Hollywood's Fogotten Female Past.

by Chloe Buxton.

It’s 2022, after four different waves of feminism, MeToo, Time’sUp, and Jane Campion being nominated twice for the best director Oscar we’re at the peak of female involvement in the film industry, right? Wrong. Sorry folks. As Alicia Malone writes in her eye-opening novel on women in film, there were more women working at the top of Hollywood in the early 19th century than there are today. So, what the hell happened?

In the early 20th century the industry was not structured in the same way it is today. As film was an emerging cinematic artform, many were still learning their craft. As Lois Weber recounts “I grew up in the business when everybody was so busy learning their particular branch of the new industry that no one had time to notice whether or not a woman was gaining a foothold”. Industry professionals were still getting to grips with how to tell stories using film technology and it was initially unclear how successful filmmaking would become as an industry. Thus, female assistants, secretaries, and a bright-eyed generation of young women were encouraged to pick up a camera. Women then quickly began setting up independent studios, mentoring other female filmmakers and eventually getting hired by big studio executives. Between 1916 and 1921 alone, Universal hired 11 female directors, which is the largest concentration of women working as directors ever recorded. There were so many women working in film that journalists of the time even began to claim that women were simply better than men at making films.

So, who exactly was at the top? Let’s play a quick game:

Does the name Charlie Chaplin ring a bell?
What about D.W Griffith? Okay.
… Now have you ever heard of Alice Guy Blaché?
Lois Weber?
Mary Pickford?

If you haven't, that's okay, you’re proving my point. Unfortunately, there’s a reason these names were nearly omitted from history despite producing some of the most influential work of the early 20th century. But first let’s discuss each of them in a little more detail:

At the very dawn of cinema there was Alice Guy Blaché. Blaché was an early pioneer of the silent era, she created the first ever narrative short film in 1896 entitled La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy, Alice Guy Blaché, 1896) View on: IMDb. Lettrboxd. Wikipedia. and she was the first woman to ever start her own motion picture studio where she oversaw the production of more than 300 films.

Next up, Lois Weber. Weber was a highly respected writer and director for Universal. She is most famous for her social issue films such as Where Are My Children (Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, 1916) View on: IMDb. Lettrboxd. Wikipedia. , she was able to turn politically contentious topics such as abortion and poverty into popular films which were also extremely commercially successful.

Finally, Mary Pickford. Now Pickford was one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood during the 1920s. As an astute business woman, she was one of the highest paid stars in Hollywood, earning more than Charlie Chaplin. Pickford was also one of the 36 founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

So, we’ve established women were able to begin careers in film when it was still an early and developing artform, we’ve discussed how well they were doing in the industry and we’ve pinpointed a few key figures who made significant contributions to film history. But the burning question is why didn’t we know their names before? Well, there are a few reasons.

One is that old records were not as clear or thorough as they are today (there was no IMDb back then). Many of the accreditations which we are familiar with now were not as precise a hundred years ago. Titles such as producer and director were often used synonymously or were even referred to as “producing director”. Many women had multiple roles on a film such as actor and producer but that would not always be well recorded, making it hard for historians to correctly credit female filmmakers.

Women were also sometimes purposefully written out of history. Take Alice Guy Blaché for example, who had worked as a director and manager of Gaumont Film Company for eleven years from 1895 to 1907. Yet when her employer was publishing a history of the company, he made sure to not include anything prior to 1907. Excluding her foundational role in its establishment and her entire body of work. It took decades for this to be corrected and it wasn’t until a few years before her death that Gaumont’s son admitted that Blaché had been wrongfully forgotten.

Furthermore, upon the arrival of sound in 1927 and the stock market crash of 1929, the Studio System began to take over and the importance of profit-making in film was being prioritised. This shift began to push women out of the system, their independent production companies couldn’t compete with large studios and male executives began to choose other men to take charge of important roles as they began dealing with large sums of money. The brief period where women filmmakers held power in Hollywood began to fade away and the contemporary male dominated industry took hold.

Today the same studio that credited 11 female directors in the 1910s made only one film with a female director in 2017, Universal’s Pitch Perfect 3 (Trish Sie, 2017) View on: IMDb. Lettrboxd. Wikipedia. . Although there are circumstances and high-profile cases which make things seem like they’re dramatically improving, such as four superhero movies being directed by women in 2020. When you take a look at the wide spread statistics, we still have a long way to go. The “Celluloid Ceiling” figures run by the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film, show that women are often present in more overlooked roles for example 43% music producers but they only account for 2% of key roles such as cinematographers on the top 100 films released, highlighting the employment inequality.

Overall, it is clear that women have always wanted to make films. There was a brief period at the dawn of cinema where women did hold powerful positions in the industry and once embraced as creative, authoritative figures, they thrived and exceeded all expectations. Although we are still a far cry from returning to those early days, there is hope on the horizon as a fierce generation of authors such as Pamela Hutchinson, Helen O’ Hara and Alicia Malone, re-write history, reminding us of the potential of women in film by taking a look into the past.

by Chloe Buxton, March 2022.