First Ladies: Early Women Filmmakers
The early years of the film industry in the US were much more open to women directors and producers than it was from the mid-'20s on. Kino has released a set of three DVDs with films by women that explores this nook of history.
Hypocrites (1915) by Lois Weber is the earliest film in the set. I'd previously seen Weber's Too Wise Wives (1921), which is a marriage-problem film in the manner of Cecil B. DeMille. She was a major director in her day. Weber was a moralist, but Hypocrites is interesting in that it almost literally turns a mirror on moralism. The spiritual man who seeks to reveal the Truth to the pious hypocrites of his flock is also shown to be blind to the human needs and affections of those who follow him. The self-reflexive nature of the criticism is wonderfully captured in a close-up of a human eye in which one can make out the reflection of the cameraman shooting the picture. The movie was a bit of a cause célèbre because Weber chose to personify the Truth with a naked girl. "The people are shocked by the nakedness of truth," says one of the intertitles as a statue of the naked figure is revealed. This causes a riot in the film, and apparently the film caused a riot in New York because of the nudity. A lot of the allegory is pretty ham-handed, it must be said, but as an almost avant garde piece of visual film-making with a lot of camera movement (still rare in this era of the tableaux style), Hypocrites has a lot of interest.
The Ocean Waif (1916) by the French emigre Alice Guy Blaché is described in Kino's liner notes as a parody of women's melodramas, but it was hard for me to see the parody. A young woman who was found by the ocean as a baby and raised by a brute of a man runs away from his abuse and takes up in an abandoned mansion. A best-selling writer settles in as well to finish his next book in peace and quiet, and soon his valet is telling him the place is haunted. This ends up pretty much the way you'd expect it too, and the most interesting thing about the film (despite a severely decomposed print) is the delicate visual style. As Alice Guy, the director started working for Gaumont in France in 1896. IMDb says she is considered the first woman director.
49-17 (1917), which is on the same disk as The Ocean Waif, was directed by Ruth Ann Baldwin. Kino's liner notes again describe this as a parody, this time of Westerns. Again, I found the parody hard to detect. A judge wants to relive his past as a goldminer in the West, so he sends his male secretary out to hire an acting troupe to inhabit a ghost town. The secretary falls for the beautiful girl in the troupe, but there's a desperado in the group who has his own evil intentions toward her. There are certainly moments of comedy here, but it's mixed with straight-up melodrama and action, much as The Ocean Waif. The strange title is apparently an amalgamation of 49er, as in goldminer, and 1917, the year the film was produced. Don't ask me why!
Finally there is The Red Kimona (1925), which was directed by a man, Walter Lang, but produced by Dorothy Davenport (as Mrs. Wallace Reid*) and written by Dorothy Arzner, who would go on to be one of the few female directors to work in Hollywood in the '30s and '40s. This is a fallen woman story, based on a real life woman, Gabrielle Darley, who was forced into prostitution by her husband and who later killed him but was acquitted of murder. Darley sued the movie's production company for using her real name in the film, and the suit resulted in new privacy laws being enacted in California. The movie itself is a decent melodrama that does a good job of showing the woman's plight in the face of polite society's hypocritical moralism. We are thumped on the head by Mrs. Wallace Reid herself at the beginning and end of the movie. The title refers to the piece of clothing Gabrielle wears as a prostitute, and the "kimona" was hand-painted red on the film itself -- a strange special effect. This is also possibly the only film of these four that would pass the Bechdel Test.
*Wallace Reid was a major star in early Hollywood who was injured in 1919 while performing one of his famous film stunts and then supplied with morphine by the studio so that he could keep working through the pain. He became an addict, although also of alcohol, and was dead three years later. Aspects of his story seems to have inspired the recent movie The Fall, which is so far my favorite film of the year.
Hypocrites (1915) by Lois Weber is the earliest film in the set. I'd previously seen Weber's Too Wise Wives (1921), which is a marriage-problem film in the manner of Cecil B. DeMille. She was a major director in her day. Weber was a moralist, but Hypocrites is interesting in that it almost literally turns a mirror on moralism. The spiritual man who seeks to reveal the Truth to the pious hypocrites of his flock is also shown to be blind to the human needs and affections of those who follow him. The self-reflexive nature of the criticism is wonderfully captured in a close-up of a human eye in which one can make out the reflection of the cameraman shooting the picture. The movie was a bit of a cause célèbre because Weber chose to personify the Truth with a naked girl. "The people are shocked by the nakedness of truth," says one of the intertitles as a statue of the naked figure is revealed. This causes a riot in the film, and apparently the film caused a riot in New York because of the nudity. A lot of the allegory is pretty ham-handed, it must be said, but as an almost avant garde piece of visual film-making with a lot of camera movement (still rare in this era of the tableaux style), Hypocrites has a lot of interest.
The Ocean Waif (1916) by the French emigre Alice Guy Blaché is described in Kino's liner notes as a parody of women's melodramas, but it was hard for me to see the parody. A young woman who was found by the ocean as a baby and raised by a brute of a man runs away from his abuse and takes up in an abandoned mansion. A best-selling writer settles in as well to finish his next book in peace and quiet, and soon his valet is telling him the place is haunted. This ends up pretty much the way you'd expect it too, and the most interesting thing about the film (despite a severely decomposed print) is the delicate visual style. As Alice Guy, the director started working for Gaumont in France in 1896. IMDb says she is considered the first woman director.
49-17 (1917), which is on the same disk as The Ocean Waif, was directed by Ruth Ann Baldwin. Kino's liner notes again describe this as a parody, this time of Westerns. Again, I found the parody hard to detect. A judge wants to relive his past as a goldminer in the West, so he sends his male secretary out to hire an acting troupe to inhabit a ghost town. The secretary falls for the beautiful girl in the troupe, but there's a desperado in the group who has his own evil intentions toward her. There are certainly moments of comedy here, but it's mixed with straight-up melodrama and action, much as The Ocean Waif. The strange title is apparently an amalgamation of 49er, as in goldminer, and 1917, the year the film was produced. Don't ask me why!
Finally there is The Red Kimona (1925), which was directed by a man, Walter Lang, but produced by Dorothy Davenport (as Mrs. Wallace Reid*) and written by Dorothy Arzner, who would go on to be one of the few female directors to work in Hollywood in the '30s and '40s. This is a fallen woman story, based on a real life woman, Gabrielle Darley, who was forced into prostitution by her husband and who later killed him but was acquitted of murder. Darley sued the movie's production company for using her real name in the film, and the suit resulted in new privacy laws being enacted in California. The movie itself is a decent melodrama that does a good job of showing the woman's plight in the face of polite society's hypocritical moralism. We are thumped on the head by Mrs. Wallace Reid herself at the beginning and end of the movie. The title refers to the piece of clothing Gabrielle wears as a prostitute, and the "kimona" was hand-painted red on the film itself -- a strange special effect. This is also possibly the only film of these four that would pass the Bechdel Test.
*Wallace Reid was a major star in early Hollywood who was injured in 1919 while performing one of his famous film stunts and then supplied with morphine by the studio so that he could keep working through the pain. He became an addict, although also of alcohol, and was dead three years later. Aspects of his story seems to have inspired the recent movie The Fall, which is so far my favorite film of the year.