Now that the temperatures have fallen and the winds have picked up, it’s a great time to spend evenings in front of a TV set viewing DVDs and Blu-rays, streaming documentaries and fictional features and shorts. Bundle up in your heaviest fleece robe, grab that Sherpa throw, and begin!
For my part, the most exciting Blu-ray set of vintage titles to recently become available is PIONEERS: FIRST WOMEN FILMMAKERS from Kino Classics and the Library of Congress. There are a number of strong reasons why this set has been winning awards. The six discs contain one-after-the-other of entertaining, thought-provoking films dating from 1911-1929, along with explanatory essays and interviews by historians. At a time when women filmmakers are stepping up to claim their rightful status as professionals in what has been a predominantly male industry, it is significant to note how many women worked hard and accomplished plenty to help create the American film industry.
In the cinema’s infancy, Alice Guy-Blache headed up her own studio. Lois Weber and other women headed their own production companies and made lucrative distribution deals with major studios. Canadian Nell Shipman was an actress, screenwriter, animal trainer, director, and producer who made the most successful silent film in Canadian film history. A number of talented women were prominent directors at Universal Studios. Exotic silent film star Alla Nazimova and Mack Sennett comedienne Mabel Normand directed with success.
Then the men took over. By the very early 1920s, huge corporate-minded studios such as Paramount, Universal, Goldwyn and Metro had developed into multi-million-dollar companies. There was big money at stake. One studio mogul after another switched out the women filmmakers and replaced them with males, some of whom had fought in World War I and had tales of derring-do to share. Worldy-wise males belonged in Hollywood’s new world; women belonged onscreen or as scenarists and film cutters, but not as directors, not as producers.
In its more than 25 hours of programming, PIONEERS: FIRST WOMEN FILMMAKERS also includes works by independent filmmakers such as African-American folklorist and author Zora Neale Hurston who took a 16mm camera and a gun for protection, hopped into a model-T Ford, and headed South to make visual documents of black people and their cultures. Also outstanding is a surviving fragment of an indie feature made in San Francisco by only recently recognized Chinese-American filmmaker Marion E. Wong.
Some of the films in this collection have already appeared on disc or are streamable, but it’s appealing to have them in one place-- and many of the titles have not appeared before now. Particularly enjoyable is watching the titles on these discs with fine musical accompaniment by individual musicians and orchestras that have experience with musical scores for silent films.
As for favorite titles, certain films have more relevance than others, some are more advanced in technique or story-telling. Of all, my favorite is an Alice Guy-Blache short from 1912 called FALLING LEAVES. In it, a doctor notifies a loving family that their teen-aged daughter, who is suffering from consumption, will be dead by the time the last leaf falls off the tree outside her window. To prevent the death of her sibling, a tiny younger sister takes string and fastens leaves to the branches of the tree. The film lasts 12 minutes and is primitive in its technique, but it has the power and the heart to make you cry.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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