Women and the Silent Screen conference

Tsuru Aoki and her husband Sessue Hayakawa in Courageous Coward (1919)

The Fifth International Women and the Silent Screen Conference is being held at Stockholm University, Sweden, 11–13 June 2008, and a full programme with screenings has now been published. The aim of the conference is to “celebrate the diversity of women’s engagement with silent cinemas across the globe”, and it’s very interesting to see the current issues being covered by the papers and some of the unfamiliar films which are being put back on the screens in response to such new debates. This is why we have research; so we can see more.

Here’s the outline conference programme:

Wednesday, June 11

Keynote address
Jane Gaines - Women and the Cinematification of the World

11:00–12:45
Parallel Sessions 1.1
National and Transnational
Rosanna Maule - Feminist Film History and the (Un)problematic Treatment of Trans-nationalism in Early Cinema
Christine Gledhill - Mary Pickford: Emerging Stardom and Transnational Circulation
Sanjoy Saksena - Image of Women in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indian Cinema
Phil Powrie - Josephine Baker and Pierre Batcheff in La Sirène des tropiques (1927)

Sharpened Pencils
Domenico Spinosa - The didactic-instructive task of cinema (1907-1918) in the Italian women writings
Luca Mazzei - Going to movies wearing a skirt and handling a pen. Women writing about cinema 1898-1916
Luigia Annunziata - Matilde Serao and the cinema
Louis Pelletier - Ray Lewis and the Birth of Canadian Film Culture

Germaine Dulac
April Miller - Pure Cinema, Pure Violence: Murder as Avant-Garde Aesthetic in Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman and La Souriante Madame Beudet
Tami M. Williams - An Invitation to a Voyage: Cross medial spatial metaphors, modes of transport and sexual liberation in the cinema of Germaine Dulac
Catherine Siberschmidt - The concept of spectatorship in Germaine Dulac’s film theory
Sarah Keller - “Optical Harmonies”: Sight and Sound in Germaine Dulac’s Integral Cinema

13:45–16:00
Parallel Sessions 1.2
Conceptualizing “Female Pioneers”
Shelley Stamp - Lois Weber’s ”Feminine Hand” at Rex
Karen Ward Mahar - Working Girls: The Masculinization of American Business in Film and Advice Literature in the 1920s
Isabel Arredondo - Forgetting Women Film Pioneers: Juliet Rublee and the Myth of the Avant-Garde
Mark Lynn Anderson - The Real Dorothy: Mrs. Wallace Reid, the Newspaper, and Feminist Film Historiography
Monica Dall’Asta - What Means to Be a Woman: Theorizing Feminist Film History Beyond the Essentialism / Constructionism Divide

Case Studies in Stardom
Tijana Mamula - Ideal Situation: Projecting Knowledge in Prix de Beauté
Miya Tokumitsu - f(Swoon): The Function of the Female Swoon in Silent Film
Nicole Beth Wallenbrock - The Hollywood Flapper dies an Expressionist Death (Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box)
Galen Wilson - Performance of Anxiety: Les Vampires and the Crisis of Gender in the Fin-de-Siecle
Hélène Fleckinger -“The wicked woman” On the character of Irma Vep in Les Vampires of Louis Feuillade

Authorship and Screenwriting
Vincent L. Barnett - The Novelist as Hollywood Star: Author Royalties and Studio Income in the 1920s
Alexis Weedon - Elinor Glyn the Author On Page and Screen
Stephan Michael Schröder - The conditions of freelance script writing – example Harriet Bloch
Claus Tieber - Between Sentimentalism and Modernity: The narrative structure of Frances Marion’s screenplays
Anke Brouwers - The Name Behind the Titles: Women, Authorship and Silent Screenwriting

Thursday, June 12

9:00–10:45
Parallel Sessions 2.1
Cross-Gender Casting and Lesbian Characters
Astrid Söderbergh Widding - Flickan i frack – A Case of Cross-Dressing
Laura Horak - Edna/Billy Foster, the Biograph “Boy”
Fiona Philip - Veiled Disclosures and ‘Speaking Back’: Borderline (1930) and the Presences of Censorship
Susan Potter - Opening up Pandora’s Box

American Stardom
Mary Desjardins - A Method to this Madness? The Myth of the Mad Silent Film Star
Charlie Keil - ’Studio Girls’: Female Stars and the Logic of Brand Names
Jeannette Delamoir - Mary Pickford and Louise Lovely: The silent motion-picture star in the age of reproduction
Tricia Welsch - From Pratfalls to Glamour: Gloria Swanson at Triangle

(Re)discovering Female Filmmakers 1
Nathalie Morris - “Alma isn’t Talking”: The Early Career of Alma Reville aka Mrs Alfred Hitchcock
Claudia Preschl and Elisabeth Streit - Making Noice (Proud to be loud). Women in the Silent-Period of Austrian Film History
Anne Bachmann - Parallel stories? Ebba Lindkvist’s brief career and the film version of a
theatrical play
Annemone Ligensa - “A Cinematography of Feminine Thought”: The Novel The Dangerous Age (1910) by Karin Michaelis and Its Filmic Adaptations

Parallel Sessions 2.2
(Re)considering Genres and “Feminine Tastes”
Lea Jacobs - On Hating Valentino: The Rejection of the Romantic Drama in the American Cinema of the 1920s
Annette Förster - Humorous reflections on acting, filmmaking and genre in comic film productions by Adriënne Solser, Musidora, and Nell Shipman
Kristen Anderson Wagner - “Ever on the Move”: Silent Comediennes and the New Woman

Fashion and Fandom
Mila Ganeva - Women between Screenwriting and Fashion Journalism: The Case of Ruth Goetz
Therése Andersson - Beauty Box – Film Stars and Beauty Culture in Early 20th Century Sweden
Andrea Haller - “Flimmeritis” and Fashion – Early intermedial practices of female movie fandom in Imperial Germany
Lisa Stead - “It costs nothing to wish!” Female Fan Writing and Self-Representation in the British Silent Cinema

(Re)discovering Female Filmmakers 2
Marcela de Souza Amaral - Alice Guy and the narrative cinema
Mike C. Vienneau - The discursive Art of Alice Guy: The cinema and the feminine silent word
Jindiška Bláhová - “The lady crazy about film” – demystifying Thea 􀀀ervenková, the mystery woman of the early Czechoslovak cinema
Micaela Veronesi - A woman wants to create the world. Umanità by Elvira Giallanella

