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RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes to DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii). We learn from Derek Allen’s 1936 Federal Writers Project report that she was also an accomplishedmusician
BLANCHE SEWELL
NANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silent LOIS WEBER – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Lois Weber was the leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood. She began her career alongside her husband, Phillips Smalley, after the two had worked together in the theatre. They began working in motion pictures around 1907, often billed under the collective title “The Smalleys.”. In their early years at studioslike Gaumont
CUTTING WOMEN: MARGARET BOOTH AND HOLLYWOOD’S PIONEERINGSEE MORE ONWFPP.COLUMBIA.EDU
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
HELENA CORTESINA
Lived: July 17, 1903 - March 7, 1984. Worked as: director film actress film company owner producer theatre actress theatrical entrepreneur. Worked In: Spain. by Elena Cordero-Hoyo. Little is known—and even less is written—about the role that women played within the Spanish silent cinema. Cinema, along with other visual arts, constituted WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes to DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii). We learn from Derek Allen’s 1936 Federal Writers Project report that she was also an accomplishedmusician
BLANCHE SEWELL
NANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silent LOIS WEBER – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Lois Weber was the leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood. She began her career alongside her husband, Phillips Smalley, after the two had worked together in the theatre. They began working in motion pictures around 1907, often billed under the collective title “The Smalleys.”. In their early years at studioslike Gaumont
CUTTING WOMEN: MARGARET BOOTH AND HOLLYWOOD’S PIONEERINGSEE MORE ONWFPP.COLUMBIA.EDU
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
HELENA CORTESINA
Lived: July 17, 1903 - March 7, 1984. Worked as: director film actress film company owner producer theatre actress theatrical entrepreneur. Worked In: Spain. by Elena Cordero-Hoyo. Little is known—and even less is written—about the role that women played within the Spanish silent cinema. Cinema, along with other visual arts, constituted KIM TOMADJOGLOU DISCUSSES ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ AND HER NEW DVD ← News Archive Kim Tomadjoglou discusses Alice Guy-Blaché and her new DVD set with Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center blog. WFPP contributor, audio-visual curator-archivist Kim Tomadjoglou, recently spoke about Alice Guy-Blaché’s career and the DVD set thatshe curated:
STELLA F. SIMON
Stella F. Simon and Miklos Bandy’s 1927–28 16mm film, Hands: The Life and Love of a Gentle Sex, is a short, experimental, feminist film whose aesthetic is drawn from American and European modernist photography movements and early avant-garde film traditions.The film’s underlying melodramatic narrative formula is complicated by the use of hands as both protagonists and as the centralELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
HELENA CORTESINA
Lived: July 17, 1903 - March 7, 1984. Worked as: director film actress film company owner producer theatre actress theatrical entrepreneur. Worked In: Spain. by Elena Cordero-Hoyo. Little is known—and even less is written—about the role that women played within the Spanish silent cinema. Cinema, along with other visual arts, constitutedVALDA VALKYRIEN
by Jia Jia Liu. Named after the Valkyrie of Wagnerian lore, the martial warrior maiden who led warriors into battle, Valda Valkyrien herself emerges from the Hollywood press glowing with a mythical aura. Distinguishing between the real Valkyrien and Valkyrien the Hollywood myth is key to a profile of the star. Valda Valkyrien portrait.MARIA P. WILLIAMS
Maria P. Williams, who, like Tressie Souders, also lived in Kansas City, Missouri, produced, distributed, and acted in her own film, The Flames of Wrath (1923). The Norfolk Journal and Guide, as quoted by Yvonne Welbon, thus lauded her: “Kansas City is claiming the honor of having the first colored woman film producer in the UnitedStates” (40).
CAROLINE LEJEUNE
Caroline Lejeune, better known to readers of her reviews as C.A. Lejeune or even simply C.A. L., said that The Mark of Zorro (1920) determined her choice of career. As she wrote in her autobiography, Thank You for Having Me: Suddenly, as I watched Fairbanks’ harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount FilmHELEN KELLER
Helen Keller’s brief career in silent film began when she was approached by historian and author of the popular Photographic History of the Civil War Francis Trevelyan Miller, who hoped to write a motion picture script based on Keller’s life and work. Miller, in a January 1918 letter to Keller, argued that the motion pictures were “a universal language” and an opportunity for the deaf AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE SILENT FILM INDUSTRY However, with the exception of Eloyce King Patrick Gist, who has received some critical attention for her work making 16mm educational religious shorts and Zora Neale Hurston, known primarily because of her work as a writer and ethnographer, African-American women filmmakers have not come to the attention of historians.Yet in their own time the achievement and consequently the WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes toEMMA GENDRON
Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognized LOIS WEBER – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Lois Weber was the leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood. She began her career alongside her husband, Phillips Smalley, after the two had worked together in the theatre. They began working in motion pictures around 1907, often billed under the collective title “The Smalleys.”. In their early years at studioslike Gaumont
NANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silentBLANCHE SEWELL
WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
PEARL WHITE
March 4, 1889 - August 4, 1938. Worked as: film actress music hall performer. Worked In: United States. by Marina Dahlquist. Commonly known as the Pathé Frère company’s “Peerless Fearless Girl,” or the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts,” Pearl White’s undaunted and adventurous persona became emblematic for her career and forserial
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes toEMMA GENDRON
Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognized LOIS WEBER – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Lois Weber was the leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood. She began her career alongside her husband, Phillips Smalley, after the two had worked together in the theatre. They began working in motion pictures around 1907, often billed under the collective title “The Smalleys.”. In their early years at studioslike Gaumont
NANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silentBLANCHE SEWELL
WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
PEARL WHITE
March 4, 1889 - August 4, 1938. Worked as: film actress music hall performer. Worked In: United States. by Marina Dahlquist. Commonly known as the Pathé Frère company’s “Peerless Fearless Girl,” or the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts,” Pearl White’s undaunted and adventurous persona became emblematic for her career and forserial
