Whether women worked as motion picture camera operators during the silent era seems never to have been seriously considered. The very few who did this work tried not to draw attention to themselves, and as a result many people in the commercial industry may have believed there was no such thing as a woman camera operator. Even one of the best-connected women in the industry could not think of one. Asked in 1925 for her views on women’s contributions, the powerful head producer and screenwriter June Mathis said she could think of cases in which women had worked as cutters or title writers, but that she had not yet come across a woman “turning the crank of a camera” (664). Nevertheless, despite the skepticism and even hostility they very likely faced on set, there were a few women who operated the heavy 35mm motion picture camera and mastered the new technology in defiance of cultural expectations.

“Women with Cameras” versus Women Camera Operators

While women who actually worked as camera operators were rare, “women with cameras” were a publicity trend. If, in 1916, silent film actress Marie Doro shot footage of Blanche Sweet with a motion picture camera given to her by Charlie Chaplin, the New York Dramatic Mirror would report it as news (22). Even so, it was not women using “small” 16 mm cameras but women working with large 35 mm cameras on a motion picture set who made bigger news. Yet not all the women photographed with cameras were professional camera operators. Some of them were actor-directors or women producers, and on this point the composition of the photograph tells us a great deal. Women actor-directors or producers pose beside motion picture cameras when photographed with men or alone with the cameras. Women camera operators, by contrast, are photographed behind the motion picture camera, and in this sense they are entirely original. In the woman’s strange and novel relationship to this technological apparatus, this feminine anomaly becomes a metaphor for the startling strangeness of motion picture photography itself.

Other Professional Camerawomen

The most in-depth of these stories, “The Only Camera Woman,” begins: “How many of you have ever heard of a woman camera man?” (59). The Picture Play Magazine writer’s angle on the story is to correct the mistaken assumptions about women’s technological skills that the piece attributes to its 1916 readers. Although the byline, A.J. Dixon, gives no indication of gender, contemporary readers might assume the writer was a man, given the remarks about the shy “Miss Davison” as an interview subject and the writer’s familiarity with the men on the Astor Company set, such as director Al Ray and veteran cameraman Harry Fischbeck. Part of the writer’s approach is to make fun of the expectation that women would be incompetent and, better still, to turn the situation to the writer’s own advantage with the readers. The writer had imagined footage that was out of focus and made up of over- or underexposed negatives. Before arriving on the set, the writer wants to learn about the camerawoman’s technical skill from the two men there, moving between questions in a way that offers a chance to display the writer’s own technical knowledge. “And does Miss Davison know all the tricks of photography?” the writer asks (61). The writer is assured that she does double exposures and even triple exposures (61). Davison then explains to the writer that she started out with a Graflex still camera, because it was easier to master than a motion picture camera since “there is no crank to turn” (62). However, it is not Davison but the professional cameraman Fischbeck who explains the single-crank animation technique, produced with the crank on the side of the camera, which is turned and stopped while the pose is changed, then turned and stopped again for the next pose. Continuing to vouch for Grace Davison’s competence, cameraman Fischbeck hands the fan magazine writer a strip of Eastman Kodak film negative, shot with the “single-crank movement” technique he has just described, which turns out to be Davison’s own experimental footage. In the “tiny pictures that look like ping-pong balls,” the fascinated writer sees that Davison has filmed her own image against a black velvet background using a mirror and a reflector (64). The “new and astonishing” camerawoman thus brings with her a metaphor for a “new and astonishing” phenomenon of the motion pictures (65).

The camerawoman’s appearance is “astonishing,” too. In October 1916, Photoplay published a full-page photograph of camerawoman Margery Ordway wearing a checked cap, a striped blouse and checked trousers. The caption, “New Fall Styles for Camera‘Men’,” makes subtle fun of the gender switch in question (103). The unusual unconventionality of her outfit also confirms how rarely women were found in this line of work. A.J. Dixon, the writer of uncertain gender, described Grace Davison’s clothing in much the same way. What Davison called her “camera costume” was a checked suit with a matching checked cap (61). The costume is also in keeping with the oddity conveyed by the terms “grinding” and “cranking,” which the article uses both to describe the cameraman’s work and to slyly hint at the double meaning of “crank,” slang for a cantankerous, eccentric person, without quite saying that a woman behind the camera must be ill-tempered.