14:00–15:45
Parallel Sessions 2.3
Stardom and Intermediality
Anne Morey - Geraldine Farrar: A Film Star from Another Medium
Victoria Duckett - A new anachronism: Sarah Bernhardt and the modern theatrical film
Elena Mosconi - The Star as an Artist: Italian Divas between Symbolism and Liberty
Maria Elena D’Amelio - Damned Queens. Two case studies on the dark ladies in Cabiria and Maciste all’inferno films

(Re)discovering Female Filmmakers 3
Begoña Soto Vázquez - How to research the exception: the power of the unknown
María Cami-Vela - Women, bullfighters and identity in Spanish Silent Cinema: Musidora
Bárbara Barroso - Virgína de Castro e Almeida: writing, producing and envisioning film
Nadi Tofighian - Isabel and José – the pioneer tandem filmmakers of the Philippines

More than Filmmakers
Anne Marit Myrstad - Film censorship, morality and female identity: Fernanda Nissen, a case study
Joshua Yumibe - The Gendering of Color and Coloring of Films: Female Film Colorists of the Silent Era
Christopher Natzén - Greta Håkansson – a female conductor in a time of change during the transition to sound film in Sweden 1928-1932
Tony Fletcher - Laura Eugenia Smith and the Biokam Films

16:15–18:00
Parallel Sessions 2.4
Film Festivals and Screening Networks
Kay Armatage - Women’s Cinema, Film Festivals and Their Contribution to Women’s Film History
Ingrid Stigsdotter and Kelly Robinson - ‘Clowning Glories’: A Case Study of a Festival Programme and its Audiences
Rebeca Ibanez-Martin and Andrea Gautier Sansalvador - Women as Archivers of Films Made by Women: the Project of Envideas

Russian Pioneers
Dunja Dogo - Re-editing History in the Works of Esfir’ I. Šub (1927-30)
Ilana Sharp - Esfir Shub’s Costructivist Non-Fiction Film and Soviet Silent Cinema
Lauri Piispa - Vera Kholodnaia: Queen of Screen, Slave of Love
Michele Torre - A woman of all trades: Zoia Barantsevich, a pioneer in early Russian cinema

Asta Nielsen
Ansje van Beusekom - Asta Nielsen in the Netherlands in 1920
Annette Brauerhoch - Between Pleasure and Pain: Asta Nielsens Acting Acts
Heide Schlüpmann - Playing History – Asta Nielsen in Early Cinema
Karola Gramann - Screening and discussion

Friday, June 13

9:00–10:45
Parallel Sessions 3.1
Three Histories, One Archive
Jennifer Horne - Premediations: Previewing for Better Motion Pictures, 1916-1930
Mark Garrett Cooper - The Universal Women: An Institutional Explanation
Richard Abel - Unexplored Margaret Herrick Library Resources, 1910-1916

Chinese Stardom
Yiman Wang - Between “Yellowface” and “Yellow Yellowface” – Anna May Wong and Her Chinese Audience during the Interwar Era
Erin Kelley – Dance, Stardom, and the Trans-National Celebrity Status of Anna May Wong
Qin Xiqing - Pearl White and the New Female Image in Chinese Silent Cinema
Yuan Chen - Wang Hanlun, a ‘successful’ Runaway Nora in Early Chinese Film Industry
Ruixue Jia - Silence can kill: rethinking Rua Ling-yu’s tradgedy

Images of Women
Constance Balides - Moralizing Typologies to Sociological Personalities: Delinquent Women in Early Social Problem Films
William Van Watson - Enrico Guazzoni’s Marcantonio and Cleopatra: The Feline-Feminine Construct and the Colonial Dangers of Heavy Petting
Selin Tüzün Gül - From stage to the screen: Actresses as one of the symbols of Turkish modernization project
Tommy Gustafsson - The Significance of the New Woman in Swedish Silent Film

11:15–13:00
Parallel Sessions 3.2
Politics of Ethnicity
Denise McKenna - What Happened to Myrtle? Latina Stars in Early Hollywood
Ora Gelley - Race and Gender in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915): Patterns of Narration and Vision
Nina Cartier - I Get Lifted?: Delineating Uplift’s Restrictions Upon Black Female Desire in Silent Era Race Films
Kyna B. Morgan - The First African American Woman Film Producer: Maria P. Williams and The Flames of Wrath

European Stars and Audiences
Dominique Nasta and Muriel Andrin - Engaging National Emotions on Screen: European Silent Women in “strikingly effective” Melodramas
Anna Cabak Rédei - Garbo as ’Greta’ in Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925)
Irina Novikova - Female Stars of Cinematic Peripheries – Lilita Berzinja (Latvia)
Silvia Horváth - Feminine (self-)staging in the Hungarian Silent Film of the 1910th

Strike a Pose: Female Models and Magicians
Cynthia Chris - Censoring Purity
Pierre Chemartin and Nicolas Dulac - The pose as performance: Early cinema acting and the female stereotype
Matthew Solomon - Women and the Trick Film

An extraordinary line-up indeed. And here are the films scheduled for evening screenings, with the conference organisers’ notes and comments. Note in particular the premiere of the restoration of the recently rediscovered Mary Pickford title, The Dawn of Tomorrow:

LA RUSE DE MISS PLUMCAKE / MISS PLUMCAKE’S TRICK (France, 1911)
35mm b/w print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
180 meters, 5 mins (18fps)
Dutch inter-titles
Prod: Pathé Frères / SCAGL
Director: Georges Monca
Script: unknown
Cast: Mistinguett, Andree Pascal, Charles Lorrain

This comedy offers us the music-hall star and future ‘queen’ of the revue, Mistinguett, in the role of a maid that is mistaken for her American mistress while visiting Paris. Mistinguett makes a parody of the
attractiveness of American women and lampoons Parisian men’s idolatry with them. The film’s inclusion in the program serves three purposes: first, because the print is incomplete, it may be taken as an example of a fragment, one of the core topics of this conference; second, bringing the existence of this rare print of a Pathé-SCAGL comedy with Mistinguett to the attention of feminist film historians; and third, calling attention to Mistinguett’s significance to the relations between French music-hall and cinema in the early 1910s, which deserves more research.

