People tend to look back on the early 20th century and focus on how far we’ve come as a society, especially when it comes to women’s rights. After all, in the early 1900s, women were still fighting for the right to vote – a right they wouldn’t win in the United States until 1920. The notion of reproductive rights was practically nonexistent, with modern forms of family planning still in the very early stages of being accepted. And yet, if there was one area where it seems that women a century ago were actually just as empowered – if not more so – than they are today, it was behind the camera.
In the early 1900s, the film industry was still very new and not yet as hierarchical as it is today. The modern notion of concrete roles on a film crew had not yet come to be since no one was entirely sure what those roles should be yet; crew members would collaborate and take on numerous roles in order to get the job done because they often had no other choice. Even the film director – much-vaunted in the modern era thanks to the auteur theory – was considered less of an artist and more of a ringmaster on set. Because of this, it wasn’t unusual for the director to not even be credited on a film.
Lost and Found
Despite this making it hard to discern who the true creative voices behind some of the earliest films were, one thing is clear: women’s voices were frequently heard and celebrated. From Alice Guy-Blaché, one of the first filmmakers of either gender to make a narrative film, to Lois Weber, a multi-hyphenate who was at one point the top director at Universal, to Mabel Normand, a talented comedienne who directed and co-starred with Charlie Chaplin: there were many women working both in front of and behind the camera in the early 1900s. Alas, there were only scant efforts to preserve these trailblazing women’s work for future generations to watch, study and enjoy. Many prints ended up missing reels or were lost altogether.
Fortunately for audiences today, Kino Lorber has curated a collection of more than 50 films from the early silent era and issued them in loving restored versions as part of its Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers DVD box set, which I wouldn’t hesitate to say is one of the most essential DVD releases in recent years. It resurrects the work of so many women whose names had been lost to the ages and ensures that they’ll continue to find new audiences for years to come.
Not all of the women are credited as directors – some are producers, writers, performers – but they all have the distinction of being the primary artistic voice in their work. From slapstick comedy shorts to action serials, Western thrillers to dramas packed with social commentary, the six-disc set includes a wide range of films made by women that should keep any fan of cinema history occupied and enraptured for hours.
Changing – and Creating – the Narrative
The first disc of Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers is fittingly devoted to Alice Guy-Blaché, who as I noted above is not only one of the first female filmmakers, but one of the first filmmakers, full stop. Early comedy shorts like Mixed Pets (a woman tries to hide her new dog from her husband while her housekeeper tries to hide her baby from her employer) and Tramp Strategy (a woman plans to dress her fiancé as a heroic tramp to impress her father, but a real tramp gets involved instead) are charmingly silly comedies of errors that tend to focus on the simple notion that it’s better to be open with your loved ones than to hide things from them.
Other Alice Guy-Blaché films of note include A Fool and His Money, one of the earliest films to have an all African-American cast, and Two Little Rangers, a short Western in which two young girls, wielding rifles, are the ones who save the day. However, my favorite is probably The Ocean Waif, in which a woman named Millie (played by the delightful Doris Kenyon) washes up on the shore of a fishing village and is taken in by a man who abuses her and forces her to work for him. Eventually, Millie escapes and holes up in an abandoned house, where she meets a famous novelist who has absconded there to work. There’s a great deal of suspense, drama, and romance, all carried by Kenyon’s sweet and spunky performance as the titular waif.
Disc two is devoted to the works of Lois Weber, an actress, writer, producer, and director who eventually became the first American female director to establish and run her own movie studio. Weber’s work is notable for its focus on social issues, including poverty and birth control, but it’s not just the humanity of her films that makes them stand out; she was also an artistic innovator whose thriller Suspense is an early masterpiece of the genre.
In Suspense, Weber stars as a young mother home alone with her baby in a remote house after her husband goes to work and her housekeeper abruptly quits. A dangerous looking vagrant lurking outside soon finds the spare key hidden under the mat. From there, the film rapidly increases in intensity as Weber’s character desperately attempts to hide herself and her baby while calling her husband on the phone for help. Through landmark use of split screen, the audience is able to simultaneously see the intruder prowling through the house while Weber frantically tries to convey the danger to her husband. The story is simple, but the techniques Weber uses to convey the tension of the situation are anything but.
Taking Action and Speaking Out
The third disc of the set focuses on women genre pioneers. From 49-17, the first Western feature to be directed by a woman, Ruth Ann Baldwin, to the Hazards of Helen serials starring Helen Holmes as a fast-running, high-jumping action heroine who could give Tom Cruise a run for his money, to Caught in a Cabaret and other slapstick comedy shorts starring and directed by Mabel Normand, it’s wonderful to see that these early women filmmakers were not constrained by their gender when it came to the subject matter of their work. Yes, many women filmmakers did focus on women’s stories – especially Weber – and those films are remarkable in their sensitivity and their willingness to explore certain issues. But these early experiments in genre provide a necessary reminder to the modern film industry that women are capable of telling all kinds of stories, not just those about wives, mothers, and waifs.
