“While many approached cinemas with dread, as spreaders of disease, I was glad to find one gentleman who regarded the cinema and the theater as fighters against influenza.”
I have previously reported on my research into some of the debates in the cinema trade that were said to have intensified during the 1918 influenza epidemic. In the struggle between local health officials, who wanted cinemas closed, and local exhibitors, who wanted them to stay open, some rather curious ideas about how the disease spread were put about. Some exhibitors, relying on the quite mistaken connection between catching a cold and being cold, believed that the virus was more likely to be caught outdoors. Following this logic, others argued that the germ-laden air of the streets should not be carried into indoor spaces such as theaters and cinemas.
Others, meanwhile, stocked up on mothballs, valued for their disinfectant properties, and on pungent chemical products.
Reading such reports, one can see that defenses against influenza and similar contagious infections had not yet been sufficiently explored by medical science. These reports made no mention of measures such as face masks, frequent hand washing or social distancing. Yet it is clear that the benefits of such measures were well understood, and that, through the film Dr. Wise on Influenza, cinema proved a considerable tool in this respect. According to an article in the Birmingham Daily Gazette, our hero Dr. Wise offers important advice on the subject, free of charge:
Anyone who feels they have a cold or a fever should stay at home until the symptoms subside.
A lack of fresh air allows germs to grow stronger and linger in the body.
Gargle and rinse your nose with a solution of potassium permanganate and salt water.
Keeping fit is of great importance. Drinking alcohol and frequenting pubs can lead to a rise in infection.
The critic for The Bioscope wrote that it was very hard to suppress the flicker in the microscope images of the influenza germs, but that, as in all good public information films, the message was not delivered through advice and information alone but was also carried by a story:
A foolish man who does not treat his cold is shown. He goes to his office, sneezing on the tram, on the train, in the streets, in his office, onto his letters and his telephone, and is likely to have spread the germ to others everywhere he went. And spread it he did. He, the carrier, and several of those he infected died. Another man in the story took precautions when he caught a cold and quickly recovered.
In his report, the critic also noted that the film was powerful enough to set everyone in the auditorium sneezing and coughing.
Dr. Wise on Influenza was created by Joseph Best, a champion of the educational value of cinema. Before the war, he had been head of the educational and scientific department of Pathé Frères. This was not Best’s first venture into producing information films: he had previously been commissioned by the National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases to make a film called “Whatsoever a Man Soweth.” Dr. Wise on Influenza was funded by the Local Government Board (the forerunner of the Ministry of Health), which arranged for it to be distributed to medical officers of health in the regions. Those health officers, in turn, took on the responsibility of distributing the film to cinemas in their areas. Given the tensions between these officials and local exhibitors that I mentioned earlier, one might well question how widely the film was actually shown. Toward the end of the war, there was considerable resistance among cinema managers to screening state-sponsored public films. Venereal disease and other subjects that the CEA regarded as partisan were major points of contention, and during the December 1918 election the coalition government issued slides showing Lloyd George and his ministers visiting cinemas, but after lengthy debate the CEA refused to show them. The withdrawal (or suppression) of Maurice Elvey’s The Life of David Lloyd George (1918) may also be connected to this. A few years later, in 1920, an interesting debate took place at a meeting of the Leeds and District Branch of the CEA. Local health officers asked whether exhibitors might show a single slide in support of Child Welfare Week. The exhibitors’ answer was to turn the proposal down flat. During the discussion, one of the supporters of the plan pointed out that a request to show another film had been refused a short while earlier, and that showing a single slide ought now to be a reasonable compromise. The health officer was reported to hold strong views on cinema as a means of propaganda for health matters. The speaker explained to the branch that they themselves had fought against the decision to close cinemas during the influenza epidemic, arguing that cinemas could serve a far greater purpose by showing public information films on how people could protect themselves against infection, and said that he found the refusal of this request hypocritical. This argument was likewise met with a hostile response, and the discussion moved on to how absurd the restrictions of 1918 had been.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84nq2KxZMBw
Advocates of public information films such as Joseph Best faced an uphill battle. Even so, I have found reports that Dr. Wise on Influenza was distributed as the official epidemic film in Birmingham, Cambridge, Sheffield, Newcastle, Bradford and Whitby. In the report on the film that went to Whitby, the section on how to make a mask from a cloth handkerchief stands out. Thanks to this measure, which had been tried in San Francisco, a mandatory mask-wearing rule enforced for nine days had prevented the spread of the flu.
Further progress would be made as time went on. When the Local Government Board became the new Ministry of Health in June 1919, Christopher Addison, who was appointed minister, was one of the foremost advocates of using cinema for health education.
As the first Minister of Health, one of Addison’s greatest achievements was choosing a film about the influenza epidemic. Unfortunately, the film was not Dr. Wise but a shorter one. “I have seen a great many health information films that were far too long and far too dull,” said Addison,
During the 1920 influenza epidemic, together with a well-known production company, I had a film made showing girls gargling at school. The film lasted 90 seconds. Financed by the distributors, it cost 30 pounds. Within a week it had been shown to 30 million people, and so it was recommended as one of the ways of protecting oneself against the epidemic, at no cost to either the public or the Treasury. If it is run by “live” people in Whitehall, cinema used in this way can achieve a great deal.
The Silent Spectators of Dr. Wise on Influenza
Dr. Wise, in my view an excellent public information film, gets its message across not only through Dr. Wise’s didactic pronouncements but also through an illustrative drama that is realistically and convincingly acted. For audiences, though, the film’s real attraction was the chance to see postwar London. The other filming locations were the theaters and cinemas around Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square. As these shots make clear, the film crew also ventured into busy streets and filmed wherever it could. Not a single passerby who strayed into the frame failed to look at the camera with curiosity. Some, realizing what was going on, stepped out of the frame in embarrassment; some watched the proceedings in amazement; and others kept looking at the camera, as if stealing the scene from the main character on whom the camera was meant to be focused.
I have written before about passersby during filming who boldly and deliberately steal the scene, or who, through their unobtrusive presence, add an element of commentary for the audience. This is an element of drama rather than of reality. Since no one gave any warning that filming was under way, you can see passersby rounding a corner unaware of the shoot, spotting a camera and film crew in front of them, and changing their behavior accordingly. I particularly love the scene in which Brown leaves his house sneezing. A young man in a bowler hat is absorbed in watching the actor’s performance before he notices the camera and spins around 360 degrees. Having seen the camera, he then slowly tries to back out of the scene behind the actor, his eyes fixed on the lens.
In another scene, filmed in Trafalgar Square, a woman in a hat stands beside the camera watching what is going on, but then a man appears at the left of the frame, sees the camera and quickly steps back out of shot. Later, as Brown stands in front of a restaurant, a woman walks into the frame and, quite deliberately, she and her friend look straight at the camera and burst out laughing. Meanwhile, amid the stares of the doorman and other passersby in the background, the actor has to shoo the woman away in order to regain control of the scene.
In the very next shot we see three uniformed men, but they soon vanish and a woman and a man come around the corner into the scene. Watching the filming, the man grins mischievously at the camera and, with no regard for the feelings of the woman he is escorting, joins the line at the restaurant door, realizing that he is appearing in the film. These moments pass too quickly for viewers intent on following the film’s main narrative to notice them. But watching these scenes again sheds an intimate light on the unselfconsciousness of street life in 1918.
