Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives (2024)

Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives (Open Access)

What motivates feminist film research today? Exploring women’s contribution to silent cinema, scholars from across the globe address questions of performance, nationality, industry, technology, labor, and theory of feminist historiography. The volume builds on the thematic, methodological, and material diversity that characterized earlier efforts in women’s film history, and the originating context of the sixth Women and the Silent Screen conference (Bologna, 2010). Much emphasis is given to the transitional period of silent cinema (1910s to the early 1920s), which emerges as the field where feminist film scholars are beginning to claim their own theoretical and historical ‘place’. While giving a new impetus to the idea of transitional cinema, the collected essays also illuminate the importance of film’s transnational circulation. Questions of nation and nationhood, and women’s inclusion or exclusion within these terms, are examined in connection to issues of cultural globalization. How did American serial queens impact early Chinese film? How did the variety stage accommodate American films in Rio de Janeiro? Along what lines might we discuss women filmmakers who literally toured the world? These are just some of the issues that are discussed in the volume. Each investigation prompts us into distinct acts of cultural contextualization. A particular focus on acting and the agency of the actress is shared across the volume. The fundamental figure of the actress links multiple threads of scholarship, traversing different films and national cinemas. Alice Guy, Asta Nielsen, Florence Turner, Lois Weber, Mary Pickford, Esfir’ Shub, Pearl White, Vera Karalli, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Elsa Lanchester, Louise Fazenda, Sarah Bernhardt, Gemma Bellincioni, Angelina Buracci, Yin Mingzhu, Leni Riefensthal: these are but some of the names that are encountered across the essays in the collection. New findings are exposed and new research perspectives are opened through these and other figures, allowing us to uncover original ways of thinking about women’s visibility and agency on film.

"The Passionate Eye of Angelina Buracci, cinepedagouge", in M. Dall'Asta, V. Duckett, Lucia Tralli (eds.), "Researching Women in Silent Cinema. New findings and perspectives", Bologna - Melbourne, University of Bologna - University of Melbourne - Women and Film History International, 2013.

2013

Not so Silent: Women in Cinema Before Sound

2010

"The work of the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences [...] is to collectively create a new realm of cinema history, neither 'the' history, nor 'a' history, but a strange double world." These words are from Jane Gaines in her keynote address for the fifth Women and the Silent Screen Conference, held at the Stockholm University in 2008. This proceedings volume gives a representative picture of the breadth of the conference. The rich and varied contributions address theoretical issues around this double world of "cinematification" and feminist historiography, advancing questions on the authorship of pioneering female filmmakers and the role of female stars in early cinema. Other topics explored include transnationalism, the performance of femininity, fandom and fashioning, and branding within the studio system. The diversity of subjects in this volume reveals both the complexity and the problems of the field of research that the Women and the Silent Screen Conferences represent. Not only do these papers deal with well-known, concrete issues within feminist scholarship, but they also consider a more fundamental question: that of the medium as such in its early years, and its conceptualisation within a feminist scholarly framework."

"Speaking Silently: Women’s Voices in Early Italian Film Culture", in "Presences and Representation of Women in the Early Years of Cinema,1895-1920" (Angel Quintana and Jordi Pons, eds. Girona: Fundacio Museu del Cinema, 2018)

Presences and Representation of Women in the Early Years of Cinema,1895-1920, 2019

As with many other different aspects of film culture, the contribution of women to the history of film theory has left very few traces behind. The few exceptions that come to mind (Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Mary Field, Esfir Shub) have gained a (relative) attention only in fields we are accustomed to conceive of as minor or marginal, for example experimental cinema, educational cinema, archival compilation, and so on. Even more than “straight” film history, the history of film theories has for a long time been the narrative of a homosocial debate. Until the advent of feminist film theory in the 1970s, film theory was virtually an all-male business. In recent years much work has been done to recover documentation about early women's reflection on cinema. An interesting corpus of material has surfaced in different countries, and research in this field is constantly rewarding. This growing corpus is peculiar under several different aspects, which, however, all ultimately have to do with the “minor”, or better, “micro-theoretical” nature of women's writing on film. In this article we try to offer a few insights into women's relation to the “micro-theoretical” form of writing by analyzing the case of Italy. Here, during the silent period, several interesting female voices emerged that crossed the public sphere for a brief moment, yet only to pass by and leave no trace of their reception.

Historiographies of Women in Early Cinema

NECSUS Journal, 2019

In the recent decades, academic research on early cinema has grown remarkably. At the intersection of early cinema studies and feminist history, significant new research has revealed the hitherto overlooked presence of women, and the rich diversity of positions they held, in the first decades of film production. It is possible to see "Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?" and "Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes" as products of a visionary investigative potential that currently characterises feminist film historiography of early cinema.

Editorial: Women and the Silent Screen

Screening the Past, 2015

What are the gaps in current film histories? Who has been forgotten and why? How can we write histories of cinema that are more inclusive while not eliding processes of exclusion or other dynamics of power? The essays in this special dossier respond to these questions, demonstrating the significance of gender in relation to early cinema. The essays emerge from the VII Women and the Silent Screen Conference that Victoria Duckett convened with Jeanette Hoorn at the University of Melbourne in 2013. This was the first time that this conference was brought to Australasia; the following iteration was taken to Shanghai in 2017.

Silent Subversions : Exploring the Enigma of Female Spectatorship in Silent Cinema

2009

Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future

Historical contexts and contributions of women pioneers in film: How women were part of the creation of the cinematographic language and narrative

Historical contexts and contributions of women pioneers in film: How women were part of the creation of the cinematographic language and narrative, 2021

In the film production industry women are underrepresented in almost all production areas around the globe. Numbers show that female directors are similarly marginalized in Europe (films directed by women reached 19% in 2017 1) and in the United states (14% of the directors that worked in the 500 top movies of 2019 were women 2). This shortage of women in audiovisual production occurs not only in large industries, but also in the most emerging ones, remote places like Chile have numbers as low as only 5.7% of women directed films between 2011-2016 3. The marginalization of women in creative production spaces is not a new and it has had social consequences that affect the perception of women in their societies, perpetuating stereotypes and restricting the creative diversity that would be undeniably beneficial to the film and audiovisual industry worldwide. From this statement, I ask the following questions: Why do women occupy such a limited space in industries such as film? What would be the impact on society if more female voices were made known and recognized in the same way as their male counterparts? If we review the history of cinema, women have been part of its evolution from the very beginning. Unfortunately, there is not much information about their participation in general, but especially after the first two decades of its existence. It is as if they were never written into history, but they were there. Prejudices, responsibilities, social and cultural pressures could be attributed to this absence in books and classrooms. It was probably a process of segregation that relegated them to the limited and caring space in which they remain majority to this day (this happened not only in the cinema, but in many other male dominated work environments ).

New Women of the Silent Screen: China, Japan, Hollywood

Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2005