Category Archive for: ‘Issue 40 – First Release’

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. As this special dossier demonstrates, presumptions about industrial, cultural, artistic, national, political and social change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are challenged when an apparently simple question …

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 American West by exploring how this location became central to the first myths told about the film industry’s social significance. These myths – spun in advertisements, booster campaigns, newspapers columns, …

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 writing played a crucial role in creating a popular film culture that supported and sustained the new industry’s spectacular growth as a mass entertainment; and (2) women, many long forgotten, …

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 in their own right as victims of industrial conditions that limited production, distribution and exhibition opportunities for Australian films. Indeed, the narrative that emerges from scholarship on the McDonaghs situates …

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 public attention usually devoted to stars. A multi-talented figure (designer, dancer, producer, screenwriter, actress, and playwright), she is the subject of feminist scholarship and appears in the Women Film Pioneers …

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 greatly expanded our knowledge of silent film stardom in Italy, allowing a detailed analysis of the conditions in which this phenomenon emerged. Cristina Jandelli has, for example, recently reconstructed the …

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 to present two of the few surviving New Zealand features from the silent era at WSS VII. Pianist Mauro Colombis masterfully brought both feature screenings to life for a twenty-first …

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 alongside director, Raymond Longford, she had a considerable influence on the twenty-eight films they made together. [1] Longford directed and Lyell starred in nearly all the films, but it is …

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 lost films: a one-reel film produced by the Thanhouser Company in 1911; a 1917 production directed by Joseph De Grasse and starring Dorothy Phillips [fig. 1]; a 1918 film directed …

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 Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s Betsy Ross Dance (1903). [1] As film technologies evolved, dance continued to be thematized: for filmmakers, dance served not only as a means to display film’s …

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 I hosted the first conference on Women and the Silent Screen in Santa Cruz. Major books have been published on key figures, with more still in the works. [1] Anthologies …