Lawrence Napper
Turkish translation: Nil Ege Özden
For the original article, please click here.
However much passion films may inspire, delving into the depths of film history can be daunting. For every cinephile obsessed with a particular actor, director or subgenre, there is someone else who struggles to know where to begin. Sometimes the right recommendation is all it takes to set you on the path from beginner to connoisseur…
Why this may not seem so simple
In the silent era, films were mostly made for women, and frequently by women. Yet when it comes to early women filmmakers, there is a misconception known as the “myth of scarcity.” In many places, from current film magazines to respected film history books, early women filmmakers are routinely presented as rare exceptions – even when that was far from the case. The director of what may well have been the world’s first scripted, narrative fiction film was a woman, and from the mid-1910s onward there was a boom in women directors at Universal Studios. Women such as Lois Weber, Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac, Lotte Reiniger and Mabel Normand were each pioneers in their own field, and they were supported by an industry full of women screenwriters and hugely important women producers making films for a predominantly female audience. But you won’t learn that from the textbooks that reduce “women in cinema” to a subheading.
The upshot is that if the names of early women filmmakers are unfamiliar to you, their films will be too – and it is only natural to think they aren’t worth seeking out. But thinking that way would be a big mistake – because these are great talents, often making films that take a critical look at the gender relations of their time, whether in a playful or a political tone. Directors whose names appear on only a handful of credits shouldn’t be overlooked either. The structure of the film industry mirrored the rest of society, and there were many reasons why talented directors left the business to work elsewhere (or not to work at all) – but before they did, they still managed to show us what they were capable of.
The best place to start – “Suspense” (1913)
Lois Weber, one of the finest filmmakers of the early 20th century, was a heavyweight rival to D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Watching this 10-minute action film just once will give you a sense of Weber’s talents. This nail-bitingly intense home-invasion thriller features cross-cutting between parallel action, a three-way split screen and a masterfully shot car chase. At the same time, she made the radical choice of telling a story often told by her male colleagues – a vulnerable woman alone in an isolated house, threatened by an intruder, telephoning her husband to come and rescue her – from the woman’s point of view. In doing so, Weber uses extreme POV shots to put us directly in the place of the woman trapped in her home with her baby, listening to the man with a knife climbing the stairs. Not content with that, Weber plays the role of the mother herself. Unlike the pity other directors conveyed whenever they showed a woman in peril, Weber instills an icy dread, living up to the film’s stark and evocative title.
After this film, we can guarantee you’ll want to explore more of Weber’s work. Like her contemporary Dorothy Davenport Reid, Weber made many films that tackle social issues. In the second half of the 1910s she made powerful films with a purpose, such as “Discontent” (1916). But to grasp the full scope of Weber’s remarkable career, you should head straight for the 1921 film “The Blot”.
Made at Weber’s own studio and shot in chronological order, this drama foregrounds the attention to detail of a director who was also a meticulous stylist, blending naturalism and a passion for social justice in a way that feels refreshing and modern. Without giving any spoilers, it has one of the most moving and sensitive endings in 1920s cinema, and it is a film you may find yourself thinking about for a long time.
What to watch next
Weber was lucky enough to work for a woman boss in her first job in the industry – and that woman was none other than the renowned Alice Guy-Blaché. Having pioneered fiction filmmaking at Gaumont in Paris as early as 1896, Guy-Blaché crossed the Atlantic and began working in the United States. One of her loveliest films, “Falling Leaves” (1912), is a delicate drama built around an unforgettable image: a young girl tying leaves onto bare branches after hearing that her sister will die when winter comes.
As you start to look more closely at Alice Guy-Blaché’s films – “Making an American Citizen” and “Algie, the Miner,” both from 1912, or “The Ocean Waif” from 1916 – you’ll notice how much attention she pays to constructions of gender and to relationships between men and women, which are often troubling or unequal.
By now you should be ready to discover silent films with even more overtly feminist messages… And this is exactly the point at which to turn to Germaine Dulac. Two wonderful Impressionist films, “La Cigarette” (1919) and “La Souriante Madame Beudet” (1923), center on women who are unfulfilled by their marriages. Another name not to be missed is Dorothy Arzner. Like Dulac, Arzner was a queer woman; the difference is that she worked in Hollywood. The scene in “Dance, Girl, Dance” (1940) in which Maureen O’Hara scolds the audience ogling her is a famous example of the rejection of the male gaze.
If Dulac sparks your interest in artistic or experimental cinema, then it’s time to savor Mary Ellen Bute’s “visual music” film “Parabola” (1937), or the spectral double exposures in Marie-Louise Iribe’s fantasy film “Le Roi des Aulnes” (1931).
Where to go from here
You may not be able to resist Mabel Normand’s charm and comic gifts for very long, but you’ll be glad you saved her work for last. It’s not hard to see why Normand became a star at Keystone Studios in the 1910s. As well as being a vivacious and quick-witted comedian, she was utterly fearless in the dangerous scenes usually handed to stunt doubles – so much so that the studio staff nicknamed her “the sugar on the Keystone grapefruit.” Normand was also a director, and her many achievements behind the camera include directing “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” (1914), the first film to feature Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character.
Normand’s films are rambunctious, laugh-driven treasures. In truth, there is little that sets her work apart from that of her male colleagues at Keystone or at the other Hollywood studios where physical comedy reigned. Watching her work on both sides of the camera, especially in gems such as “Mabel’s Blunder” (1914) – in which you can see Normand in a dazzling drag costume – you may start to wonder why she never enjoyed the kind of celebrated career afforded to Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd. The answer is complicated, but it rests at least in part on the fact that she died tragically young, at the age of 37. All of which gives us even more reason to watch, enjoy and celebrate the films that Normand and her fellow women filmmakers made in this pioneering early era of cinema.
Pamela Hutchinson
Turkish translation: Gizem Ünsalan
This article is taken from the BFI website.
In a 1921 Picturegoer article, Jeanie Macpherson advised prospective writers not to worry about submitting scenarios with scene by scene outlines; instead they should send in a synopsis of 3000 words and a scenario staff would reshape the material for shooting. She warned her audience: “Do not have the camera in mind as you write.” In contrast, by 1926 Francis Marion in Photoplay was advising those interested in adaptations to go beyond plot, to translate the original story “into screen language.” Their different perspectives on how to write for the screen reflected the rapid changes in the craft during Hollywood’s silent period. Women, like Macpherson and Marion, were very much a part of these changes. As Wendy Holliday points out, about 50% of the scenarios were written by women; although, the exact percentage is unknown due in part to inconsistent crediting. In fact women’s presence was felt in multiple areas of the American film industry including writing, directing, producing, and editing, as the industry initially welcomed, even sought out, their contribution. Women wrote both original and adapted scenarios. In addition, they contributed story ideas, served as story editors and continuity writers, and wrote titles. As department and unit heads, they further impacted the stories being told. Women were everywhere as the craft of screen writing took shape.