DIE LANDPOMERANZE / THE UNWIELDY COUNTRY WOMAN (Germany, 1917?)
35mm (Desmet method) colour print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
540meters (ca)., 26mins (18fps)
German intertitles
Prod: Treumann-Larsen Film GmbH
Director: Dr. R. Portegg aka Rosa Porten and Franz Eckstein
Script: Rosa Porten
Cast: Rosa Porten (Isa), Franz Verdier (Caspar Freiherr), Max Wogritsch (Jürgen von Oesterlingk)

Isa’s father, a wealthy gentleman of the countryside, wants her to marry Jürgen. However, Jürgen is rather prejudiced towards country women. Furthermore, he is attracted to a rich girl from the city. Upon hearing this, Isa, who doesn’t want to get married anyway, swears to teach Jürgen a lesson. For this purpose, she leaves her house and applies for a job (disguised as a boy) at Jürgen’s household. This fast-paced comedy, written and directed by Rosa Porten herself, appears in almost no written sources. It is therefore no surprise that this film was lost for many years, until this incomplete print appeared in the Nederlands Filmmuseum collection, carrying the original German titles. Die Landpomeranze has been preserved in 2008 in order to be presented for the very first time at this conference. Given the impossibility to complete the missing ending, due to complete lack of written sources, the preserved print has an open end, in hope that the missing reel(s) get discovered somewhere in the future.

Trailer DIE GESUNKENEN / THE SUNKEN (Germany, 1925)
35mm b/w print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
65 meters, 3 mins (18fps)
German inter-titles
Prod: Aafa Film
Director: Rudolf Walther-Fein
Script: Ruth Goetz and Leo Heller, based on the novel by Luise Westkirch
Cast: Asta Nielsen, Olga Tschechova, Hans Albers, Wilhlem Dieterle, Otto Gebühr

Dutch trailer from the presumed lost Asta Nielsen film Die Gesunkenen (1925), a drama based on a scenario by Ruth Goetz after the novel Diebe (Thieves) by Luise Westkirch. The Dutch censorship board noted about the film (2340 meters, + 117 minutes): ‘rough milieu’, ‘cocaine abuse’, ‘prostitution’, ‘ladies and gents of suspect repute’. In addition to Nielsen, the film featured the actors William Dieterle, Otto Gebühr, Olga Tschechowa and Hans Albers.

‘A SANTANOTTE / HOLY NIGHT (Italy, 1922)
35 mm colour print restored by Associazione Orlando (Bologna), Cineteca Nazionale (Rome) and George
Eastman House (Rochester, USA), with the endowment of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
1250 meters, 61 mins (18 fps)
Italian inter-titles
Prod: Films Dora (Neaples), “Serie grandi lavori popolari.”
Director: Elvira Notari
Script: Elvira Notari, based on the song ‘A Santanotte by Eduardo Scala (words), Francesco Buongiovanni
(music).
Photography: Nicola Notari.
Principal cast: Rosè Angione (Nanninella), Alberto Danza (Tore Spina), Eduardo Notari (Gennariello), Elisa
Cava (madre di Tore), Carluccio, a student of Notari’s school of acting.
Original length: mt. 1285.

Based on a popular Neapolitan song by Eduardo Scala and Francesco Buongiovanni, ‘A santanotte was one of the greatest hits of Elvira and Nicola Notari’s Dora Films. It tells the tragic story of Nanninella, a waitress who supports her alcoholic and abusive father Giuseppone. She is in love with Tore, but her father prefers the deceptive Carluccio. When Giuseppone accidentally dies, Carluccio accuses Tore of murder. Nanninella is forced to accept Carluccio’s marriage proposal hoping that this will convince him to withdraw his accusations against Tore. As she tries to escape with Tore on the day of her wedding, the film ends in death and misery. The story has several points in common with that of Assunta Spina, a popular theatrical drama by Salvatore Di Giacomo that Francesca Bertini had adapted into a film in 1915. Yet Notari’s film surpasses its predecessor in its crude representation of patriarchal oppression, offering a powerful melodramatic interpretation of the everyday experience of so many Italian working class women at the beginning of the century.

DIE BÖRSENKÖNIGIN / THE QUEEN OF THE STOCK-EXCHANGE (Germany, 1916)
35mm colour print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
1090 meters, 52 mins (18fps)
Dutch inter-titles
Prod: Neutral Film
Dir: Edmund Edel
Script: Edmund Edel
Cast: Asta Nielsen, Aruth Wartan, Willy Kaiser-Heyl

Asta Nielsen plays the proprietor of a copper mine on the verge of ruin. After the plant manager has traced a new copper vein, she buys the almost worthless shares and therewith secures the finances of the mine and herself. Gratefully, she makes the manager, with whom she is also in love, a share-holder. But when he deceives her with another woman, she takes revenge with great sovereignty. The film is particularly interesting for its setting – the male-dominated milieus of an industrial plant and of the stock-exchange – and for Nielsen’s superior role in it, which she plays with both style and gusto.

Trailer VADERTJE LANGBEEN / DADDY LONGLEGS (The Netherlands, 1919)
35mm b/w print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
32 meters, 1 min (18fps)
Dutch inter-titles
Prod: Mary Pickford Co.
Director: Marshall Neilan
Script: Agnes Johnson, based on the novel by Jean Webster
Cast: Mary Pickford (Jerusha Abbott), Milla Davenport (Mrs. Lippett)

Among the few silent trailers of the Filmmuseum collection, this stylish trailer is remarkable for the drawings it contains. Discovered and preserved in 2004 during the international Mary Pickford research project by Christel Schmidt, this film has only been shown in Amsterdam during the Pickford program. Although the trailer shows nothing of the film itself, it constitutes an important evidence to prove the
popularity of Mary Pickford with Dutch audiences.

THE DAWN OF A TOMORROW / NATTENS SKUGGOR (USA, 1915)
35mm colour print from the Archival Film Collections of the Swedish Film Institute
1283 meters, 66 mins (17 fps)
Swedish inter-titles
Prod: Famous Players Film Co.
Director: James Kirkwood
Script: Eve Unsell, based on the novel and the play The Dawn of a Tomorrow by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Principal cast: Mary Pickford (Glad), David Powell (Dandy), Forrest Robinson (Sir Oliver Holt), Robert
Cain (his nephew)

This conference screening will be the premiere of the restored Mary Pickford film The Dawn of a Tomorrow, a film that was considered lost until a tinted nitrate print with Swedish inter-titles surfaced in 2005. The film is set in London and Pickford plays Glad, ”the poorest and happiest of all orphans”. During the course of the film, this angel in a Dickensian world gives shelter to an evicted mother and child, prevents a suicide, intervenes to inhibit domestic violence, and convinces her sweetheart to reform. The beauty of the close-ups displays an extraordinary preciseness of expression that makes this long lost Pickford film a revelation to watch.

