This brief article was adapted from a talk presented during the event ‘A focus on females in Art: film screening and discussion‘ given by Naomi Bajada Young which was organised by the Department of Art and Art History in collaboration with the Advancing Women Artists Foundation.
The movie industry started to take shape in the early 19th century from technological innovations and a series of developments. Cinema does not have a precise starting point since many inventors created motion picture cameras and other techniques at around the same time.
We’re all familiar with the big names such as Georges Méliès, Thomas Edison, Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, D. W. Griffith, François Truffaut etc… But what about Alice Guy-Blaché, Louis Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac and Margarethe von Trotta (amongst many others, I would list them here, but I would skip my word limit.)
In the early years of the film industry, women were known to have held positions of high-regard, such as directors, producers, actresses, writers, editors, technicians, camera crew and even had their own production companies! Perhaps the reason why these women go unnoticed is that the work of women has been devalued over time. Also, the shift of the film industry to Hollywood resulted in an isolation of power to a select few studios, run by monopolistic men.
“There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art.”
From The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blaché.
Alice Guy-Blaché was the first female directors in the history of film. In 1896 she produced ‘La Fée aux Choux’, one of the earliest narrative films to be created. Alice had initially worked as a secretary to Leon Gaumont, founder of the Gaumont film studios. Some time later, she started to produce films and she became the head of production for the studio up until 1906. In 1907, Alice set up a film company, Solax Studios, and throughout her career, she directed 1000 films, 22 (feature length films), however, only 350 survive. She was an innovator in synchronised sound, early use of colour and is thought to have invented the concept of filming on location and produced one of the first close-ups. When she had returned to the US after some time in France, she could not recover all her films and could not get the Gaumont company to acknowledge her work. Soon after, she started giving public talks and also wrote her memoirs about her work.
Dorothy Arzner, one of the only major female directors in Hollywood during the “Golden Age” of the 20s and 30s, previously worked as a stenographer and worked as a film director. She is also the first editor to be named in a film’s credits and director. She produced 2 films, 14 talkies and is attributed to have invested the boom microphone.
Margaret Booth had started her working at D. W. Griffith’s studio in 1915 as a film joiner and negative cutter. Florence Osborne wrote a 1925 Motion Picture Magazine article: “Among the greatest ‘cutters’ and film editors are women. They are quick and resourceful. They are also ingenious in their work and usually have a strong sense of what the public wants to see. They can sit in a stuffy cutting-room and see themselves looking at the picture before an audience.”
There were many well-known female colourists at the time. The Edison company employed Mrs Kuhn to hand colour prints from their films. Madame Elisabeth Thuiller’s Company managed over 200 female colourists!
“I coloured all of Méliès’ films, and this work was carried out entirely by hand. I employed two hundred and twenty workers in my workshop. I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colours, and during the day; the workers applied the colour according to my instructions. Each specialised worker applied only one colour, and we often exceeded twenty colours on a film.”
MMe Thuiller in an interview, Mazeline, 74n1, 1929.
The cinema industry had changed with the Hays Code in the 1930s (A Code To Govern The Making Of Motion Pictures). The early silent films had featured complex women as protagonists and dealt with contemporary issues such as birth control, sex, crime, divorce and mental illness). The Code erased these ideas, sexism grew, and changed the audience’s perception, giving rise to the headless women of Hollywood.
Women still fail to be treated as equals and it is unfortunate that these women who were responsible for many innovations are still waiting to come out from the shadows.