With many of the films and scripts from this period lost, scholars have turned to archival sources, such as fan and trade publications, memoirs and biographies, to explore women’s contribution. They have documented women’s work, and have examined both the social and economic forces that influenced women’s entrance into the industry and the gendered context and nature of their work. However, research has been relatively silent on the ways in which these women influenced screen writing as a developing craft. Women writers offered insights on how to write the scenario or shooting script. And while many women met the studio and audience expectations for female-centered narratives, female protagonists and subject matter, they also pushed the boundaries of expectations by crafting strong independent female characters, by refusing to “write to gender,” and/or by producing alternative cinematic forms. During their time in the industry, women helped shape the form and technique of cinematic writing and influenced both its tone and content. They carved a place for themselves in the history of a developing art form.
When women entered the industry as “writers,” there was no existing craft to learn as there were no written scripts. Writing for cinema prior to 1912 involved submitting story ideas/plot synopses or writing titles. Ideas and synopses were elicited through magazine advertisements or contests, freely submitted, or written by company staffers. Women were counted among the many early contributors of these “stories,” as gender was not an impediment. Karen Ward Maher notes in Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood that women in all areas of cinematic production “enjoyed low craft and gender boundaries” in the very early days of cinema–a situation that would later change. These early stories took the form of a few lines of text, a paragraph or a one-page plot summary. Producers/directors then took the story from page to screen, while a clerk on set “held the script,” recording scenes, action, dialogue, and shooting directions. These clerks were called script girls, since most were female secretaries or assistants, a testament to the different ways women were tied to early storytelling in Hollywood.
Writing for the screen was attractive to women, both those who freelanced from home (through open submission or writing contests) and those who sought full-time careers. Martin F. Norden in his study of The Moving Picture World articles from the teens explains that the open submission structure was appealing to women bound to the home as it offered them an opportunity “to pursue more creative experiences.” Maher finds a similar attraction in the company-sponsored contests advertised in popular fan magazines. Her research indicates that most winners of early company contests for the best “story idea” or plot synopsis were women. Such women followed in the footsteps of those women writers who had been contributing stories to popular magazines since the nineteenth century. Women also were drawn to full careers in the cinema. Cari Beauchamp argues in Creative Screenwriting that writing for the screen appealed to women, as did other jobs in the industry, because “With few people taking the new industry seriously, the doors were wide open to women.” Lizzie Francke in Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood believes the arts in general, including cinema, offered attractive careers particularly to the white, middle class “New Woman” of the time, “the independent career minded and mostly middle-class females who were striding into the twentieth century.” For many, there was a financial need to work. As Sumiko Higashi explains in Virgins, Vamps and Flappers: The American Silent Movie Heroine, this need successfully challenged the separate spheres model that argued for women’s place in the home. As a result, between 1910 and 1920 women’s presence in the work force increased as did their wages. The need for writers in Hollywood, then, emerged at a time when women were looking to expand opportunities, financial and/or creative, beyond the home.
Among the documented early career writers were Edison’s Carolyn Wells who joined the staff as a writer in 1909, according to Lux Graphicus in Moving Picture World. Mary Pickford began her career the same year, writing and acting in both Getting Even (1909) and The Awakening (1909). And Kathlyn Williams started as a writer with The Last Dance (1912), before her run as a serial queen. Gene Gauntier was also one of those early writers. She quickly became a driving force as both an actor and writer for Kalem productions. In “Blazing the Trail,” which first appeared as a serialized article in the 1928 Women’s Home Companion, she explains that though she was hired at Kalem as an actor, she began writing “crude” scenarios in 1907: “A poem, a picture, a short story, a scene from a current play, a headline in a newspaper. All was grist that came to my mill.” Her comments reflect the skeletal nature of early writing. When she first started, stories consisted of outlines with a few words describing each scene: “There was never a scenario on hand.” Like Gauntier, Anita Loos entered the business early; however, Loos focused her career solely on writing. In her 1977 memoir, Casts of Thousands, she explains how she began submitting stories from home, and was only a teenager when she captured the attention of D.W. Griffith. In fact when Loos came to Hollywood to meet him, at his request, he mistook her mother for his intrepid new writer. Loos writes that her first produced story was The New York Hat in 1912, and for the next three years, she turned out over one hundred stories/scenarios. Whatever Biograph rejected went to Vitagraph, Kalem, or Selig. Loos admits in an interview with Film Fan Monthly in 1967, however, that what were called scenarios were pretty bare: “As a matter of fact, the films were practically composed on the set.”
This assembly line of film production that both Gauntier and Loos identify resulted in early crediting problems that impacted the woman writer. In the absence of detailed scenarios, the final film was often far from the original story idea or plot summary, and the author forgotten. As a result, writing credits typically were either absent or assigned to producers or directors. Scholars have explored this early issue, identifying gender bias as a “possible” cause. Jane M. Gaines in “Anonymity: Uncredited and Unknown in Early Cinema” sees the “anonymity” issue prior to 1911 as affecting both players and screen writers. Fan and trade magazines, she explains, eventually called for the crediting of players, but not writers. Though she does not argue for gender as a key factor in early anonymity, she admits that “In the first two decades of the century, anonymous is almost synonymous with the ‘woman’ writer.” Holliday, however, makes this issue the centerpiece of her 1995 dissertation, Hollywood’s Modern Women: Screenwriting, Work Culture, and Feminism, 1910-1940. Uncredited status was linked to women, she argues, because most of the early amateur/freelance screen writers were women, and freelancers were usually not credited. The link between gender and crediting bears further study. This problem only intensified as women took on full-time careers as writers.
By the mid-teens, the scenario started to take shape as something more than an idea implemented on set by a director. Women contributed to this developing craft by writing more detailed scenarios and instructing on the art itself. Among those women who actively wrote original or adapted scenarios, or both, were Zoë Akins, Hetty Gray Baker, Clara Beranger, Catherine Carr, Russian-born Sonya Levien, Loos, Macpherson, Marion, June Mathis, Bess Meredyth, and Eve Unsell. Jane Murfin adapted her own plays or wrote original scenarios, and Edith M. Kennedy is mentioned in the online AFI catalogue as a story contributor, scenarist, and adapter. Many of these women also advised prospective writers on the continually expanding scenario format. Their advice, which appeared in interviews and in their own written manuals, articles, and books, emphasized the importance of picturizing the material. Carr in The Art of Photoplay Writing (1914) asserts the need to visualize an action and even an emotion. This, she says, will produce “a human interest story.” Mathis in The Photo-Play Journal in 1917 explains, “In your mind’s eye you must visualize your plot, just as you would stand on a mountain-top and gaze at beautiful scenery surrounding you. You must visualize your characters…You must see your characters.” Marguerite Bertsch in her book How to Write for Moving Pictures (1917) also provides detailed descriptions of what goes into a scenario and models for aspiring writers. Scenarios, she explains, must include a title, the number of reels, a one paragraph synopsis, a cast, a list of scenes, a list of props, and a detailed summary of each scene including its setting, character action, and maybe some dialogue. By 1920 Loos and John Emerson in How to Write Photoplays were telling prospective writers to add descriptive subtitles and visual aids for the director, like telegrams or letters. Writing for the screen had evolved well beyond the initial story ideas or plot summaries.
