by Birgit Granhøj, Eva N. Redvall

Harriet Bloch is regarded as the first professional female screenwriter in Denmark (Sundholm et al. 2012, 405) and as one of the most successful Danish screenwriters to this day (Schröder 2011). She had no formal training in writing, but picked up knowledge of films at the cinema where she could watch up to three films a day (Bloch 1962, n.p.). The idea of writing screenplays of her own came from watching Urban Gad’s classic silent film Afgrunden/The Abyss (1910) starring Asta Nielsen. Bloch figured that she would be able to write something of a similar quality, and she thus sent an unsolicited screenplay to the cinema owner and film producer Constantin Philipsen, who had opened Denmark’s first cinema, Kosmorama, in 1904. According to Bloch, Philipsen was not interested in her story because he only wanted films that were either really vulgar or really exciting and this was a romantic melodrama (1962, n.p.). However, Nordisk Film took an interest in the story, which became August Blom’s Hendes Ære/Lady Mary’s Love (1911). The film was presented as a play in fifty sections by “Mrs. Harriet Bloch” on the cover of the printed programme, which labelled it as part of an “art film series” (Redvall 2015, 268).

Harriet Bloch. Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

In an interview recorded by Danish film historians Arne Krogh and Ib Monty in 1962, Bloch estimated that she had written 150 films, some of which were never made. One hundred of the screenplays were sold to Nordisk Film, but she also wrote for other companies in Denmark, as well as in Germany and Sweden. In spite of the many screenplays sold to Nordisk Film she was never on the permanent staff but remained an independent freelance writer (n.p.). In the beginning of her career, Bloch was paid in the range of 50 DKK per screenplay when writing shorter films and up to 3000 DKK at the end of her career. In 1916 she sold twenty-one screenplays and had an income of 6000 DKK, which was almost as much as her husband who was a self-employed engineer (Schröder 2011, 607).

Bloch rarely used pre-existing books, plays, or other source material for her screenplays. Her breakthrough as a screenwriter came around 1913-14 and she was known to be the favorite screenwriter of Ole Olsen, the head of Nordisk Film, although she never met him. She was also the favorite screenwriter of the biggest Danish male star in the silent era, the world famous Valdemar Psilander (Schröder 2017, n.p.). Bloch found Psilander to be very appealing and wrote ten films for him. In 1916, they made the Blom film Du skal elske din næste/The Samatarian. In the programme the film was presented as a “novel on society” [“samfundsroman”] in three acts and sixty sections directed by Blom and starring Psilander, but with no mention of Bloch. Another film they made in 1916 was Manden uden Fremtid/The Man Without a Future. Psilander once told Bloch that he dreamed of playing a cowboy and she wrote the cowboy part, Percy Fancourt, for him. It became her favorite film (Bloch n.p.).

As the titles of many of the films credited to Bloch bear witness to, she wrote several stories about women and love. Most of these were domestic melodramas, which were predominant in 1910s Danish cinema. She wrote her screenplays from a woman’s point of view, wrote about women, and her position as a woman may have drawn many women to the theatres. Infidelity, love intrigues, gender issues, and love entanglements among the upper classes of society were frequent topics in her films. Members of the working class were rarely seen. This was in line with the “Instructions for Film Writers” [“Instruktioner for Filmsforfattere”] issued by Nordisk Film in 1912 (Nørgaard 1971, 99; Schröder 2011, 330). This manual, now held in the Nordisk Film Collection at the Danish Film Institute, informed writers about what to tackle (they should focus on dramas with a few main characters that take place in the present and among the upper classes), as well as what not to write about (e.g., the military, historical topics, crime, anarchism, nihilism, or poor people). These instructions had to be obeyed in order to sell a screenplay to Nordisk Film.

Bloch seems to have been continuously writing from 1911 to 1920. However, she wrote all screenplays from her home where she lived with her husband and their six children. In the interview with Krogh and Monty, she notes that her husband probably never saw her writing as she wrote while he was at work, and, besides occasional meetings at the production companies, she did not socialize with the industry. For Bloch, one of the attractions of writing screenplays seems to have been that they did take too long to write and they could thus be fitted into her other duties, while the thought of writing a novel was overwhelming (Bloch n.p.).

Harriet Bloch. Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

Over the years, Bloch gained a solid reputation as a writer even if she was unknown to the general audiences. She had work offers from Sweden, where the popularity of Danish melodramas led to the hiring of several female writers with experience in this genre (Forsman and Sundstedt 2015, 550-552). Her most well-known Swedish film is the Mauritz Stiller comedy Kärlek och Journalistik/Love and Journalism (1916). Bloch also sold some screenplays to Germany. F.W. Murnau directed one of them in 1921, Der Gang in die Nacht/The Dark Road. In the 1962 interview she explains how she tried to get a film made in the United States, but did not succeed (n.p.).

Although not many Danish women wrote screenplays in the 1910s, Bloch was not the only one. Agnete von Prangen (1880-1968) was married to director Blom. She acted in films from 1912 onward and moved into writing screenplays from 1914 to 1919, but she was mainly known as a lead actress in films for Nordisk Film. Helen Gammeltoft (1895-?) is credited with twelve screenplays from 1916 to 1919. She was also an actress and wrote screenplays exclusively for Lau Lauritzen, Sr. in which she frequently played the leading role. Emma Pedersen (1868-?), Rigmor Holger-Madsen (1890-?), and Ljut Steensgaard (1884–1968) all wrote a few screenplays in the 1910s, but none of these writers were as productive or prolific as Bloch.

Bloch left the film industry by the late 1920s. She wrote a few plays that were never produced and also some radio dramas, but her main occupation became managing the two apple plantations that she ran with some of her sons. She was proud of having been able to buy the plantations with the money that she had earned from screenwriting. However, based on her description of her career in Krogh and Monty’s interview, Bloch seems to have never regarded her screenwriting work as a real profession, but rather as a fun hobby, which earned her some extra money (n.p.).

Bibliography

Bloch, Harriet. Audio interview with Arne Krogh and Ib Monty. May 1, 1962. Danish Film Institute.

Forsman, Johanna and Kjell Sundtstedt. “Sweden.” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 550–577.

Nørgaard, Erik. Levende billeder i Danmark: Fra den gamle biograf til moderne tider. Copenhagen: Lademann, 1971.

Redvall, Eva Novrup. “Denmark.” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 266–287.

Schröder, Stephan M. Ideale Kommunikation, reale Filmproduktion: Zur Interaktion von Kino und dänischer Literatur in den Erfolgsjahren des dänischen Stummfilms 1909-1918. Berlin: Nordeuropa-Institut der Humboldt Universität, 2011.

------. “Screenwriting for a Star: The Scripts for Valdemar Psilander’s Films.” Kosmorama (6 March 2017): n.p.   https://www.kosmorama.org/en/kosmorama/artikler/screenwriting-star-scripts-valdemar-psilanders-films.

------. “Screenwriting for Nordisk 1906-1918.” In 100 Years of Nordisk Film. Eds. Lisbeth Richter Larsen and Dan Nissen. Copenhagen: The Danish Film Institute, 2006. 96–113.

------. “Tracing a Woman Screenwriter.” Nordic Women in Film [online database] (February 2018): n.p. http://www.nordicwomeninfilm.com/tracing-a-woman-screenwriter/

Sundholm, John, Isak Thorsen, Lars Gustaf Andersson, Olof Hedling, Gunnar Iversen and Birgir Thor Møller. Historical Dictionary of Scandinavian Cinema. Kanham, Toronto, Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Archival Paper Collections:

Nordisk Film Collection. Danske Filminstitut.

Research Update

February 2019: Recent research suggests that the extant En Lektion (Dir. August Blom, 1911), which was included in the filmography at the time of publication, was actually written by someone else. A print of this film is held at both the Deutsche Kinemathek and the Danish Film Institute.

Citation

Granhøj, Birgit; Eva N Redvall. "Harriet Bloch." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4wt4-4h36>

Elizabeth McGaffey

by Lisle Foote

Elizabeth “Bessie” McGaffey founded the first studio research department in 1914 at the Lasky studio, where Cecil B. DeMille was the chief director. She was in charge of all research for his films until 1931, and then she became the head of R.K.O.’s research department. She also briefly tried scenario writing in 1916, writing the story for The Honorable Friend.

Passport photo, Elizabeth McGaffey, 1922.

Elizabeth Brock McGaffey was born on January 17, 1875 in Chicago. After her father died when she was young, her mother moved the family in with her parents in Dubuque, Iowa. McGaffey went to school at St. Mary’s School in Knoxville, Tennessee and then, according to a later article in Motion Pictures and the Family, became a feature writer for the Chicago Interocean (1938, 3). After a brief career as a journalist, she moved to New York City to study drama at the Sargent School, and she became an actress in stock companies, touring with the Charles Frohman and Henry B. Harris companies. When she had enough of that, she became a play reader for Harris and for theatrical producer Joseph Grismer.

McGaffey and her publicist husband Kenneth McGaffey, whom she married in 1911, moved to Los Angeles and she found a job as a script reader for the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Because of her wide experience and excellent memory, people got into the habit of asking her whenever they had a question. She “persuaded them to give her a dictionary, the National Geographic Magazine, and a public library card,” and with those tools she started the first studio research department in 1914 (Percey 1936, 253).

Trade ad, The Honorable Friend (1916), Motion Picture News.

McGaffey also enjoyed writing, and in 1916 she sold a scenario to Famous Players-Lasky that was made into the film The Honorable Friend.  It was an unusual story because it featured only Japanese characters and the one Caucasian actor was in yellow face. The star, Sessue Hayakawa, got to play an ordinary man and a hero, not a villain or exotic, forbidden lover, as was often the case. The story involved a handsome gardener (Hayakawa), an innocent young woman (played by Hayakawa’s wife Tsuru Aoki), and an unscrupulous rich man, as well as kidnapping, murder, revenge, and self-sacrificing false confessions. Contemporary reviews, such as one by Lynde Denig in Moving Picture World, were favorable: “Pictures such as this, acted in the principal roles by Japanese players, are welcome because of their novelty, and the more so when the story stands up well on its own account” (1685). The Honorable Friend is considered a lost film.

On the strength of that film, McGaffey was promoted to the Lasky scenario department (Kingsley 1917, III19). Unfortunately, her career as a writer did not last long and, as far as we can tell, her only credit is The Honorable Friend. However, she did not leave the film industry—she went back to the library.

McGaffey was one of the dedicated women who helped DeMille make his films. This group also included editor Anne Bauchens, screenwriter Jeanie Macpherson, and executive secretary Gladys Rosson. McGaffey’s work was particularly important, because DeMille sold his epics on the strength of their historical accuracy. But her responsibilities went beyond looking things up in books; she also did original research. A 1930 article in Talking Screen described some of her work: “While compiling data for Dynamite [1929], she spent hours down in a mine shaft, absorbing the atmosphere, talking with mining engineers and workers, contacting the Hercules explosive specialists, and making notes on incidents and details so casual that they might never be used. For Madam Satan [1930], DeMille’s latest opus, she traveled about in a dirigible, recording the special phrasing of the officers’ orders and their individual slang. Not long ago Miss McGaffey took a submarine dive in San Diego; and she wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. DeMille should suddenly ask her to take a parachute jump!” (Cartwright 1930, 65). An undated 1928 payroll sheet for Famous Players-Lasky, held in the Cecil B. DeMille Collection at Brigham Young University, indicates that an “E.B. McGaffey” in the research department was earning $110 at that time, most likely per week.

McGaffey worked for DeMille until he closed his production office in May 1931 after his studio contract was not renewed. She quickly found a new job as research director at R.K.O. in August, according to a 1931 article in Film Daily (2). She stayed there until she died, on March 13, 1944, following a heart attack. While obituaries and her death certificate list her age as fifty-nine, census data indicates that she was five years old in 1880, making her actually sixty-nine at the time of her death.

Bibliography

Advertisement. The Honorable FriendMotion Picture News (9 September 1916): 3.

Cartwright, Dorethea Hawley. “Their Job is Looking Up.” Talking Screen (July 1930): 65-66.

Denig, Lynde. “The Honorable Friend.” Moving Picture World (9 September 1916): 1685.

“Film Research Expert Succumbs.” Los Angeles Times (14 March 1944): A10.

Kingsley, Grace. “Studio.” Los Angeles Times (12 February 1917): III19.

Koury, Phil A. Yes, Mr. DeMille. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1959.

“Major Fairbanks Leave Radio.” Film Daily (5 August 1931): 2.

Percey, H.G. “Problems of a Motion Picture Research Library.” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (March 1936): 253-258.

“Snapshots of Film Personalities.” Motion Pictures and the Family (15 April 1938): 3.

Archival Paper Collections:

Cecil B. DeMille Collection. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Citation

Foote, Lisle. "Elizabeth McGaffey." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-qyry-vv55>

Marvin Breckinridge

by Charles Tepperman

Marvin Breckinridge was an amateur filmmaker, best known for her 1930 silent film The Forgotten Frontier. This film presents the activities of the Frontier Nursing Service, a group (primarily women) that provided medical services in remote and rural areas of Kentucky. While the film was named to the National Film Registry in 1996, its position as an amateur production, a late silent film, and documentary made outside of commercial production and distribution networks compound its marginality. Despite having a place on the Film Registry, Breckinridge and her films have received little scholarly attention. This neglect cannot be ascribed to a shortage of documentation about her work; archival and historical sources of information about Breckinridge’s life and filmmaking are plentiful. She took meticulous notes during the production of her completed films, and along with her published memoir, these offer us unique access to Brickinridge’s filmmaking activities.

Grandchild of Vice President John Cabell Breckinridge on one side of her family, and the industrialist B.F. Goodrich on the other, Breckinridge was a member of the New York aristocratic class. She was also, in many respects, a “New Woman” of the 1920s and 1930s who sought out advanced education, socially committed work, and a career as a photographer and journalist. Her films reinforce this attitude, focusing on women in professional roles  (frontier nurses) and higher education (university students and professors). Breckinridge became interested in journalism and international affairs while a student at Vassar College. She participated in the 1925 International Conference of Students in Copenhagen, and was on the founding Executive Committee of the National Student Federation of America. Breckinridge contemplated a transfer to the Columbia School of Journalism, but ultimately graduated from Vassar in 1927. Her appetite for adventure is evident in her extensive travels and training as a pilot. However, Breckinridge’s privileged social position meant that she never completely relied on working for an income.

According to a 1977 speech that she gave about her film She Goes to Vassar (1931), Breckinridge received a 16mm camera for Christmas in 1926 (when she was twenty-one years old, and a Vassar undergraduate), but was already an experienced still photographer, having taken stills since age nine, and developed her own photographs since age fifteen (1). Her home movies, held at the Library of Congress, included footage of Vassar that winter and other travel and holiday films. After her graduation from Vassar in 1927, Breckinridge worked for a period for her cousin Mary Breckinridge’s Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky. This would eventually lead to her production of The Forgotten Frontier in 1929-1930. To make this film, Breckinridge sought out an education in filmmaking via the amateur film world, and the New York-based Amateur Cinema League (ACL) in particular. Her production notebook for The Forgotten Frontier, archived at the Library of Congress, includes a diary that chronicles Breckinridge’s training in camera operation and cinematography in the fall of 1929. Her instructor in this was ACL technical consultant, and Movie Makers magazine contributor, Russell Holslag. Breckinridge also became involved with amateur film culture, joining the Metropolitan Movie Club of New York and, according to an article entitled “Vacation Films” in Movie Makers, presented footage of a trip to Mexico at a club meeting in 1930 (1930, 444). Movie clubs provided filmmakers with a venue for gaining technical skills and receiving advice about their current projects. During the 1930s, Breckinridge herself contributed an article and several photographs to the ACL’s Movie Makers magazine, and her activities as a filmmaker and member of the organization were also frequently noted.

Marvin Breckinridge at work, circa 1930. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

The Forgotten Frontier was filmed on 35mm, with a camera provided by Mary Breckinridge. The production of the film started in December 1929, and continued through the winter and spring of 1930 over the course of several visits to Kentucky. In her memoir My American Century, Marvin recalls that her cousin’s instructions for the film were explicit: Marvin was responsible for writing a script and filming it but there would be no professional actors, costumes, or make-up. They could, “where necessary, stage events where they had occurred with the nurses and doctors of the FNS, and the people of the mountains would play themselves” (2006, 90). The resulting style is substantially more evocative than a pure informational film. It is especially effective in its depiction of the hardworking women working for the Frontier Nursing Service. Wearing breeches and sporting short hair, these nurses on horse-back are depicted as tough medical professionals. The film also captures the rugged settings of southeastern Kentucky vividly, as well as the rural and backwoods folks served by the Nursing Service. The portrait of the region anticipates the Farm Security Administration photography of rural life that would follow later in the decade. The film’s public premiere took place in January 1931 in New York, but by this time it had also been acclaimed by Movie Makers magazine as one of the Ten Best amateur films of 1930 (1930, 758, 788).

The success of The Forgotten Frontier did not lead to a career in film, but it did result in a further commission. Starting in 1931, Breckinridge lived in Washington, D.C. and worked for the Democratic National Committee. At the same time, from approximately February to August 1931, Breckinridge devoted many weekends to producing a film for Vassar College’s alumni association. The result was She Goes to Vassar, a one-reel film that provides an overview of college life from the perspective of a new freshman student. From her arrival on campus, to settling into her new dorm and meeting her professors and classmates, the film depicts many facets of the college experience. Perhaps most striking about the film from today’s perspective are the shots of the academic environment, as the young women attend lectures and labs instructed by their professors, many of whom are also women. Though it was ultimately used primarily as a fundraising tool by the college’s alumni association, the film nevertheless provides a valuable glimpse of this women’s college through the eyes of a recent graduate.

The Library of Congress holds copies of Breckinridge’s films including both The Forgotten Frontier and She Goes to Vassar. In addition to these, there are four other titled works in the Library of Congress collection, which I have not yet had an opportunity to view. Three of these date from Breckinridge’s 1932-3 trip to Africa, during which she took many still photographs (Some of these photographs were published in Olivia Stokes Hatch’s book Olivia’s African Diary: Cape Town to Cairo, 1932.) Breckinridge took a 35mm camera on the trip, but later wrote in her memoir that “we traveled so fast that I couldn’t use the movie camera very often or very well. A movie requires a theme, a purpose, the ability to make some statement that holds it all together. It takes time to figure out the meaning of what you are seeing and time to get the scenes you need once you have figured it all out” (98). This account contradicts a more contemporary report of her trip published in Movie Makers as “Filming a New Africa” immediately after her return, in which she describes spending several days shooting and planning her films (1935, 153, 172-3). The Library of Congress lists “The Ruins of Zimbabwe, Rhodesia”; “A School for Natives, South Africa”; and “Golf in the Belgian Congo” among her films from this trip. An additional film in the Library of Congress collection dates from a visit to Chichen Itza in Mexico, likely in 1930. An examination of these films would determine the extent to which we can consider them “finished” works, but in her own recollections Breckinridge affords them much less significance than The Forgotten Frontier and She Goes to Vassar.

After returning from Africa in 1933, Breckinridge again lived in Washington, D.C., this time working in the office of Democratic congresswoman, and distant relative, Isabella Selmes Greenway. In 1936, Breckinridge enrolled in the Clarence White School of Photography in New York and, upon graduating in 1937, launched her career as a professional photographer. She set up a studio, but it was really as a travel photographer and photojournalist that she found success. Over the next few years Breckinridge published photographs and sometimes articles in several magazines, including LIFE, Harper’s Bazar, and Town and Country. In 1939, Breckinridge was in London when World War II broke out and was asked by her friend Edward Murrow to present CBS radio broadcasts about conditions there. She continued this work in 1940 on the European continent, but quit that year when she married Jefferson Patterson, an American consular official serving in Berlin. This marked the end of Breckinridge’s career in broadcasting and photojournalism, replaced by a “career” as a diplomatic spouse, which continued through the 1950s. It appears that Breckinridge’s media production after her marriage was limited to home movies of her family, but more research is needed here.

In examining Marvin Breckinridge’s film career, important questions emerge about the position of amateurs in the history of women’s filmmaking. Breckinridge came to filmmaking via the amateur world but she aspired to professional results and approached her film training and productions with a professional attitude. However, she did not primarily use her films to turn a profit or seek an income, instead producing them for their fundraising or social value. In these senses, she was an amateur, working outside of mainstream production contexts, and generally unconcerned with the financial returns of the activity. More research is needed to fully understand Breckinridge’s career as a filmmaker alongside histories of other women–from a variety of different social backgrounds–who worked as prolific, polished amateur filmmakers.

Bibliography

Breckinridge, Marvin. “Filming A New Africa.” Movie Makers (April 1935): 153, 172-3.

------. “A Frontier Nurse Rides Through the Rain.” LIFE (14 June 1937): 33.

------. [as Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson]. My American Century. Marpat Foundation, 2006.

------. “She Goes to Vassar.” Speech given at Vassar College alumni event, 1977. Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Collection. Vassar College.

Breckinridge, Mary. Wide Neighborhoods: A Story of the Frontier Nursing Service. New York: Harper and Row, 1952.

“Closeups–What Amateurs Are Doing.” Movie Makers (April 1932): 179.

“Educational Films.” Movie Makers (December 1930): 772, 800.

“Educational Film.” Movie Makers (November 1931): 631.

Hatch, Olivia S., with photographs by Marvin Breckinridge Patterson. Olivia’s African Diary: Cape Town to Cairo, 1932. Arlington: A.C.E. Distribution Center, 1980.

“Marvin Breckinridge.” Vassar College Encyclopedia, Vassar College, 2012. https://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alumni/marvin-breckinridge.html

Tepperman, Charles. Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923-1960. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

------. “Mechanical Craftsmanship: Amateurs Making Practical Films.” In Useful Cinema. Eds. Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 289-314.

“The Ten Best Amateur Films of 1930.” Movie Makers (December 1930): 758, 788.

“Vacation Films.” Movie Makers (July 1930): 444.

“Women Come to the Front: Marvin Breckinridge Patterson.” Library of Congress [online exhibition]. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/wcf0009.html

Archival Paper Collections:

The Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Collection.  Library of Congress.

Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Collection. Multiple Collections, Box 1, Special Collections (includes She Goes to Vassar production notebook). Vassar College.

Amateur Movie Database [online database], University of Calgary.

Citation

Tepperman, Charles. "Marvin Breckinridge." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-br3g-ey39>

María Luz Morales Godoy

by Begoña Soto-Vázquez

María Luz Morales—officially known as María Luz Morales Godoy, but, following Spanish tradition, only went by her first surname—is not an unknown name in the history of culture and journalism in Spain. However, her name is only known within the narrow limits reserved for the acknowledgment of a woman within the Spanish context of her time. Her recognition is due, mainly, to her career as a journalist. In 1936, she was the first female director of the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia and also worked as an editor, translator, and adaptor of literature for children, adapting many classics for the series Las Obras Maestras al Alcance de los Niños for the publishing company Araluce in the early 20th century. Furthermore, her work as a promotor of women’s education—in relation to the Residencia Internacional de Señoritas Estudiantes/International Residency for Female Students, which was created in 1931 and which she directed—is just starting to be acknowledged. Thus, her cinematographic career is eclipsed as a result of all her other activities, together with the fact that most of her journalistic texts on cinema were written under a masculine pseudonym: Felipe Centeno.

Morales’ work in the Spanish film industry was atypical. On the one hand, her work revolved around her film criticism and on the transmission of the history of cinema. On the other hand, it was also focused on education and the diffusion of cinematographic culture, and, as far as we know, she only collaborated directly with the production of a single film, Sierra de Teruel (1939). Until very recently, Morales’ cinematographic labor has remained unresearched and, although now there are some studies about her persona, these always focus more on her work as journalist or editor. Therefore, there is an evident lack of interest about Morales in the field of the history of Spanish cinema.

María Luz Morales, c. 1915.

Morales’ biography is not easy to reconstruct. Although she leaves many footprints because of the visibility of her name and her work, these footprints are always widely dispersed, unconnected, and heterogeneous. In other words, the difficulty in reconstructing her biography does not come from a lack of information about her, but from giving that information an appropriate and coherent narration.

Although born in Galicia, Morales developed ties to the city of Barcelona throughout her entire professional life. In the Catalan city, during the early 1920s, she directed the publication El Hogar y la Moda/Home and Fashion. Then, at the young age of twenty-two, the newspaper La Vanguardia hired her as a film critic. In the pages of La Vanguardia, Morales wrote about cinema from 1923 until 1932 under the masculine pseudonym Felipe Centeno. It is unclear if the masculine pseudonym was an imposition of the newspaper or a personal choice. In any case, what she did seem to recognize, as María Pilar Comín remarked in La Vanguardia in 1972, was that this choice was not related to being a woman but that it came from an attempt to create a review section independent of the control of producers and distributors (41). Therefore, to be anonymous was fundamental. Although Morales did choose the specific name, which is a character from the 1883 Spanish novel El Doctor Centeno, we do not know why anonymity had to come under a man’s name. Working as a film critic shaped her interest in cinema and her active role in the industry, and she participated in initiatives such as the I Congreso de Cine Iberoamericano/First Congress of Ibero-American Cinema, celebrated in Madrid in 1929.

Paramount then hired her to adapt and translate their productions into Spanish, as well as write their news bulletins in trade journals like Revista Paramount and then in Paramount Grá-fico. In the meantime, Morales continued writing for the press, not exclusively in La Vanguardia, about cinema and also about theater and fashion. She also translated, adapted, and edited a large quantity of works that do not have any relation to cinema.

Film criticism, promotion, and other writings in relation to cinema are the three aspects most notable of Morales’ film career during the silent era. These three aspects, specifically film criticism, were developed by herself, with an incredible continuity and independence during a period in which cinema was still being institutionalized in Spain. Through Felipe Centeno’s name, Morales was an important agent in this institutionalization. Thus, the importance of her work must be underlined, especially considering the lack of interest in international cinema of the Spanish culture of that time.

María Luz Morales featured in her article “Frente a nosotras y junto a nosotras.”

With the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, La Vanguardia, where Morales was then an editor, was seized by the workers, who decided to name Morales the director. This was one of the main causes, although not the only one, of Morales’ arrest after the Fascist victory in 1939. It was also during the Civil War when she collaborated for the first and only time with the production of a film. It is important to note how her participation in Sierra de Teruel was more a political act than a professional one as this was not just any film in any political context. Quite the opposite: Sierra de Teruel, directed by French writer André Malraux, was made between 1938 and 1940, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. The government of the Spanish Republic financed the film in order to use it as international propaganda. Although Morales does not appear in any of the credits on the existing copies of the film, the different information about the production seem to indicate that she was the assistant to Max Aub—who adapted the script to Spanish—and assistant to the director (Farreras i Valenti 1995, 15). In photographs of the production, held in the Max Aub Collection at the Filmoteca de la Generalitat de Valencia, Morales appears together with the crew in Barcelona.

After the Civil War, Morales stayed in Barcelona until her death, dedicating herself to theatrical criticism. However, during that period, she wrote a history of cinema in three volumes, titled El Cine: historia ilustrada del séptimo arte, published in 1950. It is a general history of cinema, essentially expository, but one of the only ones written in Spanish and by a Spanish author. Although this work lacks any mention of the academic or essayist tradition dedicated in Spain to the historiography of cinema, it is important to mention because of how it treats the silent period, and specifically, Spanish silent cinema; a study distanced from the regular tone of personal anecdote or pure cinephilia.

Morales constitutes an extremely modern case of a woman’s dedication to cinema in a country like Spain. As a journalist, film critic, and cinema historian, she was a pioneering figure who demands more research and study. She established a body of work that intellectually focused on film, from her writings and evolving from her criticism to historical overviews in a period and in a country where this was not only (and still is) unusual, but that was ahead of its time.

Translated by Alejandra Rosenberg

Bibliography

Comin, María Pilar. “Mirando hacia tras sin ira. Una mujer en la aventura política.” La Vanguardia Española (26 January 1972): 41.

Farreras i Valenti, Elvira. “Maz Aub y Barcelona.” La Vanguardia (5 August 1995): 15.

Favá, Mª Luisa. 50 mujeres de nuestro tiempo. Barcelona: Editorial de Diáfona, 1975.

García-Albi, Inés. Nosotras que contamos: Mujeres periodistas en España. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2007.

Irwin, Will. El edificio construido por las sombras. Trans. María Luz Morales. Barcelona: Paramount Films, 1931. Filmoteca Española.

Marco, Aurora. As Precursoras. Achegas para o estudo da escrita feminina (Galiza, 1800-1936). A Coruña: La Voz de Galicia, 1993.

Morales, María Luz. Edison. 3rd ed. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1947.

------. El Cine: historia ilustrada del séptimo arte. Barcelona: Salvat, 1950.

------. “Frente a nosotras y junto a nosotras. Heroínas, mujeres, cine y moda.” In Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat 18 (2012): 277-298.

------. “La mujer y la pantalla.” Arte y Cinematografía vol. 300, no. 17 (January 1926): n.p.

------. Vida de Edison. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1934.

Rodrigo, Antonina. Mujeres para la historia. La España silenciada del siglo XX. Madrid: Compañía Literaria, 1996.

Servén Díez, Carmen. “María Luz Morales y la promoción de la lectura infantil.” Álabe 5 (17 June 2012): 1-17.

Archival Paper Collections:

María Luz Morales personal files. Ateneu Barcelonés.

Articles by María Luz Morales/Felipe Centeno can be found online through La Vanguardia's digitized archive (La Vanguardia Hemeroteca).

Citation

Soto-Vázquez, Begoña. "María Luz Morales Godoy." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4b8j-cp05>

Asta Nielsen

by Julie Allen

Frequently lauded as “die Duse des Kinos” [the Duse of the cinema], as Poul Elsner noted in Weltrundschau in 1911 (517), the Danish actress Asta Nielsen was the first major star of German silent film. She acted in more than seventy films, all but four of them made with German production companies, during the twenty-two years of her film career. The phenomenal success of her debut film, Afgrunden/The Abyss (1910) enabled her to become the first global film star under the new monopoly distribution system. From 1910 to 1914, she collaborated closely with director Urban Gad, who was also her first husband, under the auspices of Deutsche Bioscop and Projektions-AG “Union” (PAGU), and later established two film companies of her own. Although she struggled to come to terms with the director-centric turn of the film industry in Germany in the 1920s that restricted the artistic autonomy she had enjoyed in the 1910s, she made several of her most artistically impressive films, including several Weimar street films, during this period. In 1932, she acted in her only sound film, Unmögliche Liebe/Impossible Love, which was also her final film, aside from two documentaries about her made decades later.

Publicity photo of Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad on set in Berlin. Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

Nielsen’s path to film was as unlikely as it was dramatic. She was born in Copenhagen in 1881, the second child of an impoverished working-class Danish couple, Jens Christian and Ida Frederikke Nielsen. She spent seven years of her early childhood in Malmö, Sweden, before returning to Copenhagen, where her father died shortly before Asta’s fourteenth birthday. Biographer Poul Malmkjær notes that her mother hoped that Asta would become a shop attendant (38), but she dreamed of the theatre. In 1899, her striking tenor voice attracted the attention of actor Peter Jerndorff, who arranged for her to have free acting, elocution, and dancing lessons. On Jerndorff’s recommendation, Nielsen was offered a position at the Danish Royal Theater in the fall of 1900, but the birth of her illegitimate daughter Jesta, likely fathered by Jerndorff, in July 1901 caused her to lose both her voice and her position at the Royal Theater. During the next decade, she attempted repeatedly to break into the Copenhagen theatre world, acting in minor roles at the Dagmar Theater and in provincial touring troupes, but without notable success.

Asta Nielsen and Poul Reumert performing in Afgruden (1910). Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

Nielsen’s cinema debut, Afgrunden, was a collaboration with screenwriter/director Gad made on a minuscule budget over the course of a single week that came about almost accidentally as a last-ditch attempt to raise her profile in the Copenhagen acting world, but when it premiered in Copenhagen on September 12, 1910, it became an overnight international sensation. Afgrunden was one of the earliest and most successful Danish erotic melodramas, an extremely profitable genre throughout Europe between 1910 and 1915. The film’s plot line is high melodrama: Nielsen’s character, the respectable bourgeois music teacher Magda Vang, becomes engaged to a pastor’s son but runs away instead with a circus cowboy named Rudolph, who cheats on her with other women, forces her to play piano in cafés to support his drinking habit, and ultimately tries to extort money from her abandoned fiancé. When she protests, Rudolph tries to strangle her, forcing Magda to stab him to death with a table knife. The final scene of the film shows a dazed, dry-eyed Magda being led away by the police. Nielsen’s minimalistic acting style, particularly evident in the memorable final scene, contrasted sharply with the histrionics of other early film actresses, while her remarkably expressive eyes and provocative but restrained sensuality, which featured prominently in the film’s extended erotic gaucho dance sequence, enraptured audiences and critics alike. In 1924, the Hungarian-born film commentator and theorist Béla Balázs described the subtlety of Nielsen’s sexual appeal:

She is never undressed, she does not show her thighs like Anita Berber…, and yet this dancing harlot could take lessons from Asta Nielsen. Her belly dancing is tame compared to Asta Nielsen fully dressed. … [Asta Nielsen’s] spiritualized eroticism is demonically dangerous, since it works at a distance through all of her clothes (162).

After spending a decade struggling to make her name in the Danish theater world, Nielsen suddenly became an international celebrity.

Asta Nielsen. Private Collection.

Nielsen was recruited to work in the German film industry, where she soon became one of the most successful and aggressively marketed film stars of the period. Danish journalist Adolf Langsted reported in 1916, “Jeg sad i Paris og saa Filmens Stjerne stige: med Undren opdagede jeg at den var—dansk. Den første Filmskuespillerinde til at opnaa Verdensry var Asta Nielsen” [Trans.: I sat in Paris and saw film’s star rise: with wonder I discovered that it was—Danish. The first film actress to attain world renown was Asta Nielsen] (11).  In an era when actors and actresses were rarely credited on-screen for their roles, Nielsen’s global fame and the commercial success of her films gave her the necessary leverage to demand an active role in the production of her own films. In the summer of 1911, Austrian film distributor Christoph Mülleneisen orchestrated an agreement among several German film production companies, including Paul Davidson’s Projektions-AG Union (PAGU) and Carl Schleussner’s Deutsche Bioscop, to establish a new monopoly distribution company, Internationale Film-Vertriebs-GmbH, based in Vienna and headed by Davidson, which would distribute thirty-two Asta-Nielsen films over the next four years. Historian Andreas Hansert documents that Nielsen agreed, in exchange for an annual salary of 80,000 German marks, 33.3% of the revenues generated by her films, full artistic freedom in choosing her screenplays, costumes, and supporting actors, and, perhaps most importantly, the right to be directed exclusively by her soon-to-be husband Gad (48).

Asta Nielsen. Courtesy of the Deutsches Kinemathek.

As a result of these favourable contractual terms, Nielsen was able to be intimately involved in the creation of both her films and her public persona, unlike many Hollywood stars whose image was dictated by the studios. Working closely with Gad on each year’s Asta Nielsen Series, a collection of eight to ten films that had been pre-sold to distributors around the globe, Nielsen exercised a degree of control over her work on an artistic, technical, and economic level that was extraordinary for a woman at the time. Heide Schlüpmann explains, “Under the sign of the Asta Nielsen series, Nielsen worked with a producer and director in a contractually secured constellation in which all of the freedom was hers” (2012, 47). Some of this freedom may have been due to her close, collaborative relationship with Gad, with whom she made the majority of her (and his) most commercially successful films over a four-year period. Although, as Stephan Michael Schroeder documents, Gad provided detailed scripts for his wife’s roles, Nielsen claimed primary credit for the films she made with Gad (194). Gad is credited as both director and screenwriter on most of their joint films, but Nielsen, in an interview with Danish film historian Marguerite Engberg, described his scripts as partially-completed canvases that left her considerable room for improvisation and dismissed his contribution as primarily concerned with “coming up with good roles for me” (8).

Asta Nielsen as Ivigtut in Das Eskimobaby (1918). Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

In her memoirs, Den tiende Muse [The Silent/Tenth Muse], which have not been translated into or published in English, Nielsen claimed to have had a hand in the pre- and post-production phases of her early films, from choosing the screenplays and making her own costumes to splicing the negatives and helping to market the final product, much like her character in Die Filmprimadonna (1913) (Nielsen 1945-46). During World War I, Nielsen parted ways with Gad and formed her own Berlin-based production company, Neutral-Film GmbH. The films Nielsen made with Neutral, including Das Eskimobaby/The Eskimo Baby (1918), and Die Börsenkönigin/ Queen of the Stock Market (1916) are clever and bold, but their circulation was limited by wartime conditions. Many were not released until 1918 and several of the original negatives were later destroyed in a warehouse fire in Berlin. After the war, in 1920, she launched another production company in Berlin, Art-Film GmbH, under whose auspices she made such ground-breaking films as Hamlet (1921), in which she plays a cross-dressing female Hamlet.

Publicity poster for Hamlet (1921). Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

The increasingly director-centric production conditions in Germany after 1918 meant that Nielsen could no longer exercise the same degree of influence over her films as before the war. As her highly publicized disagreement with Ernst Lubitsch over the making of Rausch/Intoxication (1919) reveals, she refused to accommodate directors’ insistence on their complete artistic control over the films they made. She continued making films in Berlin until 1932, including such critically-acclaimed Weimar street films as Die freudlose Gasse/ The Joyless Street (1925) and Dirnentragödie/A Tragedy of the Streets (1927), in both of which she played an aging prostitute, but she found herself increasingly excluded from the off-screen elements of filmmaking she had once handled with such finesse. She returned to Denmark in 1937, where she lived in quiet obscurity as “Fru Nielsen”—except for a sensational love match at the age of eighty-eight with an art dealer eighteen years her junior that made headlines across Germany and Denmark—until her death in Copenhagen in 1972.

Asta Nielsen, Die Filmprimadonna (1913). Courtesy of Filmarchiv Austria.

Bibliography

Allen, Julie. Icons of Danish Modernity: Georg Brandes & Asta Nielsen. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.

Balázs, Béla. Der Sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films. Vienna: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924.

Diaz, Pablo. Asta Nielsen. Eine Biographie unserer populären Künstlerin. Translated from Spanish. Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbild-Bühne, 1927.

Elsner, Poul. “Die Duse des Films.” Weltrundschau (1911): 517.

Engberg, Marguerite. Asta Nielsen. Copenhagen: Danish Film Institute, 1966.

Gramann, Karola and Heide Schlüpmann, eds. Nachtfalter. Asta Nielsen, ihre Filme. Vienna: Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, 2009.

Hansert, Andreas. Asta Nielsen und die Filmstadt Babelsberg, Das Engagement Carl Schleussners in der Deutschen Filmindustrie. Petersburg, Germany: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2007.

Howard, Tony. Women as Hamlet. Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Langsted, Adolf. Asta Nielsen. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1918.

Loiperdinger, Martin and Uli Jung, eds. Importing Asta Nielsen. The International Film Star in the Making 1910-1914. KINtop 2. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey, 2013.

Malmkjær, Poul. Asta. Mennesket, myten, og filmstjernen. Copenhagen: P. Haase & Son, 2000.

Nielsen, Asta. Den tiende Muse. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1945-1946.

Schlüpmann, Heide. “27 May 1911: Asta Nielsen Secures Unprecedented Artistic Control.” In A New History of German Cinema. Eds. Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. 44-50.

Schlüpmann, Heide, Eric de Kuyper, Karola Gramann, Sabine Nessel, and Michael Wedel, eds. Unmögliche Liebe. Asta Nielsen, ihr Kino. Vienna: Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, 2009.

Schroeder, Stephan Michael. “Und Urban Gad? Zur Frage der Autorschaft in den Filmen bis 1914.” In Unmögliche Liebe. Asta Nielsen, ihr Kino. Vienna: Verlag Filmarchiv Austria, 2009. 194-210.

Tind, Eva. Astas skygge. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2015.

Archival Paper Collections:

Asta Nielsen Collection. Danish Film Institute.

Importing Asta Nielsen Database [online database], Deutsches Filminstitut.

Citation

Allen, Julie. "Asta Nielsen." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-dw7e-x721>

Tazuko Sakane

by Xinyi Zhao

Tazuko Sakane was the first female director in Japan. By 1936, Sakane had taken a variety of positions at virtually all stages of film production, ranging from director and editor to script supervisor and assistant director. She remained the only female director in Japan until 1953, when the actress-turned-director Tanaka Kinuyo made her first film. Not only is Sakane’s life illustrative of the constricting roles enforced by Japanese society almost vengefully upon women, but her involvement at Manchuria Film Association further poses questions pivotal in theorizing the mutual implications of feminism, imperialism, and colonialism. That being said, Sakane has long been marginalized, if not erased, from the history of Japanese cinema.

Tazuko Sakane portrait. Courtesy of the Museum of Kyoto.

At the historical juncture when cinema started to entwine with nationalism in Japan in the early 1900s, Sakane was born in Kyoto, a city dubbed “Japan’s Hollywood.” Sakane’s father was a wealthy inventor and businessman with connections to the film industry. As a young child, Sakane developed her cinephilia through frequenting cinemas with her family. She went to Doshisha Women’s College to pursue a degree in English literature at a time when only one percent of Japanese women received higher education, yet her stepmother forced her to quit college in her second year (Ikegawa 2011, 7). At the age of twenty, Sakane’s parents arranged for her to marry a gynecologist. Four years later, her marriage ended with her divorcing her husband, who had been found disloyal (McDonald 2007, 129).

After her marriage broke up, Sakane decided to obtain a job instead of getting remarried, an unusual decision for an upper-class woman in those days. In 1929, Sakane’s father helped her join Nikkatsu Studio as Kenji Mizoguchi’s assistant. At the time, Japanese cinema had just entered a prolonged silent-to-sound transition (1929-1935), during which both silent and sound films were produced and exhibited (Kinoshita 2011, 4). Sakane’s first work was taking notes when the crew brainstormed the story for Mistress of a Foreigner (1930), a film with partial sound, also known as a “part-talkie.” She was also responsible for helping actors memorize lines, so that their lip movement would correspond to the content of the spoken dialogue. Whereas she remained unpaid for the first six months, Mizoguchi was quick to appreciate her potential, and kept her working as his assistant for Fujiwara Yoshie’s Hometown (1930), And Yet They Go On (1931), and The Man of the Moment (1932). On set, Sakane’s work entailed such tasks as climbing ladders and crouching behind set pieces, responsibilities that were highly inconvenient to perform in a kimono. As a result, she cut her hair short and started wearing tailored pants and suits, which not only allowed her mobility, but also helped her blend into the male-dominated working environment.

In 1932, Mizoguchi moved to Tokyo and joined Shinko Kinema, and Sakane followed; in those days, when the director transferred to another studio, it was very common for him to take his disciple along. She notably edited Mizoguchi’s The Water Magician (1933), which was also Sakane’s first film as an editor. Having assisted Mizoguchi on more than ten films as assistant director, screenwriter, and editor, Sakane started to plan her own directorial debut based on Jean Webster’s 1915 novel Daddy-Long-Legs and applied for a promotion to director. Virtually over night, rumors spread throughout the studio si her co-workers suspected that Sakane was having an affair with Mizoguchi in order to get the promotion (Ōnishi 1993, 49). For whatever reason, Sakane’s petition for promotion was eventually rejected by the studio executives.

Tazuko Sakane (middle) at Daiichi Eiga with Takehisa Shin (l) and Tōkichi Ishimoto (r), c. 1936. Courtesy of the Museum of Kyoto.

In 1936, Mizokuchi and Sakane transferred to Daiichi Eiga in Kyoto, where Sakane was eventually given an opportunity to direct, albeit without the freedom to choose the subject matter. The first film project that the studio assigned to her was New Year’s Finery (1936), a period drama adapted from a shinpa (early modern drama) that reflected upon the social obstacles of free love through the unlikely and finally soured romance between a geisha-to-be and a Buddhist candidate. For the sake of commercial promotion for the first film by Japan’s first female director, the studio published an article that focused on Sakane’s private life. Written in a mocking tone, it mentioned her divorce and even questioned if she was still a virgin (Ōnishi 62). The reception of the film was far from universal appeal. Japanese critics at the time–predominantly male–denounced her work as “simply imitating the deficiencies of Mizoguchi films” and short of what they called “female sensibilities” (Ikegawa 2011, 25). Sakane herself recalled her first film with regret in her seventies: “I really wished to make a film about female students…I was unlucky because it was far from the film that I truly wanted” (qtd. in Ikegawa 2011, 25). The negative reviews also tarnished Sakane’s reputation as a new director. Unable to get another project from the studio, she was demoted back to Mizoguchi’s assistant director and editor. Unsuccessful debut notwithstanding, the later two Mizoguchi films in which Sakane was involved as editor, namely Osaka Elegy (1936) and Sisters of the Gion (1936), both won the Kinema Junpo Best Ten Films of the Year. Upon Daiichi Eiga’s collapse in 1937, Sakane moved to Shinko Kinema with Mizoguchi, where she edited The Straits of Love and Hate (1937).

Tazuko Sakane (r) with unidentified woman. Courtesy of the Museum of Kyoto.

In July 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, leading to a tightened censorship enforced by the state. Three years later, Sakane left Mizoguchi and joined Tokyo Riken Film Company, where she was assigned to make a documentary on the Ainu of northern Japan, an indigenous ethnic minority group. She spent eight months in Hokkaido documenting Ainu customs, daily habits, festival celebrations, and Ainu women in particular (Ikegawa and Ward 2005, 261). However, her film Fellow Citizens in North (1941) was initially denied release, as the studio had envisioned a film that promulgated the “one nation, one people” ideology that asserted Japan as ethnically homogeneous, not one that mourned the loss of native cultures (Ikegawa 2011, 35-6). Sakane had to return to Hokkaido for another month of shooting and adding footage, including of a young Ainu soldier in order to attune her film for war propaganda. The reediting, however, resulted in narrative inconsistencies that put her work under scathing criticism later on.

Tazuko Sakane with unidentified woman. Courtesy of the Museum of Kyoto.

In February 1942, aware of the multifarious constraints that confronted her as a woman filmmaker in wartime Japan, Sakane decided to relocate to the Manchuria Film Association (Man’ei), a “national policy company” in the Japanese “puppet state” Manchukuo (today’s Northeastern China). Sakane joined the education section, which was responsible for producing documentaries, cultural films, and educational shorts to educate and enlighten the Manchukuo populace (Hori 2005, 90). Contrary to Man’ei features that targeted both male and female audiences, their educational films barely addressed female audiences until Sakane’s arrival. “Although I joined Man’ei as a female editor in the beginning, given the necessity to make films for women in the [Great East Asia] Co-Prosperity Sphere, and that only women can make films for themselves, I was promoted again to director,” said Sakane in a 1942 interview. “At this point my work mainly targets Chinese women, but in the future I would love to expand my audience to Japanese women in Manchuria, and introduce their life to other ethnic groups in the [Great East Asia] Co-Prosperity Sphere” (qtd. in Ikegawa 2011, 53).

During her four years at Man’ei, Sakane made fourteen films for both Japanese and Chinese viewers, including Children’s Manchuria (1942), Working Women (1942), and Healthy Little Citizens (1942). Amongst these titles, only the documentary film Brides of the Frontier (1943) is known to be extant. The film sought to encourage young Japanese women to settle down in Manchuria as farmers’ wives, against the background of a severe labor shortage in Manchuria. Featuring Japanese men and women performing household activities side by side in the idyllic countryside, the film carved out a utopia seemingly intact from war mobilization and a land of gender equality that was unimaginable in Japan. Apart from Brides of the Frontier, Sakane made thirteen educational shorts that provided essential knowledge of everyday living particularly for women, such as vegetable preservation, indoor gardening, and heater usage. Sakane herself appeared in her educational film Gardening in Spring (1944).

An excerpt from Tazuko Sakane’s handwritten CV. Courtesy of the Museum of Kyoto.

In August 1945, Japan’s defeat in the Asian Pacific War coincided with Man’ei’s collapse, simultaneously terminating Sakane’s two on-going film projects. The Soviet Red Army quickly took control of Man’ei, followed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), turning the site into Northeast Film Studio, also known as “the cradle of new China’s cinema” (Zhang 2012, 165). Alongside other Japanese staff who opted to stay in China, Sakane joined the newly founded Chinese studio. She trained Chinese film workers, most of whom had no filmmaking experience, and cooperated with them in making propaganda films for CCP’s newborn regime. In September 1945, Sakane was invited by the Red Army to make a documentary on Sino-Soviet friendship, yet no record of its availability has been found. “I don’t have any political leaning, nor am I affiliated to any party,” Sakane wrote in her diary in 1945. “I am only a film worker” (qtd. in Ōnishi 172).

Sakane went back to her homeland in October 1946, which ironically marked the very end of her directorial career on the grounds that she had to have a college degree to be a director in post-war Japan. Sakane was forced, at age forty-two, to return to Mizoguchi as his assistant–the only position available to her–and help him on a number of critically acclaimed films, including The Love of Actress Sumako (1947), Women of the Night (1948), and My Love Has Burned (1949), to name but a few. In 1962, Shochiku cut down the retirement age from sixty to fifty-five, and the fifty-seven-year old Sakane retired from the studio, ending a career that spanned thirty-three years. After retirement, she continued to work as a freelance scriptwriter for the Daiei Company until her death from gastric cancer in 1971 at the age of seventy.

For all the discussions on Sakane, one striking aspect of her persona has largely been ignored. A decent number of photographs depict a woman who favored a look and style that connote lesbian identity. Moreover, she was quite open about her interest in lesbian subculture worldwide, even acknowledging Dorothy Arzner and Leontine Sagan’s radical German lesbian film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) as major inspirations, according to Ikegawa Reiko’s 2012 presentation at the Makino Symposium at Columbia University. As I have argued elsewhere, assuming a masculine persona to resist and readdress the sexist and constricting roles enforced by Japanese society, Sakane embodied a queerness so threatening to male superiority. The unsettling erasure of Sakane seems to reflect on what might be retrospectively regarded as a “homophobia” inscribed in our history writing that unwittingly partakes in the patriarchal negation of her embodied queerness (Zhao 2017, 10-11). Did an (unspoken) lesbianism inform her cinematic representations of women, a group so central to her oeuvre? Did her female and feminist perspective possibly exert an influence on Mizoguchi, who was often labeled a “feminist” or “woman’s director” (Morimoto 1994, 15)? To be sure, Sakane did not leave behind any personal belongings that substantiate her lesbian identity. Still, to address these issues revolving around her sexuality may in some way open up new horizons in alternative feminist historiographies.

See also: Tanaka Kinuyo

Bibliography

Hori, Hikari. “Migration and Transgression: Female Pioneers of Documentary Filmmaking in Japan.” Asian Cinema vol. 16, no. 1 (2005): 89-97.

Ikegawa, Reiko. Sakane Tazuko, Director of the Empire: Brides of the Frontier, 1943Man’ei/Teikoku no Eiga Kantoku Sakane Tazuko: Kaitaku no hanayome,1943-nen, Man'ei. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2011.

Ikegawa, Reiko and Julian Ward. “Japanese Women Filmmakers in World War II: A Study of Sakane Tazuko, Suzuki Noriko and Atsugi Taka.” In Japanese Women Emerging from Subservience, 1868-1945. Eds. Gordon Daniels and Hiroko Tomida. Folkestone, UK: Global Oriental, 2005. 258-277.

Kinoshita, Chika. “The Benshi Track: Mizoguchi Kenji’s ‘The Downfall of Osen’ and the Sound Transition.” Cinema Journal vol. 50, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 1-25.

McDonald, Keiko. “Daring To Be First: The Japanese Woman Director Tazuko Sakane (1904-1971).” Asian Cinema vol. 18, no. 2 (2007): 128-46.

Morimoto, Maries Thorsten. “The ‘Peace Dividend’ in Japanese Cinema.” In Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema. Ed. Wimal Dissanayake. Indiana University Press, 1994. 11-29.

Ōnishi, Etsuko. The Woman Who Loved Mizoguchi Kenji: Life of the First Female Director Sakane Tazuko/Mizoguchi Kenji o aishita onna: jōryū eiga kantoku dai ichi-gō, Sakane Tazuko no shōgai. Tokyo: San’ichi Shobō, 1993.

Zhang, Yingjin. A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Zhao, Xinyi. “So Queer Yet So Straight: Japan’s First Female Director(s).” Conference paper, Women and the Silent Screen IX, Shanghai, June 16-18, 2017.

Archival Paper Collections

Tazuko Sakane files (includes production notes, memos, photos, scripts, and correspondence). The Museum of Kyoto.

Citation

Zhao, Xinyi. "Tazuko Sakane." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hvzm-a486>

Fan Xuepeng

by Panpan Yang

Fan Xuepeng was a luminous Chinese film star through the silent era and into the sound era. She was perhaps most famous for her performance as knightly female characters in martial arts films from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. Later she became a regular on Chinese screens, often portraying mothers and was given the nickname “the popular mother.” Far less known, however, was her contribution to the film industry through setting up Qianghua Film Company and working as a producer, special effects designer, and recording engineer in different periods of her life. To explore her film career and to highlight how her work in the industry went beyond just acting, this profile uses Chinese newspapers and magazines from the 1930s and Fan’s own memoirs as the main references.

Special issue of Youlian Magazine on Heroic Son and Daughter (1927), starring Fan Xuepeng.

Fan was born Yao Xiongfei in 1908 in Jiangsu, to a once-noble family in decline. Her film career started at Youlian Film Company where she was an actress under a short-term contract and a hardworking staff. Her most successful role during this period was perhaps Thirteenth Sister in Heroic Son and Daughter/兒女英雄 (1927), a no longer extant martial arts film that enjoyed a half-a-month run in 1927, saved Youlian Film Company from bankruptcy, and spawned four more sequels. The only extant film starring Fan from this period is Red Heroine/紅俠 (1929). It fell into the category of martial arts-magic spirit film—a highly popular yet short-lived genre melding martial art spectacles with fantastic narratives in an often eerie setting. The exaggeration of martial arts skills, the fascination with the experience of flying, the use of experimental special effects, and the renewed perception and self-perception of the female body in association with the female knight-errant subgenre all found visibility in Red Heroine. As Fan recalled, during the production of Red Heroine, she came up with the idea of dyeing her character with red ink to make her authentically “red” (1956, 66). Although she was never credited as a special effects designer, this visual trick triggered great interest among Nanyang audiences and therefore contributed to the film’s commercial success. According to Fan, Mingxing Film Company even borrowed this idea to portray Red Maiden in The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple/火燒紅蓮寺, a legendary martial arts-magic spirit film series produced between 1928 and 1931 (1956, 66). “Special effects designer” as a category in motion picture credits most likely did not exist in China at that time. In addition to the historiographical problem of lost films, that women could be involved in various aspects of film production without earning a credit (and that these roles might not be clearly defined) also plagues studies of women film pioneers in Chinese silent cinema and may have contributed to an underestimation of Fan behind-the-scenes film work.

Movie Monthly/電影月報 advertisement for Red Heroine (1929).

The proliferating martial arts-magic spirit genre came to an abrupt halt in 1931 when the National Film Censorship Committee officially banned many films of this genre for their use of superstitious motifs (Zhang 2005, 235). This ban put many small studios that had produced a disproportionate number of martial arts-magic spirit films on the verge of bankruptcy (Xiao 1999, 192). In 1932, Fan was involved in a case of what I would like to call “twin films”/“雙胞案”: Mingxing Film Company and Dahua Film Studio were both shooting Romance of Laughers and Tears/啼笑因緣. As a result, the Dahua version, starring Fan, had to be turned into a stage production. This interesting case of twin films foregrounded the permeability between film and theater as a prevalent feature in the culture and art practices in China at that time. After working as a stage actress in Nanjing, Tianjin, and other major cities for about one year, Fan returned to Shanghai in the winter of 1933. Together with Wen Yimin and Yao Shiquan, Fan established Qianghua Film Company in Xujiahui District, exploring her dual career as actress and producer.

Fan Xuepeng on the cover of Movie Weekly/影戲生 活 , 1931.

“Qianghua,” literally meaning “Strong China,” revealed Fan’s ambition of producing progressive films. Qianghua Film Company also kept a close relationship with Lianhua Film Company, where the so-called left-wing influence was believed to be palpable. At a time when the sound film industry in China was still in its infancy, Qianghua Film Company produced silent pictures, including As They Awake/覺悟 (1933), Our Road to Life/我們的生路 (1933), and Iron Chain/鐵鏈 (1933). As They Awake depicted Meigu, betrayed by her husband, becoming a fallen woman at a turbulent time. On June 1, 1933, an article in Shenbao praised this film for its capacity to resonate with the audience: “It earned thousands of women’s tears!” (30). What is more, it received a special award from the National Film Censorship Committee for its power to awaken the masses and for its nuanced description of inner turmoil, according to a June 14 article in Shenbao (1933, 28). The premiere of Our Road to Life also saw the emergence of numerous film reviews. A July 7, 1933 article in Shenbao described it as a film comparable to Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life (1931), a Soviet film shown in Shanghai in 1932 (27). Indeed, Our Road to Life made good use of the so-called Soviet editing style, especially contrasting montage and its social and political implications. According to a negative review in Shenbao on July 8, 1933, however, this film used a large number of inter-titles, so it was far from cinematic (25). The use of contrasting montage continued in Iron Chain. For example, a shot of many nannies milking their breasts in order to feed a dog in a rich family was followed by an image of a poor crying baby without milk. As Fan recalled, they tried to sell Iron Chain to film entrepreneur Wu Bangfan, who believed that for censorship reasons this film was too “left” to release (1956, 66). Consequently, Qianghua Film Company closed down and Fan soon joined Tianyi Film Company. The short yet fascinating history of Qianghua Film Company, to a certain extent, can be read as “the left turn” of Fan, who had built her career making commercial films in the 1920s. It challenges the understanding of the left-wing cinema as a radical movement and calls for more nuanced studies of the tension-ridden historical period. It also offers an interesting case of censorship studies and testifies that censors could be understood as agents within the field of film production, contributing to the making of film texts often through negotiations and power exchanges.

Fan Xuepeng in Drama and Film/戲劇與電影 in 1934.

During her time at Tianyi Film Company, Fan worked as a recording engineer in Hong Kong for about one year. A 1935 article in Film News reported that Fan’s relocation signaled the company’s devotion to its offshoot in Hong Kong (4). A 1936 article in Plasmatic Girls offered a different view: it was because most of Fan’s pictures in Shanghai were losing money that the “useless” actress, who could not speak Cantonese, was sent to Hong Kong (14). However, Fan, the article continued, soon found “her new road to life” by quickly learning the sound recording techniques. The contradiction highlighted the influence of the arrival of the sound era upon Fan’s career trajectory. In the PRC era, Fan participated in the organizational activities of the Shanghai Drama and Film Association and appeared in dozens of films and stage productions.

Bibliography

Advertisement. Movie Monthly/電影月報 no. 11-12 (1929): 22.

Bao, Weihong. Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

“Beijing Big Theater: As They Awake.” Shenbao (1 June 1933): 30.

“Beijing Big Theater: Our Road to Life.” Shenbao (7 July 1933): 27.

“Chen Yumei and Fan Xuepeng’s New Road to Life.” Plasmatic Girls/彈性女孩 vol. 1, no. 8 (1936): 14.

Drama and Film/戲劇與電影 vol. 1, no. 2 (1934): 4.

Fan, Xuepeng. “The Experience of Film Actress”/“一個電影演員的經歷.” People’s Daily/人民日報 (6 August 1960): 8.

------. “Memories of My Screen Life”/“我的銀幕生活的回憶.”  China Films/中國電影. Vol. 2 (1956): 64-67.

“Fan Xuepeng is Going to Hong Kong.” Film News/電影新聞 vol. 1, no. 9 (1935): 4.

Movie Weekly/影戲生活 vol. 1, no. 45 (1931): n.p. [cover page]

“A Review of Our Road to Life.” Shenbao (8 July 1933): 25.

“Southeast Big Theater: As They Awake.” Shenbao (14 June 1933): 28.

Teo, Stephen. Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Xiao, Zhiwei. “Constructing a New National Culture: Film Censorship and the Issues of Cantonese Dialect, Superstition, and Sex in the Nanjing Decade.” In Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Ed. Yingjin Zhang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 183-199.

Youlian Magazine/友聯特刊 no. 3, Special issue on Heroic Son and Daughter (1927): n.p. [cover page]

Zhang, Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

------.“Bodies in the Air: The Magic of Science and the Fate of the Early ‘Martial Arts’ Film in China.” Post ScriptEssays in Film and the Humanities vol. 20, no. 2-3 (Winter 2000): 43-60.

Archival Paper Collections

Digitized newspapers, including the ones used to illustrate this profile, can be accessed online in the Chinese Periodicals Database for the Republican Period 1911-1949 (民国时期期刊全文数据库). [Note: database may require a login/university subscription].

Citation

Yang, Panpan. "Fan Xuepeng." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6ny0-av44>

Isabel Acuña

by Nadi Tofighian

Isabel Acuña met José Nepomuceno, a Filipino film pioneer, while he was shooting his third film, Un Capello Marchito/The Wilted Rosebud (1920), in Manila in 1920. She was sixteen years old, and her younger sister, Luisa Acuña, was starring in the film. Nepomuceno founded Malayan Movies together with his brother, Jesús, in Manila in 1917, after previously having run a successful photography studio there. Two years later they made the earliest known fiction film directed by a Filipino, Dalagang Bukid/Country Maiden (1919) (Tofighian 2008, 78).

Acuña and Nepomuceno married on June 6, 1920 at the Quiapo Church in Manila, a few months after their first meeting. From that time forward, Acuña was involved in the filmmaking process of Malayan Movies. Initially, she primarily worked on scouting talent, costume design, and make-up. She was instrumental in making costume design and make-up an important part of the mise-en-scene of the film, and she is reported to have spent hours on the streets, in bazaars, and in movie houses researching and getting ideas about set designs and costumes (Quirino 1983, 23). Acuña insisted on using simple words in the dialogue and intertitles in order for everyone to understand, and functioned as an informal censor at Malayan Movies as she required no dirty language or inappropriate scenes. As a casting director, she was particularly adept at recruiting young actresses, including convincing parents to permit their daughters to be on the screen as many still looked down on cinema as an art form (Kabristante 1981, n.p.; Quirino 5, 22).

Isabel Acuña and José Nepomuceno, year unknown. Private Collection. 

None of the around eighty films, including thirty-eight silent films, Nepomuceno made are intact, as far as we currently know, which makes the research harder (Tofighian 77-78). Current research has hitherto not considered Acuña as a film pioneer, but rather as a helper and assistant, and in that way this career profile diverges from current historiographical accounts. Most Filipino film historians have omitted the role and impact of Acuña on early Filipino cinema. She is omitted from Lena Strait Paneja’s 1998 analysis of the roles and images of women in early Filipino cinema. The film historian Nick Deocampo describes Acuña’s role in the following way: “The labor to produce film was divided between the Nepomuceno brothers and even Jose’s wife, Isabel Acuña of Iloilo. […] Jose’s wife was the company’s treasurer, casting directress, and hair and make-up supervisor” [my emphasis] (2003, 257).

In my archival research, I have found two articles in Filipino newspapers, both in the weekly paper Graphic, where Isabel Acuña Nepomuceno is mentioned. First, a 1928 article on stars in Philippine cinema describes how she helped fifteen-year-old Eva Lyn land a role in the local success La Mujer Filipina/The Filipino Woman (1927): “Miss Lyn is the type the movie director was looking for, but the fact that her hair is bobbed almost spelled disaster to her movie career. ‘I almost lost out,’ to use her very words. But Mrs. Nepomuceno came to her rescue by suggesting that she wear a wig, and she landed the job” (San Martin 1928, 3). The second article is a 1931 biographical portrait of Nepomuceno and his filmmaking. The article is telling in the limited role it ascribes to Acuña, where she is described as wife, sister, and mother, without any mention of her contributions to the films: “The pioneer film producer, Nepomuceno, married the former Miss Isabel Acuña, sister of Consuelo (Monina) Acuna, Miss Philippines, 1930, on June 6, 1920. The Nepomucenos have seven children” (1931, 16). The couple later had an eighth child. All their children appeared in their films, and their son Angelito became a popular child actor. Another son, Luis, became a famous film director and producer, and made Dahil Sa Isang Bulaklak/Because of a Flower (1967), Igorota (1968), The Pacific Connection (1974), among others (Quirino 71).

Acuña’s range of responsibilities in the studio and during the filmmaking process increased over time. In 1931, Malayan Movies was dissolved, and in its place Malayan Pictures Corporation was formed. In the 1932-33 edition of the Rosenstock’s Manila City Directory, Malayan Pictures Corporation is described as “Moving Pictures Producer–Importer & Exporter–Pictures Show–Film Exchange–Cine Advertising–Portraits & Views–Photographic Supplies,” a much wider array of services compared to Malayan Movies. Isabel de Nepomuceno is listed as the vice president of the new company (1932, n.p.). As a comparison, she was never listed as having a special role for Malayan Movies throughout the 1920s. Further research can shed additional light on what exactly her responsibilities and tasks were as the vice president of Malayan Pictures Corporation.

Journalist and film critic Joe Quirino writes about Acuña’s long workdays, how she was always on set, and how she “did most of the preparatory work before any actual shooting started” (23). In his book, he twice describes her as “the right hand and left hand” of her husband (22, 71). She also developed screen ideas and commissioned scripts, such as Punit na Bandila/Torn Flag (1939), written by Dr. Fausto Galauran.

In a 1981 interview, Isabel confirms her role in the film production process alongside her husband: “He had always wanted me to work side by side with him in our film projects. So he taught me the rudiments of casting, scriptwriting, production design and even art direction. That’s why in the States I was considered the first casting director in the Philippines. The film projects we undertook were really husband-wife venture, or call it team” [sic] (Kabristante n.p.).

These illustrations confirm two clear tendencies. First, Acuña was an early film pioneer in the Philippines and very involved in the production process of Nepomuceno’s films. Second, she is still primarily talked about as being Nepomuceno’s wife and much of her work has consequently not been noticed nor credited. This piece is a starting point to rectify the latter, whereas future research can shed more light on her involvement and specific role in the films of Nepomuceno and the productions of Malayan Pictures Corporation.

Bibliography

Deocampo, Nick. Cine: Spanish Influences on Early Cinema in the Philippines. Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 2003.

Kabristante, George Vail. “Jose Nepomuceno: The Father of R.P. Movies.” Jingle Extra Hot Movie Entertainment Magazine (4 May 1981): n.p.

Quirino, Joe. Don José and the Early Philippine Cinema. Quezon City: Phoenix Publishing House Inc., 1983.

Rosenstock’s Manila City Directory 1932-1933. Manila: Philippine Education Co., 1932.

San Martin, M. “Stars that Shine in Philippine Filmdom.” Graphic (20 October 1928): 2-3, 42-43.

Strait Paneja, Lena. Roles and Images of Woman in the Early Years of Philippine Cinema 1912–1941. PhD Dissertation, University of the Philippines Diliman, 1998.

Tofighian, Nadi. “José Nepomuceno and the Creation of a Filipino National Consciousness.” Film History 20.1 (2008): 77-94.

“Who is Who in the Philippines: A Biographical Sketch of Jose Nepomuceno, Pioneer Filipino Film Producer.” Graphic (2 September 1931): 16.

Citation

Tofighian, Nadi. "Isabel Acuña." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-dvw9-1k76>

Greta Håkansson

by Christopher Natzén

“We can also mention that Miss Håkansson, who has been with the union since 1921, is a particularly devoted member…[A]t several occasions she has showed an interest for union policies that unfortunately many of her male colleagues lack…Miss Håkansson is…as good a conductor as she is a union member, and therefore we have also found it well motivated to feature her picture and to bestow her with an honorable mention in our publication” (“Greta Håkansson” 336-337). In this 1928 quotation from Musikern/The Musician, the periodical for the Swedish Musicians’ Union, Greta Håkansson is highlighted as an example to follow.

Greta Håkansson in Musikern in 1928.

We know that many female musicians played in theaters and some, like Håkansson, also performed the role of conductor. But despite this, the male cinema musicians and conductors in Sweden, with Rudolf Sahlberg and Otto Trobäck at the forefront, are the ones highlighted in historiographies. Women’s vital involvement in cinema music for the film medium since the early days has so far been very poorly investigated and documented. There are therefore still significant gaps in our knowledge about Håkansson’s life and work, and what can be presented here are merely a few biographical traces.

According to the brief 1928 biographical sketch in Musikern, Håkansson studied piano with Kerstin Runbäck and Astrid Berwald and music theory with Oskar Blom in Stockholm. She was also an assistant teacher at Richard Andersson’s music school. During the 1928­-1929 season, she became conductor of the 300-seat motion picture theater Påfågeln/The Peacock at St. Eriksgatan 84 in Stockholm. Besides Håkansson, who had the overall musical responsibility, on piano, the ensemble included a violinist, a cellist, and an oboe player, all positions contracted by men (336).

Håkansson’s time at Påfågeln was short-lived, however, as the ensemble was dissolved in the early 1930s when the theater installed sound film equipment. How and where Håkansson then continued her musical or cinematic career is still unknown. According to Dagens Nyheter, she seems to have continued in the film world, because in 1943 she appears as one of the founders of the all-female association Föreningen Filmia, which was formed in order to create a forum for women “working in the film industry as office workers or clerks, and wives of male employees and female cinema owners and cinema owners’ wives” (1943, 6). The idea was to facilitate contact between the film companies’ female employees. Håkansson served as treasurer in the association’s first board, and, as employment, she indicated the production company Sandrew-Bauman Film.

Aftonbladet ad for Ned med vapnen (1914), with music by Greta Håkansson.

Finding information on Håkansson’s early career is just as difficult. The only trace that has so far been found is an advertisement for the Reform cinema at Hornsgatan 59 in Stockholm from December 1, 1915 in Aftonbladet. Håkansson is listed as one of two female musicians (the name of her female colleague was Emmy Lily). The duo performed the music for the Danish film Ned med vapnen/Ned med vaabnene/Down with the Weapons (1914) and, according to the ad, the music was both “excellent, well chosen, and famous” (2).

The Musikern article quoted above mentions Håkansson’s musical skills, but it was mainly as a loyal union member that she was honored with a biographical article. Normally only male musicians were featured in the periodical’s biographical tributes. If women appeared in such articles, they were almost exclusively sopranos from the opera stage. Even the periodical’s editor, Gustaf Gille, seems to have considered the need to justify the biographical text.

Bibliography

Advertisement. Aftonbladet (1 December 1915): 2.

“Föreningen Filmia.” Dagens Nyheter (10 April 1943): 6.

“Greta Håkansson.” Musikern (December 1928): 336-337.

Citation

Natzén, Christopher. "Greta Håkansson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-skme-cb55>

Mary O’Connor

by Liz Clarke

Mary O’Connor worked at numerous companies, in positions such as a manager of the scenario department for Lasky studios, as an assistant to producers, and as a scenario writer. O’Connor’s work with the Screen Writers Guild and its social club, The Writers, is perhaps the part of her career that offers the most fruitful avenue for future research. O’Connor will never be remembered for particular films or even as a particularly powerful member of any one company. However, she was a permanent fixture of the Screen Writers Guild during the 1920s and 1930s and, as such, she offers a lens through which further scholarship can understand how women’s roles in early guilds and unions were central to the development of Hollywood industries.

Mary O’Connor, 1910. Private Collection.

The earliest record of O’Connor’s work in Los Angeles is a 1914 article in Moving Picture World, though this source states that she had been working as an “editor, reader, and publicity manager” at Vitagraph prior to moving to a role as scenario editor at Ursona (Irvine 660). Between 1914 and 1917, O’Connor worked for D.W. Griffith and was a scenario editor for Majestic-Reliance and Fine Arts. A “Plays and Players” column in Photoplay states that by 1917 she was working as the assistant to Frank E. Woods at Lasky’s studio (1917, 110). In the October 12, 1918 issue of Motion Picture News, an announcement stated that O’Connor was promoted from Woods’ assistant to the head of scenarios and film editing (2381).

According to Moving Picture World, O’Connor resigned from Famous-Players Lasky as the scenario and film editor in December of 1920 and moved to the Paramount scenario department in London to focus on writing (1920, 862). The only two listed film scenarios by O’Connor are The Sins of Rosanne (1920) and Dangerous Lies (1921). One curious story about O’Connor’s career comes first from a family member who was told that if a writer was sent to Europe from Hollywood, it was a way to “put them out to pasture” (Thompson 2015, n.p.). An article on May 14, 1921 in Moving Picture World states that O’Connor was working under Paul Powell to adapt a story to scenario at the London branch of Paramount (190). Yet, by August of 1921, Moving Picture World released a brief notice about the Americanization of the London branch of Paramount (692). The entire organization of the London filmmaking unit was rearranged to showcase American stars and the American style of filmmaking. At this time, O’Connor was sent back to the United States where she returned to Los Angeles and worked in scenarios for some time longer. It is conjecture to say that something happened in the two years that O’Connor moved between Los Angeles, New York, and London, however, coupled with her family’s anecdote, it may indicate an impetus for O’Connor’s involvement in the early Screen Writers Guild and other similar organizations.

Around the time of her return to the United States, her name appears more often in the trade press in relation to the Screen Writers Guild and its social club, The Writers, rather than in relation to her work within the studios. This is also evident in O’Connor’s personal archive, which is available at the Writers Guild Foundation library in Los Angeles. Although she was involved in other organizations, The Writers is the one with which she was most credited. In 1923, an article in Motion Picture News also stated her involvement as treasurer of the Catholic Motion Pictures Actors Guild (1640). However, she is also credited with a number of roles both in The Writers and the Screen Writers Guild: in 1921, O’Connor was on the Floor Committee for The Writers’ party held at the Ambassador Hotel (Tidden 1921, 192) and, according to Motion Picture News, in March 1923, she was listed on the Executive Board of the Guild (1148). Additionally, in 1926 the Film Daily Year Book listed her as the Vice President of the Screen Writers Guild (657). In 1931, it listed her as a member of the Board of Directors for The Writers (589). O’Connor’s work with The Writers lasted throughout the early half of the 1930s. She was last noted as the Financial Secretary of the L.A. Writers Club in 1936 in an issue of Variety (4).

There are a handful of things to remark on in this career trajectory. The last time that O’Connor is mentioned in the trade press in relation to film production is in The Film Daily in 1925. This brief mention states that she was “en route to New York to head Lasky’s story department” (1). While the height of her production career seemed to be between 1918 (after her promotion from assistant to Woods to the scenario and film editor) and 1921 with her return from the Paramount London office, O’Connor was in fact incredibly active in committee work related to the early Screen Writers Guild. The involvement of women in the early Guild is harder to trace, particularly in the blurry distinction between the Screen Writers Guild and The Writers. In O’Connor’s collection, the lease for the clubhouse (which served both the early Guild and the social club) is available. In addition to this, O’Connor kept numerous playbills from the parties hosted by The Writers. Her collection also includes a ledger that lists all of the stockholders in the Las Palmas and Sunset Corp., which was the name used for the Screen Writers Guild’s business transactions. O’Connor was listed as the top stockholder, with 249 shares, while Charlie Chaplin had 100, Donald Crisp had 212, June Mathis had 30, Frances Marion had 20, and numerous other stars and writers had a handful each. This collection offers many avenues for further research on the Guild’s involvement in social events in 1920s Hollywood, as well as women’s involvement in the development of early guilds.

Bibliography

Film Daily Year Book of Motion Pictures 1926.  New York: Film Daily, 1926.

Film Daily Year Book of Motion Pictures 1931. New York: Film Daily, 1931.

Irvine, Clark. “Doings at Los Angeles.” Moving Picture World (2 May 1914): 660.

“L.A Writers Club’s New Officers Slate.” Variety (12 February 1936): 4.

“Mary O’Connor Eastbound.” The Film Daily (27 March 1925): 1.

“Mary O’Connor Going to London for Paramount.” Moving Picture World (18 December 1920): 862.

“Meighan Heads Catholic Picture Actor’s Guild.” Motion Picture News (6 October 1923): 1640.

Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual (1918). New York: Motion Picture News Inc., 1918.

“Pictures and People.” Motion Picture News (10 March 1923): 1148.

“Plays and Players.” Photoplay (December 1917): 110.

“Powell Working on Oppenheim Story.” Moving Picture World (14 May 1921): 190.

“Sweeping Reorganization of Paramount London Producing Forces Announced.” Moving Picture World (13 August 1921): 692.

Thompson, Kelvin. Personal Interview. May 26, 2015.

Tidden, Fritz. “Keep In Personal Touch.” Motion Picture World (12 November 1921): 192.

“West Coast Activity, Lasky Says.” Motion Picture News (12 October 1918): 2381.

Archival Paper Collection:

Mary H. O’Connor Collection. The Writers Guild Foundation.

Citation

Clarke, Liz. "Mary O’Connor." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-a23t-xs03>

Mary Lawton Metcalfe

by Patrick Ellis

Mary Lawton Metcalfe began writing for The Moving Picture News, a New York City-based trade journal, in 1911. This was, according to available materials, her first foray into film writing, although she had served as an advice columnist in a regional publication—“the Dorothy Dix of the Staten Island World” (MacDonald 1911, 7). At first glance, Metcalfe’s essays appear to be atypically strident advocacy pieces for the moral reform of cinema, and for the use of moving pictures in education: “This is a bomb I am going to throw right into educational circles,” she threatened—the bomb of moving pictures (“A Practical Plan” 6). In a May 1912 article, she proposed that every university, public library, Sunday school, and church have a motion picture projector, and this at a time when such proposals were unorthodox (28). Reading her essays and non-film-related writing more closely, it becomes clear that Metcalfe’s advocacy was premised upon an interlocking, sui generis theory of film. Cumulatively, she called for an entirely new, curative cinema, one that would encourage moviegoers to develop the right thoughts by which they could be physically improved: she called for a cinema that doubled as a medicine.

Mary Lawton Metcalfe in The Moving Picture News, Oct. 1911.  

There were many influences that helped Metcalfe come to this provocative proposal. She was, to begin with, involved in the who’s-who of society life in Staten Island and New York City, where she was known as an education reformer and suffragette. Her interest in education meant that she was receptive to the pedagogical possibilities of cinema; her commitment to the vote meant that she was already outspoken in public on contested matters. By far the greatest influence on her theory of film, however, was New Thought, a metaphysical Christianity then at its peak (Satter 2001, 225). Like Christian Science, New Thought believed in the “mind-cure,” the idea that the mind had the power to impact the body toward sickness or (especially) health. To this end, New Thoughtists favored mesmerism, magnetic cures, and faith healing, among other disputed treatments. Metcalfe’s devotion to New Thought was so great, she often wrote under the nom de plume “Electra Sparks,” evidencing her belief in the healing power of “positive electricity,” as noted in the Staten Island World in September 1910 (2).

Alongside Metcalfe’s New Thought assumption that exposure to morally corrupt film could warp the viewer and produce illness and disease, was the idea that exposure to “virtuous” cinema could produce positive physical change. This was true for adults freely choosing to visit the film theater, but Metcalfe’s special concern was for the unborn, brought there without choice. In an article titled “First Impressions of Living Pictures,” she argued that the embryonic child was especially susceptible, receiving filmic emotions through the pregnant mother-to-be at a vulnerable stage (1911, 15). This theory of film, although unusual, was not fringe per se at the time of writing; indeed, it is surprisingly consonant with much of the work of Hugo Münsterberg, the Harvard psychologist whose film theories in his book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916) have undergone a scholarly renaissance. Münsterberg likewise allowed that moving pictures may physiologically “mark” the viewer (128). Indeed, Münsterberg was a well-known and highly positioned sympathizer of mental healing who took seriously the mind-cure and aimed to make it palatable to scientists. New Thought journals embraced his work as well (Anderson 1911, 147), and it is not unlikely that Metcalfe was aware of Münsterberg, or vice-versa.

“Moving Pictures Aid in Education.” The Moving Picture News, 1912, by Mary Lawton Metcalfe. 

Although essays are her abiding achievement, Metcalfe did not limit her advocacy to this form. She delivered lectures on cinema, including talks on “The Psychology of the Moving Picture” and “The Moving Picture to the Good”; she began three separate screening series of educational films for children on Staten Island in 1911 and 1912, where she would lecture in between screenings. According to her article “Snapshots: Women’s Views of Vital Interest to Moving Picture Trade” in The Moving Picture News, these were ultimately broken up by the police (1913, 23). Additionally, in a December 1911 article, she wrote an outline for a moving picture, which remained unmade, called The Captain’s Treasure, tellingly concerned with neonatal culturing and studded with New Thought imagery (17).

Beyond 1913, there is little record of Metcalfe’s activities. Apart from writing film synopses in the 1920s—for Talking Picture Magazine among others—she apparently had nothing more to do with cinema, although she maintained her New Thought writings in, for instance, an article for the Washington Times in 1917. This same year, she moved to Florida, where she died in 1949.

Bibliography

Anderson, John Benjamin. New Thought, Its Light and Shadows: An Appreciation and a Criticism. Boston: Sherman, French & Co, 1911.

“Clubwomen Capture Dongan Hills Fair.” Staten Island World (17 September 1910): 2.

Ellis, Patrick. “A Cinema for the Unborn: Moving Pictures and Electra Sparks's New Thought Film Theory.” The British Journal for the History of Science vol. 50, no. 3 (2017): 411-428. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087417000644

MacDonald, Margaret I. “Mrs. Mary Lawton Metcalfe Gives the Moving Picture First Place as an Educator.” The Moving Picture News vol. 4, no. 43 (28 October 1911): 6-7.

Metcalfe, Mary Lawton. “The Captain’s Treasure: Mental Films for a Picture Story.” The Moving Picture News  vol. 4, no. 52 (20 December 1911): 17.

------. “Carolina Belle.” Rev. Talking Picture Magazine vol. 1, no. 3 (December 1929): 19.

------. “First Impressions of Living Pictures–The Manufacture of Mental Films–How to Project Memory Pictures: Scientific Principles of Psychology in Human Reproduction.” The Moving Picture News vol. 4, no. 44 (4 November 1911): 14-15.

------. “Moving Pictures Aid in Education.” The Moving Picture News (21 September 1912): 19.

------. “A Practical Plan for Teaching Without Books.” The Moving Picture News vol. 4, no. 49 (9 December 1911): 6.

------. “‘Real-I-Zation’ and the Cosmos.” Washington Times (23 November 1917): 20.

------. “Snapshots—Women’s Views of Vital Interest to Moving Picture Trade.” The Moving Picture News vol. 7, no. 16 (13 April 1913): 23.

------. “Snips and Snaps of News by a Peripatetic Camera.” The Moving Picture News vol. 5, no. 21 (25 May 1912): 28-29.

Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. D. Appleton: New York, 1916.

Satter, Beryl. Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Citation

Ellis, Patrick. "Mary Lawton Metcalfe." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6c1s-1y04>

Eliane Tayar

by Laura Vichi

Although Eliane Tayar is undoubtedly a fascinating figure, she is a relative footnote in any study of the silent film era, having made her first appearance as a film actress at the end of the 1920s. Daughter of Salomon Tayar, a Libyan stockbroker of Caucasic origins, and of Jeanne Monteauzé, a French woman, she had a difficult childhood. She lost her mother when she was six years old and grew up in a convent until the age of seventeen, marrying soon after in 1921. It may be that she established contacts in the cinema world through her first husband, Fraisse Zamisky, who was probably introduced to her by her father, and who was a banker and owner of the celluloid factory Anel et Fraisse. Tayar’s father died in 1922 and Zamisky, who was addicted to gambling, killed himself in 1923 after filing for bankruptcy (Mazet 2000, 14). At nineteen years old, Tayar was both orphan and widow. She had a younger sister, Henriette, who studied fine arts starting in 1930 and most likely introduced Eliane into the Parisian artistic milieu.

Practically speaking, Tayar was a self-taught woman. Keen on reading and history, she was acquainted with several important intellectuals of her time, including Louis-Ferdinand Céline whom she met in 1930, together with film critic Aimée Barancy, on the houseboat “Le Malamoa,” which was the painter Henri Mahé’s studio. The relationship between Tayar and Barancy is detailed in Eric Mazet’s introduction to his 2000 edited collection of Céline’s letters (7-32). In late 1930, Tayar began writing for the journal Le Courrier cinématographique and for the film magazine Pour vous in 1931.

Poster for Amour et carrefour (1929).

Tayar’s exotic beauty, her big green eyes and olive complexion, did not pass unnoticed, and, beginning in 1928, she was invited to appear in a few films. According to her daughter, Colette Forestier, she would have preferred to become a poster designer, which was a male-dominated profession at that time (2006, n.p.). In 1928 and 1929, she worked on several film sets as an extra or in supporting roles. From the magazines of her time, it is clear that Tayar was considered an emerging film star (e.g., Despa 1928, 21-22). Yet, the only film in which she played the lead role is Georges Péclet’s Amour et carrefour (1929), a comedy where her character seems to exhibit qualities similar to Tayar’s, for she is outgoing, active, enterprising, and a sports car lover, especially of the Bugatti (Barancy 1929, 54).

However, she did not become a star actress. Instead, Tayar’s exuberant and ambitious nature, which is evident in her writing style and her willingness to take minor parts, led her to become an assistant director. Tayar felt the need to give herself to this profession completely and wanted to become more involved in various aspects of filmmaking. On December 6, 1930, in Le Courrier cinématographique, she expresses her position: “Assistante…c’est bien moins glorieux que d’être artiste, mais c’est faire partie de l’équipe; c’est être liée intimement avec tout ce qui est le cinéma proprement dit” [Trans.: Assistant… it’s less prestigious than an artist, but it means to belong to the team; it means to be intimately connected to everything that cinema is] (11). She started her career by working with Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, whom she may have met through the cameraman Gösta Kottula, one of Mahé’s “Malamoa” regulars. In 1928, she worked as an extra and, according to her daughter Colette, became the assistant director on the silent classic La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc (1928) after the shooting of the film had already started (Forestier n.p.).

Barancy’s 1933 “L’archange et les vampyres,” her first published piece, describes her friend Tayar’s attempt to become the lead actress in Vampyr (1932) (307-338), but this may be a fictional account. What is certain is that Tayar worked as Dreyer’s assistant between the summer of 1930 and the beginning of 1931. The film was Vampyr and the director entrusted her with finding locations and set pieces for it. However, this experience turned out to be traumatic because of the director’s difficult, if not impossible, demands. Tayar wrote about this experience in a series of articles in Le Courrier cinématographique titled “Quand j’étais assistante de Carl Dreyer,” which ran from December 1930 to February 1931. However, her relationship with Dreyer continued. When the director was asked by the leaders of the Fédération Nationale des Blessés du Poumon et Chirurgicaux/The National Federation of Lung and Surgical Wounds (FNBPC) to make a documentary film about the sanatorium under construction in Clairvivre in Salagnac, Dreyer sent Tayar.

Eliane Tayar, in 1928 in Le Courrier cinématographique. Private Collection. 

Before shooting La Cité sanitaire de Clairvivre (1935) between the summer and the fall of 1933, Tayar co-directed Versailles (1934) with Maurice Cloche. This documentary film was received positively by the critics because, even if its subject matter was considered quite challenging, the film managed to break from established models of both tourist films and cinematic portrayals of historic events (Fainsilber 1933, 826; Mazet 21). Later, Tayar entrusted a print of Versailles to Henri Langlois, but the film is presently missing from the archives of the Cinémathèque Française.

A 35mm print of La Cité sanitaire de Clairvivre was discovered in 1999 in the basement of the village film theater by Gabriel Peynichou, the grandson of the man who founded the Clairvivre theatre. Clairvivre had a very challenging goal, since not only was it supposed to make the public aware of the FNBPC, but its mission was also to spread Clairvivre’s ideals. In a style reminiscent of Eisenstein’s The General Line (1929), the film shows tuberculosis as a disease determined by social and economic factors and proposes the utopian solution embodied by Clairvivre, “lieu de paix et de fraternité” [a place of peace and fraternity], where life is based on citizen cooperation. Modern, well-equipped facilities and lodgings were set up in the village thanks to agricultural, commercial, and industrial activities. The film promotes an idea of modern life close to that trumpeted by architect Le Corbusier who believed that architectural structures must optimize their residents’ health and welfare. The camera pays attention to both the structures and the machinery in this new town and the faces of the citizens, highlighting both the modernity of the buildings and the town’s humanity. We see patients who no longer need to leave their families to be cured, as an intertitle says at the beginning: “Living like all the other people.” This approach to illness was not obvious, since it conveyed the will of creating a community and a model for a new society where everybody would give his or her contribution in proportion with his or her possibilities (Moreau 2002, 148-149). In Clairvivre, Tayar met her future husband, architect and town planner Pierre Forestier, creator of the modern sanatorium town (Moreau 41).

From the extant documentation, it is possible to speculate that Tayar held ideals that we would understand today as feminist. Moreover, she was an appreciated figure in the cinema industry, as we can read in a letter from Céline about the project of translating the story Secrets dans l’île, previously called Ouessant and then Tempête (Mazet 35), into a film: “Les personnes consultées te trouvent un talent ‘fou.’ J’ai ajouté ‘génie’ et je m’y connais” [Trans.: The people who have been consulted find that you have a ‘tremendous’ talent. I added that you were a ‘genius,’ and I know a thing or two about that] (Mazet 41-42). He concludes by saying that he is sure that Jacques Deval, the director of the future film (which, in the end, was not made), would give Tayar “la place,” or the assistant director position. Tayar wanted to make the film after seeing Jean Epstein’s Finis terrae (1929), which enthused her (Mazet 35). Nevertheless, as her daughter Colette recollected, it seems that since she was not encouraged by her husband and her family in general, Tayar reduced her film activity to dedicate herself to the Montessorian education of her daughter, who was born in 1936 (Forestier n.p.). After La Cité sanitaire de Clairvivre, Tayar worked on a few other documentary films—an unidentified title on Chartres (1937-38) and Orléans (1938). Later, she worked as Jean Vidal’s assistant on Le Roi Soleil (1958) and then on a series of three films on the French Revolution. Orléans is still extant, but it does not have the same freshness as Clairvivre. Tayar’s role on the 1938 film was limited to a technical one as it was directed and produced by Jean-Claude Bernard. However, it is possible to notice the same attention of the camera to architectural structures as seen in Clairvivre. One can safely say that Tayar’s greatest film remains Clairvivre, her most ambitious project.

Tayar’s career and her commitment to documentary cinema deserve more investigation. The story of each of her films needs more research too, since we know little or nothing about them. Finally, a Tayar collection (presently there are only some scattered archival sources), even if small, would be worth setting up in a public establishment, not only for its intrinsic value, but also because Tayar’s career represents a cross-section of key moments in French film and cultural history from the 1920s to the 1960s. Moreover, she represents a case study in women’s history: her whole life and career represent a further piece in the male-dominated panorama of the cinematic industry and, ultimately, of society.

Bibliography

Barancy, Aimée. “L’archange et les vampyres.” Les œuvres libres 139 (January 1933): 307-338.

------. “Un quart d’heure avec Eliane Tayar.” Cinémagazine 28 (12 July 1929): 54.

Bierre, René. “Quand on tournait le film de ‘Clairvivre,' ville d’harmonie et de lumière.” Pour vous 331 (21 March 1935): 11.

Chirat, Raymond, ed. Catalogue des films français de long métrage. Films de fiction 1919-1929. Toulouse: Cinémathèque de Toulouse, 1984.

Chirat, Raymond, and Jean-Claude Romer, eds. Catalogue des films de fiction de première partie 1929-1939. Service des Archives des Films du CNC, 1984.

Despa, M. “Eliane Tayar.” Le Courrier cinématographique 20 (19 May 1928): 21-22.

Fainsilber, Benjamin. “Entretien avec Maurice Cloche.” Cinémonde 259 (5 October 1933): 826.

Forestier, Colette. Personal Interview. 23 December, 2006.

Francès, Robert. “Embrassez-moi.” Le Courrier cinématographique (6 October 1928): 33-34.

“Les principaux films documentaires et reportages filmés en 1935, 1936 et début 1937.” La Cinématographie française 973 (25 June 1937): 257.

Mazet, Eric, ed. Au fil de l’eau: lettres de Louis-Ferdinand Céline à deux amies, Aimée Barancy et Éliane Tayar, et documents annexes. Tusson: Editions du Lérot, 2000.

Moreau, Pierre. Clairvivre, une ville à la campagne.  Paris: Editions du Linteau, 2002.

S.A. “Artiste et assistante!” Le Courrier cinématographique 48 (29 November 1930): 17.

------. “Champagne. ” Pour vous 450 (1 July 1937): 11.

Tayar, Eliane. “Quand j’étais assistante de Carl Dreyer.” Le Courrier cinématographique 49 (6 December 1930): 11; 50 (13 December 1930): 16; 51 (20 December 1930): 16-17; 52 (3 January 1931): 33-34; 53 (10 January 1931): 15; 54 (17 January 1931): 22; 56 (31 January 1931): 21; 57 (7 February 1931): 23-24; 8 (21 February 1931): 17-18. Partially reprinted in Dreyer, Carl Th. Réflexions sur mon métier. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1997. 169-181.

------. “Quelques clairs secrets du ‘Vampire.'” Pour vous 205 (20 October 1932): 11.

“Une présentation de films documentaires organisée par les Grands Réseaux Française.” La Cinématographie française 971 (11 June 1937): 14.

Vidal, Jean. “Clairvivre.” Pour vous 340 (23 May 1935): 12.

Wahl, Lucien. “Versailles.” Pour vous 257 (19 October 1933): 14.

-----. “Vivre.” L'Œuvre (22 March 1935): n.p.

Archival Paper Collections:

Various journals. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Fonds Albatros, Fonds Henri Fescourt, Fonds Yves Kovaks, Fonds Robert Lachenay. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Citation

Vichi, Laura. "Eliane Tayar." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-8d8b-8219>

Katri Viita

by Riikka Pennanen

Katri Viita, born Karin Elisabet Viitainoja, is one of the pioneer female screenwriters of Finland. In fact, only two female scenarists are known to have worked during the silent era: Viita, who wrote Työn sankarilaulu/A Song About the Heroism of Labour (1929) and Gerda Hintze, the scenarist of Kajastus/Mirage (1930). Viita and Hintze worked around the same time: Työn sankarilaulu was filmed during the spring and summer of 1929 whilst Kajastus went into production during the fall of 1929. Unlike Hintze, Viita also worked during the sound era. It is important to acknowledge the challenge of identifying all of the crew members of silent-era Finnish cinema. For example, only a few crew members are credited in existing original opening credits and film programmes, which were available to cinemagoers. In some cases, resources like Suomen kansallisfilmografia/The Finnish National Filmography only identify the surname of crew members (Uusitalo et al. 1996). Furthermore, it is known that women working in film sometimes used gender neutral or masculine pseudonyms (Pennanen 2016).

Karin Viitainoja was born in Helsinki in 1898 to Johan Vilhelm Viitainoja, a custodian, and Hilda Sofia Vesterinen. According to a 1975 article in Viikkosanomat, Viitainoja’s education was cut short due to financial matters. However, she was gifted both as a writer and as a painter (Tammi 53). Viitainoja’s first novel, titled Keväästä kesään, was published in 1926 under the name Katri Viita.

Kalle Kaarna and Katri Viita on the set of Työn sankarilaulu (1929). Courtesy of Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto (Kalle Kaarna: Työn sankarilaulu 1929 ©KAVI/Filmi O.Y. Kotka).

In the late 1920s, Viita approached filmmaker Kalle Kaarna about an idea for an original script (Tammi 52). She then wrote the script for Työn sankarilaulu, a melodrama directed by Kaarna for Filmi o/y Kotka, his production company. Only Viita’s name is mentioned as the screenwriter in the film’s programme, but the script itself credits both Viita and Kaarna as its authors. According to the 1975 article in Viikkosanomat, the collaboration between Viita and Kaarna worked so that she wrote the scripts, which he then fashioned into shooting scripts (Tammi 52). Interestingly, Viita was also a member of the board of Filmi o/y Kotka in 1929 and 1930, according to trade journals such as Suomen kaupparekisteri and Kauppalehden Protestilista (1929, 33; 1930, 25).

Työn sankarilaulu follows the love triangle of Margit von Stenhjelm (Kaisa Leppänen), Juhani Rauta (Urho Somersalmi), and Olli Järvelä (Einar Rinne), who grow up together at Baron von Stenhjelm’s (Kalle Kaarna) ironworks. The film is a celebration of labour and the working man, as implied by the title. Juhani, who like his father ends up working at the ironworks, and the baron’s daughter Margit are in love. However, they are unable to be together because of the difference in social class. Olli, the son of an engineer (Eero Leväluoma) working at the factory, is taken by Margit and will stop at nothing to possess her and her family’s wealth. Juhani is angered by the way the workers are treated at the ironworks. He resigns after a confrontation with Olli’s father, which has been set up by a jealous Olli. Juhani then moves to Lapland in search of gold. Margit and Olli marry, and he ends up spending the Stenhjelm family fortune. Drunken and close to bankruptcy, Olli decides to apply for a position at a mine in Lapland. It turns out that Juhani, who has risen in social class through hard work, runs the mine. He hires Olli as the engineer and thus the three childhood friends are reunited in Lapland. After a near death experience Margit confesses her love to Juhani and they kiss passionately. The scene is witnessed by Olli, who in a jealous rage attempts to kill Juhani by pushing him into the rapids. Juhani is saved by Margit and the workers of the mine. Meanwhile, Olli goes to the woods to hunt and ends up accidentally shooting himself. Juhani finds Olli fatally injured and carries him home. The childhood friends reunite once more on Olli’s deathbed, where a remorseful Olli admits he has been the “discord” throughout their lives.

Viita accompanied the cast and crew to Filmstaden in Råsunda, Sweden, where Työn sankarilaulu’s interior shots were filmed, and Ivalo in Lapland, for the exterior shots. Työn sankarilaulu opened on September 29, 1929 to favourable reviews. A critic for Helsingin Sanomat going by the initials E.I.H noted that whilst Viita’s script does not bring anything particularly new to Finnish film in terms of its content, she treats the often-used subject matter “with sensitivity, warmth and skill” (1929, 7). A reviewer called “H-m” for Aamulehti echoed Helsingin Sanomat, saying that Viita treats an old and often-used subject in an interesting way, but ultimately finds the characterisation of Olli too black and white and Margit too weak (1929, 2). Unfortunately all known copies of Työn sankarilaulu were lost in a fire in 1959, but the original script can be found at the National Audiovisual Institute in Finland.

Viita and Kaarna next adapted the script for Kuisma ja Helinä/Kuisma and Helinä (1932) from a collection of poems by Larin-Kyösti, which Kaarna also directed. Like Työn sankarilaulu, Kuisma ja Helinä depicts a tragic love triangle. It is an example of an early Finnish sound film. According to Suomen kansallisfilmografia/The Finnish National Filmography, Kuisma ja Helinä’s exterior shots were shot non-sync, but scenes shot in the studio were with synchronized dialogue (Uusitalo et al. 513).

Viita and Kaarna married in 1943, and from then on she went by the name Kaarina Kaarna. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, she focused on writing popular literature mainly under the pseudonym of Tuulikki Kallio. During World War II, two of her novels were adapted into highly successful costume dramas: Kaivopuiston kaunis Regina/Beautiful Regina of Kaivopuisto (1941), written and directed by Toivo Särkkä, and Katariina ja Munkkiniemen kreivi/Catherine and the Count of Munkkiniemi (1943), directed by Ossi Elstelä and adapted by Nisse Hirn. Together with Antti Metsalo and Erkki Uotila, Kaarina Kaarna wrote her final script for the Eino Kari-directed film Suviyön salaisuus/The Secret of the Summer Night (1945), based on her 1943 novel.

See also: Gerda Hintze

Bibliography

Ahonen, Harri (The National Library of Finland). Email Correspondence. May 22, 2013.

E.I.H. “‘Työn sankarilaulu’–Uusi kotimainen suurelokuva.” Rev. Helsingin Sanomat (1 October 1929): 7. Työn sankarilaulu clippings file, Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

H-m. “Uusi kotimainen elokuva: ‘Työn sankarilaulu.’” Rev. Aamulehti (22 October 1929): 2. Työn sankarilaulu clippings file, Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Kauppalehden Protestilista/Report of Bills Protested in Finland 12 (18 March 1930): 25.

Pennanen, Riikka. “Finland–Overview.” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 302-307.

------. “Gerda Hintze.” In The Women Film Pioneers Project. Eds. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall'Asta. New York, NY: Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries, 2016. https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/gerda-hintze/

“Suomalainen filmi kansainvälisille laduille.” Uusi Suomi (15 June 1929): n.p. Työn sankarilaulu clippings file, Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Suomen kaupparekisteri [Virallisen lehden liite/Supplemental material] 12 (1929): 33.

Tammi, Lumikki. “Kuka oli Tuulikki Kallio.” Viikkosanomat 37 (1975): 50-53.

Uusitalo, Kari, et al., eds. Suomen kansallisfilmografia 1, 1907-1935: vuosien 1907–1935 suomalaiset kokoillan elokuvat. Helsinki: Edita, 1996.

Viita, Katri. “Erän työn tragedia.” Aamulehden sunnuntailiite (8 September 1929): 4-5. Työn sankarilaulu clippings file, Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

------. “Työn sankarilaulu.” Lukemista kaikille (28 September 1929): 10-12. Työn sankarilaulu clippings file, Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Archival Paper Collections:

Työn sankarilaulu clippings file. Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Archival materials related to Työn sankarilaulu [film programme & script]. Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Citation

Pennanen, Riikka. "Katri Viita." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-xx3j-d210>

Lucie Derain

by Laura Vichi

Lucienne Dechorain, whose professional name was Lucie Derain, was above all a film critic, but she was also a film director, film editor, fiction writer, and very likely a screenwriter. She entered the world of cinema in 1919 by subtitling and editing newsreels at Van Goitsenhoven, Gaumont (in 1921), and Eclipse-Journal (in 1923). We know that she wrote the screenplay La Tour de Vie et de Mort for Films Albatros, although the manuscript provides us with no further information, including a year, and there is no evidence that it was ever made into a film. She was a contributor to Hebdo-Films, La Semaine Cinématographique, Le Quotidien (Paris, 1923-1936), Cinémagazine, Pour vous, Cinémonde, Ciné-Miroir, Photo-Ciné, and La Cinématographie Française. Since in this last journal the editorial board is not mentioned, it is not possible to definitely state for how long she belonged to it, however, she was a member of the editorial board (Thévenet 1953, 233; Beyle and D’Hugues 1999, 131). Between October 11, 1924, and June 1940, she wrote the “Courrier des studios” column (also called “Studios,” “Dans les studios,” “Le Travail dans les studios”), a survey dedicated to the news from the studios and the set. She was also a contributor to La Technique CinématographiqueCiné-Amateur, and La Vigie Marocaine, as well as the editor-in-chief of Le Film Français from 1945 to 1948.

Scan of portrait of Lucie Derain in book Annuaire biographique (1953).

Derain also wrote the titles and subtitles for foreign films, such as the American Should a Girl Marry/Destin de Femme (Scott Pembroke, 1928) and the Russian The Patriots/Okraina/Faubourg (Boris Barnet, 1933). It appears that she first tried her hand at directing with Désordre (1927), a 16mm short compilation film, as mentioned some years later by Maurice M. Bessy, who considered it a real avant-garde film: “La nouvelle [avant-garde] c’est Préméditations; Désordre, de Lucie Derain et de Jean Tarride, film de montage bien conçu” [Trans.: The new avant-garde is PréméditationsDésordre, by Lucie Derain and Jean Tarride, a compilation film well conceived] (Bessy 1931, 52). Désordre was intended to be integrated into the homonymous drama written by the Lorraine-born avant-garde poet, writer, and playwright Yvan Goll, according to Claude Beyle and Philippe D’Hugues (131) who profile Derain’s assistant or co-director Jean Tarride, future director, together with Jacques Brunius, of Record 37 (1937). Beyle and D’Hugues do not mention Derain among their “oubliés du cinéma français” [“forgotten people of french cinema”] and do not give further information about her film Désordre, which is unknown even at the Goll archive preserved at the Musée Pierre Noël in Saint-Dié des Vosges. This most likely means that it was not eventually integrated into Goll’s play. What is certain is that at some point the film came out, credited to Derain and Tarride, and was scheduled at the Studio des Ursulines from September 26 to October 31, 1930. This information is based on issues of the touristic guide La Semaine à Paris, published by the Office de tourisme et des congrès (1930, 55; 1930, 64; 1930, 64).

Frame enlargement, Harmonies de Paris (1928). Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française, Catalogue des films réstaures.

The only 35mm film that Derain both wrote and directed, Harmonies de Paris (1928), was released, although without much critical success, together with René Clair’s La Tour (1928) to fill the release program of Les Deux Timides (1929) by Clair. Both of these films were produced by Films Albatros. Derain dedicated some of her articles to the work at the Albatros studio, where she probably went regularly. The company was managed initially, from 1919 to 1922, by Joseph Ermolieff and then by Alexandre Kamenka, and was formed around Russian revolutionary exiles like actors Ivan Mosjoukine, Nathalie Lissenko, and Nicolas Rimsky, directors Jakob Protazanoff, Alexandre Volkoff, and Viatcheslav Tourjansky, and set and poster designers Ivan Lochakoff, Boris Bilinsky, and Lazare Meerson. In a second phase, in which we can situate Derain, Albatros welcomed young French directors such as Clair, Jean Epstein, Jacques Feyder, Marcel L’Herbier, Robert Boudrioz, and Marcel Silver, who contributed to the renewal of French cinema (Albera 1995).

Frame enlargement, Harmonies de Paris (1928). Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française, Catalogue des films réstaures.

Today the Cinémathèque Française’s Albatros Collection contains a few archival documents related to Derain, whose biography and career are very difficult to reconstruct because information about her is simply too scarce. What one can learn from the Albatros Collection’s documents, however, is that she wrote the titles of Adelqui Millar’s Souris d’hôtel (1927) (Albera 175) and that, in 1929, Harmonies de Paris was distributed together with Clair’s La Tour in Great Britain as well, as proven by a letter from a commercial agent at the Gaumont-British company to Albatros on January 4, 1929 (n.p.). The agent says that they wanted “such good French films” to become better known in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, Derain’s film is quite far from La Tour’s avant-garde style and the two films never met equal critical reception, Harmonies de Paris receiving positive but not enthusiastic reviews. For example, Cinémagazine described the film as a “summary,” a “nice trip” surely appreciated by everyone who loves Paris, while concluding that the film must be praised and encouraged (Francès 1928, 493); Pour vous focused on how Harmonies de Paris speaks about the soul of the French capital through simple images (Régent 1928, 6). Derain herself, interviewed by a journalist named “Saint-Sèvre” of L’Ami du Peuple, explained that the aim of the film was to show “some harmonies of Paris…and nothing more. I tried to create a synthesis of the city’s charms” (1928, n.p.).

Frame enlargement, Harmonies de Paris (1928). Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française, Catalogue des films réstaures.

Harmonies de Paris, restored by the Cinémathèque Française in the 1990s, was shot entirely on panchromatic film and was meant to be a documentary tour of Paris in thirteen thematic chapters. The subject is a tourist group arriving in the French capital by airplane, which explains the many shots of monuments and other canonical places. Derain did not hide the fact that she drew her inspiration from Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927), whose avant-gardism she partially copied, along with some of its images, such as workers leaving a factory, city traffic, railways, and shop windows. However, the formal comparison seems to literally stop (due to the use of a static camera in parts of Harmonies de Paris) before the focus on a few corners of old Paris, as if it were stuck in time, seen with a nostalgic attitude: an intertitle tells us that in Paris the past emerges everywhere.

Frame enlargement, Harmonies de Paris (1928). Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française, Catalogue des films réstaures.

In this way, the film creates a contrast between “modern fever” or “fièvre moderne,” to which the second chapter of the documentary is dedicated, and historical memory, which is represented in some chapters by the shots of monuments, gardens, and corners of the old Paris. The photography of Eugène Atget probably served as inspiration for Derain’s work. Atget’s work was exhibited for the first time in the spring of 1928, just before Derain shot her own film, in an important Salon Indépendant de la Photographie retrospective, which was announced by Cinémagazine on May 18, 1928 (262). Another very probable model is Claude Lambert’s Voici Paris (1926), a film also influenced by Atget’s photographs (Juan 2004, 304) with which Derain was certainly familiar. This can be inferred by her 1929 Cinémagazine article “La ville au cinéma,” where she calls the film “ingénieux et vivant” [“ingenious and alive”] (320).

In January 1928, some months before making her film, Derain wrote “L’art moderne à l’écran” in Cinémagazine, where she affirmed that what characterizes the modern era is a “nervous, bright, quickened life” (148) and that cinema and other arts can grow and nourish each other up to a “revenge,” or dominance, of cinema, which will become, thanks to the avant-garde experimentations of the time, “the modern time’s writing” (150). Later, some time after the press release of the film, in February 1929, she wrote “La ville au cinéma” where, while saying that Ruttmann’s Berlin is the most interesting and complete film ever made on a city, she mentions some French films like Voici Paris, Études sur Paris (André Sauvage, 1928), La Zone (Georges Lacombe, 1928), and Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1928).  She particularly appreciated the last two for the values they convey: nostalgia and emotion issued from the shots of popular Paris (320-321).

Frame enlargement, intertitle: “Faubourg’s, tumultuous heart of Paris,” Harmonies de Paris (1928). Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française, Catalogue des films réstaures.

What emerges from Derain’s Harmonies de Paris is a sort of anticipation of her 1929 article: the film does not really offer a modern vision of a metropolis, as one could say about other avant-garde films, in particular Ruttmann’s film on Berlin or Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). In these films the main features of a modern city are functionality and speed, while in Harmonies de Paris the French capital is not generally seen, after all, as a symbol of modernity, but as a place where humanity can still express itself and escape the modern tendency toward anonymity. One can see this idea in the film, for example, in the contrast created between the distorted shot of the Stock Exchange, La Bourse, which lends a sense of foreboding, and the more human shots of people quietly crowding Les Halles and of workers and shopkeepers going about their daily tasks. This idea of the metropolis puts Harmonies de Paris in a category with a series of other films about Paris, including Marcel Carné’s well-known Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1929). These films show some connection to the then emerging literary movement of “populism” (Vichi 2017), whose center is constituted by the “mythe du peuple,” as Alain Pessin calls it (2000, 131-144), which considered brotherhood and innocence as the fundamental values represented by ordinary people.

Frame enlargement, Harmonies de Paris (1928). Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française, Catalogue des films réstaures.

According to Myriam Juan, in 1929 the press announced Derain’s new project, a documentary about Rouen titled Rouen, Ville Sonore, but this information has to be checked by an in-depth analysis of the 1929 press (2002, 246).  Unfortunately, this film was probably never made. However, Derain’s career continued in another vein, and, starting in 1929 and continuing throughout the 1930s, she authored numerous novelizations of films, mostly published by Jules Tallandier in the popular collection “Cinéma bibliothèque.”

Moreover, in the beginning of the 1930s, she was co-founder of the Ciné-club de la femme (a subject which would be worth pursuing in more depth) where a young Henri Langlois collaborated with her for two months in 1934 and helped with film programming. In a note written by Langois in 1952, this experience is remembered by the Cinémathèque founder as the key moment where he understood that many silent films where dispersed in a sort of second-hand market and, in some ways, this inspired him with the idea of collecting them in an archive (Mannoni 2006, 31). Furthermore, it is at the Ciné-club de la femme that Langlois met Jean Mitry, with whom he would create (together with Georges Franju) the Cinémathèque Française in 1936.

The importance of studying Derain lies not only in the fact that she represents the female intellectual figure of her time–with all the implications of that function–and the marginality of women in the cinema milieu (including at Films Albatros), but that she also encourages us to explore those pockets of film history that have not yet been fully brought to light. Derain’s film lets us imagine a documentary panorama that remains almost completely hidden and unknown still today, both in terms of archives and research. Furthermore, Harmonies de Paris represents a kind of urban film from 1920s France whose characteristics are not exactly those of the established “urban symphony,” but which refer instead to specific aspects of French culture. According to many, even in light of existing scholarship, this group of films still needs to be fully assessed and examined (Gauthier 2004, 64-68; Jeancolas 1989, 20-22; Juan 2004, 291-314). To historians interested in Derain’s work, another obvious subject of study is the enormous popularity, at the beginning of the 1930s, of the roman-cinéma, what today we would call an “intermedial” genre that merits further investigation.

Bibliography

Albera, François. Albatros. Des Russes à Paris. Milano-Paris: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque Française, 1995.

Aumont, Jacques. “Harmonies de Paris.” In La Persistance des images. Ed. Jacques Aumont. Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1996. 86-87.

Bessy, Maurice M. “Ciné-clubs et écrans d'avant-garde.” Cinémagazine 3 (March 1931): 52.

Beyle, Claude, and Philippe D’Hugues. Les Oubliés du cinéma français. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1999.

Derain, Lucie. “L'art moderne à l'écran–Décoration, architecture sous les lumières.” Cinémagazine 4 (27 January 1928): 148-150.

------. “La ville au cinéma. Les poètes de la ville. Les beautés, les laideurs et le mystère des villes.” Cinémagazine 8 (22 February 1929): 319-321.

Francès, Robert. “Présentations (Les). Harmonies de Paris.” Cinémagazine (14 December 1928): 493.

Fronval, Georges. “Avec Lucie Derain pendant les prises de vue de Harmonies de Paris.” La Presse (17 July 1928): n.p. Fonds Rondel, BNF.

Gaumont-British. Letter to Films Albatros. January 4, 1929. Fonds Albatros, BIFI.

------. Letter to Films Albatros. January 12, 1929. Fonds Albatros, BIFI.

Gauthier, Guy. Un siècle de documentaires français. Paris: Armand Colin, 2004.

“Harmonies de Paris.” L’Ami du peuple (14 December 1928): n.p. Fonds Rondel, BNF.

Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre.“N.V.D. 28, appel à témoins.” In 100 ans Lumière: rétrospective de l'oeuvre documentaire des grands cinéastes français de Louis Lumière jusqu'à nos jours. Eds. Louis Marcorelles, Claire Devarrieux. Paris, AFA-Intermedia, 1989. 20-22.

Juan, Myriam, Ça c’est Paris! Paris dans le documentaire français des années vingt, 1919-1929. PhD dissertation. Université de Paris I, 2002.

------. “Le cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne.” Sociétés et représentations vol. 1, no. 17 (2004): 291-314.

Lynx. “Echos et informations. Un Salon de la Photographie.” Cinémagazine 20 (18 May 1928): 262.

Mannoni, Laurent. Histoire de la Cinémathèque française. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.

Office de tourisme et des congrès. Semaine à Paris (La): ce qui se fera, se verra, s'entendra, et tourisme 435 (26 September-3 October 1930).

------. Semaine à Paris (La): ce qui se fera, se verra, s'entendra, et tourisme 437 (10-17 October 1930).

------. Semaine à Paris (La): ce qui se fera, se verra, s'entendra, et tourisme 439 (24-31 October 1930).

Pessin, Alain. “Le Mythe du peuple au XIX siècle.” Le Peuple dans tous ses états, Sociétés & Représentations 8 (2000): 131-144.

Régent, Roger. “Harmonies de Paris.” Pour vous 4 (15 December 1928): 6.

Saint-Sèvre. “Prises de vues. En parlant d’Harmonies de Paris.” L’Ami du Peuple (30 August 1928): n.p. Fonds Rondel, BNF.

Thévenet, René, ed. Annuaire biographique du cinéma et de la télevision en France. Paris: Contact-Organisation, 1953.

Vichi, Laura. “Harmonies de Paris ou le documentaire entre avant-garde et populisme.” In Da Caligari al cinema senza nomi. Studi in onore di Leonardo Quaresima. Milan: Mimesis, 2017. 530-539.

Archival Paper Collections:

Various archival materials [correspondence between Gaumont-British and Films Albatros; un-produced screenplay, La Tour de Vie et de Mort; contract between Lucie Derain and Alexandre Kamenka regulating Harmonies de Paris' production]. Fonds Albatros. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Fonds Rondel [includes press reviews and articles about Harmonies de Paris]. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Citation

Vichi, Laura. "Lucie Derain." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-m4hr-rm50>

Bianca Virginia Camagni

by Emiliana Losma

Bianca Virginia Camagni was one of the first women directors in Italian silent cinema, as well as one of the most important if we take into consideration the few scattered reports in the film magazines of the time. The sources are unanimous in describing Camagni as a woman of uncommon talent and acuteness with a lively intelligence. She built around herself a unique culture based on her personality, films, collaborations, and network of relationships that made her a very special kind of diva, at variance with the mainstream conventions of the times.

Portrait of Bianca Virginia Camagni by Emilio Sommariva. Private Collection.

In October 1939, her collaborator, Tito A. Spagnol, her partner at Camagni Films, thus described her:

Bianca Virginia Camagni whom many of you still remember, was a blonde woman from Lombardy. She was practical and energetic in an almost masculine way which, added to her feminine qualities, made her a charming and ever-changing creature. She was not arriving as other actresses of that time, from concierge or kitchen, but was instead educated, refined, spoke several languages and was a fine and sensitive pianist; she had traveled in Europe, loved the company of writers and artists, being an artist herself albeit occasionally. Whenever she was forced to distance herself from this art [film] it was the aversion to having to be subordinate to people whose talent and culture were unlike her own. Nothing was more natural then, with so much potential, than to aspire to do film herself, that is to create, as was said of those of a film who were not only its performers, but its writers and directors in concert (285).

According to a writer going by the name “Hover,” Camagni’s film career began in 1914 as an actress at Milano Films, which straight away decided to dedicate a series of films to her. As Hover writes in Maggese cinematografico:

Milano Films is resolute in its decision to inaugurate a new series about Miss Bianca Virginia Camagni. Hers is not a household name, by no means, however, surely if the intelligent direction of the “Milano” has decided on this new series it has its good reasons to do so. Indeed Miss Camagni’s artistic baggage includes everything that a great actress must have. To her wondrous beauty can be added a beautiful body, great class, sweetness of expression, spontaneity, verve, passion and a sentimental character. Moreover, she is blessed with a grand and innate artistic sense that will most surely lead her to the height of her career (1919, 30).

Bianca Virginia Camagni on Bianco e Nero cover. Private Collection.

Even taking into account the number of articles that were promotional pieces, we know that Milano Films was a local and international leader and therefore that the media’s exaltation of its cultural ambitions, the choice of subjects, the use of special effects, and the wealth of decor and mise-en-scène is not an exaggeration. Milano Films was run by aristocrats, who, believing that they had an educational responsibility, hired the best known intellectuals and writers. Therefore, even though, since 1912, Milano Films had been specializing in dramas of love, the company tried to remain consistent–producing films that, while narratively straightforward and easy to comprehend by audiences, were still as elegant and lavish as the theater in terms of set design and costumes (De Berti 2000, 276-287). However, the first Camagni films came at the end of a productive time in the early Italian film industry, which was soon to be in crisis. According to a May 1915 article in La vita cinematografica, the series was interrupted by World War I, and, at the end of the war, all of the staff was fired (90). This represented a fundamental shift in the career of Camagni, but she continued to collaborate with the best Italian intellectuals and began her career as director and screenwriter. In an interview published in 1917 in Il cinema illustrato, a journalist by the name of “Arx” captures a truly poetic declaration by Camagni:

I love cinema and I feel that this ardor flares within me with such fury that one day I shall end up unable to bear it any longer. Just think, that to achieve my goal I subject myself voluntarily to an iron discipline. To be able to follow after the spirits who rise of my fever, I want to breathe to the rhythm of boundless freedom and not feel tied to any specific contract or be held by any circumstance that chains me. I was born to be a pilgrim as is a swallow to float in the sky like a summer cloud. And everything I do, I do myself: I weave the threads, I write the work, I do the representation. And depending on needs and convenience, I accept the invitation of this or that film company (3).

Film brochure, La crociata degli innocenti (1917). 

Around the time of World War I, Camagni appeared in important films like I pagliacci (1915) and Cavalleria rusticana (1916), and was the star of films of cultural validity, such as Il re, le torri e gli alfieri (1916) and La crociata degli innocenti (1917). Her exceptional interpretations of her characters made Camagni one of the finest artists of the screen, according to the most authoritative critics. For example, Francesco Manelli penned a 1916 tribute to the actress, entitled “Camagnina,” in La vita Cinematografica (212-213). When Camagni launched a career as a screenwriter and director this work was immediately acknowledged and appreciated by audiences and critics. For Galatea Films, a production company in which she perhaps had financial interests, she wrote Il figlio della guerra (1916) and wrote and directed La piccola ombra (1916). A 1916 review in the magazine Apollon recognized her work and talent, stating:

Bianca Virginia Camagni is perhaps the cleverest and most cultured among the actresses in our cinema. This is illustrated in La Piccola Ombra which she wrote and interpreted, and is a prime example of a drama whose promise and originality are thanks to the actress on the screen. There is no lack of illustrious precedents even in recent productions–[Francesca] Bertini and [Diana] Karenne being among the best–but in them is dominant the awareness of the concept of having to impersonate the most important figure in the drama, the drama was not created from an inspiration but instead to cater to the vanity of the actresses. In those cases the postures, the gestures and the expressions of the actresses were exalted but often to the detriment of the story. Bianca Virginia Camagni, diversely, was able to make the sacrifice even in trite situations in the interest of the theme of the drama itself (Rosso 11).

The films attached to Camagni were considered the “greatest hope of the new art cinema,” according to Giorgio Hortensien in 1916 (4). This hope, unfortunately, was dashed by the financial difficulties into which Italian cinema had fallen after World War I. As a consequence, the directorial career of Camagni suffered a setback and many films planned could not be produced and distributed, such as … Povero cuore..! (1917),  La compagnia della leggera (1917), a film adaptation of the novel by Luciano Zuccoli, and Usque dum viva et ultra (1917), an original film script by Irma Gramatica.

There were still some important collaborations to come, including the best known–the “poema sinfonico-visivo-corale” Fantasia bianca (1919), in which Camagni acted. According to Claudia Giordani, Camagni suffered in particular from the failure of this film when it was presented at the Costanzi in Rome on November 26, 1919. As a result, she decided to buy the film rights and try to redistribute it under a new title: Fantasia (1921), which she starred in, directed, and produced (1999, 133-148). The fact that both Fantasia and Fantasia bianca are considered lost does not allow for a comparison of the two titles. Sources are not clear as to what extent Camagni borrowed from the first film, shot by Alfredo Masi and Severo Pozzati (Scardino 1979, 56-58; 2000, 40-42; 2003, 95-104).

Bianca Virginia Camagni.

In 1920 she formed her own production house, Camagni Films, for which she conceived, wrote, directed, and acted in a few motion pictures, such as La sconosciuta (1921), La bella nonna (1922), and Il cuore e l’ombra (1922). Unfortunately, the company’s growth was blocked by market conditions abroad. For example, in Paris, Camagni could not find distribution given the French attitude that it was a waste of time to watch Italian films (Spagnol 1939, 311). The film career of Bianca Virginia Camagni culminated in a devastating fire at her own film company, according to the recollections of her nephew (Gamba 2010, n.p).

Bibliography

Alacci, Tito. Le nostre attrici cinematografiche studiate sullo schermo. Firenze: Bemporad, 1919.

Arx. “Bianca Virginia Camagni.” Il cinema illustrato (28 July 1917): 3.

“Bianca Virginia Camagni.” Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo. Roma: Le Maschere, 1959. 1540-1541.

“Bianca Virginia Camagni." Filmlexicon degli autori e delle opere. Roma: Bianco e Nero, 1961. 1146.

Chiti, Roberto. Dizionario dei registi del cinema muto italiano. Roma: edizioni M.I.C.S., 1997.

De Berti, Raffaele. “Milano Films: The Exemplary History of a Film Company of the 1910s.” Film History (2000): 276-287.

Gamba, Ugo. Personal interview. January 4, 2010.

Giordani, Claudia. “The Copy Vanishes, ovvero Il film senza il film. Note su Fantasia bianca.” Fotogenia (1999): 133-148.

Hortensein, Giorgio. “Un'artista di eccezione: la Camagni.” Apollon (1916): 4.

Hover. “Notizie.” Maggese cinematografico (10 July 1919): 30.

La vita cinematografica 29-30 (7-15 July 1917): 116.

Manelli, Francesco. “Camagnina.” La vita cinematografica (December 1916): 212-213.

Martinelli, Vittorio. Il cinema muto italiano: i film della Grande Guerra, 1916, seconda parte. Roma: Nuova Eri, 1992.

------. “Le metteuses-en-scène.” Cinemasessanta (Fall 1981): 20-75.

Mattozzi, Rino. La rassegna generale della cinematografia. Roma: Unione Cinematografica Italiana, Società Editrice Rassegne, 1920.

“Notizie.” La vita cinematografica (15 May 1915): 90.

Paolella, Roberto. Storia del cinema muto. Napoli: Giannini, 1956.

Redi, Riccardo. Film d'arte e teatro: la breve parabola di Ugo Falena. Roma: Associazione italiana per le ricerche di storia del cinema, 2000.

Rosso, Antonio. “La piccola ombra della Galatea Film di Milano.” Apollon (June 1916): 11.

Scardino, Lucio. “Il giovane Sepo: dall'Accademia a Comacchio, dalla scultura a ‘Fantasia bianca.’” Anedocta (June 2003): 95-104.

-----. “Pozzati nel cinema: il ‘Fantasia bianca’ e altre fantasticherie del comacchiese.” In Sepo 1895-1983. La donazione Severo Pozzati al Comune di Pieve di Cento. Eds. Tiberio Artioli, and Sabrina Cavicchi Cantoni. Cento: Siaca Editore, 2000. 40-42.

------.“Sepo Cineasta.” Pianura (1979): 56-58.

Spagnol, Tito A. “Facciamo un film?” Cinema (25 October 1939): 285.

------.  “Facciamo un film?” Cinema (10 November 1939): 311.

Citation

Losma, Emiliana. "Bianca Virginia Camagni." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-nzct-8378>

Anna Hofman-Uddgren

by Marina Dahlquist

Anna Hofman-Uddgren was a Swedish actress, vaudeville artist, scriptwriter, theater director, and film director. When she became the first woman film director in Sweden in 1911 she was already a well-established profile within the entertainment business in Stockholm. Hofman-Uddgren’s film involvement was not limited to production. Already in the summer of 1898 she introduced moving pictures, shown by a Mr. Hough from Edison’s Wargraph, at the variety theater Sveateatern, located in downtown Stockholm, and the following year, after Sveateatern had been destroyed in a fire, Hofman-Uddgren programmed moving pictures at Victoriateatern from May onwards (Waldekranz 1983, 117). Around a decade later, during a short period in 1911-1912, she directed six films of which only one survives. A possible reason for Hofman-Uddgren’s relative oblivion might be that the surviving film from her productions, Fadren/The Father (1912), based on August Strindberg’s drama, is a rather static example of filmed theater.

Anna Hofman-Uddgren. Courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute. 

Hofman-Uddgren’s biographical background is filled with gaps and blanks. Rumor has it that Anna Maria Hammarström, her name at birth, who was raised by a single mother, was actually the daughter of Oscar II, King of Sweden and Norway. As Marika Lagercrantz argues, this is probably why Hofman-Uddgren avoided giving out any biographical information and thereby could form her own star persona (Lagercrantz 2009, 186-192). Hofman-Uddgren nevertheless started to write her memoirs in the 1920s. Only the very beginning of her biography has been found, consisting of four typewritten pages describing her first encounter with the King at the age of seventeen, although it remains in a private collection. Even though the King would finance her studies in Paris, as these pages reveal, it was not until after Hofman-Uddgren’s death that any of this information was published (Lagercrantz 186-189).

All of the films produced in the 1911-1912 period seem to have been commissioned by Stockholm’s leading film exhibitor (having as many as six theaters) and distributor, the former horse-dealer, N.P. Nilsson, who wanted domestically-produced films for his theaters to compete with other Swedish producers. Together with Otto Bökman, an experienced film photographer, Hofman-Uddgren made six motion picture films. Gustaf Uddgren, a well-known journalist and writer whom Anna Hofman had married in 1900, would become another of her closest collaborators during these film productions. He is credited with writing the film script for FadrenFröken Julie/Miss Julie (1912) (together with Hofman-Uddgren), Stockholmsfrestelser eller Ett norrlandsherrskaps äventyr i den sköna synderskans stad (1911), and the scenario for Systrarna/The Sisters (1912).

In the spring of 1911, during a heated debate about the importance of film censorship, Nilsson was highly criticized in the daily newspapers by Walter Fevrell, president of a pedagogical association known as Pedagogiska sällskapet, for showing lurid Danish and French sensational films depicting decadent urban nightlife. Fevrell also reported Nilsson to the police, which was the local censorship authority in Stockholm before December 1911 when a national censorship body, Statens biografbyrå, was established. Additionally, Fevrell had apprehensions about Nilsson’s first production, which would also be Hofman-Uddgren’s first film—the comedy Stockholmsfrestelser eller Ett norrlandsherrskaps äventyr i den sköna synderskans stad (Björkin 1997, 17-20). The film opened in April 1911 at Nilsson’s largest film theater, Orientaliska Teatern in Stockholm, and could be understood as a long commercial for the city itself and what it had to offer, which included a shopping expedition to the foremost fashion shops, a series of sights from Stockholm, as well as numerous well-known local personalities. Stockholmsfrestelser was advertised as the first Swedish one-hour film drama, featuring popular actors from the Stockholm theaters. Reviews in newspapers like Dagen and Dagens Nyheter extolled Stockholm’s consumerist offerings and praised the well-known actors. In line with prevalent practices of the time, Hofman-Uddgren was not mentioned in either the newspaper advertisements or reviews, but instead her famous husband, Gustaf Uddgren, is singled out as the man behind the production. Several actors made their film debut in Stockholmsfrestelser, amongst them were Gösta Ekman, who would become one of the big names of theater and film and a director himself.

Hofman-Uddgren’s next two films, Blott en dröm and Stockholmsdamernas älskling, both made in 1911, continued the formula of “city films.” They depicted Stockholm’s most attractive sights, emphasizing the local character and Swedish origin of the productions, and featuring well-known performers. Carl Barcklind, an immensely popular singer and actor, had, for example, the leading role in Stockholmsdamernas älskling and was prominent in the advertisements.

Hofman-Uddgren would not only become Sweden’s first woman film director, but she also directed the first adaptions of August Strindberg’s literary work Fröken Julie and FadrenThe two dramas were at this time very popular on the stage and thus considered a safe investment and a way to improve the standing of Nilsson’s film theaters. Apart from using renowned stage actors for films in feature format, adapting famous literary works was a strategy during this period through which directors could achieve legitimacy and thereby attract an audience of higher standing; i.e. the middle class. Both films were of considerable length for their time; Fröken Julie was 732 meters after a cut of eighteen meters by the censors and Fadren was 777 meters, and both featured actors from Strindberg’s Intima Teatern. Hofman-Uddgren, together with her husband, who knew Strindberg well, secured the film rights for all of Strindberg’s dramas. In an article in Film-Journalen, Uddgren recalled Strindberg’s sympathetic attitude towards the new and rather undeveloped film medium at the time, as well as how they secured the film rights to all of his dramas without paying any fee (Uddgren 1920, 171).

According to Rune Waldekranz, Fröken Julie was, together with SystrarnaHofman-Uddgren’s principal achievement as film director. In contrast to Fadren’s somewhat static and theatrical appearance, these films allegedly explored the medium’s possibilities of editing and change of scenes. Systrarna had a more serious topic than the first films and was based on an original story written for film by Elin Wägner about two sisters with contrasting moral conduct, and a rather detailed film script describing characters, sets, and atmosphere has survived (Waldekranz 118).

Fadren seems to have been the least successful of the screen versions of Strindberg’s dramas. As the funding for the film was scarce, all the interior scenes were shot outdoors in late fall of 1911. The need for daylight came with a drawback: the breath of the freezing actors became visible. Similarly, seemingly by accident, a journalist from the newspaper Dagens Nyheter passed the Fröken Julie set during shooting on a chilly day in November 1911, resulting in one of the first film production reports in Sweden (Olsson 1990, 258-259). Ernst Klein, writing under the pseudonym “Selim,” vividly describes the change of scenes from a cold quiet countryside to a scene of thinly dressed country people dancing in the celebration of Midsummer. The journalist cautiously approached, fearing mental derangement, only to find Hofman-Uddgren in the midst of directing a scene (1911, 1). In Klein’s interview, Hofman-Uddgren underlines the significance of finding the right outdoor environment for the scenes and complains about the insufficient funds, as the shooting was not easy when it snowed on the tables and the actors were frozen stiff (1).

The reviews of Fröken Julie were very mixed. The most enthusiastic was probably written by “Dorian,” a pseudonym for Uddgren himself, who wrote about a preview of the film in Stockholms-Tidningen and commented on Hofman-Uddgren’s accomplishment in adapting the drama to the silent film medium (1912, n.p.). Criticism in Aftonbladet and Social-Demokraten focused mainly on the lack of words and the added scenes, among them Julie’s suicide, which was only hinted at in the play but made explicit in the film. Some years later Uddgren claimed that the film was a success in the way it captured the spirit of Strindberg’s play (1920, 171). But even Uddgren himself considered Fadren flawed as it suffered from the lack of respect the actors showed the film director. Even if a valuable document of the acting style at Strindberg’s theater, the film is ultimately an example of filmed theater. The reviews of the two Strindberg adaptions were mostly harsh, pointing out the sacrilege of turning the famous author’s work into wordless moving pictures. Even though the film rights to Strindberg’s dramas were granted without stipulation, Fadren became Hofman-Uddgren’s last film. Shortly after the opening of the film in 1912, her financier, Nilsson, died. After that she returned to the theater only to contribute to a couple of film productions as an actress.

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

Bibliography

Björkin, Mats. “Fröken Julies rakkniv: Orientaliska teatern, sensation och konst.” Filmhäftet vol. 25, no. 99-100 (3-4) (1997): 17-21.

Dagens Nyheter. Rev. Stockholmsfrestelser (27 April 1911): n.p.

“'Fröken Julie’ som biografdrama.” Aftonbladet (16 January 1912): n.p.

Helge. “Stockholmsfrestelser.” Dagen (27 April 1911): n.p.

Ingvar. “Strindbergs ‘Fröken Julie’ på biograf.” Social-Demokraten (16 January 1912): n.p.

Klein, Ernst [“Selem”]. “August Strindberg på Biograf.” Dagens Nyheter [Stockholm edition] (1 December 1911): 1.

Lagercrantz, Marika V. “En oavsluten berättelse. Om varietéstjärnan Anna Hofmann.” In Reflektioner i Erlind Bjurströms anda. Eds. Johan Fornäs and Tobias Hardling. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2009. 186-192.

Olsson, Jan. I offentlighetens ljus. Stockholm: Symposion Bokförag, 1990.

Uddgren, Gustaf. [“Dorian"]. “Strindberg på biograf.” Stockholms-Tidningen (16 January 1912): n.p.

------. “Om Strindberg och filmen.” Film-Journalen 6 (2 May 1920): 171.

Waldekranz, Rune. “Anna Hofman-Uddgren: Sveriges första kvinnliga filmregissör.” Chaplin vol. 25, no. 3 (1983): 117-121.

Archival Paper Collections:

Systrarna film script. Script collection. Swedish Film Institute.

Typewritten memoirs. Circa 1920s. Private Collection.

Citation

Dahlquist, Marina. "Anna Hofman-Uddgren." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-efnz-vm65>

Haydée Chikly

by Ouissal Mejri

At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were still relegated to an inferior position in Tunisia. Women had no authority and could not give their opinion on issues that concerned the whole family. It was unacceptable for some parents to send their daughters to school. At the same time, women could not work in an office or elsewhere. Women had not yet removed the veil. Haydée Chikly, the first actress and screenwriter in Africa, lived in this context. “I do not want a quiet and easy life, I want to fight, strive and struggle” (Tamzali 1992, 11). That was the statement made by Chikly in 1918 when she was a little girl sitting on a terrace in Carthage, contemplating people going out for a walk on a Sunday and observing the routine activities performed by the girls of her generation. Haydée started her career when she was only sixteen. Not only was she a screenwriter and an actress, but she also cut and hand-colored films on occasion (Mansour 2000, 200). She played a part in building the history of Arabic and African cinema.

Portrait of Haydée Chikly portrait by Albert Samama Chikly. PC

Portrait of Haydée Chikly by Albert Samama Chikly. Private Collection. 

Haydée was born in Tunis on August 23, 1906, in a country where Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox Greek lived in harmony and where you could see an Arab conversing with an Italian, a French, a Greek, or a Maltese. Her family tree illustrates the diversity that characterized the ancient history of Tunis. This young Tunisian lady had maternal ancestors from the Principality of Savoia. Bianca Ferrero, Haydée’s Italian mother, lived in Tunisia and worked as a nurse for the Red Cross. Ever since she was young, Haydée cultivated the hobby of writing, an activity encouraged by her musician mother. She alternated piano lessons, considered “tedious hours of exercises” (Tamzali 25), with writing. From her father’s side of the family, Haydée was the descendant of a Jewish family that had lived in Tunisia for a long time. Her grandfather, David Samama, was the banker of the Bey (the former king of Tunisia at the time of the Ottoman Empire), who established a banking institution that later became the Bank of Tunisia. The family name of Chikly was an alias chosen by Haydée’s father, Albert Samama, in reference to Chikly Island located in the Lake of Tunis and bought by his father in 1860.

Albert Samama Chikly, a pioneering researcher in many fields, was considered to be a legendary man. He was a supporter of X-rays, radio, the wireless telegraph (TSF), photography, and, especially, cinema. He encouraged Haydée to develop her passion for the cinema. She was her father’s muse and during her childhood, he would shoot scenes that she played. He would often photograph her, thus immortalizing the freshness of her youthful face. Haydée won the contest for “the most beautiful eyes of Paris” and was awarded the title of first actress of the Arab world.

In 1922, Samama Chikly directed Zohra, the first film with Haydée as protagonist and screenwriter. Being a dreamer, she decided to title the story Zohra, which in Arabic means “star of happiness,” the name given to the planet Venus. The name is explained in the original intertitle of the film, found in the archives of the family. The story of Zohra is well-written with a light plot. Ciné-miroir described it as “a simple but touching story” (1922, 8). The film follows a young French girl who survives a ship-wreckage on the north African coast of Tunisia and is rescued by a Bedouin peasant family whose daily life, under the roofs of their tents, unrolls before her eyes, as well as ours. They shear the sheep, make cous-cous, and collect water and wood until an airplane lands nearby and the girl goes back home.

Haydée Chikly (a/w) in last scene of Zohra (1922). PC

Haydée Chikly in the last scene of Zohra (1922). Private Collection. 

In 1924, it was announced that “The American director Rex Ingram went to Tunis to shoot an African movie” (Pittaluga 1924, 241), most likely The Arab (1924). Haydée was part of the cast and played a role alongside Ramon Navarro. Her career as an actress was supposed to take off and continue in Los Angeles. The director offered her a five-year contract, including travel fees and accommodation in Hollywood. The contract also covered her mother’s tutorage since Haydée was only sixteen years old. Unfortunately, her father prevented her from going. She later said that “it was her first great sorrow” (Tamzali 115). After that, she continued her career as a screenwriter. She wrote the screenplay for the film Ain-el-Ghezal/The Girl from Carthage (1922), and played the leading role. “The heroine of the film is a very beautiful young Tunisian with a curious oriental character involved in the various vicissitudes of the drama,” reported Tunisie Française in 1924 (4).

 Haydée Chikly with Ramon Navarro in The Arab (1924). PC

Haydée Chikly with Ramon Navarro in The Arab (1924). Private Collection. 

In an interview conducted in Paris in 1924, Samama Chikly told Mon Ciné: “The screenwriter of Ain el Ghezal is my daughter Ms. Haydée Chikly, who is very passionate of cinema” (15). The fact that Haydée was the actual screenwriter is reinforced by the first intertitle of the film: “Ain-el-Ghezal, The Girl from Carthage, a drama set in the Arab life and played by the author, Ms. Haydée Chikli.” The Girl from Carthage is the dramatic story of a young girl forced by her family into marriage. According to filmmaker Omar Khlifi, “The main character of the movie, Ain el Ghezal, is the daughter of a Caid, Bou Hanifa, who forces her to betroth Bou Saada, a rich, wicked and brutal farmer” (1970, 30). In the meantime, Ain el Ghezal is secretly falling in love with Taleb, a muezzin and school teacher. On the wedding day, while the sacred rites and warriors’ representations are taking place, Ain el Ghezal escapes and joins Taleb in the desert. The horsemen start looking for them, catch the lovers, and kill Taleb, while the fierce Ain el Ghezal gets stabbed while covering her fiancé’s body. Thus ends this Tunisian romance drama.

We can see in this impossible love story a kind of Tunisian “Romeo and Juliet,” brought forth by the imagination of a young Tunisian girl. About the story of the film, Haydée said: “I wrote this story to show how badly women were treated when they were just sold off with an arranged marriage into a man’s world” (Tamzali 112). The screenplay of the film presents a feminist point of view embodied by a courageous heroine who takes her destiny in her own hands and decides to escape from her family-imposed fate. Forced marriage would later became the main topic of the Tunisian feminist movement. In the early 1980s, The Girl from Carthage’s script was removed from the family archives when the Ministry of Tunisian Culture planned to open a museum of cinema. Unfortunately, the material was then lost. While reading Haydée’s diary, the film’s story looks like a mirror to a part of her life, introducing “the most special and endearing habits and customs of the country: the wedding, the preparations, the parties, taken smartly where everything is alive, swarming and real” (Mansour 257).

Unfortunately, no other Tunisian films were shot during the silent era. Although The Girl from Carthage and Zohra remained isolated experiences, they were harbingers of future themes for the Tunisian cinema, such as the role and conditions of Tunisian women. Between 1924 and 1925, Haydée held a column in Le Petit Matin, a French newspaper of that time.

In 1929, Haydée got married to the Algerian Khellil Tamzali and became Haydée Chikly Tamzali. She left Tunisia for Algeria where she continued to write. She was active in the civil society, becoming President of Social Works, Secretary of the Red Cross, and President of the League Against Cancer. She wrote many short stories and articles for the Tunisian national newspaper La Presse, as well a book in 1992 comprised of true stories about the past called Lost Images. Chikly also continued to act, working with Ferid Boughedir in 1996 in A Summer in La Goulette and appearing in Mamoud Ben Mamoud’s documentary on Albert Samama Chikly. In her book, she also wrote about her life, ending it as follows: “I would like to conclude today, at the end of my life, saying that the most beautiful character of woman is to be a woman” (Mansour 200).

Bibliography

“Ain el Ghezal.” Tunisie Française (1924): 4.

Khlifi, Omar. L’histoire du cinéma en Tunisie. Tunis: Société Tunisienne de Diffusion, 1970.

Mansour, Guillemette. Samama Chikly un tunisien à la rencontre du XX siècle. Paris: Simpact Editions, 2000.

Mejri, Ouissal. “The Birth of North African Movies.” In Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press Imprint, 2014. 24-34.

Pittaluga, Stefano. Notiziario. Italia: Films Pittaluga. 1924.

Tamzali, Haydée. Images Retrouvées. Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l’Edition, 1992.

“Un film Tunisien.” Ciné-miroir (20 December 1922): 7-8.

“Un film Tunisien.” Mon Ciné (30 October 1924): 14-15.

Citation

Mejri, Ouissal. "Haydée Chikly." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-bws6-q352>

Georgette Méliès

by Jacques Malthête

Georgette Méliès may be considered to be one of the first film pioneers, since she started acting in her father’s films in 1896 and also became a projectionist and a camera operator, or opératrice de prise de vues, very early. Georgette Eugénie Jeanne Méliès was born on March 22, 1888 in Paris. Her father, Georges Méliès, had married Eugénie Génin three years before in June 1885 and Georgette was their first child. Thirteen years later, her brother, André, was born.

Portrait Georgette Méliès, January 1922. FRC

Georgette Méliès, January 1922. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.

Only three months after Georgette’s birth, her father bought the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, which he attended quite frequently. This famous theater of magic on the boulevard des Italiens in Paris was then going through difficult times. Méliès renovated it and created the first grand illusions that brought him fame. On December 27, 1895, the day before the first public screening of the Cinématographe, Antoine Lumière invited a few theater owners to discover the first animated images projected by the machine invented by his two sons. Méliès was among the guests and he was immediately charmed by the extraordinary magic lantern, whose possibilities appealed to him right away.

Promotional still for Entre Calais et Douvres (1897), Georgette Méliès (far right). FRC

Promotional still for Entre Calais et Douvres (1897), Georgette Méliès (far right). Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.

In May 1896, when Méliès made his first film, Une partie de cartes, in the yard of his family’s estate in Montreuil-sous-Bois, Georgette, who was then eight years old, made her first appearance in this one-minute scene that was already carefully staged. One year later, she acted in another film, Entre Calais et Douvres (1897). In fact, these are the two films in which she can be seen among the 213 extant titles out of the 520 made by her father between 1896 and 1913. However, it is quite certain that she acted in at least two other films made on the coast of Normandy during the yearly closure of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in the second half of July 1896: Un petit diable and Bébé et Fillettes (Noverre 1929, 76; G. Méliès 1961, 190; G. Méliès 2012, 68). Unfortunately, too little information remains to be able to say more concerning her career as a child. Around 1900, Méliès made around twenty short films advertising combs, mustard, whiskey, beer, liquor, shoeshine, baby bottles, insecticide, corsets, hair lotion, hats, and chocolate, and according to his recollections in the 1930s, Georgette was then in charge of projecting these on the opaque window looking out on the boulevard des Italiens at the entresol of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin (Noverre 76; G. Méliès 1961, 190; G. Méliès 2012, 67-68; A. Méliès 1991, 41).

After the duping of Voyage dans la Lune (1902) in the United States in the fall of 1902, Méliès sent his brother Gaston to New York to open a new branch in March 1903. At the end of 1902, however, Georges started to shoot with two negative films and two cameras simultaneously, which were then put together mechanically and activated by one operator. The first two cameras required two operators, one of whom was Georgette Méliès, who first worked with Lucien Tainguy, followed by Lucien Bardou after Tainguy left for the United States. Of the two negative prints, one was subsequently sent to the American market, while the other was used to print copies for Europe. This system allowed the company to pay less custom taxes when entering the United States, since the positive prints were produced in New York, while also enabling them to deposit each new film at the Library of Congress in Washington and thus protect Méliès’s rights (Noverre 71-72; G. Méliès 1961, 177, 210; G. Méliès 2012, 40, 96; A. Méliès 1990, 20-21).

At the beach in Mers-les-Bains in 1905. First row, from left to right: Georgette Méliès, her brother André, and Georges Méliès. 1905. FRC

At the beach in Mers-les-Bains in 1905. First row, from left to right: Georgette Méliès, her brother André, and Georges Méliès. 1905. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.

Nevertheless, this period still remains quite obscure. Théophile Michault, who was operating the unique camera in Montreuil, continued to do so even when the films were shot simultaneously with two cameras. Lucien Tainguy then replaced him in 1904. However, the remaining documents do not mention Georgette Méliès as a camera operator before Tainguy (Noverre 76; G. Méliès 1961, 190; G. Méliès 2012, 68). In other words, it remains unclear who was working alongside Michault and operating the second camera between the end of 1902 and 1904, when the two cameras were replaced by the double camera, which only required one operator. Furthermore, it is difficult to determine whether Georgette worked in the second studio built in the winter of 1908, after the first studio was created in the spring of 1897 at the estate in Montreuil. Just as it is hazardous to enumerate the exact number of titles in which she acted, it is impossible to give a more accurate estimation of the number of films for which she operated the camera.

Façade of the villa rented by Méliès family in Mers-les-Bains circa 1900. 1st floor on the left: Georgette Méliès. On the balcony, 2nd floor: Georges Méliès. FRC

Façade of the villa rented by Méliès family in Mers-les-Bains circa 1900. 1st floor on the left: Georgette Méliès. On the balcony, 2nd floor: Georges Méliès. Courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française.

Eventually, her brother recalls that Georgette operated one of the two Pathé cameras, most likely when Méliès shot the last six films financed by Pathé in 1911-1913: Les Hallucinations du baron de Münchausen (1911), Le Vitrail diabolique (1911), À la conquête du Pôle (1911-12), Cendrillon ou la Pantoufle merveilleuse (1912), Le Chevalier des Neiges (1912), and Le Voyage de la famille Bourrichon (1912-13) (A. Méliès 1990, 21). Upon the death of her mother, Eugénie Génin, who had conducted many of her husband’s affairs, in 1913, Georgette took over the management of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. Before the Great War, Méliès transformed his second studio into a local cinema-theater and then, in October 1917, after a few additions, the “Salle Méliès” became the théâtre des Variétés artistiques. Until the beginning of the 1920s, the Méliès family organized operettas, comic operas, dramas, and comedies there. Georgette then displayed her skills as a manager, piano player, and especially as a soprano singer, while she also organized shows at the military hospital “number six” where she volunteered as a nurse. For her extreme devotion, she received six distinctions, such as the medal for Reconnaissance nationale. After the estate in Montreuil and the théâtre des Variétés artistiques were sold in 1922, Georgette pursued her career as an artist with her husband, Amand Fontaine, also known as Pierre Armand Fix, who was a baritone singer. During their tour in Algeria, Georgette became ill and upon her return to France, she died at the hospital of Coubevoie on August 29, 1930, at the age of forty-two. Her daughter, Madeleine, was then seven years old.

Translated by Aurore Spiers

Bibliography

Ciné-Journal-Le Journal du film 1099 (19 Septembre 1930): 3-4.

Malthête, Jacques. “Correspondance de Georges Méliès (1904-1937).” In Méliès, carrefour des attractions. Eds. André Gaudreault and Laurent Le Forestier. Rennes: Colloque de Cerisy/Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014. 313-523.

------. Méliès, images et illusions. Paris: Exporégie, 1996.

Malthête, Jacques and Laurent Mannoni. L’œuvre de Georges Méliès. Paris: La Cinémathèque française/Éditions de La Martinière, 2008.

------, eds. Méliès, magie et cinéma. Paris: Paris-Musées, 2002.

Malthête-Méliès, Madeleine. Georges Méliès l’enchanteur. Grandvilliers: La tour verte, 2011.

Méliès, André. “Mémoires et notes d'André Méliès.” Bulletin de l'association Les Amis de Georges Méliès-Cinémathèque Méliès  17 (1990): 20-21.

------. “Mémoires et notes d'André Méliès.”Bulletin de l'association Les Amis de Georges Méliès-Cinémathèque Méliès 18 (1991): 41.

Méliès, Georges. “Mes mémoires.” In Georges Méliès mage. Eds. Maurice Bessy and Giuseppe-Maria Lo Duca. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1961. 169-217.

------. “Mes mémoires.” In Georges Méliès. La vie et l'œuvre d'un pionnier du cinéma. Ed. Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan. Paris: Les Éditions du Sonneur, 2012. 21-109.

Noverre, Maurice. “L'œuvre de Georges Méliès.” Le Nouvel Art cinématographique 2:4 (October 1929): 56-76.

Archival Paper Collections:

Fonds Georges Méliès. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Fonds Merritt Crawford. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Fonds Méliès (includes programs and posters from the théâtre des Variétés artistiques). Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.

Citation

Malthête, Jacques. "Georgette Méliès." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-14t0-y593>

Dorothea Mitchell

by Michel S. Beaulieu

In the spring of 1929, the Port Arthur Amateur Cinema Society made Canadian history. To a crowded house in the city of Port Arthur, in Ontario’s largest theatre, their first feature-length film, A Race for Ties (1929), premiered. Not only was it one of the few feature-length films made in Canada at the time, but it holds the distinction of being the first amateur feature-length film in Canada, and the first of three that involved the talents of Dorothea Mitchell, a British-born, India-raised women who is best known as Ontario’s first single woman to be granted a homestead in that province’s history.

Dorothea Mitchell (d/w/a/e/o). Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society

Dorothea Mitchell. Courtesy of the Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society. 

Mitchell’s involvement in film production resulted from a confluence of historical circumstance. The daughter of a British railway engineer, Mitchell spent the majority of her early life in India and received an education proper for one of the colonial elite. By the late nineteenth century, family fortunes had changed. In 1894, her mother’s health forced the family back to England. In 1897, her father’s death while away in India forced Mitchell and her sister to become governesses in the homes of the wealthy. Seeing no future in this line of work, Mitchell left for Canada.

Dorothea Mitchell arrived in Canada in 1904 and after short stints in Toronto and Hamilton, she answered an ad for a job as the companion to a mine manager’s wife at Silver Mountain, Ontario, a whistle-stop 75 kilometres from the then city of Fort William at the head of Lake Superior. When the mine closed shortly after her arrival, she turned her misfortune into opportunity by taking over the local post office and becoming the railway stationmaster. In 1911, she petitioned the Government of Ontario for the right to obtain a piece of crown land, arguing that she was responsible for the welfare of her mother and sister, and, after a feisty exchange of letters, which are held in the Archives of Ontario, Dorothea Mitchell became the first single woman in Ontario history to be granted a homestead. From there, she ran a small sawmill and lumber company, often filling in for men who quit suddenly. Her fair treatment of immigrant workers and commercial success against the lumber barons of the period earned her the respect of businessmen in Northwestern Ontario and Manitoba and the local nickname the “Lady Lumberjack.” In 1921, Dorothea Mitchell retired to the relative comfort of the city of Port Arthur, adjacent to Fort William. In Port Arthur she worked as an accountant and later became one of the first female real estate agents in Ontario.

Dorothea Mitchell, 1926. PC

Dorothea Mitchell, 1926. Private Collection. 

It was in Port Arthur that Mitchell was able to indulge in her passion for theatre and the arts. As a result of her theatrical and business connections, Mitchell met Fred Cooper, a local businessman who happened to own a 16mm film camera. Mitchell and Cooper spearheaded the creation of the Port Arthur Amateur Cinema Society; the first Canadian affiliate to the New York-based Amateur Cinema League, which was headed by Percy Maxim. At first, it was thought that suitable scripts could be found in magazines such as Movie Makers Magazine.  However, after purchasing one, Mitchell felt that none reflected the Canadian experience as she saw it, according to both a 1963 audio interview with Mitchell that is held in the Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society and her own notes entitled “A Race For Ties (Its Inception)” (1). These scripts, she believed, were also “too short” for the serious filmmaking envisioned by the Port Arthur Amateur Cinema Society (1).  At the urging of Fred Cooper, Dorothea Mitchell wrote an original script based on her own experiences as a sawmill owner and homesteader at Silver Mountain during the 1910s.

Dorothea Mitchell, circa 1910s. PC

Dorothea Mitchell, circa 1910s. Private Collection. 

The resulting film, A Race for Ties, became Canada’s first feature-length amateur film and it premiered, accompanied by a locally made newsreel produced by Fred Cooper, on May 31, 1929. Afterwards, the film toured the Northwestern region of Ontario. A Race for Ties tells the story of a sawmill owner, Joe Atwood, and his race against a large timber company, headed by U. Cheetem, to sign an exclusive contract for railway ties. In addition to a plot driven by one of the region’s staple industries (the lumber industry), the film highlights the scenic nature of the region. The characters of Joe Atwood and his daughter are composites of Mitchell as she felt audiences outside of the region would find it difficult to believe a single woman could accomplish so much, according to an undated article held in the Dorothea Mitchell File at the Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society that is entitled “The Mitchell Story Continued” (n.p.). 

Screenshot, The Race for Ties (1920).

Screenshot, opening of The Race for Ties (1929).

On the set of A Race for Ties (1929). Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society

On the set of A Race for Ties (1929).C ourtesy of the Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society. .

Buoyed by the success of their first production, the Port Arthur Amateur Cinema Society completed their second film, Sleep-Inn Beauty (1930), in the summer of 1930. The film is a comedy about a bathing beauty contest based on a story adapted by Mitchell. Filmed over two days north of Port Arthur, Ontario, the cast included over sixty extras. The thirty-minute film was never exhibited to the public, although it was most certainly shown privately and eventually found its way into the Library and National Archives of Canada.

Screenshot, Sleep-Inn Beauty (1930).

Screenshot, Sleep-Inn Beauty (1930).

The earnest filmmakers from the Lakehead pushed on with their projects and in the spring of 1930, the Port Arthur Amateur Cinema Society, with Mitchell at the helm, took a leap of faith. Deciding to expand, the Society purchased office space and invested in new equipment such as arc lights and a larger camera in preparation for the production of a much more complex film. Following the successful formula established with A Race for Ties and Sleep-Inn Beauty, Mitchell wrote the script for The Fatal Flower (1930), a crime story set in Port Arthur. The plot of The Fatal Flower revolves around a young couple whose budding romance coincides with a rash of bank heists in Northwestern Ontario. The young woman’s father happens to be the chief of police, and he is murdered while investigating a tip about a robbery. In the end, the robber turns out to be the boyfriend and the young woman assists the police in his capture.

Port Arthur's News Chronicle "Huge Crowd Gathers to See New Film." (May 29, 1929): n.p.?

“Huge Crowd Gathers to See New Film” announcement in the Port Arthur News Chronicle.

In May of 1930, Movie Makers Magazine reported that The Fatal Flower was nearing completion, running 1600-2000 feet of film footage (285). As it turns out, it was also going to be one of the last silent films to be made because the “talkies” had arrived and a revolution was taking place in the film industry. Needing only to complete the title cards, the Port Arthur Amateur Cinema Society did not finish the film due to the onset of the Great Depression and the instant success of sound films in the region. Not to be deterred, Mitchell took it upon herself to off the Society’s debts in an effort to keep her dreams alive. Despite her best efforts to reorganize and revive the film project, the unfinished Fatal Flower was the Port Arthur Amateur Cinema Society’s final film.

While the Depression prevented Dorothea Mitchell from finishing the film, the onset of the Second World War took her in a completely different direction when she responded to the call to take up arms for King and country. Enlisting in the Red Cross Society’s transport corps, she fully intended to go overseas following her training. However, when the time came, she was put in charge of training young recruits because, as she later found out, according to an undated written and signed recollection called “After Silver Mountain,” which is held in a private collection, that at the age of sixty-three she was considered far “too old for overseas service” (1-2). The Government of Canada put Dorothea Mitchell in charge of the local office of Voluntary Registration of Canadian Women. In 1941, Mitchell became secretary to the Dependent’s Advisory Board for the Thunder Bay Region and remained there until, grudgingly on the advice of her doctor, she left the Lakehead to retire to the West Coast of Canada. 

Screenshot, The Fatal Flower (1930).

Screenshot, The Fatal Flower (1930).

As with all her previous decisions to “retire,” it was not long after she settled into her new lodging in Victoria that Mitchell, now sixty-four, began to distinguish herself in the cultural milieu within the province of British Columbia. She once again became involved in amateur filmmaking by joining the Victoria Amateur Movie Club (VAMC), and also decided to expand her literary talents by joining the Victoria Branch of the Canadian Author’s Association, becoming secretary for most of the 1960s. While she was with this organization she began to write and publish numerous short stories based on her life, some of which, according to news reports, formed the basis of VAMC films (Brown 1971, n.p; Chadwick 1962, n.p.).

Dorothea Mitchell, circa 1898. PC

Dorothea Mitchell, circa 1898. Private Collection.

Her greatest literary achievement was the 1967 publication of Lady Lumberjack, a book she published at the age of ninety, and now a staple in the field of women’s history in Canada. Dorothea’s writings, like her films, are a testament to the pioneering life of a single woman who made Canada her home. Shortly after its publication, she was invited back to Port Arthur, now Thunder Bay, at the age of ninety-four in 1970 to re-screen A Race for Ties. At the event, reporters for the Port Arthur News Chronicle asked her why she decided in the 1920s to make films. Her reply, filled with her characteristic wit and charm, was like everything in life, she “did it just for fun” and to demonstrate that she could “compete in what was once a man’s world” (1970, n.p.). She passed away in Victoria in 1976 at the age of ninety-nine.

Bibliography

Beaulieu, Michel S. “The Best Picture Ever Made in Canada? Thunder Bay Films Limited and The Devil Bear.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies/Revue Canadienne D’Études Cinématographiques 14:2 (Fall 2005): 18-37.

------. Celluloid Dreams: An Illustrated History of Early Film at the Lakehead, 1900-1931. Thunder Bay: Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society, 2012.

------. “Early Filmmaking at the Lakehead, 1911-1931.” Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society Papers & Records XXXIII (2005): 42-64.

------. “‘We did it just for fun’: Amateur Filmmaking at the Lakehead, 1929-1930.” Ontario History XCIX:2 (Autumn 2007): 168-189.

------, and Ronald N. Harpelle, eds. The Lady Lumberjack: An Annotated Collection of Dorothea Mitchell’s Writings. Thunder Bay: Lakehead University Centre for Northern Studies, 2005.

Brown, Marcy. “You Find Adventure in Travel.” Victoria Daily Colonist (9 December 1971): n.p.

Chadwick, Vivienne. “Mills, Magnets, Measles.” Victoria Daily Colonist (18 August 1962): n.p.

Denault, Jocelyne. Dans l‘ombre des Projecteurs: Les Québécoises et le Cinénma. Sainte-Froy: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1996.

“Dorothea Mitchell.” In Inspiring Women: A Celebration of Herstory. Eds. Mona Holmund and Gail Younberg. Saskatoon: Saskatoon Women’s Calendar Collective, 2003. 179.

“Dorothea Mitchell.” In 100 More Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces. Ed. Merna Foster. Toronto: Dundurn, 2011. 246-249.

“Finishing Third Film.” Movie Makers Magazine 4:5 (May 1930): 285.

Huge Crowd Gathers to See New Film.” Port Arthur News Chronicle (May 29, 1929): n.p.

Lady Lumberjack. [online resource]. http://www.ladylumberjack.ca/home.html

Mitchell, Dorothea. “After Silver Mountain.” Undated and signed recollection. 2 pages. PC.

------. Lady Lumberjack. Vancouver: Mitchell Press Limited, 1967.

------. “A Race for Ties (Its Inception).” Unpublished notes, c. 1963. 5 pages. Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society.

------. Audio interview with the Canadian Film Institute. November 1963. Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society.

The Mitchell Story Continued.” n.d. n.p. Dorothea Mitchell File. Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society.

Morris, Peter. Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadia Cinema, 1895-1939. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978.

Pelky, Patricia. “Letter to the Editor.” Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal (12 November 1998): n.p.

“A Race for Ties Feature in Gala Night to Remember.” Port Arthur News Chronicle (3 November 1970): n.p.

Saxberg, Kelly. “Dorothea Mitchell.” In The Artist Herself: Self-Portraits by Canadian Historical Women Artists/L’artiste elle-même: autoportraits de femmes artistes au Canada. Eds. Alicia Boutilier and Tobi Bruce. Kingston and Hamilton: Agnes Etherington Art Centre and Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2015. 89-90; 151-152.

Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society. “‘A Race for Ties’: Canada’s First Feature-Length Film Produced by Amateurs.” Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society website. n.d. n.p. http://www.thunderbaymuseum.com/exhibits/virtual-exhibits/a-race-for-ties/

Archival Paper Collections:

Dorothea Mitchell Collection. Library and Archives Canada.

Dorothea Mitchell File.  Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society.

Fred Cooper Collection. Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society.

Entire correspondence between Mitchell and various government officials regarding the granting of a homestead are located in the Land File (RG1, C-5, Box 1654, File #8118/85). The Archives of Ontario.

Citation

Beaulieu, Michel S. "Dorothea Mitchell." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-p9gn-4h05>

Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko

by Natalie Ryabchikova

Ironically, it is her life before the cinema that has been described in detail: sometimes it is possible to know the exact movements of Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko over a particular day, say, in 1914. It is her work in film that is little known by comparison—all because she was a revolutionary first, and a screenwriter second. The two lives famously intersected in 1925 when she wrote the synopsis for what was to become Battleship Potemkin (1925).

Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko (w) c. 1920s.

Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko c. 1920s, from the book Sviaznoi Moskvy (1975).

An orphaned daughter of an Armenian merchant from the south of Russia, she joined the illegal Social-Democratic party, the future Bolshevik/Communist Party, in 1907, while still a schoolgirl. Having studied music, in 1908 she worked for several months as a silent film accompanist in Ekaterinodar, now Krasnodar, near the Black Sea. She managed to turn even the film theater into a secret Bolshevik meeting place (Leiberov and Peregudova 1985, 94).

Agadzhanova never graduated from college, although she studied history and literature in Moscow. Instead, she was put into prison six times and sent into exile twice over the course of the decade for political propaganda, often returning to the capital under false names. During one of her times in exile she met her future husband, Kirill Shutko, also a professional revolutionary whose favorite non-political activity was theater.

A cover page for a secret police surveillance report on Kirill Shutko and Nina Agadzhanova (w), 1915

A 1915 cover page for a secret police surveillance report on Kirill Shutko and Nina Agadzhanova in book Sviaznoi Moskvy (1975).

Together with Shutko, she was in the thick of the action in the fall of 1917 in Petrograd. Then, for about a year and a half, she worked as a Bolshevik spy in the territories controlled by the White Army. Only in 1924 was she allowed to “retire” from active Communist Party work. Having always dreamed of being a professional writer and having worked at the Party magazine for women, Rabotnitsa/The Woman Worker, before the Revolution, Agadzhanova turned to cinema, as did her husband. Her first script, for Boris Chaikovskii’s Behind White Lines (1925), was most obviously based on her own experience with the underground revolutionary work before 1917. At the same time, it was written in response to the Party demands to “adventurize” the Revolution for the sake of the action genre-loving youth and was accused by some critics, in newspapers such as Pravda (1925, 8), Tikho-okeanskaia zvezda (1925, n.p.), and Krasnoe Chernomor’e (1927, n.p.)of being cliché-ridden, at times unrealistic, and not showing enough workers as underground revolutionaries.

An ad for Behind White Lines (1925), Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko (w).

Ad for Behind White Lines (1925) in Kino-nedelia.

Since Kirill Shutko was included in the Party commission for the celebration of the First Russian Revolution of 1905, and since both he and Agadzhanova admired Sergei Eisenstein’s first film Strike (1924), they suggested him as the director of the projected anniversary film. Agadzhanova naturally was to write the script, or, rather, the synopsis of the multi-episode production, which was to cover the whole range of the events of the Revolution and was to be called The Year 1905. Eventually, Eisenstein significantly expanded only one episode from the initial synopsis, that of the battleship Potemkin mutiny in Odessa. Some parts of Agadzhanova’s initial script for The Year 1905 were also used for another anniversary film, The Red Presnia (1926), which had to be produced so fast, in only nine days, that four directors worked on it. It was still deemed unsuccessful even by the scriptwriter herself (Agadzhanova-Shutko 1927, 4).

Excerpt from Nina Agadzhanova's script The Year 1905

Excerpt of Nina Agadzhanova’s script The Year 1905 in book Sovetskii ekran (1975).

While Agadzhanova and Eisenstein were working on the script for Battleship Potemkin in the summer of 1925, Eisenstein and his assistant Grigorii Aleksandrov were also writing another script, a war-zone brother comedy called The Bazaar of Lust. It was planned that Valerii Inkizhinov would direct, while Agadzhanova was slated as a co-director and was supposed to polish the script. Inkizhinov was already extolling his crew in the papers as his true collaborators during pre-production, but the script did not pass the censoring committee, which, ironically, included Kirill Shutko, and that was the end of it (Vii 1925, 2).

Eisenstein later reminisced about this period, describing the Shutkos’ salon and its hostess:

Nina Ferdinandovna Agadzhanova—small, blue-eyed, bashful, and unbelievably modest…had the uncanny ability to collect around her small samovar a great number of hurt egos and lives abused by fate, and put them on the path of reason and a return to the calm of creativity…The most important thing that happened to us at [Agadzhanova’s] was that each one gained renewed confidence in himself by realizing that everyone was needed to do the work of the Revolution. Each one, moreover, was needed in his own, special, unique, clumsy, individual way (82-83).

Eisenstein and the Shutkos remained friends, although the relationship between them slightly soured after the protracted discussions over who was the official author of the script of Battleship Potemkin. After some legal battles, the right of both to be paid 1% from the film’s royalties was established (Khokhlova 1992, 140-146). Since only one episode from the Agadzhanova/Eisenstein libretto eventually remained in the filmand this episode was developed into the shooting script by Eisenstein—he was accepted as the main author, at least in the eyes of the film community. 

Excerpt from Nina Agadzhanova's script The Year 1905

Excerpt of Nina Agadzhanova’s script The Year 1905 in book Sovetskii ekran (1975).

In 1926, Agadzhanova tried to explain her screenwriting credo in a lengthy “theoretical” article in Kino-front on reflexes in cinema: the viewers have to be “conquered” by the things on the screen (including people); their reflexes have to be “put to sleep” and overcome by the new reflexes-stimuli shown to them. Still, the old and the new reflexes have to have some points in common, because “demonstrating things that are little known or entirely unknown to an unprepared viewer are accompanied with great strain on his perception, which is why he exhibits feelings of ‘dissatisfaction,’ ‘mistrust,’ ‘coldness’, and ‘downright animosity’” (1926, 14). Another article was promised that would explain the theory further, using Battleship Potemkin and Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923) as examples, but it never appeared [See Khrenov 1976, 165-68 on the relation of Agadzhanova’s ideas to other contemporary and subsequent theories of film perception. EDs.].

A short bio of Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko (w) in Kino-zhurnal A.R.K. (October 1925): 37

A 1925 bio of Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko in Kino-zhurnal A.R.K.

Still, by the fall of 1927, Agadzhanova was considered experienced enough to participate as one of the teachers in a correspondence course on scriptwriting for the Society of Friends of Soviet Cinema, a mass organization that never quite achieved the numbers desired by the Moscow proletarianists. Her last three scripts were all realized in the next five years at Mezhrabpomfilm, the USSR’s only remaining semi-private studio. Ivan Galai the Sailor (1929) answered to the immediate demands of propaganda directed at the forced collectivization of the Soviet village. Some critics, such as a writer going by the pseudonym “Ari” in Bakinskii rabochii, were severely disappointed:

The name of the screenwriter…made us wait for the film with heightened interest…Unfortunately, this time, although the choice of topic was quite fortuitous, its development in script form was not up to expected standards…With all the topic’s seriousness and depth, the film sounds like an unpolished and transparent agitation piece. Its plot is easy to predict…The artistic impotency leads to an overabundance of intertitles. The film’s authors are able to treat their material in political terms but cannot handle it artistically (1929, n.p.).

Although both the film’s technical primitivism and lack of emotional tension were blamed on the beginner director, the screenwriter’s ideological soundness began to be seen as no substitute for creative deficiencies.

Photo of Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko (right) and Hollywood screenwriter Lucita Squier (left) taken by James Abbe circa 1927. Courtesy of the James Abbe Archive.

Agadzhanova’s name appeared next in the credits of Two-Buldi-Two (1930), which was directed by Lev Kuleshov and combined a circus and a Civil War setting in a poignant story of a father-and-son clown duet divided by their political views. Agadzhanova possibly participated in fixing the script, officially credited to Osip Brik. The film was nevertheless decimated in the press as a formalist exercise, unfit for the harshening political climate (Alpers 1930, 5). In his memoirs, Kuleshov claimed that two versions of the film had been made. His version did not satisfy the audience and the critics but he refused to re-edit the film, and this was when Agadzhanova was brought in. According to Kuleshov, her version, although having introduced only minor revisions, satisfied the censors even less, and the original version was kept in theaters (98). The extant copy of the film lists them as co-directors.

A 1963 newspaper article about Nina Agadzhanova (w).

A 1963 newspaper article about Nina Agadzhanova in Sovetskaia kul’tura.

Agadzhanova’s last realized script was directed by another darling of the Soviet montage school, Vsevolod Pudovkin. Film historian Jay Leyda reported in his book Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film: “Two young journalists, Lazebnikov and Krasnostavsky, had shown Mezhrabpom[film] and Pudovkin a carefully documented script on the life and struggles of Hamburg’s dock-workers—S.S. Pyatiletka, to be made both in Russian and German versions. When Pudovkin returned from Hamburg, and went to work on his new subject, he asked Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko to strengthen the script” (295). Soon afterwards Agadzhanova was again reclaimed by the Party and sent to the Soviet consulate in Riga, Latvia. Some time before leaving Moscow she divorced Kirill Shutko and this was perhaps the reason the Great Terror did not claim her as one of its victims after Shutko was arrested in 1938 on charges of counter-revolutionary activities and was shot in 1941. His name became unmentionable in public and in print for the next several decades. Conveniently, by then Agadzhanova had already lost the second part of her last name.

After 1938 she returned to cinema, but worked primarily as a script consultant, script editor, and the head of the screenwriting department at Soiuzdetfilm, which was formed on the basis of Mezhrabpomfilm in 1936. Little is known of her later works. In 1945, during the period of biopics of pre-revolutionary creative artists and military commanders, she claimed to be working on a script based on the life of 19th century pianist Anton Rubinshtein, according to personal files held at the Archive of the State Russian Institute of Cinematography. Her personal collection, kept at the State Archive of the Russian Federation, consists almost entirely of documents dating from early 1940s to the late 1960s, and retains only a very fragmentary draft of the Rubinshtein script. There are, however, several versions of another 1940s script, Viktuar/Victoire, which was not produced either.

Between 1945 and 1952 Agadzhanova taught screenwriting at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), but had to leave due to her declining health. She spent the last decades of her life bedridden, occasionally receiving biographers and journalists and, in the realm of film studies, becoming known almost exclusively as author of the script Battleship Potemkin. This was an honor that had been denied to her during Eisenstein’s life (Cherniavskaia 1969, n.p.; Kirillova 1970, n.p.).

See also: Ol’ga Rakhmanova

Bibliography

Agadzhanova, Nina. “1905 god.” Sovetskii ekran 33 (1925): 3-4.

------. “Zametki o refleksakh v kino.” Kino-front 9-10 (1926): 13-14.

Agadzhanova-Shutko, Nina. “Kakovy dostizheniia?” Kino 46 (15 November 1927): 4.

Agadzhanova-Shutko, Nina F. “Otryvki iz stsenariia ‘1905 god’.” Kino-zhurnal A.R.K. 11-12 (1925): 5-6.

Alpers, Boris. “2 Bul'di 2.” Kino i zhizn' 32-33 (1930): 5-6.

Ari. “Ekran za nedeliu.” Bakinskii rabochii (21 August 1929): n.p.

Cherniavskaia, L. “Knizhka v chernom pereplete.” Vechernii Leningrad (16 December 1969): n.p.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “Nooneh.” Immoral Memories: An Autobiography by Sergei M. Eisenstein. Trans. Herbert Marshall. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1982. 80-83.

G., V. “V tylu u belykh.” Pravda 40 (18 February 1925): 8.

Khokhlova, Ekaterina. “Kto iavliaetsia avtorom ‘Bronenostsa Potemkin’?” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 16 (1992): 140-46.

Khrenov, Nikolai. “K probleme sotsiologii i psikhologii kino 20-kh godov.”  Voprosy kinoiskusstva. Vol. 17. Moscow: Nauka, 1976. 163-84.

Kin. “V tylu u belykh.” Tikho-okeanskaia zvezda (16 October 1925): n.p.

Kino-nedelia 2 (6 January 1925): n.p. [cover page]

Kirillova, Anna. “Po prizyvu revoliutsii.” Sovetskaia kul'tura (15 January 1970): n.p.

Kotenko, Evgenii, and Vasilii Sugoniai. Sviaznoi Moskvy. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1975.

Kuleshov, Lev. Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh. Vol. 2. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988.

Leiberov, Igor,' and Zinaida Peregudova. Podvig Nune: Dokumental'naia povest' o N.F. Agadzhanovoi. Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1985.

Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. 3rd ed. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton UP, 1982.

“Stsenaristy.” Kino-zhurnal A.R.K. (October 1925): 37.

V., A. “V tylu u belykh.”  Krasnoe Chernomor'e [Novorossiisk] (18 September 1927): n.p.

Vii, E. “‘Bazar pokhoti’ (Beseda s rezhisserom V.I. Inkizhinovym).” Kino 20 (4 August 1925): 2.

Vol'nik, O. and P. Romanov. “Veteran sovetskogo kino.” Sovetskaia kul'tura (7 March 1963): n.p.

Archival Paper Collections:

Agadzhanova Nina Ferdinandovna. Fonds R1815. State Archive of the Russian Federation.

Letters of Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko to Sergei Eisenstein. Fonds 1923 (Eisenstein Collection), inventory list 1, file 1596; inventory list 2, file 1785. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Personal file. Agadzhanova Nina Ferdinandovna. [held in actual archive, not research collections]. State Russian Institute of Cinematography.

Citation

Ryabchikova, Natalie. "Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-rswd-9k23>

Lotte Reiniger

by Frances Guerin, Anke Mebold

Lotte Reiniger made over sixty films, of which eleven are considered lost and fifty to have survived. Of the surviving films for which she had full artistic responsibility, eleven were created in the silent period if the three-part Doktor Dolittle (1927-1928) is considered a single film. Reiniger is known to have worked on—or contributed silhouette sequences to—at least another seven films in the silent era, and a further nine in the sound era. Additionally, there is evidence of her involvement in a number of film projects that remained at conceptual or pre-production stages.

Lotte Reiniger with paper doll. PC

Lotte Reiniger with paper figure. Private Collection.

Reiniger is best known for her pioneering silhouette films, in which paper and cardboard cut-out figures, weighted with lead, and hinged at the joints—the more complex the characters’ narrative role, the larger their range of movements, and therefore, the more hinges for the body—were hand-manipulated from frame to frame and shot via stop motion photography. The figures were placed on an animation table and usually lit from below. In some of her later sound films the figures were lit both from above and below, depending on the desired visual effect. Framed with elaborate backgrounds made from varying layers of translucent paper or colorful acetate foils for color films, Reiniger’s characters were created and animated with exceptional skill and precision.

Reiniger’s early films ranged in length from brief shorts of less than 300 feet to Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed/The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1923-1926), a film that is arguably the first full-length animated feature and is thus considered to be among the milestones of cinema history. Reiniger wrote the screenplays for her films and worked as a major contributor on a number of live action films, for example, as assistant director on films made by her husband Carl Koch. These included the wartime Italian productions Tosca (1940-1941) and La Signora dell’Ovest/The Lady of the West (1941-1942). Among her earliest involvement in motion pictures was her production of decorative silhouettes for the titles of feature films directed by Paul Wegener and Rochus Gliese: Rübezahl’s Hochzeit/Rübezahl’s Marriage (1916), Der Rattenfänger von Hameln/The Pied Piper of Hamlyn (1918), and Apokalypse/Apocalypse (1918). She also made animated silhouette sequences as well as shadow play sequences included in Die Schöne Prinzessin von China/The Beautiful Princess of China (1917) and Der Verlorene Schatten/The Lost Shadow (1920).

Lotte Reiniger. PC

Lotte Reiniger, portrait. Private Collection.

In addition to producing silhouette animation films, Reiniger was equally engaged by live shadow puppetry, which was at times recorded on film and used in live-action films. For example, in 1933, Reiniger made a shadow play sequence for G.W. Pabst’s Don Quixote (1933). In 1937 she created “Le Pont Cassé,” which translates to “the Broken Bridge,” a short shadow play sequence filmed for Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938). This famed shadow play was the most popular piece by François Dominique Séraphin, founder of the Theatre Séraphin in Versailles in 1770. Reiniger’s filmed play emulated Séraphin’s style and was thus an homage to the roots of European shadow play.

The German Years

Before she left Nazi Germany and moved to England in November 1935, Reiniger had been deeply immersed in the cultural and intellectual avant-garde world of pre-World War II Berlin. Among her circle of friends in 1920s Berlin were such well-known artists as Walther Ruttmann, who contributed to Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, and playwright Bertolt Brecht. The earliest films that Reiniger realized with full creative freedom and responsibility were produced by the Institut für Kulturforschung [Institute for Cultural Research] in Berlin. These early films include Das Ornament des Verliebten Herzens/The Ornament of Hearts in Love (1919), Amor und das Standhafte Liebespaar/Love and the Steadfast Lovers (1920), Der Fliegende Koffer/The Flying Suitcase (1921), and Der Stern von Bethlehem/The Star of Bethlehem (1921). Established in 1919 by Hans Cürlis as a production enterprise for educational films, the Institute was also a testing ground for experimental animation. At the Institute, which was equally committed to film as an art form and as a highly effective means of communication and education, Reiniger worked with a number of other prominent young intellectuals. Among them was Berthold Bartosch, a collaborator on many of her films during the 1920s and, most importantly, Reiniger’s soon-to-be-husband, Koch. At the time, he was making educational films and documentaries for the Institute. Koch was interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking, specifically experiments with methods of animation. This made him an ideal collaborator on Reiniger’s films on which he was both camera operator and fellow animator.

Screenshot, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1923-26).

The short silhouette animation films were received with critical acclaim and lauded as art, yet financing such film productions proved difficult throughout Reiniger’s life. Reiniger and Koch thus supplemented their income with work for Julius Pinschewer, an early producer of advertising films. Two of possibly four animated silhouette advertisements by Reiniger are known to survive: Das Geheimnis der Marquise/The Marquise’s Secret (1922), which promoted Nivea skin care products, and Barcarole (1924) for Mauxion’s chocolate desserts. From 1923 into the early sound era, Reiniger’s most significant works were produced by Comenius-Film, a company financed by friend and patron Louis Hagen Sr. and managed by Koch. Following Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, Comenius-Film produced four more Reiniger films: The three-part Doktor Dolittle series, based on Hugh Lofting’s stories, and Die Jagd nach dem Glück/The Hunt for Luck (1930), a live-action feature co-directed by Reiniger, Koch, and Gliese with Renoir and Catherine Hessling in major parts. Although initially produced as a silent film, The Hunt for Luck was released in May 1930 with a soundtrack produced in post-synch. Today, however, only the silhouette animation sequence survives.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed? BFI.

Scene from The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1923-26). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

Screenshot, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1923-26).

In 1926 Reiniger traveled to Egypt and then to Greece in 1936. While traveling, she studied the shadow play as well as the tradition of silhouette representation of the human figure. The popular Greek puppet show tradition of Karagiozis became a significant influence on Reininger’s work, supplementing her knowledge of ancient Eastern and Oriental performance traditions. Reiniger’s notes, screenplays, storyboards, and in particular her music and opera films, testify to the role that classical music especially played in the conception of her films from the silent era onwards. Classical music dictated the movements of the shadow figures, and she used the music of Mozart, Bizet, and Offenbach, but also collaborated with contemporaries such as Wolfgang Zeller, Paul Dessau, and Benjamin Britten, as well as her friends Eric Walter White and Peter Gellhorn.

Beyond the cinema, Reiniger designed costumes and sets for theatre and opera, staged puppet shows and shadow plays, and illustrated books, newspapers, and magazines. The study of the documents that Reininger left behind indicates that she was an accomplished artist working in ink as well as watercolor, as well as a writer and a poet. In addition, she occasionally gave public lectures on the animation process and experimental film history. Reiniger’s breadth as a multi-talented artist and filmmaker is apparent in the archival material: doodles, notes, letters, diaries, sketches, water colors, scripts, storyboards, silhouettes, as well as the finished films are evidence of the care given each stage of the film production as an art form.

Screenshot, Papageno (1935).

That her contributions to film history are not better known is perhaps attributable to her choice of subject matter: the majority of her silhouette films are based on fairy tales, fables, or ancient myths. Contrary to generally held beliefs, however, the treatment of the material is more suited to adult than to child audiences. Further, finding the target audience for her music films proved difficult. Immediately embarking on the production of music films such as Zehn Minuten Mozart/Ten Minute Mozart (1930) with the advent of sound, she realized something quite new—highly condensed, parody films of well-known operas like Carmen (1933) and Papageno (1935), films that are most appealing to an audience familiar with those operas. And yet, because of their ironic approach to the source material, and perhaps due to the use of film, as opposed to opera itself, they did not appeal sufficiently to these audiences to succeed in the German market and her productions struggled to find distribution. Additionally, the subjects chosen for her filmmaking—and also her choice of friends and artistic collaborators—did not meet the criteria set forth by film politics in Nazi Germany.

The Years in Britain and Europe

With the outset of war, on September 1, 1939, Reiniger left for Italy to rejoin her husband who had moved with Renoir to Rome in August for work on Tosca. Soon, without Renoir, Koch and Reiniger worked jointly on two live-action features, the opera-themed Tosca, which premiered in January 1941, and then the western La Signora dell’ Ovest. Before the end of 1939, Lotte had already completed her only Italian solo short, a film of Donizetti’s opera “L’Elisir d’Amore.” All three Italian film works were commissioned productions of Scalera Film S.p.a., Rome. In September 1943, on account of the worsening war-time situation in Italy—which had declared war on Germany on October 13, 1943—Reiniger and Koch were advised by the embassy to leave without delay. On September 22, 1943, they moved from Rome to Venice, and on Christmas 1943 they headed back towards Berlin, not least because Reiniger’s mother was there, in ill-health and alone. Surprisingly, back in the capital, Reiniger succeeded in receiving a film commission, and the rather prolonged production of Die Goldene Gans (1944-1947) secured their daily bread. In 1948 she left Germany permanently, and in 1961 she and Koch became British citizens. Since the 1970s Reiniger’s work has received limited but constant attention via festivals and specialized cinema programming, facilitating re-discovery by the film history community. Nevertheless, attention has been focused on the films produced and re-released by the British Primrose Productions in the 1950s. Most prominent among Reiniger’s now widely known films are fairy tales from the silent era, music films from the first half of the 1930s, and the popular series of twelve children’s fairy tale films produced in England in 1953 and 1954.

The limited number of films available on 35mm or 16mm prints has also resulted in an underestimation of the range of Reiniger’s work, and those made just prior to, during, and after World War II have hitherto remained almost unseen. For example, the information films she made on commission for the General Post Office and Crown Film Unit are not known outside of Britain. The multinational scope of her work, thus its ostensible lack of cohesion, and the spread of Reininger’s work across archives in Germany, England, Italy, France, and Canada is partly responsible for the incomplete retrospective reception and the paucity of scholarship. In a similar vein, many of her black and white works are widely seen and applauded while her equally impressive work in color made in Britain is ignored, forgotten, or lost. Fortunately, there is an abundance of readily available historical material, on paper and film, awaiting research.

Lotte Reiniger at work. PC

Lotte Reiniger at work. Private Collection.

Close examination of individual films is highly rewarding: Reiniger’s productions of all genres—fairy tales, opera parodies, advertisements—are exciting and strange films, filled with contradictions, satirical commentary, and often, strong erotic undertones. For example, in Der Kleine Schornsteinfeger/The Little Chimney Sweep (1934), Belinda, the young, pretty protagonist is abducted by a Mohock, or “gangster,” after the two have watched a passionate erotic stage play. The version re-released by Primrose in 1953/1954 was shortened, stripped of its original soundtrack as well as the two erotically charged “seduction scenes”—a theater performance and an aria sung by the gangster—in order to accommodate the targeted child audience and television time slot. A wealth of unexamined material, including personal letters, diaries, as well as sketches, screenplays, notes, drawings, and storyboards, sometimes set to music, await examination in the Lotte Reiniger Estate Collection in the Stadtmuseum Tübingen [City Museum of Tübingen]. Likewise, the surviving production records in the National Archives in Kensington, which trace the production history of films made on commission for the British government, offer a starting point for future research.

Bibliography

Beckerman, Howard. “Animated Women.” Filmmakers Newsletter (Summer 1974): 40-42.

Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Centro Internazionale per il Cinema di Animazione. Omaggio a Lotte Reiniger. Turin, 1982.

Coté, Guy. “The Films of Lotte Reiniger.” Film Culture 9 (1956): 20.

------. “Flatland Fairy Tales.” Film (October 1954): n.p.

Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1982.

Dastidar, Abhijit Ghosh. “Lotte Reiniger’s Silhouettes.” Frontier India. n.d. n.p. http://frontierindia.scriptmania.com/page30.htm

Dütsch, Werner, ed. Lotte Reiniger. Eine Dokumentation. Berlin: Deutschen Kinemathek, 1969.

Ferbier, Carola et al., eds. Lotte Reiniger. Filme/FilmsMünchen: Goethe Institut, 1999.

Gassen, Heiner, and Lotte Reiniger. Lotte Reiniger, Carl Koch, Jean Renoir: Szenen Einer Freundschaft [anlässlich Einer Ausstellung Im Stadtmuseum Tübingen, 16.6.- 14.8.1994]. München : CICIM, 1994.

Gelder, Paul. “Lotte Reiniger at Eighty.” Sight & Sound 3 (1979): 155.

Happ, Alfred, and Lotte Reiniger. Lotte Reiniger: 1899 - 1981 Schöpferin Einer Neuen Silhouettenkunst. Tübingen: Kulturamt, 2004.

------. Lotte Reiniger: Schauspieler-silhouetten, Mozart-Opern, Andersen-Märchen: Aspekte E. Lebenswerks. E. Ausstellung Im Sommer 1982, Städt. Sammlungen. Tübingen: Kulturamt, 1982

Hurst, Heike. “Zum Tode Lotte Reiniger.” Frauen und Film (September 1981): 48-49.

Jouvanceau, Pierre. Le Film De Silhouettes: The Silhouette Film. Genova: Le Mani, 2004.

Kemp, Philip. “Reiniger, Lotte (1899-1981).” BFI Screenonline. n.d. n.p. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/528134/

Leslie, Esther. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso, 2002.

“Lotte Reiniger au pays des ombres.” Image et Son (December 1981): 12.

Lotte Reiniger. Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Landesbildstelle Stuttgart. Stuttgart, undated.

Moritz, William. “Lotte Reiniger.” Animation World Network (1996): n.p. http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.3/articles/moritz1.3.html

Pilling, Jayne. Women and Animation: A Compendium. London: British Film Institute, Exhibition & Distribution Division, 1992.

Primrose Film Productions/Kinderkino München e.V. Lotte Reiniger: Erfinderin des Silhouettenfilms. München: Das Freie Buch, undated.

Reiniger, Lotte, and Margit Downar. Lotte Reiniger, Silhouettenfilm Und Schattentheater: 2. Juni-17. August 1979, Ausstellung Des Puppentheatermuseums Im Münchner Stadtmuseum. München: Lipp, 1979.

Rondolino, Gianni. Lotte Reiniger. Torino: Laboratorio Lanterna Magica, 1982.

Russett, Robert, and Cecile Starr. Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1976.

Schnorr, Günter. Lotte Reiniger. Bochum: Deutsches Institut für Puppenspiel, 1978.

Simmons, John R. “She Made First Cartoon Feature.” Films and Filming (December 1955): 24.

Speed, Louise. “The Adventures of Prince Achmed.” Marvels and Tales vol. 17, no. 1 (April 2003): 181-183.

Starr, Cecile.“Lotte Reiniger's Fabulous Film Career.” Sightlines (Summer 1980): 17-19.

Strobel, Christel, ed. Lotte Reiniger–Erfinderin des Silhouettenfilms [brochure]. München: Kinder-Jugendfilm Korrespondenz, 2000.

Tichy, Wolfram and Walter Schobert, eds. Lotte Reiniger, David W. Griffith, Harry Langdon. Frankfurt/Main: Kommunales Kino, 1972.

Weaver, Randolph. “Prince Achmed and Other Animated Silhouettes.” Theatre Arts (June 1931): 108.

White, Eric. Walking Shadows. London: The Hogarth Press. 1931.

Archival Paper Collections:

Lotte Reiniger Personal Estate Collection, Signatures R1461 to R1487, and Antiquariat Cassel & Lampe Collection [unconfirmed prior provenance: Private Collection Lawyer Heinz Berg]. Stadtmuseum Tübingen.

Lotte Reiniger Silhouette Artwork and Primrose Productions Deposit Files. Deutsches Filminstitut.

Production files General Post Office Film Unit and Crown Film Unit Films. The National Archives, Kew.

Large collection of original artwork and notebooks relating to Lotte Reiniger [uncatalogued]. Huntley Film Archives.

National Cinematography Collection. Silhouette artwork and cut-outs by Lotte Reiniger, including silhouette artwork entitled The Dance in the Park (1956), signed by Reiniger and cut-outs of dancers from Swan Lake by Lotte Reiniger. The National Media Museum.

Files relating to General Post Office Film Unit (programmes, catalogues), including a synopsis of The Tocher (1937/1938). The Postal Museum, Royal Mail Archive.

Lotte Reiniger Collection. Unpublished scripts, press books, designs, stills, ephemera. British Film Institute.

Several specific collections at the British Film Institute hold material related to Reiniger: a detailed list of archival materials at British Film Institute, Special Collections

Citation

Guerin, Frances; Anke Mebold. "Lotte Reiniger." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6m3p-mh27>

Rosa Porten

by Annette Förster

Rosa Porten’s work as a screenwriter, an actress, and a film director has been practically neglected in film history, but what she accomplished in the German silent cinema is truly noteworthy. In a two-decade career, from 1906 until 1928, she created a cinematic oeuvre that was substantial, original, versatile, and entertaining. The exact number of films to which Rosa Porten contributed is uncertain, but historical substantiation points to around forty titles. Between 1916 and 1919 alone, she wrote and co-directed at least twenty-four catching comedies and gripping social dramas and in most of them she played the protagonist. Even more notable in retrospect is that Porten’s stories often privileged the perspective of a female character who, with non-conformist pragmatism or jokey recalcitrance, seizes her chance to defy bourgeois conventions and role patterns. In the trade press, the comedies were often praised: 1e Internationale Film-Zeitung highlighted the “überschäumende Komik” [scintillating jocoseness] of Die Film-Kathi (1918) (1918, 47); Der Kinematograph noted the “herzerfrischenden” [heart-freshening] humor in Die Erzkokette (1917) (1917, n.p.); both Der Film and 1e Internationale Film-Zeitung noticed the serious undertones in Der Neueste Stern vom Varieté (1917) and Das Musikantenmädel (1918) respectively (1917, 57; 1918, 58).

Rosa Porten. PC

Rosa Porten. Private Collection.

My fascination with Rosa Porten was triggered by Wanda’s Trick (1918), a comedy with close to feminist wit brought to my attention by Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (EYE Filmmuseum), with whom I prepared the film program for the Women and the Silent Screen V Conference in Stockholm in 2008. The director, Dr. R. Portegg, was identified, but that this name was a pseudonym used by the couple Rosa Porten and Franz Eckstein in their function as co-directors I gathered from the website of the Deutsches Filminstitut, where Gabriele Hansch and Gerlinde Waz had uploaded their rare research on German women filmmakers in the silent era (now f-films). This information motivated Rongen-Kaynakçi to restore another, yet incomplete, print of a Dr. R. Portegg comedy, Die Landpomeranze/The Unwieldy Country Girl (1917). A consecutive revelation was the homage to Rosa Porten initiated by Jeanpaul Goergen in 2010, which included Dr. R. Portegg’s drama Das Opfer der Yella Rogesius/The Sacrifice of Yella Rogesius (1917). The latest archival finds were prompted by Mariann Lewinsky, who invited me to curate a program of comedies by and with Rosa Porten at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2014 in Bologna. Not only were brand-new restorations provided of Wem gehört das Kind?/To Whom Belongs the Child? (1910), by Deutsche Kinemathek and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, and Das Teufelchen/The Imp (1917), by Österreichisches Filmmuseum, but also for the presumed lost comedy, Der Neueste Stern vom Varieté/The Latest Star in Vaudeville, rediscovered by Rongen-Kaynakçi at the EYE Filmmuseum. These rare prints and the scarce paper documentation offer intriguing glimpses of Rosa Porten’s appealing and extraordinary oeuvre.

Rosa Porten. PC

Rosa Porten. Private Collection.

Rosa Porten was a daughter of the opera singer, theatre director, and early filmmaker Franz Porten, and the older sister of Henny Porten, who would become the most popular German female star of the silent era. Before 1910 the careers of the sisters ran parallel, as both performed in their father’s Tonbilder. Such “sound pictures” consisted of a three to five minute, one-take scene to accompany a well-known song or opera aria, which was played from a record. The earliest Tonbild by Franz Porten, Meissner Porzellan (1906), presents the sisters in their screen debut. Rosa plays a female and Henny a male porcelain figurine who both come to life once they are taken out of their case and paper wrapping. The record is presumed lost, but the lyrics sang the praises of the china mentioned in the title and the music was a gavotte. Franz Porten made several more Tonbilder featuring his daughters, who initially sang the recorded songs, through which they attained some prominence as Geschwister Porten (Goergen 2012, 169). In 1910 Rosa and Henny likewise acted side by side in Wem gehört das Kind?, an eight minute, fast-paced comedy sending up predictable but mistaken doubts on the part of the female protagonists about one another.

Henny Porten used to mention that Rosa had convinced the producers at the Messter’s Projektion GmbH that her younger sister would be the suited actress to play the blind woman in the romance she had written, Das Liebesglück der Blinden/The Happiness of the Blind Woman (1911). According to Henny, an article in Illustrierte Filmwoche notes, this film gave an important boost to her career because fans kept asking for more films with her (Jacobsohn 1917, 120). For Rosa Porten, the appreciative reception of the story in trade papers like Licht-Bild-Bühne (1911, 12) implied recognition as a professional screenwriter, an occupation which she kept up throughout her career. Want of credits makes it difficult to identify with due certainty her pre-war scenarios, but it is generally accepted that she wrote at least one more melodrama for her sister, Das grosse Schweigen/The Big Silence (1916). During the war years, reviews in the trade press, newspapers, and film magazines on and off pointed Rosa Porten out as the scenarist, most notably when she also played the female protagonist in films by Dr. R. Portegg. After 1918 she was usually properly accredited, for instance with the scripts for Asta Nielsen, Hedda Gabler (1924) and Die Schmetterlingsschlacht (1924), according to a 1924 program booklet for Die Schmetterlingsschlacht in Illustrierter Film-Kurier (n.p.). 

The retrievable highlight of Rosa Porten’s career constitutes the years 1916, 1917, and 1918, in which she and her husband, Franz Eckstein, were affiliated with the Treumann-Larsen Filmvertriebs-GmbH, the independent film production company (1913-1922) of the actors Wanda Treumann and Viggo Larsen. In these particularly prolific years she wrote scenarios for and co-directed, using the pseudonym Dr. R. Portegg, at least twenty-four feature-length films. In three dramas and two comedies the popular actress Wanda Treumann played the protagonist, in some ten comedies and six dramas Rosa Porten herself acted the principal role. In conformity with the German star system, initiated by Asta Nielsen, these films were marketed as “Wanda Treumann Serie” or “Rosa Porten Serie.” According to an article in Illustrierte Filmwoche by a critic under the pseudonym “Spectator,” it had been the managing director of the production company, Wanda’s husband Carl Treumann, who persuaded Rosa Porten to embody in person the characters originating from her fantasy:

Now, Rosa Porten’s resounding successes have shown that Mr. Treumann was right and corroborated that there is space for two film stars Porten in the world. The audience is now accustomed to admire and adore besides the blonde Henny the zesty Rosa–also because their profoundly dissimilar personalities assign to them types of roles which foreclose every rivalry from the outset (1917, 115).

Rosa Porten. DEK

Rosa Porten. Courtesy of the Deutsches Kinemathek.

While Henny was molded into the German prototype of the self-sacrificing, virtuous melodrama heroine, Rosa Porten fashioned for herself preferably comic characters, who mocked the gutless and idleness of (men of) the upper class and crossed gender boundaries with gusto. This is substantiated by the extant two reels of Die Landpomeranze and in Der Neueste Stern vom Variété, in which she plays a farmer’s daughter and a vaudeville artiste, respectively. The first concocts a range of comical pranks to shake off the patrician whom her father envisions as her fiancé, even cross-dressing as his valet to marry him off to the “finance lady” whom he matches better. The vaudeville artiste transmits the assertiveness, which she demonstrates in her stage act as a boxer, to her private life with the aim of hooking her spoiled and feeble-minded fiancé. To be sure, the tone of these films is unconditionally nonsensical, but their spunky humor holds the promise that a morale in which women are expected to be obedient, passive, and virtuous was due to be abolished. Rosa Porten’s female protagonists are recalcitrant against conventionality, gutsy in finding solutions, and carefree in relationships. Her comedies, moreover, are ultimately nonjudgmental about whomever’s conduct, which makes them pleasant for everybody. On the other hand, they reverberate the all too real insecurities women and men experienced about the social order and gender relationships that the war was bringing about. This is equally tangible in the two surviving comedies by Dr. R. Portegg in which Wanda Treumann played the female protagonist. Stressing the realistic propensity of character and plot, Treumann plays her roles with a mix of comical obstinacy and decorous pride in whatever hilarious or precarious situations Rosa Porten’s scenario and co-direction put her. Porten thus created for herself a distinct comic screen persona, but also adjusted her comedy to the aptitudes of other actresses.

The association with contemporary actuality is further suggested by the films’ realistic settings, such as a cigarette factory, a typing office, a farm, and outdoor scenes in parks and streets, which add a down-to-earth flavor. This even holds for the drama Das Opfer der Yella Rogesius, of which the climax consists of a horse race by the former circus girl Yella set in a hippodrome. The perspective of the female protagonist is privileged again and allows the film, with its tragic ending, to contrast an upper class man’s lack of fortitude with a working girl’s loyal and plucky pragmatism. Whether wrapped in humor or presented as drama, the female protagonists’ resilience to get a life that they envision seems to be a recurring motif in Rosa Porten’s films from the war years.

Bibliography

Förster, Annette. “Dr. R. Portegg, I presume? Comedies by and with Rosa Porten.” Catalogue Il Cinema Ritrovato. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2014. 48-54.

Goergen, Jeanpaul. “Vom Tonbild zum Tonfilm. Henny Porten singt und spricht.” In Henny Porten–Gretchen und Germania. Neue Studien über den ersten deutschen Filmstar. Eds. Jürgen Kasten and Jeanpaul Georgen. Berlin: Cinegraph Babelsberg, 2012. 169-177.

Jacobsohn, Egon. “Henny Porten und der Film.” Illustrierte Filmwoche 18 (1917): 120.

Porten, Rosa. Die Filmprinzess. Roman aus der Kinowelt. Berlin: Eysler, 1919.

Program booklet. Die Schmetterlingsschlacht. Illustrierter Film-Kurier 60 (1924): n.p.

Rev. Das Liebesglück der Blinden. Licht-Bild-Bühne (7 January 1911): 12.

Rev. Das Musikantenmädel. 1e Internationale Film-Zeitung (23 November 1918): 58.

Rev. Der Neueste Stern vom Varieté. Der Film (19 May 1917): 57.

Rev. Die ErzkoketteDer Kinematograph (25 July 1917): n.p.

Rev. Die Film-Kathi. 1e Internationale Film-Zeitung (7 December 1918): 47

Spectator. Rosa Porten. Zu unserem Titelbilde.” Illustrierte Filmwoche 26/27 (1917): 115

Waz, Gerlinde, and Gabriele Hansch. Biography Rosa Porten. Film Pioneers in Germany. A Contribution to Film History. Berlin, 1998 [unpublished]. http://f-films.deutsches-filminstitut.de/biographien/f_porten_bio.htm

Citation

Förster, Annette. "Rosa Porten." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-q5qw-0p84>

Ellen O’Mara Sullivan

by Donna Casella

Ellen O’Mara Sullivan and her husband, James M. Sullivan, started what scholars have called the most prolific indigenous film company of the silent period, the Film Company of Ireland (FCOI). The company began trading in Ireland in 1916, producing primarily historical melodramas and romantic comedies and dramas, all focusing on Irish culture and/or the historical battle for political autonomy from Great Britain. The films had wide release in Dublin and the provinces, and a select few opened in Great Britain and the U.S. Though Sullivan and the FCOI have been the subject of some study, O’Mara Sullivan has received little scholarly attention. Private collections and archival material, however, point to her active participation as the FCOI’s co-director, running the company with her husband until her death in 1919.

Ellen O'Mara Sullivan (p/o). PC

Ellen O’Mara Sullivan. Private Collection. 

Shortly after O’Mara Sullivan’s 1910 marriage to the Irish-born American, discussions began on an indigenous Irish film company. In March 1916, her husband and banker Henry Fitzgibbon registered the company in Dublin, according to the “Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Film Company of Ireland, Limited,” held in the National Archives of Ireland. The agreement indicates that anyone holding shares could function as company director (n.p). Fitzgibbon appears to have served only as a financial advisor. Sources, such as the James O’Mara Papers at the National Library of Ireland, however, acknowledge both O’Mara Sullivan and her husband as working company directors. She came from a wealthy Limerick family that not only fronted the money to start the company, but also financed its productions. Liam Ó Laoghaire’s handwritten notes and his unpublished interview with her daughter, Sheila Sullivan Callaghan, confirm O’Mara Sullivan’s role as co-director. In the interview, her daughter notes that the FCOI was the family business and that both her parents were active in production and sales. Dr. Michael Rynne further identifies O’Mara Sullivan as one of the directors in a 1965 letter to historian Poinsias Ó Conluain. Rynne explains that he visited the company offices several times a week in 1917-1918 and that O’Mara Sullivan and her husband were the only directors taking an active role in company business. Rynne played a starving teenager in one of the company’s films, Knocknagow (1918), and his mother Mary (O’Mara Sullivan’s sister) also had a small role in the film. According to O’Mara Sullivan’s granddaughter, novelist Mary Rose Callaghan, family members frequently served as actors, crew, and company workers.

O’Mara Sullivan’s involvement in the shipping, distribution, and marketing of their films in the U.S. is documented in letters to her niece Hazel and husband Karl. The letters are housed in Mary Rose Callaghan’s Private Collection and are explored in studies by Dan Schultz and Maryanne Felter. In 1918 O’Mara Sullivan and her husband left their young children in the care of a nanny and went to New York to oversee the sales of what she continually refers to in the letters as “our films.” They also launched a branch of the company in the U.S. Her uncle Joseph, an opera singer, was on the board of directors and spent time in the U.S. organizing the company, according to documents in the James O’Mara Papers. In one of the first letters to Hazel on July 27, 1918, O’Mara Sullivan talks about having to “pawn her rings” to get the films out of customs. Other letters discuss sale negotiations, where the films are screening, and successful runs.

O’Mara Sullivan and her husband initially distributed their films in commercial and private picture houses, as well as in schools and churches, particularly in Irish-American neighborhoods on the east coast. Her letters do not always indicate which films the company marketed. However, the historical melodrama Knocknagow (adapted by Mrs. N. F. Patton) is discussed several times. Presumably the other films included some of the romantic comedies and dramas not destroyed in the fires that The Irish Limelight in January 1917 reports consumed the company offices in Dublin (3). An article on December 10, 1918 in The Boston Globe notes Knocknagow’s screening together with the shorter Widow Malone (1916) at Boston’s Tremont Temple that month (3). O’Mara Sullivan’s letters indicate that their films did well. When both she and her husband returned to Ireland in 1919, company officials remained. They added another historical melodrama, Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn (1920), and a propaganda film, the Dáil Bonds Film (1919), to their repertoire. The latter is a non-fiction short featuring notable Republicans in a bond drive to raise money for the newly-formed Republic. The film was screened in the U.S. and Ireland. Gary Rhodes, in his study of Irish-American press response to the U.S. screenings, notes that Knocknagow also opened in New York during this period in a double bill with The Miser’s Gift (1916) (2012, n.p). Felter and Schultz explain that the company quickly faced difficulties connected both to the competitiveness of the American market and the changing political scene in Ireland (2004, 35-40). They note a failure to meet theatre demands and the waning interest of an Irish-American audience. They blame the loss of interest on the political in-fighting over the 1921 Anglo/Irish Treaty that led to the 1922-23 Irish Civil War. FCOI director and actor John MacDonagh also noted the company’s inability to navigate the intricacies of the American film market (1976, 10). The U.S. office closed its doors in 1922.

Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn (1920). IED

Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn (1920). Courtesy of the Irish Film Institute. 

While ample evidence of her role as company co-director exists, some confusion has arisen over a possible writing credit on Knocknagow. Schultz and Felter note that O’Mara Sullivan’s appearance as the copyright holder on Knocknagow indicates she wrote the adaptation (2012, n.p; Felter 2013, n.p.). Patton is widely acknowledged in newspaper reviews like in The Clonmel Chronicle and credit reports  as having scripted the adaptation from the Charles Kickham novel of the same name (1918, 5), though scholars have not discovered any details about Patton’s personal life or her writing career beyond Knocknagow. O’Mara Sullivan could have been assigned the copyright as either the financial backer and/or as the company director. Kevin Rockett believes that the copyright is most likely the result of her family’s investment in the production (2015, n.p.).

What little scholarship does exist focuses on the nationalist underpinnings of the films. Scholars have argued that the company’s work was heavily influenced by the nationalist agenda of Ireland’s theatre companies. They even recruited actors and directors from the Irish Theatre Company and the Abbey Theatre (Rockett 1988, 16-32; Barton 23-31). In keeping with the cultural renaissance of the period, scenics showcased the countryside and historical places. Fiction films featured mostly a pastoral Ireland, presented idealized Irish characters, and explored nationalist themes like the colonial struggles under Great Britain. The historical melodramas, like Knocknagow and Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn deal directly with those struggles, focussing on Catholic/Protestant disputes and the evictions and poverty that resulted from tenant/landlord differences of the 18th and 19th centuries. Romantic comedies and dramas, like An Unfair Love Affair (1916), The Miser’s Gift, Rafferty’s Rise (1917), O’Neil of the Glen (source writer Mrs. M. [Margaret] T. Pender, 1916), and When Love Came to Gavin Burke (1917) assert their nationalism through Irish characterizations distinct from what Mary Trotter identifies as the 19th century stage image of the simple, sometimes clownish Irish peasants that appealed to British audiences (38-39)According to scholars, the FCOI films did present stock characters, but cast them in a positive light. As a result, these characters became important features of Irish national discourse. Men are presented as predictable heroes fighting for Irish rights, while women are drawn as figurative representations of the land (Meaney 238-39; Casella 60). Advertisements and reviews of the period also promoted the nationalist agenda by noting the films were made in Ireland by an all Irish cast and crew.

The attention to nationalist issues in these films is not surprising, given O’Mara Sullivan and her husband’s political leanings. Both supported an independent Ireland and subsequent formation of an Irish republic. According to accounts, Sullivan was briefly jailed following the Easter Rising, though at the time he claimed to be too busy with the FCOI to take part in the Rising (LaVelle 111-13). O’Mara Sullivan came from an active Republican family. Her father, Stephen, was mayor of Limerick. Brother James was Sinn Féin TD in the Dáil Éireann (Irish parliament), supervised finances under Éamon de Valera’s first presidency, and was an early Sinn Féin financial director. Research thus far does not address the extent of O’Mara Sullivan’s political activities. However when she died in 1919, a May 23 obituary in the Limerick Leader noted that she was afforded a full nationalist funeral (3).

The FCOI ceased production in 1920 after O’Mara Sullivan died of typhoid nursing her son who had contracted the disease. Noting her contribution to the FCOI, a writer going by the initials J.A.P. and working for the British trade, The Bioscope, predicted that her death would interrupt the company’s production. However, the writer expected the company to continue making films (1919, 98). The FCOI released only three more films: the Dáil Bonds Film, Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn, and Paying the Rent (1920). All were in preproduction or production while she was still alive. Sullivan distanced himself from these remaining productions, eventually moving to the U.S. where he worked as a lawyer and newspaper journalist. When the FCOI folded, some of the directors and actors formed Irish PhotoPlays, making three films: The Casey Millions (1922), Cruiskeen Lawn (1922, released 1924), and Wicklow Gold (1922). FCOI regular John MacDonagh directed all three films, which followed the FCOI’s nationalist model.

The full extent of O’Mara Sullivan’s influence on the company productions still needs to be documented, as well as her involvement in the distribution of the films in Ireland and Great Britain. In addition her input on the U.S. screenings needs further research. However, preliminary study suggests that the FCOI was a joint effort between her and her husband, and that they both shared a desire to use the arts to further a nationalist agenda.

See also: Mary Manning, Mrs. M.T. Pender

Bibliography

Barton, Ruth. Irish National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Callaghan, Mary Rose. Personal Interview. 10 June 2015.

Callaghan, Sheila Sullivan. Interview with Liam Ó Laoghaire. Audio cassette. Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection, Bray, IE.

Casella, Donna R. “Women and Nationalism in Indigenous Irish Filmmaking of the Silent Period.” In Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives. Eds. Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, and Lucia Tralli. Bologna: University of Bologna, 2013. 53-80.

“The Casey Millions.” Program. Irish Photo-Plays file. Liam Ó Laoghaire Archive. NLI.

“Casey’s Millions.” Dublin Evening Mail (26 July 1922): 3.

“Cinema Notes. New Irish Film.” Irish Times (9 Sept. 1922): 9.

Condon, Denis. Early Irish Cinema, 1895-1921. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008.

“Cruiskeen Lawn.” Kinematograph Weekly (4 Dec. 1924): 50-51.

“Death Notice.” Limerick Leader (19 May 1919): 3.

Donovan, Stephen. “Introduction: Ireland’s Own Film.” Screening the Past 33 (2012): n.p. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/02/introduction-ireland’s-own-film/

Downing, Taylor. “The Film Company of Ireland.” Sight & Sound 49.1 (Winter 1979/80): 42-45.

“Family Seeking to Save Sullivan.” n.d. n.p. Newspaper clippings. Liam Ó Laoghaire Archive. National Library of Ireland.

Felter, Maryanne. E-Mail Correspondence. 23 Sept. 2013.

------, and Daniel Schultz. “James Mark Sullivan and the Film Company of Ireland.” New Hibernia Review 8.2 (Summer 2004): 24-40.

------. “Selling Memories, Strengthening Nationalism: The Marketing of Film Company of Ireland's Silent Films in America.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 32.2 (Fall 2006): 10-20.

“The Film Co. of Ireland.” Irish Times (15 Aug. 1916): 3.

“Film Company of Ireland.” The Bioscope (14 Dec. 1916): i.

“Food of Love.” Advertisement. Dublin Evening Mail (4 Nov. 1916): 2.

“Four More Irish Rebels Are Executed in Dublin.” n.d.  n.p. Newspaper clippings. Liam Ó Laoghaire Archive. National Library of Ireland.

“From Lantern to Slide Show.” Memories in Focus. Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Dublin. 27 Apr. 1995. Television.  IFI Irish Film Archive RTÉ Archives .

Humphreys, Mark. “Stephen O'Mara.” Humphreys Family Tree (2015): n.p. http://humphrysfamilytree.com/OMara/stephen.html

“Interview with Kathleen Murphy.” The Irish Limelight 1.4 (April 1917): 6.

“Irish Film Production.” Irish Times (30 June 1916): 7.

“Irish Productions Find Their Feet.” Memories in Focus. Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Dublin. 4 May 1995 . Television.  IFI Irish Film Archive RTÉ Archives .

J.A.P. “Irish Notes. The Film Company of Ireland.” The Bioscope (5 June 1919): 98.

-----. “Irish Film’s Success.” The Bioscope (11 Nov. 1920): 91.

-----. “Irish Producers Inactive.” The Bioscope (24 June 1920): 105.

-----. “With the Film Company of Ireland.” The Irish Limelight 1.6 (June 1917): 10-11.

“James Mark Sullivan.” The National Encyclopedia. (n.d.): 362. Liam Ó Laoghaire Archive. National Library of Ireland.

Kelly, Stephen. “The Sinn Féin Millionaire: James O’Mara and the First American Bond-Certificate Drive, 1919-1921.” New Hibernia Review 15.4 (Winter 2011): 9-28.

“'Knock-Na-Gow'” is Real Story of Irish in Ireland.” The Boston Globe (10 Dec. 1918): 3.

“Knocknagow.” Advertisement. Irish Independent (24 Apr. 1918): 2.

“Knocknagow.” The Clonmel Chronicle (2 Feb. 1918): 5.

“Knocknagow: Filming of Kickham’s Famous Novel.” The Irish Limelight 1.5 (May 1917): 6.

“‘Knocknagow’ Given at Private Exhibition.” The Boston Globe (21 Oct. 1918): 12.

“Knocknagow.” Rev. The Bioscope (16 Oct. 1919): 58.

“Knocknagow.” Rev. Variety (30 Sept. 1921): 35.

Knocknagow. Script. Rare and Manuscript Collections, 3924. Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library.

“Late Mrs. E. Sullivan.” Limerick Leader (23 May 1919): 3.

LaVelle, Patricia. James O’Mara: The Original Sinn Feiner: 1873-1948. Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1961.

MacDonagh, John. “Film Production in Ireland in the Early Days.” In Cinema Ireland 1895-1976. Ed. Liam O'Leary. Pamphlet. Dublin: Dublin Arts Festival, 1976. 10-13.

“Marriage of Miss Nell O’Mara.” Limerick Leader (12 Oct. 1910): 3.

Meaney, Geradine. “Landscapes of Desire: Women and Ireland on Film.” Women: A Cultural Review 9.3 (1998): 237–51.

“Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Film Company of Ireland, Limited.” (3 Mar. 1916): n.p. Dublin Records Office. M5190. National Archives of Ireland.

“The Miser’s Gift.” Advertising Leaflet. Paper Collections, Box 157. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

“Mrs. James M. Sullivan Dies in Ireland.” The Gaelic American (14 June 1919): n.p.  Liam Ó Laoghaire Archive. National Library of Ireland.

Ó Conluain, Proinsias. “Ireland’s First Films.” Sight & Sound 23.2 (Oct-Dec. 1953): 96-98.

O’Connell, Diog. Phone interview. 4 Aug. 2015.

Ó Laoghaire, Liam. Handwritten Notes. J. M. Sullivan file. Liam Ó Laoghaire Archive. National Library of Ireland.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” Advertisement. The Bioscope (24 Aug. 1916): 754.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” Advertisement. Dublin Evening Mail (12 Aug. 1916): 2.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” Advertisement. Evening Herald (3 May 1920): 2.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” Advertisement. Irish Times (7 Aug. 1916): 4.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” Advertising Leaflet. Paper Collections, Box 157. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

“O’Neil of the Glen.” The Bioscope (14 Sept. 1916): 1060.

“Our Home-Made Pictures.” Advertisement. Irish Limelight 1.12 (Dec. 1917): 16.

Paddy. “The All Irish Films.” The Bioscope (2 Nov. 1916): 518.

-----. “Film Company of Ireland.” The Bioscope (5 July 1917): 88.

-----. “Nine-Reel Irish Scenic–Native Company’s Notable Venture.” The Bioscope (23 Aug. 1917): 881.

Paying the Rent. Program. Film Company of Ireland file. Liam Ó Laoghaire Archive. National Library of Ireland.

“Picture Plays and People.” New York Times (19 Sept. 1921): 70.

“Public Amusements. Next Week’s Programmes.” Irish Times (22 July 1922): 7.

R. A. O’F. “Rafferty’s Rise.” The Irish Limelight 1.11 (Nov. 1917): 6.

“Rare Chance to See Collins’ 1919 Screen Debut.” Irish Times (28 Aug. 2007): 12.

Rhodes, Gary D. “The Film Company of Ireland and the Irish-American Press.” Screening the Past 33 (2012): n.p. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/02/the-film-company-of-ireland-and-the-irish-american-press/

Rockett, Kevin. Email correspondence. 9 Aug. 2015.

------.  “Part One: History, Politics and Irish Cinema.” In Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988. 1-144.

-----, and Emir Rockett. Irish Film & TV Research Online. 15 Mar. 2012. n.p. http://www.tcd.ie/irishfilm/

Rynne, Michael. “Knocknagow.” Letter. Irish Times (7 Jan. 1975): 9.

-----. Letter to Proinsias Ó Conluain. 6 May 1965. Paper Collections, Box 283. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Schultz, Dan, and Maryanne Felter. “The Making of an Irish Nationalist: James Mark Sullivan and the Film Company of Ireland in America.” Screening the Past 33 (2012): n.p. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2012/02/the-making-of-an-irish-nationalist/

“Sean Kavanagh to James O’Mara.” Letter. James O’Mara Papers, MS 21547. National Library of Ireland.

Slide, Anthony. The Cinema and Ireland. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1988.

Sullivan, Nell. Letter to Hazel. 4 Dec. 1918. Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection. Bray, IE.

-----. Letter to Hazel. 15 Dec. 1918. Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection. Bray, IE.

-----. Letter to Hazel 19 Dec. 1918. Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection. Bray, IE.

-----. Letter to Hazel. 21 Nov. 1918. Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection. Bray, IE.

-----. Letter to Hazel. 27 July 1918. Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection. Bray, IE.

-----. Letter to Hazel and Karl. 14 Aug. 1918. Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection. Bray, IE.

-----. Letter to Hazel and Karl. 4 Jan. 1919. Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection. Bray, IE.

Trotter, Mary. Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

“An Unfair Love Affair.” Advertisement. Democratic Evening Mail (23 Nov. 1916): 2.

“What the Irish Film Company Is Doing.” The Irish Limelight 1.1 (Jan. 1917): 3.

“When Love Came to Gavin Burke.” The Irish Limelight 1.12 (Dec. 1917): 6-7.