Francelia Billington: From Film Acting to Camera Operating and Back Again

In a 1914 Photoplay article based on an interview with “camera operator” Francelia Billington, the film actress herself comments on the double fascination with this strange machine and with a woman operating this mechanical marvel: “I suppose it still seems odd to see a girl more concerned with a mechanical problem than with makeup” (59). Although she notes that her interest in photography did not mean she was also interested in popular films, Billington, like Davison, says she started out at a young age with a still camera and later moved on to the motion picture camera. Katherine Synon conducted the interview while Francelia Billington was “assisting” director W. C. Cabanne on the Los Angeles set of the Reliance-Majestic Studio. Billington is efficiently doing the work of a “cameraman,” or what would later be known as a “cinematographer,” described as “turning a crank while closely watching a scene played out by a group of actors.” (no page number). In 1914, however, Billington’s work is not taken very seriously, and the reference to her “dual role as both actress and camera operator” implies that she was a lucky stand-in cameraman who helped operate the camera when she was not acting. (no page number)

Considering how work was organized on set, one can see from a photograph taken at the Edison Studio in the same period that the hierarchy of labor was determined by gender, and one can imagine how difficult it must have been for Billington to move back and forth across the invisible line between the dramatic scene and the all-male camera department. Like Davison, Billington says that she started in film as an actress but preferred camera work. However, the year of the interview was probably her last chance to work as a cameraman. Reliance-Majestic Studio was a new studio on the West Coast under head director D.W. Griffith, whose big plans did not include a woman camera operator.

Francelia Billington’s career trajectory, outlined by William M. Drew in “More Than Just a Pretty Face,” got off to a slow start with her involvement in a 1915 project written by Nell Shipman and later abandoned, but it picked up speed soon afterward. Around 1916-17 she was a prolific actress working with the American Film Co. and Universal Pictures, and although she no longer worked with cameras, Movieland Notes showed her working on a vehicle like a mechanic.

The high point of her career was the lead role she shared in director Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919). After the 1920s, however, things gradually took a turn for the worse for Billington, who played small parts in westerns and adventure films and appeared in one sound film before her death in 1934. Grace Davison’s career likewise picked up after she returned to acting after 1916, but, like others, she took advantage of the 1917-1918 window of opportunity for independent production and set up “her own” production company. See Women’s Production and Pre-Production Companies. A note in the American Film Institute Catalog states that the actress Davison founded the company to make Wives of Men (1918), written and directed by John M. Stahl. While Harry Fischbeck (credited as Fishbeck) is named as cinematographer on the film, Davison’s name appears in publicity and reviews not as producer but as part of the cast (Hanson, 1050). After producing Wives of Men, she took on one or two acting roles a year in independent productions until 1922.

In the first decade of the 1900s, women camera operators were a rare phenomenon, which explains why Mathis had neither seen nor heard of one by 1925. Women camera operators did not catch our attention until the 1970s, when Anthony Slide began to uncover the women directors of the silent era. In his first book, he cites Grace Davison and Margery Ordway, whom he found in the fan magazines cited here, and briefly mentions Dorothy Dunn, who he says was part of the “army of cameramen” working for Universal Animated Weekly (Slide 1974, 168). While Dunn fits the pattern of women who started out as actresses before taking up the camera, unlike Davison and Billington, who gave up camera work for acting, Dunn gave up acting and became, according to Moving Picture World (1609), “the only woman photographer on the staff.” In a later book, Slide mentions Dunn, Davison and Ordway, and adds to these women Louise Lowell, who worked for Fox News in 1920 (1996, 5-6). Yet the label of “first” or “only” continues to tempt us, and more recently Suzy Groves discovered Katherine R. Bleecker as “the earliest professional motion picture camerawoman” (quoted in Krasilovsky 1997, xxi). Although the New York Times reported on Bleecker in 1915 and Photoplay discovered Billington in 1914, the difference between the kinds of work the two took on matters more than the year that separates them. While Billington had the chance to shoot some fictional short films, Bleecker wrote, directed and shot scenarios set in New York prisons, casting the inmates as themselves, and she should therefore be recognized as a pioneer of what we know today as docufiction.

Jane Gaines, Michelle Koerner

Translation: Nahit Evre Uçarcı

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