FLICKAN I FRACK / THE GIRL IN TAILS (Sweden, 1926)
35mm colour print from the Archival Film Collections of the Swedish Film Institute
2506 meters, 115 mins (19 fps)
Swedish inter-titles
Prod: AB Biografernas Filmdepôt
Director: Karin Swanström
Script: Hjalmar Bergman, Ivar Johansson, based on the novel Flickan i frack by Hjalmar Bergman
Principal cast: Einar Axelsson (Ludwig von Battwhyl), Magda Holm (Katja Kock), Nils Arehn (her father),
Georg Blomstedt (Starck, the headmaster), Karin Swanström (Hyltenius, the vicar’s wife), Erik
Zetterström (Curry, Katja’s brother)

An early example of cross-dressing in Swedish film, a restored version of the comedy Flickan i frack will be screened at the conference for the first time ever. Magda Holm plays Katja, a bright, small-town daughter of an inventor who cares more for the upbringing of his son than his daughter. When Katja’s request for money to buy a new dress for the examination ball is turned down by her father, she decides to attend the ball dressed in tails, creating a further scandal by drinking and smoking cigars. Flickan i frack was Karin Swanström’s fourth and last film as a director, and she also plays one of the leading parts in the film. The film was remade in 1956.

BILLY’S STRATEGEM / DE LIST VAN BILLY (USA, 1912)
35mm b/w print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum, courtesy of the AFI.
290 meters, 14 mins (18fps)
Dutch inter-titles
Prod: Biograph
Director: D.W. Griffith
Script: George Hennessy
Cast: Edna Foster (Billy), Wilfred Lucas, Claire McDowell, Inez Seabury, Robert Harron, William Butler

Billy and his sister are home with their grandfather, while their parents are out working. Their house gets attacked by the Indians, who get past the grandfather. However, Billy has a plan; he finds a way to get out of the house and blows up the house with the Indians in it. This Griffith film, starring Edna Foster as Billy, was repatriated from the Nederlands Filmmuseum archive to the USA, through the AFI, back in 1974. The film was then restored by the AFI, and a projection print, still carrying Dutch titles was kindly donated to the Filmmuseum Collection.

COURAGEOUS COWARD /SUKI’S REHABILITATIE (USA, 1919)
35mm (Desmet method) colour print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
283 meters, 14 mins (18fps)
Dutch inter-titles
Prod: Haworth Pictures
Director: William Worthington
Script: Frances Guihan, based on a story by Tom Geraghty
Cast: Sessue Hayakawa (Suki Iota), Tsuru Aoki (Rei Oaki)

Suki Iota, a young Japanese-American lawyer, is investigating a murder case and is secretly in love with his custodian’s niece, Rei. When Suki realizes that Rei’s boyfriend Tom is involved in the murder case, he drops it, despite being called a coward for his actions. The only surviving fragment of this long lost film is its last reel. Despite the fact that most of the action is lost, Nederlands Filmmuseum decided to make a presentation print of this fragment, since it is still worthwhile to watch Tsuru Aoki and her real-life husband Sessue Hayakawa in the few romantic scenes that have survived. Another point of interest is the way in which Aoki’s character gets criticized in the film as a young woman of Japanese origins who in her eagerness to become Americanized neglects her own roots.

UMANITÀ / HUMANKIND (1919)
35 mm colour print restored by Associazione Orlando (Bologna) and Cineteca Nazionale (Rome), with
the endowment of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
720 meters, 35 mins (18 fps)
Italian inter-titles
Prod: Liana Film (Rome)
Director: Elvira Giallanella
Script: Based on Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta’s poem Tranquillino dopo la guerra vuol ricreare il mondo
Principal cast: a little boy (Tranquillino), a little girl (Serenetta)

Presented in an introductory title as a “humoristic-satirical-educational” work, the film is centered on two young siblings, Tranquillino and Serenetta, who get up during the night to steal from the jam jar and play with Daddy’s cigarettes. The smoke gives Tranquillino a terrifying dream: the world has been destroyed by a terrible war and his attempts to recreate the world only makes him retrace and redo the mistakes of humankind during the course of history, from dictatorship to war. The backward trip throughout the pastmakes the kids realise that history has been built on arms and war. Desperate and frightened, they seek help in prayer and are finally saved by a bearded God, who appears in the sky and takes them in his arms. Based on a poem for children by Vittorio Emanuele Bravetta, Umanità is the only title in Elvira Giallanella’s filmography as a director. A quite mysterious figure, Giallanella was involved in film production since 1913, when she participated in the founding of the Vera Film company, which produced one of the first Futurist films, Mondo baldoria (1913). It is uncertain whether Umanità was ever screened, as it’s not listed in the censorship archives and never mentioned in period film magazines.

KAERLIGHED OG PENGE / LOVE OR MONEY aka OUTWITTED (Denmark, 1912)
35mm colour print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
260 meters, 13 mins (18fps)
Dutch inter-titles
Prod: Nordisk Films Kompagni
Director: Leo Tscherning
Script: Harriet Bloch
Cast: Else Frölich, Oscar Stribolt

Kaerlighed og penge is a comedy after a scenario by Harriet Bloch in which men’s intentions with women are getting spoofed. Both the situation and the plot are rather surprising. The main character, Karen, is a well-to-do single mother with a son. She has three admirers courting her: a lieutenant, a poet and a wealthy man. This amuses rather than impresses her, and she candidly questions if they are after her love or her money. One day, her friend from America, Ebba, visits Karin, who seizes the opportunity to throw a party. Together they concoct a test to find out about each man’s true intentions… and they are having a ball while evaluating the outcome.

PAS DE FEMMES! / NO WOMEN! (France, 1920)
35mm (Desmet method) colour print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
506 meters, 27 mins (18fps)
Dutch inter-titles
Prod: Film Denizot, Marseilles
Director: Vincenzo Denizot
Script: unknown
Cast: unknown

This comedy is exceptional in two respects: first, it seems to be an unknown French production by the Italian director Vicenzo Denizot, known from Maciste-films; and most importantly in the context of this
conference, it seems a rare counterpart to the many anti-suffragette films of the time: it ridicules antifeminism. A luxury hotel by the sea is occupied by a bunch of spoiled girls eager for excitement beyond their daily routines of gourmet dining and playing tennis. The chief rascal among them is Suzy, who preferably drives her governess to despair with her unruliness. One day, a notorious anti-feminist arrives together with his nephew, to recover from the stress of campaigning against furious women. He demands to be served only by men and chases the chamber maid from his room. The girls agree that this is an affront to women’s dignity and Suzy is appointed by lot to scheme and lead their vengeance…

DIE LIST EINER ZIGARETTENMACHERIN / WANDA’S TRICK (Germany, 1918)
35mm colour print from the Nederlands Filmmuseum
920 meters, 45 mins (18fps)
French inter-titles
Prod: Treumann-Larsen Film GmbH
Director: Dr. R. Portegg aka Rosa Porten and Franz Eckstein
Script: Wanda Treumann
Cast: Wanda Treumann, Heinrich Schroth, Marie Grimm-Einödshofer

This is a film produced by and starring German comedienne Wanda Treumann, and co-written and co-directed by Rosa Porten. Rosa Porten made films in the 1910s together with her husband Franz Eckstein, using the pseudonym Dr. R. Portegg. According to contemporary press, they were known for their proficient direction. The film mixes comedy with romance and social drama. It focuses on the interrelations of gender and class and on a factory girl’s independent spirit, business competence, and sense of humour. The plot has a serious undertone, but both its comic twists and Treumann’s guileless acting lend it a striking breeziness and a pro-lib edge.

