Women Pioneers of Silent Cinema

1896 · Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy was Gaumont's house director, already assigning herself the fiction films, when she put a fairy in a cabbage patch and treated it as catalogue product rather than a parlor trick. She and Léon Gaumont later dated her first version to 1896; that print is lost. The surviving film, identified at the Svenska Filminstitutet in 1996, matches the 1900 Gaumont listing (Yvonne Mugnier-Serand, no honeymoon couple), and she remade the idea in 1902 as Sage-femme de première classe. A minute of painted vegetables is how a woman already in charge of a Paris studio tested what a story on film could be.

1906 · Alice Guy-Blaché

By 1906 Alice Guy was still the director Gaumont trusted with the week's fiction, which is why a gender-swap comedy sat on the same production line as everything else coming out of the Paris studio. Les Résultats du féminisme sends the women to the office and leaves the men with the baby, the sewing, and a slap for talking back. She is making the joke from inside the company, with a camera she already ran, not from the gallery. A few minutes of studio time, and the original household arrangement looks as silly as the reversed one. That is what a woman holding the catalogue could do with a gag.

1912 · Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy-Blaché shot this at Solax, the Fort Lee studio she owned and managed, with Magda Foy (the Solax Kid) tying fallen leaves back onto the trees so her sister will not die of consumption. Moving Picture News printed the studio's own synopsis in March 1912, which is how a woman-headed company talked to the trade that month. A 35mm print survives at the Library of Congress. The O. Henry borrowing is ordinary; the credit is the news, because the director's name on a Solax one-reeler is the woman who signed the checks and ran the New Jersey lot.

1912 · Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy-Blaché cast an all-Black company for this Solax comedy, a decision the AFI Catalog and the Library of Congress still flag; it is the first American narrative film known to do so. James Russell plays Sam Jones, a whitewasher who finds a wad of cash, buys clothes and a car, and loses the fortune at an engagement party. A nitrate print later turned up in a California trunk, and the AFI preserved it at the Library of Congress. In 1912 a woman studio head decided who stood in front of her camera, and she did not ask the trades for permission.

1913 · Lois Weber, Phillips Smalley

Lois Weber designed this Rex one-reeler with Phillips Smalley, and the triangular split-screen is her proof that a woman could run the cut as well as the scene. The maid quits, a tramp finds the key under the mat, and Weber (on screen as the mother) telephones while three actions share one frame and an overhead shot looks down the stairwell. Motography compared the reel to Griffith's The Lonely Villa; the BFI National Archive preserved a clear print of roughly a thousand feet. She is in the shot, but the job that matters is the one that framed it.

1914 · Mabel Normand

Mabel Normand directed this Keystone one-reeler herself in January 1914, her second film as director, and she is also the girl who decides the constable's son is her ideal. Moving Picture World called it a nonsense number; the credit line is the news. Long thought lost, a print turned up in New Zealand in 2010 under the British title Won in a Cupboard and reached the Library of Congress through the New Zealand Project. Sennett's lot is usually told as a factory of men. This is one of the reels a woman signed, and it is the earliest of hers that survives from behind the camera.

1916 · Lois Weber, Phillips Smalley

Lois Weber, working with Phillips Smalley at Universal in 1916, used a feature to argue a Progressive brief on birth control and abortion, in the eugenic language of that year. The trades already treated her as one of the highest-paid directors in America, which is the authority she spent on this picture. Tyrone Power Sr. prosecutes a doctor for mailing contraceptive advice while his own household is seeing another doctor. Motion Picture News noted the Broadway crowds at the Globe, and California state-rights sales alone covered the negative cost.

1916 · Marion E. Wong

Marion E. Wong wrote, produced, and directed this for the Mandarin Film Company, the Oakland studio she headed, then could not get a distributor to take a Chinese American picture without the usual stereotypes. Production ran 1916 to 1917; she also played the unkind woman opposite her sister-in-law Violet Wong. Two reels survive of an estimated seven or eight, without original intertitles, and the Academy Film Archive restored them from the camera negative (reels 4 and 7). It is the earliest surviving Chinese American feature, and the company president's name is the one that belongs on this card.

1916 · Lois Weber

Lois Weber took Stella Wynne Herron's story and made a fifty-minute picture about a five-and-dime wage and a pair of worn soles, with Mary MacLaren on her feet for most of it as Eva Meyer. In 1916 Weber was among the highest-paid directors in America; this is what she spent that authority on, a Universal feature that looks at women's labor instead of a star entrance. She shoots the job and the walk home without dressing them up as a sermon. The shoes are the plot, and a woman in charge of the camera decided they were enough to carry the feature.

1920 · Bert Van Tuyle, Nell Shipman

Nell Shipman produced this for Nell Shipman Productions, co-directed with Bert Van Tuyle, wrote the script, and did her own stunts in the Mojave while Joseph Walker pointed the camera at a Maxwell roadster. A woman writer is kidnapped in the desert, and the rescue vehicle is a car, not a horse, which is a production choice as much as a gag. She was already done waiting for a studio to let her run the set. The company name on the picture is hers, and the desert is a location she chose before she moved that company farther north into the Idaho woods.

1921 · Pauline Brunius

Pauline Brunius wrote and directed the Vinner-family shorts that Swedish cinemas ran in front of the feature from 1920 to 1924, situation comedies built on a single premise and then run until it breaks. This is the only one that survives complete; Svenska Filminstitutet holds the print. Olof and Frida Winnerstrand, a married couple from the Stockholm stage, play the lawyer and his wife; Brunius's son Palle is their boy. She later became the first woman to run the Royal Dramatic Theatre, and she left these films out of her memoirs, so the reel is the evidence she already knew how to work from behind the camera.

