Myths and Misses

Acting: The Silent Screen (1895-1927)

Acting, 2015

In 1915 the American poet Vachel Lindsay claimed that European stage acting was unsuited to film. This critique held sway for decades, during which commentators celebrated American, as opposed to European, contributions to the new craft of motion picture acting. European acting became associated with mannered staginess in contrast to a more subtle American style. Building on recent scholarship that questions this dichotomy, Duckett skillfully analyzes the screen performances of two women actors: the French Sarah Bernhardt, arguably the most famous late nineteenth-century actor, who electrified theater audiences but made relatively few film appearances, and the American Lillian Gish, who began her career as a child in stage melodramas but whose fame derived from her appearances in films. Duckett’s nuanced reading of Bernhardt’s performance in the film Camille (Film D’Art, 1911) and Lillian Gish’s in Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919) reveals that despite their differences, they both used their bodies expressively to convey meanings and emotions.

Editorial: The Actress-Manager and Early Film

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 2018

In this issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film we ask: can early film be included in discussions of women and nineteenth-century theatre? Can scholars whose work extends into the 1890s include that most portable of popular theatres – the silent film – in their research? Is it possible for discussions of women’s theatrical work to include the cinema, particularly when stage actresses entered film in the early twentieth century, bringing middle-class and female audiences with them? Might we expand the debate to include other countries, so that the ‘soft’ commerce of the nineteenth-century theatre is positioned as a global trade that helped define and develop modern reproductive industries such as the cinema? Conversely, what happens if we acknowledge the importance of theatre actresses not only to the visibility and appeal of the nascent cinema, but to the theatre’s global renown? Surely the actress-manager who entered early film did so knowingly, with an awareness of what it means to work both commercially and globally? Why is it that film historians remain ensconced in teleological narratives of disciplinary progression when it is precisely the established and tested practices of the nineteenth- century theatre that are embedded in the cinema’s distribution networks, promulgation of celebrity, range of acting styles and theatrical titles on offer? Papers by: Ann Featherstone: ‘A Good Woman of Business’: The Female Manager in the Portable Theatre Vito Adriaensens: The Bernhardt of Scandinavia: Betty Nansen’s Modern Breakthrough Maria Pia Pagani: Eleonora Duse: An Actress-Manager for the Italian Film Industry in the 1910s Elena Cordero-Hoyo, Begoña Soto-Vázquez: Women and the Shift from Theatre to Cinema in Spain: The Case of Helena Cortesina (1903–84) Denise K. Mok: Transcending Categories, Staging Autonomy: Marion Davies’s Transitions from Showgirl to Screen Star and Producer-Manager

The Forms of Acting in Silent Movies, the Discovery of Audio Recording in Movies

2019

Silent movies did not have any talking or music in them but they left indelible traces to this day, primarily because they possessed undisputed artistic values. The themes that were discussed by the artists of the silent movies, are the main focus of my work. The silent movie provided entertainment to people for decades and provided the industry with a springboard to talking pictures, and the movies we know today. The technological developments that lead to the first sound movies, hardships, difficulties and challenges in acting in front of the camera, would certainly give another direction to the artistic film. All these factors had a massive contribution to its development, but at the same time banal obstacles appeared that created a collision between the actors of theater and actors of silent movies.

The Analysis of Female Characters in the Golden Age of Hollywood

BCP Social Sciences & Humanities

The United States experienced a 25% unemployment rate in 1929 as a result of the Great Depression. More than 5,000 banks in the United States announced closure, and more than 80,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy as a direct result of the Great Depression. Everyone was drowning in the woes of being unemployed. However, Hollywood movies provided a pastime for people who were suffering every day during the Great Depression. Although the 1930s was the worst time for the U.S. economy, it was the golden age of Hollywood. The 1930s to the late 1940s are referred to as the Golden Age of Hollywood, in which Hollywood dominated the film industry. Women on screen have many images, but all these female portraits cannot be separated from men. Women's life at that time was inextricably linked with men's. This paper analyzes women's images from the Golden Age of Hollywood movies. The purpose is to explain how the portrayal of women on screen reflects the status of women in society at...

Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives (Open Access)

What motivates feminist film research today? Exploring women’s contribution to silent cinema, scholars from across the globe address questions of performance, nationality, industry, technology, labor, and theory of feminist historiography. The volume builds on the thematic, methodological, and material diversity that characterized earlier efforts in women’s film history, and the originating context of the sixth Women and the Silent Screen conference (Bologna, 2010). Much emphasis is given to the transitional period of silent cinema (1910s to the early 1920s), which emerges as the field where feminist film scholars are beginning to claim their own theoretical and historical ‘place’. While giving a new impetus to the idea of transitional cinema, the collected essays also illuminate the importance of film’s transnational circulation. Questions of nation and nationhood, and women’s inclusion or exclusion within these terms, are examined in connection to issues of cultural globalization. How did American serial queens impact early Chinese film? How did the variety stage accommodate American films in Rio de Janeiro? Along what lines might we discuss women filmmakers who literally toured the world? These are just some of the issues that are discussed in the volume. Each investigation prompts us into distinct acts of cultural contextualization. A particular focus on acting and the agency of the actress is shared across the volume. The fundamental figure of the actress links multiple threads of scholarship, traversing different films and national cinemas. Alice Guy, Asta Nielsen, Florence Turner, Lois Weber, Mary Pickford, Esfir’ Shub, Pearl White, Vera Karalli, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Elsa Lanchester, Louise Fazenda, Sarah Bernhardt, Gemma Bellincioni, Angelina Buracci, Yin Mingzhu, Leni Riefensthal: these are but some of the names that are encountered across the essays in the collection. New findings are exposed and new research perspectives are opened through these and other figures, allowing us to uncover original ways of thinking about women’s visibility and agency on film.

Paris, America, the World: Chevalier, Dietrich, and International Stardom During the Transition to Sound

During the transition to sound, from about 1929 to 1934, Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier emerged in France as the first and greatest stars of the new technology. This article examines French primary materials from the period – movie magazines, trade journals and newspapers – as a means of analyzing changes in film stardom during this era. Studying Dietrich and Chevalier in the French context indicates the international reach of cinema from the period, the cultural relation- ships between France and its colonies, the relative status of the cinematic image and voice for film audiences, and also the impact on stardom of rapid technological innovation and implementation. The primary materials allow for an examination of the transition to sound and its effects on stardom at the level of film reception, so that we can understand how movie enthusiasts learned about films and stars as local, regional and international phenomena. Thus the early film careers of Dietrich and Chevalier serve as instructive case studies on the manner in which new technologies affect the cinema broadly and, more narrowly, a specific cinematic practice, the production of celebrity.

Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives

DAR, University of Bologna, 2013

Women and Screen Cultures is a series of experimental digital books aimed to promote research and knowledge on the contribution of women to the cultural history of screen media. Published by the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna, it is issued under the conditions of both open publishing and blind peer review. It will host collections, monographs, translations of open source archive materials, illustrated volumes, transcripts of conferences, and more. Proposals are welcomed for both media studies, visual studies, photography and new media.