“Wicklow Gold.” Dublin Evening Mail (20 Nov. 1922): 5.

“Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn.” Advertisement. Boston Globe (9 Sept. 1920): 14.

“Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn.” Advertisement. Boston Globe (18 Sept. 1920): 9.

“Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn.” A Sense of Ireland: Irish Cinema. National Film Theatre Programme Notes. Paper Collections, Box 94. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

“Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn.” Program. The Irish Film Institute, 1991. Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn clippings file. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Archival Paper Collections:

Dublin Records Office. National Archives of Ireland.

James O’Mara Papers. MS 21547. National Library of Ireland.

Jimmy O’Dea Collection. Dublin City Archive, Irish Theatre Archive.

Knocknagow clippings file. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Liam Ó Laoghaire Archive [currently re-cataloguing]. National Library of Ireland.

Mary Rose Callaghan Private Collection. Bray, IE.

Paper Collections. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Wharton Releasing Corporation Records, ca 1916-1923. #3924. Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library.

Willy Reilly and His Colleen Bawn clippings file. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Citation

Casella, Donna. "Ellen O’Mara Sullivan." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ja5a-ec12>

Lydia Hayward

by Christine Gledhill

Lydia Hayward—born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Sheffield, England, to a father in the entertainment business—started her career as a stage actress, but in her early forties switched careers to become a leading scriptwriter in the British film industry. Her theatrical career has yet to be researched; however, in 1914, according to the website Theatricalia, she was taking roles at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (n.p.). By 1920 she had become a sufficiently spirited and dependable character actor to be cast as the convention-challenging Lona Hessel in Rex Wilson’s film adaptation of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society (1920), giving a performance that Kinematograph Weekly found “probably the best all-round piece of work” in a well-regarded film (1920, 82). However, thereafter she deserted both stage and film acting, to go behind the scenes as a scenarist, working in the British film industry between 1920 and 1942, where she achieved frequent recognition in the trade press: on May 12, 1927, The Bioscope declared her “the finest scenario writer we have” (33). Indeed, her aim in joining the cast of Pillars of Society may have been to learn the film business, since in her only known interview—made in Australia on April 12, 1939 with The Sydney Morning Herald—she cites as her inspiration a shilling guide on the art of scenario writing, loaned to her when visiting the office of Frank Benson’s Shakespearean company (6).

Lydia Hayward as Lona, Pillars of Society (1920). Private Collection.

Aside from this interview and a couple of brief articles on scenario writing, Hayward has left no account of her story. From official records—birth, marriage and death certificates, census records, and her will—we can piece together a life seemingly as unconventional as Ibsen’s Lona, including a penchant for changing her age according to circumstances. An early marriage in 1900 to Belford Forrest, an aspirant actor but actually the student son of the Dean of Worcester Cathedral—and recorded in the 1901 census as single, living back at home—was followed in 1903 by the birth in the Deanery of their daughter, Helena Travers Forrest. The 1911 census records Lydia living alone in (probably) actors’ lodgings in Hammersmith, London, but includes the existence of two children. Of the second child no more is currently known, but in 1938 Helena was witness to her second marriage to the Australian actor, William Freshman, star of three of Lydia’s later films and twenty-three years her junior, her own age conveniently lowered to forty-seven.

Despite such adventuring, Hayward’s work as scriptwriter sits centrally within the industrial mainstream of British cinema. Moreover, she worked in literary adaptation, for many later critics not a proper cinematic practice. Nevertheless, she carved out a successful career in a largely male dominated film industry and in the process gained considerable respect for her professionalism. We therefore need new terms to understand both life and career—terms not axed on cinematic auteurism or personal exceptionalism, but which, applied to scattered evidence, can be made to reveal something of the horizons of expectation and cultural contexts within which Hayward worked—suggesting the significance of her widely enjoyed films in their own, rather than our, terms. Central to charting her career are, of course, the films she left behind, some of which have survived. But central to understanding the nature and significance of her “invisible” work as scriptwriter are their credits, detailing crew and cast; then trade press sources—reviews, studio news, advertisements—and film press books; and crucially, alongside Lydia’s own two short Bioscope articles and her Australian interview, her one extant film script, preserved under the (male) source novelist’s name.

Challenging for authorial approaches, her film credits highlight a series of shifting partnerships, collaborations, and networks as Lydia moved from studio to studio along with the ups and downs of the British film industry. This calls for a concept of collective creativity, which, expanding the research field to Hayward’s collaborators, enables us to trace the development of her writing as her experience of working with different partners and film genres broadens. At the same time surviving films from the different phases of her career allow cross-comparison with the work of literary authors as well as with the work of successive actors and directors with whom she collaborated.

Monty Works the Wires (1921) pressbook. Courtesy of the British Film Institute, Special Collections. 

Pursuing this line of investigation, we can discern several distinct phases in Lydia’s career. The first ran between 1921-1924, when Manning Haynes, stage and film actor, involved her in scripting films for Artistic, a small company set up as the British film industry recovered from World War I. Drawing on their association with a loose network of authors, playwrights, actors, and filmmakers living around London, Haynes and Hayward began learning the business of filmmaking by co-scripting an adaptation of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1920). The film was a huge success, partly because of the wonderfully natural acting of Monty, Haynes’ dog. On this basis, they concocted a spin-off, Monty Works the Wires (1921), a courtship comedy and Lydia’s only original scenario, which Haynes co-directed with Challis Sanderson. Following these successes, Haynes proposed to W.W. Jacobs a series of film adaptations of his stories (James 1999, 134), with Lydia and Haynes as respectively scriptwriter and director. Together with cameraman Frank Granger and a stable repertory of actors, the Artistic team went on to produce two series of Jacobs films over the next two years, all popular successes. Lydia’s 1939 interview in The Sydney Morning Herald offers a lively glimpse of the improvisatory conditions of work in which they honed their skills and seemingly had collective fun: “when…a visitor came to see us on the set of ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ I was fixing the curtains on the window, the director, Manning Haynes, was plastering the walls, and the star, Moore Marriott, was hard at work on the carpenter’s bench” (6).

Collaboration—not only on the set but in Lydia’s work with author and director—was frequently noted by trade commentators as key to their films’ success, while to her Australian interviewer she testifies to her happy relationship with Jacobs: “I have done scenarios for 14 [sic] of W. W. Jacobs’ books, and we sit hand in hand at all the trade screenings of the films” (6). Against notions of authorial ownership, Lydia herself was adamant, writing in her June 1927 Bioscope article, “the completed film is the result of the fusion of many minds…No single person connected with the production can point to any section of the film and say, ‘Alone I did that’” (155). Increasingly, the trade press linked Hayward and Haynes as co-creators, suggesting a working ethos that was not simply a matter of studio harmony but could be felt in the film.

“Lydia Hayward: Joint Authoress,” Monty Works the Wires (1921). Courtesy of the British Film Institute, Special Collections.

In this collaborative context, while adapting Jacobs’ stories, Hayward cut her scriptwriting teeth. His tales were much loved for their acute, sometimes acerbically witty observations of human foibles, involving marital mishaps and heterosexual misunderstandings among the boating communities of Wapping and the river Medway. However, as works of a raconteur, his stories posed the difficulty of capturing the narrator’s sly verbal irony in a silent medium. From the evidence of the surviving films and fulsome press appreciation, Hayward’s ear for speech and verbal tone enabled her to translate Jacobs’ knowing turns of phrase and comic vernacular character interaction into sharply witty inter-titles. And she learned to skillfully draw out the comic absurdity of the slight situations around which Jacobs spun his tales, providing opportunity for Artistic’s actors to elaborate his characters as natural vectors of the joke. When the final six films were released in 1924, Kinematograph Weekly’s Lionel Collier declared, “Lydia Hayward’s scenarios are brilliant. It is in a great measure due to her work that the Jacobs spirit and humour have been so carefully preserved” (68).

Following the industry’s recession in the mid-1920s, Artistic folded, Haynes struggled to find work, and Hayward entered the next phase of her career, moving to the larger company, Stoll, where, between 1924-1926, she scripted five films for Will Kellino—one of the “Famous Kellinos,” who toured turn-of-the-century music halls with fast and furious acrobatic acts. The most significant change, however, is that all five scripts were adapted from novels written by women, featuring feisty heroines who implicitly counteracted the acerbic humour Jacobs often aimed at his older female characters. How this choice came about is a matter of speculation. However, in the process of adaptation we might find evidence of a tradition of women’s fiction supporting women’s filmmaking and it seems that Lydia found new opportunities by tapping into modern middlebrow women’s stories.

If comedy remained the dominant mode, the resulting films took a more romantic turn while broadening the class base to include upper-class characters as downwardly-mobile romantic leads or cads bent on leading trusting femininity astray, only to be thwarted by honest toilers. Hayward and Kellino seem to have made a good match. His music hall experience registers in strings of comic “gags,” by performers injecting into their byplay the sassiness and direct address of the music hall skit, adding “pace” to Hayward’s scripts, which were sometimes noted for leisureliness; while Lydia’s sharp-eyed wit and skill at episodic structure, honed through the Jacobs’ adaptations, brought to Kellino’s quick-fire gags a verbal skill at caustic repartee, now given greater license within socially pointed narrative juxtapositions. Cross-class romances are mirrored by cross-class assaults, resonating to post-war social changes, and facilitated by expanding forms of popular entertainment including skating rink, nightclub, and cinema as sites of social class intersection.

Billie takes on Flash Wheeler in We Women (1925), pressbook. Courtesy of the British Film Institute, Special Collections.

We Women (1925), adapted from a novel by the colourful, many pseudonymed “Countess Barcynska,” opens in a skating rink, introducing two friends, played by two popular vaudeville artists, Billie and Dollie: Bee in charge of the pay-box and Paulee, playing violin in the band and subject to the suggestive attentions of the owner, Flash Wheeler: “You certainly can tickle the fiddle, girlie, but you’re working too hard. I could make it easy for you.” Paulee’s struggle against his attentions gets her the sack, but Bee, has an answer for any man who tries to get one over on her or tries to exploit her friend: “You can’t sack me, old four wheeler—you don’t travel fast enough. I resigned 30 seconds ago”—uttered while struggling into the tangled arms of her coat. This is the only one of Hayward’s films to have been unequivocally disliked by the trade press. In its March 5, 1925 review, Kinematograph Weekly declared, “We are quite sure that Lydia Hayward is incapable of including in a scenario two-thirds of what is shown. It has evidently been drastically ‘revised’ by others” (65).

After Kellino left for America, and while Haynes was still seeking to set up new film deals, Lydia embarked on a third phase of her career. Between 1926-1929 she became intermittently involved as scenario editor/writer for Britain’s only woman director of the time, Dinah Shurey—both an intriguing and, frustratingly, the least documented of her moves. Possibly Shurey’s wartime experience led her to make what, for the pacifist-oriented 1920s, struck many reviewers as anachronistic military and naval melodramas, often involving rivalry between two brothers or male friends, combining heroics on the field with tragic marital entanglements—subjects somewhat removed from Hayward’s talent for class and heterosexual comedy.

Working with Shurey cannot have served Lydia’s reputation well and it is noticeable that her involvement is discretely ignored in reviews. However, while The Last Post (1929) was denounced by Film Weekly as “clap trap patriotism” (1929, 13), Kinematograph Weekly’s Collier conceded that its “blend of patriotism and sentiment” would be “successful with the masses” (1929, 53). In this respect, Lydia’s experience with Shurey appears to have broadened her range as a scenarist, skilling her in the construction of melodrama and the pathos of the wounded male to whom she returned in many of her later sound films.

Lydia Hayward in The Bioscope, June 1927. Private Collection. 

Writing for Britannia, however, appears to have been a stopgap, since Hayward alternated work for Shurey in renewed partnership with Haynes and in new collaborations. For Haynes, Lydia scripted his first production for Gaumont, London Love (trade shown in 1926, released in 1927), a crime-laden romance, for which Kinematograph Weekly took Lydia to task on account of its weak and jumpy continuity: “Lydia Hayward has done much better work than this” (1926, 34). Relief, then, was expressed on November 24, 1926 when the Daily Chronicle and Daily Express both reported that Haynes was to set up his own production unit at Pathé, followed the next year by The Bioscope’s headline, “Lydia Hayward Signed Up,” announcing a year’s contract with the company for “the finest scenario writer we have” (1926, n.p.; 1926, n.p.; 1927, 33).

Passion Island (1927) did indeed involve a regrouping at Pathé of colleagues from the former Artistic and current Britannia teams, reuniting Haynes and Hayward, bringing Jack Raymond across from Britannia as Haynes’ assistant while attempting to revive the Jacobs connection with a storyline he reputedly suggested (James 137). Despite a plot summary sounding like a concoction devised over a long dinner, Kinematograph Weekly praised the film for its dramatic story value and continuity “that flows easily” (1927, 27), while The Bioscope congratulated Lydia Hayward for a scenario “of great power…and…atmosphere” (1927, 37).

Lydia’s career now triangulated between Raymond, Shurey, and Haynes. The “exceedingly happy partnership” noted in 1928 by  Collier in Kinematograph Weekly (64) between Lydia and Haynes continued in their inventive adaptation of George Pleydell’s West End country-house thriller, The Ware Case (1928)—the last of their collaborations to be greeted with wholehearted enthusiasm. During this period, Hayward was finally persuaded, in 1927 and 1928, to write two articles for The Bioscope on scenario writing. The first and lengthier of these suggests a search for the literary in the visual: “in the first instance, a film should exist on paper…no producer would accept a scenario in which they could not ‘see’ a film” (1927, 155). For Lydia as adaptor, this required a translation of “a quality which is peculiar to [the author] himself [sic]—but without verbal style.” With the W.W. Jacobs adaptations she had a truly quality literary source. But in the only one of her scripts to survive—Those Who Love (1929) adapted from Guy Fletcher’s 1927 novel Mary Was Love—there is revealed a process of visual translation that circumvents the weaknesses of the original, while deploying skills acquired in earlier collaborations with Kellino and Shurey. The novel is a rambling lachrymose tale, centering on the melancholia of its hero, David Mellor, whose courtship of Mary in flashback is broken off by her death, while his promise that he will “love her always,” and Mary’s that “you will find me again” produce her visionary reappearances that block his later attempt to form a relationship.

Hayward’s script straightens the storyline and cuts sub-plots, while avoiding the novel’s inward-turned psychology through an unfolding series of set piecespictorial visions, comic vignettes, and melodramatic climaxes. The transitions between sequences are accomplished through Hayward’s deft structuring of character interaction and detailed specification of the visual, compositional, and performative parameters of each scene. The script includes shot scale, angle of view, framing of characters in relation to each other and direction of looks; editing devices such as fades out and in, cuts, mixes and double exposure, and iris shots; camera movements such as trucking and tri-cycling. Such visual scripting derived not only from her work as an actress but, seemingly, from her experience on the studio floor, her Australian interviewer reporting, “Mrs Freshman…in many cases aids with the direction, and is on the floor all the time a picture is under production” (1939, 6).  

Hayward’s surviving script turns on a fine balance between the comedy of popular social types—delicately honed in the Jacobs collaborations and more rumbustiously rendered with Kellino—and the lachrymose phantasms of the novel, more characteristic of Shurey’s pathos saturated melodramas. This ability to work the tropes and emotional effects of popular culture into a modern visual medium, along with her grasp of trenchant, vernacular dialogue, enabled Hayward to cross into the sound period. Indeed, the techniques evident in her script for Those Who Love make apparent her hand in rendering the well-loved but mordant and rambling novel Sorrell and Son (1933) into a remarkable film.

However, expectations set by Hollywood, along with changing “modern” social attitudes and rearguard class reaction to cinema as a now dominant mass medium merged in ambiguous responses to Hayward’s 1930s films, which, while often valued for their professional skill and crowd-pleasing mix of humour, pathos, and patriotism, were now felt “old-fashioned.” The works she was skilled in adapting were not modernist texts for minority readers, but populist, middlebrow novels and short stories, cueing into the culture to which they contributed, even as, in adapting them, she drew into cinematic form their slow registration of changing codes of modernity. More crucially, for the history of women’s impact on cinema, her work alerts us to the need not only for an understanding of the horizon of expectation from which films emerge, but for recognition of the processes of co-creation and collaborative filmmaking.

The author wishes to thank Janice Healey for help with birth, death, marriage, and census records.

Bibliography

The Bioscope (2 June 1927): 37.

Collier, Lionel. “Screen Values.” Kinematograph Weekly (24 January 1924): 68.

------. Kinematograph Weekly (3 May 1928): 64.

------. “Reviews of the Week.” Kinematograph Weekly (17 January 1929): 53.

Daily Chronicle (24 November 1926): n.p. Sidney Carroll 1926 Scrapbook. British Film Institute, Special Collections.

Daily Express (24 November 1926): n.p. Sidney Carroll 1926 Scrapbook. British Film Institute, Special Collections.

Film Weekly (21 January 1929): 13.

Gledhill, Christine. “Lydia Elizabeth Hayward (1979-1945).” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 606-615.

------.“Reframing Women in 1920s British Cinema: the Case of Violet Hopson and Dinah Shurey.” Journal of British Cinema and Television vol. 4, no. 1 (2007): 1-17.

Hayward, Lydia. “Concerning Scenarios.” The Bioscope (8 March 1928): 34.

------. “On Adaptation: Why A Story is Altered.” The Bioscope (18 June 1927): 155.

James, Anthony. W.W. Jacobs: A Biography. Knebworth: Able Publishing, 1999.

Kinematograph Weekly (16 June 1927): 27.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film 1918-28. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971.

Lydia Hayward.” Theatricalia.  https://theatricalia.com/person/1c2/lydia-hayward

Lydia Hayward Signed Up.” The Bioscope  (12 May 1927): 33.

Rev. London Love. Kinematograph Weekly (22 July 1926): 34.

Rev. Pillars of Society. Kinematograph Weekly (30 September 1920): 82.

Rev. We Women. Kinematograph Weekly (5 March 1925): 65.

The Sydney Morning Herald (12 April 1939): 6

Archival Paper Collections:

The Stills Collection at the British Film Institute contains the following:

Small pressbooks for: Monty Works the Wires (1921), Not For Sale (1924), We Women (1925), Confessions (1925), Second to None (1926), London Love/The Whirlpool (1927).

Digitized stills for: Pillars of Society (1920), Sam’s Boy (1922), The Ware Case (1928), The Last Post (1930).

Undigitized stills for: Monty Works the Wires, A Bachelor’s Baby (1923), His Grace Gives Notice (1924), We Women, Confessions, The Gold Cure (1926), Every Mother's Son (1926), Second to None, London Love/The Whirlpool, Somehow Good (1928), Those Who Love/Mary Was Love (1929).

Shooting script for Those Who Love/Mary Was Love (1929).

Citation

Gledhill, Christine. "Lydia Hayward." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cak6-6f05>

Mary Murillo

by Christina Petersen

In March 1918, Moving Picture World heralded British screenwriter Mary Murillo as a “remarkable example” of “the meteoric flights to fame and fortune which have marked the careers of many present day leaders in the motion picture profession” (1525). This was more than just promotional hyperbole, since, in just four years, Murillo had penned over thirty features, including a highly successful adaptation of East Lynne (1916) starring Theda Bara and the original story for Cheating the Public (1918), “which proved a sensation” at its New York debut according to Moving Picture World (1525). Murillo wrote or adapted over fifty films from 1913 to 1934 in the United States, England, and France, including slapstick comedies, melodramas, fairy tale adaptations, and vehicles for female stars such as Bara, Ethel Barrymore, Clara Kimball Young, Olga Petrova, and Norma Talmadge. As a scenarist, her range included several films focused on contemporary issues—gender equality, women’s suffrage, economic progressivism, and labor reform—while others, such as the child-oriented adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk (1917), seem to have been meant to appeal as pure escapism. In the latter half of her career, Murillo left the United States for England where she joined several ventures, but never equaled her American output.

East Lynne (1916) sc: Mary Murillo, with Theda Bara

Screenshot, Theda Bara in East Lynne (1916), Mary Murillo (w). 

A Woman Redeemed (1927) sc: Mary Murillo.

Screenshot, A Woman Redeemed (1927), Mary Murillo (w). 

Born in January 1888 and educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton, England, Murillo immigrated to the United States in 1908 at the age of nineteen (“Mary Murillo, Script Writer” 1525; McKernan 2015, 80). As her travel documents list her occupation as “actress,” this suggests that Murillo, like so many others, first planned to make her mark in front of the camera rather than writing for it (n.p.). She got her start in the entertainment industry the following year as a chorus girl in the Broadway production of “Havana” according to the March 1918 Moving Picture World article (1525). This was along with her stepsister Isabelle (Isabel) Daintry (Williamson), who would also appear in The Minister (1916), an early feature written by Murillo. United States census records tell us that by 1910 Murillo was living near the New York theater district and still attempting to make her living as a stage actress. A June 1917 article in Motography highlights that she found work in touring productions and as a member of Annie Russell’s Old English Comedy Company, yet Murillo’s stage career proved short-lived (1262). According to Moving Picture World, Murillo made the transition from actress to screenwriter when husband-and-wife team Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley accepted her first slapstick comedy story; however, there is no record of her involvement in any Weber-Smalley production (1918, 1525). Rather her first screen credit was for the Reliance Film Company two-reeler romance The Dress of Lolita (1913), according to an advertisement in Bonham Daily Favorite (1913, 1) followed by the one-reel Vitagraph comedy A Strand of Blond Hair (1914).

Lantern slide, The New York Idea (1920), Mary Murillo (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Sources, like Moving Picture World, suggest that she was a hustler from the start, since in October 1915 Murillo was working as a scenario editor at the Eastern Film Corporation based in Providence, Rhode Island at the same time her first feature, The Little Gypsy (1915), premiered (1915, 246). The Little Gypsy constitutes an interesting moment in Murillo’s career, not only because it marked the beginning of her seven-year affiliation with the Fox Film Corporationthe first half of which she served as the company’s chief writer—but also because it points to Murillo’s status as something beyond that of a contract screenwriter at this early stage. While Motion Picture News effaced Murillo’s contribution altogether and attributes The Little Gypsy screenplay to Walter Dare (1915, 92), a critic for Moving Picture World identified Murillo as co-director on the production along with credited director Oscar Apfel (Denig 1915, 631).

The Forbidden City (1918) sc: Mary Murillo, wtih Norma Talmadge.

The Forbidden City (1918),  Mary Murillo (w), Norma Talmadge (a).

The Forbidden City (1918) sc: Mary Murillo, wtih Norma Talmadge.

Ad, The Forbidden City (1918), Mary Murillo (w), Norma Talmadge (a). 

Following The Little Gypsy, Murillo went on to write twenty-seven more features for Fox, including five starring Theda Bara, and by March 1918 it was reported in Motography that she was making a yearly salary of $25,000 (464). In June of that same year, Moving Picture World announced that Murillo was hired to write starring vehicles exclusively for Norma Talmadge’s production company (1871). Several of Murillo’s Talmadge films are still extant and demonstrate both women’s willingness to take on controversial topics when adapting stage material for the screen. Both The Forbidden City (1918) and The Heart of Wetona (1919) explore the conditions and repercussions of interracial love and romance. In The Forbidden City, Talmadge plays a double role as two Asian protagonists (a Chinese mother and her Chinese-American daughter) who both fall in love with American men. In The Heart of Wetona, Talmadge’s mixed-race Native American heroine loses her virginity to a white cad outside of wedlock. The Passion Flower (1921) was equally daring in its subject matter, depicting incestuous love between a Spanish stepfather and stepdaughter.

Heart of Wetona (1919), sc: Mary Murillo with Norma Talmadge

Heart of Wetona (1919), Mary Murillo (w), Norma Talmadge (a).

After her affiliation with Talmadge ended, Murillo again attempted to parlay her considerable experience into sustained collaborations with new companies on the rise. In June 1921, according to Film Daily, Murillo signed a contract with British-owned Robertson-Cole Pictures, the production arm of Film Booking Offices of America, for $300 a week (1924, 12). However, no R-C films produced during her contract  bear her screen credit and the Film Daily article goes on to explain that three years later she would sue the company for back pay. Rather Murillo finished her American career with two more films for Fox, repartnering with frequent collaborator Herbert Brenon for Moonshine Valley (1922), in what appears to have been her final Hollywood film. By 1924, Murillo had moved back to England and was writing for Stoll Pictures and that same year she was hired to write a script with American appeal for the Charles de Rochefort vehicle La princesse aux clowns (1924) (Foley 1926, 95). It may have been through this production that Murillo met her partner, cinematographer Maurice Velle, the son of French silent film director Gaston Velle, with whom she would have two children although they never married (McKernan 2015, 88-89). In May 1928, after a stint at the British Lion Film Corporation, it was reported in The Yorkshire Post that Murillo joined the production council of the fledgling Louis Blattner Picture Corporation along with German director Lulu Pick and Rex Ingram (17), but she is not credited on any Blattner productions and the company declared bankruptcy four years later.

Shams of Society (1921) adp: Mary Murillo.

Shams of Society (1921), Mary Murillo (w).

The final years of Murillo’s career were marked by further struggle to get her scripts filmed and receive credit for those that were produced. In July 1929, it was announced in The Yorkshire Post that Murillo had written what would have been her first sound film, an adaptation of Ouida’s Moths starring British tenor Thomas Burke, however there is no record that the film was completed (8). In addition, although the British Lion film The Ringer (1928) does not credit Murillo, in February 1929, The Yorkshire Post noted that she gave evidence in a suit brought against the production company that alleged that she had been forced to “write a new story” rather than faithfully adapt the Edgar Wallace novel (14). And in September 1930, Variety revealed that she sued Pathé-Natan for story credit for the Maurice Tourneur sound film Accuséelevez-vous! (1930) (7). Although Murillo wrote her last credited scenario for Sinclair Hill’s comedy My Old Dutch (1934), she remained active in the film industry as managing director of the short-lived Opticolour company, which attempted to market her partner Maurice Velle’s Franchita-Realita color process in Britain (“Thomas Bazley’s Evidence” 1; McKernan 2015, 88-89).

The Sign on the Door (1921) adp: Mary Murillo with Norma Talmadge

The Sign on the Door (1921), Mary Murillo (w), Norma Talmadge (a).

A Woman Redeemed (1927) sc: Mary Murillo.

A Woman Redeemed (1927), Mary Murillo (w).

Mary Murillo (w). PD

Mary Murillo portrait. 

Based on these accounts, Murillo offers an example of a well-educated, fiercely independent woman who rose to prominence in the early feature film era and then struggled to find work during the transition to sound. From what can be discerned from the existing records, her scripts struck a balance between putting forth her own point of view and producing work for hire. In an August 1920 statement in Motion Picture News about her adaptation of Landon Mitchell’s divorce comedic drama The New York Idea (1920), Murillo offered a rare personal insight, stating, “the love of children is not so everlasting and binding that it should be dragged into every divorce court story, and there is no doubt that many children are better off in a reliable school than with parents who are continually nagging each other” (1700). Herself a product of British boarding schools, Murillo’s promotional spin suggests how she drew on her own experience even when adapting others’ works. Indeed, according to box office reports and critical reviews, Murillo’s greatest successes were adaptations while her own original stories and screenplays were at times criticized as confusing and political. In particular, the June 1919 Variety review of The Other Man’s Wife (1919), a lost film which opened with a dedication to the “women who proved during World War I that they were equal to men,” questioned whether the film was a misplaced “propaganda stunt for women suffragists,” since “certainly a more blatantly crude bid for the approval of women who have banded together to assert their superiority to men has rarely been made in these parts in a picture, a piece of writing or a speech” (50). The reviewer’s swift exoneration of director Carl Harbaugh, who “is far less to blame for the [film’s] many faults than Mary Murillo,” suggests that at the time a well-known female screenwriter like Murillo became a film’s discernible driving force when a feminist agenda came to the fore. And as her frequent bouts of litigation attest, there may be further films that she had a hand in as her name alternately served as a scapegoat, promotional tool, and something to be elided depending on the project and the subject matter.

Additional research by Luke McKernan

 See also:Norma Talmadge

Bibliography

“Burning of a Factory Staged in Fox Feature.” Motion Picture News (18 Sept. 1915): 92.

Denig, Lynde. “The Little Gypsy.” Rev. Moving Picture World (23 Oct. 1915): 631.

Divorce from New Angle: Mary Murillo Seeks in New Story to Approach Problem in Novel Way.” Motion Picture News (28 August 1920): 1700.

“The Dress of Lolita.” Advertisement. Bonham Daily Favorite (26 December 1913): 1.

“Eastern Wants.” Moving Picture World (9 October 1915): 246.

Foley, Edna. “Charles de Roche Returns.” Picture-Play Magazine (June 1926): 95.

“Hats Off to Mary Murillo.” Motography (16 June 1917): 1262.

“Ludwig Blattner Film Corporation, Ltd.” [company prospectus] The Yorkshire Post (21 May 1928): 17.

“Mary Murillo, Script Writer Extraordinary.” Moving Picture World (16 March 1918): 1525.

“Mary Murillo to Write for Select.” Moving Picture World (29 June 1918): 1871.

“Mary Murillo Added to Talmadge Staff.” Moving Picture World (6 Sept. 1919): 1472.

Mary T. De Murillo.New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957. n.d. n.p. www.Ancestry.com

McKernan, Luke. "Gaston, Maurice and Mary.” LukeMckernan.com (16 May 2015): n.p. http://lukemckernan.com/2015/05/16/gaston-maurice-and-mary

------. “Searching for Mary Murillo.” The Bioscope (5 November 2009): n.p. http://bioscopic.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/searching-for-mary-murillo

------. “Searching for Mary Murillo.” In Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future. Eds. Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight. Urbana, IL.: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 78-92.

“Meaning of ‘Super’ Film.” The Yorkshire Post (23 February 1929): 14.

“Murillo, Mary.” Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1921. New York: Motion Picture News Inc., 1921. 291.

“Must Furnish Particulars.” Film Daily (23 November 1924): 12.

“An Operatic Film.” The Yorkshire Post (9 July 1929): 8.

“The Other Man’s Wife.” Rev. Variety (13 June 1919): 50.

“Post-War Drama Dedicated to Woman Fairly Forceful.” Wid’s (15 June 1919): 11.

Ralston, Ray. “Ink in Their Veins.” Picture-Play Magazine (July 1917): 42.

“Stokes Makes Seizure: Deputy Sheriff Levies on Possessions of Woman Scenario Writer.” New York Times (18 March 1923): S8.

“Thomas Bazley’s Evidence In Claim Against Company.” Gloucestershire Echo (21 July 1937): 1.

“Tourneur Film, French-Made, Big Hit.” Variety (17 September 1930): 7.

“Writer Has Rapid Rise.” Motography (9 March 1918): 464.

United States Census. Year: 1910; Census Place: Manhattan, Ward 22, New York, New York: Roll: T624-1045; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 1280; Image: 462.

“Velle, Mary.” England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1966 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: www.Ancestry.comOperations Inc., 2010. n.p.

Archival Paper Collections: 

Extant scripts:

The Little Gypsy (1915), Ambition (1916), A Parisian Romance (1916), The Vixen (1916), The Bitter Truth (1917), Love’s Law (1917), Sister Against Sister (1917), Two Little Imps (1917). University of California, Los Angeles, Charles E. Young Research Library.

The New York Peacock (1917), The Vixen (1916). Part of microfilm series What Women Wrote: Scenarios, 1912-1929. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library [search by title];  University of Rochester, River Campus Libraries.

The Sins Ye Do (1924), A Woman Redeemed (1927). British Film Institute.

A Woman Redeemed (1927). Norfolk Record Office.

Research has shown that Twentieth Century Fox Corporation, Feature Story Files holds the following scripts: A Soldier's Oath (1915), Sins of Men (1916) [held as The Evil That Men Do], The Vixen (1916),  The Bitter Truth (1917)and possibly Sister Against Sister (1917).

Citation

Petersen, Christina. "Mary Murillo." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-bb1b-pk46>

Marie Stopes

by Annette Kuhn

Marie Stopes, scientist, birth control activist, and author, was born in Scotland and moved to London in her teens. Her father was an architect and her mother a Shakespeare scholar and campaigner for women’s education. Prodigiously bright, Stopes had earned two doctoral degrees by the age of twenty-five and enjoyed early academic success in paleobotany (the study of fossil plants). Her first marriage, in 1911, was not a success and after five years she secured an annulment on grounds of non-consummation. In the meantime, she had embarked on research in sexology, work which included observation of her own sexual feelings, and had met and exchanged ideas with US birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger. In 1918, her book Married Love, subtitled A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties, was published and she married her second husband, Humphrey Roe, retaining her maiden name. The same year also saw the publication of Wise Parenthood, which dealt explicitly with contraception. These books sold in hundreds of thousands and went into numerous editions; by 1921, when she opened her first birth control clinic, Stopes had become a household name. Unheard of in its time, her unique selling point was the idea that women’s happiness and sexual fulfillment in marriage rested upon their ability to control their own fertility.

Marie Stopes (o), 1904. PD

Marie Stopes, 1904

During the late 1910s, Stopes cultivated an interest in cinema, which she considered “the greatest social influence since the discovery of printing” (qtd. in Stead 2011, 78), serving on the 1917 Cinema Commission of Inquiry as a representative of the Incorporated Society of Authors, Playwrights and Composers. The Commission’s remit was to inquire into “the physical, social, educational, and moral influences of the cinema, with special reference to young people” and the “present position and future development of the cinematograph, with special reference to its social and educational value” (National Council of Public Morals 1917, ix). Stopes’s view was that the huge appeal of cinema to ordinary people had hitherto been exploited solely for commercial gain and that opportunities to harness it for purposes of art and education had been disregarded. Several years later, according to an undated typescript of a speech held in the Marie Stopes Collection at the Wellcome Library, she decided to “give myself a little holiday from my other and more serious preoccupations” and step into the breach (n.p.).

Married Love (1923) pressbook cover, Marie Stopes (w). BFI

Married Love (1923) pressbook cover. Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

The outcome was a fiction film called Married Love (1923). It tells the story of waitress Maisie Burrows, the eldest of ten children, who falls in love with Dick Reading, a fireman. Terrified of becoming like her constantly pregnant, worn-out mother, Maisie refuses Dick’s proposal of marriage and sends him away. Turned out of home after a family row, Maisie attempts suicide, but is rescued and taken in by a comfortably-off two-child family. Here she learns that married love may be enjoyed without the burden of unwanted pregnancies. Maisie and Dick are reunited and wed. According to an April 1923 memo held in the British Library, Stopes’s agreement with the film production company gave her the right to be consulted about “details, atmosphere, etc.,” approval of the whole scenario and final film, the right to veto scenes she might object to, and permission to use her name as joint author. As a result, the credit onscreen and in the pressbook reads: “A story specially written for the screen by Dr. Marie Stopes, D.Sc., PhD in collaboration with Captain Walter Summers” (n.p.).

Still from Married Love (1923), Marie Stopes (w). BFI

Still, Married Love/Maisie’s Marriage (1923). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

The title’s promise notwithstanding, the film offered no advice, graphic or otherwise, on “sex difficulties,” but was, as a May 1923 review in The Bioscope noted, a “straightforward human story of sentimental rather than sexual appeal” (61). It was trade shown in London in May 1923 and scheduled for release the following month. As a social problem melodrama, Married Love is a fairly unexceptional piece of cinema. However, before it found its way onto Britain’s cinema screens, it encountered formidable opposition from the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), and behind the scenes also from their government minders in the Home Office. Although birth control was a subject of considerable public interest and controversy at the time, the BBFC regarded it as a wholly inappropriate topic for cinema. The censors, in a note to Napoleon Films on May 17, 1923, took exception to Stopes’s film on the grounds that certain scenes and intertitles made the film unsuitable for “ordinary” audiences and that the film’s title and the implied connection with Marie Stopes “suggests propaganda on a subject unsuitable for discussion in a Cinema Theatre” (n.p.).

Poster for Maisie's Marriage (1923), Marie Stopes (w). National Archive, UK

Poster for Maisie’s Marriage (1923). Courtesy of the The National Archives, Kew.

Release was held up for several weeks while the censors were deciding how to proceed, and eventually a list of cuts and changes was put to the producers. Since there was nothing objectionable in the film itself, the changes—with the crucial exceptions of a title alteration, to Maisie’s Marriage, and a stipulation that no reference to Stopes or to the book Married Love could be made in the publicity for the film—were minor. But even these conditions were widely flouted once the film was released. Stopes attributed the Married Love affair to Catholic intrigue in the Home Office, but in the end the publicity and the notoriety did little damage to the film, and Stopes did not entirely give up on filmmaking. In 1923 her birth control-themed play, “Our Ostriches,” enjoyed a successful run at the Royal Court Theatre in London; a few years later a plan to make a sound film version was mooted. In 1930 a scenario was submitted to the BBFC for approval; but the Board’s position had not changed. According to a letter to Stopes dated July 16, 1930, the BBFC did not feel that “a film on this subject, dealing as it does with Birth Control, is a suitable one for general exhibition in cinemas throughout the country” (n.p.).

While feminists have criticized Stopes’s view that female sexual liberation is grounded in marriage there is no doubt that her energetic promotion of contraception brought hope to countless women. But her ventures into filmmaking, undertaken in the spirit of public service and education, were frustrated by Establishment attitudes towards cinema and its audience, and her messages about birth control and women’s sexual fulfillment could not be effectively communicated through film. Consequently it is not unreasonable to suggest that in Married Love/Maisie’s Marriage, the “oblique message about birth control and its corollary, sexual happiness, relied on a prior, somewhat classed, knowledge of Stopes’s work and of popular sexual discourses” (Chow 1999, 69-70). Even so, Marie Stopes broke new ground in recognizing cinema’s potential to reach audiences—working-class women above all—that her books could not. As such, she is unquestionably entitled to a place in the female film culture of the silent era.

Bibliography

Box, Muriel, ed. The Trial of Marie Stopes. London: Femina Books, 1967.

British Board of Film Censors. Letter to Marie Stopes. July 16, 1930. PP/MCS/F. 13/7. Wellcome Library.

------. Note to Napoleon Films. May 17, 1923. ADD 58507. The British Library.

Chow, Karen. “Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stopes's Married Love and EM Hull's The Sheik.” Feminist Review vol. 63, no. 1 (1999): 64-87.

Hall, Ruth. Marie Stopes: A Biography. London: Andre Deutsch, 1977.

Kuhn, Annette. “The ‘Married Love’Affair.” Screen vol. 27, no. 2 (1986): 5-21.

“Married Love.” The Bioscope (17 May 1923): 61.

Memo to Marie Stopes. April 11, 1923. ADD 58507/1. The British Library.

National Council of Public Morals, Commission of Inquiry on Cinema. The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities. London: Williams and Norgate, 1917.

Stead, Lisa Rose. “Women’s Writing and British Female Film Culture in the Silent Era.” PhD Dissertation, University of Exeter, 2011.

Stopes, Marie. Married Love. 11th ed. London: G.P. Putnam's Sons Ltd, 1923.

------. Our Ostriches: A Play of Modern Life. London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1923.

------. Undated typescript for a speech. PP/MCS/F. 12/74. Wellcome Library.

------.“The Unsuspected Future of the Cinema.” The New East vol. 3, no. 1 (1918): 26-28.

Archival Paper Collections: 

Married Love Pressbook, Pressbooks Collection, PBS-227958. British Film Institute.

Stopes Papers. The British Library, Manuscripts and Archives.

Marie Stopes Collection. Wellcome Library.

Home Office Papers. The National Archives, Kew.

Citation

Kuhn, Annette. "Marie Stopes." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-nfd0-nq26>

Gladys Hall

by Barbara Hall

The remarkably prolific fan magazine writer Gladys Hall was born in New York City in 1891. According to typed biographical notes located in folder 541 of the Gladys Hall Papers at the Margaret Herrick Library, the young Gladys graduated from St. Gabriel’s School for Girls in Peekskill, New York. By her own account, Hall began writing popular poetry and short stories at an early age, and was published in magazines like Munsey’s, Cavalier, and H. L. Mencken’s The Smart Set. Hall married photographer Russell E. Ball on February 1, 1912, when she was twenty years old. That same month, a poem by Hall entitled “Fetterless” was published in The Motion Picture Story Magazine, the first movie fan publication, which had been launched by J. Stuart Blackton and Eugene V. Brewster the previous year. By December 1913, Hall was a regular contributor to the magazine and was on staff as one of several associate editors.

Gladys Hall (o). AMPAS

Gladys Hall portrait. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

The Motion Picture Story Magazine was modeled on popular fiction publications of the time, and in its early years each issue featured a dozen or more photoplay stories written in novelized form. As an aspiring author, Hall appears to have found a great deal of success writing in this genre, which took the often relatively simple plot lines of films and spun them into short fiction. A publicity page located in a scrapbook in the Gladys Hall Papers states that she wrote between two and three hundred of these photoplay stories in the first decade of her career (1922, n.p.). During this time, Hall also contributed feature stories, profiles, and humor pieces to The Motion Picture Story Magazine, renamed Motion Picture Magazine in 1914, and edited the magazine’s “Public Opinions of Popular Plays and Players” column. According to an article entitled “Good Things A-Coming for 1918,” Hall and her fellow associate editors were also assigned to write many of Motion Picture Magazine’s monthly features, including “Greenroom Jottings, the Movie Gossip-Shop, Limericks, puzzles, photoplay reviews, verses, and various other departments, with no accredited authors” (121). During this time, Hall was also continuing to write fiction and poetry, as well as serialized novels and plays, and was regularly submitting her work to the many popular magazines of the day. Early in her career, like many fan magazine writers, Hall began using a number of pen names, including Faith Service, Janet Reid, and Russell E. Smith, though the vast majority of her stories were published under her own name.

Motion Picture Magazine editorial staff, circa 1910s. AMPAS

Motion Picture Magazine editorial staff, circa 1910. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Though she produced a remarkable number of photoplay stories and other articles during her early years in the fan magazine field, Gladys Hall became most well known for her interviews with film personalities and other celebrities. In notes for an unpublished memoir entitled “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Hall recalled that her first movie star interview was with the actor James Cruze in October 1913, and as early as January 1914, she published, under the name Gladys Ball, an interview with Blanche Sweet in The Motion Picture Story Magazine. In the late 1910s and 1920s, Hall chronicled the lives and loves of hundreds of stars, and on occasion writers and directors, of the silent screen, often interviewing the always fashionable actresses and reliably dashing actors at their homes or in lavish hotel suites or restaurants, which Hall captured in detail for her readers. Described by Flair magazine in 1950 as the “undisputed queen of the cozy confession” (35), Hall was a sympathetic interviewer who avoided writing about scandal and controversy, and often befriended the stars that she profiled (Slide 2010, 37-38). Later in life, Hall was quoted as saying, “People don’t want their movie stars torn down. Even if there WAS something to say against them, it’s not what the public wants. The public wants to believe in Santa Claus and in the movie stars” (Taylor 1947, n.p.).

"An Interview Playlet in One Act and Five Scenes." Motion Picture Magazine 32:3 (October 1926): 29. MHDL

Gladys Hall and Adele Whitely Fletcher interview Gloria Swanson for Motion Picture Magazine

In the 1920s, Hall cemented her reputation as an interviewer when she collaborated with fellow Motion Picture Magazine writer and editor Adele Whiteley Fletcher on a string of featured stories on major stars, including Mary Pickford, Wallace Reid, Rudolph Valentino, Charles Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, and Colleen Moore. For this popular series, the interviews were structured as “playlets,” complete with a cast list, scene numbers, and stage directions. This format made Hall and Fletcher characters in a narrative that was as much about conducting the interview as it was about the interview itself. This also gave the writers the opportunity to comically contrast their own all-too-human shortcomings and prosaic concerns—how to get to the meeting on time, what to order for lunch—with the brilliance and kindness of their interview subjects, reinforcing the notion that stars are in many ways superior to regular folks. This self-deprecating style is also on display in “Here Are the Movie Mommers!” and “Lamentations of a Lady Interviewer, both published in Photoplay in December 1921 and March 1922 respectively. In these short humor pieces, Hall wrote of the frustrations of dealing with overbearing stage mothers (1921, 77) and described being driven insane by uncooperative stars and their ever-present Pekingese dogs (1922, 82).

llustration accompanying article “Here Are the Movie Mommers!” Photoplay 21:1 (Dec. 1921): 77.

Illustration accompanying “Here Are the Movie Mommers!” in Photoplay.

Not all of Gladys Hall’s work was self-deprecating or comical, however. In 1922, Hall wrote a five-part series on film feminists for Filmplay, a new fan publication that billed itself as “a magazine of importance for every American home.” Hall’s profiles explored the feminist beliefs of actresses Elsie Ferguson, Madge Kennedy, Olga Petrova, and Lillian Gish, and screenwriter Rita Weiman. Even given the fact that the changing role of women in modern society was a frequently debated topic in fan and women’s magazines at the time, Hall’s articles are noteworthy in foregrounding feminism as the theme of the series, and for discussing issues like financial independence, socialism, equality in marriage, and opportunities for women in the film industry. Interestingly, Hall, who was a working mother and a member of the progressive The Woman Pays Club in New York, often comes across in the articles as more feminist than her interview subjects. For instance, when Lillian Gish suggested that women already “ruled the world” by supporting and encouraging powerful men, Hall disagreed, writing “I brought forth the objection that it is a humiliating thing to invariably rule from behind something or other, be it man, war, throne or philosopher” (Hall 1922, 21). Several of these articles, and other pieces that Hall had written for the fan magazines, were reworked for Hall’s syndicated newspaper column, “The Diary of a Professional Movie Fan,” which debuted in April 1922 and continued for about a year.

In 1927, Hall and her husband Russell E. Ball, who was now a noted portrait photographer, relocated their family to Los Angeles and settled in a house in Benedict Canyon. Though Hall had always been comfortable writing about film personalities from the vantage point of New York, the move not only gave her easier access to the stars, but also allowed her to write first-hand about the film industry and the studios. In the 1930s, Hall continued to freelance for a wide variety of fan and women’s magazines and was active in the Hollywood Women’s Press Club, which she had co-founded in 1928 with Louella Parsons and a small group of fellow writers. By the end of the decade, an article about fan magazine writers (or “hacks,” as the author called them) acknowledged Hall as the “Grand Old Dame of the Fannies” and reported that she was the most well-paid of all the writers, earning an estimated $10,000 per year (Cotter 1939, 18, 20). After the death of her husband in 1942, Gladys Hall moved back to New York, but continued to contribute regularly to the fan magazines, now singing the praises of a new generation of stars. Gladys Hall died in Huntington, New York in 1977 at the age of eighty-six.

Although she had a lengthy career and created an extensive body of work, there has been surprisingly little written about Gladys Hall or her contributions to popular discourse about film. Unlike fellow fan magazine writer Adela Rogers St. Johns, who achieved her own level of celebrity and crossed over to writing film stories, novels, and scenarios, Gladys Hall never became famous outside the pages of the popular magazines that published her work. Other than a handful of newspaper and magazine articles, the only significant published source on Hall is Anthony Slide’s excellent book Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, which profiles Hall and other important early writers and editors, including Adele Whitely Fletcher and Myrtle Gebhart. But despite Slide’s admirable research on Hall and her colleagues, there is much more that should be done to shine a light on the lives and careers of the dozens of women whose writing filled the pages of the fan magazines in the silent era. Although the sheer volume of their output and the ephemeral nature of their writing may make this research challenging, Gladys Hall and other early female fan magazine writers are pioneers whose influence on generations of female movie fans deserves closer consideration from film historians.

See alsoLillian GishLouella ParsonsAdela Rogers St. JohnsGloria SwansonOlga Petrova

Bibliography

Cotter, Carl. F. “The Forty Hacks of the Fan Mags.” The Coast (Feb. 1939): 18-21. Gladys Hall Papers, folder 539. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

“The Film, Upward and Onward.” Flair (Sept. 1950): 34-35. Gladys Hall Papers, folder 539. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

“Good Things A-Coming for 1918. And the People Who Will Contribute Them.” Motion Picture Magazine vol. 14, no. 11 (Dec. 1917): 120-122.

Hall, Gladys. “Here Are the Movie Mommers!” Photoplay vol. 21, no. 1 (Dec. 1921): 77.

------. “Lamentations of a Lady Interviewer.” Photoplay vol. 21, no. 4 (March 1922): 82.

------. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Undated notes for an unpublished autobiography. 3 pages. Gladys Hall Papers, folder 541. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

------. “The Serious Side of the Women of the Screen: Lillian Gish.” Filmplay vol. 2, no. 1 (July 1922): 20-21.

------. “The Serious Side of the Women of the Screen: Rita Weiman.” Filmplay vol. 2, no. 2 (Aug. 1922): 20-21.

------, and Adele Whitely Fletcher. “We Interview Gloria Swanson.” Motion Picture Magazine vol. 32, no. 3 (Oct. 1926): 28-29, 94-96, 107.

Publicity page.  “The Diary of a Professional Movie Fan.” Metropolitan Newspaper Service (30 March 1922): n.p. Gladys Hall Papers, Scrapbook 1922-1923. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Singer, Anita. “Gladys Hall, columnist, dies at 86.” Obit. The Long-Islander (22 Sept. 1977): 1-2. Gladys Hall Papers, folder 541. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Slide, Anthony. Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson, Miss: U.P. of Mississippi, 2010.

Studlar, Gaylyn. “The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women’s Commodified Culture in the 1920s.” Wide Angle vol. 13, no. 1 (Jan. 1991): 6-33. Rpt. in Silent Film. Ed. Richard Abel. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996. 263-297.

Taylor, Carol. “Stars in Her Eyes, Pen in Her Hand.” New York World-Telegram (4 Dec. 1947): n.p. Gladys Hall Papers, folder 539. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Typed biographical notes [possibly by Gladys Hall] circa 1943. Gladys Hall Papers, folder 541. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Archival Paper Collections:

Gladys Hall Papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Hall, Barbara. "Gladys Hall." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-1z95-5v19>

Beatrice Maude Tildesley

by Jill Julius Matthews

Beatrice Tildesley is a little known name. Her status as a woman, an Australian, and a critic has muffled any resonance in traditional film history. But in the 1920s and 1930s she had considerable influence as a leading member of Sydney’s cultural elite. She was one of very few Australian intellectuals to write seriously on the cinema and can lay claim to being the country’s foremost independent film critic and commentator for a decade beginning in the mid-1920s.

Beatrice Tildesley was the third of four children born into a well-to-do small manufacturing family in Staffordshire, England, in 1886. Educated in Birmingham and at Girton College, Cambridge, she left England during the First World War to join her older sister, Evelyn, in Sydney, where she taught classics, tennis, and fencing at a private girls’ school. In 1923, Tildesley “obtained the means of independence” (Rutledge 1990, 230) and thereafter she pursued the active life of a single, female, Australian intellectual: she went to the theatre, recitals, and lectures; she wrote poetry and reviews; she was a member of many political and cultural committees; an art and theatre critic; an amateur actor, and bonne vivante. From 1922 to 1924, she was the regular drama critic for the short-lived ForumA Journal for Thinking Australians, after which she wrote occasional drama and film reviews and articles for numerous small magazines: the Triad, the Bulletin, Beckitt’s Budget, and The Home. It was her love of theatre which drew Tildesley to what she hoped would be its modern incarnation, moving pictures. For over a decade, she sought to encourage the moving picture industry and its audience to live up to their inherent possibilities. Although her numerous commentaries were couched in moralistic tones, it was the failure of art that Beatrice Tildesley most deplored. She wanted to see and to encourage the best in this most modern art form.

Beatrice Maude Tildesley (o), December 1922, from book Dance Hall & Picture Palaces (2005).

Beatrice Maude Tildesley, December 1922. Courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.

The first steps in Beatrice Tildesley’s career of civilizing moving pictures were taken in 1924 or 1925, when she joined the Good Film League. The League had been founded in 1922 under the auspices of the National Council of Women of New South Wales (NCW of NSW) acting on a resolution of its parent body, the International Council of Women (ICW). The League’s aims were explicitly crafted to give effect to a moral and aesthetic agenda through a dual practice: censorship and encouragement. It sought to suppress the corrupt and vulgar and to encourage the good and beautiful.

In November 1927, Tildsley gave evidence to the Commonwealth Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry (1926-1928) as a representative of both the Good Film League and the NCW. She was, according to the Minutes of Evidence, “a member of the general public who has given more study than the average person to the films” (916). Tildsley spoke strongly against the “vulgarity and false sentiment” of the average American film, but applauded fine acting from performers of whatever nationality (917). She advocated a quota system for British and Australian films, to encourage the local industry and to instill patriotic taste and values. The Minutes of Evidence noted that she urged that “on any Board of Censors there should be one person to consider especially the taste and truth of the film to be shown” (917) and, further, that such a Board should include a woman “whose judgment would be particularly helpful in deciding what films were suitable for children” (918). All these views were mirrored in the Commission’s recommendations in their final report (1928, 1371-1409). One further recommendation was that awards of merit should be made to the best films produced in Australia and, in 1934, Tildesley was appointed one of three adjudicators for the Commonwealth Government’s second Film Competition. She was disappointed in the poor production values of most of the entries.

A strong committee woman and cosmopolitan, Tildesley represented the Good Film League on the New South Wales branch of the League of Nations Union. She was a member of the NCW’s Standing Committee on Cinema and Broadcasting, and in 1930 she became the Australian Correspondent on the Cinema Project for the Women’s Pan-Pacific Conference, whose primary concern, according to the Pan-Pacific Union Bulletin in 1929, was to investigate “the undoubted influence of the moving picture on the formation of thought and character, especially with reference to young people and children” (n.p.). Tildesley prepared two reports in The Australian Quarterly for the Project: “The Cinema in Australia,” which presented a wide-ranging overview of the development of the industry in Australia, noting that local production was negligible (Tildesley 1930, 89-103), and “The Cinema and Broadcasting in Australia,” which addressed changes since 1930 (Tildesley 1934, 129-36).

In 1931, she was one of the founders of the Film Society of Australia, modelled on the British Film Society established six years earlier. Its primary aim, according to a 1933 editorial in Film Society of Australia Film Review, was to organize for its members screenings and discussions of “outstandingly good films” that might otherwise not get commercial release (n.p.). The society’s preference was for British and continental films and educational and ethnographic films, but it also showed members’ amateur work. As well as acting as the Society’s secretary from 1931 until it wound down in 1935, Tildesley was part of the Reviewing Group whose members furnished reviews of all the first release films at city theatres, and scoured international journals for reviews of films released elsewhere and likely to come to Australia. All these short critiques were published in the Society’s Film Review. During the heyday of the Society, Tildesley was invited to form an Australian committee of the International Educational Cinematographic Institute, a body established in Rome under the direction of the League of Nations, whose function was to investigate cinema in relation to such things as the conditions of workers in the film industry and the use of cinema for purposes of children’s education, social hygiene, and physical education. No committee seems to have been formed, but Tildesley did agree to act as Australian Correspondent with the Institute.

Even in their early, optimistic years, none of these organizations provided funds for its correspondents to attend meetings, and Beatrice Tildesley did not become actively involved in the dizzying inter-war world of international committee work, although she did write several reports for international circulation. But importantly, through her involvement in these bodies, she wove Australian intellectuals into a dense international network of talk and research around the notion of cinema as an art form and an instrument of peace, co-operation, and civilization.

Although much of her film activism and writing occurred in the context of elite organizations, from the early 1930s she took her values of civilization and aesthetic pleasure to mass audiences. For the period from 1933 to 1935, she was the inaugural film critic for the leading women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly, as well as for The Housewife, the magazine of the powerful Housewives Association of Australia, whose president, Eleanor Glencross, was the first woman appointed to the Commonwealth Film Censorship Board in 1928. During 1934, Tildesley wrote regular columns on film for the monthly glossy, To-Day. After about 1935, Beatrice Tildesley’s film activities fade away from the public record, but she continued to enjoy going to the pictures and talking about them for the next forty years.

Bibliography

Australia. Parliament 1926-1928. Report of the Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia 1927-1928. Parliamentary Papers Vol. IV. Canberra: Government Printer, 1928.

Editorial. Film Society of Australia Film Review (June 1933): n.p.

Maltby, Richard.  “The Cinema and the League of Nations.” In “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920-1929. Eds. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999. 82-116.

Matthews, Jill Julius.  “Beatrice Maude Tildesley Goes to the Pictures.” Screening the Past (May 16 2004): n.p. http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr_16/jjmfr16.html.

------. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005.

Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, 1926-1928. Minutes of Evidence. Evidence of Miss Beatrice Maude Tildesley. 1926-1928. 916-920.

Rutledge, Martha. “Tildesley, Evelyn Mary and Beatrice Maude.” Australian Dictionary of Biography 12. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990. 230-31. Also available ADB Online. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/tildesley-beatrice-maude-9254.

Seeking Data on Moving Pictures. Pan-Pacific Union Bulletin 112 (June 1929): n.p.

Tildesley, Beatrice. “The Cinema in Australia.” The Australian Quarterly 8 (December 1930): 89-103.

------. “The Cinema and Broadcasting in Australia.” The Australian Quarterly 24 (December 1934): 129-36.

Archival Paper Collections:

Bound printed copy of Minutes of Evidence of the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, 1926-1928. (A11636/4/1). The National Archives of Australia.

The Evelyn and Beatrice Tildesley Papers. (ML MSS 3361). State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library.

Film Society of Australia Film Review. May 1933-December 1933. Q791.4305/16). State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library.

Citation

Matthews, Jill Julius. "Beatrice Maude Tildesley." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-5z2k-7n36>

Gerda Hintze

by Riikka Pennanen

Gerda Hintze is one of the pioneer female screenwriters who worked in early Finnish film. In fact, only two female scenarists are known to have worked during the silent era: Katri Viita for Työn sankarilaulu/A Song About the Heroism of Labour (1929) and Hintze for Kajastus/Mirage (1930), which ended up being her only script that went to production. However, identifying all of the crew members of silent era Finnish films is challenging. Only a select few (if any) members of the crew were officially credited in the existing opening credits or programmes, which were available for patrons attending the screenings. In some cases, Suomen kansallisfilmografia/Finnish National Filmography only identifies the surname of crew members (Uusitalo et al. 1996). Also, gender neutral or masculine pseudonyms were sometimes used by women working within film, such as writer-screenwriters Hella Wuolijoki (Juhani Tervapää), Seere Salminen (Serp), and Kersti Bergroth (Tet), all of whom began their work in film later in the 1930s or early 1940s.

Portrait, Gerda Hintze (w). PC

Portrait, Gerda Hintze. Private Collection. 

Hintze was born in Oulu, in the north of Finland, in 1905. She later relocated to Helsinki, where she worked as a pharmacist. Prior to Kajastus, Hintze did not have experience as a writer, but she did have a keen interest in history and photography. Hintze’s nephew, Sten Berger, has speculated that she encountered filmmaker Carl von Haartman whilst working at the pharmacy at Market Square in Helsinki, which led to Hintze penning Kajastus. Carl von Haartman had returned from the United States in 1928, where he had appeared in bit parts and as a supervisor on Wings (1927). In Finland, von Haartman began working as a director, screenwriter, and actor at the Suomi-Filmi production company.

According to Carl von Haartman’s autobiography, Suomi-Filmi had ambitious plans for a film about the Russification of Finland and Nikolay Bobrikov as the Governor-General of Finland. He wrote: “The screenplay was already done, and it only had to be fashioned into a shooting script. This took me a couple of months, and then pre-production started in practice” (1972, 144). Kajastus, directed by von Haartman, was filmed during the fall of 1929. However the story goes, Hintze wrote the original script for Kajastus, the historical drama set between Finland’s years of oppression, 1899-1905. Hintze alone was credited as the screenwriter in the film’s opening titles and in the programme, despite von Haartman’s apparent involvement.

Gerda Hintze (w) and Carl Von Haartman on the set of Kajastus (1930) in 1929. KAVI (National audiovisual institute, Finland)

Gerda Hintze and Carl Von Haartman on the set of Kajastus (1930) in 1929. Courtesy of Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto (Carl von Haartman: Kajastus 1930 ©KAVI/Suomi-Filmi Oy).

Hintze’s script for Kajastus combines political history and a love story. The film begins with Nicholas II of Russia signing the February Manifesto of 1899, which asserted the imperial government’s right to rule Finland without the consent of local legislative bodies. After the assassination of Nikolay Bobrikov, the Russian gendarmerie begin house searches to look for weapons. Kajastus is set in the Toivola country house, where the Cederström family and their staff reside. Siblings Oscar (Gunnar Wallin) and Louise Cederström (Elsa Segerberg) side with the Finnish Nationalist activists, such as their neighbour Antti Ahma (Aarne Leppänen). Oscar and Louise’s cousin Gustaf Cederström (Helge Ranin), who serves as a cavalry master in the Russian military, arrives in Toivola. Gustaf confesses his feelings for Louise but she acts cold towards him because of his Russian ties. Meanwhile, Oscar has previously been involved with Louise’s maid (Vivan Cravelin). Once he rejects her, she takes revenge on her former lover by reporting on the family’s alliances to countess Maria Feodorovna (Anielka Elter) and the Russian officials, thus endangering the activists’ dangerous mission.

Film programme for Kajastus (1930). KAVI

Film programme for Kajastus (1930). Courtesy of Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Kajastus premiered on April 13, 1930. It ended up being the last fully silent Finnish film. Kajastus was a highly ambitious and also an unusual Finnish film for its time. It even featured an international star, Czechoslovakian actress Anielka Elter, whose stay in Finland was widely reported by the press. Additionally, Kajastus features the work of another female film pioneer: fashion designer Jenny Kuosmanen of Salon de Mode designed the costumes.

Kajastus received mixed reviews upon its release. A reviewer for Karjala, going by the initials “H-e,” criticized Hintze’s script for touching upon history that felt too recent and too sensitive (1930, 5). A critic named “Ped, writing for Ylioppilaslehti, thought that the film’s failure was the fact that it was advertised as treating the highly sensitive period in near history in an unbiased manner: “As a result, the film failed to convey the national and patriotic Finnish spirit that the audience expected because of the advertisement. The viewer objects in his/her mind to such an unbiased treatment which is not acceptable with certain things” (1930, 6-7). However, one can argue that the film has aged quite well partly due to the fact that it remains objective and rather detached in its treatment of the difficult period in Finnish history. The subject of the Russification of Finland and Finnish National activism became the topic of several films in the late 1930s—and this time with a much more obvious sense of patriotism.

Film programme for Kajastus (1930). KAVI

Film programme for Kajastus (1930). Courtesy of Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Hintze had plans for at least one other film script. A six page synopsis titled Lisa, written in Swedish, can be found at the National Audiovisual Institute. Hintze prefaces the text by suggesting it would work best as a “tonfilm-operette,” or “sound film operetta,” so it can be assumed that the undated synopsis is from the early to mid-1930s. Lisa is a rags-to-riches story mixed with romance and thrills. The story follows Lisa, an eighteen-year old girl who works at the Stockmann department store in Helsinki. By chance Lisa is given an opportunity to sing at a society matron’s party. She borrows a dress from work and has to hurry back in time to return itonly to discover that burglars have entered the department store.

Although Hintze’s other script never came to fruition, her experience as a screenwriter inspired her to continue writing. She would work as a pharmacist until her retirement, occasionally taking time off from work to write for magazines. In 1934, she traveled to Berlin and wrote an article for the magazine Fama about UFA’s Babelsberg Film Studio. After the Continuation War, she wrote for the Swedish language newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet. Hintze never married. She died in Helsinki in 1977.

See also: Katri Viita

Bibliography

Berger, Sten. Personal Interview. July 30, 2013.

Haartman, Carl von. Antaa Haartmanin yrittää. Helsinki: Otava, 1972.

H-e. “Kotimainen elokuva-ensi-ilta Viipurissa.” Rev. Karjala (13 April 1930): 5. Kajastus clippings file. Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Hintze, Gerda. “På jakt efter Turandot. En vandring inom Ufas ateljéer.” Fama 8 (1934): 92-94.

Laine, Kimmo. “Pääosassa Suomen kansa: Suomi-Filmi ja Suomen Filmiteollisuus kansallisen elokuvan rakentajina 1933–1939. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1999.

Ped. “Elokuva sortovuosilta.” Rev. Ylioppilaslehti (30 April 1930): 6-7. Kajastus clippings file. Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto

Pennanen, Riikka. “Finland–Overview.” In Women Screenwriters: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 302-307.

------. “Gerda Hintze.” Elonet, Kansallisfilmografia [online database] (June 12, 2014): n.p. http://www.elonet.fi/fi/henkilo/117475

Seppälä, Jaakko. Hollywood tulee Suomeen: yhdysvaltalaisten elokuvien maahantuonti ja vastaanotto kaksikymmentäluvun Suomessa. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto, 2012.

Uusitalo, Kari, et al., ed. Suomen kansallisfilmografia 1, 1907–1935: vuosien 1907–1935 suomalaiset kokoillan elokuvat. Helsinki: Edita, 1996.

Archival Paper Collections:

Kajastus clippings file. Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Scripts for Kajastus. Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Lisa. Undated synopsis. Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Juha Seitajärvi Collection (Kajastus programmes). Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen arkisto.

Citation

Pennanen, Riikka. "Gerda Hintze." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-g3nv-ac75>

Ol’ga Rakhmanova

by Natalie Ryabchikova

Like many other early Russian film actors, Ol’ga Rakhmanova entered into a new career after a long professional life in theater, mostly in the provinces. She was born in Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, sometime in 1871 and studied there at the Drama School of the Russian Music Society. Abandoning her married name, Sokolova, and her three children, she first acted in semi-amateur troupes. In 1896, as the first Lumière films were shown in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, she made her professional stage debut under the guidance of a well-known provincial entrepreneur, Konstantin Nezlobin, in Vilna, now Vilnius, Lithuania. However, it would take her almost twenty years to branch out into cinema.

Ol'ga Rakhmanova (a/w/d/) in 1910.

Ol’ga Rakhmanova in 1910 in book Byloe pered glazami: Teatra’nye vospominaniia (1963).

During those two decades, Rakhmanova worked as an actress, a theater director, and entrepreneur in various towns of the Russian Empire. In 1905 or 1906, in her hometown of Odessa, she opened declamation and elocution classes, which were later transformed into a theater school. In the 1910s she moved to Moscow, where she worked in the popular Drama Theater of V. Sukhodol’skii, whose company included most of the screen stars of the time, among them Vera Iureneva, Vladimir Maksimov, and Ivan Mozzhukhin (Mosjoukine). It is not surprising, then, that in 1915, Rakhmanova also made her screen debutin Petr Chardynin’s sensational drama Mar’ia Lus’evaAfter that, she mostly worked at Aleksandr Khanzhonkov’s studio, playing mothers of suffering young heroines, and occasionally aunts of heroes. Most famously, she was the merchant step-mother of Vera Kholodnaia in Evgenii Bauer’s A Life for a Life (1916), who shot her son-in-law in a dramatic finale. In a May 15, 1916 review of that film in Teatral’naia gazeta, Rakhmanova was acknowledged as “a wonderful grande dame” of Russian cinema (16). 

Screenshot, Ol'ga Rakhmanova (a/w/d) in After Death (1915).

Screenshot, Ol’ga Rakhmanova, After Death (1915).

In 1916 Rakhmanova’s first script was directed by Bauer himself. Only What’s Lost is Forever told the story of the tragic rupture between an artist and his family and friends, who are unable to understand his creative aspirations. Together with most of Khanzhonkov’s cast and crew Rakhmanova went to Crimea in the summer of 1917 for the annual location shoots. When Bauer suddenly died at the very beginning of the trip, several of his films were left unfinished, including the adventure melodrama The King of Paris (1917). Since all the interior scenes for it had already been shot in Moscow, the film was finished on location by members of the cast and crew. In the restored version of the film, preserved at the Russian State Film Archive, Rakhmanova is listed as its co-writer and co-director together with Bauer, which is also reflected in historical overviews of the period (e.g., Ginzburg 2007, 385). Some contemporary sources, however, stated that the film was finished by its cast headed by Emma Bauer, the director’s widow. At least, the studio’s head, Aleksandr Khanzhonkov, says as much in the unabridged, unpublished version of his memoirs, The First Years of Russian Film Industry, written in the mid-1930s and held at the Russian State Film Archive (310). Alternatively, Lev Kuleshov, who was the film’s art designer, claimed in his memoirs that he participated in the collective efforts to finish the film (1988, 43), and his participation has been recently more and more emphasized by scholars. Eventually, the new “restored” version of the film shown on Russian television in 2008 credited Kuleshov and Bauer, but left no mention of Rakhmanova.

Screenshot, Vera Kholodnaia and Ol'ga Rakhmanova in A Life for a Life (1916).

Screenshot, Vera Kholodnaia and Ol’ga Rakhmanova, A Life for a Life (1916).

This difficulty of attribution is characteristic of most of Rakhmanova’s output as a director. A simpler case is presented by her next film, The Tale of the Spring Breeze (1917). Although Ivan Perestiani, who played the main part, later claimed to have directed the film, an October 1918 article in Kino-gazeta clearly named Rakhmanova the film’s director (4). At the same time, a June 1918 article in Kino-gazeta called her next film, An Episode of Love (1918), her first work as a director (11). It had been, perhaps, begun before The Tale of the Spring Breeze, but completed and released later. Rakhmanova also wrote the script for An Episode of Love and, as usual, played the blind harpist mother of the heroine, Irina. The young version of her character in the film was played by Natal’ia Sokolova, who most likely was Rakhmanova’s own daughter. She had studied in her mother’s acting school in Odessa and also appeared in Rakhmanova’s next film, Faust (1918). One contemporary critic, going by the pseudonym Ten, had this to say about Rakhmanova’s work on An Episode of Love: “One feels that the new film director has a firm grip on her material, arranges mise-en-scènes clearly, and does not lose the action’s tempo. But the combination of author, actor, and director in one person hindered each of them individually” (1918, 9). 

A publicity still for Only What’s Lost is Forever (1916), Ol'ga Rakhmanova.

A publicity still for Only What’s Lost is Forever (1916) with Ol’ga Rakhmanova in Vestnik kinematografii

In the last months of private film production in Russia, Rakhmanova wrote and directed an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s short story, Faust. Because of the absence of positive stock and electricity to power film theaters, the film was never released. In August 1919, in the atmosphere of diminishing opportunities for practical filmmaking, another former director of the Khanzhonkov studio, Boris Chaikovskii, organized a private film school called “Tvorchestvo,” which translates to “Creation,” with Rakhmanova as one of the main teachers. He was also behind her return to cinema, first as an actress. In 1920 Chaikovskii made two short agitation films, It Shouldn’t Be This Way, and On Peasant’s Land; in both of which he employed Rakhmanova. 

Never quite leaving the stage, in 1921 Rakhmanova became the director of the newly-formed drama workshop/studio at the Moscow Military Sanitation Administration. It was created to promote sanitation education through “show trials,” for example, of prostitutes, as well as through performances of classical plays such as Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” Additionally, new works under the titles such as “Stigmatized by Shame” and “The Victim of Dirt” were performed (Wood 2005, 111-12).

A newspaper ad for Behind White Lines (1925), Ol'ga Rakhmanova

Ad for Behind White Lines (1925) in Kino-nedelia.

In the mid-1920s Rakhmanova continued teaching acting at Chaikovskii’s film school and took part in the production of his new film, Behind White Lines (1925), written by Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko. The cast included several of their students, and Rakhmanova herself played the wife of General Durasov. When Chaikovskii suddenly died of a brain hemorrhage in November 1924, she again finished the film. In this case, unlike the Bauer controversy, her own account of how much was done by each co-director survives. Rakhmanova’s slim personal file, held in the collection of the Union of Drama Writers and Composers at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, includes a statement that asserts that Chaikovskii had done all the outdoor scenes and had drafted the plan of the rest. After his death, Rakhmanova shot interior scenes and edited the film together with Agadzhanova-Shutko and Petr Malakhov. For the purposes of protecting her author’s rights, she concluded: “I think that half of the work was done by B.V. Chaikovskii and the other half by me” (8).

Rakhmanova’s obituary of Chaikovskii is the closest one finds to her own director’s creed. Dividing Russian directors into two “schools” according to the role they delegate to human beings on screen, Chaikovskii (and Rakhmanova with him) proclaimed man

the center of a film shot, its main part. All the other shots are supplementary. They don’t have intrinsic value on their own. Nature, sets, lighting, propsall this is only a background, elements needed to strengthen the general impression, and nothing else. Man with all his inner essence, with all his multifaceted alternation of feelings is the primary great force of cinema, the reason for its unprecedented influence on viewers (Rakhmanova 1924, 7).

In September 1925 Rakhmanova started making a film called Why? at the Proletkino film studio in Moscow. It was a semi-educational film, alternatively called Clap is a Woman’s Bane, about the dangers of venereal diseases and their improper treatment, possibly connected to her previous work for the Military Sanitation Administration theater workshop. For unknown reasons, however, the shooting was stopped after a couple of months and then continued by another director, Valerii Inkizhinov (of the future Storm Over Asia [1928] fame), and with a mostly new cast. The released film, renamed Payback (1926), again had Rakhmanova listed as a co-director, although it is very unlikely that any of the scenes shot by her crew made it into the finished film (Ryabchikova 2010, 390–92). This was her last attempt at directing. In 1926 she was expelled from the main professional organization of filmmakers, Association for Revolutionary Cinema, for “having nothing to do with Revolutionary cinema,” according to the “Minutes of the 8th Meeting,” which are held at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (10). 

When Chaikovskii’s school, which she headed after his death, was closed sometime after 1930, Rakhmanova retreated into teaching elocution in the main Moscow theater institute, GITIS. She primarily worked with “nationality classes,” teaching students from the republics of Latvia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, now Kyrgyzstan, and Chuvashia. According to her obituary, until her death, Rakhmanova continued working on a textbook for theater, in addition to the previously written book on the phonetics of speech, declamation, and acting (Filippov and Saricheva et al. 1944, 4). Neither was ever published.

See also: Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko

Bibliography

Advertisement. Behind White LinesKino-nedelia 3 (1925): 19.

Filippov, B., E. Saricheva, et al. “O.V.Rakhmanova [Obituary].” Literatura i iskusstvo 3 (1944): 4.

Ginzburg, Semen. Kinematografiia dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii. Moscow: Agraf, 2007.

“Khronika. Kino-gazeta 27 (June 1918): 11. 

Korotkii, Viktor. Operatory i rezhissery russkogo igrovogo kino (1897–1921). Moscow: NII kinoiskusstva, 2009.

Kuleshov, Lev. Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh. Vol. 2. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988.

Nezhnyi, Igor'. Byloe pered glazami: Teatra'nye vospominaniia. Moscow: VTO, 1963.

Perestiani, Ivan. 75 let zhizni v iskusstve. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1962.

Rakhmanova, Ol'ga. “B.V.Chaikovskii.” Kino-nedelia 42 (18 November 1924): 7.

Ryabchikova, Natal'ia. “S"emochnaia ploshchadka: ‘Proletkino’.” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 92/93 (2010): 388–405.

“Skazka vesennego vetra.” Kino-gazeta 36 (October 1918): 4.

Ten. “Epizod liubvi.” Kino-gazeta 32 (July 1918): 9.

Vestnik kinematografii 119 (1916): 27

W. [Vitol'd Akhramovich]. “Zhizn' za zhizn'.” Teatral'naia gazeta 20 (15 May 1916): 16.

Wood, Elizabeth. Performing Justice: Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Archival Paper Collections:

Khanzhonkov, A.A. Pervye gody russkoi kinopromyshlennosti/The First Years of Russian Film Industry. Research fonds. Veniamin Vishnevskii Collection, folder 25. Gosfilmofond.

“Minutes of the 8th Meeting of the Commission for the re-registration of members of ARK, August 14, 1926”/Protokol № 8 zasedaniia Komissii po pereregistratsii chlenov ARK ot 14/VIII - 26.” Fonds 2494, inventory list 1, file 47. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Personal File 1236. Rakhmanova Ol'ga Vladimirovna. Fonds 675. Inventory list 2, file 522. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Citation

Ryabchikova, Natalie. "Ol’ga Rakhmanova." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-7dr7-wm36>

Alma Reville

by Nathalie Morris

Best known as the wife and collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock, Alma Reville’s career as a screenwriter and editor has largely been overshadowed by that of her director husband. As Hitchcock was fond of pointing out, however, Reville entered the film industry long before he did and by the time they met in 1921, she was already an experienced editor, continuity supervisor, and director’s assistant (1995, 51). Around 1915, at the age of sixteen, Reville joined the London Film Company which was based near her family home in Twickenham. Starting out as a tea girl, she was soon promoted to the cutting room and within two years was working as an assistant to director Maurice Elvey, according to a 1925 article in The Picturegoer (48). In 1918, she took a role in Elvey’s The Life Story of David Lloyd George (Hitchcock O’Connell and Bouzereau 2003,  26-27). This experience may have briefly inspired her with the desire to become an actress but despite a fleeting cameo in The Lodger (1927), the remainder of her career was based behind, rather than in front of, the camera.

Alma Reville (a/w/e/o) and Alfred Hitchcock. BFI

Alma Reville and Alfred Hitchcock. Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

In 1921, Reville moved to Famous Players-Lasky’s studio in Islington where, according to The Picturegoer, she worked as an editor and second assistant director (1925, 48). At this time the duties of a second assistant director may have varied depending on studio, director, and the assistant’s skills. For Reville, it seems that a central part of the job was largely based around continuity and script editing. She had to spot potential continuity flaws, edit and re-write the script accordingly, and ensure that the shots taken on the studio floor would cut together once the film reached its assembly stage. Although editors were generally credited with little creative input at this time, Reville published an article in The Motion Picture Studio in 1923 in which she argued that editing was not merely a mechanical part of the filmmaking process but was in fact an “Art […] with a capital A” (10).

Although Reville and Hitchcock may have contributed to several of the same films at Islington, the pair did not begin working closely together until 1923. By this time, Famous Players had abandoned production in Britain and independent producer Michael Balcon was using the studio. Reville was hired initially as an editor, but soon began working uncredited with Hitchcock on scripts for new productions. When Hitchcock was offered the chance to direct, Reville became his assistant director. She later claimed to have been Britain’s first female assistant director. During the shooting of his debut feature, The Pleasure Garden (1927), Hitchcock appears to have been highly reliant on Reville. After each take he turned to her to ask, “Was that alright?” (McBride 1976, 225). She also managed many of the film’s financial and practical demands while on location in Europe, and later supervised its editing (Hitchcock O’Connell and Bouzereau 42).

By the time The Pleasure Garden was released, Reville was a well-known and respected figure in her own right. Described as “clever and experienced” by an industry insider in Kinematograph Weekly (Mannock 1925, 49), she was also the subject of a lengthy profile in the fan magazine The Picturegoer in 1925 (48). Hitchcock had to wait until the following year to receive a similar honor. The profile cast Reville as a pioneering figure within the British film industry and hinted at the possibility of a future directorial career, but Reville ultimately did not pursue this avenue. We can only speculate about the reasons. After the birth of the Hitchcocks’ only child, Patricia, in 1928, Reville moved more decisively towards screenwriting, a type of work with more flexible working patterns and perhaps more compatible with childcare than the tough routines of work at the studio. But Reville also later stated that she felt she lacked the physical presence and temperament to be a director (Chandler 2005, 46), a notion that Hitchcock supported in an article published in 1929, telling interviewer Roger Burford that when they directed together “some of the more unwieldy departments of film producing were difficult for [Reville] to control” (102).

Alma Reville (a/w/e/o) and Alfred Hitchcock at work, c. 1930. BFI

Alma Reville and Alfred Hitchcock at work, c. 1930. Courtesy of the British Film Institute.

After Reville’s marriage to Hitchcock in December 1926, credited scenario writing for a variety of producers, and increasingly uncredited collaboration with her husband came to define the rest of her silent and later sound film work. While pregnant with Patricia, she co-wrote the script for Gainsborough’s The Constant Nymph (1928), a popular success upon its release. The majority of the scenarios Reville worked on were collaborative efforts, her only sole credit being the courtroom drama After the Verdict (1929). Her final silent film was A Romance of Seville (1929), co-written with Garnett Weston for British International Pictures, the company with which she and Hitchcock would continue their careers, both separately and together—Reville worked on several non-Hitchcock pictures as well as having a regular credit on her husband’s films—in the 1930s.

Reville’s personal papers are not held in a public archive, although her daughter Patricia has made tantalizing references to them in her biography of Reville, The Woman Behind the Man. Photographs and anecdotal accounts often provide the only real clue as to Reville’s involvement in certain silent era productions. Even then it can be difficult to ascertain the extent of her input, a problem which persists into her later and often informal work with Hitchcock, although the Hitchcock papers held at the Margaret Herrick Library do provide significant evidence of Reville’s important contributions to his later American films. While these documents, which include scripts, letters, and snapshots, may not fully answer these questions of attribution, they would certainly constitute an extremely valuable source of information for any further research on Reville and, particularly, her early career.

Bibliography

“Alma in Wonderland.” The Picturegoer (December 1925): 48.

Burford, Roger. “A New ‘Chair’ Which a Woman Might Fill.” The Gateway (for Women at Work) (July 1929): 100-103.

Chandler, Charlotte. It’s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock – A Personal Biography. London: Pocket Books, 2005.

Hitchcock, Alfred. “The Woman Who Knows Too Much.” McCalls 83 (March 1956): 12, 14. Rpt. in Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writing and Interviews. Ed. Sidney Gottlieb. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. 51-53.

Hitchcock O’Connell, Patricia, and Laurent Bouzereau. Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man. New York: Berkeley Books, 2003.

Mannock, Patrick L. “Two New British Production Units.” Kinematograph Weekly (8 October 1925): 49.

McBride, Joseph. “Mr and Mrs Hitchcock.” Sight & Sound (Autumn 1976): 224-225.

Reville, Alma. “Cutting and Continuity.” The Motion Picture Studio (13 January 1923): 10.

Archival Paper Collections:

Adrian Brunel Collection (contains material on The Constant Nymph [1928]). British Film Institute.

Alfred Hitchcock Papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Unpublished script collection (shooting script for A Romance of Seville [1929], S1582).British Film Institute.

Citation

Morris, Nathalie. "Alma Reville." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-rkt5-8s39>

Ray Lewis

by Paul S. Moore, Louis Pelletier

For nearly four decades, Ray Lewis was one of the most vocal representatives of the Canadian film industry. The trade journal she edited from the late 1910s until the mid-1950s, the Canadian Moving Picture Digest, kept the nation’s film exhibitors informed on a wide variety of topics. It also permitted Lewis to mount campaigns dealing with some of the most vital issues of the day, such as the defense of independent exhibitors and the quest for a distinctly Canadian film culture.

Ray Lewis, 1927. GRAFICS

Portrait of Ray Lewis, after a painting by Joshua Smith, RBA. Canadian Moving Picture Digest (9 July 1927): 25.

Ray Lewis’s early years have yet to be adequately chronicled: most of what is currently known about her life and career prior to her arrival at the Canadian Moving Picture Digest in 1918 derives from later accounts by Lewis herself, who defiantly remained a storyteller of the “print the legend” type throughout her life. Census data do reveal that she was born Rae Levinsky in 1883 to a Jewish family that had recently resettled from Polish Russia to the quickly developing city of Toronto, Canada. Lewis appears to have demonstrated from very early on a strong attraction to the dramatic arts as well as a taste for performing–a development which seems to have upset her conservative family. While Lewis’s claims regarding the many theatrical productions she is supposed to have starred in as a child remain for the time being unsubstantiated by historical research, a steady run of advertisements published in Variety shows that she was indeed well-established as a vaudeville performer by 1907, when she formed half of the Palmer & Lewis duo (1909, 36). The frequent and unexpected change of personae performed by Lewis throughout her life were already at the center of the act she developed with Palmer. She would later be in the habit of quoting her married self, “Mrs. Joshua Smith,” in the pieces she wrote as “Ray Lewis” for the Digest. The duo’s signature number, “Footlight Flashes,” required her to sing, dance, and personify an impressive number of characters in just a few minutes. By 1914, Lewis was writing and performing in dramatic plays. Four of the plays she wrote in the mid-1910s were deposited at the U.S. Library of Congress, where they remain available to researchers. One of these, “The Other Woman,” was performed in Toronto in 1915 under the auspices of a suffragist group. A strong autobiographical subtext can be detected in this play centering on a young woman attempting to launch a stage career while resisting the social pressure to marry. Lewis also published two volumes of poetry in the mid-1910s.

Portrait Ray Lewis, 1917? or 1927

Ray Lewis portrait from her book Songs of Earth (1917).

Lewis appears to have developed during her vaudeville days professional relationships with Marcus Loew, Nicholas and Joseph Schenck, as well as the Allen brothers, operators of the first national chain of moving picture theatres established in Canada. However, she seems to have delayed her entry in the film industry until 1914 when she was asked to act as wardrobe consultant for Conness Till, a short-lived company that attempted to launch into fiction film production in Toronto. By the summer of 1915, she was living in Flushing, Long Island, and allegedly working as a scriptwriter for Lewis J. Selznick’s Equitable company. She developed a close relationship with the studio’s supervisor of production, Isadore Bernstein, who edited her first volume of poetry. Following the demise of Equitable, Lewis and Bernstein moved to Los Angeles, where at least one film adapted from one of her stories was produced, Loyalty (Jack Pratt, Bernstein Film Productions, 1917). This title remains Lewis’s sole screen credit in the filmographies compiled by the American Film Institute and the Internet Movie Database, even though Lewis also claimed to have worked between 1916 and 1918 as both a dancer and a writer for the Fox Film Corp. The scarcity of titles attributed to her in established sources should be considered in light of the claim, later made by Lewis in an article on August 20, 1927 in Canadian Moving Picture Digest, that directors and scenario department editors had routinely adapted, reconstructed, retitled, and even outright stole her stories (10). It should on that regard be noted that at least one Fox production of the era, Jealousy (Will S. Davis, 1916), presents some strikingly Lewisian features, such as its title echoing that of Loyalty and its lead character: a female dancer in love with an impoverished artist.

Lewis was back in Toronto in the fall of 1918 when she became the editor of the Canadian Moving Picture Digest, which would also become her property a few years later. The Digest had been the first Canadian film trade journal when it had begun publication in 1915, several years after the launch of similar French, British and U.S. trade publications. This delay can partly be attributed to the fact that Canada was at the time thoroughly integrated into the U.S. market, and thus extensively covered by publications such as Variety and the Moving Picture World. Accordingly, the quest for a distinctive Canadian film culture was one of the first causes taken on by Lewis in the fierce editorials and film reviews she wrote for the Digest. A staunch royalist and proponent of Canada’s Imperial connection, Lewis argued that British films should become a mainstay of the programming in Canadian theatres. A first extended stay in the United Kingdom in 1919-1920 (from which she returned with the British painter Joshua Smith, soon to become her husband) permitted her to tour British studios and buy products for the Canadian theatres operated by her friends the Allens. Her defense of British cinema nevertheless stood apart from that of most of the members of the Canadian elite in that it remained free of contempt towards Hollywood and, more generally, cinema as a form of popular entertainment. Lewis did not hesitate to praise U.S. films while criticizing the output of British studios, which she generally found less effective as entertainment.

A charcoal sketch by Joshua Smith (Ray Lewis's husband) reproduced from: Canadian Moving Picture Digest (12 September 1925).

A charcoal sketch of Ray Lewis by husband Joshua Smith. Canadian Moving Picture Digest (12 September 1925): n.p.

Lewis’s crusade for a British-Canadian film culture overlapped throughout the 1920s with her passionate defense of independent exhibitors. The Digest opposed the ruthless treatment of independents by Famous Players Canadian Corp. (managed in Canada by Nathan L. Nathanson, but vertically integrated with Adolph Zukor’s Paramount), which had gained monopoly control of the Canadian film market in the aftermath of its 1923 acquisition of the best theatres operated by the failing Allen Theatres chain. Lewis further opposed a deal formally transferring control of Famous Players’ theatres to Paramount-Publix in 1929. The Digest’s agitation on behalf of independent exhibitors and Famous Players minority shareholders eventually led to a federal investigation on Famous Players’ alleged monopoly in 1931. Lewis’s significant contribution (attested by numerous contemporary newspaper reports) to the investigation led by Peter White was, however, edited out of the Commission’s final report.

A photograph of Ray Lewis interviewing Louis B. Mayer reproduced from: Canadian Moving Picture Digest (25 May 1935).

Ray Lewis interviewing Louis B. Mayer. Canadian Moving Picture Digest (25 May 1935): n.p.

Lewis’s various campaigns showcased her ability to strategically deploy her multiple identities. She could at times foreground her female identity when striking a maternal tone to chide exhibitors or disclosing some of the insider info she was privy to (i.e., gossiping). She could also hide behind her male-sounding pen name when wishing to confuse opponents. She was for instance fond of one particular story centering on the discomfiture of a pair of stooges sent by Paramount executive Sam Katz “to kick Ray Lewis in the pants” according to a June 1930 Canadian Moving Picture Digest article (4). The 1930s saw a calmer tone prevail in the Digest, possibly as a result of the failure of the White Commission to bring reform to the Canadian film industry and of the arrival of Lewis’s son, Jay Smith, at the journal. Lewis, for instance, did not hesitate to applaud the return of Nathanson, once her archenemy, at the helm of Famous Players in 1933, and even became one of the chain’s affiliates when she opened the Toronto Pylon theatre in 1939. The indefatigable Lewis further broadened the scope of her activities in the 1940s and 1950s by getting involved with the Canadian Film Pioneers organization while also becoming active as a film distributor. She kept publishing the Canadian Moving Picture Digest up until her passing in 1954. Once a valuable resource for Canada’s distributor and exhibitors, Ray Lewis’s Digest remains an essential source for film historians.

Bibliography

Canadian Moving Picture Digest (7 June 1930): 4.

“Footlight Flashes” [advertisement]. Variety (2 October 1909): 36.

“Killam Refuses to Make Replies to Mrs. Smith – Turns His Back and Answers Commissioner White, Who Relay Queries.” Toronto Daily Star (7 March 1931): n.p.

Lewis, Ray. “All About Myself [part 1].” Canadian Moving Picture Digest (13 August 1927): 4, 6.

------. “All About Myself [part 2].” Canadian Moving Picture Digest (20 August 1927): 4, 10-11.

------. The Cup of Civilization, from “Songs of the Universe.” Ed. Isadore Bernstein. Flushing, NY: McConnell, c.1915.

------. Songs of Earth. New York: Boni, 1917.

Moore, Paul S. and Louis Pelletier. “Une excentrique au coeur de l’industrie: Ray Lewis et le Canadian Moving Picture Digest.” Cinémas vol. 16, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 59-90.

White, Peter. Combines Investigation Act: Investigation into an Alleged Combine in the Motion Picture Industry in Canada, Report of Commissioner, April 30, 1931. Ottawa: F.A. Acland, Printer to the King, 1931.

Archival Paper Collections:

Canadian Moving Picture Digest (1918-1954). Microfilm. Library and Archives Canada; New York Public Library. Also available in part online via HaitiTrust.

Canadian Dramas: Unpublished 1906-1942 microfilm series (“In Shadow Land: A Fairy Play in Four Acts,” “The Other Woman: A Modern Comedy-Drama in Four Acts,” “All Men Are Liars: Satirical Drama in Four Acts,” “All Women Are Liars: One Act Drama”). Library of Congress.

Citation

Moore, Paul S; Louis Pelletier. "Ray Lewis." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kwyr-0y66>

Maude Adams

by Vicky Jackson
A previous version of this material can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-frvz-e959

Maude Adams was a hugely successful American stage actress of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was perhaps most famous for her performance as Peter Pan. Whilst she never appeared on screen she nevertheless made a significant contribution to the film industry through research she coordinated into lighting technology and color cinematography during the 1920s. Notoriously private, Adams gave few interviews and few personal papers survive. As a result, her own thoughts on her work remain elusive and, for the most part, this research has relied on film trade journals, newspaper reports, and previous biographies.

Maude Adams in "L'Aiglon." USW

Maude Adams in play “L’Aiglon.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

During her theatrical career, Adams became interested in stage production and in particular stage lighting technology and design and came to work closely with technicians and engineers on her productions. Her most significant collaboration was with Bassett Jones, an electrical and lighting engineer consultant, who she worked with between approximately 1905 and 1915. Together they developed and modified incandescent electrical lighting for the theater. Incandescent lighting had been developed during the nineteenth century and used filament wire heated to a high temperature by an electric current until it glowed to produce light. However, existing lights were too weak and unwieldy for the theater. Adams and Jones’ research made its use in the theater practicable by making incandescent lighting stronger, smaller, and more mobile.

Adams’ experience in stage productions allowed her to identify problems and opportunities to improve stage lighting, which helped direct the research of technicians such as Jones. In addition, she helped to develop ways to implement new technologies and techniques for the stage. For example, in the case of incandescent lighting, Adams was also credited in The New York Times in 1908 with coordinating research into the development of a light bridge, which held seven incandescent spotlights that could be used during a performance (“Maude Adams Invents”). She also helped to develop many novel lighting effects in her productions.

After retiring from the theater in 1919, Adams returned to her research in electric lighting. She was interested in incandescent lighting’s further application to the theater but also in its possibilities for motion picture production (Robbins 201-13). Adams established and funded her own research team to investigate the possibilities of developing stronger incandescent lighting. Although Adams herself was not present at all times, she managed the direction of her team’s work and visited them regularly (Fields 262). So promising was their research that they were able to form collaborations with General Electric, who had recently developed tungsten filaments bulbs, and Eastman Kodak, who were interested in Adams’ lights and their potential use with their new color system Kodachrome (Fields 263).

The result of her research and collaborations with General Electric and Eastman Kodak was the manufacturing of the world’s then-largest incandescent lamp in 1922. The lamp used a tungsten filament and was eighteen-and-a-half inches high with a bulb that was twelve inches in diameter. It required 30,000 watts to operate and emitted 60,000 candlepower of illumination (Fields 264). Despite Adams’ contribution, she did not feature in any of General Electric’s incandescent lighting patents and received no financial reward for her work. Her name is also largely missing from General Electric’s official accounts and surviving archive (Hanson 72; Fields 262).

Maude Adams as Peter Pan c.1905. PD

Maude Adams as Peter Pan, c. 1905. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Although Adams never appeared on screen, she did contemplate entering the production field during the 1920s. She planned to produce several titles, all in color, including Aladdin and Peter Pan for which she was anxious to perform on screen. She also purchased the film rights for Kim from Rudyard Kipling in 1923 with the agreement it must be shot in color, in India. Whilst Adams experimented with a number of color processes using her lamps, she ultimately failed to find one that would satisfactorily produce the films in color (Robbins 201-213). Through the decade she continued to experiment, establishing Maude Adams Productions in 1924 and in 1926 participating in color film experiments with Kodachrome, this time through another collaboration with the filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty. Together they reportedly produced test films featuring pottery and stained glass windows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, according to Film Daily in 1926 (1-2). However, the museum has no records of these films being produced.

Maude Adams, with incandescent lamps, 1922. Museum of Innovation & Science

Maude Adams with incandescent lamps, 1922. Courtesy of the Museum of Innovation and Science.

When it became clear to Adams that she would be unable to produce films in color she chose to abandon these projects rather than complete them in black and white. For Adams, the absence of color and sound was a flaw of the medium. In a letter to J.M. Barrie dated October 13, 1920, regarding her preparations for filming Peter Pan, she stated she was prepared to try a few scenes in black and white, but later in the same letter she wrote:

The only pictures I have seen in black and white have been rather cheap—a cheap sensationalism. Without color and sound there is little to appeal to the emotions and the repeated attempts to create sensations become rather monotonous. (qtd. in Robbins 203-4)

Clearly placing great importance on color’s ability to influence the emotional response of the audience, she reflected the ideas of the new stagecraft movement in theater production in the United States, which were moving stage production away from realism and towards suggestion using visual aids of which color was an essential tool.

Page 1, Patent #: US001884957. Courtesy of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Page 1, Patent #: US001963949. Courtesy of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

While Adams’ name did not appear in patents connected to General Electric in the 1920s, she did feature in four patents relating to high powered incandescent lighting submitted between 1931 and 1932. In three of the patents she was listed as a co-inventor (and as the primary, or first, inventor), along with Raymond Francis Howe and Perley Gilman Nutting. Nutting had worked with Adams at General Electric on her experiments in the mid-1920s (“Incandescent Studio Lights Tested”). Her patents were for a method for supporting the filament so that the lamp could be tilted (Adams et al. 1935); a support for the filament to make it efficient and rugged in construction (Adams et al. 1932); and a method for cooling a high-powered lamp (Adams and Howe 1934).

Page 1, Patent #: US002006820. Courtesy of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

I have found no reference in biographies or contemporary press articles to Adams returning to her research in the 1930s. It is, therefore, difficult to say for certain if Adams embarked on a new period of research or work originating from the 1920s was finally patented. Nonetheless, the existence of these patents only serves to prove she played a significant part in these inventions. Adams may not have been a traditionally-trained engineer, but she did have, as Phyllis Robbins described it, “a mechanical bent” (201). Alongside her unquestionable technical knowledge, she had an excellent understanding of the challenges in lighting stage productions and color cinematography. This in-depth knowledge helped her to shape the research agenda she collaborated on, ensuring it addressed the key problems in those areas.

What is also particularly striking about Adams’ work is her collaborative approach. She was fortunate in this respect that her stage career provided her with influence, money, and a reputation for working on technical innovation. This meant large corporations such as General Electric were more willing to listen to her ideas and to then realize their potential, which enabled her to employ highly-skilled engineers to conduct research for her.

Following her experiments with lighting and film production, Adams returned briefly to the stage in 1931 before becoming a professor of dramatic art at Stephens College in 1937. She retired from the college in the winter of 1949-1950 and died in 1953, aged eighty. Writing after her death, Bassett Jones said of her: “she completely revamped the whole art of stagecraft—setting and lighting…In my opinion, Maude Adams was the greatest production artist this country ever saw” (qtd. in Flinchum n.p.).

Bibliography

Adams, Maude, Raymond F. Howe, and Perley G. Nutting. Illuminating device. US 002006820, United States Patent and Trademark Office. July 2, 1935. Epacenet [database]. https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?FT=D&date=19350702&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EP&CC=US&NR=2006820A&KC=A&ND=4.

---. Illuminating device. US 1884957, United States Patent and Trademark Office. Oct. 25, 1932. Epacenet [database].  https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?FT=D&date=19321025&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EP&CC=US&NR=1884957A&KC=A&ND=4.

Adams, Maude, and Raymond F. Howe. High powered illuminating device. US 1963949, United States Patent and Trademark Office. June 26, 1934. Epacenet [database]. https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?II=3&ND=3&adjacent=true&locale=en_EP&FT=D&date=19321025&CC=US&NR=1884957A&KC=A.

Fields, Armond. Maude Adams: Idol of American Theater, 1872-1953. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.

Flinchum, Russell. “Bassett Jones: Under Our Noses and Over Our Heads.” D-Crit (12 Feb. 2011): n.p. [Eds. journal no longer online].

Hanson, Bruce K. Peter Pan on Stage and Screen, 1904-2010. Jefferson, N.C.; London: McFarland, 2011.

Howe, Raymond F. Lamp base. US 2010084, United States Patent and Trademark Office. August 6, 1935. Epacenet [database]. https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?FT=D&date=19350806&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EP&CC=US&NR=2010084A&KC=A&ND=4.

“Incandescent Studio Lights Tested. Years of Experimenting Done By Maude Adams and General Electric Company; Metropolitan Studios Giving Practical Try-Out.” Motion Picture News XXXIV, no. 24 (11 Dec. 1926): 2249.

Jones, Bassett. “A Statement by Bassett Jones about Maude Adams’ Technical Knowledge.” c. 1956. Series I: Correspondence b.1, f.1. Maude Adams Collection. New York Public Library.

“Maude Adams Invents Stage Lighting Device; Her Novel Theory of Stage Illumination Developed from a Hobby and Now for the First Time to Be Put to Practical Use.” The New York Times (5 Jan. 1908): 108.

Robbins, Phyllis. Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Putnam, 1956.

“Using Color Process.” Film Daily (28 May 1926): 1-2.

Archival Paper Collections:

Maude Adams Collection. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Citation

Jackson, Vicky. "Maude Adams." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-h4hd-5p43>

Elvira Giallanella

by Micaela Veronesi

Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of the company Verafilm. In 1917-1919, while at Verafilm, Giallanella also began collaborating on the production of films with the company founder, the journalist, director, stage designer, and screenwriter Aldo Molinari.

First of three siblings, Giallanella was the only survivor. Her elder sister died at birth in 1887 and her other sister died of tuberculosis in 1915, leaving behind a husband and a very young daughter, Liana. These family events left a deep mark on Giallanella’s life and career.

Elvira Giallanella (d/w/p/o). PC

Elvira Giallanella. Private Collection. 

Between 1917 and 1920 Giallanella’s name appears in all the main Italian newspaper cinema reviews, especially in the listings of upcoming films. During World War I, like most film distributors in Italy, Giallanella sponsored some war documentaries according to a 1917 article in Film (3-5). In January 1919, together with her business partner, Molinari, Giallanella sought permission to build a cinematographic studio in Rome, probably in an attempt to boost their turnover capacity. Notably, in those years the rising star Ileana Leonidoff was acting in Verafilm productions; she later became a very famous dancer with an enterprise staging Russian ballets, the “Russian Ballets Leonidoff,” in which Molinari also was involved as a stage designer.

In the same year (1919), Giallanella started to film her motion picture, Umanità. Giallanella’s choice to look after her niece since 1916 put her in closer touch with the world of children’s tales, and in particular she became familiar with the nursery rhyme book Tranquillino dopo la guerra vuol creare il mondo… nuovo, which had been published in 1916, written by Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta and illustrated by Golia. Elvira drew inspiration for her work from this book and created a completely original film, radically different from other contemporary productions. The film was financed by Liana Film, a new production house that Giallanella named after her little niece. An article in the publication Film on September 30, 1919 says that the main purpose of Liana Film was to “produce movies for children, with children themselves as leading characters” (21).

Internal cover of Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta book Tranquillino dopo la guerra vuol creare il mondo… nuovo (1916), which inspired Umanità (1920). PC

Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta’s book Tranquillino dopo la guerra vuol creare il mondo… nuovo (1916), which inspired Umanità (1920). Private Collection. 

From articles appearing in magazines between September 1919 and March 1920 we learn that, after selling her share of Verafilm to Molinari, Elvira moved to Milan, allegedly to set up her own production company; this information, however, has not been confirmed and the news is most likely to have been a publicist’s copy. In any case, we know for certain that Giallanella filmed Umanità between the end of 1919 and early 1920. The filming took more time than anticipated, probably because of Giallanella’s desire to film some of the sequences on location, featuring the aftermath of the war in the Carso region among the ruins of the cemetery of the town of Gorizia, in North East Italy. In a review in Film on February 26, 1920, we read that Giallanella

è partita con tutta la sua minuscola troupe per eseguire gli esterni, i quali, per gentile concessione delle autorità militari, e per le esigenze del lavoro, avranno come sfondo il Carso e i punti più importanti della oramai ex-zona di guerra. [Trans.: is filming on location in the Carso region with her little troupe thanks to a military permit because her work needs the background of the ex-war zone] (11).

Newspaper article about La Liana-films" in Film (1920). PC

“La ‘Liana-films.’” Film 8 (26 Feb. 1920): 11.

The film’s main characters are Tranquillino and Sirenetta, two orphaned children, the only survivors of a catastrophic war that obliterated the whole world. In the company of a gnome, the two children wander around the ruins with the specific task God Himself has charged them with: rebuild the world. Surrounded by violence and death, they get caught and entangled in the dynamics of hatred and injustice that have led the world to its destruction; God then takes them away into heaven. The film ends with a tribute to the values of labor and brotherhood as the only means to recreate a peaceful world for the human race to enjoy. Based on Bravetta’s poem, the director nonetheless introduces several original elements. Firstly, she frames the short narrative with a description of the children’s life before the catastrophe; this frame acts as a preview to some of the themes developed in the main narrative, which has a markedly fairytale style. Further, Giallanella deletes from the text of the nursery rhyme the undertones of political satire that were so typical of the Italian pre-war climate but had by 1919-20 become dated. She also gives the girl a more prominent and active role and adds an ending that portrays the return to the real world, as described in the intertitles. This final reality, however, is different from the world the two children knew before the catastrophic events of the war. This world has a more universal dimension that reaches beyond the family life of the individual to a broader picture, where a life of work, out in the fields, in the mines, and in the factories, is the model for a peaceful life that can be accomplished only through widespread and shared prosperity.

Frame from Umanità (1920), Elvira Giallanella (d/w/p/o). PC

Screenshot, Umanità (1920).

Frame from Umanità (1920), Elvira Giallanella (d/w/p/o). PC

Screenshot, Umanità (1920). 

These final themes raise several questions as to how to interpret Giallanella’s aims and political stance. Extensive archival research has not yielded evidence of memberships to political or ideological groups and she never exhibited an explicit favor toward or dislike of any political party, including during Fascism. Giallanella’s life appeared to have been a normal life; like many women at the end of World War I, she was against every kind of conflict, she embraced a combination of Christian and Socialist values and imagined a peaceful new world.

Giallanella’s Umanità demonstrates great ability in film direction and a deep sense of mise-en-scène. She shows originality and talent in planning every scene in great detail. At the start and at the end of the film, Giallanella also uses the found footage technique, inserting edited shots from Molinari’s archives of news footage.

Frame from Umanità (1920), Elvira Giallanella (d/w/p/o). PC

Screenshot, Umanità (1920).

Umanità, however, never had proper distribution, presumably because it failed to clear censorship, and unfortunately Giallanella’s directing career came to an end before it started. She once attempted to sell the film as a comedy to Pasquale Principe, a distributor in Milan, and also tried to change the names of the Italian crew to English, crediting a fake male director named Edmond Davidson. All of this she did to no avail: Umanità remained unsold.

In the early 1920s Italy’s cinema industry was already in decline. In December 1920, a very gloomy article in La Vita Cinematografica, titled “Chiusura di bilancio,” discussed the Italian cinematographic industry’s crisis using metaphoric language. Here we find the last mention of Giallanella’s work:

…i topi quest’anno hanno divorato molte pellicole tra cui una che aveva un nome assai lungo: Tranquillino dopo la guerra vuol creare il mondo nuovo, e molti se non onesti genitori: la Liana Film, Fuse e il Monopolio Principe. [Trans.: …mice devoured several films like one with a very long name: Tranquillino dopo la guerra vuol creare il mondo nuovo, and many producers like Liana Film, Fuse, Monopolio Principe] (312-316).

After the 1920s, nothing more can be found about Elvira Giallanella in cinema papers, reviews, or publications.  She withdrew from the world of cinema, continuing her working life as an accountant, living and working in Rome always with her niece Liana, until she reached the end of her life. Elvira Giallanella died on September 15, 1965.

Elvira Giallanella's death certificate. PC

Elvira Giallanella’s death certificate. Private Collection.

Many gaps still remain in the production history of Umanità and in Giallanella’s biography.  Her name fell into oblivion for about eighty years.  Vittorio Martinelli included Umanità in his Il cinema muto italiano film inventory, but no one else took notice of it (276-277).  She was completely unknown until a print of her film was found in 2007. Giallanella’s film had lay forgotten in the archives of the Cineteca Nazionale (Italian National Film Archive) in Rome since May 1957. The film that survived is a 35mm nitrate positive, imbibed and tinted, with unnumbered Italian title cards; it probably had never been screened for an audience before being presented–in a restored version–in Bologna, in December 2007, during the event “Non solo dive. Pionere del cinema italiano.” The restoration was sponsored by Associazione Orlando (“Orlando” Women’s Association) and the Italian National Film Archive, with the support of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities).

Frame from Umanità (1920), Elvira Giallanella (d/w/p/o). PC

Screenshot, Umanità (1920).

Bibliography

“Annuncio della fondazione della Liana film.”  Film 30 (30 September 1919): 21.

Bravetta, Vittorio Emanuele [versi], Golia [disegni]. Tranquillino dopo la guerra vuol creare il mondo... nuovo. Milano: Treves, 1916.

“Chiusura di bilancio.”  La Vita Cinematografica (December 1920): 312-316
.

Dall'Asta, Monica, and Jane Gaines. “Constellations: Past Meets Present in Feminist Film History.” In Doing Women's Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future. Eds. Christine Gledhill, Julia Knight. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 13-28.

“Informazioni, Liana Film.” Film 37 (29 November 1919): 11.

“La ‘Liana Films.'” Film 8 (26 February 1920): 11.

“La signora Giallanella.” Film 36 (1917): 3-5
.

“Liana Film.” La Rivista Cinematografica 6 (March 1920): 62.

“Liana Film.” La Vita Cinematografica 7-8. (22­-29 February 1920): 119.

Martinelli, Vittorio. Film del dopoguerra 1919. Il cinema muto italiano. Vol 17. Rome: RAI-ERI, 1995.

Mattozzi, Rino. La rassegna generale della cinematografia.  Roma: (Unione cinematografica italiana) Soc. Ed. Rassegne, 1920.

Mazzei, Luca. “Babbo tu compri solo divise e armi per te”: bambini, sogni e armi giocattolo nel cinema italiano della IGM.” In A fuoco l’obiettivo! Il cinema e la fotografia raccontano la Grande Guerra. Eds. Alessandro Faccioli, Alberto Scandola. Bologna: Persiani, 2014. 186-187.

“Nel mondo cinematografico romano, la signora Giallanella." Film 5 (10 February 1917): 5.

Piccolo, Laura. Ileana Leonidoff. Lo schermo e la danza. Roma: Aracne, 2009.

Pravadelli, Veronica. Le donne del cinema. Dive, registe, spettatrici. Napoli: Laterza, 2014.

Veronesi, Micaela. “A woman wishes to ‘Make a new World.' Umanità by Elvira Giallanella.”  In Not So Silent. Women in Cinema before Sound. Eds. Sofia Bull, Astrid Soderbergh Widding. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2010. 67-79.

------.  “Elvira Giallanella.” Quaderni del CSCI. Rivista annuale di cinema italiano (2015): 288-289. 

------.. “Una donna vuol rifare il mondo. Umanità di Elvira Giallanella.” In Non Solo Dive. Pioniere del Cinema Italiano. Ed. Monica Dall'Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 159-172.

------.  “Uno sguardo femminile sulla Grande Guerra. Il caso del film Umanità di Elvira Giallanella.” In Nuove frontiere per la storia di genere. Eds. Laura Guidi, Maria Rosaria Pelizzari. Atti del congresso SIS, Napoli, 28-30 January, 2010. 279-283.

Citation

Veronesi, Micaela. "Elvira Giallanella." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-jnah-5238>

Fernanda Nissen

by Anne Marit Myrstad

The socialist politician and theatre critic Fernanda Nissen was called on to serve as one of two film censors when the Norwegian Censorship Board was established in 1913. Nissen held this position until 1920, when she died on a trip to Germany that she undertook to see film and theatre. In her years as a film censor, she was an active participant in the public sphere. She represented the Labour party in the municipality of Oslo and fought for working-class welfare, while also continuing her work as a respected critic of theatre and literature for the socialist paper Social-Demokraten. Her reputation at the time of her appointment as a film censor may still have been coloured by the scandal she caused in the 1890s, when, as a mother of two small children, she asked for a divorce. Her husband at the time was the editor of the leading liberal paper Dagbladet. However, while fighting on the side of the striking match workers, the first strike among women workers in Norway, she had fallen in love with the socialist doctor Oscar Nissen, who later became editor of the main socialist newspaper, Social-Demokraten.

Fernanda Nissen’s public arguments against film censorship at the State level during the debate leading up to The Norwegian Cinematograph Act of 1913, opposed the Act. She argued that the establishment of a central censorship board was too late, particularly because the medium of film was making transitions from the immature early years and was now finding its true identity as an art form according to the Social-Demokraten that year. As one of her examples of this maturity, Nissen identified the German drama Das Mädchen Ohne Vaterland/The Girl Without a Nation (Urban Gad, 1911), with the Danish star Asta Nielsen playing a gypsy spy. The available film stills, showing an erotic, challenging, and smoking Asta Nielsen, suggest that the star in this film did not portray a woman who conformed to current conservative feminine ideals. Mrs. Nissen is quoted in the Social-Demokraten as praising the film for showing the actress’ “slender, supple body” and arguing that the film promoted good values (1913, n.p.). Nissen’s sympathy for Asta Nielsen’s film role is understandable in light of the fact that Fernanda had herself fought for the emancipation of women. Together with female friends, in the 1880s she established an urban lifestyle, cut her hair, smoked in public, and took part in the cultural and political debates of the day according to her biographer Kari Skjønsberg (1978, 13-15).

If she was so accepting how did she function as a censor? The picture is not clear and needs to be investigated more thoroughly. Seeing the bulk of foreign films seeking an audience in Norway evidently challenged Fernanda Nissen’s positive outlook on film. In a 1915 article in Social-Demokraten, she explained her dislike of the obligation to describe in writing the content of each film she censored. These were “abominable small depictions,” according to Fernanda Nissen (5). These “depictions,” as documented on the censorship cards, illustrate not only plots that an experienced theatre critic would find disgusting, but also films she found quite interesting. In her justifications for prohibitions she also expressed doubt about her decisions. We can read this hesitation in passages like: “unacceptable content–in spite of the many excellent scenes,” “rejected, unfortunately, for the sake of children, due to the coarse content” or, “brilliant, but too frightening.” Even among the films she had to cut, there were clearly some great moments. Her doubt is also present when decisions made by the board were criticized and she would have to comment on complaints to the Department of Justice. She does not seem afraid to admit that censorship implied difficult judgments. Rather than defending every cut or the release of films without cuts, she stressed the censors’ changing moods, and thus changing ability to judge along with a willingness to discuss whether she might have chosen incorrectly.

In a 1917 interview given to the newspaper Den 17de May/May 17th after four years in office, she seems neither particularly liberal nor ambiguous. Contrary to her earlier statement, she rejects the idea that film has anything to do with art. Again it seems as though the censorship work itself challenged her positive outlook on film. She would not even allow that film could generate interest in the arts: “Movies make people unmotivated and lazy. Not just one single movie, but movies,” she is quoted as saying (n.p.). But even here she holds that in spite of so many bad films, the general quality of films had improved over the years. And although basically questioning the worth of film in May 17th, in an interview in 1918 with the film periodical Helt og Skurk/Hero and Villain, Fernanda Nissen had to defend her liberal attitude towards nudity in films. She argued that clothing was unnecessary when “the human body is a hymn to nature’s beauty” (55-56). At the same time she seems aware that the very cinematic portrayals of nudity could be essential, and she exemplified her point with an “absolutely superb swimming movie.” In this film, as she describes it,  “a young beautiful woman flitted back and forth on the beach and up and down in the water.” This was no problem. Fernanda found the scene quite beautiful. But then “suddenly two gentlemen with monocles appeared. They watched the woman with great interest and grinned and laughed.” The censor found this “disgusting” and thus cut the two gentlemen and their looking. And then “the young, beautiful woman was now allowed to swim in peace and quiet.” Moviegoers watching the bathing beauty without the intervention of male voyeurism was acceptable to Fernanda.

As censorship was controversial, so became the censor. Before taking her post as censor, Nissen’s public image was, as suggested, morally quite liberal. When censorship caused public offense and controversy, however, it was the liberated Fernanda Nissen, not her far more conservative male colleague, who was caricatured as the angry, old, and asexual censor with scissors according to Sigurd Evensmo in his history of Norwegian films.  Evensmo describes Fernanda Nissen’s wise discretion and refreshing temperament and also calls attention to her criticism of the absence of political commitment in film and suggests that, in her day, the image of a radical censor could not find a foothold (1967, 81).

In his history of the Labour movement’s amateur theatre, Jostein Gripsrud describes the socialist Fernanda Nissen’s criticism of popular theatre and assigns her a fairly conservative position as cultural pedagogue (1981, 67ff). When he later describes Norwegian film censors of the silent era, he nuances this image by stressing her liberal attitude to the realm of the erotic (Dahl et al. 1996, 69-70). Tanya Pedersen Nymo, who has written on the early history of the State Censorship Board, primarily follows Gripsrud’s understanding of Nissen as a culturally conservative pedagogue. According to Nymo, Fernanda Nissen—though a socialist—is conservative in the sense that she is a middle class woman who wants to lift the working classes and involve them in middle class culture and the arts (2003, 55).  This is basically correct, but Nissen’s position is also more complicated. For example, in the censorship debate, the Norwegian Women’s National Council (NKN) represented the culturally conservative position, but Working Women, with Fernanda Nissen as one of the leading figures, never joined NKN and their cultural conservatism. Progressive aspects of Nissen’s film censorship such as an open and liberal take on sexuality, are left out when she is positioned as the conservative pedagogue in cultural matters.

Clearly, conflicting interests and values met in Fernanda Nissen as censor, and her practice appears simultaneously ambiguous, contradictory, and explorative. The positions she took toward film are particularly interesting in that, as far as we know, she was the only woman of her time to participate in the public debate over film. And this is at a period when there were hard fought battles over how film should be defined, regulated, and understood, internationally as well as in Norway (Kuhn 1988; Myrstad 1996). Her work as a film censor, however, has turned out to be parenthetical in the current version of her life and work. This underscores the need for further research to illuminate Fernanda Nissen’s contribution to the public film discourse in the period of silent film.

Bibliography

Dahl, Hans Fredrik.  m.fl. Kinoens Mørke. Fjernsynets lys. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1996.

Evensmo, Sigurd.  Det store tivoli. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1967.

Frifant. Den 17de May (18 April 1917): n.p.

Gripsrud, Jostein. La denne vår scene bli flammenOslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1981.

Kuhn, Annette. Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality 1909-1925. London: Routledge, 1988.

Myrstad, Anne Marit.  Melodrama, kjønn og nasjon. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Trondheim, 1996.

Nissen, Fernanda. Social-Demokraten (19 May 1913): n.p.

-----. Social-Demokraten  (28 January 1915): 5

Nymo, Tanya P. Slibrige scener – listige knep. Statens filmkontroll og den moralske orden 1913-1940. Oslo: Spartacus, 2003.

Sinding, Leif. Helt og Skurk 15 (1918): 55-56

Skjønsberg, Kari. Fernanda Nissen. Oslo: Tiden Norsk Forlag, 1978.

Archival Paper Collections

Film Documentation Division. National Library of Norway.

Handwriting Collection (letters from Fernanda Nissen to Norwegian cultural elite). National Library of Norway.

Newspaper clippings Archive. National Library of Norway.

Letters to the Department of Justice from Fernanda Nissen from 21 August, 1917 and November 8, 1919. The State Archive, File M-0093: The State Censorship Board 1913-1919. M/0093 State Film Control 1913-1919. The National Archives of Norway.

Censorship cards (from 1913 forward). Films that Fernanda Nissen accepted with or without cuts. Norwegian Media Authority. [Censorship cards from 1913 on that Nissen prohibited have been digitized by the Norwegian Media Authority].

Citation

Myrstad, Anne Marit. "Fernanda Nissen." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-arf4-0a52>

Encarnacion Rosa Scott

by Amy Bethel

Described by The Cinema in December 1922 as “the Lady Director of Wardour Street” (8), Encarnacion Rosa Scott held a number of prominent positions in the British film renting business in the silent era. Scott was Spanish by birth and moved to London as a child. In 1914 she married Walter Comrie Scott, a British film agent who was a founding director of the American Company (London) Limited.

The company was formed in August 1911 as a manufacturer and dealer in cinematograph films and apparatuses. They were the sole and exclusive agent in the United Kingdom and Europe for the sale of the American Film Manufacturing Company’s films, including the brand names “the sign of the Flying A,” “American Beauty Films,” and “Beauty Films.”Research to date has concentrated on the Flying “A” Studios in Santa Barbara. The importance of the London company and the role of Encarnacion Scott have been somewhat overlooked.

Encarnacion Rosa Scott, caricature from 'The Cinema', September 21, 1922, p38.

Encarnacion Rosa Scott, caricature in The Cinema (September 21, 1922): 38.

Information concerning Scott and her business ventures is accessible in British trade magazines such as The Cinema and The Bioscope. The Kinematograph Year Book also frequently included Scott in their “Who’s What in the Trade” listing, which not only supplies factual business information, but also provides an insight into her character, and in 1923 noted that she enjoyed motoring and studying languages (271). The National Archives in Kew holds business papers for the London company and the British Film Institute also holds some rental information, along with at least forty Flying “A” prints. Despite the American Company (London) Limited being a British company, further research in American archives could prove valuable. Sifting through American Film Manufacturing Company’s archival materials may uncover references to Scott and the London wing of the American Company that has so far been neglected.

When Walter Scott commenced active service in the Royal Army Service Corps in 1916, Encarnacion became a shareholder in the company and manager of the firm’s factory in Croydon, Surrey. She was widowed not long afterwards in 1919, leaving her to raise their three year old daughter alone and officially assume the role of managing director of the company. The company became a significant part of her life–even inspiring her to name her home “Santa Barbara“ as we learn from Ward’s commercial directory in 1920. As late as 1929, The Kinematograph Year Book reported that “Mrs. Scott holds a unique position in the Trade, for she is, we believe, the only lady occupying the position of managing director of a producing and film printing concern” (280). It is for this position that Scott is best known, but it was also the springboard for several other business projects.

In September 1922, Scott became the managing director of a new film renting firm called the Rose Film Company. With her practical knowledge of running the American Company in London, Scott was regarded as a “valuable asset” by The Bioscope (36). During the company’s inaugural dinner at the Trocadero in London, Scott is quoted in The Cinema as explaining that they were “out to put the best possible films on the market … at the best possible price” (38). They planned to release twenty-six high-class super productions over the course of the following year, including twelve Flying “A” productions. Three months later, The Cinema reported on a dinner dance held in London for the staff of the American and Rose Film Companies where a special presentation was made to Scott “as a mark of respect and affection from the staffs and agents of the company.” She seems to have been held in high regard in the trade for the speeches that evening recognized her “untiring labours” and “wonderful business capacity” (8).

Despite such glowing reports in the trade press, by the end of the 1920s Scott’s business ventures were beginning to fail and she spiralled towards bankruptcy. The year 1921 saw the demise of production at the American Film Manufacturing Company although the headquarters and laboratory in Chicago continued to operate for several years and the American Company retained shares in the London company. Operations in London were evidently still active between 1925 and 1927 as records held at the British Film Institute show rentals to the Film Society during that period. In 1927 the American backers finally pulled out of the London company, and unable to continue business due to its liabilities, the company went into voluntary liquidation in August 1929.

The 1932 Kinematograph Year Book, estimating Scott’s personal financial loss to be £60,000, reported her first meeting with creditors at Bankruptcy Buildings in London where the “debtor” summarized her business activities and losses (191). Before the American Company (London) Limited was liquidated, Scott had formed and managed another company Film Distributors Ltd., liquidated in 1930. Her next move had been to set up on her own as a film renter to try to repay the debts incurred by Film Distributors with the idea of supplying silent films, a somewhat high-risk strategy following the emergence of sound films. This venture also ended in failure, and as a last resort she set up Star Films (Commercial) Limited, which failed to operate. The Rose Film Company which had been set up under such fanfare in 1921 also went into receivership in 1927, but this was omitted from Scott’s statement as the 1928 Year Book reported (196).

One of the challenges in researching Scott is her involvement with several companies in the last few years of her business career, all of which were short-lived. Each of these companies would require further research to ascertain the cause of their demise. The role of the 1927 quota legislation, the impact of the 1929 stock market crash and economic slump, as well as the arrival of sound films may each have played a role. Scott was evidently a determined, energetic, and career-driven woman. Rather than walk away from the industry when things turned sour in the late twenties, she battled on as she viewed her debts as “debts of honour” (“Meetings of Creditors” 191). Despite the unfortunate end to Scott’s career, this should not detract from her successful management of the American Company (London) Limited for at least a decade. Following her husband’s death, Scott was more than simply a company caretaker–she was an active manager and established herself as a prominent player in the distribution wing of the film industry in Britain.

Bibliography

“The Exhibitors' Mecca.” The Bioscope (7 Sept. 1922): 36.

“Inauguration of The Rose Film Company.” The Cinema (21 Sep. 1922): 38.

Lyons, Timothy James. The Silent Partner: The History of the American Film Manufacturing Company 1910 - 1921. The Arno Press Cinema Program. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

“Meetings of Creditors.” The Kinematograph Year Book, Diary, and Directory (1932): 191.

Obit. The Times (9 Dec. 1953): 1.

“Presentation to Mrs. Scott.” The Cinema (21 Dec. 1922): 8.

“Receiverships.” The Kinematograph Year Book, Diary, and Directory. London: Kinematograph Publications, Ltd., 1928. 196.

“Rose Film Company's Inaugural Dinner.” The Bioscope (21 Sept. 1922): 42.

Ward's Commercial and General Croydon Directory (1920).

“Who's What.” The Kinematograph Year Book, Diary, and Directory. London: Kinematograph Publications, Ltd., 1923. 271.

“Who's What in The Trade.” The Kinematograph Year Book, Diary, and Directory. London: Kinematograph Publications, Ltd., 1929. 280.

Archival Paper Collections:

The Film Society Collection, Item 29, invoices and receipts, the American Company (London) Ltd. British Film Institute.

Board of Trade Files of Dissolved Companies, American Company (London) Ltd, BT 31/20163/117170. The National Archives, Kew.

John Rudolph Freuler Papers & Prints and Photograph Collection. Chicago History Museum.

Scott R. Beal Papers, 1911-1957, clippings and correspondence relating to American Film Manufacturing Company. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Bethel, Amy. "Encarnacion Rosa Scott." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-90m8-j245>

Sarah Bernhardt

by Victoria Duckett
Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre programme, 1900. PC

Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre programme, 1900. Private Collection.

Sarah Bernhardt is the most famous actress of the late nineteenth century stage. Celebrated by an emerging and very vocal group of young female workers and artisans in her native Paris in the late 1860s and the 1870s called “les saradoteurs” (Rueff 1951, 48-49; Bernhardt 1923, 290), she went on to become the most popular actress of her generation in Europe, North America, and Australia. Attention has been paid to her “golden voice,”  the clever ways she marketed and promoted herself, her pioneering patronage of artists such as Alphonse Mucha and René Lalique, and her capacity to be at once a successful actress, manager, and theatre director (Pronier 1942, 93; Musser 2013, 154-174; Stokes 1988, 16-30). Scant attention has been paid, however, to Bernhardt’s involvement and success in the early motion picture film industry, both in France and abroad. This is surprising. Indeed, she was among the first celebrities to engage with the motion picture, playing Hamlet in a one-minute film that formed part of Paul Decauville’s program for the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre at the Paris Exposition of 1900. The first feature film that she released–Camille (1911)–was promoted the following year by the French American Film Company in Moving Picture World as “Making New Records for Selling States Rights” (982-983). A subsequent advertisement in the same trade press claimed that the film was “The Fastest Seller Ever Offered State Right Buyers” (1088-1089). As many film historians know, Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth (1912) was the Famous Players Company’s first release in the U.S. It similarly enjoyed success, helping to open the market for legitimate motion picture exhibition in the U.S. Queen Elizabeth thereby provided audiences with their first experience of the longer-playing narrative feature film (Quinn 2001, 48).

Sarah Bernhardt (a/p/w) in “Hamlet", a Phono Cinema Théâtre production, 1900. FRPG

Sarah Bernhardt in Hamlet (1900), a Phono- Cinema-Théâtre production. Courtesy of the Gaumont Pathé Archives.

Although cinema critics, cinéphiles, and scholars have critiqued her theatrical acting on film (Lindsay 2000, 108; Bowser 1990, 204-205; Abel 1994, 316), Bernhardt’s contribution to the nascent cinema was broad as it was profound. She appeared not only in roles that were familiar to the late nineteenth century stage (Camille and Queen Elizabeth) but in new and original contexts. Of the films that survive, we can see her in rare celebrity “home movie” footage in Bernhardt at Home (1915), a social problem film Jeanne Doré (1916), as well as in a propaganda film sponsored by the French Ministry of War seeking American involvement in World War I (Mothers of France, 1917). The only film that survives from the post-war period is a fragment of the death scene from Daniel (1920). This shows Bernhardt at the age of seventy-seven performing as a young bed-ridden man dying of morphine addiction. Daniel is testimony to Bernhardt’s fame as an actress who specialized in the performance of death. Like her previous films, it is also testimony to Bernhardt’s refusal to accept invisibility even when she was aged and infirm (her right leg had been amputated in 1915).

Queen Elizabeth (Sarah Bernhardt) dies on film. Queen Elizabeth (1912). AUC

Queen Elizabeth (Sarah Bernhardt) dies on film. Queen Elizabeth (1912). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Bernhardt in her atelier, Sarah Bernhardt at Home (1915). ATF-CFAL

Bernhardt in her atelier, Sarah Bernhardt at Home (1915). Courtesy of the Filmarchiv Austria.

As an actress, Bernhardt was renowned for the innovative way she developed the spiral. She made this the structuring motif for theatrical action. We can see the spiral most obviously in the way she swivels to her death in Camille. We might argue, in this context, that Bernhardt incarnates the French art nouveau movement, bringing the signature tendril of this decorative art form to film. As Stephen W. Bush argued in the Moving Picture World in 1912, she accordingly made herself “more enduring than brass” (760). It would be remiss to separate the agency Bernhardt enjoyed as an actress literally shaping the meaning of her films from the making of the films themselves. Indeed, we need to ask: who directed theatrical action in her films? Who organized and framed the mise-en-scène, particularly since there are visual overlaps between photographs of Bernhardt’s stage productions and the mise-en-scène in some of her films? Finally, who modified the story of the original theatrical play for the screen? While directors such as André Calmettes, Henri Pouctal, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton, and René Hervil are (often jointly) credited with directing her films, and while Jean Richepin is famously credited for the screenplay of Mothers of France, we still need to determine the role that Bernhardt played as director and perhaps even manager, producer, and screenwriter of her own films. Indeed, it is inconceivable that a mature woman who was an actress, manager, director, and playwright on the live stage would relinquish creative control on film.

Bernhardt beseeching Paul Dubois’s Joan before the cathedral at Reims, Mothers of France (1917). FRL

Bernhardt beseeching Paul Dubois’s Joan before the cathedral at Reims, Mothers of France (1917). Courtesy of Lobster Films. 

Bernhardt spirals to her death, Camille (1911). AUC

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

Of Bernhardt’s extant narrative films, only three are available on DVD. These are Camille, Queen Elizabeth, and Mothers of France. Although Hamlet (1900) was newly presented in color as part of the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre 35mm program organized by Laurent Mannoni at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, in 2012, it is still unavailable online. It features only as a black and white “bonus” on David Menefee’s Camille DVD. Of the narrative films commercially available, these often show intertitles and feature music that has been adapted and inserted according to the contemporary taste of the DVD producer. The more representative examples of Bernhardt’s films reside, therefore, in various film archives in Australia, Austria, France, and the United Kingdom. For example, the best and most complete copy of Camille is located in the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, Australia, and must be seen on location. This contains the first two scenes that are missing from all available DVDs. Lobster Films in Paris, France, has a copy of Mothers of France that shows some of the original tinting. The film also allows us to see, quite clearly, Bernhardt’s vision of Joan of Arc. This was an excerpt from Geraldine Farrar’s film Joan the Woman (1916) that Samuel Roxy Rothapfel inserted as a special effect into the film when it arrived in America through a process of double projection, according to Motography in 1917 (665-666). Lastly, Filmarchiv Austria holds the extant copy of the 1915 “home movie,” Sarah Bernhardt at Home. Fascinating for the support this footage gives the contention that Bernhardt was an astute manager of her own public image, it has yet to be made publicly available for further study.

A vision of Joan appears, Mothers of France (1917). FRL

A vision of Joan appears, Mothers of France (1917). Courtesy of Lobster Films.

Just as there is no single repository or archive that holds all of Bernhardt’s films, neither is there a library that centralizes materials about Bernhardt’s involvement in motion pictures. Trade press reviews and publicity for Bernhardt’s American releases–La Tosca (1908), Camille, Queen Elizabeth, An Actress’s Romance (1913), Jeanne Doré, and Mothers of France– provide insight into how Bernhardt’s films were exhibited and received in the U.S. We must thank Lantern as well as Domitor’s Media History Digital Library, for these online resources. For the first time, scholars have easy and ready access to publications that help us better understand Bernhardt’s U.S. reception.

Advertisement for Camille (1911). PC

Advertisement for Camille (1911). Private Collection.

What, however, of Bernhardt’s reception elsewhere, in France or in any of the other countries across the globe that she vicariously toured as a “moving picture?” Online holdings for French film journals are sketchy, at best. Further, a January 27, 1912, advertisement for Camille in Ciné-journal advertises the film’s circulation in the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and the Orient (32). How was the film marketed and received in these countries? How long was the film in theaters? Recent work on Asta Nielsen systematically scrutinizes her appearance and interpretation in local newspapers across the world providing an exemplary model of scholarship for the research yet to be conducted on Bernhardt’s distribution, exhibition, and marketing (Jung and Loiperdinger 2013). Bernhardt studies can follow Nielsen’s reassessment, which comes on the heels of research into the related histories of the Danish actress on both stage and screen. Our knowledge of Bernhardt’s contribution to the early film industry hinges as well upon scholarly consensus as to whether she was given or claimed the kind of agency as producer now attributed to Nielsen. For all the exhibition catalogues, publications, and biographies newly written about Bernhardt, she still needs to be explored as a celebrity who shaped theatrical film both locally and transnationally.

See also: Asta Nielsen

Bibliography

Abel, Richard. The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Bernhardt, Sarah. Ma Double Vie: Mémoires de Sarah Bernhardt. Paris: Eugène Fasquelle, 1923.

Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1990.

Bush, Stephen W. “Bernhardt and Rejane [sic] in Pictures.” Moving Picture World (2 March 1912): 760.

Ciné-journal (27 Jan. 1912): 32.

Duckett, Victoria. “The Actress-Manager and the Movies: Resolving the double life of Sarah Bernhardt.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film no. 45, vol. 1 (September 2018): 27-55.

------.  “Celebrating transgressive celebrity: Sarah Bernhardt.” The Dangerous Women Project. The University of Edinburgh, The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (9 June 2016): n.p.  http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/06/09/sarah-bernhardt/

------. “Her Majesty Moves: Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Elizabeth, and the Development of Motion Pictures.” In The British Monarchy on Screen. Ed. Mandy Merck.  Manchester: The University of Manchester Press, 2016. 111-131.

------. “Investigating an interval: Sarah Bernhardt, Hamlet, and the Paris Exposition of 1900.” In Reclaiming the Archive: Feminist Film History. Ed. Vicki Callahan. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. 193-212.

------. “The Moving Pictures: Sarah Bernhardt and the Theatrical Film.” Cinegrafie 19 (2006): 314-326.

------. “A public precedent: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, and the early French double feature film.” L’Esprit Créateur vol. 58, no. 2,  Special Issue, Femmes Créa(c)tives: Women’s Creativity in its Socio-Political Contexts (Spring 2018): 23-40.

------. “Sarah Bernhardt.” The Literary Encyclopedia. (06 August 2016): n.p. http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=391 

------. Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

------. “The 'Voix d’Or' on Silent Film: The Case of Sarah Bernhardt.” In Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives. Eds. Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, and Lucia Tralli. Bologna: University of Bologna, 2013. 318-333. http://amsacta.unibo.it/3816/

------. “Who was Sarah Bernhardt? Negotiating Fact and Fiction.” Journal of Historical Biography 10 (Autumn 2011): 103-112.

“The Fastest Seller Ever Offered State Right Buyers.” Moving Picture World (23 March 1912): 1088-1089.

Jung, Uli, and Martin Loiperdinger, eds. Importing Asta Nielsen: The International Film Star in the Making 1910-1914. New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey, 2013.

Leveratto, Jean-Marc. “Sarah Bernhardt dans Queen Elizabeth (1912), du théâtre (français) au cinéma (américain).” In Théâtre, destin du cinema. Eds. Agathe Torti-Alcayaga and Christine Kheil. Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2013. 25-43.

Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. Ed. Martin Scorsese.  New York: The Modern Library, 2000.

“Making New Records for Selling States Rights.” Moving Picture World (16 March 1912): 982-983.

Menefee, David. Sarah Bernhardt: Her Films, Her Recordings. Dallas, Texas: Menefee Publishing, 2012.

Musser, Charles. “Conversions and Convergences: Sarah Bernhardt in the Era of Technological Reproducibility, 1910–1913.” Film History vol. 25, no. 1-2 (2013): 154-174.

Ockman, Carol and Kenneth E. Silver, eds. Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005.

Pronier, Ernest. Une vie au théâtre: Sarah Bernhardt. Geneva: A. Jullien, 1942.

Quinn, Michael. “Distribution, the Transient Audience, and the Transition to the Feature Film.” Cinema Journal vol. 40, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 35-56.

Rueff, Suze. I Knew Sarah Bernhardt. London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1951.

“'Split Reel' Notes for the Theatre Men.” Motography (31 March 1917): 665-666.

Stokes, John. “Sarah Bernhardt.” In John Stokes, Michael R. Booth and Susan Bassnett, Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The actress in her time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 13-64.

Archival Paper Collections:

Sarah Bernhardt clippings file. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center

Sarah Bernhardt Collection. University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center.

Sarah Bernhardt letters. New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Various archival materials relating to Bernhardt. State Library New South Wales, Michell Library.

An assortment of archival materials (images, clippings, and more) are held in various collections at the following institutions:

Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Départment des Arts du Spectacle, Départment des Audiovisuels, Départment des Estampes et de la Photographie, Départment des Imprimés, Départment des Manuscrits).

Broadway Photographs. David S. Shields Collection [online]. University of South Carolina.

Harvard University, Houghton Library (Harvard Theatre Collection).

Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Service de Documentation).

Musée d’Orsay.

Museum of the City of New York.

Petite Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (Service de Documentation).

Citation

Duckett, Victoria. "Sarah Bernhardt." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2015.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cqt4-pc13>

Fabienne Fabrèges

by Elena Nepoti

“For me theater has been and still is my passion, the only passion of my life, alive, strong, burning like a fever, and even if it has cost me a lot of sacrifices and a lot of pain, it has procured for me many joys and satisfactions” (“Fabienne Fabrèges” 6). In these words, Fabienne Fabrèges explains the emotional energy that accompanied her throughout her career, which, at first, led her to tour the major theaters of Europe as a theatre actress, and then into performing in more than sixty motion pictures. Fabrèges is one of a generation of young “modern” women who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, were able to move beyond the fixed roles (legislative, cultural and symbolic) imposed upon them in Western society, to pursue their careers (Guerra 2008, 39-48), even if that meant sacrificing family life. In this interview she is remembering the tenacity that she had to maintain during her struggles in order to achieve her objectives, which is also why reviewers generally recognized her as a cultured, intelligent actress with a personal and accurate way of playing her roles.

Announcement of the film Il discepolo (Corona Films IT 1917) starring Fabienne Fabrèges in Film (30 Sept. 1916): 2

Announcement for Il discepolo (Corona Films 1917) in Film, September 1916. Private Collection.

Her film career, between 1910 and the mid-1920s, can be divided into three periods. Between 1910 and 1916, the actress worked in France for the Société des Établissements Gaumont. During World War I, she relocated to Italy, where she was immediately recognized as a leading actress by the Italian film industry, and, between 1916 and 1923, acted in two dozen films. In many of these films she is credited as the screenwriter, and for one of them, also as the director. Finally in the twenties she left the stage and screen in Italy and most likely moved to England, where it seems she carried out some further stage work, and then her career seems to have come to an end.

Historical research on female figures that worked in the cinematographic industry during the silent era is always incomplete and problematic, especially when dealing with the primary sources from that period (Dall’Asta, Duckett and Tralli 2013). Little information has come down to us regarding Fabienne Fabrèges, as well as the many other actresses of that time, despite her well-known and remarkable career. One major source was found to be the specialized cinematographic press, especially since a search of Turin’s commercial and anagraphical archives has yielded no results. Reconstructing a complete biographical profile (which even now is lacking the most basic data, such as dates and places of birth and death) would require archival research in France, Italy and England, which has not been possible to conduct to date.

Fabienne Fabrèges (a/d/w) in La vita cinematografica (7-15 April 1918): 38.

Fabienne Fabrèges in La vita cinematografica, April 1918. Private Collection.

Fabienne Fabrèges made her stage debut in Paris, when she was very young (about fifteen years old), playing Balzac’s “La cousine Bette.” By 1911 her performing skills were already receiving favourable reviews  in  the  periodical Le monde  artiste illustré  for  her role  in “Le Monde où l’on s’ennuie” by Pailleron, which was playing in Geneva’s Théâtre de la Comédie (155), and again in subsequent years for performances with Charles Baret’s company in Strasbourg and various French cities. In her 1925 interview with Al cinemà, Fabienne Fabrèges recalled how, in those years, she played abroad on stages in St. Petersburg, Berlin, London and Madrid (6).

The first steps of her career in motion pictures were taken in 1910 (Bastide 2003, 14-19; Richard 2003, 130), when the actress was hired by Gaumont and joined the troupe of Léonce Perret, lead director of the company along with Louis Feuillade. In the Gaumont period, between 1910 and 1916, Fabienne Fabrèges starred in over forty films, most of them directed by Perret, and, starting in 1913, also by Feuillade. Among these, we note the third episode of the Fantômas series, Le mort qui tue (L. Feuillade, Gaumont, 1913), and the patriotic films by Perret, Une page de gloire (Gaumont, 1915) and L’Angélus de la victoire (Gaumont, 1916). During the war, in 1916, the actress made a journey to the United States, and in August of that same year she moved to Turin (Richard 130), which, at that time, was the city where the Italian film industry was most advanced. Her first Italian engagement took place for Corona Films, in Turin, established in 1914 (Prono 1997, 134-137; Friedemann 2002, 73-78) by a few Jewish shareholders, who, in 1919, subsequently joined the Società Anonima Stefano Pittaluga, then the most important Italian distribution company of the twenties. Under Corona Films she acted in several other films, all directed by Giuseppe Giusti, including such works as Spasimi (1916), Signori giurati… (1916), for which she also wrote the screenplay, and Il discepolo (1917). Reviewers of the time hailed her as a great actress of international standing and praised her refined acting style in these first films (Martinelli 1980, 19-20). Without interrupting her work at Corona Films, she began to collaborate with smaller Turin-based production companies, such as Gladiator Film and Latina Ars, under the direction of Giuseppe Ciabattini and Riccardo Tolentino. During these years her work included such successful films as Wanda Warenine (R. Tolentino, Latina Ars, 1917), Sorrisi e spasimi della menzogna (R. Tolentino, Latina Ars, 1917) and Nozze bianche (G. Giusti, Corona Films, 1917). Not all of her films from this period were produced in Turin: one was produced in Milan by Milano Films (La maschera del destino, U. Gracci, 1917) and another in Rome by Tespi Film (Anna Karenine, U. Falena, 1917).

Publicity still of Sua Meastà il Denaro Dir.: Agostino Borgato (Fabrèges Film/De Giglio IT 1918), starring Fabienne Fabrèges in La vita cinematografica (22-30 Aug. 1918): 38

Publicity still, Sua Maestà il Denaro (Fabrèges Film/De Giglio Film 1918) in La vita cinematografica, August 1918. Private Collection.

Fabienne Fabrèges’ Italian career began to reach the pinnacle of its success in 1918, when she became the lead actress of the De Giglio Film company, in Turin. Alfonso De Giglio was one of the most important entrepreneurs of those years, beginning in 1912, when he was the head of a very important distribution company, which, in 1918, also became involved in production. De Giglio gave Fabrèges the leading role in both serials Sua Maestà il Denaro and Sua Altezza l’amore (both by A. Borgato, De Giglio Film, 1918). De Giglio’s investment in Fabrèges’ career became increasingly relevant and it is probable that, as was happening with other actresses of the time, he was using his own funds to establish a production company in her name in the city of Turin. Unfortunately, the Fabrèges Film Company, has left no documentary evidence of its existence as an independent company in the commercial archive of Turin (Friedemann 2002, 73-78). At the time, the founding of a new film company in the name of an actress was a common practice. Fabrèges was called upon to act as scriptwriter for many of these films, and in one instance, L’altalena della vita (De Giglio Film, 1919), she was also its director.

Advert for Fabrèges Film Company in La vita cinematografica (7-15 April 1918): 37

Advertisement for Fabrèges Film Company in La vita cinematografica, April 1918. Private Collection.

In this film, Fabrèges plays the part of a young runaway named Mietta, who falls in love with a young man, who soon abandons her when he leaves for America. Mietta is then welcomed into the home of an English noblewoman, Lady Hamilton, where she meets an older nobleman, a widower, and soon becomes his bride. The couple then have a baby girl. Meanwhile, Mietta’s former lover returns from America and realizing her new circumstances, starts to blackmail her. The nobleman’s son from his first marriage learns of this and decides to kill Mietta’s old lover in order to defend the honour of his stepmother. After the murder, the nobleman unfortunately convinces himself that Mietta and his son are having an affair and kicks both of them out of his home with dishonor. However, he keeps with him the small daughter he fathered with Mietta. After a period of some years, the latter falls seriously ill and asks for her mother. As a result the nobleman allows Mietta back, having realized in the meantime her innocence. The intricacies of the plot received a cool reception from reviewers, who almost exclusively reserved their praises for the performances of the actors, Fabienne Fabrèges and Alberto Nepoti.

Announcement of the film L'altalena della vita(Fabrèges Film/De Giglio IT 1919), Fabienne Fabrèges (d/w/a) in Film (23 Aug. 1919): 6

Announcement for L’altalena della vita (Fabrèges Film/De Giglio Film 1919) in Film, August 1919. Private Collection.

As a screenwriter for films such as Il cuore di Musette (1919), Fabrèges received unflattering reviews from such critics as Carlo Zappia (Martinelli 1991, 72-73).  In 1920, Fabienne Fabrèges took part in her last few films for the De Giglio production house, in La principessa nera (F. Elvezi, De Giglio Film, 1920) and La maschera e il destino (F. Elvezi, De Giglio Film, 1920).

Fabrèges’ last Italian film came out in 1923, and, that same year, according to the periodical Al cinemà, the actress travelled to an isolated castle in Scotland to forget the disappointment of a broken love affair (Piero 2). This news was confirmed by the presence of the actress in a Company called “French Plays,” established in the early twenties by theater manager J.T. Grein, and directed by George de Warfaz, which played at the Queensborough Club Theater, in South Kensington, in London (Schoonderwoerd 213-214; “French plays” 4). Despite the fact that the actress most likely continued her theater career in England, this is a chapter in her life that requires further research. What has been gathered so far clearly presents us with the profile of a greatly talented figure, cultured and refined, with a career that crossed a number of international borders. Fabrèges pursued her career from a very young age and was subject to many struggles and setbacks, such as the alienation of her family’s affections. Despite all of these obstacles, she was blessed with a measure of fortune, and, as she said in Al cinemà in 1925, “Luck has always followed me. I’m the enfant-gâté by chance” (6).

Fabienne Fabrèges (a/d/w) in La vita cinematografica(22-23 June 1918): 58.

Fabienne Fabrèges in La vita cinematografica, June 1918. Private Collection.

Bibliography

Announcement [Il discepolo]. Film (30 Sept. 1916): 2.

Announcement [L'altalena della vita]. Film (23 Aug. 1919): 6.

Bastide, Bernard. “Léonce Perret, maître des lumières et des ombres.” In Léonce Perret. Eds. Bernard Bastide and Jean Gili. Paris/Bologna: Association francaise de recherches sur l'histoire du cinema/Cineteca di Bologna, 2003. 14-19.

Dall'Asta, Monica, Victoria Duckett, and Lucia Tralli, eds. Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Finding and Perspectives. Bologna: Dipartimento delle Arti - DAR, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, 2013.

“Fabienne Fabrèges.” Al Cinemà (20 Sept. 1925): 6.

“French plays.” Glouchester Citizen (18 Feb. 1925): 4.

Friedemann, Alberto. Le case di vetro. Stabilimenti cinematografici e teatri di posa a Torino. Torino: Fert, 2002.

------. “Imprenditoria femminile nel cinema torinese.” In Non solo  dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall'Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 195-228.

Guerra, Elda. “Oltre i confini. Il movimento delle donne tra Otto e Novecento e l'affermazione di una nuova soggettività.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall'Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 39-48.

La vita cinematografica (7-15 April 1918): 37.

La vita cinematografica (22-23 June 1918): 58.

La vita cinematografica (22-30 Aug. 1918): 38.

“Lettre de Suisse.” Le monde artiste illustré (11 Mar. 1911): 155.

Martinelli, Vittorio. “Il cinema muto italiano, 1919: I film del dopoguerra.” Bianco & Nero (Jan./June 1980): 19-20.

------. Il cinema muto italiano, 1916. Torino: Nuova Eri, 1991.

Piero, L. “Che ne dice lei?” Al Cinemà (4 Nov. 1923): 2.

Prono, Franco. “Atti di nascita del cinema a Torino.” In Le fabbriche della fantasticheria. Atti di nascita del cinema a Torino. Ed. Ira Fabri. Torino: Testo & Immagine, 1997. 134-137.

Richard, Jacques. “Quelques acteurs fidèles.” In Léonce Perret. Eds. Bernard Bastide and Jean Gili. Paris/Bologna: Association francaise de recherches sur l'histoire du cinema/Cineteca di Bologna, 2003. 130.

Schoonderwoerd, Nicolaas. J. T. Grein ambassador of the theatre 1862-1935: A study in Anglo- continental theatrical relations. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1963.

Archival Paper Collections:

Monographs, periodicals (preserved by Biblioteca Mario Gromo). Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Citation

Nepoti, Elena. "Fabienne Fabrèges." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2015.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-jfa6-vx26>

Emma Gendron

by Germain Lacasse

Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about  the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognized as the first important screenwriter in Quebec. She wrote at least two scripts that were brought to the screen by her probable lover, Joseph-Arthur Homier—Madeleine de Verchères (1922), a biopic about a New France heroine, and La drogue fatale (1924), a thriller in which the drug mafia kidnaps the police chief’s daughter. Gendron might have written other scripts and might also have been more involved in directing these films, but nothing is proven as the films, and along with most of the relevant paper archives, were destroyed.

Flyer (in English) for the film Madeleine de Verchères (1922), Emma Gendron (w). CAQ

Flyer (in English) for the film Madeleine de Verchères (1922), Emma Gendron (w). Courtesy of La Cinémathèque Québécoise.

Like many scriptwriters, Gendron started her career as a journalist. Born in 1895 in a small Canadian village, she came to Montreal to study and started sending texts to newspapers and magazines. She was hired around 1918 by an important publisher, Poirier and Bessette, to write columns about women’s fashion and romance under the alias “Manon.” She also started writing serial romances published in the popular magazine Le Samedi. The publisher asked her to write a cinema fan column in their new magazine, Le Panorama, launched in 1919. In 1922, she wrote the play “Namounah,”a drama based on the history of a native princess who falls in love with a white man.  Gendron then met Joseph-Arthur Homier, a well-known professional photographer who also had made newsreel films about Montreal. The nature of their relation has never been completely clear, but until Homier’s death in 1934 they worked together very closely despite the fact that he was a married man with children.

Flyer (in French) for the film Madeleine de Verchères (1922), Emma Gendron (w). CAQ

Flyer (in French) for the film Madeleine de Verchères (1922), Emma Gendron (w). Courtesy of La Cinémathèque Québécoise.

There is no evidence that Gendron was involved in the first Homier film Ho Ho Jean (1922), a burlesque comedy about a tramp who tries to seduce a widow, a film now lost. Homier was trying to launch a fiction film business in Montreal and this first try was based on the personality of the popular actor Maurice Castel who played the tramp. The film was a local success and it is in the following project that Gendron is credited for the script, which was adapted from a book about a New France character. At the time there was a strong emerging national feeling in French Canada and many forgotten heroes were brought back in the media, among them Madeleine de Verchères who is said to have saved the new colony in 1692 by fighting the Iroquois with only a few settlers to help her. Like the film, the script is lost, but newspapers from the time like La Presse tell us that the film was considered realistic in describing the historical facts (1922, 15; 1922, 43).

Satisfied by the success, Homier and Gendron started another project that was miles away from the national history. La drogue fatale (1924) seems to have been inspired by Hollywood films of the time and this hypothesis has been ascertained when the synopsis of the film was recently rediscovered and is now available online and explicitly attributed to Gendron. The story is about a fight between the Montreal Police and a drug mafia leader; to stop the police investigations against them, the mobster kidnaps the police chief’s daughter and gets her addicted to drugs. She is later freed by another victim of the mafia who has fallen in love with her and will eventually marry her.

Homier and Gendron started another film project entitled Les fils de la liberté recalling the Québécois rebellion against the British empire in 1837-38.  However, probably because the previous film was not as successful as they wanted, the new project was never pushed forward to production. Homier went back to photography and Gendron to journalism. She specialized in the writing of cinema chronicles in newspapers and later in magazines that she edited herself. The main one was La revue de Manon, her alias as an author, where she wrote serial romances, gossip columns, and cinema fan chronicles all through the 1920s. After Homier’s death she married Allan Robert Green and started to publish serial novels and children’s comics, propagating the ideas of the “Rose-Croix,” a bizarre ideology mixing the ideas of Christianity and those of modern science.  She also became involved in politics and was a candidate in provincial elections where she raised the same strange ideas but also promoted women’s right to vote.  Gendron died in 1952 from an asthma crisis. She remained forgotten until the 1980s when historians started researching about Québécois cinema’s beginnings. Her archives are lost but the search through newspapers and magazines has slowly revealed her importance in journalism, cinema and, more recently, literature — a doctoral thesis being now in preparation about her serial novels

See also: Marie de Kerstrat

Bibliography

Denault, Jocelyne.  Dans l'ombre des projecteurs. Montreal: Presses de l'Université du Québec: Montreal, 1996.

Hins, Sara-Juliette. “La réalisation de soi au féminin chez certaines héroïnes d’Emma Gendron, de 1920 à 1940: entre rupture et continuité.” Recherches féministes vol. 24. no. 2 (2011): 173-188. https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/rf/2011-v24-n2-rf5005937/1007758ar.pdf

Lacasse, Germain. “Écrire entre les lignes: Emma Gendron et le nouveau cinéma québécois des années 1920.” Nouvelles Vues 12 (2011): n.p. https://bit.ly/2uwzHKv

------. Histoires de scopes. Le cinéma muet au Québec. Montréal: Cinémathèque québécoise, 1988.

------. “Vestiges narratifs. Les premiers temps du scénario québécois.” Études littéraires vol. 26, no. 2 (Autumn 1993): 57-65.

“Madeleine de Verchères.” La Presse (12 December 1922): 15.

“Madeleine de Verchères.” La Presse  (16 December 1922): 43.

Archival Paper Collections:

La drogue fatale (1924) synopsis. Fonds G.-Édouard Rinfret, No. MSS58. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

Citation

Lacasse, Germain. "Emma Gendron." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2015.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-yb5b-yw66>

Marie de Kerstrat

by Germain Lacasse

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

Marie Joséphine Charlotte de Tréourret de Kerstrat was born in France in 1841, having among her ancestors the famous Mirabeau family. These aristocratic families lost their position after the French Revolution and her father had to sell his domain and put his three daughters in a convent. Marie married an aristocrat from Brittany, Count Gustave de Grandsaignes d’Hauterives, a simple customs officer despite his impressive name. Marie received a donation from an old aunt and decided to invest it in a then very new business: tourism. She bought properties along the Atlantic shore and built villas that she rented to tourists mainly from Paris or Great Britain. The place was beautiful and drew many important artists who came there to paint and helped bring other customers. Her life would probably have continued in this pleasant environment of great landscapes and distinguished guests if there had not been a young man around: her own son Henry. Born in 1869, he later went to Paris to study law; but he loved leisure more than work and, after marrying, he spent the dowry of his wife who ran away with their son and then, in 1896, asked for a divorce. Like his mother, Henry had an imagination and he decided to travel to America to try to earn money within the new cinema business. He had ideas, but not much leadership capability and, when he soon came close to ruin, asked his mother for help. Meanwhile, the old Count had died and Marie made an audacious decision: go to America with her son and manage this new business that he wanted to start. She left her villas under the management of a notary and took the boat for Montreal.

Marie de Kerstrat (o) and her son Henry. GRAFICS

Marie de Kerstrat and son Henry. Courtesy of the Archives Départementales du Finistère.

In the end of October 1897 Marie and Henry landed in Montreal where they started the first exhibitions of the show they called the “Historiograph,” mounted by their venture, The Historiograph Company. Already well-informed about the then very religious culture of French Canada, they had selected a program that would be pleasing as well as educational: the Lumières’ Passion Play and other historical films. After a great success in Montreal they started touring the small towns around Montreal and Quebec City and they rapidly established a reputation for the quality of their show. Henry might have been a poor businessman, but he was a talented speaker and soon became a very skilled film lecturer. After touring the Quebec province they went to Ontario and exhibited many shows in Toronto, Ottawa, and elsewhere. To obtain recommendations from authorities Marie developed a model of philanthropic business: twenty percent of the revenues were donated to the institution that patronized the presentation: schools, churches, and other benevolent institutions.

However, a traveling show cannot be managed like a tourist resort; the business has to be taken on the road to stay profitable. Soon she understood that the eastern United States could be a better market for their business and thus they took their show to New York City, Boston, and Atlantic City. Going south offered another kind of relief, the Canadian winter being as bad for health as for revenues. So within a few years, the pattern was established: summer and fall in Montreal and the neighboring areas, winter and spring in the eastern United States where the Historiograph Company became the Dreamworld Company and later the Parisian Mimodramas. New French films from Méliès and Pathé were added to the show every year and Henry, who also spoke English, could perform in both the United States and in Canada. Quite rapidly Marie de Kerstrat had established a reputation that allowed her to earn a good living and even pay back part of her son’s debts. Traveling was difficult but had some consolations, among which was going back to France every year. The peak of this business was said to be in 1904 when Marie and Henry presented their Dreamworld show in St. Louis, supposedly on the site of the World’s Fair. However, for the “Motion Picture Countess,” as she was called in Montreal, the descent was close.

Marie de Kerstrat (o) (at the ticket counter) and her son Henry (fifth from the right) in front of their St. Louis moving picture show. GRAFICS.

Marie de Kerstrat (at the ticket counter) and son Henry (fifth from the right) in front of their St. Louis moving picture show. Courtesy of the Archives Départementales du Finistère.

In the spring of 1905, nickelodeons started to boom in the United States and this fever soon reached Montreal. The first “scope,” as it was called there, opened in Montreal in January 1906, and within a few months there were about twenty more. In New York City, Boston, and Atlantic City, there were now hundreds of the same; the traveling show had to evolve rapidly to survive. Marie de Kerstrat had already shown that she was able to shift fast and did so again. In 1907, she rented two theaters in New York and transformed the traveling show into new refined nickelodeons. But the competition was very tight and new difficulties arose that were hard to solve, as Marie testifies in letters to her notary in France:

Business here is not like in France; here a man can ruin you if he wants and there is no way to defend yourself. (…) Film prices have raised from 10 to now 15 cents per foot, everything is now trusted and the distributors have the control. (…) We found it cheaper to rent three theaters and buy our films like we always did, this way we preserve our high reputation in America and beat the competition. (Les affaires ici ne ressemblent pas à celles de France; un homme ici vous ruine à sa convenance, sans que vous puissiez vous défendre (…) Le prix des vues a renchéri beaucoup de 10 sous le pied, on nous fait payer 15, tout est en syndicat et les loueurs sont les maîtres. (…) Nous avons trouvé meilleur marché d’ouvrir trois salles et d’acheter nos vues comme nous avons toujours fait et de cette façon nous gardons notre nom qui est le premier en Amérique et battons la concurrence).

What she did not see or neglected to say is probably that the difficulties she encountered in this business were because she was a woman with character and determination. Men certainly did not like too many women around in this new venue and most likely hated one who could oppose them.

Marie stopped the exhibition in New York and moved to St. Louis where the conditions seem to have been easier and allowed her to survive for a while as an independent exhibitor. But yet this would not make it easier and finally she gave up being part of the business in the United States and found other territories. She spent the autumn on the French island of Saint Pierre off of the coast of Newfoundland where motion pictures became a good attraction for the numerous teams of fishermen. There, she also started a new profitable sidelinehe bought Brittany needlepoint lace without the taxes that made it so expensive on the continent and brought it back to Bermuda where she could sell it at a higher price to rich tourists while Henry operated the cinema that she probably supervised as before. This allowed them to survive from 1910 to 1913.

Marie de Kerstrat (o). GRAFICS.

Marie de Kerstrat. Courtesy of the Archives Départementales du Finistère.

In 1913, Marie reached her seventy-second birthday and decided the time had come to have a smoother life and returned to Brittany to try to start a new cinema that would allow Henry to earn his living.  They established themselves in Dinard, a city popular among tourists and vacationers and opened a theater called Le St. Pierrais in honor of the people of the islands. But this was the summer of 1914 and, a few weeks later, France and all of Europe was involved in World War I and thousands of businesses, among them cinema, closed. Henry became a clerk for the French army in Rouen where his mother lived with him, but she returned to Brittany around 1920 to spend the last months of her life with family and friends. She is buried in the cemetery of Pont L’abbé with her husband and son. For decades she was completely forgotten, but her story was rediscovered as historians started researching for the cinema’s centennial in the 1980s. First, we discovered the shows, then Henry as the first film lecturer in Quebec, then the importance of Marie de Kerstrat as the real manager of this traveling show through which most Quebecers and thousands of Americans had discovered motion pictures. But being a woman pioneer is probably not even the main feature of this story; as important would rather be all the detours Marie took to become not only a motion picture film exhibitor but also an independent one. The only dependence in her life might have been that of her beloved son, but that she knew, even if she never would acknowledge it.

See also: Emma Gendron

Bibliography

Lacasse, Germain. L’historiographe. Les débuts du spectacle cinématographique au Québec. Montréal: Cinémathèque québécoise, 1985.

------. Histoires de scopes. Le cinéma muet au Québec. Montréal: Cinémathèque québécoise, 1988.

Lacasse, Germain and Serge Duigou. Marie de Kerstrat l’aristocrate du cinématographe. Quimper: Éditions Ressac, 1987.

Savoie, Chantal, “‘Moins de dentelles, plus de psychologie' et une heure à soi: Les Lettres de Fadette et la chronique féminine au tournant du siècle.” In Tendances actuelles en histoire littéraire canadienne. Ed. Denis Saint-Jacques. Québec: Nota Bene, 2003. 183-199.

Archival Paper Collections:

Lettres de Marie de Kerstrat au notaire Francis Gaouyer, Fonds Pouliquen, No. 60 J 67. Archives Départementales du Finistère.

Citation

Lacasse, Germain. "Marie de Kerstrat." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2015.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-awcv-3e60>

Iris Barry

by Robert Sitton

This particular pioneer had a transcontinental career. As a result, her profile will include multiple essays by different authors.

Her American Career

By Robert Sitton

After her success as a film critic, novelist, and co-founder of the London Film Society in 1925, Iris Barry’s career took a major downturn in the fall of 1930. She ran afoul of her employer, Lord Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail, when she panned the Elinor Glyn film Knowing Men (1930). Although Glyn was well-known as a romantic novelist and screenwriter, Barry found her film to have been made on “an abysmally low level” (qtd. in Sitton 2014, 145). Rothermere took Glyn to dinner on opening night and, without consulting Barry, promised her a favorable review. The next day Iris received a check for the balance of her contract: “No questions. No excuses. No job” (Sitton 145). Native product had long been under siege at the box office by American competitors and Iris also suspected she had proven less a fan of British films than Rothermere expected.
Portrait of Iris Barry. USM

Portrait of Iris Barry. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. 

Iris went to America, taking along her husband of seven years, Alan Porter, the poet and literary editor of The Spectator. Arriving at the start of the Depression, they were little known in New York and their first five years were difficult. Barry ghost-wrote a book on Afghanistan and, with Porter, who was also trained as a psychologist, a directory of dreams. She published book reviews in the New York Herald-Tribune, but the two lived precariously on freelance fees and Porter’s income as a therapist and professor at the New School.

Iris’ prospects brightened in 1932 when she became a regular guest at the Askew salon, a remarkable assemblage of modernists who met on Sunday evenings at the home of Kirk Askew, the American representative of Durlacher Brothers art dealership, and his socialite wife, Constance. There, Iris became friends with Philip Johnson, the architect, composers Paul Bowles and Virgil Thomson, architecture historian Henry Russell Hitchcock, theater director John Houseman, art historians Agnes Rindge and Margaret Scolari Barr, dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein, A.E. “Chick” Austin, the adventurous director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, and, most fatefully for Iris, Alfred Barr, Jr., director of the newly established Museum of Modern Art.

Iris and Porter divorced in July 1934 and within a month Iris married John “Dick” Abbott, a stockbroker six years her junior who liked motion pictures more than his job on Wall Street. Abbott, a somewhat dour numbers man, accompanied Iris to the Askew salon, but few remembered his being there. Barr, however, decided that Abbott and Barry should together write a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for funding a film library at the Museum. During the fall and winter of 1934-35 Iris and Abbott polled colleges and universities, assessing their interest in films for study. Positive responses included in the couple’s proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation resulted in the founding in 1935 of the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, supported by a grant of $100,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and most of an additional $60,000 from John Hay “Jock” Whitney, who had introduced Technicolor to Hollywood. John Abbott was named the library’s first director and Iris Barry was named curator.

Campaigning to secure films for the library, Barry and Abbott went to Hollywood. On August 1, 1935, they appeared before a glittering crowd at the Pickfair mansion of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Many in attendance were in control of major film collections, among them Pickford herself, Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Walter Wanger, and Samuel Goldwyn. Barry and Abbott appealed to their desire for immortality, arguing that by donating their films for preservation they would live in popular memory. Their appeal was successful. Films were forthcoming and began to circulate in 1936.

Pickfair guests (left to right): Frances Goldwyn, John Abbott, Samuel Goldwyn, Mary Pickford, Jesse Lasky, Harold Lloyd, Iris Barry in 1935. USM

Pickfair guests (left to right): Frances Goldwyn, John Abbott, Samuel Goldwyn, Mary Pickford, Jesse Lasky, Harold Lloyd, Iris Barry in 1935. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. 

In May 1936 the couple traveled to Europe where many nascent film archives had been established as political instruments in a time of impending war. Iris undertook the trip with a dual purpose. In addition to seeking films of aesthetic significance she secured the approval of Secretary of State Cordell Hull to bring back films that, as she put it, “might become politically or militarily useful to the United States in the event of our entry into conflict” (Sitton 213). This ambition reversed her earlier tendency to avoid politics. Visits to London, Paris, Hanover, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad, and Stockholm brought in films now regarded as iconic, including the works of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Murnau, Pabst, and Wiene, and the most controversial of which was Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).

Although the Museum of Modern Art is known as a venue for film exhibition, exhibiting films was not an early priority of the Film Library. The first attempts in 1936 met with a mixed reception when many in the audience derided the antiquated styles of early cinema. More successful was an initiative in September 1937 to create a new kind of film course, one in which the audience interacted with filmmakers after their films were screened. The course was co-sponsored by Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art and among those attending were many who would shape film education in the future, including the film critic Arthur Knight whose influential Thursday night classes at the University of Southern California were, in his words, “patterned precisely after those long-ago Tuesdays with Iris Barry” (1978, 19).

Iris Barry and John Abbott. USM.

Iris Barry and John Abbott. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. 

The approach of war brought pressures upon the Film Library. In the spring of 1939, Nelson Rockefeller became President of the MoMA board and that summer turned the administrative reins of the Museum over to Dick Abbott. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Rockefeller Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, a role he carried out in cooperation with the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Through Rockefeller, Iris and the Film Library facilitated the production of many films favorable to U.S. policy in Latin America, including films produced by Walt Disney featuring his cartoon characters. She also screened German propaganda films for American filmmakers aiding the Allied cause. In response, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and others produced the Why We Fight series, a major wartime recruitment tool.

After the war ended, Barry found herself faced with a generation of filmmakers using lightweight 16-millimeter film equipment to produce a decidedly personal art. Iris’ stated preference for narrative consistency in film left her unprepared for the non-narrative character of many post-war independent films. In late 1945, as arbiter of a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation by the filmmaker Maya Deren, Barry rejected Deren’s proposal outright and concurred with a letter from the Foundation’s John Marshall that Deren would be wise to adopt another profession. In response, in February 1946, Deren rented the Provincetown Playhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village for a retrospective of her “abandoned” films. In the audience were Amos and Marcia Vogel who went on to found the highly influential film society, Cinema Sixteen. Others present formed the New American Cinema Group, followed later by the Filmmakers Cooperative, Canyon Cinema Cooperative, and countless other independent film groups. With the establishment of these organizations, American film culture became more complex and decentralized, challenging the leadership of the Film Library.

In February of 1949 Iris suffered a health crisis. She underwent treatment for cancer, which, although ostensibly successful, left her insecure about her mortality. At the same time, the French Ambassador to the U.S. notified her of her induction into the French Legion of Honor. Iris had helped Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque française shelter many valuable films from the Germans during wartime, and the French were grateful. They also recognized her as the principal founder of FIAF (the International Federation of Film Archives, founded in 1938), for which Iris served as Life President. In the late 1940s Iris was increasingly asked to do what she did not care to do: raise money. Film activity at MoMA for too long had depended on Rockefeller support and the costs of film preservation were outstripping income. After her cancer operation she received a $4,000 gift from Nelson Rockefeller to support her recovery. She took the money and sailed for France. Iris had served on the jury of the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946. There, she met a Frenchman, Pierre Kerroux, a rough, handsome Breton twenty years her junior. Iris joined him again in the south of France in 1949 while on convalescent leave from the Museum. She quietly decided to remain there. With Rockefeller’s check she bought a car and a tumbledown farmhouse in Fayence, the village noted for its pottery.

For fifteen years this couple co-existed warily, selling antiques from the first floor of a townhouse lent to them by Chick Austin. Occasionally, Iris made trips for FIAF to foreign archives. In 1955 NBC asked her to consult on their Victory at Sea World War II series, although privately she despised television. In 1962 she returned to New York briefly as the honoree of the first New York Film Festival. Spurred on by deteriorating relations with Kerroux, she tried reconciling that year with her two children by Wyndham Lewis in England, but to no avail. Alone and ill with cancer of the throat (she had been a lifelong smoker), Iris entered the hospital in Marseilles where an operation in October 1969 left her unable to speak. She died there on December 22, 1969, and is buried in the cemetery above Fayence. Her grave bears no mention of her accomplishments.

Iris Barry’s work in the UK will be thoroughly covered and included shortly.

Bibliography

Bandy, Mary Lea.  “Nothing Sacred: Jock Whitney Snares Antiques for the Museum, the Founding of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library.” In The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change. New York: Abrams/Museum of Modern Art, 1995. 91-98.

Barr, Alfred, Jr.  “Notes on Departmental Expansion of the Museum,” typescript dated June 24, 1932. Department of Film Archive Records, Museum of Modern Art Department of Film Special Collections Archives, New York.

---. “Chronicle of the Years 1902-1929.” Compiled by Rona Roob in collaboration with Margaret Scolari Barr, issued as a special edition of The New Criterion vol. 5, no. 11 (1987): 14-28.

Barry, Iris, undated autobiographical typescript, 26. Iris Barry Papers. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Decherney, Peter. Hollywood and the Culture Elite. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Ernst, Jimmy. A Not-So-Still Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.

Glancy, Mark. “Temporary American Citizens? British Audiences, Hollywood Films and the Threat of Americanization in the 1920s.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 26, no. 4 (22 January 2007): 461-484

Hankins, Leslie. “Iris Barry, Writer and Cineaste, Forming Film Culture in London 1924-26: the Adelphi, The Spectator, the Film Society and the British Vogue.” Modernism/Modernity vol. 11, no. 3 (2004): 488-515.

Henson, Bruce. “Iris Barry: American Film Archive Pioneer.” Katherine Sharp Review 4 (Winter 1997): 1-7.

Knight, Arthur. “I Remember MoMA.” The Hollywood Reporter (21 April 1978): 14-19.

Lynes, Russell. Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Atheneum, 1973.

Meyers, Jeffrey. “New Light on Iris Barry.” Paideuma (Fall 1984): 285-289.

Montagu, Ivor. “Birmingham Sparrow: In Memoriam, Iris Barry, 1896-1969.” Sight & Sound vol. 39, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 106-107.

Sitton, Robert. Lady in the Dark: Iris Barry and the Art of Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Wasson, Haidee. “The Cinematic Subtext of the Modern Museum: Alfred H. Barr and MoMA’s Film Archive.” The Moving Image: Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1-28.

------. “What’s Old is New Again: Film History’s New York Debut.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies vol. 12, no. 3 (1998): 245-267.

------. “The Woman Film Critic: Newspapers, Cinema and Iris Barry.” Film History: An International Journal vol. 18, no. 2 (2006): 154-162.

Archival Paper Collections:

Alan Porter papers. Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

A. Everett Austin Papers. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Edmund Schiddel Collection. Boston University, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Iris Barry Papers. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Poetry Collection. State University of New York, Buffalo.

Rockefeller Family Archives. The Rockefeller Archive Center.

Wyndham Lewis and John Widdicombe Collections. University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center.

Wyndham Lewis Papers. Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library.

Citation

Sitton, Robert. "Iris Barry." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-f2zz-7v28>

Mary Manning

by Donna Casella

Mary Manning was one of a handful of women active behind the camera in Ireland’s two waves of silent film production. Between 1914 and 1926, a prolific mass-market industry specialized in popular film genres like historical melodramas and romantic comedies and dramas. Ellen O’Mara Sullivan (co-founder of and producer at Film Company of Ireland, 1914-1920), Margaret T. Pender (source writer, O’Neil of the Glen, 1916), Ulster novelist Mrs. N. F. Patton (adapter, Knocknagow, 1918), and Dorothy Donn-Byrne (source writer, Land of Her Fathers, 1925) were the female pioneers in this first wave. Between 1930 and 1935, a second silent industry produced more experimental, less commercial films, extending this second silent era well beyond the 1927 advent of sound in the U.S and much of Europe. In addition to Manning, women filmmakers included Lettice Ramsey and British- born Frances Baker Farrell who designed sets (Some Say Chance, 1934) and Gate Theatre actress Maírín Hayes who edited (Guests of the Nation, 1935). Scholars offer few details on Manning’s contribution in this second wave, though she appears to have been one of the driving forces behind five of the six films produced. In her brief, but significant film career, Manning was a screenwriter, adapter, director, assistant director, and actress who also worked on props and casting. In addition, she was a film critic and a founding member of an art house film society and an amateur filmmaking club.

Mary Manning (a/d/w/o). PC

Mary Manning portrait. Private Collection.

Manning’s film work evolved out of a broad interest in the arts. Born in Dublin in 1905, she briefly studied painting in London. Back in Dublin, she apprenticed under actress Sara Allgood at the Abbey Theatre. As Ireland’s official national theatre, the Abbey was at the center of the country’s cultural renaissance in the 1920s. According to scholars, the theatre asserted nationalist pride through its productions of Irish-themed plays by local writers avoiding traditional Irish theatre’s romanticized view of nationalist struggles and stereotypes of the Irish as deferential rogues and vulnerable maidens (Trotter 38-39). Manning contributed to this new aesthetic as a regular member of the Abbey players and later the newly-formed Gate Theatre in 1928, where she both acted and wrote plays. She saw her time at the Gate and the early 1930s as a period of “intellectual creativity which I’ve never known again” (Manning 1978, 39).

By the late 1920s and early 1930s Manning also was reshaping Ireland’s cinematic landscape, initially as a film critic and later as a filmmaker. Her interest in motion picture film was in keeping with the trend of many theatrical artists from the Abbey, the Irish Theatre Company (formerly the Abbey players), Trinity College Dramatic Society, and the Gate Theatre who recognized the potential for cinema to carry on the period’s cultural initiatives (Rockett 1988, 24; Barton 23, 27). As a film critic for the Irish Statesman from 1929 until it folded in 1930, Manning kept a watchful eye on British and American film imports. In “Dublin Cum-Elstree” and “What Is the Wild West Saying?” she was particularly disapproving of the Hollywood model of filmmaking with its unimaginative stories and its stereotypical portrayals of Ireland and the Irish (1929, 254-56; 1930, 497). In “A Silent Interlude” she also criticized Hollywood for its failure to evolve as an art form, praising continental European cinema for its growth and experimentation (1929, 7273). Throughout the magazine, Manning was equally disparaging of the Irish government’s lack of support for the creative arts, including film.

In an effort to influence the kinds of films Ireland imported, Manning co-founded the Dublin Film Society in 1930 and served as its secretary. Funded through subscriptions, the society screened European art house films not typically found in the picture houses of Dublin and the Provinces. This attracted the attention of J. N. G. (Norris) Davidson and together they formed Irish Amateur Films (erroneously referred to in some sources as the Irish Film Society). This small group of amateurs made four films in 1930. The full extent of Manning’s involvement in two of these, Pathetic Gazette (1930), a satire on the legend of Cuchulain and Deirdre, and Screening in the Rain (IFA, 1930), a short about the Gate Theatre’s annual garden party in the Spanish Embassy gardens, remains a subject for further research. However, given the group’s fostering of collective filmmaking and acknowledgement of both Manning and Davidson’s joint leadership in the company, according to the Dublin Evening Mail in 1930, Manning probably worked in some capacity on these productions (2).

“From Lantern to Slide Show,” an episode of Ireland’s national public service broadcaster’s 1995 television series Memories in Focus, and newspaper clippings of the period provide more information on Manning’s work on the other two films. She directed Bank Holiday (1930) an amusing actuality on Irish holiday-makers, and was assistant director to director Davidson on By Accident (1930), a psychological study of a young man’s fear of death and his obsession with a woman. Manning also had a small role in this film and worked on casting, discovering the female lead, Olive Purcell, in a book-binding factory, according to The Sunday Chronicle that year (n.p.). Advertisements in the Irish Times and the Irish Independent indicate that all except Screening in the Rain were shown at the Peacock Theatre on August 25-30, 1930. The films also enjoyed an enthusiastic reception in local newspapers. Critics noted the amateur quality, but praised the films for their technical experimentation. In an Irish Times interview on August 26th, 1930, Lennox Robinson, who earlier worked with Manning at the Abbey, noted these films were the “beginning of an intelligent making of Irish pictures by intelligent Irishmen” (6).  Manning’s Bank Holiday was singled out by the Irish Independent as “a far less ambitious attempt than ‘By Accident,’ but one which shows a shrewder appreciation of the present limitations of Irish amateur films and considerable skill in making the best use of them” (1930, 10).

Irish Amateur Films on location. NLI

Irish Amateur Films on location. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Manning continued to explore the dramatic possibilities of motion picture film with Guests of the Nation (1935). Discussions between Manning and fellow Gate artist Denis Johnston in 1932 led to the making of the film (Adams 126). Set in 1921, the film is based on Frank O’Connor’s short story about British prisoners and their Irish captors in a remote rural cottage. The film was shot with basic equipment and makeshift sets during the next two years. Johnston directed and the crew consisted of Manning’s brother, cameraman John Manning, and artists from the Abbey and Gate. Manning was responsible for some of the logistics. According to the Memories in Focus episode, “Irish Productions Find Their Feet,” she secured armored cars from the British army. In his diaries, Johnston explains that she also averted a raid by the IRA’s Gilmore Brothers who spotted guns on the set (“3rd Omnibus X Book”). In addition, she wrote the screen treatment and adaptation. As in the original story, Manning avoided the idealized view of Ireland’s struggle with Britain; however, rather than limiting the point of view to one of the IRA guards, as O’Connor does, Manning gives the old woman who runs the cottage a perspective on the Anglo/Irish conflict. Finally, Manning added an additional character, a female IRA courier, a role that reflected the kind of work women activists assumed during the Anglo/Irish War (1919-1921). Manning’s interpretation gave voice to women who had participated in Ireland’s nation-building – a voice absent from both official history and literature (Casella 57-58, 68). Guests of the Nation was screened at the Gate Theatre on January 20, 1935 and to this day is still exhibited in private and art house venues.

Throughout the shooting of Guests of the Nation, Manning continued to work as a film critic, this time for the Gate Theatre arts magazine, Motley. She co-founded the magazine in 1932 and was editor and contributor throughout its two-year run. She tackled film censorship and crippling duties on Dublin screenings in “Why Not a Repertory Cinema?” (14). Manning again praised continental Europe for its focus on art over commercial cinema and criticized American cinema for uninventive filmmaking in “Hail Veidt!” (11) and “The Fairchild Family at the Films” (12-14). She periodically asserted the need for a stable indigenous film industry backed by both government and the picture houses. Without this, Manning feared a true Irish cinematic voice would slowly disappear as she wrote in “The Voice of Ireland” (15). Her fears were well-founded. Following Guests of the Nation, the silent era came to a close and indigenous productions ground to a halt, although one might reflect that extending non-synchronous film production well into the 1930s helped to extend the life span of early Irish cinema. Except for a few sporadic productions, many in collaboration with foreign companies, and the nationalist work of Gael Linn in the 1950s and 1960s, there was no steady indigenous film industry in Ireland until the 1970s (Rockett 1988, 46, 71-126).

Guests of the Nation (1935), Mary Manning (a/d/w/o). NLI

Scene, Guests of the Nation (1935). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

After the 1935 screening of Guests of the Nation, Manning moved to the United States. Research thus far gives little indication as to why she left both Dublin’s theatrical and film scenes. She mentions in Enter Certain Players that the Gate community of artists was starting to splinter (39). Her family suggests that financial insecurity and the political difficulties in Ireland may have contributed to the move. Manning settled in Boston where she married lawyer Mark de Wolf who had worked as second assistant director for Paramount Studios in the late 1920s. Shortly after, her 1938 play “Storm Over Wicklow” was produced by BBC television. She continued writing plays, both original and adaptations, and added three novels to her writing credits. She maintained her commitment to a less-commercial art scene as managing director of the Idler Theatre at Radcliffe College in the 1940s and as one of the founding members of the Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge in 1950. After her husband’s death in 1967, Manning moved back to Dublin for ten years where she was theatre and book critic for the Irish Times and Hibernia. Her only film work was as a writer on Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1967) based on the 1955 “The Voice of Shem,” Manning’s stage adaptation of Joyce’s novel.

Mary Manning died in Boston in 1999. Her obituaries list her plays and novels and note her contribution to Dublin’s theatrical and Boston’s literary scenes, but rarely mention her films. Scholarship has been equally reluctant to explore the extent of her contribution to the film industry in Ireland, though sufficient archival material, family history, and periodicals are available for study. There is still much to be learned about this film artist who advocated for an indigenous Irish industry of filmmakers committed to experimenting with film as an evolving art form.

See also: Maírín HayesMargaret T. Pender, Lettice Ramsey and Frances Baker Farrell, Ellen O’Mara Sullivan

Bibliography

Adams, Bernard. Denis Johnston: A Life. Dublin: Lilliput, 2002.

Advertisement. Irish Times (20 Aug. 1930): 6.

Advertisement. Irish Times (23 Aug. 1930): 6.

Advertisement. Irish Times (26 Aug. 1930): 6.

Advertisement. Irish Independent (23 Aug. 1930): 8.

Advertisement. Irish Independent (26 Aug. 1930): 6.

Barton, Ruth. Irish National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Casella, Donna R. “Women and Nationalism in Indigenous Irish Filmmaking of the Silent Period.” In Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives. Eds. Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, and Lucia Tralli. Bologna: University of Bologna, 2013. 53-80.

“From Lantern to Slide Show.” Memories in Focus. Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Dublin. 27 Apr. 1995. Television. IFI Irish Film Archive RTÉ Archives .

Howe, Fanny. Personal Interview. 10 July 2015.

Howe, Susan. Personal Interview. 11 June 2015.

"Irish Amateur Films." Irish Times. (26 Aug. 1930): 6.

“Irish Amateur Film Society.” Dublin Evening Mail (30 Aug. 1930): 2.

“Irish Productions Find Their Feet.” Memories in Focus. Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), Dublin. 4 May 1995. Television. Irish Film Institute, RTÉ Archives.

“Irish Girl Makes Film Name.” The Sunday Chronicle (6 July 1930): n.p. Norris Davidson file, Liam O’Laoghaire Archives. National Library of Ireland.

“Irish Playwright – Critic – Novelist Mary Manning Adams is Dead at 93. Obit. Playbill. July 1, 1999. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/irish-playwright-critic-novelist-mary-manning-adams-is-dead-at-93-82864

Johnston, Denis. “3rd Omnibus X Book.” Denis Johnston Papers (MS 10066/181/95/194). Trinity College Dublin.

Manning, Mary. "Dublin-Cum-Elstree." Irish Statesman (30 Nov. 1929): 254-56.

------. “The Fairchild Family at the Films.” Motley (Nov. 1933): 12-14.

------. “Hail Veidt!” Motley (Mar. 1933): 10-12.

------. “Mary Manning.” In Enter Certain PlayersEdwards-MacLiammóir and the Gate 1928-1978. Ed. Peter Luke. Dublin: Dolmen Press 1978. 35-39.

------.“A Silent Interlude.” Irish Statesman (28 Sept. 1929): 72-73.

------. The Voice of Ireland.” Motley (Feb. 1933): 14-15.

------. What is the Wild West Saying?” Irish Statesman (22 Feb. 1930): 496-98.

------. Why Not a Repertory Cinema?” Motley (Sept. 1932): 14-15.

“Mark de Wolfe Howe Dies; Lawyer, Historian Was 60.” Obit. The Harvard Crimson. (1 Mar. 1967) http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/3/1/mark-de-wolfe-howe-dies-lawyer/

“Mary M. Adams, 93; Irish Novelist and Playwright.” Obit. The Boston Globe (27 June 1999): 7.

“Mary Manning Howe Adams.” Obit. Irish Times (8 July 1999): 19.

“Producing Films in Ireland.” Irish Independent (26 Aug. 1930): 10.

Programme, Guests of the Nation. 16 Mar. 1960. Guests of the Nation clippings file. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Rockett, Kevin. “Part One: History, Politics and Irish Cinema.” In Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland. London: Croom Helm, 1988. 1-126.

Rockett, Kevin and Emir Rockett. Irish Film and Television Research Online. Mar. 15 2012. http://www.tcd.ie/irishfilm/

Trotter, Mary. Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

Archival Paper Collections:

Denis Johnston Papers. Trinity College Dublin.

Dublin Gate Theatre Archive. Northwestern University.

Guests of the Nation clippings file. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Irish Industry clippings file. Irish Film Institute, Tiernan MacBride Library.

Irish Theatre Archive. Shelah Richards Collection. Dublin City Library and Archive.

Letters between Mary Manning Howe and her sister Helen Howe. Helen Howe Papers. Harvard University Libraries.

Mary Manning Collection. Boston University, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Norris Davidson file. Liam O’Laoghaire Archives. National Library of Ireland.

Poets’ Theatre Records. Harvard University Libraries.

Ria Mooney Papers, 1917-1983. Manuscript Room. National Library of Ireland. .

Citation

Casella, Donna. "Mary Manning." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-yg87-rr16>

Esterina Zuccarone

by Alessandra Chiarini

Esterina Zuccarone was born in Foggia, in southern Italy, into a family of seven daughters and one son. In 1912 her family moved to Turin, joining the flow of migrants from the South to the North of Italy that, in those years, involved many people. The transition from a rural to an industrial society allowed Esterina to grow up with more emancipated female role models, starting with her older sisters who, in the new urban environment, decided to leave home to find work (de Miro d’Ayeta 2007, 229). In particular, one of her sisters started working in one of the numerous local textile mills, allowing the young Esterina to familiarize herself with skills such as precision, sense of proportion, and attention to detail, which were necessary to produce good quality and stylish garments.

In Turin, the young girl was witness to the development of modern life and came into contact with the latest technological innovations of the time—cars and railways, gramophones and buses, cameras and sewing machines, to name just a few. There was also the emerging cinematographic industry, a sector that made use of the manual ability of seamstresses for film developing, printing, and editing, allowing many women to get involved with the fascinating world of cinema—its glamour, its stories, its magnificent settings—and, consequently, to imagine new aspirations and ways of life (de Miro d’Ayeta 230).

Despite her father’s resistance—as a typical conservative Southern Italian man—Esterina, too, became a seamstress at the age of twelve. A few years later, at the age of fourteen, she found a job at La Positiva, the development and printing section of Giovanni Pastrone’s Itala Film. As Esterina remarked about her work in those early years:

Il lavoro era duro, dodici, quattordici ore di lavoro e la paga era bassa. Che ero brava lo capirono subito, a diciassette anni ero la capo reparto di una bella squadra di dieci uomini e tutti mi davano retta! [Trans.: The work was hard, twelve, fourteen hours of work and the pay was low. They understood immediately that I was good, so at seventeen I was the forewoman of a beautiful ten-men team and all of them gave heed to me!] (Cossu 2008, 21).

Esterina demonstrated from the beginning a remarkable practical intelligence: she received many production awards and was soon assigned to a Moviola to work at film editing. She did not care much for the more spectacular and glamorous side of cinema; her main interests were in the technical and physical aspects. In an interview with her before she died, as part of the documentary La storia di Esterina (Milli Toja, 1995), she tells us that as a specialized worker, she knew projectors and other equipment perfectly and followed their technological evolution over time.

During the 1920’s, Esterina also developed a political consciousness, participating in the women editors’ strike held in Turin’s Vittorio Veneto Square (de Miro d’Ayeta 231). After the First World War Italian cinema was in crisis: the birth of UCI (Unione Cinematografica Italiana), an organization that comprised most Italian production companies, ended up absorbing Itala Film, with Rome gradually replacing Turin as the national “cinema city.” As Esterina affirms in Toja’s documentary, she struggled to accept this change because it meant that an important future for cinema in Turin was unthinkable.

Nonetheless, Esterina continued her professional activity in that city. She divided her employment between La Positiva and FERT (Fiori Enrico Roma Torino), a company set up in 1919, which, together with La Positiva, came under Stefano Pittaluga’s control in 1925. At FERT, she further improved her technical skills, met and worked with one of the founders of Arri, designers and suppliers of motion picture film equipment, and, with the advent of sound film, specialized in sound synchronization (de Miro d’Ayeta 232). Despite the outbreak of World War II, Esterina did not stop working and, in that period, started giving lessons in editing to a young Franco Cristaldi, the future producer and editor of Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988).

After the end of the war, FERT’s new owner, Catalucci, dismantled the Turin studios to move them to Rome. Esterina and other workers formed a cooperative to continue their careers, but because of economic difficulties the company was forced to close in 1951. Left unemployed, Esterina found a job in the FIAT automobile factory. Shortly afterwards, the firm decided to create a cinema department designed to produce documentaries and advertisements to promote itself. Esterina was called upon to plan and organize this new sector. Here she coordinated the works commissioned to directors such as Alessandro Blasetti, and personally met Walt Disney, who congratulated her on her skills and competence, as she recalled in the 1995 documentary.

Despite her many accolades and her huge responsibilities, her title was always that of metalworker. Nevertheless, she was satisfied: Esterina’s concern was not so much her career, but the possibility of contributing to the art of cinema and learning about new machines and innovative technical solutions.

Bibliography

Cossu, Luisa. “Trascrizioni dell' isola immaginata. Grazia Deledda e l'arte delle immagini in movimento.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sassari, Italy, 2008.

de Miro d'Ayeta, Ester. “Cucire nastri di celluloide. L'oscuro iter di montatrice di Esterina Zuccarone, 'operaia' a Torino.” In Non solo dive: Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall'Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 229-233.

Citation

Chiarini, Alessandra. "Esterina Zuccarone." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2015.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-adb7-br02>

Cissy Fitzgerald

by Maggie Hennefeld

With a film career spanning over four decades—from a vaudeville dancer in an early Edison actuality and a silent comic film actress to an independent producer in the 1920s and a character actor in talkies in the 1930s— Cissy Fitzgerald experienced the vicissitudes of early film history. Born on February 1, 1873, christened Marie Kathleen Cecilia Fitzgerald, and educated in a British convent, Fitzgerald was already famous for her stage dancing and coquettish wink when she made her first screen appearance in 1896. Best known as “The Girl With the Wink,” Fitzgerald primarily worked in theater until her transition to comedic film acting in 1914. She appeared in multiple, trans-Atlantic runs of “The Gaiety Girl,” “The Foundling,” and “The Family.” Although she only appeared in one film role prior to 1914, an Edison Vitascope recording of her dance act in a Boston Keith-Albee show, her stage personality radiated cinematic qualities. From her saucy lingerie dancing to her gleefully incessant winking, Fitzgerald integrated bodily displays with the act of looking while most films were still shot in static, long-framed, proscenium views.

Cissy Fitzgerald (a/p). PD

Cissy Fitzgerald. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When “she kicked herself” up from $50 to a $350 per week salary in her first American engagement, an unlabeled scrapbook clipping found in the Robinson Locke collection at the New York Public Library advertised Fitzgerald’s exciting range of allures: “Her dancing is distinguished for its seductiveness, its lingerie display, and its celebrated wink accompaniment.” Her first film appearance, as Charles Musser explains,  was viewed as a supplement to her live stage performance (170). The Boston Herald pitched the 1896 Edison recording of Cissy Fitzgerald: “Those who were captivated with Cissy Fitzgerald’s kick and wink during an engagement at a city theater the past season will have an opportunity of passing judgment on the Vitascope’s reproduction of the same; it is said to be capital” (“Keith’s New Theater” 10). Along with a motley cast of boxers, exotic dancers, magicians, circus animals, soldiers, moving automobiles, and state-executed anarchists, Fitzgerald provided a body for displaying the technological appeals of the motion picture apparatus.

Cissy Fitzgerald (a/p). PD

Cissy Fitzgerald. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Fitzgerald’s best comic asset, her saucy left-eye wink, was like a fetish object that looked back. Erupting in involuntary winking spasms, Fitzgerald’s trademarked left eye plagued the comedienne in her off-stage, off-screen domestic life.  As her Doctor E.C. Peck explained Fitzgerald’s condition to a New York Journal reporter in 1896, “The wink, which has really become a stage property of Miss Fitzgerald, involves an extraordinary tension of what are known as the orbicular muscles, which surround the eye, and which are used in an exaggerated or tight closing of the eye” (n.p.).  According to Dr. Peck, Fitzgerald’s constant over-tension of these “wheel muscles” in her live stage performances caused her wink to “break loose…and she couldn’t get it back under control again.” As the Journal reporter waxed, “Now the eye winks Cissy.”

Newspaper clipping, Cissy Fitzgerald (a/p). NYPL.

Newspaper clipping, Cissy Fitzgerald. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Popular press discourse of the time made no bones about capitalizing on the slapstick potential of Fitzgerald’s medical affliction. The over-strained, nerve-shot muscles surrounding the comedienne’s left eye became popular protagonists of the entertainment columns. The reporter for the New York Journal continued: “The eye seemed to glory in its misbehavior” (n.p.). The automatism of Fitzgerald’s winking muscles provided the perfect alibi for the otherwise decorous comedienne to misbehave in public. Her evil eye would wink at perfect strangers on the train, in the street, and at horse shows, leaving both parties feeling assaulted and ill at ease. Fitzgerald’s left eye came to personify all of the historical contradictions of the comedienne’s stage persona: her saucy inflections on everyday etiquette.

In another unmarked clipping file found in the Robinson Locke collection at the New York Public Library, one reporter described her allures in 1895: “While not strictly beautiful, the English dancer has an extremely piquant expression which is more taking than beautiful. Her large black eyes flash and sparkle in an irresistible way and her charm is compounded of naiveté and diablerie”(“Cissy Fitzgerald” n.p.). The bad object of her own wide-eyed personality, Fitzgerald’s unruly wink provides a generative example for feminist film historians today grappling with the gender contradictions of early film entertainment culture.

Newspaper clipping, Cissy Fitzgerald (a/p). New York Journal (November 15, 1896): n.p. NYPL.

Newspaper clipping, Cissy Fitzgerald, New York Journal (November 1896). Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

If constant strain and repetitive performance caused the stage comedienne involuntarily to automatize her own physical gestures, then somehow media reproducibility provided a salve to Cissy’s afflictions. Fitzgerald did not make the transition to motion pictures until 1914: long after the dubious nickelodeon years, when the industry had been widely legitimized as a respectable, middle-class institution. Fitzgerald had taken a hiatus from her stage celebrity to make her nuptials in Britain and, according to Moving Picture World, travel the world with her husband, Oliver Mark Tucker (423). They visited India, Africa, Australia, China, and other outposts of British imperialism, until the outbreak of World War I—among other things—drove Cissy back to the still isolationist United States to launch her film career.

She signed a contract with the Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Company in 1914, and played a comedic lead character named Cissy in single-reel larks, including The Win(k)some Widow (1914), Cissy’s Innocent Wink (1915), A Corner in Cats (1915), and Zablitsky’s Waterloo (1915). Like her earlier stage shows, Fitzgerald’s narrative film roles often thematized the involuntary nature of her womanly charms. In Casino’s Cissy’s Innocent Wink, Fitzgerald plays the urban sophisticated wife of a rural deacon. According to a 1915 review in the New York Dramatic Mirror: “Unknown to her husband she has a nervous affliction which takes the form of an unconscious wink” (8). Giving the wink to all the men in her husband’s congregation, Cissy quickly develops quite a reputation against her better intentions. Working simultaneously for Vitagraph, Casino, Broadway Star, and later for Kleine Studios, Fitzgerald appeared in over twenty films between 1914 and 1917. She primarily played comic roles, while occasionally displaying her versatility in films such as, The Esterbrook Case (1915), a mystery melodrama. However, with her automatized facial tics and gracefully awkward corporeality, the actress was really made for comedy. As the Milwaukee Journal put it, “Her face radiates fun and it is on that account that she is so very famous. Cissy’s wink won her fame back in the days of ‘The Gaiety Girl’ and ‘The Foundling,’ and now that she is with the Vitagraph Film Co., she and her wink are more popular than ever” (“Cissy’s Wink Make Her Famous” n.p.).

Newspaper clipping, "Cissy Fitzgerald in 'The Girl with the Wink.'" NYPL

Newspaper clipping,“Cissy Fitzgerald in ‘The Girl with the Wink.’” Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Sadly, almost all of Cissy’s mid-career silent film titles are no longer extant—with the exception of Look Out Below (1916), an episode of the comic series, The Mishaps of Musty Suffer, that recycles footage from Cissy’s appearance in the series pilot, Keep Moving. After a five year screen hiatus between 1916 and 1921, Cissy starred in five single-reel comedies in 1921, which were produced by her own short-lived, West Coast production company, “Cissy Fitzgerald Productions.” These films, marketed as “refined comedies,”  include Cissy’s Saucy Stockings, Seeing America Thirst, Cissy Invades Bohemia, Cissy’s Economy, and, appropriately enough, Cissy’s Financial Flivver (“Comes Back Cissy” n.p.).  The contents of these suggestively titled films must be left to the imagination, because none of them have survived on their precarious nitrate film stock.

From vaudeville mega-star, to globe-trotting homemaker, to Vitagraph lead player, to short-lived independent producer, Cissy Fitzgerald reinvented herself yet again as a feature film character actor in the 1920s and 1930s. She appeared in dozens of silent and sound films across genres, many of which are still extant. She is perhaps most widely viewed today as Giancinta in Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928), a Lon Chaney vehicle about a circus clown suffering from uncontrollable bouts of weeping who befriends an Italian count who is similarly plagued by uncontrollable fits of laughing. Although Giancinta is a relatively minor character, we can speculate that forgotten histories of Fitzgerald’s uncontrollable winking must have haunted the production of Laugh, Clown, Laugh.

Cissy Fitzgerald (a/p). AMPAS

Cissy Fitzgerald. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Several years after Fitzgerald’s career swan song—as Duchess Banning in the romantic comedy, Patricia Gets Her Man  (1937)—the actress died on May 10, 1941 in Ovingdean, Sussex, England. In addition to a handful of still extant screen roles, Cissy Fitzgerald survives today through numerous archival documents—including theater and film reviews, fan magazine photos, and scrapbook clippings. As a 1915 reporter for the Milwaukee Journal put it, “Cissy Fitzgerald’s face, once seen, can never, never be forgotten” (“Cissy’s Wink Make Her Famous” n.p.).

Bibliography

“Cissy Fitzgerald.” Unmarked clipping file (May 1895): n.p. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

"Cissy's Wink Make Her Famous." Milwaukee Journal (29 Aug. 1914): n.p. Robinson Locke Collection, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

"Comes Back Cissy." Unmarked clipping file (192o): n.p. Robinson Locke Collection. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Kear, Lynn and James King. Evelyn Brent: The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Lady Crook. NC: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2009.

"Keith's New Theatre." Boston Herald (24 May 1896): 10. Robinson Locke Collection. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Moving Picture World (16 Oct. 1923): 423.

Musser, Charles. “A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Ed. Wanda Strauven. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. 159-179.

New York Dramatic Mirror (18 Dec. 1915): 8.

New York Journal (15 Nov. 1896): n.p. Robinson Locke Collection. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Archival Paper Collections:

Robinson Locke Collection. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Citation

Hennefeld, Maggie. "Cissy Fitzgerald." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2015.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-fvrk-0345>

Elsa Chauvel

by Ina Bertrand

Elsa Chauvel had strong opinions about a woman’s role in both work and life. In an interview in 1934, she explained that a woman should charm men and a wife should support her husband (28). Her own life exemplified these principles.

She was born Elsie May Wilcox in 1898 in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia. She was the second child and only daughter of itinerant Irish-born actor Edward Wilcox and his wife Ada Maria (née Worrall). When Elsie was about five years old, the Wilcox family moved to South Africa. Edward Wilcox, under the stage name Silveni/Sylvaney, became the actor-manager of a touring theatrical company. From a young age, Elsie’s brother Kyrle performed under the stage name McAllister, and Elsie herself performed under the stage name Sylvaney. They began with juvenile roles, but were soon being made and dressed up to play older characters.

The troupe travelled with limited success all over South Africa, finally disbanding in Capetown. There, Kyrle and Elsie supported the family by taking minor roles as understudies or in the chorus line until their father became stage manager for the American Dramatic Co. While working for the African Theatre Trust, Elsie was cast as the lead in “The Silent Witness,” after both the leading actress and her understudy fell ill. This fairy-tale break led to further leading roles and Elsie was a popular actress, doing well in Johannesburg, when the decision was made to bring the family back to Australia. Kyrle financed the move by a successful tour of Basutoland with his own company.

The family arrived back in Australia in 1924. By now Elsie was a pretty young woman, who quickly found leading roles in Australian theatres. Charming men must have come easily to her.

Elsa Sylvaney (a/p/w/o) in Greenhide (1926), from the book Charles and Elsa Chauvel: Movie Pioneers.

Elsa Sylvaney, Greenhide (1926). From the book Charles and Elsa Chauvel: Movie Pioneers (1989).

The second phase of her life followed her marriage on June 5, 1927, at St James Church of England in Sydney, to film director Charles Edward Chauvel. On that occasion, Elsie Wilcox became Elsa Chauvel, the name she kept for the rest of her life. Charles Chauvel had seen Elsa playing in the musical “Crackers” at the Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane, and immediately cast her as the lead in his second feature film, Greenhide (1926). Elsa seemed to slip easily into the role of supportive wife. She toured with Charles around New South Wales, selling Greenhide to reluctant local exhibitors, caught in a contract system that required them to buy out any (usually American) picture already contracted, before they could screen an independent local production.  Greenhide was Chauvel’s last silent film, but he went on to make seven sound feature films, several wartime documentaries, and a major television series. In all of this, Elsa worked tirelessly in any capacity required at the time.

She went with Charles to Pitcairn Island to make In the Wake of the Bounty (1933), as well as to inland Australia to make Jedda (1955) and the travelogues. Much of her work, particularly in the early years, was uncredited. She never again played a lead role, but she did appear briefly as Lady Macquarie, the wife of Governor Macquarie, in the historical epic Heritage (1935). On this film, she was credited both for this role and as production assistant, but under the name of Ann Wynn. She was also credited as Ann Wynn as assistant director on Uncivilized (1936). Further credits include co-writer on multiple films, as well as assistant producer on Sons of Matthew (1949) and dialogue director on Jedda – all under her own name.

However, these official credits do not do justice to Elsa’s cinematic contribution as she often called herself “Girl Friday.” On every production she stood (often literally) behind Charles, doing whatever seemed necessary. It was Elsa who rode a camel in Uncivilized, doubling for Margot Rhys. Before each production she was actively involved in researching and writing, designing costumes, and assessing locations. On set, she coached actors and did make-up and continuity.

Between films, when finances were tight, Elsa occasionally supported the family by giving elocution and dancing lessons. She also acted occasionally, but only twice in Australia. She went to California with Charles, in an effort to further his career, and while there she appeared on stage briefly in Los Angeles and performed in one film in Hollywood. However, as always placing Charles’ career ahead of her own, she declined an acting contract offered by Universal.

Elsa Sylvaney c. 1920s from the book Charles and Elsa Chauvel: Movie Pioneers.

Elsa Sylvaney, c. 1920s. From the book Charles and Elsa Chauvel: Movie Pioneers (1989).

Elsa’s responsibilities as a wife did not end with Charles’ death in 1959. For the rest of her life, she worked tirelessly to promote Australian film in general, and her husband’s innovative and artistic contribution in particular. She collected prints of Chauvel films for preservation in the national film archive, and in 1964, her contribution to the Australian film industry was recognised with the award of OBE.  She retired to Toowoomba, Queensland, where she died on August 22, 1983, at St Vincent’s Hospital. Her ashes were buried at the Northern Suburbs cemetery in Sydney.

Bibliography

Bradley, Anne. “She married adventure.” Australian Women’s Weekly (7 August 1957): 7.

Carlsson, Susanne Chauvel. Charles and Elsa Chauvel: Movie Pioneers. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1989.

Chauvel, Elsa. “‘Refugees in Arcady.” Australian Woman’s Mirror (24 January 1933): 18.

------. “Making ‘The Bounty’ through a woman’s eyes.” Photoplayer (11 March 1933): 5.

------. “Pagan beauty.” Woman’s Budget. (25 April 1934): 28.

------. My Life with Charles Chauvel. Sydney: Shakespeare Head Press, 1973.

Crichton, Pam. “Elsa Chauvel.” In Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/chauvel-elsa-12309

Collins, Diane. “Elsa Chauvel.” In Two Hundred Australian Women. Ed. Heather Radi. Broadway, Sydney: Women’s Redress Press, 1988. 304-305.

Cunningham, Stuart. Featuring Australia: the Cinema of Charles Chauvel. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991.

“Elsa Chauvel: an epic vision of Australia.” Sydney Morning Herald (26 August 1983): 9.

Rees, Jacqueline. “Films of the past on the screen again.” Canberra Times (17 September 1974): 3.

“South sea glimpses: Mr and Mrs Chauvel tell fascinating story.” Telegraph (Brisbane) (19 April 1933): 4.

Archival Paper Collections:

Chauvel, Charles and Elsa archival materials (press clippings, images, tagged under “Documentation”). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Citation

Bertrand, Ina. "Elsa Chauvel." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2015.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kxmj-4v08>

Jenny Strömberg

by Outi Hupaniittu

Jenny Strömberg was the first woman credited in filmmaking in Finland for her appearance in the film Släpjakt/Drag Hunt (1908). She arranged the filmed event and appeared in the film as herself, and was the only one mentioned by name in the adverts and reviews of the film. Her drag hunts initiated the making of the film, and she led the hunt on horseback, but most likely she had nothing to do with the actual filmmaking. There are also no hints about her participation in financing the filmmaking or other tasks associated with the traditional role of producer. Nevertheless, she was promoting the hunt dogs that appeared in the film and her husband was among the wealthiest businessmen in Finland, which means that she could have financed the film, if it was needed.

At the time, Jenny Strömberg was a prominent figure in the Helsinki upper-class, spending her time promoting tennis competitions and breeding hunting dogs. She had gained this status via the success of her husband’s company. Twenty years before, Jenny had been a primary school teacher from a relevantly poor family of upper middle class civil servants. She had married Gottfried Strömberg, five years her junior, and given up her occupation. The young engineer had just set up his own company, which soon became the leading electrical engineering company in Finland (Hoffman 2008, n.p.).

The couple had no children. Together, they played tennis and rode daily, and seem to have been very active in different kinds of sports (Hoffman n.p.). The wealth and status gave Jenny Strömberg the freedom to follow her sporting pursuits, which then led to the filmmaking project.  In 1907, she acquired new English foxhounds from a Swedish kennel, and soon started to arrange events to promote and showcase them. In January 1908, the newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet reported:

New Sport in Helsinki. Yesterday, at 10 AM, a drag hunt with English foxhounds was organized. The scent had been dragged from Sörnäinen for about 3,000 metres over the frozen sea to the shore by the fields of Viikki, where the end signal was blown. The hunt was led by Mrs. Jenny Strömberg, who owns the hounds. Some of them are imported from England by the Stockholm Eventing Club, others were raised in the club’s kennel. The hounds were followed smoothly and without disturbance by some riders, both male and female. The drag hunt is going to be ridden regularly 2-3 times a week at least as long as the large bays are covered with ice and snow (6).

The new sport Strömberg had introduced drew the attention of one of the leading Finnish cinema companies, Nordiska Biograf Kompaniet, and soon after, it was arranged that the hunt would be filmed. It is not known when the filming commenced, but Drag Hunt premiered in late April 1908. The review in Hufvudstadsbladet described it as follows (my translation):

A film that drew special attention was Drag Hunt, filmed by Nordiska Biograf Kompaniet and arranged by Mrs. Jenny Strömberg with Mrs. Strömberg’s English foxhounds on a snow-covered ice near Helsinki. With the unfavourable weather and wind considered, the filming was done bearably, and despite some parts are not fully sharp, it is still worth seeing (6).

At the time, Finnish film production focused on actualities. The first fiction film had premiered the previous spring and the second was in post-production, but the third would not be released until 1912. Most of the actualities were travel films, but the second most common topic was sporting events, which is why it was not that surprising that Jenny Strömberg’s hunt was filmed (Hupaniittu 2013, 95-97).

In 1907-1908, there were five companies producing films in Finland and Nordiska Biograf Kompaniet was the third largest. Along with the two larger companies, Apollo and Maat ja Kansat, these three dominated the Finnish cinema business. These three companies had film theaters spanning across the large cities of southern Finland, as well as their own import branches and distribution functions. The big business was in film exhibition, but filmmaking was an important feature for the leading companies in their mutual rivalry. Most of this production consisted of filming day-to-day happenings, but every now and then a special topic was chosen and special attention was paid to the publicity (Hupaniittu 89-90, 99-112).

Drag Hunt was one of these special films. Strömberg was a well-known figure and her new hounds had gained recognition by winning at the dog shows. As the hunts were organized regularly, they drew attention that the film utilized. It is not known if the initiative came from Nordiska Biograf Kompaniet or from Strömberg, or if there were financial arrangements between the wealthy society matron and the film company. However, it is evident that the film was to advance them both: Strömberg got publicity for the new sport and her dogs, and Nordiska Biograf Kompaniet got interesting material for the screens.

When it came to the publicity, the film was all about Jenny Strömberg and her dogs, as for example the cinematographer was not mentioned. In the adverts, she was presented as “Mrs. Jenny Strömberg (Master),” which emphasized her significance to the project (“Biograf Teatern” 2). Nevertheless, one must bear in mind that “master” did not refer to filmmaking, but to the English traditions of fox hunts. She was not the director of the film, and probably had nothing to do with the practicalities of filmmaking – at the time the Finnish cinematographers worked quite independently from planning to execution and post production (Hupaniittu 107-111). Instead, she led the hunt from horseback, thus appearing in the film as herself. Still, this does not decrease her status. Her name was presented in the adverts and reviews, which proves that she was the most important factor in the marketing of the film.

The review reveals that due to the poor weather the film was not technically as good as could have been expected, but these kinds of problems were not exceptional (Hupaniittu 104, 108-111). The film got regular distribution, which means that it travelled from one Finnish city to another in one of the film programs provided by Nordiska Biograf Kompaniet. Like most of the films made in these years, however, Drag Hunt is considered lost.

Jenny Strömberg did not appear in other films, but her husband commissioned a commercial film of his electric factory some five years later. After the First World War broke, Jenny Strömberg moved to Sweden and in 1916 the estranged couple received a divorce (Hoffman n.p.). What happened to her afterwards and even her date of death are unknown.

 

Bibliography

“Biograf Teatern.” Advert. Nya Pressen (22 April 1908): 2.

“Biografteatern N. Esplanadsgatan 21.” Rev. Hufvudstadsbladet (24 April 1908): 6.

Hoffman, Kai. Gottfried Strömberg (1863-1938). National Biography of Finland. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, 2008. http://www.kansallisbiografia.fi/kb/artikkeli/4351/

Hupaniittu, Outi. Biografiliiketoiminnan valtakausi: toimijuus ja kilpailu suomalaisella elokuva-alalla 1900–1920 -luvuilla. Turku: Turun yliopisto, 2013.

“Ny sport i Helsingfors.” Hufvudstadbladet (15 January 1908): 6.

Citation

Hupaniittu, Outi. "Jenny Strömberg." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2015.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-40zk-n194>

Marie Louise Gagner

by Jan Olsson

Born in Karlskrona in 1868, Marie Louise Gagner was raised in Helsingborg, and died in Stockholm in 1933. She received her diploma from the Teachers College in Stockholm in 1893 and was thus eligible for teaching at upper-level girl schools as well as in co-educational programs. Hired in 1895 at the Teachers Seminar for Normal Schools in Stockholm, she was first an adjunct with tenure and in 1919 she was promoted to the rank of lecturer. Gagner formally retired in 1928. Her life’s work was dedicated to pedagogy and children’s developments and experiences in relation to language acquisition, literature, and popular culture. She was very actively involved in didactic initiatives and a member of many pedagogic bodies. Gagner’s outlooks regarding culture and educational matters were framed by her Christian faith with a feminist slant and its challenges in the face of modernity and modernism.

Gagner published widely: introductions to famous Swedish authors for young readers, and for the same target group of readers, an oft-reprinted hagiographic account of General Charles George Gordon’s military career and his role as Evangelical warrior first in China and later in several campaigns in Africa in the service of the British Empire. Gordon, “the hero of heroes,” as Gagner titled her 1909 book, was killed in Khartoum in 1885.  In addition, Gagner edited literary anthologies, translated novels for young readers, and authored a textbook on orthography and grammar, which was published in many editions. And she published pamphlets in the campaigns against pulp literature in the vein of Nick Carter alongside tirelessly working for what she considered inspirational reading.

Gagner’s involvement with children’s reading and creativity was the background for her discovery of the educational possibilities of moving images as well as their putative detrimental influences. She and her activist colleagues alleged that cinema chocked full children’s fantasy life by being over-concrete and favoring cheap melodrama and crime stories over the many-sided opportunities afforded by non-fiction genres for cinematic education.

Marie Louise Gagner (Swedish film censor). Courtesy of Scanpix, Stockholm.

Marie Louise Gagner at desk. Private Collection. 

A first wave of press dissent vis-à-vis cinema came to the fore in late 1905 in Gothenburg as well as Stockholm. Gagner and her teacher colleagues actively mapped film exhibition in several cities in 1907 as a precursor to a public debate on February 24, 1908, which put the question of children and cinema on top of the cultural agenda. The meeting led to the forming of a committee within the Pedagogic Society for monitoring film culture. At the meeting Gagner emerged as the leading spokesperson in defense of vulnerable children. In 1907 She had already published a first note on cinema in the weekly magazine Idun (607-08) and her introductory speech at the campaign meeting was published as Barn och biografföreställningar or “Children and Moving Picture Show,” first in the journal Verdandi and later in 1908 as a pamphlet. The Swedish debate and its line of reasoning in many ways mirror the “crusade” against moving pictures in Chicago in the spring of 1907 (Grieveson 2004, 59), apart from the absence of clerical involvement in Sweden. Also, Sweden did not have a juvenile court system, and officers from the juvenile-court system played a key role in the Chicago debate. In Sweden, in the absence of such courts, the case reporting came via pedagogues after consulting with the police.

After fruitless attempts from the Swedish film distributors to muffle the criticisms from the Pedagogic Society and its supporters, a government investigation was formally launched with Gagner, the CEO of Swedish Biograph, Charles Magnusson, and the legal authority Per Cronwall as investigators (Boëthius 1989; Olsson 1988, 1990 and 1995). As a part of the investigation, Gagner visited Germany to study film culture there. The investigators’ findings and proposals led the Parliament to establish a national censorship body for film inspection in Sweden named Statens biografbyrå, which began operating in December 1911. This body lasted for almost a century and Gagner was one of the first three censors. She stepped down to deputy censor after only a year, but remained in that honorary capacity up until her death.

The first generation of censors, led by Dr. Walter Fevrell—who also had an activist background with the Pedagogic Society—was by its many spectacular bans of films, plus cutting of scenes in others, instrumental in recasting production practices in Sweden. Among the notable casualties were Georg af Klercker’s Tvänne bröder/Two Brothers (1912) for Swedish Pathé, Victor Sjöström’s Världens grymhet/Trädgårdsmästaren /The Broken Springrose (Svenska Biografteatern, 1912), and Asta Nielsen’s feature In dem grossen Augenblick (Deutsche Bioscope, 1911). Regarding this latter title, Nielsen penned an open letter to Gagner, woman to woman, pleading for a revoking of the ban. Gagner had however not participated in the inspection of this particular title and after an intense press campaign and a non-public screening for journalists, the government turned down the formal complaint as it did all the subsequent complaints (Olsson 2009).

The period of 1907 through her tenure as a full-time censor displayed Gagner’s most intense involvement with film culture although. After 1912, her main focus shifted back to teaching literature and language at the Teachers Seminar. After her pioneering stint as an activist and subsequently as a civil servant in her job as  a regular censor, she continued to be involved in the capacity of  honorary deputy censor, participating in several international film congresses up until her death in 1933.

Bibliography

Boëthius, Ulf. När Nick Carter drevs på flykten: Kampen mot ‘smutsliteraturen’ i Sverige 1908–1909. Stockholm: Gidlunds, 1989.

Gagner, Marie Louise. “Barnen och biografteatern.” Idun vol. 20, no. 49 (5 December 1907): 607-08.

------. Barn och biografföreställningar: Ett föredrag jämte ett uttalande i samma ämne af B.E Gadelius. Stockholm: Hökerberg, 1908.

------. Hjälten bland hjältar: Charles George Gordons liv och stordåd skildrade för barn och ungdom. Stockholm: Folkskolans barntidn., 1928 [1909].

Grieveson, Lee. Policing Cinema. Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.

Olsson, Jan.“‘Dear Miss Gagner!’ – A Star and Her Methods.” In Stellar Encounters: Stardom in Popular European Cinema. Ed. Tytti Soila. New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 2009. 217-29.

------. “I offentlighetens ljus—några notiser om fimstoff i dagspressen.” In I offentlighetens ljus: Stumfilmens affischer, kritiker, stjärnor och musik. Ed. Jan Olsson. Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 1990. 211-272.

------. Sensationer från en bakgård. Stockholm/Lund: Symposion, 1988.

-----. “Svart på vitt: film, makt och censur.” Aura. Filmvetenskapig tidskrift vol. 1, no. 1 (1995): 14-46.

Citation

Olsson, Jan. "Marie Louise Gagner." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-c89w-7y64>

Fanchon Royer

by Lisle Foote

In the 1930s Fanchon Royer was famous for being one of the few female producers in Hollywood, but she got her start in the industry during the silent era as a journalist, publicist, and producer. She was born Fanchon Pauline Royer on January 21, 1902 in Des Moines, Iowa. Her parents, Elwood A. and Jessie Havens Royer, had a contentious relationship and they divorced in 1907, the same year as the birth of their second child, Robert (Royer 1960, 303). She had a peripatetic childhood, moving between her maternal grandmother’s house in Minneapolis, her father’s in Des Moines, and roaming with her restless mother, attending ten different schools in nine and a half years. She was allowed to remain with her father, a prosperous wholesale grocer, long enough to attend East Des Moines High School, where she acted in the senior play and served as the first female editor of the school’s monthly literary magazine, Quill (1960, 303).

Scan of Fanchon Royer's (p) 1915 Iowa Census Card

Scan of Fanchon Royer’s 1915 Iowa Census Card. Private Collection. 

She graduated in 1918 at sixteen and moved with her mother and brother to Hollywood where her mother opened a real estate agency, Royer Realty, while Fanchon took classes in journalism and short story writing at University of Southern California. However, she wanted to act in films so she wrote a letter to Douglas Fairbanks. He replied, arranging a meeting for her with his casting director Jimmy Hogan, who in turn referred her to the casting chief at Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, Lou Goodstadt, who found work for her as a film extra (Tildesley 1929, 100). Royer appeared in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1918 remake of The Squaw Man. She tried to find more work as an actress, running an ad in June 1919 in the trade publication Camera! in which she called herself “a versatile ingénue,” but that career did not take off (15). She later told fan magazine Screenland “that one year in pictures contained more heartbreaks than I have ever known, before or since” (Tildesley  100). So she went to work for Camera!