1923 · Charles Bryant

Alla Nazimova financed this Wilde picture through Nazimova Productions and lost the money; Charles Bryant directed, but the company, the casting, and the look were hers. Natacha Rambova designed the Beardsley court of white wigs, painted floors, and a prophet in a cistern. It played as a flop in 1923 and found its later life as an art-film curiosity. The pioneer fact is the woman-run production: an American picture a woman paid for and controlled, before the industry had a useful word for either the financing or the design. Her name financed the negative.

1923 · Germaine Dulac

Germaine Dulac directed this from the Denys Amiel and André Obey play and used superimposition for the life a provincial wife is not allowed, which is a formal choice made in the chair, not in the drawing room. About half an hour of impressionist cinema. CNC and the Cinémathèque Française hold the key surviving materials and treat the film as central to what a woman director cut in the 1920s. Madame Beudet smiles because the house requires it; Dulac is the one who decides how that smile is photographed, and when the empty revolver stops being a joke.

1924 · Albert Samama Chikly

Haydée Chikly wrote Aïn el-Ghezal and starred in it; her father, Albert Samama Chikly, directed. The opening title names her as author, which is the credit that belongs on this card. She later said she wrote the story to show how badly women were treated when they were sold into marriage. Only a fragment survives, later pieced together from the family scenario and paper documents held with the film. A Tunisian woman wrote a narrative feature in 1924, put her name on the first card, and most of those reels never reached a film archive. The writer is the pioneer credit.

1925 · Walter Lang, Dorothy Davenport

Dorothy Davenport, billed as Mrs. Wallace Reid, produced this reform picture for her own company and took a hand in the direction; Walter Lang is the credited director. Adela Rogers St. Johns supplied the story, from a real New Orleans case, and Dorothy Arzner did the adaptation. Priscilla Bonner plays the woman the papers will not release. The red kimono is the costume the city will not let her take off. A woman ran Mrs. Wallace Reid Productions, and the production is an argument about who gets to leave a story the headlines have already written.

1926 · Lotte Reiniger

Lotte Reiniger wrote and directed this silhouette feature, cutting figures from paper and lighting them from behind for three years (1923 to 1926) in a Berlin attic a banker lent her. The BFI calls it the earliest surviving animated feature; Quirino Cristiani's earlier Argentine features are lost, which is why "surviving" is the honest word. Carl Koch, Walter Ruttmann, and Berthold Bartosch worked the effects under her schedule. A woman ran the production with scissors and a camera, and the crew took a three-year feature seriously because she did.

1927 · Olga Preobrazhenskaya

Olga Preobrazhenskaya directed this Sovkino feature with Ivan Pravov, on location in a Ryazan village, which is a woman holding the chair on a state production and taking it outdoors. Two women share one patriarchal roof: one broken by it, one walking out. She was one of the few women directing features in the Soviet 1920s, and she uses that authority on the peasant household as a political unit. Scenario by Olga Vishnevskaya and Boris Altshuler, with Konstantin Kuznetsov on camera; war, a rape, a child, and a Revolution that changes the slogans more than the grief.

1927 · Dorothy Arzner

Dorothy Arzner directed this Clara Bow picture for Paramount, then the studio's only woman director, from Louis Verneuil's play Tu m'épouseras. Variety, 12 October 1927, called it an all-woman production: Hope Loring and Agnes Brand Leahy on the script, Marion Morgan on the tableaux, Henrietta Cohn as business manager. Two of the original six reels are missing from the Library of Congress print, and later restorations fill those gaps with stills and new titles. A woman cut a Paramount feature, and the trade paper noticed the women on the crew around her.

1928 · Germaine Dulac

Germaine Dulac directed Antonin Artaud's scenario and then had to live with him disowning the result after the premiere, where his friends shouted her down. The British Board of Film Censors, 13 November 1929, rejected the picture as so cryptic as to be almost meaningless, adding that if there is a meaning it is doubtless objectionable. Later CNC work is what keeps her cut in circulation. She held the scissors on a forty-minute film the surrealists tried to talk over; Alex Allin plays the clergyman, and the archive kept Dulac's name on the picture.

1915 · Lois Weber

Lois Weber wrote and directed this 1915 sermon about people who will not look, using traveling double exposures so Margaret Edwards, unclothed as the Naked Truth, walks through pulpits and parlors that refuse her. Courtenay Foote's Gabriel carves a nude Purity and is killed by the mob that asked for it. The scandal sold tickets; Weber controlled both the sermon and the box office. A woman director put an unclothed allegory through American censors, kept her name above the title, and let the audience decide whether they would look at what she had cut.

1921 · Lois Weber

Lois Weber wrote, directed, and produced this through Lois Weber Productions in 1921, after the Universal years, and kept the camera on a professor's wage that will not feed his family. Claire Windsor's Amelia works the library; Louis Calhern's rich student finally sees the hole in her shoe. She shot on real Los Angeles streets, often in narrative sequence, which was her way of working once she had her own company. F. B. Warren distributed it independently. The credit is hers: a woman still running the cut, the budget, and that social argument.

1923 · Bert Van Tuyle, Nell Shipman

Nell Shipman wrote, directed, and starred in her last feature, shot at Lionhead Lodge in the Idaho woods around Priest Lake with animals from her own menagerie. Faith Diggs sells her hair for medicine, follows a bad grub-stake north on a promise of marriage, and flees into country that could kill her. Shipman's company was already past the Hollywood lot; the production fact is the land and the zoo she brought with her. This is a woman finishing a feature on ground she controlled, then stopping, after Something New had already shown she could finance the work herself.