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
HOW WOMEN WORKED IN THE US SILENT FILM INDUSTRY The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, eds. Cynthia A. Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 155-77, for the argument that given recent research, the story has changed from the idea that there were “no women in 1925” to DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii). We learn from Derek Allen’s 1936 Federal Writers Project report that she was also an accomplishedmusician
KIM TOMADJOGLOU DISCUSSES ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ AND HER NEW DVD ← News Archive Kim Tomadjoglou discusses Alice Guy-Blaché and her new DVD set with Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center blog. WFPP contributor, audio-visual curator-archivist Kim Tomadjoglou, recently spoke about Alice Guy-Blaché’s career and the DVD set thatshe curated:
CUTTING WOMEN: MARGARET BOOTH AND HOLLYWOOD’S PIONEERING In 1919, when Griffith closed down his Los Angeles studio and moved his production facilities to New York, Booth was out of a job. She worked briefly at Paramount, assembling tinted films for the studio before she found better work at Louis B. Mayer’s small studio, where she got her foot in the door when she helped one of Mayer’s cutters, Billy Shea, who was behind schedule and needed aCAROLINE LEJEUNE
Caroline Lejeune, better known to readers of her reviews as C.A. Lejeune or even simply C.A. L., said that The Mark of Zorro (1920) determined her choice of career. As she wrote in her autobiography, Thank You for Having Me: Suddenly, as I watched Fairbanks’ harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE SILENT FILM INDUSTRY However, with the exception of Eloyce King Patrick Gist, who has received some critical attention for her work making 16mm educational religious shorts and Zora Neale Hurston, known primarily because of her work as a writer and ethnographer, African-American women filmmakers have not come to the attention of historians.Yet in their own time the achievement and consequently theALICE GUY BLACHÉ
by Alison McMahan. From 1896 to 1906 Alice Guy was probably the only woman film director in the world. She had begun as a secretary for Léon Gaumont and made her first film in 1896. After that first film, she directed and produced or supervised almost six hundred silent films ranging in length from one minute to thirty minutes, themajority of
OSA JOHNSON
Osa Johnson, billed as “The Heroine of 1,000 Thrills” in the promotion for Jungle Adventures (1921) and deemed “the greatest woman explorer and big-game hunter” by Collier’s magazine, spent most of her career as “Mrs. Martin Johnson,” the female half of the famous “Martin Johnsons.” She only acquired popular recognition as “Osa Johnson” when she continued her adventures ELENA SÁNCHEZ VALENZUELA Worked In: Mexico. by Patricia Torres San Martín. Thanks to recently discovered materials, Elena Sánchez Valenzuela has finally received the official recognition she deserves as a journalist; actress; founder, in 1942, of the first Film Archive in Mexico; and documentary filmmaker. It is now clear that she was a seminal figure in Mexicancinema.
WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes toNANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silentEMMA GENDRON
Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognizedBLANCHE SEWELL
WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
PEARL WHITE
March 4, 1889 - August 4, 1938. Worked as: film actress music hall performer. Worked In: United States. by Marina Dahlquist. Commonly known as the Pathé Frère company’s “Peerless Fearless Girl,” or the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts,” Pearl White’s undaunted and adventurous persona became emblematic for her career and forserial
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes toNANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silentEMMA GENDRON
Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognizedBLANCHE SEWELL
WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
PEARL WHITE
March 4, 1889 - August 4, 1938. Worked as: film actress music hall performer. Worked In: United States. by Marina Dahlquist. Commonly known as the Pathé Frère company’s “Peerless Fearless Girl,” or the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts,” Pearl White’s undaunted and adventurous persona became emblematic for her career and forserial
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film HOW WOMEN WORKED IN THE US SILENT FILM INDUSTRY The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, eds. Cynthia A. Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 155-77, for the argument that given recent research, the story has changed from the idea that there were “no women in 1925” to DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii). We learn from Derek Allen’s 1936 Federal Writers Project report that she was also an accomplishedmusician
KIM TOMADJOGLOU DISCUSSES ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ AND HER NEW DVD ← News Archive Kim Tomadjoglou discusses Alice Guy-Blaché and her new DVD set with Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center blog. WFPP contributor, audio-visual curator-archivist Kim Tomadjoglou, recently spoke about Alice Guy-Blaché’s career and the DVD set thatshe curated:
CUTTING WOMEN: MARGARET BOOTH AND HOLLYWOOD’S PIONEERING In 1919, when Griffith closed down his Los Angeles studio and moved his production facilities to New York, Booth was out of a job. She worked briefly at Paramount, assembling tinted films for the studio before she found better work at Louis B. Mayer’s small studio, where she got her foot in the door when she helped one of Mayer’s cutters, Billy Shea, who was behind schedule and needed aCAROLINE LEJEUNE
Caroline Lejeune, better known to readers of her reviews as C.A. Lejeune or even simply C.A. L., said that The Mark of Zorro (1920) determined her choice of career. As she wrote in her autobiography, Thank You for Having Me: Suddenly, as I watched Fairbanks’ harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE SILENT FILM INDUSTRY However, with the exception of Eloyce King Patrick Gist, who has received some critical attention for her work making 16mm educational religious shorts and Zora Neale Hurston, known primarily because of her work as a writer and ethnographer, African-American women filmmakers have not come to the attention of historians.Yet in their own time the achievement and consequently theALICE GUY BLACHÉ
by Alison McMahan. From 1896 to 1906 Alice Guy was probably the only woman film director in the world. She had begun as a secretary for Léon Gaumont and made her first film in 1896. After that first film, she directed and produced or supervised almost six hundred silent films ranging in length from one minute to thirty minutes, themajority of
OSA JOHNSON
Osa Johnson, billed as “The Heroine of 1,000 Thrills” in the promotion for Jungle Adventures (1921) and deemed “the greatest woman explorer and big-game hunter” by Collier’s magazine, spent most of her career as “Mrs. Martin Johnson,” the female half of the famous “Martin Johnsons.” She only acquired popular recognition as “Osa Johnson” when she continued her adventures ELENA SÁNCHEZ VALENZUELA Worked In: Mexico. by Patricia Torres San Martín. Thanks to recently discovered materials, Elena Sánchez Valenzuela has finally received the official recognition she deserves as a journalist; actress; founder, in 1942, of the first Film Archive in Mexico; and documentary filmmaker. It is now clear that she was a seminal figure in Mexicancinema.
WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes toNANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silentEMMA GENDRON
Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognizedBLANCHE SEWELL
WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
PEARL WHITE
March 4, 1889 - August 4, 1938. Worked as: film actress music hall performer. Worked In: United States. by Marina Dahlquist. Commonly known as the Pathé Frère company’s “Peerless Fearless Girl,” or the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts,” Pearl White’s undaunted and adventurous persona became emblematic for her career and forserial
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes toNANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silentEMMA GENDRON
Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognizedBLANCHE SEWELL
WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
PEARL WHITE
March 4, 1889 - August 4, 1938. Worked as: film actress music hall performer. Worked In: United States. by Marina Dahlquist. Commonly known as the Pathé Frère company’s “Peerless Fearless Girl,” or the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts,” Pearl White’s undaunted and adventurous persona became emblematic for her career and forserial
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film HOW WOMEN WORKED IN THE US SILENT FILM INDUSTRY The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, eds. Cynthia A. Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 155-77, for the argument that given recent research, the story has changed from the idea that there were “no women in 1925” to DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii). We learn from Derek Allen’s 1936 Federal Writers Project report that she was also an accomplishedmusician
KIM TOMADJOGLOU DISCUSSES ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ AND HER NEW DVD ← News Archive Kim Tomadjoglou discusses Alice Guy-Blaché and her new DVD set with Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center blog. WFPP contributor, audio-visual curator-archivist Kim Tomadjoglou, recently spoke about Alice Guy-Blaché’s career and the DVD set thatshe curated:
CUTTING WOMEN: MARGARET BOOTH AND HOLLYWOOD’S PIONEERING In 1919, when Griffith closed down his Los Angeles studio and moved his production facilities to New York, Booth was out of a job. She worked briefly at Paramount, assembling tinted films for the studio before she found better work at Louis B. Mayer’s small studio, where she got her foot in the door when she helped one of Mayer’s cutters, Billy Shea, who was behind schedule and needed aCAROLINE LEJEUNE
Caroline Lejeune, better known to readers of her reviews as C.A. Lejeune or even simply C.A. L., said that The Mark of Zorro (1920) determined her choice of career. As she wrote in her autobiography, Thank You for Having Me: Suddenly, as I watched Fairbanks’ harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea. LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN IN THE SILENT FILM INDUSTRY However, with the exception of Eloyce King Patrick Gist, who has received some critical attention for her work making 16mm educational religious shorts and Zora Neale Hurston, known primarily because of her work as a writer and ethnographer, African-American women filmmakers have not come to the attention of historians.Yet in their own time the achievement and consequently theALICE GUY BLACHÉ
by Alison McMahan. From 1896 to 1906 Alice Guy was probably the only woman film director in the world. She had begun as a secretary for Léon Gaumont and made her first film in 1896. After that first film, she directed and produced or supervised almost six hundred silent films ranging in length from one minute to thirty minutes, themajority of
OSA JOHNSON
Osa Johnson, billed as “The Heroine of 1,000 Thrills” in the promotion for Jungle Adventures (1921) and deemed “the greatest woman explorer and big-game hunter” by Collier’s magazine, spent most of her career as “Mrs. Martin Johnson,” the female half of the famous “Martin Johnsons.” She only acquired popular recognition as “Osa Johnson” when she continued her adventures ELENA SÁNCHEZ VALENZUELA Worked In: Mexico. by Patricia Torres San Martín. Thanks to recently discovered materials, Elena Sánchez Valenzuela has finally received the official recognition she deserves as a journalist; actress; founder, in 1942, of the first Film Archive in Mexico; and documentary filmmaker. It is now clear that she was a seminal figure in Mexicancinema.
WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
ANNOUNCING THE 11TH WOMEN AND THE SILENT SCREEN CONFERENCE Announcing the 11th Women and the Silent Screen Conference, June 2021! Women & Film History Internationa l and Columbia University’s School for the Arts are delighted to announce that the 11th Women and the Silent Screen Conference will take place at Columbia University in New York City, with the topic Women, Cinema, and World Migration. DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii). We learn from Derek Allen’s 1936 Federal Writers Project report that she was also an accomplishedmusician
NANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silent KIM TOMADJOGLOU DISCUSSES ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ AND HER NEW DVD ← News Archive Kim Tomadjoglou discusses Alice Guy-Blaché and her new DVD set with Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center blog. WFPP contributor, audio-visual curator-archivist Kim Tomadjoglou, recently spoke about Alice Guy-Blaché’s career and the DVD set thatshe curated:
BLANCHE SEWELL
ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
ALICE SMYTHE JAY
Alice Smythe Jay was a cinema organist, conductor, composer, and inventor. She spent much of her career in Hawaii and the West Coast. Over the course of her career, Jay composed music for accompanying film and for the concert hall; conducted orchestras and ensembles in concert; became a well-known commentator on music for the cinema; made recordings to use in accompanying film; andHELENA CORTESINA
Lived: July 17, 1903 - March 7, 1984. Worked as: director film actress film company owner producer theatre actress theatrical entrepreneur. Worked In: Spain. by Elena Cordero-Hoyo. Little is known—and even less is written—about the role that women played within the Spanish silent cinema. Cinema, along with other visual arts, constituted WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT May 30, 2021 Doing Women’s Film and Television History V, July 10-11, 2021 (virtual conference) May 15, 2021 Register now for Women & Silent Screen Online, June 2-6, 2021. Apr 29, 2021 “Directed by Lois Weber” program coming to the Criterion Channel in May. View NewsArchive.
ANNOUNCING THE 11TH WOMEN AND THE SILENT SCREEN CONFERENCE Announcing the 11th Women and the Silent Screen Conference, June 2021! Women & Film History Internationa l and Columbia University’s School for the Arts are delighted to announce that the 11th Women and the Silent Screen Conference will take place at Columbia University in New York City, with the topic Women, Cinema, and World Migration. DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii). We learn from Derek Allen’s 1936 Federal Writers Project report that she was also an accomplishedmusician
NANCY NAUMBURG
Nancy Naumburg. On September 25, 1934, Irving Lerner devoted an entire column in New Masses to “the first to come out of the revolutionary movement,” a “dramatic documentary” on the farm crisis that had just been screened at the headquarters of the radical collective Film & Photo League. Sheriffed was a three-reel 16mm silent KIM TOMADJOGLOU DISCUSSES ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ AND HER NEW DVD ← News Archive Kim Tomadjoglou discusses Alice Guy-Blaché and her new DVD set with Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center blog. WFPP contributor, audio-visual curator-archivist Kim Tomadjoglou, recently spoke about Alice Guy-Blaché’s career and the DVD set thatshe curated:
BLANCHE SEWELL
ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
ALICE SMYTHE JAY
Alice Smythe Jay was a cinema organist, conductor, composer, and inventor. She spent much of her career in Hawaii and the West Coast. Over the course of her career, Jay composed music for accompanying film and for the concert hall; conducted orchestras and ensembles in concert; became a well-known commentator on music for the cinema; made recordings to use in accompanying film; andHELENA CORTESINA
Lived: July 17, 1903 - March 7, 1984. Worked as: director film actress film company owner producer theatre actress theatrical entrepreneur. Worked In: Spain. by Elena Cordero-Hoyo. Little is known—and even less is written—about the role that women played within the Spanish silent cinema. Cinema, along with other visual arts, constituted WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
RESEARCH UPDATE: ALICE GUY BLACHÉ AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Thanks to new information from WFPP readers, I am now able to share an update. To recap my previous research, in 1917 Guy Blaché was invited by the “professors at Columbia University” 1 to give two lectures on cinema—the first on Friday, July 13 and the second on Friday, August 3. The first lecture reportedly covered “What themes toEMMA GENDRON
Emma Gendron was probably the main female figure in Quebec during the silent film era, but her importance appeared only recently along with new research about the early cinema and its centennial. Ongoing research about her career as a screenwriter will probably also reveal more about her motion picture film activity, but she is now recognizedHAZEL BURNETT
Hazel Burnett, as she was primarily known, was a theater accompanist who performed in Texas’s biggest motion picture palaces in the 1910s and 1920s. Burnett performed for both cinema and live theater as an organist and pianist. After an early career in Ohio, she moved south, where she played at the Majestic Theater in Austin and the QueenSTELLA F. SIMON
Stella F. Simon and Miklos Bandy’s 1927–28 16mm film, Hands: The Life and Love of a Gentle Sex, is a short, experimental, feminist film whose aesthetic is drawn from American and European modernist photography movements and early avant-garde film traditions.The film’s underlying melodramatic narrative formula is complicated by the use of hands as both protagonists and as the central CUTTING WOMEN: MARGARET BOOTH AND HOLLYWOOD’S PIONEERING In 1919, when Griffith closed down his Los Angeles studio and moved his production facilities to New York, Booth was out of a job. She worked briefly at Paramount, assembling tinted films for the studio before she found better work at Louis B. Mayer’s small studio, where she got her foot in the door when she helped one of Mayer’s cutters, Billy Shea, who was behind schedule and needed a ESTHER ENG – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Esther Eng was a female filmmaker who worked as a director, a writer, a producer and a distributor. In her creative and business endeavors, she was a woman pioneer who crossed the boundaries of race, language, culture and gender. As a young San Francisco-born teenager, Esther Eng learned about film by watching hundreds of them in the local theater. LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Film WOMEN AS CAMERA OPERATORS OR “CRANKS” Alla Nazimova and Herbert Brenon, 1916. Courtesy of Library of Congress. While women as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” was a publicity trend. If in 1916 silent actress Marie Doro took footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera, a gift from Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror printed it as news(22).