The Camera! masthead (October 30, 1920):5

Camera! masthead, October 1920.

Royer first appeared on Camera!’s masthead as the Society Editor on January 24, 1920, but just a week later, she was called the Assistant Editor. Two weeks later on February 9, 1920, she married Camera’s editor, Raymond Cannon. Cannon was also an actor; he had been part of D.W. Griffith’s stock company and he continued to appear in comedies like Penny of Top Hill Trail (1921) and dramas like The Printer’s Devil (1923). In September 1920, Royer became Camera’s editor. Most of her articles were unsigned, except for her editorials, which Royer later called “stormy” (1960, 304). Her first was entitled “Today’s Picture” and it addressed current trends in filmmaking:

[A]fter a siege of war pictures which ran the gamut from tragedy to slapstick, the all star cast was initiated with a luxuriously enameled set of sex plays…after a very successful reign, decreasing box office receipts proved to theater owner and producer alike that something was amiss with this type of entertainment…Polished sordidness and foolish stories have sung their swan song in film production (1920, 3).

During the Arbuckle scandal, she was as sanctimonious as most of the other film writers:

We haven’t the slightest idea as to whether or not Roscoe Arbuckle killed Virginia Rappe unintentionally or otherwise; but we have several unpleasant ones concerning the loathsome debauchery that could bring about any such circumstances as those which attended this sensational tragedy…The sooner that every drunkard, dope-addict and degenerate is thrown out of the studios into the gutter where they all belong, the better it will be for each serious minded, self-respecting worker in our enterprise…Hereafter it is imperative that all the entrances to our highly desirable circle be closed save the one that is only to be reached through unquestionable merit, artistic and moral (1921, 5).

After the founder’s death, Cannon bought Camera! in June 1921, and he sold it in May 1922. Royer’s good-bye editorial appeared on May 20, 1922, although she continued to occasionally contribute articles. The magazine merged with Film Tribute on January 5, 1924, and ceased publication on February 16, 1924.

Six weeks after the birth of the couple’s first son, Royer and Cannon tried to break into filmmaking. According to “Pulse of the Studios” in Camera!, they began production for Fine Arts Studios on an untitled farce written by Royer, directed by Cannon, and starring Cecil Holland (14). It was only listed in the publication for one week and was never completed (17). Royer then became a writers’ and actors’ agent, forming a talent agency with actress Martha Mattox, according to the Los Angeles Times in 1927 (A7). She also worked as a freelance publicist, and wrote film reviews for Story World and Photodramatist. Her film reviews were often humorous, as for example, her review of Divorce (1923) started with “Divorce is an awful thing! In fact, one must witness Andrew Bennison’s drama to realize just how awful the subject can be made” (1923, 82).

Fanchon Royer (p/o) and her two sons in a 1928 “at-home” publicity photo for Screenland.

Fanchon Royer and her sons in an “at-home” publicity photo for Screenland, January 1929.

In 1928 the couple decided to try production again, and this time they were more successful. The film was called Life’s Like That and it starred Wade Boteler and Grant Withers. Royer told Screenland about its origin: one day in March, she was waiting for Cannon in a café, and she decided to produce a picture. So the next day she went to her banker and borrowed the necessary money. She said she did it because she refused to stagnate (Tildesley 101). They started production in early May, according to Film Daily (3). The Bioscope described the plot as “…conventional family man indulges in an affair; complications lead to his becoming mayor of the city” (1929, 48). Cannon wrote and directed it. The film was completed and ready for review by June 16  although it did not have a conventional national release through a studio’s distribution network; instead Royer sold individual states the rights to it. This venture led to Cannon getting a contract as a director at Fox Film Corporation and to Royer’s new career as an independent producer. She had discovered she really enjoyed producing, writing later in an autobiographical essay: “Not only the distinction, the work, itself, the building of something out of nothing, was too fascinating” (1960, 306). The Exhibitor’s Daily Review reported that Royer traveled to New York in July to sell a series of features co-starring Boteler and Withers, but they were never completed  (4).

After the silent era, Royer went on to produce over thirty films with her own company, Fanchon Royer Productions. Her films were made quickly and cheaply, in four to six days at a cost of no more than $20,000 (Thomas 1933, 15). She formed a new production company in 1940, Way of Life Films, to make educational and industrial films. After converting to Catholicism in 1943, she began producing religious films. In 1945, she moved to Mexico, where she produced, wrote, and directed two films, Bell Ringer of Antigua  and A Fighter for True Peace, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1948 (A3). In addition, she wrote a book, The Mexico We Found, about her adventures filming throughout Mexico and Guatemala, as well as her family’s adventures living there. In 1957 her father died and Royer used her inheritance to buy a fruit farm in Teziutlan, Puebla, Mexico, where she retired. She died there on December 13, 1981 (Longden B1).

Bibliography

Camera! (30 October 1920): 5.

“Fanchon Royer.” [Advertisement] Camera! (15 June 1919): 15.

Kennedy, Tom. “Hidden Glamor.” Screenland (August 1938): 51; 97.

Life's Like That. The Bioscope (5 June 1929): 48.

Longden, Tom. “Fanchon Royer.” Des Moines Register (16 February 2003): B1.

“Miss Royer Producing.” Film Daily (1 May 1928): 3.

“Publicist Returns.” Los Angeles Times (11 July 1927): A7.

“Pulse of the Studios.” Camera! (6 January 1923): 14.

“Pulse of the Studios.” Camera! (15 January 1925): 17.

Royer, Fanchon. “Across the Silver Screen.” Story World and Photodramatist (August 1923): 82.

------.“Another Jolt.” Camera! (17 September 1921): 5.

------.“Fanchon Royer.” Book of Catholic Authors. Ed. Walter Romig. Vol. 6. Grosse Pointe, MI: Walter Romig Publisher, 1960. 302-308.

------. “Today’s Picture.” Camera! (9 October 1920): 3.

------.  “To You.” Camera! (20 May 1922): 3.

“Studio Briefs.” Los Angeles Times (27 November 1948): A3.

“Studio Gossip.” Exhibitor’s Daily Review (23 July 1928): 4.

Tildesley, Ruth. “The Girl Producer.” Screenland (January 1929): 40-41, 100-101.

Thomas, Dan. “Women Score Success as Movie Producers.” Sheboygan Press (24 August 1933): 15.

Citation

Foote, Lisle. "Fanchon Royer." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6sk3-p343>

Pu Shunqing

by S. Louisa Wei

In histories of early Chinese cinema, Pu Shunqing is only mentioned in passing as China’s first female scriptwriter for Cupid’s Puppets (1925), a Great Wall Film Company film co-directed by her husband, Hou Yao, and Mei Xuechou. The film is noted as the first Chinese film narrated from a female perspective (Li and Hu 143). Great Wall was founded in Brooklyn, New York, by Chinese students studying in the U.S. and then relocated to Shanghai in 1923. Pu had worked for Great Wall as a scriptwriter and as an actress between 1924 and 1926 before she moved on to Minxin Film Company where she wrote her next three screenplays. Although her contributions are rarely discussed or even known, until the late 1920s, Pu was the only woman to be credited as a scriptwriter both in film prints and publicity ads.

1926 Minxin Advertisement of the Company personnel. PC

1926 Minxin Advertisement of Company personnel. Private Collection.

Before making films, Pu Shuqing was already a known playwright. While majoring in political economy at Southeast University, Nanjing, Pu pursued her love of stage drama by writing for and performing in the Southeast Drama Society, a club she co-founded with her then-schoolmate, Hou Yao (Law 42; H. Li 23). Pu’s renowned three-act play, “Paradise on Earth,” twists the plot of the Book of Genesis by introducing a female character, “Wisdom,” who encourages Eve first to eat the apple in the Garden of Eden and then to build a paradise on earth. Eve then persuades Adam to work hard on their own paradise, playing “an active role in shaping her own and Adam’s destiny” (G. Li 3) while reversing the literary pattern of women as receiver of men’s enlightenment (Liu 116). Pu’s call for women’s liberation is loud and clear when “Wisdom” declares, “if you don’t believe in God, he will disappear.” Before the curtain falls, the character of God actually disappears. Her one-act play, “Daybreak,” presents a nameless “woman” and her husband “man,” whose peaceful rural lives are disturbed by the appearance of a Factory Demon. The Factory Demon takes them to the city where they encounter Money Demon, Ethics Demon, and Public-Opinion Demon. The demons enchain the woman’s body and her husband cannot save her. “Wisdom” appears again, bringing a light of Consciousness and encourages her to fight.  When the woman begins to fight the demons herself, nine fairies with lights marked Independence, Autonomy, Self-improvement, Self-encouragement, Self-respect, and so on help the woman rise to her feet and tear off the chains around her body (Pu 1927, 96-98). As later critics observed: “although adopting a non-realist form, it touches real problems of society and thus carries a realistic significance” (Chen and Dong 129-30).

Pu Shunqing headshot from 1926 Minxin Advertisement of the Company Personnel. PC

Pu Shunqing’s headshot from 1926 Minxin Advertisement of the Company Personnel. Private Collection.

Major dramatist and director of early Chinese film Hong Shen notes the mutual influence between Pu and Hou, particularly when it comes to style and didacticism, but it is possible that Pu also had an impact on Hou’s advocacy of women’s rights during their years of collaboration (93). The first film they made together, The World Against Her (1924), was adapted from a play Hou had written during his years as a college student. Both the original play and the film script focus on the troubled life of Zhifang, a young mistress who, disowned by her husband’s family, is left to struggle against various patriarchal forces as a young female professional. Pu played the role of her maid, Cailan, in her screen debut. While the original play has Cailan ultimately sacrifice her life for the sake of her mistress (Hou 1929, 61), the screen adaptation offers a more optimistic view of women’s future by allowing the lower-class Cailan to survive her mistress as a figure of hope and strength, one who promises to carry on Zhifang’s unfinished quest for women’s rights (Hou 1925, 163). In retrospect, Cailan and Zhifang’s relationship might be considered a precedent for the pairing of the working class activist A-ying and struggling writer-teacher Wei Ming in Cai Chusheng’s famous film New Women (1934).

Still of Cupid’s Puppet (1925). PC

Still, Cupid’s Puppet (1925). Private Collection.

Following The World Against Her, Pu adapted her own play “Cupid’s Puppets” into a film script that depicts what one journalist described as “various situations regarding love and marriagesuch as misinterpreting something else as love, wanting love but failing to get it, or rejecting love but still being loved” (Jun 14; Qian 12). Compared to her earlier works, Cupid’s Puppets is more of a melodrama.  The heroine Guoying’s stepmother and evil cousin-in-law want to trick her into a marriage so they can steal her inheritance, but she fiercely rejects their scheme and ends up in an insane asylum where her cohabitants are two women who are both driven mad by broken hearts. The rejected suitor Renjun manages to infiltrate the asylum and proposes that they escape together. Guoying asks: “Where are we going after leaving the madhouse?” Renjun replies: “Let’s find a life in a new society!” (Pu 1927, 82). The film presents a unique perspective through the complexity of Guoying’s character. As the heroine, she not only rejects an arranged marriage but also hesitates about the hero’s love proposal, wanting, above all, her own autonomy and independence. Even after she accepts Renjun’s help in escaping, the question as to whether they will remain “friends” or become “lovers” is left unresolved. The accessibility and theme of both The World Against Her and Cupid’s Puppets made them a good fit for Great Wall’s commitment to making “problem dramas” or films dealing specifically with social problems (Harris 54; He 1065-6). Moreover, many such problems center on how women relate to love, career, independence and self-assertion.

Pu Shunqing (a/w/d/e/o) and husband Hou Yao. PC

Pu Shunqing and husband Hou Yao. Private Collection.

Although the films Pu Shunqing wrote screenplays for between 1926 to 1929 are seldom discussed, they were from her most prolific period. Pu and Hou married in late 1926 and both joined the Minxin Film Company where she began by assisting Hou in editing God of Peace (1926) before being entrusted with the roles of scriptwriter and assistant director for Way Down West (1927), a film based on the ancient Chinese drama Romance of the Western Chamber (Pan 511).  The story is an ode to freedom of love, but it seems that Pu and Hou focused more on the period visualization of the tale rather than giving the heroine Yingyinga stronger subjectivity, as they did with their modern female characters (Harris 72-3). Later, Pu and Hou co-wrote Divorcee Comedies (1927), a comedy attacking arranged marriages by ridiculing the “God of Matchmaking” as the victim of a bad marriage himself.

Minxin’s crew of Mulan Joins the Army>/i> (1928).

Minxin’s crew of Mulan Joins the Army (1928). Private Collection.

As regional tensions escalated in Asia, Pu’s work also shifted towards more patriotic concerns. Pu wrote the script for Cai Gongshi (1928), a film based on recent events involving a Nationalist Party emissary, the title figure, who was tortured and killed by Japanese soldiers. To write the script, Pu interviewed Cai Gongshi’s widow. Both Pu and Hou were also involved with various underground anti-Japanese activities including transporting arms for the Chinese army before the second Sino-Japanese war officially broke out in 1931. Another patriotic film project was Mulan Joins the Army (1928), which required them to travel with key production figures to Northern China and acquire the help of a warlord general who offered his soldiers as extras. The film took four years to complete and included landscapes from four different provinces, but still failed to compete with the Shaw Brothers film of the same title released just slightly earlier. In fact, the failure of this project resulted in the Minxin company filing for bankruptcy. When it was absorbed by United China Film Company in 1930Pu’s filmmaking career also ended.

The Camera reporting on Pu Shunqing (a/w/d/e/o). PC

The Camera reporting on Pu Shunqing. Private Collection.

1927 United Six Advertisement of Company personnel. PC

1927 United Six Advertisement of Company personnel. Private Collection.

While working for Great Wall and Minxin, Pu remained active as an independent screenwriter, ambitious professional, and public figure. She wrote several screenplays that, although they received prizes, were never filmed. The newspaper Shenbao reported on her winning the first prize for Hibiscus Tears in the Anti-Opium Screenplay Competition of 1926 as well as the second prize for Her New Life in a competition organized by the Young Women’s Association in 1927 (1926, 15; 1927, 15). We know from a 1932 newspaper report and also a 1935 new year’s resolution she published in Shenbao that Pu became a lawyer in Tianjin while continuing to write screenplays (Wei n.p.). In her capacity as both writer and lawyer, she contributed to books such as Life of Soviet Women (1935) and acted as a legal consultant for Shenbao by answering readers’ questions in a special column. During World War II, she is mentioned once in the press as a jury member in a school drama competition. She even ran for office as congresswoman after the war.  The 1946 article that announces her intentions, however, still identifiesher as Hou Yao’s wife even though they had long since separated. The last mention of Pu in Shenbao announces that although Pu was not elected as a congresswoman, she was named as a candidate to represent women’s organizations in the National Delegation of People in Nanjing, China’s capital at the time (1947, 2).

Pu Shunqing (a/w/d/e/o). PC

Pu Shunqing. Private Collection.

Looking back at the history of silent cinema in China, Pu Shunqing is not only the first woman scriptwriter, but also the only university-educated woman working in China’s early film industry. Her career began with writing, but moved quickly into social practice. In every sense, she should be remembered as an unabashedly feminist writer and a true champion of women’s rights.

The author generously thanks Mr. Lai Shek and Mr. Frank Bren for the images in this entry.

Bibliography

Chen, Baichen, and Dong Jian. Historical Documents of Chinese Modern Theatre/中國現代戲劇史稿. Beijing: China Drama Press, 1989.

Chen, Fang. “On the Works of Early Chinese Women Dramatists.” Theatre Art/ 戲劇藝術  no. 4 (1993): 62-71.

Harris, Kristine. “‘The Romance of the Western Chamber’ and the Classical Subject Film in 1920s Shanghai.” In Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Ed Yingjin Zhang. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. 51-73.

He, Xinleng. “My Impression of Films of the Great Wall School”/“長城派影片所給我的印象.”  Great Wall Special Issue of The Hypocrite/長城畫片公司特刊 僞君子.  Shanghai, 1926. 1065-6.

Hong, Shen. “Introduction to Modern Drama”/ “現代戲劇導論.” Hong Shen Wenji/洪深文集 no. 4. Beijing: China Drama Press, 1959. 1-120.

Hou, Yao. “Chapter 11: Screenplay of The World Against Her.” Methods in Writing a Screenplay/影戲劇本作法. Nanjing: Taidong Books, 1925. 65-164.

-----. Abandoned Wife/棄婦. Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1929.

“Introduction to Women’s Life in Soviet.” Shenbao (17 Feb. 1935): 20.

Jun, Yun. “Recent News from Great Wall Film Company.” Shenbao (28 September 1925): 14.

Law, Kar. “Reexamining and Reconstructing the Legend of Hou Yao.” In Transcending Space and Time—Early Cinematic Experience of Hong Kong, Book II Pioneer Filmmaker Hou Yao. Ed. Winnie Fu. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2014. 42-66.

Li, Guo. “Rethinking Theatrical Images of the New Woman in China’s Republican Era.” Comparative Literature and Culture vol. 15, no. 2 (2013): 1-9. http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss2/21

Li, Huang. Memoir of Learning/學鈍室回憶錄. 2nd ed. Taipei: Biographical Literature Press, 1979.

Li, Suyuan, and Hu Jubin. Chinese Silent Film History/中國無聲電影史. Beijing: China Film Press, 1996.

Liu, Chuanxia. “On Historical Female Characters in Modern Literary Narrative”/“論現代文學敍事中的女性歷史人物.” Jianghuai Forum/江淮評論 4 (2005): 114-8, 129.

“Minxin Film Company Filming Cai Gongshi.” Shenbao (30 June 1928): 28.

“News from the Anti-Opium Competition.” Shenbao (18 July 1926): 15.

Pan, Chuitong. “Film and Literature”/“電影與文學.” Minxin Special Report/民新公司特刊— Romance of the Western Chamber/西廂記 7 (1927): 505-11.

Pu, Shunqing. Paradise on Earth/人間的樂園. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927.

------. “Pu Shunqing’s New Year’s Resolution.” Shenbao (6 Jan. 1935): 17.

Qian, Ou. “Cupid’s Puppet.” Shenbao (22 Oct. 1925): 12.

“Result of National Delegation Election.” Shenbao (3 Dec. 1947): 2.

Shu, Ping. “The First Woman Script Writer: Pu Shunqing”/“第一個電影女編劇—濮舜卿.” New Film Work/電影新作 no. 5 (1994): 62.

“Theatrical News.” Shenbao (6 March 1927): 20.

“Theatrical News.” Shenbao (6 May 1927): 18.

“Theatrical News.” Shenbao (7 May 1927): 19.

Wei, Taifeng. “Pu Shunqing and Zhang Shunqing: A Film Director’s Wife and a Famous Writer’s Wife.” Camera/開麥拉 no. 156 (1932): n.p.

“Young Women’s Association Discloses Results of Literary Competition.” Shenbao (7 Sept. 1927): 15.

Citation

Wei, S Louisa. "Pu Shunqing." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-fp66-k424>

Alva Lundin

by Sofia Bull

The practice of rendering inter-title cards more decorative and expressive by means of creative typography, ornate borders or other types of illustrative artwork was first picked up by the Swedish film industry around 1919, a few years after it had become established in Hollywood. Swedish audiences were already familiar with so-called “art titles” from imported American films, and the incorporation of this feature into domestic productions partly answered more general calls for Swedish cinema to reinvent itself according to international standards. Furthermore, as had previously been the case across the Atlantic, the emergence of this practice followed debates about the artistic value and usefulness of title cards. Claire Dupré la Tour has argued that art titles along with the success of the “Loos-style” title writing—a reference to the inventive writer Anita Loos—granted the inter-title a more “privileged status vis-à-vis the image” and helped popularize the idea that inter-titles could make a significant contribution to a film’s success. This is as true for the Swedish context as for the American (329).

Alva Lundin (o) (fourth from the left) attending art school with other female students. PC

Alva Lundin (fourth from the left) attending art school with other students. Private Collection.

Throughout the 1920s, Alva Lundin was the most prolific credit title and inter-title designer in Swedish cinema and she designed title cards for at least nineteen silent films. It is difficult to determine the exact number, partly because only a small collection of documents from Lundin’s company are extant and partly because she only started marking the title cards with her signature “AL” after 1927. A number of the original art title cards preserved in the Swedish Film Institute are unsigned, and because Lundin’s style and motifs were fairly generic in many cases, it can be difficult to determine authorship with complete certainty. Furthermore, Lundin’s titles are, in a number of cases, missing from the extant film copies; they might have been removed during restoration attempts, but it is also possible that they never made it into the finished films in the first place. As far as we know, Lundin created her first title cards in 1919, but her career within the film industry took off more fully after she achieved critical acclaim for her witty art titles in Mauritz Stiller’s comedy Erotikon (1920). Following the transition to sound, she went on to create credit sequences for around four hundred feature films, as well as illustrations, graphics and typography for a still unknown, but undoubtedly large, number of educational and promotional films. She continued working as a title designer until the end of the 1950s.

Alva Lundin (o) (furthest to the left) attending art school with other female students. PC

Alva Lundin (furthest to the left) attending art school with other students. Private Collection.

Some information about Lundin’s early years can be pieced together from the Swedish population registry and public tax records, as well as private records and accounts provided by her living relatives. Lundin’s father died while she was still a child, at which point her mother moved the family to Stockholm to work as the manager of a retirement home for widows. In 1904, at the age of fifteen, Lundin enrolled as a student in the female section of the art school Tekniska skolan, which later became the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, where she stayed for two academic years and graduated with middling grades. As historian Ingrid Ingelman has outlined, the Swedish art schools had accepted female students since the middle of the 19th century and it had become increasingly acceptable for women to work as artists or illustrators, but it was still fairly unusual (32-33). Tekniska skolan specialized in teaching the applied arts and, according to Lundin’s diploma, she studied, among other things, freehand drawing, shading techniques, figure and landscape drawing, painting, typography, and calligraphy. No actual records have been found supporting the kind of work Lundin did following her graduation, but according to her relatives she worked at the publishing company AB Hasse W. Tullberg in the mid-teens where she probably was hired for her skills as a calligrapher and illustrator. Alledgedly, Lundin met her future husband, Sven Lundin, while working at Tullberg’s. They were married in 1915 and subsequently left their jobs to start their own company: Lundins Ritbyrå/Lundin’s Drawing Company. An article about Lundin’s company, published in the film magazine Filmnyheter in 1924, refers to both Alva and Sven as “young artists” (8), but her relatives are adamant that they had a strict division of labor: she was the artist and he was the manager and administrator.

Portrait of Alva Lundin (o) as a young woman. PC

Portrait of Alva Lundin as a young woman. Private Collection.

The company’s primary source of income was providing typographical designs for letterheads and diplomas. In 1919, Lundin was commissioned by the film company Svensk Filmindustri to design the typography and produce the handwritten title cards for Mauritz Stiller’s Herr Arnes Pengar/Sir Arne’s Treasure. This was probably her first assignment as an inter-title designer, but since no records concerning Lundin’s transactions with the film industry have been found, it is still unclear exactly how and when this alternate line of business was established. Either way, Stiller and Svensk Filmindustri must have been pleased with Lundin’s work, because the following year they asked her to provide far more elaborate art titles for Erotikon. Only a few Swedish films had previously sported illustrative artwork and these had predominantly been of the decorative kind that added fairly little in terms of narration. Lundin’s illustrations received particular admiration because they delivered witty, playful and clever comments on the plot and the characters, which helped deepen the audience’s understanding, while also providing comic relief.

Portrait of Alva Lundin (o) as a young woman. PC

Portrait of Alva Lundin as a young woman. Private Collection.

Only a few years later, in 1924, Lundin was described in a Filmnyheter article as “the only [Swedish] film title specialist” (8). That same year Lundin had completed a third and even more ambitious collaboration with Stiller. This time she had been commissioned to create between three to four hundred art titles for Gösta Berlings saga (1924), a task that, according to one journalist, had “required the efforts of an able man for several weeks,” “the man” in this case being Mrs. Alva Lundin (8). This is not the only article published about Lundin’s work during the 1920s that explicitly commented on the fact that she was a woman. While praising her work, the journalists often expressed some measure of surprise at her gender, particularly when observing that she had both artistry and wit. The same writer that acknowledged her status as a “film title specialist” went on to describe her as such:

Mrs. Lundin is an energetic and inventive lady, and the film directors that have had the opportunity of collaborating with her are delighted with her work. This is not surprising when considering that she has a never failing ability to hit the nail on the head. In addition, she has a sense of humour–something that, according to prevalent prejudice, isn’t that common amongst the female sex (8).

Portrait of Alva Lundin (o) that accompanied the film press in the early 1920s. PC

Portrait of Alva Lundin that accompanied the film press in the early 1920s. Private Collection.

While Lundin’s choice of profession and body of work were occasionally met with some surprise and prejudice, her career can still be seen as fairly characteristic of female art students of the time. Few women were able to become successful independent artists; most either worked as art teachers or illustrators if they continued working after their education at all. As Ingelman has shown, female artists were particularly frequent illustrators of fairytales and children’s books, probably because these were genres considered to belong to the “female sphere” (70-71). This line of work could perhaps be seen as a parallell to Lundin’s career within the film industry. Both children’s books and films have a history of being considered less prestigious when compared to the fine arts. Perhaps this actually made it somewhat easier for Lundin, as a female artist, to  sustain such a long and successful career.

Bibliography

“Den som ‘textat’ Gösta Berling.” Idun: Illustrerad tidning för kvinnan och hemmet 10 (9 March 1924): 231.

Dupré la Tour, Claire. “Intertitles and titles.” In Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Ed. Richard Abel. London: Routledge, 2005. 326-331.

“En Kartongartist för svenska filmtexter: Lundins ritbyrå med Fru Alva Lundin i spetsen.” Filmnyheter 11 (1924): 8.

“Erotikon å Röda kvarn–de Wahl debuterar och gör lycka.” Nya Dagligt Allehanda (9 November 1920): 9.

“Erotikon–Ett nytt mästerprov av Mauritz Stiller.” Filmnyheter 7 (1920): 16.

“Erotikons texter. Konstnärliga supplement till filmen.” Filmnyheter 6 (8 November 1920): 13.

“Filmtexternas utsmyckning: En detalj som börjar ägnas allt mera omsorg.” Filmnyheter 8 (1924): 8.

Florin, Bo. Den nationella stilen: Studier i den svenska filmens guldålder. Stockholm: Aura Förlag, 1997.

“Fru Alva Lundin 50 år.” SF nyheter vol. 9, no. 20 (14-21 May 1939): 2.

“Gösta Berling-filmen.” Arbetaren (11 March 1924): 5.

“Gösta Berling-filmen.” Nya Dagligt Allehanda (11 March 1924): 9.

“Gösta Berling-filmen är nu framförd i sin helhet.” Dagens Nyheter (18 March 1924): 7.

“Gösta Berlings saga på film.” Svenska Dagbladet (11 March 1924): 7.

Ingelman, Ingrid. Kvinnliga konstnärer i Sverige. Uppsala: Acta, 1982.

Magnegård, Omar. “Garbos texterska skrev privat som en kråka.” Svenska Dagbladet (21 February 2000): 18.

“Mälarpirater–vacker svensk framgång å Röda Kvarn.” Nya Dagligt Allehanda (30 October 1923): 12.

Archival Paper Collections

Collection of title card originals. Swedish Film Institute.

Collection of material from Lundins Ritbyrå. Swedish Film Institute.

Citation

Bull, Sofia. "Alva Lundin." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-326g-2n79>

Caroline van Dommelen

by Annette Förster

Caroline van Dommelen directed three fiction films, two of which were co-directed with Léon Boedels, between 1911 and 1912 for the production company Film-Fabriek F.A. Nöggerath  in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She was the first woman in the Netherlands to direct films, and was succeeded in this in 1924 by the only other female filmmaker in Dutch silent cinema, Adriënne Solser. According to Geoffrey Donaldson, van Dommelen’s name as the director appeared in the advertisements of all three films (1972, 33). In her reminiscences, a first, five-part, series of which were published in the magazine Het Leven in 1921 and another, four-part, series in the film paper De Rolprent in 1925, she says that she wrote one of the screenplays, acted the female leads and directed the actors while she charged a co-director with supervising the mass scenes (1925, 188; 236).  For one film, Vrouwenoogen/Women’s Eyes  (1912), she was the sole director. She furthermore acted, between 1911 and 1920, in ten films, in eight of which she took leading roles. Together, these add up to more than 11,000 meters or roughly 33,000 feet of nitrate film of which a mere 368 meters or about 1,000 ft. have been preserved, yet only as fragments of  Oorlog en vrede 1914 and Oorlog en vrede 1918 (both 1918), two later films in which she played minor roles. No prints of the films van Dommelen directed survive today.

Paper documentation is equally scarce. Of two of the films she directed, only one review of each could be traced, and of the third, Vrouwenoogen, not a single review. The Algemeen Handelsblad review of her first film, De Bannelingen/The Exiles, indeed credited van Dommelen with the direction, and favourably so: “The shots are very varied and offer everything that belongs to the cinema: beautiful nature scenes with the necessary action, refined interiors, and… most importantly, fine acting that comes out well” (1911, 10). In contrast, in the review in De Kunst of her third film, Graaf Willem IV van Holland / Earl William IV of Holland, van Dommelen was just listed as an “artieste” [player]. The critic applauded the acting and the production values, but criticized stylistic flaws and the tedious plot for which producer Nöggerath and co-director Léon Boedels and the cinematographer were held responsible (1912, 748).  The record in the press is so scant that if Caroline van Dommelen had not repeatedly referred to her early film directing in her successive reminiscences, her work as a film director in the early 1910s might have been completely missed.

Caroline van Dommelen (a/d/w) on a holiday hike. 1914. PD

Caroline van Dommelen on a holiday hike circa 1914. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Caroline van Dommelen wanted to study to be a doctor, following the Dutch feminist role model Aletta Jacobs, but as a child of a theatrical family, with a father and three brothers being professional actors, she went to drama school. Acting for the legitimate stage was the centerpiece of her long career, and contemporary critics confirmed that as a stage actress she was sensitive, passionate and versatile (1909, 185). However, she also wrote, translated and directed plays. In addition, she was a novelist, a photo editor of an illustrated weekly, and a journalist who published about traveling, sports, and fashion, as well as her experiences in theatre and cinema. For several years, she ran a model farm for bee keeping and chicken breeding. Unlike many stage actors in 1912, she considered working in cinema attractive and thrilling.  Eventually van Dommelen quit because she felt it to be too demanding when combined with her work for the stage (van Dommelen 1921, 435).

In her reminiscences, van Dommelen revealed herself as proud of having been a film director at Film-Fabriek [F.A. Nöggerath], a fully equipped studio that, as a first in The Netherlands, aimed to produce ambitious fiction films. Franz Anton Nöggerath Jr. did not spare on sets, costumes, locations, actors or extras, but lost so much money with this policy that he had to give up production in 1913 (van Dommelen 1925, 199). The films that van Dommelen directed were also ambitious in length, considering that the standard film at the time ran approximately 350 meters (1,000 ft.). Her three films ran 1,000 meters (about 3,000 ft.),  1400 meters (about 4,200 ft.) and 750 meters (2,250 ft.), respectively.

Little can be confirmed about either the subject of Vrouwenoogen or van Dommelen’s role in it, although one production still from the film survives at Eye Film Institute Netherlands, showing an interior shot with a man and two women, one of whom is van Dommelen. It appears to be a confrontational scene, the two women in conflict with one another, the man with a letter in his hand appearing to ask for an explanation from van Dommelen’s character.  De Bannelingen, in contrast, was an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play “Vera or the Nihilists,” which dealt with the anarchist resistance against tsarist Russia. Van Dommelen played a heroic woman who managed to set the anarchists free from prison but died in the fight. Graaf Willem IV van Holland, the third film that van Dommelen co-directed, was a romance period piece set in Holland in 1345 in which she played the leading part, a woman who loves a man from a rival family, but gets him nevertheless and makes the families reconcile in the end. Further research might disclose the reasons for selecting these motives and roles.

See also: Adriënne Solser

Bibliography

B.G. “Caroline van Dommelen.” De Prins (17 April 1909): 185.

Dommelen, Caroline van. “Vijfentwintig jaar tusschen de coulissen (IV).” Het Leven (29 March 1921): 397.

Förster, Annette.  Women in the Silent Cinema: Histories of Fame and Fate. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.

------. “Vijfentwintig jaar tusschen de coulissen (Slot).” Het leven (5 April 1921): 435.

Dommelen, Caroline van Lancker-van. “Coquette filmpjes.” De Rolprent (12 November 1925): 162.

------. “Coquette filmpjes (Slot).” De Rolprent (3 December 1925): 236

Donaldson, Geoffrey. “Caroline van Dommelen.” The Silent Picture (Summer 1972): 33-34.

------. Of Joy and Sorrow. A Filmography of Dutch Silent Fiction. Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997.

“Uitgaan: Bioscope-Theater.” Rev. De Bannelingen. Algemeen Handelsblad (11 December 1911): 10.

Wolf, Nathan Heyman. “Kinematografie.” De Kunst (24 August 1912): 748.

Citation

Förster, Annette. "Caroline van Dommelen." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-fq5b-v520>

Daisy Sylvan

by Cristina Jandelli

Daisy Sylvan—the producer, director, and star of two motion pictures, both lost—was born Elena Mazzantini in Rome. She moved to Florence, where she started a film production company, Daisy Film. In 1920, she became the widow of her husband, Francesco Rosso, and the beneficiary of a retirement fund, as we can infer by the registry office certificate only discovered recently (Pepi 2008, 11). Her education is still unknown, though she was not a Florentine nor an aristocrat, as has been erroneously reported by sources until today (Strazzulla and Baldassini 1995-1996, 25-27; Martinelli 1998, 47).

Daisy Sylvan in «La Cinematografia Italiana ed Estera», XIV (july 10 1920), 7, 1. PC

Daisy Sylvan in La Cinematografia Italiana ed Estera XIV 7 (July 10 1920): 1.

In fact, she was legally separated from her husband, having married in Rome in 1897, by the judgment of Florence Courthouse in September 1902, according to the Civil Registry and Graveyards Archive of the city of Florence (Pepi 15).  After the completion of the two motion pictures in Florence, the only two produced by her company, all trace of her was lost.

The first press mentions about Daisy Film, established with legal domicile on the very centralized Via Strozzi 1 at the end of 1919 (Martinelli 1998, 47), is the publication of an announcement in L’Arte Italiana Giornale del teatro e del Cinematografo on April 25, 1918: “Two wonderful scripts have already been written, one of which set in Russian location with traditional costumes. A beautiful lady, who possesses all the quality to become a good and sublime actress as well, will be the protagonist” (Cardini 1918, 3). The script quoted by the journalist Gino Cardini is evident: we are talking about …Bolscevismo??/Bolshevism??, whose shooting was concluded before June 10, 1920, according to an ad that appeared in Film in 1920. …Bolscevismo?? is a work that Italian film history knows because of a harsh journalistic controversy that may have been the reason the film was not distributed: “The base seems to be union nature matters: the critic Giuseppe Lega gets to accuse Daisy Film of anti-union behavior towards society’s personnel, suddenly fired for unclear reasons. Daisy Film strikes back with great announces on all the specialized press, précising that, on the contrary, the reasons were grave and plausible, and it presents a legal action which consequently leads to a counteraction… After that, no one heard anything about the movie and it is reasonable to doubt that it has ever been presented to the audience” (Martinelli 1998). But Giuseppe Lega was not just a critic: in 1924 he directed Piccola Monella/Little Brat, sold in France, Belgium, and Great Britain.

Daisy Sylvan in Film VII (July 29 1920): n.p. PC

Daisy Sylvan in Film VII (July 29 1920): n.p.

In 1920, Lega founded the fortnightly review L’Arte del Silenzio/The Art of Silence in Florence, whose management, in 1921, was passed to Paolo Azzurri, founder of the school of acting of the same name, first in Palermo and then relocated to Florence, in an ancestral building on Via Cavour. In 1920, Azzurri directed the film Il Soldato cieco/The Blind Soldier, produced by Azzurri Film  (and financed by the National Pro-Blind Institutions Federation), performed by the students of the school and presented in every Italian city. What seemed to be a journalistic controversy appears, in fact, to have been a turf war between producers and actors-directors (Azzurri had debuted as an actor at The Ambrosio in Turin in 1908). Sylvan, Azzurri and Lega had, each one of them, to defend their personal interests, which explains the legal actions taken as well as the delinquencies Sylvan was accused of as a producer.

But the city’s acting schools appear even more at the very center of Sylvan’s production adventure if we consider that, at that time, the most prestigious of them was the Florence School of Acting, founded by actor and theater historian Luigi Rasi in 1882. Rasi managed the school until his death in 1918, the very same year production of Sovrana /Sovereign began. His teaching emphasized a naturalistic style of acting. Rasi was the most important male actor in Sovrana, which, according to the leading actress, director, and producer of the movie, was completed in April of 1920 (“Conversando con Daisy Sylvan,” 1). Of both these lost works, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze stores two commercial pamphlets, printed in Rome and void of date (edited by Daisy Film dealer, A.M. Capasso, located in Via Gregoriana 5, Rome), which contain accurate synopses of the motion pictures, set photos, and Sylvan portraits. The first line of the description of Sovrana, adapted from a theatrical comedy by Dario Nicodemi, states: “Giana, with no family, is saved from the underworld by the great actor Luigi Rasi and launched through the glorious paths of the art.” Considering that the Florence Courthouse ratified the legal separation of Elena Mazzantini in 1902, the most reliable hypothesis is that Daisy Sylvan was an “artistic creation” of Rasi himself: presumably she was an apprentice “saved” from a disreputable life (at that time, the say-so of the Sacra Rota was necessary in order to obtain a legal separation).

Daisy Sylvan in Film, VII (February 19, 1920): n.p. PC

Daisy Sylvan in Film VII (February 19, 1920): n.p. 

Contrary to what was thought until that time, a careful reading of the synopsis contained in the pamphlet of …Bolscevismo??, held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, presented by several ads as a “cinedramma di avventure” [dramatic adventure film] (Film 1920, 5; Contropelo 1920, 3), highlights the structure of a morality play, with “social life violent scenes” (Baiardo 1920, 14), whose central theme is love of work. Talking about it in the only interview she granted, Sylvan defines it, “a great moral and social motion picture,” adding, “I wish to develop novels not only consisting of a storyline, but involving moral and social content, taken from real life. Cinema must have an educational purpose as much as theater” (“Conversando con Daisy Sylvan,” 1).  The pamphlet introduces the film with the sentence, “We can achieve Good through nothing but Good itself: which is Love – Duty – Work.”  The narrative scheme is resolved in a battle between Good and Evil, in which Sylvan interprets the double role of Elena Morgani, who represents Good, and her sister Enelia, who represents Evil, though both are burdened by the vicious journalist with the adventurous and exotic name of “Zobisant” (in the set photos he is portrayed with Lenin’s Mephistophelean goatee), an “ill-omened man who already once spread the pain of Elena Morgani’s soul for evil passion.” Elena, a “flower of beauty and goodness” is a hard-working woman who, from her office, of Work and Homeland, guides “the industriousness of the industrious village,” Selenio (a reference to the Goddess). Zobisant persecutes the two sisters (the evil one stole the other one’s husband) because he has been harboring hatred “during the years of absence spent in a Country which has been made barbaric by internal fights and revolutionary disorder.” Zobisant is the real Bolshevik, the personification of Evil. On the other hand, Elena accomplishes quite another kind of revolution, which is fulfilled in the finale, when, after many misadventures, “She stands there, despising the danger she is exposed to, and dominates… dominates… ‘Bolshevism???'” An instant later, Zobisant has fallen to his knees at her feet, begging for mercy and forgiveness. The final sentence of the pamphlet’s description of the film ends the morality play with the necessary victory of Good: “The Evil that passes, swamps but does not destroy: it restores the blooming forces to the right and holy fight of right and duty.” Even the complex sentimental storyline of Sovrana, defined by La Nazione as “a delicate and interesting plot on the suggestive background of the majestic Florentine beauty” (3) ends with the protagonist’s final victory. Giana (an allusion to the two-faced divinity, but in its female inflection), rejects the insisting avances of a prince, who is a beau of hers: “victorious, she is the sovereign of her heart.” Separated, with an adult son obliged to take her defenses during an argument (L’Arte del Silenzio 1920, 4), but educated at the Rasi’s school, Elena Mazzantini attempts the adventure of artistic emancipation by producing, directing and acting in two motion pictures.  However, Paolo Azzurri’s campaign against her proved to be a major obstacle for Mazzantini’s artistic endeavor. The pamphlet of …Bolscevismo?? describes very carefully how Zobisant orchestrates a libelous campaign against Elena Morgani, playing her own employees against her, spreading distrust and dissatisfaction towards her, while “under the ruins of the disasters that the evil ones carry out all over the Country, the innocent victims are amassed without any remorse.” The first page of the pamphlet presents the film as based on the novel La fiamma nella steppa by Danilo Korsakoff, a Russian exile, according to Martinelli, “adapted to a different kind of environment” (1981, 20).

...Bolscevismo?? was shot in the Florentine villas and in vividly realistic locations, including miserable hovels (Baiardo 14), likely because Daisy Film possessed a just barely passable studio (Cardini 3). The film seems, in fact, to reread the adventure set in Russia with traditional costumes in a more private, intimate way, including traces of the real production conflicts which animated this cinematographic endeavor. Furthermore, Florence, artistically speaking, was a hostile environment. However, in spite of that, they succeeded for a short time in that town. The Elena portrayed in ...Bolscevismo?? fights for “justice, right and duties;” the Elena the magazines of the time refer to,  often by the denigrating epithet “Lady,” is the tyrannical ruler of Daisy Film who repeatedly laid off workers without notice: after all, we find numerous signs of mysterious personnel alternation in reviews in Film.  An article of the controversy (Azzurri 1920) reveals that Azzurri rented Sylvan some cameras, provided Kodak film stock, and directed photography on behalf of her. His son, Natale Azzurri, the operator of Daisy Film who abandoned the set (or was fired, depending on the version) was substituted by Luigi Martino, of the Roman company Guazzoni Film, which provided Daisy Film with technical and artistic personnel after the layoffs. From that moment on, the battle blustering in L’Arte del Silenzio  was covered by all of the main film publications. It is fair to suppose that the dispute was not really about anti-union behavior, but rather about the fictional motion picture that alluded frequently to reality to substantiate Sylvan’s side of the argument with Azzurri in the audience’s eyes: an unbiased media confrontation, Cinema versus Press, transfigured into a fantastic narration cast into a physically recognizable universe of everyday objects and landscapes.

Daisy Sylvan in Le Maschere II, 32. 1 (August 22 1920): n.p. PC

Daisy Sylvan in Le Maschere II, 32. 1 (August 22 1920): n.p. 

Therefore, in the fiction, the beautiful Elena wins the “arm wrestling” contest against Zobisant; in reality, Azzurri surely gained the upper hand by attacking Sylvan in public, accusing her of dishonesty and tyranny (Azzurri 4). Sylvan filed a complaint for defamation (Kines 1920, 3). The movie, after a private showing in 1921, which was only reported by the fortnightly Febo Periodico bisettimanale d’arte, spettacoli e mondanità, appears not to have been distributed. …Bolscevismo?? gained the censorship’s stamp on March 3, 1922, after making cuts to a scene “in which we can see two violated woman struck down to the ground” (Strazzulla and Baldassini 25-27), and in 1923 was given to Turin by Itala Film on behalf of U.C.I. to be distributed. Indeed the title appears quoted in a letter from a functionary of U.C.I. who asks Itala to recover and send to Rome several hundred posters of the motion picture, printed in Turin by the Buttery society at Via Mantova 45 (Carteggio UCI-Itala Film, n.d.). So this film, as many others, though distributed, was never shown in theaters. The same fate befell  Sovrana, which constituted, along with ..Bolscevismo??, a sort of “package.”  Hundreds of other films languished in the same obscurity, stowed in warehouses of the bankruptcy consortium Unione CInematografica Italiana. Eventually, the only documents we can use to reconstruct the first film remain the commercial pamphlet and the anonymous review that followed the private showing in Rome, not examined by historians until now because it was published in an artistic magazine (repr. in Pepi 2008, 259-261). The columnist claims that he attended the showing with a “very restricted number of friends.” The event appears “new” to him, “partially human and partially adventurous,” “elegantly, modernly, detail-oriented” staged. But his attention is focused on the leading actress’ execution, playing two different parts, “unrecognizable between one and the other,” author of a splitting accomplished “with marked and distinct psychological characters, with a different set of movements, with a complete substitution of attidutes [sic], expressions, gestures” (“Una visione private di ‘Bolscevismo’” 3). Elena and Enelia Morganti, but also Elena Mazzantini and Daisy Sylvan, represent the different souls of a leading actress, director, and producer, whose films have not survived. However, several portraits attributable to ...Bolscevismo?? still exist, the most amazing of which remains a full shot of a woman with a pants suit tight under the knee, ankles exposed, short frothy hair à la Clara Bow, white starched lace collar and hands in the pockets: it portrays a radiant working girl who, as a cinematographic character, only 1940s American Cinema would be able to completely define, that is, socially validate (Pravadelli 2007, 157-194). From the top of her affiche, Daisy Sylvan smiles, looking happy and a little spiteful, questioning us (Gaines 2008, 19 – 30).

Bibliography

Azzurri, Paolo. “Lettera aperta alla Signora Elena Mazzantini Rosso di S. Secondo da parte di Ernst T. Baumann e relativo commento.” L’Arte del Silenzio 10 (1 June 1920):  4.

Baiardo. “Bolscevismo." Il Fortunio. Rivista del teatro e del cinematografo 5 (15 August 1920): 14.

Cardini, Gino. “Un bel casetto…” L’arte Italiana. Giornale del teatro e del Cinematografo 10-11 (1918): 3.

Contropelo 24 (12 June 1920): 3.

“Conversando con Daisy Sylvan.” Le Maschere: Rivista illustrata d’arte e mondanità 16 (18 April 1920): 1.

Film: Corriere settimanale dei cinematografici 20 (10 June 1920): 5.

Gaines, Jane. “Esse sono noi? Il nostro lavoro sulle donne al lavoro nell’industria cinematografica muta.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Monica Dall’Asta, ed. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008. 19-30.

Kines: Giornale della cinematografia italiana 39 (23 Sept. 1920): 3.

L’Arte del Silenzio 15 (15 August 1920): 4.

Martinelli, Vittorio. “Les metteuses-en-scène.” Cinemasessanta: bimestrale cinematografico di cultura  9-10 (Sept.-Oct. 1981): 20-25.

------. “Una realtà ignorata: lo sviluppo del cinema regionale in Italia negli anni venti.” Immagine 40-41 (1998): 47.

Pepi, Leonardo.“Elena Mazzantini alias Daisy Sylvan, pioniera del cinema muto italiano.” PhD dissertation, University of Florence, 2008.

Pravadelli, Veronica. La grande Hollywood. Stili di vita e di regia nel cinema classico Americano. Venezia: Marsilio, 2007.

Strazzulla, Gaetano, and Duccio Baldassini. “Il (non) mistero di Daisy Sylvan.” Immagine 33 (1995-1996): 25-27.

“Un ‘Film’ fiorentino: ‘Sovrana.’” La Nazione (8 May 1919): 3.

“Una visione privata di ‘Bolscevismo’.” Febo. Periodico bisettimanale d’arte, spettacoli e mondanità 46 (12 Feb. 1921): 3.

Archival Paper Collections:

...Bolscevismo?? folder. vol. Stampa Sansaini, Roma, n.d. S.9191, ufficio gruppi, cartella [folder] “cinema,”1. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.

Sovrana folder. vol. Stampa Sansaini, Roma, no date. S.9191, ufficio gruppi, cartella [folder] “cinema,” 1. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.

UCI-Itala Film correspondence, no date. vol. 171/27. Museo Nazionale del Cinema.

Research Update

November 202o: Cristina Jandelli discovered new information about Daisy Sylvan, including the location of her gravestone, the date of her death (listed now in the profile), and new photographic materials. 

Citation

Jandelli, Cristina. "Daisy Sylvan." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-k4gy-7r56>

Esther Eng

by S. Louisa Wei

In 1946, the Seattle Times described the visit of a young Chinese-American filmmaker: “Still in her teens, and with no background of such a venture, Esther went to Hollywood, rented a studio in Sunset Boulevard and made her first picture for Chinese markets here and in China” (n.p.). This may be somewhat of an exaggeration because Esther would have been in her early 20s, but her youth was still remarkable. Once called China’s first woman director by both the Chinese and American press, Esther Eng had been forgotten for twenty-five years after her death when, in the summer of 1995, Todd McCarthy, then chief film critic for Variety, came across her name in the credits of Golden Gate Girl (1941). It was a Chinese film Eng had directed in San Francisco. McCarthy provocatively claimed in the August 21-27 issue of Variety that Eng was “an Asian woman filmmaker who had utterly eluded the radar of the most diligent feminist historians and sinophiles” (10). This statement inspired veteran film critic Law Kar to research and write on Eng’s life and work, and he concludes that “[i]f Eng had worked in the film industry today, she could have easily been seen as a champion of transnational filmmaking, feminist filmmaking, or antiwar filmmaking” (313).

 Esther Eng with Grandview actress Marianne Quon and actor Teng Pui, San Francisco, 1947. PC

Esther Eng (middle) with Grandview actress Marianne Quon and actor Teng Pui, San Francisco, 1947.  Private Collection.

Esther Eng, Nanyang Film Studio, 1938, Kowloon, Hong Kong. PC

Esther Eng, Nanyang Film Studio, Kowloon, Hong Kong, 1938. Private Collection.

Esther Eng was a female filmmaker who worked as a director, a writer, a producer and a distributor. In her creative and business endeavors, she was a woman pioneer who crossed the boundaries of race, language, culture and gender. As a young San Francisco-born teenager, Esther Eng learned about film by watching hundreds of them in the local theater. She grew up in a period where public attitude toward China was improving due partly to Pearl S. Buck’s positive portrayal of Chinese peasants in her 1930 bestselling novel The Good Earth, while Chinese-Americans unfortunately still lived under The Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1933, a U.S. screening of the The Battle of Shanghai, a documentary about the Chinese resistance against the 1932 Japanese military advance on Shanghai generated a great deal of patriotic feeling among local Chinese communities. This development indirectly landed Eng her first chance at filmmaking. Moved by patriotic sentiment, Eng’s father started the Kwong Ngai Talking Pictures Company (a.k.a. Cathay Pictures Ltd.) with a friend and assigned her as co-producer of what would become Heartaches (1935), a melodrama depicting the Chinese war effort. The Los Angeles Times review declared it the “first oriental production with sound finished in Hollywood” (A2).

Esther Eng (d/w/p/o) and Wai Kim Fong (a) in front of RKO Studio in Hollywood, 1936. PC

Esther Eng and Wai Kim Fong in front of RKO Studio in Hollywood, 1936. Private Collection. 

The next year the Chinese Digest, an English language periodical published for the West Coast Chinese community, announced the San Francisco premiere of Heartaches along with news that “Miss Eng” and the film’s leading actress “Miss Fong” (Wai Kim Fong) would “journey shortly to China to seek prospective film stars for their coming productions” (2).  The local publication Rose reported that the two young women were welcomed to Hong Kong in June of 1936 by a slew of film companies and local media. To those present, Eng declared her wish to promote Chinese national filmmaking in the US. She would not return to the U.S., however, without making a splash in Hong Kong. Thanks to publicity drumming up its Hollywood production credits and the film’s patriotic content, the film caused a sensation in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Singapore. Eng then registered Kwong Ngai Talking Pictures in Hong Kong and took her career in a bold and risky direction. For her next project, National Heroine (1937), she cast her friend and travel companion Wai Kim Fong in the female lead and booked top-billing star Kwong Shan Siu for the male lead. To head the project, twenty-two year old Eng took up the director’s chair herself without any of the studio apprenticeship that was essential in launching the directing careers of the few women directors of her time, notably American Dorothy Arzner, Japanese Sakane Tazuko, and German Leni Riefenstahl.

Wai Kim Fong (a) Heartaches (1935). PC

Wai Kim Fong  in Heartaches (1935). Private Collection. 

National Heroine premiered successfully in Hong Kong in March 1937. The film departed from Heartaches, whose female protagonist was a weepy victim of love and war, in its portrayal of a heroine fighting alongside male comrades for the sake of China. The Cantonese Women’s Association gave Eng an award certificate for the film’s patriotic message and promotion of positive images of women. This film was also one of the first examples of the so-called “National Defense Cinema” that would dominate the Chinese film world only a year later.

 Poster for A Night of Romance A Lifetime of Regret, 1938, Hong Kong. PC

Poster, A Night of Romance A Lifetime of Regret (1938), Hong Kong. Private Collection. 

Eng moved on to make more social commentary films focusing on female protagonists. Working with four different Hong Kong film companies, Eng directed Ten Thousand Lovers (Grandview, 1938), Tragic Love (Tianle, 1938), A Night of Romance A Lifetime of Regret (Great Star, 1938), and It’s a Women’s World (Wode, 1939) during the remainder of her stay in Asia. It’s a Women’s World (a.k.a. 36 Amazons), also co-written by Eng, was advertised as the first Hong Kong produced film to feature an all-female cast of 36 actresses. The ambitious project follows its 36 female characters all of whom occupy different social positions to highlight the harsh reality of living as a woman in a modern society. In retrospect, Esther Eng’s Hong Kong filmmaking career is incredible for how script writers, film companies, top stars, and the local press alike seemed to accept the inexperienced young woman as their director and, at times, producer. Press reports often mention Eng’s assuring openness and amicability as well as a sense that her early associations with Hollywood gave her an advantage over unknown local directors. There is another aspect of Eng that most likely contributed to the positive attention she received: her gender presentation. Eng dressed in men’s attire and was quite open about her several lesbian relationships. The latter was especially closely followed and reported on by the Hong Kong media. Sophisticated magazine editors often referred to her romantic interests as her “bosom friend” and “good sister.” Perhaps because all-female opera troupes with male-impersonating actresses were quite popular in the 1930s, Eng’s appearance and relationships did not cause much controversy. This did not mean there were no sensationalist reports on the matter. In 1938, Lei Qun, a young Sing Tao Daily News reporter expressed his astonishment towards everything about Eng, calling her “living proof of the possibility of same-sex love,” remarking that, “It’s not just work, address, manner, and dress…it’s her sensibility that was completely that of a man.”

Bruce Lee’s first screen appearance in Golden Gate Girls (1941). PC

Bruce Lee’s first screen appearance in Golden Gate Girl  (1941). Private Collection.

By October of 1939, the war’s progress prompted Eng to return to the U.S., but wartime Hong Kong remained on her mind. She spent several months in Hollywood learning about the new developments in the motion picture business before directing Golden Gate Girl (1941). The film is an immigrant saga situated against the backdrop of The Rice Bowl Movement, an overseas Chinese community effort to raise funds for China’s war with Japan. This film makes use of documentary footage taken by Grandview Film Company director  Joseph Sunn and also gave Bruce Lee his screen debut as a baby girl. After the war, Esther Eng decided to set up her Chinese language filmmaking operations in the U.S., and in January of 1947 the Singtao Evening News reported that one major factor for Eng’s decision may have been that film production costs in the U.S. were one-third of  the cost in Hong Kong.  She set up her own company, Silver Light, and produced two color motion pictures back to back. Back Street (1948) adapted Fannie Hurst’s 1931 bestseller of the same title and resets the story in a Chinese-American community. Eng apparently chose to adapt the novel because of the tragic element she felt would appeal to Chinese audiences,  the exotic tale of two cities set up, here San Francisco and an unspecified Chinese city, and the familiar theme of unfulfilled love that figures prominently in nearly all of her films. Despite the ethnic backdrop, Eng’s adaptation follows the novel’s two Hollywood adaptations in promoting women’s love and sacrifice as a universal theme. A year later, Eng would explore interracial romance in Mad Fire Mad Love (1949).

Mad Fire Mad Love premiere at San Francisco’s Great China Theatre, February 1949. PC

Mad Fire Mad Love premiere at San Francisco’s Great China Theatre, February 1949. Private Collection. 

Ronald Liu and Fe Fe Li in Back Street (1947) produced and directed by Esther Eng. PC

Ronald Liu and Fe Fe Li, Back Street (1947). Private Collection.

With the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, many of the Cantonese opera and film actors that had supported Chinese language filmmaking in the U.S. returned to China and Hong Kong, and the talent drain forced Eng to cease filmmaking. She took over a film distribution business started by her father to bring Hong Kong films to the U.S. and moved to New York City to open the iconic Bo Bo restaurant that would become a gathering place for friends and actors in the motion picture and Cantonese opera business. She even ran a theater exhibiting films she acquired in Hong Kong where she sometimes invited Cantonese opera troops to perform. When she died in early 1970, obituaries appearing in Variety as well as the New York Times remembered her for being a filmmaker, a restaurant owner, and a hub of Chinese film culture in the US.

See also: Tazuko Sakane

The author generously thanks Mr. James Wong and Ms. Sally Ng for the images in this entry.

Esther Eng (d/w/p/o) 1949, Honolulu, HI. PC

Esther Eng in Honolulu, HI, 1949. Private Collection.

 Esther Eng (d/w/p/o) and Siu Yin Fei (a) working on Murder in New York Chinatown (1961). PC

Esther Eng (L) and Siu Yin Fei working on Murder in New York Chinatown (1961). Private Collection.

Esther Eng (d/w/p/o) and Fe Fe Lee (a). PC

Esther Eng (L) and Fe Fe Lee. Private Collection.

Bibliography

“All-Chinese Film Made.” Los Angeles Times (15 December 1935): A2.

Can, Xiang. “A Sketch of the Ladies’ Welcoming Party.” Rose 11 (1936): n.p.

“China's Only Woman Director Esther Eng Is Eager to Return to U.S.” Singtao Evening News (12 January 1947): n.p.

Cornelius, Betty. “Esther Eng, Movie Maker, Visits Here.”  Seattle Times (9 June 1946): n.p.

“‘Heartaches’ to Be Shown This Week.” Chinese Digest (14 February 1936): 2.

Law, Kar. “In Search of Esther Eng: Border-crossing Pioneer in Chinese-language Filmmaking.” In Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts. Ed. Lingzhen Wang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 313-329.

Lei, Qun. “Female Director Esther Eng.” Sing Tao Daily News (15 December 1938): n.p.

Lynch, Frank. "'Tragedy! They Love It' in the 'Seattle Scene.'" Seattle Intelligencer (August 1947): n.p.

McCarthy, Todd. “Eng’s Lost Pix a Chinese Puzzle” Variety 21-17 (August 1995): 10.

Wern. “Golden Gate Girl.” Variety (28 May 1941): n.p.

Citation

Wei, S Louisa. "Esther Eng." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-rhpq-0f69>

Aleksandra Khokhlova

by Ana Olenina

Today Aleksandra Khokhlova is remembered as the star actress in films directed by Lev Kuleshov in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, at the peak of her career she was at the epicenter of the Soviet avant-garde, an icon of the experimental acting that matched the style of revolutionary montage cinema. Looking back at his life, Kuleshov wrote: “Nearly all that I have done in film directing, in teaching, and in life is connected to her [Khokhlova] in terms of ideas and art practice” (1946, 162). Yet, Khokhlova was much more than Kuleshov’s wife and muse as in her own right she was a talented author, actress, and film director, an artist in formation long before she met Kuleshov.

Screenshot Aleksandra Khokhlova By the Law (1926).

Aleksandra Khokhlova in By the Law (1926). Private Collection.

Growing up in an affluent intellectual family, Aleksandra would have had many inspiring artistic encounters. Her maternal grandfather, the merchant Pavel Tretyakov, founder of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, was a philanthropist and patron who purchased and exhibited masterpieces of Russian Romanticism, Realism, and Symbolism. Aleksandra’s parents’ St. Petersburg home was a prestigious art salon and significant painters, actors, and musicians were  family friends. Portraits of Aleksandra as a young girl were painted by such eminent artists as Valentin Serov and Filipp Maliavin. Aleksandra’s father, the doctor Sergei Botkin, an art connoisseur and collector, cultivated ties to the World of Arts circle–the creators of the Ballets Russes. Serge Diaghilev along with designer Leon Bakst, painter Alexandre Benois, and ballet dancers Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky appear in Botkin family photos (Botkina et al., 134-143, 155-159). In her memoirs, Aleksandra recalled the strange fascination of seeing those she knew from the intimate family circle on stage (Botkina et al.,  56). Listening to conversations at the family table and watching splendid performances made Aleksandra privy to the secrets of stagecraft, and considering her close connection to the Ballets Russes as a new era in Modern dance performance, future researchers will no doubt evaluate their influence on Khokhlova’s experimental acting style and her worldview. Certainly her childhood exposure to theater instilled a passionate, selfless dedication to artthe kind of idealistic commitment typical of the early twentieth-century Russian intelligentsia. Later in her memoirs she wrote that working in cinema was for her “the most important thing in life” (Kuleshov and Khokhlova 1975, 62). Perhaps this commitment fortified her against the daunting challenges of  Soviet state cinema workfrom a drastic lack of resources to censorship and Party pressure.

As we learn from the memoirs, one more childhood influence reinforced an idealistic view of the actor’s professionKonstantin Stanislavsky, director of the Moscow Art Theater and close friend of Aleksandra’s parents (1975, 54). Stanislavsky  taught how to approach the actor’s work as a search for authenticity, for ways to convey the irreducible complexity of the character’s inner world. Alexandra’s relationship with the Stanislavsky school, however, is often overlooked because her career as a film actress evolved under the banner of Soviet avant-garde, which cut ties with established theater traditions. Yet, Kuleshov’s desire to revolutionize cinema was fueled by the same hatred of stage clichés and bad acting that compelled Stanislavsky to search for new forms in the theater. Echoing her husband’s disdain for the histrionic acting in film dramas of the past, Aleksandra wrote: “I absolutely agree with Stanislavsky, who said that the best film actors are animals; they move in a way that pertains to themorganically, naturally, truthfully, and therefore, artistically. A tiger onscreen walks just like a tiger…whereas people representing other people often come across as unnatural and non-artistic” (1975, 58).

Portrait of Aleksandra Khokhlova by Aristarkh Lentulov (1919).

Aleksandra Khokhlova by Aristarkh Lentulov (1919). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Although Kuleshov shared this conviction, his approach to unconvincing acting was very different from Stanislavsky’s. While the theater maître emphasized subtle character movements growing from the everyday environment to gradually disclose inner states, Kuleshov expected actors’ movements to be athletic, visually impressive, and efficient in conveying plot. Remembering that Kuleshov’s avant-garde work used actors in a highly farcical, even grotesque stylization, it is no wonder that Stanislavsky is undetectable in Alexandra’s acting there. However, the question of her indebtedness to realist theater merits further research, especially considering that her best rolesEdith in By the Law (1926) and Dulcie in The Great Consoler (1933)exhibit psychological depth that exceeds Kuleshov’s framework. Likewise, two fiction silent films that Khokhlova directed herself, The Affair of the Clasps (1929) and Sasha (1930), convey the nuances of characters’ inner worlds and reconstruct their daily lives. This work seems at odds with Kuleshov’s manifestoes of the early 1920s,  situating her closer to realist theater traditions, and in this regard it is notable that eventually Kuleshov himself would come to embrace Stanislavsky’s method in his 1941 textbook for student filmmakers, Foundations of Film Directing/Osnovy kino-rezhissury, based on the couple’s joint work teaching  film directing.

Beyond intimate knowledge of theater, Aleksandra’s acquaintance with the Stanislavsky family exposed her to other arts, and, together with her peer, Stanislavsky’s daughter Kira, she studied painting and grew  interested in abstraction. The two girls were especially fascinated with the Moscow Kubo-Futurists and other fractions of the legendary association “Jack of Diamonds,” becoming friends with abstract painters Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova who designed sets for Aleksandr Tairov’s Chamber Theater where they attended many innovative stage productions (1975, 56).

In 1914, Aleksandra married her first husband, Konstantin Khokhlov, an actor in Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater. At the time, Khokhlov was himself a rising film star, appearing in a number of successful melodramas, and it was in one of his films, (Uragan/Hurricane, directed by Boris Sushkevich), that Aleksandra made her debut as a supporting actress in 1916 (E. Khokhlova 2006, 4; 1975, 57; Fomin 2004, 201). The birth of Aleksandra’s son Sergei, Konstantin’s departure for World War I, the turmoil of the Revolution, and the Civil War explain the gap in Aleksandra’s cinematic career.

WFP2-KHOK03

Aleksandra Khokhlova in a dance étude from “Kuleshov’s Effects.” Russian Heritage 2 (1993): 110-115.

In 1919, Aleksandra Khokhlova passed her entrance exams for the new State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, the first professional institution of its kind in the world, testimony  to the Bolshevik government’s commitment to cinema as a mass art. Despite official support and enthusiastic faculty, the Institute’s early study programs were unsystematic and poorly equipped, having neither cameras nor film stock available for pedagogical purposes. Moreover, the new professors did not always know how to teach  the cinema, a young art and even younger academic discipline. Aleksandra’s major was film acting, but the schooling consisted of dance and movement exercises in which Aleksandra excelled, having studied under the Czech actress Běla Gorská. Looking back, however, Aleksandra reflects that “elementary theatrical techniques and symbolic gestures” she had learned from Gorská confined her acting to a set of clichés, and the poses she memorized were “examples of what not to do” (1975, 57). Unfortunately, the acting classes in the Institute itself were not much different, and teachers privileged the systems of François Delsarte and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze which gave students little to help develop their creative imaginations. Khokhlova recalls taking a course on acting taught by Olga Preobrazhenskaia and being disappointed that the studies went no further than dance and rhythmical movement (1975, 59).

The Institute opened a new chapter in Alexandra’s career, for there she met Lev Kuleshova young director determined to revolutionize the art of cinema, who was immediately struck with her: “They drew my attention to a tall, very rhythmical woman in an orange tunic, who was dancing in a circle of other young men and women…This was Khokhlova. And the tunic she wore was given to her by Isadora Duncan herself!” (1975, 45). The first project they collaborated on was Kuleshov’s semi-documentary On the Red Front (1920)a film that combined actual footage from the Civil War with staged sequences, featuring Kuleshov and Khokhlova as Polish peasants.

WFP2-KHOK04

Aleksandra Khokhlova as the countess in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924). Private Collection.

Upon their return to Moscow from the shooting trip in the provinces, Kuleshov put all his efforts into exploring the laws of cinematic expressivity. He believed that the power of cinema as an art lay in editing and dynamic action. These two elements became the object of his experiments conducted in collaboration with a group of students from the State Cinematographic School where Aleksandra Khokhlova became a main figure in the legendary “Kuleshov collective” along with Vsevolod Pudovkin, Vladimir Fogel, and Boris Barnet. Working under conditions of extreme poverty, Kuleshov’s troupe was at first unable to procure film stock so they concentrated on acting études, using a special rectangular frame with black velvet curtains to imitate the camera’s viewfinder (Kuleshov 1974; Kepley 1986; Kepley 1992; Olenina 2011). Kuleshov demanded extreme bodily mastery and geometrical precision of movement from his actors. Seeking to maximize the narrative value of each shot and increase the pace of cutting in his future film projects, Kuleshov trained his students to act in a series of discrete vivid and concrete motions. Mindful of shot composition, he insisted that actors plan how the vectors of their gestures would look onscreen, breaking  down movements into elements and implementing rigorous exercises that taught his actors  to turn and bend abruptly following set rhythmical patterns, evident in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) and The Ray of Death (1925). In these films, Kuleshov’s troupe intermixes trained expressions with grotesque buffoonery and eye-grabbing acrobatics modeled after American action films and circus stunts, these the daring physical spectacles that became known as “eccentric” acting. Here is Sergei Eisenstein’s  1926 encomium for Khokhlova, first female performer to embody this experimental style:

Khokhlova has, of course, a talent for acting that is perhaps the only one of its kind that is worthy of serious mention…America is possessed by the ideal of the petty-bourgeois “ Bathing Girl.” […] Khokhlova frustrates that ideal. The firm grip of her toothy grin shreds the hackneyed formula of ‘the woman of the screen = the woman of the bedroom.’ […] Khokhlova can create an entirely new genre…Khokhlova has to be provided with sharply Soviet roles and a proper interpretation to match her essential qualities. Firmly rejecting demonic women, adventuresses and the rest, I would plait her hair, dress her in a sarafan and release a cycle of grotesque comedies on a “town and country” theme with a screen’s first female eccentric–Khokhlova… (2010, 71-72).

Eisenstein saw gags and stunts, characteristic of eccentric acting, as “attractions” that smashed the conventions of the bourgeois theater with its voyeuristic pleasures. For him, Khokhlova’s eccentricities not only challenged the stereotypical female roles in cinema but promoted a more active and critically engaged viewing experience.

WFP2-KHOK05

Khokhlova by Sergei Eisenstein and Viktor Shklovsky (1926). Private Collection.

WFP2-KHOK06

Aleksandra Khokhlova in The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924). Private Collection.

Other contemporaries emphasized a different side of Khokhlova’s acting, especially  after By the Law (1926) when it became apparent that she  brought remarkable psychological nuance and emotional power to her roles. Formalist literary scholar and scriptwriter Viktor Shklovskii wrote in 1926 that Kuleshov had thus far failed to find suitable roles for his wife: his penchant for eccentric performances blinded him to her talent as a tragic actress (14). American Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) noted Khokhlova’s  conveyance of extreme psychological states in the execution and burial scenes in By the Law, writing in 1928 in the British journal Close-up:

A girl, a child with incredibly thin legs, hurled herself on the ice and snow crusted bad earth, clung to it, like some wan and exquisite Persephone, crying to be buried, dragged in, taken back and back away from human consciousness…The gestures of this woman are angular, bird-like, claw-like, skeleton-like and hideous. She has a way of standing against a sky line that makes a hieroglyph, that spells almost visibly some message of cryptic symbolism. Her gestures are magnificent. If this is Russian, then I am Russian. Beauty is too facile a word to discuss this; this woman is a sort of bleak young sorceress, vibrant, febrile, neurotic, as I say, cataleptic. …. Her face can be termed beautiful in the same way that dawn can be beautiful rising across stench and fever of battle… there is no word for such things. Her mind, her soul, her body, her spirit, her being, all vibrate, as I say, almost audibly. If this is Russian then I am Russian (1998, 126-127).

WFP2-KHOK07

Akeksandra Khokhlova in By the Law (1926). Private Collection

WFP2-KHOK08

Akeksandra Khokhlova in By the Law (1926). Private Collection.

H.D.’s London review, virtually unknown in Russia, might have appeared too philosophical for Khokhlova’s politically-minded compatriots. Yet Khokhlova had allies among Russian avant-garde artists and leftist intellectuals, and she and Kuleshov had close ties with the Left Front of the Arts–Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lili and Osip Brik, Nikolai Aseev, Viktor Shklovsky, Esfir Shub, Aleksei Gan, and Aleksandr Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova.

Despite important connections and critical acclaim, Khokhlova fell out of favor with Soviet film industry authorities, and after By the Law when Kuleshov proposed new projects he found himself under pressure not to cast Khokhlova, because of her non-proletarian descent. Khokhlova’s uncle, personal doctor to the Czar’s family, followed Nicholas II into exile and was executed alongside his royal patients. But the official rejection stated that Khokhlova was not “not beautiful enough” for the screen and looked “emaciated” (1975, 90). In response to these accusations, many intellectuals defended Khokhlova’s right to the screen (1975, 108). Eisenstein, infuriated, argued that “artistic councils of the studios look at a woman through the eyes of a primeval cattle-breeder” (2010, 71). Osip Brik responded by writing a motion picture play script specifically for Khokhlova, entitled Cleopatra (Brik 2003).

WFP2-KHOK09

Akeksandra Khokhlova in Your Acquaintance, or The Journalist (1927). Private Collection.

But all these efforts failed and Khokhlova would star in only two more Kuleshov filmsYour Acquaintance, or The Journalist (1927) and The Great Consoler (1933), the last of which offers a bitter commentary on the situation unfolding in her life off-screen. Khokhlova’s heroine, Dulcie, fired from a department store because she is “too thin” and “not pretty enough” for the counter, wipes her tears as a glowing advertisement for “Men’s Neckties” swings before her face.

WFP2-KHOK10

Aleksandra Khokhlova in The Great Consoler (1933). Private Collection.

Surprising as it may seem, although Khokhlova was prevented from acting, in the late 1920s she was allowed to direct her own films, although she had to find her own producer (1975, 122). Eventually, the Sovkino Studio accepted her idea for an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s story “An Affair of the Clasps” on condition that she obtain Gorky’s approval which she did by promising to employ realist acting techniques (1975, 123). Set in the 1890’s, Gorky’s story exposes the bigotry and hypocrisy of a small town matron as she mistreats the tramps hired for work on her estate. Every day, she reads the Bible to them, pretending to shepherd their souls, but her actual motive is to cut down their wages to make up for unplanned “rest” time. As the cheated workers retreat to their quarters, one of them shows the others the silver book clasps that he ripped off the matron’s Bible in revenge. Another young tramp buys the clasps with his meager savings and returns them to the lady, only to encounter her anger and dismay. Khokhlova represents these events using a mixture of nineteenth-century realism in the vein of Tolstoy and Chekhov and Kuleshov’s anti-realism. Kuleshov’s lessons in analytical editing and the rhetorical power of montage is there in a scene that creates an ironic perspective on the matron: multiple shots of her zealously kissing relics in church, are intercut with images of tired workers waiting outside. A sarcastic title card comments “The lady is accumulating sanctitude.” In another scene, Khokhlova’s montage juxtaposes an angry conversation between the matron and her workers with shots of a boiling pot of jam, the steaming liquid becoming a metaphor for escalating tension, as a boiling kettle works in By the Law. Although these formal devices align Khokhlova with avant-garde directors Dziga Vertov and Shub, An Affair of the Clasps (1929) differs from 1920s Soviet production in the genuine interest shown to the characters by lingering on their imperfect yet beautiful faces and savoring the weathered, dusty textures of their clothes. Her elusive close-ups suggest the enigmatic complexity of the person’s inner world instead of emphasizing a single emotion in the style of Kuleshov. An Affair of the Clasps thus presents characters with more sympathy and humanity than Soviet films committed to agit-prop clarity.

WFP2-KHOK11

Sovetskii Ekran [The Soviet Screen], “Khokhlova as a film director.” Rev. of An Affair of the Clasps (1929). Private Collection.

In her next full feature-length project, Sasha (1930), Khokhlova continued to search for a personal style, navigating between realism and constructivism and juggling contradictory concerns for socio-psychological complexity and dynamic efficiency. The first scenes of the film show the peasant heroine Sasha lost on the busy streets of Moscow. As a true Kuleshovian, she uses montage to encapsulate the situation. Sasha asks for directions, and the film juxtaposes her anxious face with an extreme close-up of a chewing mouth of an indifferent constable. She wanders into a department store, and her bewilderment and disorientation are conveyed through rapidly switching shots of people’s feet entering a swivel door, the glitter of the turning glass, and various goods crowding the store counters. To further accentuate Sasha’s confusion and helplessness, Khokhlova stages a traffic accident in which Sasha is nearly run over by a tram, echoing a similar incident in The House on the Trubnaya Square (Boris Barnet, 1928). But unlike Barnet’s  film, Sasha is no comedy. The story is dominated by a melancholic and bitter mood with light hints of sentimentality. Sasha is pregnant and has left her native village out of desperation. After her traffic accident, she is apprehended by a Moscow policeman and begins a new life as a cleaner in the police station. Hard labor, exposure to the city’s underworld and the bureaucrats’ indifference cause her much suffering. Because Sasha never fully integrates into the brave new world of a Socialist metropolis, the Soviet society is not affirmed, setting Khokhlova’s film apart from the ideological projects of her contemporaries. The heroine passively accepts everything that is happening to her, remaining motionless as if in a stupor, and her sad, inward gaze communicates a mute reproach. The only two moments in the film when Sasha bonds with others are scenes of women’s solidarity: first, when Sasha is embraced by a hysterical “fallen woman” at the police station (Liudmila Semenova, a former member of the FEKS group); and the second time when Sasha’s benefactor’s wife offers support for her and her baby.

WFP2-KHOK12

Aleksandra Khokhlova in By the Law (1926). Private Collection. 

Khokhlova’s last independent project as a filmmaker was a kulturfilm about wooden toys made by Russian folk craftsmen. Entitled Toys (1931), this film presented the evolution of toys from archaic times to the present day. In her memoirs, Khokhlova recalls that she invited boys and girls from an itinerant gypsy camp stationed near Moscow to perform the role of prehistoric children (1975, 128). Though critical reviews of Khokhlova’s films were generally positive, she received no further commissions although her name appears in the credits for several Kuleshov films made in the 1930s and 1940s as “assistant director.” The films of the 1940’s were Socialist Realist projects that Kuleshov had no choice but to accept, and some were unfinished works botched by other filmmakers that Kuleshov was charged with “rescuing.” As Khoklova’s granddaughter, the film scholar Ekaterina Khokhlova, characterized them, these adventure stories for adolescents had little artistic value (Olenina 2008). Besides her work in cinema Khokhlova’s life was dedicated to teaching film directing and acting at the VGIK–the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. Together with Kuleshov she wrote a book of memoirs, 50 Let v. Kino or 50 Years in Cinema, and after her husband’s death, she served as general editor of his Collected Works.

See also: Esfir Shub

Bibliography

Albéra, François, Ekaterina Chochlova, and Valérie Pozner. Kouléchov et les Siens. Locarno: Ed. du Festival international du film de Locarno, 1990.

Botkina, Aleksandra, Ekaterina Khokhlova, and Aleksandr Riumin. Serebrianyi vek v fotografiiakh A.P. Botkinoi. Moskva: Izd. zhurnala Nashe nasledie, 1998.

Brik, Osip. “Kleopatra.” Kinovedcheskie Zapiski 62 (2003): 81-111.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “However Odd –Khokhlova!” (1926). In Selected Works: Writings, 1922-1934. Vol. 1. Ed. and trans. Richard Taylor. London and New York: Tauris, 2010, 71-73.

-----. “Kak ni stranno – o Khokhlovoi.” Sergei Eisenstein i Viktor Shklovskii. Khokhlova. Moskva: Kino-pechat’, 1926. 5-9.

Fomin, V.I., et al. Letopis’ Rossiiskogo kino, 1863-1929. Moskva: Materik, 2004. 201.

G.L. “Khokhlova kak rezhisser.” Sovetskii Ekran 10 (1929): 5.

Golovnia, Anatolii. “Blistatel’noe masterstvo: neskol’ko myslei ob Aleksandre Sergeevne Khokhlovoi.” Iskusstvo Kino 1 (1978): 126-127.

Golovanova, N. “Effekt Khokhlovoi.” Iskusstvo Kino 10 (2004): n.p.

H.D. [Hilda Doolittle]. “Expiation” [A review of Kuleshov’s film By the Law]. Close-up vol. II, no. 5 (May 1928); Rpt. in  Close-up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism. Eds. Donald, James, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998. 125-129.

Kepley, Vance Jr. “The Kuleshov Workshop.” Iris vol. 4, no. 1 (1986): 5-23.

-----. “Mr. Kuleshov in the Land of the Modernists.” The Red Screen. Ed. Anna Lawton. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 132-147.

Khokhlova, Ekaterina. “Kuleshov’s Effects.” Russian Heritage 2 (1993): 110-115.

-----. Aleksandra Sergeevna Khokhlova: aktrisa, rezhisser, pedagog. Ed. V. A. Rodionov. Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, 2006.

Kuleshov, Lev, and Aleksandra Khokhlova. 50 Let v Kino. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1975.

Kuleshov, Lev. “Kaki a stal rezhisserom?” Kak ia stal rezhisserom? Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1946. 156-162.

-----. Sobranie sochinenii. Eds. A. Khokhlova, S. Sosnovskii, and E. Khokhlova. 2 vols. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987-1988.

-----. Stat’i, Materialy. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979.

Olenina, Ana. “An Interview with Ekaterina Khokhlova on Lev Kuleshov’s Retrospective. Cinema Ritrovato Festival, 2008.” ARTMargins (October 2008) http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/6-film-a-video/90-lev-kuleshov

-----. “Engineering Performance: Lev Kuleshov, Soviet Reflexology, and Labor Efficiency Studies.” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture vol. 35, no. 3 (2013): 297-336.

Rev. Sasha. Kino (Moscow) (20 July 1930): n.p.

Rev. Sasha. Kino-front (16 July 1930): n.p.

Shklovskii, Viktor. “Khokhlova.” In Khokhlova. Sergei Eisenstein i Viktor Shklovskii Moscow: Kino-pechat’, 1926. 10-16.

-----. “Serdechnyi privet ot starogo druga.” Iskusstvo Kino 11 (1982): 121-122.

Sheffer, Pavel. “‘Venetsianskii chulok’: 30 stsen v 25 minut.” Kino-fot 1 (1922): 9.

Shub, Esfir. Zhizn’ moia–kinematograf. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1972.

Tsivian, Yuri. “Notes historiques en marge de l'expérience de Koulechov.” L'Effet Koulechov/The Kuleshov Effect. Iris vol. 4, no. 1 (1986): 49-60.

Tsivian, Yuri, Ekaterina Khokhlova, and Kristin Thompson. “The Rediscovery of a Kuleshov Experiment: a Dossier.” Film History vol. 8, no. 3 (1996): 357-367.

Yampolski, Mikhail. “Kuleshov's Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor.” In Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. Eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. 31-50.

Zorkaia, Neia. Portrety. Moskva: Kinoiskusstvo, 1966.

Archival Paper Collections:

“Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov i Aleksandra Khokhlova.” F. 2679. Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Citation

Olenina, Ana. "Aleksandra Khokhlova." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-20ff-2c08>

Emilia Saleny

by Moira Fradinger

Among all the pioneers linked to the birth of cinema in Argentina was the young woman of Italian origins who was to become, as far as we know at the moment, not only the first Argentine woman filmmaker, but also the filmmaker of the first Argentine children’s movie and the first woman to found an academy for film actors in South America: Emilia Saleny. Few records are available for us to piece together her life. Her death certificate, found in the Registro Nacional de las Personas (National Register of Persons in Buenos Aires), states that she died on August 22, 1978 at her home, Calle Caseros 574, the widow of Alberto Olivero, and the daughter of Antonio Saleny and Victoria Pieri. Her nephew José Di Leo declared her death. The certificate indicates that she was an Argentine citizen and her birth date appears as June 26, 1894. The scant critical essays that have remembered her name seldom include biographic details, and those that do, offer inconclusive speculations. Theater historian Beatriz Seibel follows Jacobo De Diego’s assumption that Emilia was born in 1891 in Buenos Aires (Seibel 2002, 529); historian Héctor Kohen wonders whether she was born in Italy and arrived in Buenos Aires already as a professional actress (Kohen 1994, 34); and film critic Paraná Sendrós asserts in a newspaper article that her origins were Italian and that the original spelling of her name was “Salegni” (n.p.). Several announcements between 1917 and 1919 in the most important newspaper of the Italian community in Buenos Aires at the time, La Patria degli Italiani (1876-1931), indicate that she was an active member of the Italian community settling in the city at the beginning of the century. On June 23, 1917, la “Signora” Emilia Saleny appears as a “valorosa artista” (“valiant artist”)  in the newspaper’s announcements concerning her film career (“La Niña del bosque” 4).  An announcement in La Patria from October 16, 1917 even suggests that her birthday might have been on October 16, instead of June 26 (4). According to an announcement in La Patria on May 5 of the same year,  her mother, Vittoria, had been a renowned actress in Italy (4). However, Seibel, following the information found in De Diego’s 1973 unpublished Diccionario Teatral (Theater Dictionary/Patrimony of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes), indicates that it was Emilia’s aunt and uncle who were respected Italian actors, and that Emilia would have traveled to Italy in 1910 to train as an actress, working successfully there between 1910 and 1914 in the theater and returning to Buenos Aires in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I (529). On first examination, study of the passenger records of Italian ships entering or exiting the port of Buenos Aires in those years yields no surname that comes close to that of Emilia’s. Neither the spelling “Saleny” (or “Salegni”) is Italian, nor is a name by that spelling listed in genealogical research tools or registered in any Italian ship record—that is, until 1924.

Josefina Emilia Saleny (d/a/o) in the magazine Caras y Caretas, 1915.

Josefina Emilia Saleny in magazine Caras y Caretas, 1915.

By 1924, when Emilia’s last name appears as “Saleny” on ship records, she had made four films, and perhaps as many as five. Nonetheless, matching the year of birth on Emilia’s death certificate we find a record on the ship Garibaldi arriving on July 29, 1915 in Buenos Aires  from Genoa. It was a ship that offered only 25 first-class bookings out of a total of 1,625. Among the Italian first-class passengers there were two women, both registered as theater actresses: Vittoria Pieri Salani, a fifty-year-old widow; and Emilia Pieri Salani, a twenty-year-old single woman, both listing their nationality as Italian. To judge by at least one other immigration record, her trips to Italy may have been frequent. Almost ten years later, on October 20, 1924, Emilia disembarked in Buenos Aires, having sailed from Genoa on the ship Nazario Sauro, and here on the 1924 voyage where her last name is finally spelled “Saleny” we learn that her profession is still “actress” but her nationality is now Argentine, her age is thirty and her marital status is “widow.”  We can deduce the last name of her first husband from the several announcements about her films in La Patria, where she appears as “Emilia Saleny in Ferrari.” But according to her death certificate, her husband’s last name was Olivero. Thus we are to assume that she was twice a widow.

Saleny belonged to the vibrant Italian community that was rapidly increasing in turn of the century Buenos Aires. The city of Buenos Aires during this period was undoubtedly home to a good number of women dedicated to public culture. However, if they were not involved in the cultural front of the anarchist or feminist movements of the period they tended to be women of high society who, with a few exceptions, educated “decent” señoritas in cultural workshops, teaching the piano or singing classes, or hosted charitable cultural events in ladies clubs. A perusal of the main newspapers – La Nación or La Prensa – or those within the Italian community itself, such as La Patria, shows us that film production, distribution and exhibition were heavily enlisted for charitable purposes.

Saleny must have moved among educated, artistic, and wealthy circles of the city because she traveled first class. However, while we do not have information about her membership in any political group of the time, we may assume that she did not dedicate much of her time to charities. She not only acted and filmed but also founded what was most likely the first Academia de Artes Cinematográficas on the continent, just months after disembarking from the Garibaldi in 1915 when she was probably only twenty years old.

On November 6, 1915, the magazine Caras y Caretas announced her debut as a lead actress at the Apolo theater (n.p.). In 1916, filming had begun at the Academia, and on July 3, 1917 La Patria announced the premiere of her first film, La niña del bosque/The Girl of the Forest (4). Considering the 1917 announcement of her as “Emilia Saleny in Ferrari,” she appears to have married right at the beginning of her filmmaking career. In 1916 she also acted in El evadido de Ushuaia/The fugitive of Ushuaia, a mystery film written by the Marquis Enzo D’Armensano which premiered on December 27, 1916 at the Cine Callao. El evadido de Ushuaia was produced by Condor Films and Saleny’s co-stars were Luis Ramassotto and Pepita Muñoz. Also in 1916, Saleny acted in América by Federico Mertens, together with the famous actor Roberto Caseaux. In 1917 she acted in Problemas del corazón/Problems of the Heart, apparently also produced by Condor Films, “an improvised studio at 1600 Sarmiento Street” (Foppa 1961, 951).

We may imagine that Emilia made the transition from actress to instructor on her (probable) October 16 birthday in 1915. Two years later, on October 16, 1917 La Patria announced the anniversary of the Academy of “declamation, recitation, and cinematographic art,” celebrating its third year of operation (and its 50 students) in its location at Cangallo Street 1636, as well as “signora Saleny’s” birthday (4).  In 1917, the film magazine La Película reports on the opening of the academy at another location in Belgrano.  Here, Saleny’s Academy is described as the most serious and trustworthy of all the academies in Buenos Aires, and is compared to other academies that would take advantage of young people aspiring to become actors. According to Seibel, who follows De Diego, a fire would destroy all of Emilia’s films and she subsequently returned to theater acting, touring Argentina and Brazil as well as working in radio with her own scripts (529). On July 30, 1920, La Nación announced the premiere at the theater Círculo Católico de Obreros of the comedy Cantos rodados/Boulders by Francisco Imhoff, in which “Señorita” Emilia Saleny was the actress (n.p.).

We know as little of Emilia Saleny as a filmmaker as we do of her life.  She directed the films La niña del bosque (1917), Paseo Trágico/Tragic Promenade (1917) and El pañuelo de Clarita/Clarita’s Kerchief (1919). If we trust the aforementioned birthday announcement for the Academy in La Patria there was another film, Delfina, also from 1917, which Seibel and De Diego credit to her. However, the newspaper’s announcement is unclear as to whether this film was actually directed by students. The latter would have been the same students that apparently filmed Luchas en la vida/Life Struggles (1919). Yet film historians who mention Saleny have thus far recorded her film career differently, and there is wide disagreement among them. According to four of these historians, she directed only two films (Paranaguá 129; Couselo 34; Trelles Plazaola 9; Núbila 28). A fifth, Jorge Finkielman, mentions two films, spells Emilia’s last name “Salemy” and states that there were only child actors in El Pañuelo de Clarita (21). Others credit her with more than two films but do not concur as to her role. According to Héctor Kohen, Emilia Saleny acted in at least one film, directed three, and “enabled the making of another” (34). César Maranghello lists three films yet confuses El Pañuelo de Clarita with Paseo Trágico (35). Calvo thinks Saleny directed four films with her students, but all are now lost, and Seibel concurs (Seibel 529). Finally in Manrique Zago’s edited collection there are two images from the film El Pañuelo de Clarita, dated 1918 and directed by “Elena” Saleny,  although not a single line is written about the director (17; 31). cIn the Diccionario Teatral del Río de la Plata Emilia’s surname is spelled “Salegni,” and she is mentioned as having directed El Pañuelo de Clarita (Foppa 950).

WFP-SAL05

Still, El Pañuelo de Clarita (1919). Courtesy of the Amé Family Archive.

It seems safe to assume that there were four films and a fifth perhaps only produced by her students. La niña del bosque (1917) was most likely Saleny’s first film and a pioneer film of this genre in Argentina. Produced by Colón Film, it had an almost all-child cast. Titi Garimaldi, an eleven- year-old Argentine had the lead role and was described in La Patria’s review on June 23  as having “a unique elegance” (4).  The review mentions that the actors were from the Academia Saleny and included the young Argentino Carminati, “one of the most intelligent students.” According to La Patria, the film premiered on July 4, 1917 at a private function in the Teatro Esmeralda at 11 a.m. and on July 12, 1917 at the Splendid.  It must have been a great success, at least within the Italian community, as the announcement for the private premiere appears in La Patria not just once but four times, and on July 3, 4 and 5 it includes an appeal to support the effort of “Signora Saleny” and the technical director of the “Colón Film” production house. On July 3, this was an appeal addressed not only to the “educated public” of the city but also to the press and the “minister of the P.I.” as well as the “Consiglio scolastico” [In Italy “P.I” refers to “public instruction” and the “Consiglio escolastico” refers to the scholarly council; these would amount to a reference to the minister of education and the scholarly councils at more local levels. EDs.] (4). On July 5, La Patria reviewed the success of the previous day’s exhibition, saying that the film had been “pleasant, moral and educational” like all the films presented by Colón Film for children’s audiences, with “very clear photography” and “picturesque locations” (5). Both Emilia and her mother, Vittoria Pieri–an “appreciated actress of the Italian stage”–were credited among the actresses.

WFP-SAL06

Still, El Pañuelo de Clarita (1919). Courtesy of the Amé Family Archive.

Of the 1917 Delfina we know little if anything for the moment. However, La Película tells us that the short film Paseo Trágico was completed in November, 1917, and students from the academy acted in the film, which premiered in a private function at the now-demolished Crystal Palace. According to Italian newspapers the theater also organized charity events for families of the Italian “richiamati” who returned to Italy, the “grande patria,” in order to fight in the war. The Giornale d’Italia dedicated a review to the “short but beautiful” film that attracted over a thousand spectators on “Sunday, the 2nd of this month” and that was to be shown again on Thursday the 6th (n.p.).  Judging from the calendar for 1917, that would have been Sunday, December 2. The Giornale says that the photography by Scaglione was “perfect,” Saleny herself performed the role of “the unfortunate Mimi, that incomparable actress known by everyone,” perhaps referring to Mimi in Puccini’s  La Bohème or possibly Mimi Aguglia, the Sicilian actress (1884-1970) who visited Buenos Aires in 1907. The review went on to comment that the expression of fear by the children Oliveira and Coduca was “very remarkable.” Mrs. Saleny is portrayed as “the tireless woman” who “will soon begin to film her next movie, Clarita.” Juan Bautista Amé, the author of Clarita’s screenplay, here appears as a “good student” of Saleny’s.

WFP-SAL07

Still, El Pañuelo de Clarita (1919). Courtesy of the Amé Family Archive.

It was also the now-disappeared Crystal Palace theater that welcomed El Pañuelo de Clarita, the only one of Saleny’s films that has survived. According to La Patria’s announcement on October 28, 1919, Saleny filmed it from 1917 to 1918 and it premiered on October 30, 1919, at a private function at 10:30 in the morning (5).  La Patria’s review, however, was mixed. It reported how the audience “admired and sincerely applauded the film,” but the photography “left something to be desired,” and although the acting was only effective enough, the direction was judged to be “perfect.” On November 2, the newspaper L’Italia del Popolo published a review along the same lines, and although it did not praise the photography, it claimed Saleny’s direction was “impeccable,” the acting “admirable,” and the author of the story, Bautista Amé, “a good observer and a man of the heart” (n.p.). But the most praise was reserved for the performances of the nine-year-old girl, Aurora Rovirón, the young Argentino Carminati, and the amateurs Olivio Gianccaglio, Bautista Amé, Luis Suárez and Eduardo Di Pietro. La Película mentions Emilia’s mother, Vittoria Pieri, as part of the professional cast (“La película de la Sra. Saleny” 17).

WFP-SAL08

Still, El Pañuelo de Clarita (1919). Courtesy of the Amé Family Archive.

El Pañuelo de Clarita is a moral drama whose most striking feature is the point of view of the girl Clarita. She finds a beggar on a park bench and gives him her handkerchief and a coin. The daughter of a wealthy family, she is kidnapped by a gang of thieves who want a ransom. Among them is the same beggar that Clarita had found in the park. He recognizes her and saves her. The beggar in question turns out to be the girl’s relative, an honest carpenter who, having found himself unemployed and having been denied help by his wealthy family, unwillingly turns to crime. Once he is recognized by Clarita’s mother as being part of the family, he is given the administration of family land in gratitude for his deed and the family is reunited. 

Bautista Amé (w), <em>El pañuelo de Clarita </em>(1919). Amé Family Archive

Bautista Amé, El Pañuelo de Clarita (1919). Courtesy of the Amé Family Archive.

El panuelo de Clarita. Donated by the Ame family archive.

Still, El Pañuelo de Clarita (1919). Courtesy of the Amé Family Archive.

Saleny’s role in one last film is not clear. This is because so far as we know, as was reported in La Película in January 1919, the film Luchas en la vida (1919) was a project carried out by her students (13). It was filmed by student Argentino Carminati who later went on to direct the company Unión Film. The director of photography was a Mr. Aymaso. The cast included Tota Barbieri, Iris de Turias, Eduardo di Pietro, Argentino Carminati, Olivio Giaccaglia, Marcelino Buyan and Gauna, as well as the children Tito Ramos and Elda Carminati. According to La Película in the late December 1918 issue, the film was to have been completed in the winter of 1919 (“Notas Varias” 13). All we know is that, according to El Excelsior in two August issues it opened on August 6 and ran until August 27 and the film’s poster promised “emotion, sentiment, reality”(921; 1023).

Bibliography

“Accademia Saleny.” Rev Giornale d’Italia (December 1917): n.p.

“Al Crystal Palace.” Rev. La Patria (28 October, 1919): 5

Calvo, Guadi. “Las mujeres pioneras del cine en America Latina.” http://www.caratula.net/archivo/N31-0809/Secciones/cine/cine.html

Caras y Caretas (6 November 1915): n.p. [photo].

“Cinematrografiche.” Rev. La Patria (3 July, 1917): 4

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

El Excelsior  (6 August 1919): 921.

El Excelsior  (27 August  1919): 1023.

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

Foppa, Tito Livio. Diccionario Teatral del Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Tespis, 1961.

Kohen, Héctor. “Emilia Saleny: Actriz, directora, maestra.” Film. Buenos Aires, Nov. 1994: 34-5.

“L’Accademia Cinematografica.” La Patria  (16 October 1917): 4.

La fanciulla del bosco.” La Patria (5 July 1917): 5.

La Nación (30 July 1920): n.p.

“La Niña del bosque.” Rev.  La Patria  (23 June 1917): 4.

La Patria (5 May 1917): 4.

La Película (15 November 1917): 13.

La Película (13 December 1917): 15.

La Película (23 January 1919): 13.

“La película de la Sra. Saleny.” La Pelicula (7 November 1918): 17.

Maranghello, César. Breve historia del cine argentino. Buenos Aires: Laertes, 2005.

“Notas Varias.” La Pelicula  (26 December 1918): 13.

Núbila, Domingo di. Historia del Cine Argentino. Buenos Aires: Ed. Del Jilguero, 1988.

Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio. “Women Film-Makers in Latin America.” Framework 37, 1989: 129-139.

Seibel, Beatriz. Historia del Teatro Argentino. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2002.

Sendrós, Paraná. “Las cineastas olvidan a dos pioneras.” Ámbito Financiero (31 March, 1988): n.p.

Trelles Plazaola, Luis. Cine y Mujer en América Latina: Directoras de largo-metrajes de ficción. Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1991.

“Una nuova pellicola nazionale.” Rev L’Italia del Popolo (2 November 1919): n.p

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

Archival Paper Collections:

Assorted archival materials, records, and information relating to Emilia Saleny can be found in various collections at the following Argentinian organizations, archives, and online databases:

The Asociación La Mujer y el Cine

The Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Visuales

Biblioteca Nacional

Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos

The Fundación Cinemateca Argentina

The Hemeroteca de la Biblioteca del Congreso de la Nación

Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos

The Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken

Registro Nacional de las Personas

Citation

Fradinger, Moira . "Emilia Saleny." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2014.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-pnm3-m563>

Mae Murray

by Artemis Willis

Actress Mae Murray’s famous epithet, “The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips” describes far more than her cupid-bowed mouth; it evokes something unusual, distracting, and for some of her fans perhaps even overwhelming.  Also known as  “The Gardenia of the Screen,” Murray’s presence can be considered excessive and baroque, pleasurably perfuming and intensifying audience experience beyond whatever movie happens to encircle her.  Critics of Murray’s abilities consider her actions (vamping villains at midnight) silly and her presentation (bee-stung lips on an 1840s girl from Utah) incongruous (Slide 2002, 259).  But a force of nature is not necessarily natural, and Murray’s fans reveled in her colorful performances.

Advertising slide Mae Murray (a/w/p) What Am I Bid? (1919). MoMI

Lantern slide, Mae Murray in What Am I Bid? (1919). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image. 

Indeed, an acting style as gestural as Murray’s is anything but naturalized, as in merging with an ensemble or submitting to a role; it is a hallmark of the nineteenth century melodramatic repertoire.  Further, Murray’s signature dance narratives actually conjoin stage stardom of the late 1800s with the foundations of movie stardom in the early 1900s by existing without as well as within the text.  Apart from personal taste–predilections for exaggeration or realism–French Surrealist writer Jacques Rigaut was simply intoxicated by something alogically sublime: “Her little laugh you’ll never control, her latest lies, her next lies, her gowns, her exasperating childishness, her ultimata about a glove or stroll, things you’re unaware of…or an extravagant reward, of vice, I’m in love with Mae Murray (Rigaut 2000, 205).”

Advertising slide Mae Murray (a/w/p) Face Value (1918). MoMI

Lantern slide, Mae Murray in Face Value (1918). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, Murray (née Marie Adrienne Koenig) learned to dance in Chicago, where she was employed by a number of nightclubs as a chorus girl.  In pursuit of the dream of stage stardom, she moved to New York, changed her name to Mae Murray, and immediately found work as a dancer.  Her Broadway debut in 1906 was the result of an emergency substitution for Irene Castle, co-star of Vernon Castle, in Irving Berlin’s first musical, “About Town.”  Joining the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies in 1908, by 1915 Murray had become a headliner.  Shortly thereafter, Adolph Zukor signed her to a screen contract with Paramount.

Advertising slide Mae Murray (a) The Bride's Awakening (1925)

Lantern slide, Mae Murray in The Bride’s Awakening (1925). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

John Gilbert, Mae Murray and Roy D'Arcy in "The Merry Widow." MoMI

John Gilbert, Mae Murray, and Roy D’Arcy in The Merry Widow (1925). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

Released in 1916, Murray first film, To Have And To Hold secured her status as a movie star (“Mae Murray Makes A Good Movie Star”), generating a string of box office hits, including the De Mille-directed The Dream Girl (1916) and A Mormon Maid (1917), in which she played alongside then-actor Frank Borzage.  Her second husband Robert Z. Leonard, with whom she joined Universal to open her own production unit, Bluebird, directed most of Murray’s films in the 1910s. In films such as Her Body in Bond (1918), Leonard created a dance prologue in which she performed as Pierrette, replacing the expository approach of intertitles with pantomime.  Perhaps because many of her films contained dance sequences designed for her, such as The Delicious Little Devil (1919) with her former onstage dance partner Rudolph Valentino, Murray was one of the first actresses to demand live mood music on her sets (as well as the ubiquitous soft focus required of so many actresses).

In 1922 Murray and Leonard signed with Louis B. Mayer to make films for MGM under the Tiffany label, producing eight elaborate showcases for Murray’s extravagant and florid performance style.  After Circe the Enchantress (1924) Murray and Leonard parted.  [See Mae Murray, Interview, December, 1959, Columbia University Oral History Project, 1227-1228, where she says she named the company after her Tiffany ring, about which “I had my own way,” but complains about being called “hard to handle” in her account of the move from her company to Metro Goldwyn Mayer. EDs.]

Mae Murray (a/w/p) The Merry Widow (1925). MoMI

Mae Murray, The Merry Widow (1925). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

The unquestionable apex of Murray’s cinematic oeuvres was the 1925 von Stroheim masterpiece, The Merry Widow, in which she famously waltzed with leading man John Gilbert.  Critical and popular reception for the film was superlative.  In addition to praising artistic choices, such as the colors in the wedding sequence at the film’s end, the New York Times identified a new dimension to Murray’s range in this “fantastic affair:”

Mr. von Stroheim also is to be credited with having elicited from Mae Murray the best acting she has done in the last few years…Here she is not the spinning top she was in other features directed by Robert Z. Leonard, but almost a restrained actress, who gives a splendid account of herself in every situation.  She illustrates her grief and her joy, her contempt and her admiration in telling style (“Mae Murray Charming in The Merry Widow”).

Murray made three more films for MGM before marrying her fourth husband, David Mdivani, a specious ‘Prince’ who coerced her into remaining in Europe, effectively nullifying her contract with the studio.  After another divorce, which ended in a bitter custody battle in which she eventually lost her son, Koran Mdivani, Murray’s career began to deteriorate.  She acted in a few low-budget talkies in the early 1930s, and in 1934 returned to Broadway briefly to perform in The Milky Way.  In the 1940s she made regular appearances in the Times Square establishment, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, where her act included dancing the Merry Widow Waltz.

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

Lantern slide, Fascination (Tiffany Productions, 1922). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

Apart from collaborating with Jane Ardmore on her aptly entitled biography, The Self-Enchanted (1959), Murray’s final decades were spent in eccentric reverie and abject poverty [See 3 pages from her unpublished memoir “Life Stories.” EDs.]. Wandering from coast-to-coast, she was occasionally discovered absently humming the Merry Widow Waltz on a Central Park bench. Like Blanch Dubois and Norma Desmond (a character considered to be inspired in part by Murray) her lyrically lavish imagination, which for the French Surrealists once evoked something of the uncontrolled, had suffused her own perception.  As she introduced herself to a doctor at her final residence, the Motion Picture House and Hospital, “I’m Mae Murray, the young Ziegfeld beauty with the bee-stung lips – and Hollywood is calling me (Marion 1972, 297).”

Murray_CCP_FIGX_WFP-MURR11

Lantern slide, Mae Murray in The Big Little Person (1919). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

Bibliography

Anger, Kenneth.  Hollywood Babylon.  San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1975: 73, 123, 145, 152-3.

Ardmore, Jane.  The Self-Enchanted, Mae Murray: Image of an Era.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959.

Balshofer, Fred J. and Arthur C. Miller.  One Reel a Week. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967: 143-154.

Bangley, Jimmie.  “Mae Murray: ‘The Girl With The Bee Stung Lips.’”  Classic Images no. 254 (August 1996): 14-25.

Bennett, Alice.  “Mae Murray Makes-Believe.”  Motion Picture Classic (February 1919): 25-26.

Bodeen, DeWitt.  “Mae Murray.” Films in Review (December 1975): 597-618.

Briscoe, Johnson.  “A Child of Fortune.”  Motion Picture (March 1917): 29-31.

Cohn, Alfred A.  “The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips.”  Photoplay (November 1917): 53.

Corliss, Allen.  “Motoring with Mae.”  Photoplay (March 1917): 29-31.

Evans, Delight.  “The Truth about Mae Murray.”  Photoplay (August 1920): 40-41.

Kozarski, Richard. An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990:87, 257, 337.

Lee, Carol.  “A Bit of Fluff from Folly Land.”  Motion Picture Classic (June 1917): 35-36.

“Mae Murray Charming in ‘The Merry Widow.’”  New York Times (30 August 1925): n.p.

“Mae Murray—the Star Who Danced to Fame.”  Theater (June 1919): 395.

“Mae Murray Makes a Good Movie Star: Former Dancer an Attractive Heroine in ‘To Have and to Hold’ at the Strand.” New York Times (6 March 1916): n.p.

Marion, Frances.  Off With Their Heads! New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972.

Morgan, Mary.  “Secrets of Mae Murray’s Success.”  Photoplay (January 1922): 31, 112.

Rigaut, Jacques.  “Mae Murray.” In The Shadow & Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema. Ed., Paul Hammond.  San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000: 205.

Slide, Anthony.  Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses.  Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002: 258-260.

St. Johns, Adela Rogers.  “Mae Murray—A Study in Contradictions.”  Photoplay (July 1924): 43, 124.

Archival Paper Collections:

Reminiscences of Mae Murray: oral history, 1959. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Citation

Willis, Artemis. "Mae Murray." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-p81s-ec45>

Nell Emerald

by Tony Fletcher

Ellen Maud O’Shea was born on October 29, 1882, in Soho, London. Both her parents were Irish. They had five daughters, and each sister had a stage name: Sarah Emily was known as Eily Adair, Alice Mary as Norah, Julia Blanche as Monie Mine, Ellen Maud as Nell, and Constance Gladys as Connie.

Eily and Norah, the two eldest sisters, had a specialty act that was a version of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Corsican Brothers. Their mother worked as manager for “The Sisters O’Shea, Irish Duettists and Comedy Dancers.” Ernest De Vere, the manager of the Cambridge music hall, finally changed their name to “The Emerald Sisters,” and they became regulars on the Moss and Stoll Theatre circuits and toured abroad. All the sisters, apart from the youngest, Connie, took turns in the act.

When she was twenty-eight, Nell married David George Beattie, also known as Charles Beattie, on August 9, 1910.  This brought a change to her career. At Charles’s request she stopped performing in variety and music hall shows. It was around this period that Nell entered the film industry both as actress and producer, working throughout most of the 1910s  in various film companies located at Brighton and Shoreham on the south coast of England. One of these companies, the Brightonia Film Company, was registered on May 7, 1913, with a capital of £1,000 and a film factory at Hampton Street in Brighton. The two company directors listed were W. H. Speer, managing director, and Mrs. N. Beattie, indicating that Nell was also known professionally by her married surname.

W. Harold Speer had been involved in the variety business for some years. In January 1901, his cinematograph and variety combination had appeared at Pirbright Hall, Woking. In March of the same year, he showed Aladdin on the Ventiscope at the Royal in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. He later became proprietor of the Queen’s Theatre in Brighton, and on October 5, 1911, he launched Biocolour Films, a system invented by William Friese-Greene, which led to litigation over a number of years with the rival color company of Charles Urban and G. A. Smith with their Kinemacolor. Speer also founded Brighton and County Film Company, producing two fiction films released in May 1912: A Nurse’s Devotion  and The Motor Bandits. In addition he had a distribution company, the Popular Film Company, at 20 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London.

The Brightonia Film Company released six fiction films between May and July 1913: Tracking the Baby; East Lynne; Mercia, The Flower Girl; Wanted: A Husband; The Grip of Iron; and Flying from Justice. Nell acted in at least four of these. She played Lady Isobel in East Lynne; Mercia in Mercia, the Flower Girl; Cora Simmonet in The Grip of Iron; and Mildred Parkes in Flying from Justice.

An advertisement in The Cinema on June 4, 1913, stated that “Miss Nell Emerald, the producer and leading lady (late of the Prince of Pilsen Company and John Hart’s Company), is a well known and popular actress” (n.p.). At least two of her sisters were also in the Brightonia Company—Monnie Mine and Eily Adair. Nell continued her acting career with the Progress Film Company at Shoreham in Sussex where Sidney Morgan was a director. She acted in features throughout the 1920s, and in the late 1930s returned to producing films. She ventured into writing scenarios, one of which, This Week of Grace (1933), became a Gracie Fields feature. She died on June 21, 1969, at eight-seven years old, by which time she would have seen her niece, the actress Ida Lupino, make a directorial career for herself in the United States.

Bibliography

The Cinema (4 June 1913): n.p.

Gifford, Denis. The British Film Catalogue. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.

Low, Rachael. History of the British Film. Vol. II: 1906-14. London: Allen & Unwin, 1949.

Lupino, Stanley. From the Stocks to the Stars. London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1934.

Citation

Fletcher, Tony. "Nell Emerald." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-jrk7-4543>

May Clark

by Tony Fletcher

On March 14, 1907, Mabel Louise Clark married Norman Hughes Chaplin Whitton at St. Mary’s Church, Walton-on-Thames, England. She was twenty-one while he was twenty-four. Their professions were the same: they both called themselves “cinematographers,” which in her case may have meant any and all of the jobs listed in occupations above.

May Clark (a) and Margaret Hepworth (a) (as White Rabbit) in (i) Alice in Wonderland (/i) (1903). BFI

May Clark and Margaret Hepworth as White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (1903). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

May Clark (a) in Alice in Wonderland (1903). BFI

May Clark in Alice in Wonderland (1903). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

May Clark (a) (Alice) and Margaret Hepworth (a) (Queen) in (i) Alice in Wonderland (/i) (1903). BFI

May Clark as Alice and Margaret Hepworth as the Queen in Alice in Wonderland (1903). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

May Clark (a) in (i) A Seaside Girl (/i) (1907).

May Clark in A Seaside Girl (1907). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

May Clark (a) in Alice in Wonderland (1903).

May Clark in Alice in Wonderland (1903). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

Mabel Clark was born in June 1885 at Sunbury in Middlesex. Her father was a boatman based at Walton, and along with her father and her brother, Reggie, she started to work for Cecil Hepworth in 1898. She was employed doing small acting parts in the short films that Hepworth was beginning to produce. In 1900, at the age of fifteen, she joined him full time and continued in his employment until the birth of her first child in 1908.

In an interview she gave to the television program Yesterday’s Witness in 1968, she went into some detail about the work she did at Hepworth Studios. Most of the interview, which was filmed in conversation with the Clarendon Company actress Dorothy Bellew was left out of the completed program. However, the transcript of the interview survives, and we can read her account of her experiences in the early years of film production. To summarize this interview, in it Clark says that she was involved in many aspects of the production of Hepworth’s films—from special effects and set decoration to costume design and carpentry. She told Yesterday’s Witness that her first on-screen role in 1900 coincided with managing the pyrotechnics for The Burning Stable (1900). She had to orchestrate the burning of the barn and the saving of a horse. “None of it was prepared beforehand, or rehearsed or anything like that,” she said. “We just had to do the best we could and Cecil Hepworth kept turning the handle all the time. He got quite a good film, but it was only about 100 ft. long.”

She was paid 7s/6d a week by the company to do “odd jobs,” she says, and her hours were supposed to be from ten in the morning until five in the evening, but she often worked much longer. The mornings were dedicated to making the set and props as well as filming. Margaret Hepworth assisted her in sewing costumes. After lunch Clark developed and printed the film shot in the morning. Clark recalls that there was a lot of trial and error during this process. When finished, she would run the film through a projector to assess the print, and she often stayed late in the evening to correct a mishap. When she married Whitton in 1907, it was expected that she would retire, but she continued to work for the company a little while longer.

The period following Clark’s departure from Hepworth is, however, a blank apart from two films in which she acted for British and Colonial: The Winsome Widow (1912) and The Adventures of Dick Turpin-Two Hundred Guineas Reward, Wanted Dead or Alive (1912). However, Liam O’Leary, the Irish film historian, interviewed Vernon Whitton, her son, and although O’Leary’s summary of the interviews mainly deal with Norman Whitton, May is mentioned.

After their marriage, May and Norman left Hepworth and set up the Stamford Hill Film Cleaning Company, where they repaired perforations and tears and cleaned films. Later they joined forces with May’s brother, Reggie Clark, to form the County Film Company. In 1912, they moved to Dublin, and Norman Whitton established himself as a film producer, film renter, and cinema equipment supplier. Clark returned to London every couple of months to buy film programs.

In 1913, Norman set up the General Film Agency, which in 1914 became the General Film Supply Company with offices in Dublin. He produced “Irish events” and Pathé Gazette Specials of “The Troubles.” He directed a film In the Days of St. Patrick (1920) in which he and May were involved in every aspect of production. May ran the business for seven months while Norman went to the United States; however, the business failed, and by March 1921 they had sold it and returned to England. Next, Norman set up Vanity Fair Pictures with May’s brother, Reggie, now Reggie Strange, who had a film printing business. May Clark was the head business woman for both of these concerns. Around this period, the marriage between May and Norman ended, and very little is known about her subsequent activities. She must have remarried at some time because she was known as May French when she died on March 17, 1971, aged eighty-six.

Bibliography

Gifford, Denis. The British Film Catalogue. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.

Archival Paper Collections:

Clark, May. Interview. “Yesterday’s Witness.” 1968. British Film Institute

Whitton, Vernon.  Interview with Liam O’Leary. n.d. Liam O’Leary Archive. Interview tapes.  National Museum of Ireland.

Citation

Fletcher, Tony. "May Clark." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-av2p-qv38>

Eslanda Robeson

by Kyna Morgan
Eslanda Robeson (a)

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

Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson had a varied and remarkable career both within and outside motion picture filmmaking, working initially as the first Black hired at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital in the surgical pathology departmentAfter her marriage to Paul Robeson, world-renowned actor, singer, and activist, whose biography she wrote in 1930, she joined him in several independent film projects. Later she worked as an anthropologist and travel writer.  In addition to being Robeson’s talent manager when he worked on Body and Soul (1925), Charles Musser argues that Eslanda managed many aspects of her husband’s film career as well his musical and theatrical career (91). In the silent era, Eslanda appears only in the avant-garde classic Borderline (1930), but later would have a role, which she negotiated to secure, as a café proprietress in the Robeson film Big Fella (1937) (Duberman 207).

Eslanda Robeson (a) Borderline (1929)

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

Borderline tackled the issue of a biracial love affair between a white man and a black woman, played by Eslanda Robeson, and has been widely considered bold and ground-breaking for the way in which it treats not only racial tensions but heterosexuality and homosexuality. Filmed by avant-garde artist and filmmaker Kenneth MacPherson in Territet, Switzerland, during March 20-30, 1930, the film also starred the poet, actress, and producer of Borderline, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who recollected that “Essie Robeson treated the experience as being something of a lark for them.” Eslanda Robeson’s diary, however, reveals the Robesons’ point of view on their white European collaborators. She wrote that “Kenneth and H.D. used to make us so shriek with laughter with their naïve ideas of Negroes that Paul and I often completely ruined our makeup with tears of laughter, had to make up all over again. We never once were colored with them.” MacPherson had worked on the film for a year as writer, producer, and director while the Robesons were filmed over the course of one week. Paul and Eslanda agreed to participate in the experimental film, thinking of it as a type of vacation retreat. Although they were only a part of the production process for a week, Eslanda began talks with MacPherson early in the script development often suggesting ideas. According to Robeson biographer Martin Duberman, however, MacPherson only “promised to incorporate her suggestions” and finally did not allow her to see the finished version (130).

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay.

Citation

Morgan, Kyna. "Eslanda Robeson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-v5rc-mv43>

Zora Neale Hurston

by Aimee Dixon

Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-American woman filmmaker. The film footage, which includes Children’s Games (1928), Logging (1928), and Baptism (1929), appears to be from her work as a student of anthropology under the tutelage of famed anthropologist, professor and mentor, Dr. Franz Boas. A graduate of Barnard College and a Guggenheim fellow, Hurston traveled to back to a South similar to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida to capture a variety of short takes of African-American life. Ethnographic in nature, the films reflect a focus of folklorists of that time period who believed that “…cultural performance and beliefs must be expeditiously collected and documented because they would soon be gone forever” (Gibson, 205).

Zora Neale Hurston (d/p) 1927

Zora Neale Hurston, 1927. Courtesy of Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

While these films are considered by Gibson to most likely be an element of her research on folklore of African-Americans, Hurston was also a playwright. Her prize-winning 1925 play “Color Struck”  attracted the attention of members of the Harlem Renaissance. That project along with other dramatic works by Hurston led to a collaborative project with Langston Hughes.  The 1930 play “Mule Bone” could be seen as  reflecting Hurston’s  concern with “authenticity” that at least one critic has attributed to her training as an anthropologist (Carson, 123). Finally, a footnote in Antonia Lant’s Red Velvet Seat tells us that Hurston  worked as screenwriter and novelist Fannie Hurst’s personal assistant from 1925-26 and went on to a job as  a staff screenwriter at Paramount Studios in 1941 (795).  Hurston, looking back, wrote about her relationship to the novelist four years after the 1933 publication of Hurst’s famous passing novel Imitation of Life.

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay.

Citation

Dixon, Aimee. "Zora Neale Hurston." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-qvay-6n29>

Alice B. Russell

by Kyna Morgan

Alice B. Russell, the second wife of Oscar Micheaux, played a large part in the professional life of her husband, starring in several of his films as well as helping to administer the Micheaux Film Company. There are several conflicting dates for her birth, ranging from 1889 to 1899. Patrick McGilligan believes that the date, June 30, 1889 recorded on the 1900 US Census, is the most reliable one (223). Her acting work began in 1928 with the Broken Violin, and she continued working in various capacities until Micheaux’s last film, The Betrayal, in 1948.

In recent years she has come out of obscurity as film scholars such as Ron Green began to argue that she effectively worked as producer on some of his later films. Alice Russell appears briefly in Darktown Revue (1931), a variety-show style short, in a non-speaking role and may also be a member of the choir. This extant film was first produced as a prologue to Micheaux’s first sound film, The Exile (1931), but was eventually released as a separate film, according to Bowser, Gaines, and Musser (Green 274). In 1926, Russell married Micheaux in Montclair, New Jersey. Their marriage license lists her as “concert soloist.” J. Ronald Green postulates that one of Micheaux’s female characters in his novel The Case of Mrs. Wingate who takes on many aspects of the motion picture business including both film editing and film sales, might represent Russell (27-28). According to Green, it is a reflection on both Micheaux and his wife that he appears to have appreciated her superior education and took her black middle-class background into consideration when assigning her roles (27-28, 151). Following Green’s suggestion, we might see that this treatment of the characters that Russell played not only spoke to the esteem in which Micheaux held his wife but also is indicative of the refined image he wanted to project to an audience wider than the African American community, and in this Micheaux and his wife were typical of the uplift aspirations of the “race cinema” producers. It also seems likely that Alice B. Russell downplayed her indispensability to the motion picture business. In a letter Russell wrote to her sister Ethel in 1948, she mentions Micheaux’s travel to Chicago to make a motion picture, but only of her work that “He took me along to help him.” And again, the image of herself as nothing more emerges in the 1930 New York City Census record where “Alice Micheaux” has apparently listed her occupation as “Helper – Motion Pictures.” Today, however, we read this entry as leaving no doubt that she was actively engaged in many aspects of production.

With additional research by Aimee Dixon.

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay.

Citation

Morgan, Kyna. "Alice B. Russell." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hnkm-zc28>

Eloyce King Patrick Gist

by Kyna Morgan

Eloyce King Patrick Gist produced films of entertainment but with a strong moral and spiritual mission, a goal she shared with her filmmaker husband. The Library of Congress publication on silent era women behind the camera lists all of Gist’s credits as shared by her husband, James Gist. In the case of Hell Bound Train (ca. 1929-30), she re-wrote and re-edited the 16mm film after her husband completed it, and Gloria J. Gibson thinks that she may have also helped to re-shoot sequences (201). Verdict Not Guilty (1930-33) is thought to have been produced, written and directed with James Gist. Although the two made their short religious films together, Eloyce belonged to the Bahá’í faith and her husband was a Christian evangelical. But both worked to find an audience for their films in African American community groups and churches. In recent years, the job of editing and restoring these films was taken up by the Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and Sound Recording Division of the U.S. Library of Congress, which represented a challenge because the original 16mm footage was in shreds and out of order due to multiple screenings, indicating a wide use of the films. The Gists ran a very low budget operation using non-professional actors and their object was to make 16mm motion pictures to accompany religious services, thus Hell Bound Train preached temperance. Verdict Not Guilty was a crime drama commentary on the justice system which was screened often by the NAACP (Gibson, 195-209). Eloyce Gist’s work remains unique in its explicitly non-theatrical definition and its purpose as a tool for moral education and social uplift.

With additional research by Aimee Dixon.

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay.

Citation

Morgan, Kyna. "Eloyce King Patrick Gist." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-0fdd-a762>

Henderina Victoria Scott

by Amy Bethel

Henderina (Rina) Victoria Scott, née Klaassen, was a botanist with a special interest in fossil botany and plant physiology. Our interest lies with her pioneering experiments with cinematography in the early 1900s when she photographed and exhibited around a dozen moving pictures featuring plant and flower movements.

Henderina Klaassen was born in 1862 in Brixton, Surrey. She studied advanced botany at the Royal College of Science in 1886, where she was lectured by the botanist Dukinfield Henry Scott. A successful personal and professional partnership ensued. They were married in 1887, and Rina Scott began to assist her husband with his work while also conducting her own research. They were both notable in the field of botany, and material relating to Rina Scott is archived under both her own name and her husband’s.

Other than a handful of obituaries in the scientific press, there is no real public record of Scott’s life or work. To date she has been little more than a footnote in motion picture history, cited only for showing time-lapse films at the Royal Horticultural Society in 1906 (Low 1949, 158).

However, her career deserves further investigation, the consequences of which should award her more recognition in light of her creative use of experimental photographic techniques and her enthusiasm for exhibiting her films for scientific purposes.

It was in 1902 while studying the plant Sparmannia africana that Scott first saw the potential of cinematographic technology as a scientific tool. She spent at least a year experimenting with cinematography before publishing her results in the Annals of Botany in 1903, claiming to have made the “first kinematograph experiments under natural conditions, daylight being used and artificial light only resorted to at night” (775). Despite initial challenges, Scott’s experiments were well suited to cinematographic work and enabled the observer to witness what is usually imperceptible to the eye. Plant growth that took several months could be viewed in mere seconds when photographed at intervals and projected on screen. Scott later explained during a lecture in 1906, referenced in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society: “An ordinary kinematograph picture reproduces rapid movements of living objects. The purpose of my pictures is to show at an accelerated speed slow movements which cannot be watched by the eye, such as the growth of the young plant from the seed” (49).

Scott’s inspiration appears to have come from Professor Pfeffer in Germany who used a kinematograph around 1900 for botanical demonstrations. Pfeffer was using a comparatively expensive kinematograph adapted specifically for his experiments. Scott, however, experimented with a standard kinematograph and discovered that the damp, humid conditions in her greenhouse were not compatible with celluloid film, and unfortunately the inventor of her machine was unwilling to adapt it to her needs. The London-based inventor of the Kammatograph, Leonard Ulrich Kamm, was more useful to her since he customized a machine to suit Scott’s work.

In 1898,  Kamm patented his combined camera and projector, the Kammatograph, and marketed it for amateur use from circa 1900. The main advantage for Scott was that it used a glass disc to record a spiral row of images, rather than using film, so it was better suited to her greenhouse studio. Once the sensitized disc was removed and developed, a positive plate could be printed from it. A lantern was placed in front of the wooden box housing the machine, and the resulting images were accelerated when projected on screen. Her model could take 350 photographs, giving her around thirty seconds of motion pictures.

Scott usually took regular time exposures at fifteen minute intervals rather than using instantaneous photography. She did, however, use instantaneous photography in order to capture rapid movements such as a stamen being touched. In the 1907 Royal Horticultural Society journal article, Scott described the time-lapse method of photography as “very laborious work.” It was a time-consuming process, and Scott also bemoaned: “I have only about a dozen successful plates as a result of over three years’ labour” (50).

This was not of course a commercial enterprise. Scott does not appear to have sold or marketed her animated photographs. Rather, she saw herself as a “private investigator” (772) and employed the kinematograph for research rather than for public entertainment. As well as publishing the results of her Kammatograph work in the scientific press, she demonstrated her moving pictures at a variety of scientific societies in the south of England. Much of the information concerning Scott therefore derives from scientific archives and journals, a fruitful source for necessary cross-disciplinary research.

On August 19, 1904, Scott gave an exhibition of her Kammatograph photographs at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, documented in their report (102). Later that year, on December 2, she exhibited the same program at the Holmesdale Natural History Club in Reigate. Scott described the apparatus and method for taking pictures and exhibited animated photographs of flowers opening and closing, buds expanding and developing into flowers, the sensitive plant closing and re-opening, the movements of climbing plants, and insects visiting flowers (73). It is difficult to know how Scott’s animated photographs were received as they were shown to scientific audiences and not the paying public. Her presentations at scientific societies were not reviewed critically, presumably because she was either a society member or a guest. Brief details were generally recorded in society proceedings, and the most descriptive comment we have is from the Holmesdale Proceedings: “Mrs. D. H. Scott… gave a very interesting exhibition of Kammatograph Pictures” (73).

In February 1905 Scott became one of the first women to be admitted as a fellow to the prestigious London Linnean Society. Less than a month later, she exhibited nine animated photographs at the society, we learn from the 1904–1905 Proceedings (10–11). From the 1906–1907 Proceedings we learn that in April 1906, Scott delivered a lecture at the Royal Horticultural Society showing around six of her animated photographs. In 1907, she displayed animated photographs again at the Linnean Society, on this occasion for the Society’s June anniversary meeting (63). This appears to have been Scott’s final exhibition of animated photographs, although there may be further demonstrations that have not yet come to light.

A poignant entry in her husband’s diary on January 18, 1929, records Rina’s unexpected death after a short illness at her home in Oakley, Hampshire. Dukinfield writes: “the blow fell… I found Rina unconscious.” Scott’s pioneering work with cinematography over twenty years earlier had enabled her contemporaries to see the invisible. When projected on screen, her Kammatograph plates manipulated and accelerated time, allowing her to demonstrate an inherently slow but vital process—the growth and evolution of plants. This must surely have been an incredible visual experience, so it is particularly unfortunate that none of Scott’s films are known to have survived. It would be a fitting tribute if unidentified Kammatograph plates could be attributed to Rina Scott so that the fruits of her labor can be brought to life on the screen once more.

Bibliography

A. B. R. “Mrs. Henderina Victoria Scott.” Journal of Botany (1929): 57.

British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Seventy-Fourth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Held at Cambridge in August 1904. London: John Murray, 1905.

Holmesdale Natural History Club. Proceedings of the Holmesdale Natural History Club for the Years 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905. Reigate: Reigate Press, 1906.

Linnean Society of London. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 117 (1904-1905): 10-11.

------. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 119 (1906-1907): 63.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film 1906-1914. London: Allen & Unwin, 1949.

“Mrs. D. H. Scott.” Nature: A Weekly Journal of Science 123 (1929): 287.

Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey, and Joy Dorothy Harvey. The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-20th Century. Vol.2. L-Z. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Oliver, F. W. “Mrs. Henderina (Rina) Victoria Scott.” Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 141 (1928-1929): 146-147.

Scott, Dukinfield Henry. Diary (1929). Box 3, D. H. Scott Collection. Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Scott, Mrs. Dukinfield H. “Animated Photographs of Plants.” Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 32 (1907): 48-51.

------. “Animated Photographs of Plants.” Knowledge & Scientific News (May 1904): 83-86.

Scott, Rina. “On the Movements of the Flowers of Sparmannia africana, and their Demonstration by means of the Kinematograph.” Annals of Botany 17:68 (Sept 1903): 761-777.

“Scott, Victoria Henderina (Mrs. D. H. Scott), née Klaassen.” The Botanical Society and Exchange Club of the British Isles Report for 1929 9:1 (1930): 98.

Archival Paper Collections:

D. H. Scott Collection. Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Estate of Dukinfield H. Scott (title deeds and papers) [2202/3/1-38]. Surrey History Centre.

Citation

Bethel, Amy. "Henderina Victoria Scott." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4sms-3r28>

The McDonagh Sisters

by Rebecca Barry

Isabel, Phyllis, and Paulette McDonagh were sisters, business partners, and creative collaborators who made films in Sydney, Australia, in the 1920s and 1930s. Isabel, the eldest, was the actress and star of all their films under the name Marie Lorraine. Phyllis took on the role of art director, publicist, and producer. Paulette, the youngest of the three, was the writer and director of all their films.  The sisters grew up in the upper middle class suburb of Drummoyne in Sydney, Australia. Drummoyne House, the grand family home, was filled with antique furniture and became the movie set and backdrop for many of their films. The home was a hub of bohemia, with traveling theatrical and entertainment people visiting whenever in Sydney.

Isabel McDonagh (a) as Marie Lorraine in advertisement for McDonagh Sisters The Far Paradise (1928). AUC

Isabel McDonagh as Marie Lorraine in advertisement for McDonagh Sisters The Far Paradise (1928). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Phyllis McDonagh (art director, publicisit, prod) nd. AUC

Phyllis McDonagh portrait. Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Paulette McDonagh (d/w) nd. AUC

Paulette McDonagh portrait. Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Isabel McDonagh in Those Who Love (1926) Paulette McDonagh (w/d). AUC

Isabel McDonagh. Those Who Love (1926). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Paulette McDonagh (w/d) directing a scene, The Far Paradise (1928). AUC

Paulette McDonagh directing a scene, The Far Paradise (1928). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Paulette McDonagh (w,d) directing scene from The Cheaters (1930), AUC

Paulette McDonagh directing scene from The Cheaters (1930). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Advertisement for The Cheaters (1930) Paulette McDonagh (d/w). AUC

Advertisement for The Cheaters (1930). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

McDonagh Sisters "Two Minutes of Silence" 1933 article. AUC

McDonagh Sisters, “Two Minutes of Silence,”1933 article. Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The McDonagh Sisters’ first film Those Who Love (1926) was privately funded by family money. Being their first foray into the filmmaking business, the sisters engaged the services of P. J. Ramster, who ran an acting school in Sydney. After creative differences with Ramster came to a head, Paulette took over the reins of directing the screenplay she had written with a new-found confidence. The risk paid off, and the release of the film was triumphant. Those Who Loved received rave reviews in 1926 from the publication Everyone’s, which hailed the film and declared that “The result is a dazzling triumph and which is said to be the best Australian film that has yet graced the screen” (n.p.). Everyone’s was positive again three days later, one journalist commenting about Isabel’s performance: “A Sydney girl whose Histrionic ability is remarkable. Her splendid performance ranks with some of the best characterisations ever given to the screen by the world’s greatest stars” (n.p.).

It seems that the McDonagh Sisters had a connection with their audience and Those Who Love was a box office hit, earning more money in the Australian domestic market than the Charlie Chaplin film of that year, The Gold Rush. Unlike other domestic films being made at the time, the McDonaghs didn’t make explicitly Australian films, but were influenced by Hollywood melodrama and also German Expressionism.

As the result of this success, the sisters were able to finance their next feature The Far Paradise (1928). According to Smith’s Weekly, The Far Paradise has a smoothness and finish rare in Australian Films. Apparently the astute sisters have realised that America has developed the techniques of production to fine art and have been willing to learn” (n.p.). The Far Paradise was also a box office hit, but the distribution arrangement meant that the money didn’t go to the McDonagh Sisters. The bombardment of Hollywood product and distribution strongholds on the domestic market was making it nearly impossible for local filmmakers to compete. By the late 1920s, the family finances were strained as all of their inherited wealth was spent on making motion pictures, and they resorted to mortgaging the grand family home, Drummoyne House.

The Cheaters (1930) was the next film up for production. The sisters were summoned to the offices of Frank Thring, Sr., managing director of Hoyts Theatres, who offered them a lucrative distribution and exhibition deal, but the sisters declined the offer and later lived to regret the decision. They were forced to sell Drummoyne House, but found a private investor, Neville Maken. The Cheaters was entered into the Australian Film Competition, but the rules required the film to be released in sound. The conversion to sound proved to be a difficult process, and they encountered political as well as technical problems. Worse, the screening of the film was an absolute disaster, with the conversion to a Talkie eliminating the intertitles of the silent version.

The sisters persevered with another film Two Minutes Silence (1933), an antiwar film, a move away from their typical romantic melodramas. Sadly, this picture was a failure at the box office, and the sisters never made a film together again. Over forty years would go by before another Australian woman got a chance. When Gillian Armstrong directed My Brilliant Career in 1979, she was the first Australian woman credited with directing a mainstream feature since Paulette McDonagh directed Two Minutes Silence in the 1930s.

Isabel moved to London, married, had three children, and performed occasionally on the stage. Phyllis also married and worked in New Zealand as a journalist, returning to Australia as social editor of the North Shore Times. For a short time Paulette made documentaries, and then she lived out the rest of her days in Kings Cross until her death in 1978.

Bibliography

Hall, Ken. Interview with Graham Shirley, 1976. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Shirley, Graham and Brian Adams. Australian Cinema: The First 80 Years, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1983.

McDonagh, Paulette. Interview with Graham Shirley and Joan Long. Recording. August 1974. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The Far Paradise Rev. Smith’s Weekly (1928): n.p.

Those Who Love. Rev. Everyone's (24 Nov. 1926): n.p.

Those Who Love. Rev. Everyone's (24 Nov. 1926): n.p.

Archival Paper Collections:

McDonagh Sisters, clippings and transcripts files. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

McDonagh Sisters, scrapbook for The Far Paradise (1928). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Citation

Barry, Rebecca. "The McDonagh Sisters." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kees-a847>

Thea Červenková

by Jindřiška Bláhová

When Thea (Terezie) Červenková left Czechoslovakia in 1923 to start a new life with her brother in Latin America, her passport stated that she was a writer and a journalist. However, she was more than that. At the age of forty-one she was leaving behind at least two careers—one in writing and a shorter, but no less prolific career in the film industry, where she worked as a director, a screenwriter, a journalist, and, most importantly, as an entrepreneur. During a five-year period, from 1918 to 1923, she translated continuity titles, wrote eight scripts, directed eight films, wrote articles for the trade film magazine Československý film, and cofounded, with cameraman Josef Brabec, her own film company, Filmový ústav, which she ran until her departure for Rio de Janeiro in 1923. We learn this from an undated interview with her closest coworker, Josef Brabec (Josefem Brabcem), who also recalls her as a woman with a “business spirit,” who managed a guesthouse in Prague (Brabcem 3).

Paličova dcera (1923) Thea Červenková(dir/scr) with: Václav Brabec, Antonie Nedošinská, Jiří Nedošinský, Božena Plecitá.

Paličova dcera (1923). Courtesy of the Národní filmový archiv.

Before she departed for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Červenková had worked in the fledgling Czechoslovak film industry on several levels from 1918 to 1923. She started in 1918 as a continuity intertitle translator, presumably for the film company Slavia. In this five-year period, Červenková supervised production and was writer-director on eight motion pictures. Four of these were produced by her own company Filmový ústav. Červenková also published numerous articles in the pioneering Czechoslovak film magazine Československý film.

When one looks back at Červenková’s activities in the highly disorganized and unstable environment of the early Czechoslovak film industry at the end of the 1910s and early 1920s, boldness and drive typify her character. The interview with Josef Brabec confirms this as he describes her as a highly intelligent, independent, and capable woman (Brabcem 3). Červenková’s work and film career have been so far documented very little, but in the existing accounts of Czechoslovak film history by Czech film historian Zdeněk Štábla, it has been reduced to several short remarks that focused on the highlights of her latter career. In the Czech film history, she has become widely known as the “lady crazy about film,” but the nickname obscured her far more complex involvement in the industry. Červenková’s personal and professional life beyond the motion picture business has been neglected entirely, as has her life before she started to pursue her film career.

Further, contradictory versions of Červenková’s entry into the motion picture business exist, one published, the other unpublished. Where the two versions agree is that the initial phase of her film career began when, at the age of twenty-six, she became involved in the local film scene before the coup for Czechoslovakian independence in October 1918. But beyond that, the two versions of her career development diverge. According to Štábla’s published history, in June 1918, Červenková, together with cinematographer Josef Brabec, founded the film company Slavia (Štábla 314). In this version, after the coup, she sold Slavia to the Austrian firm Sascha-Film, but remained with the company as a film director.

Paličova dcera (1923) Thea Červenková(dir/scr) with: Josef Gabris, Božena Plecitá, Miloš Vávra, Vojtěch Záhořík, Alois Škrdlík

Paličova dcera (1923). Courtesy of the Národní filmový archiv.

Babička (1921). Dir/sc.: Thea Červenková with Liduška Innemannová, Ludmila Innemannová,

Babička (1921). Courtesy of the Národní filmový archiv.

Štábla’s own interview with Červenková’s coworker and later business partner, Brabec, challenges this version. As Brabec recalls, the two first met in 1918 when they were working for Pragafilm, one of the bigger film companies at the time. Červenková, who previously worked as a writer for the theatre, was given her first film job there. She worked as a scriptwriter and also as an editor, focusing on intertitles (Brabcem 12). Brabec and Červenková soon left to work for the Czech branch of the Austrian film company Sascha-Film. In the aftermath of the 1918 coup, the branch was renamed to bear the more patriotic Slavic moniker of Slaviafilm. Slaviafilm was initially a film distributor, which did not finance its product, but purchased completed films from filmmakers. Shortly after Červenková’s and Brabec’s arrival, the company expanded into film production. Červenková was one of those who initiated this business expansion (Brabcem 12). She was entrusted with the “artistic supervision” of production, which basically involved directing and scriptwriting.

Babička (1921).Thea Červenková.

Babička (1921). Courtesy of the Národní filmový archiv.

Červenková’s first script for Slaviafilm was a short film, Lásko třikrát svatá/Love Sacred Three Times (1918), which is technically still an Austrian-Hungarian production since it was shot before the coup. Červenková wrote or helmed five short films for Slaviafilm, all shot by Brabec. After the rather dramatic experience of shooting the 1918 revolution in the streets of Prague, which earned her press accusations of unpatriotic activities, she moved on to her directorial debut, the short film comedy Náměsíčný/Sleepwalker (1919), while still helping with the continuity titles. She continued directing short films, making another four, all of which were low-end comedies or grotesques. She then wrote the 1919 film Ada se učí jezdit/Ada Learns to Drive. Later that year she directed another three films: Náměsíčný Monarchistické spiknutí/The Monarchist Conspiracy, and Zloděj/The Thief. The last of them stands out. Zloděj, a farce about a housewife who cheats on her husband as he investigates a string of local burglaries and the only extant film of her early career, offers us a unique opportunity to actually glimpse the director herself, who reportedly disliked being photographed. Extending her film activities to acting, Červenková appeared in a charming, small role as a rather dumb maid who is drugged by a thief who is the seducer of her landlady.

Slaviafilm turned out to be a takeoff platform for Červenková’s own film business. Working together, Červenková and Brabec became a well-coordinated team. Aspiring to make her own films and fulfill her ambitions to adapt classical works of Czech literature, however, she left Slaviafilm in the second half of 1919 and cofounded Filmový ústav. As with many companies of that time, Filmový ústav was a small, family-style enterprise producing virtually homemade movies—the interiors were shot in the backyard of her father’s house in the Vinohrady quarter of Prague, which became the center of Červenková’s film activities. The company had fairly limited commercial ambitions, aiming to generate enough revenue from its films to permit continued production. “It was just for living,” commented Brabec on the financial success of the films. “After all, we were saved by a few features… [w]e just kept our heads above water. And grew old,” concluded the cinematographer (4). Despite these limitations, Filmový ústav was one of the more ambitious film producers of the time (Štábla 47). The family-like nature of her film company raises the rather intriguing issue of Červenková’s social status as a female filmmaker, which seems to be closely tied up with the status of the cinema itself. Brabec makes an explicit link between the social status of a single person and the dedication required in the movie business. “… I was not married, so I could venture and so could Miss Červenková who was also single… ” Červenková was divorced by that time and had a son who might have been fourteen when she started the company; however, the fate of her son is not entirely clear. His name is not on Červenková’s passport issued for her 1923 journey to Latin America, and neither is there any other reference to him in any police documents available.

WFP2-CER05

Unidentified Thea Červenková film. Courtesy of the Národní filmový archiv.

The inclination towards classical literary works leads us to yet another one of Thea Červenková’s passions—film journalism, writing that was part of her effort to conceive of the cinema as a cultural and national phenomenon. In articles published in the film trade magazine Československý film, she balanced cultural, economic, national, and social aspects of cinema in the young nation. “Film is a deep well of knowledge, film will become more influential than press, film is an art which mustn’t be profaned by flag-waving or turned into a cash cow… But film is also a national credo, a declaration… and this mustn’t be forgotten,” wrote Červenková in the 1919 article “Film, jeho význam a národnost,” which translates as “Film, Its Meaning and Nationality” (3).

Between 1919 and 1923, Filmový ústav produced five feature films and several documentaries about famous national figures. Červenková penned and directed all of them except for one of the documentaries. Both the documentaries and the features reflect the company’s aim to enlist film to help construct a national identity. This is most clear in the first feature film that Červenková produced and directed for Filmový ústav. She adapted Božena Němcová’s novel Babička/The Grandmother (1921), arguably the most iconic piece of Czech classic literature. This was the first attempt to bring this epic, yet very intimate, novel to the silver screen. After Babička, she adapted two famous stage plays: Paličova dcera/The Arsonist’s Daughter (1923) and Bludička (1922).

Babička (1921). Dir/sc.: Thea Červenková. online source.

Program, Babička (1921). Courtesy of http://www.filmovy-plakat.cz.

The press articles, the interview with Brabec, and the fate of the company itself indicate that her adaptations of the classic works of Czech literature and theatre were neither commercially nor critically successful, and that her work was critically viewed as mediocre at best. She was accused of highlighting sensational, attention-grabbing material rather than loyally adapting classics in Filmový kurýr (59). Another critic, writing in Večerník Práva lidu dismissed her adaptation of Babička as “a crime” against the critically acclaimed novel (3). The look of her film was made to exemplify the overarching problem of early Czechoslovak cinema. “The problem of Czech film generally is evident in Babička,” continued Filmový kurýr, “it was made very quickly and with insufficient capital” (59). Červenková’s last film, Ty petřínské stráně, received a similarly negative critical response. Comparing the film with foreign film productions, Rozpravy Aventina critic Otakar Štorch-Marien derided it as an “embarrassing mistake” (13). Her work was deemed mediocre, preferring sensation to accuracy, said one review of Babička (59). The Večerník Práva lidu critic even called her adaptation of Babička “a crime” (3). Since Červenková’s feature films were generally dismissed by film critics when they were released in the 1920s, her work was then deemed to be of little importance by the film historians in the subsequent decades (Štábla 391).

Červenková’s third film Paličova dcera was granted a more positive critical reception. The film magazine Filmové zprávy praised the drama as “[a] truly Czech film… full of dramatic moments” (8). The mediocre commercial performances of the company’s films had been sufficient to ensure the company’s survival during a period of relative economic stability. In 1923, however, the Czechoslovak film industry was plunged into a severe economic crisis. Interest in domestic product dipped considerably when the market was flooded with imported films (Havelka 6). Like many other companies, Filmový ústav was forced to cease production.

WFP2-CER02

Byl první máj (1919). Courtesy of the Národní filmový archiv.

According to contemporary critics, Červenková was hardly the director whose work would improve the status of the cinema and elevate it to the level of respectable but democratic art, the very status she was advocating. Although her films are far from being creative milestones, her contribution to early Czechoslovak cinema is not insignificant. She is one of the trailblazers who adapted works of classic literature and theatre for the big screen. She also systematically attempted to employ film to cultivate national self-confidence and contribute to national identity. Her departure for Latin America offered the opportunity to turn her into a truly mysterious woman of the silent era of the Czechoslovak film industry. The extreme paucity of archival documents represents the main obstacle to the full reconstruction of the life and career of this undeniably ambitious woman. The research in the Czech archives is complicated by two factors. The reliability of the existing accounts of early film history is brought into question by the lack of referencing primary sources. This means that it is difficult to cross-reference old claims with new materials. Furthermore, after the nationalization of the Czechoslovak film industry in 1945, many primary documents on the history of the film industry prior to World War II were lost or destroyed by the authorities. Research, however, should not be limited to the Czech archives. Relevant documents on Thea Červenková may be available in the Austrian archives, since Červenková started her career as a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The second possible source of data may be private and public archives in Brazil, her second home.

Bibliography

“Babička.” Rev. Divadlo budoucnosti vol. 3, no. 8 (24 Feb. 1922): 2. Národní filmový archiv.

“Babička.” Rev. Filmový kurýr vol. 1, no. 5-6 (24 Feb. 1922): 59. Národní filmový archiv.

Brabcem, Josefem. “Rozhovor s Josefem Brabcem.” Undated interview by Zdeněk Štábla. Os 3/3, vol. 44, no. 3-12. Národní filmový archiv.

Červenkova, Thea. “Film, jeho význam a národnost.” Československý film vol. 2, no. 6 (1 April 1919): 3. Národní filmový archiv.

Český hraný film I, 1898–1930. Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 1995.

Havelka, Jiří. 50 let Československého filmu. Praha: Československý státní film, 1953.

J.P. “Zločin They Červenkové.” Večerník Práva lidu 269 (28 Nov. 1921): 3. Národní filmový archiv

O.Š.M. [Otakar Štorch-Marien]. “Ty petřínské stráně.”  Rozpravy Aventina vol. 1, no. 1 (Sept. 1925- 1926): 13.

“Paličova dcera.” Rev. Filmové zprávy vol. 1, no. 8 (3 Nov. 1923): 8.

Štábla, Zdeněk. Data a fakta z dějin československé kinematografie, 1896–1945. Vol. 2. Praha: Čs. Filmový Ústav, 1989.

Archival Paper Collections:

Various clippings and archival documents. Národní filmový archiv.

Citation

Bláhová, Jindřiška. "Thea Červenková." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-dn2b-9w86>

Maria P. Williams

by Kyna Morgan

Maria P. Williams, who, like Tressie Souders, also lived in Kansas City, Missouri, produced, distributed, and acted in her own film, The Flames of Wrath (1923). The Norfolk Journal and Guide, as quoted by Yvonne Welbon, thus lauded her: “Kansas City is claiming the honor of having the first colored woman film producer in the United States…” (40). Recall that Kansas City had made the same claim for Souders the year before. There is also, however, the question of the difference between “director” and “producer,” which makes an important distinction between the two since Souders is credited with directing, producing, and writing, and Williams with producing and writing, but not directing. “Producing,” it should be noted, is often used ambiguously in the silent era. The Flames of Wrath, for instance, is described on the first page of the Norfolk Journal and Guide as a mystery drama in five reels, “written, acted and produced entirely by colored people” (Welbon, 40).

Maria P. Williams (d/p/a) Title Page My Work and Public Sentiment (1916)

Title Page, My Work and Public Sentiment (1916), by Maria P. Williams. 

Maria P. Williams (a/p/o) and Jesse L. Williams

Maria P. Williams  and Jesse L. Williams. 

Williams’ career up until this point revolved around social activism and leadership as evident in a short book she authored, My Work and Public Sentiment, published in 1916, which credits her on the cover as “National Organizer, Good Citizens League, Lecturer and Writer.” This is confirmed by the 1922 City Directory of Kansas City which lists her as “lecturer.” Motion pictures, however, appear to have been the family business, and Maria P. Willliams should be linked with other African American women film producers who worked with their husbands such Mrs. M. Webb and Oscar Micheaux’s wife, Alice B. Russell, but with a significant difference. We learn from the Chicago Defender in 1923 that Jesse L. Williams, Maria’s husband, operated a motion picture theater as the general manager while Maria served as the assistant manager. In addition, her husband was president of The Western Film Producing Company and Booking Exchange for which she was secretary and treasurer. This explains more specifically her role as the distributor of The Flames of Wrath (6).

With additional research by Aimee Dixon.

.

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay.

Citation

Morgan, Kyna. "Maria P. Williams." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-twb8-2b84>

Tressie Souders

by Kyna Morgan

It was in 1922 that the Black press named the filmmaker Tressie Souders the first African American woman director. Her film, A Woman’s Error (1922), was distributed by the Afro-American Film Exhibitors’ Company based in Kansas City, Missouri. The company seems to have handled only two titles about African Americans, one of them A Woman’s Error. To date, the one source that has led scholars to Souders and her film is Henry T. Sampson’s Blacks in Black and White (188). Sampson’s reference book mentions that this obscure figure not only directed but produced and wrote the screenplay for A Woman’s Error (626). Although in this source her surname appears as Saunders, it is likely that this is the same woman covered in the black press from this era. In her dissertation, “Sisters of Cinema,” Yvonne Welbon quotes The Billboard which refers proudly in their review of A Woman’s Error to  “the first of its kind to be produced by a young woman of our race” and, most importantly, they see it as a “picture true to Negro life” (40). What little information can be gleaned beyond Samson’s references can be found in the City Directory of Kansas City, Missouri, for 1921, which contains an entry for a Souders who is listed as “Tressa maid 5500 Ward Parkway.” With this we can establish the fact of her existence and are led to want to discover more about both the woman as well as the story told in a film with the intriguing title of A Woman’s Error.

With additional research by Aimee Dixon.

 

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay.

Citation

Morgan, Kyna. "Tressie Souders." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-39t1-gm85>

Drusilla Dunjee Houston

by Peggy Brooks-Bertram

Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii). We learn from Derek Allen’s 1936 Federal Writers Project report that she was also an accomplished musician who studied at the Northwestern Conservatory of Music in Minnesota where she trained in classical piano.  In addition to her community work, Houston engaged in pioneering African American scholarship in which she crafted a series of historical texts on ancient African history, most notably, what she called “The Wonderful Ethiopians.” Her first book in the series, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empires Book 1: Nations of the Cushite Empire, Marvelous Facts from Authentic Records, was self-published in 1926 and was followed by at least six others, all written somewhere between 1915 and 1926 (Brooks-Bertram 2002, 69). Regrettably, four volumes in the series appear lost, but Volume II subtitled Origin of Civilization from the Cushites was discovered in 1998 and published again in 2007.  Houston was the daughter of Rev. John William Dungy, famed church builder who started  the American Baptist Home Missionary Society. In addition to writing historical texts, Houston worked as a contributing editor for the Oklahoma Black Dispatch, a newspaper she ran with her brother civil rights activist Roscoe Conkling Dunjee who founded the Oklahoma branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Between 1914 and her death in 1941 Houston wrote nearly 3,000 editorials on subjects including the Tulsa Race Riot, the Houston Riots of 1917, and the East St. Louis Massacre, one example of which is a 1922 article in the Oklahoma Black Dispatch on caring for Black children.

Apparently unknown to anyone at the time, as early as 1902 Houston also began to write a refutation of Thomas Dixon’s works. [Ed: If she began in 1902 she may have been challenging The Leopard’s Spots, the first novel in Dixon’s reconstruction trilogy, the second of which was the 1905 The Clansman. Dixon’s play “The Clansman,” dating from 1905, was a based on both of these novels, and began its long run in the south that year. See Gillespie and Hall, 7, 10.] Looking back, it is now clear that Drusilla Dunjee Houston was also taking on the notorious motion picture based on Dixon’s play and novels,  D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). It may be  that Houston was the first and only African American—male or female—to write a blow by blow refutation of Birth of a Nation, a challenge that she hoped would become, in her words, a “flashing photo play.” We see her hopes in  the closing statement of her prologue: “This story told by a powerful grapho-phone with the pictures flashing might be something new in moving pictures.”

In the foreword to one of the volumes of the 2007 Oklahoma Centennial Project  the editors describe Houston as having “railed against the lynching of black men and women in Oklahoma and throughout the country” (Nevergold and Brooks-Bertram). Here, where Dunjee Houston’s  screenplay is brought to light for the first time in recent years, the editors explain that her eloquent attack on lynching was written in verse and variously named: “Spirit of the Old South: The Maddened Mob” and “The Maddened Mob-America’s Shame,” (Nevergold and Brooks-Bertram, 15). But the fifty-eight page elegy, written in screenplay format was never produced as a motion picture. Drusilla Dunjee Houston explains what happened to “Spirit of the Old South: The Maddened Mob” in  the prologue to it: “The photoplay lay for long years, pushed aside by executive duties and also because the author knew that American literature was only catering to Topsy, Uncle Tom, and slap-stick minstrel Negro types. This screenplay represents an early attempt to refute not just the racist themes in Birth of a Nation but also an attack on all of Thomas Dixon’s novels and plays that contributed to the film, Birth of a Nation.”

In 1933, she broke her silence about the screenplay she had begun writing  more than two decades earlier, motivated at the time by the need to refute the ugly misrepresentation of African Americans in Birth of a Nation. [Ed: The film continued to be screened into the 1930s. See Fleezner-Marzac 1980.] Fearing threats to her life and danger to her family because the content violated the Sedition and Espionage Acts and because the Ku Klux Klan  was  active in Oklahoma at the time, she had kept the play a secretShe finally wrote to a friend in 1933: “For 23 years, I have had lying unpublished a motion picture play almost as sensational as ‘The Clansman,’ but I did not dare to offer it to the literary public because the American white man utterly refuses to recognize such a character as my heroine, though the race has many of her counterparts” (Brooks-Bertram 2002). In 1938, still furious with the widespread support for  Dixon’s works, especially  the The Birth of a Nation, Houston described in the Oklahoma Black Dispatch what  Black women had to do to challenge the film and the play on which it was based. Since, as she wrote, the historical truth still needed to be brought to the attention of the nation,  “The Negro must produce plays to answer and undo the work of ‘The Clansman.'”

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay.

Citation

Brooks-Bertram, Peggy. "Drusilla Dunjee Houston." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-vsf2-3y15>

Louella Parsons and Harriet Parsons

by Michelle Kelley

Although best known as the premiere Hollywood gossip columnist of the classical Hollywood studio era, Louella Parsons began her career in the film industry in 1911 when she was hired by the Chicago-based production company Essanay as its chief scenario editor. Referencing a story published in Louella’s hometown Illinois newspaper the Dixon Telegraph in 1936, Parsons biographer Samantha Barbas writes that, although Parsons’s application for the position was initially discarded, she ingratiated herself with Essanay cofounder George Spoor’s wife, who subsequently persuaded Spoor to hire her. Barbas’s account of Louella’s hire differs slightly from that of Louella herself, put forward in her best-selling 1944 book, The Gay Illiterate. Barbas writes that Louella, upon discovering that her cousin Margaret Oettinger was friendly with Ruth Helms, the daughter of George Spoor’s wife’s closest acquaintance, begged the little girl to introduce her to Mrs. Spoor in exchange for movie tickets. In contrast, Parsons recalls that Helms was so impressed by a scenario she had written entitled Chains that the twelve-year-old took it upon herself to acquire Louella a job in the film industry: “Ruth hounded poor Mrs. Spoor so unmercifully that she, in turn, hounded her busy husband into giving me the appointment.” Parsons notes that Essanay not only hired her as scenario editor, but purchased the scenario for the sum of twenty-five dollars. Although no longer extant, Parsons reports that Chains was produced in 1912 staring Essanay heartthrob Francis X. Bushman (Barbas 2005, 33; Parsons 1944, 20–21).

Louella Parsons (w), AMPAS

Louella Parsons portrait. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Throughout her later career as a gossip columnist, Louella Parsons’s writing was maligned in the press. The title of her memoir The Gay Illiterate was, in fact, an epithet for Louella coined by screenwriter-producer Nunnally Johnson in a scathing 1939 Saturday Evening Post article on her entitled “First Lady of Hollywood” (Barbas 2005, 247). Four years prior, Joel Faith, in an equally devastating exposé printed in the leftist newspaper New Theatre, described Louella as “a poor reporter and a wretched writer,” attributing her success not to the quality of her work, but to her alliance with newspaper baron and paramour of actress Marion Davies—William Randolph Hearst (Faith 1935, 8). Regardless of the allegation’s veracity, it attests to the perceived influence of Louella in Hollywood—what she herself facetiously referred to as “Parsons Power, whereby with a slight flick of the typewriter I was credited with being able to save or ruin [Hollywood careers]” (Parsons 1944, 170).

Parsons’s critics were evidently unaware of her role in the history of the scenario form prior to writing syndicated gossip for Hearst papers. In addition to her significant editorial responsibilities at Essanay Studios from 1912 to 1915, Louella wrote the scenarios for at least four Essanay productions: not only Chains (1912) but Margaret’s Awakening (1912), The Magic Wand (1912), and the Charlie Chaplin film His New Job (1915). Parsons’s daughter, Harriet, made her film debut in Margaret’s Awakening under the pseudonym “Baby Parsons”; in The Magic Wand she acted alongside Francis X. Bushman (Barbas 2005, 35). Louella also wrote the story for The Isle of Forgotten Women (1927), adapted for the screen by Norman Springer and directed by George B. Seitz. In Louella’s first book, How to Write for the Movies (1915), Parsons proffers advice to aspiring “photoplaywrights” culled from her years in the editorial chair at Essanay. Glossy photographs of Hollywood stars—Pearl White, Theda Bara, Charles Ray, etc.—are interspersed throughout the book, accompanied by baroquely descriptive captions. The eyes of actress Clara Kimball Young are described by Parsons as “dark lustrous orbs [that] suggest the light that lies in a woman’s eyes,” while Geraldine Farrar is dubbed “A song bird whose pictorial solos have enriched the shadow stage” (2). How to Write for the Movies confirms Parsons’s significant role in the history of the scenario form as well as presages her fascination with the cult of Hollywood celebrity.

Discussing her childhood literary efforts, Louella Parsons in The Gay Illiterate writes: “A ‘wronged girl’ was usually the subject of my writings, and I was always violently on the side of ‘the Woman’ in the case. This prejudice in favor of my own sex has followed me along my entire career” (11). Indeed, Parsons’s career attests to a commitment to the rights of women in both the field of newspaper journalism and the motion picture industry. As Barbas notes, while employed at the Chicago Herald, where she wrote her first regular motion picture column, “Seen on the Screen,” Louella was handed a “sob sister” assignment. That is, she was asked to write on the eight hundred deaths that resulted from the capsizing of a Lake Michigan ferry using maudlin, characteristically “feminine” prose. Barbas explains that sob sister writing, although criticized as sensationalistic, made the careers of the best of the early twentieth century female journalists (56). After leaving the Herald for the New York Morning Telegraph in 1918, where she wrote the column “In and Out of Focus,” Parsons became involved with women’s organizations such as the Woman Pays Club, whose members included early screenwriters Anita Loos and Frances Marion; the Professional Women’s League; and the New York Newspaper Women’s Club (Barbas 2005, 69) In 1926, Louella shocked her male journalist colleagues when she joined them in the press box at the Dempsey-Turner boxing match in Philadelphia, on which she reported for Hearst’s the Los Angeles Examiner (Barbas 2005, 115). Parsons had joined the paper that same year to begin her column “Flickerings in Filmland.” In 1928, Louella and her daughter Harriet established the Hollywood Women’s Press Club, an informal forum for female reporters and fan magazine writers to exchange ideas and gossip over lunch at the Brown Derby (Barbas 2005, 124–5).

Like Louella, Harriet Parsons was a shrewd professional who combated the prejudices of her contemporaries in order to achieve success in the Hollywood film industry. Upon signing with Columbia Pictures to direct and produce the series Screen Snapshots in 1934, Harriet became the only woman producer and, with the exception of Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director working in Hollywood at that time (Barbas 2005, 166).

Harriet Parsons and Fritz Lang on the set of Clash By Night (1952). Private Collection.

Although RKO initially denied her the opportunity to produce a film version of Arthur Wing Pinero’s play “The Enchanted Cottage,” she alleged because she was a woman, Harriet went on to produce several classic films for the studio (Crane 1982, 30, 35). And as film historian Arthur J. Mann notes, not only did Harriet exceed the circumscribed roles assigned to women within the studio structure—she was also one of a small coterie of lesbians to exert creative control behind the camera (Mann 2001, xvi). Although Harriet was indebted to her mother for helping to launch her career, according to columnist Tricia Crane, the iconic Louella cast a formidable shadow over her diminutive daughter. Following Harriet’s graduation from Wellesley College in 1928, Louella arranged for Harriet to begin work as a junior writer at MGM. Because Hearst was aligned with MGM in the 1920s, Louella knew she could appeal to the studio for the favor (Barbas 2005, 171; Pizzitola 2002, 217). “You couldn’t be any more junior than I was,” acknowledged Harriet in an interview with Crane shortly before her death. “I realized they had hired me because of my mother, and I quit to move to New York” (qtd. in Crane 1982, 30). In New York, Harriet achieved success as a writer for motion picture fan magazines and was appointed assistant editor of Photoplay. However, a severe bout of pneumonia forced Harriet to move back to Hollywood and to Louella, who acquired her a position at Columbia. There she produced Screen Snapshots, featuring “the stars at work and play,” until 1941, at which time Harriet left Columbia for Republic Pictures, tempted by the false promise of the opportunity to produce her own feature. She would not realize this goal until departing Republic for RKO, where she produced such films as The Enchanted Cottage (1945), I Remember Mama (1948), and Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952). Although she achieved her greatest success after the coming of sound, beginning with her roles at Essanay, the foundation of Harriet Parsons’s career was established in the silent era.

See also: Gladys Hall

Bibliography

Barbas, Samantha. The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Crane, Tricia. “Parsons Jr.: Produced What Mom Juiced.” Hollywood Studio Magazine. (October 1982): 29-30, 35.

Darling, Velva. “Is Feature Writing Hard Work?” n.d., Scrapbook #13. Louella Parsons scrapbooks and photographs. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Editor and Publisher (14 August 1926), Scrapbook #14. Louella Parsons scrapbooks and photographs. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Eels, George. Hedda and Louella. New York: Putnam, 1972.

Ephron, Nora. “Hedda and Louella.” New York Times (23 April 1972): BR7.

Ergenbright, Eric. “Louella Parsons.” Dixon Evening Telegraph (14 December 1935): 5.

Faith, Joel. “Louella Parsons: Hearst’s Hollywood Stooge.” New Theatre  (August 1935): 8.

Feeley, Kathy, “Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: The Rise of the Celebrity Gossip Industry in Twentieth-Century America, 1910-1950.” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2003. “

“The Magic Wand.” Moving Picture World (11 Aug. 1912): n.p.

Mann, William J. Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969. New York: Viking, 2001.

“Miss Parsons to Cover Fight at Quaker City.” n.d., Scrapbook #14. Louella Parsons scrapbooks and photographs. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Parsons, Louella. The Gay Illiterate. New York: Doubleday Doran, 1944.

------. How to Write for the Movies. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. 1915.

------. Tell It to Louella. New York: Putnam, 1961.

Pizzitola, Louis. Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Stanley, Fred. “Hollywood Bows to the Ladies.” New York Times (7 January 1945): XI.

Archival Paper Collections:

Harriet Parsons scrapbooks, 1926-1955. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Harriet Parsons clippings file. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Louella Parsons scrapbooks and photographs, 1915-1961. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Louella Parsons clippings file. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Reminiscences of Louella Oettinger Parsons. June, 1959. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Rob Wagner papers, 1925-1942. University of California, Los Angeles, Library Special Collections.

Citation

Kelley, Michelle. "Louella Parsons and Harriet Parsons." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4xqb-t541>

Ruth Bryan Owen

by Christina Lane

Ruth Bryan Owen was an orator, a US Democratic congresswoman (1929–1933), and a minister to Denmark and Iceland from 1933 to 1936. She was the daughter of the “Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential nominee who retired to Florida in the late 1910s. She was married three times, first to Chicago artist William Homer Leavitt, in 1903, then to retired major Reginald Altham Owen, and lastly to the Danish captain Borge Rohde in 1936 (Vickers 59). Between 1919 and 1922, however, she devoted almost all of her energies to filmmaking in Miami, Florida, declaring in a letter dated July 22, 1921, to her friend Carrie Dunlap that she loved nothing as she loved the cinema, and she had finally found her true “métier.” She independently financed, produced, wrote, and directed the feature film Once Upon a Time/Scheherazade (1922), which is now considered lost. 

Ruth Bryan Owen (p/w) 1929, LoC

Ruth Bryan Owen,  1929. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Born in 1885 in Jacksonville, Illinois, Owen grew up in a household immersed in intellectual conversation and political discourse. Inspired by her attorney mother, she worked diligently on her father’s presidential campaign and wrote much of his political correspondence (Springen 11-12, 14). During World War I, she served as a voluntary nurse in the Egypt-Palestine conflict, where she met and married Major Owen. The couple relocated to her parents’ home, Villa Serena, in Miami, where Owen’s life consisted of nursing her invalid husband back to health and caring for her four children. She was a leader in the Parent Teachers Association, the Theater Guild, and the National Consumers League, and served as president of the Miami Women’s Club, speaking on a national tour circuit (Letter from Owen to Dunlap dated June 13, 1921).

In the spring of 1921, she embarked on Once Upon a Time. Conceived as an introduction to Arabian Nights and set in India, the motion picture drama involves a shah who is dethroned by his chief counselor, a sadist who uses his power to torture young women. Owen’s film opens, according to the 1922 Moving Picture World review, with the overthrow of the Middle Eastern Shah Zaman, King of Sassan, by a sadistic invader—the second Shah Wazir. The usurper begins sentencing fair maidens to be thrown to the hungry crocodiles, until the climactic moment when he discovers “the most beautiful one of all,” Scheherazade (207). Her life hangs in the balance. A detailed description in the Miami Metropolis explains that, in the finale, the original shah, who has been presumed dead, returns just in time to save the heroine and take his rightful seat of power. During a Miami screening, “the audience gave a sigh of relief when the Wazir finally killed himself…and harmony in the kingdom was restored.” The shah, believed dead, returns just in time to save the heroine from his nemesis.

One gathers from the 1922 review in Moving Picture World that the film used detailed costuming and ornate, complicated staging (207). The mise-en-scène thus evoked a mood and atmosphere that Owen herself had experienced while traveling extensively throughout the Far East, visiting, as we know from her correspondence, India, Burma, Sri Lanka, China, and Japan. Perhaps the fantasy of Far Eastern adventure was drawn as well from her service in Egypt during World War I, where her experiences attest to the risks she was willing to take to be near Officer Owen, especially once she knew he had few years left to live. Another way of reading these experiences is proposed by Sarah Vickers, who thinks that they signified her “transformation from ‘proper’ wife into activist” (50). In her life in the Far East, she gained a social awareness, Vickers suggests, confirmed by Owen’s correspondence, which reveals that she had made feminist and antiwar speeches—as well as storytelling in general—an urgent priority.

Little would be known about the making of Once Upon a Time without Owen’s correspondence with one of her closest friends, Carrie Dunlap, who was based in Illinois and had served for many years as William Jennings Bryan’s campaign treasurer. Owen describes to Dunlap on June 13, 1921, the scope of her venture into cinema:

You know the movies have always had a lure and just the atmoSpehre [sic] spoiled them for me. Well it struck me this winter that I might plunge in [and] direct movies of my own, with no objectionable atmoSpehre. I wrote scenario, raised finance for the photography, hired a camera, organized over two-hundred amateurs, played a five-reel film, direct[ed] all five hundred pictures [shots] myself, designed costumes, trained the actors.

In this and other letters, Owen expresses a genuine awe of the visual images she has created. In her June 13, 1921, letter to Dunlap, she declares, “It is amazingly beautiful. As a series of pictures, I’ve never seen a lovelier film…. I can scarcely believe the film is mine when I see it ‘projected’ on the wall above our fireplace.”

Ruth Bryan Owen clearly saw herself as a film pioneer. She demonstrated remarkable confidence and seemed to have little doubt in her ability to produce as well as to distribute an independent film from such an isolated position. There had been an active regional film industry based in Jacksonville, Florida, one that was beginning to shift toward South Florida in the late 1910s and early 1920s as dozens of New York studios brought productions to the area before the Great Hurricane of 1926 (Nelson 43-44). Among the New York studios that had brought productions to South Florida in the 1910s was the Kalem Company with which Gene Gauntier was associated. But with the industry shift to California, Owen was both amateur and outsider. Her letters claim inaccurately that an amateur feature had never before been attempted and that she was the first woman producer to make such an effort. She writes to Dunlap on June 25, 1921, that she must look “quaint trotting in with a five-reel picture” but the thousands of officials and “all their mahogany walls are not going to convince me” to give up. In the same letter, in one of her most poignant declarations, she laments that those who work in “the big movies have such a firm belief that the eternal [love] triangle or the office-business-man-with-a-cigar-in-his mouth film is the popular film [and] I know, in advance, that they will want a bit of convincing that pure beauty is marketable. I believe I will win out in the long run.” On the positive side, Owen was aware of her struggles within a male-dominated industry; on the downside, she remained unaware of the fact that other women were seeking to establish themselves as producers and directors. We know now that in the 1920s, Nell Shipman was making films independently in Idaho, and Juliet Barrett Rublee, like Owen, was staking everything on a single feature motion picture that she would attempt to distribute outside Hollywood.

Unknown Ruth Bryan Owen set design. PC

Unknown Ruth Bryan Owen set design. Private Collection.

Once Upon a Time was uniquely positioned as both independent and regional. Owen imported only three professionals from New York: cameraman Dudley Read, costume designer Peter Templeton Hunt, and actor Bernhard Guttmann, who also designed the art titles. Nancy Bryan was a family member (promoted as “Miss Bryan of Miami” when the producer looked for national publicity), and Owen’s adult daughter Ruth “Kitty” Owen had a bit part. Everyone else was an amateur, including two hundred local extras whom she called the “Community Players of Coconut Grove” (Kelly 207). The emphasis on the region was further achieved by location shooting at two South Florida estates, the James Deering Estate in Coconut Grove and William J. Matheson’s Mashta House in Key Biscayne, which Owen would have had access to because of her social standing. Mashta House, for instance, built to resemble an actual home on the Nile River, was meant to appear as though it was floating magically above the water (Blank 2). Recent evidence confirms Mashta House as the film’s central location and that Owen herself may have taken the only known series of still photographs of the interior of the house, which was destroyed in the 1940s (Lane).

Set design by Ruth Bryan Owen (des), PC

Unknown Ruth Bryan Owen set design. Private Collection.

Owen financed her film solely through the income she earned on the grueling public lecture circuit, a situation she found herself in because her family had disinherited her for marrying her first husband, the artist (McKenzie 107-08; Vickers 59). While it is difficult to know all of the distributors she approached, there is evidence that she met with Famous Players-Lasky and Pathé. It was not until she gained the support of the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs, however, that she was able to secure a distribution arrangement with the Society for Visual Education, which also agreed to distribute all of her future films, we learn from letters dated May 20 and June 4, 1923. She had high hopes for her filmmaking career, especially after an encounter with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and contact with D.W. Griffith, who helped her edit on a trip to New York, and an invitation to travel to Germany to learn Expressionist filmmaking, events referred to in her November 5, 1923, letter to Dunlap. Perhaps because of the difficulties of finding distribution and the time demands of her political speaking engagements, however, Owen never attempted to produce another film after Once Upon a Time. Her decision to forgo further projects might also have been related to the mixed to negative reception it received in the motion picture trade press. A 1922 reviewer for Moving Picture World wrote that “If a more ordinary, more conventional theme had been chosen, there would have been a better chance to conceal the marks of the amateur… [and to appreciate] the romantic and picturesque, which the producer undoubtedly possesses” (207).

Considering the range of materials in the Dunlap papers, further areas of research might include a more detailed analysis of how Owen’s hopes for filmmaking coincided with her political agendas, which included suffrage, prohibition, and preservation of the Everglades. Given her fervor for politics, her decision to place her debut motion picture firmly within the genres of fantasy and romance points either to a desire for escapism or a complex perspective on the intersection between reality and imagination. Furthermore, as with many women of her time, her correspondence with Dunlap romanticizes her adventure yet speaks to the challenges she faced as well as the support she received in caring for her husband and children, responsibilities that competed with her female friendships and career ambitions. In addition to those of wife, mother, and friend, Owen wore the many hats of University of Miami professor, congresswoman, ambassador, world traveler, environmentalist, women’s advocate, published author of six books, and, of course, independent filmmaker, making her a very significant figure in women’s history as well as motion picture history.

Bibliography

Blank, Joan Gill. “The Architectural Legacy of W. J. Matheson on Key Biscayne: Plantation Buildings and Mashta House.” Key Biscayne: Key Biscayne Community Center Exhibition (24 September, 2007): 1-5

Freeman, Jo. “Ruth Bryan Owen: Florida’s First Congresswoman.” Florida Association for Women Lawyers(Spring 2000): 15

Kelly, Mary. “Once Upon a Time.” Rev. Moving Picture World (14 Jan. 1922): 207

Lane, Christina. “Forging Florida’s Sun Screen: Architecture, Film, Orientalism, and the Settling of America’s Final Frontier.” Mississippi Quarterly vol. 63, no. 3-4 (Summer-Fall 2010): 373-398.

McKenzie, Howard Glenn. “William Jennings Bryan in Miami, 1915-1925.” Unpublished Phd. diss. University of Miami, 1956.

Nelson, Richard Alan, Lights! Camera! Florida!: Ninety Years of Movie Making and Television Production in the Sunshine State. Tampa: Florida Endowment for the Humanities, 1991.

“Once Upon a Time.” Rev. Miami Metropolis. n.p. Ruth Bryan Owen letters. Historical Museum of Southern Florida.

Owen, Ruth Bryan. Letter to Carrie Dunlap. Carrie Dunlap Papers, 1907-1929. (Includes 22 Jul. 1921; 13 Jun. 1921; 25 Jul. 1921; 20 May 1923; 4 Jun. 1923; and 5 Nov. 1923). University of Miami, Otto G. Richter Library.

Sewell, C.S. “Bryan’s Daughter to Produce Films.” Moving Picture World (13 Aug. 1921): 713.

Springen, Donald K. William Jennings Bryan: Orator of Small-Town America. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Vickers, Sarah Pauline. “The Life of Ruth Bryan Owen: Florida’s First Congresswoman and America’s First Woman Diplomat.” Unpublished Phd. diss. Florida State University, 1994.

Archival Paper Collections:

Arva Moore Parks. Private Collection.

Carrie Dunlap papers. University of Miami, Otto G. Richter Library.

Ruth Bryan Owen letters. Historical Museum of Southern Florida.

 

Citation

Lane, Christina. "Ruth Bryan Owen." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-5zy2-5z02>

Wanda Tuchock

by Michelle Koerner

Screenwriter Wanda Tuchock retains a singular role in film history as one of the few women who began her career in the silent era and was able to maintain her career in Hollywood during the early sound years. It is now well known that after the end of the silent era, the number of women directors trickled down to nearly zero. Anthony Slide highlights this for us by pointing out that screenwriter Wanda Tuchock was the only woman apart from Dorothy Arzner to receive a directing credit on a Hollywood studio film in the 1930s (Slide 1996, 136). Tuchock shared the directing credit with George Nichols, Jr., on the RKO production Finishing School (1934). This legacy must have defined her career, as it is highlighted in her Chicago Tribune obituary, which also offers the information that she entered the industry in 1927 from work as an advertising copy editor, and this would have been when she was nearly thirty years old (A6).

Tuchock was not a product of the silent era and has essentially one silent film credit, shared with Agnes Christine Johnson, on Show People, a Marion Davies comedy vehicle based loosely on the life of Gloria Swanson. From there, at Metro-Goldyn-Mayer, she went on to write the scenario for the important all-black cast musical Hallelujah (1929) directed by King Vidor. Tuchock was one of the few female screenwriters who, along with Frances Marion, worked at MGM in the early 1930s, but one of her last jobs for the studio was the adaptation of the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel Letty Lynton (1932), notorious not only for the puff-sleeved dress that Gilbert Adrian designed for Joan Crawford in the film, but also for the lawsuit against the studio filed successfully by the writers of the play based on the same novel.

This charter member of the Screen Writers Guild continued to write one or two films a year in the 1940s. Her last two credits in the 1950s were apparently for a documentary short and a thirteen-minute fiction film that she wrote and produced.

See also: Dorothy Arzner

Bibliography

Slide, Anthony. “The Talkies’ First Women Directors.” Films in Review vol. XXVII, no. 4, (April 1976): 226-229.

“Third Woman Gets Rank as Film Director; Wanda Tuchock Promoted by Radio Studio.” Chicago Daily Tribune (22 Nov. 1933): 19.

“Film producer Wanda Tuchock, 86.” Obit. Chicago Tribune (14 Feb. 1985): A6.

Archival Paper Collections:

Wanda Tuchock Papers, 1898-1975. University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center.

Citation

Koerner, Michelle. "Wanda Tuchock." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-aaj3-hc57>

Texas Guinan

by Corey K. Creekmur

Texas Guinan’s lasting fame derives from her reign as New York City’s Prohibition-era “queen of the nightclubs,” who greeted patrons with the famous cry, “Hello, sucker!” This is the persona displayed in Incendiary Blonde (1945), the flashy Hollywood biopic about Guinan starring Betty Hutton, and by Guinan playing herself in a few early Talkies, including the now-lost Queen of the Night Clubs (1929). But Guinan, born in Waco, Texas, obviously the source of her nickname, first achieved national prominence in the ostensibly masculine domain of the silent film Western, where she was promoted as the “female William S. Hart.” “Texas Guinan to Typify West” promised an early ad campaign for a series of her films, and, playing a tough “gun woman” rather than a timid schoolmarm in need of rescue, Guinan tailored her defiantly unglamorous image as a rowdy cowgirl who tames men as easily as horses. Moreover, her success as a performer allowed her to assume off-screen control of her career, first as the department head of the unit producing her films at Bull’s Eye/Reelcraft in 1919, and most significantly in 1921 by forming Texas Guinan Productions, her own independent company, to make The Code of the West (1921) and Texas of the Mounted (1921), her final silent films before her successful reinvention as a night club hostess. Some evidence suggests that the company may have produced additional films. According to her biographer Louise Berliner, Guinan was an innovative and energetic producer, choosing to cast each film rather than employ a stock company, helping to inaugurate states-rights distribution of her films, and supervising the publicity campaigns (including staging live skits before screenings) for her new company.

Texas Guinan (a) Some Gal 1919, PCCC

Texas Guinan, Some Gal (1919). Private Collection.

Miss Texas Guinan called at the White House Today, April 22 1922. USW

Miss Texas Guinan, 1922. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Although the Western is often considered the most masculine of genres, this characterization does not easily apply to the silent period, when some women played prominent roles in their production. Louise Lester starred in a dozen “Calamity Anne” films for the American Film Company between 1912 and 1914, and in 1919 Marie Walcamp played Tempest Cody in nine films in Universal’s “Spur and Saddle” series. Such popular movie cowgirls (or “cowboy girls” as the early trade press called them) had roots in pre-cinematic media, including dime novels, stage melodramas, and Wild West shows like “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s spectacle featuring sharpshooter Annie Oakley. The prolific Bertha Muzzy Bower, under the gender-obscuring pen name B.M. Bower, published best-selling Western novels between 1904 and 1914 that were often adapted into successful films. In this context, Guinan was perhaps the most significant woman in early cinema to challenge the assumption that women could only play secondary or conventionally feminine roles in the popular Western. Fond of firing guns and racing on horseback, Guinan established a tomboy presence in the Western that did not fit into the opposed roles of the refined Eastern lady or the Western dance hall prostitute that would delimit women’s roles in “mature” examples of the genre. Perhaps recognizing that she occupied an unconventional position both on screen and in the industry, in Texas of the Mounted, the first film she produced for her own company, Guinan plays male and female twins: when he is killed, she avenges his murder while wearing his clothes.

ad The Gun Woman Texas Guinan (a), PCCC

Ad for The Gun Woman (1918). Private Collection.

Constructing an accurate picture of Guinan’s film career, or her rumor-filled private life, for that matter, is difficult. Many of her films were shortened later by Melody Productions and re-released with soundtracks under multiple titles, and perhaps only a half-dozen survive, some as incomplete prints. Most unfortunately, all of the films she produced, varying in number from two to fourteen in different accounts, are lost, although a few of the two-reelers she supervised for Bull’s Eye/Reelcraft are available. By a conservative estimate, Texas Guinan starred in approximately 33 silent films made by a handful of production companies, including Mack Sennett’s Triangle Film Corporation (four films in 1917-1918), Frohman Amusement Corporation (thirteen two-reelers in 1919), Bull’s Eye/Reelcraft Film Company (twelve two-reelers in 1920), and Victor Kremer Productions (two features in 1921). These companies may be less familiar to film scholars than some of the notable directors who supervised Guinan: Frank Borzage directed her first major film, The Gun Woman (1918), and Francis Ford, Western film director John Ford’s older brother and mentor, directed her in I Am the Woman and The Stampede, both in 1921.

ad Two-Gun Woman Texas Guinan (a), PCCC

Ad for the “Two-Gun Woman.” Private Collection.

Although publicity materials attempted to glamorize Guinan, her stout body, broad face, and insistence on playing heroic leads didn’t allow her to be cast in conventionally “feminine” roles. Working almost exclusively in the genre that would eventually seem the most unwelcoming to women as performers or producers, her evident popularity and success suggest that our own understanding of the early Western genre requires revision in order to properly acknowledge her contribution, but also to begin to ponder the fantasies the boisterous movie cowgirl embodied for cinema’s early audiences.

See also: Bertha Muzzy Bower

Bibliography

Berliner, Louise. Texas Guinan: Queen of the Nightclubs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Craig, Johnstone. “Texas, the State of Excitement.” Photoplay (Aug. 1918): 77.

Guinan, Texas. “My Life—And How!” New York Evening Journal (29 April- 25 May 1929).

------.“Texas Guinan Says.” New York Graphic (15 Sept. 1930-17 Oct. 1931).

Rogers St. John, Adela. “Guinan of the Guns.” Photoplay (Aug. 1919): 60.

Shirley, Glenn. Hello Sucker! The Story of Texas Guinan. Austin: Eakin Press, 1989.

Archival Paper Collections:

Actors’ Equity Association, Records 1915-1977. Actors’ Equity Association.

Clippings from the newspaper column “Texas Guinan Says” 1930-1931. New York Public Library, Archives and Manuscripts.

Citation

Creekmur, Corey K. "Texas Guinan." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-y3jv-jb08>

Hettie Gray Baker

by Marsha Gordon

Hettie Gray Baker, who is as yet undiscovered by film historians, had a long and exceptional career in motion pictures. She was a writer of motion picture titles and scenarios; of library science, theatre, and fan magazine articles; and, later in life, of highly regarded books about cats. In her heyday she was scenario and film editor and eventually production editor and censorship representative at Fox studios. The range of her work, however, is not so surprising given that she was employed full-time for the motion picture industry from the early teens through the early 1950s. In 1915, Book News Monthly proclaimed that Baker was “among the leaders of the photoplay world” (331). In 1918, Photoplay described her, then working as an editor, as “the supreme authority… responsible only to [William] Fox himself” (83); and in 1922, Filmplay Journal described her career as “pioneerical,” calling her “one of the most influential people in the production of the films” (18). Although she has not figured in accounts of studio film history, Baker was clearly far from being a marginal figure in her day. She also seemed well aware of the advances she made as a woman in the film industry, commenting in 1922, for example, that she believed that her editing credit on Daughter of the Gods (1916) “was the first time that a woman’s name ever appeared on the screen as an editor” (Block 19).

Hettie Gray Baker (e). CHS

Hettie Gray Baker examines film strip. Courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society.

Hettie Gray Baker was born in Hartford, Connecticut, was educated at Simmons College in Boston, and spent several years as a librarian at Hartford Public Library, working in the private sector at the School for Social Workers in Boston, and then as a librarian at the Hartford Bar Library, starting in July 1907, where she was, of her own account, the first woman law librarian in the United States (Block 18; Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1920, 317; Leonard 69). Although she had never seen a motion picture scenario before, she had—since she was a child—spent her spare time writing, and began to compose one-reel scenarios while working as a librarian. She recalls: “I sent them out to the film companies one after another, hundreds of them in a year. Lots and lots were returned, but, not in the least dismayed, I put them into new envelopes and sent them on their way to a new address. Finally I sold one. Then another was accepted. At last I was a full-fledged writer and one after another was ordered by the producers” (Block 18). By the early teens Baker had sold scenarios to six early motion picture companies—Vitagraph, Selig, Edison, Kalem, Biograph, and Mutual.

In the spring and summer of 1913, Baker took a vacation to tour the studios that were making her scenarios into films, starting in New York, traveling through Chicago to California where she stopped at Los Angeles, Pasadena, Santa Barbara, and Niles, all over the course of three-and-a-half months. She met Hobart Bosworth at the Selig studio in Chicago and, shortly after returning from her vacation, received an offer from his newly formed company, Hobart Bosworth Inc., where she took a scenario writer position and moved to Los Angeles in September 1913 (Block 18). With Bosworth’s permission, during the period she was under contract to him, she worked as a freelance writer for a variety of companies, especially the William Selig Company. At Bosworth, one of her major jobs entailed work on the adaptations of American author Jack London, and, in addition to scripting and editing, this involved writing the publicity. Although Baker receives no on-screen credit on the extant prints of the Jack London films for either writing or editing, she is noted in the press of the day for “having filmized all of his [Jack London’s] novels for the screen” (Smith 331). Indeed, one of her surviving letters to Jack London, dated November 1, 1913, details the way that she and Bosworth proposed to change plot incidents in London’s novels; another proposes strategies for timing the preparation, production, and release of an adaptation of “The Sea Gangsters.” While at Bosworth, Baker clearly did many things—even on occasion acting. The Hartford Daily Courant reported that Baker “has been on the screen herself,” taking small parts in The Valley of the Moon (1914) as well as one film that still survives, Martin Eden (1914) (2). In February 1915, the same year she was described as favoring “woman suffrage” in Woman’s Who’s Who of America, Baker announced that she was “now out of Bosworth Inc.” in a letter to Mr. John Pribyl, a literary buyer for the William Selig Company, which was accompanied by a photoplay “written with Tom Mix in mind” that Mix had already read and endorsed (Leonard 69; February 3, 1915, letter to Mr. Pribyl).

Letter from Hettie Gray Baker (e) to Mr. Pribyl, 1915 AMPAS

Letter from Hettie Gray Baker to Mr. Pribyl, 1915. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Baker seemed undaunted by the move from steady contract work with Bosworth to the less predictable life of the freelancer: “I feel very happy at the opportunity to free lance, and know I shall enjoy the freedom of it for a while” (February 3, 1915, letter to Mr. Pribyl). However, her freedom did not last long. She wrote again to Mr. Pribyl just twenty days later, announcing that she had already received and accepted an offer from the Reliance-Majestic Studio, where she was to work directly with D. W. Griffith (Block 19). Filmplay Journal in a 1922 article on her career further tells us that after eighteen months with Reliance-Majestic, Baker accepted a better offer from the Fox Corporation to work at their new Los Angeles studio as production and scenario editor (Block 19). Six weeks later, producer William Fox sent Baker back to New York, where she assumed her position as production editor, and, where, as her hometown paper reported in 1922, she became Mr. Fox’s “right hand man” (X2).

Fortunately for us, Baker described her duties as production editor. Her work began, she said, in the final stages after the film had already been shot and edited: “I take all the parts of the film which the film editors have considered unnecessary or unsatisfactory and have those run off for me on the screen. I pick a piece here and insert it there, clip a part from here and substitute it for another. Finally, I have the whole film run off as I have revised it. Then, if it looks almost censor-proof and yet retains enough interest and spice to hold the public, I let it go” (Block 19). At this stage, Baker was clearly working on making a film that could meet censor approval. Indeed, by the 1930s Baker had assumed the title of “censorship representative,” also referred to as “director of censorship” for the New York Fox office, her New York Times obituary tells us (28). It is worth noting that Baker does not appear to have been on a mission to clean up the movies for the sake of upholding America’s virtues. In fact, as early as 1913 she wrote a letter of protest to her hometown newspaper, the Hartford Daily Courant, protesting against “the implication that moving pictures were in any way responsible” for a murder that was being blamed on the corrupting influence of the motion picture industry (8).

There is as yet no substantive writing about the significant career of Hettie Gray Baker, yet the evidence points to her centrality and trailblazing in the fields of writing, editing, and executive work. Most of the secondary sources referenced here make only one passing mention of Baker, and many of her film credits had to be gleaned from casual contemporary references. Baker was clearly a mover and a shaker. She also appears to have had a rather wicked sense of humor, which is noted in contemporary accounts and is equally evident in the cat books she authored later in life. To give one colorful example of how she described the downside of censorship: “If it [a film] is so fixed that it will pass the censors—Lord help the people. It is usually so slow and stale that a church deacon would have a hard time not imagining that he is listening to the minister’s sermon, and you find him sound asleep—mouth open and all” (Block 19).

See also: Winifred DunnKatharine HillikerViola Lawrence, Jane Loring, Irene MorraBlanche SewellRose Smith, “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Baker, Hettie Gray. 195 Cat Tales. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953.

------. Letter. Hartford Daily Courant (14 Jan. 1913): 8.

------. Letter to Jack London. 1 Nov. 1913. Papers of Jack London, 1866-1977.  Huntington Library.

------. Letter to Jack London. 2 June 1914. Papers of Jack London, 1866-1977. Huntington Library.

------. Letter to Mr. Pribyl. 3 Feb. 1915. William Selig Collection. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

------. Letter to Mr. Pribyl. 23 Feb. 1915. William Selig Collection. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Block, Ruth-Dorothy. “A Movie Stepmother.” Filmplay Journal (May 1922): 18-19.

“Hettie Gray Baker, Productions Editor.” Hartford Daily Courant (8 Jan. 1922): X2.

“Hettie Gray Baker Visiting the Studios.” Hartford Daily Courant (5 June 1913): 6.

“J.Q. Baker 36 Years with Aetna Life.” Hartford Daily Courant (30 Nov. 1914): 2.

Leonard, John William, ed. Woman’s Who’s Who of America, 1914-1915. New York: The American Commonwealth Company, 1915.

“Miss Hettie Baker, Ex-Fox Films Aide.” Obit. New York Times (15 Nov. 1957): 28.

Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1920. New York: Motion Picture News Inc, 1920.

“She Lives in the Dark.” Photoplay (June 1918): 83.

Smith, Russell E. “The Authors of the Photoplay.” Book News Monthly (March 1915): 326-332.

“Successful Scenario Writers.” Moving Picture Stories (Jan. 1916): 28.

Archival Paper Collections:

Hettie Grey Baker letters 1946, 1951. Connecticut Historical Society.

Jack London Book Collection. Utah State University.

John Ford Papers. Indiana University, The Lilly Library Manuscript Collections.

Papers of Jack London, 1866-1977. Huntington Library.

William Selig Papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Gordon, Marsha. "Hettie Gray Baker." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-efst-jm15>

Gertrude Atherton

by James Hansen

Gertrude Atherton, a famed author during the early 1900s, was always more a novelist than a screenwriter, but, amid her fame as a novelist, she was given major opportunities during the silent era when studios began turning to literary properties to adapt for the screen. A 1932 Los Angeles Times article says that after her husband died in 1887 and was shipped back to Chile in a barrel of rum, the writer left the Atherton estate and, dismissing her dead husband as “the second rate offspring of the Athertons,” moved to San Francisco. Eventually, she relocated to New York with a completed novel that shocked publishers and was derided by critics, but immediately made Atherton famous (B14).

Gertrude Atherton (w), c. 1904 LoC

Gertrude Atherton c. 1904. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

The Los Angeles Times reported that in May 1919, Rex Beach, president of the Authors League, and Samuel Goldwyn announced the formation of the Eminent Authors Pictures Corporation, an organization that owned exclusive picture rights to works by famed authors, one of whom was Gertrude Atherton. Each signed author was given supervision over the motion pictures that were being made from their source material, although they rarely wrote the screenplays for their projects (II10). Atherton was no exception to this rule, although she did work closely with studios during the production of films based on her novels. In a 1921 Los Angeles Times article, she called her life on the studio lot “intensive, unique, exciting, almost unreal” and referred to herself as being “as temperamental as a prima donna” (III16). Although she mainly supervised the adaptations of her work, in November 1920 the Los Angeles Times reported that Atherton was working on her first original screen story titled Noblesse Oblige (II11). In April 1921, the same paper reported that the film opened under the title Don’t Neglect Your Wife (III16). Although it is possible these are different films, they are both referred to as Atherton’s first original screen story, so it is more likely that the title changed over the course of the production.

In 1933, Gertrude Atherton became part of Woman Accused, a large-scale serial project initiated by Paramount Pictures. The sound film written by ten popular authors received a mixed reaction. Critics noted that Atherton’s classic touches were less recognizable than others included in the project. Providing further evidence that Atherton continued working with studios during the sound era, is a 1933 Los Angeles Times article (A7). While original stories were never her focus in production, Atherton blurred the line between novelist and screenwriter during the silent era when she worked in two worlds of writing—inside and outside of the major studios.

Bibliography

Atherton, Gertrude. “Many Thrills On Movie Lot.” Los Angeles Times (6 July 1919): III34.

“Authors as Movie Magnates.” Los Angeles Times (6 July 1919): III34.

“Famous Authors Who Write In Hollywood.”  Los Angeles Times (23 July 1922): III13.

“Gertrude Atherton Busy.” Los Angeles Times (14 Nov. 1920): II11.

McClure, Charlotte S. Gertrude Atherton. Boise: Boise State University, 1976.

Schallert, Edwin. “Big New Concern Is To Make Pictures From Novels.” Los Angeles Times (26 May 1919): II10.

Scheuer, Philip K. “Sea Melodrama Screened.” Los Angeles Times (21 Feb. 1933): A7.

“Social Contracts.” Los Angeles Times (17 April 1921): III16.

“Writers Take The World Into Their Confidence.” Los Angeles Times (17 April 1932): B14.

Archival Paper Collections:

Correspondence file, 1928-1930, from Boni & Liveright and Horace Liveright, Inc. University of Pennsylvania, Rare Books & Manuscript Library.

Gertrude Atherton, family, and celebrated friends: oral history transcript, 1981. University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library. Digitized by archive on the  Internet Archive.

Gertrude Atherton letters to Clifford Smyth. University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library.

Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton letters, 1915-1937, to Charlotte Rudyard Hallowell. University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library.

Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton collection of papers [ca. 1917-1948]. University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library.

Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton papers. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Citation

Hansen, James. "Gertrude Atherton." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-tcv9-5916>

Gladys Rosson

by Zack Oleson

Gladys Rosson was Cecil B. DeMille’s secretary for thirty-nine years, starting the summer she graduated high school in 1914 until her death in 1953 (DeMille and Hayne 1959, 95). She was also his mistress, part of his “harem,” or, as DeMille’s niece Agnes, calls it, his “seraglio”—the members of which vary according to sources (Agnes deMille 1990, 183). Regardless, she was intimately involved in DeMille’s work, ranging from the production of his films to the investment of his finances to the management of his image. If ever there was a woman behind the man, Gladys was she.

Gladys was with DeMille throughout the course of his career. According to her Los Angeles Times obituary, she started out as the first secretary employed by the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, then she and Florence Cole were the only secretaries kept by DeMille during his shift from Paramount in the early thirties (A9; Higham 1973, 215). At the time of her death, her title was secretary-treasurer of Cecil B. DeMille Productions (A9).

Gladys Rosson (o). BYU

Gladys Rosson at her desk. Courtesy of Brigham Young University. 

Dividing her time between the studio bungalow, the company offices in Laughlin Park, the DeMille mansion, the yacht, and Paradise Ranch, where Cecil spent most weekends, Gladys Rosson accompanied DeMille everywhere, wherever he needed her. According to a 1920 Photoplay interview, he “in eighteen years… has never passed a Saturday night at home,” never saying “what I was doing, nor whom I was with” (St. Johns 30). On set she acted as a stand-in for Geraldine Farrar in Joan the Woman (1916) since the flames at the stake were too hot for the star and Gladys had a similar complexion and hair color as Farrar (DeMille and Hayne 1985, 174). At the studio she responded to letters, speaking on behalf of DeMille, and copied longhand the script for Old Wives for New (1918) after a successful screening of the completed film in Los Angeles, just so she could send it to her sister in New York to see what Adolph Zukor’s pet scenario department would say (DeMille and Hayne 1985, 214). New York disdained DeMille productions, which seldom enjoyed favorable East Coast critical reception, and Zukor’s department sent back the transcribed script as unsuitable for pictures. As a typist, she was also indispensable to creative personnel. On the Seaward, DeMille’s yacht, Gladys accompanied writers in order to type up their work, but not always with a paperweight—she lost The King of Kings (1927) to the wind. But clearly Rosson operated on multiple levels—maid, typist, researcher, executive producer, accountant. According to Phil Koury’s biography of DeMille, his secretary not only went on location scouts with DeMille, but also appointed the members of the staff who would accompany them (36). Preparing for The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), she took 135 pages of notes documenting circus life as she traveled around with DeMille and the Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus (DeMille and Hayne 1985, 404). Koury writes that on trips Gladys even picked out DeMille’s outfit the night before—the director known for his puttees, boots, and breeches (36). Unaccompanied, too, she traveled; a document from the DeMille archive details her itinerary for a trip from Los Angeles to New York to many locations around the Caribbean and South America, presumably scouting for locations (BYU, box 307, fldr. 10).

The correspondence between DeMille and Gladys Rosson reveals a strategically tactful voice. After watching a print of Four Frightened People (1937), for instance, Gladys slides in a point-by-point critique of the film’s continuity, color matching, and decency. Some actors are “too exposed,” she notes, but all comments are passed off as “just a few things… in case they mean something” (BYU, 1933 note, box 829, fldr 9). Sources confirm that DeMille solicited opinions from any member of his staff, though Charles Higham thinks they were seldom heeded (1973, 146).

Most significantly, DeMille also trusted Rosson to invest the money made through DeMille Productions (Koury 1959, 37). As a notary public, she handled both DeMille’s business and private loans and investments and helped advise him during court cases, notably preparing for his court appearance when he and his wife went on vacation to Europe in the early thirties (Higham 1973, 136). Notoriously, Gladys lost DeMille around a million dollars during the stock market crash. After William Randolph Hearst indirectly tipped Julia Faye to sell all stocks, DeMille instructed Gladys to do so, though she offered the stock at a half-point above market, as she always did (DeMille and Hayne 1985, 129). No one took their offer and DeMille never said a word to rebuke her. He explains in his autobiography, “she was, after all, the same Gladys who, one evening when she was dining with me and I fell asleep exhausted at the dinner table, calmly sat all night with her hand under my chin, so that I might sleep undisturbed by a duckling in the soup plate” (295).

A woman who lets her employer sleep on her hand all night is clearly more personally devoted than any ordinary secretary. Gladys never married; neither did Jeanie Macpherson or Anne Bauchens, two other women of the “harem,” although most of DeMille’s secretaries also never married (Koury 1959, 31). That term “harem” appears in many accounts of DeMille’s life. According to Gloria Swanson in her autobiography, gossip columnists were already using it before 1918—roughly around the time DeMille’s The Arab (1915) was released, which, although it did not star Swanson, might account for the gossip columnists’ terminology. But Swanson also thought that being invited over to dinner by Constance, Cecil’s wife, in order to quash the story of their affair might have had something to do with the term (Swanson 1980, 112). Gladys, however, is seldom mentioned as part of the harem in contemporaneous sources; most biographies and profiles seem to add her name after the fact. Whether or not the story of her affair broke during her lifetime is difficult to say.

Anne Edwards interviewed Cecil’s granddaughter Cecilia about Gladys Rosson for her book, The DeMilles: An American Family. On Cecilia’s authority, Edwards claims that the affair between Gladys and Cecil started in the early thirties, almost twenty years after she started working for him. “To compensate Gladys for abject and unfulfilled early devotion,” she then argues, “Cecil became ‘godfather’ to the entire Rosson family,” helping all of Gladys’s siblings with their careers in the motion picture business (87).

Behind every great woman, there is a string of other women, and Gladys no doubt had a relationship with each one of them. It is revealing that Gladys was sent presumably as a delegate for the DeMilles (including brother William) to visit Lorna Moon, the writer, scenarist, and mother of William’s biological and Cecil’s adopted son, Richard, when she was on her deathbed dying of tuberculosis (de Mille 1998, 249 ). All of the memos Lorna received regarding loans from Cecil were signed by Gladys, as were the memos to MacPherson’s assistant, Cora, once she was dying of tuberculosis as well (Richard deMille, 190). Gladys visited Jeanie when she was dying, too (Higham 1973, 282). When you have an affair with your accountant, such as Cecil carried on with Gladys, she knows who’s getting how much. The DeMille archive contains much correspondence in which Gladys follows up on loans to Julia Faye and Macpherson, as well as relatively unknown actresses such as Genevieve Bell (BYU, Oct. 1945 letter 23, box 393, fldr. 4).

Katherine Albert, a Screenland features writer, once blamed DeMille’s staff, who “thrill at his every word” for the lack of soul in his pictures (16). Whether or not we give credence to this analysis, we can say that through her undisputed devotion, DeMille’s secretary helped create not only an auteur but a mogul. But in retrospect we have to wonder what portion of his achievement was made possible by such a capable coworker. It is a shame Gladys Rosson is credited with so little.

See also: Jeanie Macpherson

Bibliography

Albert, Katherine. “Well, Mr. DeMille, We’re Waiting!”  Screenland vol. 2, no. 1 (Nov. 1923): 15-16.

Edwards, Anne. The DeMilles: An American Family.  New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988.

Koury, Phil A. Yes, Mr. DeMille.  New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959.

Louvish, Simon. Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

“Miss Rosson, C.B. De Mille Secretary, Dies.” Los Angeles Times (15 June 1953): A9.

Rosson, Gladys. Correspondence. 1933 [Box 829, fldr. 9]. Brigham Young University.

------. Letter 23 October 1945. [Box 393, fldr. 8]. Brigham Young University.

St. Johns, Adela Rogers.  “What Does Marriage Mean?  As Told by Cecil B. DeMille to Adela Rogers St. Johns.”Photoplay 19.1 (December 1920): 29-30.

Archival Paper Collections:

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Citation

Oleson, Zack. "Gladys Rosson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-2mb2-b419>

Margaret Mayo

by Artemis Willis

To become a playwright, all Margaret Mayo required was a plot, a stenographer, and a day. As reported in the New York Times in 1903, Mayo was performing a supporting role in “Pretty Peggy” at the Herald Square Theatre when she won a bet that she couldn’t complete a play in twenty-four hours (6). Attuned to the freshness of farce, the twenty-one-year-old actress accepted the wager, sketched her scenario, and dictated through dinner, producing “The Mart,” a comedy in three acts, minutes before midnight.

Having already adapted Ouida’s novel Under Two Flags in 1901 so she could play the role of Cigarette, Mayo’s new coup de théâtre prompted an almost instantaneous retirement from the stage. She averaged at least a play per year until 1917, at which point she left play writing for screenwriting, according to the New York Times (39). Women playwrights proliferated during the era of the New Woman. In 1910, female writers wrote thirty percent of the plays produced in New York (Engle 29). Professional theatre on Broadway was particularly robust, and accomplished writers such as Mayo commanded $65–$100,000 for a new play (Engle 33).

After her successful 1907 adaptation of Victorien Sardou’s 1880 play “Divorçons”/“Let’s Get a Divorce,” Mayo wrote “Baby Mine,” an original farce par excellence. Presented around the world from Japan to Berlin, “Baby Mine” was revived multiple times on the Broadway stage and remade into several films. Mayo’s work in cinema and theatre connects 1880s French farce with the remarriage plots of the 1910s and ’20s cinema as well as subsequent sound era screwball comedies (Vermillion 360). As a result, she can be considered a key figure in the history of novel to stage to screen adaptation.

Born near Brownsville, Illinois, Lillian Elizabeth Slatten, or Clatten, was raised on a Midwestern farm and educated at the Girl’s College in Fox Lake, Wisconsin; the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Salem, Oregon; and Stanford University, which she attended for one year (Browne and Koch, 307). Still in her teens, she traveled to New York City to pursue acting, adopting the stage name Margaret Mayo. In 1896 she performed in William Gillette’s “Secret Service” with Edgar Selwyn, a fellow actor-writer whom she subsequently married in 1901 and then divorced in 1919.

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

Mayo’s earliest efforts were adaptations of novels, as in Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s The Marriage of William Ashe (1905) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1907). Her first original play, “Polly of the Circus” (1907), was her first great success. She subsequently wrote the hit farces “Baby Mine” in 1910 and “Twin Beds” in 1914,  adapting them several times for the silent screen. A founding partner of the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation in 1916 with her husband Edgar Selwyn, his brother Archibald Samuel Goldfish, and Arthur L. Hopkins, Mayo contributed the screen rights for “Polly of the Circus” for her $75,000 share. Starring Mae Marsh and Vernon Steele, Polly became Goldywn’s first production in 1917. A second version was produced in 1932 with Marion Davies and Clark Gable.

After World War I, Mayo’s awakened social consciousness led her to work beyond Broadway and Hollywood. In 1918, she participated in the Program Committee of America’s Over-There Theatre League, leading the first unit of artists entertaining US soldiers in France according to the New York Times. In 1926 she signed the Agreement of American Dramatists, a document that ultimately led to the establishment of the Dramatists Guild. As a resident of Croton-on-Hudson, Mayo was active in environmental and other community issues. In 1932 she arranged for the Eastern mystic Meher Baba to reside for a year in a fieldstone house on her estate, according to the New York Times, a gesture of hospitality reflecting her attraction to the spiritual, thirty years after her first publication in 1901, Our Fate and the Zodiac: An Astrological Autograph Book (N2).

Margaret Mayo. NYPL

Margaret Mayo. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Mayo’s work often hovered between the plausible and the astonishing. She employed parody, satire, and especially farce to dramatize social issues, relishing every opportunity to overturn dramatic conventions within credible situations. In an article in the New York Times in 1910, she advised aspiring writers: “It isn’t necessary to even keep the ‘sympathy’ of the audience in one place… All you’ve got to do to hold an audience is to startle it. Give it a surprise of some sort, even if it is a surprise that has been expected, if such a paradox is permitted.” Mayo’s best farces present a subtle challenge to perennial wisdom on social class and marriage, and as a consequence, they continue to work. At least two  adaptations of Baby Mine have been produced internationally—the 1954 Finnish-Japanese Minako Isa! and the 1967 Mon Bébé, for the French television series Au théâtre çe soir.

Bibliography

“Baby Mine’ Still Amusing.” Los Angeles Times (9 March 1944): A9.

Berg, A. Scott. Goldwyn: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1989.

Browne, Walter and E. De Roy Koch eds. Who’s Who on The Stage 1908. New York: B.W. Dodge and Company, 1903: 307-308.

Engle, Sherry. “An ‘Irruption of Women Dramatists’: The Rise of America’s Woman Playwright, 1890-1920.” New England Theatre Journal 12 (2001): 27-50.

“The Entertainer in France.” New York Times (29 Sept. 1918): 42

Mayo, Margaret. Our Fate and the Zodiac: An Astrological Autograph Book. New York: Brentano’s, 1901.

------. “Entertain Your Audiences.” New York Times (11 Sept. 1910): X5.

------. Trooping for the Troupes: Fun-Making at the Front. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1919.

Morgan, Mary. “Mayo, Margaret – Successful Playwright.” Theater 12 (July/Dec. 1910): 103.

“Mystic Redeemer Awaited at Croton.” New York Times (8 May 1932): N2.

Vermillion, Billy Budd. "The Remarriage Plot in the 1910s.” Film History 13:4 (2001): 359-371.

“Writes a Play in a Day.” New York Times (13 April, 1903): 6.

“Written on the Screen.” New York Times (14 Oct. 1917): 39.

Archival Paper Collections:

Samuel Stark. Theatre scrapbook collection, 1860-1950. Stanford University.

Citation

Willis, Artemis. "Margaret Mayo." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-s3a0-zg38>

Winifred Dunn

by James Hansen

Known for being one of the youngest scenario editors, male or female, during the silent era, Winifred Dunn, like Anita Loos, started writing at a young age. As a girl in Chicago, Dunn discovered her skills as a writer as well as a translator when at the age of eighteen she translated a German play into English and altered the production to fit an American stage. While still in her teens, Dunn began writing two-reel film plays for Selig Polyscope in New York, where her first original feature Too Late (1914) was produced (II16).

Winifred Dunn (w/e), MoMI

Winifred Dunn portrait. Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image. 

The Truth About the Movies Dorothy Farnum (a/w), Winifred Dunn (w/e), Florence Lawrence (p/a), Olga Printzlau (w), Ethel Chaffin, Rosemary Cooper PCRK

“The Truth About the Movies,” Dorothy Farnum, Winifred Dunn, Florence Lawrence, Olga Printzlau, Ethel Chaffin, and Rosemary Cooper. Private Collection.

In late 1921 or early 1922, Dunn moved to Hollywood, where she led Sawyer-Lubin Productions for Metro Pictures. During this time, she assisted in editing and titling Quincy Adams Sawyer (1922) and wrote the screen version of Willard Mack’s play “Your Friend and Mine” (1923). Then, on February 10, 1923, at the age of 24, Dunn began her duties as scenario editor at Metro Pictures, which by 1924 would be Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (B12). Dunn quickly became regarded as one of the busiest scenario editors in Hollywood, where she advocated for writers’ perfecting their craft by the reading of newspapers in order to “keep a metaphorical finger on the pulse of life everywhere” (B36). In 1925, Dunn’s success was taken to new heights when Mary Pickford asked her to handle her future stories (A11). In 1926, Sparrows, the first collaboration between Dunn and Pickford, opened to great acclaim, hailed as Pickford’s “greatest picture” and “a remarkable triumph” (H4). But some controversy arose in June 1927 when Pickford and Dunn were sued for $100,000 by the estate of Harry Hyde for copyright infringement, Hyde claiming that Sparrows was based upon his scenario for The Cry of the Children (3). After the tremendous success of Sparrows, Dunn signed a long-term contract in November 1926 to write scenarios for First National Pictures (A8), the first of which, a prizefighting film entitled The Patent Leather Kid (1927), was noted for its virility, as newspapers asked, “How could a woman know so accurately how bloody noses were made?” (C16). After The Patent Leather Kid, Dunn terminated her contract with First National in order to become the chairman of the woman’s executive committee of the Southern California Olympic Games, which were to be held in Los Angeles in 1933 (C13). Meanwhile, Dunn continued to work as a freelance writer in the late 1920s for studios such as Metro, for The Drop Kick in 1927; and Columbia Pictures, for the early Frank Capra melodrama Submarine in 1928.

In December 1928, the outspoken Dunn was the only woman elected to the writers’ executive committee for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and served as a member of the Executive Board for the Writers’ Guild. Shortly after that, Dunn announced her marriage to sculptor Harold Swartz. This, however, did not stop Dunn from working. She remained an active freelance writer into the sound era through at least 1936, when it was reported that Dunn was working on the first of three features, entitled Everybody’s Boy, with boy singer Bobby Breen for RKO Pictures (27).

See also: Hettie Grey BakerKatharine Hilliker, Anita Loos, Mary Pickford

Bibliography

“Academy Of Film Arts In Election.” Los Angeles Times (6 Dec. 1928): A5.

“Journal As Text-Book.” Los Angeles Times (29 June 1924): B36.

Kingsley, Grace. "Star In Another French Farce." Los Angeles Times (26 Nov. 1926): A8.

“New Combine To Start Work Soon.” Los Angeles Times (25 May 1924): B12.

“News Of The Screen.” New York Times (23 June 1936): 27.

“Reputation of Well Known Bee Is Tottering.” Los Angeles Times (26 Aug. 1923): III42.

“Scenario Editor at Metro. Youngest Chief Is to Take Charge.” Los Angeles Times (10 Feb. 1923): II16.

“Scenarist Aids Olympic Games.” Los Angeles Times (8 April 1928): C13.

“Scenarist Bride Of Sculptor.” Los Angeles Times (21 Dec. 1928): A3.

Schallert, Edwin. “One of the Screen's Most Thrilling Pictures is ‘Sparrows’.” Los Angeles Times (25 Apr. 1926): H4.

“Sue Mary Pickford For $100,000 Damages.” New York Times (19 June 1927): 3.

Williams, Whitney. “‘Submarine’ Affords Lively Interest.” Los Angeles Times (16 Sept. 1928): I3.

“Winifred Dunn to Write for Mary Pickford.” Los Angeles Times (3 March 1925): A11.

“Woman's Right Script Raises Big Question.” Los Angeles Times (6 March 1927): C16.

Citation

Hansen, James. "Winifred Dunn." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-mr6b-bt07>

Lillian Ducey

by Daniela Bajar, Livia Bloom

“The skeptical may not believe it… Hundreds of directors may scoff—But—There is one director who is efficient—and without the aid of puttees. Introducing Lillian Ducey, directing Youth Triumphant for the newly formed Fisher Productions. Efficiency plus is said to be Miss Ducey’s middle name,” heralded the Los Angeles Times in reference to Ducey’s first job as a motion picture director in 1923 (III34). With silent star Anna Q. Nilsson in the lead role, Youth Triumphant, alternately titled Enemies of Children, was a melodrama about “a street waif of questionable parentage [who] is taken into a wealthy home,” according to Variety’s summary (26). Distributed by Mammoth Pictures and released on December 13, 1923, the black-and-white six-reeler was based on the 1921 novel by George Gibbs. The film was expected to be the first of many, and as the Los Angeles Times announced a few months later: “Mrs. Ducey’s next production will be an original story of her own … .” (II10). Yet despite these announcements of her directorial debut and the possibility of other films, Lillian Ducey’s only association with directing is a single feature. In this, she can be compared to other writers like Frances Marion and Eugenie Magnus Ingleton who had one opportunity to direct. However, unlike Marion and Ingleton, Ducey’s credit has not been verified. In the American Film Institute Catalog, Ducey is not even credited as the sole author of Youth Triumphant; John M. Voshell receives equal billing for both direction and adaptation. Ducey’s accomplishments as a women’s magazine writer, however, were remarkable by any standards. She wrote for numerous publications and her work was everywhere on newsstands. According to The Writer, in one month, June of 1914, her stories appeared in six magazines: Harper’s Bazar [sic], Red Book, To-Day’s Magazine, McCall’s Magazine, Woman’s Magazine, and Ladies’ World (104).

Born in New York City in 1878, Ducey had no formal training as either writer or director. She began her career in 1910, at the age of thirty-two, when she entered seven pieces in a short-story contest held by the New York Evening Telegram. All of her entries were accepted, and despite her modesty when describing her work to the press, calling her stories “near-stories” and herself a “near-writer,” Ducey quickly began to publish an impressive average of six stories and articles every month. Her byline appeared in national and local publications with stories like “Courting Millicent” (The Cavalier, 1911), “The Proposal” (Young’s Magazine, 1912), “No Sentiment” (National Magazine, 1913), “Their Tongues” (National Magazine, 1914), “The God in the Box-Office” (Romance, 1915), “The Love Game” (To-Day’s Magazine, 1917), and “The Worth of a Woman” (Breezy Stories, 1918). “For a year now her average receipts have been between $300 and $500 a month for her writing,” gushed The Writer in 1914 (104).

Ducey wrote the story for her first film, His Enemy, the Law, in 1918. Her work was then singled out by Peter Milne in his Motion Picture News review of the film: “Lillian Ducey has provided a very human set of characters in her story and, being human in character and in deeds, they are always the center of attention” (3949). Ducey went on to write the Selznick productions The Spite Bride (1919) and Upstairs and Down (1919) for the celebrated silent actress Olive Thomas. She then worked with legendary director Eric von Stroheim, writing the titles for his directorial debut, Blind Husbands (1919). The film was hailed as a masterpiece. “Virtually a new angle on cinematic productions is provided by Blind Husbands,” said Edwin Shallert in The Los Angeles Times (II 12). Von Stroheim himself agreed. As the Atlanta Constitution quoted him: “I am Stroheim. They call me the Satan of the screen … I am the author and director and leading man in a photodrama which many people believe to be one of the best pictures of the year [and] the first picture I ever directed” (D6).

Ducey went on to collaborate with another renowned director-producer; her work for Allan Dwan included his films The Scoffer (1920) and A Broken Doll (1921). She also wrote Dwan’s In the Heart of a Fool (1920), which starred Anna Q. Nilsson and presumably led to the actress’s subsequent starring role in the single film Ducey directed, Youth Triumphant, in 1923. Deferential, Ducey would credit von Stroheim, Dwan, and director Maurice Touneur with her success (III34).

The sources of inspiration for Ducey’s scripts were varied, and their influence was often seen as socially profound, as with Lullaby (1924), which the Los Angeles Times in a 1936 article reported came from a three-line newspaper story that described how the State of New York would take over the care of a baby after the execution of its mother for murder. After this case, the article went on, other states arranged to take over the foster care responsibilities for other children who were orphaned in this way (C1). Ducey frequently explored themes of questionable parentage and adoption, for instance, in In the Heart of a Fool (1920), The Lullaby (1924), and Enemies of Children (1923); battered or crippled children in The Scoffer (1920) and A Broken Doll (1921); and broken or conflicted families in The Captain of His Soul (1918) and His Enemy, The Law (1918).

A group of melodramas brought Ducey’s career in screenwriting to a close, corresponding with the end of the silent era: The Warning (1927), Behind Closed Doors (1929), The Devil’s Apple Tree (1929), and The Climax (1930). The last, a tale of romance and opera in which the heroine’s voice is first lost and then regained, was the only film that she wrote to have been released in a sound as well as a silent version. She is not known to have been credited on films after 1930, and her literary star seems to have faded as well. Neither did she fulfill the Los Angeles Times’s expectations of a longer run as the “Efficiency Plus” female film director (III34).

Bibliography

Ducey, Lillian. “Their Tongues.” National Magazine vol. 40 (1914): 417-421.

“Enemies of Children.” Rev. Variety (20 Dec. 1923): 26.

“Fisher Plans Expansion.” Los Angeles Times (19 June 1923): II10.

Kingsley, Grace. “Plots Inspired in Odd Surroundings.” Los Angeles Times (13 Sept. 1936): C1, C3.

Milne, Peter. “His Enemy, the Law.” Rev. Motion Picture News (20 June 1918): 3949.

Schallert, Edwin. “Drama: ‘Blind Husbands.’” Los Angeles Times (22 Dec. 1919): II12.

“Stars and Stories of the Film World: Stroheim, ‘Satan of Screen,’ Comes to Tudor This Week, Stars in ‘Blind Husbands.’” The Atlanta Constitution (23 Nov. 1919): D6.

“Woman Director Efficiency Plus.” Los Angeles Times (29 April 1923): III34.

“Writers of the Day.” The Writer: A Monthly Magazine for Literary Workers Vol. XXVI. (January/December 1914): 104.

Citation

Bajar, Daniela; Livia Bloom. "Lillian Ducey." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-wyq7-mn82>

Lucy Duff-Gordon

by Randy Bryan Bigham, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche

Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, professionally known as “Lucile,” was a couturière to wealthy European and American women as well as actresses in London, Paris, and New York when she began to design costumes for film stars. As early as 1913, she dressed Alice Joyce in Kalem’s The American Princess (1913). In addition, Lucile’s New York and London salons provided the setting for several motion pictures in which fashion show scenes were filmed. These included: The American Princess (Kalem, 1913), The Whirl of Life (Cort Film, 1915), The Spendthrift (George Kleine, 1915), The Amateur Wife (Famous Players-Lasky, 1920), and Walls of Prejudice (Gaumont, 1920).