The need to bridge the gap between page and screen and to include the business end of film production led to further changes in the scenario and to the birth of the continuity or shooting script. Women again were on the frontlines. Janet Staiger, in “Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts,” argues that between 1908 and 1917 the increase in film length (more reels) and the desire for well-made films with narrative fluidity resulted in a shift prior to production “from the scenario script to the continuity script.” In “Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System,” Staiger explains that continuities added the following to a scenario: director, cast and actors, locations, detailed mise-en-scene, intertitle placement, shooting schedule, budget, and distribution plan. Women, like Beranger, Sada Cowan, Beulah Marie Dix, and Meredyth, were among the many continuity writers. However, it was Mathis and Ince at Metro who developed continuity scripts as the backbone of production. According to Lewis Jacobs “they can be credited with the make-up of continuity as we know it today.”
Women also penned titles well before the continuity script came into play and instructed on the aesthetic of this new practice. Among the first title writers were women like Lenore Coffee, Katharine Hilliker, Loos, and Dorothy Yost. As Bertsch explains in her 1917 how-to book, title writing provides information on action, sets, and character emotion, and includes character dialogue, the latter a recent addition. She even advises on the art of title writing: “We must seek in our subtitles that harmony with our picture which causes them to heighten the action, bring out or express its underlying meaning or atmosphere;–all in that unobtrusive way which makes them part and parcel of the effect in toto.” Titling was a natural transition from story writing for women like Loos. As she notes in Kiss Hollywood Good-By (1974), Griffith shelved many of her early scenarios because they contained written dialogue. He believed that “people don’t go to the movies to read.” He changed his mind when he saw the reception for her titled 1916 His Picture in the Papers. As story, scenario, and title writer, Loos witnessed all aspects of the developing craft. According to her 1968 interview with Kevin Brownlow, Loos was Biograph’s scenario department.
As screen writing was codified as a respected profession, women were represented in all areas of writing in all the major studios. Epes Winthrop Sargent in his 1914 The Moving Picture World article, “The Literary Side of Pictures,” notes the following women writers and their studios: Baker (Bosworth), Carr (Vitagraph and North American), Beta Breuil (Vitagraph), Peggy O’Neil (Vitagraph), Bertsch (Vitagraph), Maibel Heikes Justice (Selig), and Mary Fuller (Edison). According to John William Kellette that same year, Elizabeth Lonergan had worked at Biograph, Kalem, and Majestic. Marion also was starting out at this time. By 1914 she was involved in all aspects of production as Lois Weber’s assistant at Bosworth. She then moved briefly to the smaller Balboa in 1915 hoping to write, finally settling in at Famous Players where she began scripting for Pickford. Sought after for her writing skills, Marion worked throughout the 1920s for a number of companies, including Norma Talmadge Productions, Goldwin Pictures (eventually Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), and Fox Films. Macpherson, who acted before she took to writing in 1915, regularly contributed stories and adaptations for Jesse L. Lasky, prompting Alice Martin in 1916 to call her the “left half of Cecil de Mille’s brain.” By 1919 Unsell had already worked with Pathé, Kalem, Universal, Metro, Triumph, and Famous Players-Lasky, according to a writer with the initials M.H.C. in The Picture Show. And a 1923 Photoplay article, “How Twelve Famous Women Scenario Writers Succeeded in This Profession of Unlimited Opportunity and Reward,” lists Beranger, Ouida Bergère, Cowan, Dix, Marion Fairfax, Loos, Marion, Mathis, Murfin, Olga Printzlau, Margaret Turnbull, and Unsell as actively working in the industry. The article notes that these women “have caught the trick of writing and understand the picture mind.” Fan magazines found women’s accomplishments noteworthy, as companies jockeyed for their skills.
Women’s readiness to handle the complex art of writing for the screen is not surprising. Most career women joined the field from acting and/or related professions. Bergère began as a stage actor, and Beranger, Marion, and Printzlau were newspaper and/or magazine writers. Novelists and playwrights included Dix, Murfin, Turnbull, and Unsell. Justice was a fiction writer, Marian Lee Patterson a magazine writer, and Baker a law librarian. Carolyn Lowry in her 1920 First One Hundred Noted Men and Women of the Screen notes that Fairfax was a stage actor and dramatist, Mathis a stage actor and magazine fiction writer, and Weber a soprano and stage actor. Loos was also a stage actor, a profession that bored her so much she started writing film plots. Adele S. Buffington was a cashier at a movie house prior to writing horse operas at Fox, and Isabel Johnston was a journalist and book editor before writing for Vitagraph. English fiction writer Elinor Glyn was recruited by Famous Players-Lasky in 1920 to write original film stories and to supervise their production. Scottish-born writer Lorna Moon was living in Minneapolis as a journalist when she was recruited by Cecil B. DeMille. Canadian-born Nell Shipman was a stage actress before writing scenarios and starting her own company in the US where she produced, directed, and wrote wilderness films. And French-born Alice Guy Blaché was a secretary for Gaumont in France before moving to the US in 1907 and starting her own company, Solax, in 1910. Here she wrote, directed, and supervised productions. Women like Shipman and Guy Blaché found an early control in the industry because they could write, direct, and produce.
In addition to shaping the form of their craft, women influenced its content. Writing for the screen quickly emerged as a female art form, written by women for women. By 1910, 40% of the working class audience was female, according to Kathy Peiss, and company heads were well aware they had to meet the needs of this demographic. To do so, they turned to the popular literary marketplace, and the romantic comedies, romantic dramas, and melodramas that had gained popularity among female readers in the previous century. These female-centered literary narratives were penned mostly by women and focused on women’s social concerns as girlfriends, wives, and mothers. Film companies hired women to write and adapt such stories for the screen. E. Ann Kaplan in “Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film 1910-1940” identifies some of these films collectively as the “woman’s film.” Unlike the maternal melodrama which speaks to both the male and female spectator, she explains, “the woman’s film more specifically addresses the female spectator.” The common belief of the time was that women were uniquely suitable for writing the kinds of stories a female audience demanded. As Gary Carey explains in his study of Loos, women writers were seen as “more attuned than men to turning out the kitsch melodramas and hot-house romances that dominated the run-of-the mill Hollywood product of the period.” Even women writers acknowledged their innate ability to deal with stories of love and marriage. In a 1918 Motion Picture World article, Beranger asserts that domestic stories, love triangles, and human interest narratives are “more ably handled by woman than men because of the thorough understanding our sex has of these matters.” In a 1925 article in The Film Daily, Mathis declares that women know best the female mind and, as a result, “seem to succeed in the careful, fine detail work of scenario writing.” Among the women who delivered on these popular stories were Frederica Sagor who scripted romantic comedies, Mrs. Sidney Drew (Lucille McVey) who penned domestic comedies along with her husband, and Loos who was known for her slapstick comedies in the early years and romantic comedies throughout her career. Coffee, Julia Crawford Ivers, and Marion wrote the intensely emotional dramas and melodramas. There was no shortage of women writers in Hollywood willing to turn out the “writing to gender” studios demanded of them.