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Zora Neale Hurston. Lived: January 7, 1891 - January 28, 1960. Worked as: director ethnographic filmmaker novelist personal assistant playwright screenwriter. Worked In: United States. by Aimee Dixon. Better known for her work as a novelist, Zora Neale Hurston could be, according to an essay by Gloria Gibson, the first African-Americanwoman
MATILDE SERAO
An Italian writer and journalist who was born in Patrasso, Greece, to a Greek mother and Neapolitan father, an anti-Bourbon exile, Matilde Serao’s relentless and eclectic writing was distinguished by her extraordinarily committed professionalism. She cofounded several newspapers in Rome and Naples with Edoardo Scarfoglio, whom shemarried in
WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Women Film Pioneers Project is a scholarly resource exploring women’s global involvement at all levels of film production during the silent film era.PEARL WHITE
Hired by the American branch of the French Pathé Frères Company in Jersey City, she achieved her breakthrough in 1914 as Pauline in The Perils of Pauline, Pathé’s first serial.The Perils of Pauline is still the best-known production from the American serial craze featuring a new and independent female type of protagonist within a sensational, action-packed framework.NANCY NAUMBURG
A year later Naumburg and Guy premiered a second film, Taxi, at the New School for Social Research in New York City.Shot once again on the amateur 16mm camera that Nancy had been given by her mother, Taxi combined news footage of the 1934 New York taxi strike with dramatized recreations and cinéma vérité-style coverage of union meetings, and, in one sequence, a cabbie’s wedding. KIM TOMADJOGLOU DISCUSSES ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ AND HER NEW DVD ← News Archive Kim Tomadjoglou discusses Alice Guy-Blaché and her new DVD set with Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center blog. WFPP contributor, audio-visual curator-archivist Kim Tomadjoglou, recently spoke about Alice Guy-Blaché’s career and the DVD set thatshe curated:
PEARL ING – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Ing herself was absent from the screen for three years and during this time, Helen Wang, Yang Naimei, Zhang Zhiyun, and Xuan Jinglin became the so-called “Four Amazons” of Star Film Company and made Star the biggest film company in the industry.When Dan invited Pearl back to filmmaking in 1925, her mother gave in, partially because film actresses enjoyed a much better social status than DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii).HELENA CORTESINA
Cortesina made her cinema debut in 1920 with the film La Inaccessible/The Unapproachable Woman.The film was well-received, especially for Cortesina’s performance. For example, a writer going by the initials M.R. in La Correspondencia de España advocated that Cortesina was “not to stray far from cinematography, not to mistake it as a secondary art, but as the main career move for herEMMA GENDRON
Bibliography. Denault, Jocelyne. Dans l'ombre des projecteurs.Montreal: Presses de l'Université du Québec: Montreal, 1996. Hins, Sara-Juliette. “La réalisation de soi au féminin chez certaines héroïnes d’Emma Gendron, de 1920 à 1940: entre ruptureet continuité.”
LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount FilmHELENA SMITH DAYTON
Helena Smith was born in 1883 and appended Dayton to her name upon marrying Fred Erving Dayton on June 26, 1905. Dayton began her career as a reporter at The Hartford Courant and described her transition into sculpting as follows: WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Women Film Pioneers Project is a scholarly resource exploring women’s global involvement at all levels of film production during the silent film era.PEARL WHITE
Hired by the American branch of the French Pathé Frères Company in Jersey City, she achieved her breakthrough in 1914 as Pauline in The Perils of Pauline, Pathé’s first serial.The Perils of Pauline is still the best-known production from the American serial craze featuring a new and independent female type of protagonist within a sensational, action-packed framework.NANCY NAUMBURG
A year later Naumburg and Guy premiered a second film, Taxi, at the New School for Social Research in New York City.Shot once again on the amateur 16mm camera that Nancy had been given by her mother, Taxi combined news footage of the 1934 New York taxi strike with dramatized recreations and cinéma vérité-style coverage of union meetings, and, in one sequence, a cabbie’s wedding. KIM TOMADJOGLOU DISCUSSES ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ AND HER NEW DVD ← News Archive Kim Tomadjoglou discusses Alice Guy-Blaché and her new DVD set with Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center blog. WFPP contributor, audio-visual curator-archivist Kim Tomadjoglou, recently spoke about Alice Guy-Blaché’s career and the DVD set thatshe curated:
PEARL ING – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Ing herself was absent from the screen for three years and during this time, Helen Wang, Yang Naimei, Zhang Zhiyun, and Xuan Jinglin became the so-called “Four Amazons” of Star Film Company and made Star the biggest film company in the industry.When Dan invited Pearl back to filmmaking in 1925, her mother gave in, partially because film actresses enjoyed a much better social status than DRUSILLA DUNJEE HOUSTON Drusilla Dunjee Houston was a prolific, but now forgotten, African-American woman writer of the American West. She was a skilled journalist, Racial Uplift matriarch, and community builder in early Oklahoma (Brooks-Bertram 2002, xlii).HELENA CORTESINA
Cortesina made her cinema debut in 1920 with the film La Inaccessible/The Unapproachable Woman.The film was well-received, especially for Cortesina’s performance. For example, a writer going by the initials M.R. in La Correspondencia de España advocated that Cortesina was “not to stray far from cinematography, not to mistake it as a secondary art, but as the main career move for herEMMA GENDRON
Bibliography. Denault, Jocelyne. Dans l'ombre des projecteurs.Montreal: Presses de l'Université du Québec: Montreal, 1996. Hins, Sara-Juliette. “La réalisation de soi au féminin chez certaines héroïnes d’Emma Gendron, de 1920 à 1940: entre ruptureet continuité.”
LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount FilmHELENA SMITH DAYTON
Helena Smith was born in 1883 and appended Dayton to her name upon marrying Fred Erving Dayton on June 26, 1905. Dayton began her career as a reporter at The Hartford Courant and described her transition into sculpting as follows:CAROLINE LEJEUNE
Caroline Lejeune, better known to readers of her reviews as C.A. Lejeune or even simply C.A. L., said that The Mark of Zorro (1920) determined her choice of career. As she wrote in her autobiography, Thank You for Having Me: Suddenly, as I watched Fairbanks’ harlequin poses and swirling trajectories across the screen, there sprang into my mind a wonderful idea.STELLA F. SIMON
Stella F. Simon and Miklos Bandy’s 1927–28 16mm film, Hands: The Life and Love of a Gentle Sex, is a short, experimental, feminist film whose aesthetic is drawn from American and European modernist photography movements and early avant-garde film traditions.The film’s underlying melodramatic narrative formula is complicated by the use of hands as both protagonists and as the central LOIS WEBER – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Lois Weber was the leading female director-screenwriter in early Hollywood. She began her career alongside her husband, Phillips Smalley, after the two had worked together in the theatre.ZORA NEALE HURSTON
Bibliography. The bibliography for this essay is included in the “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry” overview essay. Filmography. A. Archival Filmography: Extant Film Titles: 1. Zora Neale Hurston as DirectorHELEN KELLER
Helen Keller’s brief career in silent film began when she was approached by historian and author of the popular Photographic History of the Civil War Francis Trevelyan Miller, who hoped to write a motion picture script based on Keller’s life and work. Miller, in a January 1918 letter to Keller, argued that the motion pictures were “a universal language” and an opportunity for the deaf LORNA MOON – WOMEN FILM PIONEERS PROJECT Although she told several versions of the story, in 1920, Scottish-born Lorna Moon left her job in Minneapolis for Hollywood at the invitation of Cecil B. DeMille after sending him a critique of Male and Female (1920) in which she “razzed him wickedly” for embellishing the original Scottish play (de Mille 1998, 176). She trained with DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount FilmALICE B. RUSSELL
Alice B. Russell, the second wife of Oscar Micheaux, played a large part in the professional life of her husband, starring in several of his films as well as helping to administer the Micheaux Film Company.TERESITA ARCE
Some years later, when she had become a star in popular theatre and was an entrepreneur with her own company, Arce acted in Luis Pardo (1927) as the virginal bride of the likable bandit immortalized in the Creole music that inspired the film.Unlike the previous film, some materials from this film have survived, allowing us to see the actresson screen.
SONYA LEVIEN
The period of the early 1920s provided opportunities for Levien, for although women directors and producers were being phased out, some of the most skilled writers were retained by studios, most notably Frances Marion at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Motion picture audiences had increasingly become middle class, and melodramas, especially stories about romance and love, were still being sought.ELVIRA GIALLANELLA
Elvira Giallanella was a film producer and distributor. She also wrote and directed one film, Umanità (1920). Like many other women in the Italian film industry in the late 1910s, she began her career as a film distributor under her own name or possibly under the name of thecompany Verafilm.
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actress
* Worked In: AustraliaUnited States
_by_ Jeannette Delamoir Louise Lovely was an Australian actress who worked in early Hollywood between 1915 and 1922. Although she made ten verified films in Australia and fifty in the United States, few are extant. With scant surviving personal papers, research into Lovely’s oeuvre depends largely on trade journals and star publicity—materials that have limitations as sources. Furthermore, while Australia’s Film and Sound Archive has important collections of Louise Lovely photographs and scrapbooks, trade journals or Hollywood studio records have been difficult to access in Australia. Nevertheless, the available materials reveal Lovely’s struggle to expand her filmmaking beyond performing and to exert control over her career. After working as Louise Carbasse in stage melodramas and vaudeville in Australasia and the United States, Lovely’s new name and her youthful, blond, Pickford-esque appearance were created by Universal at the end of 1915, apparently as conditions of a contract, _Theatre_ reported in 1916 (27). An issue of _Motography_ from October 1917 reveals that Universal established Louise Lovely Productions, but does not appear to have given her any control over the productions (869). In a 1978 interview with Ina Bertrand, Lovely recalled that she had left Universal in March 1918, following disagreements over wages during which it was revealed that her name, owned by Universal, could legally prevent her working for any other studio. She finally secured a contract at Fox, where she supported husky star William Farnum in Westerns. She made her final US films in 1921, including two for Quality Film Productions. These films were distributed by the recently formed CBC Film Sales Company, which became Columbia Pictures in 1924, and Lovely claimed that she had been invited to join the company board of directors, according to Kathy Kizolos, writing in 1981 (14). The purported connection with Columbia is further supported by Lovely’s comment in her 1978 oral history that Harry Cohn suggested she tour vaudeville following her second Quality Film Productions film (53). She and first husband Wilton Welch traveled between 1921 and 1925 with “A Day at the Studio,” in which audience members volunteered for on-stage “screen tests” that were screened the following week. The act was popular with hopefuls in movie-struck North America, and then in Australia. Lovely described further to her interviewer that she and Welch shared screen-test directing duties: “He directed me sort of thing, and I directed everybody else…”(54).