Lady Lucy Duff Gordon ("Lucile") (des), New York, 1916, LOC/ PCRB

Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon (“Lucile”), New York, 1916. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

In 1890, Duff-Gordon began dressmaking in London. In 1893 she opened her first salon, Maison Lucile, which was incorporated as Lucile, Ltd., in 1903. After that she capitalized on her success and opened studios in New York in 1910 and Paris in 1911. In 1915, Madame Lucile, as she was often called in the press, inaugurated a second American branch in Chicago. Lucile was a celebrity, and her title gave her career an added prestige. In addition to designing clothing and costumes, she also wrote about fashion and manners in columns for Good Housekeeping (“Her Wardrobe,” 1912-1913), Harper’s Bazaar (“The Last Word in Fashions,” 1913-1921), the Ladies Home Journal, and the Hearst newspapers syndicate, from 1910-1921. In England she wrote a fashion advice column “Letters to Dorothy” for the London Daily Sketch from 1922-1928. She appeared on screen with her designs in newsreels of the period. Briefly during World War I, she created mass-produced ready-to-wear styles for Sears, Roebuck and Co. Like so many of the stars she dressed, Lucile provided commercial endorsements for a wide range of products such as petticoats, brassieres, corsets, textiles, perfume, shoes, and even automobile interiors. In fact, she was so well known that she could be parodied, as she was in the skit “Lady Bluff Gordon’s dress making establishment,” seen in the musical revue “The Passing Show of 1916,” which played at the Winter Garden in New York City, according to Green Book Magazine (422).

Norma Talmadge (a) The Way of a Woman (1919), Lady Lucy Duff Gordon (des), PCRB

Norma Talmadge, The Way of a Woman (1919), in Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon design. Private Collection.

Lucile knew well the requirements of stagecraft, and first began to experiment with the medium in 1897, and in 1904 she presented her seasonal collections by mounting elaborate fashion shows complete with stages, ramps, curtains, limelight, and music. In 1917, Lucile took her models to Broadway as well as on a vaudeville tour with a musical fashion parade fund-raiser, with proceeds going to relief funds for French war refugees. “Stage dressing demands accentuation!” Lucile exclaimed in Harper’s Bazaar in 1914. “The actress moves under special conditions of light that exist nowhere else and under auditory conditions as well…. her dresses have to be of broader effect and more vivid coloring” (34). Duff-Gordon designed costumes for some of the most prominent theatrical actresses of her day, including Sarah Bernhardt, Lily Langtry, Ellen Terry, and Lily Elsie, helping Elsie to mold her image. In her autobiography, Discretions and Indiscretions, Lucile recalled a conversation with the play’s producer, who made the following request: “She [Elsie] has never done anything to speak of… but I know she is clever… You must give her a personality, and coach her so that she can keep it up” (109). Lucile also designed for the Ziegfeld Follies, where she helped to establish the prototype of the American showgirl.

Lady Lucy Duff Gordon ("Lucile") (des) New York, 1916, LOC/ PCRB

Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon  (“Lucile”), New York, 1916. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

As her actress clients began to make motion pictures, Lucile adapted her designs to suit the screen, between 1913 and 1930 working with Irene Castle, Billie Burke, Mary Pickford, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Clara Kimball Young, Pearl White, Corinne Griffith, Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, and Marion Davies, among others. She contributed costumes to more than eighty films, causing Motion Picture Magazine in 1916 to remark: “Nowadays it is an everyday affair for a prominent actress to blossom forth in a Lucile frock” (n.p.). A 1916 issue of Pictures and Picturegoer tells us Lucile contracted briefly with Essanay and the World Film Corporation (58).

Working collaboratively, couturière and star exerted influence on these films by expressing character traits through costume features. When Lucile worked with actresses, she designed their costumes to fit narrative as well as technical requirements. When Mae Marsh, for instance, prepared for The Cinderella Man (1917), she was advised to “go to Lucile, explain the story to the designer and let her show you the kind of costumes she would suggest.” Lucile made two copies of the main dress, one in green and the other in grey, to ensure its effectiveness under varying conditions of illumination, the actress recalled in her book, Screen Acting (70–71). Lucile’s use of sheer fabrics, pale colors, soft drapery, dramatic asymmetrical effects, and tiny, hand-wrought silk flowers as trimming became hallmarks of the ultra-feminine, romantic mien that was so sought after by her society and theatrical clients, touches that made a Lucile gown immediately recognizable to female audiences. In 1918, Lucile designed costumes for Clara Kimball Young, who starred in The Reason Why, a film based on a novel written by Lucile’s sister Elinor Glyn. As Lucile would help to define femininity through her fashions in the 1910s, her sister, as Hollywood producer-writer, would contribute “It” and the “It Girl” to American popular culture of the 1920s.

Publicity stil, Clara Kimball Young (a/p) The Road Through the Dark (1918), Lady Lucy Duff Gordon (des), PC

Publicity still, Clara Kimball Young, The Road Through the Dark (1918), in Lady Lucy Duff Gordon design. Private Collection. 

Irene Castle (a) French Heels (1922), Lady Lucy Duff Gordon (des), Eve Unsell (w), PCRB

Irene Castle, French Heels (1922), in Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon design. Private Collection.

Due mainly to mismanagement, Lucile Duff-Gordon’s business empire began to falter after World War I, and she died of breast cancer in 1935. While she was the most prominent of the couturieres who designed costumes for actresses in the early years of cinema, Lucile was not alone. Madame Frances designed costumes for Mary Pickford and Norma Talmadge, while other women designers, such as Clare West at Paramount Studios and Sallie Milgrim, joined the ranks of Henri Bendel, Charles Hickson, Herman Patrick Tappe, Travis Banton, and Gilbert Adrian in collaborating with actresses on their costumes for stage and screen in the United States during the silent period. There is still an enormous amount of work to be done to construct a fuller history of costume for silent motion pictures from the 1890s through the 1920s. In order to flesh out the record, film historians need to plumb fashion trade papers like Women’s Wear Daily, women’s magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies Home Journal, and the Delineator as well as national and local newspapers where actresses and designers were often featured.

See also: Lillian Gish, Elinor Glyn, Corinne Griffith, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Clare West, Pearl White, Clara Kimball Young

Bibliography

Courtlandt, Roberta. “My Lady of the Roses.” Motion Picture Magazine (Aug. 1916): n.p. Robinson Locke Scrapbooks, 89 Vol. 5. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Duff Gordon, Lucile [“Lucile”]. Discretions and Indiscretions. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1932.

------. “Lady Duff-Gordon’s Message to the Women of America.” Ladies’ Home Journal (Oct. 1916): 72-73.

------. “The Last Word in Fashions.” Harper's Bazaar (Dec. 1914): 34.

Etherington-Smith, Meredith and Jeremy Pilcher. The “It” Girls, the Couturiere Lucile, and Elinor Glyn, Romantic Novelist. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986.

Marsh, Mae. Screen Acting. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, Co., 1921.

Mayo, Edna. “Fashions on Film.” Pictures and the Picturegoer (15 April 1915): 58.

Movie Margerie. “Lucile Creations for the Crowd.” Picturegoer (25 Nov. 1916): n.p.

“The Passing Show of 1916.” Green Book Magazine (Sept. 1916): 422.

Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, 118 N.E. 214 (N.Y. 1917).

Archival Paper Collections:

Lady Duff Gordon. Lucile sketches, 1915-1925. Fashion Institute of Technology.

“Lucile” Lady Duff-Gordon papers, Randy Bryan Bingham Private Collection.

Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon drawings, 1913-1923, 1913-1917. UCLA, Charles E. Young Research Library.

Robinson Locke collection, 1870-1920. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Citation

Bigham, Randy Bryan; Leslie Midkiff DeBauche. "Lucy Duff-Gordon." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-0azr-aq70>

Beatrice deMille

by Julie Buck

Beatrice deMille was born Matilda Beatrice Samuel in Liverpool, England. She immigrated with her family to New York in 1871. Though her family and friends called her Tillie growing up, when she met Henry deMille, he immediately started calling her Beatrice, after Dante’s Beatrice. According to her son, the director-producer Cecil B. DeMille, when Beatrice told her family that she intended to marry Henry, a Christian, they said they would disown her for converting from her Jewish faith (12). Never one to obey the rules, Beatrice married Henry deMille in Brooklyn, New York, in 1876. Henry had always wanted to be an actor. To make money when they were first married, they both taught—he composition and she elocution—at a preparatory school. When school was out for the summer, they would work as traveling actors, Beatrice always using the stage name Agnes Graham. Programs from a number of the theatrical productions in which they performed are found in the DeMille collection at Brigham Young University. To secure his success as an actor, Henry began writing plays in which he would play the lead role. Soon he formed a partnership with future theatre impresario David Belasco, and the two wrote and produced a number of theatre productions, most of which starred Henry, that were enormously successful. Henry was able to buy a large house in Pompton, New Jersey, for the three children he had with Beatrice—William, Cecil, and Agnes, who would die at age four of spinal meningitis. Then, at the height of his success, according to his obituary, Henry deMille contracted typhoid fever and suddenly died (5).

Beatrice DeMille (p/w/ag)

Beatrice DeMille. Courtesy of Brigham Young University.

Beatrice knew she would have to support her children. Within weeks of his death, she converted the Pompton house into the Henry C. deMille Preparatory School for Girls. Although she was not particularly good with money, Beatrice managed to save enough to send William to Germany for an education and Cecil to a boy’s school in exchange for educating the daughter of the school’s president. To make additional money, she convinced Belasco to let her work as exclusive agent of the plays that he and deMille had written, and from there she began to represent other writers. During an era when very few women worked outside the home, Beatrice became a play broker and authors’ agent (Louvish 13).

By 1907, the school was no longer profitable. The final blow came in 1907, when former student Evelyn Nesbit made national news headlines. Nesbit’s husband, Harry Thaw, shot and killed architect Stanford White after Thaw realized Nesbit was having an affair with White. Alarmed parents stopped trusting Beatrice and removed their daughters from the school, and Beatrice was soon forced to declare bankruptcy (Louvish 29). Never one to focus on the negative, Beatrice sold the house and added new writers to her stable, including sons Cecil and William, as well as female playwrights who fought for women’s equality (Long 21). She became successful enough in the New York theatre world that she was able to finance and produce plays for many of the writers she represented. According to her granddaughter, Agnes deMille, Cecil went to work for his mother at that time, and later credited her with teaching him how to write, direct, and produce (Easton 19).

Soon Beatrice herself turned to writing. Collaborating with Harriet Ford, she wrote her first published play, “The Greatest Thing in the World,” which was performed on Broadway and in Washington DC. Beatrice continued to grow her company of playwrights, and, even if she was never very good with money, she was good at making deals. It was Beatrice who introduced her son Cecil to Jesse Lasky and then arranged for Cecil to write and direct and Lasky to produce (Wellman 100). This collaboration led to what would later become Paramount Pictures, a company that produced Cecil’s major silent era motion pictures. Clearly Beatrice was good at spotting talent, also starting the career of actor Victor Moore and writer Beulah Marie Dix, whom she had represented in New York (Birchard 166).

In 1914, Beatrice finally moved to Los Angeles (Louvish 68). Although she was in her sixties by then, she did not sit still. While William was a bit wary of his mother during this time, Cecil doted on her, and she, along with her sons, worked for the Lasky Company, where she collaborated with fellow playwright Leighton Osmun on a series of scenarios. The films she wrote, from 1914 to 1917, were usually sentimental, but she was respected enough that she wrote not only for her sons, but for other directors as well. While most of the deMille/Osmun scenarios were based on their own stories, they also collaborated with other Lasky writers such as Jeanie Macpherson and Eve Unsell. Slightly more than half of the films Beatrice wrote are still extant and held by the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress.

By the late teens, Beatrice had stopped writing. The 1920 census lists her profession as a writer for motion pictures, but as Cecil wrote in his autobiography, she was doing anything but settling down. She spent lavishly—buying huge hats for herself and paying rent for less fortunate friends—but then claimed poverty and sent the bills to her sons. She drove around in a car that would often break down, and she habitually abandoned it anywhere, including once in the middle of Sunset Boulevard where it blocked traffic for hours. Cecil, who claimed that his mother was the single most important influence in his life, recognized that she was a character. As he wrote in his unpublished papers, “My mother always had a scheme for making large sums of money. Once she had a cactus, withered and old, in a pot on her porch. She said, ‘that is my secret—it is wealth. We will ship it to Australia where they have lots of cattle. This is a spineless cactus. They will plant it there and have food for the whole country.’ The cactus was shriveled and dead in a week.”

See also: Beulah Marie Dix, Jeanie Macpherson, Eve Unsell

Bibliography

Birchard, Robert S. Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.

DeMille, Cecil Blount, and Donald Hayne. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1959.

“Drama and Music.” The Boston Globe (19 March 1901): 8.

Easton, Carol. No Intermissions: The Life of Agnes de Mille. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000.

Long, Robert Emmet. Broadway, the Golden Years. London: Continuum, 2003.

Louvish, Simon. Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Macmillan, 2008.

Wellman, William Jr. The Man and His Wings. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006.

Archival Paper Collections:

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Citation

Buck, Julie. "Beatrice deMille." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-wbr5-1f25>

Sada Cowan

by Daniela Bajar, Livia Bloom

“He told me I’d better make my living with my brains [rather] than any beauty I thought I had,” writes Sada Louise Cowan in 1932, remembering her first interview with Cecil B. DeMille. An established playwright, Cowan had little experience with motion picture work. So when DeMille gave Cowan a studio pass, she started to visit the set regularly. “I made myself a complete nuisance,” she says, recalling that she learned about angles by standing behind the cameraman and asking the cutter millions of questions. It was Ruby Miller, supervisor of the “girls who copied scripts,” who helped her by showing her the best continuities, until one day on the set DeMille barked, “Tell that girl with the Japanese name to come over here.” He gave her a chance to work on the continuity of Why Change Your Wife? (1920) on which she is credited with the more experienced Olga Printzlau and William deMille. She began at twenty-five dollars a week, and director DeMille demolished her work, berating her as a failed writer whom he didn’t expect to succeed. Then, she goes on, one night after he had been so hard on her that she was left “limp and exhausted,” he apologized by raising her salary to sixty dollars a week. Cowan never thought of herself as part of the Famous Players-Lasky scenario department that included top writers Jeanie MacphersonClara Beranger, and Beulah Marie Dix. She explains in 1932 that even if she had a twenty-one week contract there, she still worked freelance (8). In Hollywood, however, it was well known that Cowan eventually became one of the highest paid writers for Cecil B. DeMille, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1939 (A11).

Sada Louise Cowan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1883. Probably of Jewish heritage, Cowan moved to Europe as a teenager and studied music in Germany, we are told in a 1919 collection of one-act plays (Gardner 77). She then went on to make her name as a playwright in “The State Forbids,” “In the Morgue,” “Pomp,” “Playing the Game,” “The Moonlit Way,” “The Honor of America,” and “The Wonder of the Age.” Thus, it was with a formidable reputation as a playwright that Cowan wrote her first credited silent film, The Woman Under Cover in 1919, at the age of thirty-six. Soon after she completed her first work with DeMille in 1920, she entered into contract with director-producer Harry Garson for several films starring his wife Clara Kimball Young, a deal that the Los Angeles Times announced with the headline “Signs Sada Cowan” (III13). The year 1922 saw the release of Fool’s Paradise, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, on which Cowan is credited with Famous Players-Lasky studio writer Beulah Marie Dix.

In 1923, at the age of forty, Cowan teamed up with writer-director Howard Higgin. Working freelance, they could alternate between studios. Thus, the Los Angeles Times printed the Universal Films announcement that the head office was happy with a script outline (31). For Universal, they completed, for instance, the extant title Smouldering Fires (1924), directed by Clarence Brown. Between 1923 and 1926, Cowan and Higgin worked together on numerous motion pictures, including Broken Barriers (1924), Don’t Doubt Your Husband (1924), Changing Husbands (1924), The New Commandment (1925), In the Name of Love (1925), and The Reckless Lady (1926). They were also frequently publicized together in newspaper articles discussing the craft of screenwriting, as the Los Angeles Times featured them in October 1923 (VI11).  

Sada Cowan (w) AMPAS

Sada Cowan with unidentified man. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

If there are consistent themes in Cowan’s scripts, they would be marriage, love, divorce, and infidelity. Yet it is important to understand how these issues fit into a pattern of popular Jazz Age contemporary dramas that Karen Mahar describes as formulated by the DeMille trilogy, Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), and Why Change Your Wife? (1920), the film on which Cowan learned so much (2006, 144–45). If the Moving Picture World called Why Change Your Wife? “as near a 100 per cent perfect picture,” why wouldn’t she continue? (1678). Mahar argues that the first of DeMille’s Jazz Age trilogy was in 1918 a risky move urged by Jesse Lasky, aware of the censorship climate immediately following World War I, but gambling that a sexually risqué drama would not attract censorship (2006, 146). Perhaps, then, we can locate Sada Cowan’s first scenarios in the space between the post-World War I censorship and the more constraining Hayes Office censorship that, beginning after his 1923 appointment, defined the rest of the 1920s and into the 1930s.

One could consider, for instance, that what was allowable to say about modern marriage over these years determines the outcomes of the domestic dramas to which Cowan contributed. In Why Change Your Wife? (1920) a dapper husband splits from his nagging, modestly dressed first wife (Gloria Swanson), only to discover that his second wife (Bebe Daniels) becomes a similar nuisance the moment he marries her. He ultimately returns to Swanson, not out of love or devotion, but because she has mended her nagging ways. Though it is possible to read the film as a parody of the shallowness of men, Why Change Your Wife? can also be seen to cynically reinforce notions of female subservience and interchangeability. In Changing Husbands, released by Famous Players-Lasky on April 6, 1925, and reviewed in Bioscope, actress Leatrice Joy played look-alikes named with switched initials: Gwynne Everett and Eva Graham, a housewife and an actress, each of whom longs for the life that the other one has. By the film’s end, the women trade careers and husbands (34). The Universal drama Smouldering Fires (1924), reported Bioscope, is “the tragedy of a woman of middle age who falls in love with a boy twenty years younger than herself, only to realize after marriage that his affections have turned to the first superficially attractive girl he meets, who in this case happens to be his wife’s sister” (51).

In her own personal life, Cowan was married and divorced two times. We could speculate a link between the failures of marriage and the sometimes jaded tone of her writing. Her first husband’s name was Fredrick James Pitt, although “Miss Sada Cowan” remained her appellation in professional endeavors. In 1929, the Los Angeles Times reported a second marriage to Dr. Ernest L. Commons. Although she was forty-six at the time, the press gave her age as thirty-four (A7). Cowan’s career in Hollywood had continued successfully until her marriage to Commons. In 1925 alone, several films on which she had writing credit were released, including The Charmer, The Trouble with Wives, and East of Suez, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Pola Negri, based on a play by W. Somerset Maugham. After her marriage, reports vary as to her whereabouts between 1929 and 1932. Conflicting sources suggest that she may have been traveling, with or without her husband, in Europe or “the Orient” (A11). In 1932, however, Cowan reappears on the American scene as a writer of magazine articles, including some controversial essays on racial issues in the entertainment world in the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News (A6; 8).

She eventually returned to work on plays and sound motion pictures including Woman in the Dark (1934), adapted from a Dashiell Hammett story. The Los Angeles Times heralded her return and ranked her as one of the three “ace writers” in the silent motion picture industry—all women, they noted—Frances Marion, June Mathis, and Sada Cowan. “Miss Mathis died and Miss Cowan, after a brilliant career in the films, married and went to Europe to reside. Marion was left alone to continue on. Cowan has returned now” (B7). At the age of sixty, on Saturday, July 31, 1943, Cowan died in Los Angeles (19). Samson and Delilah (1950), directed by Cecil B. DeMille, the final film on which she worked, was not released until seven years after her death (19).

See also: Clara Beranger, Beulah Marie Dix, Jeanie Macpherson, Frances Marion, June Mathis, Olga Printzlau, Gloria Swanson, “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

“Changing Husbands.” Rev. Bioscope (18 Dec. 1924): 34.

Cowan, Sada. “Negro to Blame for ‘Darkie’ Types on Screen.” Pittsburgh Courier (15. Oct. 1932): A6.

------. “Hollywood Writer Reflects on Status of American Negro.” The New York Amsterdam News (28 Sept. 1932): 8.

------. “What ‘Pull’ You Need To Get Into the Movies.” The New York Amsterdam News (24 Aug. 1932): 8.

“Doctor Will Marry Writer of Scenarios.” Los Angeles Times (16 July 1929): A7.

Gardner Mayorga, Margaret. Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1919.

“Grab Plots on Treks Through the Southland.” Los Angeles Times (7 Oct. 1923): VI11.

Kendall, Read. “Around and About in Hollywood.” Los Angeles Times (16 March 1939): A11.

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

Malanay, M.A. “Why Change Your Wife?” Moving Picture World (6 March 1920): 1678.

“Sada Cowan to Write Dialogue for New Play.” Los Angeles Times (18 Sept. 1932): B7.

“Sada Cowan: Silent Film Writer, Playwright and Novelist is Dead at 60.” Obit. The New York Times (3 Aug. 1943): 19.

“Script Pleases: Production of Scenario Writers to be Screened Promptly.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (22 June 1924): 31.

“Sign Sada Cowan.” Los Angeles Times (20 June 1920): III13.

“Smouldering Fires.” Rev. Bioscope (12 March 1925): 51.

Archival Paper Collections:

W. Somerset Maugham Collection, 1905-1962. University of Michigan, Special Collections.

Citation

Bajar, Daniela; Livia Bloom. "Sada Cowan." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ybx4-5z37>

Kate Corbaley

by Song Jegal

“To some people life is narrative. To others it is drama. To me life is dramatic. It is never just a story, and to me scenario writing is the easiest form of expression.” Kate Corbaley thus expressed her views in Photoplay after winning first prize in the Photoplay-Triangle Scenario Contest.  The film she wrote was Real Folks (1918), which began her journey as a screenwriter. Following Corbaley’s receipt of the prize, Real Folks was produced by Triangle Film Company and released in theatres. Although the Photoplay contest appears to have given a talented young woman a head start, we still have reason, given Anne Morey’s recent research, to be skeptical about the industry recruitment of amateur writers and the promotional motives behind contests (Morey 1997, 300-319). We wonder if Photoplay’s figure of 7,000 stories submitted was an inflated number. Further, Corbaley was not a complete novice, as the Photoplay article reveals that Real Folks was Corbaley’s second prize (104). In 1917, she had written a comedy for Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew and the comedienne praised her for her ability to create people. And the relatively untrained Corbaley had not written a scenario that went directly into production but “Real Folks” was an original story that still had to be adapted for the screen—something we learn from the American Film Institute catalog, which lists Corbaley as “storywriter” and credits Jack Cunningham as scenario writer. Was Corbaley’s story worthy of the prize? Although no extant prints of Real Folks survive to help us assess the work, film reviews were favorable. Exhibitor’s Trade Review praised the visual style, mentioning its landscapes, interiors, and close-ups as well as the story that combined “mirth” with “pathos” (913).

Kate Corbaley (w), with children "The Winners of the Contest" Photoplay. Jan. 1918. p. 103. PD

Kate Corbaley with children “The Winners of the Contest“ Photoplay, 1918. 

From the 1930 United States Census we learn that Kate Corbaley was born in 1879 at sea. That she was born on a steamship en route to San Francisco is confirmed by her 1938 Los Angeles Times obituary, which also tells us that she graduated from Stanford University (A1). How did she enter into the film industry with her stories? Was the writing for Mrs. Sidney Drew actually her first step? What little we know about her personal life is from the Los Angeles Times obituary, namely, that Corbaley began her career in the motion picture industry with two stories for the Triangle Film Company and that she wrote for many periodicals after ending her twelve-year marriage to engineer Charles Corbaley (A1). We can infer that her career began after her marriage was over and while she was raising four daughters as a single parent. Apparently she used her family life as material on at least one occasion, which we learn from the Photoplay coverage of the prize-winning Real Folks (103). Following the success of Real Folks in 1919, two films based on Corbaley stories were produced by Frank Keenan Productions—The False Code (1919) and Gates of Brass (1919), the first of which Moving Picture World refers to as a “well sustained melodrama” (1014). Subsequently, Moving Picture World evaluated the Gates of Brass story itself as “quite unusual” (117). Did these accomplishments lead to Corbaley’s work as a consultant to the Palmer Photoplay Institute?

Kate Corbaley (w) The Essentials of Photoplay Writing, 1921. PCRK

Kate Corbaley, “The Essentials of Photoplay Writing,” 1921. Private Collection.

With Palmer featuring her Selling Manuscripts in the Photoplay Market as one of their basic textbooks, Kate Corbaley became a major spokesperson for the company’s method and served as an official advisor along with screenwriters with many more credits such as Jeanie Macpherson. In 1919 the Chicago Daily Tribune featured Mrs. Kate Corbaley in a Palmer Photoplay Institute advertisement as “the head of special marketing service” (B10). Another announcement followed in 1920 in the Los Angeles Times, presenting Corbaley as a “well known author” and one of the “advisory counsel” members of the Palmer Photoplay Corporation (117). The next year, Palmer announced in the Los Angeles Times that after two years at the company Kate Corbaley was continuing as department manager in charge of “reading and sales” (III1). Corbaley doesn’t diverge from a basic Palmer goal to convince moviegoers that they could learn to write and, most importantly, sell their screenplays. A December 1921 article in the Los Angeles Times quotes her advice regarding the importance of assessing the changing market in order to sell photoplays (III17). Elevating the Palmer Photoplay Corporation’s commercial motive, Corbaley could be relied upon to rhapsodize about the reasons for learning to write for the screen. As she expressed her convictions in one motivational talk reprinted in the manual:

As for other rewards, there can be no greater satisfaction, to my way of thinking, than seeing one’s brain children “come alive” on the silver sheet, and knowing that millions of people will get the message and the meaning of your visualized thought, knowing that you are reaching a greater audience and are touching and influencing more lives than is possible through any other form of art expression (14).

In 1926, Corbaley joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures as a story editor and that year the studio produced The Fire Brigade, based on her original story. This extant title was highly praised in the Los Angeles Times for its “realistic spectacle” featuring an orphanage destroyed by fire (12). It would be her last job, for she worked there as a scenario editor for twelve years until the day she died at the age of sixty, but in this time several newspaper articles lauded her. In 1937, the Los Angeles Times wrote that Corbaley had knowledge of the plots of 5,000 plays and novels (21). She was so good that she could quickly detect any plagiarism, added the Chicago Daily Tribune (F4).

From Real Folks in 1918 to her last credited title in 1927, The Fire Brigade, nine films were produced from Corbaley’s stories, including The Girl of Gold (1925), which she adapted in cooperation with Eve Unsell, who wrote the screenplay. Among these films, Corbaley is listed as the original story writer for Desert Blossoms (1921), and for the extant titles The Bad Lands (1925) and The Fire Brigade (1926). Although she is only credited on nine titles as a story writer or adapter, it is not difficult to imagine that a wide range of stories and scenarios must have passed through her hands almost “invisibly” while Corbaley worked at Palmer Photoplay Corporation and later at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures. Although it might seem that her work was invisible, we know that she was well paid. In 1937, the New York Times published a list of industry personnel making salaries in the range of $50,000, which contained film directors and screen writers as well as film stars. Kate Corbaley was included in this list (33). But how important was she? How could she be both powerful and unknown? A newspaper article titled “Hollywood Heroine” found in the Corbaley clippings files at the New York Public Library states that she was “nonexistent” since her name was not on the screen, but that she was powerful and important because she was able to say “no” to MGM producers Louis B. Mayer and Eddie Mannix.

See also: Mrs. Sidney DrewJeanie MacphersonEve Unsell

Bibliography

“Announcement: Palmer Photoplay Corporation.” Los Angeles Times (22 June 1921): III1.

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

“Country for New Workable Photoplays. Chicago Daily Tribune (30 Nov. 1919): B10.

“The False Code.” Rev. Moving Picture World (20 Dec. 1919): 1014.

“The Fire Brigade Realistic Spectacle. Los Angeles Times (23 Jan. 1927): 12.

“Gates of Brass.” Moving Picture World (5 July 1919): 115-117.

“Hollywood Heroine.” Unidentified article clipping. Kate Corbaley clippings file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

“New Salary list of $50000 or less.” New York Times (29 Jan. 1937): 33.

“Real Folks a Sermon with Comedy -Cast Does Good Work.” Exhibitor’s Trade Review (16 Feb. 1918): 912-913.

“Tells Pen Women About Marketing.” Los Angeles Times (25 Dec. 1921): III17.

“Town Called Hollywood.” Los Angeles Times (5 Nov. 1937): 21.

U.S. Census 1930. Census Place: Los Angeles, California. Roll 142, Page 26B, Enumeration District 231.

“Veteran Studio Editor Dies” Obit. Los Angeles Times (24 Sept. 1938): A1.

“The Winners of the Contest.” Photoplay vol. 13, no. 2 (January 1918): 103-104.

“This Woman’s Success Might Easily Be Yours.” Los Angeles Times (5 Aug. 1920): 117.

“Women Film Workers Total Forty per cent.” Chicago Daily Tribune (1 July 1934): F4.

Archival Paper Collections:

Kate Corbaley clippings file. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Citation

Jegal, Song. "Kate Corbaley." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-3whq-pf79>

Hope Loring

by Annie Berke

The life and times of Hope Loring, scenarist and wife of her collaborator, writer-producer Louis “Buddy” Lighton, are mentioned in the margins of Hollywood history. Loring, however, cuts a colorful, memorable figure in the few texts that mention her. Elia Kazan, in his autobiography, deems her petite and asexual (252), and W. C. Fields reportedly did not like this “fast-talking” woman (Curtis 199). However, in her autobiography, screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas gives us more insight into the couple’s marriage and working relationship than gossip columnists would dare:

Hope Loring, a manipulator and fast talker… had a heart condition, which she played up to the hilt. It won her B. P. [Ben Schulberg]’s sympathy and helped her control her Buddy. She was the brains of their writing partnership. He needed her and could not afford to lose her (149).

But while some, like Maas, could not abide her, Loring had allies in the film community. One was Mary Pickford, who in 1937 married Buddy Rogers (Carey 217), at what as one society page referred to as “Hope Loring’s home” (Kendall A7). Loring not only wrote for some of the top stars in Hollywood, such as Pickford, Clara Bow, even Gary Cooper, but was written about along with them.

Hope Loring at her desk. AMPAS

Hope Loring at her desk. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Hope Loring’s early life proves something of a mystery that we must puzzle together to produce a time line. From a 1919 article in the Moving Picture World, we learn that she was born in Barcelona to an Irish father and Spanish mother, but was orphaned as a baby after her parents were killed in a car accident. Hope’s aunt moved Hope to England at two years old and to the United States at the age of five (n.p.). Hope’s coming-of-age is not well-documented, but an item in the Los Angeles Times society page from 1922 gushes about how Hope Loring the writer “achieved no little fame as a dancer” and, further, that “[i]t was real dancing, not the shimmy, jazz or any of the numerous flapper varieties” (“Writes” III31). According to a 1925 Los Angeles Times article that provides us with the most biographical detail, before she arrived in Los Angeles, she worked in Florida as a drama critic and as a film extra in New York (Williams 26). Perhaps during these years Loring was loathe to reveal her true age to journalists, though a voting census from 1916 has a “Hope Loring” already registered in Los Angeles county (she will be registered in this county up through 1942), meaning that if she was at least twenty-one in 1916, she would have been in her thirties by 1925. Furthermore, a New York Times article from 1914 reports the scandal of one “Hope Loring,” a young dancer with a small child bringing suit against her homicidal jilted lover (3). One wonders if this Loring is the same woman who would later become a Hollywood insider. The parallels are striking—both the plaintiff in the case and the screenwriter were single mothers. The finding aid for the Lighton Family Papers at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville states that the Patricia Lighton who survived her mother is Loring’s daughter from a previous marriage. Maas confirms that Loring was on her second marriage with Lighton (Maas 149), and Kazan maintains that Lighton had no children (Kazan 253).

Lantern slide, The Rainmaker (1926), Hope Loring (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

The Lighton Family Papers at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville not only contain Loring and Lighton’s 1920 marriage announcement, but many of her husband’s notes and papers. Loring is mentioned in a few select documents, perhaps the most illuminating of which is a letter from William to Laura Lighton. Louis’s father William writes to his wife on Monday, April 19, describing Louis and Hope’s impromptu City Hall wedding that had occurred that very day. In his letter, Mr. Lighton praises Loring’s creative gifts and “practical genius,” and, tellingly, says that “her work and his will be together. She has helped him beyond telling in giving him a settled confidence in himself.”

In the years prior to their 1920 marriage, Loring had accrued scenarist credits on such films as A Society Sensation (1918) and Lure of the Circus (1918–1919). She was also working at Universal Pictures as the head of the serial and short reel department. Although she was only beginning her Hollywood career, news about her had already been picked up by local entertainment and gossip columnists. In 1918, a piece in the Atlanta Constitution runs: “Hope Loring, that clever young miss who turns novels into photo dramas, believes in living up to her name. On the door of her office at Universal City she has reversed that famous line on the entrance to Hades by printing ‘Who enters here finds hope’” (C7).

Loring_CCP_FIG178_WFP-LOR02

Lantern slide, The Blue Fox (1921), Hope Loring (w). Courtesy of Bison Archives.

Loring_CCP_FIG177_WFP-LOR01

Lantern slide, The Blue Fox (1921), Hope Loring (w). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

Hope and Louis struggled to succeed in the early years of their marriage. We know this at least from Maas’s description that they began their married life in a studio apartment on Fairfax Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, riding the bus because they didn’t have money for a car. In her estimation, they were “a couple of mediocre writers on the low end of the totem pole” (149). By the end of 1920, Loring had left her responsible job at Universal Pictures, then working under General Manager Isadore Bornstein, which we know from the Los Angeles Times headline “Hope Loring Resigns.” Not surprisingly, the article mentions that after her honeymoon, Loring would continue to write feature pictures on a freelance basis (III4). The couple would go on to collaborate on at least thirty feature films.

Journalists of the period were always interested in reporting on creative couples, and writers in particular, paying special attention to the way in which the couple balanced domestic and professional duties. In addition to the most visible husband-wife writer teams such as Anita Loos and John Emerson, there were Mr. and Mrs. George Randolph Chester (Lucille Chester), Agnes Christine Johnston and Frank Mitchell, Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, Bess Meredyth and Wilfred Lucas, among others. The Louis Lighton and Hope Loring collaboration was one of the longest. A Los Angeles Times piece from 1925 titled “Silence Being Golden, Two Scenarists Work Out Own Ideas Without Conference” describes their custom of each buying the other a gift after they finished a screenplay. In this same piece, the author sums up the couple’s routine, with the separateness of their tasks mirroring the ideal household in which man and wife each focused on their own circumscribed responsibilities: “Miss Loring writes a pictorial synopsis of the story, just as she visualizes it on the screen. Lighton writes his version…. Not a word of conversation relative to the story passes between the coauthors until each has read the other’s synopsis. Then, in their own words, “the fireworks start” (C28).

Additionally, a 1925 article entitled “Loring-Lighton Scenario Team Combines Work With Romance” contains Loring’s screenwriting method and philosophy, laid out in three points. First, “the business of writing must be learned.” Second, “get practical experience,” and third, consider budget. She explains, with reference to what she learned as a supervisor at Universal, that writing an expensive sequence “appears to me to be criminal” (Williams 26).

Loring worked on some of the most popular and successful vehicles of her time—including It (1927), an adaptation of Elinor Glyn’s popular book, and Wings (1927), which won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award that year for Best Picture. Her final credit was as a contributing writer on Once a Sinner (1931). Lighton would go on to produce Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) (Kazan 233) and films starring James Stewart, Orson Welles, and Rex Harrison, for instance, in the starring role in Anna and the King of Siam (1946). The couple eventually retired to Mallorca, Spain. Loring died in 1959 and her husband four years later.

Bibliography

1910 Los Angeles Voting Registration (as Hope Loring). California, Voter Registrations, 1900-1968 [online database]. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/cavoterrosetta/

1940 Los Angeles Voting Registration (as Hope Lighton). California, Voter Registrations, 1900-1968 [online database]. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/cavoterrosetta/

1942 Los Angeles Voting Registration (as Hope Lighton). California, Voter Registrations, 1900-1968 [online database]. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/cavoterrosetta/

“And The Greatest of These is Hope: Hope Loring, Scenarist, Confessing Startlingly on Eve of Going Abroad on New Universal Serial.” Moving Picture World (28 June 1919): n.p.

Carey, Gary. Doug & Mary: a biography of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977.

Curtis, James. W.C. Fields: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

“Hope Loring Resigns.” Los Angeles Times (6 June 1920): III4.

Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.

Kendall, Read. “Around and About in Hollywood.” Los Angeles Times (19 June 1937): A7.

Lighton, William. Letter to Laura Lighton. 19 April 1920. (MC 779, Box 4, File 1). Lighton Family Papers. University of Arkansas Libraries, Special Collections.

“LOCKED HER IN TO DIE WITH HIM, GIRL SAYS; Hope Loring, Dancer, Causes Arrest of Derby Crandall, Jr., for Assault.” New York Times (20 July 1914): 3.

Maas, Frederica Sagor. The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

“Scenarists Will Again Free Lance.” Los Angeles Times (17 May 1925): 30.

“Silence Being Golden, Two Scenarists Work Out Own Ideas Without Conference.” Los Angeles Times (22 Nov. 1925): C28.

“State President State Sponsor.” Atlanta Constitution (1 Sept. 1918): C7.

Wedding announcement. (MC 779, Box 4, File 1). Lighton Family Papers. University of Arkansas Libraries, Special Collections.

“What’s New on Stage and Screen—“ (MC 779, Box 15, File 8). Lighton Family Papers. University of Arkansas Libraries, Special Collections.

Williams, Whitney. “Loring-Lighton Scenario Team Combines Work With Romance.” Los Angeles Times (5 July 1925): 26.

“Writes and Dances” [Display Ad 175 – No Title]. Los Angeles Times (30 July 1922): III31.

Archival Paper Collections:

Lighton Family Papers. University of Arkansas Libraries, Special Collections.

Research Update

November 2019: Recent information concerning Hope Loring's place of birth has come to our attention, revealing that she may have been born in the United States and not Barcelona, Spain (a likely self-promotional, or studio-prompted, origin story). Census records and passport applications indicate that she was born in Iowa. For more information, please see: https://www.flickr.com/photos/puzzlemaster/47997273256/.

--The Editors

Citation

Berke, Annie. "Hope Loring." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-vnr3-pv51>

Beta Breuil

by Maria Fosheim Lund

In a little yard cottage at the Vitagraph Studios in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, Mrs. Beta Breuil ran the company’s scenario department from 1910 until 1913. As the company’s first scenario editor and perhaps the first woman to assume this position in the United States, Breuil’s career was brief, but significant. Her name is attached to more than fifty produced scenarios, and she mentored several women scenario writers at the company. However, researching Breuil’s career presents problems, as she operated with at least five names: her maiden name, names from three marriages, and a nom de plume—Mrs. Beta Breuil—her professional identity.

WFP-BRE01

Beta Breuil in The New York Times.

Breuil’s venture into the film business and the work sphere seems to have been caused by financial necessity. Born into privilege in New York City in 1876 as Elizabeth Donner Van der Veer, Breuil was the daughter of a lawyer, educated at the Misses Graham’s School in New York City and the Misses Virgin’s School in Dresden, Germany (Leonard 125). In 1893, the New York Times printed a wedding announcement of her marriage to Frank M. Willard, a wealthy manufacturer. However, ten years after their wedding, the New York Times ran another article with the semi-scandalous headline “Death Prevented Divorce” (1). Here, we learn that Willard had died just before the couple’s divorce had been granted and that his family and insurance company were working to prevent her from getting the insurance money.

In 1903 she was remarried, this time to Hartmann Breuil, but was soon widowed for a second time in 1908. Her nom de plume thus stems from her last name from her second marriage and an abbreviation of her first name, Elizabeth. And so, it was as a two-time widow that she entered the business. A 1916 article in the Moving Picture World describes her path to Vitagraph: “Mrs. Breuil, after much travel throughout the world, had been thrown on her own resources at an age past thirty and had tried the stage before she sought and got the position of scenario writer for the Vitagraph Company. From that she rose to the position of editor and headed the department which she organized herself” (431). It remains unclear in what capacity Breuil was first hired, as the New York Times describes her first job with Vitagraph as an assistant, but she rose fast: “In four months she was at the head of the scenario work in their studio.” The same article asserts that Breuil had 192 produced scenarios to her name in 1912 (1913, SM4). Most accounts agree that Breuil’s rise to fame was quick, due to the enormous amount of work she completed in a very short amount of time. This massive work effort was also given as the reason for Breuil’s retirement from Vitagraph in 1913, after only three years at their service, when Marguerite Bertsch succeeded her (630). Participating in the contemporary discourse about the screenwriting profession, Breuil wrote a short article in the Moving Picture World in 1913 in which she refers to the development from what we today we call the early “cinema of attractions” (“the trick pictures, absurd chases and fairy spectacles”) towards narrative design (“a real basic plot—a logical, well-planned interest-holding story”) (482). This development is also reflected in Breuil’s own work.

Certainly, Breuil seems to have had an eye for talent, as she is credited with giving the aspiring young actress Norma Talmadge her breakthrough at Vitagraph, having been thoroughly impressed by her beauty (Spears 107). Talmadge’s first role as a contract actress at that company was also in a film written by Breuil, In Neighboring Kingdoms (1910). Apparently Talmadge had not impressed the director with her acting skills, but according to Spears, Breuil had persuaded J. Stuart Blackton—the company’s cofounder—to give her a second chance (110). Breuil also wrote the Belinda series for Norma Talmadge in the title role, including, all in 1913, Belinda, the Slavey; Sleuthing; and A Lady and Her Maid, of which only the latter is extant.

In a biography of her father, Marian Constance Blackton recalls that Breuil was also the person who, rather by chance, opened the doors for Larry Trimble and Jean the Vitagraph Dog. Blackton  recounts how Larry Trimble had been “amiably, if absentmindedly, received by Breuil, assistant and only staff to the department’s nominal head, Rollin S. Sturgeon” (44). Trimble, who was researching an article, had gone to Vitagraph to do his research, when he had learned of Breuil’s problems with finding a dog who could take directions. Demonstrating his skills with dogs on the spot, having found a homeless dog on the studio lot, Trimble was invited to return with his border collie mix—Jean (46).

During this relatively brief period of time, Breuil had become a well-known and respected figure in the business, and most trade journals noted her resignation with regret, accompanied by great interest in her future plans. The Moving Picture World wrote that “she has worked constantly for the last three years without cessation and is entitled to a little ‘loafing time’ before she again gets into the traces,” adding “Mrs. Catherine Carr (…) who has been coached by Mrs. Breuil to the same modes of thought and action, remains in the staff and in time will gain equal regard in the affections of the photoplaywrights—but we are going to miss Mrs. Breuil” (630). An article in the Motion Picture Story Magazine also paints a portrait of Mrs. Breuil as a mentor for young screenwriters at Vitagraph, amongst them Doris Schroeder, and again Catherine Carr, who is described as “another brilliant graduate of Beta Breuil’s ‘scenario class’ in the Vitagraph’s little yard cottage” (87).

After leaving Vitagraph, Breuil worked freelance and was also briefly connected to other companies. The Moving Picture World reported that she was doing “splendidly” in a 1913 article written by an unnamed but clearly indignant author, who in response to a reader who “ungallantly ha[d] argued that the business of writing stories would be better if the women would keep out,” mentioned Breuil together with Hettie Gray Baker, Maibelle Heikes Justice, and Gene Gauntier as examples of good women scenario writers, concluding that “We do not believe in votes for women, but we most assuredly believe in scripts by women, yessir!” (257). In 1914, Epes Winthrop Sargeant in his Moving Picture World column reported that she had accepted the artistic management of the North American Film Corporation, adding, “She is not editor, nor is she production manager. Her undeniable talent is not limited to any particular line, but she is the artistic advisor of the corporation, bringing to her work the valuable knowledge gained through her previous connections, but here her genius for devising effects and working out ideas will have an absolutely unlimited scope, for she will have no one between herself and the company” (40).

Perhaps under contract, or perhaps as a freelance, Breuil worked on at least four titles at the Rhode Island-based Eastern Film Company during 1915–16, the flower-themed films Daisies (1915), Wistaria (1915), Violets (1916), and My Lady of the Lilacs (1916–1919). All four titles are in the collection of the Rhode Island Historical Society, and interestingly, the films’ opening credits read “by Beta Breuil, Eastern Film Company,” perhaps a clue that Breuil produced and/or directed these films as no other names are listed in the credits. My Lady of the Lilacs was recently restored, and despite missing scenes and at times severe deterioration of the film’s negative, the narrative remains intact. The silent melodrama tells the story of the artist Stanton King who is in search of a subject to paint, and finds a woman asleep under the lilac trees: “Myra Craig—with ambitions to become an author,” as the title card announces. Stanton starts painting the sleeping beauty, who is both startled and angry to be awakened by a man painting her portrait. At an exhibition, a wealthy art collector places a bid on the painting, but Stanton refuses to sell, having fallen in love with the girl on the canvas. In the meantime, Myra is invited to a “Literary Evening” in the city, where the collector recognizes her face and courts her. Stanton falls into despair when he sees the wedding announcement in the local paper, and feels an urge to return to the lilac trees where he first saw Myra. Again, he finds Myra asleep under the trees, but instead of being startled, she realizes that he is really the man of her dreams. Abruptly, the film ends happily with Stanton painting a portrait of Myra and their baby child.

The career trajectory of Beta Breuil seems to fall apart in the last half of the 1910s. A 1916 article in the Moving Picture World announced that she had been engaged by Mirror Films to do “special work on several feature pictures” (431), but like her work at Eastern Film Company and North American Film Corporation, there are few, if any, sources that describe her work there nor are there any film titles credited to her name that could give insight into her work with these companies, with the exception of the four flower film titles at Eastern. In 1918, she is listed as screenwriter on three titles, none of which are extant: When a Woman Sins, A Daughter of France, and Life or Honor?, the latter an Ivan Photoplay production; the first two by Fox Film Corporation. When a Woman Sins featured Theda Bara, and its reviews may be the last published references to Breuil. The “advertising angles” section in Moving Picture World following the review of the film serves as a fitting afterword: “Make all the use you can of the Bara name and as companion angle tell that the story is by Beta Breuil, who wrote some of the greatest Vitagraph stories a couple of years ago” (1780).

See also: Hettie Gray Baker, Marguerite Bertsch, Gene Gauntier, Maibelle Heikes Justice, Norma Talmadge

Bibliography

“Beta Breuil with Mirror.” Moving Picture World (15 Jan. 1916): 431.

Breuil, Mrs. Beta. “The Reward for Reading.” Moving Picture World (3 May 1913): 482.

“Death Prevented Divorce.” New York Times (27 March 1904): 1.

“In Error.” Moving Picture World (18 Oct. 1913): 257.

La Roche, Edwin M. “A New Profession for Women.” Motion Picture Story Magazine (May 1914): 83-88.

“Mrs. Breuil’s Plans.” Moving Picture World (18 Oct. 1913): 738.

“Mrs. Breuil Retires.” Moving Picture World (9 Aug. 1913): 630.

Sargent, Epes Winthrop. “Mrs. Breuil Lands.” Moving Picture World (3 Jan. 1914): 40.

———. “The Literary Side of Pictures.” Moving Picture World (11 July 1914): 199-202.

Smith, Russell. “The Authors of the Photoplay.” Book News Monthly (March 1915): 326-332.

Trimble, Marian Blackton. J. Stuart Blackton: A Personal Biography by His Daughter. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985.

“When a Woman Sins.” Rev. Moving Picture World (10 August 1918): 1780.

“Writing the Movies: A New and Well-Paid Business.” New York Times (3 Aug. 1913): SM4.

Citation

Lund, Maria Fosheim. "Beta Breuil." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-82c9-5857>

Annette Kellerman

by Clarice M. Butkus

Annette Kellerman’s entrée into silent film began in the middle of an acrimonious battle to control the terms of her vaudeville career. Australian-born, she had established herself as a powerful draw on the American vaudeville circuit by promoting her “Perfect Woman” physique and presenting spectacular high diving and underwater exhibitions. Caught in a firestorm between theatre magnates B. F. Keith and William Morris after Morris offered Kellerman $1,500 per week, she astutely used her commercial popularity to get an agreement to appear in several silent kinetoscope shorts. She was ordered by court decree to fulfill the rest of her contract with Keith before beginning with Morris (Gibson and Firth 2005, 79–82).

Annette Kellerman. USW

Annette Kellerman. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Annette Kellerman (a/d/w) in swimsuit, LoC

Annette Kellerman in swimsuit. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Annette Kellerman (a) Neptune's Daughter(1914), PCRK

Annette Kellerman, Neptune’s Daughter (1914). Private Collection.

Annette Kellerman. USW

Annette Kellerman. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Annette Kellerman. USW

Annette Kellerman. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Annette Kellerman. USW

Annette Kellerman. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Kellerman’s “bodiliness” and sexuality were key aspects of her vaudeville performances. Thus, by the launch of her motion picture career, she had already developed a compelling trademark that combined an eroticism emphasized by form-fitting costumes with a daredevil prowess to which was added advocacy of women’s access to physical culture. Kellerman was arrested and charged with indecent exposure on Boston’s Revere Beach for wearing a “maillot pantaloon,” a unitard with no legs, and was critical of corsets, which she described as “fiendish things injurious both to body and health” in her 1918 book Physical Beauty: How to Keep It. Between 1909 and 1911, Kellerman appeared in both aquatic and nonaquatic silent roles for the Vitagraph Company, with her athleticism most prominently displayed in Miss Annette Kellerman (1909). She starred as well in The Bride of Lammermoor: A Tragedy of Bonnie Scotland (1909), Jepthah’s Daughter: A Biblical Tragedy (1909), The Gift of Youth (1909), and Entombed Alive (1909). With the exception of Jepthah’s Daughter, these early films are believed to no longer exist, making it difficult to trace Kellerman’s nascent film star persona. However, the highly marketable appeal she had developed for mass audiences likely increased the control she would have over her image production (Cullen, Hackman, and McNeilly 2007, 619-20).

Kellerman finally left vaudeville when Edward Albee of what became the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation threatened to cut her salary in half. Striking out on her own, she convinced Captain Leslie T. Peacock to script her idea for the underwater fantasy film Neptune’s Daughter (1914). Carl Laemmle of Universal Film Producing Company took on the project, and Herbert Brenon directed. Kellerman’s biographers Emily Gibson and Barbara Firth sketch the outlines of her uncredited “co-directorial” role in this production, describing Kellerman as contributor in the development of story lines, stunts, locations, and camerawork. In the degree of control she exercised, they compare her favorably with the most powerful stars of the day—Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. In support of this view of Kellerman, her biographers quote her as having said of director Brenon that he constantly turned to her, asking, “What do you think we should do here?” (118).

Kellerman’s sheer physicality and bravery dominated her films and propelled the scene action. For example, in one scene from Neptune’s Daughter, she leaps from a cliff in combat with the villain then overcomes him to rescue the male romantic lead. Her biographers tell us that the dangerous physical stunts in the film left both Kellerman and Brenon severely injured. Kellerman was knocked unconscious in a cliff dive, and both actress and director were badly cut when the underwater tank in which they were performing burst (119–21). In Kellerman’s next film, A Daughter of the Gods (1916), reportedly the first feature film to cost over a million dollars, she again became an uncredited cowriter of the script in addition to costume designing, casting, and training hundreds of performers (135–6). For the film, Kellerman and Brenon scripted a death-defying waterfall dive. Gibson and Firth tell us that when William Fox studio executives eliminated the scene because it looked too risky, Kellerman complained to them: “That’s the way. Somebody’s always trying to take the joy out of life” (136). Kellerman also refused a double for a scene that required her to jump into a pool of live crocodiles, and she became notorious for delivering the first nude appearance by a high-profile star in a large-scale production (139).Yet Kellerman’s film publicity couched her sexual charge in terms of formal artistry, comparing her physique to that of the goddess Venus, a ruse to keep from offending middle class tastes. But Kellerman’s fearlessness and sexuality went beyond pure titillation. According to one Boston Post journalist: “After seeing her, one may feel like defying any ten-foot man in the audience to declare that the sex of which she is an ideal example hasn’t the courage to fight or the ability to vote or do anything else they choose to do” (149).

Queen of the Sea (1918), What Women Love (1920), and Venus of the South Seas (1924) were Kellerman’s last three major motion pictures. The first was a less successful reworking of many of the themes and stunts found in the earlier mermaid films. The second was a comedy that initially paired Kellerman with Lois Weber, the director who had launched her own production company, but who was ultimately replaced on the film. Venus of the South Seas was a comparatively low-budget production with a New Zealand production company directed by Kellerman’s manager-husband James Sullivan and thought to be the only complete Kellerman film extant. Though far less grandiose in scale, Venus reprises her signature role.

Beyond the biographical account provided by Gibson and Firth, there have been few attempts to identify Kellerman’s agency in the film projects she built. In all of her films, her characters retain names that are some form of “Annette,” attesting to the carryover of Kellerman’s prefilm star persona. During the making of the fictionalized account of her life in the Esther Williams star vehicle Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), Kellerman technically advised Busby Berkley on the choreography of water scenes. Kellerman was so active in the mode and manner of her representation that we might best see her various theatrical producers and film directors as her collaborators. Further consideration of her creative input is now more possible because partial prints of key titles, among them Neptune’s Daughter and Siren of the Sea, have been recently uncovered through amateur research and are held in archives in Australia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Russia.

Bibliography

Boston Post (n.d.): 149. Clippings files.  State Library of New South Wales.

Butkus, Clarice M. “’A Story of Girls and Pearls’: Genre and Gender in the Films of Annette Kellerman.” Unpublished M.A. Thesis, New York University, 2008.

Cade, Mary Ann. “The Lost Films: Searching Archives for Films that are Presumed Lost.” Silentsaregolden.com. http://www.silentsaregolden.com/articles/lostfilmsarticle.html

Cullen, Frank, Florence Hackman, and Donald McNeilly. Vaudville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America. Vol. 1. New York: Routledge, 2007. 618-620.

Gibson, Emily, and Barbara Firth. The Original Million Dollar Mermaid: The Annette Kellerman Story. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.

“I always advocate something to do.” New York Evening Journal (1 May 1912): 92.

Kellerman, Annette. “My Story.” Unpublished memoir. n.d. State Library of New South Wales.

------. Physical Beauty: How to Keep It. United States: George H. Doran Company, 1918.

“Kellerman, Annette Marie Sarah.” HerStory Archive [online database]. The National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame. https://pioneerwomen.com.au/collection/herstory-archive/kellerman

Wooster, Marcelle [Kellerman's sister]. “Let’s Do Something.” Unpublished memoir. n.d. State Library of New South Wales.

Archival Paper Collections:

Various archival materials. State Library of New South Wales.

Research Update

Additional resources (compiled by Columbia MA student Maria Teresa Fidalgo in 2020):

Gibson, Emily and Barbara Firth. The Original Million Dollar Mermaid: The Annette Kellerman Story, Allen & Unwin, 2005.

Kellerman, Annette. How to Swim. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1918.

Stieglitz, Olaf. “ Swimming the Crawl to Educate the Modern Body: Visual Material and the Expanding Market for Participatory Sports in the USA, 1890-1930s.” In Body, Capital, and Screens: Visual Media and the Healthy Self in the 20th Century. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 159-180. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv12sdvgj.9.

Walsh, G. P. “Kellerman, Annette Marie (1886–1975).” In Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography. Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kellermann-annette-marie-6911/text11989 (accessed 12 January 2020).

Archival Digital Exhibition- Videos, Interviews, etc

Who is Annette Kellerman? (2018) "Fearless Pioneer,"  National Film and Sound Archives of Australia. https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/online-exhibition/annette-kellerman-australias-fearless-mermaid

Citation

Butkus, Clarice M. "Annette Kellerman." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kye3-cb18>

Maibelle Heikes Justice

by Daniela Bajar, Livia Bloom

“Mr. Osbourn took me to the deathhouse at the New York State penitentiary in order that I might secure better local color for my film drama, Who Shall Take My Life?” writer Maibelle Heikes is quoted in the Atlanta Constitution, explaining her research process for the 1917 film. She entered Sing Sing prison with an order from the New York Supreme Court of New York (D4). Written by Justice and directed by Colin Campbell, Who Shall Take My Life? (1917) tells the story of Big Bill O’Shaughnessy, a man convicted and executed for the murder of a woman who, after his execution, is discovered to be still alive. Although at times described as anti-capital punishment propaganda, the film was also appreciated in the press for its high level of realism and notably sparked intense discussion because of its strong moral and political stance. The Moving Picture World review mentions a screening for members of the Chicago branch of the Anti-Capital Punishment Society of America attended by prominent politician and citizen supporters (1800). Maibelle Heikes Justice was no stranger to the thorny political and emotional questions raised by the US legal system. The Moving Picture World review explained that she was the daughter of prominent Indiana jurist James Monroe Justice and speculated that quite possibly the screenwriter was familiar with many cases of “miscarried” justice, which produced the suffering of the innocent for crimes they never committed. “Miss Heikes Justice,” the writer asserts, is “an ardent opponent of capital punishment” who produces in her photoplay a “most convincing argument in favor of her belief” (1800).

Maibelle Heikes Justice, 1917. AMPAS

Signed portrait Maibelle Heikes Justice, 1917. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

In 1895, at the age of twenty-four, Justice began her career writing articles and monthly book reviews. An aspiring poet as well as a playwright, “My Sweetheart’s Fan,” published in Current Literature in 1897, locates her in the romantic tradition: “The air was suave with summer / More suasive Dora’s eyes—/ Such eyes that fall to drooping / at first, at love’s surprise” (336). Numerous short stories over the next twenty years eventually led to Justice’s transition from the literary realm into the motion picture world. When she was in her mid-forties, for instance, “The Other Man,” published by Cosmopolitan in 1913, was also produced as a short film. Justice’s output during her early years writing for the cinema is impressive. Between 1913 and 1916 she is credited with writing either titles or scenarios for over thirty short films. She also worked for more than ten different directors at companies including Selig Polyscop, Lubin, Metro, and Essanay (Brownlow 1990, 259).

Justice’s collaboration with the actress, writer, and director Kathlyn Williams is particularly notable as together they made several short motion pictures including The Governor’s Daughter (1913), The Love of Penelope (1913), Mrs. Hilton’s Jewels (1913), and The Leopard’s Foundling (1914). When she later moved into feature film work, Justice continued collaborating on projects with established women in the industry, one example of which is The Glory of Yolanda (1917), written by Justice and based on her play, directed by Marguerite Bertsch in a production starring Anita Stewart.

Letter from Maibelle Heikes Justice (w) to Selig, 1915, AMPAS

Letter from Maibelle Heikes Justice to Selig, 1915. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

In 1915, Maibelle Heikes Justice entered the national spotlight for a tragic reason — her sister perished on the RMS Lusitania when it was sunk by a German submarine. The incident, which historians claim led to the US entry into World War I, led the “clever New York authoress,” according to the Los Angeles Times, to a fascination with the occult as a consequence of her sister’s death ( II1). In the subsequent years, however, Justice went on to write several important silent features that continued her exploration of legal themes. Youth’s Endearing Charm (1916), a film based on her novel, tells the story of an orphan girl who escapes a rural life of hardship and is apprehended by the courts. Justice explored the ambiguity of circumstantial evidence in Melissa of the Hills (1917) a film in which, like Who Shall Take My Life?, the name of an innocent man is cleared after his death. Subsequent films continued to address issues of social and familial responsibility, including The End of the Trail (1916), Durand of the Bad Lands (1917), Intrigue (1917), Her Husband’s Honor (1918), and Birthright (1920).

In her lifetime, Heikes was acknowledged for her work in the press. Toward the end of her career in 1924, the Washington Post acknowledged her as “one of the most accomplished women in the scenario business,” and numbered the stories she had written for the screen at two hundred, many of which had served as models of scenario writing technique (A3). In addition to her literary achievements, Justice was also the inventor who devised a renewable typewriter ribbon device (Morey 87). In “Maibelle Heikes Justice: Literary Star,” a profile appearing in Photoplay Author, the article’s male author recalls that he had low expectations of her on their initial meeting: “I mentally sniffed, and thought to myself: ‘Another fiction star selling scripts on her literary reputation!’” Much to his surprise, however, the writer comes to admire Heikes, although for some disconcerting reasons. One, she appeared “unaffected by her success”; two, she was not a “blue stocking”; and three, as a member of a tight group of writers, she was “one of the boys” (163–165). Significantly she was a member of the Inquest Club, a circle of screenwriters founded in 1913 by Epes Winthrop Sargent, understood as the first informal organization of the new “photoplay” writers (Wright 217).

Louella O. Parsons sought Justice’s advice for her 1917 screenwriting manual, How to Write for Movies. There, Justice explains that “The plot or central idea of the drama must never for an instant be forgotten.” Demonstrating an interest in structure, she recommends that “Each scene must be a little stronger in story value than its predecessor… About two-thirds of the way through, one is over the hill of ‘high lights’ and must now begin to drive his subject home in a strong and perfectly logical manner toward the final[e]” (240–241).

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Folliard, Edward T. “Sheen of the Silver Screen.” The Washington Post (24 May 1925): A3.

“Is Waite the Murderer in Heaven?” The Atlanta Constitution (15 July 1917): D4.

Jones, Marc Edmund. “Maibelle Heikes Justice: Literary Star.” Photoplay Author vol. 11, no. 6. (Dec. 1913): 163-165.

Justice, Maibelle Heikes. “The Other Man.” Cosmopolitan Magazine vol. 54 (1913): 787-796.

------. “My Sweetheart’s Fan.” Current Literature vol. XXI, no. 4 (April 1897): 336.

McQuade, James S. “Who Shall Take My Life?” Rev. Moving Picture World (22 Dec. 1917): 1800-1.

Morey, Anne. “Would You Be Ashamed to Let Them See What You Have Written?” The Gendering of Photoplaywrights, 1913-1923.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature vol. 17, no. 1. (Spring 1998): 83-99.

New York Dramatic Mirror (30 June 1917): n.p.

“Tidings of Lusitania Message from Grave?” Los Angeles Times (9 May 1915): II1.

Wright, William Lord. Photoplay Writing. New York: Falk Publishing, 1922.

Citation

Bajar, Daniela; Livia Bloom. "Maibelle Heikes Justice." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-m0p7-0369>

Eugenie Magnus Ingleton

by Jane Gaines

Although Eugenie Magnus Ingleton established her reputation as a scenario editor and writer at Universal Pictures between 1916 and 1917, before she arrived in the United States, she had several exciting careers on two continents—from Britain to South Africa.

The most complete biographical information about Ingleton is found in a 1915 Moving Picture World article featuring her as the reference librarian at the World Film Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In this “interview,” which she may have written herself, she reveals that she was not only a nurse and newspaper correspondent during the Boer War in South Africa, but worked for the British Secret Service. In London, where she was born, she says, she began on the stage playing Little Eva in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” at ten years old and continued, playing one hundred and four leading roles in a London stock company. Thus it was that she came to the United States to perform, first in New York then Chicago, where theatre impresario William A. Brady was one of her managers (662). It may have been through Brady that she arrived at the World Film Corporation, which Anthony Slide tells us evolved from a 1914 venture to film the successful Shubert-Brady theatrical productions as the Shubert Film Corporation (Slide 1998, 235). The idea was to promote the film versions as costing as little as ten cents as opposed to the $2.00 a Broadway production could cost (Spehr 1977, 86). Ingleton’s early credits list the producer as either William A. Brady Picture Plays or Shubert Film Corporation, but these companies were merged in 1915.

The fact that Ingleton describes work on a scenario for a five-reel production of Irish melodrama dramatist Dion Boucicault’s 1868 “After Dark” suggests that the companies did not just film stage play performances, but that they rewrote these productions for motion pictures. Further, in the Motion Picture World article, she says that her adaptation work on “After Dark” involved an updating from London to contemporary New York and from the Crimean War to the Spanish-American War (662).

Eugenie Magnus Ingleton, The Moving Picture World, January 1915.

From Ingleton’s description, she was working in January 1915 at the new Paragon studios, recently acquired by the World Film Corporation. Describing the library of the reference department that she started there, it is clear that she anticipates the needs of directors looking for ideas for costumes and scenes, so she collects sketches that might be used as visual reference for period films or particular locations (662). According to Slide, the studio World Film had taken over was the largest on the East Coast, and, as part of the expansion, Lewis J. Selznick had been hired as general manager and vice president in 1914, although he left in 1916 to form Lewis J. Selznick Productions, taking the company’s leading star, Clara Kimball Young, with him (1998, 235). Ingleton would have overlapped with Young, who appeared in Trilby (1915), one of two scenarios Ingleton wrote—the other, The Ivory Snuff Box (1915)—directed by Maurice Tourneur. She herself left in 1916, her arrival at Universal Pictures in August announced in Motography (512).

At Universal, Ingleton, beginning with Circumstantial Justice, released September 1916, wrote around thirty features and shorts. Cooper says that Ingleton was one of a very few female department heads in the 1916–1917 time she was at Universal, and, what is more unusual, she ran the scenario department with Eugene B. Lewis. Cooper says that at that time, of the fourteen staff writers, five were women. Motion Picture News in December 1916 names twelve, including Lewis and Ingleton, one of whom is Bess Meredyth. The article announces as well a significant change in the work of the studio writers and by implication the function of the scenario department. With a reduction in the number of “reading staff” who evaluated outside scenarios, more scripts were to be written by studio writers who would have been on payroll (4027).

In 1920, the Ladies’ Home Journal mentions Ingleton as one of those scenario writers who had occasionally directed, remarking that “Now and again a woman scenario editor would direct a picture.” Listing her along with Jeanie Macpherson, Ruth Ann Baldwin, and Elsie Jane Wilson, the author refers to her as “scenario writer and afterward director” (140). This is somewhat of an exaggeration, however. Macpherson directed one film, The Tarantula (1915), quite by accident early in her career, and for the next decade was a screenwriter at Famous Players-Lasky, where she never directed. There is no evidence that Ingleton directed more than one five-reel feature, The Birth of Patriotism (1917). Cooper explains Ingleton as an “exception to the rule” that at Universal, women began directing shorts before they directed feature films, even the most accomplished and prolific feature director Lois Weber. It is his theory that Ingleton was recruited to direct The Birth of Patriotism, a Special Attraction mounted as part of the war effort, because it was set in London, and she would have been the most knowledgeable person about British culture at the studio (142).

According to Cooper, the Universal Weekly says of Ingleton that she “has already shown her skill in a short picture,” by which they must mean that she wrote many (142). And further, Cooper states that the house organ refers to The Birth of Patriotism as “her first important photoplay,” based on a Saturday Evening Post story (142). He also sites the Universal Weekly’s enthusiastic coverage of the production of The Woman Who Would Not Pay (1917), a film in which a husband takes revenge on his wife and her lover by suffocating him in a safe. “Three clever women combined their work,” says the Weekly, citing Ingleton’s job as writer with actress Cleo Madison and director Baldwin. Ingleton would write two more films that Baldwin directed that year—The Storm Woman (1917) and When Liz Lets Loose (1917). Both of these were produced as part of the Victor Company, started by Florence Lawrence and Harry Solter in 1912 as one of the small companies within Universal integrated into the company by 1914 and phased out in 1917 (Slide 1998, 221).

In retrospect, Ingleton’s career followed the rise and fall of the “Universal Women”: at their productive high point in 1916 and gone from the company by 1917. Her next credits are for Triangle Film Corporation, which produced Because of a Woman (1917) and The Answer (1918). She adapted the George Barr McCutcheon novel as Black Is White (1920) for Thomas Ince. Her last credit is for the Fox Film The Kiss Barrier (1925), suggesting that her motion picture career was effectively over at age thirty-nine.

See also: Ruth Ann Baldwin, Florence Lawrence, Jeanie Macpherson, Cleo Madison, Bess Meredyth, Lois Weber, Elsie Jane Wilson, Clara Kimball Young.

Bibliography

“The Birth of Patriotism.” Moving Picture Weekly (28 April 1917): 12-13.

“Cleo Madison in ‘The Woman Who Would Not Pay.” Moving Picture Weekly (21 July 1917): 11.

Condon, Mabel. “The City Universal.” New York Dramatic Mirror (5 Aug. 1916): 26-28, 32-36, 44.

Cooper, Mark Garrett. Universal Women: A Case of Institutional Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Jessen, J. C. “In and Out of West Coast Studios.” Motion Picture News (23 Dec. 1916): 4027.

McMahon, Henry. “Women Directors of Plays and Pictures.” The Ladies’ Home Journal (Dec. 1920): 13, 140, 143-144.

“New World Film Department.” Moving Picture World (30 Jan. 1915): 662.

“Shifted from the Studios.” Motography (26 Aug. 1916): 512.

Spehr, Paul C. The Movies Begin: Making Movies in New Jersey, 1887 – 1920. Newark, N.J.: The Newark Museum, 1977.

Research Update

Recent research by Luke McKernan, based on details provided by a relative of Eugenie Magnus Ingleton, sheds light on her pre-film industry life in the United Kingdom. Prior to coming to the United States, Eugenie (born Anne Eugenie Magnus) was married to Frederick William Watkins. The couple married on December 28, 1896, and he eventually became an actor with the stage name Fred W. Leonard. The couple had one son in 1897 (listed in the birth notice under “Leonard”). It is unclear what happened to this son. In the 1901 census, they are listed as Fred W. and Eugenie Leonard, theatre professionals, living in Kirkdale, Lancashire. They appear to no longer be together by the 1911 census (she's back to using her maiden name and listed as widowed, although Fred is alive and living with another woman).

On December 9, 1911, Eugenie Magnus, aged 34 (listed as married and an actress) came to the United States, departing Southampton for New York, as a first class passenger on board the S.S. Minnewaska. It is unknown where she met George Ingleton, an eventual film actor and writer, who likewise immigrated to the United States in 1911 (from Scotland on the “California”). Most likely, the two met in New York, although it is unclear whether or not they were ever officially married. A later trip in 1913 (on the passenger ship “The Philadelphia”) from Southampton to New York calls them married.

--The Editors (November 2019)

Citation

Gaines, Jane. "Eugenie Magnus Ingleton." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-0akf-p282>

Katharine Hilliker

by Kristen Hatch

Katharine Hilliker, best known for her work as a team with her husband, Harry H. Caldwell, began her career writing silent motion picture titles and shaping European films for release in the United States before becoming a freelance production editor for Samuel Goldwyn, United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Fox Film Corporation. As a production editor, her responsibilities, she states in her resume, involved “consultation on story and cast and the supervising of scripts before production to the job of preparing the picture, after it was shot, for theater presentation.” Hilliker’s papers, which include a number of personal letters, are a rich source of information on the films she edited and titled and the people she worked with, including producers Harry Rapf, Irving Thalberg, and Samuel Goldwyn; director F. W. Murnau; and Fox studio head Winfield Sheehan.

Poster for Street Angel (1928).

Poster, Street Angel (1928).

Hilliker was born Katharine Clark in Tacoma, Washington. Her father died when she was young, and she was later adopted by her stepfather, thus becoming Katharine C. Prosser. She attended high school and college in Savannah, Georgia, before moving to San Francisco to become a society editor for the Berkeley Independent in 1909. In addition to working as a society editor, she was a proofreader and rewriter. From there she worked at other publications in the San Francisco area including the Oakland Inquirer and The Call.

It is at The Call where she met her first husband Douglas “Bill” Hilliker. Douglas Hilliker was a talented graphic designer who would also work in the motion picture industry designing the publicity posters and materials for studios such as Paramount. In a strange twist of fate, Bill Hilliker would later remarry and have a daughter who would marry Katharine’s son from her second marriage. But it is from Bill Hilliker that Katharine became familiar with and learned quite a bit about graphic arts, which would aid her in collaborating with art departments later in her film titling and editing career.

Katharine Hilliker (titlist). PD

Katharine Hilliker portrait.  

Her journalism career led her to New York, where she became the motion picture editor for the New York Morning Telegraph. In 1915, she left journalism to become an associate editor in the scenario department at Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Reaching a salary cap and figuring there was not much of a future in reading, in 1917 she resigned and became an assistant to Vivian Moses, the director of publicity at Lewis Selznick and Adolf Zukor’s Select Pictures, where Hilliker wrote publicity copy for magazines and newspapers. That year she also published an article in Motion Picture magazine in which she was identified as a scenario editor and gave advice to aspiring writers. A 1927 profile of Hilliker reports that she wrote the titles for The Lesson, which Select released in 1918 (106). In a small personal statement, Hilliker reminisced that the film had sat on the shelf for six months and over that time several attempts were made to make it releasable with little success. Seeing this as an opportunity to get into the production circles, Hilliker wrote new titles and working with a cutter reedited the whole film. When it was released, after Hilliker had left Select, the new version made back production costs and a profit.

Poster for Eternal Love (1929).

Poster, Eternal Love (1929).

During World War I, she joined George Creel’s staff as an assistant editor for the Division of Films of the Committee on US Public Information, writing publicity and helping to make films shot in military camps and munitions factories. For these pictures she traveled extensively, visiting the locations and overseeing various aspects of production. During this time she also returned to publicity, working for magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair writing up and conducting star interviews and putting together layouts. It was while working for the magazine Film Fun that the editor, Jesse Nile Burness referred her to C. L. Chester, a travel and comedy picture producer.

Following the war, Hilliker joined the independent company C. L. Chester Pictures Corporation as a production editor, which meant overseeing scripts, cameramen, and cutters. According to the Motion Picture Studio Directory and a “List of Pictures” found in her personal papers, she edited and titled the first two Torchy comedies and Toonerville Trolley comedies at Chester Pictures (306). All Chester Pictures would eventually be absorbed by Educational Pictures, which sadly lost the majority of their film library to a laboratory fire in 1937.

Screenshot of logo for C.L. Chester Pictures. PC

Screenshot, logo for C.L. Chester Pictures. 

Hilliker’s primary contribution at Chester Pictures was writing the titles for the “Chester Outing scenics,” or “screenics,” a series of short films produced by Chester Pictures for Outings, an outdoor magazine. These travelogues depicted people and scenery in locations ranging from the Philippines, China, and New Zealand to Taos, New Mexico, and Yellowstone National Park. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Chester Outing scenics “brought us to every part of the picturesque old world, and their beauty made us glad. Too, their humor made us laugh.” This humor, the Times noted, was to be found in the intertitles, which we know were written by Hilliker (III1). A 1920 Photoplay article describes Hilliker’s approach to titling the scenics: “If you give her a waterfall scenic, does she write gentle things about the waterfall whose splashes clear bring sweetest music to our ear? She does not. She turns it into a half-whimsical, half-hilarious treatise on prohibition” (124). While with Chester, she would title over fifty scenic pictures, and meet her second husband, a man with an illustrious military career, H. H. (Harry Hadley) Caldwell.

Screenshot They Went To See in a Rickshaw (1919), edited and titled by Katharine Hilliker. PC

Screenshot, They Went To See in a Rickshaw (1919), edited and titled by Katharine Hilliker.

In 1920, Hilliker was hired by S. L. “Roxy” Rothafel, who owned the Capitol Theatre in New York, to write English titles for Ernst Lubitsch’s German film, Madame DuBarry (1919). She was repeatedly called upon to title European films, including the Weimar era German classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), for which, according to Motion Picture, she wrote the prologue and epilogue of the US release print (106). In 1922, she began part-time work as an assistant to Major Edward Bowes in the Goldwyn Company New York office. In her resume, Hilliker explains that her work at Goldwyn involved taking care of all possible censorship problems and that she had quite a lot of responsibility, as she “passed on the possibilities of pictures offered for distribution [and] sat in on all editorial matters.” This resume, a remarkable narrative of eighteen years of work experience, is perhaps the most comprehensive description we have of the function of a story editor as well as that of a film editor and title writer between 1915 and the end of the silent era. Its value is in its confirmation of the early participation of women in so many aspects of motion picture pre- as well as post-production work.

Poster for Faust (1926)

Poster for Faust (1926)

In 1921, Hilliker married Harry H. Caldwell, the vice president and general manager of the C. L. Chester Pictures Corporation, which produced the Chester Outing scenics, and the two, often referred to as The Captain and Miss Kit, began titling films as a team. A 1927 profile of the couple published in Motion Picture magazine describes their collaboration: “The two look at a picture two or three times and write down ‘scratch’ titles. They each write their own titles. Then they compare them. Sometimes the title of one is used, sometimes that of the other, or thirdly, they often combine or work out a title together that satisfied both” (106). In order to avoid being separated, the couple often signed joint contracts, at a reduced salary, sharing credit for titling and editing the films they worked on from this point forward. However, it appears that Hilliker enjoyed more prestige within the film industry than her husband did. In a 1925 letter to her agent, Cora Wilkenning, Hilliker complains bitterly that “a lot of dumb Doras seemed to think I wrote his stuff for him.” This impression may have been due to the fact that it was generally Hilliker who pursued and negotiated the joint contracts. Even outside the industry, Hilliker had made a name for herself. A Washington Post article about the new profession of title writing and the couple notes, “Mrs. Caldwell had herself won such distinction her maiden name was retained” (n.p.).

Soon after their marriage, Hilliker and Caldwell moved to Los Angeles to title Samuel Goldwyn’s releases of two Italian feature motion pictures, Théodora (1919) and The Ship (1921), that Goldwyn had imported. In a 1922 Photoplay article, Hilliker describes her role in rescuing problem-plagued films, compensating for a miscast actor or covering up missing scenes in Goldwyn’s print of Theodora, for instance. During this period, Hilliker became increasingly frustrated with cutters who would refuse to make changes she suggested, the cutters often claiming the reasons were too technical for her to understand. Enlisting the help of a friend in the cutting room, Hilliker learned all about the various editing practices, from cutting to other post-production effects. From then on, if the cutters refused to make the changes she suggested, she would do them herself.

Poster for Lucky Star (1929).

Poster, Lucky Star (1929).

In 1922, according to the Moving Picture World, the couple began work as personal assistants to June Mathis, producer at the Goldwyn Company, where they would become heads of both the film editing and what was then called the “art title” department (732). However, they were not given the creative freedom they would have liked, and in January 1923, they informed Mathis that they would return to New York upon completing their work on Lost and Found on a South Sea Island (1923), complaining in a 1923 memo to her that “a job that has nothing to commend it but the salary involved is not much of a job.” For the next two years, the couple freelanced, working for large companies, the US First National Exhibitors Circuit, the German UFA, and independent producers Jules Brulatour and E. K. Lincoln, as well as the Canadian government, “whipping productions into shape for theater showing,” she writes in her career resume. In 1925, Katharine Hilliker signed an individual contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had absorbed Goldwyn in 1924. Her signing was an important enough event to receive mention in the Moving Picture World (451). Her resume says that she was “adviser on editorial problems; trouble-shooter on censorship snags; [and was] responsible for final editing and titling of productions assigned.” Hilliker moved once again to Los Angeles, although Caldwell initially stayed behind in New York. Her letters to Caldwell during this period vividly describe working with Harry Rapf and Irving Thalberg. She was, she says, thrilled to be working with Thalberg on Ben Hur (1925), although the film was plagued by production problems. Ultimately, though, her experience at the studio was not happy, and she would write to her husband in June 1925 of what she saw as the chaos and inefficiency of the studio system. With three “continuity men” on the same story, she complained, the final continuity script made no sense. “I have yet to read a continuity here,” she writes, “which is not as full of holes as a Swiss cheese.” In an effort to keep Hilliker, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer eventually gave her a suite of offices with her own screening room and even revised her contract to include Caldwell. However, the work remained unbearable to the couple, and before they left the studio, they requested that their names be removed from The Scarlet Letter (1926), the Lillian Gish star vehicle credited to writer Frances Marion.

Poster for Ben Hur (1925).

Poster, Ben Hur (1925).

Poster of Seventh Heaven (1927).

Poster, 7th Heaven (1927).

In July 1926, Hilliker and Caldwell signed a contract with Fox Film Corporation, where, according to publicity that they may have written themselves as part of a letter to Sol. W. Wurtzel, general superintendent of the company’s West Coast studio, they would be “supervising editors and personal aides to Wurtzel.” Further, in addition to supervising scripts and titles, they would have control of the final edit on every production, and be given full publicity credit as production editors for each film they cut, unusual contract stipulations for editors at the time. Evidence that Fox lived up to the contract is the advertisement for Seventh Heaven (1927), which features a photograph of the couple, identified as the film’s “editors and title writers,” accompanying photos of the film’s director, Frank Borzage, and its stars, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. The pair were permitted a great deal of creative control over the films they worked on, and were trusted by the studio’s directors, including F. W. Murnau. Hilliker and Caldwell consulted on story and cast, supervised scripts, and even wrote new sequences in order to fill narrative gaps.

Poster of Sunrise (1927).

Poster,  Sunrise (1927).

Given Hilliker’s comfort around the drawing table and graphic design, she would often work with the art department giving input on the artistic design of the title cards as well. It is speculated that on the film Sunrise (1927) it was Hilliker who conveyed Murnau’s vision for the title cards to the art department, resulting in the famous animated title card “couldn’t she get drowned” along with the stylistic elements of the other title cards. Hilliker’s thirst for learning and taking on new projects and skills raises questions and speculation about the connections between script and title writers, editors and the art department, and how they all worked together. Hilliker provides one of those links, as according to her family, she was fastidious about overseeing her titles down to the last detail, including design and how and when they would appear on screen. In both the MoMA archives and the personal family collection of papers, there are hundreds of drafts of titles the couple worked on, some with the most minor change of word choice or word order. That fastidiousness and attention to detail may have been part of the reason they worked so well with the stern F. W. Murnau. It has been said that the couple were two of the only people on the set or otherwise that could openly poke fun and joke around with the director. Looking through Hilliker and Caldwell’s papers, one finds various drafts to get the titles just right, correspondence working to the same end, and other notes, letters, and memorandums all in an effort to support the creative vision of the director. She and Caldwell’s dedication to the director and his vision seems to imply more of an artistic and personal partnership with Murnau than a mere professional one.

According to Janet Bergstrom, Hilliker and Caldwell were so essential to the endangered production of City Girl (1930) that they effectively were responsible for “saving Murnau’s vision” of the beleaguered film (448). During this period, publicity for Hilliker, says Bergstrom, often described her as “one of the best known title writers in the industry” (451). The couple’s activities were even reported in the society pages of the Los Angeles Times, as in the 1928 coverage of their travels (C15).

The advent of sound brought an end to Hilliker’s film career. Intertitle writers did not fare well in the transition to sound, for theirs was a skill developed for the silent cinema. Eventually, independent producer Sol Lesser hired Hilliker to write a sound version of the popular stage play “Peck’s Bad Boy.” However, her script was scrapped when Lesser sold the property to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which released the film in 1934. In 1932, after being turned down for a contract with Universal, the couple signed a two-month agreement with Joe Brandt at World Wide Pictures in New York. According to their contract, their role there would be to “read stories, prepare synopsis of such stories; read treatments, continuities, dialogues, etc., and [give] opinions on them.” The financial difficulties of World Wide Pictures, however, brought an end to Hilliker’s motion picture career. Despite having had a creative hand in many of the most prestigious films of the silent era, Hilliker found herself out of money in Los Angeles, selling off her belongings in order raise enough cash to return to her husband and son in New York.

Hilliker returned to writing with some success. She contributed to the WPA, collecting oral histories, and she and Caldwell wrote three plays together. Following his death, she returned to magazine writing, working for various publications. She lived out the rest of her life in New York City, maintaining her independence by writing and creating ads for The Grosvenor, where she lived. Katharine Hilliker, as Katharine Clark Caldwell, and her husband are interred in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

With additional research by Bethany Czerny

See also: Hettie Grey Baker, Winifred Dunn.

Bibliography

Anderson, Antony. “Photoplay Lady of Many Titles.” Los Angeles Times (24 July 1921): III1.

Bergstrom, Janet. “Murnau in America.” Film History (July 2002): 430-460.

“Caldwells to Assist June Mathis.” Moving Picture World (23 Dec. 1922): 732.

“Celluloid Doctors on High Seas.” Los Angeles Times (1 Apr. 1928): C15.

“H.H. Caldwell is Amongst the Outstanding Figures in New Profession” Washington Post  (27 Nov. 1926): n.p.

Hilliker, Katharine. “The Scenario Editor and the Plotting Public.” Motion Picture Classic (Dec. 1917): 30-31, 66.

------. Letter to Cora Wilkenning. 2 July 1925. Hilliker-Caldwell Collection. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

------. Letter to H.H. Caldwell. 5 June 1925. Hilliker-Caldwell Collection. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

------. Letter to Mrs. Brophy. Undated. Caldwell Family Collection.

------. “List Of Pictures.” Undated. Caldwell Family Collection

------. Resume of Career Experience. Undated. Unpublished typescript. Hilliker-Caldwell Collection. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

------.“Writing the Titles.” Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry. Vol. 2. Los Angeles: Photoplay Research Society, 1922. 49-53.

Hilliker, Katharine and H. H. Caldwell. Memorandum to June Mathis. 30 January 1923. Hilliker-Caldwell Collection. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

------. Letter of agreement with Joe Brandt, President, World Wide Pictures. 10 June 1932. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

------. Letter to Joe Brandt, World Wide Pictures. 10 Jun. 1932. Hilliker-Caldwell Collection. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

------. Letter to Sol. W. Wurtzell, Fox Film Corporation. 2 Aug. 1926. Hilliker-Caldwell Collection. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

“Katherine Hilliker Signs New Contract.” The Moving Picture World (25 July 1925): 451.

Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual. New York: Motion Picture News, Inc., 1921.

Smith, Alison. “Kidding Mother Nature.” Photoplay (May 1920): 124.

St. Johns, Adela Rogers and Katharine Hilliker. “The Motion Picture Alibi.” Photoplay (March 1922): 47-48, 98.

Thompson, Paul. “They’re Married and the Work Together.” Motion Picture (Oct. 1927): 47, 106.

Archival Paper Collections:

Hilliker-Caldwell Collection. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Katharine Hilliker and H.H. Caldwell Papers. Dennis Doros, Milestone Films. Private Collection.

Caldwell Family Collection. Barbara Caldwell and Katherine C Parsons. Private Collection.

Citation

Hatch, Kristen. "Katharine Hilliker." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kfp2-2s54>

Alice Guy Blaché

by Alison McMahan

From 1896 to 1906 Alice Guy was probably the only woman film director in the world. She had begun as a secretary for Léon Gaumont and made her first film in 1896. After that first film, she directed and produced or supervised almost six hundred silent films ranging in length from one minute to thirty minutes, the majority of which were of the single-reel length. In addition, she also directed and produced or supervised one hundred and fifty synchronized sound films for the Gaumont Chronophone. Her Gaumont silent films are notable for their energy and risk-taking; her preference for real locations gives the extant examples of these Gaumont films a contemporary feel. As Alan Williams has described her influence, Alice Guy “created and nurtured the mood of excitement and sheer aesthetic pleasure that one senses in so many pre-war Gaumont films, including the ones made after her departure from the Paris studio” (57). Most notable of her Gaumont period films is La Vie du Christ (1906), a thirty-minute extravaganza that featured twenty-five sets as well as numerous exterior locations and over three hundred extras.

Alice Guy Blaché (d/w/p). PCAM

Alice Guy Blaché. Private Collection.

Alice Guy Blaché (d/w/p) on set

Alice Guy Blaché on set. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Alice Guy Blaché (d/w/p)

Alice Guy Blaché. Courtesy of the Royal Belgian Film Archive.

Matrimony's Speed Limit (1915) Alice Guy Blaché (d/w/p). PC.

Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1915). Private Collection. 

A House Divided (Solax, 1913) Alice Guy Blaché. PC

A House Divided (Solax, 1913). Private Collection.

Two Little Rangers (Solax, 1912)

Two Little Rangers (Solax, 1912). Private Collection.

In early 1907, Guy resigned her position as head of Gaumont’s film production arm in Paris although she did not end her business relationship with Gaumont. She married Herbert Blaché, another Gaumont company employee. Léon Gaumont sent Herbert to Cleveland to start a Gaumont Chronophone franchise. After nine months the franchise failed, and Gaumont made Herbert manager of his New York studio in Flushing, Queens, which was originally built to produce English language chronophone films. Gaumont had an agreement with the Edison Company and the other members of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) that his company’s sound as well as silent motion pictures would be distributed as licensed films. In 1909, Edison, who planned his own synchronized sound device called the Kinetophone, began to resist the idea of including the Gaumont company as a licensed MPPC distributor. As a result of Edison’s influence, Gaumont’s many applications for formal membership in the MPPC were rejected. The Flushing plant languished.

In 1910, Guy decided to take advantage of the under-used Flushing plant. She started her own company, Solax, and made silent films using the Gaumont studio. The Solax films were then distributed by Gaumont through George Kleine’s distribution company. By 1911, Solax was making enough money for the Blachés to move into their own large house. Guy built a $100,000 studio plant for Solax in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1912, the same year her second child, Reginald, was born, brother to Simone, born in 1908. Once Gaumont, no longer part of the MPPC monopoly, joined the ranks of the independents, Solax had to negotiate for distribution on a state-by-state basis.

For the two years that it was successful, the Solax Company jump-started the careers of several actors and made stars out of performers such as Darwin Karr and Blanche Cornwall, who starred in a series of melodramas that critiqued the social system, such as A Man’s a Man (1912), The Roads That Lead Home (1913), The Girl in the Armchair (1913), and The Making of an American Citizen (1911) as well as action films like The Detective and His Dog (1912) and the multi-reeler The Pit and the Pendulum (1913). Karr and Cornwall also starred in comedies like A Comedy of Errors (1912), Canned Harmony (1912), His Double (1912), and Burstop Holmes’ Murder Case (1913). But the actors that really brought Guy’s comic genius to life were Marion Swayne and Fraunie Fraunholz. They starred in A House Divided (1913) and Matrimony’s Speed Limit (1913), two typical examples of Alice Guy’s emphasis on marriage as an equal partnership and the reason these two extant films still appeal to audiences today.  Guy also made numerous action films with female characters as heroes, many of them starring Vinnie Burns. Guy first cast Burns when she was an unknown teenager, then trained her to do her own stunts in actions films such as Two Little Rangers (1912), Greater Love Hath No Man (1913), and Guy’s masterpiece at Solax, the three-reeler Dick Whittington and His Cat (1913), for which the director had a real boat detonated. Guy also gave Romaine Fielding his start as an actor; he appeared in numerous Solax films, including Mixed Pets (1911), Across The Mexican Line (1911), and Greater Love Hath No Man. 

The Solax films that stand out today are Guy’s comedies of cross-dressing, such as the extant titles Cupid and the Comet (1911), starring Burns, and What Happened to Officer Henderson (1913), featuring Swayne and Fraunholz. There is also the lost film In the Year 2000 (1912), with Fraunholz and Cornwall, in which male and female gender roles are completely reversed. (Guy originally made the same film for Gaumont in 1906, entitled Les Résultats du féminisme, which survives.) The Solax Company provided a rich growth and learning environment for set designers like Ben Carré and Henri Ménessier, who had followed Alice Guy from Paris. Ménessier, who had designed the sets for Guy’s masterpiece at Gaumont, La Vie du Christ, wrote the photoplay and designed the sets for the Guy-produced film The Sewer (1912), directed by Edward Warren and starring Darwin Karr.

By 1913, the distribution difficulties began to make themselves felt. Solax moved from producing shorts to features the same year, while still producing shorts. However, by the end of 1913, it was clear that the day of the short film was over. Herbert started his own company, Blaché Features, Inc. Blaché Features used the Solax studio and often the same actors. However, Solax continued to work in parallel and some press announcements continued to use the Solax name for both companies for quite some time. Under the Blaché Features banner the couple took turns directing a feature film, or sometimes two, a month, each producing the films the other directed (Slide 74). Some of the films Guy directed include The Shadows of the Moulin Rouge (December 1913) and the following films in 1914: Beneath the Czar, The Dream Woman, The Monster and the Girl, The Woman of Mystery, and The Lure. The script for The Lure was based on the popular Shubert Theatrical production of the play by George Scarborough, and most of the cast from the play appeared in the film (“The Three Arts” 8). It was distributed by the World Corporation, which merged with the Shubert Organization just before the film was released (“World Film and Shuberts Combine” 29).

Blaché Features joined Popular Plays and Players, a loose coalition of film production companies. Under the Popular Plays and Players banner, Guy directed (all in 1915): Heart of a Painted Woman, The Vampire, My Madonna, and What Will People Say?, all starring Olga Petrova. She directed one final film under the Popular Plays and Players banner, The Empress, released on March 11, 1917 (“Features – Current and Coming” 1577), the only film of this period that still survives, though in fragmented form. Popular Plays and Players was absorbed into Metro, according to Billboard in 1917 (65).

Both Guy and Herbert worked as directors for hire in the teens. Guy directed The Ocean Waif for the Golden Eagle/International Film Service, owned by Hearst, which was released on November 2, 1916. On July 1, 1916, Motion Picture News announced that the couple would “shortly open the ‘Greater Blache [sic] Studios’ adjoining the present Solax-Blache [sic] stages and Produce for World and Pathe [sic](“Blache [sic] Will Pay $1,000 for Script4042). Her surviving feature from this period is the Marcus Loew production The Great Adventure (1918), starring Bessie Love, for which Agnes Christine Johnston wrote the screenplay. The couple separated and Herbert went to Hollywood, but had Guy join him there after she nearly died of the Spanish Influenza. There she worked as his assistant director on The Divorcee (Metro, 1919) starring Ethel Barrymore and two films produced by and starring Alla Nazimova: The Brat (1919) and Stronger than Death (1920). The couple divorced in 1920. Herbert remained in Hollywood and continued to direct features, including The Saphead (1920), starring Buster Keaton, until 1927. He remarried and became a furniture merchant. He died in 1953. In 1922, after handling the bankruptcy auction for her studio plant, Guy chose to return to France, where for the next thirty years she lectured widely on film and wrote magazine fiction and novelizations of film scripts. She never remarried, nor did she make another film. She died in New Jersey in 1968 and is buried in the Catholic cemetery in Mahwah, New Jersey. [Eds. This text was revised by the author in October 2018].

See also: Agnes Christine JohnstonAlla NazimovaOlga Petrova

Alice Guy Blaché’s work in France will be thoroughly covered and included shortly.

Bibliography

Bachy, Victor. Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968): la première femme cinéaste du monde. Perpignan: Institut Jean Vigo, 1993.

The Billboard vol.6, no. 2 (1917): 65.

“Blache [sic] Enlarging Studio.” Moving Picture World (23 Nov. 1915): n.p.

“Blache [sic] Forms New Company. Will Be Known as United States Amusement Corporation and Will Make Big Features.” Moving Picture World (2 May 1914): 653.

“Blache [sic] Will Pay $1,000 for Script, If He Gets First Pick.” Motion Picture News (1 July 1916): 4042.

“Edward Warren Leaves Solax.” Moving Picture World (16 Aug. 1913): 725.

“Features - Current and Coming.” Motion Picture News (10 March 1917): 1577.

“A Forty-Five Minute Talking Picture.” Moving Picture World (24 May 1913): 801.

“Gaumont Talking Pictures.”New York Dramatic Mirror (31 Oct. 1908): 8.

Judson, J.K. “Kelly from the Emerald Isle: Barney Gilmore Plays His Well Known Role, ‘Kelly’ for the Solax Camera.” Moving Picture World vol. XVI, no. 9 (31 May 1913): 925.

“The Lure’ to Blaché Studio.” Moving Picture World (9 May 1914): 829.

MacDonald, M.I. “Madame Blaché’s Production of Auber’s Fra Diavolo.” Moving Picture News (15 June 1912): 18.

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

------. Alice Guy Blaché: The Research and Books of Alison McMahan. http://www.aliceguyblache.com/

The Moving Picture World (23 Aug. 1913): 802-803. [Note: Blaché’s press release on pg. 804]

“The Pit and the Pendulum.” Ad. Moving Picture World (3 July 1913): 282-83.

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

“The Solax Company.”Moving Picture News (15 July 1911): 14.

“Solax Company: What It Is Doing At the Studio” and “Mr. Wilbert Melville, Managing Director of the Solax Company.” Moving Picture News (17 June 1911): 8-9.

“The Three Arts.” The Evening Sun [Baltimore, MD] (14 May 1914): 8.

Williams, Alan. Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

“Will Pay $1,000 for Scenarios.” Moving Picture World (23 June 1916): 2250.

“World Film and Shuberts Combine.” Motography (4 July 1914): 29.

Citation

McMahan, Alison. "Alice Guy Blaché." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-5a4c-yq24>

Bertha Muzzy Bower

by Charles H. Williamson

Bertha Muzzy Bower was perhaps the first female author of mass-market Western fiction. In her lifetime, Bower wrote sixty-eight Western novels under an androgynous nom de plume, a mandate made by her early publisher Street & Smith in order to conceal her gender from readers. While it is difficult to accurately assess the massive popularity of these novels, her works—particularly her Flying U novels—attracted the attention of several Hollywood producers and were regularly adapted into films. Her most popular novel, Chip, of the Flying U, seemed to have been a favorite among moviemakers, as it was adapted four times. As most scholarship on Bower focuses on her literary career, information on her work in cinema remains sketchy and indeterminable. Nonetheless, several sources tell us that Bower was attracted to cinema and particularly to the Hollywood Western. According to Orrin Engen, Bower believed that “the early cowboys of the films projected the essential vitality of life on the range” (11). Outside of the film adaptations, her ties to Hollywood seem tangential at best, though she also worked as a scenario writer and screenwriter, collaborating extensively with director Colin Campbell and cowboy actor Tom Mix.

Bertha Muzzy Bower on Horse 1910 (w) UOL-WHC

Bertha Muzzy Bower on horse 1910. Courtesy of University of Oklahoma Libraries, Western History Collections.

 Bertha Muzzy Bower at typewriter (w) UOL-WHC

Bertha Muzzy Bower at typewriter. Courtesy of University of Oklahoma Libraries, Western History Collections.

Bertha Muzzy Bower with rifle (w) OUL-WHC

Bertha Muzzy Bower with rifle. Courtesy of University of Oklahoma Libraries, Western History Collections.

Although Bower’s professional career as a novelist technically began with the 1904 publication of “Ghost in the Red Shirt” in Lippincott’s Magazine, she only attained a truly wide-ranging readership later that year with the publication of her first Western novel, Chip, of the Flying U, which was serialized in Street & Smith’s Popular Magazine. It became a sensation with readers, generating enough interest to be reissued as a hardback in 1906 by G. W. Dillinghan. The novel, which was published under Popular Magazine’s mission to print authentic stories of Western ranch life after the massive popularity of Owen Wister’s The Virginian, centers on Chip, a tough but sensitive cowboy who works on the fictional “Flying U” ranch. Much of the novel focuses on the romantic tension between Chip and the ranch owner’s sister, Dell Whitmore, an upper-class medical student traveling to the Flying U after the completion of her degree out East. Initially, their relationship is antagonistic, as Dell takes credit for one of Chip’s landscape paintings in order to sell it; this conflict resolves itself and blossoms into romance after Dell identifies Chip as the true artist and, in a rousing adventure sequence, Chip rescues her from a runaway horse. Immensely popular, Chip spawned an entire series of novels set within the fictional Flying U universe. These novels, as Victoria Lamont attests, solidified Bower’s reputation as a renowned fiction writer: “Bower’s transition from pulp author to ‘serious’ novelist was enabled by the success of her ‘Flying U’ stories” (1993, 63). From here, Bower would write continuously for the rest of her life, averaging two or three novels a year until her death in 1940.

Chip of the Flying U was adapted for the screen four times, which, as Lamont suggests, might be the most accurate indicator scholars have of the novel’s immense popularity (1998, 164). Bower’s narrative, however, seemed to be altered more and more dramatically with each successive film. Selig produced the first adaptation of Chip in 1914, a five-reel feature starring Tom Mix in the title role. According to William Everson, Chip remains singular among the films produced from the pairing of Mix and Selig, writing that this was the only of “Mix’s Selig films [that] made a strong impression” (1992, 84).  The second adaptation, retitled The Galloping Devil (1920), was directed by Nate Watt and starred Bud Osbourne and Genevieve Berte. This version jettisons much of Bower’s narrative, promoting Chip from farmhand to ranch owner, and adding in characters such as the villainous foreman Dink and heroic cowboy Andy. With the 1926 adaptation produced by Universal, romantic melodrama faded into the background, as the film made the comedic stylings of Hoot Gibson its most salient feature. For many scholars and contemporary critics, the 1939 talkie adaptation remains the most satisfying version of this novel although the original story was significantly transformed. In addition to Chip, several other motion pictures were adapted from Bower’s novels, including The Wolverines (1921), The Taming of the West (1925), and Ridin’ Thunder (1925). However, little has been written on any of Bower’s adaptations outside of the four versions of Chip.

Aside from the occasional mention of these film adaptations, Bower’s contributions to cinema did not receive much academic attention. After the publication of Chip, Bower collaborated with director Colin Campbell, writing stories and screenplays for seven one-to-five-reel Westerns under the name Bertha Muzzy Sinclair (her second husband’s surname). As Hollywood producers and location scouts flocked to Montana in order to find the assistance of cowhands, Bower became acquainted and developed friendships with Gary Cooper and Tom Mix, and she eventually developed a professional relationship with Mix. In addition to taking on the titular role in Selig’s Chip of the Flying U, Mix starred in three other films written by Bower: When the Cook Fell Ill (1914), The Lonesome Trail (1914), and Weary Goes A’ Wooing (1915). In 1920, Bower moved to Hollywood with her third husband, tearing herself away from the untamed West she had called home all of her life. Bower continued to write for Hollywood, and would on occasion use her experiences working within the studio system as the source material for her novels, as in Jean of the Lazy A (1915), The Heritage of the Sioux (1915), The Phantom Herd (1915), and The Quirt (1920).

Bibliography

Anderson, Kate Baird. “Bertha Muzzy Bower: A Montana Pioneer.” Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, 1997. n.p. https://libraries.ou.edu/locations/docs/westhist/bower/introduction.html.

Engen, Orrin A. Writer of the Plains: A Biography of B. M. Bower. Culver City: Pontine, 1973.

Everson, William K. The Hollywood Western: 90 Years of Cowboys and Indians, Train Robbers, Sheriffs and Gunslingers, and Assorted Heroes and Desperados. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Pub. Group, 1992.

Lamont, Victoria. “Cattle Branding and the Traffic in Women in Early Twentieth-Century Westerns by Women.” A Journal of American Women Writers vol. 22, no. 1 (2005): 30-46.

------. “Writing on the Frontier: Western Novels by Women, 1880–1920.” PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 1998.

------. “Writing Women Into America: Women, Democracy, and the Western 1902–1920.” MA Thesis. University of Guelph, 1993.

Meyer, Roy W. “B. M. Bower: The Poor Man’s Wister.” Journal of Popular Culture vol. 7, no. 3 (Winter 1973): 667-679.

Archival Paper Collections:

B.M. Bower Papers. University of Oklahoma Libraries, Western History Collections.

Citation

Williamson, Charles H. "Bertha Muzzy Bower." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hd31-e271>

Marian Constance Blackton

by Cameron Howard

Marian Blackton worked on over fifteen films during her short career as a scenarist and occasional actress. Her father, J. Stuart Blackton, one of the founders of the Vitagraph Company, directed all but two of her scenarios. Marian Blackton became her father’s script girl in 1921, and graduated to scenario writer in 1924. Most of her scenarios were dramas adapted from existing novels or plays.

Marian Constance Blackton with her father, J. Stuart Blackton. USW.

Marian Constance Blackton with her father, J. Stuart Blackton. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Blackton was the daughter of Isabelle MacArthur, the first of her father’s four wives. She grew up at the Vitagraph Company Studios, and thus her first appearance on screen seemed inevitable. She was watching the filming of her father’s The Life of Moses (1910), when she was spotted and sent to the costume department because they needed more extras. Blackton followed her father on location, later recalling in the biography she wrote of her father that “Location trips with my father’s company were my idea of heaven” (89). After graduating from high school, she asked to join her father, who was then working in England. As Anthony Slide explains, J. Stuart Blackton had left Vitagraph in 1917 to start his own independent company and by then Blackton Productions had a studio in London. He refused, but she went anyway, threatening, “You let me come over to England and learn the scenario business right now or I’ll join a burlesque show” (1987, 110).

Marian Blackton became J. Stuart Blackton’s script girl on The Gypsy Cavalier/A Gipsy Cavalier (1922) and also appeared as an extra, then did the same for The Virgin Queen (1923). Her first full scenario, according to the Blackton biography, was Between Friends (1924). J. Stuart Blackton was displeased with the original script, so Marian wrote her own, and she proudly recalls her father saying that it was the first script he had ever read that didn’t require a single change (52). By 1925 it was the news in the Los Angeles Times that she was adapting and writing all J. Stuart Blackton’s scenarios, and the paper praised the script for Behold This Woman (1924) for its “strength and delicacy of touch.” The same article, in addition to raving that she brought credit to the “name of Blackton” in only three years, compares her with established writers Jeanie Macpherson and June Mathis (28). Blackton adapted and wrote several more films that her father directed, including the very successful The Clean Heart (1924), as well as The Beloved Brute (1924), The Redeeming Sin (1925), Tides of Passion (1925), and The Happy Warrior (1925).

Marian Blackton seems to have quickly become a powerful figure on the Blackton Productions set. In the biography of her father, Marian recalls that they had trouble casting one part in The Happy Warrior. J. Stuart Blackton interviewed applicants and then sent them to Marian’s office so that the father-daughter team could compare notes. When they disagreed over one actor, Gardner James, J. Stuart Blackton suggested a compromise: “We’ll give him a screen test, and if he doesn’t sell himself to you, we won’t sign him” (161). This very same Gardner James became a fixture in Vitagraph motion pictures, and he and Blackton were married in 1926, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, but divorced two years later (A1). Blackton also remembers the way she influenced her father’s ideas about the portrayal of female characters and takes credits for the way they she convinced him to toughen them up. She writes, “They began to show some guts. They stopped fluttering… in short, they stopped being my father’s ‘ideal woman’.” When director Blackton reverted to his fluttery idea of women characters, Marian Blackton would remind him to stick to the script, and, she says, “To [her] astonishment, he invariably agreed” (153).

In 1925, Warner Brothers bought the Vitagraph Company. J. Stuart Blackton headed up a production unit at Warner Brothers, and Marian Blackton came with him to write the scenarios. They made four films together at the new studio—Bride of the Storm (1926), The Gilded Highway (1926), Hell-Bent for Heaven (1926), and The Passionate Quest (1926)—before J. Stuart Blackton’s unit was disbanded. Marian Blackton was next able to get a five-year contract as a writer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (169). But she was only there for two and a half years before MGM bought out the rest of her contract, and in that time she only worked on two films, neither of which were assignments she liked—Becky (1927), her only comedy, and Buttons (1927), for which she worked on the continuity (173).

Blackton, however, continued to write for her father even while she was employed at MGM. Slide says that Blackton, wealthy from the sale of Vitagraph, had retired from directing in 1926, but continued to produce until he went through his money and declared bankruptcy in 1931 (27). In 1927, he had become interested in making a motion picture with a new kind of camera, in “natural vision” with color and sound, and chose “The Flag Maker” as his story. According to a news story on this camera in the Los Angeles Times, the project was renamed The American (1927), and the “well-known scenarist” Marian Constance Blackton was writing the adaptation and the continuity (B6). Unfortunately, The American was never released, she tells us in the biography (172).

In the 1930s, Marian would continue to work on various projects with her father such as his The Film Parade/The March of the Movies (1934), an extant compilation of authentic clips and reenactments in which she appeared along with other members of the Blackton family. The last time that Blackton and her father worked together was another aborted project. When J. Stuart Blackton was appointed by the Roosevelt government to head the WPA Motion Picture Project, he hired Marian to write the scenarios. Washington would choose a subject, she would write a script, and they would hire the cast and crew, but at the last moment the government office would cancel the film. This pattern continued for eight months until the entire project was cancelled (198-199).

She had small parts in two other films, Maniac (1934), on which her brother J. Stuart Blackton, Jr., worked as assistant director, and Marihuana (1936), but these appear to be her last. In 1941, Marian Blackton married the writer-actor-producer Larry Trimble, who, with American actress-producer Florence Turner, had in 1913 started Florence Turner Productions in England and, with writer-producer Jane Murfin, the short-lived Trimble-Murfin Productions in 1922. Blackton was married to Trimble until his death in 1954 (48).

See also: Paula Blackton, Jeanie Macpherson, June Mathis, Jane Murfin, Florence Turner

Bibliography

“Hell-Bent Fer Heaven at Rialto.” Rev. The Washington Post (29 Aug. 1926): F1.

“J. Stuart Blackton’s Young Daughter Wins Success in Adapting Stories to Screen.” Los Angeles Times (7 June 1925): 28.

“Miss Blackton Returns.” Los Angeles Times (18 July 1926): C13.

“New Type Movie Camera Promises Great Things.” Los Angeles Times (9 Jan. 1927): B6.

“Screen Couple Will Marry Day After Christmas.” Los Angeles Times (22 Dec. 1926): A1.

Slide, Anthony. The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company. 1976. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987.

Trimble, Marian Blackton. J. Stuart Blackton: A Personal Biography by His Daughter. Ed. Anthony Slide. Metuchen N.J, and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1985.

Archival Paper Collections:

J. Stuart Blackton material, 1909-1939. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

J. Stuart Blackton papers, 1912-1962. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Howard, Cameron. "Marian Constance Blackton." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-n2xw-d626>

Stefanía Socha

by Mario Lucioni, Irela Núñez

Before the 1980s, the history of Peruvian cinema was based more on interviews with early filmmakers than on contemporary sources. Such informality produced misattribution. Even in 1990, Ricardo Bedoya’s 100 años de cine en el Perú: Una historia crítica attributed the film Los abismos de la vida/The Abysses of Life (1929) to the prolific Chilean director Alberto Santana. However, an advertisement from a 1920s Peruvian fan magazine El Refugio included a photograph of the writer and director of Los abismos de la vida: Stefanía Socha. Images from the magazine were intriguing. They suggested a well-defined, eventful plot, with interesting atmosphere and archetypal characters. The lead character was a naive yet modern girl, almost a flapper. She was set against a fierce lady-killer antagonist, as well as a lecherous Asian man, and finally against the hero, who started out as a shy admirer of the girl.

Additional contemporary journals described the career of Socha in more detail. Socha, who was Polish by birth, arrived in Lima around 1926 with the Polish architect Garbowski. At the time, social life in the capital was concentrated in a very limited number of establishments, mostly coffee shops, and Socha’s masculine style of dress, short hair, and independence immediately fascinated the intelligentsia. In Warsaw she had worked in the theatre and the opera. In Lima, she quickly created an acting academy for the cinema with the promising name Perú Film. In other South American countries such as Brazil, film schools played a very important role. Essentially, Perú Film organized young actors, who would then finance the films themselves in exchange for screen time. Enrique Cornejo Villanueva was likely to have been among her first students. Later, he would become the director of the second Peruvian fiction feature Luis Pardo (1927). In March 1929, the journalist who interviewed Socha in El Refugio refers to forty students at the academy and a film project, then titled El amor de la gitana. However, some months later, on October 31, the premiere of the film Los abismos de la vida was announced. The actors were all students from the academy, but the writer and the film crew were professionals. The script was written by the journalist and poet Julio Alfonso Hernández and the film shot by Luis Ángel Scaglione, an Argentinean photographer who had assisted Enzo Longhi on La Perricholi (1928) and Pedro Sambarino on Luis Pardo. Interviewed by El Tiempo before the premiere, Hernández described Socha’s use of the resources of her school:

The script has been written to use the faculties and knowledge of the students of the academy annex to the Perú Film Company. Thus there have been a lot of things we’ve sacrificed due to the impossibility of doing them with emerging actors who lack many elements and resources… I haven’t been involved in the shooting. My work has been exclusively to write. I wrote the script and put it in Miss Socha’s hands; she’s been the one directing the film, from selecting and training the actors to selecting the sets (n. pag.).

In March 1930, El Tiempo published enough information on one film for us to piece together a story. The female lead in the film is Berta, a girl from a good family who falls in love with her chauffeur, a man with no scruples. She becomes pregnant, and the chauffeur takes her to a Chinese herbalist to have an abortion. Later, when the chauffeur discovers that the girl’s family is wealthy, he decides to blackmail the father. But the father makes him his partner, and the chauffeur makes plans to marry Berta. Upset, Berta falls deeply into debt, and when her mother’s inheritance runs out, she goes to the herbalist, who finds out everything and decides to kill the chauffeur. After his plot to poison the chauffeur is exposed, the herbalist shoots the chauffeur and then kills himself. The police take Berta home, where she falls in love with her father’s assistant, whom she marries after her recovery.

The film was a success, staying at the premiere theatre for two weeks, and was continually shown in other theatres until the beginning of 1930. Critics both praised and criticized the film. Mundial approved of the scandalous story:

Mr. Julio Hernández, author of the script of the national film Los abismos de la vida, being a journalist, has a highly developed sense of sensationalism. His work addresses a social scandal. He takes two things from American cinema: realism—photographing things belonging to everyday life—yet the film also retains a certain romanticism where the bad guys are bad (and sometimes have a little mustache) and the good guys are good. Thus we follow, step by step, the tragedy in the life of Miss Iturregui and her final redemption. This doesn’t lack some interest and also, the actors do a much better job than expected—even the one who plays the Chinese herbalist, who really gets it (n. pag.)

But the writer for Revista del Touring Club Peruano was not impressed, and writes:

Los abismos de la vida passes as an attempt. Its scenes are well shot. A little long and tiresome, but taking into account our deficient elements, it can be applauded for its industrial and artistic aspects. But regarding the content, it is a crude realism inappropriate for a developing new country with an ample future (n. pag.).

Following the custom of the time, the reviews primarily discussed the plot, the screenwriter, and the actors, and very little is said about the work of the director. Nevertheless, the film Los abismos de la vida blazed the trail that was to be followed by others during the brief season of Peruvian silent cinema.

Because of this film’s success, the director Alberto Santana, who started at Socha’s film school, was able to convince producers to support him in making melodramas of a similar style. Before Los abismos de la vida was released, Santana had directed Como Chaplin (1929). Later, all in 1930, he made Mientras Lima duerme, Alma peruana, and Las chicas del Jirón de la Unión, as well as La última lágrima and La húerfana de Ate. Also, Santana worked with some of the actors who started at Socha’s academy and used her financing formula—whoever wants to act in the film must pay to get it produced. Also among Socha’s young students was Mario Musseto, who not only acted in several motion pictures, but also directed La banda del Zorro in 1930.

Perú Film and Socha never got the chance to make another film. In March 1930, Socha commented that she had been in the provinces (most likely showing her film; in a small market such as Peru, only one copy of a film was made). She claimed that she was studying some traditional Peruvian stories for her next project, but by 1930, there was suddenly a glut of silent Peruvian productions. Shortly afterward, sound films took over the market. With the worldwide 1929 depression and the fall of the Peruvian government, chaos reigned, but hope was also instilled in the people as the dictator Leguía was finally ousted from power. In 1931 Peruvian silent cinema disappeared, finally replaced by sound film in 1934.

The search for further information about Socha turned up a woman with the same name—an actress—working in Warsaw in 1952. Could this be the same Stefanía Socha?

Bibliography

“Los abismos de la vida.” Rev. Revista Mundial (8 Nov. 1929): n.p.

“Los abismos de la vida.” Rev. Revista del Touring Club Peruano (Jan. 1930): n.p.

Hernández, Julio Alfonso. Interview with Stefania Socha. El Tiempo (11 Aug. 1929): n.p.

Quiroz, Manuel Salomón. El Tiempo (8 Mar. 1930): n.p.

Citation

Lucioni, Mario; Irela Núñez. "Stefanía Socha." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kbh5-dy45>

Elizabeth Chevalier Pickett

by Michelle Koerner

Screenwriter, short film director, and best-selling novelist, Elizabeth Pickett began her career in motion pictures directing a series of documentary films for the American Red Cross near the end of World War I. Much later, in 1942, she published an extremely successful novel (fittingly entitled Drivin’ Woman) as Elizabeth Chevalier, her maiden name. In interviews given around that time, she frequently mentions her early experiences working in film as crucial to her work as a novelist (although the novel does not deal with women in the film industry). But by the time she published the novel, much of her earlier work in the silent film industry had already been forgotten.

Following the few traces left by Elizabeth Pickett in the trade presses during her earlier career, where she was profiled by Moving Picture World as having the “highest aspirations” to direct and to write films, we can reconstruct a biography, important to us as a study of an exception in these years—the Eastern women’s college graduate (29). But she was not herself an Easterner like Beulah Marie Dix, who graduated from Radcliffe College, or Marguerite Bertsch, who attended Columbia University. Pickett left the family farm in Lexington, Kentucky, in the mid-1910s to attend Wellesley Women’s College where, according to a 1942 article in Louisville’s Courier-Journal, Madame Cheng Kai-shek was amongst her classmates (n.p.). She earned her degree in 1918 and soon after began working as a publicist and historian for the American Red Cross where, according to the narrative of her life woven together in the 1927 Moving Picture World interview with Tom Waller, she had her “first taste of film work” (29).

After writing eleven hundred pages of The History of the American Red Cross published in 1923, Pickett was commissioned to shoot several propaganda films for the nonprofit organization. According to the article, the next year she landed a job with Fox Films and told producer Winfield Sheehan that she wanted to “write and direct my own pictures.” In the same interview, Pickett boldly states that while she was working on these short films for the Red Cross, she became convinced that “in this business of ours the writer will have to be the director as well, in order to survive” (29). This is a somewhat prophetic statement in light of what we know of the fate of women in the silent motion picture industry. We can glean from the 1927 interview that Pickett as a writer understood her relationship to the medium of film. Describing the work she did for Fox Films between 1923 and 1926 writing and directing a series of variety shorts, she reveals that her aspiration was to make an analogy between writing and cinematography. She tells her Moving Picture World interviewer, “I have written with the camera on some thirty or forty Varieties and I can see that the whole trend of production today, both from the standpoint of real economy and artistry, is with the person who writes with the camera” (29).

Elizabeth Chevalier Pickett (d/w) Fox Folks 1936, PCRK

Elizabeth Chevalier Pickett.  Fox Folks, 1936. Private Collection. 

Pickett’s work was situated at the overlap between documentary and narrative fiction filmmaking. And it was her keen sense of location and landscape in films such as King of the Turf (1923), her first Fox Variety short, that apparently inspired John Ford’s early Western Kentucky Pride. Her extensive work shooting much of the Western American landscape for Fox later led to another short scenic film Cliff-Dwellers of America (1925), which explored the lives of Navajo Indians living around Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park. A revealing article published in the studio house organ Fox Folks tells us that the local Native Americans were used as extras to “give the impression of how the ruins looked when peopled by this prehistoric race that lived before the dawn of Christianity” (11-12). Perhaps this interest in Native American life and the Western vista informed her screenwriter’s vision of the fiction feature film Redskin, produced and distributed by Paramount Famous Lasky and directed by Victor Schertzinger in 1929. But the film would also mark the culmination of her career in motion pictures. An excellent quality color 35mm print of Redskin, however, survives, and a contemporary revival at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy, allowed film historians to rediscover this late silent era example of what might be called an ethnographic Western—part documentary of the lives of Pueblo dwellers and part narrative fiction. We may well wonder what kinds of films this drivin’ woman would have made had she had more opportunity to realize her high aspirations.

See also: Marguerite Bertsch, Beulah Marie Dix

Bibliography

Byrd, Lois. “Novelist arrives on Bond-Selling Tour.” Courier-Journal [Louisville, Kentucky] (30 Nov. 1942): n.p.

Chevalier, Elizabeth Pickett. Drivin’ Woman. New York: Macmillan, 1942.

“Elizabeth Chevalier; Writer, Film Scenarist, Producer.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (13 Jan. 1984): D19.

“Elizabeth Pickett ‘Shoots’ Three Fox Varieties in a Row and Starts Out After More.” Fox Folks (Sept. 1926): 11-12.

“She’s a Drivin’ Woman Herself” Courier-Journal [Louisville, Kentucky] (5 Aug. 1948): n.p.

Waller, Tom. “Elizabeth Pickett” Moving Picture World (17 Dec.1927): 28-29.

Citation

Koerner, Michelle. "Elizabeth Chevalier Pickett." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-362x-nv14>

Josephine Rector

by Viktoria Paranyuk

Josephine Rector’s brief career in cinema as a scenario writer and actress is closely associated with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. Essanay was founded in Chicago in 1907 by George K. Spoor, distributor of screen equipment, and Gilbert M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, actor, director, and producer, who became known as the first cowboy star. Convinced that Western adventure stories should be filmed in the real West, Anderson and a small crew set off in the direction of the Rockies sometime in 1909 or 1910 (Bell 1984, 39) to establish a second Essanay office. In April of 1912, the group, after short sojourns in Colorado and several towns in California, settled in Niles, just east of San Francisco, building a film studio and housing for its personnel.

Josephine Rector in scene from unidentified production. Essanay Film Manufacturing Company.

Josephine Rector in unidentified production. Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Josephine Rector’s first encounter with Essanay occurred before the company set up its second office in Niles. In late 1910 or early 1911, while the group was filming in Los Gatos, California, Josephine, vacationing nearby, was introduced to actor Jack O’Brien, Anderson’s secretary. During their conversation, Rector mentioned to O’Brien that she had story ideas she had been wanting to write, and O’Brien encouraged her to submit them, as we learn from the Hayward Daily Review’s retrospective account (14). Shortly after she was hired to write for the company for fifteen dollars a week and to occasionally get in front of the camera for three (Strobel 8-S). However, soon after, Anderson and the crew moved south for the winter, and Josephine stayed behind in San Francisco, where she lived with her two sons. Around this time, a personal tragedy struck: her oldest son died. When the company returned to northern California in the spring of 1911, they set up shop in San Rafael for seven months, and Josephine was rehired. Across the Plains, Rector’s first film written for the western Essanay, was released in April 1911, and Bioscope billed it as “a dramatic picture that will arouse your fighting blood” ( xxii).

Rector’s background seems to have prepared her well for acting in and writing for Westerns. She grew up as Josephine Pickel on a ranch in Montana and was no stranger to riding on horseback and to the rough-and-tumble, outdoorsy way of life. In the late 1890s she trailed her father, a miner, over the Chilkoot Pass to scramble for gold in the cold waters of the Yukon, she tells an interviewer for a 1914 article in Motion Picture Story Magazine. Here she talks about realizing that she had wanted to learn how to “‘speak’ those things she knew” from her adventurous background, explaining why she ended up moving to San Francisco. This 1914 profile on early women scenario editors describes Rector as “presiding” behind the desk at Essanay but for whom “a chair is too tame a saddle” (La Roche 85). In an interview only several months before her death, Rector confessed that she liked acting as well as writing and reminisced about the scars she had acquired during the days when there were no doubles (Strobel 8-S).

Many who worked with Gilbert M. Anderson spoke of his difficult, autocratic personality on the set. In a candid interview in the Hayward Daily Review in the 1970s, Hal Angus, Essanay actor and Josephine’s second husband, recalled that while Anderson was a “production genius,” he was a difficult boss, and Rector had had enough of him. So when the producer announced he was moving the company to Lakeside in January 1912 and asked whether she would be joining them, she replied, “No, I’ve had enough of you” (Wiersema 4). Yet Anderson wrote her from Lakeside: “Send all the stories you have and also let me know how your account stands…I appreciate your work and realize you are a great help to us” (Kiehn 2006, 8). Three months later, when the crew returned to Niles, she was appointed chief of the scenario department for a salary of twenty-five dollars a week. Together with her son Jem, Rector moved to Niles.

The majority of the films that Essanay’s western outfit produced were one- and two-reel adventure stories, featuring cowboys who lived by a straightforward code of moral values. With their strong heroes, simple narratives, and the magnificent setting of the real West, these first Westerns enjoyed huge popularity in nickelodeons across the country (Bell 1973, 4). The first reels of Anderson’s Broncho Billy series appeared in 1910, prior to Josephine Rector’s arrival on the scene. However, the years she worked at Essanay coincided with the enormous popular success garnered by these films. During her tenure as head of the scenario department, from April 1912 until her departure in April 1914, Rector wrote original scripts as well as selected suitable material for adaptation. Anderson shot quickly, at a rate of about one or two films a week, or more, keeping the scenarist busy. Four decades later, in an Oakland Tribune interview, Josephine Rector (Mrs. Hal Angus) confessed that some of their best scripts came from pulp magazines found in the Oakland Public Library (Strobel 8-S). The article refers to the lost title The Dance at Eagle Pass (1913) as Rector’s crowning achievement, a film she wrote and in which she took a starring role. The story is interesting for its use of forensic ballistics to apprehend the real villain. Although Anderson did not care for sophisticated plots, preferring immediate action—be it a fistfight or a chase on horseback, Rector, however, injected more ingenious story lines (Lundquist 41).

Film historian David Kiehn in his recent study of the Essanay company, definitively credits Rector with either writing or acting in twenty-two titles, five of which are extant (Kiehn 2009). Yet during Rector’s tenure at Essanay from spring 1911 to April 1914, the company produced just over two hundred films in San Rafael and Niles. Knowing that she headed the scenario department from 1912 to 1914, it is likely that she contributed to many more than twenty-two films as either a writer or script editor. Bill Strobel, who interviewed Rector in 1958 for the Oakland Tribune, credits her, as scenario editor, with either writing or selecting over one hundred Westerns (8-S). Wiersema claims that as an actress she appeared in about sixty shorts between 1911 and 1914 (2). Following Rector’s departure, Anderson reworked plots of the Essanay films from the previous years in order to continue to turn out the Broncho Billy series (Bell 1973, 7).

Rector left Essanay in April 1914, intending to move to Hollywood, but never left northern California. The same year she married a fellow actor Hal Angus, and together they attempted to start their own film company, the Pacific Motion Picture Company, but as far as can be ascertained, no films were released. The Anguses ran a flower shop in Hayward, California, until 1926, and later Josephine became a homemaker (Kiehn 2006, 9). The parallels between the career of Josephine Rector and that of Gene Gauntier are remarkable, and Gauntier’s relatively well-known 1907–1912 career at the Kalem Company illuminates that of the less well-known Rector. Both were writer-actresses in fast-action adventures where they performed their own stunts, and both, in total charge of the scenario output, were pressed into borrowing as well as inventing stories to meet the need for hundreds of action shorts.

Bibliography

Bell, Geoffry. “Making Films in the Old West: the Adventures of Essanay and Broncho Billy.” AFI Report (Nov. 1973): 7 – 8.

“Daze of Studio Days Back in Niles.” Hayward Daily Review (1 June 1953): 14.

Kiehn, David. Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company. Berkeley, Calif.: Farwell Books, 2003.

------. “Those Essanay People.” Essanay Chronicle 2.3 (Fall 2006): 8–9.

------. Personal interviews via email. April 2009.

La Roche, Edwin M. “A New Profession for Women.” Motion Picture Story Magazine (May 1914): 85.

Lundquist, Gunnar. “Broncho Billy Anderson: They All Rode In His Tracks.” Part Two. Classic Images No. 145 (July 1987): 41-45.

Strobel, Bill. “Niles Days as Film Capital Recalled by Oakland Woman.” Oakland Tribune (21 May 1958): 8-S.

Bioscope (18 May 1911): xxii.

Wiersema, Brian. “The Not-So-Good Old Movie Making Days.” Hayward Daily Review (14 March 1971): 2.

Archival Paper Collections:

Josephine Rector scrapbook. Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.

Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson clippings file. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Citation

Paranyuk, Viktoria. "Josephine Rector." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-8fyf-xn02>

Adela Rogers St. Johns

by Anne Morey

Adela Rogers St. Johns delighted in the fact that James Quirk of Photoplay called her “the mother-confessor of Hollywood” (St. Johns 1976, 11). Her California birth, close association with William Randolph Hearst, and unconventional upbringing gave her an unusual vantage point on the social mores of Hollywood as was born in the 1910s and assumed its mature form in the 1920s. Indeed, St. Johns may be said to have been the most influential of the chroniclers of the Hollywood story of rise and fall inasmuch as she wrote the narrative that became the template for the motion picture What Price Hollywood? (1932) and its later iterations as A Star Is Born (1937, 1954, 1976). She both reported on Hollywood and fictionalized the lives of the stars she covered; thus her significance was as an observer of Hollywood rather than as a participant in it. 

Adela Rogers St. Johns, L-R Colleen Moore, Sam Taylor, Harold Lloyd with Walter Lundin at the camera on set of Why Worry? (1923), signed (1972). PCRB

L-R: Adela Rogers St. Johns, Colleen Moore, Sam Taylor, Harold Lloyd with Walter Lundin at the camera, on set of Why Worry? (1923). Private Collection.

St. Johns was the daughter of noted defense attorney Earl Rogers, who raised her without the help of his estranged wife, which may explain the daughter’s claim to have no attachment to her mother (Chance 311), a situation that figures in her novel about a free-thinking daughter of an alcoholic lawyer, first adapted as A Free Soul (1926) and later filmed with Norma Shearer in 1931. Through her father, St. Johns became acquainted with various “sporting” types: bootleggers, gamblers, and the prizefighter she said she received her last spanking for kissing (St. Johns 1976, 29). Rogers also introduced his daughter to Hearst, for whom she started working at age eighteen in 1913, first on the San Francisco Examiner and shortly after on the Los Angeles Herald (St. Johns 1969, 38). Their association continued until Hearst’s death in 1951. St. Johns’s close friendship with Hearst’s mistress Marion Davies and her frequent visits to San Simeon, his California castle, permitted the journalist privileged access to her subjects, and Hearst media properties—Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, Nash’s Magazine (published in England), and Photoplay—gave her work visibility and wide circulation. St. Johns was evidently one of Hearst’s favorite reporters (Nasaw 372) and he gave her important assignments beyond the motion picture industry. She covered the rise and fall of Huey Long and the trial of Bruno Hauptmann, indicted in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case (St. Johns 1969, 383–411; 311–42). Most significantly for film history, she requited Hearst’s trust with loyalty that most likely involved collecting “dirt” on director Orson Welles in retaliation for making the famous Hearst exposé Citizen Kane (1941) (Nasaw 568; Pizzitola 425).

Lantern slide, The Heart of a Follies Girl (1926). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

As her contributions to Photoplay show, Adela St. Johns’s factual reporting on cinema culture covered a range of subjects. Her submissions for 1922, for example, included brief articles on Lila Lee, Mae Busch, Ruth Roland, Harold Lloyd, Bebe Daniels, and the young Joseph Talmadge Keaton, son of Buster Keaton and Natalie Talmadge. Her fiction in the same year included “Miss Dumbbell,” “The Last Straw,” and “The Fan-Letter Bride.” The first is about a handsome young actress who can’t get a husband until she gets a “line” to spin and thus catches a young man as unpretentious as she is; the second about a demanding actor whose wife must leave him before he sees what she means to him; and the last about a young actor who has been betrayed romantically by his costar and marries the writer of a fan letter in order to be married before his traducer can be, only to discover that he has found the perfect woman. As I have argued elsewhere of St. Johns’s Photoplay fiction, stories in fan magazines may have offered a means of telling the untellable without risking the destruction of the reputations that represented huge studio investments (Morey 344). But while it is possible to read St. Johns’s fiction as operating in the mode of the roman à clef, the issue is not one of disguising identities in order to avoid prosecution for libel. Rather, St. Johns populates her fiction with the drunks, drug addicts, and seducers that are never present in Photoplay’s reportage. Her fiction, in other words, explores the background that is acknowledged only to be disavowed in the coverage of individual stars and the industry.

If one is inclined to read St. Johns’s novels as containing portraits of recognizable figures, one does not have to go far to find a savage picture of Cecil B. DeMille, the original for director William Dvorak in 1925 novel The Skyrocket. Dvorak affects a riding crop and is the master of the bathing scene, directing a film entitled Roman Bath. Starlet Sharon Kimm is his discovery and acolyte, and Dvorak is a particularly sophisticated voluptuary who delights in psychological games. As Sharon’s one genuine friend insists to the man who will marry the starlet, “It isn’t that [Dvorak] debauches Sharon’s body. He doesn’t do that. It doesn’t interest him. But he debauches her soul and her mind…. He makes every one who is around him think the only things that matter in the world are fame and success and money. He swamps them in the luxury that surrounds him until they can’t breathe” (180–81). St. Johns’s 1969 autobiography confirms her dislike of DeMille (20), although she claimed in a 1964 interview with Kevin Brownlow to “have had great fun with C. B.” (Brownlow 1968, 185). Whatever her attitude toward DeMille, however, the insight of The Skyrocket is that the problems of Hollywood are collective rather than individual, that the film industry creates an environment in which it is difficult to live sanely, a motif endlessly present in her fiction as well as in her several autobiographies. St. Johns saw herself as a feminist, and she was certainly a jaundiced observer of the virtues of husbands, having cycled through three marriages, all of which ended in divorce. As a feminist, however, she was not convinced that women could have everything that modernity promised them, even in Hollywood (St. Johns 1969, 17-26). Her fiction, for example, relentlessly emphasized the importance of marriage, domesticity, and child bearing for her heroines, who often renounce promising careers in order to occupy their “proper” places as wives and mothers. The short stories and novels are nonetheless populated by secondary female characters, frequently involved in behind-the-camera careers such as screenwriting and editing, all of whom are either the abettors of heroines who must be married off or the critics of the men who want these heroines. It is these secondary characters whose relationship to domesticity is unconventional. Examples include Helene, the chain-smoking editor in “Miss Dumbbell” who wears “worn tan knickers and stained puttees” (32) and who provides the necessary “line” to the heroine, and Mrs. William Dvorak in The Skyrocket, “a brilliant woman who wrote books on sociology and was president of a league for the education of women voters,” but who is also “just a little bored with her famous husband. She had even been known to laugh at him, lightly of course, in public” (164).

It was doubtless a combination of St. Johns’s interest in courtroom scenes and her investment in women that led her to collaborate with Wallace Reid’s widow, producer Dorothy Davenport Reid, on two projects, the extant films Broken Laws (1924) and The Red Kimono (1925) (Brownlow 1990). The Red Kimono screenplay, adapted by Dorothy Arzner from St. Johns’s story, encapsulates some of St. Johns’s most characteristic strategies as an author, inasmuch as its fictionalizing of an actual court case highlights her habit of visiting and revisiting the same material in different forms over a long span of years. Indeed, St. Johns may be said to have come into her own as a memoirist, producing at least three autobiographies: The Honeycomb (1969), Love, Laughter and Tears (1976), and even How to Write a Story and Sell It (1956), which, bursting with St. John’s recollections of such figures as Damon Runyon and Paul Gallico, may be accounted a study in the force of anecdote rather than technique in instructing readers about narration.

The importance of Adela Rogers St. Johns as Hollywood observer became especially evident toward the close of her long life when she emerged as one of the most dynamic witnesses to 1920s Hollywood in her appearance in Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s 1980 Thames Television series “Hollywood.” While it was Hearst who first provoked St. Johns’s interest in retelling stories of a vanished Hollywood by commissioning her to write a series on the film industry for The American Weekly in 1950 (Pizzitola 436), St. Johns clearly found the project of recapturing the milieu and the participants of Hollywood from the 1910s to the 1950s a most congenial project. While the title “mother confessor” appears to have been used in reference to her rather promiscuously by Photoplay editor James Quirk, one might better suggest St. Johns’s significance by calling her the “recording angel” of Hollywood.

See also: Gladys Hall

Bibliography

Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era. Berkley: University of California Press, 1968.

------. The Parade's Gone By. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Chance, Jean C. “Adela Rogers St. Johns.” Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Newspaper Journalists, 1926–1950. Vol. 29. Detroit: Gale, 1984. 310-12.

Nasaw, David. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Boston: Houghton, 2000.

Pizzitola, Louis. Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.

St. Johns, Adela Rogers. “The Fan-Letter Bride.” Photoplay (Aug. 1922): 71+

------. A Free Soul. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1927.

------. The Honeycomb. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.

------. How to Write a Story and Sell It. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.

------.“The Last Straw.” Photoplay (May 1922): 27+

------. Love, Laughter and Tears: My Hollywood Story. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.

------.“Love o’ Women.” International-Cosmopolitan (Feb. 1926): n.p.

------. “Miss Dumbbell.” Photoplay (April 1922): 31+.

------. The Single Standard.  New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1928.

------. The Skyrocket. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1925.

------. “The Worst Woman in Hollywood” Cosmopolitan (Feb. 1924): n.p.

Archival Paper Collections:

“Reminiscences of Adela Rogers St. Johns.” June 23, 1971. Columbia University, Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Citation

Morey, Anne. "Adela Rogers St. Johns." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-t44t-t674>

Gloria Swanson

by Julie Buck
By the time Gloria Swanson started her own production company, she had already been part of the film industry for over a decade. Many actresses started their own production companies in the 1920s and ’30s in an effort to gain more artistic freedom and a bigger percentage of the profits. Rarely, however, were actresses involved in the day-to-day workings of such an arrangement. Directors, husbands, or studio heads usually handled details. Gloria Swanson, however, remains an exception as she handled the business side of her first company; she did it not for “artistic freedom” but, according to Swanson herself, in retaliation against Jesse Lasky (Swanson 261).
Gloria Swanson (p/a), PC

Gloria Swanson portrait. Private Collection. 

Swanson had been a star since late 1919, when she signed a seven-year contract at Famous Players-Lasky in a series of films directed by Cecil B. DeMille. But by the mid-1920s, as Swanson admits in her autobiography, she was beginning to feel very unsatisfied at Famous Players-Lasky. Churning out four to six films a year was exhausting, and while Swanson was the most successful actress in America (save perhaps Mary Pickford), by the mid-1920s her films were famous more for her fabulous costumes than for her acting or the story line (273).

In 1925 Swanson fought to make the film Madame Sans-Gêne. It broke many conventions, and, according to Harry Waldman’s book about American filmmakers working abroad, Swanson personally went to the French government with her request and managed to do what no other company (not even Ufa) had done: gaining permission to shoot in historic French sites. It was the first French-American coproduction in which both countries had a hand in the film’s development. Swanson was deeply involved in every aspect of the production, including having a say in who directed and who was cast (111). Swanson also met and fell in love with Henri, the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, who worked as her translator. She was, however, still married to her second husband, Herbert Somborn. While she and Somborn were estranged and in the process of getting divorced, she realized she was pregnant with the marquis’s baby. She and Henri planned to marry once the divorce was final; however, it would be clear that the baby was not Somborn’s and that she had committed adultery. Swanson’s contract at Famous Players-Lasky included a morality clause, and she knew her contract could be canceled and she could be banned from working at any other studio if this morality clause were broken. In the late 1950s, when she gave an oral history to Columbia University, Swanson claimed that her reasons for leaving Famous Players-Lasky were extremely personal and that she would never disclose them. But by 1980, when she published her memoir titled Swanson on Swanson, she was prepared to discuss the issue.

Gloria Swanson. USW

Gloria Swanson. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Swanson chose to have an abortion. The abortion was botched and she ended up almost dying in a Paris hospital. Swanson claims she single-handedly brought Famous Players-Lasky huge amounts of free publicity as newspapers wrote daily about whether she would live or die. In the months following, Swanson went through severe depression. Her contract was coming to an end, and Famous Players-Lasky wanted to renegotiate. But United Artists also made Swanson an offer. They would distribute her films, and she could make whatever she wanted, even if she only made one film a year. According to Tino Balio’s book on the history of United Artists, Jesse Lasky countered with double her $6,500 weekly salary, then increased the offer to $18,000 per week and finally to $1,000,000 per year (58). But ultimately, Swanson went with United Artists. She blamed Lasky for forcing her to abort the child she had desperately wanted, and she refused his offers because of the morality clause in his contract; she never wanted to be placed in that situation again (113).

At United Artists, Swanson quickly realized that starting a production company alone would be extremely difficult. Her first film, The Love of Sunya (1927), was a remake of the Clara Kimball Young film Eyes of Youth (1919). Securing rights and renting studio space was complicated, and the film took nearly a year to produce. But it’s easy to see why Swanson was attracted to the material. She was able to play numerous variations on the character of Sunya as she looks into a crystal ball and sees her future. The film also discussed mysticism and reincarnation, and in some ways could be considered the first new age film. Though Swanson was able to borrow money from United Artists to produce the film, she quickly went over budget. The film, which generated a huge amount of publicity, was requested by S. L. “Roxy” Rothafel to open the just completed Roxy Theatre in New York. Yet when The Love of Sunya went into wide release, it received only a middling response. While certainly not an outright failure, the film had to be sold to the overseas market to break even.

Gloria Swanson (a/p) Sadie Thompson (1928), PC

Gloria Swanson, Sadie Thompson (1928). Private Collection. 

Swanson knew she could do better. She promised the head of United Artists, Joseph Schneck, that she would choose something less troublesome for her next outing. Instead she chose “Rain,” a huge Broadway hit that had been explicitly banned by the Hays Office. According to Swanson, she acquired the rights to “Sadie Thompson,” the story on which the play had been based. She even contacted W. Somerset Maugham and asked for sequel rights to make sure no one else could make the film (Swanson, 312). She then tricked Hays into giving her permission to shoot; though the Motion Picture Producers Association (precursor to the MPAA) was furious, there was nothing to be done since she had legitimately received his permission. Swanson also handpicked her cast and crew. According to the Los Angeles Times, Ernest Torrance was first announced to play reformer Alfred Davidson, but ultimately Swanson got her way and cast her first choice, Lionel Barrymore (A10). But the delays in securing Barrymore and the costs for food and lodging for a cast of hundreds on location in the Catalina Islands were mounting. And half the film had to be re-shot when Swanson’s cameraman was forced off the film by another studio. Initially budgeted at a quarter million dollars, the film’s cost had ballooned up to $650,000 by the end of principal photography. When post-production costs were factored in, Swanson would have to raise over a million dollars at the box office just to break even.Swanson was used to making and spending huge amounts of money. According to James Robert Parish in The Hollywood Book of Extravagance, Swanson’s lingerie bill alone for 1926 was over $10,000! (202) Just prior to starting her own production company, she was a multimillionaire whose every bill was covered by Famous Players-Lasky. Swanson knew Sadie Thompson was her best work, and the film was a smash with the critics and the public. Mourdant Hall of the New York Times praised the film and singled out Swanson’s performance: “Gloria Swanson… may have given clever performances in some of her pictures, but she displays more genuine ability and imagination in this present production” (12). Yet even with the seeming success of Sadie Thompson, a year and a half after joining United Artists, Swanson’s lavish lifestyle was leading her toward bankruptcy.

Enter Joseph P. Kennedy. The father of the future president was a successful Boston banker who was desperate to conquer the movie world. He had taken over the Film Booking Office and had merged it with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum to create RKO Pictures. Kennedy made millions off the merger while many stockholders lost considerable investments. But Kennedy wanted to be more than a banker in the film industry; he wanted to be a high-powered producer.

Gloria Swanson and dog. USW

Gloria Swanson and dog. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Swanson was looking for someone to deal with her finances so she did not have to worry about the day-to-day stresses of producing and could focus on acting and choosing scripts. So Kennedy stepped in. He soon took over all of her accounts, fired her entire staff on the spot, and started a new production company called Gloria Productions. They also started an affair that would eventually break up her marriage to Henri.

Both Swanson and Kennedy wanted their first film together to be legendary, and consequently hired the most celebrated director of the silent era, Erich Von Stroheim. The film was the famously unfinished Queen Kelly. According to Swanson, Von Stroheim’s relentless attention to detail, his opulence, and his need for numerous retakes led to the film going over budget within weeks of shooting (374). But Swanson and Kennedy’s lack of experience were also to blame. According to Cari Beauchamp, Kennedy put everyone from the cast to the director’s assistant on salary months before principal photography started, and while they knew the film would probably need talking sequences, they had not hired anyone who was qualified or understood early sound techniques. As costs spiraled out of control, Swanson finally had to fire Von Stroheim when she realized much of his footage would not pass the censors. At that point, less than half of the film had been shot. Kennedy would spend the next few years trying to salvage the footage and cut it into something remotely useful. He hired director Edmund Goulding, an early fan of talking pictures (who would go on to direct Grand Hotel), to see if he could direct a few added sound sequences to finish the film. Shooting with a different director, however, proved to be impossible as Von Stroheim’s style was so distinctive. Queen Kelly would never be finished. Two years later, a few additional scenes were shot and an abbreviated version of the film was released in Europe. Kennedy’s failure led to the breakdown of his affair with Swanson.

Eric Von Stronheim, Gloria Swanson (a/p), & Walter Byron Queen Kelly (1929) Marian Ainslee (titles des) PCJY

Eric Von Stronheim, Gloria Swanson & Walter Byron, Queen Kelly (1929). Private Collection. 

Swanson’s first sound film, a musical she produced titled The Trespasser (1929), was directed and written by Goulding. It was a smash hit and very well received by the critics (Kennedy, 86). Swanson starred and produced a few additional sound films in the early ’30s to complete her contract with United Artists, but the advent of the Great Depression made her glamorous, clotheshorse characters seem dated, and her popularity began to wane. She would have some success in early television, but ultimately would be remembered for her brilliant portrayal of fading former silent film star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Bibliography

Balio, Tino. United Artists: The Company Built By the Stars. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979.

Beauchamp, Cari. Joseph P. Kennedy Presents. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Hall, Mordaunt. “The Screen.” New York Times (6 Feb. 1928): 12.

Kennedy, Matthew. Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2004.

Kingsley, Grace. “Ernest Torrence as Preacher.” Los Angeles Times (31 May 1927): A10.

Parish, James Robert. The Hollywood Book of Extravagance. Hoboken: NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007.

Swanson, Gloria. Swanson on Swanson. New York: Random House, 1980.

Waldman, Harry. Beyond Hollywood’s Grasp. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1994.

Archival Paper Collections:

Gloria Swanson papers. University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center.

Rob Wagner papers, 1925-1942. University of California, Los Angeles, Charles E. Young Research Library.

Stark, Samuel. Theatre scrapbook collection, 1860-1950. Stanford University.

Reminiscences of Gloria Swanson. September 25, 1958. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Citation

Buck, Julie. "Gloria Swanson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-q0za-ts47>

Fay Tincher

by Joanna E. Rapf

One of comedienne Fay Tincher’s few extant titles, Rowdy Ann (1919), has been described recently by Andrew Grossman, as “one of the first American films, comic or otherwise, to legitimately address the social psychology of gender construction.” But Tincher is barely mentioned, if at all, in histories of the silent era. Kalton C. Lahue and Samuel Gill are among the few to acknowledge her significance, writing that her work with Al Christie between 1919–1920 “ranked among the best on the screen at the time” (372). They suggest, as have others, that she had “some of the elusive qualities of Mabel Normand,” and conclude that her disappearance from the screen in 1928 remains a mystery (368). More recently, where she does receive a few lines, scholars selectively represent her career, as when Karen Mahar remarks that Tincher, whom she too sees as the closest to Normand in beauty and ability, reached fame between 1923 and 1928 playing the wife in the Andy Gump series (Mahar 2006, 130). Tincher did play Min Gump, although not in her wackiest phase during her peak, but rather at a time when her stardom was on a decline. Yes, the “Gump” series was very popular, but Tincher’s heyday was between 1914 and 1920 when, for one and a half years, between 1917 and 1919, she was reported as having had her own company, Fay Tincher Productions. Here, she invites comparison with other popular comediennes who gave their names to short-lived companies—Normand, Marie Dressler, Flora Finch, Gale Henry.

Fay Tincher (a/d/p). PC

Fay Tincher. Private Collection. 

Fay Tincher (a/d/p) unknown film, part of the Ethel series. PCJR

Fay Tincher, unknown film, part of the Ethel series. Private Collection.

Fay Tincher (a/d/p) & Edward Dillon, Faithful to the Finish (1915). PCJR

Fay Tincher and Edward Dillon, Faithful to the Finish (1915). Private Collection. 

Fay Tincher (a/d/p) & Edward Dillon Laundry Liz (disputed) (1916) Anita Loos (w). PCJR

Fay Tincher and Edward Dillon,Laundry Liz (1916) or perhaps Back to the Laundry (1916). Private Collection.

Fay Tincher (a/d/p) Laundry Liz (1916) (disputed) (1916) Anita Loos (w), PCJR

Fay Tincher, Laundry Liz (1916) or perhaps Back to the Laundry (1916). Private Collection.

Fay Tincher (a/d/p) Sunshine Dad (1916). PCJR

Fay Tincher, Sunshine Dad (1916). Private Collection. 

World Film Corporation, the distributor for Fay Tincher Productions, publicized the new venture with this release: “Miss Tincher writes her own stories (in self defense, as she puts it), chooses her own casts, and directs her own pictures” (qtd. in Massa 22). A photo caption under a scene from one of her films, Some Job (1918), reiterates this image: “Fay Tincher is a merciless autocrat when she directs men’s activities.” But today, since most of her films from this period are lost, we know little of those years when Tincher was at her most powerful as a film producer as well as a comedy star. In front of the camera Fay Tincher had three distinct personae: 1) Ethel, the stenographer, the role that made her a star; 2) a cowgirl; and 3) the housewife, Min Gump. Before taking on the role of Min, her characters were consistently strong, independent women, anticipating something of the uniqueness, confidence, and even dominance of men, with the chutzpah later embodied by Mae West. Like West, Tincher was short, only five feet two, but both commanded the screen despite their size. Unlike West, however, Tincher never pretended to be a sex symbol; she rarely put herself in a romantic situation and rejected conventional beauty. The Milwaukee Journal in 1914 observed that Tincher “persists and revels in making herself look awkward, no makeup… nor does she care how it makes her look provided it accomplishes her purpose—to make people laugh and be happy” (n.p.). She attracted attention through her bizarre way of dressing on- as well as off-screen. Since she did not have the lead as Ethel in the Bill the Office Boy films, she got herself noticed with the distinctive black and white striped costumes that became her trademark. As Ethel, Tincher also chewed gum incessantly and styled her hair with a huge spit curl in the middle of her forehead or over one cheek. A 1917 cover story in Motion Picture Magazine noted: “the stenographer wasn’t meant to be the star of the cast, but the distinctive way in which she carried her role made her one overnight” (Wade 65).

As a sometimes cross-dresser, Tincher reveled in roles that asked her to perform athletically and to face down danger. On June 20, 1915, the Fargo Daily published a photograph of the comic dressed as a boy, with a hat and cane, its caption quoting Tincher: “It’s more fun being a boy in a movie comedy than chewing a whole package of gum” (n.p.). For the newly formed Triangle-Fine Arts Company production of Don Quixote (1916), Julian Johnson in the March issue of Photoplay praised Tincher, calling her performance “little short of wonderful,” with the reservation that she made Dulcinea “into a female Charley [sic] Chaplin” when she should have resembled Lady Godiva” (110). In the same periodical in June, John Lloyd commented that her bizarre and eccentric performance “established Fay Tincher as one of the great film actresses” (56). She then went on to star in a series of shorts for the Triangle Company, many of which were written by Anita Loos.

Born in 1884 in Topeka, Kansas to an affluent family, Fay Tincher began appearing in amateur theatre at an early age. From the beginning, she was remarkably savvy about publicity and gained a good deal of notoriety in 1908 when she seemed to be unsure about whether or not she had, on a dare, married a wealthy Connecticut bachelor named Ned Buckley. Stories about this escapade ran in a number of papers, including The World, where in 1908 Tincher is quoted as saying, “Not that Ned would not make a desirable husband for any girl who wished to marry… But I do not want to marry him nor any man” (n.p.). As far as we know, however, this marriage was a publicity hoax. Tincher never did marry.

Fay Tincher seems to have struck out on her own when she formed Fay Tincher Productions in 1917, but exactly how many comedies she made is uncertain, and none of these are extant. We still do not know what happened to her company and why she signed with Al Christie productions in 1918. Christie was fond of using cross-dressing as a comic device, and he utilized the unconventional Tincher as a wild, Western cowgirl, not only in Rowdy Ann (1919), but also Go West Young Woman (1919), Wild and Western (1919), and Dangerous Nan McGrew (1919). But in 1920 she stopped making Western comedies, and appeared in only a few more films for Christie. There is a two-year gap before she is seen on-screen again as Min Gump, a conventional woman’s role that tamed her unruly uniqueness. When the series ended in 1928, she seems to have disappeared.

Why? One reason may have had to do with her rumored sexual preference for women, as Loos intimates (Loos 1977, 31). In addition, Tincher may have been on Will Hayes’s rumored blacklist created in the wake of the Fatty Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor scandals in 1921 and 1922. Another reason may simply be that comedy changed in the 1920s. Female slapstick clowns of the teens, such as Alice Howell, Louise Fazenda, and Polly Moran took on supporting roles as comedy blended with drama in an effort to appeal to more sophisticated audiences. Tincher died in 1983 in Brooklyn, New York and is buried in an unmarked grave in Silver Mount Cemetery on Staten Island according to Billy Doyle’s Necrology (1995, 80). What happened to her during the fifty-five years that elapsed between her last motion picture in 1928 and her death deserves to be unearthed along with her lost films. In 1916 she is quoted as having said that “Comedy on screen will have to be taken seriously and raised to a much higher level than it has been so far, if it is to be permanent” (Denny 78).

Bibliography

“Am I Mrs. or Miss? Is the Lady's Query.” The World (7 Aug.1908): n. p. clippings file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Denny, Margaret. “How Fay Tincher Regards Her Profession.” Motion Picture Magazine  (Aug. 1916): 77-80.

Grossman, Andrew, “Fay Tincher.” Senses of Cinema (December 2002): n.p.  http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/23/symposium3/#tincher  

Johnson, Julian. “The Shadow Stage.” Photoplay (March 1916): 101-110.

Lahue, Kalton C. and Samuel Gill. “Fay Tincher.” In Clown Princes and Court Jesters. London: Thomas Yoseloff, Ltd, 1970. 386-376.

Lloyd, John. “Let Fay Try It!” Photoplay (June 1916): 53-56.

Loos, Anita. Cast of Thousands. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1977.

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

Massa, Steve. “Some Job: The Film Career of Fay Tincher.” Slapstick #10 (Summer 2004): 18-30.

“Playing Boy’ For Films Heaps of Fun.” The Fargo Daily (20 June 1915): n.p. clippings file. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

“Plays Cleo in ‘The Battle of the Sexes’” The New Orleans States (11 Aug. 1914): n.p. clippings file,  New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

“Some Job.” (20 July 1918): n.p. clippings file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Wade, Peter. “The Girl on the Cover.” Motion Picture Magazine (April 1917): 65-67.

“Where There's A Will There's A Way And She Has Both To Make You Laugh.” Milwaukee Journal (31 Oct. 1914): n.p. clippings file. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Archival Paper Collections: 

Fay Tincher clippings file. Robinson Locke Collection. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Various Fay Tincher clippings. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Rapf, Joanna E. "Fay Tincher." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-fn9h-vx04>

Alicia Armstrong de Vicuña

by Eliana Jara Donoso

Few professional references and little biographical data exist for this film director. We know only that, supported by her husband who was a wealthy businessman, Alicia Armstrong de Vicuña founded Alistrong Film Company in order to direct El lecho nupcial/The Nuptial Bed (1926), an adaptation of Charles Meré’s melodrama that had been serialized in local newspapers, a widely popular practice at the time. A vigorous promotional campaign in the Diario El Mercurio de Santiago activated during the week preceding the premiere announced it as “a film of great technical accomplishment, worthy of international exhibition, and having a first class work in dramatic and art direction” (1926, n.p.). However, the Diario La Nación review found the film a disappointment: “The adaptation suffers from many defects, and there wasn’t a photogenic selection of the actors. Photography is poor; except for some scenes in the snow that have a lot of light and great relief, the rest is of an exasperating poverty and opacity. The make-up is pathetic. A movie made by inexpert hands…In summary, a good intention failed due to the shortcomings of its film direction” (n.p.). To our knowledge, Alicia Armstrong de Vicuña did not make another motion picture.

Bibliography

“El Lecho Nupcial.” Diario El Mercurio de Santiago (23 December 1926): n.p.

“El Lecho Nupcial.” Diario La Nación (24 December 1926): n.p.

Citation

Donoso, Eliana Jara. "Alicia Armstrong de Vicuña." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-38gt-9g77>

Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna

by Eliana Jara Donoso

Details about the life of Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna are scarce. We know only that she played a small acting role in Juro no volver a amar/I Swear I Won’t Love Again (1925). After this experience, she founded her own film company, Rosario Film, in order to direct Malditas sean las mujeres/Damned Be the Women (1925), a loose adaptation of a novel by Ibo Alfaro. In the film, a young boy, a victim of passion, falls into despair because of unrequited love and ends up killing himself. The film had limited commercial success and was exhibited at several locations in the country.

Nothing else is known about Rodríguez de la Serna until 1929, when she completed her second film, La Envenenadora/The Poisoner, an adaptation of the novel of the same title by Paul D’Aigremont. The action of this film relies on the intrigue of a woman who poisons her husband in order to take possession of his fortune and to live with her lover. However, the victim’s sister finds out about the crime, and the criminals go to jail. This film was also screened around Chile, but the public’s welcome was quite tepid, and Rodríguez de la Serna was lost in the most complete anonymity.

Bibliography

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

Santana, Alberto. Grandezas y miserias del cine chileno. Santiago: Editorial Misión, Colección Informe, 1957.

Citation

Donoso, Eliana Jara. "Rosario Rodríguez de la Serna." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-pmqg-5w90>

Ángela Ramos de Rotalde

by Mario Lucioni, Irela Núñez

Ángela Ramos de Rotalde was one of Peru’s first journalists, and a progressive who sympathized with the early Peruvian communism of José Carlos Mariátegui. She maintained a strong feminist position that she defended with acute intelligence and a sense of humor.

Ángela Ramos de Rotalde (w) still, El Carnaval del Amor, 1930. APIS

Frame enlargement, El Carnaval del Amor, 1930. Courtesy of the Archivo Peruano de Imagen y Sonido.

She also participated in Peruvian cinema. In 1927, Italian filmmaker Pedro Sambarino asked Ramos to write the script for a film he planned to direct. Sambarino came from La Paz, where he had directed Corazón aymara/Aymaran Heart (1925), the first Bolivian feature film. In that film there are many elements indicative of the director’s interests, such as the mixture of fiction and documentary and a love story that takes place in a local indigenous area. While Ramos had never before written for film, she had worked in publicity, had published some short stories, and had flirted with the idea of motion picture work.

Ángela Ramos de Rotalde (w) still, El Carnaval del Amor, 1930. APIS

El Carnaval del Amor, 1930. Courtesy of the Archivo Peruano de Imagen y Sonido.

In El carnaval del amor/The Carnival of Love (1930), the country-city dichotomy is in full force. Here, the country represents innocence and women, and the city represents corruption, falseness, and, of course, men. But Ramos’s script contains a progressive variation in which the main character is not a naive girl but a professor, a symbol of progress, who comes from the city to work with a landowner who wants to bring welfare and education to his workers. In contrast to Chilean director Alberto Santana’s films, in which romance and the loss of virtue were depicted in a melodramatic way, El carnaval del amor was described as picturesque, humorous, and naturalistic. The film’s publicity emphasized the social aspect over the romance, and the most melodramatic scene was effectively a dream sequence.

Production took more than two years, but the success of the Stefanía Socha film Los abismos de la vida/Life’s Abysses (1929) made it possible for El carnaval del amor to receive its first screening in February 1930. Even the newspapers that had not publicized the film gave it good reviews. One January 1930 review saw the film as anticipating a national film industry:

El carnaval del amor is… the best national movie edited to this day, in spite of the pretentious La Perricholi, churrigueresque film. It exalts our country and city values. It depicts a beautiful Lima, true, without exaggerations. A fertile country, with strong and hard-working men. It exalts our best values, our richness, our landscapes, our good country people. Its plot is pleasant and well made. If the film doesn’t have many close ups it’s because we don’t have complete “studios” yet, but we’ll get there someday. We think it is important to recommend films that exalt healthy Peruvian customs, music, poetry, as well as many noble values of our nationality. This is the way national cinematography should be made. Peruvian cinema that exalts our beauty and moral, spiritual, economic, artistic and material richness.

Ramos was able to find the perfect ironic tone for Lima’s middle class audience by combining her writing style with Sambarino’s documentary-style visuals. However, because there was no Peruvian film industry, this was Ramos’s only film as with most Peruvian film pioneers.

Bibliography

Bedoya, Ricardo. 100 Años de cine en el Perú: una historia crítica. Lima: Universidad de Lima e Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1992.

------. Un cine reencontrado: diccionario ilustrado de las películas peruanas. Lima: Universidad de Lima, Fondo de Desarrollo Editorial, 1997.

Carbone, Giancarlo, ed. El cine en el Perú, 1897-1950: testimonios. Lima: Universidad de Lima, 1991.

“El Carnaval del amor.” Revista del Touring Club Peruano (Jan. 1930): n.p.

Lucioni, Mario. “Pedro Sambarino, un pionero trashumante.” El Refugio, Revista de cine. 3 (1992): 51-60.

Susz, Pedro. La campaña del Chaco (el ocaso del cine silente boliviano). La Paz: Editorial Universitaria, 1991.

------. Filmo-deografía boliviana básica (1904 - 1990). La Paz: Editorial Cinemateca Boliviana, 1991.

Citation

Lucioni, Mario; Irela Núñez . "Ángela Ramos de Rotalde." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-258t-q822>

Maria Isabel Sánchez Concha Aramburú

by Mario Lucioni, Irela Núñez

Writer María Isabel Sánchez Concha—or Belsarima, or Marisabidilla—in Lima’s small cultural environment of the 1910s, moved between drawing room conversations and huge intellectual gatherings that took place in prominent theatres. These activities were fully detailed by illustrated magazines such as Variedades and La Crónica. Sánchez Concha’s flamboyant personality and her strong writing helped promote the nascent feature film industry in Lima, starting with the release of Negocio al agua (1913) by the production company Empresa del Cinema Teatro. That year, the distributor Compañía Internacional Cinematográfica decided to produce Sánchez Concha’s script for Del manicomio al matrimonio/From the mental hospital to marriage (1913). They entrusted the camerawork to the French photographer Fernando Lund, who had already worked for the emerging companies La Crónica and Teatro Olimpo.

The national feature film industry began as an initiative to fund the work of young, talented Peruvian playwrights, thus establishing continuity with Lima’s modern theatre. The hope was to attract moviegoers to theatre and vice versa, a common practice since 1909. Following the standards of the period, the actors were cast from among society’s youth, and included Sánchez Concha’s brothers.

María Isabel Sánchez Concha Aramburú (w). Del manicomio al matrimonio (1913). APIS

Sill, Del manicomio al matrimonio (1913), María Isabel Sánchez Concha Aramburú (w).  Courtesy of the Archivo Peruano de Imagen y Sonido.

Del manicomio al matrimonio is a comedy of errors. Edmundo Alamares, a dedicated writer, falls in love with his cousin, who is also his father’s student. He manages to give her an engagement ring before her brother beats him up and he becomes mentally unstable. An unscrupulous doctor puts him into a mental hospital with the sole aim of making money from his family, but with no intention of giving him any kind of care. But the lovesick Edmundo manages to escape. With his girlfriend’s help, he exposes the doctors and is finally reconciled with his future brother-in-law. The film ends with the couple’s marriage.

María Isabel Sánchez Concha Aramburú Del manicomio al matrimonio (1913). APIS

Still, Del manicomio al matrimonio (1913), María Isabel Sánchez Concha Aramburú (w).  Courtesy of the Archivo Peruano de Imagen y Sonido.

The film—together with other stage pieces—was exhibited on July 11, 1913, at the Teatro Municipal in a gathering organized by women. The press emphasized the success of the showing. Little information on films written by Sánchez Concha has been published. However, her son Enrique Pinilla inherited his mother’s versatility. He was a musicologist, audiovisual director, film critic, and soundtrack composer of several Peruvian sound era films, as well as founder and professor of the Escuela Superior de Cine y Televisión de la Universidad de Lima.

Bibliography

Beyoda, Ricardo. 100 Años de cine en el Perù: una historia crítica. Lima: Universidad de Lima e Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1992.

Citation

Lucioni, Mario; Irela Núñez. "Maria Isabel Sánchez Concha Aramburú." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-wmx4-bm96>

Teresita Arce

by Mario Lucioni, Irela Núñez

The career of Teresita Arce spans the entire Peruvian entertainment industry in the 20th century. Her full name was Teresita Arce-Bouroncle O’Higgins, and her artist-father may have been of Guatemalan descent. She started to sing and dance in her childhood. Early articles from 1916 describe her as a young lady from a bourgeois theatre company. In 1922 her popularity was growing, and the photographer-painter Luis Ugarte asked her to act in Camino de la venganza/Juanacha/La venganza del indio, the first Peruvian fiction feature film. Arce plays the lead role of Juanacha, a young native woman. The Anglo character McDonald, a hateful mine administrator, is a violent exploiter. He is guilty of the death of the wife of a native miner, the “indio” of the alternative title. The engineer is convicted but manages to escape, taking Juanacha to the capital, where he attempts to seduce her, but without success. In the end, McDonald is assassinated by the widowed miner.

Teresita Arce (a), print add for Jabón Ross, APIS

Teresita Arce in print ad for Jabón Ross. Courtesy of the Archivo Peruano de Imagen y Sonido. 

Teresita Arce El Cancionero de Lima. PC

Teresita Arce featured in El Cancionero de Lima. Private Collection.

Some years later, when she had become a star in popular theatre and was an entrepreneur with her own company, Arce acted in Luis Pardo (1927) as the virginal bride of the likable bandit immortalized in the Creole music that inspired the film. Unlike the previous film, some materials from this film have survived, allowing us to see the actress on screen. In an interview conducted in the 1970s, the film’s director, Enrique Cornejo Villanueva, recalled that he chose the actress because of her mischievous looks and her strong character, telling an anecdote about her refusal to do kissing scenes. The rest of Arce’s career continued in variety theatre and radio, where she created the character of “Chola Purificación Chauca.” She remained popular well into the 1960s. Her last film project was the aborted feature Las desheredadas de la suerte, which tried to bring Creole culture to the Peruvian sound cinema.

Bibliography

Bedoya, Ricardo. 100 años de cine en el Perú: una historia crítica. Lima: Universidad de Lima e Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1992.

Lucioni, Mario. “Pedro Sambarino, un pionero trashumante.” El Refugio, Revista de cine 3 (1992): 55-61.

Citation

Lucioni, Mario; Irela Núñez. "Teresita Arce." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-radb-rj19>

Marion E. Wong

by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau

The existence of a figure like Marion E. Wong challenges the received narrative of American film industry history in which Anglo-American men started the majority of the first companies and the participation of Asians was limited to providing exoticism on screen as actors or extras. If we were to look to the New York Times as a definitive source, we might conclude that only one Chinese-American company existed in the silent era and that that company was started in 1922 by James B. Leong. According to the Times, Leong financed the Wah Ming Motion Picture Company in order to produce “picture-plays of, by, and for the Chinese” (69). However, five years before and with the same goal in mind, a young Chinese-American woman had started the Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California. We know now that she was not only president of the company, but also screenwriter, director, and costume designer. Until recently, however, the name Marion E. Wong was known to scholars only from a small note in the back pages of a 1917 issue of the Moving Picture World. The article mentions the Mandarin Film Company and heralds their first multiple-reel feature film, The Curse of the Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with West (1916), as the first and only film made by an all-Chinese cast and an all-Chinese company (63).

The achievements of Marion E. Wong were unusual enough to attract the attention of several local newspapers, most notably the Oakland Tribune. In the first of two articles, Wong reveals that she is determined to introduce to the world Chinese motion pictures with “some of the customs and manners of China” (1916). Sounding confident about her venture, she is quoted as saying that if the first picture was successful, her company would continue “exclusive productions.” The next year, in 1917, the Oakland Tribune describes Marion E. Wong as “energy personified,” a Chinese girl with “imagination, executive ability, wit and beauty.” According to the same article, Wong constructed a temporary studio at the rear of her home and rented camera equipment from a “special picture concern in Oakland.”After much negotiation with a businessman in Oakland’s Chinatown and with the support of her elder sister, whose husband was a rich merchant, Wong financed her Oakland-based company with the goal of producing Chinese-themed films. When interviewed, Wong always expressed enthusiasm for presenting Chinese culture to Westerners.

CCP_FIG2_Wong_WFP-WON02

Violet Wong and Marion E. Wong. Private Collection.

In a recent interview, the descendants of Marion E. Wong confirmed that she was the producer-director as well as the screenwriter of The Curse. She also cast herself as the villainess. In addition, in order to avoid extra expenses, Wong cast her family members (her sister-in-law Violet June Wong, her mother Chin See, and her niece Stella). While the company was based in Oakland and most of the film was shot in Niles Valley, California, the Moving Picture World reported that part of the film was shot in Southern China and mentions Wong’s trip to China to make arrangements for the release of the film (63).

As an American-born-Chinese, Wong’s long residence in Oakland and her Chinese heritage enables her to weave both Chinese folklore and her transnational life experiences into the script. When Wong’s descendants were interviewed by film critic Mara Math, they mentioned Wong’s trip to China between 1910 to 1911. If this is the case, as a young child she would have been a witness to the first Chinese Revolution, which not only put an end to the two-thousand-year-old feudal system, but also accelerated the pace of westernization and modernization in China. The title The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West as well as the mixed Chinese and Western dressing styles in the film indicate Wong’s awareness of the cultural conflicts and the mixture of East and West that would give rise to the formation of a transnational identity.

At the end of the twentieth century, The Curse of Quon Gwon was presumed lost. Then, around 2005, two reels of the 35mm original negative and a 16mm print were found, almost accidentally, by documentary filmmaker Arthur Dong in the basement of the Chinese American Historical Society in San Francisco. Although the source material is incomplete and there are no intertitles, a contemporary viewer can still follow the contours of a story. From the surviving materials available for viewing, one can see that The Curse of Quon Gwon is a melodrama filled with love, passion, jealousy, and family conflicts. It ends with the death of the villainess played by Marion E. Wong herself and the happy reunification of the wife, played by Violet, with her screen husband. The film is stylistically compatible with many of the mainstream silent motion pictures made during the same period in terms of its cinematography, editing, acting, and story structure. However, it could also be compared with another recently restored early Chinese-American independent film, Lotus Blossom (1921), produced by James B. Leong. In viewing The Curse, one is struck by the effective lighting of the scenes and the props wavering in the breeze, suggesting that the film was shot outdoors. Although the camera tends to be stationary and the shot composition frontal, with characters entering and exiting from lateral sides of the frame, there is at times an interesting dynamic between actors’ bodies and the slight camera movement that prevents the scenes from being static.

The acting style in The Curse of Quon Gwon is more natural than stylized, and the Chinese style set dressing appears more authentic than other films with Chinese décor made by non-Asian directors of the same period, the best example of which is D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919). Since most of The Curse was set in local stores and Asian homes in the San Francisco Bay district, the interiors in the film are decorated in a typical and authentic Chinese style. One can also see a traditional Chinese wedding ceremony performed with the rituals that were prevalent in mainland China during that time. It is also interesting to note that a special effect technique—a short sequence of super-impositions and dissolves—is used in the middle of the film to express what seems to be the protagonist’s imagination of and fear about her impending wedding. This symbolic shot, which comments on the repressive nature of some Chinese traditions, is perhaps evidence of director Wong’s cultural knowledge, and it may be significant here to note that at the time she produced this film she herself was as yet unmarried.

Marion E. Wong (d/p/w/a/o) (1916). PC

Marion E. Wong, 1916. Private Collection.

According to the Moving Picture World, Wong traveled as far as New York in an attempt to sell her film to exhibitors (63). Although this article, most likely based on a Mandarin Film Company press release, states that the company expected to continue producing motion pictures about Chinese subjects, there is no evidence that any other films were made. According to family members, Wong’s film was screened only twice over the following ninety years—in 1948 at a public screening in Berkeley, California, and in 1974 at a screening for over seventy family members. The recent rediscovery occasioned the reunion between the film and the children of Marion and Violet and, following the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences restoration, the film was placed on the US National Film Registry.

The existence of The Curse of Quon Gwon suggests that although some early independent filmmakers may have found the financial means to produce a film, they were yet unable to publicize or to promote their productions. Scholars continue to look for clues to the history of the film in the surviving material—the thirty minutes of the original 35mm camera negative, labeled as reel 4 and reel 7. Both the 35mm footage and a forty-two-minute 16mm version made at Violet’s initiative in 1969 after Marion’s death contain black leader spliced between scenes. The Kodak edge numbers on the film stock confirm that the 35mm negative was shot in 1917. Most importantly, The Curse of Quon Gwon brings the name Marion E. Wong, motion picture producer-director and president of the Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California, out of obscurity.

With additional research by Michelle Koerner and  Mengqian Xie.

Bibliography

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. Interview with family members (Mai Lon Gittelsoher, Lone Laok Wang, and A. Hong) Museum of California, Oakland, California. 24 March 2007.

“Marion E. Wong, Chinese Film Producer.” Moving Picture World (7 July 1917): 63.

Math, Mara. “Marion Wong: Chinese Film Pioneer.” CineMedusa, 2007.

“Notes of the Movies.” New York Times (7 February 1922): 69

“First Chinese Film Drama Written and Portrayed by Girl.” Oakland Tribune (11 May 1916): n.p.

Oakland Tribune (22 July 1917): n.p.

Xie, Mengqian. “Yellow Subjectivity Under Yellowface: Mapping Chinese Performance Through The Curse of the Quon Gwon.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Columbia University, 2010.

Citation

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah. "Marion E. Wong." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-s9yz-e287>

Adelina Barrasa

by Laura Isabel Serna

Exhibitor Adelina Barrasa owned the Cine Odeón, a 3,000-seat theatre located at 29 Mosqueta in the heart of Mexico City. When the Mexican Departamento del Trabajo/Department of Labor conducted a censo obrero [census] of the film exhibition industry in 1923, Barrasa was the only woman listed as gerente o propietario [manager or owner]. At the time, Barrasa had twenty-six employees. One, most likely the day-to-day manager, was a foreigner. Two women worked as taquilleras [ticket sellers]. The remaining twenty-three employees—projectionists, their assistants, musicians, and plant staff—were all male and Mexican. Based on Barrasa’s response to the census questions, the projectionists and musicians belonged to unions. The two ticket sellers did not and were paid a mere 2.50 pesos a day (approximately $1.25 in US dollars in 1923). At the time the census was conducted, Barrasa claimed 8,000 pesos, approximately $4,000 US dollars, in exhibited or liquid capital. According to folio 96 of the Censo Obreror, the theatre operated from 4:00 pm to 11:00 pm, six days a week. It is unclear from the census materials how involved Barrasa was in the day-to-day operations of the cinema or how she came to own the theatre, but when the Odeón opened in 1922, the Heraldo de México hailed it as “the premiere cinema in the capital” (6).

As the Department of Labor census demonstrates, women rarely owned or operated motion picture theatres. When their work was formally acknowledged, women occupied the poorly paid posts of ticket sellers. This represents an extension of the role wives and daughters had played in Mexican cinema exhibition during the two decades after the introduction of motion pictures in 1896. In smaller, sometimes makeshift, theatres or itinerant exhibition companies, women had worked alongside their husbands or fathers, performing a range of duties, although most likely not working as projectionists. Adelina Barrasa, about whom we can learn in property ownership registries, seems to have been singular in her cinema ownership at a moment when Mexico’s exhibition industry was becoming increasingly corporate. The uniqueness of her position draws our attention to the unexamined experience of taquillistas, employment that allowed young single women to survive or contribute to their household incomes and that was crucial to the everyday operation of movie theatres across the Republic.

Bibliography

“El Gran Cine ‘Odeón,’ se inaugura hoy en la tarde.” Heraldo de México (4 May 1922): 6.

Archival Paper Collections:

Censo Obrero, Departamento de Trabajo. Volumen 620, Expediente 5, Folios 1–217. Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico).

Citation

Serna, Laura Isabel. "Adelina Barrasa." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-52mm-2747>

Gabriela von Bussenius Vega

by Eliana Jara Donoso

When she was very young, Gabriela von Bussenius Vega wrote the story of La agonía de Arauco/The Agony of Arauco (1917). In this, she reminds us of Cándida Beltrán Rendón, who also later adapted a story she had written as a young woman. During this time, von Bussenius Vega was also writing essays and film commentary published in the celebrated magazine, Zig-Zag. Around this time she met and married an Italian, Salvador Giambastiani, considered one of the founders of Chilean national cinema, who had just joined with two businessmen to found the Chile Film Company.

Gaby von Bussenius Vega (p/w), PC

Gaby von Bussenius Vega. Private Collection.

One of the first films they produced together was La agonía de Arauco, for which they divided the work, with von Bussenius Vega in charge of the story and art direction and Giambastiani, the technical side of direction. La agonía de Arauco called for a number of natural locations, which necessitated extensive travel throughout Southern Chile in order to film traditional customs and practices, which served as background for the narrative. The film tells the story of a woman’s love and her subsequent desolation following the death of her husband and son. La agonía de Arauco was well received by the press, as evidenced in a review in Diario El Ilustrado, calling it a “happy attempt” and praising its “freshness” and cinematography. Another reviewer, in Diario El Mercurio de Santiago, however, was less impressed and commented that “the main thread of the story is a failure” and that “the Indians are nothing but some red skins in disguise.” Giambastiani’s death in 1921 marked the end of von Bussenius Vega’s career in silent film, although her brother Gustavo went on to work in the Chilean film industry. In the years that followed, von Bussenius Vega alternated her activity between journalism and film criticism and also edited two magazines, Mundo Social and Cinema Magazine. She wrote plays, including “El regreso/The Return” and “La torre de Babel/The Tower of Babel,” both of which were performed in different locations around Chile with some success. She directed plays for children and published a novel, Mis amigos los cisnes/My Friends the Swans. After her abandonment of all literary and artistic activity, she spent many years in a retirement home and died on January 28, 1975. Upon her death, von Bussenius Vega was hesitantly remembered as “the first Chilean female filmmaker.”

Bibliography

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

“La agonía de Arauco.” Rev. Diario El Ilustrado (27 April 1917): n.p.

“La agonía de Arauco.” Rev. Diario El Mercurio de Santiago (27 April 1917): n.p.

Von Bussenius Vega, Gaby. Mis amigos los cisnes. Santiago: Bustos y Letelier, 1954.

Citation

Donoso, Eliana Jara. "Gabriela von Bussenius Vega." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-02sb-cn64>

Elizabeth B. Grimball

by Carmen Hendershott

Of her work in theatre and motion pictures, Elizabeth Grimball commented in 1924 to the New York Sun and Globe: “I feel it’s a man’s game, but that won’t prevent me from playing it” (6). Grimball played the game brilliantly, in multiple capacities, but she is best remembered as a theatre and pageant producer as well as theatre educator. She put on at least thirty pageants dramatizing religious or historical themes, most of them in her native South between 1917 and 1922.

Elizabeth B. Grimball (p/d), NYPL

Elizabeth B. Grimball. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Two productions were “A Pageant of Lower Cape Fear” and “The Lost Colony,” both mounted in North Carolina in 1921. As a theatre producer and arranger of plays, Grimball was instrumental in establishing the Cherry Lane Playhouse, which survives to this day as a viable off-Broadway venue. In addition, she founded the Inter-Theatre Arts School of Acting and Production, incorporated in 1921, which continued, under various other names, at least until the mid-1940s (Gilreath 67). Several celebrated Broadway actresses of their era, such as Helen Gahagan and Betty Starbuck, were Grimball alumnae. Her intention in founding a theatre school was to raise the level of both amateur or community theatre, sometimes called “little theatre,” and professional production and performance, we are told in the American Magazine (67). In addition, she was an actress, a director, and a writer. She wrote several of the pageants she produced, at least two plays, and a book in 1925, coauthored with Rhea Wells, entitled Costuming a Play. Her articles on pageant production and the craft of the theatre, and her activities as a public speaker and commentator on the theatre all helped to publicize her activities in, and views about, the performing arts. Her place in cinema history is minor compared to her place in theatre history, since she made just one film, but The Lost Colony Film has survived and is an interesting artifact of the silent film era.

According to Tom Whiteside, North Carolina filmmaker and archivist, The Lost Colony Film was made in North Carolina in September 1921 as a consequence of the Grimball-directed outdoor pageant “Raleigh, The Shepherd of the Ocean,” which was held at the State Fair in Raleigh in 1920. Grimball says in an article she wrote for Woman’s World that the state of North Carolina had devised a plan to teach the history of the state in the public schools by means of moving pictures, a plan she thought was “ingenious and practical.” And this was the reason, she says, she was “asked to produce and direct the filming of ‘The Lost Colony’” (50). A 1925 article on Grimball in the American Magazine further describes the motion picture as a reenactment of the history of the Lost Colony of settlers on Roanoke Island, founded in 1585 by Sir Walter Raleigh (67). Mabel Evans Jones, superintendent of schools in Dare County, had suggested that this would be a suitable subject for the first of what was supposed to be a series of films on the history of North Carolina, and wrote the script for the film (Powell 115-116).

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.

A title in the credits of the film states that this film is the first in a series entitled “North Carolina Pictorial History,” but no others in the projected series are known to have been made. Although the early educational motion picture came to be known as The Lost Colony Film, the title as it appears on the film itself is The Earliest English Expedition and Attempted Settlements in the Territory Now the United States 1584–1591. Shot in 35mm by a two-man camera crew hired from the Atlas Educational Film Company of Chicago, Illinois, The Lost Colony Film was five reels in length, with a running time of fifty minutes. The outdoor drama “The Lost Colony” is still presented every summer on Roanoke Island, near the town of Manteo. According to Billy Arthur, the film was the forerunner of the pageant (12).

The Lost Colony Film is a historical costume drama made with amateur actors and a professional three-person crew, according to Whiteside. He describes it as a somewhat confusing tale of exploration, first contact with Native Americans, an attempted colony of soldiers, and their subsequent failure and departure. Another colony followed, this one composed of men, women, and children. This came to be known as “The Lost Colony.” Historical information is derived from the writings of Richard Hakluyt and Thomas Hariot, and visual information from the watercolors painted by John White, the governor of the Lost Colony. Historical scenes that receive the most emphasis include life in the Indian village, the baptism of Manteo, the birth of Virginia Dare, and White’s much-delayed return from England when he discovered Fort Raleigh abandoned, the colony lost. The Daily Advance, the local paper of Elizabeth City, N.C., describes the collective efforts of the locals to help make the film by sewing their own costumes and volunteering their time, and further praises Grimball’s tenacity: “Miss Elizabeth B. Grimball of New York who has directed the enterprise, has worked night and day from the beginning of preparations for the great movie production early in September. Every ounce of her strength, personality and will has gone into the work; and she has kept her temper and her head through ordeals and annoyances, big and small, that would have started Job on the road to profanity” (n.p.).

The Lost Colony Film premiered November 7, 1921, in the Supreme Courtroom in Raleigh, the state capital (Whiteside 1990, 8). Four prints were struck and were distributed by the Bureau of Community Service, a division of the State Department of Education, which found its intended audience in schools, community centers, and civic clubs, including several places in the district where motion pictures had never been screened before. To be able to show the film in places without electricity, a T Ford was fitted with a generator to provide power for a projector (Powell 120). A print of the silent motion picture resurfaced in the mid-1970s, and a 16mm print was made from the 35mm surviving copy by the Roanoke Island Historical Association in Manteo, North Carolina.

Bibliography

“Amateur Movie Stars Not Envious of Professionals.” The Daily Advance [Elizabeth City, N.C.] (28 Sept. 1921): n.p.

Arthur, Billy. “Descendant of Minstrels, She Produces Pageants.” New York Sun and Globe (8 March 1924): 6.

------. “How the Movies Started in N.C.” The State vol 51, no. 7 (Dec. 1983): 12-13.

Gilreath, Janie. “Half Way to Broadway Stands Elizabeth Grimball’s Shop.” The American Magazine (Nov. 1925): 67-68.

Grimball, Elizabeth. “On Producing Pageants.” Woman’s World (April 1924): 50.

Henderson, Jenny. The North Carolina Filmography: Over 200 Film and Television Works Made in the State, 1905 through 2000. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2002.

“Historical Films Ready for Exhibition Dec. 1st.” The Daily Advance (26 Sept. 1921): n.p.

Powell, William Stevens. Paradise Preserved. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

“Ready to Shoot Historic Movies.” The Daily Advance (20 Sept. 1921): n.p.

Whiteside, Tom. Personal Interview.  April 15, 1997.

------. “The Lost Colony Film.” Independent Spirit vol.11 no.2 (Summer 1990): 6-8.

“Work Goes Well in Movie Making.” The Daily Advance (22 Sept. 1921): n.p.

Citation

Hendershott, Carmen. "Elizabeth B. Grimball." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-bsj7-am84>

Adela Sequeyro

by Patricia Torres San Martín

Adela Sequeyro was born in the port city of Veracruz, Mexico, to Federico Sequeyro Arreola and Virginia Haro y Gutiérrez Zamora. The Mexican Revolution, which extended from 1910 to 1917, devastated the family fortune and compelled them to move to the town of Cuautitlán on the outskirts of Mexico City. Sequeyro studied at a French-English school in the capital and, at an unusually early age, began a career in cinema journalism in 1921.

The recent discovery of well-preserved 16mm copies of two films directed by Adela Sequeyro —Más allá de la muerte/Beyond Death (1935) and La mujer de nadie/Nobody’s Woman (1937)—sparked an overdue reevaluation of Sequeyro’s importance in the history of Mexican cinema. Before the discovery of these two films, Sequeyro was known primarily for her acting roles in Mexican silent film melodramas and as a journalist whose work appeared in many Mexico City newspapers and periodicals.

Adela Sequeyro (d/p/a), PC

Adela Sequeyro. Private Collection

In the 1920s, Sequeyro began appearing occasionally in films opposite Ricardo Mutio, a well-known theatrical actor in Virginia Fábregas’s company. In 1923, Adela Sequeyro—or Perlita, as she was known—starred in El hijo de la loca/The Crazy Woman’s Son (José S. Ortiz 1923), followed by leading roles in at least five other silent features: Atavismo/Throwback (1923) and Un drama en la aristocracia/A Drama in the Aristocracy (1924), both directed by Gustavo Sáenz de Sicilia; Ortiz’s No matarás/Thou Shalt Not Kill, (1924); Los compañeros del silencio/Companions of Silence (Basiliao Zubiaur 1925); and El sendero gris/The Gray Path (Jesús Cárdenas 1927). It was during these shoots that Sequeyro learned the secrets of film direction, and she probably derived her taste for melodrama from the same sources. In 1923, Rafael Bermúdez Zataraín published a note in El Universal entitled “The success of the national film, The Crazy Woman’s Son,” declaring that “this film has earned both the critics’ and the Silent Art lovers’ approval, and has come to boost our moribund industry, thrilling the audience and crowding the first film theatres of Mexico” (n.p.).

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, through her journalistic collaboration with El Demócrata, El Universal Ilustrado, El Universal Taurino, and Revista de Revistas, Perlita had surrounded herself with a group of friends who were very prominent on the national cultural scene—the cartoonist Ernesto “El Chango” García Cabral, with whom she had worked in silent films such as Atavismo and Un drama en la aristocracia; the muralist and vanguard painter Adolfo Best Mugard, future director of La mancha de sangre/Blood Stain; the painter, cartoonist, and set designer Matías Santoyo; and the poet Arqueles Vela, who, along with Manuel Maples Arce, founded the Estridentista (Stridentist) movement. Sequeyro herself dabbled in poetry, though in contrast to the vanguardist predispositions of some of her associates, her personal taste leaned nostalgically toward the romantic style.

Writing in El Universal Ilustrado, Sequeyro also supported Mexican actresses. In 1931, for instance, she published an article about Lupe Vélez in which she praised the actress for succeeding, even without training, to surpass dramatists of an earlier tradition with her “vigor, her sincerity and her force” (n.p.).

With the arrival of Talkies, Sequeyro took up her acting career again, starring in the classic El prisionero trece/Prisoner Number 13 (Fernando de Fuentes 1933) serving as an extra in La sangre manda/Blood Rules (José Bohr 1933), and playing a small part in Mujeres sin alma/Soulless Women (Ramón Peón and Juan Orol 1934). In 1935, encouraged by collectivist ideas and with the support of a group of film technicians and the Banco de Crédito Popular, Sequeyro founded the filmmaking cooperative Éxito (Success), which produced Más allá de la muerte, only to be bankrupted by the film’s failure at the box office. Two years later, with her husband Mario Tenorio, she founded another cooperative, Carola, through which she produced La mujer de nadie, a film that garnered qualified praise from some critics who saw the film as innovative.  Carlos del Paso, in 1937, in Revista de Revistas, wrote that “this film may not be out of this world, but on the other hand some of its achievements are without precedent in local film culture” (n.p.). Another critic, María Celia del Villar, writing in El Universal Gráfico argued that “due to her unflagging effort and artistic enthusiasm, Adela Sequeyro has achieved great success in all aspects of her chosen form of expressions—as a screen writer, as an artistic director, and as a national screen star” (n.p.).

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 the eyes of Sequeyro herself, La mujer de nadie was daring for its time because she was taking on a job that was traditionally the job of a man. At the same time, the film also celebrates the female capacity to love. The protagonist, played with great intensity by Sequeyro at the height of her beauty, projects feelings of equal intensity toward the three gallant bohemian-artist types who court her. And although the film ends with Sequeyro’s character choosing to run away rather than remain and force the three artists to confront the possibility that she would refuse to choose between them, its director was able to express a specifically female erotic universe in strikingly modern filmic language, which, in its formal rigor, invites comparison with the work in the 1930s of her contemporary American director Dorothy Arzner.

Despite economic difficulties, Sequeyro managed to direct her third and last feature film, Diablillos de arrabal/Little Slum Devils (1938), which bears no resemblance to its predecessor. Probably inspired by the famous La pandilla/The Gang serial and by the mass-produced, melodramatic print serials of the day, this film narrates the adventures of two rival youthful gangs who end up joining forces to defend their neighborhood from the ravages of a group of adult bandits. Sequeyro later said that she agreed upon this theme as a concession to her husband and that she herself would have preferred to keep costs down by doing another film with fewer sets and a very small cast. Unfortunately, Diablillos de arrabal failed at the box office, and Sequeyro had to forfeit her rights to the film, leaving her virtually destitute.

Compelled to give up her filmmaking career, she returned to journalism, which she practiced through the 1950s, producing interviews, columns on local color and customs, and even bullfight reviews. In the following decades, she was buried in ill-deserved oblivion until filmmaker Marcela Fernández Violante located her and interviewed her for a project on Mexican women film pioneers. Thanks to Fernández Violante, who used various means to bring the too-long-forgotten contributions of women film pioneers like Sequeyro and Matilde Landeta back into the public eye, Sequeyro had the satisfaction of renewed recognition late in life. She lived out her declining years in very modest conditions under the care of her only child, Sandra, and died in Mexico City on December 24, 1992, at the age of ninety-one.

Bibliography

Bermúdez Zataraín, Rafael. “El éxito de la película nacional, El hijo de la loca.El Universal (14 Oct. 1923): n.p.

De la Vega, Eduardo and Patricia Torres San Martín, eds. Adela Sequeyro. Guadalajara, Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara, Archivo Fílmico Agrasánchez, 2000.

Del Mar, Hugo. Revista de Revistas (7 Nov. 1937): n.p.

Del Paso, Carlos. Revista de Revistas (29 Oct. 1937): n.p.

Del Villar, María Celia. El Universal Gráfico (30 Oct. 1937): n.p.

Rashkin, Elissa, ed. Women Filmmakers in Mexico. The Country of Which We Dream. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Sequeyro, Adela. El Universal Ilustrado (14 June 1931): n. p.

------. Unpublished interview with Marcela Fernández Violante, 1987.

Smith, Harry T. New York Times (7 Feb. 1938): n.p.

Torres San Martín, Patricia. “Adela Sequeyro and Matilde Landeta. Two Pioneer Women Directors.” In Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers. Eds. Joanne Hershfield and David Maciel. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999. 37-48.

------. “Las mujeres del celuloide en México.” Revista de Cine y Literatura Texto Crítico 19-20 (December 1997): 93-106.

Citation

Torres San Martín, Patricia. "Adela Sequeyro." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kgwj-5j23>

Carmen Santos

by Ana Pessoa

For many poor women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the early 20th century, the only work available was in factory sweatshops or big city department stores. A young Portuguese immigrant, Maria do Carmo managed to escape this fate when she responded to an advertisement in a magazine and was cast as the lead actress in a film produced and directed by American William Jansen titled Urutau (1919). She would become the motion picture star Carmen Santos. In a fascinating interview in 1929 with the fan magazine Cinearte, Santos admitted that Urutau, the very film in which she starred, was the first film that she had ever seen in the theatre:

Carmen Santos's autographed photograph, dedicated to the readers of A Scena Muda, PC

Carmen Santos’s autographed photograph, dedicated to the readers of “A Scena Muda.” Private Collection

Publicity stills of Carmen Santos's Onde a terra acaba(1931).

Publicity stills of Carmen Santos’s Onde a terra acaba (1931). Cinearte. Private Collection.

Clipping about Carmen Santos's Onde a terra acaba(1931)

Clipping about Carmen Santos’s Onde a terra acaba (1931). Private Collection. 

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

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

Carmen Santos on the cover of "A Scena Muda" 1931

Carmen Santos on the cover of A Scena Muda, 1931. Private Collection.

Carmen Santos (a/p) in Sangue mineiro (1929), CB

Carmen Santos, Sangue mineiro (1929). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Brasileira.

Carmen Santos (a/p/d/w) in Sangue mineiro (1929). CB

Carmen Santos, Sangue mineiro (1929). Courtesy of the Cinemateca Brasileira.

Quando acabou a filmagem… o meu interesse pela fita cresceu, tomou vulto e me empolgou porque… porque eu desejava conhecer um Cinema, vêr um film, afinal!… Até então nunca tinha ído a um Cinema, nunca tinha visto um film! Eu era tão pobresinha! E o que eu ganhava—tão pouco!… A primeira fita que vi em minha vida foi a em que trabalhei!… Tenho, ao menos, essa pequenina gloria! (Vidal 34. Original orthography preserved).

Following Santos’s path, one can trace the trajectory of Brazilian film, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, from the silent era to the creation of the industrial base of the sound film industry (Noronha 1987).

Despite the praise it received at special showings in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Urutau did not catch the attention of exhibitors. Omega Filmes, the producing company founded by Jansen, folded, and the only print of the film disappeared (Pessoa 31–32). However, around this time, Santos met Antonio Lartigau Seabra, a young businessman and member of a prominent Portuguese textile family. Nine years her senior, he had received a modern European education and was devoted to horses, cars, and planes. “Antonico,” as he was called, became the principal source of encouragement and financial support for the actress’s projects (Pessoa 34–38).

In the 1920s, Santos was often featured in the pages of Brazil’s newspapers and magazines with stories about two controversial projects in which she was involved—motion picture adaptations of Julio Ribeiro’s A Carne and Benjamin Costallat’s Melle Cinema. Both novels were considered exceedingly lascivious by the era’s standards. Although filming did not go forward on either project, Santos remained in the public eye through news items accompanied by provocative photographs that showcased her beauty, a strategy that was unheard of for Brazilian actresses during this era (Pessoa 46–49). After a respite following the birth of her first child with Lartigau Seabra, Santos joined a group from Cataguases, Minas Gerais, agreeing to star in a film directed by Humberto Mauro, Sangue mineiro (1929). The experience inspired her to develop her own project, Lábios sem beijos (1929), with Adhemar Gonzaga. Filming was inexplicably halted although it was eventually completed without her participation under Mauro’s direction (Pessoa 92–103). After the birth of her second child in September 1930, Santos starred in Limite (1931), Mário Peixoto’s first film. They joined forces for another film, Onde a terra acaba, an ambitious project that was to be filmed on Marabaia Island.  The production met with great enthusiasm by the press, which constantly exalted the determination of the producer and director to put forth a national cinema project of unprecedented scale. However, the project was interrupted due to a misunderstanding between the producer and the director. Unwilling to give up, Santos engaged the support of Adhemar Gonzaga’s studio, Cinédia, hired Gabus Mendes to direct, and finished the film, which had already received significant publicity. It premiered in 1933, but was coolly received by the public (Pessoa 133-44).

However, this critical failure did not discourage her, and she turned to her former partner Humberto Mauro at this later stage in her career. Planning for sound film’s new technological requirements, Mauro and Santos founded Brasil Vox Filmes, which would later become Brasil Vita Filmes. While waiting for the studio to be constructed, the company produced a number of silent short films, of which no extant prints are known. The experiments conducted by Santos and Mauro were crucial to the development of Brazilian national sound film production, but a fire in the 1940s caused the loss of the majority of prints of films produced by the studio (Vieira 181).

Santos refused to conform to the role of the seductive muse, taking charge of her professional life by choosing her own projects, hiring her directors, and producing, starring, and directing. The one silent era film that she directed, A Carne (1923) was shot but never released for various reasons (Pessoa 48-49). Unfortunately, a complete evaluation of her contribution to the development of the Brazilian film industry is prejudiced by the irreparable loss of most of her films. Only three films in which Santos appears as an actress survive in complete form—Sangue mineiro (1929), Limite (1931), and Argila (1940). However, according to the Cinemateca Brasileira website, surviving footage from the unfinished Onde a terra acaba (1933), directed by Mário Peixoto, was used for a documentary in 2001.

Bibliography

Noronha, Jurandyr. No tempo da manivela. Rio de Janeiro: Embrafilme, 1987.

Pessoa, Ana. Carmen Santos: o cinema dos anos 20. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano Editora, 2002.

Vidal, Barros. “Lágrimas e sorrisos de Carmen Santos.” Cinearte vol. 4, no. 193 (6 November 1929): 6-7, 34.

Vieira, João Luiz. “A chanchada e o cinema carioca (1930-1955).” História do cinema brasileiro. Ed. Fernão Ramos. São Paulo: Art Editora/SENAC, 1987, 129-187.

Archival Paper Collections:

Jurandyr Noronha Collection. Museu da Imagem e do Som do Rio de Janeiro.

Citation

Pessoa, Ana. "Carmen Santos." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cyhg-6s21>

Elena Sánchez Valenzuela

by Patricia Torres San Martín

Thanks to recently discovered materials, Elena Sánchez Valenzuela has finally received the official recognition she deserves as a journalist; actress; founder, in 1942, of the first Film Archive in Mexico; and documentary filmmaker. It is now clear that she was a seminal figure in Mexican cinema. During the early years of silent motion pictures in Mexico, she acted in two precedent-setting films: Santa (1918), the first and only silent version of Federico Gamboa’s novel of the same title directed by the journalist Luis G. Peredo, and En la hacienda/At the Hacienda (1921), directed by Ernesto Vollrath. She also had roles in three other silent films: El Escándalo (Alfredo B. Cuellar, 1920), La llaga (Luis G. Peredo, 1919), and Barranca trágica (Santiago J. Sierra, 1917). Santa and En la hacienda represent two melodrama subgenres that defined the formula for Mexican melodramas until the 1940s—the brothel and the rural subgenre. In 1927, Sánchez Valenzuela described her experience in Santa for J. M. Sánchez García:

Peredo needed a protagonist, but he did not want to look for her in the theatre, because the heroine of Gamboa—a novel women in Mexico had to read secretly—had to provide the film with the youth of a fifteen-year-old and a natural naivety in her expression… I was a student at Preparatory School in 1918 and one afternoon we skipped classes to go to the film studio Mimí Derba had at Balderas street. I did not wear silk dresses or high heel shoes; I did not even use carmine in my cheeks; my student life was far away from that (n.p.).

En la hacienda was declared the best motion picture of the year in 1921. It premiered at the castle of Chapultepec in front of a very distinguished audience: the president of Mexico, Álvaro Obregón. Subsequently, it opened on 20 screens in Mexico City and over thirty articles were published about it, all praising the performance of Elena Sánchez Valenzuela in the role of the native girl Petrilla. The film critic Fray Candil wrote in El Demócrata on January 7, 1921: “The learning process of this actress in the United States has been very useful for her career. Her progress on the difficult silent art is indisputable, so much so that she is expected to be the first star of the Mexican cinema” (n.p.).

In addition, Sánchez Valenzuela was a well-respected journalist, writing columns and film reviews for Mexico City newspapers El Demócrata in the 1920s and El Día during the 1930s. Following in the footsteps of her father, Abraham Sánchez Arce, she was a journalist who opposed the oppressive regime of Porfirio Díaz in the years before the Mexican Revolution.

Elena Sanchez Valenzuela (a/d/o), PC

Elena Sanchez Valenzuela. Private Collection. 

In 1921, Sánchez Valenzuela was sent to Los Angeles as a correspondent for El Demócrata. On her return to Mexico in 1922, she began writing a column in El Universal Gráfico entitled “El cine y sus artistas/Cinema and Its Artists.” During her time in Los Angeles, Sánchez Valenzuela won a “movie actress” contest organized by a United States newspaper. The contest gave her the opportunity to promote her acting career, which meant that she met Hollywood personalities and made public appearances at places such as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. According to information from her younger brother David and articles in Mexican and US newspapers, offers soon followed for her to play important roles in films such as Almas que sufren/Suffering Souls. It has not been possible to verify whether Almas que sufren was ever produced and exhibited, although it appears that Elena Sánchez Valenzuela eventually abandoned the project and returned to Mexico at the request of producer José Vasconcelos to make En la hacienda (1921), the silent film that marked the end of her acting career. She returned to journalism, and in 1929 was sent to Paris as a correspondent, where she remained for four years.

Yet Sánchez Valenzuela’s film career was not over. Periodical references supplied by David Valenzuela now confirm that in 1936 she directed and photographed a sound documentary about the state of Michoacán. The documentary, Michoacán, was part of a larger project undertaken by Sánchez Valenzuela, known as “Brigadas Cinematográficas/Cinema Brigades,” commissioned by President Lázaro Cárdenas. “Brigadas Cinematográficas” also had the support of the left wing of the National Revolutionary bloc of Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies, at that time headed by essayist and poet Luis Mora Tovar. Periodical articles published at the time praised the film for its immense historic and artistic value. As I wrote in 1992, at least one article commented on the fact that the film was made by a woman:

The first woman in Latin America to conceive, plan and make a film, Sánchez Valenzuela has succeeded in capturing—with formidable artistic intuition and a keen sense of journalism—hundreds of the most beautiful, evocative scenes. All of these scenes speak to us, succeeding marvelously in revealing unknown details of rural life in Michoacán: the lives of humble people who are clean, healthy and hard-working, brimming with optimism, seemingly infected with the exuberance of their native land, a land filled with wondrous beauty (14-16).

A contract signed by Elena Sánchez Valenzuela and Manuel Espinoza Tagle (in the possession of the filmmaker’s brother) indicates that Michoacán’s total footage was 4,000 to 5,000 feet—that is, feature length. Interestingly, the contract also specified that the film could not be distributed commercially. In 1942, Sánchez Valenzuela founded the first Mexican National Film Library, the Filmoteca Nacional, which was then located in the Ministry of Education. Not only did her position with the Filmoteca make her the leader in the archival preservation of film material in Mexico, but it also gave her the responsibility for promoting archival preservation throughout Latin America.

Bibliography

Candil, Fay. El Demócrata (7 Jan. 1921): n.p.

Cuik, Perla. Diccionario de directores del cine mexicano. Mexico City: CONACULTA, Cineteca Nacional, 2000.

Dávalos Orozco, Federico. Albores del cine mexicano. Mexico: Editorial Clío, 1996.

De los Reyes, Aurelio. Cine y sociedad en México (1896-1930). vol. 1. Mexico City: UNAM, 1996.

García, Gustavo A. “In Quest of a National Cinema, The Silent Era” In Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers. Eds. Joanne Hershfield and David Maciel. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999.

Sánchez García, José María. “Historia del Cine Mexicano.” Cinema Reporter 715 (1927): n.p.

Torres San Martín, Patricia. “Elena Sánchez Valenzuela”. DICINE. 47 (1992): 14-16.

Viñas, Moisés. Índice cronológico del cine mexicano (1896-1992). Mexico City: Dirección General de Actividades Cinematográficas de la UNAM, 1992.

Archival Paper Collections:

Various materials. Cineteca Nacional, Centro de Documentación.

Manuel Quezada, October 9, 1920, Revista de México, México City. Private Collection. 

David Valenzuela. Private Collection.

Research Update

August 2022: A very short fragment from En la hacienda survives as part of the 1947 compilation film Canciones y recuerdos, a copy of which, according to Angel Miquel's book Mimí Derba (2000), is held at the Library of Congress. [Research Update has been slightly amended in June 2023 - Eds].

August 2022: The filmography has been updated to reflect that Santa is extant and has been restored and digitized by Filmoteca de la UNAM.

Citation

Torres San Martín, Patricia. "Elena Sánchez Valenzuela." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-wb7h-jd96>

Adriana and Dolores Ehlers

by Julia Tuñón

The sisters Adriana and Dolores Ehlers, who worked together all their lives, were pioneers in every area of filmmaking. As Dolores described in a 1977 interview, they shot documentaries, worked in film processing laboratories, sold projection apparatuses, and participated in the politics surrounding cinema during the difficult phase of the Mexican Revolution known as carrancismo (Ehlers n.p.). When they were children, their father died and their mother supported them by working as a midwife. They lived with another family in the port city of Veracruz and politically supported the anti-Porfirian aims of the Revolution’s generals, Madero and Carranza, aligning themselves with other women leaders of the time (Ehlers n.p.).

Adriana and Dolores Ehlers (d/o). RNICMC

Adriana and Dolores Ehlers. Courtesy of the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía.

Forced to leave school because of economic problems, Adriana began working in a photography studio, where she became skilled in all aspects of this trade. The sisters decided to open their own portrait studio in their patio house and soon acquired a considerable number of clients, who were impressed with the artistic style of their portraits. When President Venustiano Carranza visited Veracruz, the sisters were called upon to take his photograph. Carranza expressed his gratitude by awarding them a grant to study photography in Boston, Massachusetts. According to the Ellis Island website, they arrived in the United States on the Monterey on September 4, 1916. Dolores was nineteen years old and Adriana was twenty-one. Once there, they worked in the Champlain Studios to learn more about commercial photography and attended an art school for teachers at night. When the grant period ran out, the Ehlers were given an extension to study motion picture cinematography, and they became part of the Army Medical Museum in Washington DC, where the United States government had allocated funds for producing films to educate American soldiers serving in World War I about health issues. Here the sisters learned, under strict military discipline, to shoot, develop, process, and title films. Finally, still supported by the Mexican government, they completed their motion picture production education at Universal Pictures Company in Jacksonville, New Jersey (Ehlers n.p.).

Upon their return to Mexico in 1919, the Ehlers sisters obtained a concession to sell Nicholas Power Company cameras and projectors in Mexico City. They again set up their business in the first floor of their house, where they sold the American-made equipment under the name “Casa Ehlers” and instructed camera operators and projectionists on how to use them. They were soon appointed to the Mexican Ministry of Government—Adriana as Chief of the Censorship Department and Dolores as Chief of the Department of Cinematography—which included the laboratory for developing the documentary films both women shot. The Censorship Department was created with the intention of suppressing the demeaning images of Mexico and Mexicans that were common currency in US films, as well as those scenes considered offensive to public morals. The sisters produced a number of films that celebrated Mexico in order to counter these negative stereotypes, filming parades and protests, the caves of Cacahuamilpa, the Teotihuacán ruins, and the National Museum of Archeology, History, and Ethnography. They spent months touring the country and shooting a feature-length documentary about water treatment, carrying Bell and Howell and Universal cameras that weighed almost eighty pounds each. They processed their documentaries in the film laboratory at the Mexican Department of Cinematography, and these films were exhibited in schools, factories, governmental departments, and charity institutions (Ehlers n.p.).

As women working in an exclusively male environment, the Ehlers sisters faced criticism and resistance, in part because they dressed in pants and were self-sufficient. These were also difficult years politically. After the murder of President Venustiano Carranza, their great protector, and with the ascendancy of Álvaro Obregón to the presidency of the Republic in 1920, Adriana and Dolores were dismissed from their positions. However, for a while Adriana was able to shoot and process motion pictures in a small homemade laboratory. One of the films they made for the International Petroleum Company was exhibited in 1922 in the United States. In addition, between 1922 and 1929, they made weekly newsreels called Revistas Ehlers/Ehlers Reviews, moving images of events of the time such as catastrophes, parades, and protests, which they sold directly to exhibitors. The sisters also continued to market projectors and parts through Casa Ehlers, supplying the fledgling Mexican educational and industrial film industry (Ehlers n.p.). The materials the Ehlers sisters filmed moved from the Ministry of Government to the National Archives and from there to the Cineteca Nacional, where they undoubtedly burned in the 1982 fire.

With additional research by Greta Nordio.

Bibliography

Ehlers, Dolores. Interview with Julia Tuñón. Guadalajara, Mexico. November and December 1977.

Meyer, Eugenia. “Dolores Ehlers.” Cuadernos de la Cineteca Nacional 9 (1979): n.p.

Citation

Tuñón, Julia. "Adriana and Dolores Ehlers." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-s8kb-1319>

Mimí Derba

by Angel Miquel

Herminia Pérez de León, who adopted the pseudonym of Mimí Derba when she made her debut as a singer in Mexican theatre at the age of seventeen, was one of a number of theatre actors who made the successful transition to silent cinema.

Mimi Derba, postcard, 1925. MS

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

Mimí Derba. actress-writer-producer, Azteca Films, Mexico City, PC

Mimí Derba, publicity for Azteca Films, Mexico City. Private Collection.

Mimi Derba (p/dw/a) 1922, PC

Mimi Derba 1922. Private Collection.

Beautiful, with a light, sweet voice and a charismatic presence, Derba began her acting career as one of the leading ladies of the Spanish musical genre called zarzuela, then very popular in Mexico. She also acted in political comedies as well as traditional Mexican folkloric plays between 1911 and 1917. After 1917 and until her death in 1953, Mimí Derba starred in over seventy Mexican silent and sound films. In addition, she established her name as a writer, publishing short essays in various magazines and collecting an anthology of these writings in a volume titled Realidades, published in 1921. The end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917 and the ensuing economic and social stability allowed for the development of Mexican feature film production. In 1917, Derba, along with Enrique Rosas, established the Azteca Film Company and produced five films in that one year: Alma de sacrificio, En defensa propiaEn la sombra, La soñadora, and La tigresa. In addition to producing these films, Derba wrote two of the scripts, codirected La tigresa, and acted in all except La tigresa. Although no prints of these films have survived, they are preserved to a certain extent through stills and press reviews.

Derba and Rosas’ stated intent was to promote a civilized representation of Mexico in order to compensate for the negative impression generated by seven years of war and revolt. At the same time, Azteca Film also promoted Mimí Derba as a star, functioning both as a sex symbol and an idealized image of the young wife and mother, an image quite similar to that of the Italian diva as exemplified by Francesca Bertini. The press reviews of Derba were generally favorable, and she could easily have become the first Mexican star if Azteca Film had not gone bankrupt at the end of 1917. Disillusioned with the motion picture production business and discouraged in the face of the powerful foreign film industry, Derba acted in only one more silent film, Dos corazones (Francisco de Lavillete, 1919). She returned to the theatre and did not act in another motion picture until her role as a brothel owner in Santa (Antonio Moreno, 1931), which has been long heralded as the first Mexican sound film.

WFP-DER06

Mimí Derba publicity. Private Collection.

WFP-DER08

Mimí Derba 1924 publicity. Private Collection.

In later sound films, Derba was often cast as the respectable old woman whose young sons are heading down the wrong path. Perhaps because of her age and the roles she was offered, she never received the notoriety of Mexico’s cinematic divas such as María Félix or Dolores del Río.

Mimí Derba (a/w/p/d/o). PC

Mimí Derba publicity. Private Collection.

WFP-DER05

Mimí Derba publicity. Private Collection.

Bibliography

De Llano, Enrique. “Confidencias e indiscreciones. Entrevista a Mimí Derba.” Jueves de Excélsior (17 Nov. 1927): 34.

De Maria y Campos, Armando. “Adiós de Mimí Derba.” Hoy (9 July 1938): 52.

Miquel, Ángel. Mimí Derba. Mexico City: Archivo Fílmico Agrasánchez, Filmoteca de la UNAM, 2000.

El Hombre de los Quevedos. “Mimí Derba habla de literatura, de teatro y de cine.” Zigzag (24 Nov. 1921): 39.

Sánchez García, José María. “La Azteca Film.” Novedades (1 April 1945): C-4.

------. “Mimí Derba.” Cinema Reporter (14 Sept. 1946): 23.

Research Update

August 2022: Very short fragments from three of Derba's Azteca films (En defensa propia, La tigresa, and La soñadora) survive as part of the 1947 compilation film Canciones y recuerdos, a copy of which, according to Angel Miquel's book Mimí Derba (2000), is held at the Library of Congress. [Research Update has been slightly amended in June 2023 - Eds].

***

Additional bibliographic resources (compiled by Columbia MA student Maria Teresa Fidalgo in 2020):

Garcia, Irene. “Mimi Derba and Azteca Films: The Rise of Nationalism and the First Mexican Woman Film-Maker.” In Women, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Latin America. Eds. Natividad Guiterréz Chong. London, Routledge, 2007. 99-112.

Hernández Carballido, Elvira. “Mimí Derba: primera realizadora de cine en México.” Fem vol. 24, no. 204 (March 2000): 43-44.

Moya, Alejandro. Mimi Derba- Miradas al Cine Mexicano (Filmoteca UNAM, Mexico, 2000).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgfxbM5wmR0.

Sanchez, Courtney.  En La Sombra: Cinema Culture and Modern Women in Mexico City, 1917-1931. University of Kansas. PhD dissertation, 2019.

Citation

Miquel, Angel. "Mimí Derba." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-pw36-1k24>

Cándida Beltrán Rendón

by Kenya Márquez, Luis Bernardo Jaime Vázquez

Scene 4. Exit. House of Don Fernando. Street View. (Long Shot)

Enrique exiting the house. Stops on the sidewalk. Lights a cigarette. In the distance one sees Chiquita shouting, selling her newspapers; she comes at full speed. Enrique has not seen her…

—Cándida Beltrán Rendón, El secreto de la abuela, original film story

Around 1914, at the age of sixteen, Cándida Beltrán Rendón wrote the film story El secreto de la abuela/The Grandmother’s Secret. A copy of this story can be found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. Fourteen years later, in 1928, Beltrán Rendón, at thirty years of age, directed her first and only motion picture—a feature—from a script based on her story and became the last of the five women who directed during Mexican cinema’s silent period. Granddaughter of José Rendón Peniche (1829–1887), an important political figure in the southeast region of Mexico during the nineteenth century (Ciuk 2000, 69), Cándida’s full name was Candelaria Beltrán Rendón. Although she was not the firstborn of the siblings, after her parents died, she took charge of a large family composed of at least seven girls and two boys.

Candida Beltran Rendon (p/d/w), PC

Candida Beltrán Rendón, El secreto de la abuela (1928). Private Collection.

Unlike the actress and producer Mimí Derba, the Italian opera singer María Cantoni, or the photographers and documentary filmmakers Adriana and Dolores Ehlers —the four primary women directors of Mexican cinema—Beltrán Rendón had no previous experience in either the theatre or motion pictures. Instead, she worked in Mexico City as an employee of the town hall and in a shoe store. Her path into the field remains unknown, but she secured the help of Jorge Stahl, a cinematographer, and members of Gregorio Martínez Sierra’s Spanish theatrical company. Playwright Martínez Sierra (1881–1947) gave advice to her about perfecting the film story according to a review in Yucatán Ilustrado (Ramírez 1989, 248). In a case of unparalleled versatility among the all-Mexican features directed by women, Beltrán Rendón served as producer, director, set designer, and star for El secreto de la abuela (Vázquez and Bernardo 1996, 31). As producer, she financed the seventy-five-minute fiction film with her own resources, in the manner of contemporary independent cinema.

Candida Beltran Rendon (d/p/w/a) El secreto de la abuela (1928).

Candida Beltran Rendon, El secreto de la abuela (1928). Private Collection.

El secreto de la abuela, one of the four or five Mexican features produced in 1928, was filmed in the former headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Mexico City, among other locations (Dávalos Orozco and Bernal 1985, 126–28). It focused on the character of a poor orphan named Chiquita, played by Beltrán Rendón, who supports her blind grandmother by selling newspapers on the street. Chiquita begins a friendship with a wealthy older man who asks to adopt her. However, her grandmother confesses a secret: the man who wants to adopt her is actually the orphan’s grandfather. “A melodrama about orphanhood problems and irresponsible masculine-parenthood,” it shared some common thematic points with Martínez Sierra’s very popular 1911 play “Canción de cuna”/“The Cradle Song” (De la Vega Alfaro 1991, 19).

With filming finished in September, Beltrán Rendón introduced herself in a press interview—referenced by Guadalupe Appendini—as just a “humble employee who, without money and any support, have succeeded with my own will… to make the first artistic film made in Mexico” (15-B). She screened El secreto de la abuela for the press in early October 1928, and the film was released to the public one or two months later that year in the Regis Theatre, where Martínez Sierra’s company had been working since 1927. Despite favorable reviews about Beltrán’s acting play (Dávalos Orozco and Bernal 1985, 128) and Stahl’s cinematography that captured anonymous “people, agglomerated in the corners, with anxious curiosity, seeing a camera filming in front of them” (Peimbert 1928, n. pag.), Beltrán Rendón never returned to the cinema. The financial obligations that she took on in order to produce El secreto de la abuela and the difficulties she encountered in the production of this film contributed to her retirement. Although in 1919, she told Appendini that she had written more film stories as well as some short stories, no trace of them has been found (15-B).

As with all the women screenwriters active in the Mexican silent cinema—with the exception of Derba and perhaps María Cantoni—Beltrán Rendón has only one film credited to her name (Vázquez and Bernardo 1996, 31). She later became a composer of well-known musical compositions such as “Mesticita yucateca”/“Little Yucatecan Crossbreed,” “Este amor”/“This Love,” “Navidad en el hogar”/“Christmas at the Hearth,” “Madre mía”/“Mother mine,” and “A mi madre”/“To My Mother”; the last two gave form to “Homenaje a las madres en la voz de Luis Ortega”/“Homage to the Mothers, in the Voice of Luis Ortega,” an extended play (EP) produced to celebrate Mother’s Day.

Bibliography

Appendini, Guadalupe. “Cándida Beltrán Rendón fue actriz de El secreto de la abuela, una de las primeras películas mexicanas.” Excélsior (17 December 1979): 13-B -15-B.

Ciuk, Perla, ed. Diccionario de directores del cine mexicano. México City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (CNCA), 2000. 69-70.

Dávalos Orozco, Federico. Albores del cine mexicano. Mexico City: Clío, 1996.

Dávalos Orozco, Federico and Esperanza Vázquez Bernal. Filmografía general del cine mexicano (1906-1931). Puebla, Mexico: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) (Difusión Cultural Series; number 4), 1985.

De la Vega Alfaro, Eduardo. “Fichero de cineastas nacionales.” Dicine 38 (March 1991): 18-19.

De los Reyes, Aurelio. Filmografía del cine mudo mexicano: 1924-1931. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), 2000. [Dirección General de Actividades Cinematográficas, Filmografía Nacional Series no. 7].

García Riera, Emilio. "Mujeres cineastas." Breve historia del cine mexicano: primer siglo, 1897-1997. Guadalajara, Mexico: Mapa, 1998.

------. “Mujeres cineastas.” Historia del cine mexicano. México: Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) (Foro 2000 Series) (1986): 68.

Peimbert, Adolfo. “Una impresión sobre la película mexicana El secreto de la abuela.El Universal Ilustrado 595 (4 October 1928): n.p.

Vázquez, Jaime and Luis Bernando. “Las otras directoras pioneras del cine mexicano (1917-1938).” Juglares y alarifes 9 (November-December 1996): 31.

Archival Paper Collections:

Misc. archival materials. Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico).

Citation

Márquez, Kenya; Luis Bernardo Jaime Vázquez . "Cándida Beltrán Rendón." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-b5h1-d358>

Cube Bonifant

by Rocío del Consuelo Pérez Solano

Born in Mexico City in 1904, Cube Bonifant published her distinctive film criticism in newspapers and magazines throughout the early twentieth century. Her criticism covers the end of the silent film era, the transition from silent film to sound motion pictures, and the birth of the sound motion picture industry in Mexico. The need to learn more about the early days of film criticism—especially film criticism written by women—brings one to examine Bonifant’s work. While she was intent on attacking the Hollywood film industry, she had a journalist’s commitment to objectivity. Her colleagues such as Catalina D’Erzell criticized her for her biting, mocking style while at the same time praising her writing.

