Kay Armatage,
The Girl from God’s country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
ISBN: 0 802085423.
428pp
£20 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by University of Toronto Press)
Kay Armatage’s study of Nell Shipman – screenwriter, star, producer and director – was written with the declared feminist intention of restoring to view a woman who held a position of creative power during the silent era. Although little known today, Shipman was “one of the very few Canadians who were making feature films in the silent period, and certainly the first Canadian woman to make a feature film. . . .” (3). (A point of interest for Australians is that Shipman, at eighteen, wrote the script for The Shepherd of the Southern Cross [Australia 1914].)
An energetic and engaging subject for a biography, the life of Canadian-born Shipman unfolds in early Hollywood, New York City and North American wilderness. Not only were many of her films set in rugged country; between 1922 and 1924, Shipman, her young son and partner lived the pioneer life in an Idaho log cabin, twenty-one miles away from a road: “To get out in winter, they had to dogsled and snowshoe across the frozen lake, a two-day walk in the best of weather, and nightmarish in blizzards” (17).
Like Shipman herself, the characters she portrayed were athletic and gutsy. In wilderness melodramas, these dog-sledding, snowshoeing women rescued their men from various villains. The Shipman heroine also had a particular affinity with animals, both wild (including bears, elks, skunks, eagles) and domestic (Great Danes and German Shepherds). Shipman herself trained these animals to appear in her films, and her menagerie of potential “actors” grew to be “the largest privately owned collection of wild animals in the United States” (261).
Armatage positions Shipman as:
an exemplary figure, for her story parallels the entry, participation, and finally exclusion from cinema that was experienced by women filmmakers as a group in the first stage of film history. (14)
The financial and creative struggles of the latter part of Shipman’s life make sad reading, although Armatage is careful not to paint Shipman as a victim, nor to romanticize Shipman’s problems. Rather, her optimistic resourcefulness is celebrated at the same time it is acknowledged that Shipman was “out of step with the new industrialization of Hollywood” (18).
The small number of extant films – just three features and four shorts from the silent era, and a fragment of a sound film – become the focus of the book. Armatage creates their industrial and cultural contexts, thus setting Shipman against a broader backdrop. This investigation of the early film industry – and of women’s place in it – is useful, especially for its documentation of how the studios squeezed out independent producers, like Shipman.
However, while understandable, the lack of attention to Shipman’s other productions is regrettable. We learn little about her experiences as an actor in Hollywood, for example, and don’t really know whether the existing films are truly typical of Shipman’s body of work. Even though so many of her films are gone, a stronger sense of how the remaining productions sat within Shipman’s overall career could have been created using information from trade journals and fan magazines.
Sometimes, Armatage makes long digressions, the specific relevance of which is hard to discern. For instance, although the section beginning with “Animals in silent movies’ (272-285) provides a context for understanding the way Shipman’s animals were portrayed, it is free-floating, not anchored by discussion to Shipman’s films. The feminist perspective is also, at times, over-explained; the history of feminist film studies is one example (4-14).
The book gives the impression, too, that the author is uncomfortable dealing with the personal side of Shipman’s life. Armatage declares that she does not want to construct a “psychological biography treating her family history or personal life,” instead concentrating on “the story of Nell Shipman’s working life” (22). However, as Armatage discovers, it is not easy to draw clear boundaries around professional and personal issues, and admits: “To set the work in a social, historical, economical, and historical context is to continually encounter her personal as well as professional struggles. .” (23). Yet Armatage’s use of the rich resource of letters and memoirs clearly illuminates the back-and-forth influence of the “private” and “public” lives of an individual. There should be no need to privilege the professional, nor to apologise for paying careful attention to the “private” life of a biographical subject.
The book is, however, leavened with humour, much of it originating in Shipman’s own words. In one memoir, she describes low-budget filmmaking creativity: a scene in which a “moose” (really a black pony with papier mache antlers) is attacked by a pack of “wolves” (malamutes with wagging tails) (63). Quotes from Shipman’s letters to her son are similarly amusing. For instance, she wrote about seeing Wings in the Dark (USA, 1935), a film made from her screenplay about a blind aviator and his guide dog. In subsequent studio rewrites, the dog had almost vanished, which must have deeply disappointed Shipman, for whom animal “characters” were a trademark. Yet her comment avoids bitterness: all that was left, she tells her son, was “some ears poking up in the bottom of the frame” (307).
The Girl from God’s Country paints valuable portraits of both a fascinating woman and a dynamic period in film history, about which we still know too little. The academic, as well as the general reader, will find Shipman’s energy and tenacity appealing. In spite of Armatage’s deliberate emphasis on the professional rather than the personal, the book creates a vivid sense of an individual personality: complex, difficult, intelligent, sensual, adventurous, and ultimately, somewhat tragic. In her struggle for a place in the film industry, this study reminds us, Shipman paid a high personal cost. This view of a woman who wasn’t spectacularly successful offers a valuable corrective view to “great man”- or even “great woman”- film histories.
Jeannette Delamoir
Central Queensland University, Australia.
Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: 4-May-04