The hierarchical tensions between his “masculine” authority and her “lovely”— i.e., feminine—star persona are again evident in her final film, _Jewelled Nights, _made in Australia in 1925 after she returned from the US. Her role as the face of a public company, Louise Lovely Productions, sat uncomfortably with her “dainty” film persona. In this final film, ironically, she played a socialite who rejects gender and class restrictions by jilting her groom at the altar and, disguised as a man, hiding in a remote all-male miningcommunity.
Louise Lovely, _Jewelled Nights_, 1926. Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.__ Gordon Collingridge holding Louise Lovely in _Jewelled Nights_ (1926). Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.__ Although Lovely’s profile was featured in the logo for the company, she was credited only with acting and cowriting the scenario for _Jewelled Nights_ (1926). Wilton Welch was credited as director in the press book prepared for exhibitors, but although the extent of her contribution is not precisely known_, _she claimed in an interview for the _Weekender _that: “I was virtually the producer. I personally cut and spliced the film. The acting was only part of it.” She also recalled in her 1978 interview that she had worked on the design of, and publicity for the film, as well as on casting. Most importantly, Lovely said that she did at least some of the directing (60) and even claimed to have invented a new type of film syntax: “I said, ‘We won’t have a train and we won’t have a boat, we’ll just have the big funnel of the boat when she’s leaving there, she goes up to the boat, you see, and then we just show the funnel’ … which I thought was a rather good invention, you know” (70–71). The film was financially unsuccessful, possibly partly due to mismanagement by board members; however, the remaining footage, most likely outtakes, shows Lovely’s acting to be in a melodrama style outdated by 1926. In her move into production, Lovely had had contact with a number of impressive female film pioneers, mainly at Universal. There, she featured in seven films written by Ida May Parkand,
post-Universal, was directed by Park in a further film. Lovely was also at Universal when Cleo Madison, Lois Weber
and Elsie Jane
Wilson were
directing. Lovely had appeared with Wilson in _Bettina Loved a Soldier _(1916), which was directed by Wilson’s husband Rupert Julian. After retiring from the screen, Louise Lovely made at least two attempts to put her Hollywood experience to good use. In her evidence to the 1927 Royal Commission into the Australian Motion Picture Industry, she advised the Australian government to set up a subsidized film studio, and in 1931 she reprised the “Studio Act” vaudeville act for a week at the Melbourne Tivoli.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Delamoir, Jeannette. “Louise Lovely: The Construction of a Star.” Unpublished PhD. Dissertation. La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, 2002. Godfrey, Margaret. “Savage River Could Have Been Our Hollywood.” _Weekender_ (Burnie, Tasmania) (10 April 1968): n.p. -------. “Jewelled Nights in Toorak Setting: Louise Lovely Ball at ‘Whernside.’” _Table Talk _(21 May 1925): 8. Kizilos, Kathy. “Focus on the Stars of Yesterday.” _Age (6 February 1981): 14. ------. “November Important Month for Bluebird.” _Motography (_27October 1917): 869.
Louise Lovely. Interview with Ina Bertrand. Transcript. Hobart, Tasmania, 23 November 1978. National Film and Sound Archive ofAustralia.
Welch, Wilton. “Louise Makes Good.” _Theatre _1 (April 1 1916):27.
ARCHIVAL PAPER COLLECTIONS: A variety of archival materials and photographs are held at thefollowing archives:
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research.
The George Eastman Museum . The State University of New York at Purchase Library (Macdonald Film Stills Collection) Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret HerrickLibrary .
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.
The Palm Springs Historical Society.
FILMOGRAPHY
A. ARCHIVAL FILMOGRAPHY: EXTANT FILM TITLES: 1. LOUISE LOVELY AS ACTRESS Fragment. Catalogued: “Short fiction segment, Western, US, c. 1914, Dan Carlyle wanted for bank robbery; other segment” (item no. 67201), cas.: Louise Lovely, si, b&w, approx. 7 min. Archive: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia . _Dolly’s Scoop_. Dir.: Joseph De Grasse, sc.: Ida May Park (Rex/Universal Mfg. Co.US 1916) cas.: Louise Lovely, Lon Chaney, si, b&w, 2 reels of 2. Archive: BFI National Archive.
_The Grasp of Greed_. Dir.: Joseph De Grasse, sc.: Ida May Park (Bluebird/Universal Mfg. Co. US 1916) cas.: Louise Lovely, Lon Chaney, si, b&w, 5 reels of 5. Archive: George Eastman Museum, EYE Filmmuseum
_The Social Buccaneer_. Dir.: Jack Conway, sc.: Fred Myton (Bluebird/Universal Mfg. Co. US 1916) cas.: Louise Lovely, J Warren Kerrigan, si, b&w, 3 reels of 5. Archive: Library of Congress , Library and Archives Canada.