Cube Bonifant (a/o). PC

Cube Bonifant. Private Collection. 

As a young woman, Bonifant published romantic poetry in two national newspapers: Revista de Revistas and El Ilustrado. In 1921, she began to write advice columns that criticized the lifestyles of bourgeois women of her day in the magazine El Universal Ilustrado and later wrote an advice column for men as well. Both columns enabled her to receive and to answer correspondence from readers who gave vent to their troubles by writing to her. Bonifant delighted in replying to each of her faithful correspondents in her acid, mocking style. On February 10, 1927, she was invited by the editor of El Universal Ilustrado to shape her caustic style into film criticism, which she did under the pseudonym Luz Alba. Her articles appeared every week in the section El cine visto por una mujer, which in 1928 was renamed Opiniones de una cineasta de buena fe. Beginning in 1928, Bonifant wrote about Mexican and foreign motion picture stars in the magazine Rotográfico under the pseudonym Aura Stella. She also published columns in the weekly Ilustrado and the magazine Todo until 1940.

Bonifant’s caustic style of film criticism distinguished her from the other female critics and film writers of her day such as Adela Sequeyro, Cecilia del Villar, and Elena Sánchez Valenzuela. What film critic Ángel Miquel would call Bonifant’s “objective” approach appears in her reviews of Hollywood films, which verged on the pejorative (Miquel 1995, 213). This harsh style of observation and her tendency to “call a spade a spade” were what distinguished her from the other female critics of her era. She was especially critical of American filmmakers’ lack of cross-cultural knowledge, which was evident whenever they had to recreate other nations’ folklore and customs. Neither did Hollywood’s faulty history and geography escape her. These observations are summed up in her 1927 review of Edmund Goulding’s Paris (1926) in El Universal Ilustrado:

Since Americans are ignorant to the extreme, they can rarely do a good job of handling storylines that take place outside the United States. For example (and we have seen this in countless films), Americans think that all men in Argentina have moustaches, and that bullfighters and women in elaborate Spanish-style garb fill the streets; that all Brazilian men have bushy eyebrows; that in Mexico all men dress in traditional charro costume… They think Russians must have beards; that Frenchmen seem effeminate; that German men are all bald; that Spanish women must all be dancers, and other things that are equally astonishing (22).

Not limiting herself to film criticism, Bonifant also acted periodically. At the age of nineteen she had a starring role in La gran noticia (Carlos Noriega Hope, 1922), and described her experience in a feature article published in 1921 in El Universal Ilustrado:

I slip away to my dressing room and begin the difficult task of putting on my makeup. This is one of the many annoying things about film acting… And then you hear the voice again. We’re going to do a scene. I have to laugh my head off, even though I’m in such a terrible mood… My God , how am I going to do it? This is a ridiculous farce… I find it impossible to do these things when the spirit is otherwise inclined. I definitely won’t be able to do this scene. Making a movie is so frustrating! I don’t think it’s worth it to get up at five in the morning to act out a few scenes that I’ve studied, and I don’t think it’s worth it to ruin my skin with makeup, it’s just not worth it (10).

Even though she never considered herself an actress, Bonifant returned to film acting as an extra in Santa (Antonio Moreno, 1931).

The renowned Mexican actresses Lupe Vélez and Dolores del Río, who both became Hollywood stars, were the targets of Bonifant’s harshest criticism. She constantly compared the two stars unfavorably with other Mexican actresses, who, in her opinion, outclassed them. In her Ilustrado review of the US film Así es la vida/Such is Life (George Crone, 1930) she praises Delia Magaña, who had only a supporting role, comparing Magaña’s onscreen appeal with that of Lupe Vélez. Delia Magaña, who, although she is “ugly,” transcends this with “natural charm” and should stay this way instead of cultivating the arrogance of “La Vélez,” she writes (Bonifant 1930, 28). Dolores del Río, whom she dubbed “Lolita del Río,” was “physically unattractive and artistically insignificant” and could not measure up to the role of the mistress of Louis XIV in Madame DuBarry (1934). Although she praised Andrea Palma, whom she preferred to Vélez and del Río, Bonifant criticized the actress for imitating Marlene Dietrich, asking in her review of the Mexican release La mujer del puerto/The Woman of the Port (Arcady Boytler, 1934): “What is the point… of trying to be like Marlene both in and outside the movies?” (28).

As a critic, Bonifant was feared and loved at the same time, and this duality gave her a special position within the field of journalism as well as in the world of cinema. She had countless readers, and her critical articles were always in print, a clear indication of her ongoing popularity. In a 1923 interview published in the newspaper El Demócrata, the reporter profiled her razor-sharp wit and ability to find the irony in everything:

This small, delicate woman is both charming and naturally loquacious, and she has a sharpness that allows her to turn everything into irony, to see the good side of things, and to season her commentary with common sense by finding a pliant, favorable angle to serve as the instrument of her wit (12).

In her twenty-two-year career as a film critic, Bonifant covered many aspects of motion pictures, exploring the links between the setting of a film and its historical context as well as the connections between trends, genres, and authors. She recorded how cinema evolved as an art form as well as how audience tastes and interests changed in the first half of the twentieth century. Her criticism is now the basis for the work of such film historians as Emilio García Riera, Aurelio de los Reyes, and Ángel Miquel, a legacy she has left for the study of silent and sound films of her era. She fought one of the last battles between film critics who considered cinema an art and old-style movie gossip columnists. After thirteen years as a film critic, Bonifant was described in the film magazine Hoy as “the most successful humorist in our medium, serene, ironic, with a clear propensity for precise, biting, wounding commentary” (25).

Bibliography

Bonifant, Cube. “Así es la vida.” Rev. Ilustrado (1930): 28.

------. “La mujer del puerto.” Rev. Ilustrado (1934): 28.

------. “Paris.” Rev.  Ilustrado (1927): 22.

------. “La gran noticia.” Rev. El Universal Ilustrado (1921): 10.

Interview with Cube Bonifant. El Demócrata. (1923): 12.

“Las Mujeres en el Periodismo.” Hoy 39 (1937): 25.

Miquel, Ángel. Por las pantallas de la ciudad de México: periodistas del cine mudo. Guadalajara, México: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1995.

Citation

Solano, Rocío del Consuelo Pérez. "Cube Bonifant." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-1sdv-a842>

Clara Kimball Young

by Karen Ward Mahar
In 1916, Clara Kimball Young became only the second female film star, after Mary Pickford, to set up her own namesake production company: the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation. Soon after this, there was a flood of female star-producers, initiating what I have called a “second wave” of star companies, 1916–1923 (155).
Publicity stil, Clara Kimball Young (a/p) The Road Through the Dark (1918), Lady Lucy Duff Gordon (des), PCRB

Publicity still, Clara Kimball Young in The Road Through the Dark (1918). Private Collection.

But did a star with a namesake production company really enjoy a greater measure of creative or economic control, or was a company created in her name simply to exploit its star appeal? The career of Clara Kimball Young, associated with adult society dramas, offers some insight into this question, thanks to the extensive litigation in which she was involved. However, news coverage of these proceedings still leaves questions of autonomy unanswered. Like nearly all female film producers during this period, Young worked with male partners who acted as producers, directors, and/or business managers, and sometimes lovers. Some aspects of her legal troubles, as for instance the 1917 Moving Picture World report of her suit against producer Lewis J. Selznick, suggest that she was a forceful personality who demanded control of her films and her personal life (1580). Yet there is still a hint that some litigation may have been instigated by the men who surrounded her, each hoping to profit from her stardom. Was Clara Kimball Young under the spell of her male partners, as one biography suggests (Davis 419–23), or are these multiple legal actions (ultimately over a dozen) evidence of a feisty autonomy on the part of Young? Research into legal documents, possibly held by the County Clerk Records of the New York Supreme Court and the Los Angeles County Archives, could shed light on these dilemmas.

We know that Clara Kimball Young and first husband, actor and director James Young, left the stage for the Vitagraph in 1912. James Young’s agreement with the company stipulated that they were both paid the same salary, which rose quickly from $25 to $1,000 a week as Clara Kimball Young’s popularity soared, especially after her appearance in the five-reel feature My Official Wife (1914) (Davis 420). In 1914, the Youngs left Vitagraph to work for producer Lewis J. Selznick (“World Film in Merger” 7). Young made several films released between November 1914 and December 1916 that were produced and/or distributed by World Film Corporation, founded by Lewis J. Selznick, Arthur Spiegel (of mail order fame), Wall Street financier Moritz Rosenthal, and Lee Shubert (Lewis 39).

Clara Kimball Young (p/a) 1916, BISON

Clara Kimball Young, 1916. Courtesy of the Bison Archives.

Immediately there were tensions between Young and his wife’s new coworkers. Art director Ben Carré recalled that on the set of Trilby (1915), director Maurice Tourneur “didn’t like Jimmy watching what he was doing, or what his wife was doing.” While Clara made Trilby, the first feature in which she was not directed by her husband, James Young was working as a director on a different film in the same studio, and was clearly distracted by another man directing his wife. To be fair, Clara Kimball Young had a nude scene in Trilby, a film based on George Du Maurier’s famous 1894 serialized novel of an artist’s model who falls under the spell of Svengali, a hypnotic musician who reinvents her as a fabulous opera star but utterly controls her. The solution was to hang “a muslin curtain between the two shooting units” (Carré oral history). Young was concerned that his wife was falling under her own Svengali—Lewis Selznick. By early 1916, James Young sued Selznick for alienation of affection dating back to March 1914, claiming that the producer told Clara Kimball Young to get rid of her husband as a condition of employment (“Husband Sues Selznick” 9). Young did become estranged from his wife, but it was Harry Garson, a Detroit theatre owner and publicist with no previous experience in film production, who provided the love interest (Davis 422). In 1916, Garson survived a penknife attack by James Young, prompting Clara Kimball Young to declare in court: “I have no use for my husband” as reported by the New York Times (5).

Young was World Film Corporation’s biggest star. When financial trouble in the spring of 1916 caused the firm to reorganize, Selznick left to create his own production company, taking Clara Kimball Young with him (Lewis 45). It was at this juncture that Selznick created the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation, naming Young, allegedly at her request, as its vice president and treasurer (1761). Four features produced by the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation were released between October 1916 and April 1917: The Common Law (1916), The Foolish Virgin (1916), The Price She Paid (1917), and The Easiest Way (1917).

Slide The Common Law (1916) Clara Kimball Young (a), Beryl Morhange (w), PC

Lantern slide, The Common Law (1916). Private Collection. 

Did Clara Kimball Young actively coproduce these films? Apparently she did not. In June 1917, Young sued Selznick, claiming that although she was named vice president and treasurer, “Selznick dominated and controlled the film corporation… and she had no voice whatsoever in its affairs and was permitted to perform none of the positions held by her” (1580). A week later Selznick countersued, claiming that Young received a $1,000 a week salary and advances of $25,000, “for which she is alleged to have rendered no services whatsoever.” And it appeared that Clara Kimball Young’s new love interest was even more troublesome from Selznick’s point of view. Selznick claimed that Young pressured the corporation to elect her companion Harry A. Garson to the board of directors, and that since then she “has followed his advice in all matters relating to business relations with the corporation and that she is now carrying on negotiations to appear in films under his direction.” Since Young’s agreement with Selznick was not due to expire until 1921, leaving to make films with Garson would constitute breach of contract (1761).

One month after news of the Young-Selznick suit hit the presses, a “New C. K. Young Company” was announced. Did Young leave one Svengali (Selznick) for another (Garson)? On July 7, 1917, the Moving Picture World announced that “Clara Kimball Young has finally realized her ambition to become head of her own producing company.” Temporary offices were in Fort Lee, NJ, and the first release was estimated for the middle of August (66).

Clara Kimball Young (p/a) c.1917, NYPL

Clara Kimball Young, c.1917. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

On July 21, 1917, the Moving Picture World featured an extensive interview with Young in which she does not mention the name of her new company, nor does she detail her precise responsibilities, but relates her personal vision regarding acting styles, exteriors, interiors, story development, and continuity, implying that she would have control over such decisions (461). In mid-August, the name of a new company was revealed: the C. K. Y. Film Corporation. This was a distribution company created by Adolph Zukor, who agreed to buy, distribute, and market eight films from Young annually for four years. Now it was revealed that “Miss Young heads her own organization and dominates it completely, selecting her own stories and plays, her own directors, and her own supporting company” (“C. K. Y. Film Corporation Formed” 918). From 1917 to 1919, when Young appeared to exercise the most creative control, and is listed as “producer” by the AFI Catalog, she appeared in some of the best films of her career: Magda (1917), Shirley Kaye (1917), The Marionettes (1918), The House of Glass (1918), The Claw (1918), The Reason Why (1918), The Savage Woman (1918), The Road Through the Dark (1918), Cheating Cheaters (1919), and The Better Wife (1919).

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

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

In 1919, the C. K. Y. Film Corporation disappeared, and Clara Kimball Young’s films were now produced by a new company: Garson Productions. After its initial release, the famous Eyes of Youth (1919), a silent film revival classic directed by Albert Parker, Young’s next ten films would be directed by Harry A. Garson for his own Garson Productions. Clara Kimball Young’s career as a producer was over. Why did Young give up her own production company to work for Garson? It seems possible that they did not initially realize that their new distribution company was under the supervision of their old nemesis: Lewis J. Selznick. Zukor’s Select Pictures Corporation owned all the stock in the C. K. Y. Film Corporation, but Select was run by Selznick. This explains why Zukor had no problem signing Young to a distribution contract despite the lingering lawsuit with Selznick—the two men were partners. In late 1918, Garson and Young sued the C. K. Y. Film Corporation for “flagrant violations of the terms” (“Announcement” 170). Young and Selznick reached an agreement on June 17, 1919: Young was released from her contract, but she had to pay the C. K. Y. Film Corporation $25,000 for each of her next ten pictures. By mid-November 1920, the C. K. Y. Film Corporation claimed Clara Kimball Young owed the company $50,000 (“Sues Clara Kimball Young” 225).

Clara Kimball Young (a/p) The Flat Above (1912). NYPL

Clara Kimball Young, The Flat Above (1912). Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

This does not explain why Young gave up a namesake company. Surely she and Garson could have created a new moniker that reflected the appeal of the star, rather than naming it after Garson, an unknown. As far as her creative control was concerned, it was not referred to again in the press. Furthermore, Young’s career began to decline and never recovered. Whether it was due to Garson’s less able handling of direction and production or the difficulty of prewar stars to reach postwar audiences is unclear. It was probably both. For the Soul of Rafael (1920), directed by Garson, exemplifies these problems. Young played the part of a young, convent-bred girl of “Old California” who pledges to wed the wild son of her benefactor in order to bring him under her good influences. Although she falls for a heroic cowboy, she keeps her promise and weds the “bad” son, but refuses to consummate the marriage after discovering that he is the father of a poor woman’s baby. The narrative was an old-fashioned morality tale of abstinence out of step with the postwar American zeitgeist, and Young had little to do onscreen other than look stoic. This encouraged excessive close-ups that emphasized her anachronistic acting style and the fact that at thirty, she was too old to play the role of a fresh-faced convent girl. The film received mixed reviews. By then, newspaper readers knew Young was no convent girl off the screen either. Between 1917 and 1920, Young was sued by a woman who claimed to have been kicked by the actress, by a detective agency for $11,436 in services rendered, by a motion picture company for $50,000 in services provided for The Eyes of Youth, and in 1919 she was finally divorced from Young (“Clara Kimball Young, Pioneer Actress, Dies”).

Clara Kimball Young (a) The Hands of Nara (1922), PC

Lantern slide, Clara Kimball Young, The Hands of Nara (1922). Private Collection. 

At some point, Selznick and Zukor extended an offer to Clara Kimball Young: they would forgive her debts and pay her handsomely if she got rid of Garson. She refused (Davis 422). Financial matters became increasingly grim. In November of 1920, the same month that the C. K. Y. Film Corporation demanded $50,000, the Harriman National Bank sued Young to recover $24,500 on a loan two years overdue (“Harriman National Bank Sues” 374). The next month Selznick won his suit. A judge determined that Young and Garson kept all the profits of their post-C. K. Y. Film Corporation releases and did not send Selznick $25,000 per picture per their agreement (“Selznick Wins in Suit” 707). Garson’s last production credit with Clara Kimball Young was A Wife’s Romance (1923). Young made one more silent film, Lying Wives (1925), directed by Ivan Abramson, and then disappeared from the screen until 1931. Young gained steady work in character roles from 1931 to 1943, but never attained financial security. In 1930, a “gowns and millinery” shop sued Young for $22,675 for a mink coat and other luxury items purchased on credit but never paid for (“Clara Kimball Young Sued” 28). In 1932, the New York Times noted that Young was forced to place “many of her treasured gifts” on the auction block after a car accident with her husband, a dentist she quietly married in 1928. (The reporter noted that Young “dropped from the limelight some years ago after an unsuccessful attempt to produce her own pictures”) (19).

Slide Cordelia the Magnificent (1923) Clara Kimball Young (a), PC

Lantern slide, Cordelia the Magnificent (1923). Private Collection.

At 66, the salty-tongued Young became a Hollywood correspondent for a 1956 TV show hosted by a youthful Johnny Carson (“Clara Kimball Young, Carson Correspondent” n.p.). The new medium aired silent films, renewing the fame of many former stars, including Young. But by then Young did not want to talk about silent films. In 1955 she told an interviewer: “I’m living today” (as she raised a toast). “I’m in the rocket ship era. To hell with the past.” Young died in 1960 at the age of 70 (“Clara Kimball Young, Pioneer Actress, Dies”).

Bibliography

“Announcement.” Moving Picture World (11 Jan. 1919): 170.

“Both Sides ‘Stand Pat’ in C. K. Young Matter.”Moving Picture World (18 Jan. 1919): 313.

“C. K. Y. Film Corporation Formed.” Moving Picture World  (11 Aug. 1917): 918.

“Clara Kimball Young, Artist.” Moving Picture World (3 Oct. 1914): 41.

“Clara Kimball Young, Carson Correspondent.” Variety (22 Aug. 1956): n.p.

“Clara Kimball Young, Pioneer Actress, Dies.”Los Angeles Times (16 Oct. 1960): n.p.

“Clara Kimball Young Sued.” New York Times (12 Sep. 1930): 28.

“Clara Kimball Young Sues Selznick.” Moving Picture World (9 Jun.1917): 1580.

“Clara Kimball Young Relates Her Plans and Wishes All a Very Merry Christmas.” Moving Picture World (1 Jan. 1921): 45.

“Clara Kimball Young Wed.” New York Times (7 June 1932): 19.

Davis, Henry R., Jr. “Clara Kimball Young.” Films in Review XII (Aug-Sept. 1961): 419-425.

“Equity with Release C. K. Y. Films.” Moving Picture World (19 July 1919): 371.

“Film Stars Buy Clara K. Young’s Home Treasures.” Illustrated News (8 June 1932): n.p.

de Groat, Greta.“Clara Kimball Young." http://www.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/CKY/home.htm

“Harriman National Bank Sues Clara Kimball Young.” Moving Picture World (20 Nov. 1920): 374.

“Husband Sues Selznick.” New York Times (4 Feb. 1916): 9.

Lewis, Kevin.“A World Across from Broadway: The Shuberts and the Movies.” Film History Vol. 1 (1987): 39-52.

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

McDonald, Margaret I. “Clara Kimball Young Discusses Picture Art.” Moving Picture World (21 July 1917): 461.

“Miss Young Makes Answer to Selznick.” Moving Picture World (21 July 1917): 432.

“New C. K. Young Company Announced.” Moving Picture World (7 July 1917): 66.

“Renounces Actress Wife.” New York Times (14 Feb. 1917): 5.

“Selznick Wins in Suit from Equity.” Moving Picture World (11 Dec. 1920): 707.

“Selznick Would Enjoin Miss Young.” Moving Picture World (16 June 1917): 1761.

“Sues Clara Kimball Young for an Additional $50,000.” Moving Picture World (13 Nov. 1920): 225.

“Sues to Hold Movie Star.” New York Times (29 May 1917): 15.

“World Film in Merger.” New York Times (29 Jan. 1916): 7.

Citation

Mahar, Karen Ward. "Clara Kimball Young." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-1ts1-hf20>

Dorothy Yost

by Kim Tomadjoglou

“Dorothy is another one of the family who has inherited the art of writing—it is a YOST talent,” wrote Kathryn Yost Boyd in 1925 in an unpublished family history. In 1927, the Los Angeles Times praised Dorothy Yost as being Hollywood’s youngest and most successful scenarist (28). They exaggerated. Although she did begin working in the motion picture industry as a teenager, she would have been as old as twenty-six at the time the article was published, not so young by young Hollywood standards. A prominent writer whose career spanned both the silent and sound eras, Yost worked on more than ninety-four films throughout her lifetime, including Alice Adams (1935) starring Katherine Hepburn, That Girl From Paris (1936) starring Lily Pons, and the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals The Gay Divorcee (1934), Roberta (1935), Swing Time (1936), and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). Despite such achievement, the personal life and career of Dorothy Yost remains marginally documented, and little attention has been given to her silent period films, of which only a few survive.

Another unpublished family history, written by Yost’s niece Sally Pritchard around 1958 says that Dorothy was an unusually talented child who demonstrated her natural literary gifts by writing a group of fairy stories at the age of twelve. Born into a family of writers, Yost first experienced the world of professional journalism as a private secretary to her father, editor-in-chief of the Daily News and the Dependent in Santa Barbara, California. Throughout her early teens, she also studied acting and dramatics, appearing in a number of plays produced by the Scovell Juvenile Stock Company. In 1915, Yost left Santa Barbara to take a secretarial course at the Los Angeles Business College. Still a teenager, Yost worked as a secretary at a safe manufacturing company until December 1917 when she took a new secretarial position, this time assisting the scenario editor at the Triangle Film Corporation. Within six months she was promoted to head of the reading department, where she was responsible for reviewing and revitalizing scripts. Soon after, under the supervision and through the encouragement of editor Julian Johnson, who later became editor-in-chief at Paramount Pictures Corporation, Yost began writing scenarios and adaptations. In 1917, then, she may have been the youngest, but more likely was one of the youngest scenario writers in Hollywood at the time. Strangely, this was almost ten years before the Los Angeles Times made their claim that she was the youngest.

Dorothy Yost (w/o). AMPAS

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

Still, the claim that Dorothy Yost began young and evidenced talent early can be made, considering, for instance, that she wrote her first continuity script at twenty-one, an adaptation of For the Soul of Rafael (1920). This extant title, based on the 1906 novel of the same name by Marah Ellis Ryan, is set in the old California region of San Juan Capistrano along the US-Mexico border. The recent restoration of an original nitrate tinted 35mm print of the Mexican-American melodrama allows us to examine Hollywood’s representation of ethnic and racial minorities as well as authentic regional settings, details of mise-en-scène, and the kind of cast diversity that distinguished higher class feature productions in the early 1920s. Actress Clara Kimball Young stars as Marta Estevan, a fair-skinned, aristocratic Spaniard educated in a convent who faces an arranged marriage to her guardian’s unruly son, Rafael. At her guardian’s dying side, Marta vows to save Rafael even though she loves another. She soon learns that her peasant maid has lied about the death of Keith Bryton, a white American officer she has fallen in love with after saving him from Indian captors. By the time that Marta learns that her lover is alive, she is married to Rafael. Thus she suppresses her desire for Bryton in order to fulfill her pledge to reform her womanizing husband. The mostly Spanish-Indian cast, including over two hundred Native Americans from reservations near Los Angeles, as well as the Californian outdoor settings, which included existing missions, lends authenticity to the film’s representation of Mexican-American border tensions. The novel’s themes of racial difference, forbidden love, honor, duty, and self-sacrifice are colored with religious sentiment and moral overtones similar to those found in Prodigal Lover, the novel Yost later published in 1937.

Dorothy Yost ( ) For the Soul of Rafael ( ) poster

For the Soul of Rafael (1920) poster. 

Prodigal Lover tells the story of a young country girl’s lifelong romantic love for her childhood friend, who has become a celebrated actor surrounded by beautiful and cultured women of the world. The young girl works as a faithful servant to the actor until his career tragically ends when his face is left deformed after a jealous former lover accidentally throws acid at him, missing her intended target, his beautiful female companion. Unable to perform without his good looks, the actor leaves the stage and wanders back to the country of his youth. The girl, his faithful servant, follows him, and the actor eventually recognizes his love for her. Although his looks are finally restored when his face heals, the actor remains loyal to the girl and renounces any wish to return permanently to the stage. Yost closes both Prodigal Lover and her script for For the Soul of Rafael with a happy ending in which self-sacrificing heroines are able to realize their dreams. Ryan, in contrast, closes her novel with the two lovers spiritually bound forever but separated due to Marta Estevan’s vow to not abandon her wayward husband Rafael.

Yost liked female characters who sacrificed their personal desires in order to be faithful and devoted companions or wives to selfish men, such as the character in Mother (1927), which Yost adapted from the novel by Kathleen Norris. Her films taught lessons for life. Sally Pritchard, in 1958, wrote that she was proud that her aunt approached writing for the screen as a way of “exerting a good influence on the public,” and admired her attempts to stress moral principles. While Yost’s conservative point of view on gender relations may be attributed to the times, this viewpoint could also be explained by her strict upbringing after her father’s death as well as by her involvement with the Unity Church. It could be said that she was opposed to sermonizing, although not moralizing. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in December 1926, Yost, who had just completed the script for the title Mother, provided this moral prescription for a successful story: “No screen story can lay claim to ultimate success unless it has a definite motive… It should revive memories or visualize dreams yet unfulfilled for the individual so he may apply it to himself” (C27).

Within just a few years, the young Yost produced an impressive number of scenarios, including those for Flames of the Flesh (1920), Smoldering Embers (1920), and One Man in a Million (1921). She then wrote numerous scenarios and adaptations for Fox Film Corporation, such as The Hunted Woman (1925), Marriage in Transit (1925), and She Wolves (1925), reaching a high point with the financial success of Kentucky Pride (1925), a most unusual John Ford title narrated by a horse whose dialogue is in the intertitles. Recently preserved by the Film Foundation, Kentucky Pride, based on an original Yost story, was screened in 2010 at Il Cinema Ritrovato as part of a John Ford retrospective. At this point in her career, with an original writing credit to her name, Yost began to get some attention from the press. In 1926, Yost’s views on the subject of the original story versus the screen adaptation were given exclusive coverage in the Los Angeles Times (C24), and by April 10, 1927, she was recognized by the Times as one of the “cleverest and most versatile of the younger generation of photo playwrights” (22). In the 1927 article she provides critical commentary on screenwriting technique:

the two strongest and most interesting points of a screen play are the opening and the climax… [Between these two points] is the main body of drama which must hold the attention of audiences in suspense. And what is happening at present must be so interesting and so much a part of what is going to happen that audiences will never for an instant permit their attention to stray so far from what is being presented that they will be impatient to know how the story turns out (22).

Leaving freelancing behind, Yost joined the writing staff of Film Booking Office of America (FBO) Pictures in 1927, a fortunate move since FBO would the next year become RKO Radio Pictures, remembered for their signing of the young Orson Welles as well as for the Astaire and Rogers musicals referred to above. She immediately went to work as title writer for their special production Judgement of the Hills (1927). Yost’s career was on the upswing, and she was selected to write the screen adaptation for The Harvester (1927) from the widely read Gene Stratton Porter novel. (Porter incidentally was the mother-in-law of the film’s director, James Leo Meehan.) In this phase of her career, Yost did not escape the fashion for animal stars, and she authored the original animal story “The Untamed Heart,” which was adapted as Hills of Kentucky (1927) featuring the dog character Rin-Tin-Tin. Other animal scenarios followed such as She Wolves (1925); On the Wings of the Storm (1926), starring Thunder the police dog; and Fangs of the Wild (1928). This last title was written by Yost and Dwight Cummings, whom she married in 1927. At the young age of twenty-seven, Yost and Cummings, both employed as writers by FBO Pictures, soon to become RKO Radio Pictures, embarked on a path to become one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter teams of the sound period.

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Boyd, Kathryn Yost. “The House of Yost.” Unpublished family history, ca. 1925.

“Dorothy Yost Wins Laurels in Teens.” Los Angeles Times (11 Sept. 1927): 28.

Pritchard, Sally. “Contributions of the Yost Family to American Literature.” Unpublished family history, ca. 1958.

“Scenarist Cites Most Essential Parts of Play.” Los Angeles Times (10 April 1927): 22.

“Script Writer Holds Motive Success Basis.” Los Angeles Times (19 Dec. 1926): C27.

“Writer Enters Controversy Involving Moot Question of Ultimate Film Story Source.” Los Angeles Times (1926): C24.

Yost, Dorothy. Prodigal Lover. New York: Greystone Press, 1937.

Citation

Tomadjoglou, Kim. "Dorothy Yost." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6syw-j666>

Anzia Yezierska

by Patricia Brett Erens

There is a good deal of inaccuracy and mythologizing about the life of Anzia Yezierska. Some of this misinformation was generated by the public relations offices of Hollywood; other misrepresentations resulted from Yezierska’s own obfuscation, especially concerning her age. Yezierska may have been born in 1880 (although the date is disputed), in a Polish-Russian village, the youngest of nine children. She grew up in a poor, Jewish Orthodox family on New York’s Lower East Side. She left elementary school to help support her family, but evidently a burning passion for learning and a desire to make something of herself led her to Columbia University in 1901, where she lied about a high school diploma to gain admittance. She began writing short stories in 1913 about the Jewish ghetto. The success of her short story collection, Hungry Hearts, published in 1920, led to an offer from Samuel Goldwyn for the motion picture rights and a chance to work on the screenplay in Hollywood. She was offered $10,000 and dubbed “the sweatshop Cinderella,” a phrase created by Howard Dietz, a publicist at the Goldwyn studios.

Anzia Yezierska (w) Lima News, July 3rd, 1922. PD

Anzia Yezierska,  Lima News, July 3, 1922. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The story of the motion picture Hungry Hearts (1922) centers on a poor immigrant family and the efforts of Hannah Levin to beautify her apartment by painting the walls white. When the landlord then raises the rent, Hannah destroys the kitchen with a meat cleaver. There are differing accounts of what happened in Hollywood, but the most completely documented is by Yezierska’s daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen, in her biography. Yezierska was evidently naïve about how much control she would have over the finished work. Although she and Hollywood writer Julien Josephson wrote most of the screenplay, their work was later edited by the veteran comic writer, Montague Glass, who took out most of Yezierska’s ghetto dialogue and provided a happy ending. In the end she received no screen credit for the writing. Yezierska viewed Glass’s alterations as a desecration. She later wrote in her autobiography: “This man, with his beaming kindliness, turned out his caricatures of Jews like sausage meat… My book is my life… I’ll not let them murder it with slapstick” (1950, 87). The most powerful scene depicts Hannah destroying the newly painted kitchen. Although highly melodramatic, the anger, frustration, disappointment, and pride are all evident in her hysterical attack on the walls. Though most of the newspaper critics found the film overly sentimental, the film historian Kevin Brownlow, viewing a copy rediscovered in 1978, concluded that it was one of the best Jewish pictures of the entire silent period (1992, 392–404).

Anzia Yezierska. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Yezierska’s time in Hollywood was not surprisingly marked by her ambivalence towards money. Coming from a life of poverty that also provided the inspiration for her writing, it appears she could not reconcile the two value systems. On the one hand, she was pleased with the new celebrity; on the other hand, she was repelled by what she saw. This conflict seems to have affected her ability to create and to produce more screenplays for Goldwyn Pictures. After one month in California she returned to New York, also rejecting a three-year contract offered to her by producer William Fox. According to her own account, “This is What $100,000 Did To Me,” published in Cosmopolitan magazine, she left Hollywood “a tortured soul with a bank account” (154).

In New York she began a novel about a woman whose life is motivated by the desire to rise out of poverty by marrying well. It was published as Salome of the Tenements in 1922. Unlike the critically acclaimed Hungry Hearts, Salome of the Tenements received many negative reviews based on the grasping nature of its heroine, Sonya. Even the turn of events that leads Sonya to leave her husband, John Manning, a wealthy, repressed WASP did little to warm the critics to the narrative. The book was purchased by Famous Players-Lasky and released in 1925. Unlike Hungry Hearts, Yezierska had no involvement in the production. The screenplay was written by Sonya Levien, another Jewish female writer. Like much of Yezierska’s writing, there is a high degree of autobiography in Salome, and the story is especially telling as it reflects Yezierska’s own conflicts over money. The character of Manning is modeled after the educator John Dewey, whom Yezierska met at Columbia University in 1917 and with whom she had a platonic love affair. Dewey seems to have haunted Yezierska for the rest of her life, and many of her male characters are modeled on him.

After the filming of the two silent motion pictures based on Yezierska’s source material, her association with Hollywood ended. For the rest of her life she continued to write and publish, but with mixed success. She married once in 1911 and left her husband one day later. In 1912 she married again, producing one daughter, but she temporarily left her daughter with her husband in order to pursue her writing career. In 1950, Yezierska published her autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse. She died in 1970.

Anzia Yezierska’s critical reputation has fluctuated over the years. Mostly ignored after the 1930s, she was reevaluated in the wake of the Women’s Movement, especially because of the plight of poor, ethnic immigrant women. In 1996, a new edition of Hungry Hearts with introduction by Vivian Gornick was published. However, debates continue over the artistry of her writing. Yezierska’s time in Hollywood reveals a good deal about women’s social and economic challenges in the early 20th century, especially those of poor women. Most telling are words uttered by Yezierska’s protagonist in the 1923 novel, Children of Loneliness, who says, “My one story is hunger.” Like Yezierska herself, and so many other young women who wanted to make something of their lives, this hunger was literal as well as symbolic.

Bibliography

Atherton, Gertrude. “Fighting Up From the Ghetto.” New York Herald (7 Jan. 1923): 8.

Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Dearborn, Mary V. Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. New York: Free Press, 1988.

Henriksen, Louise Levitas. Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1988.

Rosen, Norma. John and Anzia: An American Romance. New York: Dutton, 1989.

Schoen, Carol. Anzia Yezierska. Boston, Mass: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

“The Screen: Hungry Hearts.” Rev. New York Times (27 Nov. 1922): 22.

Yezierska, Anzia. Hungry Hearts. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. Rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

------. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950.

------. Salome of the Tenements. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.

------. “This is What $100,000 Did to Me.” Cosmopolitan (Oct. 1925): 40-41, 154.

Archival Paper Collections:

Anzia Yezierska collection. Boston University, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Citation

Erens, Patricia Brett. "Anzia Yezierska." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-rc1d-tc98>

Margery Wilson

by Janet Walker

By the time Margery Wilson reached her late twenties, she had completed her work as a film director. Prior to that, according to autobiographical accounts, she had received a seminary education supplemented in philosophy and literature by her father, actively pursued social-service work, and given one-woman public performances at clubs, schools, and churches in the Cincinnati area. She toured Ohio and south to Atlanta as a leading lady with the John Lawrence players, founded her own theatre company at sixteen years of age, and embarked to London with her sister Mary on an aborted world tour as musical entertainers (Wilson 1956). Then, in 1914, Margery Wilson traveled to Los Angeles and launched her Hollywood career. Today she is best remembered as Brown Eyes in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), but her motion picture career was extensive, with three dozen roles including many starring performances to her credit.

Margery Wilson (a) Eye of the Night (1916). PC

Margery Wilson, Eye of the Night (1916). Private Collection.

In Hollywood, she was under contract to D. W. Griffith, then, as Anthony Slide says, “director-in-chief” at Reliance-Majestic Studios, which would later become the Fine Arts Corporation, (Slide 1998, 171). Working under Griffith (credited as Margie Wilson), she costarred with Dorothy Gish in Bred in the Bone (1915) and with Douglas Fairbanks in Double Trouble (1915). She played the lead (credited as Marjory Wilson) in The Eye of the Night (1916), with John Gilbert as her younger brother, and starred with W. S. Hart in a handful of films including The Return of Draw Egan (1916), Wolf Lowry (1917), and The Gun Fighter (1917), all for the New York Motion Picture Corporation, Kay-Bee. In Venus in the East (1919) for Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, Wilson was directed by Donald Crisp and she appeared (credited as Marjorie Wilson) with J. Warren Kerrigan in The House of Whispers (1920) for Robert Brunton Productions. Wilson was thus an experienced motion picture actress before she began writing, directing, and producing her own projects.

Magery Wilson (a/d/w/p) AMPAS

Magery Wilson portrait. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Born Sara Barker Strayer in Gracey, Kentucky, by her own report, or as Sarah B. Strayer in Tennessee according to the Twelfth Census of the United States [1900], Margery Wilson lived more than sixty years subsequent to her directing career, during which time she achieved success as a speech coach for actors, a public lecturer in person and on the radio, and as an author of numerous guidance books, or what might be called inspirational non-fiction. She had splendid homes on both coasts, was married more than once, became the mother of two children, both of whom predeceased her, and counted among her associates many authors, artists, business people, politicians and diplomats, and celebrities of the twentieth century, including Will Rogers, William Randolph Hearst, Howard Hughes, Elizabeth Arden, broadcast journalist Lowell Thomas, and painter Pierre Tartoué. Her autobiography, I Found My Way, was published in 1956.

This, then, is the context for Margery Wilson’s short career as a film writer-director-producer, dating from 1920 to 1923, and a few more years if we add the time during which she toured with her films. Can we count her among significant women film directors, celebrating Wilson’s achievements as a woman in a man’s profession and mourning the loss of her films as director, of which all that remains are photographic stills? Or shall we remand her to the margins of the directing profession while recognizing her achievements in acting? After all, she directed and/or produced only four films, including one, The Offenders (1922–23), that she claims in her autobiography to have directed as well as produced (196), but that the American Film Institute credits to the directorship of Fenwicke L. Holmes.

As an added complication in assessing this history, Margery Wilson’s professional achievements raise once again the question of whether it is appropriate to use the term “feminist” with reference to women directors, writers, and producers who competed and overcame the odds against their projects. One approach is Gwendolyn Foster’s inclusive understanding of Wilson’s work as “a significant part of our feminist cinema heritage” (Foster 1995, 374). And when Anthony Slide, who researched Margery Wilson’s career and spent time interviewing her over many years, revised and expanded his 1977 book Early Women Directors, he titled the resulting 1996 publication The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors. If in one decade we nominate these notable women as “feminists”, in an earlier decade people may not have thought of them—and they may not have thought of themselves—as such. One can only speculate whether Wilson would have approved Slide’s title change. But as Slide himself later recalled with all due irony at “A Tribute to Early Women Directors” held at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, in October 1982, Wilson stated clearly that she did not wish to be called a feminist.

Margery Wilson (a). Photoplay Dec. 1917. PD

Margery Wilson featured in. Photoplay, Dec. 1917. 

Such apparent conflicts over the decades and among interpretative approaches appear less sharp from a broader cultural perspective. The overarching inspirational scenario Margery Wilson created in her autobiography and interviews, and apparently through her actions, was that of her life itself, with the directing and producing work an integrated part of the plot. In particular, she seems to have been conscious always that a woman’s choices are constrained by gender relations favoring male dominance, but still offering plentiful opportunities to the artful woman. The description of her first approach to Hollywood—a streetcar trip to Reliance and Majestic studio, ostensibly to secure a job for her sister Mary by enacting the latter’s beauty and talent—illustrates Wilson’s delight in scenarizing her life for readers, portraying a Wilson persona who was both enterprising and lucky. She relates how she paid careful attention to her garb (“I went to a shoe-shop and had the buttons tightened on my shoes to make my feet look very trim”) and her demeanor (once at the studio, “I turned away to look at the buildings as though I might be considering buying them”). Wilson then writes about how she promoted her sister Mary at the audition: “I walked as she did. I tried to convey her personality. I described her, sang her praises, laughed and cried about her” (1956, 125–128). But this performance, she says with modest surprise, impressed a studio executive and won her own rather than her sister’s acting entrée (127).

Wilson’s guidance books also reflect the ability to set a scene and turn men’s actions to her advantage. In the 1951 How to Make the Most of Wife [sic], Wilson advises ambitious husbands, saying that “women are simple souls, not at all complicated and difficult as some of them would like to appear,” yet in effect she here suggests behaviors that benefit the wives, whose husbands are counseled to treat them with kindness and respect (10). In the chapter titled “The Wife as an Investment”, men are coached to protect one of their greatest economic assets: their wives. “Walk WITH your wife down the street, in stores and public places,” “Talk WITH your wife…. Even if you have to recite the multiplication table with a pleased expression on your face, looking at your wife the while, the rest of the world will want to know that animated interesting-looking couple” (16). And the wife will “become” interesting if encouraged, Wilson asserts. These small gestures will build a wife’s confidence and consequently she will run an efficient home, keep up her appearance, and in all ways help to recommend the husband in his business career. The irony for contemporary readers, and one suspects for Wilson as well, is that the partner whose behavior is in greatest need of improvement is not the wife but the husband.

Wilson left film production when she married Otto Meeks, the owner of a ranching empire, and began to raise their children. Ever active professionally, however, she turned to writing radio scripts for her own Los Angeles program on charm. The project expanded to a book, Charm, initially published in 1928 and then revised and reprinted many times as The Woman You Want to Be: Margery Wilson’s Complete Book of Charm. Additional books followed, some still quoted: The New Etiquette (1937), Your Personality—and God (1938), Make Up Your Mind (1940), The Pocket Book of Etiquette (1940), How to Live Beyond Your Means (1945), Believe in Yourself (1949), You’re as Young as You Act (1951), Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue (1961), and God—Here and Now (1978). Wilson maintained her connection to the film industry by contributing to a series of short pamphlets about famous people, writing in her autobiography that she was engaged to write fifty pamphlets drawing on her Hollywood connections (223). Two of these, one on Dolores Del Rio and another on Douglas Fairbanks, are available at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Given the wide range of her activities, it is not surprising that fewer than thirty pages of I Found My Way are devoted to Wilson’s directing and producing career. Nevertheless, she seems to have taken great pride in her accomplishments in the film industry. Interviewed in the documentary film, The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors (Jeffrey Goodman and Anthony Slide, 1993), and in print, Wilson speaks with animation about her struggles and successes, noting with evident satisfaction the respect she earned from studio chief Robert Brunton at whose Melrose, Los Angeles, studios she directed her first feature, That Something (1920), in which she also starred, and the comedy short, Two of a Kind (1920). At the time Moving Picture World reported that Wilson had plans to write and direct an entire series of two-reel “super-comedies” at the studio (Giebler 1920, 93).

Like so many of her industry contemporaries who aspired to produce and direct, Wilson’s claims of authorship are not consistently validated by contemporary sources. For instance, while a contemporaneous review of That Something in Moving Picture World (Robb 1921, 758) seems to corroborate Wilson’s singular autobiographical statement “I went to the coast and made a picture of the story” (196), the American Film Institute’s online catalog (2003–2009) lists Lawrence Underwood as co-director. Likewise, where Insinuation (1922) and Wilson’s last release The Offenders (1922–23) were marketed as Margery Wilson Productions and Wilson states unequivocally that she directed both (196, 200–210), AFI online lists Fenwicke L. Holmes as director of the latter work.

In any case, Insinuation was Wilson’s most well-received directorial effort, and here contemporaneous as well as modern sources are in agreement that she was responsible for the story, scenario, direction, and producing of this film in which she also starred (Inman 62). Wilson toured with the film throughout the United States and Canada for several years after it opened. A morality tale about a woman (played by Wilson) whose life is almost ruined by the insinuations of a small-town gossip and a brother who fell in with bad company, the film ends with the woman being saved by her upstanding physician husband, whom she meets when her theatre troupe becomes stranded in the town. A 1922 Moving Picture World review applauds Wilson’s “elusive charm” in the starring role, the casting of the other roles, including Percy Holton as the “weak brother”, and the fidelity as well as the beauty of the film’s Vermont setting: “the story they tell is natural, wholesome and absolutely faithful in detail and delineation. The plot of the picture-story is laid amid magnificent mountain scenery that is even more beautiful when covered with a mantle of snow… [The film] will be classified among the top-notchers” (62). Responding to the attention Italian neorealist films were receiving for the practice of motion picture location shooting, Wilson claimed with legitimacy to have been an innovator in this area, although her assertion of priority reveals an incomplete knowledge of the early history of the practice. “So far as I know, this was the first picture made without building sets for interiors, though the Italians in recent pictures are being credited with being the first to do so. I made mine over twenty years ago” (1956, 201). Perhaps the naturalness the reviewer sees in the film is attributable to Wilson’s having brought her own past theatre experience to bear in the creation of the story centered on an acting troupe. In any case, something genuine in Insinuation inspired the description of the film as “a page taken bodily from the book of life itself” (Inman 1922, 62).

This phrase may indeed sum up the way in which Wilson’s film directorial career, short in its span of years, was nevertheless bound up with the other chapters of the richly inventive life she lived. Testimony to the concern she had for her legacy, Margery Wilson donated her papers to the University of Wyoming in 1980, six years before she died at the age of eighty-nine.

Bibliography

Giebler, A.H. “Los Angeles News Letter by A. H. Giebler.” Moving Picture World 45, no. 1 (3 Jul. 1920): 93.

------. “That Something – Margery Wilson.” Harrison’s Reports Vol. III, no. 15 (9 Apr. 1921): n.p.

Inman, C.M. “’Insinuation’: Margery Wilson Production Wholesome in Theme and Faithful to Detail.” Moving Picture World (2 Sept. 1922): 62.

------. “Rotarians View Picture: ‘That Something’ is Given Special Showing at Atlantic City Gathering.” Motion Picture News Vol. XXII, no. 3 (10 Jul. 1920): 477.

Robb, Jessie. “’That Something’: Metaphysics Predominant Theme of Production of Herman Film Corp.” The Moving Picture World Vol. 49, no. 7 (16 Apr. 1921): 758.

Schader, Fred (as Fred.). Rev. “The Offender (sic).” Variety Vol. LXXVI, no. 13 (12 Nov. 1924): 25.

Slide, Anthony. In conversation with the author. 2004.

------. Interview with Margery Wilson. The Silent Picture no. 17 (1973): 17-24.

Wilson, Margery. Dolores del Rio. Thumb Prints of the Famous. Los Angeles: Chimes Press, 1928. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

------.Douglas Fairbanks. Thumb Prints of the Famous. Los Angeles: Chimes Press, 1928. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

------. How to Make the Most of Wife. Kingswood, Surrey, Great Britain: The Windmill Press, 1951.

------. I Found My Way: An Autobiography. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1956.

------. The Woman You Want to Be: Margery Wilson’s Complete Book of Charm. Philadelphia: J.B. Lipppincott, 1942. [Note: Originally published as Charm by Margery Wilson, 1928.].

Archival Paper Collections:

Margery Wilson clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Margery Wilson Papers, 1914-1978. University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center.

Citation

Walker, Janet. "Margery Wilson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-mdx8-af25>

Elsie Jane Wilson

by Mark Garrett Cooper

When asked by interviewer Frances Denton to comment in the pages of Photoplay on the question of whether or not directing was “man’s work,” Elsie Jane Wilson exclaimed, “I should say it is!” (50). Repeating the anecdote in his history of early women directors, Anthony Slide goes on to argue that it has largely been in the shadow of her actor-director husband Rupert Julian that Elsie Jane Wilson’s profile is sketched in existing accounts of early cinema (Slide 1996, 49–51). This much seems fairly accurate, but the degree of Wilson’s sincerity in replying to her female interlocutor remains an open question. In context, the statement can be read as an ironic one, underscoring the very attitude that working in Hollywood caused some women to rethink. The same Photoplay article cites Ida May Park as saying that “It was because directing seemed so utterly unsuited to a woman that I refused the first company offered me” (49), and then it goes on to describe the directing successes of both Park and Wilson. Wilson’s affirmation of directing as “man’s work” also may reveal something about the dynamics of her marriage, as Slide’s reminder of her connection with Julian suggests. At the time, skepticism about women’s professional abilities often indicated nervousness about their supposed abandonment of domestic responsibilities. In any event, the fact that Wilson is credited with writing two and directing perhaps eleven films between 1916 and 1919 makes it impossible to take her answer to Denton’s question at face value.

Elsie Jane Wilson was one of the numerous actresses who began directing at Universal Pictures in the 1910s. The company first credited her with directing a series of films starring child actress Zoe Rae, all in 1917: The Circus of Life, The Little Pirate, The Cricket, The Silent Lady, and My Little Boy. Thereafter, she directed two features each starring Ella Hall, Carmel Myers, and Ruth Clifford. Unfortunately, much of her work has been lost or destroyed over time leaving a fragmentary archive that raises more questions that it answers. In particular, the difficult issue of attribution emerges in attempts to compile an accurate filmography for figures such as Wilson, who was married to a director and, like Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, Helen Holmes and J. P. McGowan, for instance, collaborated on several films with her husband. Elsie Jane Wilson and Rupert Julian began working for Universal Studios’ newly established Rex Company in Los Angeles in 1914 and made several films together over the following six years. What is one to do, for instance, when Moving Picture World credits Rupert Julian for the direction of The Savage (1917), but actress Ruth Clifford recalls in an interview that it was Elsie Jane Wilson who directed her on the film? Was The Savage a man’s or a woman’s work? The same question might be asked of The Circus of Life (1917), which the American Film Institute database credits to Julian’s direction, but which Universal’s house publication, the Moving Picture Weekly, claimed as Wilson’s first feature in November 1917 (29).

We might begin to answer this question by interpreting a film Wilson certainly directed, The Dream Lady (1918), as showing us, first, that orchestrating dreams is woman’s work, and second, that such dream work entails a playful approach to gender roles. The picture features an orphan, played by Carmel Myers, who spends her inheritance fulfilling other people’s wishes, thereby realizing her own dreams by becoming the Dream Lady. Thanks to the print restored by the French Centre national de la cinématographie, we can understand this title more complexly as an early iteration of what Chris Straayer has called “the temporary transvestite film.” As is typical of the genre, gender visibility emerges as a central theme. Myers’s character grants a young woman’s wish by costuming her as boy, which sets up a series of recognitions and misrecognitions. In one scene, the woman, dressed as a man, kisses Myers’s character in gratitude. The leading man, played by Thomas Holding, happens upon the scene and misunderstands the gesture, but his jealousy ends up clarifying his relationship with Myers’s character. Further complications ensue, but in the end Myers and Holding are united in a rowboat. Just as it seems they might kiss, Wilson denies our look, cutting instead to the shore where a little girl, the Dream Lady’s assistant, covers the eyes of her pet dog.

The Dream Lady (1918) awaits comparison with other extant films that present gender as a kind of performance, such as Alice Guy Blaché ’s Cupid and the Comet (1911), as analyzed by Alison McMahan (2002, 229–233), and The Florida Enchantment (1914), which we now know was written by Marguerite Bertsch. Further research will also need to be done to determine the extent of Wilson’s contribution to many shared projects and, perhaps more importantly, such research may effect the way we think of the nature of such collaborative efforts in the early years of cinema.

Bibliography

Cooper, Mark Garrett. “Studio History Revisited: The Case of the Universal Women.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 25, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 16- 36.

“The Cricket.” Rev. Moving Picture World (24 Nov. 1917): 1223.

Denton, Frances. “Lights! Camera! Quiet!” Photoplay vol. XIII, no. 3 (Feb. 1918): 48- 50.

“The Dream Lady.” Rev. Moving Picture World (8 Aug. 1918): n.p. Elsie Jane Wilson clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Elsie Jane Wilson Directed 'The Cricket'.” Moving Picture Weekly (3 Nov. 1917): 29.

“Elsie Wilson and Rupert Julian with Rex.” Moving Picture World (4 July 1914): 79.

Milne, Peter. “The Dream Lady.” Rev. Motion Picture News (3 Aug. 1918): 793.

“Press Sheet for Carmel Myers in 'The Dream Lady'.” Moving Picture Weekly (20 Jul. 1918): 14-15.

Straayer, Chris. Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Archival Paper Collections:

Elsie Jane Wilson clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Research Update

January 2023: A 35mm print of The Little Pirate (1917), which was previously listed as lost in the filmography, is confirmed to be in a private collection.

Citation

Cooper, Mark Garrett. "Elsie Jane Wilson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-jvmq-pg55>

Kathlyn Williams

by Mark Garrett Cooper

Kathlyn Williams began work in motion pictures as an actress with Biograph in New York. “I was playing in stock,” she recounted to Photoplay in 1917. “One week when I was not working someone called me up from the Biograph studio and asked if I would work two days for them. I was dreadfully insulted at first, but I went out of curiosity expecting to be offered about fifty cents a day.” To her amazement, D. W. Griffith paid her ten dollars for each day’s work (77). Williams told Photoplay that she performed in three Biograph titles, but in combination, Paul Spehr and the American Film Institute catalog credit her with a total of five, with release dates beginning in 1909. Sources agree that she joined the Selig Polyscope Company in 1910 and quickly became the company’s leading actress. From the start, she played an action heroine, although she was also featured in dramatic roles. In 1913-14 she starred in the Adventures of Kathlyn, generally regarded as the first serial with “hold-over” suspense. While with Selig, she wrote scenarios for at least five titles, one of which, The Leopard’s Foundling (1914), written by Maibelle Heikes Justice, the Selig release notes credit her with directing. In 1916 she began her second marriage, to Charles Eyton, described in most biographies as a Paramount executive, but likely general manager of the Oliver Morosco Photoplay Company, which released through distributor Paramount at the time. Wiliams appeared in a series of Morosco pictures. In 1917, Julia Crawford Ivers produced her scenario for Lost in Transit at Pallas Pictures, also releasing through Paramount and, like Morosco, soon to be absorbed in Famous Players-Lasky-Paramount. Lost in Transit is Williams’s last known screenwriting credit. In 1919, Moving Picture World reported that she would organize her own company, but probably the company never materialized (359). Williams worked steadily as a performer through 1935, when she retired from the screen with well over one hundred titles to her name. Although several titles in which Williams acted survive, there are no known prints of the titles she either wrote or directed.

Williams_CCP_FIG245_WFP-WIL01

Kathlyn Williams c. 1916. Private Collection.

Williams_CCP_FIG247_WFP-WIL05

Kathlyn Williams, The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913). Private Collection.

Williams_CCP_FIG246_WFP-WIL04

Kathlyn Williams and Goldie Colwell The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913). Private Collection.

Kathlyn Williams (d/w/a) w/ Fluffy

Kathlyn Williams with Fluffy the dog. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Williams_CCP_FIG249_WFP-WIL03

Wallace Reid, Kathlyn Williams, and Alfred Paget, Big Timber (1917). Private Collection.

The relationship between Williams’s star persona and her roles as screenwriter and director poses an interesting, and not atypical, problem. As with many other early women filmmakers, her success in front of the camera created opportunities behind it, but her reputation as a performer may well have limited those opportunities as well. Known especially for her work with the big cats in Selig’s zoo, Williams exemplifies the “nervy movie lady” described by Jennifer Bean. Unlike her action-hero counterparts, Bean argues, this figure was represented as “nonknowledgeable and unknowabable” (14). Her hallmark was the ability to confront extreme bodily dangers with a childlike lack of concern—not, one would think, a quality prized in a director. A 1915 item in Selig’s in-house paper, The Paste-Pot and Shears, suggests the blithe unconcern Bean finds typical: asked to account for her success in working with wild animals, “‘I just act with them’ was the answer of the blonde and enticing Kathlyn.” Three titles Selig credited her with writing and (in the one case) directing in 1914 and 1915 each drew on this devil-may-care persona: The Leopard’s Foundling (1914), The Strange Case of Talmai Lind (1915), and A Sultana of the Desert (1915).

According to Harold McGrath’s illustrated novelization, The Adventures of Kathlyn is set in the mythical Indian kingdom of Allaha. The serial’s thirteen episodes chronicle Kathlyn’s perilous encounters with wild beasts and agents of the insidious Council of Three as she strives to rescue her explorer father and free the enslaved population. She finds help from a white hunter and native servants she befriends. The Leopard’s Foundling (1914), the first of three films, and the one written and directed by Williams, moves its action to Africa and makes its heroine a wild child lost to her human parents, raised by leopards, and redeemed to civilization by an American hunter. Moving Picture World in November 1913 described the then-unreleased film as “a new note in dramatic daring in dealing with the oarnivora [sic] as though the treacherous big cats were the most tractable and gentle of animals” (1017). The Strange Case of Talmai Lind (1915) returns to a mythical beast-filled India to tell the tale of Talmai, who dies tragically saving the white man she loves, and the final film, A Sultana of the Desert (1915), features Williams as Jean, the daughter of a French exporter who objects to her romance with Christoph and banishes her to the convent. Christoph chases her across the desert, and in the complications that follow Jean befriends a lion subsequently killed by her father. Although detailed analysis is impossible in the absence of surviving prints, it seems clear enough that, as in Adventures of Kathlyn, these films feature stereotypically exotic settings, adventure plots, big cats, great white hunter figures, native friends, and absent, wicked, or otherwise inadequate fathers.

Lantern slide. The Thing We Love (1918), Kathlyn Williams (a). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

As with Cleo Madison and Grace Cunard, two other serial queens who also wrote and directed the films in which they appeared, press coverage of Williams emphasized her femininity along with her daring. For instance, in 1914 the Los Angeles Times reported that for The Lady or the Tigers, “Miss Williams was required to enter the cage of three tigers lately brought from the jungle, which were untamed and didn’t know a moving-picture genius from a meat-pie,” and in the next breath that “Miss Williams has five new Paris gowns for use in The Rosary and The Ne’er Do-Well (4). In addition to uniting the daredevil and the fashionable lady in a single body, this story also implicitly parses those roles into two different genres.

Lantern slide, Lost in Transit (1917), Kathlyn Williams (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

In fact, Williams’s first credited screenplays were modern dramas with fairly conventional romance plots. The Last Dance (1912) relates the tragic story of a nightclub dancer who retreats to the country to recuperate from heart trouble. She falls in love with the local minister, who nurses her back to health but ultimately spurns her because of what he regards as her disreputable past. To prove the virtue of her dancing, she performs for him and wins him over, but her heart condition finally kills her. Williams did not appear in The Last Dance, but she plays the lead in The Young Mrs. Eames (1913). Here, a young widow rejects an ardent younger suitor after she overhears him declaring his love for her daughter. She marries a man closer to her age. After leaving Selig to work at Paramount under the direction of William Desmond Taylor, Cecil B. DeMille, and others, Williams’s films continued more in this dramatic vein. Her screenplay for Lost in Transit (1917) follows an infant boy kidnapped first from his wealthy father and then from an Italian junk man who cares for him.

In April 1917, a story in the Los Angeles Times reported that Williams “has had more than a dozen of her photoplays produced and two of them she directed herself.” It added, “Deep in her heart Miss Williams has always felt a great desire to devote all of her attention to directing, but she is too popular as an actress with the managers and the public to permit her to indulge her ambition” (18). The story leaves us with two puzzles. First, there is a discrepancy between the number of titles it attributes to Williams and known credits. Second, one might well wonder how studio producers understood her popularity and how that understanding did and did not translate into opportunities to write and direct.

Bibliography

Bean, Jennifer M. “Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body.” Camera Obscura vol. 16, no. 3 (2001): 9-57.

Denton, Frances. “Kathlyn's Memory Box.” Photoplay (Nov. 1917): 76-78.

“Kathlyn Williams’s New Play.” Moving Picture World (29 Nov. 1913): 1017.

“Kathlyn Williams to Produce Her Own Picture.” Moving Picture World (17 May 1913): 689.

“Kathlyn Williams Will Organize Own Company.” Moving Picture World (19 Apr. 1919): 359.

Kingsley, Grace. “Film Flams.” Los Angeles Times (14 Oct. 1914): sec. 3: 4.

MacGrath, Harold. The Adventures of Kathlyn. Kathlyn Williams De Luxe Edition Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1914.

MacGrath, Harold. The Adventures of Kathlyn: Synopsis of a Serial Novel.  [Folder 1, William Selig Collection]. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Miss Kathlyn Williams Tells of Experiences with Wild Animals.” Paste-Pot and Shears. (27 Sep. 1915): n.p. [ Folder 562, Selig Release Notes]. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Warnack, Henry Christeen. "Versatile Kathleen—a Close-up of a Fascinating Practical Idealist.” Los Angeles Times (1 Apr. 1917): sec. 3: 1, 18.

Archival Paper Collections:

William Selig Papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Cooper, Mark Garrett. "Kathlyn Williams." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-qh25-9013>

Pearl White

by Marina Dahlquist

Commonly known as the Pathé Frère company’s “Peerless Fearless Girl,” or the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts,” Pearl White’s undaunted and adventurous persona became emblematic for her career and for serial queens by and large. These included Grace Cunard at the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, Helen Holmes at the Kalem Company, and Kathlyn Williams at the Selig Polyscope Company. Her key work consisted of action serials during an intense decade starting in 1914. From 1910, prior to the serials, Pearl White started out as a rather anonymous actress at the Powers Company, the Lubin Manufacturing Company, and the lesser-known Crystal Film Company, acting in films little recalled today, of which few have been preserved. The bulk of her early productions were split-reels for Crystal, directed by Lois Weber’s husband Phillips Smalley and distributed by Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Pearl White reached some popularity at Crystal playing comedy parts, as Moving Picture News in a 1912 article titled “Miss Pearl White to Become Aviator” tells us (19). In multiple films in 1913 Pearl White’s characters were subsumed under a recurrent character name, in fact, her own—a practice indicative of the serial films.

Pearl White (a) The Perils of Pauline (1914), PC

Pearl White, The Perils of Pauline (1914). Private Collection.

Pearl White (a), PC

Pearl White portrait. Private Collection.

Pearl White (a) c. 1918, PC

Pearl White in car near Bayside home, c. 1918. Private Collection.

Pearl White (a) The Exploits of Elaine (1914), PC

Latern slide,  The Exploits of Elaine (1914). Private Collection.

Pearl White (a) Exploits of Elaine (1915), BISON

Pearl White, Exploits of Elaine (1915). Courtesy of the Bison Archives.  

Slide Pearl of the Army (1916) Pearl White (a), PC

Lantern slide,  Pearl of the Army (1916). Private Collection.

Pearl White (a) The Fatal Ring (1917), PC

Pearl White, The Fatal Ring (1917). Private Collection.

Pearl White (a) Plunder, (1923)

Pearl White, Plunder (1923), ep. 5 “To Beat a Knave.” Private Collection. 

Pearl White (a) c. 1915,PC

Pearl White portrait, c. 1915. Private Collection.

Pearl White (a), WCFT

Production still, Pearl White. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television

Pearl White (a) A Virgin Paradise (1921), PC

Pearl White, A Virgin Paradise (1921). Private Collection.

Pearl White (a). BISON

Pearl White headshot. Courtesy of the Bison Archives. 

Pearl White (a) in perils of pauline .

Pearl White, Perils of Pauline (1914). Courtesy of the National Women’s History Museum. 

Hired by the American branch of the French Pathé Frères Company in Jersey City, she achieved her breakthrough in 1914 as Pauline in The Perils of Pauline, Pathé’s first serial. The Perils of Pauline is still the best-known production from the American serial craze featuring a new and independent female type of protagonist within a sensational, action-packed framework. Pauline’s and her serial “sisters’” versatility and bravado in performing tasks traditionally associated with masculine brawn—fistfights, handling pistols, and agility in stunts—were the genre’s most striking characteristics. The Perils of Pauline’s initial success in the United States was fueled by the immense publicity, the product of collaboration between Pathé and William Randolph Hearst’s publishing empire. In line with the new marketing methods for the serial films in the 1910s, story accounts of episodes were published in the Sunday papers as tie-ins for upcoming film episodes. In addition, $25,000 in prize money was offered in plot-writing contests as a further incentive for readers to engage with the serial. The massive marketing, as, for example, in Motography April 4 and 18 of 1914, was of course a boon for exhibitors, spiking the circulation of serials overall. In the history of the development of the star system, taking off in the US in the early 1910s (deCordova 2001, 50-116) it is notable that the serial format stimulated new market strategies favoring stars and character development over studios or directors as the most important label for a film.

Other Pearl White serials includes The Exploits of Elaine (1914), The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), The Romance of Elaine (1915), The Iron Claw (1916), Pearl of the Army (1916), The Fatal Ring (1917), The House of Hate (1918), The Lightning Raider (1919), The Black Secret (1919), and Plunder (1923). Almost all were written and directed by George B. Seitz. The proceeds from Pearl White serials became an important source of revenue for American Pathé; especially The Perils of Pauline and the Elaine serials were remarkably successful. Due to Pathé’s international distribution unit, her films were shown in a long list of countries abroad, including Italy, India, Japan, and Sweden. Allegedly, Pearl White received heaps of fan letters from all over the world every day.

The popularity boom placed Pearl White in the midst of attention in women’s magazines, the daily press, and trade journals, making her one of the era’s most popular film actresses. In Motion Picture Magazine’s popularity contest in late 1916, Pearl White was voted the most popular movie star of all (15). Two years later, in December 1918, she was ranked third on the same list trailing only Mary Pickford and Marguerite Clark (12). In late 1920, Pearl White still came out third in the magazine’s contest (94). She did not only become popular among young women in search of new female role models, but she was also immensely popular among American soldiers during World War I, as the New York Star reported in 1917 (78). Pearl White is still regarded as the most famous of the silent serial queens.

That the dangers she was exposed to in the films were real—she allegedly insisted on performing all the stunts herself—offered one of the most recurrent promotional lines. It was apparently of paramount importance for the audience that her courage on screen was genuine, and newspaper headlines, as, for example, “Pearl White ‘Doubled’ Pathé Star Nearly Loses Her life in Strenuous ‘Iron Claw’ Stunt,” in the New York Dramatic Mirror, kept this idea alive (32).

Savvy audiences, however, no doubt understood that even if it looked real on the screen, some thrilling actions, like falling from high cliffs, had to be faked. But White’s fearless image was severely tarnished in 1922 when a stunt man was reported killed by the London Times while doubling for her in her last serial Plunder (8). Pearl White perpetuated a set of myths about herself by describing her serials in her 1919 autobiography, Just Me, as: “‘the always in danger’ type of pictures” (160). This mythology is also highlighted in her account of the contractual negotiations with Louis Gasnier, the head of production at American Pathé, leading up to her starring in The Perils of Pauline. The script presented to her had outlined a number of skills that she had not mastered. On the eve of the first episode, she would have to learn how to play tennis, swim, drive a motorcar, and survive a smashup. As she described these challenges in Just Me:

And so it has been ever since, even up to the present time. I’m always learning to do something new for each picture. I’ve even learned to fly an aeroplane, a feat that took me many months. If I have to jump off a moving train, automobile, etceteras, I always take myself out and try it several times until I get to be pretty sure of myself before they take the picture (162).

With raising stardom, Pearl White became news herself. Numerous articles explored her private as well as professional life, her background, career, home life, and clothing. The combination of athletic performance and charming appearance—characteristics considered as absolute opposites—was unfailingly emphasized in the United States as well as abroad (as in “La Vrai Pearl White” appearing in the French magazine Figaro in 1921). For publicity purposes she dangled from tall buildings in Manhattan, for example, in April 1916, to paint her initials on a brick wall. This gimmick was documented in Moving Picture World the next month (948). These stunts attracted lavish newspaper attention. The coverage was hyperbolic, encapsulated in a 1921 article titled “The Heroine of a Thousand Dangerous Stunts.” But looking at the rhetoric of publicity from another angle, White’s constant lies and fabricated information about her past, family, and career, which permeate her unreliable autobiography, also create major difficulties for her biographers.

Pearl White starred in several feature films produced by Pathé, such as The King’s Game (1916), Hazel Kirke (1916), and Mayblossom (1917). Allegedly tired of making serials, with their hectic production pace, which left little room for acting and character development, she abandoned Pathé in 1919 signing up with Fox Film Corporation to make features. White made nine films for Fox between 1920 and 1922, predominantly society dramas, but these films met with little success and none of them have survived. She returned to Pathé in 1922 for what would be her last serial, Plunder (1923), where she once again plays an unstoppable action heroine who defeats her enemies with amazing ease. Early in 1923 she left for Europe, where she would live until her death. Her last film, Terreur, released in the United States as Terror, was made in France in 1924.

As her film career petered out, Pearl White continued to perform in revues and music halls in Paris and London. She owned the Hôtel de Paris in Biarritz, where she ran a casino; a nightclub in Paris; and a stable of racing horses. In Europe she married the Greek millionaire Theodore Cossika. Previous husbands were the actor Victor Sutherland and the actor and director Wallace McCutheon, who costarred with Pearl White in The Black Secret in 1919 and The Thief in 1920. After a protracted period of failing health and problems with alcohol, Pearl White died in Paris in 1938 as a consequence of liver failure.

Pearl White seems to have had a more prominent place in film history than as “only” an internationally renowned movie star. To what extent she did influence the productions she appeared in remains somewhat unclear due to all the contradictory as well as fabricated stories surrounding her star persona. According to Just Me, White was completely committed to the “impossible” feats described in the manuscript. But as Monica Dall’Asta points out, at the end of her career, White promoted her production of Terreur in both Mon Ciné and Le Cinéopse with announcements for scripts, actors, financiers, and claims that she aimed to apply the American mode of production into a French setting. Unfortunately, the documentation of the credits is incomplete, which is prevalent in the productions of the first decades of the film industry. White’s extensive career adds up to over two hundred titles, including split-reels and one-reelers, serials and features. The few films that have survived, including the serials, are scattered over a number of archives, although the majority are in the Library of Congress, and all fifteen episodes of Plunder can be viewed in the UCLA film archive.

See also: Grace Cunard, Helen Holmes, Mary Pickford, Lois Weber, Kathlyn Williams

Bibliography

Advertisement. The Perils of Pauline. Motography (4 April 1914): 3-6.

Advertisement. The Perils of Pauline. Motography (18 April 1914): 3-6.

Bao, Weihong. "From Pearl White to White Rose Woo: Tracing the Vernacular Body of 'nuxia' in Chinese Silent Cinema." Exporting Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 187-221.

Canjels, Rudmer. "Changing Views and Perspectives: Translating Pearl White's American Adventures in Wartime France." Marina Dahlquist, ed. Exporting Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 25-45.

Condon, Mabel. “Sans Grease Paint and Wig.” Motography (22 Aug. 1914): 279-280.

deCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001: 50-116.

Dahlquist, Marina. “'The Best-Known Woman in the World': Pearl White and the American Serial Film in Sweden.“ Marina Dahlquist, ed. Exporting Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 46-70.

------. “'Why Pearl?': Introduction.“ Marina Dahlquist, ed. Exporting Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 1-23.

Dall’Asta, Monica. “Pearl, the Swift One, or the Extraordinary Adventures of Pearl White in France.” In Exporting Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze. Ed. Marina Dahlquist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 71-98.

d’H., L., “Terreur avec Pearl White.” Le Cinéopose 55 (March 1924): 261.

“Fatal Film ‘Stunt.'” Times [London] (16 Aug. 1922): 8.

“Hall of Fame.” Motion Picture Magazine (Dec. 1918): 12-13.

Johnson, Kevin B. “Fascinations for the Nation: American Serial Film, Czechoslovakia, and the Afterlives of Pearl White.” In Exporting Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Craze. Ed. Marina Dahlquist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013 126-159.

Lauwick, Hervé. “La Vrai Pearl White.” Figaro (2 May 1921): 1.

MacDonald, M. I. “Miss Pearl White to Become Aviator.” Moving Picture News (12 Oct. 1912): 19.

“The Motion Picture Hall of Fame.” Motion Picture Magazine vol. 16, no. 11 (Dec 1918): 12.

Mullett, Mary B. “The Heroine of a Thousand Dangerous Stunts.” American Magazine (Sept. 1921): 32-35.

“Pearl White ‘Doubled’ Pathé Star Nearly Loses Her life in Strenuous ‘Iron Claw’ Stunt.” New York Dramatic Mirror (1 April 1916): 32.

“Pearl White in Press Stunt.” Moving Picture World (6 May 1916): 948.

“Pearl White’s Message to our Boys.” New York Star (26 Dec. 1917): 78.

Peterson, Christina. “'The Most Assassinated Woman in the World’: Pearl White and the First Avant-Garde.” In Exporting Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze. Ed. Marina Dahlquist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,  2013. 99-125.

“Popular Player Contest.” Motion Picture Magazine vol. 12, no. 11 (Dec. 1916): 15.

“Popularity Contest Closes.” Motion Picture Magazine vol. 22, no. 11 (Dec. 1920): 94.

White, Pearl. “Comment j’ai tourné ‘Terreur.’” Mon Ciné 110 (27 Mar. 1924).

------.  Just Me. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1919.

------.  “Why I Like to Work for Uncle Sam.” Pictures and the Picturegoer: The Picture Theatre Weekly Magazine. (5 Oct. 1918): 343.

Archival Paper Collections:

Pearl White clippings file, Robinson Locke Collection, New York Public Library, Archives and Manuscripts.

Citation

Dahlquist, Marina. "Pearl White." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-9v19-2b74>

Clare West

by Drake Stutesman

Little information is available on Clare West although she trail-blazed the status of costume designer, costumed classic films, and in 2003 was entered in the Costume Designer Guild’s Hall of Fame. Allie Acker alone gives us pre-1915 details, and she finds that, after college, West studied in Paris, becoming an accomplished fashion artist. Edward Maeder (220) starts her career with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), but all sources agree that she worked for two years on his ancient-to-modern epic Intolerance (1916), the first motion picture to period-dress leads and extras. West’s exact role is unclear, but it is possible that she supervised all costuming. Clearly her work raised the level of exoticism of screen fashion and separated it from haute couture by making stunning clothing that were wearable only on film, commencing the important demarcation between the two costume modes. In the teens, actors often wore their own clothes and “wardrobe” was a division of the drapery department, which only purchased, rented, or tacked ready-made items. The costume department as such was not de rigueur until the late twenties, but West inaugurated its initial office when, with Intolerance, she attained the unprecedented credential of “studio designer,” a feat still notable almost ten years later when Motion Picture cited it (Calhoun 116-117).

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. 

In 1918, Cecil B. DeMille hired Clare West to oversee costumes for Famous Players-Lasky because he recognized that she could “make people gasp” and knew that the new motion picture audience was hungry for larger-than-life clothing. Dressing superstars such as Gloria Swanson, Bebe Daniels, and Mae Murray with outlandish, sexual elegance, West’s career was eagerly watched by contemporary film fan magazines. In 1923, Screen News quoted her declaration that Hollywood led Paris in fashion, an opinion shared, by the late twenties, by costume designers Howard Greer and Gilbert Adrian (14). Fashion historian Mulvagh adds that even French couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli saw Hollywood as in the ascendance (123). West appeared as herself in the film Hollywood (1923), a celebrity-studded comedy.

Despite her maverick achievements, Clare West is mentioned rarely, but when she is, words like “dazzling,” “outré,” and “versatile” are commonly used in reference to her designing. Her costumes are exceptional for their extravagant imagination, modern lines, thorough research, and honest rendering. West enjoyed sweeping drapery, tightly wrapped cloth, sumptuous headgear, and ornate beading. DeMille extolled her “lavish hand” (DeMille 1985, 232) as demonstrated by outfits such as the patent leather swimsuit that reflected nocturnal watery light in Saturday Night (1922), or the octopus dress and cape designed for Bebe Daniels in The Affairs of Anatol (1921). For prehistoric scenes in Adam’s Rib (1923), West made twenty-five fur costumes using no stitches (as sewing was unknown to Ice Age tribes), and formed jewelry from real bones, claws, and feathers (Prichard 354).

Clare West (des). NYPL

Clare West. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

For several years, West supervised all Famous Players-Lasky studio productions, where many pictures made huge, costly costume demands such as those in Manslaughter (1922), where Leatrice Joy’s furs alone were worth over $100,000. West worked on ten DeMille films including The Ten Commandments (1923), devising extensive research files, still used in the fifties, to help create three thousand costumes constructed by over a hundred seamstresses. In 1924, the designer left Famous Players-Lasky and went to First National Pictures, where she exclusively costumed Norma and Constance Talmadge. That year, Screen News reports that she made special garments such as Kathryn McGuire’s lingerie with bird-of-paradise fringe trim in Buster Keaton’s The Navigator (1924) while working for Joseph Schenck’s organization (13). In 1925 she made thirty-four costumes for Murray in Erich von Stroheim’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of The Merry Widow (1925) and, along with designers such as Lucille, Adrian, and Howard Greer, made runway outfits for fashion show sequences in Paramount’s The Dressmaker From Paris (1925). After that, her career becomes difficult to follow.

West’s birth and death dates are elusive, and her name is variously spelled (Clair, Clare, or Claire), but Prichard stresses that “Clare” is correct (247). West does not appear in The Silent Film Necrology or the AFI Catalog of Silent Films; the Brigham Young University Cecil B. DeMille Archives Index does not list her; and the Costume Designer’s Guild has little West information. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science has no obituary, but one of a few clippings cites her 1922 divorce from cinematographer Paul Perry. There is much contradictory information about her, and credits on films with which she was associated are inconsistent. Chierichetti’s biography of director Mitchell Leisen, who started as a costume designer and who apprenticed under West on Male and Female (1919), quotes Leisen as saying that he “sweated” alone because West shunned him (1995, 21). The American Film Institute catalog gives Leisen sole costume design credit for Male and Female (1925) although Chierichetti accords him only one sequence (the Babylonian scene). The American Film Institute gives Eric von Stroheim and Richard Day costume credits for The Merry Widow (1925), but, according to Prichard, the Mae Murray biographer, credits Adrian while both Dorothy Calhoun and Elisabeth Leese credit West (109).

Photoplay declared that the costumes in Intolerance (1916) swayed current fashion, a defining characteristic of West’s style from the outset (20). She outdid French designers to become the favorite of her era’s screen superstars. Her film designs, pushing extremes, were also important contributions to shifts in the wider fashion vanguard, nationally and abroad, and more scholarship is needed to track her invaluable progenitor role in fashion as well as her influence on other film designers.

Bibliography

Calhoun, Dorothy. “Styles Are Dictated in Hollywood and Paris Designers Follow Them.” Motion Picture 29 (March 1925): 28-9, 110-1, 116-117.

Chierichetti, David. Hollywood Costume Design. New York: Harmony Books, 1976.

------. Hollywood Director: The Career of Mitchell Leisen. Los Angeles: Photoventures, 1995.

DeMille, Cecil B. Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. Ed. Donald Hayne. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985.

Foote, Lisle. Buster Keaton's Crew: The Team Behind his Silent Films. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2014.

Higham, Charles. Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Da Capo, 1973.

“Latest Lingerie Confection.” Screen News vol. 3, no. 24 (21 June 1924): 13.

LaVine, Robert. In a Glamorous Fashion. The Fabulous Years of Hollywood Costume Design. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981.

Leese, Elizabeth. Costume Design in the Movies. New York: Dover, 1991.

Maeder, Edward, ed. Hollywood and History Costume Design in Film. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987.

Mulvagh, Jane. Vogue History of 20th Century Fashion. London: Viking, 1988.

Prichard, Susan Perez. Film Costume: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981.

“Say Europe’s Designers Using Our Film Ideals.” Screen News vol. 2, no. 10 (10 March 1923): 14.

Schreier, Sandy. Hollywood Dressed & Undressed: A Century of Cinema Style. New
York: Rizzoli, 1998.

“That Octopus Gown.” Photoplay vol. 20, no. 4 (Sept. 1921): 20.

Archival Paper Collections:

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Clare West clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Stutesman, Drake. "Clare West." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-7r5s-ge73>

Lois Weber

by Shelley Stamp

Lois Weber was the leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood. She began her career alongside her husband, Phillips Smalley, after the two had worked together in the theatre. They began working in motion pictures around 1907, often billed under the collective title “The Smalleys.” In their early years at studios like Gaumont and Reliance, they acted alongside one another on-screen and codirected scripts written by Weber. Indeed, their status as a married, middle-class couple was often used to enhance their reputation for highbrow, quality pictures. In 1912, they were placed in charge of the Rex brand at the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, where they produced one or two one-reel films each week with a stock company of actors, quickly turning the brand into one of the studio’s most sophisticated. The couple increasingly turned their attention to multireel films, completing a four-reel production of The Merchant of Venice in 1914, the first American feature directed by a woman. Later that year they moved from Universal to Hobart Bosworth Productions where they were given more freedom to make feature-length films, among them Hypocrites (1915).

Lois Weber (p/d/w/a), PC

Portrait, Lois Weber. Private Collection.

Hypocrites (1915) Lois Weber (p/w/d/a), PC

Hypocrites (1915). Private Collection.

Where Are My Children? (1916) Lois Weber (p/w/d) and Phillips Smalley, NYPL

Where Are My Children? (1916). Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Lois Weber (p/dw/a) w/ Cecil B. DeMille, BYU

Lois Weber with Cecil B. DeMille. Courtesy of Brigham Young University. 

Lois Weber (p/dw/a) working w/ secretary, PC

Lois Weber at work with secretary. Private Collection.

The Blot (1921) Lois Weber (w/p/d) Phillips Smalley (co-d), NYPL

The Blot (1921). Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916) Lois Weber (w/d) Phillips Smalley (co-d), LoC

Production still, The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916) Lois Weber, Anna Pavlova, Phillips Smalley. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Lois Weber (d) The Angel of Broadway (1927) Lenore Coffee (w), BISO

Lois Weber with crew, The Angel of Broadway (1927).  Courtesy of the Bison Archives.

Letter from Lois Weber to Cecil B. DeMille, 1939. AMPAS

Letter from Lois Weber to Cecil B. DeMille, 1939. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

By the time the couple arrived back at Universal in 1916, Weber had emerged as the dominant member of the husband and wife partnership and, indeed, as one of the top directors on the lot. She was the sole author of scripts the couple adapted for the screen, and marketing materials and reviews singled out her work on the productions. Reporters visiting the couple on set found Smalley repeatedly turning to his wife for important decisions (Stamp 2006, 124–125). During these years Weber made a series of high profile and often deeply controversial films on social issues of the day, including capital punishment in The People vs. John Doe (1916), drug abuse in Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916), poverty and wage equity in Shoes (1916), and contraception in Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917).

At a time when many remained wary of cinema’s cultural impact, Weber believed in the medium’s narrative and dramatic power. Among the first to produce complex feature-length narrative in the early teens, she sought to bring the same quality of artistry to the screen as flourished in other media. Her “ideal picture entertainment,” she once said, was “a well assorted shelf of books come to life” (“Lois Weber on Scripts”). But for Weber, bringing refinement to the cinema went beyond highbrow subject matter to include films of social conscience. She often talked of using motion pictures as a means of achieving political change, aspiring to produce work “that will have an influence for good on the public mind” (Photoplay 1913, 73).

Weber achieved the height of her renown during these years: her name was routinely mentioned alongside that of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille as one of the top talents in Hollywood. In 1916, she was the first and only woman elected to the Motion Picture Directors Association, a solitary honor she would retain for decades. While at Universal it is also likely that she helped to foster the careers of other actresses employed at the studio, many of whom she had directed, including Cleo Madison, Lule Warrenton, and Dorothy Davenport Reid, who would become directors or producers in their own right.

Weber’s prominence was solidified in 1917 when she left Universal to form her own company, Lois Weber Productions, setting up shop on the grounds of a former residential estate in Los Angeles, where she erected a 12,000-square-foot outdoor shooting stage and converted the original home into the company’s administrative offices. Weber negotiated extremely lucrative distribution contracts with Universal, making her, for a time, the highest paid director in Hollywood according to Photoplay (York 87).

At her own production company, Weber began to move away from what she called the “heavy dinners” she had produced at Universal, side-stepping the censorship troubles she had endured in favor of more intimate productions focused on marriage and domesticity, concentrating her creative energies more than ever on the lives and experiences of women in films such as What Do Men Want? (1921), Too Wise Wives (1921), and The Blot (1921). In an attempt to transcend the factory-like mass production techniques employed at the major studios, Weber also experimented with different working methods, shooting on location as much as possible and often in narrative sequence (Weber 1917, 417).

Lantern slide, The Doctor and the Woman (1918), Lois Weber (p/d/a). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.  

While Weber was one of the few female screenwriters to make a sustained career out of directing, like most other female pioneers, her output slowed down considerably after 1922. The end of Weber’s marriage that same year is often cited for the abrupt shift in her career and has led some to argue that Smalley played a more central role in her filmmaking activities than had been assumed. Anthony Slide, for instance, speculates that Weber could not function “without the strong masculine presence” of her husband (1996, 131). However, it is worth noting that while Weber’s career did decline sharply following the couple’s divorce, she wrote and directed five features over the next decade: A Chapter in Her Life (1923), The Marriage Clause (1926), Sensation Seekers (1927), The Angel of Broadway (1927), and White Heat (1934). Smalley, in contrast, never again worked in any creative filmmaking capacity other than acting—and did not get much work even at that. More than likely, the downturn in Weber’s career was related to larger circumstances at play in Hollywood during the early 1920s, circumstances that compromised the fate of many independently run production companies, especially those headed by women. Plus, Weber’s focus on urban social problems, rather than amusement, and on the complexities of marriage, rather than romantic courtship, was increasingly perceived as outdated, overly didactic, and dower. “Why does Miss Weber dedicate herself, her time and her equipment to the construction of simple sermons?” one reviewer complained in 1921 (“The Screen”).

The Rosary (1912). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By the time Weber died in 1939, at the age of sixty, she was eulogized chiefly as a “star-maker,” a director notable only for fostering the talent of young starlets. Weber herself was “rediscovered” in the 1970s by historians like Anthony Slide, who dubbed her “the director who lost her way in history” (1996) and Richard Koszarski, who remarked that “the years have not been kind to Lois Weber” (1977). It is now time to ask what a history rewritten with Weber’s legacy in mind might look like.

Bibliography

Chic, Mlle.“Greatest Woman Director in the World.” Moving Picture Weekly (20 May 1916): 24-25.

Cooper, Mark Garrett. Universal Women: A Case of Institutional Change. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Koszarski, Richard.“The Years Have Not Been Kind to Lois Weber.” In Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, eds. Women and the Cinema. New York: Dutton, 1977.

“Lois Weber on Scripts.” Moving Picture World (19 Oct. 1912): 241.

Parchesky, Jennifer. “Lois Weber’s The Blot: Rewriting Melodrama, Reproducing the Middle Class.” Cinema Journal vol. 39, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 25-53.

Peltret, Elizabeth. “On the Lot with Lois Weber.” Photoplay. (Oct. 1917): 89-91.

Photoplay (Sept. 1913): 73.

Remont, Fritzi. “The Lady Behind the Lens.” Motion Picture Magazine (May 1918): 59-61, 126.

Rudman, Lisa L. “Marriage: The Ideal and the Reel, or The Cinematic Marriage Manual.” Film History vol. 1, no. 4(1987): 327-40.

“The Screen.” New York Times. (14 Nov. 1921): 22.

Slater, Thomas. “Transcending Boundaries: Lois Weber and the Discourse over Women’s Roles in the Teens and Twenties.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 18, no. 3 (July 2001): 257-71.

Slide, Anthony. Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Sloan, Kay. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: An Introduction.” Film History vol. 1, no. 4 (1987): 341-366.

Stamp, Shelley. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.

------.“Lois Weber and the Celebrity of Matronly Respectability.” In Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, eds., Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in AmericanFilm History and Method. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 89-116.

------. “Lois Weber, Progressive Cinema and the Fate of ‘The Work-A-Day Girl.'” Camera Obscura 56 (2004): 140-69.

------. “Lois Weber, Star Maker.” Vicki Callahan, ed., Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010.

------. “Presenting the Smalleys, ‘Collaborators in Authorship and Direction.” Film History vol. 18, no. 2(2006): 119-28.

------. “Taking Precautions, or Regulating Early Birth Control Films.” In Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra, eds., The Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2002, 270-97.

Van Loan, H.H. “Lois the Wizard.” Motion Picture Magazine (Jul. 1916): 41-44.

Weber, Lois. “A Dream in Realization.” Interview with Arthur Denison. Moving Picture World (21 Jul. 1917); Rpt. in Richard Koszarski, ed., Hollywood Directors, 1914-1940 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, 50-53

------.“How I Became a Motion Picture Director.” Static Flashes (24 Apr. 1915); Rpt. in Antonia Lant, ed., Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. London and New York: Verso, 2006, 658-60.

York, Cal. “Plays and Players.” Photoplay (March 1917): 87.

Archival Paper Collections:

Claire Windsor Scrapbook Collection. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Hearst Collection - Los Angeles Examiner, Los Angeles Express clippings and photographs. University of Southern California, Regional History Collection.

Lois Weber clippings file and correspondence. Anthony Slide Collection. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Lois Weber scripts. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Lois Weber clippings file. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

National Board of Review of Motion Pictures records, 1907-1971. New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Paramount Pictures scripts, 1912-1980. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library

Research Update

November 2022: Additional bibliographic resources

Norden, Martin F., ed. Lois Weber: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019.

Citation

Stamp, Shelley. "Lois Weber." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zsv8-nf69>

Lule Warrenton

by Jane Gaines

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

Frame enlargement When Little Lindy Sang (1916) Lule Warrenton (d). USW

Frame enlargement, When Little Lindy Sang (1916), directed by Lule Warrenton. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Frame enlargement When Little Lindy Sang (1916) Lule Warrenton (d), LOC

Frame enlargement, When Little Lindy Sang (1916), directed by Lule Warrenton. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

It is, of course, difficult to construct an account of Warrenton’s career from trade journal articles that were most likely based on press releases, notorious for their inflated rhetoric and unfettered optimism. However, the extant print of the Universal one-reel When Little Lindy Sang (1916), directed and produced by Warrenton, from a scenario by Olga Printzlau, tells us much more about the kind of subject matter that women tended to take up, even with the limited independence of the short-term company under the studio umbrella. At Universal, Warrenton was given the authority to develop a series of shorts for the children’s audience. Most importantly, the film stands out in its subtle treatment of racial prejudice, and would seem to be a social issue as much as an entertainment film. Lindy, played by a talented African-American child actress (Ernestine Jones) represents the one black child who is rejected by the students in the all-white class—excluded not for her color but for her loud voice. Their prejudice is turned around when Lindy saves the others by calling out “Fire” in her booming voice. The teacher then saves Lindy, who is left in the smoking building. As an example of work in the silent era, When Little Lindy Sang is a visual gem that makes an interesting comparison with an earlier treatment of black social subject matter, Alice Guy Blaché’s highly theatrical A Fool and His Money (1912), in contrast with which it has a very documentary-like feel. Even the scene in which a white student tries to wash the black off Lindy’s face in the water fountain is as much social comment as comedy.

There is no evidence as yet that Warrenton made any more films in this series, and this could explain her move the next year to the Lankershim, California, studio of what was called the Frieder Film Corporation, where she worked on a children’s film series on her own. Working as an independent, Warrenton had a larger role as well as a stake, not only producing and directing, but also adapting the classic The Birds’ Christmas Carol, which was released under the name A Bit O’ Heaven (1917). Her second venture was significantly larger in every way, this time a feature, and Moving Picture World credits her with a company of fifty people, but then deflates this with the clarification that most in the company are children (by implication, not professional adult actors). Another Frieder Film Corporation feature is described in the trade press as “an unusually high-class production filled with charming originality” (115). Still, the next two films were announced but apparently never made, and by September 1917, eight months after the announcement of her first independent film, Warrenton returned to character acting at Universal.

Some of Lule Warrenton’s work as an actress can be seen in the extant Eleanor’s Catch (1916), a short directed at Universal by Cleo Madison, where Warrenton plays the mother of Eleanor, in a bold reversal-of-expectations comedy where Eleanor (Madison) is the undercover cop who “catches” the underworld figure she lures into her “net.” An unusual situation where the women are shown to be in league against the men, Warrenton is shown here to be full-figured, but is not inclined to use her weight for comedy in the mode of popular slapstick. She appeared as well in features directed by Madison, A Soul Enslaved (1916) and Her Bitter Cup (1916), both melodramas with Madison cast in the role of a radical factory worker. [See the scenario for Her Bitter Cup.] Warrenton can also be located on the credits for Lois Weber ’s Jewel (1915) and Anthony Slide suggests that Weber, as the most powerful female director at Universal, would have been influential in Warrenton’s career, along with those who also directed at Universal during the 1911–1919 high-water mark for women at that studio (1996, 38).

Lule Warrenton (p/d/w/a), AMPAS

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

The most detailed source of information from the period on Lule Warrenton, appearing in the Moving Picture Weekly, confirms a pattern that one sees in more than one example with women film pioneers. Coming to motion pictures from a longer career in the theatre, where she both managed stars and owned her own company, Warrenton’s inclination was to try to achieve the same position within the new industry. Her age as much as her experience is the topic of this article, which lists her as fifty-two. Anthony Slide gives her years as June 22, 1892, to May 14, 1932, which, if this is correct, would have made her forty-six in 1916, not fifty-two (1996, 48). Whether she was fifty-two or fifty-eight when she left Universal in 1922, she would have been several decades beyond most actress-directors who “retired” around the same time. Warrenton could be compared here with Marie Dressler who, because of the maturity of the type she played as a character actor, was able to significantly extend the length of her career. More work needs to be done investigating Warrenton as the founder of the “Hollywood Girls’ Club”as well as on her 1923 attempt to start a “women’s company,” significantly, not in Hollywood but in San Diego.

Bibliography

A Bit o’Heaven. Rev. Motion Picture News (17 Jul. 1917): 115.

Camera! (June 1923): 23.

“Mrs. Warrenton Starts Children’s Photoplays.” Moving Picture World (17 Feb. 1917): 1030.

Pepper, Peter. “Lule Warrenton Becomes a Director.” Moving Picture Weekly (1 July 1916):  21, 31.

York, Cal. “Plays and Players.” Photoplay (Nov. 1917): 80-82.

Citation

Gaines, Jane. "Lule Warrenton." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-z5tw-7v92>

Valda Valkyrien

by Jia Jia Liu

Named after the Valkyrie of Wagnerian lore, the martial warrior maiden who led warriors into battle, Valda Valkyrien herself emerges from the Hollywood press glowing with a mythical aura. Distinguishing between the real Valkyrien and Valkyrien the Hollywood myth is key to a profile of the star.

Valda Valkyrien (a),WCFT

Valda Valkyrien portrait. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television.

Repeated coverage portrays a talented actress and star dancer, even prima ballerina, of the Royal Danish Ballet, whose beauty so dazzled King Frederik VIII of Denmark in a nationwide beauty pageant in 1914 that he bestowed upon her the title of “Valkyrien—Year of 1914 A.D.—The Most Beautiful Woman of her Race!” (29) thereby making her “the toast of every café, club and home in Copenhagen,” as reported in the Moving Picture World (1246). The same issue reports that when Centaur Film Company producer David Horsley visited Denmark in the summer of 1913, he was so impressed by the Danish diva’s on-screen work that he made her an offer to star in his upcoming feature, an offer that she reportedly refused, for she had left the film world upon her recent marriage to Baron Hrolf von Dewitz, a naval officer and, according to Moving Picture World, an “expert of the first calibre in the finer points of photoplay construction” (624). Gathering war clouds in Europe obliged Valkyrien and Dewitz to relocate to the United States in 1914. While the Baron found himself consumed by his work as a military expert for the New York Daily, Baroness Dewitz was left languishing “alone in a strange land,” whereupon she reportedly resolved to return to motion pictures in order to stave off homesickness, and accepted Horsley’s offer (1246).

In a recent article, “The Strange Case of Valda Valkyrien,” Hans J. Wollstein gives a contradictory picture of Valkyrien’s background and pre-Hollywood film career. Born in Reykjavik, Iceland (and not Copenhagen), Adele Frede, later known as Valkyrien, may have been a student at the Royal Danish Ballet, but was neither a prima ballerina nor premiere danseuse, as she later claimed. A bit part player in at least four of Danish film industry giant Nordisk’s films in 1912, including The New Shoeshine Boy (1912) and The Story of Mother (1912), Adele Frede featured prominently as the hotel owner’s flirtatious daughter in the first film and as a domestic in the second, but was by no means a star in the flourishing Danish film industry.

The myth of Valkyrien, the great Danish star who deigned to favor Horsley while stranded away from her homeland, needs to be challenged. Wollstein argues that it was Horsley who made a star out of the little-known Valkyrien. He spotted her at the moment of budding fame when she won the title of “Valkyrien” in the 1914 beauty pageant, and transported her with her fiancé Dewitz to Hollywood, where he capitalized on the industry’s awestruck attitude towards Valkyrien’s exotic beauty and supposed aristocratic lineage by showcasing the Dane in a series of fifteen one-reeler “Baroness Films.” Dubbed “a special brand of refined comedy,” these films set her on a meteoric career path that had peaked by 1916, but she had sunk into oblivion by 1919, according to Moving Picture World (1246). Valkyrien starred in Vitagraph’s Youth (1915) and played the title role in Pluragaph’s Diana (1916). The Thanhouser Film Company even wrote a three-reeler for her: The Valkyrie (1915). Valkyrien’s other Thanhouser films include: Silas Marner (1916), The Cruise of Fate (1916), and Hidden Valley (1916). For these latter two productions, her husband, the Baron Dewitz, was signed on as “technical advisor.”

At the height of her career, there were reports of the Valda Valkyrien Production Company, but it is not clear if she was ever able to work as an independent. In 1916, Valkyrien left Thanhouser for the offer of a higher salary and top billing from the William Fox Film Corporation. Fox reneged on the second part of the offer, billing Valkyrien below both the title and her costar in The Unwelcome Mother (1916). The furious Valkyrien sued Fox for $25,000 in damages, alleging that she had lost a two-year contract with Thanhouser. The outcome of the suit is unknown, but Valkyrien returned to Thanhouser, where she starred in the well-received The Image Maker (1917) as an actress who believes herself to be the reincarnation of an Egyptian princess. The Thanhouser company folded shortly thereafter, and Valkyrien turned to parts in low-quality independent productions. For awhile, she was under contract to the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation. Her final film was the red-scare melodrama Bolshevism on Trial (1919).

It would seem that the problem of the lawsuit with Fox contributed to the reversal of Valkyrien’s fortunes by potentially marking her as a troublemaker. The question of Valda Valkyrien is also the question of the way faded European aristocracy played in Hollywood and the particular way immigrants were exoticized in the industry and in the public imagination.

Bibliography

“European Film Star Joins Centaur.” Moving Picture World (29 Aug. 1914): 1246

“Mrs. Albert K. Otto.” Obit. New York Times (25 Oct. 1956): 33

“Valda Valkyrien, Former Dancer, Film Star, Dies.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (24 Oct. 1956): C11.

“Valkyrien.” Moving Picture World (22 July 1916): 624

Wollstein, Hans J. “The Strange Case of Valda Valkyrien.” Classic Images( Jan. 1997): 28-30.

------. Strangers in Hollywood: The History of Scandinavian Actors in American Films From 1910 to World War II. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1994.

Citation

Liu, Jia Jia. "Valda Valkyrien." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-2kw7-9640>

Eve Unsell

by Charlie Achuff, Madeline F. Matz

In June of 1937, Los Angeles Times writer Alma Whitaker told a heartwarming anecdote in her regular society column. Eve Unsell, Hollywood dramatist, she wrote, had “been adopted by” a motherless seal pup camped out on the beach near her Malibu home. Although the pup had already been rescued, nursed back to health, and released back into the ocean by the volunteers at Los Flores Inn, the seal had not returned to sea. When Unsell started to feed the animal every day, the pup somehow crossed the highway from the beach to the former screenwriter’s front door. “Eve now understands what is expected of her,” teased Whitaker (D7).

Lantern slide, Siberia (1926), Eve Unsell (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

While Whitaker’s sketch depicts Eve Unsell as someone everyone knew, by the late 1930s her career was waning, and such articles, or any news items about her, for that matter, were rare. Sadly, this was the last news item, and it appeared less than one month before the writer’s unexpected and unexplained death. We know only that her death certificate indicates that the cause of death was “general peritonitis” following an operation on June 26, 1937. Yet this information does not begin to explain who she was or even why she was worthy of mention in the society pages and trade magazines, let alone the Los Angeles Times. Unsell’s death also brings something else curious to our attention by her death—the fluctuation of her date of birth. Her obituary in the Los Angeles Times gives her age as fifty years old, which means that she would have been born in 1887, and perhaps following the obituary, Doyle and Slide’s Necrology also list the year of her birth as 1887 (1999, 267).

However, the 1930 US Census lists Unsell’s age as thirty-eight, which would make her year of birth 1892 not 1887. While Unsell would not have been the first person working in the entertainment industry to subtract five years from her age, we wonder about the difference between fudging for publicity and for the census, also the source of the information that Unsell was born in Chicago, Illinois. We learn from a 1919 profile of their illustrious former citizen in the Topeka Daily Capital that Unsell was raised in Caldwell, Kansas, and attended Christian College in Columbia, Missouri, after being expelled from Hardin College for lighting a firecracker in the school chapel (n.p.). Earlier in her career, in 1913, Moving Picture World supplied the information that she received training as a journalist and magazine writer while working for the Kansas City Post. She toured Europe with her parents for two years then started postgraduate study in literature and drama at Boston’s Emerson College (1427).

Further autobiographical detail is supplied by a Moving Picture World interview, also conducted in 1919, which tells us Unsell’s version of her discovery. The short story she wrote for an extension course at Oxford University, later dramatized, caught the attention of theatrical agent Beatrice deMille. DeMille hired Unsell as a play reader for her own theatrical company in New York, where Unsell was living by 1910, according to the census of that year. It was while reading plays for deMille that Unsell learned plot construction as well as what she calls plot “detecting.” It was here, too, that she met the theatre impresario David Belasco, who cast her in the theatrical comedy “Excuse Me.” Unsell glosses over a two-year stage career, focusing instead on what she learned observing rehearsals for Belasco’s “Rose of the Rancho,” a turning point in her writing career (1169).

Indeed, it was not long before Unsell’s study of dramatic structure paid off, and she sold several film scenarios to the Pathé Frères and the Kalem Company. Then in 1913, a big year for her, Moving Picture World announced that Kalem had produced Unsell’s scenario, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter (1913), and that she had signed a contract with Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse L. Lasky for what was then the Famous Players Film Company and would soon become the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company (1427). In 1915, after two years with Famous Players, she resigned, Moving Picture World tells us, to focus on freelance work (545). A year later, the same publication is interested enough in Unsell to report that although she was only at Famous Players for two years, she had written films for John Barrymore, Mary Pickford, and Marguerite Clark (1894). This leads us to assume that she was one of the more highly regarded writers in a group that then included such experts as Jeanie Macpherson and Beulah Marie Dix.

Captain January,(1924).

Screenshot, Captain January (1924).

If there is a pattern to Eve Unsell’s eighteen-year career, it would be alternation between freelance and studio contract work. A year after leaving the Lasky company, and having just opened her own offices in New York to handle the large amount of work that had come to her, Unsell was offered a contract to write for what in 1916 would become Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. Accepting Lasky’s offer, she moved from New York to Los Angeles, and it would be with the new Lasky company that Unsell would have more responsibility and opportunity than ever before. The headline “Eve Unsell Will Sail for England” announced that she had been selected by Lasky to head Famous Players-Lasky Film Producers, whose aim was to feature European locations and to produce “the works of the greatest Continental writers” (515). As Rachael Low tells us in her history of the British Film Industry, both Unsell and Margaret Turnbull went to Islington as writers, but only stayed with the relatively unsuccessful venture two years (1971, 142–3). Of the twelve pictures produced in those two years, Unsell wrote one, The Call of Youth (1921). This professional experience must have been confidence-building for Unsell, who by 1921 had resigned from what in 1916 had become the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation and was back in New York and forming her own company, Eve Unsell Photoplay Staff, Inc., the only company of its kind headed by a woman. Advertising itself as bringing together the best scenarists in the industry: the company offered “a well selected group of trained writers” who would edit, synopsize, and revise scripts, providing, as Photoplay worded it that year, “a detailed personal service” to motion picture producers who would not need to maintain their own scenario departments if they used this service (n. pag.). It is unclear what happened to the Eve Unsell Photoplay Staff, Inc., but the remainder of the 1920s saw continued high activity in Unsell’s career as a writer.

Advertisement slide Ethel Clayton (a) The Price of Possession (1921), MoMI

Lantern slide, The Price of Possession (1921). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image. 

Moving between freelance and studio work, she headed the scenario department of R-C Pictures in Los Angeles and worked with the staff at Preferred Pictures as well as in Cecil B. DeMille’s writing department, helping to create films for such stars as “Baby Peggy” Montgomery and Clara Bow. The extant Baby Peggy film Captain January (1924) has been revived in recent years for silent film festival screenings. This heartwarming film tells the story of a shipwrecked little girl who is rescued and raised by a kindly lighthouse keeper until the outside world attempts to break them up.

In her remarkably busy career, Eve Unsell wrote original scenarios or adapted sources that were produced as more than ninety films, and she served as a film editor as well on at least six others. It is possible that the number of titles she worked on exceeds this estimate, and here we would need to consider that she also used the pseudonym Oliver W. Geoffreys as well as listed her name as E. M. Unsell, as was often the practice during this period. We know little more of her private life than that she was married to Lester Blankfield from 1911 until her death in 1937. Many details of her career are as yet unknown, although it is clear from her filmography that she was prolific, and from the business challenges that she took on herself as well as from the level of responsibility she was given in the Famous Players-Lasky Company that she exemplified the consummate female career professional.

See alsoBeatrice De Mille, Beulah Marie Dix, Jeanie Macpherson, Mary PickfordMargaret Turnbull, “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

“Eve Unsell.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (8 July 1937): A20.

“Eva [sic] Unsell Leases Famous Players.” Moving Picture World (24 April 1915): 545.

“Eve Unsell Will Sail For England.” Moving Picture World (26 July 1919): 515.

“Fame for Kansas Girl.” Topeka Daily Capital (20 Jul. 1919): n.p. clippings file, Kansas State Historical Society.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film 1918-1929. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1971.

“New Famous Players Script Writer.” Moving Picture World (20 Dec. 1913): 1427.

“Miss Eva [sic] Unsell with Lasky.” Moving Picture World (10 June 1916): 1894.

Unsell, Eve. “The 'Routine' of Film Adaptation.” In Cinema Craftmanship: A Book for Photoplaywrights. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1921: 86-95.

------. et al. “The Feminine Mind in Picture Making.” Film Daily (7 June 1925): 113, 115.

Weitzel, Edward. “Confessions of a Scenarist.” Moving Picture World (24 May 1919): 1169.

Whitaker, Alma. “Dramatist Turns Animal Trainer.” Los Angeles Times (13 Jun. 1937): D7.

U. S. Census 1930. [Lester Blankfield household] Los Angeles, California. Roll 134, Page 7B, Enumeration District 60.

Photoplay (25 Jan. 1921): n.p. Clippings file. Museum of Modern Art.

Archival Paper Collections:

Eve Unsell Clippings File. Kansas Historical Society.

Eve Unsell Clippings File. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Citation

Achuff, Charlie; Madeline F Matz. "Eve Unsell." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-t6bp-dp33>

Florence Turner

by Charlie Keil, Jon Burrows

This particular pioneer had a transcontinental career. As a result, her profile includes multiple essays by different authors.

Her American Career

By Charlie Keil

What did it mean to be a film star in the second decade of film’s existence, at a time when the idea of film stardom itself was just beginning to take shape? The career of Florence Turner offers an illuminating opportunity to consider this question, especially as she has been identified as one of the two “first big movie stars” (the other being Florence Lawrence) by no less an authority than Eileen Bowser (Bowser 1994). Aside from sharing the same first name, Turner and Lawrence both found themselves initially identified with the companies producing their motion pictures: Lawrence came to be known as “the Biograph Girl” while Turner gained fame as “the Vitagraph Girl.” The two were also among the first actors to make personal appearances in promotion of their films, ushering in an era when performers were enlisted to publicize themselves, thereby aiding in the emergence of cinema as an institution.

Florence Turner (p/a) publicity portrait, AMPAS

Publicity portrait, Florence Turner. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

As Richard deCordova has insightfully indicated, actors like Turner represented the first instance when appreciation of a film star derived from fan knowledge of that figure’s film performances rather than a star persona established within another popular medium, primarily the theatre (1990, 40). For that reason, Turner’s on-screen portrayals during her formative years at Vitagraph were probably more important to her stardom than any other element. Though not the only female performer of note at the studio, she was undoubtedly its most popular actress, and a number of the plum dramatic and comedic roles for women went to Turner until she left Vitagraph in 1913. In the years immediately following the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company, Biograph and Vitagraph emerged as the most accomplished of the so-called Trust companies, but unlike its rival, Vitagraph was able to retain the services of its most prominent female star for several years. For that reason, despite the presence of other notable female performers including Julia Swayne Gordon, Rose Tapley, Clara Kimball Young, Lillian Walker, and, eventually, Norma Talmage, during Turner’s tenure at Vitagraph, she remained the face of the company for over five years.

A measurement of Turner’s prominence at Vitagraph can be taken when one considers the nature of her performances in a selection of her extant films. A skilled comedienne, Turner nonetheless excelled in dramatic roles that called upon her growing command of the developing verisimilar style perfected at Vitagraph during this time. In particular, reflexive roles casting Turner as an actress seemed designed to showcase her prodigious talent. In Renunciation (1910), for example, Turner plays a young woman whose fiancé’s father persuades her to discourage his son’s attentions by emulating a state of dissolution. The film’s success hinges on Turner’s ability to portray convincingly an actress giving a performance designed to deceive her diegetic audience, while at the same time prompting the film’s viewers to recognize both the persuasiveness of the performance and the true emotions the character experiences when engaged in the ruse. Possibly Turner’s most demanding role was the rejected lover in Jealousy (1911), a film now lost. Promoted by Vitagraph as “A Study in the Art of Dramatic Expression by Florence E. Turner,” the film was a tour de force for the actress, as she was the sole performer on-screen for the entirety of Jealousy’s running time. Her accomplishment led Vitagraph to proclaim that “this is a supreme exhibition of histrionic excellence that challenges Bernhardt and Mrs. Leslie Carter at their best” (“Special Vitagraph Feature” 8). Moving Picture World, in August 1911, stressed the centrality of performance to the effectiveness of the film: “[The actress] has the courage to let the truth be told in her countenance and movements. The audience gazes into the mystery of a human soul” (361).

Florence Turner (p/a), NYPL

Florence Turner. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Florence Turner (p/a)

Portrait, Florence Turner. Private Collection.

Having joined Vitagraph at an early stage in its development, Turner gained the chance to mature with the company. According to some reports, she performed numerous duties there, including payroll and overseeing the other actors. Whether she involved herself in the creating of the films during this phase of her career is unknown; certainly she claimed to have written scripts when interviewed later in life, but did not specify whether this applied only to her post-Vitagraph endeavours in Britain. We can safely believe her when she says that “she was the first woman in America ever engaged as a permanent leading woman [in films].” And at one point she was undoubtedly the most popular motion picture actress in the US, receiving nearly 100,000 votes in a 1912 poll (more than double than what was earned by Mary Pickford).

Leaving America at the peak of her fame, Turner gained greater independence in Britain, forming the Turner Films Company in collaboration with Larry Trimble, who had directed her at Vitagraph. She enjoyed some success in Britain, releasing numerous films there before returning to the US for a brief period in the late teens and then going back to the UK for four more years. By the mid-1920s she had permanently relocated to Hollywood, but never recaptured the massive popularity she enjoyed prior to her initial departure, subsisting on bit parts for the remainder of her career. Though her ascendancy coincided with the very emergence of early film stardom itself, Turner never successfully moved beyond what deCordova would describe as a “picture personality,” a star defined principally by the strength of her performances (1990, 87). Fittingly, perhaps, Turner’s fame waned as cinema achieved the status of mass entertainment, abetted by a press-propelled star worship focused on off-screen scandals and carefully crafted personae that relegated her type of star image to an earlier era.

Her British Career

By Jon Burrows

In 1913, Florence Turner embarked upon an unprecedented new development in her career when she left Vitagraph, crossed the Atlantic and established her own production company, Turner Films, in Britain. She remained there for the next three years, appearing in ten shorts, mostly comedies, and sixteen feature film “exclusives.” Turner can thus be seen as the first American film star to become aware of, and capitalise upon, the international dimension of her burgeoning celebrity. Turner and her associates explained this dramatic move as a direct consequence of the stifling influence of the Motion Picture Patents Company upon the American film industry. She wanted to take control of her own career and establish herself as an autonomous agent, but felt that the current “trade factionalism” in the US created too many difficulties for independent producers. The UK, on the other hand, remained an open market in which there were no cartels dictating distribution practices.

The Turner Films operation rented the studio facilities and many of the stock company players of the Hepworth Manufacturing Company in Walton-on-Thames. The Vitagraph influence remained strong, however. Turner was joined in England by her former director Larry Trimble, her former co-star Tom Powers, and by “Jean the Vitagraph Dog.” She was also accompanied for the duration of her stay by her mother Frances Turner – herself a former Vitagraph actress, who appeared in at least one of Florence’s British films. Another significant continuity with Turner’s working life in America is represented by the numerous live appearances she made in British variety theaters and music halls. Turner was a gifted mimic and facial contortionist, and her act, which she first toured around US vaudeville theaters after leaving Vitagraph early in 1913, consisted of a series of caricatured imitations of various everyday character types and celebrities of stage and screen. In fact, she first announced her arrival in British cultural life on May 26, 1913, with a personal appearance at one of the West End’s premier variety theaters, the London Pavilion. Before any of her British films were ready for release, she then embarked upon a major nationwide tour of the theaters belonging to Britain’s biggest music hall syndicate, Moss Empires. It remains to be established if Turner had genuine ambitions to establish herself as a bona fide star of British vaudeville or whether she principally arranged such bookings as a lucrative means of publicizing her new film venture. Whatever the aims behind this strategy, she continued to tour throughout England, Scotland and Wales right up to the point of her return to New York in 1916. By so doing she can be considered as the first performer in the UK who was able to exploit a screen celebrity to launch a successful, although subsidiary, stage career.

There was no question of this eclipsing her popularity in the cinema, however. Even without the resources of Vitagraph behind them, Turner Films very effectively built upon the exposure Florence Turner had gained with her previous employers. In June 1914 she was voted Britain’s favourite female film star by readers of Pictures and the Picturegoer in the first such fan magazine popularity poll to be undertaken in the UK (358-359). Despite the increasing stranglehold on the British market which American film companies began to exercise during the First World War, Turner appears to have maintained an extremely high level of fame and recognition in her adopted country. In a 1915 Pictures and the Picturegoer poll she gained the runner’s up position behind Mary Pickford (112). A 1916 “Films Beauty Contest” run by the Picture Palace News placed her fourth in the nation’s affections (578).

A measure of Turner’s cachet at the local box office is demonstrated by the circumstances surrounding the production and exhibition of her 1915 film My Old Dutch. Although produced by Turner Films, My Old Dutch was commissioned and financed by Britain’s biggest distributor, Ideal, as a vehicle for the legendary music hall comedian Albert Chevalier, and it loosely dramatised his internationally famous “coster” song of the same name. It was one of the most prestigious productions of the year, and such was the longstanding native reverence for Chevalier that one critic felt that this record of his stage act should be viewed as “something almost sacred.” But despite the inevitable fact that Turner did not quite receive equal billing in terms of the way that the film was promoted, she did receive exactly the same £500 fee as Chevalier for her services, which was comfortably the highest sum ever paid to an actress in a British film at that time (Rowson, 66). The film was a phenomenal success in its home market. By 1918 it had been booked by 1,600 theaters, more than one-third of all cinemas in the UK, setting a new record for a feature film marketed as an “exclusive.” Ideal calculated that over five million people in Britain had watched the film during the war. It would appear that My Old Dutch was also well received in the U.S. where it was distributed by Universal and was reported to have broken all booking records for a British film in America.

Although during her British sojourn Turner did not sustain the level of popularity and stardom that she had enjoyed as a Vitagraph actress, Turner Films boasted an unusually strong transatlantic export record among British producers, and certainly most, if not all, of Turner’s British films were released in her home country. Turner Films also enjoyed a very high reputation for the technical quality of its filmmaking among its British peers. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that, despite its meagre operating resources and “borrowed” facilities, the company was entrusted by Ideal with the task of filming a number of other expensive star vehicles for eminent theatrical actors such as Sir John Hare and Henry Ainley. Turner’s business partner, Larry Trimble, who directed the vast majority of Turner productions, deserves a good deal of the credit for these achievements. But it is also important to note that after becoming an independent producer Florence Turner herself began to take a much more active role behind the camera in the making of her films. According to the credits published in trade paper reviews and publicity items, Turner took a direct hand in the scripting of six of her British films in the 1910s. The real scale of her contributions as a screenwriter may conceivably have been much more extensive than this.

Frame enlargement Florence Turner (a/p/d/o) 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.

Frame enlargement Florence Turner (a/p/d/o) 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.

The trade press also name Turner as the director of one of these films: Daisy Doodad’s Dial (1914), although most standard filmographic sources do not acknowledge the fact. Fortuitously, this is one of only two of Turner’s British films from the 1910s that survives. The original credit sequence in the viewing print held by the National Film and Television Archive in London definitively confirms that Turner was the writer, director and star of Daisy Doodad’s Dial. The film is a split-reel comic short, principally designed as a means of showcasing Turner’s much-publicized talent for facial contortion from in her music hall act. The unashamedly contrived scenario commences with Daisy Doodad and her husband played by Larry Trimble in a neat reversal of their normal working relationship, planning to enter a competition for pulling grotesque faces. Daisy is sick on the day and misses the contest; much to her annoyance, her husband returns victorious. Her eagerness to succeed is intensified by the time the next competition comes around, and she practices avidly on her journey to the venue. The faces she pulls terrify male bystanders she encounters and Daisy, arrested for disturbing the peace,  misses out on the chance to compete once again. Suspecting her husband of orchestrating the arrest to scuttle her chances, Daisy lambasts him in public. She suffers a  comeuppance, however, haunted in her sleep that night by her own bizarre grimaces. The film ends with a coda: Turner mugs directly at the camera in close up, unleashing another round of “gurning.”

Daisy Doodad’s Dial is unusual among surviving British films of this era for its confident use of a relatively fast cutting pace, with eighteen shots in just over 500 feet, and a preponderance of medium shot framings. Much like earlier French comedies such as Alice Guy’s Madame a des envies (Gaumont, 1906), Daisy invites a reading interested in presenting the chaos caused by an extrovert woman in the public sphere. But it is no substitute for the more ambitious four-reel  avowedly feminist production made late in 1914 which Turner scripted, also taking the starring role: Shopgirls; or, The Great Question. This polemical film,  consciously intended to “create a great amount of public discussion,” sought to publicise the exploitation of young female shop assistants. Turner plays a shopgirl whose subsistence level wages bring her to such a state of financial despair that she attempts to prostitute herself. In synopsis form Shopgirls bears close thematic affinities with the Lois Weber film Shoes (1916). Turner repeatedly publicised her most “personal” project, and claimed to have based the screenplay upon documentary evidence she had gathered while working incognito in a New York department store during a Christmas vacation spent away from the Vitagraph studios.

Despite the  continuing buoyancy of Turner Films, Turner and Trimble returned to the U.S. together in November 1916. Trimble explained this decision as a consequence of the difficulties involved in hiring technicians and actors and securing permits for location shooting in the UK as homefront wartime hardships started to seriously impinge upon the business of film production. He gave as a second reason the fact that “We have now arrived at a stage where our productions are being sought after in America, and it is absolutely necessary that we should keep in touch with that market in order to deliver the goods.”  Yet to be properly researched and explained is why it should then take more than two years before Turner acted in an American film again. It can hardly be that her name had lost all meaning for U.S. audiences: barely four months before she arrived back home, Mutual had bought  the stateside rights to release eight of Turner Films’ most recent productions. In August 1918 The Bioscope reported that Turner had agreed to a contract with Ideal to return to England but that this plan had been thwarted by passport problems (5). When Turner did finally reappear in American films a year later she had already begun to be relegated to the status of supporting player. It’s little wonder, then, that she agreed to return to Britain and a guaranteed star billing in 1921 after receiving another invitation from Ideal. As in the previous decade, she stayed in the UK for a further three years, making six features and four shorts, and once again her mother Frances relocated with her. She also revived her music hall act with an updated set of film star impersonations. Lightning did not quite strike twice however: even in the significantly less competitive environment of the British film industry in the early 1920s Turner had drifted out of contention for lead roles in A-list productions some time before she returned to the US in May 1924.

Bibliography

American Career Profile Bibliography:

Harrison, Louis Reeves. “Superior Plays.”Moving Picture World (12 Aug. 1911): 361-362.

Keil, Charlie. Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

“Picture Personalities. Miss Florence E. Turner: The Vitagraph Girl.” Moving Picture World (23 July 1910): 187-188.

Smith, Frederick James. “Unwept, Unhonored and Unfilmed.” Photoplay (July 1924): 64-67, 101-103.

“Special Vitagraph Feature At Crystal.” Meriden Morning Record (27 September 1911): 8

“Vitagraph Girl Feted.” Moving Picture World (23 April 1910): 644.

British Career Profile Bibliography:

“’Shopgirls.’ Miss Florence Turner’s Remarkable New Venture,” The Bioscope (21 January 1915): 227.

The Bioscope (15 August 1918): 5.

The Cinema: News and Property Gazette (8 July 1915): 52.

Cook, Ann-Marie, “The Adventures of the Vitagraph Girl in England.” In Pimple, Pranks & Pratfalls: British Film Comedy Before 1930. Eds. Alan Burton  and Laraine Porter. Trowbridge: Flicks, 2000. 34-5.

“Films Beauty Contest,”Picture Palace News (24 April, 1916): 578.

Films: The Cinema Trade Journal (25 April 1918): 5.

“Florence Turner Going to England.” Moving Picture World (22 March 1913): 1225.

“The Girl on the Film No. 9: Miss Florence Turner.” Pictures and the Picturegoer (6 June 1914): 358-359.

Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (12 October 1916): 18.

Moving Picture World (18 March 1916): 1816.

Pictures and the Picturegoer. (6 November 1915): 112.

Rowson, Harry, “’Ideals’ of Wardour Street.” Unpublished ms., c. 1951. British Film Institute, Special Collections.

Slide, Anthony, and  Alan Gevinson. The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company. 2nd ed. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987.

Archival Paper Collections: US & UK

Harry Rowson Collection. British Film Institute, Special Collections.

Florence Turner scrapbooks, 1910-1928. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Seaver Center for Western History Research.

Citation

Keil, Charlie; Jon Burrows. "Florence Turner." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-86hm-2j89>

Margaret Turnbull

by Sarah Delahousse

The year 1920 marked a significant career move for Margaret Turnbull. An article in the September 4 issue of Moving Picture World announced that she was chosen to write scenarios for the newly created Famous Players-Lasky studios in Islington, England. Her career with the studio up to this point was prolific; the article credits her with writing or adapting approximately sixty screenplays. She was also credited with writing novels and plays, and the article claimed that her diverse background enhanced her aptitude for “adapting the work of British writers for the screen” (66). One notable play was “Classmates”  that she cowrote in 1907 with William deMille. This work was likely a significant success because it was made into a film in 1914. DeMille also joined Famous Players-Lasky in that year along with Turnbull’s brother Hector, who would gain fame a year later as the main screenwriter on The Cheat (1915). Thus, Turnbull had important connections at the studio’s Scenario Department in Hollywood.

Margaret Turnbull was born in Scotland (Doyle 1999, 265), and while her birth date so far has been unknown, the 1900 US Census lists a stenographer by the name of Margaret Turnbull of Scottish heritage as living with her four unmarried sisters and two brothers, including Hector, in Manhattan, listing her age as twenty-seven—making her year of birth 1872.

Upon joining the studio in 1915, Turnbull quickly proved herself to be an apt writer for film, producing eight scenarios. A Moving Picture World review of one film, The Case of Becky (1915), marvels at its fascinating plotline. The film deals with a troubled young woman, Becky, who suffers from multiple personalities. With the help of a doctor, she is eventually cured of her condition. The review privileged the film’s strong acting, especially Blanche Sweet’s interpretation of Becky, but it also hints at Turnbull’s effective contribution to the film’s success. While her name is never mentioned, the review commented that the film’s “workings of the dual personality give rise to some weird and at times humorous situations and gain both the profound interest and the profound sympathy of the audience” (2198). Turnbull’s vision proved authentic and interesting to its audience through strong character development and skill in effectively interweaving comedy and drama within a psychological context that was both convincing and poignant.

Margaret Turnbull. AMPAS

Margaret Turnbull. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick. 

Margaret Turnbull also managed to continue writing novels in between screenplays, and her Hollywood experience proved a fruitful inspiration. Her 1918 novel The Close-Up touched on this aspect of her life to an extent. Moving Picture World described the work as “interesting not only as a glimpse into pictureland, but as a red-blooded romance” where Hollywood is “merely the backdrop to a well-planned story” (940). The story deals with a stenographer, Kate Lawford, whose boss, attorney Tom Crews, Jr., wants to quit working for his father’s firm and to start over in California. He encourages her to join him and get into the business herself. At first, she declines because she expects to marry her boyfriend in the near future, but her boss remains hopeful that she will reconsider. Surprised by his persistence, Kate begins to question her dream of matrimony, realizing that “[S]omehow the mere telling, the putting it into words, had dimmed the glory of the dream” (Turnbull 16). The chapter concludes with the suggestion that, while still dreaming of marriage, she will accept the offer and pursue a different goal in the film industry with perhaps a love triangle to complicate matters.

Margaret Turnbull returned to the United States from England in 1921 when Famous Players-Lasky replaced its American production staff with a British one (Low 143). She returned to Hollywood where she wrote and adapted nine screenplays over the next three years, the last a remake of Classmates in 1924. Yet, at one point between 1921 and 1923, Turnbull may have visited France, and certainly wrote the screenplay for the French film La Bataille (1923). According to the Sessue Hayakawa oral history taken by Columbia University in 1959, the actor left the United States to go to France to appear in the film, produced by Film d’Art and adapted from the novel by Claude Farrière: “Hector Tombeau’s sister, Maragaret Tombeau [sic], — she wrote the manuscript, she was in France.” It would appear that she remained in France after he arrived since Hayakawa states that he would only appear in the film if they agreed to alter the screenplay. “So I went to France, and Miss Margaret Tombeau [sic] was there,” he continues. Hayakawa does not detail how the screenplay in manuscript form was changed, but he does recount how he procured the battleships and the costumes and guns for the production, which was filmed in Toulon. In his book on Hayakawa, Daisuke Miyao confirms that Turnbull wrote the screenplay for La Bataille and further reflects that her screenplays were effective in  “crystallizing” Hayakawa’s star image at Lasky with titles such as  Alien Souls (1916) and The Victoria Cross (1916). If the screenplay was changed, it was probably, as Miyao reports, to make the production more of a star vehicle to revitalize the actor’s career by incorporating the motifs that had structured his films at Lasky and Robertson-Cole (262).

Margaret Turbull. AMPAS

Margaret Turnbull. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick.

Giuliana Muscio says that Turnbull “quit writing after 1924,” and surmises that she may have retired due to her age, noting that she died in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, eighteen years later. However, according to her filmography, Turnbull produced fewer scripts in comparison to her work before 1920. Her decline corresponds with the decline in opportunities for women to work in a studio system that no longer needed their presence in order to achieve respectability among the middle and upper classes.

With additional research by Jane Gaines.

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

“The Case of Becky.” Rev. Moving Picture World (25 Sept. 1915): 2198.

Hayakawa, Sessue. “Popular Arts Project: Sessue Hayakawa 1959.” Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Low, Rachael. The History of British Film: 1918-1929. Vol. 4. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1971. 5 vols.

“Margaret Turnbull to Write Continuities at Islington.” Moving Picture World (4 Sept. 1920): 66.

“Miss M. Turnbull, Author, Scenarist.” Obit. New York Times (13 June 1942): 15.

“Miss Turnbull’s Book.” Moving Picture World (30 Nov. 1918): 940.

Miyao, Daisuke. Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 262.

Muscio, Giuliana. “Women Screenwriters in American Silent Cinema.” Unpublished Conference paper. Women and the Silent Screen III. Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, June 3, 2004.

Turnbull, Margaret. The Close-Up. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1918.

U. S. Census 1900. Census Place: Kearney Ward 4, Hudson, New Jersey. Roll T623_974, Page 26A, Enumeration District 53.

U. S. Census 1910. Census Place: Manhattan Ward 12, New York, New York. Roll T624_1027, Page 7A, Enumeration District 723.

Archival Paper Collections:

Reminiscences of S.I. Hayakawa. April, 1959. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Zelda Fitzgerald papers, 1900-1948. Princeton University Library, Manuscript Division.

Citation

Delahousse, Sarah. "Margaret Turnbull." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-5za0-x430>

Gertrude Homan Thanhouser

by Ned Thanhouser

While Thanhouser Company may not be one of the best known of the early film companies, what is certain is that its founder and public figurehead was Edwin Thanhouser. Missing from this account, however, is the critical role played by his wife, Gertrude Homan Thanhouser. She was a major contributor to the success of the Thanhouser film enterprise, where she worked as actress, scenario writer, film editor, and studio executive.

Gertrude Thanhouser portrait, circa 1890s. PCNH

Gertrude Thanhouser portrait, circa 1890s. Private Collection. 

Gertrude Thanhouser portrait, circa 1890s. PCNH

Gertrude Thanhouser portrait, circa 1890s. Private Collection. 

Production still from "From the River's Depths." PCNH

Production still from From the River’s Depths (1915). Private Collection. 

Production still from "Their One Love" (1915), featuring Marion and Madeline Fairbanks (the Thanhouser twins). PCNH

Production still from Their One Love (1915), featuring Marion and Madeline Fairbanks (the Thanhouser twins). Private Collection. 

Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser with their two children, Lloyd and Marie in the Swiss Alps, 1913. PCNH

Edwin and Gertrude Thanhouser with their two children, Lloyd and Marie, in the Swiss Alps, 1913. Private Collection. 

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

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

In the spring of 1909, Gertrude moved with her husband, actor turned theatre manager Edwin Thanhouser, to New York, where they established Thanhouser Company as an independent motion picture production studio. From the certificate of incorporation, signed in New York by Louis S. Philips and dated October 28, 1909, we see that the company was capitalized with $10,000 divided into one hundred shares: ninety-eight in Gertrude’s name as secretary, and one share each to Edwin, president, and Lloyd Lonergan, Gertrude’s brother-in-law and vice president. Leon J. Rubenstein in Billboard reported that Edwin was the first to head an American motion picture studio with a theatrical background, and Gertrude’s acting career of fourteen years gave her the stagecraft to be a powerful and creative force in this new venture. Magazine articles as well as family history document Gertrude’s key role in the formation, management, and operation of the company.

Gertrude was featured in Thanhouser’s second film release, St. Elmo (1910). The Morning Telegraph 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.” It was the only film on which she received acting credit. She received co-scenario writing credit, however, with her brother-in-law Lloyd Lonergan, for the screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” which survives. Reviews for this film, like that in Moving Picture World, were positive: “Undoubtedly Mr. Thanhouser’s long knowledge of stagecraft stood him good stead in posing this picture.” By the summer of 1910, Thanhouser Company had earned enthusiastic approval as one of the leading independent film production companies. Frank Woods wrote in the New York Dramatic Mirror: “… 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.” As her son, Lloyd F. Thanhouser, recalled in August 1980, Gertrude’s contributions to scenario development, mise-en-scène, and editing helped make these good reviews possible.

In the spring of 1912, three years after establishing Thanhouser Company as a producer of high quality films, Gertrude, Edwin, and Lloyd Lonergan sold their shares in the company to producer Charles J. Hite of Mutual Film Corporation for $250,000, as reported in the New Rochelle Pioneer. Gertrude, Edwin, Lonergan, and Hite were appointed to the board of directors of Mutual’s new acquisition, now incorporated as “Thanhouser Film Corporation.” In the fall of 1912, Hanford C. Judson reports for the Moving Picture World that Gertrude and Edwin took their two children on a “grand tour” of Europe, where they studied the European film industry with the intention of returning to America to resume their careers in motion pictures. Charles J. Hite assumed leadership of the corporation when Gertrude and Edwin left for Europe. 

According to Q. David Bowers, Hite expanded the reputation of the “Thanhouser” brand as an innovative leader in the industry with the twenty-three episode serial The Million Dollar Mystery and two new brands: “Princess Films” and “Falstaff” comedies (1995). When World War I erupted in August 1914, the Thanhouser family made a hasty escape back to the US on a refugee ship. Within weeks of Gertrude and Edwin landing in New York in September 1914, Charles Hite was tragically killed in an automobile accident, leaving the Thanhouser Film Corporation leaderless and adrift. In February 1915, the Mutual Film Corporation board of directors in an extraordinary move lured Edwin out of retirement. He was made president of the Thanhouser Film Corporation on a three-year contract with a salary of $75,000 per year. Photoplay tells us that Edwin and Gertrude returned in February 1915 to lead the company that bore their name.

According to the Morning Telegraph, Gertrude 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 one-reel drama, still extant, capitalized on the 50th 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: “As a whole: A gem; Story: Different…,” wrote Wid Gunning in the Evening Mail (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; as the Moving Picture World notes, she attended a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson on February 12, 1916.

In the summer of 1916, the untimely death of Thanhouser leading actress Florence LaBadie and the rise of films with big name stars such as Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin contributed to the decline in popularity of Thanhouser films. Ejected from Mutual’s distribution schedule, Edwin was forced to scale back operations and speculatively produce feature films for sale to Pathé Exchange, and, according to Bowers, Gertrude now spent little time at the factory. In 1918, Motography reports, the founders and former owners retired from the film industry, leaving the Thanhouser Film Corporation with a positive bank balance, unlike many others of the era.

The full extent of Gertrude Thanhouser’s contributions to the success of the Thanhouser film enterprise and the early film industry will never be known for certain. Much of the public records cite Edwin and only give credit to Gertrude when her role was documented by company releases. It is evident, however, that Gertrude’s day-to-day involvement in the management of the company and her leadership over the creative aspects of scenario development and film editing were significant contributions to the success of the Thanhouser film enterprise.

See also: “All in the Family: The Thanhouser Studio

Bibliography

Bowers, Q. David. Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History. CD-ROM. Portland: Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, 1995.

Gunning, Wid. “Their Only Love.” Rev. Evening Mail (17 Apr. 1915): 5.

Judson, Hanford C. “Frou Frou.” Rev. Moving Picture World (17 Jan. 1914): 277.

Motography (4 May 1918). Moving Picture World (22 Jan. 1916): n.p.

The New Rochelle Pioneer (13 Apr. 1912): n.p.

Photoplay (May 1915): n.p.

St. Elmo. Rev. The Morning Telegraph (27 Mar. 1910): n.p.

“The Thanhouser’s ‘Winter’s Tale.’” Moving Picture World (21 May 1910): 835-837.

Rubenstein, Leon J. The Billboard (21 Oct. 1911): n.p.

Thanhouser, Edwin. Interview by Leon J. Rubenstein. Moving Picture World (26 Feb. 1910): n.p.

Thanhouser, Lloyd F. Oral History, 1980 (unpublished audiotapes). Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc. collection.

Woods, Frank E., “The Spectator.” The New York Dramatic Mirror (Summer 1910): n.p.

Archival Paper Collections:

Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

Citation

Thanhouser, Ned. "Gertrude Homan Thanhouser." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-24qe-7d47>

Alice Terry

by Heidi Kenaga

Alice Terry is probably best known to silent cinema historians in relation to the men with whom she frequently worked—Rudolph Valentino, in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Conquering Power (1921); Ramon Novarro, in Scaramouche (1923) and The Arab (1924); and her husband, Rex Ingram, who directed Terry in all of these films as well as eight others. “Rex and His Queen” were one of the more celebrated director-actress teams of the 1920s, but there are indications that performing was only one dimension of Terry’s contribution to their work together. The most concrete acknowledgment of this behind-the-camera labor is found in their last film, Baroud (1932), in which she did not appear but for which she received on-screen co-directorial credit.

Alice Terry (a) Scaramouche (1923), PCJY

Alice Terry,  Scaramouche (1923). Private Collection.

Alice Terry (a) Scaramouche (1923), PC

Alice Terry,  Scaramouche (1923). Private Collection. 

Alice Terry (a), Rex Ingram The Arab (1924), PC

Alice Terry and Rex Ingram, The Arab (1924). Private Collection. 

Alice Terry (d/a) c. 1923, PC

Alice Terry, c. 1923. Private Collection.

Alice Terry. USW

Alice Terry. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Alice Terry (a) Scaramouche (1923),PC

Alice Terry, Scaramouche (1923). Private Collection. 

Alice Terry (d/a), PCJY

Alice Terry. Private Collection.

Alice Terry Ingram, death certificate. PC

Alice Terry Ingram, death certificate. Private Collection.

Trade and publicity materials suggest that around 1915 Alice began working as an extra to help her family financially. The general tenor of the publicity narratives after her sudden success in Four Horsemen was that she had been a “shy little extra,” nice but not terribly ambitious, attractive but not especially talented, and interested primarily in steady work to support her family rather than in becoming an actress. She had even been interested in other motion picture jobs, considering work as a script girl or a cutter behind the camera as preferable to performing in front of it. Terry’s status began to change after meeting Ingram, who promoted her to small parts in his early Metro Pictures films in the late teens. He also directed her physical transformation, encouraging her to wear a blond wig over her own auburn hair, overseeing a program of weight loss and dental repair, and creating “Alice Terry”—both the name and the image—as his protégé.

The trade and fan press promoted Rex Ingram’s authority over all his productions and considered Alice to be part of them, referring to her as “pliant clay” in the hands of her director, soon to become her husband. Terry herself disclaimed any agency for the new direction of her career, both in contemporary materials and upon subsequent recollection, as in the 1958 interview with George Pratt, and in fact it was this very lack of self-promotion that distinguished her persona. As Picture Play commented in a 1924 article, she was set apart by “her unrestrained enthusiasm for her husband, her unqualified praise for his work, with absolutely no mention of her own minor but definite achievements.” Further, “under his competent direction she will doubtless continue to acquit herself creditably… [As such] there is no valid reason for her to head her own company” (104).

In a sense, however, Terry already did head things up. A sensitive reading of publicity materials as well as anecdotal evidence suggests more agency on Terry’s part, as the de facto manager of the productions of the acclaimed director Rex Ingram. As she wryly commented to Photoplay in 1924, “[it] takes all my talent to play the successful actress and successful wife” (104). After World War I, Ingram experienced a succession of emotional vicissitudes, apparently the result of a physical injury he received while briefly serving in the Royal Canadian Flying Corps in late 1918. According to Anthony Slide, who interviewed Terry in later years, the actress was well equipped to handle such episodes and understood, perhaps better than Ingram himself, the commercial imperatives of studio filmmaking. After years in the business, Slide notes, the former extra had learned “many aspects of the creative process,” which proved invaluable when she had to complete Ingram’s work. As Slide describes the situation: “Ingram became incapacitated and too moody to work… [then] she would take over direction of his features” (2002, 380). Thus, although Terry is only given on-screen credit for Baroud—a sound film made after Ingram’s heyday and outside the US studio system—it is possible she also codirected some parts of Ingram’s motion pictures between 1921 and 1929.

Only in a 1932 article in New Movie entitled “Presenting Rex Ingram in ‘Baroud,’ Directed by Alice Terry,” does the dynamic of the relationship become public. Journalist Herbert Howe explores the turnabout for comic purposes, depicting Terry as authoritarian while Ingram wails about her “cracking the whip.” The article even includes a production still of Terry directing Ingram, who looks annoyed. Yet, when Rex is called to London for a few days, he promptly “turn[s] the production over to her” without a second thought (107). To a degree, then, Howe corroborates Slide’s description of Alice Terry’s behind-the-camera work on Ingram’s silent era films. The Howe article also offers a rather frank discussion of the couple’s growing differences as reflected in their domestic arrangements, revealing that they kept separate villas while on location. Such discourse seems to imply that changes in their public, artistic relationship had created a schism in the personal, domestic sphere, as if Terry’s appropriation of a directorial role could not be commensurate with that of “a successful actress and a successful wife.” Yet it may well have been Terry’s public performance of the latter that helped secure Ingram’s status as the “master of the silent cinema”—perhaps another dimension of women’s agency in the industry during this period that historically has been obscured. Although it is now clear that there were many husband and wife collaborations in the silent motion picture industry, the Alice Terry-Rex Ingram relationship was quite unique.

Bibliography

Beach, Barbara.“Rex and His Queen.” Motion Picture Magazine (Jan. 1922): 22-23, 102.

Howe, Herbert.“Presenting Rex Ingram in ‘Baroud,’ Directed by Alice Terry.” New Movie (March 1932): 37-39, 107-198.

Johaneson, Bland. “Alice and Miss Terry.” Photoplay (Jan. 1924): 41, 104.

Kingsley, Grace.“Romances of Famous Film Folk.” Picture Play (Dec. 1921): 31-33, 99.

Manners, Dorothy.“Old Friends Talk of Alice Terry.”  Picture Play (Sept. 1925): 89, 100.

Oettinger, Malcolm.“Should a Wife Tell?” Picture Play (March 1924): 84-85, 104.

O’Leary, Liam. Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema.Barnes & Noble, 1980.

Pratt, George.“If You Beat Me, I Wept’: Alice Terry Reminisces About Silent Films.” 1958. repr. in “Image” on the Art and Evolution of the Film: Photographs and Articles from the Magazine of the International Museum of Photography. Ed. Marshall Deutelbaum. New York: Dover Publications and International Museum of Photography, 1979. 181- 86.

Archival Paper Collections:

Alice Terry scrapbooks, 1920-1927. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library

Citation

Kenaga, Heidi. "Alice Terry." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-9tsm-7a02>

Ruth Stonehouse

by Michelle Koerner

Like many actresses working in the motion picture industry in the mid-1910s, Ruth Stonehouse’s chance to direct her own films came more as a result of the increased production schedule at Universal Pictures than as a result of studio mogul Carl Laemmle’s progressive attitudes toward women (Slide 1977, 41). Like other “Universal Women” such as Cleo Madison, Lule Warrenton, and Elsie Jane Wilson, Stonehouse was a hard-working actress before the chance to direct arose. Acting in hundreds of early comic films, writing six and directing ten of these, Stonehouse was involved in film production from a very early date. Asked about her ambitions in a 1919 Motion Picture Magazine interview, Stonehouse replied: “We-ll, of course I do want to be a star… for a while… but eventually I want to be a directress, a producer; I want to be in the business end of it, that is, at the same time, the artistic end of it” (104). Perhaps the sheer number of her acting roles helps to explain the survival of some of the films in which she had parts, as a matter of odds increased by volume as well as by her long tenure in the industry, from 1907 to 1928.

Richard Travers, Gloria Swanson (a), Ruth Stonhouse (a) The Romance of an American Dutchess (1915), PCJY

Richard Travers, Gloria Swanson, and Ruth Stonhouse, The Romance of an American Dutchess (1915). Private Collection.

Ruth Stonehouse (p/d/w/a) c. 1917, PC

Ruth Stonehouse c. 1917. Private Collection.

Ruth Stonehouse (p/d/w/a) article 'Such a Little Director', PCRK

Ruth Stonehouse article “Such a Little Director,” in Moving Picture Weekly.

In 1907, along with Gilbert M. Anderson and George Spoor, she helped to launch Essanay Film Manufacturing Company in Chicago eight years before Charles Chaplin arrived. While at Essanay, Stonehouse developed her skills as an actress working on over one hundred short and feature films. In 1916, the year before Essanay closed, she moved to Universal Film Manufacturing Company, where she was soon given the opportunity to direct Puppy Love (1917). This was the first of a series of comic shorts entitled the Mary Ann Kelly Stories, which she coauthored, directed, and starred in, playing the leading role as the heroine of the series. A fascinating article, “The Directing Microbe,” published in Moving Picture Stories in 1917, highlights the entrance of the “bright little actress” into filmmaking (28). The article figures the desire to direct as an infectious microbe that has begun to attack individuals involved in film production at every level. It warns its readers that “few actors, office boys, stage carpenters and developing laborers escape [the microbe’s] ambitious sting” and that the infection has “now hit the gentler sex” (28). Stonehouse emerges as an example of the indiscriminateness of the so-called microbe insofar as even this “delicate, dainty little creature” has begun directing her own films. Emphasizing how “incredible” it is that an actress such as Stonehouse can “be so masterful as to dominate a band of fiery photoplayers,” the article goes on to suggest that the entrance of women into directing is a threat to “men who have spent a lifetime perfecting their art” (28). “The Directing Microbe” indexes the extent to which women directors were accepted as an intriguing trend in the industry even as it accentuates the development as something of an anomaly.

Ruth Stonehouse’s character could be compared with that of Mary Pickford, who perfected the screen persona of the comic, childlike picture of girlish femininity. Also like Pickford, Stonehouse developed an impish character, at the same time creating ways to use this image to make a way into the film industry that would allow control over that image.

Bibliography

“The Directing Microbe.” Moving Picture Stories (13 Apr. 1917): 28.

Lamb. Grace. “Patsel: A Descriptive Vagary of Ruth Stonehouse.” Motion Picture Magazine (Feb. 1919): 54-55, 104.

“Mrs. Felix Hughes.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (14 May 1941): 18.

“Such a Little Director.” Moving Picture Weekly (24 March 1917): 19.

Citation

Koerner, Michelle. "Ruth Stonehouse." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-72rk-1w82>

Anita Stewart

by Hugh Neely

Anita Stewart began her career as an actress at the Vitagraph Company in 1911, and rose to become one of the most popular stars of the teens. In 1918 she started Anita Stewart Productions, in partnership with Louis B. Mayer, and began to produce her own feature films for First National Exhibitors Circuit. Anita Stewart Productions produced seventeen feature films between 1918 and 1922. After concluding her association with Mayer, Stewart accepted an offer from William Randolph Hearst to appear in Cosmopolitan Productions. She continued to make films with Fox, Columbia, and lesser studios through the end of the silent era, appearing in her last feature in 1938.

Anita Stewart (a/p). PC

Anita Stewart. Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p), Theatre Magazine, 1921. PC

Anita Stewart, Theatre Magazine, 1921. Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p) 10-inch Ceramic Souvenir Plate. PCJY

Anita Stewart on a 10-inch Ceramic Souvenir Plate. Private Collection.

Anita Stewart, actress-producer. The Invisible Fear (1921). First National. Yranski Collection. PCJY

Lantern slide, Anita Stewart, The Invisible Fear (1921). Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p) Slide The Suspect (1916). PCJY

Lantern slide,  The Suspect (1916). Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p), Photoplay cover painted by Rolf Armstrong, appeared twice, in 1915 and 1920. PC

Anita Stewart, 1920 Photoplay cover, painted by Rolf Armstrong, appeared twice. Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p) Reverse of Publicity Photo, Anita Stewart Productions, 1918. PC

Publicity for Anita Stewart Productions, 1918. Private Collection. 

Anita Stewart (a/p) First National Exhibitors Circuit Promotional Still, 1918. PCJY

Anita Stewart, First National Exhibitors Circuit Promotional Still, 1918. Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p) Motion Picture Magazine (1919), The Model Waif(1919). PC

Anita Stewart, Motion Picture Magazine, 1919. Ad for The Model Waif (1919). Private Collection.

Anita Stewart on sheet music for A Midnight Romance, composed by Stewart. Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p) Munsey's Magazine(1915). PC

Anita Stewart in Munsey’s Magazine, 1915. Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p) Lobby card, The Love Piker (1923). PC

Lobby card, The Love Piker (1923). Private Collection.

ziegfeld star - anita stewart - by Alfred Cheney Johnston

Portrait of Anita Stewart by Alfred Cheney Johnston. Private Collection.

Anita Stewart (a/p) Dust jacket, The Devil's Toy (1935). PC

Dust jacket, The Devil’s Toy (1935) by Anita Stewart. Private Collection.

Born Anna Marie Stewart in Brooklyn in 1895, she was the middle of three siblings. Her older sister Lucille Lee and younger brother George also became film actors. Lucille Lee Stewart was the first to work in films, starting with the Biograph Company in 1910, and shortly thereafter moving to the Vitagraph Company, where she met and married director Ralph Ince, younger brother of Thomas Ince. Anna Marie Stewart was a high school student who had done a little modeling when Ralph Ince telephoned to say he needed some extra juveniles for a film. After her start in early 1911, sixteen-year-old Anna quickly became a Vitagraph regular, appearing in vehicles that featured the “Vitagraph Girl,” lead actress Florence Turner. Within a year Anna was herself given lead roles, receiving popular recognition for The Wood Violet (1912). After a typographer’s error changed her name from “Anna” to “Anita” in publicity for The Song Bird of the North (1913), she decided she liked it, and kept “Anita Stewart” as her professional name (Bodeen 120). Her career was assured when she became a hit in the lead role of Vitagraph’s second multireel feature, A Million Bid (1914).

Soon, Stewart was being promoted as “America’s daintiest actress,” and her image was featured on sheet music, souvenir plates, silver spoons, and a collection of paper dolls published in Ladies’ World Magazine. In 1915, Munsey’s Magazine noted that, though she had appeared in but two features and a serial and had never appeared on the theatrical stage, “her face is perhaps familiar to as wide a circle as Maude Adams’s” (88).

Stewart’s career continued at Vitagraph, and with only a few exceptions she was given leading roles in each film. The great majority of her films were directed by brother-in-law Ralph Ince, and she quite enjoyed the familial atmosphere of the company. But beginning in 1916, Vitagraph began to assign other directors to her films, one of which, The Glory of Yolanda (1917), was directed by frequent scenarist Marguerite Bertsch. Still, Stewart did not feel that all of her new directors were equally competent, and during production of two films directed by Wilfrid North, she effectively went out on strike, leaving the productions unfinished while she claimed to be convalescing from an auto accident. The same year, 1917, Anita Stewart quietly married costar Rudolph Cameron, although the marriage was kept secret from her public for over a year (Bodeen 122–123).

Among her thousands of devoted admirers was a newspaper boy named Toby who has been described as a hunchbacked dwarf. Toby took it as his duty to promote the actress to virtually anyone who would listen. “Toby was one of my most ardent fans,” Anita Stewart later wrote. “I never knew his last name. He used to beg pictures from my secretary and gave them away at the opening of the horse show and any large social gathering. Toby met Mr. [Louis B.] Mayer at the train each time he came to New York, (and) he introduced me to him” (“Anita Stewart” n.p. Bosley Crowther Papers; Crowther 1960, 53–81). Mayer, at the time of his first meeting with Stewart, was a young Massachusetts theatre owner who had made a small fortune as a regional film distributor by cornering the New England distribution rights to The Birth of a Nation (1915). Now he wanted to produce films himself; but in order to secure backing and critical attention, he needed to recruit a star.

Mayer knew that the First National Exhibitors Circuit, which had just signed Charlie Chaplin, was looking for established stars who wished to produce their own independent films, so he approached Stewart about forming her own company: Anita Stewart Productions. Why did she accept his offer? “I was completely happy at the Vitagraph,” Stewart wrote many years later, ignoring her battle over her directors, “and have often felt that I made my best pictures there, but Mr. Mayer promised me better parts, better directors, more money—really the moon, and at the time I was anxious to come to California” (“Anita Stewart,” n.p. Bosley Crowther Papers; Crowther 1960, 53-81). Husband Rudolph Cameron became her business manager, and along with Stewart, was promised a cut of the company profits. In reality, however, Mayer had little experience to back up the promises he had made. While Anita Stewart at twenty-three was a seven-year veteran of the industry, having worked her way up through dozens of shorts to the first rank of Vitagraph feature stars, Mayer’s only previous production experience at the time appears to have been as a junior executive on one serial.

Anita Stewart Productions was launched with great fanfare and wide publicity, but in hindsight, it was launched too soon. Before the actress, now producer, could start her new venture, the Vitagraph Company slapped Anita Stewart Productions with a lawsuit, claiming that the star was still under exclusive Vitagraph contract at the time that she signed with Mayer. The suit was decided in favor of Vitagraph, a ruling cited in later cases involving actor contracts (Bodeen 123; Eyman 2005, 56). According to Stewart, as a result of this suit she lost the percentage of profits she was entitled to have received from her Vitagraph films (“Anita Stewart” n. pag. Bosley Crowther Papers). However, while Mayer paid $70,000 to Vitagraph as part of the settlement, Anita Stewart Productions received two unfinished Vitagraph productions that were subsequently completed by Stewart and released by First National (Bodeen 123; Slide 1976, 88).

Stewart’s first new feature for her own company, Virtuous Wives (1918), was directed by George Loane Tucker and filmed at New York studio space rented from Vitagraph, no less. For Stewart, however, it was not a happy shoot. Supporting actress Hedda Hopper, providing her own costumes, reputedly spent her entire salary of $1,000 on custom gowns that Stewart felt upstaged her own wardrobe. Consequently, the two women refused to talk to each other on the set, beginning a feud that reportedly lasted some twenty years (Bodeen 1976, 124). Released at the end of December 1918, however, the film was a success. Following this production, Stewart and Mayer and their respective families all moved to Los Angeles, where Anita Stewart Productions settled into its new home in rented space on the Selig Polyscope Company lot (Bodeen 125; Kingsley 1919, III,1).

In a Los Angeles Times profile from January 1919, Anita Stewart is quoted: “It’s a great responsibility, being a producer, you’re honestly rather afraid to get to the top. There are so many to push or pull you off.” In the same interview, Stewart talked about stories she would like to produce in the future (Kingsley 1919, III,1). She wanted to film David Graham Phillips’s sensational novel about a woman working her way out of prostitution. That novel, Susan Lennox: Her Fall and Rise, would come to film much later, in 1931, as a pre-Code “Talkie” with Greta Garbo. Another idea was Theodore Dreiser’s sexually provocative Sister Carrie, a novel not adapted for film until 1952. But Stewart’s choice of stories would ultimately place her in conflict with her partner, Louis B. Mayer. According to Mayer biographer Scott Eyman, the producer preferred stories that could be “insanely moralistic” (2005, 58). Mayer once indicated to screenwriter Frances Marion that he only wished to make pictures that his two young girls could see (Beauchamp 1997, 145). The sort of mature stories that appealed to Anita Stewart were out of the question.

Much remains to be learned about the extent to which the actress-producer was involved in the decision-making at Anita Stewart Productions. Unfortunately, the prints of the films themselves do not give us any clues, and on extant prints examined by this contributor, Louis B. Mayer receives screen credit as presenter. But while Mayer was anxious to learn production, the crew thought he was a novice, and he was not on the set on a daily basis (Eyman 2005, 58). In contrast, since the actress-producer was the sole partner in Anita Stewart Productions, consistently present on the set of her films, it seems logical to conclude that Stewart was in position to make the daily production decisions that might be required of her as well as other creative decisions. An accomplished pianist, she wrote both music and lyrics for songs published in conjunction with the release of the pictures she produced in 1919, A Midnight Romance, Mary Regan, and In Old Kentucky (see Wlaschin 305, 309). From the comprehensive 1919 Los Angeles Times interview with Grace Kingsley, it is clear that Stewart thought of herself as a producer of her company’s product (III, 1). In this role she might, then, have made the decision to hire director Lois Weber, an engagement that warranted the Los Angeles Times news flash “Anita Stewart Engages Noted Woman Director” (Kingsley 1918, III,1). For their first production together, Weber wrote her own adaptation of a romantic mystery by Marion Orth. The film, A Midnight Romance (1919), survives in a partial print at the Library of Congress. But the title represents Weber at her most unapologetically commercial. Their second and final collaboration came with Mary Regan (1919), an adaptation of the popular novel by the same name about the daughter of a thief who tries to protect and reform the men she loves. After her brief association with Weber, Anita Stewart was directed by top directors of the day, including Marshall Neillan, Edward José, Edwin Carewe, and John Stahl. But it was Louis B. Mayer who prevailed in the choice of stories, a fact that Stewart grew to resent. According to historian DeWitt Bodeen, when her contract concluded in 1922, Stewart refused Mayer’s offered renewal, and went her own way, closing the doors on Anita Stewart Productions (125).

Some months later Stewart was shocked and saddened when her former director and brother-in-law, Ralph Ince, was indicted for the brutal beating, during an argument, of her own younger brother, actor George Stewart. George suffered brain damage, and remained an invalid for the rest of his life, with Anita eventually taking over his care. She returned to the screen one year after the release of her last Anita Stewart production in The Love Piker (1923), a film written and produced by Marion for the West Coast division of William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions. The last of three Cosmopolitan pictures was Never the Twain Shall Meet (1925), a South Seas adventure directed by Maurice Tourneur, which Stewart remembered as her personal favorite (Bodeen 126).

After this, her career quickly devolved into leading roles in lower budget productions for a succession of Poverty Row studios. Most of these were action-adventure films, including a remake of the Nell Shipman role in Baree, Son of Kazan (1925) and the Mascot serial Isle of Sunken Gold (1927). Her last leading role was in Romance of a Rogue (1928), which starred H. B. Warner and was also the last directing credit received by prolific actor-director King Baggot. Following her retirement from the screen and her 1928 divorce from Rudolph Cameron, Anita Stewart married George Converse, a New York sportsman and the heir of a United States Steel president. The couple bought a home in Beverly Hills. Stewart made several singing appearances, both in person and on the radio, and appeared in a cameo as herself in the Universal musical short The Hollywood Handicap (1932). Stewart and her second husband were divorced in 1946 (Bodeen 126–127).

In 1935 Anita Stewart authored a mystery novel, The Devil’s Toy, a strange tale in which a young stage actress comes under suspicion for a series of murders, apparent poisonings, all of which take place in the theatre. Stewart fashioned a character in her novel after the ardent fan who had introduced her to Louis B. Mayer eighteen years earlier. In her story, Toby, the hunchbacked dwarf, is the “genius of theatrical lighting” who idolizes the young actress from his position at the controls of a spotlight that follows her every movement on stage. In the surprise ending, Toby is revealed to be behind the murders, accomplished with a death ray he has invented and hidden inside one of his spotlights. When he mistakenly believes he has killed the heroine, Alice, by accident, he destroys his invention and takes his own life, thinking that in death he will at last be united with the woman he worships. Anita Stewart died of heart failure in Beverly Hills on May 4, 1961.

See also: Marguerite BertschFrances MarionNell ShipmanLois Weber.

Bibliography

Alben, Miles H. History of First National Pictures, Inc. Unpublished manuscript. n.d. Folder 15494A. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Anita Stewart Productions, Inc. Contract with First National Exhibitors Circuit, Inc. 19 June 1918. Folder 12727B. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Associated First National Pictures, Inc. “Big Time Pictures Are Built Upon First National Pictures.” Poster. 1919-1924. Private Collection.

Bodeen, DeWitt. “Anita Stewart.” From Hollywood: The Careers of 15 Great American Stars. South Brunswick: Barnes, 1976. 117-133.

“Great Campaign on Mrs. Chaplin, Louis Mayer Plans far Reaching Publicity Drive on Star to Bring her Before all the Public.” Motion Picture News (8 Nov. 1919): 3606.

In Old Kentucky. Ad. Motion Picture News (8 Nov. 1919): 3538-3539.

Kingsley, Grace. “Anita Stewart, Producer.” Los Angeles Times (5 Jan. 1919): III, 1.

------. “Flashes. Anita Stewart Engages Noted Woman Director.” Los Angeles Times (13 Nov. 1918): III, 1.

------. “Flashes. Music Enhances. ‘Rio Grande’ Score Heightens Picture Effect.” Los Angeles Times III, no. 4 (4 May  1920): n.p.

“A New Link in the Mighty Chain.” Ad.  Motion Picture News (22 Nov. 1919): 3698-3699.

“Photoplay ‘Virtuous Wives’ Begins New Era of Filming Recent Fiction Successes.” The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (9 Feb. 1919): 41, Amusement Sec. 2.

“Screen. Feature Forecast. Big Dramatic Plays Head List of Attractions.” Los Angeles Times (22 June 1919): III, 1.

Stewart, Anita. The Devil’s Toy. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1935.

------. “In Old Kentucky.” [Song]. New York: Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co., 1919.

------. ”Mary Regan.” [Song]. Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co., New York, 1919.

------. “A Midnight Romance.” Song. New York: Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co., 1919.

------. Untitled typescript, n.d. Box 25. Bosley Crowther Papers. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

White, Jr., Mathew. “The Stage.” Munsey's Magazine (October 1915): 88, 90.

Wlaschin, Ken. The Silent Cinema in Song, 1896-1929. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009.

Archival Paper Collections:

Bosley Crowther Papers. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Warner Bros. Archive. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Citation

Neely, Hugh. "Anita Stewart." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4bse-4g29>

Stella F. Simon

by Jennifer Wild

Stella F. Simon and Miklos Bandy’s 1927–28 16mm film, Hands: The Life and Love of a Gentle Sex, is a short, experimental, feminist film whose aesthetic is drawn from American and European modernist photography movements and early avant-garde film traditions. The film’s underlying melodramatic narrative formula is complicated by the use of hands as both protagonists and as the central aspect of its modernist mise-en-scène. However, as with so many of the women who collaborated with men in the silent era, official credit did not go to Simon but to Bandy. The titles on all of the extant film prints credit Bandy as the film’s director, but attribute the idea to Simon. When it published four frame enlargements from the film, the British art film journal Close-Up equally attributed the film to him “after an idea by Stella F. Simon.” However, a review published the following month praised “Miss Simon’s” experiment with abstract, constructivist “scenery” (Blakeston 137). This August 1929 article, therefore, becomes the first source in new research that supports Simon as the film’s principle director (Richter 1971, 44; Barr 21; Horak 1995, 43-44; Wild 93-105). Little is known about Bandy, who was the author of one of the first articles in France to discuss Swedish abstract experimentalist Viking Eggeling’s short film Symphonie Diagonale (1924) in Germaine Dulac’s journal, Schémas. Modernist composer Marc Blitzstein wrote and performed the film’s original four-hand mechanical piano score and made a composite recording of it in March 1936 at the behest of RCA and the Museum of Modern Art (Lehrman 35).

Hände/Hands (Miklos Bandy & Stella Simon 1927-28), PC

Still from Hände/Hands (Miklos Bandy & Stella Simon 1927-28). Private Collection.

Stella Simon, née Furchgott, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew up in Denver, Colorado, where she worked as a darkroom assistant after high school. In 1900, she married Adolphe Simon, with whom she made a home and reared three children in Salt Lake City, Utah. Upon his death in 1917, Simon moved her three boys to San Francisco, where she met the Photo-Secession photographer Anne Brigman, who played an influential role in Simon’s decision to move to New York City to pursue formal photographic training at the Clarence H. White School of Photography between 1923 and 1925. A founding member of Photo-Secession (1902) with Alfred Stieglitz, White was a renowned teacher of photography who developed, following the philosophy of John Dewey, the “project method” that used technical problems and pictorial limitations to instruct his students. Other notable students of White—though not necessarily enrolled at the same time as Simon—include Laura Gilpin, Paul B. Haviland, Dorothea Lange, and Ralph Steiner (a student between 1921 and 1922).

Clarence White’s students, including Simon and the young gallerist Julien Levy, who was a friend of Simon’s son, accompanied White on a study trip to Mexico in 1925. By this time, Simon was the president of the White School Alumni Association and had also developed an interest in filmmaking. In the fall of 1926, Simon enrolled in filmmaking classes at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, where she also encountered the modernist photographic movements associated with the Bauhaus School and the New Objectivity movement. While in Berlin, at a UFA screening of German experimentalist Hans Richter’s films, Simon introduced herself to the artist and discussed her own filmmaking project with him. Richter later indicated that he may have contributed footage to Simon’s film (Richter 44).

Hände/Hands (Miklos Bandy & Stella Simon 1927-28). PC

Still from Hände/Hands (Miklos Bandy & Stella Simon 1927-28). Private Collection.

The first important screening of Hands was on February 16, 1929, at Berlin’s Gloria Palast in the context of a Novembergruppe soirée. According to his “Russian Diary,” Alfred H. Barr traveled to Moscow around 1927–1928 with a print of the film, where he showed it to Russian Constructivist artists Aleksander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. Barr notes that Stepanova asked to reproduce frame enlargements from the film in her journal, Kino, but none were apparently ever published (Barr 21). Hands was shown as part of the inaugural screening for Symon Gould’s Film Guild Cinema in New York on February 1, 1929, which prompted the New York Times reviewer to write “Life and Love, a ballet of hands, is devoted to a strange cause. It seeks to employ hands as graceful and plastic units in some sort of cosmic drama that may mean everything or nothing” (20). For at least two series of screenings (April 1, 1936, and June 1, 1939) celebrating the Museum of Modern Art’s newly formed Film Library, Hands was programmed with director F.W. Murnau’s silent feature motion picture Sunrise (1927) under the rubrics “The German Influence” (1936) and “The German-American Film” (1939). Following the New York Times’s reference to “[films] not equipped with sound apparatus” we can assume that Simon’s film was screened on both occasions with Blitzstein’s newly recorded soundtrack (X4).

Perhaps one of the reasons Stella Simon’s contribution to the 1920s American avant-garde film movement has been overlooked is that her reputation was largely as a still photographer. The Pictorial Photographers of America held a one-woman show of Simon’s photographic career at New York City’s Art Center on January 19–31, 1931, about which one reviewer commented, “Whether it is a head or a still-life, Miss Simon has a way of getting the best out of her sitters” (Harris X13). In this year Simon opened a commercial photography studio in New York and helped Julien Levy curate his gallery’s first exhibition on November 2, 1931, a show that was devoted to American photography and where Levy may have screened Simon’s film. Simon continued to experiment with abstract photographic techniques throughout the 1930s. For example, “Landscape and Cityscape” was an “arresting” large-scale photo-mural included in a group exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 (Jewell X7).

Stella Simon stands to gain from recent reconsideration of the American avant-garde film movement, which began with the publication of Jan-Christopher Horak’s Lovers of Cinema (43–44), and continues in Jennifer Wild’s essay that re-historicizes Simon’s film as an early instance of modernist-feminist filmmaking practice (93–105). This new look is facilitated by the inclusion of Hands in the comprehensive digital video collection Unseen Cinema, which makes so much experimental and documentary work from the archives available for study. We now realize that along with other photographers such as Paul Strand and Ralph Steiner, Simon is one of the few who made a transition from still to moving photographic work and back again.

Bibliography

Bandy, Miklos. “La symphonie de Viking Eggeling.” Schémas No. 1 (Feb. 1927): n.p.

Barr, Alfred H. Jr. “Russian Diary, 1927-1928.” October (Winter 1978): 10-51.

Blakeston, Oswell. “Hands.” Close-Up  5:2 (Aug. 1929): 137-138.

Close-Up. 5:1 (July 1929): n.p. “The Film Since 1889.” New York Times (24 Nov. 1935): X4.

“Film Arts Guild Opens New Theater.” New York Times (2 Feb. 1929): 20.

Harris, Ruth Green. “A Round of Galleries.” New York Times (25 Jan. 1931): X13.

Jewell, Edward Alden. “A Gallery Resembles One of the ‘Classic’ Corridors in the Louvre.” New York Times (24 April 1932): N2.

------. “Photography and Walls.” New York Times (22 May 1932): X7.

Lehrman, Leonard. Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005.

Levy, Julien. Memoirs of an Art Gallery. New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1977.

“A Museum of Movie Memorabilia.” New York Times (30 Apr. 1939): 180.

Richter, Hans. Hans Richter by Hans Richter. Clive Gray, ed. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1971.

Sabine, Lillian. Abel’s Photographic Weekly 50 (Sept. 1924): 1292.

------. “The Women’s Page—Conducted by Mrs. Charles Abel.” Abel’s Photographic Weekly 50 (Sept. 1932): 1292.

------. “The Women’s Page—Mrs. Stella F. Simon, New York City.” Abel’s Photographic Weekly 50 (Oct. 1932): 1293.

Wild, Jennifer. “An Artist’s Hands: Stella Simon, Modernist Synthesis, and Narrative Resistance.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 46:1 (March 2005): 93-105.

Archival Paper Collections:

Stella Simon files. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Citation

Wild, Jennifer. "Stella F. Simon." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zs1p-2w25>

Nell Shipman

by Tom Trusky

The highlight of Canadian-American Nell Shipman’s career in the US is the 1921–1925 period in which she ran a motion picture company from the isolated woods of Idaho. Details surrounding Nell Shipman’s decision to move her production company from Southern California, first to Spokane, Washington, and finally to Lionhead Lodge on the shore of Priest Lake, Idaho, are still not fully known. We do know that by 1921 Shipman’s dealings with Los Angeles theatre magnate W. H. Clune had become acrimonious. Clune and other investors were enraged with Shipman and her director Bert Van Tuyle’s work on The Girl from God’s Country (1921), the first feature-length motion picture from their newly formed company, Nell Shipman Productions. Investors had wrested the film from Shipman and reedited it badly. Her response, she reported, was to place trade paper advertisements comparing their actions to Chinese men who deform their women’s feet by binding them (Shipman 1987; 2001, 103). Shipman and her lover Van Tuyle had made powerful and vengeful enemies in Southern California.

Nell Shipman (a/w/d), PC

Nell Shipman portrait. Private Collection.

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

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

Slide A Gentleman's Agreement (1918) Nell Shipman (a), PCJY

Lantern slide, A Gentleman’s Agreement (1918). Private Collection.

Nell Shipman (a/w/d) c. 1918, PC

Nell Shipman outside, c. 1918. Private Collection.

Nell Shipman (a/w/d) The Grub Stake (1923), PC

Nell Shipman, The Grub Stake (1923). Private Collection.

Nell Shipman (a/w/d) The Grub Stake (1923), BSU

Nell Shipman, The Grub Stake (1923). Courtesy of Boise State University. 

Nell Shipman (a/w/d) Trail of the North Wind (1923), BSU

Nell Shipman and crew, Trail of the North Wind (1923). Courtesy of Boise State University. 

Nell Shipman (a/d/w) publicity photos c. 1918, BSU

Nell Shipman publicity photos c. 1918. Courtesy of Boise State University. 

Shooting on the The Grub-Stake (1922), the first of the films they would make in the Pacific Northwest, began in March 1922, and, initially, stock sold well, largely because of the success of Back to God’s Country (1919). The recent discovery of a company stock certificate issued in April 1922 for 100 shares (at $1/share) purchased by or possibly dispersed in lieu of salary to Shipman Company “property man” James Davis, sheds new light on company financing. The company’s California enemies, however, warned would-be investors to beware of being bilked by Van Tuyle, and soon they were out of funds. Shipman, however, was not daunted. As she wrote in the March 1925 Atlantic Monthly, “The Picture! Anything, everything, for the Picture! Of course, others put something in too—ten thousand here, five there, twenty in another quarter—it takes big money to make movies. But with us it was more than money; it was heart’s blood… ” (327).

At Priest Lake, where they moved, they would complete “the animal parts” of The Grub-Stake. Before leaving for Idaho, Shipman had begun purchasing a zoo located in Azusa, California. The size of her menagerie may never be definitively established, however, given the vagaries of Hollywood hyperbole, the ability of animals to reproduce, and the subzero brutalities of Idaho winters. Headlines in a hostile local paper, quoted in Shipman’s biography, provided a grotesque tally as the zoo was finally set to be auctioned off in June 1925 for delinquent rent: “NELL SHIPMAN’S MICE, SKUNKS, AND DOGS WILL BE SOLD!” (160).

In Los Angeles, with 55,000 feet of film from The Grub-Stake, Shipman and Van Tuyle edited feverishly through late autumn 1922, while successfully dodging unpaid actors, but less successfully process servers, including one representing the zoo’s original owner, for missing payments. Family silver, furniture, a fancy touring car, bank accounts—all were taken or attached, but Shipman and Van Tuyle managed to send a tinted and toned screening print to New York where they recut it. Years later in her autobiography, Shipman admitted that the distribution deal that she struck for The Grub-Stake with American Releasing Corporation was premature and disadvantageous to her. They would receive no advance and only a 60/40 split on receipts, not the 70/30 arrangement that they had sought, and at the time the motion picture was estimated to have cost them around $180,000 (114–115).

When the American Releasing Corporation went out of business, distribution of The Grub-Stake was taken over by Lewis J. Selznick, who also distributed Shipman’s series of outdoor two-reelers, the Little Dramas of the Big Places, produced at the Lionhead Lodge “Studio-Camp” at Priest Lake. A dozen Little Dramas were announced, and four were completed and released: The Trail of the North Wind (1924), The Light on Lookout Mountain (1924), White Water (1924), and Wolf’s Brush (1924). A fifth, The Love Tree, was in production when Shipman and her company collapsed in 1925. However, this story survives as Shipman’s illustrated children’s book, Kurly Kew and the Tree-Princess: A Story of the Forest-People, Told for Other-People, published in 1930.

Shipman’s Little Dramas, like many of her films, are highly autobiographical. Yet their female protagonist, Dreena, is no longer merely the brave, warmhearted, strong-willed, by-last-reel married-mother of her feature films. She has evolved into a brave, warmhearted, strong-willed, childless-but-nurturing, unmarried female professional. Dreena and Shipman are both wilderness journalists or writers. They would save animals from hunters and trappers and old growth forests from loggers. Their sympathies are aligned with the less fortunate, such as fatally ill children and Native Americans. Shipman and at least one distributor realized these “little” films were pioneering in at least two ways. Instead of melodrama’s villain, the mythical evildoer lashing a hapless damsel to railroad tracks, Shipman makes Nature—the wind—into a villain in The Trail of the North Wind. Moreover, these were poetic stories, poetically filmed, as seen in Robert S. Newhard’s cinematography for the Little Dramas, three of which are extant.

In The Silent Screen, Nell Shipman’s autobiography, she describes the last two years at the Studio-Camp at Lionhead Lodge as a series of disasters and melodramatic responses. During a record cold winter in 1923–1924, Van Tuyle’s foot, frostbitten while making Back to God’s Country (1919), became gangrenous and he became delirious with pain. With the assistance of locals, Shipman rescued him, managing to transport him down the frozen lake to the hospital, imitating in life the heroine she had played in Back to God’s Country and making national headlines. Three amputated toes later, the couple was reunited and began preparations for shooting the Little Dramas series. The final debacle, precipitated by jealousy, occurred almost a year later. At Lionhead Lodge, New Year’s Eve 1924, Van Tuyle found Shipman dancing with a young actor, and, rifle in hand, accused them of impropriety. Shipman left the lodge and walked out onto the frozen lake. In her autobiography she says that she was intent on throwing herself into open water. She was saved, however, by little Barry Shipman, her son. The two fled down lake and to Spokane, and from there traveled to New York City, never to return to God’s Country or the silver screen (1987, 155-166).

Bibliography

Armatage, Kay. The Girl from God’s Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Estes, James E. Tales of Priest Lake. Spokane, WA, 1964.

Peters, Lloyd. Lionhead Lodge. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon Press, 1967; repr. 1976.

Shipman, Nell. Abandoned Trails. New York: Dial Press, 1932.

------. Kurly Kew and the Tree-Princess A Story of the Forest-People, Told for Other-People. New York: L. MacVeagh, 1930.

------. “The Movie That Couldn’t Be Screened.” The Atlantic Monthly. (March 1925): 326 - 332; (April 1925): 477 – 482; (May 1925): 645 - 651.

------. The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart. Boise, ID: Hemingway Western Studies Series, 1987; repr. 3rd ed., 2001.

Archival Paper Collections:

Nell Shipman papers, 1892-1971. Boise State University.

Citation

Trusky, Tom. "Nell Shipman." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ymha-rg65>

Lillian Case Russell

by Kristen Anderson Wagner

Born Lulu Case in rural South Dakota, Lillian Case Russell worked as a schoolteacher before beginning her writing career in New York shortly after the turn of the century. Living in Brooklyn with her husband John L. Russell (who would later become known in Western films as John Lowell) and their two children, Russell wrote stories and poetry for newspapers and magazines. Covering topics ranging from Reno divorces to men’s fashions to women’s suffrage, Russell’s early writing demonstrated the wit, flair for the dramatic, and social awareness that would inform many of her later screenplays. This is evident in the 1912 New York Times piece “You Mustn’t Ask to Vote,” in which she offers a biting criticism of anti-suffrage attitudes: “You may toil behind our counters, / In our factories you may slave, / You are welcome in the sweatshop / From the cradle to the grave; / If you err, altho’ a woman, / You may dangle by the throat, / But our chivalry is outraged / If you soil your hands to vote” (10).

After several years writing for newspapers and magazines, Russell began her screenwriting career in the mid-1910s. She wrote films in a wide range of genres and featuring a variety of personalities, from former Ziegfeld girl Dorothy Mackaill (The Broken Violin, 1923) to baseball star Ty Cobb (Somewhere in Georgia, 1916). Her comedies for Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew include an adaptation of the play “Cousin Kate” directed by Mrs. Sidney Drew (Lucille McVey) in 1921. Russell also wrote several feature melodramas for Olga Petrova between 1916 and 1918 in which Petrova played daring, adventurous women who moved freely in masculine spaces. In The Black Butterfly (1916), Petrova stars as a nurse who undergoes a blood transfusion on the front lines in France to save her beloved; in The Soul of a Magdalene (1917), Petrova portrays an expert in foreign languages; and in The Light Within (1918) she plays a doctor, but, as Variety pointed out, “Not an ordinary two-dollar-a-visit physician, but a doctor of bacteriology who discovers a cure for meningitis, and later for the deadly anthrax” (52).

Olga Petrova (a) The Light Within (1918) Lillian Case Russell (w). PCJY

Olga Petrova in The Light Within (1918), written by Lillian Case Russell. Private Collection.

By the late-1910s Russell was the chief screenwriter for Blazed Trail Productions, an independent company based in Upstate New York and specializing in Westerns. The company’s primary star was John Lowell, and Russell’s daughter Evangeline Russell was a frequent costar, often playing the romantic lead opposite her father. In 1920, Moving Picture World reported that Lillian Case Russell would be directing films for Blazed Trail Productions after the company’s previous director, Joseph J. Barry, left to form his own production company. These films, featuring stories about the Northwest Mounted Police, were described by the Moving Picture World as “full of action,” and said to have “met with a splendid reception” (1058).

When Blazed Trail Productions went bankrupt in 1925, the Russells continued making Westerns with their own company, Lowell Film Productions. By 1930, the Russells were living in Los Angeles, and the census records from that year still listed Lillian as a “playwriter” for motion pictures. While Russell continued to write films after the coming of sound, her husband John had apparently left acting by 1930 and found work as a building contractor. Russell’s son, John L. Russell, Jr., had begun work as an assistant cameraman by this time, and would later receive an Academy Award nomination for his work as director of photography on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

Early in her career Russell was interested in fostering young screenwriters. She wrote two screenwriting guides, “Here Lies” in 1914 and The Photo-Playwrights Primer the following year. “Here Lies lists numerous topics, themes, and plot devices that screenwriters should avoid at all costs. In one instance, she implores beginning scenarists: “If you must lose, or must have a child stolen, don’t identify it by means of a locket, a birthmark, a ring or necklace. Try another plot” (6). With humor, she advises new writers not to “Show the poor lover or unappreciated wife writing a photoplay and receiving a $500 prize. Too improbable” (11). Both of her books were published by the Photoplay Clearinghouse, an organization that served as a brokerage between screenwriters and studios, ensuring that deserving screenplays found their way to the appropriate studio personnel, and offering suggestions for improvement to novice writers. Lillian Case Russell was said to have “handled a majority of the 12,000 or more scripts” that had been sent to the Photoplay Clearinghouse (4). Although this book was published shortly after Russell began her screenwriting career, she could already be described in its pages as a “well-known photoplaywright” and a “successful scenario writer,” a testament to her talent and popularity as a writer (31).

See also: Mrs. Sidney Drew, Olga Petrova

Bibliography

“L. Case Russell Directing Last ‘Blazed Trail’ Films.” Moving Picture World (14 Feb. 1920): 1058.

“The Light Within.” Rev. Variety (15 Feb. 1918): 52.

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

------. The Photo-Playwrights Primer. Brooklyn, NY: The M.P. Publishing Co., 1915.

------. “You Mustn’t Ask to Vote.” New York Times (8 May 1912): 10.

Citation

Wagner, Kristen Anderson. "Lillian Case Russell." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-v3m0-pa17>

Juliet Barrett Rublee

by Isabel Arredondo

Feminist activist Juliet Barrett Rublee worked with Margaret Sanger in the US birth control movement and also produced perhaps the first US feature motion picture made entirely in Mexico—Flame of Mexico (1932), also known as The Soul of Mexico, The Heart of Mexico and Alma Mexicana. Made at the dawn of the sound era, Flame of Mexico was silent with a musical score. It is an unusual film that began with Rublee’s aspirations to make a travelogue, but ended up a historical melodrama, and thus in the extant print we see the conventions of both at work. For the most part, Rublee and Flame have been left out of written histories of film although both are mentioned briefly in Aurelio de los Reyes’s Filmografía del cine mudo mexicano and in Rangel and Portas’s Enciclopedia Cinematográfica Mexicana. Yet both are central to understanding the conditions under which a distinctive alternative visual discourse on Mexico became available to American as well as Mexican viewers.

Mrs. Juliet Barrett Rublee (d) Grand Marshal of the procession organized by the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, LOC

Mrs. Juliet Barrett Rublee as Grand Marshal of the procession organized by the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Rublee was an avid traveler prior to shooting Flame of Mexico. She visited various locations in Mexico accompanied by Captain John Noel, known in the United States for his lectures as well as for having photographed George Mallory’s fatal 1924 expedition to Mount Everest. Over the course of two and a half months, Rublee and Noel shot fifteen thousand feet of panoramic views. Some of this initial travelogue footage appears in Flame of Mexico. In an unsigned typescript titled “ Mexico City, Dec.,” most likely written by Rublee herself in December 1929, the goal of Flame of Mexico is stated as: “to show the world the real Mexico.” However, because travelogues, shown to small audiences in lecture halls, were considered educational but not entertaining, Rublee instead created a fictional narrative that could engage a wider audience, a strategy that increased her chances of recovering the $150,000 personal investment she made in the film, referenced in the New York World-Telegram review (n.p.).

Juliet Barrett Rublee (d) frame enlargement home movie, PCIA

Frame enlargement, Juliet Barrett Rublee home movie.

Juliet Barrett Rublee (d) frame enlargement home movie, PCIA

Frame enlargement, Juliet Barrett Rublee home movie. 

Juliet Barrett Rublee (d) frame enlargement home movie, PCIA

Frame enlargement, Juliet Barrett Rublee home movie.

Flame of Mexico is set in 1910 on the eve of the Mexican Revolution during Francisco Madero’s uprising against dictator Porfirio Díaz. The film’s contemporary background, however, is what was then called the “oil problem,” which reached its peak of tension during the mid-1920s, we learn from Stanley Ross (506–528). During the Díaz regime, land concessions, including rights to the subsoil, had been granted to both foreign and national companies for unlimited periods. The 1917 Constitution, an ideological product of the Mexican Revolution, changed the way in which land ownership was understood, and this change affected the exploitation of the country’s natural oil supply. Article Twenty-Seven of the Constitution established that, while land could be held as private property, the subsoil could not be privately held because it was the property of the nation. Previous presidents had avoided enforcing this provision, but in 1925, President Plutarco Elías Calles placed limits on oil concessions, creating tension between US oil companies and the Mexican government. In 1928, Calles’s oil laws were amended by US ambassador Dwight Morrow, who resolved the dispute by adding the word “confirmatory” to those concessions that were acquired before 1917, thus leaving the question of ownership open to negotiation (Arredondo 88).

Rublee’s experience in Mexico is directly related to this chapter in US-Mexico diplomacy. When Morrow became ambassador, George Rublee, Juliet’s husband, went to Mexico as Morrow’s legal adviser, accompanied by his wife, who arrived there on April 20, 1928 (Arredondo 88). When Juliet Rublee wrote the script for Flame of Mexico that same year, she incorporated the “oil problem” into the romantic narrative, creating what could be called a political melodrama. In Flame of Mexico, Rafael, an educated indigenous campesino and follower of Madero, falls in love with Alicia, the daughter of Don Rodrigo, a rich landowner and Rafael’s adversary in the local elections. The obstacle to the couple’s love is US villainous oil investor Thorton who works as Don Rodrigo’s foreman. Flame of Mexico portrays Thorton’s forced marriage to Rosita (Alicia Ortiz) as opportunistic, while it champions the romantic union between Rosita and Rafael (Donald Reed). The film is thus an implicit endorsement of Mexican sovereignty, including the nation’s right to control its oil resources.

Flame of Mexico blends ethnography and fiction, weaving Mexico’s picturesque scenery and diverse population into its romantic narrative, combined as well with staged ethnographic spectacle. The lead cast members are all Mexican, with the exception of Thorton as well as his helper, with secondary roles played by untrained actors wearing their own traditional clothing, a detail that adds another layer of ethnographic realism. Most remarkable today are the high production values of the 35mm cinematography, the work of acclaimed German-born Hollywood photographer Jules Cronjager, whose name is on the film. Flame of Mexico received, for the most part, positive reviews in Mexico, in El Nacional and El Universal Gráfico, as well as in the United States, yet there is some evidence that Rublee’s portrayal of Mexico’s struggle for economic sovereignty conflicted with the opinions of some US moviegoers. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, one critic expressed his disapproval of the film’s “ambition to be propaganda” (n.p.).

Although Rublee did not direct Flame of Mexico herself, her role as the film’s author is clear in the information that exists regarding its production. She wrote the script for Flame of Mexico in 1928 and hired a four-man Hollywood crew to photograph it under her supervision. In a letter to her friend Margaret Sanger dated July 20, 1929, she referred to herself as the film’s “presenter,” a role that involved many tasks: “I have to be Production Manager, Business Manager, Assistant Director—Location & Casting director—girl of all work, buying things, funding them, running errands, bargaining to get things cheaper, also projector of the finished film, threading & running it…” Because the director, David Kirkland, “seems to have no initiative or perhaps no imagination or versatility or vitality,” she writes, she felt obliged to step in herself.

Rublee’s letters to Sanger, found in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, also contain information regarding the film’s production and the difficulties of filming on location. The letters show that she began production in April 1929, a year after her arrival in Mexico. A comment to Sanger in her July 1929 letter indicates that she intended to make money with her project: “I hear there is a great demand for Mexican pictures & they are making fake ones in N.Y. and Hollywood. So if it could be done it might make a trillion!” To produce a film on location, however, involved circumventing many problems, such as Mexican censorship restrictions and the absence of studio production facilities. The hardest part proved to be financing the film.

Unfortunately, Flame was produced and edited during the Depression. The salaries and travel expenses of Rublee’s crew amounted to $2,925 per week, which became very costly when bad weather extended the shooting time. On June 28, 1929, Rublee had complained to Sanger: “No one is willing to take the risk with me of helping with even one penny!” In spite of these obstacles, Flame of Mexico premiered in Washington DC on June 3, 1932; it was shown in Mexico City in October 7, 1932, and in New York on February 4, 1933. Wider distribution, however, never materialized. Unable to sell her film in a post-Depression market, Rublee lost her entire investment and never made another motion picture.

That Flame of Mexico was an independently produced motion picture without distribution meant that only a few prints of the film would have been struck—another reason for its absence from most film histories. Rublee, however, left ten cans of 16mm home movies and Flame of Mexico preproduction material that are now part of the Rublee Collection at the United States Library of Congress. This footage is filed by name and date, but in reality it is quite disorganized—the same sections appear in footage bearing different dates, and dates don’t correspond to events shown in the footage. The material, however, can be divided into two phases—before and after Rublee’s 1928 arrival in Mexico.

Probably the earliest footage can be dated 1925 by means of reference to the Kodak edge numbering. This footage depicts Rublee’s expedition to southern Italy in search of the continent of Atlantis, as well as other travels and leisure activities. The second group of films, made in or after 1928, includes home movies of Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Mexico City in The Spirit of St. Louis and a picnic at the home of Ambassador Dwight Morrow in Cuernavaca, Mexico, as well as outtakes and preproduction material from Flame. This home movie footage shows Rublee’s taste for adventure combined with an urge to document her travels on film. With Flame of Mexico, in contrast, she transcended the amateur travel genre and made an important, if unjustly overlooked, contribution to both United States and Mexican film history.

See also: Marie Stopes

Bibliography

Arredondo, Isabel. “From Travelogues to Political Intervention in Juliet Barret Rublee’s 'Flame of Mexico.'” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 26:1 (Winter 2010): 79-93.

Campos, A. “'Alma Mexicana': Una admirable película.” El Nacional (22 August 1932): n.p.

“Historia de una película sobre México: Extraño caso de cariño al país.” El Universal Gráfico (5 Sept. 1932): n.p.

Katz, Esther, Peter C. Engelman, Cathy Moran Hajo and Anke Voss Hubbard, eds. The Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition: Smith College Collections. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1996.

Marashio, Paul. “A Feminist Voice in N. H., Juliet Barrett Rublee.” Unpublished essay. 1982. Ms. 18. Juliet Barrett Rublee Collection. Library of Congress.

“Mexico City, December.” Unpublished typescript. 1929. Juliet Barrett Rublee Collection. Library of Congress.

M.T. “'Soul of Mexico' Shown Before Invited Audience.” New York Herald Tribune (5 February 1932): n.p.

Rangel, Ricardo, and Rafael Portas. Encyclopedia Cinematográfica Mexicana. Mexico, DF: Publicaciones Cinematográficas, 1957.

Reyes, Aurelio de los. Filmografía del cine mudo mexicano: 1924-1931 vol. III. Mexico, DF: UNAM, Dirección General de Actividades Cinematográficas, 2000.

Ross, Stanley Robert. “Dwight Morrow and the Mexican Revolution.” The Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 38, no. 4 (November 1958): 506-528.

Rublee, Juliet Barrett. Letter to Margaret Sanger. 28 June 1929. Smith College, The Sophia Smith Collection.

------. Letter to Margaret Sanger. 20 July 1929. Smith College, The Sophia Smith Collection.

Seeley, Evelyn.“Woman Tries to Debunk Stories of Mexico in Films: She Shot 150,000 Feet and Loves Every Inch of It.” New York World-Telegram (21 December 1931): n.p.

Archival Paper Collections:

Juliet Barrett Rublee Collection. Library of Congress.

Juliet Barrett Rublee papers, 1915-1939. Dartmouth College, Rauner Special Collections Library.

Juliet Barrett Rublee Papers, 1917-1955. Smith College, The Sophia Smith Collection.

Margaret Sanger Papers, 1761-1995. Smith College, The Sophia Smith Collection.

Citation

Arredondo, Isabel. "Juliet Barrett Rublee." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-t9x8-y295>

Natacha Rambova

by Drake Stutesman

In the 1920s, Natacha Rambova created a unique look in set design and costume for some of cinema’s most imaginative films. She was a powerful influence on designers such as Gilbert Adrian, whom she hired for his first film, and Michael Morris ranks her among such innovators as Erté, Paul Iribe, and Cecil Beaton. She was the niece of interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, with whom she lived occasionally as a girl and whose style she particularly repudiated. Born Winifred Shaughnessy, Rambova changed her name in 1914 and joined Theodore Kosloff’s ballet troupe as a principal dancer. She designed their sets and costumes until Kosloff interested Cecil B. DeMille in her work, and she created the costume and décor for the Aztec sequence in his The Woman God Forgot (1917), and then sequences in DeMille’s Why Change Your Wife (1920) and Something to Think About (1920). She also designed parts of Alla Nazimova’s Billions (1920). According to Morris, Leider, and Lambert, Kosloff stole all of her credits, which she reclaimed by showing her design sketches to Nazimova.

Camille (1921) Alla Nazimova (a), Natacha Rambova (des), June Mathis (w), AMPAS

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

This meeting between the two was the start of a great artistic relationship. Aphrodite (1921), Nazimova’s film for which Rambova designed all sets and costumes, was their second collaboration. It was never completed. Undertaken by Metro Pictures as a project to adapt a successful Broadway show, Aphrodite was terminated by the studio, which feared new censorship laws. Camille (1921), A Doll’s House (1922), and Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1923) followed, producing a signature look. Rambova created homogeneity between players and décor reminiscent of French Expressionist cinema, but with an unusual elegance. She stunningly combined the straight silhouettes of Art Deco haute couture with ancient Asian and European curves and florets, using shimmering silvers, whites, and blacks, and memorably interpreted Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for Salome along these lines. Her work also exhibited meticulous period research subtly incorporated with modern patterns, especially obvious in the Egyptian-based Aphrodite and dominant in her later designs. Nazimova produced and starred in all four films and probably directed A Doll’s House (Slide, 129; Lambert, 251) and Salome (Lambert 256; Morris 83). Slide suggests that Nazimova “relied heavily” on Rambova’s directorial advice for Salome (Slide, 128). This avant-garde classic is known for its striking use of black and white costumes and Salome’s rubberized satin tunic (made in a tire factory), which prototyped the 1980s cling dress. Although Camille brought together the talents of Rambova, Nazimova, and writer June Mathis, it was not a financial success. Neither A Doll’s House nor Salome claimed a wide following, either, both considered by critics to be too bizarre. Nazimova Productions consequently collapsed (Lambert 261–262; Morris 93).

Alla Nazimova (a) & Rudolph Valentino Camille (1921) Natacha Rambova (des), June Mathis (w), AMPAS

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

Rambova’s relationship with Rudolph Valentino, not with Nazimova, effectively made her reputation. In the five years she lived with him, three of which as a married couple, they made seven films together, during which, while maintaining her own career, Rambova managed Valentino’s career, often negotiating his contracts. In 1923, after the couple’s mistreatment by the studio, she helped him to sue Famous Players-Lasky Film Corporation, eventually winning both better pay as well as artistic control, which led to their making the critically acclaimed 18th century French drama, Monsieur Beaucaire (1924), A Sainted Devil (1924), and the uncompleted The Hooded Falcon project that same year. For the latter, Rambova wrote the screenplay with Mathis, and Rambova together with Gilbert Adrian may have begun costume design work in the preproduction stage, but no director was assigned and the production money was finally pulled. The press as well as the studio encouraged public ambivalence about Valentino’s new “art” roles and accused Rambova of de-masculizing him and of interfering on the set. Barsacq asserts that she was “probably the most disliked woman in Hollywood in the ’20s” (235). Leider’s research, however, suggests that much of this was slander (330). She quotes numerous contemporary defenses of her talent, including praise for her work as an uncredited assistant director and a director (298, 308–9). Both Morris and Leider suggest that Rambova was fighting sexism, but Leider further argues that Valentino’s male fans, made uneasy by his sexuality in powdered wigs, targeted Rambova instead. United Artists capitalized on these confusions, and the terms of Valentino’s 1925 studio contract, which he signed, were contingent on Rambova’s removal from his professional life. This damaged her career and contributed to their divorce, but within a year Valentino had died.

In 1925, Rambova produced both What Price Beauty? which she also starred in, scripted, and designed, but the film wasn’t released until 1928 (Slide 1996, 130). In 1925 she also produced When Love Grows Cold in which she starred, but she soon left forever the Hollywood she called “gilded hell.” At theatres she worked as an actress, playwright and continued minor designing. Furthermore, she was a journalist and scholar. As the latter, she lectured on symbolism and on the spiritual teachings of G. I. Gurdieff and Madame Blavatsky as well as worked on Egyptian research for the prestigious Bollingen Series. Rambova lived a comfortable life abroad. Lambert states that Rambova died “mad” in 1965, in New York City (394), but Morris (255–256) and Leider (412) affirm that Rambova, diagnosed with “paranoid psychosis arising from malnutrition,” was taken by relatives to Pasadena, where she died in 1966. Despite her numerous accomplishments, her death certificate states her occupation as “housewife.”

Rambova_CCP_FIG216_WFP-RAM03

Rudolph Valentino, The Young Rajah (1922). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Rambova’s originality and versatility in cinema should have afforded her an important place in film history, but her career profile is plagued with omissions, beginning with Kosloff’s theft. In major film design histories, Barsacq mentions her briefly and Sennett omits her. This oversight may have to do with the fact that Rambova’s work was mostly uncredited, unfinished, or lost. In Forbidden Fruit (1921) and Fool’s Paradise (1921), her credit, for a single sequence in each, went to chief costume designer Clare West. Rambova removed her design credit from some Valentino films to distance herself from him, and she was never credited as assistant director on Monsieur Beaucaire according to Leider (298). Some of Rambova’s later projects never materialized. In addition to Aphrodite, The Hooded Falcon, starring Valentino, with a script by Mathis and Rambova, and costumes by Rambova and Adrian, was never completed. Only fragments remain of When Love Grows Cold with Rambova’s costumes for Valentino. A piece of The Young Rajah (1922), also starring Valentino, with Rambova’s costumes and sets and a Mathis script, exists along with an extant trailer. Tragically, Billions and A Doll’s House are lost and only stills remain. A Sainted Devil with Rambova’s production supervision and costumes by her, Adrian, and Norman Norell, and What Price Beauty? (1928) are also gone. But Beyond the Rocks (1922), with Rambova’s costumes for Valentino, long lost, was found in the Nederlands Filmmuseum in 2004 and was restored in 2005.

Natacha Rambova and Rudolph Valentino. PCRK

Natacha Rambova and Rudolph Valentino. Private Collection.

See also: June Mathis, Alla Nazimova

Bibliography

Barsacq, Léon. Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Illusions: A History of Film Design. New American Library: New York, 1970.

Lambert, Gavin. Nazimova. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Leider, Emily W. Dark Lover The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Morris, Michael. Madam Valentino: The Many Lives of Natacha Rambova. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.

Sennett, Robert S. Setting the Scene: The Great Hollywood Art Directors. New York: Abrams, 1994.

Slide, Anthony. The Silent Feminists America's First Women Directors. Lanham: Scarecrow, 1996.

Archival Paper Collections:

Alla Nazimova Papers. Glesca Marshall Library, Springer Opera House [uncatalogued].

Natacha Rambova papers. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Nazimova collection, 1877-1988. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Citation

Stutesman, Drake. "Natacha Rambova." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-pvaw-vk83>

Olga Printzlau

by Denise McKenna

Olga Printzlau was a prolific writer who began her career as an artist, but turned to screenwriting after becoming interested in the “literary possibilities” of film. By 1920 she was credited with having written 352 produced scenarios (“Olga Printzlau to Write” 183). During the twenties she was sought after for her skill in adapting popular stories and novels to the screen, most notably F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1924). But by the late 1920s Printzlau’s attention seems to have turned more to her theatre work, and her film career dwindles significantly after 1930, with no known screen credits after 1933.

Olga Printzlau (w), PC

Olga Printzlau portrait. Private Collection.

While it is not clear when Printzlau first began working in the film industry, she was employed at the Majestic Film Company in 1914, the same year she married actor Hal Clements. A few years later, she was promoted as the “sensation of New York” in the advertising campaign for “To Honor and Obey” (1917) that was adapted from one of her stories. Printzlau worked for a number of companies during her career, although from 1915 to about 1918 she worked most often for Universal. In the late teens she began writing for Famous Players, and in 1920 Printzlau signed a five-year contract with Famous Players to write exclusively for William deMille (183). Although the details are not known, this contract seems to have been broken sometime around 1922 when she was engaged by Warner Brothers to adapt The Beautiful and the Damned. In 1923 she signed another exclusive contract with the short-lived B. P. Schulberg productions to head a new adaptation department, supervising a dozen writers in adapting stories and stage plays for Al Lichtman attractions. Along with well-known scenarist Eve Unsell, who was in charge of the original story department, Printzlau was hired as part of Schulberg’s new “integral” system that was to rationalize production under the studio head rather than the director (“Efficiency in Photoplays”). She returned to Warner Brothers for another high-profile adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence. By 1925, in a Los Angeles Times article describing the progress of women screenwriters, Printzlau is identified as a successful freelancer who is able to command a $500 a week salary (C10).

Lantern slide, Believe Me, Xantippe (1918), Olga Printzlau (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

In 1927 she adapted yet another famous novel to screen for First National. She notes with some humor that Camille had been filmed so many times “it would seem the canvas square reflecting her grief would hang limp and lugubrious with her lachrymose outbursts.” Despite her somewhat unsympathetic response to Camille’s tearful existence, she was confident enough in the film to proclaim that her adaptation surpassed all others in terms of length, artistry, and circulation (“Camille has Walkaway”).

Printzlau was also a thoughtful observer of the photodramatist’s work. She published two brief essays on screenwriting in the Christian Science Monitor, describing her thoughts on the challenges of adaptations and her assessment of scenario writing’s mass appeal. In both articles she defends screenwriting as an art, comparing the photodramatist’s tools of “imagination and symbol” to Michelangelo’s chisels and marble. For Printzlau, the “conscientious” writer should avoid using too much written information on the screen, an effect she likens to attaching real hair on a marble sculpture. Perfection in screenwriting is the “wordless” screen drama that relies only on the image and the symbolic potential of everyday objects to convey meaning (“Making Thoughts Visible”). She rebukes would-be writers who assume that writing for the screen is easy, observing that screenwriting is like laying out the patterns of a mosaic, an art that “requires patience, dexterity and vision” (“Ambition vs. Obsession”).

The Truth About the Movies Dorothy Farnum (a/w), Winifred Dunn (w/e), Florence Lawrence (p/a), Olga Printzlau (w), Ethel Chaffin, Rosemary Cooper , PCRK

“The Truth About the Movies,”  Dorothy Farnum, Winifred Dunn, Florence Lawrence, Olga Printzlau, Ethel Chaffin, and Rosemary Cooper. Private Collection.

Printzlau’s interest in symbolism carried over into her theatre work, particularly her 1925 play “Window Panes,” which was published by S. French in 1932 and revived on stage in 1939. Other stage plays include: “Manna” (1924), “The Jay Walker” (1926), “The Showdown” (1927), “Back Here” (1928), “Little Heaven” (1928), and “The Ostrich” (1930).

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

“Camille Has Walkaway in Classic Heroine Handicap.” Los Angeles Times (13 Feb. 1927): C21.

“Efficiency in Photoplays."” Los Angeles Times (20 Jan. 1923): II1.

“Olga Printzlau to Write for Famous Players Corporation.”Moving Picture World (11 Sept.1920): 183.

Printzlau, Olga. “Ambition vs. Obsession in Writing for the Motion Picture Screen.” Christian Science Monitor (27 Jun. 1922): 6.

Printzlau, Olga. “Making Thoughts Visible in Photoplay Composition.” Christian Science Monitor (22 Aug. 1922):16.

Williams, Whitney. “Penwomen Dominate Screen Literati Group.” Los Angeles Times (19 Nov. 1924): C10.

Citation

McKenna, Denise. "Olga Printzlau." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-1w3m-qk77>

Mary Pickford

by Christel Schmidt

Mary Pickford was born Gladys Smith in 1892 in Toronto, Canada. After her father was killed in an accident, Gladys became the family’s main breadwinner by performing in the theatre. She was seven years old. In fact, the stage became a family venture, as her younger siblings Lottie and Jack and even her mother took up the trade. But the drive and determination to be a star belonged solely to Gladys. In 1907, her ambition would take her to Broadway and famed producer-director David Belasco, who changed her name to Mary Pickford and gave her a part in “The Warrens of Virginia.”

Mary Pickford (a/p/w/o) publicity still. AMPAS

Mary Pickford publicity still. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Ad In the Bishop's Carriage (1913) Mary Pickford (a/p/w/o). PC

Ad In the Bishop’s Carriage (1913). Private Collection.

Mary Pickford (a/p/w/o) The Love Light (1921) Frances Marion (w/d). PC

Mary Pickford, The Love Light (1921), written and directed by Frances Marion. Private Collection.

Mary Pickford (a/p/w/o) Caprice (1913). PC

Mary Pickford, Caprice (1913). Private Collection.

Mary Pickford (a/p/w/o) with Frances Marion (p/d/w/a). PC

Mary Pickford with Frances Marion. Private Collection.

Mary Pickford (a/p/w/o) Kiki 1931. PC

Mary Pickford ad for Kiki 1931. Private Collection.

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

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

Mary Pickford (a/p/w/o) Tess of the Storm Country (1922) Josephine Lovett (co-w). PC

Mary Pickford, Tess of the Storm Country (1922), co-written by Josephine Lovett. Private Collection

WFP-PIC04

Mary Pickford with directors and producers. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

In 1909, when Pickford was between stage engagements, she approached director D. W. Griffith at the Biograph Company in New York and asked for work in moving pictures. She had no intention of working permanently in the new medium, but hoped the income would tide her over before she went back to Belasco and the stage. Pickford was intrigued with film acting, and before long she began to enjoy “posing” for motion pictures. She stayed with the Biograph Company, working as both an actress and writer from 1909 to 1911, leaving for a brief stint with the Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP), and later with Majestic Pictures Corporation. She returned to Griffith at Biograph in early 1912, finishing out the year with him. In 1913, after a run on Broadway in “A Good Little Devil,” Pickford made a definitive break from the stage by signing a motion picture contract with Adolph Zukor and the Famous Players Film Company. The year 1913 marked the dawn of the feature motion picture, and Pickford was about to become its biggest star.

In fact, she came to feature films with a well-established legacy. In 1911, “Moving Picture Mary” was the first movie star to adorn the cover of the New York Dramatic Mirror, an honor previously bestowed only on theatrical stars. And because moviegoers had already singled Pickford out as a favorite, her success in features was guaranteed. In 1914, Pickford’s Tess of the Storm Country, the story of a fiery young woman fighting for the underclass, caused a sensation. The extraordinary reaction made Pickford an international star and created fan worship that had never before been witnessed. In turn, this success gave Mary Pickford incredible bargaining power. In 1916, Pickford had negotiated a contract that gave her a $10,000 a week salary, 50% of her film profits, and her own production company. Pickford would sign off on every aspect of her productions, from the script to the director. She was even known to have had a hand in editing. During these years she worked with directors Maurice Tourneur and Marshall Neilan, the writer Frances Marion, and made some of the best features of her career, including Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), Stella Maris (1918), and The Hoodlum (1919).

Pickford is often remembered for her portrayals of children in films including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917) and Daddy-Long-Legs (1919). The stories were adapted from popular novels and had been performed on stage with an adult actress (Edith Taliaferro and Ruth Chatterton) playing the role of a young girl. Pickford’s petite size and youthful beauty made her ideal for these parts, but it was her acting talent that seared these roles into the public consciousness. Her portrait of childhood captured both the simplicity and complexity of a young person’s inner world, and also its physicality, through body language and mannerism.

In 1919, when she was only twenty-seven years old, Pickford cofounded United Artists, the first independent film distribution company, along with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and her future husband Douglas Fairbanks. Then in 1920 she and Fairbanks were wed in a private ceremony, but they shared their married life with the world. At first, the couple had feared a negative reaction (both were already married when they met), but their union only fed into the romantic fantasies many fans had about Hollywood. The couple was mobbed at every port on their whirlwind European honeymoon. Back in California, they relished their place as the King and Queen of Hollywood, holding court at their home, known as Pickfair. Pickford decided to make only one film a year after 1921, focusing on the quality of her productions. Many believe that she was at her creative peak during the teens, but her films of the 1920s were the most successful. Favorite titles from this decade include a remake of Tess of the Storm Country (1922), Rosita (1923), and Sparrows (1926). Her last silent film, My Best Girl (1927), would be one of the greatest of the era.

The decade’s last year brought about major changes in the industry and for Mary Pickford. By 1929, the Talkies had all but obliterated silent film. Pickford knew she could not resist the change. She cut her old-fashioned curls and made two Talkies before the decade ended. Coquette (1929) won her an Oscar for best actress, and Taming of the Shrew (1929) featured the much-anticipated pairing of Pickford and Fairbanks. But even with good reviews and promotion, these films were not as successful as her silent pictures. She attempted two more sound features, then retired in 1933 after twenty-three years of making movies.  And though she kept on producing films after retiring, the experience was not as rich as running her own career had been. Pickford, whose professional decline had begun in the same year as the death of her beloved mother, Gladys, in 1928, saw her brother and sister die in the 1930s. In 1936, her fairytale marriage to Fairbanks ended in divorce. Fairbanks died of heart failure only three years later. In 1937, Pickford married actor Charles “Buddy” Rogers, her costar in My Best Girl. The marriage lasted until Mary Pickford’s death in 1979.

See also: Frances Marion

Bibliography

Bennett, Carl. “Mary Pickford Filmography.” Silent Era: Progressive Silent Film List. http://www.silentera.com/PSFL/filmographies/actresses/Pickford-Mary.html

Card, James. “The Films of Mary Pickford.” Image: The Journal of the George Eastman House. Vol. 8, No. 4 (Dec 1959): 172-191.

Eyman, Scott. Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart. New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1990.

Moore, Robert F. “Mary Pickford, Manager.” Motion Picture Magazine (Aug. 1917): 69-70.

“Nineteen Weeks for 'Daddy Long Legs' at Boston Theatre.” Motion Picture News (8 Nov. 1919): 3592.

Niver, Kemp.  Mary Pickford: Comedienne. Los Angeles: Artisan Press, 1969.

Pickford, Mary. “Ambassadors.” The Saturday Evening Post. August 23, 1930: 6-7, 117.

------. “Moving Pictures.” Mary Pickford: Daily Talks. The McClure Newspaper Syndicate (7 Dec. 1915): n.p.

------. Sunshine and Shadow. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

------. “Writing Scenarios.” Mary Pickford Daily Talks. The McClure Newspaper Syndicate (7 Dec. 1915): n.p.

Schmidt, Christel. “Preserving Pickford: The Mary Pickford Collection and the Library of Congress.” The Moving Image Journal vol. 3, no. 1 (2003): 59-81.

------. “The Search for a Film Legacy: Mary Pickford (1909-1933).” [online resource] (2010) http://pickfordfilmlegacy.tripod.com/

Slide, Anthony. The Griffith Actresses. New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1973.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Movies in the Age of Innocence. Norman: University of Oklamoma Press, 1962.

Whitfield, Eileen. Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1997.

Windeler, Robert. Sweetheart: The Story of Mary Pickford. New York: Preager Publishers, 1973.

Zukor, Adolph with Dale Kramer. The Public Is Never Wrong. New York, G.P. Putnum’s Sons, 1953.

Archival Paper Collections:

Lillian Gish papers and sound recordings, 1909-1992. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Mary Pickford papers, 1893-1983. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Mary Pickford scrapbook, Robinson Locke collection, 1870-1920. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Reminiscences of Mary Pickford. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Samuel Stark. Theatre scrapbook collection, 1860-1950. Stanford University.

Rob Wagner papers, 1925-1942. University of California, Los Angles, Charles E. Young Research Library.

United Artists Corporation Collection. Wisconsin Historical Society Library.

Citation

Schmidt, Christel. "Mary Pickford." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-nkzz-e525>

Olga Petrova

by Wendy Holliday

As a girl in England at the turn of the century, Olga Petrova (born Muriel Harding) felt stifled by her father’s strict rules. According to her memoir, Petrova’s father told her that while she lived in his house and ate his bread, he would set the rules. Petrova was determined to live in her own house and eat her own bread (Petrova 55-56). Her success in reaching this goal, and more, is reflected in the title of her memoir, Butter with My Bread. 

Olga Petrova (a/w/p). PCJY

Olga Petrova portrait. Private Collection. 

Olga Petrova (w/a/p). AMPAS

Olga Petrova portrait. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Olga Petrova (a) Tempered Steel(1918). PCJY

Olga Petrova, Tempered Steel (1918). Private Collection.

Olga Petrova (a) The Light Within Lillian Case Russell (w). PCJY

Olga Petrova, The Light Within,  Lillian Case Russell (w). Private Collection.

Olga Petrova (a/w/p) with Mathew Hamilton Tempered Steel (1918) Lillian Case Russell (w. PCJY

Olga Petrova with Mathew Hamilton, Tempered Steel (1918). Private Collection.

Petrova Pictures ad. Photoplay Jan 1918. PD

Petrova Pictures ad. Photoplay Jan 1918.

Slide announcing Olga Petrova's (w/a/p) contract with Paramount Pictures. PCJY

Lantern slide, Olga Petrova’s contract with Paramount Pictures. Private Collection

According to her memoir, Petrova’s desire for independence led her to run away to become a governess, but it is sometimes difficult to tell the mythmaking from reality in Petrova’s writing. She eventually met a theatre agent and became a successful actress in musicals and vaudeville in both London and New York. She likely chose the stage name Olga Petrova herself and created her own back story as a glamorous Pole or Russian. Later Hollywood publicity claimed that the studio created this persona, but press clippings and her memoir suggest that Petrova used the name on the stage.

Petrova began her film acting career in The Tigress (1914), directed by Alice Guy Blaché, whom she describes as wearing a “silken glove” but “capable of using a mailed fist” in the short piece, “A Remembrance” (102–103). Initially, Petrova did not care much for acting in films, complaining about having to play weak female characters and having to spend so much time waiting around. According to her American Film Institute Catalog credits, she made several films for Popular Plays and Players between 1915 and 1917. She made The Undying Flame (1917) and two additional films with director Maurice Tourneur, whose work she respected. In 1917 she established her own production company, Petrova Pictures, so that she could have more control (Hanson 1988, Vol. 1, 252, 506, 969). Alison McMahan says that although Petrova had a contract with First National Exhibitors’ Circuit for eight films, only a handful were made, and after these she returned to stage acting (McMahan 2002, 184).

Like many other silent actresses, she wrote several of her own screenplays. Her first credit was for the Blaché film The Vampire (1915). In the film trade press, Petrova was a vocal critic of the kind of female roles then available. She told the Motion Picture News that she disliked the “simpering, gushing ingénue” and preferred to play “the woman of today: a modern, quick thinking and wholly human woman” (2176). She confessed to Thomas Fulbright that, “The reason I started writing some of my own stories was because I wanted to portray the self-reliant, self-supporting woman.” Petrova wrote, for example, the scenario for More Truth Than Poetry (1917), which advocated a single sexual standard for men and women. Most of her other films, however, seem to be fairly traditional “love wins in the end” stories.

In her memoir, Petrova wrote that she was proud of the “self-reliant, self-supporting professional women” that she played in More Truth Than Poetry (285). She was also a skilled self-publicist and promoted this same image via fan magazines and the popular press. The Motion Picture News story plays up the busy career woman image, as Petrova “kept appointments every fifteen or twenty minutes in the day with business men, lawyers, and ‘modistes’ and handles everything from writing scripts to costumes” (2176). In her motion pictures and her public image, Petrova promoted a liberal feminist ideal, in which women could seek individual fulfillment and independence. In a 1917 Photoplay article she said, “I am a feminist. By that I do not mean that women should try to do the work of men. They should merely learn to do their own work, live their own lives, be themselves, with all the strength that is in them” (27). The example she set with her own life, achieving both bread and butter, attests to the power of this idea.

Bibliography

Fulbright, Thomas. “A Tribute: Call Me Petrova, Part 2.” The World of Yesterday (July 1977): 41-50.

James, Neville. “Olga Petrova.” The Silent Picture 18 (1973): 4-12.

“Mme. Olga Petrova Easily the Busiest of Women.” Motion Picture News (29 Sept. 1917): 2176.

Petrova, Olga. Butter with My Bread. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1942.

------. “A Remembrance.” Appendix A., Alice Guy Blaché. The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, ed. Anthony Slide. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1966, 102 – 103.

“Petrova—Prophetess.” Photoplay (Dec. 1917): 27.

Archival Paper Collections:

Olga Petrova clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Olga Petrova papers, 1918-1976. University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center.

Olga Petrova scrapbook, Robinson Locke collection, 1870-1920. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Citation

Holliday, Wendy. "Olga Petrova." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-nnyy-y904>

Frances Taylor Patterson

by Dana Polan
Most biographical details for Frances Taylor Patterson unfortunately are unknown, but she holds an important position in early American cinema history through her efforts on behalf of pedagogy. Specifically, Patterson was one of the earliest university lecturers on motion pictures. After the very first lecturer, Victor Freeburg, left for military service in 1917, Patterson took over his course on Photoplay Composition at Columbia University in New York and taught it over several decades. There has been some suggestion, as yet unconfirmed, that Patterson was Freeburg’s graduate student. She had gotten a Bachelor’s degree from Trinity College in Connecticut in 1914 and may have come to New York to pursue further studies.

WFP-PAT01

Frances Taylor Patterson being presented with a copy of Robert Riskin’s Lady for a Day script by Jack Cohn. Private Collection. 

Patterson’s efforts in the Photoplay Composition course led her to write two volumes on the art of screenplay writing, Cinema Craftsmanship (1920) and Scenario and Screen (1928), which served as textbooks for the course and which also included more general reflection on the aesthetics of film. The very fact that Cinema Craftsmanship went into a second edition one year after it was first published might suggest that the book had a larger appeal beyond the classroom. It is hard to know the extent to which Patterson’s pedagogy or writing had any direct impact on the motion picture industry and its films, but she did receive some support from the studios. For example, Paramount Pictures seems to have produced a pedagogical film about cinema techniques for her use, and her ongoing efforts in film pedagogy and film reform (she was an active and vocal member of the National Board of Review) brought her a certain regular attention in the trade press.

Photoplay Composition was the only course that Patterson taught, but she offered versions of it in a variety of contexts over the years. First, she taught it in Columbia’s Extension Program, which was an adult-education program. When Columbia subsequently began a home-study correspondence school, Patterson also offered a version of the course there. Columbia’s extension and home-study courses were noncredit offerings, and the purpose of such courses seemed to be either to offer vocational training or to provide cultural uplift and diversion. In a 1920 piece on the course in Photoplay magazine, Patterson described the range of her students as extending from would-be film-industry professionals to housewives and retirees looking to fill up leisure time, but it is difficult to know the extent to which the article was accurate or may simply have served as promotional advertising for the course.

Photoplay Composition addressed the mechanics of scriptwriting, but, even more importantly, it gave great attention to critical evaluation and the elaboration of principles of aesthetic judgment. As a way of agitating for an improvement in the quality of films, Patterson combined a pedagogy in photoplay writing with one in photoplay appreciation. She assumed a sort of feedback loop between screenwriting and screen viewing: an understanding of how photoplays were put together would improve quality, not only at the point of production, but also at that of consumption insofar as an audience aware of what could be done with the motion picture might demand higher quality motion pictures. Patterson felt that cinematic value came not only from moral or instructional content within the films, but also—and more importantly—from aesthetic qualities. She campaigned in her books as well as in her numerous articles for well-structured narratives and well-composed imagery in films. Consequently, she felt, the photoplay writer had to be a total filmmaker whose script would indicate the overall look and shape of the film. For Patterson, the writer, and not the director, was the guiding vision behind a film. Or, rather, at the extreme, she felt that the writer should also serve as director so that the original narrative design of the photoplay would not be betrayed in its translation into images. As she put it in Scenario and Screen: “The only solution is to have the author speak the screen language, so that he may deliver his own message and dispense with the services of an interpreter…The ideal is to have the author and director one, as King Vidor has been, as Monta Bell has been, and as Tod Browning has been” (126).

From Freeburg, Patterson had inherited a notion of photoplay composition as having to do not just with the story within a film, but with all of its aspects, both visual and narrative. Unlike Freeburg, however, whose tastes tended to be very conservative, Patterson was quite open to modernist experimentation (as long as it represented total planning of the overall look and feel of the film) and championed such works as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1924) or Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921). Given her call for the photoplay writer to be a film’s veritable auteur and overall composer, it is ironic that Patterson’s one produced screenplay, Broken Hearts from 1926 (now lost), was an adaptation of a Yiddish drama that was heavily monitored by the film’s producer-director-star. For all her call for more power to the screenwriter, Patterson herself seemed to have little power within the motion picture business. To be sure, in her 1928 manual, Scenario and Screen, Patterson had called for women to assert their own voices and concerns in film. Arguing that women had inherited social roles from men, she announced that “Women are throwing off their man-given character cloak…. The new freedom allows them to break the yardstick of tradition and take their own measure” (29). But her teaching career seemed designed to show that the most effective intervention in the art of cinema would come not so much in film production but in film appreciation and pedagogy. Ironically, if so little is known about her today, this is due in large part to her very publicly responsive desire to teach in adult-education and outreach programs that fell below the radar of university administrators and were rarely recognized as important by chroniclers of university history.

Bibliography

“The Author and Hollywood.” North American Review vol. 244, no. 1 (Sept. 1937): 77-89.

“Descent into Hollywood.” The New Republic (14 Jan. 1931): 239-240.

Patterson, Frances Taylor. Cinema Craftmanship: A Book for Photoplaywrights. 1920. Rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921.

------. “A New Art in an Old University.” Photoplay (Jan 1920): 65, 124.

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

------. “Syllabus of the Course in Photoplay Composition, 1920.” Syllabus for Home Study version of Photoplay Composition, 29 pages. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

------, ed. Motion Picture Continuities: A Kiss for Cinderella. New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1929.