A remarkable selection, with a palpable sense of exciting discovery. All details of the conference and screenings, including registration, accommodation, location and so forth, can be found on the conference website.

Alice, Cleo, Dorothy, Lois and Ruth

www.kino.com

More DVD releases, though in this case it is the DVD release (22 April) of titles previously only available on videotape. Kino is issuing three DVDs of silent films made by American women directors, available singly or bundled as ‘First Ladies‘. Kino claims that “the mid-1910s was a virtual golden age for women directors, with over a dozen women working behind the camera.” ‘Golden Age’ might seem to suggest an era of unfettered opportunity and creative expression, which was hardly the case. No woman was able to get behind the camera without a tough struggle, but nevertheless there were proportionately more women directors at this period than for many decades thereafter, and enough survives for us to value a distinctive and often clearly feminist body or work.

First up is the double-feature The Ocean Waif (1916), directed by Alice Guy-Blaché and 49-17 (1917), written and directed by Ruth Ann Baldwin. Alice Guy (right) or Alice Guy-Blaché (she married cameraman/ producer Herbert Blaché) is arguably the most notable of early women filmmakers; certainly one whose career has been championed in some quarters to the point of myth. She was taken on as Léon Gaumont’s secretary in 1897, and swiftly became head of film production at Gaumont, producing hundreds of short films (including proto-sound films). She moved to America in 1907 when her husband was made head of Gaumont’s office in New York. She returned to filmmaking in 1910 for her own company, Solax, before becoming an independent filmmaker, and it was during this period that she made The Ocean Waif for William Randolph Hearst’s International Film Service. Kino describes it as “a romantic story, plenty of pathos but no brutality, a likeable hero and an innocent young woman, and a suspenseful plot with a dramatic and happy ending”. It is one of the few films of hers from this period that survives. She carried on directing with moderate success throughout the teens, but her career petered out after her divorce in 1922, after which she returned to obscurity, only to be rediscovered in old age and awarded the Legion d’Honneur by a grateful French government.

The American Ruth Ann Baldwin was a journalist turned screenwriter, film editor and director. 49-17 is a parody Western, starring Jean Hersholt. It was her only feature (she directed several two-reelers), though apparently it was a hit, and the remainder of her film credits are for scriptwriting.

Baldwin worked for Universal studios, which seems to have been more encouraging of women directors than its rivals. It was home to Cleo Madison, actress turned director of the short film Eleanor’s Catch (1916), which is paired on the second DVD with Lois Weber’s feature The Hypocrites (1915). Weber (left) is the most notable of American women director of the silent era, a filmmaker as bold in technique as she was in ideas. She too started with the Gaumont company, as an actress, where for a time she worked alongside Alice Guy, and married a Gaumont manager Phillips Smalley. She turned to directing films in 1911, directing many shorts, including (with Smalley) the classic stylistic thriller Suspense (1913), before making her name with a succession of controversial and issue-led films, such as Where Are My Children? (1916) on abortion, The People vs John Doe (1916) on capital punishment as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1917) on birth control. The Hypocrites (1915), on religion and hypocrisy, itself caused contoversy for its use of nude woman (representing naked truth). She too worked for a time at Universal, enjoyed further success as a director into the early 1920, only to see her career crumble following the break-up of her marriage and a nervous breakdown.

The third DVD, The Red Kimona (1925) was directed by Dorothy Davenport Reid, better known as Mrs Wallace Reid (right), the wife of the wretched Wallace Reid. He was the actor whose death through drug addiction so shocked Hollywood and the nation, leading his wife to appear in the impassioned anti-drug film Human Wreckage (1923), which featured in the Bioscope Festival of Lost Films. After the success of that film she formed her own production company, and made this concerned drama (based on a true story) of a young woman lured into a life of prostitution, starring Priscilla Bonner. Its notable female credits continue, with a story by future director Dorothy Arzner and screenplay by Adela Rogers St. John. She continued to have some success as a director into the 1930s and thereafter as a screenwriter.

As said, it would be misleading to look upon 1910s America as some sort of golden period for women filmmakers, except by the modest proportion of women able to make films compared to later decades. It was still a cinema dominated by men in every field of production, and probably only Lois Weber rose to real prominence and power. Alice Guy worked regularly as a director in America throughout the 1910s, but generally for minor film companies set up by her husband. Her public profile was nothing like Webers. Dorothy Davenport made some courageous films, but she was never a leading figure, and by the mid-1920s women filmmakers were virtually unknown in America. The others were actresses or scenarists who were allowed a brief turn behind the camera.

However, if it was not Utopia, it nevertheless was a time of opportunities to be taken to create films from the woman’s point of view, and this Guy, Weber and Davenport undoubtedly did. They did not simply ape common themes and styles but purposefully chose subjects of particular interest to them as women, or simply revealed a different eye in how they placed and treate female protagonists within the narratives that they told. These films are no mere curiosities, but evidence of a different way of making films and seeing films. It’s good to see them made available again in this way.

When the Far East mingles with the West

The Curse of Quon Gwon, from http://festival.asianamericanmedia.org

In 2004, American filmmaker Arthur Dong was working on a documentary, Hollywood Chinese. He came across two reels of a lost and barely-known silent film from 1916-17. Amazingly, it was made by and for the Chinese-American community. The Curse of Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles with the West was all the more remarkable for having been written and directed by a woman, Marion Wong. It was instantly recognised for its national importance, and in 2006 it was added to the National Film Registry of American treasures marked out for permanent preservation.

The film was found in a basement in Oakland, California, Marion Wong’s home town and location for the film. The film’s exhibition this week at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland has generated a far bit of publicity, and a local news report on ABC7 News which is worth checking out because it has some clips from the film, plus an interview with Dong. The same clips are also available on the site of Deep Focus Productions, which made the documentary Hollywood Chinese, and which has background information on Wong’s film. It’s a graceful, professional-looking production, offering a tantalisingly narrow window on a community and on a little-known strand of American filmmaking.