_The Field of Honor_. Dir.: Allen Holubar, sc.: Elliot J. Clawson, st.: Brand Whitlock (Butterfly/Universal Mfg. Co. US 1917) cas.: Allen Holubar; Louise Lovely, si, b&w, 6 reels of 5. Archive: Library ofCongress .
_The Gift Girl. _Dir.: Rupert Julian, sc.: EJ Clawson (Elliot J. Clawson) (Bluebird/Universal Mfg. Co. US 1917) cas.: Louise Lovely, Rupert Julian, Wadsworth Harris, si, b&w, 5 reels of 5. Archive: Library of Congress . _The Third Woman_/_The Innocent Cheat_. Dir.: Charles Swickard, sc. J. Grubb Alexander, st.: Raymond L. Schrock (Superior Pictures/Robertson-Cole Distributing Corp. US 1920) cas.: Carlyle Blackwell, Louise Lovely, si, b&w, 5 reels of 5. Archive: Library of Congress , National Film and Sound Archive of Australia . _Heart of the North_. Dir.: Harry J. Revier, sc.: Eddie Dowling (Quality Film Productions US 1921) cas.: Roy Stewart, Louise Lovely, Harry von Meter, si, b&w, 6 reels of 6. Archive: Library of Congress , National Film and Sound Archiveof Australia .
2. LOUISE LOVELY AS ACTRESS, CO-SCREENWRITER, AND PRODUCER _Jewelled Nights_. Dir.: Wilton Welch, possible co-director, Louise Lovely; sc.: Wilton Welch, Louise Lovely (Louise Lovely Productions Australia 1926) cas.: Louise Lovely, Gordon Collingridge, Godfrey Cass, si, b&w, 6 minutes of 10,000 feet. Archive: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia . B. FILMOGRAPHY: NON-EXTANT FILM TITLES: 1. LOUISE LOVELY AS ACTRESS (AS LOUISE CARBASSE) _A Tale of the Australian Bush/Ben Hall the Notorious Bushranger,_ 1911; _One Hundred Years Ago, _1911; _A __Ticket in Tatts, _1911; _The Colleen Bawn, _1911; _The Girl from Outback, _1911; _Hands Across the Sea, _1912; _A Daughter of Australia, _1912 ; _Conn the Shaughraun, _1912; _The Wreck of the Dunbar_/_The Yeoman’s Wedding, _1912; _The Ticket of Leave Man, _1912; _Father and the Boys, _1915. 2. LOUISE LOVELY AS ACTRESS (AS LOUISE WELCH) _Stronger than Death, _1915. 3. LOUISE LOVELY AS ACTRESS _Dolly’s Scoop, _1916; _The Grip of Jealousy,_ 1916_;_ _Tangled Hearts_/_The Altar of Friendship_, 1916; _The Gilded Spider_/_The Full Cup, _1916; _Bobbie of the Ballet, _1916; _Bettina Loved a Soldier, _1916; _The Measure of a Man, _1916; _Stronger than Steel, _1916; _Blood Money, _1917; _The Fugitive, _1917; _Diamonds of Destiny, _1917; _The Outlaw and the Lady, _1917; _The Fourth Witness, _1917; _The Grip of Love, _1917; _Her Great Dilemma, _1917; _The Reed Case, _1917; _Sirens of the Sea_, 1917; _The Wolf and His Mate,_ 1917; _Painted Lips, _1918; _Nobody’s Wife, _1918; _The Girl Who Wouldn’t Quit _/_The Quest for Joan_, 1918; _A Rich Man’s Darling, _1918; _Life’s a Funny Proposition, _1919; _Johnny on the Spot_, 1919; _The Man Hunter, _1919; _The Usurper_, 1919; _The Lone Star Ranger, _1919; _T__he Wolves of the Night, _1919; _The Last of the Duanes, _1919; _The Wings of Morning, _1919; _The Butterfly Man_, 1920; _The Orphan, _1920; _The Twins of Suffering Creek, _1920; _The Joyous Troublemakers, _1920; _The Skyway Man, _1920; _The Little Grey Mouse, _1920; _Partners of Fate, _1921; _While the Devil Laughs, _1921; _The Old Nest, _1921; _Poverty of Riches, _1921; _Life’s Greatest Question, _1921; _S__hattered Idols/ Bride of the Gods_, 1921; _A Day at the Studio, _1923.RESEARCH UPDATE
June 2020: Research conducted by Australian historians Stephen and Louise Dando-Collins links Louise Lovely to one additional film (as actress), _Her Strange Experience _(US, 1917), which appears to be a lost 1-reeler. According to their research, the film was produced by IMP and released on June 17. It was directed by Maxwell Ryder, and written by Ryder and Jack Cunningham, from a story by Eugene B. Lewis. Their research also indicates that _Painted Lips_ (1918) was connected to the Louise Lovely Productions banner in the US, as was _A Day at the_ Studio (shot at CBC's Triangle Studio in Los Angeles), which was co-produced by Louise Lovely Productions (and Louise was the co-writer as well as star/presenter). They also credit her as producer on: _Sirens of the Sea_ (1917), _Nobody's Wife_ (1918), _The Girl Who Wouldn't Quit_ (1918), and _A Rich Man's Darling_ (1918), although her "producer credit" on the this last title was reportedly removed byCarl Laemmle.
CITATION
Delamoir, Jeannette. "Louise Lovely." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. _Women Film Pioneers Project._ New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013.⤒ Return to top
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