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

Archival Paper Collections:

Columbia University Archives. Historical subject files, 1870s-present, bulk 1968-1972. Series I: Academics and Research, Film Study, Division of, 1920s-1930s. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

University Extension Records, 1928-1942. Columbiana Collection. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Citation

Polan, Dana. "Frances Taylor Patterson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-gxx8-fb21>

Ida May Park

by Mark Garrett Cooper

The 1916 Motion Picture News Studio Directory credits Los Angeles native Ida May Park with twelve years of stage experience as a “leading woman in support of well-known stars” and with screen experience at Pathé and the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, where she was then employed as a scenario writer (134). Park flourished at Universal, where she wrote forty-four films, half of them feature length, between 1914 and 1919. Before 1917, Park’s husband, Joseph De Grasse, directed almost all of the films she wrote. In 1917, Park began directing her own scenarios and, according to a 1918 story in the Universal Weekly, a newspaper for exhibitors, editing them as well (29). She crafted a total of eleven features by this method in a scant two years. Park is important to understand as part of a strong creative presence that we now refer to as “Universal Women,” those who between 1912 and 1919 were promoted from acting or writing to directing and were credited on at least one hundred and seventy titles, a cohort that included Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Lois Weber, and Elsie Jane Wilson (Cooper 17; Denton 50). Park and De Grasse left Universal in the spring or summer of 1919 for reasons as yet unknown. On September 12, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lew Cody and manager-producer Louis J. Gasnier had signed her to direct motion pictures in which Cody would star (16). She made one such title, and, with De Grasse, directed two features for Andrew J. Callaghan Productions in 1920.

Ida May Park Pay Me! (1917) Bess Meredyth (w)

Ida May Park (w/ shawl) on the set of Pay Me! (1917). Private Collection. 

Frame from Bread (Universal, 1916) Ida May Park (d). LoC

Frame from Bread (1918). Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Ida May Park (d/w) Bread (1918). USW

Frame, Bread (1918), directed by Ida May Park. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Ida May Park (d/w) Bread (1918). USW

Frame, Bread (1918), directed by Ida May Park. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Ida May Park (d/w) Bread (1918). USW

Frame, Bread (1918), directed by Ida May Park. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Intertitle Ida May Park (d/w) Bread (1918). USW

Intertitle, Bread (1918), directed by Ida May Park. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Park’s directing career effectively ended in 1920. Ironically, this was also the year she published an article in Careers for Women that confidently described directing as an “open field” for those women who were “hardy and determined” (337). No matter how commanding a director, however, Park could not foresee the profession’s future. De Grasse’s career sputtered on, and he directed her scenario for The Hidden Way in 1926. But by 1930, his days in the director’s chair had also come to an end. The 1930 US Census lists De Grasse as a motion picture actor, Park as a writer, and their son Joseph as a motion picture “draftman.” In 1931, Willis Kent Productions financed Park’s last credited screenplay, The Playthings of Hollywood/The Chiselers of Hollywood/Sisters of Hollywood/Gold Diggers of Hollywood. Fittingly enough, the film depicts Hollywood as offering women limited options. It concerns the attempts of three sisters to find love and success as a secretary to an oil magnate, a department store saleswoman, and a motion picture extra.

In addition to praising her talent and work ethic, reports in the trade press offer at least two explanations for why Universal gave Park the opportunity to direct in 1917. Several articles represent her as a replacement for De Grasse, who was “about to go on vacation” or was unable to meet the demand for motion pictures starring Dorothy Phillips, as the Universal Weekly reported, announcing “Bluebird’s New Director” (27). One such story in Moving Picture World describes Park as a substantial collaborator on the titles Universal credited De Grasse as directing. It notes: “She prepared scenarios for his productions and assisted him materially in the manifold details of directing features” (222). Park and De Grasse took turns directing a series of Dorothy Phillips’s titles released in 1917 under the Bluebird brand, which Universal created in 1916 to market quality five-reel features. Park continued to direct Phillips when De Grasse moved to other projects in 1918, and a print of her Broadway Love, released in January, survives. Universal Weekly advertised the film as revealing “the Heart of the Great White Way in all its nakedness,” but the story is not an especially salacious one. In the film, chorus girl Midge O’Hara (Dorothy Phillips) preserves her virtue in the big city while evading the boorish advances of a country rube (Lon Chaney) who tracks her from their hometown. Meanwhile, she reforms by her example the members of a fast theatre crowd she encounters. A meticulously composed and edited scene in the second reel deftly stages Midge’s relationship to New York’s hazards. While her fashionable theatre friends dance and flirt energetically in a hotel suite’s inner room, she hovers self-consciously on the threshold in the foreground. Turning in retreat, she discovers the jilted lover of her friend, the hostess, as he raises a gun to his head in despair. She thwarts this histrionic suicide attempt with a pep talk and sends him back to the party. Soon she, too, is sucked into the melee, where her friend Cherry Blow (Juanita Hansen) tries to set her up with a millionaire. A review of Broadway Love in Wid’s found the film as a whole “inconsistent” but particularly praised this “flat party” scene and noted that “the direction is greatly responsible for the interest the story arouses” (879).

In addition to emphasizing Park’s relationship with De Grasse, stories in the trade press indicate that Universal gave her opportunities in an effort to capitalize on the reputation of its famous director Weber. A 1917 Moving Picture World article suggests that Park was promoted in order to keep “a woman’s hand in the Bluebird game” after Weber left to establish the semi-independent Weber Productions. Marketing cemented the connection between the two women when Park began to direct Mary MacLaren, who starred in Weber films including Shoes (1916) and The Mysterious Mrs. M (1917). MacLaren also played the lead in Park’s The Model’s Confession (1918), Bread (1918), The Vanity Pool (1918), and The Amazing Wife (1919). Of these titles, only a fragment of Bread is known to survive. In a review published on August 24, Moving Picture World recommended that exhibitors promote Bread with the line: “The Heroine of ‘Shoes’ Now Comes To View In Another Sociological Photodrama” (1100). The films are similar in several respects. MacLaren portrays both heroines as stoic in their suffering from poverty and upright in their refusals of improper suggestions from wealthier men. In the fragment of Bread that survives, scenes in which the starving heroine looks longingly at a loaf of bread through a shop window clearly echoe the scenes from Shoes in which she stares longingly through the glass at a pair of high-button shoes.

Lantern slide, The Grand Passion (1918).  Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

In plot outline, however, the films differ significantly. In Weber’s film, MacLaren portrays a salesclerk whose paycheck supports her entire family, including a father who squanders the money on the paperback books he reads when he should be looking for work. Her eventual acceptance of the local rake seems to be a continuation of this self-sacrificing spiral, and it puts an end to her marriage dreams, which we see in fantasy sequences juxtaposed with her return to her parents’ tenement at the film’s conclusion. Weber’s depiction of poverty as a family problem is absent from Bread, in which the heroine strives to succeed on her own as a stage actress. Although the ending is missing from the extant copy, published synopses state that MacLaren’s character finds love and marriage with a playwright whom she earlier perceived as trying to buy her. One might say, then, that Park’s film provides Shoes with a traditional happy ending. Such an alteration merits consideration, not only for what it illuminates about the two directors, but also for its studio policy implications. For marketing purposes, at least, Universal sought to associate Park with Weber as a “woman director.” It also associated them both with a particular actress and type of film—the “sociological photodrama”—the parameters and evolution of which require further study.

See also: Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Lois Weber, Elsie Jane Wilson

Bibliography

“Bluebird’s New Director.” Universal Weekly 4.13 (12 May 1917): 27.

“Bread.” Rev. Moving Picture World (24 Aug. 1918): 1100.

Cooper, Mark. “Studio History Revisited: the Case of the Universal Women.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 25 (2008): 16 – 36.

Denton, Frances. "Lights! Camera! Quiet! Ready! Shoot!" Photoplay (Feb. 1918): 50.

“Holds Three Jobs.” Universal Weekly vol. 6, no. 25 (1918): 29.

“Ida May Park Director.” Moving Picture World (14 July 1917): 222.

“Involved Melo of Theatrical Life That Is Inconsistent.” Rev. of Broadway Love. Wid's (17 Jan. 1918): 879.

Motion Picture News Studio Directory 21 (Oct. 1916): 1 - 275.

Park, Ida May. “The Motion-Picture Director.” Careers for Women. Ed. Catherine Filene. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920. 335-37.

“Sign Up Directress.” Los Angeles Times (12 Sept. 1919): 16.

U. S. Census 1930. Census Place: Los Angeles, California. Roll 134, Page 4B, Enumeration District 1605.

Archival Paper Collections:

Ida May Park clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Cooper, Mark Garrett. "Ida May Park." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ynfq-gj50>

Mabel Normand

by Simon Joyce, Jennifer Putzi

Mabel Normand starred in at least one hundred and sixty-seven film shorts and twenty-three full-length features, mainly for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company, and was one of the earliest silent actors to function as her own director. She was also one of the first leading performers to appear on film without a previous background in the theatre (having begun her career in modeling), to be named in the title of her films (beginning with 1912’s Mabel’s Lovers), and to have her own studio (the ill-fated Mabel Normand Feature Film Company). That her contributions to early film history are not better known is attributable in part to her involvement in the Hollywood scandals of the 1920s, and in part to our reliance on the self-interested memoirs of her better-known colleagues (especially Sennett and Charlie Chaplin) following her death at age thirty-eight. It is hard to get an accurate picture from such questionable and contradictory recollections, or from interviews with Normand herself, filtered as they often were through a sophisticated publicity operation at Keystone. Film scholars who have worked with these same sources have often proved just as discrepant and unreliable, especially in their accounts of her directorial contributions.

Mabel Normand (p/d/w/a). PC

Mabel Normand with doll. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Mabel Normand. USW

Mabel Normand portrait. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Leah Baird, Flora Finch, Ann Brody, Anne Shaeffer, Anita Stewart Mabel Normand, Norma Talmadge, Constance Talmadge, Florence Turner, 1926,AMPAS

Leah Baird, Flora Finch, Ann Brody, Anne Shaeffer, Anita Stewart, Mabel Normand, Norma Talmadge, Constance Talmadge, Florence Turner, 1926. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Mabel Normand. USW

Mabel Normand portrait. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Mabel Normand. USW

Mabel Normand portrait. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Normand_CCP_FIGX_WFP-NOR08

Lantern slide, Jinx (1919), starring Mabel Normand. Private Collection.

The Mabel Normand Studio. PCPM

Photo of the Mabel Normand Studio. Private Collection.

Mabel Normand (a/d/p),MoMA

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

Mabel Normand (p/d/w/a) death certificate, PC

Mabel Normand’s death certificate.

Normand’s early career included stints at the Biograph Company, working with D. W. Griffith, and at the Vitagraph Company, yet it was her work at Keystone that solidified her image as slapstick comedienne. Typical roles featured her as the object of desire, often pursued by Sennett’s country “rube”; as an urban ingénue in films like the metacinematic Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913), in which she becomes a Keystone actress; or as the helpless victim in parodies of period melodramas like Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life (1913), in which she is the iconic woman tied to the railroad tracks. At other times, including the six-reel feature Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), she “gives as good as she gets,” as an accomplice and equal partner with Chaplin in the physical comedy of slapstick. Later, beginning with Mickey (1918), she sought to combine these different character tropes as a tomboy figure who actively works to overcome social adversity.

While Mabel Normand may have codirected at least two shorts with Sennett prior to 1914, including Tomboy Bessie at Biograph (1912), it was in this year that she identified her profession in the Los Angeles city directory as “director,” rather than “actress,” as she did in 1913 and 1915. Moving Picture World reported in December 1913 that the “leading woman of the Keystone Company, since its inception, is in the future to direct every picture she acts in. This will undoubtedly make Keystone more popular than ever, and this will give Miss Normand the opportunity of injecting some of her comedy, which she has never had an opportunity to put over before” (1289). It is hard, however, to definitively distinguish her films from others as they all evidence the studio’s recognizable house style, one that de-emphasized the responsibilities of the director (in those years uncredited on extant prints) and aimed for an apparently spontaneous—but actually carefully crafted—filmic effect. Questions of attribution remain open for most of the films listed below, with directorial credit often given to Sennett, Chaplin, or “Fatty” Arbuckle, her frequent costar following Chaplin’s departure, and they may never be answered, since the popularity of Keystone meant multiple re-edited prints and re-issues. In the absence of definitive information, our filmography has been generated by cross-referencing the listed published and online sources, noting where discrepancies occur.

As an example of the confusion, we might consider 1914’s Mabel at the Wheel, the second film she made with Chaplin, in which she resists the machinations of his character and drives a racing car to victory. Normand is listed as director in company records in the Keystone Collection housed in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, yet Moving Picture World reported in 1914 that “Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett collaborated in the direction of this picture” (680). Among more recent sources, Betty Harper Fussell and Kalton C. Lahue both credit the film to Normand alone, while three other sources list it as a collaboration (Fussell 257; Lahue 145). It was, moreover, in relation to the shooting of this film that Chaplin recalls complaining to Sennett about Normand’s “competence,” after which he claims he was allowed to direct all his films at Keystone (149). Sennett remembered events differently, however, suggesting that Chaplin’s apprenticeship lasted for “a dozen one- and two-reel pictures,” during which time he “learned [to direct] from Mabel Normand” (163–64). Finally, Normand herself later claimed in Picture Play that “For a long time, I directed all the pictures I played in, the best known of which are the Chaplin series” (46). Overall, she made eleven films at Keystone with Chaplin, and thirty-one in 1914 alone; if she did, indeed, direct all of the films in which she starred, this suggests a total directorial output far greater than that with which she is typically credited. Our research indicates that she acted as director or codirector for a total of twenty-six films made between 1912 and 1915; of these, however, our sources are in agreement on only seven titles.

Sennett’s motivation for encouraging Normand to direct is unclear. He clearly had respect for her talent as an actress, and most scholars agree that he had been in love with her. Although Mabel Normand was their first star, she was also notoriously underpaid at Keystone, and Sennett and his New York partners may have capitulated to her demands to direct in an effort to retain her. Chaplin’s salary famously rose to $1,250 per week after he left Keystone, for instance, while Normand was still paid $175 per week (Fussell 74). The abortive Mabel Normand Feature Film Company, launched in 1916 while the newly formed Triangle Film Corporation was collapsing, seems a belated effort by Sennett to placate the comedienne and to retain her services. Only one feature film, Mickey (1918), was released by the company, however, and only after Normand had already accepted a five-year contract with Samuel Goldwyn. The reason for the extended filming and post-production period for Mickey is, predictably, unclear, although Triangle’s management difficulties and Normand’s developing tuberculosis certainly played a role.

Lantern slide, Fatty and Mabel Adrift (1916). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

In 1920 Mabel Normand returned to Keystone to work with Sennett again on what was intended to be her come-back vehicle Molly O’ (1921). The release of the film was marred, however, by Fatty Arbuckle’s rape trials, and much of the rest of Normand’s career was similarly affected by scandal: the sensational—and unsolved—murder of close friend (and Motion Picture Directors Association president) William Desmond Taylor in 1922; a shooting two years later by Normand’s chauffeur; and persistent stories of her drug use and alcoholism. Even after her death, scholars have been more interested in the gossip surrounding Normand’s life and romances (including an announced marriage to Sennett in 1915 that never materialized) than her work. Among recent biographers, Fussell has speculated on a stillborn child with Goldwyn, while Simon Louvish’s study of Sennett suggests not only that Normand may have had hereditary syphilis, but also that Sennett may have been gay. Scholars would do well to refocus attention on Normand’s distinctive contribution to early cinema and slapstick comedy, as well as the nature of her directorial work for Keystone.

Bibliography

Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964.

Fussell, Betty Harper. Mabel. New York: Limelight Editions, 1992.

Lahue, Kalton C. Kops and Custards: The Legend of Keystone Films. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.

Los Angeles Directory Company. Los Angeles City Directory. Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Company, 1913-1942.

Louvish, Simon. Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett. New York: Faber and Faber, 2003.

“Mabel at the Wheel.” Moving Picture World (2 May 1914): 680.

“Miss Normand, Director.” Moving Picture World (13 Dec. 1913): 1289.

Rex, Will. “Behind the Scenes with Fatty and Mabel.” Picture Play (April 1916): 46.

Archival Paper Collections:

Mabel Normand clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Mabel Normand collection compiled by William R. Meyer. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Mack Sennett papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Joyce, Simon; Jennifer Putzi. "Mabel Normand." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-e84a-he64>

Alla Nazimova

by Jennifer Horne

Alla Nazimova’s silent film career began in 1916 with her performance as the feisty, indomitable lead character in the screen adaptation of Marion Craig Wentworth’s pacifist drama “War Brides.” Nazimova had performed the role as a one-act play on the vaudeville circuit in an effort to reverse course on the succession of exoticized femme fatale roles that she had accepted under contract first to New York’s Shubert brothers and then to Charles Frohman’s Theatrical Syndicate. The tour production of “War Brides” for the variety stage had been popular and well received, particularly by women’s organizations, presumably just the encouragement independent producer Lewis J. Selznick needed to make his highly profitable film version under the direction of Herbert Brenon. Prior to this performance, Nazimova had a reputation as a moody Bohemian and political subversive. (Emma Goldman once served as her press agent and companion.) With her role in War Brides, a strident feminist was invented, if only temporarily, for the screen. Nazimova boasted to a reporter for the New York American that her decision to appear as figure of suffrage in War Brides was intended to be a contribution to “the womanhood of the world” (Lambert 172). Though periodic image reinvention now seems de rigueur for Hollywood stars, it wasn’t always; part of Nazimova’s legacy is that she is said to have been among the earliest to exercise control over her own celebrity image (Mann 62). With very few exceptions, the path of Nazimova’s motion picture career is described according to skillful and timely reinventions of her public persona and a feminine will as sharply defined as the emotive theatrical poses for which she became known. Stories repeatedly appeared in the press about the actress being “caught” taking in one of her films along with the moviegoing public, suggesting that Nazimova maintained a belief in the primacy of a live appearance, even if she embraced the new medium as an advance over theatre (“Nazimova Sees Herself” 9).

Alla Nazimova (a) War Brides (1916), PC

Lantern slide, War Brides (1916). Private Collection.

Alla Nazimova (p/w/e/a) and Herbert Brenon 1916. USW

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

Alla Nazimova (p/w/e/a), LoC

Alla Nazimova. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Alla Nazimova (a) Camille (1921), June Mathis (w), Natacha Rambova (des), AMPAS

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

Slide The Red Lantern (1919), Alla Nazimova (a), June Mathis (w), PC

Lantern slide,  The Red Lantern (1919). Private Collection.

Slide Camille (1921), June Mathis (w), Natacha Rambova (des), PC

Lantern slide, Camille (1921). Private Collection.

Alla Nazimova (a) and Rudolph Valentino in Camille (Metro, 1921), AMPAS

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

Alla Nazimova (a) Salome (1923), PC

Alla Nazimova, Salome (1923). Private Collection.

Slide The Brat (1919), Alla Nazimova (a/p/w), June Mathis (co-w), PC

Lantern slide,  The Brat (1919). Private Collection.

Biographies of Nazimova—including Nazimova’s own unfinished and unpublished memoir, now housed in the Springer Opera House’s Glesca Marshall Library in Columbus, Georgia—have a tendency to trace her lesbian self-styling and her public disavowal back to a traumatic childhood and the archetypal immigrant’s instinct for survival through assimilation. The first act in that life of reinvention could be said to have begun when, at least according to Robert Shanke, at the age of ten, Miriam Edez Adelaida Leventon changed her name to one she admired from a Russian novel (Schanke 129). As biographers tell it, the story of her career always begins with her status as a Russian Jewish émigré overcoming the difficulties of a non-native speaker performing in the theatrical stage classics “Hedda Gabler” and “A Doll’s House.” Famously androgynous and infamously romantically linked to Mercedes de Acosta, Eva Le Gallienne, Natacha Rambova, and Dorothy Arzner, Nazimova became, according to two recent critical career appreciations, “the founding mother of Sapphic Hollywood” (McLellan xxiii), and, for a time, “the most notorious Hollywood lesbian actress of all” (White 1999, 187). The deceptive act of her “fake” marriage to Charles Bryant, the actor who starred opposite her in “War Brides” on stage, becomes, in these scholarly and popular accounts, the ultimate measure of her truly tortured lesbian identity both in Hollywood and among her extended family.

Nazimova juggled a motion picture career that allowed her to continue to perform in both the live theatre and in motion pictures. Working under contract with Metro Pictures Corporation between late 1917 and April 1921, her company, Nazimova Productions, produced nine largely profitable, feature-length films and brought along the writing talent of writer-producer June Mathis. Details regarding the supervisory roles Nazimova played in the production of many of her films remain confusing since not all of Nazimova’s contributions are reflected in the official credits on films. Contemporary sources discuss Nazimova’s work not only for direction, production, titles, editing, and in at least one instance, lighting design. For instance, Nazimova received costume design credit on the film Revelation (1918), in which she plays a French cabaret singer who finds divine inspiration in a rose bush and joins the Salvation Army as a nurse. As a screenwriter she worked under the pseudonym Peter M. Winters, and many film scholars acknowledge her as the director of pictures that gave on-screen credit to Charles Bryant. After her celebrity began to falter, Nazimova began to take aesthetic risks and to embody a gay sensibility beyond the taste of her mainstream audience. For this reason, Metro executives cancelled Nazimova’s edgy production of Aphrodite, with a screenplay by Mathis and costumes by Rambova, when they read of the film’s planned scenes of lust and violence. But they approved instead a futuristic Art Deco production of Camille (1921), with Nazimova playing opposite Rudolph Valentino.

The film from Nazimova’s silent film career with by far the most enduring cultural significance was the excessively stylized 62-minute feature film Salome (1923). A flamboyant and slightly raunchy Art Nouveau treatment of the Biblical tale with sets and costumes by Rambova in Aubrey Beardsley-esque styling, the film has been hailed as a feminist milestone and adored as cult object. Kenneth Anger’s claim that Nazimova hired only “homosexual” cast members cannot be verified, but retains significant power (Anger 1975, 113). As film historian Patricia White puts it, Salome stands today as a unique effort to produce a “female movie modernism” (White 2002, 61). Various edited versions of the film circulated in underground contexts and festivals on 16mm for years. Salome was added to the National Film Registry in 2000.

There is no denying the intriguing power of a biographical narrative that traces connections between Alla Nazimova and almost every prominent lesbian in Hollywood, as well as gay male cultural icons such as Oscar Wilde, Rudolph Valentino, and Montgomery Clift, and ends with a penniless and ill Nazimova a tenant in the Los Angeles hotel she once owned. But the archival materials that have been collected over the years suggest that much more can be made of Nazimova’s life as performer, both on screen and off. The personal correspondence and writings that constitute the Nazimova Papers at the Glesca Marshall Library in Columbus, Georgia, have not as yet been cataloged. The extensive collection of copyrighted publicity stills and family photographs, postcards, letters, and newspaper clippings at the Library of Congress in both the Kling-Lewton Papers and the Harry E. Vinyard, Jr., Papers offers to researchers a fragmented but illuminating documentation of the devoted following Nazimova’s celebrity attracted over the course of her career.

Bibliography

Anger, Kenneth. Hollywood Babylon. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1975.

Lambert, Gavin. Nazimova: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Lewton, Lucy Olga. Alla Nazimova, My Aunt: A Personal Memoir. Ventura, Calif: Minuteman Press, 1988.

Mann, William J. Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood: 1910-1969. New York: Viking, 2001.

McLellan, Diana. The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood. New York: LA Weekly Books, 2000.

Nazimova, Alla. Untitled and unpublished memoir. undated. The Glesca Marshall Library, Springer Opera House, Columbus, Georgia.

“Nazimova Sees Herself: Appears at Premier of Her Film ‘Revelation’ and Audience Cheers.” New York Times (18 Feb. 1918): 9.

Schanke, Robert. “Alla Nazimova: ‘The Witch of Makeup.'” In Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History. Eds. Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998. 129-150.

White, Patricia. “Nazimova's Veils: Salome at the Intersection of Film Histories.” In  A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Eds. Jennifer Bean and Diane Negri. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002: 60-87.

------. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Archival Paper Collections:

Alla Nazimova scrapbook, Robinson-Locke Collection. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Alla Nazimova Papers. Glesca Marshall Library, Springer Opera House [uncatalogued].

Eva Le Gallienne papers, 1875-1993. Library of Congress. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Nazimova clippings file. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Nazimova collection, 1877-1988. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Salomé lobby cards. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Stark, Samuel. Theatre scrapbook collection, 1860-1950. Stanford University, Special Collections & University Archives, Manuscript Collection.

Citation

Horne, Jennifer. "Alla Nazimova." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ws0b-qz98>

Nancy Naumburg

by Richard Koszarski

On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first [film] to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silent motion picture that had been written, directed, and photographed by Nancy Naumburg and James Guy. Lerner was not entirely happy with the film, which lacked the technical skill of Vertov or Dovzhenko, the obvious models for this sort of genre. The farmers played themselves as best they could, while the filmmakers fought a losing battle against a series of technical deficiencies. But the “vitality, freshness, and honesty that springs from its revolutionary convictions” was undeniably impressive (30).

Nancy Naumburg (d/ph/w) c. 1945, PCMG

Nancy Naumburg c. 1945. Private Collection. 

A year later Naumburg and Guy premiered a second film, Taxi, at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Shot once again on the amateur 16mm camera that Nancy had been given by her mother, Taxi combined news footage of the 1934 New York taxi strike with dramatized recreations and cinéma vérité-style coverage of union meetings, and, in one sequence, a cabbie’s wedding. “We did not even have a carefully written screenplay,” Naumburg remembered in 1975. “We just blocked out the action of what we wanted and shot it” (Thomas Brandon Collection). As with Sheriffed, the new film was praised for its political idealism and damned for its structural inadequacies. Somehow a film that conjured “the raw meat of social reality” had done so without a finely pointed script. “You feel the cameraman is doing the writing while shooting,” wrote Robert Gessner in New Theatre, obviously uncomfortable with such a notion (20).

The Film & Photo League was already splintering over issues of politics and art, and Naumburg’s films proved to be targets of opportunity. “Revolutionary film making is a painful process,” she told the readers of Filmfront, defending her “politically and documentarily correct” content over the opposition’s stylistic niceties (10–11). It was an argument she lost, or lost interest in. Sheriffed and Taxi, despite their pioneering status as independently produced political documentaries, quickly slipped into the black hole of film history. Not exactly forgotten—both Russell Campbell and William Alexander give the films their due—they are more properly described as ignored, or of interest only to a handful of specialists. Political and artistic conflict on the left (including sexual politics), the vicissitudes of film preservation (Naumburg lost track of the films shortly after they were made), and the shifting cultural agenda of postwar America all conspired to bury not only the films, but also the filmmaker. A further loss is the history of the challenges to radical filmmaking in the US. The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1931–1940, incorrectly lists these two low-budget silents as sound films, which would have been financially unfeasible in the early 1930s.

Naumburg was born in New York City in 1911 and died there in 1988. She attended the Ethical Culture School and was part of Hallie Flanagan’s Experimental Theatre Workshop while at Vassar College, graduating from there in 1934. It is not known how she became involved with the Film & Photo League or the nature of her relationship with the painter James Guy, but letters from both of them in the Thomas Brandon Collection at the Museum of Modern Art indicate that she photographed the films while they shared writing and directing responsibility. She never discussed her films with her children, and never even mentioned them to her daughter Margie, who became a novelist and filmmaker herself, and admitted with some pride to having been booted off the Daily Worker.

In fact, Naumburg saw herself primarily as a still photographer, and in 1936 traveled through West Virginia with her friend the poet Muriel Rukeyser, documenting the industrial disaster at Gauley Bridge. That trip became the focus of Rukeyser’s second volume of poetry, U.S. 1. Settling in on the West Coast, Naumburg edited the book We Make the Movies (1937), an anthology that documents the many hands required to produce a Hollywood feature. Artistic films, she notes, might be successfully produced if done on very low budgets and distributed only to a string of sympathetic urban theatres. This was what the Film & Photo League had once called “the subway circuit.” In 1939, she married Gene Goldsmith and eventually returned to the East Coast, where she raised three daughters and did volunteer work for various medical charities. Although she wrote a few plays for the Greater Norwalk Mental Health Association, and exhibited her photographs at a gallery in SoHo, she never returned to filmmaking.

Bibliography

Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Campbell, Russell. Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States, 1930-1942. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982.

Gessner, Robert. “Movies About Us.” New Theatre (June 1935): 20.

Goldsmith, Margie. Personal communications with author. 2004.

Kennedy, Ed. “Three Workers Films.” Filmfront (7 Jan. 1935): 10-11.

Lerner, Irving [as Peter Ellis]. “A Revolutionary Film.” New Masses (25 Sept. 1934): 30.

“Nancy Naumburg Married.” New York Times (4 Oct. 1939): 32.

Naumburg, Nancy, ed. We Make the Movies. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1937.

Archival Paper Collections:

Thomas Brandon Collection. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Citation

Koszarski, Richard. "Nancy Naumburg." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .

Jane Murfin

by Julie Buck

As a woman who wrote or cowrote over sixty produced films, a producer who championed strong female roles, and a Hollywood insider with a career spanning over three decades, Jane Murfin may be one of the most prolific but least known writers of the 1920s and ’30s.

Jane Murfin was born Jane Macklem in Quincy, Michigan. Her first marriage, in 1907, to lawyer James Murfin, lasted less than five years, but Jane adopted his surname and would use it—excluding the brief period in the late 1910s when she and Jane Cowl used the pseudonym Allan Langdon Martin—throughout her life. Although the 1910 US Census records list her as living as a housewife in Michigan with her lawyer-husband James, according to Murfin family correspondence from 1967, Jane moved shortly after to New York City while her husband remained in Michigan. According to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, James eventually became a school regent, after a long career teaching law, and even has a gate on the grounds named after him.

In 1915, Murfin struck up what would become a lifelong friendship with actress Jane Cowl. In an undated typed letter written by Cowl, she describes Murfin as the best friend any person could hope to have (Cowl Papers, Box 2, Folder 8). The two collaborated on a series of plays in the late teens, including the popular and often revived World War I theatrical melodramas “Lilac Time” (1917) and “Smilin’ Through” (1919). Evidence of their business savvy, the two retained the rights to “Smilin’ Through.” According to a 1931 Los Angeles Times article “exposing” what writers in the industry during the silent era made, Joseph Schenck optioned the play for $22,500 in 1920 as a vehicle for his wife Norma Talmadge (Schallert K7). The two women later resold the dialogue rights to Schenck while retaining the rights for radio and TV adaptations, according to a series of financial documents exchanged between Cowl and her attorney (Cowl Papers, Box 2, Folder 5). Murfin and Cowl’s early Broadway collaborations, which starred Cowl, were credited to “Allan Langdon Martin,” as the two thought Broadway producers would take their work more seriously if they believed a man had written it. Though this ruse may have initially helped to get “Lilac Time” produced in 1917, they later regretted their scheme as the play continued to be credited to the nonexistent “Martin” long after Cowl and Murfin had gained fame as dramatists, which is clear from Jane Cowl’s correspondence with her attorney (Cowl Papers, Box 2 Folder 5).

Murfin’s first motion picture scenario, Marie, Ltd., was written and produced in 1919 by Adolph Zukor’s Select Pictures Corporation in New York. Shortly after, Murfin relocated to California and made the transition from writing plays to writing primarily for film. She wrote scenarios for a number of films during the mid-1920s, primarily romantic comedies and a few dramas. In 1924, she wrote, codirected, and coproduced Flapper Wives, a May Allison drama about faith healing adapted from an unproduced Murfin and Cowl play called “The Flaming Sign.” But her biggest success in the 1920s was writing scenarios for her dog, Strongheart.

Jane Murfin (d/w) with Strongheart, NYPL

Jane Murfin with Strongheart the dog. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

In a 1925 Los Angeles Times article, Murfin claims that her European representative purchased Strongheart. That representative was Laurence Trimble, a dog trainer and early director for Vitagraph Studios (H12). Trimble had moved to England in 1912 to direct Vitagraph films starring John Bunny and Turner would eventually leave Vitagraph to form Florence Turner Productions, churning out numerous films together. According to unsubstantiated sources, Murfin had met Trimble in New York and followed him to London in 1912, which ended his relationship with his first wife, opera singer Louise Trenton. Murfin would return to New York later in 1912, while Trimble would return a few years later at the onset of World War I. While visiting Germany just after the end of World War I, Trimble purchased a German attack dog christened Etzel von Oringer. In 1921, Murfin and Trimble formed Trimble-Murfin Productions as a vehicle to produce films for the newly renamed Strongheart (H12). Strongheart became the first true canine star of cinema, predating Rin-Tin-Tin by two years, according to Ally Acker (1991, 208).

While there is no firm record that the couple ever married—none of the articles in the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times ever refer to them as a romantic couple, and often refer to Murfin as living alone—by 1921 according to Trimble and Trenton’s daughter Jan Trimble Zilliacus, Trimble and Murfin had traveled west together, and soon shared a home in Hollywood. Among their friends were Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and Marion Davies. Murfin also remained friends with Anita Loos and Frances Marion, whom she had known in New York. Trimble directed the Strongheart movies and Murfin wrote the scenarios. Murfin was so devoted to Strongheart she even wrote a 1924 editorial for the Los Angeles Times discussing the importance of treating animals well on set, and mentioning the Trimble-Murfin Productions’ habit of hiring someone from the Animal Defense League to oversee the making of the film, ensuring that no animals would be harmed (A4). Murfin was always recorded as being Strongheart’s sole owner. When the dog had to stop performing after developing a tumor from burns received after falling on a klieg light, Trimble’s relationship with Murfin soured. Trimble immediately started up another relationship with Bradley King, and when that relationship too ended, he quit film and moved to an island on the St. Lawrence River, to train dogs. Ever attracted to screenwriters, he eventually returned to Hollywood and would marry Marian Constance Blackton, according to the 1999 obituary of Jan Trimble Zilliacus written by Kevin Brownlow.

Strongheart scenarios ranged from Murfin’s original stories to adaptations of famous books about dogs (such as White Fang). At the height of Strongheart’s popularity, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, had a collected book of fan letters printed, and had a dog food line produced with his name (Strongheart Dog Food is still produced today) (Boone 1976, ix). Tragically, most of Strongheart’s films are now believed to be lost. However, a print of The Love Master (1924) featuring Strongheart and Lady Jule (Strongheart’s leading lady on- and off-screen) recently surfaced at Archives du Film du CNC in Bois d’Arcy, France, and his final film, The Return of Boston Blackie (1929)—which was not written or directed by either Trimble or Murfin—exists at George Eastman House.

Concerned about getting proper credit for film work, in 1921 Murfin became one of the founding members of the Screenwriters’ Guild. In 1933, when the Guild was reformed as the Writers’ Guild of America, Murfin was asked by her friends Marion, Loos, and Bess Meredyth to write the original rules and guidelines (Beauchamp 1997, 307). Her 1955 Los Angeles Times obituary lists Murfin as serving on numerous boards throughout her life, including the Board of Directors for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (4). Murfin continued to work steadily in the industry during the sound era. Later, she would become RKO’s first female supervisor and a producer at MGM, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1931 (27). She would also marry the actor Donald Crisp. And she would gain even greater prominence in the 1930s and ’40s, cowriting scripts for What Price Hollywood (1932), The Women (1939), Pride and Prejudice (1940), and numerous other films.

Bibliography

“AUTHORESS GIVEN OFFICE.” Los Angeles Times (23 Aug. 1931): 27. Los Angeles Times (1925): H12

Boone, J. Allen. A Kinship to All Things. New York: Harper One, 1976.

Boone, J. Allen, ed. Letters to Strongheart. New York: Robert H. Sommer, 2008.

Brownlow, Kevin. “Obituary: Jan (Trimble) Zilliacus.” The Independent - London (1 June 1999): n.p.

Cowl, Jane. Typed untitled document. Cowl Papers, Box 2 Folder 8. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Gallo, Joe. “Flashback: New England Director Larry Trimble.” Imagine News (March 2000): n.p.

James O. Murfin household, 1910 U.S. Census, Michigan, Wayne Co., Sheet 9A, line 26, National Archives Microfilm Publication M19, roll. 73.

“Jane Murfin Crisp; Film Writer, Taken by Death.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (11 Aug. 1955): 4.

“May Allison Heads Murfin Picture Cast.” The Los Angeles Times (17 April 1923): II11.

Murfin, Jane. “Trained by Kindness.” Los Angeles Times (11 June 1924): A4.

Murfin, Orin Gould. Letter to Clif H. Murfin, 17 June 1967. Private Collection.

Schallert, Elza. “What Price Authors?” Los Angeles Times (19 July 1931): K7.

“Strongheart Gets Last Cue.” Los Angeles Times (25 June 1929): A3.

“Writing for a Dog Star.” New York Times (17 June 1923): X2.

Archival Paper Collections:

Jane Cowl papers, 1884-1949. New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Charles Edward Murfin Jr. Private Collection.

Citation

Buck, Julie. "Jane Murfin." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-wwsf-rc28>

Lorna Moon

by JoAnne Ruvoli

Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film Corporation for a year then moved on to write three more films for producer Jesse Lasky, two of which were written for Gloria Swanson (de Mille 1998, 178). In 1922, her career was interrupted when she gave birth to screenwriter William de Mille’s son, a baby named Richard whose real parentage was kept secret. Richard was adopted and raised by his uncle Cecil B. DeMille as his own, but in later years all was revealed and the son wrote the biography of Moon, entitled My Secret Mother. Battling tuberculosis for the four years after her son’s birth, Moon wrote short stories and plays from her bed in the sanitarium. In late 1926, she was well enough to return to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where she worked on film scripts for Norma Shearer, Lionel Barrymore, and Lon Chaney. With Frances Marion, she adapted Anna Karenina for a film entitled Love (1927) starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. When the tuberculosis again forced her to return to the sanitarium, she completed Dark Star, a novel that reached the best-seller list before her death in 1930.

Lorna Moon (w) MGM publicity portrait, AMPAS

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

Moon was working on adapting a Clara Beranger story for her fourth film, Her Husband’s Trademark (1922), when fatigue forced her to seek a medical examination that not only diagnosed her tuberculosis but confirmed her pregnancy (de Mille 1998, 203). At a time when the Fatty Arbuckle trial and the William Desmond Turner murder were still making headlines, public judgment would have been harsh, and thus cover-up was imperative. As a window into how this was achieved, Moon’s clippings file at the Margaret Herrick Library offers a case study in how to cover up a scandalous pregnancy by means of studio spin. In October 1921, the Morning Telegraph reports that Moon is on “a four month’s tour of foreign countries.” In December it reports that she is “gathering material during her European trip for another original for Gloria Swanson,” and in April 1922, the Morning Telegraph writes that Moon is back after six months of writing short stories in Scotland. In reality Moon was convalescing in Monrovia, just east of Pasadena, in the California tuberculosis sanitarium where baby Richard was born (de Mille 1998, 212). After eight months, William de Mille’s lawyer arranged for Cecil and Constance DeMille to adopt the baby, whom the newspapers reported had been left in the lawyer’s expensive car (de Mille 216). Weakened by the pregnancy and birth, Moon spent another two years in the sanitarium.

Moon returned to screenwriting at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in 1926, where she worked in the scenario department with Marion and wrote scripts for Irving Thalberg’s wife Norma Shearer (de Mille 1998, 221). She wrote four films in less than a year, but only After Midnight (1927) has survived. She claimed to have returned to scenario writing only for the money, but by spring 1927, she had to return to the sanitarium and finished the rewrite of Love with a studio secretary typing at her bedside (de Mille 1998, 223).

Lantern slide, After Midnight (1927), Lorna Moon (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Indiana University’s Lilly Library holds the archives of Bobbs-Merrill, the Indianapolis company that published both the novel Dark Star and Moon’s 1925 short story collection Doorways in Drumorty. Richard de Mille augmented the Bobbs-Merrill correspondence and publicity material in 2005 with the Moon Mss., another small collection of Moon’s personal letters. Moon’s letters to Bobbs-Merrill show a writer who swings between confidence and insecurity. In 1928, for example, she writes to her editor, D. L. Chambers, “I’m always either convinced that nobody can write as I can—or that I’m the world’s louseyest [sic] writer.” She complains extensively to Chambers about the demands of the film industry. “The truth is, that when I hired myself to the movie brothel for fifty thousand a year,” she writes in 1926, “I had an optimistic and childlike belief that God was good and that nobody would expect me to do anything for the money. Now I find to my dismay that these sons of Israel expect me to earn it.” Some of the best letters from the Lilly Library are reproduced in Moon’s Collected Works and provide an engaging narrative that details her struggles with Hollywood, writing, and tuberculosis.

Although Moon was able to move back into her house, she never regained enough of her strength to return to the studio. Dark Star was on the best-seller list, but Lorna Moon needed more money in order to try a very expensive new sanitarium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The story of how Marion and Kate Corbaley tricked the studio executives into paying Lorna Moon seventy-five hundred dollars, while reviving Marie Dressler’s career, should be a legend in the history of female networking in the motion picture business. Marion pitched Dark Star to the male screenwriting team, but instead of telling them Moon’s tragic story, she presented Dark Star as the story of Min and Bill, which was then produced as a comedy from the original script she had written for Dressler (Beauchamp 1997, 264–6).

Richard de Mille’s biography, My Secret Mother, revived interest in Moon and is the most extensive and well-documented exploration of her life and her writing. Since the publication of My Secret Mother, Moon’s work has attracted the attention of literature scholars including Glenda Norquay, who recently edited the Collected Works of Lorna Moon. While this volume returns her novel and stories to print and publishes some of her letters, little attention has been directed to her screenplays. Moon’s complaints about working for the studios suggest that further investigation into the production files may turn up other examples of conflicts that she had with producers or directors. In addition, the complex relationship between Moon and the de Mille family and the way in which the brothers chose to cover up the scandal of her pregnancy suggest how moguls such as Cecil B. DeMille had the power to also write the script of women’s lives.

Bibliography

de Mille, Richard. My Secret Mother: Lorna Moon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

“Lorna Moon.” Morning Telegraph (18 Dec. 1921): n.p. Lorna Moon clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Lorna Moon Back at Lasky’s.” Morning Telegraph (10 Apr. 1922): n.p. Lorna Moon clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Lorna Moon Going Abroad.”Morning Telegraph (30 Oct. 1921): n.p. Lorna Moon clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Moon, Lorna. The Collected Works of Lorna Moon. Ed. Glenda Norquay. Edinburgh: Black and White Publishing, 2002.

------. Dark Star. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1929; London: Victor Gollancz, 1929.

------. Doorways in Drumorty. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1925.

------. Letter to D.L. Chambers. March 6, 1928. Lorna Moon Collection. Indiana University, The Lilly Library Manuscript Collections.

------. Letter to D.L. Chambers. November 15, 1926. Lorna Moon Collection. Indiana University, The Lilly Library Manuscript Collections.

Archival Paper Collections:

Bobbs-Merrill Manuscript Collection. Indiana University, The Lilly Library Manuscript Collections.

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Lorna Moon clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Lorna Moon Collection. Indiana University, The Lilly Library Manuscript Collections.

Citation

Ruvoli, JoAnne. "Lorna Moon." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-86t7-6a90>

Beatriz Michelena

by MaryAnne Lyons

One of the first Hispanic women to attain stardom in the silent cinema, Beatriz Michelena appeared in at least a dozen films between 1914 and 1920 and headed her own production company, Beatriz Michelena Features, from 1917 until 1920. She was the daughter of Fernando Michelena, a well-known operatic tenor and the sister of Vera Michelena, also a screen actress. Like her father, Beatriz first found professional success as a singer. She turned to film in 1914, achieving immediate stardom with the release of her first film, Salomy Jane (1914), and was pictured on the front cover of the December 1914 issue of the New York Dramatic Mirror.

Beatriz Michelena (a/p/o).

Beatriz Michelena. Public Domain.

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

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

Beatriz Michelena (a/p/o) as Mignon in Mignon (1914).

Beatriz Michelena as Mignon in Mignon (1914). Courtesy of the Marin County Free Library.

Beatriz Michelena(a) in Unwritten Law (1916), California Motion Picture Corporation, .

Beatriz Michelena,  Unwritten Law (1916), California Motion Picture Corporation. Private Collection.

Beatriz Michelena (a/p/o) in Rose of the Misty Pool (1915).

Beatriz Michelena, Rose of the Misty Pool (1915). Courtesy of the Marin County Free Library.

Beatriz Michelena(a/p/o) as Marguerite in Faust (1916).

Beatriz Michelena as Marguerite in Faust (1917). Courtesy of the Marin County Free Library.

Beatriz Michelena(a) in Just Squaw (1919).

Beatriz Michelena, Just Squaw (1919). Private Collection.

Beatriz Michelena(a).

Beatriz Michelena. Private Collection.

Reviews of Michelena’s acting emphasized her natural beauty, acting ability, and versatility. She also reportedly performed her own stunts in several Westerns, most notably those produced by her own company. A review of The Flame of Hellgate (1920) in the Moving Picture World remarks that “Miss Michelena’s riding and easy manipulation of the lariat compels admiration” (2007). The actress also drew on her operatic background for her performances in Mignon (1915), The Woman Who Dared (1916), and a highly touted but ill-fated production of Faust (1917).

Between 1914 and 1917 Michelena starred in a series of successful films for the California Motion Picture Corporation. Although some sources identify Michelena and producer-director George E. Middleton, referred to in some but not all sources as her husband, as the owners of that company, their very public and apparently acrimonious departure from the company in 1917 suggests otherwise. The rift occurred when both Michelena and Middleton left the company over a salary and contract dispute during the making of Faust (1917). Evidence suggests the degree to which Michelena was involved at the production level in her last few projects with the California Motion Picture Corporation, utilizing her family as well as her own professional background as a singer. Her father, Fernando Michelena, directed the opera scenes in the extant title The Woman Who Dared (1916), and may have worked as well on Faust (1917). An article appearing in the New York Dramatic Mirror before the completion of Faust (1917) notes the prima donna singer’s commitment from the beginning of her career to producing the “greatest of the operas” as motion pictures (26).

Something of the rift between Michelena and the California Motion Picture Corporation is also told in the fate of the Faust footage, which appears to have been incorporated as a dream sequence into a later California Motion Picture Corporation production, The Price Woman Pays (1919). Promotion for the film in which Michelena does not exactly appear reveals both the box office power of the name Beatriz Michelena and what might be interpreted as the company’s lingering rancor towards its former leading lady. Strangely, the actress’s name is misspelled in the promotional material appearing in the Exhibitor’s Trade Review as both “Beatrize” and “Beatrice,” aberrations from the consistent spelling “Beatriz” found in sources from the period. Despite the fact that the actress was no longer involved as producer, she was still used as the draw, which is seen in the promotional material recommending that theatres emphasize Michelena in the role of Marguerite. Promotional posters for the film feature “the beautiful Marguerite in all her womanly charms” and note that, along with costar Lois Wilson, she was “too well-known to need any introduction to the average motion picture fan” (1575–76). We begin to see the opportunism of the California Motion Picture Company when we read the Wid’s Daily review of the film, which describes Michelena’s role in the film as “unimportant” and “unnecessary” and even states that her star-billing is “misleading.” The review finally dismisses The Price Woman Pays (1919) as nothing more than an “ordinary program picture” aimed at a “cheaper picture clientele” (23).

Just Squaw (1919), Moving Picture World. PD

Just Squaw (1919) ad, Moving Picture World. 

In 1917 Michelena formed her own production company, Beatriz Michelena Features, located in San Rafael, California. She was joined by George Middleton and several actors with whom she had worked at California Motion Picture Corporation, including William Pike, Albert Morrison, and Clarence Arper. The venture, although short-lived, was successful in its first years. In May 1919, the Moving Picture World reported that the distribution company Robertson-Cole had purchased a series of three feature-length productions that Beatriz Michelena and “her own company” had completed in these few years, listing Just Squaw (1919), The Deadline or The Dead Line, released as The Flame of Hellgate (1920), and The Spitfire, which appears to be an earlier title for The Heart of Juanita, released in 1919 (700). Whether this last title was produced by Beatriz Michelena Features or the California Motion Picture Corporation is not entirely clear. The American Film Institute Catalog lists the latter as the production company, noting that the film was produced in 1916 while Michelena was still with the company, and gives the original title of The Heart of Juanita as The Passion Flower. In her own account of the split with the California Motion Picture Corporation, Michelena mentions that at the time of her dispute over Faust (1917), she had still not been compensated for her work in The Passion Flower, so it is possible that she obtained the rights to the film and was thus able to include it in the package purchased by Robertson-Cole. The entry in the American Film Institute Catalog lists The Specific as the title under which Robertson-Cole purchased the The Heart of Juanita, but the similarity between this and the title The Spitfire announced in Moving Picture World suggests that one or the other is a misprint.

Lantern slide, The Flame of Hellgate (1920). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

All three of these last Michelena films are Westerns that rely on action and emphasize the beauty of the northern California landscape. The variations on the role of the Western heroine found in Michelena’s characters are unusual for their time, allowing for an unprecedented fluidity in both ethnic and gender identity. In the extant film Just Squaw (1919), she plays a white woman raised to believe that she is Native American; in The Heart of Juanita (1919) she plays a Spanish dance hall girl banished to Mexico for killing her lover in a fit of jealousy; and in The Flame of Hellgate (1920) she plays a hard-riding, gun-toting daughter, who takes on the guise of a male bandit in order to track down her father’s killer. Little is known about Beatriz Michelena after 1920, and one wonders what this ambitious actress-producer did in the twenty years after the end of her company. She died in 1942 at the age of 52.

Bibliography

“Faust Nearly Ready.” New York Dramatic Mirror (11 Nov. 1916): 26.

The Flame of Hellgate Rapid Action Western.” Rev. Exhibitor’s Trade Review (13 March 1920): 1571.

“The Flame of Hellgate.” Rev. Moving Picture World (20 Mar. 1920): 2007, 2009.

MacDonald, Margaret I. “Beatriz Michelena Speaks.” Moving Picture World (7 Apr. 1917): 105.

“Miss Michelena Explains.” New York Dramatic Mirror (24 Feb. 1917): 29.

“Miss Michelena Leaves California Corporation.” Moving Picture World (13 Jan. 1917): 211.

Motion Picture News (6 Mar. 1920): 2238, 2336.

“New Issue by Robertson-Cole.” Motion Picture News (28 Feb. 1920): 2128.

Palmisano, Joseph M. ed. Notable Hispanic Women, Book II. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998, 207–208.

“The Price Woman Pays.” Ad. Exhibitor’s Trade Review (4 Oct. 1919): 1575–1577.

“The Price Woman Pays.” Rev. Wid’s Daily (2 Nov. 1919): 23.

“Robertson-Cole Buys Three Michelena Productions.” Moving Picture World (3 May 1919): 700.

“The Woman Who Dared.” New York Dramatic Mirror (15 Jan. 1916): 23.

Research Update

August 2020: Recent research by film scholar Laura Isabel Serna calls into question Beatriz Michelena’s status as the first Latina film actress. While many sources state that Fernando Michelena, who was born in Venezuela and came to New York in 1887, was her biological father, a March 12, 1921, obituary for him in The Daily Times (a Bay Area social and cultural publication) notes that he was a “devoted stepfather” to Beatriz and her sister Vera (“Town Talk” 9). To date, Serna has not yet found a birth record for Beatriz or a marriage record for her mother (Frances Lenord) and Fernando Michelena. Lenord also does not appear in the census in New York or San Francisco, which further complicates this ongoing investigation into Beatriz’s status as the first Latina film actress.

Citation

Lyons, MaryAnne. "Beatriz Michelena." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-76bd-6466>

Bess Meredyth

by Victoria Sturtevant

Bess Meredyth is mentioned in nearly every account of women screenwriters of the silent era, but very few details about her work seem to make it into print. The richest source for information about this extremely prominent screenwriter is Eighty Odd Years in Hollywood, the autobiography of Meredyth’s son, John Meredyth Lucas. This text, too, however, leaves large gaps in detail and in the chronology of the author’s mother’s career, and the son reflects: “It, unfortunately, never seemed important that I learn Mother’s early history. She never wrote it, only mentioned a few disconnected anecdotes. I never asked. By the time the questions were formed, the answers had died” (19).

Bess Meredyth (d/w/e/a/o). PCVS

Bess Meredyth. Private Collection.

Lantern slide, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1928), Bess Meredyth (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Born Helen MacGlashan in Buffalo, New York, Bess Meredyth’s father was the manager of a local theatre, and she began working as an organist and later a vaudeville light comedienne in her teens. She came to Hollywood in 1911, working as an extra for the Biograph Company for a short while, and quickly began writing scenarios on a freelance basis to supplement her income. While at Biograph, Bess Meredyth met and married actor and director Wilfred Lucas, who became her frequent collaborator. In 1914, the couple left Biograph to run their own unit at the Universal Manufacturing Company, where she became a fairly well-known comic actress, appearing primarily in “Willy Walrus” and “Bess the Detectress” shorts. The period from 1914 to 1920 seems to be Meredyth’s most prolific, a period during which she wrote, acted, and directed motion pictures with her husband. A 1927 Moving Picture World profile by Tom Waller claims that Meredyth wrote roughly two hundred original stories while she was at Universal, then quit acting to devote herself to writing full time, producing a story per week for Kalem serial star Ruth Roland. Waller further notes that Meredyth then returned to Universal to cosupervise the Yonkers, New York, Triangle Film Corporation Studio, and codirected some motion pictures with Allan Dwan (15). Published sources assign her only one feature directing credit, as codirector of the 1918 Bluebird release Morgan’s Raiders. The American Film Institute catalog also notes, however, that copyright records for the National Film Corporation feature release The Girl from Nowhere (1919) indicate that it was “Written and Directed by Bess Meredyth and Wilfred Lucas,” although the press book credits only Lucas (324). Because they collaborated so closely, “credit” is ambiguous and inconsistent, especially in their early work, as was the case with so many other married couples who collaborated as writers throughout the silent and into the early sound era. Yet the differences between these collaborations is also significant, and Meredyth and Lucas were perhaps more like Agnes Christine Johnston and Frank Mitchell Davey than Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, the difference being that Lucas, like Davey, in addition to writing screenplays also worked as a director.

Lantern slide, Sailors’ Wives (1928), Bess Meredyth (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

In 1920, Meredyth and Lucas sailed to Australia to make action films with stuntman and star Reg “Snowy” Baker. Although they only stayed in Australia for a year, the experience with a small crew far from Hollywood gave Meredyth the chance to take a more active role in motion picture production, including the cutting and titling of her films (Waller 15). This episode also suggests that Meredyth was very much at home with the masculine ethos of action filmmaking, and was willing to travel halfway around the world to pursue her work, infant son in tow.

Bess Meredyth (d/w/e/a/o). AMPAS

Bess Meredyth. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

When the family returned to Hollywood in 1921, Bess Meredyth resumed a career during which she was ultimately to accumulate more than one hundred and twenty-five writing credits, working in succession for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, Goldwyn Productions, First National Pictures, and Columbia Pictures, before landing again at MGM in 1928. Her credits include a remarkable number of milestones and prestige pictures. She was a fast-working studio contract writer and consummate technician who appears to have had a very pragmatic approach to her work. Famously, MGM sent Meredyth to Italy in 1924 to help rescue the production of Ben-Hur that was falling grossly behind schedule and running over budget, and she is listed on the writing credits with Carey Wilson as “continuity,” although she is widely known to have supervised the enormous production.

Lantern slide, Rose of the Golden West (1927), Bess Meredyth (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

As in the Ben-Hur episode of her career, Meredyth seems to have been prized particularly for her ability to handle sticky situations in a way that helped the studio run smoothly. Meredyth’s fellow screenwriter Gene Fowler praised her ability to humor the volatile John Barrymore, who would show up at her house with new and often outrageous passions or ideas for his films (1976, 236–237). John Meredyth Lucas also admiringly described his mother’s ability to fend off advances from amorous leading men with a wry retort, a talent that probably served her well in her work with male film stars and in male genres throughout her career (29–30, 36).

Bess Meredyth was equally adept with women’s films, however, and notably adapted a series of delicate vehicles for Greta Garbo, including Michael Arlen’s racy novel The Green Hat, which was produced by MGM as A Woman of Affairs (1928). Meredyth was faced with the more or less impossible task of maintaining narrative coherence while evading Production Code censure of the novel’s original narrative material, which involved venereal disease, alcoholism, infidelity, unwed pregnancy, and suicide. For A Woman of Affairs, a remarkable melodrama that survives from the silent era, Meredyth received a best adapted screenplay nomination at the first Academy Awards ceremony, held in 1929. One of the thirty-six artists (including screenwriter Jeanie Macpherson) who founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1928, Meredyth was nominated for two screenplays, Wonder of Women (1929) as well as A Woman of Affairs. 

Ad The Wife Who Wasn't Wanted (1925) Bess Meredyth (w).

Ad The Wife Who Wasn’t Wanted (1925). Private Collection.

It is perhaps surprising, given such honors, that Bess Meredyth’s career faded quickly in the 1930s—a fact that is partially attributable to changes in the organization at MGM, particularly the death of her friend Irving Thalberg, whose support had also advanced the screenwriting career of Frances Marion in that competitive studio writing department. But the studio upheaval also coincided with a series of illnesses that would render Meredyth bedridden for much of the rest of her life. Lucas describes a series of panic attacks that began to affect his mother while she was still at MGM in the early thirties, and left her under a doctor’s care for much of the rest of her life (62, 72–74). Though she no longer maintained a formal career during these years, it is likely that she continued to exert herself creatively through the films of her third husband, Michael Curtiz, director of Casablanca (1942). Years later, Casablanca screenwriter Julius Epstein would recall her contributions to her husband’s career: “When we had a story conference and Mike came in the next day and made criticisms or suggestions, we knew they were Bess Meredyth’s ideas, not his, so it was easy to trip him up. We’d make a change and say, ‘What do you think, Mike?’ and he’d have to go back and ask Bess” (Harmetz 123).

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Fowler, Gene. Good Night Sweet Prince. 1943. Cutchogue: Buccaneer Books, 1976.

Fowler, Gene, and Bess Meredyth. The Mighty Barnum, A Screenplay. New York: Garland, 1977.

Harmetz, Aljean. Round Up the Usual Suspects. New York: Hyperion, 1992.

Lucas, John Meredyth. Eighty Odd Years in Hollywood: Memoir of a Career in Film and Television. Jefferson: McFarland, 2004.

Miles, Allie Lowe, and Bess Meredyth. When a Man Loves: The Story of a Deathless Passion. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927. [Note: This book is based on the motion picture story by Bess Meredyth.]

Waller, Tom. “Bess Meredyth.” The Moving Picture World 2 July 1927: 15.

Research Update

March 2023: A Five Foot Ruler (1917), a two-reel presumably lost film with a story credited to Bess Meredyth in the trade press, has been added to the filmography.

Citation

Sturtevant, Victoria. "Bess Meredyth." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-1g0x-gr09>

Vera McCord

by Christina Lane

Theatrical actress Vera McCord wrote, produced, and directed her one and only independent feature motion picture, the semi-scandalous The Good-Bad Wife, in 1921. She had had a relatively short theatrical career between 1912 and 1914 in Oakland, California, after a seven-year stint on the stage in London before her one producing gamble. What else we know of McCord’s life is that she was born in 1872 in Marshalltown, Iowa. The daughter of the town’s deputy sheriff, she, her parents, and her two brothers eventually moved to central California, where her father took up real estate. As a young woman, she enrolled at Snell’s Women’s Seminary in Berkeley, and later took a single course at Emerson College in Boston. It was on a trip to England and Paris “under the chaperonage of [one] Lady Lewds,” according to an Oakland Tribune article in 1914, that she developed her theatrical skills (28).

During the years in Oakland, McCord appeared in her only known film. She starred opposite Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson in the one-reel Broncho Billy’s Mistake (1913), an installment in the long-running set of Broncho Billy serials. Like many of these Essanay West Coast productions, it was shot in Niles, California, twenty-five miles south of Oakland. While McCord’s movements in the mid-to-late-1910s remain vague, she reveals potentially crucial information about why she made the move back to California from New York in 1912 in what was most likely a self-written “press release” published in the Oakland Tribune. The article, “Is Oakland Girl to Appear Here?” states that “she was playing with Henry Miller when her father became ill and it was necessary for her to cancel her engagements” (28). The 1920 US Federal Census tells us that she had returned to Manhattan with her widowed mother, her widower brother, and his young son, listing herself as single actress.

Piecing together information about McCord is complicated by the fact that her theatre-driven career resulted in a nomadic existence, but also, like so many actresses, she practiced the deceptive art of self-invention. For example, although McCord lists herself in the 1920 US Federal Census as thirty-five years old, which would mean she was born in 1885, the 1880 census lists her birth year as 1872. Doing the calculation, we realize that at the time she made The Good-Bad Wife, she was a fifty-year-old woman portraying herself as thirty-seven.

Vera McCord (a) 1911. PD

Vera McCord, 1911.

McCord wrote the screenplay for The Good-Bad Wife, adapting Mary Imlay Taylor’s short story “The Wild Fawn,” which had been serialized in Munsey’s Magazine between September 1919 and February 1920. The American Film Institute online catalog summarizes the plot of the film as follows: “Virginia aristocrat William Carter (Sidney Mason) becomes entranced by famed French dancer Fanchon La Fare (Dorothy Green) while on a trip to Paris. After she trails him back to the United States, William suddenly finds himself marrying Fanchon to save her from deportation.” After returning with her new husband to Virginia, Leonard Frank in the Motion Picture News review explains, “‘Frenchie’ does not forget her old ways, smoking cigarettes before the family, appearing in scanty costume at a church entertainment,” and flirting outrageously (3451). Still, she wins over the stuffy family and the community, but not until after she is stalked by a brutal former husband who is after her wealth, a trial stages her innocence, and her attempted suicide proclaims her honor. One sales strategy was to propose to prospective female audiences that they could see Fanchon as either a “good” or a “bad” wife. A suggested tag line, found in the press materials accompanying the Motion Picture News article is “Don’t fail to see ‘The Good-Bad Wife.’ It will please all the good little wives and charm all the naughty ones” (3451).

Photoplay not only commented on the film’s “scandalous” and “shocking” protagonist, but also its controversial way of representing racial identity (104). The Variety review compliments the comedy talent of the African-American actors Pauline Dempsey and J. Wesley Jenkins and says that what could have been “an insignificant bit part” by Chinese actress Moe Lee is much more (4). Mary Imlay Taylor’s “The Wild Fawn,” which, incidentally, had no Chinese character, follows generally the same story line. It is notable that given her theatrical experience, McCord did not appear as an actress in The Good-Bad Wife. The film’s female lead, Dorothy Green, was a Russian-born actress who made over a dozen motion pictures between 1914 and 1921, several of which were directed by McCord’s theatre coach at the time, Frederick A. Thompson, who would marry screenwriter Frances Marion and go on to become a major star actor and director (Beauchamp 1997, 120–122).

WFP-MCC02

Lobby card for The Good-Bad Wife (1921). Private Collection.

Vera McCord was always cited as an independent producer, and according to her New York Times obituary in 1949, financed her one film through Vera McCord Productions (21). A closer look at the production and distribution path of The Good-Bad Wife tells us something about the challenges that faced independent productions in the 1920s. The film was originally released on June 7, 1920, through the low-budget Film Booking Offices of America (FBO), which suggests that McCord may have arranged for financing through that company (Leonard 3451; Beauchamp 157). After her years in London, McCord might have had ties to FBO, the distribution arm of the British company Robertson-Cole, which underwent a major reorganization between 1920 and 1922. The American Film Institute online catalog, a good source of production and distribution information on this film, starts with the fact that the company shot the film at the Bacon-Becker Studios in New York, and tells us that The Good-Bad Wife had two different releases, eight months apart. After the first run, in October 1920, the distribution rights were again sold to the Walgreene Film Corporation, which immediately turned them over to the Federated Film Exchanges of America. Most likely, The Good-Bad Wife had its New York City premiere around January 14, 1921, and went into its general release in February 1921. Because Federated Film Exchanges was a “states rights” company, which meant that it released films to specific states or regional territories through a system of self-distribution, The Good-Bad Wife was seen in certain small towns throughout the US. Reviews or advertisements appeared in papers in Oakland, California; Mansfield, Ohio; and New Castle, Pennsylvania, to name a few.

Many factors explain the poor distribution of McCord’s film, over and above the challenges faced by independent films exhibited outside the increasingly monopolistic Hollywood studio system. It is easy to see how it probably lost its place on the roster at FBO in the summer of 1920. According to the New York Times in 1928, the company had gone into its first American-made production in May, and within the year moved its hub from New York to Los Angeles, absorbed the Hallmark Pictures film company, and formed a partnership with Joseph P. Kennedy (10). Another factor may have been a very negative Variety review after the January 1921 New York premiere, which not only criticized the editing (“the picture has been badly assembled”), but also disparaged Green’s dancing and the “contention that she is the darling of Paris” (4). More curious, at its first release, the The Good-Bad Wife was six-reels long, and its publicity materials credited Chester DeVonde with direction, citing McCord as the producer, but by the second release, McCord was listed as director, and the film was cut to five reels.

After McCord made The Good-Bad Wife, she apparently responded to its relative failure by founding and serving as club president of the New York-based “National Club for Better Movies,” part of the thriving Better Films Movement—which sought to improve the industry’s image, especially among educators, parents, and public officials, we learn from the New York Times in 1926 (30). The most noteworthy—and newsworthy—turn in McCord’s life was documented in a series of sensational newspaper headlines between 1929 and 1931. She filed a $250,000 breech of promise suit against the Chicago banker Maurice Rothschild. According to the Associated Press account, which was transmitted in regional papers such as Virginia’s Danville Bee across the country. According to The Reno Evening Gazette,  “Miss McCord had alleged that Rothschild… had proposed marriage to her but failed to attend the betrothal party and had not kept the promise of engagement. He said he’d been attracted by her home at Little Neck, Long Island, but disillusioned by her admission that she often quarreled with her brother” (14). The brother, Don McCord, however, appeared at the trial as a witness for Rothschild, testifying to the excessiveness of his sister’s drinking, according to other news coverage in the Danville Bee (6). Once the actress lost her suit, she appears to have gone underground. A glimpse of McCord in her final years comes in an unlikely place—a testimonial blurb in a 1947 book on healthful breathing methods. McCord died of a heart attack on March 2, 1949, at her New York home and studio at 115 East 34th Street, where her obituary tells us she was teaching speech and acting (21).

Bibliography

“Actress Asks for $250,000 Heart Balm.” Danville Bee (15 June 1929): 6.

“Actress Loses Court Contest.” Reno Evening Gazette (23 Oct. 1931): 14.

Gaines, Thomas. Vitalic Breathing: The Miracle Air Discovery. New York: Health Research Books, 1947.

“Good-Bad Wife.” Adv. Mansfield News (Ohio) (22 Mar. 1921): 5.

“Good-Bad Wife.” Rev. Photoplay (Jan. 1921): 104.

“Good-Bad Wife.” Rev. Variety in Variety Film Reviews, 1921-1925 vol. 2 (21 Jan. 1921): 4, col. 12.

“Is Oakland Girl to Appear Here?” Oakland Tribune (18 Jan. 1914): 28.

Leonard, Frank. “The Good-Bad Wife,” Motion Picture News (30 Oct. 1920): 3451.

“Miss Vera McCord.” Obit. New York Times (4 Mar. 1949): 21.

“Movie Chief’s Rapid Rise: A Cinema Chief.” New York Times (3 June 1928): 10.

“Plea for Better Movies.” New York Times (15 Dec. 1926): 30.

Taylor, Mary Imlay. The Wild Fawn. New York: Moffat Yard and Co., 1920. 250-377.

“Theaters.” Oakland Tribune (2 June 1921): A7.

“Vera McCord is Denied Heart Balm.” Sheboygan Press (23 Oct. 1931): 6.

“Where to Go Tonight.” New Castle News (Pennsylvania) (8 Apr. 1922): 2.

Archival Paper Collections:

Vera McCord Clippings files. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Citation

Lane, Christina. "Vera McCord." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-v9vv-rd77>

June Mathis

by Virginia Wright Wexman

Once called the most powerful woman in Hollywood, June Mathis is known to have written or cowritten the screenplays of one hundred and fourteen produced features. Yet she is a shadowy figure today. Though one can find summaries of her biography in studio publicity releases of the day and puff pieces in the fan press, apart from these notoriously unreliable sources, little is known about her life. Her greatest moment of fame came when she died suddenly while attending a play with her mother at a New York theatre. The New York Times reported her dramatic demise in a front page headline: “June Mathis Heart Victim.”

June Mathis (w/e/d/p). PC

Portrait, June Mathis. Private Collection. 

June Mathis (w/e/d/p). PC

June Mathis holding a book. Private Collection.

June Mathis. writer-producer. NYPL

June Mathis at desk. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Mathis was one of several prolific women screenwriters of the silent era, in a group that included Frances Marion, Bess Meredyth, Anita Loos, and Jeanie Macpherson. Like many of her female colleagues, she worked not in splendid isolation but in tandem with others. She cowrote most of her scripts and specialized in star vehicles as well as adaptations of literary and stage successes. Ascertaining the precise contributions she made to films associated with her name is further complicated, however, by that fact that she is frequently credited in the form of ambiguously worded phrases like “adaptation by…,” “story by…,” “titles by…,” “continuity by…,” “dialogue by…,” “editorial supervision by…,” and so forth. Further, surviving scripts of films she was associated with are often unattributed, with no author(s) name(s) indicated on the typescripts. Correspondence contained in the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California suggests that Mathis left numerous unproduced scripts in various stages of completion at her death, but what has become of these is a mystery.

June Mathis (w/e/a/d/p),NYPL

Portrait, June Mathis. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

In addition to writing, Mathis was also a production executive; as such her influence was widely felt throughout the industry. The titles she held at Goldwyn Pictures, Metro Pictures, and Famous Players-Lasky Film Corporation included “artistic supervisor” and “editorial director.” Such positions ceased to exist in the years that followed; but as far as one can tell, they involved overseeing the development of motion picture scripts, supervising activities on the set, and presiding over the editing process, duties studio producers commonly assumed during the 1930s.

Core General Goldwyn Pictures Corporation Group Pictures. AMPAS

Core General Goldwyn Pictures Corporation Group Pictures. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Mathis is perhaps best remembered for having discovered Rudolph Valentino, casting the then-unknown bit player in the lead role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921 and thereby creating a newly exotic and sexually dangerous image of the screen lover. Mathis was the primary architect of Valentino’s career, according to Thomas Slater and Fr. Alcuin Siebenand. She directed him in Four Horsemen (even though Rex Ingram was the credited director on the film), writing follow-up vehicles for him (The Conquering Power, 1921; Blood and Sand, 1922; The Young Rajah, 1922), and acting as mentor to the star until their friendship was broken up by Valentino’s wife Natacha Rambova (Leider 2003, 323–24). In 1924, after the rift, Mathis married Sylvano Balboni, an Italian cameraman who resembled Valentino. But she kept her ties to the star and, when he died suddenly in 1926, she arranged for him to be buried in her family crypt in the Hollywood cemetery. She is interred in the vault next to his. 

Core General Pictures Corp. June Mathis (second from left, bottom row). AMPAS

Core General Pictures Corp. June Mathis (second from left, bottom row). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Mathis’s relationship with Valentino was closely connected with her participation in actress Alla Nazimova’s “8080 club,” a social circle that included both Valentino and Rambova and that functioned as a center of lesbian life in Hollywood during the early 1920s (Lambert 1997, 218). Nazimova, who had achieved great fame on the stage as a tragedienne, collaborated with Mathis on several films, including Eye for Eye (1918), Out of the Fog (1919), The Red Lantern (1919), The Brat (1919), and Camille (1921). In these endeavors, Mathis was undoubtedly the minor voice whose contribution supported the artistic vision of her strong-willed collaborator. Material documenting the nature and extent of the Mathis-Nazimova collaborations is contained in the Nazimova archive in Columbus, Georgia, but the archive is currently unavailable to scholars. The versatile Mathis also played handmaiden to two other major women stars whose talents lay in the realm of comedy. For Colleen Moore, the tireless screenwriter penned Sally (1925), The Desert Flower (1925), We Moderns (1925), and Irene (1926); and for Corinne Griffith, she wrote Classified (1925).

June Mathis (w) w/ Sylvano Balboni (d) The Masked Woman (1927), PC

June Mathis with Sylvano Balboni, director of The Masked Woman (1927). Private Collection.

The administrative skills and collaborative spirit Mathis brought to such undertakings did not always enable her to triumph over the fractious, ego-driven climate that prevailed in the Hollywood industry, and she has been scapegoated by posterity for the derailment of a few of the era’s major productions. French film scholar George Sadoul singled her out as the “butcher” who edited Greed (1925), though evidence shows that she championed both the project and its willful director Erich Von Stroheim from the outset (Slater 133). And though Mathis was held responsible by Irving Thalberg when the ill-fated megaproduction Ben-Hur fell to pieces under her supervision while on location in Italy in 1924, the problems that arose appear to have been caused not by Mathis but by labor slowdowns and the imperious behavior of the film’s original director Charles Brabin (Brownlow 1968, 385–414; Keel 32-33, 101).

Core General Metros Pictures Corp. AMPAS

Core General Metros Pictures Corp. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

As a potential subject of auteurist analysis, Mathis presents obvious difficulties. Most of her scripts were cowritten with others, and many were adaptations of popular novels and plays of the day. To a degree, however, many of these diverse projects reflect a distinct sensibility that can be identified with Mathis herself. Many feature high melodrama and a fascination with mysticism and spiritualism as well as with geographically and historically distant locales. Though most display the ethnic and gender stereotyping that permeated popular discourse at the time, films like the extant The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), and The Spanish Dancer (1923) are marked by imaginative daring in their conceptions and skilled craftsmanship in their plot construction. These films, along with others from the Mathis oeuvre, stand as quintessential expressions of the taste for stylized and otherworldly fantasies that characterized the 1920s, but they also betray a distinctive flair that was Mathis’s own.

See also: Alla Nazimova, Natacha Rambova, “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

valent-rajah.Mathis

Poster, The Young Rajah (1922), written by June Mathis.

The Four Horsemen

Poster, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), written by June Mathis.

Bibliography

Benthall, Dwinelle. “Which Road Leads to Happiness?” Motion Picture Magazine (Dec. 1926): 30-31, 119-22.

Hall, Gladys, and Adele Whitely Fletcher. “We Discovered Who Discovered Valentino.” Motion Picture Magazine (April 1923): 20-22, 93-95.

“June Mathis.” Employee Biography Sheet. Goldwyn. 29 Nov. 1922. June Mathis clippings file. Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“June Mathis Heart Victim.” New York Times (28 July 1927): 19.

Keel, A. Chester. “The Fiasco of ‘Ben Hur.’” Photoplay (Nov. 1924): 32-33, 101.

Mathis, June. “Harmony in Picture Making.” Film Daily (6 May 1923): 5.

------.“Scenario Writers Must Find Theme.” New York Times (15 Apr. 1923): Sec. 7, 3.

------.“Tapping the Thought Wireless.” Moving Picture World (21 July 1917): 409.

------. “The ‘Wave Length’ of Success.” Motion Picture Director (Feb. 1927): 22.

------. Day of Faith synopsis (1923), In the Palace of the King synopsis (1923). In What Women Wrote: Scenarios, 1912 – 1929. Eds. Ann Martin and Virginia Clark.Microfilm. University Publications of America, 1987.

Siebenand, Fr. Alcuin. “June Mathis Balboni: Initial Research on her life and Contributions.” Unpublished ms. n.d., 16 pp. June Mathis scripts and scenarios. Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Slater, Thomas J. “June Mathis: A Woman Who Spoke Through Silents.” Griffithiana vol. 18 no. 53 (May 1995): 133-155.

Van Vranken, Frederick. “Women’s Work in Motion Pictures.” Motion Picture (Aug. 1923): 28-29, 89-91.

Archival Paper Collections:

Alla Nazimova Papers. Glesca Marshall Library, Springer Opera House.

June Mathis clippings file. Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

June Mathis scripts and scenarios. Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Nazimova collection, 1877-1988. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Citation

Wexman, Virginia Wright. "June Mathis." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-npcm-5927>

Sarah Y. Mason

by Victoria Sturtevant

Sarah Yeiser Mason shared an Academy Award with her husband Victor Heerman for the 1933 screenplay for Little Women. It is startling, in light of this achievement, to see how little information on Mason is available for researchers today. She seems to have left no papers, and most of the existing manuscripts and correspondence belonging to her are among Heerman’s papers in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Sarah Y. Mason (w/o) & Zasu Pitts

Sarah Y. Mason and Zasu Pitts.

Born in Pima, Arizona, Sarah Y. Mason began work in films in 1918 when she joined the company of a location shoot for the Douglas Fairbanks film Arizona. In the first years of her career in Hollywood, Mason wrote short comedies for notable figures such as Fatty Arbuckle, Louise Fadenza, and especially ZaSu Pitts, with whom she became very close. In 1920, she was hired by Owen Moore to work with director Heerman on the scenario for The Poor Simp, and they married that same year.

Like many married screenwriters who collaborated with their spouses, the historical record of Mason’s work during this period of her life has been to some degree subsumed under her husband’s. It is therefore difficult at this stage to separate one author from the other, as it is with Mrs. George Randolph Chester and her husband, for instance. But the difference in the couples is important since while the Chesters were always employed as a team and received double credit, Mason appears to have been eclipsed by her husband. Locating her contribution is a problem compounded by the fact that an unpublished interview with Heerman conducted by Anthony Slide in the 1970s is one of the only extended examinations of Mason’s work available. In this interview, Heerman further obscures Mason’s authorship by taking credit for the creative work even on motion pictures where he is not credited alongside his wife. Says Heerman of a trip he took: “Well I went to Cleveland, and my wife was with me, because she was going to Europe. When I left, she wouldn’t work, she couldn’t work, because I mean I practically laid out everything while she was at MGM—she was at MGM a couple or three years” (48).

Sarah Y. Mason. AMPAS

Sarah Y. Mason at work with children. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Lantern slide, Held in Trust (1920), Sarah Y. Mason (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Heerman’s claims about Mason’s role in their collaborative screenwriting sessions vary. In some cases, he describes her as a valuable partner, while other times he relegates her to a virtually secretarial role. At one point he claims “I told her what to write” (54). During a period of time in the early 1930s when Heerman was feuding with some prominent people in the industry and had trouble finding work, he claims that producers would hire Mason, knowing that they were getting Heerman’s work as well. There is a noticeable gap in Mason’s career from 1923 to 1925, for which there is no apparent explanation. It could be that her collaborations with her husband bore his name when he was doing well professionally and bore her name when he had burned some bridges. Most of Heerman’s recollections of their collaborations date from the early sound years. A close examination of their working relationship in the silent era would be an important starting point for a critical history that separates Mason’s work from that of her husband.

Sarah Y. Mason (w), Dick Rosson, Allan Dwan Bound in Morocco (1918), AMPAS

Sarah Y. Mason at typewriter, with Dick Rosson, Allan Dwan, Bound in Morocco (1918). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Heerman is more generous when he describes Mason’s collaborations with writers other than himself. He claims that she often would give another writer undue credit as collaborator on a screenplay, as she did with George O’Neil on the script for Magnificent Obsession (1935). Again, to Slide, Heerman claims that O’Neil had almost nothing to do with the final script: “But Sarah was always generous with other people’s work. She did it many times. But that was all right. Things I didn’t work on, if she wanted to share it with somebody else, that was fine. She’d say, “I can’t put your name, and I like this fellow.” And that would be it” (60). Indeed, Mason’s lack of concern with laying claim to her artistic work has left contemporary researchers with an unclear road map of her professional and artistic accomplishments.

Sarah Y. Mason and baby Catharine Heerman. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

This lack of information is particularly lamentable in light of the fact that Mason was clearly a talented writer who worked with some of the most important artists in the industry. Mason’s grandson, John Koenig, in an interview in 2003, describes his grandmother as a voracious reader who had memorized all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. While Heerman was certainly a go-getter, Koenig offers an impression of Mason as more of an eccentric, someone who wrote for the love of writing. Because she spent more time “in her own head,” Koenig speculates that she was someone “who wouldn’t have hustled for credit.” As a result, scholars do not yet adequately understand the actual nature of Mason’s contributions to the films she was involved in writing.

Sarah Y. Mason (w/o)

Sarah Y. Mason portrait. 

Bibliography

Koenig, John. Interview with Victoria Sturtevant. Los Angeles, 5 April 2003.

McGilligan, Patrick. George Cukor: A Double Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Mason, Sarah Y. The Girl Said No [screenplay] New York: World Wide Publishing, Inc., 1930.

Slide, Anthony. Unedited Transcript of Interview with Victor Heerman. Victor Heerman papers, Box 8. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Archival Paper Collections:

Victor Heerman papers, 1917-1976. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Sturtevant, Victoria. "Sarah Y. Mason." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ctxd-v547>

Frances Marion

by JoAnne Ruvoli
Frances Marion (p/d/w/a) publicity photo, c. 1918, PC

Publicity photo, Frances Marion c. 1918. Private Collection. 

In 1919, when Moving Picture World asked her what her work meant, Frances Marion said, “Stories, working scenarios ready for the director to proceed, tarrying with him through every scene as it is filmed; editing and cutting the complete product and title-writing every bit of it.” The native San Franciscan, born Marion Benson Owens, worked in every facet of film production and wrote the stories and scenarios for over three hundred films in a career that spans from early cinema to the sound era and netted her two Academy Awards for screenwriting. Trained by director-producer Lois Weber, Marion worked with nearly every major player over the years, and maintained ongoing collaborations with Mary Pickford, Irving Thalberg, and William Randolph Hearst. She excelled at writing scripts that accentuated the strengths of specific actors and is often credited with defining the careers of Marie Dressler, Greta Garbo, Marion Davies, and Pickford as well as her husband, cowboy star actor Fred Thomson.

Mary Pickford (a/p/w/o) with Frances Marion (p/d/w/a). PC

Mary Pickford with Frances Marion (left). Private Collection. 

Marion’s high profile during her own lifetime and her close relationships with star actresses such as Pickford — for whom she wrote character-defining films including The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), and The Little Princess (1917) — have resulted in a well-documented life and career. In addition to several period articles and interviews she conducted for magazines such as Photoplay, we are fortunate to have Marion’s own engaging memoir Off With Their Heads! as well as Cari Beauchamp’s definitive biography Without Lying Down and its 2001 companion documentary film. The available material on Marion goes far beyond recovering the historical record of her career. Her own writings, as well as Beauchamp’s work, restore the cultural contexts of the silent cinema era and open up the field for new angles of analysis, exemplified by Jennifer Parchesky’s recent discussion of Marion’s use of automobiles in the 1925 film Zander the Great (180).

Poster, Stella Dallas (1925), written by Frances Marion.

Throughout her career, which spanned 1915–1946, Frances Marion both adapted other texts and wrote original scenarios, sometimes as a freelance writer but most notably under studio contract. Her Hollywood tenure was spent mostly in the screenwriting department at the premiere major studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where she worked closely with producers Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg. Marion’s relationships with writers, actors, directors, and executives as well as the crew and staff show an enormous generosity that extended beyond position or power. Her attempts to revive the career of comedienne Dressler and to improve the fortunes of failing screenwriter Lorna Moon are legendary. The published letters of Valeria Belletti, Samuel Goldwyn’s secretary, also illustrate the way Marion’s generosity extended to all studio employees in the story of how she encouraged Belletti’s writing ambitions.

Prolific and skilled in the craft of scenario writing, Marion taught, wrote a textbook, How to Write and Sell Film Stories, and in interviews often commented not only on the evolution of screenwriting, but on the writers’ working conditions as well. For instance, she told Elizabeth Peltret of Photoplay in 1917 that she preferred writing at home, asking, “how can they expect a poor scenario writer to plunge into deep and silent study when Rome is burning on the lot across the street” (31). Eventually, in 1933, she was instrumental in urging the Screen Writer’s Guild to address the more serious of these conditions (Beauchamp 1997, 307). But the socially conscious side of Frances Marion was not made available to the public; rather, the articles in fan magazines and trade publications like Moving Picture World treat her in a fashion similar to the motion picture stars for whom she wrote, publishing glamorous photos and reporting on her industry successes, personal milestones, and every career move, as in the 1919 article, “Frances Marion Returns to Task” (1013).

Frances Marion (p/d/w/a) publicity photo, c. 1924,PC

Publicity photo, Frances Marion c. 1924. Private Collection.

Frances Marion is credited with directing two motion pictures—The Love Light (1921) and Just Around the Corner (1921). During World War I, she had filmed women’s contributions at the front for the US government and, on this assignment, became the first woman to cross the Rhine after the Armistice (Beauchamp 1997, 98). From a story she heard in Italy after the war, she wrote the script for The Love Light, a project that would capitalize on the public’s fascination with Pickford ’s marriage to Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and present Pickford in an adult role as a young woman who discovers that her lover is a German spy (Beauchamp 1997, 124). Pickford insisted that her friend direct The Love Light, and Marion began by moving the production to Monterey, California, where the cypress trees on the coast stood in for those in Italy (Beauchamp 1997, 128).

Advertising The Love Light (1921), Frances Marion (d/w), PC

Ad, The Love Light (1921), directed and written by Frances Marion. 

Using the Pickford-Marion formula of adding slapstick comedy to drama, the film begins with Angela (Pickford) as an Italian peasant girl chasing her brothers around several inebriated farm animals. This scene is singled out by the Photoplay reviewer as the best thing he remembers except that the film “takes the nation’s sweetheart out of her curls and short frocks and makes a woman of her” (77). Marion uses beautifully framed long shots of the coastal overlook to show the lighthouse, which is left for Angela to manage when her brothers go off to war. One day, after a storm, Joseph (Fred Thomson) washes up on shore and is taken in by Angela, who does not know that he is a German spy. Thinking that he is a deserter from the American Navy, she hides him, but they quickly fall in love. Beauchamp reports stories of friction on set between Pickford, Thomson—by now married to Marion—and the first-time director, but suggests that these stories originated from a crew who may have had difficulty taking commands from a woman (1997, 129). Pickford’s performance shifts from passion, as Angela and Joseph secretly marry, to heroic pathos, as she finds out that he has tricked her into using the lighthouse to send messages to German submarines.

Scene The Love Light (1921), Frances Marion (d/w), PC

The Love Light (1921). Private Collection.

She turns him over to the angry villagers and again Marion’s chiaroscuro exterior shots tell the story of his death. The last part of the film shifts again as Angela gives birth to Joseph’s baby and is stricken with grief at the loss of her two brothers, who die in the war. The plot devolves to a climatic shipwreck, which Marion chose to film during a real storm with a real ship, putting her assistant director in peril (Beauchamp 1997, 129). In Off With Their Heads! Marion writes, “If only women’s lib had been active in those days!” in response to a reviewer who nearly fifty years earlier had dismissed the scene with “A man wouldn’t try to get away with that phony miniature” (103). The visual aspects of Marion’s direction as well as Pickford’s performance have perhaps been underrated and deserve further study. Cari Beauchamp claims Marion was never again the sole director, but just how much she contributed to the direction of other films in a collaboration with others warrants more attention.

Frances Marion (p/d/w/a), PC

Frances Marion. Private Collection

Despite evidence of Marion’s hands-on involvement in many stages of the motion pictures she wrote, she is credited with codirecting only the extant film The Song of Love (1923), on which she worked with Chester M. Franklin. Later in Frances Marion’s life, after a career of writing for the film industry, she told DeWitt Bodeen, “[I]t was apparent that if a writer wanted to maintain any control over what he wrote, he would have to become a writer-director, or a writer-producer. Writing a screenplay had become like writing on sand, with the wind blowing” (113).

With additional research by Jane Gaines.

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Belletti, Valeria. Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary. Edited by Cari Beauchamp. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Bodeen, DeWitt. More From Hollywood: The Careers of Fifteen Great American Stars. New York: Barnes, 1977.

“Frances Marion Returns to Task.” Moving Picture World (22 February 1919): 1013.

Mantle, Burns. “The Shadow Stage.” The Love Light. Rev. Photoplay (April 1921): 51-53, 77.

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

------. Off With Their Heads! A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

Parchesky, Jennifer. “Women in the Driver’s Seat: The Auto-erotics of Early Women’s Films.” Film History 18 (2006): 174-184.

Peltret, Elizabeth. “Frances Marion—Soldieress of Fortune.” Photoplay (November 1917): 31-33, 124.

Archival Paper Collections:

Frances Marion clippings files. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Frances Marion Collection. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Gloria Swanson papers. University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center.

Reminiscences of Frances Marion. June, 1958. Columbia University, Rare Books and Manuscript Library.

Thomson family letters. Private collection of Carson and Mary Thomson.

Citation

Ruvoli, JoAnne. "Frances Marion." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kvq5-gm17>

Cleo Madison

by Mark Garrett Cooper

“One of these days, men are going to get over the fool idea that women have no brains,” Cleo Madison told Photoplay magazine in 1916, “and quit getting insulted at the thought that a skirt-wearer can do their work quite as well as they can. And I don’t believe that day is very far off” (109). Such statements encourage us to imagine Madison in the vanguard of what must then have seemed a major trend. It is clear from the published record of Universal Motion Picture Manufacturing Company credits from 1912–1929 that, beginning in 1915, the company employed increasing numbers of women as directors, and by the end of 1919 it had credited no fewer than eleven women with directing at least one hundred and seventy titles (Braff 2002). Before 1915, Universal credited Grace Cunard, Jeanie Macpherson, and Lois Weber as directors. After 1915, the studio credited Cunard, Madison, Weber, Ruth Ann Baldwin, Eugenie Magnus Ingleton, Bess Meredyth, Ida May Park, Ruth Stonehouse, Lule Warrenton, and Elsie Jane Wilson. By 1920, however, none of these women directed for Universal, which promoted men to take their places. Most never directed again. Madison’s own directorial career lasted scarcely a year. It thus poses with particular clarity the mystery of why Universal’s attitude toward women directors changed so dramatically over such a short period of time. Madison’s case also reveals the instability of the facts contemporary scholars encounter when they begin to investigate silent era filmmakers in depth.

Cleo Madison (p/d/a) 1916

Cleo Madison in Photoplay (Jan. 1916).

Cleo Madison (p/d/a), PC

Cleo Madison. Private Collection. 

Cleo Madison (a) The Trey O' Hearts (1914), PC

Cleo Madison, The Trey O’ Hearts (1914). Private Collection.

Marriage certificate Cleo Madison (p/d/a) to Don Peake

Marriage certificate, Cleo Madison and Don Peake. 

Cleo Madison (p/d/a), PC

Cleo Madison at home. Private Collection.

Cleo Madison in "Her Defiance" (1916). PC

Cleo Madison, Her Defiance (1916). Private Collection.

Cleo Madison (a) Her Defiance 1916, PC

Cleo Madison, Her Defiance (1916). Private Collection. 

Cleo Madison (p/d/a), PC

Cleo Madison. Private Collection. 

Cleo Madison (a) The Lure of Youth (1921), PC

Cleo Madison, The Lure of Youth (1921). Private Collection. 

Cleo Madison (a) The Lure of Youth(1921), PC

Lantern slide, The Lure of Youth (1921). Private Collection. 

All published biographical sketches agree that Cleo Madison’s acting career began in stock theatre and vaudeville, that Universal hired her in 1913, and that her performance in the dual role of good and evil twin sisters in the popular serial The Trey o’ Hearts (1914) secured her celebrity the following year. Beginning in 1915, she directed as well as acted in sixteen shorts and two features. The director credits stop in 1916 for reasons as yet unknown. Madison continued acting at Universal and elsewhere until 1924, by which point she appeared only in supporting roles. She then disappeared from the industry. Anthony Slide reports that she went into “white collar work” before dying “alone and forgotten” in March of 1964 (1977, 54).

There is room to improve on these basic biographical details, however. Most intriguingly, existing accounts of Madison’s life and career seem not to have noticed her marriage in November 1916 to “Don Peake of San Francisco, western sales manager for the Briscoe Motor Corporation,” although the Los Angeles Times noted the event (IV12). A records request to Riverside County, California, returned the marriage license included here. The date, groom’s name, and location on the certificate all match the details in announcements of Madison’s marriage, but the bride is identified as Lulu Bailey. Two items make it possible to confirm that Cleo Madison, Lulu Bailey, and Lulu Peake are the same person. First, a 1916 Motography story identifies Cleo Madison’s invalid sister as Helen Bailey (622). Also, Universal credited Grace Helen Bailey as the author or scenarist of nine titles between 1915 and 1917. Second, in 1917, Lulu Peake filed a complaint for divorce, included here, that identifies her as an actress. The case was dismissed in July of 1918, which makes it uncertain whether the Peakes actually divorced.

In addition to providing Cleo Madison with what was likely her birth name, these sources offer a possible explanation for the redirection of Madison’s career in late 1916. The divorce complaint paints Peake as a violent husband jealous of his wife’s work. It should be noted, however, that marriage was not the only development in her life that year. Articles in late 1916 and early 1917 in the Los Angeles Times as well as the Exhibitor’s Trade Review and Moving Picture World indicate that she planned to start an independent production firm called the Cleo Madison Film Corporation with former Universal General Manager Isadore Bernstein. Further research will be necessary to understand these developments.

It bears mentioning that the marriage license introduces an additional complication when it identifies Lulu Bailey as twenty-seven years old. This would establish her birth year as 1889 or late 1888, rather than 1883, as listed in Reel Women and Women Filmmakers and Their Films (Acker 1991; Foster et. al. 1998). These sources also give Madison’s birthplace as Bloomington, Indiana, whereas sources from the 1910s and 1920s uniformly make her a native of Bloomington, Illinois.

Only two Madison-directed films, both shorts and both released in 1916, are known to survive. Eleanor’s Catch features a notable surprise ending in which the heroine (played by Madison) turns the tables on her would-be betrayer by revealing herself as an agent of the law. In Her Defiance, codirected by Joe King, according to the Library of Congress print, Madison’s farm-girl heroine falls for a city youth and conceives a child with him, but a series of miscommunications convince her that he has abandoned her. With extreme reluctance, she agrees to a marriage arranged by her brother. Willis Marks portrays the groom, “the valley’s wealthiest farmer,” as the archetypical old lecher. Unable to face a future with him, she flees the wedding ceremony, precipitating a thrilling buggy chase that, unbeknownst to her, terminates in a crash fatal to her new husband. In the end, happenstance reunites her with her child’s father in his office building—where she mops the floors.

The theme of past transgressions redeemed figures largely in films of this period and informs both of the features Cleo Madison directed in 1916: A Soul Enslaved, the screenplay of which was adapted by Olga Printzlau from a story by Adele Farrington, and Her Bitter Cup, written by Madison herself and based on a story by Kathleen Kerrigan. The synopsis of Her Bitter Cup was filed with the Library of Congress for copyright purposes. The synopsis indicates a notably radical revision of story in which restored romance forgives past wrongs. There is no suggestion here of the woman’s betrayal by a devious man or her abandonment due to unforeseen circumstances. Rather, the scenario seems calculated to make improper sexual relations a logical extension of labor exploitation and to define bad management as the obstacle romance must surmount.

In her struggle to better the lives of her fellow factory workers, Madison’s Rethna extracts money from the family of the exploitative owner. She agrees, first, to be kept by his dissipated son, Harry, and then to marry Harry’s upstanding younger brother, Walter. To arrive at an ending in which love redeems Rethna’s deception, Madison contrives a scene that urges us to see her transgression as victimization and sacrifice. As the Library of Congress synopsis of Her Bitter Cup describes it, the degenerate brother, “fortified by dope and almost crazed with jealousy” at the discovery that she has married his brother and lied to them both, nails her outstretched hands to a door with nut picks (5). We can only speculate about how Madison’s direction rendered this scene on screen. In one review, Moving Picture Weekly praised the “great originality” of the film’s lighting and the “extraordinary beauty” of its settings. This review includes a synopsis suggesting that the episode with the nut picks was rendered as a dream sequence (24). Even so, a review in the Moving Picture World notes that “the crucifixion of the girl’s body at the close seems revolting” (648). However it was played, all synopses agree that this scene leads quickly to her reconciliation with Walter and a happy ending.

See also: Ruth Ann BaldwinGrace CunardEugenie Magnus IngletonJeanie MacphersonBess MeredythIda May ParkRuth StonehouseLule WarrentonLois Weber, and Elsie Jane Wilson

Bibliography

“Bernstein Gets Excellent Studio Location in Los Angeles; Cleo Madison Star in His First Production-Other Coast News.” Exhibitor's Trade Review (27 Jan. 1917): 554.

“Cleo Madison in 'Her Bitter Cup.'” Review. Moving Picture Weekly (15 Apr. 1916): 24-25, 80.

“Comments.” Her Bitter Cup. Review. Moving Picture World (22 Apr. 1916): 648.

“Film Star Weds at Photoplay Scene.” Los Angeles Times (26 Nov. 1916): IV12.

Henry, William M.“Cleo, the Craftswoman.” Photoplay (Jan. 1916): 109-11.

“Isadore Bernstein to Produce on Coast.” Moving Picture World (23 Dec. 1916): 1789.

“Plan Studio on Historic Site.” Los Angeles Times (3 Dec. 1916): III A22.

“Sifted from the Studios.” Motography (9 Sept. 1916): 620-22.

Citation

Cooper, Mark Garrett. "Cleo Madison." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kfn3-q031>

Jeanie Macpherson

by Jane Gaines
Jeanie Macpherson imagines scenario, BYU

Jeanie Macpherson imagines a scenario. Courtesy of Brigham Young University. 

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

Jeanie Macpherson on set of "Joan The Woman" (1917). BYU

Jeanie Macpherson on the set of Joan The Woman (1917). Courtesy of Brigham Young University.

There are several versions of how Jeanie Macpherson, out of work after The Tarantula, was hired by DeMille at the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. The most elaborate version is from Higham, who describes Macpherson’s attempt to get an acting job as involving a series of battles between the two while the director was shooting Rose of the Rancho (1914) (38–40). The tempestuousness of their relationship is echoed in DeMille’s account of their final breakup at a luncheon thirty years later: “I disagreed with Jeanie rather sharply—she got up and left the table—I said, if you go now you can’t come back” (BYU, Dec. 1953 note, box 15, fldr. 65). Stormy or not, the relationship appears to have been highly productive, if screen credits are any indication. Of the silent films produced and/or directed by DeMille in the 1915–1930 period, Macpherson is given scenario credit on thirty-two (Cherchi Usai and Codelli 1991, 20). Still, the question of DeMille’s relation to Macpherson has continued to color the assessment of her involvement in the silent film industry, where she was on the board of Palmer Photoplay Company and listed as a founder of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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. 

Jeanie Macpherson with Cecil and Constance DeMille and daughter Cissy, BYU

Jeanie Macpherson with Cecil and Constance DeMille and daughter Cissy. Courtesy of Brigham Young University.

The director’s niece Agnes deMille (different spelling) confirms that Macpherson was one of DeMille’s three mistresses, the others of whom were the actress Julia Faye and his secretary Gladys Rosson, liaisons publicly accepted by Constance DeMille, the director’s wife (deMille 1990, 182–183). The significance of Macpherson’s part in her collaboration with DeMille, however, still needs to be clarified, particularly since the record is contradictory. In a 1957 interview DeMille says of Macpherson: “She was not a good writer. She would bring in wonderful ideas but she could not carry a story all the way through in writing. Her name is on many things because she wrote with me. I carried the story and she would bring me many, many ideas. You’ll find her name on a lot of scripts.” The daughter of Beulah Marie Dix (Flebbe), Evelyn Flebbe Scott, recalls that her mother, one of the top Lasky Company writers, although more impressed with screenwriter Frances Marion, still respected Macpherson for understanding exactly what DeMille wanted in every scene: “Mother never really thought of her as a writer, but as an exceptional collaborator for an exceptional man… Jeanie had a genius (for some reason everybody called her ‘Janie,’ so there is no alliteration) for putting this on paper” (70). Yet another story is told by the salary records of the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. In 1918, Macpherson was making less than Marion Fairfax but more than Dix, and by the mid-1920s, she was the highest paid employee in the scenario department.

Jeanie Macpherson (w/d/a) with Cecil B. DeMille. BYU

Famous Players-Lasky Corporation Payroll 4/17/28

Famous Players-Lasky Corporation Payroll 4/17/28. Courtesy of Brigham Young University.

DeMille credited Jeanie Macpherson and paid her well, but may not have fully understood her point of view. In his autobiography he praises her choice of the title for his 1917 film about Joan of Arc, but while he says he sees the title Joan, the Woman as emphasizing the “humanity” over the sainthood of the historical figure, he doesn’t mention that the film turned her into a “woman” by giving the celibate saint a torrid romance (DeMille 1959, 171). In 1924, DeMille made some attempts to secure for Macpherson the rights to the original stories that she had written for him. These included Forbidden Fruit (1921), Adam’s Rib (1923), The Little American (1917), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), and The Ten Commandments (1923) (Higashi 1994, 227). Macpherson is also credited with Hector Turnbull on the DeMille classic, The Cheat (1915), the Gloria Swanson vehicles Male and Female (1919) and Manslaughter (1922), and many of the melodramas of marriage and divorce for which the director was legendary, although he later mused that she probably didn’t take as much credit as she might have (DeMille 1959, 342). Since about seventy-five percent of the films on which Macpherson’s name appears survive, a more in-depth analysis is due, beginning with her original story for The Little American (1917), a Mary Pickford vehicle. Set in the US prior to and during World War I, the film features Pickford as an American girl heiress (Angela Moore), torn between German and French suitors. Her indecision is played out over the siege of her aunt’s French chateau, where she is attacked by her own former lover, the German Karl, who fights her in the dark until the lights go on and her identity is revealed. Karl renounces Prussian ruthlessness, but is still unable to keep the German officers from attacking women, and the Pickford character complains in the intertitle: “Somewhere in this house—there must be a man who is something more than a splendidly drilled beast!” The American flag-waving patriotism, ordered by studio head Jesse Lasky in a 1917 letter to DeMille, may be excessive for later decades. Standing for all Americans, Pickford single-handedly proves to be more courageous than the French, who appeal to her to intervene to stop a firing squad. Although the film retains the characteristic lightheartedness of a Pickford comedy, its structure calls attention to the ludicrousness of war by juxtaposing stubborn love with belligerent animosity. The Little American deserves comparison with at least one of Marion’s screenplays for Pickford. Like The Love Light (1921), which Marion wrote and also directed, The Little American is an antiwar film, and in casting Pickford in films about the heart-wrenching trauma of World War I, both films dare to add bitterness to the sweet Pickford persona.

Jeanie Macpherson on set of "Joan The Woman" (1917). BYU

Jeanie Macpherson on set of Joan The Woman (1917). Courtesy of Brigham Young University.

Jeanie Macpherson (w/d/a) with photo of Cecil B. DeMille. BYU

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

More research needs to be done on DeMille’s total paternalism, which extended to his talented secretary Rosson as well as to Academy Award-winning editor Anne Bauchens, both of whom, like Macpherson, never married. DeMille’s guardianship involved managing Macpherson’s finances—deducting her back income taxes from her salary—and even rescuing her from bankruptcy after their relationship had ended around 1930. The end of the relationship was the end of her career, and she died August 26, 1946.

We are left to interpret documents like Macpherson’s portrait of the producer titled “DeMille,” where she defends him fiercely, attempting to soften the man who was known for his cold monomania: “Scintillating, dominant and magnetic. Or as shy as a boy at graduation is Cecil B. DeMille. A connoisseur of rare tapestries, and gems, and human beings.” Jeanie Macpherson’s own capabilities should not be in question, however, as much evidence points to her New Woman risk-taking resourcefulness, the most well-known example of which was her passion for piloting airplanes (Beach 54).

Jeanie Macpherson death certificate

Jeanie Macpherson’s death certificate. 

With additional research by Elisa Lleras

See also: Gladys Rosson, “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Beach, Barbara. “The Literary Dynamo.” Moving Picture World (13 July 1921): 54 - 55, 81.

Cherchi Usai, Paolo, and Lorenzo Codelli. “The DeMille Legacy: An Introduction.” In Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli, eds. L’eredità DeMille/ The DeMille Legacy. Pordenone: Edizione Biblioteca dell’immagine, 1991, 14 – 29.

deMille, Agnes. Portrait Gallery. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990.

------. Interview with Art Arthur. Typescript. 17 July 1957.[ Box 13, fldr. 8]. Brigham Young University.

Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Higham, Charles. Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

Lasky, Jesse L. Letter to Cecil B. DeMille. 5 March 1917. repr. in Cherchi Usai and Codelli, 517.

Macpherson, Jeanie. “DeMille.” Unpublished ms. Brigham Young University.

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

Martin, Alice. “From ‘Wop’ Parts to Bossing the Job.” Photoplay (June 1916): 95.

Scott, Evelyn F. Hollywood When Silents Were Golden. New York: McGraw Hill, 1972.

Archival Paper Collections:

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Jeanie Macpherson clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Jeanie Macpherson photograph album. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Gaines, Jane. "Jeanie Macpherson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6f7m-rc94>

Mary MacLane

by Julie Buck

Mary MacLane lived to shock her public. In her 1902 autobiography, The Story of Mary MacLane, she wrote:

Periodically I fall completely, madly in love with the Devil. He is so fascinating, so strong—exactly the sort of man my wooden heart awaits. I would like to throw myself at his head. I would make him a dear little wife…. (28).

Considering her stated desire to marry the devil, her open bisexuality, and her revelation of the most intimate personal details in print, writing and starring in a motion picture was perhaps one of MacLane’s least shocking acts.

Mary MacLane (w/a) Photoplay. Jan. 1918, p. 24. PD

Mary MacLane in Photoplay,  Jan. 1918. 

Mary MacLane. USW

Mary MacLane. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Mary MacLane (w/a) Photoplay. Jan. 1918, p. 25. PD

Mary MacLane in Photoplay, Jan. 1918.

Born in Canada, but settling near Butte, Montana, in her early teens, MacLane gained notoriety in 1902 at the age of nineteen with her best-selling, scandalous, confessional, diary-style novel, The Story of Mary MacLane. Selling over one hundred thousand copies in its first month of publication, her book was reviewed across the country, banned in Boston, and savaged by conservative critics, according to Penelope Rosemont in a recent edition of MacLane’s writings (1–2). MacLane was a self-admitted egotist, and her writing was frank and filled with outrageous thoughts. In the book she chafed at having to live in the desolation of Butte, and wrote at length about her distaste for conformity.

MacLane’s name was rarely out of the newspapers between 1902 and 1917, the publication dates of her first and last books. Particularly after the first book, newspapers tracked her movements as she traveled to Chicago, then eastward. She arrived in Boston, hoping to attend Radcliffe College, but was turned away for lack of scholarship, and finally moved on to New York, where she settled in Greenwich Village and, according to Western historian Cathryn Halverson, was finally able to live the bohemian life she had so craved (66). When public attention began to wane, MacLane would give interviews and write articles capturing the ennui of being a public figure, or, as in a 1910 Chicago Daily Tribune article, she might claim to be looking for a husband in order to create good copy (G3). After contracting scarlet fever in 1911, Mary returned to Butte to write her final novel, I, Mary MacLane, which was published in 1917 (Halverson 71). While this book did not approach the success of her first, it did catch the attention of George Spoor, who ran Essanay Studios in Chicago.

Essanay, by 1918, was on its last legs. The majority of the company had moved from Chicago to Niles, California. Charlie Chaplin, Essanay’s biggest star, had left the company in 1916 to seek more creative control, and Spoor’s business partner, G. W. “Broncho Billy” Anderson, the A of “S&A,” had quit in anger over Chaplin’s departure. Both men went to California, but Spoor bought out his partner Anderson and continued on in Chicago (Barbas 36). The company went through a series of mergers, and historian Jack Spears claims that Spoor imported Max Linder from France to improve the financial situation of Essanay, but when Linder’s comedy didn’t transfer well to American audiences, Spoor, in dire need of a hit, began looking for other alternatives (92).

An admitted fan of the movies, Mary MacLane was delighted when Spoor approached her in 1918 with a multi-picture contract that gave her the opportunity to write as well as to act. The first film would be an adaptation of her 1910 article, “Men Who Have Made Love to Me,” in which she was to play herself. Though the film itself is believed to be lost, the plot can be pieced together from contemporaneous reviews by James McQuade in Motion Picture World and Peter Milne, who wrote for the Motion Picture News in 1918. The original article followed MacLane’s relationships with eight men who embody the flaws of the average male and represent popular types: “The Callow Youth,” “The Literary Man,” “The Bank Clerk,” “The Prize Fighter,” “The Absinthe Drinker,” “The Middle Aged Gambler,” “The Baronet’s Son,” and finally, the adulterer, here “The Husband of Another.”

To streamline the script in the adaptation, MacLane removed the gambler and drinker roles, which would have invited trouble from censors as at the time absinthe and gambling were illegal in the US. In the original article, MacLane does not describe how the relationships end, which meant that the original didn’t provide enough dramatic structure for either a short or a feature-length film. She solved this problem, for instance, by enlarging the role of the Baronet’s Son so that when the Mary character tires of him, and he tries to force his attentions on her, she can be saved by the Prize Fighter. Although in the article Mary falls for the Prize Fighter, for greater dramatic flair the film gives the Prize Fighter a girlfriend who begs Mary to leave him, which she does. Like his character in the article, the Literary Man is too domineering, but in the film he also fails to respect her writing talent. The idealistic Boston Bank Clerk, whom Mary finds too boring in the article, leaves her in the film when he discovers that she smokes and drinks. Finally the Husband of Another, who in the article is a weepy sap desperate for Mary, becomes in the film a brute who tries to force himself on her. All of the men in the article are obsessively in love with the Mary character, but none are abusive rakes; in the film, however, Mary is attacked by two of her five suitors in harrowing scenes. To connect each story, Mary appears, languidly smoking while addressing the audience (via title cards) about the trouble with all men. In the final scene, Mary, again addressing the audience, questions whether true love really exists, and though her French maid says “Oui,” Mary still has her doubts.

Mae Tinee of the Chicago Daily Tribune noted in a late 1917 article that the film was highly anticipated (C3). When finally released, however, most of the reviews were not positive. Tinee was fairly scathing: “[MacLane] on the screen is eloquently expressed by the minus sign. She looks and acts like a headache.” Not stopping there, she claims that MacLane’s only talent is the ability to look good while smoking (14). Reviews for the film were not uniformly negative, however. In his review for Motion Picture World, James McQuade credits both her performance and her writing, although one wonders about the scarcity of the actress-writer phenomenon: “It is the first time in my remembrance that I have seen on the screen author and actress concentrated in the same person” (525).

Ironically, in many ways, the film was MacLane’s downfall. Essanay merged with Vitagraph, Lubin, and Selig in late 1918, and Spoor decided to cancel the multiple picture contract with MacLane after the failure of Men Who Have Made Love to Me. MacLane publicly declared that she hated her acting in the film, but in late 1919, she was arrested for stealing the dresses that had been used in filming. The studio dressmaker had made numerous gowns for the actress, valued at $1,025, and MacLane claimed she had absentmindedly forgotten to pay for them, but she also refused to return them. In a 1919 Los Angeles Times article, she claimed jail might do her good, stating, “I am writing another book to pay for these stupid dresses.” Continuing her thought—and ever the egotist—when asked what the topic of her new book would be, she replied, “Why myself, of course! What else could I write about? What else is more interesting?” (17). MacLane’s obituary, however, states that she was financially ruined when she was locked out of her apartment for nonpayment for the dresses, and her once-popular books fell out of favor in the flapper culture of the 1920s (3). She moved to a black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where her companion, a black artist named Harriet Williams, cared for her. At forty-eight, Mary MacLane died in utter obscurity, surrounded by hundreds of newspaper clippings.

Bibliography

Barbas, Samantha. The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

Halverson, Cathryn. Maverick Autobiographies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

MacLane, Mary. “The Movies - and Me.” Photoplay (Jan 1918): 24-25.

------. The Story of Mary MacLane and Other Writings. Ed. Penelope Rosemont. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1997.

“Mary MacLane Finds Jail Soul Yearnings.” Los Angeles Times (20 Sept. 1919): 17.

“Mary MacLane is Coming Back Looking for a Husband Who’ll Make Good Copy.” Chicago Daily Tribune (6 Nov. 1910): G3.

McQuade, James. “Men Who Have Made Love to Me.” Motion Picture World (28 Jan. 1918): 525.

Milne, Peter. “Men Who Have Made Love to Me.” Motion Picture News (2 Feb. 1918): 734-735.

“Once Famous Mary MacLane Dies Obscure.” Obit. Chicago Daily Tribune. (8 Aug. 1929): 3

Spears, Jack. Hollywood: the Golden Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1971.

Tinee, Mae. “Right Off the Reel,” Chicago Daily Tribune (2 Dec. 1917): C3.

------.“'I, Mary,’ More to Be Pitied Than Censored.” Chicago Daily Tribune (25 Jan. 1918): 14.

Archival Paper Collections:

MacLane Family Papers, 1995-1929. Montana Historical Society.

Citation

Buck, Julie. "Mary MacLane." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-krqp-yg59>

Frederica Sagor Maas

by Radha Vatsal

Frederica Maas first contacted the Women Film Pioneers Project in the late 1990s. She had just completed her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, which chronicles the vicissitudes of her career from the silent period into the sound era. In the course of a remarkably frank narrative, she offers various explanations for her professional disappointments. These include bad luck, bad decisions, and bad timing; however, it is finally the assignment of screen credits that had the most lasting impact. Maas tells us that “writers in those days had little redress. The Writers Guild was new and not powerful… [T]he last writer to be hired to do a re-write got the credit… [I]t wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, but that was how Hollywood operated” (67).

For writers, the assignment or non-assignment of screen credits can seriously affect one’s livelihood; for film scholars, it muddies the question of how we determine the accomplishments of a single individual in what is essentially a collaborative business and art. In Maas’s telling, she once received sole credit for Dance Madness (1926), a film on which she did little work; she was not credited for the early Norma Shearer films that she says she wrote; and she was belatedly given shared credit for The Waning Sex (1926), although this is not reflected in the American Film Institute catalog.

Frederica Sagor Mass (w) portrait by Walter Frederick Seely, 1925. PD

Frederica Sagor Maas portrait by Walter Frederick Seely, 1925.

Maas was born Frederica Alexandrina Sagor on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Russian immigrant parents. She enrolled at Columbia University in 1917 to study journalism and worked as a copy girl at the Evening Globe for two summers. In 1919, she took a job as assistant to the story editor at Universal in New York, and was promoted to story editor in 1923. A year later, she set off for Los Angeles to try her luck as a screenwriter. There, she wrote the screenplay for The Plastic Age (1925) based on a novel that she had acquired while at Universal, only to have it rejected by Carl Laemmle for being too “dirty” (46). The screenplay was subsequently bought and produced by her friend and former colleague, B. P. Schulberg. Emerging actress Clara Bow was cast, and the film’s success allowed Maas to secure a three-year contract with MGM starting at $350/week.

What should have been the start of a promising career turned out to be the beginning of a downward professional spiral. With Dance Madness (1926), Maas experienced firsthand the vagaries of screen credit assignment—but for the first and only time to her own advantage. The story had been adapted for the screen by Alice D. G. Miller. Maas made a few changes, which in her own estimation were not significant; however, as the last writer on the project, she received full credit (67). Thereafter, she was not so fortunate. She says: “I wrote every one [of the early Norma Shearer pictures] and received credit for none…The worst part was that there wasn’t a blasted thing I could do about it” (74). The Waning Sex (1926) was to be Maas’s final credited screenplay for MGM, but only at great professional cost. She wrote the bulk of the screenplay, but another writer, F. Hugh Herbert, was initially given sole credit. Devastated, Maas complained to the producer, Harry Rapf, and finally received shared credit, but was still fired from MGM for requesting to be transferred to another producer’s unit (106–108).

Unfortunately, at the present time, no other sources can be found to corroborate or challenge Maas’s recollections. In-depth research—locating accounts by others involved in the production of those films, for example, or papers (if they exist) left by Maas’s colleagues and friends, such as Henrietta Cohn (secretary to Ben Schulberg at Paramount) or Madeline Ruthvin (secretary to Rapf at MGM), or talent and literary agent Ruth Collier—would be required to further flesh out the politics of credit assignment in the later silent period.

In recounting her one year, 1927–1928, at Paramount, Maas simply says, “I worked on four stories… It, Red Hair, Hula [starring Clara Bow] and Rolled Stockings [starring Louise Brooks]” (147). Yet, Rolled Stockings is the only title for which she is credited in the American Film Institute catalog. Given that Maas herself does not discuss the screenwriting credits for these stories, and that she describes her contributions to all four films with only the single, uninformative phrase “worked on,” it is difficult to determine exactly what her contributions were. Maas had, however, previously written the script for a Bow film together with Eve Unsell, The Plastic Age; she also socialized with the actress (75–6); so she may have played a part in helping shape the actress’s on-screen persona. This brings us to the question, by no means limited to Maas, of how film scholars handle the activities of those who contribute to a collaborative process outside of conventional and “credited” positions, such as “screenwriter,” “director,” etc. Today, stars are surrounded by an army of paid personnel including publicists, stylists, and agents whose combined efforts create the star, who is in turn credited by name on screen. While I am not suggesting that Maas functioned in any of these capacities, her narrative, and the questions it raises, highlight the limited usefulness of that most basic of historiographic tools for the film scholar—film credits.

Maas married fellow screenwriter and producer Ernest Maas, and the two worked together on several projects, many of which remained unrealized. They left the industry after their serious script, “Miss Pilgrim’s Progress,” about the advent of the typewriter and its effect on women in the workforce, was subjected to “brutal disfigurement” to become The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947), a Betty Grable musical (239). Frederica Maas began writing her autobiography in 1988, at the age of eighty-eight.

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Maas, Frederica Sagor. The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.

Roberts, Ozzie. “Memoirs of a Screenwriter.” The San Diego Union-Tribune (10 March 1998): E-1, E-4.

Archival Paper Collections:

Frederica Sagor Maas papers. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Citation

Vatsal, Radha. "Frederica Sagor Maas." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cn0j-rf56>

Josephine Lovett

by Abigail Salerno

In a 1922 interview with Louella Parsons, Josephine Lovett’s husband, director John S. Robertson compared his relationship with Lovett to that of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., whose married life he considered “ideal”:

They work together, play together, and plan their pictures together. Just the way people should do. I feel strongly on that subject, because my wife has been such a help and inspiration to me (4).

Parsons adds that Lovett contributed to the “visualizing” of scenes in Robertson-Lovett projects, but the ambiguity of this term reflects the difficulties of researching the career of screenwriter Josephine Lovett (4).

Josephine Lovett (w). AMPAS

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

Neither Parsons’s interview nor the American Film Institute catalog credit Lovett with the scenario for the Mary Pickford Company production of Tess of the Storm Country (1922), although the opening titles of the film give Lovett credit, along with Elmer Harris, for the adaptation of the Grace Miller White novel by that name. Of the thirty-five films variously acknowledged to have been based on a story, scenario, adaptation, or screenplay written by Lovett, between 1916 and 1935, eighteen were directed by Robertson.

Reviews of Lovett’s films repeatedly emphasized her ability to create heroines who could both please censors and appeal to female fans. Lovett’s greatest success was probably the story and scenario for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production Our Dancing Daughters (1928), a film promoted as featuring the new “sound,” but for all intents and purposes still a silent motion picture. In June 1928, as Don Crafton tells us, MGM followed Warner Brothers in announcing that it would begin to use talking sequences, but their facilities for recording synchronized sound had not yet been built (206). In this transitional period, while MGM was still producing silent films, Our Dancing Daughters attempted sound effects and a music track, but dialogue was still “seen” on screen in intertitles not heard as the lip-synchronized speech that defined the new rage, the “Talkies.” For Our Dancing Daughters, Lovett was nominated for the first Academy Award in writing achievement. Alexander Walker’s popular biography claims that Joan Crawford lobbied for the role of Diana after reading Lovett’s story in a newspaper serial (42). However, the 1928 Variety review of the film states that the story appeared in the Hearst papers simultaneously with the film’s release, adding that Our Dancing Daughters was an “unusual example of a film substantiating the ballyhoo” (22). In other words, the film actually lived up to its extensive promotion, which included repeated mention of Lovett’s original story in the press and the appearance of Our Dancing Daughters star actress Joan Crawford on the cover of the December 1927 Photoplay. The reviews in both the New York Times and Variety described overwhelming and immediate box office success, with “hundreds of girls and young women” (14) standing “five deep behind the last row” (22) at the opening weekend shows. These accounts agree with the story of a mobbed preview, as told by the film’s uncredited editor, Margaret Booth, in Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By (305). Further confirmation of the popularity of Our Dancing Daughters can be found in the frequent references to the film’s heroines made by the young women interviewed in the Payne Fund Study, published in 1933 by sociologist Herbert Blumer.

The poster of Our Dancing Daughters 1928.

Poster, Our Dancing Daughters 1928.

Contemporary reviewers (when they were not complaining about the theatre’s management of the new technology of recorded sound effects and musical accompaniment) characterized Our Dancing Daughters as risqué, in both visual detail and narrative content. The Variety review mentioned the appearance of “undies and much stocking” and described specific cuts made by Philadelphia censors, the “Penn scissor brigade” (22). New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall complained that “cocktails, flasks and mad dancing appear in quite a number of episodes [and] it is quite unnecessary to depict an intoxicated girl, as is done for a considerable length of this film” (14). This same review mocked the “audible mixture” of “romantic melodies… and, at the end, a chorus of shrieks” that accompanied the film. The story follows the intersecting love lives of the modern, independent Diana (Joan Crawford), Bea (Dorothy Sebastian), a young woman with a past, and Ann (Anita Page), an old-fashioned gold-digger, and ends when Ann, drunk, falls to her death at the feet of three elderly, work-worn cleaning women. The film, the published scenario, and the original sound-on-film accompaniment, present this finale with some irony.

Film set, with father and baby, The Single Standard Josephine Lovette (w). PC

Film set, with father and baby, The Single Standard. Private Collection.

Variety reviews of Lovett’s films suggest that her long career depended upon her consistent ability to create modern fantasies for women that skirted the censors. The review of Outcast (1922) praised Lovett’s adaptation of an earlier play as “cleverly handled to get past the censors… In adapting [the play] for the screen Josephine Lovett has wiped out all the suggestion the hero and heroine lived together for a period of time” (33). In her screen adaptation, the “fallen woman” became a “business partner who has brains and is making enough money to furnish her own apartment.” According to Variety, The Single Standard (1929), adapted by Lovett from a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns, showed Greta Garbo doing “what some girls do today, and a lot more would like to do,” while still frustrating censors with its subtleties (17). The New York Times gave Lovett a canny backhanded compliment, and described Our Modern Maidens (1929), another original scenario that also starred Crawford, as a revision of earlier melodramas in 1929 dress: “Instead of trailing gowns, there are abbreviated skirts” (X4). Lovett’s heroines enjoyed economic and sexual independence, with one often masking the other, and managed, through a combination of wits, bravery, and honesty, to just barely avoid scandal.

Before her first, and possibly only motion picture appearance, in The Ninety and the Nine (1916), directed by Thomas Ince at the Vitagraph Company, Josephine Lovett had been, between 1899 and 1906, a successful stage actress at Haverly’s 14th Street Theatre, where John S. Robertson also appeared in a performance in 1903. After making films together at Vitagraph, Lovett and Robertson made Away Goes Prudence (1920) for Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film Corporation. Outcast was the last film Lovett made at Famous Players-Lasky, and in 1922, after the release of Tess of the Storm Country, Lovett and Robertson began working for the short-lived independent company Inspiration Pictures, Inc. In 1926, the pair joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where Lovett wrote Our Dancing Daughters, Our Modern Maidens, and The Single Standard. Lovett wrote What a Widow! (1930) and Corsair (1931) for United Artists Corporation; she subsequently worked for Universal Pictures, before Carl Laemmle lost control of the studio, and for Paramount Pictures in its heyday as a major Hollywood studio. In 1935, Robertson and Lovett worked together again on Captain Hurricane at RKO Radio Pictures, at that time a small but established Hollywood studio. Captain Hurricane was her final film.

Bibliography

Blumer, Herbert. Movies and Conduct. 1933. repr. New York: Arno, 1970.

Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By. New York: Knopf, 1968.

Crafton, Don. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926 – 1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

“Film Flashes, Our Modern Maidens.” New York Times (1 Sept. 1929): X4.

Hall, Mordaunt. “Mad Youth, Our Dancing Daughters.” New York Times (8 Oct. 1928): 14.

Lovett, Josephine. Scenarios for Classmates, Our Modern Maidens, Our Dancing Daughters, The Single Standard. What Women Wrote – Scenarios, 1912-1929. Cinema History Microfilm Series, with index, ed. Ann Martin and Virginia M. Clark. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1987.

“Outcast.” Rev. Variety (8 Dec. 1922): 33.

Parsons, Louella. “John. S. Robertson.” Interview. Morning Telegraph (5 Nov. 1922): 4.

Silverman, Sid. “Our Dancing Daughters.” Rev. Variety (10 Oct. 1928): 22.

“Single Standard.” Rev. Variety (31 June 1929): 17.

Walker, Alexander. Joan Crawford, The Ultimate Star. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

Archival  Paper Collections:

Roland West papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Salerno, Abigail. "Josephine Lovett." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-b9md-0722>

Anita Loos

by JoAnne Ruvoli

In 1917, Photoplay reported that “The most important service that Anita Loos has so far rendered the screen is the elevation of the subcaption [sic], first to sanity then to dignity and brilliance combined.” Further, the article went on, Loos had so convinced D. W. Griffith of the value of the intertitle, and he called her “The most brilliant young woman in the world” (148). A prolific writer who appeared in the press in a manner as glamorized as the stars she wrote for, Anita Loos wrote over one hundred and fifty scripts in her thirty years as a Hollywood screenwriter and elevated intertitles to an art. She is best remembered not only for defining the silent era personas of stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and the Talmadge sisters, Constance and Norma, but for also creating the character of Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a 1925 novel adapted to films in 1928 and 1953.

Anita Loos (w/p). PC

Anita Loos. Private Collection.

Bested in script output only by her friend and fellow screenwriter Frances Marion, according to Loos biographer Gary Carey, Loos is credited with elevating intertitles to “a legitimate form of screen humor” (44). Ally Acker agrees, claiming that “the art of the subtitle was born” with the film His Picture in the Papers (1916) from Loos’s script for Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (1991, 177). Loos sold her first script to Biograph in 1911 and her second script was produced as The New York Hat (1912), directed by D.W. Griffith. One of her most celebrated scripts, The New York Hat was the last film that actress Mary Pickford made for Biograph and contains an early performance by Lionel Barrymore as well as Lillian and Dorothy Gish as extras (Carey 23). When Douglas Fairbanks Sr. arrived at Fine Arts/Triangle Studios, Loos teamed with director John Emerson to write the scripts that led to Fairbanks’s initial film popularity. The combination of her verbal humor with his action-oriented energy is cited by a number of sources as the formula for his success. Carey quotes Loos as recalling that the challenge for her was to find the widest variety of “spots from which Doug could jump.” She satirized this aspect of the Fairbanks character by opening one motion picture with an intertitle that describes him as having “a vaulting ambition which is likely to o’erleap itself and fall on the other side,” followed by a scene of Fairbanks bouncing on a mattress in a bedroom (44).

Anita Loos on set with Douglas Fairbanks and John Emerson. Private Collection.

The Emerson and Loos team parted with Fairbanks in 1918 when he began making his swashbuckling epics, but Loos continued working with Emerson and the two eventually married in 1920. Joseph Schenck, head of Associated First National Pictures, signed contracts with Loos and Emerson to make films for Constance Talmadge. They made Talmadge’s next six films and eventually Loos wrote the 1978 biography of the Talmadge sisters when she thought their successes had been forgotten. The nature of the Loos-Emerson collaboration deserves further study. Gary Carey, as well as Cari Beauchamp and niece Mary Anita Loos write that Emerson insisted on receiving screenplay credit for virtually no contribution to the scripts that Loos wrote and even delegated away much of his directing duties to his assistants (Carey 55; Beauchamp and Loos 2003, 179). Marsha McCreadie writes that Loos had directed Constance Talmadge in Mama’s Affair (1921) and also that she coproduced some of her scripts (1994, 48). Although McCreadie’s claims have not, as yet, been substantiated by the other sources, Emerson’s well-documented hypochondria, philandering, and later institutionalization for schizophrenia raises the question of how much more work Loos may have done to make up for his severe shortcomings.

There is much information available about Loos, but relatively little discussion of her work as a screenwriter. Carey’s biography fills in some of the gaps in Loos’s own entertaining memoirs A Girl Like I, which chronicles her career in early cinema, and the subsequent books Kiss Hollywood Good-by and A Cast of Thousands. Louella Parsons frequently reported on Loos in her New York Telegraph column. Photoplay published a significant number of articles on Loos including one ostensibly written by her father and in 1918 a coauthored series on the craft of “photoplay writing,” which evolved into the 1920 screenwriting manual by Emerson and Loos. The publications sparked a February 1920 exchange with the New York Times about the virtues of using intertitles. There, Loos defends intertitles as basic to the silent scenario writer’s artistry, arguing that “attempts to limit the freedom of screen authors in the use of intertitles almost invariably result in limiting their artistic field” (X7).

Ruth Taylor (a) signs contract for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), Anita Loos (w/p), Jesse Lasky, Hechtor Turnbull, John Emerson. PC

Ruth Taylor  signs contract for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), with Anita Loos (L), Jesse Lasky, Hechtor Turnbull, and John Emerson. Private Collection.

With so many of the films Loos wrote available for study, it is surprising that what little analysis there is focuses less on the extant motion pictures than on Loos’s 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which started as an amusing reprimand to H.L. Mencken. It was her satire of his behavior in the company of a “witless blonde” that eventually secured her financial success through countless editions, serializations, and theatrical as well as motion picture adaptations (Loos 1998, xix). Critical writing on the 1928 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the 1953 remake directed by Howard Hawks and staring Marilyn Monroe, however, has not yet gone beyond criticism of the talented female writer for the representation of the iconic blond gold digger. Ally Acker, for instance, takes Loos to task for perpetuating the stereotype of the dumb blond who is no more than “tits, ass, and no brains” (1991, 176). New feminist approaches to the stereotype, however, may open up the study of caricature in such a way that a more complex portrait of both Loos and her characters will appear. An important step has been the publication of Anita Loos Rediscovered, which collects motion picture treatments and literary fiction from each era of the writer’s career. Published with the help of Mary Anita Loos, the writer’s niece who holds the bulk of Loos’s papers and manuscripts, this collection may encourage more analysis of a remarkable motion picture career, with special attention to the subtle complexity of Anita Loos’s humor. For most of her adult life, Anita Loos rose at five o’clock each morning to write, and her career in films spanned from 1911 to 1942. Because in addition to motion pictures she continued to write plays and novels, references to her abound in a wide variety of literary histories as well as Hollywood biographies. Just four feet eleven inches tall, she rose to the heights of critical and financial success, from her early stage experiences playing characters like Little Lord Fauntleroy, which earned her just enough money to help support her struggling family, to glamorous, glittering international celebrity.

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Acker, Ally. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1991.

Carey, Gary. Anita Loos: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

“The Emerson-Loos Way.” New York Times (29 Feb. 1920): X7.

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

------. “Photoplay Writing.”Photoplay (Feb. 1918): 51-52; (March 1918): 53-54; (April 1918): 81-82, 122; (May 1918): 81-82, 118; (June 1918): 78-79; (July 1918): 88-89,121.

Johnson, Julian. “The Soubrette of Satire: Exposing the Harsh Philosophy of a Little Human Sub-Caption.” Photoplay (July 1917): 27- 28, 148.

Loos, Anita. Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction. Eds. Cari Beauchamp and Mary Anita Loos. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.

------. A Cast of Thousands. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977.

------. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. 1925; Rpt. New York: Liveright Publishing. 1998.

------. A Girl Like I. New York: Viking, 1966.

------. Kiss Hollywood Good-by. New York: Viking, 1974.

------. The Talmadge Girls. New York: Viking, 1978.

Loos, R. Beers. “Anita’s Dad Spills the Frijoles.”Photoplay (Aug. 1928): 47, 110-113.

McCreadie, Marsha. The Women Who Write the Movies: From Frances Marion to Nora Ephron. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Pub. Group, 1994.

Archival Paper Collections:

Anita Loos clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Anita Loos Collection. Boston University, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Anita Loos papers, 1912-1915; 1956-1979. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Anita Loos papers, 1917-1981. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Anita Loos scripts. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Interview with Anita Loos. May 1971. Time-Life History of American Movies. American Film Institute.

Reminiscences of Anita Loos. July 14, 1971. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Reminiscences of Anita Loos. December 2, 1974. Columbia University, Rare Books and Manuscript Library

Citation

Ruvoli, JoAnne. "Anita Loos." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zhbt-5730>

Sonya Levien

by Patricia Brett Erens

From a poverty stricken immigrant to one of Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriters, Levien’s life exemplifies the opportunities available to some women during the silent era of filmmaking. Born Sonya Opesken in 1888 in Panimunik, a small Jewish village within the Russian Empire, she emigrated with her family to the Lower East Side of New York, where her father had taken the name of Levien. Sonya grew up in a politically leftist household, which informed her early life, but which seems to have had little lasting influence on her screenwriting. However, the experience of poverty never totally left her; she wrote in an article published in 1918 in the Metropolitan: “A feather-duster factory swallowed up my teens at four dollars a week… If I would live I must escape from the East Side. If my body did not die, my mind and spirit would” (8).

According to her biographer, Levien dropped out of high school to help support the family. However, later, in 1906, she attended New York University Law School, graduating in 1909. Realizing that law was not her métier (she claimed she would not make a good lawyer because she was too sympathetic and her emotions were too near the surface), she held several secretarial jobs, especially in the magazine publishing business and then began to write her own stories. This period, the early teens, was especially open to young professional women with talent. In 1917 she married Carl Hovey, the son of a Bostonian first family, who was coeditor of the Metropolitan, a magazine for which Levien wrote many stories and articles. They produced two children (Ceplair 55–56).

During the early teens, Levien’s writings reflect her support of the Women’s Suffrage Movement and other liberal causes. At the same time she wrote melodramatic stories about immigrant families. One story, “Baby Doll,” was purchased by Famous Players-Lasky and was made into the feature motion picture The Top of New York (1922). Prior to this, Levien, working as a freelance writer, receiving story credit for three films including Cheated Love (1921)—a remake of The Heart of a Jewess (1913)—produced by Universal Film Manufacturing Company. The story expresses the strength of the immigrant woman.

Sonya Levien (w), NYPL

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

The period of the early 1920s provided opportunities for Levien, for although women directors and producers were being phased out, some of the most skilled writers were retained by studios, most notably Frances Marion at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Motion picture audiences had increasingly become middle class, and melodramas, especially stories about romance and love, were still being sought. Writers continued to be drawn from the ranks of magazine fiction, and a high percentage of these writers were female. However, by the mid-twenties, Levien said in an interview with the World, “The novelty of their [women] being in the business is over. They must compete with men on equal terms” (6M). Also at this time, in the studio writing department, collaboration became the order of the day—adaptation and editing rather than pure writing. All of this seemed congenial to Levien’s skills and temperament, although from time to time she chaffed under the studio system in which screenwriters were mere cogs in the wheel, subservient to the directors and producers. She analyzed the situation in “My Pilgrimage to Hollywood,” for the Metropolitan: “I never knew what work meant… until I hit the motion picture profession. The over-Lords pay well but demand every ounce of your flesh and blood” (36).

Lantern slide, First Love (1921), Sonya Levien (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Levien was employed in the scenario department at Famous Players-Lasky, then releasing films as Paramount Pictures Corporation, from 1922 until 1925. During that time, she worked on adventure and romances, as well as the adaptation of Salome of the Tenements (1925), based on a novel by Anzia Yezierska, another Jewish immigrant like herself. Studio head Jesse Lasky put her on contract for $24,000 with annual increases, and Levien moved from New York to Hollywood, leaving her husband and her young son behind. However, within one year, her loneliness and desire for another child prompted her to return to New York. In New York, Levien became a scenario editor for Samuel Goldwyn Pictures, attending Broadway plays, summarizing plots, and inquiring about movie rights. Simultaneously, Hovey lost his job, and henceforth, Levien became the main financial supporter of the family. Thus Levien returned to Hollywood, this time with the whole family. Here, working again at Famous Players-Lasky, Levien flourished. Commenting on women’s dual lives, she wrote, “A career and children are always conflicting, but one is a spur to the other” (Ceplair 64).

From 1926 until the end of the silent era, Levien wrote for several production companies, managing to avoid getting pigeonholed as only a writer of women’s pictures. She was skilled in producing scripts in all the popular genres and was especially talented in adapting material from other media, and it is clear that she was a good team player. Although it is hard to detect an original voice in her scenarios, several themes do arise. Firstly, a high percentage of the films she worked on feature intelligent, self-assertive heroines who strive to define their roles in life. Secondly, several of her best works present the lives of European immigrants with a sense of authenticity that was praised by the critics of the day. In addition to Salome of the Tenements (1925), now lost, Levien wrote the story and scenario for the extant film The Princess from Hoboken (1927) and the lost A Harp in Hock (1927), all three of which deal with Jewish immigrant life. But the immigrant scenario that received the most praise was director Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation (1929), Columbia Pictures’ first sound film, based on a story by Fannie Hurst (Ceplair 69). A reevaluation of Sonya Levien’s silent as well as sound era career is overdue, but may now be more possible with the discovery and preservation of examples of her work such as the recently restored Christine of the Big Tops (1926).

The remainder of Levien’s career, which reaches into the 1950s (one of her last screen credits was Jeanne Eagels in 1957), is a story of great success, professionalism, and reward. Later in life, Levien was given the first Laurel Award by the Screenwriters Guild of America for her contributions to the screenwriting profession. In 1955 she won an Oscar for her story and screenplay, Interrupted Melody. Without question, she was one of the survivors.

See also: Anzia Yezierska,“Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Ceplair, Larry. A Great Lady: A Life of the Screenwriter Sonya Levien. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

Levien, Sonya. “In the Golden Land.” The Metropolitan (Apr. 1918): 8, 71.

------. Interview. The World (28 June 1925): 6M.

------. “My Pilgrimage to Hollywood: Writing for the Movies is a Hard, Exciting Life, but has its Moments of Satisfaction.” The Metropolitan (Sept. 1922): 36, 114.

------. “The Screen Writer.” In Catherine Filene, ed. Careers for Women: New Ideas, New Methods, New Opportunities – to Fit a New World.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934, 433-37.

Levy-Reiner, Sherry. “Sonya Levien.” In Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds, Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia.  New York: Routledge, 1997, 831-832.

Malkus, Alida. S. “She Came to America from Russia: The Story of Sonya Levien.” Success. (Jan. 1925): 55-57, 121.

Merrill, Flora. “Sonya Levien Made Sacrifices to Have a Career.” New York World (5 July 1925): 3.

Archival Paper Collections:

Papers of Sonya Levien, 1908-1960. Huntington Library.

Papers of Zoë Akins, 1878-1959. Huntington Library.

Sonya Levien clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Sonya Levien scripts, 1939-1954. University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center.

Citation

Erens, Patricia Brett. "Sonya Levien." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-0vyq-dt60>

Marion Leonard

by Sarah Delahousse

It is well known that Florence Lawrence, the first “Biograph Girl,” was frustrated in her desire to exploit her fame by the company that did not, in those years, advertise their players’ names. Lawrence is thought to have been made the first motion picture star by an ingenious ploy on the part of IMP, the studio that hired her after she left the Biograph Company. But the emphasis on the “first star” eclipses the number of popular female players who vied for stardom and the publicity gambles they took to achieve it. Eileen Bowser has argued that Lawrence was “tied with” the “Vitagraph Girl,” Florence Turner, for the honorific, “first movie star” (1990, 112). In 1909, the year after Lawrence left Biograph, Marion Leonard replaced her as the “Biograph Girl.” At the end of 1911, Leonard would be part of the trend in which favorite players began to find ways to exploit their popularity, but she went further, establishing the first “star company,” according to Karen Mahar (62).

Marion Leonard (w/a/p). AMPAS

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

Leonard had joined the Biograph Company in 1908 after leaving the Kalem Company, where she had briefly replaced Gene Gauntier as its leading lady. Her Kalem films no longer exist nor are they included in any published filmography, and few sources touch on her pre-Biograph career. Thus it is difficult to assess her total career. However, Marion Leonard was most likely a talented player as indicated by her rapid ascension to the larger and more prominent studio. At Biograph, she immediately began working with D. W. Griffith, who directed the vast majority of the films in which she appeared, including The Lonely Villa (1909), until her departure in 1910 to join the Reliance Company. A year later, Leonard left Reliance to form an independent enterprise, the Gem Motion Picture Company, with her husband, Biograph writer-director Stanner E. V. Taylor. While Karen Mahar is certain that this was a move designed to promote Leonard’s career, she is not sure that the star name brand company gave actresses any new responsibilities or powers, although she notes that the films produced in the star companies often featured strong heroine roles and Leonard was no exception to this rule (62). An example of the way Leonard was featured as a “star” just at the advent of stardom is an advertisement in the November 25 issue of Moving Picture World featuring a medium-sized photograph of her face circled by a diamond engagement ring. In an enthusiastic, signed letter addressed to her fans, she says that the Gem Motion Picture Company “captured” her heart: “People—I am engaged!” She assures her fans that the company will capture their hearts as well because Gem plans to produce “the bestest [sic] and brightest in pictorial art” (737).

Leonard’s star vehicles for Gem featured her playing not only strong, but brave and honorable heroines. For instance, in The Defender of the Name (1912) she plays the brave sister of a Confederate soldier who commits suicide and fails to complete his spying mission in Union territory. To preserve her family’s honor, Leonard’s character acquires the Union documents to complete her brother’s mission, and she places them on her brother’s body to make him look like a hero. The film capitalized on the popular Civil War girl spy genre of the time, popularized by Gauntier. Leonard’s self-reliant heroine succeeded with at least one reviewer, who praised her but faulted the story. The picture was “not a convincing story in spite of its being very well-acted,” wrote the Moving Picture World (690). Gem fell into bankruptcy in late 1911 even before it could exhibit The Defender of the Name, which was intended to be its inaugural release. The twenty-six negatives of films the company had shot but not released were, however, bought, and prints were distributed by the Rex Motion Picture Company (Mahar 63).

Marion Leonard (w/a) Life of an Actress Folly, NYPL

Marion Leonard, Life of an Actress Folly. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

The following year, Leonard and Taylor started another venture, the Monopol Film Company, this time using her notoriety to take advantage of the new interest in feature films. They played up her star attraction value in a press release picked up by Moving Picture World. Note that it is the star’s own company that is claiming to have offered her “the largest salary ever paid to a moving picture star (… ) $1,000 per week” (988). Bowser comments that although this number may have been inflated, the advertisement itself is important as a marker of the stage at which star publicity had arrived, publicly announcing the very salary inflation that Leonard’s former employer, the Biograph Company, most feared (1990, 118-119).

Leonard and Taylor moved to California to start filming. They left Monopol in 1913, however, to form yet another independent effort, the Mar-Leon Corporation (Mahar 70). However, Mar-Leon ceased production the following year, and Marion Leonard’s name no longer appeared in the trade presses after the studio’s demise. In 1921, looking back to 1909, a Motion Picture Magazine article, asking “What Are They Doing Now?” doesn’t have an answer to the question, but remembers Marion Leonard as a “favorite,” along with Florence Lawrence, Florence Turner, Cleo Madison, and Flora Finch (32).

Bibliography

Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915. History of the American Cinema. Vol 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1990.

“The Defender of the Name.” Rev. Moving Picture World (24 Feb. 1912): 690.

Gem Motion Picture Company Advertisement. Moving Picture World (25 Nov. 1911): 737.

Handy, Truman B. “What Are They Doing Now?” Motion Picture Magazine vol. 22, no. 9 (Oct. 1921): 32-33, 91-93.

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

“Marion Leonard Joins Monopol Company.” Moving Picture World (7 Dec. 1912): 988.

Research Update

October 2023: Recent research in the trade press connects Marion Leonard with the 1926 film The Miracle of Life, which came out several years after her retirement from acting. Directed by Stanner E.V. Taylor, The Miracle of Life is presumed lost today, and was reportedly adapted for the screen by Leonard from a story by Olga Printzlau. This title has been added to her filmography by the editorial team.

For further research, please see:

"Associated Exhibitors Active in East with Four Units Busy." Moving Picture World (13 June 1925): 797.

"Popular Authors Write Assoc. Exhibs. Stories." Motion Picture News (13 August 1925): 819.

"Taylor Starts Production on Associated's 'Miracle of Life.'" Moving Picture World (30 May 1925): 567.

Citation

Delahousse, Sarah. "Marion Leonard." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hr15-rd64>

Florence Lawrence

by Kelly Brown

Florence Annie Bridgwood, usually known as “Flo” Lawrence, was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, on January 2, 1886. Her mother, Charlotte Bridgwood, was a stage actress known professionally as Lotta Lawrence, and was the manager and leading lady of the Lawrence Dramatic Company (Holland 386). Flo’s childhood, consequently, was spent on the touring road and on the theatrical stage. She began her career in the motion picture industry with a role in an Edison Company short, Daniel Boone/Pioneer Days in America (1907), an account of which is given in her autobiography, Growing Up with the Movies, serialized by Photoplay in four parts. Both mother and daughter appeared in Daniel Boone as well as in Vitagraph’s adaptation of Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s 1874 theatrical melodrama as The Shaughraun, an Irish Romance (1907), but Lotta soon returned to the stage. Flo’s motion picture career, in contrast, had just begun.

Florence Lawrence (p/a), WCFT

Florence Lawrence. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television.

Lawrence found her next job at the Vitagraph Company of America, where she worked with the company cofounder J. Stuart Blackton and with the stage actor-turned-director Charles Kent (Brown 14–16). At the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, Lawrence appeared in most of the sixty short motion pictures that D.W. Griffith directed in 1908, his second year with the company (Holland 389). Lawrence became well known for her role in the Mr. and Mrs. Jones comedy shorts, and as her effect on audiences became measurable, she set herself apart by insisting on weekly and not daily wages, twice the normal salary, and her own makeup table, according to Karen Mahar (2006, 63). As many sources tell us, Florence Lawrence became famous, but not under her own name; rather, following the Biograph policy of player anonymity, she was known as “the Biograph girl.” The actor’s transition from anonymity to picture personality to the status of star is crucial to understanding the economics of the silent era, and although Florence Lawrence is a pivotal figure, important contemporary accounts demonstrate that she is not the entire story (deCordova 1990; Staiger 1985, 101; Slide 1978, 1).

Lawrence does, however, exemplify the important principle that public recognition of actors made it possible for popular players to begin to pressure early motion picture companies, but not all were willing to change the policy of actor anonymity. Due to her growing demands on the Biograph management—quite possibly encouraged by her then husband, Harry Solter—both Lawrence and Solter were fired in 1910 (Mahar 2006, 63). They were soon hired, however, by producer Carl Laemmle, who had just started the Independent Motion Picture Company, better known as IMP, and where Lawrence was the object of a notorious publicity stunt. Her “death” in a streetcar accident was widely announced, followed by her resurrection in the first publicity tour in film history, in St. Louis on March 25, 1910, a detailed account of which can be found in Brown (47-58). The stunt, which involved IMP’s circulation of the false news as well as the false “exposure” of their own story in the famous Moving Picture World “We Nail a Lie” advertisement, has been reconsidered in recent years by Eileen Bowser, who challenges Terry Ramsaye’s earlier account (Ramsaye 1986, 523-524). Bowser argues for seeing a gradual buildup rather than a single publicity coup as instrumental in making Florence Lawrence a “star” actress.

Florence Lawrence (p/a), WCFT

Florence Lawrence. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television.

She further challenges the popular story that Florence Lawrence was the first motion picture star with the argument that the former “Biograph Girl,” now the “IMP girl,” was really “tied” for first with Florence Turner, the “Vitagraph Girl” (1990, 112-113). Now promoted as a picture personality with a name, Lawrence, along with Solter, worked at IMP for eleven months and made approximately fifty films (Holland 390). Lawrence then joined the Philadelphia Lubin Company in early 1911, taking her husband with her. Lawrence left Lubin within a year, however, and, with Solter, started one of the first US film companies to be headed by a woman: the Victor Company. In this undertaking, Mahar compares her with Marion Leonard, Gene Gauntier, and Helen Gardner, whose star-producer companies were also founded in the first wave of these companies around 1911 and 1912. With a company formed in 1912 with backing from Carl Laemmle, the first Victor studio then set up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and salaries were raised to $500 a week for Lawrence and $200 a week for Solter, who was the director. Florence Lawrence’s stardom was used aggressively in the publicity for the company, but her star billing may not have translated into real power within the company. Kelly Brown says, interpreting Lawrence’s correspondence, “Florence always considered [Victor] to be hers even though it probably never was” (77).

As Karen Mahar analyzes the history of the Victor Company, the company’s fortune was tied to the problem of motion picture distribution in the 1910s. While they found enough financing to produce the first Victor film, Not Like Other Girls (1912), the title became stuck at the distribution stage, victim of wrangling within the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company formed by the “independent” companies in opposition to the Motion Picture Patents Company and their distributor, the General Film Company. Seeking another distribution arrangement, Lawrence and Solter then signed on with Carl Laemmle’s new Universal Film Manufacturing Company, where they were one of several semi-independent companies that enjoyed the advantage of the Universal distribution channels. While Victor was one of the smallest companies under the Universal umbrella at the time, according to Mahar it was also the only one to have a star in 1912, the year that they completed a one-reel film every week (2006, 64).

Biograph production filmed at 14th Street studio area 1905. USM.

Biograph production filming at 14th Street studio area, 1905. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. 

Within this same year, however, Lawrence’s marriage to Solter began to fall apart, disrupting the company that they had started together. When Lawrence left him on August 6, 1912, Solter set sail for Europe. In his stream of letters to her, which alternate between threatening suicide and begging forgiveness, Solter provides a clue to the dynamics of their working relationship in the Victor Company. These letters, now housed in the Florence Lawrence Collection at the Seaver Center for Western History at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, are undated but numbered in sequence. In one of them Solter writes: “Shall I come to New York? Will you give me a job with the Victor? I will write you some beautiful stories, comedy or tragedy. You shall be Mamselle La Directress and I shall be Monsieur Le Property Man…You can get me very cheap. I will work for love, love.”

Florence Lawrence(p/a) in The Zulu's Heart (1908).

Florence Lawrence, The Zulu’s Heart (1908). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. 

By late 1912, the two may have been reunited and working at Victor, but the company was in serious trouble, which Brown attributes in part to Universal’s status as an independent company, though it may also have had something to do with low production values. Distribution had continued to be a problem, and Solter would complain in a letter to Lotta Lawrence that “Here in New York it is impossible to find out where a Victor can be seen.” Even after fourteen US releases, they were yet to make any profits, and they had managed only one European release (Brown 82).

Florence Lawrence intended her last Victor photoplay to be her second two-reel film, The Lady Leone (1912), and after its completion, she and Solter retired to their home in River Vale, New Jersey. This was not the end of Lawrence’s career, however, and she decided to return to work at Victor, which had expanded to producing several releases per week. Her reappearance at Victor was with The Closed Door (1913), and the small studio made twenty-five two-reelers the next year. In Karen Mahar’s analysis, after 1916 Lawrence attempted more than once to become an independent producer again, but “nostalgia” for her fame was not enough (Mahar 64-65). The Victor name appears in credits up until 1917, after which it was absorbed completely into Universal.

Lawrence and Solter filed for divorce in 1916, and Billboard reports in April 1916 that she was weighing new offers and options, including vaudeville—and that Solter was not involved (52). In a letter to their mother four months later, her brother George writes: “So Flo is getting up another company of her own, is she, well I hope she does better than she did before. She did not seem to have had the right kind of stuff with that company she had. Of course that husband of hers may have had something to do with that part of it.” The new company, however, never materialized, and this was the beginning of Lawrence’s post-Victor career slide.

While Florence Lawrence attempted a return to the screen in 1921, she found it extremely difficult to find acting work—she even underwent plastic surgery on her nose in 1924, hoping to improve her luck (Brown 131). She opened a store, Hollywood Cosmetics, with her second husband, automobile salesman Charles B. Woodring, in the mid-1920s, which featured a line of makeup with her likeness on the cover (Brown 133). Lawrence was also involved in Lotta’s entrepreneurial ventures, becoming the president of her mother’s company, Bridgwood Manufacturing. Lotta Lawrence was a woman with business ideas and patent claims, inventing a windshield wiper patented in 1917, while Florence invented an “auto-signalling arm” for an automobile (Brown 115). Her mother used Florence Lawrence’s stardom in promotional materials, ironically, in Lotta’s idea for a home motion picture filming enterprise. When these ventures failed, the former star actress returned to work in vaudeville shows, but only because she could not find motion picture work (Holland 391).

Florence Lawrence (p/a), WCFT

Florence Lawrence. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television.

In 1931 Lawrence divorced Woodring, and the next year married Henry Bolton, a marriage that ended within five months because he beat her severely. In the sound era, Lawrence, like many former stars, began around 1936 to get bit parts at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, earning $75 a week. On December 27, 1938, Lawrence was found unconscious in her West Hollywood apartment: she had killed herself by eating ant paste. In 1932, Lawrence donated many of her papers to what is now the Florence Lawrence Collection, and the remainder went to Daniel Blum, who used much of the material for his Pictorial History of the Silent Screen.

With additional research by Madhumita Lahiri.

Bibliography

Brown, Kelly. Florence Lawrence, the Biograph Girl. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999.

“Florence Lawrence out of Universal’s Employ.” Billboard (1 April 1916): 52.

Holland, Larry Lee. “Florence Lawrence.” Films in Review vol. 31, no. 7 (August/September 1980): 385-394.

Lawrence, Florence. “Growing Up with the Movies.” Photoplay (Nov. 1914): 28-41; (Dec.1914): 91-100; (Jan. 1915): 95-107; (Feb. 1915): 142-146.

Lawrence, George. Letter to Lotta Lawrence. 12 July 1916. Box 1, Folder 3. Florence Lawrence papers, 1904-1930. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Seaver Center for Western History Research.

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

Ramsaye, Terry. A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture. 1926. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Solter, Harry to Lotta Lawrence. 27 September [1912]. Box 1, Folder 5. Florence Lawrence papers, 1904-1930. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Seaver Center for Western History Research.

“We Nail a Lie.” Advertisement. Moving Picture World (12 March 1910): 365.

Archival Paper Collections:

Florence Lawrence papers, 1904-1930. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Seaver Center for Western History Research.

Florence Lawrence papers, 1908-1924. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Research Update

November 2020: The extant The Calamitous Elopement (1908) was removed from the filmography. Based on documentation in the FIAF Treasures database and the AFI Catalog as well as Paolo Cherchi Usai's book The Griffith Project: Vol. 1. and related Biograph company resources (e.g., the Biograph Project), we can confirm that Florence Lawrence did not appear in this film.

-The Editors.

Citation

Brown, Kelly. "Florence Lawrence." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-2jnw-2x82>

Bradley King

by Brian Taves

During the preliminary research that culminated in my volume Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure (McFarland 2005), I investigated the anomaly of the book Her Reputation, titled The Bubble Reputation in the UK, Mundy’s sole literary collaboration as well as the only book he wrote with a “photoplay edition” motion picture tie-in. Who was his coauthor, Bradley King? The standard references offered only a long list of credits. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences had two clippings, revealing that “Bradley” was not a man, but an attractive female brunette. County and city legal records were the next recourse, and other bits came from brief mentions in articles and papers, found as I began researching a biography of producer Thomas Ince (1880–1924). From this research I realized that, despite King’s obscurity today, she ranked as one of the leading female screenwriters during the 1920s and 1930s.

Bradley King (w)

Portrait, Bradley King. 

Bradley King was born Josephine McLaughlin in 1894. Daughter of a physician, she was educated at Sacred Heart Convent in New York City. Articles about her report that she stood five foot three inches in height, with brown hair and blue eyes. Her brother Barnum Brown later served as the head of the dinosaur department of New York’s American Museum of Natural History. Young Josephine initially wanted to be an actress, but, according to the Los Angeles Times, failure to achieve this goal led to a job as a stenographer for a motion picture scenarist who paid her $10 a week (20). When the writer stalked out of the studio one day — taking the script of a production that was ready to begin—Josephine suggested that the director use one of her own stories (Winship 63). By 1916 she was writing scenarios under her own name at the Lubin Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia, then in 1918 began to author love stories for prominent magazines under the name Bradley King.

She lived in San Diego for two years, where her naval officer husband was hoping to become an actor. She returned to motion pictures in 1920, working for a variety of companies until summoned that August by Thomas Ince; her contracts with him survive in the Ince papers at the Library of Congress. He initially signed her to a long-term contract at $100 a week. The ability to learn continuity writing and dramatic structure and to adapt to any genre soon made her the most important Ince scenarist. By late 1924, her salary advanced to nearly $700 a week. She also began writing for the stage, including a theatrical adaptation for Ince of her script for A Man of Action (1923). Her Reputation, King’s only “book,” was actually Talbot Mundy’s novelization of her script, written to add market appeal to adaptation-minded filmgoers. For the work, both received an equal weekly salary, although King was by then earning a $1,500 bonus for each original story. Later, Mundy recalled that King “‘thought’ in terms of tabloid scare-heads,” doubtless because of her talent for writing melodrama (letter to Rose Wilder Lane, June 25, 1934). King and Mundy had been brought together by mutual friend Larry Trimble; King held a financial interest in Trimble’s Strongheart dog pictures, and subsequently King and Trimble became romantically involved for two years.

In addition to her credits on completed Thomas Ince productions, King scripted many of his unproduced projects. Among these was The Just and the Unjust, an adaptation of the popular 1912 Vaughan Kester novel that was to have been helmed by Ince’s primary director, John Griffith Wray. King and Wray finally filmed it in 1926 at Fox Film Corporation as Hell’s 400, starring former Ince player Margaret Livingston. After Ince’s death in 1924, King began freelancing for various studios, making $10,000 for a single script, and easily made the transition to sound films, with over twenty feature film writing credits in the sound era. On October 6, 1928, King and Wray married. As she explained, the two had disagreed about many love scenes in the past while under Ince, but after working at different studios, they began to miss one another’s company. She briefly changed her name to Bradley King Wray. John Griffith Wray had just completed his first “talkie” production when he died of appendicitis at age forty-seven on July 15, 1929, leaving King his estate of $100,000. A newspaper morgue of clippings at the University of Southern California Special Collections Library recounts details of the brief marriage.

Slide What a Wife Learned (1923) Bradley King (w), MoMI

Lantern slide, What a Wife Learned (1923). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image.

King spent much of the time after Wray’s death traveling, hoping to improve her own poor health. While she was in Honolulu developing a screen epic based on the ancient peoples of Hawaii, she met George Hiram Boyd, a thirty-six-year-old building contractor who had previously been a stage entertainer. They were married October 31, 1930. Although King was raised as a Catholic (and her mother was a Quaker), this marriage was conducted by Reverend Ernest Holmes, Divine Science Minister of the Institute of Religious Science—better known as “Science of Mind.”

King worked steadily through 1937 on a variety of genres, then found it impossible to continue to create, after Boyd lost her entire fortune of $400,000 in failed investments and further refused to work altogether. In 1940, she divorced Boyd and returned to screenwriting in 1947 for one final motion picture, That’s My Man (1947). Subsequently, King vanished from the film industry, and not even the date of her death is known. She is absent from modern Hollywood histories, and while most of her sound films exist, nearly all of her roughly forty silent feature films are lost today. Her only major extant silent movie, Anna Christie (1923) starring Blanche Sweet, has been forgotten in favor of the 1930 Greta Garbo remake.

Bibliography

“Girl Who Has Written Scenarios Gives Sound Advice to Learners.” Washington Post (15 July 1923): 55.

King, Bradley. “The Demand for Originals.” The Photodramatist (3 Nov. 1921): 25-26.

------. “Lying Lips.” The Washington Post (6 March 1921): 75. [Short story]

------. “More Studio Secrets.” Photodramatist (3 May 1922): 5-6.

------.“The Pale Gold Lady—A Weird Study.” Los Angeles Times (20 Feb. 1921): IX6. [Short story]

------. “A Shy Celebrity.” Picture-Play Magazine (25 Jan. 1927): 44-45, 103.

------. “Some Studio Secrets.” Photodramatist (3 June 1921): 19-20.

Mundy, Talbot. Letter to Rose Wilder Lane. 25 June 1934. Rose Wilder Lane Collection. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library & Museum.

Palmer, Edwin Obadiah. History of Hollywood. Hollywood: Cawston, 1937.

Winship, Mary. “No, Bradley King is Not ‘Mr.’” Photoplay Magazine (26 July 1924): 63.

“Writer Bradley King Awarded Divorce.” Los Angeles News (8 Nov. 1940): n.p.

“Writer’s Rise to Fame Phenomenal.” Los Angeles Times (7 June 1925): 20.

Archival Paper Collections:

Bradley King clippings files. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Cinema Library clipping files. University of Southern California, Cinema Arts Library.

The Rose Wilder Lane Collection. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.

Thomas H. Ince papers. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Citation

Taves, Brian. "Bradley King." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-bgz4-6a05>

Helen Keller

by Abigail Salerno

Helen Keller’s brief career in silent film began when she was approached by historian and author of the popular Photographic History of the Civil War Francis Trevelyan Miller, who hoped to write a motion picture script based on Keller’s life and work. Miller, in a January 1918 letter to Keller, argued that the motion pictures were “a universal language” and an opportunity for the deaf-blind author and activist to share her political and social message with the world. Keller, who was often frustrated by the limitations of biographical interest in her life, responded to the broader vision of the project and wrote, typing in her distinctive typing style, back to him in April: “So according to your conception, the interest of our life-drama will not be confined to the events of my life, but will be spread out all round the world [… ] and bring many vital truths home to the hearts of the people, truths that shall hasten the deliverance of the human race.” This rhetoric becomes more pointed in the context of Keller’s public life; she had been a politically active Socialist since 1912.

With money raised through Keller’s philanthropic connections and George Foster Platt hired as director for the film, the Helen Keller Film Corporation was created in May 1918. Miller became its president, and production of the film Deliverance began. Despite the alleged universality of the medium, everyone involved found that significant translations were necessary for the director to communicate with the film’s star, Keller herself. After Anne Sullivan Macy had interpreted Platt’s directions for Keller, or she had read his lips with her hands, Platt would tap on the floor during actual filming to cue Keller’s movements and facial expressions. Reports of this process appear in various publicity articles, but the most detailed descriptions of the film production, and its difficulties, come from Keller’s memoir Midstream and her correspondence from the period.

CCP_FIG167C_Keller_WFP-KELH01

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy; Sullivan signs as Charlie Chaplin shoots Shoulder Arms (1918). Courtesy of the Bison Archives.

Polly Thompson, Anne Sullivan Macy, Helen Keller and Charlie Chaplin on the set of Shoulder Arms, 1918. AFB

Polly Thompson, Anne Sullivan Macy, Helen Keller, and Charlie Chaplin on the set of Shoulder Arms (1918). Courtesy of American Foundation for the Blind.

In her 1929 biography Midstream, Keller writes of an initial “exaltation” over the decision to attempt “a mystical unfoldment of my story” rather than “a matter of fact narrative” (195–200), but after Keller and Macy viewed a version of the film, with Macy finger spelling descriptions of the action and images, Macy wrote Miller with a list of objections. Macy and Keller revised and edited the existing titles and requested the editing or removal of various scenes. Meanwhile, Keller contacted the film’s investors, invoking in an April 1919 letter the “right to reject the picture if it does not satisfy us.” For the investors Keller described, indignantly, “a scene called ‘The Council Chamber,’ where all the great generals, kings and statesmen are assembled in a sort of peace conference. I enter … and proclaim the Rights of Man rather feebly. There is no foundation in fact for such a scene, and the symbolism is not apparent. We want it omitted. This scene is followed by a Pageant with me on horseback, leading all the peoples of the world to freedom—or something. It is altogether too hilarious to typify the struggles of mankind for liberty.”

Unfortunately, the producers did not take Keller’s perceptive critique of the weakest elements of the film seriously. The extant version of the film includes much of the footage that Keller and Macy found objectionable and actually opens with the scene in “The Council Chamber.” The following two “acts,” titled “Childhood,” in which Keller is played by a child actress, and “Maidenhood,” loosely follow Keller’s 1903 autobiography, The Story of My Life, and did meet with Macy and Keller’s approval. Some of the more fantastic scenes of Keller’s “Maidenhood,” including a daydream romance with Homer’s Odysseus, reveal the influence of Keller’s literary metaphors, as well as the influence of the sensorially rich descriptive literary style of her 1908 essay collection The World I Live In. Still, Keller and Macy were disappointed with the film.

Deliverance introduces a fictional character into Keller’s childhood in Tuscumbia, Alabama—a young immigrant girl named Nadja. Scenes from Nadja’s life, a fairly conventional silent-era story of poverty and hardship, are crosscut with scenes from Keller’s biography. The women reunite after Nadja’s son returns from war blinded and she seeks Keller’s aid. While the film includes no direct representations of Keller’s adult political work or speeches—“Act Three Womanhood” focuses instead on Keller’s sensory experiences and domestic arrangements—Nadja’s story carries an explicitly political, but conventionally patriotic, message.

In their correspondence with the filmmakers, Macy and Keller repeatedly insisted that they wanted the film to include scenes from the rehabilitation hospitals where blinded World War I veterans were learning to adjust physically and psychologically to their disabilities, work Keller was then advocating. These scenes would have been more in tune with Keller’s pacifist and socialist opposition to a war that, as she writes in “Strike Against War,” would take “the lives of millions of young men; other millions crippled and blinded for life; existence made hideous for still more millions of human beings” (79). One can’t help but contrast this statement of Keller’s antiwar sympathies with the images of the uplifting and heroic blinded soldier that appears beside the adult Keller in the film’s final scenes.

Keller had planned to speak at the August 1919 New York premiere of the film, but an actors and musicians strike was underway in the city and, according to the New York Times, “when she learned that the actors were striking against the Schuberts, who own the Lyric [the theatre premiering Keller’s film], she declined to come to the theatre” (1). The film was not successful at the box office, and distributor George Kleine eventually wrote to Keller that the film would be distributed for educational purposes and that he had removed the Nadja story to satisfy her.

 

Bibliography

Keller, Helen. Midstream: My Later Life. 1929. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969: 186-215.

------. Letter to Francis Trevelyan Miller, draft. April 10, 1918. American Foundation for the Blind.

------. Letter to Mrs. William Thaw. 12 April 1919. American Foundation for the Blind.

------. “Strike Against War.” In Helen Keller: Her Socialist Years. Writings and Speeches. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: International Publishers, 1967.

------.The Story of My Life. 1903; Rpt. Cutchogue, N.Y. : Buccaneer Books, 1976.

------. The World I Live In. New York: The Century Co., 1908.

Miller, Francis Trevelyan. Letter to Mr. Holmes. 5 June 1918. American Foundation for the Blind.

------. Letter to Richard Daly. 5 Jan 1918. American Foundation for the Blind.

“Miss Keller’s Own Work.” New York Times (24 Aug. 1919): 4.

“Stage Hands and Musicians Strike; 16 Theatres Dark.” New York Times (17 Aug. 1919):1.

Archival Paper Collections:

Helen Keller Archive. American Foundation for the Blind.

Citation

Salerno, Abigail. "Helen Keller." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-nqhs-vs25>

Agnes Christine Johnston

by April Miller

Agnes Christine Johnston repeatedly claimed that she wrote and sold her first scenario, Wanted for Murder, at the age of sixteen. In 1925 she described that effort to the Los Angeles Times as a “bloodthirsty” story about a man who was tried for his own murder (D13). Perhaps she was sixteen, but she says she is “just eighteen” in the thank you letter she wrote in 1914 to Vitagraph Company of America president Albert Smith. Here she describes her ambition to go to the Columbia School of Journalism, says how happy the check he sent made her, and raves that “even dances and parties pale beside ‘movey’ writing.” We do not know if that first scenario was actually produced, but her brief description mirrors the title of a later Vitagraph film, Tried for His Own Murder (1916).

Agnes Christine Johnston (w) MGM publicity photo. AMPAS

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

However, when Johnston officially joined the film industry in 1915, it was at first not as a scenarist, but as a stenographer in Vitagraph’s Brooklyn studio, at a reported salary of $10 per week, she told the Los Angeles Times (D13). In those first few years, she wrote scenarios for comedy-dramas released by Vitagraph, the Thanhouser Company, and the Pathé Exchange. During this period, Johnston must have worked with Marguerite Bertsch, head of the Vitagraph scenario department, whose manual on how to write for motion pictures described many devices developed at the studio. In this tradition, Johnston also wrote quite thoughtfully about the new technological requirements for as well as the ancient origins of the moving picture. Not every scenario writer thought so deeply about cinema as a kind of primal expression, although the theory she espouses is not original to her, as the idea that silent cinema could convey emotions without words was popular. Lillian Gish even wrote an encyclopedia entry on motion pictures as a basic universal language.

In a 1917 Moving Picture World article, “The Comedy Scenario,” Johnston calls the “comedy-drama” the ideal photoplay because the motion picture is “elemental.” In its reliance on “action,” she says, it hearkens back to the caveman: “It provokes first emotions, and then thought through those emotions,” through the “primal feelings” of laughter and tears. She also insists that the silent cinema not rely on the spoken word, claiming that it must be “more vital and ever-changing.” In the vocabulary emerging in the silent era, she also mentions the necessity of “continuity” (413). Her use of the term “continuity” here is interesting as it seems to encompass the term’s various meanings—from a script that facilitated efficient shooting to the way writing in conjunction with editing could produce a story that the viewer experienced as smooth and uninterrupted (Staiger 1985, 189–91).

In an article titled “A Feat in Photography” she describes writing the scenario for the extant title An Old Fashioned Boy (1920) as involving transitions between scenes that could be made without the use of silent film’s trademark iris shots. A writer, she suggested, might create transitions by the use of contrasting scenes, following action sequences with a love scene or “bit of human interest.” Although this article refers to the “continuous” approach to scene transitions as a “novelty” allowing spectators to experience a story “unfolding” without the interruption of either a “break” or a “fade,” she is in fact describing common industry practice (63). This development away from transitions that called attention to themselves in favor of smooth storytelling would have been the new industry standard by 1920 (Staiger 1985, 189–91).

Agnes Christine Johnston and Marion Davies on the set of "The Patsy" (1928). PCJY

Agnes Christine Johnston and Marion Davies on the set of The Patsy (1928). Private Collection.

In the summer of 1918, Agnes Johnston enrolled in Professor George P. Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard College, and in 1919 she became “special scenario editress” for Mary Pickford, Moving Picture World reported in 1919 (744). The amazing Daddy-Long-Legs (1919) appeared during this period, a Johnston adaptation that would become one of the films that defined Pickford’s distinctive character as the poor girl capable of changing the hearts of the rich. The extant film, produced by the Mary Pickford Motion Picture Corporation, is carefully structured to display the comedian’s use of comic incongruity, pleasing contemporary audiences with a surprising formula that effectively combines funny and poignant elements. Holding up equally well are the two extant comedies, the first silent and the second sound, that Johnston wrote for Marion Davies—The Patsy (1928) and Show People (1928)—both directed by King Vidor while she was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In recent years The Patsy has been rediscovered and was screened in 2002 at the Italian silent film festival, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

During her years at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Johnston’s salary made the newspapers. The Los Angeles Times, in an article on “penwomen” in Hollywood, estimated Johnston’s 1924 salary as $50,000 a year, or roughly $1,000 per week. She had just moved from working as a freelance writer to being under “long-term contract” with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (C14). In 1925, the Los Angeles Times described her job at MGM as assessing plays for their viability of screen adaptation and securing rights (D13). At the same time, she was writing for important talent, as her work with Marion Davies during the MGM years attests. In fact, four years later the Los Angeles Times singled out Johnston as one of a very few women then under contract to a major production company, describing her as an important name in film writing circles and, by 1928, still “one of the highest paid women scenarists” in the industry (C11). Director Paul Bern even remarked to the Los Angeles Times in 1925 that Johnston was among five scenarists, along with one other woman, Frances Marion, who he felt deserved the title “screen specialist” (A9).

Agnes Christine Johnston may have been overshadowed by Marion, her legendary Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scenario department coworker. Now, in examining Johnston’s career, we find that not only did she write or co-write circa forty original screenplays, but she also turned out adaptations in collaboration with her husband, the scenarist and playwright Frank Mitchell Dazey. For several years, between 1920 and 1936, the couple worked as co-authors, and the press frequently remarked on their successful professional collaborations, with one article titled “Mix Careers and Marriage” referring to them as “The Gold Dust Twins of Screen and Stage” (D11). Although we now know that many couples worked as creative teams in the silent era, Dazey and Johnston are less like the more visible writing-directing-acting teams such as Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley and more like Mr. and Mrs. George Randolph Chester —whose forte was joint scenario writing. Johnston and Dazey may also have been the only husband-wife team to cowrite a serial, The Jungle Goddess (1922), a project they undertook for the small Export-Import Film Company. This chapter play tells the story of a European girl who is kidnapped and tossed into the basket of a hot-air balloon only to be lost in the jungles of Africa where she becomes the “white goddess” of an African tribe. Surprisingly, ten of the fifteen episodes are extant, as are at least three other co-authored titles—Silk Hosiery (1920), produced by Famous Players-Lasky and distributed by Paramount Pictures Corporation; The Tomboy (1924) produced by Mission Film Corporation; and For Another Woman (1924). The latter was produced by the newly formed low-budget Rayart Pictures, which would become Monogram Pictures in 1930 (Slide 1998, 129).

While directors like Johnston and Weber benefited from the industry assumption that female directors would attract female spectators, this practice only held sway from about 1916–1923, after which time the industry changed course. The situation for scenario writers was slightly different as a relatively greater number of women continued to find studio as well as freelance writing work in the silent to sound transition period. One question that remains unanswered is whether the “woman’s-angle” justification for hiring women writers persisted. Defending women writers in 1924, Samuel Goldwyn sounds like a throwback to the previous decade when a new industry used women directors and scenario writers to shore up their respectability. In 1924, in an article mentioning Agnes Christine Johnston, the Los Angeles Times quotes veteran producer and head of a new company, Samuel Goldwyn, as saying, “Approximately 50 per cent of moving-picture audiences are composed of feminine spectators. So it is but natural that women make the best screen writers. They know better than men the tricks which catch the feminine mind and the little things that appeal to every class of audience” (C10). Always an advocate of women in the motion picture industry, Johnston agreed with a position held by a number of others, most notably scenario writer Clara Beranger, that women’s special aptitudes made them potentially the equal of men as directors. In 1927, Johnston stated, “I see no reason why women shouldn’t make very good directors. They may not be quite as good at inserting spectacular touches, but for photoplays of intimate characterization—and these usually mean the best drama—they should easily equal or surpass men” (350). These comments suggest how quickly the new industry players seem to have forgotten prolific directors Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché, whose careers had come to an end by the early 1920s.

It may be more difficult to assess the careers of scenario writers, if only because of a long tradition of freelance work in all writing fields and the blurring of the distinction between professional and part-time work, particularly among women writers. Johnston announced her retirement from film in 1929, opting to focus on writing for the stage and magazines, but the Hartford Courant announced her return to scenario writing in 1931 with the headline, “Hollywood Lure Too Strong for Agnes Johnston” (3B). In 1935, Moving Picture World made a similar proclamation when it announced Johnston “Signs with M-G-M” (629). That same year, Alma Whitaker, writing in the Los Angeles Times, proclaimed that women directors and scenario writers began to “lose ground to men” with the advent of sound (A1). Agnes Johnston, however, was one of a handful of women writers (the list included other experienced professionals such as Marion, Sonya Levien, and Lenore Coffee) who continued to work on film scenarios well into the sound period.

In addition to developing a reputation as a celebrated member of the motion picture industry, Agnes Christine Johnston was also one of Hollywood’s social trendsetters, with reporters remarking on her riding in celebrity steeplechase and polo matches, hosting popular ping-pong parties, and traveling around Paris with her newborn son in a handbasket. Reporters frequently commented on her remarkable ability to balance a demanding Hollywood career and a family. Johnston’s response to inquiries about this juggling act, as quoted in 1928 in the Los Angeles Times, sounds rather modern: “I think women have too much creative energy to spend it merely on housekeeping. You get neurasthenic if you have only one line. I notice it is the young mothers who devote themselves too intensely to their offspring who get nervous break-downs: also the society women who only do society, and writers who only write. When you have two young scenarios as well as two young children on your hands, you find each a relaxation and a joy. You don’t break down” (C11).

In a career that began in 1915 at Vitagraph and lasted for approximately thirty-five years, Agnes Christine Johnson became an increasingly prolific, high-profile member of the film community, writing scenarios, adaptations, or continuities for more than sixty films for a number of independent companies as well as for the emerging major motion picture company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She wore many hats throughout her career, including authoring a popular stage comedy, “Funny Little Things,” which premiered at Los Angeles’ Morosco Theatre in 1928 to very positive reviews. Though author Ayn Rand described it as a “silly play about office girls’ love,” (42) Johnston claimed, in a 1928 Los Angeles Times article that several production companies had expressed interest in adapting the successful stage comedy (A11). Johnston also continued to collaborate with her husband on stage productions, and in 1966 the couple published a children’s book, Pepe, the Bad One, whose protagonist she described as a “Mexican Andy Rooney.” According to the author bio printed on the jacket, the book was inspired by Johnston and Dazey’s experience working as the volunteer managers of a dispensario, or free clinic. In addition to the popular Andy Hardy films of the 1940s, she also wrote serial magazine stories and newspaper etiquette columns, and eventually wrote for television.

Bibliography

“A Feat in Photography.”Washington Post (14 Nov. 1920): 63.

“Agnes Christine Johnston.” Obit. Variety (9 Aug. 1978): 70.

“Agnes Johnston, Scenarist.” Moving Picture World (8 Feb. 1919): 744.

“Film Companies are ‘Bidding’ Says She.” Los Angeles Times (9 Feb. 1928): A11.

“Has Job, Three Children, Husband—Yet Writes Plays.” Los Angeles Times (5 Feb. 1928): C11.

Johnston, Agnes Christine. “The Comedy Scenario.” Moving Picture World (21 July 1917): 413–414.

------. “Hollywood Lure Too Strong for Agnes Johnston.” Hartford Courant (13 Sept. 1931): 3B.

------. Letter to Albert Smith, 26 July 1914. Box 12647A, Warner Bros. Archives. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Kingsley, Grace. “Mix Careers and Marriage.” Los Angeles Times (22 Mar. 1925): D11, D13.

“Miss Johnston Asserts Women ‘Will Make Good.’” Moving Picture World (29 Jan. 1927): 350.

Rand, Ayn. The Journals of Ayn Rand. New York: Penguin, 1992.

“Signed by Paramount.” Moving Picture World 30 Aug. 1924: 701.

“Signs with M-G-M.” Moving Picture World (24 Oct. 1935): 629.

Whitaker, Alma. “Women Lose Ground to Men in Film Work.” Los Angeles Times (14 July 1935): A1.

Williams, Whitney. “Penwomen Dominate Screen Literati Group.” Los Angeles Times (13 Apr. 1925): A9.

Archival Paper Collections:

Agnes Christine Johnston clippings files. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Agnes Christine Johnston and Frank Dazey papers, 1914–1968. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Warner Bros. Archives. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Citation

Miller, April. "Agnes Christine Johnston." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-b0jm-hj90>

Osa Johnson

by Laura Horak

Osa Johnson, billed as “The Heroine of 1,000 Thrills” in the promotion for Jungle Adventures (1921) and deemed “the greatest woman explorer and big-game hunter” by Collier’s magazine, spent most of her career as “Mrs. Martin Johnson,” the female half of the famous “Martin Johnsons.” She only acquired popular recognition as “Osa Johnson” when she continued her adventures following her husband’s untimely death in 1937. Over the course of the Johnsons’ twenty-seven-year career together, they collaborated on fourteen feature films, thirty-seven educational short films, seven books, and countless lecture presentations on their expeditions to the South Pacific, Africa, and Borneo.

Osa Johnson (p/d/a/ph) w/ Photoplay, PC

Osa Johnson in Photoplay.

Osa also penned six children’s stories, numerous articles for such publications as Good Housekeeping and the New York Times and—apparently with the help of ghostwriters—four memoirs. After Martin’s death, when Osa’s solo career truly began, she continued producing films and leading expeditions on her own, alongside publishing, lecturing, and designing, thus staying in the public eye for the remainder of her life.

It is impossible to parse fully who did what in the lifetime collaboration between Martin and Osa Johnson, but it is clear that Osa was actively involved in their motion pictures adventures at many levels. Martin consistently described Osa as his equal collaborator, although she rarely received production, direction, or cinematography credit for their joint projects. In her final memoir, Last Adventure: The Martin Johnsons in Borneo, Osa quotes Martin in an epigraph: “If ever a man needed a partner in his chosen profession, it has been I. And if ever a wife were a partner to a man, it is Osa Johnson.” In They Married Adventure, the Johnsons’ biographers say that Osa picked up languages quickly and often acted as a liaison between the film crew and local subjects while abroad (Imperato 70). The couple fostered the image of Martin as holding the camera while Osa held the rifle ready, as in this 1937 New York Times characterization of the couple: “the tall man who has turned the crank of a motion-picture camera half the uncivilized world over, and the small woman who always holds a loaded rifle at his side ready to kill whatever starts to kill him” (31). Osa’s marksmanship was renowned; not only did she save the lives of Martin and the camera crew on numerous occasions, but she also brought in game for meals. While Martin was alive, Osa humbly admitted in Good Housekeeping magazine in 1924: “though I had no genius for photography, I learned also to handle a motion-picture camera and to act as my husband’s assistant in the dark room” (167). However, in the March 1937 New York Times article published shortly after Martin’s death, Osa made it clear that on expeditions she had done as much camerawork as her husband, saying, “I can grind a movie camera as well as any man” (31).

Osa Johnson (p/d/a/o) publicity still. PC

Osa Johnson publicity still. Private Collection.

Throughout her career with Martin, Osa fashioned her persona as a dutiful, hardworking wife, attentive to her appearance as well as her husband’s needs. In a Photoplay article titled “A Wife in Africa,” she claimed: “I went to Africa with Martin for just the same reason that lots of girls settled down on Main street back home—just to be with my husband.” In the same article she emphasized her beauty regimen, remarking, “Yes, I always had my vanity bag handy, even in the jungle—everybody knows what an American husband thinks of a shiny nose” (33). Osa contributed regularly to Good Housekeeping, describing the challenge of maintaining a cozy home for Martin in the African wilds and telling stories of jungle kittens and baby hippos. In her memoirs she described her constant efforts to grow a garden whenever they “stopped long enough for seeds to sprout” and to cook good, hot, “home-styled American meals” (Johnson 1966, 68). Osa’s presence in the Johnson films, as simultaneously a devoted American housewife and a courageous heroine, set their films apart from other expedition pictures of the time. By the late 1930s, Osa’s film and public appearances had turned her into a fashion icon for active women, and the Fashion Academy in New York named her one of America’s “best-dressed” women in 1939, an honor shared with Bette Davis and announced in the New York Times (48).

Osa (p/d/a/o) and Martin Johnson with their Akeley Camera filming at Lake Paradise, 1923. MOJSM

Osa and Martin Johnson with their Akeley Camera filming at Lake Paradise, 1923. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

Osa Johnson (p/d/a/o) . MOJSM

Osa Johnson on crocodile. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

Born Osa Helen Leighty in the small Kansas town of Chanute, Osa started her adventurous life when she eloped at the age of sixteen with Martin Johnson, ten years her senior. Martin, who had recently sailed the South Seas with Jack and Charmian London aboard The Snark, convinced Osa to sing and perform faux Hawaiian dances in “native” costume for his travelogue lecture series that toured the United States, Canada, and London, England. In 1917, the Johnsons embarked on their first expedition together to the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides where they filmed Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific (1918). Between 1923 and 1935 the Johnsons led numerous expeditions to Africa to shoot motion pictures and still photographs of wild animals and local peoples for their popular, sensationalist documentaries, their lecture tours, as well as for study by naturalists at the American Museum of Natural History.

Osa Johnson (p/d/a/ph), PC

Osa Johnson. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

For their 1933 trip to Africa and 1935 trip to Borneo, the Johnsons flew over sixty thousand miles in two amphibious planes, taking aerial images of the jungles and gaining access to locations previously unavailable to white explorers. In Last Adventure, Osa claimed to have been “the first woman ever to fly over the China sea” (14). The Johnsons’ films, however, exploited racist conventions of early ethnographic filmmaking, exaggerated in their sensationalist stunts, as when in Congorilla (1932) they gave cigars to African pygmy tribesmen and photographed them choking.

Martin and Osa Johnson with film crew. MOJSM

Martin and Osa Johnson with film crew. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

Martin’s untimely accidental death in January 1937 tested Osa. The two were flying from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles to present their illustrated “Borneo” lecture when the plane crashed and Martin was killed. Osa sustained serious back injuries and a broken leg, but insisted on continuing the tour in a wheelchair. After several months, she regained the use of her legs and in early June signed a contract with producer Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox to lead an expedition to Africa to film the “safari scenes” for Stanley and Livingstone (1939). The same year, the Los Angeles Times called her “the first woman ever to take the entire responsibility of an African expedition” (20). When she returned, she launched a line of designer active wear for women and children and produced a set of stuffed animals released in tandem with her new children’s book. She also independently produced Jungles Calling (1938) as a tribute to her late husband; produced and starred in a film based on her best-selling memoir, I Married Adventure, ghost written by scenarist Winifred Dunn; and produced and toured with two silent lecture films, African Paradise (1941) and Tulagi and the Solomons (1943).

Osa Johnson (p/d/a/o) . 1924

Osa Johnson on zebra, 1924. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

In 1953, in the middle of planning her next expedition, Osa suffered a heart attack in her New York hotel room, dying at age fifty-eight. Her New York Times obituary sums up her distaste for the artificiality of city life and her preference for the jungle: “I can hardly wait to get back to the jungle. I prefer it out there. When I sling my rifle over my shoulder and go out into the forest, I feel as if everything belonged to me. There’s no competition out there, no worry about what to wear and what other women are wearing. I am Queen of the Jungle” (30).

Osa Johnson (p/d/a/o) and gun, 1928. MOJSM

Osa Johnson and gun, 1928. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

Martin and Osa Johnson (p/d/a/o) with their pets, circa 1920. MOJSM

Martin and Osa Johnson  with their pets, c. 1920. Courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

Bibliography

“12 Women Get Style Awards.” New York Times (19 March 1939): 48.

“Cure is Promised to Mrs. Johnson.” New York Times (28 Mar 1937): 31.

Imperato, Pascal James and Eleanor M. They Married Adventure: the Wandering Lives of Martin and Osa Johnson. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Johnson, Martin. Camera Trails in Africa. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924.

Johnson, Osa. I Married Adventure: the Lives and Adventures of Martin and Osa Johnson, Philadelphia, New York: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1940.

------. Last Adventure: the Martin Johnsons in Borneo. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1966.

------. “Life in the Solomons.” Collier’s 110 (26 Sept.1942): 32.

------. “My Home in the African Blue.” Good Housekeeping 78 (Jan. 1924): 48-49, 167-170, 173.

------.“A Wife in Africa.” Photoplay (June 1923): 32-34, 109.

Miller, Barbara. “Mrs. Martin Johnson Will Carry On Alone in Wilds.” Los Angeles Times (15 Jan. 1937): 1-2.

“Osa Johnson Dies; A Noted Explorer.” Obit. New York Times (8 Jan. 1953): 30.

“Osa Johnson Sails Today.” Los Angeles Times (16 Jun 1937): 20.

Poole, C.G. “The Johnson Are Off On A New Safari.” New York Times (17 Nov 1929): SM4.

Archival Paper Collections:

Johnson Archival Collection. The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

Martin and Osa Johnson papers 1933-1934. Kansas State Historical Society.

Martin Johnson papers, 1923-1942.  American Museum of Natural History.

Citation

Horak, Laura. "Osa Johnson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-8mvr-9566>

Julia Crawford Ivers

by April Miller

When discussing Julia Crawford Ivers, film historians primarily emphasize two things: her remarkably introverted personality, and her role as principle scenarist for William Desmond Taylor (Foster 1995, 199; Lowe 2005, 286). However, her 1930 obituaries assign Ivers a more independent and influential position, with the New York Times describing her as a “scenario writer, director and production supervisor” (19) and the Los Angeles Times making the inflated and incorrect claim that Ivers was “the second woman to become a film director in Hollywood” (A20). Given that a number of other women directed motion pictures before Ivers had her first opportunity in 1915, this last claim may say more about the way early Hollywood publicity machines operated than about the nature of her film industry work between 1913 and 1923.

Julie Crawford Ivers (w/d) The White Flower (1923), PCVV

Julie Crawford Ivers. Private Collection.

One might speculate that Ivers, given her tendency to avoid publicity, became an inadvertent public figure after she found herself briefly considered as a suspect in Taylor’s infamous, and still officially unsolved, 1922 murder. Perhaps it was this suspicion, combined with her extreme shyness and the almost total unavailability of photographic images of her, that led to the name “Lady of the Shadows” that has become attached to Ivers. The few glimpses we have of Julia Crawford Ivers come from the obligatory publicity she did as a studio employee, reviews of the films she wrote and directed, and her aforementioned obituaries. At the time of her death, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ivers entered the film industry in 1913 when she began collaborating with Frank A. Garbutt. At that time, Garbutt was working with the Oliver Morosco Photoplay Company, which produced films for release under then-distribution company Paramount Pictures Corporation. In 1920, during a Moving Picture World interview with A. H. Giebler, Ivers admitted that she was flexible during her early years working in the industry, having “done almost everything around a studio but sweep the floor” (951). After six years at Morosco, Ivers began the next stage of her career in the production arm of the powerful Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount organization (A20). At what she calls “the Lasky plant,” Ivers wrote, directed, and held a variety of other positions “from film cutter and editor to superintendent of the plant” (Giebler 951).

While under contract to the Famous Players-Lasky Company from 1919 to 1922, during which time it became vertically integrated as Paramount Pictures Corporation, Ivers worked closely with William Desmond Taylor, a collaboration that resulted in the production of approximately twenty films and ended abruptly with Taylor’s 1922 murder. After Taylor’s death, Lasky appointed Ivers as one of the studio’s four supervising directors, making her, according to the Los Angeles Times in 1923, “the only woman to have directed from the Lasky lot” (III 33). This phrasing, “from the Lasky lot,” allows for a seemingly contradictory fact: another woman, the renowned Lois Weber, was hired the year before Ivers and proceeded to direct some films for Famous Players-Lasky. While Weber was clearly under contract to the same studio between 1918 and 1921, she may not necessarily have shot her films on the lot. Karen Mahar suggests that Weber’s contract was not renewed because she failed to fully adapt to the “modern” morality mandated by Lasky’s box-office formula (Mahar 2006, 148). We thus need to know more about the specific circumstances that might explain why Ivers was attributed such an unusual position on the Lasky lot, particularly given what is known about the paternalism of the company. For example, some women who worked with producer-director Cecil B. DeMille (scenarist Jeanie Macpherson, secretary Gladys Rosson, editor Anne Bauchens) were retained as long as they were loyal.

The Famous Players-Lasky writing department, under William deMille, was similarly tight-knight and patriarchal in those years, though women scenarists such as Beulah Marie Dix, Marion Fairfax, and Clara Beranger enjoyed relatively long tenures. An interview conducted by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin while Ivers was shooting The White Flower (1923), the last film she would direct, reveals both her fierce independence as a writer and director and her willingness to defer to all-powerful producer Jesse Lasky. “I wrote the story… with a genuine love and affection for the islands, and will produce it in the same way. No ‘roughneck’ of a director will have a chance to squeeze the fragrance out of the plot, for I am going to direct the action myself,” she says. However, Ivers follows up this confident statement by dutifully crediting her powers to Jesse Lasky’s largess: “Mr. Lasky permitted me to select my own cast and to choose my technical force, camera man, art director and all. I am in full charge and I have every confidence in my company” (Ivers 1992).

Betty Compson (a) The Green Temptation(1922) Julia Crawford Ivers (w), MoMI

The Green Temptation (1922). Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image. 

While it may seem surprising that Julia Crawford Ivers was the only woman to whom Jesse Lasky assigned a directing project once Weber ’s contract expired, one must keep in mind that Ivers arrived at Famous-Players Lasky with both directing and screenwriting experience. In 1915, Ivers wrote her first screenplay for the still surviving short The Rug Maker’s Daughter (1915), a Morosco Photoplay Company production that starred the celebrated dancer Maud Allan in her debut film appearance. In that same year, Ivers also directed her first film, the dramatic short, The Majesty of the Law (1915), an extant film that, like many of Ivers’s later films, was well received by critics. We know from the review in the Atlanta Constitution that The Majesty of the Law, praised for its appeal to “all classes,” tells the story of a Virginia judge who sternly hands down severe sentences while in court only to later help the families of those he condemns (B4). The Washington Post gave another one of Ivers’s extant films, A Son of Erin (1916), a similarly positive review, describing the tale of a peasant who moves to America to discover the “promised land” as a “screen story of unusual beauty, full of action and appealing in its beautifully romantic charm” (4). Although directorial credit for The Call of the Cumberlands (1916) is often ascribed to Frank Lloyd, AFI and FIAF both attribute Ivers with director credits for The Call of the Cumberlands, another extant film, which compares well with other, better-known later feud films exquisitely shot on location in Appalachia, such as Stark Love (1927), directed by D. W. Griffith’s cameraman, Karl Brown, and Dorothy Davenport Reid’s last production, Linda (1929). Also in 1916, Ivers adapted The Heart of Paula, which was also shot on location, this time in Pedro Blanco, Mexico. Most remarkably, Pallas Pictures, which shared a studio with Morosco at the time, promoted The Heart of Paula as a film that offered motion picture theatre managers a unique choice: they could screen either of the two distributed endings, which the New York Times described as either “tragic” or “happy.” Anthony Slide says that although William Desmond Taylor has most often received credit for directing The Heart of Paula, it is possible that this extant title was either codirected by Taylor and Ivers or by Ivers alone (Slide 1996, 127).

Lantern slide, The Furnace (1920), Julia Crawford Ivers (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection

Lantern slide, Nurse Marjorie (1920), Julia Crawford Ivers (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection

Ivers, like other writer-directors such as Marguerite Bertsch and Ruth Ann Baldwin, also commented on the relationship between writing and directing. In 1920, she is quoted as saying that “The writer is only a helper… and sometimes very poor help. More stories have been spoiled than made by writers who tried to put them in picture form, and if many of the writers who are yelping for credit on the screen should be debited with the lack of imagination and lack of vision they display, they would have no more to say” (Giebler 951). In a 1923 Boston Daily Globe interview Ivers also contemplated how film production quality might be improved if directors and writers were to switch roles: “If all scenario writers could direct at least one picture… and all directors could write just one scenario, motion pictures would benefit tremendously” (11).

Julia Crawford Ivers (p/d/w) death certificate, 1930, PC

Julia Crawford Ivers’s death certificate, 1930. 

In her ten-year career, Julia Crawford Ivers was credited with writing more than forty original screenplays and adaptations, and she was praised in reviews for her technical knowledge as well as her writing abilities. In reviewing Widow by Proxy (1919), the Atlanta Constitution lauded Ivers as “a scenarist of rare talent and wide experience” and described her as “an expert on screen technique” (D5). Screen credits reveal that she effectively worked as a producer at Pallas Pictures on at least two films including the five-reel Lost in Transit (1917). In total, Ivers likely directed four films during her career, a fact substantiated by Ivers in an interview published in the Morning Telegraph in 1917, six years before she directed her final film, The White Flower (V6). While directing The White Flower, shot on location in Honolulu over the course of six weeks, Ivers shot scenes from inside volcanic craters, pineapple plantations, and lush undergrowth. Betty Compson described Ivers’s physical directing prowess to the Washington Post, explaining that “Mrs. Ivers has proved time and again that she yields the palm to no mere man megaphone manipulator. She took chances and smiled…. We worked in rain and wind, thunder and lightning, storm and stress” (59). Like so much of Ivers’s writing and directing work, The White Flower was critically well-received; yet it proved to be her swan song. Shortly after finishing the film, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ivers “resigned her long association with the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation as supervising director” in order to pursue work as a free-lance writer (III 33). As with so many of these news reports from the 1920s announcing that the studio writer would “free-lance,” we have to wonder if this was the optimistic spin put on the more likely event that a studio contract was not renewed. In Ivers’s case, her failing health also prevented her from resuming her job as a studio scenarist, and she completed only two more writing projects before her death, after which her record of achievement in the industry became almost completely obscured.

Bibliography

“Director’s Burial Set for Today.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (9 May 1930): A20.

Giebler, A.H. “Rubbernecking in Filmland.” Moving Picture World (16 Oct. 1920): 951.

“Hawaii’s Fire Goddess Aids in Film Making.” The Washington Post (8 Apr. 1923): 59.

“The Heart of Paula.” Rev. New York Times. (3 April 1916): 11.

Ivers, Julia Crawford. Interview. Honolulu Star-Bulletin (3 Oct. 1992); Rpt. in Bruce Long. Taylorology: A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor 22 (October 1994). http://www.public.asu.edu/~ialong/Taylor22.txt

“Julia Crawford Ivers Free-Lances.” Los Angeles Times (9 Sept. 1923): III 33.

“Julia Ivers Gives New York a Call.” Morning Telegraph (17 Dec. 1917): V6.

Long, Bruce. William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1991.

“The Majesty of the Law.” Rev. Atlanta Constitution (22 Aug. 1915): B4.  

“Movie Facts and Fancies.” Boston Daily Globe (20 Jan. 1923): 11.

“Mrs. Julia Crawford Ivers.” New York Times (10 May 1930): 19.

“A Son of Erin.” Rev. The Washington Post (26 Dec. 1916): 4.

“Widow by Proxy.” Rev. The Atlanta Constitution (12 Oct. 1919): D5.

Archival Paper Collections:

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Citation

Miller, April. "Julia Crawford Ivers." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-3a64-mr45>

Alice Howell

by Steve Massa

One of only a handful of silent comediennes who ventured into the “men’s terrain” of rough-house physical comedy, at her peak Alice Howell’s name was as well-known to moviegoers as any of the popular male comics of the day, and like them, her films were designed to showcase her talents and the characterization that she had made famous. In her day, her popularity could be compared with that of Marie Dressler and Mabel Normand, but she is unfortunately not as well remembered. At Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company, Howell quickly worked her way up from crowd scenes to featured parts in shorts such as Charlie Chaplin’s Laughing Gas (1914), and starred in at least one, Shot in the Excitement (1914). In this early one-reeler Alice helps her father whitewash a fence when sweetheart Al St. John comes calling. Complications ensue with a jealous rival, and the film ends with Alice, Al, the rival, Dad, and a couple of Keystone Cops all being chased by flying cannonballs. In her earliest known comedy in which she has the starring role, Howell’s comic timing is already in place as is her capacity for taking punishment: in the course of the film she slips down stairs, gets soaked with water, is chased by cannonballs, and has a rock bounced off her head.

Alice Howell (a). AMPAS

Alice Howell. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Alice Howell (a/p), PCSM

Alice Howell. Private Collection. 

Alice Howell (a/p) Unidentified K-Lo or Century Comedy still, PCSM

Alice Howell, unidentified K-Lo or Century Comedy still. Private Collection.

Alice Howell (a/p) Publicity still for Century Comedy, PCSM

Alice Howell, publicity still for Century Comedy. Private Collection.

Hired away by Sennett’s former second-in-command, Henry “Pathe” Lehrman, when he set up the L-Ko Komedy Company, Alice was cast to support Billie Ritchie and became popular in her own one-reelers. By 1917, she was such an audience favorite that Julius and Abe Stern formed Century Comedies to showcase her talents, making her, along with Normand and Dressler, the third comedienne to have her own exclusive production unit. Producer Julius Stern justified this decision to the Moving Picture World in 1917: “Women have demonstrated on the stage that they can be just as funny as the comedians of musical comedy, burlesque, vaudeville, or farce. We propose to establish Miss Howell as a comedy star upon the screen and we have faith in our determination. Miss Howell has ‘made good’ as L-Ko’s leading comedienne and we are convinced that she will duplicate her past success as a star of her own series” (1135). In a rare surviving Century Comedy title, Hey Doctor! (1918), Alice is a receptionist in a doctor’s office that is very short on patients. To remedy the situation she walks down a street dropping banana peels on the sidewalk. As pedestrians begin slipping and falling, Alice hands out cards for the doctor. After Howell and Century parted ways in 1919, the company continued turning out comedy shorts and was renamed Stern Brothers Comedies in 1926.

The character Howell developed was a slightly addled working class girl, and she specialized in waitresses and maids. A round Kewpie-doll face, with large eyes and bee-stung lips was topped off with a mountain of frizzy hair piled high on her head producing the effect of smoke billowing from an active volcano. To complement this look of someone who had kissed an electric light socket, she wore old-fashioned plaid or checkered blouses, long print skirts, and big clodhopper shoes. The mountain of hair and a stiff-backed penguin-waddle walk became her signature trademarks.

As we learn from the Moving Picture World in 1919, Howell moved to the independent Emerald Company, which became part of the Reelcraft Corporation and released her best surviving film, Distilled Love (1920) (123). Howell plays a farm girl who is framed as the mother of a baby by an evil Oliver Hardy. Forced to leave the farm, she goes to the big city with the baby and dances in the streets for money. The climax takes place at a big society party, which Alice totally destroys in an avalanche of stunts, including riding from room to room on the train of the hostess’s gown. One highlight is the gag made famous by Mary Pickford. She reaches for a piece of pie, but sees a placard of “Thou Shalt Not Steal” on the wall, which stops her until she sees a second sign, “The Lord Helps Those That Help Themselves.” Another occurs as she arrives in the city with the hungry baby. Howell spots a milk truck, and in a great traveling shot, she runs behind the truck, opens the back door, and produces a hose—one end of which she sticks in a milk can and the other in the baby’s mouth. One of Howell’s gifts was the ability to combine comedy with pathos, as when she is driven off the farm during a raging storm only to be stopped by a bolt of lightning that just happens to strike her in the rear.

Howell’s last starring series was a group of 1924–25 domestic comedies for Universal Pictures featuring a married couple and their goofy butler. While still addled and exhibiting her trademark hair and walk, her character graduates here to a comfortable, middle-class status as she trades in her mismatched costume for more flattering attire. When this series ended, she appeared in one last short, Madame Dynamite (1926), for Fox Film Corporation. Howell always maintained that her comedy was based on her own life experiences. In 1917, she told the New Jersey Tribune: “The days are not so far in retrospection when I was glad to do any kind of work and I have not forgotten how it feels to stand in line waiting for a chance to do extra work. I wanted the money so badly that I offered to wear any eccentric sort of make-up or take any chances so long as there was a pay check at the end of the week. I often felt then like the down-trodden, put upon, much abused ‘slavies’ that I struggle to portray humorously today. Most of my scenes are broad farce, but when I get the opportunity I try to register faithfully the character of such a girl” (15).

See also: Marie DresslerMabel NormandMary Pickford

Bibliography

“Alice Howell.” New Jersey Tribune (1917): 15.

“Alice Howell in New Comedies.” Moving Picture World (19 May 1917): 1135.

“Alice Howell, L-KO Comedienne.” Moving Picture World (2 Mar. 1918): 1215.

“Alice Howell Joins Emerald.” Moving Picture World (7 Oct. 1919): 123.

“Alice Howell in Scrappy Comedy.” Moving Picture World (23 March 1918): 1687.

“Alice Howell.” Motion Picture News Studio Directory (21 Oct. 1916): 101.

“Century Comedies Attract Buyers.” Moving Picture World (2 June 1917): 1465.

Massa, Steve. “Alice Howell and Gale Henry, Queens of Eccentric Comedy.” Griffithiana 73/74 (2004): 95-139.

------. “Alice Howell Filmography.” Griffithiana  73-74 (2004): 94-125.

Archival Paper Collections:

Slide, Anthony. Alice Howell: An Imperfect History. Unpublished memoir, n.d. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Research Update

Editorial note (May 2022): Alice Howell's date of birth has now been confirmed as May 20, 1886 (not May 5, 1892, as previously stated).

Citation

Massa, Steve. "Alice Howell." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cxpq-yf05>

Helen Holmes

by Karen Ward Mahar
Helen Holmes (a/p/w/d/o) The Hazards of Helen (1914-1915). PCJY

Helen Holmes, The Hazards of Helen (1914-1915). Private Collection.

Helen Holmes became a star playing the part of the fearless railroad telegrapher “Helen” in the Kalem Company’s long-running, stunt-driven serial The Hazards of Helen (1914–1917), and continued to make action films through the decade as an independent writer and producer. Not only were her films successful at the box office, but they featured some of the most heroic female images in silent cinema as she leapt to the top of speeding trains and handled pistols with ease. Did these images—at least some of them—originate with Holmes? Certainly Helen Holmes needs to be situated within a tradition that included the American branch of Pathé Frères Company’s Pearl White, Selig Polyscope Company’s Kathlyn Williams, and Universal Film Manufacturing Company’s Grace Cunard. Some would argue that Holmes carried on at Kalem in the tradition of Gene Gauntier, who had physically risked so much in the Girl Spy series. But Gauntier ’s memoir gives far more information about how she wrote scenarios and set up stunts for her character while at Kalem. With few sources other than extant films and popular and trade magazine discourse, it is difficult to discern the exact role Helen Holmes played behind the camera.

Helen Holmes. USW

Helen Holmes. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Advertising slide Perils of the Rail (dir. Joseph McGowan, 1926) Helen Holmes (a). PCJ

Advertising slide, Perils of the Rail  (1926). Private Collection. 

Holmes’s well-publicized status as the daughter of a railroad engineer implicitly suggests that she shaped the character of “Helen.” Holmes told Green Book in 1916 that since men were loathe to put a woman in danger, “if a photoplay actress wants to achieve real thrills, she must write them into the scenario herself” (741). The 1915 Signal serial The Girl and the Game, which she co-produced with director-husband J. P. McGowan, was full of what she called “real thrilly action”: the intrepid “Helen” saves her boyfriend and father from a train wreck, saves the former again, this time from a burning locomotive, saves the railroad from financial ruin, recovers the payroll from thieves, saves her boyfriend and another male friend from another train wreck, rescues a male character from a lynching, captures more thieves, saves two men from a mine cave-in, recovers more stolen money, and uncouples a freight train to prevent a “terrible wreck.” All this she does in The Girl and the Game, according to the “Story to Date,” from extant Episode 15, “Driving the Last Spike.” Contemporary audiences can see for themselves exactly how many thrilling chances the Helen character takes in Episode 13, “Escape on a Fast Freight,” and Episode 26, “The Wild Engine,” of The Hazards of Helen series, both available on DVD from the National Film Preservation Foundation. We have reason to believe that at least some of the breathtaking stunts were Holmes’s invention, as she told the New York Telegraph in 1915 that while Frank Hamilton Spearman authored the script, she had to adapt his story to make “the thrills cascade throughout.” In an unpublished typescript from 1916, “by” Holmes, she is made to say that “the thrills are director McGowan’s inventions,” and that she followed his direction. This last account, although credited to Helen Holmes, was written by Terry Ramsaye, then the director of publicity for the Mutual Film Corporation, who would later write the earliest history of the American film industry, A Million and One Nights (Ramsaye 1926). Holmes did appear physically able to execute her own stunts. In 1917, the Moving Picture World reported that Holmes staged a head-on railroad collision for the California State Fair, jumping from a moving train to a moving car in front of a live audience (257), and in 1919, arrangements were made for Holmes to “loop the loop” in an airplane over Broadway and 42nd Street to promote The Fatal Fortune, a stunt “which will establish her as an ‘ace’ among serial stars” (871).

Conductor's Courtship (1914). PC

Frames from Conductor’s Courtship (1914). Private Collection.

Frames from Conductor's Courtship (1914). PC

Frames from Conductor’s Courtship (1914). Private Collection.

It was when the Mutual Film Corporation offered Holmes and McGowan financing and distribution that they left Kalem and created the Signal Film Corporation in 1915, starring Holmes in similar, action-centered roles. According to a later Moving Picture World account, the only serial produced under this arrangement, The Girl and the Game, grossed $2,253,000 (298). When Mutual dissolved in 1918, so too did Signal. McGowan went back to Universal, but independent producer S. L. Krellberg created the S.L.K. Serial Corporation for Holmes and made a highbrow mystery serial, The Fatal Fortune (1919), which was not popular. In 1919, Holmes signed a contract with producers Harry and Albert Warner (of the not-yet-famous Warner Brothers) to make serials under the Helen Holmes Production Corporation, according to Variety in 1920. However, the Warners made her first film, The Danger Trail (1920), into a feature, hoping it would finance later serial production. Ultimately Holmes herself loaned the Warners $5,000 to finish the jungle-themed serial The Tiger Band (1920), and then sued them after receiving only partial repayment, as Variety reported. With distribution agreements tied up in court, The Tiger Band was released on a states-rights basis with little advertising or promotion, and did not do well at the box office. The importance of advertising and distribution in the case of the serial queens cannot be emphasized enough, and could be dramatized by a comparison between the careers of Holmes and that of the more widely known White, whose international renown was made possible by French Pathé Frères’s worldwide distribution outlets and Hearst paper promotion. Also, while White was safely ensconced at an established company, Helen Holmes, after leaving the Kalem Company, was buffeted around as an independent producer between 1915 and 1920. After The Tiger Band, Helen Holmes retired as a producer. She continued to act in character roles under the direction of McGowan. They divorced in the early-to-mid-1920s, and Holmes retired from the screen after marrying cowboy stuntman Lloyd Saunders in 1926 (1950, n.p.). She returned to Hollywood when their cattle business failed and played a small role in Poppy, a 1936 W. C. Fields film (Carroll n.p.). After working as a Hollywood animal trainer in 1945, she ran an antiques business out of her home (“Star of ‘Silents’ Now Trains Dogs” n.p.). When Holmes died of a heart attack at age fifty-eight, Rose “Helen” Gibson, the actress-producer who replaced her on the Hazards of Helen after episode 48, was by her side (1950, n.p.).

Helen Holmes (p/w/a) publicity portrait, AMPAS

Helen Holmes, publicity portrait. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Bibliography

Burden, Alan. “The Girl Who Keeps a Railroad.” Photoplay (Jan. 1916): 10.

Carroll, Harrison. “Helen Holmes.” Los Angeles Herald (2 March 1936): n.p. Helen Holmes biography file, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Duryea, Brian. “The Necessity of Thrills.” Green Book (Apr. 1916): 741-743.

“Helen Holmes Sues.” Variety (3 July 1920). n. p. Helen Holmes clippings file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

“Helen Holmes, the Money Getter.” Moving Picture World (14 Apr. 1917): 298.

Holmes, Helen. “Action is the Spice of Life, Says Miss Holmes.” New York Telegraph (21 Nov. 1915). n.p. Helen Holmes clippings file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

------. Unpublished typescript. 1916. n.p. Helen Holmes clippings file, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Lahue, Kalton C. “Helen Holmes.” Winners of the West: The Sagebrush Heroes of the Silent Screen. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1970. 159-166.

"Los Angeles Film Brevities." The Moving Picture World (14 Apr. 1917): 257.

Mahar, Karen Ward. “The Girls Who Play: The Short Film and the New Woman” in Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Paramount Publicity Department. “Star of ‘Silents’ Now Trains Dogs” (19 Feb. 1945) n.p. Helen Holmes biography file, Helen Holmes biography file, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Parsons, Louella. “Helen Holmes Dies at 58.” Los Angeles Examiner (10 Aug. 1950): n.p. Helen Holmes biography file, Helen Holmes biography file, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Sewell, C.S. “Among the Independent Producers.” Motion Picture World (12 July 1919): 100.

Archival Paper Collections:

Robinson Locke Collection. Helen Holmes clippings file. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Helen Holmes biography file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Mahar, Karen Ward. "Helen Holmes." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ev65-nn41>

Gale Henry

by Steve Massa

Thought to be the prototype for Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oyl, Gale Henry was tall and extremely skinny, with large eyes and a sharp nose. Known as “The Elongated Comedienne,” from 1914 to 1933 she entertained audiences with eccentric physical comedy. Like her contemporaries Alice Howell, Mabel Normand, Marie Dressler, and Louise Fazenda, Gale took many bumps and bruises in the name of laughter alongside her male comedian counterparts in an estimated two hundred fifty-eight shorts and features, some of the craziest of which she wrote. Her active female characters bear comparison with Pearl White and Helen Holmes, the “serial queens” of the 1910s, and she often spoofed the cliff-hanger genre in which they appeared. Henry’s performing style could be very broad, but she also had a gift for small, insightful gestures that could bring a moment of pathos and feeling into the knockabout. She often played put-upon slavies, but her unconventional looks also made her perfect as a lovelorn spinster, an overbearing wife, or a burlesque country girl. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, a tight, old-fashioned button-up blouse, a long plaid or checkered skirt, and clunky high-top shoes. The overall look had a feel of L. Frank Baum’s Scarecrow of Oz—as if she were put together from odd, mismatching parts.

Advertising slide Gale Henry (a) The Elongated Comedienne, MoMI

Lantern slide, The Elongated Comedienne. Courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image. 

unidentified Joker Comedy w/ Gale Henry (a), Billy Franey & Max Asher, PCSM

Unidentified Joker Comedy with Gale Henry, Billy Franey & Max Asher. Private Collection. 

unidentified Joker Comedy w/ Gale Henry (a), Billy Franey, Max Asher & Lillian Peacock, PCSM

Unidentified Joker Comedy with Gale Henry, Billy Franey, Max Asher & Lillian Peacock. Private Collection. 

Gale Henry (a), Billy Franey & Max Asher How Billy Got His Raise (1915), PCSM

Gale Henry, Billy Franey & Max Asher, How Billy Got His Raise (1915). Private Collection.

unidentified Joker Comedy w/ Boby Vernon, Heinie Conklin, Billy Franey, Gale Henry (a), & Lillian Peacock, PCSM

Unidentified Joker Comedy with Boby Vernon, Heinie Conklin, Billy Franey, Gale Henry, & Lillian Peacock. Private Collection. 

Gale Henry (a), Billy Franey & Max Asher in episode Lady Baffles and Detective Duck series (1915), PCSM

Gale Henry, Billy Franey & Max Asher in episode of Lady Baffles and Detective Duck series (1915). Private Collection.

Publicity shot Gale Henry (a), PCSM

Publicity shot, Gale Henry and dog. Private Collection. 

After growing up on a ranch in Bear Valley, California, Gale Henry began her stage career with the Temple Opera Company. In a 1920 Photoplay article, “The Bear Facts About Gale Henry,” she said that her film career began in 1914: “I knew a girl who worked at Universal; she took me out there with her one morning, and I got a job. That’s all there is to it, except I remained there five years and was featured in two hundred comedies” (26-27). She was regularly employed in Universal’s Joker Comedies, a series set up in 1913 to compete with Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedies. One motion picture from the series that survives, A Millionaire for a Minute (1915), stars Max Asher as a bumpkin in love with schoolmarm Gale. Her old, Egyptologist uncle is against their marriage, but when Max gets an inheritance, they decide to elope. At the same time a pair of crooks breeze into town to fleece Max. When it turns out that his inheritance is Cleopatra’s ring, everyone leaves him in disgust except faithful Gale. The uncle finds out about the ring and is more than willing to trade Gale for it to provide a happy ending. Presented in an economical style, the slapstick grows logically out of the situations, and the acting is relatively subdued for a knockabout comedy.

During her tenure at Universal Pictures, Gale Henry turned up in the studios’ other brands, such as Nestor and L-Ko, after their star comedienne Alice Howell moved to Century Comedies. In 1915 Pat Powers produced the Lady Baffles and Detective Duck series, a spoof of cliff-hanger serials in eleven one-reel chapters, of which at least two are extant. Max Asher played inventor and master of disguise Detective Duck, who was hot on the heels of his nemesis, the mysterious crook, Lady Baffles (Gale). For this witty and surreal series Gale wrote many of the original stories, with chapter titles like “The Dread Society of the Sacred Sausage.” While she is only officially credited as author on a handful of other shorts, it is very likely that she continued contributing story ideas and developing her screen character, especially when she set up her own independent production company, the Model Comedy Company.

Gale Henry left Universal in 1918 and with her husband, Bruno J. Becker, started the Model Comedy Company. Their shorts were distributed by the Bulls Eye Corporation and were designed to exploit and showcase Henry’s talents. The extant two-reel The Detectress (1919) presents her as an aspiring detective who investigates a Chinese gang lord’s plot to steal the plans for an invention that will enable diners to see what is in the chop suey they’re eating. A nonstop chase through the Chinatown maze of trapdoors and secret panels provides the climax, but in the end the story turns out to be Gale’s opium-induced dream. Another extant Model Film Company title, Her First Flame (1919), is set in the future of 1950 where women have taken over and men wear dresses. Gale is running for the office of fire chief, and after she wins, the loser kidnaps Gale’s frilly boyfriend. When he spurns her advances, the rival ties him up in a burning house, but Gale saves the day in a last-minute rescue. It would be productive to investigate whether, under the guise of comedy, Henry had, in fact, greater freedom of movement than the popular lady detectives and cliff-hanger heroines whose films she spoofed and played on.

In 1920, when Bulls Eye merged and became part of the Reelcraft Pictures Corporation, Gale discontinued her series and was off the screen for a time. Through the 1920s she appeared in eighteen features, the most memorable being Open All Night (1924), where she was teamed with Raymond Griffith, and Stranded (1927), in which she gives an excellent performance as a cynical, well-seasoned Hollywood bit player who takes young Shirley Mason under her wing and teaches her the ropes of working at the studios.

When sound took over Hollywood, Gale made a swift transition, appearing in two features, The Love Doctor (1929) and Darkened Rooms (1929), plus Charley Chase’s first talkie The Big Squawk (1929). Her precise, spinster-like voice was fine and suited to her established persona.  However, after an occasional short, again with Chase, she retired in 1933, at the age of forty, relatively old for a female silent film comic writer-performer.

See also: Marie DresslerHelen Holmes, Alice Howell, Mabel Normand, Pearl White

Bibliography

“Comedienne Gale Henry is No Longer with Bulls Eye.” The Moving Picture World (14 Feb. 1920): 1055.

“Gale Henry Forms Company.” The Moving Picture World (10 Aug. 1918): 828.

“Gale Henry is Now L-KO Star.” The Moving Picture World (26 Jan. 1918): 539.

Webster, Dorothy Faith. “The Bear Facts About Gale Henry.” Photoplay (Jan. 1920): 26-27.

Citation

Massa, Steve. "Gale Henry." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-k501-sw95>

Corinne Griffith

by Tom Slater

Corinne Griffith, who, according to the United Artists biography, was born Griffin, found success as an actress, producer, author, real estate magnate, anti-income-tax crusader, painter, and composer. We do not know enough, however, about how Griffith selected and shaped her productions. But contracts and letters on file in the Warner Brothers Archives at the University of Southern California show that arrangements between Corinne Griffith Productions and her distributors, First National Pictures (1923-26, 1928) and United Artists (1927), awarded her a relatively high amount of oversight.

Corinne Griffith (p/w/a), PCTS

Corinne Griffith. Private Collection.

Slide Lilies of the Field (1930) Corinne Griffith (a), PCJY

Latern slide, Lilies of the Field (1930). Private Collection.

autographed portrait Corrine Griffith (p/w/a), c. 1929, PCJY

Autographed portrait Corrine Griffith, c. 1929. Private Collection.

Slide Into Her Kingdom (1926) Corinne Griffith (a/p), Ruth Comfort Mitchell (w), PC

Lantern slide, Into Her Kingdom (1926). Private Collection.

Corinne Griffith (a) Black Oxen (1923), PCJY

Corinne Griffith, Black Oxen (1923). Private Collection.

Corinne Griffith (a) Black Oxen (1923), PCJY

Corinne Griffith, Black Oxen (1923). Private Collection.

Corinne Griffith (a/p) Classified (1925), PCJY

Corinne Griffith, Classified (1925). Private Collection.

Corinne Griffith (p/w/a),NYPL

Corinne Griffith. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Corinne Griffith (a) Alice Terry (a) Slide Love Watches (1918), PC

Lantern slide, Love Watches (1918). Private Collection.

Corinne Griffith (p/w/a), PC

Corinne Griffith. Private Collection.

Griffith’s contracts always stated that at the start of each production, her company would submit four scripts for her consideration for her next film. She could also choose between three available leading men and three directors, provided her choices could be hired for no more than their previous salaries. E. M. Asher served as general manager of Corinne Griffith Productions, with Edward Small and Charles R. Rogers serving as primary attorneys. Griffith apparently kept a sharp eye on their actions. On October 16, 1923, she wrote a letter to Small and Rogers, charging them with breach of contract. But, three weeks later, on November 9, she sent them a second letter, waiving the accusation.