What women wrote, however, frequently straddled both Victorian and modern sensibilities. On the one hand, women in these films were stock characters, recognizable types: the virgin, the flapper, the working girl, the sacrificing wife/mother, the reformer, and the deceived/seduced woman. They were positioned in the social order as (potential) girlfriends, wives, and/or mothers who struggled to find and keep a man or to survive difficult domestic situations. Many, however, were also independent-minded women who negotiated for freedom inside of conventional relationships, sought unconventional relationships (across classes, for example), and tried to make the best of difficult relationships. Their stories showcase the tensions surrounding the gendered expectations of women in both the public and private sphere. These edgy women are found in such films as Beranger’s Miss Lulu Bett (1921), Ruth Ann Baldwin’s The Marriage of William Ashe (1921), Marion’s The Wind (1928), and Glyn’s It (1927). Berenger’s Lulu challenges the convention that women, unlike men, are solely defined by their marital status. Baldwin’s Lady Kitty publishes political satire and poses nude for a charity event. And Marion’s Letty struggles for dignity in an abusive relationship. Glyn’s Betty Lou is a working girl and a flapper, wielding both social and sexual power. Higashi argues that the working woman status of the time shaped the female characters in these Cinderella-themed stories. Careers led to marriage even for those women not actively seeking a partner. Betty Lou, however, is also a flapper. As such, she represents what Higashi calls a new style of femininity: rebellious, sexually precocious, and capable of male friendships. Refusing to wait for a man, Betty Lou openly initiates a romance with her boss. Complications ensue as a result of class differences and Betty Lou’s brazen personality, but the two eventually find common ground. While marriage is mentioned only briefly, this is the assumed next step in their relationship. The pull of marital expectations remained strong in these films, even for sexually-liberated flappers like Betty Lou.
Some women writers avoided stories of love and marriage by focusing on female characters who operate outside of the domestic sphere, though these stories frequently contained a romantic subplot. Grace Cunard and Gauntier created girl adventurers. Cunard, in collaboration with her husband Francis Ford, specialized in the female-lead adventure serials for Universal: Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery (1914) and The Broken Coin (1915). Gauntier’s action-packed stories feature spunky, athletic women engaging in death-defying exploits. Her Girl Spy (1908-1911) is based on the exploits of Belle Boyd, a Confederate spy in the Civil War. Francke argues that Gauntier’s choice of genre was an open challenge to the male action writer: “Gauntier had established that a woman writer was as adept with the thrills and spills of action-adventure genres as her male colleagues.” Gauntier does marry her girl spy off at the end of the series, but she admits in the November 1928 installment of “Blazing the Trail” that she did so because of the physical toll of doing her own stunts. In addition, her brains had been “sucked dry of any more adventures for the intrepid young woman.” Betty Burbridge, Carr, Baldwin, and Buffington also worked in another action arena: the western. Beranger took on the thriller in The Bedroom Window (1924) about a female mystery writer who brings her talents to a murder case. And Shipman’s women meet the challenges of wilderness life in such films as The Girl from God’s Country (1921) and The Grub-Stake (1923). According to Kay Armatage, Shipman’s heroine is a blend of vulnerable femininity and unbridled heroism which “allows her to resist conventional narrative inscriptions of the woman protagonist as victimized and rescued.” Both films were the work of her newly-formed Nell Shipman Productions, which she moved to Idaho in part because of Hollywood’s continual challenge to the kinds of stories Shipman wanted to make.
In addition, women tackled controversial social issues or broadened the narrative scope of their work to include a focus on male protagonists. Fairfax’s The Honor of His House (1918) and Macpherson’s The Godless Girl (1928) deal with alcoholism and juvenile delinquency respectively. Writer/director Weber devoted her career to making films that called attention to social problems. Where Are My Children? (1916) explores reproductive rights, while both Shoes (1916) and The Blot (1921) grapple with poverty and its impact on women. Dorothy Davenport Reid also focused on the social problem film, confronting drug addiction in Human Wreckage (1923) in which she also starred. As with some of her other films, however, writing credit remains uncertain. Among the writers who expanded the narrative focus of their films were Mathis, who adapted Frank Norris’ novel McTeague (Greed, 1924) about a dentist in the Midwest, and the epic Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925). Refusing to be labelled a woman’s writer, Dix regularly wrote films for male stars like her original The Call of the East (1917), starring popular Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa. Dix’s uncompromising approach to writing in Hollywood bears further study.
Though some women may have challenged the “writing to gender” expected of them, they were still part of a collective codified in fan magazines as conventional working women. Authors were eager to assure readers that women could be “feminine” and still work in Hollywood. According to Photoplay’s “How Twelve Famous Women Scenario Writers Succeeded,” these were “normal, regular women…not short haired advanced feminists, not fascist.” Speaking of Macpherson, Doris Delvigne writes in the 1920 Motion Picture Magazine that “There’s nothing masculine about this little French-Scotch girl who has interested the dramatic world with her craftsmanship. She’s not a blue-stocking with emancipated ideas, nor has her contact with the biggest men in the motion picture world given her that swaggering independence which is supposed to adhere to begoggled authors. She is the most utterly feminine thing you ever beheld.” Of Unsell, M.H.C. writes, “She is so womanly–without the slightest trace of ‘pose’ or ‘literariness,’ and gives one a ‘homey’ feeling at once.” And Aline Carter in the 1921 Motion Picture Magazine praises Weber’s ability to produce, write, and edit without giving up a home life: “… she is the original woman who loves to linger over the table and ask for recipes.” These popular magazines reminded the female audience that writing for the screen was women’s work.
In some cases, however, this ideologically-coded image contrasted sharply with the woman writer’s professional or personal life. According to Francke, Dix was a “self-confessed bluestocking”; she dressed informally on set and smoked with the crew. Her daughter’s biography notes that Dix openly refused female lead stories, disapproving of the Hollywood stereotypes of women and the fact that female-centered stories tended to deal with lighter topics. Levien’s biographer, Larry Ceplair, explains that before her film work she expressed radical political and social views, particularly as a writer for the Woman’s Journal, the voice of the suffragette movement. He acknowledges, however, that she had difficulty reconciling her film work with these radical views. Adela Rogers St. Johns, a Hollywood journalist, story consultant, screen writer, and author of source material, wrote about both conventional and unconventional women. Throughout her life St. Johns confronted gendered views of men and women, prompting sports journalist Mel Durslag to comment in her 1988 obituary that “She was a kind of wild, uninhibited woman before feminism came in.” In silent era Hollywood women negotiated a fragile balance between their public and private lives.
Among the women who made films outside the Hollywood system were African-American filmmakers Tressie Souders, Eloyce King Patrick Gist, and Zora Neale Hurston. As noted earlier, careers for women in Hollywood were pretty much accessible only to white women, particularly middle class white women. There is no evidence, however, that Souders, Gist, or Hurston even desired to work in Hollywood. Very little is known about the making or distribution of director/writer Souders’ feature, A Woman’s Error (1922), which was produced by the Afro-American Film Exhibitors Company in Kansas City. More is known about Gist and Hurston who made films that furthered their political, religious, and/or social agendas. As Gloria J. Gibson writes in “Cinematic Foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston and Eloyce King Patrick Gist,” Hurston and Gist recognized the impact of the motion picture camera. Gist and husband James made highly moralistic, non-theatrical films that accompanied their religious services. Hell Bound Train (ca 1929-1930), which she retitled and orated, consists of a series of religious allegories, while the short Verdict Not Guilty (1930-1933) tells the story of a woman pleading for entrance to heaven despite her efforts to “prevent” motherhood, a reference to either birth control or abortion. Similarly, African-American folklorist and novelist Hurston’s ethnographic films–Logging (1928), Children’s Games (1929), and Baptism (1929)–chronicle the daily life of southern black culture. Little is known of the purpose of Hurston’s filmmaking other than to present her research in a pictorial format. In fact, while black male filmmakers of the period have been the subject of extensive research, there has been very little scholarship on the work of black women filmmakers. Yet, as Gibson has argued, such women made their “mark with a camera.”
