Women Pioneers of Silent Cinema

Women directed, produced, and wrote films from the first decade of cinema, then were written out of the story that followed. Alice Guy-Blaché was making narrative films at Gaumont before Griffith had a camera. Lois Weber was one of the highest-paid directors in America and used the studio to argue about birth control and class. Germaine Dulac and Lotte Reiniger invented forms — impressionist subjectivity, silhouette animation — that men later got credit for theorizing. This is not a spotlight on stars who happened to be women. It is a survey of women who held the camera, the cut, and the company: Guy at Solax, Weber at Universal and her own studio, Mabel Normand directing her own Keystones, Haydée Chikly writing the first Tunisian fiction film, Dorothy Davenport producing The Red Kimona, Olga Preobrazhenskaya filming peasant women in Ryazan, Dorothy Arzner cutting her way from the editing room to Paramount, Pauline Brunius making sitcoms at Svensk Filmindustri. The films survive. The habit of treating them as exceptions does not have to.

22 films