Secondary sources such as DeWitt Bodeen’s biographical article and Hedda Hopper’s unpublished biographical typescript reveal more about the choices she made in building her life, fortune, and career, and existing films provide evidence of her beauty and talent. Born in Texarkana, Texas, Griffith moved to Santa Monica with her mother after her father died. Stories about how she was signed by the Vitagraph Company of America in 1916 vary. Bodeen writes that in one version director King Vidor discovered her at a West Texas health resort while another states that she was signed after winning a Santa Monica beauty contest (514). Whatever the case, Griffith quickly moved into roles beside the studio’s leading male performer, Earle Williams. By 1920, according to Bodeen, writing in the 1970s in Films in Review, Corinne Griffith was Vitagraph’s top star and known as “the orchid lady of the screen” (513-515).

Three years later, in 1923, able to command far more salary than the struggling Vitagraph could afford, Griffith made The Common Law (1923) for producer Lewis J. Selznick and Six Days (1923) for producer Samuel Goldwyn. She then signed a three-year contract with First National Pictures, purchased by Warner Brothers in 1925 (Bodeen 517). Griffith’s July 1923 contract with First National guaranteed her $2,500 a week, and stipulated that she was to work no more than eight hours a day, being made up and before the cameras no earlier than 10:00 a.m. and finishing no later than 6:00 p.m. After four films were completed, Griffith signed a new contract in October 1924, which raised her salary to $4,000 a week and added a clause stating that she would receive an increase to $5,000 a week during her second year. By the time Griffith signed her final First National contract on December 6, 1927, her salary was $10,000 a week for fifty weeks, or $500,000 a year.  This contract stated that Griffith must pay for the building of her bungalow on the studio lot, but a letter written the same day said the studio would pay.

A great beauty and comic talent, Griffith also played dramatic roles in which her character faced major decisions affecting her life and many others. Altogether, this body of work reveals the centrality and complexity of women’s roles in the post-Victorian consumer society. In The Common Law (1923), Classified (1925), and The Garden of Eden (1928), directed by Lewis Milestone, Griffith must endure male lechery while attempting to earn a living and find romance. In Single Wives (1924), Déclassée (1925), and Three Hours (1927), she played wives involved in traumatic searches for love and meaning due to spousal abuse and neglect. In Black Oxen (1923), Griffith plays a highly unusual character for the twenties, or, indeed, probably any era, a woman who rejects romance for a political career.

Griffith left First National to form Corinne Griffith Productions with then husband, independent theatrical producer Walter Morosco, to produce films to be released through United Artists. However, they only made The Garden of Eden (1928), directed by Lewis Milestone, before returning to First National (Bodeen 519-20). Both The Garden of Eden and her earlier comedy, Classified (1925), directed by Alfred Santell, provide excellent examples of Griffith’s work. Griffith and Morosco chose to film Garden after seeing a German production of the original play, according to Hedda Hopper, writing in the New York Times in 1928 (111). New York Times coverage in 1926 also tells us that Griffith selected Classified, based on an Edna Ferber story, after one or two other actresses had rejected it (X5).

In both films, Griffith’s characters, Babs Comet (Classified) and Toni LeBrun (Garden) go out into the world expecting to be treated fairly, but soon learn that they must deal with lecherous men, and in both of these extant films, Griffith displays assertiveness, integrity, innocence, intelligence, and playfulness on top of comedic talent, and was admired enough by her peers to receive an Academy Award nomination for The Divine Lady (1929), an early sound film. The British film Lily Christina (1932) was her last; she then undertook a theatre tour in 1935-36 in the plays “Design for Living” and “No More Ladies,” but it was by no means the end of her public visibility (“Corrine Griffith Dies” 32).

In 1926, Griffith paid $185,000 for two properties in downtown Beverly Hills, and this property would become the basis for a second career and a fabulous personal fortune, according to Photoplayer magazine (n.p.). As Hedda Hopper tells us in an unpublished Griffith biography in the Corinne Griffith files at the University of Southern California Cinema and Television Library, her success led to her becoming the first woman to address the National Realty Board in the early fifties (3-4). Not surprisingly, given the legendary wealth she amassed, the former actress-producer campaigned throughout the 1950s to repeal the federal income tax.

Besides theatrical producer Morosco, to whom she was married from 1926 to 1934, Griffith’s husbands also included Vitagraph actor-director Webster Campbell (1920-23), Washington Redskins owner George Marshall (1936-58), and actor-singer Danny Scholl for thirty-five days in 1965, according to her 1979 Los Angeles Times obituary (32). Of all of the female silent film personalities featured here, Corinne Griffith was probably the most adept at reinvention and self-development. She did not stop with commercial real estate, but also discovered herself as an author, painter, and composer. After her 1944 autobiographical My Life With the Redskins, she tried fiction writing in Hollywood Stories, and then she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Papa’s Delicate Condition, adapted into film in 1963. But that was not all. She was expert enough on cooking, antiques, and sports to write three more books, Eggs I Have Known, Antiques I Have Known, Not “For Men Only”—But Almost, then another two in the 1970s, This You Won’t Believe! (a collection of short pieces about unusual items) and I’m Lucky-at Cards (a book of short informal writings). In the early 1960s, Griffith produced two music albums, Year of Love and Moods by Corinne, and also exhibited her paintings.

Bibliography

Bodeen, DeWitt. “Corinne Griffith: The Orchid Lady of the Screen.” Films in Review XXVI.9 (Nov. 1975): 513-29.

“Corinne Griffith.” United Artists Corporation Biography. 1 July 1927.

“Corinne Griffith Dies at 81; Early Star, Wily Business Woman.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (25 July 1979): 32.

Griffith, Corinne. Antiques I Have Known. New York: F. Fell, 1961.

------. Eggs I Have Known. New York: Farrar, Strause, and Cudahy, 1955.

------. Hollywood Stories. New York: F. Fell, 1962.

------. My Life With the Redskins. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1947.

------. Not “For Men Only”–But Almost. New York: F. Fell, 1964.

------. Papa’s Delicate Condition. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1952.

------. Letter to Edward Small and Charles R. Rogers. 16 October 1923. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

------. Letter to Edward Small and Charles R. Rogers. 9 November 1923. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Hopper, Hedda. “Corinne Griffith: A Biography.” (1950). University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

------. “Miss Griffith’s Eden.” New York Times (5 Feb. 1928): 111.

Photoplayer (9 Oct. 1926): n.p. Clippings file. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Slater, Thomas J. “June Mathis’s Classified (1925): One Woman’s Response to Modernism.” Journal of Film and Video vol. 50, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 3-14.

“Tireless Hunt for Picture Stories With a New Idea.” New York Times (3 Oct. 1926): X5.

Archival Paper Collections:

Warner Bros. Archives. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Citation

Slater, Tom. "Corinne Griffith." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-9fgy-5v78>

Ethel Grandin

by Kaveh Askari

With the success of Traffic in Souls (1913), the fan and trade press recognized Ethel Grandin as a leading star of Carl Laemmle’s Independent Motion Picture (IMP) Company. The subsequent articles on Grandin tell the story of her early career, citing her family history on the New York stage as well as her debut at age six with Joseph Jefferson in “Rip Van Winkle.” Shortly before acting in films, she performed in Chauncey Olcott’s theatre company alongside Mary Pickford’s sister Lottie. Grandin’s association with the Pickford family prompted her to enter the film industry soon after Mary did. A 1914 article in the Green Book Magazine notes several parallels between Pickford and Grandin—from physical appearance to career trajectory—and suggests that Grandin “stepped into little Mary’s shoes” at IMP in 1911 (256–257).

Publicity portrait of Ethel Grandin (a/p), UW

Publicity portrait, Ethel Grandin. Courtesy of the University of Wyoming.

Publicity portrait of Ethel Grandin (a/p), UW

Publicity portrait, Ethel Grandin. Courtesy of the University of Wyoming.

Ethel Grandin (a) and Glen White The Social Law, UW

Ethel Grandin and Glen White, The Social Law (1915)Courtesy of the University of Wyoming.

Ethel Grandin (a) The Social Law, UW

Ethel Grandin, The Social Law (1915). Courtesy of the University of Wyoming.

When Thomas Ince, then a director at IMP, left New York for California in 1911, he took Grandin with him as his lead actress and Ray Smallwood as his cinematographer. Smallwood and Grandin married the following year and worked together on many productions throughout her career. In California, Grandin starred in the Bison 101 Ranch films, created to satisfy increasing demand for images of the Western landscape. A full page article in the Moving Picture World praises Grandin and Ince’s first California production, War on the Plains (1912), for landscapes “sublime in their grandeur” (298). The success of the Bison films renewed Carl Laemmle’s interest in Grandin and Smallwood, and he requested that they return to IMP in New York. A 1913 article in Moving Picture World noted a combination of personal and professional reasons for their return, suggesting that Grandin agreed to move back primarily to be closer to her ailing mother (1237). Grandin, several months’ pregnant at the time of the move, began working for Laemmle soon after the birth of her son. Her work from this second period at IMP was by and large comprised of one- and two-reel comedies, although the six-reel feature film Traffic in Souls received more publicity than any of these shorts.

Hoping to capitalize on some of her recent celebrity, Grandin and Smallwood formed the Grandin Films label out of the Smallwood Film Corporation, which was founded by Ray’s brother, Arthur Smallwood, in 1913. One could say that the couple followed the lead of Marion Leonard and her husband Stanner E. V. Taylor, who started Gem Motion Picture Company in 1911, and indeed, one of Grandin’s earliest roles was in the extant Gem production, The Bachelor Girl’s Club (1913).

Grandin’s level of involvement in establishing the company is not entirely clear, but the legal documents in the George Kleine Collection do name her as a partner in these ventures along with Ray and Arthur Smallwood. In June 1914, the Moving Picture World announced Grandin and Smallwood’s departure from Universal, into which IMP was absorbed in 1912 (1706). The new production company, however, was not mentioned in Moving Picture World until December 1914 (1538).

Ethel Grandin with her own portrait. Univ. of Wyoming, American Heritage

In an unpublished interview in 1975, Grandin described how in the summer of 1914 they had begun shooting films under the glass ceiling of a converted Turkish bath in midtown Manhattan. The Moving Picture World profile of Grandin, published in December of the same year, announced weekly releases beginning with The Adopted Daughter (1914). Grandin and Smallwood began production on several one-reel dramatic films under the Grandin Films label, but they ran into financial trouble before their company even made it off the ground. The trade papers provide a few clues as to why their company floundered. In her Green Book Magazine interview of 1914, Grandin predicts the return of the one-reel film: “The public doesn’t like the five- and six-reel story nearly as well as the concentrated short-length pictures that were produced three years ago…. The future of the motion picture lies in the good, meaty one-reel picture” (257). Producing mainly short subjects, Grandin Films could not adjust to the market for features. Since feature production far exceeded the company’s resources, Grandin’s support for the one-reeler may have been her way of making a virtue out of necessity.

In an attempt to save their filmmaking operation, Grandin and Smallwood signed a contract with Chicago film importer George Kleine for exclusive rights to their films. They would provide a regular supply of films, Kleine would hold copyright in his name, and the General Film Company, distribution arm of the Motion Picture Patents Company, would distribute and promote the films. By August 1915, the Moving Picture World announced that Smallwood was to direct “a long list” of films written specifically for Grandin (983). This second venture, too, quickly collapsed. The Kleine papers at the Library of Congress detail how this business relationship deteriorated into bitter litigation. From reading the Smallwood case file, one gets the impression that Kleine’s initial pleasure with the terms of his agreement with Grandin and Smallwood soured after he was forced to continually advance them money to finish the films that they had agreed to produce on their own.

Moreover, Grandin and Ray Smallwood had left brother Arthur Smallwood out of their deal with Kleine. When Arthur filed an injunction against the release of the films produced under this new agreement, Kleine withdrew the Grandin films from circulation. Grandin and Smallwood quickly filed suit against Kleine for damages. The fact that Kleine had a stronger case led him to speculate on why Grandin and Smallwood filed suit against him. Kleine claims, at the end of his narrative of their dealings written for his attorneys, that one of Grandin’s directors in 1915 tipped her off to a recent settlement offered by Kleine simply to avoid litigation. He says of Grandin and Smallwood in November of 1916, “[I] am inclined to believe that this suit is a blackmailing scheme based upon the assumption that I would rather compromise than fight and not upon the merits of their claim” (13). Kleine partly implicates Grandin here, but he suggests that the main blame lies with Smallwood. In the introduction to the letter, Kleine describes Grandin as “a hard working actress” who went along with Smallwood’s “will to be a trickster within his limited mental capacity” (2). Another interpretation of the legal files and Kleine’s deposition is made by Karen Mahar who understands the brothers as unscrupulous in their business dealings and as having taken advantage of Grandin’s stardom, and Kleine as seeing the actress as a victim (Mahar 2006, 73-74).

After her production business fell apart, Grandin took few acting jobs, but Moving Picture World notes in 1916 that she is to be featured in the independently produced The Crimson Stain Mystery (1529). Subsequently, Photoplay announced what they saw as her “comeback” early in 1917 with The Crimson Stain Mystery, a fifteen-part serial, of which thirteen chapters are extant (137). This crime serial, which also featured former Vitagraph star Maurice Costello, did garner enough publicity to revive her career, but from her credits it appears that she remained in partial retirement. After a few more films for S-L Productions (an independent, short-lived company) in the early 1920s, she retired completely. Since Grandin retired in her late twenties and died at ninety-four, she had at least sixty years to consider her career, and even to organize her papers, which have been deposited at the University of Wyoming.

See also: Marion Leonard, Mary Pickford

Bibliography

Bell, James. “Maurice Comes Back; So Does Ethel: Once Popular Stars Return to Film Fold to Regain Fame.” Photoplay 11 (Jan. 1917): 136-137.

“Ethel Grandin.” Moving Picture World (6 Dec. 1913): 1127.

“Ethel Grandin.” Moving Picture World (12 Dec. 1914): 1538.

“Ethel Grandin Returns to Films.” Moving Picture World (11 June 1921): 629.

“George Kleine Engages New Director.” Moving Picture World (7 Aug. 1915): 983.

Grandin, Ethel. Unpublished interview (10 Sept. 1975). Anthony Slide Collection. Bowling Green State University Libraries.

Katterjohn, Monte. “A Film Star at Twenty.” Green Book Magazine (Aug. 1914): 255-258.

MacDonald, Margaret. “The Crimson Stain Mystery.” Moving Picture World (2 Sept. 1916): 1529.

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

“Old Production That Cost $5,000 Amassed $475,000” New York Times (31 May 1925): 2.

“Smallwood and Grandin Leave Universal.” Moving Picture World (20 June 1914): 1706.

“The Smallwoods in New York.” Moving Picture World (12 June 1913): 1237.

“War on the Plains.” Rev. Moving Picture World (27 Jan. 1912): 298.

Archival Paper Collections:

Anthony Slide Collection. Bowling Green State University Libraries.

Ethel Grandin clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Ethel Grandin clippings file. Robinson Locke Collection. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Ethel Grandin papers, 1914-1971. University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center.

George Kleine papers, 1886-1946. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Citation

Askari, Kaveh. "Ethel Grandin." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-5ky0-p361>

Elinor Glyn

by Denise K. Cummings, Annette Kuhn

This particular pioneer had a transcontinental career. As a result, her profile includes multiple essays by different authors.

Her American Career

By Denise K. Cummings

Publicity photo Three Weeks (1924) with Alan Crosland, Elinor Glyn (w/a/d/p/o), Cedric Gibbons. PCJY

Publicity photo, Three Weeks (1924) with Alan Crosland, Elinor Glyn, and Cedric Gibbons. Private Collection. 

Perhaps most remembered in the United States for her best-selling 1907 novel of exotic sensuality Three Weeks and her brainchild “It,” that enigmatic characteristic embodied in actress Clara Bow and dramatized in the silent motion picture It (1927), English-born journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and actress Elinor Glyn, born Elinor Sutherland, embarked on her American career in 1920 during her second visit to the United States. In October of 1907, at forty-two, Glyn, traveling as Elinor Glyn, the authoress of romantic fiction, boarded the Lusitania and set sail for New York on her first American tour in order to promote Three Weeks. According to her British biographer, Joan Hardwick, “the reception of Three Weeks in the States had renewed [Glyn’s] confidence and she decided to try her hand at dramatizing it” (133). Before that version materialized, however, Glyn returned to England, but only after lengthening her stay with a journey by rail through the American West to California. Her 1907 tour of the United States and her introduction to American culture and way of life may very well have laid the fertile groundwork for her 1920 return and subsequent work as writer, director, producer, and actress in Hollywood.

Elinor Glyn (w/a/d/p) at her home in Pasadena, PCJY

Elinor Glyn at her home in Pasadena. Private Collection. 

By the time Glyn arrived in Hollywood, California, in 1920, she had achieved popular success in her home country with a writing career that had begun in 1897 when she penned a series of illustrated letters about fashion and beauty for the magazine Scottish Life and, in 1899, when her first novel, The Visits of Elizabeth, was serialized in The World. In England before 1920, Glyn had published a dozen works, including a volume of short stories called The Contrast and a collection of essays titled Three Things. Her 1916 novel The Career of Katherine Bush was serialized in the United States in William Randolph Hurst’s Cosmopolitan. In effect, Glyn had established her literary reputation before the First World War.

Elinor Glyn (w/a/d/p/o) Beyond the Rocks (1922). PCJY

Elinor Glyn on set, Beyond the Rocks (1922). Private Collection.

Glyn arrived in Hollywood in 1920, following a proposal by Miss June Mayo, a representative of Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (which became Paramount Pictures in 1935), who was then in Europe. At fifty-six, Glyn signed an initial contract with Jesse Lasky for £10,000 ($36,364 in 1920, approximately equivalent to $376,208 in 2007 US dollars) and the promise of release time for an annual trip to Europe. She set sail for the United States, and, once there, reintroduced herself as Madame Glyn. Not having claim to an aristocratic title like her sister Lucy Duff-Gordon, she preferred “Madame” over “Mrs.” Silk, satin, and animal skins bedecked her rooms at the Hollywood Hotel (Hardwick 219-27).

Elinor Glyn (w) Beyond the Rocks (1922), PC

Elinor Glyn on set, Beyond the Rocks (1922). Private Collection.

Cecil B. DeMille gave Elinor Glyn a part as an extra in The Affairs of Anatol (1921), but it was when Sam Wood directed her story in The Great Moment (1921) for Famous Players-Lasky that Glyn became established as a writer in Hollywood. This financially successful film starred Gloria Swanson, Alec B. Francis, and Milton Stills. In addition, the book version of her screenplay for The Great Moment was Glyn’s first completely American novel. Her succeeding screenwriting credits for Famous Players-Lasky include the adaptation of her novel Beyond the Rocks (1922), also directed by Sam Wood.

After her contract with Famous Players-Lasky expired in 1922, Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio offered Glyn a contract, stipulating that she write the screenplay for Three Weeks and have a major part in directing the film. In February 1923, Glyn moved into her new home, a five-room suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and wrote a screenplay from her novel. Her directorial input was limited, but the 1924 film was a success. In 1924, she also penned a screenplay for His Hour,  based on her novel of the same name, which was directed by King Vidor. Man and Maid, released in 1925, soon followed. In his autobiography, Samuel Goldwyn describes Glyn “as the writer who knows how to get herself constantly before the popular mind” (248).

Slide How to Educate a Wife (1924) Elinor Glyn (w), PCJY

Lantern slide, How to Educate a Wife (1924). Private Collection. 

Lantern slide, Ritzy (1927). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Glyn was given a cameo role in It (1927) and became part of the propaganda machine for the film, whose catchy title and general concept derived from Glyn’s story first serialized in Cosmopolitan in February and March 1927. The story begins with a definition worth repeating here: “‘IT’ is that quality possessed by some few persons which draws all others with its magnetic life force. With it you will win all men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man” (44). Madame Glyn, by all accounts, herself possessed “It” while working and socializing in Hollywood in the 1920s. Not only was she famous for the concept “It” and the film It, she was famous for her writing published in Photoplay. Outspoken about Hollywood and marked by a self-confidence that bordered on arrogance, Glyn established herself as an early film pioneer with a sense of purpose and a determined willfulness.

Her British Career

By Annette Kuhn

Elinor Glyn in stage production of "Three Weeks," London 1908. PC?

Elinor Glyn in a stage production of “Three Weeks,” London 1908. Courtesy of Elinor Glyn: A Biography (1955).

When British-born author Elinor Glyn made her first visit to the United States in 1907 to publicize her sensational new novel Three Weeks, she was already aware of the potential of other popular media as vehicles for her work (Barnett and Weedon 2014, 4). Indeed the first of a number of screen adaptations of the novel, with Billy Bitzer credited as cameraman, was released in the following year. By the time Glyn made her longer-term move from England to Hollywood in 1920, film versions of at least six of her novels had been made, in Britain and Hungary as well as in the United States: among these were two further adaptations of Three Weeks. In Hollywood the Glyn “brand” immediately proved bankable, and her close involvement in the 1924 Goldwyn production of Three Weeks, not only as screenwriter but as all-round “supervisor,” mentor, and consultant, was widely publicized.

In her homeland, however, Glyn and her writings were looked on in a far less positive light than in the United States, and when Goldwyn’s Three Weeks crossed the Atlantic it became ensnared in Britain’s idiosyncratic film censorship system. The censors could find little to object to in the film’s content, but shrank from the notoriety surrounding it: they even consulted the government on how to proceed. Eventually, the film was passed for UK exhibition with a few cuts and a change of title to Romance of a Queen, according to a file from March 20, 1924 on film regulation in the Home Office files held at the National Archives in LondonBut in a country which was yet to embrace the concept of celebrity Glyn was never fully accepted, despite several attempts to claim a leading role in the British film industry.

Newspaper advertisement for Three Weeks screened at a London cinema. The National Archive, UK

Newspaper advertisement for Three Weeks (1924), playing at a London cinema. Courtesy of the National Archives (UK).

Her early success in the United States—and perhaps also the trouble she was having with the UK release of Three Weeks—prompted Glyn to contemplate bestowing her Hollywood magic on the “the work of Amateurs” that was British cinema, according to a letter she sent to Sir John Foster Fraser on March 2, 1924. Between 1924 and 1926, she conducted in-depth research into the state of the industry, as well as a lively correspondence with some of its leading figures, including Adrian Brunel and Michael Balcon (“there are sadly very few people like yourself,” gushed Balcon on January 5, 1925, “who have made such a serious study of all aspects of the business and really do things to help”). Plans for three British-made films were outlined, but these came to nought and the scheme was abandoned. Glyn turned full attention once again to her Hollywood career as her much-hyped ‘It’ (an indefinable personal magnetism or erotic allure) achieved wide currency both inside and outside the United States, alongside the 1927 release of the eponymous film. It enjoyed considerable success and launched the career of Clara Bow, one of several young actresses whom Glyn could justly claim to have discovered or mentored.

But the later 1920s saw a shift in attitudes towards class, love, romance, and sex, and Glyn’s signature combination of upper-class settings, old romanticism, and risqué eroticism fell out of favour, with a concomitant fall in the profitability of her films. When she left Hollywood and, after a brief sojourn in New York, travelled back to England in the spring of 1929 she probably did not intend this to be a final farewell. But with an ailing mother and considerable sums owed to the US tax authorities, she felt unwilling and unable to return to America. In any event, she was poised by now to make a fresh assault on the British film industry, which, since her earlier approaches, had been faring better in terms of the number of films made (the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927the “Quota Actmandated the UK exhibition of a set percentage of home-produced films). However, there was no corresponding rise in the quality of productions, and the industry was also faced with the problem of securing US distribution, the technical, financial, and aesthetic challenges of sound, and a national economy in decline. Glyn, however, was confident that her Hollywood knowhow could be brought to bear, with herself as the guiding hand and guardian of the British film industry as it entered the sound era (Stead 2011, 238); an attitude that must surely have caused some offense. Her plan was to form and finance her own company and thus be in a position to take control of all aspects of production. Elinor Glyn Productions Ltd. was duly incorporated early in 1930, and Glyn brought cinematographer Charles Rosher and screenwriter Edward Knoblock over from Hollywood and personally headed the production of two talkies, Knowing Men and The Price of Things, at Elstree Studios just outside London.

Elissa Landi, star of Knowing Men (1930) and The Price of Things (1930), Elinor Glyn (d/w/p/o).

Elissa Landi, star of Knowing Men (1930) and The Price of Things (1930). Private Collection. 

For a combination of reasons, though, both films were flops. Early plans to make a colour version of Knowing Men had to be abandoned due to technical and logistical difficulties; Glyn was inexperienced as a film director; and on its release Knowing Men received such a hostile reception that, fearing for his reputation, Knoblock tried to prevent its distribution to cinemas. This debacle sealed the fate of The Price of Things, which never received a proper release. Nonetheless to dismiss Knowing Men as “deplorable” (Etherington- Smith and Pilcher 1986, 249) seems extreme. Both films are pleasingly photographed, Elissa Landi is well-cast and charming in her first roles in sound films, the settings are lavish and the costumes (by Glyn’s sister Lucy Duff-Gordon) gorgeous. Notwithstanding the films’ admittedly creaky plots (centering on masquerade, deception, and mistaken identity), the accusation by some critics that their action is slow and their cinematography static seems unjust given that these were afflictions suffered by many early sound films. Moreover, while it might be true to say that Glyn failed to singlehandedly rescue the British film industry, she continued to maintain a high profile in Britain as a personage with expert insider knowledge of matters cinematic and romantic. Throughout the 1930s, she made regular appearances in the British popular press and film fan magazines as a columnist and intervieweeand as a news story in her own right. She continued writing novels and stories right up to her death in London in 1943 at the age of seventy-nine.

Elinor Glyn (w/a/d/p) c. 1925, PC

Elinor Glyn, c. 1925. Private Collection.

While, unusually, Elinor Glyn’s career embraced both silent and sound cinema, as a film pioneer she is perhaps best credited with her distinctive role within popular culture in both the United States and the United Kingdom, a role that extended far beyond her official film credits. She exerted creative influence on the screen adaptations of many of her stories and was highly successful in building and publicizing a distinctive branding for “Madame Glyn” and her creations. As a film and media personality—an “authorial star” —Glyn played a leading part in the formation of a female film culture on both sides of the Atlantic, while at the same time in Britain negotiating “specifically nationalized gender issues within film culture” (Stead 21).

See also: Lucy Duff-Gordon

Bibliography

American Career Profile Bibliography:

Barnett, Vincent L. “The Novelist as Hollywood Star: Author Royalties and Studio Income in the 1920s.” Film History: An International Journal  vol. 20, no. 3(2008): 281-293.

------. “Picturization Partners: Elinor Glyn and the Thalberg Contract Affair.” Film History: An International Journal vol. 19, no. 3 (2007): 319-329.

Glyn, Elinor. Beyond the Rocks; A Love Story. London: Duckworth, 1906.

------. The Great Moment. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1923.

------. “It.” Cosmopolitan (February 1927): 44

------. Man and Maid. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1922.

------. Romantic Adventure: Being the Autobiography of Elinor Glyn. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, Ltd., 1936.

------. The Visits of Elizabeth. New York: J. Lane, 1901.

------. Three Weeks. 1907. New York: Duckworth, 1974.

------. “What I Find Wrong with Hollywood.” Photoplay.

Goldwyn, Samuel. Behind the Screen. New York: Doran Company, 1923.

Hardwick, Joan. Addicted to Romance: The Life and Adventures of Elinor Glyn. London: André Deutsch Limited, 1994.

Kuhn, Annette: “The Trouble with Elinor Glyn: Hollywood, 'Three Weeks,' and the British Board of Film Censors.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 28, no. 1 (March 2008): 23-35.

Landay, Lori. Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in  American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Morey, Anne. “Elinor Glyn as Hollywood Laborer.” Film History vol. 18, no. 2 (2006): 110-118.

Shumway, David. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

British Career Profile Bibliography:

Balcon, Michael. Letter to Elinor Glyn. January 5, 1925. MS 4059, Box 18. Reading University Library, Special Collections. 

Barnett, Vincent L, and Alexis Weedon. Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014.

Etherington-Smith, Meredith, and Jeremy Pilcher. The 'It' Girls: Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, the couturière 'Lucile' and Elinor Glyn, romantic novelist. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986.

Glyn, Anthony. Elinor Glyn: A Biography. London: Hutchinson, 1955.

Glyn, Elinor. “Can Women Direct Films?” Film Weekly (7 October 1929): 3.

------. Letter to Sir John Foster Fraser. March 2, 1924. MS 4059, Box 18. Reading University Library, Special Collections.

------. “Men Have 'IT' Too.” Picturegoer (April 1930): 14-15.

------. The Price of Things. London: Duckworth & Co, 1919.

Horak, Laura. “'Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn?' Film as a Vehicle of Sensual Education.” Camera Obscura vol. 25, no. 2 (2010): 75-117.

Stead, Lisa Rose. “Women’s Writing and British Female Film Culture in the Silent Era.” PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2011.

Archival Paper Collections: US & UK

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Papers of Elinor Glyn. Reading University Library, Special Collections

Home Office Files. HO45/20045. The National Archives, Kew.

Citation

Cummings, Denise K; Annette Kuhn. "Elinor Glyn." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-c8nf-en39>

Lillian Gish

by Mark Garrett Cooper

In 1920, Lillian Gish both delivered a landmark performance in D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East and directed her sister Dorothy in Remodelling Her Husband. This was her sole director credit in a career as a screen actor that began with An Unseen Enemy in 1912 and ended with The Whales of August in 1987. Personal correspondence examined by biographer Charles Affron shows that Gish lobbied Griffith for the opportunity to direct and approached the task with enthusiasm. In 1920, in Motion Picture Magazine, however, Gish offered the following assessment of her experience: “There are people born to rule and there are people born to be subservient. I am of the latter order. I just love to be subservient, to be told what to do” (102). One might imagine that she discovered a merely personal kink. In a Photoplay interview that same year, however, she extended her opinion to encompass all women and in doing so slighted Lois Weber, one of Hollywood’s most productive directors. “I am not strong enough” to direct, Gish told Photoplay, “I doubt if any woman is. I understand now why Lois Weber was always ill after a picture” (29). What should historical criticism do with such evidence?

Lillian (a/d/w) and Dorothy Gish. USW

Lillian (left) and Dorothy Gish. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By far the most common approach has been to argue that Gish did not really mean what the press quotes her as saying. Alley Acker, for instance, urges us not to be fooled by Gish’s “Victorian modesty” and goes on to provide evidence of her authority on the set (62). Similarly, Affron argues that Gish’s assertions of subservience were partly self-serving. Self-effacement contributed to her star persona as “D.W. Griffith’s virginal, ethereal muse” (15). Gish cultivated this image throughout her career, and Affron finds it exemplified by the oft-repeated story of her masochistic performance in Way Down East’s 1920 ice floe rescue. A different Gish surfaces in an interview with Anthony Slide first published in 1970. There we encounter a decisive and resourceful woman who surmounted extraordinary practical difficulties in directing Remodelling Her Husband. In addition to directing, Griffith gave her the job of supervising completion of a new studio in Mamaroneck, New York. Neither subservience nor modesty inflect Gish’s assessment of the results: “We finished at 58 thousand dollars, and it made, I think, ten times what it cost, which not many films do today” (Slide 1977, 124). Gish also told Slide that she had wanted to make an “all-woman picture” and had recruited Dorothy Parker to write the titles. In the film, Dorothy Gish portrays a young wife who reforms her philandering husband by leaving him to work in her father’s business. Unfortunately, neither Affron nor Slide has been able to confirm Parker’s role, and no print is known to survive.

Lillian Gish Albin (d/a) 1922. USW

Lillian Gish portrait, 1922. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

When the biographical approach emphasizes the difference between Gish’s public persona and her private ambition, it invites us to see her demurral as a clever tactic. By identifying with “the weaker sex” she turns a low expectation of women to her own advantage. That Gish left behind such a large volume of paper makes this hypothesis extremely tempting. Not only have there been numerous published accounts of her life, but her papers, available through the New York Public Library, include personal correspondence, business documents, and scrapbooks spanning the years 1909-1992. In addition, her correspondence with Slide is available through the Margaret Herrick Library. These sorts of sources urge us to seek a more complicated woman behind the public star persona.

A different source might shift focus to the terms of public discourse and allow us to ask if these terms were as conventionally fixed as the search for the private woman can make it appear. For instance, the Paramount-Famous Players press book (which suggested stories for exhibitors to plant in local papers) provides not one but two different ways to promote Remodelling Her Husband, the famous actress’s directorial debut. The first approach resembles the above-quoted Photoplay and Moving Picture Magazine articles, emphasizing Lillian’s “delicate physique” and her decision to abandon directing as too rigorous an endeavor. The second strategy, however, foregrounds her “prowess” and presents Dorothy as cajoling Lillian into the director’s chair. The studio publicity department thus promoted directing as something women might encourage their sisters to do while at the same time presenting women directors as an aberration in a profession that required masculine strength and discipline. How this apparently contradictory message played itself out in the trade press and the nation’s newspapers wants further explanation.

Lillian Gish Albin (d/a) New York, 1922, LoC

Lillian Gish in New York, 1922. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

One could also take Gish’s remarks literally. After all, she advocates what would become the normative division of labor—women act, men direct—at a time when it was not clear that these work rules would, in fact, prevail. Similarly, while her praise of Griffith’s genius helped to ensure that her own contributions would be central to the story of American motion pictures, such veneration also promoted a particular version of historical events. By all accounts, Gish relished the role of spokesperson for silent film, and perhaps more work should consider her role as historian, critic, and theorist. Certainly Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz aim to encourage such consideration by including Gish’s Encyclopedia Britannica article, “A Universal Language,” in their collection of women’s writing about the first fifty years of cinema. Echoes of Gish’s argument in that piece may be found in her less-known 1930 essay, “In Defense of the Silent Film.” With its conclusion that “Until the cinema returns from its prodigal excursion into sound it cannot expect to resume its logical development as an independent art” (230), the essay invites comparison with classic laments about the transition to sound from such filmmakers and film theorists as Bela Balazs, Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov. In the essay, Gish writes with authority from her experience as an actor and names a wide range of directors she considers important—all of them men.

Lillian Gish (d/a), PCMC

Lillian Gish with megaphone. Private Collection.

Bibliography

Acker, Ally. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1991.

Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life. New York: Scribner 2001.

------. “A Universal Language.” Rpt. in Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. Eds. Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz. London and New York: Verso, 2006. 200-202. [Originally published in The Theater and Motion Pictures: A Selections of Articles from the New 14th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. New York and London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1929-33, 33-34.]

Gish, Lillian. “In Defense of the Silent Film.” Revolt of the Arts. Ed. Oliver M. Sayler. New York: Bretano’s, 1930. 225–30.

Gish, Lillian and Ann Pinchot. Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Hall, Gladys. “Lights! Says Lillian!” Motion Picture Magazine (April–May 1920): 30-31, 102.

Patterson, Ada. “The Gish Girls Talk About Each Other.” Photoplay (June 1921): 29.

Archival Paper Collections:

Anthony Slide Collection. Bowling Green State University.

Correspondence from Lillian Gish, 1962-1986 [with Lucy Kroll]. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

D.W. Griffith papers, 1872-1969. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

Gish Film Theater Collection: Lillian Gish papers. Bowling Green State University.

Lillian Gish-actress/Anthony Slide, compiler. Anthony Slide Collection. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Lillian Gish letters and ephemera, 1936-1991. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Lillian Gish papers, 1920-1978. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Lillian Gish papers and sound recordings, 1909-1992. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Lucy Kroll papers, 1908-1998. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

Reminiscences of Lillian Gish. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Samuel Stark. Theatre scrapbook collection, 1860-1950. Stanford University.

Citation

Cooper, Mark Garrett. "Lillian Gish." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-9vgd-hd51>

Gene Gauntier

by Gretchen Bisplinghoff

During the years 1907-1912, Gene Gauntier, the first “Kalem Girl,” was the preeminent figure at the Kalem Film Manufacturing Company. She played key roles in the events that comprise established film history.  She wrote  the scenario for Ben Hur (1907), the work involved in the controversy that established the first copyright laws covering motion pictures, and wrote and acted in key films. In addition, she acted in the Nan, the Confederate Spy series: The Girl Spy (1909), The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg (1910), The Further Adventures of the Girl Spy (1910),  cross-dressing forerunners of the serial action queens. She appeared in The Lad From Old Ireland (1910), the first film shot on location outside of the United States, and in From the Manger to the Cross (1912), the first feature-length treatment of the life of Christ. The Kalem Company was the first to make fiction motion pictures on location around the world, which has meant that 35mm film prints and other documents may have been deposited in archives outside the United States, the best example of which is the Irish Film Archives in Dublin, where one extant Gene Gauntier Feature Players title and five Kalem titles are archived (Condon 2008).

Gene Gauntier (a/w/d/p). PC

Gene Gauntier portrait. Private Collection. 

Gene Gauntier (a/w/d/p) on location shooting, AMPAS

Gene Gauntier on location shooting. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

In December 1912 she left Kalem to form the Gene Gauntier Feature Players Company, a decision enthusiastically hailed by the Moving Picture World, which noted that she was popular “the world over” (1169). From Kalem, Gauntier brought with her longtime creative partner Sidney Olcott, to serve as director in her own production unit (Slide 1996, 117–118). However, their collaboration did not last long, and the cause of the disintegration of their working relationship remains unclear. In early 1914, the Moving Picture World reported that Sidney Olcott resigned as producer at the Gene Gauntier Feature Players Company to start his own Sid Olcott International Features. The article further states that Jack Clark—Gene Gauntier’s actor husband—would replace Olcott in this position, while Olcott would “retain his interest in the [Gauntier] company” (181). But by 1915, Gauntier and Jack Clark had joined the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, a move that would be short-lived. According to a letter from Gauntier dated June 28, 1915, addressed to “Colonel” William Selig, founder of the Selig Polyscope Company (written on Gene Gauntier Feature Film Company letterhead), they left Universal unhappily the same year they arrived, effectively the end of her motion picture career. Her last appearance was in The Witch’s Lure, alternatively titled The Witch’s Gold (1921).

Further Adventures of a Girl Spy (1910), Gene Gauntier (a/w), AMPAS

Gene Gauntier in Further Adventures of a Girl Spy (1910), Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Variations of the editor’s lament, “Why did she ever leave pictures!” haunt the retrospective consideration of early women film pioneers, but too often such lamentation focuses on individual success or failure rather than on systemic patterns within the industry. Within the Woman’s Home Companion introduction, Epes Winthrop Sargent, former reporter and managing editor of the Moving Picture World, suggests how quickly the trade press began to assess the events of a decade earlier, perhaps with nostalgia for a more innocent moment: “You who read the story Miss Gauntier has written will have a new conception of the motion picture industry in the making; of the brave souls who brought order out of chaos… The story presents an interesting contrast with the million-dollar methods of today, but it was Miss Gauntier and those with her who laid the foundations on which Hollywood was reared” (4). Two years before Terry Ramsaye’s A Million and One Nights, a history of cinema to 1925 commissioned by Photoplay, was published, Gauntier recalled these years in a 1924 Photoplay interview. This article’s title, “Unwept, Unhonored, and Unfilmed,” suggests an early awareness of the unfairness of changes that swept out the women who had made such significant contributions at the start (102). She makes one comment that suggests how she, at least, assessed these changes and understood how creative chaos in the early years favored women’s relatively full participation while a new order in the industry mandated against it (Staiger in Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 113–114). Summing up her own career trajectory in the Photoplay interview, she concludes that “After being master of all I surveyed, I could not work under the new conditions” (102).

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

Memoirs of silent film pioneers offer stories of lives and work told in first person voices, and the other women who wrote these memoirs, such as Alice Guy-Blaché, Frances Marion, Olga Petrova, Kathlyn Williams, need to be added to the standard sources of American film historical narratives written by, for instance, Samuel Goldwyn, Jesse L. Lasky, and Cecil B. DeMille. We now approach memoirs as a construction, or a blend of memory, fact, and fictionalization, and Gauntier is a colorful writer who begins, disarmingly, by claiming that she is not trying to “write a history,” but is only recalling those early days (1928, 7).

Gene Gauntier (a/w/d/p).PC

Gene Gauntier portrait. Private Collection. 

Gene Gauntier's letter to William Selig. AMPAS

Scan, Gene Gauntier’s letter to William Selig. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Gene Gauntier’s anecdotes in her memoirs complicate received historical narratives. One of the most interesting is her account of how, in 1907, working in the capacity of producer at the Biograph Company in the years when jobs were interchangeable, she gave his first directing assignment to an actor they then called “Larry” who would become legendary silent film producer-director D. W. Griffith (Stempel 18). But the memoir does not tell the full story of her collaboration with actor-director Sidney Olcott, nor does it mention her directing work other than to say that she disliked it. Olcott was the main credited director at Kalem and later at the Gene Gauntier Feature Players. He had arranged Gauntier’s first job in film at Biograph on Paymaster (1906), and both moved to Kalem, where they worked as the Olcott-Gauntier unit, leaving Kalem together to form her production company in 1912. One could say that their collaboration rendered much of her work invisible. Although “Blazing the Trail” does not stress the part she played in either codirecting or directing, she gives a different account of her work in private correspondence as well as to at least one fan magazine writer. In the 1915 letter to William Selig, when she is effectively looking for a job, she wrote about her work at Kalem: “For four years I headed their foreign companies, writing every picture they produced abroad, Mr. Clark playing the leads,—in Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, Italy, Madiera [sic], Gibralter [sic], Algiers, Egypt, and terminating with the taking of From the Manger to the Cross in Palestine. This masterpiece was also conceived, written and codirected by me as was The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-Pogue, The Shaughraun, The Kerry Gow, The Wives of Jamestown, and five hundreds [sic] others.” Later in the 1924 Photoplay article, she also stressed her contributions, here, not to get a job, but to set the record straight: “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” (67; 101).

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.

Kalem Stock Company 1910, PC

Kalem Stock Company 1910. Private Collection. 

This evidence indicates how much more work still remains to be done to describe creative working relationships in the first decade that not only acknowledges individual contributions, but also redefines our understanding of roles in the early informal industry. This might acknowledge the crucial importance of the scenario writer who, in the prototypical case of the Kalem Company, was involved in so many aspects of creating a film. As for the prolific scenarist, Gene Gauntier—after her adventuresome motion picture career, she became a journalist, working as the film and drama critic for the Kansas City Post in 1919.

With additional research by Jane Gaines.

See also: Alice Guy-Blaché, Frances Marion, Olga Petrova, Kathlyn Williams, “Daughters of Mary and Gene: The Two Origins of the Serial Queen Action Heroine

Bibliography

Bland, Robert Henderson. From Manger to Cross: The Story of the World-Famous Film Of the Life of Jesus. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922.

Condon, Denis. Early Irish Cinema 1895-1921. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008.

The Daughter of the Confederacy. Rev. Motion Picture World. vol. 15, no. 4 (1 Mar 1913): 892, 1029

“Gauntier Feature Players.” Moving Picture World (12 December 1912): 1169.

Gauntier, Gene. “Blazing the Trail.” Woman’s Home Companion (Oct. 1928): 7-8, 181-84, 186; (Nov. 1928): 25-26, 166, 168-170; (Dec. 1928): 15-16, 132, 134; (Jan. 1929): 13-14, 94; (Feb. 1929): 20-21, 92, 94, 97-98; (March 1929): 18-19, 142, 146.

------. “Blazing the Trail.” Online access via The Silent Bookshelf: Blazing the Trail_1, Blazing the Trail_2, Blazing the Trail_3, Blazing the Trail_4, Blazing the Trail_5.

------. Letter to Colonel William Selig. June 28, 1915. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

------. “Taking Pictures Under Difficulties. O’Kalems Brave Real Dangers and Endure Hardships in the Emerald Isle.” Moving Picture World (16 Sept. 1911): 784.

Harner, Gary. “The Kalem Company, Travel, and On-Location Shooting.” Film History 10 (1988): 118-207.

“New Picture Making Company.” Moving Picture World (10 Jan. 1914): 181.

News of the Month.” Woman’s Home Companion (Oct. 1928): 4.

Smith, Frederick James. “Unwept, Unhonored, and Unfilmed.” Photoplay (July 1924): 64-67, 101-103.

Stempel, Tom. Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film. New York: Continuum, 1991.

Archival Paper Collections:

Anthony Slide Collection. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Blazing the Trail.” Typescript of the memoir. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center.

William Selig Papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Bisplinghoff, Gretchen. "Gene Gauntier." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-2bwk-7r27>

Helen Gardner

by Dorin Gardner Schumacher

Helen Gardner’s silent film career peaked three times. The first peak came in 1911 with her performance as Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1911), important as an early three-reel film, forerunner of four-reel and longer feature films. A review in the Moving Picture World praised the Vitagraph Company of America for the film’s wonderful fidelity to Thackeray’s novel. The reviewer was thrilled with Gardner’s performance: “We might ramble on for hours in ecstasies over the superb work of Miss Gardner and at the end of that time have given but a faint idea of what we saw her do” (887). When Vanity Fair was released, in December of 1911, Gardner had been with Vitagraph about a year and a half.  

Helen Gardner (p/d/w/e/a) c. 1911, AMPAS

Helen Gardner c. 1911. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

The second peak of Gardner’s career came when she formed her own production company, Helen Gardner Picture Players, which she publicly announced on May 22, 1912, in the New York Dramatic Mirror (27). For a woman, to walk away from success and relative security at Vitagraph in order to attempt an independent way of satisfying her ambitions was a bold and unconventional move. Gardner’s vision too was bold. She was embarking on a moviemaking venture whose stated purpose was to specialize in large feature motion picture productions of five and six reels in length.

Gardner was the first actress to strike out on her own for independent production. Although Marion Leonard and her director husband Stannar E. V. Taylor had left the Biograph Company in 1911 to start the Gem Motion Picture Company, Gardner did it alone. And she was the first to state that her reason for forming her own company was to produce feature films, to which Vitagraph was not yet committed. With her daring move, Gardner was several months ahead of Gene Gauntier, and she predated Lois Weber, who may have left the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1914 to go with Bosworth because of a similar desire to move into feature-length motion pictures before Universal was ready (Mahar 2006, 92). As with other star companies begun in this 1912–1913 period (Ethel Grandin, Florence Lawrence, Florence Turner), production as well as promotion was organized around Gardner, who always played the lead.

Gardner’s name has been linked in film histories with Charles L. Gaskill. She worked with him at Vitagraph and then hired him to direct her own productions. It is not unusual for a man to be given more credit than he deserves, but in this case, it has prevented Gardner from being recognized for her very real accomplishments, especially as a woman founding her own production company. Gardner and Gaskill may have at one time been lovers, but as her granddaughter, I know they were never married, despite what many amateur and professional film historians would like to believe. Gaskill essentially got a free ride with Gardner, as it was her family money that financed the new venture, and it was her reputation, talent, and magnetism that made it the success it was.

Helen Gardner, Cleopatra (1912). Courtesy of Harvard University. 

The third peak of Gardner’s silent film career came with the release of Cleopatra (1912). On June 15, 1912, she announced in the Moving Picture World that her company’s first production would be a five-reel [sic] version of Cleopatra based on the Victorien Sardou play (998). William Reeves Harrison, Moving Picture World critic, was enthusiastic about the film as well as about Gardner’s performance, declaring it one of the greatest he had seen: “Her impersonation… is full of varied moods as the character of Cleopatra must have been, at one time the incarnation of tigerish ferocity, at another imbued with the seductive languor and delightful enervation of tropic temperament. With all the witchcraft of a worldly woman and all the wondrous charm of a naturally beautiful one, she holds the eye every moment she is on the scene, so that all the merits of those playing up to her are merely comparative…. I think her performance will rank as one of the greatest ever shown on the screen up to the present time” (859). Today, people who watch Gardner in the restored Cleopatra on Turner Classic Movies express similar enthusiasm. Her magnetism lives on.

Gardner did not invent the motion picture feature; she was what we now call an “early adopter.” European producers had already, as early as 1911, begun making longer and more elaborate films of up to five reels as part of a strategy to attract middle-class audiences. Adolph Zukor, an exhibitor who had started in 1903 with an investment in a New York penny arcade, believed not only that the European motion picture features would draw middle-class Americans but also that films of plays starring famous stage actors and actresses would attract even more of them (Abel, ed. 2005, 710). Zukor launched the Famous Players Motion Picture Company and presented the French four-reel Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt, in New York in July 1912. He had guessed right, as had Helen Gardner. Feature films did attract the middle classes to motion pictures, increasing audience size and consequently exhibitors’ profits.

Gardner promoted her feature productions heavily and handsomely, with exquisite ads in the New York Dramatic Mirror, among other publications. Her dedication to high quality, literary, uplifting, and cultured motion pictures reveals her idealism, hopes, dreams, and ambitions. More work could be done to situate her performance style as well as the screen persona she developed. This study might begin by considering the relation between her screen performance and her studies in drama and pantomime at the school that later became the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. A close study of extant Helen Gardner Picture Players productions, Cleopatra (1912), A Daughter of Pan (1913), and A Sister to Carmen (1913), shows that she was a wonderfully expressive and sensuous actress for her day. This is seen in the dynamism of her facial expressions, the beauty of her moving hands, and the undulations of her body, which also need to be considered in terms of historical definitions of screen eroticism and the attempts to censor it. One local historian thinks that Helen Gardner was the first screen “vamp,” appearing three years before producer William Fox capitalized on Theda Bara in A Fool There Was (1915). This historian notes that censors cut Gardner’s “death dance” in Cleopatra, finding it “entirely too raw,” and that, for its time, A Sister to Carmen was shocking as well (Sessions 12).

Sadly, Helen Gardner’s potential was cut off all too soon. In 1914, unable to compete with other producers who had deeper pockets, better connections through the “old boys’ network,” and shrewder business sense, she was forced to close her company. She returned to working for Vitagraph and other studios, including Rex, IMP, and Gold Seal, where she acted, directed, and wrote scenarios. In 1918, she founded another company and produced a remake of Cleopatra. By 1924, her screen career was over. © Dorin Gardner Schumacher.

See also: Gene Gauntier, Ethel Grandin, Florence Lawrence, Marion Leonard, Florence Turner, Lois Weber

Bibliography

Harrison, Louis Reeves. “Helen Gardner’s Idealization of Cleopatra.” Moving Picture World (30 Nov. 1912): 859.

“Helen Gardner's Own Company.” New York Dramatic Mirror (22 May 1912): 27.

“The Helen Gardner Picture Players.” Moving Picture World. (15 June 1912): 998.

Hoffman, Hugh F. “Vanity Fair.” Moving Picture World (16 Dec. 1911): 887.

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

Schumacher, Dorin. “Helen Gardner-Silent Film Pioneer.” www.helengardner.org

------.“Restoring Helen Gardner’s A Sister to Carmen: A Granddaughter’s Journey.” in This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film. Ed. Roger Smither. London: FIAF, 2002, 375-376.

------. “A Sister to Carmen.XVIII Pordenone Silent Film Festival Catalogue. Pordenone, Italy: Giornate del Cinema Muto (Oct. 1999) 136-7.

Sessions, Ralph. The Movies in Rockland County: Adolph Zukor and the Silent Era. New City, New York: The Historical Society of Rockland County, 1982.

Archival Paper Collections:

Helen Gardner papers and other Gardner family papers. Dorin Gardner Schumacher, Private Collection.

Citation

Schumacher, Dorin Gardner. "Helen Gardner." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-tpex-b874>

Flora Finch

by April Miller

Flora Finch, like many actresses from the period, tried to capitalize on her fame by starting her own self-titled film production company. Although Flora Finch’s name, as well as her thin, angular face and body, is commonly linked with that of comedian John Bunny, she enjoyed a long and distinguished acting career in her own right, one that went beyond her “skinny” role in the “fatty and skinny” film comedy team of Bunny-and-Finch.  

Flora Finch (p/a), NYPL

Flora Finch. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Born in Surrey, England, Finch initially pursued a stage career with the Sir Philip Ben Greet Shakespearean Players until 1907. Newspaper reports claim she immigrated to the United States in 1908, working first with the Biograph Company before moving to the Vitagraph Company in 1909. However, Finch’s obituaries suggest a confusion of dates, stating that Finch began her screen career in 1910. An article Finch wrote for Movie Weekly adds to the confusion, for here she says that “it was in 1910, to the best of my knowledge, that I peeped into a motion picture studio for the first time… which was the old Biograph studio on East 14th Street” (10). In fact, she appeared on screen in at least seven Griffith Biograph shorts before 1910, including Those Awful Hats (1909), where she plays a film spectator who is lifted out of her seat by a crane-like device in order to prevent her enormous hat from blocking the screen—a not-so-subtle way of warning female spectators to remove their hats during film showings. While in her Movie Weekly article Finch claims that her earliest on-screen appearance was in a “Jones Family” film that required she “discuss with poker-spined primness the question of prohibition,” Finch receives her first official credit for the 1908 Griffith film, The Helping Hand (10).

After leaving Biograph in 1909, Finch began work at the Vitagraph studios in Brooklyn, New York, where she made The New Stenographer (1911), her first motion picture with John Bunny. Finch’s work in that film resulted in a five-year contract with Vitagraph, during which she starred with Bunny in a series of extremely popular marital situation farces (Finch 11). Finch claims that while at Vitagraph, she and Bunny “turned out a one-reel picture a week” and “produced close on to three hundred comedies” (11). Described as the screen’s “original Ugly Duckling,” Finch’s harsh, bony features and rail-thin frame delighted audiences in more than two hundred and sixty films, and her style of slapstick, with its frequent incorporation of unique stunts, became a prototype that later comediennes would emulate. For example, Mabel Normand claimed that Finch was instrumental in the development of Normand’s own intricate comedic style, claiming that “every fiber in my body responded to Flora Finch’s celebrated comedies; and though I was quite unconscious of it, I can see now that I was always wondering how I would do the funny little stunts she did in her pictures” (qtd. in Sherman 327). When John Bunny succumbed to Bright’s disease on April 26, 1915, Finch’s career also seemed to come to a premature end, and so rare were her screen appearances around 1915 that most newspapers claimed that Finch had retired.

Flora Finch (p/a), PC

Flora Finch. Private Collection.

In fact, by 1916 Finch was struggling to establish her own venture, the Flora Finch Comedy Company, under which she produced a series of slapstick shorts based on famous photodramas and plays, a development covered in both the Los Angeles Times and Moving Picture World. Contemporary reviews in the New York and Los Angeles Times describe these films as burlesques of popular films currently in release that often appeared on double-bills with feature-length dramas such as The Highway of Hope (1917) and Heart’s Desire (1917). Although it is unclear how long the production company lasted or how many films were released under the Finch banner, there are press references to a series of “Flora Films” released in 1917, including Flora the Life-Saver and Flora in the Movies. The Los Angeles Times in May 1917 described Guess What?, released by Finch in 1917, as a send-up of The Common Law, a film released by Lewis J. Selznick in 1916 (II3). Another noted release of Finch’s production company was the two-reel burlesque War Prides (1917), a travesty on War Brides, in which Finch plays the part of what Moving Picture World described as “a patriotic, biscuit-baking Joan, who cheerfully rejects the hand and crown of the widower king of the empire to remain at the dough-pile and do her ‘bit’ for the boys at war” (629). Although the press makes no mention of the Flora Finch Film Company’s dissolution, by the end of the year, it seems to have ceased producing these short films, suggesting that there was waning public interest in the type of burlesques that Finch envisioned as the company’s primary output.

In 1918, Finch returned to the vaudeville stage, though further references to her stage and screen appearances were rare until in 1920 Moving Picture World announced that Finch would star in a series of two-reel comedies produced under the Film Frolics Pictures Corporation banner (719). The company, incorporated in July 1920, was “especially organized to provide suitable vehicles for Flora Finch,” and Finch was signed to a three-year contract to star in “no less than six two-reel comedies yearly” (1792). Despite this attempt to revive her career, by the 1920s, Finch was playing mostly minor roles in feature films such as The Scarlet Letter (1934) and Show Boat (1936). As Douglas Churchill explains, once the heyday of slapstick in the 1910s came to an end, comedy actors like Finch often struggled to find steady work: “The great Flora Finch…should be regarded as one of the screen’s immortals because she attracted the first stable clientele the cinema knew, had one of Metro’s bit contracts, but she has been dropped in the current economy wave” (153). In 1924, when Finch was cast in the Rudolph Valentino vehicle directed by Sidney Olcott, Monsieur Beaucaire (1924), Olcott even had to defend Finch against claims that she was simply an “extra” earning “but fifteen dollars a week.” Olcott, quoted in Moving Picture World, reassured the public that Finch, “as good in motion pictures today as when she was a starring player,” was under a weekly contract to play the important role of the Duchess (632).

Flora Finch died in Los Angeles, California, on January 4, 1940, at the age of 70, from a streptococcus infection. According to her New York Times obituary, Finch was still on contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the time of her death, “drawing a regular salary for bit, extra and atmosphere roles” (23). While the remarkable images associated with Finch’s slapstick acting often receive the most attention, her innovative and daring approaches to film production also deserve recognition.

See also: Mabel Normand

Bibliography

Churchill, Douglas W. “Ecole de Custard Pie.” New York Times (6 March 1938): 153.

“Film Frolics Pictures to Produce Six Two-Reel Comedies Yearly Starring Flora Finch.” Moving Picture World (7 Aug. 1920): 719.

Finch, Flora. “Old Days in the Movies: Part One.” Movie Weekly (7 May 1921): 10-11.

“Flora Finch Has Own Company.” Moving Picture World (23 Dec. 1916): 1792.

“Flora Finch’s First Fun Film.” Moving Picture World (28 Apr. 1917): 629.

“Flora Finch ‘No Extra’” Moving Picture World (23 Feb. 1924): 632.

“Flora Finch, Star of Film Comedies.” Obit. The New York Times (5 Jan. 1940): 23.

Kingsley, Grace. “Flashes.” Los Angeles Times (20 May 1918): II8.

Sherman, William Thomas. Mabel Normand: A Source Book to Her Life and Films. Seattle: Cinema Books, 1994.

“Show World Review.” Los Angeles Times (17 May 1917): II3.

Citation

Miller, April. "Flora Finch." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-3etb-tk37>

Dorothy Farnum

by Matthew Hipps

As with many women in early cinema, such as Jeanie Macpherson and Frances Marion, Dorothy Farnum’s career in Hollywood began with acting before settling into writing. Known for her intelligence and beauty, she worked well in front of the camera. From articles in the Los Angeles Times, we know that she was educated in a convent boarding school (location unknown) where Farnum mastered French history and literature and became fluent in Spanish and German (C27, 33). Although she received several offers to act and even appeared in the films Over Night (1915) and The Cub (1915), she was reported to have instead preferred writing scenarios for the silent screen. Farnum’s scenario writing career began in 1919 when she approached producer Harry Rapf with an original scenario titled The Broken Melody. Impressed with her skills, he employed Farnum at a commission of twenty-five dollars a week. Unfortunately, after just two weeks Farnum proved to be too inexperienced and was released from her contract. Rapf promised to employ her once she attained a footing in the industry and refined her trade. Farnum continued to work for a few years, steadily writing adaptations and scenarios. Finally, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, Rapf rehired her in May 1926 and gave her work on what would become one of her most renowned films: Beau Brummel (1924) starring John Barrymore (C27).

The Truth About the Movies Dorothy Farnum (a/w), Winifred Dunn (w/e), Florence Lawrence (p/a), Olga Printzlau (w), Ethel Chaffin, Rosemary Cooper , PCRK

“The Truth About the Movies,” Dorothy Farnum, Winifred Dunn, Florence Lawrence, Olga Printzlau, Ethel Chaffin,  and Rosemary Cooper. Private Collection.

The early twenties were pivotal launching years for Farnum. Her first substantial mention in the press appeared in an article on May 19, 1922, in the Atlanta Constitution, which highlighted her work with director Kenneth Webb on the film Fair Lady (1922).  The editorial noted Webb as saying that Farnum’s script was “unquestionably one of the best technical guides ever placed in his hands for production” (18). In 1923 she married Maurice Barber, the general manager of the Cinema Finance Company. At the time of her marriage, Farnum was a member of the Warner Brothers scenario department. After finishing Beau Brummel (1924), star John Barrymore told the Los Angeles Times that Farnum had given him his greatest role up to that point in his career (C32). After this praise, columnists began to write regular stories on Farnum and her fame blossomed. When asked about her writing process, she remarked to the Los Angeles Times in 1926: “You must think with your heart and feel with your head. When I write my scenes I try hard to progress not from one thought to another, but from one feeling to another. For the majority of people want to have their hearts excited and their minds let alone when they come into the world of low lights and soft music of a motion-picture theater” (C19). Farnum was a strong proponent of keeping her adaptations true to the original author’s intent. She fought against reworking scripts to offer happy endings, according to an article titled “Success Shows ‘Happy Ending’ Not Essential” (A1).

After her success with Beau Brummel (1924), Farnum began work on adapting the Sinclair Lewis novel Babbitt. Personally acquainted with Lewis, she collaborated with him while preparing the book for the screen, the kind of cooperation the Los Angeles Times praised as a new method of writing screenplays (23). In fact, a large majority of her work focused solely on scenario adaptations. Farnum was known to delve into libraries to explore background material several months before she began writing. She would regularly confer with others such as Broadway producers, a variety of other writers, and even close friends when she adapted plays for the screen. Farnum also traveled extensively and many of her trips in the mid-to-late-1920s involved research on specific cultures and customs, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1925 (A1).

Dorothy Farnum (a/w) MGM publicity photo, AMPAS

MGM publicity photo, Dorothy Farnum. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library. 

Farnum’s inspirations not only included research and collaboration, but music as well. Known as “the writer with the Kodak brain,” she was said to have mentally stored away pictures of her travels and used music to recall them. The Los Angeles Times on November 2, 1924, thus described her method: “She always carries a small phonograph with her and when she is ready to write she puts on a particular type of record chosen as carefully as ‘emotion doctors’ on film sets choose their themes to inspire desired emotional effects in the players. Miss Farnum declares that the spell of music sets her thinking, bringing forth the ‘kodaked’ ideas from their mental storage with a clarity not otherwise possible” (C25). As Farnum commented to the Los Angeles Times in November, 9, 1924: “Writing a scenario is an orchestration, in a way, because you must proceed from one emotion to another rhythmically. A successful scenario sings its own lilt. You have to feel the course of your theme tremendously and always consult your heart before your head” (C32).

Lantern slide, The Divine Woman (1928). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

As one of the top writers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Farnum worked with many leading stars and was famously paired with Greta Garbo for several films after they worked together on The Temptress (1926). In 1927, at the height of her profession, the Washington Post reported Farnum’s earnings at $2,500 a week for her services as scenarist (F3). Grace Kingsley’s Los Angeles Times article reports that several studios contracted Farnum throughout her career, including Warner Brothers, MGM, United Artists, and Gaumont-British. After numerous lengthy tours in Europe, in 1929 Farnum took a two-year leave from MGM to live in Paris. There she reportedly worked with United Artists on writing, adapting, directing, and supervising films. She returned to Hollywood in 1932 and signed a contract with Charles R. Rogers, but once again decided to return to Europe a year later to work for Gaumont-British (A9). After her silent era success, Farnum finished her career in London and disappeared from the public eye. She quietly took permanent residence in Europe, having made her home in Grasse in Southern France, we learn from the Los Angeles Times in 1950 (B6). Unfortunately, today there is no scholarly work on Dorothy Farnum, and most of the information about her work must be culled from newspaper reports. Further archival exploration, specifically with regard to her work at Warner Brothers, MGM, and Gaumont-British, is needed in order to explore and unlock clues about Dorothy Farnum’s career as one of the most gifted and prolific scenarists in silent era Hollywood.

Bibliography

“Domination Bad for Actor, Says Film Director.” Los Angeles Times (2 Nov. 1924): C25.

“Dorothy Farnum to Do ‘Babbitt’ Script.” Los Angeles Times (10 Feb. 1924): 23.

“Heart Interest Success Secret of Film Writer.” Los Angeles Times (2 May 1926): C19.

Kingsley, Grace. “Foreign Film Advice Given.” Los Angeles Times (25 May 1932): A9.

Pearson, Felicia. “Movie Graphs.” The Washington Post (15 May 1927): F3.

“Right.” Los Angeles Times (9 Nov. 1924): C32.

“Scenarist and Husband Off on Tour of World.” Los Angeles Times (7 Feb. 1925): A1.

“Scenarist May Set Departure in Film Script.” Los Angeles Times (28 March 1926): 33.

“Success Shows 'Happy Ending' Not Essential.” Los Angeles Times (21 March 1926): 29.

“Ten Southland Officers Finish Guard Course.” Los Angeles Times (9 May 1950): B6.

Whitaker, Alma. “New Contract Awes Her.” Los Angeles Times (2 May 1926): C27.

Citation

Hipps, Matthew. "Dorothy Farnum." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-fzxp-ck12>

Dot Farley

by April Miller

While Dot (Dorothy) Farley is most often identified as a comedic actress, she also seems to have written and directed films. Anthony Slide notes that Farley asserted in a 1923 Illustrated World article that she both wrote and directed dramas and comedies. He thinks that she may not have worked as a director for Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company. She may have directed and written shorts for another company in the first two decades (Slide 1996, 121). Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dot Farley began her acting career at the age of three, and was reportedly featured in a number of stage productions including an E. A. MacDowell Company production of “Wedding Bells,” appearing as “Chicago’s Little Dot” (Waddell III4). A Los Angeles Times 1924 career overview tells us that she continued to work with a Chicago comic-opera company until her voice failed in 1910, at which time she accepted an offer to star in comedy shorts for the Essanay Company (B26).

Dot Farley (a/w), NYPL

Dot Farley. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Farley is perhaps best known as one of the earliest members of Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedy troupe, where she developed the trademark facial and bodily distortions that the Atlanta Constitution described as “A Face to Fit Everyone Occasion” (B11). Although she left Keystone after a few years of work, she occasionally returned to play such roles as Ben Turpin’s cross-eyed mother in A Small Town Idol (1921). In 1913, she left the Pathé Company to join the St. Louis Motion Picture Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She then moved to Universal in 1915, where she worked in many Luna Company productions including The Near Capture of Jesse James (1915), playing the role of a girl who, inspired by dime Western novels, puts on men’s clothing to live the life of a bandit. Farley continued to have a reputation for playing adventurous roles well into the late silent period. Newspapers reported on her ability to fool cast members and strangers with her disguises and, testimony to her indefatigability, she returned to work the day after sustaining minor burns while filming Listen Lester (1924) for the Sacramento Picture Company. Although she is most well-known for her comedic work during the silent period, Farley was cast in the sound period, starring in a series of domestic comedies at the Radio Keith Orpheum Company, in Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927), and taking bit parts in Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942) and Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero (1944).

Lantern slide, Border Intrigue (1925), starring Dot Farley. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Although Dot Farley receives official writing credit for only a handful of films, newspaper reports and fan magazines frequently describe her as a prolific scenario writer. In 1913, A. G. Waddell reported that Farley had written a large portion of the scenarios produced by the St. Louis Company that appeared under the Warner Brothers brand, and, in addition, wrote Western stories for other companies (III4). So widely recognized was Farley as the primary scenario writer of the Albuquerque Film Company that in his 1915 directory for would-be script writers, William Reno Kane proclaimed that venue “essentially closed,” explaining that “experienced scenario writer” Dot Farley “supplies most of the scripts that are used” by the company (230). By 1924, a Los Angeles Times report claimed that Farley had “some 300 produced scenarios” to her credit (A9), and in his study of female directors, Anthony Slide claims Dot Farley “tried her hand at directing” a few years after Mabel Normand directed her first pictures (1996). Though the FIAF Treasures database only shows her as credited for acting, it may be possible that Farley played a more substantial role behind the scenes as writer and conceivably even producer (“Another” A9). Perhaps Dot Farley’s reputation as a strictly comedic actor also prevented her behind-the-camera work from being taken seriously and fully recorded for posterity.

Bibliography

“Actor Saved in Studio Blaze.” Los Angeles Times (29 Jan. 1924): A5.

“Another Scenario.” Los Angeles Times (30 July 1924): A9.

“Big Picture from Albuquerque Company.” Moving Picture World (30 May 1914): 1275.

“Chance Came When She Lost Her Voice.” Los Angeles Times (13 July 1924): B26.

“Dot Farley.” The Atlanta Constitution (23 May 1915): B11.

“Dot Farley to Direct.” Moving Picture World (3 Sept. 1921): 50.

Kane, William R. 1001 Places to Sell Manuscripts. Ridgewood, New Jersey: The Editor Company, 1915.

Powell, P.M. “News Notes.” Moving Picture World (29 March 1913): 1323.

Slide, Anthony. The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

Waddell, Ad G. “With the Photoplayers.” Los Angeles Times (7 March 1913): III4.

Citation

Miller, April. "Dot Farley." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-bqwt-kv92>

Marion Fairfax

by Tom Slater

Between 1904 and 1915, Marion Fairfax wrote several successful Broadway plays before turning to screenwriting. Over the next eleven years, she achieved even greater success in her new field. In 1921, she formed her own production company that produced The Lying Truth (1922), which Fairfax wrote and directed. The most enduring film with which she was associated was The Lost World (1925), a science fiction picture about an isolated land of dinosaurs that featured tremendous special effects. A handwritten note attached to a First National Pictures legal department memo dated December 6, 1923, states: “Fairfax is always a winner—Don’t ever let her get away. Tom [unidentified] knows she is both restless and damn independent.” Three years later, however, Fairfax received her final credit for The Blonde Saint (1926) and then disappeared from filmmaking. She was married to actor Tully Marshall, who died in 1943, for forty-three years.

Like many women filmmakers of the silent era, Fairfax began her career as a stage actress. By 1901, she was appearing on Broadway. Shortly thereafter, her own plays began appearing. In 1915, Fairfax turned to screenwriting at the suggestion of William deMille, brother of Cecil B. DeMille. Over the next few years, she wrote several films directed by deMille. Another frequent artistic collaborator was director-producer Marshall Nielan, with whom Fairfax shared a long friendship dating back to her earliest years on Broadway. Together, they produced several films covering a large number of genres from 1920 to 1925. Perhaps their biggest hit was Dinty (1920) a comic melodrama starring Colleen Moore and child star Wesley Barry. Their other films included The River’s End (1920), a Royal Canadian Mounted Police adventure; Don’t Ever Marry (1920), a marriage comedy; Bob Hampton of Placer (1921), an epic Western; Fools First (1922), about a reformed gangster; and The Lotus Eater (1921), an island romance starring John Barrymore. They also created an unusual science fiction comedy drama, Go and Get It (1920), about a murderer’s brain getting transplanted into a chimpanzee.

Mary Pickford in Through the Back Door (1921), written by Marion Fairfax (d/p/w/e/o), PC

Mary Pickford, Through the Back Door (1921), written by Marion Fairfax. Private Collection.

Other directorial partners included Maurice Tourneur, with whom Fairfax created Torment (1924), a mystery; Clothes Make the Pirate (1925), a comedy with Leon Errol and Dorothy Gish; and Old Loves and New (1926), a romance set in Algeria. Other stars Fairfax wrote for included Mary Pickford (Through the Back Door, 1921) and Norma Talmadge, for whom she wrote The Eternal Flame (1922), adapted from Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais. Male stars for whom she created scripts included Sessue Hayakawa. These works included Hashimura Togo (1917) and The Honor of His House (1918), which considered the problems of assimilation in ways comic and tragic towards the Japanese; The Secret Game (1917), a spy film in which Hayakawa foils a German threat against US transport ships; and The White Man’s Law (1918), a drama set in Sierra Leone about a corrupt English businessman who impregnates an African woman.

In 1919, Fairfax wrote two comedies for actor Wally Reid, The Roaring Road and The Valley of the Giants, both directed by James Cruze. Fairfax’s familiarity with Reid, who died of morphine addiction in January 1923, may have influenced the one project she completed as writer and director for her own production company, Marion Fairfax Productions. That film, The Lying Truth (1922), now lost, involved an original story set in Ireland in which a drug pusher played by Noah Beery is responsible for an innocent man accused of murder nearly getting lynched. Unfortunately, as Karen Ward Mahar points out, social problem films had fallen out of favor in the early 1920s (2006, 7). Audiences were far more interested in the sexual comedies of Cecil B. DeMille than in moralizing tales. Today, Fairfax’s achievements in this film are impossible to determine. Her entire effort may have been hampered by health problems, or the opposite may also be true. The strain of operating her own company, writing, and directing while also working on several other productions throughout 1922 may have taken a toll on her health. In any case, she was unable to work in 1923.

Marion Fairfax (d/w/e), AMPAS

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

In 1926, Photoplay writer Ivan St. Johns stated: “Probably you didn’t know that Marion Fairfax’s opinion on a picture is considered the most valuable in Hollywood” (127). Strangely, in this same year Fairfax permanently retired from the motion picture business. Documents on file in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences library indicate that Photoplay’s statement was not simply fan magazine hyperbole. This evidence indicates that Marion Fairfax was certainly indispensable to the last company for which she worked. In 1924, Fairfax had signed a contract to work with First National Pictures, which would later become Warner Brothers Pictures. There, she became associated with the production unit under Earl J. Hudson, who worked her hard. A memo from Hudson asks if, in addition to all her other worries, she will check the daily rushes for Sundown (1924) as rapidly as possible to see if the acting is good and if they’re capturing the theme. A letter from Fairfax to Hudson the next month provides her positive evaluation for the script of The Woman on the Jury (1924). Fairfax was apparently still struggling with health problems, as a September letter addressed to her from First National production manager Richard Rowland in New York expresses regret that her illness has made her unable to come East. But he hopes she can work anyway “with whatever units may be working on the coast.” The next month, Rowland telegrammed he was glad Fairfax would be coming East to handle the editing, titling, and general editorial direction of The Lost World, for which she was also writing the script.

At the start of 1925, Hudson sent a telegram to Fairfax praising her contributions to So Big (1924), the adaptation of an Edna Ferber novel, which again starred Colleen Moore. That Fairfax’s health was still an issue is indicated by Hudson giving her time off until March 1. But the studio’s reliance on her may have overridden this offer. Another possibility is that Fairfax may have had larger goals that she wished to keep working towards. In any case, a February 2 telegram from Hudson indicates he is glad she is coming to New York to help relieve the pressure of a very heavy production schedule there and that he will begin discussing her own unit with her.

Marion Fairfax (w/d/e). BFI

Marion Fairfax at desk. Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

Throughout February, Hudson sent several undated “Radio Messages” from on location in Texas seeking Fairfax’s assurances about a variety of productions at various stages. On Sundown, he wrote, “I feel keenly that we will have a production of which we both may be mighty proud as one of the biggest if not the biggest thing with which [we] have ever been identified.” In relation to another script, Hudson wrote, “I have absolute and implicit confidence in you and your understanding of the degree of perfection entertainment value and naturalness I want in Flapper For Sale.” Finally, on The Woman on the Jury, being directed by Harry Hoyt (who would also direct The Lost World), Hudson stated, “If Miss Fairfax feels exterior masters [of the] home [are] necessary for Jury, instruct Hoyt [to] shoot it.” Similarly, Hudson also asked Fairfax to keep an eye on director John Dillon and the making of If I Marry Again (1925). Hudson liked Dillon, but worried that “his enthusiasm may carry him off on a piece of business that particularly appeals to him.”

Despite all these requests and the fact that Fairfax was struggling with health problems, Hudson playfully threatens her in the same message by writing, “Under no circumstances forget the absolute necessity to me you are and INCIDENTALLY AND OTHER WISE I WON’T LET YOU FINISH Lost World script.” The joke, in other words, is that while she needs to keep busy with five productions at once, she should not work too hard and get sick. One assumes that he is aware that the Lost World script is one of her own priorities. Hudson’s comments indicate that her opinions may have been considered more important than the official director’s on several other films. Fairfax, therefore, most likely shaped a good deal more of what appeared in silent films than anyone has before realized. Perhaps this heavy amount of work combined with her health problems contributed to Fairfax’s quiet retirement in 1926.

Careful study of Fairfax’s work might also reveal her as a progressive social thinker who put many positive ideas onto the silent screen. At a time of rampant Orientalism and warnings about “the Yellow Peril,” Fairfax’s scripts for Hayakawa continuously presented him as a hero. In The Lying Truth, she offered a plea for understanding the drug addict and a simultaneous warning against mob justice. Another fascinating Fairfax script was for The Blacklist, directed by William deMille in 1916, the first film to be shown at Cooper Union in New York. The film sided with a radical miners union whose members were being blacklisted so that they would be unable to find work after leaving a job. Blanche Sweet played Vera Maroff, the daughter of union leader Sergus Maroff. A strike turns violent, and the mine president’s son, Warren Harcourt, is unable to stop his guards from shooting the miners. Although Vera loves Warren, she accepts her assignment when she is selected to assassinate him. She fails at first, but then returns for a second attempt. This time, she wounds him in the shoulder and then turns the gun on herself. But Warren stops her and says, “Tear up the Black-List. We’re going to run things differently—you and I.” Thus, The Blacklist bent gender roles by having the heroine take up arms to end labor injustice. Another film gender bender was The Widow’s Might (1918) starring Julian Eltinge, the leading female impersonator of the time. In it, Eltinge has to use his cross-dressing skills to help his neighbor stop a land grabber’s attempt to claim her property.

Fairfax’s personal struggles, ideals, and accomplishments deserve greater study. Specifically, careful study of her scripts in relation to the original sources could provide some understanding of her goals and values. However, a greater wealth of production documents and secondary sources related to the films she worked on is also needed to determine more about the nature of her collaboration and influence. Fairfax was born Marion Josephine Neiswanger in Richmond, Virginia, and died in Los Angeles.

See also: “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Fairfax, Marion. Letter to Earl J. Hudson. 19 April 1926. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Hudson, Earl J. Memo to Marion Fairfax. 6 March 1924. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

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

“Marion Fairfax Forms Production Unit: First Offering to Be ‘The Lying Truth.’” Moving Picture World (23 April 1921): 847.

“MARION FAIRFAX, WRITER OF PARAMOUNT PHOTOPLAYS, HAS BEEN SIGNALLY SUCCESSFUL AS A DRAMATIST.” Famous Players-Lasky Corp. Press Release, n.d. 2 pages. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Rowland, Richard. Letter to Marion Fairfax. 26 Sept. 1924. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

St. Johns, Ivan. “Second Sight.” Photoplay (Aug. 1926): 76, 127.

Archival Paper Collections:

Marion Fairfax papers, 1890-1967. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Marion Fairfax scripts. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Film and Television Scripts. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

Citation

Slater, Tom. "Marion Fairfax." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-hgss-y152>

Mrs. Sidney Drew

by Casiana Ionita

There were two Mrs. Sidney Drews. Both wrote for their husband’s films. The first wife, Gladys Rankin, was a dramatist who wrote under the name of George Cameron. Her play became the scenario for Sidney Drew’s first motion picture The Still Voice (1913). After the death of the first Mrs. Sidney Drew in January 1914, Sidney Drew married Lucille McVey the following July. The second Mrs. Drew, who also used the name Jane Morrow, began her career as a stage actress and then joined Vitagraph in early 1914. That same year she was part of Sidney Drew’s company of players.

Lucille McVey (Mrs. Sidney Drew) (p/d/w/a), PC

Lucille McVey (Mrs. Sidney Drew) portrait. Private Collection.

Mrs. Sidney Drew (Lucille McVey) (p/d/w/a), BFI

Mrs. Sidney Drew. Courtesy of the British Film Institute.

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew (p/d/w/a), PC

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew. Private Collection.

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew (p/d/w/a) outside of their home, LoC

Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew outside of their home. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Mrs. Sidney Drew. Photoplay. Jan 1918. PD

Mrs. Sidney Drew  in Photoplay, January 1918. 

Sidney Drew was already established as an urbane and irreverent comedy actor-director, whose work is perhaps epitomized in the semi-scandalous race and gender-bending The Florida Enchantment (1914), which he directed at Vitagraph. The Drews (Lucille and Sidney) created their own style of domestic comedies, playing an on-screen couple, Polly and Henry, the woman towering over the man, poking fun at middle-class married life. Unlike the bawdy female partners played by Mabel Normand, Marie Dressler, and Alice Howell to make working-class couples look stupid, Mrs. Drew’s haughty matron helped to make middle-class couples look ridiculous. The extant Nothing to Wear (1917), for instance, is based on the premise that a woman with some money has entirely too much to wear, and her protest that she has “nothing to wear,” produces the inevitable exercise in comic futility for the brow-beaten husband seeking to please. In their 1917 Photoplay interview, the Drews explained that writing about a couple and impersonating one on the screen made the films seem more real to the viewers, who already knew that they were husband and wife (28).

The couple worked for Vitagraph from 1914 to 1916, and then signed a contract with Metro Pictures Corporation to produce a one-reel comedy every week, at a yearly joint salary of $90,000. During that time, they refined their Henry and Polly comedies and attempted to make their weekly quota. Among the “Henry” titles are Too Much Henry, Why They Left Home/Why Henry Left Home, and Shadowing Henry, all produced in 1917. According to the Moving Picture World, of the four one-reel comedies that Metro released in one month, March 1917, three were Drew comedies (159). After their year-long contract with Metro ended, the Drews returned to the stage and also founded their own production company, V.B.K. Film Corporation. That same year, they signed a contract for a series of two-reel comedies to be released through Paramount Pictures (Mahar 2006, 121).

After her husband’s death in 1919, Mrs. Sidney Drew continued to work for another year, and she is praised for this in a 1920 Ladies Home Journal article on women motion picture and theatrical directors. This same article is one source of the information that in 1920 she wrote, directed, and produced an entire series of six comedy shorts for the US-owned Pathé Company; however, it is unclear whether all were actually made (Mahar 2006, 121). In 1921, now on her own, Mrs. Sidney Drew directed the five-reel Vitagraph comedy feature Cousin Kate (1921) starring Alice Joyce, but it is her last credit. Some of her work after Sidney’s death is described as having the same Drew comedy charm, but the fate of both of the Drews, even before Sidney’s death, also had to do with the fate of silent film comedy in this period. The heyday of the Drew comedy shorts, 1914–1917, was the period of transition from short one-reel films to multireel films. While dramatic subject matter after 1915 was elongated from one-reel shorts to six-reel features, only the few high visibility comedians, most notably Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, made this transition. Mr. and Mrs. Drew, however, made the five-reeler Playing Dead at Vitagraph in 1915. The many silent film comedians who may have attempted the longer form as well as continued to make one- and two-reel short attractions into the 1920s have received little historical attention (Koszarski 1990, 174). The two-reel Drew comedies produced for Paramount would be understood as auxiliary to the feature, as would Mrs. Drew’s Pathé shorts. The continued demand for the short comedy genre in the silent era, then, needs to be considered when assessing Mrs. Drew’s career, taking account of the fast pace of producing so many titles under the conditions of the short-term contracts the Drews worked under after they left the Vitagraph studio.

The question of the division of labor within husband and wife teams is also relevant with the Drews as it is with other couples such as Mrs. George Randolph Chester and her husband. Both couples were inseparable collaborators in their productive years. But Lucille McVey is different in the way she continued as “the Drews” when she worked on her own as sole producer and director. Since scholars agree that “who did what” is a difficult question, particularly in the early 1910s when motion picture work was more fluid on the whole, we need to take a critical stance. Thus, we might also consider the sources of information about women’s contributions, asking whether they tend to exaggerate or help to rectify the record. In the case of Mrs. Sidney Drew, for instance, fan magazines and women’s magazines, the major sources of biographical information about female scenarists and directors during the silent era, tend to emphasize her contribution and de-emphasize her husband’s. The writer in Photoplay gives Mrs. Drew seventy-five per cent of the credit for the conception of the Drew comedies and describes her husband as the one who transposed her ideas on the screen (28). Henry MacMahon, looking back at Lucille’s career, sums up her work as exhaustively doing everything: “She was the one writing the scenario, directing the settings, providing the costumes, properties and furniture, coaching the actors, and managing the lights and picture-taking” (13). Perhaps what is needed is an analysis of Lucille McVey with and without Sidney Drew. She continued to write, produce, direct, and act after her husband’s death, preferring to keep his name, probably in order to keep their audience. But we should ask if the four films she produced and directed without him—The Charming Mrs. Chase (1920), The Stimulating Mrs. Barton (1920), The Emotional Mrs. Vaughan (1920), and Cousin Kate—were as “wholesome” as the press liked to describe their work as a couple. Comparing the features she made without Sidney Drew to those they worked on together would show us the extent to which she preserved or refashioned the core ideas they had developed as a couple.

Lantern slide. Cousin Kate (1921), directed by Mrs. Sidney Drew. Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

See also: Mrs. George Randolph Chester, Marie Dressler, Alice Howell, Mabel Normand

Bibliography

“Four Metros for March.” Moving Picture World vol. 31, no. 8 (10 March 1917): 159.

Mahar, Karen. Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Baltimore: The Johns Hopskins University Press, 2006.

MacMahon, Henry. “Women Directors of Plays and Pictures.” Ladies Home Journal (Dec. 1920): 12-14; 143-145.

Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1924.

Slide, Anthony. The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976.

Smith, Frederic James. “Seeking the Germ. An Interview with the Sidney Drews.” Photoplay (Sept. 1917): 27-30.

Archival Paper Collections:

J. Stuart Blackton material, 1909-1939. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

J. Stuart Blackton papers, 1912-1962. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Ionita, Casiana. "Mrs. Sidney Drew." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-v5hc-2j62>

Marie Dressler

by Paul Moore

Marie Dressler was a top star who died at the height of her popularity. Her career is thoroughly documented, and this synopsis unavoidably recounts the tireless efforts of biographies by Betty Lee and Matthew Kennedy. She remains a comedienne with a loyal following, with a foundation and museum in her birthplace of Cobourg, Ontario. In the context of women behind-the-scenes in early film production, Dressler provides an example of a failed attempt to turn stage and screen fame into an eponymous production company where she had a hand in writing the resulting two-reelers. In the mid-1910s, it was common to turn movie stardom into professional autonomy by creating an eponymous film company. Dressler’s self-produced films were the last before a well-mythologized descent into poverty and reemergence as an MGM early-sound star with the help of loyal friend, screenwriter Frances Marion. Her decline coincided with well-publicized off-screen activities including the World War I bond drive and the 1919 Actors’ Equity strike. Assertions that she was the victim of anti-union blacklisting remain unsubstantiated by her biographers Lee and Kennedy, who conclude instead that she had simply spent too much time off stage and screen, or in lackluster roles.

Marie Dressler. USW

Marie Dressler. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Marie Dressler (w/a) 1921 NYPL

Marie Dressler, 1921. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Marie Dressler. USW

Marie Dressler. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

publicity still from 'The Scrublady." PCPM

Publicity still, The Scrublady (1917). Private Collection. 

Marie Dressler (a) The Callahans and the Murphys (1927) Frances Marion (w) PC

Marie Dressler, The Callahans and the Murphys (1927), Frances Marion (w). Private Collection.

Marie Dressler and Jane Miller. USW

Marie Dressler and Jane Miller. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Dressler’s comic persona crystallized into the character Tillie Blobbs onstage in 1910. A 1915 Moving Picture World review described the effect as, “sort of a reckless elephant with dare-devil instincts consistently foiled by her size and weight” (463). When the play “Tillie’s Nightmare” opened on Broadway, the New York Times raved that Dressler “raised such a ruction as only a very large and very noisy and very clever person can raise without being arrested” (9). A few months earlier in previews, the Chicago Tribune was more skeptical, but still recognized that Tillie was “a harmonious environment for Miss Marie Dressler’s turbulence of face and figure” (7).

The centerpiece became a signature tune for Dressler, especially in her later Actors’ Equity efforts, “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.” With the fantastic popularity of “Tillie’s Nightmare” on stage, it became clear that Dressler’s physical comedy would translate well into film slapstick, and she negotiated top-billing in Mack Sennett’s first feature-length comedy at Keystone, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), “supported by” Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin, before he began at Mutual. The title supposedly replaced a more generic one as a capitulation to Dressler’s clear identification with the character, said Moving Picture World in 1914 (914). Dressler claimed Sennett wanted a stage star to get his comedies into high-class feature film theatres, and she recalled thinking, first meeting him in Los Angeles: “There’s a man who wants his fare back to New York!” (Dressler 127).

Opening in Chicago’s Loop late in January 1915, Tillie’s Punctured Romance sold about 10,000 tickets a day in its first-run at the 300-seat Star Theater. Kitty Kelly in the Chicago Tribune summarized the “experiment” of a feature comedy as “a howling success… a concentrated encyclopedic collection of all the standard ‘laughs’ in the Keystone repertoire” (10). A second feature, Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (1915) starred Dressler without Keystone connections. Coinciding with a third Dressler feature, Tillie Wakes Up (1917), written by Dressler’s friend Frances Marion, the Dramatic Mirror reported in December 1916 that Dressler and her romantic companion, Jim Dalton, formed the Marie Dressler Motion Picture Corporation (MDMPC) to supply producer-distributor Mutual Film Corporation with a dozen two-reel pictures based on the Tillie character (24). It was the same year that Charlie Chaplin left the Keystone Company for Mutual.

Another deal was announced in August 1917, this time between the MDMPC and Goldwyn Pictures. Filming at first in New Jersey, a Hollywood studio was reportedly leased, according to the Dramatic Mirror of September (20). Without using the character Tillie overtly, the comedies The Scrublady (1917) and Fired (1917) followed the same antics. In the Moving Picture World, more ink was devoted to the company’s business setup than its creative output. Neither of these first two releases were reviewed nor publicized; they were merely listed as “available” for two weeks in January 1918. Dressler is assumed to be the scenarist for these in the absence of published credits. The only known surviving print material of a MDMPC film, a copy of the second reel of The Scrublady, contains no credits.

The production company was subject to litigation, possibly involving a dispute over the originality of Dressler’s scenario for Fired (Kennedy 100). Next in July 1918 was The Agonies of Agnes, which received a brief comment as “horse play which never becomes really laughable” (251). Finally in August, The Cross Red Nurse (1918) was dismissed as “rather forced” (1310). By then, Dressler was putting her effort instead into patriotic wartime promotions, leaving little time for developing new projects. Beauchamp notes that Marion thought the production company was actually a troubling turn in her friend’s career (1997, 79). In that biography, Beauchamp also gives an account of how Marion later seeded Dressler’s late 1920s revival at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, crafting roles especially for her in Anna Christie (1930), Min and Bill (1930), Emma (1932), and Dinner at Eight (1933).

In Dressler’s last decade, after Jim Dalton’s death, she sought out the company of women, and her companionship with Claire Dubrey was just shy of openly lesbian, says one contemporary biographer (Lee 185–187). With Marion crafting characters for her, and Adela Rogers St. Johns as biographer, the saving grace of friendships with other women in the entertainment industry was an increasingly dominant motif in Dressler’s private life.  Though she refers to Dalton when she remarks in her autobiography that she “loved only one man,” her marriage with her second “husband” was troubled (137). Victoria Sturtevant notes that Dressler had an unhappy and short first marriage as a teenager. In the early 1910s she began to refer to Jim Dalton as her manager and husband although he had not yet obtained a divorce from his first wife. She assumed that his divorce was finalized and believed that their marriage was legitimate. However, in the late 1910s he stole the money Dressler gave him for his divorce and staged a fake marriage. When she discovered the truth, she threw him out. Dalton suffered a stroke and she nursed him until his death. She was forced to allow Dalton’s legal wife to bury him (Sturtevant 130).

As for the foray into screenwriting in her own production company, it was far from her only financial or creative misstep. She said of her legal wrangling over proceeds from Tillie’s Punctured Romance, “the business side of the moving picture business has always been too complicated for me. There are too many middlemen” (Dressler 131). Whatever the source of financial trouble, and despite her professed lack of interest in long-term planning, the production company may nonetheless have simply been a way to delay admitting that Tillie had fallen out of favor with audiences.

See also: Frances Marion, Mabel Normand, Adela Rogers St. Johns

Bibliography

“The Agonies of Agnes.” Moving Picture World (13 July 1918): 251.

“The Cross Red Nurse.” Moving Picture World (31 August 1918): 1310.

Dressler, Marie. The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling: An Autobiographical Fragment in Seven Parts. New York: McBride, 1924.

“Dressler Pictures for Goldwyn.” Moving Picture World (11 Aug. 1917): 951.

“Goes to Hollywood: Marie Dressler to Build Her Own Studio.” Dramatic Mirror (22 Sept. 1917): 20.

Kelly, Kitty. "Flickerings from Film Land." Chicago Tribune (2 Feb 1915): 10.

Lee, Betty. Marie Dressler: The Unlikeliest Star. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

“Marie Dressler Forming Company.” Dramatic Mirror (23 Dec. 1916): 24.

“Marie Dressler to Play for Mutual.” Moving Picture World (30 Dec. 1916): 1941.

“The Marie Dressler Story.” The Marie Dressler Foundation and Museum. http://www.mariedressler.ca/

Rogers St. Johns, Adela. “The Private Life of Marie Dressler.” Liberty (13 May 1933): 20-25; (20 May 1933): 10-15; (27 May 1933): 32-37; (3 June 1933): 32-38.

Sturtevant, Victoria. A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler. Urbana: University of Illinios Press: 2009.

“Tillie’s Nightmare.” New York Times (6 May 1910): 9.

“Tillie’s Nightmare.” Chicago Tribune (3 Jan. 1910): 7.

“Tillie’s Punctured Romance.” Moving Picture World (14 Nov. 1914): 914.

“Tillie’s Punctured Romance.” Moving Picture World (16 Oct. 1915): 463.

Archival Paper Collections:

Marie Dressler scrapbook, Robinson Locke collection, 1870-1920. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

Citation

Moore, Paul. "Marie Dressler." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zhz6-k505>

Beulah Marie Dix

by Wendy Holliday

Beulah Marie Dix became a writer because it was one of the few respectable options available for women in the early twentieth century. The daughter of a factory foreman from an old New England family, Dix was educated at Radcliffe College, where she graduated with honors and became the first woman to win the prestigious Sohier literary prize. Instead of teaching, she decided to write after she sold some stories to popular magazines. She wrote mainly historical fiction, including novels and children’s books. In 1916, she went to California to visit her theatre agent, Beatrice deMille, mother of film pioneers Cecil and William, who had moved there with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Film Company, which was that year to become Famous Players-Lasky after a merger with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players. Dix decided to experiment with writing for the new motion picture industry just for fun, but became a successful and productive silent era scenario writer, as her daughter, Evelyn Flebbe Scott, recalled (7-9).

Belulah Marie Dix (w) NYPL

Belulah Marie Dix. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Lantern slide, Nan of Music Mountain (1917), Beulah Marie Dix (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

She began writing for William deMille because, according to her daughter, Evelyn Flebbe Scott, Dix felt he was a “dramatist of equal standing with herself” (47). She became especially known for her ability to write strong historical characters, and she had a flare for writing scenes of violence. Her initial experiments turned into a full-time writing job, and she was placed under contract at Famous Players-Lasky, soon Paramount Pictures. She mastered all aspects of screenwriting, developing original stories, such as vehicles for Sessue Hayakawa, including The Call of the East (1917), and adapting her own work, such as the 1906 play “Road to Yesterday,” as well as the work of other writers, including writing the remake of the 1914 The Squaw Man in 1918 for Cecil B. DeMille (DeMille 1959, 208). Dix wrote quickly and is credited on fifty-two motion picture titles, most written between 1917 and 1926. During the years 1917–1924, she was employed in the Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Pictures scenario department, her tenure there overlapping with prolific industry writing legends Jeanie Macpherson and Clara Beranger, as well as Ouida Bergère, Eve Unsell, and Julia Crawford Ivers.

Beulah Marie Dix (w) outside her home. NYPL

Beulah Marie Dix outside her home. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Beulah Marie Dix (w) at home w/ husband & dogs NYPL

Beulah Marie Dix at home with husband & dogs. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Beulah Dix had a tendency either to work alone or in close partnership with a few trusted friends such as screenwriter William deMille and her writing partner of the late 1920s Bertrand Millhauser. Her work and social life revolved around a small circle centered on the Beatrice deMille household. According to her daughter’s Hollywood memoir, Hollywood When Silents Were Golden, her mother relished her role as a workmanlike writer in the early days of Hollywood: “Best of anything, she liked being with the crew, a craftsman among mutually respecting craftsmen” (71). This self-perception is reflected in Dix’s depiction in the Hollywood trade press, where she was recognized as solid and respectable, but not at all glamorous, and as one of the top writers in Hollywood in the late 1910s and early 1920s. She was thus an ideal candidate for Paramount Pictures studio to send on a 1922 tour to lecture on the positive side of Hollywood, part of an industry initiative to counter stories involving the Fatty Arbuckle sex scandal and the murder of William Desmond Taylor (Scott 120-123).

Belulah Marie Dix (w) reads script of The Country Doctor (1927) w/ husband in their Hollywood home NYPL

Belulah Marie Dix reads script for The Country Doctor (1927) with husband in their Hollywood home. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Lantern slide, The Country Doctor (1927), Beulah Marie Dix (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

According to her daughter, Dix did not like this too visible, too scandalous Hollywood culture. She especially disliked the practice of trading on social connections in order to secure work since she herself relied on talent and hard work (68). Dix’s smaller social circle and sense of professional standards might have led to her failure to make a smooth transition to the sound era. Indeed, her daughter surmised that her close association with the deMilles, who were successful but controversial, hurt her mother at contract renewal time with Paramount in 1924. She left Paramount and joined the new DeMille Studios in 1925. According to Scott, Paramount executives probably “took for granted she was part of the deMille group, and would not be happy or productive if left behind” (150). During the sound era, Dix continued to write for Hollywood, but more often as a freelance anonymous script doctor. We know little about how Dix felt about the trajectory of her screenwriting career because she left no personal reflections. Her life and career are described by others, such as her daughter, who herself became an industry writer, as well as by more famous coworkers and their biographers, the most notable of which were producer-director Cecil B. DeMille and his brother William. These portrayals converge in an image of Dix as a solid writer, proud of her craft, her work ethic, and her contribution to a new art form, the silent motion picture.

See also: Clara Beranger, Ouida BergèreBeatrice deMille, Julia Crawford Ivers,  Jeanie Macpherson, Eve Unsell, “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

deMille, William C. Hollywood Saga. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1939.

Holliday, Wendy. “Hollywood and Modern Women: Screenwriting, Work Culture, and Feminism, 1910-1940.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University, 1995.

Horn, Tamara. “Belulah Marie Dix.”American National Biography Online (February 2000): n.p. http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-02074.html

Scott, Evelyn Flebbe. Hollywood When Silents Were Golden. New York: McGraw Hill, 1972.

Archival Paper Collections:

Beulah Marie Dix clippings files. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Beulah Marie Dix Flebbe papers, 1885-1966. University of Oregon Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives.

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

William DeMille Papers, 1899-1940. New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.

Citation

Holliday, Wendy. "Beulah Marie Dix." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-rr4x-p297>

Dorothy Davenport Reid

by Mark Lynn Anderson

When she moved to Southern California as an actress with the Nestor Film Company in late 1911, Dorothy Davenport became one of the first members of the early film colony soon to be known as Hollywood. One early biography appearing in Moving Picture Stories reported that the actress had remained with the eastern branch of that company until late 1912 (31). However, a photograph in the Los Angeles Public Library shows the personnel of the Nestor Company in Pasadena, California, on December 23, 1911, with Dorothy Davenport a prominent member of the stock company. While at Nestor, which soon became a unit of Universal Pictures, she met actor Wallace Reid, whom she married in October of 1913. Both were popular players at Universal during the mid-teens, but Reid’s career accelerated after 1915 when he signed a long-term contract with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company and starred in a number of Cecil B. DeMille films, the year before the company merger that produced Famous-Players Lasky. Davenport Reid performed screen work less and less after giving birth to a son in 1917, though she was often featured in fan magazine stories about the Reids’ domestic life, like the 1921 Photoplay article “Where Bill Lives!”

Dorothy Davenport Reid (a/p/d) with Wally Reid and children. MOMA

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

Frame enlargement Human Wreckage (1923) Dorothy Davenport Reid (w) PCMA

Frame enlargement, Human Wreckage (1923). 

Ad Human Wreckage (1923) Dorothy Davenport Reid (w) PCMA

Ad Human Wreckage (1923).

Broken Laws (1924) Dorothy Davenport Reid (a/p/d). PCMA

Broken Laws (1924). Private Collection. 

Dorothy Davenport Reid (a/p/d) working on script for Dope working title for Human Wreckage

Dorothy Davenport Reid working on script for Dope (working title for Human Wreckage). Private Collection. 

Dorothy Davenport Reid (a/p/d). PCMA

Dorothy Davenport Reid. Private Collection.

Dorothy Davenport Reid (a/p/d). AMPAS

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

Dorothy Davenport Reid (a/p/d) w/ son and dog. PCMA

Dorothy Davenport Reid  with son and dog. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. 

Wallace Reid’s international stardom was the context for Davenport Reid’s emergence as a motion picture author in the mid-1920s. When the nation’s newspapers reported that Wallace Reid was a drug addict and severely ill in a sanitarium, Davenport Reid became the chief interpreter of her husband’s illness. When Reid died on January 18, 1923, she quickly returned to the screen to make Human Wreckage (1923), a film about the tragic consequences of the illegal trade in narcotics. While she performed the role of a drug addict’s wife in Human Wreckage, her relation to the production was far more extensive than that of a featured player, yet the question of her “authorship” of this and of the two subsequent social problem films credited to her, Broken Laws (1924) and The Red Kimona (1925), remains a critical problem for women’s film history. Human Wreckage is a lost film high on the list of “most wanted” from the silent era. Research establishing the specific contributions Dorothy Reid made to these film productions would be welcomed, though a far more important historical task is determining the political and ideological contexts for her emergence as a unique social authority involved in filmmaking in the late silent period. Each of the three films was promoted in fan magazines and newspapers as Mrs. Wallace Reid’s personal statement on a particular social issue—drug addiction, juvenile delinquency, prostitution—yet none were officially directed or written by Davenport Reid. The first two films were made under contract with the Thomas Ince Company, but after Ince died mysteriously in 1924, Broken Laws was copyrighted as a “Mrs. Wallace Reid Production.” Mrs. Wallace Reid Productions then produced The Red Kimona, but according to advertisements in the 1925 and 1926 Film Daily Year Book, her company also claimed the two Ince pictures as its own. Each film begins with a short prologue in which Mrs. Wallace Reid, in a direct address to the film audience, endorses the motion picture as an important message about a matter of public concern. Davenport Reid used these prologues to advocate for particular social policies, institutional responses, and changes in popular attitudes.

Davenport Reid’s ability to become a “film author” rested, in part, on her ability to speak from the sometimes contradictory positions of Hollywood producer, actress, widow, mother, and social reformer. Despite the challenge that the social problem films pose for received notions of women’s film authorship, there has been little sustained research on these unusual works, their reception, or Davenport Reid’s attempt to innovate alternative production practices and forms of authorship. Most historians have simply attempted to settle the question of her creative contributions by recourse to conventional divisions of studio labor (Brownlow 1990, 91; Foster 1998, 317; Slide 1996b, 89). Significantly, when Gabrielle Darley sought $50,000 in personal damages because The Red Kimona had used her life story and name without permission, neither Walter Lang, who received screen credit for directing, nor Adela Rogers St. Johns, on whose story the film was based, nor Dorothy Arzner, who had written the scenario, was named in the suit. Instead, producer Davenport Reid, cameraman James Diamond, and production manager Cliff Houghton were the named defendants.

Davenport Reid eventually took conventional screen credit as a director on Linda (1929), a backwoods melodrama about a young woman forfeiting her education and emotional happiness to oblige the social expectations of various men. The extant film presents an interesting portrayal of strong female friendships and loyalties. Linda, played by Helen Foster, accepts an arranged marriage to a much older man in an effort to save her mother from her father’s violent attacks. In its sensational treatment of domestic violence, arranged marriage, and bigamy, Linda looks toward the exploitation films Davenport Reid would direct for independent producer Wills Kent in the early 1930s; however, in its portrayal of Linda as a potential social worker who ultimately achieves her moral authority through reaffirming her domestic and maternal responsibilities, the motion picture looks back to the social problem films of the mid-1920s and the vicissitudes of Davenport Reid’s own public and professional identities.

Some historians have argued that Darley’s lawsuit against Davenport Reid put an end to her company, but Los Angeles County court records show that the privacy case, initially decided in Dorothy Davenport Reid’s favor, was not reversed on appeal until 1931, after the company had disappeared. Explanations of its failure might be best sought in Davenport’s Reid’s unusual and precarious position in the film industry. Rather than establishing an oeuvre of film directorial efforts, more research is needed on the alternative business and production practices Davenport Reid made possible, as well as on the cultural politics of her self-promotion as a social authority. A more systematic consideration of publicity materials should aid the latter project, while the former might be fruitfully explored if business records of her company are found, though both the trade journals and the Thomas Ince papers already indicate her exceptional place in the industry in the mid-1920s.

See also: Dorothy Arzner, Adela Rogers St. Johns

Bibliography

Anderson, Mark Lynn. “Shooting Star: Understanding Wallace Reid and His Public.” Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal. Eds. Adrienne McLean and David A. Cook. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 83-106.

Brownlow, Kevin. Behind the Mask of Innocence. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Davenport Reid, Dorothy. “Wife Pens Dramatic Story of Wallace Reid’s Drug Ruin.” San Francisco Examiner (31 Dec. 1922): 6.

“Dorothy Davenport.” Moving Picture Stories (3 Jan. 1913): 31.

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, Katrien Jacobs, and Amy L. Unterburger. Women Filmmakers & Their Films. Detroit: St. James Press, 1998.

“Melvin v. Davenport Reid.” Civil No. 346. Fourth Appellate Court of Cal. 28 February 1931.

Slide, Anthony. The Silent Feminists: America’s First Women Directors. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

“Where Bill Lives!” Photoplay 20:4 (October 1921): 50-51.

Archival Paper Collections:

Thomas Ince Papers, 1913-1964. Library of Congress.

Wallace Reid, Jr. papers, 1887-1975. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Anderson, Mark Lynn. "Dorothy Davenport Reid." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kae2-7d44>

Grace Cunard

by Jennifer M. Bean

Known to her fans as a daring jewel thief, an athletic reporter with a nose for news, and a circus tamer of rather ferocious cats, Grace Cunard (Harriet Milfred Jeffries) performed in over one hundred silent-era films, including five of Universal Studio’s most popular adventure serials in the 1910s. She was also known as “The Master Pen,” a thinly veiled pseudonym that graced announcements and title cards for her first serial story and star vehicle, Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery (1914). Although the exact number of screenplays, stories, and scenarios for which she received credit is unknown, the publicity surrounding her seven-year career at Universal stressed her capacity to “write everything” in which she appeared, and the number likely tallies around fifty films, according to a 1915 biography in Feature Movie Magazine, in what could be seen as a publicity inflation to impress Cunard’s fans (44). Other sources, however, offer alternative calculations. The same year, for instance, reporter Hugh Weir touted Cunard as a “twenty-two year old girl” who is also the “Author of Over Four Hundred Scenarios!” (26).

Cunard_CCP_FIGX_WFP-CUN04

Grace Cunard portrait. Courtesy of the BFI National Archive. 

Grace Cunard (p/d/w/a) PC

Grace Cunard portrait. Private Collection.

Jack Holt, Francis Ford, & Grace Cunard (w/a) The Broken Coin (1915) PCJY

Jack Holt, Francis Ford, & Grace Cunard, The Broken Coin (1915). Private Collection.

Grace Cunard (p/d/w/a) BFI

Grace Cunard in a car. Courtesy of the BFI National Archive. 

publicity still Grace Cunard (a) and Francis Ford The Return of Twins' Double (1914) WFHI

Publicity still, Grace Cunard (a/w/d/p) and Francis Ford in The Return of Twins’ Double (1914). Courtesy Women and Film History International.

Cunard_CCP_FIG117_WFP-CUN06

Grace Cunard, Adventures of Peg O’ the Ring (1916). Private Collection. 

Cunard’s potent celebrity status in the 1910s cannot be considered outside of her partnership with Francis Ford (born Francis Feeney, the elder brother of Western director John Ford), whom she met in 1912. Cunard’s acting and writing talents, as well as her unerring taste for the popular, merged well with Ford’s directorial experience, and in 1913 the team joined Universal Pictures together. Unlike other celebrity couples at the time who were married—Lucille McVey (Mrs. Sidney Drew) and Sidney Drew, Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, and Ida May Park and Joseph de Grasse—Cunard and Ford never married, nor did publicity hint at a budding romance between the two. At times, Ford was cast in the role of the young woman’s mentor and enthusiast, especially in stories that circulated regarding the initial formation of their working partnership. As Cunard recalled about their start in Photoplay in 1914: “Mr. Ford seemed to grasp intuitively the fact that I had something in me and so encouraged me that I played his leads and set to work to both assist him and write the Photoplays we used” (Shaw 38). But by 1915 the story of the Cunard-Ford team was most often relayed as a tale of two energetic artists mutually engaged in a collaborative endeavor. Their collaboration occasionally extended to directorial duties as well, especially during periods of acutely hectic production schedules. As Moving Picture Weekly describes their method of working: “When Mr. Ford is in a scene Miss Cunard directs, and when she appears without her virile co-star, Mr. Ford takes charge” (Weir 27). Of the team’s relatively few extant films, Cunard received codirectorial credit for Unmasked (1917), as well as for four episodes of the serial chapter-play The Purple Mask (1917).

Lauded as making the most “popular” of films, Cunard’s stories tend toward the fantastic, and her female characters tend toward the fantastically unconventional. In 1914 Cunard created “My Lady Raffles,” a jewel thief with a delightfully reckless charm who first appeared in short films like The Mysterious Leopard Lady (1914) and The Mystery of the White Car (1914). Cunard costarred in the Raffles films with Ford, and then joined Ford in directing and starring in The Twins’ Double series (1914), described by Photoplay in 1914 as “remarkable photoplay successes” in which “Miss Cunard not only takes the part of twin sisters, but of an adventuress who impersonates them as well, and she appears in several scenes as all three at once” (Shaw 38). The disarming nature of Cunard’s role as “at once” twin sisters as well as their impersonation reveals her fascination with stories of split, hypnotized, or double personalities. The Adventures of Peg o’ the Ring (1916), for instance, Cunard’s fourth serial for Universal, tells the story of a young woman who is subject to mad impulses at intervals and begins to scratch and tear at everything in sight. The opening episode explains that Peg’s psychical distress was inherited from her mother who was infected while she was pregnant.

It is possible to see Cunard’s playful rewriting of her favorite roles, and her recurrent self-referentiality, as another form of doubling. In 1916 the elusive Lady Raffles reappeared in a film conspicuously titled Lady Raffles Returns (1916), while a female heiress in Paris with a similar knack for thievery and a heart of gold headed up the cast of The Purple Mask. It is interesting to consider these character traits in the light of Cunard’s own written treatment for the team’s second serial, The Broken Coin (1915), as quoted by Robert Birchard:

Kitty Gray, an American newspaper woman and star reporter on a popular newspaper, finds, in an old curiosity shop, half of a broken coin. On this half of the coin is inscribed several words in Latin, which, when translated, read as follows: Underneath/flagstone f/north corner/torture cham/be found/treasures/valuables/the kingd/Gretzhoffen/Mi. Her curiosity aroused by the word ‘Gretzhoffen,’ Kitty goes home and looks up an old article of hers written sometime ago regarding the kingdom of Gretzhoffen and its threatened bankruptcy. Thinking she has material for a good story, she sees the editor of the paper and wagers one year’s salary with him: if she does not come back with a good story regarding the hidden treasures of the Kingdom of Gretzhoffen, he can donate her salary to charity… (80–81).

Slide, Grace Cunard. PCJR

Lantern slide, Grace Cunard. Private Collection. 

It is hardly coincidental that Kitty Gray exhibits many of the off-screen talents of Cunard herself, who was known at the time as a “star” writer with an eye for a “good story.” Moreover, whereas Kitty remembers “an old article of hers…regarding the kingdom of Gretzhoffen,” Cunard’s audience would have remembered a short film she wrote, released just six months earlier, in which she played both the pseudonymous title role of The Madcap Queen of Gredshoffen as well as a girl who “looked like” the queen.

The intrepid behavior of Cunard’s zany female characters made her a favorite among audiences at the time, whose numbers reportedly stretched across Australia, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Japan, and India, where Moving Picture Weekly reported in 1916 that the Ford-Cunard team in The Broken Coin was enjoying huge popularity (31). The stunt work demanded by the scenarios Cunard wrote took its toll, and the numerous physical injuries that she sustained on set required several production breaks during the late 1910s. Meanwhile, Moving Picture Weekly would circulate upbeat Universal studio publicity like the story that “rope climbing keeps her fit” (31). Around this time, Universal head Carl Laemmle reportedly found the Ford-Cunard team increasingly difficult to work with, and in 1919 Cunard found herself paired with muscleman Elmo Lincoln in a jungle-adventure serial, Elmo, the Mighty (1919). Although Cunard and Ford united on several more projects in the 1920s, their stardom faded quickly. Ford kept busy in the ensuing three decades, appearing as secondary characters in a variety of films ranging from Charley Chan at the Circus (1936) to The Quiet Man (1952). Although Cunard played bit parts throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, including her appearance as one of the villagers in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), she did not receive screen credit. The industry’s transition to synchronized sound and a new generation of female celebrities “crowded” her “out of stardom,” as she put it for readers of the New Movie Magazine in 1932. Even so she confessed, “[s]ome weeks the postman brings me a thousand inquiries from the fans who remember Grace Cunard and her hair-raising adventures” (39). Cunard died at the Motion Picture Country Home on January 19, 1967.

See also: Lucille McVey (Mrs. Sidney Drew), Lois WeberIda May Park

Bibliography

“The Biography of Grace Cunard.” Feature Movie Magazine vol. 2, no. 6 (25 June 1915): 44-46, 58.

Birchard, Robert. “The Adventures of Francis Ford and Grace Cunard.” American Cinematographer (July 1993): 77-82.

Cunard, Grace. “Crowded Out of Stardom.” The New Movie Magazine (February 1932): 38-39, 117-18, 932.

------. “Lucille Love, The Girl of Mystery.” [written under the pseudonym, “The Master Pen.”] Universal Weekly vol. 4, no. 15 (April. 1914): 4-5, 16.

------. “Mademoiselle Granier.” Photoplay (April 1914): 31-37.

Everett, Eldon K. “The Great Grace Cunard-Francis Ford Mystery.” Classic Film Collector 39 (Summer 1973): 22-25.

Shaw, Royal H. “Clever Grace Cunard.” Photoplay (April 1914): 38.

Weir, Hugh C. “She Has Written Four Hundred Scenarios: A Chat with Grace Cunard.” Moving Picture Weekly vol. 1, no. 10 (September 1915): 26-27.

------.“Ford-Cunard Popularity Wave Hits India.” Moving Picture Weekly vol. 2, no. 22 (May 1916): 31.

------.“Rope Climbing Keeps Grace Cunard Fit.” Moving Picture Weekly vol. 2 no. 24 (June 1916): 31, 35.

Archival Paper Collections:

Grace Cunard clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Bean, Jennifer M. "Grace Cunard." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zpaq-rp55>

Lenore Coffee

by Robin Blaetz

Lenore Coffee was a screenwriter in Hollywood from the late silent period through the end of the studio system. Although she wrote original stories, titles, and scenarios and was known for her adaptations of popular women’s fiction, she specialized in repairing the work of others. As a writer called upon to correct and reformulate the work of such well-known figures as Cecil B. DeMille and Irving Thalberg, her often unacknowledged and remarkably long-lived voice is worth examining more closely.

Lenore Coffee (w) PC

Lenore Coffee with baby. Private Collection.

Information about Coffee comes largely from a Patrick McGilligan’s interview, carried out at the end of her life, and Storyline, her own detailed memoir of the silent period. Coffee grew up in San Francisco and began her career in 1919, after responding successfully to a Garson Studio advertisement in the Motion Pictures Exchange Herald for a story for the actress Clara Kimball Young, which was produced as The Better Wife (1919). After selling her first scenario to the first producer who saw it and moving to Hollywood in 1919, Coffee worked for Louis B. Mayer for a short time before beginning her actual employment with director-producer Harry Garson, for whom she was, at one time, as she tells us in Storyline, “the only girl assistant director in the business” (55). For Mayer, Coffee’s first job was to tell and to sell the producer’s favorite stories to potential actors; for Garson, Coffee also performed the duties of what was later called a continuity girl, reading manuscripts, making cutting notes, and writing titles (Coffee 1973, 17–18). Although Coffee had been offered a job “tightening and editing and titling” by Irving Thalberg when he was first brought to Hollywood by Carl Laemmle to work at Universal, she preferred working with writers rather than producers, she says in her interview with McGilligan (140). Coffee spent two years working with the playwright Bayard Veiller at Metro, considering it her apprenticeship as a dramatic writer. While working on DeMille’s The Volga Boatman in 1924, she married the British novelist and director William Joyce Cowen, whose surname she sometimes used.

Lantern slide, The Volga Boatman (1926), Lenore Coffee (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

In Storyline, Lenore Coffee calls herself a “fixer-upper” and recalls that she received $1,000 for a week to ten days of labor per project (62). She describes her ability to see what was wrong with a film or a first cut as “instinct, like having an ear for music” (McGilligan 1986, 142). Perhaps her strict convent education, in which she specialized in Latin, provided both a unique body of knowledge and a keen critical eye. For example, when asked by Samuel Goldwyn to make sense of a film in production under George Fitzmaurice, Coffee came up with the notion of le droit de seigneur to explain why bandits were kidnapping a girl in a wedding dress (McGilligan 1986, 142). Coffee wrote in her biography that she admired the creative naiveté and enormous raw talent of the early, often uneducated film pioneers, and tried to approach her work with the same uncluttered sense of wonder (33). The degree to which she was at home in Hollywood is evident in a story that she told about receiving a call one afternoon from Thalberg, who had two hundred extras standing by and wanted her to write a speech for his star—a request she fulfilled in half an hour’s time (Coffee 1973, 124). However, Coffee’s own stories about women’s experiences were less well received. For instance, Daytime Wives (1923), which was, to quote Coffee, “a very modern idea for that time, the oddly intimate relationship between a man and his secretary,” received an inordinately long and scathing notice in Variety (Coffee 1973, 86). Daytime Wives (1923), still extant, is a domestic melodrama with a twist, its title a reference to the secretary of the husband in the story who efficiently runs his life and, in this case, steps in when a crisis ensues, in place of the errant wife who spends the money that the husband and secretary work to earn. The secretary helps to reconcile the husband and his repentant wife, even though she is in love with the husband. The difference between Daytime Wives and a film like the also surviving For Alimony Only (1926), which Coffee wrote for Cecil B. DeMille, is in the typage of the female characters. While Daytime Wives features a positive, intelligent, altruistic woman who is finally rewarded with marriage, For Alimony features a greedy, scheming wife who is tricked out of her alimony in the end, and who seems to deserve the gigolo who uses her for her money. We are led to wonder whether in this period a correlation can be found between negative reviews and the more challenging and disturbing films that dealt with the realities of women’s lives.

Lantern slide, Sherlock Brown (1922), Lenore Coffee (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Lantern slide, The Right That Failed (1922), Lenore Coffee (w). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Much of Coffee’s later career was spent at Warner Brothers, starting in 1938, where Coffee recalled that she was the only woman writing (McGilligan 1986, 147). Her most notable achievement at Warner Brothers was the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Four Daughters, cowritten with Julius J. Epstein in 1938. Coffee wrote one play, “Family Portrait,” which had its Broadway debut in 1939 and one novel, Another Time, Another Place, in 1956, which, according to the Los Angeles Times, aimed “to show that a woman can be a career woman with lots of brains and have no sense.” In 1959, Coffee moved to England, but in 1981 returned to live in retirement in the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, California. Two children, Sabina Thorne Johnson and Gary Cowen, survived her (F7). Looking back at her career, Coffee claimed that she felt “nothing but pleasure. If you can work forty years in Hollywood without getting your throat cut, you can count yourself lucky” (McGilligan 1986, 150). Coffee’s unassuming attitude, evident in her biography, in which she says she was just grateful to be working, belies the influence that she must have had in the industry. Although only seven of the eighty-five films on which Coffee claims to have worked in the silent period are extant, many more silent as well as sound era scripts may survive since Coffee wrote scenarios for twenty-two producing companies in the silent era, including the largest—Metro, Universal Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, and First National (which later became Warner Brothers)—as well as for the short-lived independent star-producer companies named for Kimball Young and Anita Stewart.

See also: Anita Stewart, Clara Kimball Young

Bibliography

“Another Time, Another Place.” Rev. Los Angeles Times (1959). n.p. Lenore Coffee clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Coffee, Lenore. Another Time, Another Place. New York: Crown Publishers. 1956.

------. Storyline: Recollections of a Hollywood Screenwriter. London: Cassels, 1973.

“Daytime Wives.” Rev. Variety (30 Aug. 1923): n.p. Lenore Coffee clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Lenore Coffee, Writer of Film Romances, Dies.” Obit. Los Angeles Times (5 July 1984): F7.

McGilligan, Patrick. “Lenore Coffee: Easy Smiler, Easy Weeper.” Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 133-150.

Archival Paper Collections:

Lenore Coffee clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Warner Bros. Archives. University of Southern California, Cinematic Arts Library.

William DeMille papers, 1899-1940. New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

Cecil B. DeMille Archives. Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library.

Citation

Blaetz, Robin. "Lenore Coffee." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-smv5-sq07>

Mrs. George Randolph Chester

by Christina Lane

For Lillian Chester, who wrote under the name Mrs. George Randolph Chester, the experience of “collaboration” guided not only her encounter with the Hollywood industry, but almost every facet of her professional and personal life. She was a very prolific writer, coauthoring with her husband, George Randolph Chester (1869–1924), a well-known playwright and short story author. Her first publication was their 1914 coauthored book, The Ball of Fire, and they remained a successful team until Mr. Chester’s premature death of a heart attack in 1924, at which point she apparently stopped writing altogether (Smith 127). In addition to writing hundreds of short stories and numerous stage plays with Mr. Chester, Lillian labored alongside him in the scenario department at the Vitagraph Company from 1916 to 1921. She also wrote with him for a stint at Universal Film Manufacturing Company, from 1922–1923, collaborating on such films as The Flaming Hour (1922) and Scarlet Car (1923). At Vitagraph, Lillian worked as a writer and editor until taking on the role of codirector for The Son of Wallingford (1921), which she helped shoot, title, and edit with her husband.

The Son of Wallingford (1921), the only motion picture directed by the Chesters, is presumed lost. The largest concentration of information about the film—and about Lillian Chester —is held in the George Randolph Chester papers at Columbus’s Ohioana Library. These clippings files, although containing scant information about her, were used in an Ohioana Quarterly article by Joe Florenski that offers few other bibliographic sources. The Son of Wallingford was based on the one hundred and fifth and final installment of their literary serial, which was launched by Mr. Chester in 1908 with Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. The series, known as “the Wallingford Stories,” followed the title character—a clever “confidence man” who tricked small-town folks out of their money—we learn from a 1915 New York Times article (SM19). One reviewer quoted in Florenski described Wallingford as “something essential[ly] American… as truly native as ice water, the city manager plan, corn on the cob and the cafeteria” (214). Later installments incorporated the title character’s adopted son, Toad Jessup, who offered a counterpoint with his honesty and scruples (Leventhal n.p.). The Son of Wallingford starred Wilfred North (J. Rufus Wallingford), Tom Gallery (Jimmy Wallingford), Antrim Short (Toad Jessup), and George Webb (“Blackie Daw”). Obviously exaggerating, given the figures it reports, a Vitagraph press release boasts that the codirectors used four thousand actors and achieved “the greatest engineering feat in screen history” (Chester papers, OH). Not only did the filmmakers create a massive set piece with a throng of burning oil wells, but they also built a man-made lake in rural California, according to a Photoplay review (67). This same brief item, however, is critical, saying that the Chester story could have been made better by another director, and asserting that writing—not filmmaking—was Chester’s forte: “Mr. Chester is an author, not a director. He furnishes excellent material, but he does not know how to project it onto the screen. At times, thrilling, at times disappointing—at all times, [Wallingford is] just a motion picture” (67). Mrs. Chester’s involvement was not mentioned in reviews, though her name is listed in all official credits. Her name was also included with his in the advertisements, one example of which is in Oshkosh, Washington’s Daily Northwestern News.

Three items found in the Ohioana papers, however, focus exclusively on Lillian Chester’s role. Two are press items that appear to have been published in August 1921, while the third is an unpublished 1924 personality sketch. The first press item, which includes a small paragraph and a large portrait of her, is titled “Wife of Author Assists Him in Productions.” It credits Mrs. Chester as collaborator on the Wallingford short stories and remarks that she is currently “assisting Mr. Chester in titling, editing, and cutting” The Son of Wallingford. The second article, “Husband and Wife Work as One,” contains more, claiming that Lillian created a major character, Blackie Daw (one of the more colorful and amoral in the literary series). In a telling statement, her husband remarks, “Mrs. Chester and I work together as one person. We make an ideal combination for we really collaborate and she should have the credit for it” (n.p.). So Mr. Chester recognized his wife’s contribution, and she, although still subordinating her identity to his as “Mrs. George Randolph Chester,” painted herself as full creative partner. She described their situation as if they were coconspirators, creating for themselves a domestic and artistic universe inhabited by fictional characters in imagined scenarios. The third item in Ohioana’s files—Muriel Levanthal’s 1924 twelve-page personality sketch—quotes Chester as explaining that “All our characters were part of the family… we knew them and what they would do if with us, just as much as we knew any of our friends.”

Mr. and Mrs. George Randolph Chester (d/w/a) ad Wid's Year Book 1921

Mr. and Mrs. George Randolph Chester ad, Wid’s Year Book (1921).

From these statements, they seemed to make few distinctions between their private and professional lives… and the personal life of the couple had begun with considerable drama. Mrs. Chester was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and met her future husband there when she was a widow. At this time, she was Lillian Hauser DeRimo, and he was married to his first wife. An article in the New York Times in December 1911 provides the semi-scandalous details of their eventual marriage. It was in 1910 or 1911 that all three moved to New York City, and Lillian was reportedly the first Mrs. Chester’s “most intimate friend” (18). The friend would soon discover her husband’s affair with Lillian. She filed for divorce; George and Lillian left for Europe to work at Gainsborough Studios in London, marrying soon thereafter. Upon docking in New York in the fall of 1911, they found that the divorce decree had not been finalized before Chester’s second wedding, putting their marriage in jeopardy, according to the New York Times in an article titled “Novelist Chester Remarried Too Soon” (6). Although Mr. Chester had two children from his first marriage, he and Lillian had none of their own, we learn from the New York Times article on his will at the time of his death in 1924 (13).

One of the most fascinating archival finds in the George Randolph Chester papers is a series of poems and valentines that George wrote to Lillian over the years. These passages are flowery in tone and accompanied by his own drawings of cupids and arrows piercing a schoolboy’s heart. On February 14, 1921, the year The Son of Wallingford was made, he wrote:

A girl both feminine and fearless, And peerless. Without whom Paradise were cheerless. Me, I’m for Lilly Chester!

Although her work as codirector of The Son of Wallingford is significant, Mrs. Chester was primarily a studio writer and editor. Here is where we would like to know more about the Chesters’ manner of working together in the 1916–1921 Vitagraph years. It would be well worth examining her role in adapting and writing scenarios during the years they spent in the scenario department working with Marguerite Bertsch, Catherine Carr, James Oliver Curwood, Lucien Hubbard, and George Plympton. We know that Mr. and Mrs. Chester coedited at least twelve films, most often recutting previous Vitagraph films for renewed release. An intriguing question concerns the division of labor in husband-and-wife editing teams, and the Chesters could here be compared to Katharine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell, another silent era coediting and cowriting husband-and-wife team. One wonders as well about their years at Universal Pictures, 1922–1923, just after the heyday of the “Universal Women,” but coinciding with the years when Carl Laemmle and R. H. Cochrane ran the studio and the young Irving Thalberg was the new head of production. A 1922 Moving Picture World article offers important clues in its announcement that Universal signed Mr. Chester on as supervising editor to preside over the producing units of films for Frank Mayo and powerful star Gladys Walton (614). The gender composition of the scenario department may have been changing, with more male writers (Shannon Fife, George Hively, Edward J. Montague) and Doris Schroeder the one other woman.

Lantern slide, Slaves of Pride (1920), Mrs. George Randolph Chester (e). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

Mrs. George Randolph Chester’s career came to an end with her husband’s death from a heart attack in New York City in 1924. Having tired of Hollywood, the couple had recently returned east to focus on short stories and stage plays, but also to investigate the possibility of independently producing their own material on film (Florenski 216). This venture was not to involve their directing, which they never attempted again after Wallingford. Instead, according to a Moving Picture World article in 1922, they had turned their attention to writing a new series of literary fiction featuring Isador Iskovitch, an irrepressible Hollywood magnate, no doubt drawn from real studio executives the Chesters had known firsthand (614).

Lillian Chester died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on June 7, 1961, and was laid to rest next to Mr. Chester a few days later in the Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, according to cemetery records. Almost nothing is known about the intervening years between the 1920s and her death, and there is no evidence that she remarried. The George Randolph Chester files files indicate that as late as 1955 she was trying to bring the Wallingford series to film and television. The Son of Wallingford was remade in 1931 as The New Adventures of Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production starring William Haines. The 1921 version of Black Beauty, directed at Vitagraph by David Smith, is the only one of the titles that the Chesters cowrote known to exist.

See also: Marguerite Bertsch, Mrs. Sidney Drew, Katharine Hilliker

Bibliography

“Author Chester Left $3000 Estate to Wife.” The New York Times (15 March 1924): 13.

Florenski, Joe. “From Shelf to Screen: Ohio Writers and the Movies.” Ohioana Quarterly vol. 39, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 214-218, 303-308.

“George Randolph Chester is Vitagraph Script Chief.” Moving Picture World (8 Feb. 1919): 757.

“Mr. and Mrs. George Randolph Chester’s ‘Son of Wallingford.” Adv. Daily Northwestern News (21 March 1922): 9.

“Mrs. George R. Chester Gets Final Decree.” The New York Times (3 Dec. 1911): 18.

Kilmer, Joyce. “Americans Like to be Fooled: George Randolph Chester Says They Have Made a Hero.” The New York Times (6 June 1915): SM19.

Leventhal, Muriel L. “George Randolph Chester: A Personality Sketch.” Unpublished manuscript, Chester Papers (Feb. 1924), 1-12. Ohioana Library.

“Novelist Chester Remarried Too Soon.” The New York Times (2 Nov. 1911): 6.

Smith, Geoffrey Dayton. American Fiction, 1901-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

“The Son of Wallingford.” Rev. Photoplay (Nov. 1921): 67.

“Universal Signs George R. Chester.” Moving Picture World (8 April 1922): 614.

Archival Paper Collections:

George Randolph Chester material. Ohioana Library.

Citation

Lane, Christina. "Mrs. George Randolph Chester." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-bkjr-f413>

Adele S. Buffington

by Matthew Hipps

Building on her early success in silent cinema, Adele S. Buffington enjoyed a long and successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter. Unfortunately, very little has been written about Buffington’s career, especially as it relates to her roots in silent cinema. Born Adele Burgdorfer in St. Louis, she began working as a movie theatre ticket cashier as a teenager. During her three years as a cashier, she was able to  study numerous films on screen before her first attempts at writing a scenario of her own (McCreadie 58). She also took notice of the movie patrons as they flooded into the theatre to see their favorite characters on the screen. She is quoted in the Ft. Wayne, Indiana, newspaper as saying: “I had always wanted to write, but never had the nerve to try before. But there came the hour when I simply had to do it—and I did. Every night when my work in the cage was done, I went to the library and read, getting details and atmosphere for the scenes I had in mind—for the background against which I wanted those dear people I knew to move and make drama. Then when everyone else was asleep, I would write and write” (qtd. in McCreadie 58).

Buffington’s career officially began at the young age of nineteen when she sold her first script, La Petite (1919), to an independent studio for three hundred dollars and was subsequently hired to work for Thomas H. Ince (Lowe 98). After writing L’Apache (1919) for Ince, which appears to be her first produced script, the Washington Post reported Buffington as being one of Ince’s “recent scenario discoveries,” continuing, “Mr. Ince has great confidence in Miss Buffington’s ability” (A4).

Adele Buffington (w) The Photoplaywright's League of America, 1921-1922 PCRK

Adele Buffington in The Photoplaywright’s League of America, 1921-1922. Private Collection.

Although she worked steadily during the silent years, Buffington received very little coverage in the press. Even writing credits associated with her films were sparse in newsprint at the time, offering a clue as to why Buffington had such a low public profile as she began her career and slowly gained a foothold in the industry. In 1924, the Los Angeles Times briefly featured Buffington in an article entitled “Beauty and Brains Go Together Here,” which claims that her work in the industry helped disprove the “beautiful but dumb theory.” The article thus works this cliché: “Miss Buffington, who is 24 years of age, says that she’s sorry she doesn’t look intellectual,” and quotes her as saying, “I suppose I’ll have to plaster my hair down with grease, wear huge horn-rimmed spectacles and talk the classic and evolution of drama and motion pictures, and tell them I am 44 instead of 24” (C33).

In the year 1924, Buffington produced many scripts and would become known for her productivity, especially during her years writing Westerns, although many would not have been aware of this since she was also known to use the pseudonyms Jesse Bowers and Colt Remington (Colton X5). She championed the creation of original screen stories at the moment when studios were open to re-evaluating the practice of buying rights for published source material. “The present demand for original stories rather than published fiction or successful stage plays is largely the result of the wise attempts producers are making to curb over-lavish expenditures,” Buffington explained. “Every large studio has numerous books on its shelves to which the film rights were purchased from time to time, only to determine later that the stories in question did not possess plots suitable for cinema presentation. Other novels and plays have been brought to the screen only after many necessary changes were made, due to the fact that the original stories owed their charm to brilliant dialogue rather than the interesting action essential to silent drama” (Whitaker C36).

Buffington worked for numerous film companies, sometimes several at a time, including Fox Film Corporation, FBO (which became RKO Radio Pictures), and Gotham Film Company. After transitioning out of the silent era and into sound, her output of Westerns increased, totaling forty-eight. She wrote the first script for the “Rough Rider” series, the script for Arizona Bound (1941), as well as scenarios for well-known Western genre actors such as Tom Mix, Buck Jones, and Tim McCoy (Lowe 98). Her last produced script was for the Western film Bullwhip (1958).

Buffington was also a founding member of the Screen Writers Guild. After being active in the All-Guild Committee to Suppress Communism during the tumultuous McCarthy era, she infamously stirred up controversy in the 1951 guild elections after circulating letters attacking guild president Karl Tunberg for allegedly being a Communist sympathizer. In Buffington’s long career she accumulated  more than one hundred and fifty writing credits, testimony to her achievement and longevity as a woman scenarist in the early motion picture industry.

Bibliography

“Beauty and Brains Go Together Here.” Los Angeles Times (14 Dec. 1924): C33.

Colton, Helen. “Meet the Gals Who Write ’Em, Not Ride ’Em.” New York Times (31 Oct. 1948): X5.

Lowe, Denise. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films, 1895-1930. New York: Haworth Press, 2005.

McCreadie, Marsha. “Pioneers.” Films in Review vol. 46, no. 1-2 (1995): 58.

“Plays and Players.” The Washington Post (22 June 1919): A4.

Whitaker, Alma. “Sugar and Spice: Original Tales Held in Vogue Now for Films.” Los Angeles Times (1 April 1928): C36.

Citation

Hipps, Matthew. "Adele S. Buffington." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-n538-1r93>

Madeline Brandeis

by Radha Vatsal

Despite subheadings that highlight Madeline Brandeis’s success and expertise in film production (“Finds Ready Market for Her Cinema Features” or “Writes Own Continuity and Attends to Details”), a 1926 Los Angeles Times article titled “Woman Makes Films for Fun,” depicts Madeline Brandeis as a wealthy hobbyist: “Will the producing of motion pictures ever become the plaything—the pastime—of the rich? This question recurred mentally again and again in the course of a conversation with Madeline Brandeis in the delightful patio of her hillside home in Hollywood.” Brandeis herself appears to be complicit with the portrayal of her work as an activity she undertakes primarily for its personal satisfactions. She is quoted saying: “‘In a sense, this picture-making is only a pastime. Perhaps I shouldn’t say just that—it was a pastime in the beginning, but the success I have had and the financial returns have been so gratifying that I know I shall make pictures from time to time as long as I live. It is fascinating and keeps one occupied’” (“Woman Makes Films” C30)

What are we, as film historians, to make of a woman who describes her work in cinema as a “pastime,” as something to be indulged in “from time to time”; who was, in addition, personally wealthy enough not to have to call any undertaking “work”; and who primarily made films for a child audience? The tension between Brandeis’s significant accomplishments during the course of her career, and the ways in which her career was portrayed (both by herself and the print media), puts into question several binaries that the field frequently relies on to evaluate filmmakers and films: professional versus amateur, full-time versus part-time, entertainment versus educational, and films for general audiences versus those aimed primarily at children.

Brandeis was born Madeline Frank on December 18, 1897. She attended the elite Miss Burke’s School in San Francisco, and in 1918, at the age of twenty-one, married millionaire department store owner E. John Brandeis (Who Was Whom? 1976, 198). She moved with him to Omaha, Nebraska, and the couple had one child, a daughter, Marie Madeline. They were divorced on April 25, 1921, just three years after their marriage. Brandeis was granted $400,000 in lieu of alimony, as well as sole custody of Marie Madeline (“Gets Divorce” 15). She died in 1937, at the age of 39, as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident that occurred while she and Marie were driving to Hollywood from New York.

Madeline Brandeis (w/p/d), dust jacket of novel, Adventure in Hollywood. PC

Madeline Brandeis, dust jacket of novel, Adventure in Hollywood. Private Collection.

Brandeis directed and financed her first film, a feature-length fairy tale with an all-child cast, The Star Prince (1918), in Chicago. In “Filming Children for Children,” writer Ruth Tildesley describes Brandeis’s foray into filmmaking as the whim of a wealthy, homesick bride who wanted something to do in order to keep herself occupied: “‘Give me a check instead of a bracelet,’ [Brandeis] urged her husband . . . ‘I’d like to make a picture’” (Tildesley 16). According to the Omaha Daily News, she made When East Meets West in 1919. This love story set in Omaha, Nebraska, appears to have been a short commissioned by the Omaha Chamber of Commerce (n.p.).

After her divorce, Brandeis moved to Hollywood where she produced and financed Not One to Spare (1924), and shortly thereafter appears to have formed her own production company, Madeline Brandeis Productions, under whose banner she produced The Shining Adventure (1925). Both films were features and both were about children. In 1927, Brandeis produced an unusual short fiction film, Young Hollywood, which featured the children of screen stars Erich von Stroheim, Jack Holt, Tim McCoy, William Desmond, Wallace and Dorothy Davenport Reid, Hobart Bosworth, Reginald Denny, and Pat O’Malley (Hall 33). Unfortunately no print remains, but the composition of the cast suggests Brandeis’s close connections to well-known Hollywood personalities of the day.

The following year, she changed directions and embarked on an educational series for Pathé, Children of All Lands. These scenic one-reel shorts were filmed on location in Europe and the US, using local casts and crews. Brandeis wrote the stories, hired her crew, edited the films, and sometimes even developed negatives (Tildesley 17). The shorts were geared towards use in the elementary-school classroom and were accompanied by companion children’s books written by Brandeis and illustrated with photographs she took on location.

While the project generated positive press coverage, and Brandeis was recognized as a contributor to World Peace by the League of Nations (Tildesley 16), it was to be her last effort as a filmmaker. She went on to achieve commercial success as a writer, adding further volumes to the Children of All Lands series (all published by Grosset & Dunlap). By the time her final novel, Adventure in Hollywood (1937), was published, none of the female protagonists even considered any behind-the-camera roles in filmmaking. The heroine of this “Story of the Movies for Girls” dreams of becoming a film star, only to reject Hollywood in the final chapter as “unreal and disappointing.” While it is tempting to read Barbara Lord’s views as substitutes for Brandeis’s own, especially given the limited scope of girls’ ambitions in this novel, we must not overlook a secondary character, Dolores Ortega, a hardworking Mexican girl, who also aspires to become a movie star, and who, unlike Babs, never loses her desire to “make it.”

Bibliography

“Gets Divorce and $400,000.” New York Times (26 April 1921): 15.

Hall, Mordaunt. Rev. Young Hollywood. New York Times  (13 Dec. 1927): 33.

Omaha Daily News (29 Jan. 1919): n.p.

Tildesley, Ruth M.  “Filming Children for Children.” The Woman's Journal (July 1929): 16.

Who Was Whom Among North American Authors, 1921-1939. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1976.

“Woman Makes Films for Fun.” Los Angeles Times (16 May 1926): C30.

Archival Paper Collections:

Madeline Brandeis clippings file. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division.

The US Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. [Files on Not One To Spare, Maud Muller, Young Hollywood, The Little Indian Weaver, The Wee Scotch Piper, The Little Dutch Tulip Girl, The Little Swiss Wood-Carver]. Library of Congress.

Citation

Vatsal, Radha. "Madeline Brandeis." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-f5kt-sa11>

Paula Blackton

by Cameron Howard

Paula Hilburn, also known as Paula Dean, was an actress, writer, director, and costume designer at the Vitagraph Company. She acted in eight films, wrote seven, directed one, and designed the costumes for three. Her earliest credit is her role as Lady Mary in Vitagraph’s Monsieur Beaucaire: The Adventures of a Gentleman of France (1905), opposite Vitagraph company cofounder J. Stuart Blackton as the wicked Duke. According to Marian Constance Blackton, J. Stuart Blackton’s daughter by his first wife, Dean and Blackton’s intimacy on screen carried over into real life. J. Stuart Blackton married Paula Dean in 1906 on the same day his divorce to his first wife became official (Trimble 26). They had a daughter, Violet Virginia, in 1910 and a son, Charles Stuart, in 1914. Marian Contsance Blackton remembers her stepmother as a “handsome, dynamic, passionate extrovert” (27) with an “ear as well as an eye for elegance.” Further, she claims that it was Paula who persuaded J. Stuart Blackton to call Vitagraph’s place of business a “studio,” rather than a “factory” (29).

Paula Blackton. USW

Paula Blackton. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Charles Stuart Blackton, J. Stuart Blackton & Violet Virginia Blackton LoC

Charles Stuart Blackton, J. Stuart Blackton & Violet Virginia Blackton. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Paula Hilburn Blackton (a/w/d/des) c.1912. LoC

Paula Hilburn Blackton c.1912. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Paula Hilburn Blackton (a/w/d/des) c. 1910. LoC

Paula Hilburn Blackton c. 1910. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

After her marriage, Blackton wrote a series of six short films called Paula Blackton’s Country Life Stories, four of which are extant. The series included The Collie Market (1917), The Diary of a Puppy (1917), The Fairy Godfather (1917), A Spring Idyll (1917), The Little Strategist (1917), and Satin and Calico (1917). These shorts all starred Paula Blackton and her two children and were directed and produced by their father J. Stuart Blackton. With The Littlest Scout (1919), according to Karen Mahar, Blackton became one of at least four women to direct at Vitagraph after 1916. (The other three were Marguerite Bertsch, Lucille McVey, and Lillian Chester [2006, 183].) She wrote, directed, and acted in the film, starring as the mother of her real-life children. The motion picture follows Charles and his Boy Scout troop as they rescue Violet from spies and hunt a German submarine. According to the Los Angeles Times, The Littlest Scout was released during “Boy Scout Week” (15). Besides her Country Life Stories and The Littlest Scout, Blackton’s only other appearance on screen was in a “symbolic tableau” in J. Stuart Blackton’s Womanhood, The Glory of a Nation (1917) in which she held Charles on her lap while Violet stood beside her (Trimble 78).

In her biography of her father, Marian Constance Blackton also tells us that Paula was also a costume designer for J. Stuart Blackton’s productions after he moved to England and started Blackton Productions, and credits her with working on The Glorious Adventure (1922), A Gipsy Cavalier (1922), and The Virgin Queen (1923). More often, however, Blackton mentions her stepmother’s “vaulting social ambitions,” and the public record of Blackton’s social life overwhelms the news of her part-time work in the film industry, which appears in retrospect to have been more of a temporary avocation (50). Her image graced the society pages, especially after J. Stuart Blackton became commodore of the Atlantic Yacht Club in 1912, and the status-conscious couple became very active in yachting and motorboat racing.   In 1911, the Washington Post in “She Saves Drowning Man,” reported that Blackton jumped overboard from her yacht “with all her wraps on” to save a drowning waiter (3). In 1914, she won a gold cup prize in a Lake George yacht race (“Baby Speed Demon” 7). In 1916, she made news spotting a shark while she and her children were swimming in Oyster Bay. The New York Times reported the phone call she made to a neighbor reporting the citing (“Big Posse” 7).

Paula Blackton with J. Stuart Blackton and their children Charles and Violet at the grand piano. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Paula Blackton’s children also had careers in motion pictures. As Marian Constance Blackton put it, “all of the Blackton brats were shoved into the production somewhere” (129). Besides appearing in all of her mother’s films, Violet Blackton had small parts in her father’s films as well: The Moonshine Trail (1919), A House Divided (1919), and The Common Cause (1919). Violet and her older half-sister Marian were made Indians for an afternoon when they visited their father on location filming The World for Sale (1918), and when Violet was twelve she played the lead character “as a child” in The Glorious Adventure (1922). She also appeared in The Virgin Queen (1923). A 1925 Los Angeles Times article about Marian Constance Blackton mentions Violet as well: “J. Stuart Blackton has another gifted daughter, Violet Virginia, who is to be educated for the stage and later the screen.” Paula Blackton, quoted in the same article as “Mrs. J. Stuart,” however, is slightly satirical about the Blackton family dynasty: “How would it look to see ‘J. Stuart Blackton presents,’ ‘Adapted by Marian Constance Blackton’ and ‘Violet Virginia Blackton starred’ all on the same program?” (28).

See also: Marian Constance Blackton, Lillian Chester, Mrs. Sidney Drew

Bibliography

“Baby Speed Demon Wins: Mrs. Paula Blackton Wins Gold Cup in Lake George Race.” The New York Times (1 Aug. 1914): 7.

“Big Posse to Hunt Oyster Bay Shark.” The New York Times (19 July 1916): 7.

“J. Stuart Blackton’s Young Daughter Wins Success in Adapting Stories to Screen.” Los Angeles Times (7 June 1925): 28.

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

“New Pictures on the Screen” Los Angeles Times (8 June 1919): 15.

“She Saves Drowning Man.” Washington Post (29 Aug. 1911): 3.

Trimble, Marian Blackton. J. Stuart Blackton: A Personal Biography by His Daughter. Ed. Anthony Slide. Metuchen N.J, and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1985.

Archival Paper Collections:

J. Stuart Blackton material, 1909-1939. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

J. Stuart Blackton papers, 1912-1962. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Howard, Cameron. "Paula Blackton." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-bryb-0h04>

Marguerite Bertsch

by Jennifer Parchesky

Little is known about the background or personal life of Marguerite Bertsch, who is quoted in a Photoplay biography in 1916 as saying that “I believe one’s work should speak for one, and if it cannot do that, the less said, the better” (160). We do know that she was well educated, having attended Columbia University, and that she worked as a public school teacher before joining the Vitagraph staff in New York. The same 1916 “thumbnail biography” also mentions playwright Beatrice deMille, mother of Cecil, as an early mentor. Beginning as a staff writer at Vitagraph in 1911, Bertsch had risen by 1914 to become editor-in-chief of the scenario department—succeeding Beta Breuil—where she was responsible for evaluating hundreds of scenarios submitted weekly to the company, selecting promising properties, and revising scripts, all while continuing to write her own original scenarios. Contemporary reports, like that in the New York Telegraph in 1916 emphasize her professional achievements and intellectual acumen, describing her as “a big woman mentally” and “delightfully feminine, but with the brain of a diplomat.” A 1916 cartoon in the Columbus Dispatch depicts her as a bespectacled figure taking a pen to an enormous pile of scenarios under the caption, “Margaret Bertsh [sic] is a scholarly woman.”

Marguerite Bertsch (d/w) RG

Marguerite Bertsch from book Theatre of Science (1914). 

In interviews, Bertsch articulates both the practical principles of cinematic craft and an idealistic vision of “the future of the photoplay,” themes that she would develop more fully in her 1917 book, How to Write for Moving Pictures: A Manual of Instruction and Information. Bertsch’s approach combines traditional principles of literary and dramatic criticism with an eye to the particular demands of motion pictures, explaining the narrative functions of techniques such as close-ups, cross-cutting, dissolves, subtitles, as well as the practical economics of production. She emphasizes the importance of audience, describing the mind and the emotion of the viewer as the “instrument” that is “played” by the screenwriter (1917, 17). Rejecting stereotypes, Bertsch insists that audiences quickly tire of hackneyed plots and cheap thrills. Yet this did not mean that she took an elite view of popular motion picture culture. Dismissing stories that appealed only to an elite “view of life” that might appeal to a scenario author and to the “limited class who think as he does,” she heralded cinema as a universal art accessible to all (1917, 252). At Vitagraph, the largest of the US film production companies, during the first seven years of her tenure, from 1911 to 1918, she certainly worked on popular genre films. Bertsch adapted mystery, adventure, and even horror stories for the screen, but she told the Brooklyn Eagle in 1916 that “the mechanical thrill and the reign of horror have passed away”, rejecting what she saw as “threadbare stories.” Since she saw so many stories as hackneyed, she placed more emphasis on character as a means to a fresh approach. Thus in her manual she advised aspiring screenwriters to seek out novelty through a careful study of the faces they encountered in everyday life (1917, 181–184).

Bertsch’s original scenarios exemplify this character-centered approach, which extended to sensational melodrama narratives in which illicit romances lead to forced marriages, illegitimate pregnancies, divorce, bigamy, blackmail, suicide, or murder. As part of a studio team she knew how to develop an emotional narrative to justify expensive spectacle, as she did with The Wreck (1913), the idea for which began with the studio’s plan to wreck two trains. Bertsch developed around the disaster a widely acclaimed drama, structured around several characters whose selfish lives set them on a collision course, as they “ rush[ed] headlong into a wreck—of career, life, and train”, the New York Evening Sun reported (10). In How to Write for Moving Pictures she insisted that audiences wanted more than a “milk and sugar diet”, that “the darker side of life, the mistakes, the soul upheavals, present a light and shade… that is fraught with the keenest dramatic interest”, and that such themes treated carefully could provide “a serious, wholesome exposition of life’s facts” (1917, 19–20). In the context of these remarks about “the darker side” we can place the sensational melodramas she wrote as well as directed, but this stated philosophy does not exactly explain the gender-bending comedy fantasy A Florida Enchantment (1914), which has survived into the present, heralded as one of the most transgressive of US films from the silent era. We would want to ask if Bertsch’s concern for the moral influence of cinema led her to tone down the controversial racial and sexual subplots of A Florida Enchantment, an extant title that in recent years has become a gay and lesbian film festival classic (Somerville 51).

In 1916, Marguerite Bertsch “left her desk to take command in the studio”, first as co-director with W. P. S. Earle and then as director on her own four films, as reported in the Columbus Dispatch. But that same year the New York Telegraph reports her as saying that “I never wrote a picture that I did not mentally direct. Every situation was as clear in my mind as though the film was already photographed”, a comment that suggests a downplaying of the distinction between screenwriting and directing. Although none of her directorial efforts survive, a New York Dramatic Mirror critic in 1917 praised the “vivid quality and marked originality ” of the films she directed (52). Motion Picture Weekly in a review of The Glory of Yolande (1917), a film about a Russian peasant who becomes a great ballerina, gives the advantage to Bertsch as a woman, and mentions story author Maibelle Heikes Justice and actress Anita Stewart as well, describing “A photoplay written by one woman, directed by another and acted by a third member of the gentler sex, should be a correct and convincing revelation of character.” But the The New York Times goes further to comment on what they find atypical for a woman writer-director in The Devil’s Prize (1916). This tangled tale of illegitimate pregnancy, abandonment, and murder, both written and directed by Bertsch is acclaimed by the Times as “treat[ing] a theme at once philosophical as well as psychological, and of a nature not generally accredited to the woman writer.”

Marguerite Bertsch’s influence as writer, director, and chief scenario editor at Vitagraph was widely acknowledged in many articles, appearing in local newspapers as well as in the trade press in her day. Yet her overall career has received no consideration as yet, especially her early work for the Famous-Players Film Company. More importantly, the reasons for leaving Vitagraph in 1918 at the peak of her career remain a mystery as do the circumstances surrounding her death. The 1930 US Census records list Bertsch as a freelance writer living with her sister, brother, and father in Brooklyn, and she seems to have done some real estate investing in the New York area between the 1920s and 1940s (“Manhattan Transfers”, “Transfers in the Bronx”). At her father’s death in 1941, she was living with her sister in Union City, New Jersey (“Wills for Probate”). A recent necrology gives the date of her death as 1967 (Doyle 1999, 23). By 1918, however, Vitagraph had lost its competitive position in the US motion picture industry as they were saddled with debt incurred in 1916 in an attempt to shore up their position, and eventually they were sold to Warner Brothers in 1925 (Abel, ed., 2005, 680). Until recently it has been assumed that none of the films Bertsch worked on had survived, although prints of two 1913 films on which she is credited as scenarist, The Diver (1913) and The Troublesome Step-Daughters (1912), with intertitles in Dutch only, have been identified in the Nederlands Filmmuseum. Their presence in a European archive can be explained by Vitagraph’s aggressive overseas distribution plan, which began when the company opened a Paris office in 1908 (Abel 2005, 680).

See alsoBeta Breuil, Beatrice deMille, Maibelle Heikes Justice, Anita Stewart, “Shaping the Craft of Screenwriting: Women Screen Writers in Silent Era Hollywood

Bibliography

Abel, Richard, ed. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. London: Routledge, 2005.

Brasell, R. Bruce. “A Seed for Change: The Engenderment of ‘A Florida Enchantment.’” Cinema Journal vol. 36, no. 4 (1997): 3-21.

“The Glory of Yolande.” Rev. Motion Picture Weekly (3 Feb. 1917): n.p. Marguerite Bertsch clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Grau, Robert. The Theatre of Science: a Volume of Progress and Achievement in the Motion Picture Industry. New York: Broadway Publishing Co., 1914.

Katterjohn, Monte M. “Thumbnail Biographies.” Photoplay (Oct. 1914): 160.

“Manhattan Transfers.” New York Times (4 Oct. 1935): 42.

“Margaret Bersh [sic] Is a Scholarly Woman.” Columbus Dispatch (8 Jul. 1916): n.p. Marguerite Bertsch clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Marguerite Bertsch, Authoress and Producer.” Philadelphia Inquirer (9 April 1916): n.p. Marguerite Bertsch clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Marguerite Bertsch.” Morning Telegraph (5 Nov. 1916): n.p. Marguerite Bertsch clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Marguerite Bertsch.” New York Dramatic Mirror (27 Jan. 1917): 52.

“Marguerite Bertsch, a Brooklyn Girl, Makes Success as ‘Movie’ Director.” Brooklyn Eagle (9 April 1916): n.p. Marguerite Bertsch clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Marguerite Bertsch in Another Success.” New York Telegraph (5 Nov. 1916): n.p. Marguerite Bertsch clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“She Made Two Hundred Dollars for Planning a Railroad Wreck.” New York Evening Sun (8 April 1914): 10.

Somerville, Siobahn. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

“Transfers In The Bronx.” The New York Times (22 Jun. 1948): 42.

U. S. Census 1930. Census Place: Brooklyn, Kings, New York. Roll 1498, Page 16B, Enumeration District 1314.

“Wills for Probate.” The New York Times (8 Aug. 1941): 32.

Archival Paper Collections:

Albert E. Smith Papers, 1879-1933. University of California, Los Angeles, Charles E. Young Research Library.

Marguerite Bertsch clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Parchesky, Jennifer. "Marguerite Bertsch." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-fdxx-xa22>

Ruth Ann Baldwin

by Mark Garrett Cooper

The 1900 census found Ruth A. Baldwin, born in Connecticut in September 1886, living in San Diego with her mother, Abby Baldwin, who was divorced. Two decades later, the census found Ruth A. Pierson (née Baldwin) residing in Los Angeles with her husband, motion picture actor Leo O. Pierson, and a Japanese servant, Mr. Kogiro Yokoyama. The census lists no profession for Ruth, although her entry in the 1920 Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual suggests she was available for screenwriting positions (317). The 1920 census also makes her four years younger—twenty-nine as opposed to the thirty-three years old she should have been if we go by the earlier record. Baldwin had been busy in the intervening years. She had written for a San Diego newspaper, worked as a publicist for the San Diego Exposition, and performed what the 1920 Motion Picture Studio Directory described as “commercial art, concert work” (317). In 1913, Baldwin joined Universal Manufacturing Company as a scenario writer. In late 1916, after six months as a film editor and a brief apprenticeship with director Lynn Reynolds, she got her opportunity to direct, and Universal credited her with a total of thirteen titles. She soon left Universal, however, for reasons unknown. Beginning in 1919, Fox Film Company and Metro Pictures Corporation together credited Baldwin with six scenarios through 1921. In 1925, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Ruth Ann Baldwin, a writer” was living in a stone cabin on a 320-acre “desert ranch” (A1). There, for now, her trail ends.

Passport Ruth Ann Baldwin, 1915. PD

Passport photo of Ruth Ann Baldwin, 1915.

Credits do not record some of the most significant accomplishments of Baldwin’s amazing decade. In January 1915, for instance, Universal dispatched her to London to collaborate with mystery novelist E. Phillips Oppenheim on The Black Box serial. A press book for the serial’s British release explained: “the author, realising that with all his brilliance as a novelist, it was necessary to consult someone with a complete knowledge of the technical side of film manufacture in order to get the best possible results, was more than glad to have Miss Baldwin’s valuable aid.” Given that serials were among the most costly productions at that time and that Oppenheim had no prior experience writing for motion pictures, the appointment testifies to Universal’s confidence in Baldwin’s ability.

Universal’s house organ, then called the Moving Picture Weekly, provides in an article titled “Another Woman Directing,” another glimpse behind the scenes when it reports that, as part of her apprenticeship as a director, Baldwin assisted Reynolds in the production of The End of the Rainbow (1916) (23). In this feature, Myrtle Gonzalez stars as the business-school educated daughter of a timber baron who, defying her father’s interdiction, goes undercover as a stenographer to investigate corruption in his logging camp. Although the extent of Baldwin’s contribution to this film will likely never be known, a print does survive. Shot on location in a redwood forest near Hume, California, the film stands out for its amazing scenery, snappy cross-cutting, Gonzalez’s take-charge heroine, and a proto-environmentalist subplot involving the male lead’s sentimental attachment to “Old Sentinel”—a particularly ancient redwood that ultimately succumbs to the villains’ saws and axes.

Baldwin directed and typically also adapted the scenario for a variety of dramas. Timed for a Thanksgiving release, her directorial debut, The Mother Call (1916) tells in one reel the story of an elderly mother who feels abandoned by her children and is delighted when they show up for the holiday, according to the November 18, 1916, issue of the Moving Picture Weekly (23). A dozen films followed in 1917. In The Rented Man (1917), a young boy hires a boarder to play the part of his missing father only to discover that the “rented man” is his real parent. The Black Mantilla (1917) narrates a tragic love story set in Mexico. Two shorts employ a framing story: in A Soldier of the Legion (1917), boarding house residents concoct an Algerian fable; in The Storm Woman (1917) an old man’s tale of a fatal love triangle involving a New York playboy and two Italian sisters has a surprise happy ending. Baldwin’s first feature, A Wife on Trial (1917), depicts a woman librarian who marries a moody paralytic in order to be near to his wealthy family’s rose garden. In the final reel, this marriage of convenience gives way to true love, according to a synopsis in Moving Picture Weekly (30). Although difficult to appraise in the absence of surviving prints, Baldwin’s oeuvre suggests an interest in problems of narrative construction, and reviews on both sides of the Atlantic emphasized the novelty of the plots as well as the manner of treating them on screen, as in, for instance, the British trade paper Bioscope review of The Girl Who Married (1917). The beauty and exoticism of the settings of these films are also frequently noted.

'49-'17 (1917), Ruth Ann Baldwin (d/w).

Screenshot, 49-’17 (1917), directed by Ruth Ann Baldwin.

A keen awareness of narrative convention as well as a wry perspective on the motion picture business comes across in Baldwin’s surviving feature,’49-’17 (1917). A Western genre parody, the film stars Baldwin’s husband Leo O. Pierson as a city man hired to recreate a Western town for his boss, Judge Brand, who wants to relive his glory days as a miner “Forty-Niner.” He hires actors, but some members of the troupe turn out to be figures from Brand’s past. Western fun turns dangerous when a backstory involving a love triangle, an attempted murder, and a gold mine comes to light. It all works out in the end, however, and Pierson’s character earns his spurs and “gets the girl,” played by Donna Drew. The parodic doubling of the plot, in which actors portray actors who turn out to be “real Westerners,” that is, stereotypical figures from Western films, takes on an ironic cast when one recalls that some of Baldwin’s Universal contemporaries were building reputations by taking the genre far more seriously. Less than two months before ’49-’17, for example, Universal had released Straight Shooting (1917), the first Western feature directed by Maine native John Ford, staring New Yorker Harry Carrey. The historical record might never reveal whether Baldwin intended to deflate or celebrate the spectacle of grown Eastern men playing at being cowboys. Her film, however, leaves little doubt that we are to regard it as a form of playacting.

Bibliography

Carr, Harry. “The Lancer.” Los Angeles Times (8 Dec. 1925): A1.

“Claire McDowell in ‘The Black Mantilla’.” Moving Picture Weekly (9 June 1917): 9.

“Doings at Universal City.” Moving Picture Weekly (13 Jan. 1917): 22-23.

“The Girl Who Married-a Rose Garden.” Rev. Bioscope (18 Oct. 1917): 49.

“Irene Hunt in ‘A Soldier of the Legion’.” Moving Picture Weekly (21 July 1917): 28-29.

“Mignon Anderson and Leo Pierson in 'a Wife on Trial.'” Moving Picture Weekly (21 July 1917): 30-31.

“Miss Ruth Ann Baldwin Sails for Europe.” Moving Picture Word (9 Jan. 1915): 197.

Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1920. New York: Motion Picture News Inc, 1920.

“The Rented Man.” Synopsis. Moving Picture Weekly (24 Feb. 1917): 16.

Rothschild, Herbert. “Two Universal Thanksgiving Offerings.”Moving Picture Weekly (18 Nov. 1916): 1, 23.

“The Storm Woman.” Synopsis. Moving Picture Weekly (22 Sep. 1917): 9, 39.

U.S. Census 1900. Census Place: San Diego Ward 2, San Diego, California. Roll T623_99, Page 2A, Enumeration District 190.

U.S. Census 1920. Census Place: Los Angeles, California. Roll T625_107, Page 17A, Enumeration District 180.

Archival Paper Collections:

Ruth Ann Baldwin clippings file. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

The Black Box Pressbook. British Film Institute, Special Collections.

Citation

Cooper, Mark Garrett. "Ruth Ann Baldwin." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-09tg-1y17>

Dorothy Arzner

by Allyson Nadia Field

With a film career spanning from 1919 to 1943, fifteen years of which were spent as a director, Dorothy Arzner remains the most prolific woman studio director in the history of American cinema. She has received significant scholarly attention from feminist film critics and queer theorists who have been interested in this pioneer filmmaker both for her body of work and for the critical possibilities suggested by feminist approaches to reading that work as a whole.

Dorothy Arzner (d/w/e) as a little girl. UCLA

Dorothy Arzner as a little girl. Courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Dorothy Arzner (d/w/e). UCLA

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

Dorothy Arzner (d/w/e). BFI

Dorothy Arzner. Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

Dorothy Arzner (d/w/e). UCLA

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

Dorothy Arzner (d/w/e). UCLA

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

Arzner grew up in Hollywood, California, where her father owned a restaurant next to a theatre that was popular with actors. Her work in the film industry began when she started typing scripts for the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, which would later become Paramount. After six months, she became a cutter and editor at Realart Studio, a subsidiary of Paramount. As chief editor, she cut and edited fifty-two films before being recalled to Paramount to cut and edit the Valentino vehicle Blood and Sand (1922), her first “big picture” and the first film for which she had undertaken some of the filming (Peary and Kay, 21). At Paramount, Arzner worked on several pictures with director James Cruze, often mentioned as her mentor, then left to write scripts for independent companies, among them Dorothy Davenport Reid Productions, for which she adapted an Adela Rogers St. Johns story on a scandalous trial as the important The Red Kimona (1925). Returning to work at Paramount, Arzner wrote the shooting script for Old Ironsides (1926), which she also cut and edited. Soon, however, she received an offer to write and direct a feature film for Columbia, and stayed with Paramount only after being offered the opportunity to direct a more prestigious “A” picture. After four successful silent feature films for Paramount—Fashions for Women (1927); Ten Modern Commandments (1927); Get Your Man (1927); and Manhattan Cocktail (1928)—Arzner was entrusted with the studio’s first sound film starring Clara Bow, The Wild Party (1929), the silent version of which she had edited earlier.

Reflecting on her work for Paramount, and on women in the workplace, she later recalled in an interview by Gerald Peary and Karyn Kay: “No one gave me trouble because I was a woman. Men were more helpful than women” (23). At Paramount, she was given her choice of crew, and she maintained that she had little interference with her pictures. She recalls in that same interview that, “I was not dependent on the movies for my living, so I was always ready to give the picture over to some other director if I couldn’t make it the way I saw it. Right or wrong, I believe this was why I sustained so long—twenty years” (25). For Paramount, she directed eleven features including Sarah and Son (1930) and Anybody’s Woman (1930), both with Ruth Chatterton, and Honor Among Lovers (1931) with Claudette Colbert. She left Paramount in 1932 to work on a freelance basis, directing films for RKO, United Artists, Columbia, and MGM. During this time, she made Christopher Strong (1933) with Katherine Hepburn and Craig’s Wife (1936) with Rosalind Russell. After leaving Hollywood in 1943, a decision she made freely though arguably catalyzed by conflicts with Louis B. Mayer, she made training films for the Women’s Army Corps; produced a radio program, You Were Meant to Be a Star; worked in theatre production; and taught filmmaking at the Pasadena Playhouse and later at UCLA. She also made a series of fifty commercials for Pepsi at the behest of Joan Crawford.

The question that feminist scholars first faced, the relationship of gender to filmmaking, found an apt subject in Dorothy Arzner, whose films inspired the earliest feminist film criticism, as in Claire Johnston’s seminal 1973 essay. Arzner’s oeuvre continues to beguile and fascinate critics, and enough of her silent as well as sound era films are extant and thus available for further analysis. Also, situating her industry work within the silent as well as the sound eras as a career professional helps us to understand not only her personal strategy for surviving, but also attitudes towards gay and lesbian creative personnel working in Hollywood in the 1920s to 1940s. First, Arzner as product of the studio system received consummate professional training in many phases of film production, from editing and scenario writing to directing. For her work on Blood and Sand, she proved herself to be a savvy, cost-conscious problem solver by turning to stock footage to augment the bullfighting scene. It was her indispensability to Paramount that enabled her to leverage an offer to direct at Columbia Pictures into a promotion, leading to her directorial debut with the silent feature Fashions for Women (1927). Judith Mayne notes that since Arzner was constantly referred to as the sole woman director working in Hollywood, her first goal was to prove that she was competent. In the end, says Mayne, “competence was far more important than brilliance or originality in making her career possible” (Mayne 1994, 48). Mayne also emphasizes the importance of female relationships in her career; in addition to director James Cruze, Arzner was strongly influenced by producer-actress Alla Nazimova and editor Nan Heron. Thus, Arzner can be seen as a Hollywood film director whose gender explained her career trajectory in a positive way.

The question of gender and narrative emphases is, however, a different question that goes beyond Dorothy Arzner’s career trajectory to the question of feminist theory. In the surge of academic interest in Arzner in the 1970s, she was cast as an “overtly proto-feminist director,” a move more difficult to prove, Theresa Geller concludes, than the assertion that Arzner was a female director concerned with the female relationships on screen. It may not be finally possible to locate a particular female sensibility in her directorial output, but it is possible to note the strong emphasis on women’s relationships with one another in Arzner’s extant sound films: The Wild Party (1929), Working Girls (1931), and Dance, Girl, Dance (1940). Finally, Arzner has been embraced by both feminist film critics and queer film theorists who find in her unconventional characterizations a subversiveness that this theory connects with her lesbianism. We know that she maintained a long-term relationship with Marion Morgan, a dancer who headed her own dance troupe and who worked as a choreographer on several of Arzner’s films. Mayne notes that although Dorothy Arzner kept her life private, in her dress and demeanor she “flaunted a style that signified ‘lesbian’” (1994, 2). It is such questions that have kept Arzner research vital, and the insights we have to gain from studying her career will go a long way toward helping us to develop a fuller explanation as to why and how this director alone made the transition between work in the silent and sound industry when so many other women did not.

See also: Dorothy Davenport Reid, Alla Nazimova, Adela Rogers St. Johns

Bibliography

Geller, Theresa L. “Dorothy Arzner.” Senses of Cinema 26 (2003): n.p. http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/great-directors/arzner/

Johnston, Claire. “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” In Notes on Women’s Cinema. Ed. Claire Johnston. London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973. 24-31.

Kay, Karyn and Gerald Peary, eds. Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology. New York: Dutton, 1977.

Mayne, Judith. Directed by Dorothy Arzner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Peary, Gerald and Kay, Karyn. “Interview with Dorothy Arzner.” In The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema. Ed. Claire Johnston. London; British Film Institute, 1975. 19-29.

Archival Paper Collections:

Dorothy Arzner Papers. University of California, Los Angeles, Performing Performing Arts Special Collections..

Research Update

February 2024: Additional bibliographic resources:

Norden, Martin F., ed. Dorothy Arzner: Interviews Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2024.

November 2022: Additional bibliographic resources:

Norden, Martin F. "Exploring the Work of Dorothy Arzner as a Film-Making Teacher in Southern California." Film Education Journal 5.2 (Fall 2022): 68-79.https://uclpress.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14324/FEJ.05.2.01.

Citation

Field, Allyson Nadia. "Dorothy Arzner." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-cj7m-bt21>

Leah Baird

by Robin Blaetz

In marking the death of Leah Baird, known chiefly as an actor in the silent period, Variety stated that she “was reputed to have written some of her own films” (55). With less sense of incredulity, production notes for a later film (Caged, 1950), in which Baird worked as an extra, refer to her as “a silent day star [who] once owned her own production company.” Although most references to Baird in the silent period in newspapers and trade journals stress her screen performances and her relation to the theatrical stage, she remains an intriguing figure for the sheer number of films on which she worked, for her interest in writing throughout her professional life, and for the length of her career, which spanned from 1911 to 1956.

Leah Baird (p/w/a) AMPAS

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

Billy Doyle’s necrology of “lost” performers of the silent period says that Leah Baird was born in Chicago to German parents, was educated in a convent, and attended business school to train as a secretary before becoming an actor. She worked in stock theatre in Toronto, Buffalo, and with the Morton Snow Stock Company in Troy, New York. In 1907, Baird performed in a play called “The Mummy and Hummingbird,” which garnered the attention of producer, director, and sometime actor William A. Brady, who founded World Film Corporation in 1915. Brady cast her opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in “The Gentleman from Mississippi,” which ran from 1908 through 1910 (Doyle 1995, 1). In 1911, Baird signed a contract with the Vitagraph Company and appeared in her first film, the comedy The Wooing of Winifred. She continued making comedies through 1913, when she joined Independent Motion Picture, newly part of the consolidation of independents as Universal Film Manufacturing, and began working with director Herbert Brenon. By 1914, Baird returned to Vitagraph, where she worked in a number of two-reel domestic dramas through 1916 (Doyle 1995, 2). A 1915 issue of Photoplay notes her marriage to Arthur F. Beck, the man who would later produce some of her films (n.p.). In late 1916, Lois Weber, who may have been a model for her as a woman with something to say in the film industry, directed Baird in Universal’s The People vs. John Doe. Although a 1919 New York Times article does not refer to Baird as anything but an actor, her presence as one of the four stars in the first “Four Star” production by the independent W. W. Hodkinson Corporation (started after the distributor had been deposed from Paramount Pictures) indicates her importance as a box office draw (46).

Leah Baird (p/w/a) 1923 LoC

Leah Baird by car in 1923. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Leah Baird (p/w/a), inscription: "Faithfully Yours, Leah Baird" PC

Leah Baird portrait, inscription: “Faithfully Yours, Leah Baird.” Private Collection. 

Baird continued acting through 1920 and in 1921 started with Arthur Beck, Leah Baird Productions, Inc., in Cliffside, New Jersey, making her part of what Karen Mahar has called the second star-producer movement of 1917–1923 (2006, 158–59). Baird’s marriage to Beck, like that of other actress-writers to their producers, allowed her options besides remaining in front of the camera. Between 1920 and 1925, she wrote as well as starred in a serial titled Cynthia of the Minute, taken from the work of popular novelist Louis Joseph Vance (Doyle 1995, 2). Variety reviews indicate that the films she wrote and produced independently in the 1920s were released by the independent Associated Exhibitors through Pathé Exchange. Doyle notes that Baird also continued acting for Pathé at the same time that she was writing and producing on her own through this period (1995, 3). A 1922 Variety review of When Husbands Deceive notes that “women stars who write their own scenarios invite disaster” (97). But an Exhibitors Herald article in 1922 suggests that Baird’s films in this period were successful. This positive article describes the composite narrative of her work as “a woman jilted by the man she hoped to marry, who after bitterness passes, reforms her mode of living, finds happiness in the love of another man and assists her former sweetheart to right himself with the ‘other woman.’” Considering that the negative reviews of Baird’s films usually begin with expressions of indignation that they were written by a woman, it would be important to study how her melodramas might or might not have differed from similar stories written by men in the period.

Like director-writer-producer Weber, Baird was interested in bringing women’s issues to the screen, a commitment exemplified by such Leah Baird Productions, Inc. titles as The Bride’s Confession (1921), Don’t Doubt Your Wife (1922), When Husbands Deceive (1922), Destroying Angel (1923), and Is Divorce a Failure? (1923). A Morning Telegraph article of 1923 reported that Baird traveled to Texas to present Is Divorce a Failure? to the Women’s Club of Houston (n. p.). She shrewdly used the power of celebrity to gain access to the governor and the mayor and at the same time force the discussion of the difficult issue of divorce reform. In 1925, she began to concentrate on writing and producing full time, being at the time one of the few women, including Dorothy Davenport Reid, producing in these years. The Primrose Path, from Baird’s original story, was produced by Beck in 1925 and received an excellent review in Variety (43), while the following films received fair to good Variety reviews for Baird’s writing: The Shadow of the Law (1926), Devil’s Island (1926), The False Alarm (1926), and Spangles (1926). Baird retired in 1934, but appeared at a 1940 symposium to defend the double feature, referenced in the New York Times as “Mrs. Arthur Beck, housewife” (108). Just after this appearance she began in 1941 to take small, often uncredited parts in Warner Brothers films, including Mildred Pierce (1945), ending her career in 1956 with Around the World in Eighty Days.

See alsoDorothy Davenport Reid, Lois Weber

Bibliography

Caged. Production Notes (John Cromwell, 1950). Leah Baird papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“Devil’s Island.” Rev. Variety (4 Aug. 1926): 12.

“The False Alarm.” Rev. Variety (1 Dec. 1926): n.p.

“In the News Net.” New York Times (16 Mar. 1919): 46.

“Leah Baird.” Obit. Variety (13 Oct. 1971): 55.

“Leah Baird in When the Devil Drives.” Exhibitors Herald (24 June 1922): 97

“Leah Baird Touring Texas.” Morning Telegraph (8 Apr. 1923): n.p. Leah Baird papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

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

“More About the Gallup Double-Feature Survey and Sundry Other Items.” New York Times (18 Aug. 1940): 108.

“Primrose Path.” Rev. Variety (9 Dec. 1925): 43.

Pryor, Thomas M. “The Shadow of the Law.” Rev. Variety (21 April 1926): 35.

“Spangles.” Rev. Variety (19 Jan. 1927): 18.

Photoplay (1915): n.p. Leah Baird papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

“When Husbands Deceive.” Rev. Variety (24 June 1922): 97.

Archival Paper Collections:

Leah Baird papers. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Citation

Blaetz, Robin. "Leah Baird." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-azpb-9y89>

Tsuru Aoki

by Sara Ross

Tsuru Aoki is best remembered as the wife of Sessue Hayakawa, and certainly Aoki’s role as adoring wife on- and off-screen was extremely important to the remarkable success of Hayakawa as a romantic lead in the teens and early twenties. Hayakawa’s popularity rested on the assurance that his exotic and inscrutable Oriental exterior hid a soft and romantic side, proof of which was his “little wife.” But her star image was complex, erasing her immigrant background and presenting her as a model of assimilation, with her undeniably modern American lifestyle a sharp contrast to the diminutive Oriental “doll” aspects of her persona.

Courageous Coward (1919) w/ Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki (a/p) PD

Frame enlargement, Courageous Coward (1919), Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki.

Although she often played opposite her husband, Aoki was also a significant star actress in her own right and a veteran performer who entered motion pictures before Hayakawa, at least as early as the extant 1914 Kay-Bee Western, The Death Mask/The Redskin Duel, in which she plays a Native American, which she did more than once in her career (Miyao 2007, 301). She worked on films produced by major silent era companies—the Jesse Lasky Company that would become Paramount Motion Pictures as well as Universal Motion Picture Manufacturing Company. Since she was one of the earliest professional Japanese film actresses in the United States, there is much at stake in the research that still needs to be done on her other contributions to the production process, following up, for instance, on the reference to the credit she received as supervising set constructor for The Breath of the Gods (1920).

AOKI_CCP_FIG103_WFP-AOK03

Frame enlargement, Courageous Coward (1919), Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki.

Aoki came to prominence in productions for Thomas Ince’s New York Motion Picture Corporation, where Hayakawa first appeared with her in The Wrath of the Gods, released in 1914. The film was a tremendous success and a high point in Ince’s career. As a consequence of his experience working with her on The Wrath of the Gods, Ince signed Aoki and her “company” of twenty native players late in 1913. However, sources do not specify if this company belonged to Aoki or what type of company it was, whether it was a theatre troupe or an actors’ company, for example. Aoki and Hayakawa appeared together in Jesse Lasky productions for Paramount from 1916 to 1917. Then, in 1918, Hayakawa formed Haworth Pictures Corporation in an attempt to generate roles for Asian performers that broke with the American popular stereotype of Asians—a goal that extended to roles for Aoki herself. Her work for Haworth, for instance, included a role opposite Hayakawa in The Courageous Coward (1919), in which she played a Japanese woman who tries to transform herself into a modern American girl in the mistaken belief that this is what her American suitor desires. Wid’s Weekly advertising copy for the film proclaimed that she was “delightful in her efforts to imitate her western sisters in everything from high heels to powder puffs” (6).

Lantern slide, A Tokio Siren (1920). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

In 1919, the Los Angeles Times reported with great fanfare Aoki’s contract for three special features at Universal, beginning with a lavish adaptation of the Sidney McCall novel The Breath of the Gods, stating hyperbolically that the salary she was to be paid was “one of the highest salaries in picturedom” (III4). This is the film on which Aoki was also reported to have had a supervisory role in the design of the Japanese sets. Aoki’s American film career slid after her three features at Universal, however. It was reported that she planned to start her own company in 1920, but no evidence of this has been found to date (Pratt 108). Following a few additional titles in Hollywood, she made a handful of films in Japan and the UK, as well as La Bataille/The Danger Line (1923), written by Margaret Turnbull for Film d’Art in France. Her final screen appearance was again with Hayakawa in the war film Hell to Eternity (1960).

Tsuru Aoki (a/p) for Kay-Bee, Broncho & Domino NYPL

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

Many of Aoki’s film roles reiterated stereotypes of the Asian woman such as the innocent flower, the self-sacrificing Madame Butterfly, and the picture bride. However, as we can see in her extant films, Aoki also displays the rebellious spunk found in many of the modern female paradigms of the period. For instance, her character Toya-san in The Wrath of the Gods is an unusually self-possessed modern melodrama heroine. Toya-san rebels against paternal authority and tradition to marry her sweetheart, a European-American sailor, and sails off with him in a happy ending. Aoki’s performance as Toya-san and also as Ume-ko in The Dragon Painter (1919) reveals a performance style that has more in common with Mary Pickford than with the sort of Asian exotics played by European Americans in “yellow face” in the period. In the roles found in her existing films, she adroitly enacts girlish enthusiasm for nature, demure consciousness of romantic encounters, and rebellious indignation. Her small stature is repeatedly emphasized by framing and staging, as when Hayakawa’s character in The Dragon Painter (1919) effortlessly swoops her up in his arms and lifts her high in the air.

Aoki’s biography as a star also underscored comparisons between the actress and the doll. Her star narrative treats her move from Japan to the United States as a journey from tradition into modernity. She came to the United States at the age of six, traveling with a Japanese theatre troupe that included her aunt, the pioneering Japanese theatre actress Sada Yacco, and her uncle, Otto Kawakimi, owners of the Imperial Theatre of Japan (Berg 157). She was soon after adopted by stage designer Hyosai Aoki, and much is made of the illustrious social milieu, excellent private school education, and French chaperone with which he provided her. She met Hayakawa at the Japanese Theatre in Los Angeles, where both performed, and it is said that it was she who persuaded Ince to consider Hayakawa for film roles. As a couple, the Hayakawas were portrayed as the perfect model of cultural assimilation and balance between traditional and modern marital roles. Aoki, however, is portrayed as the more American and modern of the two, with a fondness for the latest dances and sporty roadsters. The complex blend of Orientalism and the modern woman in her persona is exemplified by a 1914 Los Angeles Times article that reports on her use of “Jiu Jitsu” to incapacitate eight burly police officers during a demonstration for the police force (117). Aoki deserves greater recognition as a pioneering Asian-American performer and as an aspiring producer, whether she worked independently as a professional or as a “domestic” assistant to Hayakawa.

With additional research by Yuan Chen.

See also: Lillian GishMary Pickford

Bibliography

Berg, Shelly C. “Sada Yacco the American tour, 1899-1900.” Dance Chronicle vol. 16, no. 2 (1993): 157.

“Closeups of Screeners.”The Atlanta Constitution  (22 Aug. 1920): A14A.

“The Courageous Coward.” Ad. Wid’s Weekly (6 Apr. 1919): 6.

“High Rank or Fisher Maid?” Los Angeles Times (20 Dec. 1914): 117.

“Jiu-Jitsu for Police Force.” Los Angeles Times (27 Dec. 1914): 117.

Kingsley, Grace. “‘Universal Sparkler’ in ‘The Spice of Life.’” Los Angeles Times (24 July 1919): III4.

Miyao, Daisuke. “Containment of Horror: Tsuru Aoki's Transnational Stardom.” In Screening Trans-Asia: Genre, Stardom, and Intellectual Imaginaries. Eds. Chris Berry and Zhen Zhang. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, forthcoming.

------. Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Moving Picture World (28 Aug. 1915): 1946.

New York Dramatic Mirror (28 Jan. 1914): n.p.

“Next Hayakawa Film Shows Him in Play of Moods.” Moving Picture World (19 April 1919): 417.

Pratt, George. “See Mr. Ince...” Image: Journal of Photography and Motion Pictures of the George Eastman House vol. 5, no. 5 (May 1956): 99-110.

“Tsuru Aoki is Starred in ‘The Courageous Coward.’” Moving Picture World (26 April 1919): 567.

Waller, Gregory. “Japan on American Screens, 1908-1915.” In Early Cinema and the 'National.' Eds. Richard Abel, Robert King, Giorgio Bertellini. New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Press, 2008. 137-150.  http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/research/Japan%20on%20American%20Screens.pdf

Worrell, Joseph. “Tsuru Aoki.” Silent Era [online database]. n.d. n.p. http://www.silentera.com/people/actresses/Aoki-Tsuru.html

Archival Paper Collections:

Reminiscences of S.I. Hayakawa. April, 1959. Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Citation

Ross, Sara. "Tsuru Aoki." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-x7rv-gq22>

Ruth Goetz

by Mila Ganeva

Ruth Goetz, one of the most prolific writers for film in Germany in the period 1916-1927, with about sixty-five titles including original scripts and adaptations credited to her name, is not well known today. “The film writer is like a ‘violet’ that blooms hidden from sight,” she said at the beginning of her spectacular career during the late 1910s. “The audience does not know anything either about him or his work. Rarely does he get mentioned and he is never seen. If the film is bad, it’s the writer’s fault. If the film earns the label ‘good’ or ‘very good’ then the writer is entitled to a minuscule credit. This is different for the playwright and if one has started writing for the theater stage, one has quickly to adjust to this reality. I am letting this journal publish my photograph, so that people can at least once see a film writer” (600). Goetz was the only woman featured in this special 1918 issue of the Berlin-based trade magazine Kinematograph edited by E. A. Dupont and devoted to the invisible work of scenarists. A year earlier, one of her scripts had been included as a model for aspiring writers in one of the first manuals compiled by Wilhelm Adler. The film based on this script, Noemi, die blonde Jüdin/Noemi, the Blond Jewess (1917), was directed by Hubert Moest and served primarily as a star vehicle for actress Hedda Vernon.

WFP2-GOE13

Screenshot, Noemi, die blonde Jüdin (1917).

WFP2-GOE14

Poster, Veritas Vincit (1918).

Mia May in Die Herrin der Velt (1919-1920) Ruth Goetz (w). DIF

Mia May in Die Herrin der Velt (1919-1920). Courtesy of the Deutsches Filminstitut.

Mia May in Die Herrin der Velt (1919-1920) Ruth Goetz (w). DIF

Mia May in Die Herrin der Velt (1919-1920). Courtesy of the Deutsches Filminstitut.

Scene from Veritas Vincit (1918), written by Ruth Goetz (w) .

Scene from Veritas Vincit (1918).

Goetz’s career ascent coincided with the emergence of the longer narrative film around 1913 and the parallel development of a sophisticated and socially diverse mass audience. As German film productions experienced a boom in the mid-1910s and the feature film length was set at about ninety minutes, the demand for more complex and dramatically coherent film scripts became apparent. This demand was met by a new cohort of authors who worked predominantly in the fields of journalism or light and pulp fiction, in German, unterhaltungs, kolportage, and trivialliteratur. These authors were accustomed to writing fast and keeping deadlines and were attuned to the tastes of the contemporary audience. While established writers continued to be skeptical about the aesthetic status of the new mass media and avoided working for it, screenwriting earned a reputation as a new professional field and aspiring young writers, especially women, also found relatively easy access to it. In 1918, as the above quote from the trade journal Kinematograph shows, screenwriters were referred to with masculine pronouns, and further the term for them was always the masculine “filmschriftsteller” or “filmautor.” However, as film historian Jürgen Kasten has pointed out, the participation of women in the screenwriting branch of the film industry was unusually high. In the lead, along with Goetz were Jane Bess and Fanny Carlsen, each of whom authored the scripts for over fifty films produced in the period 1916–1930. They were followed by Marie Luise Droop and Margaret Maria Langen, and the best known of all, Thea von Harbou, each of whom wrote about twenty screenplays for silent films produced in the 1919-1929 period (Kasten 1990, 54–55). Kasten estimates that around twenty percent of all produced film scripts were authored by women in the earlier phase, 1916–1925, dropping to about eight percent in the later years of silent cinema, but despite the high percentage of women in screenwriting, female film writers have occupied a blind spot in German as well as Austrian film history. Apart from some work on von Harbou and a short article on Jane Bess by Jürgen Kasten, there has been no sustained research on women as screenwriters in German silent cinema (Kasten 1992).

The personal and professional life of Goetz confirms the pattern suggested by the few existing studies of women screenwriters. Born in Oberglogau, today Głogówek, Silesia, in 1886, Goetz attended an elite private high school and then moved to Berlin in 1911 with the ambition to become a writer, according to the Lexikon des Films (65). She started right away to work for Gaumont while freelancing as a fashion journalist for a variety of daily newspapers owned by the Berlin media giants Ullstein, Mosse, and Scherl. Throughout the second half of the 1910s and the 1920s, she juggled both careers simultaneously. On the one hand, she was writing scripts for popular films and collaborating with successful directors such as Joe May, for whom she wrote all eight installments of the epic Die Herrin der Welt (1919-20) and parts of the trilogy Veritas vincit 1918-19). On the other hand, Goetz established a reputation as a fashion expert, and was known as a regular contributor of essays and commentaries to the fashion sections of high-circulation daily newspapers and women’s magazines such as Die Dame and Der Modenspiegel. She became the editor-in-chief for Der Modenspiegel in 1925, and, with the advance of sound film, she gradually gave up screenwriting and dedicated her time exclusively to fashion and style themes, publishing in fashion magazines well into the 1930s. After her second marriage in 1922, many of her articles are signed “Ruth von Schüching” although the name “Ruth Goetz” appears as well.

Particularly understudied in Goetz’s case is the way in which she drew benefits from her expertise in fashion. Several of the films that she scripted, for example, Die Kleine aus der Konfektion (1924), Wie bleibe ich jung und schön (1926), and Heiratsannoncen (1925), exemplify the bonds established in the late 1910s and early 1920s between fashion and film, between journalism and screenwriting, and, finally, between film viewing and consumerism, especially in the subgenre of the “fashion farce” or konfektionskomödie (Ganeva 115-150). The rise of the subgenre coincided with the flourishing of konfektion, Berlin’s fashion industry, from around 1900 to the late 1920s. Fashion farces were among the first longer and commercially successful feature films that appeared between 1911 and 1918, including the first productions that featured Ernst Lubitsch, initially as the lead actor and later as both an actor and director (Hake 25-36). A peculiar mix of spectacle and narrative, the fashion farces scripted by Goetz guided a female audience, increasingly more mobile and often working, through the practices of fashion that were relevant, with some modification, in their own everyday lives. What these films lacked in artistic ambition they compensated for with  fashion spectacle that attracted large audiences, as we learn from a 1924 review of Die Kleine aus der Konfektion in Film-Kurier (n.p). Thus, these films functioned, in the words of one contemporary observer, as “a live fashion magazine,” or,  a compendium of suggestions, tips, and updates disseminated to a mass audience at no extra charge (Moreck 39-40). True, they offered fantasies beyond reach, but they were also a source of practical, usable advice that tapped into the expertise of the professional fashion journalist Goetz, who doubled as a screenwriter.

Bibliography

Adler, Wilhelm. Wie schreibe ich einen Film. Germany: Schriftstellerbund, 1917.

“Filmautor.” Kinematograph (3 July 1918): 600.

Ganeva, Mila. Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture 1918-1933. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008.

Hake, Sabine. Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Kasten, Jürgen. Film schreiben: eine Geschichte des Drehbuchs. Vienna: Hora-Verlag, 1990.

------. “Populäre Wunschträume und spannende Abenteuer. Das erfolgreiche trivialdramatische Erzählkonzept der Jane Bess und anderer Drehbuchautorinnen des deutschen Stummfilms.” In Das Drehbuch: Geschichte, Theorie, Praxis. Ed. Alexander Schwarz. Munich: Schaudig, Bauer, Ledig, 1992. 17-54.

Die Kleine aus der Konfektion.” Rev. Film-Kurier (16 April 1924): n.p.

Moreck, Curt. Sittengeschichte des Kinos. Dresden: Paul Aretz, 1926.

Mühsam, Dr. Kurt and Egon Jacobsohn, eds. Lexikon des Films. Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbildbühne, 1926.

“Ruth Goetz.” Filmportal profile. 1998. n.p. http://www.filmportal.de/person/ruth-goetz_8e852385cb1e44db8c8eb479d13415c5

Citation

Ganeva, Mila. "Ruth Goetz." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-6wak-6h54>

Josephine Clement

by Richard Abel
Bijou Theatre

Photograph of the Bijou Theatre, Boston, MA. Private Collection

Nothing is known of Josephine Clement (usually called Mrs. Edward Clement in the trade press) before the summer of 1909, when she is mentioned as managing the Bijou Theatre in downtown Boston (on the corner of Washington and Tremont) for the Keith theater circuit. Nor is anything known after she left her position in early 1914.  During that period of nearly five years, however, she exerted a good deal of influence in the exhibition sector of the film industry. Along with the much better known S. L. (Roxy) Rothapfel, Clement established a model of the “artistic and wholesome” moving picture theater that was thought to appeal to a “refined” clientele. By late 1910, according to “a handsomely printed booklet describing its aims” and amenities (a reception room where a maid looked “to the comfort of ladies and children”; a “men’s smoking room”), the Bijou ran five daily shows of two and a half hours each, with programs comprised of several MPPC moving pictures, a one-act play, vocal and instrumental music (not illustrated songs), and “camera chats” using lantern slides and “stereoptican views.” This was a “high-class” variety program that had its supporters in the pages of the Moving Picture World and New York Dramatic Mirror and that Clement herself promoted as late as November 1912 in an address to the Massachusetts State Conference of Charities, and which subsequently was published in Motography. Why Clement “severed her connection” with the Bijou and was replaced by J.W. Craig in February 1914 remains uncertain, but a likely reason may be the Keith theaters’ decision to return to offering vaudeville acts as their principal entertainment in the face of the growing number of metropolitan palace cinemas and their programs organized around feature-length films.

Bibliography

Clement, Josephine. “Standardizing the Picture Theater.” Motography (21 Dec. 1912): 457-460.

“Correspondence: New England.” Moving Picture World (21 Feb. 1914): 979.

Film Man. “Motion Pictures: Comment and Suggestion.” New York Dramatic Mirror (13 Nov. 1912): 25-26.

“Mrs. Clement and Her Work.” Moving Picture World (15 Oct. 1910): 859-860.

“Refined Picture Theatre.” New York Dramatic Mirror (8 Feb. 1911): 28.

Citation

Abel, Richard. "Josephine Clement." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-mwwb-fg90>

Caroline Frances Pugliese

by Fiona Gunn

As a founder and director of Pugliese Enterprises, a family-run film exhibition and production company, Caroline Pugliese owned and operated three theatres in Sydney from 1909 until 1922—the Alhambrain Haymarket, the Star Theatre in Bondi, and the Broadway in Leichhardt. According to reports in Kino Cinema International, running the theatres was a hands-on activity for the entire Pugliese family, with Caroline controlling the company finances and helming major business decisions and her children acting as ticket-sellers and projectionists (18). The Puglieses subsisted at the lower, populist end of the market, eking out an existence by showmanship and adding value via music and performance to film screenings. Like other small exhibitors in these early days, Pugliese experienced difficulty accessing a ready supply of motion pictures for screening, which may have prompted her foray into film production in partnership with son Humbert in 1917.

Lottie Lyell in The Church and the Woman (1917) Caroline Pugliese (prod). AUC

Lottie Lyell in The Church and the Woman (1917). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Lottie Lyell and Boyd Irwin in The Church and the Woman (1917) Caroline Puliese (prod). AUC

Lottie Lyell and Boyd Irwin in The Church and the Woman (1917). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Scene from The Church and the Woman (1917) Caroline Pugliese (prod). AUC

Scene from The Church and the Woman (1917). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The Waybacks (1918) Caroline Pugliese (prod). AUC

The Waybacks (1918). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Advertisement in Theatre Magazine for Struck Oil (1919) Caroline Pugliese (prod). AUC

Advertisement in Theatre Magazine for Struck Oil (1919). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The first Pugliese Enterprises production was Raymond Longford’s The Church and the Woman (1917) starring Lottie Lyell.  Advertising in the Sydney Morning Herald asked the question: “Do you believe in mixed marriages? See the great tragedy of the love of a Protestant man for a Catholic woman” (4). The same paper, reviewing the film a week later, applauded The Church and the Woman as an “intensely dramatic story about the love of a man and a woman of varying faiths” (9). Short seasons followed in Newcastle from October 22 to 25 and in Adelaide from October 24 to 30, 1917,  solidifying its commercial success. The Lone Hand of July 1918 reported that the film had turned over a staggering £16,000 for Pugliese Enterprises (310). Such a strong box office may have been in part attributable to their pioneering marketing initiatives, as the Puglieses had brought their exhibition experience to bear on the distribution of The Church and the Woman with groundbreaking use of a forthcoming attractions trailer. According to the Lone Hand of December 1917, views of the film and announcements were distributed to showmen in order to let “patrons know that The Church and the Woman is coming along and stimulating their interest in the picture” (31). However, The Church and the Woman was plagued by legal challenges. On October 13, 1917, the day before The Church and the Woman opened at the Theatre Royal, rival theatrical entrepreneur Joseph Marks unsuccessfully sought an injunction preventing Humbert Pugliese from using the title, stating that Marks had released The Monk and the Woman just days earlier. As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald that day, Justice Harvey in the equity court “smilingly asked if this was a friendly suit for the purpose of advertising” (9). The court ruling, according to the Daily Telegraph was that all advertising for The Church and the Woman should contain the words “This film must not be confused with the film or play entitled The Monk and the Woman” (2).

A second legal challenge to The Church and the Woman was mounted in 1918 by Edward Finn, an author claiming that the film breached copyright in his novel A Priest’s Secret. Although director Longford had registered copyright in the scenario at the Commonwealth Copyright Office on March 8, 1917, it was an obvious breach. Longford had quoted passages verbatim and in one instance had used a character’s name from the novel. Despite Longford’s blatant breach, action was brought against Humbert Pugliese for “authorising” the breach of copyright, setting the tone for the subsequent strict reading of authorization in Australian copyright law. The trial transcript also indicates a general uncertainty by the court about dealing with cinematographic films and disdain for this “cheap” form of amusement. At one point in the proceedings, C. J. Street refers to The Church and the Woman as a “so-called dramatic work—or photoplay drama as it is uncouthly called” (156). The Puglieses lost the case, and Finn was awarded not only his injunction, but also an account of profits and delivery of the film print and negatives.

Meanwhile, the Puglieses second film The Waybacks (1918), directed by Arthur W. Sterry, opened on May 18 at Sydney Town Hall to instant success, even, according to the Lone Hand of July 1918, “to turn the people away” (352).  Based on the novel by Henry Fletcher, The Waybacks was a comedy about a country family at home and visiting the big city. Remnants of this film exist, illustrating its sense of slapstick and larrikinism, or rowdiness, described in the Lone Hand review as “typically Australian with a strong vein of humour” (310). Although commercially successful, The Waybacks did not entirely ease the financial woes of Pugliese Enterprises after the legal expenses incurred by The Church and the Woman.

The final motion picture produced by the Puglieses was Struck Oil (1919). Directed by Franklyn Barrett, Struck Oil featured celebrated actress Maggie Moore in a role she made famous on the international stage. The film opened at Sydney Town Hall on October 20, 1919, and received glowing reviews in Theatre Magazine of November 1919, declaring it “a production that must command the admiration of every picture-goer” (33).  Despite favorable reviews and two weeks’ screening to capacity audiences, Struck Oil failed to gain a foothold outside of Sydney, perhaps as a result of competition from the larger cinemas and distributors such as Australasian Films and Union Theatres. Whatever the  reason, Pugliese Enterprises never made another picture, and by 1922 had divested themselves of all three theatres. Although Humbert Pugliese was credited as producer on all films made by Pugliese Enterprises, there are traces of the overriding guidance and financial control of his mother, Caroline Pugliese, in a role similar to today’s executive producer.  Advertisements and reviews for Pugliese-produced films appearing in Theatre Magazine usually stated “Australian-made for Mrs. C. F. Pugliese” (33); “C. F. Pugliese submits… ” and “… presented by C. F. Pugliese” (37), emphasizing Caroline Pugliese’s status as a pioneering film producer and motion picture theatre owner.

See also: Lottie Lyell

Bibliography

“The Church and the Woman.” Rev. Sydney Morning Herald (18 Oct. 1917): 2.

“The Courts. Civil. The Church and the Woman.” Daily Telegraph (13 Oct. 1917): 9.

Finn v. Pugliese. 18 SR NSW 530. Weekly Notes (NSW) vol. 35, no. 26 (Nov. 1918): n.p.

“Leading Men of the Film World—Humbert Pugliese.” The Lone Hand (1 July 1918): 352.

The Lone Hand (1 Dec. 1917): 31.

“Rival Films: Marks v. Pugliese.” Sydney Morning Herald (13 Oct. 1917): 3, 4.

Struck Oil. Advertisement. Theatre Magazine (1 Nov. 1919): 33, 37.

“Struck Oil.” Theatre Magazine (1 Nov. 1919): 33.

“The Waybacks.” Rev. The Lone Hand (1 June 1918): 310.

Archival Paper Collections:

The Church and the Woman, 1917–18.” Copyright Collection. Serial Number: A1336, 5650. National Archives of Australia.

Longford, Raymond. Application for Registration of Copyright in a Dramatic Work. The Church and the Woman. Attorney General Department Copyright Office. No. 5650. 8 March 1917. Copyright Collection. Serial Number: A1336, 5650. National Archives of Australia.

Citation

Gunn, Fiona. "Caroline Frances Pugliese." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-580t-ff10>

Adriënne Solser

by Annette Förster

Adriënne Solser was the only actress other than Caroline van Dommelen who directed silent era films in the Netherlands. Between 1924 and 1928, Solser co-directed two feature-length farces and acted the leading parts in another two for her own company, combining production and distribution, the Hollando-Belgica Film Mij. or Dutch-Belgian Film Company “Eureka” (Förster 117). Each film featured a female protagonist named Bet, a figure shaped after the stage persona of the Amsterdam folk character that Solser had created and successfully presented in Dutch “variété” or vaudeville shows and revues since 1914. With this stage persona, Solser fashioned her own variant of the so-called “Jordaan-genre” in Dutch popular theatre in the 1910s and transferred and adapted it to the cinema in the 1920s. The “Jordaan-genre” was a local and cross-disciplinary fictional genre that remained popular from around the turn of the century throughout the 1930s. It could take the form of vaudeville acts, sketches, revues, or full-length plays or films, but its core was mocking the inhabitants of the poor man’s neighborhood called “the Jordaan” in Amsterdam. The generic requirements included the use of the local tongue and humor, the composition of lifelike characters, and the insertion of sing-alongs and traditional dance (Förster 130–131). Adriënne Solser’s variant was closely related to the sketches and plays designed and acted by her younger brother Lion Solser in the early 1910s, the production of which ceased after his suicide in 1915. Like Lion Solser’s longer pieces, her films and stage performances had a female protagonist and an episodic rather than melodramatic structure; used current events to motivate the narrative; and were primarily farcical, with a social note, in contrast with other variants that were social dramas with comical notes. Adriënne Solser’s Jordaan persona was seconded by a henpecked husband and moved from stage to screen (Förster 132).  Solser was instrumental in this move across disciplines, initially as the leading actress in two farces that were produced and directed by a colleague, then subsequently as the producer, co-director, and leading actress of the Eureka company’s productions (Förster 114-115).

It is further significant that Solser took an active part in the six films in which she played the leading part, accompanying their screenings with onstage performances in person. She maintained this idiosyncratic practice even after sound film had become the rule, touring again with her productions from October 1932 until June 1934. Her live performance went far beyond the function of the lecturer of earlier years. Solser used to double her on-screen character, to speak the dialogue, to crack pointed jokes, and to perform the sing-alongs. In doing so, she drew from the interactive combination of stage appearance and film screening that comic performers had established within the revue of the mid-1910s, in which the comical effect was produced by the simultaneous presence of the actor on screen and on stage (Förster 109–110). Contemporary reviews attest to the fact that Solser’s double performances guaranteed her success with the public. The trade paper Nieuw Weekblad voor de Cinematografie, for instance, contended with regard to Solser’s second production, Bet trekt de 100.000/Bet Wins the Lottery (1926):  “Adriënne Solser does not pretend to create a work of art. […] When she makes a film, she asks herself how to entertain the audience for a while, so that people laugh their heads off and forget about themselves. To that end, she replays the entire film in person. […] The comic performer Adriënne Solser […] knows perfectly how to please the audience and making them laugh is what she strives for. For that reason, this film has to be perceived from a completely different angle than any other film. People attend the screening to see Adriënne Solser, and perhaps even more to hear her” (“Bet trekt de 100.000” 8).

In contrast to Dutch film historians, who found it difficult to come to terms with Solser’s cinematic unpretentiousness, the contemporary public did not mind as long as they were entertained. Solser’s production practices teach us to keep looking beyond the history of film as art or film as an autonomous form of entertainment, not just with respect to early and transitional cinema, but with respect to the later years of silent cinema as well (Förster 129).

Bet de Koningin van de Jordaan (1924), Adriënne Solser (p/d/a). PC

Adriënne Solser in Bet de Koningin van de Jordaan (1924). Private Collection.

Two of Adriënne Solser’s productions, Bet, de Koningin van de Jordaan/Bet, the Queen of the Jordaan (1924) and Bet naar de Olympiade/Bet to the Olympics (1928), have been preserved. Fortunately, Solser’s live accompaniment has also been reconstructed, based on her own notes, on songs from the era, and on lip-reading. The notes, now housed in the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam, were found in Solser’s handwritten repertory books that also include numerous verses, dialogue lines, and song texts that she delivered on stage between 1904 and the mid-1930s.

There is more to say about the films than the generic conventions delineated above. In her first production, Solser aptly turned her own forty-year stage jubilee into that of a fishmonger on the market, occasioning exuberant scenes set in the Jordaan and hilarious situations set outside: on a trip through the city park, to the zoo, and even out of town to the beach. The shooting on location gives the images a documentary quality. The comedy derives from the uncultured behavior of the Jordaan couple, from Bet’s bossiness to Hein, and, last but not least, to Bet’s big bearing—a feature of the actress that she made fun of in her last production. As its title suggests, Bet now prepares for taking part in the Olympics. The Games were indeed held in Amsterdam in 1928, but Solser satirized the historical fact that women were granted participation for the first time. The film also includes scenes mocking other women’s occupations of the day, such as the girls parading their legs in revues and the intrepid serial queens saving the hero. This is not to say that the work should be read as a statement on contemporary issues. For Solser, the local, topical, and gender-related nonsensicality was simply a means to create fun. If enlivened with performance, it is enjoyable to this day.

See also: Caroline van Dommelen

Bibliography

“Bet, de KONINGIN van de JORDAAN.” Rev. Weekblad Cinema en Theater 44 (1924): 18.

“Bet naar de Olympiade.” Rev. Weekblad Cinema en Theater 235 (1928): 4.

“Bet trekt de 100.000.” Rev. Nieuw Weekblad voor de Cinematografie (22 Jan. 1926): 8.

Donaldson, Geoffrey. Of Joy and Sorrow: A Filmography of Dutch Silent Fiction. Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997.

Förster, Annette. Histories of Fame and Failure. Adriënne Solser, Musidora, Nell Shipman: Women Acting and Directing in the Silent Cinema in The Netherlands, France and North America. Unpublished dissertation. Utrecht University, 2005.

------. Women in the Silent Cinema: Histories of Fame and Fate. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.

“Een nieuwe Nederlandsche film.” Rev. Weekblad Cinema en Theater 157 (1927): 9.

Archival Paper Collections:

Archief Adriënne Solser en Lien D’Oliveyra. EYE Filmmuseum.

Cheiënne Solser. Private Collection.

Citation

Förster, Annette. "Adriënne Solser." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-2rh6-dv41>

Dorothy Gordon

by Deb Verhoeven

Perhaps due to her later fame as the newspaper columnist and controversial radio personality known as “Andrea,” the early film career of Dorothy Gordon has been largely overlooked. Certainly her significant celebrity in Australia in the 1960s overshadowed her comparatively lesser achievements as a silent cinema extra, actor, screenwriter, and art director. The recognition of her contribution to the Australian film industry is further diminished by the loss of her major work as star of Raymond Longford’s Hills of Hate (1926). In addition, her reputation as an entertaining raconteur fond of telling tall stories, especially about herself, leaves much room for doubt about the recorded detail of her early career in both Hollywood and Australian silent films.

Lobby Card. Dorothy Gordon (a) The Hills of Hate, 1926. AUC

Lobby card, The Hills of Hate (1926). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Having developed a taste for appearing on stage, principally as a chorus girl in the 1912 Melbourne production of “Girl in a Train,” Gordon left Australia for the United States in 1915. She arrived in Hollywood brandishing several letters of introduction including one that brought her to the attention of a second cousin working for Jesse Lasky. To supplement a small stipend provided by her father, Gordon took a job as dressmaker in the costume department and developed a reputation for stunt work. At other times she also worked as a scenario reader, writing summaries for each script. In 1916, she was put in stock at Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, later Paramount Pictures, appearing as an extra in uncounted films.

Most knowledge of this period of Gordon’s career comes from her own writings, especially an article for the Australian press published in 1927 and her autobiography Darlings, I’ve Had a Ball! published in 1975. Conjuring the relevant details from Gordon’s entangled account of her various roles in Hollywood is not simple, and further archival and textual research is warranted. In her autobiography Gordon claims to have appeared in at least two Valentino films, The Sheik (1921) as the robber chief’s wife and Blood and Sand (1922) as a Spanish lady. Apparently her relationship to Valentino was so close that she was named as a character witness in his divorce proceedings. She says that she later worked with Jean de Limur on an unproduced screenplay for Valentino and claims to have worked as well with W. C. Fields and Houdini. Gordon made other uncredited appearances in Unseen Forces (1920) and A Wise Fool (1921). Additionally, her work as a production assistant on Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1923) went uncredited.

Dorothy Gordon (a/w/o), Gordon Collingridge and Bill Watson, The Hills of Hate, 1926. AUC

Dorothy Gordon, Gordon Collingridge and Bill Watson, The Hills of Hate (1926). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

In her memoirs, Gordon makes further claims about her involvement in two other significant films going into some detail describing her preparation for her role as a role as a prostitute in The Sheik (1921) and later as a grandmother in The Cheat (67-68, 90-91). The latter opportunity is portrayed as if it occurred after her marriage to George Jenner in 1922 which would make the film the George Fitzmaurice version, The Cheat (1923). However, Gordon’s description of the crew and cast (including a particularly unkind assessment of Fannie Ward) would suggest that she read for or acted in the original and more renowned version directed by Cecil B. DeMille in 1915, a claim that appears equally unlikely (90-91). Gordon also goes into some detail describing her work on Fatty Arbuckle’s Brewster’s Millions (1921), but we should be equally skeptical of the accuracy of this claim since Gordon incorrectly cites the film as directed by Paul Powell and as Fatty Arbuckle’s last film before his trial for rape and manslaughter (87).  In her 1975 interview with Graham Shirley, Gordon says that the police asked her to make a statement about Virginia Rappe’s death but we then wonder why in her memoirs she maintains that she wasn’t herself present at the infamous San Francisco party that led to Rappe’s death (87).

Dorothy Gordon (a) and Gordon Collingridge The Hills of Hate, 1926

Dorothy Gordon and Gordon Collingridge, The Hills of Hate (1926). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

On her return to Australia in 1925, Gordon was treated to the sort of media attention accorded to homecoming success stories. On the basis of her assumed status in Hollywood, she was almost immediately cast as the lead in Raymond Longford’s Hills of Hate (1926), a melodrama produced by Australasian Films that was Longford’s last production for that company. Though little is known about this film, Gordon herself in her autobiography concedes that it was not, as she says, a “worldbeater” (96). The film did, however, provide her with an introduction to Raymond Longford’s son Victor who was an associate producer on the film. At the conclusion of filming, Australasian asked Gordon to collaborate with Victor Longford on the screenplay for one of the most ambitious productions undertaken in Australia, the convict epic For the Term of His Natural Life (1927).

Dorothy Gordon (art), For the Term of his Natural Life(1927). AUC

Dorothy Gordon, For the Term of his Natural Life (1927). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Gordon readily agreed, on the understanding that the American action director Allan Dwan would be brought in to helm the production. To her horror, instead of Dwan, the lesser-known Norman Dawn arrived, a fact only she seemed to recognize, having worked previously with Dwan in the United States. Norman Dawn proceeded to dismantle Gordon and Longford’s screenplay, preferring instead to work directly from the novel, and they requested that their names be removed from the credits. Gordon’s association with the film continued, however, and extended to location and prop research. For this she received an art direction credit. In her 1975 interview, Gordon is scathing about Dawn, calling him an “egomaniac” and describing his involvement in the production as “The biggest con job I have seen in films.” On its release the film was panned by critics for its narrative shortcomings yet its visual impact and impressive special effects continue to be admired. We can only speculate about the different film that might have been made from Gordon’s screenplay. In her interview with Graham Shirley, she proposes a less literal rendering of the sprawling novel, claiming that she and Longford were aiming for an international audience and were more respectful of their audience, leaving out scenes such as one featuring cannibalism. The impact of the film on Gordon seems to have been far greater because For the Term of His Natural Life (1927) was the end of her film adventure. Although her career in cinema never reached the heights of those of her Australian contemporaries such as Sylvia Breamer and Louise Lovely, Gordon’s various roles in the early Australian and American film industries suggests there is further research to be done on the transnational dimensions of early film production

Dorothy Gordon (art), Eva Novak and Dunstan Webb, For the Term of His Natural Life (1927). AUC

Eva Novak and Dunstan Webb, For the Term of His Natural Life (1927), Dorothy Gordon (w). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Bibliography

Gordon, Dorothy. “The Australian Stunt Woman.” Adam and Eve (1 August 1927): 9.

Gordon, Dorothy and Trish Sheppard. Darlings, I’ve Had a Ball!, Sydney: Ure Smith, 1975.

Archival Paper Collections:

Dorothy Gordon Jenner Papers. Title No. MLMSS 5184. State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library.

Gordon, Dorothy. Interview with Graham Shirley. Title No: 464835 (21 Jan. 1975). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Citation

Verhoeven, Deb. "Dorothy Gordon." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-2w23-6s32>

Gwladys, Marchioness of Townshend

by Mirte Terpstra

The Marchioness of Townshend was born Gwladys Ethel Gwendolen Eugénie Sutherst. She married the 6th Marquess of Townshend in 1905 by whom she had two children, including the 7th Marquess of Townshend. Townshend later remarried Bernard le Strange. A high society celebrity, Townshend was a writer of articles, plays, novels, and scenarios, and in 1936 published the collection True Ghost Stories with Maude Ffoulkes (McKernan “Interview”). In her 1937 autobiography, It Was and It Wasn’t, Townshend writes that she also inspired two fellow peeresses to write scenarios, the Countesses of Warwick and Roden.

Marchioness Townshend (w) The Bystander, 1905. PD

Marchioness Townshend on the cover of The Bystander, 1905.

An exception for scenarists in the early period of British cinema, Townshend was given full credit on all her scenarios. None of the films survive, but we can assume that Townshend’s eight scenarios form her complete scenario oeuvre. All of the motion pictures she wrote were made for Clarendon, one of the seven major British companies at that time; all were directed by Wilfred Noy; and the main actress was always Dorothy Bellew. In her autobiography, Townshend writes that she entered into an arrangement with Clarendon in 1912 “to produce a series of picture plays,” adding that “these were the first cinematograph dramas to give the author’s name, and I was the first peeress to write for the Cinema” (39). In Great Britain, Clarendon was certainly among the first companies to credit their writers, but the fact that Townshend was a peeress was undoubtedly the main reason that she was credited at all. In her autobiography, Townshend actually only refers to seven film scripts and omits Behind the Scenes (1913). This film was reviewed in the Bioscope, but received less attention and therefore the Bioscope itself refers to The Convent Gate (1913) as Townshend’s third film. Looking back, she saw her visibility as a boon in the first decade: “When I see the enormous development of the Cinema to-day I am glad I broke through the barriers of anonymity” as a gesture to future writers for the screen (41). The trade press was also impressed by Townshend’s involvement in a new film industry seeking respectability. The Kinematograph Monthly Film Record confirms that she was an asset, writing in 1913 that “there is a distinct drawing power in a poster announcing the fact that a certain play is from her pen” (148).

Yet this quote also reflects an ambivalence on the part of the trade press towards Townshend’s scenarios. Each of her eight films was reviewed extensively with long descriptions of the story lines, in which, as noted by the Bioscope in 1914, “plausibility has been sacrificed to the exigencies of melodrama” (671). Even Townshend herself, in 1937, comments that her scenarios “sound most melodramatic now” (41). However, the first four films she wrote were received with well-wishing enthusiasm, but when Clarendon held a joint trade show for her three 1914 films, they were reviewed as one, suggesting a similarity in both form and content. The Bioscope review reveals a certain weariness with these “somewhat conventional” films that they perhaps felt obliged to like. Townshend’s final scenario for When East Meets West (1915), in which a fakir uses hypnotism to explode light bulbs filled with poisonous gas from a distance in order to rob unsuspecting Westerners, was again well-received in the Bioscope, but this time was not accompanied by enthusiastic trade show announcements (569–571). The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, however, commented that the film “tells quite a fascinating story,” but only when “admitting, for the purposes of the play, an hypothesis that is obviously inadmissible” (49). It would appear that, while grateful for Her Ladyship’s interest in motion pictures, the trade press was not so impressed with the quality of her scenarios. The oddity of her position as both aristocrat and industry worker comes through in the deferential attitude of the press. For instance, the Bioscope in July 1914 relates how she “kindly granted” them an interview, and promises that actors in her future films would have “the advantage of Lady Townshend’s personal supervision and advice,” awarding her a symbolic status that did not go with the job (429-431).

What distinguishes Townshend’s scenarios is that all were written originally for the screen. For example, The Love of an Actress (1914) featured the novelty of a film actress who falls in love with a Lord when her company makes a film on the grounds of his country house. Scenarios in this period were often barely worked-out ideas, but Townshend seems to have given her work an unusual amount of creative attention. In her autobiography she writes that she had “built a small model theatre” for which she used “figures cut from illustrated newspapers, and photographs and cardboard buildings,” and for The Convent Gate (1913), she even arranged scenes in her garden with “cut-out figures of nuns in cardboard” in an effort to imagine the scene (40). The Bioscope review enthusiastically saw the film as “the work of an author who has imagination and a true appreciation of dramatic effect,” who especially understands the “requirements of the camera” while other scripts were only “made to order” (429-431).

Just before the joint trade show of The Love of an Actress, Wreck and Ruin, and The Family Solicitor in July 1914, Townshend revealed in the Bioscope interview that she had just signed another contract with Clarendon to write six more films. This may be the contract she refers to in her autobiography when she explains that “I was paid ?300 for writing six film plays” (40). Only one other film, When East Meets West, however, was eventually made, assuming that she did not count the three 1914 films. In the same interview, Townshend mentions that she had written “one or two costume plays” that remained unproduced because there was no interest in that genre. Unfortunately, the case may have been that there was no more interest in Townshend’s scenarios in a rapidly changing film industry. Although her scenarios should perhaps have started a development of more original scripts, the British film industry, in the years during World War I, began to focus on making adaptations of novels and plays as a way to make cinema-going more respectable. Townshend, however, had stated in her interview that “I do not care to see the stage adapting itself to the film, for neither great plays nor great actors can always be represented adequately on the screen” (430–431). But Townshend’s status was no longer required since the status of British film was improving by other means.

Bibliography

Bioscope (13 Aug. 1914): 671.

Bioscope (11 Feb. 1915): 569-571.

Kinematograph Monthly Film Record (1 June 1913): 148.

Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (11 Feb 1915): 49

Gifford, Denis. The British Film Catalogue: Fiction Film, 1895-1994. Vol.1. London: Routledge, 2001.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film, 1906-1914. 2nd ed. London: Unwin Brothers Limited, 1973.

McKernan, Luke. “Interview with the Marchioness Townshend.” The Bioscope: Reporting on the World of Early and Silent Cinema (9 June 2007): n.p.  http://bioscopic.wordpress.com/2007/06/09/interview-with-the-marchioness-townshend/

Townshend, Gladys Ethyl Gwendolen Eugenia Sutherst. It Was - and It Wasn't. London: J. Long Ltd., 1937.

------. “Interview with the Marchioness Townshend.” The Bioscope (30 July 1914): 429-431.

Townshend, Gladys Ethyl Gwendolen Eugenia Sutherst and Maude Ffoulkes. True Ghost Stories. London: Hutchinson & Co.,1936.

Terpstra, Mirte. Girls from the Sky:; A Critical Catalogue of Women in the Production of British Silent Cinema, 1914-1918. Nottingham: Univ. of Nottingham, 2006.