Little seems known about the film itself. Marion Wong made it for Mandarin Film Productions, and employed mostly family members for its production. Wong herself acts in the film, as do her sister-in-law Violet Wong (whose daughters had held on to film until Arthur Dong discovered it) and her mother Chin See, while other family members worked on costumes, sets and finance. Overall there was a Chinese cast of thirty. The surviving film is incomplete, reels four and seven of what may have been an eight reel feature. A 16mm print duplicates this footage while adding an additional ten minutes. The film is now preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

What other Chinese-American filmmaking existed in the silent era? The Curse of Quon Gwon is thought to be the first Chinese-American film, but what led Marion Wong to produce it, and what followed it? Was it actually shown in public? There doesn’t seem to be any actual evidence that it was screened, just that it lost the family a lot of money. The Deep Focus website tells us that Motion Picture World of 17 July 1917 noted the film, saying that its plot:

… deals with the curse of a Chinese god that follows his people because of the influence of western civilization. The first part is taken in California, showing the intrigues of the Chinese who are living in this country in behalf of the Chinese monarchical government, and those who are working for the revolutionists in favor of a Chinese republic. A love story begins here and is carried through the rest of the production.

Another press notice from May 1916 has Wong’s thoughts on her film:

“I had never seen any Chinese movies,” Miss Wong said today, “so I decided to introduce them to the world. I first wrote the love story. Then I decided that people who are interested in my people and my country would like to see some of the customs and manners of China. So I added to the love drama many scenes depicting these things. I do hope it will be a success.”

There’s a helpful family history for Marion Wong on the CineMedua site, but I’ve found nothing else of Chinese-American filmmaking in the silent era (plenty of Chinese-American characters of course, usually of the tedious ‘yellow peril’ villainous type, alas), certainly not in the American Film Institute catalog. So maybe it’s a remarkable one-off, not a fragment of a lost history but a fleeting vision of a history that might have been.

Women and British silent cinema

Women and Silent British Cinema

Congratulations and welcome to the latest silent cinema blog on the block, WSBC - Women and British Silent Cinema. Not so much a blog, though, more a focal point for the growing research interest in women and silent cinema generally. It has information on conferences past and future, and links to external resources, including a promised WSBC Wiki site. Of most interest probably is the long list of British women involved in film in various ways from the silent era (just a handful so far with biographies attached), which covers relatively well known (in this narrow field) figures as Betty Balfour, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Elsa Lanchester, Caroline Lejeune, Blanche McIntosh, Joan Morgan, Alma Reville, Marie Stopes and Virginia Woolf, while also providing many names of which few as yet know anything. I look forward to finding out in due course just who were Mrs K. Beck, Elise Codd, Nellie Tom Gallon, Jean de Kirharski, Edith Nepean and Jane Tarlo.

Some you will have already met through the pages of the Bioscope: Jessica Borthwick, Gladys, Marchioness of Townshend, Jakidawdra Melford. More, I can promise, will follow.

Clowning glories

Clara Bow in The Wild Party, from www.birds-eye-view.co.uk

The Birds Eye View Film Festival returns 6–14 March 2008. This is the UK’s festival of women filmmakers, and as was the case last year it includes a silent film strand.

This year the festival features ‘Clowning Glories’, a retrospective of women in film comedy before 1930, to be held at the BFI South Bank. The titles being shown are:

• 7 Mar - My Best Girl (USA 1927 d. Sam Taylor). With Mary Pickford
• 8 Mar - Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to be a Man) (Germany 1918 d. Ernst Lubitsch). With Ossi Oswalda + The Danger Girl (USA 1916 d. Clarence G. Badger). With Gloria Swanson
• 10 Mar - The Vagabond Queen (UK 1929 d. Geza von Bolváry). With Betty Balfour
• 11 Mar - Show People (USA 1928 d. King Vidor). With Marion Davies + Mabel’s Dramatic Career (USA 1913 d. Mack Sennett). With Mabel Normand
• 12 Mar - The Love Expert (USA 1920 d. David Kirkland). With Constance Talmadge, Natalie Talmadge + Blue Bottles (UK 1928 d. Ivor Montagu). With Elsa Lanchester
• 13 Mar - The Wild Party (USA 1929 d. Dorothy Arzner). With Clara Bow + A House Divided (USA 1913 d. Alice Guy)

There’s a complementary season of screwball comediennes of the 1930s, the UK premiere of Cannes hit Expired starring Samantha Morton, LFF critics’ choice Unrelated, and documentaries from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and Nepal. Plus mobile phone filmmaking, women in video games, music vids, fashion films, and “a one off Whitechapel Gallery Late Night event starring a high profile all girl line up of live artists, VJ’s and DJ’s”. More details from the festival website.

Human Wreckage

USA 1923

Director: John Griffith Wray
Production company: Thomas H. Ince Corporation
Director of photography: Henry Sharp
Script: C. Gardner Sullivan

Cast: Mrs Wallace Reid (Ethel MacFarland), James Kirkwood (Alan MacFarland), Bessie Love (Mary Finnegan), George Hackathorne (Jimmy Brown), Claire McDowell (Mrs Brown), Robert McKim (Dr Hillman), Harry Northrup (Steve Stone), Victory Bateman (Mrs Finnegan), Eric Mayne (Dr Blake), Otto Hoffman (Harris), Philip Sleeman (Dunn), George Clark (The Baby), Lucille Ricksen (Ginger Smith), George E. Cryer (A city official), Dr R.B. von Kleinsmid (An educator), Benjamin Bledsoe (A jurist), Louis D. Oaks (A police official), Martha Nelson McCan (A civic leader), Mrs Chester Ashley (A civic leader), John P. Carter (A civic leader), Mrs Charles F. Gray (A civic leader), Dr L. M. Powers (A health authority), Brig. C. R. Boyd (Salvation Army worker)

7,215 feet
Distributed by Film Booking Offices of America

Mrs Wallace Reid and Bessie Love (right), in Human Wreckage

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening, and welcome to the third screening of the Bioscope Festival of Lost Films. Today we find ourselves at the Casino de Paris in London’s Oxford Street. This small but fine building, which first opened its doors on 18 September 1909, seats just 175 of you. The venue has been chosen for its select nature, as only an invited and carefully vetted audience could be allowed in to see this evening’s sensational production which - as you will know - has been banned by the British Board of Film Censors. It is only under special licence from the London County Council that we are able to show it to you at all. The music comes from that legend among silent film pianists, Mr Arthur Dulay (round of applause).

What is also special about this evening’s main film is that it is to be shown in the presence of its principal performer, Dorothy Davenport, previously a popular film actress but now perhaps best known to you all as Mrs Wallace Reid (murmurs of sympathy). For it was the unfortunate death of her husband, the much-loved Wallace Reid, as the result of a wretched morphine addiction, that led her to produce Human Wreckage, and she has been tireless in presenting the film herself at its screenings across America. She is in this country to promote the film’s serious message, and we welcome her (warm and prolonged applause).