Continue reading on WFPP page.
by Jane Gaines, Michelle Koerner
During the silent era there does not appear to have been much serious thought given to the question of why there might or might not be women working as motion picture camera operators. The handful who did do this work kept a very low profile, and, as a consequence, many in the commercial industry may have thought that there was just no such thing as a female camera operator at all. Even one of the most well-connected women in the industry couldn’t think of one. Powerful executive producer and screenwriter June Mathis, when asked in 1925 to reflect on women’s contributions said she could think of cases in which a woman worked as a cutter or a title writer but had yet to find a woman “turning a camera crank” (664). There were, however, a handful of women who despite the skepticism and even hostility they must have encountered on the set, did operate the heavy 35mm motion picture camera and mastered the new technology despite cultural expectations.
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). A bigger story, however, was not women and “little” 16mm cameras it was women with big 35mm cameras on the motion picture set. Yet not all women photographed with cameras were professional camera operators—some were actress directors or female producers, and here the photographic composition is telling. When actress-directors or female producers are photographed with cameras, either with men or alone in the frame, they are next to the motion picture camera. The female camera operator, however, is photographed behind the motion picture camera and in this she is a total novelty. In her strange new relation to the technological device this female aberration becomes a metaphor for the wondrous strangeness of motion picture photography itself.
“How many of you have ever heard of a woman camera man?” begins the most in-depth of these stories, “The Only Camera Woman” (59). The Picture Play Magazine writer’s story angle is the attempt to correct incorrect assumptions about women’s technological abilities that the story attributes to the 1916 reader. Although the author byline is the gender inspecific A.J. Dixon the contemporary reader may assume that the writer is male from remarks made about the interview-shy “Miss Davison” as well as from an easy familiarity with men on the Astor Company set—director Al Ray and veteran cameraman Harry Fischbeck. Part of the writer’s approach is to make a joke about the expectation of female incompetence, all the better to turn the tables on the reader. The writer has imagined footage out-of-focus and either over or under-exposed negative. Before arriving on the set she wants to know from the two men about the camera woman’s technological skill, a segue into questions that give the writer a chance to display technological knowledge. “And does Miss Davison understand all about trick photography?” the writer asks (61). The writer is assured that she does triple exposure as well as double exposure (61). Davison then explains to the writer that she started with a Graflax still camera because it is easier to master than the motion picture camera because there is “no crank to turn” (62). But it is the professional Fischbeck, not Davison, who gets to explain the technique of one-crank motion animation produced with the hand crank on the side of the camera which he says is turned and stopped while the pose is changed, then turned and stopped again. Cameraman Fischbeck, continuing to testify to Grace Davison’s competence hands the fan magazine writer a strip of Eastman Kodak film negative which turns out to be Davison’s own experimental footage shot with the “one-crank motion” technique he has explained. The fascinated writer sees from the “little pictures that looked like ping-pongs” that Davison has taken an image of herself against black velvet using a mirror and reflector (64). Thus the “new and startling” woman camera operator advances a metaphor for the “new and startling” phenomenon of motion pictures (65).
In addition, the female camera operator’s looks are “startling.” In October, 1916, Photoplay featured a full page photo of camera woman Margery Ordway wearing a checked cap, striped blouse, and checked puttees. The caption below attempts to make light humor out of the gender switch: “This is the New Fall Style in Camera ‘Men’” (103). The quirky unconventionality of her outfit confirms the atypicality of women on this job. The gender-unspecified writer A.J. Dixon describes Grace Davison’s outfit similarly. What she calls her “camera dress” is a checked suit with a matching cap (61). The dress goes with the oddity of the terms “grinding” or “cranking” used to in the article to describe camerawork, slyly invoking the double meaning of the slang “crank” for operator without exactly saying that a woman behind a camera is bad-tempered.
In a 1914 Photoplay article based on an interview with “camera operator” Francelia Billington the motion picture actress herself comments on the double fascination of the strange machine and a woman operating the mechanical wonder: “I suppose that it is still a novelty to see a girl more interested in a mechanical problem than in make-up” (59). Like Davison, Billington says that she started with the still camera at a young age and moved up to the motion picture camera although she says that her interest in photography did not mean that she was interested in popular films. Katherine Synon’s interview finds Francelia Billington on the Los Angeles of the Reliance-Majestic Studio “assisting” director W. C. Cabanne. She is effectively doing the work of the “cameraman” or what would later be credited as “photography by,” described as “turning a crank as she keeps close watch on the scene that a group of players are enacting” (n.p.) In 1914, however, Billington’s work is not taken so seriously and the reference to her “double role of actress and camera operator” suggests that she is a lucky cameraman stand-in who helps out with the camera operation when she isn’t acting (n.p.)
Considering the organization of work on the set, one can see from this still taken from around the same time at the Edison Studio that jobs are already gender-hierarchized and one imagines the difficulty with which Billington moved back and forth across the invisible line between the all-male camera department and the dramatic scene. Like Davison, Billington says that she began as an actress but preferred camera work. However, the year of the interview must have been her last opportunity. The Reliance-Majestic Studio was new on the West coast under director-in-chief D.W. Griffith and he had big plans that did not include a woman camera operator.
Francelia Billington’s career trajectory, summarized in William M. Drew in “More Than Just a Pretty Face,” gets a slow start by association with an aborted 1915 project written by Nell Shipman, but picks up soon after. She was prolific as an actress at American Film Co. and Universal Pictures beginning around 1916-17 and even though she no longer worked with cameras she was featured in Movieland Notes working, like a mechanic, on her car.
The high point in her career was a co-starring role in director Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1919). But it is down hill for Billington in the 1920s, with parts in western and adventure genre films and an appearance in one sound film before she died in 1934. Grace Davison’s career similarly accelerates once she resigns herself to acting after 1916, but like others she also took advantage of the 1917–1918 window of opportunity for independent production and started “her own” producing company. See Women’s Production and Pre-Production Companies. A note in the American Film Catalog refers to actress Davison as having started the company in order to produce Wives of Men (1918), directed and written by John M. Stahl. While Harry Fischbeck (as Fishbeck) gets the credit for photography, Davison is credited as part of the cast in publicity and reviews but not as producer (Hanson, 1050). After producing Wives of Men she took one or two acting roles per year with independent productions until 1922.
