Women Pioneers of Film: A Quick Glance
When discussing film history and the directors, producers, and inventors that brought us today’s film industry, we usually hear an endless slew of male names.
Edison, Dickson, Griffith, DeMille, on and on it goes. Well, women did play a huge role in film’s early history, not just as beautiful silent film actresses such as the prolific Lillian Gish but also as directors, producers, and screenwriters, many of whom were later “forgotten” or purposefully left out of the film industry once it became a respected field to work in. So let’s right this wrong and highlight a small handful of awesome women film pioneers.
Alice Guy-Blaché, (pictured above) — According to Columbia University’s Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), Alice Guy-Blache’s first film was made in 1896 and she “directed, produced, or supervised almost 600 films.” Guy-Blaché was also an early pioneer who experimented with synchronized sound, a technology that wasn’t perfected until the late 1920s. According to mic.com, her name is listed on around a 1,000 different films in her time.
Her films tend to be very poetic and full of symbolism. An easily accessible Guy-Blaché film is called Falling Leaves, made in 1912 for the company Solax. The story is of a little girl, Trixie, who overhears that people who have tuberculosis die “when the leaves begin to fall” in the autumn.
Guy-Blaché was advanced for her time and was known to cast people of color in her films, something that many did not do, especially the likes of infamous film pioneers such as D.W. Griffith, who was known for casting white actors in blackface to portray African Americans.
Lois Weber — Like Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber initially started in film working with her husband but eventually came to surpass him and create her own identity as a filmmaker. Weber became known for both being a director and a screenwriter and used her films to highlight the social conditions of her time and often focused on poorer and middle class family life.
A film that does a good job of this is her 1921 film entitled The Blot, which she produced under her own production company Lois Weber Productions, that explored the themes of women, domesticity, and financial struggle. She also became known for tackling other issues in her film such as drug abuse and capital punishment in the films Hops, the Devil’s Brew and The People vs. John Doe, both released in 1916 while she was working for Universal, respectively.
Her career took a downturn in the mid-1920s, which, according to the WFPP, coincided with the time that many women-run production companies started to fall apart as major studios were becoming more successful and filmmaking was becoming lucrative. Many historians considered her work to be lost to history. The WFPP cites the words of historian Anthony Slide, who stated that Lois Weber was “the director who lost her way in history.”
Zora Neale Hurston — While Zora Neale Hurston is first and foremost known as a writer and anthropologist, whose legacy is best exhibited by the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, it is still important to include her as a filmmaker as she did direct a few ethnographic films surrounding the African American community. More importantly, however, she left her mark on the world of film and theater via her scripts and screenplays. According to the WFPP, she worked as a screenwriter for Paramount Studios starting in 1941.
She was particularly interested in documenting the daily life and folklore of African Americans in the American South and according to some scholars, she can even be considered the first African American woman filmmaker, which is a giant feat especially considering the rest of her accomplishments for which she is more known.
Her work as an anthropologist also brought her to record the story of Oluale Kossola, believed to be, in Hurston’s time, the last survivor of the last American slave ship, the Clotilda. In addition to recording Kossola’s story in her book titled Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” she also created Kossula: Last of the Takkoi Slaves, a short silent film of only five minutes.
Esfir Shub — When discussing early Russian film pioneers, many will immediately cite Sergei Eisenstein’s BattleShip Potemkin (1925) or Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) but few will mention Esfir Shub, who is most well-known for directing her film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927).
Shub became involved in the film industry as an editor and worked on many projects in the Soviet Union, even the film Carmen (1926) which, according to the WFPP, was the first Charlie Chaplin film allowed to be screened in the USSR. She is mostly known to be a documentary pioneer as her films mostly compiled footage into documentary formats such as the aforementioned The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty.
Shub constantly changed and perfected her technique and wanted to make a film entitled Women but, unfortunately, it never took off. Eventually, many of her desired projects were given to other filmmakers and she lost her influence in the industry. Despite all this, her techniques were copied and thus she was able to leave her mark on the film industry.
Many of these women and others like them lost their jobs and studios to men and the machine of the film-making industry. They were forgotten simply because they were women. It’s time to change the legacy and write women filmmakers back into history.
Citations:
McMahan, Alison. “Alice Guy Blaché.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. Web. September 27, 2013. <https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-alice-guy-blache/>
Hawkins, Chelsea. “11 Female Film Pioneers Who Paved the Road to Hollywood.” Mic.com, 2014. Web. March 14, 2014.<https://mic.com/articles/84569/11-female-film-pioneers-who-paved-the-road-to-hollywood>
Stamp, Shelley. “Lois Weber.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. Web. September 27, 2013. <https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-lois-weber/>
Dixon, Aimee. “Zora Neale Hurston.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. Web. September 27, 2013.<https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/zora-neale-hurston-2/>
Katz, Brigit. “Zora Neale Hurston’s Study of the Last Known U.S. Slave to Be Published in 2018.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, Dec. 2017. Web. December 21, 2017. <www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/zora-neale-hurstons-study-last-known-us-slave-be-published-2018-180967613/>
