Introduction: Women and the Silent Screen
What makes women and the silent screen a compelling field of research - one that engages scholars, students and film-going publics - is the opportunity to explore film history anew.…
Sex Matters: The Rise of Early Hollywood
This essay distils some of the claims made in my book Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood. [1] That project mines the importance of Hollywood’s rise in the…
“A Great New Field for Women Folk”: Newspapers and the Movies, 1911-1916
Over the past few years, I have been researching American newspaper writing about motion pictures in the early and mid-1910s. That research has led me to argue that (1) newspaper…
Re-assessing the Demise of the McDonagh Sisters
When we consider the achievements of Paulette, Phyllis and Isabel McDonagh, it is tempting to regard the first Australian women to own a production company, and receive credit as filmmakers…
Picturing Natacha Rambova: Design and Celebrity Performance in the 1920s
Costume and set designer Natacha Rambova attracted an unusual amount of media scrutiny during the 1920s. She became a high-profile celebrity whose private and professional life received a level of…
On the Stage: Mimì Aylmer’s Public and Private Life as a Performance
1. The Constellation of “Minor Stars” In recent years, the growing interest of scholars in silent movies and the birth of research networks among academics, archivists, and film librarians, have…
New Zealand film pioneer: Hilda Maud Hayward (1898 – 1970)
The New Zealand Film Archive, now renamed Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision (The New Zealand Archive of Film, Television & Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua Me Ngā Taonga Kōrero), was honoured…
Lottie Lyell: the silent work of an early Australian scenario writer
Lottie Lyell was a much-loved silent movie star in the early days of cinema in Australia. She was also an accomplished scenario writer, director, film editor, and producer. Quietly working…
A Doll’s House and the Performance of Gender in American Silent Cinema
In the US during the silent period, four film adaptations of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem) from 1879, were produced, all of which are considered to be…
Dance Pictures: The Cinematic Experiments of Anna Pavlova and Rita Sacchetto
Dance was a popular subject of early cinema. Solo vaudeville and burlesque dancers appeared in early moving picture experiments such as Thomas Edison’s Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) and the American…
Feminist Media Historiography and the Work Ahead
There has been an explosion of scholarship in the sixteen years since the Gender and Silent Cinema conference was held in Utrecht and the fourteen years since Amelie Hastie and…