The history of Wallace Reid you will know well. The highly popular American star of such popular films as The Affairs of Anatol and Forever, became addicted to morphine, it is said after he suffered injuries in a railroad crash in 1919, while making The Valley of the Giants. What was at first medical expediency became an increasing habit, to the extent that it is believed that Wallace had morphine administered to him by a doctor at Famous Players-Lasky studios, to ensure that he could complete the many motion pictures that were demanded of such a popular star (expressions of shock and dismay). Many among you will recall the apathetic look that Wallace bore in his later pictures - only now do we know why! His death came on 18 January 1923, aged just thirty-one (deathly silence).

Human Wreckage is not the story of Wallace Reid. Instead it is a product of Mrs Wallace Reid’s determination, following her husband’s death, to campaign against the evils of drug pedling and addiction. Of course, its theme of drug addiction runs against the normal American censorship codes, but the picture’s serious intent has seen it gain a special dispensation from Mr Will Hays, and it was made under the guidance of the Los Angeles Anti-Narcotic League. You will have noted the various civic and health figures included in the cast (murmurs of approval).

Bessie Love as Mary Finnegan in Human Wreckage

The film tells of the evils of drug addiction as they affect several people. Jimmy Brown, a heroin addict, is arrested by the police but successfully defended in court by attorney Alan MacFarland. Jimmy is sent to hospital (where he endures the pains of withdrawal symptoms), while MacFarland, exhausted by pressure of work, is offered morphine by a friend. He gradually becomes addicted. Meanwhile his wife, Ethel, notices that a young girl, Mary Finnegan, living in the same tenement as Jimmy’s mother, is injecting herself with morphine. She is also putting morphine onto her breast to quieten the baby she is nursing. Mary tries to kill herself, but ends up in hospital and separated from her baby. Alan MacFarland is hired by Steve Stone, who is his own dealer, and manages to keep him out of jail. Ethel is unable to save her husband from his addiction, but then he discovers that despair has apparently led her to her own drug addiction, and this brings him to a shocked realisation of what he has put her through. Her ruse works, and he gives up morphine. Jimmy Brown takes Steve Stone on a mad taxi drive through the city, and both are killed in a crash. The film concludes with a plea from the MacFarlands for stronger laws to confront the evil of drugs.

The film has caused a sensation in the United States. Those uncertain about the film’s motives have been shaken by its sincerity and the power of its telling. Mrs Reid herself has been tireless in promoting the film, often introducing it herself, and using her profits to support the Wallace Reid Foundation Sanatorium, as well as establishing her own film production company (warm applause). It is no cheaply-made exposé; instead it has been handsomely produced by the Thomas Ince Corporation, and boasts some remarkable sets inspired by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari for one fantastical sequence. The producers’ confidence has been rewarded by the film’s noted financial success in America.

Here in Britain, where the American context of the story means less, the censors have been less accommodating. Our BBFC rejected the film in January 1924. Mrs Reid has organised some screenings for private individuals - our screening this evening is one of these - but this seems to have shocked the BBFC still further. The chief censor, Mr J. Brooke Wilkinson, has gone on to say:

There have been few, if any, films submitted to the Board since its inception which the examiners look upon as more dangerous than this film ‘human wreckage,’ and we see no possibility of altering it so as to make it suitable for public exhibition in this country.

And so it remains banned, and unseen (cries of ’shame’).

The lost short accompanying our main feature is Dorian Gray (1913), also known as The Picture of Dorian Gray. How bitterly ironic it is that the young Wallace Reid should have starred in this film, playing Oscar Wilde’s seemingly unblemished young man, whose true, corrupted nature is revealed through a deteriorating portrait of him. The film was directed by Phillips Smalley and written by his talented wife Lois Weber, both of whom also appear in the film. It was made by the New York Motion Picture Corporation.

This has been a harrowing evening. We thank you all for you attention, and particularly to Mrs Reid for having graced us with her presence (loud applause). Tomorrow we will move around the corner to the Cambridge Circus Cinematograph Theatre, for a compelling Anglo-German production. Do join us.

Women and Silent Britain

Alma Reville

The 11th British Silent Cinema Festival, Rats, Ruffians and Radicals: The Globalisation of Crime and the Silent British Film (3-6 April 2008), is hosting a special panel session on Women and Silent British Cinema.

This panel will be separate from the main festival theme and will introduce and report on the activities of two projects: the international Women Film Pioneers project and the recently- formed Women’s Film History UK. The panel will also present research being undertaken on women and silent Britain and the organisers are currently seeking proposals for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of women working within the British film industry during the silent era.

Topics can range from studies of individuals to practical research- related issues, and they would particularly welcome presentations that offer some reflection on the issues, questions and problems of researching women’s film history.

Those interested should email a 200-300 word outline proposal to Clare Watson and Nathalie Morris (University of East Anglia) at womenandsilentbritain@hotmail.com, no later than 31 January 2008.

The Classic Slum

www.amazon.co.uk

It’s been a while since we had any memoirs of cinema-going. This, as regulars may know, is a particular research topic of mine, particularly memoirs of those who were children in London before the First World War.

The example below, however, comes from Salford. It comes from a renowned memoir of working class life, Robert Roberts’ The Classic Slum: Salford life in the first quarter of the century (1971). Roberts looks back to his childhood in Edwardian Salford, combining the personal with academic historical research in a uniquely powerful combination. As Roberts says, “few historians are the sons of labourers”, and his account of hard urban poverty hits you with eloquently-expressed authenticity.

The section from The Classic Slum on the cinema is typically evocative and filled with telling observations. He identifies the joyous effect that the cinema had upon its early, working class audiences, but also how it was a boon for women as a legitimised form of entertainment that had none of the social stigma of the pub. He also makes useful observations about seat pricing policies, children reading out intertitles to help out the illiterate, and the genuine educative value of the cinema.

Cinema in the early years of the century burst like a vision into the underman’s existence and, rapidly displacing both concert and theatre, became both his chief source of enjoyment and one of the greatest factors in his cultural development. For us in the village the world suddenly expanded. Many women who had lived in a kind of purdah since marriage (few respectable wives visited public houses) were to be noted now, escorted by their husbands, en route for the ‘pictures’, a strange sight indeed and one that led to much comment at the shop. Street corner gossip groups for a time grew thin and publicans complained angrily that the new fad was ruining trade: men were going to the films and merely calling in at the tavern for an hour before closing time. The disloyalty of it! Children begged, laboured and even thieved for the odd copper that would give them two hours of magic, crushed on a bench before the enchanting screen.

