THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 69
Mary Blair generated concept art for Disney classics like “Alice in Wonderland.”
BOOKS
OUT OF FRAME
Women once played a big role in the American movie industry. What happened?
BY MARGARET TALBOT
COURTESY ESTATE OF MARY BLAIR
O
ne of the stranger things about the
history of moviemaking is that
women have been there all along, peri-
odically exercising real power behind
the camera, yet their names and contri-
butions keep disappearing, as though
security had been called, again and again,
to escort them from the set. In the early
years of the twentieth century, women
worked in virtually every aspect of
silent-film-making, as directors, writ-
ers, producers, editors, and even camera
operators. The industry—new, ad hoc,
making up its own rules as it went
along—had not yet locked in a strict
division of labor by gender. Women
came to Los Angeles from all over the
country, impelled not so much by dreams
of stardom as by the prospect of inter-
esting work in a freewheeling enterprise
that valued them. “Of all the different
industries that have offered opportuni-
ties to women,” the screenwriter Clara
Beranger told an interviewer in 1919,
“none have given them the chance that
motion pictures have.”
Some scholars estimate that half of
all film scenarios in the silent era were
written by women, and contemporaries
made the case, sometimes with old ste-
reotypes, sometimes with fresh and
canny arguments, that women were es-
pecially suited to motion-picture story-
telling. In a 1925 essay, a screenwriter
named Marion Fairfax argued that since
women predominated in movie audi-
ences—one reason that domestic melo-
dramas, adventure serials featuring acts
of female derring-do, and sexy sheikh
movies all did well—female screenwrit-
ers enjoyed an advantage over their male
counterparts. They were more imagi-
natively attuned to the vagaries of ro-
mantic and family life, yet they could
write for and about men, too. After all,
men “habitually confide in women when
in need either of encouragement or com-
fort,” Fairfax wrote. “For countless ages
woman’s very existence—certainly her
safety and comfort—hinged upon her
ability to please or influence men. Nat-
urally, she has almost unconsciously
made an intensive study of them.” Alice
Blaché, the French-born director be-
hind some six hundred short films, in-
cluding “The Cabbage Fairy” (1896),
one of the first movies to tell a fictional
story, was one of many women to head
a profitable production company. She
founded hers, in 1910, with her husband
and another business partner, in Flush-
ing, New York, and moved it to Fort
Lee, New Jersey, the pre-Hollywood
filmmaking capital. Blaché wrote in 1914,
“There is nothing connected with the
staging of a motion picture that a woman
cannot do as easily as a man, and there
is no reason why she cannot completely
master every technicality of the art.”
In a way, the early women filmmakers
became victims of the economic suc-
cess that they had done so much to cre-
ate. As the film industry became an in-
creasingly modern, capitalist enterprise,
consolidated around a small number of
leading studios, each with specialized
departments, it grew harder for women,
especially newcomers, to slip into na-
scent cinematic ventures, find some-
thing that needed doing, and do it. “By
the 1930s,” Antonia Lant, who has co-ed-
ited a book of women’s writing in early
cinema, observes, “we find a powerful
case of forgetting, forgetting that so
many women had even held the posts
of director and producer.” It wasn’t until
a wave of scholarship arrived in the nine-
teen-nineties—the meticulous research
done by the Women Film Pioneers Proj-
ect, at Columbia, has been particularly
important—that women’s outsized role
in the origins of moviemaking came
into focus again.
Now we are in the midst of a new
round of rediscoveries—this time of
women’s behind-the-camera roles well
into the golden age of Hollywood.
There’s a romance to ushering lost
women back into the light. Second-wave
