Pink-Slipped
What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Women held more positions of power in the silent film era than at any other time in American motion picture history. Marion Leonard broke from acting to cofound a feature film company. Gene Gauntier, the face of Kalem Films, also wrote the first script of Ben-Hur. Helen Holmes choreographed her own breathtaking on-camera stunt work. Yet they and the other pioneering filmmaking women vanished from memory. Using individual careers as a point of departure, Jane M. Gaines charts how women first fell out of the limelight and then out of the film history itself. A more perplexing event cemented their obscurity: the failure of 1970s feminist historiography to rediscover them. Gaines examines how it happened against a backdrop of feminist theory and her own meditation on the limits that historiography imposes on scholars. Pondering how silent era women have become absent in the abstract while present in reality, Gaines sees a need for a theory of these artists’ pasts that relates their aspirations to those of contemporary women. A bold journey through history and memory, Pink-Slipped pursues the still-elusive fate of the influential women in the early years of film.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This intellectually rich and sometimes challenging treatise from Gaines, a feminist film scholar, casts new light on the history of women in early cinema. She examines an assertion commonly made by film scholars that women enjoyed higher status in early Hollywood than in American filmmaking today and seeks to complicate and contexualize it. To this end, she explores not only the careers of pioneers, such as directors Alice Guy-Blach and Lois Weber, but also those of lower-level female film workers. Gaines critiques a narrow focus on how "top women" were phased out of creative filmmaking roles, observing that many women continued to find employment behind the camera, often in clerical jobs or in the editing room. She also delves into critical theory, such as the writings of Reinhart Koselleck, in order to unpack the expectations historians bring to their subjects. Gaines argues against readings of early female filmmaking as primarily a story of failure, defined in terms of subsequent male dominance in Hollywood. Observing "how unanswerable historical what happened' questions really are," she prefers to see this past era as a cause for optimism and a source of inspiration to women today. Her work should not be missed by those interested in the intersection of critical theory, feminism, and film.