The female camera operator was a phenomenon of the first decade which explains why in 1925 Mathis had never seen nor heard of one. It was not until the 1970s when Anthony Slide began to discover women directors in the silent era that camera operators were also brought to our attention. In his first book he refers to Grace Davison and Margery Ordway, having found them in the fan magazines referenced here, and briefly mentions Dorothy Dunn who he says was part of a “corps of cameramen” working at the Universal Animated Weekly (Slide 1974, 168). Dunn confirms the pattern of women beginning as actresses before they take up cameras, but unlike Davison and Billington who give up camera work for acting, Dunn gives up acting, becoming the “only woman staff photographer,” according to the Moving Picture World (1609). In his later book Slide mentions Dunn, Davison, and Ordway and adds Louise Lowell who worked for Fox News in 1920 (1996, 5-6). But the trope of “the first” or “the only” continues to lure us and more recently Suzy Groves discovers Katherine R. Bleecker as the “earliest professional moving camera woman” (qtd. in Krasilovsky 1997, xxi). While the New York Times covers Bleecker in 1915 and Photoplay discovers Billington in 1914, the difference between the kind of work the two undertook is more important than the year between them. While Billington had some opportunities to shoot motion picture fiction shorts, Bleecker wrote, directed and photographed scenarios set in New York prisons, casting inmates as themselves, and thus should also be understood as pioneering what we today call documentary fiction.
This article is taken from WFPP official website.
Perhaps the earliest production work available to women in the film industry was coloring work—hand-coloring dyes onto film prints frame by frame. Female colorists were also common in the nineteenth century in the lantern-slide and postcard industries, for at least initially, they could be exploited at a lower wage than men to perform the repetitive and detailed tasks. By the mid-1890s, the film industry had adopted similar labor strategies for coloring prints. Aesthetic assumptions also grounded this practice: an enduring trope of western color theory pertains to the gendering of color—females have long been assumed to be more attuned to color. Women were not only cheaper in general to employ but also were thought to be, with their supposed sensitivity and nimble fingers, innately suited to the detailed work of coloring films.
Sources suggest that the Edison Company employed the wife of Edmund Kuhn in the mid-1890s to hand color prints such as the popular serpentine dance films (Yumibe, 45). According to Charles Edward Hastings, writing in the Moving Picture World in 1927, there were a number of other well-known female colorists working in the U.S. film industry at the turn of the century: “colorists in the early days were Miss Martini, of West Orange, N.J.; Miss Sarah Levy of New York City, and Miss Tompkins, of Brooklyn, N.Y. These famous hand colorists brought their art to a high degree of perfection, and displayed remarkable patience in working out their results” (346). However, scant documentation has been found about these women’s labor.
Fortunately, the recorded history is somewhat better for female colorists in France. Georges Méliès, for example, outsourced his hand-coloring work from 1897 to 1912 to a Vincennes firm in Paris run initially by Élisabeth Thuillier, and subsequently by her daughter Marie-Berthe Thuillier, who managed a workforce of over 200 female colorists (Mazeline 74n1; Fossati 122-123; Malthête, 6-9; Yumibe 48). An earlier version of this essay only identified Élisabeth Thuillier, but thanks to Stéphanie Salmon and Jacques Malthête’s wondrous discovery, reported here on the Women Film Pioneers Project, it was Berthe Thuillier who in fact headed up most of the film coloring work formerly attributed to her mother, who died in either 1904 or 1907 (Salmon and Malthête). The Thuillier firm began as a lantern-slide lab and became involved with film coloring in the late 1890s, also working for other companies and filmmakers such as Pathé and Raoul Grimoin-Sanson. In an interview in 1929, Berthe Thuillier recalls, “I colored 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 colors, and during the day; the workers applied the color according to my instructions. Each specialized worker applied only one color, and we often exceeded twenty colors on a film” (Mazeline 74n1, author’s translation). From Thuillier’s account, one can begin to surmise the complexity of the firm’s coloring operation. The Thuillier firm structured its workforce in assembly-line fashion, dividing the labor by hue to increase productivity. Based upon surviving Méliès prints and fragments from the turn of the century, the colored results were remarkable.
Méliès continued to use hand coloring throughout the early 1900s; in contrast, beginning in 1903, the Pathé Company transitioned its color work from hand coloring to stenciling as part of a larger project to industrialize its production methods. Though still a manual process, stenciling facilitated the application of dyes to positive prints. Each color on a print had its own stencil, which laboriously was cut out frame by frame for the length of the coloring sequence. Once produced, the stencils could be reused on multiple prints, thus saving time and labor on lengthy print runs. As with hand coloring, Pathé hired women to prepare the stencils. Rapidly expanding in 1906, the company attempted to recruit the Thuillier firm to carry out this work exclusively for Pathé at its Vincennes factory. Élisabeth and/or (more likely) Berthe Thuillier initially signed with Pathé but then broke contract a few weeks later when it became apparent that they would have to share authority with one of Pathé’s chief colorists, Mme Florimond. Despite this setback, Pathé proceeded to expand its coloring workforce in 1906, more than doubling its female colorists from 80 to over 200 (Yumibe 78-90).
One of the more remarkable accounts of Pathé’s colorists is a 1984 interview with Germaine Berger by Jorge Dana in Positif in 1992. Along with her sister Lucie, Berger began cutting stencils for Pathé in 1911 at the age of 15. She had a strict upbringing and worked for her father (a furniture draughtsman) for several years before Pathé. Ironically, even when employed in the film industry, Berger was not allowed to go to the cinema—her only experience of film as a young woman was through stencil cutting. Mirroring her domestic life, the work day at Pathé was also highly regulated. Working in close quarters, Pathé’s colorists were not allowed to converse or socialize during the day. Nonetheless, Berger enjoyed the work, and because she and the other colorists grew remarkably adept at stenciling, they were well-paid by Pathé, receiving 21 francs per week, as opposed to the 15 francs averaged by less-specialized, male factory workers surrounding Pathé’s workshop. Thus, the stereotype that females are innately attuned to color worked to the economic advantage of Pathé’s skilled colorists. However, the work also came with its diminutive epithets: due to their nest eggs of well-deserved earnings, Berger and the other colorists came to be known around the Vincennes neighborhood as the “poules de chez Pathé [hens of Pathé].”
Image taken from : https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/french-film-colorists/
This article is taken from WFPP official website.
Having undergone a new transformation through Beykoz Kundura, whose cultural heritage it inherited, the organization has become one of the most important arts and culture organizations in Türkiye in recent years. The organization, which has held many film screenings under the name Kundura Sinema, is presenting “Silent Film with Live Music” and “Hollywood Classics” screenings as part of its November–December program. We spoke with Donald Sosin at Beykoz Kundura about Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Woman in the Moon, which was screened as part of this program.
First of all, I’d like to know how this whole adventure began, and how you decided to make music for silent films. How did it happen, and how did you decide on it?
Actually, it all started by accident. In the early 1970s I was at the University of Michigan for college. I was learning many different kinds of music and trying to play them. I played in restaurants for fun. Around that time, I would have dinner with a group of friends. Someone brought an instrument and I started to play. I was also playing for dance clubs at that time. That’s how I started, and during this period I also began watching people: how they moved, how they danced; their different styles of music, jazz, ballet or whatever kind… I could play many kinds of music. It was a lot of fun. Then nothing really happened. One day my composition teacher came and asked, “You know there’s going to be a screening of The Phantom of the Opera here, and you have the experience, why don’t you play something?” I said “okay” and thought about it. Ballet, opera, organ music; those were 20-minute performances, but this was around 90 minutes. So I started doing research. I was trying to figure out and understand what I needed to do. I wrote something and finished it. There were various films from the 1910s and ’20s, mostly from those periods, you know. Then we talked again. He asked me again: all these films have no sound or music, so why don’t you do something for them too? I said there was no piano there. He asked me, “If I get a piano brought into the auditorium, can you play music?” And I said, “Of course, why not?” My friend and I moved that very heavy equipment into the auditorium. They were quite old things and some of them didn’t even work. But we played like that in Michigan for 2 years and managed. Later I met someone who made music for The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). We became friends and I started doing things for him too. I left college and went back to New York. Later he left MoMA and I took his place. That was really the whole beginning. Then I kept going. I met someone else, then someone else, and someone else… 20 years later I went to Pordenone in Italy for the Silent Film Festival and met even more people there.