Moralists were not long in condemning cinema as the tap-root of every kind of delinquency. Cinema owners protested virtue: one kept an eight-foot-long poster across his box office: ‘CLEAN AND MORAL PICTURES. Prices – 2d. and 4d.’ In our district the Primitive Methodist chapel, recently bankrupt and closed, blossomed almost overnight into the ‘Kinema’. There during the first weeks would-be patrons of its twopenny seats literally fought each night for entrance and tales of crushed ribs and at least two broken limbs shocked the neighbourhood. In the beginning cinema managers, following the social custom of the theatre, made the error of grading seats, with the most expensive near the screen and the cheapest at the back of the house. For a short time the rabble lolled in comfort along the rear rows while their betters, paying three times as much, suffered cricked necks and eye strain in front. Caste and culture forbade mixing. A sudden change-over one evening, without warning, at all the local cinemas caused much bitterness and class recrimination. By 1913 our borough still retained its four theatres, but already thirteen premises had been licensed under the Cinematograph Act.

Yet silent films for all their joys presented the unlettered with a problem unknown in theatres – the printed word. Often in the early days of cinema, captions broke into the picture with explanations long, sententious and stage-ridden. To bypass this difficulty the short-sighted and illiterate would take children along to act as readers. In this capacity I saw my own first film. When the picture gave place to print on the screen a muddled Greek chorus of children’s voices rose from the benches, piping above the piano music. To hear them crash in unison on a polysyllable became for literate elders an entertainment in itself. At the cinema many an ill-educated adult received cheap and regular instruction with his pleasure, and some eventually picked up enough to dispense with their tutors. Yet in spite of all the aids to culture and learning, unknown fifty years before – compulsory education, free libraries, the spate of cheap print, the miles of postered hoarding, and the cinema, the brightest lure of all – among the lower working class a mass of illiterates, solid and sizeable, still remained.

Non solo dive

www.nonsolodive.com

More information is now available on Non solo dive (Not Only Divas), a conference and retrospective on women and silent Italian cinema. The conference takes place in Bologna, 14-16 December, and here’s the line-up:

Friday, December 14

2.30 PM – Welcoming addresses

3.00 PM-6.30 PM – Session I:

Jane Gaines – Duke University and Columbia University (USA)
Are They Us?: Our Work on Women Working in the International Silent Film Industry
Christine Gledhill – University of Sunderland (UK)
Rethinking Women’s Film History from Britain
Elda Guerra – Associazione Orlando
Beyond Boundaries: The Women’s Movement at the turn of the 20th Century, and the Emergence of a New Subjectivity

Alberto Friedemann – Associazione Fert
Women Entrepreneurs in the Turin Film Industry during the Silent Period
Andrea Palladino – Documentary Filmmaker
The Amazing Story of Frieda Klug: Research Hypothesis for a Documentary about the Origins of Italian Cinema

Discussion

Saturday, December 15

9.30 AM-1.00 PM – Session II:

Cristina Jandelli – University of Florence
“The Sharpest of Them All”: Diana Karenne
Teresa Antolin – Archivio in penombra
Elena and the Men: Francesca Bertini and Film Historiography
Elena Dagrada – State University of Milan
The Temptation of Silence: Eleonora Duse and the Cinema

Elena Mosconi – Catholic University of Milan
Divas and Anti-Divas in Early Italian Cinema: Elettra Raggio and Astrea
Valeria Palumbo – Journalist, L’Europeo
Viper: the Myth of Anna Fougez
Ester De Miro D’Ayeta – University of Genoa
Sewing Celluloid Ribbons: The Obscure Career of Esterina Zuccarone, Editor and Working Woman in Turin

Discussion

3.00 PM-6.30 PM – Session III:

Luca Mazzei – University of Florence
Alone in the Dark. Memories and Narratives of Italian Female Viewers between 1898 and 1916
Silvio Alovisio – University of Turin
The Image of the Spectatrix in the Italian Film Press of the Twenties
Gina Annunziata – University of Siena
Matilde Serao and the Cinema

Roberta Gandolfi – University of Parma
“New Women” of the Italian Theater between Reform and Tradition, Feminism and Modernism
Vittorio Martinelli - Italian Association for Research in Film History
Origins of the Italian Star System
Claudia Gianetto – Museo Nazionale del Cinema
Gigetta Morano: An “Irresistible Force”

Discussion

Sunday, December 16

10.00 AM – 1.00 PM – Session IV:

Kim Tomadjoglou – American Film Institute (USA)
Rethinking the Cinema of Elvira Notari
Irela Nuñez, Franca Farina – Cineteca Nazionale
Women’s Films of the Cineteca Nazionale: Restored and to be Restored
Micaela Veronesi – Italian Association for Research in Film History
A Woman Wants to “Recreate the World”. Umanità, by Elvira Giallanella

Stella Dagna – Museo Nazionale del Cinema
In the Giant’s Shadow. Second Lead Actresses in the Maciste series
Elena D’Amelio – University of Padua
Damned and Beautiful. Powerful Women of the Italian Epic Genre

Discussion

Monica Dall’Asta – University of Bologna
Conclusions

That’s an impressive, specialised but wide-ranging line-up, and to complement it there’s a retrospective of relevant films running 2-15 December at the Cinema Lumière, Bologna. The highlights are two new restorations: Elvira Giallanella’s pacifist film Umanità (1919), restored by the Cineteca Nazionale and the Orlando Association, and Elvira Notari’s ‘A Santanotte (1921), a Neapolitan melodrama, restored by the same institutions in association with George Eastman House. Notari is the subject of Giuliana Bruno’s influential study, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, and is now something of a cult figure. There are other Notari films on show, a collection of comedienne Lea Giunchi’s short films, Cenere (1916) (the only film of the legendary stage actress Elenora Duse), Francesca Bertini and Gustavo Serena’s Assunta Spina (1915), Giulia Rizzotto’s A Mosca Cieca (1921), and more.

The full conference and retrospective programme is downloadable here (PDF, 212MB, in Italian), and the website www.nonsolodive.com (also in Italian) will be active from 26 November. Clearly, knowing Italian will help, but English translation will be provided throughout the conference.

The rationale behind the event is given in this earlier post.

Women silent filmmakers in Britain

I’ve just uploaded a revised version of my filmography, Women Silent Filmmakers in Britain, onto my personal site. The story behind this was first reported in the Women behind the camera post. Essentially it’s a filmography of women directors, producers, editors, scriptwriters and camera operators active in Britain in the silent. It’s still very much a work in progress, and any comments or corrections are most welcome.