Women Film Pioneers Project
Projections is a new platform for posts and essays of varying lengths, multimedia content, and digital-friendly approaches to silent film research and feminist scholarship. Content can take the form of self-reflexive essays, online curatorial projects, image galleries, data visualizations, multimedia analyses of a particular film, research updates, and more. View the Contribute page for info on proposing a Projections post.
Although the films of the serial queens, seen from a distance, may seem to follow a relatively uniform pattern—following adventurous young women who fought against dastardly villains, often, but not always, in order to claim an inheritance or protect loved ones—for most of their heyday, they evolved along two separate, but parallel tracks.
The Women Film Pioneers Explorer (WFPE) allows users to explore the invaluable research of the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP). Implementing the WFPP’s biographical data, the WFPE offers additional perspectives on the rich collection with the means of interactive data visualizations.
In 2017, to mark the centennial of Alice Guy Blaché’s visit to Columbia University, I wrote about her two lectures. It was a fairly open-ended post that outlined both what I knew and still did not know about these ephemeral moments in film history. Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able Read More…
While many US trade journals and newspapers referenced the activities of these “camera-maids,” very little extant data exists today to confirm their efforts. Building a fuller picture of their work has thus proven to be a challenge.
“I try to make my theater as homey as possible,” says one woman manager.
These seven profiles, all written by Richard Abel, complement his 2016 overview essay “Newspaper Women and the Movies in the USA, 1914-1925” by providing a closer look at each woman’s career and her particular journalistic output.
“My films about editing and women editors assert that good editing is not invisible and neither are the women who do it.”
A spotlight on a handful of digital research tools, specific archival materials, and gaps in WFPP’s published scholarship. We encourage you to view the films featured in this video gallery and start researching a name (or two).
With the release of the documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Pamela Green, 2018), it is certain that Alice Guy Blaché will now be heralded as the motion picture innovator that we in the field have always known her to have been. But the claim that the documentary makes—to Alice’s originality and imaginativeness—should please us and then immediately worry us as historians of the first decade of cinema.
When understood in the context of its historical milieu, the Sapphic visuality of The Cabbage Fairy radically transforms common assumptions about the so-called “birth of cinema.” Close attention to Guy’s early work reveals the centrality of queer sexualities, not only to her trademark disruptions of gender norms, but to the development of motion picture industries more broadly at the turn of the twentieth century.
Earlier this spring, while rereading a portion of Alison McMahan’s book Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema, I was reminded that, in the summer of 1917, Columbia University invited the eponymous film director, producer, screenwriter, and studio head to come give two lectures on the art of cinema. These lectures took place on the evenings of July 13 and August 3, 1917, two Fridays during the university’s notable Summer Session.