To read the rest of the interview, click here.
The concept of “Early Murnau” is a little bittersweet. The German director had such a short career that the films in this new collection from Masters of Cinema take us up to just six years before he died. And while his most famous film was made during the period (1921-25) covered by this box set, that work, Nosferatu, is not included. The set ends just one year before his hypnotic Faust was made, and two before his Hollywood masterpiece Sunrise.
This is technically middle Murnau, then, or “the Murnau you may have missed if you only knew Nosferatu and the surviving Hollywood work”. All the same, this is a gorgeous collection of distinctive, spectacular films, well worth adding to your shelf. All of the films in the set have been made available on DVD from Masters of Cinema previously, but here together, on Blu-ray, they represent a far better bargain.
The journey through Murnau’s lesser-sung German work begins in 1921 with Schloss Vogelöd, a country-house mystery rendered mysterious and dreamlike at the director’s touch, and climaxes with the bracing and inventive Molière adaptation Tartuffe (1925), which introduces an especially noxious virtue-signalling hypocrite and hangs him out to dry. In between we delve into the romantic and financial misery of a poetically minded clerk in Phantom (1922), and the related entanglements of an aristocrat in Die Finanzen de Grossherzogs (1924). Indisputably, the highlight of the collection is the low-key masterpiece Die Letzte Mann (1924) starring Emil Jannings as the hotel doorman whose life hits a downward spiral when he is demoted to a toilet attendant.
As the many extra features and essays included with the set attest, Murnau’s oeuvre is hugely varied, swinging from genre to genre and rarely settling in one place for long. Stylistically, though, he is mistakably himself at all times. You can see the walls of the city bend down to oppress the heroes of both Phantom and Die Letzte Mann, for example. And you may already have noticed that the films above share a set of preoccupations with money and social position, with impossible aspirations and with toxic pride.
The faces of these oppressed, haunted characters loom out of the darkness in crisp close-ups, or surrounded by Murnau’s sympathetic murk of spectral apparitions and psychologically motivated special effects. The films here are Expressionistic, but in a very sophisticated way – not the greasepaint and distortion of Caligari, but infused with a subtler, much more uncomfortable disquiet. It’s closer to poetic realism than the Grand Guignol. The set design in Schloss Vogelöd, for example, is stunning, and a dissolving close-up of Lya de Putti in Phantom is a gorgeous as it is unsettling. In an era before horror became a codified genre, Murnau made films that are genuinely disturbing, with shadows that creep where they are not wanted, without swamping and swallowing the frame.
Schloss Vogelöd is perhaps a little slow and stagey for modern tastes, and Phantom is definitely over-long, but both those films more than reward a quiet night in on the sofa – with arresting imagery and gut-wrenching plot twists. Die Finanzen de Grossherzogs reveals that Murnau was incapable of making a film without beauty, but that extended comedy did not come naturally to him. Tartuffe is a true delight, a sharp and human satire told visually (and a valuable lesson in how to turn a stage play into a film, really). Murnau’s decision to place a film within a film gives the satire a modern bite, with Emil Jannings in the deliciously wicked title role. And Die Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh is a triumph that deserves repeat viewing from any serious silent cinephile. It’s a pleasure to see it on Blu-ray and from its dizzy opening sequence, via its heartbreaking middle to its sardonic mockery of a happy ending, it reveals new treasures each time you watch it. Jannings is triumphant, and Karl Freund’s nauseous, roaming, spinning and climbing camera takes the audience to the darkest of emotional spaces.
Highly recommended for anyone who loves Murnau’s better-known work, this a set to linger over. The troubled homes and terrifying cities of these films may seem inhospitable, but as landmarks in the enchanted Murnauland, they offer incomparable cinematic spectacles. Supported by the aforementioned Freund, and by screenplays from Carl Mayer and Thea von Harbou, Murnau made these films for Erich Pommer’s Ufa, and they are all quality productions, sophisticated and elegantly made. The accompanying essays, and the audio commentary by David Kalat on Die Finanzen de Grossherzogs, as well as a smart new video essay by David Cairns, that lingers, understandably on Die Letzte Mann, make it an altogether richer experience.
“Art – authentic art – is simple,” Murnau once said. “But simplicity itself demands artistry.” Other films by the director may be so familiar that we can almost miss the touch of his technique, but the works collected here allow us to understand exactly what makes a Murnau a Murnau.
Article is taken from Silent London.
The joy of cinema is different every season, but in the last months of the year it is, I think, something else entirely! We spent October to the fullest with FilmEkimi. The smell of popcorn was all around; for days we found ourselves at back-to-back matinees, rushing out as each film ended so as not to miss the next one, and we enjoyed it immensely! For those who never tire of enjoying cinema, a new film feast is now on the way: Kundura Sinema. So what exactly is Kundura Sinema? What does it offer, and how can we find out about it? Here is a piece on Kundura Sinema, which will let you spend your weekends full of cinema until the end of the year, and on my own experience there. Happy reading!
Miray Süer To read the full article, please click here.
A SHORT BREAK FROM QUARANTINE WITH KUNDURA SİNEMA
In his short documentary Nature: All Rights Reserved (2016), young Dutch director Sebastian Mulder prompts viewers to question the place nature holds in urban life through the simulations of nature in our everyday lives. How do we interact with nature in city life? Through the forest pictures we see while staring at the ceiling in the dentist’s office, and the artificial trees we so often come across in shopping malls? Nature: All Rights Reserved offers us 20 minutes in which to reflect on all of this. But Mulder does not stop his questioning there. In the film’s final section, ‘Future Nature,’ he reminds us that although we can currently tell that images of nature are artificial, virtual reality technologies are advancing day by day. And so one cannot help but ask: will people one day have artificial pets, as in Blade Runner (1982)?
Alper Yıldırım (www.altyazi.net)
To view the original film, click here!
A SHORT BREAK FROM QUARANTINE WITH KUNDURA SİNEMA
On the side of the highway in Palm Beach County, Florida, a curious crowd has begun to gather. Young and old, children, people with their dogs, people struggling along with walkers all share a single goal: to take a few cool selfies with Air Force One, carrying the President of the United States, in the background. Premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, Roadside Attraction is a documentary in which the directors feel no need to comment, letting the images provide all the explanation needed. With its approach of quietly observing ordinary people and capturing their excitement and facial expressions, the film stands as a modest but striking document of the notion of entertainment inherent in American culture, the cult of the leader, and the ailments of the selfie age.
Berke Göl (www.altyazi.net)
To view the original film, click here!