Citation

Terpstra, Mirte. "Gwladys, Marchioness of Townshend." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-qb57-xj22>

Gurly Drangsholt

by Anne Marit Myrstad

Gurly Drangsholt is the first woman we know who played a role behind the camera on a Norwegian feature film production during the silent era. True or false? She is known for her collaboration with Harry Ivarson on the screenplay of the crime film Madame Besøker Oslo/Madame Visits Oslo (1927), based on a work by Alf Rød. The film was directed by Ivarson and premiered on October 17, 1927. However, in the surviving premiere program, Drangsholt is also credited as assistant director and head of production, credits confirmed in Lars Braaten’s Norwegian filmography. Madame Besøker Oslo, in which two swindlers try to steal the property of a wealthy banker who has died while abroad, is categorized as both crime comedy and crime drama. The heir and nephew, played by Erling Drangsholt, Gurly’s husband, succeeds in bringing the swindles to light. The film was a departure for the small Norwegian film industry. Norwegian films made in the 1920s were set in a vague past and in what could be called national-romantic surroundings. Madame was marketed as something different: “Norwegian film takes a new road,” cheered the periodical Filmen og Vi/The Film and Us in a September 1927 preview article. The article asks if Norwegian film has at last matured, observing that Madame leaves the peasants and the countryside behind and is instead set among the luxurious estates along the Oslo fjord with sailing yachts, riding horses, cars, and Norway’s famous Hankø Regatta. Even a private airplane is part of the action, this indicating the distance from the typical Norwegian film set in a beautiful but modest and traditional countryside.

Archival sources for information about Gurly Drangsholt are few. Apart from the premiere program and a few clippings, there is little primary material on her in the folder on Madame Besøker Oslo in the Film Documentation Division of the Norwegian National Library, and there are no entries on her in Norwegian archive publications. However, her role behind the camera is briefly commented upon in a Filmen og Vi/The Film and Us article, most likely from later in 1927. Drangsholt is here presented as a woman of many skills, a woman of ambitions who wants to learn more. She had already left for Hollywood before the October 1927 Oslo premiere, and the article anticipates that she will return a full-fledged film director, imaging her as the third female director in the world behind Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner, who the article cites as the only women film directors. The Madame Besøker Oslo folder also contains an undated article from the evening newspaper’s magazine A-magasinet focusing on the use of aeroplanes in film. Erling Drangsholt, interviewed about his breathtaking jump from an airplane in Madame Visits Oslo, mentions that his wife is currently in Hollywood, leading us to conclude that the article appeared soon after the premiere of Madame Besøker Oslo. Erling Drangsholt is quoted as saying that he always admired jumps from airplanes in American movies and that he had asked his wife to investigate the possibilities further during her visit to Hollywood.

Erling Drangsholt, Gurly Drangsholt, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in Hollywood 1925. From Erling Drangsholt by Reidar Lunde.

Erling Drangsholt, Gurly Drangsholt, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks in Hollywood, 1925, from book Erling Drangsholt (1943). 

This 1927 trip would not have been Gurly Drangsholt’s first trip to Hollywood, as it followed another, two years before, in which both Erling and Gurly were welcomed by so-called Hollywood “royalty.” Much can be gleaned by studying photographs from the trip held by family members as well as those published in Reidar Lunde’s 1943 biography of Erling Drangsholt. In one published photograph from 1925, Erling appears with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford outside their home, but the second woman in the photograph is unidentified (Lunde 1943, 26). But on the identical photograph held in the private collection of Gurly Drangsholt’s grandson, the second woman is identified as Erling’s wife Gurly. Also in the grandson’s album are several photos of the Norwegian couple pictured together with other Hollywood actors and actresses in different settings, giving the impression that on the first trip, their stay was relatively long. A photograph from New York tells us that the couple also brought their four-year-old son with them on the 1925 trip to the United States.

But how did this couple with no motion picture experience in 1925 get to meet the inner circles in Hollywood? One could conjecture that it was enough to be Scandinavian at a time when Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo entered Hollywood, and director Victor Sjøstrøm was already a success. Or perhaps the Drangsholt couple made this contact through the Norwegian actress and dancer Lillebil, with whom Erling had appeared on the Oslo stage. Or, Lillebil’s husband Tancred Ibsen, grandson of both the writer Henrik Ibsen and the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjønson, might have made the introductions since Tancred had in 1924 joined the writing department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Drangsholts’ grandson suggests that the Drangsholts may have met important people in Los Angeles through Gurly’s father, the Norwegian engineer Severin D. Anker-Holth, who had been living there since 1920.

Anker-Holth first travelled to Chicago in 1878 as a newly educated engineer. After several technological achievements, such as a milking machine and separator as well as caterpillar tracks for ploughing successfully adapted for tanks during World War I, he returned to Norway in 1889, the year after Gurly was born. The Anker-Holth family moved back to Chicago in 1901 with eleven-year-old Gurly. Fifteen years later, the Anker-Holths returned to Norway and remained until 1920, when Gurly, thirty years old, married Drangsholt. Anker-Holth then settled permanently in Los Angeles (Bjork 1947, 42).

Biographical material on Severin D. Anker-Holth tells us that Gurly spent the first fifteen years of her life in the US and confirms that he was a famous inventor and engineer and that he lived near Los Angeles beginning in 1920 (Bjork 42). This supports the idea that Gurly’s father may have played an important part in the couple’s visit to Hollywood in 1925. Additionally, the second trip to Hollywood that she made alone in late 1927 may have been motivated both by her interest in film production and by a desire to visit her parents.

In 1936 Gurly and Erling divorced and Gurly settled in San Pedro, California. During World War II, she worked as head of dressmakers for the Norwegian government in Little Norway, Canada, making the uniform worn by the Norwegian prince who later became King Harald, a dress suit visible in patriotic photographs of the royal family. But she returned after the war not to Norway but to Southern California. Gurly last visited Norway with her new husband, Hamilton Murray, in 1956, four years before her 1960 death in La Paz, Mexico. We are left with many questions. What was her role during the production of Madame Besøker Oslo? Did she actually travel to Hollywood in 1927, or did she only visit her parents? If she did make Hollywood her destination, was she able to improve her film production skills, and if so, how was she met when she returned to Norway and a somewhat disintegrated and unstable Norwegian film scene?

With additional research by Pétur Valsson and Maria Lund.

Bibliography

Bjork, Kenneth. Saga in Steel and Concrete. Norwegian Engineers in America. Minneapolis: Norwegian-American Historical Association: The Lund Press, 1947.

Braaten, Lars Thomas et al.  Filmen i Norge. Norske kinofilmer gjennom 100 år. Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal, 1995.

Lunde, Reidar. Erling Drangsholt. Oslo: Nasjonalforlaget, 1943.

Teknisk Ukeblad/Technical Weekly (9 March 1928): n.p.

“Madame Besøker Oslo.” Filmen og Vi (September 1927): n.p.

Filmen og Vi (1927): n.d. clippings file. National Library of Norway

Archival Paper Collections:

Film Documentation Division. National Library of Norway

Citation

Myrstad, Anne Marit . "Gurly Drangsholt." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-e6jh-4j85>

The Egede-Nissen Sisters

by Gunnar Iversen

During the 1910s and 1920s, Aud Egede-Nissen and her sisters Gerd and Ada made a name for themselves in the Nordic and German film industries as actors, producers, and directors. Like many female pioneers in the film industry, their work has been neglected. The contribution of the Egede-Nissen sisters, especially Aud, to silent film in the 1910s is remarkable given the odds they had to overcome as female producers in a male-dominated industry and the lack of tradition and experience in their home country, Norway.

The Egede-Nissen sisters were the daughters of a radical politician. Through her younger sisters, Aud became interested in the theatre and made her stage debut in Trondheim in 1911. Her sister Gerd had her first engagement as a film actor for Nordisk in Denmark in 1912. A year later, Aud joined her in Copenhagen, working for the Dania Biofilm company. Aud went on to Berlin in 1914, working at Kleines Theater auf der Bühne for a short period and appearing in her first German film as an actor in the Literaria production Teddy im Schlafsopha (Bjørn Bjørnson 1914). That same year she acted in at least three other German films, and by 1915 had made herself a name in the German film industry as an actor. In 1915 she appeared in at least sixteen German feature films and was about to become famous as a motion picture star.

Aud Egede-Nissen (a/p). PC

Aud Egede-Nissen postcard. Private Collection.

In 1916, Aud met actor and director Georg Alexander. Alexander directed her in Wer wirft den ersten Stein auf Sie? in 1916, and in the same year they married. Together with her husband and sisters, Aud Egede-Nissen established a production company in Berlin. Egede-Nissen-Film Company GmbH produced ten features in 1917, the first of which was the comedy Ich heirate meine Puppe (Georg Alexander 1917) starring Aud in a comic role. Most of the thirty feature films the company produced were divided into three series, each with one of the three sisters as leading actor and star. The Egede-Nissen series, built around Aud, came in two waves, the first in 1917–18 and the second in 1918–19, with a total of eleven features. Some of these were dramatic tragedies, like Die Geburt der Venus (Georg Alexander 1917); others were detective films.

Aud Egede-Nissen was the producer for all thirty features, and in interviews she was represented as the ruling force behind the film company. When a Norwegian journalist visited her company in Berlin in 1918, he gave a vivid portrait of a large film production company, bursting with energy, making new films and copies of older films in their own laboratory, all ruled by one will, one person: “die schöne Egede Nissen” (“the beautiful Egede Nissen”) (Lie 1918).

Aud Egede-Nissen (a/p). PC

Aud Egede-Nissen postcard. Private Collection

Unfortunately, it is difficult for film historians today to assess the film production output of the company. All but two of the films are lost, and the only existing Egede-Nissen-Film Company title with a users’ copy available for screening is Erblich belastet (Georg Alexander 1919), a film rediscovered in the Desmet collection of the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Material from a second film, Der Todestraum (1918), exists in the Bundesarchiv in Germany. One assumes that as the ruling force behind the company, Aud Egede-Nissen did some writing and directing, but this question is difficult to answer at this point.

Erblich belastet recounts a narrative set in America. The story is full of clichés and abruptly changes tone in the middle when a slow melodrama becomes an action-filled Western. By the end, the film returns to the slow melodrama. The film is thus a curious mixture, presenting a mini-Western bracketed by a tragic melodrama about old sins, love, suicide, and triumphant love. This mix of genres and modes give the film an ”international” tone as it attempts to combine all the most attractive elements of European tragic melodrama with the speed, rhythm, and violence of the American Western.

In 1920, the company ceased production. Gerd Egede-Nissen left both stage and screen and returned to Norway. Ada married a Norwegian musician and returned to Norway to start a career on the stage under her new name, Ada Kramm. Only Aud remained in Berlin. She divorced Georg Alexander and married the actor Paul Richter. She later changed her name to Aud Richter, the name she kept for the rest of her life.

Today, Aud Egede-Nissen is internationally known for her acting in German films of the 1920s. She is remembered for her roles in two Ernst Lubitsch films, as Haidee in Sumurun (1920) and as Jane Seymour in Anna Boleyn (1920) as well as Cara Carozza in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922). She also had major roles in F. W. Murnau’s Phantom (1922) and Die Austreibung (1923), and in Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (1923). From 1920 to 1929 she acted in at least thirty-nine German features, as well as a few Norwegian films. When sound film production started in Germany, she starred in Gerhard Lamprecht’s Zwischen Nacht und Morgen (1931).

Aud Egede-Nissen (a/p). PC

Aud Egede-Nissen in unknown film. Private Collection.

In the late 1920s, Aud relocated to Norway and, like her younger sisters, returned to the stage. She worked mainly as an actor and director in the theatre for the rest of her life, but occasionally was mentioned as working on film projects. As late as 1962, a Norwegian film magazine noted that she had started work on a short drama-documentary about the Second World War.

Bibliography

Birett, Herbert, ed. Verzeichnis in Deutschland gelaufener Film—Entscheidungen der Filmzensur 1911–1920. Berlin: K.G. Saur, 1980.

Iversen, Gunnar. “Sisters of Cinema: Three Norwegian Actors and Their German Film Company, 1917–1920.” Nordic Explorations: Film Before 1930. Ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson. London: John Libbey, 1999.  93-101.

Lamprecht, Gerhard. Deutsche Stummfilme 1917–1918. Berlin: Deutsche Kinematek, 1969.

Lie, Jonas Jr. “Aud Egede Nissen - Norsk Kunstnerliv i Berlin II.” Ukens revy (1918). 234-235.

Usai, Paolo Cherchi and Codelli, Lorenzo, eds. Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895–1920/Prima di Caligari: Cinema tedesco, 1895–1920. Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto/Edizioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1990.

Citation

Iversen, Gunnar. "The Egede-Nissen Sisters." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ttax-da73>

Rose Smith

by Kristen Hatch

Rose Smith edited a number of D.W. Griffith’s films. According to the Los Angeles Times in 1925, Rose Smith had “been a cutter for D.W. Griffith since her little-girl days,” joining Griffith’s Biograph studio in New York and traveling with him to California (C2). Her husband, James Smith, became Griffith’s cutter at Biograph, and Rose appears to have joined him in the cutting room during the editing of Birth of a Nation (1915). Later sources often mention Jimmie Smith but not his wife Rose.

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

Still from Intolerance (1916). Rose Smith (e).

Way Down East, DW Griffith (1920)

Way Down East (1920). Rose Smith (e).

See also: Hettie Grey Baker, Anne Bauchens, Margaret Booth, Winifred Dunn, Katherine Hilliker, Viola Lawrence, Jane Loring, Irene Morra, Blanche Sewell

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors” overview essay.

Citation

Hatch, Kristen. "Rose Smith." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-vqh1-0a87>

Blanche Sewell

by Kristen Hatch

Blanche Sewell entered the ranks of negative cutters shortly after graduating from Inglewood High School in 1918. She assisted cutter Viola Lawrence on Man, Woman, Marriage (1921) and became a cutter in her own right at MGM in the early 1920s. She remained an editor there until her death in 1949.

Film set, with father and baby, The Single Standard Josephine Lovette (w). PC

The Single Standard film set. Private Collection.

Blanche Sewell

Blanche Sewell. Private Collection.

See alsoHettie Grey BakerAnne BauchensMargaret BoothWinifred DunnKatherine HillikerViola LawrenceJane LoringIrene MorraRose Smith

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors” overview essay.

Citation

Hatch, Kristen. "Blanche Sewell." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-m475-v517>

Carmen Toscano

by David M.J. Wood

As a girl growing up in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico, Carmen Toscano Escobedo was strongly impressed by the family film screenings held by her father Salvador Toscano Barragán, a film pioneer, cameraman, exhibitor, entrepreneur, actuality and compilation filmmaker and collector, forestry and highway engineer, and, in the latter part of his career, a mid-ranking official in Mexico’s postrevolutionary government. Many years later, Carmen recalled with fondness and nostalgia, in a poem entitled “Testimonio” reprinted in her 1993 biography of her father:

[… ] cuando mi padre

sobre la gran pared herida por la luz

proyectaba unas sombras con fusiles

e iniciaba el relato como un cuento:

‘Cuando naciste en la revolución… ’ (11)

Carmen’s early adult years were dedicated to poetry and literature rather than cinema, and she spent more of her career writing and editing poems, short stories, essays, plays, and poems than she did working in motion pictures. In 1941, she founded the women’s literary journal Rueca. Indeed, although she would go on to produce, script, and edit one of the towering achievements of twentieth-century Mexican documentary cinema, Memorias de un mexicano (1950), becoming in the process a key figure in the preservation and circulation of Mexico’s silent nonfiction film heritage, her involvement in cinema seems to have been a product of circumstance rather than a calling.

Carmen’s father Salvador had expended much effort from the 1910s to the 1930s producing and exhibiting historical compilation films narrating the “complete history” of the Mexican Revolution. But by 1937, his energies were spent, and, conscious of the historical value of the material that he had in his possession, he vainly tried to sell a twenty-one-reel version to the Public Education Ministry (Miquel 1997, 91–92). Soon after, Carmen assumed the effort to offload the archive at least in part, involving an apparently fruitless exchange in 1942 with Iris Barry, film curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Film Library, and, again in 1945 with MoMA as well as with the British Museum. By the time her father passed away in April 1947, Carmen had cataloged most of the 100,000 feet of actuality film comprising the archive and sent a sample to Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles in the hope of stretching the silent footage to 24 frames per second, an effort documented in the 1947 correspondence between Carmen and Chico Alonso. Alonso, whom she appears to have met during a trip to Los Angeles in August 1946, was Carmen’s contact at Paramount.

Her aim was to produce a synthesis of Salvador’s compilation to showcase the entire collection in an effort to sell it to the Mexican state. Although once more the deal failed to materialize, the project gathered steam as Carmen, with the technical assistance of CLASA studios (Cinematográfica Latinoamericana, S.A.), set about scripting a fictional voice-over narrative and designing a soundtrack that might make these  images work for a modern audience. Half a decade’s work paid off when the feature-length compilation Memorias de un mexicano finally premiered in 1950, hailed by critics and intellectuals accustomed to Golden Age historical melodrama for its “objective and serene impartiality” (Novo 1.4) that revealed Mexico with “no virtuoso camerawork or actors who, however well they play, we know well that they’re only feigning a truth” (Magdaleno 1.3).

Aside from a brief succession of present-day shots in its closing sequence that were filmed ex profeso, the Memorias image-track is composed entirely of archival footage filmed from 1897 to 1946, although the main body of the film ends in 1924 during the regime of Álvaro Obregón, after which Toscano’s actuality archive thins out. The documentary’s first-person voice-over, spoken in the polished tones of well-known radio commentator Manuel Bernal, is a fictionalized narration of the last fifteen years of dictator Porfirio Díaz’s rule, the armed revolution of the 1910s, and the consolidation of the postrevolutionary regime. Unlike Salvador Toscano’s descriptive compilations, which are recounted in an omniscient third-person conveyed through intertitles, Carmen Toscano’s Memorias de un mexicano is narrated in first-person by a character who lived the vicissitudes of modern Mexican history, which here becomes a family drama of the Bernal character’s troubled but loving relationship with his uncle Luis.

By Carmen Toscano’s account, the choice of Bernal’s fictional voice-over was intended to lend flexibility to the narrative in an effort to fend off accusations of historical inaccuracy. In an unpublished, undated account held in the Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico, she writes: “the memoir introduces a subjective element that allows the author slight errors and oversights.” Fictionalization did not stop subsequent critics from lamenting the narration’s extreme nationalism. Yet critical opinion, exemplified by film historian Emilio Riera García, has tended to see the intrinsic value of the images as overriding the questionable narration (vol. 5, 355). Today’s viewer, however, might find a certain subtlety in the subjective narrator that echoes Carmen’s own poetic sensibility, as I have written elsewhere. In any case, Memorias proved hugely successful, both in Mexico and abroad. It earned an Ariel, that is a Mexican Film Academy award, for the film that best served the national interest in 1951; it traveled widely, frequently aided by Mexican diplomatic channels; and it competed at Cannes in 1954.

Although Salvador Toscano was credited as the photographer on Memorias in the original release, it was later discovered that much of the footage was in fact filmed by his colleagues and even competitors. There is now no doubt of the collaboration of Carmen and Salvador, daughter and father, on the enormous task of collecting, organizing, compiling, and editing Memorias. Carmen Toscano’s subsequent activities in cinema were largely dedicated to safeguarding and promoting both Memorias de un mexicano and the family archive, although her play “La llorona” was adapted to the screen in René Cardona’s 1959 film of the same name. Toscano’s correspondence suggests a hugely determined spirit that was fiercely protective of the integrity of her father’s cinematic legacy. She had good contacts in high places, as her husband, Manuel Moreno Sánchez, was a high-ranking politician in the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Yet these contacts were not always quite influential enough to help her realize her goal.

Attempts to get the government to acquire the archive continued unsuccessfully, even though in 1967 the National Institute for Archaeology and History (INAH) declared Memorias de un mexicano a “Historical Monument” of the nation, according to Novedadas in 1967. Earlier, in 1963, Carmen Toscano had founded the Cinemateca de México with the support of a list of dignitaries constituting a who’s who of contemporary Mexican artists, intellectuals, and politicians. She hoped to place the Toscano archive at the heart of a new national cinémathèque run independently of the state but with government subsidy, however, that proved short-lived (Puente 59–60). In 1976 Toscano directed the semi-documentary Ronda revolucionaria, written by Matilde Landeta and coproduced with the state via the National Film Corporation (CONACINE). Ronda revolucionaria was screened to a private audience, but remains unreleased to this day and few can speak with any authority about it. García Riera describes the film as a roundtable of specialists exchanging analyses, anecdotes, and memories of the Mexican Revolution interspersed with documents, artworks, photographs, and film clips, and cites a contemporary critic unhappy with historical inaccuracies (García Riera 1992, vol. 17: 296). In 1992, four years after Carmen Toscano’s death, her widower Manuel Moreno Sánchez established the Carmen Toscano Foundation to continue to safeguard the collection now housed in the Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico, the historical archive held by the foundation.

Interviewed by the writer Elena Poniatowska following INAH’s declaration of Memorias as a “Historical Monument” in 1967, Toscano likened her 1950 documentary to a pre-Hispanic pyramid in terms of its national patrimonial value and its right to physical integrity. Toscano was concerned that Memorias should not be fragmented or recontextualized as stock shots. Of course this position could be used by critics who found the documentary rigidly nationalistic. Yet at the end of the biography of her father, Carmen suggests that the celluloid monument is rather fleeting:

La aguja de Cleopatra, clavada en el corazón elegante de París y que habla a los franceses de sus triunfos, al turista extranjero le recuerda la grandeza de Egipto y lo mismo pasa con los templos asirios y griegos en los museos de Europa. La historia de la Revolución Mexicana tiene sus monumentos de celuloide (154–155).

So close to political power and yet never quite reducible to it, Carmen Toscano’s Memorias was perhaps always meant, on some level, as a Trojan horse. Much is yet to be discovered about her work and about the silent actuality archive, one of the most important collection of its kind relating to the Mexican Revolution. In 2011 the Carmen Toscano Foundation agreed to deposit the entire collection in the Filmoteca UNAM, raising the hope that the many thousands of feet of celluloid untouched in decades will finally be restored, preserved, and made available to researchers. Access to this material will enable us to understand the long process of selecting and organizing footage that Toscano undertook during the 1940s; her late work Ronda revolucionaria may also be made available to the public. Just as her poem “Testimonio” tells us how her recollection of the Revolution is inextricable from the cinematic imagery imprinted on her from a young age, her extant documentary work is closely bound up with today’s historical memory of early twentieth century Mexican history.

Bibliography

Alonso, Chico. Letter to Carmen Toscano. 21 March 1947. Fundación Carmen Toscano, Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico.

Barry, Iris. Letter to Salvador Toscano. 14 May 1942. Fundación Carmen Toscano, Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico.

------. Letter to Carmen Toscano de Moreno Sánchez. 12 August 1942. Fundación Carmen Toscano, Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico.

De Orellana, Margarita. “Una voz del presente sobre imágenes del pasado.” In Margarita de Orellana, ed. Imágenes del pasado. Mexico City: Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematograficos-UNAM, 1983. 81-84.

García Riera, Emilio. Historia documental del cine mexicano. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, 1992.

“Javier Sierra.” In Eugenia Meyer, ed. Testimonios para la historia del cine mexicano, vol. 6 (Cuadernos de la Cineteca Nacional). Mexico City: Cineteca Nacional, 1976.

Magdaleno, Mauricio. “En torno a las ‘Memorias de un mexicano’” El Universal (29 August 1950): 1.3.

Miquel, Ángel. Salvador Toscano. Mexico City: Universidad de Guadalajara/Gobierno del Estado de Puebla/Universidad Veracruzana/UNAM, 1997.

Noble, Andrea. Mexican National Cinema. London/New York: Routledge, 2005. 48-69.

Novo, Salvador. “Ventana de Salvador Novo. ‘Memorias de un mexicano’” Novedades (12 September 1950): 1.4.

Ortiz Monasterio, Pablo, ed. Fragmentos: narración cinematográfica compilada y arreglada por Salvador Toscano, 1900-1930. Mexico City: Conaculta/Imcine/Universidad de Guadajalara, 2010.

Pick, Zuzana M. Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution: Cinema and the Archive. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. 11-38.

Poniatowska, Elena. “Declaran monumento histórico el filme Memorias de un Mexicano.” Novedades (8 October 1967): 1, 9.

Puente, Carlos. “Celuloides Archivados” Sucesos Para Todos (5 November 1963): 59-60.

Toscano, Carmen. Memorias de un mexicano. Mexico City: Fundación Carmen Toscano, 1993.

------. Trazo incompleto. Mexico City: Cvltvra, 1934.

------. Inalcanzable y mío. Mexico City: Taller Poético, 1936.

------. Rosario la de Acuña. Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1948.

------. Leyendas del México colonial: telerrelatos. Mexico City: Libro-Mex, 1955.

------. La llorona. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959.

------. Letter sent to Chico Alonso (draft). 9 March 1947. Fundación Carmen Toscano, Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico.

------. “Memorias de un mexicano, una excursión al pasado." Unpublished document. n.d.: 21. Fundación Carmen Toscano, Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico.

Wood, David M.J. “Memorias de una mexicana: la Revolución como monumento fílmico.” Secuencia 75 (2009): 147-170.

Archival Paper Collections:

Various archival materials cited above. Fundación Carmen Toscano, Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico.

Citation

Wood, David MJ. "Carmen Toscano." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-fdz9-ja61>

Ida Jenbach

by Robert Von Dassanowsky

The previous lack of even the most basic published information on Ida Jenbach is symptomatic of the long scholarly neglect of Austrian cinema history in and outside the country. With research, restoration, and archival work beginning in the last decade of the twentieth century, much has been reclaimed and often examined for the first time. This includes the rare female artists behind the camera, and the careers of those who perished in the Holocaust. The triple layer of cultural amnesia surrounding the work of screenwriter Ida Jenbach as Austrian film talent, female artist, and Shoah victim is a case in point.

Jenbach, born 1868, either June 4th or 16th, depending upon the source, as Ida Jakobovits in Miskolez, in the former Austria-Hungary, now Hungary. She studied acting at the Vienna Conservatory and gave her stage premiere in Mannheim in 1888, and subsequently found acting work in theatrical productions in Vienna, Munich, Salzburg, and Kronstadt. With the establishment of a film industry in Vienna, Jenbach was employed as the dramaturge for Wiener Kunstfilm or Viennese Art Film, the studio of Austria’s first female film pioneer, Louise Kolm, who, along with Count Sascha Kolowrat, led Viennese film production through World War I and into the mid-1920s. Although Kolm would share or give her husbands—first, director Anton Kolm, then cameraman Jakob Fleck—credit for her screenwriting, editing, direction, and production, leaving her own official film credits inconclusive, her realization as a filmmaker must have been influential on Jenbach. Kolm, with Fleck, directed the film on which Jenbach received one of her first recorded credits as screenwriter, Der Geisel der Menschheit/The Hostage of Mankind (1918). Der Schmuck der Herzogin/The Jewels of the Duchess (1917) followed, which Jenbach cowrote with Edmund Porges, but since no director is credited, we could speculate that it may have been directed by one or both of its writers. Next, just prior to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Jenbach wrote what is one of the few German language detective films of the era, Frauenehre/Women’s Honor (1918), directed by Georg Kundert.

Jenbach did her most of her screenwriting for Austrian directors Hans Karl Breslauer and Max Neufeld and helped develop new genres for both of them. She was also a scenarist for Carmen Cartellieri, a leading silent screen star who formed her own production company and created one of the first significant roles for future German-language leading man and film director Willi Forst in Breslauer’s Oh, du lieber Augustin/Oh, Dear Augustin (1922). Strandgut (1924), about a female shipwreck survivor who is rescued and pursued by two brothers, directed by Breslauer and staring Forst, shows Jenbach’s talent in furthering neorealistic melodrama and location-shot productions. The character constellation of a woman caught between the desires of two men, and the equation of the female with dangerous natural forces became a dependable trope in the so-called Bergfilm or mountain film genre of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Hans Moser in Die Stadte Ohne Juden (1924) Ida Jenbach (w). ATF

Hans Moser in Die Stadte Ohne Juden (1924). Courtesy of the Filmarchiv Austria.

Jenbach’s most well-known film is Die Stadt ohne Juden/The City Without Jews (1924), for which she adapted the popular satirical novel on anti-Semitism by Hugo Bettauer. Directed by Breslauer, Jenbach’s script of Bettauer’s Novel About the Day After Tomorrow, as it was subtitled, was met with more controversy than the original publication of the novel, particularly in National Socialist and other anti-Semitic circles. Literary critics tend to agree that Bettauer’s novel was not intended as a visionary warning against a future expulsion of the Jews from Austria, but as a commentary on the absurdity of bigotry. Economic disaster in the city of Utopia, visually indicated as Vienna, leads to the expulsion of the Jews, who are then asked to return when the original problem is only exacerbated by their expulsion. A romantic pairing symbolically reunites the divided culture. Jenbach contextualizes the novel’s satiric political statement with a mollifying ending in which the narrative is revealed to have been a dream by an anti-Semite locked in an Expressionist Dr. Caligari-like cell. Unfortunately, the subsequent murder of author Hugo Bettauer by a Nazi party member resulted in a limited release of the film; screenings were greeted with violence or stink bomb attacks and cuts were made by alarmed theatre managers.

Although Jenbach never received credit for film direction, she became the only female member of the Austrian Directors Club. There is the possibility that she assisted in the direction of Der Schmuck der Herzogin, and, following the  model of Louise Kolm, Jenbach might also have codirected other screenplays she wrote for the Kolm-Fleck team as well as for actress-producer Cartellieri. Writer-director Heinz Hanus, who had worked with the filmmaking couple at the very inception of studio production in Vienna, headed the Club, and it was with Hanus and the founder of the Austrian Stage Association, Alfons Bolz-Feigl, that Jenbach cofounded the Vereinigung aller am Filmschaffenden Österreichs, or the Union of the Austrian Film Industry, more commonly known as the Filmbund in late 1922. The organization set standards for protecting the industry’s interests during the time of crushing inflation and unemployment, fighting for copyright protection and engaging in labor arbitration.

Jenbach again courted controversy with her adaptation of nineteenth century Austrian author Ludwig Anzengruber’s play “Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld” as Der Pfarrer von Kirchfeld/The Pastor of Kirchfeld (1926). It was the second of three film versions of the play to be directed by Louise Kolm and Jakob Fleck, and featured a young German actor who was to become noted Hollywood director William Dieterle. Although interpreted as a Heimatfilm, a rural melodrama in which provincial tradition resolves conflict, Jenbach maintained aspects of Anzengruber’s naturalist drama critical of Catholicism. Her pause in screenplay production between 1928 and 1930 remains unexplained, but it may have been due to her adjustment to the challenges of the new sound film. When Jenbach returned to writing, she worked in the German film industry and again primarily for the Kolm-Fleck team, which had moved to Berlin in 1923. Most of these features were produced by Berlin’s female silent picture mogul, Lydie, or “Liddy,” Hegewald. Jenbach now abandoned the socially critical aspects of her earlier work and concentrated on operettas. Gabrielle Hansch and Gerlinde Waz quote Kolm’s son on the popularity of these imperial-era romances, referring to “[the] Viennese films that were so popular in Berlin.” Among these is Jenbach’s screenplay for director Max Neufeld’s first sound film, Opernredoute/Opera Ball (1931), which the New York Times praised (1931). When the film was remade the following year in England as After the Ball (1932), only Neufeld received credit for the original screenplay.

Die Stadt Ohne Juden (1924),written by Ida Jenbach (w/d/o).

Die Stadt Ohne Juden (1924). Courtesy of the Filmarchiv Austria.

Because she was of Jewish extraction, although she claimed the Protestant faith, as was Jakob Fleck, neither Ida Jenbach nor the Kolm-Fleck team were able to work in German film after 1933. Jakob Fleck and Louise Kolm returned to Vienna, but Jenbach did not continue with them, and her final credit is as cowriter for the sound film Hoheit tanzt Walzer/His Highness Waltzes (1935), a lavish Viennese film-style operetta directed by Max Neufeld. Produced in Prague, the film was simultaneously shot in German; French, as Valse éternelle; and Czech, as Tanecek panny Márinky, with each version featuring a different cast. With the German ban on Jewish and other so-called “unacceptable” film artists, racial laws governing film imports from Austria, and Nazi infiltration into Austrian production, a secondary “independent” film industry emerged in Vienna. This consisted of films made with Czechoslovakian and Hungarian studios by German émigrés and Austrians not allowed to work in films exported to Nazi Germany. Jenbach was well suited for this work in internationally marketable contemporary and socially critical comedy, and it remains a mystery as to why she did not remain active. A factor in her exit may have been the two professional relationships that soured. Heinz Hanus, who continued to head the Austrian regime’s successor to the Filmbund, the union that she cofounded with him, supported the outlawed Nazi party and provided “racial” information regarding performers and crew to producers. Director Hans Karl Breslauer, who retreated from filmmaking after Die Stadt ohne Juden, became a Nazi party member in 1939.

Jenbach was forbidden to work following the German Anschluss in 1938, and in 1941 she was deported to the ghetto at Minks which was liquidated in 1943, so she either perished in Minsk or at the nearby Maly Trostenets extermination camp (Loacker 2003). No records survive. Jenbach’s screenwriting credits and her central involvement in professionalizing the Austrian film industry suggest the significance of women’s contribution to early Central European film production. Her life and work are crucial pieces of the puzzle we study in an attempt to grasp the historical moment of the creation and destruction of a democratic society.

See also: Louise Kolm-Fleck

Bibliography

Die Csikósbaroness. Illustrierter Film-Kurier (1930): 4.

Geser, Guntram and Armin Loacker, eds. Die Stadt ohne Juden. Edition Film und Text 3. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000.

Hall, Mordaunt. “Opera Ball/Opernredoute at Carnegie Playhouse.” New York Times (6 November 1931): n.p. https://www.nytimes.com/1931/11/06/archives/the-screen.html.

Hansch, Gabrielle and Gerlinde Waz.  Filmpionierinnen in Deutschland. Ein Beitrag zur Filmgeschichtsschriebung. Unpublished, 1998.

Hoheit tanzt Walzer.” Illustrierter Film-Kurier (1936): 8.

Loacker, Armin. “Kino vor dem KZ. Östereichische Filmschaffende als NS-Opfer.” Film-Archiv 7 (2003): 11.

------, ed. Kunst der Routine. Der Schauspieler und Regisseur Max Neufeld. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2008.

------, and Martin Prucha, eds. Unerwünschtes Kino: Der deutschsprachige Emigrantenfilm 1934-1937. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000.

Mörth, Otto. “Die Filmadaption des Romans Die Stadt ohne Juden (1924).” Maske und Kothurn 43 (1999): 73-92.

Prawer, Siegbert Salomon. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910-1933. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005.

Archival Paper Collections:

Paimann's Filmlisten clippings [film publication] (1921-35). Filmarchiv Austria. Elements available online via European Film Gateway.

Citation

Von Dassanowsky, Robert. "Ida Jenbach." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-5c5x-0b10>

Dorothea Baird

by Trish Sheil
Dorothea Baird as Trilby in original theatrical production of Trilby, c.1895

Dorothea Baird as Trilby, c. 1895. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In 1895, Dorothea Baird aged twenty, played Trilby at the Haymarket Theatre opposite Beerbohm Tree’s Svengali, in Paul Potter’s stage version of the Daphne Du Maurier novel Trilby. With Trilby’s charming beauty, infamous hat, low-class humour and bare feet, Baird became a British stage celebrity. Her rehearsals under Tree, who groaned “Give me actresses from the Gutter!” undoubtedly influenced her stage success as comic, lower-class Jenny in The Princess Clementina, filmed in 1911 by William G. Barker (Irving 1967, 213).

These portrayals of feisty, lower-class women, alongside Dorothea’s charitable work for impoverished mothers, culminated in her main contribution to early cinema when she scripted and starred as a health visitor in her film Motherhood (1917), an instructional film for National Baby Week promoting better parenting for lower class mothers. The Successors and The Precarious Crust, both written by her son, Laurence Irving, provide details of her life and career while the Laurence Irving collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Theatre and Performance Archives holds original documents.

Dorothea Baird and H.B. Irving, Bain News Service

Dorothea Baird and H.B. Irving.

In 1894, Baird was playing in “The Tempest” when she met Sir Henry Irving’s son Henry Brodribb, known as H.B. In 1896, the year of the birth of British cinema, they married. According to The Bioscope in March 1911, her son Laurence Forster Irving was born in 1897, the year Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was filmed by the cameraman William G. Barker  who would later introduce Baird to cinema (n.p.). Her daughter Elizabeth was born 1904.  The next year, Sir Henry Irving died and Baird and H.B. formed their own theatre company while Barker founded Ealing Studios. By 1910 they were both performing in “The Princess Clementina,” George Pleydell’s stage version of  A.E.W. Mason’s novelBaird’s interpretation of the role of Jenny provided socially pointed comic relief as suggested by such lines in Mason’s novel: “I am poor…but it gives no one the right to dwarf me,” and “She swore more loudly than she had wept … she struck at his head with her fist…And what do you make of me? A maggot?” (Mason 1925, 139-140).

Dorothea Baird as Idolanthe in King Rene's daughter, c. 1907, postcard

Beagles postcard, Dorothea Baird as Idolanthe, c. 1907.

Her first screen role followed in 1911 with Barker filming The Princess Clementina at Ealing Studios as a prestige historical production. He borrowed all the scenery from Queen’s Theatre production which, according to The Bioscope in a March article, was returned quickly “in good time for the evening performance” (n.p.).  According to The Bioscope in the first week in May, Barker supplied the film as an “exclusive”  to exhibitors with expensive promotional material and on terms similar  to those used for Henry VIII (1911) (183). Such was the success of the film that by May 18, The Bioscope reported, there were only two play dates available to exhibitors (288).

Princess Clementina cast list, (Dorothea Baird as Jenny), 1910. VATPA

“Princess Clementina” cast list, Dorothea Baird as Jenny, 1910. Private Collection. 

Rachael Low found Barker’s “frankly melodramatic” film, “a wildly impossible romance” (1948, 193). New approaches to melodrama suggest that this assessment  is too dismissive of an important mode of  popular film and theatre. However, given that the film is not extant, any re-assessment would have to rely on existing production stills as well as  reviews of Baird’s performance.  Photographs from the Queen’s Theatre production in 1910, for example, illustrate her comic role in contrast to the melodrama love theme.

In 1913, following a miscarriage, Baird retired,  a development that may  explain why  Viva Birkett was seen in the lead role in Trilby (1914) (Irving 1971, 145).  Her retirement, however, allowed Baird to devote more attention to her interest in family welfare for The St. Pancras School for Mothers, on whose board she had served for several years. The school’s  first report in 1907 indicates that  H. B. was honorary treasurer and that Dorothea generously contributed £2.2.00 while HRH the Princess of Wales gave £5.00, (5, 22, 20). The second report in 1908 shows even more involvement, with Dorothea organizing a tea party and the entertainment for 78 mothers and babies, and raising £15.0.0 with the “sale of Autographs,” and speaking at a prize-giving event. She and her husband further raised £157.9s.11d through a special matinee performance of the play “Charles the First” (21, 25, 7). The school, or “The Welcome,” as it was known, provided mothers with advice and information, home visits, meals, babies’ health care, “parent-craft,” nutrition and housewifery classes. The Provident Maternity Club was formed and the school also held what were called Fathers Evening Conferences.

Dorothea Baird in Daily Mirror, Jan. 11. 1911. VATPA

Dorothea Baird, in The Daily Mirror (Jan. 11. 1911). Private Collection. 

Baird continued with this work as seen in a Daily Mirror photograph on January 11, 1911, of a Christmas Tea at the St. Pancras School for Mothers. She holds her godchild Dorothea Olive in her right arm and looks after the children while the mothers enjoy their meal. In 1913 Dorothea campaigned successfully for election as member of the St. Pancras Poor Law Guardians. On the “Welcome School” committee she used modern audio visual education  which, according to the 1908 Second Annual Report,  consisted of  magic lantern slides for the fathers’ evenings. These slide shows, according to the report, were intended to illustrate, “the evil effect on child-life of bad housing conditions, improper conditions during infancy because, for example, the mother goes out to work” (15). Given this background, it is no surprise that, given the rising popularity of cinema,  in 1917 Dorothea would draw on  her film and theatre experience to script the film Motherhood directed by Percy Nash, co-founder of Elstree Studio. Dorothea knew Nash from his work with her brother-in-law Laurence (Ince 2007, 292-301).  An editorial in The British Journal of Nursing credits her for scripting Motherhood for the first National Baby Week and praises the film for its aims which it lists as not only improving mother and infant welfare but “combating of Disease, Ignorance, Carelessness,” as well as fighting all of  the “evils” seen to arise from “improper” living conditions (58).

Dorothea Baird (w/p) as Health Visitor in Motherhood (1917). Baird convinces Letty Paxton (Mary) and Jack Denton (Jack) to reconcile and for Mary to go to School for Mothers.

Screenshot, Dorothea Baird as the Health Visitor in Motherhood (1917).

Letty Paxton (Mary) visits School for Mothers, Dorothea Baird (w/a/p) in center (Health Visitor), in Motherhood (1917)

Screenshot, Letty Paxton (Mary) visits School for Mothers in Motherhood (1917).

Drawing from the St. Pancras School For Mothers program, the film focuses on the poverty conditions in slum dwelling, showing newly-married Mary (Letty or Lettie Paxton) scrubbing floors,  carrying buckets and coughing in laundry fumes. Returning late from visiting Mrs. Jones, her slovenly neighbour, Mary faces her husband Jack’s (Jack Denton) violent disapproval, causing the health visitor (Dorothea Baird) to intervene, reconcile them, and to introduce Mary to a School for Mothers. Once pregnant, Mary chooses advice from the certified nurse rather than  her grandmother, reflecting the 1917 health visitor goal of teaching women the “art of looking after children” that would counteract the kind of bad advice passed on by an earlier generation (Giles 1995, 112).

Dorothea Baird (w/a/p) (Health Visitor) teaches mothers how to sew at School for Mothers in Motherhood (1917)

Screenshot, Dorothea Baird (Health Visitor) teaches mothers how to sew at School for Mothers in Motherhood (1917).

Dorothea Baird (a/w/p) teaches mother how to bathe a baby at School for Mothers in Motherhood (1917)

Screenshot, Dorothea Baird (Health Visitor) teaches a mother how to bathe a baby at School for Mothers in Motherhood (1917).

The cinematography on Motherhood works to confirm the period’s official scrutiny of impoverished women. Mary as object of welfarism, is in the front of the frame while Baird is prominent,  standing or moving to oversee the young mothers. Baird in close-up demonstrates directly to camera how to bathe and to dress the healthy baby, reiterating class positions through an instructional register (Giles 1995, 115-6). The character of Mrs. Jones represents the ignorant poor who gets drunk and falls asleep on her baby. The film tableau of her despair at her baby’s death, aligned with sorrowful husband and children, pictorially echoes a D.W. Griffith melodrama. It also illustrates a 1917 concern over infant mortality experienced locally at the St Pancras School for Mothers and nationally, against the background of World War I. According to the June 1917 issue of The British Journal of Nursing: Of 800,000 babies born England and Wales…100,000 die before the year is out, so that a soldier at the Front has a better chance of life to-day than a baby under a year old in this country. In the screenplay, the coroner, addressing the jury of male citizens with voting rights, states:If there were more schools for mothers these tragedies would not happen.”

Mrs. Jones has killed her baby by sleeping on it while drunk in Motherhood (1917) written by Dorothea Baird (a/p)

Screenshot, Motherhood (1917).

Baird used the film Motherhood, like many middle-class women supporting charity work, to make political demands for social improvements (Giles 1995, 108-113). The Bioscope reports that she  used her fame and the on-screen promotion of Mrs. Lloyd George, The Duchess of Marlborough and Lady Rhonda, for its message directed To the women of Britain(602). She spoke on the significance of Motherhood for the National Baby Week plan at an exhibitors’ screening at Trans-Atlantic’s Universal House, again reported in The British Journal of Nursing, arguing that “Citizens were the only people who could really deal with the question, for … the legislators only carried out their instructions …the man in the street should realize his responsibility” (409).  Motherhood’s ending with Jack  returning to his wife and children in their modern house, with bath and hot water, cinematically illustrates the “Homes Fit for Heroes Campaign,” as Local Authorities used Government subsidies to improve homes for returning servicemen in recognition of war service  (Giles 1995, 65-73).  Released July 2, 1917, Motherhood received national press support linked to National Baby Week campaigns and opened to critical acclaim. W.G. Faulkner wrote for The Bioscope: “There is no suggestion of fussy interference, no uplift of the puritanical type resented by the average mother. There is just a nice atmosphere of helpfulness throughout a story, a drama, a real life”  (980-81). Still, years later British film historian Low did not disguise her low opinion of social conscience films which she saw astiresomely exhorting action” (Low 197).

WFP2-BAI19

Screenshot, Motherhood (1917). 

According to Irving, Baird’s letters to The London Times such as “On The Victimisation of Single Mothers” in 1918, indicate her continued support of single mothers despite her husband’s illness (Irving, 1971, 309-312).  H.B. died in 1919 and she died in 1933 at fifty-eight,  and while remembered mainly for the theatrical success of “Trilby,” her welfare work with impoverished mothers was recognised  in The Daily Mirror obituary (n.p.). The London Times reports that in 1937 a print of Motherhood was donated to the British Film Institute by the National Baby Week Council (n.p.). Further research could situate Motherhood in relation to  World War I Home Front propaganda as an instructional, a  drama, or a documentary film. Clearly, it documents class and family welfare reform and thus would have made a contribution to inter-war debates on birth control as well as social Darwinist eugenics.

Dorothea Baird, Cigarette Card. NYPL

Dorothea Baird, Cigarette Card. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Dorothea Baird, Cirgarette Card - Imperial Tobacco Company of Great Britain and Ireland. NYPL

Dorothea Baird. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. 

Bibliography

“Barker Films H.B. Irving. The Authors of ‘Princess Clementina’ To Apply for an Injunction to Prevent Films being Shown. An Interesting Point.” The Bioscope (23 March 1911): n.p.

The British Journal of Nursing Supplement, The Midwife (9 June 1917): 409.

“Editorial.” The British Journal of Nursing  (30 June 1917): n.p.

“Editorial: National Baby Week.” The British Journal of Nursing (28 May 1917): n.p.

Faulkner, W.G. Bioscope (17 May 1917): 980-981.

Giles, Judy. Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain 1900-1950. London: Basingstoke, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1995.

Ince, Bernard. “‘For the Love of Art’: The Life and Work of Percy Nash, Film Producer and Director of the Silent Era.” Film History vol. 19, no. 3 (2007): 292-301.

Irving, Laurence. The Precarious Crust. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971.

------. The Successors. London: Rupert-Hart Davis, 1967.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film: 1906-1914. London: Allen & Unwin, 1948.

Mason, A.E.W. Clementina. London: Methuen & Co.Ltd., 1925.

“‘Motherhood.’ Many Notabilities are becoming interested in Trans-Atlantic photoplay which is to be Released During the First Week of July.” The Bioscope (17 May 1917): 602-3.

“The National Film Library: Recent Acquisitions.” The London Times (18 May 1937): n.p.

Obit. The Daily Mirror (26 September 1933). n.p.

Perry, George. Forever Ealing: A Celebration of the Great British Film Studio. London: Pavilion Press, 1981.

Potter, Paul. “Trilby.” In Trilby and Other Plays.  Ed. George Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 201-271.

“‘Princess Clementina.’ Another Great Achievement by Barker.” The Bioscope (4 May 1911): 183.

“The Princess Clementina. Only Two Vacant Dates Left.” The Bioscope (18 May 1911): 288.

Sheil, Trish. “Trilby (1914): Theatre to Film.” In Pimple, Pranks and Pratfalls: British Film Comedy Before 1930. Eds. Alan Burton and Laraine Porter. Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000. 42-50.

The St. Pancras School For Mothers. First Report. 1907. Laurence Irving collection. The Victoria and Albert Museum, Theater & Performance Archives.

------. Second Report. 1908. Laurence Irving collection. The Victoria and Albert Museum, Theater & Performance Archives

Archival Paper Collections:

The British Journal of Nursing. Royal College of Nursing Archives.

“The Princess Clementina. A Play in Four Acts.” Queen’s Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, W. Programme. Wednesday, December 14, 1910. Private Collection.

The Victoria and Albert Museum, Theater & Performance Archives contains the following materials:

Dorothea Baird: Theatre Museum Biographical File. Biog Baird Box 53.

Laurence Irving collection. THM/39.

Princess Clementina.” Queen’s Theatre 1910 Production File.

Photo file/Baird, Dorothea/Trilby/Haymarket/His Majesty, 1903.

Citation

Sheil, Trish. "Dorothea Baird." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-y5ss-py39>

Irene Morra

by Kristen Hatch

Irene Morra worked as a negative cutter at D. W. Griffith’s Los Angeles studios before becoming a cutter for Jackie Coogan Productions and Fox Films. She worked as an editor until her retirement in 1958.

See alsoHettie Grey BakerAnne BauchensMargaret BoothWinifred DunnKatherine HillikerViola LawrenceJane LoringBlanche SewellRose Smith

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors” overview essay.

Citation

Hatch, Kristen. "Irene Morra." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-t4f1-vf36>

Enid Lorimer

by Mirte Terpstra

Enid Lorimer was born in London in 1887 as Enid Bosworth Nunn. She eventually became an Australian citizen, however, and died in Sydney on July 15, 1982, a month after she received a Medal of the Order of Australia for the Performing Arts. Lorimer was a theatre actress almost all her life, but also participated in many radio plays and television series in both Britain and Australia. Much less is known about her involvement as a scenarist in the early British film industry. As a result only one confirmed writing credit exists for Lorimer. Although Lorimer was asked about her involvement in early film as part of an interview for the Australia Film Council On Stage! series in 1979, by that time she was ninety-one and not surprisingly did not recall the full details. Another factor in our limited knowledge of Lorimer’s early film career is the lack of attributed credits for early British films. Few extant film prints survive, and as a rule, the trade press did not mention either scenarists or other production staff (Wolstencroft 2009).

Lorimer was born into an upper-middle class family from London. After she graduated, former teacher Elsie Fogerty persuaded Lorimer’s parents to let her participate in Fogerty’s drama classes at the Royal Albert Hall in 1911. In 1912, with Fogerty’s help, Lorimer joined the theatre company of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and this is when Enid adopted “Lorimer” as a stage name. She took mainly understudy parts, reading for Phyllis Neilson-Terry, for example. Lorimer acted at several companies, including Sir Laurence Irving’s, where she met fellow actor Wentworth Zerffi, whom she married in July 1912. By 1914, Lorimer even had her own repertory company in Manchester, but with the outbreak of World War I and Zerffi enlisting, everything changed.

It was at this moment in late 1914 that Lorimer was probably first contracted to a film company as an actress. But since, in her words, “I was tall, and at that time what was wanted were little fluffy types,” she ended up working “more or less as general dogsbody, writing them, which meant of course writing the subtitles which was all that writing consisted of.” This sounds very modest, but later in the 1979 Stage Series interview Lorimer speaks of “my office,” which was located near the manager’s office. The question is: exactly for whom did she work?

It appears that Lorimer initially worked for the Samuelson Film Company, although we have no evidence of this. In the Australia Film Council’s On Stage! interview, Lorimer mentions Samuelson in connection with anecdotes about films that were actually made by the Ideal Film Company. Ideal, however, did not start making films until late 1915. Nevertheless, Lorimer’s one confirmed scenarist credit was for the Ideal Company. This was Her Greatest Performance (1916), which she cowrote with Benedict James. James was a regular writer for Ideal and often teamed up with actor-director Fred Paul until they both left Ideal in late 1917. Interestingly, Paul acted for Samuelson and directed his first film, The Dop Doctor (1916), for them before he joined the new Ideal Company. Lorimer remembers Samuelson as having “the first ever studio at Elstree” while they in fact had their studios at Worton Hall, Isleworth. Ideal, in contrast, did not have its own studios and started filming at Worton Hall at the beginning of 1916, before moving on to Elstree at the end of that year and staying until 1917. All this suggests that Lorimer probably first worked for Samuelson at Worton Hall and then moved with Ideal to Elstree and possibly with director Fred Paul (Low 89, 92-93; Burrows 192, 196-187, 218).

Two of the anecdotes Lorimer related in the On Stage! interview suggest that she was at least part of the production staff on two other Paul films. First, Lorimer was on the set of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1916), adapted by Benedict James, as she remembers the actor Bernard Vaughn, who was a “very dignified […] old man,” but in contrast “had a good old ripe Cockney accent.” Lorimer comments that writing intertitles could be very amusing because the actors did not have to stick to the words. And apparently Vaughn would come on set and say, “Well, Gentleman, what seems to be the problem?” What would come out would be “Well, me old duck, what’s it all about?” So, Lorimer focused on the title words in the interview because she may have been the one who wrote them (Low 300).

In the second anecdote Lorimer says she saw the actor James Welch angrily storming into the manager’s office on the day Ideal was filming “the big circus scene” for the comedy The New Clown (1916). Interestingly, Low refers to the intertitles from this film as described in the Kinematograph Monthly Film Record in July 1916. “Who, for instance, could help laughing at subtitles such as this: “What is the number of my dressing room?” “Dressing room! It’s the second flap on the right behind the camel” (130). Low uses The New Clown as an example of the development of comedies through the comic title rather than through the script or actors (Low 167). It is perhaps too tempting to think that Lorimer may have written these particular titles. One, I think erroneous scenarist credit for Lorimer is that of the Broadwest film The House Opposite (1917). In his record of the film, Dennis Gifford gives the adaptation credit to both Enid Lorimer and Reuben Gillmer, possibly to rule out doubts. The Bioscope probably simply made a mistake when they referred to the script in their news columns as being “prepared for the film by Enid Lorimer,” because on other occasions they mentioned only Reuben Gillmer as the scriptwriter. It was never suggested that they adapted the play together or that Lorimer ever worked for Broadwest. Moreover, Gillmer leaves no room for doubt in his indignant reaction to the Bioscope’s mistake, saying he himself wrote the script without assistance. Ironically, the subsequent review of The House Opposite in the Bioscope does not mention any scriptwriter at all. Equally tempting is the knowledge that there are some other Ideal films directed by Fred Paul for which Low does not give a scriptwriting/adaptation credit. These titles include Still Waters Run Deep (1916) starring Lady Tree and The Lyons Mail (1917) starring H. B. Irving. Both of these films starred famous theatre actors and were based on plays, according to the Kinematograph Monthly Film Record (130).

Most Ideal films were prestigious films based on famous British novels or plays and starring household theatre names in the hope of legitimizing the British film. As such it seems very likely that Lorimer’s theatre background was an important factor in Ideal’s hiring of her, especially because the one confirmed writing credit for Lorimer, Her Greatest Performance (1916), was a star vehicle for another famous stage actress, Ellen Terry. Her Greatest Performance was an original screenplay cowritten especially for Terry by Enid Lorimer and Benedict James. Lorimer recalls that Terry made specific suggestions as “she would come into my little office and say, look dear, this is a very nice bit here but if you don’t mind, do you think we could do it like this?” But Lorimer did not mind because “she knew her stage craft, that lady.” Her Greatest Performance was a critical success, the trade press praising an excellent scenario although not always mentioning the writers by name (Terpstra 32).

We do not know of Lorimer’s activities for Ideal or any other film company after 1916. But at some point during this period Lorimer became an advocate of the educational values of the cinema. Probably inspired by her work at Ideal, which prided itself on making highbrow, typically British films, Lorimer wanted to demonstrate that films and cinema-going were not necessarily a bad influence. In a letter to the Bioscope, written in September 1917 from the Writers’ Club, Lorimer argues that “when intelligent and keenly critical audiences fill every part of the picture theatre, the higher-priced seats as well as the others, surely then the stream of public opinion will become so strong” that the press has to accept that the cinema is an art equal to theatre or literature. A second letter to the Bioscope in November 1917, written on behalf of Femina Films states that “we are supplying privately owned cinemas with films chosen for their suitability for our purpose,” which is “to bring about the much-to-be-desired rapprochement between picture playhouse managers and the local clergy and educational authorities” thus “helping to break down lingering prejudices against the ‘pictures’.” According to company records at the National Archives, Femina Films was registered on May 25 1916, but stopped issuing stock by the beginning of 1918, not long after Enid Lorimer was registered as one of seven shareholders on December 28, 1917.

In a 1979 interview with Filmnews Australia, Lorimer fills in the details of her life dating from the end of World War I when her husband returned so traumatized that the marriage failed. In 1926 he committed suicide. Even before that, in 1923, Lorimer had emigrated to Australia to continue the work of the Theosophical Society, which she had joined in 1918. Looking back she explains that “I went back into theatre almost as soon as the war ended,” which meant that the actress never had the chance to appear on the moving picture screen (11).

Bibliography

The Bioscope (17 Aug. 1916): 601.

The Bioscope (18 Jan. 1917): vi.

The Bioscope (1 Feb. 1917): 515.

The Bioscope (5 Apr. 1917): 11.

The Bioscope (31 Aug. 1917): 780-781.

The Bioscope (Sept. 1917): n.p.

The Bioscope (Nov. 1917): n.p.

Burrows, Jon. Legitimate Cinema; Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918. Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 2003.

Gifford, Denis. The British Film Catalogue: Fiction Film, 1895-1994. Vol.1. London: Routledge, 2001.

Kinematograph Monthly Film Record (July 1916): 130.

The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (31 Aug. 1916): 7.

Lorimer, Enid. “The Cinema and Education.” The Bioscope (1 Nov. 1917): 23.

------. “Film Criticism and the Lay Press.” The Bioscope  (8 Feb. 1917): 537.

------.“Last Words: End of Career.”  Filmnews Australia (November/December 1979): 11.

Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film, 1914-1918. 2nd ed. London: Allen & Unwin, 1973.

On Stage! Videos of Australian playwrights and performers: Enid Lorimer.” Archival Stage Series, videotape recording. Australia Council 1979.

Terpstra, Mirte. Girls from the Sky; a Critical Catalogue of Women in the Production of British Silent Cinema, 1914-1918. Nottingham: Univ. of Nottingham, 2006.

Wolstencroft, Anne. “Career Overview of Enid Lorimer.” Women and Silent British Cinema (August 2009): n.p.  http://womenandsilentbritishcinema.wordpress.com/the-women/enid-lorimer/enid-lorimer-career-overview/ 

------.“Enid Lorimer: Last Words: End of Career.” Filmnews Australia (November/December 1979): 11.

Archival Paper Collections:

Femina Films, Company Records. Board of Trade: Companies Registration Office: Files of Dissolved Companies.  The National Archives (UK).

Citation

Terpstra, Mirte. "Enid Lorimer." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-3gft-rw52>

Jane Loring

by Kristen Hatch

A Denver native, Loring edited movie trailers before becoming a film cutter for Paramount-Famous Players Lasky in 1927. She would remain with Paramount until the early 1930s, when she moved to RKO as an assistant director.

See alsoHettie Gray BakerAnne BauchensMargaret Booth, Winifred DunnKatharine HillikerViola LawrenceIrene MorraBlanche Sewell, Rose Smith

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors” overview essay.

Citation

Hatch, Kristen. "Jane Loring." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-7sn0-x271>

Musidora

by Annette Förster

If we merely looked at contemporary advertisements and reviews, it would appear that Musidora had directed only two films in the silent era: Vicenta (1919), and La terre des taureaux/The Land of the Bulls (1924). These credits can be further substantiated by personal statements about the making of these films published by Musidora herself in contemporary periodicals. There, she additionally claimed credit for writing both scripts as well as for editing La terre des taureaux. However, on the two other films that were produced under the banner of her company, Société des Films Musidora, she credited as director her codirector Jacques Lasseyne. Even the richly illustrated publicity booklets of Pour Don Carlos/For Don Carlos (1921) and Soleil et ombre/Sun and Shadow (1922) listed Musidora only in the cast, and her article in the magazine Ève bore the telling title “Comment j’ai tourné ‘Don Carlos’” or “How I Acted in Don Carlos” (10). After the 1940s, however, Musidora began to claim the codirector and adaptation credits of these productions for herself, and these credits have now been accepted as definitive. Additionally, she added the credit for codirection, with Roger Lion, for La flamme cachée/The hidden flame (1918), which she mentioned in a 1950 article on her professional collaboration with her artistic mentor and longtime friend, Colette.

Musidora in magazine Fantasio (c.1912)

Musidora (a/d/p/w) in the magazine Fantasio (c. 1912). Courtesy of Beth Ann Gallagher’s Flickr account. 

Poster by Guy Arnoux for Les Vampires (1916), Musidora as Irma Vep

Poster by Guy Arnoux for Les Vampires (1916); Musidora as Irma Vep.

Musidora (a/d/p/w) BIFI

Musidora. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

At the time that Musidora began making motion pictures, she was an acclaimed film and revue actress. She performed in the most popular revues at French music halls and cabarets, such as the Folies Bergère, Concert Mayol, and La Cigale. In cinema, she had cheered up the public during the dark years of the Great War in some fourteen comedies and in her roles of the female gangsters Irma Vep and Diana Monti in the Gaumont crime series Les vampires (1915–1916) and Judex (1916), directed by Louis Feuillade. Musidora’s reluctance to claim the screenwriting and directorial credits on her own productions may therefore be partly explained by her status as a film star and a revue celebrity. From the point of view of publicity, her fame as an actress was a bigger asset than her name as a director or a producer. Since she played the leading parts in all of the productions of her own company, this does not, however, explain her inconsistency. Another explanation for Musidora’s withholding of her own contribution is that she strategically foregrounded the names of literary authors. What the three films in which Musidora did not credit herself as codirector have in common is that they were adaptations of the work of best-selling literary authors: La flamme cachée was written by Colette, Pour Don Carlos by Pierre Benoît, and Soleil et ombre by Maria Star. Granting more prominence to these authors than to herself may have been a publicity strategy rather than intentional self-effacement. 

One question prompted by the surviving prints of Musidora’s productions concerns the differences between them in terms of style. The historical adventure story Pour Don Carlos and the tragic romance Soleil et ombre were set in the Basque Pyrenees and in the Spanish province of Andalusia. Both can today be seen as stylistically ambitious productions that call to mind aesthetic ideals then current in French film production. A widely shared ideal was shooting on location and taking advantage of the evocative qualities of provincial sites. In Musidora’s films, shots of landscapes, sites, and objects convey atmosphere and mood. Like theatre and film director André Antoine, she preferred to adapt gripping stories and to employ a mix of stage and lay actors. Colette, in her film reviews, promoted the use of accurate costumes and props as well as “photogenic” acting (Virmaux 1980, 67–75). This entailed an impassive acting style and an effacement of the act of acting that resulted in expressing as little as possible and yet evoking a range of emotions. In order to demonstrate that she was capable of such acting, Musidora as the screenwriter altered the ending of Benoît’s novel from an escape scene to a burial scene meant to rival the highly acclaimed dying scene played by Marie-Louise Iribe in Jacques Feyder’s L’Atlantide (1921). The burial scene had been difficult to play, Musidora asserted in a letter to the novelist: “I wanted my face to be covered like my body, so that the impression of getting buried would be genuine. I took another deep breath, and searched for total immobility. And I gave the sign: ‘Action…. ’ The first scoop of ground fell on my chin and cheeks… The second covered my eyes. The third left only the tip of my nose free. The ultimate, heavy one, hid my face completely. It was about time! All of this lasted barely twenty-five seconds, but I suffocated; my mouth ate crunching earth, my ears were stuffed with humid earth, I kept my eyelashes closed, fearing to fill my eyes with scratching grains of sand. And it was with the word ‘Damn!… ’ that I regained my friends, the air, the sun, warmth and life.” (as cited in Cazals 1978, 79–80). This lengthy quote offers us Musidora as the leading actress and the director at once.

Musidora inLes Vampires (1916)

Screenshot, Musidora in Les Vampires (1916).

Musidora.

Musidora portrait. Private Collection.

While her films were favorably reviewed in the press, Musidora as producer reputedly only lost money on them. It remains unclear whether this was due to the terms of her contract, as she claimed in a 1946 interview with Renee Sylvaire, or to the fact that the films failed at the box office. Although her fourth production, La terre des taureaux,like Soleil et ombre, was set and shot in Andalusia, Musidora now refrained from dramatic storytelling and photogenic acting. Instead, she returned to the comic and playful genres that had brought her gratification as an actress and included ironic comments on her cinema career. A scenario held at the Bibliothèque du Film actually implies that the production was conceived as a combined film and theatre show, with Musidora and her partner, the Cordoban mounted bullfighter Antonio Cañero, acting additional scenes live on stage (Musidora Collection, Musidora 3–B1). The filmed parts as well as the stage scenes can be read as Musidora’s response to a film world and a press that wished to see her in dramatic parts and in an acting style, that, in her experience, curtailed her capabilities. It may then be considered a sign of professionalism that Musidora the film director quit the silent cinema with self-irony and humor. Except for one supporting part in another film, she left for the popular stage, which she never had actually abandoned.

Poster for Les Vampires (1916), Musidora as Irma Vep

Poster for Les Vampires (1916); Musidora as Irma Vep. 

Bibliography

Cazals, Patrick. Musidora. La dixième muse. Paris: Éditions Henry Veryier, 1978.

Förster, Annette.  Histories of Fame and Failure. Adriënne Solser, Musidora, Nell Shipman: Women Acting and Directing in the Silent Cinema in The Netherlands, France and North America. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Utrecht: Univ, 2005.  141-289.

------. Women in the Silent Cinema: Histories of Fame and Fate. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.

Lacassin, Francis. “Musidora Filmography." In Patrick Cazals, Musidora, La dixième muse. Paris: Éditions Henry Veryier, 1978. 213-223.

Musidora, “Colette et le Cinéma Muet.” In Patrick Cazals, Musidora. La dixième muse. Paris: Éditions Henry Veryier, 1978. 195-199.

------.“Comment j’ai tourné Don Carlos.” Ève (30 January 1921): 10.

------. “Grandes Enquètes d’Ève: Comment je suis devenue Torera.” Ève (28 September 1924): 11-18.

------. Interview with Renée Sylvaire. Manuscript. Committee on Historical Research Collection [Fonds Commission des Recherches Historiques], CHR29-B1. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

------.“La Vie d’une vamp”, Ciné-Mondial 42-48 (12 June – 17 July 1942): n.p.

------. Paroxysmes. De l’amour à la mort. Paris: Éditions Eugène Figuière 1934.

------. Souvenirs sur Pierre Louÿs. Muizon: Éditions “À L’écart,” 1984.

------. “Vicenta.” Comoedia illustré (15 February 1920): 207-208.

Virmaux, Alain and Odette, eds. Colette at the Movies. Criticism and Screenplays. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980,  67-75 

Archival Paper Collections:

Collection Johan Daisne [Fonds Johan Daisne]. Folder Musidora [Dossier Musidora]. University of Ghent.

Committee on Historical Research Collection [Fonds Commission des Recherches Historiques]. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Musidora Collection [Fonds Musidora]. Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Publicity folder Pour Don Carlos (4e RK 7565), “Musidora,” Biographie-Critique (4e RT 9736), “Musidora” Iconographie Personalités (4e Ico Per). Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française.

Research Update

January 2023: A fragment of Vicenta, which was previously listed as lost in this filmography, was discovered in 2016 at the Cinémathèque française.

New publication: Musidora qui êtes-vous? Edited by Carole Aurouet, Marie-Claude Cherqui, and Laurent Véray (Paris: Editions de Grenelle, 2022).

Citation

Förster, Annette. "Musidora." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-f4nt-4j92>

Viola Lawrence

by Kristen Hatch

Viola Lawrence is often credited as Hollywood’s first female film cutter. She began working in film at the age of twelve when she held title cards at the Vitagraph studio in Flatbush. Six years later, she edited her first film, a Vitagraph three-reeler, O’Henry (1912). In 1917, Lawrence moved to Hollywood, where she worked at Universal, First National, and Gloria Swanson Productions before arriving at Columbia Pictures, where in 1925 she became the supervising editor, and where she was still editing until the late 1950s.

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

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

See alsoHettie Grey BakerAnne BauchensMargaret BoothWinifred DunnKatherine HillikerJane LoringIrene MorraBlanche SewellRose Smith

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors” overview essay.

Citation

Hatch, Kristen. "Viola Lawrence." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4msv-v936>

Señora Spencer

by Deb Verhoeven

In 1918, Mary Stuart Spencer, more widely known to the film-going public as the theatre owner Señora Spencer, found herself at the center of a court case in which her capacity to conduct business independently of her husband was put into legal debate. Theatre Magazine, reporting on “The Spencer Case,” put it bluntly, asking in bold type, “Was Señora Spencer merely a blind for her husband?” At the time, Cosens Spencer was the proprietor of a string of successful motion picture theatres located in Brisbane, Toowoomba, and Newcastle. The case was fought by a “stupendous array” of lawyers including no less than four King’s Counsels and was prominently reported in both the popular media and trade magazines (32-34).

The two were married in Melbourne on February 14, 1903, although some contemporary reports have them marrying in Canada. They had met earlier in either the US or New Zealand, and even before they were married, the couple had already begun working together, presenting touring film exhibitions. Although she was three years older, her marriage certificate states her to be four years younger than her husband. In a 1906 interview, Señora Spencer describes her professional collaboration with her husband, explaining that “after our marriage, having always been interested in electricity, I studied it up and was soon able to operate and assist him” (8–9). Interviewed for the article, she states she had been involved in the industry for seven years after first meeting Spencer in the US. This boast, however, could just be an attempt to promote their Great American Theatrescope, which opened at the Lyceum in Sydney in 1905 before touring to Adelaide, Broken Hill, and Perth.

Senora Spencer (p/o), 1906. AUC

Señora Spencer, 1906. Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

It was at this time that Señora Spencer achieved notoriety as “The Only Lady Cinematograph Artist in the World,” as the article was titled, and one assumes that “cinematograph artist” was a term for projectionist, since here she describes projection as “very hard and trying work” (8–9). In an interview for the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly,  Spencer himself described it somewhat differently, and praised his wife’s technical talent: “It is very delicate work to turn the handle and I claim my wife is a better manipulator of the machine than any man. Not only that, but she takes a keen interest in the work” (393).  Señora Spencer ’s feats as a projectionist were recognized by those she worked with, evidence of which is that at the end of the 1907 Theatrescope run at the Lyceum, the appreciative house staff presented her with a diamond and ruby brooch (Kinetograph and Lantern Weekly, 393). This gesture itself implies that Señora Spencer was more than just a projectionist, and Hamilton Johns claims in a 2005 Kino article that she appeared at every session at the Lyceum on an elevated, open projection platform and that during screenings, she would give a running commentary on the program (28). However, she is quoted in 1918 in Theatre Magazine as saying that she operated at the back of the stalls, which were shadowed by two balcony tiers, calling into question John’s attempt to make her into something akin to a film lecturer. Other mysteries arise. A 1985 article in Kino described her as a bejeweled, “lovely lady with flowing black hair,” even more of an attraction than the films themselves (5). It is not clear where these vivid depictions come from, however, and this description does not correspond with the extant photograph of her from this period.

In 1907 the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly presented the two Spencers as partners in the enterprise of exhibition, describing them both as artists in the sense that they actively reedited films before presenting them to the audience: “Any unnecessary padding is at once cut out, and, without in any way upsetting the plot depicted, the duration of the subjects is modified, so that they fit in with the orchestral program” (393). The article further describes the process of exhibiting films as being like a production, with music being rewritten to suit particular scenes, the development of appropriate  “mechanical effects to accompany the screening,” and “each subject being rehearsed a great many times before it was ready for final exhibition upon the screen” (393). This sense of artistry is further extended to Señora Spencer’s work as a projectionist, and the article paraphrases “Mr. Spencer” contending that “a lady operator has the delicate touch necessary to make each operation a success, and she knows exactly how to apply the light and shade, the celerity or the slowest movement.” Spencer goes further, asserting that “In fact the entire success of the entertainment is due to her efforts.” The article also claims that they have succeeded in eliminating flicker in their shows—the result of “long years of study on the part of both” (393).

Articles from the period also include details about the role of exhibitors in small-scale moving image production undertaken to fill their otherwise imported film programs, although the discussion of production activity is rarely emphasized. American Theatrescope—later Spencer’s Theatrescope and then Spencer’s Pictures—shot several films, and it is likely Spencer was involved in aspects of their production. She claims she herself shot The Spanish Bullfight, mentioning it in passing to Theatre as if it is of less consequence than her skills as a projectionist (8–9). In Adelaide in 1906 the Spencers shot two films: Happenings Taken at the Adelaide Show and Adelaide’s Fire Service. By 1908 the company was taking enough footage to warrant the establishment of a fully fledged production unit. In 1909 when Spencer’s Theatrescope returned to Adelaide to screen a new collection of films, they shot three more, which they screened as part of their program: Adelaide the City, Zoological Gardens, and Fighting the Flames. The Register in Adelaide reported: “The Company had shown that they can not only show pictures but can take them also”It should be noted, however, that advertisements for these screenings list C. Spencer as the “Director” of the exhibition event and also identify the films as having been “Taken by Mr. Spencer.” This integration between the roles of presenter and producer continued into Spencer’s later activities as a theatre proprietor. For example, in 1916 the Strand in Brisbane showed a short film of highlights of the Brisbane show, which according to historian Eric Reade were shot by “Senora Spencer’s cinematographers” (93).

The Spencers’ exhibition activities have been noted by film historians for being instrumental in making cinema attractive to the Australian middle-class, and as Diane Collins puts it in Cosens Spencer’s biography, “ambitious musical and special effects, lavish theatres—and no doubt the presence of a lady operator.” Pike and Cooper claim that Cosens was simply using his wife as part of “a wide range of ingenious gimmicks” to attract audiences to his theatres (12). The contemporary evidence suggests that Señora Spencer was more involved in the business than Pike and Cooper concede, and that promoting her profile in the media benefited the entire enterprise.

It was on this very point that the later 1918 court case focused. Around 1911, Cosens Spencer placed the various film businesses (distribution, exhibition, and production) in the hands of a public company, Spencer’s Pictures, in which he became a director and shareholder. In 1912 while he was overseas, the board of directors voted to merge the company into what became known after further mergers in 1913 as the Combine (Australasian Films/Union Theatres). In selling his goodwill and creating a public company in 1911, Spencer had made a legal undertaking that he would not, at any time within ten years from the date of the agreement, to quote the Newcastle Morning Herald, “either solely or jointly with or as manager or agent for any other person or company permit his name to be used in connection with any picture show business in the Commonwealth” (4). The Sydney Morning Herald on July 30, 1918, tells us that the agreement went even further, stating that Cosens Spencer “could not, directly or indirectly carry on or be interested in any business similar to that which he had sold” (4). It was further alleged that Señora Spencer had “without justification participated in breaches of the agreement by erecting moving picture shows in Brisbane and Newcastle.” It would appear, however, that it was only when Spencer was believed to be bidding on the lease of the Lyceum that the two were sued by Spencer’s Pictures, Australasian, and Union Theatres for a breach of contract following application for an injunction against their acceptance of the lease.

The Newcastle Morning Herald reports that the affidavit alleged that Cosens Spencer had purported to act on his wife’s behalf when in reality he was the proprietor of the Brisbane and Newcastle theatres (operated ostensibly in the name of Señora Spencer). It also alleged that he was peculiarly interested in a contract for Famous Players and Lasky films, which were shown in Brisbane and Newcastle—thus establishing a film business in competition with the Combine (4). The Lone Hand describes one further aspect of the suit: “The Male defendant permitted his wife, the female defendant, to use the name of Spencer at these picture shows” (444).

The Spencers’ defense involved a general denial of any wrongdoing, but, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald on July 30, Cosens also “denied that he had entered, as alleged, into covenants on behalf of himself and his wife as partners,” and vigorously rejected the idea that the theatres were only “ostensibly” conducted by and in the name of his wife (4).

The first two days of legal debate centered on two matters: first, the specific activities of Cosens Spencer in assisting with negotiations for the establishment of his wife’s theatres, and, second, the terms of the original 1911 sale of the businesses in which it was revealed that although the Spencers held a joint bank account, the covenant of sale did not include Señora Spencer. Theatre Magazine presumed that the purpose of this evidence was to give rise to speculation: “If Señora Spencer was not a partner with Mr. Spencer in his original business, she came to have the means to suddenly begin acquiring expensive properties and erecting palatial theatres thereon” (32–34). It is also conceivable, however, that, in shielding Señora Spencer from the covenant of sale, Cosens Spencer was already preparing a way for her to expand her business activities independently of his own business plans.

After just two days of proceedings, the parties settled and the two granted to give up all direct or indirect interest in the moving-picture business in Australia for at least seven years. More importantly, Señora Spencer ’s theatre leases and other properties were taken over by Union Theatres for the same term. It proved to be an inauspicious end to a promising enterprise, and the Spencers left shortly afterwards for Canada. It is hard to know how the case might have proceeded had it continued beyond the second day. Certainly to the paying public, the cinemas were owned and directed by Señora Spencer. Advertising for her cinemas made it abundantly clear that she was “director” of proceedings. One example, an advertisement in The Darling Downs (April 5, 1916) promoting the imminent launch of the Toowoomba Strand, indicates this: “SEÑORA SPENCER seeing no reason to doubt that the high class features, style, and novelty, that characterise the enormously successful Cinematograph Exhibitions conducted by her at the Strand Theatre, Brisbane, would prove immensely popular with the Toowoomba public, has arranged to extend her operations to this city and has accordingly secured an extensive lease of the Theatre in Margaret Street, now almost completed, to be known as the Strand Theatre” (1). This emphatic personification of the ownership of the theatre is typical of the Strand, but not typical of other cinema advertising at this time.

The case of Señora Spencer presents some interesting challenges for feminist film historians. It prompts us to consider that perhaps, in some cases, rather than embarking on a venture of disentanglement, it is just as important to understand how the careers of women film pioneers were practically if not always formally implicated with their husband’s or partner’s, and that this recognition need not diminish our appreciation of their singular achievements. Despite Cosens Spencer’s protestations of his wife’s autonomy as a cinema proprietor and the courtroom evidence that strongly suggested she was not a legal partner in their earlier businesses, it is highly probable that the two worked closely together in their various exhibition enterprises. The entwined business activities of Señora Spencer and her husband, Cosens, can then be seen as illustrating both the evident opportunities and liabilities afforded by personal partnerships for women’s forays into the Australian motion-picture industry at this time.

On returning to Canada, Cosens Spencer became a property magnate operating one of the largest cattle ranches in British Columbia. On September 10, 1930, he turned a rifle on two of his employees, killing one of them before running into the surrounding countryside with a number of troopers and a posse of civilians in pursuit. His wife posted a $500 reward for information leading to his return, dead or alive. His body was retrieved several days later from the Chilco River in which he was presumed to have committed suicide.

Bibliography

Collins, Diane. “Spencer, Cosens.” Australian Dictionary of Biography – Online Edition. (1992): n.p. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A120041b.htm

“In Equity [Law Report].” Sydney Morning Herald (30 Jul. 1918): 4.

“In Equity [Law Report].” Sydney Morning Herald (1 Aug. 1918): 4.

Johns, Hamilton. “Fire Ravages Sydney Lyceum.” Kino: Journal of the Australian Theatre Historical Society 92 (2005): 28-9.

“A Lady Kinematograph Operator: Some facts about Senora Spencer” Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly ( 17 Oct. 1907): 393.

“A moving picture drama: Union Theatre Ltd. take over Spencer’s.” The Lone Hand (2 Sep. 1918): 444.

“The Only Lady Cinematograph Artist in the World.” The Theatre (2 Jul 1906): 8-9.

Pike, Andrew and Ross Cooper. Australian Film 1900-1977. Oxford University Press, 1980.

Reade, Eric. Australian Silent Films: A Pictorial History of Silent Films from 1896 to 1926. Melbourne, Lansdowne Press, 1970.

“Spencer’s Pictures: Dispute over a lease.” Newcastle Morning Herald (14 Sep. 1917): 4.

“Strand Theatre [public notices].” Darling Downs Gazette (5 Apr. 1916): 1.

“The Theatre Magazine: Reel life section.” Theatre Magazine (2 Sep. 1918): 32-34.

Tod, Les. “The Greater Union Story.” Kino: Journal of the Australian Theatre Historical  Society 14 (1985): 5-22.

Archival Paper Collections:

Marriage certificate issued in the state of Victoria. Reg No. 281. 14 February, 1903. Births, Deaths and Marriages, Victoria, Australia.

Citation

Verhoeven, Deb. "Señora Spencer." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-njgx-mg15>

Thea von Harbou

by Brigitta B. Wagner

In his 1928 book on film directing and screenwriting, Russian filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin notes that many literary figures had difficulty adjusting to “the optically expressive form” of film (110). Thea von Harbou, one of three German screenwriters who Pudovkin singles out, stands alongside Carl Mayer as one of the most influential film figures in Weimar German cinema, which spanned the years 1919 to 1933.  Including an excerpt from Harbou’s script for Spione (1928), an espionage adventure film, Pudovkin goes on to praise the novelist Harbou for her ability to work with the film medium. Indeed, it is Harbou’s awareness of the “possibilities of the camera such as shots, framing, editing, [and] intensification through visually striking details” that distinguishes her work (212). In the scene in question—one of the most visually dynamic in the film—Harbou conveys in words the sense of movement, speed, and sudden discovery surrounding a train wreck. Each shot, each significant gesture, is noted, and in this she exemplifies the way her husband and collaborator Fritz Lang once described the model screenplay: “To the last intertitle everything has to be ready before the cameras roll” (62).

Thea Von Harbou (w). DEK

Thea Von Harbou portrait. Courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek.

Despite Pudovkin’s support and her work with Lang and F. W. Murnau, Harbou had her detractors. Unlike Lang, who did not rise to prominence with several directing and screenplay credits until 1919, Harbou had been publishing popular sensationalist novels since 1910. Reaching a wide readership through serialized publication in newspapers, her books, such as Der Krieg und die Frauen in 1913 and Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg in 1915, catered to a blend of wartime nationalist sentiment and feminism. When her family, descended from nobility, began to struggle financially, Harbou turned to both fiction writing and the theatre. As a stage actress from 1906 to 1914, she performed in Düsseldorf, Weimar, Chemnitz, and Aachen, where she met her first husband, theatre actor and director Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who later starred in several Lang-Harbou films. In her 1917 novel Der belagerte Tempel, Harbou even addressed the transition from theatre to film acting in a tale of two unemployed actors who move to Berlin.

If one strain of her writing dealt with a recognizable German present, another indulged in fantasy, adventure, science fiction, and colonialism. While most of Harbou’s contributions to the German film industry involved the adaptation of the literary works of others, many of her screenplays were based on her own novels and stories, such as Das indische Grabmal (1921), or were written in conjunction with book versions, such as Metropolis (1927), Spione (1928), and Frau im Mond (1929). In the film versions, a fascination with modernity and machines is made visual. Though Fritz Lang is often credited in written film history as the auteur of these films, an idea supported by his own accounts, Weimar film critics were careful to recognize the contributions of Harbou and screenwriters. This was so much the case that Siegfried Kracauer could lament the fact that such an “unusually talented director [Lang] could also be artistically aligned with Thea von Harbou.” In a review that couples misogyny with aesthetic critique, Kracauer holds Harbou responsible for the “sensational content” of Spione and suggests that Lang only made the “senseless” spy thriller “in order to please the author,” his wife. This disparagement of Harbou not only reveals a perception of her power both within her marriage and within the film community, but also suggests the extent to which she was considered the author and creator of her films.

Thea Von Harbou (w/d) and Fritz Lang by Waldemar Titzenthaler

Thea Von Harbou and Fritz Lang at work, photo by Waldemar Titzenthaler from book Berliner Interieurs, Photographien von Waldemar Titzenthaler (1999). 

Because her work with Lang spans the bulk of his Weimar oeuvre, it is difficult to distinguish their respective contributions. Harbou, however, did work with other directors during the same period. From Joe May and Robert Dinesen to F. W. Murnau, Arthur von Gerlach, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, her filmmaking colleagues were prominent in the industry. As a writer of screen adaptations, Harbou received praise in the Lichtbildbühne review for her ability to balance milieu and character psychology in Murnau’s Phantom (1922), the film version of a Gerhart Hauptmann novel (16). In a review of von Gerlach’s Zur Chronik von Grieshuus, a Theodor Storm adaptation, Willy Haas paid Harbou a high compliment: “she is a wonderful dramaturgical technician, no doubt about that…. This simple, clear, continuous thread, this intensification at the end of the second chapter—. Our scenarists could… learn a whole lot from this handcraft.” Harbou’s familiarity with the plot twists of sensational literature prepared her for silent narrative cinema. By the time Lang and Harbou completed two sound films, M (1931) and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), their personal and professional relationship had ended. With the rise of National Socialism in 1933, Lang went into exile, continuing his career in Hollywood, while Harbou worked as a successful screenwriter during the Third Reich. For many  film scholars, Harbou’s career effectively ended with her support for the Nazi Party and her failure to join Germany’s exile community. Others would banish her completely from world cinema history. Harbou’s artistic contributions, discredited because of her politics, have also been a function of Fritz Lang’s German émigré-in-America success story. Yet Harbou’s motivations in the early 1930s remain shrouded. Throughout the decade, she openly cohabited with the Indian doctoral student Ayi Tendulkar, several years her junior. Like her contemporary Leni Riefenstahl, Harbou may have been tempted by new professional opportunities. In 1934, she directed both Elisabeth und der Narr and Hanneles Himmelfahrt, but spent the remainder of the Nazi period writing screenplays, primarily comedies and entertainment films, but she now collaborated with prominent Third Reich filmmakers Veit Harlan, Josef von Baky, Hans Steinhoff, and Erich Engel. After a brief detainment by British authorities in 1945, Harbou continued to publish, to write screenplays, and to give lectures at the Free University of Berlin into the 1950s. In July 1954, she died from internal bleeding after tripping and falling in front of a movie theatre.

Thea Von Harbou’s nearly fifty-year, highly controversial career as a novelist and screenwriter merits attention rather than dismissal, and we can now place her political alliances alongside her accomplishments. First, we would consider opportunities for women under various German political regimes, from the monarchy to democracy to fascism. Second, we would look at her career choices in the light of the intersection between political and personal circumstances, given that the rise of Nazism coincided with the dissolution of her artistic partnership with Lang. Finally, distinguishing Harbou’s silent motion pictures from her Nazi sound-era films may be a step toward a more complex and critical portrait of this talented and ambitious woman as well as the two tumultuous eras in which she worked.

Bibliography

Haas, Willy. “Zur Chronik von Grieshuus.” Rev. Film-Kurier (12 Feb. 1925): 1-2.

Kaufhold, Enno. Berliner Interieurs, Photographien von Waldemar Titzenthaler. Berlin: Nicolai, 1999.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Spione.” In Kleine Schriften zum Film. vol. 6, no. 2. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2004. 62-63.

Lang, Fritz. “Mein ideales Manuskript.” In Werkstattfilm. Eds. Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen. Munich: edition text + kritik, 1998. 61-62.

Pudovkin, Vsevolod. Filmregie und Filmmanuskript. Berlin: Lichtbildbühne, 1928.

Von Harbou, Thea. Der belagerte Tempel. Berlin: Ullstein, 1917.

------. Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg. Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, 1916.

------. Die Frau im Mond. Berlin: Scherl, 1929.

------. Das indische Grabmal. Berlin: 1917.

------. Metropolis. Berlin: Scherl, 1926.

------. Spione. Berlin: Scherl, 1928.

Wollenberg, Hans. “Gerhart Hauptmann 60 Jahre.” Rev. Lichtbildbühne (18 Nov. 1922): 16.

Citation

Wagner, Brigitta B. "Thea von Harbou." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-r04z-tm58>

Agnes Gavin

by Ina Bertrand

Agnes Adele Wangenheim was born in Sydney in 1872. At the age of eighteen, she married Barney Kurtz, but divorced him not long after. She was Agnes Kurtz on the first of October 1898, when she married Sydney-born stage actor John Francis Henry Gavin, then twenty-three years old. They were a striking pair: John, tall and dark, bluff and hearty, with a broad smile; Agnes smaller, attractive, with a clear, olive complexion and bright, dark eyes. Together they worked as actors in the Bland Holt stage company and in vaudeville for many years before entering motion pictures together in H.A. Forsyth’s 1910 production of Thunderbolt in which John played the title character and Agnes may have played a gypsy. The Gavins were not unusual for their time, working as a partnership, but with the husband in the more public and visible role. On Forsyth’s next film, Moonlite (1910), John moved into direction while Agnes played the aboriginal girl Bunda in blackface. John then directed several films in 1911 for Crick and Finlay (Ben Hall and His Gang; Frank Gardiner, King of the Road; The Assigned Servant; Keane of Kalgoorlie) and followed Stanley Crick into the Australian Photo-Play Company, directing The Mark of the Lash (1911). He then branched out on his own, forming John F. Gavin Productions, which produced two further films in 1911: The Drover’s Sweetheart and Assigned to his Wife.

The Assigned Servant, Agnes Gavin (w) 1911. AUC

The Assigned Servant (1911). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Agnes, meanwhile, had continued to take small roles in John’s films, but was also credited as scenario writer for all the films from Ben Hall and His Gang (1911) onwards. Most of these told stories about the outback and most were set in earlier times. Bushranging was a favorite theme—not just featuring the well-known historical and literary characters such as Thunderbolt, Moonlite, Ben Hall, and Frank Gardiner, but also with their original subplots. The Assigned Servant (1911) is the story of a convict who marries the daughter of the man to whom he has been assigned and, as a consequence, is sent back to prison from which he escapes to take up life as a bushranger. Convicts featured again in The Mark of the Lash and Assigned to his Wife. In fact, in this period Agnes wrote only one scenario of contemporary city life and that was not an original story. Keane of Kalgoorlie (1911) was taken from the play by E. W. O’Sullivan, based on the novel by Arthur Wright, and concerned horse racing and the gambling that surrounded it. The Australian film industry in which the Gavins worked was dependent largely on nonfiction; that is, it recorded contemporary events. However, fiction was also popular and Australia moved into multireel fiction earlier than other countries. When they formed John F. Gavin Productions, John and Agnes were riding this wave: Assigned to his Wife, which opened in Sydney in October 1911, was 4,000 feet long. The Drover’s Sweetheart (1911), somewhat shorter at around 3,000 feet, may or may not have opened as there is no record that it was ever screened publicly.

Advertisement for The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell, Agnes Gavin (w) 1916. AUC

Ad for The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell (1916). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

After this burst of creativity, resulting in nine films in less than two years, most of them multireel, the Gavins’ names disappear from the  record. Presumably they returned to the stage, except for one short venture back into film in 1913, when John appeared as an actor in A Melbourne Mystery. However, they had not given up completely on the motion picture business, and in 1916 came their most successful production of all—The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell, produced for Australian Famous Feature Company. The length of this film was no longer noteworthy, as most productions were now multireel. However, this was the first film to tell the story of the execution of English nurse Edith Cavell by the German army in October 1915—a story that had captured the imagination of audiences worldwide and certainly in Australia. John claimed that Agnes wrote the scenario overnight and that the entire production was completed in just three weeks. It was directed jointly by John Gavin and C. Post Mason and was well received, both in Australia and, later, in Britain and the United States. Gavin then made two short films: Charlie at the Sydney Show (1916), with Chaplin impersonator Ern Vockler, and An Interrupted Divorce (1916), for which Agnes again wrote the scenario.

The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell, Agnes Gavin (w) 1916. AUC

The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell (1916). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The Murder of Captain Fryatt, Agnes Gavin (w) 1917. AUC

The Murder of Captain Fryatt (1917). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

There is copyright registration evidence that around this time Agnes also wrote other film scripts that were never produced. She certainly wrote John’s next feature, The Murder of Captain Fryatt (1917), again for Australian Famous Feature Company. It was expected that this story of another German atrocity, which had received nearly as much coverage in Australian media as the death of Edith Cavell, would be a financial success. However, the Australian public seemed to be tiring of the war, had defeated conscription in two referenda, and was not nearly so concerned about the fate of the commander of a merchant ship as they had been about that of a young nurse. Agnes returned to convict times and familiar themes for her next scenario—His Convict Bride (1918), again for Australian Famous Feature Company.

His Convict Bride, Agnes Gavin (w) 1918. AUC

His Convict Bride (1918). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Later that year, John and Agnes left for Hollywood, where John returned to acting, mainly in Westerns and comedies, but there is no record of what Agnes did. They returned briefly to Australia in 1922 and permanently in 1925, John full of great plans to revive Australian film production using his knowledge of Hollywood methods. He joined his old boss, Herbert Finlay, in the Australian Artists Company, to make Trooper O’Brien (1928). Finlay was producer; John Gavin directed; and Agnes Gavin once again wrote the scenario—returning to familiar territory with a story of a rural policeman that incorporated segments from earlier bushranging films. The film was ignored by Australia’s major distributors although it enjoyed a modest success when they did manage to get venues to screen it. This seems to have been Agnes’s last film, though John acted in Norman Dawn’s The Adorable Outcast (1928). The Gavins followed trends rather than led them, but they did so with persistence and occasionally outstanding success. Although their careers could never be described as brilliant, they made a significant contribution to early Australian film and without a doubt Agnes was the first Australian woman to make a career in scenario writing.

Bibliography

Australian Variety and Show World (4 Oct. 1916): n.p.

Brisbane Courier (13 March 1911): 2.

Everyone’s  (24 May 1922): 19.

Everyone’s (9 May 1923): 166.

Everyone’s (22 Aug. 1923): 5.

Everyone’s (9 April 1924): 7.

Everyone’s (1 April 1925): 24.

Everyone’s  (2 Sept. 1925): 12.

Everyone’s (9 Dec. 1925): 6.

Pike, Andrew, and Ross Cooper. Australian Film 1900–1977. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. 

Sydney Morning Herald (13 April 1928): 6. 

Theatre (1 March 1916): n.p.  

Tulloch, John. Legends on the Screen: The Australian Narrative Cinema 1919–1929. Sydney: Currency, 1981.  

Archival Paper Collections:

Film scripts: The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell (1916), The Murder of Captain Fryatt (1917), For the Term of Her Natural Life (1917), Outlaw Ned Kelly and His Gang (1918), Gold Heart or Odds On (1923), Money Down Brown (1926), Binda’s Mistress or The Girl of the Soil (1930). A1336/1-2, Attorney-General’s Department, Copyright registrations. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Stanley Crick scrapbook. Title no. 208161 (358216 - 1001 1923-1930). National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Citation

Bertrand, Ina. "Agnes Gavin." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-w2ya-j927>

Ada Aline Urban

by Luke McKernan

Ada Aline Urban is not mentioned in any film histories, but as co-owner and chief financier of the Natural Color Kinematograph Company, she was the leading female figure in British film of her day. She was the seventh of the eight children born to Anton Leon Gorecki, of Polish ancestry, and Margaret Brown. Her father worked as professor of languages at the University of Glasgow. Little is known of her upbringing, but she first married Alexander James Jones, a traveling salesman with the cinematograph and optical firm of Butcher’s & Sons. The couple had two children, Maxwell Jardine and Anna Marguerite, known as Margot. It became an unhappy marriage, and around 1907 she met American film producer resident in Britain, Charles Urban. Each divorced their previous partner, and they were married in February 1910.

Ada Aline Urban. Private Collection.

In 1908, Charles Urban had given the first public presentation of Kinemacolor, the world’s first successful natural color motion picture system. Commercial production and exhibition began in 1909 after Urban acquired the patent rights from inventor George Albert Smith. The money for the purchase came from Ada Aline Jones, at the considerable sum of £5,000. She was made a director of the film company formed to exploit the new process, the Natural Color Kinematograph Company, becoming  the most powerful woman in British film to that date. Kinemacolor became a considerable financial as well as social success. Its showcase screenings at the Scala Theatre around 1911 to 1915 became an essential attraction for the discriminating Londoner who would rather experience film in a theatre than in a low class cinema. In particular their extensive color record of the Coronation at the Delhi Durbar, With Our King and Queen through India (1912), encapsulated an Imperial experience and drew respectful audiences around the world.

The degree to which Ada Urban was involved in the day-to-day running of the company is unclear, but she was not involved in the production process. A snapshot portrait of her at Kinemacolor’s height is provided by William T. Crespinel, who worked for Charles Urban as technician. He recalled one of her visits to the Kinemacolor editing rooms: “Mrs. Urban was a grand lady, resembling, in physique, the famous and respected Lillian Russell. I recall she usually had a box of liquor-filled chocolates and would leave me a few when she left with the mild admonition to her husband, ‘Now don’t work too late dear.’” She also became owner in its latter years of Kineto, another of the film companies her husband had set up, which specialized in informational films. In 1914 she became co-director of Color Films, the successor to the Natural Color Kinematograph Company after the latter was voluntarily liquidated following a revocation of the patent she had purchased, which spelled the end of Kinemacolor as a viable business.

Ada Urban moved to the United States at the end of World War I when her husband relocated his businesses to Irvington, New York, and returned with him to Britain in the late 1920s when those businesses ended in bankruptcy. She owned property in London’s Half Moon Street, which supported them, but much of her money was lost when Charles Urban invested unwisely in the patent rights for a new form of metal bottle top. She died in 1937, her husband in 1942. Her involvement in film was purely financial, but she sensed the value of Kinemacolor when it was an uncertain risk and then supported the most globally significant British film venture of its time. She needs her place in the film history books.

Bibliography

Crespinel, William A. “Pioneer Days in Colour Motion Pictures with William T. Crespinel.” Film History vol. 12, no. 1 (2000): 57-71.

McKernan, Luke. “'Something More than a Mere Picture Show”: Charles Urban and the Early Non-Fiction Film in Great Britain and America, 1897–1925. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of London, 2003.

Urban, Charles. A Yank in Britain: The Lost Memoirs of Charles Urban, Film Pioneer. Ed. Luke McKernan. Hastings: Projection Box, 1999.

Archival Paper Collections:

Charles Urban Papers. The National Science and Media Museum (United Kingdom).

Citation

McKernan, Luke. "Ada Aline Urban." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-t53x-pv31>

Margaret Booth

by Kristen Hatch

Margaret Booth began work as a negative cutter for D. W. Griffith in 1915. After Griffith closed down his Los Angeles offices, she worked briefly at Paramount before joining Louis B. Mayer’s studio in 1919. There she began to work closely with John Stahl, who tutored her in the art of film cutting. When Mayer merged with Metro-Goldwyn, Booth joined a staff of about two dozen cutters, including Blanche Sewell. At MGM, Booth eventually became the supervising editor, where she remained until 1969.

Margaret Booth (e) at work.

Margaret Booth at work.

See alsoHettie Grey BakerAnne BauchensWinifred DunnKatherine HillikerViola LawrenceJane LoringIrene MorraBlanche SewellRose Smith

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors” overview essay.

Citation

Hatch, Kristen. "Margaret Booth." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ps4e-hw86>

Mona Donaldson

by Ina Bertrand

In February 1915, at the tender age of fourteen, Mona Donaldson started to work for Australasian Films in Sydney as a film examiner. Two years later she moved to Paramount Pictures, first as a film examiner, then as a booking clerk. In 1921 she left that position to look after her ailing mother, but she had enjoyed the work, and when her sister was able to take on the caregiver role, she looked around for further work in the film industry. Because she had experience, she was able to obtain a position as a film cutter in what was then the largest film production enterprise in Sydney—Australasian Films. Already, she was building a reputation, both for competence and for independent spirit. When she found that her new employers were considering her job as temporary, she reminded them that the original advertisement had not stated that. When they suggested that her salary should be the same as it had been at Paramount, she insisted that it was a more responsible position and she deserved a higher salary. She won on both counts (Wright 47; Donaldson).

In a 1980s interview deposited at the National Film and Sound Archive, she described herself as a perfectionist who believed that “near enough wasn’t good enough,” and recalled how she had often worked unpaid overtime, sometimes all night. Her social life suffered, and she acquired a reputation for being rather formal and distant. Even among close colleagues she was “Miss D” rather than Mona. Editing was at that time considered to be suitable work for a woman, requiring the same sort of hand-eye coordination as cutting out a dress pattern, but neither particularly skilled nor particularly creative. Most of her early work at Australasian Films with filmmakers such as Alexis Albert, Frank Hurley, or Arthur Shirley was not credited on-screen. In the 1980s interview with Andrée Wright and Stuart Young, she describes cutting on Painted Daughters (1925) for F. Stuart Whyte; The Grey Glove (1928) and Tall Timber (1926) for Dunstan Webb; and Hills of Hate (1926) and The Pioneers (1926) for Raymond Longford—all without screen credit. When the company moved to Bondi Junction, she found herself working near Gayne Dexter, who did all the title sequences. It was he who first gave her a screen credit although she was not clear in her interview which film this might have been.

The first film for which her editing was clearly recognized was Norman Dawn’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1927). The original editing was credited to Katherine Dawn, but it was well known that Mona Donaldson completed the film after the Dawns returned to America. So when Graham Shirley reconstructed the film for the National Film and Sound Archive, he gave a credit to Mona Donaldson as well. When the Dawns returned to Australia to make The Adorable Outcast (1928), they invited Mona to edit the film, this time for full screen credit. On Showgirl’s Luck (1931) Mona did the final cut, but did not prepare the work print. She remained good friends with the Dawns, resisting their invitations to work in the United States because her mother needed her, she said, but maintaining a correspondence with Katherine Dawn for thirty-five years (Donaldson).

Around this time, Lacey Percival, who had also worked at Australasian Films, started Automatic Films, and invited Mona to join him. She told Australasian, hoping they would be interested enough in her to offer her a raise, but they said her salary was ample for a woman, so she accepted the new job around 1928 and remained there for eighteen years. She explains in her one interview that she found the transition to sound easy, saying that she “drifted into it without any bother.” However, during the depression in the early thirties, Lacey Percival asked her, along with Phil Markham, to take a cut in salary. They were puzzled by this since they were working flat out all through those years that were so difficult for others; however, she agreed to having her salary cut by £5 per week, only to discover later that it had not been necessary at all.

Automatic Film Laboratories also loaned her out to work on feature films. Charles Chauvel had had Heritage (1935) cut by Lola Thring-Lindsay, but he was not pleased with the result and asked Lacey Percival if “one of the boys” could “have a look at it.” Percival explained that “Miss D” did all their editing, so Chauvel asked Mona to look at the film. She recommended changes, and he told her to recut it completely. Heritage won the Australian Film Award in 1935. Chauvel was so impressed that he asked for her again on Uncivilised (1936). They did not take her to Suva for the filming because they needed her expertise in Sydney to check all the footage and let them know if something needed to be reshot on location. Mona was also loaned out by Automatic to National Studios for Clarence Badger’s Rangle River (1936). After that film, her work was mainly that of checking final prints and cutting films submitted to the censorship boards.

Donaldson became very ill in 1946 and spent seven months in the hospital. In her oral history she recalled that when the management at Automatic refused her sick leave and told her that she no longer had a job if she was too ill to work, she was hurt. She had spent eighteen years with the firm, and in that time had never received payment for overtime and had even brought printing as well as work to the firm. Looking back, she told her interviewers about how she met news cameraman Bill Carty some time later, and he greeted her enthusiastically, but recalled that although “Miss D was always finding fault,” this actually made the job easier for everyone. Both Cinesound and Commonwealth Film Laboratories invited her to work for them, but she decided to leave the film industry permanently. She bought a shop in Chatswood and became a successful milliner.

Bibliography

Pike, Andrew and Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900-1977. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Wright, Andrée. Brilliant Careers: Women in Australian Cinema. Sydney: Pan Books Australia, 1986.

Archival Paper Collections:

Donaldson, Mona. Interview with Andrée Wright and Stuart Young. 274184. n.d. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Citation

Bertrand, Ina. "Mona Donaldson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-baca-b187>

Esfir Shub

by Dunja Dogo

Esfir’ Shub was born in the town Surazhe in the Chernigovsky governatorate (which is now the Brianskaya province), in the southwest part of the Russian Empire. By the mid-1910s, she settled in Moscow to study literature at the Institute for Women’s Higher Education, where she got involved in the revolutionary movement that was becoming popular among young female students. In 1918, Shub started her career in the Soviet administration at the head office of the TEO Theatre Department of the Narkompros (People’s Commissariat of Education) although she was originally hired only for minor secretarial tasks. Having a fascination for the theatre, she began collaborating with the stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and endorsed the manifesto for a renewal of Russian theatre written by the director Evgenii Vakhtangov. Together with the poetess Nina Rukavishnikova, Shub conceived a mass pantomime involving hundreds of extras that was to be staged at the Moscow circus in 1921. During her time at the Narkompros, she also collaborated on issues of the journal Vestnik Teatr and got acquainted with the Left Front of the Arts (LEF) group. LEF was an ensemble of artists with whom Shub would be associated till the end of the decade; its founder, Mayakovsky, became one of Shub’s most vocal supporters when, in the mid-1920s, she turned her expertise to film direction. Later between 1928 and 1931 she took part in the artistic avant-garde group “October,” considered to be the last constructivist collective of the century.

Esfir Shub (e/d/w). KT

Esfir Shub. Kino-teatr.ru

In 1922, shortly after Shub had become employed at the Goskino, the major state-owned film company, she was unexpectedly promoted to chief of the local montage division alongside another woman, Tatiana Levinton. At Goskino, in conjunction with another film company, Kino-Moskva, she underwent specialized training to teach her to excise politically incorrect portions of films in order to render them suitable for Soviet audiences. Re-editing and titling imported films for domestic distribution, Shub developed a new style in designing documentary films. Due to the lack of production facilities and the limited supply of films from abroad in the early days of Soviet Russia, old titles were reissued, adjusted of course to Communist ideological principles, and Shub devoted herself to this major task. She completely reedited Carmen (1916), Charlie Chaplin’s first film to be screened in Soviet Russia, and worked on a range of subjects from various American serials starring, for instance, Pearl White, Eddie Polo, and Ruth Roland, to Intolerance (David W. Griffith 1916). She then progressed to cutting new films, until she joined Sergei M. Eisenstein in writing the shooting script of Stachka/Strike (1925), and coediting the “July Uprising” episode in Oktiabr’/October (1928). In 1923, at the third factory of Goskino, Shub worked on more than 40 films, including a long series in three parts, Prikliuchenie brat’ev bliznietsev/The Adventures of the Twin Brothers (1924), which was released with many difficulties (RGALI Fund 3035).

Still The Fall of the Romanoff Dynasty (1927). MOMA

Still, The Fall of the Romanoff Dynasty (1927). Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art. 

After gaining expertise reediting pre-revolutionary and foreign productions as well as new Soviet features, Shub became, largely on her own initiative, a pioneer of the new Soviet documentary subgenre: the “compilation film.” Her first accomplishment as a compilation director was Padenie Dinastii Romanovykh/The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), part of a trilogy to celebrate the rise to power of the Bolshevik Party. The film combined vastly different kinds of footage (old newsreels, amateur footage, footage shot by official cinematographers of the imperial family) recovered fortuitously from cellars, vaults, and closets of wartime cameramen such as Aleksandr’ Levitsky and Eduard Tissé, whom she interviewed when possible. Using restoration methods, Shub saved precious revolutionary footage that might otherwise have been destroyed. Here, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty represents the second period in Soviet documentary cinema history following the earlier Dziga Vertov period. Thus a documentary work made entirely of archival material was contrasted with Vertov’s celebrated “life caught unawares” poetics (Petric 1978, 434–443; 1984, 30–39).

Despite the official position that not one meter of negative or positive film on the February Revolution had been preserved, Shub recovered footage classified as lost. For The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty she inspected about 3 million feet in order to select 17,060 feet to be combined as montage (Petric 1978, 430–32). Her method, a minute study of formal elements, blending shots that had no strict causal or temporal relationship to make a precise political point, took further what she had learned from Lev Kuleshov as well as Eisenstein’s theory of montage. Asserting fact over fiction, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was conceived as a visual book of history,meant to document the real Russian Revolution, which began in February 1917, not October 1917. Before the 10th anniversary of the February Revolution (March 11, 1917, in the old calendar), Shub discovered additional material in a huge package of films purchased from Eastman Kodak, found to contain intimate scenes with Lenin and a never-before-seen image of the dead leader, which she inserted in Veliky put’/The Great Road (1927).

Esfir Shub

Portrait, Esfir Shub. 

Facing changes in mainstream cinematography with the advent of sound film at the time of Stalin’s shifting politics, Shub changed her method, purposely stopping her meticulous work on archival material. Instead, she aimed for ultra-realism, employing newly shot material. Rather than just registering, she turned to creating while working on K-SH-E or Komsomol/Leader of Electrification (1932), a long feature film in which she inserted shots of people looking into the camera lens, screwing up their eyes as they looked into bright arc-lamps. Never abandoning her profession of editor, she taught montage for Eisenstein’s class at the VGIK Film Institute in 1933–1935. At the same time, she started a project entitled Women (1933–1934), which was never completed but was intended to demonstrate, as she wrote in her autobiography, that “only the proletarian revolution closed the account of ‘the history of the women question’” (Shub 1972, 286). Shub’s script shows women as liberated by the Bolshevik Revolution from the proto-capitalist Russian system in which they were exploited both as objects of desire and as a working-class minority. Her idea was to use common women telling the story of their lives in front of the camera, but also fictional fragments, one of which depicted as a minor heroine an ex-prostitute who, after rehabilitation, became a shock worker within the Stalinist ranks.

Another important production was Ispanya/Spain (1939), a romantic account of the Spanish Civil War supporting the Republican cause. Here Shub returned to editing, combining captured fascist newsreels with the frontline camera footage shot by Roman Karmen and Boris Makaseyev. She continued her documentary work through the war years and into the late 1940s. In 1942, Shub left Goskino to become chief editor of the newsreel Novosti Dnya/The News of the Day at the Central Studio for Documentary Film in Moscow. In the last years of World War II, she departed from the objectives of Soviet propaganda to move to more socially conscious themes. Thus, her last completed project, Po tu storonu Araksa/Across the Araks (1946) criticized the terrible living conditions of Azeri people in Iran. Whereas in the 1920s Shub influenced mainstream Soviet directors, thanks to her ingenious montage of preexisting materials to create didactic and emotive effect, in the 1930s, she fell into disfavor with the government after Soviet ideology shifted. By 1934, she composed a few magazine announcements titled “I Want to Work,” but none of these was published, and after her death, they were filed at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI) archive in Moscow (Roberts 1997, 44). One year later, however, Shub was honored as Artist of the Republic, and in 1937, while making the documentary Strana Sovietov/Land of the Soviets for the 20th anniversary of the Revolution, the state commission asked her to take on a new assignment—to honor Josef Stalin as head of the Bolshevik Party. This she undertook in Strana Rodnaia/Native Land, a chronicle of the first years of Soviet power ending with Stalin’s addresses in 1936 and 1942 and completed for the 25th anniversary of the October Revolution.

Esfir’ Shub’s main legacy remains the establishment of documentary editing as principally creative in the effort to define the dramaturgy of the visual film form. As an editor and master in the silent era, heyday of the Soviet avant-garde, she established new theoretical principles of nonfiction filmmaking, but under the Soviet totalitarian regime, she suffered from indifference (Dunbar 1998, 388). In her memoirs, she describes numerous films that were either never made or that the government handed to lesser-known filmmakers who were favored at the time.

See also: Elizaveta Svilova, “After the Facts – These Edits Are My Thoughts

Bibliography

Attwood, Lynn. Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era. London: Pandora, 1993.

Dunbar, Robert. Women Filmmakers & Their Films. New York and London: St. James Press,  Detroit, 1998.

Halter, Regine. “Esther Schub: Ihre Bedeutung für die Entwicklung des Dokumentarfilms. Frauen und Film 9  (1976): 34-44.

Leyda, Jay. “Bridge. Esther Schub Shapes a New Art (1927).” Film Beget Films. London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1964. 22-31.

Petric, Vlada. “Esther Shub: Film as a Historical Discourse.” In Show Us Life: Toward a History of Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary. Ed. Thomas Waugh. New York: Scarecrow, 1984. 21-46.

------. “Esther Shub: Cinema is My Life.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4 (1978): 429-448.

------. “Esther Shub's Unrealized Project.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4 (1978): 449-456.

Roberts, Graham. “Esfir Shub: a Suitable Case for Treatment.” Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television 2 (1991): 149-159.

------. “The Great Way.” History Today 11 (1997): 39-44.

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Ob Esfiri Shub i eio kinematograficheskom opyte.” Iskusstvo kino (May 1969); Rpt. in Istoriia sovetskogo kino: tom 1, 1917-1931. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969. 505-511.

Shub, Esfir' I. “Neigrovaia fil'ma.” Kino i kul'tura  (6 August 1929): n.p.

------. Krupnym planom [In the Close-up)]. Iskusstvo. Moscow, 1959.

------. “Na postupakh k vtoroi piatiletke.” Proletarskoe kino (28 March 1932): n.p.

------. “Proidennyi put'.” Sovetskoe kino (November - December 1934).

------. “Vvodnaia zapiska.” Iskusstvo kino (November 1960).

------. “Vmesto predisloviia.” Iskusstvo kino (November 1964).

------. Zhizn' moia - kinematograf (My Life - Cinema). Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972.

Archival Paper Collections:

Fund Esfir' I. Shub (no. 3035). Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts.

Research Update

October 2023: Additional bibliographic resources

Shub Sharp, Ilana. Esfir Shub: Pioneer of Documentary Filmmaking. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Sharp (née Shub), Ilana."The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927): A Constructivist Paradigm for Neigrovaia Fil’ma." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 28, no. 2 (2008): 195–217.

Citation

Dogo, Dunja. "Esfir Shub." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-7jyf-d183>

Kate Howarde

by Ina Bertrand

Catherine Clarissa Jones was born in England and migrated to New Zealand as a child. She married William Henry de Saxe in 1884, and their only child, Florence Adrienne, was born at Christchurch on December 5, 1884. William de Saxe died in 1899, and she died in 1939 as Catherine Clarissa Black, but there is no Australian record of her second marriage to vaudevillian Elton Black.

Possum Paddock (1921) Kate Howarde (d/w/prod). AUC

Possum Paddock (1921), Kate Howarde. Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. 

Only so much can be gleaned from the official records. A rather different story emerges from media reports about theatrical entrepreneur Kate Howarde—her professional name throughout a long career. These records note her commanding physical presence, charming manner, and soft speech, as well as her formidable organizational talents, fierce independence, and pluck. They also demonstrate her acute publicity skills and her nose for a good story. For instance, on January 15, 1929, the Australian Woman’s Mirror gave her year of birth as 1869, making her talent appear precocious—her stories published in the Wellington Post at age nine, her children’s pantomime publicly performed at age ten, and her own theatrical company by age seventeen (12).

By the late 1890s the Kate Howarde Company was based in Australia and reported to be touring extensively through New Zealand and all Australian states, performing mainly in country town halls and tents according to Harold Love (120). As well as managing the tours, including controlling finances, she directed the performances, performed herself, and wrote much of their material, including sketches, songs, and pantomimes. She also copyrighted several serious plays, although it is not always clear which of her plays were entirely original and which were Australian adaptations of mostly American works.

The Kate Howarde Company included her two younger brothers, Louis and Albert Howarde, and her sister Billie, who later married Harry Craig, also of the company. It was Billie and Harry Craig who kept the Kate Howarde Company touring in Australia during Howarde’s first extended trip overseas. She traveled to San Francisco in 1906, where she was reported by the Australian Woman’s Mirror to have lost all her playscripts in the earthquake (12). She then moved to New York, where she had a play pirated by an American theatrical agent. However, Howarde was able to support herself in New York for some time writing theatre reviews for newspapers then going on to London. It may have been during this trip that she married her second husband, Elton Black, who had been with the company from about 1904 and returned to Australia with Howarde in 1909. From 1914 to late 1917, at a time when suburban theatrical companies were not common, the Kate Howarde Company successfully presented weekly-change repertory at the National Theatre in Balmain, Sydney. The fare included Howarde’s own melodramas in 1914, “The White Slave Traffic” and “Why Girls Leave Home.”

Kate Howarde separated from Elton Black around 1918 or 1919, just before her greatest theatrical success—the bucolic comedy “Possum Paddock,” which she wrote, produced, and presented. This toured country areas before opening in Sydney at the Theatre Royal on September 6, 1919. The huge success of the play, focusing on the money and romantic problems of a bush family, mixing sentiment with farce, encouraged Howarde to turn it into a motion picture. This she produced and, with Charles Villiers, cowrote and codirected. Many of the original cast returned, including Howarde herself as the widow Nella Carsley. Her daughter, using the stage name Leslie Adrien, took the female romantic lead, originally played on stage by Rose Rooney. The New South Wales censor required the excision of a scene in which an unmarried mother imagines drowning her baby, but the film was released successfully at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney on January 29, 1921, and was exhibited throughout Australia and New Zealand (Pike 137). Howarde later explained that because she was not familiar with the methods of picture manipulators, she had not benefited financially from the film, which we learn from Andrée Wright, in a book called Brilliant Careers (107). The difficulties of film financing may explain why she never made another film. Perhaps none of her other plays were successful enough to warrant the risk.

Possum Paddock (1921), however, as both play and film, was far from being a failure. According to the publication Everyone’s from May 1922, the work had been sufficiently successful to finance a ten-month tour for the whole company to South Africa, the United States, and Great Britain (21). On their return, the company continued to tour country areas with occasional city seasons, presenting revivals of Possum Paddock as well as imported plays and others written or adapted by Howarde herself. Her second bucolic comedy “Gum Tree Gully” was only a moderate success in 1924, but by then she had also moved on to writing more dramatic works. She presented “The Judgment of Jean Calvert” in Sydney in 1935, only four years before her death.

Although most of her career was on the stage, Kate Howarde has been cited as the first woman to direct a feature film in Australia. The play and screenplay of Possum Paddock survive in the National Archive of Australia, and part of the film itself also survives in the National Film and Sound Archive although in a form that does not match either script and does not make particularly good sense.

Bibliography

Australian Women’s Mirror (15 Jan. 1929): 12, 45.

Ballard, Michelle. “Kate Howarde” in Philip Parsons (ed). Companion to Theatre in Australia. Kensington: Currency Press, 1995: 286-7.

Bertrand, Ina. “Celebrating Kate Howarde.” Senses of  Cinema 22 (October 2002): n.p. http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/22/howarde/

------. “Kate Howarde” Australian Dictionary of Biography Supplement.Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005.

Everyone's (May 1922): 21.

Garlick, Barbara. “Australian travelling theatre 1890-1935: a study in popular entertainment and national ideology.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Queensland, 1994.

Love, Harold, ed. The Australian Stage: a Documentary History. Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1984.

Sydney Morning Herald (8 Sept. 1919): 21.

Wright, Andrée. Brilliant Careers. Sydney: Pan Books, Sydney, 1986.

Archival Paper Collections:

Theatre programmes for “Possum Paddock” and “Gum Tree Gully.” Arts Centre Melbourne, Australian Performing Arts Collection.

Theatre programmes for “Possum Paddock” and “Gum Tree Gully.” State Library of Victoria.

Copyright registrations for play scripts of “Gum Tree Gully,” “Common Humanity,” “Possum Paddock,” and “The Limit.” and film script of Possum Paddock. A1336/1-2, Attorney-General’s Department. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Citation

Bertrand, Ina. "Kate Howarde." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-7hpf-ns90>

Margaret Hepworth

by Tony Fletcher

Margaret Hope McGuffie was born in 1874 at Charlton in Lancashire, England. By 1900, the family had moved to Chapel-En-Le Frith in Derbyshire, approximately twenty miles from Manchester. One of her brothers, John, who worked as a games master on the steamship The Argonaut had met the filmmaker Cecil Hepworth on board on his way to Algiers to film a solar eclipse. The two men became friends, and when they returned to Britain, Cecil was invited to meet the McGuffie family, who lived not far away from where Cecil was filming for the showman A.D. Thomas. Cecil was advised to wear evening dress for dinner, which was the practice of the McGuffie family. This may explain why in Rescued by Rover (1905), Cecil is seen wearing top-hat and tails.

Margaret Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth, Blair, and Cecil Hepworth in (i) Rescued by Rover (/i) (1905).

Margaret Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth, Blair, and Cecil Hepworth in Rescued by Rover (1905). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

Cecil Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth, and Blair in (i) Rescued by Rover (/i) (1905), Margaret Hepworth (w/a).

Cecil Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth, and Blair in Rescued by Rover  (1905), Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

Barbara Hepworth and Blair in (i) Rescued by Rover (/i) (1905), Margaret Hepworth (w).

Barbara Hepworth and Blair in Rescued by Rover (1905). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

Cecil Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth, and Blair in (i) The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper (/i) (1908), Margaret Hepworth (w/a). BFI

Cecil Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth, and Blair in The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper (1908). Courtesy of the British Film Institute. 

Cecil and Margaret were married at Buxton, Derbyshire, on February 11, 1902. Cecil later recalled in his memoirs Came the Dawn: “I had been married about a year and my wife, broken in to film work, played the part of “The White Rabbit” in Alice in Wonderland” (63). He recalled that the film Rescued by Rover (1905) was a family affair. “My wife wrote the story; my baby, eight months old, was the heroine; my Dog, the hero; my wife, the bereaved mother and myself, the harassed father” (67). The film was shot three times, the second and third version approximately five months after the first version. According to May Clark, who worked for Cecil between 1898 and 1908: “For Rescued by Rover Hepworth used up three films. We filmed once. He wore that copy out, so we filmed it again and took two of everything when we were filming it, so that we had two separate copies, and that film built his studios. All his expenses for twelve months were paid out of that film.”

Cecil also recounted that Margaret had a considerable influence on the films he was making (49). This was corroborated by Clark. In the transcript for the 1968 interview she gave to the television program Yesterday’s Witness, she recalled that she often heard Cecil and Margaret arguing in the evenings about what they should film the following day.

Margaret had three children: Elizabeth, known as Barbara, born in December 1904; Blanche Margaret, known as Margaret, born in January 1907; and Thomas Andrew Cradock, born in November 1910. Margaret cast her daughter Barbara as the central character of Rescued by Rover and featured her in an early health education film entitled Baby’s Toilet (1905), in which Margaret demonstrates how to bathe and dress a baby. Barbara is also featured in The Dog Outwits the Kidnapper (1908), in which Margaret again played the mother and their dog Blair, the rescuer, while Cecil played the kidnapper.

It is difficult to quantify what role, if any, Margaret had in the family’s filmmaking business after 1908. In future years, Cecil tried to expand production by employing more outside film producers. Margaret died on October 9, 1917, following a three-month illness from breast cancer.

Bibliography

Clark, May. Interview. Yesterday’s Witness. Transcripts. 1968. British Film Institute.

Gifford, Denis. The British Film Catalogue. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.

Hepworth, Cecil. Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer. London: Phoenix House Limited, 1951.

Low, Rachael. History of the British Film. Vol. 1: 1896-1906. London: Allen & Unwin, 1949.

------. History of the British Film. Vol. II: 1906-14. London: Allen & Unwin, 1949.

Archival Paper Collections:

Yesterday's Witness episodes. British Film Institute.

Hepworth Catalogue of Films 1906. British Film Institute.

Citation

Fletcher, Tony. "Margaret Hepworth." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-9y5e-7822>

Laura Bayley

by Tony Fletcher

Laura Eugenia Bayley was born in Ramsgate, England, in 1864. With her three sisters, Blanche, Florence, and Eva, she performed as part of J.D. Hunter’s Theatre Company at the Brighton Aquarium. When she was twenty-four, Laura married George Albert Smith. They had two children, Harold Norman, born in 1889, and Dorothy Eugenie, born in 1890.

Tom Green and Laura Bayley (a/o) in Let me Dream Again (1900).

Screenshot, Tom Green and Laura Bayley (a/o) in Let Me Dream Again (1900).

George Albert Smith and Laura Bayley (a/o) in The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899).

Screenshot, George Albert Smith and Laura Bayley in The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899).

In 1897, G.A. Smith decided to enter the early filmmaking fraternity at the Pleasure Gardens, which they ran at St. Anne’s Well in Hove, near Brighton. G.A. Smith not only produced films and sold copies of his own productions, but also supplied a photographic developing service for other filmmakers. He was involved with Charles Urban, who managed the Warwick Trading Company. They developed, along with others, a cinematograph camera, the Biokam, for the amateur home market, which had film lengths of twenty-five feet with a rectangular space for the sprocket between each frame, situated at the top. The 17.5mm film was half the length of the standard 35mm, and the aim was to encourage customers, particularly women, to shoot their own films. The Biokam was also a printer and projector. In G.A. Smith’s Cash Book, which survives, the entries for the Biokam are given under the initials “L.E.S.” for Laura Eugenia Smith. The entries range from July 29, 1898, to May 21, 1906, and indicate that over 1,000 Biokam films were marketed by March 1900:

Entries from the Cash Book Relating to “L. E. S.”
Date Price Action
29/7/1898 5/- (shillings) Cleaning films
9/12/1899 £34.13s.9d. 555 Biokam films @1s/3d each
12/12 1899 £6.5s.0d 100 Biokam films @ 1s/3d each
29/12/1899 £11.0.0 Biokams
10/2/1900 £8.13s.9d 139 Biokam films @ 1s/3d each
12/3/1900 £12.7s.6d 198 Biokams
Nov. 1900 £1.2s.6d Biokams
3/12/1900 £4.8s.0d Title Slides
22/12/1900 £6.4s.6d Title Slides
14/1/1901 £4.5s.10d Slides to date
13/3/1901 £5.10s.8d Slides and Biokams
8/4/1901 £5.18s.6d Biokams and Slides
10/6/1901 £4.17s.8d Biokams and Slides
20/7/1901 £6.5s.6d Biokams and Slides
19/10/1901 £6.7s.1d Slides to date
7/12/1901 £2.18s.4d Slides and Biokams to end of 1900
20/1/1902 £1.18s.10d Biokams (£2.10s)(less chemicals 11/2d)
4/3/1902 £2.10s.0d Biokams and Slides to end of Feb.
14/4/1902 £1.8s.9d Biokams etc.
15/5/1902 £8.12s.6d Biokams and Slides
18/9/1902 £13.2s.0d Biokams and Slides
18/11/1902 7s.3d Biokams
13/7/1903 £1.5s.0d Biokams etc. to date
5/10/1904 £2.0s.0d Perforating Biokams
21/5/1906 £2.12s.6d Biokams to end of Sept.

On October 14, 1899, G.A. Smith gave an interview to the Brighton Herald about the Biokam, which had been launched on the market that year. He stated: “Films are being made for this [Biokam Camera] that will cost only 3s/6d a minute.” He referred to Bayley, then Laura Smith: “Then Mrs Smith came in to borrow the identical camera and to go off and photograph the waves breaking over the Hove sea wall” (2). In June 1899, J.K. Cramer-Roberts in an article for The Golden Penny described in detail the workings of “the Biokam,” which were supplied by the Edison-Bell Phonograph Company. It included a photograph of a woman, in the mode of the amateur, taking photographs with the Biokam. During this Biokam period, Laura Bayley also appeared in her husband’s films along with their two children, and a number of these films were made as Biokam subjects for which she was responsible. Some of these shorts survive at the British National Film and Television Archive. Mrs. Smith also appeared in some of the Kinemacolor test films made by G.A. Smith between 1906 and 1908. Laura Bayley ’s last three entries in G.A. Smith’s Cash Book relate to “Rowe’s Cash” between December 19, 1907, and October 8, 1908. This appears to mark the end of her involvement in the early film industry.

Bibliography

Cramer-Roberts, J.K. [article title unknown]. The Golden Penny (3 June 1899): n.p.

Gray, Frank, ed. Hove Pioneers and the Arrival of Cinema. Brighton: University of Brighton, 1996.

Smith, G.A. Interview. Brighton Herald (14 Oct. 1899): 2.

Archival Paper Collections:

G.A. Smith’s Cash Book. The Cinema Museum.

Citation

Fletcher, Tony. "Laura Bayley." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-ef6a-f668>

Caroline Lejeune

by Amy Sargeant

Caroline Lejeune, better known to readers of her reviews as C.A. Lejeune or even simply C.A. L., said that The Mark of Zorro (1920) determined her choice of career. As she wrote in her autobiography, Thank You for Having Me:

Suddenly, as I watched Fairbanks’ harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. Why should I not turn my pleasure into profit, and earn my living by seeing films? The profession of film criticism had not yet come into being…An extra deterrent was the fact that women had very little standing yet as journalists (1964, 69-70).

She liked to remark that she and the cinema were almost of the same age.

C.P. Scott, then editor of the Manchester Guardian, was a family friend. He made the necessary introductions to the London editor of the newspaper and young Caroline left Manchester for the capital, chaperoned by her mother. Having previously provided anonymous pieces for the Guardian‘s Women’s Page and in an article titled “The Undiscovered Aesthetic,” giving “an impassioned plea for recognition by ‘discriminating’ persons of kinematography” (68), she was given her own column, “The Week on the Screen,” in 1921. “To celebrate the event, I bought myself a packet of gold-tipped Aristons, and mother and I recklessly shared a nip of medicinal brandy,” she recalled (A. Lejeune 1991, 27). But Caroline did not forget her early film-going experiences, and in a typically atmospheric piece in Cinema (1931) recalled queuing with a charwoman and a professor on a cobbled street, in the wind and rain, to see the great Alla Nazimova.

Lejeune’s early reviews are worth reading as much for her descriptions of the methods used to promote films as for her comments on the material seen. In March 1924, she noted:

[T]he film today is the least important part of a super-kinema programme… [there are] programme girls and commissionaires in fancy costumes, exhibits from the film, copies of songs or books from which the films have been adapted, souvenirs, photographs… [I have seen] a monkey…a hooded falcon…white roses…red roses… and a handkerchief stall—for the tears shed when watching…

In 1925 she married her fellow film journalist, Edward Roffe Thompson. In 1928, she moved to the Observer and her son, Anthony, was born (A. Lejeune 30).

Lejeune’s tastes were catholic. Certainly she embraced the product of the Hollywood studios more readily than contemporary critics such as Winifred Bryher at Close Up and many of her colleagues at the Film Society. However, she shared their belief that there could be progress in film art and technique and their insistence on particular filmic properties as evaluative criteria. She foresaw the establishment of cinema museums in which the history of the medium could be displayed and its finest exemplars celebrated, and she welcomed the coming of television as a means of film distribution. Lejeune noted that the term “popular” was often employed derogatorily in film criticism, but was far from despising the popular herself, finding as much worth in Photoplay as Close Up. She appreciated the cinema culture of Paris, from the Grands Boulevards to flea pits on the outskirts. We learn from the recently published C. A. Lejeune Film Reader that she was an early champion of René Clair (46), a lifelong favorite, and of Jacques Feyder’s Thérèse Raquin (1928), while bemoaning that Alexander Volkoff’s Kean (1924) was unlikely to be exhibited in Britain despite the appearance in a cameo role of the British producer Kenelm Foss. Lejeune appreciated the talents of the pre-Revolutionary Russian star Ivan Mosjoukine while the Film Society positioned itself against émigré cinema in favor of the more advanced work of new Soviet directors (46).

Both Lejeune and Bryher recognised the dangers of “loose, romantic militarism” in war films and the propagandistic potential of the genre. In 1928, Lejeune published a pamphlet, War Films and World Peace, acknowledging the current popularity of war films with audiences, returning to this theme in 1931:

Even those of us who hold most steadfastly to the belief that fighting is futility and warfare the last evasion of the weak, have in us too much of our fathers to be proof altogether against the bugle calling, and the drum rolling, and the tramp of marching feet. We make the war film successful. The generosity and sympathy, the sentiment and tradition, of every man and woman in an audience may be counted upon to provide what the producer lacks. The biggest dunce in the industry can make a sensation out of a war film, and does. The war has never helped the cinema to find itself. It has only put easy money into the exhibitor’s cash-box, and built up a reputation for a number of quite undistinguished directors through an emotion borrowed at second hand (220).

Adopting a stance that has since become familiar, Lejeune decided that a British critic was ideally placed to value equally the work of Hollywood, usually dismissed as commercial, and that of Europe, conveniently designated as art, with the star system of the former distinguishing it from the use of actors by the latter. But Lejeune was able to identify exceptions, finding the German studios as methodical and systematic as their American counterparts.

As for British cinema, Lejeune’s feelings were mixed. She regretted that Estelle Brody, the Canadian actress who appeared in a number of Maurice Elvey films, was less acknowledged than the star Ivor Novello. On various occasions she recommended the work of directors Elvey, Graham Cutts, and Walter Summers. But Lejeune cautioned against the over-hyping of British cinema in campaigns such as the British Film Weeks of 1924:

The injury which the British studios have drawn to themselves by praise of bad and inefficient workmanship is almost incalculable. In the name of patriotism they have misled the public over so many trivial British pictures that the few good ones have been sceptically received….To do our kinema justice I think that all, or most of its faults are negative ones. It has not the harsh technique of Italy, nor the crudeness of Russia, nor the insatiability of France nor the heaviness of Germany, nor the vulgarity of America. It simply has nothing, neither character nor courage, neither commercial success, skill nor artistic sense.

Lejeune recorded various triumphs of British cinema during the Second World War, mapping recurrent character types and themes, often producing reviews wittily composed as imaginary conversations.

In the 1930s, Graham Greene at the Spectator pilloried Lejeune’s criticism even when they agreed over John Grierson and the work of the Empire Marketing Board. Paul Rotha referred to Lejeune’s temporary and fashionable “documentary fetish” (1973, 108). But she worried about the absence of a story in her review of Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934), complaining that in a crucial scene the audience saw “only the woman and the seaweed” (1991, 94). In 1956, Lindsay Anderson opened fire on Lejeune’s Observer reviews as an instance of “the kind of philistinism which shrinks from art because art presents a challenge” (2000, 54).

Lejeune maintained that new films should be appraised relative to the merits of their predecessors. Increasingly, though, she felt herself ill-equipped to engage adequately with the films she was required to review and produced her last column for the Observer on Christmas Day, 1960.

Bibliography

Gledhill, Christine. Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion London: BFI, 2003.

Lambert, Gavin. Mostly About Lindsay Anderson. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

Lejeune, Anthony, ed. The C. A. Lejeune Film Reader. Manchester: Carcanet, 1991.

Lejeune, C. A. Chestnuts in Her Lap. London: Phoenix House, 1947.

------. Cinema. London: Alexander Maclehose, 1931.

------. Manchester Guardian (March 1924).

------. Thank You for Having Me. London: Hutchinson, 1964.

------. War Films and World Peace (1928).

Rotha, Paul.  Documentary Diary. London: Secker and Warburg, 1973.

Sargeant, Amy. British Cinema: A Critical History. London: BFI, 2005.

Citation

Sargeant, Amy. "Caroline Lejeune." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-x02r-j972>

Elvira Notari

by Kim Tomadjoglou

According to her son Eduardo, who described her in interviews as having an authoritarian attitude or piglio, Elvira Notari was called “The General.” She earned the nickname from the strong will and determination she exhibited as head of the Dora Film Company in Naples, Italy (Masi and Franco 49). Director, actress, screenwriter, producer, and distributor, Elvira Notari is now celebrated as Italy’s first and most prolific film director. Over the course of 25 years in which she made 60 feature films and hundreds of shorts and actualities, she led Dora Film to become one of Naples’s leading production houses.

Elvira (d/p/w) and Nicola Notari. PC

Elvira and Nicola Notari. Private Collection. 

Rosè Angione as Nanninella in ‘A Santanotte. ITB

Frame enlargement, Rosè Angione as Nanninella in ‘A Santanotte (1922). Courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna.

Eduardo Notari as Gennariello in Fantasia ‘e surdato (1927) IRB

Frame enlargement, Eduardo Notari as Gennariello in Fantasia ‘e surdato (1927). Courtesy of L’immagine Ritrovata.

Eduardo Notari as Gennariello in Fantasia é Surdato (1927). IRB

Frame enlargement, Eduardo Notari as Gennariello in Fantasia ‘e Surdato (1927). Courtesy of L’immagine Ritrovata.

Ad for E’ Picerella (1922). NYSA

Ad for E’ Picerella (1922). Courtesy of the New York State Archives.

NYSA censor report for ‘A Santanotte (1922). NYSA

Censor report for ‘A Santanotte (1922). Courtesy of the New York State Archives.

NYSA censor report for ‘A Santanotte (1922). NYSA

Censor report, ‘A Santanotte (1922). Courtesy of the New York State Archives.

Alberto Danza as Torre in ‘A Santanotte (1922). IRB

Alberto Danza as Torre in ‘A Santanotte (1922). Courtesy of L’immagine Ritrovata.

Ad with Leyda Gys in Nobody’s Children (1926). NYSA

Ad featuring Leyda Gys in Nobody’s Children (1926). Courtesy of the New York State Archives.

Ad with Leyda Gys in Nobody’s Children (1926). NYSA

Ad featuring Leyda Gys in Nobody’s Children (1926). Courtesy of the New York State Archives.

Working alongside Elvira was her husband Nicola,who was responsible for camerawork, and their son Eduardo, affectionately known as Gennariello from the character he played. The company was named Dora after the Notaris’ youngest child, although she never worked in the business. Like other artisanal family businesses, the Notari business started small, with the opening of a photographic laboratory in 1905. Their specialty, hand-colored moving pictures, distinguished them among others, as did the Arriverderci ed Augurali, which were brief hand-colored film titles, also called visual postcards, that they produced to preview coming events and attractions (Bernardini 1982, 119; Miscuglio and Daopoulo 243).

By 1912, Dora Film became a full-fledged production house after the Notaris built a teatro di posa (stage set) at their home in the Ponti Rossi section of Naples. In an apartment adjacent to their residence, Elvira founded an acting school for young, aspiring nonprofessionals (Masi and Franco 49; Bernardini 1982, 174). Eduardo’s schoolteacher, the beautiful and sensuous Rosè Angione, was featured as a femme fatale in many of Notari’s films. In ‘A Santanotte (1922) she played the role of a lower class café waitress. In contrast to the glamorous and elaborately costumed bourgeois and aristocratic divas of Italian cinema, Angione’s natural beauty and fiery, sexual demeanor offered audiences an alternative to the traditional femme fatale.

Notari’s acting methods merit some discussion as she is generally credited for presenting a realistic form of popular cinema. In interviews, her nephew Armando has described how his aunt, consistent with her nickname “The General,” was not only severe, but extremely picky. For example, she forbade players to use glycerin to artificially stimulate tears. Instead, on the set, Notari would bring up a painful or emotionally sensitive episode or detail of a player’s private life until an emotional response was achieved, and then she would order the camera to roll (Miscuglio and Daopoulo 248).

Notari incorporated the notion of typeage to create and develop players with regionally distinct facial features and body physiognomies that were codified to display a range of familiar repeated attitudes, gestures, and behaviors. With his slender physique, large, dark eyes and high, bushy hair, Gennariello epitomized the southern subaltern in his role as the good street urchin; local “black boot,” or shoeshine; or ‘guaglione ‘e core (good-hearted kid). Later he was given a series of his own based on that character. An unsettling figure, he was often the gauge by which critics judged Notari’s films as either degenerative displays of lower class vulgarity or artistic works of moral value and truth. Local critic Giuseppe Fossataro emphasized the educative influence of Notari’s films by praising Genariello’s emotionally convincing performances: “I saw tears in the eyes of those sitting next to me during the fourth part of A mala nova where the son of Mrs. Notari confirmed himself a true artist” (Troianelli 74).

In addition to relatives and friends, members of the Naples artistic community participated in Dora Film production activities, including Michele di Giacomo, brother of the illustrious poet Salvatore, who is said to have authored some of Notari’s films. In several interviews, however, Gennariello insists that his mother was responsible for directing and writing all of Dora Film’s productions, including adaptations:

Contrary to what is written in the general histories, all misinformed, my mother directed all of the films we produced, from the first to the last, including the seventy features. Not only this, she was also the author of the original subjects and adaptations (Miscuglio and Daopoulo 245).

Unlike many Italian women of her time, Notari graduated from high school and was educated in literature and danced as a hobby. She acted in her first films, including La figlia del Vesuvio (1912), and directed and wrote short topical subjects. With Italy’s involvement in the Libyan War in 1912, Elvira Notari directed a number of films that focused on news events related to the conflict, including Eroismo di un aviatore a Tripoli (1912), shot locally but advertised as shot on location. In Guerra italo-turca tra scugnizzi napoletani (1912), she cleverly captured Neapolitan children and street urchins, including her then ten-year-old son Gennariello as a fearless bandleader of an Italian street gang engaging in battle with a Turk gang that is dispersed under a hail of stones. Other films Notari directed in support of the Libyan war effort include Sempre avanti, Savoia! (1915), Addio, mia bella addio… l’armata se ne va (1915), and Gloria ai caduti (1916). Whether she intended these films to be vehicles of propaganda or simply portrayals of newsworthy events is not clear.

Notari made films geared for Neapolitans, especially middle-class women, that were full of cultural references and familiar social settings. She first looked to Neapolitan popular literature, specifically the serial novel form, as a source, as in Ciccio il pizzaiuolo del Carmine (1916), Il barcaiuolo di Amalfi (1918), and La Medea di Portamedina (1919), all based on feuilletons by Francesco Mastriani. She also wrote and directed screen adaptations of successful novels, including Chiarina la modista, by well-known Turinese author Carolina Invernizio. Women were at the center of these domestic melodramas filled with unsettling depictions of tragic and cruel figures. For example, Il nano rosso (1917), based on Invernizio’s novel Raffaella o I misteri del vecchio mercato, is a story about a deformed wealthy man who becomes enamored with a chorus girl and then depletes his fortune to conquer her affections, only to be betrayed when she leaves him. When he discovers the truth, he kills himself.

Melodrama was also a vehicle for Notari’s later “city films,” where local street life became the center of stories with criminal settings such as prison cells. Thus they featured representations of deviant behavior, including knifings, suicides, and violent acts of revenge. By the early 1920s, Notari, while continuing this thread, shifted her focus to a new artistic form, the sceneggiata, a hybrid theatrical form drawing on popular dramatic songs and the variety stage, producing films geared not only to local Neapolitan audiences, but also to Italian immigrants living overseas. Notari was quick to recognize the marketability of the musical narrative form, which was conventionalized around 1919, around the same time she began producing filmed sceneggiate. Songs had been an earlier source for Notari, but the film sceneggiata was a distinctly Neapolitan regional expressive form that quickly developed into a trademark genre of companies from the Parthenopean region.

During the 1920s Dora Film distributed their filmed sceneggiate to overseas markets with Italian immigrant populations, in the United States, for example, to Baltimore and New York, as well as to South American cities. Often the film prints were accompanied by singers who performed the soundtrack (Bruno 1997, 51). Of the few surviving prints of Notari’s entire film career, all are sceneggiate or fragments of the form, although Fantasia ‘e surdate (1925) is incomplete and was reedited by Notari after it did not pass Fascist censorship.

A Santanotte (1922) merits further discussion since the film was recently restored between 2007 and 2008 after an American distribution copy was discovered at the George Eastman House. It is widely accepted that Notari’s films were refused censorship visas by Roman authorities and were then smuggled into the United States, where they were popular, as many ads verify. However, documents located in the New York State Archives reveal that Dora Film faced similar problems with United States censors. Reports stipulate that violent scenes in ‘A Santanotte showing the father character, Guiseppone, beating his daughter Nanninella and dragging her by the hair, should be removed because they were “inhuman, and incite to crime.” Similarly, depictions of physical violence, drinking, and “unacceptable conduct” were cited as reasons for rejecting other films. The two prints used to restore ‘A Santanotte, one an Italian, the other an American reissue copy, each contain pertinent scenes, frames, intertitles, and tinting information that, when combined together, provide a clearer picture of Notari’s original film, the goal of the restoration, on which see Pozzi and De Sanctis.

Censorship is only one of the factors to be considered when speculating about Elvira Notari’s departure from the cinema. Masi and Franco suggest that with the increased difficulty of Fascist intervention at home, Notari abandoned her traditional repertoire and made a Hollywood-style sound film Napoli terra d’amore (1928) featuring Gennariello as a jazz musician. They claim that the film was a disaster with Notari’s public, particularly because a soundtrack replaced live singers (111-112). While Notari’s Trionfo cristiano (1930) is said to have revived the company, the exact date of its release is unclear since a longer title is listed as 1924 or 1925. The 1930 date may reflect the year of its US release while earlier dates may refer to years of production. The film is about the life of the local patron saint (San Pellegrino) and his triumph over sexual temptation, a film said to have been commissioned by a group of Italian-American immigrants from Altavilla Irpina (Masi and Franco 23; Bruno 1997, 53). Masi and Franco think that the religious slant of the film, in which Gennariello undergoes a transformation from guaglione ‘e core to holy martyr, suggests that Dora Film had changed its identity (124). But another explanation for the turn to religious themes may have been nothing more than their popularity. American newspapers promoting Nobody’s Children (1926) depict a saintly nun, as played by Neapolitan Lyda Gys, wife of distributor and producer Gustavo Lombardo. If we see this as a reference to The White Sister (1923) starring a saintly, de-sexualized Lillian Gish in a similar role, we might conclude that Notari was keeping abreast of market trends as she had always done, whether her audience was in New York or in Altavilla Irpina.

Undoubtedly, Fascism played a decisive role in the eventual closing of Dora Film. The discovery of more prints and further research into censorship documentation from Italy, the United States, and other countries where Notari’s films were distributed will help us to determine the degree to which her pictures were altered. Although her husband and son remained active in the film industry in the 1930s, Notari apparently lost her momentum and left the cinema to retire in Cava dei Tirreni, where she died on December 17, 1946.

Bibliography

Aprà, Adriano, Aldo Bernardini, Vittorio Martinelli, and Partrizia Pistagnesi, eds. Napoletana, Images of a City. Milan:  Fabbri Editori, 1993.

Bernardini, Aldo. Cinema muto italiano. 1905-1909. Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 1981.

------. Cinema muto italiano. 1910-1914. Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 1982.

Bruno, Giuliana. “City Views, the Voyage of Film Images.” In The Cinematic City. Ed. David Clark. London and New York : Routledge, 1997. 46-58.

 ------. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map. Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Il Progresso Italo-Americano. Advertisements. (1918-1920, July 1921, Sept 1924): n.p.

Masi, Stefano and Mario Franco, eds. Il mare, la luna, i coltelli. Per una storia del cinema muto Napoletano. Naples: Tullio Pironti, 1988.

Miscuglio, Annabella. “An affectionate and irreverent account of eighty years of women’s cinema in Italy.” In Offscreen, Women and Film in Italy. Eds. Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. 151-164.

Miscuglio, Annabella and Rony Daopoulo, eds. Kinomata. La donna nel cinema, Bari: Dedalo, 1980.

Pozzi, Celine and Marianna De Sanctis. “Analisi del restauro di 'A Santanotte.” In Non solo dive. Pioniere del cinema italiano. Ed. Monica Dall’Asta. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2009. 149-158. 

Scialo, Pasquale, ed. Sceneggiatta : rappresentazioni di un genere popolare.  Napoli: Luogo, Editore Alfreda Guida, 2002.

Troianelli, Enza. Elvira Notari, pioniera del cinema napoletano (1857-1946). Rome: EURoma Editrice Universitaria di Roma – La Goliardica, 1989.

Archival Paper Collections:

Cumulative Catalogs of Motion Picture Entries. Library of Congress, Copyright Records Reading Room

Motion Picture Script Collections. New York State Archives

Citation

Tomadjoglou, Kim. "Elvira Notari." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zdmp-rs37>

Anne Bauchens

by Kristen Hatch

Anne Bauchens was a St. Louis, Missouri native who, at the age of twenty, moved to New York City in the hope of becoming an actor and was hired by William de Mille as a typist and stenographer in 1912. Five years later, she traveled to Hollywood to help William’s brother, producer-director Cecil B. De Mille, edit We Can’t Have Everything (1918). DeMille is quoted in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner as saying about her that “though a gentle person, professionally she is as firm as a stone wall . . . We argue over virtually every picture” (III 3).  Nonetheless, she was the only person the director would permit to edit his films and continued working with him until his death in 1959.

Cutting_Women_WFP-BAU01

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

See alsoHettie Grey BakerMargaret BoothWinifred DunnKatherine HillikerViola LawrenceJane LoringIrene MorraBlanche SewellRose Smith

Bibliography

The bibliography for this essay is included in the “Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors” overview essay.

Citation

Hatch, Kristen. "Anne Bauchens." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-229t-9n77>

Matilde Serao

by Anita Trivelli

An Italian writer and journalist who was born in Patrasso, Greece, to a Greek mother and Neapolitan father, an anti-Bourbon exile, Matilde Serao’s relentless and eclectic writing was distinguished by her extraordinarily committed professionalism. She cofounded several newspapers in Rome and Naples with Edoardo Scarfoglio, whom she married in 1885. For years, they were the most brilliant and followed couple in Italian journalism. After divorcing her husband, Serao established her own daily, the Neapolitan Il Giorno (1904), which she headed until her death. She was the first Italian woman, and until recently the only woman, to run a newspaper in Italy.

Matilde Serao (w) and Edoardo Scarfoglio. PC

Matilde Serao and Edoardo Scarfoglio. Private Collection.

Eleonora Duse (a) and Matilde Serao (w) on vacation in St. Moritz, 1895. PC

Eleonora Duse (right) and Matilde Serao (left) on vacation in St. Moritz, 1895. Private Collection.

Matilde Serao (w). PC

Matilde Serao reading. Private Collection.

Matilde Serao (w). PC

Matilde Serao at desk. Private Collection.

Matilde Serao.

Matilde Serao portrait. 

In her copious narrative production, which included more than forty volumes of novels and short stories, Serao depicted the lower middle class and working class life of Naples using a personal, visionary, and spectacular style derived from the southern Realism (Verismo) so effective in her initial literary works. Well received and so esteemed in France that her translator, Georges Hérelle, was also the translator of Gabriele D’Annunzio and Grazia Deledda, she wrote for La revue blanche alongside Marcel Proust and Guillaume Apollinaire and was a regular guest at the famous Parisian salon of countess Rosa de Fritz-James. Her personality and work drew the attention of Germaine Dulac.

A close and long-time friend of Eleonora Duse, whose theatrical plays she frequently reviewed, Serao herself most probably suggested to Duse the novel Cenere (1904) by Grazia Deledda, which Duse then adapted for film as her only cinematic performance (Cenere, 1916).

Serao’s novels were adapted for film, which was the subject, among others, of her journalistic writings, such as her well-known reviews of films like Inferno, Quo vadis, and Cabiria. She also wrote original scenarios. As a regular collaborator of the film magazine L’arte muta edited by the Neapolitan distributor Gustavo Lombardo, she fervently promoted Neapolitan cinema, which was favoured by a cultural environment well oriented towards the Seventh Art. However, Serao never worked with Elvira Notari, the Italian cinema pioneer, who also contributed to the booming film production in Naples, where between 1924 and 1925 more than one third of Italian movies were produced.

Cinema was for Serao a popular art, able to reach a widespread and, at times, uneducated audience. In her 1906 article “Cinematografeide!,” the first article about film written by an intellectual in Italy, she caught the dawn of the Neapolitan enthusiasm for the cinématographe, suggesting, with the suffix of the neologism she coined, the emergence of cinema in Naples as an epidemic, a contagious disease. Serao’s consciousness of cinema as a medium, as a device for production and reception, is also evident in her vision of the relation between literature and cinema: she endorses the artistic dignity of the new language, underlining its capacity to represent the masses and collective movements. In her most significant writing on cinema, “Parla una Spettatrice”/“A Female Spectator Speaks,” from 1916, she demanded that her fellow writers address the new art from the viewpoint of an “ordinary spectator.” She described her own training as watching movies without preconceived ideas, simply bathing in the visual experience as any of those “creatures of the crowd” in the movie hall. Serao felt she shared the same emotional wavelength of the audience, which made her a “perfect spectatrix.” In her appeal to other writers, she urged them to take up topics that would allow common viewers to recognize themselves in what is projected on-screen, to tell stories “go[ing] to the truth of things and to people’s naturalness.”

No traces, however, are left of her original scenarios. The very first, La mia vita per la tua! (1914), was brought on the screen by Emilio Ghione, who also acted in the film. The movie, now lost, was a commercial success but strongly rejected by the critics. Negative reviews, however, did not stop Serao’s creativity and the appeal to adapt her literary works into film.

Resolute and charismatic, Serao was a role model for Italian women during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her paradoxical modernity as an opponent of female suffrage and divorce was not only a contrast with the characters of her own stories, but also with her own personal experience. She was one of the signatories of the May 1, 1925, “Manifesto of anti-fascist intellectuals” by Benedetto Croce, and her opposition to extreme nationalism and war led the fascist regime to reject her nomination for the Nobel Prize, which went instead to Grazia Deledda in 1926.

After she died in 1927, her name fell into oblivion for about twenty years. The rediscovery of Serao as a writer began during the 1940s with the creation of a number of film versions of her novels, such as Addio Amore (Gianni Franciolini, 1942), based on the 1914 Castigo and Via delle cinque lune (Luigi Chiarini, 1942), based on the 1889 work Giovannino o la morte. Other films were planned but not produced, such as La virtù di Cecchina (1884) by Alberto Lattuada or Vite sensazionali, a scenario written by Luigi Zampa about Serao and her husband.

Bibliography

Annunziata, Gina. “Matilde Serao e il cinematografo. ” In Monica Dall’Asta, ed.  Non solo dive : Pioniere del cinema italiano. Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2008, 249–255.

Alovisio, Silvio and Alberto Barbera, eds. Cabiria & Cabiria. Milano: Il Castoro/Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 2006.

Bernardini, Aldo. Cinema muto italiano. Vol. 2. Bari: Laterza, 1981.

Brunetta, Gian Piero. Storia del cinema italiano 1. Il cinema muto, 1895-1929. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2001.

Bruno, Giuliana. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map. Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, Princeton University Press, NJ 1993.

------. Rovine con vista. Alla ricerca del cinema perduto di Elvira Notari. Milano: La Tartaruga Edizioni, Milano 1995.

De Nunzio Schilardi, Wanda. L’invenzione del reale. Studi su Matilde Serao. Bari: Palomar, Bari 2005.

Pupino, Angelo R, ed. Matilde Serao: Le opere e i giorni: Atti Del Convegno Di Studi (Napoli, 1-4 Dicembre 2004).  Napoli: Liguori, 2006

Serao, Matilde. Castigo. 1914. Casanova, Torino: 1983.

------. “Cinematografeide!” Il Giorno [Naples] (30 March 1906). In Aldo Bernardini. Cinema muto italiano. Vol. 2. Bari: Laterza, 1981, 20–21.

------. Giovannino o la morte. 1889. Napoli: Perrella, 1912.

------. “Parla una Spettatrice.” L’arte muta [Naples] 1:1 (15 June 1916): 31 -32. Trans. Giorgio Bertellini; Rpt. in Antonia Lant, ed. Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. New York: Verso, 2006, 97-99.

------. La virtù di Cecchina. Catania: Giannotta, 1884.

Sheehy, Helen. Eleonora Duse. La donna, le passioni, la leggenda. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori,  2005.

Tortora, Matilde, ed. Matilde Serao a Eleonora Duse. Lettere. Napoli: Graus Editore, 2004.

Citation

Trivelli, Anita. "Matilde Serao." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-vze6-7463>

Louise Lovely

by Jeannette Delamoir

Louise Lovely was an Australian actress who worked in early Hollywood between 1915 and 1922. Although she made ten verified films in Australia and fifty in the United States, few are extant. With scant surviving personal papers, research into Lovely’s oeuvre depends largely on trade journals and star publicity—materials that have limitations as sources. Furthermore, while Australia’s Film and Sound Archive has important collections of Louise Lovely photographs and scrapbooks, trade journals or Hollywood studio records have been difficult to access in Australia. Nevertheless, the available materials reveal Lovely’s struggle to expand her filmmaking beyond performing and to exert control over her career.

After working as Louise Carbasse in stage melodramas and vaudeville in Australasia and the United States, Lovely’s new name and her youthful, blond, Pickford-esque appearance were created by Universal at the end of 1915, apparently as conditions of a contract, Theatre reported in 1916 (27). An issue of Motography from October 1917 reveals that Universal established Louise Lovely Productions, but does not appear to have given her any control over the productions (869). In a 1978 interview with Ina Bertrand, Lovely recalled that she had left Universal in March 1918, following disagreements over wages during which it was revealed that her name, owned by Universal, could legally prevent her working for any other studio. She finally secured a contract at Fox, where she supported husky star William Farnum in Westerns. She made her final US films in 1921, including two for Quality Film Productions. These films were distributed by the recently formed CBC Film Sales Company, which became Columbia Pictures in 1924, and Lovely claimed that she had been invited to join the company board of directors, according to Kathy Kizolos, writing in 1981 (14).

The purported connection with Columbia is further supported by Lovely’s comment in her 1978 oral history that Harry Cohn suggested she tour vaudeville following her second Quality Film Productions film (53). She and first husband Wilton Welch traveled between 1921 and 1925 with “A Day at the Studio,” in which audience members volunteered for on-stage “screen tests” that were screened the following week. The act was popular with hopefuls in movie-struck North America, and then in Australia. Lovely described further to her interviewer that she and Welch shared screen-test directing duties: “He directed me sort of thing, and I directed everybody else…” (54).

The hierarchical tensions between his “masculine” authority and her “lovely”— i.e., feminine—star persona are again evident in her final film, Jewelled Nights, made in Australia in 1925 after she returned from the US. Her role as the face of a public company, Louise Lovely Productions, sat uncomfortably with her “dainty” film persona. In this final film, ironically, she played a socialite who rejects gender and class restrictions by jilting her groom at the altar and, disguised as a man, hiding in a remote all-male mining community.

Louise Lovely, Jewelled Nights, 1926. Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Gordon Collingridge holding Louise Lovely in Jewelled Nights (1926). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Although Lovely’s profile was featured in the logo for the company, she was credited only with acting and cowriting the scenario for Jewelled Nights (1926). Wilton Welch was credited as director in the press book prepared for exhibitors, but although the extent of her contribution is not precisely known, she claimed in an interview for the Weekender that: “I was virtually the producer. I personally cut and spliced the film. The acting was only part of it.” She also recalled in her 1978 interview that she had worked on the design of, and publicity for the film, as well as on casting. Most importantly, Lovely said that she did at least some of the directing (60) and even claimed to have invented a new type of film syntax: “I said, ‘We won’t have a train and we won’t have a boat, we’ll just have the big funnel of the boat when she’s leaving there, she goes up to the boat, you see, and then we just show the funnel’ … which I thought was a rather good invention, you know” (70–71). The film was financially unsuccessful, possibly partly due to mismanagement by board members; however, the remaining footage, most likely outtakes, shows Lovely’s acting to be in a melodrama style outdated by 1926.

In her move into production, Lovely had had contact with a number of impressive female film pioneers, mainly at Universal. There, she featured in seven films written by Ida May Park and, post-Universal, was directed by Park in a further film. Lovely was also at Universal when Cleo Madison, Lois Weber and Elsie Jane Wilson were directing. Lovely had appeared with Wilson in Bettina Loved a Soldier (1916), which was directed by Wilson’s husband Rupert Julian.

After retiring from the screen, Louise Lovely made at least two attempts to put her Hollywood experience to good use. In her evidence to the 1927 Royal Commission into the Australian Motion Picture Industry, she advised the Australian government to set up a subsidized film studio, and in 1931 she reprised the “Studio Act” vaudeville act for a week at the Melbourne Tivoli.

Bibliography

Delamoir, Jeannette.  “Louise Lovely: The Construction of a Star.” Unpublished PhD. Dissertation.  La Trobe University, Melbourne,  Australia, 2002.

Godfrey, Margaret. “Savage River Could Have Been Our Hollywood.” Weekender (Burnie, Tasmania) (10 April 1968): n.p.

-------. “Jewelled Nights in Toorak Setting: Louise Lovely Ball at ‘Whernside.’” Table Talk (21 May 1925): 8.

Kizilos, Kathy. “Focus on the Stars of Yesterday.” Age [Melbourne, Australia] (6 February 1981): 14.

------. “November Important Month for Bluebird.” Motography (27 October 1917): 869.

Louise Lovely. Interview with Ina Bertrand. Transcript. Hobart, Tasmania, 23 November 1978. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Welch, Wilton. “Louise Makes Good.” Theatre 1 (April 1 1916): 27.

Archival Paper Collections:

A variety of archival materials and photographs are held at the following archives:

Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research.

The George Eastman Museum.

The State University of New York at Purchase Library (Macdonald Film Stills Collection)

Academy of Motion  Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

The Palm Springs Historical Society.

Research Update

June 2020: Research conducted by Australian historians Stephen and Louise Dando-Collins links Louise Lovely to one additional film (as actress), Her Strange Experience (US, 1917), which appears to be a lost 1-reeler. According to their research, the film was produced by IMP and released on June 17. It was directed by Maxwell Ryder, and written by Ryder and Jack Cunningham, from a story by Eugene B. Lewis.

Their research also indicates that Painted Lips (1918) was connected to the Louise Lovely Productions banner in the US, as was A Day at the Studio (shot at CBC's Triangle Studio in Los Angeles), which was co-produced by Louise Lovely Productions (and Louise was the co-writer as well as star/presenter). They also credit her as producer on: Sirens of the Sea (1917), Nobody's Wife (1918), The Girl Who Wouldn't Quit (1918), and A Rich Man's Darling (1918), although her "producer credit" on the this last title was reportedly removed by Carl Laemmle.

Citation

Delamoir, Jeannette. "Louise Lovely." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-zwzy-qe67>

Jessica Elvira Borthwick

by Luke McKernan

Jessica Borthwick, named Jessie at birth, is an unusual figure in early film history. In 1913 she took it upon herself to record the war between the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan states—Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro—through motion pictures and still photography. An interview she gave to a film trade paper, the Bioscope, has burnished an image of an intrepid adventurer whose exploits overturn the traditional history of war filming as well as the early documentary film (625). Borthwick was undoubtedly an enterprising figure of varied and sometimes remarkable interests, but her foray into filmmaking was brief.

“With her waxen Sarah Bernhardt: Miss Jessica Borthwick.” The Sketch Supplement, 1916. Courtesy of The Illustrated London News Archive.

She was the daughter of General George Colville Borthwick, who had been commander-in-chief of the Turkish army in Eastern Roumelia, made part of Bulgaria after 1885. His brother was Sir Algernon Borthwick, First Baron Glenesk, a prominent figure in Victorian society as editor of the Morning Post newspaper, a position that by 1913 was occupied by his widow, Alice. It was her father’s Bulgarian connections that led her to undertake her year-long Balkan venture. The 1914 interview in the Bioscope reveals a woman, aged twenty-two (although she was really twenty-four at the time), of sturdy independence. Armed with a still camera, a Newman cinematograph camera, and a revolver, which she added to the other weapons she picked up from the bodies of dead soldiers, she attached herself to the Bulgarian army, witnessing some horrendous scenes and at one point falling ill with cholera. She said of her filmmaking experiences, “The difficulties of taking cinematograph pictures on the battlefield, especially when you are alone and unaided by any assistant, are, as you can imagine, tremendous. The use of a tripod is a particular embarrassment. Things happen so quickly in time of war that, unless one can be ready with one’s camera at a few seconds’ notice, the episode one wishes to record will probably be over. During the Servian war in Macedonia, my tripod was smashed by a shell, and although the camera was intact, the film which I was taking at the time got hopelessly jumbled up and had to be cut away from the mechanism with which it had become entwined” (625).

On her return to Britain, Borthwick took her films and photographs on a lecture tour although it was less successful than she had hoped, owing to differences of opinion with her projectionist, which resulted in a court case, which she lost. Borthwick’s films do not appear to have had a title as such, but her lecture was billed as “The Aftermath of the Balkan War” when it was featured at the Scala Theatre in London in February 1914. The New York Times reported her feats as “Horrors of War Seen by a Girl” (4).

Jessica Elvira Borthwick on Red Cross Schooner Grace Darling, October 1914. © IWM (WWC D9-19)

Evidence of further showings has not been forthcoming. The films were never shown in a conventional cinema. She announced that her next adventure would be to travel to the Arctic with a cinematograph camera, but although she did go to Spitzbergen, spelled Spitsbergen in Norwegian, where she hunted seals and farmed reindeer for a period, World War I intervened. She served as an ambulance worker on the western front, where she was wounded by a shell and made an honorary corporal by the Belgians. She helped refugees escape Ostend by boat, ferrying them in her steam yacht, the Grace Darling. She spent the latter part of the war in Britain, establishing a doll-making factory. She was also a sculptor, working under the name of “Nell Foy.”

Borthwick lived her life among the artistic community in South Kensington, a somewhat Bohemian figure with her sculpting and a taste for pipe smoking. She made no further films, but did have an early involvement with television, on November 14, 1932, as reported in the Daily Express, organizing a BBC broadcast through the Baird process of Russian singers, an allegiance she felt through her mother, a Russian aristocrat (9). She never married, and died in 1946. Sadly, her Balkan War films are not known to survive.

Bibliography

Brownlow, Kevin. The War, the West and the Wilderness. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1979.

“Corporal; War-Worker; Sculptor: 'Nell Foy.'” The Sketch Supplement (29 March 1916): 8.

“A Girl Cinematographer at the Balkan War.” The Bioscope (7 May 1914): 625.

“Horrible Story of Balkan Scenes.” Manitoba Free Press (13 March 1914): 3.

“Horrors of War Seen by a Girl.” The New York Times (13 March 1914): 4.

The Kinematograph Year Book 1921. London: Kinematograph Weekly, 1921. 136-137.

“War Heroine’s New Venture.” The Daily Express (15 November 1932): 9.

Archival Paper Collections:

Photographs Department. Image of Jessica Borthwick. Imperial War Museum.

Citation

McKernan, Luke. "Jessica Elvira Borthwick." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-btdw-yx73>

Jackeydawra Melford

by Mirte Terpstra

Jackeydawra Melford was really called Alice Bradshaw Jackeydora Melford. There are many ways to spell her name, but Melford herself wrote it as Jackeydawra. She was the daughter of theatre actor Mark Melford, who possibly named her after a popular comic opera that he wrote, and in an interview with Audrey Wadowska in 1963, Melford also claims that this opera was the basis of her father’s film The Herncrake Witch (1912). It is an extraordinary name for an extraordinary woman. An audiotape interview from 1975 focuses on her beginnings performing on stage in her father’s comedy sketches in music halls from the time she was very young. She may even have been born while his theatre company was on tour in Nottingham. Audrey Wadowska suggested to Tjitte de Vries that this videotaped interview was intended to be the start of a full autobiography, although there does not appear to be evidence of further work on such a project. As typed, the manuscript only amounts to three pages. Melford’s brother Jack and sister Mavis were also actors and Jackeydawra acted in at least two motion pictures directed by her father, The Land of Nursery Rhymes (1912) and The Herncrake Witch, but she may have appeared in many more, we learn from an interview conducted with her on the Isle of Sheppey in 1963. She completed one film, The Inn on the Heath (1914), as director, producer, and actor after her father suddenly died in January 1914. Melford was an active suffragette and joined Emmeline Pankhurst’s movement, the WSPU. Arthur Melbourne-Cooper displays a slight annoyance at having had to bail “his” star actress out of jail a couple of times for her violent protesting, he stated in an interview with Audrey Wadowska and other family members in 1956. She married Wallace Colgate in 1915 and together they lived a large part of their lives on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, all of which is documented in sources held in the Arthur Melbourne-Cooper Archive.

Jackeydawara Melford

Portrait, Jackeydawra Melford.

Mark Melford was quite a famous theatre actor and playwright and as such was contracted to the Heron Film Company, probably around mid-1912. He directed many of his own short sketches, of usually around five hundred feet, in which he also acted. Joint managing director of the company with Andrew Heron at this time was animation film pioneer Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, and thanks to his daughter, Audrey Wadowska, who made reassembling Melbourne-Cooper’s films her life’s work, we have videotaped interviews of Jackeydawra Melford as well as Wadowska later interviewed about those interviews by Tjitte de Vries. Wadowska interviewed Melford many times and rescued some of the 35mm nitrate positive motion picture prints that Melford kept in precarious conditions in her house on the Isle of Sheppey. Among these films were the Heron Company The Herncrake Witch (1912) and the Brightonia film Flying from Justice (1913), both adaptations of plays written by Mark Melford. Jackeydawra Melford refers to The Herncrake in great detail in her interview with Wadowska in 1963, and remembers a lot about the process of filming it. She even criticizes the back-up camerman for his incapability of filming tricks, as she was used to Melbourne-Cooper’s expertise. Prints of these films as well as the taped interviews are now in the Arthur Melbourne-Cooper archive in Rotterdam. Wadowska and Melford also had a regular correspondence, and many of Melford’s letters have been preserved. Although Wadowska repeatedly encouraged Melford to remember details about her involvement with early cinema, Melford either did not remember, or, as Wadowska seems to think, was reluctant to share her knowledge. Another theory is that the senior Melford and Melbourne-Cooper apparently did not get along well. Mark Melford’s tendency to overact, big star though he may have been on the stage, did not translate well onto the screen, and he was very demanding behind the scenes as well, something we glean from the 1963 interview that is confirmed by Wadowska, interviewed in 1981, and also by a 1913 article in the Cinema (37).

Mark and Jackeydawra Melford, father and daughter, were working together on a new film when he suddenly died in January 1914, and that film, The Inn on the Heath, was finally released in November 1914. We wonder exactly what stage they were at in the production in January, but the fact that Jackeydawra Melford has been credited with directing it suggests that it may not have been shot or was only partially shot. Since Mark Melford is credited as an actor, we wonder if he appeared on screen. In her interviews with Wadowska, Melford insists she only finished the film and that it was really her father’s project. However, she does recall that it was she who asked her father to come up with a story for a highwayman film.  The film was produced under the name Jackdaw Films, a company especially created by Melford to release it. Although some comedies were later issued by Jackdaw, Melford’s claim was that someone had just used the name. The Inn on the Heath was distributed by R. Prieur & Company, and in the 1963 interview, Melford suggests that the original print of the film probably stayed at Prieur’s office because they wanted to make more positive prints. However, when the war broke out, the person in charge enlisted, and this confused things, explaining why it was not among the nitrate prints she kept on the Isle of Sheppey.

In 1914 the trade magazine the Bioscope visited Melford at the Prieur offices to screen the film and in print exhibited enthusiasm for this “new British lady producer’s” first effort, making it clear that she had been the director as well as the producer of The Inn on the Heath (253). A later review by the Bioscope included a film still, revealing it to be a costume film set in 18th century London that had been partly filmed on location at the Staple Inn. These settings were praised as “extremely picturesque” as were the romance, humor, and resourceful action. Although by all appearances a typical highwayman film, it is actually the girl, played by Melford, who rescues her highwayman lover from prison and prevents her stepfather from murdering him. The Bioscope critic concluded that although it was no masterpiece, “it reveals a surprisingly firm grasp of picture play technique besides real artistic sensibility on the part of its maker” (253). In her interviews from 1979, Wadowska recalls that Melford could remember going to the York castle museum to do research for a highwayman film, which supports the possibility that the film had really been her idea in the first place.

Even though we can only confirm one directorial credit, Melford has somehow become known as the first woman to direct a British film. She is even mentioned as such in the Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats (121). I would contest this because it is true that Ethyle Batley directed many motion pictures in the 1910s. Rather than making factual statements, however, it is more interesting to trace the assumption. In an interview with Tjitte de Vries in 1981, Audrey Wadowska suggests that it was Melford herself who promoted the idea that she was the “first woman,” evident in the way she responded to the interviewers from the Bioscope and the Cinema. In 1913, the Cinema reported that Melford at that point was already “developing an ambition to master the mysteries of the camera” and that she had “acquired that technical knowledge of the art of film-making” that has made her “an invaluable assistant to her able chief” (37). In 1914, after her father’s death and with her own film finished, Melford could have been promoting herself as unique in the film industry, defining herself without her father. Unfortunately we know of no other involvement she may have had in that industry, and the interviews imply that the outbreak of World War I was the end of it all. Tjitte de Vries’s lecture at the Arthur Melbourne-Cooper Archive in 2005 is illuminating. There is a clue to be found in correspondence deposited in the Arthur Melbourne-Cooper in the form of a letter written by Melbourne-Cooper from the early 1920s in which he explains some techniques of animation filmmaking, complete with drawings of a set with camera positions and angles. This letter was written in reply to Jackeydawra Melford, who had written to him for advice because she had bought a camera and was planning to make her own animated film.

Bibliography

The Bioscope (15 Oct. 1914): 253.

The Bioscope (22  Oct. 1914): 309.

The Bioscope (5 Nov. 1914): 573-575, xi.

The Cinema (19 March 1913): 37.

Gifford, Denis. The British Film Catalogue: Fiction Film, 1895-1994. Vol.1. London and Chicago: Routledge 2001.

Kine Weekly Monthly Alphabetical Film Record 32 (Dec. 1914): 96.

McKernan, Luke. “Jackeydawra Melford.” The Bioscopic: Reporting on the World of Silent and Early Cinema (18 May 2007): n.p. http://bioscopic.wordpress.com/2007/05/18/jackeydawra-melford/

Melbourne-Cooper, Arthur, Audrey Wadowska, and other family members. “Clapham Xmas ’56.” Tape recording T003 (Clapham 1956). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

Melbourne-Cooper, Arthur. Letter to  Jackeydawra Melford. c. early 1920s. East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

Melford, Jackeydawra. Interview with Audrey Wadowska. “Audrey Visits Jackeydawra.” Tape recording TO92 (Sheppey 1963). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

------. “Jackeydawra Melford Manuscript.” Tape recording T432 (Sheppy 1975). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

------. Interview with Tjitte de Vries, and Audrey Wadowska. Tape recording T030 (London 1978). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

------. Interview with Tjitte de Vries, and Audrey Wadowska. Tape recording T038 (London 1979). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

------. Interview with Tjitte de Vries, and Audrey Wadowska. “Audrey Wadowska.” Tape recording T061 (London 1979). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

------. Interview with Tjitte de Vries, and Audrey Wadowska. “Notes 200 Audrey.” Tape recording T052 (London 1981). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

------. Interview with Tjitte de Vries, and Audrey Wadowska. “Tjitte w. Audrey: Alpha Actors.” Tape recording T040 (London 1979). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

Robertson, Patrick. The Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats. New York: Abeville Press, 1991.

Terpstra, Mirte. Girls from the Sky; A Critical Catalogue of Women in the Production of British Silent Cinema, 1914-1918. Nottingham: Univ. of Nottingham, 2006.

de Vries, Tjitte. “Arthur Melbourne-Cooper Lecture.” Unpublished typescript (Tilburg 21 September 2005). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

Wadowska, Audrey. Interview by Tjitte de Vries. “Notes 200 Audrey.” Tape recording T052 (London 1981). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

Archival Paper Collections:

Arthur Melbourne-Cooper & Audrey Wadowska Papers (1890s-2011). East Anglian Film Archive, Special Collection.

Citation

Terpstra, Mirte. "Jackeydawra Melford." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-kf01-jn26>

Carmen Cartellieri

by Robert von Dassanowsky

Carmen Cartellieri was born Franziska Ottilia Cartellieri in Prossnitz, Austria-Hungary, which is today Prostejov, Czech Republic, but spent her childhood in Innsbruck, Austria. In 1907, at age sixteen, she married the aristocratic artist-turned-director, Emanuel Ziffer Edler von Teschenbruck. Her husband and Cornelius Hintner, a cameraman from South Tyrol who had worked for Pathé in Paris and then as a director in Hungary, helped make her one of the most fashionable stars in German-language film of the 1920s. Using the stage name of Carmen Teschen, she appeared in several Hungarian silent films between 1918 and 1919 and made her Austrian film debut in Hintner’s Die Liebe vom Zigeunerstamme/The Gypsy Girl (1919), which she reportedly cowrote. Political changes in postwar Hungary made her relocate to Vienna where she returned to her exotic surname, suggesting to the press that she was born in Italy, and founded the Cartellieri-Film company in 1920 with her husband and Hintner.

Carmen Cartellieri (a/p/w), 1919 by Madame d'Ora, Atelier. ONB

Portrait of Carmen Cartellieri by Madame d’Ora, Atelier, 1919. Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

Carmen Cartellieri (a/p/w), The Hands of Orlac (1924).

Carmen Cartellieri, The Hands of Orlac (1924).

Carmen Cartellieri (a/w/p), portrait by: Madame d’Ora, Atelier. ONB

Portrait of Carmen Cartellieri by Madame d’Ora, Atelier. Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

Carmen Cartellieri (a/p/w), Atelier: Madame d'Ora, 1919. ONB

Portrait of Carmen Cartellieri by Madame d’Ora, Atelier, 1919.Courtesy of Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

The first two Cartellieri-Film productions in Vienna transferred her Hungarian fame into true stardom. Carmen lernt Skifahren/Carmen Learns to Ski (1920), a broad comedy directed by her husband, now known as Mano Ziffer-Teschenbruck, was clearly aimed at gaining Cartellieri wider recognition. Die Würghand/Die Hand des Teufels/The Hand of the Devil (1920), a crime drama set in the mountains and directed by Hintner, was critically praised for its style and narrative effectiveness as well as for Cartellieri’s performance as the femme fatale. She also produced Hintner’s Die Sportlady (1922), a high-society melodrama set at an elite resort in the Tyrolean Alps, which was intended as a vehicle for the actress-producer and permanently set her “vamp” image. That same year Cartellieri and her husband created one of the first feature-length silent films dealing with outer space that was not based on the writings of Jules Verne, Parema, des Wesen aus der Sternenwelt/Parema, The Creature from the Stars (1922).

Cartellieri preferred to work with female screenwriters like Tilde Fogl and Rita Barré throughout her acting and producing career. Ida Jenbach wrote Das Drama in den Dolomiten/Drama in the Dolomites (1921), Der weisse Tod/The White Death (1921), Die Sportlady (1922), Die Sünde der Inge Lars/The Sin of Inge Lars (1922) for her and she performed in four films by scenarist Rosa Wachtel. The beauty and fashion prizes Cartellieri was awarded during the 1921-23 period speaks of her intense popularity. She easily eclipsed the fame of Austria’s first female film stars, Liane Haid and Magda Sonja, with her leading roles in classics such as Wilhelm Thiele’s Fiat Lux (1923) and Robert Wiene’s Orlacs Hände/The Hands of Orlac (1924) opposite Conrad Veidt as well as Hans Homma’s Die Puppe des Maharadscha/The Doll of the Maharajah (1924). Her supporting role in Robert Wiene’s Der Rosenkavalier/The Cavalier of the Rose (1926), based on the opera by Richard Strauss with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was the last large-scale Austrian silent epic and signaled her decline as a lead actress.

Cartellieri continued her popular career on stage and in Austrian and German films until the end of the silent era. She could not, however, transfer her career into sound, and her final film was the German production of Rolf Raffé’s Das Schicksal derer von Habsburg/The Fate of the Habsburgs (1928), which was considered lost until reconstruction by the ATF in 2000. It was not the first attempt to bring the Mayerling romance-tragedy of Emperor Franz Joseph’s son Archduke Rudolf and his mistress Baroness Vetsera to the motion picture screen, but through documentary footage, it does so within the overall context of the collapse of the monarchy. The film was not a success, but it remains notable today for its opulent design as well as for the unexpected passing of the female film pioneer mantle. Playing opposite Cartellieri’s manipulative countess in the role of the young Mary Vetsera is Leni Riefenstahl, a former dancer making her film acting debut.

Bibliography

Achenbach, Michael and Paolo Caneppele. Das Schicksal derer von Habsburg/Il crollo degli Absburgo. Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2000.

Caneppele, Paolo. “Carmen Cartellieri.” Filmhimmel Österreich 009. I. Das Privileg zu sehen. Mar. 2005: 12–15.

------. Il regista e la diva: L'attice Carmen Cartellieri e Cornelius Hintner, regista. Bolzano: Bolzano Centro Audiovisivi Bolzano/Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano Alto Adige, 2000.

“Carmen Cartellieri—Stummfilmstar.” Viennale 2000. Katalog des Vienna International Film Festival. Vienna: Viennale 2000, 178-79.

Die Filmwelt [Vienna] 2 (1921): 14.

Die Filmwelt [Vienna] 4 (1921): 13.

Der Filmbote [Vienna] 12 (1922): 14.

Die Filmwelt [Vienna] 12 (1923): 3.

Hansch, Gabrielle, and Gerlinde Waz. “Filmpionierinnen in Deutschland. Ein Beitrag zur Filmgeschichtsschriebung.” Unpublished, Berlin, 1998. Mein Film [Vienna] 69 (1927): 3.

Neue Kinorundschau 17 (April 1920): 7.

Archival Paper Collections:

Collection of issues of Paimann's Filmlisten (1920-28). Filmarchiv Austria.

Citation

Robert von Dassanowsky. "Carmen Cartellieri." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-g34j-yq20>

Blanche MacIntosh

by Simon Brown

Blanche MacIntosh is a familiar name thanks to her adaptation of Helen Mather’s novel Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1923) for Cecil Hepworth, a film often discussed as a key example of British silent cinema. The film though tends to be viewed as primarily Hepworth’s work, leaving MacIntosh’s contribution unexplored. Yet from 1912 until 1924 Blanche MacIntosh wrote twenty-eight films for Hepworth, and for the latter part of this period she was his chief scenario writer. When and why she assumed this role is one of the many mysteries about her life and her industry role.

The first mystery is the spelling of her surname, which was routinely printed in the trade press as well as in later histories as either McIntosh or MacIntosh. In fact she was born Blanche Mary MacIntosh on July 19, 1877, in Marylebone, London. She married in September 1908, becoming Blanche MacIntosh Hubbard, but would retain her maiden name as a nom de plume for her screenwriting work. Far from being a professional writer, MacIntosh was a Hepworth family friend. According to Hepworth’s memoirs, he first met her on holiday in Deal in 1891 when the Hepworth and MacIntosh families formed a lasting friendship (25). The young Blanche showed an aptitude for writing although according to the 1901 UK census, she was working from home as a second class clerk in the civil service. Some time after her marriage and before the birth of her second daughter Lorna in 1913, she left the civil service and moved from Marylebone to Clarence Road in Hersham, which is a walk of about fifteen minutes from the Hepworth Studios in Walton on Thames. She was almost certainly living there when, in 1912, Hepworth asked her to write a scenario for a film that became In Wolf’s Clothing (1912). We could conjecture that Hepworth knew her as a family friend whom he turned to when his writer-director Lewin Fitzhamon, who had been with him since 1903, left to start his own company. Hepworth’s request marked the beginning of a working relationship that lasted until the company went bankrupt in 1924. Further proof of her commitment to scenario writing by virtue of her friendship with Hepworth is the fact that after the bankruptcy, MacIntosh wrote no further films.

There are no records documenting MacIntosh’s arrangement with Hepworth, although some details can be sketched out here thanks to the memory of her daughter, Lorna Hubbard, who was interviewed for this article shortly before her death in 2007. It is not clear whether MacIntosh was a full-time employee or paid by the script, but according to her daughter, she worked from home, visiting the studio infrequently. Lorna also described her as a professional reader whose job it was to analyze books in an effort to determine whether they would make suitable films. MacIntosh’s husband George Joseph Hubbard regularly checked out books for her from the Mudie Library, and when she found one suitable for adaptation, she took the idea to Hepworth.

In this respect, MacIntosh was distinct from some if not all the other Hepworth writers. Sometime between 1912 and 1914, Hepworth created a permanent scenario department at his studio, hiring scenario writers like Blanche and scenario editors, like Victor Montefiore, who also wrote, but would in addition routinely read scenarios sent in by members of the public, submissions actively encouraged by the studio via both the Hepworth Picture Play Paper (6) and the trade press (Elliott).

Only four of the films Blanche MacIntosh wrote survived, three in incomplete versions and one in a format which is not viewable; thus, in order to assess her work, it is necessary to rely upon secondary sources such as reviews and press books. MacIntosh was not particularly prolific, with five scenarios in 1916 constituting the maximum for any one year. She was, however, versatile. She adapted plays such as Pinero’s 1916 “Trelawney of the Wells” and George Sims’s 1915 “Nightbirds of London” and novels such as Molly Bawn (1916) by Mrs Hungerford and Sheba by “Rita.” She also wrote scenarios based on original ideas by Hepworth Company performers including Tom Powers—Morphia the Death Drug (1914)—and Henry Edwards—The Failure/Dick Carson Wins Through (1917). Although she adapted comedies including Alf’s Button (1920), Once Aboard the Lugger (1920), and Mrs Erricker’s Reputation (1920), MacIntosh was clearly more interested in melodrama. Of the six original stories that she herself wrote for the screen, four are melodramas, namely Blind Fate (1914), The Canker of Jealousy/Be Sure Your Sins (1915), The Baby on the Barge (1915), and Love in a Mist (1916).

It is difficult to assess the cultural impact of her work, but her status as the chief scenario writer at the most quintessentially English silent era production company challenges us to pursue this question. Hepworth famously described his films as “English pictures, with all the English countryside for background and with English atmosphere and English idiom throughout” (Hepworth 144), and this notion of English-ness has infused much of the commentary on his output so that the majority of writing on the surviving Hepworth films credit Hepworth as the driving force behind them, retrospectively elevating the producer-director to auteur status. Yet because of Hepworth’s stated aversion to screenwriting, it is interesting to consider how much he relied upon his writers to create his trademark atmosphere. Apparently, MacIntosh’s work was rarely changed by Hepworth (Hepworth 139–40), and in an article from the Hepworth Company magazine entitled “The Author and the Film,” reprinted in the Bioscope in August 1921, Hepworth asserted that “there is no real line of demarcation or place where it can be said ‘Here the author’s work ends and here the producer’s begins’” (33).

This begs the question as to how MacIntosh and Hepworth worked together. In the pamphlet Writing Screen Plays, Alfred Hitchcock’s screenwriter Eliot Stannard is quoted as saying that “if you can find [a producer] whose temperament is in harmony with your own… your joint work should express all that is best in each of you” (Stannard 24). Was MacIntosh in this sense “harmonizing” her ideas and his or just attuning herself to Hepworth’s style and preoccupations? Or did she play an even more active part in creating this “English” atmosphere?

For example, the most detailed study of any Hepworth film on which MacIntosh is credited is Andrew Higson’s analysis of Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1923). Higson compares the novel and the film and notes that “Hepworth’s aesthetic sensibility does not really seem suited to the passions of the novel” (73). To prove this he cites the use of tableau staging in long shots as less able to create a psychological space for the audience than the novel with its first-person, present-tense narration. The long shot instead encourages the audience to admire a nostalgic pastiche of Victoriana, he argues. However, Higson does not take into consideration how MacIntosh adapted Mathers’s long, detailed, and subtly feminist novel. Indeed he never mentions MacIntosh at all, but it was she who firstly interpreted the text through her adaptation. There are many facts that indicate that we should reconsider the extent to which changes from novel to film are the result of Hepworth’s style choices or of MacIntosh’s adaptation: The fact that MacIntosh did seem to be influential in determining the Hepworth Company vision, that Hepworth did not change her scripts, as well as that his stated opinion was that there was no demarcation between writer and producer. For example, in the transition to the screen, the character of Helen Adair’s father has been softened, his nickname changed from the oppressive “governor” of the novel into the much more informal “guv’nor.” This change downplays the image of patriarchal authority in favor of curmudgeonly paternity, adding to the nostalgic feel that Higson attributes to Hepworth. But to what extent was this decision made in the scenario stage, and did Hepworth have any input into the scenario or not? Given the legacy of pioneer director-producer Hepworth, it is surely important to acknowledge the contributions of this key collaborator.

Blanche Mary MacIntosh Hubbard died in 1954, aged seventy-seven, in Hersham, not far from the site of the Hepworth Company studio at Walton on Thames.

Bibliography

“The Author and the Film: Cecil Hepworth States the Producer’s Case.” Bioscope (18 Aug. 1921): 6.

Blind Fate.Bioscope Supplement (1 January 1914): vii.

Elliott, William J. “The Picture Playwright.” Bioscope (3 June 1915): 955.

Hepworth, Cecil. Came The Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer. London: Phoenix House, 1951.

“A Hepworth Mystery Melodrama: An American Heiress.Bioscope (8 Feb 1917): 615.

Hepworth Picture Play Paper (Nov. 1916): 6.

Higson, Andrew. Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.

Hubbard, Lorna. Interview with Simon Brown. 16 August 2007.

Mathers, Helen. Comin’ Thro’ the Rye. 158th edition. London: Herbert Jenkins, n.d.

Stannard, Eliot. “Writing Screen Plays.” In Cinema – in Ten Complete Lessons. London: Standard Art Book Company, 1920.

Time–the Great Healer.” Rev. Bioscope (29 Oct. 1914): 468–9.

Citation

Brown, Simon. "Blanche MacIntosh." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, .  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-5sga-fn38>

Bessie Barriscale

by Maria Fosheim Lund

On May 1, 1917, actress Bessie Barriscale invited members of the press corps and trade papers to the Paralta Plays company offices in New York. Agnes Smith, there on behalf of the Morning Telegraph, reported on the event a few days later, confessing to her readers that she had not initially known why the press had been summoned. However, the journalist quickly realized why when she arrived and saw a new sign on the door: “The Bessie Barriscale Feature Company.” Inside the Paralta offices she found Barriscale with her husband, actor Howard Hickman, director Oscar Apfel, and producer Robert Brunton. Announcing the formation of her own company whose pictures would be distributed by Paralta, Barriscale stressed the point that “good stories [would be] her first consideration” (n.p.). The Bessie Barriscale Feature Company was to start work in a new state-of-the-art studio in Hollywood, where, according to the Moving Picture World, they hoped to produce six to eight features per year with their first project to be the still extant title Rose O’Paradise (1918) (1100).

Publicity portrait Bessie Barriscale (a/p) SU

Publicity portrait Bessie Barriscale. Courtesy of Stanford University. 

Barriscale’s career in the moving pictures had started a few years earlier when Lasky, of what was then called the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, bought the film rights to ten plays produced by theatre impresario David Belasco (Birchard 2004, 30). Barriscale, who had starred in the successful Belasco play “Rose of the Rancho” and may have originated the part of Juanita, was invited to repeat the performance in the 1914 film of the same name directed by Cecil B. DeMille, the Atlanta Constitution reported (D8). At twenty, Barriscale was already a veteran actress. She had been raised in the theatre milieu by her actress mother and had acted on the stage from the young age of five. She met her husband Howard Hickman on the stage, and the two had worked together as members of the same stock companies for years, according to a 1998 Silent Film Monthly profile.

Upon completing her first film, Barriscale and Hickman left the legitimate stage for what would be a period of seven years. According to an unidentified article in the Bessie Barriscale clippings file in the Museum of Modern Art, Thomas H. Ince had been impressed with the performance of the young actress in Rose of the Rancho and consequently brought her to work for the New York Motion Picture Company, where she stayed for three years. When her contract expired, she left the company, which had been sold to Triangle Film Corporation. While Barriscale had quickly become a major star with Ince’s company, the films she acted in were easily forgettable.

Advertising slide Those Who Pay (1917) Bessie Barriscale (a/p) MoMI

Lantern slide, Those Who Pay (1917). Courtesy of the Museum of Moving Image. 

Why did Barriscale start her own company? The Silent Film Monthly profile suggests that she was unhappy at Triangle after playing in a series of insignificant films and that forming her own company at Paralta would also give more work to her husband, who had not found the same screen success as had his popular wife (2). And so, like many other actresses, Barriscale capitalized on her fame and formed her own star company. As is the case with other stars and star companies such as the Gem Motion Picture Company started by Marion Leonard and the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation formed during what Karen Mahar has called the “Second Wave” of star companies (2006, 155), it is similarly difficult to determine Barriscale’s exact function within the Bessie Barriscale Feature Company, beyond her role as leading lady and figurehead. It is fair, however, to assume that she had script control as suggested in the Morning Telegraph (Smith, n.p.).

The Bessie Barriscale Feature Company released eight films in 1918 and from reviews, it is clear that she abandoned the ingenue role with which she had been associated at Triangle in favor of more varied, mature, and challenging parts. Hickman continued to act alongside his wife, but also started directing her in films such as The White Lie (1918), which caused Wid’s Daily to joke, “It looks as though the Los Angeles ‘Only Their Husbands’ Club was due to lose a member to the M.P.D.A. ’cause dog-goned if ‘Mr. Bessie Barriscale’ doesn’t put this one over like he had been directing all his life” (29).

Lantern slide, Madam Who? (1918), Bessie Barriscale (a). Courtesy of the Cleveland Public Library Digital Gallery, W. Ward Marsh collection.

About a year and a half after the start with Paralta Plays, the Moving Picture World announced that Bessie Barriscale would withdraw from the Paralta program after the release of the film The Heart of Rachael (1697). An item in the Museum of Modern Art clipping files explains that Paralta had only achieved restricted distribution for Barriscale’s films, which would explain why in 1918 she changed distributors, continuing with the Robertson-Cole Company. In November that same year, the Los Angeles Times announced that due to a change of management, Bessie Barriscale’s company would undergo a slight name change, now to release pictures as B. B. Features, sometimes referred to as B. B. Productions. Howard Hickman would be the new president, and Bessie Barriscale would be in charge of finances and the script selection (III1).

Between 1918 and 1921, B. B. Features produced and released a total of sixteen titles of which none are known to have survived. Reviews in newspapers and trade journals provide some information about the films the company produced, including the great variety of roles Barriscale played. The first release of Barriscale’s second star company was Two-Gun Betty (1918), a mélange of comedy and Western in which Barriscale plays a girl (Betty) who—dressed as a cowboy—seeks employment on a ranch. While Betty’s disguise fools no one, she is hired as a help. The Variety review describes how the ranch cowboys decide to have some fun with the new help, giving “him” challenging tasks, all of which “he” skillfully masters, including swinging the lasso and capturing a “bad man” (“Two-Gun Betty” 44). Other B. B. Features releases include A Trick of Fate (1919) featuring Barriscale in a dual role as a “naughty Parisian dancer” and what one review described as a “Southern girl of a long and illustrious line” (1383). In Her Purchase Price (1919), Barriscale plays a woman who was kidnapped from England as a child by a desert pirate, brought up in a harem, and sold on an auction block, all considered “splendid” by the Exhibitor’s Trade Review (1179).

Not all of Barriscale’s films were so well received, however, and in fact most received unfavorable reviews. The Notorious Mrs. Sands (1920), for example, was panned in Variety: “An alleged high society drama, a story that is weak to the point of absurdity and badly directed. Would be sniffed at in a high class house, but can get by in the cheaper run theatre” (37). In A Woman Who Understood (1920), Barriscale played the part of an altruistic woman who sacrificed herself for her family, but the Variety reviewer criticized the film for being dull, concluding: “Pep. That seems to be the most needed asset to the feature, but it is absent” (54). Other films that received only lukewarm reviews include The Woman Michael Married (1919); Kitty Kelly, M.D. (1919); and Hearts Asleep (1919).

The public persona Bessie Barriscale developed over the course of her career was based on her wholesomeness and traditional values. Indeed, there is a plethora of articles focusing on the happy and harmonious family life she shared with her husband and son. Perhaps her traditionalism explains why the Motion Picture Magazine in 1916 invited Barriscale to comment on the moral reputation of the motion picture industry, which she did in an article titled “Does Immorality Exist in the Studios?” Answering the question of the article title in the negative, Barriscale writes that the motion picture industry is no more immoral than any other industry, but what was different about it was the scrutiny it received. As she wrote, “the fierce light of publicity shines constantly upon the photoplay folk,” producing a situation in which “[t]heir every act is the subject of observation” (79). By 1921, Barriscale’s screen career was over. Perhaps a result of what seems to have been only a mild success with her own companies, Barriscale left the screen. She did not, however, retire, but returned to the stage where she and Hickman together continued to enjoy long careers.

Bibliography

Barriscale, Bessie. “Does Immorality Exist in the Studios?” Motion Picture Magazine (Sept. 1916): 79–80, 167.

“Bessie Barriscale in B.B. Features.” Los Angeles Times (10 Nov. 1918): III1.

“Bessie Barriscale to Change.” Moving Picture World (21 Sept. 1918): 1697.

“Bessie Barriscale Heads Own Company.” Moving Picture World (19 May 1917): 1100.

“Bessie Barriscale Signs with Lasky Co.” Atlanta Constitution (9 Aug. 1914): D8.

“Double-Header at Victory Draws Well.” The Notorious Mrs. Sands, Los Angeles Times (2 Aug. 1920): II8.

Hamm, Gerald. “Bessie Barriscale.” Silent Film Monthly vol. 4, no. 10 (Dec. 1998): 1-12.

“‘Her ‘Purchase Price’ a Splendid Drama.” Exhibitor’s Trade Review (6 Sept. 1919): 1179.

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

“The Notorious Mrs. Sands.” Rev. Variety (14 May 1920): 37.

“Pleasing Star in Classy Mystery Stuff Which Has Unusual Twists.” Wid’s Daily (1 Sept. 1918): 29–30.

Smith, Agnes. “Bessie Barriscale Now Heads Company.” Morning Telegraph (6 May 1917): n.p. Bessie Barriscale clippings file. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center. 

“A Trick of Fate.” Motion Picture News (1 March 1919): 1383, 1390.

“A Woman Who Understood.” Variety (26 March 1920): 54.

Archival Paper Collections:

Bessie Barriscale clippings file. Museum of Modern Art, Film Study Center. 

Citation

Lund, Maria Fosheim. "Bessie Barriscale." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4azg-tx30>

Jenny Gilbertson

by Barbara Evans

Growing up in Glasgow in the early part of the 20th century, Jenny Brown should have had a conventional upper-middle-class future, attending parties and balls, marrying a man from a “suitable” family, and living an easy life as a respectable Glaswegian society matron. But this was not at all the life Jenny Brown, later Jenny Gilbertson, was to carve out for herself. Her mother wanted her, Gilbertson told Ann Black, to “stay home, drive the car, play golf and dust the legs of the dining room table” (2010). Against her family’s wishes, she attended the University of Glasgow, where she received her MA, followed by training as a teacher. Wanting to expand her horizons, she traveled to London to study journalism, and while she was there, an event occurred that would change her life. She attended a screening of an amateur film about Loch Lomond and, with a typical burst of enthusiasm, decided that filmmaking was to be the career for her. Acquiring a 16mm Cine-Kodak camera, she taught herself the fundamentals of cinematography while shooting footage of scampering squirrels in Kensington Gardens and barges on the River Thames.

As a schoolgirl, Jenny Brown had accompanied her parents on holidays in Europe and in the remote Shetland Isles, the most northerly area of Great Britain, where her parents rented a house in Hillswick near the dramatically rugged sea cliffs that would feature so prominently in her later motion picture work. Enamored with the area and energized by her spirit of adventure, she returned in 1931, this time bringing her camera with her, determined to record the landscape and people to which she was so irresistibly drawn. The first film she made there was the 56-minute documentary A Crofter’s Life in Shetland (1931), a cyclical film portraying a year in the life of the island people, which she wrote, shot, and single-handedly edited. The film reveals Brown’s keen interest in the daily lives of the inhabitants and her ability to establish an intimate rapport with her subject matter.

A Crofter’s Life in Shetland (1931). Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

The life of the country people she found on Shetland was historically and geographically far removed from the life she had led in Glasgow, but, although she arrived as an outsider, Brown quickly won the hearts of the islanders. Working as a one-women film crew, she covered events from one end of the islands to the other, from the isolated landscapes of the crofts to the relatively bustling center of the capital town of Lerwick, from the south at Sunburgh to Britain’s most northerly lighthouse, Muckle Flugga. The islanders seemed hardly aware of her presence, and her unobtrusive, early observational style allowed them to carry out their daily activities in a natural and unselfconscious way, whether digging peat, rooing sheep and knitting their wool, planting potatoes, or fishing at sea.

On February 5, 1931, Jenny Brown noted in her diary that she had seen John Grierson’s film Drifters (1929) about the herring fishing industry and was somewhat scornful of what she deemed the manipulative nature of the filming and editing of the storm at sea, although she noted in the diary that it appealed to people’s fondness for a “good story.” She was determined to present a more truthful, less spectacular version of events.

Jenny Brown Gilbertson c. 1932. Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

Throughout A Crofter’s Life in Shetland, women’s work is given equal status to that of the men. After shots of men fishing at sea, the film cuts to a title card announcing: “Meanwhile his wife is preparing the potato.” Women’s contributions to the household economy are emphasized. “Every woman in Shetland knits,” the caption tells us, “for it is one of the few ways they can make money.” Women are filmed with busy needles flying as they go about their daily chores, contributing to the household economy at all times of night and day. We see women doing the backbreaking work of planting potatoes, stooping along behind a horse-drawn plow as it cuts a deep furrow into the earth. Men may dig the peat, but it is the women who stack it ready for burning. Shots of fishermen unloading their boats are followed by scenes of women cheerfully gutting and packing fish into barrels.

When A Crofter’s Life in Shetland premiered in Edinburgh, John Grierson, the founder of the British Documentary Movement was thrilled, and is quoted in the 1999 Gilbertson commemorative program as saying: “For a solo effort it is an extraordinary job of work. It not only gives you very beautiful pictures of Shetland but it gets down to the life of the crofters and the fishermen, and brings the naturalness of it… Miss Brown has already broken through the curse of artificiality and is on her way to becoming a real filmmaker, an illuminator of life and movement” (n.p.). According to that program, he recommended that she upgrade her camera to a more professional model and, enthused by his encouragement, she purchased a 35mm Eyemo camera to continue her filmmaking career. Grierson offered her editing space at the renowned General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit in London for her next films and ultimately purchased the complete series for the GPO library for forty pounds. These short films attracted the attention of the Royal Geographical Society and show the development of Brown’s ability to tell a story through careful selection of shots and editing.

Da Makkin o’ a Keshi (1933). Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.

One of the short films in the series, Da Makkin o’ a Keshie (1932) (a basket used for carrying peat) has been eloquently described thus: “Old Gideon accepts the eye of the camera without a glance or a word. Young director Jenny Brown soberly films his calloused hands at work, alternating the shots like for a teaching lesson. According to the Europa Film Treasures website, this close and sustained attention to ancestral practices is what made the Shetland islanders adopt ‘Jenny Broon’ from Glasgow as one of their own.” [Europa Film Treasures website now seems to no longer exist, as of Fall 2015. Eds.]

Brown next undertook her most ambitious film to that point, a 56-minute dramatized documentary, Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1933), again a one-woman production that she wrote, directed, filmed, and edited herself. Starring the crofters who had appeared in her previous documentaries, along with a professional actor, Enga Stout, Brown crafted a narrative revealing not only the beauty and pleasures, but also the hardships and conflicts of life on the islands. Through dramatic sequences and remarkable compositions, Rugged Island tells the story of a young couple torn between the yearning to escape Shetland’s declining economy and the ingrained sense of moral duty to remain on the islands to care for aging parents.

While filming her earlier documentaries of Shetland life, Brown had met a young crofter, John Gilbertson, whom she cast as the leading man in Rugged Island,and romance soon blossomed between them. We learn from a 1980 program on Scottish television that Gilbertson had left school at fourteen to apprentice as a blacksmith. Although their backgrounds were dramatically different, she recalled that “there wasn’t an intellectual difference… He was a man of great dignity, great kindness, all of the things that really matter.”

Shot silent, Rugged Island (1933), also had a sound version made by London distributors Zenifilms, who added a soundtrack including commentary and music. Comparing the silent and the sound versions, we see striking differences, beginning with a male voice-over that now carries the narrative that had been told through title cards. The focus is no longer the betrothed couple strolling hand-in-hand along the cliffs, but rather Andrew, the young man, and his battle to earn a living from the sea. Enga, the voice-over tells us, is merely “Andrew’s sweetheart.” While still a poetic documentation of life on Shetland, the film undergoes a subtle shift in focus. Released in 1934, the sound version played in British cinemas for several years, although Zenifilms collapsed and Gilbertson, in undated and unpublished notes, says that she never received a penny.

To provide a living, the Gilbertsons took Rugged Island on a lecture tour throughout Britain and Canada. During the tour, Brown met Canadian Evelyn Spice, the first woman filmmaker to join the Grierson unit. They codirected Prairie Winter (1934), a dramatized documentary about the harsh conditions of the winter months on the Canadian prairies. Gilbertson commented in her unpublished notes on the way that men were engaged in eminently cinematic outdoor activities that only required existing light and that it was impossible, without artificial light, to film women’s indoor work, an observation that may help us understand the lack of shots representing women’s household work in early documentary films. The directors had to content themselves with filming a sampling of women’s outdoor chores, carrying in the frozen laundry from the line, or sweeping snow out of the yard. Although the film was shot without sound, on their return to London, the women added the sound effects they had recorded on location in Canada. The finished sound film was distributed in cinemas throughout Britain, but unfortunately only the silent version exists today. Later, after the birth of their first child, Jenny and John continued touring the film around Britain, but now with a new baby as well as the reels of film packed into the back of the car.

Jenny Gilbertson was to make three more films before the outbreak of World War II. Now, with two daughters and John in the Royal Army Service Corps, family responsibilities required her full-time attention. When her husband was invalided out of the army, she initially ran a small woolen shop on Shetland, but, realizing that business was not her calling, she accepted an offer to teach in the local school, where she stayed for the next twenty years. It was not until the 1960s that she was able to resume her filmmaking career, which, with her unique blend of passion and commitment, she carried on into her early eighties.

With additional research by Cameron Howard.

Bibliography

Black, Ann. Interview with Barbara Evans. August, 2010.  DVD. Private Collection of Barbara Evans.

------. Interview with Janet McBain. n.d. National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive.

Gilbertson, Jenny.  “The making of Prairie Winter. Western People (10 January 1991): 12- 14.

Jenny Gilbertson –Documentary Film-maker, 1902 -1990. Commemorative program. Glasgow: Scottish Screen, 1999. University of Stirling, Special Collections.

McBain, Janet.  Interview about Jenny Gilbertson. 2004. Transcript. Scotland on Screen. BBC. SSA-11/1/515. National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive.

“A Shetland Lyric.” Cinema Quarterly vol. 2, no. 3 (Spring 1934): n.p.

Taylor, Marion Grierson. Interview with Dean Duncan and Janet McBain. 3 Feb. 1995. SSA-8/86. National Library of Scotland, Scottish Screen Archives.

------. Unpublished notes on Jenny Gilbertson. n.d. National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive.

Archival Paper Collections:

Brown, Jenny.  Unpublished diary. 1932.  SSA – 4/6/10 and P/CN 82. National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive.

Brown, Jenny. Unpublished Notes. Transcribed by Ann Black, 2011. Private collection of Ann Black.

John Grierson Archives. University of Stirling, Special Collections.

McBain, Janet.  Interviews. SSA – 11/1/515. National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive.

Citation

Evans, Barbara. "Jenny Gilbertson." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2012.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-53nv-g730>

The Talmadge Sisters

by Greta de Groat

The Talmadge sisters were two of the most beloved stars of the silent era. At first glance, they could hardly seem more different. Norma was a slight, soulful-eyed brunette beauty adept at “emotional” roles while Constance was a tall, gawky blond, not particularly pretty but with a face full of mischief. Yet they were bound together closely in their professional careers and linked in publicity as well as in their personal lives. Their films were marketed together to distributors, and publicity generally presented them as a family unit, with sister Natalie along with their mother, the indomitable Peg. Norma is something of an enigma today. Though most of her films survive, they are rarely screened. Constance has fewer surviving films, but is more familiar to modern audiences through her appealing role in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

Norma & Constance Talmadge (a/p). PC

Norma & Constance Talmadge together. Private Collection.

Norma Talmadge (a/p). PC

Norma Talmadge portrait. Private Collection.

Constance Talmadge (a/p). PC

Constance Talmadge portrait. Private Collection.

Constance & Norma Talmadge (a/p). PC

Constance & Norma Talmadge. Private Collection.

Norma Talmadge (a/p).USW

Norma Talmadge. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Norma Talmadge (a/p) She Loves and Lies (1920). PC

Norma Talmadge,  She Loves and Lies (1920). Private Collection.

Constance Talmadge (a/p) The Duchess of Buffalo (1928). PC

Constance Talmadge, The Duchess of Buffalo (1928). Private Collection.

Norma Talmadge (a/p) publicity photo, c. 1927. PC

Lantern slide, Breakfast at Sunrise (1927). Private Collection

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

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

Norma Talmadge (a/p) publicity photo, c. 1927. PC

Norma Talmadge publicity photo, c. 1927. Private Collection.

Hollywood premiere Camille (1926), Norma Talmadge (a/p). PC

Norma Talmadge, Hollywood premiere for Camille (1926). Private Collection.

Constance Talmadge (a/p) Venus (1929). PC

Lantern slide, Constance Talmadge’s Venus (1929). Private Collection. 

Constance Talmadge (a/p) Wedding Bells (1921), Constance Talmadge Film Company. LoC

Lantern slide, Wedding Bells (1921), produced by Constance Talmadge Film Company. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Norma Talmadge (a/p). LoC

Norma Talmadge portrait. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 

Norma Talmadge (a/p) She Loves and Lies (1920). PC

Norma Talmadge, She Loves and Lies (1920). Private Collection.

According to the 1900 and 1910 census, Norma Talmadge was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1894. The oldest of three daughters in a largely fatherless Brooklyn household, Norma broke into films at the Vitagraph Company studios in Flatbush, New York, in 1910, with no previous acting experience. She started playing bit parts, and by the end of 1910, she was taking leading roles and had a prominent part in Vitagraph’s three-reel special A Tale of Two Cities (1911). Shortly thereafter she was given a permanent position in the stock company and was assigned to Van Dyke Brooke’s unit. In films that are still readily available, she appears chiefly in ingenue parts, but the true scope of her early roles is still under investigation. Youngest sister Constance tagged along to the studio and worked as an extra. In 1914 Constance also became part of the Vitagraph Company stock company, often in comedies with Billy Quirk.

The written material on the Talmadges is vast, but not deep, and largely repetitive. Much material about or attributed to Norma concerns her early days at Vitagraph. Details vary from one version to another, but common elements include her debut in a bit part in The Household Pest/A Four-Footed Pest (1910), the latter title referenced in Lauritzen and Lundquist’s Index; her starstruck worship of Vitagraph leading lady Florence Turner; and her reputation for versatility, which is possibly inflated in retrospect. One begins to wonder whether interviewers and ghost writers were copying each other, and we assume that Norma approved of these versions of her career, since several of the articles are attributed to her. Some of the stories may even be true, since they were told again years later by biographer Anita Loos, supposedly based on her conversations with Peg Talmadge. Many articles stress the Talmadges as a family; those and the rarer articles on Constance alone reinforce her carefree reputation.

Norma was well positioned for the transition to feature films with her harrowing performance in Vitagraph’s ten-reel special The Battle Cry of Peace (1915). Norma received a contract offer from National Film Corporation, and Constance resigned from Vitagraph as the Talmadge women pulled up stakes and moved to California. The National Film Corporation proved to be undercapitalized, and after one film, Norma was released from her contract. Constance picked up work in some Smiling Billy Parsons comedy shorts. Norma and Constance applied at the Triangle Film Corporation, supposedly drawn by the reputation of D. W. Griffith. Though she made much in later years of having worked with Griffith, Norma did not appear in any of his films. However, she found plenty of work starring in mostly unremarkable feature films by other directors. Her first film, The Missing Links (1916), also featured Constance. The impudent and irreverent Constance captured Griffith’s attention, and she was rewarded with a star-making role in Intolerance, as the comic and tragic tomboy Mountain Girl. After this she was promoted to starring parts. At Triangle, the Talmadges made an important professional contact, writer Loos. Loos wrote Norma’s best Triangle film, The Social Secretary (1916), a comedy about a young working woman who disguises herself to discourage unwanted advances from her employers.

Norma’s career took an important turn when she met self-made millionaire Joseph M. Schenck, who wanted to produce motion pictures and was looking for a star. He set up the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation in New York. Their first production, Panthea (1917), about a young Russian pianist who gives up her honor to save her husband, was a huge popular and critical success. The film was still extant in the 1950s but appears to now be lost. Norma married Schenck during the production of Panthea, and they worked together in producing a series of dramas that steadily built her popularity. Karen Mahar locates the Norma Talmadge Film Corporation as part of the second “star-producer movement,” and contrasts her relative passivity with Mary Pickford’s power as a film executive and Clara Kimball Young’s struggles with producer Lewis J. Selznick (2006, 158–159; 165). It now seems likely that the company named forNorma Talmadge was inspired by the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation, particularly since it was Selznick who encouraged his friend Schenck to start the company using the star actress drawing power of the woman he would soon marry. Mahar says that in this venture, Schenck’s control was dominant, but the fact that Norma Talmadge received a percentage of the profits from the films in which she appeared is significant (2006, 159). While we wouldn’t discount the benefit to the star actress of being married to the producer, the company profit-sharing suggests an advantage that accrued to Talmadge beyond any awarded even the most popular male and female screen stars under contract in the next decades of the studio years. It is unclear exactly to what extent, however, Norma Talmadge participated in the production end. Norma took responsibility for the films in the public press aimed at her fan base, but Schenck was the public face of the Norma and Constance corporations in the industry press. We know that she spent long hours on makeup and costume tests (Sumner 38, 149), and she surely had story approval. Also, there is some evidence that at least story selection was a family affair (Talmadge 1924, 216; Loos 52). Director Allan Dwan, for instance, complained of “pillow talk” during the production of Panthea (Bogdanovich 43). Norma and Constance also critiqued each other’s rushes, as Norma tells us in the 6th part of the series titled “Close-ups” that she wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in 1927 (46). Norma’s years of experience must have been helpful in getting Schenck up to speed in the technical side of the picture business, starting him on his career as one of Hollywood’s most important and powerful producers. It was as a motion picture actress that she made her greatest impact. Her performances were usually excellent, and she gained stature as an actress in both public opinion and among her peers.

According to Loos, Peg Talmadge convinced Joseph Schenck to start a company for Constance when her Triangle contract ran out in mid-1917 (Loos 33). The Constance Talmadge Film Company, however, is not credited until 1920 when Loos and husband John Emerson began coproducing the films. Constance became renowned as a light comedienne, and her popularity soared. In a 1921 Moving Picture World poll, Norma and Constance Talmadge were voted the first and second most popular movie actresses in the country. They had sizable foreign followings as well.

Sister Natalie worked as a secretary to her sisters as well as in the Comique Film Corporation, Schenck’s other film corporation, which he started first to produce Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle films and later to feature Buster Keaton. Natalie, who married Buster Keaton, is also credited with one Keaton screenplay, Out West (1918). She later tried acting briefly, giving creditable performances in Norma’s Yes or No (1920), and in Keaton’s Our Hospitality (1923). Mother Peg, an irrepressible wit, achieved immortality of a sort by inspiring the character of the wisecracking Dorothy in the Loos property Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928).

Norma’s roles in her early independent productions were often honest young women in some sort of compromising situation and misunderstood by her husband or fiancé. She sometimes performed double or quasi-double roles, enabling her to briefly break out of her own mold, such as a bored socialite and tenement mother in Yes or No (1920), or the young wife who suffers a brain injury that turns her into a criminal in De Luxe Annie (1918). In 1921 there was a move to upgrade her films by hiring director Herbert Brenon. The results of this partnership range from the excellent The Sign on the Door (1921) to the abysmal The Wonderful Thing (1921). The most interesting was The Passion Flower (1921), which Norma fondly remembered as an artistic experiment (M. Talmadge 1924, 210–211; N. Talmadge 1927, 43). This disturbing and conflicted story of a Spanish girl stalked by her stepfather was a box office disappointment, and Norma never attempted anything noncommercial again. She did, however, begin to make fewer but bigger and often better motion pictures, particularly after the family moved to Hollywood in 1922, and she topped the Exhibitor’s Herald box office attraction polls in 1923, 1924, and 1925. Her greatest commercial success was the romantic Smilin’ Through (1922), but her greatest artistic successes were with director Frank Borzage in Secrets (1924) and The Lady (1925). In both of these films, Norma convincingly enacts characters who age from young women to old. She followed these dramas with a surprising comedy, Kiki (1926), which prompted director Clarence Brown to call her “the finest pantomimist who ever lived.” Later films included an excellent modern dress Camille (1927), written by Olga Printzlau, which survives in sadly abbreviated form, and an offbeat adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Boule de Suif,” Woman Disputed (1928).

Constance continued appearing in light romantic comedies, with only an occasional foray into drama. She usually played a willful young woman who was constantly having misunderstandings with the men in her life. Throughout the 1920s her films were becoming fewer and further between, and in 1929 Time magazine reported that she had become bored with filmmaking. Her last film, Venus (1929), was made in France. By this time, the tide had definitely turned in favor of Talkies, and Constance Talmadge retired. Norma, however, was not ready to end her career, and studied with actress Laura Hope Crews in an attempt to perfect her speaking voice. Her first Talkie, New York Nights (1929), was well received, and in this extant film her dialogue shows no trace of the Brooklyn accent that modern accounts often cite as ending her career (Thompson 1976, 548). However, her next film, Du Barry, Woman of Passion (1930) was not a success. The public turned way from silent stars, particularly those, like Norma, who had been in motion pictures from the earliest days and were identified with those pioneering times. She was announced for a role in Samuel Goldwyn’s The Greeks Had a Word for It in 1930, but she quit before production started and never made another film.

In their own times Constance Talmadge was the lower-profile sister, but today she is more familiar than Norma, and her madcap antics may be seen as a precursor to the screwball comedies of the 1930s. Modern tastes find Norma at something of a disadvantage. With her reputation as the great dramatic actress of the silent screen, modern audiences expect a more high-powered histrionic type, and her still photos encourage the expectation of a diva personality. Though something of a grand manner appears in her late films, she is for most of her career a very youthful looking woman with a disarming, dimpled grin and a warm, friendly personality, and it is easy to overlook the subtlety and naturalism of her performances. Her persona well suited her times and Norma loomed large as a cultural icon and an ideal of modern womanhood. Audiences had grown up with Norma and delighted in seeing her as they would an old friend. Given a chance for repeated exposure, she can still captivate new viewers as well. With their marvelously expressive faces, high-spirited vitality, and effortless charm, the Talmadge sisters had much in common after all.

Bibliography

1. Norma Talmadge

Bogdanovich, Peter. Alan Dwan: the Last Pioneer. New York: Praeger, 1971.

de Groat, Greta. “Rediscovering Norma Talmadge.” Griffithiana. no.71 (2001): 82-109.

------. The Norma Talmadge Website. http://www.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/NT/home.htm

Loos, Anita. The Talmadge Girls: a Memoir. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

Oettinger, Malcolm H. “Beauty and the Bean.” Picture Play (April, 1922.  http://www.welcometosilentmovies.com/features/norma/norma.htm

“Sisters Three: the Life Story of the Talmadge Sisters.” Picture Show (30 Oct. 1920): 15, 20, (Nov. 6, 1920): 18, 26, (13 Nov. 1920): 19-20.

Spears, Jack. “Norma Talmadge.” Films in Review (Jan. 1967): 16-40.

Smith, Greg N. “Silencing the New Woman: Ethnic and Social Mobility in the Melodramas of Norma Talmadge.” Journal of Film and Video, 48, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 3-16.

St. Johns, Adela Rogers. “Our One and Only Great Actress.” Photoplay (Feb. 1926): 58, 136-7.

Sumner, Keene. “Norma Talmadge: A Great Moving Picture Star.” American Magazine (June 1922): 36–39, 147–150.

Talmadge, Margaret L. The Talmadge Sisters: an Intimate Story of the World’s Most Famous Screen Family. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1924.

Talmadge, Norma. “Close-ups.” [Six article series] Saturday Evening Post (12 March 1927): 6-7; (26 March 1927): 26-27; (9 April 1927): 30-33; (7 May 1927): 34-35; (21 May 1927): 41-43; (25 June 1927): 43-46.

Archival Paper Collections:

Gloria Swanson papers. University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center.

Norma Talmadge scrapbook, Robinson Locke collection, 1870-1920. New York Public Library, Archives and Manuscripts.

Samuel Stark. Theatre scrapbook collection, 1860-1950. Stanford University.

2. Constance Talmadge

Bodeen, DeWitt. “Constance Talmadge.” Films in Review (Apr. 1967): 613-630.

Kingsley, Grace. “The Wild Woman of Babylon.” Photoplay (May 1917): 80 - 82, 148.

Loos, Anita. The Talmadge Girls: a Memoir. New York: Viking Press, 1978.

“The New Pictures.” Time (28 Oct. 1929): n.p.

“Sisters Three: the Life Story of the Talmadge Sisters.” Picture Show (30 Oct. 1920): 15, 20, (Nov. 6, 1920): 18, 26, (13 Nov. 1920): 19 - 20.

Talmadge, Margaret L. The Talmadge Sisters: an Intimate Story of the World’s Most Famous Screen Family. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1924.

Archival Paper Collections:

Samuel Stark. Theatre scrapbook collection, 1860-1950. Stanford University.

Citation

de Groat, Greta. "The Talmadge Sisters." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2011.  <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-4pbj-6z33>

⤒ Return to top