Possibly the most intriguing inclusion on this disc is novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s Ethnographic Films, a collection of fly-on-the-wall documentary shorts that explore and observe everyday black life at the beginning of the 20th century. For one thing is for certain: while women were certainly on equal footing with men in the early days of Hollywood, it was primarily white middle-class women who benefited; women filmmakers – and actors – of color were still too few and far between.
The next two discs are devoted to social commentary – for indeed, Weber was not the only women filmmaker who tried to make moral statements with her work. These films are, for the most part, the most narratively developed of the set, with well-rounded and sympathetic protagonists dealing with issues to which audiences could likely relate. Here we find Weber’s Where Are My Children?, a film that serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when women are forced to have babies they do not want.
Tyrone Power plays a district attorney who, while prosecuting an illegal abortion provider, discovers that his wife is one of the procurers of the man’s services. Isn’t it better, the film argues, for women to be able to use birth control and prevent these unwanted children from ever being conceived than to murder them in the womb? Weber’s argument feels somewhat dated today due to its drastically anti-abortion stance, but in speaking out in favor of birth control, it carries a revolutionary message for its time.
Lovers and Fighters
Another revolutionary film – albeit for very different reasons – is Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingle with the West. Directed by Marion Wong, it is the first known film to have an entirely Asian-American cast. Sadly, any intertitles the film may have had are missing, along with whole reels of the film. Yet even incomplete, Wong’s film tells a powerful story of one couple’s struggle to balance their Westernized ways with those of their much more old-fashioned elders. The costumes and sets are lovingly crafted and give the film a surprisingly high-budget look, considering that nearly everyone involved was a member of Wong’s family that she roped into the production.
Yet another standout is The Red Kimona, produced by Dorothy Davenport Reid (at the time credited as Mrs. Wallace Reid) with a script by Adela Rogers St. John from a story by Dorothy Arzner. The film is based on the true story of Gabrielle Darley (played by Priscilla Bonner), a young woman who escapes her abusive household by running away to New Orleans with the man she loves. Unfortunately, said man turns out to be a pimp who forces Gabrielle into prostitution. Gabrielle eventually shoots him when she finds out he plans to marry another woman; after serving time in jail for her crimes, she vows to devote the rest of her life to serving others as a nurse. The film is not critical of Gabrielle or her choices; rather, it is critical of a society that forces women like Gabrielle into such desperate and unhappy situations and then punishes them for trying to find a way out. It is also critical of the high-society women who embrace fallen women like Gabrielle solely as a means of improving their own social standing through the guise of doing good works.
One of my favorite films in the entire set – and one of the most unusual – is Salome, a loose adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play, starring and produced by Alla Nazimova. The film was, at its time, a high-budget commercial failure, but watching it today, one is mesmerized by the highly stylized sets and costumes and the devastating close-ups of the actors’ expressive faces. Nazimova plays the titular role, the stepdaughter of King Herod who demands the head of John the Baptist as a reward for performing the dance of the seven veils. The film is one of the earliest examples of an art film that exists, and a fitting tribute to its unique and magnetic star, who was an LGBTQ trailblazer in Hollywood.
The sixth and final disc is devoted to a small selection of feature films, including The Call of the Cumberlands, which chronicles a violent family feud that tears apart the Kentucky mountains. Adapted by Julia Crawford Ivers from a novel by Charles Buck, the film follows Samson South (Dustin Farnum), a young man who is set to take over one of the two warring clans when instead he accepts an offer to study art in New York City. The film alternates between South’s attempts to fit into a world that is radically different than any he has ever known and his family’s attempt to survive without his leadership. The film is only 50 minutes long – the term feature is relative here – but despite its brevity, it still manages to have a complete and satisfying dramatic arc. Modern filmmakers who seem increasingly incapable of making feature films shorter than two hours would do well to learn from pioneers like Ivers that one can tell a story succinctly without giving any characters short shrift.
Pioneers: Conclusion
In addition to the plethora of restored films, Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers contains several documentary shorts that serve as delightful explainers to this early era of cinema, providing historical context to the period and background information on the key figures involved. If you find yourself curious about the silent era or filled with a desire to see more films directed by women, then there is no better place to begin your journey than with this veritable treasure trove of cinematic history, once lost but hopefully – thanks to Kino Lorber – never to be forgotten again.
What do you think? How many of these early women filmmakers are you familiar with? Whose films are you most excited to watch? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Kino Lorber on November 20, 2018.
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